Hulu really hates the TV, PlayStation 3 blocked - <AUTHOR> http://www.last100.com/2009/06/28/hulu-really-hates-the-tv-playstation-3-blocked/ <comment><USER2> To put this story into context, remember that the biggest stake holders in Hulu are NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment, and Disney (27% each).

Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu>

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I bet Hulu would love to be on the TV, it's the content owners who don't.

<comment><USER4> Hulu is on my TV, using Hulu Desktop application, provided by Hulu, with an 10 foot experience approaching the usability of TiVo.

EDIT:

Hulu Desktop is at <http://www.hulu.com/labs/hulu-desktop>, have a look at the screenshots or try it.

Note that "Hulu Desktop will work with Apple and Windows Media Center remotes" suggesting they don't expect it to be driven by a mouse and keyboard.

<comment><USER5> But Hulu Desktop is the just the same Flash bullshit, with the same ridiculously awful performance.

If you're going to go to the trouble of distributing a desktop app, why the fuck would you still accept playback 100x crappier than native implementations?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, this isn't going to really accomplish much except annoy users.

They're going to have to win an Olympic gold medal to block people like me though: Mac Mini + TV. Their beta desktop software runs very nice, better than Boxee in fact. Haven't paid a penny for Cable TV in two months and never plan on doing so ever again. :)

<comment><USER7> Yes I have the same thing! It's so easy to connect and the Mini fits nicely within my entertainment cabinet. Also I enjoy the full Internet from my couch; youtube, hulu, cbsnews, hacker news, etc, etc...

I guess ppl think this type of set up is not intuitive as they need a wireless mouse or think they won't be able to read the text from 10' away. I use a wireless handheld mouse (gyration) and firefox mouse gestures add on to motion down to enlarge text when needed; few clicks and text is large enough to read.

Well this is the solution I've used for years and I prefer it over any boxee or whatever. Those don't give u the full Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately this will encourage customers to pirate the content.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. I've been in love with Hulu but after Boxee and now this, a big FU HULU.

I had no problem the commercials in Hulu (would even pay for premium Hulu access), I know people need to get paid. But if the conglomerates are going to force proprietary delivery channels to strictly Hulu-approved devices/software, then they didn't learn a damn thing from the music business and deserve everything coming.

I'm hoping that a Boxee developer makes a plugin that gives me access to my usenet accounts, handles the download, unparing, etc. Very high quality (often 1080p), commercial free, no latency/skipping and super fast for only $18 month.

<comment><USER10> _handles the download, unparing, etc._

Some Usenet providers do this on the server-side and just give you an HTTP download. Watching a show consists of starting the download, and invoking VLC on that. (The download is faster than real-time, so it "streams".)

Easynews also has RSS feeds, so it would be a simple matter of programming to write an app that searches for your favorite shows and lets you immediately start watching them.

<comment><USER11> Bittorrent clients also have RSS feed readers. For less than HD, you can often watch a show for only 30 minutes lead time. If you have things set to download automatically, then there are probably unwatched shows waiting for you all the time. Then, it's like Tivo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "...might be the final push viewers need to dump their TV subscriptions altogether."

I recently dumped DirecTV. I have a Mac Mini running Plex. The latter nicely integrates seamlessly with Hulu, TheDailyShow.com, TheColbertReport.com and Netflix (watch instantly), and to round out my TV watching experience I download the rest from P2P (eztv.it, currently down with "hardware problems").

I've been giving preference to Hulu, TDS and TCR over P2P so that the content providers know I'm watching. I also want Hulu to make some money on the ads, which aren't too bad.

What I don't understand: from the point of view of content providers, Hulu should be preferred, because, after all, I can't skip commercials. TiVo, my old DirecTV DVR and other means all allow me to skip commercials. They should embrace Hulu. It will save their asses.

</comment><comment><USER13> So I have a 23" widescreen monitor that can do 1080p. What if I had a 30" monitor? Would Hulu want to block it then? What if I have a 50" monitor? When does it turn into a "TV" that Hulu would block?

When you put a couch in front of the monitor. Then it becomes "TV"

Try writing the Terms of Service for that. "You are authorized to watch Hulu on a computer monitor up to 30" in size. You are _not_ authorized to watch hulu while sitting on a couch, or in the presence of more than 2 people, or with munchies."

<comment><USER4> Again, on the contrary, Hulu themselves offer a "lean back" (their words, not mine) experience through the Hulu Desktop application.

<comment><USER13> Right, except that they keep banning all of the devices that would be convenient to play TV on your couch

<comment><USER4> Any HTPC (or what I use these days, the Mac Mini), plus a HDCP compliant DVI- HDMI adapter and you're golden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well this is how I watched hulu, I guess that is over now though and they've probably lost quite a few customers.

Maybe youtube shows will take over at some point and we wont have to worry as much.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why not link to the original content:

[http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/27/ps3-owners-get-boxeed- hul...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/27/ps3-owners-get-boxeed-hulu-this- video-is-not-available-on-yo)

</comment><comment><USER16> The _owners_ of Hulu don't hate Hulu on TV. They simply don't want to sacrifice the revenue they get from live broadcasting. Not all shows on Hulu make as much as The Simpsons does.

The content is only free b/c advertising pays for it. Without the ads, that shit would be very expensive.

<comment><USER17> Indeed, They want to add a 'computer' revenue stream, not convert 'television' users to 'computer' users.

That reasoning makes sense when you're thinking about a particular configuration, but that's changing. If my partner and I had a child right now, he/she would grow up having no idea what a television is, because there isn't one in the house.

Before this would be strange, limited only to hippies wanting to make a statement. But the three people in my house aren't morally opposed, all grew up with TVs, and I'm the only geek. We don't have a TV because it never occurred to any of us to buy one when we moved in together (it's only been brought up once). All content which we'd wish to see is available online, for free, most even legally. It doesn't seem odd, only a minority of my friends (mid-to-late 20s) have a TV, so if broadcasters want to keep their jobs they should probably figure something out quickly...

It should be mentioned that I'm living in Holland which has most programming available online (uitzendinggemist.nl). Many US programs are available via their own website (Daily Show, Colbert, etc), and we were watching Hulu until they became geographically impaired. Result: we watch something else or someone downloads it if it was 'important'.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Airbnb but without code - <AUTHOR> http://codefreebnb.com <comment><USER2> I see no fun in using a WYSIWYG instead of a text editor & code. I also foresee trouble when a developer will have to deal with the produced code (Or rewrite everything from scratch).

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the great things about WYSIWYG is it brings you closer to what you're making. Bret Victor nails why this is important in his talk "Inventing on Principle" \- these tools help beginners shape their idea into something usable. And obviously these things can't scale like Airbnb, but they can scale enough to get traction and convince a developer to join your team. As a potential co-founder, would you feel better about joining a non-technical founder 1) with an idea on a napkin or 2) some traction and a code-free prototype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a non-technical founder, I have made tremendous progress on my MVP with the help of codefree! Brent walks you through the process, showing how to do things, and why.

So glad I found it!

</comment><comment><USER4> Code free startup is a great concept and the Airbnb clone built by Brent is fantastic!

Keep up the good work and all the best going forward!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not really sure what I'm looking at - it doesn't really appear to "do" anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try signing up! You can create a new listing, search existing ones, send messages to other users, and view upcoming trips. It's integrated to Stripe as well so you can actually book a trip (although I wouldn't recommend that since every listing is fictional).

<comment><USER5> I get zero results for every search I try. EDIT : I think because I was searching outside of San Fran (looks like there are only 6 properties there, probably for your testing)

Either the site is super buggy or my browser is just barfing everywhere. Most photos don't load.

I think I'm getting the point now though - this seems like a GREAT way to provide proof of concept!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love Bubble!

</comment><comment><USER7> Good luck.</comment>


OLED Screen So Flexible and Thin it Blows in the Wind - <AUTHOR> http://www.futureofgadgets.com/futureblogger/show/1158-oled-screen-so-flexible-and-thin-it-blows-in-the-wind

<comment><USER2> 50 katrillion dollar company and no one brought a video camera? It's just a "curled display" if you take a still picture. "flapping" requires motion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Blog spam? Why not just link straight through to [http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20081029/160349...](http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20081029/160349/)

It has better technical details there too.

</comment><comment><USER4> As far as I can tell, the problem with OLEDs at the moment isn't how thin you can make them, but how long they last; they seem to degrade pretty quickly.

<comment><USER5> I think the most important thing it is cost, and how cheap they are.

what if they were cheap enough to produce to be replacable.

If you can just stick on a display like a wall paper, in any surface, and if it was cheap, people wouldn't mind replacing them every 10,000 hrs. of usage. (If you watch 10 hrs a day, that's almost 3 years).

<comment><USER6> I wonder if OLEDs break down more or less independent of usage anyways like how a lithium ion battery can wear out faster from use, but is still wearing out even if you don't use it.

<comment><USER4> That's certainly the impression I've taken away from reading a bunch of articles on OLED displays. The failure rate is apparently still high enough (at decent yields) that they're not practical yet, and unlike back-lit LCD displays, individual pixels degrade at different rates, which is pretty bad for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I think blue breaks down the fastest color wise. I suppose it might be because the emitted light would have higher energy than red or green.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome. We can change our national flag to a video loop of 'Deal or No Deal' highlights.</comment>


Making an Operating System Virus Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/making_an_opera.html <comment><USER2> So, I was wrong. Schneier's analysis wasn't based on the halting problem, but an even sillier analysis by Fred Cohen's U Cincinnati thesis that found it necessary to reach all the way to Godel to come to the conclusion that "it is impossible to write a program that determines whether another program will function correctly".

Virus study is fringe computer science. When there are vast tracts of solid systems research across operating systems, compilers, and symbolic analysis to cite, reaching for the goofy fringe stuff is not a credibility enhancer.

I don't think Schneier has shown he has anything useful to say about Chrome OS yet.

<comment><USER3> Does it matter what he has to say though? The thing isn't even out yet. His speculations are about as good as anyone's at this point and, in the end, it really is up to you to decide what to call bs on, whether it came from a celebrity's mouth or not.

<comment><USER2> Things I care about here:

(1) The "virus-free OS" meme, which is pernicious and displaces reasonable thinking about system security, which is something that everyone --- Apple, Linux, Microsoft, and Google included --- are working hard on.

(2) The guru phenomenon, where people embed themselves into the industry consciousness and become fonts for random meaningless sound bites.

Probably good to call me out for obsessing about it, though I'll note that I feel comfortable babbling about it on Hacker News because I "know" you people, and would be less comfortable talking to a reporter about it.

<comment><USER4> What bothers me about this discussion is the assumption that crappy software people are used to is the only type it's possible to build.

You can write software that deals with reasonable levels of memory corruption when it's operating. As in this will survive if no more than X bits are flipped per second in either the source code or RAM.

Yes, it's slow and expensive to create and operate, but it is also possible. Yet his argument is based on the assumption that you need a virus scanner for some reason. I know it's hard and expensive to create clean systems, but that's a long way from impossible.

PS: What I love about Hacker News is talking with people who understand some things and a far deeper level than I do, and are also willing to listen to a reasonable argument.

<comment><USER5> _What bothers me about this discussion is the assumption that crappy software people are used to is the only type it's possible to build._

A capability system would be a lot harder to completely corrupt. Sandboxing can limit damage to manageable compartments, and enable the system to roll back without user intervention. I think you could make an OS two orders of magnitude harder than current commonly used systems. It will never be complete mathematically provable security. Just make it so hard to do, that the cost increases enough to change the fundamental economics, so that only very _high value_ targets will ever get that degree of attention. (Which means that the cost has to be much higher than someone's credit card number.)

<comment><USER2> Bernstein disagrees with you, in his analyis of 10 years of qmail security. Worth reading.

The problem with sandboxing is the misalignment of effort between attacker and defender. Sandboxing and capabilities are a huge pain in the ass for the defender, who have to construct and deploy applications with perfectly configured security controls. They're just an obstacle course for attackers.

<comment><USER4> qmail is a program written in C which runs on UNIX. Trying to secure that is a near impossible task.

Building a secure system would basically need to start from scratch with a micro kernel which supported a sandboxed OS written in an interpreted language. Even then drivers and HW would need to be treated with the utmost care.

Granted, actually building such a system would be horribly expensive and probably take the better part of a decade, but it's still possible.

<comment><USER2> It's easy to specify secure systems that don't do anything in the real world.

<comment><USER4> I completely agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How to make an OS virus-free? It's quite simple actually, make it so difficult and/or useless that it will have no user base whatsoever.

Windows has so many viruses because it's the most popular OS in the world (not the _best_ imho, but that's for another flamewar). Mac OS used to be mostly virus-free until it started rapidly gaining in popularity. Linux as well, though the technical prowess of Linux users is generally MUCH higher so it may just be that potential Linux viruses don't spread as much.

<comment><USER7> This is a good point not mentioned yet. The number of viruses targeted to an OS is directly proportional to the market share it has. As long as it stays in single digits any "economically rational" virus maker will write yet another windows virus instead of working on an unfamiliar platform.

Whether it will be technically more difficult to write a virus on linux, max of chrome os, we will only know for sure when/if they become a target tempting enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The 'best' method to keep viruses off an OS is what Apple is doing with the iphone - reviewing every app by hand before it is allowed to run on the OS. Even that is far from foolproof though, and it has a whole host of other problems.

<comment><USER9> They aren't actually reviewing apps by hand, the reviewers aren't remotely competent enough to make any technical assessments at all. They don't even review obvious copyright / trademark infringement!

They don't do any basic static analysis of your object code, even to check for private symbols, and they don't have your source code. They don't even take the obvious step of having some APIs be mutually exclusive!

Their process is as immature as it could possibly be. I had assumed the reviewers were mouthbreathers from a temp agency, but apparently they are actual Apple employees! It's possible that they're just the low-skilled drones that were reviewing media submissions from the labels and studios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Fred Cohen's 1986 Ph.D. thesis where he proved that it was impossible to create a virus-checking program that was perfect_

What about white listing? All programs on a list run, everything else does not.

<comment><USER9> You'd need to use NX memory for everything, and not allow any binaries that contain interpreters to have access to user or network data.

You couldn't have anything resembling a shell!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought all operating system viruses were free. After all, who would pay for one?

(Oh, "virus-free". Stupid Ameriglish)

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the comment on Schneier's blog: Similar to the old saying... secure, functional, easy-to-use.... pick any two... \-- Posted by: BillF at July 10, 2009 11:11 AM

</comment><comment><USER13> An operating system cannot be virus free. Because of the human error. Even if we made the 100% perfect virus checker, the human part of the equation will always find a way to give out their password or admin privileges to a phishing site or many other scenarios.

That said, there are tools an OS can do to mitigate the damage that viruses can do. So while there will always be a smarter virus, there can always be a way to only let the smart virus get to something that it could have gotten to no matter what.

Its like Google Chrome. Google Chrome itself is not perfect, has MANY (those we know of, those we don't) security flaws, BUT getting out of the sandbox that Google Chrome provides is a very difficult problem. The basic idea is really to let viruses happen. Just let them get made. There will always be a security hole to exploit. As long as the damage the virus can do is very limited and moot it won't matter.

That might be what google is doing. Maybe they are just making a super- glorified browser-based system in which google chrome's sandbox protects the user while googles native client allows all sort of cool programs to run and in the end you are still on windows, but the security risk is absolutely minimal.

</comment><comment><USER14> The only solution that will make an OS virus free is to not ever release or use the OS.

Indeed, even programming the OS itself could result in the introduction of viruses, so it's probably better to just leave it on the drawing board without ever actually implementing it.</comment>


Finance geeks: what's behind this odd chart? - <AUTHOR>

This is strange looking:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=EURUSD=X&t=5d
Not the fact that it's trending downward, but the very regular looking stairstep each day. Any idea what that is? <comment><USER2> Your link goes to the 1 year chart, but I think you meant the 5 day chart. I dunno how to hotlink to specific ranges in the new Y!Finance charts; viewer should click on 5D.

Anyway, the stairstep is at 4:00 AM GMT, which happens to be midnight EDT. I don't know about the intricacies of currency markets, but I'd imagine there's some sort of daily currency balancing where the main banks buy all the currency they need to settle international transactions on behalf of customers. Note that there's a sharp gap downwards between 9:00 PM and midnight GMT (when European banks would presumably be buying dollars to settle international transactions), and a sharp gap upwards at midnight EDT (when U.S. banks would presumably be buying euros to settle international transactions.)

<comment><USER3> This pattern is anomalous. It cannot be explained by normal daily activities because it does not happen every day, just for the last five.

<comment><USER2> Is there a way to get historical intraday data for currencies, beyond the last 5 days?

I'm just going by what the data shows - this is a plausible explanation given the times and known facts about the domestic financial system. (For example, domestic banks have the balance all deposits daily to ensure they meet reserve requirements.) If you can find data that refutes this hypothesis, be my guest. Simple assertions don't count, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The currency markets work 24 hours. Yahoo plots the intra day voltality but the graph that yahoo shows in that link does not chart all 24 hours and that is why you see a break which causes it to look like steps. The steps are going down because the currency seems to be on a downward trend.

<comment><USER2> I think he was really asking about the 5-day chart, which has a large stairstep _upwards_ at 4:00 AM GMT on each day. The date range parameter apparently doesn't hotlink very well on Y!Finance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Market prices as fractal patterns? Where have I seen that before?

Ah, yes, here: [http://www.amazon.com/Mis-Behavior-Markets-Fractal- Reward/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Mis-Behavior-Markets-Fractal- Reward/dp/0465043577/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3399981-1108425?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187279234&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER6> Yahoo's data appears to be messed up. Maybe screwed up the trade date when dealing with different timezone... or something. Here's another couple free charts you can verify against:

[http://chartsrdc.cme.com:443/cs/charts.jsp?_quickEntry=6E1%2...](http://chartsrdc.cme.com:443/cs/charts.jsp?_quickEntry=6E1%21&_symbol=6E&_month=1%21&_period=intraday&_size=large&_barType=Lines&_density=high&_selectedIndicators=&_availableIndicators=&_submit=Get+chart) <http://www.dailyfx.com/charts/ChartStation.html>

I realize the first is futures, but they match the spot market extremely well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Switching from the 5 day view to the 3 month view, you tell me what's behind _this_ chart, and I'll be impressed:

[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=EURUSD=X&t=3m&l=on&#...

<comment><USER8> The central banks are flooding the markets w/ currency right now to try and bail out the banks who took on bad debt.

The European central bank floated more currency(~100bn) than the Fed did(~60bn), so I think that is why the dollar gained a little on the Euro over the past few days.

<comment><USER7> I'm impressed. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interestingly I was looking at this chart and then came to news.yc and saw your post. I don't understand your question. Are you asking why there are lows and highs for each day? It is because the its traded just like stocks are traded and have intra day lows and highs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, but why the odd looking stairstep?

[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EDJI&t=5d](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EDJI&t=5d)

Is not nearly so regular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's the "plunge protection team" at work.

<comment><USER10> If your choices are "The world is complicated," or "The world is simply controlled by powerful, evil forces," why would you choose the latter?

<comment><USER3> I don't know if the PPT is doing anything with the USD-EUR, I was only being cute. But if you're implying the PPT does not exist and is not active, you are naive. Its existence is fact. The evidence for its manipulations in the past is overwhelming.

"State Sponsored" manipulation of currencies explains a lot of weird forex chart patterns. It's hardly a secret that the BoJ manipulates the Yen, for example.

<comment><USER2> <http://xkcd.com/258/></comment></comment></comment></comment>


France says it will recognise Palestinian state if new peace effort fails - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/30/france-recognise-palestinian-state-if-peace-effort-fails-ultimatum?CMP=share_btn_tw <comment><USER2> Holy shit! I usually don't get into this issue but France is literally incentivizing the _failure_ of peace talks.</comment>


CloudStats Goes Out of Beta, Releases New Agent, Fixes Bugs. 300 Monitors for HN - <AUTHOR>

In our previous post on HN we have asked you to provide feedback about our server monitoring platform - CloudStats.me.
We have to say that the feedback that community provided was invaluable. HN users have found tens of bugs and helped stress test the platform. Our team took all bugs into account and worked with every HN member to resolve them.
New Linux Monitoring Agent
Since then, we have completely revamped our linux monitoring agent and coded it in Ruby on Rails, instead of Python. This was due to the fact that many users complained about the reliability of the monitoring agent and high number of false positive alerts. We worked hard to resolve this and we believe the new agent addresses that in the first place. You can now find CloudStats agent log and see what's happening here: /var/log/cloudstats.log. New agent is able to securely update itself and once we add new features you will not need to upgrade agent at all.
RAM Buffers / Cached display
Many HN members asked us to not just display FREE and USED ram, but also wanted to see Buffers and Cache. It is true, that sometimes Linux RAM usage can be confusing for beginner server admins. So we have taken this into account and now you can see Free, Used, Buffered and Cached RAM separately on the server information page.
Once again, we would be grateful for any added feedback HN community may provide and we are providing totally free accounts for HN members of:
100 Server Monitors
100 URL Monitors
100 IP Ping Monitors
In return, we only ask you to share our website on your Twitter or Facebook. This will help to keep the platform growing and will allow us to add more features into the panel.
GET HN DEAL HERE:
http://cloudstats.me/hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> clickable hn deal link:

[http://cloudstats.me/hackernews](http://cloudstats.me/hackernews)</comment>


Why can't we cure the common cold? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/06/why-cant-we-cure-the-common-cold?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits <comment><USER4> So a promising treatment for the cold was dropped by the drug company because it was too expensive to develop, and the potential payoff too small. Drug companies' profit models pretty much require them to focus on developing drugs that people have to use for the rest of their lives - that manage a condition rather than treat it.

Is there a good reason why we shouldn't club together as rich countries and fund a not-for-profit drug research body that _does_ fund this sort of thing?

<comment><USER5> _> Drug companies' profit models pretty much require them to focus on developing drugs that people have to use for the rest of their lives - <USER2> manage a condition rather than treat it._

Not true - there are plenty of examples of genuine cures developed and marketed by pharma.

What drug companies _do_ require is a return on their investment, which can be in the multiple-billions. This isn't evil-big-pharma stuff... this is just how any sensibly-run company operates, pharma or otherwise.

Achieving an ROI is seen as difficult _in this particular case_ because (as TFA says) people don't value vaccines highly enough because they are taken when they're well, and (as you say) they're only needed once.

(Personally, I think the article over-estimates this challenge; sell 100m doses at $50/dose and [assuming CoG is not a problem] you've got a major blockbuster. Even if the NHS/insurers didn't want to pay, employers and individuals likely would, at this price level. And 100m doses is pretty low- ball, if you consider the likely uptake of a vaccine promising a genuine cure for the commonest cause of the common cold.)

-

 _> Is there a good reason why we shouldn't club together as rich countries and fund a not-for-profit drug research body that does fund this sort of thing?_

I've wondered about this in the past. I think a major aspect is risk.

If it was easy to pick a disease to cure and a way to do it, then we'd not be in this situation in the first place - developing drugs is actually incredibly difficult and unpredictable. This is well-demonstrated by an analysis published in Forbes a few years ago. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/08/11/the- co...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/08/11/the-cost-of- inventing-a-new-drug-98-companies-ranked/)

Rather than taking an individual drug and pricing the work done on it to bring it to market (as with many previous studies) this analysis looks at total R&D spend by individual pharma companies over time, and divided that spend by the number of new drugs brought to market. As such, it takes into account the extraordinarily high rate of attrition in drug development - the time and money spent on countless thousands of drug candidates that are abandoned before the ever make it to market. (Note the analysis does have one major weakness, but now's not the time.)

To quote the article: _" For companies that have launched more than three drugs, the median cost per new drug is $4.2 billion; for those that have launched more than four, it is $5.3 billion."_

And there's the rub: I'm sure you could find some way of funding a few hundred million if it was _guaranteed_ to result in a cure for a disease - Governments, the Gates Foundation, etc. But do such bodies genuinely have the will to spend countless billions, every year, to chase those few new treatments that might --or might not-- emerge? And having found a new treatment, would they just give it away... or would they want to recoup some of the costs they'd invested?

<comment><USER6> >"there are plenty of examples of genuine cures developed and marketed by pharma."

Name one.

<comment><USER5> Abbvie (Mavyret) and Gilead (Solvadi, Harvoni) have both developed and marketed treatments which cure Hepatitis C.

Roche sells MabThera which (together with chemotherapy) cures about 2/3rds of a common type of lymphoma. They also recently failed with a large phase III study in this setting, having hoped to cure even more people with an improved treatment.

Celgene and Abbie/Pharmacyclics both have large phase III trials running in the same disease, aiming to cure more patients through the addition of their drugs to the current standard-of-care treatment.

Novartis has just launched Kymriah, a CAR-T treatment which offers the prospect of long-term remissions in paediatric ALL. (Too early to say whether some of these will effectively represent cures.)

Various pharmaceutical companies are attempting to develop new antibiotics, which would cure infections.

 _(Just recent examples, and off the top of my head...)_

<comment><USER7> I was like "MabThera?" but then I Googled it and that's Rituximab which I'd heard of. I had Hodgkins (which is one of the less common Lymphomas) so I got ABVD which doesn't involve Rituximab, but I read about loads of the chemotherapy drugs because I was morbid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting read. Unfortunately it then comes to a sentence like this:

"For his PhD on asthma, Johnston developed a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which magnifies DNA so that viruses can be identified more precisely."

which make me not sure what to believe: Is that bad spelling or has the author not even basic knowledge of modern biology?

<comment><USER9> I'm not well educated as I have no idea what you're referring to, mind pointing out what in specific was misspelled or not correct.

<comment><USER10> The problem with the quote is Jonston neither invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) nor are most cold viruses DNA viruses (most are RNA).

<comment><USER11> The reporter also called cholera a virus. You can't expect too much from science reporting in mainstream newspapers.

<comment><USER10> This is certainly true. Of course if they can't report science correctly what chance do they have on any other subject that I don't know about :)

<comment><USER12> Zero. Why people believe anything that's in mainstream news is beyond me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most important thing from this whole article is that the brute force approach works. Just make a vaccine against all the different common cold viruses (250 to 300) and vaccinate everyone. Done.

Of course this will never be done because the system for developing vaccines is so broken that it is impossible to make money selling a vaccine for the common cold. You could make a magic vaccine that was 100% effect with zero side effects (no vaccine is magic) and it would be impossible to develop and sell under the current regulations.

<comment><USER13> You're overstating it a bit. The difficulty of making money from it does sound like the reason we don't have such a vaccine _already_, but someday we will. The question will be whether we're still around to enjoy it.

<comment><USER10> What makes you think that the regulations that prevent the development of a vaccine today are suddenly going to go away and allow it in the future? The reason we don't have a vaccine has nothing to do with science and everything to do with regulations and economics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Sixteen healthy volunteers were kissed by people with colds. The result: > just one confirmed infection.

This doesn't sound like a debunking of what people think at all. If the chance of getting infected from a kissing for a minute is 6%, and you spend a week around an infected person and you kiss them repeatedly, you will almost certainly get sick with that infection rate.

<comment><USER15> To deduct a general 6% infectionrate because 1 person got infected by 1 other person is kind of not what I believe.

People's immune systems are so different... before I believe that I'd want to see every sick person kissing every healthy person or something. I don't even know how that would work with incubation times. Lock people away and just allow contact every 2 days for 3 weeks? But then all the sick people would probably be healthy again already.

My head explodes just trying to think about this kind of trial, mixed with statistics :P

<comment><USER14> > To deduct a general 6% infectionrate because 1 person got infected by 1 > other person is kind of not what I believe.

Sure, I'm just saying this was not a very strong result in terms of disproving the fact that kissing doesn't spread cold viruses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > ... experiments have shown that low temperature neither increases the > likelihood of catching a cold, nor the severity of symptoms.

> Adults suffer an average of between two and four colds each year, and > children up to 10, and we have come to accept this as an inevitable part of > life.

I live in Europe and go through one or two flu seasons a year on average. I don't recall catching cold/flu ever since I started using cold water exclusive year-round, as I wrote previously[1]. I was pessimistic about this practice at the beginning, and truth be told this enhanced immune system is the only benefit I'd attribute to cold showers, yet there it is, no cold for quite a few winters despite people around me getting it on schedule.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8808859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8808859)

<comment><USER17> Mileages vary. I indulge in hot showers - and full blast heating in winters. I haven't had a cold or any other infectious malaise since 2004. I am also in Europe.

Mind you, I am probably more mindful about disease vectors than most. Avoid shopping-trolleys and -baskets, keep my fingers clear of mouth, nose, and eyes at all unwashed times.

<comment><USER16> I agree, avoiding catching it is a better strategy than putting the immune system to test every time.

I didn't do much to avoid it, though, a few times I even had to nurse close ones through their colds fully expecting to catch it from them, yet nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The frustrating thought I had when reading this article:

If we'd spend all the money that people spend on OTC cold remedies that almost certainly don't work on developing a vaccine we probably could have one soon.

<comment><USER19> OTC cold remedies do not cure your cold, but they certainly do work by treating the symptoms. Ever taken an airplane with congested sinuses without taking a decongestant?

<comment><USER20> The palliatives do work, but there are a lot of things that claim to actually shorten the duration of a cold, e.g. Zicam, Cold-EEZE that have little to no evidence that they work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n07.shtml](http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n07.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER22> Viruses laugh at man's feeble attempts to eradicate them.

They will adept. And possibly give you more than a runny nose.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've always wondered if the common cold is not something that we just need from time to time. I mean, it seems so universal, and the reasons we catch it so random sometime it seems like the body just decide "ok let that in".

<comment><USER24> Agreed, like a mostly harmless disease that we get occasionally to keep our defense mechanisms working and ready for possible worse problems. Like a natural health check up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Scientists today identify seven virus families that cause the majority of colds: rhinovirus, coronavirus, influenza and parainfluenza virus, adenovirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and, finally, metapneumovirus, which was first isolated in 2001."

</comment><comment><USER26> What the article says nothing about is the usefulness of taking Vitamin C in high doses - it only mentions shortly regular doses probably something like 100-200mg a day. This is enough to prevent Skorbut an ensures basic need.

But there are studies that high doses can help a lot with colds.

EDIT:

examples:

[http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/9/4/339](http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/9/4/339)

[https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/uoh- ldo03301...](https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/uoh- ldo033017.php)

[https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/high-doses-of- vitamin-c...](https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/high-doses-of-vitamin-c- shown-to-reduce-duration-of-colds-033117.html)

After reading about it i tried this, and confirm that high doses help to cure colds much faster. In 2 of three cases i managed to get over a cold which otherwise lasts 7-10 days for me in just 3-4 days with much lower symptoms. The dose at which this begins to work is 3g (yes 3000mg!) per day - i take 6x1g the first day, then 3g/day a few days more. Pure Vitamin C powder with no other additives(many products nowadays are combinations, in spain where i am right now, the pure powder is hard to get, in Germany it's in every drugstore). It works even better with herpes i sometimes get on the lips. Here, the success rate of making the illness last 2-3 days instead of 10 is 100% since i started do treat it that way a few years ago, with much less symptoms, just a little itching, no big wounds for many days like many suffer from (and i did) when getting a herpes push.

I can clearly understand why this is not researched and communicated much - <USER3> pot of 100g Vitamin C powder, good for about 5 such treatments costs just 3€ ... not much money to be made.

EDIT:

This is my _personal_ experience - for which I don't claim general applicability for everyone. But I find it very interesting that some people see the urgent need to downvote a post where someone reports personal experience, without saying it must be generally applicable.

<comment><USER27> This has been debunked extensively, eg: [http://www.yalescientific.org/2015/03/mythbusters-does- vitam...](http://www.yalescientific.org/2015/03/mythbusters-does-vitamin-c- really-help/) [https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.h...](https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.html)

<comment><USER26> Oh really - It has been proven that it does not work for _me personally_ exactly as i wrote?

I didn't see the researcher team coming through my door...

I didn't say it works for everyone, but only report how it turns out for me.

Interesting that some find a personal report enough reason to downvote...

How do we know the research you point at is not sponsored by those with an interest in selling more expensive stuff?

<comment><USER28> You are getting downvoted because pseudomedicine, including the idea that Vitamin C cures diseases, causes real harm. Low-information patients reject proven therapies in favour of quackery and make their ailments worse, ultimately leading to higher costs for all of society.

"It may not work for everyone but it works for me" is a fallacy – if you run a 50/50 blind study on yourself for the next 30 colds you catch, controlling for factors like season, air quality, stress levels, sleep, and nutrition, and you still find that Vitamin C consistently cuts your colds in half, _then_ we'll believe you. Otherwise, stop pushing misinformation.

<comment><USER26> Strong argumentation... with just a few logical errors...

Unless you can prove what I wrote didn't happen to me, i can as well insult you of pushing misinformation about what happened to me and what not.

I talk about personal experience and clearly mark it as such.

And then, i didnt know this is a forum of "low-information patients" - but i start to believe it...

Furthermore it has been said in the article that there is no verified cure for colds. Insofar even if someone would refuse to take other non-verified, more expensive medications because of my report, it wouldn't do harm. It's just changing one unverified cure against another.

do i talk about cancer? No. It's about colds.

Believing only in studies will not help you at all - many studies have been proven to be false for many different reasons and later detected errors. Just happened for cancer studies of multiple decades!

So with your randomly selected criteria there's still many things that can be wrong, and the same goes for all studies that prove Vitamin C helps and those that prove it doesn't. You forgot age, for example... 30 colds is at least 3, at my current rate rather 10-15 years... a lot changes in a body. I can be weaker due age, or fitter due more sports etc...

So i believe only in what works for me, and i report about it personally with clear marking that it's just that, personal experience.

And i didn't recommend anything to anyone else.

Also, i said that success rate is just 2/3\. THAT would have been a good point to attack my idea that Vitamin C helps - because it is actually a low rate.

While we discuss this, a lot of money is spend for other cures of cold that equally has no proof of working. But this is accepted... you might be better off trying to stop big pharma for advertising anything as a cure for cold instead of insulting me for telling personal experiences.

<comment><USER29> What makes you think it was the Vitamin C that prevented the cold? It could as easily have been your belief in the Vitamin C cure that prevented the colds.

<comment><USER26> It could.

Who knows if there was actually Vitamin C contained in what i bought?

But my experience still exists.

I took that stuff that has been sold to me as Vit C and had a lot less to suffer. Didn't spend a lot of money, and didn't have a lot of risk involved.

So what?

I tried other remedies before - as well ones that were organical stuff recommended by someone ( ginger tea for example which some believe in is helping a lot - but not myself ) as well as commercial products. I believed or at least hoped they'd help in each case. But only this did with _some_ \- and i say 66% is not great, just some - reproducability.

With Herpes it's 100% were in my personal experience it removes a lot if suffering and bad feeling for days.

<comment><USER29> My point wasn't to deny your experience, only to comment that even for your specific experience it's impossible to be so confident as to state it was Vitamin C that prevented illnesses.

I'm happy you found something that works for you, but the certainty you ascribe to causes is not justified by the evidence.

<comment><USER26> Thanks ;)

yes sure, it can be many things - and a repeatability of 2 in 3 is not very much... just some.

It can also be that as the original article mentions there are many causes for a bad cold, that my system worked only with a part of them.

I just get a bit upset with (some other) people saying my personal experience isn't a properly conducted study - it sure isn't.

At the same time, these studies fail every day, in the end they are all just statistics, which can be forged, lead to wrong assumptions, or just be flawed in a failure criterion not being thought of until now - like, oh, 30,000 cancer studies... [http://www.sciencealert.com/more-than-30-000-scientific- stud...](http://www.sciencealert.com/more-than-30-000-scientific-studies- could-be-wrong-due-to-contaminated-undying-cells)

But I'm not even talking about cancer - and I sure would defintely rather try fighting cancer with a "western medicine" approach that has some reasonable success rate and never recommend anyone diagnosed with such trying to treat that thing with a spoon of Vitamin C everyday...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What if our approach to viruses is basically-wrong?

I grew up before children were vaccinated against chicken pox. When I was about 5-6 years old, I had a case... Mom counted 12 pox, which was enough to assume that I'd be immune for the rest of my life.

Some children are covered with chickenpox... Heard a story of someone who scratched their eye out. The mother of six children told me her oldest had a horrible case, but her subsequent children each had a less-severe case than the previous.

One theory is that winter diseases stem from decreased sunlight... Less ultraviolet light -> less vitamin D. Red light is also important. A few years ago there was an outbreak of chickenpox amongst some baseball players who came from Central America, where chickenpox is not a problem.

On account of my experience with chickenpox, and the institution of mass vaccination of children & adults against the horrible chickenpox virus (99.99% survivable)... Shouldn't we be looking at what makes people vulnerable to colds? Virus exposure might not actually be important. From the article:

> In 1984, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to > investigate one of the best-known ways of catching a cold. They infected > volunteers with a cold virus and instructed them to kiss healthy test > subjects on the mouth for at least one minute. (The instruction for > participants was to use whichever technique was "most natural".) Sixteen > healthy volunteers were kissed by people with colds. _The result: just one > confirmed infection._ (emphasis added)

I heard of an investigation in Central America that found providing clean water, outhouses, and basic nutrients was the most important public health intervention that could be done for a village.</comment>


Increasing fuel efficiency with a smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/smartphone-saves-gas-0825.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A simple app that helps you avoid red lights, saving gas and emissions.</comment>


Timsort, the Python sorting algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://skerritt.blog/timsort-the-fastest-sorting-algorithm-youve-never-heard-of/ <comment><USER2> My favourite TimSort story is of ex-Sun employee, Joshua Bloch of _Effective Java_ fame. J Bloch was in audience at the time when Tim Peters presented his new algorithm to sort a list, and he was so blown away that he started porting Tim's implementation right there with an intent to commit it to the JDK mainline [0], which he eventually did [1].

[0] Some of the core JDK developers are really on another level. The JDK code, post 1.5, is a joy to read, though verbose. Compilers and Languages seems to attract a certain caliber of engineers, I think.

[1] [https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-6804124](https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-6804124)

<comment><USER3> Then, many years later, input was found that made the Java version crash:

[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-21690-4_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-21690-4_16)

<comment><USER4> I found a similar problem using a fairly battle-tested C# implementation of timsort. Felt lucky that I had managed to reproduce it in a dev environment instead of it being a mysterious crash for users.

<comment><USER5> Many years ago, I copied an implementation of the Cohen-Sutherland algorithm (for line clipping) to C++ from pseudo code (I don't remember where I got this pseudo code from, but other sources used equivalent pseudo code).

The code (it was a backend server code for a web app) was heavily tested with ab [0] and JMeter [1] against extreme load, everything seemed to worked fine. Fast-forward 6 months, when we had a sudden peak in users (for a few days, we went from around 500 visitors a day to around 500.000, which roughly meant > 5 million requests per day). Suddenly, the backend, which ran without problems for half a year, crashed in production every 5 hours or so with a segmentation fault. I could not for the life of me reproduce this. After some panicking, I let the backend run in gdb in production against the ~50 requests per second we were still getting. After a few hours, the segfault occurred again, and I figured out that on extremely rare edge cases, the pseudo code I copied to C++ divided by 0, which lead to chain of problems afterwards, eventually resulting in said segfault. If I remember correctly, the fix was trivial.

[0] [https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/programs/ab.html](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/programs/ab.html)

[1] [https://jmeter.apache.org/](https://jmeter.apache.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can beat O(n log n). That limit is for sorts that use only a ">" comparison. A distribution sort, where you distribute the keys over buckets, can approach O(n).

The first software patent, for SyncSort, is for a sort that beats O(n log n). The basic idea is to read records for a while, get some stats about the key distribution, and set up the buckets to get a roughly equal fraction of the observed keyspace. If blocks of records show up with very different stats, action has to be taken to adjust the bucketing.

<comment><USER7> Big O notation is about the theoretical upper bound of an algorithm. Clever data-based tricks like putting items in buckets or gathering statistics are unrelated to this notation as they rely on a certain consistency. Maybe you should call it average run time on typical data.

<comment><USER8> Radix sort is worst case O(n). (which is what I'm assuming the parent commenter is referring to) It's not n in common situations, but nlogn in pathological cases the way Timsort is.

The reason is it "violates" the n logn lower bound of comparison sorts is because it isn't a comparison sort. Sort of like how hash table lookups "violate" the O(log n) average lower bound of binary tree lookups. It has different performance bounds because it's a different problem.

<comment><USER9> No, radix sort is worst case O(n * k). In many common cases, k ~= log(n). IN certain specific cases, k < log(n), and specifically for cases where you have a very large n, but a bounded number of values (say, you're sorting 10 billion 4-bit ints), k can be considered a constant. But that is by no means generally true.

<comment><USER10> In most cases k << n. For 64-bit integers, byte wise radix sort k is 8, which is less than log n whenever n is more than 256. So, radix sort is typically much faster than an O(n log n) sort of your data support it. It just isn't as widely used because it is not as general as a comparison based sort.

<comment><USER11> Jumping in this fascinating thread about sorting to ask what the double less than chevrons mean? I know what one means but what do two of them mean?

<comment><USER12> In this context, it means "much less." It's used that way sometimes in mathematical discussions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> WikiSort should even be faster still

Original author: [https://github.com/BonzaiThePenguin/WikiSort](https://github.com/BonzaiThePenguin/WikiSort)

Graph and copyage (by me): [https://tse.gratis/aArray/#details](https://tse.gratis/aArray/#details)

Or grail sort: [https://github.com/Mrrl/GrailSort/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/Mrrl/GrailSort/blob/master/README.md)

Sort, is a deep rabbit hole

<comment><USER13> WikiSort previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404223)

Can't find a direct comparison with TimSort though..

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I heard of it from a talk about a bug in the implementation of TimSort in several popular libraries [1]. That bug should be fixed in Java, Android and Python.

If you're using another language, you might want to verify that the bug is fixed/not present in your library

[1] [http://www.envisage-project.eu/proving-android-java-and- pyth...](http://www.envisage-project.eu/proving-android-java-and-python- sorting-algorithm-is-broken-and-how-to-fix-it/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Here are the Python 3 docs for sorting [1], in-place list.sort() [2], and sorted() [3] (which makes a sorted copy of the references). And the Timsort Wikipedia page [4].

[1] [https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sorting.html#sort- stability-...](https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sorting.html#sort-stability- and-complex-sorts)

[2] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#list.sort](https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#list.sort)

[3] [https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#sorted](https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#sorted)

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

</comment><comment><USER16> Besides Python and Java, it's also the sorting algorithm used by Chrome, Android, and Swift. At this point I think more than half the world's programmers are using Timsort, whether they realize it or not.

<comment><USER17> And Rust, the rust std lib uses a modified timsort/mergesort

<comment><USER18> FWIW, Rust uses Pattern-defeating quicksort for it's unstable sort.

[1] [https://github.com/orlp/pdqsort](https://github.com/orlp/pdqsort) [2] [https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/vec/struct.Vec.html#method.sor...](https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/vec/struct.Vec.html#method.sort_unstable)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Note that Timsort uses O(n) extra space: sometimes this can be undesirable.

<comment><USER20> Note that this is true for any (edit: stable, nlogn) merge sort.

<comment><USER21> Heapsort is a lovely, simple, O(NlogN) sort that sorts in place (so that it requires no extra space). (Explicitly stating something that is implied by an existing response).

Edit: Whoops, apparently heapsort is not "stable" (not sure what that means actually), sorry.

<comment><USER22> A "stable" sorting algorithm preserves the relative order of elements with "equal value". This doesn't really apply if you are only sorting simple values, as there is no difference between a 7 and another 7, but does if you are sorted more complicated objects by some key.

Example: sorting 2#a, 1#c, 2#b by only the first number.

An algorithm that produces 1#c, 2#b, 2#a is a correct sorting algorithm, but not stable as it changes the order of 2#a and 2#b.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the explanation, interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think most Python devs have heard of this, as well as avid followers of HN, of course.

</comment><comment><USER24> Here is a video I made a while back to better visualize the runs of timsort:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxLxf5xqqyE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxLxf5xqqyE)

Might be of interest...

</comment><comment><USER25> Rust uses timsort as the stable sorting algorithm in its standard library.

[https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/primitive.slice.html#method.so...](https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/primitive.slice.html#method.sort)

</comment><comment><USER26> For an audio representation of TimSort: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoR-1KwQh2k&t=274s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoR-1KwQh2k&t=274s)

<comment><USER27> I watched probably ten minutes of that video. Don't know that I learned anything, but it was sort interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Never heard of since it was last discussed on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17436591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17436591)

<comment><USER29> And [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17883461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17883461) after that.

Quite a few submissions for something no one has heard of: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Timsort&sort=byDate&type=story)

The other main discussions are 2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214527)

2009: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752677)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Tim Peters is also the IEEE-754 guru for the Python codebase.

Truly a giant of the Python community.

<1/2 wink-ly yr's>

</comment><comment><USER31> There are cases where pattern defeating sort beats timsort

[https://github.com/EmuraDaisuke/SortingAlgorithm.HayateShiki](https://github.com/EmuraDaisuke/SortingAlgorithm.HayateShiki)

<comment><USER32> "external area" tho

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As an (unrelated to the Algorithm) Python developer, also named Tim, I've never been able to hear the last of it. Still a great algorithm, though!

</comment><comment><USER34> I always thought this sort visualizer was cool [http://sorting.at/](http://sorting.at/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Heard about it by reading Java stacktraces one day.

</comment><comment><USER36> Isn't this the same idea as the Introsort[1], which was created in 1997 (four years earlier) and is the default sorting algorithm in C++'s standard library (and .NET framework since 4.5)?

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

</comment><comment><USER37> That's why I encode all my data in a format optimized for galloping mode. Just kidding. That'd be sweet though

</comment><comment><USER38> I also love pdqsort. It has many of the same advantages, and has the advantage of being easier to implement (particularly if you already have a quicksort lying around).

[https://github.com/orlp/pdqsort](https://github.com/orlp/pdqsort)

Basically, timsort is to mergesort as pdqsort is to quicksort.

</comment><comment><USER39> other sorting algorithm, taking advantage of SIMD instructions and being cache-aware, chipsort: [https://github.com/nlw0/ChipSort.jl](https://github.com/nlw0/ChipSort.jl)

</comment><comment><USER40> I dont understand how it is so special. Every single realworld sort I have seen are hybrid sorts. Very often merge sort + insertion sort or bubble sort for small sub-array.

Can you englight me ?

</comment><comment><USER32> It's an awesome idea, but seems to cross the line into "exploiting specific properties of the input", even if just a little, which would impact it's usefulness in say, a general purpose library.

</comment><comment><USER41> Thanks for editing what was originally an inane title "Timsort the sort you haven't heard of" to describe something I (and probably most here) have heard of many times over and over again.

</comment><comment><USER42> How to be THIS good as a Software Engineer?

<comment><USER43> Practice, challenge yourself constantly, seek mentorship, humbly request feedback and act on it, and devote your life to the craft, not your wallet or your family. I think. Read Hamming.

<comment><USER32> Easier said than done

<comment><USER44> If it was easy, folks wouldn't have to ask how it could be done and everyone would that THAT good. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> radixsort is better still

<comment><USER46> Only for numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Tim the enchanter!

</comment><comment><USER48> "never heard of"?? I would hope all Python devs at some point Google "What algorithm is Python's built-in sort function?"...

[https://docs.python.org/2/howto/sorting.html#sort- stability-...](https://docs.python.org/2/howto/sorting.html#sort-stability- and-complex-sorts)

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10948920/what- algorithm-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10948920/what-algorithm- does-pythons-sorted-use)

<comment><USER49> Great, yet another True-Scotsman of being a proper developer. There is so much you should have read, googled, written to be a "True" dev these days. My theory is - if you are often learning stuff and producing good working code be happy. Not every developer needs to know the underlying sort algorithms.

<comment><USER50> The person never said that you had to google it to be a "proper developer", just that they hoped that every python developer would have done so.

<comment><USER51> I hate to disappoint that hope but I have never search for Python's sorting algorithm.

<comment><USER52> What about the hash strategy used in dicts? I'm holding on to hope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I, for one, cannot wait that quantum computing to be the norm, like current one is. Then the only algorithm everyone will use will be randomsort. Got a list to sort it? Allocate one q-bit for each element and apply randomsort and boom, done in under a picosecond, regardless of list size. This is the ultimate algorithm to be implemented for parallelization, all others will take more since they depend on sequence input.

<comment><USER54> That's not how it works . Grovers algorithm takes O(sqrt(n)) using a quantum computer .

Values in a quantum computer are superpositions but when measured they will return only one result. They don't have an infinite amount of time and or space .

<comment><USER53> We are today on quantum computing where we were in 18th century when Ada was creating the 1st computer program. Sure, Grover's algorithm is good for current state of quantum computing but when it will reach to be a current norm just like the Silicon based one is today then is entire state altogether. By that time Grover's algorithm will take it's place in history but will not be used in practice. From wiki: Perform the following "Grover iteration" r(N) times. Iteration? That means one state of the computation is waiting for a previous one to be completed. That, to me, sounds like not a true parallelization algorithm, hence randomsort still wins.

<comment><USER19> I suggest you read up on how superposition works in quantum computers–they not just computers with an infinite number of cores :/

<comment><USER53> No, they are not. Also 128 billion is a big enough number that if you'd say to a 18th century scientist who was working with punch cards computers that in the future one with 128 billion punch cards would exists he would've replied something along the lines, just like you, that there are not enough trees on Earth to create 128 billion cards for a single computer, let alone billion of them that they are more common than horses in 18th century. And yet, here we are, with computers that have 128 GB RAM, like the one I use to reply to you. So how about you let me dream big instead, eh?

<comment><USER55> If you are going to come up with purely conjectural advantages with no basis in known science, why bother attributing them to one thing (like quantum computing) and not any other thing?

Like why are you not arguing that C++24 will make all algorithms O(1)? There is as much reason to believe that as there is to believe that quantum computing will do so.

Or maybe graphene memresistors will form timelike loops and allow computers that give you results before you ask the question? Maybe! Again, no more reason to think that won't happen than some kind of purely conjectural magic from quantum computation.

Maybe the development of green energy such as solar panels will lead to the development of nano-scale self assemblers, allow us to turn the entire moon into ultra efficient computronium powered by sinking the moon's residual heat of formation into deep space, making the asymptotic complexity of most algorithms on many problems largely irrelevant. Maybe! Or maybe the insight might actually come from a school kid that trips over a rock and gets a vision after hitting their head. Better start putting pebbles out in front of schools, because you never know! :)

Isn't getting a sqrt() speedup for everything and an exponential speed up for a few things good enough for you?

If we really understand the idea of quantum computing so poorly that that we've massively underestimated it, isn't it even more likely that our misunderstanding has made us massively overestimate it?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript Cryptography Considered Harmful (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/august/javascript-cryptography-considered-harmful/ <comment><USER3> You can't roll your own TLS replacement using Javascript, because you need some way to _deliver_ that Javascript to the browser in the first place. If you don't use TLS for that, you're doomed. Sure.

On the other hand, that's a pretty narrow definition of "Javascript Cryptography". The article overlooks a bunch of other useful cryptographic things you can do in the browser, like end-to-end encrypted messaging. You can't lose a giant database of customer data if you don't _have_ a giant database of customer data sitting around. Javascript can encrypt stuff before it even leaves the browser.

If you build your service this way, an attacker would have to carry out an active attack that injects bad code into your Javascript bundle. That's much harder than stealing a database, and even if it works, it can only compromises the users who log in during the breach.

So, no, the right kind of Javascript Cryptography is actually quite beneficial.

<comment><USER4> You're skipping over the part about users having to recheck what you serve them every request to see you haven't added a backdoor. Not sure how much security people being able to look at and pin versions with traditional software they build adds, but probably nonzero.

<comment><USER3> Right, and the only solution is to audit and compile all the code running on your computer, including firmware. Otherwise, you have no idea what your computer is really running.

In the real world, most people run pre-built software, which is worse than this ideal. I agree that browser Javascript is worse still, but it's still better than sending secrets to a centralized server somewhere.

Security is a spectrum, not a binary on/off thing like this article tries to paint it. Things can still be helpful, even if they aren't perfect.

<comment><USER4> I agree completely. I didn't intend to say you were wrong, just that you didn't mention an important consideration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Much as I'd like it to, this article will never die. I'm still convinced directionally of the argument I made here: browser Javascript cryptography is essentially cosmetic and provides none of the assurance that cryptography normally offers for client/server applications with clientside secrets. I think I could make a better, shorter, simpler can now than I did way back when I wrote this.

Just to head off as many of the standard arguments I can remember occurring whenever this shows up on HN:

* I'm talking about browsers-qua-browsers: while Javascript is not especially hospitable to cryptography the way, say, Rust is, it's not my claim that something intrinsic to Javascript is what makes cryptography hard. In particular: Node.js serverside applications and Electron clientside applications (with some caveats) are capable hosts for cryptographic features.

* Yes, Chrome extensions do complicate the analysis for the browsers themselves (of course: application providers don't want to do Chrome extensions, because it drastically cuts down user adoption). The story with extensions is not as simple as for Electron applications.

* No, WebCrypto doesn't make any of these problems better. WebCrypto provides primitives, but the interesting vulnerabilities in cryptosystems are in the joinery; a malicious server can still exfiltrate secrets even if you're using WebCrypto.

* It remains Hard to effectively assure the integrity of whole programs delivered to browsers, because there are too many ways to update an instance of content-controlled Javascript. The standard answer of "we'll just hash the js files" has never been credible!

<comment><USER6> Recently, I heard a smart person[0] make the argument that application-level encryption, even in the browser, is a net win. It's also worth mentioning that ProtonMail and 1Password both practice application-level encryption/decryption in the browser in their front-end web clients.

App-level crypto in the browser certainly provides no added security to data transmitted over the wire, since (a) connections to back-end servers are already TLS-encrypted, (b) a breakdown of TLS implies the code running on the endpoint can't be trusted, therefore (c) assume data exfiltration when TLS breaks down regardless of other variables. I think this line of reasoning is just a restatement of your points above.

However, depending on how the back-end is set up, a zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted vault would be impractical and even dangerous to _decrypt_ in the cloud prior to serving it. Hence, in an end-to-end encrypted app, the chain of trust in client connections is anchored at the static file servers, the JS code they serve, and the TLS connection itself, not application servers -- the less trust app servers have to have, the better. I posit that it's easier to secure a static file server and TLS endpoint than it is to secure application servers. Furthermore, client crypto protects servers from ever seeing (or having to store/hash/cache) the whole symmetric key.

So client-side crypto _can_ improve the security and trust calculus for server-side systems. In that case, a back-end breach of _all but_ TLS endpoints and static file services would not expose user data.

If anyone can explain what's wrong with or missing from this line of reasoning, I am all ears -- please do!

[0] [https://qconsf.com/sf2019/presentation/security](https://qconsf.com/sf2019/presentation/security)

<comment><USER7> > (b) a breakdown of TLS implies the code running on the endpoint can't be > trusted, therefore (c) assume data exfiltration when TLS breaks down > regardless of other variables

In security engineering the main question is always "from whom do you want to protect it." If your assumed adversary can overtake both your TLS and deliver modified scripts, yes, the encryption in browser doesn't bring anything. If your assumed adversary is somebody less powerful like a passive listener somewhere the traffic is comes out of TLS, or somebody who has access to the data, but the data are already encrypted, then yes, the encryption can make a difference.

Or as one great thinker wrote for Usenix 2014: "In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you're either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad." "If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU'RE GONNA DIE AND THERE'S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ [https://](https://) If the Mossad wants your data, they're going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that's shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they're going to hold a press conference and say "It wasn't us" as they wear t-shirts that say "IT WAS DEFINITELY US," and then they're going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them."

[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uhhhh... like what's the point of this? Like who is doing what they suggest folks are doing with JavaScript? Who isn't using SSL and who is rolling their own encryption layer?

It seems like a clickbait rant more than something actionable or even really relevant. They even go on to say in the article you totally can do crypto "right" with JS it's just really hard. Isn't that known? Isn't that why we have libraries which are audited for security vulnerabilities by experts in the field? Isn't that true for literally _every_ language/runtime/vm ? I'm not saying JavaScript's number types and quirks aren't a huge pain in the ass but so is managing memory.

/shrug just my two cents.

<comment><USER9> This is from 2011, when people (usually correctly) believed things like "SSL certificates are expensive," "SSL connections are expensive," "it's reasonable to host just the secure parts of your website on SSL," "if you only need authenticity and not confidentiality, it's better to avoid SSL if possible," etc.

In the years since 2011, we could have implemented high-quality side-channel- resistant JS crypto libraries (plus added browser features to allow storing secret data that wasn't accessible to the website, auditing JS source, etc.), or we could have just deployed SSL everywhere. The world chose the latter, and it was a better choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is a little outdated. (2011; that should probably be in the title.) JS in the browser _does_ have a cryptographically secure random number generator now, for example (Crypto.getRandomValues) and a secure way to generate and store keys (SubtleCrypto.generateKey).

A lot of the article's other concerns are still valid, but there are a few new standards on the horizon which could eventually fix most of those and make cryptography in the browser viable, such as the Web Package standard. The Signed HTTP Exchanges standard's section on binary transparency is especially interesting for this use case: [https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft- yasskin-http-origin-...](https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http- origin-signed-responses.html#name-binary-transparency)

</comment><comment><USER9> Mods, can we add (2011) to this? A bunch of the comments seem to be saying this advice doesn't make much sense in 2019, and in fact, it doesn't - it's written for a world where people are trying to avoid SSL if they can.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thread from 2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903720)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5123165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5123165)

Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2935220](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2935220)

</comment><comment><USER12> From a purely technical perspective, this article raises multiple valid points. From a practical perspective, there can be legal and logistical benefits to not knowing what your customers are doing.

I think articles like this get treated like they're referring to a broad category of activities, or making very broad statements, when in fact they're talking about a very narrow aspect of security. And to be fair, people do treat Javascript Crypto like it's the same thing as normal, native E2E encryption, so maybe that pushback is sometimes necessary. But this isn't a binary, black-and-white principle.

JS crypto is problematic in environments like the web because it is very hard to validate or pin the code that is sent to your browser (and for a few other reasons). This means that E2E crypto is not a good way of protecting yourself _from a malicious provider_. JS crypto does not remove your need to trust your host, and to trust your host's security.

It does not follow the E2E crypto has no uses at all on the web. It just means you have to be open about what benefits it does and doesn't provide. It isn't a silver bullet that will protect you everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is using some other encryption for client interactions common vs just using TLS? I don't think I've seen anyone ever recommend any of these things.

"You can't simply send a single Javascript file over SSL/TLS. You have to send all the page content over SSL/TLS."

Is this a common problem in some way? It doesn't seem like a big deal unless you are trying to shave a few bytes off of your traffic.

<comment><USER14> The article is from 2011. Certs were expensive back then. People thought TLS was an unnecessary hassle, difficult to configure etc. There was an idea that you just do the really important parts (logins, authorizing fund transfers) over TLS and do the mundane stuff offer HTTP. (Static site assets) XSS was so rampant they gave it its own acronym. The natural extension of that was to do everything over HTTP and for the handful of objects that need to be secured, you just encrypt those ~100 bytes of important data.

Then let's encrypt happened and all that went out the window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Any attacker who could swipe an unencrypted secret can, with almost total > certainty, intercept and alter a web request.

Not really. Modification risks exposure and some attacks are only possible after hours of compute time. For example if the HTTPS connection uses a cypher that's later found to be insecure then they can analyze the data pushed through the connection after the fact, but they can't intercept the now-closed connection. The NSA layers encryption for this purpose, and I don't really see the harm in encrypting with JavaScript as an additional layer in addition to HTTPS.

Plus, there are many places where passive attacks are much more likely than someone that's actually going to change your JavaScript. For example, many organizations terminate HTTPS at the perimeter of their network in order to monitor employee actions on the web. Using JS to encrypt is going to keep your secrets safer there, though some would argue that it's hostile to the orgs that downgrade the protocol on purpose.

</comment><comment><USER16> Cryptography in JS is useful when you have a secure channel and you only want the plaintext available to one party. (ex. a secure file store or encrypted mail server)

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting that author seem to omit the possibility of PGP functionality available locally in the browser - as, say, a bookmarklet.

Surely websites aren't designed in a way to take advantage of that, but I still don't see in the article a good argument why that is impossible - <USER2> that the local code is a carefully written (e.g. Stanford crypto library seems to be a good example of crypto JS code).

</comment><comment><USER18> This is not the best article, it fundamentally sees security as a black and white concept. Whereas its shades of gray and levels of defense.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting to relitigate this every few years. We can sum it up every time with, "private/secret keys accessible to browser means trusting the users browser." the details are superfluous.

The relevant xkcd on this is this one: [https://xkcd.com/2217/](https://xkcd.com/2217/)

Where "check my math" means the same thing.

The browser isn't trustworthy.</comment>


Amazon bans the sale of rogue USB-C cables - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/29/amazon-bans-the-sale-of-rogue-usb-c-cables/ <comment><USER2> Amazon has a genuine problem with their reputation brewing at this point. Here's an example:

Try to buy replacement printer ink for a HP 8600 printer. This is a super common machine sold on special in Costco and Best Buy, possibly the most popular general purpose printer out there.

Seriously, go to Amazon's site and try to just buy some replacement cartridges for it. The first result looks great, tons of reviews average almost five stars, appears to be sold by Amazon and made by HP: [http://www.amazon.com/HP- Magenta-Original-Cartridges-CR314FN...](http://www.amazon.com/HP-Magenta- Original-Cartridges-CR314FN/dp/B005BZNE2A/ref=sr_1_1?s=office- products&ie=UTF8&qid=1459336766&sr=1-1&keywords=hp+951)

Now scroll down and look at the top customer reviews. Something is going on here. Are these real or refilled? Who exactly is selling them? OK go back to search results and look again. But there isn't any entry that stands out as obviously just made by HP and sold by Amazon, they all have similar problems.

Ugh. This of course happened to me the other day. I spent 10 minutes trying to just figure out how to buy real OEM printer ink, gave up, and navigated over to HP.com where aside from typing in all my info again, it was painless and next day shipping was free.

This has become a _constant_ problem that Amazon has to fix.

The next exercise for the reader is to try to find a pair of genuine Apple OEM headphones, the kind that come with the iPhone, that can be bought with actual confidence. That should be the easiest online shopping task imaginable, but it's literally _impossible_ at this point on Amazon. Not slightly frustrating, impossible.

And don't get me started on the switch to USPS shipping.

Despite their seeming chokehold on online shopping, Amazon is vulnerable to competition that can solve these kinds of problems.

<comment><USER3> Their introducing non-Amazon sellers on Amazon.com has really put me off. When I'm ordering from Amazon, I know I'm going to get what I paid for, shipped quickly, with an easy returns process. If I wanted to compare seller ratings, decide on trustworthiness vs price, etc etc I'd go to eBay. I really wish there was some option to just turn the marketplace completely off when I know I just want to buy from Amazon.

<comment><USER2> > I really wish there was some option to just turn the marketplace completely > off when I know I just want to buy from Amazon.

This actually would solve much of the problem. I've tried to figure out how to do this. My theory was that limiting the search to sold by Amazon.com would accomplish this, but it doesn't seem to actually work that way in practice.

It's possible also that the customer reviews are for all sellers of item X, so that the strange mix of 5-star "yes this is real in real box" reviews with 1-star "this is fake in a white envelope" reviews when looking at item X is due to some kind of aggregation of all sellers of item X, and not individualized.

Either way it's a UX disaster.

<comment><USER4> Not sure, but I think checking "Prime Only" essentially accomplishes this because you can only get Prime shipping on items sold or fulfilled by Amazon. Obviously is only relevant to Prime users, but at least it's something.

<comment><USER2> That's not it. There's a lot of marketplace sellers that use fulfilled by Amazon and offer prime shipping.

<comment><USER5> Using Amazon is more risky for them, though, for example, if Amazon kicks them to the curb, which happens frequently with e.g. DVD sales, they have to pay hefty money to either get their inventory back _or have Amazon destroy it_.

Me, I find that if I stick to sellers of enough age, quantity of sales, and a 96% or better rating, I'm very seldom disappointed.

<comment><USER3> > if I stick to sellers of enough age, quantity of sales, and a 96% or better > rating

This is exactly the calculus that I don't want to bother with.

<comment><USER5> It's a simple enough algorithm that I find it worthwhile, given the value of my time vs. dollars.

That said, I do all the Amazon purchasing for my ~80 year old parents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, this is all nice and true, but how would such a thing be handled in practice? There's a difference between "Standards Compliant" and "Does not work for me". Many of the standards compliant cables might work just fine for a majority of users.

Most specifically, the typical non-conformance was a wrong resistor value indicating that an A-to-C cable would be free to draw up to 3A from the A socket. This was in violation of maximum current allowed on an A connector, but I guess this is what many users appreciated, because it made the tablets charge faster.

So, who gets to decide if a USB-C cable is nonconforming? Remember, we are not talking about expensive industrial or laboratory equipment but $10 (or ceaper) cables.

Do I get to send it back to Amazon if it doesn't work with my USB-C device [which itself might be too picky, violating the standard] Or may I send it back when I can show a non-conformance using proper test equipment, even though the cable would work for most users? Does every vendor have to provide a certificate for successful passing of a testsuite/measurement? -- Also keep in mind that the specification doesn't only cover charge currents (which is pretty much exclusively what Benson Leungh had tested).

And when I have demonstratively proven that a cable is dangerous, will Amazon reimburse all buyers?

<comment><USER7> > There's a difference between "Standards Compliant" and "Does not work for > me". Many of the standards compliant cables might work just fine for a > majority of users.

I'd assume that a USB-Type C recepticle embedded in a costly device, such as a smartphone or notebook, is more likely to be manufactured by someone who adheres to the specs, or at least strives to.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I had assumed such things in the past, too... ;-).

But of course you are right in general: A smartphone, notebook or tablet manufactured will likely be built to stricter standards than a random cable from a random Amazon seller. Nevertheless, "works with a good notebook" is generally not a replacement for a proper acceptance test. -- Typically it will be in favor of the marginally failing component, as standards always employ some safety margins, and properly built hardware will be forgiving for "slightly broken" cables. Such a cable may as well, and rightfully, fail with any number of other perfectly standards compliant computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My experience is that quality wise that OEM or "real" products offer better quality, but the risk in general doesn't negate the extra expense of buying the real thing; short-term this is, the half-life of non-real products is unpredictable and given the life spans of USB cords it's increasely worth the risk. Real issue is that complaint cables are over priced, and there no cheap way to confirm if a cord is non-complaint or for the matter if a device is complaint.

</comment><comment><USER9> USB-C is good news for consumers and companies alike because it helps standardize the very different kinds of ports and adaptors that tech firms have traditionally used for their products. But low quality and cheap cables have flooded the market, causing more harm than good by frying laptops and phones so that they can't be used again. Finally, it seems that major distributors like Amazon are waking up to the issue and clamping down, but there's plenty more to be done as Leung noted.

</comment><comment><USER10> Generally, if the cable isn't made by Anker, Monoprice, or AmazonBasics, why are you buying it?

<comment><USER11> To your average consumer those names mean nothing (except for maybe AmazonBasics, because "Amazon" is in there).

<comment><USER12> Question, is amazonbasics amazon.com or just a name trick that amazon.com allows ?

<comment><USER5> It is Amazon.com, and generally of high or at least good enough quality, but you have to check the reviews.

Given that they have their logo on the items, they'd better be careful about policing it.

<comment><USER12> Right, the logo matches too. So far it seems like a curated list of cheap enough parts. No expectations of awesomeness just functional without hidden strings.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Doc42 – Simple documentation tool - <AUTHOR> http://doc42.io/ <comment><USER2> It's ironic that a tool (probably!) intended for building documentation lacks in its documentation heavily. I couldn't even tell why I might want to use it over good old Perl's POD.

</comment><comment><USER3> Completely unreadable on mobile because of a overlaid menu with position:fixed.</comment>


Wait but why: Why Generation Y yuppies are unhappy - <AUTHOR> http://www.waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html <comment><USER2> Nothing to do with boomers growing up in times of growing equality, while gen y grew up in times of increasing inequality?

Yes, it does kind of piss me off that my previous landlord could afford multiple properties from the proceeds of selling pirated tapes in London in the 70's / 80's, yet as an educated knowledge worker on an above average wage, I could barely afford the crappiest flat there.

I guess I must be wildly ambitious like the article suggests.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was posted back in September, when it first came out. It has not improved with age.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting read, I found the tips at the end to be both... extremely practical, and kind of a mix of "You suck...BUT YOU DONT HAVE TO!".

However, I feel the writer is massively ineffective at communicating the tips at the end.

I think a few things could improve this to be readable by more than just the curious.

* - Stop lumping a 30 year gap into one group/personality. // While aware that you _may_ not be, it doesn't come off as that, I may feel this way because I was born in '91.*

* - Start with a problem. Fix the problem, before the next problem. example: A lot of people with this mentality share another slightly dysfunctional mentality, with this [subject] you'll come across this [problem]. Here is how you fix it, and work past it. *

* - Work on the wording. You seem either pretentious or born in the 40's and pissed about how the world changed, unable to accept advancements/changes through the world, while being angry with a younger generation. (Also, this is the internet, just to be clear, I'm not trying to be an asshole.) *

I hope you understand. I was born in this generation of "GYPSYs" as you (or the author) called it, I don't feel a sense of entitlement, my sense of being 'special' isn't "I am better than you.", it's more so that I have a love of education, technology, and programming, and that's 'special' to me because quite a few of the people I've known in my generation strongly dislike those topics.

Frankly, I love working my ass off and seeing a small blade of grass popup in my metaphorical soil. I hope (not expect) some day this metaphorical soil will be covered in countless tiny blades of grass that end up becoming a gigantic metaphorical greener-grass that is my life.

There are plenty of people (young and old-alike) that feel they are entitled to things. Respect, Success, Money, Fame(?). Those people suck. But your entire mentality isn't based on the time you were born. I feel like the things experience it, mixed with your environment are what attribute to those types of mentalities. (Yes, the old Nature VS Nurture)

\- Ash</comment>


Search Takes a Social Turn - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/technology/13search.html

<comment><USER2> Rejoice! There's no need to talk to your friends anymore.

<comment><USER3> Although it seems like that, I'd like to believe this is the time of "social networking" hype and fads and that, ultimately, it'll calm down. Anecdotal case in point: I've yet to find a good site that will help me find good books according to my taste. Social networking or not, the problem of taste doesn't seem like something machines can solve well.</comment></comment>