Knwl.js – A JavaScript NLP - <AUTHOR> http://loadfive.com/os/knwl/ <comment><USER2> This is not NLP. The code just finds words in list of pre-defined words. It ignores the context of the sentence or perform any "real" NLP analyzing.

<comment><USER3> You are correct, it is not NLP. But I wouldn't downplay the potential of this javascript library.

I have hundreds of digital documents that need to be sorted and archived. I am able to extract a document's text via OCR, but now have to find a way to sort/file them based off certain keywords present within the document (date, time, place, etc).

I think Knwl.js will be a perfect fit for this. So far I have only spent a couple of minutes looking through the demo and GitHub repository, but it looks like with this library I will be able to write an extension that can help detect restaurants and stores I frequently visit (which will further help me sort all those pesky paper receipts).

I will definitely start playing around with Knwl.js once I get home. Good job!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice parser collection. But there a more powerful NLP libraries out there for JS: [https://github.com/spencermountain/nlp_compromise](https://github.com/spencermountain/nlp_compromise)

<comment><USER5> That module looks pretty useful. I've been resorting to node-natural [0] and then using a quick part of speech tagger so far, but this looks a lot better and doesn't have a heap of baggage.

[0] [https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural)

<comment><USER6> A while back when I used to work a lot with this stuff I wrote a library to do a lot of sentiment, tokenization, and part of speech tagging based on several corpus I came across when I realized natural didn't have what I needed at the time.

[https://github.com/nyxtom/salient](https://github.com/nyxtom/salient)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> knwl.english.adverbs = [ 'red', 'blue', 'green', 'orange', 'black', 'white', 'yellow', 'purple', 'really', 'sweet', 'sour', 'bitter', 'evil', ];

NLP. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

<comment><USER8> NLP or adverbs? Both seemed to be applied incorrectly...

<comment><USER9> He means to say that Natural Language Processing isn't just scanning a text for patterns, like this library does, hence it's not a NLP library in the strict meaning of the term. It's an interesting project but it's really a parser, not a NLP.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I got that part. I was pointing out that this array of "adverbs" really contains adjectives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> sed -e "s,NLP,some hardcoded parsers for English-only dates/emails/links/…,"

</comment><comment><USER11> This is going to look like "oh typical HN shooting things down", but:

Parses 13/4/2012 as:

year: 2012

month: 13

day: 4

<comment><USER12> Yeah seems obvious, but I don't think it really makes sense to guess that it's a UK format date based on whether one of the numbers is bigger than 12. 4/5/2012 could be 4th May or 5th April and it would be impossible to tell programmatically.

People really need to start using yyyy/mm/dd :-)

<comment><USER13> dd/mm/yyyy and yyyy/mm/dd are as valid as each other, since it proceeds in either increasing or decreasing unit size. Having dates as mm/dd/yyyy makes about as much logical sense as writing: 10492 as 49210.

<comment><USER12> It doesn't make sense mathematically because it isn't a mathematical notation, it's linguistic in nature.

In Europe, '4th May' is shortened to 4/5.

In the US, 'May 4th' is shortened to 5/4.

Neither is right, wrong or illogical.

I'm from the UK, but have spent a lot of time working with US based clients/colleagues. They only way I've found to avoid confusion and ambiguity is to use YYYY/MM/DD.

<comment><USER13> It still makes no sense to have MM/DD/YYYY.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This could be a little more robust... Miss a dot and you get weird places like "if". Relative times don't get extracted.

Something like: "Hi Frank,

I've looked up the OIDs in the Cisco manual. Let's meet for lunch at burger king tomorrow at noon.

S" yields only "Cisco" \- as a place. Well.

I know parsing natural language is hard. So keep up the good work and keep on tweaking :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> This NLP is extremely naive. It's just a hard-coded dictionary lookup with rudimentary English language syntax and structure recognition.

</comment><comment><USER16> It is faster than some of the others I've tried. Good thing is, since it is built to be basic and domain specific, the core should be kept as simple as it is, and allow extensions to be built on top.

There are mess ups around sanity checks, but looking at their source it's actually trivial to fix. Forking it, I hope they accept community pull requests.

</comment><comment><USER17> At thirst I was scared to click, because I though it is going to program me neurolinguistically to use Knwl.js whatever that is.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like it. I wonder if it would work with mixed in Markdown annotation.

</comment><comment><USER19> These two sentences were not parseable: "What if we head to Rockville and buy Daniel a beer or 2. May you fetch me a bottle of water?"

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone explain to me how that demo matches "Chicago"? From the source provided, I don't see how that is possible.

<comment><USER21> [https://github.com/loadfive/Knwl.js/blob/master/experimental...](https://github.com/loadfive/Knwl.js/blob/master/experimental_plugins/english.js)

knwl.english.prepositionalPhrases = [ ["about"], ["below"], ["in", "spite", "of"], ["regarding"], ["above"], ["beneath"], ["instead", "of"], ["since"], ["according", "to"], ["beside"], ["into"], ["through"], ["across"], ["between"], ["like"], ["throughout"], ["after"], ["beyond"], ["near"], ["to"], ["against"], ["but"], ["of"], ["toward"], ["along"], ["by"], ["off"], ["under"], ["amid"], ["concerning"], ["on"], ["underneath"], ["among"], ["down"], ["on", "account", "of"], ["until"], ["around"], ["during"], ["onto"], ["up"], ["at"], ["except"], ["out"], ["upon"], ["atop"], ["for"], ["out", "of"], ["with"], ["because", "of"], ["from"], ["outside"], ["within"], ["before"], ["in"], ["over"], ["without"], ["behind"], ["inside"], ["past"], ["away", "from"] ];

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Do not find "London" when in the demo text I added this: "Regards from London,"</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use an eReader? Why? Why not? - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to decide whether to get one or not, and am curious to hear what every one has to say about them here. I will be reading an array of styles of books, from novels, to technical books on development. So, what are your opinions on eReaders based on your experiences with them? <comment><USER3> Exactly the reasons I bought mine, and for at least one of them, I'm loving it (Kindle 4 - non touch version).

I have some technical books on it, but mainly ones where I want to get through the content, as opposed to using it as a reference (nothing beats hardcopy for that). I've started reading recreationally again for the first time in nearly 8 years after buying it, and it's been absolutely awesome. I can take it to the park with my son, and read while he plays, or weekends away, etc, and not have to pick one or two books due to luggage restrictions.

I have an htc One, Nexus 7 and a Acer Chromebook - all devices that I could use for reading electronically, but usually, the Kindle wins hands down.

Pros: \- Compact \- Extremely readable, even in direct sunlight \- Generally cheaper books \- Samples (these are awesome from Amazon - a few clicks away and you can read the first 5% or so of the book for free) \- Crazy battery life, compared to other devices (~2 weeks) \- Good price point, compared to other devices

Cons \- I tend to stay up late reading again, which my wife is not too thrilled about ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, a Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight. I don't read technical books on it, but I love it for reading novels on the go. It solves my two big issues with paper books: the integrated light source, and automatically saving my place. The second one wins me over because I've had bookmarks fall out myriad times and it's kind of a pain to find the specific page I was on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats great, those are two of the reasons I was looking to get Simple Touch GlowLight; plus it is much lighter than carrier around some books. Unfortunately I am planning to read some technical books as well so I'm hoping someone here can shed some light on how it works on that area.

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind there's a wireless glitch with the simple touch, it may not like your router. Had to set up a separate 801.11b router to talk to the simple touch as it didn't like connecting to our 802.11n mixed mode one.

I think this is specific to the simple touch model. It's my wife's eBook so I cant comment on the technical books part. Though I would research PDF usability if that is a factor for you... Might be limited on book file size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes. I wanted to have several titles at hand in a small package. I also use calibre to convert technical pdfs to MOBI. And to manage my ebook library. I don't use amazon, just torrents or sometimes direct purchase from publisher.

I like the readability and form factor of my little black and white kindle.

<comment><AUTHOR> And in MOBI format on Kindle, the content seems to be pretty readable - <USER2> for technical books with pictures?

<comment><USER6> Yes, the MOBI quality has been very good for commercial ebooks and even clibre made ones. But I do not know about color.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a galaxy tab 10.1 tablet (Kidnle App, Google books), mainly for other stuff , emails, newsreading , etc... but I also use it for Books and am very happy with it. I however prefer Hardcopies when available, has more to do with perceive value, since there's mostly no big price difference.

</comment><comment><USER8> I did briefly, but ended up preferring hardcopy books because: -I can flip through pages -Write notes and highlight where I want -One less thing to worry about getting stolen

They are cool, but they are not for me.

</comment><comment><USER9> So, the best place for reading Letter/A4-sized PDFs is still the computer? :/

(I bought and sold an iPad - it didn't felt very mobile).</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any angels investing in the marijuana industry? - <AUTHOR>

Marijuana will be completely legal in my country(Canada)within 2 years, and it is already a multi-billion dollar industry. I would love to speak with anyone interested in investing capital in a marijuana production facility. I would like to capitalize on my programming skills by developing systems to automate production and increase quality by precisely monitoring and controlling growing conditions. <comment><USER2> There are a lot of tech/start up/cannabis here in Colorado that I have been to. This particular Incubator had easily over 300 people at there kickoff party.

[http://www.canopyboulder.com/](http://www.canopyboulder.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you get on angel.co and search 'marijuana' you can find a list of investors that have funded such things. As well as startups in the space.

<comment><USER4> An aside, what is the opinion you (or anyone else has) on angellist?

<comment><USER3> I have not taken a job through it, but I have met many interesting startup team members that I have kept in touch with on an ongoing basis from the platform. I am currently experimenting with it in partnership with a local group that has had a successful kickstarter and is looking for an angel/seed investor to bolster their first production run (product, not software based startup).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Snoop Dogg is. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I could do business with Snoop Dogg. You just can't pass him a joint you want back..[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMp2WfOw2-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMp2WfOw2-4)</comment></comment>


CES 2010 TV Trends - 3D, Ridiculously Thin and Connected - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3718 <comment><USER2> I don't see 3D really catching on. At least not as a driving factor for HDTV sales. If it happens to be something that every HDTV includes it will be adopted for the novelty factor alone but I can't imagine a wide mainstream market paying a premium for it. It's just too gimmicky. I think the push for 3D is simply a result of how quickly HDTV prices dropped. They need something new to sell until 2K displays (and content to sell them) are mainstream.</comment>


Go crypto: bridging the performance gap - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/go-crypto-bridging-the-performance-gap/ <comment><USER2> It's great to see that companies can turn a profit AND contribute to open source projects that benefit the web as a whole. Thanks, Cloudflare.

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't know the name Vlad Krasnow (I'm not that familiar with the crypto world), but from looking at these [1], [2], it seems that he would know what he's talking about from both a crypto and performance viewpoint.

> attempting to make them part of the official Go build for the good of the > community

Would be interesting to hear what Adam Langley thinks about this, but I couldn't find anything recent on the golang-dev list.

[1]: [http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/k/Krasnov:Vlad](http://dblp.uni- trier.de/pers/hd/k/Krasnov:Vlad)

[2]: [http://stackoverflow.com/users/1516766/vlad- krasnov](http://stackoverflow.com/users/1516766/vlad-krasnov)

<comment><USER4> I found this: [https://github.com/cloudflare/go/issues/5](https://github.com/cloudflare/go/issues/5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand, why reimplement this if it is already implemented with adequate performance/quality in OpenSSL? I thought Go didn't have issues calling C code?

<comment><USER6> Go has moving memory so it generally means calling C requires a bunch of copying. This is slow and annoying.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure that's true? Perhaps they have reserved the ability to do that in the future (can you point to doc on that? ), but right now I'm fairly certain that go does no such thing. The only copies necessary when calling C code are for strings since they aren't guaranteed / required to be null terminated byte arrays in Go. And cgo has C ABI compatibility so function call overhead is non existent.

<comment><USER8> Function call overhead in cgo is considerable. You're right that it's not from copying, but the runtime scheduler still has to coordinate the blocking call, and the stack needs to be switched out to the C stack, kind of like a context switch.

<comment><USER7> True, just benchmarked it and found the function call overhead to be about 1.85834729e-7 seconds (185 ns). Which isn't much, but the pure C version would obviously be single nanoseconds for the handful of instructions needed depending on the function call.

<comment><USER9> 185 ns is worse than function call overhead in Python (about 100 ns on this machine)

<comment><USER7> Python calling Python, Python calling out to a native module, or Python calling through ctypes?

<comment><USER9> Python calling a no-op Python function def foo(): pass

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I will happily look over these once they are part of upstream Go, or I will happily review them once they are proposed upstream, but I will take a pass on their "special fork of Go".

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure what's involved with getting assembly working in Go (my experience has only been with servers/clients and CLI's), but could this not have been implemented as a stand alone package? What's the benefit of a fork in this case?

<comment><USER12> I'm also wondering the answer to this question. To my understanding, go-crypto is actually maintained separately from the Go stdlib by the Go developers[0]. So why isn't this just a fork of crypto? Why fork the entire language? Why can't this be upstreamed?

[0]: [https://github.com/golang/crypto](https://github.com/golang/crypto)

<comment><USER13> This is a library of supplemental crypto algorithms. You won't see things like AES, SHA-2, or the NIST curves in here. Those things are part of the standard library in Go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice work! The article benchmarks a > 20X speedup for AES-128-GCM, for performance described in the text as "on par" with OpenSSL. It would be helpful for reference to have an OpenSSL column added to the benchmark table.

</comment><comment><USER15> Cloudflare's Universal SSL is pretty great - I used to host my static website on S3, but that means no SSL or ipv6. Putting everything through cloudflare sorts both those out.

The original announcement [1] mentioned they were planning support for adding in the HSTS header - as jgrahamc is here responding to comments, I'd be interested to hear how far they've got with that :)

[1] [https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal- ssl/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal-ssl/)

<comment><AUTHOR> We added it during "Week of SSL": [https://blog.cloudflare.com/enforce-web- policy-with-hypertex...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/enforce-web-policy-with- hypertext-strict-transport-security-hsts/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Let's just rewrite all the crypto ourselves! In assembly!"

Sorry to be a buzzkill, but that sounds like a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER10> _All_ the low-level crypto is written in assembly. And not only for speed, but for ensuring properties like constant-time execution, etc. It's the same for OpenSSL, and the same for commercial crypto libraries. Go is not at all different here.

The difference is that the higher-level crypto is written in Go, not in C; Go is memory safe, much more strongly-typed in general, and with run-time bounds checking which eliminate buffer overflows.

The bugs are almost never in the low-level algorithms, they are in the higher- level components.

<comment><USER17> There was a post on HN a few weeks ago talking about "ensuring properties like constant-time execution" isn't possible as instruction timings doesn't take in account things like caching, pipelining, task switching, microcode optimisations etc.

<comment><USER13> When people describe crypto code as "constant-time", they typically just mean its execution time is data-independent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Given the many vulnerabilities related to the use of AES-CBC with HMAC

What are they talking about here? Are there any important ones if you MAC after encryption? The only vulnerabilities I know of are when you MAC before you encrypt.

<comment><USER19> They're talking about the TLS CBC constructions, not AES-CBC and HMAC in the abstract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wish Cloudflare spread some of that Go asm love to Ed25519.

<comment><USER21> Indeed. Couldn't they have supported it for a small part of users like they're doing with ChaCha20-Poly1305?

<comment><USER20> ChaCha20-Poly1305's 3-4x performance gain over AES-GCM made it worthwhile for them where Ed25519's benefits are not as clear cut to non-proponents. Too bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice work! Do you guys also have a similar implementation of ChaCha20-Poly1305 for Go? If so, any chance you could share that too?

<comment><AUTHOR> That work has been done for OpenSSL, I guess we could add for Go: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/do-the-chacha-better-mobile- perf...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/do-the-chacha-better-mobile-performance- with-cryptography/)

<comment><USER22> That would be pretty awesome! Also, do you happen to know if your current patch is safe to apply on top of OpenSSL 1.0.2a?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Strange they dont mention AES-CCM at all. I'm using it a lot in IoT applications (dtls). It's not frequent in the "web" world?

</comment><comment><USER24> Off-topic but, they probably shouldn't be using a Southeast train image in this blog post as they are notoriously bad for delays and slow service in the UK[1] :)

[1][http://www.which.co.uk/home-and-garden/leisure/reviews- ns/be...](http://www.which.co.uk/home-and-garden/leisure/reviews-ns/best-and- worst-uk-train-companies/best-and-worst-trains-for-delays-/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I added that. As someone who lives in London I'm well aware of how bad their service is. It was a deliberate ploy to make you spend more time on the blog post by getting your to shake you head about the image and then read the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious whether the Go team will merge Go crypto into the core or not. It will show how open they are to third party contributions.

<comment><USER10> Your comment is significantly out of place. The Go team is extremely open to quality external contributors. 463 people have contributed to Go so far, (obviously) most of them outside the core Go team. The Windows port was exclusively done and maintained by contributors. I have done the arm64 Go compiler, which is upstream now, the Solaris port, and I am now doing the sparc64 compiler. Many 3rd party contributors do many things every day.

The Go project is an extremely open project. More than half of the people who have direct commit access are external contributors.

<comment><USER26> > _Your comment is significantly out of place. The Go team is extremely open > to quality external contributors._

I think his comment is still valid. Adapting something major like this is not the same as accepting bugfixes from hundrends of people, or ports to a different architecture.

Even more different would be accepting some code for the standard library whose API wasn't designed by the core team.

From what I've seen the core team is quite opinionated and micro-managing things.

<comment><USER27> well, for starters, to accept it, the licensing would need to be changed slightly.

Parts have

      +// Copyright 2015 The Go Authors. All rights reserved.
      +// Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style
      +// license that can be found in the LICENSE file.
      +
      +// Copyright 2015 Intel Corporation
      +// Copyright 2015 CloudFlare, Inc.
      +
      +// This file contains constant-time, 64-bit assembly implementation of
      +// P256. The optimizations performed here are described in detail in:
      +//   S.Gueron and V.Krasnov, "Fast prime field elliptic-curve cryptography with
      +//                            256-bit primes"
      +"

The additional copyright notices would not be okay. They would cause _everyone_ who uses this library to have to reproduce not just the standard go copyright notices, but _those_ , too.

<comment><USER28> They seem OK to me. A quick grep of my Go tree turns up lots of third-party copyright notices. It's OK as long as their code was released under licenses compatible with Go's.

These additional copyright notices could be removed by CloudFlare and Intel going in the AUTHORS file (which defines "The Go Authors"), presumably after they and Google do any required paperwork. Red Hat, Dropbox, and Fastly are in AUTHORS. But that needn't be a condition of integrating their code as long as it's licensed properly.

The paper citation doesn't appear to be copyright-related, and others like it are sprinkled around the codebase, e.g., package sort's source cites some papers on efficient sorting.

<comment><USER27> "They seem OK to me. A quick grep of my Go tree turns up lots of third-party copyright notices. It's OK as long as their code was released under licenses compatible with Go's."

Okay, let me rephrase: "they aren't okay". It's actually my job to make these decisions and tell teams what is and what isn't okay :)

The other issues you mention are in the process of being fixed.

"These additional copyright notices could be removed by CloudFlare and Intel going in the AUTHORS file (which defines "The Go Authors")"

Yes, they could, but that requires agreement from more than just cloudfare. This is code Intel donated to openssl, not to Go, so it's simply not as trivial as cloudfare saying "sure, here's some code". Intel has to agree to have their copyright notice changed, etc.

"The paper citation doesn't appear to be copyright-related, and others like it are sprinkled around the codebase, e.g., package sort's source cites some papers on efficient sorting. " I have no care in the world about this part.

<comment><USER28> I get that Google always _really_ really wants a CLA since it does things the BSD license doesn't (patent grant!). I also agree that, practically speaking, legal stuff is absolutely part of the process of getting the asm crypto stuff merged in. And I know you're qualified.

But I read the initial comment as saying, specifically, no third-party copyright notices, ever.

I have code up with under Go's license with more than one set of copyright notices ([https://github.com/twotwotwo/sorts](https://github.com/twotwotwo/sorts)). From a grep, Go 1.4 has ~1,026 non-"The Go Authors" copyright notices in ~271 files in ~35 dirs (Lucent and other Plan 9 copyright holders, Sun, individuals, MPEG and yacc authors).

If there is stuff I should read/learn to have any hope of understanding what's OK (to keep my own stuff clean, and generally), it would help me to know.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


_STARCODER: the first mmo game teaching kids how to code - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/232672973/starcoder-learning-to-code-is-more-fun-together

<comment><USER2> why kickstart something like this?

invest the time to already sell support contracts with schools... and private schools would love that. and just work with the know and tested open source model for the actual game.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the input. i've looked into a few open source models. can you tell me more about how this might work or any examples of open source games with this model that i could possibly emulate?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whats the best way to find a technical cofounder - <AUTHOR>

I am a business founder with a dynamite idea/plan and looking for a technical cofounder I have been actively learning how to code but would love to have a technical counterpart . Where would you guys/girls recommend I start looking for one?. My email is in my profile if your interested <comment><USER2> 1\. Honestly embrace the idea that you're a business person and don't have what it takes for an idea. A technical co-founder isn't a pair of hands to build your dreams, it's the other way around. If you don't like this approach then don't do tech, instead focus a business you know.

2\. Winners love winners: Focus on execution for an existing startup. You don't need to be the CEO of that startup, but you need to build a track record of execution. You can be the sales guy who brought in the top clients or be the gumshoe who knocked on every door and raised a round.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe it was Confucius who said "the man who says they can and the man who says they cant are both generally right" which means conversely the man who tells others they can and they cant is generally right on both assumptions...... I couldn't disagree more with your opinion. Im going get this thing done one way or the other but i guess we will see who was right.

<comment><USER2> Well then what you don't need is a co-founder, what you really need is a pair of hands: That's not hard to find.</comment></comment></comment>


Recreating the THX Deep Note - <AUTHOR> http://www.earslap.com/instruction/recreating-the-thx-deep-note <comment><USER2> The song Spaced by Beaver & Krause made this sound before THX, in 1970 on the album Wild Sanctuary

3:10 at [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xKO3KAtDZ0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xKO3KAtDZ0)

Edit: additional wikipedia searching reveals this unsourced fact

"A variation of the end of their track "Spaced" from the Wild Sanctuary album became the inspiration for dual gliding synthesizer soundtrack for the copied THX Sound Logo in movie theaters, also for which neither Beaver or Krause were compensated."

([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_%26_Krause](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_%26_Krause))

<comment><USER3> Iannis Xenakis' song Metastasis got there first as far as I know, in 1953 with a full orchestra. It has a slightly different (less harmonic) end:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI) (mostly the first minute)

It's one of my favorite songs, mostly for when I want to be left alone in a room.

<comment><USER2> Makes you wonder how things would have played out if Dr Dre's Lolo sampled Iannis Xenakis instead of THX's sound. Would placing the sample at the beginning of a record the way Deep Note is placed in a movie have been a violation of THX's trademark?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a working link to the THX 'Deep Note' theme sound (the link on the page seems to be dead): [http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/soundmarks/74309951.mp3](http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/soundmarks/74309951.mp3)

<comment><USER5> In comparison, the modern "quintessential" Deep Note which (by my ear) is a lot more intense [http://www.thx.com/consumer/movies/8286511](http://www.thx.com/consumer/movies/8286511)

<comment><USER6> This one is great. How do I get a copy of this one?

<comment><USER7> Here you go: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/231528979/thx.mp3](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/231528979/thx.mp3)

It came out kind of quiet, but I think the quality is the same. May be able to just run it through a gain filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I appreciate the level of detail the author goes to in describing the creation process. Very informative. I did this myself once, but using a patch I made in Max/MSP for drawing and listening to line segments on a pitch vs time plane. For this particular use case, I generated the input score with a Python script rather than drawing them manually. I found that detuning the sustained tones made the biggest difference in matching the original sound, which the article author mentions. Here's a video of my patch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl4C4zsy9LY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl4C4zsy9LY)

</comment><comment><USER9> I use Deep Note as the sound for my alarm clock. It's perfect.

<comment><USER10> The first half of it is a bit too creepy for me during Deep Sleep ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Shrek version was better.

[http://www.thx.com/consumer/movies/8286492](http://www.thx.com/consumer/movies/8286492)

</comment><comment><USER12> I made a version in JavaScript based on this description. You can hear it here - [http://stuartmemo.com/thx-deep-note-in- javascript/](http://stuartmemo.com/thx-deep-note-in-javascript/)

</comment><comment><USER13> The ChucK version is worth checking out as well:

[https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/pipermail/chuck- users/2009-Ap...](https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/pipermail/chuck- users/2009-April/004133.html)

Thanks to ahmetkizilay in the comments.

</comment><comment><USER6> It reminds me of the score from There Will Be Blood.

<comment><USER14> I expect Greenwood was as influenced by that sound growing up as the rest of us - the bits of the TWbB score that echo DN are probably homage.

<comment><USER15> I think that both Greenwood and Moorer were influenced by the compositions of Iannis Xenakis and others, as noted in the article.

<comment><USER16> I've gotta say, making a sound like this is one of the very obvious things to do with any synthesizer that has more than one oscillator (which is most of them) and which allows pitch modulation (again, most of them). I made it by accident some 20 years ago when I was learning to program my first analog synth and didn't know about the similarity to the THX sound until someone pointed it out to me (I grew up outside the US and had never been to an Imax presentation at that time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And who can forget The Simpsons' THX introduction?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu0R96OZy6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu0R96OZy6w)

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone ever try this with an analog synth?

</comment><comment><USER19> Well that was well worth my time. Awesome.

<comment><USER19> I'm guessing the down votes are because people think I'm being sarcastic?? I'm not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seriously, why?

<comment><USER21> hobby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The only part of this "deep note" that I like is the very end; top of the crescendo. The first part has always creeped me out worse than watching Hostel for the first time.

<comment><USER23> Without the first part, a whole orchestra's worth of sawtooth oscillators playing octaves is pretty boring. The effect of the beginning is to build tension, which is released at the point when all the oscillators converge on the single note. Tension and release is the basis for most (if not all) music. Whether its in the form of a V7->I cadence, which builds tension harmonically with a tritone that "wants" to resolve to the root. Or the "riser" before the drop in electronic music, just a single note with it's pitch going up and up and up or a filter sweeping through white noise up and up and up with drums doing more and more subdivisions until a second of silence and then boom...the main theme. In and of itself it may be interesting but only within the context of it being the release of tension built up previously does it have that profound effect.

<comment><USER22> I wasn't trying to get fucked by the deep note, a tickle would have sufficed.</comment></comment></comment>


eBay user data for sale? - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/vmvjGw3N <comment><USER2> Is there anything to suggest this is real? Classic scam would be to just sell a bunch of random data, people tried that when Mt Gox was compromised. People apparently provided "samples" on IRC with either random data or data from other leaks presented as being from the Bitcoin exchange.

A quick google search shows

• [http://pastebin.com/L7CYznfK](http://pastebin.com/L7CYznfK)

• [http://pastebin.com/4YRgEwPb](http://pastebin.com/4YRgEwPb)

that have the same message with different bitcoin addresses.

<comment><USER3> And more here (from the list of public pastes):

[http://pastebin.com/YA2b6xCZ](http://pastebin.com/YA2b6xCZ)

[http://pastebin.com/u4feDLAQ](http://pastebin.com/u4feDLAQ)

[http://pastebin.com/NQWEnW2v](http://pastebin.com/NQWEnW2v)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hacking as a spectator sport: we get to watch the blockchain for buyers![0]

[0] [https://blockchain.info/address/1e4aLP3jKD9wRAcSRNVb7VHbd7Kb...](https://blockchain.info/address/1e4aLP3jKD9wRAcSRNVb7VHbd7KbcdPfA)

<comment><USER5> Protocol question:

What's to stop me from emailing one of those txn-ids to email@example.com and stealing the dump?

<comment><USER2> Nothing. People make this mistake when doing legitimate things too. You're meant to make a new address for every single client. The response could be that they only send to unique TXID that haven't been used before, but you can always race it out by sending the email first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is no evidence yet that this is real, so we're burying the post.

<comment><USER7> See my post below - ebay states this when you reset your password: To protect the security and privacy of our customers, we're asking all eBay users to reset their passwords on or after May 21, 2014. If you already reset your password and forgot it, please follow the reset process below. Learn more

Try with an ebay account and then revisit this decision.

<comment><USER8> Nobody is debating that a breach occurred. But there's no evidence that this paste is from someone who actually holds the stolen data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why the ":s"? Are they supposed to offer it for free?

Jokes aside, this, hopefully followed by a (class-action?) lawsuit, is the only way that the companies will learn how to properly store user data. The engineers have been talking about "best practices" for a very long time, but it appears managers only understand the language of money.

<comment><USER8> Let's not attempt to justify profiting from stolen personal data. This isn't a glorious mission to save the world from poor security practices, this is somebody trying to make money selling people's personal information.

<comment><USER9> You're a brilliant hacker, you lurk on security and blackhat forums, you know exploits inside and out. One day, you decide to check the security of some big consumer websites, and you find a security hole. What do you do (choose your adventure style)?

* You're a white-hat honest hacker, and all you want is for the internet to be a safer place. You decide to report the vulnerability to the company. Unfortunately, after you sent the email to their engineering team, they told you that the security hole you found isn't critical and refuse to award you a bounty. The rest of the emails go unanswered. You try sending emails to some other departments, including customer support, sales, and legal. No response. 2 months after that, when you're taking a dump on the toilet, federal agents burst into your apartment, knock you down and arrest you without even giving you the chance to wipe your ass. You're charged with industrial espionage, breach of security, and conspiracy to defraud. It turns out that someone _did_ read your emails, checked out the logs, found traces of you researching the security hole. Your defense that you were trying to help is summarily dismissed and you rot in jail.

* You think most people are too serious and need to relax. You decide to have some fun. You download tons of embarrassing data from the company website, write them an untraceable email demanding 1000 BTC and public disclosure of your skills. You're pretty sure they will refuse your request, which they soon do. You troll the company by disclosing that they were hacked, and decide to sell the security hole to the highest bidder. You also sell chinks of data to random hackers and credit card scammers. You retire to a tropical island, drink martini and surf all day.

<comment><USER10> If choice 1 is to supposedly be good and suffer and choice 2 is to be an asshole - there's always choice 3: walk away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ha! That's cute. The joke is that anyone can send any relevant transaction hash that they see straight by email. Obviously, if they were serious, they would offer a unique Bitcoin address to each prospective buyer.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't be hard for him to follow up with "to prove it was you, sign X with the sending private key" if there are multiple claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have an eBay account, but I haven't used it in years, and I doubt I remember the password.

How worried about this should I be? Are there plaintext passwords exposed, or do they just have a lot of properly salted hashes that aren't much use to an attacker?

<comment><USER14> The passwords look like this:

        pbkdf2_sha256$12000$zhMKabMgayvK$iniviUCcX9y2PYJcm0AoB3MhybRA1z2Cec1DZnLWxWc=

I do not know how much time it would take to bruteforce these. Can any experienced HNers weigh in?

<comment><USER15> I am not an expert by any means, but I believe pbkdf2 is a recommended key stretching function for a hashing method (which looks to be sha256). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2)

I think cracking difficulty depends on how many "iterations" they use though.

<comment><USER16> The iterations are listed as 12000. This value is supposed to double every two years and is around 128k I believe currently.

<comment><USER17> This is probably to try to offset Moore's law, by keeping the hash cracking difficulty in line with technology progrss. But it's funny how this works. If you think about Moore's law, it's basically describing the number of transistors on an IC, those doubling every two years. But it doesn't address expansion in the ways we use our technology. If new machines come out which allow us to stack even more GPUs into a single machine, performance capacity per cracking host will rise even farther than double per year.

One person estimated an 8-GPU cracking machine two years ago at about 539 billion hashes per minute. At 128k hashes for one password, you could make about 70,182 attempts per second.

But here[1] is a five-machine cluster from a year and a half ago with 25 GPUs. Its speed? 63 billion _per second_ against SHA1. This results in 492,187 attempts per second. Assuming SHA256 is about 50% slower, this would be around 246,093 per second.

Some password dictionaries contain millions of words. But if your password is '0Password', it'll probably be cracked in a couple of seconds on modern hardware.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/12/25-gpu-cluster- crack...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/12/25-gpu-cluster-cracks-every- standard-windows-password-in-6-hours/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> None of the sample e-mail addresses contains "ebay", as in "firstname.lastname@example.com". I just thought that was interesting.

<comment><USER19> Does eBay even allow you to enter that? What benefit would that provide?

<comment><USER20> firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com point to the same GMail inbox; you can use the part after + sign to filter incoming mail. A quite useful feature, I must say.

<comment><USER21> I love that feature as well, but I must say that I'm thwarted by faulty email address verification logic at least 75% of the time and end up resorting to my no-frills address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Now _that_ is a nice route to some fast cash. (I'm assuming that no CSV file will actually be forthcoming.)

Kudos to to whoever moved quickly on this one. A fool and his money...

</comment><comment><USER23> Hey, you can buy it cheaper!

0.5 BTC here

[http://pastebin.com/Tfs07HDp](http://pastebin.com/Tfs07HDp)

<comment><USER24> [https://blockchain.info/address/1Kfxm6Y5bRDnC9JLwq6vpYYcw439...](https://blockchain.info/address/1Kfxm6Y5bRDnC9JLwq6vpYYcw439zgvVzB)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be hilarious if the seller accept bids for that on eBay ....

</comment><comment><USER26> Worth more than $1000, wouldn't you think? Or perhaps Ebay will buy it regardless of the price, in hopes of quashing this?

<comment><USER3> Nobody said s/he would only sell it once. It's $1000 _per copy_. Assuming it's true, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just reset my password and was greeted by this message: To protect the security and privacy of our customers, we're asking all eBay users to reset their passwords on or after May 21, 2014. If you already reset your password and forgot it, please follow the reset process below. Learn more

</comment><comment><USER27> Even if it is real, the losers haven't been paid anything: [https://blockchain.info/address/1e4aLP3jKD9wRAcSRNVb7VHbd7Kb...](https://blockchain.info/address/1e4aLP3jKD9wRAcSRNVb7VHbd7KbcdPfA)

</comment><comment><USER28> 1.453 bitcoin. Reference to the fall of Constantinople, or patternicity at work?

<comment><USER29> Great catch there. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1453](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1453)

"It is sometimes cited as the notional end of the Middle Ages by historians..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why didn't they sell it on eBay?

<comment><USER31> EXCELLENT SELLER!!1 FAST SHIPPING! WOULD BUY FROM HACKER AGAIN!!1 A++++++++++++!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Slightly racist observation about the sample data:

there is surprisingly large amount of Asian-sounding and Middle-East-sounding names there. Not sure how the data was chosen, but I would expect more... white-sounding names.

<comment><USER33> It says sample "from apac region" right in the pastebin.

<comment><USER32> Oh. I missed that. That makes sense then.

<comment><USER34> More specifically, all the sample data is from Malaysia. So you'll get mostly Chinese, Malay and Indian names.

(I'm Malaysian).

<comment><USER32> Thanks!

(by the way, I want to visit Singapore in the summer once I have my finals done. But that's beside the point.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So, should I also change my security question?

<comment><USER36> I'm really getting tired of having to change my cat's name.

<comment><USER26> Poor kitty. You should just give it a wildcard name.

<comment><USER13> Here, Mr. (Fuzz|Purr|Meow)[aeo](les|ly|ey)!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> All personally identifiable data should be stored in a non usable form. You'd think people by now would know that eventually your data will leave your protection.

<comment><USER38> But then, why store them ?

<comment><USER39> I believe that he's implying they would be hashed just like your password and used solely for verification with another system (like transaction authorization).

<comment><USER40> I don't think hashing an address is a very good way to store it, recovery might take a while.

Likely the poster means person information. Name, date of birth, address, back up email, phone number should be encrypted. Even just using the users password as a key would be better then clear text.

<comment><USER41> Wouldn't it be easier to "guess" the passwords then? If you know both input and output.

<comment><USER40> It wouldn't be difficult, but a bandage is better then leaving a gaping wound. Yes it would be better store a second salt and do a scrypt style password generation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> $750 for a copy...seems reasonably

</comment><comment><USER43> Why is this on the HN front page?

</comment><comment><USER44> quick somebody automatically send thousands of "spam" claim emails whenever a payment is made!

</comment><comment><USER45> Haha, smartasses :D

<comment><USER46> :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> They should start auction on e-bay. ijs.</comment>


Too bad, China. Rare earth monopoly isn't enough. You have to be able to use it - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/23/rare_earth_non_monopoly/ <comment><USER2> He might have a good point, but writes like a moron.

<comment><USER3> Common problem with the Register.</comment></comment>


Why We Removed the Word 'Hacker' from Buffer Job Descriptions - <AUTHOR> https://open.bufferapp.com/job-descriptions-diversity/

<comment><USER2> Because it should never have been used in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm getting tired of these pseudo-cool programming job titles. Guru, hacker, wizard, ninja.

I haven't met many well-functioning, self-described ninjas.

</comment><comment><USER4> reading this on hackernews feels ironic</comment>


Fourier Toy - <AUTHOR> http://toxicdump.org/stuff/FourierToy.swf <comment><USER2> Try the Fibonacci sequence:

0.01, 0.01, 0.02, 0.03, 0.05, 0.08, 0.13, 0.21

It generates a beautiful wave [1].

There's also this interesting property that you can use any part of the sequence, and it will be the same wave [2].

[1] [https://www.dropbox.com/s/89fg14dvsi3wuox/Captura%20de%20tel...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/89fg14dvsi3wuox/Captura%20de%20tela%202013-11-06%2020.20.29.png)

[2] [https://www.dropbox.com/s/yu05xs10tauumgu/Captura%20de%20tel...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/yu05xs10tauumgu/Captura%20de%20tela%202013-11-06%2020.32.30.png)

<comment><USER3> what phases did you use?

<comment><USER2> All in phase.

<comment><USER4> how do you set all in phase?

<comment><USER5> Align all the blue lines inside each circle, hold shift and drag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article and related commentary are relevant:

[http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs- and-h...](http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-homer- simpsons-face)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6683866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6683866)

In fact, it looks like Lucas Viera may have used that blog post as inspiration.

<comment><USER7> I think you're being downvoted because anyone who is interested in DSP already knows about Fourier transforms, they're fundamental and quite well known. Frankly, I'm surprised to find that they're new to so many HN readers.

<comment><USER8> Fundamental if you ever finished a CS degree. Shamefully, the Wikipedia articles (German and English) aren't really good, and I dropped out of university before FFT was a topic.

Lots of HN readers are self-thaught hackers or come from non-theoretic backgrounds... so they likely won't have had a good explanation of it. (Speaking of which, the circle analogy is truly awesome - but how does it work in code?!)

<comment><USER9> It's more of an electronic engineering thing than CS

<comment><USER10> In fairness, it's more of an _everything_ thing. You won't get far in any science without hitting a Fourier transform somewhere!

<comment><USER11> Yes, and in music too. When I worked as intern at IRCAM FFT was a big deal, and was the only part of the code we weren't allowed to checkout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I learned about Fourier this way from an old "American Scientist" book. The writer had a very powerful remark at the end. He explained how Ptolemeus first used epicycles as a base model to explain planetary motion [edit: their paths]. The criticism that led to the demise of this model was basically "yeah, well, you can make planets have square paths this way". If someone connected the dots at that point we could have had Fourier transform a couple of hundred years earlier. Maybe we did, but the documents disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER13> Right-click the page for some pre-defined wave patterns (pulse, sawtooth, triangle, etc.)--at least it worked for me in FF.

</comment><comment><USER14> Beautiful .. has my 6 year old entranced. You know what he said, though? "This thing needs sound." I'm proud of him. :)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is really awesome. First thing I did was try a sawtooth wave by entering sequential powers of 0.5... this had the intended effect of creating a sawtooth wave, but also the circle diagram was tracing an almost perfect circle in 2D. Really cool for discovering things like that!

</comment><comment><USER16> These guys are one of the reasons I love mathematics.

Check this out too: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw)

Edit: Didn't realize that this was also linked to in another thread on the front page as well.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anybody got the sequence to draw Homer's head?

Reminder: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw)

</comment><comment><USER18> This is very cool and reminds me of something I've wanted for a long time: a tool like this that is used to make sound. The synthesizers I've used seem predisposed to making a certain type of sound, however, something like but which gives you complete control of the wave form, should give you complete freedom when creating sounds. Maybe I've been looking at the wrong synths... Neat though :)

<comment><USER7> What you want is an _additive synthesizer_. Usually these contain a lot of fairly high level 'helpers' rather than control over every individual sine wave, because while 8 sine waves are fun to play with full sound sculpting requires more, and applying envelopes, LFOs and other modulation sources to 64 (or 128 or 356 or 512...) sine waves rapidly becomes tedious.

You could easily make one with (or download a premade one for) _Reaktor_ or _Synthmaker_ (now called _Flowstone DSP_ ) or _Max /MSP_. _Kyma_ is another system for doing so, but very expensive as it's hardware based. _Pd_ / _Puredata_ is free, albeit ugly. Various plugins exist, from VSTi's to rack extensions for Propellerheads' _Reason_. If you're feeling brave/patient and you want to do it in a hardware instrument, then you can get hold of a _Kawai K5000_ for only a few hundred $. If you're code-inclined (ugh* ) then try _Supercollider_ or _Csound_. A related but slightly orthogonal techniques is spectral manipulation using tools such as _Metasynth_ (Mac, $$$) or _Coagula_ (Win, free). Neither of these latter two have seen an update for a long, time, reflecting the general lack of popularity of this technique.

(All these _Italicized words_ are well-known product names, BTW that should come at or near the top in any search engine)

Also, check out [http://amaranthaudio.com/](http://amaranthaudio.com/) for Cycle which is new and impressive, though a bit clunky last time I checked. I'm hardware based but this is the first instrument I've seen in a while that could draw me back to the PC. I'm sure there's a bunch of iPad apps too, but not having an iPad I only check that platform occasionally.

Additive synthesis is a lot of fun but because there are so many harmonics to play with it's very easy to go astray and end up making clangorous noises that are not particularly musical or natural sounding; of course this makes them an automatic go-to for sci-fi noises, but the problem is that everything sounds unnatural in much the same way, if you see what I mean - the brain says 'ah, that's a very unnatural arrangement of harmonics' and gives up for all but the simpllest cases, much as it decides that poorly-designed FM sounds are quite noisy or that distorted sounds certainly involve a lot of clipping. It's still interesting territory for any sound nerd to explore, but don't expect m/any of your friends/loved ones to share your enthusiasm for such esoteric timbres.

* writing code is a rather masochistic approach to producing sounds IME.

<comment><USER19> I'll add SynthEdit, because the demo version is fully-featured, intuitive, standalone and free.

If you just want to do it by numbers without interface, and get as mathematically crazy as you like, R has some simple "turn a timeseries to a wav file" libraries.

Also to add: quite a few ipad apps that let you sketch in either a wave form or a spectrum, then turn knobs on it like a synth. Addictive Synth is one that lets you draw spectra freehand; WaveGenerator lets you put in various surfaces or even pictures and "listen" to them. This specific method is called "Wavetable Synthesis".

<comment><USER7> Just FYI editing the spectra is usually referred to spectral or additive sysnthesis.

Wavetable synthesis involves a table of single-cycle waveforms that you then sweep through, either manually or preferably with some sort of modulation source. The PPG Wave is the most famous case, and Ensoniq's Transwave technology was basically the same thing. Typically you'll start with 2 waves of completely different harmonic spectra and interpolate between them. IIRC there's a quite affordable PPG wave for iPad now from Wolfgang Palm (who is the authority on this method of synthesis).

<comment><USER19> I was forgetting for a moment the key part of wavetable was the sweep/interpolation. Silly me! The name of the Wolfgang Palm App is the Wavegenerator I mentioned above -- been playing with it a while, v. v. cool, but (as per your original comment) I can't stray to far from presets without sounding horribly metallic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just read that he was an orphan at age 9 and then made governor of lower Egypt at age 30 by Napoleon, what a life!

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

<comment><USER11> And he tutored Champollion at age of 11!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Such Fourier decomposition for an interactive quantum simulation:

[http://www.falstad.com/qm1d/](http://www.falstad.com/qm1d/)

(A rare piece of software not getting older with time; and in general, other Falstad's simulations are great, especially Ripple Tank for optical interference and electric circuits.)

<comment><USER22> nice. The circuit simulator is wonderful - have used it for years. In fact I actually tried to port it to .Net but never finished it.

<comment><USER21> I would love to see such things rewritten to JS. And it does not sounds strange, as there are some applications based on Falstad's code, e.g. [http://icircuitapp.com/](http://icircuitapp.com/).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow! So cool. I love the connection between the waveform and the trochoid curve on the left.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very nice overview of fourier transforms: [http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide- to-...](http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-the- fourier-transform/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Very much reminds me of the Spirograph I had when I was a young.

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

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd like to be able to make a triangle wave, but I think the program needs to be able to input negative values for the components.

Nicely done.

<comment><USER27> There's a triangle wave preset already available. Right click on the page to select it. It uses values: 0.75, 0, 0.083, 0, 0.03, 0, 0.015, 0

<comment><USER26> Very helpful - thanks.

<comment><USER28> It uses the phase. The 0.75 is 180 deg out of phase (blue line of circle points to the left) compared to the 0.083. Compare to the square wave, as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a really nice demo, but note that it's not the full Fourier series. This is only the 'sine' contribution. I'm not sure how you could expand the animation to include cosine as well.

<comment><USER30> Cosine can be approximated by rotating the sine phase 90 degrees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It would be cool if someone created the inverse of this, where you could input a signal (audio) and have it show the fft decomposition circles moving around in real time :)

<comment><USER32> Isn't that approximately every Winamp visualization plugin ever created?

<comment><USER33> You sure dem younguns ever heard of Winamp?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Doesn't work in Shumway yet.

<comment><USER35> and probably won't for some time without an official bug report ;)

[https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/issues](https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/issues)

<comment><USER36> Though perhaps a canvas rewrite would be better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Brilliant! But where's the algebra of complex numbers. :-)

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd love this as an OS boot time animation.

</comment><comment><USER39> What determines the time/speed of each circle?

<comment><USER40> The nth circle from the right is n times the speed of the first circle.

<comment><USER41> Why is this? Could you make it work using, say, 2n instead of n? or n^2 instead of n?

<comment><USER42> The definition of the Fourier series is an infinite series of integer frequency multiples adding up to reproduce any periodic signal, sort of like how the Taylor series can additively reproduce a function.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


*Made on Earth by humans* - <AUTHOR> https://www.instagram.com/p/Be31IJxgOoK/ <comment><USER2> At this point Elon could be angling for Colbert's old job.</comment>


Steve Blank: The Covid-19 virus is not politically correct - <AUTHOR> https://steveblank.com/2020/05/21/the-covid-19-virus-is-not-politically-correct/ <comment><USER2> I've seen a lot of takes that boil down to: "We can easily end the quarantine if we just take steps requiring coordinated national effort that we're clearly not capable of."</comment>


Modeling the effectiveness of respiratory masks in reducing influenza (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30229968 <comment><USER2> The US has 12 million N95 in stockpile, another 5 million N95 that expired.

The US has 30 million surgical masks in stockpile.

The US needs 300 million N95 masks for medical professionals. [1]

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/us-mulls-using-sweeping- powe...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/us-mulls-using-sweeping-powers-to- ramp-up-production-of-coronavirus-protective-gear.html)

Therefore it is rational for public health policy to reserve high quality masks for medical professionals, regardless of their effectiveness for the general public.

I wonder how many masks they can manufacture a week in this emergency.

<comment><USER3> I've seen a lot of people suggest not buying the masks when they're in stock at hardware stores so 'hospitals can have some' which I find absolutely hilarious - Just the image of a hospital sending staff down to a Home Depot for some N95 paint masks...

<comment><USER4> I know a story of an ER doctor sending somebody to the hardware store for a tool. My brother also had a regular tool used during his visit to the ER. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that they simply purchased it at the hardware store. (It was a dremel with a diamond blade to remove his aircraft-grade aluminum ring from an injured finger. Let that be a warning to you about what you put on your finger.)

<comment><USER5> Out of morbid curiosity, how'd they get it off?

Slip a super-hard, super-thin backer underneath it, then cut? (Aluminum probably being the best scenario, as far as industrial metals go)

<comment><USER6> Just cut directly. A tiny scratch and a tiny burn from the heat of the cutting disc, but nothing worse than a paper cut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More here: Study finds N95 masks reduce risk of coronavirus infection [https://www.livescience.com/respirators-prevent- coronavirus-...](https://www.livescience.com/respirators-prevent-coronavirus- infection-study.html)

 _As Wang 's study revealed, rates of infection differed between doctors and nurses with [N95] respirators and those without._

 _Specifically, the authors examined data collected from Jan. 2-22 at six departments within the Zhongnan Hospital. Within the 10-day period, the hospital treated 28 individuals with confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 58 "suspicious" cases. The medical staff in each department followed different safety protocols when treating the patients._

 _About 280 medical staff in the hospital 's Respiratory, ICU and Infectious Diseases departments wore N95 respirators and washed their hands frequently, while about 215 in the departments of Hepatobiliary Pancreatic Surgery, Trauma and Microsurgery, and Urology wore no masks and disinfected their hands less frequently. Although the respirator group encountered confirmed cases more often than the unmasked group — more than 730% more often — no one in the respirator group became infected._

 _In comparison, 10 people in the unmasked group contracted the novel disease, despite treating fewer infected patients._

 _" It would appear that N95 respirators, no surprise, protect against health care acquisition of the virus," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious- diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, who was not involved in the current study. The small study is "reassuring in that sense," although there was no reason to think that N95 respirators wouldn't block out the novel coronavirus effectively, he added._

<comment><USER8> So the mask group was also competely confounded with being infectious disease specialists? Perhaps there were other precautions besides masks and hand washing that they were taking due to their training, even if not explicitly. Still interesting, particularly given the widespread appearance of "don't bother with masks" articles these days.

<comment><USER9> I don't think you can call multiple elements to a protocol a "confounding factor".

Study: "wearing a mask and washing your hands has been shown to stop infection."

Critic: "This study is worthless, it can show which of these procedures was effective!"

Study: "uh, err..."

Confounding factors would uncontrollable factors that people couldn't implement themselves. People can clearly wash their hands and wear masks.

<comment><USER8> That's simply not what I said. The confounding factor isn't hand washing (though that also makes it impossible "model the effectiveness of respiratory masks" as the title says), it's that it's comparing one department to other departments, and those departments surely differ by more than just hand washing and face masks. Infectious disease specialists were trained differently, do different procedures, etc. They see patients with different symptoms and at different stages of their disease.

Essentially the way to treat this is not a study of N doctors but a study of only n departments, which turns it more into an anecdote - albeit a compelling one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone have any info on the comparability of COVID-19 to H1N1 in terms of transmission methods since we have official trace data, studies and reports on H1N1? Am having this discussion and being pointed out the fact that H1N1's particulate size is actually smaller than COVID-19 (80-120nm vs 200nm respectively).

</comment><comment><USER11> According to Google Scholar, this paper has zero citations. This does not engender too much trust in its results.

</comment><comment><USER12> For something like this, I wonder why the health workers haven't started using those positive-pressure helmet hazmat suits. Like those from that Outbreak movie.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how it feels to be assigned to the control group?

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems very simple and cost effective?

</comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for this. The US Surgeon General needs to be fired and delicensed from medical practice after his claim yesterday that no one should buy masks because masks don't work. He has no business representing himself as a qualified medical professional.

His statements are such egregious malpractice that they rise to the caliber of extreme negligence and should expose him given his position to liability and possibly criminal charges for contributory homicide.

South Korea is looking at charging church officials with "murder through willful negligence" ([https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/world/coronavirus- news.ht...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/world/coronavirus-news.html)). The reason? They told church members to remove their masks during services as it was "disrespectful to God." Telling people not to wear masks is murder through willful negligence.

<comment><USER16> Masks don't protect you from others, they protect others from you, and if you are a health professional dealing with infected people from vulnerable populations, or a surgeon asking for a scalpel over an open body, you are going to assume that you are infected and capable of transmitting disease out of an abundance of caution. Masks for the general healthy public is borderline hysteria and affects the medical supply chain.

<comment><USER17> Respiratory masks do indeed protect you from others. This is the whole point of this article.

<comment><USER16> I wasn't saying n95 respirators don't do anything. They are very effective. I was talking about disposable surgical masks that people are now wearing everywhere.

<comment><USER15> You should consider reading the scientific study that this entire thread is about.

 _> In this article, a risk assessment model previously developed in general form was used to estimate the effectiveness of different types of protective equipment in reducing the rate of infection in an influenza outbreak. It was found that a 50% compliance in donning the device resulted in a significant (at least 50% prevalence and 20% cumulative incidence) reduction in risk for fitted and unfitted N95 respirators, high-filtration surgical masks, and both low-filtration and high-filtration pediatric masks. An 80% compliance rate essentially eliminated the influenza outbreak._

It's not the only study.

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190903134732.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190903134732.htm)

 _> Summary: The study reported 'no significant difference in the effectiveness' of medical masks vs. N95 respirators for prevention of influenza or other viral respiratory illness. _

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I did my own little experiment with masks which you can also easily repeat the experiment yourself.

Note that this works on the regular masks you can buy from regular shops such as convenience stores that the general public mostly wears.

Put on the mask in cold weather or a chill room and then take a deep breath and breathe out. You will notice a lot of steam is coming off around the sides of the masks and especially around the nose area where these masks are not sealed. Worse if you cough of sneeze! This is even more so after the mask has been worn for some time and gets soggy.

Next, go outside and ask your friend to light a cigarette and exhale smoke in your face while you take a deep breath through your nose. (Wearing the mask as you would normally do). You will find a lot of smoke gets around the mask, mostly around the edges around the nose.

You can make your own conclusions from there. My conclusion was that these things are mostly toys and the majority of people wearing them either do not fit them correctly or do not change often or both, and they also may be putting too much confidence in them.

<comment><USER19> As I imagine you are expecting to test for smoke in that case by seeing if you can smell it: of course you can smell it, as what you are smelling there is a gas. An N95 mask filters particles larger than some reasonably large size, which hopefully includes giant encapsulated viruses filled with genetic material but is not going to include the odor from smoke which is made up of individual molecules of stuff like syringol. An N95 mask is not some kind of "only oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide (and whatever else you absolutely need from air)" filter: it is just that most scents thankfully aren't harmful, but happen to be correlated with stuff that is.

FWIW, when I wear an N95 mask I do _not_ get steam from its edges (that is either a ludicrously poor fit or you are expecting to be able to breath out too quickly for your mask design), but you also need to remember that breathing out is "safe" while breathing in is not, and yet the pressure in the two cases is very different, so something can be very effective even if it has the issue you are complaining about (and some masks are even designed specifically like that, with pressure vents to make breathing easier so you can exhale quickly without a problem and then pull air in more slowly where the feedback is more clear).

<comment><USER20> > giant encapsulated viruses filled with genetic material

Somewhat tangential, but viruses are actually _really_ small. Some approximate sizes for comparison:

* Pollen: 20 - 35 um

* E. coli: 2 um

* HEPA filter: 99.97% capture at 0.3 um

* N95: 95%+ at 0.1 - 0.3 um [1]

* Sterilizing filter pore size: 0.22 um

* Virus: 0.004 - 0.1 um

Even the sterilizing filter in the lab doesn't remove viruses. I'm not actually sure what mechanics are going on in this case that allow an N95 to protect you.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9487666](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9487666)

<comment><USER21> Masks actually have kind of a funny response curve (see 5th page of linked PDF).

The masks are basically made out of layers of tiny (as small as 1um) fibres that force the air to weave through them to get to you. Larger particles tend to hit fibres on their way through, while smaller ones tend to get pushed out of the way of bigger things like air molecules rushing through and get bumped into the fibres and captured. The things that get though are the ones in the sweet spot of being small enough to make their way around the fibres in the air, but large enough to not simply be knocked out of the path by the air molecules themselves.

The lowest efficiency is around 0.04-0.1um on the models tested (so perfect range for most viruses) but even then they were still only dropping to like 94% effectiveness. I expect "94% effective" is still enough to see a significant different but that's just my gut feeling.

All kind of moot, though, as coronaviruses (per 4th page of linked PDF) are actually closer to 0.125um, which is veering back to 100% effectiveness. And if we expect that a lot of transmission is happening in droplets, those are _much_ larger and easily caught by the filter.

[https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/409903O/respiratory- prot...](https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/409903O/respiratory-protection- against-biohazards.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ed, man man ed - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html <comment><USER2> Ah, an oldie but a goodie. Never read the Intel "press release", thanks for bringing this up!

Another old but awesome story of real men and their tools... [http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html](http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html)</comment>


Hyperledger – Linux's open source approach to blockchain building - <AUTHOR> https://litepaper.com/resources/hyperledger <comment><USER2> An overview of the Linux _Foundation 's_ open source approach to blockchain. LF is involved with lots of projects which aren't all explicitly Linux these days.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the title needs to be changed. This is not related to Linux in any way.

<comment><USER4> It could be changed to "The Linux Foundation's approach", sure, but it's very much a Linux Foundation project, and is developed and managed using the same template by which the Foundation manages the kernel project and others. We have some differences - there is no central kernel, but a family of different DLT systems within the Hyperledger community, reflecting geniunely different approaches. But other parts are similar, from technical governance to everything being under an open source license to legal compliance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did research Hyperledger Fabric and compared to other "Blockchain platforms". My conclusion was that it made a lot more sense to use Ethereum in most cases due to:

\- Ethereum has a bigger community that is more open and inclusive. While Hyperledger is mainly an IBM and friends like project and a lot of decisions and information is kept inside. Goodluck getting things done without involving consultants from these "supporting" companies.

\- Consensus algorithm is what makes a Blockchain a blockchain. Hyperledger says something like you can use whatever consensus mechanism you want but in practice there is not a real alternative to proof of work. Relying on a in public production battle tested algorithm will save a lot of effort and headache.

\- crypto economic incentive is what makes a Blockchain a blockchain. Without having a coin to motivate participants in a balanced way to act in a specific desired way, there will not be any real advantages to use a blockchain platform and it is in most cases smarter to just use a distributed database. Hyperledger doesn't provide a practical way to create an incentive mechanism.

\- The underlying philosophy of hyperledger is around "federated networks" which means that it is trying to create a controlled environment where transactions take place between authorized participants. This leads to centralization by authority which leads to data immutability according to the degree you trust this entity. This defeats mainly the purpose of Blockchain to create a trustless environment of immutable data record.

<comment><USER6> > Consensus algorithm is what makes a Blockchain a blockchain. Hyperledger > says something like you can use whatever consensus mechanism you want but in > practice there is not a real alternative to proof of work.

For public use maybe but for commercial/private use cases it can often be assumed that all parties are trusted in some manner. I think their approach to different consensus algorithms makes sense when you're solving for use cases beyond financial transfers between untrusted parties.

<comment><USER5> If parties are trusted, don't bother with Blockchain. Huge added complexity (which brings security issues) without any benefit. Use for example git or a conventional database.

<comment><USER7> Ever try to share a conventional database between multiple different companies or organizations? It's not practical. It seems more complicated than going with a blockchain solution (or will be as blockchain deployment tools mature).

The adage that 'if parties are trusted, than go with a conventional DB' doesn't hold water anymore. If you need to share a database with other companies, it inevitably leads to contracting a third party solution to manage the data entry between all parties, which means you now have to trust this one entity and there's a single point of failure.

Hyperledger, blockchain, and the like eliminate the need for third party management. A few engineers at each party needs to set up the new service, and now you don't have to worry about central points of failure, you have built in redundancy, and you save money by not having to use a data management service that exists to make money off of you.

<comment><USER8> > Ever try to share a conventional database between multiple different > companies or organizations? It's not practical.

Not practical how? It seems like this criticism can only be applied to usability, but that's not a technical shortcoming.

> If you need to share a database with other companies, it inevitably leads to > contracting a third party solution to manage the data entry between all > parties, which means you now have to trust this one entity and there's a > single point of failure.

This criticism seems a bit underspecified. While it's true that having a single entity to handle data entry results in a single point of failure, but what's the failure model? Do we assume that this single entity might be malicious? Or are we assuming that the entity handling data entry isn't familiar with the types of failures they may encounter, and thus hasn't taken steps to mitigate the effects of those failures? Both of those scenarios, given the context of sharing data among organizations, seems unrealistic.

> Hyperledger, blockchain, and the like eliminate the need for third party > management. A few engineers at each party needs to set up the new service, > and now you don't have to worry about central points of failure, you have > built in redundancy, and you save money by not having to use a data > management service that exists to make money off of you.

The claims you make here are correct: (1) the consensus protocol provides a decent mechanism for writing to the database, (2) redundancy insulates against loss of data, and (3) the open nature of the protocol means you don't have to use a for-profit service. However, there are far more efficient ways to achieve these things without relying on blockchains. If everyone that could write to the database is known, and what you want is simply to guarantee the integrity of the database, there are better data structures than a linear chain of hashed, batched events (which is all that a blockchain is, at its core).

<comment><USER9> The failure mode that keeps happening is that the trusted central third party charges high fees to access the database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Was good to work with HLF but the ops background required to run it in production was staggering: Replicated Kafka + ZK backing the consensus algorithm. I put it all in Kubernetes with StatefulSets. Even with my background running those systems it felt unreasonable. I quit that job in Nov so I don't know if the situation has improved since then. I liked the architecture and the team was responsive and put care into docs. Would use again.

<comment><USER4> Thank you! Folks are working hard to get deployment and management via Kube (and Helm Charts, etc) to be first-class supported and consistent. It's about where one would expect a 1.x level project to be, which means improvements like you point out are needed. Lots has happened since November. :) Hope you consider coming back and contributing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> we did a long evaluation of HyperLedger Fabric (0.6 - 1.x) for a project at my company.

We really wanted it to work since the chain code model was cool however we ran into stumbling block after stumbling block and in the end ditched it for something else.

List of pain points (no idea if any have been solved since we gave up on it)

1) Distributing chaincode updates to participants was an exercise in coordination that is unscalable

2) Kafka as consensus. At the time you had to use an infinite kafka queue since pruning it would throw fabric nodes into a panic and they'd drop off the network. We thought for sure we were doing something wrong but the need for an infinite queue was verified by someone at IBM

3) Community. The community around HL F was mostly IBM people or folks off doing their own weird thing and adding features or pull requests that were bizarre (a custom fork of postgres to act as state dB??). With that said there were a handful of _very_ helpful people there just never was a good mass of them

4) Performance. We wanted to run a private blockchain but amongst nodes distributed across the globe in whatever datacenter they chose. Running fabic in a truly distributed way just kills performance. There is a lot of cross talk and waiting for the ordering service to get sorted

5) Not really a blockchain. Fabric relied on the centralized ordering service and each node would contain its own state. If the ordering service pruned logs (which I guess is a feature now) then the distributed nodes could have ledgers that have content the central order does not know about. If that node wanted to rebuild it would need to rebuild from other nodes without a way to truly verify the content of the chain. This may have been solved but it was a gaping wound of a question when we raised it

There are others, in the end it was just way to much work and we moved off to a more popular blockchain and brought our proof of concept to feature parity and beyond in just two weeks.

We reached out to IBM for help several times and the answer was mostly "just buy bluemix" or "pay us and we'll implement it for you"

To use HyperLedger Fabric in any sense of scale and operational readiness you must run it all within one data center. If you have external participants in your network they must also be customers of that service or you can just run it all yourself in y our own DC for your own needs.

IF you go that route, it begs the question of "why bother?" You're putting everything in the hands of one entity and then adding in a ton of complexity and slowness. Just use a database or something right?

*edit format

<comment> at-fates-hands We had a large presentation from IBM about hyperledger (I work for a healthcare company) and it seemed like something our industry could really leverage.

I was put on a team to research using it on an upcoming project. Once we started digging in and asking questions, it became apparent very quickly IBM wants to control everything from top to bottom. It's on their network, they build it, they maintain it, and there's not a lot of options outside of what they've already built.

We had some very specific functionality we needed and were told by the IBM team it wouldn't be a problem. When we got down to delivery and talking actuals, they started to balk if they could even deliver what we really needed. After trying to nail several things down and not getting anywhere, we pivoted and are currently looking at other blockchain platforms.

After reading your response, it sounds like we may have dodged a bullet and made the right choice.

<comment><USER4> IBM is not the only company that can deliver a network built using Hyperledger Fabric, or any of the other frameworks. Did you take a look at Sawtooth, or Iroha? Did your devs engage with the actual Hyperledger community, or only through IBM? There are several healthcare companies (Change Healthcare is one, managing insurance claims) who have engaged directly and are in production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am looking for a library that provides a blockchain, without needing a consensus mechanism. 50% of the the need is to gain experience and 50% is for a couple of light weight projects. I was hoping this was something I could try out but from the comments it looks like not. I use nodejs so extra points for that, but I am open to other alternatives. An example project would be to set up a local swap market, where users can swap appliances for swap-coins, then spend those for other appliances at a later time.

<comment><USER13> IMHO a "blockchain without a consensus mechanism" is tantamount to a security door without a lock. The whole point of "blockchain" being that all transactions on it are correct and verifiable via a consensus mechanism, i.e. a distributed, non-centralized trust mechanism where you don't have to trust one individual or company to get it right.

If you really want to record transactions without a consensus mechanism, use a database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a lot of misinformation circulating in the comments here that I'll be addressing as replies to some of these threads, though inevitably won't be able to get to each one. I'd ask each of you to not just repeat misinformation you've heard from others, but do first-hand research by going to the Hyperledger website, wiki, discussion forums, or other places and learn about the tech before taking the snarky way out. Thanks,

Brian Behlendorf, Exec Director, Hyperledger

</comment><comment><USER14> Kind of light on details. My own impression of Hyperledger is that it is like the ISO OSI network layers - there is everything in it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Love the format and illustration, though I feel having a high-level comparison between different Hyperledger projects (especially Fabric versus Sawtooth) is probably important here. Happy to contribute/collaborate on this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Related, from a few weeks ago:

Hyperledger Fabric: A Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17586355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17586355)

</comment><comment><USER17> Can someone give me a concrete example of a situation in which a private blockchain makes sense for a company or industry instead of a shared, permissioned database?

</comment><comment><USER18> My intuition tells me hyperledger is a bunch of bs.

</comment><comment><USER19> > You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.</comment>


Ask HN: Please review my new website www.favilous.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.favilous.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm being shown the line:

"Favilous is supported on all major browsers excluding Internet Explorer 6. Upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer."

I don't think I need to see this as I'm on Safari.

<comment><USER3> Same for me. I'm on Firefox 3.5 (Linux).

<comment><USER4> Also on Chrome 4.0 (Windows).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a good start, but it feels like it's a bunch of unconnected ideas at this point. I think you need some better copy, but you also need to refine your layout.

Overall, it feels too busy. Items are shunted together in a confusing way, and they don't feel like they related to each other. Look at sites like <http://www.pixelmator.com/> and <http://feedafever.com/> \-- their sites are brilliantly executed.

Focus on what you want your site to do: 1\. Explain what you're offering 2\. Convince people that they need it (especially as opposed to other, similar, services) 3\. Make it easy to sign up and use

As it stands now, I feel like you have the rough beginnings of this, but it's not a finished, polished version.

More technically, here's what I recommend. First, you need to snap things down to a grid. This will make the page flow and FEEL better overall, and allow you to control how the user views it.

Second, you need to make everything more cohesive. It looks like you have seven different fonts now (the "favilous" name, "Bookmark Tools," the default body text, the sign-in button, the rotating text in the main box, the navigation links, and the "Follow Us" link), and a huge amount of colors. You should come up with a simple color scheme of maybe three main colors and a few shades of each, and cut the number of fonts you're using down to one or two. Yes, one or two -- the Fever page uses just one.

There seems to be a lot of empty space. Not white space, which a good design needs, but EMPTY space. Your main box looks like it's three times as big as it needs to be for the content it holds. Fix that, because it distracts the eye and looks unprofessional.

I would also recommend a color scheme that's black-on-white, instead of white- on-black you have now. It's much harder to read white text on a black background, especially for long periods of time, and since you're expecting people to be reading and browsing, you should probably focus on making it easy to read.

Finally, there are some instances on your site where you have an extra space before the punctuation ends. This looks unprofessional, and to grammar- obsessed reader, it's distracting.

<comment><USER6> This is great feedback, thanks. I think you are right that the homepage needs to explain who we are and what we are doing in a better fashion. We need to show people that we are different to Delicious.

We are aimed at bookmarking rather than some other sites where it seems a bit of an after thought.

I also think we need to highlight the bookmark tools more as 'favitlater' is a really bug feature but one that doesn't seemed to have been picked up here.

You are right about the fonts and we will revisit this. With regard to black on white - once registered a user can select from a range of different backgrounds (including white ones) and you can also upload your own.

Thanks very much for your feedback. We will discuss it and keep you updated as to any changes that we make! Much appreciated...as are all these comments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I clicked the link and immediately thought, "How is this any different from Delicious? Why would I use this?"

Sell me! On the front page, above the fold.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. Check how Pinboard differentiates itself against Delicious:

<http://pinboard.in>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It took me a moment to find the "Sign Up" button/link. I checked in some of the usual places.. At the top of the page near the "Sign In/Have an account?" link, the main navigation, and in the actual slide show to no avail. I eventually found it and felt stupid for not seeing it earlier.

<comment><USER10> This was the first thing I noticed, too. I'd recommend having a 'sign up' link at the top right where the 'sign in' link is--that's where people expect it to be, and that's where they'll look for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats, delicious needs more competition in this space. I started working on something like this with a couple buddies of mine about two years ago with the read sites later stuff, syncing across browsers, etc. Our project, favtopia.com, ended up getting put on a semi-permanent hold as we had other things we needed to work on. I think you guys are on to something really useful, with a lot of great features other offerings lack. Just keep refining your landing page (and the rest of your site), making what you do really clear to your visitors, and I think you guys will do well.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great thanks. You are right - we certainly need to make the homepage clearer in message. It seems to be getting lost at the moment but we are really pleased you have found the bookmarking tools and find them useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd move the "Take a Tour" link to a more prominent location and make it a button. It took me a while to find it. The tour was good at showing me what this was all about though.

<comment><USER6> Where do you think we should move it to? Would it be more obvious in the main bar running at the top of the page?

<comment><USER12> Sorry for the late reply. Here are two options I made quickly: <http://imgur.com/F3V5d>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Guided tour didn't work for me. It loaded but never started playing. I didn't immediately notice any other way to find out what exactly the site is or does. Clicking the links in the bottom columns just took me to other sites.

<comment><USER14> You have to keep clicking the forward button. I figured it out, but it is confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Positive : I like the guided Tour. It's not a traditional video and it's quite interesting.

Negative: I found the color a little dark but this might just be me. Nice website keep the good work.

</comment><comment><USER16> Design feedback: That background needs to go. Marketing feedback: Tell me what I get out of using it, not how it works.

<comment><USER17> I have to counter that I rather like the design, specifically the background, but I definitely second the marketing feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks cool but the transparent background wasn't necesary. It's hideous. In my opinion. All the best.

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks nice - need to experiment with a delicious alternative - this could be just what i'm looking for.

<comment><USER20> ^ This is my main question with the site as well: what differentiates this from other bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, we see it as being a simpler more stylish alternative which appeals to technical and non-technical people alike. We also distinguish between the sites you might traditionally store in your browser favourites versus the articles and blog posts you might view and store via delicious. So somewhere in between the facilities you get with a browser and an application like delicious. We also provide the facility to bookmark pages for viewing later or to tweet a link straight from a bookmarklet.</comment></comment></comment>


Judge to Oracle: "proceed with caution before overreaching again" - <AUTHOR> http://patent-damages.com/2011/08/oracle-v-google-ndca-judge-alsup-rejects-nash-bargaining-solution-and-grants-google%E2%80%99s-motion-to-exclude-oracle%E2%80%99s-expert%E2%80%99s-report-and-testimony-advocating-1-4b-to-6-1b-in-d/

<comment><USER2> Website seems down, here is a cache version : [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YkwoGRQ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YkwoGRQ2C2MJ:patent- damages.com/2011/08/oracle-v-google-ndca-judge-alsup-rejects-nash-bargaining- solution-and-grants-google%E2%80%99s-motion-to-exclude- oracle%E2%80%99s-expert%E2%80%99s-report-and-testimony- advocating-1-4b-to-6-1b-in-d/+http://patent-damages.com/2011/08/oracle-v- google-ndca-judge-alsup-rejects-nash-bargaining-solution-and-grants- google%25E2%2580%2599s-motion-to-exclude- oracle%25E2%2580%2599s-expert%25E2%2580%2599s-report-and-testimony- advocating-1-4b-to-6-1b-in-d/&hl=fr&gl=fr&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's refreshing to read about a judge giving a strong argumentation on a fairly technical subject.

If it comes to the point where Oracle will have to show which patents are being infringed, I wonder how they will hold up under the light of scrutiny.

<comment><USER4> I would imagine pretty good or Oracle wouldn't have brought suit.

<comment><USER5> You mean like when SCO sued IBM? If SCO didn't have a case they wouldn't have brought suit, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oy. Every single allocation of surplus is Pareto efficient, and every single allocation can result from the right Nash equilibrium. The 50/50 split of surplus is in no way anymore justified then any other. You have to reach outside game theory for that.

<comment><USER7> if you're going to speak on complex law issues, how about learning the difference between then and than?

<comment><USER8> The grandparent post's statements were related to game theory (the branch of mathematics), not law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "(...) Oracle must be aware that some of the unaddressed criticisms seem, at least on one reading, to have merit, so it should proceed with caution (...)" - It's with judges like these that we could sort the patent mess.

</comment><comment><USER10> Between 1.4 and 6.1B. That shows Oracle only valued sun for it patents it could use against people like Google (they paid 8B for sun)

<comment> eric-hu The lawyers that come up with these sums don't need a sense of money grounded in the real world. See also: RIAA wants 75 trillion from limewire: <http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202486102650>

<comment><USER11> I wonder if it sounds ridiculous even to them, or they actually believe their own claims.

<comment><USER12> Probably more like a negotiating tactic. The more that they ask for the more the _actual_ amount awarded will be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The goal of bargaining is not usually to give the other party the best possible (most profitable) outcome. Does this Nash BS take into account for the bargainers that an agreement _not reached_ will favor neither, or perhaps favor one less than the other. One party says to the other "your math is hogwater, no deal! We'll still build it some other way, but you won't get anything." Leverage is a simple machine.</comment>


Java is not dead or Your mom is the new COBOL. - <AUTHOR> http://zeroturnaround.com/blog/java-is-dead-9-million-devs-disagree/

<comment><USER2> Great Article about an ancient Language :)) Kidding :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, 9 million Java devs cannot be wrong!</comment>


API Pulse – Monitor the Health of Your API - <AUTHOR> https://apipulse.tinfoilsecurity.com/ <comment><USER2> Please don't put "Show HN" on a post until it exists for people to try out. This is in the rules: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

</comment><comment><USER3> So like runscope?

<comment><AUTHOR> My experience with Runscope is limited but it seems best suited to monitor existing production APIs and verify happy-paths. Our API Pulse actively takes an adversarial approach to examine how an API behaves when fuzzing inputs and also checks for various best practices.</comment></comment>