Apple Music Web Client - <AUTHOR> http://beta.music.apple.com/ <comment><USER2> Wow, us Apple Music users have been waiting for this forever! For anyone who's curious about how this product developed:

\- April 2016: Apple releases Apple Music API

\- December 2018: A third-party Apple Music web player is launched on Product Hunt: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/playapplemusic- com](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/playapplemusic-com) (Created by [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shivdhar](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shivdhar))

\- January 2019: Another third-party alternative, Musish, launches on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940407)

\- Now: Apple finally launches their own official player!

Makes sense with Spotify being so popular on web...

<comment><USER3> I'm not where it fits into the timeline, but Apple has actually offered a rather obscure and limited way to use Apple Music in a browser for some time prior to the launch of the full web client.

There's no way to browse, or even launch it directly. You have to search, via Google or other, for an album, and follow the link to what always used to be the iTunes Preview page. You can still listen to the thirty-second previews on this page, but there's a sign-in link in the header that will, quite surprisingly, unlock full playback of the album without launching iTunes.

It's hardly the full Apple Music experience – all you get is the album you found and some related links at the bottom, with no access to your library or playlists – but it does work. I'm not really sure what purpose this functionality served, other than perhaps as a testbed for the actual web client, but it's still active for the time being.

<comment><USER4> This is used for sites such as Genius (lyrics aggregator/social commentary mix, still uses Apple Music I believe) to provide a snippet to browsers without a subscription.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great, no longer trying to get iTunes working in wine on linux, just play the music straight from the browser, and if you want a native app, Windows and MacOS has iTunes, no electron non-sense.

<comment><USER6> Actually Apple Music in iTunes is just a web view that leaks like crazy, to the point of making iTunes slow to a crawl, if you're quickly navigating through artists and albums.

Not much better than Electron IMO. Apple Music in the browser seems like there isn't much hope of a truly native experience now.

<comment><USER7> The iMessage app is also just a webview (at least up to 10.14).

<comment><USER8> I get a beach ball All-the-time with Messages lasting 5-10 seconds. I struggle to imagine that anything it's doing is that computationally intensive.

<comment><USER9> I suspect this might be a problem with your installation - if you create a new MacOS user account for testing, does the problem persist? I don't recall Messages every beach-balling for me and I'm not exactly on new hardware.

<comment><USER10> Tangentially, this appears to be the general (and usually, only) troubleshooting step you can do with Apple products.

Yes, creating a new user resolves the problem. Yes, resetting my device to factory settings without restoring from backup resolves the problem.

How do I resolve the problem _without_ deleting my entire history?

<comment><USER9> So if you have problem that goes away with another user, the problem commonly lies in a corrupted preference related to the app, so you start hunting out the .plists for the application and moving them to the desktop before relaunching and seeing if the problem is fixed.

If not, then you start poking about in Application Support for the app.

<comment><USER10> After 9 years of Apple use, I have successfully made this method work one time (iMessages), and even then, it took a full system reboot after each file move to validate whether or not that had made a difference.

The whole process took the better part of a day. It was long, it was tedious, but at least I got there in the end. There was no paid-support story that would have done this for me, but hey ho, it all worked out. I can't imagine I'll ever have the time to go through that much effort again.

The same cant be said for my iMessage history on my iPhone, which has been lost repeatedly as the only solution was "don't restore from your backup".

<comment><USER9> Ah - I used to use it fairly frequently in the good old OS X 10.2-10.6 days - for various apps. Seemed to work fairly well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> seems they're using Ember.js . Reason I love spotify so much is that it's available on the web, no need to be downloading native apps everywhere. Always bet on the web. also good to see, another web property using Ember. As a react dev, competition is healthy

<comment><USER12> I'm surprised. I haven't heard anything about Ember in years. Not since 2013 or so.

<comment><USER13> Is it really that surprising given React is FB and Angular is Google?

<comment><USER14> > React is FB and Angular is Google

This doesn't matter in practice - they could have freely used either to design the web client at no cost. If they wanted to take over development and go their own direction they just had to fork them.

<comment><USER13> Of course in doesn't matter in practice. It's the optics.

<comment><USER15> Is there still patent uncertainty around React (or Angular)? Otherwise, Im not sure why anyone outside HN would care about the optics of which front-end library was used.

<comment><USER13> Are you really saying you don't understand why Apple might not want to use a framework created by their frenemies in Facebook and Google, especially given Apple's focus on privacy and willingness to make an example of FB and Google for their comparatively lax privacy standards?

<comment><USER15> Sure, but how does any of that resonate with the general public? "Apple is using Facebook's front-end code library" isnt exactly a gripping headline or tweet. You can read the source code to either; its not as if theyre secretly embedding tracking into every React/Angular app.

<comment><USER13> Ok. I mean you can ask that to Tim Cook :) If not optics it's about ego. Again, if Apple hates FB/Goog then why use their frameworks when there's dozens of other alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting to see Apple starting to move into the web app product space (aside from iCloud, of course). Must say though that performance feels a bit sluggish (esp. hover states) on a Macbook Pro (tested in Firefox, Chrome and Safari).

Results of a Lighthouse audit (London): [https://www.dropbox.com/s/jaf3gmgo0tpanba/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/jaf3gmgo0tpanba/Screenshot%202019-09-06%20at%2011.36.25.png?dl=0)

<comment><USER17> Not surprising as they are using Ember (one of the slowest front end frameworks), Moment (super heavy date library), and they don't even minify their code...

[https://js-cdn.music.apple.com/musickit/v2/components/musick...](https://js- cdn.music.apple.com/musickit/v2/components/musickit- components/core-02a04998.js)

<comment><USER18> > one of the slowest front end frameworks

What metric are you referring to here?

<comment><USER17> The JS frameworks benchmarks.

Here are the latest results: [https://krausest.github.io/js-framework- benchmark/current.ht...](https://krausest.github.io/js-framework- benchmark/current.html)

As you can see Ember 3.11.1 doesn't fare too well in either performance, startup metrics, or memory consumption. Glimmer does a bit better but that not much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very cool! I've loved Apple Music ever since I was able to upload my library using Match, and I feel like its recommendations are getting better and better. Nice to have this in a pinned tab.

</comment><comment><USER20> Uses 50MB less memory as the sole tab in Firefox than iTunes does on my Mac. Easy decision to switch for normal playback purposes.

<comment><USER21> > _Uses 50MB less memory as the sole tab in Firefox than iTunes does on my > Mac._

Well that's because iTunes also includes Calendar, and Mail, and Safari... ;)

[https://youtu.be/psL_5RIBqnY?t=6254](https://youtu.be/psL_5RIBqnY?t=6254)

<comment><USER22> I wonder if it's possible to trick iTunes into browsing the web. It _is_ a web view, after all (or at least the store portion is).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This was the reason I chose Spotify over Apple music all those years ago.

Any reason to prefer Apple Music over Spotify? Spotify's recommendations have been absolutely stellar for me over the years and I have a lot of playlists and stuff "locking" me in.

<comment><USER24> For the privacy-minded, Apple Music doesn't notify Facebook each time you open the app. Spotify does.

<comment><USER25> > _For the privacy-minded, Apple Music doesn 't notify Facebook each time you > open the app._

Isn't there a way to disconnect Facebook from one's Spotify account altogether?

<comment><USER24> I don't even have a Facebook account. That doesn't stop Facebook's SDK from phoning home every time Spotify is opened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Whatever. I was really hoping to see some improvements to the music- organization and display aspects here but it looks like they just re- implemented the weird parts of iTunes using html5.

For example: It drives me crazy how Apple Music emphasizes the idea that "Recently Added" is _only grouped by albums_. I don't add whole _albums_ to my library, I add individual _songs_. I want to play all the songs I've recently added because hey it's new music I like. Why can't I get an auto-updating playlist of all the songs I've recently added? None of the cloud-based Apple platforms support smart-playlists and the "Recently Added" section only lets you play songs from an individual album from which you may have only added a single song.

It's super weird. - Apple music seems to really push you into either whole albums or the overly-generic editor-curated playlists.

<comment><USER27> On iOS: Library -> Songs -> Sort by recently added

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this option exists on Android. Maybe it's hiding with the setting to let me download all of my songs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Very nice to see them provide a dark CSS theme via prefers-color-scheme, following system preference.

<comment><USER22> I would not be surprised if they have this because it's used in the Music app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It appears even Apple themselves do not bother with using the overflow scrolling CSS that iOS needs.

<comment><USER31> On iOS, it redirects to the native iTunes App. Even if you somehow manage to overcome that, its presence clearly indicates that iOS isn't a supported target - at which point, assuming it's _intentionally_ broken as you describe for non-beta reasons (this is not necessarily true), using that CSS would potentially be wasteful and break non-iOS users!

<comment><USER30> > its presence clearly indicates that iOS isn't a supported target.

They added an "open in music" button to the hamburger menu, assumed only on iOS. So they obviously did something for iOS users.

Also agreed that this is pretty silly, people will of course just use the native app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Finally. Live web clients are great - it makes it easier to reverse engineer, scrape data and build add-ons. Kudos!

<comment><USER22> I don't know…personally, Apple's native apps are easier for me to reverse engineer than most minified obfuscated JavaScript. Then again, I'm not a web developer.

<comment><USER33> Usually you only need to look at the requests anyway and there the web client is probably a bit nicer than iTunes with cert pinning if I remember correctly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can't link directly to a personal playlist (even if it's "published" to Apple's weird social network) for someone not already logged in (they just get the Apple Music landing page). So close! They're so smart, they'll figure this out some day!

<comment><USER35> Right, and that's one of the reasons why I use Spotify and won't use Apple Music.

<comment><USER35> Actually, this won't even let me sign in with my Apple ID. It accepts my username/password, and prompts me to "Try it now", but when I click that, I get a drop down telling me I need to open the Apple Music client. Bravo, Apple.

<comment><USER22> (It's a beta.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Now that there's one more platform where Apple Music is available it would be really great if we could have the playback queue synced between them. I don't want to recreate my listening queue I every time I'm changing my device.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm curious what framework Apple uses for web now. Last I checked (a week ago) icloud.com is still implemented with SproutCore.

<comment><USER17> Ember, jQuery, Moment, and RequireJS.

[https://imgur.com/DioXtwe](https://imgur.com/DioXtwe)

<comment><USER37> What extension is this?

<comment><USER38> Wappalyzer [1] is much better in my opinion.

And is available for both Chrome [2] and Firefox [3] as well as a Bookmarklet [4].

The extension that @pier25 is using seems to be available only on Google Chrome [5].

[1] [https://www.wappalyzer.com/](https://www.wappalyzer.com/)

[2] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongmhjkpfnbhagpmjfkannfbllamg)

[3] [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/wappalyzer/](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/wappalyzer/)

[4] [https://www.wappalyzer.com/download](https://www.wappalyzer.com/download)

[5] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ui- stack/ijagboogl...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ui- stack/ijagbooglignnjecmjnmdfapfbgblkdk)

<comment><USER39> Wappalyzer's results for example.com, a 1.3 KB static page with no JS or sub- requests, include eight JS frameworks and two web font providers. Its results for facebook.com include a web framework made by Yahoo and deprecated in 2014. It says Youtube is built on WordPress, and HN is a React app with custom fonts.

<comment><USER17> > _HN is a React app with custom fonts_

I only see that HN runs on NGinx.

<comment><USER39> I was using the "Technology lookup" box on the homepage, testing with the extension I get only Nginx too. And Youtube seems right and example.com maybe right, though nothing at all for Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> t-writescode This is very interesting. I'm using PiHole; and, it seems that when I click that link, I'm sent to the Chinese version of the Apple site and there's no beta. Very strange!

I'm experiencing this issue in Firefox, where I have all my regular ad- blocking, and an incognito window in Chrome, where I don't have any of it.

Anyone else seeing this?

</comment><comment><USER40> Ah, nice! I was an early Beats Music subscriber and really lamented the eventual loss of the web interface.

</comment><comment><USER41> As much as I commend them for creating a web client for their music service, the UI looks like it was designed by an amateur. Can't really put my finger on it but it's something to do with the content alignment, the gradients used. I would have expected better from Apple.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm so sad that most consumers want to pay for things like this or Spotify.

I only buy digital albums, almost always from Bandcamp or bespoke band- specific sites, or Amazon if there's no other choice.

Always just a straight download of mp3 or ogg formats, backed up and accessible in cloud storage.

I use VLC player on all my devices, and syncing music with the VLC wifi download tool is so extremely easy and simple.

I have all the music I could ever possibly want, easily accessible on all devices and easy to sync on all devices, no internet connection needed, no monthly charge or user account, no ads, can transfer it all to any new devices I get with no vendor lock-in.

I just can't believe the populace was suckered into music streaming instead of music owning. So sad.

<comment><USER12> I would have never discovered 99% of the music I listen to if I didn't use Spotify.

There are pros/cons to both sides of this argument. Many artists would not have a music _career_ if it weren't for platforms like Spotify (mainly Spotify). Spotify put their music in people's ears. Spotify made people fans and now those fans buy tickets and go to their shows, so these bands are able to tour.

There are pros/cons to both sides of this story.

<comment><USER42> > "I would have never discovered 99% of the music I listen to if I didn't use > Spotify."

Can you take a step back and recognize this is weird and pathological. Music recommendations should come from experience, people, multiple sources. If a for-profit platform interested in extracting as much money from you as they can (let alone minimize their costs paid to artists) is responsible for 99% of what you believe you are choosing to consume... something's pretty wrong.

Imagine saying, I wouldn't have discovered 99% of the foods I like if not for my Blue Apron subscription...

<comment><USER43> > Music recommendations should come from experience, people, multiple sources

Why do you assume streaming replaces all that? Streaming services immensely _complement_ all that.

<comment><USER42> The comment above specifically said 99% of the music they listen to was discovered by Spotify. That is replacing, not complementing. This is also the same model I see in friends or colleagues who use Spotify: it is their sole source of music or music recommendation.

<comment><USER12> I suppose their recommendation quality only goes up the _more_ you use the platform. It is a damn good recommender. From _Discover Weekly_ to similar features like "Artist/Song/Playlist Radio" that continue playing similar music after your playlist/album ends... the Spotify recommendation systems are probably the most successful, enhancing implementation of ML I can recall seeing in the wild. Certainly much better than YouTube which for months has been begging me to watch this "Pete Davidson Got Stuck Paying for Kid Cudi's Birthday Dinner..." video (I'm not a fan of either of those guys).

Maybe you should give it a try. Certainly can't hurt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I recently switched to a windows machine from Mac at work, and brought in iTunes to listen to Apple Music. It's really as bad as I remember.

Really great timing on this for me.

</comment><comment><USER45> Has anyone noticed this? On the native apps, when you click on an album, the most popular songs have a star icon next to them. I like that. The third party web apps that consume the Apple Music API don't have the feature, but I thought Apple's official web app would have it, but they don't!

I hope they add this feature to the app (and API!).

</comment><comment><USER46> Nice!

Now, how about some cross-platform iCloud Drive love? huh?

<comment><USER47> You can access iCloud Drive on the web at iCloud.com

<comment><USER46> i want something a lot more like dropbox or gdrive which have native applications, preferably with command line interfaces.

<comment><USER47> iCloud for Windows includes Drive: [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204283](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283)

If you are talking about Linux then you should be more explicit about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It'd be awesome if they did this next with their movie and TV stuff. I have a bunch of stuff purchased on iTunes that I can't play on my TV (out of HDMI ports and TV stand space and no AirPlay solution for Android that I know of will work due to the DRM).

Really cool they're starting to open this stuff up at least.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's funny that the web app performs better than the desktop app.

</comment><comment><USER50> Requires DRM to be turned on for it to work. No thanks.

<comment><USER51> Well, uh, yes. You really expected them to let you download an unencumbered copy of any song in the iTunes catalog?

<comment><USER50> Yes, I expect that a service I paid for does not include untrusted malware. Thankfully there are other streaming services which do not do this.

<comment><USER52> Could you name one please? (That has a comparable catalog to Spotify/Apple Music)

<comment><USER50> I used to use soundcloud which has a fairly large catalog of music if you have the paid version. I eventually canceled it because they had an annoying habit of replacing tracks with random remasters so something in your liked list could change to a different version that is much worse. These days I either use bandcamp or torrents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Interesting that Beats 1 doesn't seem to be listed in the radio section. They hyped it so much and it has just faded away.

<comment><USER18> It's a beta, live radio is forthcoming apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Apple finally comes out with something Spotify and Google have had for years... Good job.

<comment><USER55> Well Google is certainly trying their hardest to give Apple the upper hand by discontinuing Google Play Music in favor of YouTube Music. I don't know a single person who actually likes the new YouTube Music.

I ended up switching to Spotify as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Does not work in Safari for me. When playing songs they simply don't start. Weird.

</comment><comment><USER57> Says my Chrome and Firefox on Linux (ubuntu) not supported. :(

<comment><USER58> I get that semi-regularly; do you have strict content blocking + fingerprinters turned on in Firefox? IIRC that advertises that you're on FF ESR and a few sites deem that too old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Messages beta should be along shortly! Fingers crossed.

<comment><USER60> Even though many providers now have end-to-end encryption with web interfaces for messaging, Apple has maintained that it can't be done securely. We shall see if they have changed their minds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm really sad about the state of international music on youtube. Asian music is completely absent. Worse, all Chinese alternatives are blocked in the US.

</comment><comment><USER62> wow... that took a long time to happen.

</comment><comment><USER63> About time!

</comment><comment><USER64> So much for [https://musi.sh](https://musi.sh)

<comment><USER65> I was using this on Ubuntu, works great, but I'd rather use something official.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> RIP Spotify.

<comment><USER67> Not really. I've never used Apple Music, but as far as I can tell, it has no real free tier (just song previews) and it has a long way to go if it wants to compete with Spotify's playlists.

For example, regional playlists. Apple Music just has "Top 100 {country}" which is just radio pop music. Compare that to Spotify's Explore -> {Mexico,Colombia,Arab,etc} -> all the different subgenres.

Spotify's free tier is a no-brainer. I've had to listen to so many Spotify ads at parties and get-togethers that it's clear nobody cares about them either. Unless I'm missing something, Apple Music is just offering a three-month free trial.

Also, even if Apple Music managed to be a Spotify clone, doesn't it only work on iOS/OSX?

<comment><USER68> > Also, even if Apple Music managed to be a Spotify clone, doesn't it only > work on iOS/OSX?

Apple Music has been available on Android for a few years.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.android.music)

<comment><USER28> Although IME it doesn't have feature parity with the desktop or iOS versions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> So, Apple is launching an offering on par with Google's seven years later. Is that what we call innovation?

<comment><USER12> People actually use Google Music? Everyone I know who listens to music via Google-owned properties uses Youtube (free). Others use Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora, in that order of popularity.

<comment><USER17> I do use Google Play Music. I have minor gripes but in general I like it. You can upload your music and sync it in all your devices.

Google is going to kill it and transfer its users/content/playlists to Youtube Music. Not sure what I'm going to do after that happens.</comment></comment></comment>


Using Raspberry Pi 3B+ as an Oil Tank Monitoring Solution - <AUTHOR> http://myoilguage.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to check my heating oil tank from anywhere and anytime and not worry about running to the basement to check oil level. I also wanted to prevent middle-of-the-night run-outs, especially during cold weather. This enables me to track heating oil usage by the hour, quarter hour, whatever data capture frequency I wish. I can now know how much oil burned exactly throughout the day, and adjust the thermostat to conserve fuel. Detailed write up is on Github [https://github.com/pettycashstash/oiltankmonitor/wiki](https://github.com/pettycashstash/oiltankmonitor/wiki)</comment>


Why Did Anyone Think MoviePass Could Have Worked? - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2018/07/why-moviepass-collapsed.html <comment> david-cako Movie theaters are all scrambling to host event screenings and upgrade their seating and projectors since they're discovering people are having a better time at home for less money. The wait between theater and home availability is getting smaller and smaller, and streaming services are building a significant body of original content.

Moviepass could have a functional formula at 4 movies a month, IMO. Moviepass is the first widespread means of collecting viewer analytics across multiple theaters.

Unlimited viewing doesn't seem to fit the current landscape, even excluding the people that go and see the same movie multiple times. The studios expect to make too much money, and will only accept being boiled slowly.

</comment><comment><USER2> It might not work, but I like what it caused movie theatres to do - compete. Cinemark now has some $8.99/mo thing that gives you a free movie ticket each month, they don't expire, you can roll them over, and you get discounts on concessions.

I don't have MoviePass but this has already been worth it.

In the end, it's gotten me (and friends) back into movie theatres again. Then we still end up buying/renting the movies from iTunes later.

I thought it would work too, though. The gym membership model. People subscribe, forget they're paying for it, get too busy, and don't go. Then MoviePass rakes in a bunch of money. Clearly that didn't happen.

<comment><USER3> Moviepass should've gotten wholesale prices a tenth of the ticket to make it sustainable. At the end of the day, that's 10x more traffic to concessions etc that theatres can absorb. They also could've worked out a profit sharing deal with the movie manufacturers similar to how streaming services pay rights holders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did customers really think it _was_ going to work as a lasting enterprise, or did they just jump on to get some cheap movies before it went under?

<comment><USER5> Cheap before it went under seems to be the consensus I'm aware of.

There is no real disincentive to sign up, and if you saw any movies you saved money - I think it would have probably made financial sense to sign up before buying tickets and just use it as a discount.

The important thing though is that it does not cost those customers when it fails (unless they haven't seen a movie since their last payment) as the break even for customers was afaict a single movie.</comment></comment>


Railroads beware: Technology is gaining on you - <AUTHOR> http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/blogs/frank-n-wilner/railroads-beware-technology-is-gaining-on-you.html <comment><USER2> Interesting thing about railroad stocks, and no doubt one of the reasons Buffet bought BNSF, is that they own one of the most valuable things in the world of transportation: rights of way. Is hyperloop the way of the future for freight? If so, the railroad companies can build that out faster than anyone else, because they've got the rights of way.

Incidentally, this is one of the things I don't get about Hyperloop versus CHSR: there is nothing inherently cheaper about building an evacuated tube versus putting down a few steel rails. You still need a right of way and grade-separated crossings, and you still need to do all the engineering/environmental work for all that and that's where the expense piles up. You think laying some steel track down on a rock bed is the expensive part? Now, once you have the right of way in place, that's going to be valuable no matter what technology comes down the pike. Amtrak estimates the cost of upgrading the northeast corridor to 220 mph HSR at $160 billion. A lot of money, to be sure, but imagine what it would cost if there wasn't that existing right of way from DC to Boston, through downtown Baltimore, Philadephia, and New York, already in place! That'd be a trillion dollar project, whether you did it with a HSR or Hyperloop or whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> The RoW is highly valuable for all sorts of stuff. Back in the day, iirc, Qwest was owned by Phil Anshutz, who also owned the Southern Pacific Railroad. He used the SP RoW to lay down huge tracts of Fiber, which the other railroads copied.

They can and do run all sorts of stuff long the tracks - fiber, natural gas pipelines, and soon high transmission power lines.

<comment><USER3> If you want to talk about "Back in the day", telegraph companies had been running their lines along ROWs since the 1860s. They would obviously have to duplicate ways across vast expanses of the country otherwise. In exchange, they would leave a few conductors open for the railroads to use for their communications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I doubt that 3D printing will be a problem for railroads. You still need to transport for the raw materials, and most people will not have industrial- scale 3D printers in their homes (any more than they have industrial-scale paper printers in their homes). There are also limits to what can be 3D printed, and those limits will remain in effect for the foreseeable future -- liquids, timber, food, and so forth are not things that will be easy to print, but they remain important and they are often transported by rail.

If anything American railroads should be rejoicing about 3D printing, as it will encourage more domestic manufacturing and create new opportunities in transporting both raw materials and finished products.

(Edit: I know it sounds like I am making the same argument people made in the 1960s about computers in the home. However, a key difference with 3D printing is that the size of the printer determines what can be printed. It is one thing to print forks, knives, and gears; it is quite another to print a car body.)

<comment> a-priori I'm also not sold on household 3D printers. Maintaining and operating a 3D printer would be a hassle. But retail-level printers? That's a no-brainer. I'm certain people would be willing to accept a reasonable mark-up to have things printed for them.

I'm seeing hardware stores that prints all the screws and nails on-site (or at a regional distributor, shipped just-in-time) rather than keeping inventory, and "here's a random part that broke on this obsolete product, could you replace it?" services.

I'm seeing furniture stores that create made-to-measure furniture of varying dimensions or colours from a standard template to fit your room. Like made-to- measure clothing, as opposed to bespoke (custom furniture) or off-the-rack (furniture store).

I'm seeing motorcycle/bike/hockey helmets made to fit a person's head, car seats moulded to a person's backside (currently only an option on super cars like the McLaren F1), and custom orthotics that are cheap enough to become mainstream.

I'm seeing mall photo booths that produce figurines instead of photos.

But no, I can't see people having a 3D printer in their basement to do any of these things in their house.

<comment><USER5> I can see it but only with the technology changing. My husband has a 3D printer and uses it all the time for little projects around the house. Once the technology advances, you can have printers that are the right size and the right interface for the common public, they can 'buy' or create a design and have it just automatically print. Think of having toys for kids or household products printed faster than driving to a store to get it. Right now 'makers' are already doing this. It's not very friendly for most people, but its been very helpful for household uses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had a hard time reading this article without wondering if it was some kind of spoof. The USA has the most efficient freight rail network in the world (other countries optimise their networks for passenger), and this isn't due to a single factor. It is never going to be under threat from the Hyperloop, because most of the cargo carried are things like coal, raw materials, containers, etc. that aren't sensitive to being delivered "just a few hours faster" (or even days). Also, most of the US freight rail network is heavily heavily optimised and drops containers off for truck haulage after transporting the cargo to the most efficient spot on the network.

<comment><USER7> I heard about how the modern diesel-electric trains are engineered and wondered what I could learn from their systems, and was just about shocked. My intent was a thought experiment on "could we build a better hybrid car?" And the answer is a resounding yes... just look at trains.

All the research is already done, by train builders. They've done the math that says when to prioritize amperage over voltage for efficiency, and how to optimize various systems. And that's just one thing that I found massively impressive. (Now if only I could find the site I read, it was impressive.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Find it! I'd really like to know what you found.

I've done a fair amount of research myself and have always felt the auto industry could learn a lot from locomotive builders, especially the use of 3-phase ac traction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Railroads are much more valuable than most Americans can possibly imagine. And technology will only make it more so, if sufficient people are willing to work on it. Here are some ideas off the top of my head:

* automated trains for long distance travel, self-driving car-2-go's for short distance travel

* integrate future transport modules with the railway network and build more tracks; travel long distance on electric self-driving cars.

Of course, the main obstacle is the high initial capital investment. Here too, anyone really serious should start small: start by helping the current rail operators optimize freight (the real money maker); gain their confidence and then work on a joint project on a small scale; if it works out, then expand throughout the country.

It's painful to see that a country as large as America has such an inadequate railroad system. But maybe it was for the best: countries like France or Japan with an entrenched railway system will have probably have a hard time making the switch to radical new technologies

<comment><USER9> The main obstacle in the U.S. is that the interstate passenger rail system was nationalized by Congress. Congress forces unprofitable long-distance routes on Amtrak and keeps the monopoly company undercapitalized. Amtrak owns amazing assets like the Northeast corridor rail lines, but there's almost no innovation as the monopoly loses billions of dollars and can't really tap private capital markets.

Meanwhile American freight rail-- totally privately owned and managed-- is the best in the world.

<comment><USER10> To be fair it was nationalized in the wake of the Penn Central bankruptcy and all of the other railroads wanting to drop passenger rail. Railroads were even able to opt out and I think a few did for a few years but it just didn't make sense to move passengers vs freight.

<comment><USER9> The actual problem was the federal Interstate Commerce Commission regulated routes and ticket prices and wouldn't give passenger rail companies the flexibility needed to compete with cars and growing air travel. Central planning failed and completely destroyed U.S. passenger rail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Could such a system, on a more grand scale, replace railroads as conveyors of passengers and freight? The vision is not new-fangled, and a modern day visionary insists it could be a better alternative to high speed passenger rail._

The interesting thing is that the incumbent railroads are actually in a prime position to capitalize on this tech. The hard part about implementing the system isn't really the technology, it's all of the property, right-of-way, and NIMBY issues that come up. However the railroads already own property all over the country and (for the most part) they can do what they want with it.

Everyone might be better off working together than trying to approach it separately.

edit: beaten by rayiner

</comment><comment><USER12> Driverless trucks could also be a threat/opportunity. These trucks will trundle along at the most fuel-efficient speed 24 hours/day. Eventually they may be able hook together on the highway, further reducing drag.

Of course trains can also become driverless and train-cars could automatically couple/decouple, which could lead to many more trains, some with much smaller loads. I can even imagine trucks someday with wheels for both highway and steel-rails.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that driverless trucks are a natural migration of the short-haul model, where you have a container that hops off a train at an intermodal facility and is driven to the customer.

Automated trains are definitely coming; look at BHP Billiton's push toward remote train operation in the Pilbara region of West Australia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting long-term issue.

I think the next decade or two of railroad history are all about moving commodities like oil and produce. Hyperloop is all about passengers (something the rail industry has never cared out) 3D printing requires raw materials to print stuff, which will drive more demand for rail transport. Nothing can move billions of plastic pellets faster and cheaper than a train.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, we may find a hyperloop is better for transporting the smaller pieces of a commodity. After all, if you can just send a crate instead of a container, you can send to the buyer exactly what they need and nothing more. The issue with bulk freight is once you've made the pellets, at some point they have to be divided up.

I think something like a hyperloop will do very well for less-than- carload/container freight, but would probably never transport the massive volumes of bulk products (chemicals, wood, oil, coal, ore, steel coils, etc.)

<comment><USER13> Railroads lost 99.9% of that business 70-100 years ago.

You ship stuff that doesn't have time-definite requirements with UPS Ground or Parcel Post. Time definite, you use an express service. If you have time definate needs and larger quantities, you use FedEx Custom Critical, or some LTL truck service.

Some folks today ship same-day parcel shipments via Amtrak, Southwest Airlines, or other passenger service. That's what hyperloop parcel delivery would compete with. It's onerous and expensive (ie. I need a guy to drive to the station with the thing I need to ship), and only makes sense if you have an office adjacent to the city pairs or airport. Lawyers used this service alot pre-internet.

<comment><USER10> Who took that business in 1913ish? USPS was carried via rail until at least the 50s.

<comment><USER14> Trucks powered by internal combustion engines? It's not an all-or-nothing thing; many products even today have a rail segment somewhere in their delivery to the consumer. Even so, for rail to grow much it has to take business from trucking.

<comment><USER10> There wasn't much in roads or trucks for long distance travel in the early 1900s. I believe it took roughly 30 days to do the trip across the country on the Lincoln Highway as opposed to 7 days via the train.

I would expect if you look at the volume of freight shipped via rail vs trucks it wouldn't be until the 1950s and the creation of the interstate system that it really took off. Containerization in the 50s and 60s would be another big boon to trucking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is about ~121,800 miles of track in North America owned by CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, BNSF, and Canadian National.

That's about ~4.9x the circumference of the earth.

Seems like it would be quite expensive to build this new infrastructure? Maybe if highway transportation was more fuel efficient / fast the amount of tubing could be minimized.

<comment><USER16> In contrast, Germany, a country that is roughly 1/20 the size of the US, has about 60000 kilometers of track, or about 1.5x the circumference of the earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The hyperloop would actually be great for railroads to get involved in. They already have plenty of straight-line right-of-ways, they have deep pockets to finance the tech, and with the right corridor they could get into the same-day delivery business. Perhaps even be a direct competitor to Fed-Ex.

I'm not sure the industry is ready to take those kinds of risks yet, though. The entire hyperloop concept is great, but it's just an idea, and ideas without any execution intelligence don't tend to do so well.

</comment><comment><USER18> _" If you made it to age 50, you recall department stores where clerks placed a sales slip and cash in a cylindrical container that they then inserted into a steel tube at the point of sale, with the container then transported by compressed air and partial vacuum, through the maze of tubing, to cashiers elsewhere in the store."_

Many supermarkets in the UK have these at the till.

<comment><USER19> I have never seen one in the UK... where?

<comment><USER18> lots of the bigger ones - [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554632/Thief- stole-9...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554632/Thief- stole-90000-from-supermarket-tubes.html)

<comment><USER19> Ah interesting, makes sense I suppose to get cash away from tills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Take note that Musk 's Hyperloop prototype was created on a 3-D printer,_

What prototype? Did Musk actually show a model?

</comment><comment><USER20> That's far more interesting than the title would imply.</comment>


The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html <comment><USER2> What he refers to as "market" is a lot of what I think of as "product".

Really, how great is your product if nobody wants it? And how great is your team if they don't adapt whatever they are doing to build what people want?

I can imagine a lot of technology people falling into this trap though. They think that they've invented some great new technology and now they just need someone to make a product or license it or something (maybe they aren't sure, but they are certain that the technology is revolutionary).

<comment><USER3> I agree. I think Marc is using "product" in a strange way. Maybe he means quality of implementation or something. What he's basically saying is that the only thing that matters is to make something people want. This wanting he calls the "market." Which is also a bit confusing, because most VCs use that word to describe the total number of users your product could serve. "Market" in the usual sense is not so much a determiner of whether you succeed as an upper bound on the size of the success if you do.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I'm being that strange :-). At a certain point it just becomes a semantic debate, but let's try:

\- Product -- the thing that gets built. Let's assume there is one customer/user of it who finds it relevant to his needs. That customer/user is evaluating it on how fast it is, how reliable it is, how many features it has, how extensible it is, what platform it runs on, how easy to use it is, how polished the UI is, etc. That's that customer's view of product quality.

\- Market -- how many users/customers are there going to be like that? A dozen, a hundred, a thousand, a million, a billion? How hard is it going to be to get to those customers? How much will it cost to acquire them as users/customers? How long will it take them to use/buy? That's the market question.

Yes, you're right, the point is that you need to make something that people want (or, more precisely, that lots of people want, if you want leverage).

Yet the Valley and the industry is filled, and has been filled for 30 years, with very smart people building great products (as defined above) for very small markets.

The classic example is the huge universe of ISV's for marginal platforms. Ask anyone who tried to succeed as an ISV for the NeXT box, BeOS, the Amiga, etc. what the difference is between a high-quality product and a great market, and they'll certainly be able to tell you. Hell, most (not all, but most) Mac ISV's had this exact problem over the last 20 years.

I see this kind of thing _all the time_ in this industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "There is one high-profile, highly successful software entrepreneur right now who is burning through something like $80 million in venture funding in his latest startup and has practically nothing to show for it except for some great press clippings and a couple of beta customers -- because there is virtually no market for what he is building."

I wonder who that is?

</comment><comment><USER6> It's obviously risky to go after hot markets, even though there's a lot of success to be had doing it. Joe Kraus says "Better to be a trendspotter than a trendsetter" and Marc is saying something like "Make something people want, in a really hot market."

So does the advantage of working in a hot market outweigh the advantage of solving a problem you personally have? I'm thinking it probably does. If you can make it past the initial hurdle on your own steam your "hot market" users can probably carry you to victory.

<comment><USER7> What he is saying is not about "hot" markets, he says big markets. There are lots of "hot" markets that are not particularly big imho. For example videocasting. Then, there are big markets, that were not so hot, e.g. browsers around 2002-5. Before Firefox anyway.

If its hot, you probably have already missed it.

<comment><USER6> That's might be a good distinction. He did say "red-hot markets", but he mostly described a "great market" by its size, growth rate, and sales costs. That's what I had in mind but you could also interpret hot as meaning hype.

I'm not sure I'd agree that you've missed a market just because it's heavily hyped though. The blogging world still has sizable disruptions and is largely unexplored. Facebook is a late entry to social networking and it's doing okay.

<comment><USER4> Yes -- I think my use of the term "red-hot" was misleading -- in my post I meant "huge and growing".

Agree with second point also -- big markets often get a lot bigger, and provide a lot of opportunity to new entrants. And sometimes they're heavily hyped along the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess it's needless to say: The team is the most important part of a company, by a factor of...well, by an incalculable factor. A good team can change product-focus, change market-focus, create products, occasionally even _create_ markets.

A bad team is hopeless and will stay that way into perpetuity.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it's remarkably easy to upgrade a bad team when you have a great market.

Cisco.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Condensed version: Making money.

Edit: No, really. _"Because, really, what else could it possibly be?"_

<comment><USER10> You're right.

"The #1 company-killer is lack of market." is a euphemism for "when nobody buys what sells, you go out of business."

What else does the "The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit" mean much more beyond "The only thing that matters is making money?"</comment></comment>


How does one become a security researcher? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There are a ton of different directions that you can head in and focus on. I encourage you to start/look at stuff that you're genuinely interested in and excited about.

I've written a "Getting Started" guide for security researchers that people have said is helpful. I hope it helps you out :) [https://blog.bugcrowd.com/getting-started-bug-bounty- hunter-...](https://blog.bugcrowd.com/getting-started-bug-bounty-hunter- methodology)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sam - very helpful. Thanks

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Great to hear. Feel free to ping me if you have questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> depends what kind of security researcher. AppSec is p hot rn. Mobile sec is p hot. Browser security research can still advance quite a ways. ExploitDev is always popular. Just depends what niche you want to go into. Once you know your niche, just start publishing research (vulns, analysis, something interesting FFS) and sharing it online. If the research is legit, it's not hard to get noticed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I especially like the last sentence here. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Contribute to open source security projects/tools.

</comment><comment><USER5> It wouldn't hurt to go to Security conventions and start networking.</comment>


Show HN: Bloomberg-like crypto trading terminal - <AUTHOR> https://content.cryptocontrol.io/terminal/ <comment><USER2> * Duplicated question in the FAQ "Are there any free features with the terminal?" * I did not test it because I am too lazy to sign up on something were I don't have an immediate value perception Cryptowat.ch seems very similar to me [https://cryptowat.ch/markets/binance/eth/usdt](https://cryptowat.ch/markets/binance/eth/usdt) at least on the best case

</comment><comment><USER3> May i ask how you added credit card billing and crypto billing? what library or billing product do you use?

I tested it on android chrome, neat!</comment>


Ask HN: Validate my storage company idea - <AUTHOR>

1. Snap a photo of the stuff you want in storage
2. Van rolls up to your house and picks it up
3. Driver hands you a key / welcome package
Upfront fee would be based on volume, maybe pickup is free under a certain volume.
Still considering full or self service. Revenue would come from end users and partnerships with storage companies for customer contracts. <comment><USER2> My guess is it'll be too expensive to deliver that service at a price point anyone will be comfortable with. What are the margins on storage locker businesses? There are a lot of them, and they seem like a business with very few competitive barriers except for real estate costs, so my (uneducated, untested) presumption is that the margins on those businesses are bad.

To that business, add truck rolls. Your costs just got drastically worse (and in unexpected ways: for instance, a business that requires people to operate motor vehicles is much more difficult to insure). How much higher can you jack the price to compensate for that?

<comment><USER3> Margins are _ridiculously_ variable. I have an Internet buddy whose product is, basically, a $500 Excel spreadsheet which lets you model the effect of e.g. a particular site's mortgage. The main reason for the app is that often first-time business owners don't appreciate that ludicrously profitable storage businesses look exactly like money-losing storage businesses from the outside. (Similar to SaaS in a way.)

A well-run storage business is like a VPS or SaaS or pickle company: they make their money "on the cut." My father the real estate developer thinks of everything in terms of dollars per square foot, and routinely chuckles when passing ones in Chicago. "Manhattan rents for Chicago real estate. God bless them."

<comment><USER4> Patrick - what's the product your Internet buddy is selling?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Prior to building this, talk to 10 storage company owners and confirm that they're both amenable to you signing up customers for them and that they will pay $400+ for that. You may find some who require a credit check, which they may or may not be happy about you doing, for example.

</comment><comment><USER5> I guess my biggest question is how is this different from a company like PODS or the other ones that bring a storage unit to your home, or wherever, and once you fill it come back and take it to their warehouse for storage.

As someone who has moved across states several times, I can say that those types of moves are the biggest headaches for logistics personally. There is always a delay there either on receiving or sending side. On the self-storage market the biggest headaches I have personally experienced is that when I throw things in storage it tends to have absolutely no organization and I usually get a unit that just isn't big enough. What then happens is I cram so much stuff in, with no organization, that when I just happen to need something I end up spending a day pulling everything out to find it.

My dad ran a moving company for years while I was growing up and I do think there is room to move in this market I just don't know what area to target. Mark Cuban had a tweet recently about it: [https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/425750659531411456](https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/425750659531411456)

<comment><AUTHOR> PODS & Pack-Rat are cool, and maybe they are the best someone could do in this space right now. Not sure if these are enough but here are the issues with those that I've been considering:

* Expensive ($60+ transport + fuel, $125+ /mo storage)

* Inconvenient for access (PODS requires 24 hr notice, the other needs 48)

* Inconvenient for apartments (require the box to be at the location for 24 hr)

Thanks for the comment, I'll keep thinking about this.

<comment><USER5> A hybrid system of sorts may work good, but would be capital intensive. Say a PODS like box is dropped off at your home or wherever. There could be two models of these PODS. One with a trailer hitch and the other without. The ones without would require scheduling a pickup and transport time. Either way there would be an option for storage where you could take the pod when you are done packing. The storage facilities would be spread out across the country. The storage facilities would be like existing storage facilities with 24hr secured access so you could get in/out anytime to access your pod. With your fee you would have access to move your pod from one location to another anytime you wanted.

For example, let's say I have a pod in Maryland, but am now moving to California. I could just go to the storage facility, hook up my pod to my trailer hitch, drive to California, and my monthly fee would give me access to any other location that had space.

I think what Mark is referring to in his tweet, and something my dad saw in his moving business, was people who just needed a couch or bed moved quickly or something taken to the dump for them. Pull up an Uber like interface on your phone and your request would go out to a variety of movers in your area who have time to earn a quick buck for hauling your stuff for you.

Just some ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I and many of my classmates are in the process of graduating and moving from NY to SF. There's usually a decent relo budget (1-6k), but the problem is that it's a logistical nightmare.

The interstate moving industry is still in the dark ages. It could definitely use the kind of service overhaul that's making uber and tesla famous.

What I and my peers want:

Drop a pod at my house in NY. I put all my stuff in it, you pick it up quickly and get it to my new house in CA without breaking anything.

A sub-service of this could be the actual loading and unloading of contents. I'm intentionally moving as lightly as possible, but I have some female friends with heirloom furniture who are concerned about how the hell they're going to get a 400 lb oak dresser from the crate to their 3rd floor apartment.

Some data required throughout the process: How much will this cost? So far pods and the like won't let me get a quote online, which is absolutely unacceptable. I want to be able to get a custom cost estimate that's accurate to within $100. Flat rate by volume/weight * mile moved or whatever, just figure something out that lets me know the cost easily upfront.

How long will it take? What's the fastest you can do it? Can I give you more time for a lower rate, or pay for expedited shipping?

Dates - delivery, availability, everything - need to be insanely precise. Issues like landlord office hours mean these dropoffs need to be meticulously timed, and the stereotypical plumber hours where you'll show up randomly in an 8 hour range won't cut it here. I once gladly stomached a ticket for 88 in a 55 because it meant I could move into my new apartment on schedule.

So yeah. Storing stuff is easy. Moving stuff is hard. You don't need weird revenue streams like storage partnerships - the revenue comes from the fact that right now I could call probably 2 dozen people who would give you thousands of dollars for this. Be the uber of interstate moving.

</comment><comment><USER7> In NYC there is a sort of similar startup: Makespace. You ask them for storage boxes and they bring those for free. You fill them and make an appointent to fetch them from your house. They then bring it to their storage facility. Fee per box. [http://makespace.com/invite/4dA/](http://makespace.com/invite/4dA/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is like the best case scenario of what I had in mind! Have you used it yet?

<comment><USER7> Yep. I saw them during a NY tech meetup event and liked the concept and happened to have stuff I needed storing. The site is great and service is great. I wanted to schedule a drop off for the boxes but they were booked that week. Problem was I was flying back to Europe that week and so really needed them to bring the boxes. They were very flexible and got someone to drop the boxes off before they made the usual rounds. Same for picking up the boxes a few days later. Definitely can recommend them!</comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia is significantly amplifying the impact of Open Access publications - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/09/08/wikipedia-amplifying-impact-of-open-access/ <comment><USER2> Yet they seem to be promoting very closed publications as well. Interesting. [http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/09/wikigate-raises- quest...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/09/wikigate-raises-questions- about-wikipedias-commitment-to-open-access/)

<comment><USER3> That article is referring to The Wikipedia Library, which gives gratis access to editors to services like HighBeam, Questia, MIT Press, and others.

Some of the concerns are addressed here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Whynotoa)

> These editors are not a special elite or priesthood--any editor with a six- > month old account and 500 edits can gain access--they are hardworking, > dedicated, core volunteers who are summarizing research for the public. They > either have the resources they need to do their work, or they don't. In this > research climate, sadly, not having access to major publishers means missing > out on some of the best research. Which means our reading public misses out > too.

> On a more technical level, it's long been Wikipedia's policy (at least an > English Wikipedia policy) that accessibility is actually not a factor in > determining the reliability or verifiability of a source. The best > information often comes from hard to access materials, such as out-of-print > monographs or expensive paywalled and embargoed journals. We use the best > sources now to advance our mission: to write an encyclopedia. Wikipedia aims > to be an open access summary of all reliable knowledge—not a summary of only > open access knowledge. If we aim to exclude paywalled sources, our movement > would need to have a very deep discussion about what our mission means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In other news Water is wet.

Of course Wikipedia is going to favor open access sources. The average volunteer editor isn't going to have easy access to the paywalled specialized journals on a when editing or creating an article. Having the articles be openly searchable and non-paywalled means that a editor volunteer can drop the citation in easily and without having to go through the various hoops of getting someone who has access to the paywalled sources.</comment>


India suspends all visas til 15th April 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MoHFW_INDIA/status/1237807578790461441 <comment><AUTHOR> 1\. All existing visas, except diplomatic, official, UN/International Organizations, employment, project visas, stand suspended till 15th April 2020. This decision will come into effect from 1200 GMT on 13th March 2020 at the port of departure.

2.• Incoming travellers, including Indian nationals, are advised to avoid non- essential travel and are informed that they can be quarantined for a minimum of 14 days upon their arrival in India.

3.All incoming travellers, incl Indian nationals,arriving from or having visited China,Italy, Iran,Republic of Korea,France, Spain & Germany after 15th February 2020 shall be quarantined for minimum 14 days.This will take effect from 1200 GMT on 13th March 2020 at port of departure</comment>


Show HN: Federal – A minimalistic centralized React store - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/federal <comment><USER2> I agree that Redux is a horrible pain.

A week ago I started searching for a simple yet powerful solution for the state problem in React. After trying 3 libraries (Baobab, Cerebral and react- cursor) and discarding without trying a bunch more (Derivable, partial-lenses, Cycle and others), I ended up writing the app in Elm (still doing it).

Federal seems like a better Redux, but still too complected[0]. Ideally, I would want something like Baobab (a central store with cursors/lenses and event emitters), but with immutable data structures (not Object.freeze) and without the bugs. Since this ideal will never come (and I won't write it myself) I'll probably use Federal for my next app that could not be written in Elm.

[0]: [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made- Easy](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm interesting - I'll check out Baobab

</comment></comment><comment> 52-6F-62 I like the idea. I always wanted something of a "lightweight Redux" (admittedly, I never looked very hard).

I'll give this a try soon. Thanks for putting in the time.

Any attempts at implementing it with TypeScript? Also would love some examples in `class`-y components.</comment>


Spotify says Apple One bundle is a 'threat to collective freedom' - <AUTHOR> https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/09/15/spotify-says-apple-one-bundle-is-a-threat-to-collective-freedom <comment><AUTHOR> Spotify is being dramatic but it's true Apple is taking advantage of its position on the AppStore.

Apple not only has a 30% advantage over Spotify in terms of final pricing, it can also use the 30% it gets from Spotify to lower its prices even further.

<comment><USER2> Only if you assume it costs nothing to develop and market the platform.

Apple One is a boring and unattractive bundle of services.

Spotify isn't helping anyone here.

And Spotify is benevolent to nobody but themselves - they are responsible for driving down artist royalties to line their own pockets.

There are good arguments about software freedom to be made, buy Spotify and Epic aren't making them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both Spotify and Apple will have development and marketing costs.

I'm not arguing in favor of Spotify btw. I'm just saying if both services cost $10 per month on iOS, on the same number of users Apple will get $10 + $3 (from Spotify's %30) and Spotify will get $7. So Apple can actually sell it for $7 whereas Spotify can't. Obviously I'm over simplifying this.

<comment><USER2> Sure but Spotify's development costs only have to cover the upper levels of the app whereas Apple is developing the system that both they _and_ Spotify benefit from.

That's why it's not a like for like comparison.

Spotify can sell it for the same price as Apple, since they don't have to fund the extra investments.

<comment><AUTHOR> iOS dev is already paid by selling the hardware. The AppStore is also profitable by itself.

<comment><USER2> Is iOS dev paid for by the hardware? What makes you think that? It just sounds like something you made up.

And what makes you think the App Store is profitable 'by itself'?

These statements seem to indicate that the argument against Apple is just about them making profit from what they do.

That's exactly the argument Epic and Spotify are making - they want to take some of the profit from what Apple does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you aware Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world? Where do you think these profits come from?

<comment><USER2> Sale of products and services, of course.

It seems like the argument is that Apple is too profitable so it should be targeted. That stream of profits is certainly is what Epic and Spotify are trying to obtain through the courts.

Apple on the other hand, obtained that stream of profits by investing decades of resources into developing their platforms. Platforms which Epic and Spotify have not had to develop, and which they have befitted from.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


$ 300 3D Printer, the Makible Makibox - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makible.com/makibox-the-300-3d-printer-first-glimpse

<comment><USER2> To give this a little more context, we're not just trying to make a cheap 3D printer. Our goal is to make the first consumer friendly, sub $300 level 3D printer so that 3D printing can break from the current hobbyists / hackers market, into the hands of the designers and the average consumers. You can see my post here for more: [https://plus.google.com/104194244178141073757/posts/fNjEoVJf...](https://plus.google.com/104194244178141073757/posts/fNjEoVJf7E4)

It's my personal goal to enable the average consumer to innovate and become co-creators. My previous project was the LEGO crowdfunding site - <http://LEGO.cuusoo.com/> Makible is a new startup I co-founded that will hopefully disrupt the current mass-manufacturing system and give power back to the local craftsmen & makers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have to be honest, I didn't know much about 3D printers until I heard about Makibox so you could classify me as below average user. Now,, with the price point as well, I am excited just to imagine the possibilities!

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I figured 3D printers won't really go mainstream (adoption by early majority) until it can hit the $300 mark like a PlayStation or XBox!

Once we've announced we're designing the MakiBox within the $300 budget, we get lots of feedbacks like yours. I was doing a Google+ Hangout last week and Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) said:

"I was considering buying the Makerbot, but yours is $300?! And you can print bigger?! You win! I actually don't know what I can do with a 3D printer, I just know that it's cool!"

I thought that pretty much captured what I'm hoping for MakiBox, which is to get it into the hands of people who have little idea what they can do with it. I think the unbounded mind of these users, who hasn't gone through the trouble of building a RepRap or Makerbot and are aware the limitations of a 3D printer, will be so much more creative!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Putting 3D printers in the hands of avg users would create so much experimentation. I loved the LEGO, but this could be even cooler.

<comment><USER5> HeatSync Labs in Mesa, AZ hosts a 3D printing night where people (and kids!) can design and print their own objects with some hacker assistance. Its pretty rad. Result in first photo: [http://www.heatsynclabs.org/last-weeks-in-pics- because-it-ha...](http://www.heatsynclabs.org/last-weeks-in-pics-because-it- happened/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome box that makes technology more accessible to the public!

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool project!</comment>


Ask HN: I/O of Web Server - <AUTHOR>

I read a couple of articles and papers and I came to the conclusion that event-driven pattern is the way to go if one in targeting Unix platform. This is because Unix(Linux) kernel does not have asynchronous I/O(This is not so with Windows). I checked some open-source web server codes and  I noticed that some still use synchronous Unix (select and epoll), bare bone.
However, last few hours I stumbled on article written by a top dog at Mailinator which argued that threads are still fast than event-driven(Reactor). He argued that context switching and memory foot prints are just theoretical stuff. That what one should avoid is thread pool , and that threads should be started at the beginning.
Now my question is: Which one is the best as per performance from your experience, and easy to code and maintain?  And I would like to go through more papers , articles, and blogs in order to fully understand the limitations of I/O and the best way to handle such. <comment><USER2> The first 80 or so slides of this deck go into detail regarding "async I/O": [https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed- the-...](https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-gil-and- exploited-all-cores).

> He argued that context switching and memory foot prints are just theoretical > stuff.

What? Can you cite your source?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link you provided. This is the link I cited, [http://www.mailinator.com/tymaPaulMultithreaded.pdf](http://www.mailinator.com/tymaPaulMultithreaded.pdf) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You post is very broad but I understand the core question you're asking. I have done some work with a streaming servers in the past on BSD and Linux and, whilst my knowledge could be dated, I'm currently sitting at home with a cold so let me share information that might be helpful.

Last I checked it's true that on Linux there is no non-blocking API for disk I/O, and that read(), write() or accessing mmap() pages has no option but to pause the process in 'D' state. Network I/O is non-blocking, with lots of options around epoll() for edge or level-triggered, so no worries there.

So if you are going to write a fully event-driven/co-routine program that streams from disk and out of a network, you'll need to work with some options to do the disk I/O while the process continues to run.

There are some ways you can leave the main thread/process non-blocking and use several worker threads or processes doing disk I/O.

You can hand control of the socket descriptor to the worker thread for sendfile() which is likely to be simplest to develop and fastest if your application suits it.

Alternatively you can totally abstract away the I/O by having worker threads sendfile() data down a pipe, ready for splice() by the main event driven threads. Effectively the pipe descriptor now becomes your 'async' disk I/O, and you can probably write your own nice API to it. This becomes effective if your main thread needs to do some nasty things like inserting extra data within the stream.

If you're doing anything more than pure data movement then the main thread may be CPU bound, in which case a useful solution is to fork() a process per-CPU all of which are running accept() on the same socket. This assigns a client to a process on connection, and is a lovely cheap way to get nice concurrency for very little development.

Once you do have multiple forks, you may find that by having a few threads per-CPU and combining non-blocking network I/O with blocking (sync) disk I/O is valid for your task; this will do good to minimise the "average" responsiveness of the server, but not the "worse case" responsiveness.

In some practical cases, you may be able to use a combination of mmap(), posix_madvise() and mincore() as a poor man's solution to despatching lots of I/O into the kernel's I/O scheduler from one process. But this comes with little guarantees, and there's no way to be woken when the data is 'ready'.

The suggestion to use a thread per client may be valid today, I don't know. But threads have previously been a heavyweight solution (if most are to be idle at any one time, waiting on some I/O). Certainly it didn't used to be advisable to use, eg. 100,000 threads because of the memory that takes up. Whereas these sorts of numbers can easily be accommodated using the methods above.

If the number of clients is small and they are all independent, then I would consider using a process per-thread for the additional crash protection it gives (over threads).

In general, I have seen such applications more as a 'broker' which spends most of its time idle while it waits for data from either the disk or network end.

Oh, and maybe libaio will help, though I have not used this myself. It aims to be an async disk I/O API, but IIRC its implementation on Linux was as some form of worker threads.

I believe a good reference for this is: [http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html](http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html). Despite its age, I skim read this just now and I think a lot of its advice is still relevant.

<comment><USER4> > Last I checked it's true that on Linux there is no non-blocking API for disk > I/O,

There is (see io_submit and friends) but the interface is incomplete and it's often buggy. A thread pool works far better, and performance overhead (for anything in your 2.5" or 3.5" form factor) is minimal to non-existant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about epoll / kqueue?</comment>


Jr Web App Developer - <AUTHOR>

Rocklin, CA based company seeking part time jr. level or beyond employee for web application development.
Requirements are as follows: * Able to code in languages: PHP, Ruby, Python... * Good working knowledge of logic flow in general * Experience with some of the more common web frameworks like RoR, CakePHP, Symphony, Django, etc... * Ability to write clean, concise, and at least somewhat moderately documented code * Communicates well with others and works well in a team or solo * Able to communicate well with clients
Optional Skills (not required, but any of these are a bonus): * Experience with general MVC architecture concepts * Experience working with software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign * Experience with revision control systems such as cvs, svn, git, hg, etc… * Decent level of comfort with unix-type systems. * Any kind of professional IT support experience * Skilled with HTML5 and CSS3 and it's predecessors * Design and layout skills -- ability to make visually appealing pages/templates and UI components * Well versed with coding in Javascript and using the jQuery framework * Be able and willing to develop pages with high levels of compatibility (don't worry, we don't care about IE6 -- just IE7+, FF, Safari, Opera, Chrome) <comment><USER2> A part time jr. developer that can do all that is called a full time senior software engineer.</comment>


ArangoDB 3.7 – a big step forward for multi-model - <AUTHOR> https://www.arangodb.com/2020/08/arangodb-3-7-a-big-step-forward-for-multi-model/ <comment><USER2> Arangodb has always been the db that I always keep checking back every few months. I love the idea and using it has been a peach so far. This is a very underrated db and I wish more people can get into it.

To me, its best bits are;

1\. AQL - I absolutely adore AQL- the query language that you use in Arangodb. I haven't seen anything like it so far and it was somethingI could pick up in 5 mins.

2\. Multi-modal - love the idea of being able to use the same db for graph and object based data. With the new search and other geo features, this bit has become even more tempting.

3\. Orchestration - ability to have self healing clusters of db nodes makes the overall backend super redundant and safe. and also helps with latency by enabling me to have a node in each region that I want to optimize for.

Despite all this, I almost always end up going for Postgres for my personal projects.

Coming to the negatives, for me the biggest missed opportunities are;

1\. Not providing a free tier for the managed service. I really would want to use the service for small toy projects without worrying about a time limit. All of the managed service providers have a free/community tier and without it, I don't see their service succeeding.

2\. Foxx server-in-db This one pains me so much. I feel Foxx is the killer feature thay have that can push them past Postgres. Having the web server and the db in the same node makes architecting the backend so simple. But Foxx really isn't designed with developer ergonomics in mind. Issues that i opened years ago are still open, without any major update which would make developing in Foxx less than a chore. I would drop other web frameworks+dbs in a heartbeat, if Foxx was easy to develop in.

3\. No Jepsen report. No techempower entry for a Foxx+arangodb backend. No realworld backend app using arangodb. No major independent benchmarks.

<comment><USER3> I agree with the above points (except Foxx - that looked too scary, so I pretended it didn't exist so I have no opinion on how good/useful it could be). Getting the database up-and-running on my local machine was pretty painless and AQL was a joy to use.

The thing that put me off using it for anything other than a local toy project was the costs (at the time) of hosting the database anywhere outside of my laptop. Deploying ArangoDB in a Docker container on AWS ECS was far too much money to justify for any of my side projects. Hopefully running costs are a lot cheaper nowadays?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been meaning to look Arango for some side projects to learn some NoSQL. Having the primary NoSQL types in one db makes that a bit easier when writing the code, though OrientDB can fit that bill as well. From my limited experience their AQL syntax is pretty good and easy to grok, and the documentation is also good for diving in and understanding the models/features. The concept of Foxx API's someone can quickly spin up is interesting, though I'm not sure I'd use it myself. I also quite like their WebUI console, and having everything packaged up in the official arangodb[2] container image makes it simple to get up and running.

They have some performance benchmarks on their site from 2018[0] that at the time showed it to be reasonably competitive with the competition. I'll leave that up to actual DBAs to qualify though, I'm not really that knowledgeable in databases. The benchmark is also open-source[1].

[0] [https://www.arangodb.com/2018/02/nosql-performance- benchmark...](https://www.arangodb.com/2018/02/nosql-performance- benchmark-2018-mongodb-postgresql-orientdb-neo4j-arangodb/)

[1] [https://github.com/weinberger/nosql- tests](https://github.com/weinberger/nosql-tests)

[2] [https://hub.docker.com/_/arangodb/](https://hub.docker.com/_/arangodb/)

<comment><USER5> I use adb for online applications (my home control system; it archives sensor readings, keeps configuration data) and also research projects such as loading the MeSH biomedical ontology, following blood vessels from heart to hand, etc.

Arangodb = Mongodb - hype + results

Don't let your bad experiences with overhyped database scare you away from arangodb. It is real German engineering not US startup culture that starts with 'the problem I am trying to solve is Larry Ellison is worth more than me... People's lives are empty if they don't have an expensive service contract..."

<comment><USER6> I'm sure ArangoDB is wonderful technology but your characterisation of MongoDB is misplaced. The people who build the WiredTiger storage engine that MongoDB depends on have been building database engines for over 20 years. They created the original BerkeleyDB, built Oracle's NoSQL engine then left Oracle to create the Wired Tiger engine. They were acquired by MongoDB to completely revamp our storage engine technology in 2014. Don't let 7 year old memes cloud your judgement.

(I work for MongoDB).

<comment><USER7> The below is not a seven year old meme:

Even at the strongest levels of read and write concern, MongoDB 4.2.6 failed to preserve snapshot isolation. Instead, Jepsen observed read skew, cyclic information flow, duplicate writes, and internal consistency violations. Weak defaults meant that transactions could lose writes and allow dirty reads, even downgrading requested safety levels at the database and collection level.

<comment><USER8> I find MongoDB to be a very reliable database as long as I build my apps to tolerate losing data.

<comment><USER6> If you have ever lost data running MongoDB (whether you are a paying customer or not) we want to hear about that and fix it. We treat any instance of data loss as a high priority bug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess it is just me but as soon as I see "contact our sales" instead of price I turn away. Absence of perpetual license instead of monthly fee does not help either.

<comment><USER10> Running a database business is especially hard - constant development is needed and so one time perpetual licenses don't really reflect the on-going costs (esp staff) that a database company has.

Mix in the risk that your high value users end up using the FOSS edition and it can get especially difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have used Arango in a couple of project, it's a great piece of software. I wish they had support for time series and then I'd be 1000% happy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Those features are interesting, but how much can it scale? What performance (read and write) can I expect? How easy is it to update a schema? How does it handle pagination or queries with really large result sets? What's the limits on the size of data I can store in it (total, per field, per row, etc.) And how does it handle security? Is everything encrypted at rest and in transit? Can the index work over encrypted fields? Etc.

<comment><USER13> Great points here. I hear a lot of about a lot of DB's especially the new kids on the block but unless I see how they behave once you got a few TB of data in them I cannot even contemplate using them in production. Things like schema changes, backup/restore, latency, fault tolerance etc are very important to leave to chance and believe the initial marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would somebody say it can hold data as reliably as postgres. I've been very very impressed recently with Postgres and how long a DB can go (using Aurora right now). I would love to try it out but I am just too iffy on if it will withstand the load reliably (even in events of a crash).

<comment><USER15> I wish databases were more modular, I would love to be able to experiment with other models for what a database could be, backed by the rock-solid postgres write ahead log.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do I understand correctly that multi model mean you can create relational dbs, documents dbs, key value pairs etc in Arrango?

If yes, I wonder why someone would need a multi model db, do you have any examples?

<comment><USER17> Let's play make a Facebook. You need profile information. That's information that's access as block. We can use documents for that. We then want to track relationships. Friends. Friends of friends. We can use a graph. We might need a lightweight cache. Opaque entries accessed by key. We can use a key value store for that. ArangoDB does all of theses. Some times you want to join documents to documents or any other form of pairing. ArangoDB does that too.

You can then scale this across multiple machines as necessary. The benefit of such a design is that your team only needs to learn on technology not many. You don't need to know redis, postgres and Neo4j to derive the same benefits.

<comment><USER18> Isn't a graph dB a super set of a document dB Node == document Properties = attributes Edge == relationship

<comment><USER19> At a high level, you could say that you can model your data in either, so either can implement the other, and you can also include relational DBs in that too. They are all "equivalent" in an abstract sense. But it doesn't mean they support all uses equally well.

A graph DB is optimised for a traversing a general graph structure, whereas a document DB is optimised for a tree-structured document and sometimes queries can't traverse links between documents.

Optimised means performance, layout in storage (so locality, retrival and join patterns), the kinds of query operators that are offered, and even that the language they use is more suited to different ways of modelling data.

<comment><USER18> once you've implemented a graphDB you have a document DB. In a graphDB you may query all vertices with a property x=foo, which translates to get all documents with field x=foo

Effectively you can market a graphDB as a document DB, the reverse isn't true. What am I missing

<comment><USER19> You're missing that the documentDB will be faster and simpler to use for some kinds use cases, is simpler to understand in some ways, and that the query/update language used by the documentDB will funnel application design towards storage and access patterns that work better with a documentDB.

Of course you can implement a documentDB on top of a graphDB, or market the latter as the former. And of course there are applications running on a documentDB that would be as fast or faster on a graphDB.

The differences are one of "impedance mismatch" rather than insurmountable differences.

For example, if you query all vertices with a property x=foo, then query all properties of the vertices, and then traverse all tree-child like properties to more vertices, and continue doing this recursively, _that_ query will be like getting all documents with x=foo. But that's more complicated to express in a graphDB QL than a documentDB QL, and likely to run slower on the graphDB (due to data non-locality) if there are many properties or much tree depth.

In general a documentDB stores all the data for a document clustered together _without being told to_ , and likes to retrieve them as a unit. Because that structure is clear, applications tend to be designed around it as an assumption.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook growing seven times faster than LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/2/facebook-growing-seven-times-faster-than-linkedin

<comment><USER2> Linked in is about smaller numbers of genuine business associates and contacts. The site is setup in such a way as to make it difficult to simply friend people whom you have no real connection with on a whim. Slower growth would be expected given those factors.</comment>


Show HN: Fast bayesian optimization library in pure Go inspired by Optuna - c-bata https://github.com/c-bata/goptuna <comment> c-bata Posted the blog about Goptuna. As the compared result of execution speed with go-bayesopt, the TPE algorithm of Goptuna works extremely fast.

[https://medium.com/@c_bata_/practical-bayesian- optimization-...](https://medium.com/@c_bata_/practical-bayesian-optimization- in-go-using-goptuna-edf97195fcb5)</comment>


Mystery of the Email J Finally Solved - <AUTHOR> http://chrisjean.com/2009/02/06/mystery-of-the-email-j-finally-solved/

<comment><USER2> [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/23/60474...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/23/604741.aspx) where i originally heard about it

<comment><USER3> Also where I heard about it, and Chen's page is exactly 10 billion times more entertaining than the original link for this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was only a brief mystery to me - my Outlook Reading Pane rendered it as a J, while opening the email showed the smiley face.

I only hope the people who send smileys in corporate emails one day learn that they're usually not received at the other end. Then they might STOP DOING IT!

<comment><USER5> Funnier still are the people who assume they can "recall" their email once it's sent (a feature that does work on Exchange, but obviously not in SMTP). At one previous employer, HR accidentally CC'd me on a mail suggesting my salary was out of the official comp bands. Recall! Recall! Recall!

<comment><USER6> A bit of trivia about recall:

Recall is actually not even a feature of Exchange, only Outlook. Exchange sees the messages as normal emails.

Thus, if the receiving party doesn't have Outlook open, the message won't get recalled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Intense.</comment>


Hand Coding a Personal Website (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://builtvisible.com/hand-coding-personal-website/ <comment><USER2> I hand coded my own for a while. I moved to Word Press to try to spend more time producing content, less time fussing with the back end. I later moved on to BlogSpot (aka Blogger) to spend even less time fussing with the back end.

It may not be hard to code up a website, but keeping all the code up to date as the world moves forward and staying on top of security issues etc... Yeesh.

If you are a professional programmer and this helps you develop your craft, coolios. But if you really just want to blog or produce other content, it can be just overkill.

</comment><comment><USER3> Coding is one thing. Being artistic is another. I am not the latter at all.</comment>