Introducing Dav1d: a new AV1 decoder - <AUTHOR> http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2018/Introducing-dav1d <comment><USER3> I understand AV1 has attempted to avoid existing patents. Is there a consensus that they succeeded? Or might the HEVC patent pool come after them still with lawsuits?

<comment><USER4> "Under patent rules adopted from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), technology contributors license their AV1-connected patents to anyone, anywhere, anytime based on reciprocity, i.e. as long as the user does not engage in patent litigation."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#cite_note- patent_license-2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#cite_note- patent_license-23)

We can't know for certain, but with the number of big players joining the alliance, I find it unlikely that a company would want to give up their rights to use AV1.

Not to mention the PR nightmare, boycotting, and developer exodus that would ensue for that company.

<comment><USER5> > PR nightmare, boycotting, and developer exodus that would ensue

Perhaps, but I have less and less faith in these 'corrective forces'. Tech companies often seem to discount such consequences, and they get away with it just fine.

More optimistically though, I can't recall any instances of a major tech company reneging on a promise like this. The 'Microsoft Community Promise' has been honoured, for instance. (I accept it's quite possible I'm just being forgetful, mind.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great, so awesome to see the AV1 ecosystem grow like that. This will make the end of the old patent mafia.

One thing I would like to see is that this runs on RISC-V. Both are very important new open technologies and it would be great to see it run on that officially.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there an advantage to writing ASM without intrinsics?

<comment><USER8> Yes. For intrinsics, the compiler chooses whether and when to spill variables to the stack. For hand-written assembly, you are explicitly burdened with this yourself, usually causing you to optimize the flow of the function so it minimizes stack spilling. In addition, your function will perform the same regardless of the compiler.

In FFmpeg, we have found in the past that functions written in pure assembly are typically a few % faste than those written in intrinsics. Depending on your use case, that may make it worth it.

The obvious disadvantage is that pure assembly is harder, so writing functions takes a bit longer.

<comment> Const-me > the compiler chooses whether and when to spill variables to the stack.

In my experience the behavior is stable i.e. doesn't often change between rebuilds (at least in VC++). I can manage this by looking at compiler's output: when I find there something I don't want, be it stack spilling or other reasons for me not liking the assembly, I go fix my C++ code.

> so writing functions takes a bit longer

Also reading is hard, therefore refactoring/improvements is hard, too. I have an impression the assembly is write only language.

<comment><USER9> > In my experience the behavior is stable i.e. doesn't often change between > rebuilds (at least in VC++).

This is less true when you try and support many versions of many compilers, however, in my experience.

<comment> Const-me Yeah, that makes sense. I usually deliver results of my work in binaries so I can choose the compiler, and inspect compiler output of performance critical parts. Authors of that decoder didn't have that luxury.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Const-me I think if they want wider adoption of the codec, they have to port this to GPU. They are much faster in term of throughput. They are more power efficient per FLOP. Also for players, the result needs to be in VRAM anyway.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to do in cross-platform way, for Windows you have to use D3D, for iOS Metal, etc… AFAIK, cross-platform GPGPU doesn't work yet, at least when you want to target wide audience i.e. both Intel/Nvidia/AMD GPUs including older models, with default drivers.

<comment><USER10> Well, some people are working on this: [https://github.com/gfx- rs/gfx/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/gfx- rs/gfx/blob/master/README.md)

I think at this point it's clear that we'll NEVER have a cross-platform graphics API. The incentives for platform holders speak against it, and design by committee means the attempts are so inferior that devs would rather avoid them.

We have to make wrappers. Ideally, they should translate at compile time.

<comment> Const-me > it's clear that we'll NEVER have a cross-platform graphics API.

I think we will, in a few years. I never used VK in production but I've read about it a lot, and I like the technology.

Only I don't think it happened just yet. On PCs Intel is problematic, VK requires Skylake GPUs (2015), i.e. most PCs older than 2-3 years don't support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What does it mean that the ask is written in NASM/GAS syntax? Those are two wildly different asm syntaxes with different macro languages etc.

Is some asm written in one variant and some in the other, or is it all written both ways? Maybe for some targets GAS is used and others NASM (<\-- it's this one as answered below)?

<comment><AUTHOR> x86/x64 is Nasm.

ARM is gas.

<comment><USER11> Thanks, makes sense!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are the Alliance for Open Media not allowed to use Apple's logo/trademark? Weird.

[https://aomedia.org/membership/members/](https://aomedia.org/membership/members/)

<comment><USER13> Even the LLVM Developers' Meeting, which is/was organized by Apple, doesn't use the logo.

[https://llvm.org/devmtg/2018-10/#contact](https://llvm.org/devmtg/2018-10/#contact)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > written in C99 (without VLAs)

Can someone fill me in on why VLAs are a non-feature?

<comment><USER15> One of the main issue is no error checking on this kind of "allocation" (it's the same as alloca()). This issue also somehow exists with a fixed size buffer, but at least you get a much more predictable outcome (you have full control on the stack usage, unless you have a user controlled recursion).

<comment><USER16> You can check for errors with alloca. It returns NULL on failure. You have the same problem as with error checking malloc. On platforms with overcommit (any fork-based UNIX, except maybe Solaris) it doesn't fail at allocation time, it fails when you try to access the memory and fail to map a page. But at least on 32-bit systems it can detect when you exhaust your address space (an actual problem for things like web browsers that still commonly ship 32-bit binaries and use lots and lots of threads).

But yeah, the real reason is that MSVC will never implement VLAs.

<comment><USER17> How could alloca return NULL? You would have to catch bumping into a guard page would you not?

<comment><USER18> _theoretically_ a C implementation could track the maximum stack size it has allocated, detect would be overflows, and report them.

guard pages are one mechanism for doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Therefore, the VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have started to work on > a new decoder

Isn't VideoLAN the same as VLC?

<comment><USER20> maybe VLC is just one project worked on by VideoLan people ?

<comment><USER19> Seems so, but they are listed as if they are different "communities". I wonder if it's just bad wording.

<comment><USER21> If there are people in the VideoLAN community who don't work on VLC, then they are different communities. One might be a superset of the other, but they aren't equivalent.

To me, it's not bad wording to mention communities that have a lot of overlap. There's no rule that says you should only list things that are disjoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why is this written in C? I would have thought Rust would be the perfect fit for this.

<comment><USER23> afaik safe rust would not perform that well compared to unsafe. The main safe part could be the command line or API but using Rust brings you into the Rust ecosystem and it may just not be worth it to do if most of their code is going to be unsafe and purposefully use performance hacks and SIMD.

<comment><USER24> Safe Rust can outperform unsafe Rust. It really just depends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "AV1 has the potential to be up to 20% better than the HEVC codec"

Can you clarify what is meant by better here? More compressed?

<comment><USER8> Bitrate reduction for the same quality. So a file of identical quality - <USER2> some metric - will be 20% smaller (e.g. 8 MB instead of 10 MB for a video).

<comment><USER26> How quality is measured? I never saw any quality estimations in software, e.g. when I'm exporting JPEG image, I'd like to have some kind of result quality estimation, it might be hard to judge it yourself.

<comment><USER27> Some function of the difference in pixels between the original and decoded compressed version. This is a complicated subject, because a good error function should account for human perception and weight unimportant differences less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd be interested in comparisons to [https://github.com/xiph/rav1e](https://github.com/xiph/rav1e).

<comment><AUTHOR> Rav1e is an encoder. dav1d is a decoder. (Hence the last letter).

<comment><USER29> Am I right to conclude that av1 takes like 100x+ the duration of the video to encode? Like it's extremely impractical at the moment?

<comment><USER30> What you are referring to is the encoding time using the libaom reference encoder, which was developed as a research code base to test bitstream features. AV1 (the format) was designed to be used for a variety of use cases including real-time and interactive streaming and it is possible to create a non-libaom based encoder that does so (see the [https://github.com/xiph/rav1e](https://github.com/xiph/rav1e) project).

And still, for some companies the bandwidth savings of AV1 are worth deploying today even with the longer encode times of libaom. For example, you can try AV1 streams on YouTube right now:

[https://www.youtube.com/testtube](https://www.youtube.com/testtube)

<comment><USER31> So here is a possibly naive question.

From my viewing of Youtube, Google transcodes uploaded videos (typically H.264 stuff) to VP9 only when a certain view threshold is reached, which makes sense from their perspective.

However, I have also noticed that due to the chain of encodes source -> H.264 -> VP9 (latter two available to Google), the VP9 stream is often of noticeably lower quality. Thus, whenever I can, I use an H.264 stream.

This problem will not go away with AV1. In fact, from an archival/local usage standpoint, as others have noted here, AV1 is pretty much impractical due to heavy encoding time increases that will unlikely go away with SIMD as compared to x265 or x264.

As such, from an end user experience point of view, what does AV1 offer that H.265/H.264 do not already?

<comment><USER32> YouTube encodes are always done from the source. When new codecs like AV1 are introduced they reencode from the originally uploaded source not from other YouTube encodes.

The immediate benefit of AV1 will be felt by people with decent machines but terrible bandwidth as the higher compression will give them higher quality. There's talks given by YouTube employees about this process when VP9 initially rolled out and how different parts of the globe benefitted depending on their tech and infrastructure levels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> TIL what is a recursive acronym.

<comment><USER34> Have you heard of GNU?

<comment><USER35> I don't know what GNU is, but I know what it's _not_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why is this a stand-alone library and not a part of libavcodec? To avoid LGPL?

</comment><comment><USER37> Could someone confirm if dav1d uses hardware acceleration to decode?

<comment><USER38> If you're referring to SIMD, then the answer is not yet, very soon though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can anyone test this on a Raspberry Pi 3?

</comment><comment><USER40> >BSD is not copyleft, why?

Really? People are going to complain because a licence is _too free_? ...

<comment><USER41> The complaint usually comes in due to an interpretation of "free."

The author includes RMS' opinion, which is true for this particular piece of software, though in many cases it's a warranted complaint. It gets into a political argument usually, but it boils down to this argument: "If I don't require copyleft, then I can't always guarantee that users of my code will get all the freedoms I provided to them."

<comment><USER42> Here in detail: Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software - [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point.en.html)

<comment><USER43> Maybe I missed something, but this essay seems to deal with the relationship of Open Source v Free Software, not Free Software v Copyleft Software.

<comment><USER42> You don't need an explicit essay on that comparison. Morever it's not vs Copyleft, but why copyleft is generally material to the purpose of Free Software.

In the linked entry Stallman primarily explains what is understood as Free Software. The comparison with Open Source merely serves as a device to illustrate the nuances in a more relatable way.

>Another misunderstanding of "open source" is the idea that it means "not using the GNU GPL." This tends to accompany another misunderstanding that "free software" means "GPL-covered software." These are both mistaken, since the GNU GPL qualifies as an open source license and most of the open source licenses qualify as free software licenses. There are many free software licenses aside from the GNU GPL.

<comment><USER43> I find that distinction very much of interest, and sure enough, RMS also has an explicit text available which deals with that matter more directly [0].

While free software protects the freedoms of the user only, copyleft software protects the freedoms of the developer as well. Both types of software are ethical (as mentioned in [1]), so it comes down to personal choice of the original author, who can use it as a tool to ensure their goals.

[0] [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html)

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Databases for real time stats and analytics? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I was wondering what kind of database does an application like stock charts or anything that displays real time stats uses? Does it matters if its NoSQL for real time statistics and SQL for offline statistics and analytics?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I have done some work on these types of applications back before NoSQL was the thing. Essentially we did use SQL as a backing store for data analytics but never for the real-time display.

For real-time display and queries we used a combination of Queues and Cache. Where data would come in and be written to the fifo queue and cache simultaneously and then be served to clients from the cache, while the queue would guarantee order as we would write data into the database and handle transactions. Building this type of system reliably is a ton of work. In our case too, the queues were persistent to survive crashes etc and we used an object database called Versant back then for the queue backing.

Today, given all the new choices, it would really depend on the real performance requirements, not the perceived ones. 95% of the time using something like Elasticsearch or Cassandra would probably work just fine. But if the performance is truly demanding like stock quotes can be, where literally every millisecond counts and order is critical, then I'd probably go back to a queue/cache and maybe back it by Elasticsearch for ad-hoc queries and SQL for long term data storage/reporting. But there are so many good options now that it would really boil down to the use case, and requirements.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have a look at Elasticsearch. [https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch](https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch)

Disclaimer: I work for Elastic.

<comment><USER4> Elastic rocks! I've been using it for a new project and am really digging it.

You guys should build in some better profiling tools for logstash. I'd love to be able to see how much time each filter rule took to know where to spend my time optimizing. Since its all in a java virtual machine its tough to see things like how many threads are working hard vs idle and how much memory each is using etc.

<comment><USER3> We do pull out a lot of metrics as well as how well your Logstash pipelines are performing.

Feel free to drop me an email (in my bio) I'd love to help if I can!

<comment><USER4> Just stumbled upon this: [https://www.elastic.co/blog/monitoring-logstash- filters](https://www.elastic.co/blog/monitoring-logstash-filters). It may be exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you know TICK stack - Inflix DB?

web: [https://www.influxdata.com/time-series- platform/](https://www.influxdata.com/time-series-platform/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I haven't used them personally but rethinkdb looks good

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

</comment><comment><USER7> Streaming frameworks like Kafka have persistence capability in key value stores like RocksDB. You can grab the latest data from there.</comment>


All of Amazon.com today is in Italics – did I miss something? - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/yUjE2mX <comment><AUTHOR> update, a few min later, it's back to "normal", I guess I caught it in the middle of some change, since reverted. Or I got A/B tested...

<comment><USER2> Likely a missing font asset, I had comic sans code for a minute on GitHub one day. Apparently my fallback for mono was set to comic sans... and that is why I noticed. Probably missing in the CDN for a few minutes during propagation</comment></comment>


A Hacker News for Coins - <AUTHOR> http://coinspotting.com <comment><USER2> There's something disappointing about visiting a social news site and see posts on the front page that are over 5 months old.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does it have a feed?</comment>


Some Strategies for Fast Lexical Analysis When Parsing Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://nothings.org/computer/lexing.html <comment><USER2> I wonder what the audience of such a leader is. JavaScript engines would probably profit here, given the waste amount of code we download every day. Maybe even browsers in general. Maybe shells.

But your average compiler or interpreter? The thing is that new languages change so often, do you really want to always generate a lexer table for every new keyword? Or complicate your build system by not using the industry standard tools? And if you have an old language, do you really want to touch that lexer that some bearded hacker has gobbled together decades ago so it works both on a PDP11 and some long forgotten microcomputer?

<comment><USER3> Maybe people who will one day work on compilers?

I learned a lot writing a compiler for a subset of C over one semester (in C++), and just recently built a "compiler" that is used in-house for a one- shot conversion task. Without the prior knowledge that would have been a pain (the input language is poorly documented), but that way I just wrote the whole tokenizer/parser/emitter-chain in perl5 (pattern matching is awesome, and performance doesn't matter as long as I can parse in the rang of 10k to 50k lines per minute).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have always been a fan of flex. The thing that impressed me in this table is the speed-up from the -F and -f options -- I didn't realize it could make a 4X difference.

Anyway, in this benchmark, the author gets about a 15% speed-up going hand- coded over -f. Given that, my take-away is that flex is almost always the right answer for most lexing applications, because most of the time maintainability is going to win over getting the last 15%. If you absolutely _need_ that last 15%, you know it, and a living a specialized life.

<comment><USER5> fun fact: the guy behind flex is also the guy behind seL4</comment></comment>


MacRuby and the Mac App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyinside.com/macruby-and-the-mac-app-store-3922.html

<comment><USER2> "Given all of this, I think that if you want to develop OS X apps without moving away from Ruby..."

I've written a lot of both Ruby and Objective-C/Cocoa over the last few years, and as much as I enjoy working with Objective-C Ruby really would save a lot of effort. It's not like I have a problem "moving away" from Ruby, but I'd like the option to sell apps made with it through their service.

If Apple ships MacRuby pre-installed in Lion, with Xcode integration and documentation, I think it would be huge.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully Apple does include MacRuby pre-installed.

I just wrapped up a MacRuby app. MacRuby is a very cool system. However, if you are distributing the app, you either have to include all of MacRuby, or go through a complicated and error-prone process of excluding portions of the stdlib. This is a black art at the moment.

Even without most of the stdlib, the bundled app is much larger than the equivalent Cocoa app.

The larger app size could become a concern on machines like the Air with smaller SSDs. It also seems tasteless to have multiple apps each with their own MacRuby distro bundled up with the app. A pre-installed MacRuby would solve both of these problems. Then again, it would also make creating Mac apps almost too easy... how will I compete?

<comment><USER4> What kind of package size are we talking here? I see MacRuby is 30MB, surely the whole thing isnot required.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the whole thing is required. In fact, my app is 34MB, the majority of which is MacRuby + the stdlib.

I cobbled together a process using information found on a number of blog posts and mailing list archives which let me exclude the parts of the stdlib I wasn't using. This got the file size down to 14MB. However, I don't have any QA resources so I'm not sure if this has introduced any instability in the app.

In contrast, the pure Cocoa version of this app is 4.5MB.

<comment><USER5> I think the newer version of macruby, with greater bridgesupport, should help this out: [http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/10/08/bridgesupport- preview...](http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/10/08/bridgesupport-preview.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I intend to get Hackety Hack 1.0 in there, for sure.</comment>


Bitcoin Cash is Terrifying - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/bitcoin-cash-is-terrifying-f1a8cc4d536 <comment><USER2> "They are scared because Bitcoin Cash has arguably the best cryptocurrency community in the world"...is sourced to a reddit post where a guy says he loves the community. This is the kind of stuff that leads me to believe journalism is dead. In fact I could go on about a lot of his "sources"

<comment><USER3> >This is the kind of stuff that leads me to believe journalism is dead

Medium != journalism.

<comment><USER2> Valid point, I've seen equally bad sourcing in other news outlets though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a casual observer outside the cryptocurrency community, this whole thing seems quite surreal to me. Is it really necessary to have a religious war and a hard fork that divides the community whenever they need to make any sort of change? This sort of internal fighting really weakens the credibility of cryptocurrencies as a whole.

<comment><USER3> Tribal behaviour online, especially with the benefit of anonymity, it's really anything new. Throw money and ego into the mix and I'm not all that surprised that there's some messiness.

Given the current era of hardline identity politics I'm surprised it hasn't amplified though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bitcoin Cash is the malicious attack on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin cash is neither Bitcoin nor cash. It's a shitty altcoin, hastily created by big blockhole miners for big blockhole miners, who want to centralize Bitcoin so they have more power over it. And it doesn't fucking work. The blocks are either running or standing still because the difficulty adjusts to easily.

The toxic community is /r/btc/ and the non-toxic community is /r/bitcoin/. The latter will remove all posts unrelated to Bitcoin (BTC), because that's the sort of subreddit they choose to be.

If you want to discuss a particular cryptocoin, either go to the appropriate cryptocoin's subreddit or /r/cryptocurrency/.

</comment><comment><USER6> > I invite you to find out more about Bitcoin Cash and join the conversation, > which is largely taking place on r/btc. We will not censor your opinion > (unlike r/bitcoin) if you disagree with us.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6wa5vt/just_got_ba...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6wa5vt/just_got_banned_from_rbtc_so_whos_censoring_who/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Put on your tin foil hats, but think about it:

\- BTC terrified the established finance community and governments as it upended the way currency traditionally operated. I.e. Controlled by the government and traditional finance community.

\- it also stoked interest in the established financial community and governments. As always "hey we can make money with this ourselves" / "hey we can control this ourselves"

\- infiltrate the community, promote a fork with far more institutional controls and structure

\- naysayers and those not up for the new agenda: discredit and destroy that community. Deploy resources to make that happen, after all they have limitless resources.

Seems a pretty typical playbook...</comment>


Unfinished, unfair and brutally difficult - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/2/5264192/dayz-early-access-lessons <comment><USER2> _DayZ, on the other hand, does almost nothing to teach you how the game is played, much less "won."_

That's because, with the internet, you can easily look up tons of information on how to play the game as well as getting tips from other players on optimal strategies when you start out. Games are no longer played in nearly as much of a vacuum as they used to be.

 _If you encounter a group of survivors that is better equipped, you are likely to die._

Unfortunately, the more common response to these situations is for the player to immediately log out and switch to a different server (your character persists across any DayZ servers). You can also do funky things like scope out a player, switch servers to place yourself in a better position to fight them and switch back to the original server.

I'm not really complaining as much as explaining the current situation that people are running into, since the game really is still fairly early in development.

<comment><USER3> Rust, a Dayz-like game from the makers of Garry's Mod, largely fixes the issue. When a player suddenly logs out, their body collapses to the ground unconscious and can still be killed and looted.

Your job as a survivor is to build a shelter safe enough that your body can 'sleep'

<comment><USER4> Is Rust the game where most of the players stand around as naked (male) cavemen? It's rare to come across a game that shoots so hard for realism just to land right in the middle of absurdity.

<comment><USER3> Yes, they are blurred out though.

To be honest, it's a fairly good benchmark for whether or not you should be concerned with someone. If they are running across the field with a rock in their hands, chances are is that you don't have to worry about them shooting you in the face.

...Most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Supposedly, the reason there are so few successful FOSS games is that no one wants to play a half-finished game, offer feedback (or patches) and come back and play the next revision. Is this changing?

On a different note, I've been intrigued by the idea of an MMORPG with a mechanic that coerces players into acting in-character. I think DayZ just pulled this off. You can be the desprate survivor just trying to hang on, you can be the thug monopolizing precious resources, or you can be the dangerous, unpredictable psycho, and all these possibilities feel perfectly in-character. There's no grinding, leveling up, or amulets of +2 charisma.

I suspect that right there is the real reason for this particular game's success.

<comment><USER6> I think the problem with FOSS games tends to be that they get started for the wrong reasons. Like, most of them spawn from "it'd be neat to make a game like X" and "I believe in FOSS". That's fine, but when you get into the gritty details of making a game, it's /really fricking hard/. To actually finish something takes an enormous amount of passion and dedication. And people that put in that level of passion and dedication usually don't just want to give away their work for free after that much struggle.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that FOSS people lack passion or anything like that, it's just that for your average non-game FOSS project you usually start by scratching a small itch, and then if it other people like your itch- scratcher, momentum grows. Or if nobody likes it, you abandon it with minimal time lost. A game takes a lot more upfront investment before you have anything to show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone is looking at it wrong.

It's not about the game anymore. It's about the online community surrounding it. Games today are social networks. It's not about the game-play anymore. It's about the mods, the chatting, the culture, community, etc.

If you see Minecraft as a game like Sonic is a game you are blind.

<comment><USER8> That's an interesting point of view. Do you think single player games may still be able to attain success in the current landscape?

<comment><USER9> Check out the massive communities built around strategy games like Civilization - I think SP games are doing well.

That said, IMO the social and community aspects are just icing on the cake. A game gains no traction unless it's a good _game_ first. The community that grows around it are an accelerant for future growth, but will not exist at all if it weren't for a solid game underneath.

<comment><USER10> > Check out the massive communities built around strategy games like > Civilization - I think SP games are doing well.

Civilization V is _very_ entertaining for FFA multiplayer (although public games are unplayable because of leavers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > […] the game consists of trolling and ganking. Players have very little > reason to trust each other, and many reasons to kill each other.

> […]

> […] make your own fun, and that's often at the expense of the other players, > or perhaps due to their actions towards you. It's a playground for the > perverse.

As _entertaining_ as this game very well might be, I think I'll pass on putting myself through what sounds like a collection of potentially traumatic and dehumanizing experiences. I think I'd be a worse person for playing it.

<comment><USER12> That's part of why I gave up on EVE Online—I felt that to make any sort of progress towards having fun, I would have to be a terrible person.

<comment><USER13> > That's part of why I gave up on EVE Online

i have observed that certain types of personalities cannot take EVE Online's (or in this case, DayZ's) play style. I personally find EVE and dayz to be refreshingly interesting, amidst all the crap themepark MMO games out there. It's fun because you have real risks when play - a loss means something. The game feels real.

<comment><USER12> Oh believe me, I was incredibly interested in EVE Online and am equally interested in DayZ. As you said, it "feels real"—that's pretty rare in games and that's why it can be fun. Unfortunately, the consequences of realism can be unfair (what else should we expect?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since giving up cable, twitch.tv has more or less become my HGTV -- somewhat enjoyable, minimal attention requirement; decent background noise to help keep me from going insane.

I cannot for the life of me, though, understand the appeal of Day Z. Perhaps I've had the misfortune of only seeing the "slow" parts, but, from what I've seen, it's a lot of running around in large environments and then... hiding out? sometimes? Then there are zombies? I really don't get it. I tend to fall in love with niche market games, but this one doesn't do it for me.

<comment><USER15> So, I had a long response written out, but I decided it didn't really get to heart of the matter. Here's the short response:

Every time you start a new character, it takes a while -- at least a couple hours -- to get to a comfortable level of survivability (by that I mean: food, water, equipment, weapons). Even once well equipped, it's incredibly easy to die. So, when you're scrounging around for some food or poking around a military base for better weapons and you hear a gun shot, the adrenaline rush is like nothing else. The two hours you spent gearing up could literally be wiped out in an instant by sniper that you never even saw on some hill side.

Even better, everyone else is in the same situation as you no matter how long they've been playing, which leads to some really intense/scary/funny encounters in game.

<comment><USER16> So the question that determines whether someone will enjoy the game overall is: does that intense adrenaline rush outweigh having to go through all that bootstrap grinding again? I strongly suspect that the answer for me is "no", at least on the long run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I enjoyed this article, but I think one thing I would dispute is that this is a modern phenomenon.

Think back to the 90s real quick. You know what was really the first unbelievably successful unfinished game? Counter Strike.

I think the commonality that all these unfinished games have are this: 1) Inherently multiplayer 2) Players are the "creators" of content. When I say content I don't necessarily mean assets, I mean situations or gameplay experiences.

If you have those two things, releasing early sort of makes sense, because your audience will give you a lot more valuable feedback then if you just dropped it on them as a finished thing, and you can get some buzz going without raising expectations too high.

<comment><USER4> The inverse of this could be developers patching out quirks that enable emergent gameplay contrary to the direction they wish the gameplay to go in.

So rocket jumping has become a feature of many FPS games, whereas in counterstrike they patched out strafe jumping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have not checked the game, only this Polygon article, but the premise sounds a lot like a (washed down!) Dwarf Fortress. Specially the unfair part. You'll realise how unfair DF's adventurer mode is the day you pick your first mission to kill a scrawny beast only to find yourself brutally killed by a pack of capybarss.

Toady (the developer of DF) is preparing a big update to adventurer mode, by the way.

<comment><USER4> I feel like there's a big difference between the unfairness inflicted on you by a Random Number Generator, and the unfairness inflicted on you by being hounded through the streets by a gang of other players.

The two games share the same medium but are very different in nature.

<comment><USER17> DF is not as deeply random as other roguelikes (or roguelike-likes,) in that most creatures follow patterns, goals and "do their own." With the next update there will even be a "background" on everything (wars between villages, gossiping, refugees from distances, spreading of stories, yes I'm looking forward to it)

Of course, the unfairness as you say is different anyway, an AI should not feel unfair... But at some point you realise it actually _is_. Nothing in DF is specifically there to kill you, but won't bother to let you live if you cross its way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have no problem with the difficulty of the game or the realism it tries to provide. However, it seems like these type of games almost always promotes trolling and ganking. The main reason is because there really are no consequence for these actions.

It ends up being almost like a gambling game where you hope you gather a lot of resources and can get the jump on someone else before you die. I am sure there is entertainment value in this type of gameplay, but it's disingenuous to dress it up as some kind of realistic horror survival game.

<comment><USER19> There actually is a consequence, if you kill a player on sight you ruin a lot of the gear you would hope to steal from them. It's actually better to rob them while they are alive and you never know if they will pull out a revolver and pop a cap in you.</comment></comment>


Flappy bird is available again for android - <AUTHOR> http://zahraanasrcity.com/t/99

<comment><USER2> Flappy bird is available again for android</comment>


Show HN: SubtleTV – A trending video aggregator - <AUTHOR> http://subtletv.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> \- SubtleTV plays trending videos from Reddit and other sites in a continuous stream. Users can see what's popular across subreddits or within specific topics.

\- SubtleTV is designed to make it easy to find related content. Users can see videos other users recommend, and easily watch more from that subreddit or author without interrupting your viewing experience.

This has been a project of mine for a while now. I'd love to hear feedback about the UI and features from fresh eyes.

Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER2> Video won't play at all on Safari 8.0.4, it gets caught up loading HTML5 player. Works fine on Chrome though.

Are all the video files hosted through YouTube? How would you handle pulling videos from two sources (YouTube + 2nd source)?

<comment><AUTHOR> So it starts to load the html player but nothing plays? The videos are from either Youtube, Vimeo, or Dailymotion.

<comment><USER2> It won't play at all. I'm using click to flash safari extension, and generally when there is any issue with the HTML5 player I'll right click and enable flash, but right click is disabled.

While the UI is fine for mobile/touch, it's not really optimized for desktop use.

It's an interesting idea though, do you have any plans for expansion on this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> WOW I wish all streaming tv would be as easy as this. Really like the interface of the site. Very easy to navigate. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to hear. I got tired of searching for good content and using interfaces that weren't couch friendly.

<comment><USER3> Please add ability to download videos or at least link to original videos. Also ability to have all the controls visible at all times. Can you release this website ui as open-source ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Original videos are linked via the info panel. Click on the title of the video, and then in the right pane click the source title on the top right [http://screencast.com/t/xzFPQIUN0h](http://screencast.com/t/xzFPQIUN0h). You can also see the social metrics we've found on it by scrolling down in the info panel under "Popularity" and clicking any of the social links to see the sources [http://screencast.com/t/W4CbKiSCK5Ep](http://screencast.com/t/W4CbKiSCK5Ep). What do you like about having the controls stay open? Currently you can use keyboard shortcuts so you dont need to open the controls each time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Promise and Peril of Programmable Matter - <AUTHOR> http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/14967/The-Promise-and-Peril-of-Programmable-Matter.aspx <comment><USER2> Melding Plague

The Melding Plague is a nanotech virus that attacks anything that has nanotechnology present within it and does not discriminate between organic and synthetic structures. It attempts to hybridise or meld the nanomachines and nanotechnological cybernetics that are commonly present in the bodies of humans with the biological structure of their tissues at a subcellular level. This results in horrific, uncontrolled, and invariably fatal modifications to the infected body.

The most extreme example of a Plague outbreak is encountered in San Francisco, the capital of Silicon Valley. Once the centre of culture during the Trump Epoque (a Renaissance-like period of social and technological flowering), most of the built environment and its inhabitants were embedded with sophisticated programmable nanocybernetics. The coming of the Plague changed all this and reduced the City and its inhabitants to a level of technological simplicity that the Plague could not infect. By the time that the worst of the Plague had passed, the City was almost unrecognisable, its towering skyline twisted and deformed by its own autonomic self-repair systems, and the population devastated by the Plague.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a future utopia somewhere where you can use programmable digital monies that are a proxy for some sort of deeper more intrinsic value than our current economic system, which in turn allows you to purchase and unlock programmable materials. or maybe a world of abundance where that intermediate layer of monetarily designated value simple ceases to be useful.

There's also a dystopia where programmable material overwhelms organic material -- without the deep thinking and optimization runs undergone through billions of years in time.

</comment><comment><USER4> This sounds a lot like the warnings of "grey goo" described by K. Eric Drexler's book "Engines of Creation". If we're going to design materials like these, we need a fail-safe way to keep them in check!

<comment><USER5> >we need a fail-safe way to keep them in check

The first grey goo explosion happened a few billion years ago and there has been a constant DNA battle ever since. I don't think there is a failsafe way to make programmable matter. Either we get 'natural' evolution, where little accidents in occur and alter the code which lead to nano-cancer, or people will create such matter without safety checks. On top of this all of our man made matter will be locked in war with the countless living nanobots, which could lead to unexpected evolution of what's already here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Self-replicating computronium will make our definition of life even more awkward. Probably we will even stop caring about what is alive and what is not.</comment>


The planning fallacy  - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1750-the-planning-fallacy <comment><USER2> Here is the link to the original: <http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/>

This HN item links there directly: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=654950></comment>


What happened to Flight MH370? – interactive - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/what-happened-to-flight-MH370/

<comment><USER2> It crashed in the southern Indian ocean. The media circus around this has been very undignified. I hope they are able to find the black box to end the speculation and give the families some closure.

<comment><USER3> They'll have to find some debris first. So far none of the satellite sightings have resulted in recovery of anything conclusively connected to the aircraft. If they do find debris they can then check the ocean current data for the time since the crash to extrapolate a rough area where the flight data recorder might be. Even then, it could take a very, very long time. Air France 447's FDR wasn't found for two years, and they knew where it had crashed within less than a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one who thinks "interactive" oversells this a little? It's essentially a slideshow with a little animation. Most "interactives" have various ways to look at the data. Or am I wrong?</comment>


Video Vectorization - <AUTHOR> https://vectorly.io/docs/technology/ <comment><USER2> This why Flash was such a nice format for some things (not going into the pitfalls of Flash - but in some ways it was fantastic).

I guess these days we have animated SVG, and [https://lottiefiles.com/](https://lottiefiles.com/) is getting some traction - but these require you to export in a specific format of course, you can't just convert/trace a bitmap movie with these. And SVG or Lottie aren't designed for longer/streaming vector animations, and they don't carry synchronised or streaming audio - Flash did all of those things.

Vectorisation of bitmap images does have some artifacts, as is evident in the Simpsons demo on this website - when possible, you should export in a vector movie format directly from the vector animation software.

It is kind of depressing that we don't have an open standard for vector movies (with sound), over a decade after Flash was killed. Sometimes it feels like technology stops or moves backwards.

<comment><USER3> Actually I wonder why we should _have_ a vector video format in the first place. Would it not be much simpler to render a series of vector images and their transformations directly to a standard video code? I mean all the modern video codecs have vector elements afaik, and most have motion prediction. One could just leave out the whole messy inference and directly tell the decoder "here is a rectangular shape, moving with that speed in this direction", no?

<comment><USER4> The primitives aren't the same for video codecs as they are for something like flash. Even the transforms you can do are fairly limited. AV1, for example, is partially complex because it allows for some scaling transforms as part of the codec.

The problem is that you could have those concepts in a video codec, but then you'd be in some sort of weird hybrid world. A general encoder would almost certainly never use most of those transforms and primitives. Meanwhile, the decoder would need to understand both to properly render anything. I'd imagine you'd frequently run into cases where the decoder fails simply because whoever wrote it didn't want to be bothered supporting the full set of features for the steam (since encoders don't employ that full feature set).

Then there is the whole danger of having a turing complete video stream format. Last thing you'd want is for someone to publish a bitcoin miner on a youtube video :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this basically the same thing which was famously used to achieve full motion video in the 1992 Amiga demo " _State of the Art_ "¹ and improved one year later in the followup " _9 Fingers_ "²?

1\. [https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=99](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=99) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2r7-ygXOzo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2r7-ygXOzo)

2\. [https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=100](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=100) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGetanBEKK8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGetanBEKK8)

<comment><USER6> I swear I once saw a special encoder format built specifically for compressing south park episodes, but I've never been able to find it again.

<comment><USER7> I remember RMVB being very popular for animated shows (I seem to remember Family Guy most of all). It had very good compression ratios.

<comment><USER8> I remember watching ~50 MB RMVB anime fansub releases circa 2004.

<comment><USER9> Yes, this was how I was able to watch 200 Naruto episodes before there was streaming video. Good times torrenting all these RealPlayer files on my 50KB/s DSL connection/

<comment><USER10> My network provider capped my bandwidth to 1mbps because of this for like five years in the early to mid 2000s. They said I used more bandwidth than an entire apartment building (not a small one). Very early days of mainstream pirating. It was a makeshift internet provider that used (stole, I guess) internet access from a nearby university.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It just boggles my mind that the front page of a page that offers a "patented vector-transcoder converts video to a vector format, reducing bitrates" doesn't include such video on its front page.

<comment><USER12> Well, it's not at the top of the page, but they did include a short proof-of- concept video of the Simpsons at the bottom of the page.

[https://files.vectorly.io/demo/v0-2-simpsons-250kbps/index.h...](https://files.vectorly.io/demo/v0-2-simpsons-250kbps/index.html)

<comment><USER13> The video always plays at a (large) fixed size... which is unfortunate for a vector data source, scaling should be relatively easy for such a file format.

(Edit: I just notice the full-screen button on the video, I really think they should be emphasizing that, since vector video should be able to stay smooth at extreme resolutions)

<comment><USER14> Resizeable link! Previous one was a bug

[https://files.vectorly.io/demo/resizeable/index.html](https://files.vectorly.io/demo/resizeable/index.html)

We're still not comfortable putting demos on our front page, for all the bugs everyone's mentioned, and other issues.

Not even sure who posted this on HN, but grateful for the attention / feedback!

<comment><USER15> It would be useful to detect browsers that don't work at all (e.g. Safari) and at least warn that it's coming. Right now it doesn't inspire much confidence...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of a paper from 2005 by Daniel Sýkora et al. [1] which tries something very similar, with the specific use case of animation video. The authors describe it best in the abstract I think:

> Video Codec for Classical Cartoon Animations with Hardware Accelerated > Playback

> We introduce a novel approach to video compression which is suitable for > traditional outline-based cartoon animations. In this case the dynamic > foreground consists of several homogeneous regions and the background is > static textural image. For this drawing style we show how to recover hybrid > representation where the background is stored as a single bitmap and the > foreground as a sequence of vector images.

The idea of using prior knowledge about the nature of the content to decide on an encoding scheme makes intuitive sense to me, though I'm not a codec person so I don't know how feasible it would be to make these ideas into the hardware-accelerated codecs we know from other methods.

Of course, these methods would make the _most_ sense when used directly by the animation studios during export, not as an afterthought. But I'll take what we can get.

By the way, the corpus of Sýkora's works [2] is really really impressive in my opinion. He gave a talk in my institute while I was researching methods around neural style, and his take on parametric models, paired with the quality (and speed!) of his results, really left a mark, if not to say they made me seriously question wtf I was doing there. His work is strictly tailored to a professional animation / video production setting, so it seems _extremely_ applicable compared to the toy-like nature of neural style methods. That is not to say he doesn't know about those. His team's recent papers actually fruitfully combine the two.

[1]: [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11595755_6](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11595755_6)

[2]: [https://dcgi.fel.cvut.cz/home/sykorad/](https://dcgi.fel.cvut.cz/home/sykorad/)

<comment><USER2> Daniel's video style transfer tech was used in this - it's really cool. [https://ebsynth.com/](https://ebsynth.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Domain specific video formats could be the future. They can reduce bandwidth requirements and offer features not available in pixel videos.

One good example is [https://asciinema.org](https://asciinema.org) , which plays back terminal sessions. The text in the "video" is selectable!

<comment><USER18> Wow. Could you embed these files in a GitHub README.md, for instance, or does the playback require a specific decoder? I've long wondered how developers manage to capture snazzy terminal demos of their projects, as the Linux tools I've tried using for this purpose generate bafflingly huge files (~750mb for roughly a minute of content).

<comment><USER19> Apparently, you can after rendering the asciicast file to SVG: [https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli](https://github.com/marionebl/svg- term-cli)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One overlooked usecase is RDP and VNC-like concepts. Right now Appetize (App streaming service) uses raster graphics. Vector would allow high-FPS streaming of Apps, making running Apps in the cloud a realistic option.

<comment><USER21> I thought RDP was already a bit more intelligent than "only" sending raster frames, sending things like window dimensions and such to be rendered on the client?

<comment><USER22> RDP is probably more intelligent than most people are aware.

Try remoting into a machine over RDP and playing a youtube video occupying a large portion of the screen. You may be surprised to find that it plays nearly perfectly, even over non-ideal network conditions (wifi). Try this same exercise with VNC and you will experience a frame maybe once every other second.

I am not sure exactly the heuristics involved, but RDP is certainly switching between modes of operation based on what kind of visual information is on the screen.

<comment><USER23> RDP also works more reliably over mobile connections than VNC, in my experience

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there market demand for this?

In a world where videos are still sent around as multi-megabyte gif files, and audio clips are still distributed with a random slideshow on YouTube, I think a lot of users aren't so bothered about efficiency - they just want the simplest thing that works.

Lots of music is most efficiently stored as MIDI, yet how many songs on iTunes are midi?

For video, raster is king because it works for everything.

<comment><USER16> If you could drastically reduce the size of videos, self-hosting video distribution pages for e.g. training material would suddenly become feasible, if not for individuals then for small companies.

<comment><USER25> If you try to do it, you'll find that self-hosting for these scenarios is surprisingly cheap. You might be able to just use YouTube, anyway.

<comment><USER16> Well, youtube is exactly _not_ self-hosted. For one reason or another, you might really not want to have to deal with youtube (or vimeo for that matter) and it would be great to have the possibility to opt out of using such a service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of the Spaceballs demos State of the Art and Nine Fingers [1]. Released in 1993 iirc.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPoYzwib7JQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPoYzwib7JQ)

</comment><comment><USER27> I think your technology would be useful for restoring old animated videos. Plus it would be useful for The catchy intro animations used on startups to demonstrate their technology.

Also would be nice to use when you have bad internet connection speed to watch e-learning material animations.

For e-learning you may need a hybrid M3u like Playlist approach with video for the presenter and vector graphics for the screen casts.

Manga videos would probably also compress well.

Children animated videos.

What if you would reduce the color space vectorize of ordinary video to for example 8 colors and smooth out the noise to make large flat surfaces could you compress it with vectors?

<comment><USER25> The average anime or children's cartoon won't compress well with this approach unless it's authored with it in mind - if you look at the average anime episode it's full of raster effects, layered gradients, 3d perspective, and mixed in 3DCG. Worse still the anime is typically sent to the broadcaster in an already-lossy format so the vectorizer will have to handle macroblocking and noise.

Here are two random screen captures from anime airing this season:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdP8gc4WAAAbkWy?format=jpg&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdP8gc4WAAAbkWy?format=jpg&name=large)

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdPwGmyXoAIjlGw?format=jpg&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdPwGmyXoAIjlGw?format=jpg&name=large)

Suffice it to say that vectorizing this content would be difficult and the vector representation wouldn't be particularly small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> We are using a similar concept in production. Rendered videos for online education within programming. It is a limited usecase of course, but brings the same benefits: 1/100 bandwidth; crisp rendered text/content instead of rasterized; Easy editing; and the content is searchable / indexable.

Using html gives us some additional benefits in that we can combine rendered with rasterized content. We also get access to a lot more advanced functionality through the browser context.

<comment><USER29> But how do you convert a video to text? Or do you record straight to text?

<comment><USER28> We provide the recording tool, so it is recorded straight to rich data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Woah this is incredible. Even with the increased CPU demands, this is a very large bandwidth savings.

>In practice however, DRM, streaming , analytics and ad placement also require javascript logic to function in web runtimes, so in real word settings web- video playback can and does use a non-trivial amount of CPU time.

I'm a little skeptical of this claim. No idea how much CPU is used for DRM, but I can't imagine it's on the order of multiple percentage points.

<comment><USER31> > Woah this is incredible. Even with the increased CPU demands, this is a very > large bandwidth savings.

GPUs happen to be very good at drawing shapes. So there's probably a lot of room for improvement, probably even enough that these kinds of videos could be faster than decoding "normal" video (for which modern CPUs and GPUs have dedicated silicon).

This doesn't mean that I'm not entirely skeptical of this, especially because this probably will fail spectacularly for animation that isn't just vector graphics, which is most animation.

<comment><USER25> GPUs are good at drawing shapes, but that doesn't actually mean that using the GPU to rasterize high-quality polygons will be fast. In practice most production solutions for this run on a combination of CPU and GPU and use complex shaders to achieve acceptable quality. If you're rendering regular alpha-blended or opaque triangles that's very fast, but they're not going to be anti-aliased and stuff like cubic splines will need to be triangulated on the CPU or GPU. Libraries like Pathfinder and Slug are the current state of the art and they are very complicated.

In comparison, video acceleration on most modern GPUs is done using dedicated silicon that typically has its own performance budget (so it doesn't eat into the GPU time to run shaders or your compositor).

<comment><USER32> Pathfinder and its ilk would _breeze_ through this sort of thing, and are still improving constantly too, because so comparatively little work has been done in the space.

Guessing very roughly based on the figures in [https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/graphics/gpu/2020/06/13/fas...](https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/graphics/gpu/2020/06/13/fast-2d-rendering.html) (and Pathfinder is integrating some of the techniques there), I'd estimate that piet-gpu and soon Pathfinder, running on Intel integrated graphics, could comfortably draw each frame of this Simpsons sample video in well under one millisecond (for an effective maximum of 6% GPU/CPU usage), probably even under a tenth of a millisecond (0.6%).

(Admittedly you could easily create a more complicated video which would be much more draining, e.g. paris-30k frames would struggle to hit 120fps on integrated graphics. Generally speaking it's easier to make pathological cases in vector encodings than raster. But let's forget about that.)

At that point, the hardware separation of video decoder and other graphics stuff (which _is_ a strong point in general, because it's so computationally expensive) is much less important.

You speak of Pathfinder and Slug as being "very complicated", and indeed they are; but video decoding is hardly any less complicated, and _much_ more computationally expensive.

<comment><USER25> Video decoding is computationally expensive, but it's done by dedicated silicon on most modern GPUs in order to deliver better battery life and better performance. So is encoding. Dedicated silicon is what these other techniques have to compete with - certainly possible, but not easy.

<comment><USER32> It's done in dedicated silicon in order to deliver better battery life and better performance, _given how extremely computationally expensive it is_.

Playing back vector video is simply much less expensive, as it's doing much less work. Assuming content like the sample videos here, I would expect vector video to be _immediately_ competitive with raster video codecs in power efficiency and performance, once you shift the bulk of the vector rendering from CPU to GPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> >Our first vectorized proof of concept for animations is a 17 second clip of the Simpsons located here. Keep in mind, our technology is still at a very early stage, and this is much optimization work left to be done.

>[https://files.vectorly.io/demo/v0-2-simpsons-250kbps/index.h...](https://files.vectorly.io/demo/v0-2-simpsons-250kbps/index.html)

There isn't a raster version to compare to, but that looks noticeably worse than what I'd expect from a raster version. There's a lot of artifacting when there's motion, and the linework looks.... off.

>[https://files.vectorly.io/demo/khan-20kbps/index.html](https://files.vectorly.io/demo/khan-20kbps/index.html)

The khan academy one looks much better, although there's still some minor artifacting, eg. when the mouse comes close to the "O" in "O_2" changes a bit.

<comment><USER34> Most hand drawn animation wont't actually vectorize well, especially the ones from the hand drawn era, where every cel is a real painting:

[https://caseantiques.com/item/lot-738-the-simpsons- animation...](https://caseantiques.com/item/lot-738-the-simpsons-animation- cel-homer-bart-2/)

Look at all that line detail. It creates subtle gradients in the final film, which don't readily transfer to vector graphics.

In this case, I think with some better pixel-based filtering before vectorization, they could've gotten a better result.

However, the much bigger problem is that the vast majority of animation uses paintings for backgrounds that aren't just solid lines and colors.

<comment><USER35> You can extend this easily and obviously by fitting gradients.

No patent should be granted for this technique on general. It is known from late 80s. Maybe some details.

Also maybe the patent office shouldn't grant the patent because "use ANN to fit x" is also obvious. Again, only for details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> AFAIK MPEG-4 experimented with encoding 3d objects but it never took off. As usual for MPEG they did not specify how to get the 3d data from a scene but how to encode them, actually how to decode them, so that innovation could happen on the encoding side.

The idea is so obvious that I would be astounded if this company gets anywhere. I'd wager many research teams already attempted this and were never heard from again.

Also note that video compression is pretty impressive these days. A typical 2 hour 1080p movie compresses down to a handful of GiB. Compare that to a typical 1080p action game which is easily ten times that big, because storing all the meshes and textures takes a lot of space, it turns out.

<comment><USER22> I think the fundamentals are already in place to support direct encoding of 3 spatial dimensions (or more) using essentially the same ideas as in JPEG/MPEG:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_cosine_transform#3-D_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_cosine_transform#3-D_DCT- II_VR_DIF)

Not sure what the pros/cons this kind of approach might bring, or if it's already being used in some areas. I find it really hard to believe that 3d modeling software ecosystem has not experimented with the idea of lossy compression. Does the loss of high frequency information cause more adverse outcomes in 3d models than in 2d models? Seems like this could be useful in games or other creative areas where mathematical precision of the final compressed artifact is not essential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why use computer vision when likely most of these animations come from some software that can/could output a vectorized video format?

You wouldn't have any conversion artifacts that way.

<comment><USER38> They do not, the vast amount are PNG files where the creator of the video themselves didn't have access to the vectors. It also is completely unrealistic to convince everyone to use a new video format, not to mention the gigantic amount of videos from the past (e.g. cartoon tv shows from the 90s) that no longer have any source material available and all that remains are digitalized copies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It sounds cool but given that the demo looks like this [0] on my bog-standard Windows 10 PC with Chrome (and Firefox and Edge) I'm assuming they've still got some bugs to work out... If it's working for anyone here I'd love to see a screen capture of the proper rendering.

[o]: [https://i.imgur.com/YO42u2C.png](https://i.imgur.com/YO42u2C.png)

<comment><USER40> I just got a black box on my Windows system.

Looks pretty good in Firefox on the Mac though: [https://imgur.com/a/rqPgQFZ](https://imgur.com/a/rqPgQFZ)

Edit: Here it is in video form [https://imgur.com/a/B0UOigX](https://imgur.com/a/B0UOigX)

<comment><USER39> Thank you! That video really is impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> As a kid, I used to trace frames from the Simpsons in Macromedia Flash (later Adobe, later discontinued) as a way of creating high-res images, so reading this article really hit home for me!

While the output of this algorithm (just like my traces) isn't as faithful to the source material as, say, H.264 is, the result looks great and has an amazing style.

This might be a great target for mobile-first webtoons.

</comment><comment><USER42> Even their job postings on LinkedIn look like somebody anger-wrote it. For an Image Processing role, they've written no ML/DL engineers which is obvious but still, as if Computer Vision isn't any way linked to whatever it is they are trying to do with compression.

</comment><comment><USER43> I actually love the slightly 'off' aesthetic on the simpsons video, and I think there's some interesting creative space where this algorithm is deliberately de-tuned for interesting results.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's awesome, but it also brings back memories of the flash-animation.

<comment><USER45> Exactly.

The funny thing is that Flash animations where the more straight-forward way. You create vector animations and export them as such.

Obviously, this is more universal. You can take any input as opposed to something that was vectorized to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Sounds like [https://github.com/fogleman/primitive](https://github.com/fogleman/primitive) but for video

</comment><comment><USER47> Patenting algorithms is supposed to be impossible.

Companies that ignore this and patent the "system and method" for implementing algorithms are being jerks.

<comment><USER42> They're using this to get VC clout & footing in job posts since they don't have any revenue the only way of convincing people for them is to say we have a 'patent'. Almost as if a shark-tank episode wrote their pitches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Maybe this finally brings back the crispy scaling quality of Flash videos. They seem to be released in lossy raster formats these days.

</comment><comment><USER49> If the vectors also relatively smoothly morph in time, then monitor-side interpolation (including motion smoothing) wouldn't be needed and directors would have more control over how interpolation is done. They've complained about monitors trying to do too much. It seems pixels are becoming obsolete for video and movies.

</comment><comment><USER50> In terms of stream format, it seems that BIFS / MPEG 4 part 11 originaly aimed at the same purpose (probably in a more efficient manner than textual SVG), isn't it ? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_11](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_11)

</comment><comment><USER31> While this is pretty cool, this naive approach will fail spectacularly for animation that isn't just vector graphics, which is most animation.

This might have a future as _part_ of a regular video codec, being used when there's mostly vector graphics on screen (or just for those areas that are vector graphics).

</comment><comment><USER51> I imagine is a posterization preprocessing step would make this simpler and we could have _very_ low bandwidth "video". If this could be done in real time, it would dramatically lower the bandwidth required for two-way video chat.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Their android SDK (no release version yet) is available at their Github repo, and so are their bulk upload tools (for talking to their servers using, I guess, a pay to use API).

</comment><comment><USER52> If I understand this correctly, will it also allow to send updates to video on the fly ? Example : Change video from X to Y time to new vectors [V1 ..] ?

</comment><comment><USER42> Not ready yet, just hyping SVG videos for now

</comment><comment><USER53> That's really interesting, excited to follow the project and see more!

</comment><comment><USER54> Curious how ML would train on vectorized video instead of rasterized.

</comment><comment><USER55> Can this technique be used to generate a CAD sketch from a photograph?

<comment><USER56> Technically, probably, although there are exisitng and likely better vector conversions for none-animated purposes.

The problem with CAD is that whilst a conversion to a rough sketch will be possible, 'CAD' implies very high accuracy or exactness, and the amount of work required to render a converted sketch accurate will likely trump that by just doing it manually in the first place.

I suppose in future some ML-aided setup that takes a drawing in AND focuses on dimensional accuracy might fare better than this video-centric solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is really cool. So the future video inspiration that will be built using only the code, without shooting again. Because everything can only be made with code. Cool!</comment>


Ask HN: Have you worked with EDI software? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone here work with EDI [0] and/or have experience setting up an EDI server for a physical goods business? I'd like to understand more and see if it's worth implementing for our business. I have not been able to find good resources on EDI online from a developer perspective.<p>[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange <comment><USER2> We're a YC co that does EDI. email@example.com

It is horrible for developers. We can point you in the right direction, depending on your industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, I'll reach out shortly!</comment></comment>


Will This "Neural Lace" Brain Implant Help Us Compete with AI? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/-will-this-neural-lace-brain-implant-help-us-compete-with-ai <comment><USER2> I love Elon, but this notion of a "bandwidth problem" in UI is what happens when someone with no training in UI whatsoever tries to extrapolate.

Imagine the neural lace already existed. Close your eyes, and picture what you would experience. Would it be 3D? Probably. Our brains have spatial hardware. Would it be auditory? Probably, our brains have hardware for that too. Would there be language? Ya, that's part of our hardware too.

So it's an experience of sights and sounds and language...

But think about an iPad... that already had sights and sounds and language. Actually it's capable of beaming far more of all three to you than it does. And it's capable of taking in far more input than you generally use. It can do 10 finger multitouch, plus sound recording. Newer devices will have full body tracking.

And yet... we don't use all that available bandwidth. For the most part we stare at a few words, some boxes and lines... why?

If Elon is right that more bandwidth is the problem, why aren't there more high bandwidth user interfaces on existing devices?

The answer is: we don't have a bandwidth bottleneck. We have a design bottleneck. And if I dropped a fully functional neural lace at Elon's office, he'd have exactly the same design bottleneck. And he'd realize that if he wants to solve his problem, he needs to hire 10 really good UI designers, and then 10 more, and then 10 more, and it's going to be decades before they max out even the bandwidth of an iPhone.

<comment><USER3> There's a _huge_ bandwidth bottleneck on both input and output sides. Your imagination of what a neural lace would do is too limited. It wouldn't be 3d, it wouldn't be auditory.

It would be having a perfect recollection of every single moment of your life.

It would be knowing the entire contents of wikipedia off by heart.

It would be understanding and speaking every language on the planet.

It would be looking out the window and seeing exactly where a friend living 1000km is in your field of view.

It would be sharing thoughts and feelings with other people in the literal sense.

It would be the ability to suppress short term urges by being constantly aware of your long term goals and your progress towards them.

It would be the ability to open an enterprise project you're working on, and instantly know the layout of their codebase.

If you're imagining the neural lace interface to be sensory, you're way off the mark. Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your head.

<comment><USER4> > Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving > your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend > it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your > head.

The point is that you need some way of interfacing. A fast bus doesn't do me any good if I don't have drivers and then interfaces to interact with the thing on the other end of that bus.

I mean, yes, ideally we'd have some kind of thought-based interface... but you've gotta design that, too.

<comment><USER5> The bandwidth of your memory is substantially higher than reading, though, is the point.

<comment><USER4> sure, I'm not saying it wouldn't be great. but my point is that you still need an interface, and my understanding is that we're pretty far away from building an interface that feels like it's just your memory. I mean, it'd be great, sure, if you could do it... but that's an interface that needs to be designed, and it's an interface that we, as humans have no idea how to design.

How would you record a memory? how would you replay that memory? how would you index the memory?

I mean, sure, the idea is to emulate how the brain works now... but how does the brain work now? I don't think we really have a very clear idea on that level.

<comment><USER6> I agree with your point, and that probably has to be a more long-term milestone that has to be achieved for it to work well and integrate seamlessly.

I think the short-term idea is to use the extreme adaptability of the human brain to reprogram itself to send and receive data from external machines. There are already prototypes of robotic arms that are not only controlled via a brain interface, but also give sensory feedback via it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> FWIW, the term "neural lace" was coined by Iain Banks.

From Excession:

One of the exhibits which she discovered, towards the end of her wanderings, she did not understand. It was a little bundle of what looked like thin, glisteningly blue threads, lying in a shallow bowl; a net, like something you'd put on the end of a stick and go fishing for little fish in a stream. She tried to pick it up; it was impossibly slinky and the material slipped through her fingers like oil; the holes in the net were just too small to put a finger-tip through. Eventually she had to tip the bowl up and pour the blue mesh into her palm. It was very light. Something about it stirred a vague memory in her, but she couldn't recall what it was. She asked the ship what it was, via her neural lace.

~ That is a neural lace, it informed her. ~ A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented.

She gulped, quivered again and nearly dropped the thing.

~ Really? she sent, and tried to sound breezy. ~ Ha. I'd never really thought of it that way.

~ It is not generally a use much emphasised.

~ I suppose not, she replied, and carefully poured the fluid little device back into its bowl on the table.

<comment><USER8> That's briefly mentioned near the end of the first paragraph:

... solution to this unappealing fate is a novel brain-computer interface similar to the implantable "neural lace" described by the Scottish novelist Iain M. Banks in Look to Windward, part of his "Culture series" books. Along with serving as a rite of passage, it upgrades the human brain to be more competitive against A.I.'s with human-level or higher intelligence.

<comment><USER7> The only things in that paragraph that are correct are:

1\. the name neural lace

2\. Iain M. Banks coined it

3\. He was Scottish.

It wasn't first described in Look to Windward. It didn't serve as a rite of passage in the Culture. It doesn't upgrade the human brain, and certainly not to the level of the Culture's ruling machine intelligences.

And at no point does the article quote the bit that I did, which serves as a cautionary note: the neural lace is the most effective implement of torture ever.

Once upon a time, the Geek Code had an entry "c++++ I'll be first in line to get the new cybernetic interace installed into my skull." It only took a little while for everyone sensible to amend that to "Waiting for skull interface 3.1, with security patches and a really good firewall."

<comment><USER8> That's disappointing. I thought the quality of Nautilus was better. I actually pay for a digital subscription.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The fundamentals of this idea are so shockingly hand-wavey, that I find this to be something of a hazard to Elon Musk's reputation.

It's far enough afield, that as blue sky projects go, this is farther away from us now, than cold fusion was in the 1980's. Hint: we're still not sure if cold fusion will arrive very soon.

It's great to see caution in light of powerful technologies, but this blue sky concept is thrown into the mix as if to say "try anything to make it work" and in so doing, leaves the overall prophetic narrative in the realm of AI dominance as inexorable.

To hear this idea floating around is like saying:

      So, let's do something to our brain. Anything.
      Sprinkle wires on it, and maybe those wires will
      help. What's in them? Who knows! But golly, anything
      to gain an edge because the who knows!

      But yeah, AI is already here to stay, and there's no
      controlling it, so just route around it.

There's no plan here. Just add in the "make-brain-smart-wires" and pray. No one explains _how_ we'll be smarter, which is especially bothersome, given that we can't quantify subjective experience, motivation and emotional reaction.

Are terrible people, criminals, dictators,and third world war lords getting these things too? Why will it make them do good? Why is it better to make an evil person more powerful than an artificial entity which we fear?

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's quite as far fetched or far out.

The fundamental point of the neural lace is increased bandwidth OUTPUT from the human mind so that it can be INPUT for some other process.

Bare with me...

Right now I am using 2 thumbs to output this message. Not very efficient. I could hop on a keyboard and up my output bandwith to 10 fingers. That would be faster but still bottlenecked on the mechanics of my hands. Sure I could use voice buts it's loud and mostly words only. Not great for quiet rooms or coding with special characters.

Now imagine an integrated set of circuits directly connected to my brain. It wouldn't have to be many. Let's say 10. Now with training I could learn to activate each circuit. Even if the training was only for a digital signal of 0 or 1 that's 2^10 unique signals. Not to mention these could be modifiers of other outputs. And the real kicker is this signal generation happens at the speed of thought. Imagine coding in an IDE at that speed!

I didn't touch on the whole AI threat but the point is simply that if we need to be defensive or offensive against an AI we need to be able to output meaning quicker than running to the server room and unplugging HAL.

<comment><USER11> Even getting reliable and useful output from the brain is still much much harder than you think it is.

> Now imagine an integrated set of circuits directly connected to my brain. It > wouldn't have to be many. Let's say 10.

10 circuits connect to _what_ , exactly? How? Where? Attaching electrodes to existing cells is invasive and uncomfortable (to say the least), and temporary because scar tissue forms and severs the connection in time.

But suppose you developed some way of reliably, durably, and non-invasively attaching external artificial neurons into your brain (to be sure, a huge jump). Where would you put these neurons, exactly? What would they synapse to? Just one or two particular neurons? How would you locate them during "install time"? How would the user access them during "run time"? Most brain-machine interfaces use motor neurons because they're easy to access. Maybe that'd be a good route, but again, doing this reliably and non-invasively is really hard, especially if there isn't a clear feedback loop.

I don't know why, but a lot of people seem to think that neuroscience is a lot closer to being "solved" than it actually is. Truth is, we barely have any idea how the brain works, let alone how we can meaningfully augment and interact with it.

<comment><USER10> I agree. It's certainly not a plug and play device from your PC and there are hurdles to cross for sure. But, over time, you could learn to control signal output just as a baby does. The mapping will be chaotic and unique to each person but every brain is different. When you imagine a yellow elephant it is probably slightly different than my process. You don't know how you do it but you do. If a reward mechanism is tied to signal output a growing brain will figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a limit to how quickly we think (I think I remember reading during drivers ed that we had an average decision making bandwidth of ~ 2^7 bits per second.) For most people there really isn't enough going on in their head that they couldn't just spend a few hours typing it out. If you want to see what happens when people type faster than they think then visit any online forum.

IMHO: good Direct Neural Interfaces probably won't be anything more interesting than the invention of GUIs. It will be neat, it will make computers more intuitive (via neural plasticity) and maybe let us directly share thought with each other (really neat! totally useless) but nothing really new will probably ever come of something like this. In fact, if it became popular I think it might make learning some things harder. Software engineering for example is entirely about communicating precisely (with others, yourself, and your computer.) If you live your whole life communicating telepathically you might never learn to communicate well.

<comment><USER13> > and maybe let us directly share thoughts with each other

...and various advertising corporations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ada Palmer's (imo fantastic) Terra Ignota series has this concept, among many others. She envisions a "set-set", or a child who is trained to use "neural lace" like implements from a very young age and barely uses their actual limbs, and these set-sets are the most adept at running computer systems. In the world of Terra Ignota, "set-set"s are highly controversial.

<comment><USER15> "Terra Incognita takes place in 2454" I'd be surprised if humans ran any computer systems by then

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Neural Lace explained on Wait, but why? [https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> How misleading. The article is about the challenges, and possible diagnostic and repair benefits, of creating electronic circuits that don't trigger the immune system. Not "competing with ai".

</comment><comment><USER18> EEG is now "neural lace", mkay, good job naming things!

</comment><comment><USER19> The media tends to push binary stories of humans vs AI. Science fiction, on the other hand, has long explored the complexity inherent in human, AI and cyborg interactions.</comment>


Ask HN: How much tumblr cost? - <AUTHOR>

it is on the rumor that tumblr rejected $1.1 billion yahoo acquisition[1] for being too low . Just curious to know, how much tumblr really deserve ?
[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/17/tumblr-is-not-impressed/ <comment><USER2> It probably is worth about that much, but it looks like they still have plans to grow it. When you don't really want to sell, it takes more than what it's actually worth to convince you to sell.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many of yahoo acquisitions have been successful? GeoCities? Flickr?</comment>


One ISP says RIAA must pay for piracy protection - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10127841-93.html <comment><USER2> Up until about a year ago I was data security coordinator for a very large cable ISP. A large portion of our team's time was spent dealing with DMCA copyright complaints.

At this point, by law, an ISP must accept copyright complaints and have a publicly registered copyright agent (At our ISP, our team's director was the registered agent). The DMCA gives ISPs some choice in how they handle the complaints, but they can not be ignored. I fear this ISP owner may not be fully aware of current obligations(I am not speaking about non-actionable RIAA threats or future plans).

We hated this work. Our main focus was catching criminals that were committing crimes either utilizing or against our network. With an online customer base in the millions we would get thousands of complaints a day. If a big movie came out on Friday, for the next week or two we could get upwards of ten thousand a day. We feared Star Wars openings like you wouldn't believe. You can imagine a team of 6 very techy hacker guys getting extremely depressed spending 2-3 hours a day matching IP logs to modem MACs and finally onto a customer.

Our only solace in this work was something that my manager made clear was a department goal and practice. That this menial task was meant to protect the customer base from the copyright holder's carpet bombing mentality. We kept accurate data and because of that, were able to simply discard a large portion of the complaints as inaccurate. When the evidence was clear, we forwarded the complaint to the subscriber by email and snail mail. We instructed our subscribers to not contact the copyright holder to discuss it as this would just enable the holder to get identifying info(name, address) without a subpoena.

We also warned our customers that after a single complaint the copyright holder may subpoena our records and take them to court. Out of the almost million complaints a year, I saw an insignificant amount of cases ever go this far. The DMCA complaints were largely a scare tactic and often nothing more.

I was not privy to any knowledge of the compensation we received for completing this process, but did gleam from over hearing from the higher ups that we did indeed receive some money for the process or were in process of creating contracts to do so. I wish I had more info on that aspect to share with news.y.

The guys doing this work hate it, but the law forces it onto them. Until the laws change, no security department is going to bend over backwards for these guys.

It was an amazing and exciting job despite this issue.

On a lighter note, for your random facts file, the movie "Mean Girls" was the number one infringed file for 4 years running. Lots of laughs were had seeing what kind of weird and random stuff the people were downloading. Fun times.

<comment><USER3> _"You can imagine a team of 6 very techy hacker guys getting extremely depressed spending 2-3 hours a day matching IP logs to modem MACs and finally onto a customer."_

This seems like a task begging to be automated?

<comment><USER2> I absolutely agree and we did our best to automate as much of the process as possible. There were a few problems that required a pair of human eyes though. First, no copyright holder sent a complaint in the same format. Some sent a simple email with a file name and ip/time stamp while others sent a long poorly rendered xml file that was automatically sent from some contractor's hacked torrent client. There was no rhyme or reason to the manner in which we received the data. Another issue was file name problems. The copyright holder would send out complaints for a user sharing the movie "Dune" when in reality the file was only a copy of pictures taken dirt biking at the local dunes.

The automation mostly came in pulling known data like our IP block from the complaints, and having a good IP logging system. We broke the process down to 3 steps, each very quick. A complaint only took 3-5 seconds to process, so the issue was just the sheer volume in them.

When the end result is the possibility of a lawsuit, it is in everyone's best interest to maintain a human element in the chain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has "sick burn" written all over it. The RIAA wants to save their own money by asking companies to lose their own. I'm actually rather surprised it took someone to actually stand up and go "wait a minute" before there was any coverage as to how much BS this is.

</comment><comment><USER5> If the RIAA's losing so much real money over this filesharing,. then the costs of paying an ISP to reduce it _should_ pay back in droves.

... unless they're full of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"...noting that it's especially difficult nowadays because it's extremely easy to spoof IP addresses."_

Is it really? It may be easy to spoof the IP of _requests_ in protocols like HTTP (assuming the networks don't filter erroneous packets), but the RIAA doesn't typically go after people who merely download, they go after the people who share.

It seems like it would be much harder to spoof an IP when you're trying to act as a server (as the people who are sharing on BitTorrent and other P2P networks are) since you need to actually receive the requests to know what/when to respond with.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons they only go after the sharers (and of course, to cut of the supply... like going after drug dealers instead of drug users)

<comment><USER6> "and of course, to cut of the supply... like going after drug dealers instead of drug users"

and we all know how well that turned out...</comment></comment>


Blackbird: an adjustable car rig that creates photoreal CG cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.themill.com/portfolio/3002/the-blackbird <comment><USER2> This is an amazing fusion of robotics, AR, compositing and 3D tools... I wonder if any team on the project could elaborate on the technologies used and what it took to go from zero to 60 in 2 years? That seems like a punishing development schedule for an idea like this.</comment>


Managing 1.4 Petabytes can be tough, see how Blip.tv does it - <AUTHOR> http://webpulp.tv/post/972540904/blip-tv-jared-klett

<comment><USER2> This was a really interesting interview and I was surprised at some of the technology stack in use.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was more shocked to see that they use CVS. Then I remember that at job- before-last we were using RCS so I guess it's not all that weird.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't believe people still use mod_perl...</comment>