Flipboard releases React Canvas - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/flipboard/react-canvas <comment><USER2> If rendering UI to a canvas fits your needs then by all means do it.

Just be aware that when it comes time to localize to other languages it starts getting hard to support things like CJK where in order to properly work there's an Input Method Editor ([http://i.imgur.com/JmmYwyi.gif](http://i.imgur.com/JmmYwyi.gif)) that needs to be able to read the text. There's also cut/copy/paste which users can't do from text on a canvas. There's also "define" which is built into OSX and iOS (others?) letting the user select a word and look up its definition in the dictionary. Finally I'm sure there are accessibility issues. And don't forget right to left like Arabic. ([https://www.flickr.com/photos/u-e/2680759761/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/u-e/2680759761/))

UI in a game (the most common place to render a UI yourself) usually doesn't care about these things. I'd hazard a guess though that most apps do. I know I get really annoyed when I can't copy small pieces of text from a native app. For example copying a link to a browser, copying a phone number to my phone, copying an address to maps, etc.

In general DOM makes all of these just work.

<comment><USER3> React Canvas author here. I outlined some of the reasons why it is not always the right answer: [http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile- web/#Practic...](http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile- web/#PracticalApplications) On Flipboard we use DOM where appropriate for text input and areas of the application where performance is less critical.

And to your point about accessibility: [https://github.com/flipboard/react- canvas#accessibility](https://github.com/flipboard/react-canvas#accessibility)

You are correct that the DOM just works. But we need a better option on the web in order to achieve the kinds of experiences that people have come to expect from native applications. The hope is that by pushing the browser beyond its limits that we can make progress in this area.

<comment><USER2> Please don't take this wrong. I think what you're doing is great. I like perf too. I'm just kind of thinking outloud.

For example copy/paste and "define" require you to support selecting text on your canvas and then telling the OS about it when the user picks "copy" or "define". Otherwise you get the bad behavior that 99.99% of all native apps have which is that they don't support selecting anything except in editable textareas so if they display an address I can't copy it into maps.

You could argue the browser should add APIs so you can provide what the user has selected to the OS but, it means every developer has to be perfect. Developers who get it wrong end up making apps that don't follow any OS conventions, don't handle the edge cases, don't handle things when running in other languages, etc etc etc.

To take it to an extreme, maybe the browser should just be a rectangle of pixels and JavaScript. No DOM whatsoever. Imagine we had that world. There'd be no search engines and every page would have a totally unique UI. Some pages you'd use the keyboard to move a cursor to select something. Others would use the mouse. Still others might use a joystick. Some would require IJKL instead of the cursor keys. None of them would have native OS widgets. They'd all use a different font system. Most would probably only support ASCII and maybe ANSI at best.

Instead we have HTML and a DOM and most of these issues are solved and that uniformity has some arguable benefits.

I'm not saying stop your work. I'm just saying I'm there are trade offs. I think an argument can be made either way. Maybe rather than going back to a rect of pixels we should also be lobbying for ways to make the DOM better so we can keep the good parts (universality?) and still do better?

<comment><USER4> Understood. We just happened to have unconventional constraints that suggested an unconventional solution. There are many ways to lobby for improvements for things (especially Web standards) and perhaps with us showing the limitations of the DOM, we can influence change for the better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm building a complicated canvas app[1] for visualizing Bitcoin markets. I resorted to building my own framework on top of canvas, exactly for performance reasons. It's fast, but as a framework I was never too happy with it because it's a little half-baked.

More recently I found and fell in love with React for other frontend work, and use it exclusively now for any view-related work. I might have to go back and rewrite the ugliest parts of my code with this, it looks awesome. Kudos to Flipboard for open-sourcing it.

[1] [https://cryptowat.ch](https://cryptowat.ch)

<comment><USER6> Very cool app. I'm going to pass it around to friends who are more into cryptocurrencies than me. :)

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I have a question: you seem to have been successful in stopping left/right swipe from navigating back and forward. The app I'm working on supports horizontal scrolling, but it can be a bit confusing if you mean to scroll and accidentally navigate.

I've tried a few things and looked around for answers, but so far the solutions I've found haven't worked out. Can I ask what your secret is? :)

<comment><USER5>
        document.querySelector('canvas').addEventListener('mousewheel', function (e) {
          e.preventDefault();
        });

<comment><USER6> If it really is this simple, I'm going to kick myself repeatedly. Thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh my, it is beautiful on the inside. Check out the source.

They're totally showing off the power of React component model even when it doesn't render directly to DOM tree: [https://github.com/Flipboard/react- canvas/blob/master/lib/Su...](https://github.com/Flipboard/react- canvas/blob/master/lib/Surface.js)

It's about describing nested side effects in time, really.

<comment><USER8> I have generally done systems and backend work, so usually C/C++/Go/Python. React is making me extremely excited to do some frontend work!

Is React a good introduction to the land of frontend programming? Or do I first need to familiarize myself with vanilla JS and go bottom up to React?

<comment><USER9> There's no need to go deep diving on learning JavaScript.

As you're using a high level framework, you're interacting with that more than the details of JavaScript. So in essence you're learning 'React' not 'JavaScript'.

So just start building in React and the JS will come along naturally.

<comment><USER10> That's not really true. You really need to understand JS to work with React, especially since you need to combine it with other libs since it's only the view layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A stronger indictment of the DOM than finding it necessary to combine a CSS parser written in Javascript, a virtual DOM and a canvas based renderer because it is _faster_ than updating the DOM would be difficult to come up with...

It looks like amazing work, but it's quite depressing that it's necessary.

<comment><USER12> Does mobile browser DOM rendering use GPU hardware acceleration?

<comment><USER13> Yes they can. If you are interested here is how the rendering works.

The rendering happens in batches, the first render is always an expensive operation and includes both "paint" & "layout".

\- The "layout"-operation recalculates the tree of visible elements.

\- The "paint"-operation paints the element and is commonly done using a software rasterizer.

Every subsequent render happens if an DOM-element triggers a layout or a paint (or both). A re-paint occurs when changes are made to an elements skin that changes visibility, but do not affect its layout. Examples of this include outline, visibility, or background color.

When you use GPU-accelerated CSS properties such as opacity, translate, rotate & scale, both layout- and paint-operations are not executed. The GPU handles the changes for those properties. This is how famo.us wants to achieve its "60fps".

React by itself can cause expensive operations too if you trigger a CSS property that is not GPU-accelerated. In the process of rendering, a DOM- element can be destroyed and recreated when your state or model changes. So be vary of third-party React-components that promise "fluid" or "fast" speeds. IMO animation is still a research-topic for React. Their manual currently lists a method for basic CSS animations and transitions, but it's projects like React Canvas that make React a worthwhile contender for performant animations.

[http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/animation.html](http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/animation.html)

Mobile browsers are no different to Desktop browsers, almost every smartphone has a GPU of some sort. So you have 2 main-bottlenecks with every device. The first is the CPU (& RAM), the next one is the GPU (& the GPU-RAM).

What is GPU-accelerated and why:

[http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/high- performanc...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/high-performance- animations/)

How Reflows and Repaints cause slow javascript:

[http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2009/03/27/reflows- repai...](http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2009/03/27/reflows-repaints-css- performance-making-your-javascript-slow/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> New job description for front-end web developers: 5+ years of designing game engines and optimizing rendering pipelines.

If the joke is lost please go read about the similarities between react and immediate mode rendering systems.

<comment><USER15> Honest question, would studying immediate mode rendering systems improve my understanding of React's system of doing things? If so, do you have a resource I could use?

<comment><USER13> There is a video that describes "Immediate-Mode Graphical User Interfaces" really well, see: [https://twitter.com/stoikerty/status/467047333453381632](https://twitter.com/stoikerty/status/467047333453381632)

There is also a lengthy and insightful blog-post about the subject where I found the video: [http://jlongster.com/Removing-User-Interface- Complexity,-or-...](http://jlongster.com/Removing-User-Interface- Complexity,-or-Why-React-is-Awesome)

<comment><USER16> Video is here: [http://mollyrocket.com/861](http://mollyrocket.com/861)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's an interesting take on the "hybrid" app idea:

\- React Canvas is your application layer

\- HTML canvas is your common rendering layer

\- Browsers are your web runtime

\- Ejecta[0] is your iOS runtime

\- (I don't know a native android canvas runtime)

[0] [http://impactjs.com/ejecta](http://impactjs.com/ejecta) \--> renders with WebGL

<comment><USER18> React Native can be the core of your iOS/Androis runtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's funny to watch the world very slowly reinvent Adobe Flex.

<comment><USER20> Flex was ahead of its time with Spark.

It was behind its times with mxmlc. mxmlc made it painfully clear, even with incremental compile, that you were building a client-server application in a web age.

Once you wanted to build custom UIs, you lost the "WYSIWYG" GUI rapid development environment that was the whole selling point that Adobe came in with.

The data synchronization system worked but it was opaque and how (at the time) they made their money.

Flex lost to the open web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> LOL, didn't expect it to work with React Hot Loader practically out of the box (except for <Text> for some reason): [https://github.com/Flipboard/react- canvas/pull/3/files](https://github.com/Flipboard/react-canvas/pull/3/files)

The fun part is tweaking text layout algorithm and letting Hot Loader pick up changes when replacing components. Without browser refreshing, of course.

</comment><comment><USER21> Last time I checked, measuring font sizes using the canvas was horribly slow. So, I wonder how they perform measurements necessary for automatic line- wrapping, et cetera. Are they doing these measurements fully in javascript?

> Custom fonts are not currently supported but will be added in a future > version.

Ok, that is a pity. I wonder if it has something to do with the complexity of implementing measureText fully in javascript.

<comment><USER3> Custom fonts are supported on flipboard.com using the same rendering engine. It was just a matter of time to extract the Flipboard specific bits out. This is coming soon.

<comment><USER21> I was also wondering how you embed video. And what if an element in the virtual DOM (e.g., a popup box) overlaps with the video?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What are the accessibility implications of drawing all controls of a web app to the canvas using React? Are there ARIA annotations available for React already?

<comment><USER23> I don't know the specifics of how canvas accessibility does or doesn't work, but React definitely supports adding ARIA attributes to any tags it renders.

<comment><USER22> That's one of the problems with rendering UIs on canvas: it doesn't work with a11y. And since it's not rendering tags, there's nowhere to hang the ARIA attributes.

<comment><USER24> I wonder if an invisbile SVG layer would work for that purpose, or translate positioned invisible DOM as a fallback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> holy flipboard, did you see they re-implemented a subset of CSS into JS? [https://github.com/facebook/css-layout](https://github.com/facebook/css- layout) I was literally thinking about doing something similar the other day for an experimental/learning project.

React is taking over the web, and I'm excited for it - coming from a person who is incredibly cynical about frameworks. React is proving itself as a powerful library, not an assumption driven framework.

<comment><USER26> This was specifically referenced in the React Native announcement video. [0]

[0] [http://youtu.be/7rDsRXj9-cU?t=16m35s](http://youtu.be/7rDsRXj9-cU?t=16m35s)

<comment><USER27> That's an impressive segment, thanks for linking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Big fan of React. For others using it, why use JSX instead of just doing everything in js?

In other words, why is HTML like this:

      <Group style={styles.group}>
              <Image style={styles.image} src='http://...' />
              <Text style={styles.text}>
                Lorem ipsum...
              </Text>
            </Group>

Preferable to something like this (which can easily be done with some helper methods wrapping the verbose React DOM methods):

      $group({styles: style.group},
        $image({styles: image, src: 'http://...'}),
        $text({styles: style.text},
           'Lorem ipsum...'));

No pre processing step required, and of course it's natural to imbed js in, er..., js.

What am I missing? Why keep the HTML part in all this?

<comment><USER29> The XML-like syntax is just less work, mentally and physically: no need for commas between props, the props object and children, no need to carefully manage all those commas when editing, adding, deleting, moving and removing stuff later on, plus the closing tag syntax makes nesting nicer by providing context via the tag name; all of which adds up to make it more pleasant to work with.

The second approach is what I was doing in various flavours for years prior to JSX. I ended up having to adopt comma-first to stay sane in larger/deeper templates, ( e.g. [https://gist.github.com/insin/8e72bed793772d82ca8d](https://gist.github.com/insin/8e72bed793772d82ca8d) ). The first thing I did when I saw JSX was start to write a React.DOM emitting version of my then-usual JSON-ML type stuff, but then I tried it and... never going back.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for sharing the examples -- really appreciated.

I'm not convinced that HTML is preferable to other representations of the DOM, particularly for representing UI's and applications (rather than documents). The clojure script wrappers for React I've seen seem to believe, for example, that lisp is better at representing the DOM than HTML and I tend to agree. Especially since any configured IDE should be pointing out missed commas and have rainbow parens.

One thing that is different between your examples and the DOM I've been creating with React is that I tend to make custom tags, and I don't end up with tons of repetitive looking stuff. Your last example is quite readable to my eyes, and would be even more so if perhaps decomposed into some helper functions and, of course, if loops were used and the DOM was populated from some data structure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is it me or are these React frameworks heading towards the ideas in XAML and MXML?

</comment><comment><USER31> Out of the box browser features that have been removed/destroyed by the quest for 60fps:

* Copy/paste (holding on an article gives the options to email or report)

* Pinch to zoom

* Double tap to zoom (opens links instead)

* iOS swipe forwards and backwards (renders the page swipe animation twice, at 60fps I guess)

* iOS Reader View (go on, try it, I laughed)

And most importantly

* Any sort of accessibility

60fps doesn't matter to someone who can't see the screen.

60fps doesn't matter to someone who relies on assistive technologies to surf the web.

60fps doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER32> Exactly. This is a horrible misuse of the canvas element, alas, the moronic "war against native" destroyed all the good we had achieved ten years ago. I think then we had the golden age of web standards, progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, accessibility, and what not. Now we just have a race who can rape poor HTML/CSS/JS further.

<comment><USER33> And yet that's what people pay money for/perceive value in.

Disillusioned web zealot here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a great project indeed. However, as many here have already pointed out, there are many limitations to this approach, SEO and lack of ctrl+f for example.

Which reminds me of flash. Most flash controls had similar drawbacks. I think web development shouldn't repeat that mistake (again).

It also reminds me that Google Docs took similar approach. As far as I remember they use a lot of canvas with a bit of DOM intertwined where necessary.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is great. Can't wait for the WebGL version ;-)

Also, it would be really cool to run everything except rendering in a worker thread and send rendering commands to the UI thread, like react-native does.

</comment><comment><USER36> My god this is so fucking awesome! Great work guys and gals. Shows precisely what a good, wide-ranging idea _means in practice_.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm guessing [http://flipboard.com/explore](http://flipboard.com/explore) should be a good demo (in mobile safari, upper-right link off the home page), but it's just infinitely loading for me.

Posting b/c someone from Flipboard is probably monitoring this thread ;-)

<comment><USER38> Fix pushed ;-)

<comment><USER39> After 20 minutes, I still see this error: [http://i.imgur.com/AdfJNkO.png](http://i.imgur.com/AdfJNkO.png)

Tested with Chrome/FF/IE (all latest) with the same result. Hope it helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This looks really neat. How does this compare to Famo.us, which also claims at have smooth animations at 60 fps?

<comment><USER41> Famo uses the DOM, by encoding matrix transforms to strings and sticking them into the attributes of DOM nodes.

<comment><USER42> How about in terms of adoption, momentum, team, performance, etc? Any insights / predictions on how Famo.us might stack up _against_ react-canvas?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Looks really good. My only real question would be about something drab but practical: SEO.

As the components are rendered to canvas, would the metadata that usually feeds SEO be harder to generate? Is that something you could fix through use of the parallel DOM (it's mentioned briefly on the page)?

<comment><USER7> See this note: [https://github.com/flipboard/react- canvas#accessibility](https://github.com/flipboard/react-canvas#accessibility)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> > There is experimental support for using css-layout to style React Canvas > components.

Just an experiment, but that could be very powerful. A lot of canvas-eligible projects are done in the dom because CSS makes it easier that messing with hardcoding all the style in js functions.

</comment><comment><USER45> So one of my friends says that a potential issue is accessibility compliancy. And that due to lack of compliancy Flipboard may find themselves in a lawsuit. I know next to nothing about this type of thing. Anyone have thoughts on the issue?

<comment><USER46> Lawsuit seems unlikely, but it is certainly hostile to screen readers (though, it's quite possible to create a set of hidden DOM nodes that expose the structure of the page to screen readers. See google docs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's a shame that so many custom android roms either do not or have only very limited support for hardware acceleration in the browser. I do not know what percentage of users would fall into this category, but worth keeping in mind.

</comment><comment><USER48> Is there a live demo I can run?

<comment><USER4> Just go to [https://flipboard.com](https://flipboard.com) on your mobile phone!

<comment><USER49> Congrats on the release Charles!

<comment><USER4> Thanks Filipe! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Oh man, it's a small thing, I _love_ how well the back button works. Feels totally like a native iOS app. (Though not so much if you use the swipe from left gesture, sadly.)

</comment><comment><USER51> Amazing and buttery smooth on my Android/Chrome, but as of now, there are big accessibility hurdles to overcome with Canvas and that's concerning.

</comment><comment><USER41> \- Will this work inside of iOS's JavaScriptCore? \- Could this use grid style sheets as its styling engine?

</comment><comment><USER52> This is so beautiful! I can see this being used for building canvas based web applications as well!

</comment><comment><USER53> At first blush, the mental model reminds me of ASP.NET WebForms.

<comment><USER54> err, WebForms is the exact opposite. WebForms is about taking something stateless (HTML) and making is stateful. React takes something stateful (the DOM) and makes it stateless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Am I the only one who sees the parallel with Flash?

</comment><comment><USER56> Loving it.

</comment><comment><USER57> Cooooool!</comment>


Ask HN: Our payment processor collects unnecessary information - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN, we've recently integrated with a very decent payment processor for accepting credit cards online. They certainly don't come with the same level of control and ease of integration as some of the recent ones do like Stripe payments.
But they work and they work well for our needs. However since the payment page is hosted on their end, they force our customers to enter their billing address, zip code and phone number, for a SaaS product geared towards mobile developers we feel this is sincerely unnecessary.
Their argument is, it's fraud protection but for other processors offering the same level of fraud protection but only collecting the bare minimum amount of details (cc number, cc exp. date and name on card) we feel our users would be turned off from completing a subscription.
Is that a valid concern?
Thank you. <comment><USER2> We've always had to collect billing address and zip code when running transactions, even with Stripe. Not sure phone number is required, but I can understand why they would ask for it.

You would be surprised at the amount of fraud these companies get so it's understandable why they ask for the details. And I think customers are use to entering this information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the insight.</comment></comment>


Twitter Launches Suggestions Tool - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/01/15/twitter-suggestions/ <comment><USER2> its suggested purely bots or "rss readers" for me. They really need to make a clear clarification between bots and users.

I don't like following bots, and I don't like following users like Barack Obama or Lance Armstrong - because its single direction communication. I follow users that follow me, and we have a twitter relationship. Rather than me standing on the side of the field watching some celebrity.

</comment><comment><USER2> oh, and it'd also be fascinating for it to tell me how many users it's recommending _me_ to.</comment>


One year, one lab, 16 spinouts - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-019-0369-7 <comment><USER2> The secret? They're junk!

There is only upside for Church, who will get a piece of every company. If they fail, he has nothing to lose.

One of A16z's past biotech stars was uBiome. The science there was bad from the beginning but investors couldn't tell.

I think a better article could be written about how many have failed, and how many will continue to fail. 5 years from now it'll be even easier to write.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a direct consequence of an explosion of private sector / VC funding into "risky" biotech bets. Will be very interesting to see how this plays out!

A16Z also has a podcast with George Church (who sums it up as "multi-disciple" people who are taught to "fail fast" and explore low-hanging theoretical and experimental fruits) ;)

What's in the Water at the Church Lab? A Conversation Between George Church and Jorge Conde

[https://a16z.com/2019/02/26/george-church-genome- sequencing-...](https://a16z.com/2019/02/26/george-church-genome-sequencing- conversation-jorge-conde/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I worked with Francois back in 2010. A few years later I turned down his overtures to join AbVitro. Even with the benefit of hindsight it was the right risk-adjusted decision.

As for the why, I don't think it's in the water. Church is a brilliant scientist and mentor, but he's also in a position to skim the cream.

</comment><comment><USER5> George Church has put his name on a ton of questionable ventures over the past 5 years.

People in the know in biotech double check any deal with his name on it.

<comment><USER6> People in the know double check every deal, period. "three-quarters of venture-backed firms in the U.S. don't return investors' capital" (WSJ). Is "ton of questionable" more or less than 75% ? Or what other metric?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I applaud the entreperneurship, there is something wrong with the numbers here. 16 spin-outs in one year, at least 16 "founders" of biotech companies...last time I checked most research labs have more than one PhD- trained scientist. We can't all be founders. Someone has to work in the lab!

Starting a company can be hugely educational but probably not if it's just an exercise in PR and fundraising, which all biotech companies are until they can actually start selling (usually years after inception).

So, not to be negative, but would like to see something a bit more critical and less gushing from Nature. It's a thinly veiled PR piece for the Church lab.

</comment><comment><USER8> Most of these will be defunct a few years from now, they run on VC money. Becoming profitable in biotech is much harder than IT.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting article; well worth reading the whole thing. Exciting to see startups in the "hard tech" space!

Also, complete transcription of the conversation with George Church: [https://bioengineeringcommunity.nature.com/users/20939-laura...](https://bioengineeringcommunity.nature.com/users/20939-laura- defrancesco/posts/57342-a-conversation-with-george-church)

Some choice excerpts:

> _Shendure feels the inflection point came in 2010, with the founding of > AbVitro by Church and his then-postdoc Francois Vigneault. AbVitro may to > this day hold a special place in the annals of startups from the Church lab. > After starting from only a little over $3 million in startup funding from a > single VC firm, Sante Ventures, in 2012, the company was snapped up by Juno > for $125 million four years later. That was followed by Celgene's purchase > of Juno, and more importantly led to several cell therapies now in the > investigational new drug (IND) phase, according to Vigneault. "[Church] > never had a really big success until we decided to do AbVitro and that one > ended up knocking it out of the ball park. That triggered a lot of people to > start companies because it looks easy from the outside," he says. "It's > not," he adds. [...] Whether or not AbVitro was the bellwether, the pace > began picking up around 2015, and reached a fevered pitch in 2018._

> _[...] biggest change from the past is that lab members are stepping up to > take the role of CEO, rather than chief scientific officer (CSO) or chief > technology officer (CTO). He sees an upswing in entrepreneurial verve across > the university, but especially coming out of the Church lab. "They really > have a desire to take on that business challenge of managing the company and > growing the opportunity, seeking out the financing, seeking out the > collaborations, and really focusing on the business aspect [...]_

> _[...] the current startup environment is different from that of the past in > several significant ways. There is a very rich ecosystem of infrastructure > for startups to launch into. "Places like LabCentral or Alexandria > LaunchLabs are where you have a full BSL2 [biosafety level 2] lab ready to > go and you can rent a bench on and have access to equipment for relatively > small amounts of money," he says. Access to capital is high for these kinds > of ventures, he says, adding that a new breed of scientific founder is also > emerging. "They have grown up in the era of startups, and have technology, > multidisciplinary backgrounds across biology, computer science and > engineering," [...]_

> _In addition, the technology may now be catching up with some of the Church > "crazy" ideas of years past. Cain McCleary, of KdT Ventures, which has > invested in two from this cohort and one a few years back, says, "I feel > like he's consistently been ahead of his time in creating tool sets, but all > of a sudden, our analysis and manufacturing has caught up to it, so it's a > particularly special time for folks in his lab," he says._

</comment><comment><USER10> How many patents did this produce, and how many of them were essentially funded by public money?

</comment><comment><USER11> how many of them were running away from academia? It's no secret that the academic prospect of perpetual postdoctry is unattractive.</comment>


The Windows 8 tablet train wreck - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/108335-the-windows-8-tablet-train-wreck

<comment><USER2> Microsoft can no longer command high prices for its tablet OS because it lacks incumbency and vertical integration.

The net result is her competitors are driving MS towards a cliff of zero or low margin OS and inexpensive apps.

If you look at Windows 8 carefully, the ARM version will not run desktop mode. This gives it some protection that a tablet manufacturer adding on a $20 keyboard turns a tablet into a replacement OS. However, as more applications become metro-fied, its margins will be totally fried.

This is why Microsoft is pinning its hopes on the server. Azure and various cloud services and tight developer tooling might make up for the lost revenue.

</comment><comment><USER3> The huge thing that this article fails to take into account is the frequency of upgrades. Most people are not buying brand new PCs every two years, but almost everyone upgrades their phones that frequently and I'd be willing to bet that tablet upgrades will follow a similar pattern.

So a user who has a Windows Phone and a Windows Tablet will bring in $30 ($15 licensing fee x 2) every two years. If the average PC is upgraded every 4 years then the $60 of revenue for Microsoft that they realize in a 4-year span in this hypothetical post-PC world would end up perfectly matching their average revenue for Windows right now.

Does the average home user buy a full-blown copy of Office? Probably not, but I'm sure that people will be willing to pay a monthly fee to back up their documents or access some sort of Office subscription. Businesses will, of course, get on board with a subscription model too. Or if they're willing to keep paying full price every few years that's just fine as far as Microsoft is concerned as well.

Furthermore, some users will end up with a Windows Phone, a Windows Tablet, AND a Windows PC. That's even more licensing revenue for Microsoft.

$15 sounds scary compared to $60, but only if you think that people will hang onto their phones as long as their PCs. They won't. If all of this plays out as Microsoft hopes then they are going to be just fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting analysis. Everyone focuses on technology, but Win8 has a lot of unanswered business questions. The premise of the article is essentially, if MS sells Win8 tablets as a tablet (i.e., iPad), how can it continue to charge desktop prices for Windows and Office in Win8? Especially since MS repeatedly touted the "dual use" tablet/desktop scenario at BUILD. Both of these products are basically free on WP and their equivalent products are cheap on iOS and Android.

The options, as I see it are:

1\. Continue to make Office desktop only (does not work in Metro) 2\. Create a tablet-only SKU for Office (does not work in Desktop) 3\. Create a dual use SKU for Office (tablet + desktop). Ultimate? Sounds expensive. 4\. Switch to subscription pricing for Office

None of these sound ideal. I think MS will ultimately go with #4. They've been planning to do so for half a decade now.

</comment><comment><USER5> _First, if you already use Windows 7 — and hundreds of millions do — there is little reason to upgrade to Windows 8_

Same as there was no reason to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7 itself. Yet plenty did and do.

 _Microsoft could buy out Nokia and create a beautiful Windows Phone 7 tablet._

Given that the distinguishing feature of WP7 is the Metro UI, what would the effective difference be between a Windows 8 tablet and a WP7 one? It seems like the whole point is merging these functionalities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Compared to Vista -> 7, very few upgraded from XP to Vista. I think Vista's market share topped out at just 17 or 18%, compared to XP's 80%+. Windows 7 is now around 35%.

The difference between Win 8 and WP7 is cost, and the huge Windows ecosystem. MS is trying to bring some of that ecosystem over to mobile apps with the whole Metro/Windows Store thing. Hopefully it pans out.</comment></comment>


BitTorrent's DHT - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT <comment><USER2> There was an interesting talk [0] and paper [1] presented at some security conferences about crawling the DHT for different purposes. It's been a while, but I remember these to be a great read.

[0] [https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-18/dc-18-presentations/...](https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-18/dc-18-presentations/Wolchok/DEFCON-18-Wolchok- Crawling-Bittorrent-DHTS.pdf)

[1] [https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dht- woot10.pdf](https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dht-woot10.pdf)

<comment><USER3> State-of-the-art in DHT measurements: [http://www.p2p-conference.org/p2p14/wp- content/uploads/2014/...](http://www.p2p-conference.org/p2p14/wp- content/uploads/2014/09/225.P2P2014_50.pdf) "100 Million DHT replies"

<comment><USER4> Am I missing it in the paper or was the code for this ever released?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is an Erlang implementation of, essentially, the BT DHT:

[https://github.com/jlouis/dht](https://github.com/jlouis/dht)

Its main feature is that it has a full formal model written in QuickCheck to verify its integrity. That is, the dht code is simulated in a universe in which rarely occurring events are far more likely to happen.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's also fairly robust pure JS implementation of the BitTorrent DHT that works in both Node and the browser: [https://github.com/feross/bittorrent- dht](https://github.com/feross/bittorrent-dht)

I'd love to see more decentralized web apps built on similar technologies.

<comment><USER7> How can it work in the browser? There's no reference to WebRTC in the code.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, it looks like you're right, there's no browser support yet.

I had always simply assumed that since webtorrent works in the browser, the DHT it uses must also work in the browser, but apparently browser DHT support is still a work in progress: [https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/288](https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/288)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why I don't get the fuss about IPFS.

It's basically bittorrent and its DHT, just named differently! (and without the added value of trackers)

<comment><USER9> I suggest you learn more about IPFS, you are missing quite a bit. Read up on merkle-dag's, content addressable storage, and universal name spaces.

It's a distributed filesystem. IPFS uses the DHT similarly to bittorrent, just to find peers. But there's much more to IPFS than DHT+torrent.

<comment><USER8> All right, will try

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could this DHT be used to store _any_ content?

<comment><USER11> You're probably better off using the BitCoin blockchain (which is a distributed network). It's well documented that you can include data in BitCoin transactions and pretty secure.

But I'd bet you could store information in the DHT itself. Here's the issue: to store the information in the DHT you'd have to attach it to a torrent. To make it relatively persistent the torrent would have to be popular so that it will continue to be seeded and not disappear for a while (like a movie file or a popular music album). If you're doing that you might as well stick the info in the torrent itself instead of hacking it into the DHT. That's what torrents are for.

<comment><USER9> First blockchains are slow. Second you can put things in the DHT without having anything to do with a torrent.

<comment><USER12> +1 not sure where "to store the information in the DHT you'd have to attach it to a torrent" comes from.

<comment><USER11> It comes from the fact that the Mainline DHT is specifically about BitTorrent nodes and who has which torrents. The client programs don't just pass information around willy-nilly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How's this news? BitTorrent's DHT has been around for years.

<comment><USER14> Things don't have to be new to appear on HN, just interesting.</comment></comment>


Secure Linux Containers – shield an application from an untrusted cloud provider [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi16/osdi16-arnautov.pdf <comment><USER2> Too bad they're based on the insecure Intel SGX technology:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/01/sgx_secure_until_yo...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/01/sgx_secure_until_you_look_at_the_detail/)

<comment><USER3> From your link:

"The SGX patents disclose in no uncertain terms that the Launch Enclave was introduced to ensure that each enclave's author has a business relationship with Intel, and implements a software licensing system."

Sounds worse than just insecure. Typical of Intel, of course.</comment></comment>


Sand won't save you this time (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time <comment><USER2> Possibly the best of the "Things I won't work with" series: [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things- i-wont-work-with)

I particularly like the quote "It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers.." (hypergolic means it ignites spontaneously upon mixing)

<comment><USER3> The book that quote is originally from, _Ignition!_ , is 100% worth a read. Picked up a copy through Amazon a few months ago, and it's one of the funniest (in a nerdy way) and most interesting books I've read in a loooong time.

<comment><USER4> The book seems hard and very pricey to come across. I know for a fact that certain people have had better luck with Libgen.

<comment><USER5> It was recently republished as far as I know but yes, originals are hard to come by.

<comment><USER6> I was completely unaware this had been republished. I think it might be finally time to get myself a copy. £13.69/$20.49 (paperback) is a completely reasonable price compared to what I had seen before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Discussed a bit in 2009: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532278)

and a tiny bit in 2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656994](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656994)

<comment><USER8> "Things I won't work with" is right up there with the SR-71 "ground speed check" story, in my category of "things I can't believe everyone hasn't seen yet because it's literally everywhere nerds go on the internet".

<comment><USER7> Yes, lots here: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=things%20i%20won%27t%20work%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=things%20i%20won%27t%20work%20with%20comments%3E0&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> FOOF[1] is still my favorite in this series. Such a wonderfully onomatopoeic chemical formula.

If you read the reference I shared you'll see that some maniacs reacted chlorine trifluoride with dioxygen difluoride.

High energy chemistry is nifty.

[1] [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride)

<comment><USER10> I love the line: _At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature._

Meanwhile, the wiki page on Florine looks more like that of a serial killer than an element. "fluorine martyrs" indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A current column (4 days old) about fun lab discoveries [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/07/10/bu...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/07/10/buried- treasure-of-a-sort)

No FOOF that I saw listed though.

<comment><USER12> FOOF reference:

[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Truly a classic... and the whole series is loads of fun.

Then there's this set of three articles in this series:

"Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane": "I'd call for all the chemists who've ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio."

"Peroxide Peroxides": "There are a lot of things, unfortunately, that can lead to peroxide decomposition – all sorts of metal contaminants, light, spitting at them (most likely), and it doesn't take much."

And then, the punch line, where our hexanitro compound above gets some extra oomph: "What This Here Compound Needs is Some Hydrogen Peroxide." "So I have to congratulate these folks; they've managed to combine two of my Things I Won't Work With entries into the same flippin' substance."

</comment><comment><USER14> One of the substances featured on the excellent "5 Most Dangerous Chemicals" episode of Sci-Show: [https://youtu.be/ckSoDW2-wrc](https://youtu.be/ckSoDW2-wrc)

</comment><comment><USER15> Saw the title, thought "that sounds like a post from In the Pipeline, I wonder what happened to that blog".

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER16> That must be the thing the dragons are made of.</comment>


Show HN: Make Visual Studio #regions suck less. - <AUTHOR> http://teamsearchapp.com/region-tool

<comment><AUTHOR> Visual Studio may not be the choice environment for many HN'ers, but if you are stuck using it I made free extension to make #regions in Visual Studio less noticeable and work a bit better.</comment>


World's Largest Math Proof Solved. And It Takes Up 200 Terabytes - <AUTHOR> http://futurism.com/worlds-largest-math-proof-solved-and-it-takes-up-200-terabytes/ <comment><USER2> Horrible title, and wrong. A proof has been created and verified, and the dump file used for verification is the largest ever. Even the description of the conjecture is misleading. Do yourself a favor and read the wikipedia article instead of this one.</comment>


Study: cellphone radiation can cause cancer - <AUTHOR> http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2015.1043557

<comment><USER2> The original title is: "Oxidative mechanisms of biological activity of low- intensity radiofrequency radiation"</comment>


Show HN: #strappers – an IRC chan for bootstrappers - <AUTHOR> https://webchat.freenode.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> An alternative to the forums. Even if only a handful of folks pop in, I'll respond to any messages when I see them.</comment>


Firefox Will Give You a Fake Browsing History to Fool Advertisers - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43j8qm/firefox-will-give-you-a-fake-browsing-history-to-fool-advertisers <comment><USER2> What's the benefit of fooling advertisers? So then I will get ads that I'm even less interested in?</comment>


Greatest Science Books of All Time (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/25-greatest-science-books-of-all-time?b_start:int=1&page=2 <comment><USER2> I can recommend "The Eighth Day of Creation" as a very well-researched history of the early days of molecular and structural biology. The value comes from the deep relationship between the savvy journalist-author and the scientists who did the work. It also contains the most balanced and fact-driven arguments about Rosalind Franklin and Watson/Crick. Also, the writing is just excellent.</comment>


Libertarians make the case: net neutrality is unconstitutional - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/libertarians-make-the-case-net-neutrality-is-unconstitutional/?comments=1#comments-bar <comment><USER2> It's alway sad when there is "libertarians" wanting to preserve nothing more than corporate rights over people's rights using skewed interpretation of the (US) constitution.

And yes, I'm using libertarians with quote because a real libertarian would have thought a bit more than just "The constitution is the supreme rule!!!" and more about every right involved and how to maximize everyone liberty.

<comment><USER3> It's obviously not right for the government to mandate that certain corporations must deliver certain messages. The only justification for this is that telecommunications companies are heavily regulated and are granted franchises which are effectively monopolies. So the libertarians should solve the monopoly problem, _then_ the free speech problem. Fixing them in the wrong order is worse.

<comment><USER4> I think the message is not that they have to deliver "certain" messages, just that they are not allowed to discriminate in the messages they deliver. Like the phone company is not allowed to listen to calls and decide to terminate a call if people are talking dirty to each other.

It is -and should be- an all or nothing kind of proposition I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of the "libertarian" argument that business owners should be allowed to choose not to serve black people.

Civil rights were something the government had to step in to protect. I think that net neutrality might be the same kind of thing.

<comment><USER5> The "libertarian" argument against the Civil Rights Act isn't that discrimination is good. It's that the prevailing attitude towards discrimination was inevitably going to trend away from discrimination, and that forcing businesses to serve people harms their right to associate freely with the people they chose; while this limitation on free association is obviously benign, it sets us on a slippery slope towards other violations of free association.

I am not a libertarian and find this argument very unconvincing. Also, my emotional brain tends to impute racism towards those politicians who have advanced it. But it's not an illogical argument.

So in that spirit I'd say: if you think the government should step in to guarantee neutrality, you're not a pure libertarian. You don't need the scare quotes.

<comment><USER6> I think the race situation is actually the most damning example for libertarianism. I'm not convinced that, without anti-libertrian intervention by Congress and the Supreme Court, we wouldn't still be segregated today.

<comment><USER5> Well, you disagree with many (most?) libertarians on this point. They think we'd have reached the same freedom from formal racial discrimination that we have today without starting us down the slippery slope of telling businesses who they have to associate with. I'm not sure that's damning.

Obviously I agree with you on this, but after years of having to confront smart people on HN who disagree with me _fundamentally_ on issues like this, I'm trying to keep a more open mind.

<comment><USER7> Without a hint of sarcasm, I genuinely admire your resolve to be open minded no matter how patently stupid an idea is. I'm not as open minded as you; some day I'd like to be.

The moment someone can supply an objective, verifiable, scientifically valid _proof_ that formal discrimination would have ended on its own, then I'll consider it. Otherwise, it sounds like after-the-fact rationalizing from people who were part of the problem and ashamed of themselves (as they should be). Ideology and academic hand-waving about the principles of some Invisible Hand moving society forward simply did nothing. The hands that broke the shackles were very visible, covered in dirt sweat and blood, and very pragmatic.

In general, I steer clear of ideological decisions with hand-wave philosophies which hold their conclusions to be self-evident. I see a lot of this in economic discussions, too. My challenge is for these ridiculous vapid ideologies to come with formal justification that doesn't involve circular reasoning or false premises.

<comment><USER8> _someone can supply an objective, verifiable, scientifically valid proof that_

How could you do this for _any_ counter-factual of a government policy? Is criticism of the PATRIOT Act stupid if someone cannot provide an objective, verifiable, scientifically valid proof that we wouldn't have been attacked without it?

<comment><USER7> I did a poor job of explaining myself despite my over-sized rhetoric. It's one thing to point to specific provisions of a policy and say "In the following case, Provision A had Effect B" and show the specifics. It's another to espouse platitudes with to backing data about a hypothetical scenario and claim ideological superiority.

So, no, criticisms of the Patriot Act backed by data are not stupid, especially if the criticism is up front and says "we _believe_ this to be true."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We wouldn't accept any federal agency enforcing "Printing Press Neutrality", requiring the owners of printing presses to submit to government rulemaking about what pamphlets, periodicals, and books are printed on their presses. We would understand, instinctively, that having government involved in such matters is inviting the fox into the henhouse.

For some reason, with newer media, the simple principle of "no meddling in private communications/publishing" gets lost. So we have the FCC, censoring broadcast media, and used via licensing and ownership rules to extract 'favors' for the political classes. And we have people who are ostensibly in favor of free speech inviting this censorious, political-establishment- subservient agency into Internet regulation. No, thank you.

There's no need to tame the Internet to be safe and 'neutral'/neutered like regulated broadcast TV. It's working just fine without the FCC's enlightened approach, which historically has included set-asides for certain favored classes of programming [1], moral crusades, and other benefits for the politically-connected [2].

[1] <http://reason.com/blog/2008/06/17/the-fccs-obsolete-quotas>

[2] [http://reason.com/archives/2008/06/12/the-central- committee-...](http://reason.com/archives/2008/06/12/the-central-committee-is- in-se)

<comment><USER10>
      For some reason, with newer media, the simple principle of
      "no meddling in private communications/publishing" gets
      lost.

You _do_ realize that the same principle is hardly something that a free market would automatically support at reasonable price to the user, right?

      It's working just fine without the FCC's enlightened
      approach

You're not a Time Warner Cable customer, or Cox, or subject to throttling very much, are you?

<comment><USER5> What's a "reasonable price"?

A penny taken off the monthly cost of Internet access by fiat is a penny subsidy granted to Internet service customers.

In a competitive market for Internet service, providers can't gouge customers because they'd lose to competitors that didn't.

You are making a stronger argument against local service cable, copper loop and RF monopolies than you are against the libertarian opposition to net neutrality.

<comment><USER4> That is exactly the point though. Since there AREN'T enough competitors, the free market does not work. BEING a competitor means laying cable, getting right-of-ways, getting other permissions from local government, etc. It is not something where several competitors will spring up offering better service and/or better price when one bad actor decides to disallow skype on their network for instance.

When the market fails to provide a fix, the government should step in to keep the public from being at the mercy of greedy monopolies.

<comment><USER5> It's also very difficult to start a new car company. But we don't have "car neutrality".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My quick and dirty analogy:

Imagine a world where each street is owned by a company. Then they start deciding who is allowed to drive which road. People who pay for the premium package don't have to stop at red lights, and right of way. Freetards aren't allowed between 08am and 12am. Only bicycles with UEFI are permitted.

<comment><USER12> I once asked on a libertarian forum what would happen in that kind of world, where all streets and roads are privately owned, if someone were able to acquire ownership of a closed set of roads that separated me from things I need to live, and refused to give me permission to travel on his roads and refused to give permission to anyone who was bringing me stuff.

I was told why this would not be a problem: under libertarian property theory, ownership is initially established over a resource by using it. Thus, land becomes owned by the first person to start making use of it. This ownership only extends to that which is being used.

This means that most land is only owned at the surface, and as far enough down as is necessary to provide support for the surface land. Thus, I am free to TUNNEL UNDER THE ROADS, as long as I go deep enough and do it in a way that does not cause damage to the roads. I can thus tunnel my way under the enclosing roads out to someplace where I am welcome.

<comment><USER5> Isn't this a little silly, though? It's not the universal libertarian position that all functions of governments are best served by free markets. The real position is: those functions of government that _can_ be served by markets _should_ be.

A basic functional system of transportation sufficient to enable (but not optimize) commerce seems like something that could reasonably require a government to operate.

<comment><USER12> That some functions can't be well served by free markets and so there does need to be some government seemed to be the most common form of libertarianism years ago, but the impression I get nowadays based on online activity is that the "everything can be handled by the free market" form has gotten the upper hand. Or maybe they are just louder?

<comment><USER5> I think that's called Message Board Libertarianism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> " Specifically, the groups say that compelling private companies to "speak," by requiring them to carry all traffic across their networks, instead of allowing them to discriminate as they see fit, violates the principle of freedom of speech. "

As someone pointed out in the comments below the article, this seems like a path the ISPs _really_ don't want to go down. If you equate all packets running through your network to your speech, then you're implicitly making yourself responsible for their contents. This is hardly in their best interests, considering the amount of pirated content, [everyone's favorite boogeyman] kiddy-porn, and God-knows-what-else running down their pipes every day.

</comment><comment><USER14> The actual article (not the comment section) - [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2012/07/libertarians-make...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2012/07/libertarians-make-the-case-net-neutrality-is-unconstitutional)

</comment><comment><USER15> I read sometimes about how few choices you US people have when buying your Internet connection. Something about only a single ISP allowed by the city etc.

That would make your ISP the de facto government for your online activities. A government that is potentially very invasive, inspecting your every data package, limiting your access to certain sites and dictating what kind of content you can download at full speed.

How is that libertarian?

<comment><USER5> That's a non sequitur question. A circumstance in a particular market isn't "libertarian" or "not libertarian".

A libertarian would say, people should be free to make and enforce promises among themselves, and the government should constrain itself to those roles that can't be performed by markets.

Libertarians by and large don't believe in "antitrust". The market is, a libertarian would reason, inevitably more powerful than any temporarily dominant firm. If a cartel of ISPs emerged from a free-market approach to Internet governance, that cartel would either (a) be an optimal solution to the requirements of Internet users or (b) eventually worked around and eventually replaced by alternate offerings in the market.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't that ignore the effect of government granted monopolies? Since some ISPs are granted monopoly status by local governments, by definition the free market can't work. So, as in cases of civil rights, maybe the answer IS to attach neutrality conditions to such monopolies?

<comment><USER5> A libertarian would throw up in their mouth at the idea of a government- granted monopoly.

<comment><USER10> So, they have little-to-nothing useful to say on the current state of affairs for modern ISPs and telcos, then? And are instead just wanking around a mythical tabula-rasa marketplace?

<comment><USER5> No. Obviously, a libertarian would say, "instead of changing the law to further enhance state control over the Internet, we should enact _different_ laws to deregulate local last-mile telecom".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I propose a simple compromise in which ISPs can elect into one of two regulatory statuses:

 __Unregulated and unprotected __\- The ISP is free to "curate" the content they deliver to customers as they see fit. However, customers may also hold the ISP responsible for their content, for example by initiating civil litigation if pornography is delivered.

 __Regulated and protected __\- ISPs cannot be held legally responsible for the content they deliver, but they must deliver all content requested by customers, in accordance with published tiers of service and rate cards.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just to play Devil's Advocate, this is what I'd imagine the average Libertarian response to this would be:

In a free market the consumers hold the power. An ISP that didn't restrict Internet usage or tier what it offered would become in-demand, and would profit and succeed more than the others. In other words, the market would correct itself towards those ISPs that espoused the principles of staying neutral. If that didn't happen, then net neutrality isn't a big enough concern to drive the average consumer's purchase.

It's a simplified generalization, but take from it what you will.

<comment><USER4> That argument would hold sway if being an ISP did not have such a huge barrier to entry. Having to run physical cables GREATLY reduces the pool of business that can afford to enter that market. This of course, reduces the number of competitors, and the market pressure to compete.

<comment><USER5> So should we have "neutrality" in every market with large barriers to entry? Drug neutrality? Railroad neutrality? Automotive manufacturing neutrality?

<comment><USER4> Actually that seems like an interesting idea! If we did, maybe we could have non-proprietary car parts for instance? Better drugs? Fewer patent monopolies granted?

Am I missing something fundamental in your point?

<comment><USER5> No. You just have a _much_ more expansive view of the role of governments in the markets than I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why shouldn't the government, as the representative of the people, place constraints in its contract with the providers? There is nothing compelling them to provide service, rather than a different provider. It is unfair to call this a libertarian position: it is the position of some specific capitalist-anarchist-libertarians. Not all libertarians see the social contract as less valid than other sorts, nor do all libertarians believe freedom of business trumps the freedom of consumers.

</comment><comment><USER19> Useful Idiots: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot>

</comment><comment><USER20> If I say something in defense of libertarians, will I get down-voted and burn through karma? Experience says that the answer is yes.

What are the implications for the level and type of discussion here at HN?

<comment><USER5> There are lots of libertarians on HN. As a liberal, the impression I personally get is that I'm outnumbered by them.

I think these impressions come in part from which threads you choose to join. If you restricted yourself to threads about Airbnb and Uber, you'd be forgiven for assuming that this was a Cato board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree with Ted Stevens... <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE></comment>


Piping Output to a Pager - <AUTHOR> https://samrat.me/posts/2019-10-28-git-style-pager/ <comment><USER2> Disappointed; I was not expecting that kind of pager.</comment>


The what and why of product experimentation at Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/2015/the-what-and-why-of-product-experimentation-at-twitter-0 <comment><USER2> This is an odd blog post for a company people consider to be utterly paralyzed and incapable of shipping new features.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only thing Twitter is likely considering for new features is "Can we sell ads on this?"

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like analysis paralysis to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Apparently there's a framework for experimentation at Twitter, but it looks like few experiments actually succeed to turn into new features. What goes wrong there? Or is Twitter really a prime example of analysis paralysis, as others suggest here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, author of the post here.

A few brief points:

1\. The post talks about most experiments not moving core metrics in a large way. This does not mean the experiments don't ship, it just means core metrics are very hard to move. So "few experiments actually succeed to turn into new features" is not entirely correct -- quite a few of them do ship because they improve a particular feature, or because the team believes they are the right thing to do as long as they don't do any harm, or even an acceptably small amount of harm.

2\. If the majority of the experiments worked, we wouldn't need to experiment, would we? :-).

3\. Core metrics being hard to move is not a Twitter-specific thing. If you find them easy to (positively) move, you are either so tiny that any change is a large change, or you are measuring something incorrectly. LinkedIn, Bing, and Amazon experimenters contributed to a paper, linked from the post, which states as "rule of thumb #2" that "changes rarely have a big positive result on key metrics." Anecdotally, the same is true for Google, EBay, and Pinterest.

4\. Analysis paralysis, according to wikipedia, is "an anti-pattern, the state of over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome". Deciding to not ship something is not analysis paralysis. It's a valid outcome. If everything you try works, you are probably not trying hard enough. Now, if you ran an experiment and kept saying there is not enough data to make a decision, and kept analyzing the data and collecting more inputs -- that would be analysis paralysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Give me an API and I will move the world... I can't find API in that page.

</comment><comment><USER7> hahahaha oh wow. yeah, no.

EDIT: It is the game of thrones version of product development, except no dwarf or sexy people.</comment>


Got change for a $100,000 bill? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/drdon/20070322_denomination_treasury_bill_a1.asp <comment><USER2> There are far more valuable "100 million pound" sterling banknotes known as Titans. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterling>

</comment><comment><USER3> One man's story about a million dollar bill.

[http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscit...](http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/8CA33A4D9B3F31C08625768A001A23E1?OpenDocument)</comment>


44% of Medical Cannabis Users Stopped Taking a Pharmaceutical Drug or Used Less - <AUTHOR> https://news.umich.edu/many-users-prefer-medical-marijuana-over-prescription-drugs/ <comment><USER2> There is some anecdotal evidence that the ED drugs are being used less because of the canabis affect on the stage fright type of ED - relaxing. [1]

[1] [http://vqrn.com/Erectile-Augmentation- Dysfunction.html](http://vqrn.com/Erectile-Augmentation-Dysfunction.html)</comment>


FBI to build social network spy app - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3332999/fbi-build-social-network-spy-app/

<comment><USER2> I think their definition of "Open Source" and our definition of "Open Source" is a just a little bit different.</comment>


Added something fun to my app trial version - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/whnPC34.gifv <comment><AUTHOR> This starts showing app after hours of using the app and it's the only limitation so far. You can get the free trial here: [https://hazeover.com](https://hazeover.com)</comment>


Sqitch; Sane database change management - <AUTHOR> http://sqitch.org/ <comment><USER2> This is by an internal employee at iovation who is more or less solely reposniboe for doing DB updates and schema migrations. Amazing feat that.

<comment><USER2> I am not a moron I just don't check my spelling when I post.</comment></comment>


Venture Capitalists Don't Want You to Have a Sex Life - are you kidding me - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/05/08/why-venture-capitalists-dont-want-you-to-have-a-sex-life/?mod=WSJBlog?mod=yahoo_hs

<comment><USER2> While it's impressive to see the WSJ trying to adapt to the web, this kind of cheesy, recycled linkbait doesn't seem like the right plan. It's like a middle-aged guy trying to dress like a high school kid.

<comment><USER3> Seems more like bad thinking than bad clothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Which one of these comments seems like the better startup filter:

1)"That correlates more with any other success factor that I've seen in the world's greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or [Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo Inc. co-founder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest."

2)Moritz said he's learned as an investor to listen carefully to entrepreneurs and only look at the facts, casting aside prejudice and opinion. "That stuff will preclude you in making a new investment in a new area that hasn't hit the radar screen yet or is preposterous to other people," he said.

Put my money into Sequoia.

</comment><comment><USER5> VCs analyze opportunities largely by pattern recognition. They detect correlations between their past successes and then ride them for all they're worth when looking at new deals. The "no sex life" thing is a particularly peculiar correlation that Doerr is focusing on, but his process of pattern recognition investing is pretty normal.

Important to note: these patterns and correlations, not causations, and no one is claiming them to be causations. Doerr clearly does not think that "nerdy, white, no sex life" necessarily leads to "billion dollar dot-com success". As Founders at Work (Jessica Livingston's book) very clearly outlines, successful founders look very different from each other and take very different paths to success.

</comment><comment><USER6> No social life !=> no sex life...

Entrepreneurs are more efficient!

<comment><USER7> do you mean they pay for sex?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I read Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (an excellent book, btw), one thing jumped out at me regarding physics research centers in the first half of the 20th century.

PhD students and postdoctoral research fellows may have been engaged (commonly for many years to someone back home), but were expected not to wed. You were supposed to throw yourself entirely at your field of research in the beginning of your career, and place the rest of your life entirely on hold.</comment>


Why is e^(pi i) = -1? - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/questionCorner/epii.html

<comment><USER2> Imagine you're a complex number, which is just a type of 2-vector.

Exponentiation is to do with growth at a speed which is a multiple of how big you are already.

i is the multiplication which turns you through ninety degrees.

If you grow in a direction which is at right angles to yourself, you turn rather than increasing in magnitude.

Pi is how long it takes you to turn through a half circle.

So if you grow at right angles to yourself for time pi, you are pointing the opposite way.

<comment><USER3> This is a good explanation of why the result is negative and why it has zero imaginary component - ie why it is _pointing the opposite way._. But it doesn't explain why the result is _unit one_ in magnitude / length. Can you extend it do that that?

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Yes, when you grow in a direction at right angles to yourself, you don't increase in magnitude. So the turning arrow is the same length at the end as it was at the beginning.

This is actually a slightly tricky point, because it requires the direction of growth to change as you grow. If you grow by a finite amount all at once, then you do get slightly longer. So you might expect an outward spiral.

But a point moving round in a circle is always moving at right angles to the radius connecting it to the centre.

And in the same way, an arrow whose tip is moving at right angles to its shaft isn't extending. If the length is changing, then the direction isn't 90 degrees.

To reason about this properly I think you need some sort of theory of infinitesimals and continuous motion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pi is Wrong: <http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.pdf>

It should be e^(pi i) = 1, but pi was unfortunately defined at half the appropriate value in the 17th century.

<comment><USER5> Pi is defined as the circumference of a circle of unit diameter. This isn't somehow less correct than the alternative of making that circle one of unit radius. It causes some annoying extra factors (as the PDF points out), but the alternative would cause different complications. The area of a circle, for example, would be r^2*pi/2.

<comment><USER6> _The area of a circle, for example, would be r^2 pi/2._

This is actually my favorite example of why pi is wrong—it's the "exception" that proves the rule. To see why, set _τ_ = _C_ / _r_ = 2 pi, and then consider the following chart of common quadratic forms:

      integral of u       1/2   u^2
      kinetic energy      1/2 m v^2
      distance fallen     1/2 g t^2
      spring energy       1/2 k x^2
      triangular area     1/2   b h
      circular area       1/2 τ r^2

We see that, far from causing "different complications", using the right circle constant brings the area of a circle into a more natural form. The 1/2 in the formula for circular area is actually a _missing_ factor; using tau in place of pi restores it.

N.B. I made a previous comment along these lines, but put it in the wrong place. If you're still a "pi is wrong" skeptic, considering the improvement in radian angle measure may yet convince you:

The explanations mapping complex exponentiation to rotations are basically right. In this context, it's worth noting that the conventional choice of circle constant is off by two. We should be using tau = _τ_ = _C_ / _r_ as the circle constant, rather than pi = _π_ = _C_ / _D_. Read _τ_ as "turn" and all those radian angle measures suddenly make sense. Ninety degrees? Instead of the confusing _π_ /2 we have 90° = _τ_ /4 = one quarter turn. And so on: 60° = _τ_ /6 = one sixth of a turn, 180° = _τ_ /2 = one half turn, etc.

In these terms, Euler's formula would be recast as

 _e_ ^( _i_ _τ_ ) = 1

That is, the exponential of the imaginary unit _i_ times the circle constant _τ_ is unity: one full rotation.

<comment><USER5> All of those (except the circle) have the 1/2 because they're integrals of something linear. While it's true that area and integral are closely related (the latter being a special case of the former), a circle is clearly not linear.

<comment><USER2> As a circle expands, its area grows proportional to its circumference. The circumference is proportional to the radius.

So you're getting the area by integrating a linear thing.

<comment><USER6> _As a circle expands, its area grows proportional to its circumference. The circumference is proportional to the radius._

Exactly. In symbols, this reads _dA_ / _dr_ = _C_ ∝ _r_. Setting _τ_ = _C_ / _r_ = 6.2831853…, we have _dA_ = _C_ _dr_ = _τ_ _r_ _dr_ => _A_ = ½ _τ_ _r_ ². Q.E.D.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article didn't have any mention of Euler, but this is typically called Euler's Formula and is considered one of the most beautiful formulas to Mathematicians.

Here's some more info if you want to find out some info, applications and such: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulers_formula>

</comment><comment><USER8> Write this as e^(iπ) + 1 = 0 and you have my favourite equation.

It relates all the fundamental mathematical numbers: e, i, π, 1 and 0.

<comment><USER9> ... using the fundamental equivalence relation =, and the operations +, * & ^

</comment></comment><comment> alan-crowe You remember those half-angle formulae

sin 2A = 2 sin A cos A

cos 2A = (cos A)^2 - (sin A)^2

If you are happy using sine of small x is x and cosine of small x is 1 as your base cases, you can write sine and cosine as mutually recursive functions:

             (defun sin (z)
               (if (small z)
                   z
                   (* 2
                      (sin (half z))
                      (cos (half z)))))

             (defun cos (z)
               (if (small z)
                   1
                   (- (square (cos (half z)))
                      (square (sin (half z))))))

(sin pi) => 6.167817939221069d-7 quite close to zero (cos pi) => -1.0012055113842453d0 you can get this much closer to -1 by using 1-x^2/2 as your base case.

It had never occurred to me to do exponential the same way, as

             (defun exp (z)
               (if (small z)
                   (+ 1 z)
                   (square (exp (half z)))))

So it is a bit of a shock to try it and see it work just fine for complex numbers

(exp (complex 0 pi)) => #C(-1.0012055113842453d0 6.167817939221069d-7)

</comment><comment><USER6> The explanations mapping complex exponentiation to rotations are basically right. In this context, it's worth noting that the conventional choice of circle constant is off by two. We should be using tau = _τ = C/r_ as the circle constant, rather than pi = _π = C/D_. Read _τ_ as "turn" and all those radian angle measures suddenly make sense. Ninety degrees? Instead of the confusing _π_ /2 we have 90° = _τ_ /4 = one quarter turn. And so on: 60° = _τ_ /6 = one sixth of a turn, 180° = _τ_ /2 = one half turn, etc.

In these terms, Euler's formula would be recast as

 _e_ ^( _i_ _τ_ ) = 1

That is, the exponential of the imaginary unit _i_ times the circle constant _τ_ is unity: one full rotation.

</comment><comment><USER10> I enjoyed Lakoff and Núñez's section on this in their book _Where Mathematics Comes From_ [1]. The relevent pages are available at Google Books[2].

1- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From>

2- [http://books.google.com/books?id=YXv6SEjTNKsC&pg=PA432&#...</a>

</comment><comment><USER11> For those of you interested in a longer look at this, check out "E, the Story of a Number" by Eli Maor.

Yes, I read when I should probably be hacking.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like Feynman's description, where he actually used 10^x first, just noting that 10^x for small real x was 1 + ln(10)*x (approximating from the derivative), assuming that this worked for small complex values too, and then extended to larger values by squaring.

</comment><comment><USER13> So to broadcast my math ignorance to all:

Why does cos(pi) + i sin(pi) == -1 ??

Why does i disappear in this?

Edit: Thanks to the replies below.

<comment><USER14> We verify in a quick Google search: [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=sin(pi...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=sin\(pi\)&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10)

that sin(pi) = 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> <http://xkcd.com/179/>

I'm sure almost everyone has seen this anyway, but why not post.

</comment><comment><USER16> So many texts on complex analysis simply define e^{i \theta} = \cos \theta + i \sin \theta without ever explaining how. This provides a good introduction to the reason behind with only minimal recourse to Calculus.

Another good description is discussed in "Visual complex Analysis" by Needham.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have known it as the celebrities formula, because if you write it this way: e^(pi i) + 1 = 0

It contains all the "celebrities" of the math world.

It's quite cool actually.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pages like this will be so much better when we have MathML in the browser and can stop using fuzzy images for mathematical formulas.

<comment><USER19> If you control the website just use <http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/> and you're fine. Any users that want can install the fonts and will get a better experience.

Given how much harder MathML is to author, the jsMath solution is always going to be more popular among random math folks. Particularly since they're already used to writing TeX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A better question is how can you:

(pi/2)^2e

</comment><comment><USER21> umm i m no smart ass.. but i think e^(pi i) = -1 cuz LHS = cos PI + isin PI = -1 .... :O</comment>


Predicting Student Exam's Scores by AnalyzingSocial Network Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.academia.edu/1123106/Predicting_Student_Exams_Scores_by_Analyzing_Social_Network_Data

<comment><USER2> Could the correlation in grades within a social group be caused by smart kids being more likely to hang out with other smart kids, and vice versa?

<comment><AUTHOR> And being into the same topics, watching the same movies, reading the same books...</comment></comment>


Sketchers Rips off Tom Shoes - <AUTHOR> http://www.good.is/post/skechers-s-amazing-tom-shoes-rip-off/

<comment><USER2> Oh noes, competition! Burn the capitalists!

Jeez. This whole 'x ripped off y' thing is ridiculous. There's a reason that it's legal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why is it bad to cheer for the little guy?</comment></comment>


Is it legal for Hillary to require remote-wipe of her staffers' phones? - <AUTHOR> My gf is a paid staffer for the Hillary Clinton campaign and she told me they required remote-wipe access to her (personal) phone. Is this legal? How is it done, technically? <comment><USER2> This is pretty common with a lot of companies switching to byod (bring your own devices to work)

The idea is the company saves money by loading a secure workspace to your personal device instead of paying for a corporate device.

Companies setup a mdm server such as blackberry, good, airwatch, etc that basically send a remote wipe command. You would then download an app to activate it.

It depends on the company but check if there is an opt out clause or demand the company to provide you a corporate phone as you don't have a personal device.

It's ok in most cases since the company is paying for your phone bill as compensation so you can just get a second personal device.

I'm not sure about the legal issues, especially if you can't opt out of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the light off Hillary's email scandal I think they are more secure now than ever.

And it can be easily be done with a exchange server.

</comment><comment><USER4> ... and this is why Trump is better for the US gov transparency.

Do you imagine that Trump required that kind of actions in his business he has built over the last 20-30 years.

Only bureaucracy works this way, to hide grey stuff from the public.

<comment><USER5> Oh yeah because Trump's businesses have never faced scrutiny for their shady dealings before...

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/us/politics/donald- trump-u...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/us/politics/donald-trump- university.html?_r=0)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Android accessories with only Arduino code & the Handbag App - <AUTHOR> http://rancidbacon.com/p/android-arduino-handbag/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been playing with Arduino-based Android accessories for the past few days and thought more people could play with them if they didn't have to write Android code.

So, I created the Handbag App which enables you to both define the Android application user interface and implement the behaviour in your Arduino sketch.

If you've got an Android 2.3.4 device, an Arduino Uno or similar and a USB Host Shield you can try it out.</comment>


Ask HN: Which Companies provide devs subscriptions to Safari Books or similar? - <AUTHOR> I have curiosity to know if a company providing developers with corporate/business accounts to Safari Books Online is common?  I think it would be a great benefit to have. <comment><USER2> IBM does.</comment>


Ask YC: Any startup here familiar with Brad Greenspan or LiveUniverse? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering if anyone here has worked with Brad, or been involved with any deals with LiveUniverse? Any feedback on how things went? What is the reputation of LiveUniverse apart from buying up companies on the cheap? <comment><USER2> I work with Jangl who was just acquired by LiveUniverse. I don't know much about them, but I would be interested in chatting.

jason [a] jnjmobile-com

</comment><comment><USER3> Email me to get info.</comment>


Why is Hacker News behaving in such an unfair way? - <AUTHOR> Can someone please explain this?
These two items point to the same URL (with a slight user-based URL "token" difference at the end; that's why it's not detected by HN as double).
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12529981 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12534296
The first one has 6 upvotes, the second one has 204.
The first one was published to HN much earlier (2016-09-19T09:13:07.000Z) than the second one (2016-09-19T20:10:34.000Z).
The first one was published by a user with 3052 karma, the second one by a user with 1476 karma, at the time of this writing.
What is going on? <comment><USER2> First one was submitted at 2:13am on the US west coast; 2nd one was at 3:10pm. Obvious which would get more eyeballs.

As for dupe fairness, the 2 stories point to different domains (at least now), but even with the same domain, identifying what part of a domain to ignore for uniqueness isn't simple and dupes get through all the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have a problem with the dupe itself, as it's indeed different.

With regards to timing: earth is round. It's daytime and night time in different parts of the world in any given instant. Why does it matter what's the time in US west coast (or any other geographical location for the sake of this)?

<comment><USER3> The earth is round but HN users aren't evenly distributed across the globe. The time on the US west coast matters because that's where the majority of users seem to be.

Has anybody ever studied HN demographics?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bueZoYhUlg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bueZoYhUlg)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a conspiracy.</comment>


URLTeam releases public URL shortener backup/dataset - <AUTHOR> http://urlte.am/

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been asked in the past how this is different from 301Works. Let me explain: After tr.im shut down, everyone was suddenly worried about link rot caused by URL shorteners, so bit.ly and others founded 301Works, a backup provider for URL shorteners. Everyone was back to not worrying about link rot, but the sorry state of 301Works is, that only 7 URL shorteners actually send in backups of their data, and those 7 aren't exactly big fish like bit.ly or Tinyurl. Furthermore, all data on 301Works is private and will not be usable for research.

URLTeam on the other hand does not rely on the cooperation of URL shorteners. We make backups, if you want it or not. We also publish those backups regularly.

As for the size of this backup: It's 40 GB compressed, uncompressing to about 160 GB of text files.</comment>


"The World Is Hers" - the curious phenomenon of Vocaloids - <AUTHOR> http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2011-07-15

<comment><AUTHOR> Wikipedia background: <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Vocaloid>

Hundreds of Vocaloid videos and other material (since we all like our social news sites): <http://www.reddit.com/r/Vocaloid/></comment>


Explaining Net Neutrality to Non-Technical People - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/vinaypai/explaining-net-neutrality-to-non-technical-people-ai9 <comment><AUTHOR> There is a lot of buzz about net neutrality, and the FCC is set to kill the rule requiring it on Thursday, but a lot of people I've talked to still don't have a good understanding of what net neutrality is exactly. So I wrote a non- technical analogy that should illustrate the general idea.

</comment><comment><USER2> Four paragraphs of a weak and factually incorrect analogy.</comment>


Chronic pain and tinnitus may share a common source - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/now-we-know-what-causes-tinnitus-that-never-ending-ringing-in-your-ears <comment><USER2> For anyone here that suffers from tinnitus, a relief method was posted on Reddit recently that is apparently fairly successful: [https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/slug/cv3474n](https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/slug/cv3474n)

<comment><USER3> what. the. fuck. I'm without words. I used to have tinnitus when I was a kids, but as far as I know, don't now. But my mom has Meniere's disease and that causes hearing loss and tinnitus so I was curious. I tried it myself and it is absolutely crazy. AFAICT, I've had a very low hum in my ears (usually thought of tinnitus as being high pitched) for a long , long time because after I do this, I can hear silence. it is fucking crazy.

eager to tell my mom. thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.ata.org/](http://www.ata.org/) is an excellent resource.

In particular: [http://www.ata.org/understanding- facts/symptoms](http://www.ata.org/understanding-facts/symptoms)

It's weird, I listened to the first couple of samples on my PC speakers, not loud, and the volume of my tinnitus dropped noticeably. Everything else (TV, fan, chair squeaking) sound the same.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some tinnitus can be caused by sinus issues, and may clear up with medication. My physician inspected my nose and ears and then recommended over-the-counter pseudoephedrine, loratadine, and fluticasone, which have improved things greatly. It's certainly not the most common cause, but it might be worth a doctor visit.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've had a 'frequency' in my left ear for YEARS. It's not painful, and doesn't seem to affect my hearing or ability to concentrate (I learned to 'blank' it) but it's definitely 'there'.

Of course I know there's no real fix, but having studies trying to find one is nice!

<comment><USER6> Do you notice any difference when you are stressed or anxious?

My tinnitus is fairly mild but when I'm stressed it seems much worse.

I'm also very sensitive to certain noises - a single dog bark, for instance, can leave me feeling very anxious for a period of an hour or more.

<comment><USER7> Anecdote: I get tinnitus—just random short bursts of it, the ringing appearing from nowhere and lasting about a minute.

I also have ADHD, but wasn't aware of that for the longest time. When I started treatment for it, the tinnitus went away.

If I stop taking my ADHD medication for any length of time, the random bursts of tinnitus-noise come back.

I mention this because an interesting thing about the dopaminergic system is that stress makes dopamine run out faster, because your body needs to convert it into adrenaline. Tyrosine, a dopamine precursor nutrient, is often marketed in pill form as "for coping with stress, lack of sleep, or prolonged cold", because these are all things that make you use up dopamine.

The question being: is tinnitus symptomatic of low dopamine?

There are alternate explanations, of course. ADHD medications usually have the side-effect of being vasoconstrictors; vasoconstrictors, along with their effect on the diameter of your circulatory system, also seem to fiddle with the diameter of your lymph channels and sinuses, including your ear canal. Decongestant drugs (which are also vasoconstrictors) frequently carry a warning that, in rare cases, they can cause sudden and permanent deafness!

<comment><USER6> The short bursts, lasting a minute or so are reminiscent of my childhood (early teens) experience. As I got older I thought it was something I'd grown of but then in my 30's it came back. Short bursts again at first but now permanent.

I think that tinnitus is one of those ailments with many causes but the low dopamine theory is an interesting one I've not come across before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is another approach: [1]

I'm not sure if it really works, though, or if it is safe.

[1] [http://www.microtransponder.com/technology/how-it- works/](http://www.microtransponder.com/technology/how-it-works/)</comment>


Browse faster, access blocked sites and more for free - <AUTHOR> http://hola.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Submitter here. I read about this in Haaretz (<http://technation.themarker.com/1.1899600>) in Hebrew. For the non-Hebrew speakers here, I'll try to explain.

Basically, the app (Windows and rooted Android only currently) uses your computer/phone when idle to share your internet resources with other users of the app, by sharing your bandwidth and using your computer as cache for content. They say this will make your internet faster and more secure (since they encrypt 100% of communication passed by the software). As a Mac user, I cannot verify it. The concept reminded me a bit of SETI, only for your internet communication.

At the same time there is a Firefox/Chrome extension which allows you to circumvent geographical blocking of websites (BBC iPlayer, Hulu, etc.) since they can route the request through an exit node in the country where the service is not blocked. I have tried the plugin to access the BBC iPlayer, which I used to access using a proxy, and it's working great. Definitely faster than using a proxy (free or paid) and definitely cheaper than paid proxy (since it's free). They currently unblock the following websites: Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, BBC iPlayer and ITV Player. You can request more websites using their Facebook page and they say that soon they will allow users to set up unblocking for whichever websites they want.

Edit: formatting.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there any product that mimics this one but free software?

<comment><AUTHOR> For the unblocking/encrypted features of Hola there is Tor, but in my experience it's more complex to install and much slower.</comment></comment>


Show HN: free filebased Dropbox synched Tasklist App for iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/neatlist/id419663309?mt=8&ls=1

<comment><USER2> Very cool. Do you have an api? I'd love to push my tasks in mindwallet into this. See my show HN post from yesterday here:

[url]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2340758[/url]>

I'd love to get two way syncing going and dropbox saves is a perfect bonus.

I guess if I integrate with the drop box API I could just start dumping files to the user's drop box and they'd start showing up in your app?

<comment><USER3> Go to <https://www.dropbox.com/developers>

They have an official API libraries for iOS and as well for Android, Java, Ruby and Python.

After reading the documentation further help can be found in the API Development forum: <http://forums.dropbox.com/forum.php?id=5>

P.S. You should apply for a Developer Key, and you should implement OAuth authentication (for getting a token for the user who'll use your application).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice. I like the way you add new tasks/subtasks by using the edit box at the bottom. I also like that there's no Settings page.

You should probably charge something for this app.

Only one nitpick: Remove the alert box that comes after syncing is complete.

Are you going to add any more feature (reminders or due-dates?).

<comment><USER5> I find the alert box is a bit much as well. Maybe change the status icon somewhat to signify if it's in sync or not?

I also got a 404 error when I started it the first time. I'm assuming since it didn't find the NeatList directory that it then created. It may confuse / annoy new users into thinking the app doesn't work right, may want to make that a silent check & fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How did others feel about the iTunes link?

It started my iTunes as I clicked it (a bit frustrating), but then I thought it might be great for increasing the number of people who buy the app.

<comment><USER7> Reading on iOS devices will go directly to the app, which I appreciate. That said, I would prefer a transitional page to the developer's site with a description first, and then be given the choice to view the app in iTunes or the App Store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Where can I get in touch with you?

<comment><AUTHOR> diego [at] nonmonkey.com</comment></comment>


Apple is testing a way to completely turn off location tracking in iOS - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/iphone-ultra-wideband-chip-location-data/ <comment><USER2> As I understand, if you turn off Location Services entirely, it already disables this.

Having a toggle to disable it individually is a net improvement though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe stupid question incoming but the linked page says that "iOS 13.3.1 beta 2 does have a new toggle to disable Ultra Wideband" and then goes on to display an image from IOS System Services presumable containing this very toogle. On the picture I see no toogle called anything with "Ultra Wideband". What should i be looking for?</comment>