You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mars-colonies-counting-ads-edward-hsu <comment><USER3> I'm surprised this article is so upvoted.

1\. The author took this nearly word for word from Thiel/Eric Weinstein, who have both discussed this point extensively, most recently on Weinstein's podcast.

2\. The author is using this click bait headline to discuss his own industry/company, and this looks like some content marketing piece.

<comment><USER4> Plus, the clickbait headline is merely a copycat of one Thiel's own words, except it was with flying cars and Twitter

<comment><USER5> Please post the Thiel article

<comment><USER6> "We wanted flying cars - instead we got 140 characters."

Quote is from the article, "What happened to the future?"

[https://foundersfund.com/the-future/](https://foundersfund.com/the-future/)

<comment><USER4> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's great that there's a renewed discussion about the nature of productivity and growth and that people are starting to become aware that economic profit or consumer demand are not the same as progress on long term fundamental science and manufacturing. For way too long now we have all operated on the mainstream economic view that productivity growth is somehow like manna from the heavens and that we only need to let market forces play it out.

I wholeheartedly recommend reading Dan Wang's piece on the issue: [https://danwang.co/how-technology-grows/](https://danwang.co/how-technology- grows/)

<comment><USER8> What we need is progressively stricter tariffs paired with looser immigration laws. We need to force companies that want to efficiently compete for our consumer demand to in-source process knowledge and manufacturing.

<comment><USER9> Dunno if we is U.S. or someone else, but the U.S. could at least loosen up its immigration policy a little bit. We're literally putting Mexicans in fucking camps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "You get what you measure" \- talk to VCs that could finance your idea and then weep when you see what ideas do they actually select. Quick boring ROI + veiled scams are the way to go these days if you want to get external funding.

<comment><USER11> I think the bigger lie is that you absolutely _need_ VCs to finance your idea.

<comment><USER12> What do you think is a better way to fund a manned mission to Mars? It's hard to argue with the progress that SpaceX has made - and that wouldn't exist without VC funding. Meanwhile NASA continues to operate at the whims of Congress. It's doing fine, but it's not looking for any moonshots like it was 50 years ago.

<comment><USER13> The goal of NASA is scientific exploration, not human colonization. Robots and satellites are much cheaper and safer than trying to make Mars a viable place to live, and you can explore many more places.

<comment><USER12> I agree, but the title of the article we are commenting on is "You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I got Facebook"

I didn't mean to say NASA is failing (although they are a political entity and have a lot of ups and downs as a result), but literally to say "how else could you possibly fund this if NASA isn't going to do it?"

If NASA is meant for exploration and we don't need VC funding (the point of the original comment I responded to), what do you consider the best way to fund a Mars colony?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This raises some interesting questions about why the-future-seen-from-1970 included so many developments that failed to materialize. Unfortunately, I think it provides mostly wrong or irrelevant answers.

One thing that made the 20th century so amazing was the discovery of scientific phenomena that were easily translated to _industrially and commercially relevant_ technologies. We're still mining the rich vein of technological possibilities opened up by quantum mechanics. The major features of the field were well established before World War II. There has been nothing so technologically fruitful discovered since. It's possible that amazing _scientific_ breakthroughs in cosmology or particle physics will be made this century, yet fail to have anything like the _technological_ impact of quantum effect devices, if the time/length/mass/energy scales are not amenable to building products and factories usable on Earth.

The other big headwind since 1970 has been the price of fuels. In every year of the 21st century, inflation adjusted global crude oil prices have remained above where they were in 1970. The one modern bright spot [1], the shale revolution, has spectacularly failed to make its investors prosper [2]. Nor is its continuance assured enough for airlines and aircraft manufacturers to decide that the time has come again for faster rather than thriftier passenger service. Airframes last a long time. Want faster-than-Concorde passenger air service for the 21st century? You need new vehicles _and_ a stable, low priced [3] energy source for them to consume.

[1] For oil and gas prices. Not for the climate.

[2] [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shale-pioneer-fracking- unmiti...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shale-pioneer-fracking-unmitigated- disaster-230000670.html)

[3] Including climate externalities. I wouldn't bet on those remaining unpriced over the airframe's life either.

<comment><USER15> The future acording to Ford Perfect: just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air. Douglas Adams was a visionary, as many writers before him. That's why we need literature and human sciences - because we lose focus otherwise.

<comment><USER16> Almost all "visionaries" are wrong, and it's impossible to tell in advance which ones aren't.

> _That 's why we need literature and human sciences - because we lose focus > otherwise._

Non sequitur: neither part of that sentence follows from the rest of your post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> NASA hasn't been actively trying to drive down the cost of space. If the had it would of unlocked space for all of us decades ago.

It took SpaceX investing their own profits into building a reusable booster. And now they're doing the same for the entire vehicle with Starship. NASA does pay SpaceX for flights to the IIS, but most of that money goes into building Dragons and the rockets to support them.

What if NASA actually invested in truly low maintenance fully reusable vehicles decades ago? You might actually have Mars colonies today. But what do we have? Continued investment in SLS when the writing has been on the wall for years now.

<comment><USER9> Well then there would be less money for things like PACE, ICE-SAT, ICE Bridge. They've been building earth satellites to improve fisheries management and inform earth conservation efforts. PACE will be particularly helpful for me as an oceanographer because of they've got those neato optical plankton sensors onboard.

Also, NASA allocates funding based on decadal surveys of the scientific community, so they have really considered doing as you propose.

<comment><USER18> Or, there would be less money for SLS. NASA has been spending $2 billion annually for SLS development for a while now, and all they'll get is a disposable rocket the size of Starship that costs at least a billion dollars per launch, or $10,000/kg payload.

Meanwhile SpaceX is spending less than one billion dollars total for Starship/Super Heavy, and at scale it'll launch payload for $20/kg. How much more money would NASA have for observation satellites with $20/kg launch?

Probably even more than you'd think because when launch is cheap, you can also afford to make your satellite cheaper. If it fails, it's not so expensive to launch another one.

<comment><USER9> That's strange. Why is NASA doing sls instead of just contracting SpaceX? From your comment it sounds like SpaceX is much more efficient at launching things into space than NASA, and I'd like to know how that came to be the case.

<comment><USER18> Various reasons:

Good: NASA started SLS years ago, and had no idea that SpaceX would be so successful. They also didn't know SLS would take as much time and money as it has.

Bad: NASA is at the mercy of Congress and SLS has a lot of political support. It spreads jobs over a lot of districts and pays big money to major defense contractors. At this point it's a huge sunk cost and embarrassing to cancel.

Ugly: Those contractors work on cost-plus contracts so they have little incentive to make a cheap launcher. To illustrate, the SLS uses Space Shuttle main engines, which cost several times as much per unit thrust as the Saturn V's engines. That was worthwhile for the Shuttle since it reused them. Naturally, NASA's contractors thought they were perfect engines to throw away on every flight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The author works for a HPC company and is probably using this article for recruiting. I would've preferred the article to have more than a couple measly paragraphs on that subject, rather than he pander to the 'futurists'

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like we don't get Mars colonies and supersonic jets for good economic reasons? These are luxuries at best. It's a nostalgic idea of progress only tenuously related to actual progress.

More relevant questions might be why the cost of housing hasn't improved and why we haven't cured cancer yet.

<comment><USER21> Cancer's a really tough problem, and we're only now getting the mass of detailed information about its biology (in all its forms) that allows targeted therapies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _"Why We Can't Solve Big Problems"_

I think it may partly be because most of human civilization is still basically slave labor.

You indenture some people and you tell them what to build.

People don't care about problems they're not supposed to take care of. It's a detriment to them if they do.

This kind of makes it tricky to take on tasks like say, space elevators or arcologies or extraterrestrial colonies. You need expertise and constant collaboration from so many different domains it's hard for a single organization to have enough musclepower and brainpower for, even with contractors.

Then there's the tribalism. Governments may have the resources to take on global/space-scale projects but they generally try to hinder other governments, even within the same nation.

<comment><USER23> I agree with this. A basic income program could have an unexpected dividend of a new innovation boom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the article points out the main reason. It is more profitable to build Facebook than put a man on mars.

<comment><USER25> Connectivity-driven innovation is cheaper. Science is becoming harder and is getting less bang for its buck. We saw great progress in AI over the past few years but even this has taken far more effort and money than building social networks. Perhaps connectivity-driven innovation could help to speed up applied science innovation if power of the crowd is more efficiently utilized?

<comment><USER9> I don't agree that connectivity and applied science are two separate things. We don't get to netflix without applied sciences: encryption, compression, networking, neural networks. I don't know why the author said that. He has a degree in computer science

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Forget mars colonies, i just want robots that can do household chores that don't cost more than a vacuum cleaner (and i think roombas are overpriced), where's Rosie?! That's hard, let's build the 10000th chat app instead, e.g. why did this cost $120 million [https://qz.com/1194939/the-us-government-just- gave-someone-a...](https://qz.com/1194939/the-us-government-just-gave- someone-a-120-million-robotic-arm-to-use-for-a-year/) ? Can't we do better now with 3d printing? I dunno, i think we're getting there : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6xqTcLXXC8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6xqTcLXXC8)

<comment><USER27> Thought: is the migration of manufacturing away from western countries part of the problem? Lots of innovation in software in the US or UK, but less in manufacturing - perhaps because the skills aren't there?

<comment><USER28> Is there really a lack of innovation in manufacturing? 3D printers (hyped though they are) are improving rapidly. Nanoscale stuff (not just graphene and chips, but also those) are seeing a lot of progress.

I'm not in hardware though, so I can't tell if that's part of a trend or not.

<comment><USER27> Oh, sorry, I mean - as in innovation in hardware products rather than the manufacturing process itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have talked to VCs who told they love to fund "deep tech", but when they realize that basic research is binary result, they get surprised, and say it's too risky. And sometimes the VCs who evaluate this are people who are young enough to never lived on their own during a recession.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why is it always space? Space technology requires lots of energy and our society is currently in the middle of realizing that our current way of getting energy is going to kill us. Of course we're not making large-scale investments in energy-intensive exploration.

I wish EDS maglev, fusion power or quantum computing generated so much excitement, to say nothing of grid batteries, magnetocaloric heat pumps, or electric impedance tomography. I guess QC has done well lately.

<comment><USER31> _Why is it always space?_

Good question. The best off-earth real estate in this solar system is worse than the worst on-earth real estate. It's easier to build colonies in Antarctica or underwater on the continental shelf than on Mars. Mars is small, cold, and nearly airless.

We're not short of low-value real estate, after all.

<comment><USER32> "Hell is other people". It's not possible to escape the state on Earth anymore. It's a pure question of travel time. Underwater continental shelf or Antarctica, it's all trivially accessible and indefensible. It's not possible to start a new way of living somewhere, like the Amish or Mormons did. What's needed is at least the equivalent of travel time and cost between Europe and Americas before steam ships.

Space is not that hard assuming some basic human upgrades. Nothing scifi needed (like mind uploading), just an engineering problem - things that today take a factory but would have to fit into a human sized body.

<comment><USER33> This is so much hyperbole, typical of manifest destiny escapists.

You start with a pop-interpretation of an edgy existential statement. The point of Sartre's "No Exit" was not to glibly quote the punch-line, it's to think about the logical implications. Probably something about learning to live together despite our flaws/sins.

About escaping the state, the Book of Genesis figured it out long ago: humans behave badly (aka sin) and were thus cast out of the only place they could live in peace--in other words, some people ruined it for all the others. And because of bad behavior, humans need to follow laws; and who makes the laws is what has created (and continues to create) history. So it was never possible to escape the laws/state ever.

To dream of running far enough away to a mythical place where you alone get to make the laws is just futile escapism. The Amish and the Mormons just moved with their laws to a new place, and if you didn't agree with their laws, you still got kicked out.

Now for the hyperbole: the "underwater continental shelf" and Antarctica are not "trivially accessible", they are some of the most unexplored and hostile environments on Earth. You'd have lots of trouble establishing a livable base there.

Why does it have to be defensible? Is this some sort of Fort Laramie you have to steal from someone else? Leave society, live off only what you can make or grow, have no contact with the outside world. Find a lake in some remote mountains or an island in some remote sea, sneak out there and never come back! What? You still want the amenities, energetic resources, trade, and communication with the rest of the world? Then you're going to have to deal with other people and THEIR laws.

"basic human upgrades" "just an engineering problem" fit a factory in a human- sized body??? Why that should be as easy as a CRUD app on a virtual server with some rented storage.

Face it: for all intents and purposes, the world is full, nobody is escaping anywhere, and we all have to learn to live together.

<comment><USER32> >To dream of running far enough away to a mythical place where you alone get to make the laws is just futile escapism. The Amish and the Mormons just moved with their laws to a new place, and if you didn't agree with their laws, you still got kicked out.

Strawman. I literally wrote "like the Amish or Mormons did" yet you describe living alone in a hidden hut somewhere, Theodore Kaczynski style.

>Why does it have to be defensible?

Even in the XIX century, Mormons were eventually subjugated by force. They only managed to last several decades under their own laws. Today under the "Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act" it's a federal crime to operate a submersible vessel without nationality in international waters. The claimed jurisdiction is global. So no, it's not possible to move away anywhere on Earth anymore. The moment anything substantial would be created, some state would claim it as their own.

>Why that should be as easy as a CRUD app on a virtual server with some rented storage.

What's the point of this hyperbole? The difference between an engineering problem and scifi is that the former can already be done, but is expensive or otherwise impractical, while scifi problem like mind uploading can't be done for any money today. Engineering problems, like making rockets cheaper, are solvable by throwing money at the problem as long as general physical laws permit improvements.

>the world is full, nobody is escaping anywhere

Which is exactly why developing space travel technology is so important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another reason: no imminent threat from the rival superpower. Though , the rise of china may change that

</comment><comment><USER34> There's also a factor of iterativeness. I think everyone here will appreciate the value of designing something you can do step by step, with value at each step of the way. You don't have to go zero to 100 immediately. You can course correct. You can revise. You learn from 0-50 to do 51-100 better.

Facebook can be built that way. Google too. SpaceX, maybe not so much. It's simply a harder and more expensive and riskier investment to do something that has so much startup cost before you start to get any value or pivotal learnings back.

</comment><comment><USER35> In a way, FB is more useful than Mars colonies could ever hope to be. How the hell do you even survive on a planet without a magnetic field to repel cosmic radiation? A few kamikaze will go, but it's lunacy to expect some kind of massive and growing settlement there. It'll likely be an extremely expensive counterpart of the ISS or an arctic research station. You aren't ever going to get it to more than a few hundred people. Inspiring? Hell yeah. But beyond that also pointless.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm writing a book on future thought tentatively titled

The Soul of Tomorrow

A futurist's construction kit

A field manual for how to think about and create "future stuff", stepwise advances for a continuous world.

I'm about 25,000 words in. It's currently being developed on github. If this really interests anybody, I'd really love to talk to them about things.

The chapters are starting to come together, but honestly this is 15 years of thinking and currently only 15 days of writing (November novel writing)

I intend to eventually get this to a publishable academic state with careful citations. I've even taken a week off work to travel around to libraries and do research for it.

I'm looking at how visions of possible futures operate, how they change, get communicated, materialize, and often collapse.

I've developed a number of frameworks that I'm currently trying to validate and falsify by looking at many classes of future from things like biblical second coming theology to socialist theory to technological dreams to even white nationalism. I'm trying to figure out how the dreams of a different tomorrow operate at fundamental levels.

Please reach out and contact me if you want to talk about this. I'm really passionate about this study.

My email address is in my bio. If you replace the domain of Yahoo with Gmail I'll probably see it quicker.

<comment><USER37> Have you checked out Shell's scenario writing? They used to publish some very good how-to guides for futures research. I didn't see as much how-to content the last time I visited the website. [https://www.shell.com/energy-and- innovation/the-energy-futur...](https://www.shell.com/energy-and- innovation/the-energy-future/scenarios.html)

Syd Meade is also an interesting person to study for a book about envisioning the future. He designed a number of cars and is famous for Blade Runner. I talked with him & his key insight was that he always drew a car in a world. A car needs a world (context) in order to make sense of its design. [http://sydmead.com/](http://sydmead.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'll just mention there are a bunch of privately-funded fusion reactor projects, including TAE, General Fusion, Commonwealth, Tokamak Energy, LPP, Helion (funded in part by YCombinator), and others.

There are also lots of companies working on molten salt reactors. In theory that's easier than fusion, but governments are more prickly about letting you work on fission.

<comment><USER21> TAE: it was explained to them 20 years ago why their idea didn't work, even theoretically.

General Fusion: acoustic compression was shown to be unworkable, so they pivoted to a slower scheme with a central conductor down the middle of the chamber. Good luck getting that conductor to survive 100T magnetic fields and orders of magnitude higher neutron loading than in conventional reactor concepts.

Commonwealth and TE: overall volumetric power density of their concepts will be very poor compared to fission reactors, even if every other problem is avoided.

LPP: there is a serious disconnect between accomplishment and hype. Also, pulsed approaches with very short bursts of fusion output make wall engineering much harder, and it's already very hard in continuous fusion reactor concepts.

The only one I cannot immediately dismiss is Helion, although that may be because I know less about them. The goal of direct conversion is admirable if they want to have a chance of being cheaper than fission, but the demands on that seem formidable. The high current, high voltage, billion reps over the lifetime of the reactor switching requirements seem extreme.

<comment><USER18> I'm not trying to claim that these particular projects will succeed. I'm just saying that some VCs are in fact funding the sort of high-risk breakthrough physical technologies that the article claims are not being funded.

But a nitpick on LPP: wall engineering isn't really an issue for them since they're attempting boron fusion. Like Helion they're also planning direct conversion, since the output is a pulsed beam of charged particles. I once asked Lerner why they don't start with D-T and he had an argument that their concept actually works better with boron (don't remember why).

<comment><USER21> Of course wall engineering is going to be a problem with boron fusion. Any very hot plasma will emit photons, and H-11B plasmas will emit them even more than DT plasmas (because the rate of emission increases rapidly with the charge of the nuclei). In fact, a H-11B plasma will normally emit photons faster than it can reheat itself from fusion. LPP makes noise about making tiny knots of plasma that are so dense and ultramagnetized that this doesn't happen -- but as those knots expand, the supposed effects that suppress radiation would die away, and out would pour the photons.

<comment><USER18> The reactor would only be about 5MW, and the wall of the reactor core can be however far away it needs to be to not get melted by x-rays. It's not like it's surrounded by superconductors or breeding blanket, it's just vacuum containment. Generally it's neutron radiation that's considered difficult to deal with, and there'd be little of that.

And the reactor won't produce net power at all unless they're right that bremsstrahlung will be suppressed long enough by the plasma's magnetic field. If it is, then most of the energy will go into the alpha particle beam.

<comment><USER21> The reactor is described to be 5 MW average output. But if it's very bursty the instantaneous power will be far higher. Damage to the wall will be determined by heating of the surface by these flashes (and possibly mechanical damage from shocks induced by vaporization in that surface layer). Keeping the instantaneous power low enough to avoid damage could make the reactor unacceptably large.

<comment><USER18> So your criticism is that maybe, possibly, the reactor will be too big. I'll take it.

<comment><USER21> That is a central problem with fusion: the volumetric power density of fusion reactors sucks. It's not a trivial criticism, it's an economic showstopper.

LPP's concept has other problems, of course, like the aspirational physics of those putative 1000 T plasma knots, and direct conversion by Handwave Engineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I dunno why ppl keep saying all we got is facebook. We got vxlan, 100gbe, SSDs,nvme SSDs,and soon non-volatile memory, GPUs, dpdk, segment routing, containers, config management, nosql, json, bittorrent, blockchain, eliptical curve crypto, totp, letsencrypt/acme, raft consensus..and more!

<comment><USER39> I somewhat agree. Facebook may not appeal much to people interested in let say space exploration or self-driving cars, but amount of engineering lessons learned by deploying a software at that scale is still invaluable. We are so much better at distributed systems, machine learning than we were, and that knowledge can be applied to other problems (and it is).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What is tough about this problem is how hard it is to communicate. We all know something is wrong, even if we don't really realize it. Like the article says, we've been promised all of these incredible things by the advancements we've seen, but we have gotten very few fundamental improvements. I live in the US, so I'm going to speak from that point of view.

We work more than every, are poorer than any time in recent memory, have a broken healthcare system, we're seeing decreases in life expectancy, epidemic levels of suicide, etc. and all of this at a time when the market is at ridiculous highs. There are very few people talking about this in highly coherent ways, one is Eric Weinstein on his podcast The Portal, which focuses on this. What we have seen in the past 50 years is that physics has hit a wall in delivering meaningful real world improvements for people's lives, biology has largely done the same, and chemistry pushes forward at a snails pace in the form of pharmaceuticals. The saving grace that makes everyone feel as though we're progressing is technology, which seems to have hit the same wall in recent years since most of the easy problems to solve with computer science have been solved.

In the soft sciences, economics has some deeply troubling problems down to the fundamentals, our politics/government/public policy is damaged and decaying at the root, academia has exploded in cost with little payoff for most, and has entrenched itself as a inescapable shadow that looms over young people for the rest of their life, all while cannibalizing those who speak out against it.

Many great advancements are threatening to become meaningful, but many more have been doing that for decades. It really seems like we are running out of easy problems to solve, and the systems that we have in place are remarkably bad at solving hard problems, while being remarkably good at concentrating wealth

I often think of the first few lines of a poem by Allen Ginsberg:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz..."

I'm seeing the best minds of my generation destroyed trying to sell ad space, starved of connection, posting selfies looking for a hollow fix.

</comment><comment><USER41> Am I the only one who feels weird reading this article on LinkedIn?

</comment><comment><USER42> I watch what NTT Research is up to, and frankly, how many startups even know anything about how to fabricate a superconductor, let alone have the facilities to create them? They have the tools to make websites and little computers with sensors made in Shenzhen, so that is what they make.

[https://www.ntt- review.jp/archive/ntttechnical.php?contents=...](https://www.ntt- review.jp/archive/ntttechnical.php?contents=ntr201910fa4.html)

</comment><comment><USER43> Humans are notoriously terrible at predicting how technology with develop over decades. It's humorous to look at what people a hundred years ago thought technology would be like.

[1][https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2014/05/victorian...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2014/05/victorian- postcards-predict-future/amp)

</comment><comment><USER44> Well. Complexity kills. This is true on so many levels. Whatever was promised by futurists or science, is most of the time a marketing blurb. But it almost always adds complexity. Maybe it is a good idea to avoid easy gains. You get born, you have to learn the ropes and use your skills. You always build on the knowleadge of others. But you have to learn it first. That's something other than reciting.

</comment><comment><USER11> And he doesn't even touch on the inefficiency of public research spending which has ballooned since 2000 with disappointing returns

</comment><comment><USER45> Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff notwithstanding. The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades through tax cuts.

If the author would take off his (it's always a he) blinkers of technocracy he might see that profitability is not the only measure of "why." Some things are not profitable, yet are still worth doing. Andrew Yang-lite doesn't account for this at all (see "blinkers" above), which is pretty much par for the course for the "Facebook is the be-all end-all" attitude.

To paraphrase JFK, we pay taxes for public benefit not because it is cheap, but because it is expensive.

<comment><USER46> >Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff notwithstanding

Exploration has a long history of rich benefactors and private interests. Monarchs, Dutch East India Corporation, etc., are closer to Musk and Bezos than a modern democratic state

>The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades through tax cuts.

This graph suggests otherwise? In current dollar terms, R&D spending is double what it was in the 1970s.

[https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/DefNon.png](https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/DefNon.png)

<comment><USER45> I am skeptical of the success rate of rich benefactors for a technology with only a century of practice, vs. boats that have been used for thousands of years.

> _In current dollar terms, R &D spending is double what it was in the 1970s._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NAS...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NASA- Budget-Federal.svg)

And there are more budgets to be involved than just these two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> There's a certain irony in Buzz Aldrin complaining that he didn't get Mars Colonies and simultaneously hating on Elon Musk for not being the US Government.

</comment><comment><USER48> It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources. The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances and has been self-sustaining from a profitable perspective. Sure, the worlds' governments could have spent billions / trillions building bases on Mars or even terraforming it. But for what purpose? And for how much misery would earth have to endure for all that effort?

<comment><USER49> > _It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, > repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of > sources._

Facebook is not the internet. This problem was solved long before 2005.

<comment><USER50> Depends where you live. [https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/facebook-is-the- internet-f...](https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/facebook-is-the-internet-for- many-people-in-south-east-asia-20180322-p4z5nu.html)

<comment><USER51> You can also argue that Facebook was the death of local communication and socialisation and thus a step back for that goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The problem is Intellectual Monopoly laws.

Imagine you have 8 billion processors but you only provide 8 million of them with disk access.

Very few people have access to the information necessary to build innovative products. Instead of waiting for BillG to solve the energy crisis and healthcare delivery and new kinds of toilets for everybody, let's abolish Intellectual Monopoly laws and unleash the power of all 8 billion processors on solving these hard problems.

#intellectualfreedom #scihub

</comment><comment><USER53> To provide an edgy answer, we live in a rather peaceful time...

We haven't had a good old fashioned War to accelerate our technological advancements. As humans were rather adept at finding new and creative ways to kill each other and then ultimately repurposing it for good later on...

</comment><comment><USER54> I hope tech will be used to hack universe not people eventually

</comment><comment><USER55> Facebook is addictive. There's nothing addictive on Mars. If we discover space crack then we will have a real space program.

</comment><comment><USER56> Remember: Back to the Future?

</comment><comment><USER57> All of these articles and ways of thinking always miss the bigger, more fundamental shift in human society — we now know there is literally no place we can access in any meaningful amount of time where the "grass is greener" than the places we've already been.

This is profound, semi-depressing, and enlightening at the same time. Rather than seeking something new somewhere else, our new obsession is in improving what we've got, where we are right now.

I know a lot of you are going to make hand-wavy claims about space mining and things like that, but our population curve seems to indicate a very minimal benefit to all of that. If anything, the fastest-growing environmental concern seems to be space and sky pollution. Starry-eyed young engineers have been sold on the idea of interstellar space travel, when the reality of the commercial application of their work is that it's more likely to lead to an over-proliferation of satellites and help rich people get to places faster via space plane.

The final argument someone's inevitably going to make is, survival of the race. Yeah, okay. You might want to self-reflect on our existence as deeply terrestrial beings that are intrinsically connected to the Earth. Even if you spend all of your day hidden in a bedroom, you can't escape your bond with this planet. Instead of trying to find a mistress in the form of another moon/planet, we need to spend more time working on the marriage.

I think space technologies are fun, and that rich people obsessed with suicide missions to other planets should be able to do what they want, but let's not kid ourselves on the moral superiority of these sorts of things. There is no shame, and no inferiority, in working to optimize our Earth-bound existence.

<comment><USER58> I try to imagine humanity a thousand years from now, still bound to the same increasingly inhospitable planet, paying for the sins of our generations but nowhere to escape to. With probably an abandoned Mars or moon colony. Just nothing to explore. Even the boundaries of natural science would be mostly understood by that point. It would be so depressing. Our only salvation would be if we still have enough resources remaining for computers to run virtual worlds for us to explore. Basically video games, that's our best hope.

<comment><USER59> I don't think there is any chance we make it a thousand years without either reaching technological singularity or destroying ourselves. In the 80 years of transistor technology we went from string manipulation via pneumatic tubes to real time ray tracing.

Though to be fair, both outcomes basically end biological human life - <USER2> technological singularity obsoletes carbon based biology and any rational successor species wouldn't keep living humans around when they can trivially archive our genetic code and reproduce us at will if ever needed - which is also then unlikely to happen. Its that or nuclear annihilation.

<comment><USER60> Paul Davies (head of SETI) has a fantastic book called "The Eerie Silence". It was the first time in years that I had read a good science book written for the layman that taught me not only a lot of new scientific ideas, history I didn't know about, and made me think about humanity in a new light. I really can't recommend it enough.

Ok, so he makes an argument that made me put down the book (ok 17 year old me) and really ponder the statement. It was his belief that "all biological life is transistory". Of course we have no other intelligent life outside of earth to compare against, but it kind of makes sense in a completely unproven kind of way. A species develops as biological and eventually transcends to machine. At that point, you would be far more intelligent (maybe) and the only requirement for society would be lots and lots of energy. You would essentially be a mind floating around in infinite cyber space experiencing everything there is to experience. You could travel to the stars if you would like (no cryogenics or food necessary), but honestly...why would you want to?

The book mostly sticks to scientific fact and covers a lot of SETI history, but there are many additional topics like this that are thought provoking.

Some of my friends were horrified by this (end of biological humanity assuming it is ever possible), but to me...it is the most logical progression for humanity to become more than what it currently is. These flesh bodies cause us to die far too early and our brains can probably only be enhanced so much.

<comment><USER59> We are in effect the same tragedy that encompasses Octopoda. They are provably relatively intelligent and emotive creatures but have extremely short lifespans for their mental capacity and thus can never take real advantage of their learning ability.

Humans are still that, just on an order of magnitude longer time scale. Its still hugely limited when compared to orders of magnitude larger time scales than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly.

I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero and the attitude is "we're better than the rest of humanity. We deserve all, the rest deserves nothing."

I did an Electrical Engineering faculty. I know how hard it is to do math and physics and all that. But since there's such an easy money to be made from slinging yet another website or a stupid mobile app with these dumbed down languages, the interest in the sciences and anything more complicated slowly wanishes. We'll pay the price eventually. Maybe not now, maybe not in 10 years, but eventually. We're too comfortable.

"There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind — we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge." \- Dune

(I'm from Eastern Europe)

<comment><USER62> "I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero"

This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.

<comment><USER63> I can say I worked on one.

But because it was well managed, small team, everyone listened to each other's areas of respective expertise and authority, we wrapped it up in a year on a 6 digit budget.

Meanwhile, a previous project elsewhere i have experience with, had a team of approx 30 cycle through, 10 to 20 external consultants (some flown in and put up in hotels, but who had no actual experience in the things they were consulting on) , had been running for several years, estimated 8 digit budget, and by the time i left had been running for several years with no discernable output compared to the status quo except reports and presentations taking about how good things would be one day in the indeterminate future.

I'm convinced the later is the norm, and it's even harder to go back to once you've worked on a project that 'just works', but I'm sure several people used the later one to land themselves high paying jobs by putting it on their resume using management speak to make it sound impressive, so I guess success depends on whose point of view you're looking from...

<comment><USER64> From my experience in consulting and internal, there are two major things you can do.

1) Use objective KPIs + encourage a culture of admitting, taking responsibility for, and being forgiven for failure

Failing to admit failure is incredibly toxic to ongoing corporate functioning, and a culture that doesn't allow for it endlessly moves goalposts until there is success (by some metric) without motion (by objective metrics).

2) Don't allow anyone to overscope sprints

If all the "team" can accomplish is a "Hello World" in the next week, then that's the goal. Better to be honest than slide down the slippery slope of lying to ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> A lot of really stupid shit is going to happen in 2020, but if Starship makes it to orbit and Crew Dragon successfully launches astronauts, those are the only events anyone will remember in 100 years.

(Come, on tell me with a straight face you remember anything else important that happened in 1903)

<comment><USER66> Don't want to sound as a fanboy, but IF (and this is a huge if) Elon succeeds on his mission to make humanity a multi-planentary species, he'll be remembered as a greatest human who has ever lived for a very long time

<comment><USER67> I'm no Elon fan, and it's a really really big _if_ , but - you're absolutely correct about that if he succeeds completely he'll go down in the same category as Edison or Napoleon.

<comment><USER68> Napoleon in most of the English speaking world is much more infamous/loathed than admired.

<comment><USER66> yes, I'm Russian and, IMHO, napaleon isn't that far from hitler. Both were mass murderers who valued a lot of silly things above human life

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Only 4 more years until Elon Musk puts a $30,000 Tesla on Mars where solar power roofs cost the same as conventional.

I believed it until about 3 years ago, when I realized spaceX is Elon's government subsidized advertisement for his other projects. Also the 30k car is never coming. And the roof price is loaded with astricks to be 'correct".

We really need to wake up to the next gen marketing tactics.

<comment><USER70> > the 30k car is never coming

 _Never_ is a strong word. We may not get 30k electric cars in 5 years, but we will eventually. We may not get full autonomous vehicles in a decade, but we will certainly have it before the turn of the century.

<comment><USER71> You mean when global warming will make most of the US a nightmare ? Great.</comment></comment></comment>


Requesting The Opinion Of Hacker News:  Received This Letter, am I alone? - <AUTHOR>

This was sent to our CEO, is it legit?  Is this Chinese Cyber Squatting?  They sent this message to our 'firstname.lastname@example.com' account (which they must have received by going to our website).<p>A message from: jake shen(firstname.lastname@example.com):(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please transfer to the right person/department. Thank you.) Dear CEO, We are the department of registration service in China.we have something need to confirm with you.We formally received an application on February 24, 2009,One company which self-styled "Path soft Corp" are applying to register (tapinko) as internet brand name and domain names as below (tapinko.cn tapinko.asia tapinko.mobi tapinko.cc tapinko.net.cn tapinko.org.cn tapinko.com.cn. .etc). After our initial checking,we found the internet brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company's, so we need to get the confirmation from your company.If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please DO NOT reply us,we will approve the application automatically.If you have no any relationship with this company,please contact us within 7 workdays. If out of the deadline,we will approve the application submitted by "Path soft Corp" unconditionally. Please forward the email to your decision maker,and let them contact me in time,so that we can handle this in reasonable,Look forwarding to hearing from you. Best Regards, Jake Shen Senior Consultant TEL: +86 21 69929440 Fax: +86 21 69929447 Website:www.qpnic.org.cn Address: Room 301, 42th, nong 1519, Jinyuan 1st Road, Jiading District, Shanghai city. <comment><USER2> It's a scam -- they're trying to get you to pay lots of money to register those domain names.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get similar letters at least once a week. The first time it did catch me off-guard, but after talking with our attorney we determined it was a scam to get people to buy China domains. Interestingly enough the same company "Path soft Corp" is always the one trying to register domain names that supposedly infringe on my trademarks.

<comment><USER4> I got the same email too. A new twist on an old scam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When you go to buy a domain name, if it's available, they just give it to you. They don't go checking if anyone else wants it first. If these guys wanted tapinko.cn, they would already have it. So this is bogus.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just Found This: [http://www.hhtimesheet.com/blog/2009/02/how-to-build-a- domai...](http://www.hhtimesheet.com/blog/2009/02/how-to-build-a-domain- registrar-company-the-chinese-way/)

Not sure if it answers any of my questions though.</comment>


U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok's acquisition of Musical.ly - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-cfius-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-opens-national-security-investigation-into-tiktok-sources-idUSKBN1XB4IL <comment><USER2> Musical.ly was started by entrepreneurs in Shanghai. Although it may have had US and Japanese investors, I don't think it was an American company. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly)

>"It's the first company to be headquartered in China, designed in China, but popular in the US," said Greylock investor Josh Elman. "Finally we're seeing talented people who live in that ecosystem in that world and actually transcend it and build products in the US."

[https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is- musically-2016-5](https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-musically-2016-5)

<comment><USER3> I've heard this myth that musical.ly was founded in China before, but it's hard to believe if you look at some basic facts.

One cofounder worked full time at SAP in SF bay area for several years before and after musical.ly was founded. The other says on his LinkedIn that he was working in Santa Monica for several years on either side of the founding. They lived, worked, and founded the company in CA.

<comment><USER4> Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang don't sound very Californian to me.

<comment><USER5> Really? As both a SoCal and Bay Area resident name alone would tell me absolutely nothing about whether someone was a native to either area.

<comment><USER6> Their public LinkedIn profiles say that they went to university in China. They're Chinese.

<comment><USER7> Probably true. Of course, them being Chinese has nothing to do with where the startup was founded.

<comment><USER6> That's true, of course. However, every source I can find says that the company was founded in Shanghai, but ended up being more successful in the American than the Chinese market, and opened up offices in California. Most of the engineers are supposedly in Shanghai, though. One more detail is that the founders appear to have worked in Silicon Valley before founding the company.

Whether any of this makes any difference, as far as US law goes, I don't know.

1\. [https://www.businessinsider.de/what-is- musically-2016-5](https://www.businessinsider.de/what-is-musically-2016-5)

2\. [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance- musically/china...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance- musically/chinas-bytedance-scrubs-musical-ly-brand-in-favor-of-tiktok- idUSKBN1KN0BW)

3\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTyg2E44pBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTyg2E44pBA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I highly recommend folks listen to recent episodes of Ben Thompson's exponent podcast where he discusses TikTok and its influence in the USA.

He makes the point that US consumers become subject to Chinese censorship policies when using the platform while China outright bans or heavily restricts American companies from operating (eg google search, Facebook).

<comment><USER9> I mean, as a Canadian consumer using American social media platforms, we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality. This argument of who censors makes sense for Americans, but it's more about picking your poison for people from other countries.

<comment><USER10> >we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality

No, you're subject to corporate censorship policies. Let's not pretend that individual platforms regulating content is the same as government censorship. Please show me how their policies are related to "the American governments stance on human sexuality".

Also, doesn't Canada have a few laws on the books regarding how people are allowed to address other people, specifically, LGBTQ people?

<comment><USER11> Let's not pretend a monopoly regulating content is much different from government.

<comment><USER12> Oh it is when the entity with a monopoly also has a monopoly on violence a.k.a government. A Uighur detention center, U.S. concentration camp etc. can only enforce their views with threat of violence. It is on an entirely different level of cardinality. To equate them would be to undermine the misery that those that suffer under such extreme regulations of content/thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> After the US claimed that Huawei was a national security threat only to drop this claim completely when China started cooperating on trade talks I honestly don't know what to believe anymore.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure what you're referring to in reference to "drop this claim completely".

FCC is actively pursuing removal of Huawei and ZTE equipment under a threat to national security.

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/28/fcc-rules-huawei- zte/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/28/fcc-rules-huawei-zte/)

<comment><USER14> > I'm not sure what you're referring to in reference to "drop this claim > completely".

Probably in reference to this: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/business/dealbook/huawei-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/business/dealbook/huawei-5g-national- security-trade.html)

<comment><USER15> That was a really good read. Thanks for sharing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It was clear to me how threatened Facebook was by TikTok when I brought it up with an employee in June.

They kept mentioning infinite scroll, and that everyone was supposed to be thinking about how to incorporate that into product.

After zuck discussed TikTok directly recently, I'm not surprised google and fb lobbyists would press for this investigation.

One question I have, is the real-time interests of millions of 16-24 yo Americans reported back to the Chinese government a national security concern?

<comment><USER17> 16-24 yo (and even younger) American kids/youth being exposed to Chinese propoganda and censorship is most definitely a national security concern.

<comment><USER18> Yes, Americans should only be exposed to American Corporate-sanctioned propaganda.

<comment><USER19> Hey, at least americans can vote on that propoganda.

<comment><USER20> They can not. Media ownership and media content, even NPR, is not tied to electoral representation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TikTok is actually a great app. When I was a kid in the 00's my friends and I used to carry around a video camera to make music videos. With TikTok you can do it with your cell phone.

They beat SnapChat, FB and Instagram on experience.

Censorship is something serious to consider, but these are mainly kids making music videos. They aren't using it to organize campaigns.

<comment><USER22> > _these are mainly kids making music videos. They aren 't using it to > organize campaigns._

I think that's a dangerously naive interpretation of the platform (or any platform really), particularly when it involves children and young adult minds.

<comment><USER23> Have you seen the weird articles on Snapchat Discover? "Why I'm never taking my mom to an x-rated convention again" "How my kitten play fetish makes me feel less alone" "Why I've been dressing like a horse for twenty years"

If I had a teenage daughter, I'd feel much more comfortable with her using the Chinese tik-tok than whatever tabloid-level trash Snapchat is pushing these days. Some of these American media companies have just gotten _weird_

<comment><USER24> I think you're too worried about that. I saw plenty of weird fetish shit on forums in my teens and I _think_ I turned out okay, plus a preparedness to accept the breadth of weirdness in humanity. The main thing you should care about is teaching your daughter to recognize clickbait and worthless content.

<comment><USER25> "preparedness to accept the breadth of weirdness in humanity"

Why is it a good thing? Or even okay? Isn't it a slippery slope?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oct 14: "TikTok has moved into Facebook's backyard and is starting to poach its employees"

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/tiktok-has-mountain-view- off...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/tiktok-has-mountain-view-office-near- facebook-poaching-employees.html)

<comment><USER27> If they're highering engineers at "20% above Facebook compensation", it really doesn't make sense. In china they could higher roughly 15 top engineers for the price of 1 engineer in the bay area (in China there's an even bigger surplus of engineering talent).

<comment><USER28> That's simply not true. A top engineer in China costs at least $100k, no way Facebook is paying its engineers ~$1.5 million. ByteDance is famous for paying high salaries: [https://crm.org/articles/3-million-pay-packages-how-a- chines...](https://crm.org/articles/3-million-pay-packages-how-a-chinese- startup-is-attracting-top-talent).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The article conveniently forgets to mention that Musical.ly was founded by Chinese founders and headquartered in Shanghai. Maybe they technically were an American company, but it's not clear the outcome would have been much different from a "national security" perspective.

<comment><USER30> That doesn't matter at all.

The US controls its domestic market - just as China controls their domestic market - and when it comes to going back and reviewing the TikTok / Musical.ly combination it can dictate terms across the app stores which are all US controlled.

The US can say: we're going to ban your combined entity from all global app stores by forcing Google and Apple to comply with our position on that merged entity (TikTok + Musical.ly).

Google and Apple resist? Say hello to national security based sanctions. They will immediately comply, no more questions asked.

The US can instantly, globally kill TikTok, for all intents and purposes. TikTok would disappear from most global app store availability within a week, from Canada to Australia. It would probably only exist in China.

It's unfair? Tell Qualcomm - NXP that. That was blocked solely out of spite by China. This is an economic conflict with China. When China lets US Internet companies have proper, full access to their market maybe the US will relent and start playing 'fair.'

<comment><USER29> Yes, the US government has the power to block mergers. However, consider the hypothetical scenario where Musical.ly rejects TikTok's offer and competes them out of the US market, growing to the same size as TikTok is today. In that case, there would be no merger to block, but the national security implications would remain the same. What would the US government do then? Put them on a blacklist like Huawei?

<comment><USER31> It will be forced to sell to US entities, like Alstom and Samsung.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I know this a long time ago, they ban lgbt content and I never download the app on my phone. Chinese business is controlled by the state.

</comment><comment><USER33> I would support a wholesale ban on Chinese acquisitions of American companies until American companies are allowed to acquire Chinese companies (or otherwise operate in China).

These ridiculous double standards from China are not free trade, and we should stop pretending it is.

<comment><USER34> Most people probably realize it. What we need is for the American CEOs, financial elite, members of government that have investments in China to invest in their own country rather than in a lop-sided trade economy that doesn't allow free flow of money back to the US.

<comment><USER35> This is an area where both the right and left can find agreement.

<comment><USER36> Doesn't 1 side support globalism politically though?

<comment><USER37> "Both sides" have anti-globalists, and both have globalists, and despite an interesting few years globalism is still the establishment norm for most mainline parties in liberal democracies.

<comment><USER38> "globalism" isn't one thing. Both communism (international workers movement) and libertarianism (free markets) have globalist aspects.

You can believe in geographical borders while also having foreign relations.

<comment><USER37> I was not trying to imply globalism was one thing. I also pointed out that it is the norm for "liberal democracies", as a way to not paint with too broad of a brush. I very much agree with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It is crystal clear that TikTok is a pivot for China. I think this is the first Chinese application that beats the US (Silicon Valley) "monopoly"? It is a great business and cross cultural achievement.

It seems like the Chinese could be successful in duplicating SV even in a non democratic context.

<comment><USER40> These types of applications come and go. That a Chinese company made a popular one shouldn't be shocking or indicate some major breakthrough.

<comment><USER39> You can say the same of FB, Instagram, etc but coming to the "top top" is not an easy task and give you leverage for launching the next app. But you missed my other observation: it was difficult for Chinese companies to launch western attractive apps, you can take TikTok as an outlier or lucky app or you can be alert of the things that might come next.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> TikTok is actually a great app. Content is very entertaining and it is actually easy to use. I still can't figure out Snapchat.

Today it is just a way for me to burn 15 minutes, but I see plenty of potential and make the concerns of censorship and ownership valid concerns.

<comment><USER32> And jumping bytes is a great company yet they have no choice but to get political and enforce censorship that bans lgbt contents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Does anyone have any insight into their revenue model? How are they succeeding where Vine failed or are they still just riding investor capital?

<comment><USER43> Profitability is not required if you are an intelligence asset for the state. In this case, the state is China. Maybe it's legitimately profitable, maybe the Chinese govt is purchasing ads with other companies it owns, maybe the books are entirely cooked. It's hard to tell in China.

<comment><USER44> You're being downvoted but state subsidies are one of the largest concerns US/EU have with China, so it's a valid point.

Not to say that TikTok doesn't have any revenue at all, they have ads.

<comment><USER45> I've seen maybe 3 ads in using TikTok for 6 months every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Bring back Vine, Twitter!

Why was it shuttered? It seemed like such a short-sighted move. Vine had such cachet and was fun to use & create on it. RIP

</comment><comment><USER47> I'll never understand why (a) Vine was shut down, and (b) So many Americans are eager to rush out and use a Chinese social network.

I suspect (b) can be explained primarily through ignorance.

<comment><USER48> A huge swath of the consumer market in physical products is Chinese goods. Why would your average nontechnical, fairly apolitical, non-foreign policy or intelligence news following person draw a distinction?

They see a fun app, they play with it. If they're even aware of censorship issues or geopolitical power games, that seems very distant from some app that amuses them for a few minutes a day.

<comment><USER49> This so much. Few consumers know this fact, and fewer care.

Everyone knows the stuff they buy is manufactured in China, and the old timers holding weird grudges from the 1970s are long gone.

There is no economic incentive for anyone to bring this up at any time during any transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Twitter really screwed up by shutting down Vine. What a crazy thing to think that by doing so they may have generated a national security issue? Wild.

</comment><comment><USER51> US companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google) censor people all the time.

<comment><USER52> After all the political stuff going on, every country began seeing foreign communication companies as a national security threat. Russia and China were early on this but EU is also tightening the grip. We had a good go but since the politicians got involved I expect the internet to become separated into regional islands of regulations.

Facebook probably had a dream of becoming a global political influence broker and sell mandate to the highest bidder but I think the people who control the guys with the guns are not especially thrilled to play this game.

<comment><USER53> I dont know, I really fear a world where the US blocks all chinese social media, and china blocks all US social media, in the name of 'national security'.

<comment> kube-system That would be unfortunate, but it's not nearly as bad as the effects we'll see if the trend of information warfare against civilians continues.

I've come to expect falsehoods on the internet for political or commercial gain -- but I find the recent trend of using propaganda to spark hatred, outrage, and panic, to be particularly disturbing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It is not about censorship. It is about WHO censor WHO.

<comment><USER55> Everyone just stop using other ppl's app. If you need a app you need to code it yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I am an American-born man of Western European descent. My girlfriend is a Chinese passport holder here on H1B. I am an anarchist.

I absolutely do not understand why there is so much hate for Chinese people, Chinese companies, or the Chinese government. Literally everything has flaws, and Western Europe and USA have plenty of them.

If you are not willing to say "China does xyz but actually also my country does something similar to xyz too, and it's definitely bad"...

...then at the very least, please do not act as if your statements about Chinese nationals are 100% true for every individual. Humans are humans, they differ in meaningful ways but they also deserve dignity and respect.

<comment><USER57> This line of discussion seems a bit off the topic of the thread, but I want to respond to you. Based on your last paragraph, it seems to me like it should be pretty clear why there is so much hate for the Chinese government and the companies that act as agents for Chinese government censorship and oppression policies. There are many Chinese nationals suffering and dying in concentration camps _right now_. Am I obliged to engage in whataboutism just to hold the opinion that example and other human rights atrocities are sufficient reason to reject cooperation with the Chinese regime, or the opinion that domestic companies should not become active agents of the the regime's censorship objectives to do business there?

Your comment seems to conflate all of that criticism with "hate for Chinese people," which seems unfair and disingenuous since I and presumably many people opposed to the CCCP feel that way because of the fate of all the people currently in China's borders and subjugated by the regime.

<comment><USER56> I do not deny any of the claims you have made about concentration camps, human rights abuses, corporate interests etc.

But I would really like to understand why there is a double standard in the minds of "my fellow Westerners".

Boeing, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, Halliburton, Lockheed, and the whole Washington aparatus in general have been (in)directly responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people in the Middle East, yet I am still happy to use Instagram and Whatsapp and Youtube.

Similarly I will use TikTok concurrently while understanding that the Chinese government has locked 1 million Uighurs in a concentration camp. Surely, not every Chinese citizen voted for this idea. So we shouldn't make assumptions about what "Chinese people" are like

<comment><USER58> Nobody is stereotyping the Chinese people!

Google and Apple have publicly stood up against the US government, and the US doesn't (publicly and legally, at least) meddle with companies to anywhere near the same extent as China.

When I support Google, I support Google alone, but when I support Tencent, it feels a little like I'm supporting the Chinese government, too.

<comment><USER55> Imagine being this native.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> FaceApp redux? [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/18/heres-w...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/18/heres- what-we-know-about-russian-company-behind-faceapp/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Shouldn't this issue be addressed by the free market rather than by the government getting involved? If there is evidence that the app censors content to serve CCP propaganda, then consumers can make the choice not to use it.

<comment><USER61> Markets work best when there is transparency: for instance adding MPG to car labels helps "the market" make good choices by informing customers at the point of sale. The law which dictates an MPG sticker is "the government getting involved".

Another example: trademarks allow superior brands to win over time. The enforcement of trademarks is "the government getting involved".

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Time for some savvy US entrepreneurs to spin up a TikTok alternative..

<comment><USER63> would anyone use it though? Isn't this the same as launching a instagram clone a couple of years ago. It's not a challenge to build but your a clone and presumably don't have the clout to get teens to even see it let alone use it.

<comment><USER62> You'd probably need some compelling functionality.. maybe filter fx or something. But if TikTok is banned in the US then you might have a fighting chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> There are entire sub-genres of lesbians, trans, gays, and all sorts of LGBT people on TikTok. I don't see a ban on the platform

<comment><USER65> It was only in Turkey, since TikTok has to follow local laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> unrelated question: but why would any investigator leak information like this? who benefits?

<comment><USER67> i suppose there are trade deal talks going on between us and china?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> The censorship argument against TikTok seems odd given that Trump supporters are a prominent voice on the platform (I'm a huge TikTok user). Wouldn't its Chinese masters want to silence support for him as well? Why haven't they?

To be clear, I don't like the idea of foreign state controlled major social platforms opaque to US oversight. I'm commenting specifically on the argument that TikTok silences Hong Kong supporters.

<comment><USER21> > Trump supporters are a prominent voice on the platform

Not necessarily, the algorithm shows you things you are interested in. I see China, Golden Retrievers and various songs I like. You see Trump because your eyeballs got locked on the screen. So you will see more Trump.

<comment><USER68> Their algo is weird. I've noticed if I watch something more than once my feed will be all about that thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> YouTube: That's a nice video streaming business you got there TikTok. A shame if anything ever happened to it.

<comment><USER70> YouTube isn't hip enough to take away TikTok market share in any worthwhile amount.

There are a few US companies that might, but Google isn't going to be it. Social sharing isn't in Google's blood, and they've never succeeded before with their $1,000,000,000+ spent on attempts.

<comment><USER71> Especially not in China ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Ar-Curunir While I agree that Chinese soft imperialism is bad, I think it's tremendously funny that Americans are complaining about it now, after years of using military and economic power to enforce a similar imperialism everywhere.

<comment><USER72> The false equivalence is strong with this one. In no way shape or form is it even remotely similar.

<comment><USER73> "Your boy cracked my son's head!"

"Your boy started it first. He broke mine's leg!"

"Yeah, a cracked head is not even remotely similar to a broken leg!"

Moral of the story: Broken legs are normal.

<comment><USER74> In the world of international relations, there really are no good guys.

But in a world where everyone is a bad guy, hypocrisy can be forgiven, since it keeps other bad guys in check despite its self-serving intent. Hypocrisy, whether European, Russian, American or Chinese, keeps the peace.

<comment><USER75> > In the world of international relations, there really are no good guys.

Bhutan. Bhutan are the good guys.

<comment><USER76> Bhutan engaged in ethnic cleansing and expelled over 100,000 Lhotshampa into Nepal.

<comment><USER75> Googled it. Thanks for that. I was unaware.

For anyone else: [https://thediplomat.com/2016/09/bhutans-dark-secret-the- lhot...](https://thediplomat.com/2016/09/bhutans-dark-secret-the-lhotshampa- expulsion/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> So HN changed the headline to remove TikTok which is a name I reconized and replaced it with "ByteDance" and "Musical.ly", which I've never heard of before. It was originally displayed on HN the same as it is in the article.

From the article, I know that the new headline is more precise. But it's much less informative, I wouldn't have clicked the article under this name.

<comment><USER78> They also edited a headline for a #1 ranked story about Blizzard and the Hong Kong issue, removing Hong Kong from the headline entirely.

HN sort of reminds me of China -- a dictatorship with zero transparency and a penchant for manipulation.

Edit: Can't forget the spineless bootlickers who are hopelessly devoted to the state! You know you've struck a nerve when the best 'reply' they can offer is a silent downvote.

<comment><USER79> The phrase spineless bootlicker is such an internet citizen phrase.

Outrage culture signaling with respect to language is always so fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> For context: title appears to have changed from "U.S. opens national security investigation into TikTok" to "U.S. opens a national security review of ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly".

</comment><comment><USER81> Why was the title changed from "tiktok" to musical.ly?

</comment><comment><USER82> China now flexing its soft power...

<comment><USER83> You can't flex "soft power" when all you have is monetary grip of the situation (investments).

Where is tactful diplomacy, cooperation and building mutual rapport when dealing with China?

<comment><USER84> Soft power is all about money. All the rest you mention is useless without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> There is a massive push to make TikTok a thing. But it is the most stupid app I have ever seen. So they might as well stop pushing the fake videos online.

<comment><USER21> This app is amazing. Its growing like crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> So a president who basically hands victory after victory to foreign governments and who effectively reduced the toolbox of the United States to shape foreign relations to "sanctions" and "tariffs" is not considered a threat to national security. Everything's fine with that.

But if just one foreign social network app manages to divert some serious attention of US teenagers from Facebook for the first time in Internet history, THAT of course is a threat to national security.

Seriously...is this a parody?

<comment><USER87> I mean, there's basically one primary mechanism by which the president's actions can be challenged (other than lawsuit on constitutionality), and that mechanism is currently in progress in the House of Representatives.

I'm not sure I'd call that "Everything's fine"

<comment><USER86> At the moment there is definitely a majority of people sitting in the Senate who would put their signature under an "everything is fine". My hope is that this changes, but the chances are limited, if at all existent, so: yes, by all accounts I currently have to assume the powers in charge consider everything to be fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> > They said they were concerned ... whether China censors content seen by U.S. > users. They also suggested TikTok could be targeted by foreign influence > campaigns.

That reminds me of Soviet Union. Government choosing what kind of propaganda citizens should watch.

> He cited questions about why TikTok had "only had a few videos of the Hong > Kong protests that have been dominating international headlines for months."

Does politburo^W democratic government has a right to decide that a privately owned app must show Honkong protest videos? If yes, then what is the minimum quota of Honkong protest videos the app needs to meet? Should other apps, like dating or chess apps, show Honkong protest videos too?

> The company has said U.S. user data is stored in the United States

They should not. The data are better protected from such US senators if stored in China.

> Any platform owned by a company in China which collects massive amounts of > data on Americans is a potential serious threat to our country

And what about US companies collecting data on foreign citizens?

> Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content

Some might call it moderation.</comment>


Show HN: A React Native app to help millennials learn new career skills - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fed-career-re-training-for-millennials/id1246455050?ls=1&mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a millennial and wanted to help myself (and others) learn new career skills. So I built an app using React Native and Redux, pulling from the Udemy API. Backend is Firebase.

iOS: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fed-career-re-training- for-m...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fed-career-re-training-for- millennials/id1246455050?ls=1&mt=8)

Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.millennial...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.millennialjobs)

Feedback welcome!

React Native was awesome to use, btw</comment>


Show HN: My wife's email was hacked, I created an app to protect online accounts - <AUTHOR> https://getlogdog.com/

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Potentially useful. Love it when people create new products. Very scary to put yourself out there like that. Especially in the security space.

From reading the site and URB's comments on this page, LogDog appears to be a host intrusion detection (HID) package that works first in "learning mode" to establish a baseline set of acceptable or normal behaviours for any given user then eventually moves into notification mode in which it signals to the user that unusual activity has taken place.

Unusual, in this context, means anything outside the thresholds established during learning mode. Presumably, learning mode continues over time and the system becomes more refined.

So far, so good.

What's not so good:

1\. The basic premise is "trust us, we know what to look for, but won't tell you because we don't want the bad guys to know". This is security through obscurity and I'm afraid I can characterize this only as "charmingly naive". A) The bad guys already know, guaranteed. B) Unless you are truly expert in this area (see below), you don't and are only guessing. I don't want to harsh anyone's mellow, but you need to be able to back up your claims - <USER2> when you claim your product will make someone's life more secure. We will consider believing your claims after we have read the research papers you are going to publish, the papers that provide enough information for thems of us who know this area to guess at your bona fides but not so much as to reveal all your secrets.

2\. All data sent to servers is anonymized. So you say. I will take you at your word. But it means nothing, unless you have done the extremely hard work necessary to show that the data you maintain cannot in any way be used to establish identity after the fact, whether it be by patterns of behaviour or other means. This is an area of active security research and active attacks, and is not for the faint of heart. I invite you to research super cookies, click profiling, etc., etc.

3\. Re #2: Your servers are now known to attackers who want that juicy high value data that they can probably do more with than you - unless you are as large and as well funded (they are both). Please describe, at least at a high level, how you are protecting this high value asset you have created. If you cannot, we cannot expect our data to be safe. Regardless of claims of anonymization. Convince us you understand defense in depth, prevent-detect- respond-recover, etc.

4\. No offense, but this is a security product from someone with no documented (as far as we can tell) expertise or experience in this area. Everyone who has ever developed a security product from scratch has gotten the first release wrong. Every single time. This stuff is complex and complicated, it takes tremendous experience in the field to design a tool properly, let alone implement one, experience gained either from starting from scratch and surviving to release 4 or 5 or from working on other products developed by experts/survivors.

URB, you may find comments herein and on this page to be assertive, even aggressive. None of us will apologize for this. You are making BOLD claims and providing no reasons for anyone to believe you know what you are doing. You need to do that work before the security community will accept this product.

Try to get hold of Bruce Schneier or another well-known, respected commenter in the field. If you can convince a few such people by giving them a privileged, behind the scenes view (they won't sign your NDA, there is nothing for them in that), that will a) provide real marketing bumpf and b) go a long way to silencing many critics.

But note that you still need to address 2 and 3, even if you convince the best of the best of 1 and 4. Good luck, those are hard problems to solve.

<comment><USER4> "No offense, but this is a security product from someone with no documented (as far as we can tell) expertise or experience in this area. "

This is my theory on why santoshi released bitcoin anonymously. ad hominem attacks like this are way too common in security. Often there's some justifications, but i'd prefer if conversations were about the content alone.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that this actually qualifies as an ad hominem attack. In cases such as this, a lack of experience and expertise is a serious concern.

True, there may well be outliers who, with little to no previous experience in a field, are able to master and advance it - but they are outliers.

As to specific comparison with Santoshi and Bitcoin, it doesn't stand, due to the relatively poor history and documentation for LogDog and the relatively greater history and documentation for Bitcoin: There is the 2008 research paper that built upon well-known and well-examined previous work on electronic cash, anonymous payments, etc., etc., and there is the subsequent open source client. No one ever said "trust us, this is cool". Instead, they wrote detailed papers and code and released those to the world - and we made up our own minds.

LogDog is, by comparison, _sui generis_ , a thing of itself, that has sprung into being with neither preamble nor publicized foundations.

URB may be the outlier. Or not. Given the lack of documentation, the lack of openness, and the apparent lack of expertise, we are but wise to raise the questions.

So far, URB seems responsive and engaged, and not particulary evasive. Those are good things for that particular hominid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      Hundreds of parameters are used to identify unauthorized access to your accounts.

I would love to know how.

Seriously, no sarcasm here, I'm actually curious about those _hundreds of parameters_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously I can't go into too much detail, but we cross reference data from the different services we monitor and thus create a fairly robust usage profile.

<comment><USER6> It isn't at all obvious to me why you can't reveal more information, unless your signals are something trivial a hacker could mimic. Please explain more.

<comment><USER7> Here's the unfortunate truth: a good majority of security companies out there are banking on the hope that the signals they are looking for are not known to hackers and so cannot be mimicked or evaded.

>unless your signals are something trivial a hacker could mimic

Name _any_ security product out there, whether they make software tools or hardware appliances, and chances are there is a set of trivial signals a malicious actor can mimic to appear to be trusted by that product, or a set of trivial signals to avoid to prevent being considered malicious.

And yet those products can still provide tremendous value. There is serious value in a large team of intelligent, experienced, resourceful people spending 8-10 hours a day tracking fraud and crime patterns so they can detect suspicious activity and meticulously add to and update their signatures. Yes, if their list of signatures was published on a fraud forum, the fraudsters would see it and take advantage of it and the company would have more workload trying to detect the new pattern changes. But it's still a useful service for many people.

My only concern in OP's case is that neither he nor his company has any track record in the security industry. He's perfectly reasonable to not reveal the precise technical details of how they're detecting suspicious activity, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Refusing to explain how LogDog works, how should you trust them with your precious accounts?

</comment><comment><USER9> "1 in 4 online accounts gets hacked."

I've got hundreds of online accounts and so far none have been hacked. Where you getting this number from?

I think for you to be successful in this venture you're going to have to be very transparent in how everything works, based on comments so far that's not the case.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks interesting. Does anyone else use Two-Factor authentication for their emails? I do.

I also use that SMS service for PayPal.

Does nobody else?

<comment><USER11> I use two-factor auth whenever it is available. I've also mandated it for all user accounts (on Google Apps) at my organization.

For a while, I was trying to encourage adoption by expounding on its benefits, but then one of our users (without two-factor auth) had her account hacked, and I was able to employ the panic around the office to justify making it mandatory for everyone. This caused some pain for a little while (when two- factor auth enforcement is enabled for a Google Apps domain, users without two-factor auth enabled must use a temporary code, which can only be retrieved by a domain admin), and I wouldn't recommend this approach for more than a dozen users or so.

<comment><USER10> Great idea. I am surprised so few use two-factor authentication. My bank requires it for logging in, sending money, even for going into the branch (thanks Barclays); RSA fobs or Quest Defender fobs were also used in a company I used to work for, for their VPN.

With Google, the list of massive passwords they provide for logging in via POP3 is a useful thing to print off and have secreted at your house somewhere in case your phone gets pinched.

And periodically/regularly tidying up old emails from your inbox (archiving them offline somewhere) is a way to keep the email account a bit safer, as there isn't any info in the mailbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do I have to believe the reddit-like story in the title? Looking at the website it looks way too professional to be something suddenly made out of the blue one day after your wife got hacked.

<comment><USER13> Yes. Also, you are required to believe eBay was founded to help Pierre Omidyar's fiancée collect Pez dispensers. And Sara Blakely got Spanx off the ground by dragging Bergdorf buyers into dressing rooms and demonstrating control-top girdle underwear. If you can't invent a believable meet-cute creation myth, how can you create a good company?

According to Wikipedia "The frequently repeated story that eBay was founded to help Omidyar's fiancée trade Pez candy dispensers was fabricated by a public relations manager in 1997 to interest the media. This was revealed in Adam Cohen's 2002 book,[14] and confirmed by eBay." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Omidyar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Omidyar)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Could you elaborate a bit on some of the things you're checking for as signs of "suspicious activity"?

I ask because I receive warning emails on occasion from Gmail ever since I started routing all of my data through a rotating-server VPN. I imagine LogDog might send similar emails, which is not necessarily a bad thing--I'm just curious exactly what else you're monitoring other than suspicious IP/geolocation.

<comment><AUTHOR> LogDog monitors multiple parameters and will not send you alerts just because your VPN changes IPs. We establish a usage profile and only alert on significant anomalies.

<comment><USER14> And, again, what would be an example of an "anomaly", other than an IP address from India suddenly signing in?

<comment><USER15> A strange IP, signing in at early morning hours when you usually don't, using a different browser, different OS, different language config, different browser plugins, running through all your email folders... THAT would be suspicious all together, most of them are not by themselves.

I understand that URB doesn't want to reveal all they do. It's the same way AV companies do not reveal how the develop all their signatures.

Everyone crying "you should reveal all your secrets, otherwise you're doing security through obscurity" do not get it. It's not secret because of security concerns, but for competitive advantage against other companies in the field. Why aren't we asking FireEye, Mandiant, CloudFlare, Incapsula or any of the other supercool security company what are they parameters for behavioural detection? Do we feel we have a superior moral stance against LogDog because we don't know them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand how it works or could possibly work. How is your app going to detect that someone is accessing one of my accounts from Israel, as indicated in your screenshot?

Do you have software running on google's servers so that it knows what IP addresses are accessing gmail/evernote/one of the other services and can geolocate? (Obviously not). So how is this supposed to work?

<comment><USER17> If you scroll to the bottom in Gmail you can see a "Last account activity: 1 hour ago: Details" link. If you click that you can see everyone who logged on.

<comment><USER18> As far as I know, there's no official API to access this data. And that data definitely isn't available for all the services regardless.

<comment><USER19> This shows sessions across all Google products:

[https://security.google.com/settings/security/activity?pli=1](https://security.google.com/settings/security/activity?pli=1)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for this. I actually found 2 devices that I didn't recognize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Don't get hacked, get a LogDog"

From what I can tell this service does absolutely nothing to protect you from being hacked.

It's more like a "you might've been hacked" notification.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you know something suspicious is happening you can change your password (from the app) and throw the hacker out. You can also avoid rolling-hacks (ex: when your email is used to reset passwords on other services)

<comment><USER21> I'm not saying the service has no potential value, rather that it doesn't fulfill the "don't get hacked" reprise by notifying you after the fact.

The notification could allow you to fix the problem once it has happened but any hacker with reasonable sophistication can download data and change passwords in an automated fashion long before you can finish reading the notification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So to protect myself I have to give out ALL my credentials to this new app? No thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your credentials stay on your phone (where you already have most of your passwords). They are never sent to LogDog servers.

<comment><USER22> Well that's reassuring. It's not obvious from scanning the first page that this is how it works and will potentially scare away users. So I guess then it only works if I have a reliable internet connection and my battery doesn't run out.

Do you know how battery/network heavy logdog is?

<comment><AUTHOR> We keep battery consumption <1% and compress all data traffic.

<comment><USER23> >We keep battery consumption <1%

What does that even mean? 1% per hour? per day? 1% of your phone's battery? of my phone's battery?

Meaningless statements like the one quoted do not inspire confidence in you or your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Android settings -> General -> Battery. Power consumption divided by Android into percent per app

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sorry if I'm going to sound a little _childish_ but...

What if my LogDog is hacked? What kind of _thing_ will the attacker be able to do with whatever LogDog has about my accounts everywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> LogDog does not save account credentials. They are kept only on the device and are never sent to our servers. The servers only keep anonymous data. There is nothing to hack.

<comment><USER24> In another comment, you mentioned your system works by polling for user activity, creating "baseline" profiles and monitoring usage activity. That certainly does not appear to be anonymous data to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wouldn't a third party service repeatedly logging into my services from a LogDog IP raise some flag on it's own at the service's own intrusion detection?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good point. It took us a while to get around that :-)

<comment><USER11> Perhaps it's simply a poor choice of words on your part, but "get around that" raises red flags for me. It makes it sound like you've found a loophole in their intrusion detection systems, that will (hopefully) be closed when it is detected—which will become ever more likely if your system becomes more popular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't know the situation with your wife's email... but if she had a poor enough password that it was easy enough to hack OR if she didn't update her password after heartbleed etc., then why do you think she will be proactive enough to use LogDog?

(Obviously she will, because she's your wife, but the question is if people aren't proactive to keep their accounts safe, will they be proactive enough to use your service?)

<comment><USER27> It's far, far more likely that she was phished or that she used the same password on a site that was compromised than that her email password was guessed or sniffed. (edit: of course, this is a general comment rather than any comment specific to OP's wife!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> So I prevent getting hacked by giving some random app the login details to all the services that could be used to fake my identity. Makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER29> First Show HN where I've seen someone have a phone number listed. Not sure if smart, or brave.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is it open source? How does it work?

This info is kind of important if you are posting on HN!

<comment><AUTHOR> LogDog is not open source. It works by polling services periodically for information about user activity, establishing a baseline profile and then looking for usage anomalies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> From what I can see he crawls the website as a user would do. He logs in to Google just via [https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=mail&contin...](https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=mail&continue=https://mail.google.com/mail/), two-factor authentication might involve user interaction.

Session information (about other sessions) from for example Facebook can be obtained through [https://www.facebook.com/ajax/settings/security/sessions.php](https://www.facebook.com/ajax/settings/security/sessions.php)

</comment><comment><USER32> two comments -- 1\. Since your app is free what's in it for you ? You mentioned in other comments that passwords are never shared with your app, however, you do continuous polling and create profile. Are you going to sell this data to advertising for behavior targeting and advertising ? Amount of information you know what a particular user is using and how they are using it ( due to continuous monitoring ) is way too much intruding in my opinion.

2\. What if , my account gets hacked due to logdog ? You approach is not too convincing since you even did not answer other users question on what parameters you are monitoring. Sophisticated hackers might take advantage of your service and hack into my account. Do you assume liability and loss that would occur because of your service ? I don't want to sound rude but putting cheesy story in headline might get you temporary attention but this service is no better than saying "we will watch out who will rob your bank and then directly or indirectly responsible for lost money"

</comment><comment><USER33> Your press kit was not accessible as of the time of this post via the link you provide:

[https://getlogdog.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/08/Logdog.zip](https://getlogdog.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/08/Logdog.zip)

</comment><comment><USER34> Hate to be that guy, but in About Us you have a minor typo; "Having one of your online accounts hacked and loosing all your.." should read; "Having one of your online accounts hacked and losing all your.."

<comment><USER35> It could have been intentional, I think, in this context.

Very unlikely, of course, but I think it reads properly with "loosing."

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does it run client-side (device), or server-side? I ask, because if you're without a net connection, will LogDog still monitor your accounts (if it's server-side, it will, I guess)?

</comment><comment><USER37> How does this protect me any more than 2FA does?

<comment><USER15> Seems that in the same way a house alarm protects you, loosely compared to your house keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Typo:

> "loosing all your data"

</comment><comment><USER39> I love the skepticism!</comment>