Introducing the 4chan API - <AUTHOR> http://www.4chan.org/news#108 <comment><USER2> I feel kinda silly just having spent the long weekend writing a threaded 4chan scraper. This is a super welcome change though. Even if you don't visit 4chan regularly you can't ignore the VAST amount of content people upload there. I imagine some interesting statistics will come of this ( I know I plan to).

<comment><USER3> I don't know. Getting an API to 4chan is like getting a parking pass to the local garbage dump. What statistics are you actually mining here?

<comment><USER2> 4chan represents a social cauldron unlike others. The first and foremost question I had hoped to find out was "What do people talk about when they don't have an identity to think of?" There is almost zero consequence in the case of failure. If you say something and no one responds, or everyone insults you, it is completely forgotten within a few minutes. You can say almost anything you want without fear of retribution. (Where else in life does this exist?) So, with no rules, what do people want to talk about?

<comment><USER4> I understand what you're saying.

BUT, be careful with the concept of 4chan and "no retribution". There have been countless examples of 4chan "reacting" to threads, I'm sure I don't need to go into detail here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first thing that jumps to mind with this is... "Oh $#!*." I don't know why, but it scares me what could come out of this.

<comment><USER6> Came to post this. The only redeemable value in 4chan, in my opinion, is that the fact that posts _aren't_ archived makes for a very interesting social experiment. An API firehose pretty much puts an end to that.

<comment><USER7> Selective archives (users vote to archive a thread) have been around since at least 2007:

<http://4chanarchive.org/>

<http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html>

Full board archives have been around for quite some time as well:

<http://easymodo.net/> (the original complete archiver, now dead)

<http://archive.foolz.us/>

<https://archive.installgentoo.net/>

etc.

I'd say the fact that your posts are most likely to be forgotten, even if it is archived, is much more of a negative aspect of the site than a positive. How many times have I spent 30 minutes on a post, only for no one to respond to it, or worse, realize that the thread 404'd? It makes you look at yourself and wonder why you bothered.

Forced anonymity is the interesting part of imageboards -- the text BBS equivalents to anonymous imageboards, based off the original 2chan, manage to maintain a very similar flavor while featuring permanent archival of all posts, and enjoy longer-form discussion as a result.

<comment><USER8> > I'd say the fact that your posts are most likely to be forgotten, even if it > is archived, is much more of a negative aspect of the site than a positive.

This is the most magical aspect of 4chan, which is why I don't care for archives.

<comment><USER9> > This is the most magical aspect of 4chan, which is why I don't care for > archives.

The written word allows us to lend ideas (memes, concepts, what have you) a sense of permanence that they never would have had otherwise. But at the same time, it prevents them from evolving in a way they otherwise might have, if their exact origins were not so easily recorded & referenced.

I don't think it's a coincidence that 4chan, which lacks this permanence, is the origin of so many of the top memes of the past decade (and by 'meme', I don't just mean things like LOLcats).

(Gleick argues this same point in the first few chapters of The Information, for those who are interested).

EDIT: Just realized who I was replying to - if I may ask, are you concerned at all that an official API might detract from 4chan (by making said content more traceable)?

<comment><USER10> >The written word allows us to lend ideas (memes, concepts, what have you) a sense of permanence that they never would have had otherwise.

I agree, and that's why it was horrible for 4chan. In the beginning, there were new memes, concepts, and what have you every other day, and old stuff was forgotten (or rather used to show you'd been there for a while.) Now, it's just a constant recycling of the first few years of the site.

IMHO it was caused by archives and meme dictionaries. No need to lurk moar anymoar. Also, very little reason to laugh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a new graduate student in an American university. As part of my Data Mining/NLP project, I'm wondering if I can do something cool with this fresh API. Any ideas?

<comment><USER12> create a markov chain 4chan slang generator.

track usages of phrases over time. (thinking of the recent evolution of "rustled my jimmies" derivatives)

See what topics are trending

Fuck maybe I should build some of this...

<comment><USER13> do you have some more ideas? these are really good

<comment><USER12> um... make a 4chan app that lets users up/downvote threads, then builds a naive bayesian model of what keywords (eg. "toasting epic bread") are correllated with the kind of threads you like. Netflix-like. A sort of automatic cream-extractor.

de-anonymizer based on posting times, writing style, what baits them to respond, etc. The Thread-Local unique ID's would help, giving you more stuff that you knew came from same user. Don't know if this one is practical. Kindof scraping the bottom here...

That's it for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"... The decision to release an API was partially out of necessity, but also because I'm curious to see how people will use it. ..."_

And _who_. The API just made a group of intelligence hackers very happy indeed.

</comment><comment><USER15> It still requires scrapping to discover the thread ids though does it not?

<comment><USER8> We'll have indexes and a catalog view soon.

<comment><USER16> That's great news. No hope for a posting API I presume?

<comment><USER8> Probably not. Since we don't have user accounts, and already have a bit of a spam problem, I'd be pretty worried about what a real POST API might bring.

<comment><USER16> I figured as much. Just wishful thinking on my part--it'd be nice to be able to build a client wholly atop the API.

<comment><USER12> It's not like the html form does anything special. Forms don't have funny markup you have to scrape or produce. It's just a POST.

I guess there's mime/url encoding or whatever, but that's hardly an issue.

<comment><USER17> There's a captcha

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What I'm taking away from the comments below is:

"Everything that could be done with this API has already been done using HTML parsing. This development will simply make those applications faster."

Truth?

<comment><USER19> Yeah, and there have been Python scripts anyone interested passes around and shares too, so you haven't even had to write it yourself...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Could someone explain to me how this could be leveraged (or if it could be) to gather a sort of stream of messages, a la the Twitter streaming API or reddit.com/r/all/comments.json?

I'd be interested in doing some language statistics and comparing them to the aforementioned networks.

<comment><USER21> Elsewhere in the comments here, moot said, "We'll have indexes and a catalog view soon." So for now, you need the thread id.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sadly read-only, though it's not much work parsing the HTML and faking a submit through a Post request. Good luck submitting a 4chan app to Apple's app store though :)

<comment><USER23> They have already existed. They all got pulled recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Forgive me if this is a noob question, but does 4chan restrict embedding of images.4chan.org images from external urls? I was just playing around with the API and it seems all the images are rendered as the placeholder image that says "4chan.org".

If this is true, I don't know how to utilize this API to make something valuable since all I can do is get the url or text. Somebody please enlighten me. Thanks!

<comment><USER19> This sort of protection is usually done by checking the referrer header, which is trivial to set when retrieving something programmatically or when using standard tools like wget. The API seems focused on reducing the processing costs of browser extensions that let the user view the page, but add extra features to the page, anyway. Those would probably still seem like a normal browser view of the image to the site by default even if browser plugins can't perform the trivial client sent header change (not sure if the browser plugin API exposes it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This could transform 4chan as mobile and desktop clients are created. God I hate the web interface.

<comment><USER26> The mobile adapted web interface is pretty good now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can anyone repost the info for those of us who can't (or prefer not to) visit 4chan at work?

<comment><USER28> Every thread will be available as JSON.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Regarding financial sustability, have you thought about charging for the new API?

<comment><USER30> I'm sure this is about trying to improve site performance, and charging for it would inevitably cause everyone to continue scraping the HTML, thus defeating the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is interesting. Would surely give it a try and integrate with our app

</comment><comment><USER32> Something I just cobbled together:

       curl http://api.4chan.org/b/res/423418552.json | python -mjson.tool
       curl http://api.4chan.org/b/res/423418552.json | json_pp

Example for grabbing a thread and prettyprinting the JSON of it.

Because, you know, we need more 4chan in the house.

(EDIT: brief skimming of the comments indicates it may be semi-offensive, so be warmed. We're skimming /b/, after all.)</comment>


Derek Sivers and the Art of Enough - <AUTHOR> https://brendancahill.io/brensblog/dereksivers <comment><USER2> Derek's writing influenced me quite a bit in the early 2000s. I bootstrapped a software business from zero to near $10m in annualized revenue, and sold it almost half a decade ago. I contributed 100% of my equity into a charitable remainder trust because I learned about that idea from his website.

Since then, I've done a lot of "puttering". I'm teaching myself jazz guitar, and I'm currently enrolled in law school. I have basically unlimited time to read whatever interests me. If I could go back five years and give myself some advice, I would say that "enough" is not durably satisfying. Purpose is durably satisfying. Purpose arises from constraints. Having "enough" means you lack a particular type of constraint. Thus, enough" can get in the way of developing purpose, particularly if you are somewhat undisciplined like me.

(Also, I would abolish charitable remainder trusts from the tax code. I created one for lifestyle reasons not tax reasons, but after experiencing the tax consequences firsthand, I think they are profoundly unfair.)

<comment><USER3> Wow cool! For those of us who don't regularly create charitable remainder trusts, what are the tax consequences and why are they unfair?

<comment><USER2> I had a bunch of equity in a startup that had a cost basis of, essentially, $0. Under normal circumstances, I would have sold this for $millions, and would have paid nearly 20% in capital gains taxes immediately.

Instead, I contributed my equity to a CRUT. I paid zero capital gains taxes at that moment, and the CRUT pays zero capital gains taxes ever. Also, because a contribution to the trust is a contribution in part to charity (with proportions calculated according to actuarial figures of my life expectancy), I got a charitable tax deduction of many million dollars which I was able to carry forward for many years.

Each year I owe taxes on the 5% which the CRUT distributes to me every year, but since this is capital gains income, it is taxed at a very low rate -- which is effectively reduced even further because it is offset by the charitable deduction which I have been able to carry forward.

The net effect is that I'm paying capital gains taxes in a tiny trickle over the remainder of my lifetime, and I also got a giant charitable deduction to offset those capital gains taxes. When I die, the principal in the trust goes to charity. The IRS will never get the kind of bite at this equity that I would intuitively expect it to get.

I don't understand how this capital gains tax loophole could be beneficial to society. I think it should be removed from the tax code.

Another side effect of the CRUT I hadn't anticipated: Occasionally, I note the intrusive thought that my continued life is the one and only barrier which is keeping a decent amount of capital from serving charitable purposes right now. That's honestly pretty depressing sometimes.

<comment><USER4> Whether that's bad depends on how you feel about the way your government spends tax money. Because you used a CRUT, the money that doesn't support you will go to some worthy charity, instead of funding a series of wars, pervasive surveillance, and cages for kids.

Of course the government also does many worthwhile things, but your extra money will be spent entirely on worthwhile things, and not at all on horrific ones.

<comment><USER5> The problem with this thinking is that only those privileged enough to take advantage of it get to pick how their tax money is spent.

I disagree with (even despise) some of the ways government spends our money, but should I get to choose like some special snowflake while most don't have the same opportunity?

This just enforces a rigged economy... and guess what? Many of the privileged few would support government programs the rest of the so called democracy wouldn't.

Your tacit assumption is that wealthy individuals who can take advantage of bullshit tax favoritism will spend that extra money in worthwhile (subjective) ways.

<comment><USER4> I would certainly prefer a government that doesn't spend money on horrific things at all. It'd be great if I could pay my taxes without feeling dirty. I'm hopeful that maybe, with a lot of hard work and creativity, we'll manage to fix our democracy.

But in the meantime, I don't think there's anything morally wrong about legally reducing taxes and sending the money to charity instead. I'd even argue that, since privilege is an issue, we should expand this opportunity beyond the privileged few.

<comment><USER5> I'm criticising the system more than the individual. That being said, I've noticed that people will rail against big brother and _all these rules_ and yet turn around and take advantage of any flaw in the system because they can (everyone else is doing it!). Proving that we need hyper-specific and cumbersome rules because no one is capable of policing themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's weird to come to my favorite forum, and see my name in the title of a post.

It's weirder to read comments claiming to know about my personal life and motivations, though they're all wrong. (Both the good and the bad.)

The public me is not me - [https://sivers.org/publicu](https://sivers.org/publicu) \- so I don't feel a great need to correct the errors here.

But thanks (tw04, lukego, marcinzm, s_a_p) for the reminder that anything I do can be spun negative.

<comment><USER7> There are so few famous people online that have been so giving with their time, willing to reply to every email.

I think your (public) actions speak volumes about who you are.

Your writing (and also whenever you're interviewed on a podcast) has had a huge positive impact on me. I appreciate it and you (or at least the public persona of you).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone else find it frustrating when people talk about not working too hard and already having enough, after they have become wealthy?

<comment><USER9> Derek did not became wealthy. He gave the $22 million dollars he got from selling his company to a fund, and gets over $1000 each month, hardly "wealthy".

Derek has worked in a circus and knows how to live cheap enough. He also has lots of friends so he does not need to pay for lots of things.

I know people that earn in excess $10.000/month and spend it all or even get into debts.

<comment><USER10> Wikipedia disagrees:

>Derek Sivers transferred ownership of his company to a charitable remainder unitrust for music education, and had the trust sell it to Disc Makers. This agreement requires the trust to pay Sivers 5% of the trust's value annually (hypothetically $1,100,000 pretax, based on a sale price of $22 million as reported by Sivers)[4] until death, while upon death the remainder will ultimately go to charity.

So he actually earns around $90k per month. The foundation was also probably a tax dodge more than some altruistic thing.

<comment><USER11> He also acquired a second nationality, renounced US citizenship, and moved to a country that doesn't tax foreign sourced passive income. It's the most extreme example I've seen of planning your whole life around tax optimization.

Understandable though if you've read his book because he's had big problems with the IRS in the past and probably really wanted to show them his "FU money."

<comment><USER12> I was under the impression that the US does not allow you to revoke your citizenship purely for tax reasons.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't but all that means is the form for renouncing has a checkbox asking "are you doing this for tax reasons"? And you check "no". Then during the consular interview you spew some line about how you no longer have attachments to the US -- "I haven't been back in over 3 years, own no property, let my driver's license expire" and you do have attachments in your new country "All my friends are here and I even spend Christmas here!"

It is more of a retroactive "if we find out later you lied we now have a legal basis to add extra penalties" but in practice nobody is really checking or cares. The underfunded IRS doesn't care about the tiny number renouncing and the consular officials doing the interview certainly don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Derek and his writing used to be a frequent top page link on HN. When I first started reading them I found them inspirational. As I read more of his writing I got the impression that most of the things he did were presented in the light of "I'm just a simple person that doesn't need a lot" type of minimalism. However if you look at his "charity" he seems to have just figured out a way to avoid taxation and keep most if not all of his CD Baby exit. Additionally despite using what was the .com boom environment of the late 90s and early 2000s to generate his wealth I believe he has renounced his US citizenship and lives abroad now. I don't care that he did that really, it just seems that his public persona is a bit of an act and hides a bit of entitlement/petulance.

<comment><USER15> "I don't need a lot" isn't mutually exclusive with "I don't want to pay a lot in taxes". Besides that, he lives in New Zealand where everything costs twice as much. Sounds like your crediting his success solely on being at the right place at the right time. I got news for you - that's pretty much all success or a component of it. Not to mention, he did build a sustainable business that gave independent artists an outlet to distribute their music. I'd say the guy is a saint.

<comment><USER16> When I emailed him in March he said that he left Singapore for England because he wanted his son to grow up near nature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remember when I was in college trying to figure out what to shoot for in life, I had the realization that if you shoot for "more" it's a goal you'll never reach. There is no end to it.

But if you shoot for "enough", there is a very definite point between "more than enough" and "not enough".

It's a nice goal to shoot for. When you are above "enough", it means you can relax and enjoy life.

<comment><USER18> But then you have to answer the question of what makes you happy. For some people buying an ocean front house and fishing or playing golf all day is the answer. But for the successful entrepreneur type that isn't "enough" usually

<comment><USER17> > But then you have to answer the question of what makes you happy.

Self-introspection and awareness are helpful basically always, in my opinion.

If you don't know what you want, you'll never be satisfied.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That #10.5 point really resonates with me. Especially now with all of this isolation, it's become very apparent that almost all communication on the internet is the screaming from inside the car type instead of the real human connection type. I made [https://otherrs.com/](https://otherrs.com/) as an experiment to see if I could drum up more of that second type

</comment><comment><USER20> "I became rich when I earned more than I spent" are words spoken by a rich man with 0 self awareness. I can tell you the second my life became infinitely less stressful: when I paid off my student loans.

I too spent almost no money, went on almost no trips, and lived way, way below my means to make it happen in my 20s. It turns out as my income has increased my happiness has increased - and I'd agree with all the studies of once you cross a certain threshold in the 6-figure range that more money means "less". Generally it just means: I have nicer versions of the same things.

All that is to say: I sure as hell wasn't "rich" when I was making more than I owed each month, not even close. And I don't believe for a SECOND Derek would be happy going back to living in a flat with 3 other people, eating peanut butter sandwiches 3 days a week but "making more than he spends", which is what he implies.

Derek: there are people out there who are in their 50s who would still have to live with 3 other people and eat peanut butter sandwiches 5 days a week to earn more than they spend. THAT'S THE POINT. Maybe if I make $90k/month some day I'll also be blind to the reality of the common man, but I can still see it from this little perch I'm sitting on at the bottom of the mountain.

<comment><USER21> I think it is noble to preach being rich in the moment. I think for Derek quitting his job in his 20s to play music full time was for sure a mark of affluence in his social circle at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > now living in New Zealand

Derek does not live in New Zealand anymore. He moved to England some time ago (perhaps 1 or 1.5 years ago?)

<comment><USER23> According to his website he moved back to New Zealand this year.

<comment><USER22> Ouch, missed it. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just listened to this episode in [The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish] podcast.

#88 Derek Sivers: Innovation Versus Imitation

</comment><comment><USER25> Like anything else in life this piece has good parts and not-so-awesome parts.

My opinion: take the good and forget the rest.

If I can draw the line on what is enough for me, I can lead a life that is happier and free of divisive depression that comes from comparing myself to others.</comment>


How It Works: Linear Resonant Actuators - <AUTHOR> https://blog.somaticlabs.io/how-it-works-linear-resonant-actuators/ <comment><USER2> _there are two nontrivial challenges to producing a viable implementation: 1) intellectual property_

Hey, wait just a moment! Copyright and patents are supposed To promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts, not hinder them by posing challenges.

<comment><USER3> Also annoying to have a quote from a patent but not be told when it was granted or when it will expire. Anyway most of these patents are obvious to one skilled in the art. They only survive because no one can afford to fight them and the Patent Office is not very interested in properly examining patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's clever. All that complexity leads to lower power consumption, because the device is dynamically driven at its resonant frequency. You could drive it at a fixed frequency, calibrated once at the factory, and avoid patent problems.

</comment><comment><USER5> The copy repeats itself 20 times... Painful to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey arch2! I'm sorry you found the post hard to read, thank you though for the feedback. Were you referring to the blog post specifically being repetitive or was there something about our website copy that you found repetitive? We are always trying to improve the content we are putting out.

<comment><USER6> I also found the blog post a bit repetitive - not the content itself, which was great, but the sentence structure was repetitive.

It heavily uses sentences of the form "Subordinate clause, independent clause", starting many sentences with one of the words although, since, unlike, or rather. This makes it hard to read after a while.</comment></comment></comment>


Vending Machine Dispenses MacBooks for Student Use - <AUTHOR> http://newsblog.drexel.edu/2013/01/04/vending-machine-dispenses-macbooks-for-student-use/ <comment><USER2> That seems pretty cool, provided the computers are cleaned regularly and one has a workflow which is sufficiently non-local.

Here are the primary reasons which always keeps me from using our university's computer pool's computers:

1\. Horribly dirty keyboards.

2\. Horrible keyboards.

3\. The computers are outdated (as in: really slow).

Given these points are avoided — which comes at a cost for cleaning and up-to- date hardware — the offer is attractive to me.

<comment><USER3> I also love the concept, but I'm curious how they'll handle user security -- How would they prevent key-logger installation or something of the sort.

<comment><USER4> The same way it's handled on all other university computers I assume. There's no saving on the hard drive because they are wiped between uses and a new environment is setup each logon. That's the way it's handled at my university, looking from the outside I'm not part of the IT dept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat.

I suppose this uses the 'Security Slot/K-slot' and pushes it out of the foam receptacle (via a solenoid) when a purchase has been made? Returning would be reverse, checking continuity with the lock cable when it's inserted...and maybe a RFID tag inside the case to detect the laptop ID?

I've been spending a good amount of time thinking about networked bikesharing locks, so that's my guess at how this works:

</comment><comment><USER6> Well that puts a higher price on stolen student id cards!

<comment><USER7> Not if the university applies a pin/password system.

<comment><USER6> Having been a university student and knowing the types who circle around on campuses, they'd just beat it out of you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> But, assuming saving to HDDs aren't allowed, why handout MBPs rather than chromebooks? You can get four of them for the price of one Mac Book.

<comment><USER9> More applications on Macbook for one. It probably includes those installed on desktop iMac that the university has (e.g., MS Office, Matlab, Strata etc.)

I'm not from Drexel but in my university, computers are configured to automatically mount network drive that I can save files in.

Chromebooks are nowhere as capable as the Macbooks.

<comment><USER10> more capable yes, but are they good enough? for most college students (excluding CS,IT, Engineering etc)i would say yes and like someone said 4 Chromebooks for the price of 1 macbook. from what i have done with Google Apps and Chromebooks, i would say the chromebook is probably a better fit out of the box for this use case than a Macbook.

<comment><USER11> Not having MS Office is a dealbreaker. It's not a matter of being able to do what you need on Google Docs, it's lack of perfect MS Office compatibility with back/forth revisions, track changes, etc.

Also, why exclude engineering? Drexel has pretty big engineering, science, and math departments. And I'd imagine some of the softer majors like business, accounting, etc, still need their own software.

<comment><USER12> > why exclude engineering?

I think the grandparent post was saying that engineering students (as well as those for other named disciplines) may have a need for non-webbased software that a Chromebook wouldn't adequately satisfy.

<comment><USER11> Right. My point is that they use the library too.

<comment><USER10> I'm not saying use chrome books exclusively, buy chromebooks for the english 1101 term papers and macbooks for engineers.

so instead of buying 2 macbooks, you've bought 4 chromebooks and a macbook for the same price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how they manage patching, resetting and general maintenance of the devices being rented.

<comment><USER14> This is basically the equivalent of a computer lab (remember those places? me neither)... but you happen to be able to take the computer with you instead of being stuck in a seat. I assume they will use whatever management tools they use in those labs.

<comment><USER15> I'm not so sure. The article states that Drexel is the third school on the East Coast to use such a kiosk. Another option is that whoever provides the kiosk takes care of maintenance as well.

<comment><USER14> Right, I imagine that the WHO is different. But the what/how (i.e. what software they use, how the machines are configured, etc) is probably pretty darn similar. Really, how is it different than a session in a computer lab, except that the person picks up (and eventually returns) the computer, instead of sitting in the lab? Why reinvent the wheel here?

<comment><USER15> It's a question of ownership & service contracts. The article is light on details.

If the school owns the laptops, and whoever provides the kiosk only provides kiosk (and not the laptops) you might very well be right. However, I imagine whoever runs the kiosk is also "renting" the laptops to Drexel, and Drexel pays (via a support contract) for that company to keep the machines in working order.

Plus, if it is the latter, there's no guarantee that the group that runs the computer lab even had any say in this. I The library is a separate entity from from the computer lab/help desk.

<comment><USER14> I don't think we are disagreeing here. When asked the question "how are these maintained", I was providing a technical answer (with similar tools that labs use) and you are providing a business answer (by outsourcing). Both are valid answers, and appropriate perspectives for HN.

<comment><USER15> I'm saying both are possible answers but we can't know because the article doesn't have enough details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wouldn't at all feel safe walking around their campus at night carrying any expensive electronics, so this is a fantastic idea.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would have loved this when I was in college. Even though I studied mathematics, I needed my computer for everything. I got all my books in digital format (for a significantly lower price or free) and typed my homework in LaTeX. I lived 30 minutes walking from campus so by the end of my senior year my back was killing me.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how physical security is handled. Losing a student ID is a not too uncommon for college students. Without someone checking to make sure the person holding the ID matches the picture on the ID, what is going to stop someone from finding/stealing an ID and using that to "borrow" a laptop from this machine?

<comment><USER7> I would guess there is an ATM like pin code that you would have to enter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> what was wrong with putting desktop machines in the library which you can check out by, you know, sitting at the desk, and which are hard to steal because they are bolted to the furniture?

what exactly are we maximizing here? the amount of money spent by the university?

<comment><USER20> Are you really asking why someone would want to use a laptop instead of a desktop?

Students could take it off campus to their home or use it anywhere outdoors within campus, take it to some other location off campus.

Also, Macbooks are < $1k with an educational discount. How is it a waste of money to make 12 more computers available to students that can be used anywhere on/off campus?

<comment><USER21> Assuming _every_ student has a laptop anyway[1], this basically caters "to students who don't want to carry a laptop while walking late at night from their dorm or off-campus housing to the library".

What's the point of getting one "for five hours of use" to take it off campus or home _if you have a laptop off campus or at home_?

What dire need exactly does this solve? Put computers in the library for people who, well, work in the library. If you want to work elsewhere, _do_ bring your own.

[1]: And I know of _no_ student who does not own a laptop[2]

[2]: Cue anecdotal evidence of that _one_ person of a student body of thousands of people without their own laptop...

<comment><USER22> If you have ever walked in the area where drexel students live, you probably wouldn't want to carry your laptop from your home or dorm to campus. I didn't go there, but I lived nearby.

<comment><USER21> Mhm, it makes somewhat more sense to be able to borrow one at the university if security is indeed a concern. I still wonder why it has to be a laptop, though, since desktops (and maybe communal working spaces[1]) seem to fit the bill just fine.

[1]: The University of Edinburgh for example has workspaces called "pods" with a big screen and a desktop that allows for a group of students to work together and display relevant files/work on the big screen.

<comment><USER23> > I still wonder why it has to be a laptop, though, since desktops (and maybe > communal working spaces[1]) seem to fit the bill just fine.

You can't take a desktop with you. Sure, you can go to the computer lab, and there will probably be enough computers that you can sit next to each other, and you can probably talk quietly enough to not disturb anyone else around you.

You definitely can't take a desktop with you to class. I've tried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> NC State installed those a little while ago too. Haven't used them personally but they seemed pretty nice and very convenient.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice! I would love for computers to be more of a commodity!</comment>


Ken Iverson: Math for the Layman - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.trinity.edu/About/The_Courses/cs301/math-for-the-layman/ <comment><USER2> Very cool resource. I've just been reading Iverson's "A Programming Language"-- I'll have to put this one on my list.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome post:-)</comment>


Tech takes over: New York is the sector's second city - <AUTHOR> http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20180226/FEATURES/180229939/new-york-is-the-tech-sectors-official-second-city-and-the-boom-is <comment><USER2> "official"

FTEs is one way to slice it, but kind of dumb.

Seattle is home to two of the five biggest tech companies in the US.

Boston has had an IPO every year for the last ten years that exceeds any in NYC history.

LA has had the only 11-digit IPO in the last five years, outside of the bay area. It's also capturing the zeitgeist in a way that NYC no longer does (that's subjective, of course, but I'd debate it).

Just by market cap, Sydney's three biggest tech co's would are more impressive than NYC's.

NYC is an awesome startup city, but the idea that it's the clear #2 is silly.

<comment><USER3> All the criteria you chose seem like bad proxies for the things that really matter. I would count the following as the fundamental metrics that really count.

\- Average (high-end) programmer salary

\- Amount of VC funding

\- Total number of full-time tech workers

The 1st and 2nd criteria determine how attractive the city is, for employees and founders respectively.

The 3rd criteria determines how much clustering/network effects the city enjoys.

On all 3 criteria, NYC is either 1st or 2nd. NYC hedge funds have bid up programmer salaries to levels that are virtually impossible to get anywhere else besides SFBA. The data on VC-funding shows NYC as a solid #2, only behind SFBA. And the linked article shows that in terms of networking potential, NYC is #2 as well.

[https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/10/venture-capital- concent...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/10/venture-capital- concentration/539775/)

<comment><USER4> You get paid more gross in NYC than Seattle, but the take-home is less due to taxes. Cost of living is also approximately double. I did the math last year -- offer was 5% higher in NYC, but the after-tax and living disposable income was 50% higher in Seattle.

2/3rd the gross pay in Austin probably gives a significant "raise" in terms of relative standard of living and maybe 1/4 the money in many parts of Asia would move you even higher.

All I'm saying is that Average Salary is probably a bad way to compare across geographies.

<comment><USER5> I'd be curious to see more of those CoL comparisons. How big of a place are you pricing for NYC, and in which neighborhood? Are you factoring in the savings from not needing a car?

You can find CoL calculators out there, and they have their faults, but Seattle is already an expensive city in its own right, and I simply don't see how you possibly got NYC to come out double. That's way out of line with the calculators.

<comment><USER6> I've also done this math -- price per sqft is wayy better in Seattle and you don't necessarily need a car. In any case, a metro card isnt cheap. The cost of groceries/alcohol is also much much higher in nyc and at a lower quality.

I have a postdoc friend who lives in Seattle on slightly less than I do. They have a huge 1br in cap Hill with parking next to the subway with a short committee downtown or to UW. Meanwhile my apartment is the same price with a minifridge, a 40m commute, and no dishwasher/laundry/disposal.

Plus the PNW is just more enjoyable to explore than the northeast in my opinion. You definitely can make more in Nyc but the COL and QoL is just awful compared to the pnw

<comment><USER7> While I agree with your opinions here, those things are also somewhat personal. I place a lot of value on large housing, cheap car ownership and easy access to nice outdoor spaces.

A lot of other folks place more value on not needing a car ever, lots of easy food delivery options, and access to any kind or show or performance you might ever want to see without having to travel.

<comment><USER8> As someone who moved from LA to SF to Brooklyn, this exactly. There's a ton of factors that are very personal. I need a big city; SF is just too small, among all the other reasons I disliked living there. I'm happy to pay for a place that has the things I actually prefer. This sentiment, of course, goes both ways. NYC isn't for everyone. I don't want to live in Midtown...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my experience the NYC tech scene is far more grounded in reality. Far far less hype, uber for lawn gnomes nonsense and a lot more companies focused on real solutions and, often, with real customers. Silicon Valley has become, well, Silicon Valley while NYC is and feels much more like a true business hub.

Seems to be a lot of B2B stuff that's driven by the overall diversity of NYC's economy, which is far more diverse than SF/SV.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point. One quote that didn't make it in was that NYC doesn't have an "infrastructure of crazy," i.e., there aren't mentors/peers here who might tell a founder not to take a risk, not to take that offer from Google for $30 billion...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am not surprised to read this and also not sure what makes this article/publisher the assumed authority to christened NYC as #2. After Silicon Valley one might argue that Seattle has better tech than NYC but again NYC always has breadth and depth of diverse markets such finance, fashion, ads, hotel, food, law and education to name a few. Not to mention, easy access to EWR/JFK/LGA airports from European continent makes it easier for people to come here and get involved.

Updated: Improved verbosity

<comment><USER11> Seattle has better connections to Asia, given the way planes travel it is closer to Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul than any other major American city besides anchorage.

<comment><USER12> Unlike Anchorage you can actually fly to those places straight from Seattle as a commercial passenger.

<comment><USER11> Yep, you can only fly direct from Anchorage if you go in a box :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The best part about tech in NYC is that it isn't a non-stop, in-your-face bubble the way that it is in SF/SJ. I work in tech but enjoy having friends in fashion, finance, real estate, advertising, etc. The conversations here are much more diverse. Interestingly, that same diversity helps improve the tech sector.

<comment><USER14> I find statements like this both cringe and problematic. The heavy emphasis on industry defined identity is creepy, extremely impersonal, and backwards.

I've been a software developer in advertising, various startups and have friends in fashion and finance. While sure you can get some interesting insights into their industries, for example Gucci's new operating room spread is dope af, or the fact that hedge funds year over year make 20% on average using their "genius quants" (aka insider trading), I find that the actual people themselves are a relatively homogenous subculture across industries. That is a typically upper middle class white with a BS/BA in econ/finance/cs/communications who got "really drunk" in college, "loves" IPAs now and does sober February's as a challenge.

These are all various shades of yuppie identity non-diverse in thought, culture, or world perspective. They are boring.

<comment><USER15> _> > The best part about tech in NYC is that it isn't a non-stop, in-your-face bubble the way that it is in SF/SJ_

 _> I find statements like this both cringe and problematic._

I think the 1st sentence of the 1st comment is amusingly and inadvertently supported by the 2nd.

 _These are all various shades of yuppie identity non-diverse in thought, culture, or world perspective. They are boring._

You're painting with a pretty broad brush there, yourself.

The diversity of thought and culture in the NYC area is breathtaking. It takes a lot of effort to navigate it at times, but it's definitely there. Hundreds of years worth. It used to be that the North East of the US kinda _was_ the US. Half of the soldiers who went to fight in Europe in WWI were from New York state alone.

A big part of US history of the 20th century has been the demographic, economic, and cultural shift away from the North East to the West and South. As a part of this, it's only natural that a new intelligentsia would arise on the West Coast and pooh-pooh the North East. It's a very common historical pattern. However, when it comes down to it, people living, thinking, and working in close proximity will create cultural value. To denigrate this is to throw out the baby with the bathwater if you are a humanist, or a progressive.

<comment><USER16> I've always thought the stereotype was that of the metropolitan North East pooh-pooh-ing the West, e.g. : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MaCXa3ZSH8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MaCXa3ZSH8)

<comment><USER15> _the metropolitan North East pooh-pooh-ing the West_

That's the other side of the historical pattern. It also happened between Europe and the "New World."

My Louisiana Creole girlfriend (at the time) and I showed up for a concert with Joanna Newsom and Phillip Glass. Let me assure you that there are older West Coast elites who can wonder aloud about you and look down their nose at you just as much as Mainline and old New England preppies. (Basically the fans of Phillip Glass wondering about the Joanna Newsom fandom _hoi polloi_.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cheaper rent than Silicon Valley, tons of cultural diversity, and amazing food. Really nice place to live.

<comment><USER18> High stress, high pollution, rat race of a lifestyle, you are regulated and taxed on more things you even thought possible, and one of the worst imaginable places to try and raise a family. It has it's pros and cons, but I think we both agree it is certainly better than Silicon Valley. It's great if you are a young professional figuring out the world, but eventually people want their space and be able to stretch out their legs.

<comment><USER19> I am a tech worker raising my family in Brooklyn and it's quite lovely. Expensive, yes, but lovely. Whether you find it a "rat race" of a lifestyle or not is much more dependent on your internal psychology than the city itself.

<comment><USER18> I have heard Brooklyn is gentrifying at a rapid pace, but back when I was there, Brooklyn just wasn't an option.

<comment><USER20> Do you have any idea how big Brooklyn is?

<comment><USER18> Since this comment is attempting to be pedantic, I'll give you a pedantic answer: Yes I have access to google maps just like the rest of the world.

Serious answer: Yes, the _landmass that constitutes Brooklyn is large_. The landscape of the main neighborhoods that have gentrified over the years are not so big. If you actually live there you know which parts I am talking about.

<comment><USER21> > The landscape of the main neighborhoods that have gentrified over the years > are not so big

What are you talking about? By area, Brooklyn is more gentrified than not- gentrified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm sure NYC is doing quite well, but a New York based website is saying NYC is doing great without any context or even a reporting of the full list? You could write the same article about Boston, Denver, Austin, etc.

<comment><USER23> In absolute numbers, New York would be at or near the top of the list just out of sheer size. New York has a lot of people doing IT work because it's a huge city and every business needs some IT to a greater or lesser degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really want to move to NYC. As a full stack developer in SF I only get interest from companies in the Bay Area. All my NYC applications get no response even if it's the same resume with locations removed. Am I missing something? Can someone who has mde a similar move cue me in?

I have 4 years of full stack experience. Do people tailor their resume for NYC companies?

<comment><USER25> As someone who has been on both sides of the table (an employee living outside of NYC and looking to move and a hiring manager in NYC who has received applications from remote candidates), it's way easier to get hired if you live in the area.

There are a few reasons for this (smaller companies don't want to risk flying you in and it not working out, longer interview process, recruiters limiting searches to a geographic area), but my advice would be to just take the plunge and move here without a gig. My partner and I made the jump that way many years ago and had new jobs within weeks. I don't think we're special, it's just a testament to how valuable tech sector is in NYC at the moment and how limited the talent pool really is.

You have a very employable set of skills and the market in NYC is great at the moment, so this is a low risk move.

<comment><USER26> One would think if the talent pool were limited they'd be more responsive to those outside the area

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What is Boston doing wrong? In the 80s thanks to the 128 Tech Row, it was on par with Silicon Valley as the top spot, then it lost ground and now NYC is considered #2? We have the highest concentration of collegiate tech talent, the same weather as NYC (obviously worse than SV), lower cost of living than both cities, and there's been a ton of investment in real estate for tech companies in the Seaport District. Too little, too late, perhaps?

<comment><USER28> I know it's a minor point, but Boston absolutely does not have the same weather as NYC. The winters are so much worse in Boston.

I'm a current NYC-er finding NYC too expensive to raise my family and the winter there is the only thing pulling me away from Boston, which is otherwise quite attractive.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, the weather this past holiday season, for instance, was a once-a-decade sort of event and 20-40 degrees colder than usual. Our compatriots in Boston were laughing at us, saying "that's just another Tuesday up here".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is a retail business really a tech business?

The article says, "tech companies -- defined as those whose principal business is tech and its applications" but then their examples are companies that are largely shops. There's nothing wrong with shops(!!) but these people aren't developing any technology, and aren't really taking advantage of new technology any more tahn (and probably less than) Target, Wal-mart or McDonald's. Perhaps a better way to put it is we call UAL, AA, etc "airlines" rather than "aircraft companies". We don't call comcast, or sprint "tech" companies even though they have a _lot_ of engineers on their staff.

In one sense, who cares? If these companies are successful and good for their customers, employees and investors that's great.

(of course to me Cummins engines and 3M are pretty high tech businesses too, even if little computation or electronics is discussed by them).

But I am quite interested in _tech_ businesses and products, and this all seems a bit weird.

</comment><comment> p-funk I'm sorry if this is off topic, but I'm just looking for some advice I guess. I'm currently an electronics engineer in NY and I've been trying to switch to something in software for about a year now because there are essentially no electronics jobs here in my field. I've had a hard time convincing employers how my electronics experience is relevant or how well it would translate to a software role, because, basically, no one knows what electrical engineers actually do, much less how similar it is to software engineering. How do I convince people that I'd be a good hire, despite not having "production" software experience apart from a few embedded projects? I know for certain I can do the work, I just don't know how to prove that to someone doing the hiring.

<comment><USER31> Some companies in NY hire for software engineering without requiring a comp- sci degree. Used to work at Bloomberg and a lot of the people there were hired without a classical programming background but still with some programming experience even if not professional; a lot of physics, biology, and mathematics people for example. Then they put them through a 4 month internal coding course teaching them C++, JS, git, etc. and a lot become surprisingly competent. And then they go to Google once they are all trained up :)

Edit: point being is that there a number of companies that don't look only for traditional hires. Networking (via Meetup for example) helps. Also going through a recruiter or (Recurse if you have the time!) is also helpful.

<comment><USER32> For a Bloomberg job you can probably just show up at a nearby bar on a Thursday and be social through the 10pm black hole.

Try to avoid challenges for feats of strength.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> General comment - it's unlikely tech will come to dominate NYC, and therefore it's a healthy place to start if you want to avoid a monoculture.

Is housing cost a problem though?

</comment><comment><USER34> Crypto will be a leading force in NYC's tech growth over the next 5-10 years.

</comment><comment><USER35> > On Wall Street, new computer engineers get hired at $120,000, but senior > managers can make $400,000 plus the bonuses Wall Street hands out every > winter

This always bums me out. Why do managers make so much more money than engineers?

<comment><USER36> A group of 5 engineers, left to their own devices, would probably produce about $100k worth of value. An effective manager can extract two million dollars worth of value out of those same 5 engineers.

If you don't believe this, you may have never had a great manager.

<comment><USER37> Could say the same thing about athletes and coaches but who makes more in pro sports?

<comment><USER36> Athletes collectively bargain. Either way, coaching still matters in sports.

<comment><USER38> Of course coaching matters! The point, I believe, is that the relationship between management and creative can be mutually beneficial, with both parties earning considerably more through a partnership than they would on their own.

The fact that developers become much more valuable with a good manager doesn't, in itself, explain why managers are paid more.

For example, let's say a manager without a good developer would be worth 100k of value a year, and a developer without a good manager would produce 100k, but working together, they produce 500k. There is now a surplus.

Now, if it's easy to be a developer and very difficult to be a manager, then it would make sense that the manager would capture most of the surplus, because he or she could always just go and find a new talented developer to work with. The Rolling Stones can find a new manager more easily than a manager can find a new Rolling Stones.

However, ahem, it seems to be the managers constantly bemoaning the difficulty of hiring good developers. Share a bit more of that surplus, and you may find those hiring woes aren't quite so woeful?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-how-i-self-attacked.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion (763 points, 143 comments). For some reason this doesn't show up in the "past" search results but shows up if you search for the domain.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890328)

<comment><USER3> New title: "How I attacked myself with Google Spreadsheets (2012)" (I assume someone added the 2012 later.)

Old title: "How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill"

I think that the problem is that Algolia looks for results with _all_ the words, the new title has the word "Spreadsheets" that is not in the old title.

I think Algolia has an option to allow variations and typos in words, but not an option to match most of the words (like 4 of 5 words).

<comment><USER4> The url is the same though. That ought to be detected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That is just such a fantastic headline. So close to linkbait but really just a brilliant summary of what actually happened. So good I actually remember it from last time (and clearly others did too based on first comment!). I'm always amazed by what enters our collective consciousness based on exceptional word smithery.

</comment><comment><USER6> Apparently this is a repost, but I for one missed it the first time around.

I'll just say I found it to be a highly entertaining and well-written account of a nightmare scenario I think many of us here can relate to: The unexpected and unexplained exploding AWS bill.

</comment><comment><USER7> I know Google has cheaper bandwidth than most, but it's still amazing that they are willing to pull 250gb every hour of every day for a single, free spreadsheet.

<comment><USER8> Welcome to the wonderful world of network peering.

I suspect Google is very transmit heavy on bandwidth usage. Peering agreements tend to sweeten as your rx/tx ratio approaches 1, so increasing rx on the network makes it easier to establish a peering arrangement, avoiding the need to purchase transit.

<comment><USER9> Is that why download traffic (incoming data) is free on EC2?

<comment><USER10> Almost certainly. Many datacenters offer free incoming bandwidth either to improve their ratio or just because it doesn't actually cost them anything (e.g. they're paying for a 10gbit internet exchange port but their traffic is highly asymmetrical on the outgoing side).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > What I find fascinating in this setting is that Google becomes such a > powerful weapon due to a series of perfectly legitimate design decisions.

It does have a certain "perfect storm of good intentions" quality, but no, "prefetching" hundreds of gigabytes worth of images that the user is not looking at right now* and that will not be cached for the next time the user views it, that the user did not indicate will be changing frequently or have recently changed, and doing it every hour on the hour (according to timestamps in a screenshot), is not a "perfectly legitimate" design. Calling it that implies IMO that there is nothing Google should change about this (maybe the author does not mean that.)

Maybe I or the author are missing something here -- why did Google think it was necessary to fetch something that will not be immediately shown to the user nor will it be cached for later? I can understand the no-caching decision, but then why fetch at all if it's not needed _now_? Why is 1 hour supposedly short enough for some hypothetical user that wants their spreadsheet's embedded images to update automatically, but long enough to not cause damage (wasn't long enough in this case)? And I hinted at "on the hour" above because it seems like some sort of staggered refreshing would be better on the CPUs and networks involved, though it wouldn't make a difference to the author.

Even if for some reason they think fetching this aggressively and wastefully is good, it seems like it's in Google's own interest to have some kind of safety valve (bandwidth restriction, hard abort, something in between) after a few hundred megabytes on one spreadsheet's refresh cycle. If nothing else, that omission means it probably wasn't a "legitimate" design decision.

Wild theory: the author was accidentally causing the refresh somehow (or maybe purposely automated but forgotten.) Somehow it seems more likely than Google setting it up this way on purpose...

* I'm kind of assuming here, but the author doesn't mention anything like he was actively viewing the spreadsheet while the attack was happening. Even if he had it open (and with all the image-linked cells in view!) for hours on end, I stand by my other points that it's strange and not a perfect design for Google to auto-refresh in this fashion.

<comment><USER12> I'm gonna test it out on a much smaller scale, and slightly different setup. I just grabbed 3 images from a rarely used server hosted with DigitalOcean, with a custom domain, and put them in a new Google Sheet using the same =image(url) technique the author mentioned. The access logs show Feedfetcher-Google; (+[http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)"](http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html\)") grabbed each of the images once immediately which makes sense. I'll check back in a few hours and see if there are any other requests.

Edit: I also grabbed 3 different images and put them in a separate sheet. I'm gonna leave one open on my desktop and not open the other and see if that changes the requests.

One Hour Later: I think that Google is probably grabbing images On-Demand now. There are 12 total requests on my 6 images. The first 6 are sporadic, which correspond to when I added the images to the sheets. Then the next 3 are in the same second, which come from opening the sheet on my desktop. And the last 3 also came in the same second, again from opening that sheet on my desktop. I kept one open and closed the other and neither have had the images requested since.

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure they fixed it. I don't remember whether that was already in the original discussion of this story or a little bit later, but I remember the comment that one can't use it anymore as an attack tool since the feedfetcher behaviour changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A lot of people complain about amazon lacking a cap for spending everytime such a story appears. Invariably though everrytime i've read about something like this happening amazon dropped the bill if the usage was not intentional.

Honestly from what i've seen this policy of amazon's is really nice and if they did otherwise they'd constantly get a lot of bad pr. Cases like this probably happen often but not everyone writes about it. A lot more would write rant blog posts if amazon didn't drop such bills.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know if Google ended up changing their behavior on this?

I'm struggling to see why this is a legitimate design decision on their part - how is downloading a new copy every hour different from maintaining a persistent cache wherever they are storing it after download?

<comment><USER16> > Since these URLs are private, Google does not want to store them anywhere > permanently in the Google servers.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I read that part, I just don't understand it. They are obviously storing the contents of the image somewhere (in memory?) for an hour, otherwise there's no point prefetching it in the first place. At the end of that hour, they download it again. If the image isn't different, they would be better off not throwing away the old copy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why do people chose to use hosting services with no cap, and then complain that their bills are arbitrarily high? You agreed to that in the Terms and Conditions.

Just use a service with a fixed monthly rate for a fixed capacity, and up/downgrade as needed. Of course you don't want your service to be shut down after reaching a limit, but you should be watching the resources as you would with AWS, only the consequences are much less bizarre than a surprise $1,700 bill.

<comment><USER18> People aren't as self-compliant with watching their resources as you think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If content negotiation[1] had a standard way, Google's client could have told the server it was only for a thumbnail of N size and a smart server could serve less bytes.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Content_ne...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Content_negotiation)

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it a good idea to use AWS through a prepaid virtual card to avoid such cases? I'm planning to set a up a personal site and I could afford the site going down instead of paying $1000. The guy got refund though, but I would rather not going through this hassle.

<comment><USER20> Well... even tough they wouldn't be able to charge the money to your card, you would still owe them.

<comment><USER21> Yep.

Even if Amazon would claim the money you owe in realtime, they probably wouldn't shut you down if your prepaid hits zero.

I use a prepaid for my Kindle purchases and Amazon processes the order even if the payment gets rejected, following up with increasingly insistent reminder emails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I REALLY REALLY want someone to do this with a huge amount of google image thumbnails so that the google crawlers just start hitting google servers. Would it be considered malicious to do such a thing?

<comment><USER23> > _Would it be considered malicious to do such a thing?_

Maliciousness is usually described in the context of intent. So your first sentence should provide the answer to your own question. Is there a way to do what you describe such that the result is gratifying and yet doesn't cause significant duress on Google's servers and employees?

<comment> jon-wood Just doing it the way started wouldn't cause significant duress on Google's servers. You'd be requesting that Google transfer data from a service designed to handle massive volume of traffic, across their own network, to another service designed to handle massive volume. Honestly, I'd be surprised if it even tripped any monitoring alarms.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: UX Design Course for Everyone - <AUTHOR> https://schoolofux.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I came to the UK from Estonia 15 years ago in search of career prospects. Three years (and thousands of pounds in fees) later I have completed computer science degree (hooray!) and realised that sadly much of the academic curriculum wasn't relevant to what actual industry and employers were expecting from new hires ( _sigh_ ).

It was only thanks to my proactive freelancing and numerous side projects with fellow teammates, that I've gained experience, which significantly helped me start my career. I wondered if there are other ways.

People who want to progress in their career in creative industry of software design have to take a loan and quit job to take lengthy and costly degrees and courses taught by academics or alumni without real-industry experience – that's what I'm keen to change.

Having then worked with Microsoft, Heathrow, British Gas, fintech companies and various startups, I've decided to share my knowledge with aspiring designers and started The School of UX [https://schoolofux.com/](https://schoolofux.com/) in London — bringing accessible and affordable education in User Experience design to everyone – short and reasonably priced UX and UI workshops with career advice run by professionals.

I've been often asked how my startup compares to other institutions on the market (and there are quite a few, which launched since then) — any education is great and it's up to you to pick the right one for you. Here's how The School of UX compares to General Assembly, CareerFoundry, Flatiron and other UX bootcamps [https://schoolofux.com/pages/the-school-of-ux-compared-to- ux...](https://schoolofux.com/pages/the-school-of-ux-compared-to-ux- bootcamps/), how it compares to Udemy, Lynda, Coursera and other online UX courses [https://schoolofux.com/pages/the-school-of-ux-compared-to- on...](https://schoolofux.com/pages/the-school-of-ux-compared-to-online-ux- courses/), and finally how it compares to Master degrees and UX diplomas at universities [https://schoolofux.com/pages/the-school-of-ux-compared-to- un...](https://schoolofux.com/pages/the-school-of-ux-compared-to-university- degrees/)

Your feedback is highly appreciated folks.</comment>


Ask HN: What benefits did you get from being featured on the HN front page? - <AUTHOR>

Share with us what benefits did you get from being featured on the HN front page? (e.g. 10x increase in traffic, 50% increase in signups compared to the baseline, a new strategic deal...). I think it would interesting to see the statistics behind something that majority of submitters seek to experience here.<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> The benefits from getting front page of HN are insignificant 99.9% of the time.

If your startup goes viral and it appears on HN, it's likely that appearing on HN is not the causal effect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! I know many people who view HN as a path towards viral. Any specific examples from your experience?</comment></comment>


Context aware MySQL pools via HAProxy - <AUTHOR> http://githubengineering.com/context-aware-mysql-pools-via-haproxy/ <comment><USER2> This is similar to how we direct traffic to MySQL at Eventbrite. We also have multiple MySQL clusters with complex topologies for different services. Every server that can access MySQL has a local HAProxy that it connects to. This local HAProxy is checking the health of a pool of dedicated HAProxy servers. Those HAProxy servers are hitting a script run by xinetd on the MySQL servers to determine whether a server should be in its pool. Here is where we differ the most from Github. Instead of having two backends per frontend, we only have one, but the health check itself is context-aware. In addition to takings its own lag into account, it also queries HAProxy to determine the number of healthy servers in its backend pool. As the percentage of healthy servers goes down, the threshold for declaring itself unhealthy based on lag goes up. Additionally, there are some extra safeguards to make sure we never dip below a certain number of servers in the pool. We use variations on this approach for other services like Solr and Redis as well.

BTW, if managing this sort of infrastructure excites you, we're hiring! [https://jobs.lever.co/eventbrite/cd7d6b95-0226-4e03-b9fa-c15...](https://jobs.lever.co/eventbrite/cd7d6b95-0226-4e03-b9fa-c157f7920b6e)

</comment><comment><USER3> So, I see more and more organizations using "chatops". Are they really delegating control of their infrastructure out to Slack/HipChat? If not, how does authentication/authorization work?

<comment><USER4> At CloudFlare we use a self-hosted, and accessible via corp VPN only, Hipchat.

However it's important to note that this is primarily information inbound, and not instructions outbound.

Additionally, the disabling of a Hipchat account is near the top of the list of the security incident response team.

If a laptop is lost, if a machine compromised, the ability for those accounts to continue broadcasting information of any kind is immediately neutralised.

The risks are real, but one can mitigate them by:

1\. Securing access to the chat environment (self-hosting, VPN only, different auth to this than to the rest of the infrastructure)

2\. Not having chatops send instructions to other systems

3\. Having well practised plans for disabling accounts in response to incidents

4\. All of the above is no replacement for access control and auditing on all other systems

I'm not going to speak on behalf of the security team, but the idea that the chatops would send instructions to systems is pretty horrifying even if they originated from a machine or person.

It's bad enough to imagine the scenario that if someone's chat account were compromised and someone could gain access to the VPN to then use the chat, that social engineering via chat is likely to be more successful than by other mediums (people trust chat). Hence ensuring those accounts are disabled very quickly.

<comment><USER2> So you make chatops secure by not having chatops, it sounds like.

Being able to gather information in a chat room is helpful, but I don't think its fair to call it chatops unless you have can act on that information through chat, too.

To use examples from the blog post, both querying for the slaves in a pool and marking one down for maintenance, all through chat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are the pros/cons of doing this in HAProxy natively?

Could you just use something like a health-check on a cluster system like zookeeper/etcd/consul/keepalived/... to simply peek at the lag time, and then mark a replica as unhealthy and regenerate your HAProxy config?

Just curious as I have very little experience with HAProxy. I do everything with consul right now and it works very well (previously I used keepalived + vrrp, or pacemaker/corosync but no multicast "in the cloud.").

</comment><comment><USER6> This is cool. I dont think it would be useful in my case though.

99% of the time the cause of lag I see is some heavy inserts on the master. These hit the slaves at the same time so this wouldn't mitigate that issue.

It got me to wondering, what is the common cause of slave lag for other people?

<comment><USER7> All kinds of reasons. A few quick examples:

\- say one of the slaves actually has some monitoring system break and now runs out of disk space, and stops the ability to write locally, so the lag will go up and/or health check will see its replication is failing, and it will automatically be taken out of the pool.

\- say you run a site where a user has a list of songs they like. some users have larger libraries than others, but there is a few outliers that have 100x the amount of songs. your growing fast and you have some code paths that are not optimized for this, and some features that folks barely use that you don't spend time on. one of these users goes on your site and uses this feature and now you have 1 slave that is lagging because the overly intense query landed on it.

\- say you have a high traffic site, or you are in a datacenter where you are sharing networking gear with a very high traffic neighbor, and the datacenter has over provisioned the networking gear, so there is no headroom for bandwidth. now you have slave lag if your replication is passing thru a switch at saturation. maybe this is only present some times of the day, on some slaves, so they will be taken out of the pool so servers with better network paths are prioritized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You have to be careful to tune your xinetd script to increase the cps and per_source limits accordingly to the load that your pool of servers generate with this proxy forwarding.

Assuming that all servers that need to connect to MySQL have this local tcp 3306 proxy setup, each time you increase your pool of servers the load of incoming check requests increase as well.

Xinetd is quite nasty and by default will stop responding to requests for like 10 seconds after some defaults. This will effectively "block" your whole database connection flows, especially when you restart services at batch during a rolling update, and under some other circumstances...

</comment><comment><USER9> It would be interesting to know GitHub's policies on persistent MySQL connections. If apps hold long lived connections, even if a server was deemed unhealthy, I don't think there would be anything to force the app to reconnect and find a new slave?

</comment><comment><USER10> In addition, they could also have used agent checks to enable each MySQL server to decide of its own weight. This way, more busy servers could receive less traffic until the situation improves.

</comment><comment> vhost- I did something very similar on a 5 read cluster, but wrote custom NetScaler health checks to pull laggy replicas out of the virtual server pool.

</comment><comment><USER11> as a note this is pretty much the only way to run Galera (multi-master MySQL variant) from HAProxy - you need to provide a custom HTTP service that checks that the cluster node in question is ready to serve requests. Galera's flow control feature likely does a lot that the tests here for "lag" accomplish.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, that's common practice with Galera.

Percona xtradb cluster provides a clustercheck service script listening on port 9200 (http).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Er, so, are they using a separate database application to abstract the mysql operations? They don't mention it in the article. Not abstracting your database leads to major issues from unusual load and operations. And there's a lot of performance, portability, release engineering, etc wins. I don't see what other companies are doing so i'm not sure how common it really is.

<comment><USER2> What do you mean by "a separate database application"?

<comment><USER12> Instead of:

      web app
              -> haproxy
                         -> mysql

Doing this:

      web app
              -> backend app
                             -> haproxy
                                        -> mysql

It allows a dedicated application layer to handle database communication/changes in a more intelligent way than a proxy/load balancer can. Helps account for scaling issues, batches transactions, retries on failure/inconsistency, throttles, caches, advanced logic, schema/application change resiliency/consistency, network segregation, restricts operations, etc etc. Nobody seems to implement it unless there's a wide range of applications with different needs, or when things break.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Bank suggestions.  - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
I'm looking into opening an account and would appreciate any suggestions. I'm in California, 22, do not have a steady income, enjoy playing with puppies and the occasional romantic dinner. I thought you all would be the best to ask as many of you are penny pinching your way through startups, and are generally very resourceful and quick to find problems in any system. I have several hundreds to start out with, and am looking for the most transparent, fair, and preferably most advanced with respects to online banking and mobile access.
Also, there is a big chance I may be studying in Europe for an extended period of time, so I'm also looking for suggestions as far as accounts that could possibly be accessed on the cheap whilst I am abroad.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I use Bank of America and have used Wells Fargo, mainly because they are all over the place. They have an international presence, whereas your small local bank probably doesnt.

Also, if you qualify, consider a credit union. They usually have all the usual services, plus pay higher interest on deposits and charge lower for loans.

</comment><comment><USER3> ING direct for savings.

I'm in California too, and use Mechanics Bank (<http://www.mechbank.com>) for checking. They have great service, and they pay your ATM fees no matter which bank's ATM you use.

</comment><comment><USER4> i use HSBC direct and have been happy with it. i've heard ING direct is probably a little better, but its rates are typically a little lower.</comment>


North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due to Core Flux - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091224-north-pole-magnetic-russia-earth-core.html <comment><USER2> There is definite theoretical argument that the poles have completely switched polarity in the past. The truth is that the magnetic poles are always changing and moving and we can never be sure if they might switch completely.

That would cause chaos as we would have to adjust to the new North being the old South.

<comment><USER3> I doubt it would really be that bad. A couple software patches and we are all set.

I bet the patches are not even that much needed. All software that deals with magnetic North and its relation to geographic North can deal with nothing more than a new config file telling where magnetic North is this week.

<comment><USER4> Maybe true for newer software... older software might be harder to patch (but not necessarily hard).

Can anyone think of any physical devices that depend on magnetic north = geographic north in a mechanical (i.e. not software) way other than a compass?</comment></comment></comment>


Armed with APIs, developers will drive the composable enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/10/12/armed-with-apis-developers-will-drive-the-composable-enterprise/ <comment><USER2> Or in other words, SOA is back, we just call it now "API".

Loosely coupled APIs and services is an old idea, Amazon live by it, even internally. However it is true that most enterprises failed to adopt it. And I agree with the article that companies that write every piece of functionality with API in mind, will have the upper hand in the long run. And those stuck with monolith closed systems will eventually pay a price due to inability to adapt to rapid changes.

If calling it API will convince the decision makers to provide budget for internal APIs even though no customer is paying for it directly, then I don't mind. But this is not a new idea. the problem is how to justify ROI for making your code API friendly (doesn't go without saying by the way, there is a price, of backward compatibility, documentation, decoupling etc). For most CEOs this is a waste of time unless there is a direct revenue path from it (e.g. a customer pays for it). It's hard to justify extra effort on the code to management when all you can say is: it will pay off in the long run (imagine the link to the relevant XKCD here)

<comment><USER3> SOA is not back. It never left. It just much more mature now and easy to implement thanks to RESTful APIs.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. A few years ago SOA = a bunch XML-defined web services with ill- conceived and complex grammars + J2EE "enterprise" stuff and unusual return formats.

The maturity of REST has resulted in simpler return types, more mature and easier-to-use serialization libraries, and explicit, English documentation to define interfaces (for the most part). It's a welcome change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me, or is this article filled with a lot of complicated buzz words and hyperbole?

"APIs have eaten software, and they'll go on the eat enterprise architectures, too."

Yes, that API someone did a few months back that allows you to do a GET and POST "F *ck you" 10 different ways will eat software indeed. As will that API that gets a random LOLCat pic.

<comment><USER6> > Is it just me, or is this article filled with a lot of complicated buzz > words and hyperbole?

A helpful site for biz tech writers on a tight deadline is [http://bullshitipsum.com/](http://bullshitipsum.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Right on. In the future, all applications are just going to be collections of remotely callable objects, with just a bit of local glue code to tie everything together.

This is going to be even bigger than Sun RPC, DCOM, or even CORBA!

</comment><comment><USER8> Damn. Nice.

This article is really true, and is terrible news for Microsoft. Many great applications do one thing well.

Github --> source control (and issue track, ok whatever). Dropbox --> File storage on devices Sublime --> Code editing MailChimp --> Email Marketing

Hopefully, the days of doing everything within one program are over. The "microsoft word can build a website" concept needs to die hard.

Developers have always been building on top of people's solved problems, but we are slowly learning to formalize that into a sustainable business agreement via API, which is exceedingly good for the pace of growth.

A good application over the next few years might take Twilio, Mailchimp, Dropbox, and Github and add something uniquely special on top.

</comment><comment><USER9> To me, the "web" is currently as successful as it is, not because of the APIs by which you access data, but by the fact that it is a lot of data. Most of it publicly accessible.

Some of the markup is "semantic," which is certainly nice, but even that which isn't has a way of being figured out by people.

</comment><comment><USER10> A noble concept. I first read this in the original J2EE documents which imagined a future where you just connected EJB's together to build apps. Didn't work out that well. It's not as easy to build tiny pieces of apps as people thought.

</comment><comment><USER11> As a civilization, we went from "grow what you eat" to "buy what you eat." Today, every member of our society specializes in something and collectively, we cover the overall needs of the society. This transformation took place a long time ago for our civilization and the same transformation is now taking place in technology.

My company, TrueVault ([https://www.truevault.com](https://www.truevault.com)) is definitely betting on this trend by specializing in being the data backend for healthcare apps, sites and devices.

</comment><comment><USER12> Armed with marshaled data, developers will drive the composable enterprise.

Hey lets bring back ASN1 and call it something hot.

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://mashape.com](http://mashape.com)</comment>


Show HN: Dart-rpg – a browser-based RPG game maker written in Dart - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brad811/dart-rpg <comment><USER2> I bought 5 potions and it seems that I never run out. (Which doesn't actually bother me because I have to use them often)

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, looks like items wouldn't be removed from your inventory when used in battle. Just put out a fix for it, thanks for letting me know! (and sorry for ruining your infinite potions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Game Player Demo does not run on Chrome Version 47.0.2526.35 beta-m (64-bit)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, that's not good! I've switched to Chrome Version 47.0.2526.35 beta-m (64-bit) and am still able to play. In what way is it not working? What OS are you on?

<comment><USER3> Oh my bad. It does run but with extremely high input lag. I am on Windows 10.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> very cool concept!

anyone else have any input lag?

</comment><comment><USER5> good job Brad!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Moments of Being – Smart Journaling App - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moments-of-being/id1341320367?ls=1&mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> or Progressive Web App: [https://lazarustechnology.org/moments-of- being/](https://lazarustechnology.org/moments-of-being/)</comment>


French data protection watchdog fines Google $57M under the GDPR - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/21/french-data-protection-watchdog-fines-google-57-million-under-the-gdpr/ <comment><AUTHOR> The original article by CNIL has been posted at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18960564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18960564) but this article might bring more context about the fine, incl. the key notion of consent bundling.</comment>


A WWII hero returns to Germany to meet his enemy (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/10/us/ww2-reunion-us-german-veterans/index.html <comment><USER2> What a moving story. Thank you for posting it.</comment>


Marelle: logic-based devops with Prolog - <AUTHOR> http://larsyencken.github.io/marelle/

<comment><USER2> Hi guys, I'm the author. I've been playing with this for a little while, and trying to work out an idiomatic style for it. Suggestions for improvement are most welcome.

Some pleasant parts have been writing metapackage rules. For example, playing with Julia yesterday:

      % if P is a Julia package, it's also a general package
      pkg(P) :- julia_pkg(P).

      meet(P, _) :-
        julia_pkg(P), !,
        % install the package using the Julia interpreter
        ...

      met(P, _) :-
        julia_pkg(P), !,
        % try to import the package in Julia
        ...

      julia_pkg('PyCall').
      julia_pkg('DataFrames').

The only potential problem (on the horizon) is namespacing, which IMHO Babushka does well, but which is less obvious with Prolog's fact system.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting project.

The home page could use more contrast though, that grey on white is nearly unreadable.

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks like scripting to me, not describing the desired state of a system:

        % we can install by running apt-get in shell
        meet(python, linux(_)) :-
          % could also use: install_apt('python-dev')
          bash('sudo apt-get install -y python-dev').

<comment><USER5> Give them a break. It is not prolog had been hip for a long time. Using it more idiomatically will take some practice, maybe a few web frameworks and a couple of package managers.

<comment><USER4> Give them a break? Why? They're trying to push this as a better way of managing a system.

<comment><USER5> Another failure for getting my point across on my part.

I don't see that we disagree that it is a feeble attempt at best. But consider this, who are we to judge the merits of that particular thing without more than a cursory examination? His project may as well be just a seed round away from becoming the next buzzword which people would wax poetic in the next few years. Also, logic programming is well positioned to be the next big thing discovered by the web developers because of its relative obscurity and functional programming losing its mystery.

Give them a break. It is just one of the hundreds of hopeful toy projects posted here, of which only a handful that haven't been shot down within ten seconds.

<comment><USER4> You're right: it might be.

But it also might not.

And without him explaining the advantage of his approach, the project will be ignored by anyone who has used a system that shares his goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Quickstart

> Run the bootstrap script:

        bash -c "`curl https://raw.github.com/larsyencken/marelle/master/bootstrap.sh`"

PFHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

no

<comment><USER7> Ahm, that's the way to install pretty much everything these days.

I mean, I know it's a security risk. But it isn't any more (or less) of a risk than installing nvm or just running git clone.

<comment><USER6> No, it's not. I only see it on the odd hip-n-cool project by people with less experience than my server's uptime. Everything I install is either from a distro's package, from a tarball or by compiling from source.

I don't mind having a script that sets up the environment, there is a lot of software out there that does have these set up scripts in the tarball, or is distributed as a self-extracting archive, but you can always see it is marked as such. What I really balk at is "run this random script, trust me it installs". Would it kill them to write "download this script which will run apt-get pkg1 ... pkg10, then extract an inline tarball to ~/.local/lib"? I'm not going to run a random script that I have ZERO idea what it will do. It's not about security, it's about knowing that a good-intentioned non-compromised script won't crap all over my environment.

<comment><USER8> If you want to know what the script does, reading the script would be the obvious solution. Why should this program's author hold your hand and explain the script in prose when the script clearly explains itself already in its own language? The guy isn't demanding that you run it blindly. Maybe he figured anyone smart enough to write Prolog programs is smart enough to understand the implications of downloading and running a shell script.

<comment><USER9> It will be ok in most cases... until it won't. What this script does is install dependencies. And fails for anything that isn't the most popular system. I really don't see the point of writing a script like this, as opposed to the following text:

        Requirements: git, prolog (package swi-prolog-nox, or swi-prolog).
        To install checkout repository https://github.com/larsyencken/marelle and run "make install" (optionally with DESTDIR=/your/custom/destination/path).

Less writing, clear instructions and provided you know how to write a standard well-behaved makefile, it will also not assume surprising things about your system. Also they could ship the bin file without a static path in their repo instead of creating it on installation for some reason.

Those bootstrap files are really annoying me - also because they assume zero knowledge from the user (even if that user is supposed to later write system standup script in prolog... oh the irony). It also gets completely redundant sometimes - like the composer in php ([https://getcomposer.org/installer](https://getcomposer.org/installer)) - it's a php script that includes loads of logic to download a single file and put it in the correct directory. And it's not an unusual case.

I really believe the bootstrap scripts are both useless and harmful, apart from a very few special cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Babushka not found

<comment> peter-fogg [https://github.com/benhoskings/babushka](https://github.com/benhoskings/babushka)

Looks like the repo has moved to a new Github account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not relevant to devops. Please change the title.

<comment><USER12> I'd like to hear your argument for this change. Seems apt to me.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What does the ideal office include? - <AUTHOR> Our company is calling for suggestions on what we'd like our offices to look like / include / feature.
I think variable height desks, walls that can be drawn on (whiteboard like), large monitors in meeting rooms, small phone booth like boxes for ad-hoc meetings and conference calls, air conditioning, ...
What else would you suggest? <comment><USER2> Silence. Give all of your employees, not just the devs, the joy of silence and focus.

And a nice espressso machine to boot :)</comment>


Firefox 72 vs. Chrome 80 Browser Performance on Ubuntu Linux with AMD Ryzen - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-80-benchmarks&num=1 <comment><USER2> Page 5:

"On a geometric mean basis for this Ryzen Threadripper + Radeon VII Ubuntu setup, Chrome 80 was about 24% faster than Firefox 72. Enabling WebRender did help in a few of the relevant benchmarks to provide an overall uplift of about 8%."</comment>


Siri Like App For Android Phone - <AUTHOR> http://nativeblogger.com/2011/10/siri-like-app-for-android-phone/

<comment><USER2> The text to speech part is good, but the intelligence is lacking. Here are some examples:

Me: "should I wear a jacket today?" Iris: "tell me what is infinity by infinity, and I will give you the answer"

Me: "what is the temperature right now?" Iris: "what is it?"

Though it did some well Me: "what is today's date?" Iris: October 19th 2011, 03:31:42 UTC B

Me: "who is the president of the United States?" Iris: "Barack Hussein Obama (plus a link to Wikipedia)"

Me: "who is the king of pop?" Iris: "Michael Jackson, born 1958 (plus a link to Wikipedia"</comment>


Robot Can Do More Push-Ups Because It Sweats - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/this-robot-can-do-more-pushups-because-it-sweats <comment><USER2> You can go the other way and add closed-loop cooling to a person [http://news.stanford.edu/2012/08/29/cooling-glove- research-0...](http://news.stanford.edu/2012/08/29/cooling-glove- research-082912/) Apparently it's been commercialized already [http://www.avacore.com/](http://www.avacore.com/)

<comment><USER3> These are used extensively in endurance automobile racing, and in desert racing. Keeps you much more alert, especially in hot environments.

Well, not the glove, but a shirt and or pants:

[https://store.windingroad.com/fast-cool-suit-system---no- air...](https://store.windingroad.com/fast-cool-suit-system---no-air---no- shirt-p90.aspx)

<comment><USER4> I wear a cool shirt even for sprint races (30 minutes) - it can be 110 degrees at the track and the nomex fire suit gets hot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is brilliant. Evaporative cooling is extremely efficient, and the use of laser sintered aluminum in the support structure to facilitate it is flat out genius. It's like we're living in the future.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm really amused by the artistic pointlessness of a robot doing push-ups.

<comment><USER7> It's not pointless. It's a familiar enough exercise that people can get a realistic idea of the energy expenditure this robot could be expected to perform in the field with the right control software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We humans look smart when we manage to create a bad copy of a tiny part of nature. How small we are.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, nature had a 3.5 billion year head start.

<comment><USER10> Ah, but unlike nature _we_ get to use intelligent design!

<comment><USER11> And, we came up with an emulation of a product of billions of years of evolution in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Being as it's early in the morning and I'm still blurry-eyed, I thought the headline read 'Robot Can Do More Push-Ups Because It Swears.' Now _that_ would have been an interesting article to have read!

</comment><comment><USER13> Those are some really crummy push ups. Get your chest down to the floor, Private!

</comment><comment><USER14> related to man vs horse [http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/06/long...](http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/06/long_distance_running_and_evolution_why_humans_can_outrun_horses_but_can_t_jump_higher_than_cats_.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how effective the micro-porous aluminum is at transferring heat from a cooling fluid to a heat sink. That might be useful even in active, non- evaporative cooling systems.

<comment><USER16> Isn't heat transfer very closely tied to surface area (among other things)?

<comment><USER15> That's my thinking - so this should have crazy surface area.

You could make some really awesome aluminum parts. Create a dense exterior with some interior "strut" infill structure and a very porous fill and put plumbing fixtures on the ends. Super strong, lightweight parts that you can cool at crazy rates. I wonder if this would work for aerospace? IIRC cooling the components exposed to exhaust can be a big limitation.

<comment><USER10> Oh man, keeping the flow laminar over all those transfer surfaces, and of course increasing the work because of the obstructions to flow...so many fun engineering problems!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Rocket engines have been probing these kind of technologies for decades, and it's been proposed for re-entry vehicles too. Called transpiration cooling. Only more recently, with additive manufacturing, it's become a lot cheaper to integrate into the structures. I haven't read of anyone actually using it.

</comment><comment><USER18> As soon as I saw the robot's face mask I knew it was going to be Japan.</comment>