Ask HN: How do you remember names? - <AUTHOR> I have a really, really poor memory of names.  Virtually the moment someone tells me their name, I forget it.  It almost doesn't even register.  I nod, but can't recall their name a moment later.<p>What are some tricks and techniques you use for remembering names? <comment><USER4> You can try to connect the name to the person you know (e.g: when someone introduces himself 'Hi, I'm Mark!' \- you can think about the Mark from high school and "attach" his image to this new person - 5 minutes later it may be easier to recall the person's name).

<comment><USER5> My stock answer is always Memory by Association too.

Many names can be associated with objects and other conceptual links, only few names are unique enough so as to be hard to associate with already pre-cached objects in memory.

And if a name is so unique that it's hard to associate with pre-cached objects/concepts then even more of a reason to memorize it.

For example, 'Mark' would be easy as I just think of the person being an actual mark[1] and I want to pull a Con Trick on him/her, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar might be trickier.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll have to ask the football teachers (under 5s) because they remember hundreds of kids names, and they remember new names immediately and forever, and there are lots of kids coming and going all throughout the year.

</comment><comment><USER7> Repeat it back to them. "Nice to meet you, <name>." Then repeat it to yourself multiple times mentally over the next minute or so. Try to associate it with some distinctive aspect of that person.

</comment><comment><USER8> Are you a visual learner? Because that is often my problem... best thing is to search social media and write their name out.. or add it to a contact list... also joke around with nicknames can help.

</comment><comment><USER9> I also am really bad at remembering names, my solution is to remember faces(since it is pretty easy) and inform people I am really bad at names, so as to not be rude when I ask their name for the 5th time

</comment><comment><USER10> After someone tells me her/his name, I always say: "I'm terrible with names, so I will ask about yours a couple of times, but that's the only way for me to remember," and I smile very very friendly. 90% of time people say something: "yeah, me too".

Then I really ask again, about 2-3 times, even if it's just within 30 seconds after the introduction. If there is more people around, together, then I say: "Hey, does everyone know names of each other? Let me try!" And then I try to say the names. People take it as very very friendly and fun, and by doing this I release a lot of pressure, because the less confident people also can use this opportunity to review the names.

There are often moments when I happen to be a guest at small parties/meetings. Learning all the names is my little game (the side effect of which is that girls will think you are more attractive). I sit next to the host, so that I can ask silently about the names (assuming that the host knows almost everyone), and then I just repeat them in mind again and again. Being silent in a conversation is usually a good idea anyway[1]. And then, when I leave, I stand up and say: "Thank you very much: John, Anna, Martha... etc, it was a lovely evening with you". And everyone is really impressed. The next time you meet with the same crowd, people will be extremely friendly to you :)

In business setting: that's more tricky. First of all you collect business cards and check people you are going to have a meeting with way ahead - <USER2> them up on facebook or linkedin. Even if you know only the name and function, and not the face, it will be later easier for you to associate them with the right person.

When you sit down with people who gave you their business cards, put the cards in front of you, on the table, in the same order they are sitting.

If this meeting is another meeting with the same people, take your note pad with you (you should be ready to take notes anyway) and before the meeting write the names on the margin. Then when you are with them, they will usually mention some names of the people present, or titles. Then you write on the page the names in order of sitting - person to your right - write the name on the right side of the page, etc.

Btw: it is extremely important to ALWAYS make notes from meetings. Do it right after the meeting, sit in the lobby or in your car and write down things like: who you met with, what were the issues discussed (even - or especially - <USER3> someone said something trivial or private like: my son was playing football last weekend, you will ask about football the next time you are on the lift with this important CTO), what you agreed for, what is missing, what do you have to bring to the next meeting. Collect those and always review before another meeting [thank you B. for teaching me this].

[1] - the little secret about conversations: people will think that the conversation was interesting if you let them talk. That's true when you are on a date or with your client. Ask questions, listen to what they say, reply with short replies, listen more. Show them that you are really interested in what they say, laugh at their jokes, consider what is important for them, be sad when they are sad. We often tend to think that we become interesting because we say something smart, but that's not true. -- does not apply to John Carmack and the like;)</comment>


Airbnb Files Petition to Block NY Subpoena, Cites Burden to Compile Data - <AUTHOR> http://skift.com/2013/10/09/airbnb-files-petition-to-block-ny-subpoena-cites-substantial-burden-to-compile-the-data/

<comment><USER2> I won't comment on the merits of the subpoena itself, but I find it somewhat amusing that a company so focused on data[1] is arguing that it can't deal with "hundreds of thousands of separate records spanning millions of [Excel spreadsheet] cells."

According to this[2], Airbnb's "world-class" team has built some pretty impressive systems to deal with significantly greater amounts of data ("20 terabytes of new data created daily").

[1] [http://gigaom.com/2013/07/29/airbnb-is-engineering-itself- in...](http://gigaom.com/2013/07/29/airbnb-is-engineering-itself-into-a-data- driven-company/)

[2] [http://www.bigdatarepublic.com/author.asp?section_id=2635&do...](http://www.bigdatarepublic.com/author.asp?section_id=2635&doc_id=266519)</comment>


MacRuby Drops GIL, Gains Concurrent Threads - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/macruby-drops-gil-threading

<comment><USER2> Many people have played with removing the GIL over the years in python. The issue is not that it's impossible, but rather that it's impractical and slows down the single threaded case significantly. This article did not go into details about how C extensions manage the changes, or whether they're compatible at all. It also doesn't talk about performance penalties that may be incurred by synchronizing data structures. Until we have hard data on that, this can't be called a success.

That being said, the article didn't go into any detail at all. Perhaps these questions have been answered already. Either way, this is promising step for MacRuby.

<comment><USER3> That's what I've heard about CPython's GIL, but no one has said _why_ it slows down single threaded performance significantly. Do you happen to know?

I understand that finer-grain locking incurs more overhead, but if done well, it shouldn't be a huge performance hit. The Linux kernel at one point was protected by one, big kernel lock, too, and that was successfully relaxed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's hoping that unladen-swallow succeeds as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> A little more info in the mailing list status update: [http://www.mail- email@example.com...](http://www.mail- email@example.com/msg01312.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the Tcl approach a lot: one interpreter per thread, with message passing. That gets around the problem entirely, for a lot of things.

<comment><USER7> That's been possible in python for a long time using pyprocessing (part of the stdlib since 2.5 i think). No idea about ruby but don't they have something similar?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat.

It's too bad that MacRuby is wed to, uh Macs, as it is maturing pretty quickly. I assume that's because there is not much dissonance between the broader goals of Apple's approach to Obj-C and Ruby the language. I'd like to see a day where it isn't the bastard step-child of Ruby VM's, but I somehow doubt that will happen.

<comment><USER9> _I'd like to see a day where it isn't the bastard step-child of Ruby VM's, but I somehow doubt that will happen._

The JRuby guys have been saying the same thing about JRuby for a while :P

MacRuby will also be installable/runnable on non-mac systems too i hear (although i guess we'll see how far that gets as well)

<comment><USER10> It only relies on Obj-C runtime, so it could conceivably run on any system.

Given the name though, I would surmise that is low priority for the developers.

<comment><USER8> I'm wondering if some of the OS X specific Frameworks have made it into the code...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


China Reaches the Moon Snapping Incredible High-Definition Images - <AUTHOR> http://www.physics-astronomy.com/2017/05/china-reaches-moon-snapping-incredible.html <comment><AUTHOR> A probably better link: [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2016/0128165...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily- lakdawalla/2016/01281656-fun-with-a-new-data-set- change.html?referrer=https://www.google.ca/)</comment>


Course materials for Malware Analysis - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RPISEC/Malware <comment><USER2> Very interesting! Are you going to publish lecture slide or more better notes? Would be great and highly appreciative.

I know that Win* are more popular for malware therefore lectures. But by any chance are you considering doing something similar for nix*?

Thanks for putting it on line!

<comment><USER3> The lecture slides are released. If you're looking for more detail, I highly recommend the Practical Malware Analysis book! There are also additional books recommended in the readme for the class.

We've talked a little about doing something *nix, but I don't think we will have the time until maybe the Summer, as all of us 3 authors are full-time students.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for recommendation! It seems more like win focused book. Maybe you have books recommendation for nix*?

<comment><USER4> [https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/evilmalware.html](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/evilmalware.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How one gets into anti-malware/virus business nowadays? I mean, e.g. you have to get a signatures database somewhere - are these available on the market?

<comment><USER6> You can get ClamAV's database files. Though most AVs are cloud based now. They store the hash database online and the clients just query it. Most integrate sandboxes with heuristics for malicious behavior (for unseen samples) and machine learning on previously malicious samples to create rules for new detections. Most will also monitor network traffic and have rules for detection there too.

<comment><USER7> That seems like a terrible idea... hashes are small, and I should be able to run an AV scan without connecting to the net.</comment></comment></comment>


Introduction to the Modern Server-Side Stack – Golang, Protobuf, and gRPC - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/velotio-perspectives/introduction-to-the-modern-server-side-stack-golang-protobuf-and-grpc-40407486568 <comment><USER2> why not using Modern C++ or Java 12 or PHP 7.3 for modern stack?</comment>


Ask HN: Best place to buy .io domains? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN Just wondering where you guys go to buy .io domains? nic.io seem to make you fill a very long form. Are there any alternatives? I usually use namecheap for my domains, however they don't support .io domains.<p>Thank you. <comment><USER2> I just buy straight from nic.io. You only have to fill out the forms once and while I did do it a few years ago I don't remember it being all that bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't google just buy up all the 3/4 letter common-word domains or something?

<comment><USER2> Google just started considering .io as a gccTLD ( which is basically just a ccTLD which they consider as a gTLD ( which means they don't consider it localized but rather a generic TLD ))

<comment><USER3> Oh thanks a bunch for the clarification</comment></comment></comment>


Rich Hickey on Datomic: Datalog, Databases, Persistent Data Structures - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-datomic <comment><USER2> I work in a hospital and alot of the things he talks about would be quite cool.

Immutability: we have one big as table with tons of stuff in it (this is not the db design you learned in school) and and even bigger table of all the changes made. The way this is handeld in datomic would be optimal.

Querys: Query all the data based on a time stamp would be really useful. Querys where I could combine the DB data with some other data I got from other applications/databases, heap or somewhere else.

<comment><USER3> Would you be able to use a database hosted on EC2?

<comment><USER4> It's possible, but the most obvious obstacle is HIPAA compliancy.

Check out AWS's whitepaper [1] and some discussion [2].

[1][http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/AWS_HIPAA_Whitepaper_Fi...](http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/AWS_HIPAA_Whitepaper_Final.pdf) [2][http://healthcareit.stackexchange.com/questions/812/can- phi-...](http://healthcareit.stackexchange.com/questions/812/can-phi-be-hipaa- compliant-on-a-cloud)

<comment><USER5> I never understood Amazon's stance. Their whitepaper and case studies just says medical companies have built applications on our cloud. What they fail to mention is whether they were only able to do so by anonymizing the data prior to upload which means in fact there isn't any PHI on their clould.

They seem to circumvent these disclosures for the obvious reasons of liability and the fact that today you really need a signed Business Associate (BA) agreement with any 3rd party company that may host PHI. Hospital compliance officers would have a heart attack if they hear 'clould' and no BA offered.

The whole AWS medical position feels very hand wavy--yet another reasons this whole medical industry has such a hard time innovating.

<comment><USER6> I worked for a company that had a large amount of HIPAA data on Amazon's EC2 platform. We did significant encryption (including field-level encryption) on the data to help mitigate security concerns.

We were able to pass security inspections by 4 fortune 500 health companies with this model (though a couple of them needed significant hand-holding).

It made querying that data a pain in the ass because you couldn't do a SELECT ... WHERE <encrypted field> = 'foo' as the data wasn't encrypted client side.

One cool thing about datomic is that the query engine runs client side, so it can also invoke client side methods as part of the query. This means that if you had encrypted data in your store, that it could be trivially decrypted client-side and you could potentially get the full expressiveness of the language to work with your data.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the info. Just curious were the encryption keys stored on EC2 as well? Dataomic client/peer model is definitely interesting.

<comment><USER6> They were, but not on the same nodes as the data was on. They were in a different AWS security zone with different ssh keys/access privileges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, but not up to the usually stellar level of Rich Hickey's own presentations.

<comment><USER8> I believe Rich Hickey discussed Datomic in his Clojure/west keynote:

<http://clojurewest.org/sessions/>

I'm looking forward to the release of the conference videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For some reason, I really like this simple idea of "persistent, durable data structures".</comment>


Advanced Software Protection Now (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.2356

<comment><USER2> I'm going to have to question this article even without reading all of it: the basic assumption is the DRM is necessary for a software industry. I don't think that experience, or the current state of the internet, bears that out. Experience is that often, if not almost always, commercial, license-protected software is almost always of lower quality, and lower desirability, than free software.

Now, if they'd addressed the existence of Mathematica, as commercial, license- protected software, that might have made a difference to the world. As it stands, they wasted their time.</comment>


Australia uses new technology to catch drivers on phones - <AUTHOR> https://ktar.com/story/2754759/australia-uses-new-technology-to-catch-drivers-on-phones/ <comment><USER3> Good. People in Australia don't take driving seriously. I spend a lot of time on the road, and have lived all over Australia, and the one defining thing I've found in common all over the country is that people are WAY too casual about driving.

Sydney and Melbourne being the worst by far, with it being so bad it has become entertainment[0]

On any given commute you'll see dozens of people playing with their phone while doing 110km/h down the freeway, doing make-up, eating cereal out of bowl, reading, blowing red lights (not "late orange" but "it already went red and now the other direction who got a green have to hit the brakes to not get t-boned", ignoring lane lines, ignoring indicators, and/or ignoring the existence of any/every rule or nearby vehicle.

It's like a national sport. How much of a dickhead can you be in your car then get violently angry if anyone dares even tap their horn at you to remind you the light has been green for 30 seconds now and you're still flicking through Facebook.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/user/DashCamOwnersAustral](https://www.youtube.com/user/DashCamOwnersAustral)

<comment><USER4> Completely agree.

I can't figure it out though, they have some strict standards getting a license, red p's for 12-24 months + 120 logbook hours, then green p's where they are restricted to dangerous below highway speeds so have drivers aggressively overtaking them. Despite this, standards seem far lower than Europe.

The horn thing is really annoying, often the person being beeped can't move forward anyway due to traffic across a junction and people are just being impatient but sometimes it's the other way and people are just day dreaming at junctions when the light changeover is quick so you ha e to go.

It seems car first. Cross a road in Europe a car a few hundred meters down the road will back off the accelerator slightly when they see you and let you cross. Australia they see a pedestrian and will speed up as it's their road and the light is green, they'll speed up to the point they are deliberately trying to hit you.

Speed limits are annoying here. For such a big country it's really difficult to travel big distance like you can in Europe or the US. Most people on the highway drive 100km/h as lots of police and the limit is 110. Also everyone will do 100km/h in the outside lane, inside lane doesn't exist for most people as that's where the p players are doing 90 and they are afraid of overtaking. It's also odd as when you pass someone going well below the limit, a minute later they'll aggressively speed up, fly past, then 5 minutes later they are slowed down and you are overtaking them again when you have kept a constant speed.

I've found driving in Northern Africa and Asia far less frustrating than Australia and those countries are bit of a free for all, especially Ho Chi Minh. It's easier in those countries as no one follows any rules and you know that, AU being 50/50 you just have no idea what drivers are going to do and makes it harder to judge.

<comment><USER5> The difference between European and Australian drivers is not that Australians have to do 120 hours of supervised driving, but that the supervisor for the hours of driving in Australia is usually the parents of the learner. So any bad habbits from parents are taught between generations.

Compare that to the European system where you are requiredto hire a professional driving instructor to teach you (at great expense I might add) for the entire time you are learning.

And because of that, the culture in Australia seems to be that driving is a right where as Europeans seem to treat it as more of a privilege.

<comment><USER6> I got my license in Canberra, where I had the option to skip the driving test by doing enough hours with a qualified driving instructor. It was a big contrast to my previous struggles to get supervised drives with friends and family.

I had picked up a habit of going much too fast around every corner, because the owner of the car I was practicing in insisted that it must be done that way. She did it because that's what her brother taught her. The real instructor got rid of that bad habit very quickly.

It's a bit more expensive, but honestly it's so much quicker to get good and less stressful that I recommend it to anyone who has the option.

People lie in the log book, too. So I don't believe many actually do the 120 hours they claim.

<comment><USER7> I got my license the same way and 100% agree. It's a shame that Canberra is planning to move to the logbook system next year. I only know of one person from NSW who actually did the full 120 hours, and that was only because they took several road trips to other cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great. We need this in every US city ASAP.

Walk around in a downtown area and it's blatantly visible how many drivers use their phones while driving , often performing illegal maneuvers due to their distraction.

<comment><USER9> We don't need police-connected camera networks running machine learning in _any_ US city.

<comment><USER10> Yes, we do. Every single car should be tracked. 40,000 people are killed every year due to car drivers, we should start taking this seriously.

<comment><USER11> That just sounds like a band-aid solution, what is needed are walkable cities, and decent public transportation.

<comment><USER12> That just sounds like a huge change that will take a long time and a lot of money to do.

<comment><USER13> With all the discussion on HN about "technical debt" I wonder why the same sort of strategies to avoid technical debt aren't applied outside the domain of software engineering.

Sure, it's effort now to do the smarter-but-harder thing, but the payoff will be huge in a few decades. Sure beats having a police state that is precipitated by goody-two-shoes demanding video surveillance of nearly all public roads in the USA.

<comment><USER14> Probably because leaders have to get elected, and "we're going to work through this backlog" is far less exciting in general to "new features!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So they're ramping up the detection of people using their phones while waiting for the traffic light to turn green?

Doesn't really sound like this is actually about safety.

I doubt these cameras can capture the photo do a decent quality on that angle for anything but standing or very slow moving cars

But I guess we can hope it will stop some people, even if there will be a lot of people caught that weren't really endangering anyone

<comment><USER8> People using their phones while waiting for the light is absolutely a safety issue.

They aren't paying attention and when the light turns green they may either hit a pedestrian as they hurry to move , or not notice the green and be rear ended by a driver who expects them to begin moving.

<comment><USER16> To second your point- I'd hazard that people using phones at lights are also using them in between lights. I filter at lights despite it being illegal where I live- because I've already been rear ended twice by people on phones. And by filtering I get a great view on people using their phones. They are nine times out of ten using their phones leading up to the light, during the light and during takeoff. I've also noticed that when they notice movement in their peripheral, they start driving forward even when the light is red. I filter much slower now so as to keep people from blindly thinking the light is green and shooting out into traffic or into a pedestrian.

<comment><USER17> In the last year I've begun pausing slightly before pulling into an intersection when the light just turned green. I don't care to be t-boned by someone failing to get through before it turned red.

I've also started glancing left & right going through the green even if it's been green a while.

Once the traffic in front of me stopped suddenly, I stopped, and the truck behind me didn't and totaled my car, nearly killing me. Since then I glance in the rearview mirror when I have to stop hard, which paid off one day when I figured the guy behind me wasn't going to stop in time, I pulled off onto the shoulder, and he hit the car in front of me.

<comment><USER18> Isn't this just how everyone should be driving all the time?

This is what I was taught when I learned to drive 20 years ago, and texting wasn't really a thing back then.

<comment><USER17> > Isn't this just how everyone should be driving all the time?

Perhaps, but I too frequently encounter the notion that having the legal right of way means one doesn't have to look. I've especially encountered this with bicyclists. Sometimes they'll tell me that it's ok because if someone hits them, they'll get a huge lawsuit judgement. I counter with what good is that if you're dead or crippled?

Some people I just don't understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The only technology needed to solve bad/dangerous driving is a cheap camera phone.

Allow people to turn in video of people violating traffic laws in public places for money. Receive more money if it leads to prosecution/fine.

Rewards split amongst all who submit videos.

Big bonus if person is DUI/OUI/OWI prosecuted.

If it's too much to have just anyone do this, then have some sort of minimal- requirements program where you sign up, pay $X, get registered and a permit, and do it.

This can help homeless people.

<comment><USER20> You could sit at intersections and make bank recording videos of people driving through. _So_ many people are holding their phone in the hand and interacting with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> On a related note, Dash Cam Owners Australia[1] just put up their monthly video of collected accidents and near misses.

I watch these with my kids, who recently started driving, as it is a good lesson in why you drive defensively and not be too arrogant about your own abilities and reaction times - because you have to take into account the abilities, reaction times, and occasionally the boneheaded idiocy of any other driver in your immediate vicinity.

"If it weren't for physics and law enforcement, I'd be unstoppable."

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/user/DashCamOwnersAustral/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/DashCamOwnersAustral/videos)

</comment><comment><USER22> They don't need new technology, just a bus. Sit a few officers in it where their vantage point is about a meter over the top of cars, drive around the highway a bit, and mail merge a bunch of citations.

I was bored on a 2 hour bus ride the other day and easily spotted hundreds of drivers fooling around in their phones while driving at highway speed. Mostly texting. Insanity!

<comment><USER23> Stop, why!

Aiming to catch people on their phones is a perversion of the laws because we have made it too easy to get away with driving while distracted.

It used to be that distracted driving was subjective; but with dash cams on police cars, why can't police crack down on actual distracted indications objectively. All of us anecdotally can guess that someone not moving on green, going slow in the left lane, crossing multiple lanes at the last minute is on their cell phone; So let's start enforcing a law that applies more broadly (eating, intoxicated, cell phone, distracted by passengers, rubber necking) and start seriously enforcing it.

If we seriously enforced distracted and reckless behavior, maybe cities wouldn't even have to worry about congestion taxes.

<comment><USER24> The root of the problem is bad driving. You can be stone sober, fully rested and have your phone locked in the trunk of your car, but none of that matters if you lack the skills needed to operate a vehicle at speed. Drivers education is woefully inadequate and the only driving laws I see enforced are the ones which have a clear easy to obtain financial incentive attached for the police.

<comment><USER25> I think the lack of decent public transport in many places contribute to this. When I've lived in cities with good public transport I would usually take the bus, especially if I wasn't feeling in a good mental state to drive (tired, stressed, other). In Orlando that's not an option, here I can chose to stay home or drive.

<comment><USER24> That is a very valid point. Even the best city I've lived in as far as public transit goes had issues such as stopping service around midnight, even on weekends. If the goal was to reduce drinking driving and/or driving tired you'd think they'd keep those going, but instead they just bring out the DUI checkpoints.

<comment><USER25> Where I grew up the last bus would leave downtown around 4am and the trams stopped for an hour between 6-7am on Sat-Sun (after basically all the bars and clubs had closed). That aspect was pretty good. Most other aspects of Swedish drinking culture is not great...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Has anyone bought a new car recently? Many essentially have a center mounted full size tablet. Yes, police phone usage. But car newer car interfaces cause a lot of distraction on their own.

<comment><USER27> No. The horrific interfaces being one of the reasons :P I've suffered with various hire vehicles though.

Some are literally tablets I think (or very good imitations?) - the interfce had pull-down menus, swipe left/right app screens/desktops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's ridiculous is you can't turn in any footage you take yourself. As a cyclist with a camera on my bicycle I have hundreds of drivers on their phone, yet the police has nowhere for me to turn this in.

<comment><USER29> This is simply not true. You can report any incidents via Crime Stoppers here: [https://www.crimestoppers.com.au/give-information#block- view...](https://www.crimestoppers.com.au/give-information#block-views-block- report-crime-block-1). Each jurisdiction's specific reporting forms are different, but you can usually upload small files as attachments.

If you do want the footage to be useful though, you'll have to be willing to put enough personal information in so the police can use you as a witness in court. Your witness account is the primary evidence and the footage the supporting evidence.

<comment><USER28> Yeah so if I want to give up a lot of personal information, then give up my time appearing in court, and have the guilty party know who I am, then yes, there is a way to report it. But if I don't want that massive impact on my life just to share my clear video and photo evidence, then I can't do anything. But you can report littering easily. No reason I shouldn't be able to do the same for people on their phone. They've made it prohibitively difficult to share my evidence, so I think I'm fine saying there's no way for me to just turn in my footage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> About time. I'm not worried about terrorists, not worried about mass shootings, I'm not worried about meteors or sharks. I'm worried about other drivers using their phone while driving -- that's __the __existential threat right now by far, and they 're everywhere!

</comment><comment><USER31> >But it is illegal to touch a phone while driving except to pass it to a passenger. The ban even applies to drivers who are stationary at red lights or stuck in traffic jams.

This sounds like a hassle for anyone trying to use gps on their phones. Also, doesn't this essentially outlaw rideshare drivers? How can you accept rides or confirm a pickup if you can't touch the phone? I never saw any driver use voice commands for uber.

<comment><USER32> >This sounds like a hassle for anyone trying to use gps on their phones.

What hassle? Futzing with your GPS app while driving is just as dangerous as texting. Set your destination before you drive and pull over if you need to adjust it, just as you should if you need to text.

>How can you accept rides or confirm a pickup...

Pull over.

<comment><USER33> Do you yourself drive? It's easy to make these demands when you're not affected by the resulting inefficiency.

<comment><USER32> I drive 2+ hours round-trip for work every weekday, and my work often has me visiting client sites during the week. I find nothing difficult about setting my destination via GPS before I begin my drive, and I find that my attention to what's going on around me is significantly diminished should I attempt to modify my route while driving. An inconvenience of, say, 5-10 minutes to find a place to pull over and input new coordinates is absolutely worth it to prevent an expensive collision or running into, say, a motorcyclist I haven't seen because I'm staring at my phone.

I cannot believe people are arguing for "efficiency" over traffic safety.

<comment><USER33> > absolutely worth it

Can you demonstrate, using numbers, that the tradeoff is positive?

> I cannot believe people are arguing for "efficiency" over traffic safety.

People prioritize efficiency over safety all the time. It's a good thing. So do you, if you support non-zero speed limits. The current animus against cell phone use while driving is the result of a moral panic, not a rational cost- benefit tradeoff.

> If I pull over to a safe place to use my phone, nobody is harmed.

Untrue. The act of pulling is _itself_ is a complex maneuver that practically invites accidents. Most accidents occur at low speed, and often, when you pull over, you pull over into an area where pedestrians are active. It might be the case that pulling over instead of using a phone at a red light results in _more_ people being injured or killed.

[https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/lytx-fleet- accidents-...](https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/lytx-fleet-accidents- low-speed)

> My wife was rear-ended while waiting

Anecdotal personal misfortune is not an argument for society-wide policy.

<comment><USER32> >Can you demonstrate, using numbers, that the tradeoff is positive?

Are you kidding? If I pull over to a safe place to use my phone, nobody is harmed. If I'm driving and take my attention off of the road and over to my phone, and I smack into a motorcyclist because I didn't see them, I could _kill them_.

>The current animus against cell phone use while driving is the result of a moral panic, not a rational cost-benefit tradeoff.

Moral panic? My wife was rear-ended while waiting to turn because the driver of the car that hit her was on their cellphone and didn't see her - <USER2> admitted as much. She's still suffering from pain from that accident and the car she was driving was totaled. How is _not getting into an accident_ "not a rational cost-benefit tradeoff"?

<comment><USER34> There are 268 million vehicles in the United States. If we assume that each vehicle makes two trips per day on average, and than the number of minutes of inconvenience taken up by pulling over to operate a phone is 5, that'd be 2.68 billion minutes of inconvenience per day alone!

We can be generous and put the intrinsic value of a human life at the average lifespan in the US of 78 years, or 41 million minutes. That means you'd be inconveniencing people at the rate of 65 human lives _per day_ by implementing your law.

Why do you hate human life so much? Think of the children. Hail Satan, etc.

<comment><USER35> > If we assume that each vehicle makes two trips per day on average, and than > the number of minutes of inconvenience taken up by pulling over to operate a > phone is 5,

Once you need to pull over to check your phone you realize that you can just wait until your destination. I never touch my phone while driving, but I'd estimate the time I spend pulled over to use my phone to be more in the area of 5 minutes per couple thousand km.

<comment><USER34> But how will tech companies extract value from you if you don't pick up your phone even when driving?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> One thing that is unclear is that the two _independent_ images, one showing an individual using a phone where they may be personally identifiable and a second showing the car's license plate. So they fine the registered owner of the car for the driver being distracted? What if I'm in a car share? Do they subpoena the companies records or just fine them and have it passed on a la rental cars and speeding tickets?

I think distracted driving is a real problem but just like photo radar this punishment weeks after the fact when you get a fine in the mail will have very little impact on the underlying behavior. It's like watching your kids do something unacceptable and then grounding them a week a later as punishment. If they wanted to really change behavior they need to get in the faces of drivers like drinking and driving check-stops; pull them over, ask them if their using their phones, warn them of the danger (they could check for impaired driving at the same time). The problem is cops on the ground costs money; this makes money.

<comment><USER37> >> So they fine the registered owner of the car for the driver being distracted?

Yes, I think that makes sense.

If the car owner is a car share company, they will know who the car was shared to, at the time, and then they will send the ticket to that person.

And if the car owner just borrowed the car to a spouse/child/friend/whoever, they can pass the ticket to the borrower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> As an Australian, I'm happy they're doing something about stopping stupid/distracted drivers.

I'm also very nervous because I'm 100% sure this will end up being abused or "enhanced" in some scary way in the future, or used as an argument for more government AI cameras to police other transgressions.

</comment><comment><USER39> The new New South Wales Roads Minister Andrew Constance emphatically states:

">There is no doubt drink-driving as far as I'm concerned is on a par with mobile phone use, and that's why we want everyone to be aware that you're going to get busted doing this anytime, anywhere," Constance told Australian Broadcasting Corp."

But the further down we read:

>"Photos that show suspected illegal behavior are referred for verification by human eyes before an infringement notice is sent to the vehicle's registered owner along with a 344 Australian dollar ($232) fine."

I'm guessing the penalty for being caught driving under the influence in Australia is far greater than $344 AUD. Why wouldn't they price the infraction for driving while texting similarly then?

<comment><USER40> They don't need to increase the price, just make it a 6 month loss of licence for the first time, 1 year for the second and 5 for the 3rd. 4th offence should probably be life time loss of license.

<comment><USER39> Sorry yes that it what I meant by price, the total penalty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> No fancy technology is needed.

All they need is inspectors on motorbikes riding between cars that are stopped at traffic lights.

Large number of people are using their phones when waiting at the lights.

A motorbike inspector riding between cars would make an infinite number of catches.

<comment><USER42> But; are those really the people you WANT to catch as a matter of priority? What is our goal - sheer income, or safety? :-/

In my mind, I'd rather people check their phone at a stopped traffic light, going 0kph; then while driving at 100kph or turning etc...

Ultimately tickets should have a purpose - prevent the most atrocious behaviour we see.

There's a poorly marked off-ramp from a major freeway in Toronto; and after off-ramp it's still a divided highway that basically looks like freeway. Cops are constantly staking out this exit because they know they'll get tickets - but what are you teaching? Most of these people were honestly trying to do the relatively right thing. There's no lesson or behaviour modification, just income. (if you want to modify behaviour at that particular offramp, add signing and/or lights etc).

Understanding that it's against the law in most places (because technically you are "operating a motor vehicle", I honestly don't have a problem with people glancing at their phone on a red traffic light. Others, I suppose, may vehemently disagree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> what a waste of money. studies show its not the lack of a free hand that causes accidents, but lack of attention. and hands free is legal. also day by day more cars will have phone paired with the infotainment system

</comment><comment><USER44> My prediction is that this initiative will kill people by encouraging phone apps to build in complex voice interaction features that are almost as dangerous but undetectable and therefore will be used indiscriminately by drivers. To those arguing this is a good thing in a black and white manner, please have a think about whether the convenience of that simplistic approach is worth the lives of the people who may die through unintended consequences.

</comment><comment><USER45> Kinda funny how HN is normally anti-surveillance and against automated law enforcement unless you frame it as something pro-social.

At the end of the day this is still a camera network capable of being repurposed for more sinister means of revenue generation at the whim of the government.

If you really want to stop this behavior post a cop on the corner. His presence will prevent people from all sorts of other minor traffic violations too.

<comment><USER33> It's simpler than that: a lot of HN posters are just anti-car, and anything that makes driving less convenient is a good thing in their eyes.

<comment><USER46> motor vehicle accidents/deaths are a public health crisis in the US: 30K deaths/yr, $300mil direct medical costs/yr (more indirect obv.)

if you are between 18-34 in the US your highest probability of death was/is motor vehicle accident

i'm guessing most people here are anti bodily harm/death/opportunity loss due to stupidity/impatience more than anything else

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> China has been doing this for years! How can they say they are first in the world?

This is an article from 2016: [http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-08/08/content_263919...](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-08/08/content_26391919.htm)

</comment><comment><USER48> Australian drivers aren't the best, but they're better behaved than drivers in SE Asia. I've driven in Australia and the Philippines. In the Philippines, road rules aren't enforced. In Australia they are, but people don't always follow the rules anyway.

</comment><comment><USER49> Excellent. I hope the technology also works for truck drivers.

</comment><comment><USER41> I turned on the iPhone "do not disturb while driving" functionality which is awesome.

It helps me not fiddle with the phone whilst in the car.

</comment><comment><USER50> The technology is from Acusensus:

[https://www.acusensus.com/](https://www.acusensus.com/)

</comment><comment><USER51> And yet in the same state, NSW, they could do nothing when my car was stolen and recorded speeding on the motorway. And took nearly a year to apprehend a suspect in the shooting of a fast food restaurant worker when it was caught on multiple cameras.

I'm not saying that people should be free to use phones but it's increasingly obvious to me that the police's main objective is to keep mostly lawful people in line, pursuing criminal activity is a secondary concern.

</comment><comment><USER52> In Holland they just put a few people on a bus and they look in the cars on the highway, very high score results.

</comment><comment><USER53> In London the rules are really stupid. Using smart-devices while driving is allowed as long as the device is mounted. Woe betide anyone caught with a phone to their ear.

<comment><USER54> Yeah, if the reason is attention (and safety), then it does not matter whether it is mounted or not. Your attention is still elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Unpopular opinion, but vehicle deaths are at basically the lowest they've been since the introduction of the car. I honestly believe phone use while driving hasn't had a major effect on safety overall. The statistics certainly don't indicate it.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year#/media/File%3AUS_traffic_deaths_per_VMT%2C_VMT%2C_per_capita%2C_and_total_annual_deaths.png)</comment>


Ask HN: Why do some hardware only have proprietary drivers? - <AUTHOR> Inspired by nerdponx: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14050297
During all my years running linux I have only encountered binary, proprietary, driver blobs for some certain type of hardware. Most commonly graphics cards and wifi-adapters.
Why are just those drivers closed source, and not all? Is it that other stuff, like USB-controllers, are standardised in grater extent and therefore opensource reverse engineering efforts can be focused and deliver open drivers? Or do the manufacturers actually provide open drivers? If they actually do provide them, why do they? Or perhaps rather, why does not AMD/Nvidia do it?
In the case of binary blobs in mobile devices, I have read stuff about security aspects of keeping the baseband drivers closed source. Something about protecting the cellular network. Is there anything behind this? <comment><USER2> There have been efforts at least from AMD: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open- source_graphics_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open- source_graphics_device_driver#ATI.2FAMD)

For recent cards, it makes more sense for these companies to tend on the side of not giving out competitive information, hence their NDA processes for developers.</comment>


Making Lego Into Art: Nathan Sawaya's Impossible Brick Sculptures - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcocreate.com/1682144/making-lego-into-art-nathan-sawayas-impossible-brick-sculptures

<comment><USER2> For anyone else annoyed by the continually re-positioning "next" arrow, using the keyboard right-arrow seems to work.

<comment><USER3> Every third image skipped back to the first when trying to use the right- arrow.

And the next image was missing half the time.

I did not make it to the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw this in Sydney. I kind of hated it. What we have here is someone who drops a hundred thou a year on Lego and builds realistic 3D sculptures by gluing the pieces together into suspiciously realistic computer-generated forms.

It would have made mediocre art in any other medium, and it's not actually Lego building (if you're gluing the parts together). Meh.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nathan Sawaya's are is currently being exhibited at the Magic House in St. Louis, Missouri. I am hoping to go this week.

</comment><comment><USER6> Saw this in Singapore a month ago. Clever and interesting, though I thought the commentary alongside the work wasn't very deep. Worth checking out if it's easy and affordably priced.

</comment><comment><USER7> Who cares about this DIY person, have you even heard of LegoLand?

</comment><comment><USER8> While this is really cool, how is this HN material?

<comment><USER9> Sigh.

Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html></comment></comment>


Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,725798,00.html <comment><USER2> The human race has a problem or two to solve before it can lay claim to "immortality."

For example:

1\. The 20th century brought us the "war to end all wars," followed by a "lost generation" that essentially turned to boozing and high living as a way of escaping the loss of joy and the mass death of trench warfare; it brought us the mechanized warfare of WWII, by which devastation and death rained from the skies upon countless thousands of innocent people, the vision of a Third Reich and mass slaughter in ovens of an innocent religious group, from which thousands recoiled in horror but were powerless either to stop or to comprehend how such things were possible, and nuclear death that engulfed massive numbers of Japanese innocents, from which a mass stockpiling of such devastating weapons by the world's superpowers ensued, with follow-on proliferation now having reached into the hands of megalomaniacal dictators whose main claim to previously unthinkable levels of power will lie mainly in having developed such weapons and in being prepared potentially to use them, all followed by a "beat generation" that turned to drugs and other forms of escapism, and by a "hip generation" that did the same and by subsequent generations that are still groping in the dark, so to speak, to make sense of it all while somehow hoping that mankind will improve dramatically in its quest to achieve peace and tranquility notwithstanding all the sorry history to the contrary in ages past. As technology enables us to develop ever-greater forms of lethality, does anyone see "immortality" in his future even if one could live appreciably beyond the limit of 100 years that serves today as a pretty good measure of when the very few remaining representatives of a generation will in themselves be on the verge of dying. Yes, we all hope for solutions but let us see evidence of such solutions in action before laying claim to immortality.

2\. The obvious problem that, when one reaches much beyond the age of 90, he begins to "fall apart." I know that is not a scientific phrase, but it accurately describes what happens when senility, dementia, and other mental problems attack the mind, when the body shrinks and most muscle mass is lost, when the skin deteriorates, and when cancer, congestive heart failure (or other heart disease), strokes, arterial, vascular, and blood problems, or any one of countless other illnesses attack and eventually overwhelm the body. And when there is no obvious illness, there is a winding down, a dying in one's sleep, a passing away owing to "natural causes." It would be one thing if some or most of these illnesses has been cured and scientists were able to say, "we are close and in a short while we will solve the remaining problems." It is quite another when science has not the slightest idea, based on today's knowledge, of how to solve even some of this onslaught of lethal conditions that affects us all at life's end.

3\. The pure force of random accidents. This may not mean much if a lifespan is measured by a century. Multiply that by several centuries (assuming the other problems could be solved) and, in time, the odds will catch up with most people. Thus, solving the aging problem still leaves unsolved the cases of accidental, traumatic death, etc. that has never been a trivial problem at any point in history.

This piece, to my mind, projects fairly extreme forms of wish fulfillment in assuming that modern science is anywhere close to holding the "key" to solving any of this, much less in speculating that the answers lie in analyzing the genes of the little girl featured in this piece.

I understand the fascination of believing that potentially vast amounts of human betterment might result from the careful study of genetic conditions, and I have no doubt that much genuine progress can come from such studies. But science has to be tied to reality, above all things, and it does no service to its cause to deny the obvious (such as the items noted above), or to engage in what I believe are unsubstantiated speculations about "immortality," in hoping for the best from any given avenue of research.

Apart from speculating about immortality, this piece is interesting, and even fascinating, in highlighting the study of this young girl's unusual condition.

<comment><USER3> I know it's only one part of your comment, but Steven Pinker argues very convincingly that human violence is at an all time low, even when including events like WWII.

Ted talk: [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html)

Chart of warfare deaths: [http://www.martincwiner.com/wp- content/uploads/2008/02/maled...](http://www.martincwiner.com/wp- content/uploads/2008/02/maledeaths.png) (Note: that last one includes 2 world wars!)

Edge article: <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html>

<comment><USER4> World War II was really boring if you lived in South America at the time.

<comment><USER3> Note that it says "US and Europe"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This case has no application in aging research, and is of no interest to the biogerontology community. It's an interesting developmental abnormality, but nothing more. Aging is caused by accumulated biochemical damage, and this person is apparently aging normally at the level of cells and macromolecules.

<comment><USER6> Even though I agree with you, I have to point out:

You don't know that. Nobody does.

We don't know exactly how aging works and this theory needs to be tested as well. If we stop research because we just know something, we'll never get anywhere.

<comment><USER7> We know a lot about how a lot of different mechanisms of aging works. Although I agree, he very likely doesn't know which ones are and aren't in play in this case either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazing story! Two minor details piqued my attention:

* How the journalistic storytelling style is different from the US one. I guess I have grown accustomed to reading NYT and other newspapers here. For example, I don't think the sentence "Other girls her age are driving, going out dancing and sleeping with their first boyfriends" would have been used for a story like this.

* And more importantly this: "Pakula [her doctor] practices in a medical building near the Greenbergs' house. He wears a tie adorned with cartoonish hippopotamuses. A tall stack of paper -- Brooke's file -- sits on his desk. "This can't be lost," says the doctor, placing his hand on the documents. He knows what a treasure the file represents." It's outrageous that they are using _paper_ records to track this girl. At this age of iPads and other amazing handhelds, doctors' offices are still operating in the 1960s.

<comment><USER9> To my eyes, this journalistic storytelling style is "feature" writing -- different from "news" style, but US newspapers have both. You'll see a form of it in NYT Magazine profile articles (<http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/>).

<comment><USER10> Der Spiegel was modeled after British and American news magazines when it was founded in 1947 in post-war Germany (with allied approval as was necessary for all press at that time). The magazine is really very similar to Time, Newsweek or The Atlantic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age. "

how come "immortality" comes to play here?

<comment><USER12> +1 million. She's still _aging_ , she's just not _developing_

(by aging I mean the kind that kills you. Being an adult does not kill you; being old does.)

<comment><USER13> > being old does.

Actually, being old does not suffice. You need a combination of short telomeres and cell damage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, and I hope that we can learn from her condition.

However, I wouldn't call it "immortality" until she's 70 and has the body and development of a teenager. Unfortunately, unless that happens, it's just a rather sad medical condition. Even if we can learn from it.

<comment><USER15> I don't think anyone's making the claim that she will live forever (or even more than normally).

<comment><USER16> The article doesn't outright say "she will live forever," but it refers to her as "Brooke the Immortal," says her DNA is the "key to immortality" through which humans can live "at least 1000 years." If they're not trying to claim she's immortal, they're being pretty deceptive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've always wondered about the human body. Right now I am studying engineering, but eventually I would like to delve deep into anatomy and biology. An automobile can theoretically run forever as long as it is properly maintained, even if that means replacing major parts - engine, transmission, even frame (but at a certain point the repairs are no longer financially feasible). Why then, can't the human body last forever? As long as we are able to make repairs and replace parts when they fail, I don't understand why people have to die.

With all of the knowledge and advanced technology of today, something tells me we should be able to figure out how to stop aging - or at least slow it. We should be able to cure cancer. We should be able to cure AIDs. We should be able to regrow missing appendages or failed body parts. Am I the only one that thinks about these things? I would love to get involved in this field one day. I know there have been great advancements in these areas, but it seems like there is so much more that we could be doing.

<comment><USER18> Computational biochem student here. Unfortunately we do not have the technological prowess to replace parts of our body as they age. Researchers are working on growing whole organs from the extracellular scaffolds of cadavers, but this technique is in its infancy and I would take all news concerning it with a grain of salt.

Unfortunately, we are limited by which organs and tissues we can replace. Case in point: we cannot transplant the brain. Intracellular and extracellular buildup (eg. amyloid beta, lipofuscins, etc) will cause inflammation and cellular damage, and there is no way to remove them. Loss of telomeres and the accumulation of mutations leads to the breakdown of the genome, which is the host of the majority of a cell's state information. We ARE computer programs, and the moment memory gets corrupted things start to break down and behave improperly. The probability of any one of an unlimited number disease states in a cell correlates also with the level of misfolded, degraded, improperly tagged or trafficked gene products, which will always increase with time, even if the central program is well-behaved.

Remaining at homeostasis requires us to not reach chemical equilibrium, which requires we consume a ton of energy. Converting the necessary molecules during cellular metabolism puts our cells under heavy oxadative stress. Living requires a substantial number of evolved countermeasures, but eventually it will all catch up to us.

Why then are we so inept in our understanding of biology? The sheer astounding complexity of our biological machinery is not matched by any other problem that faces us. Biotechnology is amazing, but we are vastly limited by what we can do outside the context of in vitro techniques or simple, sacaled down in vivo assays. The real systm is always too complex to fully understand, and with so many unknowns we are essentially flying without radar. We can study proteins, promoters, etc. (slowly and with great difficulty) but we cannot "repair" them. We can't excise a damaged region of the genome and replace it at will. You would probably be shocked to see what techniques are actually even available--with my own limited experience it often feels like we are blindly throwing darts at targets that may not even exist. Our sequence information gives us clues, but we lack structural information (especially post-translational modifications) or knowledge of interaction details in the biochemical pathway.

If every physicist, computer scientist, mathematician or engineer stopped what they were doing and began work on this problem we might make some headway. Right now our hands are tied. This is absolutely the most important and complex problem in the world. We need the transcriptome, proteome, interactome, complete structure data, better algorithms, faster computers, higher resolution imaging (spatial, temporal, etc), better techniques, higher througput, I could go on and on. We certainly haven't entered the industrial age of biotech yet...

Do consider giving biology a try. We could use you and everyone willing. If you want to live twice as long, not get cancer or Alzheimer's, or cure any important infectious diseases, you should join us. Especially if you're a logical and abstract thinker.

<comment><USER19> I enjoy machine learning, pure and applied maths. Where do I start? Any books, any summaries of the state of the art for the computationally inclined? I ignorantly guess that graph theory, statistics and perhaps even group theory may provide useful perspectives? I know dynamical systems theory has been applied and hear you can code new simple organisms or something? Am I talking nonsense? heh This has always been an end goal of mine but I don't know where to begin. I figure start now and in 5 - 10 years I'll be ready to join you :)

<comment><USER18> Graph theory is applicable for exploring biochemical pathways, and all manner of statistics, ML, and metaheuristics are useful.

We can't "code" an organism, unfortunately. That won't be possible for some time. Venter has inserted a bacterial genome into a preexisting cell and called it "synthetic life", but this is hyperbole. He essentially just swapped out the operating system if you will. Both the genome and the cell were preexisting. This would be impossible to do for a eukaryotic cell with any of today's technology since we have extremely complicated molecular (genomic) machinery. Not to mention how much of our state information is epigenetic-- precise methylation, etc.

We certainly cannot create novel proteins outside of fusions between subunits. Protein folding is just way too difficult to solve. If we ever figure it out, society will change overnight.

If you would like to study this, get some texts on cell physiology, molecular biology (genetics++), and maybe do some reading on higher level function. Like me you will see that your existing skill set is not immediately transferrable until you learn enough biology: you cannot effectively program in a language until you really know it innately. Biology is the same way, just much, much more sysemitized, complex and abstract. It has a very high barrier to entry (akin to learning Vim, but takes longer.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's somewhat amusing and nice to see that Aubrey de Grey who is one of the few people on this planet seriously working on immortality and who always had to fight for acceptance is the skeptic in this article.

<comment><USER20> No, it's should be an important clue for people who are not aging researchers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Who knows for sure that this isn't even a rare condition? In theory, there could be people living among us that are centuries old and might look like 20-30. If I was, I wasn't going to tell everybody. If you travel a lot people won't notice your condition. I believe this is just proof that the condition exists, not the magnitude of it.

<comment><USER22> There's no proof that she's going to live any longer than a normal human. She's just developing much more slowly than normal.

She's also had many severe medical conditions which required intensive medical care. She still has to be fed via a gastric feeding tube. I doubt anyone with a similar condition would have survived the first 5 years of their life as short as 60 years ago.

<comment><USER23> Well, at the end of the article, there was mention of a 40 year old in the body of a 10 year old boy. We can probably observe him to see if such people can have abnormally long lifespans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _"Brooke holds the key to everything," says Walker. He's anxious to press on with his work, because he feels that his time is running out. But Howard Greenberg is stalling. He has long felt that he is protecting a valuable treasure in his red brick house. He's even hired lawyers to examine the issue of the rights to Brooke's genome._

It saddens me that the state of human genetics in the United States (perhaps elsewhere, but I've only done genetics here) is such that Mr. Greenberg would even have to consider such things.

<comment><USER25> You're probably familiar with the case of Henrietta Lacks. Do you happen to know how these things are handled abroad?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks>

<comment><USER24> Yes, very much so; her story took place at my hospital. The way that her story is presented to us varies with who does the presenting, but no matter the spin, it's hard not to feel terribly for her and her family.

I'm not familiar with how this works abroad, which is why I tried to qualify my statement.

<comment><USER26> How do you feel her family is being hard done by? This girl is certainly not the model of immortality that the article makes her out to be. She's likely to have a very hard life.

If anything, I think it's sad that the father sees his daughter as some sort of valuable item, rather than working with researchers to help figure out why this developmental problem came about.

Even if the genetic information _is_ an important piece of the puzzle of immortality, is keeping this information from the public, and himself, in anyone's best interest?

<comment><USER24> There might be a bit of confusion here. In the post that you replied to directly, I am referring to Henrietta Lacks, not the Greenbergs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Biological immortality is possible," says Walker. "If you don't get hit by a car or by lightning, you could live at least 1,000 years."

Interesting that the definition of immortality is living 1000 years.

<comment><USER12> The reasons his idea of immortality has an end time may be for other reasons. For example, perhaps you aren't going to die of old age but over the course of time your joints wear and can't repair themselves fully, so you wind up alive and healthy but broken. Or perhaps you inevitably accumulate CO or some other trace toxin in your bloodstream and can't get rid of it.

Immortality in his sense I believe simply means you don't die of age, but there are a lot of other ways to die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why the journalists and PR folks probably figured out calling her condition "immortality" would attract more attention just like it did here on HN, it appears obvious that there are many possible explanations for her condition, other than retro-aging. She could simply be suffering from a combination of genetic or non-genetic disease creating her very small stature and mental disabilities.

See a video here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBbG2tSDfOo>

</comment><comment><USER29> I think they are obsessing unnecessarily on the semantics of what "development genes" are.

I strongly doubt there is a bright line separating developmental genes from normal steady-state genes. A multicellular organism is one hugely complicated, parallel, state machine. If certain states become unreachable, that doesn't necessarily mean all the genes responsible for those states are no longer doing anything.

</comment><comment><USER30> Not related to the purpose of the article, but the subject:

Are there legal precedents regarding situations like this? If she developed into a body/mind of a child who understands how to buy something, could she buy alcohol/cigarettes? If someone had sex with her (again, not now, but say she developed to the equivilent of a 13-15 year old) then presumably it wouldn't count as sex with a minor? (If someone were to have sex with her right now then it might be proven to be non-consensual, but not legally paedophilia?)

 _Sorry, latter part of that is not exactly a nice subject, but pretty interesting from a legal point of view I think._

<comment><USER31> Yes of course there are laws against rape of someone who is mentally incapacitated. Ususally something along the lines of: "[It's rape if] the actor knows or has reason to know that the victim is mentally incapable, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless"

<comment><USER30> But what about if she becomes mentally/physically ten, and consents?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am surprised this hasn't had more attention than the couple articles I've read about Brooke over the last 1-2 years.

One of the worst parts about this (from a scientific standpoint) is probably the waiting game - will this person's DNA eventually mutate, forming cancer or other age related diseases? Are there tests, other than appearance of age related diseases, to determine if she is aging?

[EDIT] VladRussian pointed out that they talked about the length of her telomeres corresponding to her actual age. Hence, she isn't "immortal", but there is something else going on.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wish we could leave people like this alone, why does this kid have to endure a life of being a lab rat?

Also, giving "mankind the gift of eternal life" is a flawed idea. Simply by improving our medical science which has given people a longer lifespan has caused a ridiculous amount of problems.

There are too many people on this planet and by creating more and more that live longer and longer we are sacrificing the longevity of the human race as a whole, not to mention the other life on this planet.

<comment><USER14> Disagree strongly. At risk of sounding too metaphorical, death is the greatest enemy of the human race. It represents the loss of unique and worthwhile personalities, and places a strict upper bound on mortal human achievement.

Of course we'll have to deal with the sociological and economic ramifications of that in the scope of limited resources. But it is entirely appropriate to rage against the dying of the light.

<comment><USER33> I suppose i was taking a contrarian stance but i still believe that right now humans living longer is causing many problems that just arent being addressed at all.

Taking social problems as an example, governments are scared to do anything about it because they'd have to do things like raising the retirement age, which is what France had major problems with recently.

The people that dont want things to change for the older population are the older population and that is the demographic that is already huge and getting larger and larger and because their against it, nothing will get done.

This is a very specific argument but my point applies to the broader problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've had distant cousin, and she was exactly like that - older than me, she was still baby at 18. I'm not sure whether she's still alive.

</comment><comment><USER35> Amazing story.

As stated in the article, assuming we do figure out how to make people live forever (or a very long time), Who is allowed to use it? The rich? The fastest? Strongest? Smartest?

Everyone can't live forever, there would be too many people. Unless we move to colonize space of course.

<comment><USER36> Global 2-child policy for the 'immortals' + colonize space. When people like Einstein can continue building on their knowledge and understanding for ~1000 years instead of ~60, I imagine we'd develop the science and technology required to colonize space at faster rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> We are not ready for immortality yet. Just think of the strain it would put on the already overpopulated earth. Resources are already scarce and we are searching for more efficient ways of using energy. Moral, Economic and Social Consequences would be disastrous.

<comment><USER38> Nonsense. Human beings have turned thinning our own population when resources are contested into a science and that's before you factor in the odds of any true immortal being torn to shreds by the masses of have-nots doomed to a "normal" human lifespan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Interesting. I always thought that living beings age just because they were programmed to do so, because that's how the genetic algorithm works I guess.

<comment><USER26> Programmed isn't quit the right word. It is true that aging is in our genetic code, but it has arising via random mutation combined with selection. This case is hypothesized to be a result of yet another random mutation that has tampered with the aging mechanics. Thus, it's interest to scientists.

<comment><USER13> Death supposedly helps evolution by removing previous iterations of the genome from the gene pool, leaving newer, allegedly better adapted, "models" with less competition. It works cross-species - if your species does not provide better adapted generations for some time, it will be outcompeted into extinction.

<comment><USER18> A really ineresting way to look at aging is this: if longer life was evolutionarily advantageous, we would have evolved additional molecular mechanisms to support it. It's not that by dying earlier we keep the gene pool fitter, because that's not how evolution works. (We'd otherwise have a much more complicated algorithm on our hands.) Rather, we die simply because there is no advantage in having us persist--we only gained and conserved what was optimal for our species' lifecycle. Anything else requires extra energy and support machinery and is not likely to be amplified since occasional breakdowns are likely to be serious or fatal (and more common with the increased complexity!)

Compare gymnosperms (conifers) and certain angiosperms (flowering plants). The former persist for long periods under drought and stress conditions and only bear seeds after a two-year long development. Some desert angiosperms sprout, pollinate, spread seeds, then die in the span of a week. -- Different evolutionary strategies evolved under different environments and selection pressures.

(Concession: evolution isn't "optimal", but it has found good enough solutions that I often call it such.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> rewrite: "Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to (Aging) Developing"

If they can find someone's who's telomeres haven't shortened or aren't shortening (and they haven't contracted any cancers) then there might be a chance.

</comment><comment><USER41> That poor kid.</comment>


Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228440.700-dotdashdiss-the-gentleman-hackers-1903-lulz.html

<comment><USER2> A mischievous hacker who justifies his hacking by claiming the exposed security holes would have endangered the public, and who was originally mad that he could not market his own innovations due to his victim's overly-broad patents?

The more things change...

</comment><comment><USER3> "Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector's electric arc discharge lamp."

Serious power! Remember this was _before_ tuned circuits became common (google 'syntony oliver lodge'). Even allowing for the sensitivity of a balanced carbon spark gap, you need to move a carbon rod or have a magnetic field strong enough to change the position of the discharge. He must have been in the same building...

</comment><comment><USER4> Single page:

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228440.700-dotdashdi...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228440.700-dotdashdiss- the-gentleman-hackers-1903-lulz.html?full=true)

</comment><comment><USER5> I recall reading about this event in Erik Larsons "Thunderstruck". The book includes a pretty interesting account of the fits and starts of wireless technology, if not overly embellished.

The tuning issue is one of many snags that Marconi ran into, and with a government contract on the line, he made no small effort to keep the technological troubles under wraps until solutions could be found.

</comment><comment><USER6> 109 years ago. Mind boggling.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article paints Marconi in a really bad light. It seems like he was either not that bright or a liar to claim that people couldn't listen in to his specially tuned signals.

<comment><USER8> Security is hard, and has a long history of clever schemes that just don't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> and this is why I love reading history.

</comment><comment><USER10> I really want the word 'lulz' to go away.

<comment><USER11> It's also interesting that they chose the spelling "diss", which is incorrect. It's "dis", from "disrespect".

<comment><USER12> 'Diss' is widely used in common vernacular.

<http://www.thefreedictionary.com/diss>

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=diss>

See also:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diss_track>

<comment><USER11> <http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-of/diss></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to find my post in news or Ask HN? - <AUTHOR>

I cannot ind them.. Even when I reply so if i am not seeing neither is anyone else.  Thanks. <comment><USER2> Go to <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=10smom></comment>


TCP HTTP Server written in Assembly - <AUTHOR> http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/server.s <comment><USER2> Cool stuff. Really, though, this is still relying on a rather large runtime library: the physical, data-link, and network-layer drivers.

Now what'd be really awesome to see, would be one of those Operating System guides that shows you how to write an OS kernel, in assembler, that can speak HTTP. Even just limiting yourself to targeting the synthetic hardware of a VM program, it'd still be quite a feat.

Bonus points if the entire network stack has been flattened using the hand- rolled equivalent of stream-fusion. :)

<comment><USER3> Here you go:

[http://www.kyllikki.org/hardware/wwwpic2/src/wwwpic2.asm.htm...](http://www.kyllikki.org/hardware/wwwpic2/src/wwwpic2.asm.html)

Bonus: runs on 68 bytes of ram. Not a typo, it's bytes, and it's a "complete" http+tcp/ip server.

<comment><USER4> That is just running the TCP/IP layer speaking RS232 and relying on an external IC for lower layers. It's not at all what the GP is looking for.

It should probably also be noted that a minimum TCP header, with no data attached, is 20 bytes, so to implement a 'full stack' in 68 bytes is a pretty strong indication that you're relying on off SoC memory to handle the packet buffering.

<comment><USER3> I encourage you to read the source code instead of guessing how it may work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's another simpler implementation of an HTTP server in Linux x86 assembly from last year, coincidentally by the one who did the Seiken Densetsu 3/Secret of Mana 3 translation hack and the old Starscream 68k emulator:

[http://www.neillcorlett.com/etc/mohttpd.asm.txt](http://www.neillcorlett.com/etc/mohttpd.asm.txt)

And a not so successful thread to go with it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714971)

<comment><USER6> That's very nice! Thanks! I spent a lot of last night figuring out how to use socketcall, and this should be helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hacked on httpdito some more, and it has been improved in several ways:

\- it now forks so that it can handle multiple concurrent connections (up to a limit of 2048);

\- it no longer uses libc at all, so it's down to 2088 bytes (I had it lower, but then I added forking);

\- it's less complex now that it only has one way of invoking system calls instead of two;

\- there are some performance results in the comments.

\- it has a name, "httpdito";

\- strlen works correctly.

Probably nobody will read this comment here, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

<comment><USER6> Down to 1928 bytes now, and has timeouts for robustness. You can still DoS it but it takes more work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool I think. But cooler, Web Server on a FPGA, without CPU, only VHDL [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7syu5EC1OWg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7syu5EC1OWg)

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool!

My comments as an inexperienced assembly developer, assuming this is optimising for binary size:

\- The pug/doN macros do an extra reg-reg copy if passed a register - and the recursive definition calls pop/pop/pop instead of just add %esp, -4*N, you could shave a few bytes

\- AT&T syntax will always look weird to me, but the heavy use of macros and local labels is quite elegant

\- A little bit of candid swearing in the comments? Fine by me, but is this officially associated with canonical?

<comment><USER9> Agree, AT&T syntax was just not designed for human reading. I doubt this is too optimized for size, since there are obvious tricks that it misses.

Another observation: the strlen code is incorrect, as it also counts the \0. We can fix this, and make the code 1 byte shorter (in glorious Intel syntax):

        lea esi, source        ; depends on source
        xor ecx, ecx           ; 2 bytes
        salc                   ; 1 byte
        cld                    ; 1 byte
        _back:
        scasb                  ; 1 byte
        loopnz _back           ; 2 bytes
        not ecx                ; 2 bytes

<comment><USER6> BTW, I've fixed the strlen code (although differently). I didn't know about SALC! That's a very clever way of zeroing AL.

I think at this point I might be able to get away with CLD since I never STD any more :)

Some of the obvious tricks it misses are probably because they're not obvious to me, while others may be just because I haven't gotten to them yet.

<comment><USER9> Your way is much cleaner; mine was just a size gimmick. I just can't resist it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a web developer who isn't familiar with assembly or any web server more barebones than nginx, what benefits does something like this provide? Speed? Could this be a solution for an extremely simple directory/static file web server?

<comment><USER11> This is a simple, single-threaded single-process accept-read-respond-loop web server. It's vulnerable to trivial trickle DoS attacks and probably has other issues. There are no advantages, the author just did this for fun.

The TCP part comes from C code in the kernel, so this headline is a little misleading ;-).

<comment><USER6> Agreed. However, it _should_ be safe from buffer overflows, path traversal attacks, XSS, and obviously CSRF. It should be fine other than DoS. Let me know if you find any exceptions.

<comment><USER11> It's hard to be vulnerable to XSS and CSRF with all-static content, no?

So, not only will a trickle DoS other clients, each byte will also force an O(n) traversal of $buf (burning CPU). Granted, buf is only 1000 bytes, but that's not great.

It looks like a request with no space could force you to walk (`repne scasb`) through invalid memory after $buf. Also maybe corrupt it (unescape_request_path).

It will also fail to correctly parse HTTP/0.9 (not a big deal, but part of spec). The parsing code ignores the existence of verbs other than GET. (Doesn't check that the verb is GET either.)

We don't validate that paths start with /, we just skip that byte. Okay:

            mov (path), %al
            ...
            cmp $'/, %al
            je badreq

Since valid GETs are of the form:

        GET /foo.txt HTTP/1.0
             ^-- path=buf+5

As you point out, a client close will cause SIGPIPE causing a crash (DoS).

That's all I see. But I'm not an asm expert and I'm sure I've missed something.

<comment><USER6> > It's hard to be vulnerable to XSS and CSRF with all-static content, no?

You would think, but actually Apache managed to be vulnerable to XSS by including bits of the request URL in its error paegs, if I remember right. Last millennium, I think.

> So, not only will a trickle DoS other clients, each byte will also force an > O(n) traversal of $buf (burning CPU). Granted, buf is only 1000 bytes, but > that's not great.

Hmm, while I hadn't thought about that, and I should have, I think that's probably okay; basically you're saying that you can get the machine to burn up to, say, 2048 cycles by sending it a small TCP packet. Which means that a 4-core 2GHz server machine can't handle more than about four million packets per second (well, one million until I parallelize), which is about 85 megabytes per second, or 680 megabits per second. There are probably other bottlenecks in the code, the kernel, or your data center that will kick in first. It's probably more effective to DoS the server by just requesting files from it.

> It looks like a request with no space could force you to walk (`repne > scasb`) through invalid memory after $buf.

It's possible I could have gotten this wrong, but I did _try_ to limit the number of bytes it would scan to the bytes that it had actually read, by doing

        mov (bufp), %ecx

before the repne scasb. Did I screw that up?

> HTTP/0.9 ...verbs other than GET.

Yes, those are unimplemented features, and you're right that their lack makes the server behave incorrectly; hopefully they don't result in security bugs. I think they don't matter in practice, since nobody sends HTTP/0.9 requests or HEAD requests, except by hand, do they?

> We don't validate that paths start with /, we just skip that byte.

Right. And the $'/ check below is to keep you from saying

        GET //etc/passwd HTTP/1.0

and getting /etc/passwd. In case that matters in 2013.

Thank you very much for looking over it!

<comment><USER12> Didn't send ab HEAD requests?

I know it does this by a given flag, but in some tests I have seen some HEADs between my GETs. I haven't used ab for long time, so don't quote me on that. Have u tried httpress[1] as a benchmark tool?

How about a simple check against the first byte equals G (DEC 71) if it is a GET? Shouldn't be that expensive, I think.

Thanks for creating it.

[1] [https://bitbucket.org/yarosla/httpress/wiki/Home](https://bitbucket.org/yarosla/httpress/wiki/Home)

<comment><USER6> I don't know if ab sends HEAD requests! Thanks for the link to httpress; I've been having trouble with ab failing at high concurrencies (1000 concurrent connections) and also being the bottleneck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat little piece of performance art (pun intended).

<comment><USER14> Good way to put it, was trying to think of something similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No full tcp stack in assembly? =p

(Yes there's no point as it's better in hardware blah blah)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm really happy that executable size doesn't matter for server software. Because Yesod produce really big execs.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Depends on the C libraries.

^ That tells everything you need to know.

</comment><comment><USER18> and I just got finished rewriting all my large webapps in some obscure Java framework for performance, because of some benchmarks I saw on HN. Guess now I have to rewrite it all in assembly, because more performance is always better right?

<comment><USER11> This is not a very fast webserver. Anything using sendfile() and threads/processes will beat it handily.

<comment><USER6> I haven't measured, but I'm pretty sure you're right.

<comment><USER11> Me too. You could probably find a single-threaded, small file benchmark where they compare similarly (or this even compares better — it does almost nothing). But this is not most benchmarks. Large files or multiple clients will bench this server poorly compared to MT + sendfile(2).

This server is single threaded and artificially serializes requests, at a minimum. The copy through userspace is going to hurt compared to sendfile for larger files.

<comment><USER6> I made it fork. Now, on my netbook, it's able to handle in the neighborhood of a thousand requests per second and 20 megabytes per second, with up to 2048 concurrent connections. Not, I think, spectacular performance, but acceptable for many purposes. You can still DoS it by opening 2048 concurrent connections to it; as long as they are open, it will open no new connections, and it has no timeout.

This has bloated the executable up to 2088 bytes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> OMG all these macros. It looks more like Python then Assembly. Come on, real men do not use macros.

<comment><USER20> > Come on, real men do not use macros.

The sexism and historical ignorance in this sentence are in a race to see which can be more breathtaking.

Regardless of which wins, meshko will look like a complete fool to anyone who knows what they're talking about.

<comment><USER19> Wait, are you serious?

<comment><USER20> Yes. I am. The fact you weren't makes the sexism all the more odious.

<comment><USER19> Can you explain? I am genuinely curious as two the line of your thoughts now.

<comment><USER20> > Can you explain? I am genuinely curious as two the line of your thoughts > now.

The worst forms of bias and discrimination are unexamined, because they can fester and influence thought and action without ever being questioned. It's difficult to argue someone out of a position they don't even realize is a position that is up for argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Likely does not have any back door. Rumor is GCC opens back door for you know who.

<comment><USER22> Voldemort?

<comment><USER21> Shhh.</comment></comment></comment>


Samsung to Unveil Eight-Core Chip for Smartphones and Tablets - <AUTHOR> http://hothardware.com/News/Samsung-to-Unveil-EightCore-Chip-for-Smartphones-and-Tablets/ <comment><USER2> A lot of people have misunderstood this. It does have 8 cores, but you can only use one cluster of 4 cores at a time, either the low-power A7 one or the high-performance A15 one. So it will still work effectively as a "quad core". The 4 low-power cores should only use like 2% of the chip's size, while giving a boost in overall power efficiency of the phone.</comment>


Reducing Cross-Team Blocking - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@karti/reducing-cross-team-blocking-dfd2811c8802 <comment><USER2> So, in the base amp solution where anyone is allowed to go in anywhere and implant whatever they need in order to be unblocked, how does the company actually function?

If you're a backend API developer, how do you keep anything actually running and working, when you've got every other moron in the company who thinks they should be able to dig into your codebase and do whatever they want?

I get the concept of empowering your people to do their jobs, but there have to be some sort of controls and limitations.

<comment><USER2> Read "basecamp", not "base amp".

DYAC!

<comment><USER3> You should still be within the edit window for your comment above.

<comment><USER2> Sadly, the Octal app which is so wonderful about most everything else, does not provide an "edit function that I can find.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like something you should take up with the developer:

[https://github.com/dangwu/Octal/issues](https://github.com/dangwu/Octal/issues)

<comment><USER4> I've added edit and delete with v2.15.0 :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


SockJS – WebSocket emulation (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2011/09/13/sockjs-websocket-emulation/ <comment><USER3> Very cool, but as someone developing real-time, browser-based games this troubles me:

"If the browser supports it SockJS first tries to open a native WebSocket connection. Depending on a network and server setup it may work or fail. The failure should happen quite fast, unless the client is behind a badly misbehaving proxy - in such case it can take up to 5 seconds to timeout."

engine.io's approach of _starting_ with the lowest common denominator, JSONP, to get communication up and running immediately seems much better to me.

Starting with the LCD connection and upgrading to something more performant also works around the below issue:

"This is one of the reasons why SockJS avoids using Flash transports - <USER2> connection can take at least to 3 seconds if port 843 is blocked"

There's a bunch of nice stuff in this library too. The built-in support for load-balancers is sweet. That's often something of a frustrating afterthought for library writers.

The large number of fallbacks is nice as well.

<comment><USER4> Hi, SockJS author here.

The hardcoded 5 second delay was true for early SockJS (0.1) but since 0.2 we have a more sophisticated timeout mechanism. Nowadays SockJS falls back to next protocol when:

\- protocol is not available in the browser

\- protocol was tried but failed (like: proxy actively rejecting requests)

\- protocol timeouted before receiving first frame (ie: no error, just lack of action)

The last case is the most interesting (but also the least common) - we timeout when N x RTT ms passed (for N depending on a particular transport). This is pretty reliable, and very fast in practice.

In real world people have different uses for SockJS, but some just open a new SockJS connection on every page refresh (like: a newspaper website). This is rather extreme, but SockJS does seem to be working fine and establishing connections fast even in this circumstances.

There was a lot of discussion about SockJS vs Engine.io approach to falling back / upgrading protocols. Engine.io approach is caused by the fact that they support flash websockets, which have some weird properties (launching flash can take a while, plus flash timeouts after 3 seconds if port 843 is blocked, so you might want to have JSONP already running during that time). SockJS doesn't use flash - a simpler fallback mechanism is enough.

<comment><USER5> Does Sockjs correctly fallback from websockets in all situations? Looking at this:

[https://speakerdeck.com/3rdeden/realtimeconf-dot-oct- dot-201...](https://speakerdeck.com/3rdeden/realtimeconf-dot-oct-dot-2012)

Makes me afraid to turn on websockets. Will websockets correctly fall back if blocked, even if I don't use SSL?

One of the biggest problems with socket.io is that it doesn't fallback correctly.

<comment><USER4> I have problem with this presentation - it doesn't seem to contain too many details. What mobile, what browsers, what 3g networks, etc.

Sure, there are issues - Safari (I think) used to crash when you opened inspector on a page with ws.

Some (meteor.com) just ignore all those issues by disabling native ws altogether. Performance of polling SockJS transports is enough for them now, so why bother?

If you find a real problem with SockJS in the wild - please do let us know!

<comment><USER5> I'm using sockjs right now with polling, so don't get me wrong, I'm with you. I'm thinking about experimenting with turning on ws so that was the source of my question. I'd appreciate it if it could be addressed. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For anyone that is coming to SockJS directly from socket.io, I've built an event system on top of SockJS that has a similar API to socket.io. It's called ChuckT, and [like SockJS] it has both a client and server-side component.

Client: <https://github.com/epixa/chuckt>

Server (node): <https://github.com/epixa/chuckt-node>

The project is still very new, so I haven't finished the tests nor documentation, but the readmes on those repos have information about installation and usage.

</comment><comment><USER7> SockJS has ambitious goals:

      1. Simple browser-side and server-side APIs, as close to WebSocket API as possible.
      2. Well documented scaling and load balancing techniques.
      3. Transports must fully support cross-domain   communication.
      4. Transports must fall back gracefully in case of  restrictive proxies.
      5. Connection establishment should be fast.
      6. No Flash on the client side, Javascript only.
      7. Client-side Javascript must be reasonably well tested.
      8. Additionally the server side code should be simple, in order to lower the cost of writing servers for different languages.

<comment><USER4> In retrospective I can say that some of them are much harder than originally anticipated :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Shameless plug_. SockJS powers:

* meteor.com

* q-music.be

* getbridge (from nowjs fame)

* realtime.co

* smarkets

* and loads of others.

</comment><comment><USER8> There was a comment about java on browser. I think history tells us how people hate java on browser.</comment>


Show HN: Shirts.io, API for Printing T-Shirts - <AUTHOR> https://www.shirts.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I'm a part of ooShirts, a rapidly growing t-shirt retailer than currently prints 200,000 shirts per month.

Today, we're launching Shirts.io, an API that lets you print and ship t-shirts to anywhere in the world. T-shirts are printed and shipped out of our world- class production facilities in California, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

Without a single dollar of capital investment, every Shirts.io user will have access to massive printing capacity, world class printing equipment, and distributed production centers. Whether you're a developer or t-shirt entrepreneur, Shirts.io means you'll never again need to worry about t-shirt fulfillment again.

Take a look here: <https://www.shirts.io/>

<comment><USER2> My first thought is that you blatantly copied Stripes layout for your homepage. My second thought is maybe that works since the business could be described as "Stripe for t-shirts". Oh well, at least it's not a bootstrap site.</comment></comment>


Curb Your Distraction - <AUTHOR> http://mmhd.ca/2012/01/curb-your-distraction/

<comment><AUTHOR> What are your distractions and how do you avoid them?</comment>