Why the Tor attack matters - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/11/why-tor-attack-matters.html <comment><USER2> I don't really buy the comparison that what CERT did is similar to a university-sponsored DDoS. I think a better parallel is the Dan Egerstad case. He ran a Tor exit node and analyzed all the plaintext traffic leaving the exit nodes. He ended up collecting a ton of sensitive usernames and passwords. He tried to contact some of these people by e-mail but they ignored him. So he posted a bunch of these passwords on his blog. He was promptly arrested (and eventually released). At that time the security community was outraged that an obviously well-intentioned researcher was being harassed by the police for doing his job. The response is a lot different now for reasons I don't really understand.

I do wish both sides would acknowledge this is a tricky issue. On the one hand, if I run a tor exit node or relay, it is my node and it seems like I'm allowed to do with it as I please. At the same time, it also seems obviously unethical (maybe illegal?) to be harvesting passwords off an exit node or to dole out vigilante justice to Tor users I don't like.

One other thing to keep in mind here is that SEI is a DoD funded center. It may be nominally affiliated with CMU, but all their money comes either from the DoD or external grants awarded to the researchers at SEI. So CMU the private research university and SEI the DoD-funded research center have very different obligations to the public. It's important not to conflate the two.

The big question is this: what are our responsibilities as security researchers, especially when we're working on "live" software systems? Green seems to be suggesting some form of a review board which pre-approves experiments on live targets. Maybe this is what we need, but be careful what you wish for though. The bad guys don't have review boards.

<comment><USER3> > I don't really buy the comparison that what CERT did is similar to a > university-sponsored DDoS. I think a better parallel is the Dan Egerstad > case.

Here's why it's worse: they inserted a plaintext encoding into the response from the onion-address lookup relay, and so anybody observing the user (e.g. the ISP) could detect what onion address the user was connecting to. This applies after the fact to recorded traffic as well. Thus the researchers had no control over who got deanonymized, to whom they were deanonymized, and when they were deanonymized.

> I do wish both sides would acknowledge this is a tricky issue. On the one > hand, if I run a tor exit node or relay, it is my node and it seems like I'm > allowed to do with it as I please.

You actually are not allowed to do with your relay as you please. At least in the US, the legal theory protecting relay operators (i.e. safe harbor) also makes it illegal to observe user traffic content except in certain cases (e.g. to improve network performance).

> One other thing to keep in mind here is that SEI is a DoD funded center.

This doesn't seem very relevant. All researchers have an obligation to consider and mitigate possible harms that occur during their research (source: I work in a military research laboratory). These researchers clearly did not fulfill that obligation, and I'm sure their institution is reviewing or has reviewed their procedures to make sure it doesn't happen again.

<comment><USER2> Let me try to understand your position a little better.

Are you saying the problem here is simply that the effects of the attack were observable by others? If this were not the case, you'd have been fine with it?

And since you seem to be arguing that researchers shouldn't examine user traffic, do you also think that what Egerstad did was also wrong? Do you agree with his arrest?

And one more thing sort of related to this. What's your opinion on research like Arvind's Netflix deanonymization attack? Do you think the work that research involved was also unethical?

> All researchers have an obligation to consider and mitigate possible harms > that occur during their research

This is nice idealism and I'm totally in support of it. But I can't help think this is pie-in-the-sky thinking, especially when organizations like the DoD are involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> But there's also a view that computer security research can't really hurt people, so there's no real reason for sort of ethical oversight machinery in the first place._

Worse: there's a view that people who get owned "deserved it." Our industry, and its academic attachments, have a really strange vindictive streak towards those who it should be looking out for. (Which is not to say that those people should be looking out for people swapping child porn--but what about the thousands and thousands of people who were _not_?)

</comment><comment><USER5> It would have been more ethical if the university had not blocked the "researchers" from disclosing the vulnerability at Black Hat. (Though even then they were not following responsible disclosure practices). The fact that Tor had to guess what the vulnerability was and the "researchers" still have not released their paper is unethical and probably illegal.

<comment><USER6> I'll grant you it might be unethical, I don't see how it could possibly be illegal.

<comment><USER7> CFAA

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like more research needs to go into preventing traffic confirmation attacks: [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory- relay...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay-early- traffic-confirmation-attack/)

"A traffic confirmation attack is possible when the attacker controls or observes the relays on both ends of a Tor circuit and then compares traffic timing, volume, or other characteristics to conclude that the two relays are indeed on the same circuit. If the first relay in the circuit (called the "entry guard") knows the IP address of the user, and the last relay in the circuit knows the resource or destination she is accessing, then together they can deanonymize her."

Interesting technical problem. They patched it, obviously, but similar attacks are still possible. It does say more research needs to be done, when that post was published. Obviously the method they used to send and receive signals from one side to the other doesn't work anymore, but statistical methods presumably do. Sort of like this:

[https://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=...](https://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=556&format=pdf)

Seems like a very difficult problem to solve.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is so surprising here? The DOD is the largest funder of research grants in the US. Pretty much every university is doing research for a US agency from cyber security to lasers for missile defense. I find it very hard to believe that this is the firs time a university was conducting computer security research on live targets.

<comment><USER10> Whether or not it's _surprising_ is perhaps the least interesting point for discussion. Universities have a responsibility to conduct human research ethically and I hope we hear a lot more about how this research in particular was conducted. This could have endangered lives depending on how it was done, and I'm quite sure the ends don't justify the means unless it was specifically done in a way which protected the anonymity of untargeted users.

<comment><USER11> >Universities have a responsibility to conduct human research ethically

which means little given the laws of nature, all that matters is what people end up doing and measuring that statistically. If statistically speaking most people aren't ethical then that's what we'll get. This whole idea that people are in control of their actions or have any freedom whatsoever given what we know about the laws of nature has to go.

<comment><USER12> If people lack free will, then the people judging/punishing them also lack free will, and the entire premise of your arguement is an absurdity.

<comment><USER13> If free will didn't exist, it would be necessary to create it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From their website, I get that CMU/SEI/CERT works with both DHS and DoD.[0] Although I don't see anything specific about the FBI, it's not too much of a stretch. As DHS has grown and evolved since 9/11, distinctions between police and military have weakened. A decade ago, CERT would have been carefully shielded through parallel construction.

In my opinion, this is a wakeup call for the Tor Project. The attack would have been obvious if they'd been tracking the requisite circuit parameters. Ironically enough, it strikes me that the Tor network needs something like CERT for detecting attacks.

[0] [https://www.cert.org/about/](https://www.cert.org/about/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The article raises the issue for computer security but computer science is used in many other fields where it could have ethical implications. Self- driving cars is on top of my mind, but for sure other applications has issue too. So I agree with his point and should be extended.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think we have to assume that if a government can hack it, they will try. Perhaps it's sad that a university will help them but I'd also to be assumed that they're going to be trying it in some way.

<comment><USER17> > I think we have to assume that if a government can hack it, they will try. > Perhaps it's sad that a university will help them but I'd also to be assumed > that they're going to be trying it in some way.

Sure. And we can also-- for the purpose of thinking about risks-- assume that if a government can torture people, they will.

This doesn't make it right, and it doesn't mean that people should sit idly by. Nor does the fact that people oppose and discourage such actions mean that systems can be left vulnerable to these attacks.

Opposing unethical and abusive behavior is not mutually exclusive with building systems which are robust even against unethical attackers. Human wellbeing is maximized when we do _both_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm willing to bet that the NSA has started to hook into the Tor network and add in their own nodes, which monitor the traffic. Unless it's not possible to snoop in on data.

<comment><USER19> William Binney claimed in a recent reddit AMA that the NSA is monitoring packet routes throughout the tor network in a program called Treasuremap.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3sf8xx/im_bill_binney...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3sf8xx/im_bill_binney_former_nsa_tech_director_worked/cwwr7y9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The response by Patio11 regarding how this was acceptable penetration testing was beyond stupid.

Just because you are univesity researcher does not means you can take money and then attack some random company and say LOL JK just doing "Research". Universities have enormous computing power / resources available via various means to do research. Just because I have access to a thousand node cluster does not means I can randomly launch DDOS attack against some company and then claim "Research". This is equivalent to those youtube videos where at the end they justify assault and other egregious behaviour claiming "Social experiment" or "Prank".

<comment><USER21> This is perhaps the most unnecessarily rude comment to be at the top of a hacker news thread in some time. Let's all remember that disagreeing with someone doesn't mean being glib or mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I still remember the researchers working with Facebook on some social science project or the discussion on that guy tweeting about airplane security, so the response from HN on this case baffles me somewhat.

</comment><comment><USER23> None of this should be much of a surprise.

There has always been the possibility of bad actors being involved with Tor. In addition, the Tor software is complicated enough that there undoubtedly _will_ be bugs in it.

This is "you bet your life" serious. However, both the architecture and the implementation of software must be _perfect_ for that to succeed. It's pretty easy for one bug to mean "game over".

People using Tor just don't have a chance when it comes to dealing with the NSA, FSB, GCHQ or any similar state actors. Even allowing for inevitable government bureaucracy and incompetence, the disparity in resources can just be staggering. A big agency can easily, easily afford to devote 100 full time people to one high value target. Those are not odds I'd like to bet against.

In the bigger picture, the NSA doesn't give a rats ass about either Silk Road or about child pornography (at least I hope they don't). Which is why an "academic institution" was enlisted to help out the FBI with this.

But if I was a dissident or protester in Turkey, Syria, Russia, or any of a large number of authoritarian countries, I certainly wouldn't use Tor. Not if my life and the life of my family was at risk.</comment>


Patience and Hard Work - The Web Apps game - <AUTHOR> http://www.contrast.ie/blog/patience-and-hard-work/

<comment><USER2> LOL... you bet youre going to need to wait a long time for that concept!!</comment>


Show HN: TSpoon – Writing Hammerspoon Scripts with TypeScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/djyde/TSpoon <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hackers. Hammerspoon is a wonderful macOS automation tools. But writing large Lua scripts become a terrible experience.

So I create and publish a TypeScript declaration file for Hammerspoon APIS. With the help of typescript-to-lua, we can now writing hammerspoon scripts in a better way.

Since there are lots of APIs, I need some help complete them. If someone are interested, pull request is welcome!</comment>


Facebook is using billions of Instagram images to train AI algo - <AUTHOR> https://preadr.com/l/5aed98bb0ae09a66ce711fdf <comment><USER2> That can become game changer for Facebook if they implement it for content moderation and maybe fake news which is a biggest issue in current time.</comment>


Ten Rules for Web Startups (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp?hn=true <comment><USER2> Wow, nine years old! I like how some of these ideas have become _completely_ commonplace since then. It's cool that we as a community are progressing.

Also I'm impressed at how some of these ideas are still neglected, or controversial at best. Think about how much of the startup world, leading thinkers like Paul Graham and Sam Altman included, still haven't figured out #10 on this list.

<comment><USER3> You took your words right of my mouth, well my keyboard. It is surprisingly true almost nine years later, it is probably more true now than it was then, or at least it has been proven to be more true, if that is even possible.

<comment><USER4> Makes you wonder which of the blog posts giving advice today will ring as surprisingly true in 9 years from now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meaningful stuff always remains such - a classic.

</comment><comment><USER6> Take the Top 100 Startups since 2005 and explain me, compared to this list, why they were successful.

<comment><USER3> Well, 100 is a lot of work, but I think some of the YC top startups fit quite well: let's say Dropbox, Disqus or Stripe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Take money in six months - and do it with Paypal, rule #7, I think is very accurate to a degree. However, it also depends on if you're doing a media startup or a Saas startup. Most of the bootstrapped businesses I've done were professional services or (a few times) download software. In both cases, we took money but in the media business, it was always indirectly - eg, CJ sales, Adsense, etc.

Rule #10 I've seen tossed out the window too many times, as a consultant, to admit it. Thing is though, when I review my own performance, it's always when well balanced with actual life that I get the most work done, even if I'm putting in a paltry ~50 or less hours per week of work.

As an employer and manager, I've also seen the difference between people's engagement and output at peak and at "overclocked performance," where they put in an extreme amount of overtime. Perhaps I'm missing an instance, but I've yet to see the team win where they gave up everything that meant something in their lives in an effort to somehow make the business better.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great rules. I'd spread the advice except that I cannot stand that it advices to be greedy.

Greedy is self-serving and it will block things sooner or later.

Way more interesting is to advice Ambition.

Positive ambition.

Possibilities-expanding-for-all kind of ambition.

Subtle you might say. Yet greedy and ambition have different ethos in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER9> Write article in 2014.

Edit post date.

Instant visionary.

PS. And this article is just a bunch of generic small business advice where grocery store was replaced by web startup.

<comment><USER10> This was written by Ev Williams of Bloggers / Twitter / Medium fame. Not sure visionary is the right word but it's close enough.

I don't think he has much reason to back date his posts but you would think he'd at least put it on Medium versus Blogger.</comment></comment>


Tips for Picking the Best Images for Your Articles - <AUTHOR> https://articled.io/blog/6-tips-for-picking-the-best-images-for-your-articles <comment><USER2> I think webp is taking over the internet in term of light speed page loading. [https://www.webp2jpg.net/](https://www.webp2jpg.net/)</comment>


Low Hanging Fruit for Most Online Stores: Better Search Features - <AUTHOR> http://blog.exorbyte.com/2010/08/low-hanging-fruit-for-most-online-stores-better-search-features/ <comment><USER2> This is low-hanging fruit not just for online stores, but for many kinds of sites, especially those that don't specialize in search. For example, I often have to use the site Grants.gov, which you'll recognize if you've ever had to submit or deal with research grants. And the search engine is _terrible_ and frequently doesn't work at all.

The last time this happened, it inspired me to write a blog post about how to use Google for site-specific search: [http://blog.seliger.com/2010/10/24/google-faster-than- grants...](http://blog.seliger.com/2010/10/24/google-faster-than-grants-gov- finding-the-capital-fund-education-and-training-community-facilities-program- and-the-fy-2011-recovery-implementation-fund) . Most of our readers aren't technical and probably don't know how to do this, but it can make search much, much better.

But that's for Grants.gov, and grants.gov dispenses money, which highly motivates its users. If you're trying to get users to pay you, on the other hand, you'll need to pay more attention to their experience.

<comment><USER3> I had the same first instinct. Search is almost always an after thought unless it's the primary focus. If anyone wants a startup idea, the search feature on forums is something that people constantly suggest using, but generally provides awful results. Furthermore, a lot of forum owners restrict search usage for guests because it eats memory. If you make a replacement for vBulletin, phpBB, and Invision I wouldn't be surprised if you could sell it for $50+ to more active communities.

<comment><USER4> _If you make a replacement for vBulletin, phpBB, and Invision I wouldn't be surprised if you could sell it for $50+ to more active communities._

The problem with search for forums is that there is no getting around the fact that you have to either search through the text of the posts (standard search) or have a massive index that gets out of date quickly (Sphinx). You can't get more creative than that and have your software still be compatible with most hosting (including $5/mo shared hosting that most people will have). When I worked at Internet Brands (makers of vBulletin), we used Sphinx on all of our forums, which worked, but was far from perfect. It's just the nature of the beast for forums...the interesting stuff is in the text fields (hard to index), compared to an online store where you can sort by category, tags, price, title, etc.

<comment><USER5> Why is the text inside the document hard to index? Isn't that what Lucene/Solr is for? Not sure what you mean...

<comment><USER4> _Why is the text inside the document hard to index? Isn't that what Lucene/Solr is for? Not sure what you mean..._

You just proved my point...if I have to install a standalone Java full-text engine running on Tomcat, I've already gone beyond what most forum owners can do on shared hosting.

Imagine searching through all posts on HN for the phrase "proved my point" anywhere in the post. There is no way other than iterating through all of the millions of posts.

For commonly-searched phrases such as "P vs NP", "scalability", or "rate my startup" you can create an index for faster searching, but it is impossible to anticipate every possible search, and in particular, long tail searches which can be the most useful will be the least likely to be indexed.

<comment><USER6> _Imagine searching through all posts on HN for the phrase "proved my point" anywhere in the post. There is no way other than iterating through all of the millions of posts._

This is not true. Rather, in addition to the document ID, the inverted index stores the position information for each term occurrence, and can very quickly find any phrase of your choosing. While it's possible that this isn't always the default behaviour, all modern general purpose search engines support this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I concur with nkurz here. Inverted index are the basis for most full-text search engines and they can handle this quite well.

Another issue with searching a large forum like HN though can be keeping the index up-to-date through crawling new posts constantly to add the terms they contain to the inverted index. However, you can usually build a simple script that adds news posts URLs to a list of priority crawl targets.

Free HTDig (<http://www.htdig.org/>) for instance could do the task pretty well and run on a budget hosting plan described above. It can index up to 100ks of documents easily and may require disk space upgrades for large sites but not much more.

There are many other inverted index search engines available and some now easily index without crawling through XML feeds from your CMS or forum software.

<comment><USER4> See my original post...I acknowledge that an inverted index can do it, but when you have to make it compatible with a wide range of hosting and technical ability as in the case of vBulletin, you are more limited. The typical forum owner will not install a standalone search engine, especially if his $5 hosting doesn't support it

<comment><USER3> Yes, but perhaps larger forums with dedicated servers can handle it? If this is true, selling a Search Replacement for forum software could really be a viable business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input and sorry the site has been down part of the evening. I have no access to the web server right now but it will be back up tomorrow. Dan</comment>


Radi - mac app for producing web visual animations, video, realtime graphics - <AUTHOR> http://radiapp.com/

<comment><USER2> This app is made by me, thank you for posting it!

Radi is a side project of mine that finally saw the light of day 7 months ago, when I announced it here on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2040844>

I've recently tried to pick up the pace with updates to Radi. I'm hoping to finish the first draft of a manual soon, and to get some more concrete examples done. (Producing sample content and tutorials is really hard, because it's not enough to know the app, but you have to be able to see it through the new user's eyes -- very difficult for me when I've worked on the app for so long...)

I'm currently pretty excited about the possibilities of using <canvas> on top of <video>, so that's something I'd like to write some documentation about... If there are any other ideas about topics of interest, I'm all ears!

<comment><USER3> A suggestion for helping you see things with fresh eyes -- read aloud. Seriously, shut your door, open up the app and read the instructions aloud and try to follow them. Note everything down that is missing or unclear (print the instructions and buy a red pen.) And really read aloud, whispering or mouthing isn't quite enough. It makes a difference to how you hear things.

Oh and p.s. that looks pretty damm good. I do research on visual programming, so I was interested to take a look at your conduit app (reminds me of toolbox) as well. I particularly like the comments you have attached to edges in the graph, sadly I literally thought I'd invented that idea this morning :-)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, and great suggestion about reading aloud, I'll give it a try. I'm pretty sure that the typical "computer manual" style of acronym-loaded, compressed run-on sentences is not a delight to the ear :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can someone who has done some graphic design do a write up and comparison of this and the Adobe Edge preview? I'd be interested to see how they compare, especially in terms of the ease of creating stuff and the quality of the output - speed, browser support, size.

<comment><USER4> I'd be interested in this as well. Also, it would be nice to know how this stacks up against Hype (<http://tumultco.com/hype/>).

<comment><USER2> The big difference is that Hype and Edge use CSS properties for animation. The image composition is built up from <div> elements whose style properties are modified by JavaScript. This means the animation capabilities are limited to those properties that can be expressed using CSS -- although this is not such a bad limitation at all, because CSS3 is now so powerful and starting to be widely supported.

Radi operates on a lower level to render its animations in HTML. Layers in Radi don't directly become <div> elements in the output; instead, the layer content is rendered either within <canvas> or <video> elements. You can use both together, for example using canvas to overlay some dynamic graphics context on top of a video.

To me, the capability to render content seamlessly to either video or canvas is the most unique thing about Radi. Although I'm still not quite sure how to express that as a benefit to the user, rather than a tech-spec curiosity... :)

(It's possible to do some limited CSS animation in Radi as well. There's a concept called "timeline events" that can be used to animate top-level element properties, so you can also use this model of animation on top of the canvas/video rendering... But it's currently limited to opacity only, so this feature is very much in its infancy.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know this is a subjective thing, but I think the app's graphical style is somewhat ugly. If I'm supposed to be creating an attractive animation for my site, I want to be surrounded by a similarly attractive workspace. I know it's a nitpick, but it's why I write code in Coda, not Vim, TextMate, BBEdit, or anything else. I'm fickle like that.

<comment><USER2> I see what you mean... The trouble for me is that I'm working on Radi alone. Coming up with an attractive custom UI style is a big undertaking with an inherently uncertain result.

It feels like a safer use of my time to work on features, and just aim for a "boring but reasonably professional grey" appearance for the interface. I know that many artists actually prefer grey UIs so that it doesn't compete with the actual content.

I've tried to use Cocoa-native controls wherever possible, and that also limits the UI possibilities quite a bit. The overall look needs to be rather neutral so that changes in the Aqua look don't mess up the custom-drawn controls. (Recently Lion had a big change in most of the standard controls' appearance, but IMHO the updated look made Radi look a bit better.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2040844>

</comment><comment><USER7> I hope Adobe is paying attention.

</comment><comment><USER8> how does this compare to the mac app, hype? looks too similar no?</comment>


In Italy, Going Back to Work May Depend on Having the Right Antibodies - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/world/europe/italy-coronavirus-antibodies.html <comment><USER2> If you only allow cured people to work, you could end up with poorer people trying to get the disease in the wish to cure from it and be able to work.

People with antibodies could even temporarily earn more than others, since they'd be able to work without restrictions.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this is the point. They can also enjoy life like eating out and seeing movies, while not saving lives.

> poorer people trying to get the disease

Rich people like money too, so it would be most working people.

I'd be more interested in the percent of the population who continue to be carriers. What do you do with them? Lock them up for life?

<comment><USER4> > Rich people like money too

While that's trivially true rich people like money _less_ than poor people -- simply because of diminishing returns. If I hand a homeless person $100 they'll be a lot happier with that than if I hand Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos $100.

If we do allow people with antibodies to work then for a poor person getting the virus might save them from starvation or homelessness or any one of a thousand terrible things that happen if you run out of money. If you have even the smallest amount of money saved up on the other hand it's not really worth risking your life since you won't end up malnourished or on the street in either case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This could be a giant experiment on wether we can function as a society working much less. A experiment that we'd be forced to make on an immense scale at the same time and across too many segments of the economy unfortunately.</comment>


Try Elasticsearch, Get a Shirt - <AUTHOR> https://www.compose.io/articles/try-elasticsearch/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like the offer expires tomorrow.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anybody use ZFS on their mac? - <AUTHOR>

Just found out about this: http://downloads.maczfs.org/
If you use it, what are your experiences?
Is it reliable? Does it work without glitches? I'm mostly looking to use it on two external HDDs. I wont create any pools spanning over drives. I'm mostly interested in the data integrity aspects of the file system.
The installation notes say this:
> Using kernel extensions introduce a degree of instability into a system that userland processes don't encounter; the software has been known to cause kernel panics in the past. In addition, any file system has the possibility of causing damage to files; whilst ZFS creates checksums of all blocks (and so can detect failure earlier than in other systems) there's no guarantee that your data will be accessible in the event of problems. <comment><USER2> I used to use it but stopped after Mavericks because the version I was using is no longer supported. (I was using the version made by Greenbytes.) I've since migrated my data off of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking about using ZFS on my data drives and HFS on the backup drives, in case of trouble. Perhaps this is flawed thinking.</comment></comment>


Richard Hakluyt and Early English Travel - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/10/26/richard-hakluyt-and-early-english-travel/ <comment><USER2> I'd recommend the travel writing of Richard Francis Burton: adventurer, spy, scholar, and all-around erudite Victorian badass.[1]

Burton was famous for being the first non-muslim to see Mecca and Medina (which he did in disguise), when the penalty for non-mulsims entering the holy cities was death. He did the same in other dangerous places as well, taking similar risks. Burton also wrote a famous translation of the _Thousand and One Nights_ (aka _Arabian Nights_ )[2], translated the _Kama Sutra_ and other works.

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

[2] - Burton's is by far my favorite translation of the _Thousand and One Nights_. You can read it for free at Project Gutenberg.[3]

[3] - [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3435](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3435)

</comment><comment><USER3> From a few hundred years later, I would recommend Frederick Gustavus Burnaby's _A Ride to Khiva_. It's striking how much is the same about travel writing even a century and a half ago - and at the same time this makes the differences all the clearer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Richard Hakluyt; arguably the world's first tourist.

<comment><USER5> It's a cool-sounding book but let's not go overboard here. Marco Polo? The Grand Tour? Ibn Battuta? Alexander the Great? All the Roman nobility who would take tours of the famous sites in Greece (so much so that Pausanias wrote a length - and now historically invaluable - guidebook)? Hakluyt wasn't even much of a traveler himself: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hakluyt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hakluyt)</comment></comment>


On this shirt is the name of the person who bought the last one - <AUTHOR> https://www.thisisashirt.com/

<comment><USER2> This is what you get if you try this from Canada:

{"__PHP_Incomplete_Class_Name":"EasyPost\\\Error","httpStatus":400,"httpBody":"{\"error\":\"Invalid State Code. \"}","jsonBody":{"error":"Invalid State Code. "},"param":"I"}

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Free to answer any questions about the project, making the shirts, getting it automated with making the shirts, process, anything. Lose to hear feedback!

<comment><USER3> Interesting idea.

What if I order two shirts in consecutive order? Am I not myself?

<comment><AUTHOR> This question is one for the ages my dear friend.</comment></comment></comment>


When Is "ACID" ACID? Rarely (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bailis.org/blog/when-is-acid-acid-rarely/ <comment><USER2> One of my favorite things about VoltDB, as one of the people who built it, is that its serializable isolation is actually a fundimental part of the architecture.

Many of these systems get slower as you turn up the isolation. VoltDB is faster _because_ of isolation.

More here: [http://voltdb.com/products/featuresbenefits/reasons- behind-v...](http://voltdb.com/products/featuresbenefits/reasons-behind- voltdb-architecture)

<comment><USER3> I've heard VoltDB has had a lot of problems with this, actually: [https://forum.voltdb.com/showthread.php?552-Nodes-stop- talki...](https://forum.voltdb.com/showthread.php?552-Nodes-stop-talking-to- each-other-and-form-independent-clusters)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, as Ryan said, no split brains possible in VoltDB for quite some time. We originally had split brain protection something you could enable for cloud deployments, but figured it wouldn't be worth the tradeoff if you had 5 machines in a rack connected directly. It turns out we made a bad choice and we fixed it.

Unless you're speaking of something else you heard about on a more recent version?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be more accurate to say, several SQL databases (that you may or may not have heard) of don't provide full ACID in the strongest sense, while MySQL, Postgres, and MS SQL Server all do if you pass the right flags.

In a world plagued by NoDBs, it seems like a very small point.

<comment><USER5> I found the article pretty poor in general. It equates use of lower isolation levels with use of NoSQL, despite the fact that RC still provides dramatically higher guarantees than a typical NoSQL DB - particularly when you add in the ability to use foreign keys.

Further, it counts 'well understood and quantifiable' consistency flaws as a negative, where in fact the whole point is that you can trade off isolation for performance in ways that are easy to mitigate for certain applications. By contrast, the consistency tradeoffs you make when using a NoSQL DBs are clearly rather poorly understood by the community at large.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _The textbook definition of ACID Isolation is serializability_

Not really: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID)

He confuses ACID and isolation levels. Typical internet FUD.

<comment><USER7> Agreed.

Also, Microsoft SQL Server does support snapshot isolation. See: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/tcbchxcb(v=vs.110)....](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/tcbchxcb\(v=vs.110\).aspx)

<comment><USER8> But not for indexes...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You know you're being sold something solid if the vendor start talking about multi-phase commit and/or multi-version currency control.

If they just splash you ACID all over as a mantra to tell you their database is reliable, be wary.

For databases that persist to disk, it is for example not possible to do that asynchronously and be ACID. You need, at the very least, to journal every write before confirming the write.

Last but not least, it is not possible to have 100% bulletproof transactions. Even with 2PC, or 3PC. There is always a windows of opportunity for a failure to screw your transaction.

</comment><comment><USER10> PostgreSQL uses serializable snapshot isolation (SSI) for the SERIALIZABLE level, which is a relatively new technique that doesn't have much of a performance penalty.

READ COMMITTED will probably remain the default forever though, because many applications aren't prepared for serialization failures (which should normally be retried).

</comment><comment><USER11> Junk article. The important vendors are ACID. Just because the default isolation level isn't serializable doesn't warrant the conclusion.

One amusing thing is that every now and then there is an article stating that certain relational dbs aren't webscale because the default isolation level is too high.

</comment><comment><USER10> You have to consider the capabilities in addition to the performance/guarantees trade-off.

A key/value store with SERIALIZABLE transactions isn't as useful as a system that allows multiple-statement transactions but only offers REPEATABLE READ.

</comment><comment><USER10> Even though some anomalies are possible, SQL does a great job of eliminating some of the trickiest bugs, particularly on the error paths.

</comment><comment><USER12> Did anyone else expect this to be an article about the drug LSD and the unreliability of its composition when being purchased at the street level?

<comment><USER13> Yes because this is a big issue. Many research chemicals are sold as being LSD. Though the effects can be similar, some of them have unknown side effects and a much lower 'overdose' level. It's practically impossible to overdose on LSD but something like NBOME can be dangerous in as little as 10 hits.

<comment><USER14> NBOME can be dangerous in two hits. And at smaller doses then you've taken previously.

It's an interesting series though, very visual.</comment></comment></comment>


Panasonic Develops 123dB Wide-Dynamic-Range Image Sensor - <AUTHOR> http://news.panasonic.com/press/news/data/2016/02/en160203-5/en160203-5.html <comment><USER2> > 2\. 123dB simultaneous-capture wide dynamic range (that is 100x wider than > that of common silicon image sensors*3), while maintaining the conventional > chip size, due to our original " simultaneous-capture structure ".

I'd like to see a concrete product. Even if the dynamic range data is right, there might be catches marketing conveniently forgot to mention.

123 dB, so 20.4 stops? 100x corresponds to 6.6 stops. Most consumer level DSLRs have about 12-15 stops, so the math is about right.

If it's really this wide dynamic range, it's pretty trivial to get a good exposure with a camera with this sensor in. At least it's going to be hard to burn details short of pointing this at a bright light source, such as the sun.

To understand what this means on a concrete level, here's a EV (stop) value table with typical (lighting) scenes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value#Tabulated_expos...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value#Tabulated_exposure_values)

</comment><comment><USER3> That is ingenious. By having alternating small and large photosensitive areas coupled to fixed size charge storage devices, you get high and low sensitivity pixels with high commonality.

In theory you could have an exponential series to have even more dynamic range.

Or alternatively, if you use powers of two for the sizes, you could use 1-bit sensors, though you probably couldn't do a high bit depth that way. But it'd be extremely fast, as there wouldn't need to be a real A/D conversion. Maybe concentric pixels of varying sizes...</comment>


Some things I learned so far in bootstrapping my part-time startup - <AUTHOR> http://farmdawgnation.com/blog/2013/5/4/bootstrap-checkpoint-zero

<comment><USER2> Nice post, and the home page is well designed but it's hard to tell what the product does without a screenshot or walkthrough of some sort.

It sounds reminiscent of HelloBar although you say in your post that it isn't like HelloBar at all - bad sign. I'd also recommend saying explicitly a few of the customers you're targeting e.g. bloggers, companies with large audiences etc etc.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback man! And yeah, I guess part of our problem with the Hellobar comparison is that we're solving a problem they've been solving for a small subset of their users for awhile.

They're really optimized for "I have a user on a page, and I want them to go to X." X could be a product information page, or a page to add their email to a list. We're optimized for "I have a user on a page, and I want them to put their email on my X list so they can get my updates." where X is the name of your email marketing service. That distinction means we can get some tighter integration and a few more UX brownie points for that use case than would make sense for Hellobar to implement.

<comment><USER3> Aha.

If passive email is what your product is for then you need to:

       1. make the bottom bar slightly bigger
       2. allow me to be able to add a picture of the lead magnet im offering
       3. the bar should slide up after after 1-2 seconds

This will result in a 3x bump in conversion(if i remember correctly), when compared to the side bar opt in form on most blogs, so if you were getting 50 subscribers a day, this will increase it to about 200.

You are essentially a saas version of <http://instantslideup.com/> and your target audience is BLOGGERS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the ideas. We've had all of these ideas come up before. 1 is a clear possibility in the near future (or possibly the ability for it to be configurable) and 3 is configurable by the user (I also want to add a scrolling trigger to it as well, but that's not on the schedule yet).

The one that's the most problematic is the image. I've struggled with a way to implement such a feature and avoid it from being gimmicky-looking. Or, rather, some up with mechanisms to prevent the user from making it look gimmicky. I'm open to any ideas/suggestions around that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read your blog post and the front page of Anchor Tab and I still have no idea what the product does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like I mentioned in the blog post, we have a messaging problem. Though the blog post really wasn't intended to communicate that message. Ha.

Our product is an email marketing toolbar that sits the bottom of your blog or website and can accept email addresses onto an e-mail mailing list. So, let's say you run a company called Widgets, Inc, and a part of that is you have an email list that gets an email each time you post a new blog. You could add an Anchor Tab to your page as an elegant way of getting users onto that email list. (They enter their email onto the bar at the bottom of the page and it's added to your Constant Contact or MailChimp list.)

Does that make sense or am I just perpetuating the fail?

<comment><USER5> I think it would really, really help to have a few example images of what the damn thing actually _looks like_ on a webpage. People are inherently visual creatures and imho this would go a long way.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good thought. There is an example on the page, but we _do_ need to draw some more attention to it. Maybe we'll do it in style using the <blink> tag. ;)

But seriously, thanks again, this is really helpful!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the idea, it seems like there is a pretty large, mostly unexplored market there, but the thing that personally makes me pause as a potential customer is that _I have no idea how to write those emails._

If you could create a micro-course that illustrates what a mailing list should be like, or even bake some kind of "meta wizard" into your product, I'd be much more willing to sign up.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an awesome idea. I'm going to pass on a direct link to this comment to the Cirion guys. That's right in their wheel house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> ". As it turns out, we had enough people enjoy the beta and sign on after the 30 day trial that we're covering our monthly systems operations expenses. "

This is great, congrats. Would be willing to share more information about this? Conversion rates? Were these "real" customers or people that you know who paid?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not going to go into conversion rates and exact numbers for the moment. I avoided that in the blog post mostly because we haven't, as a team, had the conversation about how much we want to publish in that regard, and I don't want to make any unilateral decisions about it.

I will say that most of the current customers do _know_ us, but a majority of them know us because they have some business relationship with my partners, Cirion Group. It makes sense because it was these same clients who first made the need for such a product known to my partners, and who, however indirectly, sparked the idea that made this happen. Also, most of our advertising has been word of mouth up until this point and will likely stay that way until we fix the messaging problem.

So, do they know us? Yes. Are they are posse of friends? No. There's no quid pro quo. They're people who, like us, are running a business, and aren't likely to buy something because it'll make our socks roll up and down.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. Thanks for sharing.</comment></comment></comment>


What are good subscribe rates for email newsletters? - <AUTHOR> http://www.launchbit.com/blog/what-are-good-subscribe-rates-for-email-newsletters/

<comment><USER2> I didn't get anything of value here. The bullet points:

* Most lists have a subscription rate of 1-2% * Most lists have an unsubscription rate of 1-3% * Not surprisingly, most lists aren't growing at all or are growing very slowly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I missing something or are there no units? Sub and unsub rate per... mailing, week, month..?

My newsletters consistently run an unsub rate of about 0.15% per issue (so about 0.6% per month). And probably a growth rate of about 3.5% per month.

</comment><comment><USER4> If your ideas are intriguing, people will _wish_ to be subscribed to your newsletter.</comment>


We Are Sovereign - <AUTHOR> https://www.wearesovereign.net/ <comment><USER2> I want a pony.

No, scratch that, I want TWO ponies.

Direct democracies like this are a recipe for disaster and no "politician" taking this pledge is going to get any kind of help from the entrenched system which will be quite hostile to this "radicalism" of listening to the electorate. It doesn't make the currency of politics visible: money, power and intent. Even if somehow, somewhere, a politician who took the Sovereign pledge was elected, they would fall in a blaze of shame when a scandal derails their brand.

You cannot delegate your desired leadership to a third-party that cannot be "instantly fired" from the office---this is the formula that for decades, even centuries, enables systemic corruption. These ideas come and go cyclically, but the corruption and power always remains with those who play the game the way it has been played.

So anarchists will always continue to sit back and watch the trains collide on time, as the State intends.

<comment><USER3> Tell that to Switzerland...</comment></comment>


Zika Is Coming - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/opinion/zika-is-coming.html <comment><USER2> I take the top-level comments so far as an indication that -- if they aren't exactly afraid -- deep down inside, people are definitely feeling a certain amount of anxiety about the sudden rise of the Zika virus, and more the the point, what it really means about this new world we we're lurching into. A world which isn't coming to an end -- but slowly but surely, from one day to the next, it's a world which is _changing_ , and generally for the worse. And in which ideas we might have taken for granted until now -- like "Hey, I could just move to Miami, and start a family, if I wanted" \-- suddenly become quite complicated, indeed, and fraught with uncertainty.

And unfortunately, the only tool they know of to defend themselves with is snark.

<comment><USER3> _it 's a world which is changing, and generally for the worse_

Ah, but this is objectively wrong, by almost every metric (crime, security, murder, health, longevity, happiness, poverty). What _is_ getting worse is the general level of fear, and this comes from the fact that we can hear bad news faster and more generally than ever before, combined with our evolved nature to implicitly feel that everything that we hear about might personally affect us (see Dunbar's number), and clickbait tactics of news editors and the need to fill the 24 hour news cycle with sensationalism. Fear causes stress, and both fear and stress cause physically and socially damaging effects.

To wit: I never met anyone affected (directly or indirectly) by the recent Ebola outbreak in any social environment (online or offline) to which I belong, but almost everyone I spoke to about it was afraid of it. That's not to diminish the effect on the (globally) few people it impacts, which is horrible and terrifying, so the imbalance is not at all universal. However, it's a fair assumption that _fear_ of Zika is considerably more dangerous to the average person (globally) than the risk of the virus itself. Multiply this across all the other things that people are afraid of but that are actually less dangerous now than at any time in our recorded past, and you end up with _fear_ being the most damaging change for the worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Notice that the hot zone spans across jurisdictions that deliberately opted out of Medi-Cal, and generally opposed public health measures in general. Sad, because if Zika gets rolling there, the people who will most need access to health care will be the working poor.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have they actually proved that Zika is even causing microcephaly?

</comment><comment><USER6> It's either DDT or Ospreys. One comes with micro-cephalic children. The other dooms an endangered species to extinction.

Speak now, or forever hold your peace.

<comment><USER7> DDT is still used in the third world, and mosquitoes are evolving resistance to it. So choosing DDT will eventually end with extinct ospreys, and DDT- resistant mosquitoes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This isn't news. It's fear-mongering.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you are so worried, don't have a kid. The world is overpopulated enough as it is.

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only who's noticed that there is always one and exactly one major disease of which we should all be mortally afraid?

<comment><USER11> Because health agencies pour tons of work and money into preventing their spread before the next major disease can hit us.

Or would you rather a modern Spanish flu pandemic kill half a billion people?

<comment><USER12> We're probably due for a good culling. There'll be eight billion of us before long.

Time to go play Plague, Inc, again...

<comment><USER10> It's OK. As long as we are all morbidly afraid, we will be immune.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"5 Companies I'd Invest in at Any Valuation" - Rob Go - <AUTHOR> http://robgo.org/2012/05/22/5-companies-i-would-invest-in-at-any-price-2012-edition/

<comment><USER2> It's hard to take someone seriously when they say they would invest in a company at _any_ valuation. That's not investing, that's making a donation.

<comment><USER3> I think he just wanted a catchy title. I like his call on eventbrite, I never considered it, but they are doing a really good job in that category.

<comment><USER2> I agree that he wanted a catchy title. It distracts from the point he's trying to make, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The Qwerty layout also was designed to actually slow down the speed at which we type in order to prevent typewriter keys from jamming."

A myth, most likely false: <http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if he'd be willing to buy futures, I'd sell 'em to him ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know 3 of the 5 mentioned and no links provided.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think Craigslist deserves to be on the list.</comment>


Every Noise at Once - <AUTHOR> http://everynoise.com/ <comment><USER2> _Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 3,294 genres by Spotify as of 2019-07-29. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier._

Lots of other cool Spotify-scraping projects by the author at the bottom.

<comment><USER3> Interesting choice of dimensions... So basically how human and how rhythmically distinct.

Edit: so out of curiosity I looked at the bottom right corner and found "tanci". Odd name. Clicked on it, and it's Chinese spoken word artists. Incidentally I practice Chinese so it's perfect.

<comment><USER4> > Interesting choice of dimensions...

IIRC, there are 14 dimensions in total, but it's impossible to represent all of them on a page. So he went for up-down, left-right, clusters, and colors to represent a subset of them.

Source: used to work at Spotify.

<comment><USER5> What do the colours mean?

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, I can't remember :( COuld be rythm or number of instruments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of the old school flash app Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. Man was that thing ahead of it's time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishkur%27s_Guide_to_Electronic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishkur%27s_Guide_to_Electronic_Music)

<comment><USER7> [https://twitter.com/Ishkur23](https://twitter.com/Ishkur23) A new version is coming out in a couple of weeks(supposedly).

<comment><USER8> Oh my god, no way! That guide shaped my entire music taste. I'd spend fucking hours trawling through it.

One thing that's really funny is now with my current taste, going back on there and re-listening to the clips of artists that are now in my mainstay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Talk about false advertising. I couldn't find the button that plays all of the samples at the same time.

<comment><USER10> I was hoping for that as well ... however the thing that I found was much better than my expectations. So I think it's ultimately okay.

If you still feel that you didn't get what you were looking for ... here's an acceptable substitute perhaps?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5h3qXAQOQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5h3qXAQOQI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get it. I mean, I understand what I'm looking at; a word cloud of music genres that is each linked to a sample. That part I got. But when you label your website 'Every Noise at Once'... I kind of expect to hear multiple (perhaps not 'every') noises at the same time.

<comment><USER12> I was expecting to just hear white noise. Isn't that what all frequencies is added together, like the color white is all colors added together?

<comment><USER13> White noise is equal energy across all frequencies linearly. Sounds hissy because there are more frequencies included within each musical octave as you go higher.

A more even-sounding spectrum is pink noise which is equal energy per base 2 logarithmic bandwidth. Sounds like a waterfall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The bottom of the page is a little weird. "Byzantine" is not Russian Liturgical Music.

This is Byzantine Chant: [https://youtu.be/Bs--5yMg1g0](https://youtu.be/Bs-- 5yMg1g0)

Also, Georgian Polyphony did not involve strings as a general rule. There were regional exceptions, but early Slavic polyphony was generally a capella.

Here's a good example of Gerogian polyphony: [https://v-s.mobi/elia-lrdei- princeton-georgian-choirs-fall-2...](https://v-s.mobi/elia-lrdei-princeton- georgian-choirs-fall-2011-02:19)

Sorry to nitpick, but I hate to see a fascinating corner of music ignored. Happy Listening!

<comment><USER15> Spotify, and other commercial online sources, have long failed to get genres like "classical" right. It sounds like they're screwing up "Byzantine" as well, which is sadly unsurprising.

<comment><USER16> Well it classifies Three Dog Night and Grand Funk Railroad as "Southern Rock" so it is certainly not perfect for other genre's either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Where this site really shines is when you get into a genre that links to a series of linked Spotify playlists. Pretty awesome for exploring Intro, Edge, Pulse, playlists of genres of music you like. It's great for discovery of new artists.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I've been searching for a specific genre (what to even call it) for a long time and I feel like this site just gave me a treasure trove of artists I didn't know about.

+1 from me

<comment><USER19> Same here, in a specific genre I like all the artists were clumped together.

Would be cool to see something like this on song-level, not artist/group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Filthstep didn't sound anything like what I was expecting. But I didn't really _know_ what to expect. So then I selected some genres for which I could confidently propose an exemplary piece. Ragga jungle: precisely correct. Chicago blues: nailed it. Ragtime: the very archetype. Schranz: maybe that's the intro of a track that eventually meanders into schranz, but the clip on hand is way off. Swedish pop: pretty good. Glitch hop: no way. Gospel singers: US centric, but OK. Nigerian Hip Hop: yeah that's sort of valid in the sense that 2Baba is a Nigerian hip hop producer, but that sample is neither especially Nigerian nor particularly hippy-hoppy. Electro swing: all thumbs up. Bury St Edmunds Indie: A truly sublime blend of Sudbury angst and Lavenham melancholy, virtouosly caramelised in Ipswich je-ne-sais-quoi. (Yes of course I'm joking about that last one; the combination of specific location with vague genre is just absurd.)

This seems like a useful tool for discoveling new sounds, but when it comes to finding out what Polish free jazz really sounds like, I wouldn't trust it one bit.

<comment><USER21> I believe Bury St Edmunds _does_ have an established indie scene... Not sure if it developed it's own sound though?

<comment><USER22> Bury St Edmonds is musically interesting.

[https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/68n44v/the-ill-fated- tale...](https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/68n44v/the-ill-fated-tale-of-bury- st-edmunds-the-british-market-town-john-peel-dubbed-the-new-seattle)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Previous HN Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10269685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10269685)

It's a great music discovery service that I've used several times in the past. I've found some good artists this way, and really wish someone would build something similar for fiction books. The only downside is it's tied exclusively to Spotify.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've been told multiple times that I don't really have a taste in music, because I listen to a confusing mix of genres.

This is perfect for me. So much more to discover.

<comment><USER25> You're not the only one. I have tastes in music, even strong ones, but they don't tend to follow the way genres seem to be split at _all_.

Defining a genre by its characteristic instrument set, for instance, doesn't match how I tend to react to things very well, but it's a fairly popular way of separating genres, it seems. (I'm not saying I don't understand the use of that metric, it's very, well, _available_ , in the sense of "availability heuristic". But I do not _personally_ find it all that useful.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here I was expecting silence, as each sound - including each sound's inverse - was played simultaneously.

<comment><USER27> Depends how you take the sum!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_series#Absolute_conv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_series#Absolute_convergence)

[edit] See my comment below: my joke is about the fact that, depending on the _order_ in which you sum an infinite sequence of waveforms, you can create a sequence that converges to _any_ sound you want [1] (as long as those waveforms together span the full frequency space). Note also that a sum over a truly continuous space of arbitrary waveforms is even more ill-defined.

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

<comment> ctrl-j Sound waves are physical. You cannot change the empirical outcome by doing the math differently.

Sound waves are indeed cancelled out by their inverse.

<comment><USER28> Isn't the inverse of a sound the same sound?

<comment><USER29> It's the same sound, but out of phase, so they cancel out. Think operating principle of noise-canceling headphones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I use this site a lot, it is pretty good for finding new music especially new genres of music. I discovered Arab Metal last week which was pretty good.

<comment><USER31> My friends' band is in there as "Boston metal". Cool stuff!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> For an interactive music map with bands, check out Music-Map:

[https://www.music-map.com](https://www.music-map.com)

You start at a band of your choice and then can travel all the bands in the world.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's sad that it only has one example for tanci, a genre I discovered due to this list, that aside from wikipedia is barely documented on the internet. After some searching I've managed to recover about 6 hours / 58 tracks of tanci in a spotify playlist -- most of it under the 'various artists' tag, one of the reasons why it was difficult to find any artists, I expect. I'm sure spotify has more of it and that it's uncategorized and badly labelled.

You can find it here, if anyone is interested: [https://open.spotify.com/user/gallefray/playlist/6CzafKwRUi5...](https://open.spotify.com/user/gallefray/playlist/6CzafKwRUi5UcBqsv3VAPF?si=dnlleoNJSsGyBLMoZx- vTw)

</comment><comment><USER34> This site just gave me a nostalgic flashback to the type of thing I'd stumble across (heh) via StumbleUpon.

</comment><comment><USER35> How are these genres being plotted? What are the axes? What are the text colors?

<comment><USER36> At the bottom of the page it describes this a little better:

>The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.

Not sure about the colors though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> You guys should check out Quebec related music :) Some pretty good bands up here.

</comment><comment><USER38> The artist search is very picky. E.g., "cat ctevens" does not work. "yusuf" does not work. But "yusuf / cat stevens" works.

Some of the genre memberships seem odd. Barry McGuire is bubblegum pop? As is Zager & Evans? Roy Orbison? That whole category seems to be a weird mashup of what I'd expect in bubblegum pop plus a random dump of '60s rock.

For artists that appear in more than one genre, it seems to use the same sample clip for all of them, so don't be put off from checking out an artist in a genre you like because the sample doesn't fit.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow! I'm having flashbacks to Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music.

</comment><comment><USER7> The examples this site chooses aren't the greatest... It maps an entire artist to a genre, so when one artist makes multiple genres of music the examples end up being very off. Take dubstep for example, the artist they chose for the example is Skream, one of the people who popularized dubstep, but the song they chose is his latest release "Otto's Chant" which is tech house, not dubstep. Skream hasn't even made any dubstep in quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER40> Missing a few modern genres such as Bubblegum Bass and Deconstructed Club. Would be interested to see what this site has to say about those genres.

</comment><comment><USER41> Reminds me of [https://www.surfr.fm/music](https://www.surfr.fm/music)

</comment><comment><USER42> Somebody could probably write a program to generate new EDM sub-sub-genres. Somebody probably already has.

Good problem for adversarial learning. Train one ML system to rate EDM, trying to match some metric like total sales. Second system tries to generate EDM which gets high scores from the first system.

</comment><comment><USER43> One of my favorite things to do is listen to music in foreign languages. (Turkish pop is my favorite. Check out Tarkan or Ismail YK if your ears are curious.) This site is a fantastic way to discover more music from around the world. Great resource!

</comment><comment><USER44> The title, if not the content, reminded me of this awesomeness: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=wanpSQXU_3Y](https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=wanpSQXU_3Y)

</comment><comment><USER45> I was disappointed that I didn't see Bagpipe Folk Dubstep. ;)

Here is an example in case you thought I was making up this genre:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-s8wefKlA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-s8wefKlA)

</comment><comment><USER46> I wish the clustering made any sense at all. "Lullabye" and "marching band" are nearest neighbors?

</comment><comment><USER47> So many bands from the "progressive alternative" genre are now either defuct or stopped releasing material.

<comment><USER48> same for this genre called "classical", whatever that is.

</comment></comment><comment> 867-5309 Ukrainian Choir are nnexed to nothing

</comment><comment><USER49> Incomplete

for starters, no Kwela, Mbaqanga, Marabi, or Highlife. Allthough here is Kwaito

</comment><comment><USER50> Amused to find Pakistani Pop right next to Christmas music and Polka.

</comment><comment> ryan-allen I love this, I am going to discover so much new music!</comment>


PayPal, Visa rival Revolution Money gets $42 mln from Goldman, others - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/americasIpoNews/idUSN0536202620090406

<comment><USER2> I have a Revolution card. I got $50 off at Buy.com a year ago, so I signed up. Haven't used it since. The rate was absurd -- about 27% for a guy with a good credit score. So, I think they're just transferring the cost from merchant to consumer, at least for those who keep a balance.

I don't use the card because I have other cards with good "rewards" equal to a percent or two of purchases. If a merchant charges me the same price for a widget no matter what card I use, why wouldn't I use the one with the bribe? The obvious solution for merchants is to offer a percent or two off the normal price, but the Visa/Mastercard cartel requires the same price to be charged to consumers no matter if a Visa/MC is used or not (IIRC). So, Revolution would have to have market penetration close to Visa/MC to convince merchants to opt out of the cartel's grasp. Unlikely to happen without a lot more than $42M spent in marketing.

So, while I hope somebody disrupts the current state of affairs, I don't understand how Revolution thinks its going to pull it off.

<comment><USER3> Actually, just being able to keep more of the transaction should be incentive enough for merchants. All that's really needed is a high enough consumer buy- in to make it worthwhile to deploy.

Credit card processing fees are ridiculously high given how much of the risk is offloaded onto merchants and other parties.

<comment><USER2> Getting merchants to sign up should be really easy. But, how do you get them to pull the plug on Visa/MC? They'd have to be sure that they wouldn't lose too much revenue, and that would require a significant portion of the card- holding population to have a revolution card. And, you'd have to deal with corporations that only have one of Visa/MC/AmEx for corp purchases.

I suppose merchants could feature Revolution prominently to increase its use, but they can't make it too hard to use other cards or they'll lose out. And, given my 1%-2% bribe for using my Visa/MC, why wouldn't I look for the little button down in the corner?

Discover (Sears) was able to introduce a new card, but they too the opposite route -- they bribed consumers to use it. So, even though it has basically the same fees as the others (IIRC), consumers could see an effectively lower price through its use.

<comment><USER3> The bribe in this case is free consumer to consumer transfers (and I don't think this bribe should be underestimated), but you're right, savvy consumers will still just use their rewards cards and continue to be subsidized by those who don't have rewards cards.

I don't think anyone will pull the plug on Visa/MC any time soon, but more competition would be nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the article it mentioned that they will do user to user transfers for free. That alone makes me want to sign up, and get my clients to sign up too.

<comment><USER5> They use free p2p payments as a loss leader to up-sell their credit cards. It's a pretty interesting model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great news. PayPal and the Big Card companies really need some competition.

</comment><comment><USER7> wow, they charge no interchange fee and only 0.50% for transaction processing and settlement. i have a similar idea (a new payment system/credit card) but was thinking to charge about 1% processing fee... need to recalculate my fee and rev. est.

<comment><USER2> You had better have a lot of capital. Introducing a a new product into a space where network effects create barriers to entry requires significant cash.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Blank – A stack-based programming language I wrote 21 years ago - <AUTHOR> https://esolangs.org/wiki/Blank <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote Blank back in the spring of 1997 when I was a senior in high school. I had gotten kind of into a programming language called Befunge ([https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge)), and I decided to write my own weird programming language. I'll admit that it was _highly_ derivative of Befunge, but I threw in my own little twists. For example, Befunge programs were written and executed in a fixed 2 dimentional grid, while my language was 1 dimensional and you could add and remove segments from the program. It was the first C program of any size that I had ever written.

Blank lacks the inspired audacity of languages like Brainfuck and Whitespace. It has almost none of the playfulness of Befunge. Missing, too, is the outright user-hostily of INTERCAL. It was bad, but so mediocre in its badness that it wasn't really worth remembering for most people. But it was mine.

I had never taken a programming class and I'd never really had any sort of adult who could help me much with programming at that time, so this was basically something that I did through sheer stupid stubbornness. The folks on the Befunge mailing list were nice to me and were very polite in the face of my teenage ignorance and over-confidence. In retrospect I probably could have spent the time doing something better, but one of the wonderful things about being young is that you can waste some time exploring.

<comment><USER2> I aplogize if it's mentioned in the wiki, but do you still have the source code?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly no, lost to the dusts of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this. I was looking at adding some form of simple flow control to my stack based texture maker. [http://fingswotidun.com/stackie](http://fingswotidun.com/stackie)

This gives me a good insight into how to go.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh, me too! I wrote this 8 years ago: [https://esolangs.org/wiki/BAM128](https://esolangs.org/wiki/BAM128)

Although it's much less impressive than Blank :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Not nearly as interesting, but I've written a silly version of brainfuck in the past where you used the command line arguments to write your program: [https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/bin/optf...](https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/bin/optfuck.c)

</comment><comment><USER6> It looks pretty cool ... I tried to follow the link to the homepage (for the documentation) but it appears to be gone.</comment>


MIT's new nylon muscles could lead to actual Westworld hosts - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/mits-new-nylon-muscles-could-lead-to-actual-westworld-hosts/ <comment><USER2> These are very different from human muscle fibers which actually shrink and expand. Seems a little less useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably, but some initial solutions are worse than natural design, it is only a starting point. And of course it could be helpful for some kind of special situations.</comment></comment>