Lethal Opiates Delivered by Mail from China, Killing Addicts in the U.S - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/2017/03/11/519649096/can-china-ban-on-deadly-opioid-save-lives-in-the-u-s <comment><AUTHOR> Ah, if the trend toward nastier and more potent fentanyl analogues was an expected and predicted consequence of opioid prohibition. That would have been nice to know!

Before opioid prohibition deaths from opioid use were quite rare. You ever heard a pothead drone on about "it's nearly impossible to overdose from smoking marijuana"? The same thing applies to smoking opium. It's nearly impossible to overdose on that. But prohibition has pushed us from opium smoking and oral laudanum to injectable heroin to fentanyl and now we're at _carfentanil_.

The current USian "opioid crisis" is another manifestation of opioid prohibition pushing people from safer, cheaper, less disruptive and deadly drugs to more deadlier ones. Two decades ago some USian opioid users could go to pill mills and get prescriptions for pharmaceutical grade opioids but the DEA kicked down doctor's doors a bunch and that ended up pushing people to the illicit market. Maybe next time you see those scary increasing graphs of opioid deaths vs time, give that a thought? Sum up all those deaths (compared to the baseline, prior to the increased LEA focus on "pill mills) and ask yourself: are all those needless deaths worth it?

For a unit volume (so, for a unit risk of ending up in a concrete box as a consequence of shipping/making raw product) of uncut/active material, you want to be able to sell the most diluted/cut doses to end-users. __Of course __people will want their chemist to synthesise carfentanil (over regular fentanyl), because you can supply the the same number of end-user doses with 10,000 times less active material. The harder the enforcement, the more potent this selection pressure gets:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition)

<comment><USER2> > Before opioid prohibition deaths from opioid use were quite rare.

Maybe in the U.S., less so in China where ~25% of adult males were opium addicts in the early 1900s. The war on drugs isn't a success by any means, but at least the problems that exist aren't on that scale.

A better example of prohibition backfiring is with marijuana, where before prohibition ~0% of Americans were marijuana users, whereas today ~85% of American adults have used marijuana.

<comment><AUTHOR> My argument isn't that opioid use in the time of opium dens was harmless, nor that opioids can be used willy-nilly without any harms. I am well familiar with some of the dangers of opioid use and do not wish to discount them at all. My argument is that opioid prohibition in the 21st century in the US is a legal regime that _amplifies those dangers_ \-- it kills lots of people quite effectively (and keeps killing more every year).

The number of people who use opioids regularly is a second-order concern (if only because fent-laced heroin certainly gets that number down) to me, frankly -- reducing morbidity and mortality due to drug use is a lot more important. With a decent medical infrastructure, addicts should be able to get opioid maintenance therapy with the right drugs and dosage and be able to lead actual interesting lives beyond trying to score the next hit.

I'd so much rather live in a country where people who want to get high on opioids can buy cheap, pure, precisely metered opioids that won't kill them rather than smashing car windows to be able to pay for overpriced fentanyl- laced drugs sold by criminals that might overdose them in the street (which will cause even more expense and load on the already-awful USian medical system).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some of these synthetic opiates are a bit terrifying. There are some research chemicals available that are hundreds or thousands of times more potent than fentanyl and they're still technically legal.

It's so hard to work with these that even the drug boards say it's suicide to try to work with them without a clean room and a hazmat suit. If you inhale just a little bit of the drug dust in the air it will kill you.

It's gotten to the point where some of these respiratory depressant drugs can be used as a chemical weapon if inhaled.

For instance:

Heroin = 2.5x potency of morphine

Hydromorphone = 7.5x potency of morphine

Fentanyl = 120x potency of morphine

Carfentanyl = 5000x to 7500x the potency of morphine

Methoxyacetylfentanyl = 30,000x the potency of morphine

A lethal dose of Methoxyacetylfentanyl is so small it's not even visible to the naked eye. Some powdered methoxyacetylfentanyl released from a drone over a crowd would be disastrous.

<comment><USER4> Is there any reason to treat these as drugs instead of just poisons?

We sell all kinds of poisons on the regular basis and don't bat an eye. Are these any more interesting because they're opiates?

<comment><USER5> It's the dose that makes the poison. This is 16th century toxicology: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus#Contributions_to_to...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus#Contributions_to_toxicology)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a yellow journalism headline. Hearst would be proud.

As I've remarked before, the war on drugs and getting tough on crime is not working out too well for us, so it's time to change our plan.

I don't advocate off the shelf heroin or any of the cluster of ideas that suggest that. I do advocate focusing on the funnel that leads to addiction, homelessness, and death. Part of that is significantly amping up mental healthcare spending; part of that is having legally controlled drugs available in pharmacies for reasonable prices; part of that is supporting better schools (giving a window into a better world, and a way to climb through); part of that is supporting jobs programs. All of those relate in one way or another to the problem, some years and years earlier in the funnel.

No one is born choosing to be an addict in their later life; a series of choices and pressures put them there. The pressures from society can be changed, which shapes the set of choices visible.

<comment><USER7> I live next door to a rich heroin junkie. She has no job. What's left of her family has basically cut her off. She can afford all of the care in the world, but chooses heroin over treatment instead. Why? Heroin don't care.

The city of San Francisco took her dog away (twice) and declared her place a health hazard for a while, but ultimately it never forced her to get treatment and is tacitly approving of her heroin use. She hasn't paid her property taxes in years and the police come out about once a month, but the US has no ASBO laws so it's catch and release in hippie dippie SF.

She's got the money for the dope, and heroin don't care.

PS> She got the dog back both times.

<comment><USER8> > _She 's got the money for the dope, and heroin don't care._

So you what do you propose as a solution for this (likely unrepresentative) anecdote? Lock her up?

<comment><USER7> I don't have a solution, but my point was that not all addicts are victims. For some, it's a conscious decision about choosing heroin over life (insert Trainspotting ending here).

Unless the US adopts some sort of ASBO laws, there's not much you can do about forced treatment for someone who doesn't choose treatment.

Also, you could substitute heroin here with any other equally damaging substance like alcohol and the situation wouldn't change.

<comment><USER9> How about we just let addicts be addicts while we figure the rest out. That's certainly better than today's situation where we make extra sure we ruin their lives to, ya know, protect them from themselves.

<comment><USER7> The problem is they create a wake of destruction in their path of addiction.

<comment><USER10> The cost of a free society.

Keep that ASBO trash on the other side of the pond.

<comment><USER7> How about charging them for their public costs? If you get rescued by helicopter because you went skiing out of bounds at a resort and got lost, don't they send you a bill? How about that for people with money who abuse the system while abusing other things?

<comment><USER10> Like how the Japanese will send a bill to the family of someone who commits suicide on a train line?

I prefer my government to absorb the cost of human despair rather than bill for it. Don't write policy based on outliers.

<comment><USER11> > absorb

You are very good at using language. The reality is that government doesn't 'absorb' anything. Other people, some of whom can't afford to, pay for it.

<comment><USER10> All economics are redistribution, it's simply the details that change with the methods. It is unrealistic to want a world where each person pays exactly for what they consume or are liable for.

<comment><USER11> Maybe you are right but I cannot understand or agree with this idea that has taken hold among some on the internet that we should be happy to pay taxes because the government will go and solve problems with that money. Beyond the fact that the government is horrible at allocating resources and using them efficiently, every tax is a dollar being taken from the economy that could have gone to people that produce things of value not what some bureaucrat decided was of value.

<comment><USER12> _every tax is a dollar being taken from the economy_

Government turns around and spends those dollars in the economy. They are reallocated, not removed.

<comment><USER11> Individuals are significantly better at allocating resources than a central authority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reads like a thousand other articles over decades, like moral panic. There's always some new drug that's coming along, whether meth, this, bath salts, whatever.

When will culture come to its senses and realize that humans like to get high and that this will never stop?

Let's just focus on giving users accurate information and pathways out of usage, and skip the moral panics and claims that X is "sweeping the nation".

<comment><USER14> You do a great disservice to the people overdosing with such a middling dismissal. This is not a 'moral panic' this is a medical disaster unfolding in slow motion.

The combination of the technology to synthesize these drugs from unconstrained pre-cursors, the intensity of their effect, the lack of education on the part of consumers, and a tracking/enforcement system which responds more slowly than conditions change is leading to a situation where tens of thousands of people are going to die essentially at their own hand.

It is not a question of 'people like to get high' it is that 'people getting high on arbitrary things will kill themselves'.

I understand that you're approaching this from a legalization standpoint, and on that we agree. But the overdose rate is "actually" sweeping the country now and that is born out by the available reports of emergency rooms around the country. And between your "regulated and safe" future and now, there is a large pile of unnecessarily dead people.

<comment><USER15>
       the lack of education on the part of consumers

You realize if drugs were legal and regulated people wouldn't need to seek out desperate and risky online orders to satisfy their addiction?

When weed was legalized in Oregon, I immediately knew exactly what strain/THC%/CBD% I was buying. This was not available on the black market.

Education and security come from acceptance and regulation.

<comment><USER14> I do realize this, and agree that a saner drug policy is to legalize them and regulate them rather than the prohibition we have today. My point is that between the time we can get to that point, and now, a lot of people are going to end up dead unnecessarily and that they are worth trying to save. Sometimes this sort of 'look how horrible it is' type of article can help with that.

<comment><USER16> But "look how horrible" actually prevents decriminalization/legalization efforts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems like an ironic reversal of sorts in Sino-western opium relations, given the Opium Wars[0], which if I understood correctly, forced China to accept opium trade from the British.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars)

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks like irony ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion)

<comment><USER19> Definitely ironic.

Some of the earliest drug laws in the United States were enacted to discriminate against (primarily Chinese) opium users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's amazing what isn't legal to buy or sell in the USA, but you can easily buy from China and have delivered in the mail. $100 of testosterone powder which you can re-constitute and sell for $20,000 on the street here. Some of the more sophisticated resellers will even pack your order inside of a less conspicuous object.

<comment><USER21> Better be prepared to calculate in a lot of $ for lab testing of what you think is worth $20,000 before you kill a bunch of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you order anything at all for consumption from China be aware that you may get anything and everything besides the product that you ordered. White powder of any kind is an easy substitute for white powder of any other kind.

<comment><USER22> I don't know how much is psychology/paranoia, but every package I get from there smells chemically bad. One stupid plastic case for a laptop dvd drive gave me headache I had to throw the thing out.

That said, I also bought an old FP book from the US and got a similar smell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yellow journalism just attacked your postal secret, your democracy ; this by means of using your disdain for junkies and drugs. Who else besides the mentioned politician and a large chunk of the logistics sector profits ? Put their heads on a pike, show the world how utilitarian their true face is.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is the text of the STOP act mentioned in the article: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/6045...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/6045/text)

IANAL but would be interested to hear from one about the privacy and financial implications of this bill. For example, (d)(1) seems to suggest a $1 processing fee for non-letter class mail originating outside the US.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder as an analogy what markets would develop if caffeine sources were illegal. Caffeine isn't as harmful as other drugs but it is very addictive. By the same extension, this is why I think getting any drug should be eaiser. It's safer

</comment><comment><USER26> I've used many grams of these substances. AMA

</comment><comment> s- and you thought only legitimate businesses had a customer attrition problem...

</comment><comment><USER27> >A better example of prohibition backfiring is with marijuana, where before prohibition ~0% of Americans were marijuana users, whereas today ~85% of American adults have used marijuana.

No a better example was when Alex3917 made up shit, and then tried to legitimize his shit by comparing regular "users" to the population that has had at least one use. Wait that's not a better example, I'm just calling you out.

Cannabis use was alive and well before Federal Prohibition, Alcohol and Marijuana. ~0% of Americans were users? Maybe in the early 1400s.

<comment><USER2> Harry Anslinger estimated that there were 100,000 marijuana users when marijuana was banned 1937, when the U.S. population was ~129 million. In other words, a little less than 0.08%, or ~0%. Fail.

<comment><USER28> Getting your drug "facts" from Anslinger is like trusting what Jerry Falwell says about homosexuality.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but he wasn't exactly known for underestimating the scope of any drug- related problems. A better analogy would be that if Falwell says that gay marriage isn't responsible for causing hurricanes, you can probably take his word for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to keep viewers engaged in an online video - <AUTHOR> http://wistia.com/blog/4-ways-to-keep-viewers-engaged-in-an-online-video/

<comment><USER2> Your 4 tips are probably true for that particular type of short "testimonial" video but not necessarily true for longer videos.

For me it comes down to context, content and expectations. I expect a short testimonial video on your landing page that gets to the point, not a 4 minute drawn out circle jerk. If I see a runtime of 4 minutes on a testimonial video, I probably won't even click play to begin with. A Mixergy video on the other hand is something I expect to be long and not necessarily pack a punch right up front.

Do you find the viewing data from longer videos to be consistent with your 4 suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER3> Along the lines of cutting the videos short. Cut them down shorter than you feel is warranted. These videos should be product teasers.</comment>


Emacs setup for Python development - <AUTHOR> http://caisah.info/emacs-for-python/ <comment><USER3> That's a lot of junk that doesn't have a lot to do with Python.

Take a look here at my dotfiles to see how to use Rope/Ropemode/Ropemacs to get a Python-aware Emacs environment with the goodies that entails:

<https://github.com/bitemyapp/dotfiles/>

Edit: Try to ignore or not be daunted by the other directories, my Emacs setup is well maintained but very old and has over 400,000 LOC.

<comment><USER4> Yep, Rope in emacs is the way to go. I remember having trouble getting Pymacs set up the first time around, but if you are working on an actual python project (not just some loosely couple source files) I have not found a better environment anywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> On a related note, emacs support for ipython notebook with ein (<http://tkf.github.io/emacs-ipython-notebook/>) is marvelous. If you are comfortable with emacs, ein is far superior for interacting with your ipython notebook compared to the browser experience.

<comment><USER6> Seriously. I spend a large fraction of my day in ein. Great for exploratory data analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have found EmacsRedux informative for learning GNUemacs. The key for me was understanding that Emacs is command driven and that shortcuts are merely shortcuts to commands - i.e. M-x <command> invokes the <command> of which emacs has hundreds (+ lisp expressions). Unlike shortcuts, commands can be accessed with auto-complete.

<http://emacsredux.com/>

</comment><comment><USER8> The Emacs tutorial is a great place to start.

Using Emacs is a bit of a paradigm shift in text editing, so you should expect a bit more work up front for great results later on. Going through the tutorial and learning the basic vocabulary and commands takes care of most of that up-front cost and should not take long. I think it took me less than two weeks of fairly casual use.

Part of the beauty is that most of the things in the blog are not limited to Python. All the general text-editing stuff trivially transfers to other languages you may want to learn. And Emacs supports any language you _do_ want to learn to one extent or the other. For some languages, Emacs is even the only option!

So you should consider going through at least the beginning of all this even if you're not interested in Python _per se_.

Also, check out some of the Emacs Rocks![1] videos. I keep on recommending them because they are _awesome_. They really show off why Emacs is truly magical.

[1]: <http://emacsrocks.com/>

<comment><USER9> >> For some languages, Emacs is even the only option

Which ones would those be? Common Lisp using SLIME?

<comment><USER10> Erlang. Even though some IDE's are starting to support it now. Erlang is the original reason I got into using Emacs actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a similar emacs setup with cedet, autocomplete, and whatnot, but I have one problem -- things like "evaluate this buffer" don't work when your python environment is on a remote server (due to work constraints I am obliged to do this). Files open fine over tramp, but a lot of things (python-mode, jedi, etc.) don't understand that they are interacting with a remote python shell. Is there any easy way that someone here has found to get around that?

<comment><USER12> The way I get around that is running emacs on the remote server in screen/tmux. If there's a better way I'd love to know it, but I haven't found it to be too much of a problem.

<comment><USER11> I have tried this, and it works fine... _almost_ :) The only problem I have is that doesn't give you some of the GUI goodness. For example, I find CEDET's code folding incredibly useful when I want to get a bird's eye view of my modules, and the CLI version doesn't seem to support drawing the expandoes.

Thanks for the tip though.

<comment><USER12> True, but "emacs in screen/tmux" has a few other advantages for me - <USER2> that I can leave all my buffers open when I leave the office and easily pick up from home. It's also more pleasant over a slow vpn connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm happy with using elpy for python development in Emacs. The defaults are nice. Also backends like jedi/rope are supported. <https://github.com/jorgenschaefer/elpy>

</comment><comment><USER14> The author seems to imply that sublime does not qualify as a "serious" editor, and offers a link to quora as explanation, but the article there doesn't address what Sublime is missing at all.

<comment><USER15> >doesn't address what Sublime is missing at all.

Being a fully programmable work environment.

Edit: I used ST2 for about a month. The Python was neat but it's going to fade away eventually.

<comment><USER16> Vim and Emacs have had decades to get to that point. ST is a comparative baby. I'd love to see a modern editor that isn't designed around a terminal join those ranks.

<comment><USER17> There is Acme for Plan9 [1] and it has inspired a few other editors. I don't use them myself because they don't have syntax highlighting.

[1]: demo at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M>

<comment><USER18> That looks awesome. Having used the WMII window manager it looks quite familiar. Even then the learning curve seems steep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've attempted something similar but without installing any external package and by documenting the config inline so that one could pick only what needed:

[http://giuliofidente.com/2013/04/getting-to-know-and-use- ema...](http://giuliofidente.com/2013/04/getting-to-know-and-use-emacs- better.html)

In there I tried to address also other issues like saving the backup files out of the working dir, show the line numbers, highlight long lines.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone link a vim setup for python, for comparison puposes, perhaps with a short feature comparison? I'm currently a vim user with a fairly basic setup (I tried st 2 but couldn't figure it out for managing my work flow) , but I find the idea of emacs attractive.

<comment><USER21> Conque shell can 'run a terminal' inside of vim, but it's a bit buggy. It's not really fair to compare vim and emacs, because vim is _just_ a text editor. Vim + screen or vim + tmux (my preference) is much closer to the same ... category of thing that emacs is.

You can split tmux tabs so that you can have vim up in one pane on a 'tab' and python running in another pane in the same 'tab'. Both tmux and screen have decent copy/paste functionality that mimics vim's movement behaviour to some degree. (Tmux also has scriptable sessions, if you like different workflows for different types of projects)

If you want a nice vim setup SPF-13 is a decent place to start. There are tmux configs everywhere. Also Ipython does a lot for you as far as completion, looking at documentation, and the like.

I think that's kind of what you're after, sorry if it's not.

<comment><USER22> Tmuxinator especially makes doing the vim + tmux thing so much better because it has nice session support (just type "mux <name>" to bring up a session). I've been using it for about six months now, and my current setup can do anything an IDE can in a fraction of a time.

<comment><USER14> What do you use for automatic refactoring? Are there good command line tools for renaming methods across an entire source tree for example?

<comment><USER21> sed can do in place recursive changes for search patterns. if you use vim search and replace across a file it's pretty much the same.

<comment><USER14> I was thinking of something more context aware than a simple find/replace. If you're changing MyClass.getFoo() to MyClass.getBar(), you only want to do that on instances of MyClass.

<comment><USER20> If there is a plugin for intelligent refactoring in vim, I have yet to see it. You can use tabdo or buffdo for multiple files, but the class/object parsing isn't there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> iPython Notebook is really cool and the emacs client is extremely well done. I highly recommend checking it out.

<http://tkf.github.io/emacs-ipython-notebook/></comment>


Ask HN: Traveling for 3 months, what do i do with mail? - <AUTHOR>

I am leaving the country for 3 months.  I would love to receive a scanned copy of my mail by email so  I don't miss anything while travelling.
I found http://blog.outboxmail.com/ but it is only in san fran.  I live in Virginia.
Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> I use [https://www.earthclassmail.com/](https://www.earthclassmail.com/) they scan/shred/recycle or forward if you have a place to forward it to.

</comment><comment><USER3> I did it the old school way. When I was out of the country for about a year, I paid a local bookkeeper to handle my mail and asked the USPS to do a temporary forward.</comment>


Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp: Lessons learned from 21 startups - Leancamp - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/12008010

<comment><USER2> The slides are a bit dense and I would say the insight is in the stories I'm trying to share through each example. Would love to hear more such stories/insight from other startups</comment>


HyPer – A Hybrid OLTP and OLAP High-Performance DBMS - <AUTHOR> http://www.hyper-db.com/

<comment><USER2> Stumbled upon it a few months ago, but nowhere to download it unfortunately. For OLAP needs, the best solution as far as I know right now is still KDB+ ( managed to make some complicated queries with aggregates on 2 millions rows in 46ms on a macboook air with it, quite amazing )... Any alternative you know ?

<comment><AUTHOR> KDB+ .. looks to have its own language to query it .. btw you can download hyper-db from [http://www.hyper- db.com/downloads/hyperdemo.tar.xz](http://www.hyper- db.com/downloads/hyperdemo.tar.xz)

<comment><USER3> > KDB+ .. looks to have its own language to query it

And that's a good thing.

You can use sql to query it if you want by starting the query with "s)" in the console, or simply by using the ODBC/JDBC drivers.

But KDB+ embraces order in a way that SQL does not, which means that if you limit yourself to SQL then you miss out on a lot power that KDB gives you.

For example, say you want to select a list of (date,teacher) records ordered by date, and out of these pick out the records in which the teacher is not the same as in the previous date.

In kdb+, it's "select from (select from records by date) where differ teacher" (or just "&~=':teacher[<date]" if you use K notation). What's the SQL equivalent?

<comment><USER4> At first I thought you could do this with window functions ([http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/tutorial- window.ht...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/tutorial-window.html)) but now I'm not so sure, or at least it doesn't seem very straightforward to me - very neat!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I couldn't find any information on persistence and crash recovery for this thing... is it able to beat Volt because it doesn't write to disk?

<comment><USER6> In fact we do write a redo log to disk (Set the REDO environment variable, e.g. REDO=$filename bin/driver when running the driver in our example download). VoltDB tries to be fast at highly partitionable workloads and does not provide OLAP-style query support. HyPer aims at bringing OLTP and OLAP together into one system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Peter Boncz is involved in some capacity, he told me last time we talked. I believe Peter is the senior academic from the VectorWise project, and second most senior generally in the MonetDB gang after Martin Kersten.

</comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone tried it? Is it an open source or commercial product? Can't find enough information... Can anyone help?

<comment><USER6> It is currently a closed-source academic project but is in the process of being commercialized.

<comment><USER8> Do you know the timeframe for commercialization ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any more In Memory Databases ..which you have tried ?

</comment><comment><USER9> License ?</comment>


True to his words: Rubin "Hurricane" Carter's Exoneration Story in Detail - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnnsi.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1003662/2/index.htm via DuckDuckGo for Android

<comment><AUTHOR> I felt like reading the movie, except much more detailed; things that were cryptic in the movie are clear here</comment>


Show HN: movies.io — torrent search like it should be - <AUTHOR> http://movies.io/ <comment><USER3> I don't know which I feel saddest about:

1\. Whether or not this is actually illegal, it is clearly unethical and not in the spirit of good clean business and technology practices we should all be aspire to.

2\. That it quickly made it to #1 on Hacker News.

3\. That I seem to be one of the few who cares while most others nit on details.

<comment><USER4> I'll bite.

Why do you think this "clearly unethical"? I don't think it's clear at all.

Everyone I know pirates movies, TV shows, and music. Everyone I know also jaywalks. I also know people who use drugs illegally, as well as participate in or facilitate underage drinking, and I don't have a problem with any of it. Are these unethical? Someone clearly thought so. Do I care?

You know what the truth is, for me, and everyone I know, at least? The truth is, we don't care about "other" people's opinions on ethics (where "other" people=people on the internet, in the government, in anti-piracy ads, etc). The fact is, it's _socially acceptable_ , among my social circles, to pirate, to use drugs, and to {participate in,facilitate} underage drinking. So I have no qualms with people I know doing so, nor if I were to do so myself.

You don't pirate, ever? Because it's "clearly unethical"? Do everyone in your social circles hold similar opinions? Do you jaywalk? Have you ever used drugs, or facilitated illegal drinking?

Those aren't rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely curious.

I guess my point is, I don't think ethics matter. I don't think about whether what I do is ethical. I don't hurt people, and I don't steal (physical things), because I have empathy. I guess you could say I have ethics in that if you asked me why I don't, I'd say "it's wrong", but I'd never say something is "clearly unethical" and try to argue why. I'd say it's wrong because it's hurtful, and I don't like being hurt.

Is this just me?

<comment><USER5> Since you asked, I shall explain. Here is my working definition of something that immoral:

      Violating the written or unwritten rules of the society one
      lives in, in a way that is directly harmful to another person or
      group of people, though ones actions.

So taking drugs is fine, since you are not harming another person. Downloading a film is also fine for the same reason. With selling drugs and jaywalking it depends.

Building a torrent site is different though, because under the rules of our society someone who made a movie can decide who sees that movie and who does not. You are taking that right away from them by distributing that movie. If the rules make sense or does not really matter (within reason), it is a rule that we as a society agreed upon.

EDIT: I don't think morality can ever be subject to loopholes and technicalities, it's governed by common sense.

However, the counter-argument that would let count is good intentions: if OP truly believes that the world might become a better place as the result of his action and he has no selfish motivations at all, I might consider it moral (at least from his point of view).

<comment><USER4> 1\. To be immoral, something both has to violate rules of society in addition to being "directly" harmful? So if it's directly harmful but violates no rules of society (e.g. beating and raping women in societies where that's socially acceptable), or it violates rules of society but is only indirectly harmful, it's perfectly moral?

2\. What's your working definition of "directly harmful"? Littering directly harms wildlife, does it directly harm people? Buying some drugs directly supports people who actively harm other people. Last I heard, there was mounting evidence that second-hand smoke was worse than what used to be believed; is smoking indoors "directly harmful" to other occupants?

3\. I'm not sure what you mean by "counter-argument" (what are you arguing against? Your definition?), but you seem to be saying you feel like there should be intentionality in there somewhere but you're not sure where. I hope you don't need me to tell you that muddies the issue further, e.g. religious fanatics that really believe they're saving souls or the world when they hurt people.

<comment><USER5> Are you seriously not understanding what I am saying or are you just looking for a discussion?

You asked (basically) why anyone would consider jaywalking, taking drugs, and downloading movies to be ethical, but not hosting a torrent site. So, I tried to give a rough stipulation of my own personal ethics. That definition was not meant to be universal, bulletproof, or exhaustive.

1\. My point is that what is considered harmful or not is decided by the rules of society. Different societies agreed upon different rules about what the rights are of a person. If there was a society were there copyright is not commonly accepted then making a movie pirate site is (obviously) not a problem. If you don't agree with the rules, you should work to change them, but not take justice in your own hands.

2\. Specifically, I was thinking about a situation where you buy drugs and that money gets used to finance a drug war. Even though, I think that is bad, I don't think it an deciding factor in this case if buying drugs was legal or not.

3\. That's why I added "from his point of view". If I would consider it ethical in this case depends on whether I think it is reasonable or not, and whether the mean justifies the end in this case.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry, I now realize I didn't express that I was looking for a discussion, you seemed open to that.

1\. I feel like you're conflating societies' notion of what people are allowed to do, which is what I'd understand "rules of society" to mean, and societies' notion of what counts as harmful, which I wouldn't consider to be the same thing.

2\. I see...so what's your working definition of "directly harmful", and how do, say, littering and second-hand smoke fall into it?

3\. I assume you meant "whether the ends justifies the means". So how does the reasonability, and whether the ends justifies the means, fit into your working definition?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't like it that much.

Yes, it's deadly simple, but what I actually like on sites like PirateBay or demonoid is the discussion below the torrent. Yes, it is sometimes idiotic and distracting, but if it's bad quality/a different movie/contains a virus, someone will mention that.

With your website, I have no clue at all what I am downloading. What is the format? How is the quality? Is it nuked? Is it DVDrip/camrip/webrip/...?

I don't know any of that from your site. I see just a link and filesize. Who knows what the file actually is. I personally find the quality more important than the number of seeders/leechers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Power users are not well served with this version of movies.io

Results are usually "pretty good", but that's nowhere satisfying for a connoisseur such as yourself.

We're working on that though, but we'd much rather have people talking about the movie than about the torrent. A movie is art, it's emotions, stories, parts of our childhood. Much more interesting than a bitrate, a codec, a PSNR level.

<comment><USER6> That last part is true - and it's evident from your application that you give more weight to the movie than to the technical details. And it's good, in a way.

But in my opinion, even to a less powered user, it's still important to know if he is going to watch a DVD-rip or a russian-dubbed camrip.

<comment><AUTHOR> More importantly, it matters that the first result is a the cleanest rip possible in english.

We'll add a dropdown for alternative languages etc., and subtitles, but we got to breathe a little first. Lotsa things in the issue tracker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's mighty purty.

Bug: if you try to type in something that doesn't exist, say an actor's name like Walter Matthau, it autocorrects so aggressively you can't finish typing

Feature requests: If it's available on Netflix/other streaming services, show a link.

Oh, and this seems like a very bad place to actually log-in.

<comment><USER8> According to the Netflix terms for their affiliate program[1], they won't let you participate in their program if your site includes "illegal activities."

Seems understandable, but maybe if they allowed torrent sites to direct users to them they could help prevent some piracy AND everyone would make some money.

[1] <https://signup.netflix.com/Affiliates>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, that seems to be a stupid policy.

Anyway, linking to Netflix/others is nice in theory but clutters the interface. Until we find a good solution for that, we won't do it.

<comment><USER9> It is a defensive posture against the mafia. Netflix is already bent over backwards as movie distributors try to run it into the ground with overt contracts, so they force them to use policies like these because they have the backwards idea that sharing will go away when they put their fingers in their ears and go lalalalala you don't exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, yes, I can definitely guess the _thinking_ behind it, I'm just saying this thinking is antiquated and doesn't work well in 2012.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> ☑ Massive market opportunity

☑ Tons of room for product innovation

☑ Potential for significant revenue

☐ Ability to do business without being sued out of existence.

<comment><AUTHOR> And that's why it's not a business. Just a temporary solution for movie lovers until content owners get their stuff straight.

In the meantime, it's still a great product building experience for us, even if we make $0 out of it.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that you might not get to walk away scot-free from this even when you want to.

One thing I can gaurantee will help you: make no attempt whatsoever to profit from this. Don't put up any ads. Don't have any affiliate links. Profiting from a (potential) crime or infringement makes it 100x more dangerous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, I guess I'll postpone that flight to NY.

No intentions to profit from this, except for the experience, the friends (and enemies) we make, and the excitement.

<comment><USER5> I am surprised you are taking this so lightly. Are you sure this can not get you into trouble in France / the EU?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thankfully France is not the only french-speaking country.

Don't be surprised: I'm taking this "fuck it, we need to do something" approach. We've been trying to get heard by content owners for years but nothing has worked. If this is the only thing we can do, I'll do it.

I'm more curious than anything to see if this will get me into any real legal trouble. I believe what we do is legal, I also wish we didn't need to do it at all.

As mentioned previously, if I could have simply built a good front-end that calls an API to license content, I'd have very happily done it.

Coming from the music industry, when I hear the excuse "but it's hard to create a worldwide licensing system like you ask", I say bullshit. Both the movie and music industry are waaaaaaaaay behind in terms of technology, and everything is so inefficient.

Ever tried to obtain the rights to (legally) burn a CD compilation of your favorite songs? You'll have to send snail mail, make phone calls, wait weeks for confirmation (while you pay, of course), if you're very lucky you'll be done in 6 months with a lot of work. This is not the way it should happen.

Some start-ups (say, <http://official.fm/>) are working towards resolving the situation on the music side: providing a friendly licensing platforms for content owners is a good start. But that only works for small to middle content creators/owners. The big will never bow to that, they'll always go for their own, often crappier, solution.

So, I'm willing to work on their own terms: you give me an API key, a doc, and you decide the pricing. That's all I ask. Then we can all get busy building apps around content, which is what is dear to my heart.

Hope this helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I built a somewhat similar product <http://www.dexy.tv> but it only links to 'legit' content (netflix, hulu, amazon, etc).

nddrylliog, send me an email if you're interested in potentially collaborating so you can list both kinds of content. Really like what you've done on the UI side.

<comment><USER12> Do any torrent sites have affiliate links to legit content like Amazon? That seems like a good opportunity. If someone searches for a movie torrent, the movie might be available on Amazon (DVD or streaming) even if no torrents are found. And, more interestingly, someone might search for a movie torrent but see they can stream it from Amazon right now for just $5 without waiting for a torrent download.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of torrent movie downloaders check for the "type of" print available - CamRip, Blue Ray RIP, DV RIP etc. It would be great if you could display these after the search goes through. It would make the movie download decision 1-click.

<comment><AUTHOR> cf. <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4054667>

Displaying by default would confuse lambda users. How would you solve it UX- wise?

<comment><USER14> I notice you are trying to display quality, like HD1080 on this movie[1]. But doesn't this HD1080 label seem a little inconsistent with the file size?

1\. <http://movies.io/m/37>

Another example[2], variously tagged HD720 and HD1080, with the latter clearly wrong.

2\. <http://movies.io/m/4o>

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely: some results are wrong. We're working from text data, so it's kinda inaccurate sometimes.

We plan to develop our own crawler (instead of relying on other search engines), and refine our heuristics for tags / flagging false torrents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> is it legal to download movies from these torrents? I believe no, correct me if I am wrong

[http://techland.time.com/2011/08/30/expendables-piracy- lawsu...](http://techland.time.com/2011/08/30/expendables-piracy-lawsuit- dropped-for-now/)

<comment><USER16> No, it's not legal. But only non-MPAA-affiliated films are the subject of torrent lawsuits. The MPAA gave up that tactic a while ago. Movies like The Expendables and The Hurt Locker aren't MPAA-affiliated. Those lawsuits are being pushed by independent lawyers trying to get rich quick through mass settlements. Of course, that doesn't prevent them from suing in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, legislation differs depending on the country you live.

Get informed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How do you plan on staying online?

<comment><AUTHOR> \- Not based in the US: check

\- Not hosting any infringing content: check

\- DMCA-compliant: check

\- Not selling anything: check

\- Not doing ads, not tracking you [1]: check

\- Not trying to sell your data elsewhere: check

Lawyers will handle the rest. We're not interested in piracy, just very very good UI/UX. Stay tuned.

[1] We use Gaug.es and Piwik with IP fuzzing. They provide enough high-level metrics so that we can improve the interface while letting you guys off the hook.

<comment><USER18> > Not doing ads, _tracking you_ , trying to sell your data elsewhere: check

With the absence of a "not" there, it's not quite clear whether you're telling the truth or not, but a http request to "track.gif" could be construed as, you know, _tracking us_.

[http://secure.gaug.es/track.gif?h[site_id]=4fb448ea613f5d5be...](http://secure.gaug.es/track.gif?h\[site_id\]=4fb448ea613f5d5be100000e&h\[resource\]=http%3A%2F%2Fmovies.io%2Fm%2F1m&h\[referrer\]=http%3A%2F%2Fmovies.io%2Fi%2Ftop50&h\[title\]=Project%20X%20\(2012\)%20%7C%20movies.io&h\[user_agent\]=Mozilla%2F5.0%20\(Macintosh%3B%20Intel%20Mac%20OS%20X%2010.6%3B%20rv%3A12.0\)%20Gecko%2F20100101%20Firefox%2F12.0&h\[unique\]=0&h\[unique_hour\]=0&h\[unique_day\]=0&h\[unique_month\]=0&h\[unique_year\]=0&h\[screenx\]=1920&h\[browserx\]=1920&h\[browsery\]=594&timestamp=1338576974951)

> We're not interested in piracy

Sure you are. You're directly helping people perform it. I'm not saying what you're doing should be illegal, but let's be honest here. You _are_ "interested" in piracy. One could argue you're even _involved_ in it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wanted to clarify on:

> Sure you are. You're directly helping people perform it. I'm not saying what > you're doing should be illegal, but let's be honest here. You are > "interested" in piracy. One could argue you're even involved in it.

To be, again, completely honest with you, no. If you could have that much exposure showing photos of shoes, we'd do it instead.

I see it as... a start-up without the worry to make profit. We use analytics only to improve the product. We use this as a product building exercise, that's all.

We don't upload movies, we don't run a tracker, we don't belong to any release groups: that's how not interested in piracy we are.

<comment><USER19>
      > We don't upload movies, we don't run a tracker, we don't belong to
      > any release groups: that's how not interested in piracy we are.

That's like saying "We don't sell crystal meth, we're not distributors for crystal meth, we don't belong to any drug production groups, but our site helps kids obtain crystal meth from those who do: that's how not interested in crystal meth we are."

<comment><USER20> Your analogy is paired because both piracy and meth are illegal in the USA. However, the pairing lacks equivalence in my view because crystal meth is clearly (and by nature, not by law) harmful to the user, while piracy is not.

A better analogy might be a website that helps others circumvent the Great Firewall of China. It is illegal in one particular country, but circumvention does not harm individuals (only the society, one could argue). "We don't circumvent the wall, we don't run a proxy, we don't belong to tor: that's how not interested in circumventing the wall we are."

<comment><USER21> Your censorship analogy is flawed, since copyright infringement is not legal in any country (im not sure, but Ethiopia might have started recognising foreign copyrights now)

<comment><USER22> Downloading movies from torrents is legal in Canada (covered by a copyright levy on data storage media), for example.

<comment><USER23> In Poland it's also completely legal if you don't distribute (seed) it. Legal for movies and music, illegal for programs/games.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same goes here in Switzerland. We have a tax on storage media that is supposed to cover that use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not working in konqueror and midori. In opera I had to hit enter twice - <USER2> only once, then it worked normally.

Background images that are even bigger than 700 KB and every single click on a link has a new one? Is that really necessary?

While the search is all nice and stuff, what about browsing available stuff? Is that an intentionally lacking feature because you say "please don't download content that you haven't bought" anyway?

<comment><AUTHOR> Konqueror and Midori are not on our radar (although we know of them). We'll try to keep them in mind also admittedly that's not priority #1.

About backgrounds: the randomness is part of what attracts people to the website (bored? just reload N times). That said, for logged on users, there could be an option 'disable random background' or something like that.

Why is page size a problem btw? Are you browsing on mobile? We'll have a mobile-friendly website without random backgrounds.

As for browsing available stuff: there's top50, and you can share public watchlists. For other queries such as Year/Genre, etc. you're better served with a search on IMDb or similar and then come back to movies.io. It takes time to do it right and we didn't want to release something half-assed.

We'll look a lot more into recommending content (from your 'peers'), there's a whole social aspect of the website which isn't there yet (mostly because some people don't care about it, and just want a search engine).

<comment><USER24> Not all people have fast internet connections. Seeing a background image loading 2+ seconds just isn't a good impression.

There are file specific things where imdb wouldn't help me:

What if I want to browse all 720p or better h.264 science fiction movies with a german audio track?

Stuff like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, a user setting would work then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not too familiar with the inner workings of P2P technologies of torrent and magnets, but is "snooping" possible with magnet downloads ? Like in the case of torrents, MPAA often hops on to a tracker, doesn't send/receive any data, but all it does is log the public IPs of all peers on the tracker. Is this a problem with magnet downloads as well ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. See <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4055215>.

Magnet links don't protect you, they're just a simple and standard way to refer to a torrent.

Thankfully, an IP address can't identify a person: [http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-cant-even-identify-a- stat...](http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-cant-even-identify-a-state- bittorrent-judge-rules-120515/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I torrent stuff, like a substantial portion of humanity. Except music (Spotify) and games less than five years old. Movies I torrent without a care, unless they're indie or similar. Anyway, I digress, I'm just saying I'm not going to hypocritically pontificate, just comment on the product.

On the actual site: I like the straightforward process you've gone for. A search for 'Dracula' returns multiple, relevant results with the year of release where it's available. It's very easy to find what movie I want. A downside is the download options, all I'm presented with is some links with the filesizes, that's not enough information in my opinion, but I suppose there's not actually much you can do about that. It's a downside because it's not immediately clear if it has subtitles, what language it might be dubbed in and if it is HD or not.

It's a pretty well executed idea that's naturally going to be a bit rough 'round the edges, but it's a great start.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to be able to set a minimum quality for torrents that appear in the RSS of my watchlist. This allows me to add it to the watchlist when it's widely promoted when it launches, and watch it when eventually a good torrent appears of the movie.

I've been looking for an aggregator that does this for a long time, but still haven't found it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely, definitely, very strongly on our TODO list.

Consider this a first step :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It certainly looks nice, but it's not really accurate. E.g. the page for Moon links to Twilight torrents: <http://movies.io/m/9t>

<comment><AUTHOR> Our algorithm tries to things: to flag the bad torrents so they're not displayed, and to not penalize the rare torrents you get for old/unpopular movies.

Moon has bad results because the title is only one word, and Twilight's sorry excuse for a movie happens to be the same year.

We'll definitely look to improve that, thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER29> When you click on the Genre labels (like on the Moon page, for example), they don't take you anywhere. Is this feature in the works? I was expecting to be taken to a page listing all Thrillers or Dramas. The Genre titles look like links, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely in the works.

<comment><USER30> Hijacking the thread to ask you a question:

How do you do acquire the background image? That just blew my mind, it's an awesome feature. Do you have to pre-associate each film with an image, or.... ? Details please! In fact, I'd read a blog post about the frontend tech, the backend tech and the general UI philosophy. It's an awesome site.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, I'll take the time to set up our website blog, and then I'll let you check back for it :)

We'll communicate about our work on the site. We use GitHub a lot to manage issues / collaboration within devs, it's an awesome tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've always wondered why _all_ torrent sites look like ass. Nice job with this.

<comment><USER32> It's tracker sites that often look like ass.

<comment><USER33> Gazelle is awful, and far too many private trackers use it.

<comment><USER34> what's so awful about it?

<comment><USER35>
      - Custom wrapper around MySQLi, which doesn't support parametrized queries
      - No separation of Model, View and Controller (in 10 lines, there's SQL, HTML, JS, PHP and if you get lucky, PHP generating JS or piecing together HTML)
      - Their idea of IRC integration is to write a bot in PHP, where different pages send it raw IRC commands to execute
      - is_numeric used for most SQL injection checks
      - User information stored in two tables (users_main, users_info), for no apparent reason
      - About 1/3 of the code is in a file named script_start.php, which defines a mess of global variables and functions
      - They store PHP-serialized data in MySQL TEXT fields
      - They store pipe-separated data in MySQL TEXT fields

I could go on, but you get the idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly, movies.ioi is a relatively clean rails app.

Sure, we still have to refactor our TMDb client into a separate lib, stuff like that. But otherwise good clean MVC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "please don't download content that you haven't bought"

It's kind of hard to purchase The Avengers (2012) given that it's currently still running in theaters.

</comment><comment><USER37> Warning to those at work, there's at least one NSFW image in rotation on the landing page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, sorry about that. The NSFW filter is off on our TMDb requests but apparently some go through regardless.

The rotation is random from _all_ movies in the db btw, not featured or anything.

<comment><USER38> If you just run the randomizer and get the first unique 100 or 200 and cull for NSFW, the effect would be the same without the peril.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the thing though: we have 0 movies marked as NSFW from TMDB in our database.

We'd have to have a 'Report as NSFW' link somewhere to achieve that, and that seems easy to abuse.

<comment><USER38> What I meant is that you pull 100-200 out and go through them yourself, manually. Take a look at 15 or so a day and you'd be done in a week or two. Spread them out amongst the team and it'd take less time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a good idea, we'll try to find some time to do that.

In the meantime, we've added a few restrictions as to which movies can be featured: they must have an artwork at TMDb, and a rating of over 5/10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Pretty.

I searched for the film 8 1/2 (<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056801/>)

Two things:

1\. The director's first name is wrong.

2\. No results (maybe due to the ½ symbol.)

EDIT: here <http://movies.io/m/fI>

<comment><AUTHOR> Entirely agree, I suggest you edit the TMDb entry to make it better :) <http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/422>

We don't yet update our stuff from TMDb once cached, but will do soon.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra Why? torrentz.eu is more generic and works better on fuzzy searches. And I don't care that you parsed wikipedia.

I've tried searching for some anime and it's not pretty, suggest offers you some transliterated or authentic japan which is confusing.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not good at niches (japanese movies, etc.), yet! But we're working on better international support: Japanese, German, Italian, French movies have often confusing results, we'll display alternative titles and offer torrent search in multiple results.

Torrentz.eu works better for everything else, obviously :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> There is one book from a portuguese writer where the argument is something like this: press a button, you'll get a million dollars and somebody (that you don't know) in a very far way place dies. Nobody will know about it just you. Will you press it or not? Piracy is the same. Is so easy to get and normally nobody will know, just a smaller reward and smaller consequences too. Most of people just press it..

disclaimer: I and nearly everybody somewhere during is life press it, specially if the "reward" is larger. A videogame in my country is around 75€, minimum wage less than 500€, unemployment rate among younger around 40%.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently Hollywood made that book into a movie: <http://movies.io/m/TN>

<comment><USER40> I heard about that movie, is based on ("The Mandarin", 1880) by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Maria_de_E%C3%A7a_de_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Maria_de_E%C3%A7a_de_Queiroz)

<comment><AUTHOR> See, that's the kind of info we'd like on movies.io.

There's so much more about movies than you can learn about from TMDb, some people do research, are passionate about a particular subject, especially niche movies that aren't available anywhere (not legally, even often not by torrent).

We'd love to nurture that. We're looking for a great way to manage that information: just 'comments' on the movie isn't going to cut it. Stay tuned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Nice job, the first thing I would like to see is a tag for CAMS and TeleSyncs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

The initial version had a lot more tags, but we've learned that lambda users even go so far as to ignore what 720p/1080p means.

It's a nice UI/UX challenge to accomodate for both beginners and power users. We have a few power users in our ranks and since we scratch an itch we'd definitely like to address our own needs as well.

Consider this version an MVP, good enough for most people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> At least in Opera the search function is not really working. Neither pressing Enter no clicking on the magnifying glass does the trick.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reported, we don't really test on Opera, but we should.

(Do you have JavaScript disabled btw? That could be it: the magnifying glass doesn't do anything except change to a loading icon when it's fetching suggestions)

<comment><USER43> Same thing happens sporadically in Chrome too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It needs to be able to distinguish the different types (DVDRIP, TS, etc...)

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I like the UI and the execution. I don't know why it is limited to movies. The UI could easily be used for music too.

<comment><AUTHOR> We bought <http://shows.io/>, which is the logical next step for us. Music is a lot trickier, I don't think we're going to attack it.

As for 'why it's limited': gotta focus on one thing at a time. We want to improve this one as much as possible, serve the community, improve content discovery/suggestion (that is personalized from your friends, not from some oracle rating stuff from 1 to 10)

<comment> jack-r-abbit I can't argue with that. I'll certainly keep this one in my mind when I am looking for a movie. Good job. Stay focused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I want this except with paying to get an actual license.

<comment><AUTHOR> We really want, too. We'll try to make it happen. In the meantime, don't dl movies you don't own.

Oh, and the watchlist functionality is pretty cool too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'd like to hear some talk about how the post went to the frontpage very quickly, generated some very interesting comments and then got buried (atleast temporarily)?

Was this a result of people flagging the post due to the (some would argue) unethical function of the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> if you hear more about this, let me know: I'm as curious as you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Feature request: The background images look very nice. I'd like to be able to easily hide all the text and just view the background (But, please don't 1) dim the text - completely hide it, 2) use one of those stupid _LightBox_ thingies)

<comment><AUTHOR> We hate lightbox as much as you do. No, more!

Yes, the backdrops are awesome (thank the amazing guys at <http://www.themoviedb.org/> !), we'd like to find a cool way to let you show them without crowding the interface.

<comment><USER48> Tmdb and their API is awesome. But I wish they would provide a dump of their database. I wonder how did you get a copy of all their data, did you build scraper and grab every movie?

<comment><USER47> Apparently they're using an scraper. See his/her other comment here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054755>

<comment><AUTHOR> The TMDb API v3 is good. We're scraping Torrentz for the results, might do our own indexing later.

Oh, and "his".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> How do you choose the splash screen for the different movies? It seems that for each movie I tried you have a very good screen-cap that is obviously not something random, and yet it is also not the official poster.

Did someone select these screens by hand?

</comment><comment><USER50> YES! Thank you! I have been thinking about building this forever, but have never actually implemented it due to the fuzzy legal issues (read: it's totally illegal) and imminent shut down.

Love the interface. Love the simplicity. Love the graphics. Love the lack of [unnecessary] technical details and inclusion of details about the actual movie (rating, genre, summary, cover photo, etc).

Only thing I can think of to improve this is including a trailer on the download page. Yeah, IMDB is linked and that has trailers, but not quite as cool :) Also, related movies would be awesome.

<comment><USER51> There is nothing illegal about this. It provides magnet links, so it is not even linking to the files themselves, they aren't hosting infringing content...

<comment><USER50> I wish you were right, but I don't think Johnny Law agrees with you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> BUG:

\- Resource interpreted as Font but transferred with MIME type text/plain: "[http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Reg- webfont-6690edfe4c4ab548613...](http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Reg- webfont-6690edfe4c4ab548613491ba6f916cd2.woff)

\- Resource interpreted as Font but transferred with MIME type text/plain: "[http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Lig- webfont-653131606c56b81c0ae...](http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Lig- webfont-653131606c56b81c0ae5a882a781ce74.woff)

(Safari 5.2 beta, OS X Lion 10.7.3, though that is clearly irrelevant!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Aw fuck, missing mime-type in the nginx config.

I clearly suck at sysadmining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I miss the time when torrentz.com (now <https://torrentz.eu/> ) used to have magnet links. Now I have to click through to piratebay (or worse).

Although I don't plan on using this, nice job. One point - I don't think you should move the search bar around. It would be better if it was in the same place all the time, whether there are results or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point about the search bar, we'll try to think of it in the redesign.

Do you have any idea why torrentz pulled magnet links? Seems insane that linking to sites with .torrent files is easier to defend (legally) than having directly magnet links.

<comment><USER32> Maybe someone got scared? I don't know.. but my guess would be a better CTR on sponsored links that are shown alongside trackers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, fair point.

The Torrentz guy seems paranoid indeed (lots of disclaimers everywhere) but that seems to serve him well, it's been online for 8 years.

Also, hamsters! <http://torrentz.eu/img/hamster.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> NICE! It would be nice if I knew the rip quality of the trackers though, I'm not gonna blindly download a crappy telesync without knowing

<comment><AUTHOR> Hover over the 'download' link and you'll see the full release name :)

<comment><USER53> The only reason I still use tpb is the comments will usually let you know if a torrent is of poor quality, passworded, etc. Consider adding peer ratings for video and audio quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Passworded torrents? Dear god, where have you been?

As for poor quality etc. here's our stance: by default, the first search result should be a release of 1) reasonable quality 2) reasonably well seeded.

For power users, we're working on user settings to adjust your preferences for release groups, etc.

Of course, working from a .avi/.mkv/.mp4 file would be optimal because we'd be able to get a lot of codec info from there, but we won't go so far.

<comment><USER54> >"Passworded torrents? Dear god, where have you been?"

That's actually pretty, pretty sad. Last week I've downloaded the most seeded torrent of the movie "In Time" and it came passworded.

I got all surprised because it was THE MOST SEEDED.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, indeed.

Wow, I've only seen passworded rar files on, say, DDL. We gotta be careful about that, thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> it's pretty, but it's a worse experience than legal alternatives like netflix because you have to take the gamble deciding which copy to download. I value piracy for pushing the user experience forward (without the competition it provides, i doubt we would have netflix instant streaming now), but nothing here seems different than anything before it, just prettier.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first result should be reasonably good. We're working on that to improve the algorithms and find the best possible torrent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Just a thought. If you consider the site as kind of a model and example for films distribution, why can't you add a [Donate] button, and direct all the funds to the corresponding companies who produced the movies? They might even get a better idea that convenient service without any DRM junk brings them revenue. Without such option the site is questionable.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you suggest raises several important issues: first, we'd expect of these companies to go the extra mile of taking our money and redistributing to the rightful owners (which costs, it's a great deal of work to find out who owns what, be it in the music or movie industry).

Second and most importantly, there would be no way for us to guarantee that the donations you make go to them and not us. We'd get shot down because we'd then try to 'profit' from it. Which we don't and we won't.

So nope, no donations directly on the website, ever. However, we'll start displaying legal offers (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc.) for US visitors, and we're working towards featuring Open / Creative Commons / Libre movie content.

<comment><USER56> Well, first part is possible to resolve (but requires effort to find out who's the owner, yes). Second part can be resolved if you technically build the transparency system. I.e. those who pay will have a tracking mechanism for the transaction and would be able to confirm that their money aren't used by you. But in general I agree, it's more of a wishful thinking, in practice it requires effort. But you went so far as to make the site which offers a way to get the content completely for free. It would be fair to put at least some effort for enabling the backwards flow. If you are scared of being shut down, why not being scared of acting without respect to the creators of the movies? Linking to DRMed channels kind of defeats the purpose, since you are promoting a DRM free way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Regardless of what you're searching for, it is a really nice site and very functional. Yes all other torrent sites are hideous and full of horrible spammy adverts pretending to be download buttons (so I'm told), but this one is nice and clean, has a gorgeous UI, and makes great use of movie art in the design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the feedback! Glad you like it. We really love movies, hope it shows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Love it. Really nice site, I'm going to have to try and remember to use this over torrentz.eu. Killer extra feature: Suggestions. But before you go reinventing the wheel, can you implement this? tastekid.com. Best recommendations I've seen. I believe they have an api.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reinventing the wheel is part of the fun. Recommendation algorithms are not _that_ hard once you know the math behind. But, sure, it goes further than being a Rails dev.

We'll compare with Tastekid for quality :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I really like what you've done. Torrent sites never had a clean look, and you are making it first. You are trying to make the world suck less, and i dig that. keep up the good work, and I really hope you can establish a legitimate business model based on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. I plan to make a living out of my programming & product building abilities but not in this domain, it's too messy.

However, I hope we can reach an agreement with content distributors at least in some countries and replace the torrents by available legal sources.

Thanks a lot for the positive feedback, got a lot of hate uncalled for here, that's refreshing :)

<comment><USER60> You will, of course, be making all code and all data you produce in your career publicly available as a torrent?

If not, why not?

<comment><AUTHOR> To quote one of my favorite personas on the internet: "You's trolling".

I buy a lot of indie content, I hope that it helps them make a living. I'm currently contacting people to try and start a legal offer for indie content: apparently nobody got that right yes (if you know of any, let me know).

As for sharing my code, part of it, yes, open-source has been very beneficial to the software industry in the past... 30-odd years, and we plan on keep doing it since it seems to work out on everyone.

I probably shouldn't even have replied to that comment, but from all my comments here it's pretty obvious what I really want to happen: it's not movies.io, it's a 'Steam' for movies. Who cares if you don't have the latest mainstream crap (read: BF3, etc.) as long as you have a sort of 'quality seal' and very very easy payment/access ?

<comment><USER60> Nope, not trolling. Just making a point.

All of your comments aside, your actions, not your words, indicate that you're completely happy making the fruits of other people's labor available for free.

You're not willing to do the same for your labor.

It's not at all "obvious" that what you want to do is make a Steam for movies, because that's not what you're doing.

If you want to enter into agreements to license the content easily and cheaply, then do so. That's not what you've done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then again, I'm not exactly finished yet.

But I understand your point of view. Reading my other comments here would give a more complete overview of how I feel but I don't think many people have the patience to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Hey, bug report: you didn't check if the password I entered second time matches the first one.

</comment><comment><USER62> You can't even pay for this if you live in Europe.

There's a reason Pirate Bay originated from Sweden...

</comment><comment><USER63> What metadata are you using to distinguish movies from other videos (and other things)?

I did a test search for two European TV shows: Forbrydelsen (aka The Killing) and Braquo. The second didn't even try for an imperfect recommendation.

</comment><comment><USER64> I like the high resolution background image, maybe you could find a more graceful way of introducing it. Try fading it in after it has finished loading, like bing.com, instead of making the user watch it "build down".

</comment><comment><USER65> I want to see something like this for music; I hate how badly sorted most public music trackers and search engines are. What.cd is fantastic, but I hate that they're private and don't use them.

</comment><comment><USER66> you should add collections like can be found on whatcd and passthepopcorn[1] that users can link to and search

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/PXFRE.jpg>

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, we have our own watchlists, but they seem to be inferior in features to what you can find on whatcd/ptpc. We'll keep working on that. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Very nice. Very slick. A little too slick though for my tastes concerning movie torrents. I'd like to have some info on A/V codecs, bitrate, etc. before I even think of downloading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Understood. Real power users aren't well served by the current version.

We might go further in that direction, but we'll weigh our legal options first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Looks nice. There seems to be a bug with the movie titles though. I clicked the top 50 and most of the torrent links for the movie Safe were actually for the movie Safe House.

</comment><comment><USER69> Your torrent results are absolute crap. Downloaded 3, won't say which, but they all turned out to be crap for lovelymovies.com which is a spam site.

</comment><comment><USER70> Very nice, I love how clean the iface is. Adding imdb info to search results is very classy as well. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER71> Oh great... Now the MPAA will overreact and ICE will shut down YCombinator in the name of "national security".

</comment><comment><USER72> Should be greater a modal link (fancybox or facebox) with trailer! This project is awesome!!!!

It's available code via Github??

</comment><comment><USER73> I like the 1080p indicator! It would be cool to add similar ones for other formats (CAM, SCREENER, 720, etc)

</comment><comment><USER74> <http://torrentbutler.eu/> seems to have a better UI.

<comment><USER75> Came here to say this. I love the wall of movies, no need for searching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Needs better search logic & display results.

Clicked on #2 "Safe" and 4 out of 5 were for "Safe House".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, short film names currently give not-so-good torrent results. One guy in the team is working on much better algorithms for the following:

      - Torrent ranking for a given movie

      - Better heuristic to detect the quality of release, language, and 'advanced' tags: there's a lot you can guess from the release name without having to download/cache the files yourself.

      - Movie recommendation (stuff like "3 of your friends want to watch the same kind of movies, why not watch them together?")

      - Hell, who knows, matchmaking? "You and X would probably get along well, since you're both hardcore Tarantino fans"

In any way, clean design is not the only way we try to differenciate ourselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Pretty site, it sure is a nice way to 'share' torrents, although its pretty illegal.

</comment><comment><USER78> Without file formats it's a non-starter (unless, for me, they are all x264).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hover over the 'download' link, see full release name, often x264/h264 is present in the name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I sure as hell ain't downloading any movies from mystery trackers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Look again: there are only magnet links on there.

Trust the DHT :)

<comment><USER80> As someone not too familiar with p2p technologies: What difference does that make for the user?

<comment><AUTHOR> I love to teach! Here's a small run-down:

Previously, .torrent files were the preferred method to distribute torrents. They contain meta-data such as the size of the torrent, its name, whether it's a single file or a folder, the file structure, and more importantly, a list of trackers (think of them as "matchmakers" for people who participate in the torrent) and SHA-1 hashes of all blocks of the torrents.

However, recently, magnet links seem to be preferred: instead of sending all the info above, you just send the SHA-1 hash (20 bytes) of the torrent. (We add in some extra stuff, such as the torrent's name and size so it displays faster in torrent clients).

From that hash, torrent clients will join the Distributed Hash Table ( <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table> ) and ask around if anyone has seen this torrent. If yes, the content of the .torrent file is transmitted directly from peer to peer, and you can start downloading it like a regular torrent.

It's a very neat trick, and it allowed bringing down the size of ThePirateBay to 90MB total: [http://infworm.com/fit-the-entire-pirate-bay-site-on-a- usb-d...](http://infworm.com/fit-the-entire-pirate-bay-site-on-a-usb-drive)

<comment><USER81> Magnet links are great for trackers dodging liability, but the risk to the user is still the same, correct? The RIAA and MPAA can still monitor connected peers.

I think Mike might be making more of a reference to non-private trackers.

I wish I had your great interface for trusted communities I'm a member of...

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. We're thinking of open-sourcing it, but we want to clean it up first.

Just a Github button away...

<comment><USER82> nah... community is always good at cleaning-together :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to meet that community :)

Communities are generally pretty bad at product design though. Having a BDFL that has ears open but a straight cannon. We're trying to do that here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Off-the-charts awesome!

</comment><comment><USER84> you incite the wrath of the gods. hope you know a lawyer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Several!

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> It's awesome! Is there any change to made this legal??

<comment><AUTHOR> cf. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058057>

We're looking into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Beautiful. The background HD image was a nice touch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Blame <http://themoviedb.org/> for all the nice image resources. These guys do an amazing job. Props!

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> What torrent sites are you scraping with nokogiri?

</comment><comment><USER86> looking good - though it seems like you're filtering porn. obviously slightly less useful without pornography.

</comment><comment><USER87> Wow, this is quite a nice UI.

</comment><comment><USER88> this doesn't work anymore! I can't download anything :(

</comment><comment><USER89> the downloads don't actually work!!!

</comment><comment><USER90> This is beautiful. Thanks! <3

</comment><comment><USER91> My only tip: for the rating of the movie, while giving a decimal grade is good and acceptable, using 10 stars is distracting and breaks with the overall good UX.

Would go better with just 5 stars, or just ditch them and think on something else.

For instance, if the grade you are showing is a derivative of multiple sources, why not try to derive something on the line of: "5 of 10 reviewers found this movie good".

By the way, always cite your information sources, where does the rating come from? Users? Review sites?

</comment><comment><USER92> But where are the flashing penis enlargement banners???

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, we don't have that feature yet. Or ever :)

Just got contacted for an ad campaign and turned them down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> heh, i watched <http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html> i don't ever care about copyright anymore

</comment><comment><USER94> Wow, top voted submission. I'm rather disappointed with the HN community. I guess it's time to stop visiting this site.

<comment><USER95> Oh. It's not possible to down vote such a comment. I guess it's time to stop visiting this site.</comment></comment>


Roads That Work for Self-Driving Cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/roads-that-work-for-self-driving-cars-1467991339 <comment><USER2> Really great point about cars only taking off once they paved the roads. The government should get involved in building out infrastructure that will make it easier for self driving cars to work better, and get the technology production ready faster. Such an investment in next-gen infrastructure could be a huge competitive advantage for the US economy.

<comment><USER3> I guess my question is how do you denote road ways in such a way that is detectable in all weather types without being sight pollution or requiring external power sources. I can only figure embedding something in the road in such a pattern that it indicates direction of travel. Yet I don't know what can be buried that can work that doesn't require power but can be detected by a car traveling past it.

<comment><USER4> Several projects have had good results with embedded magnets:

[http://www.gizmag.com/volvo-road-magents-autonomous- cars/311...](http://www.gizmag.com/volvo-road-magents-autonomous-cars/31172/)

It wouldn't be too hard to pattern the magnets to communicate other info to the car too, such as an upcoming sharp turn. More abstractly, magnets could mark the car's position extremely precisely, and the car could then acquire regularly updated info about upcoming road conditions from the internet, or a short-range local radio broadcast.

Magnets seem very cheap compared to the cost of resurfacing. I don't understand why we haven't been putting these in for years.

> The magnet-based system relies on magnets embedded along the center of the > lane 1.2 meters apart to define the roadway. The car tracks the magnets with > less than 7.5 centimeters of error. Although this requires doing something > to the road, it is very cost-effective to spend about $10,000 per lane mile > to buy and install the magnets compared to spending from $1 million to $100 > million per mile to build new lanes. And the life of the magnets is 30 to 50 > years -- longer than the best pavements.

[http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/97novdec/p9...](http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/97novdec/p97nov32.cfm)

<comment><USER5> $10000 per mile is still a huge cost. If human is able to do it then AI should be able to do it. The cost should be no more than reprinting blurred out lanes.

If a car can work if the roads are well marked, run it can work in many different countries too. That's a huge boon for car makers.

<comment><USER4> Whether AI can replicate all human abilities is an empirical question, not a matter of "should". And it's clear it can't currently. Given that 30k people per year die of preventable traffic accidents, we obviously shouldn't wait to deploy AI until it is perfect. Adding magnets to all 160,000 miles of the US highway system would be a one-time cost of roughly $10B, which is small in comparison to the hundred of billion we lose _every_ year that autonomous cars are delay.

Additionally, humans _do_ fail to keep track of lane lines in bad weather, and this result in accidents that could be prevented if magnet-directed computers were driving the car.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>