Should UX/UI Designers Code? Finding a Balance Between Yes and No - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2017/09/26/should-ux-ui-designers-code/#.WcqhPMLkkHU.hackernews <comment><USER2> UI/UX designers should know - approximately - what is going to be required by software developers to implement the designs they want (ie, they should have a basic knowledge of platform APIs, coding, etc) because lots of stuff that looks cool/good turns out to be really hard to build on <insert-name-of- platform-here>

And you have to know that what you're designing is following a given platforms' interface guidelines, standards, and expectations</comment>


What's New in Little Snitch 4 - <AUTHOR> https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/whatsnew.html <comment><USER2> Last time Little Snitch was discussed here on Hacker News[1], I mentioned this:

One preset that I would love is "maximum privacy while user initiated outbound still works". So my browser would work because I initiated it, but everything OSX or apps do in the background are blocked. Automatic updates are blocked? Good! Network time sync is blocked? Fine by me. Only what I initiate gets through. Can you do that as a preset please?

Did they do that?

Seriously, I love the idea of a reverse firewall, but I don't want more work to do. I don't want to analyze connections, look at visualizations, read logs, react to alerts, set up filters, and configure rules.

I just want a high security, maximum privacy system.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443858)

<comment><USER3> My problem with Little Snitch is that it throws too much information at me, or it's better to say that I care too much for the information that it provides (and it provides a lot of information). What I would like to see is exactly what you said, a preset that would disable everything besides browser and what I initiate.

Edit: Ok so I installed Beta, and it asks you on initial setup page if you want to enable or disable all iCloud and macOS services (respectively, they are completely separated options). That's cool!

<comment><USER4> I don't know how Little Snitch does it as I've never used it, but one of my favorite UX/UI implementations for something like this is how GlassWire does it. When something connects to the outside, it subtly notifies you about it, you see everything in an easy to read list, and you can also easily take action like instantly-block something. There is no myriad of popups and alerts and a whole multi-step process to disable something, which is how most such solutions do it.

For something that would "disable everything by default" I would simply like to get a GlassWire-like +1 notification on the icon, and then I should be able to see a list of "last blocked" so I can troubleshoot myself later if something went wrong.

<comment><USER5> That's what Little Snitch does as well.

Its nothing new though. Layer-7 firewalls ("personal firewalls") have existed for desktop OSes for a while. I ran them in end of 90s on Windows 9x. Software such as ZoneAlarm, and there were others as well (IIRC LavaSoft had one, but not sure). Nowadays, Windows has one build-in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> LS4 has had a few private betas up until now, but it's in public beta at this point and some of the new stuff they've been working on is pretty interesting. Their main landing page has been updated for LS4 [1] and has a nice general summary of new features with screenshots, but trying to submit that link just goes back to the HN discussion on LS3 five months back [2]. The What's New is more detailed. I'm particularly curious how their improved Research Assistant 2.0 will turn out. They're making an effort to open it up and turn LS4 into a bit more of a platform, allowing 3rd party devs to make specific descriptive information available:

> _Third party developers can now bundle their apps with an Internet Access > Policy file containing descriptions of all network connections that are > possibly triggered by their app. Little Snitch will then display that > information to users, helping them in their decision how to handle a > particular connection. A description of the policy file format will be > provided soon._

Research Assistant is a useful feature and at first blush this seems to have the potential to make it even better, assuming LS has enough market penetration to actually get more then a handful of devs to provide a description. The spirit of transparency is a good one too. One thing I wonder about though is how well they're prepared to deal with lying, because this seems like it could possibly open up a potential risk for social engineering. Can the developer of an application making a connection a power user would consider worth blocking actually be trusted provide their own description? If they do lie (directly or by omission) or even simply obfuscate about what it's doing, is Obdev up to policing that?

Having used it since version one though I'm excited about a lot of the new changes. I hope OpenSnitch and similar projects are inspired and vice versa.

1: [https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html](https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html)

2: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443858)

<comment><USER6> Have you been using 4 beta or are you still on 3? If the former, what's your take on the changes? And how stable is the beta?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a comunity-curated list of rules I can import to LS?

My LS experience: Most of the time, I was not qualified to make a reasonable call when deciding whether or not to block certain connections.

I can always side with a conservative approach (block), but I quickly broke miscellaneous services.

A community promoting a healthy debate for each rule inclusion, based on criteria (or different levels?), pulling in those more familiar with diverse services, may enable us all to use LS more effectively.

</comment><comment><USER8> A kernel network manager with monitoring and limiting capabilities for macOS: [https://github.com/iadgov/netfil](https://github.com/iadgov/netfil)

A userland network manager with monitoring and limiting capabilities for macOS [https://github.com/iadgov/netman](https://github.com/iadgov/netman)

[https://github.com/wokhansoft/WFN/](https://github.com/wokhansoft/WFN/) src: [https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3896749](https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3896749)

</comment><comment><USER9> This would be a great potential full-time Touch Bar app. If the network graphs and stuff could be there, that would be nice.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. Hopefully the developer will get in touch with the Better Touch Tool developer. He's built a few widgets for the Touch Bar, and like you say, this would be a great full time option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd recommend Radio Silence[1] as a great alternative to little snitch (for specific use cases). The link below helps with understanding the differences between the two.

[1] [https://radiosilenceapp.com/radio-silence-vs-little- snitch](https://radiosilenceapp.com/radio-silence-vs-little-snitch)

<comment><USER12> I wish Radio Silence had a snitch-like option, so I could run it in "noisy" mode for a day and block anything that I deem necessary, and then go silent after that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've used Little Snitch a few times and have ended up just "always allowing" things because there's just so many network connections things say they need.

I started using it again a few months ago, and this time I banned myself from "allow all" except for things that I trust/reallly need... It's painful, but also just incredible how many superfluous and obviously-metric-gathering- disguised-as-a-feature apps do. They are relentless.

Apple itself is the worst, with Google being a close second (google update is VERY serious about keeping your shit up to date by checking every 30 minutes... don't want to miss out on something!). I'd love to see some real- time visualization they must be doing with the constant geo/metric data they are collecting: it would be fascinating!

But I'm not getting paid to provide them with that data, so thanks lil' snitch!

<comment><USER14> May I provide a view from someone who is aggregating app-specific data from thousands of users a day?

I create software that people enjoy using. Unfortunately, the market isn't very big. Fortunately, they use it every day.

For my existing users to continue getting updates/upgrades, I need to be able to afford to spend time on the product. I cannot spend enough time on the product if it does not make enough revenue. This means (among other things) making sure I lose as few people as possible through the funnel. This is the only reason I aggregate the data: for example, if I can see that 95% of users who complete task X go on to purchase, then I can try to ensure that more users complete task X without it being.

This provides more funding, updates and upgrades. It allows me to keep prices reasonably low (so you are, in fact, getting paid for it).

You may say: instead of charging $40, charge $80 and don't track me!

The commensurate amount of features needed to double pricing, or whatever the case may be, may not be supported by the market. After some point, there are diminishing returns: software does get "done" eventually and only a radical re-imagining can reinvigorate the customer base. But quite often, you will lose a substantial portion of the customer base because they like the old way of doing things.

This is primarily why I allow tracking by websites I use on a daily basis.

Or you might say: Just pick something that makes more money!

I'm currently working on a business model that does this as a business model. Who knows if it'll work :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I bought LS3 < 6 months ago. Is there a free upgrade process? I might just be outside the window.

<comment><USER6> You'll probably have to mail the devs. The normal upgrade is $25 (half price) and I've seen no mention of further reduction but asking never hurts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd wait to see how High Sierra will be supported before buying this or any other. Some stuff seems to be deprecated (possibly hard-deprecated), which may block Little Snitch in High Sierra.

<comment><USER17> The Little Snitch beta works on High Sierra (I have both running on one of my machines).

High Sierra does not load 3rd party kexts by default, but you can whitelist the LS kext in the Security Preferences.

(The day I cannot use signed kexts anymore will probably my last day on macOS.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have an iMac, MacBook Pro , and a mac 12"

If I buy the single license will I be able to run it on all of them? I already got burned by sketch only running on one computer.

<comment><USER19> Seems like it.

> The single license permits either a single user to use the software on > multiple computers or multiple users to use the software on a single > computer. However, it does not allow multiple users to ever use the software > on multiple computers, regardless of whether such use is concurrent. [0]

[0]: [https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/order.html](https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/order.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Slightly off-topic but does anyone have any suggestions for Little Snitch like application for Windows?

<comment><USER21> I've been using GlassWire: [https://www.glasswire.com/](https://www.glasswire.com/)</comment></comment>


Where Online Services Go When They Die - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where-online-services-go-when-they-die/374099/

<comment><USER2> Prodigy is what got me into programming. While trying to find something to do online, I came across their message boards for game programming.

I vividly remember following directions and downloading files to play a game someone else uploaded for QBasic. The first page of code were nothing but comments, so I naively assumed that computers could just "understand" prose and display it on screen.

The message boards were extremely helpful (where Red Baron was released!), and even had gurus who wrapped their names with tildes to distinguish themselves.

~Eric~

<comment><USER3> It got me into computers as well. I vividly remember checking their message boards on my IBM PS1 to get me through King's Quest VI back in the day. More importantly, I was able to find information on how to navigate DOS so I could free up the 20 megs of Hard Drive space I needed to play it.

<comment><USER4> You didn't have a DOS manual?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" As we invest more of our lives into the electronic realm, corporate decisions to shut down online services without recourse are beginning to resemble digital acts of Nero burning Rome—cultural history and entire communities are trashed in the process."_

The OA was aged 11 to 18 while using Prodigy. Recent work on memory tends to suggest that particular age range, perhaps up to early 20s, leaves very strong memories - many things are new &c. So this aspect of OAs life has a lot of importance to the OA.

In the area I live in, we have, in the last 30 years or so, demolished huge factories and whole vertically integrated industries have vanished or moved south to lower wage countries. Foundaries, lock factories, tool making, car making. Those factories were the site of communities - you spend half your waking lives at work - but they were demolished as quick as anything. Some history survives but not the detail/experience.

If anything, digital communities are _easier_ to preserve in the sense that the whole corpus can be captured. Please note I said easier, not easy!

<comment><USER6> Good point on that last part. It's amazing that EzBoards exist in this day in age, in any form, but we've yet to figure out an easy way to gobble things up; I can get my own wikipedia site started in under 10 minutes but I can't get an easy way to archive a bunch of stuff online? It'd be a service for sure, but storage is cheap these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The issue even back then, was data portability. We should do this not only for selfish reasons, but for capturing our history, our discussions and knowledge sources that don't exist anywhere else for history. A small example, tonight I wanted to revisit my comments at the 2010 World Cup that I did at Television Without Pity 4 years ago - But NBCUniversal decided to shut down the site and kept the recaps, but killed the forums, and over 10+ years of TV discussion is lost. So I bet we'd like peeps from the year 2064 to be able to see our Facebook pages to at least understand some of our day-to-day lives for historical reference. Will it be there?

<comment><USER4> This is why self-hosted WordPress is cool. If you have something important to say, do it on your own domain where you have permanent control of the content, presentation, backups, etc. And nobody can ban you, downvote, etc.

<comment><USER8> You just have to pay for it yourself, which cuts a lot of people out (kids, low income, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey Facebook users! There's a lesson to be learned here; in case you missed it:

 _It had no where to go but away. That data was never on the Internet; it existed in a proprietary format on a proprietary network, far out of reach from the technological layman. It was then shuffled around, forgotten, and perhaps overwritten by a series of indifferent corporate overlords._

</comment><comment><USER10> More importantly, where does you data go when business die? To anyone that is willing to pay for it?

<comment><USER11> _> To anyone that is willing to pay for it?_

Bingo.

If the business is sold as a potential "going concern" the new owner will have your information.

If not a "going concern" businesses the assets are still flogged off, if only to try get some money back for any creditors it may have had, and any data they have is potentially an asset. Often they will be bought quite cheaply.

Of course someone working for the company as it dies might less officially take the information.

And if an online service is abandoned as-is and stays online for a while unattended, the lack of maintenance may mean it is vulnerable to security flaws it doesn't receive patches for at which point any information stored there is available to any black-hat who cares to look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Prodigy got me online when I was about 7 years old. I played some maze game on there on my family's 386 over an expensive 9600 baud modem. I also remembering reading a lot about video game cheat codes on their BBS system ... good times.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hah, apparently Prodigy got in a bit of trouble over STAGE.DAT.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=stage.dat+inurl%3Atextfiles....](https://www.google.com/search?q=stage.dat+inurl%3Atextfiles.com)

<comment><USER14> They mention this in the article:

> This same STAGE.DAT got Prodigy in trouble in the early 1990s when users > discovered that it could contain fragments of data culled from their PCs. As > it turns out, Prodigy's client was filling in "empty" portions of STAGE.DAT > with random snippets of system memory. Users were convinced Prodigy was > spying on them, uploading this data to its servers (it wasn't); Prodigy > denied this and released a tool for the paranoid to zero out their STAGE.DAT > files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I thought Yahoo was where online services went to die.

<comment><USER4> +1 That was my first thought too ;-)

Maybe you could say the same about Google or Lycos?

If nobody wants you, there's always cybersquatters.</comment></comment>


Airbus and Boeing are exploring the viability of electric planes - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-04-global-aviation-aims-green.html <comment><USER2> Norway is in an ideal position; a surplus from oil money and excessive access to hydro power. I would hope they can use their current oil prosperity to prepare for a hydro (and other green energy) powered future, in all kinds of new places.

After I typed that I realized that the whole world could be said to be in oil prosperity still, so the same applies to us all: with less evenly distributed oil prosperity, and not every species of green energy available everywhere.

<comment><USER3> But that will never happen in the USA due to the influence of the oil industry.

<comment><USER4> You may be interested in the Norwegian TV series "Occcupied":

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

The premise is that Norway develops thorium reactor technology and ceases all fossil-fuel production. And then is clandestinely and later openly invaded by Russia, with the blessing of other countries, to seize oil and gas production facilities and forcibly re-open them.

<comment><USER5> Oil is always a liability. It would be better to claim you ran out. But the Russian subearth nuclear boring machines don't need to invade.

<comment><USER6> >Russian subearth nuclear boring machines

The what now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're interested in the electrification of flight check out this episode of Fully Charged: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1g1JrRRkY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1g1JrRRkY)

Its kindof like a "roadster" for the sky.

I was really impressed by the contra-rotating prop opportunity that becomes possible because of how small electric engines are (for their power).

<comment><USER8> I feel like it would chop up The air too much for the second propeller?

<comment><USER9> The issue with the «chopping» is noise level. Counter rotating propellers are more efficient than a single propeller. «Contra-rotating propellers have been found to be between 6% and 16% more efficient than normal propellers.» [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra- rotating_propellers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra- rotating_propellers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's just a question of the energy density of batteries vs. fuel. We need a couple more battery breakthroughs before we get a fully electric commercial airliner.

<comment> GuB-42 There is more than that. Planes become lighter as they burn fuel, batteries don't become lighter as they drain.

Lighter planes are more efficient, and most airliners are not designed to land with their tanks full. They have a option to jettison their fuel in case of emergency.

It means that just matching the energy density of fuel is not enough, batteries must exceed it. Jet engines are also quite efficient: around 40% now, and it may reach up to 60% in the future. It means that the more efficient electric engine is less of an advantage compared to cars for example.

The only battery technology that seems viable in order to replace fuel would be lithium-air. Petrol is just too good at storing energy.

Right now, I'd say the only chance for a "zero-emission" plane would be using biofuels.

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure the "emergency fuel jettison" is for "I'd rather it not splash about everywhere and catch fire in the case that I put this plane down hard enough to split the tanks open" rather than "It's impossible to land this plane safely at the same weight as it took off".

(Not that I'd want to be hurtling at the ground barely in control with many tons of fully charged LiPo battery on board either...)

<comment><USER12> Nope, look at the difference between the MTOW and MLW columns here: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliners_by_maximum...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliners_by_maximum_takeoff_weight)

The issue is the brakes overheating and the impact on the landing gear.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! Yet another thing to add to "the list of stuff I'm wrong about"... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The stat that really woke me up to how popular travel was when an aviation magazine once posted that at any second of any day, there are at least one million people flying in an airplane somewhere.

That's an entire good sized city full of people who are not in contact with the ground at any point in time you care to pick. And that article was quite a few years old, I wouldn't be surprised if that number has increased significantly lately.

That should bring some perspective to the environmental impact of transporting that many people around the globe.

<comment><USER14> It's said that 1000+ Boeing 737 alone are airborne $NOW.

<comment><USER15> That's likely true. They produced the 10,000th 737 in March, so if each plane were airborne eight hours a day (not unrealistic for commercial planes), two thirds of all 737s produced could be out of service to get at that 1000 ⇒ I would guess that actual number is closer to 2000, possibly even over iT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would make infinitely more sense to look into carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels that could be used in conventional turbofans.

Some more material on this topic: [https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/26910/could- an-...](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/26910/could-an-electric- engine-provide-the-same-performance-as-jet-engines-on-current)

<comment><USER17> Another SE link of interest, how much electrical power needed to run a 747 engine:

[https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how- many-...](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many- kilowatts-to-get-an-electric-747-8-airborne)

The consensus is ~90 MW.

That's a lot of energy, electric air travel is certainly possible, but it will likely come at a severe cost to speed and endurance.

If we are going to travel slowly would personally prefer autonomous airships.

<comment><USER18> Megawatts is a power unit. To sustain 90MW for a 4hr flight you need a battery that can provide 360MWh of energy.

Anyone care to do the numbers on how much a lithium ion battery would weigh to be able to deliver 360MWh, and remember if you want to use it more than once you can full charge no discharge it.

<comment><USER19> A standard lithium ion battery has between 100-265 Wh/kg if you need 360 thousand to 135 thousand kg of lithium ion batteries plus probably a few thousand for charging equipment. A a 747 has capacity for about 45k kg of fuel so a factor of 4 improvement is needed before that is comparable.

<comment><USER17> The energy density of most fossil fuels is still far beyond anything we've managed through incremental improvement on 1900's battery technology.

There's much more work to be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The only plausible near-term renewable-energy flight option I can see is hydrogen fuel cells powering electric planes.

The equipment is heavy, but compressed liquid hydrogen is both producible from renewable sources and has a significantly higher energy/weight ratio than traditional fuel. It would require a few advances in fuel cell technology, but that's totally plausible.

</comment><comment><USER21> As a first step, they could make at least the take off and landing electric, that would help a lot with the noise and pollution around cities, i.e. where people live. I guess the batteries could be recharged during the flight for landing.

<comment><USER22> Takeoff is the hardest part requiring the most power, unfortunately.

<comment><USER23> > Takeoff is the hardest part requiring the most power, unfortunately.

So, we just need a catapult system for commercial aircraft (like used on aircraft carriers, only lower acceleration since you are doing it to reduce the amount of energy needed from the engines, not to shorten the take-off distance.)

<comment><USER24> Why not something similar to railgun but at a slower speed.

This would involve few things on the plane.

The draw back is that airports needs to install this system.

During take off, if there is a problem, the system could be stopped.

Perhaps it's not usable in this context ?

<comment><USER25> Magnetic media on the plane might be unhappy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> side note: a few companies are also bringing back zeppelin, so far for freight/cargon (10s of tons) but also but slow public transport. Hindenburg drama aside, I find them superbly peaceful.

see: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxotOEZCh8g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxotOEZCh8g)

<comment><USER27> I can totally see them in helicopter-like roles for heavy cargo. I have my doubts about the viability of public transport.

In the times of the Hindenburg the zeppelin was already becoming obsolete. If you wanted comfort ships could provide much more because weight was a major issue for zeppelin interiours, and if you wanted speed planes were already several times faster. The high number of crew combined with slow speeds (i.e. long travel times) meant that zepellin tickets weren't cheaper than either of the two alternatives.

With both ships and planes significanlty better than 80 years ago I don't see how economics should be more in favour of zepellins now. There's novelty value, but that didn't keep the Concorde flying either.

<comment><USER26> Depending on the price and some safety stats, I think I'd be very willing to take slower trip in a modern zeppelin. Just for the passiveness (for my own comfort and the lower energy requirement for the environment) of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can see playing and winning against ICE with electric motors, but against the efficiencies of a turbine? Ummmm....

<comment><USER29> Electric engines are about 98% efficient.

What's hard to beat is the energy density of kerosene.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's weird, recently a solar plane circumnavigated the globe, but got very little publicity.

<comment><USER31> You can't scale up solar power to an aircraft carrying significant passengers / cargo.

<comment><USER32> Do you have anymore information on that, a link perhaps?

<comment><USER33> The weight for the mass of the passengers scales with the volume (m^3) while the area of the solar cells (and wing) to lift them scales with m^2. The typical solution for human scale aircraft is to fly faster (higher stall speed) and extend the length of the fuselage. Unfortunately, that combination doesn't increase efficiency so you end up needing even more fuel (or area and weight for batteries and PV).

The demonstrated PV aircraft are already pushing the lowest wieght, lowest drag wings with the highest efficiency PV and energy dense Batteries. This is a case where bigger is harder (not so with Zeppelins where structural material weight/stiffness scale to much larger sizes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm not sure how on-topic this is, but this story/topic reminds me of the latest from Isaac Arthur called "Portable Power": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffXqcf48D9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffXqcf48D9Q) That's not about electric power per se, but maybe a nice context/background. If nothing else, in the first 2 minutes I learned something that I (who studied physics) hadn't even considered: that the electrical words "battery" and "charge" come from artillery terminology!

</comment><comment><USER35> Article says that the electric powered planes need shorter runways, why is that?

<comment><USER36> Instant maximum torque most likely.

I guess they are assuming equal or less weight for the plane

<comment><USER37> Yeah the torque is probably the reason. From experience, if you stand on your brakes and throttle to take off power then let go your take off performance is better. It's part of the short field take off procedure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How about Hybrid planes?

Take a conventional Dreamliner or A320, and add batteries and electric engines. Plane takes off using fossil fuel (hard to electrify), and then switches to electric engines once at cruise altitude. This is best of both worlds, and provides additional redundancy...

<comment><USER8> I'd actually suggest the opposite. Planes cuuently need overpowered engines just for take off

<comment><USER39> It will still never make sense until battery energy density increases a lot more. Boost power for takeoff is still going to be cheaper weight-wise burning kerosene than with electric batteries.

<comment><USER40> How much of a Tesla's battery is drained after a drag race? Electric seems to be quite good at delivering boost. See also the current generation of supercars from Porsche, Ferrari and McLaren.

<comment><USER41> The problem is that then the battery and the entire electric half of the hybrid system is then deadweight for the rest of the flight.

Now that doesn't mean it's not viable, but it's going to be a difficult calculation to make without actually have specs in front of you.

The catapult solutions elsewhere in the thread seem to make more sense.

But once again we're all back to actually having to do the math on these.

Commercial flight is viable because the engineering safety factors and economic margins are so close to 1. This means that changes actually have to be considered carefully, unlike some other fields where the greater safety factors and margins let you get away with more assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> From an engineering perspective how much harder would be to do a cross Atlantic high speed rail: Norway <-> Canada ?

Politically, it would probably be possible due to cost and risks.

<comment><USER22> The Channel Tunnel cost ~£200m per mile. The Atlantic is ~4000 miles across. That implies the Atlantic crossing would cost £800bn, slightly more than a trillion dollars and roughly the cost of the Iraq war and occupation.

<comment><USER43> Not sure the cost would be linear either since the Atlantic floor is probably deeper in certain sections

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A related YouTube video about the subject: [https://youtu.be/ql0Op1VcELw](https://youtu.be/ql0Op1VcELw)

</comment><comment><USER44> For anyone not aware, YC grad Wright Electric is in this space:

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

</comment><comment><USER45> Or we just stop flying arround the world for two-day trips.

<comment><USER46> I think we should now be at a point where we realize that people won't give up these benefits to their lives "for the greater good". Convincing people to go green as a business model would be a huge failure - nobody would pay to get convinced to stop doing something convenient.

<comment><USER47> That is what I always say! Teslas, for example, are not becoming so popular because their owners are all environmentalists. They got so popular because they are extremely fun to drive and save on fuel a lot while not restricting their owner in range. I for example, recently reserved a Model 3, but I would not stop flying. But I would choose the airline that first provides me with a calmer and less smelly airplane any time. Ä

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Musk-Stark efforts bear fruit?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9BUcjuW- _A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9BUcjuW-_A)

</comment><comment><USER49> Airbus actually made a prototype electric ducted fan plane: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_E- Fan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_E-Fan)

The core problem with it though was the poor energy density of batteries. Hopefully electric cars will drive more innovation in this area, although the aviation industry is usually at least 20-30 years behind the automotive industry as far as engine technology goes, so we're probably 40 years away from getting widespread adoption of electric aircraft.

<comment><USER50> > behind the automotive

That's far from true, large aircraft engines are vastly more efficient than automotive engines. Small aircraft are such a tiny market they effectively get zero R&D.

Interestingly hybrid cars could be significantly improved fuel efficiency using turbine engines though at increased costs. Plug in hybrids may actually see the adoption due to lower weight and lower useage making those tradeoffs less meaningful.</comment></comment>


The Internet is getting less and less free - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/10/28/the-internet-is-getting-less-and-less-free/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a problem which people here at HN have the ability to change. We need strong access-enabling tools built, along with strong anti-shill/anti- propaganda tools.</comment>


3(+1) things I learned by writing chimp's garbage collector - <AUTHOR> http://tomlee.co/2013/01/4-things-learned-writing-chimps-garbage-collector/

<comment><USER2> Call me obsolete, but I still prefer RAII over GC.</comment>


Highly Abstracted Machine Learning and AI API - <AUTHOR> http://web.cognitio.heurolabs.com

<comment><AUTHOR> HeuroLabs started the private beta program for their API featuring computer vision, speech processing and entity extraction at a very high level. Try the live demo and the documentation. The API is designed to be very easy, with the main building block being the concept of a pipeline. Content is ingested to a pipeline and a key is returned. The key can be used to poll for results. Overview: [https://heurolabs.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CogniDoc/Overvi...](https://heurolabs.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CogniDoc/Overview) API Docs: [http://api.cognitio.heurolabs.com/assets/docs.html](http://api.cognitio.heurolabs.com/assets/docs.html). We are looking for feedback from the community, especially people working with hardware that is sensor rich as well as mobile applications that deal with visual/audio signals.</comment>


Brainstorm HN:  Unions are dying - can technology help? - <AUTHOR>

It seems to me that the massive economic and social dislocations brought on by technology are mainly hurting the middle classes of the world.  In one industry after another, the fact that companies can recruit workers in other countries to do a given job for less has completely taken away the bargaining power of workers - the result is massive income growth among the rich and stagnation or decline for the rest of us.
It seems to me that technology could be used to even up the score.  What I have in mind is some kind of unionization platform, in which workers from any industry can organize and bargain collectively.
I think initially the platform would have to focus on a very skilled group of workers whose wages are roughly comparable worldwide.  I'm thinking VFX artists or computer programmers.
The idea would be that when you register your dues are collected automatically.  In order to prevent picket line crossing, it might even make sense to have your paycheck paid via the union itself.  All accounting would have to be fully transparent, of course - but I think that would be one of the advantages of doing it all online.
I'd love to hear from people on this - it's come up several times for me and I'm wondering if there's a there there. <comment><USER2> Unions were (and are) a reaction to how some employers can treat employee's unfairly.

Now it could be said the end result of an union is worse than the bad employer.

Also, why would most workers want to be taxed (additionally on top of their state, and federal income tax) to have someone protect them?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't follow the logic in your statements. How is the end result of a union worse than a bad employer? The empirical evidence around unions is pretty clear - they result in better conditions, higher pay, etc etc. Fundamentally they reallocate the proceeds from the firm away from shareholders and management to the workers - which is something that drastically needs doing.

<comment><USER3> There is no empirical evidence of any benefit of unions. Ultimately everywhere where unions grew strong, problems occured and companies failed. There's no single succesful company that has strong unions.

And do please stop talking about reallocating proceeds from management and shareholders. You probably read too much Marx. Go read how that worked out for the WarPac countries, or better yet, read "Animal Farm".

Those people get more because their work is either worth more to the company or they risk more.

You want to earn more? Stop being a crybaby and do something that has more value to people around you.</comment></comment></comment>


Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build 'Newspaper Of The Future' - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/16/ex-google-news-bing-engineers-set-out-to-build-newspaper-of-the-future/

<comment><USER4> I wonder if personalized news has that much appeal, really. Part of the success of traditional tv, radio and newspapers is the shared experience with some group you identify with.

Incidentally, this is why I read news.YC also, it's fascinating to read what smart people have to say after they have been exposed to the same stimulus like you. With traditional media, this discussion was in the pubs or the workplace the day after.

Traditional media is not necessarily dying because the stories are not interesting, well that's the symptom, but the cause is maybe that the group is not one that you feel you belong to anymore, and the content is taylored to the mean of that group anyway.

<comment><USER5> The product seems like a shiny interface to a personalized Google News, which as you say is just not very interesting.

A word to aspiring news startups: journalism is old and sophisticated - <USER2> learning something about it instead of pretending it is a data clustering or personalization problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> News is a funny market. If you say to someone "we'll help you find interesting or relevant news articles" they'll shrug and say it isn't a problem. Keeping informed as to what is happening in the world is a solved problem - <USER3> editors.

And whilst the current solutions (eg: everyone sees the same content on BBC) aren't _perfect_ they're _good enough_ and this is a tough product to justify to users.

Additionally, changing habits is really really hard. People habitually load nytimes.com every lunch time to see what is happening in the world - and you expect to shift that habit - for a marginal improvement in life? The brand loyalty with publications is ridiculously strong, not only do I _trust_ The Financial Times, I _hate_ the alternatives. "You just called me a Daily Mail reader? I am _literally_ offended."

A lot of people insist that RSS Readers are too complex, and juggling multiple sources without an RSS Reader is too hard. That's true, but in reality most people don't care. If you think about it - people use different destinations for just about everything, so it's tough to imagine why _this_ should be consolidated.

Another small problem with this market is that algorithm aggregators become over tuned. You read six articles about BP and suddenly your newspaper is less of the brilliant news paper and more of a BP quarterly earnings report. So then you down vote a few articles and then you miss the next BP scandal a few months later.

Also with this product - I'm expected to "thumb up" interesting news articles, this hurts emotionally if I'm "thumb up-ing" a news article about six 21 year old american soldiers being limbless in Iraq. "Show me more like this?" I think not.

I think there is significant value in topic communities and curation, an example of this is the Reddit Subreddits, if you want to stay informed in Venture Capital, in Golf, or in MotoGP it's quite hard to scratch that itch and always find cool new content (eg: a few articles a day)

Ask yourself: How would you find up to date content about Fashion? Or Coeliac Disease? Or Graphic Design.

I think news needs a fundamental shift towards social consumption, I think Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook have incrementally shifted this towards a social experience - which is exactly what news is about, it isn't about "being informed" per se, it's about "being informed _amongst your friends_ " people want to look like they are in tap with what is happening in the world, and do not like having to ask their friends what they missed.

<comment><USER7> I can't say I understand why some people would consider RSS feeds to be too complex. There really are only two operations that you have to know how to do:

1) subscribe to a feed you like (so you like this web page? click the rss button in the url bar.)

2) Read their feeds, which basically consists of just scrolling down a page full of articles.

Sure, there are lots of other things you can do with RSS, but when it comes down to it, the system is incredibly simple. Far simpler than visiting a every site to find updated articles...

<comment><USER8> RSS readers suck. I've signed up for a abandoned Google Reader at least three times. Here's why:

1\. I have maybe 20 or so sites I like to follow. 2\. Adding all these into Google reader takes me 20-25 minutes or so. It's annoying. 3\. Once I add them in, Google reader starts filling itself up with all their posts. 4\. Suddenly I'm faced with two things:

       a. A rapidly growing number of unread posts I'm supposed to deal with.
       b. A generic, plain, boring interface in which Gizmodo articles, Slate articles, NYTimes articles....all look exactly the same, as if they'd been published by...Google.

I hate both of these things. I don't need another guilt box nagging me to do stuff all the time. And I don't know why I'd want to reduce all the lovely web sites I enjoy reading into a single, generic, designed-by-Google design. Variety is the spice of life. I'd rather just click on my bookmarks, actually go to the sites when I want to read stuff from them, and let the publishers get some ad views in the process.

I can't stand RSS readers.

<comment><USER9> I share this sentiment towards RSS readers to some extent. I've done a similar signup-giveup dance with Google Reader several times. It is all the _work_ it adds to my day that I dislike. I've tried desktop RSS readers too, with the same result. It gets harder to go back after a while too - I can almost feel the stress increase when I am trying to use an RSS reader again.

I've often felt that something like the "River of News"[1] notion that Dave Winer likes to talk about would work really well, I wonder if there are any public services that behave in that manner.

The basic idea is:

1) No read/unread counts. 2) No bold-ing/un-bolding of stuff I have or have not read. 3) No emphasis on grouping by site - should work out of the box as a single stream of posts to any of the sites I am interested in. 4) Subscribe via single-click bookmarklet, ala Instapaper's Read Later bookmarklet.

1: <http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews>

<comment><USER7> I do admit, having high unread counts ticks me off. I wouldn't mind seeing that go. but I try to keep my feeds small so I only get a small stream of content that is all important to me, instead of a firehose of worthless stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The thing about technological progress is that the replacement is never just "the old thing, only on computers". When people in the 90s wrote about the Internet and the Digital Library, quite a lot of them were envisioning something like Google Books, which is just a collection of books, _only online!_ What actually _happened_ was Wikipedia. (And a lot of other stuff, all of which further proves my point, but Wikipedia is sufficient.) Nobody in the 90s but the wildest visionaries saw Wikipedia coming. The Digital Library wasn't just the analog library writ large, it was something new that an analog library could never do.

Digital newspapers already exist. They are fed by RSS/Atom and do a variety of exciting things. Adding a top layer of formatting driven by a computer to make Google Reader (or your favorite RSS/Atom consumer) look like a old-style paper newspaper is a waste of time, and even worse, a waste of valuable screen space. Especially if you're going to try to write an algorithm to automatically figure out what the "top story" is, which will never be as good as a human. (And as in the first paragraph, there's also a variety of other things, like Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and all kinds of further digital elaborations on the fundamental newspaper template as modified by what digital makes easy and/or possible.)

Trying to replicate the old analog way of doing things is just silly.

<comment><USER11> I don't necessarily want to disagree with you, just mention that there are examples were the new thing was the old thing, only on computers. One would be digital photography. Sure, photography got a lot faster but it's basically still the same thing. Changes have been slow and only recently began to have an impact.

And I don't think Canon or Nikon did anything wrong. I think that it was probably correct to understand digital photography as analog photography – only on computers – first and look which places you can go only after you executed that perfectly.

<comment><USER12> > ...the new thing was the old thing, only on computers. One would be digital > photography.

And that led the Flickr and Photoblogs & Tumblr. Not the same thing if you ask me.

<comment><USER11> Eventually. At a time when pros were already routinely shooting with expensive digital gear that looked and worked a lot like the analog ancestor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _> >and thus "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry"._

Language like this generally makes me more skeptical that they'll accomplish this

It is one thing to blog or to aggregate "news", it is another to actually investigate and report the news. I don't know if they realize this, when they talk about delivering the "final blow to the newspaper industry"

 _> >The first 100 TechCrunch readers to retweet this article and add the hashtag #freeapollo (ha ha, retweet bots!) are getting a promotion code for the app on iTunes._

Their 1.0 version launched today. Apple only gives you 50 promo codes for an app version. I wonder whether they really have some way to hand out 100 promo codes today or whether this is just going to be their first case of over- promising and under-delivering.

<comment><USER14> Maybe 1.0.1 is already in the pipeline. They didn't say all the codes would go out today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This endeavor relies on a healthy ecosystem of news. This product is a recommendation system, a glorified web browser--not a newspaper. And it's insane to think that destroying the newspaper business is in these founders' best interest, if indeed they wish to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry." The arrogance and short-sightedness of the statement is thick.

I will never understand so many technical folks' glee in watching the decline of investigative reporting, media companies, publishing houses, and so on-- especially when so many applications like this simply exploit the work of others, add a layer of abstraction on top. ("Exploit" being non-pejorative, simply descriptive.)

</comment><comment><USER16> The future of news, as I see it: traditional media mostly dies, leaving a giant vacuum that part-time enthusiasts can't fill. People don't know what their local and regional government is up to because research is mostly boring, and who wants to do boring stuff for free? Corruption increases until investigative media outlets rise up to do full-time research and exposure. Frustrated citizens value this enough to pay for it. Paid-for media rises again, albeit in new forms, supplemented by volunteers.

In other words, the pendulum will swing back and forth as fickle humans change their mind, just like in politics and most other things in human history.

<comment><USER17> Saying that traditional media mostly dies is like saying "Since there's Youtube now, movie studios and cinemas will die off".

(Yes, I get a newspaper delivered every day, and love reading it).

I get the majority of my news from BBC/other TV, news paper etc. For funny, biased news, rumors, hyperbole, mob rule etc I go to the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> /pushes button

>modal dialog: "Are you sure you wanted to push that button? No / Yes"

/pushes yes.

/pushes another button

>modal dialog: "You pushed that button you pushed!"

/pushes ok.

Yep, I'm really seeing the Bing/Microsoft side of the application's design. I wonder if it asks if you want to launch the application when you launch the application?

I find it particularly ironic that the yes/no dialog comes up on the button with the _greatest_ amount of error-room, while the one that just says "yaay!" has essentially the _least_. Apparently they're not a fan of Fitts' Law or its ramifications; they just put the double-check cost on the hardest button to miss, and the "congrats" on the one easiest to miss.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone know if there are amateur news sites that do things like collect shit people just report like "oh shit, this guy just got hit by a car on Damen & Wolcott" or "Hey, guys, the regime is cracking down on our protest", or has Twitter somehow filled in that gap?

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds like they have an extremely talented tech team. I'm not sure I find what they are doing to be particularly groundbreaking or interesting, though.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is interesting considering some of the reaction to the new google news redesign: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=3b7b3632b344057f&hl=en);

</comment><comment><USER22> There has never been and never will be a computer algorithm that can take the place of a good editor. Period, cannot be done but it won't stop the clueless from trying.

For example I may not wish to ever see stories about say Britnney Spears but I guarantee if she dies from an overdose tomorrow I will want to know it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice to know the problem of content overflow is being solved intelligently.

Haven't spent time finding out it this exists already, but would love to have sometime which lets me follow a news item over a time period, like a story unfolding everyday and I could track it from its beginning and analyse like a detective :P

</comment><comment><USER8> So they're going to kill newspapers by....stealing all their headlines and packaging them in a (marginally) better UI...that they charge money for?

Yes, that's definitely going to kill newspapers. Good luck with that one.

Looks like I've got one more line to add to all my robots.txt files.

</comment><comment><USER24> Any ideas what they are doing in their source of their homepage with G-analytics JS written 4 times in a row? Then also it seems 2 more times at the bottom; Is that A/B testing or are they pumping numbers>? (and surely pumping numbers this way wouldnt work)

<comment><USER25> It's most likely a result of bad programming. My guess is that the page is made up of a bunch of components using templates.

Instead of including the GA-JS in one master template, it's probably being included in one of the templates that gets rendered multiple times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting that the company uses @gmail.com email accounts and not their own domain name: <http://www.hawthornelabs.com/about.html>

</comment><comment><USER27> Direct link to video of Apollo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqlu-kWAcHA>

</comment><comment><USER28> The music in the video had to be the worst selection of music for a demo video of all time. Note to self. Lay off the beat boxing.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's about time someone did . I have to say, the Google News improvements recently released were not improvements.

</comment><comment><USER30> Big advantage running in a rich client app: easier to collect data on who spends time reading what articles.

</comment><comment><USER31> No real mystery...

Newspapers = day old news printed on paper.</comment>


Gorgonia: a library like Theano or TensorFlow, mainly written in Go - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chewxy.com/2016/09/19/gorgonia/ <comment><USER2> I don't see the point of writing a machine learning package in Go.

Go is designed for system programming, which is the opposite of scripting. In scientific computing, interactivity is an important feature. Softwares like MATLAB and IPython(now Jupyter) become popular because of this. Go doesn't have a nice REPL like IPython, and it never will. Besides, Go doesn't allow operator overload, which leads to verbose programs. Compare `c = a @ b` with `c := Must(Mul(a, b))`, the former Python statement is much cleaner than the Go one.

Usually, researchers use MATLAB, R, and Python for prototyping and training. The final model will be put into production by using something like TensorFlow Serving or by hand written C++ for performance. Even if the final product uses Go for serving, the Go program mostly runs the model via cgo or RPC.

Write in C/C++, and wrap the library in Python and Go is a much saner option. TensorFlow and MXNet are both good examples.

<comment><USER3> I've been

> scientific computing

for quite some time, and I've the value of a REPL steadily in decline: what's far more useful is a tested code snippet or function & a debugger, occasionally.

Also, if a scientific stack were available in Go, I'd jump on it, because deploying Go is so much simpler than Python. Python's deployment story for scientific software often starts with either )a) create the perfect storm of dependency versions or (b) use Anaconda. Even MATLAB is way better in this regard.

<comment><USER4> The "perfect storm of dependency versions" is a problem in Go as well though?

<comment><USER5> Not in practice. The vendoring solution that they are standardizing on makes versioning issues very manageable.

<comment><USER4> Which solution is this? Do you have any links or more information about that spesifically?

<comment><USER6> [https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PackageManagementTools](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PackageManagementTools)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The tensorflow team is working on a go wrapper as well:

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/10#issuecomm...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/10#issuecomment-245687757)

</comment><comment><USER8> Hi,

I wrote Gorgonia: [https://github.com/chewxy/gorgonia](https://github.com/chewxy/gorgonia)

If there are any questions I'm available to answer them

<comment><USER9> How does it handle recurrent connections. I really like Microsoft's approach with CNTK - they use a DSL called 'BrainScript' to define the network, and it's basically a computational network (hence then name), but there are special operations like

        x = PastValue(y)

and

        y = FutureValue(x)

for forward and backward recurrent connections. It even automatically only unrolls the recurrent part of the network.

In contrast all of the other NN systems I've used have premade layers like LSTM and GRU, and to be honest their methods are so hacky I haven't really been able to work out how to do _custom_ RNNs in any other system.

How does Gorgonia handle it?

<comment><USER8> The trick, IMO, is to manually unroll them.

So what I do is something like this:

        func (m *model) costFn() (cost *Node, n int, err error) {
            var prev *recurrentOutput
            for ...{
                // build your recurrent graph here
            }
        }

        func (m *model) runOne() (err error) {
            cost, n err := costFn()
            g := m.g.SubgraphRoots(cost)
            machine := NewLispMachine(g)
            if err = machine.RunAll(); err != nil{
                return
            }
        }

The LispMachine type allows for rapid prototyping. Then once that's all done and stuff, you would probably have figured out what the size of your graph is and you can then create a TapeMachine that have the sizes you defined (though I have removed all the bits of the TapeMachine that made it turing complete, so it may be a bit hard to do that).

<comment><USER10> Manual unrolling fails as soon as the number of repetitions is not fixed (e.g. NLP tasks where it matches number of tokens in a sentence); so you want the looping to happen _after_ the graph has been made, preferably on the GPU.

<comment><USER8> For Gorgonia it's the other way around. You build the graph by manually unrolling it. It'll be a big goddamn graph, which is why you subgraph it and run it.

source: actually have various LSTMs running. Some with attention, some with ADHD

<comment><USER10> Is performance acceptable if you're required to re-build/adjust the graph for every single minibatch, because the number of unrolled items is different every time?

 _That_ is what I mean by "Manual unrolling fails as soon as the number of repetitions is not fixed"; you can do manual unrolling in every framework but generally repeated graph building makes it unusably slow if you're unable to do the loop "in the system" with a runtime-chosen number of repetitions.

Padding is also not really a solution, since your average sequence length is likely 5 or 10 times less than the maximum sequence length that you want to support, so just padding to a fixed size will mean 5-10 times slower processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is awesome! Great to see so much momentum on the Go data science front (see [https://github.com/gopherds/resources/blob/master/tooling/RE...](https://github.com/gopherds/resources/blob/master/tooling/README.md) for more). Go provides a great integrity and deployment story for data scientists, and contributions like this are well worth the effort!

<comment><USER12> Yup, amazing work. I hope it gets traction. In fact, there's a lot happening in the "Machine Learning" front of Go [https://go.libhunt.com/categories/507-machine- learning](https://go.libhunt.com/categories/507-machine-learning)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think Microsoft should take some initiatives to help bring more of these projects into the .NET ecosystem. C# is a fantastic language, and is generally missing out on a lot of this ML stuff.

(Although maybe it conflicts with their desire to profit from it?)

<comment><USER14> There are no conflicts. The latest strategy across the board is to give away everything for free and then run it on the cloud. In that sense microsoft has a lot to gain actually by offering a solution in .net and then making it dead simple to deploy to azure.

Software and hardware are now a commodity and all the big players know it. So the only way to make money is to add value some other way like making it dead simple to deploy tensor flow graphs in gce.

<comment><USER15> I agree with you on Microsofts/Googles/Amazon's cloud business strategy. In spite of the apparent good profits Amazon is making, I question how profitable this business will be long term. I expect large gross sales and small profits because of intense competition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Number one on my wish list for Go 2 is the ability to go from A to B:

A =

if xw, err = Mul(x,w); err != nil { log.Fatal(err) }

if xwpb, err = Add(xw, b); err != nil { log.Fatal(err) }

if prob, err = Sigmoid(xwpb); err != nil { log.Fatal(err) }

B =

probs := Sigmoid(Add(Mul(x,w), b))

<comment><USER17> Go 1 is already there:

probs := MustSigmoid(MustAdd(MustMul(x,w), b))

<comment><USER16> That panics. What I want is monadic error chaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18>
        Fixed up GPU work

I haven't thought about using golang to feed data to a GTX 1080 or similar, but before i do that, i'd like some info on the above, and a quick google shows that there may not be a complete wrapper for the Cuda Driver or Runtime API's like pyCuda.

<comment><USER8> Hi,

So I wrote my own CUDA wrapper. Turns out there was a bug. I'm not sure where and how, but it worked for the earlier versions of Gorgonia but not this release.

You may also note that a bunch of assembly for the float32 tensor are missing... they seem to be affected by the same bug, so what I'm doing now is I'm planning to rewrite from scratch

<comment><USER18> Did you reach out to Nvidia? It seems like they should be willing to help with putting out tested/documented bindings for more languagues.

Also, where in the repo is your wrapper? (I don't have enough knowledge to debug s.t. like that, just curious how they work)

<comment><USER8> It's not released - simply because it failed to even build properly.

No I have not reached out to nvidia. Don't have any contacts there

<comment><USER19> You could possibly try [https://twitter.com/AlisonBLowndes](https://twitter.com/AlisonBLowndes)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: GPU text rendering with vector textures - <AUTHOR> http://wdobbie.com/post/gpu-text-rendering-with-vector-textures/ <comment><USER2> This is really neat. Though in practice if you are using this kind of thing I'm pretty sure you will want to combine it with atlasing (i.e. construct an atlas of glyphs via render to texture). That's because it's a waste of time to rerasterize glyphs in the FS every frame (which appears to be 200+ lines) instead of caching the results and reducing the per-frame work to a 5-line FS that just blits. In most apps pans are more common than zooms and the same glyphs are used over and over, so this usually ends up being a win. Using atlases also reduces the number of raster operations because the same glyphs tend to appear on the page repeatedly, and by using atlases you rasterize each glyph only once. Even more importantly, though, atlasing gives you the ability to reuse a blitting fragment shader to render other content (images, figures, etc.) as well as glyphs from the atlas in order to reduce state changes.

<comment><USER3> There's also the higher level—the thing web browser rendering engines do, where you generate a texture for each "tile" (single-layer viewport rectangle) of likely-to-be-static text, and carry those around until you have to zoom or the text changes.

I'm not sure if you need the medium-level (font atlasing) if you have both lower-level (bezier-curve atlasing), and higher-level (pre-composited "tiles.")

This is one of the reasons I really like WebGL, actually: for GUI elements, you can usually skip rendering them _within_ the game altogether, instead using plain HTML+CSS controls positioned _above_ the <canvas>, where they'll be treated as separate "tiles" that aren't dirtied by whatever your game is doing. Imagine: relatively-static fully-RGBA-translucent stuff sitting on top of your animating viewport, composited into a final image each frame, "for free."

<comment><USER2> > There's also the higher level—the thing web browser rendering engines do, > where you generate a texture for each "tile" (single-layer viewport > rectangle) of likely-to-be-static text, and carry those around until you > have to zoom or the text changes.

I think this is actually a harmful approach in most cases--all it does is reduce the number of vertices and slightly reduces overdraw in exchange for a lot more memory consumption and a lot more draw calls. Overdraw can be reduced in other ways, such as sorting front to back and taking advantage of early Z for opaque content. Web pages and PDFs are so totally not bound on either ROPs or VS, and are very sensitive to draw call count, that caching tiles to minimize overdraw is almost never worth it.

But this is somewhat off topic.

> I'm not sure if you need the medium-level (font atlasing) if you have both > lower-level (bezier-curve atlasing), and higher-level (pre-composited > "tiles.")

You definitely do. You're sacrificing a lot of performance for the rendering of each tile if you don't do that.

<comment><USER3> > Overdraw

I don't think we're imagining the same things here. Think less '3D landscape with text floating in it for some reason' (e.g. SecondLife), and more '3D landscape with _labels_ applied to it' (e.g. Google Earth). Nothing from the "VR" layer obscures the "labels" layer; the labels float above everything, as if part of the GUI, but following the same scale as the things they label.

> PDFs

I'm actually unsure why a (non-interactive) PDF page, displayed at 100% zoom, can't be baked into a _single_ extremely-high-resolution tile—applied as a texture to a single GL rectangle with plain-old lanzcos downsampling. That'd work for the overwhelming majority of the frames.

You'd only need to re-render the tile when you zoom in enough that it'd look bad; effectively, you could think of the PDF page as coming from a mipmapped texture, but where you only have the current size and will just-in-time rerender when the zoom-factor changes. And then, when the zoom factor makes the PDF not fit on the screen, the "tile" would be the screen size—so you'd re-render sibling tiles when the user moves.

Or, in other words: PDFs can be rendered exactly the way the image tiles on a mapping website are rendered, can't they? Doesn't that approach win over re- rendering _all_ the text from a font-atlas every frame? And if not, _why do browser rendering engines use tiles_? (This isn't a rhetorical question to make my point; I'm not a graphics dev and I honestly don't see why.)

<comment><USER2> > I'm actually unsure why a (non-interactive) PDF page, displayed at 100% > zoom, can't be baked into a single extremely-high-resolution tile—applied as > a texture to a single GL rectangle with plain-old lanzcos downsampling. > That'd work for the overwhelming majority of the frames.

Sure, but that uses a lot of memory, and initial pageload is going to be really slow. Especially when you consider you need to generate mipmaps if it's really high resolution, or else blow out your GPU's L1/L2 cache in FS execution.

> Doesn't that approach win over re-rendering all the text from a font-atlas > every frame?

Not significantly, in my experience. Assume, in the simple case, that you're just rendering a bunch of text with no overlap. In that case, the only thing that tiles buy you over rerendering all the text from an atlas is decreased vertex count. You're still touching the same number of pixels in the FS and ROP units either way: you just do so with more vertices in the texture atlas case and fewer vertices in the tiling case. Now consider that creating and maintaining the tiles has costs over maintaining the glyph atlas (which you have to do either way): you have the memory of the tiles, the overhead of creating and switching FBOs, lots of little textures to keep around (which in naive implementations results in tons of state changes), and extra draw calls to render the tiles after rendering the content.

> why do browser rendering engines use tiles?

Mostly because it was an easy way to fit GPU-accelerated panning and zooming into the existing, originally CPU-based, rendering architectures that browser engines used (and still largely use). Tiling was popularized by Mobile Safari on the iPhone in 2007 as an easy way to avoid repainting the entire page on the CPU every frame when the user performed touch gestures. I don't think it's necessarily a globally optimal decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great work! Is there any WebGL source available?

The demo runs very poorly on my 15" MBP (late 2013, Intel Iris Pro). I'm not sure if it's just the sheer number of glyphs being rendered at once, or whether it's something specific that this GPU is having trouble with.

Some related links for those interested in WebGL text rendering:

1 - [https://github.com/Jam3/three-bmfont-text](https://github.com/Jam3/three- bmfont-text)

2 - [http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/material-design-on-the- gpu](http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/material-design-on-the-gpu)

3 - [https://github.com/mattdesl/text- modules](https://github.com/mattdesl/text-modules)

<comment><USER5> It's probably Apple's custom intel HD graphics driver. I'm getting 60fps on an intel HD Graphics 4400 on linux.

<comment><USER6> Whole PC freezes (except the cursor) with GeForce GT 610 in Chrome (Linux) on the demo. Can't even switch to another tty to kill the process. The PC is average otherwise (AMD FX 8320 with 8GB of RAM).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did a simpler, potentially faster approach that also does subpixel AA: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13285702/M3.png](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13285702/M3.png) [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13285702/M3-TTF8.png](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13285702/M3-TTF8.png) [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13285702/morphic3-jenson...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13285702/morphic3-jenson.png) [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13285702/Morphic3-TimesN...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13285702/Morphic3-TimesNewRomanSample.png) [http://www.jvuletich.org/Morphic3/Morphic3-201006.html](http://www.jvuletich.org/Morphic3/Morphic3-201006.html) [http://www.defensivepublications.org/publications/prefilteri...](http://www.defensivepublications.org/publications/prefiltering- antialiasing-for-general-vector-graphics)

</comment><comment><USER8> Another one: [https://github.com/behdad/glyphy](https://github.com/behdad/glyphy) (SDF, but full vector outlines, not texture sampling)

<comment><USER5> I'm actually quite surprised this author didn't mention Glyphy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This paper from 2014 is the best recent work I've seen about rendering vector graphics on the GPU:

[http://w3.impa.br/~diego/projects/GanEtAl14/](http://w3.impa.br/~diego/projects/GanEtAl14/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I really like this idea, but bezier curves are quite computationally difficult to use. There are many representations of these kind of continuous shapes which are much easier for this kind of processing.

For example I would try converting the bezier representation into an implicit HRBF representation (here is a good explaination in 3D [http://rodolphe- vaillant.fr/?e=12](http://rodolphe-vaillant.fr/?e=12)). This representation should be much easier to process on the GPU - checking how much the point is inside/outside the glyph should only be one matrix multiplication which would make the computation in the actual shader really really fast.

</comment><comment><USER11> Exactly what I needed, just as I was about to start screwing with distance fields or the like. THANK-YOU!

Edit: I may have spoken slightly too soon, not since the technique isn't awesome, but because this isn't yet usable without an atlas generation tool that I don't know how to build.

As far as performance goes, this is rendering a 124-page PDF (I know, just the glyphs...) utterly without lag using the GPU, on a 16 Gbyte quad i7 box that can barely render a couple of pages under OS X Preview without significant pauses. Impressive and Incredible.

<comment><USER12> It's _very_ laggy and slow on a quad i7 16GB Macbook Pro. Presumably this is because of the retina display.

<comment><USER11> Here's my experience on my local devices:

      * Quad i7 16 GBytes GTX 970 OSX FFox - perfectly smooth
      * iPhone 6s+ - very smooth
      * Nexus 6p - slightly jumpy / laggy but still impressive
      * Lumia 640 Windows Phone 10 - dFdx undeclared identifier (120,33)

There may be issues with webgl on the MBP if it's using Intel graphics, but I'd be pretty disappointed to get worse performance than an iPhone ...

For the curious, the Lumia error appears to stem from this: [https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/#!topic/angleproject/-...](https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/#!topic/angleproject/-CcKYvupr80)

<comment><USER12> Yeah my rMBP uses an embedded Intel graphics card. The performance is horrible, ~2 fps, tried FF and Chrome.

<comment><USER5> Performance is pretty decent (around 48fps for a full page with lots of glyphs, 1080p) on my Intel HD 4400. This is on linux though. I hear the OS X intel drivers have some shader compiler pitfalls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> See also: [http://www.msr-waypoint.net/en- us/um/people/cloop/LoopBlinn0...](http://www.msr-waypoint.net/en- us/um/people/cloop/LoopBlinn05.pdf) (work done on the subject at Microsoft Research, with more of the math described).

<comment><USER11> Just had a quick read though that paper, and it doesn't really look like the same thing.

This technique treats a pixel as a unit circle, coloring it according to its length of intersection, along multiple axes, with a glyph simply described by 3 point beziers, oriented to keep 'inside' on the right.

A point fully inside a glyph has a trivial intersection, and is fully shaded.

Points on the edge of a glyph intersect a bezier, with shading of the pixel being proportionate to the amount of intersection, giving anti-aliasing.

The product I work on in my day job has similar code to handle rendering filled polygons, with similar constraints on widdershins/anti-widdershins to turn off filling for 'holes'. The 'magic' of this technique seems to be applying that technique in a shader, on a per-pixel basis.

There's no triangulation that I can see (compare with the elaborate schemes Loop-Blinn paper above), just a decomposition of glyphs to these ordered collections of 3 point bezier curves, and some fiddling to get it all saved in a texture.

<comment><USER13> Yes, it's a different technique, one that creates a triangle mesh from the curves first. Sorry for the lack of clarity in my original post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice work. The subdivision into cells and encoding into GPU textures is strongly reminiscent of the 2008 paper "Random-Access Rendering of General Vector Graphics" by Nehab and Hoppe [1].

Rotating the line samples is a rather interesting idea. Seems like that would converge to the equivalent of a convolution with a radial tent filter.

[1] [http://w3.impa.br/~diego/publications/NehHop08.pdf](http://w3.impa.br/~diego/publications/NehHop08.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> This looks great, but I don't understand much of the article. As a half-decent dev, what do I need to do to write "Hello World" on the screen?

</comment><comment><USER16> Signed Distance Field fonts are wonderful! I've been using a Unity extension called TextMesh Pro, which works very efficiently, and renders beautiful text that you can configure and decorate in many ways.

Beyond the obvious benefits of SDF fonts, it also has excellent and extensive layout, formatting and other useful features, like automatically scaling the text to fit in a given area.

The source code for the shaders and formatter and ugui integration is included, but not the atlas generator (although you might ask the developer if you need it -- he's engaged and helpful, and provides good support and quick fixes for Unity updates). It includes desktop shaders with many fancy features (outlines, drop shadows, beveling, glow, bump mapping, a surface shader that reacts to lighting and throws shadows into the world), and simplified optimized shaders for mobile.

I've used it (and read the source code to see how it works), and can testify that it works great on Unity's desktop, iOS, Android and WebGL backends. The code itself and the way it offloads so much work to the GPU is very beautiful and elegant.

TextMesh Pro - Unite 14 Demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3ROZmdu65o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3ROZmdu65o)

Here's a benchmark that compares 5000 crisp TextMesh Pro objects rendering at 70 FPS, versus 5000 fuzzy Unity text objects rendering at 42 FPS: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdc8UkxuSZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdc8UkxuSZc)

Here's the same benchmark compiled with Unity's WebGL backend, with the same number of 2500 static and 2500 dynamic text objects. Nowhere near the 70 FPS of native code of course, but not bad for WebGL and so many objects -- zoom in with the mouse wheel to see the text up close: [http://donhopkins.com/home/TextMeshProBenchmark/](http://donhopkins.com/home/TextMeshProBenchmark/)

TextMesh Pro on the Unity Asset Store: [https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17662](https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17662)

Digital Native Studios home page: [http://digitalnativestudios.com/](http://digitalnativestudios.com/)

<comment><USER17> They are good but they do have their weaknesses: Rounded Corners, Not good with thin lines, time required to generate the SDF

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very clever technique! It seems more true to letterforms than SDF. Seems like it might need more texture bandwidth/dependent reads than SDF, but less texture memory as a whole?

I've been looking at different text rendering methods for a VR engine. I wonder if this technique works in 3D space? If so I'll give it a shot, benchmark it against SDF :)

<comment><USER16> I'm using TextMesh Pro for a VR/AR application in Unity called Pantomime, and it works great for text in the 3d world space, as well as 2d gui dialogs. You can get up really close to the text, and it looks perfect. I posted some links to demos on the TextMesh Pro forum here:

[http://digitalnativestudios.com/forum/index.php?topic=470.ms...](http://digitalnativestudios.com/forum/index.php?topic=470.msg3493#msg3493)

Some discussion about text in VR:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/comments/34d8nm/reading_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/oculusdev/comments/34d8nm/reading_in_the_dk2/)

More about Pantomime:

[http://pantomimecorp.com](http://pantomimecorp.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It doesn't work here, Nexus 5. That's what I see when I zoom in:

[https://goo.gl/photos/3EXv2t4YZRxmyNPe8](https://goo.gl/photos/3EXv2t4YZRxmyNPe8)

</comment><comment><USER17> The use of the grid reminds me of Qin 2006's "Real-time texture-mapped vector glyphs":

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1111433](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1111433)

[http://docdro.id/ynU32mg](http://docdro.id/ynU32mg) (Paper)

[http://docdro.id/t6XiE97](http://docdro.id/t6XiE97) (Slides)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a cool technique. The WebGL demonstration is pretty compelling!

It's a little odd to me that they describe distance fields as having an unavoidable problem with sharp corners, though. The Valve paper on signed distance fields for text demonstrates a simple workaround that fixes sharp corners...

<comment><USER17> While it seems simple in the paper, it is way more complicated to implement in practice as it comes with all sorts of edge cases.

[https://lambdacube3d.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/playing- around...](https://lambdacube3d.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/playing-around-with- font-rendering/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The method seems to assume the geometric complexity of a glyph is relatively small. I wonder if it will work with CJK glyphs. Possibly the number of tiles per glyph would need to be greater; I'm not sure how badly a couple of doublings would impact performance.

</comment><comment><USER22> _Source: MS Paint._

haha, that's clever ^^ EDIT: seriously though, those are some Paint skills, I didn't even notice until I saw the "source" text below it.

</comment><comment><USER23> no subpixel rendering or hinting. Im confused - is there a problem with cpu rendered fonts that needs fixing? I didnt notice anything wrong last time I was reading schematics and datasheets on 4K monitor.

<comment><USER24> Don't know why you're getting downvoted. More performance is certainly always good, but without subpixel anti-aliasing the text will tend to look pretty crappy absent a ridiculously high resolution display.

<comment><USER2> Ridiculously high resolution displays are rapidly becoming the norm.

<comment><USER25> I assume you are thinking through it's implications for WebVR+servo?

I can see questioning the utility for current 2d applications but this is really critical speed when the large amount of translation and scaling of many pages in a 3d environment is the expectation.

The css3d "portal" solution for webgl doesn't seem like it can get us very far at all...

I'd use this today in my webvr/gl project if it was source complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why don't GPUs have some hardware in them to make rendering text simpler? It seems like a pretty common function that every game has. Have you ever seen a game without any text in it?

<comment><USER27> Fixed-function hardware on GPUs is really on the way out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> strange, I only see white rectangles on the demo (using ff 43.0.3)

</comment><comment><USER29> Although cool, this is not a particularly novel idea.

I remember reading a 2007 SIGGRAPH paper about something similar Valve did in HL2 (or maybe it was Orange Box). Either way, it was a similar method of rendering vector textures via distance fields. Here it is: [http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/SIGGRAPH2007_...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/SIGGRAPH2007_AlphaTestedMagnification.pdf)

<comment><USER30> This isn't my field of expertise, so maybe I'm missing something, but the article cites the paper you describe in literally the second paragraph.</comment></comment>


Smartflix – Access the entire Netflix catalogue, region-free - <AUTHOR> http://smartflix.io <comment><USER2> > Smartflix is a simple application that combines an index of Netflix content > available worldwide, an optimized proxy service and a chromeless web browser > that embeds the Netflix web player.

Welp, this will be shutdown anytime soon since it is an obvious violation of the Netflix TOS.

<comment><USER3> Could they shutdown the site itself though? Sounds like the TOS violations are from the users themselves, not the site

<comment><USER4> Site is helping violating copyright. Will be closed very soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I maybe wrong but I don't think Netflix has these restrictions just to fuck with people and ruin their day. It would seem from their implementation point of view, simply having same content everywhere would be easier. I suspect these are enforced by licensing rules from those who own the content. Anyone want to confirm that?

This might get Netflix in trouble if those who own the contents will see it, see Netflix not to anything about and either increase their fees or refuse to let Netflix license the contents.

<comment><USER6> Aren't these licensing rules precisely designed to fuck with people and ruin their day?

<comment><USER7> I'm sure Netflix would wholeheartedly agree. It's no surprise they've pushed so hard into self-published content where they no longer have to deal with this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand. I mean I agree that at some point smartflix is going to get into trouble for doing this, but I doubt it will come from Netflix (unless forced to). As far as legalities are concerned, Netflix is serving content allowed in country X to an IP address located in country X. Netflix is not breaking copyright that I can see. Why should Netflix worry?

<comment><USER9> They've been known to send cease and desist letters at the very least: [http://www.itbusiness.ca/news/netflix-sends-cease-and- desist...](http://www.itbusiness.ca/news/netflix-sends-cease-and-desist- letter-to-virtual-border-hopping-service/53321)

Not sure if it's ever become more serious than that though.

<comment><USER10> They've reserved the right to cancel accounts for using proxies.

[http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/netflix-vpn-cheat-accounts-be- termi...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/netflix-vpn-cheat-accounts-be-terminated- users-threaten-piracy-if-they-cant-pay-content-1495223)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This shouldn't be confused with SmartFlix.com, which is like Netflix DVD, but for instructional and educational videos:

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

</comment><comment><USER6> So if I have a Netflix account in my home country, I can access content from other regions as long as I go through the corresponding proxies? Or do I need an account in each region I'm trying to access?

<comment><USER12> By merely accessing a country-specific DNS server, Netflix will serve up the country-appropriate selection. You don't need to proxy your traffic through a VPN for this to work. There are DNS services which let you pick which country you would like to appear from and people use this for Netflix, Hulu, and others.

<comment><USER13> This is not entirely accurate. The way these DNS services work is that they return a different IP address (one they control) for certain Netflix domains. Then they do TCP proxying between you and Netflix to get around the region restrictions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> tl;dr: It routes your Netflix traffic through proxy servers in other countries, thus granting you access to content available in that region.

It seems to me that Netflix could easily just block traffic from the proxies' IP addresses, should this start to bother them or their licensees.

<comment><USER15> I think they have, I just tried to use it and I'm getting a Netflix site error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Advertising this is a bad idea and I'm 99% sure this is going to get taken down because of it :p

<comment><USER4> yes. If you build an obviously illegal service, stay under the radar for god sake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seems like it'll get DMCA'd or something... I doubt netflix will like it too much.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmmm people seem to be pretty shooken up w/ the whole C&D bit, meanwhile here I am worrying about putting my credentials into this custom browser. At the very least I would like to compile this myself from the source. Thats just me :)

</comment><comment><USER19> _Netflix data from across all regions is provided by the great folks at uNoGS.com — by far the most accurate Netflix database on the Internet. Check them out!_

Now that's useful!

<comment><USER20> I had a quick look at uNoGS based on personal knowledge, and just across the few titles I examined, they had numerous inaccuracies -- both missing regions that have support and also missing any regions/listings for titles I know Netflix streaming is currently carrying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Side note, does anyone know if there's a way to determine what's available on Netflix in each country so you could emulate this manually? i.e. any public catalog search engine?

<comment><USER9> From the bottom of that page:

> Netflix data from across all regions is provided by the great folks at > uNoGS.com — by far the most accurate Netflix database on the Internet. Check > them out!

So yes, you can use the exact same database: [http://unogs.com](http://unogs.com)

<comment><USER21> Missed that, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't see how they think they can get away with _charging_ for a service that defeats restrictions which were deliberately put in place by Netflix.

<comment><USER23> I find that a bit frustrating too, though to be fair it's not Netflix's fault those restrictions are in place - they're just complying with copyright laws.

At least it's not as bad as Paragon charging for basic NTFS reading/writing functionality on Mac OS X.

[https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/](https://www.paragon- software.com/home/ntfs-mac/)

<comment><USER9> Paragon puts in a non-trivial amount of effort to build functionality that people are willing to pay for. I'm not sure how that's bad at all.

<comment><USER23> Thinking about it further, I guess my main beef is with Apple for not including that functionality in the first place, and I don't like the idea of paying money for something that should be free in essence.

It's also why I don't like how mIRC was so popular, despite numerous open- source IRC clients being available. And I'd feel pretty uncomfortable paying for text-editors like Sublime Text or TextMate. But that's just me :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This isn't a product I would be proud of. Netflix doesn't block content because they feel like it, they do it because of licensing issues in the various different countries. It is not your choice as a user to be able to access whatever content you please, as you are a customer of Netflix and must abide by their terms of service. Don't like it? Don't use Netflix.

And this service charging for breaking Netflix's ToS? Super sketchy. I personally hope this is shutdown before this team can start making money off of it.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely agree. I can't imagine that someone built this without considering how illegal (immoral?) it is.

<comment><USER25> How could this be considered immoral?

<comment><USER7> Because you are making money off of breaking someone else's terms of service?

<comment><USER26> It is quite easy to make the case that breaking bad rules is moral. In this case, ridiculous region-based restrictions on copyrighted material are the bad rules being broken. These are paying customers, after all. Why should it matter where they watch what they paid to watch?

<comment><USER27> > Why should it matter where they watch what they paid to watch?

Because they are watching things they didn't pay to watch.

If, for example, HBO locks up rights to broadcasting a movie in US, Netflix might be able to get the rights in the UK. Watching it in the US via a UK Netflix proxy is (theoretically at least) depriving HBO of revenue, since they paid for exclusivity.

<comment><USER26> That's really HBO's problem, then, for thinking they can continue to forcibly segregate the world. I'll note that I don't use this service or any like it, but I do think that people need to keep pushing against the insane excesses of copyright through the political process, through education, _and_ through civil disobedience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I sure hope no one invested in this company. This will be destroyed once Netflix's lawyers see this.

</comment><comment><USER29> I hope they get a C&D from Netflix, I see services like this ruining Netflix for the rest of us who actually know what they are doing, rather than Joe user who could care less and just wants more movies... causing push back from the industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also wish bad things upon people.

<comment><USER29> You are already breaking Netflix's Terms and Conditions by doing this. It's just when a few people break the rules, they go unnoticed, and perhaps those who make the rules don't care. When the masses do it then it's a problem that then gets special attention.

<comment><USER26> When masses break rules it's often a sign that there's something wrong with the rules.

<comment><USER29> Yes I want unlimited free content for $7.99/mo. What's so hard to understand?

<comment><USER26> You could look at the argument a bit more charitably, as in, "I don't want to be treated as a digital inferior just because of the country I happened to be born in." If $X/mo is good enough for a certain lineup in the US, it should be good enough for the same lineup anywhere.

<comment><USER29> valid point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>