On David Lynch's 'Dune' - <AUTHOR> http://www.avclub.com/article/dune-cant-capture-novels-incalculable-brilliance-233858 <comment><USER3> Lynch's Dune is one of my all time favourite movies. I watched it a lot growing up and it didn't make a lick of sense to me, but I still loved the world it created. Later on I saw the extended edition (on laser disk baby!) and it became a lot more clear. And then finally I read the book and it all made sense to me.

Yes the SyFy Mini-Series is more true to the book, but their pronunciations make it unbearable to watch for me. "Hark-e-nin" vs "Har-ko-nin" drives me up the wall.

Another thing I love about it is how surreal Lynch creates the future. To me it's one of the most immersive sci-fi movies that really takes you out of this reality and into it's own and it does it with minimal flash and special effects.

The Guild navigators are gross and amazing. The Lynch Baron Harkonin is possibly my favourite Sci-fi villain of all time.

<comment><USER4> Mostly agree... I have always loved the look of Lynch's Dune... I want the look of Lynch's Dune with the story telling of the mini series... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any fans of Dune should check out the exceptionally good documentary about the aborted film version by surrealist film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky.

The vision he had for his film far outstripps anything seen in the Lynch film or TV show.

Trailer here: [http://youtu.be/GOaGoFqTWtw](http://youtu.be/GOaGoFqTWtw)

<comment><USER6> It would have been amazing if Jodorowsky's Dune actually got made and released. He really was too far ahead of his time for the studio.

I feel that in order to make a roughly 2-hour long film on as complex a subject as what the novel portrays, the only way to illustrate that complexity properly is to ascribe to surrealist elements. That is the only form that can provide the necessary density, if done properly. Lynch knew this, which is why he took on the project, but was later pressured by the studio and his vision was lost. He did a pretty admirable job considering.

Lynch's pedigree speaks for itself:

Blue Velvet: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_23](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_23) Lost Highway: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116922/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_16](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116922/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_16) Mulholland Drive: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166924/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_14](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166924/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_14) Twin Peaks... etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read the book before the movie, yet I still liked the movie. It's not a pure adaptation by any means but it has style, it's not really good but it's glorious. It's a mess but there's imagination and it took guts to make this movie. And I love the guild navigators!

By contrast the Scyfy mini-serie is closer to the book but is boring in that it doesn't bring anything compared to the book.

Granted last time I saw the Lynch movie was 20 years ago about but I'll watch it again this month :-)

Another completely different take on Dune that used scenes from the movie and was really great even though it was very loosely based on the book was the game from Cryo. If you have a chance to play it, do it. It's a very weird and interesting mix of adventure and strategy.

It's actually kind of amazing how much inspiration this book gave to multiple innovative projects from the Lynch movie, the Jodorowsky movie (I wish I could go to a parallel universe where this movie got made...), the first real RTS Dune 2, the weird and imaginative Dune game from Cryo...

<comment><USER8> The Dune game from Cryo is one of my favorite games of all time. It has cartoony graphics and solid controls so it is still a very playable game and the combination of adventure and strategy is really well done. Would love to see more games combining adventure and strategy like that. Though I am afraid as a genre it doesn't cater to a very wide audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I actually like Lynch's Dune. There are dozens of us, dozens!

<comment> david-given Oh, I love it. Not because it's good, it's not, it's an incoherent mess; but it's a _great_ incoherent mess. By which I mean that it tries so hard and fails so badly I end up somehow seeing through it to the vision of the film Lynch was trying to make, which is a masterpiece. It's fascinating.

And there _are_ moments of brilliance to it. The Guild Navigators! The Emperor's Court! The spacecraft design! I even love the poorly matted and ludicrously scaled sandworms, which convey a sense of grandeur that modern films somehow have trouble with. Oh, and Toto's soundtrack is great.

Ah, here we go.

David Lynch's sandworm ride: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld2DMsyy0go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld2DMsyy0go)

Scifi channel's sandworm ride: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVqXE9ZY5wk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVqXE9ZY5wk)

Which of those is more fun?

I'd rather have a glorious failure like _Dune_ over the polished insult that was _Avatar_ _any_ day.

Next I will explain why _Van Helsing_ is one of my favourite films...

<comment><USER10> For me, the Lynch one is better because it was clearly filmed in a desert. The SciFi one is just too obviously a soundstage.

<comment><USER11> It was the CGI equivalent of matting for nearly the whole movie. Sill a very nice looking but unnatural film. Which seems appropriate.

I think Lynch's characterizations were superior. But the SciFi one was long enough to do a better turn to the book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A related epic failure, that gave so much to film even though it was never made:

Jodorowsky's Dune

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg4OCeSTL08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg4OCeSTL08)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune)

They discuss Lynch's version in the film. Highly recommended viewing for all sci-fi enthusiasts.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dune needs/needed the Game of Thrones treatment. Full seasons to develop the story and characters.

The film was interesting mess. It was very beautiful visually. It was also very stupid - both Harkonen and the Aes Sed .. I mean Ben Gesserit were just a pale shadow of themselves without the depth in the book. And we had naked Sting in thongs which is something that the Geneva Convention strictly forbids to be unleashed on civilians.

<comment><USER14> Robert Jordan wrote the Wheel of Time long after Dune.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Frank Herbert seemed to like it...

[http://io9.gizmodo.com/5458417/new-evidence-that-frank- herbe...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/5458417/new-evidence-that-frank-herbert- loved-david-lynchs-version-of-dune)

</comment><comment><USER16> The extended directors cut edition was much better.

I saw the film before reading the book and it inspired me to read the book.

I thought the movie whilst not perfect was very well done.

</comment><comment><USER17> Man, these book-movie comparisons always annoy the hell out of me.

If a painter paints a cliff-side seascape, and a dozen years later a sculptor sculpts the painting as a bas-relief, you don't judge the sculptor because his sculpture didn't measure up to the painting. He's not a painter. He didn't paint a picture, he made a sculpture. It's the same subject, even the same perspective, but they are two completely independent works of art made by two separate artists. The fact that the cliff was in both works is inconsequential because the works stand by themselves.

The same goes for novel-film "adaptations". It's a different work, produced by a different artist, and involves a completely different process to accomplish. They aren't _supposed_ to be the same. They _can 't_ be the same. If you like the novel, enjoy the novel. If you like the movie, like the movie. If you don't, that's fine too. But stop comparing them, please.

<comment><USER18> It's an implied promise when someone announces they are adapting some beloved work that there will be some level of faithfulness to the source material. That is why many people pay to see it, and they have a right to be disappointed when that promise is unfulfilled. No it is not required or even possible for it to be 100% faithful, but it's ridiculous to say an adaptation should not be compared to the original. "Don't act offended by this movie of bacon cooking that is my adaptation of Casablanca. What did you expect it be exactly the same?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If only it had more sex in the novels, it is basically the next Game of Thrones scale.

Maybe if they "fleshed" it out with more drama between the houses, and Dune's portion only came as the later seasons.

Fleshing out the badassery of:

\- Bene Gesserits \- Sardaukar \- Navigators \- Spice use \- Mentats

The alien culture of Dune is kind of it's problem. GOT is basically just a middle ages Europe riff, much easier to understand.

But Dune is still close since it's technology use limits makes it accessible to our imagination. And the things that aren't can be teased out...

<comment><USER20> It's amazing to me that Dune, in 412 pages, develops a more fully fleshed-out universe than A Song of Ice and Fire does in 4,223 (so far).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's too easy to criticize the film, but I wouldn't want to be in Lynch's shoes. He was too inexperienced and the book is far too large and there were many other constraints. All in all it must have been a terrible experience.

I however really like the art style. A weird mix of 19th century uniforms and steam punk(?). Also: The navigator is the best navigator I've seen so far.

<comment><USER22> "To that point, one of the more prevalent criticisms, specifically from Roger Ebert, was that the movie was ugly."

The movie is intensely influential on me, aesthetically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I really disliked the that Dune miniseries[1]. There was some really awful acting and very cheap looking sets throughout a lot of it.

I also thought they got the tone of Paul's character completely wrong. To me he came across starting off as an arrogant thug whereas my perception of him from the books was a very thoughtful and reserved young man. (Obviously subjective viewpoint, but it put me off right from the start.)

OTOH, the audiobook produced by Audible I thought was very good. I've probably read the book four or five times, the last time well over a decade ago. I listened to the audiobook recently and really enjoyed it and reminded me how much I liked the first book[2].

[1] Have not seen the Children of Dune miniseries.

[2] I'm in the "first book was good, the rest was crap" camp. I read through 'til about halfway through Heretics of Dune before asking myself why I was still reading and stopped.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have to login and comment to express my disappointment with the bad reviews this movie has always gotten.

Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 56%, which is really sad. Here are two of the negative reviews.

Corliss:

       Most sci-fi movies offer escape, a holiday from homework, but Dune is as difficult as a final exam. You have to cram for it.

Ebert:

       This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.

This movie is Lynch interpretation of a very complex book and he did so while still being faithful to its uniqueness. He gave us visual aesthetics that are very different from our standard views of space travel (ie: arabesque spaceships and gothic outfits) and didn't skip over the less popular concepts of mind evolution present in the book

What can I say? This movie deserves more recognition than a 56% score.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am a David Lynch fan, I loved Dune. I lent out my DVD copy to a few people and everyone hated it. I've never read the book, I really should, considering that when I do actually read (very occasionally), it is more than likely sci- fi; and I've never seen any of the series' that were made. Basically I watched Dune because I'm a David Lynch fan and all of my knowledge of Dune comes from the film, so I guess it's not all that accurate? Anyway, I liked it because of the atmosphere, and the story; it's certainly unique, but that's Lynch for you.

</comment><comment><USER26> Alejandro Jodorowsky's version would have been incredible. There is a documentary ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune)) about it. Shows a lot of the concept art and describes the vision Jodorowsky and the others had. I think he got salvador dali to agree to take part under some outrageous terms.

</comment><comment><USER27> The movie was good- for the time it was rare to see many decent SCIFI movies made at all. There is no way they could capture the nuance of those books and expecting that is a recipe for frustration.

That said, Scifi did an amazing job of the books and they are well worth watching

</comment><comment><USER28> these books are so incredible well written, but because of their style - <USER2> inner thought and subtlety focused - I think any director would have a difficult time realizing the intricacies and tense plots of the books.

But if captured in the tone of Frank Herberts novels, I think the series could easily rival Game of Thrones, it certainly is epic enough. And that is something I would love to see onscreen.

Oddly, I have the feeling these novels aren't that popular (compared to Lotr or GoT or even some Philip K Dick), which is equally odd to me b/c they certainly are just as incredible intricant, fascinating and innovative.

<comment><USER29> Dune is probably the bestselling science fiction novel ever. By 2000, it had sold more than 12,000,000 copies[1]. It also won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It's true that it hasn't penetrated popular culture like Game of Thrones but I think the reasons why are obvious.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/03/tv/cover-story-future- myth...](http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/03/tv/cover-story-future-myths-adrift- in-the-sands-of-time.html?src=pm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One of the those movies that critics love to bash, but it's actually pretty good -- if you don't judge it by the book. The book is in a whole different stratosphere.

</comment><comment><USER23> The David Lynch movie was both good and original. However the bits that were good where not original, and the bits that were original were not good.

<comment><USER23> I'm referring primarily to the script. The set design was a very good 1984 interpretation of the feel for the book, I thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really want somebody with a budget to take this on like LOTR.

</comment><comment><USER32> Where did this come from? Is someone planning a remake?

<comment><USER33> There was an attempt recently but it was aborted. The concept art looked a touch dodgy too me (pink tiger strips on spaceships) so I'm kinda glad it never became anything.

Wish someone would do a full scale remake though (LotR style big)

<comment><USER34> The Sci-Fi channel (when it was still Sci-Fi...) did do a miniseries version of Dune[1]. Some people apparently don't like it, and they did make it on a relatively low budget, but I like it, and it feels more like what I imagined reading the books than the David Lynch freakshow.

Seriously, "weirding modules"...?

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/)

<comment><USER35> agreed. I liked them as well. Though probably heresy, the Sci-Fi series of the first two books were how I got into Dune.

I went on to read all the Frank Herbert written Dune books and I still like the Sci-Fi series.

<comment><USER36> I also enjoyed the SciFi series. While it didn't posses the same level of Artiness that the Lynch adaptation had, it definitely was a very beautiful movie.

There was very little CGI in the movie. Seriously real sets and some absolutely massive and impressive ones at that. All of the interiors of the palaces on Arrakis? Wow.

The backdrops weren't CGI either, nor were they Matte paintings. They used Translights [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translight) which are basically gigantic sheets of plastic that hang behind the sets meaning the actors actually got to stand on real sets and actually see the world around them and I think it showed in the quality of the acting. Actors don't act well when they aren't able to immerse themselves in the world they are pretending to be in. Watch the LOTR making-of documentary where Andy Serkis explains how he basically inserted himself into parts of filming that Peter Jackson didn't think a Voice/Motion-Cap actor needed to be involved in (not that Jackson objected, he embraced the ideas, but just didn't realize it at first).

Speaking of the acting, I hear a lot of people complain about Alec Newman, calling his character "wooden". Hard tasks need hard ways and hard ways need hard people. I think he nailed it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sacha Baron Cohen Speech at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/22/sacha-baron-cohen-facebook-propaganda <comment><USER2> I wonder how far Borat would get with the Anti Defamation League types these days.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TLDR: 'A sewer of bigotry and vile conspiracy theories that threatens democracy and our planet - this cannot possibly be what the creators of the internet had in mind.'

In a speech last night at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen attacked Facebook and other social media platforms for enabling the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation.

The speech was striking in its sincerity – Baron Cohen appeared as himself, rather than "in character" as one of his satirical personas – and its blistering tone.

Describing Facebook as "the greatest propaganda machine in history", Baron Cohen argued that the company, which does not vet political ads for truthfulness, would have allowed Hitler to run propaganda on its platform.</comment>


Ask HN: Best registrar only and why - <AUTHOR> I have read blogs, searched HN, and it seems it's time again to find a good registrar.  Seems about once a year someone steps in and offers the same as everyone else plus more, and is regarded great for tech support.
I am in need to park 30 or so domains ( now, much more later ) all in various forms of expiration, some just renewed at places like the top 5 ( GoDaddy etc. ) and others are at obscure registrars as I inherited them that way from a client or other source.
I have about 6 that are up for 30 day renewal right now.  One is the domains where I have email@example.com so I want this to be as smooth as possible.
I have managed DNS/bind/named for years, though it has been years since I have.  Now it is just troubleshooting with dig and other tools.
What is your favorite registrar only, or colo/shared/hosting/ISP and why?
How are they with SSL certs, changing, and keeping up on keeping TLS secure and doing it all right.
I do need good DNS on their end, though I can't say I have ever had issues with an SOA case, it's always at the DNS level on some remote server somewhere.  Though these days I find managing DNS in most registrars browser control panels sufficient. GoDaddy is stupidly convoluted. I am not making mass changes of 1000 domain files at a time.  Just one off, add an MX, add DKIM, etc.
If they make setting up any of the above simpler, note that too.
Which ones to stay away from and why.
Thanks for any pointers.
Oh, any that will take current registration time plus what you buy is going to work better for me.  I just renewed a large batch with a terrible registrar, and want to move them, but don't want to lose out on those 11 months I just paid for.  Some registrars offer "rollover" like that, where you get 11 months plus your year or more you just signed up for. <comment><USER2> I have been using Namecheap since 2004 which is I beleive around the time they started and way before they were popular.

I was lucky enough to buy a ton of EMD's before the dot com bubble. Have let a lot of them go, held on to dome. My portfolio is huge, thousands of domains personally owned, clients, former clients, projects, etc (like you)

That said I do stand behind Namecheap. I've never had an issue with them and any issue that comes up are promptly squashed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This was the other name I was trying to remember, as I know a lot of people like them. Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My company uses Gandi, and personally I use iwantmyname.com.

Gandi is a no-nonsense service:

* Seems very security-minded, and overall serious and professional. Nothing like GoDaddy.

* Their UI is conservative and well-organized; not as modern as iwantmyname.com, but not as antiquated as EasyDNS and Namecheap (and not a jumble of different, conflicting, confusing UI styles like the latter is).

* Supports (in fact, requires) zone versioning so you can always undo.

* Supports raw "BIND"-format zone files so you can quickly edit in your favourite text editor, rather than a cumbersome web form.

* Lets you share the same zone file across multiple domains. If you need more automation (eg., lots of very similar domains with a slight tweak here and there), just use the APIs.

* Great APIs.

* 2FA account security.

* Also provides SSL (cheap, toplevel CA) and very good, reasonably priced virtual hosting (US and Europe).

iwantmyname.com has a more minimalistic, modern UI, but lacks things like zone versioning, raw editing, and they're still working on an API. Also, their 2FA is apparently SMS-based, won't work with a standard authenticator app.

We previously used Namecheap and EasyDNS. No significant complaints, but their UIs are horrible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much. I will check it out, I have a feeling these are not going to be 7.99 each with all the above. I also hope they are giving away domain privacy, as charging for that in this day and age is insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FWIW about 13 years ago when I needed to register some domain names I chose inww.com which is really Melbourne IT.

Why them? Simple. Read the terms of service you are agreeing to. At the time a lot of them were very very biased against the consumer. Melbourne IT was different, they were one of the few who had a reasonable policy.

Note that these terms are different for each registrar. I'm not talking about the common ICANN rules which all registrars also require consumers to agree to.

I don't know the current situation, for all I know Melbourne IT now has the worst terms of service in the world! Simple inertia has kept my accounts from moving.

Just something to think about when picking a registrar.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using iwantmyname.com for the past two years -- just take a look at the front page, that's the clear, uncluttered design you'll get for your control panel.

And yes, they let you keep your paid term for transfers.

</comment><comment><USER6> I used to work for MarkMonitor so i have great insights into this. Google is becoming a registar and they will hands down be the best in the new gtld space. Use MarkMonitor if you can afford it- they are the industry gold but if you can't, google will absolutely crush it in the domain space.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gandi.net. Their system is good to use. First year free SSL, renewal is $16. Free basic email hosting.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been using Namecheap for several years, following HN recommendations. No complaints.

</comment><comment><USER9> I really like Google Domains. All domains come with free privacy guard which is nice. If anyone needs an invite let me know.

<comment><USER10> Would it be possible to get an invite?

<comment><USER9> Sure, what's your email? You can email it to me if you prefer. Email is in my profile.

<comment><USER10> Sent!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> AWS/Route53 is the best registrar IMO. 2 clicks to buy, no ads or upsells, API access and advanced DNS features.</comment>


Parts.io is free and no longer requires registration for parametric search - <AUTHOR> http://blog.parts.io/open-parts-io/ <comment><USER2> that custom scrolling animation.</comment>


Why HTML5 is superior to native for mobile apps - <AUTHOR> http://fincrunch.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/native-vs-html5-html5-wins/ <comment><USER2> I write HTML5 mobile apps and I've written native mobile apps and native lets me craft the best possible experience. HTML5 is pretty great in a lot of contexts, but I wouldn't go so far as to call is superior. It might be a better fit for your project, but it doesn't make it superior in a general sense.

Just remember that the web runs on top of a runtime called a bowser and you will always be at the mercy of said browser for a lot of functionality. Without native code, you don't have access to the services that make mobile phones more special and interesting than just a really tiny browser screen with a always on internet connection wherever you go.

</comment><comment><USER3> Having done both, this is laughable, native is always the correct way, you may get away with HTML5 for a few months but it will not scale, ask Facebook.

I can't be bothered to go into a full reply but...

Continuous deployment: No, your users don't want their apps changing on their phones without any interaction. "Why did app XYZ just look totally different, I didn't update it" ? They are used to an update strategy and they might not want your _amazing_ feature you just wrote.

One code base: I get this, but this is not the way you do it, you should create a library and your applications are thin views of this, using cross platform tools like Mono-esq.

Design advantage: Meh, you have design patterns you must follow on each platform, the amount of HTML5 + Phonegap applications that look like iOS on Android on Windows phones is laughable. You can do exciting things on the platforms without thinking that CSS3 is the only way to do it.

Speed and user experience: Never in a million years, I'm not a purist, I tried using Phonegap for projects, but it always came down to speed on all devices being less than native, so why would they use ours?

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, each time a new article claiming that HTML5 has better user experience (as stated by this article "Speed and user experience"), i can't find an app that feels just right made with HTML5.

Just can't find any HTML5 app that feels better than a native app. It doesn't even feel the same, at least to me.

I've seen great apps, with great user experience, but all of them could be a lot better if they were native.

Just my opinion, no disrespect to anyone, and i'm not saying i won't develop an app with HTML5, i just think that we just can't compare them, so we should stop comparing them.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is basically spam.

While many things in the article are just bogus, what tickled me the most is the one about how html5 helps design innovation. Hardly! In fact HTML is a terrible language for designing good ui's. The only reason we do it is because of its pervasiveness.

</comment><comment><USER6> So at least the famo.us open beta will open beta will open up properly tomorrow.

This is an html5 app built in famous:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXeFl093_FI&t=50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXeFl093_FI&t=50s)

<comment><USER7> Is this on the app store? I don't see it. Video is cool though but I like to test it for real. Or is there an url of the web version?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another good option is to use [http://ionicframework.com/](http://ionicframework.com/) \+ phonegap to get the native functionalities such as camera and accelerometer. Ionic uses angular for SPA.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a smart phone user, I applaud the move to HTML-based apps. The storage on my phone is limited, and Android has moved towards making additional storage useless. A significant amount of that limited space is also taken up by the phone maker's notion of a UI and with preinstalled apps that I will never use and can't remove without significant hackery. If I can't fit your amazing user experience on my device, it doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER10> Building a single page is just the step 0 of building a native apps. Rendering the DOM efficiently is another issue much harder to solve.

</comment><comment><USER11> This article is mostly rubbish (sorry) but the point about conintious deployment raises some questions. Does anyone have any ideas or experiences about continuous deployment with native apps? What's possible (on iOS and Android) with self-updating apps?

<comment><USER12> You can't push updates on iOS without going through the app store approval process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Native if you an afford it, HTML5 if you can't.

</comment><comment><USER14> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Meanwhile, let me keep thinking native gives better results...

</comment><comment><USER15> Well JavaScript works fine in Mobile Safari, not so much on WebViews.

Apple is playing security card here by no enabling JIT compiler. The reality is probably a bit different. They could have solved the issue long time ago, but I guess for now it's just better (for them) to continue building Objective-C developer community. In some sense they are sustaining higher app quality by... making it worse.

</comment><comment><USER16> If HTML5 is so great then why isn't it used for most desktop applications?

<comment><USER6> You mean like Atom, Adobe Edge, TileMill, PopCorn Time, Light Table or any of the other things on here :

[https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/wiki/List-of- apps-a...](https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/wiki/List-of-apps-and- companies-using-node-webkit)

<comment><USER16> Do those run on a phone?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a payment provider that allows you to take deposit without fee? - <AUTHOR> I am working on a startup that requires us to take damage deposit from clients. We don't want to pay hefty fee for damage deposits that we would eventually have to refund to our clients. Is there an online payment provider that supports this scenario? <comment><USER2> I can't promise a zero percent fee but I can promise much smaller than traditional CC/debit card rates.

Shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


A "Third Way" in Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://tomvladeck.com/2013/07/05/a-third-way-in-entrepreneurship/

<comment><USER2> I agree "killing it" (KI) is a dumb phrase and someone needs to come up with a better one. But I have a dumb question; How is, for lack of a better way of saying this, "not killing it" !KI) different from just going to work for "the man". That is, if you are KI isn't that what separates you from a large corporation where everyone there is !KI ?</comment>


Time Warner Killed Jon Miller/Yahoo Board Deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/8/time-warner-killled-jon-miller-yahoo-board-deal

<comment><USER2> What I don't understand is why Yahoo would want anything to do with a CEO who was pushed out of AOL. That company has been so mismanaged for so long I couldn't possibly fathom what it takes to get fired from there. They went from being on top of the world to being practically radioactive. I know their downward spiral started long before this guy came in, but there certainly wasn't any improvement under his leadership. Why would another company in a slump want to get anywhere near that?</comment>


Ask HN: How to earn $1/day? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for ideas to create a passive income of $1/day online and will appreciate any advice from HN community. <comment><USER2> putting stuff on envato works. not sure if u can call it completely passive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon's MechanicalTurk

<comment><USER4> That's not passive. If we're including not passive we could suggest sites like Bountify - (<https://bountify.co/>)</comment></comment>


20th Century Fox Gives Real Apology for a Fake News Campaign - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/business/20th-century-fox-fake-news-ad-campaign.html?_r=0 <comment><AUTHOR> A neighborhood paper here in Houston called The Leader was hit hard by a fake news campaign and in the following article McElvy who runs the paper shared details on what it was like fielding tons of angry phone calls:

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/hollywood-funded- fak...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/hollywood-funded-fake-local- news-and-this-real-local-newspap)</comment>


The Avogadro Project (produces the roundest object in the world) - <AUTHOR> http://www.acpo.csiro.au/avogadro.htm

<comment><USER2> Just so they don't make it _too_ round. That would be bad :)</comment>


Ask HN: Why do images look different in Firefox and Chrome? - <AUTHOR>

A friend recently drew to my attention that Chrome and Firefox render images differently.
Images in Firefox look much more vibrant, with more detail and colour. Here are a couple of example images that show the difference very well:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jikklor/5804669752/in/photostream https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jikklor/6204745249/in/photostream
Images in Chrome just seem flat and washed out in comparison.
Can anyone explain this? Why does this happen? <comment><USER2> I'm betting this has to do with color correction.

[http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPE...](http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow thanks for this, so Chrome is not colour managed? That seems a shame, since it virtually cuts out all photographers as users...

<comment><USER2> Experts say (and I agree) that all images posted to the Web should be sRGB with no ICC profile (the profile is not needed since sRGB is the default on more or less all systems); AFAIK such images should appear the same in different browsers. If you post an image using a low-dynamic-range format (e.g. JPEG) with a non-default colorspace (e.g. AdobeRGB), it will either be displayed wrong (in non-color-managed browsers) or it will lose color accuracy (possibly introducing banding) when the browser converts it to sRGB.

<comment><USER3> That's all nice and geeky, but those images don't look as good in Chrome as they do in Firefox.

<comment><USER2> My point is that those images were probably converted wrong, so of course they look bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could you post a screenshot? I'm with fferen, don't see any difference.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, here is a screenshot:

<https://underrun.org/~stack/colour.png>

Firefox 10.0 and Chrome 16.0.912.77 m

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only Windows version of Chrome has some color correction and render problems. On Apple devices there is no difference.

So if you use a macbook or imac don't try to find any difference.

</comment><comment><USER6> I see absolutely no difference at all. I'm using OS X 10.6, Chrome 16.0.912.77, and Firefox 10.0.

<comment><USER3> Windows 7, Chrome 16.0.912.77 and Firefox 9.0.1 and I DO see a difference. Not in the gradient picture, but in the motorbike picture everything seems to be slightly more contrasty, like the fire and the tent in the background... Firefox just updated to 10.0, still more contrasty. IE9 looks the same as Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nothing ever happened with WebP from what I understand though, but you can still check it out. Just Google and click on any one of the thousand of stories.

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20018146-264.html></comment>


Freedom, the US Government, and why Apple are still bad - <AUTHOR> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/39999.html <comment><USER2> Huh. The fact that Apple are the only ones that can sign software that runs on an iPhone may just allow them to defeat the DoJ in court.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/apple- fbi-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/apple-fbi-fight- asks-is-code-protected-as-free-speech)

Apple has indicated that they're going to continue to keep increasing the security of their products in the future, which may make it impossible to update firmware to the Secure Enclave (or at least require the user's permission first), but that's actually a weak measure.

I'm not sure why tech people think that technical means to accomplish zero knowledge is the holy grail, that will never trump having the law on your side. Congress could pass legislation (like CALEA for tech companies) that would require everyone to design their products to make them accessible to law enforcement any time they want.

<comment><USER3> At this point you might as well kiss goodbye to the US tech industry as nobody overseas will by anything that has a US government mandated backdoored.

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure if Congress passes legislation mandating it they can influence plenty of non-American businesses by withholding their ability to do business in the US.

<comment><USER4> If they don't buy American products? I don't think so.

<comment><USER2> Do any of those businesses want to sell their products to Americans? Maybe they can sell different SKUs with those capabilities but they'll have to do it for every market they sell to because the US won't be the only government that will want backdoors.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. This already works the other way round: companies selling into China have to comply with their "great firewall" requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with all the ideas in the article, but at a bare minimum, Apple should configure devices so that no firmware update can be installed unless the user enters their PIN first. This would be an easy move that would make this whole debate moot. The problem is that Apple only partially protected users from Apple itself.

<comment><USER7> There's a much bigger elephant in the room, though:

Updates to the OS and applications are encrypted, completely opaque, signed by Apple instead of the original developer, can be granted additional entitlements for arbitrary permissions, and cannot be audited by anyone but Apple without a jailbreak.

When coupled with push updates, Apple already _has_ a targeted backdoor into every iPhone anywhere connected the network.

This is a much more difficult problem to solve, as securing against that threat model requires an diverse ecosystem of 3rd-party audit/review, software, and tools.

I don't see any way of solving that issue while also maintaining their stranglehold on the platform via DRM.

<comment><USER8> Don't users need to confirm OTA updates?

<comment><USER9> This person is talking about for applications, to which many users have "automatic updates" turned on; this is one of the places where Android is fundamentally by design more secure than iOS (though by implementation has often been weaker :/ see the Master Key family of vulnerabilities).

<comment><USER8> Ah. Missed that point.

What's the highest permission an app can have? Wouldn't that be the limit of the vulnerability here? Also, many permissions require manual granting, e.g. contacts, camera.

Edit: also, that could be mitigated partly by requiring user approval of any updates adding permissions.

<comment><USER9> The kinds of permissions that can be granted to an application by way of entitlements is pretty brutal and go well beyond the permissions that people tend to think of applications as being able to have: there are entitlements for things like "can install other applications" and "can obliterate all data stored on the device". I'm not certain if some of these are blocked to applications of certain kinds, but I know that a lot of them are available if Apple chooses to deploy them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't have anything against Apple retaining control of the firmware on an Apple phone. It _is_ their closed system after all. It's just that Apple should not imply that their phones are somehow secure. The FBI thing reminds us that they are all effectively backdoored by Apple.

</comment><comment><USER5> On this topic I have a large unfinished essay: [https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/pentagr...](https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/pentagram- control.md)

</comment><comment><USER11> ... _is_ still bad? /grammarnazi

<comment><USER12> The British tend to use plurals with corporations.

<comment><USER11> Interesting... the plural says to me "all the individuals at Apple", vs the singular referring to the company as a single, faceless entity.

I wonder if that was intended by the author.

<comment><USER13> Surely not. Just a weird British thing. Like how they write "math" as "maths" and pronounce it "mafs"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Whose logo is on your i-thing? Render unto Apple the things that are Apple's, and keep private what is truly private in the first place.

If you'll forgive the abuse of an old parable...</comment>


Preventing server overload: limit requests being processed - <AUTHOR> http://www.evanjones.ca/prevent-server-overload.html <comment><USER2> I've used fair queuing to solve this problem.

I have a site and API which rates other sites, checking them for ad links and trying to match them to real world business records. Inspecting a site takes 10 seconds to 2 minutes. The API, which is usually used from browser add-ons which tag web search results, lets anyone request the rating info for a site.

Most requests are already cached and return immediately. Requests for unknown sites are queued up for the rating engine, which runs in processes separate from the web-facing side, and return "wait" to the requestor. So there's a work queue to manage.

It's managed using fair queuing. If there is no pending request from the requesting IP address, the new request goes into the queue. If there's a request from the same IP address already in the queue, the new request is held until the first one completes, and then added to the end of the main queue. No request is rejected until there are 100 requests from a single IP address. So each IP address competes against itself, and no one IP can hog the system.

A typical overload comes when someone searches for an unusual topic and flips through many pages of search results quickly. This can result in the rating engine having fifty or so new sites to examine within a few seconds. Those requests will be processed one at a time until the rating engine catches up.

This queuing system held up well when someone tried a test where they fed a huge list of sites into the API without waiting for completion of any of their requests. The rating engine ran busily for a week, but they were only tying up one rating process, and it didn't affect other users at all.

There are no adjustment parameters. It just runs. It's not perfect, but it deals well with legitimate transients and with abuse from a small number of IP addresses.

<comment><USER3> That's really interesting. Can you tell more about how it is implemented technology wise?

<comment><USER2> Python and MySQL/MariaDB. The queue is an in-memory table. Fair queuing is implemented as a big SQL SELECT statement.

The time scale is slow enough that polling it once a second for new work is sufficient. If it had to go fast, it would require something like a standard fair queuing implementation, where you hash the IP address and put the request onto 1 of N queues, serviced round-robin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Over Quota

This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

I'm actually not super sure is this is a single-serving joke site like isthemissiononfire.com, or if this is just a hilarious coincidence.

<comment><USER5> I thought that was pretty funny lol! They probably weren't expecting all that traffic from hacker news

<comment><USER6> Indeed, very funny :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [I'm a Google employee, opinions are my own]

The GCP team did a blog post similar to this about using Load Shedding to survive a spike[0]. It's definitely a great way to survive a sudden spike in traffic, but not optimal, as serving errors is also bad (unless your clients have some sort of retry mechanism in-place). But if your clients do have a retry mechanism in place (especially one that has a backoff time on retries), it can be a great way to handle high loads.

[0] [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/12/using-load- shed...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/12/using-load-shedding-to- survive-a-success-disaster-CRE-life-lessons.html)

<comment><USER8> Retries aren't the only option if you control (or can at least influence) the client. Fallback sources and sane (or customer preferential) defaults are some additional options when the primary source of truth is unavailable. Both of these bypass thundering heard situations where recovery can be difficult even if the application returns to full health.

As a concrete example, when I worked at a large online retailer, we had to check certain customer properties during checkout. In the optimal case, we went to a service which fronted a consistent, transactional database. If that service failed or timed out, we had the option to hit a fast cache which generally was only a few milliseconds out of date. Finally, we could use less authoritative data that came from the application earlier, and if present, would always be in the customer's favor. That made it unlikely that our service ever appeared "down" regardless of the state of the dependencies.

<comment><USER9> Why wouldn't you start with the cache?

Isn't the consistent database only useful if you require it to be used, and don't fall back to a less consistent alternative?

<comment><USER8> Based on previous decisions made by customers that were processed within the lifetime of the same request, there was some probability that the cache could be out of date.

Typically, there was enough context within the request to make assumptions about the state of the authoritative store if data hadn't propagated to the cache in time. We eventually moved to using that initially.

edit: I should add, though, the order of the datasources wasn't critical to the strategy: have a primary data source, backup data source, use any data available in the request context, and finally err in the customer's favor. That's 4 chances to get things right, none of which include retrying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The thing that trips me up along with request caps a lot is timeouts (briefly mentioned). There are so many network / API / retry timeouts set to arbitrarily large amounts (e.g. 30 seconds) that it's hard to predict how they'll interact, and often you don't know that some of these exist and at which layers they exist (application layer, network layer, DNS, etc).

How you often see this is that your request limiter keeps booting new requests (FIFO/drop tail), and then when you check your currently processing requests, they seem to be all in some busy loop, and hopefully you have some means of checking why. You check, and you find that they're all querying a service that accepts the request but doesn't respond ever (e.g. server down behind a proxy), but for some reason the timeout on the client side is set to 30 seconds so stuff keeps hanging until it's killed.

Anyway, this is to say that in any sufficiently complex networked system scenario, it helps to review all these timeouts holistically and in the context of your application.

<comment><USER11> You also have the issue that you might be dropping new requests, but there's so much backlog that old requests eventually time out in droves, too. You might end up spending a lot of CPU cycles doing partial work on some requests, only to eventually see them hit their deadline.

That's one of the reasons why Facebook has a mechanism that switches their FIFO queues to LIFO, once the server has passed a certain load/latency threshold.

<comment><USER12> Thereby inadvertently rewarding people who mash their reload button when the app/site is slow :)

<comment><USER13> But mashing reload is what users are supposed to do by design of the web.

That is, errors in internetworked systems can happen at a level high enough that machines can't decide if it is sane to retry or not, they should simply bubble the error all the way back to the user and let her press F5 if she wants to.

Modern UIs might hide this, but users well know the web is flaky and understand it in their bones. So when they press reload they are sending important information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A classical solution is to use a control algorithm (for example PI or PID) to avoid having to estimate the overload threshold: the server will just start shedding a fraction of the requests to maintain some metric (CPU utilization, latency, queue length, ...) below some target.

See for example [1]. This is about background jobs, but the same principles apply to load shedding.

[1] [http://folk.ntnu.no/skoge/prost/proceedings/acc04/Papers/035...](http://folk.ntnu.no/skoge/prost/proceedings/acc04/Papers/0354_ThA01.3.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the link, the abstract seems relevant. I agree: a control algorithm seems like it should work. The challenge is figuring out the metrics and parameters to make something that works "well enough" for most applications, like TCP does for networks. I would really love for someone to figure that out, so we don't run into this very often.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, it's something that needs to be tuned per-service. It is quite easy if the service is X-bound for some local resource X (CPU, disk, flash, network card), but if it is bottlenecked on external service calls it can be quite challenging to define a representative stress metric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The SRE book has some useful discussion[1] on this topic too.

[1] [https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/addressing- casc...](https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/addressing-cascading- failures.html#xref_cascading-failure_load-shed-graceful-degredation)

<comment><USER17> The SRE book is already mentioned (with the very same link you provided) in the discussed article:

> The Google SRE book has a chapter about server overload and cascading > failures, which I highly recommend if you want to learn more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've seen similar issues occur, but based around GC behavior.

As with the authors example, when requests start stacking up in a process, we also potentially increase the memory load on the GC. It's also possible to cause a sort of pathological case, where the object allocation lives long enough to get promoted to the older generations, and then die, requiring almost constant major GC's to occur to free the promoted objects.

I worked on one system, where all performance testing was done in a lab environment under perfect conditions, and external resources all taking less than 1ms to respond. However, when deployed to a production network, it consistently performed abysmally, losing an order of magnitude of performance to having more outstanding requests being processed, and the associated GC load.

Newer GC's do appear to handle object promotion much better, but it's one more thing to consider, where some GC tuning and reduction in garbage can cause an order of magnitude increase in performance.

Anyway's, one more thing to consider.

</comment><comment><USER19> I developed a library to guard against server overload. It automatically gauges the capacity and rejects requests exceeding it.

[http://iheartradio.github.io/kanaloa/docs/theories.html](http://iheartradio.github.io/kanaloa/docs/theories.html)

<comment><USER15> Awesome this is exactly the sort of system I had in mind when I wrote that article, I'll take a look, thanks!

<comment><USER20> Logged in users should take priority, depending on the number of page requests, all users will see an error at some point breaking the site for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There was a native NodeJS module called "toobusy" that I rewrote a few years back to remove the native dependencies:

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/toobusy- js](https://www.npmjs.com/package/toobusy-js)

It's worth checking out - and helps you achieve this goal _without_ necessarily having to come up with a req/s magicnum; instead you measure actual event loop latency to detect a slowdown.

<comment><USER22> That's really neat to actually measure event loop latency

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A non-general solution that might work for most of us is often goes by the name "shopper prioritization".

Basically if you have a site that does lots of processing (search, orders, etc) then a pretty effective strategy is often to show a generic static "down for maintenance, try again" page. This requires vastly fewer resources to serve since the page can be sitting in web server ram and doesn't result in rpc calls throughout the whole stack.

You can also do something like prioritize logged in users over casual browsers.

Since most http clients are smart clients you can even do some stuff with rngs and timeouts to selectively let people who are willing to wait around back into the site.

Of course if you're an ad-tech company it's likely that serving an error is about as fast as serving something successfully.

<comment><USER24> Non-logged in users should be served almost exclusively from cache anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ironically, I'm getting a message saying the server is overloaded. Here is the cached copy: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1oBS2v-...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1oBS2v-V_r0J:www.evanjones.ca/prevent- server-overload.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

</comment><comment><USER26> Haproxy is very flexible for this sort of thing. You can, for example, limit concurrent connections to backends, and place requests in a queue with a specific timeout. Not at all automatic, but at least all the right knobs are there.

Edit: Related, Fedex's tracking is down on their website right now. It's returning quickly, though, with this in the JSON: _" Service com.fedex.nxgen.trck.v8.ientities.TrckInterface is busy, max invoke limit reached"_

</comment><comment><USER27> In AWS, achieving peak theoretical performance requires queueing & pooling jobs of specific sizes. You are literally going to suffer costly bad performance if you don't implement and limit backlogs and concurrency.

This is basically just "stacks and queues" in a general sense, most often seen as wait-and-retry in an application, and rate controls in a service.

To do this and survive cascading failures you have to know the limits of each part of your stack and implement rate controls for each. An easy way to do this is to design network services that serve requests for applications via an API, rather than giving apps unfettered access to network resources. You can allow applications access to your network service and change rate controls for each app as needed. Alternately, you can add limits to your apps' layers at design time, rather than having to discover the limits by performance testing or trial-and-error.

The author wants a universal solution, which is a bit like saying, please solve "traffic" for me for every mode of transportation. Airplanes have different traffic than cars, so their designs will differ, although they all involve an agent that coordinates traffic flows according to a set of rules.

<comment><USER15> I agree that a universal solution sounds difficult. However, it seems like it should be possible to have something that works "well enough" for some (broad) class of servers. My example is TCP, which does a "good enough" job of controlling the flow of packets over a wide range of networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> My recommendations for rate limiting:

1) Sign session ids that you issue and reject requests that don't have a valid signature. This can be done entirely in software at the router level without any I/O

2) For each session, do authentication. Unauthenticated sessions get lower caps.

3) For authenticated sessions, have various schemes for X units of Y in Z seconds. And then use this database - sharded by Y - before each expensive Y.

4) Y should be prefixed with a user role or payment plan or whatever, followed by the actual resource id. So people can buy another payment plan.

5) Possibly let people pay to access a resource beyond the quota.

6) Make clients recognize quota errors and retry with exponential backoff.

7) Host static resources in the app, fallback to a CDN, and only host dynamic resources on your own source servers.

8) Wherever possible, cache things in the client, keeping in mind that you have to evict the lease recently used items eventually.

</comment><comment><USER29> Nginx has some config features related to just that: [https://www.nginx.com/blog/rate-limiting- nginx/](https://www.nginx.com/blog/rate-limiting-nginx/)

<comment><USER26> The docs are centered on per client rate limits, which is a bit different. Though I believe you can make them global.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The main problem with this article is that it assumes that the only resource consumption is CPU/memory on the server. With that assumption, it makes complete sense to limit the number of concurrent connections.

However, if you do so, then your server can be brought to its knees by a single client opening that many connections, and then just being really slow in accepting the data down the network. Then the limited connections on the server are all sitting there doing nothing, and no new connections are allowed.

<comment><USER15> This is a good point, although I don't think I said "connections", I said "requests". The definition of requests is going to vary significantly. Yes, very slow clients are yet another problem that extremely robust systems don't have to handle.

In my personal case, nearly all of my work has always been on "internal" services that are being used inside a single organization inside a data center, where this is rarely a problem. This is much more of an issue for services that are accessed over the public Internet, where you need to handle malicious attackers as well as users that have horrible connections.

In any case, I believe what I wrote still applies, but you do need to set appropriate timeouts (yet another parameter to tune; yuck!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sounds like a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_bucket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_bucket)

</comment><comment><USER32> For those asking, this seems to be hosted on App Engine and he's gone over his quota. App Engine's throttling is both a blessing and a curse (presumably he's using the free tier and never noticed this). You'll note that it's explicitly saying he's over _quota_ not that it can't handle it ;).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

<comment><USER15> Exactly right. I just enabled billing on this project. Oops!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This extremely simple solution works nicely for us:

        $load=file_get_contents('/proc/loadavg')[0];
        if ($load>10) die('Server load currently too high.');

So when the load gets too high, the server will not procss the request. This will bring the server load down. An easy self regulating system.

<comment><USER34> But by this point the request has already been accepted and processed. It's also using a rolling average, which means you'll be "killing" connections that otherwise wouldn't need to be killed.

<comment><USER33> Well, there is no exact threshold what "needs to bee killed". The higher the load the longer it takes to process requests. At some point you rather want to drop additional requests instead of making things even slower for everybody. This is what happens here.

Think of it like this: When the server is already darn slow at a load of 10 we don't want to process more requests because we know at values over 10 it gets unbearable.

<comment><USER34> My point is it's still processing the request. You're just shielding the web server from whatever the application holds.

In other words, let's find the theoretical limit to what your web server can handle in terms of concurrent requests. Let's throw them all at your application. In this scenario, the check-load-then-die code is worthless because the request will never get there. It doesn't solve the problem as shown in the OP. What it does is mitigate the effect of the application on the total load of the web server. Which is another problem altogether.

Also:

> drop additional requests instead of making things even slower for everybody. > This is what happens here.

Not exactly. The request completes like any HTTP request would. That you're die()ing out doesn't change that, at least from the perspective of the web server.

<comment><USER33>
        find the theoretical limit to what your web server
        can handle in terms of concurrent requests. Let's
        throw them all at your application. In this scenario,
        the check-load-then-die code is worthless because
        the request will never get there.

If there is such a limit, then why not mitigate that by setting a max number of connections for the webserver?

        You're just shielding the web server from
        whatever the application holds.

True. But as I said: it works. Never seen our server get slow since we implemented this a few years ago. It kicks in when we get about 25x our normal traffic. Which happened less then once a year so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ironically enough, clicking the link tells me that your site itself has exceeded its serving quota.

What a world we live in.

</comment><comment><USER36> [https://github.com/brandur/redis-cell](https://github.com/brandur/redis-cell)

This is fast becoming my go-to tool for any sort of rate limiting at the application level.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is another good post on the topic: [https://stripe.com/blog/rate- limiters](https://stripe.com/blog/rate-limiters)

</comment><comment><USER28> Irony of ironies:

* Error

Over Quota

This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later. _

</comment><comment><USER38> The GCE Over Quota page is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is reddit using this? At times of high load, getting an error there seems kinda random.

</comment><comment><USER40> is this a /s post? I get a server overloaded message when I click the link

</comment><comment><USER41> This is basically how Hapi works in the NodeJS world.

If the event loop is too long (you configure this) it means you're doing too much! So it issues 503s to all new traffic until the server can cope with the requests it's receiving and get the loop time time.

Works very well and you can configure it to do the same with memory limits as well.

Doesn't fix all issues, but it's a good way to keep your site usable by _some_ users at least.

<comment><USER42> Not for some users though, usable for some requests. Users will still be annoyed when they can't complete actions, because some of their requests are failing randomly.

<comment><USER41> That's true, and it is a limitation.</comment></comment></comment>


Coding is the new Rock and Roll - <AUTHOR> http://www.petenelson.co.uk/2011/01/coding-is-the-new-rock-and-roll/

<comment><USER2> When I'm afraid of getting a STD by shaking a coder's hand, then it will be rock and roll.</comment>


Amazon.com Web site faces more trouble Monday  - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080609/ap_on_hi_te/amazon_outage;_ylt=Ahvf29s6JqNn.SkTAExZiSGs0NUE

<comment><AUTHOR> another reason why i shouldnt use Amazon web services(AWS)?

<comment><USER2> From the article:

 _Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith described Monday's troubles as "intermittent" and said they did not affect Amazon Web Services_

I've certainly seen no sign of problems with AWS; nor have I heard people complaining about issues with AWS at the point when amazon.com was having problems, so I think we can take Smith's statement here as accurate.</comment></comment>


When Just Hiring the Top 1% Isn't Good Enough - <AUTHOR> http://sablog.com/archives/2007/10/18/when-just-hiring-the-top-1-isnt-good-enough Every company says that they only hire the top 1%. Joel Spolsky has already ripped the credibility of this to shreds.<p>Apparently a local Bay Area company is either 1) so arrogant, or 2) really has the goods, that they demand their coders be "one of the best coders in existence." <comment><USER2> I swear I've seen this before. They may haveripped this off rapleaf (if my memory serves me right)</comment>


Show HN: Pattern.css – CSS-only library to fill empty background with patterns - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bansal-io/pattern.css <comment><USER2> Pretty neat project and great presentation, starred!

You could reduce the distributed CSS version even more if you used the gradient definition only once, it's always the same.

          background-image: repeating-linear-gradient(45deg, currentColor 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, currentColor 75%, currentColor), repeating-linear-gradient(45deg, currentColor 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, currentColor 75%, currentColor);

With class composition it's easy:

        .pattern-checks.xl {
          background-position: 0 0, 100px 100px;
          background-size: calc(2 * 100px) calc(2 * 100px);
        }

But if you added a copy-paste ready snippet to the landing page, that would be great too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also see Hero Patterns: [http://www.heropatterns.com](http://www.heropatterns.com) by Steve Schoger.

<comment><USER4> Subtle Patterns [1] has been fairly popular throughout the years as well.

[1] [https://www.toptal.com/designers/subtlepatterns/](https://www.toptal.com/designers/subtlepatterns/)

<comment><USER5> Also Transparent Textures ([https://www.transparenttextures.com/](https://www.transparenttextures.com/)) – disclaimer, I made it — which is basically Subtle Patterns with a colorwheel that allows the backgrounds to be any color.

<comment><USER6> Thank you very much! That's exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Example site ( [https://bansal.io/pattern-css](https://bansal.io/pattern-css) ) misrendered in Vivaldi, which brings me back PTSD grade memories about the browser war and css bugs, implementation-diferences, etc. So let me ask, how is it possible on the almost completely monoculturized web, where is no Presto and almost no Trident anymore, where almost every browser is kind of chrome- isotope. So let me ask, maybe a web developer cn answer me: what is missing to be able to provide complete support forthe main browsers? Is there still prefixed css tags? OR is it so hard to handle differences between browsers/browser-versions? Doesn't CSS have any graceful fallback functionality for older browsers? Why is this phenomen exists today?

<comment><USER8> As a user, I'm all for browser choice in the abstract: it sounds like a good thing, but it doesn't often deliver me tangible benefits in usability, performance, etc. (And, to wit, the only real exceptions are when large organizations bankroll extensive browser development teams.)

As a developer: even with several browsers converging on the same renderer and JS runtime, it is _still untrue_ that all things work in all browsers [1] [2]. HTML, CSS, and JS continue to evolve as standards, and mobile browsers complicate the compatibility picture.

This may be hard to hear, but: right now, polyculture delivers largely abstract ideological benefits to a small subset of users who care about these things. Monoculture delivers real, tangible benefits in usability, performance, and accessibility to users, plus massive gains in productivity to developers and tech companies.

On top of that: few of the privacy / security features in modern browsers are at the rendering or JS runtime level - they often have more to do with defeating cross-domain cookie trackers, execution sandboxes around JS, a whole slew of security headers at the HTTP level, and value-added features like password managers and private browsing sandboxes. IMHO, centralization of the HTML / CSS / JS part is a _net win_ for privacy / security, as it makes it possible to focus efforts on these sorts of features instead of on the fine details of basic rendering and execution.

[1] [https://kangax.github.io/compat- table/es6/](https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/) [2] [https://caniuse.com/](https://caniuse.com/)

<comment><USER9> Mono culture provides an average or worse UX experience but the sameness element hits many humans subconsciously.

The JS problem was solved with jQuery.

<comment><USER8> Among HCI researchers and UX practitioners, it's well-understood [1] [2] that consistency and standardization in interfaces often improves user experience by helping users lean on pre-existing mental models.

(That said, the question of when to lean on existing convention vs. establish a new one is a difficult one.)

[1] [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability- heuristics/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/) [2] [https://www.interaction- design.org/literature/article/princi...](https://www.interaction- design.org/literature/article/principle-of-consistency-and-standards-in-user- interface-design)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Like it says, <1kB minified and gzipped. But 9.5kB only minified, i.e. The css is highly repetitive so gzip is able to do a lot.

I know it's still small, but I'd be tempted to extract just the rules I wanted. Very nice regardless.

</comment><comment><USER11> The website [https://bansal.io/pattern-css](https://bansal.io/pattern-css) was clearly produced on a platform with overlay scrollbars. There are a number of horizontal scrollbars that shouldn't be there.

      .overflow-scroll {
        overflow: scroll !important;
      }

`overflow: scroll` is pretty much _never_ what you want: it draws scrollbars whether needed or not. You want `overflow: auto` instead, which doesn't draw scrollbars unless necessary.

      .w-100vw {
        width: 100vw !important;
      }

Viewport units are fundamentally broken by design. Don't _ever_ use them for layout. In fact I recommend against using them in any situation at all. In this case, use `width: 100%` or just nothing, and it'll yield the desired results.

<comment><USER12> > Viewport units are fundamentally broken by design. Don't ever use them for > layout. In fact I recommend against using them in any situation at all.

That's a pretty bold claim. Can you elaborate on that?

<comment><USER11> Some comments I've made here on the topic:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21244656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21244656)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20956850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20956850)

The currently-implemented viewport units are just fundamentally _bad_. And I've only been talking about the badness of vw; vh has further troubles of its own on mobile.

<comment><USER13> What was Firefox's former behavior for viewport unit handling that other browsers didn't want to go with?

<comment><USER11> [https://github.com/w3c/csswg- drafts/issues/1766](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1766) is the main link that explains it, [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1468684](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1468684) is also useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is pretty cool. It's reminds me of [https://css-doodle.com/](https://css- doodle.com/), which is a native web component with the same general goal. Iirc, it uses canvas under the hood.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you don't need to install stuff from npm and prefer to hack your own, here's a nice list of CSS patterns to get you started: [https://leaverou.github.io/css3patterns/](https://leaverou.github.io/css3patterns/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Wonderful! The demo site hijacks my back button, and the animations are incredibly slow.

Edit: Rereading made me sound very salty. Nice project and I'm sure I'll use it in the future.

</comment><comment><USER17> I really like this, but it would be great if the example site didn't use that scrolling. I wanted to click between examples and I browsed away because it took too long. Bookmarked for my next project though.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is very cool. I'd like to include this library in the website builder we've built for Webase [1]. We currently have a color background and an image background but these patterns would make it easy for non-coders to add some panache!

Thank you for sharing!

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

</comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for the patterns, they look great! Some have commented about the usability of the sidebar / js autoscroll, which could be improved—but it is functional and am I gonna use this as my homepage or am I gonna configure this into my project one time when I need it?! ... jeesh, lighten up.

</comment><comment><USER20> Works great in Chrome, but many of them aren't smooth in Firefox. It doesn't seem to like diagonal lines, the display is inconsistent.

I'm guessing it's a bug in Firefox with sub-pixel rounding.

</comment><comment><USER21> It'd be nice if this used CSS variables so that you didn't need hardcoded sm, md, lg, and xl sizes, but could set the size to any length.

Looks like from the source that this would cut the size by 75%.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hm, the diagonal lines are rendering quite badly for me (randomly jagged edges). Anyone else seeing this? (I'm on Linux, FF75)

</comment><comment><USER23> Love it!

Site could use some help though. Consider making a repo for the actual website please! Would love to help clean it up a bit.

</comment><comment> Funes- >>Features

>Only CSS. No JavaScript!

It _is_ indeed a feature, and one that I wish the vast majority of websites adopted.

</comment><comment><USER24> I always love seeing small, yet very valuable and informative projects on the front-page-- bravo!

</comment><comment><USER25> reminds me of the 'ol stripe generators, that were big in the early 2000s

</comment><comment><USER26> I bet this will the hottest web-design trend for next two years.</comment>


The Lottery of Life: Where To Be Born in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be-born-2013-lottery-life <comment><USER2> On the substance of the submitted article, I find it interesting that Taiwan outranks (a little) the United States as a place to be born in 2013 by the methodology used here by the editors of The Economist. The listing is broadly plausible, but of course in most countries it is better to be born as a well- off person in a stable family than as a member of that country's underclass in an unstable family.

The lottery of HN submissions: when to submit to be noticed? That question is raised by the two previous submissions of this interesting article.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819542>

(40 days ago, 4 points, no comments)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4863788>

(29 days ago, NOT canonical URL, 6 points, one comment)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't aware it'd already been submitted. You're right that it's a bit of a lottery.

Being in Australia, I find that stuff submitted in (my) morning seems to catch some Europeans and night owls in the USA, from whom only a few upvotes are required to climb the rankings.

Once you hit the front page, you're golden.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's only been in the last few years I've realised how lucky I've been: born in a stable, prosperous country to stable, intelligent parents.

I think the "birth lottery" is the single biggest stroke of luck there is. It's so influential that people just don't see it. It's the elephant in the room.

I'd be interested to see this list modified by profession. Australia might be #2 on a general basis, but it would be hard to argue that being born in the USA gives you the inside edge on getting ahead in the web industry, for example.

Only one thing worries me:

> _Small economies dominate the top ten._

They also dominate the bottom 10. Might this be a sampling effect?

<comment><USER3> Some of those countries in the bottom ten have quite large populations and land areas too. They are also desperately poor, with inadequate infrastructure, corrupt ineffectual governments, and lack a substantial civil society willing & able to put pressure on the government to implement the necessary developmental changes & reforms necessary for their country to develop and to bring up the necessary living standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell as I'm sure many folks on HN have read really digs into how external factors (time, school registration dates, etc) have a significant impact of the success of individuals. Having just completed reading it, I thought this was an interesting article.

</comment><comment><USER5> at least brazil wasn't overrated again.</comment>


Ask HN: A systematic approach to picking app colors? - <AUTHOR> I'm the sole creator and designer of an app, and picking colors in particular is causing me a lot of stress. There are so many variables! Let's say I need to pick the color for a button. I have to answer the following questions:<p>* What's the primary color? Red for destructive and green for confirmation is given, but what about everything else?<p>* Given the primary color, how do I select the hue, saturation, and brightness to mesh with my existing color scheme?<p>* How do I pick the text color? Should it be lighter or darker than the background?<p>* What color will the button be when it's held down or disabled?<p>* If the button is particularly important, how do I give it extra weight? Otherwise, how do I ensure it has the same intensity as other buttons in its category?<p>* Maybe the button can be toggled. What color should I make its toggle state? How do I keep it legible while making it clear that it's not just a weirdly colored button?<p>* What color should the border be, if any?<p>...over and over again! Matters are further complicated by the fact that the user can pick their own hue for several prominent UI elements. There's also a dark mode, which multiplies the design effort by 2. (You can't just darken the existing colors and call it a day: many pairs of colors have to be switched in order to preserve the legibility, e.g. the color of a button background and its label.) Picking colors has become an incredible burden, forcing me to try colors over and over again until I find something that intuitively feels right. I've tried some algorithmic approaches ("if toggled, darken by 20%"), but it doesn't give consistent results. Perhaps switching to a perceptual color space (HCL?) would help, but it would be a major refactor. In the meantime, I have to make do with what I have.<p>(Sample screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/SRh5pPA.png)<p>Is there a good, systematic way to pick and organize colors for a theme, especially with modifiers? (Toggled, disabled, etc.) <comment><USER2> Wow. It feels like nobody even tried to answer you.

For starters, there won't be any easy algorithmic way to defines shades and tones of colours (shade is the term for mixing a colour with black, tone is mixing a colour with white) as the eyes perceive them all a bit too differently, so they will all require some hand tweaking.

When users can choose colours, try and keep any preselected colours neutral. Blacks, whites and greys. Sometimes a slight blue can be applied. Blue is universally the easiest/most agreeable colour.

For finding good color combos the major ways to go about it are to either pick color chords and tweak slightly, or to play with the hot/cold contrast.

Color chords means using 3 or 4 colours which are equidistant on the HSL wheel (90 or 120 degrees apart), you can then play with them a bit to see what you like.

Hot cold contrast just means that warm colors and cold colours always look good against each other. So red/orange/yellow against blue/violet.

Also worth noting that different colours have different weights. Yellow is perceptually bigger than purple. So if you have two equal sized dots, one yellow one purple, the yellow will appear larger.

Most of this comes from The Elements of Color [https://www.amazon.ca/Elements- Color-Johannes-Itten/dp/04712...](https://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Color- Johannes-Itten/dp/0471289299) . Im sure many other books cover it but this one is considered a classic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the practical advice! I will have to read that book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For the palette look at [http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes](http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes)

in general I found this talk to have some interesting recommendations [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKpfO331DY4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKpfO331DY4)

</comment><comment><USER4> Look into the source for bootstrap 3 or 4... They only define a handful of colors. In the end, pick your main branding color, and work out from there.

Even if you don't use bootstrap, it's a good baseline to look at, and imho every web developer/designer should definitely dig through the source of that codebase.

</comment><comment><USER5> You are approaching it too much like a programmer in my humble opinion.

Yes there is rules and guidelines, but before you can follow them you need a style , a feel , a culture .

You should get ( pay ) a graphic designer friend to come up with some food mockup of a single page. Work on it worth them or have them do a few iterations until you are really excited about it and both of you think "aha!"

Once you get that far your next challenge is to truly use this as a style guide and pivot off of it as you design the rest of the pages.

Good luck, it can be rewarding!

</comment><comment><USER6> One thing that no-one has mentioned so far is that you shouldn't rely on color to convey information, because some people have color blindness. That's about 10% of the male population.

You also want to pick things that have nice levels of contrast (again for accessibility).

I'd be interested to read how you approach this problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do this:

1\. Kuler.adobe.com . Click on Most Popular. Pick a palette. Now you have your absolute colors.

2\. Now go to the website of a beautiful SAAS that you think looks good that makes over a half million dollars per month. Now copy them for using your absolute colors relative to one another.

Ta-da! Now don't spend any other effort on this problem.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've used 'color scheme designer' [1], recently renamed 'paletton' [2], in the past. It has some of the specific features you are looking for, like darkened/lightened alternatives of your main colors.

[1] [http://colorschemedesigner.com/csd-3.5/](http://colorschemedesigner.com/csd-3.5/) [2] [http://paletton.com](http://paletton.com)

</comment><comment><USER9> Always found this useful [https://color.adobe.com/create/color- wheel/](https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/)

And whatever you do, don't spend too much time on this stuff.

As long as your colours aren't too garish, then you should spend way more time on whitespace and typeface.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just so ya know... the color scheme will look very different on different monitors. So make it look good, but be careful not to yak shav over colors only you will ever see as intended.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's another bullet point I forgot to mention: testing with different brightness settings and color temperatures! Egads!!</comment></comment>


The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/07/26/editors-note/ <comment><USER2> Here's how "Best Sellers" become a thing:

Publishers count the number of books they sell.

This seems pretty simple, right? It is, but as a consequence, easily gamed. Publishers don't sell to you and me, they sell to book stores. So, you create some marketing to get people to preorder your book from a lots of different book stores. Book sellers inform the number of copies based, in part, on preorder numbers. There are ways that you can get book stores to order many more books than there is demand for by fraudulently (not sure if it's legally fraudulent, but maybe?) pre-ordering books, and stocking shelves with books that no one ever picks up. But boom, there you go - best seller.

If you want to cut out the middle man, and you're rich enough, you can just _be_ the middle man. Buy all the books from the publisher, and resell them. The publisher still gets their money, so they don't care. Again, now you have a best-seller.

And then, of course, there are legitimate sales that the best seller lists market themselves as measuring.

Book sellers don't want to be stuck with unsold inventory, so there's something of an arms race between book sellers and publishers/authors.

After seeing this game first-hand, I no longer believe anything on a best- seller list. As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear whether this problem will be addressed or not. The system can still be gamed, especially if it's run by algorithms.

So, basically, I'd argue that it doesn't matter whether WaPo is "right" or not because the input data is likely of poor quality anyways.

<comment><USER3> Book sellers are rarely stuck with unsold inventory. They almost always have the ability to send unsold inventory (though not magazines) back to the publisher for full credit.

<comment><USER4> To remainder paperbacks, instead of sending the entire book back for credit they'd rip off the covers, send those instead, and dumpster the book. I don't know if they do this anymore. When I grew up in the 80s, I read an enormous number of coverless books:)

<comment><USER5> This was SOP for me when I worked as the receiver in a supermarket from ~2007-2011.

It's a shame, I must have thrown thousands and thousands of books away, instead of donating them to a library or something.

But then again, I guess the library would only accept so many copies of the same nascar-themed trashy romance novel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kudos to the Post for attempting to produce an objective list. The New York Times doesn't:

> In other words, The New York Times best-seller list is not a best-seller > list -- which even The New York Times once acknowledged. In the early 1980s, > William Peter Blatty, author of the monumental best-seller "The Exorcist," > sued The New York Times for only listing his novel on the list one time, > even though it sold in the millions. In defending itself before the court, > as reported by Book History, the annual journal of The Society for the > History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (Penn State University Press), > The Times said, "The list did not purport to be an objective compilation of > information but instead was an editorial product."

[https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the-...](https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the- new-york-times-bestseller-list-another-reason-americans-dont-trust-the- media-n2471554)

<comment><USER7> Does that apply to the rest of paper as well?

<comment><USER8> Not sure why the downvotes. If a news provider can't promise to try to tell the truth in a legally binding way, but just claims to be editorializing, it's no wonder there is so much public distrust of the news.

<comment><USER9> > If a news provider can't promise to try to tell the truth in a legally > binding way

which news provider does this?

<comment><USER10> You see the point then...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These lists can be manipulated. There was a case a few years back involving bogus bookstore sales of Lani Sarem's "Handbook for Mortals" to trick the New York Times:

 _Stamper and other YA writers, including Jeremy West, began to investigate. Stamper shared messages he had received from bookshop staff who said they had been contacted to see if their store was an NYT-reporting shop – the paper's lists are collated from information supplied by a confidential group of stores – before a bulk order was placed. Another bookshop shared similar information with West, while Publishers Weekly reported that a shop outside Las Vegas had a customer who ordered 87 copies after learning it was an NYT-reporting shop._

(Source: [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook- for-m...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-mortals- by-lani-sarem-pulled-from-nyt-bestsellers-list))

I'm also skeptical of data from Amazon, whose KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited ebook platform is notorious for scams designed to ensure rank or extra payouts for authors. See [http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you- nee...](http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to- know/) for an explanation of how one scam worked, and the HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212).

<comment><USER12> A friend used to work for an organization whose function was to buy books from NYT-reporting sellers for purposes of inflating the sales numbers of a given title, to manipulate it onto the bestseller list. They were usually paid by the publishers, but sometimes directly by the authors themselves.

This has been going on for a very long time.

EDIT: Phrasing.

<comment><USER13> WOW, can I ask what the most common genre was?

<comment><USER12> I didn't ask, but in the conversations we had on the topic, I never got the sense that was a thing that mattered to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The process was broken for seven months before anybody noticed?

If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies with other lists during that time.

<comment><USER15> I misread it the first time as one month (May->June) but it was May 2018 to June 2019(!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> They should just get rid of bestseller lists. They exist purely for marketing and for tricking chumps into buying mediocre books.

<comment><USER17> Discovery is challenging, how would you propose finding something new to read?

<comment><USER18> A lot of influential figures publish their reading lists, like Bill Gates [0], Elon Musk [1], and Patrick Collision [2]

[0]: [https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer- Books-201...](https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-2019)

[1]: [https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every- book-h...](https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-he- mentioned-on-twitter-with-tweets-aee4361f3513)

[2]: [https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf](https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf)

<comment><USER19> That seems like an even more questionable tool for deciding what to read than a best-seller list. Those guys are renowned for starting tech companies that made lots of money, not for their outstanding taste in books.

<comment><USER20> They are also very smart, which made them read/like interesting books.

If they read books ofc, in these cases they obviously do

<comment><USER21> >They are also very smart, which made them read/like interesting books.

This logic doesn't take us anywhere because there existed equally intelligent people who either worked in farm or meatshop or even might be working as a janitor instead of launching companies worth billions and recommending othes books.

And does being intelligent means not being evil? What if they posted these books to distract you while they go around reading something else which helps them build competitive advantage against masses.

I won't blind accept a reading suggestion from someone even if they happen to be commerically successful or they happen to be smarter.

<comment><USER20> So people post book reviews to distract you from doing something. Lol.

I still have a bigger respect for people that started a multi billion dollar company than a janitor. It doesn't mean I have no respect for them, but just a bigger one for someone that did something unique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's securities fraud

<comment><USER23> For which security?

<comment><USER22> I guess the joke wasn't clear enough: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/a...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything- everywhere-is-securities-fraud)

<comment><USER23> I actually wondered whether it was a reference to Matt Levine. Does literally every HN reader also read his news-letter?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Un-patched for months, could Cisco 0-day lead to another round of WannaCry? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sourceclear.com/blog/Un-patched-for-months-could-Cisco-0-day-lead-to-another-round-of-WannaCry---SourceClear/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6epyhj/cisco_0...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6epyhj/cisco_0day_cve20173881_has_been_unpatched_for/)</comment>


New Stock platform - <AUTHOR> http://tickmarkt.com/signup/hackernews09 I have a new site that allows you to write stock trading applications and see how they would perform. Its in beta but I would love feedback.<p>http://tickmarkt.com/signup/hackernews09 <comment><USER2> You need to have examples for the backtester and screener ASAP... I can't even figure out what language these should be written in... are they written in Javascript?

Also, it was difficult to figure out how to create a new application... Put a box around the "Create New" button to make it more obvious that that is a button.

Overall, the concept has merit... You need to make clear that this is a PROGRAMMABLE stock tracking website, since that seems to be the innovation here. Might be something I would use, once it's more polished.

Note that you app somewhat limits users to "programmers who are also stock traders", which could be a smallish niche... The barrier to adoption of your tool are high as well- Steep learning curve. Also, many such folks may not trust you enough to store their trading strategies on your site.

...You're going to have to create a _fantastic_ implementation of your idea before a critical mass of people will spend the time to learn the system- Long way to go.

But I can see what your trying to do and I think there is potential in this direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is javascript...thanks for your feedback

<comment><USER3> Is the backtester "script" executed server side? Why javascript?

<comment><AUTHOR> Both screener and backtester are executed client side. Its very opensocial style of development. Also since this is private funded I dont have money for servers on server side.

Also for the non programmers...the applications can be made public so non programmers can use the public of applications.. Also the app developers like in opensocial can throw ads on the screeners.

<comment><USER3> Could you upload or paste a (complete) example backtest script?

<comment><AUTHOR> The following code is for a backtester. I created the application on tickmarkt. It checks when an exponential moving average with 5 day lags crosses over the 10 day moving average and will open a trade. You might need a large time period for this to work or you can lower the lag and it will fire off sooner. I have some technical analysis indicators built into the system that I will soon open source as well.

here is some example backtester code:

var hasTrade = false;

function Init() { }

function Tick() { //5-day exponential moving average var ma5=analysis.Technical.ema('AAPL', 1 , 1 , 5 );

//10-day exponential moving average var ma10=analysis.Technical.ema('AAPL', 1 , 1 , 10 );

//invalid time data because of weekend if (ma5.length == 0 || ma10.length == 0) return;

if (ma5[0].value > ma10[0].value) { //open a trade if we dont have one if (hasTrade == false) {

          api.Broker.OpenTrade('AAPL',
                               100,
                   'open trade on cross');

         hasTrade = true;
       }

} else if (ma5[0].value < ma10[0].value) { //close a trade since we have one if (hasTrade == true) { api.Broker.OpenTrade('AAPL', -1100, 'close trade on cross');

          hasTrade = false;
       }

}

}

function Destroy() { }

<comment><USER3> can I email you at any particular address?

<comment><AUTHOR> tickmarkt at gmail

Sorry Edit its tickmarkt not tickmark

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a professional stock picker, but I found the interface confusing. After I made an account and logged in I was not sure what I should be doing or where I should go.

I managed to click around and find google, but then accidentally clicked a trade button and now I have an open trade for 3 shares of google at 100.17! I have no idea how that happened or what it means.

Your site is also a bit slow, but I'm assuming that is because you are under provisioned and this is an alpha.

Good luck.

<comment><USER5> "I found the interface confusing"

That's my experience as well. I'm not sure what the site is trying to do. I had to sign in just to find out.

Care to explain the site for us? I'm not a trader, so I might be missing something.

<comment><AUTHOR> The site is basically a website where you can write backtesters and screeners and there is a bit of social network/trading thrown in. Screeners and backtesters work on algorithms to actually find and trade stocks. I have traded in the past and always wanted something like this. There are software packages but they are expensive and you need a lot of money for them and the data feeds are expensive as well. My goal is to bring all this information in an easy to use way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please let me know what you think of the site. Its currently in stealth and I wanted to share it with the community.

</comment><comment><USER6> tried to sign up twice and got a "change you wanted was rejected" message</comment>


Cloudy Conway - <AUTHOR> http://www.vexorian.com/2015/05/cloudy-conway.html

<comment><USER2> This is such a great project – really awesome to see art and tech come together.</comment>