A new report on a basic income scheme launched in Iran - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/1613/iran-introduces-basic-income <comment><USER2> I wonder if UBI actually allows the economy to become more efficient. It could be the case that an abusive employer would be more severely punished by the labor market if the economic cost to the worker is diminished by a UBI (i.e. My boss is a jerk, I'm just going to quit and find an employer that treats me better). I would assume then that satisfied employees, with good employers, would then be more productive than their dissatisfied counterparts.

It also seems reasonable to assume that workers would also be more likely to create new businesses entirely if the personal financial risks associated with doing so were diminished by a UBI.

<comment><USER3> The flip side of this is abusive workers who will refuse to put in good effort because the cost of getting fired is lower.

Of course, we could argue that workers should be more motivated by the promise of a good reward, but it looks like evidence from behavioral economics suggests that fear of loss is approximately twice as powerful as the hope of gain. So let's not underestimate the power of fear to generate productivity.

By the way, I am generally supportive of the UBI, just wanted to point out a potential cost. Over the long run I think the UBI's benefits would exceed its costs, but I can't deny that there are real costs to an UBI (beyond the simple direct costs).

<comment><USER4> That's not an abusive worker, that's just a bad worker.

In the current system bosses are sometimes hesitant to fire people if they know they have a family to support. Knowing people have UBI to lean on there's much less guilt about letting people go.

<comment><USER5> and people can leave when they have a shitty boss and they know they could be their own boss.

It'll also kill of a load of businesses where there's a bulk of minimum wage staff that could work for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Iranian expat with some insight into this program here; any study that doesn't isolate confounding factors will be inconclusive at best, especially since the Iranian economy has been changing drastically in recent years. Hyperinflation during Ahmadinejad administration, economic embargoes, and the nuclear deal affected people's lives so much more than a measly basic income.

Also, a fraction of the average (or even median) income is not a good indicator, because of high class division in Iran. It certainly doesn't translate into what $16K can give you in the US. E.g. if you're an unemployed youngster living with your parents in Tehran, it can help you with your entertainment budget, but it's in no way a life-changing amount.

<comment><USER7> Just curious, but would it be enough to subsist in a rural part of the country?

Just curious what the amount of money could cover, in terms of food and shelter.

<comment><USER6> It could be a big help. In fact, the program's name roughly translates to "subsidy" or "helper amount", which sets the right expectation I guess.

The cost of living is vastly different in urban centres and rural areas though, as is the quality of life in general. You can live on that kind of money if you live in the boonies and only consume locally-sourced food (increasingly rare as the middle east is getting hit hard by climate change), but anything that's imported will be prohibitively expensive. That includes medicine and fuel.

Once you enter a large city (where you can have an acceptable quality of life), shelter becomes very expensive. Putting together the deposit to rent an apartment for Iranian youth is almost as hard as saving up for a mortgage downpayment in the US.

<comment><USER8> And honestly, most now live in the cities. By the way on a good standard for many and with almost no homeless people to be seen (I call you, USA).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These studies have been popping up on HN, and they're all pretty interesting, yet all seem fairly inconclusive to me.

This one started in 2011, and I'm guessing since the article doesn't say they stopped, that it is still going on?

> The report found no evidence for the idea that people will work less under a > universal income, and found that in some cases, like in the service > industry, people worked more, expanding their businesses or pursuing more > satisfying lines of work.

but yet they say:

> The researchers did find that young people — specifically people in their > twenties — worked less, but noted that Iran never had a high level of > employment among young people, and that they were likely enrolling in school > with the added income.

It seems like tracking how many people who are enrolled in school would be fairly easy to track to verify this. They do say in the paper that youth does have a reduced labor rate, but then they say it might be education (but provide no numbers):

> While there is no evidence of a negative supply response for the average > worker, male or female, there is one for youth in their twenties. If one > were to expect a strong negative impact it would be for youth, who have weak > job attachment, can stay in school longer, or enjoy more leisure, though we > do know which of these options they choose.

While I do think there's value in looking at the micro circumstances, I do wonder how culture will change and shift because of UBI, and how that will also affect its outcome.

For example, if we say that we believe in UBI, that means that basically everyone should have enough money to live. We're offering an entitlement to which people will feel entitled. Over time, how will that change society?

One past example of this would be college education. Nowadays everyone goes to college, but it wasn't always so. Would as many people to go college if society didn't push them that way? One other such cultural shift might be women entering the workforce, or desegregation, and how that lead toward the fight for civil rights.

<comment><USER10> Since many things happen in that period this is not a controlled experiment so you can't have strong conclusions, they can notice some correlations at most such as the program did not increased the number of unemployed people, maybe something else balanced this program but this was not found so the authors are challenging others to look at the data and find things that support the idea that unemployment would rise or other bad side effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Found a litte more background info.[1]

If I'm reading that right, Iran basically tried to swap fuel subsidies with "universal grants" (aka "basic income"). The grants were a lower amount than the fuel subsidies so it was a strategy for the government to reduce overall spending.

What's not clear is if people _kept working_ to help pay for the shortfall in fuel subsidy or compensate for spending on other goods that the higher fuel subsidies allowed. Maybe this clarification is in the researchers 31 page pdf but I haven't had a chance to read the whole thing.

[1] [https://books.google.com/books?id=MPahDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT162&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=MPahDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT162&lpg=PT162#v=onepage&q&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER12> Having lived in Iran, the program is not a UBI, but a "replacement" for the petroleum and energy subsidies that were provided to all. So, instead of the government paying for your gas - which subsidies consumption - the idea is to pay a fixed subsidy primarily to benefit the very poor. This income has a large benefit for the very poor parts of society, but they still have to work to make ends meet. If this amount of money makes a difference to you, you probably have no disposable income. This is more akin to a tax reform than a UBI program, though.

</comment><comment><USER13> Even though I am sympathetic to the idea of Universal income, the fact the Iran's economy experienced inflation as high as 45% the rapid rise of which correlates closely with the start of this program[1], should make this a worrisome rather than promising case study.

[1] [https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/iran- inflation-...](https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/iran-inflation- cpi.png?s=irairaninfnrate&v=201705282226v&d1=20070101&d2=20171231)

<comment><USER14> It also correlates closely to the increase in banking sanctions, which were enacted very close to the spike in that graph.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/world/middleeast/us- adds-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/world/middleeast/us-adds-to-its- list-of-sanctions-against-iran.html)

<comment><USER13> sure, sanctions may very well be one of the factors causing such high inflation levels (although I am hesitant to say that they completely explain away the massive increase in the money supply. FWIW, according to IMF, in 2008 Iran's M1 base has been around $70 billion[1]. Giving a population of over 75M a $1.5 * 365 does nicely increase that base by around 50%). My main main point however was not to claim that the UBI program caused the inflation, rather to challenge the reliability of the main claim of the report as to the change the UBI makes to people's working behavior. Under such high inflation, whatever the cause, people need to work more, rather than less, to make ends meet, so comparing their behavior to pre-inflation periods is just bad science.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_of_the_Islamic_Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_of_the_Islamic_Republic_of_Iran#Money_supply_and_inflation)

<comment><USER15> Handing out money every month means it's much closer to 1.5 * 30 than 1.5 * 365.

<comment><USER13> The article says $1.5 a day IIANM

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe a dumb question, but I have always wondered this.

Won't UBI just shift the poverty line to a value above whatever it is now(0 maybe), without changing the income inequality/wealth difference. In a hyper- simplistic hypothetical scenario, if it's assumed that a person is poor if he has $0, with UBI, he'll have $X/month, making him above the poverty line. But now the entire country, rich and poor, have at least $X/month, which might translate to an increase in cost of all goods/services by $X, rendering the poor as poor and rich as rich.

<comment><USER17> > Won't UBI just shift the poverty line to a value above whatever it is now(0 > maybe), without changing the income inequality/wealth difference.

As far as I can tell this keeps coming up because the answer is "no" but the explanation is complicated.

The are two types of inflation.

One is industry-specific and happens when the government subsidizes something. For example, if the government provides education subsidies then the cost of education increases compared to other things like food or transportation.

The other is currency-specific. When the government prints a lot of new currency, the value of a dollar goes down. Prices go up not because there is more demand for products but because there is less demand for dollars.

A UBI doesn't do either of those things. It doesn't subsidize any specific thing and it doesn't create any new money.

The closest you can get is that there is a theory that higher income people spend less of their income than lower income people, so anything that transfers money from higher income people to lower income people is equivalent to creating new money, because the money in the hands of higher income people was effectively out of circulation.

That general form has nothing to do with a UBI. It applies equally to any government program that produces per-capita public benefits from sales or income tax revenues. The rich pay a tax and the poor get public schools and housing subsidies, which means the poor have the money they didn't spend on schools or housing and can spend it on something else.

Moreover, the effect is small (most people aren't rich enough to never spend their money), and it's simple to compensate for it -- the government is constantly creating new currency because more currency is required as the economy grows. So if you want less inflation, print less money.

And that's assuming that moderate inflation would be a problem, but in fact it's a benefit. The country is in a debt crisis. People have too much mortgage debt, too much student debt, too much credit card debt. The government itself has too much public debt. The prices of housing and education and medicine are too high, but lowering nominal prices is very difficult because everyone has mortgages and contracts that assume the existing prices. The US balance of trade has been out of whack for decades. Lowering the value of the dollar helps with all of those things because it lets the nominal price of those things stay the same while reducing their actual cost back to sane levels.

<comment><USER18> Imagine, though, a city where most poor people earn about $1000 per month spend about $750 rent (housing). If the landlords catch wind that everyone is now taking in $1200 after the institution of UBI, won't they collectively up their rates to $950 (because where else are the tenants going to go)? And who does that help but the landlords?

This is the (less abstract) way I've seen the question asked before. I'm not necessarily saying that this is what would happen (it could though, especially if the landlords are on the zoning board). I'm just saying you haven't necessarily answered the concern here.

<comment><USER17> > Imagine, though, a city where most poor people earn about $1000 per month > spend about $750 rent (housing). If the landlords catch wind that everyone > is now taking in $1200 after the institution of UBI, won't they collectively > up their rates to $950 (because where else are the tenants going to go)?

Where is the extra $200/month supposed to come from? A UBI doesn't create new money. If the average person had $1000/month before then they will still have $1000/month. For the government to pay $1 in UBI it has to collect $1 in taxes. There is no extra money for the landlords to capture.

<comment><USER19> > For the government to pay $1 in UBI it has to collect $1 in taxes.

Excluding debt financing (with which it need not increase present taxes) or monetization (with which it need never increase taxes.)

> There is no extra money for the landlords to capture.

Even in the balanced-budget, non-monetized case, landlords renting to a particular social class may have more money to capture if the taxes are levied on a different class (landlords or other vendors selling to a different class may lose money for the same reason.)

<comment><USER17> > Excluding debt financing (with which it need not increase present taxes) or > monetization (with which it need never increase taxes.)

Which is equally true of any government program financed in those ways.

> Even in the balanced-budget, non-monetized case, landlords renting to a > particular social class may have more money to capture if the taxes are > levied on a different class (landlords or other vendors selling to a > different class may lose money for the same reason.)

That's hardly "UBI leads to fully-canceling prices increases".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My concern about UBI is not the initial situation, but what happens in a democratic society, when the majority of citizens can continually vote for increases in the level of UBI, which will be paid for by the small number of the richest in society. If $20000 UBI annually is good, why not vote to increase it to $40000? Or $60000? Or $1,000,000? And will "the rich" be happy to keep paying more and more, while their level of work remains the same? Isn't there _some_ level of taxation at which those people would quite rationally either work (and earn) less, or go live in another country that doesn't have a similar tax burden?

I feel there is something very different between the richest 80% choosing to tax themselves more to support the poorest 20%, vs the poorest 80% or 90% forcing the richest 10 or 20% to hand over an ever-increasing amount of money. Even if you think that is morally correct, I don't think it would _work_

<comment><USER21> The situation is no different than it is now. People can vote for welfare increases or lower taxes, or vote for increased taxes on the rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why basic income experiments are a fallacy of composition. [https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/is-basic-income- basi...](https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/is-basic-income-basically- finnished-babadac2d29b)

</comment><comment><USER23> This article is really bad. M. Friedman has nothing to do with UBI. What is the origin of the money given ? No one seem to talk about it.

From the paper "Assuming that leisure is a normal good, economic theory predicts that an increase in unearned income reduces labor supply [...] In this paper we study a large cash transfer program in a developing setting, one that has come under criticism for its potential negative labor supply effect" Why would reducing the labor supply be a bad thing ? If we can live the same lives and work less, that's definitely a good thing.

<comment><USER24> Friedman advocated a form of UBI called negative income tax. Today we know it applied as policy in the form of the EITC.

<comment><USER19> The EITC is not a negative income tax or UBI, it's a ramp-up/ramp-up means- tested and behavior-tested welfare program.

It may have been inspired by the NIT, but the essence of the inspiration was lost entirely in conventional welfare-program thinking.

<comment><USER24> Yes, you're right. To be clear, Friedman's NIT was merely a spiritual successor to the UBI, and the EITC is of course what happens when ideas traverse through the bastardization of academia to actual policy making.

Who is to say what an actual UBI would look like after undergoing a similar process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article says, "In the U.S. such a measure would translate to about $16,000 per year." No. $1.50 per day per household is not the same as $45.00 per day. I see what they did. They zeroed in on 29% of median income. That's a nice trick to make their argument stronger, but it makes no sense. $1.50 per day is $1.50 per day regardless of the median income. This article tells us what would probably happen if you gave a family $1.50 per day. It says absolutely nothing about what would happen if you gave them $45.00 per day

<comment><USER7> I was going to argue with this, but looking into it, it seems the cost of living is only about 50% of the US, so it's really more equivalent to $3/day or so in the US, which would be about $1k/yr. So yeah, I'm a lot less impressed by this now.

It looks like you'd be able to maybe cover basic staple foods in Iran with this income, without anything left for shelter or other necessities. But that said, it means the median income is only about equivalent to $3k/yr US in spending power, which is incredibly depressing, and makes me wonder if I'm doing some math wrong, since surely half the population can't be poor to the point of homelessness. Perhaps the numbers I'm looking at don't factor cost of living in rural vs urban areas, and there is an order of magnitude difference?

<comment><USER26> Shelter costs very little in poorer countries where the land is worth much less and building regulations and taxes are reduced (and some consumer goods Iranians don't expect to have or don't replace regularly cost more) which is one of the big problems with PPP adjustments trying to assess costs of living in different countries based on a basket of goods. Not that the unconventional method the article uses of scaling median income to suggest it's as high as $16k per year is any more representative. To the extent it's possible to compare the standard of living of an Iranian on UBI with a US standard of living it's probably in between those extremes...

<comment><USER27> Very few homeless people in Iran as people can always return back to their 'village' if they don't make it in the city. There will be relatives helping them out and land more or less costs nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I disagree to call this a UBI. No one in Iran was ever able to live from this in any way. It is like the 193€ child support the German state pays to every parent: it is helping, but I could not pay even the lowest rent in the country with it. I know this "UBI" from Iran because of my relatives there and essentially it was considered a joke and no one cried a tear when it went away.

</comment><comment><USER28> To be honest, the idea of universal income appeals to me because it sounds like free money.

So one could simply decide not to work at all and use that UBI money for housing, food, and habits and everybody would be fine with that.

I can see how that would have appealed to my 20-something year old self; and it's not much different than how it appeals to my 30-something year old self.

<comment><USER29> You lost me with the "and habits". Bill Gates has said he wants his kids to have enough money to do anything, but not so much they can do nothing. Which is to say you can get a good education, but at some point you need to do something with your life other than gamboling, drugs and prostitutes [you can substitute/add whatever wasteful habits you want here]. It is quite obvious (almost a straw-man) that if everybody did that society would collapse.

I want enough of a fall back that people survive. I want it uncomfortable enough that people decide to get a more productive job if they can. (leaving only the disabled to actually live on the basic income)

Of course I don't know what your habits are. If they are walking around the park you can do that cheaply, I'm willing to take the risk that you won't get bored quickly doing that.

<comment><USER30> At what point is your definition of "discomfort" another person's definition of "poverty?" Discomfort today is poverty tomorrow, especially if the standard of living keeps going up.

<comment><USER29> this is a trick question and the fact that I do not have an answer is why I ultimately oppose the idea (everything else I can see the pros and cons going either way so I would want to see how they plays out in practice in our culture before I give judgement on if it is good or bad).

The reason it is a trick question is based on the following two real people I know. (I'm trying to hide as many details as I can, but these are real people so there isn't much I can do)

Person A was a straight-A student until she dropped out in 10th grade. Then she a few kids by different men - all losers who rarely held any sort of job (she dropped out before getting pregnant, but getting pregnant was her plan). In short the stereotypical image of "folks standing in a welfare line"

Person B was born with Downs Syndrome. He is assistant usher at the movie theater, a job he has held for years and does okay in, but when there are problems the head usher (some kid who has only worked there for 2 weeks) takes over.

When we are talking person A: she made her bad choices and I have no sympathy for them, she can live well below the poverty line. I make some different choices: when she dropped out her life was better (no school) than mine, but by choosing to continue in school I made my life better.

When we are talking person B: life is stacked against him. He was never able to amount to anything, but he has my full sympathies. I want him to have a few luxuries in life that he will never earn himself.

There are lots of other cases you can point to where ultimately I want to give a different answer on a case by case basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Specifically they found that generally people didn't work less, although young people did and they aren't sure if they are just not working, or if they are going to school. They counter that observation that employment in young people is also low in general. (presumably allowing for systemic unemployment of some form).

There is a consistent outcome from many BI tests, which is that just knowing there will be some money each month can mitigate stress and anxiety in people. People with reduced stress and anxiety are both more productive and more functional.

<comment><USER32> I think you can judge success of UBI only over decades and generations of people. People who grew up in a world of UBI will have a totally different view on life than current generations.

I am not saying it's good or bad but I think it will be very difficult to figure out what the eventual outcome of UBI will be in a few decades.

<comment><USER33> > you can judge success of UBI only over decades and generations of people. > People who grew up in a world of UBI will have a totally different view on > life

Thay's why I think experiments like the Finnish one also mentioned on the linked page:

"Finland will select 2000 unemployed citizens to receive 560 euros a month for 2 years - no strings attached. It's part of an experiment to find out what happens people's desire to work when they're guaranteed a basic income."

are nearly useless for evaluating the effect of UBI on an economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here is a new working paper on implementing a budget-neutral UBI in the US. We use a suite of open source models.

[https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/UBI- working-p...](https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/UBI-working- paper.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER35> The biggest problem is that, as per the law of rent, rents will rise by the amount of the dividend once the market has time to react to it.

There would be constant compulsion to raise the basic incomes at the cost of greater and greater public debts or taxes on production... and all the corresponding deadweight loss.

However, if it were funded by taxing land by value, then the rising rents would produce a sustainable public surplus.

</comment><comment><USER36> I believe UBI would lead to changing the fundamental nature of money as it goes from scarcity based to rate-of-flow based in its value basis. It will work as long as people who receive UBI spend that money, as opposed to horde it. That mens UBI should be given to people who have no other sources of income, not to those who will likely just accumulate it with no intent to spend it.

<comment><USER37> There's a significant gap between the bottom end of people with other sources of income and those who will "accumulate it with no intent to spend it". Further, even if you give it to everyone across the board, most of the people who don't need it for basic expenditures and have no intention of saving for a big purchase at some point in the future (e.g. a down-payment on a car or house) would likely be making enough money that the UBI is less than their taxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> >The report found no evidence for the idea that people will work less under a universal income, and found that in some cases, like in the service industry, people worked more, expanding their businesses or pursuing more satisfying lines of work.

>The researchers did find that young people — specifically people in their twenties — worked less, but noted that Iran never had a high level of employment among young people, and that they were likely enrolling in school with the added income.

Seems the authors' agendas are leaking through, these two consecutive paragraphs from the article essentially contradict each other and the premise of the article.

What I read: "we found evidence that young people did work less, but we hand waved it away with a seemingly plausible and totally unsubstantiated assumption."

This is politicized science.

<comment><USER39> The linked report makes the distinction a little clearer:

> For the most part, we focus on the labor supply of poorer workers, who are > more likely to reduce their labor supply as a result of a modest increase in > unearned income. Our results do not indicate a negative labor supply effect > for either hours worked or the probability of participation in market work, > either for all workers or those in the bottom 40% of the income > distribution. We do find a negative labor supply effect for workers 20-29 > years old for their hours worked.

<comment><USER26> The linked report is also more comprehensive than the summary, including the points that: (i) the next Iranian government and Iranian press strongly believe that it _did_ cause massive reductions in labour supply in certain suggestions including citing a paper claiming a loss of 500,000-700,000 agricultural workers[2] (ii) the context of the poorer people not dropping out of work was a period of enormous inflation (caused in part by US sanctions) and the removal of enormous food and fuel subsidies which the program replaced and (iii) this measures very short term impacts (prior to the program launch and within the first three months): against the backdrop of rising prices and brand new US sanctions it's perhaps particularly unlikely that many poorer workers would rush to quite their jobs, even if it were to produce such an effect in the longer term in times of greater economic security (iv) it's actually specifically focusing whether people were more likely to quit their jobs than people who didn't get the subsidy for the first three months due to paperwork problems rather than whether employment didn't fall overall; the paper correctly points out that in an economy with wide access to cheap credit (not Iran) the orthodox economic view would actually expect those receiving subsidies now and those expecting to receive them asap to respond by reducing willingness to supply labour by similar amounts (v) there was a perfectly good reason for them doing the study that way because Iranian labour force trends are all over the place

TLDR: the actual study doesn't tell us very much through no fault of the authors, because a lot of other shocks were happening to the economy at the time. Which is a shame, because it was a huge new program in a middle income country that didn't involve outside capital, which would have made it much better evidence of a UBI's expected effects than most studies carried out.

[2]having read that paper as well, it doesn't appear to be a claim with empirical support</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help me find a website - <AUTHOR> The other day I stumbled upon a website where you can input a name and it will spit out possible domains that spell your name. I've looked through my history and googled furiously; but no luck. Has anyone seen it? <comment><USER2> domai.nr ?

<comment><AUTHOR> No thats not it... Lets say if the project was called 'project' it would spit out ways to get project like pro.ject or proj.ect, whatever is valid

<comment><USER2> Ok. It might not be what you previously saw, but it does do that:

[https://domainr.com/?q=project](https://domainr.com/?q=project)

Returns things like:

proj.ec/t

Hope that helps :)</comment></comment></comment>


Why is Juul worth $16B? It's more like a cigarette than you think - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17529442/juul-vapes-nicotine-electronic-cigarettes-addiction-funding <comment><USER2> Cigarettes have all the right metrics for a startup: great user engagement, network effects, negligible per-user costs, sticky and hard to leave.

The big invention here is a one-liner: s/smoking/vaping/g.

<comment><USER3> Very much like social media, porn, automobiles and sex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting how the messaging has shifted over the past ~4 years from vaping being a way to quit nicotine addiction, to vaping being a way to stop smoking cigarettes. I've often heard the former from people, but the latter from companies.

With the low nicotine liquids coming out, I bet they are low enough that you can't smoothly transition from higher nicotine content to lower nicotine content. I'm sure they won't sell a smooth gradient of nicotine levels that help people quit, instead it will just be marketed as "diet vaping" and will be a huge marketing effort that will pain then in a much more positive light without any real loss of lock-in.

<comment><USER5> >With the low nicotine liquids coming out, I bet they are low enough that you can't smoothly transition from higher nicotine content to lower nicotine content.

There's a funny little "vape van" in back of a strip mall where I live. They make their own vape juice (with a permit, of course) in-house right in front of you. They measure the nicotine themselves, so theoretically I could get as much or as little nicotine as I wanted in 240 mLs at $80. They also label the bottles if there are any controversial flavorings.

There are more than a handful of vape shops in my city like this, who can mix their own and who care about what happens with their customers. It's actually like a little community sometimes.

I think as long as the gourmet vape juice business survives, there won't be the problems you talk about. Kids want the Juul convenience, but adults trying to quit smoking usually want to do it the best way-- ie. not with salted nicotine, or disposable juice pods, etc. It's kind of like coffee or chocolate in that way, where it's easy and fun to become sort of a connoisseur and buy all the best and interesting flavors and smoke them in the perfect vape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does Juul do any advertising? One of the biggest problems I see in the historical tobacco industry was how subversive the advertising was. I wonder if Juul goes down a similar path.

<comment><USER7> They are HUGE with the Instagram influencers, and therefore the younger audiences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something to keep in mind is that the tobacco industry has a ton of money, a demonstrated willingness to play dirty if needed, and a deeply vested interest in undermining companies like Juul.

I'm not saying that the The Verge or Rachel Becker have any intention of defending the tobacco industry from disruptive startups, not am I suggesting that vaping in general or Juul in specific aren't be problematic.

What I _am_ saying is that there's an immense amount of money and effort is being deployed to ensure that people will defend the tobacco industry and will attack vaping, and it's always worth being extra cautious. "Where there's smoke, there's fire" is rarely a useful heuristic, but it's extra useless when you know there's a guy with a smoke machine around the corner. :)

<comment><USER9> To some extent for Big Tobacco this might be like BP hedging on solar power. Nicotine is still best extracted from the tobacco plant. I doubt they'll fight vaping forever.

What I see is people foolishly fighting the last war. Today's adults have been trained since early life on the evils of smoking and nicotine addiction and vice. We have this narrative of Big Tobacco pushing a product they claimed was safe and which was not. There are all these programmed mental circuits saying "if you don't like smoking, you should be suspicious of vaping."

And so at the beginning of vaping there was a lot of FUD about popcorn lung. Now there's FUD about kids getting hooked on Juul. Everybody's looking for the catch because last time there was a catch.

A future in which 20% of the population is forever hooked on vaping nicotine and no cigarettes are sold is a utopia compared to what we have now. Instead of embracing that future we have the anti-tobacco activists spreading alarm about vaping and all the old smoking laws being expanded to cover an activity that doesn't justify the ostracism.

I've never smoked or vaped and the laws have no effect on me. For a brief period I saw smokers switching when they could vape indoors. That advantage is disappearing.

We're missing a chance to _kill cigarettes_ in the developed world. We should embrace the viral appeal of the vape fad before they become just another nicotine delivery device. We could save millions of lives.

<comment><USER8> I agree very strongly. Vaping is a bit of an unknown, but it's difficult to overstate how terrible tobacco is.

Like you, I've never smoked or vaped, but I see vaping as an excellent chance to actually kill off tobacco. If we later learn some flavouring agent is harmful, well, we have an entire regulatory apparatus that let's us solve these things.

> We could save millions of lives.

Yep. Or we could virtue signal about how important self restraint and puritan morals are. Might kill a bunch of people, but man, think how great that smug feeling will feel!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Spourious claims about the chemical makeup of vapor? Check.

Misinformed statements about what science found about the dangers of vaping vs cigarettes? Check.

Citations of studies with no peer review, that likely don't say what the article claims? Check.

Wrong information about the mechanics of vaping? Check.

Boogyman chemistry? Check.

No indicative knowledge about how people actually use these devices? Check.

What about the children-isms? Double check.

Look, I get it. As someone who vapes, I truly do my best to treat it like smoking, which is saying I do my darndest to respect those around me.

I don't know what to think of Juul. I was told it has 50 mil nic and my jaw hit the floor. Those that vape knows that's a crazy number, and obviously these are incredibly low powered devices.

People do move from Juul to more advanced setups, and yes, they step all the way down to 12 or 6 mil (nicotine) off the bat and likely go down to 3 mil after a few months.

<comment><USER11> Why do you go down mil(lileter?) nicotine as you progress? pardon my ignorance i have only vaped a few times.

Why did your jaw hit the floor for JUUL?

<comment><USER12> Most vaping devices (mods) produce much denser vapor and doing 50 mg/ml nicotine with them would not be pleasant even for an experienced smoker. People who use vaping to quit smoking gradually decrease nicotine concentration to wean themselves off nicotine.

<comment><USER13> It wouldn't even be safe, much less pleasant.

In my experience, 50mg/ml in a low power device like a July is about equal to 9mg/ml in a sub-ohm device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's essentially a drug delivery device. I don't understand how it's not regulated by FDA.

</comment><comment> bra-ket The great thing about Juul is the lack of chemical aftertaste

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure why it is called vaping. You can see smoke come out. It uses a heater to burn the juice.

<comment><USER16> It's called vaping because the carrier liquid (propylene glycol) is being vaporized. There isn't supposed to be any smoke - if so, something is wrong.

<comment><USER17> I think the GP is confusing smoke with vapor.

<comment><USER15> To be honest I've only seen pot vapes. And I do see smoke, not vapor.

<comment><USER18> Pot vapes definitely aren't supposed to put out smoke. With some vapes you could achieve this by cranking the heat all the way up, but it'd be a far worse experience than just smoking.

I guess some of the cheap $20 chinese ones like the "gpen" might not actually vaporize though.

<comment><USER15> I see a white cloud. Could that be vapor? I always thought vapors were invisible.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, that is vapor. Vapors aren't necessarily invisible, you can see the clouds in the sky too.

Might look similar, but it's a completely different experience for the user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It feels like there's a premeditated process, here, in terms of timing.

1\. Tobacco Cigarettes emerge as public health scare in the late 1990's.

2\. McDonaldsization of Coffee via Starbucks in the late 1990's.

3\. Cigarettes taxed and regulated with punishing costs and counter-media- manipulation.

4\. Bindings introduced to market coffee with free wi-fi, boosting high-end coffee's incidental exposure to novice internet users at a time when caffeine is very-nearly required to negotiate the ever-expanding terrain of new technologies. (it's just good business, of course)

5\. Millions of former nicotine addicts herded away from nicotine to expensive, premium high dose caffeine alternatives, serving as stimulant to wean many down off of nicotine cravings with new habits.

6\. 20 years later, with ordinary tobacco cigarettes habits all-but-destroyed, across two generations of former users, and new technologies now well established, coffee habits can wind down. A mild campaign against coffee is introduced. See: acrylamide, poor stock performance, racial sensitivity incidents in liminal zones of large franchise chain restaurants.

7\. Emerging technologies, now ready for maturity may be re-introduced with new players. These entities work to re-normalize a newly engineered and tested concept in managed synthetic addiction, with status symbol oriented marketing plays.

Why vaping is anything is beyond me, but I feel like this represents the fundamentals of a broader subversive program to phase out agricultural- plantation-oriented modes of daily-use otc psychoactives that play vital roles in common universal social norms that cut across a wide array of global cultural customs.

<comment><USER20> If you've ever tried nicotine you'll quickly understand why caffeine could never substitute for it. Sure, they're both stimulants. But nicotine _decreases_ anxiety. Caffeine increases it.

<comment><USER19> Actually, they both do the same thing, but attack different sides of the mood slope.

Which you'd know, if you ever stopped to consider how to adjust your mood with either.

Caffeine introduces anxiety and irritability on downslope, after about two half-lives, or 12-ish hours (6 hour half life). On the up slope, caffeine provides a long slowly declining period of alertness and performance. The initial buzz comes on strong and tapers off over time.

People seek caffeine to perform. But a slow sinking feeling appears near the end of the day.

Nicotine modifies mood on the other side of the bend, with it's presence evening out irritability with immediate relief. The trail off goes unnoticed until a sudden urge kicks in, to bump one's self back up onto the plateau.

Nicotine is sought to cure or cool an immediate pang, which leaves the impression of easing into relaxation, which degrades silently until suddenly noticed as an urge to re-up.

The perception of nicotine is downtime, even though the dosage process and serum curve is the usual spike and tapered downslope, people learn modify the nicotine downslope differently, by catching the drop-off before cravings become desperate.

Which is why cigarettes are designed as they are, and achieve product success the way they do. Metering doses at an almost hourly rate, with twenty dose packs marketed to afford exactly that behavior.

Coffee, as a liquid, is readily either sipped or chugged as needed, and has different preparation and consumption habits, so its marketing is different.

Caffeine's downslope is handled differently, since the withdrawal effects, are separated by longer distances of up to 48 hours, and because circadian rhythms are more drastically effected. Consuming in the late afternoon results in insomnia, so the better choice is to cure the anxious late day mood disruptions with food and alcohol, and stave off withdrawal (vasodilation migraines, etc) the next morning.

<comment><USER20> I use both regularly. I never notice the "downslope" of caffeine, although maybe that's my tolerance.

The neurology is totally different. Caffeine primarily affects the heart rate via adenosine (A1R) antagonism. Nicotine binds to the ion channel nAChR which is expressed all over the brain and the nervous system. Full agonists of nAChR cause convulsive seizures, while antagonists are paralytic, but nicotine is a partial agonist, producing a sort of stability.

That's why nicotine is anxiolytic: it interferes with spikes and droughts of acetylcholine, smoothing the highs and lows of neural activation. The brain responds by "sensitizing", changing acetylcholine more dramatically in response to stimuli, and increasing the density of nACh receptors. That's why nicotine withdrawal is so awful: every mood is enhanced and you can't calm down.

By contrast, caffeine, which primarily affects the A1 receptors that are expressed in cardiac neurons and smooth muscle tissue, is obviously never anxiolytic. A faster heartbeat does not produce calmness. The faster heartbeat increases the availability of energy in the brain and muscle, producing wakefulness. It has some other effects in the brain, particularly the basal forebrain, where inhibiting A1 also promotes wakefulness, but the cardiac effects of A1 dominate its practical effects to the extent that A1 agonists (opposite of caffeine) have never been implemented as sedatives because of their tendency to produce life-threatening drops in heart rate and blood pressure.

You'd think, having studied this so much, I'd be more responsible, but humans are a funny animal. Anyway, there's no way a pure stimulant is going to substitute for an anxiolytic that takes effect in ten seconds. It makes sense in zero realities.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop Complaining about Your PR Firm. Here's How the Media Works - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/ba600f39a13d

<comment><AUTHOR> "Your story is boring until proven otherwise." Lora Kolodny</comment>


Trouble brewing for Google Wallet - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilepaymentstoday.com/blog/6993/Trouble-brewing-for-Google-Wallet

<comment><USER2> My "sources" tell me that Visa/MC will just drastically drop fees for using their services if things like G Wallet and Square gain any sort of real traction. Right now, from an aggregate volume percentage, neither are even at 0.1%.</comment>


Data Links Drive Trust - <AUTHOR> https://community.bigcrunch.io/2019/06/25/data-links-drive-trust/ <comment><USER2> Feedback from a reader that found himself a user shortly thereafter: \- That's one hell of a funnel. I found it rather irresistible to explore the grid, and eventually to make an account.

\- I am very impressed with the concept and the relative performance for a zoomable code/viz canvas.

\- I was unable to open a link in VScode or to use the Open Cell pallet action. "An unknown error has occured, please report." I'm dutifully reporting it. The web link prompted an extension install, then on subsequent links prompted for open permission then failed silently.

\- It would have been cooler if the population of Australia updated while I was watching the odometer.

\- I disabled ghostery after it was blocking a bunch of network requests.

\- The console threw a ton of 404 errors, but only for the same resources: [https://dc8bsfv4udm20.cloudfront.net/cell_images/551e4016-14...](https://dc8bsfv4udm20.cloudfront.net/cell_images/551e4016-1452-415f-85bd- fc3133de58ed.png) [https://rur.bigcrunch.io/cell_images/551e4016-1452-415f-85bd...](https://rur.bigcrunch.io/cell_images/551e4016-1452-415f-85bd- fc3133de58ed.png)

\- I could not delete a space I made. It didn't send a network request.

\- I was trying to delete a space in the first place because the one I made was too small to try any nifty templates.

\- I really wanted middle mouse to pan around. In fact I wanted anything that can pan besides clicking the arrows.

\- I perused the docs. I really wanted to just modify a link to make an array link to an additional cell, but I couldn't find out about anything but creating a link. I still haven't been able to figure that one out.

\- It takes about 40 seconds for data to start really flowing. Until then I can't navigate to my space, and I'm prompted to let BigCrunch take care of making one for me. After the data starts rendering then I can navigate to my space. It would be nice if that returned sooner. Also nice if there was a visual indication that data is on the way.

You're really on to something here!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback Reilly, its extremely valuable to us. We're working on make the experience better and better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "it's" should be written "its" [0].

I am not a native English speaker, but somehow I feel the urge to notice it, and keep noticing it everywhere. I think it's fairly common mistake.

[0]: [https://grammarist.com/spelling/its- its/](https://grammarist.com/spelling/its-its/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahah doh, thank you for pointing it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like a better way to do it would be the way Wirecutter handles prices in their reviews? They give you both the price when the article was written and the current price on Amazon. When the data changes, you probably want to see both.

</comment><comment><USER5> > As Berners-Lee told The Guardian, he created the internet with the intent of > it being "built for the public good" ....

Sir Tim B-L, inventor of the world wide web, did not create the Internet...</comment>


How data from the Kepler Space Telescope is changing the Drake equation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/how-data-from-the-kepler-space-telescope-is-changing-the-drake-equation-cea9c7008bc1

<comment><USER2> What a fascinating read. Very cool that "life" may be as close as ten light years away.

<comment><USER3> Life may be much closer than that.

[http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/europa/multimediaimagedetails.cf...](http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/europa/multimediaimagedetails.cfm?Subsite_IM_ID=8421&SiteID=4)

<comment><USER4> I hope so. It would be quite a blow if Europa doesn't hold any life but has all of the conditions we think are necessary for it.

[http://www.astronomywise.com/articles/could-life-survive- on-...](http://www.astronomywise.com/articles/could-life-survive-on-europa/)

<comment><USER3> It will give us information. Right now we have very little idea about abiogenesis. We don't know if it happens often or rarely. We haven't been able to do this in labs.

If there is life on Europa, life is probably everywhere in the universe. If not, it means life will be hard to find. It also means that we are very rare and unique and need to work hard to preserve the earth and what we have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're looking for extra info, NOVA did a documentary on Kepler: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/alien-planets- revealed.ht...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/alien-planets- revealed.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Slightly misleading title - its not changing the equation per se but filling in more confident values.</comment>


Drilling into the Chicxulub Crater, Ground Zero of the Dinosaur Extinction - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/science/chicxulub-crater-dinosaur-extinction.html <comment><USER2> Here's the science paper: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6314/878](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6314/878) reply</comment>


How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone) - <AUTHOR> http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html <comment><USER2> Interesting read.

> So better than many options, but not great. And sadly the usage is connected > to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server to associate it > to my home and person.

I wonder how often you need to enter that verification code provided by the robot-voice via the phone number used as identifier. Might one be able to bootstrap Signal with a public telephone? Of course that would tie your Signal identity to that specific phone number, but it's a step up from associating it with a phone number registered to your real-world identity.

Still pretty useless if you care about keeping your (on-line) identities separate. It seems like most major services on the internet today desperately want that neatly unique key that is my phone number in their databases. The amount of nag-screens asking for it is absurd (Twitter, Steam, anything Google, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER3> Just create google account, use sms to that number, activate signal.</comment>


ES6 starterkit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elierotenberg/es6-starterkit

<comment><USER2> There is also Google's Traceur, which "is a JavaScript.next-to-JavaScript-of- today compiler that allows you to use features from the future today"

[https://github.com/google/traceur- compiler](https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler)</comment>


What is Bitcoin Cash? - <AUTHOR> https://litepaper.com/resources/bitcoin-cash <comment><USER2> No mention that mining difficulty changed with BCH?

Cant trust a coin that has a few players that decide how much money they want to print.

</comment><comment><USER3> While this is a fairly balanced description of Bitcoin Cash, there are a few glaring errors that should be addressed. It's about 1000% better than most though. Kudos to the author.

> _It has made a number of subtle but significant changes to distinguish > itself from Bitcoin_

It has made a number of subtle but significant changes to survive as a minority hard fork until it can attract enough hash power to take the network.

> _This has lead to nearly 2,000 Forks of the Bitcoin network_

Almost all of the 2000 "forks" referenced here are forks of the codebase. Bitcoin Cash and only a few others are forks of both the codebase AND THE BLOCKCHAIN. When the blockchain is forked, the new coin contains the same transaction history and coin distribution up until the fork point.

> _However, the person most directly connected to the currency today is Roger > Ver, an early Bitcoin adopter and investor._

This could not be further from the truth. When the censorship started in r/bitcoin, multiple teams started working simultaneously on separate clients to fork the network. The team that was first out of the gate is said to be affiliated with ASIC manufacturers Bitmain. It took months before Roger Ver even spoke about it. It wasn't until the Segwit2x fork failed on the Bitcoin Core network that Ver actually put his resources behind it. He was even criticized for not supporting it immediately.

> _A brief history_

The history goes much further back. See the following links

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info...](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/informative_btc_vs_bch_articles/)

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pitch_for_decred/dmcer4d/)

\- [https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete- histor...](https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of- censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43)

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7hckeb/in_response_to_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7hckeb/in_response_to_my_post_the_other_day_about/dqq2t7q/)

\- [https://blog.coinbase.com/what-happened-at-the-satoshi- round...](https://blog.coinbase.com/what-happened-at-the-satoshi- roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf)

> _Because the Bitcoin Cash blocks are significantly larger, that makes them > tougher crack, and harder for small miners to solve the blocks._

Block size has nothing to do with difficulty. Difficulty or "how tough to crack" is set by a function called the "difficulty adjustment algorithm" and is completely separate from the code that handles block composition.

Edit: formatting</comment>


Ground Breaking Ideas Sought to Improve the Lives of Millions - <AUTHOR> http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2013/03/Ground-Breaking-Ideas-Sought-to-Improve-the-Lives-of-Millions

<comment><USER2> Just out of curiosity I've been looking around for good articles/surveys on data interoperability, but not finding much so far. Anyone have some links?</comment>


Theheadless.dev – open source Puppeteer and Playwright knowledge base - <AUTHOR> https://theheadless.dev/ <comment><USER2> I used puppeteer in my book's ([https://www.handsonscala.com/](https://www.handsonscala.com/)) build pipeline to convert HTML sources into PDFs, for online distribution and printing. This let me write and style my book using common web technlogies (e.g. bootstrap CSS) rather than needing to fiddle with specialized tooling like Pandoc or LaTeX, and it ended up looking pretty good.

Works flawlessly, and has exactly the configuration knobs you would expect and want. Took a bit of plumbing to call into a Node.js script from my Scala build logic, but all in all ended up being like 20 lines of plumbing which was straightforward to write and understand. A welcome change after struggling with bugs in wkhtmltopdf!

<comment><USER3> This is a really interesting use case! Screenshots of your book look great.

I'd just started looking into the existing tools like those you mentioned for e-book authoring and it's quickly gotten overwhelming. From what you've described, I'm interested in looking into puppeteer as an alternative workflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One day I will right an extensive post (or set of them) about using Puppeteer to bypass sites' anti-bot measures. It's a fascinating (and annoying) cat-and- mouse game. But at the end of the day, almost all bot detection measures rely on using Javascript to report back metrics about the browser, but those measures are running in an environment where the bot completely controls what Javascript reports back.

One of my favorite tricks I've seen employed are detection measures that look to see if common detection bypass tricks have been implemented (like checking the toString output of commonly overridden native functions.)

[https://theheadless.dev/posts/challenging-flows/#bot- detecti...](https://theheadless.dev/posts/challenging-flows/#bot-detection)

<comment><USER5> I wonder if google captcha will always be able to defeat puppeteer? Seems odd for google to publish a set of abuse-able APIs, and not be able to detect their use.

<comment><USER6> There are farms of people who literally sit around all day and solve CAPTCHAs - there's no surefire way to address this problem and it usually ends up in an orchestration of reputation-score tooling (including making a user fill out a CAPTCHA) to fingerprint a bot.

If you're good at spoofing all of that fingerprinting you'll blow straight past them - it's all client-side in-which you have control all the way down to the bits and bytes.

<comment><USER7> You can just use Google text to speech to solve reCaptcha

<comment><USER8> This is a their answer: [https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/86640?hl=en](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/86640?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've used and love Puppeteer, but it also makes me realize with enough money and the right skills, these tools are exactly what would be used to mass manipulate social media. You could literally create thousands or millions of accounts and add enough entropy to make it undetectable.

I've created a couple scripts to delete accounts, and even signing in can include randomization between scrolls and clicks to make each change entirely unique and to mimic real user interactions. Sort of scary to think about what is possible with this, especially given a large pool of residential IP addresses.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here: funny and true story. We had a misconfiguration in our rate limiting. One smarty pants used it to blast his twitch channel with "viewers", e.g. a 1000 concurrent Puppeteer sessions.

It was probably great for his engagement / viewership numbers till we shut him down.

<comment><USER10> I have to ask... What was the reason you shut this person down? Was it simply that they were violating your rate limit, or something more?

E.g. if they were paying for the 1000 concurrent puppeteer sessions, would everything be in the clear with your SaaS?

Presumably, your service doesn't care what the users use it for. Sure, though, it's a violation of twitch's terms of service to fake viewers on the platform. I may be naive -- could twitch sue a service that is used to fake viewers?

<comment><AUTHOR> They were violating our terms of service, rate limiting, responsible behaviour etc. etc. So we care quite a bit what Checkly is used for. We have a page for it:

[https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/browser-checks/responsible- us...](https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/browser-checks/responsible-use/)

Luckily, most users are completely ok. But fraud and abuse will always be a thing.

<comment><USER11> That you were asked this question makes me a little sad.

Beside risks like Twitch (or worse, all of Amazon) blocking your traffic wholesale, letting someone use your product to abuse another is just a crappy thing to do; Especially if you let it because "well we're making money".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anybody know of a framework which can record user sessions and output puppeteer commands? _(basically mouse clicks - > code)_

It would make writing end-2-end integration tests much easier...

<comment><USER13> Hey, here is a basic & open source recorder for Puppeteer: [https://github.com/checkly/puppeteer- recorder](https://github.com/checkly/puppeteer-recorder) from the same team (disclaimer I'm co-founder of Checkly)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm working on a video course for all things browser automation, whether it's testing, scraping, auditing, deploying etc.

I'm keeping the codebase open on GitHub: [https://github.com/umaar/learn- browser-testing/](https://github.com/umaar/learn-browser-testing/) so anyone who wants to follow along can do so for free.

I've almost finished some cool content such as:

\- An Amazon price checker which sends you a text message when the price decreases

\- An Playwright script which gets to Wikipedia Philosophy ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy))

\- Having an automation script constantly running on a cheap Raspberry PI

<comment><USER15> A good use case would be indexing real estate portals for interested buyers. I could imagine it as a relatively attractive side business, targeting real estate agencies and buyers/renters alike. But I haven't had the time to actually build it

<comment><USER16> From my having worked ~8 years in residential real estate (and overseeing dev. and maintenance of an in-house api)...I've learned that real estate data on all those real estate sites (from zillow, to any other broker site, etc.) is very much not clean, not always correct, nor updated at a realistic interval. From a data perspective, it is extremely messy to work with. Plus real estate brokers (and related data brokers) have little incentive to clean up the data, let alone make updates more real-time. This might not be a big issue for personal apps...but just be aware of the not-so-little gaps around real estate data. Now, if someone did this as an exercise to learn about apis, scraping, web browser automation, then by all means enjoy; plenty to learn for sure! But don't expect the data to be as usuable. (Oh, and my claims of data messiness are not limited to automata, as anyone searching for homes can tell you about their disappointments when asking about a home only to hear from the agent: "Sorry, that home was sold, we/someone forgot to take the listing down...").

<comment><USER17> This is unfortunately the truth of the situation. I spent way too much time writing scrapers for Zillow and Redfin to guide home purchasing decisions, only to find out half the stuff listed for sale had been under contract for weeks, places listed with garage that had none, homes with pictures of pools and no pool in the data fields... just tons of errors in the data that no amount of vigilance could clean.

<comment><USER11> The mad thing is, I would happily pay for the real estate sites to provide me with this kind of data because buying a house is so expensive and such a pain...

But it would STILL suck, because the input is so dodgy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been a long-time Puppeteer user, it's been game-changing in so many ways. We even built a whole platform with it to automate our company's social media presence, among countless small bash scripts, archiving utilities, QA workflows, etc.

Playwright interests me even more though. We've been getting a lot of requests for ArchiveBox.io to support other browsers as the rendering engine for web archives, and it's always seemed daunting to try and reimplement multi-browser support ourselves for puppeteer-style workflows, but Playwright seems to completely take care of that!

</comment><comment><USER19> I've never really worked too heavily with headless, so what would be some examples of 'real-life' applications using this API? Looking for some inspiration to maybe build a side project around this :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously tooting my own horn here, but these are some products:

\- [https://checklyhq.com](https://checklyhq.com) \- synthetic monitoring

\- [https://microlink.io](https://microlink.io) \- automation

\- [https://www.browserless.io](https://www.browserless.io) \- testing

\- [https://www.scrapingbee.com/](https://www.scrapingbee.com/) \- scraping

All are business leveraging these types of frameworks

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the mention (browserless.io)! Really enjoying this site, let me know if you'd like a guest post and I'd happily add something. We've gathered a few weird tricks and tips as well. Definitely a lot that can be shared!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Maybe fun to add. The guides and articles are all on GitHub as is the source code for the site - it's Vuepress based so it might help folks who want to make their own knowledge base using that framework.

</comment><comment><USER21> How do these differ from something like Selenium?

<comment><USER20> Hey, I work on browserless.io, which supports both puppeteer and selenium.

Selenium uses a chatty HTTP interface, whereas puppeteer/playwright use WebSockets or pipes to communicate. Under-the-hood, however, Selenium is simply using chrome's devtools protocol to communicate with it. The way selenium does this is by another binary, generally a `driver`, that has the protocol "baked" into it and has the HTTP selenium API as its input interface.

This is all a long way of saying that puppeteer/playwright have a lot less moving parts, and are generally more approachable. Selenium _does_ have a lot more history behind it, better support across languages and frameworks, and is more stable but it's also much larger and "clunkier" feeling. It's also a lot harder to scale with load-balancers since, again, it's all over HTTP so you'll need some way to load-balance with sticky sessions.

Practically speaking they all do the same thing at some layer. Both are high- level APIs around the devtools protocol, it's just what higher-level interface you prefer and what your language/runtime is.

<comment><USER11> ^^ All of this. I work for Sauce Labs; We've been pretty focused around Selenium but we're building out support for Puppeteer, Playwrite, Cypress et al.

The newer automation tools benefit from being newer; They can take advantage of hardened, well designed interfaces (like the Dev Tool protocol). Selenium's been around for a bit longer, and was built when browsers didn't make it easy to control them. That's influenced the semantics of Selenium quite a lot, as well as explaining the extra moving parts (Drivers exist to map the Selenium Wire Protocol (or W3C protocol) to whatever they're driving because Selenium wasn't built with a specific browser in mind).

I feel like, at this point in time, the real difference is how much abstraction you want from the browser. Selenium is a set of knives, Puppeteer is a Die Cutter. You'll put in more work with Selenium, but maybe you need something do happen a REALLY specific way. Or, you might just need shapes cut, and Puppeteer will be more reliable and faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I work for [https://headlesstesting.com](https://headlesstesting.com) where we provide a grid of browsers, which people can use in combination with Puppeteer and Playwright. One of the reasons people use this, instead of Selenium, is because of the increase in speed.

</comment><comment><USER23> How does one reliably use puppeteer and know when a page has loaded?

I've tried using the various networkidle events, wait for some DOM element, and I find myself just using 5 seconds or something like that as the most reliable solution.

Is there a foolproof way of doing this? I feel like it should be way easier and less hacky.

<comment><USER24> You can't really know whether a site has fully loaded and is just sending analytics ajax to the server or is querying some random service and will trigger a navigation based on the response, whether there's a setTimeout running somewhere that'll trigger a navigation etc. I've found a timeout to be the safest bet. If onload has been fired and it hasn't jumped in the last X seconds, it's probably going to stay at that URL.

Humans don't know either, they're just better at guessing based on visual cues.

<comment><USER25> It's something of a UX question too.

One _could_ design a page that visually loaded, then jumped to a redirect after 10 seconds on the page. But who would?

The primary approach is always event-based, because most pages do that sanely.

If not... the best approach I've found is looking for sentinel elements.

Essentially, something that only matches once the website is de facto loaded (regardless of events). Sometimes it's a "search results found" bit of text, sometimes a first element. But more or less, "How do I (a human) know when the page is ready?"

<comment><USER24> > But who would?

Affiliate networks (the shadier they are, the more likely they will), because they are weird and load third party tracking beacons in transitional pages and want to make extra sure that the beacons (who also can redirect multiple times) have been loaded. To add to the fun, they're also adding random new tracking domains (to avoid being blocked, I assume), so you can't even say whether you expect some domain to be transitional or final to increase your confidence in what you measure.

You're right though, looking for elements is a pretty good way if you know the page you're checking. If you're going in blind, you can still look for things they probably have (e.g. <nav>, <header>, <section> etc), but I haven't found any that are reliably on a "real" page and reliably not on a redirect page.

<comment><USER25> That's a use case I haven't encountered, nor considered!

Most of my work is making known transitions (e.g. page1 to page2) work reliably, so I have the benefit of knowing the landing page structure.

If you're crawling pathological, _client-side_ redirect chains, maybe do pattern-matching scans on loaded code for the full set of redirect methods? There's only so many, and includes / doesn't-include seems a fair way to bucket pages.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, we had been doing that initially and found that there are lots of imaginative ways to use e.g. refresh meta-tags that browsers do accept but we did not (e.g. somebody might say _content= "0.0; url=[https://example.com/"*](https://example.com/"*)) and more and more networks and agencies switching to JS-based redirects lead to a headless browser being easier in the end, despite dealing with these specific issues.

A simple _self.location.href = ...* is still doable (-ish, because I've seen conditional changes that were essentially if(false)... to disable a redirect, which we obviously didn't consider when pattern matching), but once they include e.g. jQuery (and some do on a simple redirect page) it got far too complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You might wanna switch to another analytics provider (temporarily) when posting on HN. Because 60%+ users probably block it anyway, so you will lose the insights, etc

<comment><USER27> I am asking out of curiosity: is it possible & legal to set up a simple proxy server to redirect analytics data to the provider? So that the analytics traffic goes to the same domain - and is not blocked?

<comment><USER28> Google probably don't want that happening because they use the data to inform decisions for all kinds of other things (search, ad sales, filling in gaps in their creepy profiles of people, maybe even metrics-driven machine-learning- for-web-design, who knows) and are more worried about web site owners feeding them mountains of fake data than about missing stats on some % of ad-blocking users.

<comment><USER26> Use uBlock Origin. It blocks even those sneaky DNS changers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awesome! Would love to see something like that for Selenium

</comment><comment><USER30> What about Cypress though? How does it compare to Playwright ? Is it going to die now that MS has rolled out their own RPA?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cypress is an E2E testing solution with batteries included. Playwright is just the browser automation part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Chrome only...

<comment><USER32> "Playwright provides a set of APIs to automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit browsers."

<comment><USER31> Indeed I missed that. So playwright is definitely more interesting.

What is surprising is the linked site is quoting the FAQ of playwright that has been removed a couple of months ago: [https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/pull/1930/files](https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/pull/1930/files)

That FAQ seems to be giving a lot of perspective on the subject. Wondered why it was removed.</comment></comment></comment>


I've discovered a data breach, what should I do? - <AUTHOR>

I've just discovered a data breach - 80,000+ names, emails, addresses and birthdates all publicly available on Google. This is personally identifiable information.<p>The data owner is not responding. What should I do? <comment><USER2> Send them a list of data breach notification laws by state: [http://www.csoonline.com/article/439940/state-breach- disclos...](http://www.csoonline.com/article/439940/state-breach-disclosure- laws-update)

That might scare them into action. They have very real legal obligations and if they are in Europe the laws are even more strict.

Edit: A more complete list: [http://www.ncsl.org/IssuesResearch/TelecommunicationsInforma...](http://www.ncsl.org/IssuesResearch/TelecommunicationsInformationTechnology/SecurityBreachNotificationLaws/tabid/13489/Default.aspx)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I'll leave it a few more days to give them a 'reasonable' period to sort it out, then put in a complaint to the UK's ICO office: <http://www.ico.gov.uk/complaints/data_protection.aspx>

Although I'm pissed they neither responded to my complaint nor bothered to remove the spreadsheet. Makes me wonder how ignorant some of these corporations really are...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Trying to contact Google could be a good thing. They would probably remove it from their system so at least it's not searchable from Google and make it harder to find.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the idea but this falls outside Google's criteria for reporting personal info in search results: [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164133)

Basically they say 'tell the site owner to remove it...'</comment></comment>


How much is "too much" to spend on your launch? - <AUTHOR>

I'm launching a product that requires network effects. Now we have partners who can throw a launch party and get the top influencers in the community to download the app. Let's say the product needs about 100 active users in a single day to work. If you were running this project, how much would you spend on the launch?
My "guesstimates" right now is like this:
Launch Party 200 attendees - 50% downloads the app  - 30% actively use the app = 30 active users
If we can bootstrap the parties to around $2k, that mean the total costs might be $6k+. Do you think that's worth it base on your experience?
Thanks for any feedback/comments. <comment><USER2> $6000+ to get 30 users.... that's $200+/user _before you even know if anyone likes what you've done_.

I have my doubts about "influencers" as well ... I'm skeptical that success could be as simple as getting some dude with a bunch of twitter followers to use you.

<comment><USER3> I agree. The math sounds awful. 100 active users is nothing, and will equate to 1 active user in 2 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you can spend $6k to make your thing work then sure it's worth it. It's more likely that you'll find your party doesn't convert nearly as well as you hope and the users aren't nearly as sticky.

You are probably far better off spending that $6k promoting your startup on the web. The nice thing about marketing on the web is you can run significant experiments for $200 vs $2000.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think that it all boils down to how good your end product is. Tweets by top influencers will bring in some initial traffic but it'll quickly die out. I think it would make more sense to build a landing page to showcase your product early and then use the 2-3k to generate a slow but steady stream of signups of people that will try it. You'll get a much bigger bang for your buck and have some extra cash lying around. But like I mentioned, the % of active users will really depend on your end product.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the input guys. I like your way of thinking on a per user basis, and also raising the concern with how effective the "influencers" will truly be.

Launch party is just part of the strategy. I'm definitely leveraging many low cost channels as well. Just needed some outside perspective :)</comment>


Randomly-generated math paper accepted for publication - <AUTHOR> http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102

<comment><USER2> A reminder that mathematicians shouldn't be too confident that something like the Sokal hoax could never happen in their discipline.

The reviewer(s) had at least _some_ suspicions, although the fact that the paper was complete gibberish overall seems to have eluded them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I frequently found the language and notation used in math papers to be nearly unintelligible. It doesn't matter how simple the underlying concepts are, scientific papers manage to make them _seem_ incredibly complicated.</comment>


Information Retrieval papers you need to read - <AUTHOR> http://www.scienceforseo.com/information-retrieval/10-papers-you-need-to-read/

<comment><USER2> Anon84, you have been churning out some good links lately. What is it? hack mode? beautiful isn't it? :-)

[sorry, had to make a private remark publicly, to someone I don't know because HN doesn't have messaging. just had to acknowledge that Anon84, and others like him, has been keeping the place more "hackish" and less TechCrunch- fluff.]

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the support.

I've been spending a lot more time lately reading up on this type of stuff for a _huge_ scraping/data mining project. My background is mostly in Physics so depending on what I happen to be working on at any given moment there's always some catching up to do.

Anything particularly interesting gets posted here for others to enjoy and comment. :)

<comment><USER2> I'm doing the same right now. Massive scraping plus "gisting" or document summarization. You're pretty much on the right track; half of those papers are industry standards (my browser marked them as "visited" automatically :-)

<comment><USER3> So which of those would be a good starting point for someone who has no idea about IR?

<comment><USER2> start with LSA: laten semantic indexing, if you want information gisting/summarization.

i'm not worried about IR because I use a good search-engine library: Montezuma, and it's in Common Lisp. It's Java clone is called Lucene :-)

<comment><USER3> A Google search gave me this: <http://www.cs.utk.edu/~lsi/>

Is that what you're talking about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A couple other seminal favorites:

 _Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment_

<http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf>

 _Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis_

<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~th/papers/Hofmann-UAI99.pdf>

Kleinberg, author of the first paper, is quite possibly my favorite computer scientist. He's been on the leading edge of a lot of largely disjoint areas of research on the information structure of the web and almost always drops in some really smart stuff. He seems to hit new fields and drop in some big ideas and move on, so a lot of the more concretely applicable stuff comes in refinements of his work, but sometimes I feel like every time I cross into a new problem domain he's already written three papers on it. Beyond that, he writes in a very readable style, which is frustratingly rare for top-notch computer scientists.

<comment><USER5> The "rebel king" is also a phenominal lecturer and a favorite among all cornell CS students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> All good links. Thanks for sharing.

Another list of books for IR [http://researchonsearch.blogspot.com/2005/12/information- ret...](http://researchonsearch.blogspot.com/2005/12/information-retrieval- textbooks.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Also you guys surely you would like this book too: [http://www- csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-...](http://www- csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-book.html) <http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/pdf/irbookprint.pdf>

Is a very readable and comprehensive introduction of the field. Besides it is recent and covers in a depth several current hot topics.

here is a review the book [http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/02/book-review- introduction...](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/02/book-review-introduction- to-information.html)</comment>


Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? Here's What Happened to the Money - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/money/4000583/ice-bucket-challenge-money-donations/

<comment><USER2> Cool, I was afraid this was going to be a story about corruption and mismanagement, but it's not.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is good. The very odd thing about this event is that I recall the benefit and to some extent the ridiculousness of the ice bucket challenge, and thought to myself that it's great that people were coming together to help those in need.

Several months later, my father was diagnosed with ALS. A week ago, my father passed away.

At this stage in my life, I can't begin to express how thankful I am that there is a group dedicated to the treatment of this condition and that (unlike many other US charitable endeavors) the monies received have been utilized efficiently.</comment>


Angry Birds Star Wars - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/08/angry-birds-star-wars-blasts-off-on-android-ios-windows-phone-8-kindle-fire-mac-pc-windows-8-sorry-blackberry-users/

<comment><USER2> This is exciting. I wonder what the next Star Wars thing will be that comes out. Hopefully Disney won't ruin their image!</comment>


Show HN: Docverter: Convert your text content to PDF/HTML/EPUB with one REST API - <AUTHOR> http://www.docverter.com <comment><USER2> This looks like a landing page site to measure interest.

I was hoping to try it out too but it looks like the API spec isnt finalized.

Some working demos would be great, as html to pdf is quite precarious especially when it comes to reliable output given all kinds of html that can be put into this kind of convertors. Reliable url to pdf is another thing altogether.

<comment><USER3> I like the "buffer approach" (fake landing page and plans) personally, although I have never implemented it so far.

I don't feel cheated - instead I'm glad someone is verifying the usefulness of something before building it.

Life is short so I can only hope more software will be developed that way :)

<comment><USER2> Agreed, I don't have any problem with it ending up in a sign up screen, it's good to have a sense of interest. Sorry if it came across in any other way to the OP.

Perhaps I found this more to be an Ask instead of a show? Just thinking out loud for what I might do with my own ideas in the future here.

<comment><USER4> I think you nailed what's off about this. I don't mind landing pages, but when I see "Show HN" in the URL, I expect something already built. I don't feel cheated, but I won't be upvoting either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't get why I should pay for this service. I could just download and install pandoc for free on my system. Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's targeted at people using a cloud provider like Heroku or Appfog, who want to use pandoc but can't install 2-3gb of software along with their app.

<comment><USER5> Alright, that makes sense. Great idea and reasonable pricing, I wish you the best of luck with your project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A corollary to this service, on OSX and only for pdf, is to put the OS CUPS print driver to use. I've always been impressed with how well the print -> save as pdf functionality works on OS X. Recently I needed to batch it for text files and looked up the specifics. (It works for html as well, just save your sites procedurally and batch.)

/System/Library/Printers/Libraries/convert -f infile -o outfile

As stated somewhere in the comments this service is probably aimed at people on remote machines, but the above has been a handy trick for my local life.

I'm sure equivalents exist on Windows (PDFcreator comes to mind) and Linux.

<comment><USER7> The OS X Save as PDF feature is amazing. I use it many times every day and I never have messy random files laying around. It has never, ever failed me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice :), though I would consider making your $5 tier free, in order to encourage developer adoption.

Even though $5 isn't much, it's a bit more friction in the decision making process.

</comment><comment><USER9> would you consider having a discounted version for educational accounts? As a grad student I would find this immensely useful, but I couldn't necessarily afford it/justify the extra expense.

e.g. Prezi give 2nd tier accounts to academic email addresses for 1st tier price (free).

obviously, it seems fair to wait until the system has a good revenue stream before adding this kind of discount...

<comment><AUTHOR> I would definitely consider it. Go ahead and sign up for a beta invite and I'll add it to the todo list.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, have done.

Just FYI, I didn't even click on the pricing buttons to see that there was even a beta! Brain got to the 'it costs $5 per month' stage and went 'awwwww...'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would be nice to have a demo example thing. I have had problems with bad formatting results for these things before and don't want to sign up if I am not sure it will work. Even something like the samples at <http://htmltolatex.sourceforge.net/> would be nice

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. I'll have a demo and some samples up soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > And when you outgrow it, we'll grow with you. Automatically.

Does this mean that when you exceed your quota, Docverter starts charging you more without your permission?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. Docverter will charge you the smaller of 1) your selected payment plan, 2) your payment plan + the additional per document charge * the number of additional documents, or 3) the next payment plan up. Does that sound fair, or do you think it would be better to get cut off? Maybe a toggle switch in account settings?

<comment><USER12> The smallest would always be #1. You probably meant to only say 2 and 3. I think a toggle switch would be a good idea. That's how most services allow you to control your spending.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, you're right. Toggle switch and cost control options are now on the todo list. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kinda unrelated but, thats a nice customised boostrap, did you do that yourself or use something pre-made?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. It's a slightly customized pre-made theme off of bootswatch[1]

[1]: <http://bootswatch.com/spacelab/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks interesting. Is there a limit on document size?

<comment><AUTHOR> There isn't one right now but I may put one in depending on usage patterns.</comment></comment>


RIAA Wants To Start Peeking Into Files You Store In The Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110520/03411314352/riaa-wants-to-start-peeking-into-files-you-store-cloud.shtml <comment><USER2> Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt. If possible, use ecryptfs or TrueCrypt or some other _non-transparent_ encryption mechanism on files that you back up to remote sites so that you know they are always safely encrypted and don't have to think about it (just copy the lower-level, encrypted container). Both ecryptfs (with filename encryption) and TrueCrypt can back up encrypted versions of your files without even giving away filenames, so RIAA can't go acking for MP3s. Of course, manually using gpg and specifying an unrelated output filename works too.

If you're uploading anything remotely important to a third-party service, you should encrypt all of it beforehand. As we see time and time again, it can be really surprising how easy it is for an insider, a random script kiddie, or in this case, a company with a posse of anxious lawyers to grab your data. You need to encrypt that data before it ever leaves your disk for persistent storage on someone else's infrastructure. Encrypt encrypt encrypt.

<comment><USER3> All file locker services should offer a check-box or something by default, before you upload your files, to encrypt them with your own key. That should cover a lot more people than it would if everyone had to do everything by themselves.

<comment><USER4> Let's take Dropbox for example.

They save a lot of costs by deduplicating copies of files, and it makes file renames/moves/shares really easy for them. Therefore, they wouldn't have the incentive to destroy that advantage: That's one of the major scale advantages they get for covering so many users.

With that said, they could offer that "by default" to premium users who already pay for the service to simplify their lives and keep their more profitable customers happy.

What are everyone's views on that, from Dropbox's perspective?

<comment><USER5> _They save a lot of costs by deduplicating copies of files, and it makes file renames/moves/shares really easy for them. Therefore, they wouldn't have the incentive to destroy that advantage: That's one of the major scale advantages they get for covering so many users._

I posted this elsewhere in the thread: That's not true. As is, in a lot of crypto problems, there are powerful workarounds that require a lot of work. See here for one idea: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2461713>

Please also see the further discussions. Crypto gives us powerful tools to mitigate several attacks with minimal compromise on functionality. Unfortunately there are legal ways that are more powerful.

<comment><USER6> That idea doesn't work. It doesn't stop a third-party from seeing who has copies of a file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is the RIAA special? I produce copyrighted material all the time.

I demand the right to start looking at everyone's cloud files too.

<comment><USER8> For a specific example. <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10133425-38.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sure if the MAFIAA thought they could get away with it they'd lobby for mandatory snooping software on everyone's PC so they could check for illegal copies.

Because, y'know, human rights and the rule of law are far less important than preserving the music industry's business model for a few more years.

<comment><AUTHOR> This idea is actually not as crazy as it may seem. Copyright lobby is usually just one step behind the Chinese policies of restricting access to the illegal content, with the only difference in definition of illegal. Chinese have developed such tool, [1], and were planning to install it on every new computer sold in China. But later scaled down it's use.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why don't the cloud storage service providers encrypt/store all user content in such a way that it can only be read by the user? I doubt there are any ethical benefits in storing the data in such a way that they (the service providers) can read it. Even if there is I doubt that users would agree to such usage.

<comment> brown9-2 I think some storage providers might not be comfortable with the situation where they'd have to tell a paying customer that they can't help them at all when the customer loses the key - they choose simplicity as a feature over appealing to the security-conscious.

As for Dropbox, they need to be able to read the files to serve it to you from their website.

<comment><USER11> Can't they implement client side encryption? A javascript based encryption mechanism could be interesting.

<comment><USER12> And completely unusable for the average consumer (needing them to keep track of their key, and somehow secure their key, and somehow pass their key to every browser they use.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The RIAA really has become a disturbing entity.

<comment><USER14> The politicians who are willing to accept and act on their greased palm offers are the real problem. In a normal, non-corrupt system, the RIAA would never come anywhere near receiving such powers, anymore than Jim McJones down the street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The RIAA is about to discover client-side encryption by default :)

</comment><comment><USER16> I welcome thee, dear MAFIAA, to bring out your inspective forces upon the encrypted bits of my tarsnap.com archives.

I hereby promise they positively do contain copyrighted materials indeed, and I thus encourage your troops to spend considerable time trying to decipher whatever it is that I've stored in these clouds of the 2010's internet.

</comment><comment><USER17> I guess it is time to start encrypting the files I got in the cloud. None of which are copyright'ed or especially secret but better safe than sorry.</comment>


Is Enron Overpriced? (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/13/news/companies/enronoriginal_fortune/index.htm

<comment><USER2> I know that hindsight is 20/20, but I can say with a lot of confidence that this would raise serious red flags for me if I were researching a similar stock today.

"How exactly does Enron make its money?... "If you figure it out, let me know," laughs credit analyst Todd Shipman at S&P. "Do you have a year?" asks Ralph Pellecchia, Fitch's credit analyst, in response to the same question."</comment>


'Nothing on this page is real': How lies become truth in online America - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/national/nothing-on-this-page-is-real-how-lies-become-truth-in-online-america/2018/11/17/edd44cc8-e85a-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html <comment><USER2> Information literacy seems to be at an all time low</comment>