CountUp.js - <AUTHOR> http://inorganik.github.io/countUp.js/

<comment><USER2> You might also want to look at Odometer: [http://github.hubspot.com/odometer/docs/welcome/](http://github.hubspot.com/odometer/docs/welcome/)

<comment><USER3> Wow, really nicely done on that landing page. Curious, why'd you make the API depend on a class name instead of assuming something more common like:

      odometer(el, 42);

<comment><USER2> We've been having fun building things lately with transparent APIs. e.g. You drop Pace[1] in a page, and it figures out how to create a progress bar from it.

Odometer is nifty in this way because you can still just set the value with innerHTML or .html, and it will animate it, so the overhead of adding it becomes just adding the class to whatever elements you'd like.

You can actually also manually instantiate one pretty much exactly as you described:

        new Odometer({el: el, value: 42});

[1] - [http://github.hubspot.com/pace/docs/welcome/](http://github.hubspot.com/pace/docs/welcome/)

<comment><USER3> Wow, Pace just blew my mind. You guys are releasing some really awesome stuff :) random other thing is would be sweet if these were component[1] friendly. (Dunno if you've already checked out component, but it is insanely good for front-end work.)

One pattern I picked up from reading TJ's code is the transparent constructor...

      odometer(el).value(42);

...which I like using to make things that share a bit of state, but are still one-offs, a bit terser. (Coupled with avoiding options objects in general.) Achieved with the following:

      function Odometer (el) {
        if (!(this instanceof Odometer)) return new Odometer(el);
        ...
      }

[1] [https://github.com/component/component](https://github.com/component/component)

<comment><USER2> We try to include component.json files, but we don't use component, so it's usually left to a benevolent pull-requester. We've been using bower more and more, and liking that a lot, but it's essentially arbitrary. It's a bit annoying that npm, bower and component all require their own files to say essentially the same thing.

I agree with wrapping the constructor function. Requiring the consumer to remember new adds one more tripping point for users. In this case, I suppose my thought was that the manual-creation path was such a small percentage of users that it wasn't a huge deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Suggestion: allow passing in target as a DOMElement, rather than by id. That makes this more useful when template rendering in done off-DOM, or when IDs aren't used.

<comment><USER2> If it's an object treat it as a dom node, if it's a string, run it through document.querySelector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks to the open-source community, a bunch of improvements and fixes have been made on this:

\- merged @lifthrasiir's PR. \- counts in both directions \- easing optional \- supports IE8 \- optional callback on animation complete \- coffeescript and minified versions available

</comment><comment><USER6> If I have it count up to 1 in 20 seconds, it only takes 10 seconds?

It also doesn't seem to be linear, which is fine, but there should be some way to make it linear

And why just up? It'd be great if it could also count down.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like the behaviour is limited to the first 2 decimals.

You can see this if you put 6 random decimal numbers and set the duration to 20.

I tried putting 10 decimals and it just shows a string of 0s after the 2nd decimal.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. It should use the scaling factor of 10^6 (instead of 60). I have submitted a pull req: [https://github.com/inorganik/countUp.js/pull/2](https://github.com/inorganik/countUp.js/pull/2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It makes the figure comma formatted, most excellent.

I've now implemented this in my ridiculous stock-market simulator game. Looks fantastic. Many thanks OP.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why would you set `user-scalable=no` but not re-flow for tablets? I really wish Safari would provide an override for these incorrect viewport declarations.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nothing happens on mobile safari, looks like the button is not clickable?

</comment><comment><USER12> doesn't work at all on browsers without requestAnimationFrame support (e.g. Opera 12). I guess that that's fine, but then better display the final number instead of 0.

</comment><comment><USER13> so easing... really does this need to be library

</comment><comment><USER14> that easing</comment>


U.S. military strong-arming IT industry on IPv6 - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/122010-dod-strongarms-suppliers-on-ipv6.html?hpg1=bn <comment><USER3> IPv6 is such a mess that the DoD needs to ensure that when IPv6 is claimed as "supported" by a vendor, that it actually does work. There are plenty of bugs, corner cases, and limitations in what vendors are offering.

This "strong-arming" is not that much different than asking a new car salesman why he is selling GM while personally driving an Audi.

<comment><USER4> Actually, the IPv6 stacks I've been seeing from Cisco are starting to look pretty good. The protocol, itself, shouldn't cause much in the way of concern for most network engineers. I'm interested to hear if the problems (which were myriad, and painful early on) you ran into in the last 10 years are still present in the more recent stacks from your vendor?

Speaking as a Network Engineer - I actually quite like IPv6. It took about 3+ years for my eyes (and brain) to get used to seeing 128 bit addresses, and remembering them, but I'm pretty good now. I think that's what the article is saying, too - the DoD wants people to start getting used to the protocol so that it doesn't take a crack team to deploy the protocol. As one who interviews network engineers frequently, I have yet to run into more than half a dozen out of 100 (and that's being generous) who could speak coherently about IPv6, and have never run into one who knew something as simple as what a solicited nodes multicast address was (basically the address you use for the IPv6 equivalent of ARP).

So - the technology is getting there, now we need to get the network engineers moving along...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dan Bernstein outlines why it has been so difficult to transition to IPv6:

<http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html>

<comment><USER6> ...and that appears to be from 2002! :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Like Walmart and barcodes, maybe this is the final push that's needed. As for strong-arming, I'd say they have every right to demand suppliers who eat their own dog food. They've got a lot at stake.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just the other day I was pleasantly surprised to notice my MacBook using IPv6 to stream a song over to my Apple TV (remote speakers). For grins I disabled v6 on the interface to see what would happen. The stream cut out briefly and then resumed over IPv4.

</comment><comment><USER9> If the US military can save us from depleting IP addresses maybe they'll save us from running out of oil, too.

Damn... It seems to take a government agency to keep the world spinning.

<comment><USER10> Solar power humvees won't happen very soon.

But the US military is one of the World's largest oil consumers.

<comment><USER11> He's probably referring to DoD-funded research efforts like this: <http://www.google.com/search?q=algae+oil+dod>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice. I am pleased to say that even my TV has a globally-routable IPv6 address. (Unfortunately, I've never actually had physical IPv6 connectivity anywhere, so I always have to VPN to my internal IPv4 network. I have SSH'd from my server with IPv6 connectivity, though, and it worked :)

Oh well, at least I'm cooler than my friends :)

<comment> rm-rf A globally routable v6 network isn't too hard to do at home with tunnelbroker.net and similar services. A Dlink DIR-825 has enough v6 support to hold up it's end of the tunnel and route a /64. Clients (Mac, Windows, Unix's) 'just work'. Tunnelbroker does the hard part.

To move a whole enterprise is hard.

<comment><USER4> Moving a whole enterprise turns out to be remarkably simple. Most OS stacks from the last 5+ years have support for IPv6 - even windows XP allows a pretty straightforward upgrade. Enable the client stacks, Turn it on on your routers, and voila - your enterprise is now IPv6 enabled. Add it to your SSL VPN - <USER2> from home. The Dual-Stack capability really does make it bog simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like arm twisting, but does anyone have an alternative plan?

<comment><USER14> Fix the spec there is no reason it shouldn't be possible to have a package with an ipv4 destination and an ipv6 source (all oses knows about ipv6) except that those who wrote the specs forgot the iron law of software - nothing, no matter how good it is - succeed without being backwards compatible. That's why c++ and Java are a success, but Lisp isn't.

<comment><USER15> There is one problem. The IPv6-enabled equipment that provides Internet access to the IPv6 sender knows how to route an IPv4 address, but the IPv4 equipment at the recipient's ISP might not know how to route back to the IPv6 source.

<comment><USER14> They would have to replace the equipment anyway

<comment><USER15> ...which kind of defeats the point of backward compatibility, doesn't it?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I would re-design Facebook, Twitter, Brizzly, etc. - <AUTHOR> http://philosophistry.com/archives/2010/06/last-update-filter.html

<comment><USER2> That's less a redesign than a cry for help against the input overload social networks provide. I'm glad my social surrounding is relative quiet and for Twitter I only follow a handful of people that don't tell me what they just ate.

 _Or even better, what if a site could combine all my social feeds, and make sure that I only see the most recent update from a person across all their networks._

I haven't used it but it looks like the author would like <http://www.friendfeed.com>. Maybe not the best implementation, but a start.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell The best solution to this problem is to minimise the number of social networks you use and the number of people you follow on them.

Of course, most people don't realise this until they're already suffering from the problem. When I had a Facebook account, I regularly "pruned" people from my friends list. Now I have a twitter account I try to minimise the number of people I follow, and the number of uninteresting posts I make.

<comment><USER3> For the average internet user, the number of social networks they use and the number of people they follow is monotonically increasing. It's much easier to sign-up for something new than it is to delete your account. And it's much easier to add friends than it is to remove them. It's like asking people to get rid of every item in their house that they don't really need. It just requires too much work to sit and analyze someone and think, "Hmm, do I want to never hear from this person again on this network?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would prefer a sophisticated metric (popularity, karma) over a timestamp. I don't actually want to see last updates from all the people in my social graph, just the ones that are in some way significant. There was talk on filtering out stuff like #lunch on Twitter, but it's hard to really make a CAPTCHA judgement on the semantics of an update.

</comment><comment><USER5> I believe Facebook already does that, try toggling "Top news" and "Most recent" to see it.

I've been thinking about adding something like this to <http://friendbinder.com> for a while now, though it's quite hard to get the filtering right to pick out the best stuff (I don't think just filtering the latest update is good enough).

<comment><USER6> yeah, facebook actually does a pretty good job of this, and so did friendfeed before fb acquired them; I wonder if the friendfeed guys helped improve it.

but as for twitter, I agree completely with the author's assessment

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While the author proposes a solution, I don't believe his solution would provide the user with any more value from the pared-down stream. Instead, it would just minimize the deluge of information. Assuming that one is always interested in the most recent message from a user makes a conclusion that most recent = most important. As we all know from experience that isn't the case.

A better solution would systematically rank incoming message types based on prior determinations of importance of related messages (bayesian) and weight can be added to a particular user's messages (positive and negative) to help the cream rise to the top. The addition of collaborative filtering would help those that aren't interested in flagging their own incoming messages (up/down vote) still reap the benefits of the crowd.

<comment><USER3> Yes, as I was designing this, I thought, okay, 300 updates becomes ~100, fine. But what happens when I'm on even on more networks, and ~1,000 updates becomes ~300? Would then I need another layer on top of that to further reduce the deluge?

Maybe a "pin" and "unpin" feature that would pin these people to the top could work.

<comment><USER8> So what we have is a timeseries of user-post pairs, and we want a good view for that, a UI that scales well to handle pathological cases. I like the idea presented in the article, but, as you mention in this comment, it is only the first step. Perhaps a library for creating good views for this model would be good, and it should have some good primitives. Then people can develop and share new views for social news. The article's suggestion would be one view, and maybe some of these views would compose (i.e., after the transformation from the article, a timeseries of user-post pairs becomes a timeseries of user-(timeseries of posts) pars, where a (timeseries of posts) is presented as the most recent post and a control with the cardinality of the timeseries as its label and a toggle-hide behavior, and that thing fits in the outer UI the way a "post" would.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> None of the implications of this are explored. Such as that Twitter conversations would no longer be easily (for some values of easily) readable as such. Or that by having "Show More" links next to so many items, the user would constantly be made aware of (and thus anxious about) the fact that they are missing lots of information.

<comment><USER3> What gave me confidence that this could work, is that Google Buzz already does a little bit of grouping, and it seems elegant enough to me.

But, yes, I didn't explore the details too much about the "show more" feature. Would you list a count of the "unread items" from friends? Or would you need a slider that says "Show updates from the last 48 hours?" Then, would you need to couple this with some algorithm that bubbled up to the top the friends that you clicked "show more" on frequently? I'm not sure about the answers to all these questions, so I'll leave up to developers to figure it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've always thought Twitter should have an auto generated list that shows 1 tweet per day per user. I think I added this to the wishlist for Tweetdeck (Groups) a while back. From glancing over the link, that solution sounds decent too.</comment>


If The WSJ.com Says Goodbye To Google, It Will lose 25 Percent Of Its Traffic  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/if-the-wsj-com-says-goodbye-to-google-it-will-also-say-goodbye-to-25-percent-of-its-traffic/ <comment><USER2> That 25 percent of their current traffic comes from Google does not necessitate that they will lose 25 percent of their traffic if they block Google.

There are numerous reasons why this is true, and I'll give some of them, but the basic point is that nothing is that simple.

1\. What percent of that Google traffic is coming from "I'm feeling lucky" hits by just typing "wsj" or "wall street journal" into the address bar? Presumably the people doing this could figure out how to find wsj.com without this feature.

2\. What percent of that traffic is accidental search bar queries for wsj.com instead of address bar queries? I do this all the time, and once you're at the Google results, it's quicker to just click the link there.

3\. How much traffic will be _gained_ by blocking Google? It would be silly to ignore the fact that since this will be a big decision, people might check out wsj.com just to see how things are going since the Google block. People may also be impressed with the courage and more likely to trust and use wsj.com in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Never mind that in order to get people to pay for content, they first have to be able to find it._

For new sites maybe... but the WSJ is well known, has a huge user base and will probably continue to for some time.</comment>


Meet the Bisickle, a Commuter Bike Concept - <AUTHOR> http://www.good.is/post/meet-the-bisickle-a-commuter-bike-concept/ <comment><USER2> This appears to be a bike designed by someone who has never ridden a bike, and who never got a handful of bits of wood and mocked the thing up. For example:

1) The handle bars have two hand positions, yet no brakes. Dual brakes are possible, but expensive, fiddly and don't work with hydro disk brakes.

2) No mud guards.

3) Why solid spoke carbon fiber wheels when stressed steel spokes work so well?

4) Riding a bike with a 8 inch wide cross bar: a 10 minute mockup of this by sellotaping a lunchbox to to crossbar of a normal bike would reveal why this doesn't work

5) The saddlebag briefcase will interfere with your heel while pedaling: panniers need to much further back.

6) No lights

<comment><USER3> As for (3), the carbon fiber wheels are there, according to the video, to make it easier to build them yourself. The designer wants people to be able to rebuild wheels to fit current trends and/or changing riding conditions. According to the designer, standard wheels are too difficult to maintain and require specialized knowledge.

As an avid cyclist, though, I rarely do much to change out or even maintain my steel-spoked wheels. Once they are well-trued, I usually leave them alone for the season. I certainly never worry about my wheels not looking cool enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Low maintenance, water resistance and ride quality is everything in commuter bike design. Electric assist pessimises the first two aspects. Plastic construction seems nice but how does it ride on less than perfect roads?

Traditional bike design is refined through the ages, changing it without a good usability reason will be a tough sell. I'd like to try a prototype on cobbled streets in the rain.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand how this is a step forward; ease of manufacture, maybe? It doesn't strike me as being any more reliable, comfortable or efficient than any other electric-assist bicycle. I do like the thought that's gone into the various luggage compartments, though.

And I really don't get the CF wheels. They're about the last thing I'd want on a commuter bike.

</comment><comment><USER6> Imagine this with a heavy blow of sidewind...

</comment><comment><USER7> love the idea, but after trying to ride a 'wide bike' before (with extra large distance between the pedals) I can tell you it's a real pain. it might be an ok position for sitting on a Harley, but not for peddling with any efficiency.

some nice features though, would love to see a prototype made.

</comment><comment><USER3> According to the video, the bike weighs 27kg, which seems a bit heavy for easy pedaling. Add in all your daily luggage and you're pedaling around with something like 35-50kg of extra weight. Except in really flat areas, that seems like a lot to ask of someone.

</comment><comment><USER8> Movie about the bike by the creator: [http://s640.photobucket.com/albums/uu121/karlmcintyredesign/...](http://s640.photobucket.com/albums/uu121/karlmcintyredesign/?action=view&current=Bisickle.mp4)

</comment><comment><USER9> I would like to know why the designer thinks this is better than a normal bike that is properly outfitted for commuting purposes.</comment>


Show HN: We're devs and want to move from the political collapse in our country - <AUTHOR> http://talentrelocation.com/

<comment><USER2> a link to github / behance is a must in the description</comment>


Google Plus vs. LinkedIn: Which Platform is the Winner for B2B? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ronsela.com/google-plus-vs-linkedin/

<comment><AUTHOR> Google+ and LinkedIn are both vying for top position among business networks, and both have their own unique characteristics to bring value. Social media has absolutely exploded, and digital marketing has proven to be an incredibly valuable tool in a business's advertising arsenal.

Which one brings more value? Which one is more beneficial to a company's marketing plan?</comment>


No SDN Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rothgar/no-sdn-kubernetes-5a0cb32070dd <comment><USER2> This is a really excellent post on the different options for Software Defined Networking with Kubernetes. I wasn't aware you didn't need to run an overlay or underlay network when using Kubernetes.

Great stuff.</comment>


About Database Connection Pool Sizing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/wiki/About-Pool-Sizing <comment><USER2> I did some profiling when I was working at one of the big online travel sites. We were running about 300 or so servers with a 50-connection pool each. After testing, we determined that at no time, ever, was more than one connection in simultaneous use across the server farm. We could have reduced it to a single shared connection per server and maintained the same QoS.

<comment><USER3> I've always worked with a transaction per connection principle to saving having to manage transaction id's within a connection.

Were you not using transactions or did you have some other approach?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is that Oracle instance using a max thread pool size of 2048 on a 12-core host? That seems like the real problem. Why not configure a smaller thread pool like cores * 2, and do more queuing on the server?

It seems wrong IMO to expect _clients_ to tune connection pools based on how much concurrency they think a server can productively handle. The client doesn't necessarily know how many cores the server has, or more importantly, how many other clients are connected.

In HTTP/2, clients can configure a maximum number of streams (SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS), and the RFC recommends setting it "no smaller than 100". If servers worked on all pending requests concurrently, a value of 100 would be unreasonably large. But the implicit expectation is that servers will decide for themselves how many requests to process concurrently, and queue the rest. In other words, SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS is intended to limit the server's queue size, not its thread pool size.

<comment><USER5> The SQL "protocol"† is a hairy one for a backend to deal with, state-wise. Each concurrent connection to an (ACID conformant) SQL-speaking server implies that that connection can have a transaction in progress.

A transaction, in SQL, requires the ability for the client (or the backend) to roll it back at any time before it gets committed—and thus, a transaction in progress requires keeping around at least two "world states" of the DB engine: the one before the transaction began, and the way the world looks after the current statement's modifications—but not those of any other concurrently- executing transaction.

Thus, a backend concurrent connection (i.e. transaction) cap of N, translates to O(N) concurrent MVCC "world states" that the DB engine has to keep track of. No matter how efficient the DB engine is at doing that, that's still a lot of state!

Imagine an RDBMS instance shared between numerous clients built and run by different companies. This RDBMS is locked down in various ways to guarantee each company an SLA on their queries. And, of course, the most important part of that SLA is that a query that is ACKed by the server as having gone through, must never lose data.

If you allow clients unlimited concurrency, they can execute enough transactions to fill memory _and_ disk with MVCC world-states, causing potential data loss (since the full disk may have prevented the DB engine from writing down a _committed_ world-state.)

Thus, ACID-conformant SQL-speaking databases are always going to limit the number of concurrent transactions, and so the number of concurrent connections; and so—at least for SQL-speaking databases designed for instance- addressable rather than cluster-addressable deployment—the responsibility for deciding how much concurrency a client wants/needs is always going to be pushed to the client, so that an enterprise with a DB cluster can set up its less concurrency-intensive clients to self-limit their pool size.

† SQL isn't a wire protocol per se; it's just a syntax and semantics of a formal language, without even a shared encoding. But the standard _does_ specify per-connection and per-transaction state-machines the backend must have, and how these are affected by executing particular statements. So, in this way, SQL is an abstract contract for the semantics that any particular RDBMS's wire protocol must obey. A "meta-protocol", if you will.

<comment><USER4> That's a fair point -- most (all?) SQL servers use the connection limit as an indirect transaction limit, rather than separating the two (in which case BEGIN TRANSACTION would sometimes have to block or fail).

Are large numbers of concurrent transactions really an issue in practice though? There may be some per-transaction overhead, but I haven't seen any stern warnings about it, e.g. in the Postgres docs for max_connections.

> Thus, a backend concurrent connection (i.e. transaction) cap of N, > translates to O(N) concurrent MVCC "world states" that the DB engine has to > keep track of. No matter how efficient the DB engine is at doing that, > that's still a lot of state!

I don't quite see what you mean about world state. An abort just rolls back changes made by the aborted transaction, so I would expect SQL engines to store a diff of each updated row. And if that's the case, it seems like a single huge transaction could use as much memory as many small transactions, if the same rows were modified.

<comment><USER6> > Are large numbers of concurrent transactions really an issue in practice > though? There may be some per-transaction overhead, but I haven't seen any > stern warnings about it, e.g. in the Postgres docs for max_connections.

There's definitely scalability implications to higher number of established connections in postgres. Essentially computing a "snapshot" (visibility information for queries etc, needs to be computed at least once a transaction) is O(#established-connections). If you get in the high hundreds on a large NUMA machine, and you run tiny fast transactions, you definitely can observe the overhead of that.

>> > Thus, a backend concurrent connection (i.e. transaction) cap of N, translates to O(N) concurrent MVCC "world states" that the DB engine has to keep track of. No matter how efficient the DB engine is at doing that, that's still a lot of state!

There's definitely ways to handle that better than O(N), at least in the average case.

<comment><USER5> > There's definitely ways to handle that better than O(N), at least in the > average case.

O(N) root-level snapshot objects of the state, I mean. Like O(N) git commits. The minimum size of the persisted MVCC snapshot _data_ , probably just scales with O(log N) of the number of connections, depending on what sort of data structure you're using for copy-on-write'ing your snapshots.

<comment><USER6> Most databases don't have "root level snapshots of the state" in the way you appear to imagine them. Leaving trivial per-transaction information ('did this transaction id commit', ~a few bits per xact) aside, usually it won't scale with the number of snapshots, but with the amount of change done by writing transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The other half of this is correctly using the connection pool in the application layer to begin with.

One of the most common performance errors I see in random http applications is grabbing db connections for too long, like in middleware, or too aggressively in parallel queries.

<comment><USER8> This is so true and easy to overlook until a post mortem. A great exercise is to audit how connections are maintained in your application, before it's too late.

<comment><USER9> I'm reminded of a systems failure described in, IIRC, the O'Reilly book "Release It!". Java ODBC exception swallowed resulted in eventually running out of connections.

Very tough problem to troubleshoot without extensive monitoring.

<comment><USER10> Release it! is Prag Press. Good book too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Alternatively, and specifically for PostgreSQL, if you can live with pgbouncer's constraints then you should be using it. It effectively self- manages an optimal shared connection pool for all of the application processes that connect to it.

<comment><USER12> I would like to dissent.

If your application is long lived you will get more benefit using the pooling functionality provided by the postgresql client libraries for your platform/language.

pgbouncer is an intimidatory, and thus another thing to break- it has it's own constraints (mainly things like prepared statements will block a connection/cannot be reused) and its application should be well understood.

For instance; I use it on a local socket on my zabbix master so that it can connect using a TLS encrypted pgsql socket. (something zabbix doesn't support). But for my main applications written in C++, I use connection pooling with nothing but the C++ client libraries.

If you're bringing up and tearing down connections very often, then you will get a lot of benefit from pgbouncer, but in my experience these cases are limited.

<comment><USER8> Coming from ActiveRecord gem, pgbouncer has been great. I'd say the real advantage is transaction level pooling, which will free up connections when they're not actively in a transaction (vs request level isolation). I don't see how this is possible across a large number of isolated servers without a cooperating agent like pgbouncer.

I would advocate for pgbouncer at the DB ingress level and your languages connection pooler at the application level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Take time to peruse the rest of the Wiki; It's chock full of information of performance tuning techniques. Absolutely fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER14> See also [1]. The top comment there links to the article (2017).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18220906](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18220906)

</comment><comment><USER15> Or you could use an async. db connection: [https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/wiki/Fuse](https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/wiki/Fuse)

</comment><comment><USER16> This article would be better if it was called "connection pool sizing for MySQL". If you had a better database, you would have to worry way less about configuring pool size on the clients.

The proper way to do this would be for the server (i.e. database) itself to have maximum active transaction limits and ways to setup quotas for different use cases, especially as your company gets large, and you have many different use cases mixed in the same database. Basically the queue should exist mostly on the server, and clients shouldn't have to worry about overwhelming the server. If server queue gets large, server should start rejecting requests faster, and clients would do a backoff and retry with a delay based on that instead. This also makes sure server can't be easily overworked if you have one misconfigured and misbehaving client.

Lot of issues with many idle connections in MySQL are specific to MySQL itself and its implementation. In MySQL the perf drops not only when you have many active transaction, but even when you have many just many connected idle sessions. This is why there are tons of different random "MySQL Connection Proxy" projects that exist in the open source.

<comment><USER17> What are you referring to in your 3rd paragraph? Idle connections in MySQL pose few issues. They just take up some memory for session-level buffers, and that amount of memory depends on what you've configured those buffer sizes to. They also take up a slot in terms of whatever you've configured max_connections to, but that's fully configurable as well.

MySQL has long had some abilities to limit resources on a per-user basis, see [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/user- resources.html](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/user-resources.html) for example. This includes the ability to set max simultaneous connections per user.

MySQL's default connection model dynamically uses a thread per connection, which actually tends to handle high connection counts out-of-the-box better than process-per-conn approaches like Postgres's. In my experience, using a proxy like pgbouncer is much more common in Postgres than using a proxy is in MySQL.

I'm not bashing Postgres overall, it's a great DB. But in terms of connection- handling your criticism of MySQL here feels substantially off-the-mark.

(Source: have been using MySQL for 15 years, including at largest scale in the world)

<comment><USER16> Start of every new transaction does a scan of all connected sessions (including idle) ones. I am pretty sure this is true in 5.6 too, and most likely in newer versions too. So if the queries that you are issuing are large or the total connection count is <10k it is not going to be problem or even noticeable. But if you have lots of small and fast queries and have idle connections >100k you will definitely have significant perf issues because of the idle connections. 100k is a big number for sure, but it is definitely possible to hit those limits if the application layer is done in languages like node, ruby, python, when you need to run many application processes since each app process can't properly utilize more than single CPU core. Thus you end up having a lot of separate processes each with its own connection pool to the backing database.

As for per-user limits, those resource limits aren't that useful for stability. Setting max simultaneous connections is not as useful, because you don't know how many of those are idle or active. You want limits on active sessions that are actually doing work, not how many idle sessions exist. Unless of course you plan on not doing any session reuse, and always make a new session for each transaction, which will lead to huge other set of performance issues because establishing new sessions is pretty expensive.

As for the other "per hour" limits, they are also not useful to provide protections against burst traffic which is a common way a MySQL instance can enter into a bad feedback loop and slow down to crawl. (Example: there is a burst traffic from one use case, creating lots of new active transactions at the same time, because of that, MySQL perf slows down, so now you have even more active transactions because everything is slower, which leads to even more slow down, so even after the burst traffic is over, database is in a bad state since now you continuously have too many active transactions and it is unable to recover on its own to handle the same steady state traffic as it was able to handle before the burst).

<comment><USER17> In my experience, many high-scale MySQL configurations use a global max_connections in the single-digit thousands (4000-5000 is common at social networks doing high-volume OLTP), and an aggressive wait_timeout (~10 seconds) to kill idle conns from misbehaving/stalled clients.

I've never seen a max_connections configured anywhere near 100k. That would be an extreme edge-case, and is generally unwise unless there's some very specific unusual reason that you need that. My assumption would be something is very wrong at the application architecture level if this is needed.

What "scan of all connected sessions" are you referring to? I've never heard anything about this, and never seen general performance issues purely related to high idle connection count, but I've also never configured max_connections to such an insanely high value.

As for other databases, I don't see how Postgres would be able to handle 100k connections (without a proxy) either, given that means 100k OS processes in Postgres.

> always make a new session for each transaction, which will lead to huge > other set of performance issues because establishing new sessions is pretty > expensive

Fire-and-forget (connection per web request) is somewhat common in MySQL, especially with languages like PHP. Establishing a connection is relatively low overhead on the server side in MySQL, since it just involves spawning a thread. Usually the bigger issue is network latency, especially if cross- region SSL connections are involved. In this case, a client-side connection pool or proxy certainly makes sense, and that is true regardless of what DB technology is used.

It sounds like you have a lot of application servers maintaining connection pools to a single database. In this case it is generally beneficial to tune the connection pools to aggressively prune idle connections, or use proxies that multiplex connections (ProxySQL is great), and then set max_connections to a more sane value as a circuit-breaker.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Cold Case of the Max Headroom Signal Intrusion - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearlife.com/crime/freaky-funny-story-max-headroom-signal-intrusion/ <comment><USER2> This is a perennial story, but the best treatment of it, in my opinion, remains Chris Knittel's 2013 re-investigation of the case [1] for Vice Motherboard.

[1] [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgay3n/headroom-h...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgay3n/headroom- hacker)

<comment><USER3> Unrelated, but it's fascinating to see an article from 2013 reference Andrew Auernheimer as a benign hacker. That's turned into a hell of a story on its own, huh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That reminds me what happened in Czech TV in 2007 :

[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/arts/design/24abroad.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/arts/design/24abroad.html)

One Sunday early risers gazing at Czech Television's CT2 channel saw picturesque panoramas of the Czech countryside, broadcast to the wordless accompaniment of elevator music. It was the usual narcoleptic morning weather show. Then came the nuclear blast. Across the Krkonose Mountains, or so it appeared, a white flash was followed by the spectacle of a rising mushroom cloud

</comment><comment><USER5> In the movie "Ready Player One" I had a pleasant memory triggered by the appearance of Matt Frewer, who played Max Headroom in the TV series later.

He's one of _many_ tech / 80s cameos in the movie. I wonder if someone has counted them all.

<comment><USER5> Down voters please respond -- off topic? Something else?

Genuinely interested.

<comment><USER6> RPO might be the newest victim of choice for the cool-to-hate crowd.

<comment><USER7> Well, it _is_ bland and blatant 80s pop culture pandering with nothing real to contribute on its own. I'm amazed that Spielberg was involved, because it's way below him.

<comment><USER8> He's practically the only one who could do it, having enough influence to get the plethora of intellectual property required to make the movie work. You just can't make an 80s nostalgia trip work without a director everyone can trust their franchise characters/content to - and I do mean _everyone_.

<comment><USER6> This feat is hailed as the major accomplishment of the movie. It's leagues above the average Hollywood action movie in regard to breaking 'new' (old) ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am glad that nobody has caught "Max" in all these years.

The British signal intrusion from "Vrillon of the Ashtar Galactic Council" also mentioned in this article is pretty wild!

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure the last time this came up somebody on HN talked about meeting the people that did it (he knew them at the time it happened) along with some other interesting unpublished details.

<comment><USER11> Sure enough: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845038)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a person who claimed (4 years ago) to know the person who did it, and has recently ruled them out per the linked Reddit thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mysteries die when somebody owns up. This story works better for everyone as a bit of the past which will probably never come back, because swamping a local analog microwave feed with another beam can't happen in a digital signal world [1]

[1] for some value of can't, which includes maybe can

<comment><USER13> I wonder if that's true. When the TV station I worked at in the 90s transitioned to digital around about the time I quit, they continued to transmit the signal from station to tower over a microwave link. I would think that'd be true in a lot of cases.

It's probable, though, that the signal is now signed and encrypted and thus not easy to hijack. Then again, satellites were also broadcasting syndicated shows and news feeds in the clear back then, and probably now, for things that aren't premium channels. It was assumed that if a signal was coming down from the right satellite at the right time, it was the right content.

That said, even back then, it was non-trivial to hijack that signal. There's only a few points of entry: In the station itself, inserting a microwave signal that's closer to the tower or maybe more powerful than the one on top of the station, or in the satellite feed (which has a couple of points of entry, as well, but that would be interruptible by the station master control operator). The microwave transmitter would have to have line of sight to the tower, further complicating matters.

The article suggests that the station employees were able to "stop" the second hijacking quickly...I'm not sure how that would happen if it was a microwave hijacking. They maybe could have boosted the microwave transmitter output at the station to push the imposter down into noise, but those are regulated, I would think, and probably don't have much wiggle room.

I dunno. Even as someone that has worked in TV I don't know exactly how they did it, which makes it all the more fascinating that they did. The simplest thing I can think of is getting into the station and faking all the noise to make it look like it's "merely" a microwave hijacking. Then again, microwave is not terribly advanced technology, it is available on the surplus market, and if you can get closer to the tower with your transmitter, you don't need a whole lot of power. So, that's probably how it was done.

<comment><USER14> Satellites are a _long_ way up. A drone with a few hundred mW of transmitter hovering directly in the ground station dish beam - would quite likely completely swamp the signal from space...

<comment><USER13> That's a good point. And, it's easy to get access to the dishes with a drone. They're either on top of the station or merely behind a fence (we had both). You would need some insider information, though, or to spend a lot of time observing and experimenting. Most stations have multiple dishes and at any given time the station may be playing recordings from tape rather than showing satellite feeds directly. At the station I worked at, we rolled morning kids shows, prime time network shows, Rockets games, and later some news segments, from satellite directly. Everything else, about 85% of our programming, came from tape. That's probably evolved since then.

I wonder how much of satellite transmissions have gone digital (and thus, likely to be something you could only jam and not replace) in the ~20 years since I was working in the industry. It wasn't even really on the radar when I left the business; even stuff that had a major digital component, like automated advertising feeds, were still being transmitted analog for the video and just the metadata was digital and sent via another mechanism (internet, I think).

<comment><USER14> Live sport.

Nobody's running the F1 race from tape...

I'd be curious to know if there's much digital and/or crypto in those signals too - part of me suspect the satellites themselves are mostly "too old" to be doing anything except analog - although I do sometimes notice the resolution on MotoGP races drop significantly, I think that's last mile cable bandwidth problems when the Sunday night movie starts pumping full HD into all my neighbours houses, rather than the signal from space...

<comment><USER15> _> I'd be curious to know if there's much digital and/or crypto in those signals too - part of me suspect the satellites themselves are mostly "too old" to be doing anything except analog_

Most satilites operate as a really dumb "bent pipe".

You transmit a signal on one frequency, and it amplifies and re-transmits that signal exact same signal on another frequency.

There is no decoding and re-encoding of the signal. The satilites is completely agnostic to the formatting, and encoding of the signal. All you need to do is replace the equipment at each ground station and you can transmit encrypted digital.

On the flipside, I don't think satilites do any authentication of the signal they are retransmitting. If someone transmits a stronger signal, the satilites will lock onto that and retransmit that instead.

However, the receiving equipment probably does authenticate and won't accept the hijacked signal, so all you get is a jamming effect. But the satilite itself is hijackable.

<comment><USER14> Right - that makes sense. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I absolutely love that this is still an unsolved mystery. Fantastical story.

</comment><comment><USER17> I remember being over at my dad's house and watching the HBO signal intrusion happen.

But how times have changed. These guys would be doing some serious prison time these days.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm confused why the subtitle on the article is "This was actually an international crime" when it just goes on to say that it was probably a local, but they still don't know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had the same reaction. I wanted it to be some Canadian attack on Chicago or something, but I think the editor was trying to point out that the same thing happened in the UK too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love the maxheadroom sig. Intrusion. The whole 4chan rumor mill about it was the stuff of urban legends. A couple brothers obsessed with electronics and signal jamming.

I didnt realize it was truly a cold case

</comment><comment><USER20> For people more in the know than me: how do the broadcast engineers stop a signal jacking? If it's with sufficiently powerful microwave equipment, doesn't it drown out the real signal, and thus it wouldn't be possible to drown it out? Or am I missing something here?

</comment><comment><USER21> I figure even if the perpetrator comes clean at this point, there will be no way to actually verify it. Maybe it actually is one of many people claiming so online.

</comment><comment><USER22> If nothing else, this may bring a new legion of younger fans to the old "Max Headroom" British TV show. I enjoyed the show in my younger days.

<comment><USER23> The only way of getting the TV show or the movie in the UK seems to be Region 1 DVDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> An inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER25> To me the most disturbing thing about this incident is the way people talk about it as if it's a serious crime. It was funny and interesting, and kindled wonder and curiosity, and that's enough of a reason to do it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Ah, it must be spring. This pops up about once a quarter either here or on /r/chicago.

I still think Doc Ripco knows who did it.</comment>


Buca di Beppo, America's Most Postmodern Red Sauce Chain - <AUTHOR> https://www.bonappetit.com/story/bizarre-history-buca-di-beppo <comment><USER2> > Roberts saw an opportunity not just to re-create those bygone red sauce > joints, but to present the most exaggerated, over-the-top version of them, > to create an environment where people could feel totally comfortable—as he > describes it, "... I wanted a restaurant people could look down on."

>

> He wanted the decor to be tacky, the portions to be enormous, the atmosphere > to be boisterous. He figured it didn't matter that he wasn't Italian in the > slightest. There were also almost no red sauce joints in Minneapolis at the > time, so diners wouldn't have anything to compare it to. This was a > restaurant, he says, "that was intentionally in bad taste, but good-natured > bad taste." The kind of place where the average diner could feel superior, > and not feel bad about being puzzled over a wine list, or not knowing what > kind of fork is used for a salad.

The concept of a restaurant that people "look down on" seems both bold and mean-spirited. It also vaguely reminds me of an article I read about the Old Spaghetti Factory.

What are some other examples of American restaurants that followed this playbook?

<comment><USER3> Cheesecake Factory? They're famous for having terrible decor, service, and food, yet somehow being an essential part of the American high school prom experience.

[https://www.barstoolsports.com/barstoolu/dude-goes-viral- for...](https://www.barstoolsports.com/barstoolu/dude-goes-viral-for-tweet- storm-about-how-much-the-cheesecake-factory-sucks)

<comment><USER4> I get so peeved by the treatment of chain restaurants like this as "poor" or "terrible". Because you know what, Cheesecake Factory, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Outback Steakhouse? These are some of the nicest restaurants the average citizen can hope to afford to go to more than once in their lifetime.

It isn't going to impress folks who have a personal chef at home, but the food is _pretty darn good_ , and you don't have to saw off your right arm to pay for it.

<comment><USER5> The value proposition really isn't that great. It's not any cheaper than food from a local Italian joint. What you're paying for is that Olive Garden experience, whatever that is worth to you.

A good example is the Olive Garden in Times Square. It's _always_ packed despite there being better Italian places a few blocks away. Not to mention, if you're willing to hop on the subway there's significantly better Italian food available in the outer boroughs for much cheaper. Olive Garden isn't that cheap, that nice, or that tasty which makes it a mystery to a lot of people.

<comment><USER6> Olive Garden's appeal in Times Square is the same as McDonald's: you're in a strange place, but you know what you can expect to find inside, and you know your kids will eat it while you have a glass of mediocre wine.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, if you go to McDonald's in some foreign countries you will be in for a shock as they serve many region-specific items. (Though in Paris, it's a pleasant shock, it's mostly the same but all of the food is better/healthier.)

Source: Yes, I traveled to the capital of a country known explicitly for it's exquisite food and did patronize a McDonald's.

<comment><USER7> _FWIW, if you go to McDonald 's in some foreign countries you will be in for a shock as they serve many region-specific items._

I still remember getting a surprisingly nice pepperoni pizza at a McDonald's in the US many years ago. Undoubtedly the nicest thing I've eaten at a McDonald's anywhere in the world.

 _Yes, I traveled to the capital of a country known explicitly for it 's exquisite food and did patronize a McDonald's._

Some of the, by far, worst restaurants I've ever eaten at have been in France so there's a chance that McDonald's wasn't the worst choice you could have made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who lives in Italy, a lot of what seems to be considered "Italian" in the US sometimes feels like little more than a caricature. It does trouble me slightly, because it feels like an impersonation of Italian culture.

On the other hand, it's probably just culture diverging and developing in different ways after migration, which is to be expected. So the problem is mostly one of identity: the same label - italian - means very different things to people across the world...

<comment><USER9> Same can probably be said of any country's cuisine in America.

E.g. many staples of Chinese restaurants in America (General Tso's chicken, chop suey, sweet and sour whatever) are not found in China except at super touristy places.

<comment><USER10> There are lots of...I guess I would call them "mashup cuisines" around the world, especially in post-colonial and post-WW2 Asia. Local chefs tried to recreate western dishes with their own ingredients and techniques and it made for some interesting results.

Since it's early morning as I write this, I'll use Hong Kong-style macaroni soup[1] as an example: it's literally macaroni in broth with a slice of processed ham on top and some white bread on the side. Not Chinese in the least, but now it's as much a local breakfast staple here as congee.

Also, an aside: sweet and sour pork is a legitimate Cantonese dish and it's in every Canto restaurant in China. I really miss crab rangoon sometimes, though...

1\. [https://medium.com/@xinwenxiaojie/in-praise-of-hong-kong- mac...](https://medium.com/@xinwenxiaojie/in-praise-of-hong-kong-macaroni- breakfasts-a0b0d1eede6a)

<comment><USER11> Some "Indian" dishes, like chicken tikka masala, originated in Britain in similar circumstances to American "ethnic" dishes. And lots of Vietnamese food has French influences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fun fact! Philip Roberts, who started Buca, sold it and started what is now one of the best steakhouses[0] in the country. It's the cash cow (no pun intended) for the other restaurants in his restaurant group Parasole, and is easily the highest-grossing restaurant in Minnesota.

They're "sperm-to-table" and a treat to dine with. I'm there too often.

[0] [https://www.mensjournal.com/food-drink/10-best- steakhouses-i...](https://www.mensjournal.com/food-drink/10-best-steakhouses- in-the-world-20141223/manny-s-steakhouse-minneapolis-mn/)

<comment><USER13> Manny's is great, but in Minneapolis I'd honestly rather go to P.S. Steak or Burch Restaurant if I'm in the mood for a good steak. It may be just me though, as I don't enjoy the traditional steakhouse experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As an Italian-American, this explains why every time I go to a Buca di Beppo, I feel like I'm in some kind of merger between a mediocre Italian restaurant and a minstrel show. To those of us who grew up in this culture, it's ridiculous (almost bordering on offensive). Thankfully, I grew up in communities where the Italian's could proudly go to other restaurants that were more respectful of a 3,000 year old culture.

It's tough to feel proud of what Buca di Beppo has done to popularize Italian- American culture in the same way it's tough to feel proud of the movie The Godfather. We aren't all mobsters and we don't all have giant busts of the Pope and cherubs in our houses. Some of us are just computer scientists who like basil.

<comment><USER15> > To those of us who grew up in this culture, it's ridiculous (almost > bordering on offensive).

Both of my parents are half Italian-American, and that's the tradition in which I was raised.

My relatives who actually came off the boat loved Buca di Beppo. And Olive Garden, etc. (Of course we all know it's not as good as home cooking, but who cares when you just want something fast.)

Honestly, Italian-Americans have no one to blame but ourselves for exalting gangster culture and caricatures. We love that stuff.

<comment><USER16> BUT WHY?! That's just concerning. (After eating at places in Italy, you miss that italian cooking.. no mushy overcooked pasta)

<comment><USER15> Does McDonalds make the best hamburger? Does Taco Bell make the best burrito? Does Pizza Hut make the best pizza?

No, but I still eat at every single one of them all the time.

If I'm in flyover country, nothing beats the $19 Tuscan Steak at Olive Garden. Maybe some day I'll go to Italy and then never eat "fake" Italian food ever again, but I doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Back in the mid 90s my colleagues and I from the warm southern US found ourselves on the freezing winter streets of downtown Minneapolis after dark. We had brought coats but were still quite unprepared for 10 below zero F. As we wandered around looking for a place to eat, we spied a small well-lit door leading down to a basement. The waitress saw us, threw open the door, and said "You get in here. You're about to freeze to death!"

Whereupon we had one of the best and most welcoming meals I remember. That was my introduction to Buca di Beppo, and no matter what anyone says about it, I will always be fond of the place because it saved our lives that cold winter night.

<comment><USER18> It's amazing how much context, atmosphere, hunger, environment, etc affect our perception of food.

My most favorite and memorable meals ever were little, low quality places that I hate after coming back from long treks through the wilderness, or even the meals cooked while on those treks. As well as many places my wife and I ate on our honeymoon.

And I have been to a fair number of excellent restaurants including michellin starred ones.

It seems unlikely that those places were actually that good (probably the same as your buccas experience). And I have returned to some of them under different circumstances and not found them particularly amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think I enjoyed the 'tacky' decor of the restaurants after visiting Italy and Rome specifically. Each restaurant, is incredibly unique, amazing to hear the story behind it.

</comment><comment><USER20> ... so like Outback?

</comment><comment><USER21> How is this relevant on hacker news?

<comment><USER22> Apparently it gratified someone's intellectual curiosity. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER21> I may be an Apple user who is interested in such movies as the goonies at the matrix but I'm not going to open an Italian restaurant called iBuca. I just don't feel the article has enough intellectual relevance to be on the front page of happiness

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A friend of mine who is about 6'6"\- 350, just loves that place.

I'll pass thanks.</comment>


Pomegranate compound with anti-aging effects passes human trial - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-06-pomegranate-compound-anti-aging-effects-human.html <comment><USER2> Just fyi, the primary endpoint was safety, so to pass it just needed to not be toxic. The secondary endpoint was a biomarker of mitochondrial health. So no clinical effects are included here.

<comment><USER3> That seems overly dismissive of the finding on mitochondrial activity:

" The team then assessed the efficacy of UA by looking at cellular and mitochondrial health biomarkers in the participants' blood and muscle tissue. The results were compelling: UA stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis—the process by which cells increase mitochondrial mass—in the same way as regular exercise.

UA is the only known compound that re-establishes cells' ability to recycle defective mitochondria. "

<comment><USER4> Biomarkers are not a clinical effect, this doesn't tell you whether this compound has any anti-aging effects. This is still an early point in the development of a drug.

<comment><USER3> What particular anti-aging effects do you regard? Are not improvements in mitochondrial health practical indicators of anti-aging as improvements in skin elasticity or bone strength?

<comment><USER4> They didn't actually measure mitochondrial health, they measured acylcarnitine levels. Those levels indicate that certain metabolic pathways happening in the mitochondria are working better. This is still very far from any practical effect on the whole organism. Biomarkers can also be misleading, you're not measuring the actual process you're interested in directly, you're measuring a particular aspect that you think is strongly correlated with what you're actually interested in.

<comment><USER3> Is the article wrong in stating "UA stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis". Did the measurements of acylcarnitine levels not actually show this? Have any other substances been found to affect acylcarnitine levels or stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis ?

<comment><USER5> That's orthogonal to the point you're responding to - the point is that while this is a promising avenue for research, it does not provide evidence of a meaningful effect on the actual outcome of interest: aging/longevity.

The point of a biomarker is that we think/hope/hypothesize that we can use it as a surrogate for the thing we're actually interested in, so that we have something measurable on shorter timescales. Unfortunately, this assumption is often incorrect, and we won't actually know for years.

<comment><USER3> I'm questioning the idea that this particular biomarker - doesn't actually mark what the report claims it marks (mitochondrial bio-genesis).

How do we often test for diabetes.. cancers.. many many clinical conditions? _Biomarkers_. So they are not practically unreliable in general.

What do you know about the particular biomarker employed in the study to say that it is unreliable ?

<comment><USER5> 1\. Each biomarker has to be validated independently. 2. There's a huge difference between something used for testing, and something used for intervention. Grey hair is a pretty OK test for aging, but clearly dying it isn't going to arrest the aging process.

Long term degenerative conditions are some of the most difficult problems for such validation, due to time, cost, and the complexity of risk in real populations.

I don't know anything about how well the current study actually links to mitochondrial biogenesis, but I know that we don't have satisfactory interventional biomarkers for a process as complex as aging. By all means continue researching this, but I think it's eminently sensible to be skeptical at this point.

<comment><USER3> Be as skeptical as you wish, but that is all _very_ orthogonal to my requests to substantiate claims here that the biomarker examined is unreliably interpreted. They have not been substantiated. Discussion of what qualifies as "anti-aging" is another matter . Anti-aging is not a clinical term, there have been no claims made about general reversal of aging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1) Metabolic side effects tend to be slow and subtle. Vioxx caused increased heart attacks over time. Passing a phase 1 safety trial is fine and dandy, but it's a far cry short of long-term safety in a drug targeting metabolism, and it's not even where most drugs fail.

2) Lab evidence for a biomarker for a metabolic process is so far short of evidence of clinical improvement that it's a joke. I will never stop deriding studies that point to proxy markers (or in this case, proxy proxy markers) as evidence of benefit. This has been proven to be inadequate so many times, across so many different studies, that it's just not worth talking about anymore.

This is a perfectly fine and valid phase 1 study. It says "we have identified a dose range that doesn't immediately sicken people." That's what phase 1 trials do. The rest is press release hype.

<comment><USER7> Do all "we have identified a dose range that doesn't immediately sicken people" studies make it to Nature journals ?

<comment><USER6> Nature is a high impact factor, prestigious journal. It's million sub- journals, like Nature Metabolism ... well, vary. A lot. They mostly coast on papa's brand recognition.

Nature Endocrinology Reviews is a relatively ranking journal in endocrinology - roughly second place, by impact factor. This didn't get published there.

Nature Metabolism was only opened in 2017, as an online-only journal. It doesn't even rank in the top 50 for endocrine and metabolism journals - granted, that may be in part because it doesn't even have an impact factor yet (calculating impact factor requires two years of publication history preceding the year being calculated for. In 2020, we should see a 2019 IF.)

So, one can say they might be enormously prestigious, and we just won't see until 2020. It's more likely that people aren't bothering publishing their best articles in a 0 IF journal, because in academic circles the Nature Subbrand is recognized as not inherently meaningful, so the 0 IF pub just hurts (unless you think your pub would otherwise end up in an unimpressive journal, and you want to gamble that the future IF will be higher and pay off.)

<comment><USER7> Thank you for the thorough explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was a pretty nice portrait in the California Sunday magazine of a billionaire (Resnick) couple who owns a lot of land and water and are producing different kinds of citrus fruits and nuts in the south of California: [https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from- du...](https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust). Lynda Resnick has been heavily promoting pomegranate juice. Of course they have a lot to gain, because they are one of the leading branded producers of pomegranate juice. With these types of studies it is always a good idea to follow the money.

<comment><USER9> she's the first person i thought of when i read the title of this story (i saw her speak once).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just finished reading the paper, particularly interested in the mitochondrial biogenesis part. They make several comparisons with exercise adaptations, and the authors conclude:

>>> The present study reveals that UA induces a molecular signature response, in both the plasma and skeletal muscle of humans, resembling that observed as a consequence of a regular exercise regimen.

The also selected sedentary people only (from their participant inclusion criteria). Note that this is somehow normal: I have been rejected twice in 2 clinical trials for mitochondrial myopathy because I was too fit.

>> body mass index 18-32 kg/m2 and demonstrated sedentary behavior

All the authors declare a conflict of interest with Amazentis. Nestlé just signed a partnership agreement with them [1] to help them develop the product.

I guess they are actively seeking the exercise in a pill product. If they make it, it would be one of the biggest blockbusters in the history of medicine.

[1] [http://pdf.amazentis.com/pdf/Nestl%C3%A9_Health_Science_&_Am...](http://pdf.amazentis.com/pdf/Nestl%C3%A9_Health_Science_&_Amazentis_Press_Release_April_2_2019.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> pomegranates and raspberries as well

"A compound called urolithin A (UA) was the focus of the study, after previous experiments with it showed promise in extending the lifespans of worms and mice. The compound appears to fight aging by improving the function of mitochondria – the energy-producing part of a cell – in a way similar to the benefits of exercise. While it's not found naturally in any known food, biomolecules in fruits like pomegranates and raspberries do break down into UA in the human gut"

Here's the study [https://sci- hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-01...](https://sci- hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-019-0073-4)

Yellow raspberries seems to contain bigger amounts of ellagic acid than pomegranates

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urolithin_A#Dietary_sources](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urolithin_A#Dietary_sources)

</comment><comment><USER12> The Wikipedia page for the compound being discussed has a table of food and drink sources for it.

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

Not everyone's body can create UA from these natural sources so the idea is to just make a pill for it that will work on anyone.

</comment><comment><USER13> So there are products on the market already or no one has a product on the market yet?

<comment><USER14> Quite possibly pomegranate... It's unclear how much it has though.

<comment><USER14> From the Wikipedia link someone else posted it looks like 100g of pomegranate is approximately 250mg, so 200g pomegranates a day to get to the point where they saw any (non clinical still) effects.

<comment><USER3> Your statement reads as though the research tested lower doses and 500mg was the lowest which "saw any effects". Is this accurate?

<comment><USER14> Yes, specifically 250mg saw none (or at least no statistically significant ones).

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I hadn't time to check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a way to tell who funded this study?

<comment><USER16> Nestlé signed a deal with them at the beginning of April, according to TheKingOfBelAir's comment above, which would lead me to believe they were at least involved with the study.

Link here, to save searching. [http://pdf.amazentis.com/pdf/Nestl%C3%A9_Health_Science_&_Am...](http://pdf.amazentis.com/pdf/Nestl%C3%A9_Health_Science_&_Amazentis_Press_Release_April_2_2019.pdf)</comment></comment>


Square Now Processing $1 Million In Mobile Payments Per Day - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/02/square-now-processing-1-million-in-mobile-payments-per-day/ <comment><USER3> Mobile payments have been around in Africa for years, mainly because there's no legacy systems to compete with, and the lack of a solid banking/payment processing industry has made growth occur unopposed.

Whereas the incumbent players in North America (most credit card and payment processing juggernauts) will most likely put up more of a fight against systems like Square.

There's a recent podcast about the mobile payment industry ([http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/02/spark-139-february-27-march-...](http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/02/spark-139-february-27-march-2-2011/)), check out the part about Mobile money in Kenya, and the Smartphone wallet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations! The Square reader is one of the coolest things. I hope they come out with an API soon. I'd love to use square as my website's payment processor.

<comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, why would they do this? It'd be more expensive (you think any deals they have with CC companies will carry through to a new and crowded market?) and they'd have a lot of competitors.

<comment><USER6> One reason I can think of is high volume small transactions. Since the fee is flat percentage companies could get around the flat rate. This is problematic in settings where you are selling items for 1 or 2 dollars and the 15/30 cent fees eat up your margins.

I'm not entirely sure what the rates are for GC/Paypal but I'm sure you could manage a merchant account that gives you as good of a deal and is optimized for the web.

For instance, how many people will buy through "Square" online when they are so familiar with PayPal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Huge congrats to the Square team on the milestone, though I suspect they've only scratched the surface.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's just a matter of time before apple rolls out a platform for payments.

<comment><USER9> I'll go one step further and speculate that it's just a matter of time before Apple acquires Square as their payment platform moving forward (showcase at iPad 2 event was serious pub...)

<comment><USER8> I guess they acquire more than I thought they did : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the square website I can't understand if square can be used by international users. There's nothing about that in the faq so I created my account but now I'm not able to create a new identity as it asks for a us address.

Edit: apparently they're working on it, great.

</comment><comment><USER11> Correct me if I'm wrong, but when setting up an online business that accepts credit cards, you need a merchant account. Do you need something similar with Square? Or do they get around this somehow by keeping your funds in a paypal like account?

<comment><USER12> Square bypasses that, they deposit into the bank account every business day. There are some exceptions for larger transactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Daily Money: 1M Daily Revenue (@ 2.75%): 27.5K Yearly Gross: ~11M Employees: ~60 (about 180K yearly revenue per head!) Avg. Salary (Est.): 75K Yearly Salary (Est.): 4.5M

Assuming their other costs don't exceed $6M/yr, they're ALREADY profitable. Pretty slick. You just got Dorsey'd.

[http://niketdesai.tumblr.com/post/3613418817/square-is- actua...](http://niketdesai.tumblr.com/post/3613418817/square-is-actually-hip- and-probably-profitable)

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure most of their 2.75% take is eaten up in fees.

<comment><USER14> You're absolutely right. The processor (in this case Square) takes the smallest portion of the 2.75% with Visa/Mastercard taking the second highest, and the largest portion (by a large margin) going to the issuing bank.

Here's an illustration: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Gao- repor...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Gao-report-on- interchange.gif)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to see demographics on that... like who is using square - <USER2> of average transaction size, merchant size, etc.

<comment><USER15> I think people would _pay_ for that as well!</comment></comment>


A Free Coding Curriculum for Beginners - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/a-free-coding-curriculum-for-beginners-5f16c948e7b4 <comment><USER2> > Free Coding Curriculum for Beginners

Behind a Medium login/pay wall...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good point.

Couple reasons for this: * Medium alg prioritizes metered stories * "The startup" publication wants you to publish metered stories

I'll repost to my personal website though--thanks for the callout</comment></comment>


NYPD Union Doxes Mayor's Daughter on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/nypd-union-doxes-mayors-daughter-on-twitter-1843813751 <comment><USER2> I'll bet if you could wake up a politician from the ancient world and tell him that the "information age" allows an army to solicit money on its own and use that money to act contrary to the ruling class, such a politician would laugh and say no such civilization could possibly survive.

<comment><USER3> I mean the praetorian guard literally auctioned off the position of Roman emperor.

<comment><USER2> Slippery slope lesson in that. When Caesar 1 crossed a river with his army it was a big deal.

<comment><USER4> I mean, it was a big deal in that it was historically impactful, but he was far from the first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This wasn't doxing. It revealed her arrest details, but IRRC in New York City, is public information.

<comment><USER6> let's see what they did:

* They arrested a number of people exercising their constitutional right to protest. In this case police abuse.

* Stated they were going to war with the mayor - after all he's is not 100% in support of them having no consequences for their illegal actions.

* Then deliberately published as widely as possible the details of his daughter _specifically_

Given their ability to completely control every aspect of this, it's clearly intended to achieve the same result of doxxing: if you don't do what we say, we will deliberately put your family's life in potential danger.

NYPD union is a gang. Every officer who supports this action, or any of the brutality and constitutional abuses by the NYPD is complicit, and are criminals who should be in jail.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. They could have gotten their point across while still redacting her personal information. Publishing that information is what makes it cross the line to doxxing.

<comment><USER6> But what is their point?

No, the only reason they published this is to intimidate the people who are elected and who are meant to keep them in check.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Singapore - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com.sg/ <comment><USER2> Visited the site, interested to see if the it carries products not available in the other markets, but could only find a recommendation to sign up for Amazon Prime. It looks like Singaporeans will not have a non-prime option. This CNBC article ([http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/26/amazon-launches-prime-now- ser...](http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/26/amazon-launches-prime-now-services-in- singapore.html)) goes into some more detail.</comment>


TSA screeners point of view on pat downs - <AUTHOR> http://boardingarea.com/blogs/flyingwithfish/2010/11/18/tsa-enhanced-pat-downs-the-screeners-point-of-view/

<comment><USER2> I sympathize, but at the same time IMHO the verbal abuse must continue. You need to squeeze the TSA from all possible sides - passengers, their own employees, and the airlines for any meaningful change to occur.

I also find it somewhat disheartening the number of comments that fall back on the "I am a professional, I don't decide policy" argument - which to me smells a little too close to "just following orders" to be comfortable.

Now that the Godwin wall has been broken, I found this tidbit interesting:

> "Do people know what a Nazi is? One can't describe me as a Nazi because I am > following a security procedure of designed to find prohibited items on a > passenger's body. A Nazi is someone with hatred and ignorance in their > hearts, a person who carried out actions of execution and extermination of > those based on their religion, origins or sexual preferences."

The problem with this statement is that the security procedure will _not_ find prohibited items on a passenger's body.

Secondly, a "Nazi" in the average case is just a guy trying to survive in a nation gone completely mad. What, does anyone seriously believe that every German soldier in the war was filled with "hatred and ignorance" and gleefully executed Jews and gays? I'd argue most were not so much different than you and I - people just doing the only job available to them, morality be damned.

So, at the risk of being inflammatory, I'd say they _are_ like Nazis, or rather that the situation is rather like what the Nazis faced: a lot of batshit insane policies instituted by megalomaniacs blindly being followed by an army of dutiful people, many of whom take pride in the fact that their professionalism prevents them from rebelling from a clearly immoral act. In fact, many German soldiers were able justify their participation by believing that they were protecting _Germany_ , not the Nazis. Sound familiar to any of the comments on the page?

I realize that for many TSA screeners, their career prospects are not exactly widespread, and asking them to quit and starve just to appease their moral conscience is unrealistic. Nonetheless, this does not imply the inverse - which is that just because these people are human, have feelings, and are following unpopular policies, doesn't excuse them from criticism, even particularly harsh ones.

Yes, you have feelings. Yes, you are human like the rest of us. Yes, you are only doing your job. But despite your best intentions, you _are_ still molesting me. Doing so with orders shifts the moral responsibility somewhat, but doesn't change what you're doing still.

<comment><USER3> You saved me the effort of typing it.

I feel ANY person in ANY role has a duty to themselves and the people they work with (or for) to not comply with orders/instructions which go against their beliefs, values or morals.

When I was younger I sold used cars. We were instructed that if a potential buyer asked us if a car had been involved in accident, we were to shrug and say "we don't know" even if it was clear to us that it had been. Whenever I was asked I told the truth...most of which then didn't buy the car. When I lost one too many "done deal" sales, I lost my job. I had to go find another one. but at least I never had to go home and cry myself to sleep for being a cheating, lying scumbag.

These people aren't "drafted" to fight a cause they don't believe in, these are people voluntarily doing a job they signed up to do. I don't envy their position, as I am sure if they could get another job they would. It doesn't defend their complicity in acts which they know to be wrong. If they don't agree with what they're doing, they have the choice to not do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FTA:

"Molester, pervert, disgusting, an embarrassment, creep. These are all words I have heard today at work describing me, said in my presence as I patted passengers down. These comments are painful and demoralizing, one day is bad enough, but I have to come back tomorrow, the next day and the day after that to keep hearing these comments. If something doesn't change in the next two weeks I don't know how much longer I can withstand this taunting. I go home and I cry. I am serving my country, I should not have to go home and cry after a day of honorably serving my country."

\--anonymous TSA screener

Good. Fuck you, anonymous TSA screener. You feel bad about groping people all day and helping move this country closer to a police state? Find another job.

</comment><comment><USER5> I said this before, but I'll say it again: we're selecting for people who don't find this uncomfortable. Everyone else will eventually quit for their own sanity, even if they can't really afford to be out of a job. If it weren't for this bad economy, it would be happening even faster, but we're selecting for perverted TSA screeners (and possibly creating them).

The only fix is to stop these insane searches.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hate the policy and it is ridiculous, and we need to promote the voices of the TSA employees who also hate it.

Did anybody really think that the TSA employees were going to be excited about doing this? They're just trying to make a living.

So, rather than assaulting them? isn't there a better way to use their displeasure in making the change? These people are also apparently victims in this charade of security.

The front-line TSA employees are allies in this issue, not the enemy.

I'd like to see John Pistole take the abuse for a day. Get him on the front- line doing the pat downs and getting the abuse. Unfortunately his pride would probably prevent him from reversing his decisions.

Obama shouldn't be asking for a less intrusive way to screen passengers, he should be demanding that another way be found.

[http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/11/21/us_airport_secu...](http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/11/21/us_airport_security/)

</comment><comment><USER7> My take: "I was asked by a fellow as I was walking through Lexington whether it excited me to wear the redcoat and serve a tyrannical King George. I was very offended and felt unwell."</comment>


Hostyoself: Server in a browser – host from your computer, your phone, etc. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/schollz/hostyoself <comment><USER2> A better solution would be to integrate propositions like dweb[1] in browsers then simply use socket listening. Without socket listening, using WebRTC to create direct connections is also a solution. UPnP and ICE can help to configure routers and/or bypass their restrictions.

Using these technologies instead of OP centralized proposition would improve reliability, scalability, security and sustainability : currently hostyoself.com returns a 502 bad gateway.

[1]: [https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb](https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb)

<comment><USER3> I find myself saying this a lot recently: Opera Unite, integrated a p2p web server for social messaging and file sharing. Wish it had taken hold, that looked like the stepping stone to federated social web to me.

<comment><USER4> For those wondering what "Opera Unite" means, some archived resources from 2009:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20090618010520/http://unite.oper...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090618010520/http://unite.opera.com/)

Introduction: [https://web.archive.org/web/20090618160336/http://dev.opera....](https://web.archive.org/web/20090618160336/http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/an- introduction-to-opera-unite/)

Developer's primer: [https://web.archive.org/web/20090618170044/http://dev.opera....](https://web.archive.org/web/20090618170044/http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera- unite-developer-primer/)

(Links taken from Czech wiki article, [https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Unite](https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Unite) ) (I've never been fan of Opera but this project seemed great and so ahead of it's time. In retrospect I regret my antipathy prevented me to even try it.)

<comment><USER3> I used it and was all-in, sure that this was going to change the interwebs overnight, kinda like I went all-in on XHTML & semantics (eg microformats).

One of the facets was like Facebook's wall, they called it the "fridge door" IIRC, your friends could leave messages p2p and you could open directories really easily to share with anyone who had the right credentials (your "friends"). It really did pop out the middlemen -- share files direct from your computer by giving someone a link (like you would with Dropbox, but peer to peer); message people like on Facebook, but p2p ... some of that might be anticipation of developments rather than the actual product as set. It makes a lot of sense to me.

<comment><USER5> I ran into some folk who shared their torrent folder. These curated lists were something wonderful. You could even ask if something could be seeded. It elevated BitTorrent to new levels: You could make a torrent from anything, it made it available automatically and if someone showed an interest in it it was easy to switch on seeding. We had lots of fun watching old black and white movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To clarify: there is no server in your browser. You just shoot data across a websocket through [https://hostyoself.com/ws](https://hostyoself.com/ws)

<comment><USER7> Does the fact that it runs through a proxy make it less of a server?

<comment><USER8> The fact that it's not a server in your browser, but a client to a server on the backend makes it less of a server in your browser

<comment><USER9> No true Scotsman detected.

By extension of that argument you could argue that no server is a true server:

The fact that it's not a server in the _X_, but a client to a [_Y_ in [Database, DNS, Router, Caching Server, Search Server, REST API, etc]]_ on the _Z_ makes it less of a server in the _X_.

Maybe we should stop using the word "server" and use "client graph", or just continue accepting that there are different layers in a system.

<comment><USER8> _> By extension of that argument you could argue that no server is a true server_

No, it couldn't. For example, I could say that nginx is a server on my computer, and it would be true because it's running on my computer and is accepting connections from clients, regardless of whether it's a client to some other service. My browser isn't.

Why stop using the word "server"? Just stop watering it down and the meaning will be perfectly clear.

<comment><USER10> Your confusion is because you assume the requests have to come in via individual sockets, but several distributed designs have servers connect to a frontend and wait for requests instead of having the frontend connect. Many servers are also clients of another service.

E.g. Mongrel2 works that way.

It has the advantage that your reverse proxy does not need configuration changes to know how many processes are available - it only knows which backend servers have connected and not time out. Some such designs will also explicitly have the server do an RPC in to the frontend proxy requesting a request; doing that then also has the advantage that the backends effectively rate-limit themselves by placing themselves in the ready queue when they have capacity, and all you need to know to see if you need more backend capacity is to monitor how deep the ready queue is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the README

> Does this use AI or blockchain? Sure, why not.

They won the Internet!

<comment><USER12> Both AI and Blockchain?! This should be included in our corporate strategic planning of our digital lean agile transformation.

Also - trains!

<comment><USER13> And it's serverless, and cloud!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We've been working on a very similar idea to this for the past few months: [https://pocketweb.io](https://pocketweb.io) There is a very early beta available on both iOS and Android. We've thought a lot about battery and data and have gotten really good results by leveraging existing radio wakeups, batching requests, and doing all sorts of optimizations to the sites themselves.

Right now we're focused entirely on personal websites, because we believe the majority of those can actually easily be hosted on a phone (eg. How many people actually view your LinkedIn page every day? A single Facebook page doesn't require a datacenter. Etc).

We're limited to single static pages with images right now but better support for multiple pages and server code with SQLite is coming. More template types, for example stores, are coming as well.

Let us know what you think!

</comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of the time Opera made some big annoucement in 2009 that they were going to "reinvent the web", and when they finally revealed what it was, it was basically host some files from your browser.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-reinvents-the-web- will-a...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-reinvents-the-web-will-anyone- notice/)

<comment><USER16> And that's where Opera failed. Marketing. It was much more than just "host some files from your browser"; if was a full ecosystem with a "app-store" and technology that made it work behind NATs etc.

IMHO, the thing that killed Unite (or Alien, as the project was called internally at Opera) was the lack of a killer feature/app that could show off the technology to end users. Too much focus on technology, and way to little focus on apps. It kinda reminds me of Google Wave in many ways.

(At an internal hackaton in Opera, me and some colleagues built a rc-car controlled trough Opera Unite with a webcam and custom javascript plugin to control a servos directly from the browser. We also ended up building a picture frame powered by Opera Unite, and got to present it at a stand at MWC Barcelona. Fun times!)

<comment><USER17> I also seem to remember performance and reliability being a bit weak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personal plug: if you want something similar that supports Range requests (ie streaming), check out fibridge[0][1][2]. However, I haven't tried adding support for setting web mime types so you can actually run a website off of it like hostyoself. That's any interesting use case that I'll have to look in to.

[0] [https://fbrg.xyz/](https://fbrg.xyz/)

[1] [http://iobio.io/2019/06/12/introducing- fibridge/](http://iobio.io/2019/06/12/introducing-fibridge/)

[2] [https://github.com/anderspitman/fibridge-proxy- rs](https://github.com/anderspitman/fibridge-proxy-rs)

</comment><comment><USER18> I would never use this but I love that it exists and I love the humor/personality behind the project.

</comment><comment><USER19> Very related to this project is the Beaker Browser, which however uses P2P topology instead of a conventional proxy server.

<comment><USER20> > What inspired this? beaker browser, ngrok, localhost.run, inlets.dev, Parks > and Recreation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is pretty awesome and their list of inspirations is a veritable goldmine of tools I hadn't seen or used before

\- [https://beakerbrowser.com](https://beakerbrowser.com) \- P2P Web in the browser (Opera Unite Redux)

\- [http://localhost.run](http://localhost.run) & inlets - ngrok with feathers and a monocle

</comment><comment><USER22> IANAL but from the position of law any illegal content shared this way is hosted by the owner of hostyoself.com

<comment><USER23> Not a professional liar either but I'm not sure about that. I imagine torrent trackers are a decent analog thats been through the courts already. They don't host the content, they just host URIs and metadata to people that host the content.

The drag and drop interface isn't to upload the content to be hosted like a traditional server (what's the point then?) It looks like (without digging through code) it's so they can parse the file-structure and generate the URIs to forward requests.

<comment><USER24> > It looks like (without digging through code) it's so they can parse the > file-structure and generate the URIs to forward requests.

I haven't looked at the code either. But the hosting seems to be handled in JavaScript. There are no required clients (though there does seem to be an optional one); this is all completed in the browser.

So you're not "uploading" content, you're providing the content to the client- side application so it can be shared through that same client-side solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone remember browserver posted to HN 7 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366555)

</comment><comment><USER26> So, a proxy?

<comment><USER27> That's what I've understood, they'll have to provide bandwidth, and they'll have to use as much upload as download (though that's rarely a problem).. But still, scaling it would be interesting, but as a proof of concept it's still interesting, as they're not providing storage or processing.

<comment><USER26> I'm more curious as to the legal implications of what people might share when using the service, even if (s)he's not the one hosting, (s)he's providing bandwidth and enabling access.

<comment><USER24> Just as any other intermediate device, service, or system is doing.

The host ISP, the hostyoself.com ISP, the various routers, firewalls, networks between the two, and all the same for the end-user, any proxy servers on the path, etc. A lot of entities are hosting/enabling access to the content.

<comment><USER26> That's why it's interesting, in Sweden a person is = IP. Which in this case is considered the owner. There's also been a case recently where a private person has been hold personally responsible for other peoples facebook comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This seems a lot like [https://github.com/humphd/nohost](https://github.com/humphd/nohost)

<comment><USER7> Does nohost let you host sites that others can access, or is it just available in the local browser?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Won't I have to reload my browser if I change a file?

> Yep! Welcome to the joys of Javascript.

Although it (re-)sends file for every request, the file content must be identical. So the relay server may just cache the file.

Once you do that, it becomes more like a traditional static file hosting w/ on-demand file uploading via browser.

</comment><comment><USER30> Underwhelming, this just proxies the request through an external web server that handles it.

It would be interesting to see something using WASM to run a web server in the browser. And some kind of decentralized replacement of DNS gateways for host resolution.

<comment><USER31> > It would be interesting to see something using WASM to run a web server in > the browser.

You could possibly get one going on top of something like this: [https://browsix.org/](https://browsix.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I could see a use case for something like this to temporarily share a picture or other file on a web message board, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER33> What prevents hostyoself.com (or more likely, a malicious actor that hacked HYS) from executing a MITM attack on everything?

</comment><comment><USER34> Opera had something like that built-in years ago. I don't remember if it made it out of the preview feature.

</comment><comment><USER35> Oh well, HN hug of death killed it.

Hopefully no one uses this for anything critical.

</comment><comment><USER36> > Does this use AI or blockchain? Sure, why not.

uh... okay?

<comment><USER37> He's being cheeky..

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > That parcs and rec meme is awesome!

>They won the Internet!

I thought this place was supposed to be better than that.

<comment><USER39> I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it reeks of manufactured support.

<comment><USER40> This is Hacker News. This project is perfectly targeted for the audience here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> That parcs and rec meme is awesome!</comment>


Can cops legally fire "GPS bullets" at fleeing cars to track suspects?  - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/can-cops-legally-fire-gps-bullets-at-fleeing-cars-to-track-suspects/

<comment><USER2> The intent reminds me of the technology of the incorruptible Galactic Patrol of E.E. Smith: "He was so close that he saw his flare, so close that he could slap onto the fleeing vessel the beam of the CRX tracer which he always carried with him."

(My fondness of Smith's works would later cause me to confuse the names of Ford's Mercury Tracer and Honda's CR-X.)</comment>