Do People Really Want Apps on Their TVs? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/01/06/do-people-really-want-apps-on-their-tvs/ <comment><USER3> TBO, people want TV apps on their TV. Like an IMDB, Rotten Tomato, tmdb, youtube, or Netflix. Those are apps that would be useful on your TV. Hardly anyone is checking email, using facebook, or posting twitter on TV. Those are smartphone, tablet, or computer apps.

Who wants to get a drunken email from an ex while sitting next to your SO? There are things you want to keep on a 4-inch screen and not blasted out on 50-inches of glory.

</comment><comment><USER4> People want their TVs to display video and play games. And the apps that do that, they want.

I have NetFlix and Amazon's TV service on my TV, and they are nice. Not because the interface is good, or anything like that... But because it's a lot easier than using my computer or game console to do the same. And believe me, the interfaces on those apps need a lot of work.

<comment><USER5> I think people do want access to social media through their TV. I think "co- watching" with realtime voice comms, optional video, and some form of cooperative channel/site surfing would be very popular.

<comment><USER6> I'd just use my iPhone or iPad for that. It's more intuitive and doesn't block what I'm watching on the TV.

<comment><USER5> I think that's a great idea. The activity of "co-watching" and any social networks growing up around that are still going to center around the TV, so integration is going to be necessary. A small device acting as a smart-remote would be ideal. Free apps on smartphones would be a good way to get this started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apps that enhance the TV viewing experience will be absolutely huge. As mentioned in the article, the functionality to find out more about what you're watching will be popular. Watching an advert and being able to click to be sent info/find out more will become widespread very quickly. Instant polling on news programs ("Tax cuts good or bad? Click your remote now!") or entertainment programs ("Do you like Biebers new haircut?") will be fun.

"Social" TV services will emerge, allowing you to share with your friends what you're currently watching, and for interested friends to tune in to the same channel. People will publish lists of recommended shows, and you'll be able to automatically follow their recommendations and have your PVR record those shows, or your set top box will go find the on-demand versions of those shows...

I was working for interactive TV companies in the late 90's/early 00's - <USER2> were about 15 years too early it would seem. A lot of concepts have been really well fleshed out and are ready to go. I'm excited that it seems as though it is finally the right time for this stuff to go mainstream.

(And go look at the UK and their 'red button' services. They're a lot further ahead than the US with this stuff.)

</comment><comment><USER8> I for one would love a Netflix app on my TV, and maybe a Hulu one. Booting into the XBox or the Wii for Netflix is kind of a pain, and only works on the TV they are plugged in to.

Of course, Netflix apps in TVs are already available.

As for channel guides and stuff like the article says, how would that even work? You normally need a cable box at the very least anyway.

(Edited comment to expand it a bit, before any replies)

<comment><USER9> Channel guides can be downloaded over the air in some countries, and from the internet in others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lately my wife and myself have been debating dropping cable and realized just about everything we want from our TV is out there, but none of it is integrated. Here's what we want:

1\. My wife watches mostly shows from the major networks (ABC and CBS mostly) and we can get them in HD OTA. There are a few on cable networks, but we could always wait until they're released to DVD and have Netflix deliver them to us (either streaming or in the mail).

2\. I enjoy sports, just about any sports. This time of year I watch NFL (available mostly OTA), NCAA basketball (ESPN3 shows a lot of these games), and NHL hockey (available via NHL internet package). In the summer we both watch a lot of baseball (MBL.TV would work for this). It would suck not having regular ESPN, but I could live with it.

3\. Movies. We don't get to watch as many as we used to (the things a toddler removes from your life), but we still enjoy sitting down at least one night on the weekend for something.

I don't want apps on my TV. Instead I want a way to integrate all the streaming platforms that are already out there. If they're so called "apps", then that's fine, but just put them into a single, uniform package. Right now the Roku is very, very close. It can do Netflix, MLB.TV, and NHL, but it can't do ESPN3.

<comment><USER11> One of the nicest things about my Virgin Media box (IMO) is the "on demand" service which basically integrates the content from all the free on-demand services (iPlayer, 4OD, etc) and the premium on demand content all into one interface. Pity it's dog slow, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I built a DVR about 10 years ago for a major media provider. At the time we were all about ATVEF, it was a media driven effort. The interactive TV never amounted to much.

Today, there are more software and computery type companies playing in the field, there are more computers in your entertainment center, those are huge steps in the right direction. Then I don't know if you call it Apple's iPhone apps or part of web 2.0 but there is a renaissance in lean, light weight, simple applications with specific tasks. The media companies won't do it but software guys will, apps like netflix are sweet, people love that stuff. Even some apps like the CNN news app, I could very easily see that being on a TV. People don't seem to want full browsers and email on the TV. The flickr and youtube apps? Yep, people like that. Basically simple and small amounts of information to the TV seem like a positive thing and then getting media to the media center. Internet radio apps? Probably things people want.

</comment><comment><USER13> I want a music playing app on my TV.

It's hooked up to an amp with decent speakers - so streaming music (from Spotify, or from a bunch of MP3s) is damn near vital.

At the moment I'm using XBMC on an Apple TV to stream them from a NAS drive, but I'd love to get Spotify onto there.

<comment><USER3> JB the AppleTV and give groovy a try. It's not quite Spotify, but, unlike Spotify, Grooveshark works every place I've been.

<http://groovy.weasel-project.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yes, especially if those apps give them free TV shows. I maintain that BitTorrent or a Grooveshark for video would be Google TV's killer app. The would be freely available on the Google TV Market, but not on Apple TV's app store (both of which are coming)

</comment><comment><USER15> Just like with cars and other long term appliances, I am worried about these things depending on services that may or may not exist 5/10 years from now. Up until last year, I used a 20 year old tv, my car doesnt rely on google maps (I think there are some that do), and my toaster doesnt tweet.

</comment><comment><USER16> Full circle. My first computer hooked to the TV.</comment>


Command line social networking - <AUTHOR> http://computingideas.blogspot.com/2008/01/command-line-social-networking.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This post is old, but looking on Google for something similar to a "command- line social-networking" app I came across this idea. And with everyone using GitHub for everything now, maybe it could be possible... with a little work.</comment>


"E-mail prankster" phishes White House officials; hilarity ensues - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/e-mail-prankster-phishes-white-house-officials-hilarity-ensues/ <comment><USER2> I would think that the White House would flag incoming email that is not internal as "external" to at least give some more context that the sender should be treated cautiously given (obviously what this pranking reveals) how easily someone can be impersonated digitally. The ruse is still _malicious_ because it attempts to elicit responses that can be used to ridicule the target via public humiliation - and could accidentally release sensitive information.

The idea is good for a jab and opportunistic, but then making a "career" out of pestering people like this seems less than interesting in the long run. The barrier to entry seems quite low, so if one person shows how easy it is to gain public notoriety (and $$$, the pranker is creating a "book"), then I suspect we could see more of this publicized pranking.

What do you think? Are you for or against this?

<comment><USER3> This person is basically a troll who can spell. This makes him no better than those he attempts to fool. I don't think such behavior should be encouraged, especially considering how often it happens...

<comment><USER4> Oh come on. It's a form of social engineering and I'd say it has a net benefit for society.

These emails have brought to light some weaknesses in these systems. Hopefully they'll be patched very quickly.

<comment><USER3> I think there are ethical ways to publicize vulnerabilities in a system ala Google's Project Zero, and then there's public shaming through trickery. Not to say how the administration reacted may be overblown, but "ends justify the means" is a slippery slope I find unpalatable.

<comment><USER4> There's no "The Email Company" to fix such vulnerabilities.

Given the damage that could have been caused, the prank is incredibly harmless. At worst it has temporarily embarrassed a few people already shown to be immune to embarrassment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's even worse is that the guy that got phished is responsible for U.S. cybersecurity. ([http://time.com/4881849/white-house-email- prank/](http://time.com/4881849/white-house-email-prank/))

</comment><comment><USER6> There's a reason this works that I haven't seen discussed much. Namely that because of archiving rules (these are historical documents from elected+appointed officials) and the propensity for emails to be subpoenaed in investigations that much of the "work" of elected officials has been pushed off to private email services.

While it's tempting to think this happens for nefarious reasons, I suspect that it's mostly for the same reason that security is routinely circumvented in non-governmental organizations: it's cumbersome.

So it's not wildly unexpected that you might get an email from a senior White House staffer from a non-official address.

</comment><comment><USER7> This has officially hurtled past joke and into the realm of really frightening. Nobody with even a scrap of power should have skin this thin, not even if they only had that power for less than two weeks. What's worse is this is just a pale reflection of our commander-in-chief, the real nutter.

</comment><comment><USER8> Isn't impersonating someone illegal, just like publishing a response in a private email conversation?

<comment><USER9> There's nothing illegal about publishing a response.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps, but I'm pretty sure that impersonating someone, and especially impersonating someone with the intent to acquire non-public information, is illegal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> th3j35t3r strikes again!</comment>


Show HN: TOTP Based Port Knocking -- two factor firewall - <AUTHOR> http://dhj.io/posts/2017/05/16/totp-knock/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Just wanted to get some feedback on this. It's a simple proof of concept, not meant for production code. I found several similar techniques, but none exactly the same.

Short version:

Client and server share a key.

Each can generate a TOTP based hash.

Client sends hash to server listening on UDP.

If hashes match the server opens the normally closed ssh port for a few seconds (long enough to make a connection).

Like a Google Authenticator TOTP code, the correct hash changes every T seconds so identification of the UDP port and interception of the key is only helpful for a limited (if any) amount of time.

 _Is this worth turning into a robust daemon? Is there a better way to deal with constant ssh probing?_ A module in a firewall would be ideal. Environment based config would make it fairly easy to use in provisioning for ssh admin with a smaller scan footprint.

<comment><USER2> > Is there a better way to deal with constant ssh probing?

Turn off password auth (aka only accept pubkey auth) and use something like fail2ban to ip-block hosts with repeated failed login

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I will definitely try the key only. That should reduce probing. Presence will still be there, but if it completely deters probing that will be good enough. I looked at fail2ban, but it seemed like a losing battle with botnet scans.

Thank you for your feedback!

<comment><USER2> > it seemed like a losing battle with bonnet scans

I'm not sure I understand? fail2ban works like this:

it monitors configured log files for patterns/strings: in this case its looking for multiple failed logins within N minutes from the same IP.

If that condition is met, it adds an iptables rule to reject all connections from that IP.

If you're getting lots of random IPs, try tweaking the failures required or the timing window - you could reduce the number of failures and widen the window to better handle the situation where you might not get many hits from a given host.

If you're using key only access, you have much less to worry about: bots like that are just trying to defeat regular password auth. While its _annoying_ unless its causing you network issues its not a concern once password auth is disabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> > If you're getting lots of random IPs

That is the problem, it always seems to be random IPs. Thats why failtoban is a losing battle. Failtoban works per IP, but no matter how sensitive the ban rule there always seems to be an endless supply of new IPs.

I do use keys for ssh access so disabling passwords does cover most of the safety concern. I guess it is more of an annoyance than anything. It looks huge in the logs, but network usage wise it probably boils down to once every few minutes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clouds Over Cuba: Cuban Missile Crisis and What Might Have Been [video] (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://cloudsovercuba.com <comment><USER2> (2012)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, added.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recovery of blacked out text - <AUTHOR>

ASOIAF fans have a problem screaming for automation.  They're trying to recover some poorly redacted text from an original plot summary released by the publisher.
http://imgur.com/GhezIdS
I know in the past people have had success with recovering blurred text using Photoshop and Javascript. This seems like a much simpler, and likely studied, problem.
Are there articles/books/papers/tools on this subject?   I'm not sure where to start because I don't know the correct language.
Here's the thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/2usz8v/spoilers_all_uncovering_the_blanked_text_in_grrms/ <comment><USER2> Maybe something of this sort? [http://dheera.net/projects/blur](http://dheera.net/projects/blur) Just get the font and do comparison on what fits, if there's too many results, you could use a dictionary.</comment>


A new perspective on Coffee and Tea: "Building" Coffee Match - <AUTHOR> http://coffeematchdotcom.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/building-a-coffee-and-tea-brand-from-ground-up/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Xntrk, I'm Sumant, one of the founders of Coffee Match.

The $15 is just a baseline for our Indiegogo campaign. Unlike Tonx/Toby's estate - with Coffee Match, your getting great Coffee or Tea from the a unique destination along with a ton of interesting content about the region, the people, the Coffee, & much more.

With more orders & relationships, we will continue to work on keeps cost down.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, maybe I missed it, but will you be doing the roasting or will the supplier?

Why not work with small roasters instead of direct?

<comment><AUTHOR> We will be importing the beans directly to the US & then working with small roasters in certain geographic locations to roast the beans before we ship it out.

<comment><USER3> Why? Before I roasted my own beans, I was pretty much interested in the output of a specific local roaster. They source the beans, choose a specific roasting profile, are there to answer questions and guide my choices, take feedback (the Costa Rican was under/over roasted for my taste, and so on). _That_ is the kind of relationship and connection I want, if I want one at all.

That is all being replaced with some content on a website, roasted by some person you select, with beans that you select? Sorry, I doubt you are as good at bean selection as the roaster you are bring the beans to. I could be wrong about that, but I'm trying to give input as a huge coffee nerd, and a potential customer. I just don't care about a blog and pictures about where my beans came from. And then I think about the economics of it. You are acting as a middle man, meaning you need to get paid. I surely don't want to pay you to do selection that my own local roaster already does very well. I don't see any value in what you are offering.

That probably seems very negative and "snipe"y, but I think you are going to dump a ton of time and money into something that really isn't going to be successful.

Edit: as I said, I now roast my own coffee. I buy from Sweet Marias. If, for some reason, I hunger for knowledge about the source of my beans (and, I stress that I don't), I can just go to their website and read about it for free. For example: [http://www.sweetmarias.com/coffee/full- description/bolivia](http://www.sweetmarias.com/coffee/full- description/bolivia)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess I'm a philistine, but I am happy with my $12/lb local roast & my $8/can Folgers, and I really don't feel an emotional connection to the far- flung places my food is grown... nor am I pursuing one. I am happy to have both cheap and good coffee & tea and am content there.

So I don't think this business is going to get my dollars, and I feel that most people are in my boat.

Best of luck finding the niche of people that will want what is being sold!

<comment><USER5> I liked Jerry Seinfeld's quotes from his recent NPR review:

 _" I don't give a damn. That's the beauty of it. It doesn't matter. That's the nearest place. I'll meet you there. And you know what? Coffee's all good. It's all good. As long as it's fresh, it's good. And it's always fresh in New York. ... I think we're a more productive society as a result."_

and

 _" I have that at my mother's in Florida at her condo. When she says, 'Do you want coffee?' And she had a — I think it was a Cuban packet — and I started rolling my eyes. 'Oh my God that's the coffee you have?' And she boils the water and opens the packet and puts it in there and you know what? It was pretty good."_

I'm not saying that all coffees are the same, but in general if my choices are "bad" coffee and no coffee, I'll take the bad coffee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Heh, i'm sipping my

        overly roasted (and cheap) Kirkland Columbian Coffee from Costco

right now, it's not bad. But i do appreciate high-end "private label" coffee too. I was talking to somebody this week whose sibling runs a little roaster, and almost got squeezed out of business when world supplies get squeezed by a weak harvest somewhere, and Starbuck and Nestle start buying like crazy. Exciting business!

</comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't say in oz or grams how much coffee you are actually getting. From some rough math I would have to guess it is about 6oz. For $15 that seems really expensive even when compared to craft coffee (tonx/toby's estate) which is around $19 (shipping included) for 12oz bag.

<comment><USER8> Yeah I just contributed to the indiegogo but before hand I send them an email on price here is the response I got to paraphrase.

"It is 15 dollars including shipping and in terms of quantity it is 10 oz" Pretty good deal considering that they are doing interesting things with content that directly connect you to the farm and culture...

<comment><USER9> How are you "directly connected to the farm and culture"? If you are like most people, you brew your coffee and go on with your morning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey - we send you very small snippets of content everyday through email/app about that Coffee. So as you enjoy your cup everyday - you get a learn a little bit about what made all of it possible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some clever/unique ways websites have used CONTESTS for promo? - <AUTHOR>

Past or present. Just wanna look over what's been done before, and/or snatch up some ideas. Thanks. <comment><USER2> The Netflix prize was a competition for $1M to improve their recommendation algorithm. Check out ChallengePost to see current competitions offered by companies.

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

[http://challengepost.com/](http://challengepost.com/)</comment>


HipChat acquired by Atlassian - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hipchat.com/2012/03/07/weve-been-acquired-by-atlassian/

<comment><USER3> Interesting strategy by Atlassian. First they bought bitbucket, then SourceTree, now HipChat.

Also I hope HipChat will now finally get that native OS X client they've been promising for ages.

<comment><USER4> At least you can still get AIR for OSX. Trying running the HipChat client on Linux... it's pretty painful, and getting more painful as time goes on (and we get further and further from Adobe's last release of AIR for Linux). It's even more painful to get it running on a 64 bit Linux distribution...

<comment><USER5> As we speak, I'm running a Windows virtual machine in fullscreen on my left monitor. The VM's sole job is running Adobe AIR for the HipChat client.

<comment><USER6> Sounds efficient :)

<comment><USER5> Hey, what else are you going to use a 6-core CPU and 16GB of RAM for if not to throw VMs around willy-nilly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems the same person writes all these "we have been acquired" posts.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Sweet, this means my Atlassian-loving company might finally start using a web- based chat room system. For some reason our teams love email, wiki, IMs, but won't even countenance the benefit of realtime chat.

<comment><USER8> We have a permanent jabber room on our server that all but one dev uses. No one was ever told they needed to be there.

Just start using a chatroom and invite people in. Remind a few to add it to the auto-join list. If your coworkers find a benefit in it, there doesn't need to be an official policy; the usage will just grow organically. If they don't see a benefit, why force it on them?

<comment><USER6> We used to do this in '99 with an IRC server with all the IT folks on it. We would train the bots with info about systems. You could type an IP - and the bot would reply with the system details, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really would like to say my congratulations to them. They are a pretty decent project management tool, we use them at ollaa and recently I have written a blog post about HipChat. <http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/why-we- love-and-hate-hipchat/> Atlassian is making really smart decisions.

<comment><USER10> In your blog post:

        Push notifications. They're confusing. All the in-person communication is pushed, however room conversation is not unless you are @mentioned.
        If you would like to make an announcement to 10 people, you have to mention them one by one manually.

You can use "@all" to mention everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think HipChat is the best group communication tool [http://www.quora.com/Should-my-team-use-Hipchat-or- Campfire-...](http://www.quora.com/Should-my-team-use-Hipchat-or-Campfire-or- Yammer)

I wish them luck

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if Github will offer anything similar? Or will 37signal and GitHub merge one day?

</comment><comment><USER13> Congrats guys! Atlassian really seems like a good place for you :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Now you have a good excuse to rebrand (and/or change that icon?)

</comment><comment><USER15> I bet they change the logo:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3603937>

</comment><comment><USER16> why is atlassian acquiring commodity tech? I don't understand their strategy.

edit: as opposed to just building it themselves, what's so hard about a chat app? maybe i underestimate the amount of iteration in the hipchat product and they're buying that product knowledge, not the tech.

<comment><USER17> To be the be-all, end-all company that builds products for other software businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congrats guys!

</comment><comment><USER19> Congrats to Garret and his team!

</comment><comment><USER20> Another product about to be ruined...

(I'm not an Atlassian fan)

<comment><USER4> > (I'm not an Atlassian fan)

Clearly...

Care to provide any more detail? A well reasoned post might have spared you some downvotes.

<comment><USER20> Crucible/fisheye - slow. I mean really slow. Unusably slow both with respect to the UI and back end. Half our team use IE which it just doesn't work in at all. Chrome is the only thing it just about crawls along in. Incredibly difficult keeping it alive with 50 users. Crashes once a week entirely and sometimes refuses to start with no error messages at all.

JIRA - workflow crash took our team of 30 devs at the time out entirely for 2 days. Overcomplicated administrative mess especially with respect to plugins. Reindexing takes out the entire JIRA instance until complete. Permission schemes and workflow is an epic mess of cludges.

Both products: Null pointer exceptions galore, scary memory ceiling. Integration sucks - all the horrible mappings to maintain.

They feel like bloated, slow and badly designed products which is worrying considering the cost.

TBH their support are good but I shouldn't have to use it on a product suite that costs that much.

<comment><USER21> How are any of these reasons that HipChat is "about to be ruined"? Both of those are huge products, and afaict were developed by Atlassian - <USER2> acquired.

Atlassian has made two big acquisitions that I know of (Bitbucket, SourceTree), and in both cases the product was better off after the acquisition.

From what I see, Atlassian goes in and provides cash and infrastructure, leaving the teams that were responsible for the product's success to continue making great things. I don't see any indication that things will be different for HipChat.

<comment><USER22> Fisheye was bought (as was Clover and Crucible) with Cenqua.

<https://www.atlassian.com/cenqua/>

<comment><USER20> Adn they ruined it hence my original point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Set Up a Common Lisp Web Environment - <AUTHOR> http://jdpressman.com/2015/11/25/how-to-setup-a-common-lisp-web-environment-%28november%202015%29.html <comment><USER2> The download link on the sbcl.org site links to sourceforge, which I am reluctant to use as a download source. Anybody know if there is a canonically accepted alternative dl location?

<comment><USER3> There's a GitHub mirror ([https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl](https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl)), but it doesn't have copies of the binary releases.

<comment><USER4> If you want a current SBCL but want to avoid Sourceforge, use your distro's SBCL binary (which is probably ancient) to recompile the source code taken from GitHub.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not the modern way to setup common lisp environment at all. [https://github.com/snmsts/roswell](https://github.com/snmsts/roswell) is a oneshot answer for setting up Common Lisp implementation, Quicklisp and the- shell-scripting-environment-for-CL.

OSX:

$ brew tap snmsts/roswell

$ brew install roswell

Arch:

$ yaourt -S roswell

Windows: go [https://ci.appveyor.com/project/snmsts/roswell](https://ci.appveyor.com/project/snmsts/roswell) for binaries

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it is much more reasonable to have a decent fastcgi back-end for SBCL than running a full http[/2] server.

As far as I remember, there is only a naive FFI for libfcgi on github.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're entirely correct, I was originally going to have an appendix on how to install woo ([https://github.com/fukamachi/woo](https://github.com/fukamachi/woo)) but decided to get the tutorial done rather than prolong the time until I release it. I'll probably add it at a later date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note that quickload can take a list as a parameter

</comment><comment><USER8> Hint for OSX users: CMUCL works best on 64bit OSX versions. The other Lisps such as Clozure CL and SBCL sooner or later cause some incompatibility problems.

<comment><USER9> Er, what?

OS X is Clozure's home platform and in my experience where it works best. The project has all those Cocoa bindings and grew out of Macintosh Common Lisp; it's definitely an OS X friendly Common Lisp.

CMUCL is...if not precisely _dead_ , certainly moribund. It's been ported all over the place and the OS X port is certainly credible, but I wouldn't call it a first class Common Lisp for the Mac platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> On OSX I also found 'rlwrap' useful when using sbcl from the commandline.

<comment><USER11> I've seen a lot of people mention using rlwrap with sbcl. I'm a bit curious about how people actually do the development with that.

Do you use the repl to simply (load ...) files; never doing anything interactively with it? When I'm using emacs+slime I constantly write small loops/functions in the repl for testing, but doing that with rlwrap feels pretty painful to me. Do you have some sort of scratch-file that you write those in, which you can easily load?

At least to me the debugger feels pretty horrible to use without slime. How do you usually fix/redifine functions when debugging a problem? How about stepping through code? Making sense of the compiler notes/errors must also be pretty annoying without having them highlighted in your editor?

<comment><USER12> It is a _huge_ pain to use rlwrap to edit Lisp. Someone, please write a "lispwrap" program which solves this pain point once and for all.

<comment><USER13> Better to use emacs/slime with Meta-x slime-connect and ssh port forwarding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> BTW: SBCL won't work an all VPS.

<comment><USER15> How come?

<comment><USER14> Memory overcommitment. Isn't supported for all VPS solutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I totally appreciate complete focus on content.But is there any specific reason that people would not want to use any form of templating/styling?

This is a genuine question and not sarcasm.I have seen this sort of styling on several sites which excel in material provided.

EDIT: I do love the content.Gonna be trying this this weekend

<comment><USER17> From the other perspective, I was just about to say "thank you for the plain HTML".

So much easier to read than the trend of #CCC on #FFF...

<comment><USER18> I wish more sites were plain html. You can do better, but it's easy to do a lot worse, to the point of unreadability.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple soon to be most valuable company in the world - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/apple-has-only-50-billion-to-go/

<comment><USER2> World's most valuable _public_ company, perhaps.

Saudi Aramco (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Aramco>) has an estimated market value in the trillions.</comment>


Amazon's deal will let spy on you through your electricity meter - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-07/amazon-will-soon-see-inside-millions-of-aussie-homes/12582776 <comment><USER2> Very true. I had detailed monitoring on my power too the house, and noticed each device and bulb has a distinct drain. Each "10W" bulb is slightly different. I could see exactly what light was on.

With good analysis the amount of information that can be derived from one single figure of total power consumption is much higher than I ever expected.

Very bad idea to share this with a company like Amazon.</comment>


Make your next trip social, with Bloompy - <AUTHOR> http://bloompy.co/

<comment><AUTHOR> still learning</comment>


Ask HN: How can we use technology to prevent domestic mass murder? - <AUTHOR> Instead of the oft-discussed political and sociological solutions, how can we as engineers use technology to minimize the damage of mass murders or prevent their occurrence, in a way that respects individual freedoms?<p>Edit: Remember that guns aren't the only medium through which these acts are carried out. <comment><USER2> "Instead of the oft-discussed political and sociological solutions, how can we as engineers use technology to minimize the damage of mass murders or prevent their occurrence, in a way that respects individual freedoms?"

Well, there are several problems with handguns that lead to people being reluctant to carry them:

\- weight

\- size

\- expense

\- safety (esp. accidental discharges, collateral damage, over-penetration)

\- lethality (as separate from stopping power; imagine the ideal as a fictional gun that always stops an attacker but almost never kills him or her, like a Star Trek phaser set to stun)

I'm not sure how many of those are amenable to fixing. But if you could come up with something akin to a phaser, at a good price, that could be safely carried by a large subset of the population I think you'd be on to a winner.

"What does your startup do?"

"We're the Tesla of handguns"

:)

<comment><USER3> This would be a great option, non-lethal stopping force, that is small, less expensive, safer to carry, repeat shots, integrated so 911 is alerted so police can come to the area right away to sort things out provide assistance.

teslaguns.com/phaser

<comment><USER2> Re. 'non-lethal', though, bear in mind there's no such guarantee. I think 'less-lethal' is the term of art.

E.g. assuming the thing is somewhat like a Taser, good luck if you shoot someone with a weak heart, or a pacemaker. Or maybe your target falls badly and dies from a head injury. Or falls off something. Etc. etc. etc.

This is why self-defense is a moral imperative. There is no way to employ force against someone without risking his or her death.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If technology were employed (carefully) to enact more thorough and appropriate justice for all citizens, there may be less of the type of anger that leads to violent crimes and other social problems. The current justice system focuses too heavily on after-the-fact heavy-hitting crimes -- where an individual is harmed a great deal in a short period of time. But what about all the micro- crimes that many people commit over and over, hundreds or more times over the years? The justice system is, for the most part, completely oblivious in this respect. After all, how can you try a person for micro-crimes?

If instead, there were some God-like technology that watched for micro-crimes and compensated the victims in micro-payments (or something to that effect), it could really help to make reality more fair and just. Naturally the micro- payments would be funded by the perpetrators.

On another note, many mass murders are committed by people who have been essentially outcast from society in one way or another. If these people had someone to talk to about their problems or perceived social issues (real or otherwise), it could probably do some real good. An intelligent AI could serve this role. In fact, good AI friends might be sufficient alone to prevent many such murders.

Now, this is not to say that such a technology is anywhere near possible at this point in time. Nevertheless, I feel it is callous and completely inappropriate to look at things like mass murder without considering the sociological circumstances that lead to such events. The same type of thinking that makes people disregard murderers as non-humans is exactly the type of thinking that can lead someone to murder. There is a fine line to hypocrisy here.

</comment><comment><USER5> How about RFID chips (or something like that) in all firearms? And long range scanners that can detect said RFID-like chips. Make it embedded in a crucial part of the firing system (firing pin or something) so that if that part is removed then the gun becomes a doorstop. As you can tell, I don't know if this is technically feasible but hey its an idea.

Have long range scanners put into public areas susceptible to these types of attacks - schools, malls, movie theaters, etc.

Automatic notification to police when a scanner picks it up - noting the distance from the scan location, make/model of weapon and direction weapon is travelling in. Maybe scale the notifications - dispatch only for 1 weapon, if 2 or more are detected in same vicinity then direct notification to all patrol and to dispatch?

For example if it is a college campus, it could detect the firearm(s) a few minutes before a malicious minded person gets to where they are going to start something. If that few minutes allows responders to get there in time, then it could be prevented.

</comment><comment><USER6> Probably some method to help the people before they get to the point of doing violence. Many of which are experiencing some sort of distress that has not been addressed.

</comment><comment><USER7> You are asking for precrime. Is ripe for abuse, and will be badly abused. Less technology (as in "weapons", the availability of lethal ones and the culture about having/using them) is more probable that have an impact.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not necessarily asking for thoughtcrime, if that's what you mean. Technology is ripe for benefits and abuse. It's all about the manner in which it is used. For example, can we use sensors and networking on mobile devices to create a distributed system to reliably detect traces of bomb chemicals in the air?

<comment><USER7> Pre-crime, like in Minority Report, predicting somewhat that someone "will" commit a crime and jail him before it does. Even if he wasn't going to do it, or was just incriminated.

Regarding bomb chemicals or helper devices, most mass killing were using guns that god forbids if you complain about someone having the right to have them. And you can make bombs with common household items (i.e. cleaning products) and use i.e. pressure cookers as devices. The possibility of false possitives, or even discretionary false possitives is too big.

And still will remain the problem that you are giving even more power to the ones that do that control. No one watches the watchers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> changes to HIPPA laws in the US would go a long way towards making data available to predict potential issues. In many states, purchase of a weapon requires that you state you are not clinically depressed. Due to HIPPA laws, there is no way to verify this. Also, there was a story on HN recently about the results of studies on certain psych meds that were hidden by the companies producing the medicines. If a medicine causes a violent reaction, it would make sense to know if someone on the medicine is trying to purchase a weapon. Again the HIPPA laws in the US prevent this.

<comment><USER9> Most perpetrators of mass shootings (more than 4 people shot) do not have a diagnosable mental illness. Certainly most of them are not taking psychiatric meds.

Have you looked at each perpetrator of the nearly 300 mass shootings in the US this year?

<comment><USER8> kid from Newtown was on meds

<comment><USER9> That's one person. How about the other 293 (real number, not an exageration) mass shootings this year?

<comment><USER5> I think that is the point tmaly was making, there isn't a data source anyone can use to actually verify or assess the 293 because of HIPAA laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> People should carry weapons with them. Engineers can make smaller, lighter, safer, and less lethal weapons. It has to have the stopping power of a gun, capacity to be useful in a long firefight, and it needs to be readily accessible. The problem is not much is going to match a gun. Schools could install gun detectors or have armed guards, but they will cheap out and not do anything. People need to learn to defend themselves. In most mass shootings, anti-gun people want to blame availability of guns. But what about the ability to walk into a school with six guns unchallenged?

<comment><USER11> In all mass shootings pro-gun people blindly ignore that first world countries with gun control are proof that it's a sound approach.

<comment><USER12> The vast majority of mass shootings take place in places where guns are not allowed. This seems to indicate that guns are actually good at preventing mass shootings.

Finland and Norway have restrictive gun control, yet they're responsible for far more mass shooting fatalities per capita than the USA. How do you explain that?

<comment><USER11> [citation needed]</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Just Declared War On These 15 Products - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-just-declared-war-on-these-products-2012-6#google-maps-1

<comment><USER2> The only thing that I really didn't agree with was the slide about Adium. Adium is a great chat client that looks nice, is customizable, and supports more chat services than what Messages can. For instance, I sometimes IRC and MSN Messenger with Adium, and MSN Messenger is used frequently for communicating with some of my family.

Also, while Dropbox may have some more competition now, they've also had more competition from Google with Google Drive, and it doesn't seem to have affected them too much.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> " ... MacBook Pros don't have Ethernet inputs anymore either. Wi-Fi is the future."

"... And soon, car companies will put a Siri button on their steering wheels. This is bad news for Garmin."</comment>


Why Students Pay for Professors' Research - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/2012/12/28/why-professors-publis/ <comment><USER2> They don't, at least in the USA. My Ph.d. is from Texas at Austin, which is a public institution. During my time as a grad student I had numerous opportunities to 'see how the sausage is made'. Even as a public institution the vast majority of funding (over 80% in the sciences) came from outside grants, such as federal agencies. A professors appointment is also only for 8 months of the year, and they must find outside funding sources to cover the other time.

This is the business model in each department, and it is why promotion to tenure is so focused on publications and grants.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's the thing, many classes are taught by (sub)minimum wage temps or grad students. The students often don't get any benefit from the researchers.

It would be nice if colleges published how much of your tuition dollar actually went to the teachers - a bit like some charities do.</comment>


Anti-Interdiction Update: Six Month Retrospective - <AUTHOR> https://puri.sm/posts/anti-interdiction-update-six-month-retrospective/ <comment> blaser-waffle Interesting offering, but truly needed?

I can get a generic laptop at Best Buy with a reasonable assumption that no one is tampering with it enough to bury OS or firmware hacks. And if you're that paranoid, generic COTS might be an option. I might be missing something, though -- what is the use-case here?

Also, nail polish is a good low-tech solution but now I need to clean glittery stuff of my work laptop. The NSA can find nail polish, too.

Nevertheless, glad to see Purism is still going hard at it.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you can go to any random store that has a Dell laptop you want or whatever and be reasonably confident that it hasn't been tempted with between the factory and your purchase, if that's the specific that you are concerned about. However, if you want a one of Purism's laptops, you can't just go out to any big box store and grab one; there's really just this one purchase of option - shipped by post, and if you are worried about interdiction, it's a pretty risky one you would be reliant to opt for. So Purism is providing an option that mitigates that risk, allowing them to capture a market segment that naturally aligns with their product offering but would likely pass on them without this risk mitigation process.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin Undervalued by Over $200, Investment Bank Report Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-undervalued-200-needham-report/ <comment><USER2> "Investment Bank is Long Bitcoin, Investment Bank Report Finds"</comment>


Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI5MjA <comment><USER2> _If Android gains traction on x86-based tablets and other mobile devices, CodeWeavers has a lot of commercial opportunities for pushing the running of Windows software on Android._

I honestly don't see how there would be that much of a market. Any native Android implementation of a particular program will be much nicer to use than a Wine emulated program. Really the only use I have ever found for Wine and other emulation programs is for running Windows games on other platforms and usually the performance is too poor or unreliable except in the case of very old games.

<comment><USER3> SkiFree would actually be pretty fun on an Android.

<comment><USER4> DOSbox has been out for Android for quite some time. Takes a little configuring, but it works. I've seen people running windows 3.1 and win 95 on Android as well.

<http://androiddosbox.appspot.com/>

<http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1325643>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reason WINE works is that it essentially runs x86 programs as-is and provides the needed linkage (shared libraries) used by the Windows programs. (Windows syscalls are usually issued through an intermediary shared library, so WINE can trap them there.) Much of this work is re-implementing the various libraries; bugs in WINE can usually be attributed to missing functionality (incomplete or stubbed functions) or bugs in the WINE implementation.

Running an x86 program directly on ARM is … impossible. So maybe WINE on ARM can serve to run WinRT applications… but none of the existing x86 Windows applications can run without x86 emulation, which would be absurdly slow on Android devices.

Edit: Another commenter says that the project wiki suggests using qemu to run the x86 code on ARM, and then trap calls into native (ARM) WINE libraries. This approach seems unlikely to yield good performance. I am concerned that different C and C++ calling conventions means some additional work will have to be done to cleanup function arguments at every call, which is just more overhead on top of x86 emulation…

<comment><USER6> >>>So maybe WINE on ARM can serve to run WinRT applications

That would be a trick: How do you buy RT apps when not on a Microsoft-approved device?

<comment><USER7> Maybe you first buy them on a MS-approved device and either copy the app from that device or are able to get a DL link that works on the other device.

<comment><USER6> But that would make you buy what you want to avoid -- an MS-approved device.

<comment><USER7> Not everyone who wants to run RT apps on non-MS devices is trying to avoid MS in every aspect of their lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So we have windows apps on android, and android apps running on windows 8?

</comment><comment><USER9> I love ambitious projects like this, but I can't help but think this is a waste of some formidable developer talent. First, running Windows apps on Android will give Android even more of a battery life problem than it already has. Second, this will possibly increase the chance that some software shops will be even lazier in making native ports of popular applications and just tell people to use WINE. Third, if people want this kind of experience they should just buy a Surface Pro or some kind of Ubuntu touch device that can already run WINE. Again, I applaud anyone who will undertake a project of this difficulty but I just don't see the point.

<comment><USER10> You don't have to run Android on battery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do you need ARM applications, or does it emulate X86 too?

<comment><USER12> Wine is not an emulator. ;)

<comment><USER13> This is misleading, since it means it's not a CPU emulator, however it's an emulator of Windows in a sense that it mimics the Windows environment and system libraries.

<comment><USER14> I always just assumed it was a tongue-in-cheek joke à la GNU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> <http://www.winulator.com/>

P.S. knowing this dude's previous work (coLinux), he's pretty good :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Anyone know what the benefits/drawbacks are of running WINE on a MacBook/Linix versus running Windows in a VM such as VirtualBox?

<comment><USER17> With a VM you will be able to run more software more reliably but suffer a significant performance hit and require a Windows license for the VM and it will take a chunk of your RAM.

WINE is more likely to be glitchy & unreliable with many programs, will require special configuration in some cases and may not work at al in others. However since it doesn't have to emulate a computer (it basically re- implements parts of the Windows API) the performance is usually on a par or only slightly worse than native windows. You don't need a Windows license to run WINE however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How difficult would it be to get Wine running on a jailbroken iOS device?

<comment><USER12> It would be a waste of time; the devices are arm and not x86.

<comment><USER14> Windows runs on ARM too. Not sure any of the apps are worth emulating though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> all this just to run internet explorer on a macbook

<comment><USER20> <http://www.modern.ie/virtualization-tools></comment></comment>


Show HN: Soothe – Uber for Massages - <AUTHOR> https://www.soothe.com/ <comment><USER2> The problem with Uber for massages (and other Uber for _) is that the people that are searching for a new service provider aren't going to (possibly ever) go find a new provider for some services, on a regular basis. They find one they like and they stick with it. This is distinctly different than Uber's model because there's not really driver loyalty like there is with a massage or maid service. This means the contractors can just cut out Soothe after develop a reputation with clients.

<comment><USER3> There's an inherit assumption that people would rather build loyalty to people over companies for specific services and its unclear if that's true. A perfect counter example to your cleaning example is Homejoy.

<comment><USER4> Eh you think people are loyal to HomeJoy or the price?

I've heard a lot of "HomeJoy is meh but they are cheap. "

<comment><USER5> This was the exact sentiment in the HN thread a few weeks ago about Homejoy, and to those who put up with Homejoy for the price but unsatisfied with the quality, those in the thread recommended finding a professional cleaner to contract directly with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Will the Uber model work for a good or service that isn't commoditized? All we ask of a transportation service like Uber is to get us from point A to point B cheaply and safely. A massage is more complex and doesn't have a two item to do list that can simply be checked off and labeled "a good massage". This means the standard deviation of quality is a lot larger. There is also a benefit of loyalty. Massages are a more personal and customized experience than transportation and there would be a greater benefit to having your masseuse know your preferences.

<comment><USER7> While I agree completely with you on some of the differences, one of the best things about Uber (in my opinions) is that the transaction is cashless and centralized. I don't have to know or find the number for a cab, I use the app. Even if the driver is a good one, I may not use him next time because I don't want to pay him a new way. Massages _are_ more personal and I'm still skeptical of the service, but I think the model has more benefits for other services than some people are implying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seeing a lot of massage startups lately. We're at a coworking space where people book conference rooms and get massages done in them. If you use this service, please don't do this. (If you do, please pick a scented oil that doesn't smell like bacteria and pine trees.)

<comment><USER9> those people are evil

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems the same as [http://unwind.me](http://unwind.me)

<comment><USER11> And [https://pinenow.com/](https://pinenow.com/)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373501)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it's a nice concept and don't have any problems with it (in fact, it looks quite nice), but I do wonder what distinguishes these various services.

Here in NYC, there are several "Uber for" maid/massage/anything else you can think of services, and apart from the design of their sites and sometimes the pricing scheme, it's hard to tell what's actually different.

Maybe the same thing could be said about Lyft, Uber, etc., but I do wonder what kind of competitive advantage these services are going for.

<comment><USER13> I agree. The big idea behind Uber is to optimize capacity utilization. That's also the reason why it's a race between those taxi apps to get global scale first.

Unlike cars, maids and masseuses don't waste 90% of their time doing nothing and there's also not going to be a population reduction by matching supply and demand for these verticals a little bit better for iphone users.

<comment><USER9> "don't waste 90% of their time doing nothing"

that's an assumption

<comment><USER14> and a false one, at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting quirk on the website, when you click the location dropdown at the top of the page and it stays open, scrolling to the bottom of the page reveals the same open dropdown.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can I get a massage while getting driven somewhere

<comment><USER17> süther?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems sort of like Priv, they let you pick your massage professional though, also have a bunch more verticals.

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks very much like [https://pinenow.com/](https://pinenow.com/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it's time for an Uber for Uber for ______ service. There's so many of them now it's confusing and time-consuming to pick one. So why not add a crowd-sourced middleman to do it for you?

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if being the "Uber of Massages" will mean that therapists end up making minimum wage after covering their own costs. This in particular:

> Gratuity is on us. No need to tip

Is alarming.

<comment><USER22> Alarming only if it contributes to therapists making minimum wage which is not a given. Otherwise, I love not having to deal with tips. I wish every service had tips baked in and we could do away with them entirely.

<comment><USER21> It's also not a given that they actually go through with assigning proper gratuities.

The success model for startups these days is deceit and breaking laws. If a startup is claiming to be the "Uber of <blah>", I interpret that as a company which thinks being disruptive means breaking laws and screwing people over for the sake of growth and attempting to make good on the outrageously high investments they receive.

What I'm looking for is concrete proof that over the long run, not just in a recruitment surge, therapists end up making a living as good as or better than when they're employed by a spa. If that's not the case, then this is simply another widener of the wealth gap in this country.

<comment><USER23> What other verticals would these services need to expand to increase the wealth gap?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've used Soothe and the therapists were very professional. I would recommend it!

</comment><comment><USER25> Before reading the website it seemed like uber for prostitution. After is seeme some what legit. I guess you can't pick your messager, which I think people will want. I may not care who drives me or cleans my house but I do care who is rubbing all over me.

</comment><comment><USER26> also see [https://www.zeel.com/](https://www.zeel.com/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder the legal implications this is going to have regarding prostitution. I don't say this is intentional from the part of soothe's creators, but they will have to deal with (and accepting the legal liabilities of) an issue that is already there (fake massage parlors offering sexual services).

<comment><USER28> The other side of that coin is the potential for creeps and the resulting sexual harassment of the massage therapists.

<comment><USER29> Can't believe no one mentioned this sooner. This should be called uber skanky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This could create a huge underground prostitution market worth billions. I hold no political view, just a happy ending for those who pursue it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Available 7 days a week. 9am to midnight. Including holidays.Can be there in 1 hour or schedule in advance.Anywhere you want, when you want, starting at $99.</comment>


Ask HN: What is with the black border on top of HackerNews webpage? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I wish at the very least the bar was made clickable or hover-able for more information. It's usually when someone prominent in tech/etc passes away, this time likely being Paul Allen ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18224227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18224227))

</comment><comment><USER3> It appears when someone notable has passed away. In this case, Paul Allen.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18224227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18224227)</comment>


So, You Want to Be a Hacker? - <AUTHOR> http://stemmatch.net/blog/2015/december/23/so-you-want-to-be-a-hacker-the-perception-vs-reality-how-what-tv-tells-us-is-wrong/ <comment><USER2> Definitely a good perception on what hacking really is. Thanks for the share.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you enjoyed it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Changed my view on hacking.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is definitely not what it used to be. People seem to think it's all about stealing your information and trying to spend your money. Hopefully people begin to understand there's a purpose for it.</comment></comment>


Ruby, Python, "Power" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ianbicking.org/ruby-python-power.html

<comment><USER2> A mostly good article that shows little regard for reality in the performance section. "Ruby and CPython perform roughly the same." That is correct if you believe that 3x slower is roughly the same ([http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ruby&lang2=python)). They are in the same ballpark (vs. Java or C).

If the author had left it at that, fine. He goes on: "It would be surprising if [YARV, the new Ruby VM meant to improve performance] didn't perform better than CPython." That would make sense if CPython and Ruby performed the same, but Ruby is a third as fast as CPython. In order to match CPython, Ruby has a long way to go. Ruby 1.9, using that YARV VM, still lags behind Python ([http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=python)). Throw in Psyco (an optimized Python JIT compiler) and Ruby 1.9 looks a good 3-4x slower.

Python is faster than Ruby in a significant way (3x is significant). Ruby is a great language that I really like. You don't have to stretch its performance characteristics to make a case for the language - especially when raw performance often isn't important at all.</comment>


Dragon Curve fractals in LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://www.overleaf.com/read/msxcdqkpwfjw <comment><USER2> Well TikZ/PGF is really capable and "lindenmayersystems" is simply a library feature. TikZ can even have a custom shading for the Mandelbrot set (page 688. in [1]). Note that even though it's a baked in TikZ shading it uses a single function shading PDF element, kind of neat.

[1] [http://ctan.ijs.si/tex- archive/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanu...](http://ctan.ijs.si/tex- archive/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is also related to the binary complex number format discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10648847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10648847)

The set of complex numbers with all zeroes to the left of the radix point forms a fractal that is two dragon curves joined together: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_base_systems#Base_.E...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_base_systems#Base_.E2.88.921.C2.B1i)

</comment><comment><USER4> Without redundant code:

      \documentclass[border=3pt]{standalone}
      \usepackage{tikz}
      \usetikzlibrary{lindenmayersystems}
      \begin{document}
      \begin{tikzpicture}[line width=1pt, rounded corners=4pt,
              l-system={
                  rule set={X -> X+YF+,Y->-FX-Y},
                  axiom=FX, angle=90, order=11, step=10pt
              }
          ]
      \foreach \c/\r in {green/0, red/90, blue/180, orange/270}
          \draw[\c, rotate=\r] l-system;
      \end{tikzpicture}
      \end{document}

</comment><comment><USER3> It's unreadable on the iPad. The text is gigantic, and it won't let me pinch to zoom out.</comment>


Ask HN: How to create a company bank account during the quarantine? - <AUTHOR> Banks are closed. What do people suggest I use to open an account without going into a bank ? <comment><USER2> Many banks are online-only without branches to go to.

Germany: You download the forms from the bank, then go for identification to the postal office. They check your id/passport. It doesn't cost anything (the receiver, the bank pays). In recent years you can even do that online via video chat (run by the postal company but I've also seen one startup doing it).

</comment><comment><USER3> Which country is the business based in? Some countries like the UK have a very healthy fintech scene and you can open accounts fully online provided you have the required documents.

<comment><AUTHOR> US</comment></comment>


R Course Finder - <AUTHOR> http://r-exercises.com/2016/11/04/r-course-finder-update-2/ <comment><USER2> R has done more to bring non-coders into professional programming than anything else in my opinion and I love that they are sticking to their roots with self-paced courses.

<comment><USER3> What are their roots? I really didn't enjoy my experiences with R, but I also was forced to take it and have little interest in learning how to be a statistician.

<comment><USER2> Statisticians. Sorry who I meant was the whole of academia who before had an excuse to pass there stats work on to a statistician but now are happy programmers.

<comment><USER4> Keeps my consulting going ;-)

In all seriousness I've taught postdocs who were willing to learn everything from Python to C++/MPI to assembler. The key is just to be intellectually curious and enjoy solving problems. R is very often the thin end of the wedge -- its learning curve is more like a wall, but once you've survived that, most programming language quirks seem like NBD. And lord knows the real physical world is far quirkier still.

R is ugly as shit (ok not as bad as Perl, and it is lispy enough not to be infuriating) but it gives you an enormous arsenal of tools. It's not like R is unique in this way, any decent programming language enables this, it's just that R and CRAN seem to have a working implementation of most anything an analyst is likely to need; if you need speed you call out to C++ or FORTRAN, it's not beautiful but it gets things done. So more of your time can be spent in the pursuit of understanding, to poke and prod, visualize your results, solve problems and (sometimes) discover things no one else has seen.

If someone DOESN'T like those last two things, what the hell are they doing in academia anyways? Choose another line of work and make a lot more money :-)

<comment><USER5> As a data analyst/engineer, if I had to pick one tool, it would be R. It really can do just about everything data, and do it easily.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Murder of Junko Furuta - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta <comment><AUTHOR> Some time ago I was reading a book, in a chapter there is a vivid description of a judeo-christian Hell. Both the author and the person reading the audiobook version felt the need to add trigger warning. In the case of the audiobook version the reader almost said that he regretted reading that chapter.

A bit before that I encountered this story, for me it will always be proof that it is possible to summon hell on earth.</comment>


Game Theory Explained: Why The Joker and Not Batman is Our Savior - <AUTHOR> http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-the-savior-of-us-all <comment><USER2> This is an interesting article, but The Tragedy of the Commons is only 1 of 7 Nash Equilibrium possible. It was cherry picked for a funny thought experiment where Joker is the good guy. Now let's try the Volunteer's Dilemma.

In the Volunteer's Dilemma a group is faced with an inevitable negative, and the only way prevent it is for one member to assume the negative unto himself. The classic example is jumping on the grenade. Nobody wants to do it, but somebody has to or everyone dies.

1) Assume Cooperators and Defectors only. Cooperators will eventually volunteer, Defectors never will. There can be a balance where Cooperators significantly outnumber Defectors, but if this balance is disturbed the population will eventually end.

2) Add Jokers. Jokers in this case would be like Defectors and never volunteer. Worse, however, is that Jokers would probably be so interested in the destruction that they would actively prevent volunteering. There can be no balance in a group with even one Joker still alive, and the population will end.

3) Add Batmen. Batmen neutralize the Jokers' ability to prevent volunteers, and are willing to volunteer themselves. The balance is restored as long as there are enough of these individuals to restore moral and put the group first.

So now in my thought experiment, Jokers are harbingers of the end while Batmen are necessary for survival.

<comment><USER3> How is scenario 3 different from scenario 1?

<comment><USER3> Just re-read your post.

Scenario 3 includes a population of Jokers. That is the difference.

So your assertion... is that Batmen only provide a benefit where there exist Jokers in the population. At least in the Volunteer's Dilemma.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Game theory explained" with too many assumptions. Such as that punishment is so costly that it creates another problem of the commons, as the punishers (who are a subset of the cooperators) get less our of it than the non- punishing cooperators. I'd say this is wrong: in repeated games punishment is not a cost but an investment. A threat must be carried out in order to be credible in the long run, and thus a cooperator who punishes a defector (or a 'joker' for that matter) is better positioned in subsequent games to be treated fairly.

</comment><comment><USER5> The analysis doesn't seem to hold up very well in terms of US post-9/11. Jokers (terrorists) caused a ruckus, which the defectors (military-industrial complex) overplayed as a call to arms for cooperators (US populace). The cooperators then produce excess benefit for the defectors (control of oil- wealthy regions, superfluous security contracts).

I can't pin my finger on what makes post-9/11 US different. Were the jokers not destructive enough? Does the model not account for power structure, or psychological needs (i.e. security) and exploitation thereof? Is the effect of a single joker short-lived (which would correspond to the outpouring of national unity post-9/11)? Did the 9/11 attacks actually increase the cooperator/defector ratio in the long term in a way that is not apparent to me?

<comment><USER6> Could it perhaps be that a very simple thought experiment is not a strong model for the chaotic actions of hundreds of millions of people over several years?

<comment><USER5> Oh indeed! I'm just trying to figure out the most likely reason why :)

<comment><USER7> There is probably something to be said for network resiliency, as well, but I haven't the faintest idea what.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For a contrary view on game theory, I highly recommend watching the excellent BBC documentary series "The Trap" by film maker Alan Curtis.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentar...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_\(television_documentary_series\))

In the first episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War. It discusses John Nash's paranoid schizophrenia and shows footage Nash in his later years acknowledging that his paranoid views of other people at the time were false.

<comment><USER9> There are two sides of Nash's work. One is the actual math, which can be evaluated without considering the credibility of the author. The other is Nash's attempt to use it to describe the real world, which necessarily involves assumptions and simplifications. This second side is where the obvious problems are.

Game theory remains popular because people can easily take the underlying math and apply it with their own assumptions. Of course, if you make too many simplifications you risk achieving a near-useless comic-book view of reality (literally, as in the blog post here).

<comment><USER10> > Of course, if you make too many simplifications you risk achieving a near- > useless comic-book view of reality (literally, as in the blog post here).

For a moment there, I thought you were going to invoke Rorschach as an example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To answer the question, if there has to be a Joker to stop Defectors, who is the Joker?

Joker does not need to be a person; it could be anything that destroys benefits with some good success. You get where I am going with this; Joker is any disaster that causes loss. For living things, death does the job pretty well. However, in real life, people are not the only entities which gather benefits, there are organizations that live beyond the lifetime of an individual. In that case, the Joker could be paradigm shifts, weariness, anti- trust cases, scientific theory, or the occasional market crash (you get 1 point for finding each entity these destroy).

</comment><comment><USER12> The actual paper is here:

<http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3257>

<comment><USER13> Thank you, $39.99 for the paper on the link seemed steep. If it went to the authors I would have no problem paying for it but as we all know - it's not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just the day I _really_ read "Non-cooperative Games (1951) John Nash, Annals of Mathematics". If you're mathematically inclined, I can only advise you to look it up: a pure piece of powerful and concise theory.

</comment><comment><USER15> The Prestige and Inception have been two of the most literary films of the last ten years. Christopher Nolan keeps getting better and better.

So I'd be interested to read a serious analysis of the new Batman films since it wouldn't surprise me if Nolan has something up his sleeve here at this point. That said, this post is not it, so if anyone has any recommendations please share.

</comment><comment><USER16> One big problem I see here is a tendency for black & white thinking. People in the real world don't fit into a neat little "cooperator" or "defector" package. A person's tendency to cooperate can be dependent upon a huge number of factors, including what the subject of cooperation is, how they're feeling that day, current events, political, moral, and religious opinions in vogue, illness and injury, the size of the potential benefit, relationships to other people who may be defecting or cooperating, whether they are a leader or a follower, etc.

Running a simulation of simple, unchanging people doesn't produce much useful information for the real world. Real life cooperation relationships are a lot more intricate and complex.

<comment><USER17> Your complaints are not really a huge problems with this statistical population model. In the end, you took goods out of a system and/or you put goods back into it - everyone falls somewhere along this scale in their lifetimes. All the reasons behind their choices are largely irrelevant, and you can simulate the model based on it.

<comment><USER18> You can sometimes emulate the model, but not always. See the other post in this thread about post 9/11 America.

The problem is that a few well positioned people who behave in a way that is not predictable, or larger forces that the model cannot anticipate (socio- economic, the weather, etc.) can distrupt the model.

Not that the model doesn't 1. Do a good job of explaining a concept and 2. Possibly fits into a larger, more complex model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm having trouble understanding who is a defector, who is a cooperator, and who is the joker. The author has copious asides where he asserts "the financial industry; most of the people you work with, and probably you, too" are the defectors. However, I'm having trouble understanding the leap. Clearly he wants to relate this game to an insight about society at large as judged by all of his asides. So I'm trying to understand his position.

In our society most people must perform work to earn money, that money is taxed, to provide public services to all of us regardless of if we work or not. Therefore, the people paying taxes have a cost and get a benefit of the public services which fits his definition: "Cooperators generate a benefit, shared by all, but they pay a cost to do so." If someone pays taxes that must make them a cooperator. Of course we can have shades of cooperation based on how much is paid because no one give all of their money to the IRS. We do have the other extreme where no money is paid.

Now, there are people who pay less taxes or none at all as much or at all can enjoy those same services less cost or no cost all. That's his definition: "[Defectors] sit back and enjoy the group benefit without paying the costs."

In the sliding scale we are all both cooperators and defectors, but to what degree our role alters the equilibrium of the system (ie causing more cooperators or defectors).

That seems pretty straightforward, but he seems have flipped even the definitions: not just the joker/batman role.

</comment><comment><USER20> In real life, the financiers Lloyd Blankfein represents are not simply "defectors." I would argue that they contribute (or at least could). However, a less contraversial point, especially in light of the recent crash, is that they cause a whole lot of destruction, e.g. they function as "jokers" as well.

<comment><USER19> Well this is where I think the term of joker should be clarified. Jokes must not consume the public good, but they must destroy it. Lloyd certainly benefits and certainly destroys, but his benefits exclude him from being a joker. Defectors cause the tragedy of the commons by not paying a cost. Or maybe as steep of a cost as others because in the real world Lloyd definitely paid a cost, but it was a mere fraction of his wealth where others were wiped out.

It was hard to understand the role of the joker and how it creates an equilibrium, but if the joker is random destroyer then he destroys the cooperator AND the defector equally. If defectors out pace cooperators then the likelihood a defector will be wiped out is greater. By wiping out a defector that shifts the balance (ie the defector dies, or the defector turns to a cooperator from the joker's actions). That's the only way I can understand the joker as a force of "good". And jokers turn out to be a better solution to the problem of equilibrium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Fun to read! Thanks for sharing! Although, i think the author talked to much about the ins and outs without explicitly stating for everyone that the joker allows everyone else to cooperate (to eliminate the joker) :P

who are the jokers of our time?

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not a game theorist (and I'd welcome an opinion/correction from one), but I don't think the original paper's conclusion is very interesting, or has much bearing on real life.

Their result (that jokers, defectors, and cooperators will cycle) depends on some bizarre features of the joker:

\- Jokers don't damage other jokers. This is why jokers drive out defectors.

\- Jokers don't benefit from public goods. This is why jokers don't arise when there are lots of cooperators.

\- The public good benefits that jokers forgo are redistributed back onto the cooperators. This is why cooperators flourish in joker populations: they produce a benefit for a large population, which then gets focused back on their small population.

This last feature is the really weird one. No public good I can think of can be redistributed this way [1]; indeed, goods that _can_ be efficiently reallocated like this tend to be naturally modeled as private goods.

Consider a public good: say, clean air. In this model we would have cooperators, who go out of their way to keep the air clean; defectors, who prefer air to be cleaner, but save effort by polluting; and jokers, who are indifferent to air pollution, produce a large amount of pollution, and somehow transfer the health benefits of clean air back onto the cooperators. Thus, if we added a single cooperator to a population of jokers, the cooperator would get a massive health benefit from not polluting, because of all the jokers "not consuming" the benefit. This is clearly nonsensical.

In short, the paper's conclusions follow from its premises, but its premises have nothing to do with any real situation that I can think of [2].

[1] There are a lot of public goods that degrade as more people use them, but not in a way that matches the math in this paper. Can anyone think of an example where this paper's conclusion would hold?

[2] Of course one can say that all game theory is an abstraction, which is true, but it still proceeds from a simplified model of reality, rather than totally arbitrary assumptions. This paper in particular would be getting no attention if the "joker" strategy didn't have a compelling real-world analogue. Furthermore, the problem here is not that their model is too simple, but that it adds weird, artificial features without explanation or justification.

(EDIT: Changed "small amount of pollution" to "large amount of pollution", as jokers do more damage than defectors.)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's like the cholesterol saga - based on real research - but 'storyfied' beyond recognition of it's humbly narrow thesis.

What is really the relation between good writing and exploiting automatisms of human minds?

</comment><comment><USER24> I stopped reading when I got to "tragedy of the commons." I'm having trouble deciding if I think the definition is condescending or just plain ignorant. Is the rest of the article as ignorant/condescending?

<comment><USER24> I get down voted for not agreeing with the article? Or did you think the definition of tragedy of the commons was accurate?

From the discussion it seems like the article may be interesting but based off of the definition of tragedy of the commons it seems like madness lies ahead. If the tragedy of the commons definition is indicative of what is to come reading the rest does not seem like a good choice for leisure reading.

I genuinely am interested in knowing if the definition of tragedy of the commons is indicative of the rest of the work? (Sorry the edit button is gone from my original post)

<comment><USER25> You are right, the article's definition of tragedy of the commons was poorly and bizarrely written, but you were downvoted because your criticism wasn't clearly expressed. You complained about the article but didn't specifically cite or correct its error.

<comment><USER24> Is the rest of the article written in the same manner?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would be interested in how it changes the model if you assume that everyone is a continually varying mix of Joker, Cooperator and Defector, with also a value for how impressionable/stubborn they are.

Fixed roles and actions with a narrowly defined intents seem to be very common in these kind of thought experiments, mainly, I suspect, because it makes them easier to model. However I think it robs them of any real utility, and worse can give an illusion of insight that is entirely based on flawed assumptions.</comment>


DraftKings and FanDuel to Merge - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/draftkings-fanduel-merge-dan-primack <comment><AUTHOR> While this was previously submitted here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12971097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12971097)

I felt more appropriate to link to the original source</comment>


LibVMI: virtual machine introspection - <AUTHOR> http://libvmi.com/ <comment><USER2> The "crash" utility[1] has been doing this for a while on live QEMU/KVM guests, but there's certainly a need for easier to use tooling.

A long time ago I wrote some tools that let you get process listings, dmesg and so on from guests[2]. Unfortunately the kernel developers didn't want to provide an easy introspection method so it ended up being a constant battle to modify it for changes to the internal kernel structures (although not impossible, just a full time job which I didn't want to do).

Actually, just getting dmesg from a guest is super-useful when the guest "goes away" and you've no idea if it has crashed or why. Nowadays I use virt-ls to find out what a guest is doing[3].

[1] [https://github.com/crash-utility/crash](https://github.com/crash- utility/crash)

[2] [https://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt- dmesg/](https://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-dmesg/)

[3] [https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/using-libguestfs-to- fi...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/using-libguestfs-to-find-out-why- a-windows-guest-was-hanging/#content)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's viewing the memory of one virtual machine from a different virtual machine. Shouldn't it be called "inspection" rather than "introspection"?

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there anything like this for / can this be used with AWS?

<comment><USER2> These kinds of tools use hypervisor APIs that allow you to inspect memory from outside the guest. eg. QEMU's pmemsave command. I would think it's highly unlikely that AWS would want to give out such low-level access, not least because you can do very bad stuff if that access gets into the wrong hands (eg. read "secure" bits of guest kernel memory).

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I didn't expect this particular tool would work. I am diagnosing a performance issue on hosts using HVM virtualization (where instead of being better than paravirtualization, it is actually markedly worse); if there was a tool for a guest to on some level provide debug information for itself, I thought it may aid my investigation. Sadly, I suspect even if any such tools exist, Amazon will have disabled their use for all the obvious, managed, multi-tenant reasons.

<comment><USER5> If you can dump the VMs "physical memory" \- even from an AWS VM, e.g. using the LiME kernel module ([https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility/wiki/Lime...](https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility/wiki/Lime- Address-Space)) you can still use Volatility and I believe libvmi as well to get some details about what's happening and I don't think it would be possible to disable this technique. Also, this _shouldn 't_ interfere with any other guests on the same metal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Papyrusssssss

(it's, to people with a bit of design experience, just as bad as Comic Sans)</comment>


Ask HN: Best practices for interface mockups? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on an idea for a website that would communicate schedules between clients and businesses, but I can't seem to communicate my idea for the interface.
Whenever I need to communicate my ideas or expectations I have trouble getting what I have in my head into something I can show developers or potential users beyond a simple wireframe. I've tried good old pen and paper, but it's difficult to get across the feel of a screen interface onto paper, not to mention my drawing skills leave much to be desired. I ran into similar problems trying to sketch things out on Paper for iPad or Ink for iPhone.
I've seen a few interface builders available on the app store (such as Interface HD) but they seem more limiting than helpful.
What are some of your standard practices and tools for trying to get an interface together for a pitch? <comment><USER2> You say you want to create a website, but the tools you mention are mobile apps. Have you tried desktop options like Balsamiq ([http://balsamiq.com/](http://balsamiq.com/))?

<comment><AUTHOR> That actually looks like just what I had in mind. Thanks so much for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> HTML mock ups with fake data is the best I guess.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is Bitcoin deflationary by design - <AUTHOR> The bitcoin protocol specifies 21 million coins as a maximum.
The original paper says only:
Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free
Why is it desirable to be inflation free? What are the downsides to this approach? <comment><USER2> This is predicated on the notion that Bitcoin transactions in contrast to fiat money transactions aren't equal to taking out or paying back a loan: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral)

Paper money essentially is an IOU with a specific value at a specific time. If the value of the underlying currency changes after that point in time that changes the incentive to pay back that IOU because the amount owed is still the same but the underlying value of that amount is different.

The assumption with Bitcoin is that rather than a debt Bitcoin is an asset. If that asset becomes more valuable relative to the market you'd simply pay less Bitcoin for the same goods, simply because you don't have to worry about its value relative to a loan you've either taken out in the past or you're going to take out in the future.

That's the idea at least. Time will tell if it really works out that way but the theory seems to be sound.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is it desirable to have inflation?

<comment><USER4> Because users don't spend their money to buy and sell goods, they just buy and hold in hope of getting rich later.

Hyperinflation is bad of course, but moderate/controlled inflation is a need to make a currency works IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It gives bitcoin its first use-case--inflation resistance. All other currency is continually losing value, by design. It is logical to pick the currency that doesn't lose value by design to store your money. Everyone talks about how bitcoin's volatility makes it a bad store of value. This is only true in the short term, though. In the long term, an asset that trends upward is a _more ideal_ store of value even if it is volatile.

</comment><comment><USER6> What do you mean by desirable?</comment>


Evercookie - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evercookie <comment><AUTHOR> Wiki Says "In 2013, a top-secret NSA document was leaked by Edward Snowden citing Evercookie as a method of tracking Tor users."</comment>


First Images of Google Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/first-public-screen-captures-of-google-chrome/

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty amped to see how Chrome performs. Anything that could steal IE's market share I'm all for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like it got taken out by cuil.

</comment><comment><USER4> "which is slated for release on Windows tomorrow"

WTF, Google?

<comment><USER5> The Mac and Linux versions will follow soon. At least the sandboxing is nontrivial to implement across the OSes.

<comment><USER4> "At least the sandboxing is nontrivial to implement across the OSes."

Far less trivial on operating systems that have no "fork", like, say, Windows. It would be easier to implement on any UNIX, including Linux and Mac OS X, and would be more alike on any UNIX. And, of course, it would definitely not be evil to release only for Linux with plans to release for closed systems soon after. I'm of the opinion that releasing first for only Windows smells of evil, even if only when the wind is blowing right.

<comment><USER6> The timing seems good for a Windows launch; they're about to launch IE8, so there's going to be a bunch of marketing buzz about how much fun it is to upgrade your browser.

As they say in various marketing books: The best place to open a carpet store is often right next to all the other carpet stores, where the customer who is looking for a carpet will see you on his way in or out. Similarly, the best time to come out with a new browser is just _slightly_ ahead of your competition's big browser marketing push.

The other advantage of doing Windows first is that the win is bigger. The users of dinosaur browsers are all Windows users. Moving an IE user to Chrome is a huge win for Google -- now all Google's apps run better on that machine. Moving a Safari user to Chrome might barely be a win at all, since they're both Webkit based.

<comment><USER4> Now this is the first good argument I've heard. The fact that pretty much all the people using crap browsers are running Windows means that any effort to get people onto better browsers ought to be focused on the Windows platform.

I think you may have just convinced me. When it is being presented as "Windows killer", it makes no sense to further increase the strength and maintain the popularity of Windows by providing new products _only_ for Windows. But, if the purpose is merely to "make life easier for web developers" and enable modern applications for as many people as possible, then Windows would be the perfect first target.

<comment><USER6> As a Web developer, I don't care if Windows lives or dies. But I want _Internet Explorer_ killed, and the sooner the better. It's costing me and my clients a fortune, in time and in frustration. If it weren't for Dan Cederholm and John Resig IE might have driven me to drink by now. [1]

[1] I should say "John Resig and the entire jQuery community". Bless you all!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Founder Of OLPC: Maybe Net Neutrality Isn't Such A Good Idea After All - <AUTHOR> http://consumerist.com/2014/08/14/founder-of-one-laptop-per-child-maybe-net-neutrality-isnt-such-a-good-idea-after-all/ <comment><USER2> FFS! The solution to the problem is simple, ISPs (and mobile providers) should be competing to deliver the fattest pipe for the lowest cost, with no extra "value add". All this stuff about "not all bits are equal" shouldn't even be something we need to consider, if the bandwidth is abundant then any potential issue here goes away.

As for the pacemakers vs. Netflix argument, decent web routers have something called QoS that allow you to prioritise web content, that's at the level that such decisions should be made, not made by ISPs and mobile providers.</comment>


Show HN: A collaborative effort to collect information on contact tracing apps - <AUTHOR> https://cov19tech.org <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I'm the initiator of [https://cov19tech.org](https://cov19tech.org). I've started to collect information on the variety of contact tracing / exposure notification being built across the world. The website itself is open source ([https://github.com/Cov19tech/cov19tech](https://github.com/Cov19tech/cov19tech)), all the content is Creative Commons licensed and I'm hoping to get interested users to help collect information on this rapidly evolving area of the tech world. Right now the content on the site is fairly sparse - largely a table summarizing the approaches of about 30 different apps as well as a couple of more detailed write-ups on some of the apps in draft form. I'll be adding write-ups on each app in the coming days. This will hopefully give technically-inclined folks a way to understand and evaluate how these are being implemented across the world. I'd like to see if there is interest in having such a resource available, as well as see if there are people who would like to help out. Eventually, I'd like to start covering more than just contact tracing apps - and have sections on other technologies that are being applied to helping stop the spread of COVID-19.

Please do share any thoughts/comments/feedback you have!</comment>


IO name servers down - gator-io I'm getting swamped DNS resolution errors for anything .IO.<p>ns-a1.io timesout on every request so do all the others <comment><AUTHOR> I'm so glad I passed on the .io TLD for my personal page and got .pizza one instead.

<comment><USER2> I thought you're joking and then discovered there actually really is a .pizza TLD.

[https://icannwiki.org/.pizza](https://icannwiki.org/.pizza)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It appears that the issue at first impacted all servers in the anycast pool however eventually it only impacted servers ns-a2 and ns-a4. Those servers started returning NXDOMAINs. I am wondering if this was related to the root server key change yesterday. .IO seems to struggle with basic DNS engineering. We are seeing stabilization except for minor issues still on one of the gTLD servers.

<comment><USER4> The root server key won't actually change until next month. The DNSKEY responses from the root server was increased yesterday. Speculation, but it could be they're running ancient versions of BIND that fail with the larger response size. As per ICANN[0], the timeline is:

 _October 27, 2016: KSK rollover process begins as the new KSK is generated._

 _July 11, 2017: Publication of new KSK in DNS._

 _September 19, 2017: Size increase for DNSKEY response from root name servers._

 _October 11, 2017: New KSK begins to sign the root zone key set (the actual rollover event)._

 _January 11, 2018: Revocation of old KSK._

 _March 22, 2018: Last day the old KSK appears in the root zone._

 _August 2018: Old key is deleted from equipment in both ICANN Key Management Facilities._

[0]: [https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ksk- rollover](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ksk-rollover)

PS - thank you for mentioning this, I wasn't aware it was going to happen until reading your comment.

<comment><USER3> Correct the actual key change isn't until next month however yesterday there was a change in response size from the root servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For more info check the other post on this topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293578)

Not sure why that was taken of the front page suddenly.

</comment><comment> X-Istence Noticed this issue this morning too...

[https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/910515512903319552](https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/910515512903319552)

Interestingly enough I found that only some of them were returning NXDOMAIN's, so resolution would sometimes work and sometimes it would fail completely.

</comment><comment><USER6> Same here for my startup commando.io. Using AWS Route53. What DNS provider are you using?

<comment><USER7> Same here, also using Route 53.

<comment><USER6> I was certain I was getting DDoS'd, but then I inspected the Pingdom down notifications and seeing: DNS error

<comment> jon-wood This is almost completely irrelevant, but what are you doing where you jump to DDoS before misconfiguration or a service outage?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> gator-io I am so done with .io. This is one of many issues they've had in the last year.

My problem is that we have scripts all over customer websites hardcoded with api.gator.io

We're going to have to have them update the scripts and that is going to be a major pain.

<comment><USER8> Heh, it's even in your phone number

> 1-844-GATOR-IO

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> team mate posted on HN already about this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15293578)

</comment><comment><USER10> Not a surprise; country code top-level domains are run poorly and I sure wouldn't stick all of _my_ eggs in this single basket.

</comment><comment><USER9> These two nameservers: ns-a2.io, ns-a4.io return wrong results consistently

</comment><comment> gator-io Everything appears to be functioning at this point

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems to be sorted now

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems like a hijacking: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/io_hijacking_in_tra...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/io_hijacking_in_transition_cockup/)

<comment><USER13> That is a news report from July.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, the .io domain name is intended for the British Indian Ocean territory.

I think the common practice of misusing TLDs (such as registering an .io domain if you are not from the British Indian Ocean territory, or having a Soviet Union domain... a country that no longer exist), is bad.

However, I acknowledge this is not the root problem. The root problem is the scarcity of domains under traditional TLDs, and that's in great part due to speculation (e.g: domain parking). It is hard to establish what constitutes placeholder content, therefore rules preventing domain parking are hard if not unfeasible to forbid.

<comment><USER15> Thankfully built-in parking AdBlock on newer browsers is forcing domain speculators to start dropping their less valuable names, as parking pages are no longer producing any revenue. I see most tech companies coming back to .COM once their given domain is available / priced cheaply as speculators are forced to sell.</comment></comment>