The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/personaltech/the-soylent-revolution-will-not-be-pleasurable.html?hp <comment><USER2> There is a false all-or-nothing mentality being forced on Soylent. Part of this is Soylent's original marketing as a "food replacement". Part is their present refusal to make their product taste better. But part is our cultural unfamiliarity with separating utility from luxury eating.

I'm a foodie. I delight in trying new dishes, restaurants and cuisines. I'm also a marked extrovert. I constantly seek out social settings and experiences. Combined with my ineptitude at cooking and address in Manhattan, we have why I eat one to three meals out a day. I manage the healthfulness of my diet with simple rules. Salads for lunch, finish all the greens on your plate before moving to other things, defaulting to seafood over red meat, etc.

But this comes at a cost, both in dollars and in time. Many times, a meal will go half eaten, because I have to rush out for a call. Other times, dinner gets pushed out so late that the only options aren't healthy. Yes, I could schedule meals into the day, but sometimes I prefer doing other things. And it's not just work! I feel starved during film festivals, too, between full schedules and my refusal to feed on solely popcorn and tapas for two weeks.

I don't think too many people will ever seriously replace a majority of their meals with something like Soylent. But even shifting my weekday lunches and late-night snacks from salads, paninis and starving to something cheap, healthy, and available would be welcome. A prerequisite to this would be Soylent not tasting like pancake batter. Utility doesn't have to be unpleasant. But there is a place for this amongst people who love food, love people, and aren't necessarily workaholics.

<comment><USER3> I would recommend against getting too many calories for too long from something like Soylent. One issue people are missing is Wolf's law: bone grows into stress. You want strong knees and ankles? Run. If you don't chew you will end up with a glass jaw and no teeth. This is a common problem in the elderly: they start loosing a couple teeth and they're quickly all gone because they modify their eating choices to avoid foods that have become difficult to chew.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be surprised to see the Soylent guys come out with a solid food version for this and other reasons.

<comment><USER5> perhaps it could be green, plasticky chips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A. Cheap. B. Healthy. C. Pleasurable. D. Fast/Easy

Pick three.

ABC = Homecooked meals, ACD = fast food, BCD = eating out, ABD = Soylent. Not complicated. Soylent provides a specific set of design tradeoffs that suit certain situations better than the alternatives.

<comment><USER7> Why is soylent not having a billion dollar DoD contract at this time?

<comment><USER8> IIRC one of the big things they had to change with the MREs was to add more variety. Troops get low morale eating the same thing over and over.

<comment><USER9> My grandfather fought on the front lines in the Pacific Theater during the War.

Being at the very end of the supply chain, they got the worse, least desirable MREs after the variety had been cherry-picked by everyone else upstream. I forget exactly which ones they were but it was pretty grim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [For a purported breakthrough with such grand plans for reshaping the food industry, I found Soylent to be a punishingly boring, joyless product. From the plain white packaging to the purposefully bland, barely sweet flavor to the motel-carpet beige hue of the drink itself, everything about Soylent screams function, not fun. It may offer complete nourishment, but only at the expense of the aesthetic and emotional pleasures many of us crave in food.] [It suggests that Soylent's creators have forgotten a basic ingredient found in successful tech products, not to mention in most good foods. That ingredient is delight.]

Christ, it's as if he's willfully ignored everything; that's the POINT of Soylent, to give the option of a functional meal not for pleasure, so that you actually _have_ a choice whether. Right now you don't, you have non-nutritious meals that don't take preparation time and are cheap, and nutritious meals that take vast amounts of time to prepare and/or are generally more expensive to acquire/prepare.

Now you have a third choice, complete nutrition at cost, minus the pleasure associated with the above two choices.

<comment><USER11> Right - Soylent will be successful based on how it defines its mission, not as a replacement for traditional food but as a better second choice. However, if I remember correctly some of the first publicity I saw about Soylent pitched it like it was somehow a _replacement_ for food - and that's what I think this writer was reacting to. I agree with the author that I still would be reluctant to sacrifice the pleasures of eating even a non-nutritious meal for complete, ready-to-go nutrition (if that's even what Soylent is) more than a few times.

Soylent strikes me as a food not unlike MREs for the military or some of the dehydrated food that astronauts take up to space. That is, it could be the kind of nutrition that targets people in extreme circumstances, who might _desperately_ need nutrition and energy but, because they're in the middle of a war zone, or in a space suit hovering above Earth, cannot get to it.

<comment><USER12> It could also be useful in developing nations where access to food isn't as prevalent as it is in first-world countries.

Pleasurable or not, Soylent does offer huge value in these situations simply in that it's a way to _not die_.

<comment><USER13> People in developing nations can eat for an entire _week or more_ on $3. Soylent's got a long way to go before it's anything more than an overpriced meal replacement shake.

It's not even a disruptive product--there have been similar meal replacement shakes available at Whole Foods for many years now, at similarly outrageous prices. Soylent's innovation is its marketing--especially in identifying and chasing its target market.

<comment><USER6> What other meal replacement products? There are plenty of _supplements_ but are there other products that claim to give you 100% of your necessary nutrition with 3 daily servings?

<comment><USER13> Garden of Life and Shakeology are the two big ones I remember off the top of my head. There are more. Google is your friend. ([https://www.google.com/search?q=vegan+meal+replacement+shake](https://www.google.com/search?q=vegan+meal+replacement+shake))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the related video on that page: _" if this was all we had to survive, then what would be the point of living"_? That basically sums it up. I've ate field meals before in the Army and although they are okay too, I take the preparation of good food seriously. It's one of the relatively inexpensive luxuries of modern first world society. Taking the time to enjoy a meal gives my spirit a rise.

And honestly, when the world seems to be moving towards whole foods, organic meals, and avoiding processed foods, this seems to be going in the opposite direction. Not saying it has bad ingredients, but that the _appearance_ of being processed will dissuade people.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wrote this comment on an earlier soylent thread that got buried, but I think it could find a big market in people who care A LOT about eating specific nutrient proportions.

I'm working on the website Eat This Much ([http://www.eatthismuch.com](http://www.eatthismuch.com)) and a huge portion of our audience are people that want to eat EXACTLY 40% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 30% from protein (that's part of the zone diet, as an example). Our meal plan generator allows you to request those proportions, but sometimes it can't meet the exact targets due to any number of other constraints, and it's a huge source of complaints from our users. It's a pretty complicated problem to solve while trying to give people a varied and interesting diet with real food, but Soylent makes it very simple. I use my own site as much as possible, and I'm excited to have it give me half of my calories from Soylent (probably my breakfast and lunch).

<comment><USER16> this site is pretty cool. i'd do it if it didn't cost almost 3x as much as pandora per year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The main appeal of Soylent for me (I've been taking somewhere between 50%-75% of my calories from a DIY Soylent recipe for about three months now) is the ability to very precisely control how many calories I am consuming on a daily/weekly basis. I had been trying to lose weight for a while before switching to Soylent, but found it difficult to always know exactly how many calories were in something (especially when eating out or cooking something using a wide variety of ingredients). The frustrations stemming from this made progress difficult.

With Soylent, I know exactly how many calories I'm eating. I can increase or decrease very easily to make room for "cheat meals" on evenings and weekends which I enjoy much more frequently and with less guilt than I did when I was trying to control my calorie intake with regular food. My weight loss progress has resumed to exactly the rate it should based on the number of calories I'm eating, which is possibly further proof that my estimation skills on a non- Soylent diet were not very good.

Soylent is a preferable solution to this problem over something like Slim-fast or Ensure mainly due to cost, but also taste. The meal replacement shakes marketed for calorie-control/weight loss are generally very sugary or sweet tasting which is not something I could do for 2-3 meals a day for 5 days a week. Something more bland and flavorless like Soylent is much easier to handle as a staple meal long-term.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's what my on-the-street perspective is telling me: Over time the shelf space for ready-to-go protein shakes at the local convenience store chains(Walgreens, CVS, etc.) has gradually crept up. Some of these shakes still do the "joke's on you, this 'healthy' shake has as much sugar as Coca- Cola" thing. But there is a generation of them, led primarily by the Muscle Milk brand, which has stuck pretty strictly to pulling in good nutritional- facts numbers and working on taste second.

I'm a buyer of these shakes because for me, the consumption experience is mediated by before-and-after aspects as well as what the product tastes like. "Will I feel good an hour after I have this?" I tell myself. And while I have to pay a little more for the privilege of that, it's worth it for me.

Will it be a fad? I don't know. The trend has been upward so far and I think Soylent could easily ride it.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's actually one of the fairer reviews I've seen. I think the author misses the appeal of Soylent for a lot of people, which is that for these people, food itself is primarily a _hassle_ rather than a source of joy. These people would rather just scarf down a boring drink for a few seconds per day to keep themselves alive than deal with the problem of deciding on, buying, and preparing traditional food.

<comment><USER20> I think it speaks to some other problem if people think eating is a hassle. Eating is super important to live, determines a lot of your health and most people here have missed that it is also a very important social interaction. Maybe this is the HN bubble but eating is not just about sustenance. Could you get someone who is not a workaholic tech employee to eat this willingly? Somehow I doubt it.

<comment><USER19> > Maybe this is the HN bubble but eating is not just about sustenance.

It _is_ only about sustenance for some people. Many (probably most) people enjoy a lot of the food preparation and eating process. Others, myself included, do not. Maybe it's because my sense of taste or smell is stunted. Maybe it's because I'm socially underdeveloped. So be it. It's certainly not because I'm a workaholic tech employee, even if I currently am, because it has been the case as long as I can remember. Whatever the reason, I really don't enjoy the experience of preparing or eating food.

<comment><USER20> I think you are correct... this is for a niche market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I personally just don't like this concept that food is a "nuisance". Or healthy food rather. Food and meals are the one thing that brings people together and offers up conversation, laughter, and emotion. Food is something that a lot of people enjoy and look forward too.

Are we really supposed to just take soylent as a healthy alternative for sustenance so we can continue to work? Just buy a juicer and keep it natural then. But really, take the break and eat a meal with a human being. You've got one life. Live it.

<comment><USER22> > Are we really supposed to just take soylent as a healthy alternative for > sustenance so we can continue to work? Just buy a juicer and keep it natural > then. But really, take the break and eat a meal with a human being. You've > got one life. Live it.

I didn't see any stipulations on the soylent website requiring you to avoid socializing and stay chained to your desk while drinking it. Maybe I missed some small print?

<comment><USER21> No not at all. But I don't see eating as a problem that needs a solution. I didn't mean for my comment to mean that soylent is anti social.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know why there is so much hype about this product still. Maybe there's a niche market for people who are so busy they forget to eat (another problem in and of itself) but for everyone else it completely misses all that is good about eating: taste, social interaction, texture, experience, temperature, variety. Be right back, asking my girlfriend if she wants to sit and chug Soylent tonight instead of going out for Thai.

<comment><USER6> false dilemma.

nobody says you can't go out for Thai. but if you find yourself regularly scarfing down a Subway sandwich for lunch and losing an hour of time in the process, Soylent might be a healthier, more efficient alternative.

<comment><USER20> Except I'm never doing that, so I will never buy this product. I _want_ to lose an hour eating because I can spend time with my friends or take a break or talk to people. Subway isn't that bad either, and is certainly more enjoyable to eat than Soylent.

<comment><USER6> There are literally millions upon millions of people who spend at least one meal a day just consuming food and not socializing. If you've ever worked in a traditional office environment people regularly take lunch at their desk if they are too busy to socialize. It's not hard to understand the appeal of Soylent if you step just slightly outside your own personal experience.

<comment><USER20> I do work in a traditional office environment. The problem is being too busy, not eating. Eating is not a problem that needs to be solved. Being too busy is the problem that needs to be solved.

<comment><USER23> > Eating is not a problem that needs to be solved.

Obesity in America would like to have a word with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If this is truly all the body needs, then how do they deal with uptake issues? There are several things that compete for uptake in the body in the same way that oxygen and carbon monoxide compete when binding to the hemoglobin in your blood.

E.g.:

\- Omega-6 fatty acids will push out the much better Omega-3 fatty acids. IIRC, the recommended ratio is 2:1 (Omega-3 to Omega-6)[1].

\- Absorption of iron is inhibited by calcium.

[1] FYI, most oils have a _ton_ of Omega-6, and not much Omega-3. One exception here is coconut oil, which has little of either.

</comment><comment><USER25>
      costs about $3 per serving

Too fucking expensive for a cleverly named bachelor chow.

<comment><USER19> But probably considerably cheaper than what every person who has ordered Soylent was previously paying per serving.

<comment><USER25> No way. I can scrape by on ramen, potato chips, soda, hot dogs, orange juice concentrate, cereal and milk, and come out ahead (YMMV).

GNC quality protein shakes be damned. This stuff has to hit the 25 cent mark, per glass, to qualify for it's target market: the unwed and unloved who have no one to cook them decent meals while toiling away at shit jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> peter-row It sounds like the Soylent Revolution _will_ be pleasurable.

If you have Soylent for one or two meals a day, then you'll really enjoy everything else. The mechanics of pleasure are well understood - you enjoy things more when you don't get them so often.

And it's cheap(ish), and apparently not too unhealthy.

<comment><USER26> > And it's cheap(ish), and apparently not too unhealthy.

That's really too early to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have nothing constructive to add. Just as a Chinese who frequently hosts dinner party for friends and coworkers, the idea of someone voluntarily using soylent as meal substitute is utter crazy and I feel personally insulted by the mere existence of such horrific product.

</comment><comment><USER28> Still waiting for someone to invent Soylent Ramen...

I bought all the ingredients and made DIY soylent from one of the hacks someone posted... The taste was a serious problem. I wanted to drink it for a week, but there was a 0% chance of that happening the way it tasted.

Then I tried making Soylent Pasta, but boiled out all the nutrients and the water turned piss yellow ([http://juliansarokin.com/soylent-for-science-pasta- bad-decis...](http://juliansarokin.com/soylent-for-science-pasta-bad- decision/))... But if there was a way to not mess that up, I think that could be really interesting.

Still waiting on my official Soylent, hopefully it tastes better than my catastrophe.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wouldn't Soylent eventually add some flavouring to make it less utilitarian/boring? It's still the first version of the product and it seems that the author doesn't even consider the possibility that there would be variations of the powder for variety and different taste preferences in the future. Does anyone know if they ever stated anywhere that the taste won't change?

</comment><comment><USER30> Does the author not understand that significant numbers of people _already_ don't often get the opportunity to eat food that could be described as enjoyable? He seems to dismiss the idea without justification.

Given the choice between unhealthy almost-but-not-quite zero-variety food and healthy actually zero-variety food, the latter strikes me as the better option - and if you don't happen to live near a source of good food (no bakeries, butchers, delis, fresh fruit vendors, etc . . .), being low on time or money means making that choice (or not having one to make).

Speaking for myself, the cheap and ultra-quick food I usually ate during my years at school was just the same thing over and over - it didn't taste very good to begin with and certainly didn't improve with time. I couldn't fix something myself, or wait for someone else to fix something, or spend time socializing (that's what weekends were for!), or go somewhere else. I can say that I honestly would have preferred something like Soylent on grounds of both convenience and taste.

</comment><comment><USER31> Soylent strikes me as too similar to multivitamins, which haven't fared well in many studies, even though they contain a bunch of the stuff your body needs.

There is a lot we don't understand about how food and human nutrition works, and I'd be nervous about relying on a heavily engineered food as more than an occasional addition to my diet.

<comment><USER32> Yes, 'There is a lot we don't understand about how food and human nutrition works' pretty much sums it up.

Worth noting that in some reports, multivitamin preparations have been associated with adverse health outcomes. Popping pills of whatever kind can be dicey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Obesity and diabetes imply that a lot of Americans have an absolutely crap diet that probably isn't delivering much pleasure, either. If Soylent becomes a popular alternative for people who can't feed themselves properly, it could shave billions off health care costs.

<comment><USER34> I'd be interssted to see how many people will chose Soylent over fast food. Many people on HN have said they would. I suspect most people wouldn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "actually Farthard was in my original lede, was wisely cut" \- Farhad Manjoo, the author of the piece [1]

[1] [https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/471825996174217216](https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/471825996174217216)

</comment><comment><USER36> The only thing missing that will stop Soylent making heaps of money is salt and msg. People will eat anything if you add salt and msg even some oatmeal goop with added vitamins.

People who think nobody will eat Soylent because it isn't a pleasurable home cooked product have missed the mountain of products on sale that are nothing much more more than starch and oil with salt and msg added. Take something soylent-like and add a flavour pouch that will make it taste like instant ramen. Then you just have to work out how to make it 99c a meal and you will clean up.

</comment><comment><USER37> Compared to what, the TV-dinner and fast-food revolution?

</comment><comment><USER38> This reads like the opinion of one who is scared of the future.

<comment><USER39> Because dystopic ideas are the new cool, with self driving cars and astronaut food... seems that the future is designed by startrek fans that did never read 1984.

<comment><USER40> As much as I like to shake my cane at those confounded kids and their self- driving automobiles, at least they can claim their revolutionary world-saving product would actually be revolutionary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's telling that even though this individual claims to dislike Soylent, he continued to drink it for 90% of his meals on some days. Unless artificially forcing himself to drink Soylent was part of the experiment, his actions say he prefers convenience over taste. The fact that so many commentators seem terrified of the addition of another _option_ for food, without removing the ones we have today, tells me Soylent is going to be truly disruptive. The skepticism of Soylent in the mainstream media has been very much "I don't know why, but it just seems wrong to me." Appeal to tradition 101.

<comment><USER11> I think he was on assignment - that's why he consumed only Soylent for a week. It's just like the Forbes writer who forced herself to live only on BitCoin for a week. In her case, even though her first experience was uneven and a huge hassle, she eventually repeated her experiment, and found her experience was vastly improved. Unfortunately for Soylent, I think it's going to taste exactly the same in a year.

<comment><USER6> But he says that he didn't only consume Soylent for a week, that he still ate regular meals. And then went on to say that there were times when he drank Soylent he would have preferred a regular meal. It makes no sense, why not just drink Soylent when the lack of taste was less important than the efficiency? This would have been a fairer test. If by the end of the week the guy was no longer drinking Soylent for any meals, then I'd buy that Soylent was doomed, but that's not what the experiment was.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Volv – Read the world's latest stories in 9 seconds. No bias. No BS - <AUTHOR> https://www.volvmedia.com/ <comment><USER2> Is there any information on why the creators feel able to claim that their AI 'eliminates bias'? Seems like an incredibly bold (and almost certainly incorrect) claim.

<comment><USER3> Media bias is one of the main reasons we created this app. These days, bias is inescapable. Different media entities are echoing different realities about the same event. And people are taking journalists' opinions as facts. This is affecting our perception of the truth and polarizing the country.

After tons of research, we have established a set of guidelines to tackle different forms of bias. Our AI flags everything from extreme adjectives with positive negative connotations to opinions. We always make sure every article published is neutral. An easy check for you to check is for you to read our blurb on a political topic and compare it to the article we link under "read more" that redirects you to one of the major publications.

There's always room for improvement and we are working to make it even better. I'd love to know your thoughts once you download it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks interesting, wish it worked on the web too without an app.

<comment><USER5> \+ deffo have a web version. Installing the app is a fair bit of friction.

<comment><USER4> Its not about friction for me. An app has a lot more ability to spy on me than an web page - I don't want to be volv's product to advertisers. Another reason is screen size, I want to read the news on a bigger screen than my phone offers.

<comment><USER3> We have designed the app keeping our generation's preferences and habits in mind. So it's complex news in easy and quick digestible bits.

The app is specially designed to fit an article within the screen so you can read in a glance and keep scrolling for more almost like a social feed.

<comment><USER4> > keeping our generation's preferences and habits in mind

Wow, you might as well have answered with 'OK Boomer' (which I am not). I'm not your target, which is okay with me, would have been a better way to say that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting concept. I currently use Ground News and love that. Is this very different from it? (before I actually download it)

<comment><USER3> Hey! Yes, it's quite different. One of our main USPs is short content that you can go through in a few seconds. We cut the clutter and distill the main bits you need from the entire article. You can think of it as a newsletter in real- time, on several categories.

When it comes to bias, companies like Ground News, Perspective, etc give you multiple articles on the topic but let's be real - no one has time for that. That's why we created an entire guideline on different forms of bias, we eliminate everything that our AI flags as bias - from adjectives to opinions - and make sure the sentiment is always center/neutral.

Check it out - it is literally the easiest and quickest way to stay updated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love the site. Great landing page. Gonna checkout the app.

<comment><USER3> Thank you!! I'd love your thoughts on the app.</comment></comment>


Harmful Consequences of Postel's Maxim - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-01 <comment><USER2> HTML suffers badly from this. Even basic lexical syntax, as in tag and comment syntax, is not strictly enforced. Browsers became very forgiving, and in HTML 5, recovery from a long list of common errors, including comments with bad syntax, was formalized in the spec. There are pages of error recovery gimmicks defined in the spec, and HTML 5 parsers have to do all that stuff. (This is one reason why html5parser for Python is so slow.) There used to be tricks for doing different things in IE and Firefox based on how they handled errors.

On the first error, a browser should display an error bar in the middle of the page, then proceed on a best-effort basis, ignoring most styling. Bad pages would still be readable in emergencies, but they'd be annoying enough to get fixed.

(Until you write a web crawler, you don't realize how bad HTML is in the wild. There are low-level syntax errors. There are pages with more than one , , or  section, or where those sections are out of order. There are nesting errors which result in page trees a thousand deep. There are tags that don't belong in HTML. There's syntactically incorrect ad code from major vendors.)

<comment><USER3> > This is one reason why html5parser for Python is so slow.

I presume you mean html5lib and not the new html5-parser; html5lib isn't slow because of error recovery: html5lib is slow because it's a parser written in Python. The parsing performance is largely taken up, last I benchmarked the VM, by allocation overhead (heck, reading s[0] of a string s _causes an allocation_ ) and super-simple VM instructions (primarily dispatch overhead).

What I'd like to see is how much faster an HTML parser would be if it rejected any document with a parse error at the first parse error; I doubt it'd be much (you'd still need the branches to detect the parse error, though the code might be smaller and you'd get better cache locality).

<comment><USER4> Have a super strict engine that parses as fast as possible, and do a full fail on a parse error and fall back to a more lax engine and start parsing from scratch. People that care about speed will notice that they can get a speedy page by being strict, and those that don't care will see a slight slowdown in their page times. Automatic incentivization of good future behavior.

<comment><USER5> This idea comes up a lot, but it is based on faulty assumptions. First, time parsing HTML is irrelevant compared to network latency and even DOM and CSS work that browsers do. Second, a parser that handled only, say, strict XML would certainly be easier for the parser author to write, but it would be slower than the optimized parsers browsers already have for HTML. If optimized, it still would not be significantly faster than a full HTML5 parser.

Your idea wouldn't work because it would never create any noticeable impact on page loading speed even in the best case scenario. That's assuming that browsers want to maintain and ship two totally different parsers, which (cf. XHTML) they don't.

<comment><USER4> > time parsing HTML is irrelevant compared to network latency and even DOM and > CSS work that browsers do.

This is likely true for most sites on the internet. It is worth noting that on an overly large HTML file of ~1.4 MB, stuffing that into an HTML element object by assigning innerHTML with that content takes approximately 75 ms on my i7-6700HQ.[1] A much larger file of 10 MB took 656 ms to parse, which seems to indicate it scales linearly and processes ~16KB/ms (16MB/s). For the most heavy real sites I could find, it generally took no longer than 25 ms.

It's worth noting that 16MB/s is actually only slightly faster than 100Mb/s, so some people may actually take longer parsing than receiving the HTML. That said, the parsing/processing tested here may be doing more than what we strictly care about for this diuscussion, so I'm not including it as a rebuttal, but as a point of reference that thought was interesting.

1: var el = document.createElement('html'); console.log((new Date()).getTime()); el.innerHTML = htmlstr; console.log((new Date()).getTime());

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The IETF title makes it sound like developers everywhere were using Postel's words as guidance.

Instead, relaxed or permissive parsing of files/protocols/API _even though they have well-documented specifications_ is an unavoidable emergent phenomenon. The various examples across domains is fascinating:

\- HTML (missing tags, unpaired tags, etc). Developers may prefer to strictly parse HTML and any non-compliance results in a "page error". But the _websurfers want that page data_ so developers end up guessing the HTML authors intentions and renders the page.

\- PDF (malformed pdf files that Adobe can read). Lots of utilities out there create bad pdf files and Adobe Acrobat has lots of workarounds to read them. Even though Adobe Inc _controls the pdf specification_ , even they succumb to the pressure of adding workarounds to their parser to render broken pdf files. To add to the insanity, _all 3rd-party industrial-strength pdf parsers_ end up copying Adobe Acrobat's behavior to parse broken pdf files!

\- Win32 API. Programmers out in the wild will notice an undocumented behavior of an API that's not in the contract and _start to depend on it._ When a new version of Windows is released that removes the undocumented behavior and breaks the 3rd-party app, the customer blames the "Microsoft Windows upgrade" and not Quicken or videogame company. Raymond Chen has written several articles on Microsoft adding "shims" to Windows codebase to help "guarantee compatibility" for misbehaving apps incorrectly using the Win32 API. If the 3rd-party app is important enough to consumers that it prevents them from upgrading Windows (in other words -- pay Microsoft money), it means Microsoft will bend over backwards to accommodate the badly-written code from the vendor.

The external forces are too great to enforce perfect discipline of strict parsing across all parties. Even the big proprietary companies like Microsoft and Adobe can't enforce their own standards-compliant parsing. An open standard from IETF would have no chance at all.

We'd like to think of a "computing standard" as some inviolable contract but history has shown it is actually an organic (and unspoken) "social" agreement. This is unavoidable unless we all agree to have all software "approved" by a central authority before anyone can download or use it.

<comment><USER7> > Developers may prefer to strictly parse HTML and any non-compliance results > in a "page error". But the _websurfers want that page data_ [...]

Note that similar thing was happening with SSL/TLS connections for a long time: developers may prefer to strictly verify X.509 certificates, but websurfers want that page data. The result of developers bowing to accepting invalid certificates was hurting everybody.

Nowadays the situation is much better, because browser developers made visiting sites with self-signed, expired, or incorrectly named certificates significantly harder.

<comment><USER6> _> developers may prefer to strictly verify X.509 certificates, but websurfers want that page data._

I categorize that scenario in a different bucket because novice users don't understand the security implications of broken TLS. So, the users don't want that data _but they don 't know it_. The developers in this case are looking out for the user. (Same security situation as developers helping the user by restricting cross-site scripting or address bar hijacking.)

To me, that's not the same as the forgiving parsers of HTML and PDF. Whether the HTML is missing
 closing tags like this:

This is paragraph 1.

This is paragraph 2.

Or is 100% compliant like this:

This is paragraph 1.

This is paragraph 2.

... the websurfer just wants the page rendered in both cases.

<comment><USER7> > To me, that's not the same as the forgiving parsers of HTML and PDF.

Oh, of course it's not the same. The point is, in both cases users want strictness, but don't know that they want. Users want web pages that are easy for their browsers to parse; "want" to different degree, yes, even an indirect "want", but still.

If browsers fail to display web page with invalid markup, developers are forced to fix their sh&t instead of adding another exception to an already big pile of "steaming let's not" in the standard. And we had a precedent of going down this way with X.509 certificates. I think it's a pity that the way is too hard for something not as critical as SSL/TLS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem is that there are two very different contexts: users and developers. If a developer is testing their new program by having it interface with your program, you want to be strict in what you accept; this enables them to make their program strict in what it emits, and helps bugs surface early. But if an end-user is hooking your program up to some other program, then you want to be generous in what you'll accept, so that it'll work.

Compilers solve this by having an intermediate levels of strictness: warnings, which a developer who's providing input to the compiler is expected to fix, but which an end-user doesn't have to. This captures the benefits of both strict and lax input checking.

It helps to make similar distinctions in other contexts, whether that's having an explicit notion of "warnings", or just putting messages in log-file output. It also helps if a format has a well-known extra-strict checker around, which developers can test their programs' output on.

<comment><USER9> > But if an end-user is hooking your program up to some other program, then > you want to be generous in what you'll accept, so that it'll work.

No, you absolutely don't. The only reason why you would possibly need that in the first place is because software tends to be far too forgiving. Where software enforces procotol/format compliance, a normal end user essentially does not ever get to see any deviating input because generating software is written to the standard right from the start, and the few cases where that fails, the actual bug gets fixed.

Also, you actually can't. When the standard does not specify the meaning of some input, then there is no meaning. Whatever meaning you invent for it is just that: Your invention. The next software likely will interpret things differently. You do not actually have a standardized format when multiple implementations speak the same syntax, they also need to have the same semantics. Just doing something in response to broken input does not produce interoperability, but just undefined behaviour.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like /r/netsettelr's comments in reddit.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6u1jq2/the_har...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6u1jq2/the_harmful_consequences_of_postels_maxim_an/dlpe1hx/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Interestingly, I seem to have the opposite complaint about XML parsers. People generate crappy, broken XML all the time, but many of the services that digest it are horribly picky and unwilling to take even valid inputs.

Some refuse empty fields and demand they not be included as tags. Some demand a specific list of tags, and insist all be included even if empty. Some clearly have non-recursive parsing, only honor certain depths of tree. Some have completely hard-coded parsers, and only accept certain tags _in certain orders_. The list goes on.

Is this just Sturgeon's Law, where things are broken in both directions? Or is there some predictable reason that some tools become overly permissive, and others overly restrictive?

<comment><USER11> I have the same with JSON. Sure, when I'm using JSON/REST APIs everything works fine, but I deal a lot with JSON on disk, and it happens a lot that you have sloppy JSON because people hand-edit it. Trailing commas and comments are the most common, but sometimes you just have js/python object literals dumped into a file.

In every language I work in, I find myself writing a lenient JSON parser. So far, Python, C++, and Nim (for JS, there is already JSON5).

I am also working on a whitespace and comment preserving parser that round- trips, so you can change a value in a configuration file without loosing comments. (Currently, I always produce standard JSON so compatibility is not an issue.)

I have been thinking about publishing these parsers, but after seeing how much abuse and nasty comments the JSON5 guy got, I have been holding off...

<comment><USER12> > I am also working on a whitespace and comment preserving parser that round- > trips, so you can change a value in a configuration file without loosing > comments.

I am 80% done writing such a parser for a over-engineered legacy config file format. It isn't that hard really, you just need a parser framework/library that can output a complete parse tree (a tree where a preorder traversal covers every byte in the input contiguously, exactly once).

The remaining 20% of the work is keeping track of the line and column number (almost there), cleaning up the code, and being able to reserialize the AST to a binary format (for reloading in another process where I don't want to have to rerun the original PEG)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If developers can't even be bothered to get protocols right, how the hell are they going to get security right?

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian- headsets](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets)

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the benefits of Postel's Maxim, have far outweighed the negatives. One of the reasons why the web took off, is that normal everyday non-geeky people could in a few minutes crank out a webpage that could be viewed by the whole world. The browsers just made it work and generally look OK.

If we did not have Postel's Maxim, I think the Internet would have just remained the domain of geeks and not have become what it is today.

<comment><USER9> That's bullshit. It's not hard to crank out a standards-compliant web page if your browser tells you where what you wrote is broken. Certainly a lot easier than cranking out a web page that looks good in a bunch of browsers that all have their own idea of what HTML means. If you think that browsers just made things work, you never tried to build a web page that actually displayed correctly in both IE and Netscape at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've worked a few APIs that are "liberal in what they emit, and conservative in what they accept", which gets you the worst of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why do the text versions of this draft have the header "Elephants Out, Donkeys In?" Is that political commentary unrelated to the draft?

</comment><comment><USER18> I like the webpage format. They even made sure (apparently) that printing preserves the layout and page numbering.

<comment><USER19> Interesting. I find it to be one of the most egregious examples of bad skeuomorphic design. It makes no sense to me to break documents up into pages when viewing them on the web, and in Firefox's print preview it looks like the "pages" won't even print properly (the last line or two gets bumped to the next page).

<comment><USER9> Except that's not really what it is. RFCs predate the web, and were originally written in this format, and with existing standards you don't want to unnecessarily change anything, because you never know whether you maybe change the meaning somewhere as a side effect, and you also want to have consistency between standards from the same standards body, so the format was kept, and also, a plain text format was long seen as having the big advantage that it is not easily corrupted by bad rendering software, so there was just some HTML markup added after the fact to help with navigation and such, much while otherwise preserving the presentation.

However, the IETF is moving to markup as the authoritative source, so the pseudo plain text version might be losing relevance.

<comment><USER19> I see what you're saying, but I disagree that it's a substantial rebuttal to my comment. For any IETF document that wasn't originally drafted on a typewriter, this style is absolutely skeumorphic. I don't necessarily mind it as a default, but I really wish the pure plain-text document ommited the headers and footers.

<comment><USER9> Nah, it's not really skeuomorphic because it doesn't really imitate, at least until recently. The authoritative format was plain text, and that was intended to be printable (originally probably on what were in effect computer-driven typewriters), and if you want to have printable plain text, you kindof have to have headers and footers on every "page" (and page break characters between pages in order to accomodate different paper sizes, which are actually there if you look closely at the plain text version). The HTML version of those RFCs does not so much imitate the format as it is a rendering that is supposed to reproduce the authoritative document as true to the original as possible, so as to not risk any unintended changes in meaning, while adding some of the benefits of having hypertext.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the page which the top comment from two years [1] ago linked to: "This statement is based upon a terrible misunderstand of Postel's robustness principle. I knew Jon Postel. He was quite unhappy with how his robustness principle was abused to cover up non-compliant behavior, and to criticize compliant software.

Jon's principle could perhaps be more accurately stated as 'In general, only a subset of a protocol is actually used in real life. So, you should be conservative and only generate that subset. However, you should also be liberal and accept everything that the protocol permits, even if it appears that nobody will ever use it.'"

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9827669](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9827669)

<comment><USER21> Interesting! That is definitely different from how the maxim is commonly understood.

Edit: actually, some of the replies in the thread you linked disagree with this remembrance, and state that it really did mean what we take it to mean today.

<comment><USER22> The citations for the replies don't really back it up.

The context for the various iterations of Postel's Law generally suggest that they're referring to the possibility that you might be seeing the result of mismatching versions of a specification. The later iterations also give reference to an explicit example of what they mean: don't assume that enumerations in the specification are closed (i.e., assume that future revisions may add additional enumerations). There is absolutely no evidence that he is advocating trying to parse slop at all.</comment></comment></comment>


Statistics on Gun Violence in Alaska Don't Support Gun Control - <AUTHOR> http://www.professorhollybell.com/2012/12/20/statistics-on-gun-violence-in-alaska-dont-support-additional-gun-control/

<comment><USER2> "professorhollybell.com" … seriously?

Makes me think of all those new age books where the author's middle name is 'PhD'. The use of bold text doesn't help her credibility either.

Too ridiculous-looking; didn't read.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you didn't read it, than how do you know what it says?

<comment><USER2> I don't know what it says

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah good. Nothing like condemning something you haven't read including the credentials of the author.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I just noticed you're the author of the blog post.

If I had realized this I would have changed my tone (FWIW). The point stands though. Your domain name and your use of bold scream 'quackary'.

Like I said, I haven't read the post so, who knows, maybe it's insightful after all. But I definitely think you have a problem with presentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still a strange reason. Regarding the domain name I tried many others, but they were all taken so you take what you can get. You can always go to www.thetollingbell.com if if makes you happier. The bold is in place in case you don't want to read a bunch of boring stats, but just the highlights.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


News startup Scroll debuts today with ad-free access to ~300 partners - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/28/scroll-launch/ <comment><USER2> I like the idea, but the note "So your money will never go to a site that you've never visited — and you'll even get a monthly report showing which publishers your money is supporting." raises the question of who else they may be selling that report to. A detailed report of user's reading preferences and engagement would be valuable to marketers.

<comment><USER3> Hey, CEO of the company here. It's in our contract terms that we never sell your data to anyone. Aside, from the clear violations of privacy, it would completely fuck our business over night and everyone here would resign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I presented a similar project to YC Winter 2020. A project a friend of mine and me were working on.

Good move from YC to reject us.... 10M,USD backed by NYT and started already 12 months ahead of us....need to improve my google skills.

I love the concept, what can I say. I want to pay for the services/content I get. However I am in no way willing to sell my soul to a bunch of marketeers.

The model is broken, trying to move a printed press model to the web. A new model is required.

Now, coming form the other side of the pond, I have to say that our approach was substantially more privacy minded. This is the Aquiles heel of the proposal on my perspective.

Unfortunately there is no privacy laws in the US or they are simply rendered void by anybody pretending to wear anything better than a boy scout badge. An absolute joke. Maybe California sets the tone for a change.

I wish they succeed. When theinquirer.net closed last year, I doubled down on taking the idea forward. I wish I could have been compensating them over these years and they would be still in business.

JC

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using the beta version of Scroll and have been really happy with it, particularly on mobile

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish this model catches on.

Somewhat ironically, it looks like Brave Browser doesn't work with Scroll, as there's still(?) no way to globally whitelist specific script domains :/

<comment><USER3> Brendan and I are working on that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not seeing a list here; the site has a limited selection... [https://scroll.com/sites](https://scroll.com/sites)</comment>


Referly Goes Social - You Can Now Follow Profiles - <AUTHOR> http://refer.ly/blog/follow-your-favorite-profiles-on-referly/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if you already do this, or if it's on your roadmap, but I would like the option to find specific products my friends have recommended. For example if I want to purchase a new camera, I would search "camera" and it would show which cameras that my friends (or just other refer.ly users) have linked to.

I guess you could also go as far as having users review products they've purchased and have a public "review" system, the incentive for users would be: if someone finds a review you wrote and purchases the product through the review then you get rewards, it would further allow people to not need their own network outside of referly to promote their URLs, but I have no idea if that extends beyond what you're trying to achieve with referly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like it, we definitely want to make it easier to discover products from within your network -- thanks for the suggestion

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would be really cool if I could get something like my JackThreads of Gilt Group email but with stuff from my friends

<comment><AUTHOR> Good thing we have you as an advisor then, I will make that for you

<comment><USER3> Perfect :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yawn.</comment>


5 Graph Databases to Consider - <AUTHOR> https://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/04/5-graph-databases-to-consider.php <comment><USER2> "Neo Technologies cites several customers, though none of them are household names."

Really? Adobe? Cisco? Deutsche Telecom? I'd say these are.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone here have real world experience with OrientDB? I consider it a candidate for a project at the moment (where MongoDB was too flaky, CouchDB too slow for unplanned queries and the relational model not a good fit for a document-oriented domain).

</comment><comment><USER4> Actually, this article is about 5 Graph DBMS's.

If you are (like me) more interested in looking for Graph Databases to consider, it looks like Knuth's "Stanford GraphBase" is still the go-to source.

</comment><comment><USER5> neo4j illustration is really fun. FlockDB is interesting.

<comment><USER6> FlockDB is really a SQL-JOIN-only database. It's how we scale many-to-many relationships.

For more traditional graph db applications, we use <https://github.com/twitter/cassovary>, which we just open-sourced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> tldr: Not interesting because it only compares what big buzz names the projects can be linked to, not on the actual merit of the databases/DBMSes in question.</comment>


Building a GeoIP server with ZeroMQ - <AUTHOR> http://bohlander.posterous.com/building-a-geoip-server-with-zeromq <comment><USER2> I found ZeroMQ via mongrel2 as well. It's absolutely brilliant. It's the simplest and most versatile way to do async, load balanced services I have ever seen. Even for plain request/response it's way simpler than TCP alone and it does all of that without some huge bloated messaging middlware server infrastructure. It's just a simple in-process library. It really doesn't get much more complicated than what is shown in the article, even for things like pub/sub.

mongrel2 makes use of it in a very smart way as well. You don't need to tell mongrel2 about each and every backend process you're going to use. It's the other way around. The backend processes you start just connect to mongrel2 via ZeroMQ and bang they get their fair share of requests. The protocol is incredibly simple. You could implement it for a new language in an hour. The mongrel2 + ZeroMQ combination was really an eye opener for me in terms of how server-side processes should interact. This is going to be big.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm very excited to see where this sort of pattern goes. Swiss-army knife middleware projects are much less interesting to me than the more minimalist approach possible directly using 0MQ.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, message-passing seems to be such a clean way to communicate, both between different parts of your program and with the world.

<comment><USER5> Welcome to the early 1970s: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I started using ZeroMQ for async messaging for my Django project (with pyzmq) a couple of days back. I use it for pulling data from third party apps and sending emails from my app. Enhanced user experience greatly because of non- blocking calls. The APIs abstract the nitty-gritty networking details so well, that it feels like child's play to build async messaging for WSGI apps.

Great project indeed.

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for writing this up. I have heard a lot about zeromq recently and have been wanting to check it out.

I'm interested in using it for message passing and job queueing in particular from python using tornado.</comment>


Mathematical embarrassments are problems that should be solved already  - <AUTHOR> http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/12/26/mathematical-embarrassments/ <comment><USER2> My favorite mathematical embarassment: _what is the chromatic number of the plane?_ That is, what is the minimum number of colors needed to color each point in the plane such that no two points that are a distance of 1 apart are the same color? It is known that the answer is 4, 5, or 6.

<comment><USER3> I believe the 5 color map theorem is proved.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_color_theorem>

As far as I know, there is a "proof" of the 4 color map theorem, but it requires the use of a computer to analyze about a 1,000 different scenarios, so its hard to check, unintuitive, and "not elegant."

<comment><USER4> This is not the problem described by the post you are responding to. Search for "chromatic number of the plane" or "Hadwiger-Nelson problem" to find clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Terence Tao's blog: <http://terrytao.wordpress.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> The Goldbach Conjecture must be included here.

<comment><USER7> Why should the Goldbach Conjecture be included? Just because a problem's formation is easy for many people to understand doesn't mean it is an easy problem that should have been solved. The Goldbach Conjecture would be better classified as what that blog calls a 'mathematical disease', a legitimately difficult problem that infects the attentions of many mathematicians. I'm not sure the Goldbach would even qualify for this because I feel like it's famous more for attracting the attention of pseudomatheticians than genuine ones.</comment></comment>


What are the limitations of forming an Engineering union? - <AUTHOR> I typically have a good idea for how the community will feel on a given topic - but I'm not so sure on this.<p>Of course buy in and undercutting is a limitation of any union - but what would be some of the less obvious negative effects on engineers specifically? <comment><USER2> Are they really needed? I think even mediocre engineers are probably so versed in tribal knowledge within they firms that if they say they're overworked they could be moved to other departments because losing an employee is often very expensive. Not only that, unlike other assets, engineers get better over time and become more valuable as they become more expensive. We can move firms, start firms, or move laterality to other industries where our technical skills are valued. A Union protects and supports a population with many more unproductive enginneers than a place without one. We are not like line workers at a steel plant as work is abundant and if a bit of effort is made a good work life balance can be had.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have any specific limitations in mind, but I'd review the idea to see what problems the union is intended to resolve. Unions originally existed to resolve exploitation by manufacturing companies. Is the group of engineers you are considering unionizing being exploited?

</comment><comment><USER4> My girlfriend recently was forced to join a medical union for a new Medical Assistant job. Her "perks":

* $38k / year (In Seattle, which is about $3/hr above minimum wage)

* 2% salary goes to union dues

* She can't get insurance for the first 3 months

* She was not allowed to negotiate salary, even though she got a 4.0 and a perfect score on her MA test. That means she got the same package as a high-school drop-out who got a 2.3 GPA in MA school and a barely-passing test score.

I, as a non-unioned software engineer:

* Make more than $200k

* Always get health-insurance on day one

* Can easily negotiate not only starting salary, but also raise amounts

* Am compensated on background, instead of an arbitrary "this is your first day, so you make the same as everyone else" leveling system.

* Don't have to pay anyone for the privilege

* Don't have to work with shitty co-workers, because they can be fired without the employer fearing retribution from a big, faceless union.

So tell me-- why in the hell would I want to join a union?

<comment><USER5> You expect a union to negotiate 400% raise for your SO and her contemporaries? And thus transform a multi billion dollar supply and demand difference between two completely different industries? Hmm. Maybe your expectations are a wee bit high. I smell burnt straw.

<comment><USER4> Not at all. Sorry, I shouldn't have listed unrelated situations. What I would never, EVER want, is the inability to negotiate salary. Paying someone with a bad past the same as someone with a good past seems outrageous to me. I've proven myself enough to warrant my salary. If I were part of a union, they'd look at my years of experience and say, "alright you fit into the $110k a year bucket. You get an annual raise of 2% every year. Check in a few months to get your insurance card!"

<comment><USER5> Ok I see your point. Sorry to make my point so strongly but I saw it as trolling but I was wrong.

Anyway a way around this would be for the union to not touch salary, but help individuals get a good deal given that they are happy with their salary. I can think of things like helping to ensure people know what they are getting into with share options, and helping with the legal side of things if there is unfair dismissal etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PeerTube: A decentralized video hosting network, based on free software - <AUTHOR> https://joinpeertube.org/en/ <comment><USER2> > Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low > bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because > it could slow down the fediverse.

Sounds like PeerTube is vulnerable to a sorts of denial of service attack from bad actors that would join and then limit the bandwidth to extreme amounts.

Hasn't this been solved already in other P2P protocols? Couldn't they have built upon an existing protocol that protected them against this?

<comment><USER3> Regardless of that specific problem, it would be wise to build upon an existing protocol (e.g. IPFS), because it would help prevent future problems AND it would increase traction of federated content sharing. The more people use a single protocol, the more all applications benefit in latency, speed, availability; but also in future development.

<comment><USER4> It use ActivityPub for the federation part and WebTorrent (which just implement the BitTorrent protocol over websocket if I remember correctly).

It is using already using existing protocol.

<comment><USER5> WebTorrent uses WebRTC, not WebSocket.

<comment><USER6> This is the part that I find somewhat unfortunate about Peertube. This means that only ActivityPub clients that support WebRTC will be able to access Peertube media. Right now, I think this basically means just modern web browsers. It bothers me somewhat that an early, potentially major ActivityPub service is going to limit full functionality to the few existing major web browsers. That's the opposite of what I want from a federated protocol. (Someone correct me if I've got any of this wrong.)

Regardless, Peertube seems awesome, and I hope we keep seeing more and more services built on ActivityPub.

<comment><USER7> ActivityPub defines federation messages server to server and client to server. It is not a protocol per se, and rather a message exchange standard, which could perfectly be used only between servers, as is the case with federation of videos between PeerTube instances, and more recently for video comment feeds, that can interact with the larger fediverse (Hubzilla and Mastodon so far were tested).

In no way it defines how you access media. That is defined by the use of WebRTC, which is supported by a growing number of browsers, and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.

<comment><USER6> > and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any > browser can interact.

Ah, that's awesome. That definitely assuages my fears somewhat.

> [ActivityPub] In no way it defines how you access media.

ActivityStreams (which ActivityPub builds on) does define an attachment property for messages [1]. Is this not a standard mechanism for clients to access ActivityPub media (via the attachment's type and url)?

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn- attach...](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attachment)

<comment><USER7> It is, but I don't see how web browsers would need to interact directly with ActivityPub. That's just a way to settle on a json structure everyone will be using in their web application (that acts as AP client), as is the case in Mastodon.

Here with PeerTube the client interface doesn't interact with AP to watch videos or get them. It just requests the list directly to the server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> PeerTube also federates using the W3C ActivityPub protocol, so Mastodon users can follow PeerTube channels and comment on videos as they would respond to other statuses :)

<comment><USER9> Exactly: [https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a...](https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a-4ec8cbdca701)

<comment><USER10> really nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > PeerTube is a free/libre software financed by a French non-profit > organization: Framasoft.

That's a very, very good news.

Framasoft is one of the oldest, most trustworthy and passionate FOSS actor I've met in my life.

They are basically the reason I became a computer scientist.

<comment><USER12> Please write this up in longer form (or point out where you have already) if you get a chance! I'm vaguely aware that the French FOSS community is possibly the strongest (which includes having strong institutions like Framasoft) in the world, but know hardly any details, and I think very few people in the English speaking FOSS world even have that vague awareness.

<comment><USER11> Well basically framasoft is a mature community (created 17 years ago) around free software.

First, they were just a portal ([https://framasoft.org/](https://framasoft.org/)) listing good FOSS you could download for windows and a forum to help each other.

It was the best, most stable and reliable source for that kind of info at the time, and lead a lot of people gaining trust in FOSS, trying out Linux, or like me, dig more and start programming.

Eventually they got to write informative and engaged blog posts. They always took the time to explain why and what, and I'm very grateful for that. It's transparent attitude I respect. Because of this they got echoed by framous voices such as Tristan Nitot (from Mozilla at the time) and Sebsauvage (pretty much the most famous nerd blog in the country).

Among their projects, they made the "portable" versions of free software quite popular, to the extend of creating a USB key where you could store your fav stuff (OOo, Firefox, vlc, etc) and carry a decent working environment anywhere you went, with a launcher on the systray.

Then they got involved politically, especially against the DADVSI law in France. They also teamed up with "la quadrature du net", a quite tenacious group trying to defend the free Web (that teamed up with wikimedia :)). The impressive feat here is the fact they are a small team, with very low budget, but yet managed to involve the "Conseil d'Etat" and the "Conseil constutionnel". I like the fact they did it every time in a formal, respectful manner. In politics, it's quite hard to do.

The last accomplishment of framasoft is to be alive. It's all about the constant work they've done, again and again, as they didn't have major actors to help them or a big source of income.

Today they host a load of open source web services to offer alternative to google agenda, google doc, dropbox, twitter, etc. In total 27 ranging from doodle clones to pastebins. The service are not as good as the original ones, but they work damn well and are free, using open formats.

I make sure I donate to them once in a while even if I don't go to their site that much anymore. But I do use their agenda, syncing it on thunderbird and my android phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've always wondered why people want to decentralize hosting of content. This, IMO, is a much harder task which leads to such restrictions as

> Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low > bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because > it could slow down the fediverse.

Why not simply decentralize the content index and let other people worry about storage for videos? When I go to Youtube, I'm there because it's a platform where I can find a large variety of entertainment without putting any effort into it, not because Google is hosting them. I'm picturing the backend here being a decentralized database of video metadata (including where and how it is hosted), and some sort of frontend where every video in the index can be viewed through a unified player.

If we're trying to give oppressed people the ability to host their controversial content, just have them host it behind Tor or over the bittorrent network and then add it to the index. Otherwise we could just let people link to videos on other video hosting sites or on their own personal websites.

<comment><USER14> Content discovery sucks nowadays. The search results bring up mostly bigger channels instead of relevant ones. Recommendations are based on view history and likes, which means you get more of the same instead of someting new. I constantly get videos I've seen already in my recommendations, these stay there for weeks until I click on them.

The major feature I used for discovery is long gone - it was the ability to add video responses, which allowed me to not only find small, niche channels with great stuff but also built a sense of community. I don't get why did they remove this,but ever since they did the site just never felt the same.

<comment><USER15> I've noticed a growing pattern in Youtube land. I'll watch a video of of some event, maybe a talk given by a professor. Then a week or so later I'll get a suggestion to watch the same exact talk which has been uploaded by a different user, perhaps with some minor video modification to trip up duplication filters or something. It's really lowering the quality of my suggestion feed.

<comment><USER16> At least you are getting content from other channels. It seems like all my recommendations are to videos from the last few channels I have watched. Never anything I haven't heard of before. Even most of the channels I subscribe to never show up in my feed.

It's the old exploration vs exploitation tradeoff. Most recommendation algorithms are highly optimized for exploitation and not exploration.

<comment><USER17> this is what frustrates me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It looks like this doesn't offer any way for video creators to get paid?

Right now a lot of major video creators are looking to leave YouTube because YouTube is marking their videos as ineligible for monetization. That's the market you want to capture if you want to succeed as a YouTube alternative. Sites like d.tube and steemit.com and bitchute.com are offering this. Getting major video producers with a following on YouTube to use your alternative platform is how you get enough viewers to achieve critical mass. They won't come if they can't get paid.

Now there's a problem here, because the average YouTube channel suffering from demonetization is a right-wing political channel, and attracting too many of them is a great way to make no one else want to come to your platform. These aren't the _only_ video producers who are suffering from demonetization; the most egregious case I know of is science education channel CodysLab[1], which has been barred from uploading new videos a couple times on account of violating youtube's content guidelines for microwaving crickets to show that crickets are too small to be hurt by microwave radiation, and using black powder explosives.

A federated network might be better able to handle this problem, giving the right-wing creators a platform on some instances, but not on others. But if peertube offers no monetization options, then it will never compete with YouTube.

[1] [https://youtube.com/user/thecodyreeder](https://youtube.com/user/thecodyreeder)

<comment><USER19> _attracting too many of them is a great way to make no one else want to come to your platform_

Perhaps that's a feature and not a bug. After all, judging by the last US election such people are in a slight minority anyway.

And why is YouTube whacking those channels specifically - because left wing social justice types systematically try to wipe out conservative thought wherever they find it. It's a private sector form of the behavior communist countries always see. Do you _want_ those people following you to the next place you host your videos? Or would you rather leave them to sit and stew in their nicely whitewashed PC groupthink?

I think the real issue with your idea is that revenue streams from ads aren't that large, and anyway, advertisers are extremely sensitive to being targeted by witch hunts, which is why you see left wingers engage in so many of them against advertisers. I'd leave video authors to arrange for their own sponsorships; they can surely do it if the right messaging framework is in place.

<comment><USER18> _There's an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you're going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches._

 _So while some small percent of Reddit's average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit's political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn._

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the- centrali...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized- web/)

When one platform (youtube) starts banning/demonetizing certain people, and you create a new platform that guarantees free expression, that new platform is going to get swarmed by the people who were banned by the incumbent platform. If YouTube's methid of selecting people be banned/demonetized is reasonably in line with what the average viewer dislikes (no necessarily what they would want banned), then when the new platform gets flooded with content from those banned from YouTube, the average viewer will find little to like on the platform.

Many people made their living off of YouTube ad revenue. Still do. You might be right that it's not the best source of income for the typical producer.

However, right now, a lot of producers are angry at YouTube for their changes to their ad policy. Now's the time to drive a large number of big content producers off of YouTube and onto your new platform, because they are _actively searching_ for a new one. But they're motivated by the loss of their ad revenue, so they're not going to be interested in a platform that doesn't pay out ad revenue at all, that doesn't address their concerns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Youtube is more than just a tool, it's a store of culture almost. Imagine Youtube suddenly disappeared. A wealth of information and video would be lost, like rare videos which are only on youtube. Sure, someone somewhere will have a copy but on the whole you can't access them seamlessly like you can with Youtube.

Of late I have began to think this is too much power for a company to hold. I trust Youtube to not fuck up so bad that all videos are gone, but I would sleep a bit sounder at night if it was decentralised.

<comment><USER21> If you're worried about rare videos going away, don't just watch them on YouTube. Archive them yourself. You are the one who sees value in them, so do your part to keep their storage decentralized. Just a thought.

<comment><USER22> I never understand this "If you're so worried, take action" argument. We all have concerns about thousands of things. I'm concerned about kids' education in the whole world, I'm concerned about animals getting killed for fun, I'm concerned about Comcast being my only realistic ISP, I'm concerned about thousands more such things. I should be able to have and show concern even if I can't actively do much about them due to my focus on other, even greater concerns (even if they're selfish concerns like taking care of my family).

<comment><USER23> You don't understand him suggesting a completely straightforward and easy solution to the problem?

If you don't want a solution and just want to talk about it that's fine. But his comment was productive and useful.

I use youtube-dl almost daily to archive interesting videos locally.

<comment><USER22> The original post said, "(YouTube is) a store of culture almost. A wealth of information and video would be lost, like rare videos which are only on youtube."

Archiving a store of _culture_ and almost infinite rare videos is definitely not a straightforward and easy solution. Yes, you can save few interesting videos locally. But, that's not the point of the original post.

<comment><USER23> You gotta be the change you want to see even if you know it won't be enough to completely solve everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I clicked around some videos on some random server I chose from the list, and in many cases a video's preview picture has nothing to do with the video. As in, it never visibly appears in the actual video. Or it's the very first frame and not representative of the rest of the video. That opens up all sorts of clickbait/abuse issues.

I don't know how YouTube deals with generating a representative preview image, but the result is certainly better.

<comment><USER25> This was an issue at one point with YouTube as well. Heck, it's still an issue, with most thumbnails designed with emoting people, arrows, and words designed to increase click rates.

However, this kind of things _does_ increase click rates for these videos. For a platform designed to get views, is that really a bad thing?

<comment><USER24> It will not get views if users feel ripped off.

<comment><USER26> The users will feel ripped off after they have seen the video, in which case it is already too late.

<comment><USER24> The users will feel serially ripped off after they have seen three such videos, in which case it is already too late. Too late to convince them to ever come back to a platform with such an offering.

<comment><USER27> > Too late to convince them to ever come back to a platform with such an > offering

It's the exact same problem on YouTube with clickbait thumbnails and titles. It doesn't frustrate people off the entire platform, just the channels that are repeat offenders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It still possible for creators to get paid without built-in monetization. Sponsorships, patreon, etc.

Agencies will emerge to represent popular YouTubers who move to other platforms if there is sufficient advertiser demand for the (presumably sizable) audience drawn to the content.

In fact, it's probably better to decouple monetization from distribution, at least initially. It's another layer on top. We are just beginning to standardize social protocols, let's let them develop naturally.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's also bitchute, d.tube, dlive.io, the latter two being on the steem network. dlive supports live streaming so I think its gaining a lot of traction.

<comment><USER30> Bitchute? They really didn't think that name through, huh

</comment></comment><comment> saverio-murgia Does this support ads and if not, what's the value proposition for content creatos other than maybe less censorship?

<comment><USER31> The PeerTube FAQ directly states that they do not.[0] They give the reasoning (with some numbers) that small to medium sized creators are better off getting community support through patreon or similar.

0: [https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#a...](https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#are- you-going-to-support-advertisements)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So developers are building "social media" for developers with famous 30 minut install, make new instance or manage it by yourself kind of thing.

Typical social media users will never get into fediverse as they still are using shortcut to google.com as their "internet connection".

But great that technology is moving forward.

<comment><USER33> One developer or sysadmin running an instance can support hundreds of non- technical users per server. This is a model that's already validated by mastodon, which has >1M registered users across thousands of servers (and ~40k weekly active users)

<comment><USER32> And who writes on Mastodon? Mostly devs or Trump? Maybe Obama? Ellen? No? So no one will use it, ever. I'm not against technology as it is great, but looking on this as a normal user it's not appealing to me. Mastodon is like old fashion phpBB forums 15 years ago, closed groups who talk with each other. ;)

Mastodon will need to find business model sooner or later as internet isn't free as in beer because beer costs money and you can't handle 100m users with donations.

<comment><USER34> > Mastodon is like old fashion phpBB forums 15 years ago, closed groups who > talk with each other. ;)

As long as the members are part of several disparate groups, that's probably more of a good thing. Closer, tighter communities.

Also, I thought the bandwidth came from the users, since it's decentralized?

<comment><USER32> People still need to pay for it. FSF would also die of hunger if it were not for people donating them money they have to earn first... so nothing is free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> [https://D.tube/](https://D.tube/) is another one!

<comment><USER36> not open source!

<comment><USER37> what parts are missing?

<comment><USER38> UX

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Can anyone comment on how this works space-wise? Does that mean that each node will carry a copy of the whole database? Is there some geography-based sharding or something?

Cause I won't run a node of that if that means I'll need some petabytes of space and an awfully large bandwidth.

<comment><USER39> > Does that mean that each node will carry a copy of the whole database?

It is specified in the project README. Your server will only host/share its own videos:

[https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#backend](https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#backend)

As a server admin you may subscribe to other servers to have their videos presented on your server as well, but those remote servers would be in charge of seeding the content (each server is an actual Bittorrent tracker, it seems).

The subscription system is not ready just yet, it should be implemented in the coming weeks/month. If some people feel like contributing code… :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Unfortunately these things don't work because the general public needs something simple, centralised, rich in content, and which has the momentum of actual people using it. Technology doesn't help, it's about timing it the right application at the right time.

</comment><comment><USER41> More ISPs are going with bandwidth caps. I don't think things like this will take off.

<comment><USER42> It's a challenge, but it might be helped along by mesh networking.

<comment><USER43> www.altheamesh.com

<comment><USER42> Oh yes, I saw that working a few weeks ago. Quite promising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Seems like integrating this with something like IPFS would be a good match.

</comment><comment><USER45> > Issue 226: Be GDPR compliant.

I had a good laugh at that. Does anyone really think this service is going to be competitive in terms of privacy to what a centralized provider can do?

</comment><comment><USER46> [https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances](https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances)

</comment><comment><USER47> This wont work really well until everyone has fast fiber links. Streaming needs a seamless connection, unlike normal downloads.

</comment><comment><USER48> It looks like it would be (as with Mastodon) more accurate to call this federated instead of decentralized.

</comment><comment><USER49> How and by what is content moderation applied to this? If not at all- what does prevent the competition- from oploading content disapproved by society, and then smear the network as a host for pirated content, snuff and illegal pornography? Is there some jury duty for everyone- so every third video, you must watch something flagged for moderation, and judge it?</comment>


Show HN: Pxy – A Go server that proxies websocket livestreams to RTMP servers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chuabingquan/pxy <comment><USER2> Awesome to see this on the front page! I've been chatting with the OP for a few days and this is based on a Node.js PoC I wrote for a blog post on the state of broadcasting live from a browser[1].

This is, IMO, the simplest way to be able to go from a modern browser to an RTMP endpoint. You could try and do server-side WebRTC using a project like Pions[2], or use headless Chrome and be a peer, but both of those come with their own headaches. This just uses the MediaRecorder API to send chunks of video as it's available via a WebSocket, then the server pipes those messages into FFmpeg via stdin. It's lightweight enough that it even runs incredibly well on Glitch[3].

Also, if you're curious, the videos that come out of the MediaRecorder are all over the place between browsers, but they're all varying degrees of "barely qualifying as playable video". Incredibly fun to play with, but you will absolutely need to encode any output from it.

[1] [https://mux.com/blog/the-state-of-going-live-from-a- browser](https://mux.com/blog/the-state-of-going-live-from-a-browser)

[2] [https://github.com/pion/webrtc](https://github.com/pion/webrtc)

[3] [https://glitch.com/~mmcc-next-streamr](https://glitch.com/~mmcc-next- streamr)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Matthew, thanks for the insights you've been providing to me thus far, I've added [1] to the references in the project's README!

Meanwhile, there's another well-explained tutorial that complements [1] along with a code walkthrough to implement something similar in Node.js.

[https://github.com/fbsamples/Canvas-Streaming- Example/blob/m...](https://github.com/fbsamples/Canvas-Streaming- Example/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER2> Thank you! Really appreciate the link.

I'm really interested to see where this project goes, please keep me in the loop!

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the same genre of Go video streaming adapter servers. Here are a couple neat projects which stream from RTSP (as used by eg security cameras) to either fragmented .mp4 files over WebSocket or WebRTC:

[https://github.com/deepch/RTSPtoWSMP4f](https://github.com/deepch/RTSPtoWSMP4f)

[https://github.com/deepch/RTSPtoWebRTC](https://github.com/deepch/RTSPtoWebRTC)

I'm jealous of Go's WebRTC library that makes the latter possible. I'd love to have a similar Rust crate.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't Gstreamer provide a rust-based plugin to achieve this yet? It is surely just a matter of time if not.

<comment><USER5> Yes: [https://github.com/centricular/gstwebrtc- demos/tree/master/s...](https://github.com/centricular/gstwebrtc- demos/tree/master/sendrecv/gst-rust)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What kind of video sources provide output via websockets to be proxied to RTMP? OBS and other streaming video tools usually support RTMP themselves and browsers only support WebRTC out of the box as far as I know. I'm curious what kind custom browser video streaming solution you're using on the client side.

<comment><USER7> This appears to use the MediaStream Recording API ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/MediaStream...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/MediaStream_Recording_API)) to produce a WebM H.264 stream, which can be sent to the WebSocket. The server then transmuxes this to a FLV H.264 stream for RTMP output.

<comment><USER8> You get Nal h264 packets from MediaStream. Note MediaStream only supports h264 baseline on Chrome (you can request other profiles, but that's all you get). Not sure about FireFox.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see you are invoking Ffmpeg via the shell. I also tried steaming to Youtube from Go and had to resort to the same solution. It's a shame there isn't a usable library for implementing a RTMP client in Go. Using Ffmpeg from the shell is very limiting because there is no way to monitor the status of the stream or to provide audio and video separately using stdin.

<comment><USER10> Couldn't you use named pipes for passing separate streams of input?

<comment><USER9> I tried doing that, but I ran into some performance problems due to streaming raw video. Instead I streamed the audio via stdin and created a HTTP MJPEG server listening on localhost and pointed ffmpeg there. I was limited to maybe 10 FPS top and the JPEG encoding overhead was also getting noticeable, but I limited the framerate to 1 per second because it was mostly static (song name and current/remaining time of the track).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool project! I've done similar things with Kurento acting as a WebRTC peer to proxy WebRTC --> RTMP before but this is a lot more lightweight.

One thing I'd love to see at some point is a project that compiles FFMpeg's transmuxing code to WASM such that the WebM --> FLV conversion could be done client-side. That way the server-side portion would be as simple as proxying the WebSocket to a TCP socket for the outgoing RTMP traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I'm the author here, thanks for liking the project! I'm not aware of Kurento prior to your post, it seems pretty nifty, good to explore for future projects!

Getting the client to do the heavy lifting while the server acts solely as a relay is a really good idea. In my use case, however, I have a flutter client that's not capable of doing that at the moment, perhaps that's something that could be explored further in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A similar thing is used by Axis security cameras but with RTSP. The frontend bits are open source here: [https://github.com/AxisCommunications/media- stream-player-js](https://github.com/AxisCommunications/media-stream-player- js)

</comment><comment><USER12> When we first started replacing our Erlang router for Heroku Private Spaces with a go-based one, the name of the POC was 'pxy'. Very big fan of the name. Yours seems fun too. <3

</comment><comment><USER13> Which side of this proxy is producing/consuming only FLV/Flash streams?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I'm the author here. The frontend would stream the video/audio to Pxy via WebSockets. In turn, Pxy utilises FFmpeg to convert the incoming stream to FLV and send the FLV stream to your desired external RTMP service (in this case, I'm using mux.com).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> OP, could you support SRT? Listener mode would be really interesting.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can this be used as a web front end for say a raspberry pi camera ?

<comment><USER8> this will allow you to send video to any service that supports RTMP input (Facebook / YouTube etc..) If you just want to view your Rpi Camera remotely there are better solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> link is 404? forgot to set the repo to public?

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad, thanks for pointing out! The repo is now made public</comment></comment>


GPS tracks eagle for 20 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.boredpanda.com/gps-tracks-eagle-movement-over-twenty-years/ <comment><AUTHOR> Can the battery last for 20 years?

<comment><USER2> I would guess the device wasn't powered on continuously, but ran for a few minutes each day or so.

Also, that black rectangle on the red box looks like a solar cell to me.</comment></comment>


Use of WhatsApp in NHS 'widespread', say doctors - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40507440 <comment><USER2> And the NHS is the world's largest purchasers of fax machines in the world in 2017 [http://www.nationalhealthexecutive.com/Health-Care- News/digi...](http://www.nationalhealthexecutive.com/Health-Care-News/digital- doldrums-nhs-remains-worlds-largest-purchaser-of-fax-machines)</comment>


The Problem with Abandoned Apps - <AUTHOR> http://tidbits.com/article/17342 <comment><USER2> "Since apps can disappear at any moment, I'm not going to devote much money to buying them nor will I invest significant time and energy into learning and using an app."

I've started to only consider using apps (ios or otherwise) if the apps are either a) open source and free, or b) have a business model that seems sustainable. And if they offer a way to export my data.

I've also started moving away from apps for a lot of my computing needs in favor of simpler methods that only rely on a local laptop.</comment>


Two Weeks of FreeBSD – Current Impressions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eatonphil.com/2015-11-18/two-weeks-of-freebsd---current-impressions <comment><USER2> I _love_ FreeBSD as a server, and I too have forced into a desktop before... but probably should not have.

If you want FreeBSD + desktop, try out PC-BSD ([http://www.pcbsd.org/](http://www.pcbsd.org/))

<comment><AUTHOR> One reason I decided against going with PC-BSD is because apparently the package management system is a mess. I cannot remember the exact location I read that, but this thread might be a start [0]. Overall, I just got the impression that it isn't worth it.

[0] [https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/does-a-gui-package- manage...](https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/does-a-gui-package-manager- exist.51364/#post-288002)

<comment><USER3> That's odd. Dead simple package management is one of PC-BSD's biggest wins. That thread seems to be about running PC-BSD's package managers on vanilla FreeBSD, which… yeah, I don't know if that's going to work very well. It doesn't quite apply to running PC-BSD itself.

Did you find Cooltrainer's page about FreeBSD desktops? [1] It may have come in handy during your exploration.

1: [https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop- howto/](https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/)

<comment><AUTHOR> To clarify, I think there was mention that PC-BSD had a tendency to be behind the FreeBSD ports releases because it required the extra wrapping. But I am totally hazy on this so I guess I should just defer.

I did stumble upon Cooltrainer, yes. But I think ultimately I did not find it useful other than just nice reading material.

One of the "problems" is that there a ten ways to configure every setup and no one has the same setup. Sticking with the manpages and official guide were ultimately the most helpful things to me personally.

<comment><USER3> > To clarify, I think there was mention that PC-BSD had a tendency to be > behind the FreeBSD ports releases because it required the extra wrapping.

Okay, that's true - if the maintainer doesn't put in the work or there's no maintainer in the first place, the work won't get done. I find that's true with no matter what ports/package manager you choose to use, though, and at any rate, at least back when I experimented with PC-BSD, nothing's stopping you from ignoring PC-BSD's package manager altogether and just using the vanilla FreeBSD ones.

Well, I still think you should give PC-BSD a try some day, though I totally understand if you want to take a break from tinkering and use whatever's currently working for you for a while. We've all been there. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I'll have to give it a go then! Probably in VirtualBox though. I am loathe to repeat this process.

Also, any reason you'd recommend this over GhostBSD? I don't really know the difference. They seem to be offering similar things.

<comment><USER3> Back when I first tried PC-BSD, I don't think GhostBSD existed yet. I've tried it once or twice since then, though. GhostBSD is definitely more lightweight and simple in what it provides (no graphical package manager, for example), whereas PC-BSD is more kitchen sink; I guess whichever one works for you depends on what you're looking for.

By all means, feel free to give both a try.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


After 4,175,149 Plays, Pandora Pays Bette Midler $144.21 - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/04/06/bettemidler

<comment><USER2> UPDATE: Pandora's response:

"We love Bette's music and certainly respect her advocacy for fair compensation for artists," a Pandora spokesperson said in response to this story. "But we must clarify an important fact: Pandora paid more than $6,400 for those 4+ million plays, based on our 2014 rates which are published publicly. In terms of compensation to the creative community Pandora remains by far the highest paying form of radio. Pandora pays songwriters a greater percentage of revenue than terrestrial radio. And Pandora paid 48% of our revenue in performance royalties to rights-holders in 2013 – more than $300 million – while terrestrial radio was required to pay nothing." [http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and- mobil...](http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and- mobile/6039697/bette-midler-disparages-pandora-spotify-over-artist)

Older rebuttals during the original Thom Yorke / RIAA campaign:

Forbes estimates Spotify royalties per listener are almost double those of terrestrial radio: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/17/spotify-r...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/17/spotify- royalties-appear-to-be-awfully-high-despite-what-thom-yorke-says/)

The artist doesn't see most of the royalties, the payouts from Pandora / Spotify can be orders of magnitude larger than the check the artist sees: [http://theunderstatement.com/post/53867665082/pandora- pays-f...](http://theunderstatement.com/post/53867665082/pandora-pays-far- more-than-16-dollars) (This is a problem worth examining too, but it's a different problem.)

Tim Westergren makes some additional points, like Pandora's value for promotion is higher than terrestrial radio, and how many artists actually support Pandora's model: [http://blog.pandora.com/2013/06/26/pandora-and- royalties/](http://blog.pandora.com/2013/06/26/pandora-and-royalties/)</comment>


Harvard's virgins with iPhones - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37324243 <comment><AUTHOR> 4/5 use snapchat. I wonder what that number is among HNers.</comment>


Show HN: Muban – build desktop apps with system webview and native widgets - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yue/muban <comment><USER2> The description is a little confusing. Is this a Yue(Lue) wrapper for building Electron applications?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it is building a C++ native app with system widgets, and using system webview to load web pages. Not related to Electron.</comment></comment>