Acetaminophen and the War on Drugs (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paleonu.com/panu-weblog/2009/7/7/acetaminophen-and-the-war-on-drugs.html <comment><USER2> The sillier part of adding acetaminophen to hydrocodone and other opiates is that it's easy to remove the acetaminophen via cold water extraction. Thus, anyone looking to seriously abuse Vicodin can avoid the damage with just a bit of work.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Anyone who wants to abuse opiates can do a simple cold water extraction to almost completely remove the acetaminophen in less than five minutes, or else they can potentiate them using the techniques here so they only need a tiny dosage:

<http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=305596>

What this means is that the vast majority of those dying are those using these drugs for legitimate medical problems. And it's not a small number of people either; 7,500 people in the US die each year from NSAIDs, and countless more survive but are permanently crippled.

The new government guidelines do absolutely nothing to fix the problem, they're just propaganda to support what is essentially a government campaign to poison the elderly and chronic pain patients.

<comment><USER4> _they're just propaganda to support what is essentially a government campaign to poison the elderly and chronic pain patients._

The government is trying to murder the elderly with drug programs? This is almost a Godwin, but much more silly.

<comment><USER5> Its not at all silly. Its an example of the law of untended consequences. [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Unintended_co...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Unintended_consequences) The intent isn't to "poison the elderly and chronic pain patients" but it is the effect, and has been going on long enough, that like all the other unintended consequences of TWOD, are ignored by the Federal bureaucracy that benefits from it.

<comment><USER6> Funny how "unintended consequences" and "government campaign to poison the elderly" evoke different emotional responses.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. If people believe the government is doing something bad on purpose they'll make trouble, whereas if they believe the government is doing something bad by accident they'll stay home and keep beating off to Fox news.

Hence the Iraq war, public schools, war on drugs, crumbling infrastructure, farm subsidies, ethanol subsidies, oil subsidies, health care system, prison system, food insecurity, etc.

Everyone wants to create laws based on 'intentions' and 'emotion', no one gives a shit about the evidence-based policies or bodies in the street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He mentions denatured alcohol which has been around for a century and includes chemicals to make it toxic or foul tasting.

He doesn't mention that during prohibition, the government attempted to discourage the redistilling of industrial alcohol by adding poison or upping the concentration of toxic denaturing chemicals, killing thousands of Americans.

<http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/>

Edit: I'm not sure what the entire story is. It seems as though 10% methanol is standard for denatured alcohol. Not sure if that was the case before prohibition.

<comment><USER8> > "Denatured" implies there has been some chemical alteration of the alcohol, > but in fact it is just intentionally contaminated with toxic solvents like > methanol or acetone.

That's not true anymore, at least in Poland and probably other eastern European (heavy drinking) countries. Due to denaturate usage by very poor alcoholics (they drink it through a slice of bread to filter the taste- altering substances), it's no longer intoxinated with deadly liquids.

So it seems our alcohol regulators understood the issue described in the article many years before.

<comment><USER9> Other way around here in Finland: in mid-90s, on joining the EU, their free market regulations dictated lethal denaturation agents could no longer be banned by national regulations, and deaths of destitute alcoholics spiked.

(reference in finnish medical journal, google translate might work: <http://tinyurl.com/6h5gf5o>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sad to see an HN thread full of conspiracy theories and so little actual science.

Believe it or not, acetaminophen is an effective analgesic, and combined with hydrocodone it provides synergistic pain relief without any increase in side effects over the use of either agent alone. Here's a peer-reviewed 1980 study from the UK showing just that:

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1430165/>

Private drug companies didn't pursue testing & selling hydrocodone/APAP in combined form because the government hates drug users. They did so because they can market a highly potent form of pain control. Not everything in life is a government conspiracy!

<comment><USER11> A study on post-partum pain from the 1980s?

Try this one, a meta-analysis from 2000 on post-op pain: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10796810>

Acetaminophen is effective. Most professional guidelines on analgesia recommend the use of acetaminophen in addition to opioid analgesia.

The useful and perhaps unique thing about acetaminophen among pain killers is that it is well tolerated. Almost everybody from little kids to the very elderly can down acetaminophen without too many problems. This is certainly not the case with opioids. Dizziness, lightheadedness, feeling spaced out, nausea, vomiting, constipation, allergic reactions are not uncommon with these compounds, not to mention variability in effectiveness.

It is true that the majority of acetaminophen overdoses are accidental, which suggests that there is a major problem with how we distribute and use this drug. However most health professionals would take issue with describing it as a hepatotoxin. The large number of ER visits etc reflects the widespread use and easy availability of paracetamol. For example, where I work, there are at least as many presentations due to alcohol abuse (which is also available 'over the counter') as there are for paracetamol.

The funny thing about the article that triggered this thread is that your well-educated person with post-op pain is probably the ideal group to be using acetaminophen and opioid combinations.

<comment><USER12> Upvoted, but what TFA is claiming is that codine w/o acetaminophen is roughly as affective as the combination, which isn't addressed in that analysis.

<comment><USER11> <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19588335> "AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: Single dose oxycodone is an effective analgesic in acute postoperative pain at doses over 5 mg; oxycodone is two to three times stronger than codeine. Efficacy increases when combined with paracetamol. Oxycodone 10 mg plus paracetamol 650 mg provides good analgesia to half of those treated, comparable to commonly used non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, with the benefit of longer duration of action."

"<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20393966> AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: Single dose codeine 60 mg provides good analgesia to few individuals, and does not compare favourably with commonly used alternatives such as paracetamol, NSAIDs and their combinations with codeine, especially after dental surgery; the large difference between dental and other surgery was unexpected. Higher doses were not evaluated."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's worth pointing out that the FDA has since voted to reduce the levels of acetaminophen in vicodin.

<http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=12607415>

<comment><USER14> Maybe I'm just in a strange mood, but that is one of the most bizzare statements (with context) that I've ever heard. It's like something directly out of George Orwell.

"Party officials recently voted to approve a measure that would decrease the amount of poison included in medicine."

 _ahem_

"New techniques developed by party scientists have caused medicinal purities to reach an all time high!"

<comment><USER3> "Your weekly chocolate rations have been increased from 100 grams to 80 grams."

It's actually even more accurate than you might think, because APAP works by acting on the endocannabinoid system. Essentially acetaminophen works exactly the same as weed, the only difference between tylenol and weed is that one kills several thousand Americans per year and the other kills zero. Well actually there is one more difference: weed actually works amazingly well as an analgesic, whereas tylenol doesn't do anything. (Except kill people.)

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T1J-4J3WSHD-7&_user=10&_coverDate=02/15/2006&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=43c4235e76475c360ce2e9f74a168f50&searchtype=a)

<comment><USER15> Your statements about weed are very likely exaggerated in one direction, while the statements about acetaminophen are exaggerated in another. The cited journal article does not give full backup to the statements in your post.

<comment><USER3> From Wikipedia:

"Paracetamol also modulates the endogenous cannabinoid system.[44] Paracetamol is metabolized to AM404, a compound with several actions; most importantly, it inhibits the uptake of the endogenous cannabinoid/vanilloid anandamide by neurons. Anandamide uptake would result in the activation of the main pain receptor (nociceptor) of the body, the TRPV1 (older name: vanilloid receptor). Furthermore, AM404 inhibits sodium channels, as do the anesthetics lidocaine and procaine.[45] Either of these actions by themselves has been shown to reduce pain, and are a possible mechanism for paracetamol. However, it has been demonstrated that, after blocking cannabinoid receptors with synthetic antagonists, paracetamol's analgesic effects are prevented, suggesting its pain-relieving action involves activation of the endogenous cannabinoid system.[46]"

And as I have posted before, marijuana is an anxiolytic, anti-inflammatory, anti-angiogenic, anti-viral, antibacterial, neuroprotective, and pro- neurogenesis. It's down the most important of any drug there is. Plus it increases your IQ by an average of 6 points, decreases your diabetes risk by 66%, and can be used to treat everything from Parkinson's to cancer. There is even some research suggesting that up to 50% of all infant mortality may be the result of marijuana deficiency.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1979857>

<http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=258>

<http://www.mediafire.com/?4s8s6w9bwpmg24u>

<http://www.safeaccessnow.org/section.php?id=125>

<http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7002>

<http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=153>

<http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=212>

<comment><USER13> > There is even some research suggesting that up to 50% of all infant > mortality may be the result of marijuana deficiency.

I was going to ask what you're smoking, but then I realized that was a dumb question. :-)

I'm all for using pot for medicinal (and recreational) uses, but I think you've crossed the line from advocacy to cheerleading. Believe me when I say that if pot did all of the things you claim, I'd be in perfect health.

<comment><USER3> "Believe me when I say that if pot did all of the things you claim..."

Reality has a well known liberal bias.

"...I'd be in perfect health."

You get different benefits depending the quantity and method of consumption, so if you're just using it recreationally you're not going to see most (or any) of those benefits.

<comment><USER15> Citing Wikipedia for medical information on pot makes clear what kind of research process is necessary to conclude that pot is beneficial, which is not the conclusion of most people who have done the most careful research. (I'm a wikipedian, and I'm painfully aware of the research standards on the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.)

<comment><USER3> I never cited Wikipedia on pot, I cited the Wikipedia summary of the research on tylenol-- after already linking to the most important of the original journal articles.

I also never claimed that smoking an ounce a week recreationally is a great idea, all I claimed was that you can potentially receive the benefits listed if you're using the proper dosage and method of ingestion.

What I did do however was to link to several hundred pages of academic journal articles about the medical properties and health effects of cannabis. So I don't see how you can believe that "people who study the issue carefully have come to the opposite conclusion" or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A bit like shooting someone who is attempting suicide. Prohibition v. 2 has proven to be just as disastrous as v. 1, when will there finally be enough political momentum behind ending it?

<comment><USER2> Not quite. It's more like shooting anyone crossing a bridge, would it be to get to a hospital, sightseeing, or bungee jumping off it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Completely off-topic, but: _There is a better review in the WSJ today but I can't link to it._

</comment><comment><USER18> So total aside, inspired by the mention of denatured alcohol. How come you can buy bitters, which are up to 50% alcohol (i.e. 100 proof), without having to be of legal age?

<comment><USER19> I tried to buy bitters at 4 am the other day and they wouldn't let me due to the alcohol content. Pretty stupid, since getting intoxicated from bitters would be about as much fun as drinking cooking wine.

<comment><USER20> A UK supermarket was banned from selling liquor chocolates outside licencing hours!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One alternative he doesn't mention is Vicoprofen, which contains ibuprofen rather than acetaminophen.

<comment><USER21> So you can strip the lining in your stomach and intestinal track instead of blowing your liver. The article is correct: there is no value in adding anything to the hydrocodone and many possible down-sides.

<comment><USER19> No, of course there isn't any value. But ibuprofen isn't as harmful as acetaminophen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why you always, _always_ , buy your dope from hillbillies.

</comment><comment><USER23> In a hundred years from now. People will look back at the war on drugs and what else it's called in the various countries as a primitive and barbaric method.

<comment><USER24> You are aware that it is over 100 years now from the beginning of the war on recreative drug use? IIRC, the first restrictions were put in effect in the US in 1906.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Gah! I shared my concern with APAP with me doctor and she prescribed Norco which has a higher hydrocodone to APAP ratio. Not sure it's still Schedule III in the USA, but if so, there ARE alternatives which Gregory House (who should be dead by now) and those concerned with liver failure deaths should know about.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Does anyone think cannabis is deadlier than Jim Beam?

I think the vast majority of the population of America thinks that, which is why cannabis is much more highly regulated. What he should have said was, "cannabis is less deadly than Jim Bean", and provided the evidence to back it up.

<comment><USER27> Wait, they do? I can easily understand thinking it's more harmful, but _deadlier_? In what way would someone think it's deadly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not just opiates, cough syrup (with dextromethorphan) too. It's very dangerous for kids who heard of Robotripping but haven't had resources/time to learn that while DXM overdose will make you trip, acetaminophen overdose will slowly and painfully kill you.</comment>


The Best Podcasting Equipment for a New Podcaster - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@collin/the-best-podcasting-equipment-for-a-new-podcaster-a35e9a0daa <comment><USER2> So this is neat. I disagree with a good bit of it, though:

\- I wouldn't go with a Yeti (which, despite all the idiotic memes around it, is _fine_ for a starting microphone). A condenser mic is generally going to be more touchy and more susceptible to room noise issues, which you'd probably rather avoid. Instead I'd go with something like the AT2005USB[1]; its DAC is fine and it provides an XLR output as well (and you can use both, which I do for some tasks such as voice comms in games plus routing audio to my mixer). Knox also makes a good knockoff[2] with similar characteristics.

\- Audition is a good call, especially at $20/month, but IMO (and this is all totally subjective, don't take my word for it) Logic Pro X is my jam. However, these days, live-shows-to-podcast seem to really taking off, particularly on Twitch; to that end, you're probably going to be mixing in either OBS/Xsplit/vMix (eww) or mixing in your audio app and routing to the video compositor, so be ready for that.

\- Zencaster, Skype Call Recording, etc. are all fine, but they all have one really big drawback: they're most useful for _offline_ shows. The work required for Skype/VOIP guests in _online_ shows, unless you're happy letting Skype mix the voices for you (and you shouldn't), is nontrivial. I'd try very, very hard to stick with in-person podcasts with local people until you can really hack it, because VOIP'd casts are noticeable and often have a big hit to both flow and to audio quality.

[1] - [https://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-AT2005USB-Cardioid- Dyn...](https://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-AT2005USB-Cardioid-Dynamic- Microphone/dp/B007JX8O0Y) [2] - [https://www.amazon.com/Knox-Gear-Cardioid- USB-Microphone/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Knox-Gear-Cardioid-USB- Microphone/dp/B012BAX738)

<comment><USER3> I run a system called Cleanfeed, which is VOIP designed for live radio broadcasts. Sounds like it might be a good fit for your needs:

[http://cleanfeed.net/](http://cleanfeed.net/)

It handles all the audio routing for 3-way (or more), and recording too if you want it. VOIP interviews can be unnoticable -- in practice you have probably heard remote interviews on the radio done with systems like this, and may not have even realised it.

<comment><USER2> The problems with remote casts are not just audio ones, but yes, you can do good point-to-point audio. Very few people do.

I've looked at Cleanfeed and it looks like a really cool beta product, but it doesn't feel like the product appreciates how existing audio stacks and production flows work. And that's not entirely Cleanfeed's fault, because there are browser limitations, but at the same time the browser is not a good audio production platform (only Chrome seems to recognize the existence of multi-track audio devices, and that seems to be more of a "here's a 5.1 surround sound system") and that's a problem too. Like: I run a US-16x08 locally. It has eight mikes and eight line-ins. Cleanfeed (and this is probably Chrome) gets confused and says there's no microphone unless I go into Chrome's settings and force-pick the US-16x08, and then it just gives you mic one? It's mixing down the remote, too, so I just get back a single audio stream. This isn't acceptable; I 100% need to feed this into my _mixer_ , not just splat out the audio. If I just wanted to mix down, Discord provides acceptable-not-great audio quality (and it appears there's probably a way, if one is a wizard, to rip audio streams out of it _separately_ and push them through something like Soundflower).

If Cleanfeed was a local server that connected to you guys and had VSTs I could drop on instrument tracks in Logic to get individual voices out, I would pay you nontrivial money for that.

Also, video is pretty important. If Cleanfeed supported video at a size/quality that I could cap it out of a browser window I'd probably pay for it despite having to rework _everything else_ ; that would be a killer-app feature to compete with vMix Call.

Feel free to ping me offline if you'd like to chat--my email is in my profile. I think Cleanfeed has potential and I'd be happy to talk about this more in- depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My co-host wrote a better guide.[1] Can say there's some overlap, but I definitely think my co-hosts pick of mic is way better, after having experience with both.

[1]: [http://smull.net/podcasting-equipment/](http://smull.net/podcasting- equipment/)

<comment><USER2> ++ on the AT2100USB. I mentioned the AT2005USB elsewhere but this is a very similar mic (the sound profiles are basically interchangeable). And it's cheaper. And it's not a condenser. And it supports XLR without having to buy a "pro" model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No surprise that there are better options than Audacity, but for those that don't already have the Adobe subscription, Audition is going to be a bit expensive. I don't do podcast editing, but I'd probably recommend people take a look at Reaper, particularly if you quality for the discount licensing price of $60. (Commercial use bringing in < $20k p.a.)

[http://reaper.fm/](http://reaper.fm/)

<comment><USER6> If use Reaper, try Ultraschall.fm ([https://github.com/Ultraschall/REAPER](https://github.com/Ultraschall/REAPER)). It's an open source extension for Reaper for podcasting. It's extrem popular in the German podcasting scence (you know that one obsessed with chapter marks).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Missing the important piece of a sound dampening room. Record in a closet with a bunch of clothes and the audio quality will be noticeably better than in your living room.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely..

And no mention of headphones or speakers for yourself either.. Which then ties into the A/D converters which were earlier dismissed as superfluous..

My bet is that even if the mic is not quite as good, something like the focusrite scarlett solo studio pack (~199 - comparable to the 'pro' mic cited) will net overall better results since you get a full loop of prosumer/pro grade audio rather than just the input side covered.. not to dismiss the high importance of a good source track..

don't know this kit though; check sound on sound and soforth if someone is serious. I do have focusrite USB IF and it sounds great.

<comment><USER5> I think a small podcasting setup is maybe the only situation where the simplicity of a USB mic makes sense. I don't have first-hand experience with Blue mics, but I'd have no hesitation in buying one of the Audio Technica USB mics and not bothering with a separate audio interface, _if_ that's all that my requirements were.

<comment><USER2> Most of the AT USB mics, except (I think) the 2020, support XLR to keep using them later. And, as I mentioned elsewhere, you can often drive both USB and XLR in most (all?) of them, if you play and record games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why the author would choose to not use REAPER in a budget recording scenario is beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone who podcasts with multiple people in the room, or interviews or whatever, have experience or pointers for setting up digitally phased array of microphones? There are commercial systems that do this [0] but I haven't seen much example code online. I'm assuming with ~5 very cheap microphones [1] you could get a crisp sound and filter out localized noise in post processing.

[0] - [http://www.clearone.com/products_beamforming_mic_array](http://www.clearone.com/products_beamforming_mic_array)

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

<comment><USER2> I don't understand--why would you need or want a "digitally phased array of microphones"? What problem is it trying to solve that normal multi-track recording doesn't? Get five reasonable dynamic microphones (elsewhere I linked the AT2005USB for $79 and a Knox knockoff for $59), sit people about four feet apart (you can do closer if you have to), and treat the walls a little.

Professionals will do basically the same thing, only upgrading the mics to ElectroVoices or something.

<comment><USER10> It's more difficult to perform such a setup on the go. You can't bring 5 expensive mics to some places. You can't bring audio insulation to most places. You can bring a laptop, a device to multiplex recording devices, some stands, and a few cheap lapel mics to most places.

Maybe you want to, or have to, record audio outdoors.

Maybe you need to record somewhere where construction or work is happening in a single direction.

Many reasons

<comment><USER2> What you're describing doesn't really parse to me. A laptop, an audio interface, and a few pretty-cheap dynamic mics are my usual setup in the first place, and audio quality, even in relatively hostile rooms, is pretty okay. Outdoors recording has never presented much of a problem (but that's what shotguns are for anyway, yeah?), either. Maybe you're dealing with more specialized stuff than I run into, but something like single-direction noise seems kinda corner-casey to me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Logitech H390 is recommended for podcast guests. I do video conferencing from home, and I am dissatisfied with the quality of my home headset. This looks like it might be a good candidate for me to invest in.

Does anyone else have other recommendations for my use case?

<comment><USER12> Other than being just about the comfiest pair of headphones I've worn, the Kingston HyperX Clouds have a detachable mic with great quality. Also reasonably priced, regularly go down to $50 on sale.

[https://www.amazon.com/HyperX-KHX-H3CL-WR-Gaming- Headset/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/HyperX-KHX-H3CL-WR-Gaming- Headset/dp/B00JJNQG98/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This may not be the perfect guide, but I appreciate that they

1\. made a good choice for the everything you need

2\. went ahead and picked a solid choice.

For someone starting out, it would be better to just make these choices than have to suffer the tyranny of the paradox of choice.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you look at the side-by-side comparisons on YouTube, the Audio Technica AT2020 USB+ sounds much better than the Blue Yeti. Note that you need to watch in high res with headphones to fully hear the differences.

<comment><USER15> Depends on how many people you are recording. Also it's generally twice as ecpensive

<comment><USER2> It is a rare situation where you want to be recording multiple people off of one mic.

<comment><USER15> Want to or have to. But I agree anyway

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just want to throw my podcasting hosting solution Pogo into the comments (I know I'm a little late but I digress) - if you'd prefer to host your own feed on your own servers it's a fantastic solution - especially considering I haven't seen anything like it (hence the reason of creation) - [https://github.com/gmemstr/pogo](https://github.com/gmemstr/pogo)

<comment><USER17> Not knowing anything about podcasting, please excuse my ignorance. Using pogo to host your own podcast episodes, hoe would you then 'advertise' your feed for people to find them when searching on a popular Android or Apple mobile device?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For some reason, I always click on these podcasting equipment links. We just cut episode 001, so we'll go live after we cut a few more.

I think we'll have to put together out list of varying equipment as we cast from very remote places.

</comment><comment><USER19> Samson C01U Pro USB [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Eezdu7OGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Eezdu7OGw)

</comment><comment><USER15> SE radio has a guide

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure from this article and a Google search this person might not have the best advice. He scoured the Internet so you don't have to, seems laughable. Maybe he should've searched for his podcast first because I can't find his podcast show anywhere on the webpage or the Internet.

As an audio professional for over 30 years I have one question for you. What is one thing that people will stop watching/listening before any other? Yup, it's bad sound. Google did some research on this in the beginning of youTube. People are more likely to stop a video with bad sound than bad video quality. So my recommendation is to spend some money on a decent mic and interface (ADC/DAC) than buying a usb microphone. So as I'm recently starting a podcast of my own I decided starting off I wanted an EV RE20. Standard radio mic for like 50 years or something. For a good reason, high quality sound and the proximity effect is minimal. Which is important when talking on a mic, saves time in post eq because of variable distances guests or you when speaking into the mic during an interview. Now not everyone has $499 to drop on a mic right? So they've also made a cheaper version for $260 called the EV-RE320. That sounds pretty freggin good. There's also the Shure SM7B for $399 which is a pretty damn good standard. Standards are there for a reason because that is literally what you're competing against and what your listeners are expecting. You can check out the comparisons on the web that helped me make a decision other than an erroneous article that seems to be way off base to me.

I have found Audition to be extremely limiting is how I would like a DAW workflow to operate. There are too many problems for me to take it seriously but I really don't have the time to go into at the moment. I would however recommend Reaper after using it for the past 3 years on and off. Although it may not have the prettiest UI it sure can do some amazing things with audio routing that kinda makes it ahead of the game in a lot of ways. I have spent many years in front of Protools and although I still have a soft spot for its ease of use, they kinda just started pricing themselves out of the market for me upgrading towards my needs as I'm not a professional studio engineer anymore.

So here's my suggestion within the author's cheap equipment budget of $369-439: Take the $240/yr you're going to spend on Audition and buy the EV- RE320 and Reaper. That leaves you with $40 towards your mixer (if you plan on having multiple guests in your studio) and audio interface which will cost you around another $200. Just my brief ideas of how to spend the money better and get a better sound. Now as far as the content well that's up to you!

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U1S4YY4/?tag=lookjar-20](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U1S4YY4/?tag=lookjar-20)

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KCN83VI/ref=oh_aui_deta...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KCN83VI/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0002E4Z8M/?tag=lookjar-20](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0002E4Z8M/?tag=lookjar-20)</comment>


Snapshots of modern mathematics from Oberwolfach - <AUTHOR> https://imaginary.org/snapshots <comment><USER2> Mirror

[https://www.mfo.de/math-in-public/snapshots](https://www.mfo.de/math-in- public/snapshots)

[https://publications.mfo.de/handle/mfo/1336](https://publications.mfo.de/handle/mfo/1336)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm going to add this to my list of online math references. For those who, like me, want more accurate general references than the random people editing Wikipedia:

* Wolfram Alpha: For quick, very short definitions from a variety of perspectives, but probably you already know that. [https://www.wolframalpha.com](https://www.wolframalpha.com)

* Wolfram's Mathworld: Encyclopedia originally by Eric Weisstein; Wolfram acquired and expanded it. Good for brief, precise definitions and broad coverage, but it can be a bit terse: [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/)

* Encyclopaedia of Mathematics wiki: "The original articles are from the online Encyclopaedia of Mathematics, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002. With more than 8,000 entries, illuminating nearly 50,000 notions in mathematics, the Encyclopaedia of Mathematics was the most up-to-date graduate-level reference work in the field of mathematics. / Springer, in cooperation with the European Mathematical Society, has made the content of this Encyclopedia freely open to the public." IME, an excellent, reliable reference; only downside is that it's a bit uneven in breadth and depth: [https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/](https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/)

* Encyclopaedia Britannica: Excellent, accurate, and in-depth, especially for basic topics. [https://www.britannica.com](https://www.britannica.com)

* Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Encyclopedia by professional philosophers, covers many mathematics topics. Dense but certainly in-depth. [https://plato.stanford.edu/](https://plato.stanford.edu/)

...

And a few that you have to pay for:

* The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, edited by Timothy Gowers: You probably already know about this one. It's an amazing opus that covers pure mathematics.

* Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning by Aleksandrov, et al: Encyclopedia, in the form of a large collection of survey articles, by Soviet mathematicians in the mid-20th century. Strong on historical context. Highly regarded at the the time; from the review in Science: "Whether a physicist wishes to know what a Lie algebra is or how it is related to a Lie group, or an undergraduate would like to begin the study of homology, or a crystallographer is interested in Fedorov groups, or an engineer in probability, or any scientist in computing machines, he will find here a connected, lucid account." [http://store.doverpublications.com/0486409163.html](http://store.doverpublications.com/0486409163.html)

* Oxford English Dictionary: As surprising as it sounds, often I've found no better source for learning new mathematical terms. For each term, the comprehensive variety of definitions from many angles along with the historical quotes, often from mathematicians you'd recognize, provide great context, depth, and insight; the competitors above can't match the OED's research. And yes, the definitions are mathematically accurate as far as I've been able to tell. [http://oed.com](http://oed.com)

<comment><USER4> > OED

do you have an example?

Coincidentally, Wiktionary had a math session last month. How do you like [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/triangulation](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/triangulation) for example?

Mathematicians like Don Knuth take great care to source etymologies of mathematical terms, too. In some cases it seems necessary to avoid confusion over different, similarly named ideas.

<comment><USER3> >> OED

> do you have an example?

Off the top of my head and IIRC, _harmony_ and _root_.

> Wiktionary

While I respect the efforts of Wiktionary and Wikipedia, I don't use them for mathematics. Mathematics is a field whose distinguishing feature, in a sense, is its exact precision. I don't have the expertise to read crowd-sourced material and identify which information reaches that level of precision, which is a little off, which is fringe, and which is just nonsense. In the case of mathematics, information of uncertain accuracy is worse than no information at all, IMHO.

I once read an article by a mathematician reviewing Wikipedia. One page they looked at contained some good information, some imprecise information, and some nonsense: The thing I remember was a section about a discovery in the field; the discovery was insignificant, if it was real, and it was attributed to someone nobody heard of. The reviewer speculated that the person to which it was attributed must have added the section.

> Mathematicians like Don Knuth take great care to source etymologies of > mathematical terms, too

That's great. It's hard to imagine he has the resources and expertise in etymology of the OED.

When I want to learn something on a scholarly level, there's no substitute for resources who already have done some of the scholarly heavy lifting for me.</comment></comment></comment>


Has anyone ran into any limitations with Stripe or Braintree? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I use Stripe a lot (I've developed various products that use it) and have only found a couple of limitations.

1) International bank transfers. They have international accounts but you can't send transfers to non-US accounts using the API.

2) Custom amount subscriptions. You must setup a subscription plan first but if you wish to accept, say, recurring donations of varying amounts it adds another layer of complexity.

With 2) you can get around it by creating the plan via the API just before creating the customer object but it'd be nice to have direct support - you'd be surprised how many requests I get for this feature.

Overall though, Stripe is AWESOME and I highly recommend them.

</comment><comment><USER3> We couldn't use Stripe (in the UK) because they currently cannot process into our UK-held USD account, they would need to do the conversion to GBP before transferring which for various reasons is a showstopper. I was all set to ditch our merchant account/PSP setup for Stripe until we ran into that particular issue.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've had no problems with Braintree, other than some very slow-running queries (5+ minutes to get a list of subscribers, for example). Support has been fast and generally excellent.</comment>


Tesla Model Y Heat Pump – The Start of Something Bigger? - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/next-trick-elon-musk-revolutionize-183200781.html <comment><USER2> The entire 10 paragraph article is based around a single tweet from Musk and doesn't explain a single thing about how the heat pump in the headline works.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could buy a mini split heat pump from mitsubishi today. Five units of heat for every one of electricity. Rock solid reliability. I'm not sure it needs reinventing. What it needs is a better service industry so you can get them installed and maintained cheaply. Cheap installation, maintenance and repairs of the heat pumps we already have, that would change the world.

</comment><comment><USER4> You _should_ think about heat pumps for HVAC in your home, especially if it's well-insulated (if not, think about insulation and heat pumps). But you should buy one made by Mitsubishi or Fujitsu, which are already amazing.

<comment><USER5> Only in certain climates though. Heat pumps typically perform poorly in colder climates where it's difficult to extract heat from low ambient outdoor temperatures. I work in HVAC and we almost never use them here in Denver because you can't get enough heat out of them when you need it the most.

<comment><USER4> Mitsubishi and Fujitsu both have models that are rated efficient down to -15F now, with anecdotal reports they can handle -25F.

<comment><USER6> Can't you also (in new construction or remodels and not in permafrost areas) bury a heat exchanger underground?

<comment><USER7> Yes, they call this "geothermal" (although it's not like geothermal power generation). You can also use lakes and large ponds rather than burying it.

I looked into it last year. The main problem is cost (in getting into the ground) and expertise. In my area at least, there are dozens of reasonably solid residential HVAC companies with extensive traditional heat pump experience, and zero with extensive geothermal experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Flagged because all this article is, is some shallow quotes from Elon's Twitter and statements like "people are speculating how it works!" There is no new information nor interesting analysis.

</comment><comment><USER9> I really don't understand quite what's going on here - most home heating and cooling in my country has used heat pumps for years, isn't that the case in the US?

<comment><USER10> In Canada we have really cold weather and heat pumps are used but only down to between -5C to -10C depending on the efficiency of your pump. If I tried to run my heat pump in really cold weather it would just never reach the desired temperature.

<comment><USER9> One option is to use a ground-source heat pump in that kind of situation, if you have enough land to dig or drill to install the exchanger pipes. Most places in Australia where I live are able to just use air source but I've seen ground source ones in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't the Nissan Leaf use a heat pump as well?

<comment><USER12> A lot of EV use a heat pump. Some old model had a petrol heater, like the EV version of the Peugeot 106</comment></comment>


Smaz - short strings compression library - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/antirez/smaz/tree/master <comment><USER2> This code made me smile, so don't take this the wrong way.

Don't run smaz() on untrusted input. Two things you need to fix, and a general word of advice:

(1) In the 0xFE case, you check for headroom in the output buffer but not the input buffer. If 0xFE is the last character in the input, you run right off the end of it, dumping the contents of memory to the output string.

(2) In the 0xFF case, same thing; if 0xFF 0xFE are the last characters in the buffer, I get at least 254 bytes of surrounding memory in my output.

How big a deal this is depends on what's in memory (and where the buffers are being kept). Generally, these are going to be on the stack, thus, a big deal.

General advice: not in love with using signed integers for byte counts; also, I don't think you have this problem because you're using full width integers, but be aware that your length bytes can theoretically wrap back to 0 if you're ever not careful in the future.

DON'T DATE ROBOTS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello tptacek, it is not very common with the normal use case to decompress things that you didn't compressed yourself, but I agree with you that is better to add this checks at the cost of some speed. Btw note that this is common in compression code that tries to do fast. in things like Fastlz and similar libs this is a compile time define, I may do the same, if SAFE_DECOMPRESSOR is defined it will do the check, otherwise will just skip the checking code.

Also note that the access is read only, so basically it's not possible to use such thing to run unprivileged code. Also in moder operating systems pages are zeroed before to be used in a different process, so it is not possible to read part of memory about a different process.

Thanks for the hint

<comment><USER2> Three observations:

(1) It is extremely common for network apps to decompress blobs they didn't generate; even in cases where those blobs aren't passed client/server, but are instead roundtripped through a database or shared persistence layer.

(2) Whatever fastlz may do, the industry standard (in Win32 and Unix and in embedded devices) is zlib --- at least from what we've found on app pentests --- and zlib doesn't have this problem (now).

(3) Zlib is itself a minefield of vulnerabilities, which supports the point that your compression codec is a security hotspot for an application.

But my point isn't that your code sucks; it's nice and tight.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) ACK, you are right, actually I'm probably going to use in the future this lib for Redis (<http://code.google.com/p/redis>), and it is important that an untrusted DB will load correctly without memory corruptions or invalid accesses.

2) Right, but a define to don't this checks is useful for environments where data can be trusted but speed is very important.

3) Good point. I'll fix the code. Btw what is nice about that kind of things is that testing against random data helps _a lot_.

Zlib should do that. For example, do you remember the old security bug of old bind implementations of using a 'ptr' opcode (used for compression) in DNS packets in order to create an infinite loop and mount a DoS? Years ago I tested how this bug were trivial to spot just processing random data. This is true for a lot of applications.

If you know how the application works you can "tune" this random data with biases that will stimulate a lot more the code. This is a worthy testing tool that is underused IMHO.

Thanks for your comment.

<comment><USER2> The testing you're describing is called "fuzzing", and it's the dominant way researchers find vulnerabilities today (I didn't fuzz your code; I just read it, and then wrote a little test doohickey).

David Molnar at Berkeley has done a ton of work on smart fuzzing: <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dmolnar/>

Ilja van Sprundel wrote what has got to be the most popular "dumb" fuzzer, mangle.c: <http://www.digitaldwarf.be/products/mangle.c>

Mangle routinely finds horrible, horrible things in modern code; Ilja deserves some kind of anti-Nobel Prize for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I wrote this lib as an initial test on short strings compression. It seems like it can be useful for things like memcached, Redis, and alike, but may also be a good idea to make your MySQL DB shorter (chats, logs, user messages, news titles, urls, can all be compressed with this lib). In the README there is some info about the lib, the usage is brain-dead simple.

It's code of few hours ago, but should be pretty stable already, with this kind of programming what's nice is that you can encrypt/decrypt millions of strings from /dev/urandom to spot obvious bugs in very short time.

I wonder if this lib can be useful to somebody else.

Some example:

        'This is a small string' compressed by 50%
        'foobar' compressed by 34%
        'the end' compressed by 58%
        'not-a-g00d-Exampl333' enlarged by 15%
        'Smaz is a simple compression library' compressed by 39%
        'Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide' compressed by 49%
        'this is an example of what works very well with smaz' compressed by 49%
        '1000 numbers 2000 will 10 20 30 compress very little' compressed by 10%

<comment><USER3> It looks like your encoding routine could get better compression if it weighed alternative encodings more carefully. For example, "not-a-g00d-Exampl333" could be better compressed as a single run of literal characters rather than as several runs of literal characters interspersed with codebook entries. (In this sense, the single letter codebook entries might not be helping your compression ratio.)

<comment><AUTHOR> jcl yes this is a compromise, if you check smaz_compress it does this kind of checks but only in order to glue together consecutive verbatim outputs into a single one (up to 256 bytes), but does not back-check if a single byte interruption is not worth it.

I think this can be an option that can be done in a second-pass way if a given #define is active. Thanks for the useful comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems to me that gzip or lzma with a constant, language-optimized dictionary would both...

(1) compress better; and

(2) be more robust/self-documenting.

EG: "Feed this dictionary, optimized over 1 billion [English|Western language|etc] documents, to zlib deflateSetDictionary() before compressing."

(The zlib/gzip dictionary is only 32KiB, but the lzma dictionary can be up to 32MiB.)

Building a small library of standard dictionaries, keyed by hash (so they can be locally cached or fetched when needed) would offer good coverage of many string domains.

See for example the Google 'Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP (SDCH)' proposal, apparently a feature of Google Toolbar:

[http://sdch.googlegroups.com/web/Shared_Dictionary_Compressi...](http://sdch.googlegroups.com/web/Shared_Dictionary_Compression_over_HTTP.pdf)

<http://groups.google.com/group/SDCH>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure you can do this, what you get is something that is also able to adapt dynamically after the first 100 bytes or so. My requirement was to have something smaller, simpler, possibly able to run on low memory systems, and especially, with a much faster decompression compared to zlib.

I'm not exploiting an arithmetic encoding basically, and the dictionary is (intentionally) small. Add to this lib an arithmetic encoding and you get near to a zlib with an optimized dictionary, but at the cost of a lot of speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It looks like you put together your codebook by hand (containing phrases like "[http://"](http://) and ".com"), right? Wouldn't it be better to automatically extract it from a sample text corpus? Otherwise, you'd be introducing your own biases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, no I build it with a Ruby script. But I inserted two codes by hand, <http://> and .com. All the rest is based on a probability-length based weight, and a test data that is the following: english books in .txt format, and different .html pages from wikipedia.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can mechanical movements be designed systematically? - <AUTHOR> Is there any systematic method for designing/"programming" passive mechanical movements where, given mechanical input behavior, an output behavior is produced by the design?
If one can come up with a solution which produces the desired behavior, it can be modeled in a CAD tool. But how do you come up with what to model?
Here are several resources I am aware of but do not know how to piece together.
- http://507movements.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/user/thang010146
- https://www.youtube.com/user/YesYenGraphiTech
--
My specific input is a row of rods which over time independently actuate (go up) and return to their initial position (return back down). No more than, say, 6 rods are ever up at a given time.
The output is a separate register of rods (o_1,o_2,o_3,o_4,o_5,o_6) with the following behavior: At any time, say the input rods (b_1,...,b_k) are actuated, and became actuated in their labeled order. When some of them, say (b_i), i in S, de-actuate, then (o_i), i in S, should rapidly "fire," i.e. actuate then de-actuate.
This process has to be able to repeat over and over, so after an output o_i fires the (o_{i+1},...,o_6) need to somehow get reset to anticipate future input rod actuations.
I know an easy answer is to just use a microcontroller but I am really only interested in a purely mechanical solution. <comment><USER2> Maybe Norton - Design of Machinery will help you? Also, the slides for a lecture I had some years ago: [https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/3163786/mod_resou...](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/3163786/mod_resource/content/2/Aula%207%20SEM0104.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The key topic seems to be "Kinematic Synthesis" for which there appears to be a developed theory.

[https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs194-28/fa15/lectures/kinem...](https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs194-28/fa15/lectures/kinematic- synthesis-1.pdf)</comment></comment>


Plagiarism of my open source app ChatSecure - <AUTHOR> https://chatsecure.org/blog#6

<comment><USER2> "I realize the BSD allows people to sell my binaries and source but I do not believe it authorizes them to sell the source under a different license."

Er, that's the exact point of the BSD license. The GPL even allows selling binaries and source code, but not re-licensing.

So the gist of this blog post is that you offered your source code under a license that allows re-licensing provided that your copyright and some notices are included, someone did it, and now you realise you want the GPL. I applaud this person for taking advantage of the very point of BSD and making some business out of it, that chap is smart.

If he's using your logo and you didn't license the logo then that's a copyright claim. But you have no right to whine about the source code. He can say whatever he wants about it, that the "product" is his, etc. (You think Google Chrome doesn't use a hundred libraries written by someone else? But it's Google that made Chrome, right?) And in YOUR LICENSE you wrote "you cannot use my name to advertise", so the only question is whether your copyright notice and license terms are included in the redistribution.

"… illegally selling licenses to my source code for $13.99-$59.99."

I would be VERY careful about libeling people by publicly outing them as doing illegal activities. Alexander Moskalev may even have a case against you for defamation or libel. I'd take this blog down if I were you. And then go and read some pages from <http://fsf.org/>.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have the cash to buy a "license" to my own code, but I would imagine he removed the copyright notices like he did for Matt Gemmell: <https://twitter.com/mattgemmell/status/235302914258792448>

I didn't have a problem with him selling my stuff, I just have a problem with him claiming something I wrote as his own.

By the way, Chupamobile responded and removed his software: <https://chatsecure.org/blog#7>

<comment><USER2> Guilty before proven guilty. I'm glad you're vindicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you didn't download it, how do you know (s)he removed mentions of your name, and the BSD license mention? Because if those things are still there, what (s)he is doing is perfectly legal and fine.

I see two things that you could do (in addition to the DMCA if the BSD license was actually not respected):

\- Selling it yourself cheaper than (s)he is (since anyway you weren't counting on making any money with it) with premium/improved features that are not in the version which is distributed open source ;

\- Or you could just try to advertise your free product, saying that it is the same thing that this other person is selling, in order to get credited better for your own work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I shouldn't have to pay money to find out if my license is being violated. Honestly, I don't even care that they are selling the code, I just care that they are representing my work as their own.

<comment><USER4> As p4bl0 pointed out though, if your license isn't being violated then you have no claim here, they're obeying the law and your takedowns are not valid.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are relicensing my software:

Regular License - $13.99

The regular license allows the use of the purchased item in a project for either personal or commercial uses, without the payment of any further fees or charges after the initial download cost. The regular license gives you the right to use the purchased items within 1 project of your own or on behalf of a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit). You or your client cannot offer the item up for resale either on its own or as part of a project. Items purchased under a regular license must not be redistributed or resold "as- is" or as part of any other collection of files.

What you can do: You can integrate the component in 1 APP. You can be distribute it only as a binary only (You cannot distribute Source Code). Commercial use is allowed. You can customize the Source Code.

<comment><USER5> And what part of that is incompatible with a BSD license?

<comment><USER6> The license was not reproduced. Please read the BSD license.

<comment><USER7> Maybe you should too. The BSD license only requires reproduction of the copyright and license terms in (1) the source code; or (2) in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the a binary distribution.

You don't have to state the use of (revised) BSD-licensed code outside the source or binary distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey, author of ChatSecure here. Has anyone else experienced plagiarism of their open source software? This guy was almost insultingly lazy and didn't even bother to use a different logo or obfuscate the code.

<comment><USER8> i'm a bit confused: the bsd license allows you to re-sell someone else's source, binaries, images, etc for a profit. you just have to include the copyright notice.

is that what you're sending the dmca notice about? because you couldn't find the necessary copyright notice? (if you didn't download it, how do you know it's not in the about box?)

<comment><USER9> If you go to the plagiarized product page ([http://www.chupamobile.com/products/details/600/Secured+Chat...](http://www.chupamobile.com/products/details/600/Secured+Chat/)) and click more info under Regular License, the license terms are more restrictive than the BSD, which is a violation. However, the author is in Indonesia, so there's probably not much recourse.

Edit: the _plagiarist_ is in Indonesia

<comment><USER10> More restrictive terms than BSD aren't a violation.

Plenty of proprietary systems have been based on BSD code. That's pretty much the point of BSD.

If you want to prevent people placing more restrictive conditions on your code, that's what the GPL is for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What your "plagiarist" is doing is perfectly legal I think. As long as your name appears in the source code and/or binary, you can't send a DMCA takedown. Also, he is _not_ using your name to endorse his own product, which is what point 3 of the BSD license is all about.

Also, note that the plagiarist's derivative software can be under any license of his choice, be it commercial, non-commercial or personal. He is free to include / modify your source code and sell it under a different license of his choice -- the only restriction being that your name must appear in those parts of his source code _you_ have written. Unless you buy his product and confirm that he has removed your name, you can't do anything.

Remember that BSD license roughly means public domain with copyright notice preservation. That's all. It doesn't restrict anything else.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think you're missing an important lesson here: _Your product is more valuable than you think._

This guy wouldn't have started selling your thing is it wasn't clear that it's something that people will pay for. Your first reaction when you hear that he's making money off of it shouldn't be how to stop him. It should be "Wow. _I_ could be making money off of this.

My advice:

      - Don't worry about this guy.
      - Put a price on your product
      - Stop giving away the source
      - Improve it until your "competitor" fades away

There's no rule saying that you have to give your work away as open source. And as you've demonstrated, there's also no rule that if you give your work away for free, somebody else won't notice its value and sell it in your place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you trust proprietary software to encrypt your communications?

<comment><USER13> Absolutely. Time to start charging for it - you've got something here. Might as well pick the fruits of your labor.

<comment><USER12> Amazingly, this (and the root comment up top) are actually getting downvoted. I hadn't realized the sentiment among open source developers against making money from their craft was so strong.

But it shouldn't be. We, as developers, shouldn't harbor any ill will toward the OP should he decide to pull the open source version and sell it for profit. We certainly shouldn't advise him _against_ it or recommend an alternative open source license that better guarantees that nobody can make money off this excellent piece of software.

Geeks like us tend to have a natural aversion to making money by selling our work directly, as though it's somehow dirty or wrong in some way that we can't quite articulate.

But we need to get over that.

We have a guy here (patio11) whose job this normally is, but he seems to have taken the morning off so I'll do this in his place:

 _On behalf of the Internet, I hereby grant you, the developer, permission to charge money for your software._

There, you're good.

<comment><USER14> I know you (probably) mean well but you're missing the point and come off as fairly condescending.

Did you consider the possibility that the author already has a job that pays him extremely well and that the ROI he gets in spending time providing customer support/marketing for a commercial iOS app is actually losing money for him?

You should save the "you are allowed to make money" talk for people who are actually trying to sell software and doing it badly (Because they undervalue the work they created) instead of directing it at someone producing what looks like a labor of love and is not interested in marketing everything he has ever created.

<comment><USER12> _Did you consider the possibility that the author already has a job that pays him extremely well and that the ROI he gets in spending time providing customer support/marketing for a commercial iOS app is actually losing money for him?_

I think that's more a rationalization that developers use to convince themselves not to charge for their stuff than a reality. I've certainly never experienced any support/marketing overload with any of my products.

He already has the app in the app store. His support/marketing is where it is already. All he need do is tick a box marked "allow people to send me money" in his app store control panel and he's done. In short, there's no "down" for the app to go. It's already maxed out on the "losing money" front, and doesn't seem to be overburdening him.

On the customer support side, he might actually see that go down too by charging. Here's yesterday's discussion on exactly that:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4376126>

This really is a case where there's no downside to charging money. And, seemingly, a very real downside of keeping it open source.

<comment><USER14> _I've certainly never experienced any support/marketing overload with any of my products._

Presumably because that's your full time job?

<comment><USER12> Far from it. Yikes, I've never bought into the valley startup idea, where you spend all your time working on your thing. I spend maybe a dozen hours a month maintaining my little software empire and supporting customers.

There's a reason I promote the lifestyle. Having a little pile of software products paying you a full developer salary in exchange for answering a few emails a week is a pretty good place to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, someone could use your code if it is BSD and charge as much as he wants.

He could use your code with the only requirement to add you to the credits. He also could modify the license, provided that he respects the due credit.

You can't say: "Now my code is GPL!!", the code that this person is using continues being BSD. You gave it away, your DMCA complaint is invalid.

Stop whining and learn about the basics of licensing first. Then focus on your product and not on what other people do. You could also charge for it while giving your code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, apparently he removed the copyright notices, violating the BSD: <https://twitter.com/mattgemmell/status/235302914258792448>

To help prevent any future problems I have changed the license to GPL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems like a pretty reasonable response to me.

More importantly, I wonder how frequently this happens - pulling down an open- source project and trying to sell it elsewhere?

<comment><USER17> There's nothing illegal about doing that. Only the relicensing is iffy.

<comment><USER16> If you violate the license, it's illegal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is an update from the co-founder of Chupamobile:

<https://chatsecure.org/blog#7>

</comment><comment><USER18> I just looked at the license he referenced in the blog post: [https://raw.github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record- iOS/mas...](https://raw.github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record- iOS/master/LICENSE) and it is the GPL, not BSD. So all the discussion about BSD is moot (unless it was really licensed under a BSD style license previously, and was just changed).

<comment><USER11> He changed from BSD to GPL just now: [https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off- the-Record-iOS/commit/...](https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record- iOS/commit/20e7110e5ce29b3f6b91b93e45987e5fc65bef37)</comment></comment>


Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2010/08/10/yakuza-3-review.html <comment><USER2> I don't understand the need to censor parts from the American version. SEGA USA and many other western publishers are still stuck in the 90's. Adults purchase games for themselves now and Videogames are no longer exclusively for teens and kids.

Rockstar identified this and have reaped massive profits. They could've considered shipping a neutered GTA yet they didn't and the latest installment was rated one of the best games in recent times.

The stigma around adult themes in Videogames needs to die out for the industry to evolve beyond what it currently is, I suspect similar reasons affected the cancelled Silent Hills (apart from Konami's stupidity)

</comment><comment><USER3> The romanticization of gangsters (Yakuza included) really bother me. Video games aren't the devil and aren't real, but they can have real effects in how we react to the world. When we play "gangster" video games and interview "real life gangsters", it seems really edgy and cool. But these people commit real life crimes, and are actual _criminals_. Not in a video game: in real life. And aside from law enforcement, one big disincentive to actually be a gangster is societal censure / disapproval.

As cool as it is to have a realistic video game, pieces like this are a good example of the insidious impact they can have on how you treat the world.

I am sad to see a genuinely bad person being lionized.

<comment><USER4> Are you bothered by literature like Vladimir Nabukov's Lolita, as well?

<comment><USER3> Great point.

I think it's dependent on the saturation. The more pro-gangster things we see, the worse it is. But the first one or ten artworks have no impact. If we saw hundreds and hundreds of Lolita-style works, yeah, it would bother me a bit and I would object as much.

But please don't misinterpret me: I'm not advocating censorship. I'm advocating for all adults to consider the insidious aspect of "cultural acceptance creep" into their media consumption, and make their own decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great read. I think you should add a (2010) to the title though. Took me a while to get that it's not up to date.

Also what's with that font?

</comment><comment><USER6> From the article: "Kiryu is the way yakuza used to be. We kept the streets clean. People liked us. We didn't bother ordinary citizens. We respected our bosses. Now, guys like that only exist in video games."

I love how in Japan, even the criminals have a sense of social responsibility.

</comment><comment><USER7> This was an incredible read. Makes you wonder what Hitler would think about all the WW2 games and whatnot.

<comment><USER8> Time for a "Hitler discovers he's a meme" video?

<comment><USER9> Hitler uses Docker has been my most favorite recent one.

[http://youtu.be/PivpCKEiQOQ](http://youtu.be/PivpCKEiQOQ)

<comment><USER10> This reminds me that I was always disappointed when they didn't include a Stalin reference when he was mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome review and book recommendation. As an older geek, I don't care much that it's a few years old. In fact, it would make it cheaper to find an used console to play this game on.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is an awesome article! Has anybody here read that Tokyo Vice book?

<comment><USER8> I have. Cracking read, although I'm told it's somewhat dated by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fun to read, but an old review. Yakuza 6 will be released soon.

</comment><comment><USER14> (2010)?

</comment><comment><USER15> 'Goto considered harmful', avoid at all costs.

<comment><USER16> Nice.

Wonder if the rest of HN readers didn't get the reference to Tadamasa Goto, the author's arch-villain in real life. If I had a superpower to give +100 upvote once every 3 months, I'd use it on your comment.</comment></comment>


Robots won't destroy jobs, but they may destroy the middle class - T-A http://www.vox.com/2014/8/23/6057551/autor-job-polarization

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the American middle class has far more to fear from the current crop of politicians -- in _both_ parties -- than from automation.</comment>


Ask HN: Your Github profile - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering what everyone's github profile was, I'm 'jawngee'.<p>I ask because I just found swombat's and he's got some great code in there, I'm sure other HNers have got some nice repos too. <comment><USER2> <http://github.com/mbrubeck>

My current side project is "compleat", which is a super-easy way to add smart tab completion for shell commands. It's not release-ready yet (not finished or fully documented) but feel free to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://github.com/brl>

Some security and privacy related tools that I've written.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://github.com/jcapote>

This is one of my favorite features of github...

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://github.com/blackbrrr></comment>


Ask HN: Choosing a pricing model - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,

   here's the context of my question for you...
 --- What I am doing ---
I am doing a code generator to help users kickstart java application.
Using a database schema we generate all the standard technical layers (maven/bean/dao/spring/hibernate/springmvc etc).
This is pretty standard, but what's different ?

  We do it online. It's our purple's cow touch.
  We focus on the integration within frameworks/layers which is a real pain to many.

 --- How does it work ? ---
1. You reverse engineer your database using a tool available on our site
3. You upload the extracted metadata to our site
4. The site generates the source for a working CRUD java application

  With best of breed technologies and best practices.
  With *no dependency* on my service.

 5. You download the source code and start your own project using it

  You are on you own, no need for our service anymore.
  However you may want to use the tool again when
    . You add a new table/relation modify column (and do not want to update manually the source code)
    . You want a new module available (hibernate search integration, new web layer)
 --- My questions for you ---
1. How do you price a code generation tool ?

  Would you charge per generation ?
  Per month ?
  Per user ?
  Per database schema ?
  Per number of tables ?
 2. Would you give a trial version ? If so how ?

  By removing generated unit tests ?
  By forcing the package name ?
  By adding a specific header in the source files ?
 3. Would you forget the online approach and settle with

  A maven plugin ?
  An eclipse plugin ?
  A standalone application like codesmith ?
  How you would protect it ?

 Thanks for your attention <comment><USER2> "we focus on the "? You left something out.

A better approach to figuring out how to charge for this is:

"what workflow do I anticipate my likely customers will have, and how would this product integrate into that workflow?"

You should also look at what other products are in this space, if any, and see how they price themselves.

All that said:

I'm not sure selling this as a service is the right approach.

You could set yourself up as a specialized consultancy (give us your tired old schemas, we give you a shiny new data-access layer using your choice of the current best-of-breed technologies), and just keep your code generator as your secret sauce.

Then you market your consultancy to various outsourcing shops, offering to take the initial persistence layer coding off of their hands for their new projects. You can turn around better quality code for this stuff, faster, than any of the sweatshop operations, and you're cost-competitive with the sweatshops, too.

I know the dream is to set up a service, let it run, then sit back and collect the checks, but the consultancy route might be an easier route to monetizing this.

Otherwise, I would attempt to negotiate big-dollar site licenses with large outsourcing firms, who probably stand to benefit the most from this technology (b/c they are the ones who most often are given a legacy database and asked to build systems on top of it).

If you go that route, being available over the web isn't much of a selling point.

For a trial versions, making an unlimited use trial for N months (N = 1, 2, or 3) available after a phone call works:

* the phone call step slows things down, but makes it much more difficult to "farm" an infinite # of free trials (!)

* since the primary value-add for this service is at the start of a new project, and since the typical large outsourcing firm has new projects starting all the time, a short-ish trial doesn't run much risk of giving the customer everything they'd want from the full product (b/c it only helps them with projects that were getting started in those months)

(!) If you go this route, don't hard-code a time limit, but do set up some automated emails to remind you when a trial is coming close to wrapping up. It's helpful as a sales thing to be able to extend the trial a week or two (or, at least, it's terrible from a customer's standpoint if the trial cuts off hard right in the middle of something).

<comment><AUTHOR> Going after the "typical large outsourcing firm" seems too much for us: we suck at sales.

Internet is more our cup of tea, and easier to market I think, and yes I have to admit the dream to set up a service, let it run, then sit back and collect the checks it very tempting :)

Any hint on the pricing model you would see for the online service ?

<comment><USER2> If I were you I'd avoid anything overly complicated.

A lot of potential customers are going to balk if they have to put any work into figuring out how much your service is going to cost (eg: if it was based on some formula involving the table count and the column count(s)).

Sometimes a clever and innovative pricing scheme works well, but a lot of times customers shy away from anything they're not already used to. Keep it simple to figure out what this is going to cost.

If I were you I'd split your offerings into three tiers, basic, medium, and enterprise, and then sell them on a subscription basis. When you subscribe to a tier, you get unlimited use of that tier's offerings (!).

Basic would be aimed at projects a small ISV would tackle; probably put in some limit on the model complexity, or omit some of the crown jewels.

Medium would be aimed at larger projects; relax the limits on model complexity and omit fewer of the crown jewels.

Enterprise would be aimed at "enterprise" stuff, would have essentially no limits and would include the crown jewels, if you have any.

Candidate prices: 99/yr, 999/yr, 9999+/yr, but you should do more research to home in on something.

I suggest yearly subscriptions b/c it's more money upfront, it puts less mental strain on a potential purchaser, and the larger #s make you look more serious.

About the "more serious": $99 is cheap, but a believable price for "serious software". The equivalent monthly rate is ~$8.50/month, which is hard to take seriously as being "serious software".

I want to reiterate that you'll probably have better luck monetizing this in some different way; no harm in trying the service route first, if that's what you want to do.

Even as a service, though, you guys need to pound on some doors and do some interviews to figure out which features are wanted by what potential customers, and why; this will help you refine your offerings, get a better handle on the right price(s), and figure out where best to draw the lines between tiers.

(!) If you do offer unlimited use within a tier make sure your terms of service prohibit resale of the service itself. You'll also need to plan on building a monitoring infrastructure to alert you to "suspicious use" (eg: high volume on an account, or a large # of distinct ips using a particular set of credentials).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've just written an article on how best to price an application:

[http://blog.stormideas.com/archive/2009/01/07/pricing- your-w...](http://blog.stormideas.com/archive/2009/01/07/pricing-your-web- app.aspx)

I hope it's of use to you!

Bob

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is this a web app? For many companies even letting your service see the database metadata is not going to be viable. i.e. you're excluding the potential customers with the most money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand this point, that's why there the third question :)

Would you create A maven plugin ? An eclipse plugin ? A standalone application like codesmith ? How you would protect it ?

What pricing model would you choose ?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Make money w/o banner ads or subscriptions - <AUTHOR>

I've been helping work on a website www.kayak411.com and we just had a major re-release. We're not really doing it to make money or a company, we just like kayaking. It would be nice to make a little money off of it just to cover hosting costs + a little (think craigslist). So, we're looking for really creative ways to make a little money without sidebar/banner ads or subscriptions. So far we are planning on getting a cutback on camping referrals and maybe a small fee to list things in the marketplace.
Anyone have any other unusual ideas?
www.kayak411.com <comment><USER2> A big one is affiliate links, which are particularly well-suited to niche sites like this. You can regularly review products and put affiliate links so that readers can buy them online. Look into Commission Junction, Linkshare, Google Affiliate Network, Amazon Associates, etc. You can make a decent amount per sale (usually around 1-15%). If 10 people buy a $400 Kayak and you get 5%, that's $200 in your pocket.

You can also put together an instructional ebook or video about kayaking and sell it on the site.

</comment><comment><USER3> there's <http://flattr.com>, which is gaining popularity, or a paypal donate button.

I run ads on my blog <http://puremango.co.uk>. I don't think ads have to be ugly or obtrusive. I like to think my ads are subtle and not annoying.

So, I wonder why are you against a few simple ads?

<comment><USER4> I know why I'm not crazy about them: they don't make you much money. At least, in my case, Adsense and Adbrite haven't done much for me.

<comment><USER5> What makes you think anything else would? I mean, is this a site of 100 visitors a month?

<comment><USER4> Thousands.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CommerceIQ: 78% of webcam product pages showed out of stock in the week of May 9 - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/21/webcam-backorder-coronavirus-pandemic/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hat-tip to Techmeme for the headline. Original title was too long and lacked context. It was:

The hunt for a work-from-home webcam: A story of broken supply chains, 'sold- out' messages and refreshing online carts</comment>


Opening up cyberspace with Matrix and WebVR - <AUTHOR> https://matrix.org/blog/2017/04/04/opening-up-cyberspace-with-matrix-and-webvr/ <comment><USER4> I'm huge on VR -- especially WebVR -- but this isn't what comes to mind when I think of the metaverse opuses in the post. Telepresent chat rooms were never an important part of these stories. That's not where the magic is.

My take is that the metaverse is simply a software system so deep that it becomes part of everyday reality. And we've already built this, but our human- computer interface technology (mostly the software) sucks too much for us to see it. In the meantime we call it the web.

This looks like really cool tech, but I don't think the path to the matrix involves a new protocol, or a new data layer. I think it will come about by extruding our pre-existing software epic -- the web -- into our virtual and augmented environments, in the same way the iPhone compressed the software and ideas that already existed into our pockets.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that the web itself just doesn't have a standard realtime component. (other than Matrix, or possibly XMPP or Solid). Sure you can provide better HCI technology to expose the websites and webservices of today to users via VR/AR... but they end up just being disconnected silos; the equivalent of different tabs in a browser.

The thesis here is that you need some kind of fabric to weave these apps together if you want them to feel remotely immersive in AR/VR. Rather than each app being its own island, surely you want the ability to move your avatar between them, and collaborate and communicate between services and apps, and have some kind of common virtual physical metaphor that you can literally build on as a platform - whether that's with bots or services or whatever. This is the thought experiment we're doing with the VR side of Matrix.

<comment><USER4> Are Websockets and WebRTC not realtime enough? They need to bake more, but they're literally standards.

I wholeheartedly agree that probably the biggest problem that needs solving is that of siloed experiences. But this is also something the web solved long ago with URLs and files on the front, and webby APIs on the back.

If we invent another protocol to solve this problem, are we not simply creating new silos?

<comment><USER5> Websockets and WebRTC really are not enough _at all_ , and this is a very widely held misapprehension. Websockets (and their HTTP/2 equivalent) are just a dumb pipe for shifting data - just like a TCP socket, but tunnelled over HTTP. Meanwhile WebRTC defines how to encode and transport real-time media streams over the 'net... but deliberately avoids specifying how to discover or signal the existence of those streams in the first place. In analog terms WebRTC is like a phone line without a phone exchange.

I agree that the open Web avoids silos through URLs and ad hoc HTTP APIs. But this is insufficient for a hypothetical VR universe of immersive services: you don't want the only way for a user to be able to navigate between services to be to 'click a link'. And it's arguably a failure that almost every single web service ends up publishing its data via an incompatible ad hoc HTTP APIs - <USER2> instance, given Facebook, Slack, HipChat and Skype all provide supersets of precisely the same basic functionality, how come each has its own proprietary custom HTTP API to do the same thing? Wouldn't it be better if there was a standard open data fabric into which they exposed their data?

The idea here is that VR will suck if it's just a bunch of disconnected apps, and instead you need decentralised primitives for sharing Identity, Avatar properties (e.g. position & orientation), shared VoIP, shared Video, even shared world geometry/assets/physics in order to stitch it together into a coherent experience; both for users or developers.

The web was successful because HTML is so simple, forgiving and flexible - <USER3> you end up with essentially the minimum successful viable hypertext system. One could probably limp along with a VR Web which is just a bunch of webapps which happen to have chunks of WebVR UI. But it could be _so much more_ , while still being flexible and forgiving and lightweight. At least this is Matrix's hope :)

<comment><USER6> Apologies for nitpicking, but I find it rather important: Websockets are not tunneled over HTTP, they are only negotiated over HTTP. Once you are connected, there is no overhead of sending HTTP headers back and forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I want to find this exciting but I can't help feel a little jaded when I hear Matrix's PR spin this as "the missing link" when we've already have countless attempts at creating 3D worlds like this but which all have since faded into obscurity. Heck, I even wrote my own "3D website" in the 90s using a long defunct web markup language called VRML.

It will be interesting if/when we finally get there but I don't expect this will be the breakthrough product. Though personally I think the real evolution of this tech will be more along the lines of augmenting reality with web tech rather than emulating virtual reality to behave like our physical world.

<comment><USER8> Everyone's VR PR posits that they're unique and precious and indispensable. Unicorns in goggles.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure this is entirely fair, given the blog post clearly tries to mention the other folks who are working in this space. Specifically for the "missing communications/data layer" for VR, the only other options I personally know of are High Fidelity (decentralised, but not yet trying for an open standard or to use the open web), OpenCroquet/Cobalt (seems fairly dead since 2010), OpenSimulator (not decentralised, afaik), and there have been some talk of JanusVR + IPFS hybrids.

Empirically, there certainly is a missing layer here, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to propose Matrix as a possible solution :)

In terms of "this will happen organically, rather than as a whole new virtual universe appearing out of nowhere"... we see AR and VR as entirely the same problem from a comms/data interoperability perspective. Both of them need somewhere to store the data. The choice is simply whether you store it in a decentralised DB like Matrix, IPFS, a blockchain(!) or whatever... or if you store it in a silo like a typical VRML or WebVR app, or something like Google/Facebook.

I don't blame everyone for being cynical though - this is the holy grail after all :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> WebVR concerns me because of the garbage collector and the stop-the-world behaviors you see in browsers. VR is _touchy_. If you drop frames, you don't notice it just with your eyes, you notice it with your stomach. It feels really, really bad. Getting adequate perf out of a browser for this stuff seems really implausible.

<comment><USER5> that's what we thought, but you get a solid 60fps on a typical laptop in a 4 way webrtc video conference, or when showing 4K 360 degree video (plus a video call). My Samsung S5 manages about 30fps in Cardboard mode, which is adequate for Cardboard, and on a proper gaming rig it works flawlessly with a Vive or Rift. Seriously: try the demo at [https://matrix.org/vrdemo](https://matrix.org/vrdemo) in browser and see!

The only perf problems we've had are when using VP8 or VP9 for WebRTC video, whereas H.264 (which the demo prefers) correctly decodes efficiently in hardware... and on Firefox where unfortunately [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246410](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246410) slows down the 360 video significantly (to around 20fps for 4K video on the gaming rig) relative to Chromium which manages a solid 30fps (which is the source framerate).

The only motion sickness we've seen has been when editing the skiing videos - the worst thing in the world is if the cameraman wobbles the camera whilst getting up from the floor but your head doesn't move...

<comment><USER9> Video is one thing--you can offload a lot more of that out of JS-land, yeah? What worries the hell out of me is the rest of WebVR. I mean--we see frame drop in _Canvas_ on midrange PCs that's really hard to erase (sincerely, My Last Two Days Of Free Time). The prospect of that sort of mess in VR has me worried. I have a strong stomach so I may play with it once my replacement Vive gets here, but...man. This stuff is so razor-thin on the margins that it really worries me and will continue to so long as we're stuck with stop-the- world GC (and to be clear, _of course_ you can write GC-friendly code...but it's a lot harder in JavaScript, IME, than in Java) anywhere in this stack.

<comment><USER10> I'd expect 2D canvas to have worse performance than WebGL. I don't think that's a fair comparison for WebVR.

Try out [https://aframe.io/a-painter/](https://aframe.io/a-painter/) when you get your Vive in Firefox Nightly and try out the performance. It's native like for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.geektime.com/2017/04/04/matrix-org-brings- cross-p...](http://www.geektime.com/2017/04/04/matrix-org-brings-cross- platform-open-comms-to-vr/) provides another take on this, fwiw, highlighting that the battle for an open VR web has to happen right now if we're to avoid a closed and fragmented future like we have today with instant messaging.

</comment><comment><USER11> My immediate thought was Cobalt/Croquet. It's nice to see that they mention it, but only as "an ambitious project"; then go on to propose their own (part of) an ambitious project ;)

There are some _really_ compelling things to like about Cobalt; not least the fact it incorporates a load of existing protocols (XMPP for chat, VNC for accessing "traditional" applications, etc.).

Unfortunately, its use of Smalltalk (which probably helped it reach so high so quickly) seems to be holding it back from more contributors and adoption. There are Javascript ports which have seen some limited usage, but they appear to be more constrained. Perhaps bootstrapping Squeak on WebAssembly would help, and maybe offering a layer of JS scriptability on top?

Whilst I wish Matrix the best of luck with their efforts, it would be equally great to see their protocols/ecosystems integrated into existing systems too :)

<comment><USER5> We (Matrix) have been tracking Cobalt/Croquet on and off since the original Croquet project. Honestly, looking at [http://www.opencobalt.net/](http://www.opencobalt.net/), things look pretty dead currently though - no news updates since 2010? Should we be looking somewhere else?

To be clear: Matrix tries to be pragmatic above all else, and right now we're just saying "hey, use Matrix for open comms in VR/AR" (a bit like Croquet advocated XMPP back in the day). There is nothing stopping one from using Matrix to add comms into the Croquet metaverse however, and if it's alive and well I'd really hope that someone would try the experiment :)

<comment><USER11> > Honestly, looking at > [http://www.opencobalt.net/](http://www.opencobalt.net/), things look pretty > dead currently though - no news updates since 2010?

I agree it looks pretty dead, but a big bag of old, existing code still does more than a project in the idea stage :)

> Should we be looking somewhere else?

I'm not involved in OpenCobalt, I'm just someone who's also been following it for years. One of its major problems seems to be fragmentation: as far as I can tell, the descendents include:

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

[http://www.3dicc.com](http://www.3dicc.com)

[https://www.krestianstvo.org](https://www.krestianstvo.org)

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

Maybe there's something salvagable amongst all this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am not sure showing 2D videos in WebVR is actually useful or better than a standard Google Hangout. I love having a web browser open while in a video call so I can look up references, share content and other things.

Thus this feels like it is trendy (wohoo VR!), but not actually useful.

<comment><USER5> the point here is that if you view 2D video in a 3D environment with a plain old web browser on a smartphone or tablet etc, it can feel way more immersive when you hook up the accelerometers so you can look around the scene and tilt the device to look from person to person and zoom to whoever's talking etc. Obviously it makes no sense if they have goggles on, but in practice we've found it a huge win over boring 2D VC. (disclaimer, i worked on this :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Aside: To anyone finding the black-with-orange-stripes style weird/annoying, I'm guessing it is a reference to [http://community- sitcom.wikia.com/wiki/Dreamatorium](http://community- sitcom.wikia.com/wiki/Dreamatorium) .

[Edit] Sorry, re: missed reference reference!

<comment><USER7> It's actually a reference to the Holodeck[1] in Star Trek (Matrix even has the same arch design as the Holodeck but which doesn't appear in the Dreamatorium). But you're not too far wrong as the Dreamatorium in Community was also a reference to Star Trek's Holodeck.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> At last, a portal site!

Oh, right.

High Fidelity is worth a try. It's like Second Life with higher resolution, except there's nobody and nothing there.</comment>


Python's httplib uses print for debugging. Oh, it hurts… - <AUTHOR> http://blog.n01se.net/?p=213

<comment><USER2> This code is almost as old as the web itself. The debug loglevel stuff was in the original check-in in 1994, by Guido himself: [http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/httplib.py?revis...](http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/httplib.py?revision=3849&view=markup)

A simple find-replace would be enough to switch it over to python's built-in logging module.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fixing this is a minor rototilling exercise. Just change the print statements to something more sensible and submit a patch.

<comment><USER4> But I've seen this sort of crap in all sorts of "standard" lib's in Python, and it never seems to get cleaned-up...

... I really hate having to use Python.

<comment><USER5> > _But I've seen this sort of crap in all sorts of "standard" lib's in Python, > and it never seems to get cleaned-up..._

I assume you meant to write "I've seen this sort of crap and _written patches for it_ "?

<comment><USER6> Thank you. This is the wonderful thing about opensource - you can fix it if its broken - its the price you pay for getting it for nothing.

<comment><USER7> That's not a price, it's an additional benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a debugging feature. It scratched a particular itch that a particular developer had at the time that they wrote it. If it weren't there at all, would this blog post still have been written?

</comment><comment><USER9> Check out restkit (<http://github.com/benoitc/restkit>) - much better then urllib/2 or httplib/2

<comment><USER10> What's wrong with httplib2?

<comment><USER9> It actually uses httplib1 under the hood which I've had weird problems with (even when using the httplib2 abstraction). Restkit has a better interface and really cool filters for such things as proxies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Httplib has caused me headaches in the past (admittedly due to a very specific and convoluted architecture).

But I wouldn't call it bad... the point made here is simply an issue of not considering scale - in this case easily fixed.

I _would_ call it slow.

</comment><comment><USER12> Curious what you're using httplib for? 80% chance you're reinventing a wheel.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes reinventing something as simple as the wheel is more robust than adapting someone elses equally half baked and unmaintained attempt at wheel reinvention from 2002.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has cloud and mobile already happened? What's next? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to suggest that the cloud and mobile has already happened and get suggestions on what fellow HN'ers think is next. Here's my reasoning:
In cloud computing, Amazon, Heroku, Linode etc. have that pretty much sewn up. In cloud storage, Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Mega etc. have so many storage offerings, price points and features that nobody could hope to compete with them. I believe that the only scope left in the cloud is to build apps using the existing infrastructure.
In mobile there's already too many operating system and platform offerings. The respective app markets have each been driven to the lowest price points and are saturated to such a point that the old "There's an app for that" saying could now potentially be "There's a load of apps for that."
Some say that 'Big Data' is the next big thing. What do you think? <comment><USER2> Focusing on gaming in my response here...

I think the next "Big Thing" is that we are going to start moving more and more toward Augmented Reality (AR) [1] and Virtual Reality (VR) [2].

Thoughts:

1\. Look for gaming to start heading in the direction of VR with technology like Oculus Rift [3]. Also, with someone of the caliber of John Carmack [4] involved, with not only his passion and skill, but his ability to work with graphics hardware manufacturers and driver developers to effect change and garner the necessary support and backing, expect to see vibrant, compelling developments in this field.

Here is a video of John discussing some of his VR work. It is from E3 2012:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg)

2\. Look to see more games like _Ingress_ [5] as things start to move toward AR.

3\. I realize that this may be an extreme, perhaps well-into-the-future example, but check out this short film entitled, _Sight_. It is not difficult to imagine that this is where we are heading with technology like Google Glass (e.g., Note in the film the gamification of things like cooking and dating. Personally, the dating part is scary.)

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

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

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

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

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack)

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_%28game%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_%28game%29)

<comment><USER3> It is yet another cool gadget rather than something what can significantly improve your life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The internet of things. Sensors everywhere. 3d printing. open design. manufacturing getting smaller and more personalized. drones will become legal to fly commercially soon in US(maybe). if transportation gets disrupted with cars that drive themselves, what could you do with a drivable car api. I personally think a lot could be done with robotic arms and outsourced brains(telepresense). augmented reality glasses api? object recognition api? A kickstarter project reached $10 million. what kind of project can get created with say $100 million?

<comment><USER5> I agree with Internet of things being the big thing in future.

It is just matter of time when everything we use will have its own API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't really worry what the next big thing is. I worry about what problems people want to solve, and what solution to implement.

<comment><USER7> What this person said.</comment></comment>