Bicycle Attacks: Quantifying the Damage of Widespread Password Length Leakage - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.01513 <comment><USER3> Not being into security much (if I can help it) I had to look up the term [1].

Basically it's a reference to how a (tightly) wrapped bike is still recognizable as being a bike.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_attack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_attack)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you learn the exact length of a password, you gain say 3-4 bits of entropy? 4 bits if there are sixteen possible password lengths, all equally likely.

4 bits is not nothing, and it makes most cracking attacks 16 times easier, but it's hopefully never going to be the difference between good security and bad.

<comment><USER5> _" never going to be the difference between good security and bad."_

True, though there's plenty of bad out there.

Combined with dumb password rules, knowing the exact length could make things pretty easy. Like the US Global Entry password rules: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dumb-password- rules/dumb-p...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dumb-password-rules/dumb- password-rules/master/screenshots/global-entry.png)

8-12 chars with so many rules that already reduce the search space.

<comment><USER6> That looks saner than ours;

      The chosen password must:

      - Be at least 10 (ten) characters long (and must not be longer than 127 characters)
      - Contain at least 8 (eight) different characters, each of which is used only ONCE
      - Contain at least 2 letters (case sensitive)
      - Contain at least 2 numbers
      - Contain at least 2 of the symbols !"#$%&'()*+,-/:;<=>?@[\]^_`{}~¦

      The chosen password must not:

      - Contain a £ (Pound) character
      - Have 3 of any repeating character next to each other
      - Spell a word of 4 letters or more listed in a common dictionary (Most 4 letter combinations)
      - Be an abbreviation associated with the company
      - Be based on your user name

Unsurprisingly, almost everyone just memorises the initial random password given out, since it's provided on a nice piece of paper when you start. Thankfully there isn't also an expiry policy. The max length is large but that's basically meaningless when you actually need to remember it and it takes a while to come up with even a random password that fulfills these requirements.

<comment><USER7> I work in information security for 25 years. This is the most surrealistic password policy I have seen.

Fantastic awareness training material you have here (in the section "see, others have it worse than we do")

A sad part is that it is virtually impossible to use a password manager to generate a new password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is surprising to me that modern browsers don't pad TLS (in TLS 1.3 padding is "free" in the sense that you don't need any extra bytes to say "this is padding") to fill the last packet.

Supposing MSS is 1500 for a link, how much longer can it conceivably take to send say 1500 bytes including 120 bytes of padding versus 1380 bytes?

<comment><USER9> Software layering makes this much harder than it should be, but it's a good concept.

One potential pitfall is that an unfortunate number of networks still have poor path MTU detection, so padding that makes the packets larger than any previously sent packet in the stream may result in a packet too large to transit the network. Then you're at the mercy of ICMP delivery or path MTU blackhole detection, which tends to be slow and isn't enabled on Android (!).

<comment><USER8> Somewhere, one of the layers is picking a packet size. Probably the OS TCP stack. What I'd want to do as a TLS implementation concerned about hiding exact lengths is use that packet length for my final packet regardless of how much is actually inside it.

Yes if the MTU is bogus and causes fragmentation or dropped packets that's bad, but I'm comfortable it also happened to every other packet sent, I'm only making things go from terrible to slightly more terrible, not from good to bad, and only for people who've got problems.

<comment><USER9> > Yes if the MTU is bogus and causes fragmentation or dropped packets that's > bad, but I'm comfortable it also happened to every other packet sent, I'm > only making things go from terrible to slightly more terrible, not from good > to bad, and only for people who've got problems.

Certainly, this would only affect people who have problems, which is low, but if you're always padding all requests up to the full MTU, it has the potential to make things go from almost always working, to never working.

Looking at tcpdump with a real browser to one of my sites, firefox is only sending pretty short packets, everything is less than 512 bytes. But if you pad out to the full MTU, and the network is broken, those large packets may all be dropped, and the ICMPs either supressed filtered or so rate limited that they never get seen. Users on these networks with this padding would not be able to make https requests to most servers, but would be able to make connections to services where they have taken special effort to avoid MTU problems.

Special efforts like: Google and Facebook clamp the maximum MSS they send to 1380 and 1400 for IPv4; FreeBSD used to return the client MSS in SYN+ACK if it was smaller than the locally configured MSS, but that was removed with this commit: [https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/e1f9aeedee0bae9281...](https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/e1f9aeedee0bae92811248f9fcefa92ccb7be91f#diff-f3fd9f911dd76ffd9fbd0c8bfb458a61)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It feels like browsers could fix this in a fairly simple way. Something like using a value for the form boundary that varies in length for each request, or a X-RandPad type header that has some variable length data?

<comment><USER10> I think there should be a protocol in browsers where input password fields are hashed along with a blinding factor that comes from servers.

I think that protocol would solve lots of basic problems in password security. But the most important thing is that it would serve as a proof that the server is not saving your password in plain text, because the plain text never gets there, only it's hash.

<comment><USER11> I can't see how this would work. Does the blinding factor change every time you log in? How does the server validate that your password is correct - <USER2> does it store?

Server -> User : blinding factor

User -> Server: H(password || blinding factor)

Server: stores/checks what?

<comment><USER12>
      Server stores H(pw || bFixed)
      Server sends bFixed, bOnce
      Client sends H(H(pw || bFixed) || bOnce)

The server can be trusted to not save the actual password if setup/change is already sending H(pw || bFixed) instead of the password itself. But then bFixed becomes public knowledge knowledge and a leaked H(pw || bFixed) would be enough to do a malicious login.

<comment><USER10> That's Interesting!. I didn't thought it that way

What I had in mind is this:

      Server stores H(H(pw || bFixedPub) || bFixedPriv) , bFixedPub , bFixedPriv
      Server sends bFixedPub
      Client sends H(pw || bFixedPub)

bFixedPub and bFixedPriv are unique per password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Shouldn't you be able to avoid this by simply hashing the password before POSTing it?

<comment><USER14> If you're using JS to prehash before submission, an attacker who has exfiltrated hashes never needs to crack them. It also makes it impossible to degrade gracefully for a non-JS client. You're effectively taking a password hash and turning it into an unhashed password itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Bicycle attacks, because remembering that biclique attack is not spelled bicycle attack wasn't quite hard enough yet :-)

<comment><USER16> "Biclique" is pronounced "bye-kleek". I don't think "bicycle" usually sounds anything like that, so it shouldn't be too difficult.</comment></comment>


Webextension-Starter – Write Once Run on Any Browser Extension Starter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/abhijithvijayan/web-extension-starter <comment> noah-kun Any browser except Safari.

Currently I really enjoy Safari and it's extension model. Each extension has an app, so you can usually find them on the App Store, use them independently of Safari and change settings and things with a native UI. Example: OTP Auth-- an app to store 2-factor authentication tokens. Started on iPhone but now it has an app, menu icon, browser extension and so on. All with 1 download (on desktop, and another on mobile).</comment>


Netflix is making videos look like garbage on AT&T and Verizon - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/25/netflix-is-voluntarily-making-videos-look-like-garbage-on-att-and-verizon/ <comment><USER2> Clickbait title. They are doing it not to screw the customer, but to help him because of AT&T and Verizon policies. Blame these carriers, not Netflix.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. This is a positive thing.

Only thing missing is that Netflix should put a notice on the video that the quality may be bad because Netflix is protecting against overages.

When I watch a video on a phone most of the time I don't even good quality video. I just need enough to follow along.

The exceptions I can think of:

1\. movies/shows/scenes where there is some sort of significant visual reveal: a facial expression that shows an opinion contrary to what is being said; a letter shown that the viewer needs to be able to read

2\. characters that are sneaking around

3\. heavy action movies with lots of changing scenes/explosions etc.

But for something like House of Cards; its fine.

I have larger screens for a reason.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. Adding a disclaimer explaining why the quality is so bad would be a good thing.</comment></comment></comment>


Woah, Scrybe! - A new kind of online organiser. - <AUTHOR> http://marcusfoster.com/blog/2006/10/09/woah-scrybe/ <comment><USER2> it's interesting how a simple set of features can make the product seem wholly different, new, and interesting. that, and the use of 'revolutionary' and 'incredible' everywhere. =)</comment>


Stack Exchange CEO: "Nobody Wants To Find Yahoo Answers In Their Search Results" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/12/founder-stories-stack-overflows-joel-spolsky-nobody-wants-to-find-yahoo-answers-in-their-search-results/ <comment><USER2> Just last night I used search to ask a question (where to go to watch planes take off and land at SFO) and found the answer on a Yahoo Answers page.

<comment><USER3> I'll take StackExchange over Yahoo Answers for technical topics (where YA is mainly populated by kids posting their homework and spammers advertising tutorial sites unrelated to the question), but YA has been effective for getting information on popular opinion (e.g. what people think are good restaurants where I'm going), expectations in social situations I'm rarely in (e.g. how to properly tip a bartender), etc.

In both cases, it's nice that I'm never the first to want a particular question answered.

<comment><USER4> "Opinion" is the keyword here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think that's true at all. Yahoo Answers has often proved useful for me. It also lacks the snootiness of SO. TechCrunch seems to have a serious vendetta against Yahoo. Or maybe Yahoo-bashing is just cool right now. But I remember when the Yahoo CEO mocked Arrington on stage during an interview. It seems personal.

<comment><USER6> My problem with Yahoo answers is the number of times I've come across answers that are out right wrong (sometimes to the point of being dangerous) and supported by a number other people, with no right answer in sight. For this reason I completely avoid Yahoo answer regarding any topic I'm ignorant of.

<comment><USER7> This is the reason why I occasionally do answer question on YA! If nobody comes in to fix the obvious errors, it will always be full of nonsense.

The real danger is that the site is used buy a lot of young people who will consistently walk away with a completely skewed and incorrect notion of the subject they are asking about.

As they say: "Be the change you want to see around you".

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that grassroots corporate welfare through band-aiding a broken, crappy product with a sewer for a community and zero moderation is what Ghandi really had in mind, there.

Much more effective would be to advance the cause of workable communities or products while starving out the page views of ones beyond repair.

<comment><USER9> The name is Gandhi, not Ghandi.

And Gandhi never added qualifiers to his statement. As a matter of fact, the more broken a system is, the more it needs good people to step up and affect change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> CEOs should be careful about their public statements. I am going to bookmark this page because I am sure some day another high-rising CEO will say "Nobody wants to find SO answers in their search results".

<comment><USER10> What you are saying looks good for making an argument, but seriously, he is saying the truth to some extent.

<comment><USER11> The truth _now_. The problem is that words on the Internet live forever, and most people don't bother to pay attention to date stamps. At some point in the future, StackExchange will be the hulking behemoth that nobody likes, and then people will dig up this post and say "turnabout's fair play".

(It just occurred to me that someday I may come to regret all my HN comments. Gulp. Ah well, it's been fun so far.)

<comment><USER12> so you should not provide subjective commentary on the internet because _one day it might not be true_?

<comment><USER13> Yes. Or at least be specific so people can tell whether you are providing commentary or reporting on concrete facts.

Even subjective commentary needs to provide context, if it's meant to be useful.

Take the case with Joel (or at least the headline): Joel is saying, basically, "Yahoo Answers suck". It misses context: why does it suck? Does it _always_ suck? Apparently it doesn't _always_ , given that most upvoted comment here is PG giving a reasonable counter-example.

The thing is, objective statements are boring and don't make the headlines. If Joel went to an interview only to say "Gee-whiz, actually SO is doing well because we managed to provide a decent alternative to EE, but for non- programming topics people are still being served by more established players like Yahoo Answers.", there would be no headline for Techcrunch, and we wouldn't be wasting our time discussing about this.

<comment><USER12> you're right. but that's the kind of thing that got techcrunch where they are, right? it's easy to point back at your accurate predictions, and not remind anyone of the wrong ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The headline is sensational, but the interview is good.

I've always liked Joel's observation of Usenet nit-picking culture and how it's likely related to easy quoting.

I haven't followed discussion about StackExchange site creation and user acquisition models, but I think that Joel's practical, organic approach is good. Although there isn't StackExchange for medical professionals yet, if the growth rates are what they claim, it might be that in the near future there are enough doctors participating in cooking, photography and all the other SE sites, that medical SE site will emerge.

</comment><comment><USER15> His comments on Yahoo Answers' traffic coming from users migrating from Myspace struck me as way off. No one "hangs out" on Yahoo Answers because their tired the lack of anonymity on Myspace. The masses didn't leave Myspace because of any form of stalking.

Interesting interview overall I guess but his comments on this subject really annoyed me for some reason.

<comment><USER16> That seemed a bit strange to me too. For all I know, Yahoo Answer users are there because they are young, they know the Yahoo brand (maybe from their parents), and they like the cuteness of the site,

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm usually happy to see Stack Overflow in my search results, but I was reminded of a flaw this morning when I searched for "Manhattan layout algorithm". I clicked the "Show more results from stackoverflow.com" option. It turned out that a number of the SO listings appeared only because they all had the same link in the "Related" sidebar. I don't know if this is a common problem with other sites that list internal links in sidebars, but I only seem to notice it in Stack Overflow results.

 _(Unfortunately, I never did find a good description of the algorithm.)_

<comment><USER18> Exactly... that "related" sidebar is terrible for getting relevant search results from Stack Overflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tech Crunch (an AOL property) leading with yet another slam against Yahoo, a competitor? I'm shocked.

I think I'd probably add TC to a google site ban list if I used google search. The difference between the AOL way and a content farm seems to be about ~30 minutes of effort per piece.

</comment><comment><USER20> The yahoo answers that come up in search results may not be as good as those on stackexchange, but they're generally pretty good if they've ranked high enough on a google search.

For non-tech questions, I encounter many of the other mee-too q&a sites, and they usually yield someone (probably scraped from other sites) asking the question, with no answer. This has been happening with alarming frequency which to me, puts the ball in google's court.

Fixya.com, for example came up as unanswered questions in enough car/DIY searches for me recently that as soon as I saw the google blacklist feature I added them from memory.

</comment><comment><USER21> Anecdotally, it feels like Yahoo Answers has been more useful for me for non technical topics. Usually, when I'm googling for the name of a song from a commercial or trailer, I'll find a Yahoo Answers page with the info.

</comment><comment><USER22> I just want to find an answer to my question, I don't care so much where. There are far, far worse places where answers pop up. Like what are these weird mailing list to web converters, where you can not even see the conversation thread properly. Or all those private simple machine forums about the weirdest topics.

I remember when Yahoo! Answers came out it was actually pretty cool. I participated for a while and had fun. Has it deteriorated so much since? And why should other answer services fare better?

Btw, there are a lot of really low quality answers on Stack Overflow, too.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yahoo! answers does not guarantee the integrity of their information. Most of the time (in my experience), the answers are uninformed and not very applicable. Are you interested in finding people's opinions when actually you are looking for a fact/answer? I am sure some of them are useful and maybe they could secure this by a Hacker News type voting (of course this could be abused, but...).

<comment><USER24> It's true that none of yahoo's answers are fact, but I would like to point out that almost everything on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt (ahem, wikipedia). That said, your skeptic meter should be higher with yahoo than with SO but that can also be attributed to the fact that SO deals with programming (either it works or it doesn't), so bad answers are going to be discriminated against much more quickly and more correctly.

<comment><USER23> I agree with that of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Joel's really vocal about Yahoo!Answers, which is not fair to Yahoo!Answers. It's a huge site that caters to a broad base of users: take this question from a user

Why do universities cost more than community colleges? [http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AukI2XODG.mO_QE...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AukI2XODG.mO_QEq7Gd_y4jj1KIX;_ylv=3?qid=20110312142258AAGwiAp)

It's just a question, picked from the front page.

It's a legitimate inquiry. I don't see a "what do penguins eat?"

More important question is what is Joel Smoking? What are his investors smoking? To let him make such off the wall assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think Yahoo Answers are quite useful. I hate Experts Exchange, however.

</comment><comment><USER18> I actually don't mind Yahoo Answers in my search results... I know when to click there based on what I search for.

</comment><comment><USER27> They both have there good reasons for existence. For example, when I was taking Biology and Calculus those specific questions could always be answered with Yahoo. As far as technical questions I think Yahoo has a poor community to answer them while Stack has a very technical community.

</comment><comment><USER28> What happened to Joel Spolsky? I saw him at a conference two years ago and he looks terrible in this video. Not sure if it's the stress or whatever, but I don't want to see him working himself into a hole... get some time off dude. It's more important than your startup.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yahoo answers are useful in many cases. Ask a question about health, sex, travel and its awesome.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yahoo Answers is regularly trolled and the source of some memes, such as "How is Babby Formed":

<http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed>

</comment><comment><USER31> Disagreed, seems like Joel is being his usual self and claiming that competitors products are useless.

I have found a lot of useful answers on yahoo answers on a range and depth of topics that do not exist within SE sites.

</comment><comment><USER10> Though, a ceo should not make a comment like this, this is certainly true for me.

</comment><comment><USER32> Someone posts my Chemistry homework on Yahoo Answers and the answers generally walk all the way through the problems and are very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER33> No offense, but Joel Spolsky looks pretty worn out and exhausted. Having a startup is great, but I suggest to Joel he take some much needed time off. Your body needs it.</comment>


The Oleomargarine Act (1886-1950) - <AUTHOR> https://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/15032395622 <comment><USER2> It is hard for me to imagine a time when animal fat was considered surplus to needs and discarded.</comment>


California closes the Steve Jobs license plate loophole - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-closed-california-wants-temporary-license-plates/ <comment><USER2> It's insane how many cars I see driving in the Bay Area with dealer plates (DGDG anyone?)

It also helps people avoid Golden Gate Bridge tolls and redlight cameras...

Really glad to see something being done about this, too bad it's not going to be adopted until 2019.</comment>


.NET Native Performance - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/04/24/dotnetnative-performance.aspx <comment><USER2> It's a shame it's only for Windows Store Apps. I'd love to see what this can do to other .Net programs.

Although saying that, it's quite amazing how much of the core libraries are written in C#, you what have thought it would be wrappers over C++ libraries.

<comment><USER3> I would have loved to see this a few years ago on Windows Forms/WPF apps as well. Performance was an issue as the libraries continued to expand and grow with additional interdependencies.

.NET Reflector came in handy once or twice to copy out a few library functions to avoid adding another reference dll.

</comment></comment><comment> Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 How do .Net Native and .Net Core interact? I remember there was a post about .Net Corr here a while back, and one of the advantages touted was the ability for the .Net team to push out security updates for framework dlls via Windows Update that your app would automatically use because of the CLR Cache.

How will .Net Native deal with this sort of stuff if the framework parts are directly baked into the executable?

<comment><USER4> .NET team member here ... We like to think of .NET Native as a native tool- chain for .NET Core. I say "a" because the Xamarin and Unity (IL2CPP) tool- chains are equally applicable (and we've talked to them about it).

The core framework libraries (CoreFX) - [https://github.com/dotnet/corefx](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx) \- are used for all .NET Core scenarios, including .NET Native (UWP). This means that your code does the same thing in all of these different environments, since it's using the same underlying framework libraries. Separately, the Mono project is taking a lot of the same code, which means that the base framework for Xamarin apps are becoming more compatible with CoreFX, too. Yeahh! We hope to make this more formal in the future. We talk to @migueldeicaza about this frequently.

Today, .NET Native and .NET Core use two different runtimes, MRT and CoreCLR, respectively. MRT expands to the extremely creative "managed runtime". Colloquially, we call it "Mr. T". Earlier in the project, everyone working on .NET Native had posters of Mr. T (yes, that one) on our doors. Mohawks were entirely optional on the parts of team members.

MRT was built for static ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation. It is the child of the Redhawk project ([http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-codename-redhawk- live...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-codename-redhawk-lives-in- windows-8/)). Redhawk was built to be a .NET-esque (using C# + extensions) systems programming environment. MRT was built to have many of the same benefits, but be compatible with .NET (not just "esque") and support nothing less, nothing more than C#.

CoreCLR is a child of the .NET Framework CLR. CLR (and by extention, CoreCLR) was built for dynamic execution, with a JIT. It supports AOT compilation in the pre-jit/NGEN sense.

The GC is the primary shared component between the two (MRT, CLR/CoreCLR) runtimes.

We plan to bring static compilation to more scenarios, however, we strongly believe that both JIT and (real) AOT are legitimate and compelling technologies and experiences and both are on our long-term roadmap. We'd like to leave the compilation choice/appraoch up to our users/customers. Novel idea, eh?

We have a lot of fun runtime and compiler tech on the team. It's a fun place to work. Much of it is now open source, meaning that we get to work on this fun tech in the open. This is our latest compiler announcement: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/07/20/announcing...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/07/20/announcing- net-framework-4-6.aspx#ryujit).

<comment><USER5> Thanks for posting! Why only target C#? Is Net Native using C# source instead of IL? Or does it only support a subset of IL that C# currently emits? (No tail calls, no cpblk)?

Why isn't this just rolled into ngen? Or run as a second stage JIT, caching the results to disk? I cannot think of any scenarios where anyone wants to re- JIT every time they start a program. At least not on desktop and server scenarios (maybe some embedded system with no storage space).

Or, I guess the real question is: apart from reflection which other features don't work the same on .NET Native?

<comment><USER4> My post had more C# bias than appropriate. .NET Native also supports VB. See: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnetnative](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnetnative). I don't think it yet supports F#, but that's likely on the roadmap.

Reflection is supported on .NET Native Native. See: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/05/20/net- native...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/05/20/net-native-deep- dive-dynamic-features-in-static-code.aspx). Reflection.Emit is not.

There are effectively three codegen strategies: JIT, pre-jit and static compilation/AOT. They all have their own characteristics and reasons why they are a good choice. I can see that you have depth here, but I'm going to provide an answer with more context, for a broader audience.

\- JIT has the most flexibility since the code is generated (you guessed it) just in time. This means that the code generated can be specialized in terms of hardware or use a layered approach to codegen (prefer throughput and then CQ for hotter methods). It is also the best for versioning, since the code is always generated in terms of the actual dependencies, as opposed to the ones you happened to compile with.

\- Pre-JIT can be very high performance since you don't have to pay for JIT and other related costs up-front, as is the case with NGEN. Depending on the code generated, it may be subject to the fragile base class problem: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_base_class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_base_class), as is the case with NGEN. MDIL is also subject to it, but we made the cost to regenerate images very low. There can be a problem of when to generate the images and where to store them. These two issues have been a constant design challenge for us (mostly the former). At least on the surface, pre-jit is much cheaper than AOT, particularly since you can rely on a JIT for the code that you can generate deterministically (at least into a single bit of code) ahead of time (think generics). ReadyToRun ([https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/227](https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/227)) is a project we're working that makes NGEN/CrossGen images more resilient to the fragile base class problem.

\- AOT can be very high performance, for the same reasons. We've found that it is even higher performance since you can skip a number of architecural requirements for a dynamic runtime environment. If you couple this with app- local framework and runtime distribution, as is the case with .NET Native, then you also skip the fragile base class problem. Building a high-performance industrial quality AOT system with a fabulous developer experience is a fantastic computer science challenge. We've certainly found it to be that. We're several years into AOT investments and we're finding that it is paying off.

<comment><USER6> I'm late to this conversation, but thanks for this information. I'm still trying to understand the role of the source language in AOT compiling - is it actually looking at the source language and not the IL bytecode? If so, is that because IL is too low level or something similar, it would prefer to work at AST level?

<comment><USER5> I wrote to them and asked. Their response is:

"...we only support C# and VB in a technical sense. You've picked up on one reason why[1]; we do IL scanning and rewriting and look for various patterns."

They do use the normal, unmodified csc compiler to generate the IL[2]. But it sounds like they are partially decompiling the IL to get C#-level semantics? There's also this comment[3] regarding expression trees:

"the JIT runtime does emit those as dynamic code, but .NET Native can interpret those"

So I'm guessing they have to look through your source and figure out when you exec one and then do it head of time? I'm not sure how that can be a general solution, as you can construct arbitrary expression trees at runtime, even using external input. Maybe that part doesn't work, but normal programs don't do that?

I do wish they were a bit more open and clear on all this. (And wow, the public messaging is really confusing other developers. I've had a customer come super excited because .NET Native would obviously cut his server requirements by a nice chunk... had to explain it wouldn't work at all in his scenario.)

1: I wrote asking "Are dependencies being taken on specific quirks of the C# compiler? Like, I dunno, how certain members are named, or the way C# creates Expression Trees"

2: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/05/09/the-net- na...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/05/09/the-net-native-tool- chain.aspx)

3: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/05/20/net- native...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/05/20/net-native-deep- dive-dynamic-features-in-static-code.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at MSDN and trying to find any setting about it in VS 2015, it seems .NET Native is only supported in Windows Store Apps. What about standard Winforms or Console Applications?

<comment><USER8> The end of the article says: "The current preview only supports Windows Store apps written in C# and running on x64 or ARM machines, but we're hard at work adding support for other scenarios."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So this post is about a year old. Looking at the .NET blog, I don't see any direct follow-ups. How did this pan out?

<comment><USER10> All Windows (Phone) 10 apps will per default be compiled with .Net Native

<comment><USER11> Are there going to be any Windows Phone 10 phones given that Microsoft is pulling out of phones?

<comment><USER10> I think you've misinterpreted, they're not pulling out of phones... just focusing on a fewer number of phones. Seems like a new flagship is coming around September

If you think MS ever would "pull out" of mobile and be satisfied with "being a guest in someone else house", your insane :)

<comment><USER9> > they're not pulling out of phones... just focusing on a fewer number of > phones

Fewer models, to be exact. In contrast to their old strategy of saturating the low end with multitudes of confusingly numbered Lumias they're consolidating into three distinct lines. Presumably they want to have volume!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Compiles .NET/C# to native code using LLVM framework: [https://github.com/xen2/SharpLang](https://github.com/xen2/SharpLang)

</comment><comment><USER13> _> "Pay-for-Play Reflection"_

Native _and_ allowing reflection? I am now much less interested in M#.

<comment><USER14> M# might have given us the "delete" keyword. But yes, this could be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It strikes me a lot like the way Google has tried out various sorts of VMs for Java in android.</comment>


India: Land of many cell phones, fewer toilets - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101031/ap_on_re_as/as_fea_india_toilets_and_cell_phones

<comment><USER2> I object to the line about farmers living in shacks of mud and cow dung. This is probably going to sound weird to most readers, but cow dung is actually an excellent building material for plastering walls. Seriously. When it's dry you can mix it with water and a bit of straw and make an excellent plaster. It doesn't smell at all and for some reason it discourages flies. If I lived in rural India again I'd make sure my kitchen walls were plastered with cow dung.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get the point of this article. The author is repeatedly juxtaposing contradicting images. May be its an attempt to show economic disparities, or to say that this looks absurd. But he's done nothing more than putting together some circumstantial scenes.

I don't know much about journalism - but whatever it is, I hope its not this

</comment><comment><USER4> What is the point of `unless you have "X" you can't have Y?`

Why shouldn't the poorest of the poor have access to telephones? The cell phone market in India is a free(er) market and people have access to cell phone service for less than $5/mo . That is the real story that is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't really get the comparison. It seems like a really western thing to say... it's not like they're walking around with iphones and sidekicks

</comment><comment><USER6> The comments are as retarded as the article itself.

Typical western comparison as one commenter put it as.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well. Cell phones start coming at INR 500 (~ $12) with really cheap carrier call rates.</comment>


Standards-based web, plug-ins, and Silverlight - <AUTHOR> http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/standards-based-web-plug-ins-and-silverlight/

<comment><USER2> That's some seriously mixed messages. Is the bottom line that they're deprecating Silverlight for use on the web and they're going to be switching the effort to building HTML5 tooling instead?</comment>


More containers on Chrome OS - <AUTHOR> https://chromeunboxed.com/news/containers-and-chromebooks-the-future-of-chrome-os/ <comment><USER2> The assumption has to be that it is crosvm [https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/crosvm...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/crosvm/) the lightweight, Rust, qemu-less vmm they have been working on. I got this working with LinuxKit recently, which will be one way to build them. Crosvm has Wayland support for graphical apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I've misunderstood but referring to running local binaries in containers as "non native" compared to regular chrome "apps" which are web apps, just seems wrong to me.

<comment><USER4> Web apps are native on Chrome OS as was the case with its HTML5 cousin Firefox OS.

By definition then, solving the app gap by using a container to host Android or desktop Linux programs is non-native.

<comment><USER5> Disagree. They are all using the same kernel and nothing is being emulated. So they are as native as anything else. I think the confusion comes from people not understanding containers.

It is simply some extra properties in kernel data structures that allowing multiple views. But a container is just a process no different than any other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Being able to run programs from OSes other than ChromeOS and Android certainly would be exciting but the author hasn't presented much more than speculation in support of it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I went looking for evidence that supports my conclusion hardly makes for a compelling case.

The initial supposition was largely based on price and a larger SSD than normal without considering the obvious reasons.

The pixel Chromebooks have always been expensive, so no surprise there. Likewise, loads of people (myself included) refused to spend thousands if the most local storage was 64gb with a horribly slow USB 2.0 SD card reader for expansion. I remember reading (a Reddit IMA IIRC) that they wanted a larger drive, but couldn't because reasons.

I'm seriously considering getting one now that my biggest objections are gone and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you could run any application in a container, something like kubernetes looks rather compelling.

<comment><USER9> Kubernetes is a little heavyweight for just running a few apps on a consumer laptop. Not to mention the velocity at which it is evolving, and how that impacts APIs (i.e. some minor releases have removed some command line options for kubelet).

<comment><USER8> Good point regarding the consumer laptop. The point I'd like to make is that using consumer as a proving ground for a future enterprise / cloud play may be compelling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hear no compelling argument for containers on ChromeOS, nor for consumer apps on any device

<comment><USER11> > consumer apps on any device

I love sandboxes, do not want to have random application X accessing my $HOME at its own pleasure.</comment></comment>


Stop Watching Us Gathers Over 100,000 signatures to fight NSA surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/13/stop-watching-us-a-group-opposed-to-nsa-surveillance-scorches-past-100000-signatures/

<comment><USER2> I guess I don't understand how government works.

If a significant portion of the electorate doesn't want something, how do they keep the government from implementing it? Because it's certainly not by voting. I'm dead serious. Why does a government do things that its people don't want it to do?

<comment><USER3> Contrary to popular belief, the American government does not actually represent its people. It represents special interest groups, which is a euphemism for "those who have money." Once your mind makes that paradigm shift, everything becomes incredibly easy to understand.

The fact of the matter is that the seeming irrationality and inefficiency of American government is a feature, rather than a bug. The inefficiency and general waste in government affairs actually serve to obfuscate the real functions and purpose of the state and makes reform vastly more complex and costly than it otherwise would be. The example I like to give is the tax code. The income tax started out as a tax on wealth and it used to be that only a very small percentage of households paid anything. Over time though, the burden of taxation shifted downward onto the middle class, while the elite simultaneously found alternative means of storing their wealth to avoid taxation almost completely. The problem is that the tax code is so complex now that most people cannot even comprehend the amount of loopholes in it. The only people who can are tax attorneys working for corporations and the ultra- rich. This is what I mean by the inefficiency and general waste serves to obfuscate the issue.

And the funny thing is, this is all working exactly as intended. The wealthy tightly control the system and the rest of the population is too distracted fighting for the crumbs to actually organize, form meaningful alliances and fight to change the status quo. What they do instead is share news articles and memes on Facebook and sign silly petitions on the Internet to be able to pat themselves in the back for fighting the good fight. They just want to feel good about themselves.

At the end of the day, this is because the vast majority of people don't actually care about the events that happen around them. They care about their self-perceived role in those events and their own feelings. You can actually see this type of behavior in many different cases outside politics. Take something as simple as exercise. A lot of people sign up for personal trainers, not because they actually want to exercise correctly and lose weight, but because _the act of making superficial effort (such as paying a small amount of money) towards a goal is sufficient to make them feel good._ And if they fail at weight loss, they can tell themselves that, well, they at least tried. Which is what the signers of this petition are going to tell themselves when it accomplishes nothing.

<comment><USER4> 100k people who spent two seconds clicking on a link online are not representative of 300 million population of the US.

<comment><USER5> since most people probably haven't heard about it, I would say it is..

<comment><USER6> And you would be horribly, tragically, mistaken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't forget about the White House petition to pardon Snowden. It now has 70,229 signatures but needs 100,000 to get a response.

[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward- snow...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward- snowden/Dp03vGYD)

<comment><USER4> Pardon him from what? He hasn't been charged with a crime.

The temporary outrage of the internet over something they don't even have a grasp on is why no one takes these petitions seriously.

<comment><USER5> resonator--

<comment><USER8> Please stop, these posts only add noise.

<comment><USER5> If I could down-vote I would not be doing this...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know cynicism is not very productive, but I have never understood the point of petitions like this. Surely people know they are useless unless backed up by billions of dollars of funding?

<comment><USER9> Just to clarify - this is not simply a petition. We're using a script that the late Aaron Swartz wrote to deliver emails directly to Congress via the contact us pages on legislator's websites. That means there'll be hundreds of thousands of emails delivered to Congress in the coming days.

It's amazing how practical some of the things that Aaron worked on are.

<comment><USER10> So then, it's easy for them to have a consistent block of text to filter on?

Is there any data that sending template emails works? It seems like its too easy to write off as people investing minimal effort, and not sending a unique message.

I honestly don't know,, but this does not feel 'effective' to me.

<comment><USER11> I believe that the staffers of many elected representatives typically count the number of constituents who were agitated enough even to send a form letter.

Think of it like a poll. Would you make the claim that politicians are willing to write off people who respond to polls just because they all answer the same question or the question isn't somehow the "right" one? Probably not.

Of course, it's not a poll because people self-select. But even still, if the report to the representative says "this week, we had 37 letters about gun control and 43,742 about surveillance", well, it's clear what the politician wants to say that he or she is doing something about when he or she next sees a reporter.

<comment><USER12> Yet a phone call that takes a staffer's actual time probably is 1000x more effective than a form email that are easily ignored because it requires so little effort to actually generate.

If the most you can be bothered with is typing in your name and hitting send, why would any Congress member even believe you'll bother to vote in the next election? Or donate? Or convince other people to vote for their opponent?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The NSA probably thinks that collecting everything and analyzing it later was "a neat idea." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North#Iran.E2.80.93Cont...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North#Iran.E2.80.93Contra_affair)

<comment><USER14> I don't see the analogy with Iran-Contra.

<comment><USER13> Well it's a stretch I admit, but they probably really did think it was a "neat idea," which was a phrase that Oliver North used (quoted in the link) to describe his opinion of the arms for hostage deal that he was being investigated for.

A more direct if mundane line is that Oliver North worked for/with John Poindexter. Poindexter was allowed to resign in disgrace, North was fired. Poindexter later worked for DARPA, where he proposed Total Information Awareness, which was widely viewed with suspicion and back-burnered, and then came back bit by bit as cynically predicted at the time. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter)

<comment><USER14> Oooh, and there was also the part where North "deleted" his emails and thought they were, you know, actually gone? He lied to Congress and then the emails were recovered from "backup tape". [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/white_house_email/index.html](http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/white_house_email/index.html)

I'd totally forgotten the Poindexter connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Comrades! Only enemies of the United States of America would ever sign a petition like this, and thus so such enemies should be rightly targeted for increased scrutiny given their increased risk of threat to the state.

</comment><comment><USER16> The only thing politicians really care about is their ability to get elected. That is something we need to target in a threatening way.

</comment><comment><USER17> And all were immediately added to Main Core.

</comment><comment><USER18> So 100,000 people sleep better tonight. And if you ever read any of government responses, you know nothing changed.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd say only 100,000 that's it? I'm rather disappointed. There are 316,037,000 in your country, that means 315,937,000 who don't give a fuck ? Note to self: Never even set foot on USA soil.</comment>


Java vs. Go: The case for cloud-specific languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.javaworld.com/article/2111621/cloud-computing/java-vs-go-the-case-for-cloud-specific-languages.html

<comment><AUTHOR> What the article completely misses, is WHAT exactly is a cloud specific language. Concurrent programming is by no means a cloud specific feat and that's about all what the article mentions - so it makes a pretty weak case I'd say. But maybe somebody around here can add some juice? Thank you!</comment>


Node.js powered MMO scrabble - <AUTHOR> http://wordsquared.com/ <comment><USER2> Confession: it now runs on Rails 3 :-)

<comment><USER3> Can you share your reasons for switching from Node.js to Rails?

<comment><USER2> Library support mainly. Node.js is awesome, but the ecosystem is still very very early. Libraries are almost always alpha quality and don't have the level of polish you'll find in Ruby libraries that have been around a couple years. If you need something specific in Node, 9 times out of 10, you have to implement it yourself. I imagine in a couple years, it will catch up with Ruby.

For example: the MongoDB libraries for Node gave us many problems. I won't go into the specifics as that would take a while, but switching to Ruby mongo driver along with the Mongoid ORM resulted in a huge increase in code readability and is much more reliable I think.

Also being able to use amazing Ruby libraries like devise/omniauth are a big win I think. Similar with Jammit, Barista, Rspec, the list goes on. Here's our current Gemfile: <https://gist.github.com/68f0326a9480266d462e>. Some of these libraries have Node.js equivalents, but they are all very early stage.

That said, most of our code is UI side anyways. For that I'm using coffeescript / jquery / backbone.js. We'll probably reintroduce some small, focused Node.js server components in the future for the most highly accessed http requests as we start to ramp up the traffic.

<comment><USER4> > Library support mainly. Node.js is awesome, but the ecosystem is still very > very early.

Fascinating, I remember 2-3 years back people were saying exactly the same thing, but replacing Node.js with Rails and Ruby with Python. The more things change, the more they stay the same!

<comment><USER5> Even 2-3 years ago, Ruby+Rails were better than Python+Django/etc in terms of an ecosystem for webapps. Python had a better ecosystem than Ruby outside of webapps. I suspect this is still true though the gaps have narrowed a lot.

<comment><USER6> You might try and convince yourself of that, but it was never true. Django has always nurtured a better ecosystem for webapps since its inception due to its nature of packaging smaller parts of a whole as "apps". See a modern website aggregating these apps here:

<http://djangoplugables.com/>

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but this just doesn't exist for Rails. Sure you might find the random open source'd library or plugin, but that's about the extent of re-usable code you're going to have.

For the Django developer, in minutes you can have a website with a blog, tagging system, voting, contact form, traditional registration system, social authentication, openid logins, avatars, user profiles, friends/followers, on- site messaging, full-site search, and all ready for e-commerce. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Any of those parts are autonomous and interchangeable. Sure it'll take a bit longer to actually configure the apps how you'd like, display them in your desired format, and connect them up according to your business logic, but who's really going to complain about that after getting all of the above for free?

Hell, for half of my clients I barely have to write a single custom line of code; their entire site request can be broken down into reusable Django apps that already exist and I've worked with before. It's the pinnacle of Don't Repeat Yourself. If that's not the ideal ecosystem for webapps then I don't know what is.

<comment><USER7> I've been a rails developer since the beginning and this has been true on rails as far back as Rails 1.0.. Now we use github and gems on gemcutter, before that there was the list of plugins <http://agilewebdevelopment.com..>.

Now <http://djangoplugables.com/> is rather well organized and we don't really have a good centralized place to find them outside of github, but they exists and it's quick painless to use them...

<comment><USER8> <http://ruby-toolbox.com/> is probably the closest analogue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Word² was originally named Scrabbly. Here's the previous discussion on the application: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1656057>

</comment><comment><USER9> It uses websockets to provide realtime multiplayer action. And canvas to draw the graphics. This is a sweet taste of what is to come with HTML5.

<comment><USER10> It sucks that Firefox 4 won't have sockets because of transparent proxies. I feel like that's sort of an edge security case just cause those proxies can't be that popular, but then again I might just be ignorant of something.

I am actually sort of worried why the chrome team hasn't announced handling this. I searched google for a response from the chrome team but I guess they didn't think it warranted one.

[http://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/hybi/current/msg04744.h...](http://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/hybi/current/msg04744.html)

<comment><USER10> Did I say something rude?

I would seriously appreciate a reply here cause I really have no clue at all as to why my previous comment is being downvoted. It isn't offtopic, since the root comment mentions how the software is using websockets. It isn't rude to either the firefox or chrome development teams, as I said I can't really judge how severe the security problem is. So how on earth am I offending people?

<comment><USER7> For some reason, there seems to be an more random downvotings by members just because they can.. So, I often see interesting and on topic answers like yours first being downvoted and then upvoted...

I wonder what could be done by pg to counter that? Maybe have a limit of numbers of downvote per day?

<comment><AUTHOR> how about we _spend_ our points to downvote others?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, the map at top left when expanded looks awesome. This seems to draw nicely and fast on the iPad, but I can't get it to scroll around. Anyone figured it out yet?

<comment><USER2> No iPad support yet. Soon though! We're actively working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Weekend challenge: Write a bot which uses <http://www.lexicalwordfinder.com/> to bust the high score.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've done like 6 turns and I still get a message about only placing them next to mine for the first turn.

<comment><AUTHOR> i think, once you start the game you have to keep building off of your blocks.

this wasn't obvious to me at first (if it is true -- i haven't tested it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Excellent HN material. Out of the 0 startups, that ran Node.js to be successful, 0 ran it to do Scrabble for their day-to-day-work.

Thank you HN for that unique experience. You are almost as good as state school and IT hot-shot series at Martha Stewart TV.</comment>


Building a YouTube MP3 Downloader with Exodus, FFmpeg, and AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> https://intoli.com/blog/youtube-mp3-downloader/ <comment><USER2> The bookmarklet is neat, but this seems over-worked compared to just

        youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 youtube.com/watch?v=00000000

[1] [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

<comment><USER3> youtube-dl is awesome. I built a bash script around this use case, with some additional bits just for file management. I run "yety [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thnXzUFJnfQ"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thnXzUFJnfQ") and poof, the mp3 is dropboxed and available on all my devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The actual youtube metadata extraction is performed by the _awesome_ ytdl-core library [https://www.npmjs.com/package/ytdl- core](https://www.npmjs.com/package/ytdl-core) [https://github.com/fent/node- ytdl-core](https://github.com/fent/node-ytdl-core)

For local work, [https://www.npmjs.com/package/ytdl](https://www.npmjs.com/package/ytdl) is a CLI powered by the same module. There is also a python-based youtube-dl command [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/) that supports a ton of sites

<comment><USER5> Downloading YouTube files is ridiculously simple.

[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XxXxXx&layout=mobile&ajax=1](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XxXxXx&layout=mobile&ajax=1)

There you have all stream files in a nice json format, which means opus and m4a for audio files.

I have a python project which is very quick to gather metadata, because I wanted to have a responsive YouTube app without using the browser. Had no time for it recently, though.

<comment><USER6> Thanks this is actually really useful. Never knew about it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why MP3? You could download AAC files from YouTube and don't bother with (necessarily lossy) conversion.

<comment><USER8> Maybe file size is an issue here?

Wouldn't ogg be a viable alternative too?

<comment><USER9> In their previous tutorial [1] their encoding settings show that they're targeting roughly 128 kb/s VBR, which is what YouTube AACs typically are, so that doesn't explain it. AAC (and Opus for that matter, which YouTube also often has) are superior formats, and lossy encoding should only happen once if possible- so this honestly makes me cringe a bit. In this case the (probably already lossy) source audio is lossily converted by YouTube and then again by ffmpeg/LAME with rather low bitrates at each step. A lot of quality is lost along the way.

Support for Opus is unfortunately still somewhat sparse, but AAC support is essentially universal on modern devicese. So I can't think of any reason to favor this approach over:

      youtube-dl -f bestaudio[ext=m4a] "$URL"

Even YouTube's 128 kb/s copies won't satisfy audiophiles.

[1] [https://intoli.com/blog/transcoding-on-aws- lambda/](https://intoli.com/blog/transcoding-on-aws-lambda/)

<comment><USER10> I can definitely understand you cringing about the re-encoding, but I just wanted to point out that the reason that we took this approach was simply to give a semi-plausible real-world example of how tools like aws-serverless- express [1] and Exodus [2] can be used to build useful APIs with AWS Lambda [3] and AWS Gateway [4]. These articles are primarily meant to be educational tutorials that people can use as a reference when writing and deploying their own APIs. The whole "converting to MP3" thing is just an easily understandable premise which lays out a clear goal for the tutorials to build upon.

[1] - [https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless- express](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express)

[2] - [https://github.com/intoli/exodus](https://github.com/intoli/exodus)

[3] - [https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/)

[4] - [https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/](https://aws.amazon.com/api- gateway/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there any tools that can take my subscription activity in YT and convert it into a podcast or RSS feed for me?

I'm just so tired of the algorithmic hooks to waste my time.

There are 5-6 channels I really enjoy but get tired of the effort needed to fend off the constant temptation tailored to my tastes.

<comment> m-localhost [https://podsync.net/](https://podsync.net/) \+ Pocket Cast = <3 - doesn't work always unfortunately. For audio only I use [https://huffduffer.com/](https://huffduffer.com/) (well it's just adding single youtube videos to a customized podcast feed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't using this sort of thing against YouTube tos?

<comment><USER7> Yes:

4C. _You agree not to access Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Service itself, the Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate._

Source: [https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms](https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms)

<comment><USER13> How to define "the video playback pages"?

Is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[videoID]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\[videoID\]) a "video playback page"?

Most "YouTube downloaders", just like any popular web browser, access the Content through these pages.

These pages contain the (escaped) URLs for the video in various formats.

Do the terms restrict the software, e.g. HTTP client, one can use to access to these URLs?

For example, "You agree not to access Content through any software other than Google Chrome, official Google mobile app, etc."

If a user prefers some other http client not approved by Google, is that a violation of the ToS?

<comment><USER14> I think they try to say "browser" without actually saying it. Who knows why.

<comment><USER15> The less specific, the more wiggle room for lawyers. You know perfectly well that they don't offer download buttons. I'm actually surprised that ytdl still works, so I guess it's not a serious problem actually and no need to obscure further than they already do. I as an amateur could not figure out how to get the files of yt or soundcloud. Reading scdl.py it looked simple enough but I'd need to register a developer api key. For ytdl I guess the source has become bloated and obscure by now so i wouldn't even try. Having a bunch of dependencies already seemed too cluttered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> YouTube horribly compresses their audio. I don't know why you would want to download mp3 from them. (music?)

<comment><USER17> I haven't had nearly that much trouble with more recent videos, which seem to have excellent sound reproduction. It very much depends on the original upload quality though. Some older videos (anything stuck on 240p or lower) are from a time before HD uploads were a thing, and surely used more aggressive compression.

Some uploaders are also simply unskilled; I'm mostly after video game soundtracks to listen to in my car, and especially for newer soundtracks you have to watch out for the uploaders trying to be "first" to gain the popularity, while sometimes using poor settings or a bad rip. There's nothing youtube can do to improve bad source audio.

<comment><USER18> they seem to use Opus with 160 kbit bitrate now, you can view the formats with youtube-dl -F. Bandcamp disallows using compressed source audio, i wish youtube would too.</comment></comment></comment>


Top Manhattan chef reveals secret junkie past - <AUTHOR> http://nypost.com/2014/09/25/how-a-homeless-junkie-went-on-to-become-a-famous-chef/

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally off-topic for Hacker News, except... if he can go from junkie on the streets in 2007 to nationwide celebrity at his own startup 7 years later, can't you overcome whatever problems you have at your startup today?

I think you can.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, thanks for posting. I nearly flagged because it was a tabloid newspaper but this was an unusually well-written, frank, and inspiring article.</comment></comment>


The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat - <AUTHOR> http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html <comment><USER2> Cool, but no mention of worlds away or vzones</comment>


Uber CEO's mother dies in boating accident - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/27/technology/uber-travis-kalanick-parents-tragedy/index.html <comment><USER2> All: there have already been perhaps a dozen submissions of this story, but not everything community members want to discuss is on topic. HN's mandate is to gratify intellectual curiosity ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). Does this story do that? or is it rather some other form of curiosity that it gratifies? Surely the latter, so this is an opportunity for us all to distinguish what kind of site HN is.

There is a second reason. Uber has become so controversial that it is impossible for it to be mentioned on HN without the thread filling up with angry comments against both it and its CEO. The idea of that happening in a thread about someone's mother's death is pretty nauseating. Yet it would happen, not because any HN user is so bad that they'd do such a thing intentionally (in person, say), but because internet forum threads are a crude instrument that cannot be guided with any delicacy.

Therefore the users flagging this story are right to do so and it should not have a place here.

<comment><USER3> Thank you dang - you have said clearly what I've been thinking as I've watched the apparently never-ending stream of submissions.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What started the flat design trend? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Windows Phone 7, aka "Metro" aka "Windows Design Language".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_%28design_language%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_%28design_language%29)

</comment><comment><USER3> Whatever started it was not a smart idea. Humans have the ability to perceive depth from gradients and shadows very fast, it's dumb not to use it.

<comment><USER4> Why does that make a flat design a bad idea?

IMO, flat design, when skilfully used, can look really good. Of course there is quite a bit of bad flat design out there, just as there is of any other design style.

And don't worry, trends cycle with time, so it stands to reason we'll be seeing some more depth on our screens again some time in the not-too-distant future. (Depth of design, that is, not necessarily depth of content ;-) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got the impression that Google was using pretty flat designs before the Windows phone came out - think about the GMail UI, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> To me it seems like it really got rolling with Apple - Steve Jobs decision to stop doing the more richly detailed skeuomorphic designs. Which prompted flat redesigns in iOS 7 and OSX, and I think many developers followed suit to either look like today's Apple or not to be the nail to be hammered down in the iOS community. Also attributed is Microsoft Zune and Metro design work.

Historically flat design is a form of minimalist design articles point to it being rooted in Soviet design styles.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cheaper in terms of developer hours generally. No source, just my own opinion.

</comment><comment><USER7> How do you define flat?</comment>


Show HN: Thoth – a real-time Solr monitor and search analysis engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/trulia/thoth

<comment><USER2> Thanks for dropping code ahead of the talk, looking forward to the presentation tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Such an amazing project!

</comment><comment><USER4> this is pretty awesome. Congrats!</comment>


Scriptcs gets a REPL - <AUTHOR> http://codebetter.com/glennblock/2013/05/07/scriptcs-gets-a-repl <comment><USER2> I'll add an obligatory plug for F# if you're looking for a fully supported .NET language REPL (as opposed to a side project like scriptcs, not that there's anything wrong with it). As a bonus, F# is now fully supported by Xamarin Studio if you want to use it on non-Windows platforms, which means that in addition to a REPL, you have full IDE support for free on each platform.

</comment><comment><USER3> C# also has LinqPad as a REPL (<http://www.linqpad.net/>), but more is better in this case.

<comment><AUTHOR> linqpad is great. scriptcs is more than a REPL, it provides an end to end experience for authoring full apps as C# script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this would have come 7 years ago then maybe I would have been excited.

<comment><USER5> I hate how C# is constantly held to a double standard.

<comment><USER6> I know that feeling.

I remember seeing a post regarding the popularity of C# a few months back and the comments were filled with complaints that C# was more verbose than Python, lacked the instant gratification of PHP, had poor OOP when compared to Smalltalk and had worse support for functional programming than Haskell.

While none of the criticisms are necessarily false, it seems bizarre to me that the only way people would use C# is if it came in first in every single category.

<comment><USER7> > While none of the criticisms are necessarily false, it seems bizarre to me > that the only way people would use C# is if it came in first in every single > category.

It seems like a leap to say that they expect C# to come first in every single category. From the categories you've listed, it doesn't come in first in _any_ of them.

<comment><USER6> >It seems like a leap to say that they expect C# to come first in every single category. From the categories you've listed, it doesn't come in first in any of them.

No, but I'd argue it comes close to second in each category. If you were choosing whether or not to use Python or C#, why on earth would it matter that C# lacked the OOP abilities of Smalltalk and the functional capabilities of Haskell.

To me, it doesn't make sense to compare one language to four other languages. It certainly feels as though C# is held to a different standard than other languages.

<comment><USER8> I use C# actively at work, and also for some of my side-projects (though 80% of them are usually written in javascript). I definitely know a place where C# shines: Big projects with a lot of developers. C# is really easy to maintain in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ScriptCS implementation of a C# REPL is just perfection! Extremely excited to see how ScriptCS continues to progress and improve! I see improvements in the project every day!</comment>


Ask HN: Technology Reasons for Snowflake Hype? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to understand the SNOW IPO from a product perspective - what is driving the interest that is not related to stock price growth (a unicorn)?
I have tested the platform a bit in a trial, and it is interesting, but comparing BigQuery and RedShift I'm missing what makes it stand out justifying its market valuation.
Has anyone used at least two of these platforms and can speak to specific features or capabilities? <comment><USER2> It is a neutral 3rd party vendor so no cloud lockin

Polished interface and standard SQL interface

No hand optimisation required, data stored in efficient proprietary storage

Compute optimization managed by snowflake, manage it's own pools.

Seamless sharing or replication of data

All of these are easily replicable by competitors, but it also has the closed garden network effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://nattaylor.com/blog/2019/snowflake- internals/](https://nattaylor.com/blog/2019/snowflake-internals/)</comment>


German retailer Media Markt tests home delivery by robot - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-3814071/German-retailer-Media-Markt-tests-home-delivery-robot.html <comment><USER2> Im working here in Metro Group (as s/w developer) and seeing this robot for over a year roaming around the campus, with her master though. As we asked the master about it, it will deliver to the person directly where he is in the designated area, in addition to home address using user mobile. And it sounds a bit so we know if its around. Im eager to see how it actually works, as there are many obstacles for here to face on the way.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More images and information on the German website Heise:

[https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Testlauf-Media- Markt...](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Testlauf-Media-Markt- liefert-per-Zustell-Roboter-direkt-nach-Hause-3337702.html)</comment>


Which are the most and least emotional countries in the world? - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/01/which-are-the-most-and-least-emotional-countries-in-the-world.html

<comment><USER2> _The more times that people answer "yes" to questions such as "Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?", the more emotional they're deemed to be._

Anger and sadness aren't emotions? The study seems to measure happiness and not emotion...</comment>


Here's the Skinny on Why Wal-Mart Is So Evil  - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/workplace/143009/here%27s_the_skinny_on_why_wal-mart_is_so_evil_(and_has_made_such_a_killing)?page=entire

<comment><USER2> Well, that's certainly a snotty, elitist rant full of guilt by association and name calling. This bit: "But would [Walmart] have become such a powerhouse if inequality had not grown so dramatically or if conservatives had not so demonized government, often with coded racial messages?" is maybe two steps removed from conspiracy theory territory.</comment>


A great way to thank people who help you out - <AUTHOR>

Here's an idea, let me know what you all think.
Lots of times, someone will do a favor for you, and you might want to thank them or wish you had a way to show them your appreciation.
What if I came up with a service where you pay me a few dollars (or whatever) and I'll ship them a beer with a nice note (chosen by the person)?  Almost a little bit like Flattr.
Nice copy, nice design, thanksbeer.com or something way catchier.
Thoughts or ideas? <comment><USER2> In the absence of market research, here are my immediate thoughts on ways to make this work:

Try to find some of the Tooheys New tv ads (Australia) - they're currently promoting themselves as "the official currency of the beer economy", which is basically what you're talking about - beer as thanks.

Payment system will need to be easy - even things like selecting a beer and writing a note might make it too hard, so offer 'random' selections of premium / boutique / foreign beers and random selection from a page of sample thank you notes (these would be short, funny, grateful, and blokey - the sort of page I might share as a link even if I don't use your service).

I think thanksbeer, thankbrew etc are all good. Something incorporating 'Cheers' could be nifty, as Cheers means both 'thank you' and 'bottoms up'. Cheersbeers.com?

I wonder what restrictions / limitations you encounter selling alcohol over the internet?

Definitely not part of the MVP, but being able to login and create my 'wish list' would be awesome. Then when a mate says 'I'll get you some beers' I could say 'Go to Thanksbeer, look me up and it will give you some ideas'.

Having 'different' beers is probably critical. I assume it would be cheaper for me to buy a friend some beers locally rather than use your service for the same brand, but I'll gladly pay a premium for a beer I've never heard of or tried before.

And final thing which is relevant to all business planning - how much gross margin can you realistically make? (Say, a couple of bucks per beer? $10 per carton?) How much do you want to make from this (Say, $5000 per month)? And then is it realistic, and if so how do you, go about building this so you can sell 500 cartons a month?

</comment><comment><USER3> It is always a good idea to be in the chain, one gives other receive and we take some benefit from it. But the difficult point is how are we going to be in the middle?

      You should be around, helping that communication or action to happen but the prize is for the person who find the way to be around and not only as someone to reject.

</comment><comment><USER4> how are you going about shipping a glass container full of alcohol through the mail?

When I visited the US recently to resolve some tax issues I tried to mail a bottle of Brazilian cachaça from NYC to a friend of mine in California. The US Postal Service, FedEx and UPS are refused to mail it except from one specific location prepared to mail glass bottles filled with liquid. On top of that they said that I need a liquor license to send beer through the mail.

<comment><USER5> Craft-beer aficionados do it pretty frequently without much in the way of problems, though it's definitely a gray area. FedEx and UPS seem to take a don't-ask-don't-tell approach to what's in the box, though don't expect to claim insurance on broken bottles. Here's one guide: <http://www.ratebeer.com/Beer-News/Article-174.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> partially because I don't drink alcohol and thus would prefer a different beverage (coffee, tea, bawls rootbeer etc.) and partially because it sounds like a dog talking - I think "thankbrew" is a better name... I think it's available as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd use it. Like the domain too.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes! I would use it.</comment>


10 TechCruch50 grads: Where are they now? - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10350281-248.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

<comment><USER2> Related question:

What happens when funded startup decides they want to completely change directions? For example, Flickr was some sort of online game at first, right? Assuming they had investors, is it as simple as saying to the board of directors "Hey, we want to drop the idea you funded us for completely shift directions for these reasons..."?

On the other hand you have funded starts that, for various reasons, decide to shut down the business all together. For what reasons would you do this vs change directions like Flickr?

In short, as a founder of a failing funded startup, how do you decide whether to close the company and start a new one or whether to come up with a new gameplan for the existing company?

Also, how does having closed down a previous company vs shifting gameplans affect future investors?

<comment><USER3> If I remember the interview from Founders at Work, with Max Levchin (PayPal), correctly, PayPal's investors trusted them enough to radically change directions, and it of course payed off. I think this is probably dependent on who you and your investors are.

<comment><USER4> One of the benefits of top tier angels is their knowledge and experience in knowing "things often change". If you get angel investors who don't have that much experience as entrepreneurs in the web space, let alone the angel space, they're likely to flail their arms around in fear.</comment></comment></comment>


Cancer breakthrough leads China's biotech boom - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/30b5a944-3b57-11e8-b9f9-de94fa33a81e <comment><USER2> Sighhh... apparently they can't just report on a story from China without peppering it with statements about the US -- specifically about how this is a new _salvo_ in some kind of _healthcare war_ with the US. Sometimes stuff just happens when people do things. They're probably not pushing to advance healthcare _just to fuck with the US._

Some made-up headlines from world history written from this incredibly narcissistic viewpoint:

Pharaoh to Build Great Pyramid, Challenging Structure-Building Dominance of Future Country "America"

Scientist Marie Curie Discovers "Radioactivity" in Effort to Humiliate USA

In Rare Reversal, Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" Better Than Similar American Art Works

<comment><USER3> Not to say that they're by any means perfect, but I think what you've pointed out might help explain why many Americans i grew up around see the Chinese government as some sinister and inscrutable entity that is out to silently crush everyone. Also, you don't need to make up fake examples when you can look up anything in the past year about how they're making big strides towards reversing their smog problems and how that's somehow an attack on American industry. Even trump has made these claims ( [https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/uDFmIDPzCo4znxgzKlT0_jgv4C...](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/uDFmIDPzCo4znxgzKlT0_jgv4CqHkarUrQ005ED_HbclD4Ex32hmOHsAn95kbFc_WZMiOQ1BMlRj4Fu- vDLyOgnT3syuxfWFY8KxoEWpqd9gxcPzZnQUM8q76jkJzs7IQUNr_cUt) )

<comment><USER4> Younger me was a news junkie. Iran hostage crisis, USSR was gonna nuke us, Japan was going to buy us, etc. Of course, I believed it all. Over time, I noticed shit just didn't add up. And no one did a mea culpa.

So I just stopped listening.

I figure all ad supported news media is ghouls profiting from human misery, stoking fear and anxiety to keep people numb, allowing the real outrages to happen unnoticed. (eg Project Censored)

I hope China continues to do well. Ditto everyone. We all do better when we all do better.

<comment><USER5> That sounds a little bit like survivor bias to me. Nothing bad happened to the US, but in other countries shit went down in the last century, stuff that if you were not informed and aware about, might lead you to... for example go to school in the morning and realise you can't go back home since you're on the other side of a new border.

<comment><USER4> Been chewing on your reply.

Plenty bad happened in North America. Project Censored is a good starting place, if you want to raise your blood pressure.

I still seek news. Mostly from HN, Democracy Now, Vox, misc. It's just that now I consciously block any source that I feel is more noise than signal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://outline.com/tdDNdd](https://outline.com/tdDNdd)

<comment><USER7> This should be the article linked. Mods can you switch, the current one behind a subscription wall?

<comment><USER8> It's ok to post workarounds in the threads, but we don't change the official URLs to those. Doing that would obscure the article source, among other reasons.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

<comment><USER9> Hi dang. I really do not understand why it is ok to post pay-walled articles. It makes the frontpage a minefield IMHO. Maybe a short reason can also be stated in the FAQ in addition to that being ok. BTW, is it also ok to post articles behind a registration-wall? I mean, like something shared on FB which can only be viewed by members?

<comment><USER8> It's explained in the second link there as well as tons of comments I've posted about this ([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywalls&sort=byDate...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywalls&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)).

We find the paywalls as annoying as anyone, but as long as there are publicly available workarounds, the articles remain accessible at the price of annoyance. This sucks, of course, but an HN without articles from any such publications would suck worse. Since the core idea of HN is to try to optimize for curiosity, we don't have much of a choice. Hopefully someday the publication problem will get a definitive solution and we won't have to deal with this crap anymore. In the meantime, publicly accessible workarounds are the best of a bad bunch.

(Re registration sites, it's the same principle: if there's a publicly available workaround, it's ok, if not it's not.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Physician here: CAR-T is a potentially amazing technology, but really only works in a small sub-set of the patients for which it is tried. For now

<comment><USER11> Normal person here: why?

<comment><USER12> This far it only works in blood cancers, specifically B cell lymphomas. The approved CAR-Ts target a molecule called CD19 expressed on B cells

It has not worked widely in solid tumors for a variety of reasons, including immune suppression within the tumor microenvironemnt and difficulty finding antigens that are widely expressed on tumors but not also expressed on healthy cells (so you don't kill healthy tissue in addition to the tumor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > A few days before Craig Chase was discharged from the Jiangsu Provincial > People's Hospital in Nanjing, his doctor told him something he never > expected to hear: his cancer had been cured.

> "His English was not so good, so he used Google Translate. When he said I > was cured, I told him it was impossible — there is no cure for multiple > myeloma," he recalls. "But he said, 'no, you're definitely cured'. It was > unbelievable."

> Unbelievable, perhaps, but also true. When Mr Chase, now 57, returned home > to America after his six weeks of treatment in China to undergo further > tests, his doctors could find no trace of multiple myeloma. The blood cancer > he had suffered for three years — which had threatened to end his life — was > gone.

This is incredible!

If they can figure out how to cure cancer, then how will the pharmaceutical companies make money?

This sounds like a diabolical plan for.. Lex Luthor!

Lex: "Destroy the cure. Instead, make a drug treatment plan, that the patient must take every week, for the rest of their life."

</comment><comment><USER14> Unlike other medical trials involving chronic illness, cancer trials have a pretty clear indicator of whether the treatment is successful- (most) the patients survive longer than their prognosis.

In this sense, there's not much freedom for the Chinese biofirms to commit fraud during a treatment trial. Everything is verifiable.

<comment><USER15> Why would falsifying that data be any harder? Don't you just substitute patient lived for patient had less headaches or whatever?

<comment><USER14> You can always fudge your trial result. What I am saying is that the line between an effective treatment and an ineffective treatment is very clear- more patients are alive by the end of the trial. Versus, say, a test for a new antidepressant drugs, where being 'happier' is hard to quantify.

Everything else is just record tracking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This might happen more often in the near future. Whilst medical innovations are booming due to the introduction of cheap options to run machine learning the regulatory units are not keeping up. Getting FDA approvals is a long process but required before they let you enter the US market. EU is easier but soon they will put in place a new regulatory unit that is said to be even more restrictive than the FDA. When that happens it may very well be the Asian countries, China being a good option, India another, that take the lead when it comes to innovation in the medical world.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Car-T is at the cutting edge of biology: it involves extracting a patient's > blood cells, re-engineering them in a lab so they can identify and destroy > cancer and then re-inserting them into the body.

It would be interesting to see if we could one day make this more optimal by reducing the extra step. Changing the above to:

> Car-T is at the cutting edge of biology: it involves re-engineering a > patient's blood cells in a lab so they can identify and destroy cancer in > the body.

<comment><USER18> That would be cool, but also creepy if my blood cells can destroy cancer in my body while they're still in a lab. What if they start destroying cells in _other_ people's bodies?

<comment><USER19> That's not how antigens work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> According to the article, Chinese firms are making advances in chimeric antigen receptor cell therapy (Car-T) to treat cancer.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if a similar technique to car-t could be deployed to fight off autoimmune diseases?

</comment><comment><USER22> This would be great if it were true. Unfortunately, it's a clinical trial from China.

</comment><comment><USER23> Can anyone explain how you go about re-engineering a cell to fight off cancer?

<comment><USER24> ELI5: Your immune system fights cancerous cells frequently. There's only a problem when the cancerous cells evolve to avoid this by "hiding" (typically by no longer releasing a "kill me" marker). The therapy basically gives your immune system the tools to identify cancerous cells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Paywall.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would love to be able to read this.

<comment><USER27> The people who spent the time and effort to do the research and write the story would like to get paid. Seems like there is a simple solution here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Paywall! Can't be that all of you are subscribed to FT?!

Read here, maybe update original link: [https://outline.com/tdDNdd](https://outline.com/tdDNdd)

</comment><comment><USER29> > But the most eye-catching research at last year's conference was presented > by a Chinese biotech group that virtually no one had heard of: Nanjing > Legend.

I don't mean to belittle this achievement but when will media learn that there are no "unheard" companies in China. Only those which have government backing and those which don't.

While this an amazing story, I think it will be best to wait before pronouncing that there is a boom or not.

<comment><USER30> Your second and third paragraphs have no relation to each other.

The second paragraph comes from some tabloid about China.

The third one just says "wait and see"

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What will happen to american drug cartel now? FOr that matter china would be having its own drug and animal-organ-drug cartel.</comment>


Simple is Social - <AUTHOR> http://jst.is/2013/03/simple-social/

<comment><USER2> I think without new features and innovation every one get bored so innovation is necessary.But they must be user friendly</comment>


Show HN: Voronator – Voronoi them all - <AUTHOR> http://www.voronator.com/ <comment><USER2> I like the failure gallery at [http://www.voronator.com/about.html](http://www.voronator.com/about.html) . Do you have more? Why the "flower" failed?

It's good tht you have some default examples so people like me that don't work in this area can test it. Are the results recalculated on the spot? Does each user get a unique voronoization?

<comment><AUTHOR> The leaves of the flower are to thin. They swell up if you drill holes into.

The results are calculated on spot. But there is no randomness. Two identical objects will result in the same voronoi structure. But under advanced in the upload form you can change some parameter.

If you want to test a few examples you can find various .ply files on [http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/data/ply/ply.html](http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/data/ply/ply.html)</comment></comment>