What We Found When X-Raying Some MLB Baseballs - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/juiced-baseballs/ <comment><USER3> A cool article, laid out to be readily understandable for everyone.

Missing from the discussion, though, is a description of the change in the moment of inertia. If the ball's mass distribution has shifted radially, the moment of inertia can change significantly.

Spin matters very much to the aerodynamics of baseballs. A change in the moment of inertia could have a substantial impact (positive or negative) on the flight characteristics as the ball reaches the batter, the mechanics of the ball/bat interaction (particularly as relates to the spin of the ball leaving the bat), and the outbound trajectory. A lower-moment ball will spin faster initially, but slow its rotation rate more quickly, making any prediction of the overall effect of a change in moment of inertia difficult indeed.

<comment><USER4> It's funny, because based off the header image on that page [0], that's what I expected the discussion to be about. The center of gravity in those four samples is hugely off.

[0]: [https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/juic...](https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/juiced_coresplitpair_silo-2.jpg?quality=100&strip=info&w=2048)

<comment><USER5> If you scroll down further in the article, you'll see that those are cropped images of the cores. The cropping is off-center, not the cores. Otherwise, they would wobble terribly when thrown or hit.

<comment><USER4> No, I understand that. But look closely at the x-ray/CT and you'll notice that the rubber is nowhere near even around the core.

The background images appear to actually be a video or something, but here's a screenshot I took:

[https://share.neosmart.net/View/Index/nfgSDo.png](https://share.neosmart.net/View/Index/nfgSDo.png)

The two balls in the first column (so one old and one new) have a pretty symmetric distribution, but look closely at the others. Some are ridiculously uneven.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but that doesn't matter here because it's present in both the newer era balls and the older era balls. We also know that seven of these are _used_ baseballs, meaning they could very well be deformed or off center from use. There's a reason that they only use a baseball for about 8 pitches. ([https://www.foxsports.com/other/story/major-league- baseballs...](https://www.foxsports.com/other/story/major-league-baseballs- have-a-short-shelf-life-062912))

<comment><USER7> In cricket the same ball is used for 480 balls (depending of format). Initially the new hard ball is seen as an advantage to the fielding side as a bowler gets more bounce and deviation from the hard seam, but a batsman can also hit it further. There is also the phenomenon of swing (a bit like the curve ball in baseball) which is accentuated by the fielders polishing one side of the ball. As the ball ages and softens it's bounce becomes more true and therefore it favours the batting side. Often towards the end of its life the ball develops 'reverse-swing' where it curves the opposite way. They have to keep the 'rough side' of the ball completely dry to do this, so all fielders have to keep their hands dry. Penalties have been applied to players trying to alter the condition of the ball. Different brands of ball are polished differently and swing at different times. Some even have a lacquer which takes a while to come off and start swinging at all

why I think this is relevant

1) The aerodynamic effects of the kind polish applied dramatically affect performance

2) Since wear on the ball is critical to the long format games, the fans don't get to take one home and sell it on ebay, even if they catch a six (ball hit into the crowd) :(

The significant change in cricket hitting has been massively heavier bats, which used to be made of compressed willow to preserve their life (a whole season for a pro), but are now made of unpressed willow and considered disposable. The unpressed bats work much like corked baseball bats are supposed to, and have transformed the game. Slow-bowlers, like spin bowling where the bowler spins the ball to alter its flight and make it move when bouncing, have to be exceptional now or they get smashed into the car park!

<comment><USER8> The most significant change in cricket has been covered wickets when it rains. If you have ever had the fun of playing on an uncovered wet wicket you will understand how elite teams were able to be bowled out for under 20 runs on wet wickets.

I also think more body protection has played a massive role in more aggressive batting. When I was young I used to play with nothing more than pads, gloves and a box and had to face bowlers who could bowl over 140km/hr on very unpredictable wickets. I got out more than once getting out of the way of some bouncer that stayed low as I was looking to avoid getting hit. I have been hit enough times with a cricket ball to have learned self-preservation is the better part of valour.

<comment><USER9> ^This.

As a teenager growing up in the UK I played cricket for my school and a local team, and when I was about 14 I had the "pleasure" of facing roughly four balls bowled by the Legendary West Indies cricketer Viv Richards[1] when he visited my school. I somehow managed to get the bat onto the first ball and score a 4, at which I foolishly celebrated shouting something along the lines of "in your face, I thought you were a professional cricketer!" What a stupid, stupid thing to do.

There then followed a three ball lesson in bodyline bowling until I literally lost my bottle and refused to carry on leaving the wicket with what little dignity I had left. Seriously, seeing that giant six-foot tall man taking a run-up and then bowling a cricket ball at my head at what seemed like supersonic speed literally scared the crap out of me.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This single paragraph is all the specifications for a legal ball in baseball[0]:

> 3.01 (1.09) The Ball

> The ball shall be a sphere formed by yarn wound around a small core of cork, > rubber or similar material, covered with two strips of white horsehide or > cowhide, tightly stitched together. It shall weigh not less than five nor > more than 5 ¼ ounces avoirdupois and measure not less than nine nor more > than 9 ¼ inches in circumference.

So it leaves a lot of wiggle room, intentional or not, for modifying the baseball to produce different results. As the article points out, 2014 was a great year for pitchers with the fewest home runs since 1995. And that year, 1995, is significant as that was the year of the strike shortened season.

I'm still on the fence as to whether this is a good or bad thing (juiced balls) as in the 20s there were rule changes regarding how balls were treated that led to the live ball era[1] and the greatest baseball legend, Babe Ruth.

Baseball has a way of balancing out over time, so we may see a wild homerun heyday before getting a period of pitching dominance. Both super fun to watch.

0: [http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/official...](http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/official_rules.jsp)

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live- ball_era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live-ball_era)

<comment><USER11> The article says the newer balls differed in mass by 0.5 grams and that this difference was statistically significant

For reference the "not less than five nor more than 5 ¼ ounces avoirdupois" in that rule means 141.747615625 to 148.83499640625 grams. (Yes exactly, the "pound avoirdupois" no longer has any definition except that it's so-and-so many SI kilograms).

So 0.5 grams is a pretty big change, but it's way inside the variation allowed. Given the change in composition it seems to me that such a change is to be expected and actually suggests the ball makers did NOT go out of their way to hide what's happened here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If MLB did this deliberately without the consent of the teams, some owners might be upset.

As the article points out, players are already adapting their hitting approach to produce more home runs, and presumably that's at least partially due to the added likelihood of success for that strategy with the juiced balls.

So of course there's also a team-building aspect of this shift for GM's to consider. A decade ago, all the smart money was on high "OBP" (on-base percentage) players over boom-or-bust power hitters. If MLB did juice the ball, it shifted the ground out from under tens of millions of dollars of team analytics, and billions in payroll decisions made based on them.

<comment><USER13> >A decade ago, all the smart money was on high "OBP" (on-base percentage) players over boom-or-bust power hitters.

That is not an entirely accurate characterization, in fact most of the time the moneyball teams valued those boom and bust players more than traditional teams. The actual equation they were using was something close to 3*OBP+Slugging so slugging is good, and they tend to get walks a lot along with their strikeouts so OBP is usually good too.

<comment><USER14> Yep, "three-true-outcomes" (HR, strikeout, walk) players were seen as undervalued. Much of today's developments can be seen as flowing out of that re-evaluation of the "badness" of strikeouts.

OBP driven by consistent-but-weak contact was the sort of thing that sabermetrics types in 2008ish were shifting away from. Adam Dunn types (high OBP power hitter, low average) were seen as undervalued compared to Juan Pierre types (low power, higher average).

E.g. [http://www.firejoemorgan.com/2008/03/this-column-is- eternal....](http://www.firejoemorgan.com/2008/03/this-column-is-eternal.html)

Fun thing about Pierre vs Dunn - Fangraphs has them practically tied in career WAR in the same number of seasons. But traditional evaluations praised the scrappy Pierre types a lot more than the strikeout-happy Dunn types.

<comment><USER15> Right. What people always seem to forget about the analytics based approaches, particularly the "moneyball" concept is that the intent was to identify those undervalued players. If the current trend is to prefer players with attribute X, that means that they'll be more expensive than their relative worth, so identify attribute Y which is also important and you can pay them a lot less.

People still refer to moneyball style approaches as if the exact metrics which were used in 2001 are the end all be all, but as soon as people caught on to OBP and such the real moneyballers were by definition off to something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> He might be a little biased, but Justin Verlander tweeted some R analysis on exit velo and launch angle 2014 v 2017:

[https://twitter.com/JustinVerlander/status/96939000476931686...](https://twitter.com/JustinVerlander/status/969390004769316864)

Seems the balls are flying farther?

</comment><comment><USER17> There's an assumption that Major League Baseball cares about fair competition and integrity, but those things are much less important than you might think.

In the 1990s, a very large number of players used performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Those who were honest and declined to use them were penalized by being less competitive (a problem any time you allow corruption - the market favors the corrupt and weeds out the honest), undoubtedly some losing their jobs and dreams.

MLB did nothing, other than to change the rules and ban the use of the drugs. The cheaters suffered no penalties and their records stand; the victims, including honest players as well as fans, no compensation or even official acknowledgement (that I know of). One of the most prominent cheaters has a job as a coach on major league teams, including as a hitting instructor for many years. Another had his jersey retired by his team and was inducted into their team Hall of Fame, and now has a job with them. (The cheaters are having a hard time getting into the national Hall of Fame, but that's due to sportswriters and others voting against them, and they are coming closer each year.)

Does MLB care if the balls are juiced, or if current players have discovered new ways to cheat?

</comment><comment><USER18> This article really does a good job of making this topic accessible to those of us that live outside of the 'land of the free'. The graphics and UX are really neat.

The research does prove that the ball has changed.

However, the composition of the ball has changed many times over the years with new technology and new rules. It should be possible to look back at when the core changed from rubber to cork (for example) and to see the effects this has had. This bigger narrative could be useful in understanding what has gone on lately.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_(ball)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_\(ball\))

<comment><USER16> Exit velocity and launch angle of the ball have only been recorded since 2014. 2015 league-wide. That's why this latest change is causing all this analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is anyone else surprised by the sample size? I'm not sure that eight baseballs provides enough data for any relevant conclusions, especially when the differences are so small to begin with.

<comment><USER20> Assuming there has always been 50% light balls and 50% heavy balls, the probability of picking 4/4 heavy balls from the earlier period and 4/4 light balls from the later period by chance is 0.4%.

Although this statistic might be less relevant if the balls were not statistically randomly selected.

<comment><USER21> Presumably the eBay balls were probably homers or hit into the stands, no?

<comment><USER22> They could also be foul tips or grounders thrown to the crowd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Something I rarely hear discussed around the MLB home run boom, maybe because it's just too obvious (?):

Warm weather -> less dense air -> balls fly farther. Recent years have been record warm. Does that have any measurable or meaningful effect?

<comment><USER24> Similar discussion on cricket ball and how science shows no impact of weather on balls flying through air significantly enough but still remains a common misconception through out the sport's fraternity.

[http://theconversation.com/why-we-think-the-weather- affects-...](http://theconversation.com/why-we-think-the-weather-affects-how- a-cricket-ball-swings-when-it-doesnt-46587)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Baseball is such a data-driven sport, and numbers don't tend to lie. There's always always some new form of juice, some changes to the mound, something going on with the bats and balls...

* Baseball just saw its biggest home run surge since the steroids era. Here's why. - The Washington Post || [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp/2016/03/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp/2016/03/07/the-perfect-storm-that-created-baseballs-biggest-home-run-surge-since-the-steroid-era)

The real graph to pay attention to: [https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp- apps/imrs.php?src=https://...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp- apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp- content/uploads/sites/28/2016/03/2300homeruns03071.jpg&w=1484)

Do the materials in a baseball show up differently over time, say over a 20-30 year span? I'd really want to see this done on more sets of baseballs. In addition to testing players, if the goal was consistency it would be prudent to scan the balls, do a core sample of the pitcher's mound every game, make sure bat composition and temperatures are consistent... The new pitch clock isn't going to empower pitchers either though, look for batter power to rise again next year.

</comment><comment><USER26> I find the referenced [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/in-mlbs-new-home- run-er...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/in-mlbs-new-home-run-era-its- the-baseballs-that-are-juicing/) more interesting.

It suggests the lower air resistance makes pitchers throw faster, too.

I would think lower ridges also made pitchers throw more predictable balls. That may have made going for a big hit a more profitable strategy.

<comment><USER27> Definitely, here is a key sentence: "The decrease in drag is probably a result of a smaller, slicker baseball with lower seams."

The article ignores the fact that it is air resistance on the seams that creates the "break" in a curve ball. Less drag, less effective curves, ergo, advantage to the batter. So more HRs might come from less effective pitching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The MLB might be well-advised to accept this analysis (together with FiveThirtyEight's previous analysis suggesting that the rest of the uptick might be explained by an increase in batters swinging upwards), as one alternative putative explanation for this uptick would be that there has been a development of new and undetectable methods of doping.

<comment><USER29> It's just speculation, but I would not be at all surprised if there are protocols designed to maintain HGH and testosterone near the allowed limits.

Combine that with moderate improvements in training and there you go, 35 year olds that can train like they are 20.

<comment><USER30> While last year didn't see particularly outsized top end homerun figures (like the old steroid days), the increase in the huge number of people hitting 20 and 30 or more homeruns is interesting. That plays to the notion of what you mentioned about staying near limits, as a lot of people saw a lift; alternatively, the ball is juiced. Stanton and Judge hitting 50+ is very odd historically as well.

2010: 18 players hit >= 30 homeruns. 77 players hit >= 20 homeruns.

2011: 24 players hit >= 30 homeruns. 68 players hit >= 20 homeruns.

2012: 27 players hit >= 30 homeruns. 79 players hit >= 20 homeruns.

2013: 14 players hit >= 30 homeruns. 80 players hit >= 20 homeruns.

2014: 11 players hit >= 30 homeruns. 57 players hit >= 20 homeruns.

2015: 20 players hit >= 30 homeruns. 64 players hit >= 20 homeruns.

2016: 38 players hit >= 30 homeruns. 111 players hit >= 20 homeruns.

2017: 41 players hit >= 30 homeruns. 117 players hit >= 20 homeruns.

Something substantial changed in 2016.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can exit (exit from bat) velocity, trajectory and spin be measured and used with the climate conditions at time of hit to compute an expected batted ball distance which could then be compared to actual batted ball distance, with changes over time identifying possible ball changes?

</comment><comment><USER32> Has anyone tested different runs of baseballs by hitting them and seeing how far they go?

</comment><comment><USER33> Something I didn't see covered in the article (maybe I missed it) was a discussion of errors. If the ball is moving faster and potentially with more bounce, wouldn't we also expect to see an uptick in fielding errors?

<comment><USER34> Possibly, but this would somewhat be countered by the fact that you can't get a fielding error on a home run.

Edit to add more context: Home runs are much more common than errors - <USER2> 2017, there were a total of 2,820 errors, less than half the number of home runs. One of the more common types of fielding errors is dropping a fly ball, so it wouldn't take a huge percentage of would-be dropped fly balls converted to home runs to counter any uptick in fielding errors due to the ball being bouncier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This smacks of some kind of inadvertent formulation change (like a company started buying a component from a new supplier that met whatever specs they were measuring, but resulted in a ball with significantly different characteristics). Now that's it's been a couple of years, the MLB is not going to change it back.

</comment><comment><USER36> Heard a segment on this on Pardon the Interruption on ESPN yesterday. I agree with their argument that it's not a bad thing because we are in a time of sports where games need to be more exciting. We want more home runs, and more scorings, and if lighter baseballs means that we get them, then it's just a normal progression.

<comment><USER37> If we accept lighter baseballs as a way to get more home runs, what's wrong with corked bats or any other mechanical mechanisms that could be used to juice home runs? Sammy Sosa was suspended 8 games for using a corked bat, which was claimed was supposed to only be for practice and was used accidentally.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corked_bat#History_of_use_in_M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corked_bat#History_of_use_in_Major_League_Baseball)

I suppose like any other sport, baseball is picky and arbitrary about what's OK and what's not OK when it comes to changing equipment and standards.

<comment><USER38> I once read an article about the 'sport' of speedwalking that drove this point home to me. This is a sport, where pretty much the only rule is that one foot must always be touching the ground at all times. But in the age of video, it's pretty clear that this one rule is violated by every speedwalker every race. But the ruling body of the sport didn't care about any of the video evidence, and doubled down on using judges with a set of criterium to determine if walkers had both feet in the air.

My other takeaway was that if your sport can't enforce it's only major rule, because physics, they'll find ways to lie to themselves to maintain the status quo. It's probably a profound lesson in politics if I really think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I imagine someone at Ralings "refining" the process and then placing bets for the season on number of homers or some other metric that would payoff.

If it is in fact a variation, one should be able to create a subscription service that sends out regular testing results on the balls, along with bets that capitalize on the information asymmetry.

</comment><comment><USER39> Maybe just a classic case of trying to make more money by saving on material costs and passing it off as the same product?

</comment><comment><USER40> If all teams use the same baseball, does this matter? Probably not. At least the game feels more exciting with more homers...

Nonetheless, good research...

</comment><comment><USER41> Stuff like this just makes me weep for sample sizes. All this data, but now another variable to account for in _everything_.

</comment><comment><USER42> Will climate change have an effect on home runs? I'd imagine there would be more home runs in warmer years.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is a beautiful and well written article, but I find the argumentation rather weak. Let's roll up the reasoning backwards:

The article claims that changes to three factors (weight, bounciness and air resistance) could have caused a _25 percent increase in the number of home runs_ [1]. The increase in the number of home runs could be from the possibly altered balls flying farther [2].

The factors they looked into are weight, bounciness and air resistance and their contributions break down as follows:

\- 5 feet, less air resistant, according to previous research [3]

\- 3 feet, increased speed around 0.6 mph, according to previous analysis of bounciness [4]

\- 6 inches, decreased weight by 0.5 g of the ball, which their analysis did _not_ show. [5]

Never mind that 5 feet 6 inches is a little less than 8.6 feet.

When it comes to bring the argument home the article either refers to other sources instead of linking the claims together or it suggests a connection it fails to support. All the lengthy talk about the composition of the core is interesting and I enjoyed reading about it. It could have been used to support the argument about the overall weight, except the article didn't show a significant change in overall weight. It could have been used to support the argument about bounciness, but it fails to draw that conclusion while referring to previous research in a hand-wavy way.

I think they should just have skipped the CT scans, thermogravimetric analysis and the scanning electron microscope analysis. For the saved money they should have bought more balls. They could have weighed them precisely and measured their bounciness. This wouldn't have made such a beautiful article but it would have probably made a much stronger argument.

\</comment><comment>--

[1] "According to Nathan's calculations, this would lead to a more than 25 percent increase in the number of home runs. Asked whether these changes in combination could have significantly affected the home run rate, MLB declined to comment."

[2] "Combine all these factors together — a lighter, more compact baseball with tighter seams and more bounce — and the ball could fly as much as 8.6 feet farther."

[3] "According to a previous analysis performed by The Ringer, that increase in bounciness alone would add around 0.6 mph to the speed of the ball [..]"

[4] "[..] previous research at FiveThirtyEight showed that they also became less air resistant. The decrease in drag is probably a result of a smaller, slicker baseball with lower seams. The change in air resistance could add an additional 5 feet to the travel distance of a fly ball."

[5] "The overall weight of the balls also dropped by an average of about a 0.5 grams between groups, but, unlike with the cores, this difference was not statistically significant.x

The ball as a whole weighs much more than the core alone, and there was more variation in the weight of the full baseballs than in the weight of the cores, both of which meant that the bar for statistically significant variations in weight was higher for the whole baseball than for just the core."

<comment><USER44> Can you unpack their explanation of [5]? It rings false to me, because I think it's based on a false assumption of the distribution of baseball weights. I think their assumptions are that both the weights of the total ball and weight of the core follow normal distributions, but after showing that the cores do not, they continue to assume that the weight of the whole balls does. This feels like one of the classic critiques of frequentist statistics, where effect size gets conflated with sample size.

Worse, shouldn't we presume that there is a (strong) quality control step, which eliminates the tails of the distribution for overly heavy and overly light balls, but perhaps not for heavy and light cores? Which means that our assumptions that both the cores and balls follow the same normal distribution for ball weight is wrong from the start, and thus the notion of "statistically significant" shouldn't depend on total weight of the ball.

That is to say, I think the evidence is just as strong that the cores are .5 g lighter as that the balls are .5 g lighter, but it's just a quirk of p-value and our (known-to-be-false0 assumptions of normal distribution that make one conclusion "significant" and the other "not significant". They did find that the balls were .5 g lighter, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> _The cores of the new balls weighed, on average, about 0.5 grams less than the cores from the old group. This difference was statistically significant, which means it's highly unlikely that it was due to sampling error._

I'm doubtful about their use of statistics here, and whether they actually show what is being claimed. They have 4 "old" balls, and 4 "new" balls, and are making claims about the differences between the pools of (let's guess) 100,000 balls from which they were respectively taken. They then go from here to hypothesize that the measured differences in the samples can explain the number of home runs hit per year.

Assume that instead of baseballs they were trying to talk about mortality rates in small American cities, and their procedure was to sample 4 Americans from each of two cities with different mortality rates, and then run tests on them to determine what's causing the different death rates. While not impossible, it would seem surprising if such a small sample would provide firm evidence toward any conclusion. It would be less surprising if by doing multitude of tests one could come up with something that is "statistically significant" about the differences in the samples.

The first things that bothers me about the article is that they don't give the actual measured values, they just say "this difference was statistically significant". I mean, there are only eight numbers, let's see them! Also, they don't clearly say whether there was overlap in the distributions --- that is, where any of the "old" balls lighter than any of the "new" balls. If there was no overlap, I'd assume they would have said so, so their silence makes me presume overlap. By how much? What assumptions are being made about the distributions?

Second, I wonder what other tests they ran. Presumably, if they were X-raying the balls, they expected to see something different about the interiors, but was this the difference they were planning to test? If you run twenty tests (and only report one of them), you'll probably find a statistically significant result even if it's just by chance. So did they preregister this hypothesis? And what else did they test? One of the odd things about concluding a "lighter core" is responsible for more home runs is that I think a similar narrative could explain why a "heavier core" could also be an advantage.

Third, I wonder about the sampling. Are these balls (which were bought off Ebay) really randomly sampled from the game balls used at the each time? If they were bought from the same sellers, might they have have been from the same batch and thus not randomly sampled? If these were actual game balls, were they sampled from "home run balls" rather than all balls? If so, how does sampling from the extremes change the sample distribution? And might the balls have changed while in storage? That is, might the older balls have heavier cores simply because they are older, perhaps because they've been stored somewhere humid and are absorbing water?

Fourth, rather than hypothesizing about how this tiny observed difference might cause a large difference in number of home runs per season, how about some tests? Do the lighter balls actually fly farther? One might take measurements of a full set of balls, set up a batting practice with a real pitcher a real batter, and measure how far they fly. No, one doesn't have to do this for every article, but one also doesn't have to claim "statistical significance" about every hypothesis. Even if the testing doesn't explain the jump in home runs, it would be nice to have something real in the article beyond hypothesis.

Lastly, has anything else changed? A few different pitchers and a few different batters might also cause a large difference in home runs per season. The weather, the stadiums, night vs day games? The "bonus" paid for hitting home runs? They mention in the article that "The remainder could be reasonably chalked up to a philosophical shift among MLB hitters, who are likely swinging upward to maximize the number of balls they hit in the air and are not shy about the increase in strikeouts that may come with that approach." Rather than than accounting for the "remainder", is there any reason to assume that this doesn't fully account for the difference?

</comment><comment><USER45> TL;DR: The core of the balls are 0.5g lighter, good for 15cm of extra range. The balls are more bouncy, good for 90cm of extra range. And the balls are slicker/smoother/less air resistant, good for 1.5m extra range. The total of ~2.6m extra range could make the difference for the observed record number of home runs.

</comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone know what they're using to layout articles like these?

I usually hate the parallax & scroll-jacking effects but they're used really well here.

<comment><USER47> The animated background image is actually a video [0]. There are class names that contain "scrollmagic" so maybe that's it [1].

[0] [https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/juic...](https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/juiced.mp4)

[1] [http://scrollmagic.io](http://scrollmagic.io)

<comment><USER46> Yes, looks like that could be it. Thanks!

Scrubbing through the video like that is quite an interesting technique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is such an excellent use of parallax scrolling

<comment><USER49> Ha! my first thought as well. It's generally used in such a gimmicky fashion, it was nice to see how this actually made the article much more useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I hereby object to their use of "air resistant." I know what they're trying to say, but a ball does not resist the air. The air resists the ball. Air resistance is a property of the air, in other words, not the ball. So a ball can't be "air resistant" at all, much less _more_ air resistant or _less_ air resistant. In fact, because air is where the friction and resistance comes from, it seems like "air resistance" as possessed by a ball, would be a good thing. "This ball flies farther because it's more air resistant."

<comment><USER51> This seems like intentional trolling. You are nitpicking a word in the article that did not impede communication. You incorrectly describe friction without even a first semester understanding of physics.

<comment><USER50> Suddenly realized why the disconnect. You're talking physics (high school physics at that), while I'm only talking about English.

We don't say an airplane is air resistant. We say it experiences air resistance. Case closed. You need to relax, I'm not trolling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Poor baseball - it's tough when you've got a hundred years of tradition to live up to.</comment>


Attack of the Ad Blockers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-06-01/mobile-ad-blocking-s-surge-shows-digital-media-must-change <comment><USER2> I find the mindset behind, "analysts estimated that ad blocking had cost web publishers nearly $22 billion in lost ad sales" to be both hilarious and terrifying. It's something right out of Max Headroom I watched as a kid, where having an off-switch on your TV was a crime.

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If publishers would get together and come up with a single micropayment system, I'd gladly pay them 10 cents or so for each article -- the same revenue that they'd get from the ads I'm blocking.

But I'm not going to give out my credit card number to dozens of sites where I can "pay just a few dollars per month" to access their content.

I don't want an annual subscription that renews automatically, and I'm probably not going to look at another article on that site for weeks, months or maybe never, so I don't want to pay dollars for an article that they are willing to show me for a few pennies worth of ad revenue -- just let me give them the pennies directly.

<comment><USER5> Screw that. I'm not paying for an article before I even know whether it's hacky garbage or actual journalism.

As if the temptation for these sites to pump out clickbait isn't bad enough as it is....

Unless you mean a completely passive option to give them a "tip" so to speak.

In which case I'm not saying it's a bad idea but how is that any different than donating once a year to NPR and PBS during their "Oh-God-Kill-Me-Now- athons." Or in the case of for-profit sites, paying for however many months of subscription fees you feel is appropriate for the value you received.

<comment><USER4> I guess it could be some honor system "pay when you leave". Or maybe let you review the article "Was this worth 8 cents to you?" and display the votes before you pay so you can decide if it's worth the money. Or maybe you can flag an article as clickbait and get your money back.

<comment> w-ll Could it be a function of time on page, maybe even with scroll distance. You generally know if the article will be garbage in the first paragraph or two and always before the fold (doubly so before the fold if there wasnt ads taking up the top 75% of the page)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Opening the article Incognito in Chrome and examining the network tab, over 170 requests in total weighing in at around 4MB (for me anyway). That is one reason I choose to use adblockers.

<comment><USER7> Hilariously, the site opens a popup claiming that my ad-blocker may negatively impact the performance of the site.

The pop-up is now blocked by my ad-blocker ;-)

<comment><USER8> I believe it just said that ad-blockers will 'impact performance' \- Which is technically correct... they didn't specify if it was negatively or positively ;)

<comment><USER9> > _…which may adversely affect the performance and content…_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> With all the malwaretising going around on even "reputable" networks, using an adblocker is simply a basic step for maintaining enduser security, much like antivirus software.

"Attack of the malware blockers" would be a more accurate title.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've seen a lot of sites recently that either work around my ad blocker to still load ads or else pop up some other annoyance (e.g. Bloomberg). I'm starting to think about going back to noscript and just selectively enabling things.

<comment><USER9> [https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer](https://github.com/reek/anti- adblock-killer) (if you use uBlock Origin, you can turn this on with just a checkbox)

<comment><USER12> So then the question is, why is that not checked by default. I made my intention clear by installing the ad-blocker.

<comment> angry-hacker Because it's not always reliable and can cause things not working properly. It's really easy to create ad block killers/popup modals etc. It's just that lately site owners have began fighting back.

It's really interesting where it leads us, site owners and more importantly ad networks have been lazy trying to defeat adblock.

Let the war behin I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't watch regular tv because of the ads either. It's time to change revenue models.

<comment><USER14> They tried all kinds of models. People rejected them for free stuff with ads. So, it's correct to build on the only thing that works for most content most of the time. The market is the problem.

Here's a nice write-up on the beginnings:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising- is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/)

<comment><USER15> Except that Netflix and even Apple iTunes show that if you price your content to be reasonable and allow people to actually choose what they want to watch, read or hear when they want to do so you can actually make a lot of money. And you don't have to show ads.

<comment><USER16> Every WSJ article on HN has instructions to circumvent the pay wall as top comment. And it's not like we couldn't afford it.

<comment> angry-hacker Exactly. Top comment is always how to bypass the paywall and the readers here are wealthy than average. Having everything behind paywall would make the content available for selected few. How would HN even work if everything is paywalled?

<comment><USER14> I believe the academics' comments in the Elselvier threads show how it would work. Hint: it wouldn't. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oho so now they are claiming that net neutrality is being violated? So basically publishers are attempting to expand "neutrality" to not transit paths but onto end-points.

I do hope that Springer disables their firewalls, virus scanners and spam filters. Could be a boon to sci-hub once their systems are compromised and all their data leaked...

</comment><comment><USER17> The most useless survey in the world finds that most people use adblockers "in order to block ads."

Great article, but c'mon, maybe don't offer a tautology as a survey response.

<comment><USER18> It's an obvious conclusion, but I'm not sure that it's a tautology. The name of something doesn't define what it is, only tries to describe it. As others have pointed out, it is, for example, perfectly possible to be interested in an adblocker mainly from a security point of view, without taking any position on ads themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I use Ad Blockers because - for me - find something browsing the web is like run into a street artist performing while I'm walking around my city.

Often the artist didn't contribute to build the city in which he's performing (taxes, etc...). He is just using an already crowded street. I don't wont to be obligated to be distracted by commercial ads.

Off course, after seeing the performance I'll be happy to donate some money or to support the artist in some way.

</comment><comment><USER20> Bloomberg now has an adblock detector, although it incorrectly triggered on mobile chrome which doesn't even have adblockers.

<comment><USER9> > _We noticed that you 're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the > performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For the best experience, please > whitelist the site._

The dishonesty of it saying that the adblocker will ("may") negatively affect the _performance_ of the site, when it's in fact blocking an absurd number of requests unnecessary to the content people actually want to see, is astounding.

<comment><USER20> Eh, plenty of sites have broken on umatrix for me, and I need to go in and whitelist certain servers. Bloomberg for instance I needed to whitelist alternate bloomberg domains and disqus for comments.

<comment><USER15> Which servers? And why should Bloomberg break if you block servers on different domains?

<comment><USER20> bbthat.com, bwbx.io. Both owned by bloomberg, and I've had articles break without them.

Many other sites have cdns with different domains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Or perhaps it would be more fair to say "Defense of the Ad Blockers".

</comment><comment><USER22> interesting that the survey didn't have the option "to protect myself". malware is a thing. ad blockers wouldn't be as pervasive if the ad industry was less user-hostile and more discerning of it's clientele.

</comment><comment><USER23> The solution is so obvious, at least for big media outlets who complain the most: INSOURCE YOUR ADVERTISING.

This means: no external services to track the f..k out of your users, and you yourself provide a platform for bidders to upload banner images or plaintext ads (Google Adsense-like) to.

Benefits, aside from making it harder for people to ad-block:

1) you don't hand over a sizable chunk of your ad income to middlemen with incentives for fraud (they charge the advertiser, but claim fraud towards you and keep the change)

2) you can be (relatively) sure that your site doesn't get a nasty Google penalty for serving malware.

Is there any (F)OSS/SaaS platform available for an individual to provide such a platform for bidders?

edit: I forgot offering paid content and referral links (Amazon!), these can be worth quite a chunk of money if your site is popular enough.

<comment><USER7> That would be very expensive, requires a huge amount of work and maintenance, and at the end of the day it's unlikely to change anything.

<comment><USER23> Yet we see that, thanks to adblockers, 3rd party advertising, tracking and data milking won't work for much longer.

I give the ad industry, especially the fraudsters, not much longer than two years, given the rising trend of adblockers.

Native ads are the only way that's left, and turns out that the big media houses usually already have an ad acquisition and disposition department for print ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's why HEVC screen content coding extensions are so important. They enable you to present your web content as a video of someone scrolling the article page, with no loss of advertisement quality.

</comment><comment><USER25> They are not ad blockers, they are HTML firewalls.</comment>


Ask HN: what sample apps I can build while learning a web programming framework? - <AUTHOR>

I'm always get confused with this:
I want to learn some kind of framework, let's say Laravel, but I don't have any idea for app in my mind to work on it while learning the framework!
So, any suggestions on what kind of sample apps I can build while learning a web programming framework?
Ofcourse I don't want the boring blog sample! :) <comment><USER2> If you need mini projects/apps to build, check out Craigslist, oDesk, Elance and other sites, that post projects by people looking to hire freelance developers, for the projects in your framework/language. Trim the ideas down to the size of mini project. And, then figure out how you can implement a bare bone MVP on your own using the web framework you are learning.

I recently met a guy who put out a micro site for time zone conversion that he built as exercise while learning web development. He was surprised how many visitors started to come and use his micro site. Since then he has developed 100s of micro sites as part of learning and all supported by ads. It generates him nice chunk of change for the amount of effort he put in.

</comment><comment><USER3> Instead of answering what you are looking for, let me try to give some leads.

For few minutes, try to disconnect yourself from facebook, mobile, etc. Grab a coffee or your favorite drink. See what are the things that you wished would've been better. Lemme give some random thoughts.

1\. oh, my brother always forgets to buy fruits on friday. may be i should write small webapp which will take list of things to buy and reminds him on friday morning. 2\. I love, when my friends playing cricket every weekend. May be we should record all the good pics/scores and record them somewhere, so that it will be a good thing to look at later. 3\. I am always running out of money. may be i should record what i am spending on and get a report of it at the end of week/month, so that i can plan my expenditure accordingly.

remember, that every thing that needs to be built, requires few idle minutes to think about the problem, write down the things we want, design(how-it- should-look) it, code(make-it-work) it (Code is always the last and the most exiting thing!)

Hope you got some idea.

Now go have some fun !

</comment><comment><USER4> How about a to-do list? (sort of joking, though it's a nice and quick way to evaluate different languages and frameworks[1])

Do you have a simple problem you think building a simple web app could fix? Example: if you take public transit, consider making an app that fetches the schedule for a stop entered by the user. My first forays into learning programming were just scratching my own itch using technology.

Good luck!

[1] [http://todomvc.com/](http://todomvc.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Why not take an exiting app and recreate it (whilst in the process of making it better).

</comment><comment><USER6> hello world?</comment>


Obamacare is a bonanza for startups – but do they know it? - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/20/obamacare-is-a-bonanza-for-startups-but-do-they-know-it/

<comment><USER2> This is really the seachange. While it won't be popular for glibertairans at HN, the future is startups from 30-40 somethings who know what they're doing.

I've met so many brilliant rocket scientests who could not take the entrepreneurial risk because they had pre-existing conditions or insurance for three kids to think about.</comment>


A glimpse inside Google's Beijing headquarters - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_17903411?nclick_check=1

<comment><USER2> The Great Firewall recently blocked time period targeted queries from both the google.com and google.com.hk sites. So from China I can search for, say, "pets", but if I want to restrict it the search to last month only, it blocks out.

Baidu doesn't seem to offer the time period targeting facility. I guess it's a case of if you can't implement it yourself, remove it from the competitor's service.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's good to see that the campus is healthy and no different from any other Google office, despite the whole China issue.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is that Doraemon I see on the whiteboard?</comment>


I2 Files Suit Against Palantir Technologies - Misappropriation Trade Secrets - <AUTHOR> http://www.i2group.com/uk/about-i2/news/media-advisory-from-i2 <comment><AUTHOR> The filed complaint: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/36371667/i2-v-palantir-080910>

For those not in the know, i2 is the maker of what's essentially the Microsoft word of this particular industry. They're the defacto standard.

i2 is also well known for being insanely hard to work with both with customers as well as by system integrators. Palantir has been vacuuming up a lot of their business recently and they're really starting to get kicked out of some traditional spaces they normally have a safe monopoly in.

One way that's being done is through interoperability with i2's products. Folks in the community have long wondered how that was done since i2 generally safeguards their file specifications pretty tightly and is very careful about who they license to. The assumption was that Palantir, with the huge resources at their disposal simply put a team on it to reverse engineer it.

This suit is largely about this if I understand correctly and the claim is that Palantir didn't reverse engineer it, but instead used an illegally licensed SDK, purchased through a shell company setup by a Palantir employee in order to trick i2 into licensing their SDK to a competitor when they had no intention of doing so.

Actually, the whole scheme sounds like a great corporate espionage demo for both company's products.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sounds like an attempt by i2 to crush a new competitor with a very vague lawsuit. Hard to tell if it has any merit.

<comment><USER3> Actually the press release seems relatively specific in their claims. I'd expect the actual complaint to be even more explicit.

If it's true, it will not be very hard to prove.

As an aside, this stuff happens quite often. It's inappropriate and should never be condoned by anyone in an organization. I think people doing it often forget that these kind of actions can be considered illegal in some cases and jurisdictions, or at the very least a serious violation of licensing agreements.

<comment><USER4> It's interesting that they were caught and are being sued. My impression is that this happens all the time in hardware, for example: companies are often using somewhat shady means to get early copies of competitors' prototypes to do teardowns on. Obviously they don't just go to their competitor, identify themselves honestly, and ask to buy a copy. It's usually via front companies, or via contacts at legitimate companies who'll get dev samples legitimately but slip you one, or via side deals with Taiwanese or Chinese fabs, who'll set one aside for you. AFAIK that almost never gets caught/prosecuted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems oddly appropriate that Palantir would be accused of stealing secrets.</comment>


How iPad Could Transform the TV-Watching Experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662096/how-ipad-could-transform-the-tv-watching-experience <comment><USER2> Great. Youtube-style annotations as advertising using an ipad synced with a video player to augment your tv screen?

I really don't get it. I honestly can't see a use for this that isn't incredibly annoying (like youtube annotations). I also don't see what the point of even having a tv in the equation if they are going to be paying attention to an ipad screen. Or why they would want to bother with the ipad if they were already watching tv.

It really seems like a lot of extra work just to have more intrusive advertising.</comment>


Did the Vikings use crystal 'sunstones' to discover America? - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/did-the-vikings-use-crystal-sunstones-to-discover-america-53836 <comment><USER2> "But without magnetic compasses, like all ancient sailors they would have struggled to find their way once the clouds came over."

"Struggled", certainly, but Polynesian sailors crossed the Pacific without a compass or sunstone. Quoting [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation) :

> Polynesian navigators memorize important facts: the motion of specific > stars, so where they would rise and set on the horizon of the ocean; weather > and the seasons of travel; wildlife species (which gather at particular > positions); the direction, size, and speed of ocean waves; colors of the sea > and sky, especially how clouds would cluster at the locations of some > islands; and angles for approaching harbours.

Quoting from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Piailug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Piailug) concerning the master navigator Mau Piailug:

> Prudent navigation relies on no single technique, but instead synthesizes > position from multiple inputs. Underway, this constant synthesis makes it > easy to spot the navigator—he's the one with red eyes from sleep > deprivation.

I see no reason why the Norse wouldn't have had some of the similar navigation skills.

That doesn't mean they couldn't have used a sunstone, but rather that it's not unreasonable to believe that they could have navigated with only 'landmarks, birds and whales, and little else'.

<comment><USER3> _but Polynesian sailors crossed the Pacific without a compass or sunstone._

I wonder if the types of ocean weather present in the Polynesian triangle vs the viking routes would have made it easier or harder to navigate without additional aids.

<comment><USER4> Well, weather aside, the keeled Polynesian sailboats with tringular sails are basically the modern sailboat standard with excellent into the wind performance. Longboats had no keel and were not nearly as advanced.

<comment><USER5> Viking boats had keel. Perhaps you are thinking of a specific shape or something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently started designing and making jewelry. I'm particularly fascinated by Iolite. [Iolite]("[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordierite"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordierite")) is commonly referred to as "water sapphire" or "viking's compass". This is because it changes in tone depending on it's angle to the sun. Historically it would have been useful because the effect works regardless of cloud cover and even when the sun is below the horizon. I'm not sure if the nickname is a historic remainder or attached during modernity (the jewelry industry is both ancient and opaque) but the effect is real, and could potentially be of concrete utility during navigation.

<comment><USER7> "... it changes in tone depending on it's angle to the sun ... the effect works ... even when the sun is below the horizon."

This sounds like magic. Have you observed this effect yourself and do you have an explanation for it or a reference to one?

<comment><USER8> I'll have to check it out, next chance I get, with a polarizer. One thing that could be exploited is that the sunlight scattered by the ionosphere (why the sky is blue) is polarized, so the polarization axis could be the clue.

<comment><USER2> According to your link, that's the case. It only works when the sun is just below the horizon so there is still scattered light in the sky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> \- Icelandic rocks could have steered Vikings (2011) [0] \- 'Viking sunstone' found in shipwreck (2013) [1] \- Crystals 'helped Viking sailors' (2007)

[0] [http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-15523520](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-15523520) [1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-21693140](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21693140) [2] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6338535.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6338535.stm)

<comment><USER10> They were described reasonably well in multiple sagas, listed on inventory sheets, and they actually found one in a shipwreck.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_\(medieval\))

IMHO, I think is sufficient evidence to say that it is reasonably likely they were using these.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure people have found all kinds of stuff described reasonable well in myths. Isn't there books written about UFO sightings in the bible?

Churches and monasteries had them in their inventories, but how does that prove they were used for navigation? It would be like churches keeping sextants under the altar. It doesn't make sense.

The shipwreck that contained the calcite was found far away in the Channel and dated _500_ years after the vikings. And there's no record of it in any navigation books of the time.

It's myths and internet memes, being propagated over and over again. I don't doubt it'll be on HN again 3 months hence.

<comment><USER12> I think there's a different level of skepticism needed for ufos and fairly simple piece of technology.

While I don't think the case has been proved its certainly one of those things where there's a reasonable chance of it being true.

<comment><USER11> Nah, it doesn't pass the sniff test once you start looking at the details. I don't have time now, but you could look in the archives of NavList at fer3.com for more info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know tv is not a source of truth, but an interesting side note, in the Netflix series, Vikings, they used a sunstone.

<comment><USER14> Getting slightly off topic, but Vikings is a History channel production, not a Netflix show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Url changed from [http://www.universal-sci.com/headlines/2016/2/9/did-the- viki...](http://www.universal-sci.com/headlines/2016/2/9/did-the-vikings-use- crystal-sunstones-to-discover-america), which points to this.</comment>


Show HN: Google+ for Google Apps / GMail - <AUTHOR> http://www.noosbox.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you feel the 'group' method of sharing conversations (as presented in this app) is a better way of sharing information across a team than the Google Circles method? I would worry that in a workplace setting, people wouldn't be sufficiently motivated to set-up and use circles effectively.

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting app, but comparing it to Google+ is a bit of a stretch.</comment>


Ask HN: Any alternatives to gmail? - <AUTHOR>

I'm genuinely having privacy concerns about Google (http://libertycrier.com/ron-paul-julian-assange-interview/) and don't want to use gmail anymore, especially for my business.<p>I'm wondering if there's any alternatives at the moment? <comment><USER2> Other cloud providers may not read your mail to serve you ads, but they still put your data on an easy path to a government data funnel.

If you want to avoid that, but the creepiness isn't enough to scare you off email all together your options are to self host, or (better service, less privacy) rent a server.

I'm currently renting a dedicated server from OVH^. The servers are in France, with prices starting at $3 a month. You can put use the same server for a blog, VPN internet proxy, owncloud data dump, whatever you like.

Setting up mail is more time consuming than you'd think, unless you use a pack like Zimbra or iRedMail. I'm using Zimbra for some specific features, but iRedMail plays nicer with other software. They are pretty much the same thing, a package that sets up a mail server, some spam filtering, an admin interface, and roundcube for webmail.

^note that OVH will be sold out on that deal for around a month, but you can get a VPS in the mean time (recommend Digital Ocean). Take regular backups if you are buying cheap, expect a hardware fail once in 3 years so be prepared to get a replacement up very fast. The idea here is to be just obscure enough that your data is not retrievable without unlikely manual intervention.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've recently checked out gmx.com. It is ok, almost a complete replacement for gmail + google docs but the space is limited.

I also checked out the zoho.com's gmail like service, but that was painful at best. Most of the time signups are blocked and you have to have good timing to get in. They are also not very clear on what's free and what costs. I was able to sign up for the paid part of Zoho that has a trial, but, I was expecting to have the free stuff at the time. Once I found the link for the free stuff, I wasn't able to get past the signup block.

Note that Zoho has many more apps than google docs. Off the top of my head, checkbook, crm, project planner and about 10 others. However... I'm still not sure what's free and what costs money.

FWIW...

<comment> workhere-io Note that GMX Mail likely is hosted in the US (according to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmx#Growth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmx#Growth)). The same is true for FastMail, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you have nothing to hide... /sarc

Sorry I just find it funny that used to be an acceptable response to me you or anyone like us when we bring up privacy concerns about the web.

In regards to alternatives I haven't found any that checks all the boxes and isn't homegrown. I think that is the safest for now. These days i really running your own isn't too bad especially paired with thunderbird.

</comment><comment> workhere-io FastMail (read my review on [http://blog.workhere.io/my-experience-with- fastmail-as-a-gma...](http://blog.workhere.io/my-experience-with-fastmail-as- a-gmail-replacement/)) or Gandi (1 GB IMAP account included with domains).

</comment><comment><USER5> I use fusemail.com and am fairly happy with them. They have a nice webmail interface but I mostly use a desktop/iphone mail client.

</comment><comment><USER6> outlook.com works great for me, their web interface is very powerful and easy to use.

would recommend

</comment><comment><USER7> fastmail.fm for mail, but they dont really have contacts or calendar :(</comment>


Singapore passes new law to police fake news despite concerns - <AUTHOR> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/singapore-passes-law-police-fake-news-concerns-190509000809073.html <comment><USER2> This makes sense, given that they already police real news by owning major media outlets.</comment>


Ask HN: Is the Lean Startup Methodology Overrated? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I think it's a bit of a fake idea in the sense that you ALWAYS want to ship the most minimal thing you can, as soon as you can. But what that means will depend on the company, the product, and the market.

The tough part is figuring out what the MVP actually is for your situation. It might be a Shopify site that just sends you an email when someone bought your widget, or it might be a multi-year R&D effort that ends with Falcon 1 being launched.

I also think that the "Lean Startup" concept is often abused by people to justify cutting corners on things they should not. The prime example is paying zero attention to code quality and testing prior to launch, then failing to get traction because the product is so buggy and unusable that the customers don't stick around. Don't over-architect and over-test something that may not sell, but some amount of design and proper engineering is necessary to ensure that you have something worth buying.

</comment><comment><USER3> No. I've been blogging a lot about how it's actually underrated:

[https://medium.com/@lironshapira/how-to-sanity-check-your- st...](https://medium.com/@lironshapira/how-to-sanity-check-your-startup-idea- dbb3ad4c9888)

[https://medium.com/@lironshapira/when-not-to-be-a-lean- start...](https://medium.com/@lironshapira/when-not-to-be-a-lean- startup-8e974b28dbf4)

[https://bloatedmvp.com](https://bloatedmvp.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes.

It might be OK if you're trying to make a cheaper razor, but if you want to develop something technically ambitious at all it is about as a good advice as "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is good advice for an Aspie.</comment>


Mapping the Microdistricts of New York City - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@karlsluis/great-big-city-tiny-little-districts-85ff9c8777cd#.wwpa3j3y3 <comment><USER2> Interesting visualizations that confirm what personal observations definitely suggest, but....no citation as to where the data came from? Seems pretty important to me.

I find it hard to believe that there are so few "shops" north of 96th Street, which is what that map that says "all 10,298 NYC shops" suggests.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can think of many micro-districts in the other boroughs (which, btw, are part of New York City) - breweries (Red Hook), auto repair (northern Queens), car dealerships (Northern Boulevard), bakeries (Greenpoint), hipster hat shops (Williamsburg)...

</comment><comment><USER4> Only Manhattan but pretty interesting. Wonder how this would look with other kinds of businesses. For instance, tech startups are concentrated in certain areas.</comment>


On learning from "doing the math" - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/drugmonkey/2009/08/on_learning_from_doing_the_mat.php

<comment><USER2> One fact gleaned (via s link): the world hour record for human-powered vehicle is 56.3 miles! A __mazing. On a streamlined recumbent bike.</comment>


Tesla to make pickup truck after Model Y crossover - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-truck/tesla-to-make-pickup-truck-after-model-y-crossover-idUSKBN1EK1A5 <comment><USER2> I would love an Electric S10 or Ranger Compact truck.</comment>


Show HN: Plaintext article reader - <AUTHOR> http://plaintext.dwyer.co.za/ <comment><AUTHOR> An early stage PoC for a nicer way to read articles on the web. To add:

* Remove more boilerplate such as "Subscribe to our newsletter" and other text that isn't part of the article.

* Better HTTPs support - my old Apache config sometimes fails to download over HTTPS.</comment>


Cache-Control: immutable - <AUTHOR> https://bitsup.blogspot.com/2016/05/cache-control-immutable.html <comment><USER3> This Google Chrome document is worth reading: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vwx8WiUASKyC2I-j2smNhaJa...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vwx8WiUASKyC2I-j2smNhaJaQQhcWREh7PC3HiIAQCo/edit#)

In particular, it gets into the heart of the matter: What does the user want to happen when they click the Refresh button?

It does seem worthwhile to try to change the default behavior of the Refresh button to mean "refresh the page" instead of "fix the page" (what it currently does), which would make this "immutable" proposal unnecessary, AFAICT.

<comment><USER4> IIRC this is exactly what the reload button _used_ to do. You had to hold down what I believe was the Control key while pressing the reload button to do a "force refresh". Now it would seem it's the default behaviour. That, or maybe a normal refresh does the revalidation checks (which return 304), while a Control-refresh does a full download of all resources?

<comment><USER5> Browsers behave the same (though they've acquired additional nuance since the HTTP 1.0 and pre days) as they always have, generally speaking. IE had a cache control bug for many years that made it impossible to force a reload in some circumstances, but was fixed in IE 6.

The change is on the server side, not the browser. Modern single page applications do all kinds of janky things, and a lot of them break caching, either explicitly (with cache-control headers) or accidentally (with uncacheable URLs).

As far as I know, every major browser has standards compliant cache-control implementations, and all have some way to force a full reload.

Source: I worked on cache-control browser compatibility in Squid many years ago. The browsers took a while, but did get it right eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Judging by the comments here, there seems to be some confusion.

This is exactly like long-lived cache settings today. Right now browsers send a request on basic reloads and get back a 304 from the server which states that nothing has changed. All this setting does is let the server tell the browser to skip that check/roundtrip instead of wasting the time/bandwidth on confirming with a 304 after the initial load.

The browser is still completely in control here and can do a full reload or just reload all the time if it wants to. Web scrapers and other HTTP clients are unaffected.

<comment><USER7> Which is fantastic for "modern" web apps.

We use webpack and all filenames are just sha hashes of the contents in the production builds. There is no need for the browser to ever ask anything about that file again (unless its purged from the cache...).

<comment><USER8> Why use hashes? Wouldn't UUIDs make more sense?

<comment><USER9> Frontend builds sometimes destroy the dist folder and rebuild all assets. Hash will result in the same name if it is unchanged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What happens if a random wordpress blog's frontpage (/) is compromised and has malware injected, setting the immutable keyword? Cloudflare and letsencrypt means most sites will be https sooner than later, so the https part will be "taken care of". (At least that's better than nothing; imagine the power granted to captive wifi portals if not!)

<comment><USER11> What happens if a random site gets compromised and serves an HPKP header pinning a bad key for ten years?

<comment><USER12> There's max-age support, the ability to preload pins in the browser, and certificate transparency to work around this, see section 4.5: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7469#page-21](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7469#page-21)

As to this original point, it would be best if this didn't apply to the address bar URL / main document request. But it's a good point, worth considering. Perhaps the UA should set a timer, and two or three refreshes in a row would be the equivalent to the prior refresh behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Half-related to this, we need content-addressable web proxies:

[https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/half-baked-idea- conten...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/half-baked-idea-content- addressable-web-proxy/#content)

With these, you fetch data by its hash. You provide a primary URL where the item is known to exist, but the browser is free to fetch the data from any proxy (or local cache) with the same hash.

This could replace package mirroring, git clones, parts of bittorrent, CDNs and more.

It does assume that you use a hash with enough bits that collisions are extremely unlikely, and also that your hash is cryptographically strong (else a rogue proxy can inject data).

<comment><USER14> Exactly! IPFS already has a web proxy to their content addressed network. (e.g [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXZnH2WVmFoiE7tRJQk9QstLGhSKpVyEQ4Rywx...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXZnH2WVmFoiE7tRJQk9QstLGhSKpVyEQ4RywxqJKkG5A/cap.png) ) And hopefully browsers will learn to speak the protocol natively so then there's no need for a http proxy at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Immutable" with "max age" is an oxymoron. If it expires it isn't immutable. Use another word.

What you need is an absolute date and time in the cache header which says "we promise this page does not change before this date and time". This could be treated as a "lease" and automatically extended in some configurable intervals. For instance, if it is 30 days, then the file is good for 30 days since its modification time stamp. When that time passes, this is renewed automatically: it is now good for 60 days since its modification time stamp. Basically, it is always good for N*30 days since its modification time stamp, where N is the smallest N required for that time to be in the future.

When the webmaster publishes a new version of the file, he or she knows precisely when browsers who have seen the cached the previous version will start picking up the new one. Changes can be co-ordinated with the expiry time to minimize the refresh lag: the time between when the earliest new client sees the new page, and the last old client stop seeing the old one. If we know that a page expires for everyone on June 1, 2016 at noon, we can update that page in the morning on June 1. By afternoon, everyone sees the new one.

<comment><USER16> Yes I think it would still be a good idea to require expiry date for "immutable" content, just as a safety net if something is misconfigured somewhere etc - then when you fix a bug, you will know the precise time at which it will be gone for everyone (hopefully the expiry date was not set to 10 years).

However I wonder what is the typical cache lifetime of resources on current web. IIRC someone on HN posted like a week ago that from their study, it's rather short - stuff is evicted from cache quite rapidly if not used. So fast that getting a cache hit for jquery from CDN is quite unlikely very often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've learned to press Enter on the URL line instead of reload for exactly this reason.

<comment><USER18>
      > I've learned to press Enter on the URL line
      > instead of reload for exactly this reason.

Yes, this is what I do too.

The browser can do one of three things:

1\. Serve the file from cache. This is what happens when you put the cursor in the address bar and hit Enter. Well, at least for ancillary files. It likely still will ask whether the main HTML document has changed. But it will load CSS and JavaScript files from its local cache --- if the webmaster properly set the HTTP headers, like Expires, to tell the browser that it can cache the files.

2\. Ask the server whether the file has changed. This is what happens when you click the Reload button. This is the area of dispute. The article is saying it would probably be better if the browser acted just like it does when you put the cursor in the address bar and hit Enter. Instead the browser seems to check not only the main document file but also every single CSS, JavaScript, image, whatever, file. It doesn't redownload them all, but it sends an If- Modified-Since header, to ask whether they have changed, and then requests the whole file only for ones that the server says have changed. The payload back and forth is usually just a few hundred bytes for files that have not changed. But the network requests take a noticeable slice of time, because it's one request per file.

3\. Ask the server for the whole file, regardless. This is usually when you hit Shift and Reload.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I apologize if someone already mentioned this, but there's a way to eliminate the penalty to the user without changing HTTP at all. Browsers can simply check all the non-expired resources _after_ all the rest. Now the latency is the same, but we still do the checks, just after everything else and we're already rendering the page. Only if one of those resources did actually change then we re-render the page.

The immutable solution is cleaner, and doesn't load the server as much, but it's not backward compatible and requires the people who run the server to know what they're doing. Maybe the two solutions could be combined?

The biggest potential drawback I see is that maybe most resources, including the html don't expire, so every page will be rendered and re-rendered. Giving little benefit and making the rendering choppier. Some of that maybe could be mitigated by starting the rendering in the background and not displaying it until a certain percentage of requests return, or special casing the "page" itself as opposed to page resources.

<comment><USER20> What you're suggesting won't work. The problem is that a lot of pages require their resources to be loaded in a specific order. The C in CSS stands for cascading, and means that rules that are loaded later override earlier ones (if selector specificity match). The same goes for JS since later scripts might depend on the framework or libraries loaded in earlier, unless the script has the async attribute. And then there are the content which are loaded by the CSS and JS themselves, which in most modern web apps make up the majority of the content.

<comment><USER19> Nonsense. You have the css and javascripts. You just aren't certain that they're the most recent version. So you go ahead and render the page using either the version you have, or requesting it from the server, still doing everything in order. Then you validate your assumptions in the background about the stale versions you used still being the most current. If your assumptions are right (and mostly they will be) nothing happens. If they're wrong, you re-render the page, again all in order.

<comment><USER21> Sense. It makes a difference if you run an old javascript file before loading its new replacement and running that. As in,

Original script:

      <script>
        location.href="http://google.com";
      </script>

New script

      <script>
        // oops!  forgot to remove this
        // location.href="http://google.com";
      </script>

You'll want to make sure you have the right version in place before you try to run either of them.

<comment><USER19> You have a point. What about CSS? At first I think it would just render funny, but some javascript actually interacts with the CSS, e.g. jQuery selectors based on style classes or something. So it has the same problem really.

Images would be safe.

Or an alternate plan, start rendering, but do not run the javascript until the resource checks for css+js files return. It would slow things down some more, but not as much as waiting for everything.

<comment><USER21> Before:

      body
      {
        background:blue;
      }

After:

      body {}

It would play out similar to the Flash of Unstyled Content issue, but substituting "unpredictably wacky" for "unstyled".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there a danger here of getting a corrupt resource, then no matter how many times you mash reload it never gets fixed? What do we have to stop this... I don't think CSS files have a SHA checksum header by default do they?

<comment><USER23> from the article:

 _Correcting possible corruption (e.g. shift reload in Firefox) never uses conditional revalidation and still makes sense to do with immutable objects if you 're concerned they are corrupted._

Also, there is Subresource Integrity, which adds a hash to the including tags, and if it is integrated correctly with the caching logic could catch this: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Security/Subresource_Integrity)

<comment><USER24> How do I do shift reload on my smartphone browser? And how do I even know what shift reload is (most people won't) or that the site is corrupted (it still shows something - how do I know that it isn't the most recent stuff)?

And for my general understanding of this proposal: Even if the current domain owner might guarantee that the content never changes - the domain can switch to another site which might use the pathes but of course wants to put different contents there. Is this somehow covered?

<comment><USER6> You can just empty your cache completely - not ideal but still easily done on mobile.

Your 2nd question is confusing - are you asking what happens if you have the same exact path but from another domain? Then it depends on what that server responds with. This is just a HTTP response header, nothing more.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I could clean the cache. But most people won't know how - and what a cache even is.

The second question was about that I expected that the new server won't even get queried if the immutable caching policy from the old server prevented this. And so it doesn't have a chance to signal that it's content changed.

<comment><USER25> The potential for a domain to transfer ownership and still use the same paths, yet have different content seems incredibly unlikely. Like, it feels like you were trying to come up with potential issues for the sake of finding a way to say "see, this won't work!" :P

The biggest reason to use this is for versioned resources. Things that will _never_ change. Say I create a minified JavaScript file. Its MD5 hash is 123456789abcdef...., and so in the output file, the filename is "foo.123456789abcdef.js". If the file changes, the hash changes. If I request the version of the file with "123456789abcdef", I should get that one. Ignoring the unlikely potential for hash collisions, everything in this scenario is working as intended. There is no conceivable reason to ever want to change the content while keeping the same hash.

Now, let's say that file, somehow, gets corrupted AND cached in your browser. I can't say I've ever seen something like this happen, but I suppose it's possible? I'd be very interested to hear if something like this is possible, to be honest. It seems like between TCP retransmissions and Content-Length, you would need some sort of subtle corruption that flips a bit and isn't corrected?

EDIT: As Klathmon points out, Subresource Integrity is probably a better solution to "corrupted file in cache" scenarios. As it stands, if a file was corrupted on disk, let's say, but the ETag and/or the Last-Modified values were accurate, the origin would only ever respond back saying "nope, no changes! you seem to have the latest copy" and you'd still be stuck with the corrupted file. Only a hard reload/cache clear solves that.

<comment><USER24> I don't want to come up with potential issues just for the sake of preventing this. But it's my job as an engineer to think about all potential issues and to avoid them as long as possible. And I'm not directly involved in this topic here or in the web in the large, but I just read this and have wondered if this is fully thought through or not and asked therefore.

Of course domain changes are unlikely. But nevertheless they are possible in our system and we have to cope with it. I just googled subresource integrity and it doesn't seem like an appropriate solution for this scenario. This would mean a new domain owner would need to generate those for ALL his links - <USER2> to be sure that the previous site didn't mess anything up. This means at first extra work and second you wouldn't even know for how long you need this (until all previous users have visited the new site).

There would be even possibilites for major annoyancies, if a previous site owner put that feature on things like index.html before owner change - just to avoid that visitors see the new page as long as possible.

<comment><USER25> I mean, you could say the same thing about HSTS and key pinning. Domain changes hands, but "oops", HSTS was set and the old keys were pinned.

Is that actually a problem? No, it's not. Similarly, as the owner of a new domain, why would I want the _old_ content? The only reason I can think of is that I brought a company outright, or something. In that situation, if I don't want to change the content, everything still works. If I want to change it, and they did something stupid -- like unversioned paths using this proposed flag -- then yeah, I'm in a weird spot. That seems like the most trivial and unlikely of scenarios, though. It requires such a complex chain of events to occur.

I think it's safe to say that malicious usage of the flag is entirely out of scope when considering the validity of it, again, because it requires a contrived situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure that in the past at least, Firefox would skip the request even on a refresh for resources that had the appropriate Cache-Control headers and which that did not have any of the various Conditional-Get related headers: e.g. Etag, Date, etc. Did this change?

</comment><comment><USER27> > Facebook, like many sites, uses versioned URLs - these URLs are never > updated to have different content and instead the site changes the > subresource URL itself when the content changes. This is a common design > pattern...

Why not use the ETag header instead? [https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html](https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> What about overriding the reload page event with javascript?

<comment><USER29> There is no "reload page event". Even if there were, it wouldn't be overridable.

<comment><USER28> What if they made it so?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> TLDR, our web pages are so bloated we want a new HTTP standard to deal with it.</comment>


Self-Finance or Raise Money? A Quandary for Start-Ups - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/smallbusiness/self-finance-or-raise-money-a-quandary-for-start-ups.html

<comment><USER2> This highlights a good dilemma.

It sounds like people who want to keep more of their company, do it at a cost that will reduce their expansion but keep the founders rich.

With outside investment, a lot more people want and push for the companies growth so more people get rich (but the wealth is spread out more)</comment>


Show HN: OsceApp – Free open source app to help med students with examinations - <AUTHOR> http://www.osceapp.com

<comment><AUTHOR> osceApp is a project started over the summer to build a little app to help with clinical examinations for students. The goal was to build a simple app I wish I had in the first 2 years of medical school.

I'm interested in collaborating with others to help build additional free and open-source medical applications for students, doctors and patients. Any advice, suggestions or help is most welcome.</comment>


MG on Google+ integration : Misdirection, Doublespeak And Bad Decisions - <AUTHOR> http://parislemon.com/post/15664060982/misdirection-doublespeak-non-answers-and-straight-up <comment><USER2> I wonder if the author realizes that Twitter and Facebook ask the Google crawler not to crawl their data which conforms to the rules:

<https://twitter.com/robots.txt> Disallow: /search Disallow: / _? Disallow: /_ /with_friends

Similar rules apply for Facebook as well. This is why the deal between Google and Twitter was needed in the first place. Given that Twitter cancelled the deal and not Google, I don't see any other way for Google to get into social search other than beg Facebook and Twitter for access to their data again.

</comment><comment><USER3> The great thing about MG Gruber is that you don't even need to read the posts to know whether it's going to be a Google-bashing. I love that sort of consistency with my morning coffee.</comment>


Combining Farming with Solar 186% More Efficient in Summer of 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/12/fraunhofer-reports-combining-farming-with-solar-186-more-efficient-in-summer-of-2018/ <comment><USER2> The truth is that fields are basically empty for half the year- why not roll out mobile solarpanels from harvest to spring?

<comment><USER3> If solar panels were dirt cheap that would be a solution. But the panels are a lot more expensive than the ground it covers. A farmer would probably be better off to just keep the panels year around and grow nothing.

<comment><USER2> Could you grow high shade cultures, like forrest strawberrys?</comment></comment></comment>


Five Courses Receive College Credit Recommendations - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coursera.org/post/42486198362/five-courses-receive-college-credit-recommendations

<comment><USER2> This is such a progressive step. I love to see this sort of initiative. It makes it very viable for any young students looking to try and get a step ahead. I'm actually going to send the algebra course to my younger brother now.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wanted this to happen about 2.5 years ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351584>

Not exactly the way I wanted but close enough. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> (FYI, I hear a rumor that Coursera is hiring hackers.)

</comment><comment><USER5> The speed at which changes are occurring in the U.S. higher education system is amazing. Colleges and universities that don't adapt -- and adapt quickly -- will go down the same path as buggy whip makers and dead-tree publishers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bravo. I'm interested in using this for my kids to avoid some bad teachers in _high school_. The fact that the classes would be accepted at many colleges will help them to be accepted in high school as well.</comment>


Mozilla's Catch-Up Strategy for Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/mozillas-catchup-strategy-for-mobile-12012011.html

<comment><USER2> It's a shame that the mobile providers are making it so difficult for Mozilla to succeed in that space.</comment>


Steve Baller, Change Agent - <AUTHOR> http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/steve-ballmer-change-agent.html

<comment><USER2> >So then I asked him why Vista sucks so bad and he says, "Who cares? We'll do another one but the desktop is dead. Office apps are dead. We'll milk them for another five years and we'll use Yahoo to generate ad revenue to get us through the next five or ten years but the real game is a decade out when we'll be running clouds and the Internet will go beyond the browser and beyond the PC and will be embedded into everything. Ambient, persistent connections, with billions of endpoints hooked to the network. You'll be there. But so will we. Wait and see."</comment>


Dropbox Please Hire Jenny Shen - <AUTHOR> http://dropboxhire.jennyshen.ca <comment><USER2> We see those "Hire me" websites every few weeks on HN, but I'm still wondering if they ever work out.

<comment><AUTHOR> This girl got hired. :) [http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/28/heres- one-way-...](http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/28/heres-one-way-to- get-your-dream-job-actually-use-the-companys-service/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious how this turns out.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love this kind of hustle. If I was dropbox, I'd hire you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> awkward....

</comment><comment><USER6> All the best!

</comment><comment><USER7> Good luck...

</comment><comment><USER8> nice! All the best

</comment><comment><USER9> Pathetic.

<comment><USER10> If it works, then it's genius and next month everybody does it.

If it doesn't work, then there's still nothing pathetic about believing in yourself and trying to make yourself heard above the din. The worst that could happen is she doesn't get a job - not an unheard of situation to find oneself in.

<comment><USER11> The worst that could happen is next month everybody does it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there an API for HN ? - <AUTHOR>

Is there an API for HN ? I've seen a lot of apps around HN and I'd like to build my own. Is there an API for HN or are those apps scraping the content? <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/rss> ?

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I've been looking for that for a while. Is that linked anywhere?

<comment><USER2> At the bottom of the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I built the HN iPhone app. (<http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/>)

Right now, it's all done via web scraping. I think others have used BeautifulSoup.py and similar tools to quickly grab content.

<comment><USER4> I've also seen a few people use Yahoo Pipes, although that was blocked for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can download the Arc tarball and read news.arc to see what's available. It's not up-to-date with the current version of Hacker News, but it will give you the general idea.

The direct answer to your question is "no".

</comment><comment><USER6> Depending on the 'timeliness' you can scrape the google cache or you can ask Paul if it is ok to scrap HN directly.

</comment><comment><USER7> Please don't think this a trollish answer but, why not just ask the people behind the various HN apps how they're getting their data.

<comment><USER8> Like whom besides searchyc</comment></comment>


Sears dismisses XSS vulnerability report by stating "we use SSL" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Cybpoulet/status/460438949257691136 <comment><USER2> Doesn't honestly surprise me. When you email support at a larger company your response will be answered automatically. A large number of companies don't expose bug reporting services, or don't have them in place. Also 'support' =/= technical support.

Honestly twitter as a bug reporting service feels like its catching on. Faster, even custom responses I know it wasn't _made for that_ but its an interesting use case.</comment>