The borderless SIM is finally here - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/422401/goodbye-roaming-charges-the-borderless-sim-is-finally-here/

<comment><USER2> Instead of a SIM with one number that works across countries, the article discusses routing both a belgian and a luxembourgian number to the same SIM. The customer is then apparently billed by both telcos, depending on where they currently are. This seems like the worst solution to the roaming problem out there: Multiple phone numbers, relations to multiple carriers...

With (existing) competitors like OneSimCard or Project Fi, you get a single phone number, a single bill and (what seems to me like) a much better deal. Am I missing something there?

<comment><USER3> You are right in that it seems like a impractical solution and the providers should just figure out roaming.

As far as the competition goes: OneSimCard charges 25 cents per Megabyte, Project Fi doesn't really exist since you need an invite and it doesn't work on most phones.

<comment><USER4> Roaming exists, works, and is often horribly expensive to the user. This is basically a system for arbitraging that away using two numbers on one SIM rather than two SIMs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've just come back from Europe (Spain) for the the first time with my operator and their new free roaming plan - it was amazing.

I pay Three £15 p/m for unlimited data, lots of intra-Three calls and some messages/calls to other networks (in the country I'm in at the time) and can now do that not just in the UK but in Spain, the US, Australia and more ([http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home](http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home)). That's cheaper than most local operators and a much better example than whats offered here.

I'd wager it won't be long before Three sims are being picked up by tourists and used as their main operator back at home.

<comment><USER6> I'm using Three too with the same plan, but when I'm in a Feel At Home destination, I still pay if I send a texts to a local number. It is not included in my general texts allowance. Am I doing something wrong?

The data itself is free though, which is the most important for me. It is definitely better than having to go to a phone store and get a cheap sim.

<comment><USER7> Feel At Home basically means that your mobile will act the same as if you were in the UK.

Sending a text from the UK to a (for example) Spanish number incurs a cost outside of your allowance. So that same text would also incur a cost when you are in Spain.

<comment><USER8> I've set up Google Voice -> US SIP -> UK SIP -> 3 Mobile. This gives me a US number to give out to Americans (who don't want to dial my UK number) that they can text/call. I can then make calls when on Wifi or using a Phonecard app which automatically dials my UK SIP and forwards the call via the US SIP provider. I don't have to switch SIMs or give up my UK number.

This works well for me (since I travel between the US/UK often)

<comment><USER7> Can't you just use Google Voice on Three's 4g connection/Wifi to make/receive calls/texts on your Google Voice number using Hangouts?

What's the purpose of the two SIPs?

<comment><USER8> Three doesn't have any 4G when roaming, and the 4G isn't that great even in London (compared to say: Vodafone).

Texting with Google Voice is fine though.

The two sips are registered to the same installation of asterisk: The UK provider gives me a UK number and rates equivalent to a UK landline.

The US provider gives me a US number (which is registered with google voice) and rates equivalent to a US landline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So what is the advantage over having two separate SIMs and switching them at the border? You still have two telephone numbers with only one being active at a particular moment.

<comment><USER10> The advantage is not having to switch them... Your phone does it for you.

I mean, it isn't like the border between the Netherlands and Belgium is always straightforward[1].

[1] [http://www.iamdanw.com/wrote/what-are-borders- anyway/](http://www.iamdanw.com/wrote/what-are-borders-anyway/)

<comment><USER9> That's not even a workaround. I still need to give people both numbers and instruct them when they should call one or another. That's the pain carriers should address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This isn't as new or novel as the article makes it sound, though I suspect getting it done in Europe was difficult. Similar options have been available for years in China; most (all?) of the major carriers offer cross-border SIMs for Hong Kong and Macau, e.g. [1].

They're available in both prepaid and postpaid, and generally offer the same rate for calls, SMS, and data within major cities (i.e. Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, which probably covers 90% of cross-border travel.)

1\. [http://www.three.com.hk/website/appmanager/three/home?_nfpb=...](http://www.three.com.hk/website/appmanager/three/home?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=P200470391219567710594&lang=eng&pageid=561001)

</comment><comment><USER12> I've never understood why roaming charges are so scandalous. Surely the telecoms know if they dropped their prices they would make a lot more money?

<comment><USER13> Part of the problem is that country governments extracted a shitload of money out of the telcos. In Germany, the telcos paid a combined 96.000.000.000 € for the UMTS frequencies in 2000 (making 1200€ per citizen, assuming 80M citizens in Germany), and in 2010 another 3.600.000.000 €.

Now add the enormous capital requirement of first building a countrywide network of GSM BTS, then upgrade these to UMTS, then to LTE (and, of course, always having to upgrade the backhaul links) and you see why mobile phone operators try to squeeze any penny out of the customer's pocket they can.

<comment><USER14> 'extracted' as in 'run an auction to let the market sort it out'.

It's popular to blame governments for everything, but if market actors behave irrationally, there's nobody to blame but them.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, people are always saying "let the market decide". We ran a market. It decided.

<comment><USER15> to the detriment of the citizens of Germany, as they pay more for less than just about anyone in the EU for mobile data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you just need a global "page-me-if-somthing-horrid-happens" the Iridium based DeLorme InReach works well - there's a pay as you go plans for about $24 + $.50 per message.

The nice thing is they really do work anywhere, and the per-page-costs keep your family and coworkers from spamming you during a nice vacation - yet they can get ahold of you for a true emergency.

</comment><comment><USER17> Roaming just isn't a practical solution (way too expensive) but neither is this. Honestly swapping out SIMs between country isn't too difficult of a task, and likely saves you a ton of money when compared to roaming or this "borderless SIM." Lots of countries go with cheap prepaid options anyways.

<comment><USER18> The problem with swapping out SIMs is that people who have your phone number can't contact you.

AT&T Roaming typically costs about $500-$800/month with their international plan for $120/ 800 MB roaming, $150/Gigabyte. It's a pretty common plan for US road warriors who are probably racking up $20,000-$25,000 in Hotel/flight charges already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Also interesting: [http://www.politico.eu/article/data-telecoms-europe- divide/](http://www.politico.eu/article/data-telecoms-europe-divide/)

[http://www.transatel-datasim.com](http://www.transatel-datasim.com)

</comment><comment><USER20> I am customer of O2 in my home country - Slovakia and I currently live in Czech Republic. O2 recently came up with a program that allows me to pay exact same charges as I would at home (both phone and data). It is much simpler to have one number than numerous SIM cards...

<comment><USER21> O2 SK always had a somewhat funny relationship with Czech republic. It used to be cheaper to call from Slovakia or from roaming in CZ, than local Czech calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Don't Blackberry do flat rates globally, voice and data? At they did where I last worked and had a Blackberry. About $100 per month, unlimited (at least, that's how much it was charged internally).

</comment><comment><USER23> T-Mobile offers unlimited 4G in 113 countries for $90USD/month.

I travel often and haven't had any issues using it to call and text via Google Hangouts.

<comment><USER24> Is this a specific plan? The plans I know of with unlimited data in foreign countries are hardly 4G -- they might technically connect to 4G/LTE, but they are throttled to 128kbit/s. That's roughly equivalent to some of the 2G-3G transitional technology speeds. GPRS (2.5G) was 80kbit/s, EDGE (2.75G) was 2-3x that [0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Packet_Radio_Service#C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Packet_Radio_Service#Channel_encoding)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> travelling to Germany / France / Luxembourg next month and was wondering if there's a good solution for mobile data? I hear in germany you can't get a local sim card unless you are a resident. is that true?

<comment><USER3> For Germany that's false. You can get usually get one of the "no-frills" prepaid providers at any supermarket register (Medion Mobile at Aldi, Lidl Mobile at Lidl, jamobil at Rewe, ...). You will usually need internet to activate it.

I (native German, living in the US) usually just use my american T-Mobile SIM. Thanks to their free global data roaming, I don't have to care which country I'm in when visiting Europe.

It is "unlimited", but they throttle you to something like 10 kb/s. Still works fine for Maps/eMail/Facebook/... It's honestly not thaaat bad because I still had LTE, so the latency was great, just the throughput was mediocre. I was even able to use Facetime Audio. T-Mobile also supports WiFi calling on my iPhone, so as soon as I had WiFi, I was able to just call people back in the US for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sorry, but there is nothing new here. Skype has been providing this service for years now.

It could either be achieved by buying a "Skype number" in the country you are visiting, or by using "Skype To Go".

And you don't have to dual-sim, you can route numbers wherever you want.

<comment><USER27> And where does your data get paid for?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News Person Of the Year - <AUTHOR> Who is the HN POY for you? Since the Times selection is pretty limited. <comment><USER2> Elon Musk - SpaceX and Tesla have been on HN pretty consistently this year, and it's an inspiring option, too.

Snowden is not a bad choice, especially since he'll probably be snubbed by the Times in favor of the politically safe Miley Cyrus, but he's not really in tech. Satoshi Nakamoto should have been the HN POY last year (or next year once BTC goes _really_ mainstream).

<comment><USER3> How can you say Snowden is not "in tech"? He revealed the entire global internet to be something different than we thought it was. It is political but that doesn't mean it's not technology.

<comment><USER2> There's no question that the information he leaked concerns technology, but at the same time it's clear this is a throughly political problem. So that's how I can say that Snowden is not in tech, because he's not and the whole NSA storyline is only incidentally about tech. Believe me, I'm as pissed off about the whole affair as anyone, but this is a world stage event and I was thinking a HN POY could be, at least in principle, "one of our own", as poorly defined as that concept might be.

<comment><USER4> On the flip side, getting a job working at the NSA and smuggling out hundreds of Top Secret documents, talking to a bunch of reporters across the globe to orchestrate a controlled release of the information, all while seeking asylum and evading capture _is_ a pretty neat hack.

<comment><USER5> since you put it that way, I agree also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice idea, but let's clarify, it should be someone in technology, as opposed to politics or entertainment.

I nominate Bret Victor.

<comment><USER7> Bret Victor has been fantastic inspiration for me. I believed no programming video can make my jaw drop any longer, but Bret pulled it off. Hugely recommended: [http://vimeo.com/71278954](http://vimeo.com/71278954)

<comment><USER8> Aesthetics can be fun and entertaining, but a video has to have some new and novel ideas before its called jaw dropping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Edward Snowden.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a toss up between Snowden and Elon Musk. While I do believe Elon Musk will change the world we live in tomorrow, Snowden has dramatically changed our perception of the world we live in today.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't feel comfortable voting unless you make me log in with Facebook or Twitter...

<comment><USER12> That was a great way for Time to ensure that not a single vote would be cast for Snowden.

<comment><USER13> He was still winning the other day, so I'm not sure how that was a great way to keep people from voting for him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd personally go for Satoshi or/and Edward Snowden.

</comment><comment><USER14> Edward Snowden definitely, not for only personal acts but as an icon. This year has definitely been a year of surveillance scandals and we can all thank this man for taking the brave step and showing light on what governments really do. Small step for a man, giant leap for mankind, no less.

</comment><comment><USER15> Aaron Swartz

</comment><comment><USER16> I nominate Satoshi Nakamoto.

<comment><USER17> Satoshi Nakamoto is not a real person.

<comment><USER18> Well, if this is modeled after the Times' POY, then it's perfectly fitting. Former winners include You, The Protester, The American soldier, The Middle Americans, The Computer, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The suggestions made here in an HN Poll:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6801294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6801294)

</comment><comment><USER20> Satoshi couldn't be person of the year, he hasn't been heard from since '10! /s

<comment><USER21> And there is a chance he is not person.

<comment><USER22> That didn't stop TIME magazine in 2011 ("The Protestor"), or 2006 ("You").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this a HN person, or any person selected by HN? I think the former would be more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER24> Richard Stallman

</comment><comment><USER25> Aaron Swartz

</comment><comment><USER26> Michael O Church.

</comment><comment><USER27> Elon Musk, in my opinion. He is my modern day hero.

</comment><comment><USER28> Edward Snowden / Bret Victor / Elon Musk.

</comment><comment><USER29> Someone with sufficient karma should take the results here and re-post this as a poll.

<comment><USER19> As requested: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6801294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6801294)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> POY: the nucleus group of Aaron Swartz, Edward Snowden, and someone we should not forget to thank, Assange. Where, pray tell, would we be without them?

</comment><comment><USER31> Edward Snowden, undoubtly

</comment><comment><USER32> Edward Snowden

</comment><comment><USER33> Edward Snowden.

Lot's of Elon Musk's though. Let's vote him as Person of the Century.

</comment><comment><USER34> Lonnie Johnson [http://www.ajc.com/news/business/super-soaker-creator- awarde...](http://www.ajc.com/news/business/super-soaker-creator- awarded-729m-from-hasbro/nbjmm/)

</comment><comment><USER35> DPR

<comment><USER36> I second the nomination of The Dread Pirate Roberts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> [http://www.narendramodi.in/category/testimonials/](http://www.narendramodi.in/category/testimonials/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Edward Snowden

</comment><comment><USER39> Snowden isn't real, a 'Facebook Ghost Profile' is.

</comment><comment><USER40> John Carmack, leaving Id and join Oculus was awesome.

</comment><comment><USER41> Elon Musk for sure.

</comment><comment><USER42> Satoshi Nakamoto

let's drive BTC up to $10,000 before the crash!

<comment><USER43> I'm guessing you have a few you'd like to cash in on? ;)

<comment><USER42> Unfortunately not. I just enjoy watching technology eclipse another aspect of society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Elon Musk, by far.

</comment><comment><USER45> Reg Braithwaite

</comment><comment><USER46> Edward Snowden

</comment><comment><USER47> Aaron Swartz Edward Snowden

</comment><comment><USER48> Elon Musk.

</comment><comment><USER49> Elon Musk

</comment><comment><USER50> NSA

</comment><comment><USER51> Bill Gates

</comment><comment><USER37> Narendra Modi.

<comment><USER16> We are suggesting 'Hacker News Person Of the Year', not 'Politician of the Year'. 'Narendra Modi' is nominated for 'TIME's Person of the Year'. [http://ti.me/1i3OkHT](http://ti.me/1i3OkHT)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Bitcoin. easy.

</comment><comment><USER37> Narendra Modi

</comment><comment><USER53> Jack Dorsey

</comment><comment><USER54> 1\. Elon Musk

2\. Satoshi Nakamoto

3\. Edward Snowden

</comment><comment><USER55> The answers here expose the lack of gratitude and ethical backbone of certain HN readers. Snowden risked his life to expose the surveillance programs of the most powerful countries in the world. You could argue he did more for civil liberties than any other human being thats ever lived.

No one else even comes close in terms of taking personal risk for the benefit of the world.

Snowden FTW.</comment>


Windows Phone 7's Syncing Software to be PC-only - <AUTHOR> http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/35739/windows-phone-7-zune-software

<comment><USER2> _There will not be a Mac version of the software available_

I'll bet that the number of Mac users who get a Windows Phone will be very small.

</comment><comment><USER3> So they don't want to steal any of MAC's iPhone users? This makes no sense...</comment>


'Music' from /dev/urandom - <AUTHOR> http://blog.robertelder.org/bash-one-liner-compose-music/ <comment><USER2> Here is one with the blues scale. From time to time it grooves really nice.

      cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -v -e '/1 "%u\n"' | awk '{ split("0,3,5,6,7,10,12",a,","); for (i = 0; i < 1; i+= 0.0001) printf("%08X\n", 100*sin(1382*exp((a[$1 % 8]/12)*log(2))*i)) }' | xxd -r -p | aplay -c 2 -f S32_LE -r 24000

<comment><USER3> Here's Ryukyu (Okinawa) Japanese music scale

      cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -v -e '/1 "%u\n"' | awk '{ split("4,5,7,11",a,","); for (i = 0; i < 1; i+= 0.0001) printf("%08X\n", 100*sin(1046*exp((a[$1 % 8]/12)*log(2))*i)) }' | xxd -r -p | aplay -c 2 -f S32_LE -r 24000

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately markdown formatting has broken your code. I can make a guess based on where the italics starts and ends, but you might want to indent that code.

<comment><USER3> Oops, I'm sorry. Looks better now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is a recording created by someone on reddit:

[http://mirror.xwl.me/bash_music_aac.mp4](http://mirror.xwl.me/bash_music_aac.mp4)

The above is close to what it should sound like.

Here are the reddit comment threads, some of which contain instructions for OSX:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/48xf6k/bash_on...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/48xf6k/bash_one_liner_compose_music_from_entropy_in/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/48xj46/bash_one_line...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/48xj46/bash_one_liner_compose_music_from_entropy_in/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/48zvn4/bash_one_lin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/48zvn4/bash_one_liner_compose_music_from_entropy_in/)

Someone recorded what they got working on OSX, and it sounded terrible (not how it sounds on my Ubuntu machine). I haven't tested this on a mac since I don't have one.

I was surprised that many people suggested listening to the music for pleasure or inspiration. There are a few things I could do that would probably improve the sounds quality: One is experimenting with the sampling rate of the sin wave, and another is adjusting the for loop to make sure that it ends on the end of the sine curve close to y = 0. Right now, for some notes it will just stop halfway through close to y=1, and the next note will start at y=0. I think that is the source of the 'poping' sound between notes.

<comment><USER2> Those popping sounds give me the impression of a percussion instrument playing, which I find desirable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If you're a level 500 elite hacker like I am, you will note that the > cryptographic quality of numbers from /dev/urandom is not the same as > numbers from /dev/random. In our case, we don't want this operation to > block, so we use /dev/urandom.

This is wrong. See [http://www.2uo.de/myths-about- urandom/](http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/)

(The part about /dev/urandom not blocking is right though)

Edit: changed [http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/3936/is-a- rand-f...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/3936/is-a-rand-from- dev-urandom-secure-for-a-login-key) to the current link, since the current link is more to the point.

</comment><comment><USER7> For those moments when you need cryptographically secure background noise.

You can also pipe it directly to pcspkr for a real wake-up call:

        cat /dev/urandom > /dev/pcspkr

</comment><comment><USER8> Back in the day you could just do:

      cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio

[http://everything2.com/title/catting+weird+things+to+%252Fde...](http://everything2.com/title/catting+weird+things+to+%252Fdev%252Faudio)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is... is that blinking text at the bottom?

<comment><USER10> Yeah. It is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's great! Using:

        </dev/urandom hexdump -v -e '/1 "%u\n"' | ...

save you from spawning one process.

</comment><comment><USER12> Almost could replace Pandora for me. All I want is some somewhat melodious tones in the background anyway.

</comment><comment><USER13> > I only expected this to work on Ubuntu

And yet here's the command:

        cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -v -e '/1 "%u\n"' | awk '{ split("0,2,4,5,7,9,11,12",a,","); for (i = 0; i < 1; i+= 0.0001) printf("%08X\n", 100*sin(1382*exp((a[$1 % 8]/12)*log(2))*i)) }' | xxd -r -p | aplay -c 2 -f S32_LE -r 16000

There's nothing Ubuntu-specific there: it works fine on other Linuxes.

It's gotten more than a little annoying, this widespread equivalence between Ubuntu and Linux. Ubuntu is _a_ Linux distro, albeit hardly the best, most idiomatic or most traditional. It's just a single distro, out of many.

<comment><USER14> But lets admit that distros of Linux _have_ become idiomatic. Its reasonable to give a caveat when describing any Linux procedure. This is not an Ubuntu issue at all.

In fact, what's the point of different distros if they _aren 't_ idiomatic?

<comment><USER15> It's incorrect to assume that a shell script that uses tools like _xxd_ and __awk __is distro-specific. Almost every distribution ships the GNU coreutils and other GNU base tools. It 's going to work on basically every distribution. What makes distributions unique is their package manager, release and security philosophy, amount of cruft, etc.

<comment><USER14> Even the same distro line but different versions may have significant issues. This is why every build on top of Linux (e.g. Android) calls out a particular kernel version. Even a particular version for the _build machine_. Because things like command line tools differ over time. Versionology is a whole universe of hurt on Linux.

<comment><USER15> That's the cost of supporting code that is constantly being updated, you need to start freezing versions and backporting fixes. Also, I'm not sure what command line tools you're referring to as "differing over time". Kernel version freezing is mainly fear of new code (or out-of-tree vendor patchsets that depend very strongly on the kernel ABI which changes every few months -- but that's not user visible). Sure, if your system never changes anything you don't need to worry about software versions. But there are many other problems with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there a way to make it sounds more pleasant? The sine wave is a bit harsh...

<comment><USER17> The example from /r/coding[1] is very nice to listen to:

        awk 'function wl() {
            rate=64000;
            return (rate/160)*(0.87055^(int(rand()*10)))};
        BEGIN {
            srand();
            wla=wl();
            while(1) {
                wlb=wla;
                wla=wl();
                if (wla==wlb)
                    {wla*=2;};
                d=(rand()*10+5)*rate/4;
                a=b=0; c=128;
                ca=40/wla; cb=20/wlb;
                de=rate/10; di=0;
                for (i=0;i<d;i++) {
                    a++; b++; di++; c+=ca+cb;
                    if (a>wla)
                        {a=0; ca*=-1};
                    if (b>wlb)
                        {b=0; cb*=-1};
                    if (di>de)
                        {di=0; ca*=0.9; cb*=0.9};
                    printf("%c",c)};
                c=int(c);
                while(c!=128) {
                    c<128?c++:c--;
                    printf("%c",c)};};}' | sox -t raw -r 64k -c 1 -e unsigned -b 8 - -d

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/48zvn4/bash_one_lin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/48zvn4/bash_one_liner_compose_music_from_entropy_in/)

<comment><USER18> That's quite a delight for the ears. Reminds me of Stéphane Picq's work on the Dune computer game soundtrack, back in the early 90s. It had some similar sounds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone got this working on OSX afplay does not accept the same input :(

<comment><USER20> Another solution: [1]

        cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -v -e '/1 "%u\n"' | awk '{ split("0,2,4,5,7,9,11,12",a,","); for (i = 0; i < 1; i+= 0.0001) printf("%08X\n", 100*sin(1382*exp((a[$1 % 8]/12)*log(2))*i)) }' | xxd -r -p | sox -traw -r44100 -b16 -e unsigned-integer - -tcoreaudio

1: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/48xf6k/bash_on...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/48xf6k/bash_one_liner_compose_music_from_entropy_in/d0nu6ta)

<comment><USER21> Heads up, that is incredibly loud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of something similar, music from malloc, and file reads... by hooking with ld_preload.

Code: [https://github.com/gordol/ld_preload- sounds](https://github.com/gordol/ld_preload-sounds)

Preview: [https://soundcloud.com/glowdon/malloc-read-hook-self- compile](https://soundcloud.com/glowdon/malloc-read-hook-self-compile)

</comment><comment><USER23> I wrote something similar (but using Python), on how one can generate music using mathematical sequences such as Fibonacci's:

[http://pedrokroger.net/pascals-triangle- sound/](http://pedrokroger.net/pascals-triangle-sound/)

I used to spend a lot of time on The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences ;-)

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't know if I'm the only one who have noticed that, but on 64 bit machines you have to change "%08X\n" to "%016X\n". Although using %08X sounds interesting, the result is not a major scale and probably not the original intent of the code.

</comment><comment><USER25> Something a bit less random but on the same realm of things:

[http://countercomplex.blogspot.fi/2011/10/algorithmic- sympho...](http://countercomplex.blogspot.fi/2011/10/algorithmic-symphonies- from-one-line-of.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> I was listening to Esbjron Svensson Trio, and then I tried this...my ears...

<comment><USER27> If you're into jazz, you can check the label Rune Grammofon; you can start bands that are easy to listen to, such as Elephant9 (just listen to Fugl Fønix and try to resist the groove), and then get into the rest (woohoo, Shining). After that, you shouldn't find these bleep-bloops that hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Handy smoke test for a good RNG? Not sure I see any case where it would actually be useful for this in practice, but I find the idea amusing in theory.

<comment><USER29> You may be able to hear or see that a _very_ bad RNG is bad (there are certainly sufficiently bad ones for which you can), but you can not hear or see that one is good.

<comment><USER28> My thoughts exactly. You certainly wouldn't want to rely on this to identify a good RNG, but you might be able to catch a bad one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Who knew chaos sounds so melodious. You sir are a genius.

</comment><comment><USER31> I hope everyone is turning off CSS before copy-pasting this command-line into their terminal :)

[http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy- paste](http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste)

<comment><USER32> Always paste to the browser url bar and then copy again. This clears any extra tags you might carry over and will display anything that might be hidden. You could copy and paste to notepad, but the browser bar is closer.

<comment><USER31> Great point, however the browser bar is only a single line. I guess this is where a global shortcut to start a text editor would be useful.</comment></comment></comment>


China's mysterious Internet outage; speculation over a 'kill switch' - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/asia/chinas-mysterious-internet-outage-speculation-over-a-8216kill-switch/1636?tag=mantle_skin;content

<comment><USER2> Other reporting on this issue:

<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ND14Dj02.html></comment>


Yet Another Android Master Key Bug - <AUTHOR> http://www.saurik.com/id/19

<comment><USER2> Have you checked if APKs that take advantage of this bug are flagged by the Google Play Services verifier?

I can't imagine a legitimate reason to use these zip file corner cases, so it seems like the perfect sort of issue to detect and flag. And it would be a good spot-check of Google's verifier since they've had a few months to add the check.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is an _excellent_ question. I just now turned on that feature (I normally keep it off, in case Google is watching it and learns something about an exploit I might be working on) and verified that it correctly warns about both bug #8219321 and bug #9695860. It does _not_ , however, do anything to protect me against bug #9950697. I am now even more impressed with the extent to which they simply do not seem to care about proactively protecting users from these kinds of security issues :(.

<comment><USER2> When checking #8219321 and #9695860 did you make new APKs that were never "in the wild" or did you rely on existing examples?

While they haven't gone into details, I've gotten the impression that their checks are primarily based on recognizing bad APKs rather than recognizing bad constructs. While that's certainly a good defense to include (for attacks that are expensive to recognize and as a general backup), it is limited because it's inherently backward-looking. I guess I'm wondering how deep their "not proactive" approach goes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used Impactor to perform this test. Impactor generates all of the packages it needs at runtime (it includes enough of the aapt machinery to compile its own manifest files). In order to work around some situations where packages get "wedged" on some devices, all of the packages it generates have a unique package identifier based on the current timestamp. The APK files I was installing are thereby always "never before seen" files.

(FWIW, it is my understanding that Verify Apps is part of Play Services, so updates to it can be pushed at any time to all devices: if they previously were just sending a SHA-1 of the entire APK to the server, and now needed to check if the file size divided by the current day was a mersenne prime, they could push an update to do that on the client. They thereby are not limited to only "inherently backward-looking" techniques for this protection.)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the extra detail. It's good to see that Google is clearly doing more than just signature-style checks. I knew they _could_ do that sort of thing in Play Services, but, based on past coverage/discussion I wasn't confident that they _were_.

That still leaves open the question of security issues that aren't well-known, of course. Thinking about it a bit more, I can see the attraction of not adding extra complexity to the Play Services verifier until they "had to". If they're doing server-side checks and analysis that include undisclosed/low- profile issues that could be a reasonable balance (even if there is some lag time involved for simulations and the like), but if they're not...

Sadly, we're unlikely to ever know the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sidenote, but I love how the author used Twitter as a way to prove they had this information in the past.

Is this a common strategy now for proving timestamps?

<comment><USER4> Wasn't the old version of this trick sending the information in a well sealed envelope through the mail to get a dated postmark? More than 140 characters but you can only prove it once by unsealing the envelope!

<comment><USER5> I never understood this trick. Surely you could just mail an empty envelope ahead of time for the postmark, then put whatever you wanted to prove in it later?

<comment><USER6> I think the idea is that you keep it sealed until it is needed, then open it in some way that creates a legally admissible proof of the contents (maybe opened by a notary or something; and examined for postmark/envelope tampering by some sort of expert in that field, who can testify his training leads him to believe it is authentic.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey saurik, I just wanted to say that I've really enjoyed reading all of your "Master Key" analyses. It's fascinating to see an exploit broken down in such detail, and you have a knack for explaining things clearly and succinctly. Thanks for the good reads.</comment>


DeepSORT: Deep Learning to Track Custom Objects in a Video - <AUTHOR> https://nanonets.com/blog/object-tracking-deepsort/ <comment><USER2> This is an interesting and well-written post but in my experience for practical object tracking problems using a fine-tuned object detection model with a centroid tracking algorithm works well enough. Much more computationally efficient and you only have to annotate object examples rather than frame-by-frame object tracking.

I would have loved to have seen a benchmark comparing the two approaches to motivate the much more complex and labour intensive alternative ':)

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate your answer? I wonder how the second approach works, a link to an implementation would be helpful.

<comment><USER2> Yes, of course!

Essentially centroid tracking works like this:

       1. Detect objects (e.g. using TensorFlow) in each video frame

       2. Initialize an incrementing ID for each object at the first frame

       3. Compute the centroid of each object 4. For each object:

       4.1. Compute the Euclidean distance to every object centroid in the previous frame. The nearest object from the previous frame is the candidate assignment.

       4.2.a) If the distance is less than a hand-set threshold, use the object from the previous frame's ID for the object in the current frame.

       4.2.b) If the distance is above the threshold, assign a new ID

I explained it during my PyConZA keynote a few weeks ago. The vid isn't out yet but the slides are available here and it's much easier to explain visually: [http://bit.ly/pycon_keynote_slides](http://bit.ly/pycon_keynote_slides)

Feel free to email me if you get stuck or need some help implementing it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i think the idea of making kalman filter parameters learnable so a deep learning algorithm can judge appearance of the object and not just location is super neat. watching the algorithm in action makes me uncomfortable though. creepy things are in order in our future.

<comment><USER5> In some sense this is what a particle filter already does, but this allows greater learning capacity (hence also huge risks of overfitting on specific surface statistics in a given dataset).</comment></comment>


NASM Tutorial (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/nasmtutorial/ <comment><USER2> Assembly is still quite useful in a number of circumstances. The compiler was generating terrible code for a ticket (spin) lock, and rewriting in assembly helped considerably [1].

Its also still the best way to get the most out of AVX and SSE. I find the register allocation to be extremely poor when using intrinsics.

1\. [https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB/blob/unstable/src/fastloc...](https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB/blob/unstable/src/fastlock_x64.asm)

<comment><USER3> i agree with this, but find the complexity of writing assembly with modern processors instruction sets requires quite specialized knowledge.

<comment><USER4> It is, but someone needs to write compiler backends.

<comment><USER5> It is quite scary to think that less and less people know how to write good assembly. So in a few years (decades?) we will have to rely on backends, with almost no one knowing how they really work, or how to write another one.

<comment><USER6> Luckily it seems working on language design and compiler stuff is stuff is considered cool, almost as cool as game programming so I'm not too worried yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hello Nineties. Are you home? I miss you.

I don't believe I've really thought or heard of Nasm for the last two decades, but boy is it time for me to dig it out again and get assembling. For absolutely nothing but the sheer fun of it and for reconnecting with my hardware.

Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know the best way to run assembly code on Windows?

As usual, I seem to recall this is one of the many things that is easy in Linux and almost impossible on Windows.

<comment><USER9> Well, since we're talking about NASM, go to [https://www.nasm.us/](https://www.nasm.us/) and download the latest stable build for Windows.

<comment><USER8> Does that use MINGW though and require you to build all that junk on Windows?

<comment><USER10> nasm is a single .exe

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, NASM is really a blast from the past for me. 80386 assembly was my second "language" that I learned, after various forms of BASIC (on TRS-80 and QuickBASIC). In the mid-90's I was a teenager, and would write most of my code in QuickBASIC, and make optimized code in NASM. QuickBASIC was a compiled BASIC, but still pretty slow on a 386, so about half of my code base ended up being assembly.

At one point, I made my own pseudo-language, which was actually just a few dozen commands that would be translated into NASM, to make programming in assembly much easier to deal with. I ran out of room on my 40mb hard drive, and also ran out of backup floppies that worked (I would 3x backup my important stuff, because the mid-90's was a terrible time for reliable magnetic media on a budget), so I would periodically delete source code that I had spent weeks programming. The interpreter was one of those casualties, which, thinking back, was a really dumb move (I was 15 or so, cut me some slack!), because I still kept a lot of programs that needed that interpreter to compile. I have those codebases to this day, and can run the executable on my retro DOS machines, view the code, but no compilation :-(

I can't remember what my old assembler was, but I do remember NASM was a dream compared to whatever other assembler I was running at the time. I'm happy to see that it is still kicking.

In case anyone is wondering why I would be running a 386 in the mid 90's with a 40mb hdd (and 1mb RAM!), it's just because my parents had the time had no money, and to them a computer was a computer - they couldn't see the advantage of 1mb vs 16mb of RAM, people in general were much less computer savvy. It wasn't until my 30's that my mother realized that my time programming computers as a teenager was actually something productive!

<comment><USER4> On my CS degree compiler assignment, I got to learn a neat trick from our teacher that I still use when advising someone trying to write a compiler.

Basically, our IL was just a bunch of NASM macros.

So yeah not good at all for doing register assignments or writing any kind of performant code, but it was a binary generated by our toolchain anyway, and it felt good.</comment></comment>


Pavlov.js – Reinforcement learning using Markov Decision Processes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nathanEpstein/pavlov.js

<comment><USER2> The name is annoying since what Pavlov studied was more like supervised learning (prediction given input/output)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can definitely understand wanting to classify Pavlov as supervised learning. I think it's a murky issue because supervised and reinforcement are very closely related (and it is frequently possible to reframe problems of one type as problems of the other depending on what type of model one uses).

My two main reasons for going with this name are as follows (if people see issues in my logic, I'm happy to be convinced):

1) Reinforcement learning gets its name from the behaviorist psychology concept of reinforcement in which an agent's actions are met with rewards in order to shape that agent's future behavior. This is precisely the kind of response conditioning that Pavlov is well known for.

2) The key difference is what the training data look like.

In a supervised learning problem, the training data are input/output pairs (a stimulus and an appropriate action).

In reinforcement learning, the training data are input and reward pairs (an action and the reward applied to that action).

I would argue that Pavlov's experiments more like the latter case - the dogs are not shown 'this is the correct action for this stimulus', they are shown 'this is the reward for this stimulus'.

<comment><USER3> Markov decision processes is an old, mature, at times deep, and polished field. Names include R. Bellman, E. Dynkin, R. Rockafellar, D. Bertsekas.

There are connections with scenario aggregation, potentials, linear-quadratic- Gaussian certainty equivalence, currents of sigma algebras, the strong Markov property, stopping times, and much more.

Can we be more clear on just what the Markov processes involved actually are and, then, how they are to be used?

<comment><AUTHOR> The README links to a blog post ([http://nepste.in/jekyll/update/2015/02/22/MDP.html](http://nepste.in/jekyll/update/2015/02/22/MDP.html)) which details how the library is implemented from the definition of a MDP.

For a more rigorous treatment, Andrew Ng's notes ([http://cs229.stanford.edu/notes/cs229-notes12.pdf](http://cs229.stanford.edu/notes/cs229-notes12.pdf)) are an excellent resource.

<comment><USER3> Your first reference is good enough -- it's okay.

All I saw was the Github page of gibberish -- I don't use Github whatever the heck it is. But your URL was fine.

So, the work is a relatively routine application of classic work from optimization going way back, e.g., to Bellman.

The "Reinforcement learning" terminology looks like a new label for some quite ancient wine.

I've wondered what _machine learning_ had that was good and new, and so far I've seen some that is good but not new and some that is new but not good.

For an application, it would be good to justify the Markov assumption, that is, that the past and future of the process are conditionally independent given the present.

For a more detailed treatment, I'd recommend, say,

E. B. Dynkin and A. A. Yushkevich, 'Controlled Markov Processes'.

<comment><USER4> Hi - in a previous comment you mention a paper you wrote that describes a distribution-free multivariate anomaly detector (this is the comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9580929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9580929))

Would you mind emailing me a copy of it please? Address in profile. Thanks in advance!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cerne Abbas Giant: Snails show chalk hill figure 'not prehistoric' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-53313064 <comment><USER2> For context, it is fairly well-established through historical records that the figure is not ancient, but was made perhaps in the 17th century as a satirical portrait of Oliver Cromwell [there are other theories]. So it's unlike the really prehistoric horse figures (eg [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse)). Good to have the snails confirm this!

<comment><USER3> > Early antiquarians linked the giant with the Anglo-Saxon deity Helis, others > have said he is the classical hero Hercules, while some believe he was > carved during the English Civil War as a parody of Oliver Cromwell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cerne Abbas [0]. One of the few entire hills in the UK that is arguably NSFW and certain elderly aunts.

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

<comment><USER4> I grew up in Dorchester, only a few miles away from Cerne Abbas. During primary school, when I was 7 years old, we went on a field trip there. The giant's anatomy led to some fairly obvious questions from my classmates and me that were never satisfactorily answered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's amazing to me that our civilization could lose record of something like this so quickly. Like imagine if someone just stumbled upon a 30 foot tall nude statue which kinda looks like richard nixon and no one had any idea who made it or how long it had been there.

</comment><comment><USER6> > There has also been a suggestion his significant anatomy is in fact the > result of merging a smaller penis with a representation of his navel during > a re-cut by the Victorians.

Well, before the invention of email spam, they had to advertise those pills _somehow_.

</comment><comment><USER7> That gut feeling of looking at something fake...

Same with the Golden Hat discussed here before.

Is the medieval period more prone for attribution of fabrications?

<comment><USER6> I don't think it could be said to be fake as such. It's likely that no-one was pretending when it was constructed that it was particularly old; it's just that people much later on assumed it was old because it was similar to other old stuff.</comment></comment>


With 230M active users, Talking Tom Cat apps are bigger than Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/10/talking-tom-cat-outfit7-apps

<comment><USER2> Everyone seems to be missing the irony of the situation.

Twitter despite loosing $500M a year etc etc is an almost $30B market cap that is bigger than a lot of more traditional companies with a business model!

Whereas, Outfit7 is a 20-something person operation that is brining in millions in recurring revenue every month (200K on Xmas Day 2011).

<comment><USER3> Twitters revenue is more than half a billion a year. Outfit7 is nowhere near this.

Combined with the global application of twitter versus a children's game, the potential value is far far higher with twitter.

Your logic is akin to me saying my small company made six figures this year, so I'm worth more than twitter.

<comment><USER4> _potential value_

Sorry but that makes me chuckle. If I had a nickle for all of the "potential value" calculations of now dead businesses, I'd have a lot of "actual value" in my bank account.

Are we so far removed from the last crash that potential value is still considered equal to actual cash money?

<comment><USER2> That's the thing. The value is not "potential" as it would have been when Twitter was still a startup. As of right now the company has an about 30B market cap ... as big as Raytheon, for example, and bigger than LinkedIn, Northrop Grumman Corporation, BEIERSDORF, Tesla and T-mobile.

<comment><USER4> Share price drops (which can happen for many reasons) and that market cap looks similarly foolish. Market cap is only as impressive as the product or services the company actually offers. The companies you list have real products for sale in mature markets. Twitter is still trying to figure out how to monetize effectively in a very fickle market (free social networking) .. I don't think Northrop Grumman is having trouble figuring out how to make money selling fighter jets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They have 14 apps, and I suspect they may have arrived at this number by adding together the active user counts for each app. So, if I have all 14 apps, then I might count as 14 unique active users.

<comment><USER6> Apart from that in my case my 2 year old loves these apps so I've bought them in 3 app stores and installed on 5 devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it interesting that I've had a physical 'Talking Tom' (as in, a 15 inch tall plastic cat in a pose on its hind legs with a keypad for a chest) for at least 2 years. And no idea it was an app.

It cost about $5 in a local market. Pressing #9 on the keypad allows lagged realtime speech playback (from whatever it hears) accentuated in tone and speed.

For the tactile touch, the physical one is great for young kids.

</comment><comment><USER8> The nieces have these apps installed. The new "My Talking Tom" is essentially a Tamigotchi with in-app purchases (if anyone is old enough to remember those toys..)

Feed it, play with it, and it grows up and demands ever-pricier food. We haven't found the point yet where the cost of the food exceeds the coins you make by just playing the game, but I expect those curves intersect.

<comment><USER9> > if anyone is old enough to remember those toys..

Ouch. Are we at this point now where kids born in the mid 80's are "old"?

Soon you're going to be telling me kids these days have newfangled devices that have better graphics than my yellow X-Men LCD handheld game!

I think I may still have a Tamagotchi and Digimon sitting around in my basement.

<comment><USER10> There is a classic rock station here that plays Nirvana. Classic rock, 90's music. wtf is that?

<comment><USER11> "classic" in that context refers to the track being of an outstanding quality that it's appeal would be timeless, rather than the age of the track at this current point in time.

It's a little bit like how Classical radio stations play modern compositions. It's the Classical style rather than age.

<comment><USER10> No one thinks that.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_rock](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_rock)

This is the definition that people expect when they hear 'Classic Rock' -

"In the United States, the classic rock format features music ranging generally from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, primarily focusing on hard rock and blues rock popularized in the 1970s"

Also, Nirvana is grunge or Alternative, not Classic Rock.

<comment><USER11> I think you're getting too hung up on genre names and missing the bigger picture.

I used to see the same thing in the electronic music scene. Eventually it lead to half a dozen different subgenres defined primarily by the tone of the kick drum. It was nuts.

My point being this is a commercial radio station, normal rules of music snobbery don't apply. Thus their definition of the station is simply popular guitar music that isn't being hammered on the teeny stations nor offends any major demographics. And grunge or not, _Nevermind_ was a popular album with "poppy rocky singles".

By loosening their definition of "classic rock" they're attempting to appeal to the largest number of people. Thus my original statement stands.

<comment><USER12> Similarly, "modern rock" stations frequently play music from the late 60s and 70s. It's just what people expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _The Talking Tom and Friends apps aren't just for kids_

Really? These apps are also directed at adults? I find that exceptionally hard to believe.

<comment><USER14> My GF is 29 and she also uses this app. Although I find it hard to believe too:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Part of the reason is because this is one of those apps that annoys the hell out of you to "upgrade" and get more crap. I uninstalled them pretty quick.

The apps are all basically the same with different characters, and they're annoying even if your kids enjoy them for a bit.

</comment><comment><USER16> Selling virtual money to children...

</comment><comment><USER17> Talking Tom Cat versus Twitter has to be one of the worst comparisons I've seen in a while. As a small curiosity at the bottom of this article... fine. As part of the headline and lede? Come on, it's ridiculous.

<comment><USER18> Honest question: Why?

(Full disclosure: long term twitter naysayer here : )

<comment><USER17> Twitter is not competing with that cat. At all. The comparison tells us absolutely nothing meaningful at all: you can be wildly successful and have less users than TTC, or you can have way more users than TTC and be doing terribly. In no way, shape, or form should TTC be used as a measuring stick for Twitter's value or success. Again, I think it's sort of an interesting statistic, but featuring it so prominently is designed to hold the comparison up as something Very Meaningful & Insight™... which it just isn't, and I can't begin to fathom the rationale for why it would be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My daughter loves Tom and Angela.

She sings all their love songs and I know them very well for I repeat them silently while coding all day.

</comment><comment><USER4> The two key factors to these (IMHO crappy apps) are the fact that the animal echos what the child says in a high-pitch funny sounding voice, and when "hit" it reacts. Rinse, repeat (a million times) and you have a hit for the 2-4 year old age range.

Wish there was an app that did away with the "hitting" feature but it is what it is.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone help me estimate the valuation of Outfit7? I can't seem to find it anywhere. Many thanks in advance!

<comment><USER21> I doubt you'll find it since it's a private Slovenian company.

<comment><USER16> The founder may be Slovenian, but the company is not.

Looks like it is registered in Cyprus.

[http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/sn...](http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=134284315)

\-----

[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fpodjetnistvo.finance.si%2F335680%2FOutfit7-Do- bogastva-z-zabavo-na-dotik&act=url)

This article states they were first registered in Slovenia with the name Ekipa7 then they moved the company to Cyprus with the name Outfit7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fun fact. The founders of Outfit7 went from nothing to richest Slovenians in about two years! I always like to use them as an example when people from my home country say that the only way to get rich is by being a crock.

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe this will be the impetus the Guardian needs to stop reporting random twitter posts as though they were news.

Or maybe we'll start seeing "breaking news" on cat activities.

<comment><USER24> I don't see the connection. It is true that there are relatively few Twitter users, but those users tend to be exactly the kind of people that make news - politicans, celebrities, etc.

So if anything it makes even more sense that news outlets would use Twitter as a source.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ideas for startups [Chrome and Safari only] - <AUTHOR> https://ideasforstartups.appspot.com/show

<comment><AUTHOR> The Github: [https://github.com/humanarity/ideas-for- startups](https://github.com/humanarity/ideas-for-startups)

Press space or click lightbulb to get an idea.

Click the tick or press 'a' to add it.

Sign in with Google to add and vote.</comment>


Three.js: JavaScript 3D engine for canvas, svg, and WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/mrdoob/three.js#readme

<comment><USER2> The demos are really mind-blowing. Stuff that I never expected to come so fast to the browser are becoming a reality. This is really exciting stuff for me. I will definitely use some of these libraries (linked to from the page) in a few upcoming canvas based projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.learningwebgl.com> is an incredible site for learning about webgl. Here is a list of WebGL frameworks listed on their wiki: <http://learningwebgl.com/cookbook/index.php/Main_Page> (scroll to the bottom)

I'm personally using O3D right now. I've heard good things about the others such as GLGE

<comment><USER4> how are you going about learning o3d? it seems like the documentation effort stopped when they switched to webgl.

<comment><USER3> Well, the docs are a little out of date but most of it works as it did before. I had about 3 lines to change when I started using the webgl version. (details of what needs change is available here: <http://code.google.com/p/o3d/wiki/GettingStarted>)

Some parts are not yet implemented but I've managed to get work done without using any of them. The core devs are often on the mailinglist: <http://groups.google.com/group/o3d-discuss>

The repos are active, last update was last week. I just use whatever they have in SVN right now, the packages on their webstite is very outdated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm getting 60 fps approximately for the spinning cube with chrome 6 on Ubuntu Lucid and my laptop has a core i3 with built in arrandale based GPU, not an nvidia or ati one.

Not long ago, on an older laptop, I was getting the same fps for native Linux apps. Seems browsers are acquiring native capabilities, but at a faster rate :)

<comment><USER6> It seems to be capped at 60FPS. But it's the simplest demo, my results for the others are nowhere near 60FPS, most aren't even usable unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> I get 1FPS on the terrain generation one. Still cool :)

<comment><USER7> I suspect you're using MacOS? Chrome/Safari on MacOS perform horribly slow on some of these demos. CoreGraphics seem to be the culprit.

<comment><USER3> For some reason I'm getting horrible crashes on my app (has worked great for months. Still works great on Linux and Windows) since chrome switched to gpu rendering for everything. I haven't found the issue yet but it's really odd.

<comment><USER8> Did you already try to update GPU driver?

I had really bad crashes (high pitch noise, bright white flash, driver killed) on Firefox 4 and Chrome 7 when they started to use HW acceleration and problems went away after the update.

Though this was on Windows 7, no idea about OSX.

<comment><USER3> No luck on that, I checked and there was in fact a graphics update but that didn't affect the behavior. My next step is to try to figure out what is causing it to make a bug report.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yea - there's a great project using this for parametric 3D design in the browser: <http://CloudScad.com>. Has the ability to produce 3D printable files too.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's really crazy is how well these demos work on my Android phone.

</comment><comment><USER11> mrdoob is a genius

</comment><comment><USER12> Excellent Demos. The speeds these browser implementations are reaching are far better than I originally expected us to be at this point.

</comment><comment><USER13> can i make 3-d surface plots with this library? are there any alternatives to facilitate that?</comment>


ONNX Runtime: cross-platform, high performance scoring engine for ML models - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/onnxruntime <comment><USER2> Now with telemetry on windows!

Otherwise a much needed standardization effort for model interoperability and serialization.</comment>


How to Build a Software Consultancy in the Middle of Nowhere - <AUTHOR> http://marcusblankenship.com/post/55883019492/how-to-build-a-software-consultancy-in-the-middle-of

<comment><USER2> It's great to read about stuff like this - which I would argue is what most of software business around the world is - not a hyper-growth venture funded social consumer startup not making money, but a "small" "life style" non scalable but steadily growing business and pertinent advice.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. My next post is on the "Joy of Being Small". Most people have goals to get HUGE, but there's huge freedom in doing your startup as a "second job", and keeping it small. ;-)</comment>


Cholera 101: Why an Ancient Disease Keeps on Haunting Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/11/04/500664156/cholera-101-why-an-ancient-disease-keeps-on-haunting-us <comment><USER2> seems the answer is European imperialism

<comment><AUTHOR> Or mutants: [http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/07/us/clue-to-why-cystic- fibr...](http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/07/us/clue-to-why-cystic-fibrosis-has- survived.html)</comment></comment>


Google's Android Gains The Most Mobile Share In February - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/android-gains-more-subscriber-share-2010-4

<comment><USER2> Android's market share is _infinitely_ larger than it was in mid '08.</comment>


Suckless conference 2015 - vezzy-fnord http://suckless.org/conference/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hope you guys had a good time. I still miss Uriel. I hope someone stood in for him and ripped your ideas apart, particularly the C++.

</comment><comment><USER2> I love the ideal of keeping things simple. I did my first steps in C studying dwm code and making my own window manager.

That said, simplicity can obviously be taken too far. These tools do not enough to be usable in practice.

Why would I want a binary which does nothing besides warping the X11 pointer? At least do a little more, like xwit. (not that I've used either)

dwm also turned out to be impractical for me. Didn't work well for some applications like Gimp. Tiling terminals I also find impractical because I like them to be a certain size (80 columns) and that's not supported by tiling. The most important wm action for me is switching and rotating between 2-3 windows (simultaneously visible _as much as possible_). Stacked windows and Alt-Tab turn out to be better at that kind of thing.

Just tried that "sent" tool which I find nice and kind-of-usable. But so many lines of C. And a hand-rolled UTF-8 parser which discards text silently after decoding errors. Couldn't that be hacked in Python as a much shorter throw away script? Extreme portability is bogus if the software can be replaced in a few hours work. Plus, if you neglect to use higher-level libraries and tie yourself to low-level POSIX and X11, portability actually suffers.

<comment><USER3> _because I like them to be a certain size_

This was the biggest annoyance when I (briefly) tried a tiling WM - they are definitely not for those who like resizing windows independently and overlapping them so as to show only the relevant bits without having to resize.

<comment><USER4> In case you ever want to try one again; dwm most definitely supports resizing windows independently and floating them. See [http://dwm.suckless.org/dynamic_window_management](http://dwm.suckless.org/dynamic_window_management).

<comment><USER2> It was tedious last time I tried because you had to remember what windows are tiled and what floated and explicitly switch between the layers. And only rotating was supported, not Alt-Tab style LRU switching. Alt-Tab works the best for the most common case of 2 "hot" windows because you don't have to remember the order of the windows regarding rotation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Suckless inspired my naming of sxi: [https://github.com/serprex/sxi](https://github.com/serprex/sxi) & dwm served as the base from which I learnt to create nobox: [https://github.com/serprex/nobox](https://github.com/serprex/nobox)

Good stuff. Though seeing dwm have a null-check-before-free made me squirm. Have been using st for awhile now, it's nice, bit of a hassle to get backspace working & I sometimes miss being able to scroll back over console output

The only-one-file philosophy seemed to be a bit of a hassle where st had to turn down a wayland patch. One would think that it could be split into st- common.c, st-x11.c, & st-wl.c where the rendering backend is abstracted

stalin is neat but I personally feel using git to distribute binaries suboptimal. I'd prefer if there was a /build directory where one could git clone submodules & run a /build/install.sh to update the system. But that'd be something else by then I suppose & I haven't looked into it _that_ much to really critique

surf seems like a cop out using webkit

<comment><USER6> "Suckless inspired my naming of sxi: [https://github.com/serprex/sxi](https://github.com/serprex/sxi) & dwm served as the base from which I learnt to create nobox: [https://github.com/serprex/nobox"](https://github.com/serprex/nobox")

Any screenshots of nobox that I could see ?

<comment><USER5> Not really. It's chromeless, doesn't render anything. So you boot into a black screen & Alt+Q opens st in the upper left corner (this could change by modifying nobox's st invocation with geometry options)

I have st invoked in my xinitrc so that st is open as soon as I start nobox. I don't use a file manager so everything I do happens through st besides opening firefox with Alt+A or showing time with Alt+C (I use to have more shortcuts but over time have reduced my usage. I use to have Alt+S to open SciTE but have since transitioned to vim)

Anyways since you asked here's a screenshot I took just now after having opened GIMP: [http://imgur.com/pjSe3pN](http://imgur.com/pjSe3pN)

Since nobox isn't a tiling window manager it doesn't have any issues running GIMP in multi-window mode, besides my preference for unique mode: [http://imgur.com/Qf2PvhO](http://imgur.com/Qf2PvhO)

<comment><USER6> thanks - appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> suckless is awesome! xmonad would totally suck without dmenu, i found zathura because of their "rocks" page, and st[+] has unicode support now, apparently?! might be time to switch from urxvt...

i'm not saying "suckless all the things!" these people have made my daily life easier, though.

[+] [http://st.suckless.org/](http://st.suckless.org/)

<comment><USER8> xmonad has a built-in (xmonad-contrib) program launcher prompt that doesn't require an extra program and is more comfortable to use. There are other prompts included as well and you can build more prompts in Haskell. st used more memory and was slower than xterm last time I tried. I try using urxvt or st and only xterm works without problems or slowdowns. We may be using it in different ways and exercise different features of the terminal emulators :).

<comment><USER9> > st used more memory and was slower than xterm

Since st has no scroll buffer, theoretically it's impossible for st to consume more memory than xterm. If st does eat up more, it should be because of its screen buffer, whose size is decided by the size of its window.

Also, yes, the rendering portion of st is not the fastest. I know it pretty well because I implemented it like an year ago. It has been improved, but it's still kinda hacky due to lack of proper Unicode layout engine (or normalization). And what makes things worse is that existing layout engines(ICU, harfbuzz, etc) are just "sucks" for suckles community, while making a new one is not feasible AFAIK.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand what you're saying about the three different buffers and if you mean that there's a hidden buffer I don't see in xterm but which is used somewhere else in the stack.

I exclusively use bitmap fonts in terminals and editors for crisp and clear text and cannot get bitmap fonts to work in st config.h anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like being a minimalist FOSS community, they would only write in C and C++? No Python, Java?

<comment><USER11> I think they'll avoid C++ as well: [http://suckless.org/sucks/](http://suckless.org/sucks/)

<comment><USER12> >The suckless way is to have a short usage and a descriptive manpage. The complete details are in the source.

Can't agree with that. Also this reminds me to the chapter about documentation in the "UNIX Haters Guide"[1]. (I recommend everyone read it for an alternative viewpoint about UNIX, although most of it is obsolete)

The GNU info system is actually a pretty good attempt to fix the mess that is classical UNIX documentation. No, the source shouldn't be a documentation source. It's for programmers only, and it can be a reference, like man pages. A good info page can provide a full manual from which someone that is not familiar with the program/programming interface can learn how to proceed from scratch. Also, unlike man pages, info pages are hyperlinked. I agree that the info program itself is not very user friendly tho, maybe that's the reason it's not as popular as man pages or HTML documentation in the project website.

[1]: [http://richard.esplins.org/static/downloads/unix-haters- hand...](http://richard.esplins.org/static/downloads/unix-haters-handbook.pdf)

<comment><USER13> _> Can't agree with that._

You don't have to. When I first found out about the suckless project, it seemed completely inaccessible, due to the lack of in-depth documentation. After reading around a bit, it seems intentional. My impression was that suckless doesn't aim for quantity, but for quality, even among its userbase, hence the lack of documentation is an entry barrier, a minimum of technical literacy required to get in. Look at the source and you don't need a wiki. My gut reaction says, that's quite elitist - which itself is negatively connoted when everyone aims for widespread adoption and usability. In the end, I agree with this idea. Software is supposed to serve a purpose. It doesn't have to suit everyone. It can be for a selected few, and still be a great project. What changed my mind was that dwm doesn't use configuration files. I came from openbox and more than once broke the menu because of a syntax error in the xml-based config. In dwm, you change the source config and recompile. This way, any and all errors are returned to you, you can fix it and try again, without ever risking any configuration issues or breakages. They do the same with st, their terminal. I'm absolutely convinced by this approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like the underlying idea of suckless- and would put them in the same category as an academic attempt to build an OS, language et al in 20,000 lines of code.

There ought to be a set of principles we can extract - KISS probably. Ignore project plans ?

<comment><USER15> That plus some attitude?

> Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to > make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No > novices asking stupid questions.

<comment><USER14> "Elitist" != capable of modifying and compiling code.

That's _literacy_ vs _illiteracy_. I approve

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They mention that both GCC and Clang 'suck', but I don't see alternative in the 'rocks' category.

<comment><USER5> scc, suckless C compiler, is in progress: [http://git.suckless.org/scc](http://git.suckless.org/scc)

<comment><USER3> The source reminds me of the BSD one... I'm a little surprised that the parser is a plain recursive-descent one instead of operator-precedence/precedence- climbing[1][2] since the latter definitely feels like something the Suckless philosophy would highly agree with: extremely concise and elegant.

[1] [https://www.engr.mun.ca/~theo/Misc/exp_parsing.htm](https://www.engr.mun.ca/~theo/Misc/exp_parsing.htm)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think defining yourself by a negative is not a good place to start.

But good luck to them.

<comment><USER18> This comment is worthless. This obsession HN has with picking apart simple details like this to achieve some sense of superiority based on your preference to name things differently is ridiculous. Judge them based on the merits of the software they write, not based on the name they use for it. After all, Linux's creator must have been an egomaniac to name it after himself - it'll never take off.

<comment><USER19> The "Suckless" moniker gives a hint that they're about software quality, and is cute and playful enough that I actually like it.

But having spent a few moments clicking around their site, I have literally no idea what the basic idea is, who they are, what they've accomplished, or why it might be interesting to learn more about them.

<comment><USER20> Seriously? The first 2 paragraphs of the home page:

Home of dwm, dmenu and other quality software with a focus on simplicity, clarity, and frugality.

Read more about our philosophy and join us on the mailing list.

<comment><USER19> Sorry, but what the heck is dwm, dmenu? Where is your philosophy statement that can be read? I'm sure everything you're doing is great, but people aren't going to join a mailing list before they at least have a real interest in what you're doing. The current web page does very little to inform someone starting from zero. At least someone as thick as me. Cheers.

<comment><USER21> Hi, I love you. You are a normal person on HN trying to honestly make sense of the world of technology, and not taking any crap from all of the "Haha, U srsly don't know about xvzz and zxcz, LOL" types of people around here. I just love that!

<comment><USER19> Thanks. Someone seems to think i'm filled with "ire", when all I was expressing was my genuine experience of not feeling engaged or intrigued by a website. The responses so far seem very defensive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Complain HN: The new GitHub's layout is a monstrosity - <AUTHOR> I hope they will revert this. <comment><USER2> We've moved the comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617229), which is currently on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another concurrent thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617229)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> That was the best thing to do, thank you dan for moving this, better it did not reach the first page with this title.</comment>


Slicehost: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) 32-bit and 64-bit Images Available - <AUTHOR> http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2010/4/30/ubuntu-10-04-lts-lucid-lynx-32-bit-and-64-bit-images-available

<comment><USER2> Really? It's news when a VPS provider adds a new image? Heck, in that case... [http://blog.linode.com/2010/04/29/ubuntu-10-04-lts-lucid- lyn...](http://blog.linode.com/2010/04/29/ubuntu-10-04-lts-lucid-lynx/) was announced yesterday.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was on the front page yesterday... <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305749>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was talking the the Rackspace dudes at PyCon (I'm a Slicehost customer since before they were bought) and apparently the same backend infrastructure is cheaper if you buy it on a 'Rackspace cloud' branded plan rather than a 'Slicehost' plan.

<comment><USER4> That's not necessarily true, because the RS Cloud rates don't include any bandwidth while the Slicehost rates do. Depending on your usage, Slicehost can be cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't get it, admittedly this is a fast turnaround by Slicehost, but how is this news for discussion ?</comment>


Matrox History: A Computer Graphics Also-Ran's Second Life - <AUTHOR> https://tedium.co/2019/04/23/matrox-graphics-history/ <comment><USER2> I'll recount this story just for the sake of nostalgia.

Over the summer of 2001 or so I was having fun just writing little programs in VB5 while staying at my Dad's house. I wrote a flashy looking MP3 player (basically a front end for Windows Media player I embedded into the project) which made extensive use of native Windows GUI API. All the animations were smooth and fast. I felt pretty good about myself. When summer was over I went back home and found that my MP3 player animations didn't run smooth on my PC. Slow, janky, lots of flickering. What the hell? Turns out my Dad's PC had a Matrox card in it and was massively faster at 2D rendering than my PC.

</comment><comment><USER3> The technical reason to prefer Matrox cards was the sharp analog video output. You could do 1600x1200 without the pixels blurring. NVidia was a terrible blur, and ATI wasn't much better. Matrox cards were thus great for CAD and for people who wanted to use the default xterm font.

<comment><USER4> Yes, my first experience with a graphics card was a matrox G400. I still have it in fact.

I still have a soft spot for matroxes for their sheer boringness. They did the job well and... that was that. Utterly reliable. Most kinds of tech should be totally boring. Yay for dull.

Servers I've used, I think dell, claimed to come with G200 matroxes built in but they seemed totally to lack any hardware acceleration so it seemed to be pure software rendering, painfully slow and watching video was not possible. Someone elsewhere here said they were for IPMI use which makes sense. They made rotten desktops machines until you gave them a proper card.

Should anyone quite reasonably wonder why I'd use a server as a workstation, they are reliable (read: so boring). Once I get them working they almost never play up.

<comment><USER5> I have a Matrox millenium (best DOS card ever!), three G400 cards and one G400 Max. They worked incredibly well with Linux esp with multiple monitors. I had 2 of them in one tower, driving 4 monitors at once at some point.

I fondly remember MPlayer && /dev/mga_vid. They also had great Linux framebuffer console support. Their RAMDACs were legendary.

Those were the days.

<comment><USER6> Matrox Millenium with Topaz were great together for rendering in DOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, nice article. My first real job out of university was to help improve Matrox's lagging-behind OpenGL driver for the G200 through G450. Most of this driver's development was done in the Boca Raton FL office (across from the old IBM building). Great team, great memories. This is where I cut my teeth on performance programming topics like hand coded assembly, page faults, cache hits and misses, etc. Lots of Quake 'beta testing' done after hours :) What really sank their 3D ship was it took too long to get Parhelia out, which the article touches on. I didn't get any whif of them not being serious about 3D and wanting to give up—the damn chip just took too long and NVIDIA got there first.

We actually barely got the G450 OpenGL driver competitive with the competing GeForce (or was it the TNT2?), at least on the major games, but it was also too late.

</comment><comment><USER8> My nostalgic Matrox story -- I was maybe 12 when I got a Matrox card that I needed support for. I called the support number and waited on hold for about 45 minutes, then talked to the rep and got my problem solved!

Of course this was 1989, when the phone company charged you for long distance, and _really_ charged you for calls to other countries. I had _no idea_ that you could call another country without dialing a bunch of numbers, so I just assumed it would fall under our domestic long distance plan.

I could have bought another video card for the price of that phone call!

<comment><USER9> Reminds me of updating the AutoCAD DOS video drivers for an S3 card back in the early/mid 90s. Our choices were Compuserve or dialing the company's BBS (calling the US from NZ). I think even with the international toll call we still chose the BBS on price, but it was still a very expensive download for a small firm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The G450 dual-head card was _the_ card to have for Linux in the early 2000s, imo.

<comment><USER11> I remember having to compile drivers to get a /dev/mga device file that would be used to play videos with mplayer smoothly, which had a dedicated output option for mga at that time.

<comment><USER12> I had a G450 hooked up to my big old CRT using mplayer to watch my terrible anime shows. Nothing could touch the quality of Matrox on a CRT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most of the time I run into Matrox cards today it's a cut down G200 in a rackmount server designed to run only a primitive text console. Sometimes a poor soul will attempt to get X up on those things only to discover that the hardware is so crippled that it can't do better than 800x600 without artifacts and crashing. It's really kind of impressive that OEMs have managed to source a part that is so much worse than the card you could buy off of the shelf for $50 in 1997.

<comment><USER14> It's integrated into the IPMI controller and not meant to do anything more than a remote management console.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some comments on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578858) from people who worked at Matrox in their hayday of being a competitor in the 3D graphics race. Hopefully they will spot this and add some more.

<comment><USER7> Added my experience as a base level comment. Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You often come across Matrox products when you look for video capture cards and the like. I was surprised the first time I saw a Matrox video capture card in the Amazon listings, because I thought Matrox was dead, and it was a name I hadn't seen since the mid-90s.

<comment><USER17> I remember using them for 4, 6 and 8 display systems in the early 2000's, right around when people were just starting to use dual monitors.

<comment><USER18> In the mid 2000-s we were researching what video card to use for a product with very long life time and extremely tedious certification. Once completed, you can't replace one component with another without invalidating the certificate. While both Ati and Nvidia would offer better performance and features, Matrox was the only supplier promising to keep stock for the next 10 or so years.

<comment><USER19> ATI had an infuriating tendency to make their cards as impossible to identify, visually, as possible. Two different cards of the same model sold a year apart might have little in common.

Matrox may not have had cutting-edge cards, but you could at least tell what card you had.

<comment><USER20> Not only that but they would change the behavior of a chip between revisions, so drivers for one revision, if they didn't take into account the changes, would suddenly stop working even though you bought the same ( but unknown to you, newer) version of the card.

(source: me, who worked at a company that made commercial Linux drivers for Matrox, ATI,NeoMagic etc. chips )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have just spent 4 or 6k on a matrox card and little device that will send/receive KVVVM over fibre. To be used in a power station so the computer can sit in a rack on the other side of the room instead of on the desk beside the 3 monitors. Not why it is worth that much money not to have a tower on or under the desk. Maybe somebody accidentally unplugged the tower once.

<comment><USER22> How well did it work out? For complex viz/performance specifically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Matrox was the easiest card to get working with most anything. I had one in my NeXTSTEP box and it was amazing. I miss something that had such support.

<comment><USER24> Boy I wish there were more quirky workstations available these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had a matrox card on my 486 dx4 120. This would have been around 95-97. I remember matrox being the best for 2d acceleration. Back then the voodoo cards were brand new and rare.

</comment><comment><USER26> I got my first computer in 1996. I knew very little about computers but I knew I needed a "3d card" for games.

I bought a Matrox Mystique at the store. I knew nothing about 3dfx, OpenGL, Direct3D. I just knew I needed a 3D card.

The only thing it ran were the games came with and a handful of titles. It never ran GLQuake at all which became my favorite game. Total waste. Was a lot of money for 14 year old me.

I learned my lesson and researched the shit out of everything I bought after that.

</comment><comment><USER27> It seems by focusing on 2D and not 3D applications, Matrox have successfully "dodged a bullet", in terms of the competition out there for 3D. Good move.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't believe how Black Magic has been eating Matrox's lunch lately, but I still love Matrox's SDK. One of the best.

</comment><comment><USER28> Back when 4MB was a whole universe

</comment><comment><USER29> The GXT135P console graphics card in my IBM POWER6 server is a rebadged Matrox G450.

</comment><comment><USER30> They also make SDI video cards for studio video applications. I worked on a DVR-like device which used their 8-port SDI card for I/O. They have an interesting graph-based API. The cards work well enough I guess.

</comment><comment><USER31> I used one of their camera this year. Cool API for classical 2D vision, there was an onboard intel computer to perform processing on the camera itself. Did not turn out to be well suited for what I wanted sadly.

</comment><comment><USER32> Whew, a lot of nostalgia in here. I forgot I had a Matrox Millennium.

</comment><comment><USER33> The company I work for as I type fits and ships Matrox cards into Dell servers for our customers, and routinely write software to give them a damn good thrashing. They are good cards.

<comment><USER34> Do those Matrox GPUs support IOMMU/VFIO passthrough to Windows or Linux VMs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Matrox reminds me of Sam and Max. Good times.

</comment><comment><USER36> TL;DR

 _"Today, we have three basic areas of strength," Trottier said. "With computer graphics, we're strong in display walls and public information displays. With television production, when you watch any sports on the nightly news, sports or election results, our cards are in the bowels of what you see. We're also strong in machine vision. The latest flavor there is deep learning and we're getting into that via the algorithms we're developing."_

</comment><comment><USER37> Quebec is not a suburb of Montreal but actually the province (Canadian equivalent of a U.S. State) in which Montreal is.

<comment><USER38> > the company is based in Quebec, _in_ a suburb of Montreal

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> absolutely _loved_ my Matrox cards during the 2D era. Great quality and speed.</comment>


Whitehouse: "no comment" on Chris Dodd corruption petition - <AUTHOR> https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/response/why-we-cant-comment

<comment><AUTHOR> When I saw "can't comment" I had a moment of hope: visions of every crime show I've ever watched, "we can't comment on an ongoing investigation," etc.

Sadly, no such luck. This was more of a "can't" because it sounds less weaselly than "won't," even though the TOS section on law enforcement says they MAY decline... If I were a cynical guy, I'd say it probably took a lot fewer signatures to get MegaUploads investigated... Of course, those were on checks...

/grumpy</comment>