GitHub Repository for Video Generation with Deep Neural Networks Released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bernhard2202/improved-video-gan/ <comment><USER2> Mods: please edit the title, it has both a typo ("Repositoriy") and is quite unclear. The repo seems to be related to a a research paper, code and data to aid in reproducing the results I guess.

That said, the readme needs tome editing too. This sentence made me recurse for a while:

 _Every frame needs to be at least 64x64 pixels and contains between 16 and 32 frames._

</comment><comment><USER3> I was just looking at Figure 5 in the paper, and I'm not terribly impressed. The fixed-boxes example has boxes which overlap mostly with sky, and the system reconstructs that the sky is blue, but all of the surroundings are also blue. In the other examples, part of an airplane is masked out, but the reconstruction looks rather vague. And worse, you can easily tell where the original masked out area was.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but this is entirely unsupervised, and happening with GANs that are generating the entire clip from scratch instead of keeping its spatial dimensionality. I think it was more the point to show that this is possible at all, even if the video has moving background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I missing something in the paper, or is iVGAN actually just a vanilla Wasserstein GAN? Is the contribution of the paper "we tried GAN on video and it worked"? That's still a useful result, but what justifies the new iVGAN name? Perhaps the specific network architecture they're using?

<comment><USER6> How I understood it, the name refers this NIPS 2016 paper ([http://carlvondrick.com/tinyvideo/](http://carlvondrick.com/tinyvideo/)) in which video-generation happens in a two-stream architecture; therefore, relying on a static background. The approach posted here is generating videos in a single stream from what I see. Therefore it does not rely on such assumptions. This is possible by their architecture, on the one hand, and optimization within the WGAN framework on the the other hand. The dropped assumption on the background also allows using the architecture for different applications if you look at their homepage.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. I can see that this is a useful experiment, and I'm glad that the authors did it. It's just not clear to me that their model is new or needs a special name; isn't this single-stream approach just the simplest interpretation of "using a WGAN to generate video" (just generate all the pixel data)? If anything, the two-stream architecture you link to seems like the special case/new idea.

<comment><USER6> From my experience, I would say its the regular approach yes. But, since all pixels are generated and not copied from a static background image it is also much harder and probably unstable. Apparently it was not possible so far, otherwise, I cannot explain the gap in publications since the NIPS-2016 paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great work!</comment>


Apple seeks to trademark "startup" in Australia - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupsmart.com.au/leadership/legal-matters/apple-seeks-to-trademark-startup-in-australia/2013082810576.html <comment><USER2> Trademarks are not global variables. They are scoped.

In trademark law these are called "classes".

If I have a trademark for McDonalds that covers navigation equipment, then the hamburger company can't sue me using _their_ trademark which covers hamburgers. The coverage is scoped.

Now!

Observe the list of classes -- 37, 38, 41 and 42.

Apple is essentially registering "startup" to cover devices, their maintenance, development and training.

Not all uses of "startup" ever. Just those uses attached to what Apple produces.

<comment><USER3> The owner of a mark with a sufficient reputation can take action against dissimilar goods and services where they're riding on the goodwill of the mark of course so TMs are not completely limited to their classes.

Rolex could sue me if used their marks on a good which they weren't registered in if I was trying to take unfair advantage of their mark, tractors for example.

Whilst it's highly unlikely in this case that Apple would, I think it's inappropriate to seek protection of the term in the first place, at least from a PR perspective and from the risk of trade mark creep.

<comment><USER4> In Australia, McDonalds lost a case when they tried to stop McWilliams selling a "Big Mac" 2 litre bottle of wine, because no-one would mistake it for a hamburger. ([http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/detail.asp...](http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/detail.aspx?g=d30cba2f-38ce-448b-99f5-e0329cacfb1f))

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that. Interesting! Looks like in Australia there has to be a likelihood of confusion even where a mark has reputation.

This is not the case in the EU, where the mere act of taking unfair advantage/causing detriment is sufficient for a TM owner to take action, even where there is no likelihood of confusion. Likewise, in the US, a TM owner would also have an action for TM dilution which does not require confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm told that no one cares whether Apple is shady because they build quality products, but I _really_ want to see a shift away from Apple products in protest of said shadiness.

edit: clarity

<comment><USER6> Please don't say Linux.

<comment><USER7> Say one thing OS X does objectively better than Linux. I honestly can't think of any.

<comment><USER8> I've run both linux and OS X as my default setups (currently linux), and I have to say, OS X does a lot of things better. I like linux better overall, but that's just too strong a statement. Here's a few that OS X does better:

\-- Font anti-aliasing.

\-- Package management - people using linux should be expected to be able to compile from source, I know, but at least _most_ packages released for Mac OS X are developed with binaries.

\-- Graphics card drivers, specifically Nvidia (which Mac ships with).

<comment><USER9> I've been using Linux and BSD for thirteen years and I can't even remember the last time I had to manually build and install an application from source (not counting random, early-stage hobby projects from github and things).

Open source Unix systems are the kings of package management. OS X pretty much does the exact opposite of 'package management', and any third party solution is based on existing Linux and BSD implementations.

<comment><USER10> Replying to this because I can't reply to the child comment.

This is something I keep hearing, and I keep linking to the same thing. "Download and One-Click Install" can easily be done on Linux. In fact, that's even what it is called: "One Click Install", at least as far as openSUSE is concerned.

Explanation: [http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:One_Click_Install](http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:One_Click_Install)

Example: [http://software.opensuse.org/package/chromium](http://software.opensuse.org/package/chromium)

Bonus: It _still_ adds a repository so you have a working update path that plays nicely with the _centralised package management_ that lets you manage _every single package_ centrally, instead of having half a gazillion individual updaters, bundled libs etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At first I thought it was a joke. Then I read the article...

This is one of the reasons why I never buy something from Apple. I think they are bad for our creativity.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think it's important to stress that trademarks are not copyrights or patents: assuming Apple's trademark application goes through, the protection on the mark is good only for the goods and services they specified in the application (edit: with a caveat mentioned by grabeh elsewhere[1]):

> Retail store services featuring computers, computer software, computer > peripherals, mobile phones, and consumer electronic devices, and > demonstration of products relating thereto

Based on that, this looks to be a new retail service they plan on offering called "Startup".

Edit:

Also note that in 2011, Apple already applied for the Startup trademark in the US and China with the same international registration number: [http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/04/apple- fi...](http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/04/apple-files-for- mission-control-and-all-new-startup-trademarks.html)

As far as I can tell from the action on the trademark application[2], it was granted a preliminary trademark (which is standard practice) and was opened up to objections: at least one was raised, and the USPTO has now passed it to Apple to respond. It looks like they have until September 20th to do so[3].

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6288395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6288395)

[2]: [http://www.trademarkia.com/startup-85296886.html](http://www.trademarkia.com/startup-85296886.html)

[3]: [http://trademarks.justia.com/852/96/startup-85296886.html](http://trademarks.justia.com/852/96/startup-85296886.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> The article doesn't really comment on why Apple would actually want to trademark the word 'startup'. As far as I know it isn't used as part of their marketing anywhere. Can anybody here offer some insight?

<comment><USER14> The trademark application shown in the article offers a hint. The categories listed include "retail store services", "maintenance, installation and repair of computer hardware", "technical support services".

It sounds like Startup will be a service offered in Apple retail stores, similar to the Genius Bar.

<comment><USER15> Australia doesn't seem to be the typical testing ground though for Apple. Why now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If only they spent all that time and money they spend on lawyers on R&D and developing new products instead...

<comment><USER17> What would happen then? MS spends lots more money on R&D, does it matter?

<comment><USER18> Apples and oranges

<comment><USER17> My point was that the amount of money spent on R&D does not matter. Apple came up with iPhone and iPad anyway. Your point is? That R&D is apples and R&D is oranges?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> we'll just start calling it "startdown" we're in australia afterall.

<comment><USER20> I was thinking "startupside-down".

This news is right up there with the big tech companies trying to grab .book, .search, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's hard to believe that Apple could get this through in the US given the amount of live marks with the word STARTUP. Over 50 results!

I have been working on a trademark application that was rejected preliminary basis on the grounds of "likelihood of confusion." (My mark is HOTKEY MATRIX for a hardware controller of audio software, the existing mark is HOT KEYS for "Computer Software program for playback of digital audio by touching computer screen.)

I was a little shocked when I delved into the various rulings how byzantine and nuanced the judgements are. Since the core issue is the potential for likeliness of confusion on the part of a consumer, each case is supposed to be judged on its own.

If your into this kind of thing here's the discussion on the US "Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure."

[http://tmep.uspto.gov/RDMS/detail/manual/TMEP/Apr2013/d1e2.x...](http://tmep.uspto.gov/RDMS/detail/manual/TMEP/Apr2013/d1e2.xml#/manual/TMEP/Apr2013/TMEP-1200d1e5036.xml)

I wonder if there is some strategy by which getting registration in other countries helps with getting US registration.

</comment><comment><USER22> I thought it was not allowed to trade mark common words like car, plane, etc. And startup seams a common word, well in our community.

</comment><comment><USER23> In other news, Google trademarks the color blue. Smurf village foreclosed.

</comment><comment><USER24> Apple can go suck a lemon.

<comment><USER25> Do we really need that kind of comments here on HN?

<comment><USER24> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir5Xl_mLbkM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir5Xl_mLbkM)</comment></comment></comment>


Brad Fitzpatrick's Thoughts on the Social Graph - <AUTHOR> http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

<comment><USER2> Doesn't OpenID have facilities for defining other identity information, such as friends for instance?

I don't think OpenID or any other open schemes will succeed by having information stores divorced from applications. They will only succeed as protocols for existing sites to cooperate. I don't doubt the large players will be slow in adopting this sort of thing, but the smaller companies can bind together.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the three paragraph "Problem statement". I prefer my problem statements more to the point. Examples:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Subject: Fire.

Problem statement: Burns

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Subject: Water.

Problem statement: Unbreatheable.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Subject: Social Networks.

Problem statement: Flash in pan.

</comment><comment><USER4> more than anything, i'm interested in the way that this article seems to acknowledge the facebook's incumbency in the 'social graph' space. he seems to be making the statement that ownership of this graph is at present theirs to lose.</comment>


Someone cloned my website and is using it to scam people - <AUTHOR> http://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/anonymousbtcsms-scam.html <comment><USER2> kevin at anonymousbtcsms.com:

This is not a scam website. I am using Coinbase to process transactions and their platform has had a host of technical difficulties for non-usa based customers. I have been manually updating payments for the last several weeks, such that there maybe a few hours delay between when transactions have been confirmed and when they are tracked on the website.

I noticed your payments several hours ago and I had already credited your account.

While my FAQ does say no refunds, I have always provided refunds when asked. You did not contact me about the payments not being correctly stored.

-Kevin

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the update, I'm glad to hear your site is legit!

I can confirm the payment is now credited in my account, although it wasn't at the time I wrote the post.

Can you please remove the text you copied from my site?

EDIT: I've added an update at the top of the article.

<comment><USER3> Would love to hear a timeline as well, AFAIK in these kind of situations they are normally included. It's not as bad if someone doesn't reply in 24h as if someone doesn't reply in 1 month.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was only about 3 hours, I just wrote up the post as soon as I was done with other work today.

<comment><USER3> "asking for the copied text to be removed, although I haven't received a reply and no longer expect to" => so you mean you lost all hope for an answer to your email within 3 hours? (;

<comment><AUTHOR> Well after my payment didn't show up, I put 2 and 2 together and concluded (clearly incorrectly) that the site didn't actually work. :)

<comment><USER2> The timing of all of this is rather unfortunate, because I am currently on a boat on vacation with limited wifi. I have updated the copy of the website and will continue to make changes to it in the near future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is Kevin's story: [https://www.kcoleman.me/2017-05-2-case-study-start-a- saas.ht...](https://www.kcoleman.me/2017-05-2-case-study-start-a-saas.html)

"For Anonymous BTC SMS, I found my inspiration from a uk based sms provider on Indie Hackers. I chose this idea, because I have made several SMS based apps and I knew I could test this idea out pretty quickly. The owner of that app also does a poor job of SEO and marketing online so I knew I could get in front of the right people."

</comment><comment><USER5> Very charitable of you to assume that it's just a mistake. Not wrong necessarily, but very charitable.

<comment><USER6> If you want an airtight defense against libel, it's probably the right position to assume.

<comment><USER7> If you were really worried about the legal aspects you probably wouldn't include the phrase "...and is using it to scam people" in your title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah, this text from the scammer's site is still hilarious:

> 8\. There is nothing more critical to true success than openness, honesty > and integrity.

> 18\. Don't ever take credit for others' work.

Yeah, I'm sure stealing other people's work makes you an honest person.

</comment><comment><USER9> Shouldn't a rel="nofollow" be enough to not give any "link juice" to the webpage?

Link

<comment><USER10> I was not aware that one could that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> His site says "Anonymously send and receive SMS messages with bitcoin. Built during Hacker Paradise South America 2017"

Possibly just a hackathon project that was never meant to have full functionality

<comment><USER12> I'm friends with a founder of Hacker Paradise. I sent him a link to this post so hopefully he can look into it asap.

<comment><USER13> It seems like this was a project someone worked on during one of our trips in the past. While he's not scamming people, it does look like he copied the text from smsprivacy.org.

We don't have any connection to the project, but we've reached out asking him to change / delete the copied text. Hopefully this gets cleared up shortly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> ironically, both websites serve predominantly scammers who need SMS to verify with various websites to commit fraud.

<comment><USER15> Scammers don't need to use services like this to commit fraud. They'll just buy their own burner phones.

<comment><USER16> Unless they're in another country, or need to automate the process, or need multiple numbers, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Raising a DMCA notice to their hosting provider should be one of your first actions.

<comment><USER18> We just had a clients website copied (a law firm no less). We filed a DMCA notice and the site was down within a day. It's a very powerful tool if your work has been copied, so long as the infringing site is in the US (our owned by a US hosting company).

<comment><USER19> It's a powerful tool if you are a law firm and your work is not very valuable, otherwise you will receive fake counter-notification from scammer and Google will ask you for court order.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am concerned when considering developing a simple client-application to do it server side or client side. If it's javascript someone could just copy your source code. I don't use any libraries/frameworks right now so it would just be pure javascript/no dependency.

I am thinking of building something and if I did it client side I could avoid potential attacks if I'm not mistaken as no server-side storage/execution is involved. But that concern of literally right-click save page and reupload...

The tool is a put-something-in get something out sort of deal and can be done entirely client side with JS.

Also doesn't seem like it's anything "amazing" or "revolutionary" I just wonder if it's so easy to steal... ehhh cross that road when you get to it.

</comment><comment><USER21> The author is far more charitable in his characterization of the scammer than I would be. No one "accidentally" copies someone's website, and no one "accidentally" scams someone. And a person who does that is not a good person.

<comment><USER2> anonymousbtcsms here.

This is not a scam website. As I stated in my previous comment, we are having issues with our integrations with Coinbase. Because I have been out of the USA, they refuse to service my support tickets.

I am in the process of moving over to Bitpay, but I have not had the bandwidth recently to tackle that project so I have manually been entering in payments as I see them. As a result, the payments wont be registered for multiple hours.

Any customers that have not been happy with the service have been refunded upon request. I wish OP had contacted me directly about the payments not registering.

<comment><USER22> Glad to hear it's not a scam, but why did you steal basically the entire site content and concept from another website? How does that square with your 'law' #18. Don't ever take credit for others' work. ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Whois their IP and grab their Host/ISP. Contact their abuse address describing the IP theft. ISPs need to have well defined processes to deal with these complaints or they risk damaging their upstream relationships.

<comment><USER19> It doesn't work for real valuable IP because we don't have Internet court and even in obvious cases only real court can tell who is 'IP theft'. So creators have to spend a lot of time/money to prove obvious things while the scammer can change providers easily to DMCA resistant one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting. I have a side project exactly like this. I created it after I saw the need for this myself. I've never bothered to check the internet for competing services, but this kinda motivates me.

</comment><comment><USER25> A few years ago, this happened to me as well. I filed a DMCA complaint with their hosting company and in a few days, the offending website was down.

<comment><USER19> You are lucky. In my case I received fake DMCA counter-notification from scammer and Google/FB asked me to go to court.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just so I understand: You're just leveraging Twilio, and then upcharging the shit out of people for paying with BTC, correct?

</comment><comment><USER4> This post was published tomorrow?</comment>


How Sweden Became a Thriving Base of Neo-Nazi Ideology - <AUTHOR> https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3_MSHOVAs4sJ:https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-1.831763+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ar&client=firefox-b <comment><USER2> Full version didn't work, have to be really quick to click on text version before it disappears!

This will save you the trouble.. Text version...

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3_MSHOV...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3_MSHOVAs4sJ:https://www.haaretz.com/world- news/europe/.premium-1.831763&num=1&client=firefox-b&hl=en&gl=ar&prmd=ivns&strip=1&vwsrc=0)</comment>


Show HN: One OAuth API for Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Email - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailycred.com/introducing-social?redirect=false

<comment><USER2> Could not have come at a better time, I was literally going to sit down this weekend and build a multi-provider auth for my project. Just take my money. Take it!

I 'get it', it's awesome. Thanks for building :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks awesome. I think you should reverse your header and sub-header, though.

"Simple user accounts and analytics for your website" is a much clearer description than "Social Authentication Done Right."

</comment><comment><USER4> I find it a bit misleading to have your favicon be the same as the SSL lock in Chrome: <http://i.imgur.com/qnP8Q.png>

<comment><USER5> What's misleading about it? It's an https site...

<comment><USER4> It's mimicking a browser UI designed to help people feel "safe" and know they're using a website with SSL. It's probably not with malicious intent in this case, but I'd say that's not good practice.

<comment><USER6> We just couldn't find a better lock favicon to use. I can see your point though, so I'll change it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a pain in the ass if they ever go down. Remember, user auth is your bread and butter, outsource it with care and not just to save a buck here and there.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to add that the DailyCred guys are incredibly warm folks to know in person - I've had the pleasure of long chats with them here in Seattle :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Worth mentioning: this means you can add Twitter support using OAuth 2.0, instead of fighting with OAuth 1.0. That alone saves a ton of grief.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty amazing. Im dealing with this very issue on my app with devise and omniauth.

One thingI havent seen asked and answered is what do you do if the OAUTH provider does not supply email(which you mentioned is used to determined if the user has already signed in via a different provider).

For example. A user signs in via Facebook and is authenticated(his email and provider uid is stored). He then goes to a different machine/browser and signs in via Twitter which does not provide an email address neccessary to associated with a previous Facebook sign in. What then?

<comment><USER6> In this case, unless they have explicitly connected their Twitter account and their Facebook account to your service while logged in, they will not be logged into their account.

It's a hard problem to solve. Some companies are asking Twitter OAuth users to provide their email upon connecting to try and get around it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does this compare/contrast with <http://singly.com>?

<comment><USER12> Singly's big offer isn't just the federation of identity and identity services/authentication (that's just a value add and a sourcepoint). It's treating content as collections of their social objects (status, photo, video, location), and being able to retrieve and manipulate them irrespective of which network they came from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks interesting, but I had a few questions:

1\. If I use this do I have to handle account linking? Ex: Monday user logs in with FB, Tuesday with Twitter. Do you pass a unique key saying this is a canonical "user"?

2\. From the gem docs it looks like you're returning a hash of whatever the social provider returns and explicitly not trying to "normalize" the result (ex: One service might return "email" and another "email_address"). This seems fairly different to what happens with Devise and Janrain. Is this going to change with time or do you see this as key point of differentiation.

3\. What happens if you guys win the lottery and all retire to a tropical island? How screwed am I with my users?

<comment><USER9> Great questions - DailyCred does the account linking, so if someone signs up with email, and then later Facebook, the accounts are linked. You can also explicitly connect users to multiple to services, for ex if you want to have them add their Twitter account after they're logged in.

We do both normalizing the common data, and returning the raw info/access tokens for the social provider. So if you just need the user's name you can grab that from us, but if you want some data that's unique to FB you can still access all of that. We look after maintaining these social tokens for you.

Yay - we win the lottery! Or another scenario, you decide to roll your own later.. We store passwords using standard (non-proprietary) bcrypt hashes so you can implement your own auth system if you like. And social permissions are granted to your Facebook/Twitter/Google apps, so you own that connection to your user too. We're basically a proxy in the middle that handles the glue between all the providers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks great - except missing the one I need for my product: LinkedIn! any timeframe for linkedin?

</comment><comment><USER15> So first we have APIs for handling photo uploads, so we don't have to host the photos ourselves? And now we have APIs for handling users, so we don't have to host the users ourselves?

Whatever API storage service is coming out next?

</comment><comment><USER16> Wait. Does this mean I no longer need to create multiple authentication services?

<comment><USER9> Right. It turns out a lot of the work comes from gluing the various services together. For ex, when a user signs up with an email account, and then forgets and signs in with Facebook next time.

This takes care of deduping accounts, and flattening the social data, etc.

(FYI, I'm with DailyCred)

<comment><USER17> Looks really cool. We took a swipe at this at Bagcheck as well through search: [https://bagcheck.com/blog/02-design-solutions-for-new-log- in...](https://bagcheck.com/blog/02-design-solutions-for-new-log-in-problems)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very good idea however:

When you provide an service like this and your website got mixed SSL content (seems like due to youtube video, so mixed only after user plays the video), it's a bit worrying.

Not to mention this:

"Use our sign in UI, and get secure authentication over https for free. Don't waste another moment buying or implementing ssl certs ($70 on GoDaddy)."

Which is really really bad advice. SSL is not just for authentication. Keeping auth over SSL and rest of the website over HTTP is an insecure way to implement an authentication system.

<comment><USER6> You'll never get a mixed content warning on our site if you don't play the YouTube video.

Unfortunately, even if you use YouTube's https embed, it still redirects the browser through a single http site. It's annoying and I don't like it, but neither YouTube or Vimeo offer pure https best I can tell just yet.

As for implementing HSTS (as we have on our site) - it's great advice. We understand that a man in the middle attack could rewrite a customer's non HTTP page and send them to a site that looks like Dailycred but is not. (Facebook by and large suffers from the same vulnerability.) But compared to not implementing HTTPS at all, we think Dailycred is a huge step up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a use case supporting native (iOS, Android) apps?

To me, the site seems to be targeted at web platforms (Which I'm considering using for a current project).

</comment><comment><USER20> This looks incredibly useful! However, its existence raises an important question.

Doesn't the necessity of this product inherently suggest underlying flaws in the 0Auth 2.0 framework (not protocol)? In my mind (and Eran Hammer apparently agrees), one major shortcoming of OAuth 2.0 is that the specification all but ensures that a universal, drop-in library for an arbitrary implementation of OAuth 2.0 _cannot_ exist.

We saw this problem with OpenID - we even had a service designed around 'solving' the problem of integrating multiple OpenID providers. If the framework itself is so complicated that it needs extra abstraction layers to simplify it for basic, general use, to me, that suggests design flaws.

 _EDIT_ : On re-reading Hammer's post[1], I've realized that it's even worse than I'd thought: the OAuth 2.0, Draft 30 specification even admits plainly that it is 'likely to produce a wide range of non-interoperable implementations.'

If that is considered an acceptable candidate for the goal of OAuth 2.0, then I would question the goal itself.

[1] [http://hueniverse.com/2012/07/oauth-2-0-and-the-road-to- hell...](http://hueniverse.com/2012/07/oauth-2-0-and-the-road-to-hell/)

[2] [http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf- oauth-v2-30#section-1....](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf- oauth-v2-30#section-1.8)

<comment><USER6> Cofounder here. You're absolutely right. OAuth 1 (still used by Twitter) is a huge pain to implement. OAuth 2 (Google, FB) is easier, but the implementations are different enough to cause a lot of headaches.

So, we agree that OAuth is flawed. Where there is a problem, there is an opportunity. :)

By the way, add in Email/Password, and new things like Persona (which we'd like to add soon), and auth has gone in a few short years from being incredibly basic to quite complicated. We hope to abstract away all of that noise and just give devs a single API for identity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At what point do we stop outsourcing services to the cloud and start actually building things ourselves again?

Hacking used to be all about solving these problems yourself. Now its about integrating a bunch of other peoples solutions. I'm gonna start a SaaS service that integrates your SaaS services. Hows that? I'll make millions.

<comment><USER22> Hackers use the best tools available to them. It just so happens that a lot of tools are now hosted in the cloud instead of running on your desktop.

There's pros and cons to this approach. If you don't like it, don't use it. You're free to roll your own or use a gem like devise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is super cool for getting up and running supa dupa quickly.

Side Q - Does anyone have conversion data on what oauth works best? If you know of a blog, video, or insight.. would love to hear about it - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4675010>

</comment><comment><USER24> How is this different than Janrain? <http://janrain.com/>

<comment><USER6> Cofounder here. Good question. A few key areas:

You implement OAuth 2 on your side, so you're not tied to a proprietary API forever. (You can think of it as an OAuth proxy.) If you already have implemented Facebook OAuth, you can plug us in and add Email, Twitter, etc., with almost no additional work.

Our Username / Email / Password flow (and APIs) are more dev and user friendly than Janrain's -- which has been more focused on social.

If you use Ruby, you can use our Gems to get set up very quickly.

We're also cheaper since our feature set is closer to Janrain's Enterprise; you can get started today without talking to a sales guy.

Our homepage also has 100% less lightning animations. ;)

Happy to answer more questions here or via email: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can do the work but since users of all of the other competitors have chimed in I'll ask you to compare/contrast with OneAll.com.

</comment><comment><USER15> Because nobody wants to give GoDaddy $70.

</comment><comment><USER26> It would be nice with a free model which could include up to e.g. 50 users.

<comment><USER6> Sign up, and when it asks for your credit card, click "I'll do this later."

You'll be entered into our unadvertised free tier that goes up to, you guessed it, 50 users.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to monetize a young demographic - <AUTHOR>

I have a web property that has the following monthly stats:
Unique Visitors: 30k Pageviews: 110k Avg Duration: 1:34 Mailing list: 4k
My niche is Marine Corps promotion information and the like.  I generate barely enough income from advertising to cover my aws bill, which is tiny.  I do know alot about my users though.  Primary demographic is male 19-25.  They access my site 50% from their mobiles and 40% from government computers on bases.  The access from government computers will severely limit ads from any provider due to the militaries IE7 settings and network blocks/filters.
I have tried targeted affiliates, adult, and many other advertising vehicles, to no avail.
What am I doing wrong?
Does the demographic have exceedingly good ad blindness?
Any recommendations would be appreciated.
www.killfoot.com <comment><USER2> Have you tried gaming? Particularly for military types, but in general for that age and demo, that's what I'd try.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.killfoot.com](http://www.killfoot.com)

clickable</comment>


What data structures and algorithms are not implementable in C? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21396215/what-data-structures-and-algorithms-are-not-implementable-in-c

<comment><USER2> What sprang to my mind is Jensen's Device: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen%27s_Device](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen%27s_Device) . This is a clever and little-known trick, that depends on pass-by-name semantics.</comment>


How Segment's Peter Reinhardt built a successful co after crashing and burning - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/segment-peter-reinhardt-success-failure-y-combinator-2018-8?IR=T <comment><AUTHOR> As seen in his recent startup school talk and some past ones [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Peter%20Reinhardt&sort=byPopul...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Peter%20Reinhardt&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

It's actually quite a funny story in the businessinsider article -

feedback tool for lectures. Students surfed the web rather than use

similar for software

pg: "'So, just to be clear, you've spent half a million dollars and have nothing to show for it?'"

new idea - data analytics tool.

>Reinhardt said. "I said, 'That's literally the worst idea I've ever heard of — it's 100 lines of code and open source. You can't build a business from this."

>In 18 days, we had 70 companies sign up.

Now $100m + company.</comment>


Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-18/facebook-accused-of-watching-instagram-users-through-cameras <comment><USER2> Don't want to be the devil's advocate here but just because camera is on doesn't mean anything is being recorded. As an iOS developer who worked with apps that access camera frequently, I can confidently say that it's just a UX optimization. Starting the camera takes a brief few hundred milliseconds which is easily noticable from a user perspective. By keeping the camera ready, they are making the experience smoother. I think this is it. Just because Facebook is an evil company doesn't mean this directly is a malicious move.

<comment><USER3> So you are saying..

A developer went to their tech lead and said 'hey we can make the app much better by leaving the camera on all the time saves 200ms on camera startup time'

Tech lead: this is brilliant no potential problems here

Tech lead to management team: got this great new feature, we leave the camera on all the time makes the app 200ms faster.

Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of reputational damage there.

And it's all innocent and noone has any idea why anyone would get the wrong idea?

<comment><USER4> I see you don't have much experience in development. It probably went more like this:

business: "Opening the camera seems slow", dev: "it takes 200ms for the system to start it", "Can you make it faster?", "Not really, unless we keep the camera on", "Do that!", "Won't it have privacy issues?", "Don't worry about that".

EDIT: And in the end business is correct, because nobody really cares about this. Every happy instagrammer keeps happily instagramming.

<comment><USER5> That's how the explicit narrative goes.

The implicit one we can never admit to is something like: Instagrammer has a different sensitivity for 200ms than the dev and never cared.

Dev has to justify his egregious salary by manufacturing statistics to "experiment with engagement" nevermind the literal reality of having such a gadget is titillating as is, manufacturing belief that specific dev making a camera respond 200ms faster is what really made the app is where that paper is.

<comment><USER6> Camera start up time actually is quite important in my opinion. For example, I stopped using snapchat primarily because it felt laggy to get the camera open. That really grates on you when an app is mostly used for spontaneous image/video capture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let's assume for a moment the story turns out to be true: would people stop using Instagram because of it?looking at the history of privacy violations and the market's responds to it I doubt it. There is a minority of users who will feel rightfully violated in their privacy (imagine browsing instagram naked while possibly being ogled at by some creep at FB). The worst that will happen is that FB will be sanctioned to pay a laughably low fine. I think we need much harsher repercussions against these practices, up to barring them completely from operating.

<comment><USER8> A lot of people would probably deny camera permissions to Instagram (and upload by sharing from gallery if they upload content), and their reputation would take a significant hit (currently they aren't known to covertly gather any personal data beyond generic OS-provided statistics).

Also Instagram isn't really essential to communicate and learn about events in the way the main Facebook service is, so stopping to use it is highly feasible.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I just checked my setting and apparently did this "deny and post from camera roll" by default. I have no doubt I was just making a privacy conscious choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is why iOS is badly in need of a "Task Manager" and of an "Event Viewer", so that users may easily audit what resources each app is currently accessing, and which resources they have accessed in the past, including logging each instance of camera or microphone use by any app.

Apple has the power to easily mitigate these concerns - yet they do not.

Why?

<comment><USER11> Because my mother is using an iphone and nothing you described would make sense for her.

She is pretty good with tech and understands how computers and phones work, but she just does not want to browse a process list to see which process is using the camera.

<comment><USER12> _but she just does not want to browse a process list to see which process is using the camera._

How do you know until you've tried?

At the risk of provoking a tangential discussion, I don't think keeping users "in the dark" about what's happening is ever a good idea. They don't have to learn if they really don't want to, but deliberate opaqueness is bad --- if anything, it only leads to more learned helplessness and ignorance. Of course, that's probably what companies want in general, since it means they can control users more easily...

<comment><USER13> Additionally, even if the main user of the device will never pull up a task manager or usage log, that info can be useful for a friend, relative, or hired technician who is trying to help them figure out what's going on with their device.

Instead we have to explain to people that their photos aren't "in" the photos app and their music isn't "in" iTunes. It's the thing you mentioned: file managers will just confuse people so let's not include one. Easier to have them think of files as "living" in the apps we assign to open them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Being lawful-evil person I am, I once imagined a "news" app such that display content or suggestion ever so unnoticeably slightly change depending on how user behaves judged by device camera.

A facial expression ML model would be trained beforehand so camera data would not have to be collected, but only pushed to users along app updates, and content would be analyzed and encoded at server side to determine what users are to feel, along with hints to aid learning and correlation between different stories, all subconsciously and automatically.

As for what to do with a system like that...I don't know, make boatloads of cash by forcing in-app purchases? Push your favorite but little known novels and comics? Make group of people I like by my specifications? Promote good posture, regular exercises and force people to look up? I wouldn't want to use it so specific elected officials pass or resign, or world's atrocities to become accepted...

Then I got bored. But could it have been something like this?

<comment><USER15> I wonder if people make distinct enough facial expressions while reading online content for this to work. For myself, I pretty much stare blankly at the screen the whole time without much change in my expression. The ML would have to be very good at detecting slight nuance.

<comment><USER16> To your point, one of the things I worry about with apple news, for example, is that the underlying ai won't understand _why_ I dislike a particular news story. Generally I downvote hyperbole, clickbait, and paparazzi content, but I would guess it's more common for people to downvote things based on the substance of a story, e.g. downvoting a well-written, truthful article because the truth in that case is inconvenient for their political stance, or because it's about a loathsome-yet-newsworthy person. A facial recognition system would have to know the difference between my face being frustrated at a high- quality story about the fires in the western states vs my frustration that apple news seems to find Andy Borowitz to be hilarious and relevant. Maybe possible, but lots of nuance under the surface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://archive.is/uCMN9](https://archive.is/uCMN9)

<comment><USER18> much appreciated

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is the main reason the app store still has public support this belief that apple instruments the apps it reviews? Because it looks like they don't. If that's the case it's trivially easy to get malware on the iphone and the only thing the app store really does is give Apple power.

<comment><USER20> This is well known among iOS developers. Apple's approval process is far too cursory to catch malware. Also a lot of crapware gets through. The best you can say about it is that it filters out the really obvious stuff.

<comment><USER21> And provides a mechanism for pulling bad apps when they're later found to be bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this the same scandal from before: where the app had the camera on because when you swipe to record a story they wanted it to be instantly available? Did it just take a while to reach lawsuit status or is this about some new thing?

<comment><USER23> One of us would have had to write this code, a PM would have had to authorize and break it down, a UX designer might have had to design its internal dashboard for "how to perv on users most efficiently" including flows and user stories, and then that code would have had to be pushed to the Instagram git repo which surely has some ~hundred devs on it that saw it go in, or may notice it at some time in the future.

Now I know it takes a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance to work for facebook in this day and age but the main reason this doesn't seem likely to me is that that's way too many people involved in something beyond shady (even for Facebook) for this to not get out. There's even a [formula]([https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905)) to calculate how likely it is for a conspiracy to remain a secret depending on the number of people involved.

<comment><USER24> Multiple (horrible) events through history can provide the insight that as long as you partition each task enough, people will happily work and contribute to a horrible end goal and later claim they were only following orders and had no idea of the side effects of their individual actions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I suspected for a long time that they are doing the same on Android.

There must be a very small mechanical part in my phone's camera (probably the lens when it focuses) that makes a subtle noise when activated. I noticed the noise was present every few minutes when I browsed on Instagram, but only when I forgot to turn off camera permission.

It is creepy, no matter what the reason behind this.

<comment><USER26> Wouldn't this be easy to verify on those phones where the front camera pops outside when being used? [https://www.vivo.com/in/products/v15pro](https://www.vivo.com/in/products/v15pro)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "oh, it's a bug" \- so make them financially and legally responsible for bugs. Just like automotive is.

<comment><USER28> You generally need to show damages for liability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word)

</comment><comment><USER30> I personally do not accept app camera permissions for any app that I don't fully trust. I stopped trusting the Facebook app years ago when it launched itself constantly in the background.

</comment><comment><USER31> On a side note, IG works perfectly fine being denied the Camera permission. In fact, it doesn't even complain about it until you try to take a picture in- app... and most users' workflow is taking pics with their phone's camera app (which is almost always better than IG's) and uploading the actual files to IG (you can still apply filters and everything else this way).

<comment><USER32> It doesn't need access to your photo library either. Imagine giving access to your whole roll!

<comment><USER21> If you want to post, it needs access to your photo library or the camera. If you want to post stories, it needs access to the camera and microphone.

<comment><USER32> nah you pick a photo and select "share" then select insta

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I noticed this yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505285)

Facebook got caught on this one- but there are probably hundreds of Apple internal APIs that they are using to violate people's privacy.

</comment><comment><USER34> Lately was also this thing, with App check always our clipboard. I wonder how many website does the same, and also check your clipboard all the time. And with more and more APIs in browsers, I wonder how many website start to listen and watch you.

<comment><USER35> Not even websites. Desktop apps also have access to your clipboard without any permissions. Can't wait until it becomes more common practice to provide an audit trail of any apps snooping on the clipboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Kind of absurd there is not a physical camera close feature on phones at this point.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why isn't the user better protected by the OS from these kinds of malpractices?

<comment><USER38> This is starting to happen. E.g.:

 _New iOS 14 feature warns you if someone is spying on you through your iPhone: Look out for the orange dot at the top of your screen_

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8744423/iOS-...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8744423/iOS-14-update- displays-orange-dot-warn-listening-in.html)

<comment><USER39> This is the exact same thing as the red microphone banner popping up at the top left in all previous iOS versions.

Also, strongly reconsider citing tabloids as accurate - reliable news' source, especially when it comes to tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Even if this was true, which I doubt, what would Facebook actually gain by doing this? They'd see a person's face from an unflattering angle with an unflattering expression.

Or they'd see whatever the front camera sees at the time, which in my case right now is the back of my phone case or possibly the floor.

I don't see that as valuable data to mine.

<comment><USER41> They'd be able to track what your eyes focused on and for how long, whether you wore glasses, were bald, your approximate age and ethnicity, whether you have facial hair, your reactions to content, and a lot of other behaviors and metrics that would never cross your mind.

Instagram already does all of the above, but so does a lot of digital signage in shopping districts, in addition to tracking your BT HWID, to monitor trends in real time. Then they sell this info to eg- financial companies that operate things like mutual funds.

That's what I was doing with mine in the mid-2000s, anyway.

<comment><USER42> > your reactions to content

do you actually "react" to content? Like chuckle or make any other facial expressions? I just scroll and scroll and scroll with a neutral expression.

<comment><USER41> Yes. Have you ever used one of those face swap filters that turns you into a funny character that mimics your facial expressions?

Well, how does it know?

A mirth-filled squint of the eyes, dilation of pupils at something unexpected, a tightening of the mouth signalling ennui, the movements that accompany a brief nasal exhalation at something on the nose to your taste in humor... all add to something.

You're not as implacable as you think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> With the VR/AR initiatives they have, people will voluntarily share what they are looking at. Make sharing information integral part of the experience and you get everything without any wrongdoing.

</comment><comment><USER44> This kind of thing makes me glad that we've got the mic/camera indicator dots in iOS 14, along with the clipboard paste notifications.

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder how unfettered Mark's access is to all their data and systems. The answer to this question should be public in order to bolster trust, but as far as I know it is not.

More on topic, I doubt this particular feature is nefarious, but those who would spy often seem to rely on others' doubt that it is happening.

</comment><comment><USER46> Mark Zuckerberg has completed his transformation into a real life Artie Ziff.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9X3tvTmIQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9X3tvTmIQ)

<comment><USER47> Your comparison is apt, but for a moment I confused this character with that of Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. Villains with a "Z"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Conditi will have a hard time proving it wasn't a bug and the data was actually being used in the way she describes it.

<comment><USER49> This thing where Facebook collects a lot of data in ways to which most people would object for years and years, and then when they get caught they claim it was a "bug", is getting really old.

To make matters worse, they usually tend to re-introduce the "bug" as some kind of feature a few years later, as their way of saying "yes, we really do thing our users are that stupid to not realize what we've done, why do you ask?!"

<comment><USER50> Google started it with the WiFi collection "bug" and offline location collection "bug".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> did ios14 not add something like a monitoring for this ?

</comment><comment><USER52> Call it for what it is. Complete Malware. Plain and simple fact.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why physical sliding covers are not mandatory? This happens again and again. And, everybody has several cameras at home.

A part of that, Facebook still is responsible for their actions.</comment>


Wrapping Images Around Fractals - <AUTHOR> http://bamia.net/articles/fractals/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> I started building my website where I share some of my work, and this is my first article.

I explain in detail how an image can be inserted in a Mandelbrot/Julia set.

Again, sorry for my English.

<comment><USER2> Some great results, both mathematically and visually. Learnt a bunch. Thanks for putting it up online!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Gimp has a feature for this. Filters > Map > Fractal Trace. [https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-filter-fractal- trace.html](https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-filter-fractal-trace.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I did some work on this in JavaScript a while back: [http://garythom.as/myo/julia/](http://garythom.as/myo/julia/)

(Images are not uploaded, all in browser)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! How did you discover this method? How did it all began?

<comment><USER4> A friend of mine found on his own about 20 years ago programming fractals in Amiga basic, and since then have I ported/played with to Java, C++, and eventually JavaScript.

Here's the results of an AfterEffects video plugin I wrote about 2003: [https://vimeo.com/105310176](https://vimeo.com/105310176)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My personal favorites creative uses of this are from Ivan Freeman "bryceguy72" on deviantart :)

[https://www.deviantart.com/bryceguy72/art/Julia-s- Garden-781...](https://www.deviantart.com/bryceguy72/art/Julia-s- Garden-781436749)

[https://www.deviantart.com/bryceguy72/art/Dark- Forces-575209...](https://www.deviantart.com/bryceguy72/art/Dark- Forces-575209259)

[https://www.deviantart.com/bryceguy72/art/Cobra- Cantor-19622...](https://www.deviantart.com/bryceguy72/art/Cobra- Cantor-196223239)

[https://www.deviantart.com/bryceguy72/art/Weaver- Fever-19728...](https://www.deviantart.com/bryceguy72/art/Weaver- Fever-197287304)

<comment><USER4> Small world! Ivan is the friend I mentioned in another comment here

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Anyone else seeing a rotating snakes-esque illusion in the first few fractals?

<comment><USER6> Switching between this and a blank page make it incredibly visible for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _Maybe one day I will revisit this project and properly rewrite the whole > thing._

I recommend doing it in GLSL. It's very little effort to implement (about 30–50 lines of code) and even on a modest GPU it'll run fast enough so you can explore different parameters interactively. As a bonus, you can get MIP- mapping for basically free — no more aliasing!

In case you don't want to learn OpenGL or Vulkan, you can use a tool such as Shadertoy.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I agree: the GLSL is a adding value.

I found great and fabulous this: [https://www.michelemorrone.eu/glchaosp/](https://www.michelemorrone.eu/glchaosp/)

glChAoS.P ⋅ wglchaosp.p - Real time 3D strange attractors GPU explorer... and hypercomplex fractals

It's both OpenGL and WebGL (via WebAssembly), also opensource and multi platform.. and explores over 100 types between attractors, fractals and also DLA3D (Diffusion Limited Aggregation)

Very beautiful!</comment></comment>


Podcasting - Area 51 - Stack Exchange - <AUTHOR> http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/34013/podcasting <comment><AUTHOR> as podcasting becomes more and more "en vogue" I think it would be nice to have a stackexchange Q&A site for it. As far as i know there is no "single point of contact" for podcast-producer/consumer in the net. What do you think?

<comment><USER2> I proposed a Podcasting StackExchange back when Area 51 first appeared. We got to about 30 followers before it was deleted.

<http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6030/podcasting>

Hoping this proposal gets further.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why i posted it here. I hope to create a bigger audience :)</comment></comment></comment>


Skype now included in Windows Update - <AUTHOR> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2876229

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently it would update previously if you already had it, but now it shows up as "optional" update even if you never installed it. The date that started was March 24.</comment>


Soaring over the Alps on homemade jet wings - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/swiss-man-strap.html

<comment><USER2> SO COOL

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah! When I saw this I just had to submit it. He has got to be the coolest guy on the planet.</comment></comment>


Re designing a design community website with over 5000 active members - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@thebriefbox/briefbox-2-whats-new-79ae658130e2#.godzn5uml <comment><USER2> We're super excited about this update. Hope the design community are going to love it!

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks tight!!</comment>


Ask HN: Interested in learning Graphics Design. - <AUTHOR>

I am very much interested in learning graphics design like Colors Selection, Textures, Typography, Shapes etc.
I'm an engineer by profession but keenly interested in learning graphics design (not just for web designing but Design in general).
Can you suggest me some good blogs to follow.
If you know some great artists and have their twitter ID, that's fine too.
Thanks a lot :) <comment><USER2> Hmm... much like coding experience, design starts with doing. So grab a paper pen and make something. make a brochure, poster whatever. (Paper is to throw ideas together and give them structure)

Now recreate it in Gimp or Photoshop or whatever software you feel easy with.

just keep making stuff, keep getting feedback from designers and all.

The best way to learn is - see the work, see how things are working in it and do something.

Following blogs comes much later - when you are following thoughts of industry leaders.

Get started already!

<comment><AUTHOR> sure, this will help me learn how to design but I want to learn how to implement that design.

what to use to implement that design.

<comment><USER2> Nope, that will teach you "why" and "what" to design and will teach you the most important thing ""HOW NOT TO DESIGN""

Take a demo project and implement your learnings. Not really sure what you mean by implement :/</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to pick an idea to work on when you love multiple? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently applying for Startup School, and I'm torn between two projects I've been working on.
The first is to build an early warning system for various diseases (malaria, dengue fever) and public health problems, something I've been working on in grad school and  a few large orgs have shown interest in paying for.
The other is a personal preventative health dashboard that gives you dynamic predictive suggestions based on your diet, genetics, fitness and sleep data.
I have the experience and passion to build both, and they both actually slot into an ecosystem together, but one is b2b  with long sales cycles and the other is b2c in a crowded health app market. One of the things I prioritize is maximizing the value I can deliver to the most people. What would you choose and why?
Also, if you'd like to  hear my thoughts on these  in more depth, I'd be happy to  talk! I also wrote a short piece about it recently -> https://medium.com/technomancy/a-humble-proposal-the-human-healthcare-stack-e9e82eb8eff <comment><USER2> The first one. I am not an expert in this area by any means but from what you said about interested orgs willing to pay, it makes more Sense. Building one product sucks a lot out of you and it's always a good idea to stay focused and get done rather than staying distracted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, I see what you mean. Thank you!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with anxiety before an interview? - <AUTHOR> I get very nervous and anxious before an interview so much so it affects my sleep the night before. How do you guys deal with that anxious feelings? Look at pictures of cute kittens and puppies? <comment><USER2> Remember that you're judging them as much as they're judging you. Get in a mindset where you're planning to reject them, so it doesn't matter if you do well at the interview. It's up to them to convince you otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER3> Same here. I don't have a solution. Next time I guess I will do excessive excercise the day before to get tired and try some sleep pills.

</comment><comment><USER4> Anxiety is normal. Just accept that you'll feel it. Interviewers don't disqualify good people for being nervous.

<comment><USER3> The problem is not being able to sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do more of them until they become boring.</comment>


Former IBM exec says company told her to hide layoff age data from government - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/18/ibm_government_lying_claims/ <comment><USER2> Going throwaway since usual username is my full name...

Honestly I'm glad this lawsuit is happening. I used to work at IBM and left a few years later. During that time, they killed the pension program, modified separation packages that significantly affected tenured employees, and we almost exclusively hired college grads. Our budget for experienced hires was so low that it made it impossible to get any takers. I witness very well qualified folks be let go for no reason. I've witnessed college grads getting paid much much more than senior employee.

There were jokes of calling certain employees "dinasaurs" since they were put on terrible jobs in hopes to make them quit, but they would stay strong doing something they hate to get their pension. I'm talking about full time support positions on software that has had no development in 10+ years.

I think a lot of this has to do with cost. Old people cost more money. Young people are gullible and willing to take a 60k entry level with no bonus. I think age discrimination is a result of shady budgets. They need a spanking by the government and I'm glad this person of such seniority cane forward. I 10000% believe the statement.

<comment><USER3> You mention colllege grads being cheap, then also say: "I've witnessed college grads getting paid much much more than senior employee.".

<comment><USER2> Its all about economics over time.

Those starting IBM straight out of school then sticking around for 10 years vs. people coming into IBM with 10 years of experience are two separate worlds.

For example: if you started IBM 10 years ago with an undergrad, you might have been offered $55k where I live.

Then over time, you might get 2 promotions and economical raises from software engineer -> staff software engineer -> advisory software engineer. You might work yourself up to $100k. However, they would motivate new grads with ivy league degrees with 100k offers. It made me physically ill at one point working in hiring and watching coworkers get turned down for minor requests for raises to amounts lower than what these fresh faces are getting before negotiations start.

If you want to hire someone with 10 years of outside experience, those people would command at least $150 - $175k, but IBM could get 3 college grades for the price of 2 experienced hires.

Thats what I mean about college grads getting paid more than more senior employees, while college grads are cheaper than experienced hires.

Those who worked at IBM for 20 years have less motivation to keep up with current trends and tend to focus on proprietary offerings they work on. As a result, college grads are better economical value since they come 'pretrained' with the new stuff. This is my theory why older people are first to go, especially in the short product cycles IBM tend to have.

A previous co-worker who still works at IBM has been there about 20 years and he pulls $140k... I have 6 years out of college so far and pull $150k + $15k bonus + 10% yearly RSUs at a listed public business down the road. Thats not an abnormal salary)

<comment><USER4> Pensions and other benefits run about 36% of base salary nationally (meaning it could be higher or lower for IBM). College grads aren't usually vested in their pensions, so they may be paid higher salaries and net a lower expense to the company. What's aggravating (especially from the younger posters) is the assumption that older people aren't/won't stay current. Currency is a dubious argument, if you're wedded to an older product, the new stuff doesn't benefit you directly on the job. After that comes quality/rates of errors. Younger employees tend to make hard-learned mistakes long after the older engineers have learned the same lessons. So cost/value isn't the same when comparing older and younger engineers. In the "real" engineering fields, younger engineers are universally required to work directly under licensed (read: older) for precisely this reason. It prevents preventable mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sure the MBAs have calculated to the penny the cost of these lawsuits and decided it's worth it. Getting rid of one 62yo VP with 40 years of seniority will pay for at least a dozen young workers from a developing country, on contract, with no benefits or retirement plans to worry about.

<comment><USER6> This is why we need mandatory jail sentences for white collar crimes. Until we do something similar to that, the companies will simply continue to base these decisions on a calculation.

<comment><USER7> Mandatory jail times to protect 60 year old VPs over low socioeconomic status workers?

<comment><USER8> Are you the one who gets to decide which ageist (, sexist, racist, etc.) employment practices are legal because they benefit a party you see as more deserving?

<comment><USER9> Being illegal and going to prison aren't the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is part of the reason I'm working on setting up my own business rather than looking at moving back into corporate IT.

A regular salary and defined responsibilities in specific areas ("I'm building X" where X is project-level not project+financial/taxes+management/employment+regulatory) has its definite attractions, but I'm very concerned about long-term sustainability. "Flow"[0] only gets you so far, and if you have to worry about the viability of _your_ employment vs the viability of the project, product or company it's an added set of stress.

Silver temples as a company owner negotiating a services contract seems like a very different thing than silver temples as a software developer looking for work.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_\(psychology\))

</comment><comment><USER11> The thing with being over 40 is that it happens to everyone if you live long enough. If its proven that IBM did engage in this behavior, may they burn to the ground and be made an example.

<comment><USER12> I don't know if it's as effective to go after the company for this. In an ideal world, you'd go after the people who made the decision, even if they've left the company.

<comment><USER13> I think I see where you're coming from, but at the same time we shouldn't establish a precedent that makes it even easier for companies to hide behind some named scapegoat. The decision was carried out in IBM's name, and IBM bears responsibility for it.

<comment><USER14> > we shouldn't establish a precedent that makes it even easier for companies > to hide behind some named scapegoat.

As opposed to just hiding behind the corporate charter?

<comment><USER13> Not sure what kind of answer you expect. The existence of one oft-used loophole is a reason to create another?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The crazy thing is when I interact with IBM, it's mostly older workers. I can't recall a smart young person going there in decades.

<comment><USER16> I thought the same way for a long time but there's some vibrant development happening in Austin from what I hear.

They also bought Strongloop[0] a while back, so the developers from aqui-hires have to go _somewhere_.

[0]: [https://strongloop.com/](https://strongloop.com/)

<comment><USER17> > _They also bought Strongloop[0] a while back, so the developers from aqui- > hires have to go somewhere._

That would be somewhere _else_.

Strongloop is in SV, there's no shortage of opportunity for the devs who worked there.

Unless they got some serious golden handcuffs, in which case I'm sure some will stay for the 3-5 years these last.

<comment><USER16> Ah I didn't mean to imply that Strongloop was in Austin -- didn't know that Strongloop was in SV though, but I guess that makes sense.

I would think IBM has excellent golden handcuffs, not to speak of prestige and interesting problems. Like other big companies, it just depends on your distance from the C-levels and which team you get to be on -- do you get to do the interesting work or the boring work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just wait till you hear what they were up to in the early 40s...

<comment><USER19> Calculating "layoffs" back then, calculating layoffs now

<comment><USER20> More to the likes of improving gas chamber efficiency or something like that.

<comment><USER20> for those that downvoted: _" However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system-a precursor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation._ [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ibm-and-quot- death-s-ca...](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ibm-and-quot-death-s- calculator-quot)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's not just IBM, it's really any company that had a few consecutive bad quarters at this point.

<comment><USER22> IBM has a long history of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is why we need unions.

<comment><USER6> Or just much stronger labor laws with harsher penalties that make it not worth discriminating. In terms of being realistic about what might happen I think stronger laws would be easier to achieve than getting programmers to unionize.

<comment><USER24> You don't get better labor laws without unions. You just don't.

<comment><USER25> To call that unverifiable would be polite. Do you have any evidince to support your claim?

<comment><USER26> Uhm, compare western European labour laws with US labour laws?

<comment><USER6> Can you provide a source backing this up? I worked in the EU for many years and was never a member of a union. I worked in technology. However I enjoyed strong labor laws. It could be as simple as voters choosing politicians who promise strong labor laws? So it's not self-evident that unions were involved.

<comment><USER26> I thought it was self-evident that most western European countries have a long tradition of social democratic parties with strong trade union connections.

Those politicians to vote for doesn't come about magically. In the US there's no such options, just two right-wing parties, and that's reflected in their labour laws. The labour movement in large have provided those options in Europe and the trade unions are where the practical power is through the threat or use of strikes etc.

<comment><USER6> It's not self-evident that the unions played any role or a strong role. If it had been, I wouldn't have asked for a source. It's a sincere request. I lived there for a long time and am not aware that unions themselves were responsible for the strong labor laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When we had a "force reduction" being friends with three people who were let go I was given a copy of the paperwork they had all of which was in PDF form. There was a section that detailed their rights and such but also included was a list of every position and the age of the person in that position for those being let go. No names, sex, or race.

<comment><USER28> In the UK?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ageism is real. The older I get, the more and more I see it with my eyes. I have seen people denied jobs purely on age and have to work for peanuts because of their age (old or young). I sometimes fear the future because we are all getting old and the only ones living comfortably will be the elite money hoarders.

</comment><comment><USER30> I am afraid I am risking to be misunderstood, but I think, it is a question worth asking and considering.

One's outlook and productivity changes with time and age, just like an athlete's fitness. I suppose the hard question is, if a _productivity and alignment with organization attitude and culture_ index correlates indirectly with age, what is to be done?

<comment><USER31> Stop tying compensation to seniority, and start giving it upon completion of tasks/improvement of business...?

<comment><USER32> The task thing is questionable, because that way you just create incentives for the people involved to introduce more (most of them un-needed) tasks into the system, tasks which will show up on the performance reviews as being completed. A lot of the senior guys solve un-created tasks, so to speak, by saying stuff like YAGNI or KISS or by eliminating potential bugs (future tasks) by pointing out that going a certain development route will create those bugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So I wonder if there is a difference between the stock grants offered to older workers vs. current stock grants offered to the new hires. The executive officers left would be able to get a larger slice of the stock pool.

</comment><comment><USER34> Corporations are no different than being in the armed forces. You do unethical things, but it is all justifiable because you're "just doing your job and taking orders".</comment>


Cardiogram: How could an app save your life? - <AUTHOR> http://a16z.com/2016/10/20/cardiogram/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting endswapper!

I'm one of the co-founders of Cardiogram. If anybody has questions about either Cardiogram Apple Watch app or the science behind it, happy to talk here.

<comment><AUTHOR> My pleasure, it's an interesting, practical application of multiple disciplines.

I imagine new models will emerge as you accumulate data. Are there any current applications or diagnoses that are revealed simply by wearing it long enough? Or put another way are there any conditions that are knowable just based on having enough data?

<comment><USER2> Good question. Atrial fibrillation is the first clinical application, and my hope is that we'll have final publishable results in early 2017. Other studies have shown is that, in a population at high risk of atrial fibrillation but undiagnosed, it takes a median of about 80 days for the first episode to appear. So there's an argument there for continuous monitoring, much longer than the 24 hours typical of a Holter monitor or 2-4 weeks typical of ECG chest patches.

For other conditions like diabetes or sleep apnea, we definitely see correlations in our study between those conditions and heart rate variability (and the medical literature confirms the same thing), although we don't yet know how much time you need to build up an accurate risk score.

I think those other conditions are something we'd love to evaluate next!</comment></comment></comment>


A machine will serve you a free Big Mac - <AUTHOR> https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/01/25/this-machine-will-serve-you-free-big-mac/otKImEE5HZHmZbHWdd7qyL/story.html <comment><USER2> "Growth Marketing" at its finest. The quick summary is that if you give the machine access to your Twitter account so that it can tweet out an advertisement "from you" it will dispense you a pre-made burger. No doubt its one per twitter handle so be sure and have a bunch of pre-made handles ready for it.

As with most things, such systems are equal parts clever and stupid. The gamers in the crowd will get free burgers with day old twitter accounts that have specious handles like @NeverBelieveMyTweets or @ShillingForTheMan etc. This will cause McDonald's to hastily try to push updates to the software to check the ages of accounts, handles with bad words in them, etc. And of course it is "working around" a number of FTC regulations on implicit advertising in exchange for free merchandise (those tweets better include a disclaimer!) and the cash starved company (Twitter) itself is not seeing "advertising" or "promoting" revenue (it would be _really_ interesting if the BigMac machine tries to use your account to promote its own tweet from your account).

So once again we have a "brilliant" idea where if it is only used in exactly the way they want it to be used, would be brilliant, but is so easily exploitable that such use will likely be overwhelmed by mischief resulting in a much more costly campaign.

<comment><USER3>
      >> The gamers in the crowd will get free burgers with day old twitter accounts

(aged) Twitter accounts appear to be pretty inexpensive:

          http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-twitter-hacker-20160609-snap-story.html

        "The hacker... is asking 10 bitcoin, or just under $6,000,
        for what he or she claims are the log-in credentials
        for 379 million Twitter accounts."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Garbage like this is why I have never and probably will never do anything with my advertising qualification. There's nothing creative about this, the outcomes it produces are of no benefit (people will just ignore shill tweets), and it probably only exists to create a bit of short term "buzz" around the McDonalds brand.

The cynicism and disdain for consumers that it took to make something like this is almost sickening.

<comment><USER5> If people "just ignore shill tweets", then why does McD give you a free burger in exchange for a shill tweet?

<comment><USER4> Probably because some ad agency told them it was a good idea. And also because the tweets aren't really the point of this campaign - they just want to make headlines and keep the brand name in the back of people's minds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To view the article you need to "sign up" to their site for some bullshit reason. To get your "free" burger you likewise have to shill for the company.

What a world we've created.

<comment><USER7> I'll tell you what my previous manager use to say: "There is no such thing as a free lunch".

<comment><USER8> This saying is probably equivalent to the efficient market hypothesis ;) I prescribe to the point of view that while on average there are no free lunches you can still get a free lunch here and there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article touches upon automation, but doesn't make clear how the Big Macs are made. I'm assuming they are made as usual then placed in the machine.

So there isn't too much of interest here. This is really a marketing campaign and not progress on automation.

<comment><USER10> The article does mention it:

> And even the newest technology often requires some degree of human > interaction. For instance, burgers may pop out of the Boston McDonald's > machine unassisted next week, but they'll be loaded into it by actual > people. For now, at least.

So, yeah, nothing actually interesting here, just a marketing stunt.

<comment><USER9> Ah thanks, I missed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope one day we will all pay for everything by selling our friends advertisements

<comment><USER12> It's a pretty crazy indication of the world we live in that it's affordable to give away free food as advertising for that very restaurant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ever since I discovered the last ingredient to reverse engineer the Big Mac, (the magic sauce [0]), I haven't returned to a McDonald's...

Now, from time to time, I just do "Big Mac parties" with friends and family, and with €12 ($13) I can get the ingredients for 5 homemade "McMenus"... You can't beat that even with all the automation of the world. xD

[0] [http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=292462714](http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=292462714)

</comment><comment><USER7> Talked about Big Macs yesterday with co-workers (yes, of course we work in an open-space office...). Wanted to share this video of McDonalds Exec Chef Dan Coudreaut making a Big Mac: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcu4Bj3xEyI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcu4Bj3xEyI)

</comment><comment><USER14> 0wned for the cost of a big mac. Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER15> "The machine, Spadea said, is being used primarily as a marketing tool, not the first step toward employee-less McDonald's restaurants."

lol

<comment><USER16> Employee-less retail locations do not currently make economic sense. For the near to moderate future, every business will keep at least 1-2 employees per location, mostly to handle extreme edge cases like flooding, cars being driven into the building, or hostage situations. And that's in addition to the jobs that are still to complex or performed too rarely to automate.

Also, some humans are always going to want to talk to a human - maybe to express praise or dissatisfaction with something trivial about their visit, and receive a Hawthorne effect-like reward[1] - and so the human becomes a "human interface device" part of the machine.

Remember how self-check registers were supposed to replace grocery store checkers? It's been over a decade, and stores still pay people to wave food over a red light.

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

<comment><USER17> While I agree with your statement as-is ( _Employee-less retail locations do not currently make economic sense "_), I do believe we'll see a dramatic reduction in employment in commodity retail locations (anything that sells upscale or non-essentials will retain humans).

Many large companies are trying very hard, and tech is basically here, see for example:

[https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011](https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011)

Self-check is getting a lot better too (I don't understand why it's getting delayed).

I also believe that employee arbitrage is an opportunity (serving high-cost areas from low-cost areas, and improving employee usage and efficiency), and I'm going to personally invest in building tech to enable that.

<comment><USER16> It's an interesting idea. I have a lot of questions around Loss Prevention - how do they address shoplifting, on-premises consumption, destruction of merchandise, and other retail issues Amazon hasn't faced before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Am I supposed to authenticate my Twitter account on this thing? No thanks.

Also, really sucks that the homeless will be left out of this giveaway.

<comment><USER16> Where does the article say homeless people are excluded?

<comment><USER19> Surprisingly few homeless people are on Twitter.

<comment><USER20> Not so. Where do you get the idea the homeless people don't have phones? Also, you obviously don't go to many public libraries.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is using OData\IQueryable in your Web API an inherantly bad thing? - <AUTHOR> http://roysvork.wordpress.com/2013/06/24/is-using-odataiqueryable-in-your-web-api-an-inherently-bad-thing/

<comment><USER2> I actually used OData recently and love the query syntax. I actually see the awesomeness in it. But we should wait some time untill it gets better :-) (see the following)

What i hate mostly about it, is when (and this is the implementation in Web API mostly): \- synchronizing with XML (jSON is the standard :-( ) \- no flexibility on put / post and patch methodes (eg. dates!) - easy a nothing object ( eg. date datetype and <birthDate /> \--> your parameter object comes in as nothing... Also, they must use the yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss format \- put / post / patch methods and a complextype (eg. Address). GRMBL!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is why I dislike the rest of the framework! Do make sure to take a look at [https://github.com/Roysvork/LinqToQuerystring/](https://github.com/Roysvork/LinqToQuerystring/) as this should work more or less fine with XML... if it doesn't raise an issue :)

<comment><USER2> Actually, i started using DTO's on my Web API for more flexibility...

Till now, it seems perfect (but again, some extra work in my DDD app :-) )</comment></comment></comment>


How social networking sites may discriminate against women - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-04-social-networking-sites-discriminate-women.html <comment><AUTHOR> Paper title: Algorithmic Glass Ceiling in Social Networks: The effects of social recommendations on network diversity [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3178876.3186140](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3178876.3186140)</comment>


Microsoft buys shopping site Jellyfish.com - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/10/02/microsoft-buys-shopping-site-jellyfishcom/

<comment><USER2> Never heard of the site and never been to their page... but by looking at their logo, maybe MS bought it because it looks similar to MSN butterfly ;).</comment>


If politicians were mathematicians - <AUTHOR> http://gowers.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/if-politicians-were-mathematicians/

<comment><USER2> I think the writer gives too much credit to mathematicians and too little to politicians. Politics doesn't look the way it looks because politicians are too stupid to understand your counterargument. I'm sure most politicians are well aware of the logical inconsistencies or fallacies in their argument, but more importantly they realize that their arguments and talking points are a means to an end and not an end in themselves and you don't get bonus points for correctness.

<comment><USER3> This is true, but not the whole story. Many, if not most, political decisions are not determined based on logic alone, but at least partly on values. Because of this, it's possible for two different, rational people to both reason correctly from the same data yet arrive at different conclusions.

For example, amongst economists there is no question that outsourcing work or production overseas is a net benefit to the economy. If this were the entire discussion, then we'd all go home now happy. However, there is an additional level of argument that can only be addressed through one's moral system and values, which differs from person to person. Some people would say that although this outsourcing does help society as a whole, it also harms a small number of people whose jobs go overseas, and that in recompense for this benefit to the rest of us, we owe the now-unemployed some help. The truth of that, and the size of any aid that it implies, is not something we can get to through purely rational argument.

<comment><USER4> I partly agree, but this, like the original article, assumes that politicians act as free agents once elected - that is, vote according only to their own best analysis of the situation. However, most political calculus is colored heavily by the question of how it will play with voters via the media.

To take your outsourcing example, it is indeed the case that outsourcing is likely to leave everyone better off overall, and individual negative effects could be mitigated with careful planning. But if a large part of your electorate believes in the lump of labor fallacy, and your opponent's campaign team is happy to perpetuate this mistaken belief while dismissing your attempts to foster local economic alternatives as pork-barrel spending, then the arguments in your re-election campaign are rapidly headed for lowest- common-denominator territory. I made a resolution this past new year to give up my hobby of arguing politics on the internet and have (mostly) stuck with it, by the simple expedient of blocking a few websites whose signal-noise ratio had long since gone to the dogs.

I have no idea how politicians deal with the daily tide of incoming phone calls, emails, faxes and so on, beyond hiring thick-skinned secretarial staff. Not that I'm shedding tears for the political class, who in many cases choose to concentrate on the game at the expense of the results, but it's kind of amazing that anything gets done. I don't think it's a problem of scale (eg the size of the federal government); I see the exact same problems at the municipal level.

<comment><USER3> _this, like the original article, assumes that politicians act as free agents once elected_

Based on my observations of political behavior immediately preceding elections, in comparison with behavior of those same politicians following the elections, I assert that most of the time they do act as free agents.

<comment><USER5> I guess they are just acting at different time scales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Totally backwards in blaming the politicians instead of the consumers/fans of this entertainment/sporting event. If politicians started following his logical rules, the first person who came along and started breaking them would bury everybody else, because the voters would feel alienated and betrayed by logical politicians.

If, by magic, _nobody_ in political life argued dishonestly, then the only politicians who reflected the beliefs and the emotions of the electorate would be politicians who were just as poorly informed and incompetent at logical thought as the voters. One thing hypocrisy and illogic buy us is politicians who are smarter and better-informed than the people who vote for them. Sarah Palin sticks out like a sore thumb precisely because she exemplifies the average voter instead of just pandering to them.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gowers is a very brilliant man. But he supposes that most human errors in reasoning about public policy are linked to formal invalidity of the reasoning. The human mind is beset by many forms of irrationality.

[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852)

[http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss- Psycholog...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss- Psychology/dp/030012385X)

Research does not suggest that formal training in mathematics does anything to improve the quality of discourse on public policy. Please note that I write this as a teacher of mathematics. I like mathematics and think that mathematical thinking is helpful, but I don't expect it to have much help for public discussion of policy.

</comment><comment><USER8> The problem as I see it is that it's hard to form rules to discourage bad thinking and practices. It's not like we can imprison people for engaging in stupid arguments. Else, everyone - myself included - would be in prison. Short of such draconian consequences it's hard to find a system of incentives that encourage good thinking in the long run.

It's sort of like the bill being proposed in Congress that would limit lawmakers' ability to be lobbyists. It's a noble gesture but doomed to failure. A congressman wrote the part of the Medicare Prescription Plan that prevents Medicare from negotiating prices of drugs. He's now a $2 million a year lobbyist. If he couldn't be a lobbyist he'd be a 'consultant' or a 'researcher'. It just doesn't work.

The essence of the problem is that it's tough to fight apathy, ignorance, and stupidity. Collectively we are easily manipulated. Look at how many people think Sarah Palin is smart. If you don't tackle the issues of apathy, ignorance, and stupidity then you get the current system and no set of rules is going to change this.

As voters, we need to collectively focus on the qualities of a candidate and not which party they are in. Is the candidate smart? Does the candidate show signs of loving to learn? Is the candidate willing to say something like, "You know what? I'm not an expert in nuclear proliferation. There are lots of them around and I'll listen to their counsel and make a good choice." Is the candidate able to see through bullshit?

We've got it all wrong and in this sense I agree with Gowers. He has a creative solution. In the long run it won't help. Greed, incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity are too rampant.

<comment><USER9> _Short of such draconian consequences it's hard to find a system of incentives that encourage good thinking in the long run._

Decision markets (ala Robin Hanson's futarchy) attempt to do this. In short: we vote on our goals. We then bet on whether Policy X or Policy Y achieves this goal. We select the policy with the highest odds of success (say X). Then anyone who bet on Policy Y gets their money refunded, and anyone who favored Policy X loses money if it doesn't work. Thus, anyone who favors bad policy loses all their money.

The main drawback to such a market is that it might not be deep enough; if one bets 1 million dollars on policy "transfer 2 million dollars to me" and causes that policy to be enacted, they lose money on their bets but still make out like a bandit.

<comment><USER10> _bets 1 million dollars on policy "transfer 2 million dollars to me" and causes that policy to be enacted, they lose money on their bets but still make out like a bandit._

This glosses over the difference between _prediction markets_ (markets for bets on outcomes) and _futarchy_ (voting on results we want and automatically enacting the policies prediction markets endorse to achieve those results).

Also, wouldn't a market thin enough to be gamed by interested parties attract investors like a stock trading at less than 1x earnings?

<comment><USER9> It's very true that irrational bettors actually attract speculators (who are able to take their money). So it might be the case that interested parties can't push decision markets too far. I.e., the cost of influencing "policy give me 2 million bucks" might be 3 million dollars.

Robin Hanson certainly believes this is true, but Mencius Moldbug believes he has found a real world case where it isn't. I don't understand the issue well enough to offer an informed opinion.

[http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/pipe- sh...](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/pipe-shorting-and- professor-hansons.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tangential thought I've had around electoral transparency:

If you had (open schematic/open source) electronic voting equipment, you could issue a hashed/random ID on receipt of a ballot. After accumulating a number of votes, the ballot data is published alongside the secret IDs and can then be audited by the respective voters.

<comment><USER12> I've had the same thought - voter verifiability would certainly remove a lot of the ability to corrupt the vote.

However, my reservation is those who are pressured to vote in a particular way, their imam/husband/abuser tells them how to vote; that way the vote could be checked and so couldn't be consider truly anonymous.

If you go a step further and then have the hash encrypted with a one-time pad it's getting too complicate IMO and an abuser could simply demand the pad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr (too logical; didn't read)

Now if it had been _punchy, amusing, and wrong_ , but on Powerpoint with the stereo on, I would have voted for that. Oh wait, never mind.

</comment><comment><USER14> _...To make the system more theatrical, each MP could be given a certain number of cards that was less than the number of votes to be held..._

I'm sure this is a good article, but I couldn't help but think of fizzbin</comment>