You're Not Smiling Enough | Hacker News Reader

You're Not Smiling Enough

rubenerd.com

87 pointsBrajeshwar45 comments

"Online identity is hard."

I suppose I'm probably in a tiny minority here, but I think I'd be pretty happy to see online identity get harder (which I think is what will happen, with better and cheaper spoofing).

There are a very few entities I actually want to be able to verify my identity. For everyone else I'd much prefer to go back to the default-anonymous internet of the late-90s.

I'd also prefer the default anonymous late 90s, but without anonymous bots challenging the Turing Test. Not sure how to get there. In the 90s they were easy to spot by the hyperlinks to online counterfit running shoe retailers.

Well it seems bots create more accounts than humans do, so let’s go to the anonymous internet.

I was obliged to create an account with email + phone number, just to save my origin/destination on mapy.cz (hiking maps). Not my history! Just to keep state between app reopening.

I don't think there's a non-moderated scenario that puts the cat back in the bag. Even before chatbots, there were massive influence operations in favor of one strongman's favorite strongmen. Online manipulation is now an industrial science with decades under its belt.

There are so many voices now that someone or something is moderating them no matter what (in most cases just by ordering them.) The challenge now is meta-moderation.

There are still few enough moderators that one or two "good guys" could fill the shoes of the meta-moderator, e.g. EFF could tell you that HN is good and Xitter is bad.

Private torrent trackers have it figured out I think. Invite only, and if someone breaks the rules the entire invite chain gets banned from the site. You invited someone who invited a bot? Sorry buddy, find another website.

so nobody dares to invite anyone and nobody gets invited

Better than total bot takeover.

Good bots and poor humans are equally bad, so I'd be willing to accept both in exchange for default-anonymity.

In a recent conversation I had with a KYC implementor for mobile it came out that these "fit your head into the frame / make a gesture" prompts are indeed to get unfakable images of the user, but the real use is in the attempt to fulfil the task. The app is actually recording video and not just trying to get an image under arbitrary conditions. It was explained to me that the full process of adjusting your phone + position within a frame is much harder to fake convincingly than a static image. Your reaction to the prompts, rather than your fulfilment, is what is valuable.

I’ve heard (but not confirmed) that’s how some CAPTCHAs work. Clicking the right boxes is a minor metric, what they’re mostly looking for are realistic human mouse movements.

What they're actually looking for is you to click the boxes slowly like an elderly person. Which is frustrating when you have to get through 1000 captchas.

Anecdotally, with reCAPTCHA I click pretty fast and generally don’t have a problem.

Can anyone working in the industry verify that this isn't just rumor?

Try to automate anything that requires a CAPTCHA. do the CAPTCHAs manually. You will quickly become fast at clicking boxes. You will notice you always fail the CAPTCHA. Click them more slowly, and you stop failing the as much.

> when you have to get through 1000 captchas

Seriously, thanks for not using Google Chrome.

1000? Recently they started to repeat for me after just about 15, and after few rounds of repeats it didn't get me in and I gave up.

That might be what recaptcha claims, but in reality it's just based on your IP reputation, any google cookies (ie. if you're signed into google), and client fingerprinting.

YC S25 startup idea:

Online identify verification is hard. Financial apps rely on verification to meet their KYC/AML obligations. In years past, a selfie photo was sufficient, but sophisticated fraud entails that we must now ask users to perform actions while their identity is being verified.

Where there is a problem, there is also opportunity. Identity verification is ripe for commoditization as adtech. We have partnered with Mountain Dew to help users protect themselves from identify theft by asking them to perform fun, brand-aware actions during the IDV process.

Due to the revenue generated from our sponsorship partners, we can actually pay apps to include our technology, even if they don't need it. This enables revenue potential that would be impossible with the traditional app-pays monetization model.

Reminds me of the old “Please drink verification can to continue” meme https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF

Sony has a patent for something like this.

Look at page 10:

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b6/5d/66/df0f98c...

Yes I suspect that was the intended reference

ChatGPT app idea: a tool that generates YC elevator pitches from a given blog post.

Emmet Brickowski furniture idea: Double-Decker Couch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is0tzNUZwF4

LOL. Bravo!

Seriously, the very idea of this tool is deeply offensive. It's speedrunning inaccessibility.

Whether its success rate is 50% or 95%, the percentage where it doesn't work is always (obviously!) going to predominantly be made of people who are already at some disadvantage in society. The people who are already more likely to be having a shit time are going to have the shittiest time getting forced to deal with this crap. Then all the people who fit the parameters can say "oh, it always works for me". Cool.

Hope these smiles are just an optional suggestion because some people cannot smile at all, not sure if the author is physically unable to. If they’re required for verification/registration Im guessing that eventually they’ll learn it’s not a good idea and drop enforcing it.

> You know that Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons where the family is bundled off for some “Re-Neducation”, and everyone’s faces are forced into a smile with tenterhooks?

When making a reference, it’s helpful to link to some information that helps people find and understand it. Like you did with the song later on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPII9cfFe34 (exact bit is at 53 seconds)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_of_Horror_V

Also a great feature when buying airplane tickets to fly to your father’s funeral. Great time to be told to smile more. F you Ryanair

Even in the worst situation, like losing a loved one, I believe a smile can only do you good.

I am reminded of "Χαμογελα ρε μαλάκα, τί σου ζητάνε;". A book by a Greek communist who spent some time in exile during the years of the military Junta (in the '60s). The title can be translated as "Smile you malaka, how hard is it?". I believe it refers to an incident when, in exile, after days of torture and incarceration, the author or a friend of his is asked to pose for a photo for the authorities, and smile to make it look like he wasn't on a secluded island prison surrounded by fascist police who enjoyed beating the soles of his feat with their clubs.

Yeah, sometimes a smile may not make you feel good, sorry.

Edit: I possibly misremember the reason for the request to smile. It could be the following passage where a Security commander promises to let the just-arrested author go if he but smiles:

https://stefanoslivos.com/xamogela-re-rwmane-ti-sou-zitane/

Also, to be clear, "malaka" was never in the printed title of the published book but when we were kids we all knew it was there.

You want to know another funny thing that happens to only a minority of tech workers? It happened to me: a senior colleague (a lady, no less, the design department lead) complained to my boss (the dev group lead) that when I went to speak to her I didn't smile enough. After that he also advised me when I wanted to go and speak to people, e.g. the guys at the server team (this is 2011 right? No Clouds on the horizon, we had an in-house server team, and machines) I should smile.

I bet my boss never gave the same advice to male engineers (I can think of some particularly dour dudes we had, but you don't know them so it wouldn't be as funny imagining them going to the server team with a big, friendly smile on their face), nor did the lady at the design team ever complain that male engineers didn't smile enough when they spoke to her. Just me.

I don't have a Bitchy Resting Face. It's all lies.

Gerald Weinberg in one of his books, either The Secrets of Consulting or Becoming a Technical Leader, wrote of training himself to smile more, since some clients found his normal neutral look intimidating.

As for RBF, I always think of https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/alternatives-to-resting-...

You made me read each and every one of those something-something-Face lines. I think this one closely approximates the problem I had with that senior colleague:

You Make So Much More Money Than I Do and You Do Nothing Face

I think I see your polite point about Gerald Weinberg (he's a man and still he had to smile like an idiot) but in my case I can tell you with great certainty that it was my gender that was the matter. See my quip about the dour dudes above. In particular, nobody expected the dev team to be all smiles, but that didn't apply to the design and marketing etc teams who, to my knowledge, did nothing but chat and smile all the bloody time. The dev team was situated in a basement and people made all sorts of jokes about that, too. It was not a great place to work in and I left as soon as I could. I never had requests to smile in any other workplace, so I remember the incident above partly because it stood out.

In other workplaces I dealt with different, non-gendered stereotypes. E.g. a senior colleague (again) was making a fuss about some outrage she had to deal with in her personal life in the desk right opposite to mine in an open plan office. After a bit she said something apologetically to me about making noise. She kind of kicked me off my flow so I went "huh?" like, "I didn't hear anything" because I wasn't paying attention. She said "I guess you are very good at shutting out external distractions", something like that. Kind of a nerd stereotype then.

I really don't have a BRF though.

Edit: can I say something politically incorrect? I don't think I've registered any overt discrimination for my gender as a woman in tech. I may have noticed a tendency towards the opposite, like some people may be weirdly enthusiastic to see a woman programmer (I'm a post-doc researcher now so the stereotypes are much milder). Though to be fair that implies there's also people who are exactly the opposite from enthusiastic, they just don't let it show because they know their colleagues will think they're assholes. If I've ever been discriminated against it must always have been before I even got to the interview stage, so I have no way to know.

Before we married, my wife complained of a co-worker of mine who would say "smile--you oughta smile more" to women, including her and at least one woman who reported to her. So I don't doubt at all that women get a lot of that.

As for your edit, I don't think that it is politically incorrect to speak of your own experience, and I can hardly imagine a forum less hostile to that message than HN.

I had a similar issue when I was doing more help desk work as a college student. I worked in a hospital and older women would always complain that I wasn't friendly enough. I had a miserable fucking life - I was grinding myself into dust in every aspect and was doing this work purely to get to the next stage of my career. I was never unfriendly, I just was on a mission to get the work done and get out. Instead, these older women who were complaining really wanted a free therapy session. They didn't do meaningful work - they weren't cardiologists or anything of that (anyone with a "real" job would be so much more focused on resolving the issue and getting back to work - and, more importantly, learning how to self resolve the issue so they never had to talk to us again). Merely some paper pushers. I'd see my colleagues get hung up for 30 minutes listing to some of these older women talk to them about their life and then they'd come back with a haggard face.

Ironically, I ended up getting reprimanded again for having unprofessional tone because I made my response emails "too friendly". I was glad to leave that job and never return to help desk type work again.

Reminded me of this "Pretentious Movie Reviews" episode [1] by a local stand-up comic duo (especially funny if you know Bollywood cinema). The whole seven minute episode relates to the post's theme of having to conform to some very specific literal interpretation of an identity and/or emotion. The last segment starting 5m 50s is most pertinent (:

[1] MOST ACTING EVER - Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon Review

https://youtu.be/7sV6UPJa0DI?si=OdnxDck1ZXtJV0w3

The feature of making people smile for ID verification (as written in the article) is rather idiotic. I could smile but why force myself to do so? I hate smiling when it's not genuine. ID verification is a confrontation and even though necessary, rather insulting also. These modern technological systems are becoming exceptionally irritating.

There are few things more infuriating than being told by one or both of a machine or a bureaucratic process that you’re not who you in fact definitely are.

I agree, especially when you’re in a hurry, tired or stressed, it could cause quite some unnecessary anguish.

Why OR? Usually when you travel by air you are all three at once when you go through border control at the destination. That's fun! Coincidentally, for automated passport control you are asked not to smile.

It's a cultural thing, I know of one Russian guy recently who went for an interview for a principal dev in a FAANG company, and didn't get the role because he was too serious, no smiles, no little ice-breaking smirks, no chortles - but a deadpan response to each interview question. Sometimes, it does matter how you appear to be saying something as well as what you say.

They don't tell you why, so it's strange to say this is the reason. At Google the interviewers write up the discussion, questions and answers, and a separate committee decides based on the feedback from all the interviewers. There is no scoring for pun quality sadly.

Yes it is rude or uncouth to bare your teeth in Russian culture but I think that sentiment is belongs to Russia alone; I could be wrong but I don’t think throughout the world there are countries where people refrain from smiling. There is a rhetorical ambiguity in saying “it’s cultural” rather than “it’s Russian cultural”.

Facial recognition systems are generally utterly broken. Other examples of this:

- user-presence detection systems that can't see you if you have dark skin (Apple FaceID has/had this problem)

- the high rate of false positives with the facial recognition systems police use at protests

- driver drowsiness detection that can't tell the difference between a sleepy driver and someone with a narrow eye shape

We needed a form of facial movement for verification. Initially, we asked users to blink, but found that intentional blinking could feel awkward. Ultimately, we decided on using a smile instead.

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