HTTP/3: the past, the present, and the future - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-future/ <comment><USER2> A beautifully written and illustrated blog post! Cloudflare is raising the bar for documentation on the web.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey @jgrahamc, just a heads-up, the output of the curl request in the "Using curl" section is not up to date:

      alt-svc: h3-22=":443"; ma=86400

I was surprise you didn't deploy draft-23 despite quiche supporting it, so I checked:

      $ curl -vs https://blog.cloudflare.com/ 2>&1 | grep alt-svc
      < alt-svc: h3-23=":443"; ma=86400

Could you pass it along?

<comment><USER4> Nice catch! As you've noticed, we plan to keep tracking the new drafts as they come out. 22 was the current version at the time we drafted this post, and 23 is now live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are there any benchmarks comparing HTTP/1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3?

<comment><USER6> Not aware of benchmarks, but specification-wise I consider HTTP2 to be a regression.

Sure there are good things about it, and many great enhancements, but the larger mechanic of the protocol (the most important part really) has been significantly worsened. I'd rate them as follows:

HTTP3 > HTTP1.1 > HTTP2

QUIC is an amazing protocol, I have no complaints about it, and I'm very happy they decided to go with it for HTTP3. However the decision to make HTTP2 traffic go all through a single TCP socket is horrible, and makes the protocol very brittle under even the slightest network decay or packet loss. Any level of head-of-line blocking severely degrades the entire stream, even for unrelated requests.

Sure it CAN work better than HTTP1.1 under ideal network conditions, but any network degradation is severely amplified, to a point where even for traffic within a datacenter can amplify network distruption and cause an outage.

HTTP3 however is a refinement on those ideas, and gets pretty much everything right afaik.

<comment><USER7> I wish they would target a real issues of http. For example adding a proper session support and getting rid of cookies.

<comment><USER8> Do you seriously expect Google and Cloudflate to make basic web development easier when they are making tons of money by "managing" its complexity for others? It's in their best interest to make hosting your own content or using smaller hosting providers absolute hell. Just like it's in Google's best interest to make browsers so complex that other browser devs just give up and Chrome derivatives become the only choice.

I'm predicting that eventually Google will start deranking HTTP 1.1 websites.

<comment><USER9> I have no idea how cookies are supposed to having an impact on hosting in Google's cloud vs your own hardware, or why Google would care about people where something like that is in any way significant.

<comment><USER10> _> I have no idea how cookies are supposed to having an impact on hosting in Google's cloud vs your own hardware_

You do not see how lack of built-in authentication increases complexity of implementing your own website as opposed to "outsourcing" stuff to Gmail, Google Docs and so on? You don't see the zillion "sign in with Google" buttons all over the web? You don't see how cookies are abused for tracking, which benefits Google orders of magnitude more than it would a smaller company?

<comment><USER11> Do you even know what "sign in with Google" means?

It's in no way easier than adding keycloak authentication for example, which is another (selfhosted) external authentication solution.

Social auth isnt there to make authentication easier for the website owner. He still has to do everything he'd have to do if he didn't use it.

It's there for the users, do they don't need to remember a bazillion passwords

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's kind of amazing seeing positive things from monopolies and evergreen updates. These institutions can roll out things fast. It's possible in hardware too-- remember Bell Labs in it's hayday?

</comment><comment><USER13> from the article: [https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche](https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche) (QUIC & HTTP3 lib in Rust)

<comment><USER14> It's been really great to see so much QUIC and HTTP/3 stuff in Rust. We have quiche, there's also [https://crates.io/crates/quinn](https://crates.io/crates/quinn), and Mozilla's [https://github.com/mozilla/neqo](https://github.com/mozilla/neqo)

With my "Rust core team member" hat on, normally I'd want to see one good go- to library for an ecosystem. With my "I love web protocols" hat on, I want to see dozens of independent implementations. I wear hat #2 more than hat #1 when it comes to HTTP/3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> From a adoption perspective, how much is adopting HTTP/2 or /3 different from adopting a new IP "version" i.e. IPv6?

<comment><USER4> It's much easier to get the adoption flywheel moving for new application and transport protocols than things farther down in the OSI stack.

To get critical mass for HTTP/3 we'll need large server implementations (eg Cloudflare) and large client implementations (eg Chrome and Firefox) to build support and drive adoption. Which is what is happening!

Contrast this to v6 adoption which requires software support _and_ support from hardware vendors, network operators, etc.

<comment><USER15> I hope I didn't miss this from the article but how do client and server "negotiate" which protocol to use?

<comment><USER16> Already in HTTP servers can send an "Alt-Svc" header which proposes a different way that clients might reach the same resources. So one thing that can happen goes in full like this:

1\. User type [http://example.com](http://example.com) into browser

1a. Browser does DNS lookup example.com AAAA or A -> 10.20.30.40

2\. Browser connects to 10.20.30.40 TCP port 80 and speaks HTTP/1.1 over that port, announcing Host: example.com where it gets given a 301 redirect to [https://example.com](https://example.com) (and HSTS pre-load would skip this step)

3\. Browser connects to 10.20.30.40 TCP port 443, using SNI for example.com where it is offered an ALPN option h2 (meaning HTTP/2.0) and it takes that option and speaks HTTP/2.0

4\. Browser receives Alt-svc: h3=":12345" which is an announcement that this same HTTPS service is available as HTTP/3 using UDP port 12345 from the same IP

5\. Now for any future resources from [https://example.com/](https://example.com/) the browser knows it could get them using HTTP/3

In future, maybe, perhaps, a new DNS record (only really practical via DPRIVE such as DoH since useless middleboxes will probably make this undeployable without) will do what the SRV record was trying to do, but this time focused on HTTP servers in particular. So with that record (again, not even a draft exists for this yet AFAIK):

1\. User types [http://example.com/](http://example.com/) into browser

1a. Browser uses DoH to ask HTTP-SERVICE DNS lookup example.com -> big pile of stuff about how to get this service. If the DNS lookup fails it tries asking for A or AAAA instead.

2\. Browser intuits from the big pile of stuff to do QUIC to 10.20.30.40 UDP port 12345, and then speaks HTTP/3.

<comment><USER17> Nice overview!

There is a draft [1] that would support Alt-Svc in DNS. Lots to consider there but it is being presented to IETF.

[1] - [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nygren-dnsop-svcb- httpssvc...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nygren-dnsop-svcb-httpssvc-00)

<comment><USER18> That looks _very interesting_ , but, like SRV records have been studiously ignored in the past, I doubt that Google, Cloudflare, etc al. will allow this to be the norm, since this would eliminate much of the value proposition which Cloudflare has, and also partially drain the moat which Google has constructed around itself.

<comment><USER16> Maybe take another glance at the "very interesting" draft? Those named authors are from Google and one of Cloudflare's competitors, Akamai.

Of course you can imagine these are rogue actors off developing technology that's hostile to their employer's needs. But, like, Occam's razor. It seems simpler to assume that these outfits see improving the place where they make money (the web) as just good business.

<comment><USER18> I'll belive it when I see it. SRV has been around for ages, and the arguments given for not using SRV in HTTP/2, QUIC etc. have been weak and unconvincing, despite its obvious benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like a decent number of servers (~80,000) already advertise support for it:

[https://www.shodan.io/search?query=http+Alt- svc+h3](https://www.shodan.io/search?query=http+Alt-svc+h3)

</comment><comment><USER20> Are there any efforts to solve caching if encrypted counted? Currently all https traffic has to be handled by originating server directly. If there is a standard to verify document signature, clients could just cache the public key of originating website and use that to verify signature and decrypt the content. This seems to be totally ignored and http2/3 seem to be solving the wrong problem.

<comment><USER16> Such efforts are contra-indicated by privacy concerns. You'd need to have everybody agree what we're happy to just let everyone see, then that goes in the cache, and anybody who wishes we didn't know that they've just looked at, say, the Wikipedia page for HIV regrets everybody else's decision at their leisure.

Anything you decide needs to be private doesn't benefit from this cache. So, maybe we can cache the little Y-combinator logo, but not anything anybody wrote? The Youtube help pages, but not any videos? It just doesn't seem like there's any plausible way this isn't either horribly invasive or largely useless or both.

<comment><USER20> You are right, but there are other cases like say distribution of common JS libraries. The way it is working currently is via CDN, even then the client could fetch the same object from different sources. Instead if you could describe the object as some sort of signed E-Tag, then the client can just reuse previously downloaded/authenticated/decrypted copy. Of course your actual bank statement should not be distributed this way.

<comment><USER21> The privacy concerns aren't that easy to solve.

For example, let's say site G, well known for fingerprinting and tracking, wants to estimate how long since you last visited site W recently. W uses modern software engineering recommended practices: CI/CD with several deploys a day, heavily minimised EMCAScript, various icons too.

When you visit any page on G, G serves you a page that uses 37 scripts (called "signals") of particular exact, minified versions, which G happens to know M has served on any particular day. The scripts are loaded in such a way that they don't really do anything.

From that, G can estimate when you visited W, and on what day.

This works so well that G starts adding invisible iframes or AJAX calls to signed copies of entire popular pages from W, and through that, works out exactly what you've been reading. It takes a while because people read different things, but guess by guess, they build up a profile of your W reading habits over time, and the more accurate the profile becomes, the better they are able to estimate what pages to check next.

They do this even though you don't visit G all that often, because G's page does its measurements continuously while the page is loaded. You try turning off JavaScript, but G's A/B test-driven AI helpfully evolves a clever workaround with nested iframes and meta-refresh, so it doesn't make much difference.

Eventually this is done in G's ServiceWorker so it trickles along in the background, and G keep the bandwidth usage low enough that you don't notice. Battery consumption is hardly affected because they run their probes at the same time as the ubiquitous mobile-server-to-client-notification service wakes up the radio. Which 99% of users have running all the time.

A kind of "web crawling", if you will, but crawling the client's history, crawling shared, signed ETags just by trying them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I noticed it says enabling QUIC on your network provides improvements to encryption compared to TCP/TLS, why is that?

<comment><USER23> I assume it's referring to this:

> _QUIC also combines the typical 3-way TCP handshake with TLS 1.3 's > handshake. Combining these steps means that encryption and authentication > are provided by default, and also enables faster connection establishment. > In other words, even when a new QUIC connection is required for the initial > request in an HTTP session, the latency incurred before data starts flowing > is lower than that of TCP with TLS._

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is this HTTP/3 to origin too?</comment>


Summary of 'Programs with Common Sense' (1959) by John McCarthy - <AUTHOR> http://www.jackhoy.com/artificial-intelligence/2017/02/24/summary-of-programs-with-common-sense-john-mccarthy.html <comment><USER2> Ah, it seemed so simple back then. I took McCarthy's "Epistemological problems in artificial intelligence" at Stanford in the 1980s. Once, he described the missionary and cannibals problem. Then he set it up in a form where his circumscription approach would work, turned the crank on the formalism, and the answer came out. As he was setting up the problem in the correct form, I thought "This is where the miracle occurs".

The mid-1980s were the high point of trying to hammer the real world into first order logic. This was the era of "expert systems", followed by the "AI Winter". It turns out that expert systems are just another way to program. They're a domain specific language for a modest class of problems, mostly trouble-shooting and rule-driven decision making. The expert systems crowd was talking "strong AI real soon now", which was never going to happen with that technology.

Today, we may be going too far in the other direction, with model-less machine learning. Some of that is scary, such as self-driving using imagery only, trained from data recorded by human drivers. There's no geometric model there, just recognition of known objects.[1] This works great, until it fails badly.

That's what led Tesla's version of Mobileye into three crashes. It recognizes "car ahead". It recognizes road lines. It ignores objects, including cars, alongside the road. But it also ignores "car partially projecting into road ahead". Not good.[2]

You need to map obstacles geometrically, then classify them. "Car", "Pedestrian", "Bicycle", "Moving thing not unclassified". If it can't be classified, it's still an obstacle, and if it's moving, you have to assume its movements are not very predictable. This may result in annoyingly conservative driving around bicycles, skateboards, and deer. That's a good failure mode. Google/Waymo seems to do that.

[1] [http://www.princeton.edu/~alaink/Orf467F14/Deep%20Driving.pd...](http://www.princeton.edu/~alaink/Orf467F14/Deep%20Driving.pdf) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo)

<comment><AUTHOR> > "It turns out that expert systems are just another way to program"

Yes I agree with this, if you are providing the expert system with premises, although not specific to a particular problem, then you are effectively programming it.

I wonder if we could discover and obtain premises through some automated system, then the deductive process could still apply, leaving us with an understanding of how the solution to a goal was reached via the deductive argument. Do you know if this has been attempted?

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems to be relevant for premise selection [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.04442.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.04442.pdf) but not found anything yet on premise collection

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Worth a look in this context:

[http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1980/AAAI80-047.pdf](http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1980/AAAI80-047.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN:  Storing and Processing Large Amounts of Temporal-Spatial Data - <AUTHOR>

As part of our research group, we're collecting large amounts of location data. Our data essentially looks like (user id, lat/long co-ordinates, timestamp). There's other metadata involved too, but that's not relevant here.
We're collecting about 2-3 million records a week, and expect to collect about a year's worth of data in due time.
I'd really like some advice on techniques on storing and processing this data. We'd like to be able to answer queries similar to:
(1) For a given location, who was near that location (within a specified distance) over a specified period of time?
(2) Which locations are near each other?
That's the general idea. We don't need a real-time response, but what are good databases (or other data storage software)? I've come across people talking about k-d trees, does that work at this scale? What kind of hardware do I need? I'm hoping to get pointers towards general strategies. How do we store this data? Does it even make sense to store it all in a database? Which data/software/packages lend themselves well to distance/radius calculations?
We're most familiar with Python/Linux, would prefer to stay away from Java and prefer open source/free software. We're new to all this, pointers to books and papers would also be useful. All and any advice would be greatly useful. <comment><USER2> Both MySQL and Postgres support some GIS features, I would definitely recommend taking a look. I bookmarked this book about postGIS but I haven't read it: <http://www.postgis.us/> .

If the databases can handle your queries efficiently then it could save you a lot of work and you won't have to do anything nasty.

From a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, you should have under 20GB of data, so if you need to perform an inefficient computation with low latency storing it all in RAM isn't out of the question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Postgres seems like a good option. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had an interview with Boeing, and found out that they did work with Sybase to develop some DB extensions for just that purpose. I think they license them out, but that's not going to work well with your FOSS desires. Postgres seems to have extensions to allow temporal work - check here. <http://pgfoundry.org/projects/temporal/></comment>


Show HN: We Built a Marketplace for Auto Enthusiasts - <AUTHOR>

We just launched www.styckyd.com, a marketplace for automotive enthusiasts to buy and sell parts.
We're trying to tackle a number of problems that users experience when trying to buy and sell parts on automotive forums or on eBay Motors. Search, and shipping come to mind. Because of the nature of search on either of these sites it's difficult to provide relevant results, sellers have to think like SEO experts and buyers have to try multiple searches over multiple days so they can connect. I'm sure most people don't ship packages every day so figuring out how much to charge for shipping can also be a problem.
There are more problems that we're trying to solve but I'm hoping to get some feedback from HN. We've spent most of our time on some of the things you won't see unless you list a part (If you have something to sell, try us out!) as a result the rest of the site is not perfect (Well, neither is the stuff we spent most of our time on... yet). To avoid a bit of the forrest through the trees problem we're looking for feedback on these things:
1) When you look at the site, does it make sense what we do and how we can help? 2) Can you easily identify why we're better than the rest - I'm guessing that's not the case yet, any suggestions on how we can improve here? 3) Is there anything that just seems like a no-go?
We've also built a plugin for vBulletin - we want to replace/improve their classifieds systems: partners.styckyd.com
If any other feedback comes to mind, please share. We're really driven to make this work so the more we hear, the better.
ps. Are there any other car nuts on HN? <comment><USER2> I'm in your target market, though I'm not as serious as many.

My thoughts:

1\. Figuring out how to register without Facebook was way too tough. I had to find two links that were indistinguishable from the rest of the text.

2\. What is "Brand". Is that car brand (BMW) or part brand (Bilstein)?

3\. Okay, now I've gone to the "What do you want to sell" page, and I see "Brand" is the part brand (this is just because I'm poking around -- as a regular user, I'd never do this). Which makes me wonder, how do I find parts for my particular year/make/model (E46 330i, in my case)?

4\. I can't do anything useful from the home page. Show me a list of brands, a search box, anything to start me on my way.

5\. What does "forensics" mean in this context? The "Show forensics updates" is neat looking, but useless for someone who is buying or selling (but interesting for wasting time / kicking tires). The pictures should at least tell me what the product is.

Hopefully this hapazard feedback is useful. It looks like promising concept and you've clearly worked hard on it, but I think you need to populate it with products and then observe first-hand how people interact with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

1) We would prefer it if people register with Facebook but I agree that I've made it a little too discrete to register without it in the new design.

2/3) I'll add the background text examples to the search fields like we've done on the sell pages so that it's more clear what should be in the Brand field. I hope that'll clear up any confusion.

4) The home page definitely needs some work. The key thing that's there doesn't show until there are listings present, unfortunately. Like on the Forensics tab it will show the most recent listings with prices, etc.

5) I suppose we should make that more clear upfront. Part Forensics is our parts wiki. It made more sense on the original release but clearly doesn't anymore.

All feedback is useful. Right now we are talking about ways to build a user base quickly and adding a few products on our own might be a way to make the site a little more useful.

To go back to one of my questions, by looking around could you identify why our service might be better than the others? We have some very real competitive advantages but I don't think we're communicating them very well so I'm interested in hearing what first time users are taking away from it at first glance - so we can make it better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm in your target market, and I honestly couldn't figure out the site at first glance. Eventually I found the search section, but nothing I typed was even initialized in the db. I'm talking simple part names like caliper and clutch.

I've always found that Craigslist and regular forums were the best way to go besides U-Pull-It yards, though if I were buying parts for a wide variety of brands of cars it might be more useful so I didn't have to register on a bunch of different boards. You haven't convinced me that your approach is any better, in fact it seems like more work because I have to fill in your db what a clutch is!

<comment><AUTHOR> The communication of what our service does is an issue we're aware of and the feedback we received today has helped us pinpoint the key things that we can fix quickly so that it makes much more sense to everyone. We'll have it fixed up in the next few days.

The forums truly are great. They're great because of relevance and quantity/quality of content. We'll probably add a few more parts over the next little while to seed the database so that you're more likely to find some content.

Here's an example of a part page: <http://www.styckyd.com/forensics/products/23-hoosier-a6>

The usefulness of the database will become more apparent as it grows towards some sort of critical mass. If you were to try and sell the Hoosier A6 listed above your listing would be pre-populated with the description that exists within the database which makes it easier for you to sell (Because you won't have to think as much about describing the benefits of the tire). The real benefit is when buyers are specifically looking for a set of Hoosiers. They'll easily be able to find your listing. We also have a built in "Want to Buy" system. So if you click the "Want to Buy" link on the Hoosier page listed above and someone were to sell a set of Hoosiers at any point in the future our system will e-mail you - so you don't have to constantly browse the forums, just wait for the deal you're looking for.

Obviously, we're doing a terrible job of communicating these, and the other benefits that we provide. We'll fix it up very soon.

May I ask which forums you frequent?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm still a bit confused on the values of your website. Plus are you building a community to share parts' feedbacks or a marketplace to connect buyers and sellers? But one thing i believe you should change is the font color. I barely can read your text. You can make it a bit darker. Hopefully that helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent.

We're building a marketplace, so if that isn't clear I definitely dropped the ball in communications on the first few pages. (It's more clear when there are active listings, but we don't have any of those yet...)

Which text specifically? The main body text or some of the lighter grey text? I understand there are some issues with some of the lighter grey text and I'm working out a way to keep the contrast while keeping within our design constraints (When integrated with a vBulletin forum the site takes on a user- specified stylesheet).

<comment><USER4> Some of the lighter grey must be changed. You don't want your users to have a hard time reading and searching for links. Yes try changing the content of the homepage. Styckyd was built by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts, this does not explain what the website is. You can put it somewhere else. Try using 5-10 words intro to capture your users attentions. Like " A marketplace for ... built by ...". Make sure your audiences know you're communicating directly to them. Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again. We'll have the content and service more concisely defined in the next few days.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Boeing 737 Unpaved Strip Kit - <AUTHOR> http://www.b737.org.uk/unpavedstripkit.htm <comment><USER2> Great video by Sam Chui about this posted a few days ago: [https://youtu.be/csnaMnpU_BU?t=57](https://youtu.be/csnaMnpU_BU?t=57)

<comment><USER3> wow that _is_ great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't know this existed. Even with planes that were built for dirt runways (c-130, c-17) there can still be issues.

I worked briefly as a mechanic for Boeing on C-17's. One incident (I did not witness but was told) was a C-17 somewhere in the middle east landed on a clear patch of dirt/sand, except right when they touched down they noticed a small concrete barrier in the middle of the field...

The nose gear went right into it. It was narrow enough to miss the rear tires. But the impact of the nose gear ripped it complete off the plane and left a gaping hole where once the fuselage touched, blasted a ton of sand straight into the interior of the plane. I think a specialty crew eventually made it out there and rigged a nose gear together good enough for a take off and landing where it then flew back to a Boeing facility near Lackland Air Force Base (I believe).

</comment><comment><USER5> The vortex dissipators are interesting! Hard to imagine that gravel or dirt wouldn't get tossed into the jet intake and cause massive damage. Their solution is three air jets blowing air down and _aft_ from the front of each intake at 55psi, which apparently worked. I wonder though if despite this gravel sometimes still went through and damaged turbine fan blades.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I also find it hard to believe that gravel doesn't get sucked into the jet intake. The Sam Chui video mentioned above is fascinating and shows the system in regular use in northern Canada.

The aviation stack exchange has an article with pictures of the vortices created by jet engines: [https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/21219/how- does-...](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/21219/how-does-this- vortex-form-inside-a-jet-engine) . Basically jet engines create low pressure air near the ground and the dissipators cancel it out by supplying air. I imagine the dissipators point aftwards because the engine passing over the ground acts like a venturi and so the low pressure region is directly under the engine. I originally thought the intake would be creating low pressure..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really cool.

The Lockheed LC-130 Ski-bird is a cool aircraft conversion too

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_LC-130](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_LC-130)

</comment><comment><USER8> Decades ago, I used to skydive out of a small airport in Florida [1] with a dirt/grass runway, albeit a very long one, over 6000 feet. Nothing flew out of there except for the jump plane and crop dusters. One day, the jumpers were surprised to see a fully equipped 737 on the dirt runway. We found out it was running trials for unpaved runway landings as an unnamed African customer had requested.

[1] [https://www.airnav.com/airport/X58](https://www.airnav.com/airport/X58)

</comment><comment><USER9> That's awesome. I want to see a 737 land at our local grass strip (yes, I read the limitations, and know it's impossible).</comment>


ProjectLocker Blog - Cloud IDE Roundup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.projectlocker.com/2014/01/08/cloud-ide-roundup/

<comment><USER2> Firepad.io is missing from the list and has several derivate projects listed on their homepage.

<comment><USER3> Author here, thanks for the feedback!

I wasn't aware of Firepad, but it (and some of the derivative projects) look like they are more in the category of "Web code editor" than "Web IDE". That said, I did mention Nitrous.io, Koding, and ShiftEdit, which all use Firepad.</comment></comment>


Is the world running out of food? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/06/economist-explains-13?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/istheworldrunningoutoffood <comment><USER2> No, I don't think it is running out of food. The Politian want us to believe there are to many ppl, and not enough food.the amount of produce that is thrown away in the USA, just because it is not perfect, could go to food banks.They say it is to expensive,so they plough it over and creat more green house gas. What a wonderful WORLD we live in!</comment>


If you need Java, use this one instead - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/if-you-need-java-use-this-one-instead-7000010157/ <comment><USER2> If I was a blackhat malware developer, I would be drooling at the scale of Oracle's incorporation of third party affiliate software into a typical Java install. It _massively_ expands the threat surface available for attackers.

Rather than targeting the JRE itself, I would be looking for vulnerabilities in the shovelware -- which is subject to less scrutiny by developers than the language runtime itself, and which is only installed by users whose security practices are less than perfect.

<comment><USER3> It's not impossible there'd be something interesting there... but Java is a more likely attack vector simply because part of its _normal functionality_ is to execute code downloaded from the internet.

Before this recent patch, that code would be executed without even prompting the user.

Sure, there's a sandbox, but (as we know) sometimes a sandbox has cracks, particularly when the runtime is designed to let code to only enforce the sandbox for _some_ code it runs, not all. (Compare to JavaScript execution, which also runs downloaded code without prompting, but JS in the browser is _always_ in the sandbox -- there are things it simply can't do, vs. Java's "this is do-able but not for you".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, Oracle - it was only a matter of time before Oracle was seen as so untrustworthy that people now won't even install Java. Oracle are still strong, but reputation does matter. You kill off your reputation, you weaken your company.

There are a _lot_ of companies who would love to take out Oracle.

<comment><USER5> "People". Oracle software (DB, Java, etc, behind a firewall(s)) runs in _every_ big company. The people reading this probably are still using Java (Clojure, Scala etc) from Oracle (as OpenJDK sucks), so what 'people' are you referring to? A consumer? Nope; doesn't care. Who is 'people'?

I'm not a fan of Oracle or anything, but I have worked for enough big companies (Oracle's paying clients) to see that this won't matter at all to Oracle's bottomline. And probably not much to their reputation either; I used to run OpenJDK on my smaller devices like my pandora; Oracle made an ARM version of the closed source JDK. Now I _really_ want to use open source, but that binary brought tears to my eyes; it's blazingly fast, seems to use less memory than the other versions, is stable compared to openjdk and it showed that Java indeed is in the hands of Larry fully. There is no other option for Java and JVM languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've pretty much always used the offline installer with Windows (I'd stick it on a flash drive and keep it in my bag with other useful installs like editors, SSH, etc.). But it's worth pointing out that this is a Java-on- Windows problem exclusively. It doesn't happen on OS X or Linux. I can't imagine the day when "apt-get install default-jdk" prompts me to install a toolbar...

<comment><USER7> True, but remember that you can't apt-get the JVM anymore since Oracle changed the license for the newer versions, so I could very well imagine this happening to me on my Linux box unless my company switches over to OpenJDK.

<comment><USER8> I've found <https://github.com/flexiondotorg/oab-java6> really useful. It's a shell script that downloads the Java binaries from Oracle, builds Debian packages for them, stashes them at /var/local/oab/deb, and adds this directory as a local apt repo for your system. The net effect is 'apt-get install sun- java6-jre' works again like it used to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article mentions to install the 32-bit offline installer but what if you are 64? I know 32-bit will work but are there disadvantages to using it over 64-bit? Or can you just download the 64-bit and uncheck the shovelware?

<comment><USER10> See the note on the consumer-facing Java website regarding 64-bit vs 32-bit versions of the JRE:

> 64-bit Windows operating systems (which may be Windows 7, Vista or XP) come > with a 32-bit Internet Explorer (IE) browser as the standard (default) for > viewing web pages. These operating systems also include a 64-bit Internet > Explorer browser, however using it is optional and it must be explicitly > selected to view web pages. Note that because some web content may not work > properly in a 64-bit browser, we recommend using the default 32-bit browser > and downloading 32-bit Java.

More details: <http://www.java.com/en/download/faq/java_win64bit.xml>

<comment><USER11> Unless you're one of those that need to run Java applets, I don't see the issue. I used to have issues with the Android SDK and 64-bit Java on Windows, but those seem to be resolved lately.

<comment><USER12> Unless you're running Java processes that need gigabytes of memory, is there a downside in using the 32-bit JRE?

<comment><USER10> The advice in the ZDNet article is for non-technical folks. The greatest likelihood is that they'll need a JRE for running Java in a web browser, not doing development. In which case they should use the 32-bit version, even on 64-bit Windows.

If you're doing development, well then shame on you for not already knowing what you need. You also probably won't want the JRE, you'll want the JDK, which doesn't come with the shovelware anyway.

If you're a developer and you just need to run some Java utilities, then you'll probably be fine with the 32-bit JRE.

Basically, if you really need the 64-bit version, you probably already know it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain to me why they even bundle this extra shovelware in with their JRE installer? Surely the revenue gained from this is a minuscule fraction compared to their total revenue. Plus, this can't be good for their brand. So, it raises the question - why?

<comment><USER14> Didn't Sun start this practice before the Oracle acquisition? Maybe it continues due to a long-term contract that must be honored.

<comment><USER11> I vaguely remember the Google Toolbar and OpenOffice being shovelware'd with the Java installer pre-Oracle; the choice of bundles has changed but the practice hasn't.

<comment><USER15> Of course Google Toolbar and OpenOffice was much more useful than Ask Toolbar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The complexity required to write and read this article is the reason Java failed as a desktop framework.

<comment><USER17> I'm very distant from Java-land right now and equally distant from desktop development so I know next to nothing about the matter, but one of my co- workers is using PyCharm and is praising it every single day (as a former vim user, at that). So I can't help but wonder - how did Java fail, in your opinion, and what other framework "won", if any?

<comment><USER18> I agree somewhat with btip. The UI features of Java were not only ugly, but, until 6.0, slow. This is one of the reasons Eclipse uses SWT rather than native Swing.

6 brought with it a much faster UI experience. Unfortunately that happened after the transition of apps from the desktop to the web. So you had slow applet downloads vs Flash on the client. You also had compatibility issues that were more involved than Flash.

Finally, other cross platform frame works like Qt came along. Now you'd get closer native appearance with languages other than Java.

As a result of the confluence of events and changes Java became relegated to server or phone side.

<comment><USER19> > Finally, other cross platform frame works like Qt came along.

Not true. wxWidgets predates Java, it is cross platform and it does provide a real native appearance. Not emulation, true native widgets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone find it ironic that the background in the zdnet website is one huge clickable ad designed to capture accidental clicks? I tend to keep my hand over the trackball while reading for quick scrolling. I move the cursor off to the side so as to not cover the text. Yup, accidentally clicked on the zdnet background add twice while reading these articles. Funny that they are taking Oracle to task for their practices yet take an equally slime-o approach to monetizing their site.

<comment><USER12> One could argue that unlike the Java runtime, ZDNet arguably exists for the purpose of slime-o monetization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If their justification is "the one that developers use," then you want the 64-bit installer. No one is intentionally confining themselves to 32-bit these days, except under very specific circumstances (usually non-x86, or embedded, but that's 99% irrelevant to a Java discussion).

Browser plugin issues not-withstanding, of course. But who uses Java in a browser anymore?

<comment><USER3> A decent number of game educational sites, including mine: <http://eMusicTheory.com> \-- in a small Java applet, I can process MIDI and audio input, assemble digital audio on-the-fly for output (or use MIDI, but they stopped bundling the sounds), animations, etc. within pretty much any browser starting with IE5 or 6.

There's nothing else as powerful AFAIK.

Java's security problems seem like they'll kill this off, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How viable is OpenJDK JRE as an alternative for the average user? i.e. if I install it instead of the Oracle JRE next time I'm reformatting, is the Java software I use likely to stop working or develop bugs? I don't understand why Oracle would be driving people away from their platform like this.

<comment><USER23> Try it, as it depends on the applications you use. Some members of the jetbrains family didn't run on OpenJDK for a long time. The ones I use do now.

That said, if your platform lacks an installer and -more importantly- an updater, OpenJDK is not a good alternative. There's no reason to assume it is any more secure than the Oracle package except for the lack of additional toolbars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oracle Java is still a real pain to install on Linux. I still get it though the third party repository "webup8" when I set up a new install.

I wish JetBrains was compatible with OpenJDK, it's the only reason why I still bother installing Oracle Java.

<comment><USER25> Rubymine, IntelliJ user here,in Ubuntu/Mint I usually go this way:

[http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=93052&f=42](http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=93052&f=42)

[http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/10/how-to-install-oracle- java-7...](http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/10/how-to-install-oracle- java-7-jre-7-jdk.html)

<comment><USER24> Great, thanks for the tip! I just switched over to Mint a few days ago, and so far loving it. I install and reinstall Linux so frequently, that anything I can do to make the process less painful is useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ninite is by far my preferred way to get java. No crapware, and with pro you can turn off the auto-updates.

</comment><comment><USER27> For what it's worth I'm always installing Java on Linux servers without using root rights (so no rpm, no .deb: rpms but good old tarballs).

Certainly no "apt-get install whatever-jdk" for me. No, thank you very much. I want to be in control.

So I install the JRE (or JDK) in a user account and, once the .tar.gz file is decompressed/dearchived I do remove the unnecessary crap (examples, applets, etc.).

That's one big advantage right there about not needing to have admin rights to install: you _know_ where all the files have been installed (in the user account, it's not possible to write anywhere else without being root) and you have more control on the crap.

That's not really possible to do as conveniently on Windows seen that you _must_ have admin rights to install Java on Windows.

<comment><USER28> If stuff isn't running as root, but still running as you, that still gives it access to a fair amount of private data. So, to keep really suspicious code from reading your banking details, etc., you need to run it under a different uid than the one that runs, say, your web browser.</comment></comment>


Gold Nanoshell Cancer Therapy (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/naomi-halas.html <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone know what happened to research on this? It seemed like a reasonable approach to treating some types of cancer like subcutaneous tumors and brain tumors. There's a wikipedia article[1] where the last reference is from 2011 and things were looking good at that point.

IIRC brain tumors can be really tricky to treat and this method showed some promise. The testing on mice was working well back around 2010 and I figured it would be further along by now.

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

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Haha, wrong video sorry!

NOVA used to have a neat video about it so I just linked to the first thing after searching for nanoshells. Here's an article about it at least:

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/halas- nanoshell.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/halas-nanoshell.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Monetizing a mailing list - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I run a few popular mailing lists (in their respective areas) and I was thinking on adding small ads at the bottom of every post (related to the topic of the list).
Is there such a service anywhere? Something like adsense for emails? ( not necessarily mailing lists) Maybe another ideas on how to monetize it? <comment><USER2> Do you know CPA? This should convert well for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> But is there any company offering that? Tracking that via a mailing list is much harder...</comment></comment>


Japanese Manga Newspapers Report Current Events in Graphic Detail - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/st_manganews <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to see someone try that in the US. I'd probably subscribe. ;)</comment>


My biology paper in Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2862 <comment><USER2> A better title for your link would be - "OUR biology paper in Science." Big congratulations on the paper. Impressive.

</comment><comment><USER3> >ZYX _Y_ = GATTACA TAG AGT CTA.

Subtle ;) I like it.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra That's nice!

Turns out, biologists (many kinds of scientists probably) are in need of computer modelling, information retrieval and so on. Naturally it gives opportunity to us IT folks, even without terribly much scientific background.

I've co-authored a biology paper too. Here is the resulting code: [https://github.com/alamar/microbe](https://github.com/alamar/microbe)

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks fascinating. Does anyone want to summarize?

</comment><comment><USER5> If papers themselves were written like that, "science" would be so much more approachable!

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately this is hard to do because (a) insufficient time (b) insufficient number of Scott Aaronsons. I struggle to think of anyone else who can write about science in such an accessible way (without convenient misconceptions and falsehoods).

<comment><USER7> Not sure that's true... It takes a lot of effort to translate text into concise science speak ("I'd have written a shorter letter if only I had more time").

This would have a huge added benefit of making per review easier, making science more approachable, and making it all less pedantic.

<comment><USER8> Domain specific language and formalisms exist for a reason. They enable efficient communication for people who know the field.

Scientific papers are not written for the layman with an interest, but to communicate the results of your research to others in the field.

Admittedly a lot of papers are also just written to keep your University from giving your job to someone else. But publish or perish is another issue.

I agree that there should be more scientists writing articles / blogs that make their research approachable and engaging for the layman, but that does not extend to papers, in my opinion.

<comment><USER9> Or, perhaps: They enable grants.

I've only ever helped write a single grant application. My parts of that had to be rewritten with more use of passive verbs and general neutral-sounding but largely vacuous prose.

I thought it's like those chick jokes. You don't offer comments about random women's gorgeous breasts because you really want to, it's just expected in some contexts. It tells the audience you're one of the guys. Overlong sentences where all that's done is passively done inform the grant reviewers that the author a proper scientist who should be enabled to continue with valuable research.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


WD Red DM-SMR Update: 3 Vendors Bail and WD Knew of ZFS Issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-dm-smr-update-3-vendors-bail-and-wd-knew-of-zfs-issues/ <comment><USER2> I'm very happy that this tactic has backfired so spectacularly for WD. I don't know what the total impact on their bottom line is, but what I'm seeing is a huge reputation as damage for WD. People are avoiding putting WD in their NAS in general, even if they have plenty of drives that are fine with it!

<comment><USER3> I have such a hard time to understand how the risk vs. reward ratio for pulling this stunt made any sense.

SMR does not have a great reputation, to put it in drives specifically targeted for NASes and enthusiasts is a very bold move.

<comment><USER4> > _SMR does not have a great reputation_

SMR is fine _if you know what SMR is and what you 're doing_. It might even be fine given a sufficiently advanced translation layer (which apparently doesn't exist yet). The problem isn't SMR, it's selling a product which uses SMR and hiding that fact from the consumer, and I can't forgive WD for that.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > It might even be fine given a sufficiently advanced translation layer (which > apparently doesn't exist yet).

Apparently f2fs does well with it?

<comment><USER5> Not terribly surprising, f2fs and similar filesystems are log-based systems. Rather than overwrite the old data they almost always try to write to the next new area. This ends up working really well for flash technology because writing to existing areas is expensive. You have to read in a 1-4MB area depending on the block size, make your changes to that, erase that area entirely, and then write the changed version. [Those sizes might be a little off but it's what I remember]. Some of that may be hidden by the disk's controller but it has to happen on every write to an area with existing data. SMR is similar in this respect because you have to read, change, and write large blocks together because of the way the tech works. So I'd expect anything that's directly optimized for low level flash memory to work similarly ok performance wise for it.

The real problem comes when you can't work like that, in particular this happens when you're low on free space or if you're in a situation where relocating data isn't possible or known that it needs to happen. RAID setups are typically the worst case for this, since they'll effectively treat the entire disk as used and can't relocate data on it. ZFS is a bit more complicated with this but effectively ends up the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While WD's mismanagement of this is incredible, saying "WD knew about ZFS Issues" because one employee of WD said DM SMR was inappropriate for ZFS at a conference a few years ago overstates things.

Even at relatively small companies, not all knowledge disseminates equally through the company, and WD isn't exactly a small company. It's almost certain that the team that was responsible for the WD Red SMR release was not aware of this issue or this wouldn't have happened. What probably happened was something more along the lines of:

1\. Traditional wisdom says SMR can't be used in raid

2\. DM-SMR firmware has gotten much better at hiding the performance issues of SMR since traditional wisdom

3\. Let's actually measure this in some RAID setups and see what happens

4\. Hmm, those numbers look reasonable, we can ship this!

At no point did anyone think very hard about ZFS being an edge-case for DM- SMR.

All that being said, the drives _absolutely_ should have been represented as DM-SMR, along with some nice benchmark numbers to show that the performance hit isn't as bad as one might think. In the right RAID setup, these drives _are_ at a reasonable performance/value point in the curve.

<comment><USER7> It is not just ZFS edge cases seeing issues, ZFS was just the bell weather.

Synology does not use ZFS at all, and they are seeing issues

Also ZFS being an "edge case" is not going to be true long term as alot of SMB and Home NAS vendors (the very customers the WD Red Line targets) are starting to use ZFS on Linux more and more

<comment><USER8> I haven't seen the data for a few years, but I believe random Synology and other premade NAS dominated the market. To the point where ZFS would always be an edgecase.

<comment><USER7> Synology and QNap are probably the 2 biggest in this market segment, Synology already has issues and QNAP is bringing ZFS to market in their latest line of NAS devices

Synology also has used btrfs in the past which I would suspect may suffer the same kind of issue as ZFS but dont know forsure

<comment><USER8> My point here was that ZFS will continue being an edge case, as the premades dominate the market and do not provide ZFS. QNAP may offer it on home devices in the future, but may also limit it to premium devices. I am not making a statement about any compatibility here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ok, so everyone has decided that SMR+ZFS is bad.

Given that all traditional RAID arrays do online rebuild, what keeps a random application, lets say a database, from creating a write pattern during the rebuild which forces timeouts?

AFAIK, nothing. And logically, it might be possible with just a single drive without the RAID given that WD hasn't published proper command timeout definitions for these drives either.

So people are giving them a pass for finally admitting that the drives are SMR. That does nothing if they won't publish topology information, or buffer capacity so that the host can optimize write patterns.

So, until the opensource community can adjust the worse case command timeouts, and preferably optimize write patterns based on drive topology, the hardware doesn't appear fit for any purpose.

<comment><USER10> Putting a database on a spinning disk in 2020 is just completely idiotic.

<comment><USER11> I don't think so - the decision which media to use is linked to a lot of factors (type of database, amount&size of data written/read, type of filesystem, costs, durability, expectations, etc...).

<comment><USER10> You don't think so, I know so.

There are a few edge cases where spinning disks could be acceptable, but none where they are superior anymore.

Cost? Maybe if you're not billed for electricity. And the cost of hardware is beer money compared to admin/dev/architect time.

Durability? Drives of both technology vary in durability based on market class. Enterprise disks are superior to cheap consumer SSDs in that respect, but within the same class SSDs are superior.

Type of database? Well if your database is used mostly for sequential reads, in other words when it's for most intents and purposes used like a flat file would be, you're in that edge case. Few individual databases are like that, though admittedly those that are can be very large.

Data written/read? Early SSDs were admittedly prone to wearing off with heavy writes. We're long past that, except if you're talking about dodgy SD cards but you're not putting a database on that, are you?

Types of filesystems? Just no.

Hard drives are cheaper per byte. Significantly cheaper, but not even an order of magnitude cheaper anymore. They use more power, their random access time is orderS of magnitude slower, and their sequential transfer rate is slower. Hell even sequential write is not better any more.

But I'll concede this, if you look long and hard enough, I'm sure you can find that one odd case where a database is marginally better served by spinning disks.

<comment><USER12> >We're long past that

its the other way around, we are currently somewhere between 150 and 1000 write cycle endurance and going down with every new node upgrade/cell density bump.

[https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/write- cycle](https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/write-cycle)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I imagine WD has said _nothing_ so far because they're probably waiting for their lawyers to tell them exactly how much they can claim to have known/not known without opening themselves up to litigation.

<comment><USER14> WD responded via a blog post when the use of DM-SMR for WD Red drives was first exposed. It basically consisted of an attempt to gaslight those that bought Red drives into believing that this is their fault for choosing drives inappropriate for the purpose they using them for.

Who could think using Red NAS drives in a NAS would be an appropriate technology choice? /s

<comment><USER15> I saw the headline at the time, but didn't read the blog post because reasons.

Does anyone have a link or archive link?

<comment><USER16> I believe the April 20th (bottom) section of this blog post is the post in question:

[https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas- drives/](https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/)

TLDR: They suggest different RED drives should be considered for different workloads. While that may have been their intention all along, that was not communicated well at in marketing or retail, where the drive colors (red, blue, purple, etc) used to be the appropriate method for selecting the right drive for your workload/purpose.

The way they have worded it, the blog is not wrong, but they left out an important fact: consumers didn't have the necessary info to make the decision they're suggesting people should have made.

Even if you read the data sheets that were available at the time, one would expect the listed transfer rate was a limit that the drive was capable of, not the rate that if exceeded would cause the device to perform very poorly. Worse, there would be no way to know that was the case because the fact that they were SMR technology was previously unreleased and the drives themselves actively hid that information from the host computer (since they were "device managed" SMR).

The data sheets still aren't clear on how the performance is impacted with workload, but at least they're clear about the technology they use now.

<comment><USER17> >TLDR: They suggest different RED drives should be considered for different workloads. While that may have been their intention all along, that was not communicated well at in marketing or retail, [...]

I would argue that it's worth than that because they sold drives with significantly different characteristics without changing the branding.

It's not even that the users weren't given enough information to make an enlightened decision, it's that users of the older WD Red drives would reasonably expect newer models to basically fit the same performance profile. It's as if nvidia suddenly started selling GTX 2080 Ti cards that are effectively rebranded 1060 under the hood.

<comment><USER16> Absolutely. I just mean that even if consumers somehow guessed that something was different, and like you pointed out: they would have no reason to suspect that -- the information wasn't even available to decipher what that difference was. So, their cover story is completely asinine any way you look at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd really like to one day find out how this decision was made at Western Digital.

My understanding is there wasn't much for WD to gain here and serious risks...

Did they really feel this was worth it? How did this decision make its way through the management chain?

</comment><comment><USER19> WD lost all their goodwill with me as a customer because of this. Shocking how fast a brand can go from trusted to distrusted once they are shown to be untrustworthy. ;)

<comment><USER20> Well, what brand does one buy today? It's not like there was that much choice anymore to begin with. Others had massive reliability issues (too). I don't consider Seagate much of an alternative, for example.

<comment><USER21> Apparently Toshiba's the way to go. I can't vouch for 'em (I haven't bought a Toshiba hard drive... ever; all of the ones I own are the ones that came in the various old laptops and desktops I've got in my garage), and I usually stick to SSDs nowadays, but next time I'm in the market for an HDD I guess that's the way I'll end up going (with WD and Seagate both relegated to secondaries, e.g. for RAID diversification).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Open question:

Speaking as someone who accidentally bought SMR drives from Seagate that weren't advertised as such, what's the primary danger of using these drives in a _new_ ZFS setup?

From what I've seen, the write speed is bad enough that rebuilds might be problematic in ZFS. But since I'm not doing a rebuild, and since I can swap out the drive for a non-SMR alternative whenever one fails and I do need to do a rebuild, are they still relatively safe to use?

<comment><USER23> My anecdotal evidence, based on a fairly small (16TB) pool for personal use such as backups and media, is that the _Seagate_ SMR drives are fine.

I've done multiple resilvers and they're definitely slower than conventional drives at that task, but the main issue people are seeing with WD drives is that in certain cases the drives take multiple seconds to respond to an ATA command, making the system think the drive is defective. The Seagate drives don't seem to suffer from this problem. There's lots of documentation out there on people using Seagate "Archive" drives in NAS's as well.. these were some of the earliest SMR drives and were on the market before the tech became more mainstream. Their results seem to align with what I'm seeing even though mine are branded "Barracuda Compute."

So while I wouldn't be using _any_ SMR drives for a production workload, I'm perfectly happy with the 8TB Seagate SMR drives I picked up for $185 CAD each for my home use.

<comment><USER24> I ran a large array of 5TB Seagate SMR drives. Everything was fine until a disk failed, at which point the resilver took almost 24h. This was an uncomfortable window, but otherwise the array was fine, although write speeds were about 15-40MB/s in many cases.

<comment><USER23> Yup. That window is exactly why I wouldn't want to run a setup like that in a production setting.

But based on the reports of the WD drives, they are likely to never successfully resilver. Which is obviously much worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let me start by saying I also find WD's actions ridiculous and misleading.

Has WD ever said Reds would work with ZFS? The Red spec sheet says performance isn't guaranteed on setups not listed as compatible. The compatibility list is a nightmare [1] to use, but I can't find ZFS and only Gold drives are listed for FreeBSD. None of the roughly ten ransom products I checked listed Red.

[https://www.westerndigital.com/support/partner-product- compa...](https://www.westerndigital.com/support/partner-product- compatibility)

[https://www.westerndigital.com/support/partner-product- compa...](https://www.westerndigital.com/support/partner-product- compatibility)

</comment><comment><USER25> I just ordered some WD Reds and a Synology box a couple of days ago, not knowing about this issue. Should I cancel the HDDs and go for another brand, or will I be okay if I don't use ZFS?

<comment><USER26> IIRC EFAX are affected while EFRX are not.

[https://www.hwupgrade.it/immagini/wd-hdd- smr-25-04-2020.jpg](https://www.hwupgrade.it/immagini/wd-hdd- smr-25-04-2020.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interestingly these drives are on sale on newegg.com right now.

<comment><USER28> Yup. I narrowly escaped buying one of these drives as a spare for a Synology.

Anecdotal evidence is that the SMR drives will mostly work. It's not worth the time or trouble. WD is dead to me until the next cycle of vendor rage forces me to choose them again. :-/

<comment><USER29> >It's not worth the time or trouble

Especially as they are not even cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How can one tell for sure if a given WD Red drive is affected by this issue? I have some WD Red drives that are a couple years old, in my NAS.

<comment><USER31> They have different model numbers.

i.e. the original 4 TB CMR drives were: WD40EFRX

the new 4 TB SMR drives are: WD40EFAX

They also have larger caches in most cases (i.e. 256 MB vs 64 MB).

<comment><USER32> I checked and lucked out, I had WD4000FYYZs. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Maybe I need to try ZFS again now that I have different drives. I used to run it on 6x 3TB WD Red drives (raid-z2) and could never get ZFS to perform anywhere near what I expected. Ended up going with LVM on mdraid (raid 6) on dm-integrity and got tremendously better performance for my "home nas / vm image host" machine.

<comment><USER34> Use Btrfs. Seriously. It's a tremendous fs. Read the caveats concerning raid56 and success.

<comment><USER33> My stack at the moment is 6x [10 TB WD Red Pros -> dm-integrity] -> mdadm raid6 -> dm-crypt -> LVM. One of my LVM volumes is btrfs. I only use LVM because I've had terrible performance for VM images stored in btrfs volumes. You can always use fallocate and disable CoW for the image but that prevents taking snapshots.

I'd if there was a zvol equivalent in btrfs.

<comment><USER35> Neither fallocate nor nodatacow will prevent taking snapshots. The result of writing to nodatacow shared extents is that the write must be COW, not an overwrite. Same as a reflink copy of a file on XFS. New "overwrites" are COW, subsequent overwrites are in fact overwrites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why haven't the prices come down on these drives?

<comment><USER37> Greed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So tired of seeing this. The problem is you don't want to do ANY striping on ANY SMR drives. It's not a ZFS problem. It's not a SMR problem. It's STRIPING on SMR. PERIOD.

Once upon a time people knew what they were talking about. Now everybody's an EXPERT NPC.

<comment><USER39> Could you explain why? Isn't the problem rather in the fact the filesystem does not know it is SMR and does not have a capability to work with such device optimally?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> ZFS is like Bitcoin: Skyrocketing in popularity for no apparent reasons.

Although I acknowledge that in this case it is WDs fault.

<comment><USER40> The reason is the growing data people save and experiencing bit rot. Why not use ZFS?

<comment><USER41> Because it's absolutely awful at deduplicating.

Or you're on windows.

But sure yeah it's pretty good overall, I don't disagree with your main point.

<comment><USER42> ZFS on Windows is slowly getting better.

I wouldn't actually trust it with data yet, but I suspect the developers would welcome any contributions or effort sent in their direction: [https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFSin](https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFSin)

(I'm not affiliated, but I think it's a cool project, and I really want it to succeed)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Prospecting for Hash Functions - <AUTHOR> https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/07/31/ <comment><USER2> I think a non-cryptographic hash function which leverages AES-NI instructions (e.g. by performing one round of AES using a fixed key) will perform better in every possible way: high avalanche effect, low bias AND possibly better performance.

<comment><USER3> Go does this for its native map (dictionary) type. [https://codereview.appspot.com/7543043](https://codereview.appspot.com/7543043)

<comment><USER2> A fun exercice would be to compare this to SipHash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really cool project! This is a wonderful way to approach a problem. Before thinking too hard about it, cleverly applying the brute strength of the machine and saving a lot of work. I'd read more posts like this

</comment><comment><USER5> This article is about finding non-crypto hash functions that will be implemented on a general-purpose computer. Quite a lot of people have written on that subject. A different question is how to implement a non-crypto hash function in hardware; I only know about one paper on that, from 2011: "Non- crypto hardware hash functions for high-performance networking ASICs". Perhaps crypto accelerators are sufficiently fast and sufficiently widely available on different architectures that they should be used instead in most cases?

</comment><comment><USER6> Makes you wonder how the constants for the winning hash functions were chosen... (The 32/64 bit "ones to beat", not the best ones produced by this guy's project)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not an expert but the "sloshing" construct looks like multiple xorshift* operations. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xorshift](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xorshift)

</comment><comment><USER8> One reason I really like this is it gives me confidence in the results when multiple independent researchers end up at the same result.

</comment><comment><USER9> A brief look at the Linux-kernel random generator interfaces [https://nikmav.blogspot.com/2016/10/random-generator- linux.h...](https://nikmav.blogspot.com/2016/10/random-generator-linux.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'll add it to smhasher, but it looks like Murmur3 to me.</comment>


Make a Doom level, part 1: the basics - <AUTHOR> http://eev.ee/blog/2015/12/19/you-should-make-a-doom-level-part-1/ <comment><USER2> How Doom works in a nutshell:

\- Every enclosed polygon has a ceiling height and a floor height

That's it.

\- The table in the middle of the room? It's just a polygon with a higher floor. The room around it has a comparatively lower floor.

\- A door is just a polygon with a ceiling height that matches the floor height. When you use the door, the ceiling raises. Combined with the textures being pinned, this makes the door seem like it's going up.

Super simple. Also: play my wad, it's awesome. I did most of the level design on my 386, my buddy stitched them together on his 486:

Screenshots: [http://mikemaccana.com/images/work/screenshots/doom-the- path...](http://mikemaccana.com/images/work/screenshots/doom-the-path-0.png) [http://mikemaccana.com/images/work/screenshots/doom-the- path...](http://mikemaccana.com/images/work/screenshots/doom-the-path-1.png) [http://mikemaccana.com/images/work/screenshots/doom-the- path...](http://mikemaccana.com/images/work/screenshots/doom-the-path-2.png) [http://mikemaccana.com/images/work/screenshots/doom-the- path...](http://mikemaccana.com/images/work/screenshots/doom-the-path-3.png)

(yes, that's a working toilet)

Download: [https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/s-u/thepath](https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/s-u/thepath)

<comment><USER3> Don't forget the BSP tree, that's what really made Doom work and be playable with huge maps on a 386 & 486\. By cutting the game map into sections in front and behind the player it could very quickly figure out a small set of sectors that are visible and just render them instead of the entire world (which would be way too slow on computers of the time). Fabien Sanglard has a great analysis of how Doom worked: [http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/doomClassicRenderer.php](http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/doomClassicRenderer.php)

<comment><USER4> I thought bsp came in when they made quake, interesting to know! Is this how Wolfenstien and Commander Keen worked too?

<comment><USER5> Wolfenstein was grid-based (you couldn't have arbitary wall angles), and Keen was a 2D side scrolling platformer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Map making in Doom was (is?) so accessible as the editors were in 2D for a 3D world. Granted you couldn't place 1 room directly above another room, but no one cared too much at the time. Once things moved on to Quake a lot of my friends lost interest in trying to "figure it out" as the editor was more challenging.

In high school a group of friends would all create their own maps and then before classes started we would play test them on the computer lab LAN. Our favorite editor at the time was DEU.

None of us being map making geniuses, we'd always end up with something that didn't play well but did have a few "fun spots". Eventually someone had the idea to just cherry pick all those fun spots and Frankenstein together a single map using our individual parts. This map ended up being the most fun we have ever had in Doom.

I'm not sure if Doom was the first, but it was the first for me to instill the idea that a game should be moddable if you want to make a great community and give the game a very long life after the developers have moved on to the next thing.

<comment><USER7> _> Once things moved on to Quake a lot of my friends lost interest in trying to "figure it out" as the editor was more challenging._

Moving to constructive solid geometry (CSG) map editing was really hard for a lot of people, myself included. I ended up learning on _Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight_ , which was subtractive and a lot more like how Doom felt to me.

<comment><USER8> I spent many years building levels for Doom/Build engine games, and I also had trouble moving to the void-space model of the Quake engines. Unreal, with its subtractive CSG model, was the next step for me, and felt so _right_ in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A childhood friend of mine(32) from elementary school, has a mild autism and does not know how to deal with his life. We used to be mad doom fans (well, we still are) when it came out and it stuck with us for years. But the poor guy is living with his family, sitting up until 4AM making Doom levels. At this stage he is one of the leading "levellers" at Doomworld[0]. "STILL MAKING LEVELS IN 2015" is a thing which is kind of funny, but it is actually sad. He's wasted so much of his young years thinking about Doom, making levels etc. I wish he'd just snap out of it, but it seems it will not happen. That is how the story goes I guess, with the kids you grow up with. Not all of them have the interpersonal and mental means to pick a chose a good path for themselves.

[0] [http://doomworld.com](http://doomworld.com)

<comment><USER10> YOU are sad but what about him ? He might be the happiest guy in the world.

<comment><USER11> He probably is happy, but when I read that I'm sad for his parents. Especially when I think of them in another 10 or more years. And then a bit later I realise (selfishly?) there's more to it than empathy towards some strangers I've only just heard of, as it could be my own reality in another 20 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> OMG, this _was_ my childhood. So sad I decided to throw away the levels I had saved on floppy disks. Some of them I think were quite impressive.

If I recall things right my editor was a DOS program simply named "Doom Editor". Can't seem to find any info on it though... [http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_Editing_Utilities](http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_Editing_Utilities)

</comment><comment><USER13> Note that this tutorial will make a map that only works with ZDoom, not the original .exe. Having said that, mapping for Doom is fun and I suggest you try it!

</comment><comment><USER14> Haslam's Book Store's _Books of Doom_ : [http://www.haslams.com/doom.shtml](http://www.haslams.com/doom.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER15> Skimming through the article, it seems like it was so much easier and faster making a level in DEU back in the day (1994/95). It was more or less like the CAD software I was using in my senior year in high school at the time. By contrast, this seems almost counter-intuitive.

Then again, the difficulty in getting DEU to run on modern OSes might be an even greater challenge than learning a new, awkward tool.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow - the WAD editors have come a long way since 1995 - and I guess that with contemporary computing power, one doesn't have to wait a few minutes while the level renders, only to find a stupid bug to fix and render again... Which reminds me about all the quirks of Doom's 2.5D mode that the article doesn't get into - for example, put a texture on the wrong side of a wall an you'll get ugly artefacts... Lots of those gotchas to watch for... Oh the nostalgia... Doom levels have been my biggest foray in game content creation - I did the 2.5D modeling and three business school friends handled sound, music and texturing... Borrowing school hardware and organizing a 250-people tournament of two-people teams (Doom's IPX multiplayer allowed only four players) was a highlight of those times !

</comment><comment><USER17> Ahh, ther is is a lot of beauty level design on doom maps. I saw a lot of tricks like creating fake deep water, fake bridges, or simply playing with lighthing to create a deeper scene.

The only other game that I found that reach this level of simplicity and powerfull level making, are the old good Unreal Tournamet, and the Unreal Tournament 2004. It's like levels for DooM but is real 3d, thanks to substractive booleans.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh man this takes me back... I used to build maps for Doom, Unreal, Quake and Half Life. I still play one of my HL maps with a couple of friends, it's just so much fun! Back then QuArK was my tool of choice, it seems they are still releasing new versions of it! [0]

I guess I know what I'm going to do this holiday :D

[0] [http://quark.sourceforge.net/](http://quark.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER17> I did a few stuff on DooM and on Unreal Tournament. Even I found a path to convert maps from DooM to Unreal Tournament -> [http://www.moddb.com/games/unreal- tournament/tutorials/how-c...](http://www.moddb.com/games/unreal- tournament/tutorials/how-convert-a-doom-map-to-ut)

And this piece of crap, was how I got a email from ID software : [http://www.moddb.com/mods/unreal-doom](http://www.moddb.com/mods/unreal-doom)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just spent the last couple of nights watching Doom II playthroughs on Youtube and now this shows up on HN. Sweet!

I still have the (unfinished) wad I created back in the late 90s using WADED from the Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus. Barely rescued it from a floppy disk over a decade ago that reported the file size as over a gig. Now that I think about it, I hope the CD I recorded to is still good.

</comment><comment><USER20> btw doom 4 is coming 2016: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVaWl1GtDHU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVaWl1GtDHU)</comment>


Spy fears spread to power cords, driving shift from China - T-A https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Spy-fears-spread-to-power-cords-driving-shift-from-China <comment><AUTHOR> Funny how quotes mostly about "power supply systems" became "power cords" in the headline, just because one mentioned it too. I doubt Quanta or Lite-On actually make power _cords_ themselves...

</comment><comment><USER2> Why do I feel things are getting as ridiculous as 'The Reds Under The Beds' stupidity?

We've learned that the 'little white chips' story was bullshit. Now we target power cords. If we're really afraid as all that, we should not be importing ANY of our stuff from abroad.

The dumbed-down West is in terminal decline. We don't have long to go.

<comment><USER3> The risk of USB charging cables is well documented, note.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132565)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Real problems, real solutions,

[https://www.amazon.com/PortaPow-3rd-Gen-Data- Blocker/dp/B00Q...](https://www.amazon.com/PortaPow-3rd-Gen-Data- Blocker/dp/B00QRRZ2QM)

But are THEY made in China too? See how deep the rabbit hole goes...</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever got tired of programming? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
I'm 28 and been doing programming ever since I was a kid, built a pretty successful carrier out of it, tried to launch startups, worked for big corporations and small startups, contributed to open-source, became an expert in a niche domain, and ended up doing consulting working remotely for the last couple years.
The problem is, I don't enjoy it anymore. More importantly, I don't enjoy the process which doesn't involve much creativity. Especially with building software, there are always optimal engineering practices, but even with paths less travelled like reverse-engineering, there is limited room for creativity as well. In the end it's all about solving a problem, and after a while solving really hard problems which you don't care about burns you out.
Anyone else experienced something similar? What drives you to keep at programming? <comment><USER2> Yes, and you should be glad that you are feeling this way this early. Believe it or not programming is a pretty empty profession. Look back at what you've accomplish, how much can you put your finger on that says wow am so proud of that? I've made a difference. Little to none, I bet. It's so easy for your life's work to disappear because things have changed. Programming as a profession pays well but the results are hard to measure.

So use programming as means to something you really want. Maybe the breadwinner to the family you love or focus on jobs that you find fill your need to make a difference. Jobs where you can say without me that would never have happened. Chances are they won't pay as well but you'll feel better about what you are doing. Programming because it pays well does nothing for you in terms of fulfillment. Also, there's the life/work balance. Working continuously without a goal becomes a miserable situation. Understand that and you'll be a more content person.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have recently started to consider myself a recovering software developer.

Much like with alcoholism, there comes a point where the negative physical and social consequences of chronic over indulgence starts to outweigh the positives. It sounds silly on the surface but makes sense in the context of an obsessive programmer who spends 8+ hours a day almost every day doing something dev related, whether it be working or learning something new just to keep up.

It's a culmination of realizing how much of your life has been spent creating value for other people so they can pursue their own ambitions, coupled with good old fashion burn out and wondering if all of those hours of ones life could have been better spent.

The only solution I have so far is trying my best to partake with moderation, and only working on things where the end product is something I care a lot about.

</comment><comment><USER4> You're not alone. This came up the other day here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897284) and in that thread, I wrote this:

 _... I don 't love [programming]. Alan Kay is right, it's like building "an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves". There's no elegance and no higher vision. It's an Asperger profession; smart but artless._

My advice is to either try to work at making programming better or consider a move to something better.

Personally, I'm part of a group in San Francisco called 20/20 that meets monthly toward the first goal [2020salon.blogspot.com]. If I didn't see a way out, I would have left a while ago.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm tired of doing coding challenges

</comment><comment><USER6> Mostly every day. And I thoroughly enjoy it--but it's hard, and the constant decision making can be exhausting.

</comment><comment><USER7> DHH said that there are really hard and big problems waiting for being solved. He lets the unhappy cubic folks working for big corps solving this hard and big problems and makes his living by solving small problems. He seemed to be happy. And seems to have power to contribute to OS.

</comment><comment><USER8> Everyone gets tired of their profession sooner or later. Lawyers, programmers, doctors, welders, customer service people, etc.

It's natural, particularly in programming where you can have a lot of fun messing with you own projects or be locked into a very boring sprint.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like creating things and I consider myself to be a curious individual, which makes me appreciate programming.

Unfortunately I also like things that work.

It's tough. Sometimes I wish it was just a hobby.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm tired of developer issues, and starving for actual end results. Programming is a means to an end, and the drive that keeps me going is the desire to see my work finished.</comment>


Crime vs. Temperature - <AUTHOR> http://crime.static-eric.com/

<comment><USER2> > As the temperature in Chicago rises, so does the crime rate

While almost all the violent crimes rise with temperature, almost as interesting are the exceptions which are flat with respect to temperature, e.g. Narcotics, Kidnapping, Intimidation and Prostitution.

Eric, the Domestic Violence data clearly has an error.</comment>


Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://flyosity.com/tutorial/crafting-subtle-realistic-user-interfaces.php <comment><USER2> The most realistic UI ever:

<http://www.mintpass.com/select/select_detail.asp?idx=117>

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Inspired by layersapp.com. Since win32 window and controls are standardized, why can't we make awesome screenshots like the Chrome ads do? <http://i.imgur.com/tYGFk.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER3> A caveat about the whole urge to make UIs look three-dimensional: it takes more caution to prevent screwing up. More so than with a two-dimensional style, we catch subtle visual miscues and dislike them.

Things must be consistent: every 3D widget needs to appear to have the same light source and be plausibly oriented to each other, just as a start. The need for visual consistency sets up a tight coupling in 3D designs. For instance, take the OS X Leopard dock, which went from a minimally 3D background that icons "laid" on to a much more 3D table on which icons "stood". Icons designed for the old dock looked _wrong_ in the new dock.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a really great article for today's design trends. It provides the sort of knowledge that would really help a mediocre designer (i.e. multitasking founder) jump up a level.

I wonder tho. These principles were presented as universal. I wonder if the 2d/3d design trends are really universal, or whether it would be reasonable if something else had/will evolve.

</comment><comment><USER5> One that's never occurred to me as a rule:

"When using type within an interface element, it either sits on top (dark 1px drop shadow) or is inset (white 1px drop shadow), it's never at the same surface as a button or widget."

Will have to pay more attention next time I'm doing this.

<comment><USER6> When he says 'interface element', do you take that to mean a button or what? In one sense, everything on the screen is an 'interface element' ...

<comment><USER5> I take it to mean any interface element you're making in Photoshop -- buttons, nav, etc.

Now that I think about it, I stick to CSS most of the time and try to keep images to a minimum (front-end optimization is a tough habit to kick), so I may forget this by the time the next occasion arises.

<comment><USER7> For newer browsers (ff3.5, new safari and webkit) there are css3 commands you can use to provide this kind of eye candy simply. You can add a drop shadow to text (-moz-text-shadow, -webkit-box-shadow, or generally text-shadow), Or to elements (-moz-box-shadow, -webkit-box-shadow or generally box-shadow). Or rounded corners (border-radius).

Given that these elements are only eye candy, I don't worry too much that they are invisible on IE and older browsers. Think of it as free candy.

<comment><USER8> Only eye candy? I would not underestimate the importance of an application's visual aesthetic. As the author demonstrates, even subtle details (like a 1px drop shadow) can breathe life into an interface.

We developers might dismiss 1px drop shadows an unimportant; after all, the "real" application is the code we write. But users make no such distinctions. To them, the interface _is_ the application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't like _large_ amounts of inset text. It looks fantastic for section headers and UI element labels, but it's not a great look for prose (like this article uses). The inset becomes subtly distracting.

</comment><comment><USER6> Will be using these guidelines to improve the Stormpulse UI.

<comment><USER10> Stormpulse is the first time I've ever been interested in tornadoes, simply because the interface is good and the site is fun. Keep up the great work :-)

<comment><USER6> Thanks! I'm pushing a many, many hour week here doing a speed improvement. Can't wait to release it (will make our severe weather maps load much faster, and add a couple levels of zoom).</comment></comment></comment>


How our addiction to computers is helping keep the world quiet & peaceful  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0e072330-7940-11e1-9f0f-00144feab49a.html#axzz1qmyLGWn2

<comment><USER2> I'd like to know how you got your name to appear Green.</comment>


Read the fucking HIG - <AUTHOR> http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> When I'm feeling insecure about my own UI design skills, this list picks me up off the mat; somehow seeing precious pixel real estate littered with misplaced buttons, uneven gradients, random hues out of some 1970 shag carpet motel nightmare makes me feel... like not such a fucking idiot. Or maybe I'm kidding myself. Damn, I'm insecure about UI design.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a little disturbed at how much material they have to draw from less than 24 hours into the existence of the Mac App Store.

<comment><USER4> I did a double take myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice ranting. A superb complement to <http://www.psdisasters.com/></comment>


Micronauts (TV Series) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronauts_(TV_series) <comment><AUTHOR> Boulder Media Limited (a subsidiary of Hasbro) announced in June 2017 that it was developing a new Micronauts animated series for 2019.

micronauts...one of my favorites fidgets from times past</comment>


Move over, Kindle. iriver Story HD is Google's e-Reader, $139.99 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/move-over-kindle-iriver-story-hd-is-googles-e-reader-13999/26083

<comment><USER2> Unless things have changed, I can vouch for the quality of iRiver's kit, particularly the high quality of their firmware. I have owned a number of MP3 players from them over the years, and all were superb products.

</comment><comment><USER3> That is one ugly-looking device. But if we're trying to compete on e-ink readers, I think the device to compete against now is the Nook Simple Touch. I loved my Kindle when I had one, but after using the NST I realized how rough a lot of the edges on the Kindle are. It really is a clear and solid step above the Kindle, and it's the device you need to compete with for e-ink. Wifi vs 3g doesn't matter; nobody buys books often enough to really truly NEED 24/7 connectivity across the globe. The NST touchscreen is shockingly responsive and totally obviates the need for a physical keyboard.

As for integration with Google Books--while I haven't used GB myself, I read a lot of Project Gutenberg books, and I'm assuming the two are similar platforms. The problem with PG books is that the formatting is just awful for a lot of the ebooks. Sometimes the person compiling the book will slavishly stick to a print edition, going so far as putting page numbers in or other print ephemera; or sometimes the internal coding is so bad that it only looks good on a small subset of readers; or sometimes the book is OCR'd and thus riddled with typos. What I'm saying is, you get what you pay for--and a lot of the free public-domain ebooks are just awfully compiled.

Hell, even some books I've bought from the Amazon store have been very obviously OCR'd with no second thought to ebook presentation or editing--a big example is one of Stephen King's Dark Tower books, which are huge sellers that you'd expect to have been ported to digital with at least a little attention to detail. Not so: the one I bought from the official publisher was obviously OCR'd and so riddled with typos and errors that I returned it to Amazon without finishing it.

So I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not impressed with this device. It's a generation behind the Nook Simple Touch, and integration with Google Books isn't enough to interest me given the awful or non-existent editorial oversight in most public-domain ebooks.

<comment><USER4> "Wifi vs 3g doesn't matter; nobody buys books often enough to really truly NEED 24/7 connectivity across the globe."

Totally agree, personally. Some people use the 3G for other stuff, but I only read books. Btw, purchased Google eBooks are not like PG, though, they are formatted like purchased Amazon and B&N eBooks.

"It's a generation behind the Nook Simple Touch, and integration with Google Books isn't enough to interest me given the awful or non-existent editorial oversight in most public-domain ebooks."

I'm interested in the new nook too. I saw it in the store, but didn't bother with checking it out. Next time I will. Integration with Google is also irrelevant to me, but access to Google eBooks (and all the other ePUB books with DRM via Adobe) totally matters to me, and this is why I won't buy a Kindle, yet.

When it comes to well-formatted public domain eBooks, I like Feedbooks.

<comment><USER5> I used to have a 3G Kindle, but it was stolen, and now I have a WiFi Kindle.

I agree with what you guys are saying, but without the 3g, my impulse purchases have really gone down. For example, I used to buy periodicals while on the train with some regularity, but now I hardly ever do.

So providing 3g on an e-reader might be a good investment in that sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nothing jumps out at me as a Killer Feature that would make me want to own this rather than my Kindle.

I can see Google competing with Facebook, but Amazon? Seems like they should rethink that battle - going head to head is not going to be a winning strategy.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but I don't own a Kindle. If I owned a Kindle I probably wouldn't be inclined to switch either having invested in books locked (albeit easily unlocked) to that platform. I had been considering the Kobo reader since Kobo is the only vendor that also offers an app for my phone as well. I might also consider this iRiver reader since I know that the Google Books website works fine on my phone.

<comment><USER8> _I had been considering the Kobo reader since Kobo is the only vendor that also offers an app for my phone as well_

What phone do you have?

<comment><USER7> Palm Pre

<comment><USER6> Ok, so that's a killer feature for you and two other guys...

<comment><USER6> Joking aside, there are serious economic issues: the Google device needs some Big Advantage over the Kindle in order to win market share, and compatibility with a phone no one owns is not it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google's eBook strategy is excellent. Google licenses eBooks at prices that rival Amazon and B&N, and the eBooks can be read in browsers, on cell phones, on eReaders from B&N, Sony, and now iRiver, etc., and if and when Amazon enables the Kindle to read ePUB eBooks that employ Adobe Content Server DRM (e.g., eBooks that Google, B&N and Sony sell, and public libraries lend), then Google eBooks will be accessible practically anywhere. Pretty shrewd move on Google's part.

The iRiver device looks pretty good, but as duiker101 points out, the Kindle has the unique 3G advantage.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is Google the least innovative high-tech company? I cannot think of a single Google product that wasn't either an improved copy or a takeover of another company's product.

From search to gmail, maps, android, latitude, g+, tv, and now this.

I AM glad they usually make them better and more polished competitors, but still... not an ounce of originality?

<comment><USER10> This isn't a Google product -- it's designed by iriver. What's new is that it uses Google Books as its online bookstore, which potentially gives you access to the millions of books they've scanned from university libraries and such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> is it just me, or does it look shockingly similar to the Kindle (overall shape, screen size, etc.)? I am a Kindle owner, and love it, my only quibble being the DRM they use. on that front, the 3mill+ public domain books on Google Bookstore is a winner. But I don't think it will be a "Kindle killer".

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a hope that with more (successfully) competing e-book vendors, more DRM-free books will be in the works? As a Kindle owner, the biggest thing preventing me from considering buying a Google books based device would be the fact that I couldn't read the books I previously purchased through Amazon on it.

Is there any hope that DRM'ed e-books will have a similar trajectory as MP3s did?

<comment><USER11> I have thought about this as well, and I hope (and think) there will be. The Kindle DRM wasn't a problem initially, because it was one of the first widely sold e-readers with a huge company backing it. however, as more devices come out that can compete with the quality of the Kindle, a change will need to happen.

I was about to type "No one will buy Amazon e-books without a Kindle, and no one will buy a Kindle if they can't read the books elsewhere", but I'm backstepping. The current Kindle business model reminds me of Apple/iTunes, something that makes me shudder. If they can still make enough money off DRM content, then maybe the incentive to make it open is small.

<comment><USER5> And the problem with saying "No one will buy Amazon e-books without a Kindle, and no one will buy a Kindle if they can't read the books elsewhere," is that it's already untrue. With the Kindle app on iOS and Android devices, plenty of people are doing just that. Don't really have numbers to back that up, though...

So another option came to mind: E-readers that can run apps. Apps like Kindle, or Google Books. That might just be wishful thinking, though.

<comment><USER12> The Nook 2nd Edition is apparently really easy to root and install apps on: <http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1138564>

<comment><USER5> Right, that's true, but I was thinking just of e-ink devices. It's a tough sell, though, since e-ink devices are really only good for reading, so there might not be much incentive for creating an open e-ink device that can run 3rd party apps.

Amazon has started to allow 3rd party apps on the Kindle, but I don't think it's been very effective or popular, and I don't expect a Google Books app on there any time soon.

<comment><USER12> The N2E is an e-ink device :)

<http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/index.asp?PID=35699>

I agree on the openness. I don't get the impression that many manufacturers are interested in an e-ink Android device though- B&N and Notion Ink are basically the only ones, IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As long as Kindle has free 3g there is no way i'm going to change it. It can be bugged as hell, but the possibility of browsing my email or HN and someother sites from almost _everywhere_ for _free_ cannot be easilly replaced.

</comment><comment><USER14> They call it Google's ebook reader, but did Google have anything to do with it other than providing the content?</comment>