The Quest to Push a Human-Powered Bike to 90 MPH - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/04/human-powered-machines/

<comment><USER2> Last year, Guy Martin set the British cycle speed record of 112mph. Article at [http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/guy- martins-...](http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/guy-martins- record-breaking-rourke-speed-bike-118329) and a very brief video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT0eJXtrwHg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT0eJXtrwHg) \- the rules are somewhat different to this other attempt though!

<comment><USER3> Clarification: For the British record he was drafting behind a truck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting.

A question about the article style: is there a new trend about extra long articles?

<comment><USER2> FWIW, it's about 3090 words. For a feature article from a magazine, that's reasonably typical - it just looks long on the Web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _shameless plug_ A fellow sailor made the following video showing his velomobil in normal day traffic in a suburb of Cologne Germany.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UNAK8xkpBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UNAK8xkpBU)

Topspeed is "only" around 45mph (70km/h).</comment>


Show HN: Add NES & Wii-style control to your Flash game in 15 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://games.wanderplayer.com/developers/flash

<comment><AUTHOR> We're releasing an API for Flash: this enables Flash game developers to add all the fun things that iOS and Android game devs have enjoyed for years (motion control, vibration/audio feedback, touch & swipe gestures and more) to their own Flash games on the web. We'll soon release APIs for C/C++/Objective C with support for Unity, Java, and HTML5 to do the same thing. If you build games, reach out to us at email@example.com; we want to work with you to showcase your games to tens of thousands of new players.

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't know what's cooler, this project, or the index frame on your API page that tracks with the currently viewed text.</comment>


Tests suggest baby born with HIV may be cured - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/tests-suggest-baby-born-hiv-110639419.html

<comment><USER2> > _Doctors won 't call it a cure because they don't know what proof or how > much time is needed to declare someone free of HIV infection, long feared to > be permanent._

</comment><comment><USER3> Original report in the New England Journal of Medicine: [http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1302976](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1302976)

<comment><USER4> Summary: The child was born with HIV, from a mother with "relatively low viral load", and started on antiretroviral therapy 30 hours later, and continued for 20 months. (While not being breast feed, to avoid reinfection.) Resulting in controlled levels of HIV-1 viremia 18 months after treatment stopped. That sounds like early treatment being more successful, not a cure.

I also don't see a discussion about the potential long-term health issues caused by the treatment, although they do acknowledge the FDA has warnings against using some combinations of ART drugs for infants less than 14 days of age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> IANAD, but AFAIK, HIV tests check for antibodies: Your body's response to HIV. So how do they check that the virus is gone? AFAIK, the antibodies would remain in your system even if you killed the virus. I guess if the child didn't produce her own antibodies, then they'd be flushed out of her system eventually.

Are they looking at a lack of anti bodies to determine a lack of virus? Or, do they have a special test where they actually look for the virus? If the latter, why don't they use this test to determine if someone has HIV for everybody? I recall reading it takes up to 6 months for the antibodies to show up in your blood stream. If you could just look for the virus itself, wouldn't you know sooner?

<comment><USER6> You can use PCR to check for the presence of viral DNA or RNA (the "viral load"). It's a direct test for the virus and is relatively cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article suggests that no, there isn't a cure.</comment>


Ephemeral Environments for DevOps: Why, What and How? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://enterprisedevops.org/article/ephemeral-environment-why-what-how-and-where <comment><USER2> We need this so much.

The environment is part of the product. With software, if you can't easily and automatically recreate your builds from source, you have a problem.

This ought to apply to cloud environments too.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, as a dev-ops engineer, I'm trying to decide if I'm onboard with this idea. I still don't see the justification though.

The idea of provisioning an environment to test a branch seems like a lot of overhead. Concretely, how long does it take to spin up an environment, install the containers/app, and run tests?

I imagine the answer is going to be over an hour.

Definitely feels like a lot of overhead, particularly when most branches change ~.1% of an application's code and so theoretically the full-diff is kilobytes worth of data.

-

The alternative of course is just to have a pre-set number of build-servers (e.g. 5) and then have jenkins dynamically run jobs against them. Seems simpler, I assume faster, and just less risky.

<comment><USER4> > _The idea of provisioning an environment to test a branch seems like a lot > of overhead._

The idea of running integration tests on a non-complete environment seems like a lot of fun at the release.

> _Concretely, how long does it take to spin up an environment, install the > containers /app, and run tests?_

I work currently at the community-sized online bank, total time of our pipeline to spin up a new "bank" is 22 minutes, running multiple of these envs on 4 HDDs in RAID 10. We'd move the whole thing on flash array in 2 weeks and my estimation is that this metric will go down to 7-8 minutes.

> _The alternative of course is just to have a pre-set number of build-servers > (e.g. 5) and then have jenkins dynamically run jobs against them._

You have to run these builds somewhere, if changes would run on a single staging env, it would be down most of the time. If it would be a handful of stagings, it might be still not enough because either you wouldn't have enough of them and it'll ended up to the single env situation multiplied, or you would burn cash for idle servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow is this ever overkill.

This needs to be coupled with a lot more "how and we we picked this methodology" advise or information.

For example, if the goal is to reduce risk then is this the best way to approach that? Are all these components black boxes which cannot be stubbed out? Are there any other end to end or integration tests that can be ran in a canary environment that are way faster which will cover the most obvious use cases?

Id really think a few times before adopting this practice.

<comment><USER6> Currently DevOps tools do almost no testing or validation at all, it's like time traveling back to the 80s.

<comment><USER4> Internal validation of a backend system could be automated but that would be heck of a job, anything beyond that requires human to interact and report.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shameless plug: I'm currently working on a service that'll spin up / tear down environments automatically for each branch in your repo. We're focusing on the manual testing use case between designers and front-end engineers, so prod deployment is omitted from our featureset. But if you're looking to spin up ephemeral environments without building something yourself, check us out: [https://featurepeek.com](https://featurepeek.com)

<comment><USER8> Our product EnvKey[1] can also help to secure and simplify configuration of ephemeral environments—all you do is set a single ENVKEY environment variable, include an envkey library, and then all the secrets/credentials/config you need will be made available and kept in sync on each load. You also get a nice ui for editing variables and managing access. Ah, and all this is done without trusting a central server through the magic of end-to-end encryption. I think it could potentially jive well with a tool like yours given that proper secrets management can be a tricky piece of this puzzle.

1 - [https://www.envkey.com](https://www.envkey.com)

<comment><USER9> The primary problem with ephemeral environments isn't distributing secrets, it's provisioning the environment itself. It's perfectly fine to generate an empty, self contained, with dummy "abcd1234" passwords or randomly generated credentials that are used only locally.

<comment><USER8> That works for services you control, but if you depend on external services, and these are relevant to what you're attempting to test with a tool like FeaturePeek, then you still need to deal with credentials. Or am I missing something?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visions of the Future - aps-sids http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104124)

</comment><comment><USER2> I love these and wanted prints of them for myself and thought others might too (and I own a printery), so: [http://www.artfrom.space](http://www.artfrom.space)

<comment><USER3> You should ask SpaceX if you can print their retro space tourism posters from last year as well. You know... where these NASA artists probably got the idea from :)

[http://gizmodo.com/spacex-just-dropped-these-amazing- retro-m...](http://gizmodo.com/spacex-just-dropped-these-amazing-retro-mars- travel-pos-1704855680)

<comment><USER4> As that article mentions, JPL's exoplanet tourism posters preceded SpaceX's posters:

[http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/exoplanet_travel_bureau](http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/exoplanet_travel_bureau)

In any case, no need to ask SpaceX, the posters were released into the public domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lovely stuff. Reminds me of old British railway posters ...but in space!

[http://railwayposters.co.uk](http://railwayposters.co.uk)

</comment><comment><USER6> I like looking at stuff like this, but it's a completely unrealistic view of humanity's future.

If we're really lucky, the cities of the future will look something like those in Blade Runner (minus the part about people living offworld) or Dredd, or even the Mad Max movies. But more likely, things are going to look more like 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead, or the scene of the future in The Terminator.

<comment><USER7> Just on the off chance these are anything but tongue in cheek, I think at least wrt tourism it is completely unrealistic.

It's hard to see how the cost and difficulty of interplanetary travel could in any reasonable (or just any) time frame beat other, new, forms of entertainment and relaxation that may constitute or replace tourism in the future. Completely realistic VR 'holidays' to anywhere, simulated or invented, comes to mind as an obvious alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For people interested in getting these printed as posters, you could probably use FedEx: [http://www.fedex.com/us/office/poster- printing.html](http://www.fedex.com/us/office/poster-printing.html)

IKEA sells pretty cheap frames for stuff like this too: [http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/dec...](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/decoration/10789/)

<comment><USER9> $7/sqft? It looks like Costco is much cheaper: [http://www.costcophotocenter.com/Help#/topic/pricing- shippin...](http://www.costcophotocenter.com/Help#/topic/pricing-shipping)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a lot of respect both for the artists that made this and for the scientists pushing boundaries forward in a way that was almost inconceivable a decade ago.

That said, if anyone here works at JPL, I can't be (but feel like I am) the only person wondering what the hell happened to memex-explorer.

We are talking about the obvious change in search. If you are not familiar, the memex-explorer project seemed to be the first company that realized an open source tailored version of google can ve assembled out of Apache open source projects. You define a crawl structure and save your data into silos you control while using your own parameters to search.

However, despite what appeared to be solid progress and the initial buzz of articles labeling the google killer- and to be clear this tech will evolve in 1-2 years and diminish googles adverts, the project has a simple commit that says:

Not actively maintained.

Why did JPL stop working on this? Darpa brought the world TOR so they do deliver projects that could potentially be problematic to the gov't, so I don't want to jump into conspiracy theories, but what the fuck.

Tl;dr super obvious hadoop, solr, dns and elastic search is pretty much google and the browser can never be decoupled from search. JPL got close to giving the user all 3 in unity under their control and then project was abandoned. I'll say it i guess, having 50% concentration in browsing and the only proper centralization of most peoples thoughts is a big loss to google, and if I am being honest I think the govt.

<comment><USER11> Why don't you e-mail continuum and report back:

[https://www.continuum.io/contact-us](https://www.continuum.io/contact-us)

<comment><USER10> i emailed who I believe to be the lead dev.

edit: email bounced to support. Since the email was a super autistic and sarcastic look at the ecosystem as I made a case for continued development, the support guy whose desk it bounced to from the lead dev, was forgiveably baffled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> These are great. Something I've always found interesting is how often "looking to the future" campaigns harken back to decades-old iconic art styles. That's not a criticism. I love the juxtaposition of concept and style.

Side note: Am I the only one that sees the No Man's Sky reference in the Venus poster?

</comment><comment><USER13> Am I the only one getting bad CRC errors when extracting the files from the zip with all the images?

$ sha256sum ALL_POSTERS.zip

b77b67acc0d1a74cfe79ad1c223ccf801da5651b407e60d7ce225cda31623354 ALL_POSTERS.zip

It's a 672'712'771 bytes file.

The single image downloads seems to be OK.

</comment><comment><USER14> Level Frames is printing and framing these now! (Disclosure: I'm a founder) [https://www.levelframes.com/collections/visions-of-the- futur...](https://www.levelframes.com/collections/visions-of-the-future)

</comment><comment><USER15> As a fan of The Expanse the release of posters like this was very timely. While there is obviously no tie in I am just glad to have another very good scifi show on and interest in space not waning

</comment><comment><USER16> Ah yes, the infamous photobombing Cowboys of Europa...

</comment><comment><USER17> FTA:

> Imagination is our window into the future.

Maybe. But the outlook is from the past, and is subject to the past's failures and to failures of the imagination that are due to the juvenile foible of nostalgia. These posters are, after all, riffs in the genre of travel marketing, which is designed to sell the experience of a place as more than it is; they push a particular and motivated hyper-reality. This betrays their appeal as a longing to be deceived, a longing that is all too happily filled by the marketing arm of JPL.

The very idea that "space travel" is anything like "travel" in the vacationing sense is mere wordplay. Who among us can take 4 years off to "vacation" to Mars? Or 3 for Venus, to stare at the clouds? Who among us wants to die of embrittled bones and radiation sickness in a tin can?

No proper vision of the future can come from the myopic eyes developed in the dim light of popular history. These posters are adolescent fantasy, and mature minds knowingly smirk at the naivete of those so stunted as to be taken in.

EDIT: FWIW, I expect the down-votes. Bringing reality into a discussion about space fantasy always brings down-votes. It's a measure of the quality of discussion on HN.

<comment><USER18> Intercontinental travel was once like this, too. Take several months to make a horrible journey that could very well kill you. Now you can do it in under a day, safely, for a very reasonable price, with just a mild discomfort.

I think the point of these pieces is to make us think about the possibility that some day technology will have advanced so much that this is possible. Maybe we'll get there faster, or we'll develop a way to live longer so it won't matter.

<comment><USER19> Or maybe not - the Grand Tour[1] was historically restricted a wealthy elite, after all. I guess it depends on the time scale of the perspective.

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


Should I use Vagrant or Docker for creating an isolated environment? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/a/21314566 <comment><USER2> Cool to see the authors of both vagrant and docker contribute their answers to the question.

I've actually been running docker containers inside of vagrant for a few months now at work. We're moving to a service oriented architecture and the more services we add the more complex it becomes for us to get new engineers up and running on their development environment.

We're using docker-compose to orchestrate all of the services inside of vagrant and it's been working so far for our development environments. Our next step is to switch our staging servers over to docker containers once we get all our engineers running vagrant + docker locally.</comment>


Is Microsoft running out of steam? - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Is-Microsoft-running-out-of-steam-1102654.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _Android has a patent fee. It's not like Android's free. You do have to license patents. HTC's signed a license with us and you're going to see license fees clearly for Android as well as for Windows._

seems to be the only good thing happening in the mobile world at the moment for microsoft.

<comment><USER2> I hated Windows Mobile 6.x and its predecessors.

Windows 7 Phone actually seems nice, despite the stupid name. It might be too little too late, but I think it has a UI that is both novel and distinct from the iPhone. The only other phone OS currently on the market that I can also say that about is WebOS.

I'm probably in the minority, but I think the Achilles heel of the Windows 7 Phone is that Microsoft is farming out the hardware to multiple manufacturers.</comment></comment>


C++ encapsulation for Data-Oriented Design - <AUTHOR> http://bannalia.blogspot.com/2015/08/c-encapsulation-for-data-oriented-design.html

<comment><USER2> This is awful. Some reasons, in no particular order

\- Straight up, this isn't data oriented. You're dealing with one object at a time.

\- This code is vastly harder to understand in its entirety, much less extend, than the data oriented approach. This is template craziness to it's fullest degree, and what it's doing is going to be unfamiliar to the vast majority of programmers. Hell, I've read an article, and have been staring at for 15 minutes now and I'm not fully sure. Admittedly, I'm a bit rusty with my templates, but that's a very bad sign for maintainability.

\- Memory access patterns aren't the only reason to do DOD, a big one is being able to easily simd optimize your code. This defeats that.

\- If you're _not_ going to simd optimize your code, then storing everything as SoA is often not a great idea (you want to group the things you touch at the same time, so that you have fewer cache misses).

\- You can still have encapsulation with data oriented code. It's just encapsulated at a different granularity (you encapsulate access to the data arrays).

<comment><USER3> I think the idea here is just to put names onto traditional SOA. Thus, instead of doing `foo_xs[k] += foo_dxs[k]`, one does `foo.x += foo.dx` and lets it all magically resolve itself.

In theory, this should help the compiler automatically vectorize (than AOS), but even if it doesn't it still allows you to use a slightly higher-level interface for loading your values for manual SIMD.

Note that at the end, the poster says

> Traversal is at the core of DOD, as the paradigm is oriented towards > handling large numbers of like objects. In a later entry we will extend this > framework to provide for easy object traversal and measure the resulting > performance as compared with OOP.

I also agree that recursive templates are a pain, but "modern" C++ kind'a expects you to use them anyway. As recursive templates go, this one isn't all that bad to use.

<comment><USER4> I suspect it's far more likely for "foo_xs[k] += foo_dxs[k]" to be auto-vec'd than for "foo.x += foo.dx" via templates to be auto-vec'd. The first is very straightforward and obvious with a clean auto-vec route, the later is not.

<comment><USER3> I've obviously not benchmarked, but from what I can see all the complexity is in the templates, which only exist at compile-time. From what it looks like to me, it should all dissolve before the optimizer gets to peek at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Veedrac, some results at

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177262)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would worry that trying to shoehorn the code back into an entity-at-a-time OO-style interface still encourages poor access patterns. I much prefer the bitsquid approach which treats component managers as the objects and provides nice bulk-access apis for each:

[http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/08/building-data- oriented-...](http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/08/building-data-oriented- entity-system.html)

[http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/09/building-data- oriented-...](http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/09/building-data-oriented- entity-system.html)

[http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/10/building-data- oriented-...](http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/10/building-data-oriented- entity-system.html)

[http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/10/building-data- oriented-...](http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/10/building-data-oriented- entity-system_10.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Best approach imo would be a IDE which keeps the whole object-orientated approach as a purely developer-view only set of restrictiosns and allows to adapt the underlying datastructure to the algorithmic hottest spots in the code, while keeping from oo- only the component interfaces.

Thanks for the Bitsquid links.

<comment><USER7> If you have a few hours, have a look at Jon Blow's new language, Jai.

Most of the content is in video form so not easy to grok, but there is essentially a way to switch from Array of Structs to Struct of Arrays with a single keyword. This gets you many of the benefits of Data-Oriented Programming with minimal effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really hate private, protected, sealed and such. At least few times I found myself in situation that I needed to use some library in ways author haven't anticipated or create workaround for a bug there.

I had to recompile it and duplicate large parts of the library code just because somebody put private, protected or sealed for no apparent reason in few places.

In JS keeping classes only as local variables not exposed in any way to user of the library has the same effect. Please don't do it. If you want me not to shoot myself in the foot then create good api, not just try to hide the gun in the closet. I'll find it anyway and the more time I spend looking for it, the less time I'll have to understand how to operate it safely.

</comment><comment><USER9> It'd be nice to see some benchmarks...

</comment><comment><USER10> We're at a crossroads in CPU design. The hardware guys implement heuristics to make ordinary code work "pretty good", with cache lines and multiple layered caches and register calculus and stalling pipelines.

Then compiler folks reverse-engineer all that to get "really good" performance. But they can't make one code for every model of CPU because this stuff changes with each release.

How about, CPU leaves these decisions up to the compiler? Flatten and simplify, and make (allow) compiler writers to know exactly what's going on, and even control it!

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Software prefetching? Software branch prediction? Those sound like pretty poor ideas if that is indeed what you mean - a lot of time will be spent emulating something that hardware does really well.

<comment><USER10> E.g. the Mill architecture, which has no register-collision issues at all. At the cost of the compiler keeping track of the address of results as they pass through the mill.

And hardware doesn't do it well at all, at least not in the super-optimization cases discussed in the OP. They're working hard to reverse-engineer around the hardware; which is at least as hard as the compiler programming caches and pipelines explicitely.

<comment><USER4> Mill has two issues:

1) It doesn't exist. Theory is irrelevant, build an actual chip and run some actual software on it and then let's talk.

2) VLIW of 33 operations? Ain't no way in hell they are keeping that fed. Not happening. AMD couldn't keep a VLIW of 5 fed on their GPUs. They dropped to VLIW4, then switched to a RISC SIMD approach. And that's with a compiler that only has to deal with a very constrained grammar that almost never encounters branches. Which is about as far from general purpose workloads as you can get.

<comment><USER3> Issue #1 is a big deal, but they've never said otherwise.

Issue #2 is less of a reason to worry. The 33 instructions is an upper limit, and will likely be a lot lower on most implementations. They also don't expect, nor need, it to be saturated.

Further, their instruction set is much more amiable to parallelism than normal instruction sets because

* Their instructions have special values (NaN and NaR) that enable extra parallelism.

* Their instructions avoid side effects that prevent parallelism. This includes not just condition codes, but effectively the whole belt mechanism.

* Their instructions can move data across themselves horizontally (under certain phase boundaries), so certain data dependencies are allowed _inside_ an instruction. In essence, you're running at three-to-five times the clock rate but each clock is only allowed to run a given subset of instructions.

There's an example they give where the whole of a vectorized strcpy iteration is done in one instruction, with no set-up or tear-down needed. This is of course a best-case scenario, in that every technique they have is in use simultaneously, but all of the techniques they give are generally applicable and (relatively speaking) simple for compilers to use.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Automating Optimization of Quantized Deep Learning Models on CUDA - <AUTHOR> https://tvm.ai/2019/04/29/opt-cuda-quantized.html <comment><USER2> Nice work accelerating convolutional models! It might be better to see (or cite papers about) the trade-off how model performance (accuracy, etc) changes w.r.t. how it is quantized.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> With learning-based program optimizer, we can competitive performance on benchmark models and significant boost on emerging models against TensorRT(int8).</comment>


ShowHN: We tried to raise the bar with this guide to running giveaways - <AUTHOR> http://www.viralsweep.com/advanced-sweepstakes-guide/?hackernews

<comment><USER2> There is extensive law covering sweepstakes -- often specific to country and state. Does ViralSweep guide me through the process of ensuring that my sweepstakes remains within those legal constraints?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment, we supply a template for sweepstakes run in the USA and Canada under a certain prize value ($5,000; otherwise the promotion needs to be registered in several states). Sweepstakes law, as you said, is extensive so we're taking our time to ensure we handle it in the proper manner before offering global advisement.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can average programmers create great startups? - <AUTHOR> I am a pretty average programmer but I have a great passion of building startups. I have a degree in CS. I am fascinated by the startups build at YC. They have amazing tech. I am 26. I can work to improve my skills but probably not reach the level of competency other developers have. Can I start a startup now and still be able to compete with others? <comment><USER2> Yes. Startup success requires technology, of course.

But what gives you the edge isn't having the best code. It's building quickly, finding product-market fit, and masterfully marketing a good-enough product.

<comment><USER3> This 100%. Technology is nice and all, but success is about answering people's problems, not about the technical details of how you do that.

In fact, I'd say a good 50% of startups (or more) now fail because they put all their focus on the tech and have no idea how to get normal people to use their product. You can see it all the time with 'alternatives' to sites like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/YouTube/whatever. Oh joy, you're using a blockchain with machine learning technology written with the latest JavaScript framework. And? Who cares, no one's using your damn site because it's got nothing worthwhile on it. Focus on building a community, not an engineering team.

So yeah, an average programmer can create a great startup. They just need to focus on getting people to use their service or product rather than coding a fancy one.</comment></comment>


Treehotel: The Mirrorcube - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehotel.se/?pg=mirrorcube <comment><USER2> "To prevent birds from flying into the mirrored walls, they have been clad with infrared film. The colour is invisible to humans, but visible to the birds."

Nice. I wonder where they buy theirs?

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you serious? $650 a night to stay in a treehouse with no shower or toilet? It would seem that after Ikea, the swedes think they can sell anything.

<comment><USER4> According to the website, there's a bathroom.</comment></comment>


Smokescreen - a Flash player written in Javascript and HTML5	 - <AUTHOR> http://smokescreen.us/2010/05/07/slide-1/ <comment><USER2> There is also Gordon: <http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/>

<comment><USER3> WTF?

<http://www.cliki.net/Gordon>

<comment><USER4> TTF: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_gordon>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I don't understand is all the people praising HTML5 because it uses less CPU than Flash yet Chrome ends up using 15-20% CPU just to render a simple animation unlike Flash.

<comment><USER6> Some people probably just assume that switching to HTML5 content always uses fewer CPU resources. There are plenty of informed reasons to prefer HTML content over Flash though. One is that putting performance into the hands of multiple companies will introduce competition. Just like with Javascript speeds, you can expect browser-makers to start racing in other areas of HTML5 performance.

I wouldn't be surprised to see HTML5 outperform equivalent Flash content in a year or so.

<comment><USER5> Anyone could equally write their own version of Flash; the standard is freely available.

<comment><USER7> The amount of work required to do so is epic, and considering the rate of Flash's evolution it's like getting on a treadmill whose speed is controlled by Adobe.

<comment><USER8> Funny metaphor, and very accurate. However, HTML5 is like that same treadmill, only that people still have to build the treadmill itself. It's epic work times two.

<comment><USER9> HTML5 is mostly based on existing de facto standards. If you stick to those, you're good with HTML5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Posted 3 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387981>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry I haven't noticed. But I do have noticed <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387630> because it points to the page I was posting, the homepage. Too bad it hasn't became very popular

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If this means that animated advertisements and other ad agency annoyances will be coming soon to my iPad web browsing experience, put me down as a detractor.

<comment><USER12> The sad thing: the ads were coming anyway. If you build a popular platform like the iPad, the advertisers will find a way to get ads on it, whether it's with Flash or not.

But by banning Flash, Apple is pushing advertisers to HTML/Javascript, which ruins the experience for those marginal, blissful few who use Flash blockers on other platforms. Really, you couldn't have asked for a better indicator, short of a mandatory <lowvaluecontent> tag. :)

<comment><USER11> Hmmm... I wonder if we could build a bayesian filter for ad blocking rather than deal with explicit blacklists?

<comment><USER13> The question is not whether you can, but whether you should.

People who make things deserve to get paid. If you don't like what they make, fine, don't read it.

If you try and rip other people's content sponsors with a bayesian content classifier they'll be more likely to have subtler 'product placement' style sponsorship to avoid your ad ripper. They may also have things that appear as ads to your rip app that are required to navigate or read the site. However, rather than avoid a technical war, why not consider either going somewhere else or accepting that content you like is made by people who like being compensated for it?

<comment><USER11> I agree with your basic premise--that people deserve to get paid for providing me with value--but not with the mechanism of ads embedded in content.

A few reasons:

If the creator deserves to get paid, he can put up a pay wall and we can do business or I can go elsewhere. If that basic business model doesn't work, that is a strong hint that something is fundamentally broken about advertising.

Also, you pose it as giving me a choice of going elsewhere. How does that work when given a link on HN or in an email or whatever? On some sites, there's an ad right away and I can click a link to skip the ad, I can click "back," or I can look at the ad if it's interesting. Fine.

But if ads are embedded in content willy-nilly, I am blasted with them before I get to make the choice of whether to read the content. Again, there's something broken about the model if the content producer can't set up a simple gate where I can choose whether to do read their content+ads or go elsewhere.

Finally, ads in content are a deeply broken model. The reason Google is worth a zillion dollars is that ads at the moment of search are hitting me when I'm making a decision and they are providing value, even if they are biased. Ads in most types of content are hitting me when I'm not trying to make a decision.

There are some exceptions, and I'll bet they survive. An ad in StackOverflow for a programming tool that matches the answer to a question might work when I'm trying to solve a problem. If sites like that do a good job of working with ad networks to deliver the right ads, they might survive.

Almost all other content-based ads are going to continue to git shriller and shriller as they try to maximize dwindling attention. The attention is dwindling precisely because they are trying to work around a deeply broken interaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very cool. I look forward to a Chrome extension that automatically replaces flash objects with this.

<comment><USER15> Why would you want to do that for? You would still have the annoying ads (or whatever) plus the overhead of a chrome extension to convert them when the page loads!

<comment><USER16> Clearly somebody who really likes flash ads, but for some reason doesn't like adobe?

<comment><USER17> Yet he doesn't realize he's supporting Adobe and Flash...

<comment><USER14> I don't like flash on the web, but I do occasionally run across a site that requires flash for navigation. I thought an extension would be interesting. Also, I have an ad blocker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4>

yes, it's all still being improved and the engines will be a lot faster in a few years, but how about first creating a true alternative, then start bashing flash.

I don't mind getting rid of flash, but please, lets try to move forward with technology at the same time. Not two steps back, just to remove a competitor so we end up at the same point three years later...

<comment><USER18> well, that comment was not really related to smokescreen...just the general anti-flash movement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What are the footprint differences between the two? I assume FLV is compiled and optimized for running in the flash plugin...

<comment><USER20> None of the demos they show that I saw playback FLVs, where are you looking at those?

Also worth noting that in one of their demos they say that it only supports up to a "sizable subset of Flash 8" for playback currently. From: <http://smokescreen.us/demos/intro.html>

<comment><USER19> Whoops. I meant SWF. I'm wondering the footprint difference between the converted HTML5/JS code vs the compiled SWF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would really like to see a support table for smokescreen like Gordon has here: [http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/swf-tag-support- ta...](http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/swf-tag-support-table/)

</comment><comment><USER22> This could be a very revolutionary way to port flash to the IPad. There seems like an enormous value potential for that if it works well.

</comment><comment><USER23> Its amazing that Apple has caused innovation by banning flash. I wonder if this is sustainable, maybe an example of innovation?

<comment><USER24> I think it is just further proof that necessity is the mother of invention.

Flash was invented out of a need for artists to be able to create animations on the web. Now there is a back catalog of Flash content which is losing a home. A swf player of some kind is needed to preserve that content. Someone had to build this.

<comment><USER23> I completely agree with you. However, I don't think this is a invention directly out of necessity. Instead, I would say closed systems with a controlled goal might be the fertilizer for a better design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This needs to be packaged as a firefox addon and be completely transparent.

It would be great.

<comment><USER17> Why? Performance is worse and you're not "stickin" it to Adobe at all since you're still watching Flash content (SWF rendered in HTML5).

<comment><USER25> I'm not trying to "stick it". It's just an alternative to flash when the plugin is not available to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For all those people decrying this, and asking why the hell anyone would want Flash at all:

Some of us would like to play Flash games on the iOS.

That, and the porn.

That is all.

</comment><comment><USER27> In Chrome on Mac, the techno Strongbad Email played perfectly fine, and my computer didn't burn me. I'd say it's a success, though still lots of room to grow I imagine.

</comment><comment><USER28> #1 proof why Flash isn't needed anymore.

<comment><USER17> because their SWF format has been open for years and someone wrote another HTML 5 renderer that works with a subset of Flash content and performs terrible?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Very interesting! Running the Smokescreen JavaScript flash player did not cause my battery life to go down like normal flash does. I always watch that when I am running a flash YouTube video or flash game.

It will be interesting to see how the performance works with more complex games.

<comment><USER8> Did you run Smokescreen with the same SWF you used in FP? How long was your test, and what was the battery drop in both?

Tell me you're not comparing the decompression and rendering of a video against a simple animation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nevermind that: how does he generate those awesome avatars?!

<comment><USER31> <http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/monsterid>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do the demos work on the iPhone?

<comment><USER29> There is a video showing a flash ad running in Smokescreen on the iPad.

<comment><USER32> I see that now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> smart!

<comment><USER33> I can't believe I've been downed because I found something smart.

<comment><USER34> We at Hacker News prefer comments that have valuable, thoughtful, substantial ideas contained in them.

Your first comment expressed very little. It would have been better to simply upvote the thread; saying "smart" or "I agree" or "good idea" tells us nothing more than your vote would have. It makes for boring reading, and as such, it gets downvoted as a form of discouragement.

Complaining about downvotes makes for even more boring reading. Instead of complaining, learn from the experience. If you want to express "I agree" or "good idea", just click the little up arrow. Only post a comment if you have something substantial to say.

<comment><USER33> Thanks for your explanation. I honestly didn't think saying "smart" was a way to bored readers but if you guys say so, I take not of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the alternatives to CloudFlare for DDoS protection? - <AUTHOR> Given the recent security incident at CloudFlare, I'm wondering what alternatives there are for DDoS protection. Until CloudFlare came to the market, equivalent DDoS protection could cost you $xx,000 per incident. CloudFlare offered protection for nearly unlimited-size attacks. For $200/month. What's the best way, in 2017, for a web application to protect itself from large-scale DDoS attacks? <comment><USER2> Look at Incapsula. It's run by a security model and pricing is the same basic model as a monthly SaaS service. [https://www.incapsula.com/ddos-protection- services.html](https://www.incapsula.com/ddos-protection-services.html)

You can also see this comparison of Incapsula vs. Cloudflare [https://www.incapsula.com/incapsula-vs- cloudflare.html](https://www.incapsula.com/incapsula-vs-cloudflare.html)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about "Halt and Catch Fire"? - <AUTHOR>

Is a realistic picture of what was happening at that time? <comment><USER2> Meh. It is better than "Silicon Valley" which is just utter todle but accurate? I don't believe so, but it is a TV show after all aimed at a larger demographic than would find the realities entertaining.

Let's put it this way, I actually get annoyed watching "Silicon Valley" while I don't watching "Half and Catch Fire."

<comment><USER3> Do you have a definition for the word todle? I can infer from context but not find a definition online.

<comment><USER4> I think it is an dialect-y spelling of twattle or twaddle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been watching it and racking my brain trying to figure out what company it is based on. As it turns out it is completely fictional. It could be tighter - the scene of the guy singing in his car went on FOREVER and did not move the story one. inch. And the sex scenes are kind of like, oh, well we need to fill out the hour . . .

</comment><comment><USER6> I couldn't get past episode 3. The many sex scenes seemed completely unrealistic and out of place, and the characters were almost entirely unlikable.

The intro is pretty awesome though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Probably not. But awesome show. Significantly better than that garbage Silicon Valley.</comment>