The Death of the Rude Press - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/155627/death-rude-press-deadspin-splinter-blogs <comment><USER2> >It's often hard for me to imagine that anyone can grow up in this era and not end up doubting the competence and motives of nearly everyone in charge of nearly every American institution

Yes. Especially including Gawker network writers, like the author himself. What he sees as "rudeness in the name of speaking truth to power", millions of others see as low-rate tabloid-esque journalists injecting biased, poorly- formed, condescending and contemptuous opinions into articles with the direct intent of maliciously stirring outrage in an unwarranted and sensationalistic manner.

The death of the Gawker / "rude" press was a long time coming.

<comment><USER3> Gawker was trash, but I wouldn't lump all of the "rude press" in with them. There's value in low-budget "answer to no one" journalism, specifically in that the wealthy who often control the bigger outlets and their friends can be taken to task.

<comment><USER2> I'm using "Gawker network" and "rude press" mostly synonymously here. There may be outlets who act differently.

In general, though, I'm very skeptical of the idea that journalistic rudeness, snark, condescension, and contempt is a good way to address issues, even if the issues may be real and deserving of exposure.

<comment><USER3> I actually think we agree. When I think of positive "rude press", I think of local papers that, amidst some goofy headlines, do real local reporting that informs the readership. The "good" rude press imo isn't rude just to be rude, but is rude in the sense that those who are privileged aren't shown deference. The Village Voice is a good example.

The trash rude press are the tabloids and muckrakers who I think most would agree we'd be better off without.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's an assumption underneath the Gawkersphere snark (that this piece is a part of) that the correctness of one particular far left political worldview is unassailably true. This assumption undermines the entire article, because it leaves no room for dissent.

Fortunately, most non partisans recognize the complexity of the world reaches far beyond the limits of what one political viewpoint is able to encapsulate.

<comment><USER5> Gawker is not "far left".

<comment><USER6> Effectively nobody in the US is "far left".

<comment><USER7> Kshama Sawant was just elected to her third term on the Seattle City Council. Here is the Wikipedia section about her economic policy:

> Sawant has advocated the nationalization of large Washington State > corporations such as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon[62] and expressed a > desire to see privately owned housing in "Millionaire's Row" in the Capitol > Hill neighborhood turned into publicly owned shared housing complex saying, > "When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn't be privately > owned."[63] During an election victory rally for her City Council campaign, > Sawant criticized Boeing for saying it would move jobs out of state if it > could not get wage concessions and tax breaks. She called this "economic > terrorism" and said in several speeches that if Boeing moved jobs out of > state, the workers should take over Boeing facilities and bring them into > public ownership. She has said they could be converted into multiple uses, > such as production for mass transit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kshama_Sawant#Economic_policie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kshama_Sawant#Economic_policies)

<comment><USER6> Those nationalisations are like things that Labour governments in the UK _actually did_ in the '40s through '70s. At the leftmost edge of the mainstream, sure, but hardly _far_ left.

<comment><USER7> How many of those nationalizations involved the workers "taking over the factories"?

[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/seattle-councilwoman- urge...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/seattle-councilwoman-urges-boeing- workers-take-over-the-factories-end-profits)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is just trying to spin a particular narrative out of an existing and larger trend where information (and media in particular) is becoming less and less valuable to individuals.

The world is saturated with hot takes, and I don't need your particular ad- laden website to enjoy them, even if you have serious but rude journalists. Ask every other journalist in every part of the world how the industry is doing and you'll understand this isn't specific to the "rude press".

</comment><comment><USER9> > It is an attitude. The defining quality of rude media is skepticism about > power, and a refusal to respect the niceties that power depends on to > disguise itself and maintain its dominance. It's often hard for me to > imagine that anyone can grow up in this era and not end up doubting the > competence and motives of nearly everyone in charge of nearly every American > institution.

It's weird to me that people are so unskeptical about assertions that things are somehow completely dysfunctional in one of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world.

Our institutions are not only the product of a vigorous democratic process, but we can compare the results to the institutions of other vigorous democracies. If we look to our friendly neighbor to the north, we can see that in broad strokes, and even a lot of detailed strokes, they've organized their society very similarly to ours. We can look across the pond to the U.K. or Australia and see the same thing. To me, what warrants skepticism isn't our institutions, it's those impugning the "competence and motives" of those leading them.

<comment><USER10> > It's weird to me that people are so unskeptical about assertions that things > are somehow completely dysfunctional in one of the freest and most > prosperous countries in the world.

As someone who hails from Asia like you and has seen proper dysfunctional systems, I agree completely.

But don't events of the past 3-4 years give you any pause? I've recently developed a habit of reading foxnews front page, and there's a clear trend of painting Mexicans and brown people in general as troublemakers. You and I will agree that the system isn't really corrupt, but I think you and I will also agree insofar as it's all ruled by money, news will be given out in the manner in which it gets them the most money: and unfortunately that is going to be by producing more outrage and by appealing to our laziness and our worst instincts. Doesn't that give you any worry?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's not just rudeness, it's the belief that a media publications sees itself as immune to societal norms and values. Gawker truly believed that it could print whatever it wanted to, and be immune to responsibility, because it believed it was shielded by free press laws. It was nothing more than an awful tabloid. Good riddance.

<comment><USER12> Calling Gawker "rude" is at the same level as calling Baghdadi an "Austere Religious Scholar"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Insanely obvious counterexample: Barstool Sports is growing faster than ever in the _exact_ category that deadspin failed to maintain their traction in.

<comment><USER14> Barstool is referenced more than once in the piece, but not directly by name. Deadspin did not fail, it was murdered.

And I know you aren't saying it directly, but this really shouldn't be about The Left and The Right. The problem is about punching up versus punching down.

<comment><USER2> Those are largely one and the same in the current culture, though. "Progressive rude journalists" like Gawker's use "punching up" and "we're rude only to those who deserve it" as an excuse and shield for shitty epistemology, and as a justification for refusing civil engagement with those they disagree with. It's who _they_ deem to be "up", and their judgment is dictated by their personal and political biases.

"Punching up" in general is a concept unique to modern progressive philosophy, as well. I don't believe that's a concept for the right. I understand the thought behind it, but I think it's a very dangerous and slippery slope.

The fuzzy "up" concept for the modern left is kind of the equivalent of the fuzzy "degenerate" concept for the modern right. They're just labels you use to tar people you disagree with or dislike, and then you use the label as shorthand to merit any kind of judgmental or malicious behavior towards that group.

Also, even when one _does_ agree with their "upness" assessment, it doesn't necessarily have any relation to the nature or deservedness of the criticism. I agree billionaires are powerful, but you can still write hit pieces against billionaires which misrepresent their words and positions, or imply hidden intentions behind their words or actions with no credible evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We're left with the legacy of pop-SJW as a result of the blossoming of "rude media" in the 00s and early teens. Jezebel's entire schtick was to say the most inflammatory stuff they could think of and dress it up in pop-crit theory clothing. The intellectual legacy of Denton's family of muck-raking websites isn't truth-to-power journalism, it's twitter pile-ons over prom dresses.

</comment><comment><USER16> > It was rude, by and large, to people who deserved it

Almost everyone can justify to themselves and people like them why someone else deserves to be treated rudely. It's a lot harder to avoid being rude, even to people you disagree with. It's also better for society to disagree in other ways.

<comment><USER17> There is market for rudeness. But you still have to have worthwhile context.

<comment><USER16> There is a market for a lot of things that are not good for us as individuals or society at large. I would suggest people not feed that market. But, that's just my 2 cents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It mentions a number of "Rude" news sources, but fails to mention Fox News, which I think also qualifies. Rupert Murdoch started with Australian and British papers, and I think that's an important detail. Adversarial press was more of a British thing than an American one, or at least developed there earlier.

</comment><comment><USER19> Bootlickers and the civility police didn't kill the 'Rude Press'. Overpopulation killed the Rude Press.

A lot of 'normal' media sources rushed left to be the anti-Fox. It's become so crowded that the field has started to thin.

</comment><comment><USER17> Gawker were told to shut up and dribble, not be less rude. Heaven forbid the owners want to make a profit instead of bland social justice content.

If gawker were profitable enough, no one would have ever interfered with the editorial process.

</comment><comment><USER20> "It was rude, by and large, to people who deserved it: amoral and venal team owners, predatory sports media personalities, bandwagon Warriors fans. "

Being rude to people that deserve it is the same sort of justification used for punching Nazis. It's easy (and a good idea)when they are wearing a Swastika, but it's actually not so easy to discern most of the time. And when you are a media outlet, you peddle in most of the time scenarios resulting in nonstop clickbait.

Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Bootlickers and the civility police won. [...] And even worse things have > survived. [...] It is the anti-P.C. media, where the audience's vicarious > thrill comes not from watching scrappy underdogs heckle their supposed > betters, but from watching guys sitting comfortably atop social hierarchies > belittle and dominate their lessers. [...] a position of maximum privilege > is male, and young, and probably has some money to throw around

The rude media has died because the rude media is boring. You can only blame déclassé white men for the worlds problems so many times before everyone tunes out. What was new in the 1960s is not new, interesting or even right 50 years later.

OP should probably read some of that anti-pc media, like Mencius Moldbug or RMS. A few people who have something interesting to say and have been crucified for it by OP and OP's friends. To quote Moldbug (2013) [0]:

> The logic of the witch hunter is simple. [...] The first requirement is to > invert the reality of power. Power at its most basic level is the power to > harm or destroy other human beings. The obvious reality is that witch > hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to > gang up and destroy witch hunters. [...] Obviously, if the witches had any > power whatsoever, they wouldn't waste their time gallivanting around on > broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk. They're > getting burned right and left, for Christ's sake! Priorities! No, they'd > turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters. In a > country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found > dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the > size of a baseball, we won't see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there's > a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and > lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of > hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

[0] [https://www.unqualified- reservations.org/2013/09/technology-...](https://www.unqualified- reservations.org/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare/)</comment>


My Hacker News firehose is flowing again - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2010/11/09/myHackerNewsFirehoseIsFlow.html <comment><USER2> Developers themselves could also simply scrape this data as needed...

      preg_match_all('%.*?id=up_([0-9]{5,25}).*?(.*?).*?	.*?score_[0-9]{5,25}>(.*?) poin.*?user\?id=(.*?)">.*? (.*?) ago%s', $html, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

I'm working on an interesting app now that I plan to release later today using that same regex. (PLEASE NOTE: I am not a regex God, so I KNOW that it can probably be optimized/simplified significantly... But it works great :D)

Simply curl the ./newest page and apply that. The output is a beautiful array that can be manipulated at your pleasure.

This method is also impossible to "kill", as it is essentially normal traffic. As long as they don't do a major redesign or block your user agent (which you can easily change) (or possibly IP, but unlikely), this method works great.

<comment><USER3> I just use BeautifulSoup for my own personal HN/Proggit aggregator. It's not that hard to do and I don't have to rely on someone else to keep it up. Relying on someone else scraping for you means that you're dealing with your own whimsical interests as well as someone else's.

FWIW, my personal aggregator is here: <http://progscrape.com>. It's not really intended for public use, though a handful of people use it. I mainly use it to output Atom feeds that I can use for sharing via Google Reader.</comment></comment>


IDA Home is coming - <AUTHOR> https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida-home-is-coming/ <comment><USER2> Too little, too late. I'll keep using Ghidra, which is free, open source, and doesn't crash every time I look at it wrong, thank you very much.

Ghidra is absolutely amazing - I've been using it since release and it's been a huge breath of fresh air compared to the hot mess IDA is. Ghidra has great APIs, which are really well documented. It has a very powerful decompiler. It comes with a built-in, programable emulator for every platform! It has a built-in way to do collaborative reverse engineering! And it's super easy to modify the Sleigh if there's something that needs tweaking to improve the decompiler output!

Not to mention, adding your own CPU is reasonably simple - all you have to do is write a "Sleigh" description of your architecture (basically map CPU instructions to PCode) and it gives you the disassembler, decompiler, and emulator for free.

<comment><USER3> I've only just heard of Ghidra so I was happy to see your comment. I had a quick question - what is the learning curve like for Ghidra?

I noticed earlier this week that there is a forthcoming book from NoStarch about Ghidra. There's a sample chapter available in case anyone is interested:

[https://nostarch.com/GhidraBook](https://nostarch.com/GhidraBook)

<comment><USER4> coupon: OPERATION

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note, there is a free and open-source alternative for both the console world and GUI one - radare2[1] + Cutter[2] combo. Both are native and highly portable, no Java inside. And they support various decompilers, including Ghidra'one[3] and Retdec[4].

[1] [https://github.com/radareorg/radare2](https://github.com/radareorg/radare2)

[2] [https://github.com/radareorg/cutter](https://github.com/radareorg/cutter)

[3] [https://github.com/radareorg/r2ghidra- dec](https://github.com/radareorg/r2ghidra-dec)

[4] [https://github.com/avast/retdec-r2plugin](https://github.com/avast/retdec-r2plugin)

<comment><USER6> Any news on debugger integration with Cutter? The combination of working decompiler and stable debugger would get me to switch for sure.

<comment><USER5> Debugger works already. There is a room for improvement, but basic features are here already.

<comment><USER6> Hm, I think I tried it once and it just crashed immediately on a simple binary. Is this r2's debugger or gdb/lldb?

<comment><USER5> It's r2 debugger that supports native mode for all platforms, remote gdb/lldb, remote WinDbg, and a few more exotic options. Both Cutter and radare2 are developed with quite a pace, if you meet any bug - reach us and we'll try to fix it as soon as possible. This year we were accepted into Google Summer of Code 2020, and students will work on a few interesting projects [1].

[1] [https://www.radare.org/gsoc/2020/ideas.html](https://www.radare.org/gsoc/2020/ideas.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hex Rays need to take a look at how JetBrains (IntelliJ) handled the same problem.

Initially, most students and home users I knew used a cracked copy because there was no way in hell any of the students I knew had a spare $500 to pay for an IDE.

JetBrains seemed to realize this so first, they made a "self purchase" option that was half the price (or less) and belonged solely to the developer that bought it, with the caveat that they had to use their own funds. It could be used commercially too - this was the option to take if your boss couldn't be convinced to buy you a commercial license and you still wanted to use it legally.

Next, they made their tools free for people working on open source projects.

Then they made a version that had almost all the features available for free (it may have originally been only for non-commercial use but it's fine to use commercially now).

Then they worked with Google to make their free tool the default for Android development, which added many more users.

Then they switched to a monthly licensing scheme that was about $12 a month for a single product (while retaining the ability to outright buy a copy if you wanted to).

Almost everything that IntelliJ does is possible with open source competitors, but I still pay for it because of the level of polish they apply to each feature and the intuitiveness of each feature.

I think that if a $12/month copy was available initially, the number of cracked copies being used would have gone down dramatically.

EDIT: Photoshop did something similar. NO ONE I knew that used it for home use had a real license because it was so damn expensive, but I know plenty of people paying $15/month or so for access.

<comment><USER8> Unlike Adobe, JetBrains will periodically give you a perpetual license for the most recent version. I really wish Adobe would do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been using IDA Pro for over 15 years, for hobbies and my job, and I am thoroughly unimpressed with this offering. I get that Ghidra is eating their lunch, but this is a poor attempt to claw back some marketshare. Unless your only job is doing Windows malware analysis, this just isn't going to cut it; no decompiler and single CPU family both kill it.

In any given month, it's likely I'll end up disassembling x86-64, AArch64, and MIPS at the very least; that would cost me nearly $1200/year to do that as a hobbyist using IDA Home, or $0/year with Ghidra. For me, there's huge value in the muscle memory I've built with IDA, and generally I get my job to pay for a license, but the odds of me still using it in 2025 are quickly dwindling to zero. They need to make a big, big change or they're going to lose all of us.

</comment><comment><USER10> Swing and a miss.

My problem with IDA Pro isn't even the license cost. It's the licensing unfairness. Costs get multiplied a bunch of times if you want to work across multiple host OSes or want both 32 bit and 64 bit decompilation for an architecture.

I'm sure they know this stuff drives away home users, hence IDA Home. Where they miss, is what home users do. Home users do _everything_. I've seen people using Ghidra with 8-bit processors.

I don't imagine things will continue to work out well with this strategy if Ghidra gets support for debugging and continues to receive improvements for its decompiler. Ghidra is already immensely useful _today_.

<comment><USER11> I am wondering whether there is a management issue at Hex-Rays. The newly released company website features a page which appears to advertise against the product [1], because it entirely misses who their audience is.

The core point made regarding why IDA is a superior product despite license unfairness is vendor support. However, the authors seem to miss that the target audience of IDA are tinkerers, who would be fine with fixing their own tools as long as the issues are only on the surface.

Hex-Rays is not Oracle, who can afford to live from license unfairness because their product is embedded deeply into the livelihood of so many large companies. Hex-Rays provides just a tool, which I have already replaced by Cutter with Radare2 and Ghidra's decompiler in my workflow.

I would not use IDA Home even if it was free due to its limitations and lack of Hex-Rays' Decompiler.

[1] [https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/compelling-reasons- to-...](https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/compelling-reasons-to-use-ida/)

<comment><USER12> Holy crap that's an awful website. It stinks of clueless desperation. I wasn't sure about trying Ghidra until seeing that site.

<comment> kube-system Wow I don't think I've ever seen marketing that bad that wasn't satire.

It is literally shit-talking their own product.

> Isn't IDA an aging software?

> Doesn't it have shortcomings?

> Or structural limitations?

> Also… It's closed source, right?

> And how about its high price tag?

> Well sure [...]

I didn't have half of these preconceptions before reading this page.... but now I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really don't get Hex Rays and their licensing. I've seen it first-hand a lot of times: The kind of tinkerers and hackers that would use this in their spare time usually won't spend even a dollar on software, but the minute they are hired by a large corporation they get an IDA license along with their laptop.

They should release a free home version with mostly the same features (especially Hex-Rays, nobody uses IDA without it) and just prohibit commercial use in the terms of use. The kind of companies that already shell out tens of thousands every year for IDA licenses will happily oblige by the "no- commercial-use-with-the-home-edition" terms... If you want to curtail feature set then make a compelling set of features for enterprises (e.g. builtin collaboration, annotation sharing, fuzzy function search) and then make that exclusive to the commercial version, not the decompiler. Just my two cents...

<comment><USER14> Considering the amount of concern put into detecting IDA piracy, making it that accessible seems counter to Hex-Ray's goals.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h It's actually faintly amusing. I suppose if you're going to try and protect reverse engineering software against cracks, you're going to have to throw in a _lot_ of effort or you're just wasting your time.

<comment><USER14> Hex-Rays throws in a fair amount of effort. (Apparently not enough, though, because IDA cracks do exist…)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Back in 2013 or 2014 I was in school for my CS degree and was getting interested in binary analysis.

This was pre-Ghidra's release obviously, so I looked around for disassembler and came across IDA. I couldn't find a student version, so I actually emailed them asking about it.

The answer I got was a prompt, but terse, "No, sorry.".

I always wondered, how do you expect to gain mind-share if you won't even throw an undergrad a trial license? Regardless, it looks like Ghidra is eating IDA's lunch and at $365/year this doesn't seem like an adequate response.

<comment><USER16> Seems to be a common story in this area. I remember asking the Hopper folks if they'd do even an academic discount and it was similarly a no. Their argument was that it was on par with some academic textbooks .. maybe in the USA, but I never bought a textbook throughout my 3 year CS degree! That's what the library and electronic resources were for.

I concede it was more accessibly priced than e.g. IDA but it's definitely a shame HexRays and others aren't as willing to allow non-commercial educational use. I think they'd benefit in the long run, you'd definitely have some folks using the products they're familiar with commercially after a few years.

Meanwhile for software development, you have companies like JetBrains and GitHub offering premium products completely free of price.

<comment><USER14> Hopper has (or used to have) student discounts…

<comment><USER17> From my email in 2015,

> Thank you for your interest in Hopper. Yes, I usually offer a 20% discount > to students. If you are still interested, please let me know, and I'll > prepare an invoice for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If this is a reaction to Ghidra, I'm really glad Hex-Rays is reacting positively to the competition! I'm not an IDA Pro customer, but I know people have been asking for something like this for years. I'm actually tempted to buy this.

But that said, I'm still pretty wary about IDA's sales process. There seems to be many negative stories, talking about what a frustrating & arbitrary experience it has been in the past. If even Tavis Ormandy is being treated poorly, that doesn't give me much confidence as a prospective Home user. Hopefully things will have improved substantially!

And then there's little things like Linux and Windows licenses being sold separately, so I have a choice between running IDA in Wine, or almost doubling the price I'm being quoted.

But still, I think this is a very promising move! And the price might seem high for hobbyist use now that there are very high quality free alternatives, but compared to the previous high four digits quotes it's practically a bargain =]

Let's see where this goes.

<comment><USER19> > I'm still pretty wary about IDA's sales process.

Yeah, I got bit. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19316240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19316240)

Hopefully the site redesign means they've given other parts of their sales process some love, too: in particular, their self-service tool and their policy of forbidding people from registering personal licenses to personal emails.

EDIT: Looks like I got a reply from ilfak himself, but it was 6 days later and I didn't see it. If anyone from hex-rays is listening, here's a subject line with some order numbers in it: "Hex-Rays Invoice 2016-2240 orderID: (my-last- name)_4732_20160515". My email is (HN-username)@gmail. I never did get that license working, I'd greatly appreciate a reset.

<comment><USER20> Since you gave more details, we could check it out and the outcome is: you gave us your professional email address and we sent your license to it. So, from our perspective, it looks like a successfully completed transaction. As you have confirmed, you even received the invoice. You never came back with any complaints, so my guess is that you received your license. Now, 4 years later, you are saying that the license was not working. What was the problem and why did you never contact us?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find Hopper Disassembler just as good and the price is certainly much more reasonable, especially when it's for occasional use - I get out a disassembler to figure out undocumented/weird behavior maybe 4-5 times a year. IDA just isn't the only game in town anymore..

</comment><comment><USER22> Sorry Hex Rays, your licensing is still poor, and you ignored your potential and former customers for too long. Ghidra for life.

</comment><comment><USER23> Ok, it's coming, but there's no harm in waiting until it gets here. This is an announcement of an announcement. Those are off-topic. A thread now just duplicates whatever discussion will happen later, only generically and with less information.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

Edit: well, this thread is unusually good, so maybe we'll relax the objection this time.

</comment><comment><USER24> Ghidra is better than IDA for almost every use case I've found. I was working on reversing a bunch of mipsel binaries; Ghidra's decompiler worked, IDA didn't. I also tried r2 with Cutter, which did a decent job and had by far the slickest UI. Just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER25> "IDA Home has been exclusively designed to bring the experience of IDA Pro to reverse-engineers hobbyists, for the equivalent of 1$ a day!"

I find it strange to imply that a RE hobbyist would use this software every single day.

<comment><USER26> a lot of hobby is much more expensive than that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What even is this timeline anymore.

Though I don't see this recapturing the casual reverse engineering market that Ghidra ate for lunch unless they have very compelling IDA Home pricing for the decompilers as well (the "One processor family of choice from the most common processors: PC, ARM, M68K, MIPS, PPC" statement is kind of vague about that).

</comment><comment><USER28> Note: I reverse in my spare time and have occasionally been called on to reverse at work. I find subscription based pricing for software like this completely disagreeable.

<comment> non-entity The only subscription for desktop software I've found I liked is Jetbrains and that's mostly due to me getting their entire product line dirt cheap.

<comment><USER29> They also have a "perpetual fallback license," though which the product becomes __yours __after a year or so; thus, you 're incentivized to stay on the subscription, but if you decide to get off the train then your software doesn't evaporate (:eyes: 1Password.com)

[https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en- gb/articles/207240845](https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en- gb/articles/207240845)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> non-entity I've only recently gotten into reverse engineering as a hobby recently and have so far just used Ida Free and Ghidra to stuff. From what I've read it seems a lot of people are disappointed on the lack of the decompiler being included with this. How good is Ida's decompiler? I've tried using the Ghidra decompiler, and tbh I'd rather just stick with raw assembly than what normally gets generated from that.

<comment><USER2> Ghidra and IDA's decompiler are fairly similar in my experience. There are some specific situations when one is better than the other, but overall both do a really good job at recovering the control flow. One thing IDA has that I miss from Ghidra is a way to split/merge variables from the UI. In IDA, I can tell the decompiler that two variables are actually the same, and it will merge them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> IDA's license was too expensive for someone who wants to tinker, which is probably most people who want to use it. I almost feel bad for hex-rays now though, it's gotta be tough to compete with an excellent, free, state- sponsored tool like Ghidra. I would have gladly paid a reasonably, hobbyist monthly license fee for IDA for what I was doing (video game reversing in my free time). If I were using it professionally I would have paid for a professional license. It doesn't seem like hex-rays trusts anyone though - unsurprising considering their domain.

</comment><comment><USER31> Sounds like everyone like Ghidra now. I know people were leery of NSA tech at first, but people's opinions have changed?

<comment><USER32> Ghidra is open source so it makes it a bit easier to trust NSA on this

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So the decompiler is not included?

<comment><USER34> No, sorry

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> $365 is still a lot for a hobbyist. Also I'm always entertained when Europeans put the dollar sign after the amount as opposed to before (I'm also European and it took me forever to notice this).

<comment><USER36> I do it intentionally, to annoy back the americans who write stuff like €30 ... and because it makes sense zo me to write the unit after the value, or at least have a standard way of doing it.

<comment><USER37> I hate to break it to you, but where currency symbols are placed is mostly a language convention and not so much dependent on the the currency itself. €30 is very much correct when speaking English. In fact, it is the style recommended in the European Commission's style guide [1].

That means there is a standard way of doing it, it just depends on your language. If you were speaking German you'd also write 30,00$ and not $30.00. All of that said, I agree that the inconsistency with all other units is weird and unnecessary, but languages just are that way sometimes.

[1] [https://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-370303.htm#positio...](https://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-370303.htm#position)

<comment><USER36> Interesting, thanks for the guideline. I'm not sure what to think about it yet, since I'm also referring to consistency towards other units (nobody writes "cm 20").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well, I think Johnny and Deneice said it better than I ever could...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3ceb5OVG7k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3ceb5OVG7k)

</comment><comment><USER39> Does this only support 64-bit applications? In the Windows world, apps are still about 50/50\. Does it include the decompiler?

</comment><comment><USER40> How big is the legit usage demand for this? I imagine the vast majority of users are crackers.

<comment><USER6> Do you mean crackers as in people doing illegal things? Malware analysis and exploit development are two large professional subfields of infosec.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, those who produce patchers (i.e. cracks) and keygens for proprietary software, which is quite a big scene.</comment></comment></comment>


Eve: A Python REST API Framework - <AUTHOR> http://python-eve.org/index.html

<comment><USER2> Leaving PUT out might be a mistake. The rationale from the slide deck is sound but the framework neglects the case in which you are creating a resource with a known identifier. The POST verb is good for when you don't know the identifier, and want to leave it up to the handler to generate one for you. You could just define the same semantics for POST as for PUT, but that breaks the spec in that a resource created by POST should be subordinate to the requested resource.

<comment><USER3> They give a good rationale for supporting PATCH, but not for omitting PUT. Not supporting PUT is absolutely a mistake, especially with a schema-less backend. Being unable to PUT means being unable to set a property as undefined (by PUTting a complete version of the resource without that property). The usual approach with PATCH is to set it to None/null, but then the property is still defined as None instead of removed. (Or, some APIs will remove a property with a None value, but then it is undefined instead of being set to None.) A small but potentially important semantic distinction.

<comment><USER4> Does this corner case really justify dealing with another entire verb? Even if we stipulate that _null_ has a specific meaning for our application that we don't want to screw up, how about empty object, array, or string? ( _{}_ , _[]_ , or _" "_ ) Do _all_ of those mean something for, e.g., the "lastname" field?

<comment><USER3> PUT is almost functionally identical to a PATCH, so it's not exactly an entire other verb. It's also a very standard verb. Using the example from a pull request on Eve ( [https://github.com/nicolaiarocci/eve/issues/96](https://github.com/nicolaiarocci/eve/issues/96) ), what if you want to indicate that the middle name is no longer known? Marking it as null means there isn't one, not that it is unknown. Sure, for many applications the distinction doesn't matter. But for plenty, it does. (I just recently had to fix an API's implementation of PUT that actually was more like a PATCH but needed to be a proper PUT.) And it's foolish for an API to require knowing a nonstandard way of expressing `undefined` when simply _not defining_ something is the best way to not define it.

Eve looks nice, but they really need to justify not supporting PUT, beyond just "PATCH is usually better".

<comment><USER5> Hello, thanks for your feedback. PUT is coming to Eve with v0.1.0 (next release).

<comment><USER5> In fact, it's on the dev branch already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. I've just completed a library to run on Flask. Actually, it's an extension of flask_restful that allows for arbitrary nested resources, control over fields exposed the whole way down the tree etc. PUT/POST of deeply nested objects. I built it because I'm using SQLAlchemy and nothing quite supported how I wanted to do it. I've also used the helpers from flask_restless (with a bunch of modifications) to help with the loading / saving of SQLAlchemy object trees.

Example definition of a resource:

        class JobList(resty.ResourceList):
            model = models.Job
            deep = dict(disciplines=dict(drawings=None))
            query_options = subqueryload_all('disciplines.drawings')

I know have a really easy to configure api that plays very nicely with Restangular. It's very simple - totally not rest complete, but sufficient for my needs.

</comment><comment><USER7> A simple REST api framework for Python is something I've been looking for, and this definitely fits the bill. Unfortunately, I need to use it with Postgres. For those who also have this requirement, it looks like they have a SQLAlchemy development branch that enables support for relational databases. Looks promising!

<comment><USER8> Using Flask, SQLAlchemy what is it that you are missing?

<comment><USER9> Writing the glue takes a surprising amount of time/energy/learning for a newb. I've got a couple of hobby projects on the go where I am learning to create webapps / rest apis using flask + SQLAlchemy. None of these projects are anywhere near shippable.

Not knocking the tools, they're great + fun. But writing the glue gets non- trivial fast once you step beyond a single table with no access control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And as usual, this is REST-as-a-buzzword, not REST-as-REpresentational-State- Transfer.

<comment><USER11> I thought just the opposite. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it looks pretty in line with Fielding's thesis. What are you objecting to?

<comment><USER10> * Primary focus on URI structure (to the point where the third thing explained is that you can access each resource from multiple URIs… after the URI being customizable and the URI pattern & mapping to CRUD operations). That there are links is only "documented" at #6.

* Very little on document structure: only mentioned in examples, no overview let alone more precise documentation, there seems to be 5 or 6 possible _link keys but none is defined further than the examples showing it exists. Notes that the entry point will be disabled if links are disabled, said entry point's media type is not documented and only defined as "a list of links to accessible resources".

* Very limited linking (only tree traversal/reads), no support at all for resource alteration information in documents, how a resource is created, modified or deleted is solely out-of-band knowledge. No state transition is available to a RESTful Eve client, it is limited to a readonly interface.

* Same for non-trivial fetching, e.g. filter and search

* What little linking there is, is optional (!)

* No custom content types, no media types documentation

* And the official documentation generation extension documents (verb, URI) pairs: [http://blog.python-eve.org/eve-docs](http://blog.python-eve.org/eve-docs), what little _data_ documentation there is is subservient to the creation (verb, URI) pair, and is the expected payload...

I rest my case, Eve only puts "emphasis on REST" in the "REST as a meaningless buzzword" sense, no other understanding matches the reality of the documentation.

edit: don't get me wrong, if you want to build a "random stuff over HTTP" or "RPC over HTTP" or "Ad-hoc over HTTP" API it's _fine_. If it works for you (or does not, I don't really care) nobody's going to mind. Just stop fucking _lying_ about what it is.

<comment><USER12> Not necessarily disagreeing but can you point to any real-world REST-as- Master-Fielding-intended API to convince the sceptical among us it's not just an academic exercise (PhD thesis even) or wishful thinking, akin to the Semantic Web or Strong AI?

<comment><USER11> [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt)

There's no need to be sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> :( Did anyone else expect this to be about EVE Online?

<comment><USER14> EVE has really good community APIs & toys (such as the market place firehose, not sure if that's still around), I guess the developers who play it need something to do when they are mining ;-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Under the hood, is this API event-based, thread-based, or both?

<comment><USER4> Under the hood, it's Flask, so it's WSGI. WSGI can be served in a variety of ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> does it generate documentation for all link relations, media types, and available resources in workspace?

<comment><USER5> Hello, there's a third party tool called Eve-Docs [http://blog.python- eve.org/eve-docs](http://blog.python-eve.org/eve-docs). It is a work in progress, and looks promising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Disappointed that this is not the much-awaited REST API for EVE online (a game written in python)...

<comment><USER18> I totally thought this would be a third party CREST-like (CREST is what the EVE online REST API is called. The 'C' is for 'Carbon') hack of some sorts.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best tools to accept different currencies? - <AUTHOR>

I am building an e-commerce site and I want to be able to accept payments from all currencies. What tools allow me easily implement this and convert the currency to US$ on my side? <comment><USER2> SaaSy supports multiple currencies - <http://saasy.com> However, their fees is comparatively high.

The other option is PayPal.</comment>


'Magnetic graphene' switches between insulator and conductor - <AUTHOR> https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/magnetic-graphene-switches-between-insulator-and-conductor <comment><USER2> Although the term "magnetic graphene" is sometimes used to refer to FePS3, this compound isn't graphene - it's devoid of carbons.

Rather, FePS3, like graphene, has a tendency to form thin sheets. But that's where the similarities end.

The original paper's abstract is more helpful than the article:

 _Two-dimensional materials have proven to be a prolific breeding ground of new and unstudied forms of magnetism and unusual metallic states, particularly when tuned between their insulating and metallic phases. Here we present work on a new metal-to-insulator transition system FePS3. This compound is a two- dimensional van der Waals antiferromagnetic Mott insulator. We report the discovery of an insulator-metal transition in FePS3, as evidenced by x-ray diffraction and electrical transport measurements, using high pressure as a tuning parameter. Two structural phase transitions are observed in the x-ray diffraction data as a function of pressure, and resistivity measurements show evidence of the onset of a metallic state at high pressures. We propose models for the two new structures that can successfully explain the x-ray diffraction patterns._

[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.266801)

And this general-audience article is IMO better than the one linked:

 _" The discovery of graphene led me to wonder if I could introduce magnetism to 2-D materials similar to graphene," explains Park. "Physicists have inherited the challenge of studying and explaining the physical properties of the two-dimensional world. In spite of its academic importance and applicability, this field is very much under-explored," he adds._

[https://phys.org/news/2018-10-flexy-flat-functional- magnets....](https://phys.org/news/2018-10-flexy-flat-functional-magnets.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Graphene can do anything, but leave the lab.

<comment><USER4> Yes. It can simultaneously cause and cure cancer too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is 10 gPa (is that the right capitalization for gigaPascal? Gigapascal? GigaPascal?) anyway? Is that something routinely used in the lab or in production of commercial materials like chips or other electronic equipment?

<comment><USER6> 10GPa is about 100k atmosphere or 1500ksi or 1.5 million psi. The best steels in the world are what are called maraging steel and they're 500ksi. Normal mild steel might only be 30ksi. So it's going to be tough to recreate this outside the lab I suspect.</comment></comment>


Most tech employees suffer from impostor syndrome - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/tech-employees-likely-to-suffer-from-impostor-syndrome/ <comment><USER2> This was interesting:

> Seventy-two percent of Expedia employees say they experienced impostor > syndrome, the highest among companies with at least 100 employee responses.

and

> On the lower end of the spectrum, only 44.45 percent of Apple employees > experienced impostor syndrome. This is the lowest among companies with at > least 100 employee responses.

The article doesn't draw any conclusions, but I'm really curious why these two are distinct outliers (they have a graph with slight bumps/troughs at either end)</comment>