Show HN: I made an emoji URL shortener with detailed, open analytics - <AUTHOR> http://mosho.ws <comment><AUTHOR> Last week I saw a comment by @runnr_az re: his emoji domain registration engine ([https://xn--qeiaa.ws](https://xn--qeiaa.ws)). I was immediately excited by the prospect of building something novel and after some brainstorming settled on an emoji URL shortener registered under [http://xn-- dk8h6i.ws](http://xn--dk8h6i.ws) (text-friendly name: [http://Mosho.ws](http://Mosho.ws)). My hubris was great - this was clearly an original idea that no one in the entire history of the internet had thought of. I immediately began working on a prototype using the MEAN stack (minus Angular as that seemed overkill for something so simple) with full confidence that I was to be the Mark Zuckerberg of emoji URLs.

The original version simply mapped a given domain to a randomly-chosen combination of Unicode 6.0 emojis (the ones that your original iPhone 4S supported) - nothing more. I was about to start sharing around the site when I came across [http://www.xn--vi8hiv.ws](http://www.xn--vi8hiv.ws) (Linkmoji) and [http://xn--cr8hhg.ws](http://xn--cr8hhg.ws) on Product Hunt - two great emoji URL shorteners that had already beaten me to the punch - doh!

After my ego finished deflating I began to think of ways to improve on the original concept. I assumed that the most-desired feature would be custom emoji combinations so I added that first (your custom alias can be between 1 and 100 emojis). I also noticed that emoji URLs don't play nice with social media - like, at all (Twitter being the only exception at the time of this post). Through a lot of manual testing I narrowed down the URL formats that would be supported (and autolinked) by all the major players (Product Hunt, Hacker News, Slack, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr) and displayed them in a tabulated list upon shortening.

I also added detailed analytics. Originally I was just tracking clicks but ended up adding sources, mediums, cities, countries, browsers, platforms, and devices. Finally I added support for Unicode 6.1, 7.0, and 8.0 emojis which are what all modern phones offer - it currently supports 888 emojis (not intentional but awesome nonetheless).

All in all it took about three days to build the core functionality and another four to polish the User Experience (I'm a backend dev by trade so frontend work doesn't come as naturally to me). I'm sure there are many ways in which Mosho can be improved and I look forward to everyone's feedback! Finally I'm greatly thankful for [http://www.xn--vi8hiv.ws](http://www.xn-- vi8hiv.ws) and [http://xn--cr8hhg.ws](http://xn--cr8hhg.ws) \- their efforts inspired me to really push myself with this product - it wouldn't have been as polished had it not been for them.

</comment><comment><USER2> Saw this on PH today!</comment>


The AZ Problem - <AUTHOR> http://azproblem.info/ <comment><USER2> Couldn't they just check to see if tomorrow is the first of the month?</comment>


Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-amazon-idUSKCN2231UC <comment><USER2> This is a good move but several years too late. Google has already squandered it's lead in shopping when they replaced an excellent shopping search engine with a crippled advertising board that neither shows the cheapest prices nor a wide variety of products to buy. This has been compounded by introducing absolutely no substantitive improvements to the product over the past few years.

Meanwhile, because nobody used the useless shopping search, the homepage search experience has been ruined by the assumption that every search is somebody who wants to buy something.

And let's not speak of the amazon/ebay duopoly that's developed. Google could have fought against that but chose not to in the hope of slightly increased advertising revenue.

<comment><USER3> This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their "rivals" for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure).

Nobody will remember it, but in eBay's early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually built something that was better than eBay's model by many accounts. Nobody cared and it was shut down, because Amazon is not where people go to sell things at auction. Just like google search is not where people go to do their shopping.

From the outside, it seems like Amazon doesn't spend much time worrying about what Google and Facebook are doing. Not sure if that's changed recently (Alexa, certain AWS products, Amazon original series).

In general, as companies balloon in size, it's very hard to draw ROI out of the core product, and these companies tend to bloom into conglomerates (like amazon is, arguably). The biggest mistake you can make, IMO, is when you sacrifice the UX of your core product to benefit these "subsidiaries", like google has done with shopping infecting search, as others have alluded to.

<comment><USER4> >This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their "rivals" for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure).

In Steve Yegge's post on why he left google: "You can look at Google's entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don't have innovation in their DNA any more. And it's because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers."

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com/why-i-left-google-to-join- gr...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/why-i-left-google-to-join- grab-86dfffc0be84)

>Nobody will remember it, but in eBay's early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually built something that was better than eBay's model by many accounts. Nobody cared and it was shut down, because Amazon is not where people go to sell things at auction. Just like google search is not where people go to do their shopping.

For more info on "Mr Tooth" and Amazon's quest to compete with eBay, see another Steve Yegge post here: [https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma- and-the-quest-...](https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the- quest-to-kill-ebay-bb4992dc5020)

"So, Life Lesson #2 (and this one is pretty goddamn important) is: Don't try to beat a network by making a clone with improvements. It ain't gonna work. There is too much gravitational inertia in the original network; nobody is incentivized to leave it."

<comment><USER5> whats going on with facebook marketplace vs craigslist then?

<comment><USER6> at least for cars, craigslist started charging $5 for private parties to make a post, but facebook is free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wondered if this was Google Express but ... nope, seems like that closed and morphed into something else [1]. I know a lot of people joke about Google shutting down projects or aggregating disparate projects poorly but I actually think it is comical at this point. It makes me think of other recent attempts to coalesce businesses like combining their music subscription services YouTube music premium, YouTube Red and Google Play Music.

It just feels like Google keeps squandering its brand. It's like they try to break into a market (e.g. Express for shopping, Hangouts for video chat) and fail to gain sufficient traction so they shut down the attempt only to spin it up again with a new brand.

It seems Google's ineptitude at creating successful brands is causing it to continual create bad products. Instead of just sticking with a brand and growing/improving it incrementally over time they throw it away. That leaves them back at square one trying to gain traction with a brand new product with its own set of issues.

1\. [https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/11/google-express-to-close- in...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/11/google-express-to-close-in-a-few- weeks-will-become-part-of-google-shopping/)

<comment><USER8> Absolutely. The problem is that nobody gets promoted for slowly incrementing on an existing product.

<comment><USER9> And every SVP refrag means killing the predecessors initiatives to "make a mark".

Google are terrible at products

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google has always been a fascinating company to me. A lot of my friends still work there and love it and my impression of their internal developer experience is that it's top notch. This shows me though that despite them being an engineer-first company (or used to be) they really haven't created another dominant business since ads and consumer gsuite. Basically when I was a new grad I thought if your company had technical prowess everything else would follow but I'm slowly learning that it's not the case, sound strategy is really all you need and you need good leadership for that, which comes and goes.

<comment><USER11> The engineering-focused mindset is hilariously short-sighted in hindsight.

When I was AWS 2012-2013, the sense that the Cloud is going to be huge got more and more evidences from customer feedback.

When I joined Google in 2013, the sentiment was that Google can easily beat AWS. But, for all those talks, they have not mentioned any significant understanding on what customers expect from GCP, and why and how GCP can win. The idea was simply that Google's tech (and a self-complacent idea that Google engineers is somehow superior) is just better, therefore it will win. The vast majority of hard work in between was never discussed.

Even later in 2016, I was pitching my Director to build a Cloud service that exposes Borg's experience (I worked at BorgMaster team then); the experience would be close to AWS Fargate (or Cloud Run). And the reply was that its technical complexity would be too high. Once again, there is no thought given to whether or not customers would be loving to use such services. Granted that, I did not have the PM expertise or connections to build a stronger proposal, but the focus on technical thinking is evident.

<comment><USER12> Someone who used to be a Googler once told me: "A group of great engineers lead by a terrible manager will never succeed but a team of mediocre engineers lead by a great manager just might." I don't think anyone doubts Google has great engineers but I don't think it's enough for them to win. All you'll end up with is a lot of great products with no futures. I found myself in a similar situation in my previous job: a bunch of ex-Googlers and a weak leadership team. In the end, we ended up making a lot of components that went nowhere because no one would pay for them.

<comment><USER13> I suppose that, as long as the AdWords faucet keeps spewing money, Google doesn't need to build great products.

They can just wait for some rinky-dink startup to build something great, then swoop in and buy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, their UI... insists I lived in a city I used to live in years back. There's no way to even just change my city for one search. (I tried changing my address elsewhere, but it just doesn't pick up the change.)

<comment><USER15> I still can't use Google Wallet to this date because I haven't been able to update my country since 2010

<comment><USER16> Have you tried since 2017?

You can nowadays move payments profiles between Google accounts (add the other account as an admin on the profile, then remove the original account from the payments profile), or close payments profiles.

My Google Payments settings were incorrectly set as "business" for a long time, but in late 2017 I was able to move the incorrect profile to another Google account and make my main account "individual" (Google prompted to create a new payments profile when the previous one was no longer accessible to the account). Presumably closing the payments profile would have worked as well.

[https://pay.google.com/gp/w/u/0/home/settings](https://pay.google.com/gp/w/u/0/home/settings)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I honestly thought that Google's shopping tab was a search aggregator into other shopping portals (Amazon, AliExpress, etc)

In the same way that Google news isn't actually Google serving the news.

</comment><comment><USER18> it's kind of crazy how much of a one-trick pony Google is. If it weren't for search, which admittedly is very successful I don't know what the company would be worth.

Amazon's reach, on the other hand, is pretty astonishing. Cloud, Logistics, e-commerce, and even the media business is huge these days.

<comment><USER19> Google has multiple products apart from search with >1B users (Gdrive, android, photos, maps, youtube).

<comment><USER20> Which of them is profitable?

<comment><USER21> YouTube is the only product there that can stand on its own. The others are complimentary services that may not generate much revenue independently, but they add tremendous value to an ecosystem of complimentary products.

Example, Android allows for traffic data to be sampled in real time, which is then sent to Maps.

<comment><USER22> Does YouTube generate a profit?

<comment><USER23> Google doesn't disclose that, but it did say it generates around $15 billion a year in revenue, which ought to pay for a server or two:

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google- al...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet- earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> sudo-i Google dot com UI is growing ever closer to following in the footsteps of iTunes. It's just becoming a cluttered mess and more confusing to users... I didn't even know you could shop directly from the site.

<comment><USER24> The worst part is depending on your search all the different options can be in different order or sometimes not even show up. My UI pet peeve is inconsistency and Google has it in spades.

<comment><USER25> It makes sense to change rank of the search mode options depending on your query. Some examples...

[supreme court] -> "News"

[make face mask at home] -> "Videos"

[ps4] -> "Shopping"

[cute cat] -> "Images"

Google and Bing have the exact same behavior for these queries.

<comment><USER26> Personally I prefer how DDG keeps "All, Images, Videos, News, Maps" static and then shows additional tabs when relevant, e.g. "Shopping" or "Meanings".

Jumbling up the tabs on each search was one of the UI-related reasons that I gave up on GSearch years ago (outside of the occasional !g, which now usually feels like being redirected to AliExpress).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Different approach to business.

For Amazon, the product is the product.

For Google, the user is the product.

And, as others noted, how long will Google pursue this? It is definitely not a core competency, or business line.

<comment><USER28> for Amazon, the user is also the product. everything is a product to Amazon.

they have a flourishing advertising business and have extremely valuable and actionable data on all of their users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not sure Google can compete as much as they'd like in shopping due to antitrust issues. They acquired a price comparison company in 2011 and registered Google Comparison Inc. They shuttered that shortly thereafter. If you look at various Google corporate registrations they've have a few of these shopping and product corporations that went nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why it seems that google is always behind one step ? Last time it was ahead of the curve was buying android. And, it doesn't seems like it but google search quality is degrading at alarming rate, for e.g. even when I have allowed tracking my search visited pages, it failed to give me correct results for exact same queries.

<comment><USER31> Have you seen the first Android prototypes that looked like knock off Blackberries the year before the iPhone was introduced? Android was definitely not ahead of the curve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How many people were not even aware/were barely aware that Google had a shopping service? I wasn't.

<comment><USER33> They do? I thought they have a "Shopping" search results tab that aggregates store listings. Are they skimming a fee on top of ad revenue for showing those listings?

<comment><USER34> Up until now merchants had to pay Google to show up in the shopping search results tab at all. So all the shopping results were basically paid ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone know if Google comingles items from various merchants like Amazon does?

<comment><USER35> I don't believe you're actually buying the items from Google but through a merchant linked into the program

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> wait...google has a shopping service?!

</comment><comment><USER37> IMHO this is a significant new "front" in Google's battle for online retail.

<comment><USER38> "Google is trying retail now?" was my first thought.

"For how long?" was my second thought.

<comment><USER24> They've been doing it for 17 years now: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping)

<comment><USER39> Could they just invert the current scheme by which they shut down businesses?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sun's 11-Year Cycle Caused by Dark Matter, Say Physicists - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/f61d3edfee30

<comment><USER2> I'm gonna need a lot more convincing than "Thing A happens every 11 years, B also happens every 11 years, so they must be connected, by err... quantu... ummm electro.... nah, hmmm... ah! Dark matter"</comment>


Silk: why we use Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://blog.typlab.com/2009/09/why-we-use-haskell/

<comment><USER2> Nice synopsis of Haskell as a _language_ , but it doesn't touch on why they chose it for server side web application programming, specifically. I'd be interested in knowing if it's capable, scalable and stable enough to provide a platform to build on for the next few years. Based on its history to date, are there protections in place for backwards compatibility, or are they likely to end up pinning to an obsolete version? Does the standard library support web services (SSL, unicode, etc.), or will they need to turn to third parties or code essential building blocks from scratch?

<comment><USER3> One thing worth noting here is that the article dates from 2009; things have improved a _lot_ since then vis a vis web development in Haskell. New frameworks (Snap, Yesod) have sprung up, and the library and toolchain support have improved immeasurably.

To answer some of your questions a little more directly (I hope someone like dons with a more encyclopaedic knowledge can pitch in here):

* As a _language_ , Haskell is both very stable and very cutting-edge. This is because GHC (the only Haskell compiler people use seriously for production, at least as far as I'm aware) supports both the Haskell '98 standard, and the more recent Haskell 2010 standard—but it also supports a large number of language extensions [1] such as type families, existential types, GADTs etc. So

* In terms of scalability, some of the recent benchmarks for Haskell-based web servers have been very impressive. Whether or not this translates into real-world performance is something we'll see as more people start using them in production. Recent improvements to the GHC I/O manager make the case for Haskell more compelling in this regard than it used to be.

* It's pretty easy in Haskell to write wrappers around C libraries, such as OpenSSL. There are also moves to implement more of these core parts of any web stack in pure Haskell, although getting them to feature-completion is a process that will take time.

A couple of recent reads spring to mind: a Stack Overflow discussion [1] where Alex Payne asked about Haskell tools to make programs production-ready, and Johan Tibell's article [2] on which Haskell libraries one should use.

[1] [http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.3/html/users_guide/ghc-l...](http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.3/html/users_guide/ghc- language-features.html)

[2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5808825/what-are-the- best...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5808825/what-are-the-best-haskell- libraries-to-operationalize-a-program)

[3] [http://blog.johantibell.com/2011/04/haskell-libraries-you- sh...](http://blog.johantibell.com/2011/04/haskell-libraries-you-should- use.html)

<comment><USER4> Specifically, with respect to openssl and unicode

* The language standard specifies Unicode strings

* The Haskell Platform library standard adds support for Unicode IO based on packed text buffers

* OpenSSL is provided via the venerable hopenssl library

And there are many happy web users, such as Janrain, Galois, typLab, Bump, Deutsche Bank and others.

The ecosystem is in a pretty nice place now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Further proof of my theory that GHC's license has a clause buried in it stating that you must post an explanation of monads on your blog in order to use it.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure whether you are serious, cynical or tongue-in-cheek, so I feel it necessary to point out that they are not actually explaining monads. They provide an answer to the question that everyone will ask: "how do you do I/O in a language in which all computations are supposed to be free of side- effects, when I/O is obviously a side-effect?" The answer to that question is 'monads', but that's as far as they go. They don't actually explain anything about monads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "And most of all, Haskell makes programming fun!" - If you're doing a startup make sure you choose a language you enjoy. You're going to be spending a _lot_ of time using it.

(Also applies to cofounders and the application itself.)

<comment><USER8> I was gonna quote exactly the same, to affirm this. Haskell is an absolute joy to program in. Nothing in the code of a Haskell program feels like "extra" or "too much".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The most important sentence for me was "Two of us (me and Sebas) are enrolled in the Software Technology master program at Utrecht University, where we often use the programming language Haskell."

What you're familiar and comfortable with is one of the most important considerations in language/platform choice.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thank God. An article advocating Haskell that doesn't descend into some variant of "You will go to Hell if you aren't using a strongly-typed, pure, and lazy programming language."

</comment><comment><USER11> Predictably, this blog post reads like a Haskell pamphlet and it hits all the Bingo marks: purity, no side effects, ah but yes side effects with the IO monads, monads, concurrency, the awesome community (seriously? Have they actually looked into it? The #haskell irc channel is moderated by Tony Morris, a lunatic who's been banned from many mailing-lists and channels because of several psychological disorders he suffers from), etc...

Even more predictably, not a single word on more pragmatic reasons to choose Haskell as a startup, such as: web and networking support, logging, database access, etc...

The odds of a startup succeeding are already vanishingly small, why make it even harder on yourself by picking an exotic language that's all but unknown in the work force?

<shakes head>

<comment><USER12> "Haskell has no side effects" is true, but only in the sense that they are no longer side effects but simply "effects" as they are marked a such.

The idea isn't to get rid of effects but to quarantine them, separate them from simple functions into "procedures". This means you get to have real functions in Haskell, and they truly are easier to compose together than what other languages call "functions" but are actually procedures.

As for concurrency, Haskell is really in a unique spot, where you can get the performance of threads and the simplicity of processes: the immutability of everything not explicitly created for inter-thread communication gives you the same safety of IPC, but the shared memory gives you threads' performance.

I think the benefits outlined on the page may not be specific to web development, but they definitely apply to it too.

I haven't seen Tony Morris abuse anyone in the community, and the IRC channel is an amazing combination of immense knowledge and patience with newbies.

<comment><USER11> > I haven't seen Tony Morris abuse anyone in the community, and the IRC > channel is an amazing combination of immense knowledge and patience with > newbies.

Seriously? Here is the latest example on scala-debate, just two months ago, where he went so far off the deep end that Martin himself had to step in and tell him to cool down:

[http://groups.google.com/group/scala- debate/browse_thread/th...](http://groups.google.com/group/scala- debate/browse_thread/thread/db4af6597d942357)

He dishes this kind of abuse on a regular basis on lists, irc (especially #scala) and sometimes even on his own Twitter feed.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand: yes, I know the theory behind immutability and isolation and how it can enable easier parallelism. I have yet to see practical examples of that in Haskell and convincing stats that show a boost in performance compared to more traditional approaches (such as Java+nio or even Scala actors).

My questions still hold regarding Haskell's adequacy in production, e.g. with regards to database, logging or continuous integration, and I'm not the only one: Alex Payne recently expressed the same concerns on SO:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5808825/what-are-the- best...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5808825/what-are-the-best-haskell- libraries-to-operationalize-a-program)

<comment><USER13> Yes, but nothing like that is happening in #haskell. I've asked some really stupid questions there, sometimes more than once, and been treated well. The "worst" treatment I've received is an admonishment to read the Haskell site for a more trivial question.

<comment><USER4> There are 16 official moderators on the #haskell channel, as well. I apologize (as one of those moderators) if the OP has had a bad experience: with so many people in the channel, not everyone gets exactly what they need, however, we do try very very hard to be friendly.

The principles of the channel require this, <http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel#Principles> \-- if an op has treated you unfairly, please let us know, and we can correct the situation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


But what have you shipped? - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/05/but-what-have-you-shipped.html <comment><USER2> You've either shipped or you haven't:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1524352></comment>


BladeRF 2.0 micro - <AUTHOR> https://www.nuand.com/bladerf-2-0-micro/ <comment><USER2> > affordable for students and RF enthusiasts

Takes a lot of scrolling to see the price, which is $480. That's probably affordable considering the specs. But the cheap way to experiment with an SDR is to repurpose a $20 USB TV tuner.

<comment><USER3> The cheapest way is to start with a RTL SDR tuner and for example Gnuradio.

If you want to experiment with celluar mobile radios LTE you need a LimeSDR, BladeRF and a help processor.

<comment><USER4> What is a help processor?

<comment><USER3> Help CPU I meant, something accelerating the signal processing from the software defined radio often a FPGA, field programmable gate array.

<comment><USER5> In context of GnuRadio and similar, do any projects already utilize FPGA acceleration as offered by USRP?

From what I've seen, it all happens on the CPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> HackRF one can be purchased for $100 nowadays: [https://www.aliexpress.com/item/HackRF-One-1MHz-to-6GHz- SDR-...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/HackRF-One-1MHz-to-6GHz-SDR-Platform- Software-Defined-Radio-Development- Board/32809842995.html?spm=2114.search0126.96.36.199f7e44bcnJRHLi&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_3_10065_10130_10068_10890_10547_319_10546_317_10548_10545_10696_453_10084_454_10083_10618_10307_537_536_10059_10884_10887_100031_321_322_10103-10890,searchweb201603_51,ppcSwitch_0&algo_expid=15778239-d8e0-43f2-95ac-a3691a1b5c96-0&algo_pvid=15778239-d8e0-43f2-95ac-a3691a1b5c96)

Is it worth paying $380 more to have a better ADC and a few more bells and whistles in the BladeRF micro?

<comment><USER7> IMO, the bladeRF is more of an alternative to USRPs, and the HackRF is more of a hacker tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not sure how impressed I am with the specs. It is nice that you can transmit 54MHz of bandwidth or whatever... but what can you do that's actually interesting? It doesn't go down to HF where you can communicate around the world. It doesn't have the oscillator stability to run WSPR in VHF. What do people that transmit with this actually do that a $20 (or even $300 HT) FM radio wouldn't?

<comment><USER7> There are ways of achieving lower frequencies with SDRs, for example the older model of BladeRF has an expansion card that goes down to 60Khz.

There are tons of things you could transmit, for example GSM, DVB, ATSC, GPS, amateur digital modes, the list goes on.

Voice/CW aren't really what SDRs are for, just like personal computers aren't merely a replacement for typewriters. If all you want to do is voice/CW, then yes, you should just buy a Kenwood or Yaesu. You _can_ do the same things with an SDR, but that's not the point of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice to have another MIMO radio in the mix.

When I first started experimenting with SDRs I thought "widest frequency range" was the spec to go for, then it became "widest bandwidth" was the spec to go for, and then it because "highest dynamic range" was the spec to go for.

The truth is, depending on what you're interested in, any or none of those could be on your "must have" list.

My journey went as follows; first I wanted to see as many different signals as possible from as many different sources as I could find. That suggested the wider the frequency range the more success I would have. But those sources transmit with a _modulation_ and that modulation might consume a little (CW) or a lot (OFDM) of bandwidth. So more bandwidth, especially if something was using multiple "channels" in a space became key. But what if you can't hear what it is you are listening for? As digital devices the number of bits in your ADC really impacts your ability to deal with large adjacent signals in the band. You find yourself buying (or building) filters to knock back the US FM band, or a nearby TV station for example. For doing some bluetooth work I ended up with a band pass filter on the front end that killed off nearly anything outside the 2.4Ghz ISM band.

Multiple inputs and outputs became a thing for me because I wanted to build an LTE base station, so I backed the LimeSDR and got one of those. There are interesting things to see when you have multiple receivers that are all running from a phase coherent local oscillator. You get this for 'free' when you have multiple receivers running off the same local oscillator.

Lower frequencies are their own problem, the physics gets in the way. Fortunately it is well understood how to heterodyne DC to 200Mhz up into a range that these SDRs will operate. Of course that teaches you about things like phase noise and how it impacts your ability to separate individual channels.

Lots of interesting things to learn, but it isn't just 'plug and go' with one box that can see "DC to Daylight"[1]. Filters, to keep out the signals you don't want. Amplifiers that bring up the signals you do want, and not too much noise. Bandwidth to capture the full signal and a bit extra. Enough sensitivity to pull out the modulation frequencies uniquely. And a fast enough DSP platform to turn that mush into the actual signal you are looking for. It is quite the pile of projects.

[1] Daylight being visible light RF signals :-) Radios that cover say 1MZ to 25Ghz can easily cost $100,000 so they aren't really the stuff you'll pick up casually, but the industry is investing heavily and what you can do for as little as $100 (ADALM-PLUTO) is pretty amazing.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I've interacted with a lot of people that didn't appreciate the problems of ridiculously high (2+ GHz) instaneous bandwidth. It sounds great and is easy to sell, but the fact that a single high power signal can wreck everything else is pretty problematic. At that point your options are: 1. Let the high power signal drive the receiver rail to rail, and which point your signals of interest are lost, 2. Set gain to avoid the highest power signal causing clipping, at which point your signals of interest are again lost, this time below the noise floor, or 3. Like you say, add a bunch of filters for the high power undesirable signals, at which point massive bandwidth starts to look less appealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One unfortunate aspect of many of these new popular SDRs is that they do not operate at lower frequencies, so you are going to miss all the HF/MF/LF fun, and part of VHF spectrum. For example the 6 meter amateur radio band is not directly accessible with this SDR.

I wonder what it would take to make a DC to VHF (300ish MHz) SDR to complement these UHF SDRs

<comment><USER12> The original BladeRF has an optional transverter that gives you 60kHz to 300MHz. (I have one but haven't done anything with it yet.)

[https://www.nuand.com/product/hf-vhf- transverter/](https://www.nuand.com/product/hf-vhf-transverter/)

I don't see one for the version 2 though.

</comment></comment><comment> nezza-_- Unfortunately the software support for the BladeRF 2.0 micro is not yet very mature - the official installation instructions do not work (don't install udev rules etc).

I would recommend waiting a couple of months and see how the ecosystem develops.

<comment><USER13> What board / software is the current leader in this space? Is there a brand akin to Arduino ?

<comment><USER7> The HackRF ($300) or RTL-SDR ($20, but RX only) are the go-to hardware for consumers/hackers. These devices are more limited than some of the newer SDRs, but the software support is a lot better.

For software, the HackRF is probably the best ecosystem. It's open hardware, and the firmware is GPLv2.

The software ecosystem for SDR is pretty messy, pretty much all of the consumer/hacker SDR software is hard to set up correctly, and Linux only. The easiest thing to use is the Pentoo distro, it has all of the common tools, up to date and included in the base image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> USRP radio was 2000$ plus daughter board cost for specific bands. The price of this is so cheap; you can pop garages, car tire sensors, key fobs, cell phone signals, all in one.

</comment><comment><USER11> With 61 MSPS sample rate, why they spec their filter to 54 MHz? Wouldn't that cause aliasing?

<comment><USER15> No it's the other way round; with 61 MSPS sampling rate, the theoretical maximum bandwidth is 61 MHz, so they stay below.

[edit]

If you're missing the factor two, as in "sampling frequency must be twice the maximum signal frequency", the keyword is complex sampling. With complex signals, the sampling theorem is "sampling frequency must be greater than the maximum signal frequency".

[edit2]

I don't want to make anybody read about sampling. So we have a real signal - we're in the real world - and suddenly there's a complex signal? You basically fork the signal, and delay one signal path by half the clock period. You can then sample both signals at the same time, and collect the data you would get when sampling with the double frequency. Because we sample two signals, we store two samples at a time. One we call the real signal, one the imaginary -- and there we got our complex signal.

<comment><USER16> For anyone wanting to read more, this article about IQ is very good: [http://whiteboard.ping.se/SDR/IQ](http://whiteboard.ping.se/SDR/IQ)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for posting that. Very nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can this transmit more than 1Ghz of spectrum? I can't see that from the description

</comment><comment><USER19> Newbie question: what interesting applications does this technology have?

<comment><USER7> There's an infinite list of things you could do, for example:

\- wireless pentesting of GPS, RFID, NFC, garage doors, car remotes, etc.

\- Receive NOAA satellite weather imagery

\- Track airplanes using ASD-B

\- Amateur radio voice/morse code/digital modes

\- Run a GSM base station using OpenBTS

\- Capture every FM radio broadcast in your area, simultaneously

\- Transmit a DVB or ATSC stream to your TV

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > 47MHz to 6GHz

Ok wow!

<comment><USER10> By itself, that isn't particularly impressive - all that requires is a decent LO + mixer. Make sure you aren't confusing frequency range with instantaneous bandwidth.</comment></comment>


A roundabout way of turning on a light. See the explanation b4 reading - <AUTHOR> http://www.kosherswitch.com/live/tech/how In Judaism, you are not allowed to use electricity on Saturday. So this company made a light switch that according to them (and granted, many others) IS allowed to be used on Saturday. So I thought HN would like the way it works to try to get around things.<p>If your interested in seeing why this is allowed on Saturday as opposed to a normal light, if you go to Halacha>>Halacha: overview, it goes through it <comment><USER2> Poe's Law - an axiom suggesting that it's difficult to distinguish between parodies of religious fundamentalism and its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane - seems to apply here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quick explanation: In orthodox judaism, one is not supposed to operate a light-switch on the Sabbath.

I'm not jewish, but some of my friends are observant (but progressive) and use the Sabbath as a day of reflection. This seems to completely go against the spirit of the rule (to spend a day living simply with friends and family, without technology for maximum reflection, introspection, and rest).

I don't see how this gadget would catch on -- unless someone is bound is follow the rule to the letter, but doesn't really want to (but then at that point, they should just stop adhering IMHO)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am Jewish.

So I can tell you that you are 100% right. I don't think this is really going to catch on for that very reason. Sabbath is a day set aside for family, religion, and not working.

I think what the main use is going to be is people will install it for emergencies. So I'm sure in Israel a lot of people will put it in their bomb shelters so if they need to spend Sabbath in the shelter and need to use the light, it won't be directly going against Sabbath.

<comment><USER4> > will install it for emergencies

Surely use in emergencies is allowed already.

(I am not Jewish, but I heard an Oy Vey once)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is true. If any ones life is in danger, your supposed to "forget" the Sabbath right away and do what's necessary. But, for example, if your wife is very very pregnant and can give birth over Sabbath, if she goes into labour on Sabbath, 100% you HAVE to driver her to the hospital. But it's better if before Sabbath you order a taxi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi. I am not Jewish (I am in a country with hardly any Jews) and I do not know what relation there is to electrical switched to a religious day.

Sorry for being ignorant. But can you please explain in simple words what is need for this for Jews?

<comment><USER6> As far as I understand it, some orthodox jews are not permitted to do any "work" on the sabbath.

Some factions believe that flicking a light switch is "work," or that pressing a button is "work." So some enterprising fellows have been creating ingenious inventions to allow observant orthodox jews to live comfortably while still not _technically_ violating their rules.

It all seems pretty silly to me, but you have to admit, it is indeed _hacking_ and I think the devices are clever.

One specific example is an elevator, which has a sabbath mode. On the sabbath, it will stop and open its doors at every floor, over and over, so that an observant rider can simply walk on, and walk off at their desired floor, without the perceived sin of _pressing the button for their floor_.

<comment><USER7> One of my friends said that his grandparents would light their stove before sundown on friday and leave it lit until sundown Saturday so they would not break kosher laws

I have also heard that a lot of devices have kosher mode. E.g. refrigerators lights not coming on and power randomly going in and out much like this swith

<comment><USER8> The random-refrigerator-compressor one is something I read about recently and would never have occurred to me. The reasoning is that in a normal setup, the compressor's operation is driven by internal temperature, which is impacted by opening/closing the door, so opening/closing the door is indirectly "operating" an electric motor, the compressor. To avoid that, in Sabbath mode the compressor runs on a non-thermostat-based schedule, so its operation is not being directed by any human activity.

Some electric ovens and stoves also have a Sabbath mode that lets them stay on all day; in the normal mode most have an auto-shutoff after 12 hours, under the assumption that an oven left on for more than 12 hours was probably an accident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a fantastic discussion about what God might want (or not want). I am a person of faith, I'm impressed by the respectful tone of many commenters even thought they are obviously from very different backgrounds (rare in online discussions). I think God likes that, too.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's another article about jewish appliances in general [1] with more detail about the restrictions. Essentially, jewish law differentiates between direct and indirect responses to actions. And I can verify you'll occasionally see this stuff on the UES, and a little more often in the Hasidic bits of Brooklyn.

       Sabbath law prohibits Jews from performing actions that cause a direct reaction;
       that would qualify as forbidden work. But indirect reactions are, well, kosher. In
       Hebrew, this concept is called the gramma. There are two types of grammas,
       Ottensoser tells me. Say you hit a light switch, but it doesn't come on
       immediately - that's a time delay, a time gramma. There's also a gramma of
       mechanical indirectness, like a Rube Goldberg contraption in which a mouse turns a
       wheel that swings a hammer that turns a key that launches a rocket. You can't
       claim the mouse actually launches the rocket.

That being said, as an atheist, it sure looks like these people are playing rules lawyer with their god, just like the dick at your D&D game. I have to wonder if such a god would be pleased.

[1] <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/kosher.html></comment>


Show HN: Loop Email – Work smarter with your team on email - <AUTHOR> https://www.intheloop.io/ <comment><USER2> Where are you planning to take this? Slack just bought Astro a few weeks ago...when i think about it they could be working now on something similar? Channels on email actually sound interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Astro shutting down is not a big deal afterall. New game players are just around the corner. The app looks pretty neat, will dive in.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about the Linux version?</comment>


Ask HN: Does stack matter for hiring? - <AUTHOR>

Context: I'm in the initial stages of starting a company.  I'm not from the valley, but am starting in SF for Reasons.  There is funding available to hire when we need it and make payroll for a year or so.
I need to choose a stack and get started. I know node and am fast in it, however I'm in love with Clojure and Datomic.
After I list pros and cons, chide myself for self-indulgence, chide myself for complacency, re-list the pros and cons, etc., it's a dead heat. The one factor I can't decide on is hiring implications.
So the question: For people steeped in the Valley environment, is the tech stack a salient factor in how people choose where to work?  It seems to me that:
1) There is a large pool of node.js folks around, so hiring will be easier; but
2) It will be hard to attract good candidates, whereas being a Clojure shop might enable us to attract better candidates than we'd otherwise be able to.
I'm not proposing to get engineers on the cheap just because of the shop language; I'm just aware that as a new company we have little to offer candidates that isn't being offered by eight thousand other startups.
Is my point (2) reasonable, or am I just rationalizing the choice I'd prefer to make for selfish reasons?
(afterword: I'm very aware that the success or failure of a company has little to do with the implementation technology. Yet a stack must be chosen, and the question above is beyond my experience.) <comment><USER2> Why not use multiple stacks with a micro-services architecture?</comment>


Silicon Valley investors call for California to secede from the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/09/trump-win-california-secede-calexit-silicon-valley <comment><USER2> Oh c'mon seriously? Americans own brexit? We get it, you somehow are not happy with the choice you made ...

<comment><USER3> They can't legally secede, the man is ignorant.</comment></comment>


GitHub Audio - <AUTHOR> https://github.audio/ <comment><USER2> This is an interesting example where the new expanded set of TLDs can get confusing. My brain interpreted the URL as something semantically like "audio.github.com". Put another way, I thought the site was actually GitHub- made at first glance at its domain.

Of course, this was possible in various ways before expanding TLDs, but I think the problem, and thus the ease of phishing, is greater now.

<comment><USER3> I think the name "GitHub Audio" is confusing and probably a trademark violation. When I read "GitHub Audio", I figured it was a new service by GitHub for musicians to version control their music.

<comment><USER4> That would be very very cool, but good luck with trying to version .logicx or .cpr

I think popular software vendors should seriously reconsider their file formats in the 21st century, including graphical and audio ones.

<comment><USER5> For all of the things you can point fingers at Microsoft for doing wrong, opening up their second-generation document formats (docx, pptx, xlsx, etc) was a wonderful, positive move.

It's a shame that the music industry hasn't had a similar revelation. I'm tempted to be cynical and accuse them of fear and greed, but more likely "open data" just isn't something they think about.

<comment><USER6> I was under the impression their hand was forced. I vaguely recall various nation governments insisting on open standards or they would no longer use Office.

The OpenOffice formats were going through standardization and Microsoft quickly bought their way through the standards process (this part I remember). There was a _lot_ of complaining of how they exploited the particular standards' body. They bought seats, that then sat vacant after they got their standard pushed through, and couldn't meet quorums on other standards being voted on.

There were also many complaints about the Microsoft standards themselves. Particularly, that you couldn't implement support for the documents based solely on their standard.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, pretty much everyone agreed that the ISO standard for docx was nearly impossible to completely implement for anyone outside of Microsoft and that it should have never been accepted as a standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ICANN Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy

...

b. Evidence of Registration and Use in Bad Faith. For the purposes of Paragraph 4(a)(iii), the following circumstances, in particular but without limitation, if found by the Panel to be present, shall be evidence of the registration and use of a domain name in bad faith:

(i) circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name; or

(ii) you have registered the domain name in order to prevent the owner of the trademark or service mark from reflecting the mark in a corresponding domain name, provided that you have engaged in a pattern of such conduct; or

(iii) you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor; or

(iv) by using the domain name, you have intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain, Internet users to your web site or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant's mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your web site or location or of a product or service on your web site or location.

From [https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-02-25-en](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-02-25-en)

<comment><USER9> So what's your conclusion?

<comment><USER10> Maybe they concluded that this is fair to use and that's why they didn't have any argument beyond posting the ICANN rules for us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone who, like me, is interesting in digging under the surface, sound code is here: [https://github.audio/static/public/js/main.js](https://github.audio/static/public/js/main.js)

From there you can get the URLs for the audio files used. Uses Howler for audio, web sockets to talk to the server, SVG to render the animations.

The above is all easy enough to get from the source, but it might save someone else some time.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've done sonification of data before, and it's not easy at all. This one is really well done -- it's really difficult to get the tonality and rhythm to be pleasant as well as accurately represent the data. Nice work whoever built this!

<comment><USER13> sonification of data sounds wonderful. any examples?

<comment><USER14> I replied above with another example of sonification of a StarCraft 2 game in real-time. There's a link to a video of a performance there and here [1] is the paper we wrote for the NIME conference.

[1]: www.nime.org/proceedings/2013/nime2013_146.pdf

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of the (sadly) now defunct choir.io. Intro post > [https://corte.si/posts/choir/intro/choir.html](https://corte.si/posts/choir/intro/choir.html)

They had a demo of Github realtime activity and I hooked it into a bunch of different events around the org - Salesforce/Yammer/Github/JIRA - was neat to have a "pulse" of daily activity in the background.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not what I was expecting. Very soothing to have running in the background

<comment><USER16> What I find soothing about it is when there are long pauses. It makes me wonder... what's making people take long breaks?

<comment><USER17> Well people aren't taking breaks, it's just a natural random variation. It's the sound of a Poisson distribution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thought I'd seen something very similar before:

[http://listen.hatnote.com/](http://listen.hatnote.com/)

<comment><USER19> It clearly says in the footer

        inspired by hatnote

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> And here is Bitcoin audio [http://www.bitlisten.com](http://www.bitlisten.com) Instead of commits etc., you have transactions.

<comment><USER21> So awesome. I just wrote a note down two days ago to make this. Beat me to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> For some reason, this is the fifth posting of this site in the past two days, and the only one to make it to the front page.

<comment><USER23> It seems that HN is encouraging people to post the same Show HN projects multiple times until they get traction. I have been restraining myself from doing that with my own projects because I care a little about this community, but since moderators and the majority of users don't, I will not restrain myself anymore.

<comment><USER24> It's great that you care about the community. People caring about HN is what makes it good.

The repost thing is in the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). It's a well-known weakness of HN's structure that many good stories get posted to /newest and then fail to get noticed before they get washed out to see. There are just so many submissions here.

Over the last couple of years we've developed techniques for rescuing good stories and giving them second chances at attention. The simplest was just to let people know that a small number of reposts is ok. Reposts aren't great, of course, but missing good stories is worse. Think of it as allowing multiple pitches before striking out.

Another thing we did is build a system for story reviewing—initially by moderators only, now by us plus some users, with the plan of opening it to the whole community as soon as we figure out how—under which stories that get picked as good by reviewers get a random placement somewhere on the bottom half of the front page. These are stories that would otherwise have fallen through the cracks completely.

For example, your Show HN at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635722) looks good, so I just put it in the second-chance queue, and it's on the front page now. You should also have gotten an email saying we did this. Btw you might want to add a comment to that thread introducing yourself and explaining the background to the project—readers like that, and it tends to seed better discussions.

<comment><USER23> I know it is in the fact, I just thought this one was posted more times than it actually was (if it was actually only posted 3 times, one flagged).

Thank you for all the clarifications anyway. I actually complained knowing that achieving the correct mix of fairness, having-good-stories, and overposting prevention is a kind of impossible task (and HN seems to be doing well), so I was a kind of a troll, we may say. I'm sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://twitter.com/debugger22/status/783301929220780032](https://twitter.com/debugger22/status/783301929220780032)

</comment><comment><USER26> How much percent of the entire activity on GitHub is that?

<comment><USER27> I was curious about this also. It tracks the global public events endpoint

[https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/#list- public...](https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/#list-public- events)

which has a limit of 30 items, requesting every 2 seconds

[https://github.com/debugger22/github- audio/blob/e1170daa3a64...](https://github.com/debugger22/github- audio/blob/e1170daa3a6478163b7645266ec903ee254008ed/server/index.js#L96)

And then limits to 3 pushes, 5 issue comments, and 3 issue events:

[https://github.com/debugger22/github- audio/blob/e1170daa3a64...](https://github.com/debugger22/github- audio/blob/e1170daa3a6478163b7645266ec903ee254008ed/server/index.js#L108)

There are definitely situations where you'd be losing events, though I don't know what percentage that represents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sounds like it was inspired by Listen to Wikipedia.

[http://listen.hatnote.com/](http://listen.hatnote.com/)

</comment><comment><USER29> The name Github Audio reminds me of something I've been searching for: Version control for Musicians. A lot of music is now made over the internet. When I'm working on a track with a remote bandmate my workflow consists of recording, exporting the track, uploading it to dropbox, and then he needs to download, and import the track into his DAW. Surely there must be a better way. Is there a way for musicians to work together on songs the same way programmers can write software together?

I actually worked on building this before but nothing came of it. The main problem was a 'diff' for audio files.

<comment><USER30> [https://splice.com/](https://splice.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Very nicely standing on the shoulders of Brian Eno's Generative Music ideas, his Bloom app in particular[1].

[1] [http://www.generativemusic.com/](http://www.generativemusic.com/)

<comment><USER32> Much as I like Eno (this project is more Eno-lite than Eno-like imho) the story of generative music goes back some way before his time. To explore, start here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This would actually be pretty rad if I could narrow down the events to include only those from Github organizations that I care about.

<comment><USER27> The code is open source, so you (or any reader) could do that.

Either replace

[https://github.com/debugger22/github- audio/blob/e1170daa3a64...](https://github.com/debugger22/github- audio/blob/e1170daa3a6478163b7645266ec903ee254008ed/server/index.js#L70)

with

[https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/#list- events...](https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/#list-events-for- an-organization)

Or, do some filtering on

[https://github.com/debugger22/github- audio/blob/e1170daa3a64...](https://github.com/debugger22/github- audio/blob/e1170daa3a6478163b7645266ec903ee254008ed/server/index.js#L106)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Something similar from a project I'm working on. Just a silly debugger tool but turned into a way to show how how lots of components in a system are interacting:

[http://status.eventdata.crossref.org/thing-action- service/in...](http://status.eventdata.crossref.org/thing-action- service/index.html)

(if you want to know what this is about, the service is under development, you can read about it here [http://eventdata.crossref.org/guide/](http://eventdata.crossref.org/guide/) )

</comment><comment><USER35> ...bing, bong, chim, pluck..and my Chrome is frozen.

</comment><comment><USER36> Very nice. Although open source music where you have MIT licensed songs in editable format would also be an interesting experiment.

</comment><comment><USER37> A coincidentally timed writeup on 'Sonification for monitoring and debugging distributed systems':

[https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/09/sonification- for-m...](https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/09/sonification-for- monitoring-and.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> If github actually did provide a hosting/version control service for musicians, it might gain users from the musicians who are worried by soundcloud and co's pivots to monetisation.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow, this sounds really beautiful. They've done a great job and taking random signals and stringing them into beautiful and pleasant-to-hear music!

</comment><comment><USER40> Something went wrong: [https://i.imgur.com/tACBiiK.png](https://i.imgur.com/tACBiiK.png)

<comment><USER41> [https://twitter.com/debugger22/status/783301929220780032](https://twitter.com/debugger22/status/783301929220780032)

Some folks killed the comment of the author with that Link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If I was a manager and a music geek as I am now, I'd totally request integration of this thing with my repository, JIRA and Confluence :-)

</comment><comment><USER43> Am I the only one who immediately has to hunt down and close a tab the moment I hear auto-play audio of any kind?

</comment><comment><USER44> Ambient github!

</comment><comment><USER45> It's crazy that there's 3k+ people currently listening to events from github's system. So much #nerd

<comment><USER46> The link is on top of HN, that's why :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is a great idea. I love it. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER48> Not what I was epecting. Awesome. :)

</comment><comment><USER49> That's actually very relaxing

</comment><comment><USER50> Not working in mobile safari

</comment><comment><USER51> This is what I don't understand about Android. I have sounds set to "Alarms only" yet this webpage still plays it's tones.

<comment><USER52> Same. I'm at work on the toilet. Someone just called over if I needed assistance.

<comment><USER53> Would love to know how that played out

<comment><USER52> I said it was some GitHub experiment.

He said "...with photos?"

"No.. some sound thing."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Unplugged the head phone in the office today. A colleague asked "what kind of dumbass music is that?" "Sound of creation" I replied. He was intrigued and was blown away by the concept.

</comment><comment><USER55> 502 :(

</comment><comment><USER56> Well, there's a new world's worst thing.

<comment><USER57> If this is all you have to say about something on Hacker News, we kindly ask that you avoid saying anything at all.

<comment><USER56> It's shorthand for "I have a distaste for this thing which I presume to be understood if not necessarily shared." I was wrong about that.

This isn't musical at all! It's some lazy shit a high-schooler with free time and a vague understanding of the Web Audio API could do. Moreover, there's no value in it. The abstract "sonificiation of real data" is such a low bar, there's so much room for creativity, and there are so many brilliant artists who (rightfully) don't want to wade in the depths of the hacky web-tech garbage necessary to make something like this work that it's a wonder anyone gives a fuck about this. To find any value in this, one would have to have tuned out somewhere between having an abstract understanding of the project and actually listening to the darn thing.

Now, do you really want to discuss the merit of the thing, or would you rather Get Offended on the Internet?

<comment><USER57> Sorry if I wasn't clear, but my comment was strictly procedural and divorced from the topic. We ask that community members post civilly and substantively on Hacker News or not at all, because we're here to learn and to gratify our intellectual curiosity. Any substantive discussion of the merit of the original post would include information, which your comment lacked.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Live stream with interpretation into 61 different languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.lds.org/general-conference/live/languages?lang=eng

<comment><AUTHOR> I am LDS, but I'm honestly not trying to proselyte by posting this (so let's not make this into a comment thread about religion, please?). As an armchair linguist, I just think it's really neat to be able to hear the same material in this many different languages, live.

Does anyone know of any other events like this, where speech is interpreted into tens of languages live (and broadcast)? It looks like the UN General Assembly is only interpreted into ~10 languages.</comment>


Ask HN: Who Owns A.com? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Looks like it might be iana.org

[https://www.whois.com/whois/a.com](https://www.whois.com/whois/a.com)</comment>


Google offering consumer surveys - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

<comment><USER2> They announced this in April: [http://googlesmb.blogspot.com/2012/03/fast- accurate-and-affo...](http://googlesmb.blogspot.com/2012/03/fast-accurate-and- affordable-way-to-do.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @chaud Wow I don't know how I completely missed it until now. Good catch though</comment>


Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics? - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/make-physics-real-again <comment><USER3> > _Bohr postulated a distinction between the quantum world and the world of > everyday objects. A "classical" object is an object of everyday experience. > It has, for example, a definite position and momentum, whether observed or > not. A "quantum" object, such as an electron, has a different status; it's > an abstraction. Some properties, such as electrical charge, belong to the > electron abstraction intrinsically, but others can be said to exist only > when they are measured or observed._

This is a common error. Macroscopic "everyday" objects don't have a definite position and momentum. Macroscopic objects are quantum objects. But when the mass is big enough, the position and momentum can be defined simultaneously with an error that is so small that you can just ignore the uncertainty and approximate them as classical objects.

(Looking at them as classical objects is just a good approximation, like ignoring the gravity force of the Moon in most common situations.)

Anyway, the measurement problem is a real problem and nobody knows how to solve it. The current fade is to use decoherence to explain it. It is a promising idea, so I hope that in a few years/decades/centuries we can give a good explanation of the measurements that avoid anything that looks like magic.

<comment><USER4> > This is a common error. Macroscopic "everyday" objects don't have a definite > position and momentum. Macroscopic objects are quantum objects. But when the > mass is big enough, the position and momentum can be defined simultaneously > with an error that is so small that you can just ignore the uncertainty and > approximate them as classical objects.

To put this into simpler terms:

Whenever we measure something, we need to throw something at it and then have that something rebound and hit us again. In most experiments, we throw photons and have them rebound into our eyes.

Throwing a photon against a "classical object" \- a chair, a ladder, bacteria - is like throwing a tennis ball against a skyscraper. You throwing that does not have no effect at all, but it's very much negligible.

But when trying to measure quanta, you're now throwing your tennis ball at a football, or at another tennis ball. You're gonna be lucky, if it rebounds at all, instead of just pushing the object that you're trying to measure out of the way. (You also don't have any smaller balls to throw.)

That's why when you measure something in quantum physics, you only know that it has this exact value in the moment that you measure it. It's going to be pushed away because you threw something at it, so after your measurement it has a different value.

You also can't observe it over a longer period, so there's no way to know whether it was only in that moment at your measured position or a long time beforehand.

<comment><USER5> I don't think this analogy holds up. Consider the double slit experiment: throw a bunch of basketballs at a wall and see what pattern of hits they leave by looking at where they hit the wall. If the wall is being looked at (observed), we see one pattern. If we look away, conduct the experiment, then check it, we find another.

To me that suggests the act of "observance" effects the probability distribution of likely states. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, then it doesn't really fall, it just has a probability of having fallen that is not resolved until someone goes to check. How does your analogy account for those effects? For me, it looks like quantum collapse is causing the states of these objects to become "resolved" where at first they were "unresolved" and this suggests we live in a universe that knows how to save on memory and is fundamentally probabilistic.

<comment><USER3> There are two walls. One wall has two slits, the other wall is where the particles/waves/balls/whatever colide and form the interference pattern (or not).

You don't need someone observing the second wall to get the interference patters. You can replace the person with a photographic plate, a CCD sensor of a camera, or other equipment. All off them are more precise, reliable and even cheaper than a graduate student with paper and pencil.

The problem is if you try to add some type of equipment to first wall to collect information about how the particles/waves/balls/whatever passed thru it. Whatever equipment you add it will disturb the flow and it will kill the interference pattern.

This is not a technological problem. It is how the universe work. If you propose to use some particular method (like using light to detect the balls) you will sooner or later find that there is something that gets broken (see the former comment).

An important detail is that if you use a macroscopic object like a basketball, the slits size and the slits separation must be tiny (less than a millionth of the size of the nucleus of an atom, probably much less). So you intuition about how thinks work in the macroscopic level is not a good guide to how thinks work in the microscopic level. In the macroscopic level you can approximate the basketball as a perfect classic solid. It's just an approximation, a very good approximation.

<comment><USER6> > This is not a technological problem. It is how the universe work. If you > propose to use some particular method (like using light to detect the balls) > you will sooner or later find that there is something that gets broken (see > the former comment).

what confuses me in various explanations like this is that the whole 'act of observing affects what you observe' thing seems to be rather particular in that it turns the wave-like behavior into particle-like behavior, which strikes me as rather weird/counter-intuitive. Why don't we just get slightly different interference patterns? Or some spectrum of effect between wave-like and particle-like?

Is my confusion mostly a result of the limits of the analogies presented to me as a layman?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a bit ungenerous to physicists to suggest they've simply shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The first couple of paragraphs outline reasons why quantum mechanics has gained so much traction. The various attempts to understand its more difficult results have turned out to be notoriously difficult to substantiate or disprove experimentally.

I don't actually dispute the socialogical forces the author describes as they apply to physics research but I don't think apparent lack of progress is due to lack of concern amongst the physics community.

</comment><comment><USER8> There have been several books recently that describe the saga of twentieth century quantum physics, culminating in the realisation that entangelement is a real thing that has consequences. My favourite is "The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn" by Louisa Gilder. It's a fun book.

The history is fascinating. I'm waiting for a book that describes the deeper sociological aspect. A book with attitude. For instance, several of the founders of quantum physics had mystico-philosophical things to say about the quantum. But all of this was thrown out the window with the advent of the second world war. Physics became overrun by calculations. It took quite a while for people to get around to thinking about entanglement again. John Bell struggled for decades to get people to notice his work on this. Even the guy that invented the laser was met with stern disbelief when he presented his results to the "elders". Partly this is science just doing its thing, but there also does seem to be a history of science being dragged, kicking and screaming. Especially with quantum physics.

</comment><comment><USER9> Essentially because of Feynman's teaching that quantum mechanics works accurately to predict the results of experiments, that that is EVERYTHING, and that "paradoxes" and "intuition" are suspect.

<comment><USER10> And we can actually listen here Feynman's answer to " _what is the meaning of..._ " and " _why_ " questions:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA)

Note, despite the title of somebody presenting this segment of his talk, he definitely doesn't talk just about "magnets" but really about "the meaning" and "why" questions (the youtube poster got it). About the needed "expected framework" to avoid "perpetual why questions" etc. Even the things that we take for granted, e.g. using electricity in our day to day life, or the eventual "why" we don't fall through the floor _can 't_ be properly explained using just our "common" intuition.

In another direction, it works, we are "used" to see some effects of the electrical forces all the time, so that's what is "intuitive" to us because we're familiar with it.

So back to the original title of the article submission here: "why ... shrugged off the paradoxes..." it can be easily seen that once one is getting an answer inside of the expected framework, one doesn't "shrug it off," one is actually satisfied with the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the observes are in super position and measurement collapses us and the world. Thus there are no nonlocal effects rather we just get rid of multiple universes which were averages together and pick one, or at least the subset of possible universes that correspond to that particular measurement. Thus instead of non local effects one selects from multiple existing solutions at present and discard the rest.

I think this makes a lot more sense.

The other alternative was we are in a simulation and it has variable levels of resolution (wave verses particle) and it will computer higher resolutions on demand (eg observers), but that these on demand increases in resolution affect the simulation going forward. This seems to be overly complex thus I prefer the first interpretation.

I am a layman in this area so I am probably wrong.

There must already exist a formal name for this? Isn't this where multiverses comes into play?

</comment><comment><USER12> quantum mechanics has two different laws that describe how a system changes in time.

Rule 1 says that except during a measurement, the wave evolves smoothly and deterministically, exploring every possibility.

Rule 2 says that during a measurement of position, the wave collapses around the position where it's seen, with a probability proportional to the square of the height of the wave, before the collapse.

It is only Rule 2 that mentions probabilities at all.

And, Rule 1 and Rule 2 are in catastrophic tension with each other.

Rule 1 says that there are always all possible outcomes. Rule 2 says there is only 1 outcome and it's picked out with some probability rule.

It's pretty contradictory - is there one outcome or all outcomes?

> youtube.com/watch?v=Zri9gS1w5ok Perimeter's Lee Smolin will argue that the > problems that have bedeviled quantum physics since its inception are > unsolved and unsolvable for the simple reason that the theory is incomplete.

<comment><USER13> And I never understand what is a "measurement". Has it something to do with a human being observing it? Isn't any measurement just electromagnetic or gravitation forces acting on it, which act all the time?

<comment><USER14> A measurement is an interaction that crosses the Heisenberg cut separating the quantum from the classical world. Eg you prepare an atom in a superposition of states relative to some 'quantization axis' determined by a Stern-Gerlach apparatus. The state will randomly 'collapse' into one of the available final states, resulting in a macroscopic dot on some screen. You and all your physicist buddies will agree on the placement of the dot.

There is no agreement on how this happens, complicated by the fact that there is no such thing as a classical world I alluded to above, ie any interactions with the apparatus and the conscious observers supposedly obey the laws of quantum mechanics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is the general feeling among theoretical physicists when it comes to breakthroughs in resolving these paradoxes? Decades ago there was great optimism about string theory and similar, followed by a long period of disillusionment . What is the guesstimates now for the next big breakthrough such as unifying gravity and QM? Is it seen as something achievable in the near/foreseeable future, or is it considered to be a far future achievement comparable to say interstellar travel ("we'll get there if we aren't extinct by then, but our current civilization will seem primitive by the time we do")?

</comment><comment><USER16> As Wheller said "It from bit". It seems to me that when physicists can to consider observation, collapse and physic phenomenas gennerally as some kind of informatinal processes, then quantumn puzzles about reality will be resolved. I think them not sussessed yet because this is incredible difficult task; not because this wrong way. May be it will be something like informational multiverse. Some principle like multiverse branches selection to keep "information conservation law" (as another manifistation of unitarity) can explain nonlocality ect..

</comment><comment><USER17> because it's really hard, and they need to publish :)

\-- phd in physics

<comment><USER18> What, you don't want to be a 10th year grad student then post-doc till your mid-to-late 30's?

Also, to be honest, those problems are kind of boring.

:)

\-- phd in physics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> These idea is interesting, but, I had a different idea, is constraint interpretation. Mathematics is the real reality. For example, some equations can have multiple solutions, such as x^2+2x-3=0 can be 1 or -3. If you make the experiment that you have a entangled photons and you are on a different planet, you can measure it and if the people on other planet measure it in the same way they will get the same answer; it doesn't go "instantly" or at any other speed; the constraint is they are same, and this entanglement propagates backward in time from the point of view from both experimenters; it doesn't say if one is "before" or "after" another one. You can trace it backward in time to the source and forward in time to the other experimenter, and that is the line of the constraint.

</comment><comment><USER20> > Pascual Jordan, an important member of Bohr's circle, cut the Gordian knot: > An electron does not have a position until it is observed; the observation > is what compels it to assume one. Quantum mechanics makes statistical > predictions about where it is more or less likely to be observed.

The things physicists will say instead of "we don't know the answer".

</comment><comment><USER21> All human models of reality are flawed. It is improbable that our small minds will ever comprehend the nature of the universe in it's entirety. Each answer uncovers more questions, more paradoxes.

That is not to say we should not continue to try to understand the world around us. Only that logic dictates that we proceed with humility.

<comment><USER22> > _All human models of reality are flawed._

Definitely. I wholeheartedly subscribe to this view ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong)). The thinking mind will always be confined to models. The way I see it, the questions posed here are an expected wall one will eventually hit when the mind attempts to explain something that is fundamentally inexplicable - i.e the nature of existence.

My current intuition is that the hard philosophical questions posed by probing deep into what matter essentially is are deeply linked to the hard problem of consciousness.

I'll make an even bolder claim, which is that both of these questions arise from a misunderstanding of what consciousness actually is and that no less than a Copernican revolution in understanding its role is what's needed to put them to rest.

Of course, that won't be the end of physics, as the mystery is endless - <USER2> it might be the start of a deeper humility and appreciation of that mystery.

<comment><USER23> The rise in visibility of subjective science (science of consciousness/spirituality) and integration of it with objective science will accomplish that.

Luckily the subjective sciences are already highly developed, just look at Kabbalah. You can read a thousand pages of it and you still won't understand a single word!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I feel someone else may have said that, but simply said, what if the phenomenon is a wave, and its observable effect a particle? Isn't it the fact that the wave hits matter that makes it observable / measurable. Doesn't seem incompatible, even with the monitors, with the double slits experiment

<comment><USER13> I think a lot of hidden variables theories have been discredited.

[https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/374266/what- are-...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/374266/what-are-non- local-hidden-variables)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Correct me if I am wrong, the "paradoxes" described here are due to our lack of understanding of the theory right and not because the theory is inconsistent.

<comment><USER26> In what circumstance does that _not_ describe a paradox?

<comment><USER27> For instance, Russel's paradox arises from an inconsistent naive set theory.

<comment><USER26> Ah, good example. I guess that's fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They aren't paradoxes of quantum mechanics.

They are a paradox between how we intuitively expect the world to work and reality. Our intuition is wrong.

<comment><USER29> Yes there are. Even without invoking any philosophical issues, quantum mechanics admits it's not self-contained. It takes measurement - the act of an outsider interacting with a system, which collapses the wavefunction, as a postulate. Measurement is not described by quantum mechanics.

<comment><USER30> No, there is not. The Everett aka many-worlds interpretation demonstrates that you can explain the observed effects of measurement without invoking "collapse" of the wave function, and without reference to anything outside of QM.

<comment><USER31> Requiring the existence of something that is fundamentally impossible to detect, is a poor resolution to the problem.

If there are many worlds, how is it decided which one we are in?

MWI is scientifically equivalent to collapse, it's just imagined as a branching instead of a selection among alternatives.

<comment><USER32> MWI is what happens when you _don 't_ require the existence of anything extra (collapse phenomenon). It's like how <the way sound emitters change pitch when the observer is moving> isn't an unexplained phenomenon--it results from the evolution of the observer's perspective. In MWI there is no event corresponding to collapse for the same reason that Gallileo's model doesn't have any correlate of epicycles.

<comment><USER33> In MWI the event corresponding to collapse is the supposed appearance of an entire universe, which is - conveniently - impossible to detect. And which "explains" any one timeline of experience as "Actually, that's still just random."

So MWI goes from "That's random and we don't know why" to "That's random, we don't know why, but now we've added a universe too, although we can't prove it exists."

Something about this doesn't seem entirely convincing.

<comment><USER34> > In MWI the event corresponding to collapse is the supposed appearance of an > entire universe, which is - conveniently - impossible to detect.

My layman's understanding was that MWI doesn't postulate multiple universes. Rather, it posits that all particles are always in superpositions of states. What looks like a collapse to a single state is actually the particles under observation getting entangled with the particles that compose the observer: so, in the case of the double-slit experiment, you have a combined particle- observer system in a superposition of the states (particle goes through left slit / observer sees left detector activated) and (particle goes through right slit / observer sees right detector activated). Nothing has actually changed other than that entanglement: nothing is created or appears, certainly not an entire new universe.

ETA: like I say, I'm a layman, so I'd welcome any correction.

<comment><USER14> Your description looks right to me. Note that the many-worlds interpretation was originally named the theory of the universal wave-function. You get there by trying to eliminate wave-function collapse and Heisenberg cuts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> For the same reason psychologists have shrugged off the fact that most papers cannot be replicated.

<comment><USER36> Quantum mechanical experiments get replicated time and time again. There is nothing even resembling the reproducibility crisis in quantum mechanics. The issue discussed in the article is only about interpreting why the results always come out exactly like we predict, not any issues with the results or reporting of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It seems to me that the resolution of the quantum mysteries might come from three sources: (1) the Holographic Principle, (2) Dark Matter, and (3) the Planck Length.

1\. The Holographic Principle. The universe looks three dimensional but fundamentally it is different. 3-D space is a projection from some 2-D circuit board. If I believe that, then I have no problem hearing about (a) hidden variables or (b) spooky action at a distance.

2\. Dark Matter. The universe is 98% unaccounted for. Could it be that space is not a vacuum? Perhaps we are like fish in water, moving through it but taking it for granted. How can "something" have travelled through "nothing" (a vacuum) anyway? Maybe there's an aether after all.

3\. The Planck Length. Space is not an infinitely smooth line but instead there is a fundamental bit size. We thought atoms were it, that's how they got their name ("atom" means uncuttable). Later we found inside them protons and neutrons, and within those, quarks. Someone therefore might imagine that we could go on subdividing forever. But the Planck Length is a hard stop: 0.000000000000000000000000000000016 of a millimeter.

If we are immersed in invisible water, then it's unsurprising that there are "waves." And yet if there is a fundamental smallest size, like the grains of photographic film, then it's not all that weird to say that you can think of matter as particles. Perhaps that's all that a "particle" is, a piece of the water.

<comment><USER3> 2) As far as I know, Dark Matter is totally unrelated to the quantum mysteries (uncertainty principle, measurement problem, ...)

3) In elementary particles, the magnetic moment is twice the expected value of a fake classical particle of the same mass and charge (for a complete accurate explanation see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_\(physics\)) ) For elementary particles the number is 2. For non elementary particles, it can be any number.

For electrons/muons/quarks the number is almost 2, and the difference is caused because the elementary particle has a cloud of virtual particles around. We can calculate this correction quite well. So there is a high chance that electrons/muons/quarks are actually elementary particles.

Anyway, I don't understand how the subdivision of the current elementary particles is related to the quantum mysteries. You get the same mysteries with electrons (that are probably elementary) and with protons (that are definitively not elementary).

<comment><USER38> You're correct, particle physics or QFT is not needed to appreciate the fundamental QM "mysteries", any non-trivial evolving measurable observable will do.</comment></comment></comment>


How the iPod's Creator Is Making Home Heating Sexy - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/10/nest_thermostat/all/1

<comment><USER2> An object like this, which on its face evidences that a great amount of care and attention to detail went into it, immediately has my attention. Now let's hope it works as beautifully as it looks because I sincerely hate my thermostat.</comment>


Stop assuming people don't like you to solve 90% of your social problems - <AUTHOR> http://worthyinside.com/how-to-stop-assuming-people-dont-like-you-to-solve-90-of-your-social-problems/ <comment><USER2> To me the big epiphany was how little thought almost anybody gives to me (or anybody else), like or dislike. I reached it when I realized how little time _I_ spent thinking about other people.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. That awkward thing from years back that still makes you cringe inside? Extremely long odds that no one actually remembers it, and probably wouldn't even if reminded (and if they do and are that unforgiving, they're not the sort of person that matters anyway). Relax and get on with life...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why (some) drinking was always so effective for me in social situations.

</comment><comment><USER5> Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.</comment>


Wisp – A Scala library that offers interactivity for iterative development - <AUTHOR> http://quantifind.com/blog/2015/01/wisp-is-scala-plotting/

<comment><USER2> Awesome job, guys. I was just wondering recently if there's something like matplotlib but for Scala and there you go.

By the way, have you ever came across something similar to python's pandas but in Scala? Specifically I'm looking for DataFrame functionality, where you can read a dataset where column might have different types and then slice and dice this data in a way you want. The closest I found is Breeze but it supports only numerical types . And Saddle, but it supports only 3 columns as far as I understood. Anything else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks! I know internally at Quantifind we've built a lot of dataframe functionality ourselves, to help the transition for people coming from R.

I've played a little with Breeze and it didn't really fit my style either.

Let me check with some of the R-minded folk and get back to you!

<comment><USER3> I've been looking for something like python's pandas as well, so curious what they say.

Loving Wisp! I've been needing something exactly like it and will definitely be making use of it. So thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> They shared the collective disappointment in the lacking data frame DSL

Currently evaluating RinScala if you'd like to check it out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it possible for Wisp to re-render only the modified graph? It seems the whole page is re-rendered in the demo. Does Wisp cache/memoize the graphs or re-compute the data points when it re-renders?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Github: [https://github.com/quantifind/wisp](https://github.com/quantifind/wisp)

<comment><USER5> If I'm not mistaken, it generates a js spec which is rendered by an embedded server. Looks great! My second thought though was scala.js, any plans to make this 'pure' js?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. There's definitely a lot to improve around rendering. I didn't know about scala.js, thanks for the pointer!

I'm not sure what you mean by pure js though - I try to make things scala whenever I can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Excellent demo! I love how easy this is to use.</comment>


How to disable Google "Signed-out search activity" - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/history/privacyadvisor/search <comment><AUTHOR> By default, even users not logged in to Google will accumulate a search history. To disable this, visit the submitted URL when not logged in to a Google account and scroll down to the "Signed-out Search activity" toggle. Use a browser mode that persists cookies (that is, don't use incognito mode).

Repeat on each device you browse from.

Here's the equivalent for YouTube watch history and search history: [https://www.youtube.com/feed/history](https://www.youtube.com/feed/history)

<comment><USER2>
      Use a browser mode that persists cookies

Does this imply that this process must be repeated anytime cookies are cleared?

<comment><AUTHOR> For those of us who use Google and YouTube while not logged in to a Google account, yes.</comment></comment></comment>


How to become a speaker? - <AUTHOR> http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2010/08/19/how-to-become-a-speaker.aspx <comment><USER2> Wind wire around yourself and get into MRI scanner's magnet.</comment>


Open Source Bridge hacker lounge - <AUTHOR> http://opensourcebridge.org/2009/03/open-source-conference-prerequisite-1-space-for-hacking/

<comment><USER2> This is definitely needed in Portland. I know so many people that would use it, including us (Mugasha Crew).

</comment><comment><USER3> I want to encourage everybody on HN to submit a talk to this conference, or register (but c'mon, submit a talk!). I know some of the people organizing it, and they're doing some really cool things.

<comment><USER4> As one of the folks helping organize the event, I'd like to say thanks for the kind words. And I agree with you 100% on Hacker News folks submitting talks. ;)</comment></comment>


Google fined $1.7B for ad practices that violated European antitrust laws - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/20/google-fined-nearly-billion-ad-practices-that-violated-european-antitrust-laws/ <comment><USER2> Dupe, comments there: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440926)</comment>


How to rickroll Spotify for Android - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kjempelodott/rickify <comment><USER2> Apart from being a very funny, this is a very nice MiTM "Hello World". A real- world application of something that is not very easy and straight forward. I remember trying to learn this stuff a few years ago and could never find a simple way of doing it.

Really great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> This raises the question of: why is Spotify on HTTP for the first seconds? Would it be to bypass the TLS handshake, hence a faster "start" time? Wouldn't a constant connection (à la WebSocket with TLS) fix this?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure if Spotify does this, my experience is mostly in video, but if some or all content is going to be encrypted, you start with a small http/unencrypted section and then get the license to play the encrypted part. This is because you can put the unencrypted section on a edge CDN but getting a license is going to have to go through a server that could have some significant time (say up to a couple of seconds depending). This makes it so you start right away (better UX).

I do have some experience in music, and this is likely for uncompressed or hidef playback. Some labels force encryption for hidef (but in general most of the music services stream straight progressive unencrypted even though their contracts require encryption in all cases).

Edit: but doing this is really tough. You're going to need to stitch together those two stream without a gap. This takes a lot of engineering. I've done this in flash and pure js. So this is not an arbitrary decision.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't the preview always end after N seconds, and the licensed stream always begin at the very next frame? Then it's just a matter of appending the licensed stream to the playback buffer after exhausting the preview stream.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. This is how you do it. But you'd be surprised how complicated this is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tried this both on Android and iOS and can confirm that it works :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I too feel that it's better to try alternate methods once the music starts playing

</comment><comment><USER8> Can also be used to intercept Instagram images: [http://imgur.com/3cYnSzl](http://imgur.com/3cYnSzl)

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice!</comment>


Tell HN: Try Opera 10 Browser. - <AUTHOR>

Tell HN: Try Opera 10 Browser. <comment><USER2> Why? I tried opera 9 and I tried Opera 6 or 7 before that. It is solid software that lacks any real hook that makes me want to use it tomorrow. If I am going to waste time on it again it is going to have to do a little convincing.

<comment><USER3> Have you try the mouse gestures?You can open,close,switch pages with simply movements. Not to mention the notes facility, in which you can store and retrieve part of a web page without save it all. And, with a simply click on the notes if you want more information, come back to the page. Try it! For me, apart from some little inconveniences, Opera !0 is an amazing tool. Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ask OP: Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just gave it a try and was pleasantly surprise. I am still not sure why. It seems fast and the UI is very simple.

<comment><USER5> Bit like IE8, FireFox and Chrome, then?</comment></comment></comment>