Vladimir Putin resurrects the KGB - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/ <comment><USER2> It seems with the West becoming more and more aware of their own government's secret surveillance programs, and Russia going back to the days of the KGB, a second Cold War is coming or is already here.

Even the spin and outright denial Russian officials have put on Russia's role in the downing of MH17 in light of increasing evidence, reeks of the old Cold War days. A missile is seen shipped from Russia in a montage of stills and videos collected by the independent investigating committee, and Russian state officials spin a new story to cast doubt upon it.

I am not a fan of Hillary or Trump, and frankly, I don't think either of them is up to dealing with the Russia that Putin is creating.

<comment><USER3> Actually (in regard to spin) I think it's rather different, these days. Back they, they could rely on a media that was tightly controlled (and a population with a generational memory of experiencing terror at scale); while our media, while less "controlled", were much more difficult to talk back to or even bullshit-check.

These days -- where it's seemingly impossible for an educated person to be hoodwinked by canards such as the Russian government's official line on MH-17 -- it seems they pretty much as to rely on the public willingness and _preference_ for being regularly and openly deceived. Which counterintuitively has proved to be amazingly fruitful, and indeed, apparently one of the major cornerstones of their ideology (See the recent discussion on "post-truth" politics, per the recent Economist article).

At least that's how it seems. Then again, I'm not from there, and would welcome correction (or qualification) from anyone who is, on this point.

 _I am not a fan of Hillary or Trump, and frankly, I don 't think either of them is up to dealing with the Russia that Putin is creating._

Me neither, but objectively there's evidence that Hillary (while not exactly possessed of a great deal of imagination as to how to handle the problem) at least seems to (1) basically _get_ that there's a major problem (and perhaps a major storm) brewing, and (2) be genuinely, viscerally disliked in Putin's camp (such that it seems they'd be most disappointed with an electoral victory on her side).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It remembers me of these books:

[https://www.amazon.com/New-Lies-Old-Anatoliy- Golitsyn/dp/094...](https://www.amazon.com/New-Lies-Old-Anatoliy- Golitsyn/dp/0945001088)

[https://www.amazon.com/Perestroika-Deception-Memoranda- Centr...](https://www.amazon.com/Perestroika-Deception-Memoranda-Central- Intelligence/dp/1899798005)

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is the RT equivalent news: [https://www.rt.com/politics/359851-newspaper- forecasts-all-e...](https://www.rt.com/politics/359851-newspaper-forecasts- all-enveloping-reform/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Yuck.. politico.... Cant believe everything you read on there.

<comment><USER7> Would you mind sharing what's wrong with Politico? I always thought they seemed okay.

<comment><USER8> They are a bastion of false equivalence. For example:

[http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/nate-silver-politico- covers-...](http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/nate-silver-politico-covers- politics-like-sports-but-not-in-an-intelligent-way-at-all)

[http://www.salon.com/2014/05/01/politicos_false_equivalence_...](http://www.salon.com/2014/05/01/politicos_false_equivalence_garbage_no_liberal_donors_are_not_worse_than_sheldon_adelson/)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik- wemple/wp/2016/09/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik- wemple/wp/2016/09/19/no-way-is-jim-vandehei-going-to-heed-warnings-about- false-equivalence/)</comment></comment></comment>


On the Design of Application Protocols - <AUTHOR> http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3117.txt <comment><USER2> OP, what is the newsworthy part of TFA?

<comment><USER3> What's TFA?

<comment><AUTHOR> I presume he or she means "The Fucking Article".

<comment><USER2> yes</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New York Times Had a Mistake on Its Front Page Every Day for More Than a Century - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/-em-the-new-york-times-em-had-a-mistake-on-its-front-page-every-day-for-more-than-a-century/283076?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> So they started reusing issue numbers? That seems like a worse idea than just living with the mistake, because now you have two separate papers with the same number.

People usually cite newspapers by date, so it's not going to be a huge source of error, but still...</comment>


Ending Bitcoin Support - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support <comment><USER3> For what it's worth, we just spent two weeks trying and failing to get Stripe's Bitcoin integration working on our site.

The short version is that Stripe guaranteed a USD <=> BTC exchange rate for an hour, after which they would automatically cancel the transaction. Given that most transactions now take well over an hour to be verified on the blockchain, that means basically every transaction fails.

<comment><USER4> I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use- cases, you have a few competing alternatives.

In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives.

...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a store of value is better placed in an actively used coin network.

<comment><USER5> I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology.

It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.

<comment><USER6> There's a few different ones that have made huge jumps forward; RaiBlocks can apparently do around 7,000tx/s.

<comment><USER7> Meanwhile, your payment card provider is probably doing that many transactions per second just in the small city I live in.

<comment><USER8> [citation needed] A quick google says Visa peaks at 4k txs/sec

<comment> mh- [0]: _VisaNet handles an average of 150 million transactions every day and is capable of handling more than 24,000 transactions per second._

[1]: _65,000 Transaction messages per second_

[0] [https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business- tools/...](https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business- tools/retail.html)

[1] [https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about- visa/documents/vi...](https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about- visa/documents/visa-facts-figures-jan-2017.pdf)

Also, consider there are other networks like MasterCard:

[2]: _MasterCard's 2012 annual report asserts that its network can handle more than 160 million transactions per hour with an average network response time of 130 milliseconds. Operating 24 hours a day every day, MasterCard reports that its processing systems have consistently maintained availability 99.9 percent of the time._

[2] [https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/consumer-finance- ins...](https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/consumer-finance- institute/payment-cards-center/publications/discussion- papers/2013/d-2013-october-clearing-settlement.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Id like to also add that there are an order of magnitude more transaction options provided by cryptocurrencies than there are for fiat payment systems. Id bet money that, collectively, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is able to process more transactions per second than all of the leading fiat processors combined.

<comment><USER10> Probably, but only because crypto doesn't scan for fraud and abuse among other things. Monero is happy to let someone completely empty your life savings.

Cc processors on the other hand are on the hook for fraud, so they are checking every transaction to make sure it doesn't match certain hueristics that could indicate theft or fraud.

<comment><USER9> I'm optimistic crypocurrencies (not all, but some) will achieve global adoption as a payment option. I think its possible to build a cryptocurrency that could emulate the fraud / refund detection features of cc processors. If there isn't one out there, I'm sure it will exist in the future. I certainly don't see monero being used in my local bodega or as a mainstream currency because thats not really what monero is trying to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange.

What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But this news is worrying.

<comment><USER12> > What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it?

I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You're not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though.

Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there's some underlying frustration there that was expounded upon using good references and kind words.

[0]: [https://github.com/bitcoin-dot- org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010/fil...](https://github.com/bitcoin-dot- org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010/files)

<comment><USER13> Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.

<comment><USER14> Very little though. If the demand for gold were merely industrial it would not need to be mined in such quantities as it has throughout history. I would put jewelry in the 'sentimental' category as well.

Not only is Bitcoin purely sentimental, it represents has huge costs in the form of raw energy.

Bitcoin's only claim to value is that it is an artifact of an act of ritual sacrifice. One might imagine a precedent in some system of tokens issued by some ancient priesthood.

<comment><USER15> Gold has "real" demand though in jewelry. It's distributed and longstanding and it has utility. People wear it and use it in real life and value it and wish to keep it in order to look at it and possess it.

That's as tangible as anything else. Nobody would say that there's no demand for musical instruments, or baseballs, because they are optional parts of life that aren't food or shelter.

Gold has intrinsic value in part because people seem to intrinsically like it for what it actually is, not just it's utility in exchange. That's fundamentally different.

<comment><USER16> the modifier "intrinsic" doesn't add anything though. "people intrinsically like" \--> "people like"; "gold is intrinsically valued" \--> "gold is valued".

"intrinsic" seems to imply an innate persistence despite not being able to justify such innateness, just empirical persistence. It just implies things that are arguably not justifiable needlessly. gold has been persistently valuable. The universe doesn't give it an innate value.

<comment><USER14> 'Intrinsic' here means that the property of the object remains even if people's preferences and culture change. Gold's utility for electronic applications is a fundamental property of the number of atoms in its nucleus, whereas there have been cultures that had it readily available yet didn't find it particularly desirable for jewelry.

<comment><USER15> That's nonsense. People's long term interest in electronics is far more unproven and fleeting at this point than their interest in gold.

Seeing as how cultures that considered gold a highly valued item developed independently in Europe and uncontacted pre-Columbian America, and the preference remains global today, there's clearly something durable about this concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They should have replaced it with Lightning Network, is amazingly fast and cheap and works on top of Bitcoin. I'm running a test node, this stuff really works!

> Lightning is a decentralized network using smart contract functionality in > the blockchain to enable instant payments across a network of participants.

In case you are curious [https://lightning.network](https://lightning.network) and another good resource here [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7pwna9/lightning_n...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7pwna9/lightning_network_megathread/)

<comment><USER18> The article does mention it.

> We're interested in what's happening with Lightning and other proposals to > enable faster payments.

Please be careful about promoting LN. It's great tech, yes.

> this stuff really works!

* yes, but please don't actually use it with money yet. [1]

[1] [https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning#project- status](https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning#project-status)

<comment><USER17> I think they are being over cautious (other implementations are not as concern), but yes still in testing. There are over 100 nodes, doing a bunch of transactions no money lost.

<comment><USER19> 100 nodes for a network worth hundreds of Billions of dollars: that's not over cautious, that's under cautious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's nice to see they're still interested in payment-oriented tech in this area, such as Lightning and OmiseGO.

Another one to watch out for is RaiBlocks. Currently has a functioning net, featuring instant, fee-less transactions.

The thing that's really impressing me about RaiBlocks is the community that's around it - so much community dev effort going into payment adapters and services. People are already accepting Web payments with it.

I am holding some, so maybe I've drunk the kool aid but I really feel like it's something worth keeping an eye on or looking into if you're interested in the practical crypto-payments space. There's an active reddit you can find with Google if you're genuinely interested in more info.

<comment><USER21> It looks really promising. Unfortunately, it can only be bought on two relatively unknown exchanges.

<comment><USER22> They won the Binance community vote so it will be there soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another day, another HN title changed without any clear rationale. Was the original "Stripe ends Bitcoin support" really so bad that it had to be changed to "Ending Bitcoin Support"?

<comment><USER24> They have a policy of _always_ changing it to match the title of the linked article.

Most of the time this is either an improvement or (as in this case) neutral.

I do wish they'd allow a little more editorializing, quite frankly. The linked title is not _always_ an improvement.

<comment><USER23> Ah! That's interesting, I didn't realize it was an official policy. Given that, wouldn't it make sense to generate the post titles from the <title> element of the link automatically?

<comment><USER25> Title changes are still allowed when the title is too long, misleading, or provides no information about the contents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of value this makes a lot of sense.

Too bad they aren't replacing this with another cryptocurrency at the moment.

<comment><USER27> > Given that bitcoin isn't a medium of transaction anymore and a store of > value this makes a lot of sense.

Can someone bother explaining what this actually means? 3 weeks ago everyone is hype about how Bitcoin is going to be the future of currency and now that it's tanking and vendors are dropping it like a hot potato, its no longer a transactional currency and it's now a "store of value".

<comment><USER28> Bitcoin is currently the crypto equivalent of gold. It's not reasonable to use it to buy a coffee. However, Bitcoin is _trying_ (but many would argue, failing) to upgrade the network with something that will allow cheaper/faster transactions and make it a reasonable currency again. However, (imo) in- fighting has seriously hampered this. That being the reality, many people hope that Bitcoin will remain a store of value into the future, even if most people are using some other crypto for actual day-to-day transactions.

There are "old-school" cryptos with lower transaction fees (Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash). There is not much reason to use them as an actual currency except for the fact that they have more inertia than most other projects (and therefore more things have been built around them). In particular, most places that had some sort of Bitcoin integration can very easily switch to Bitcoin Cash for much lower tx fees.

There are many cryptos that are trying to be currency in a permanently scalable way (IOTA, Ripple, Stellar)

Other cryptos are trying to be cash, i.e. anonymous (Dash, Monero, ZCash).

Most others are either A. intended to be more platform than currency (Ethereum, NEO, EOS, Tron) or B. too small to mention.

<comment><USER29> No, Bitcoin is the crypto equivalent of Monopoly money: it is unreasonable to use it for anything but little fun. For real world use cases there are better solutions, including other cryptocurrencies.

<comment><USER30> There was a recent bit on NPR (Planet Money?) where they interviewed young people in Seoul - they had so little faith in their ability to earn a living and save money by working a regular job in Korea they were putting all their savings into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and hoping to hit the jackpot. It was alarming.

<comment><USER31> [http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/73...](http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/732768.html)

> Low-income South Koreans are finding it harder and harder to rise to the > middle or high-income classes through their own efforts and abilities, a > recent study shows. Just two out of every ten households saw their economic > status rise through increased income and assets over a three-year period, > the findings indicate.

Crypto provides an alternative economy where class mobility isn't broken in the same ways. Youth will continue to flock to it until the local economies sort themselves out.

<comment><USER30> I wonder if young folks in the same situation in America are doing the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Props for hanging in there as long as they did!

Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863182) (Dec 2017)

Barely related, but in case you missed it earlier this month:

Website Glitch Let Me Overstock My Coinbase | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16123496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16123496)

</comment><comment><USER33> Yeah, but who really cares?

95% of people buy, sell and transfer Bitcoin to do one thing: speculating on Crypto-Assets. It really doesn't matter if the fees are so high, it's not like people buy crypto like candy, they buy it like stocks.

Who cares if there's a 30$ fee on a 1000+$ transfer? That's still cheap compared to other methods of international money transfer. People are obviously ready to spend that much.

Bitcoin has always been terrible as an everyday currency, even when transactions were practically free and fast, who wanted to wait 10 minutes to confirm their purchase of a Grand Latte? Just pay with any of the existing methods, they work just fine, it's a _solved_ problem. There's probably 1000 cryptocurrencies that could work for that just fine, but nobody really needs that in the first place.

You gotta realize that Bitcoin is gonna be worth A MILLION dollars or maybe just one dollar, but then it could go back up to a thousand again! That is the real value of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER34> > Who cares if there's a 30$ fee on a 1000+$ transfer?

Because Bitcoin wasn't originally designed for speculating on cryptocurrencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Stellar isn't a direct replacement per-se, it's fast and has near zero transaction fees, but the lumens themselves were not intended to be used as a medium of transaction, only to have a token amount to pay the miniscule fees with.

To use the stellar network as intended, there needs to be an anchor that issues USD/EUR/whatever tokens on the stellar network, and then have stripe accept those tokens (issued by anchors they trust to convert the tokens back into real money)

XRB would be another good candidate for low fees, but that one has no fiat pair to value against, so it's hard to pay a USD invoice with it when the value is indeterminate.

<comment><USER36> Even if XLM was not intended to be used for direct payments, is there anything that actually prevents it from being used for it? From everything I see, it actually seems like a pretty good candidate for actual spending.

<comment><USER35> Well, if people decide to use it that way nobody can stop them. In my opinion, that would be an inefficient way of using the network, since if you pay with XLM today you need to first buy some, taking a loss on the conversion since you have to go through either eth or btc, then the payee needs to sell it (again with another intermediate currency) to get the money to pay their operating costs, and they'll likely charge a processing fee for that, and at that point you may as well be using a credit card.

On the other hand, if you use it like intended by getting USD stellar tokens from an anchor, and paying with those, the merchant can more or less accept them at face value (if they trust the anchor to give them USD for the token)

<comment><USER37> ELI5 on the difference between Stellar and Ripple? Why are companies like Stripe and Kik embracing XLM over XRP?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. Bitcoin is capable of handling high transaction volume with low fees. The BCH fork was created to support this case. The BTC chain's devs mostly work for Blockstream, who's business model is to create layer 2 payment solutions, so it's in their interest to choke off the main chain. And it looks like they are succeeding.

<comment><USER39> All BCH did was increase the block size limit from 1mb to 8mb. It solves the scalability problems in the short term, but will run into exactly the same issues a year or two from now. Then it'll be 32mb blocks, then 128mb, then 1Gb. An O(n) approach won't work in the long term.

<comment><USER40> Yet nobody quantifies what long term is.

Forgoing a solution that works temporarily, even if only for a year or two, isn't very bright if the alternative is this. Bitcoin is quickly loosing the network effect, the only thing it has going for it vs other altcoins.

<comment><USER41> 120 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Related to the Coinbase/insider trading noise around BCH a few weeks ago, it seems strange for Stripe to plug other alt-coins (OMG, Stellar, etc) in the post as things they view as "promising" and "imagine enabling support for". I don't think it's illegal nor unethical personally, but it is such a dicey topic that I'm surprised to see someone writing without a mountain of disclaimers on an official Stripe communication channel.

<comment><USER43> FYI, Stripe has been very transparent in the fact that they believe (and have pumped millions of dollars into) Stellar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> A lot of the chatter in this post is about the underlying value of Bitcoin (and blockchain currency generally) as an asset class. I keep telling folks: yes, it absolutely does have value apart from sentiment; holding a blockchain currency gives you access to all the infrastructure built on that product -- regardless of whether that infrastructure is for exchange, or storage, or smart contracts, or whatever.

It follows that the worth of a specific blockchain currency is tied to the usefulness and -- to be brutally honest -- the coolness of the underlying technology.

This is why you should short BTC (and even ETH). Both are proof-of-work, both consume massive amounts of power, and both are increasingly useless for transacting. Eventually, the slow deprecation of Bitcoin as a means of transaction will make the underlying infrastructure (appear) worthless, and at that inflection point, it becomes worthless as an asset class as well, as it will no longer be a stable store of value.

So take all your winnings from the Bitcoin lottery and plough them into something that actually has legs.

When my 'sell' threshold hits (I currently hold ETH), I'm buying the shit out of, e.g., Cardano, and Stellar Lumens. And if the blockade by the old guard ever cracks, TenX -- connected to a payment card -- will be sex on legs. (Ok currencies can have neither sex nor legs but you get my drift.)

I am explicitly buying as an investment in the technology. Believe in functional coding and smart contracts? You could do a hell of a lot worse. Mutatis mutandis, Stellar Lumens; different virtues, but also impressive.

I can see both technologies going forward, and I believe in both of them. Can't say the same for Bitcoin anymore.

Finally, talking about infrastructure, also evaluate _who_ the infrastructure is for, and how good it is at serving them. It probably makes sense to hold some Monero right now, as, like it or not, the traditional guarantor of value for Bitcoin is its utility in doing shady stuff. Privacycoins meet the needs of Bitcoin's original audience better than Bitcoin ever did.

<comment><USER45> Yes, some of the "dark web" marketplaces are starting to accept Monero now in addition to Bitcoin, for the reason you mentioned. I looked into buying Stellar but it was surprisingly difficult to buy, and the Stellar Desktop client was just confusing. I love Stellar conceptually but am not sure it's a good "investment" (if it was hard for me to buy/use I'm thinking it will be hard for others, too).

<comment><USER44> Hmmm good points. I'll have to think about that one a bit more. Cardano and Monero are both friends I would go to the wall for, though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> If cryptocurrencies really succeed, we will not need a centralized service like Stripe. Hopefully we will use a 'decentralized Stripe' (as far as I know the Dash Evolution platform will be sometinhg like that. Maybe that is the reason that they did not even mention Dash in the article, despite it being one of the most promising digital Cash system on the market.)

<comment><USER47> I'd rather not use a coin that requires the use of masternodes - <USER2> everyone's vote be equal and not make it a requirement to be rich in order to vote.

Also there's no way to prove that a few people don't own a majority of the masternodes.

With the huge instamine and the creator's refusual to restart the coin, it's just too sketchy for me to ever trust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Ethereum transaction fees are still in cents. They should start supporting it as a form of payment.

<comment><USER49> Actually it's pretty high too these days (not compared to Bitcoin of course)

[https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum- transactionfee...](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum- transactionfees.html)

<comment><USER50> Since many of ethereums transactions are from smart contract that use lots of gas, looking at the average transaction fee is misleading. Check ethgasstation.info for the transaction cost of a simple transaction. $0.08 will get you confirmed in the next block, and $0.02 will get you confirmed in 15 min.

<comment><USER49> That's fair, but that is just the cost right now though. The gas price necessary to get into the next few blocks has varied a lot over the past couple of months. Ethereum is definitely not immune to transaction cost difficulties as currently designed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Bitcoin isn't like gold. You cannot launder money or evade tax using gold. No need for trust means no trust. We know what "gold standard" means. You can guess what "bitcoin standard" would mean. Those who think bitcoin is an asset storage are delusional.

<comment><USER52> > You cannot launder money or evade tax using gold.

What makes you think that?

Trade dirty money for bullion, then trade bullion for cash at a pawn shop - money laundered.

Buy gold, after it appreciates trade it for a good without reporting the capital gain - evaded taxes. Or simply accept physical gold in return for labor without reporting or paying taxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> We have integrated Coinbase recently. Transactions take over a day to get verified. This is fine because the product is an annual subscription. That being said, except as an alternative to an international transfer, BTC has not much e-commerce value from our end.

<comment><USER54> Are you converting straight to USD (or your local currency), or keeping the BTC?

I know most storefronts that accept crypto do the former, but I can't help but wonder how much more they could have made if they had done the latter.

<comment><USER55> Easy to say after the fact.

<comment><USER54> Yes, fair enough - hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Love the idea of Stellar. Looks like a smart move from Stripe but will be nice to see ethereum (when and if POS).

</comment><comment><USER57> We've used the Bitcoin integration since it was in beta (I even got a Stripe t-shirt for pointing out a small bug) but I don't think we've ever received a single Bitcoin payment.

The workflow is too jarring (copy and paste a Bitcoin address to make a payment elsewhere, then come back).

Additionally, refunds are tricky: everything's immediately converted to fiat, so the customer needs to know they won't (or are extremely unlikely to) get the same amount of Bitcoin back.

Obviously these issues are true independent of current fee and transaction time story.

</comment><comment><USER58> TLDR;

 _Transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in Bitcoin price mean that it's for the "wrong" amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires._

</comment><comment><USER59> Seems to be a well written argument for ending their support while still maintaining a positive cryptocurrency stance. This will still cause many people to be upset because the state of cryptocurrency right now is a hot topic and changing quickly. Why didn't they switch to X? What about Y? etc. All of it requires development work and many of these currencies are still growing up. Seems like a reasonable approach.

</comment><comment><USER60> In my opinion, Bitcoin trading is about trading bad money for good money. When the bubble burst, the good money will be in the pockets of former Bitcoin "market makers", while the loses will be in the side of the enthusiasts/idealists/naive.

</comment><comment><USER61> This is great news and opportunity for OmiseGO, Ethereum and Stellar. Solid projects with respectful and well know developers team that do not directly compete against Bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER62> This is the snowflake that starts everything :)

</comment><comment><USER63> Stellar which they mention as alternative would probably suit them way better. It doesn't have any of the issues that were problem with Bitcoin, but it's adoption is significantly less.

Litecoin support would be very nice to have, it is kind of obvious step for transaction processing.

<comment><USER64> Would prefer them to be looking into other coins such as Raiblocks.

<comment><USER63> Yeah Raiblocks is pretty interesting too. I really like what developer had done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Is it just me or did they just cancel BTC support as it fails to provide what BTC was touted to give to the people?

In turn doesn't this imply mined coins as they are pretty much are useless for anyone except those having monetary assets in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER66> I can't blame them for doing this. I think the writing is on the wall about how people really use Bitcoin, and with the glut of ICOs (and many turning into pump-and-dump scams) reality is catching up with potential.

I still have hopes for Ether.

</comment><comment><USER67> > Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a > means of exchange.

I would say it has evolved to become an instrument for speculation or a hedge against a local currency's volatility.

</comment><comment><USER68> BCH fees are in the $0.25 range right now. I wonder if they considered BCH. They could probably pretty easily implement it with their existing BTC infrastructure.

<comment><USER40> That number is much too high. The average is much higher than for usual transactions because many wallets are overpaying and very large transactions with many outputs and inputs are driving it up.

$0.01 transactions (or 1 sat/byte) transactions will confirm in the next block. This is lower than for Litecoin or Ethereum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I hope that Stripe consider support for GNU Taler!

[https://gnutaler.org/](https://gnutaler.org/)

<comment><USER70> That website is a fake website. The real one is taler.net. See the discussion in the email list: [http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/taler/2018-01/msg00009.htm...](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/taler/2018-01/msg00009.html)

<comment><USER69> Wow, that's pretty serious, thank you for pointing it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> this is a good read for the reasons cited. it made no sense (or cents) for stripe or anyone else to put bitcoin on top of networks with traditional fees. i love stripe and hope they continue to allow me operate various businesses without the need for a traditional bank or processor. can't wait for them to do an IPO and pay off the VCs so i use them for my firearms clients.

</comment><comment><USER72> I don't have any place to criticize at all but this seems pretty short- sighted. The primary criticism is low tps and fees… but that's exactly what lightning was invented to solve (edit: as I now see someone else mentioned)… and it's already working, in testing phase. Isn't it more effort to remove support then add it back again soon than just to wait a few months? So it /seems/ either something else is going on or they just didn't know and weren't told.

<comment><USER73> "In testing phase" is probably not good enough for Stripe to roll out to their customers.

I think what they meant was "we're just not seeing enough usage of Bitcoin payments to justify the costs of supporting it." Which is perfectly fair.

<comment><USER57> In the years we've used the Bitcoin integration, we've never seen a single Bitcoin payment. Next iteration of our customer portal wouldn't have featured it, even if Stripe hadn't pulled support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> If they'd only listened when I suggested they go with Dogecoin.

Dogeconomics axiom: 1Ð = 1Ð

such finance. many simple. wow.

</comment><comment><USER75> What did you expect? They are in the business of making transactions, bitcoin isn't anymore.

</comment><comment><USER76> This is good for Bitcoin

<comment><USER77> how is this good for Bitcoin?

<comment><USER78> It's a long-standing joke about how Bitcoin proponents tend to show up in comments about bad-news-for-Bitcoin threads to explain how this latest development is actually _good_ for it.

<comment><USER77> thks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Stripe,please just add support for RaiBlocks.

</comment><comment><USER80> Beautifully written! I will take note.

</comment><comment><USER81> IOTA can actually handle great TPS unlike bitcoin. BTC is maybe 10TPS cap while IOTA is pushing towards 2k TPS which is what Visa can do.

<comment><USER40> Damn lot's of people are pushing their favorite coin.

Here are some reasons IOTA is a shitcoin and cannot ever replace Bitcoin:

1\. No decentralized solution to the double spend problem. The very reason Bitcoin exists IOTA fails at. 2\. Dev team is so incompetent they tried to implement their own cryptographic hash function and predictably failed. 3\. Mass buzzwords: Quantum proof, ternary(!), Internet of Things, instant transactions, no fees! Everything is _perfect_! 4\. They have no solution to spam. POW is the only cost to transactions but it's extremely low so dedicated computers can outspend everyone else. With the way the tangle works this in practice mean transactions won't be confirmed. 5\. Their network doesn't even work properly with users trying or hours to get their transaction accepted by the network.

There are more but I can't be bothered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> A little late to the party stripe. Bitcoin has been slow forever. Why now? It is just about to launch lightning or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER83> This is the main reason Litecoin exists. Strange that they decided not to use it...

<comment><USER40> Litecoin failed to gain the network effect which is so crucial for a currency. It never had a roadmap other than copying what Bitcoin did. It's not even a cheap coin to use compared to the alternatives.

There's no reason to use Litecoin over Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum or Monero at this point.

<comment><USER83> Litecoin volume has regularly been $1 billion+ per day during the past several months, and Ethereum has been suffering from the same issues as Bitcoin. LTC's median transaction fee is literally pennies, you don't think that's cheap?

The fact that you think ETH is more suitable for use as a currency only shows how little you know about crypto. ETH isn't even meant to be a currency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> The difference between gold and cryptocurrencies is that gold is something that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.

Simulated gold is not actual gold, in other words. They are under current conventions interchangeable, but the context that allows that is contingent.

<comment><USER85> actually if people started not viewing gold as a store of value but just as a raw material like aluminum it's price would tank.

<comment><USER86> The price of gold could significantly decrease, that's for sure, but even purely as a material it still would be reasonably valuable, significantly more valuable than silver. It has a price floor; bitcoin does not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Stripe's entire business is built on credit card transactions. They added half assed bitcoin support and then killed it.

This makes sense for a company that has every incentive to prolong a move away from credit cards.

As soon as we switch to a decentralized "currency" stripes business will begin its decline.

<comment><USER88> Bitcoin transactions take hours to confirm now, making Bitcoin useless as a transactional medium. When people are paying 25%, 50%, and more to send Bitcoin of typical levels of purchase, it's time to get out. Stripe is honestly a bit late in dropping Bitcoin for transactions.

<comment><USER89> I sent ~$5k in btc last night for a $3 fee and it confirmed in around 30 minutes..

<comment><USER88> Then you got very lucky: [https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation- time](https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> It is amazing the number of shallow comments shouting doom and gloom over news like this and others (Steam, etc). Must be the end of Bitcoin because transaction fees are too high!

And more generally everyone shouting doom and gloom over high transaction fees.

Let's stop and think about this critically for once. Transaction fees on Bitcoin are high. And that's somehow a bad thing?

By that same logic it's bad that Apple can charge so much for their phones. $800 phones are so ridiculous. No one can buy the phones! And Apple is clearly a failing business because of it.

It's bad that Tesla is able to charge $70k+ for the Model S. Tesla is a failing business with no future prospects. The experiment is over. Time to buy Chevy Volts instead. Everyone sell TSLA because the Model S is too expensive!

The interpretation that high Bitcoin transaction fees is somehow bad and signals the end of Bitcoin is just so ludicrous when subjected to even an ounce of critical thinking.

Bitcoin transaction fees are high because Bitcoin transactions are _valuable_. Because people are willing to pay that much to make a transaction on a network that secures their transaction in an immutable, public record stored redundantly on 10,000+ machines.

We should see this as a massive signal that Bitcoin is _successful_. That demand for its technology grew beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

The fact that Stripe and other payment platforms can no longer use the technology is disappointing, but for different reasons. So to re-iterate my point one last time, Bitcoin has succeeded in the same way that Tesla succeeded. It made a Model S blockchain, and people are clamoring over one another to get access to it.

Of course, I would be remiss to ignore one valid complaint about high fees. Bitcoin's goal was to free the masses from the entrenched banking system. Part of the banking system is making small, every day transactions. In that regard, Bitcoin has yet to succeed. Going back to my analogy, we can see that Tesla hasn't succeeded in a similar regard either; we don't see electric cars in the hands of the average person. But that's not because the technology has failed. That's because we haven't gotten there yet. It's a long road yet.

We'll get there. The world doesn't change in 9 years. The banking system won't be overturned in a decade. But we have a beachhead. Bitcoin is just getting started.

<comment><USER91> I'm sorry, but saying Bitcoin succeeded like the Model S succeeded is an argument that just holds no water to me at all. That makes no sense.

<comment><USER90> Perhaps the explanation of my comparison was clumsy.

Elon Musk's goal with Tesla was to disrupt the entrenched auto and oil industries, for the betterment of mankind, by spurring a transition to electric vehicles. [This is not an argument for his altruism one way or the other, merely a statement of the company's goals.]

Bitcoin's goal was to disrupt the entrenched banking industry, for the betterment of mankind.

The two goals are thus quite similar, in kind.

My argument is that people saying "Bitcoin is dead because fees are too high" is like saying "Tesla is dead because their cars are expensive."

Tesla has sold 200k cars at $70k+ a pop. That's an indicator of success, to me. In the same way that people paying $0.02/byte to be part of the Bitcoin blockchain is an indicator of success; not an indicator of failure.

The comparison itself is not really important. I chose it merely because Tesla tends to be a darling among VCs and ... well this is Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> Weird, they seemed to time it just as the Bitcoin Lightning Network is starting to work:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network#History)

[https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza- day-...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza-day-first- ever-physical-purchase-on-lightning-network)

</comment><comment><USER93> I'd just like to gripe a bit about the use of "fiat currency" as an antonym of "cryptocurrency". Bitcoin may not be similar in all respects to typical government-issued money, but it is far more similar to fiat currency than to hard currency: its supply is artificially controlled, and Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value. Bitcoin is administered by a de facto government in the form of the miners that run the network. That this government does not have a direct correlation to a UN-recognized nation-state does not make Bitcoin any less artificial or more real.

<comment><USER94> Bitcoin isn't like real money though. Take the US dollar - whatever happens, something like 300 million people and tens of millions of companies will still need to pay taxes in that currency. That's a big baseline demand, before you even consider the goods and services available in the economy that can be bought with US dollars.

Whereas everybody trading bitcoin or accepting it as a payment method could switch to a different cryptocurrency tomorrow...</comment></comment>


The Troll Hunters: wading into ugly corners of the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/photoessay/533426/the-troll-hunters/

<comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=troll%20hunters&sort=byPopular...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=troll%20hunters&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment>


Ask HN: Paid or OSS Weekly Newsletter Tools? - <AUTHOR> I have seen a ton of startups that exist to create newsletters but very few open source tools.<p>Am I looking in the wrong place? Anyone love their OSS newsletter repo? <comment><USER2> Do you just want basic html-email creation, or do you have something particular in mind? Please post links to a couple of examples of other people's newsletters you're trying to model yourself after.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://goodbits.io/](https://goodbits.io/)

basically a feed reader that allows you to setup basic html-email creation.

\- [https://web-smith.ongoodbits.com/2017/07/19/no-230-the- top-2...](https://web-smith.ongoodbits.com/2017/07/19/no-230-the-top-25-dnvb- s-of-2017) \- [http://rubyweekly.com/issues/358](http://rubyweekly.com/issues/358)</comment></comment>


Init system support in Debian - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/770093/cd322e1fedf67bbe/ <comment><USER2> The first comment in there is really gold. Get rid of sysvinit, but please do invest efforts in advancing init systems. The problem is clearly not "solved" and we need diversity.</comment>


Are you an early-stage founder with an MVP? Apply for product working sessions - <AUTHOR> http://medium.com/@firstround/working-sessions-with-top-product-leaders-now-open-in-san-francisco-df342d2d93f0 <comment><AUTHOR> If you're a founder in the Bay Area with an MVP or initial product, apply for working sessions with top product leaders like: \- Max Mullen (Instacart) \- Paul Rosania (Slack) \- Olivia Teich (Dropbox) \- Madhu Muthukumar (Oculus VR) \- Jonathan Golden (Airbnb) \- Evan Tana (Dropbox).

Sign ups close on the 19th so get those applications in!</comment>


Google Instant Pages - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/06/14/google-announces-instant-pages-delivers-common-result-pages-instantly/

<comment><USER2> If this feature is Google-specific, as in, it only operates on google results (by something within the Chrome code), then I think this represents a profound change in the generally content-neutral view of websites, and gives them an unfair competitive advantage which may pose regulatory issues.

Edit:

Okay, it seems to be part of a new HTML API ( <http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender.html> ). Just add the tag:

<link rel=prerender href=somewebsite> and it'll render and fetch a page in the background so navigation to it will be fast.

Also, apparently prerendering automatically aborts whenever plugins are found on the page, so this may be bad since many slow web pages are slow because of the use of Flash.

<comment><USER3> The announcement ([http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/knocking-down- barrier...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/knocking-down-barriers-to- knowledge.html)) says it uses a feature available in the next chrome beta (see here for the technical details: [http://www.chromium.org/developers/design- documents/prerende...](http://www.chromium.org/developers/design- documents/prerender)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't pre-caching already on Firefox? <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ>

I remember this had its controversy quite some time ago. I'm glad Chrome is taking it seriously, but I wonder what happened with the old implementation.

(Note that the markup was <link rel="prefetch"> and now is <link rel="prerender">)

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems like a significant shift for Google to be releasing major search features as Chrome exclusives. I think they did this before with the personal blacklist feature which was eventually put into the web UI. (Can anyone fact check that for me? I never used that feature.) Should be interesting to see if this is the start of a trend. I know I'll probably switch to Chrome eventually if that becomes the only way to get the full Google experience.

<comment><USER6> This isn't a search feature; it's a browser feature. There's no real way for them to implement this in a cross-browser way; they could load a hidden iframe for the first result, but it looks like they're actually rendering it in the background, not just pre-caching it, so it wouldn't have as much of an effect. Other browsers could probably implement this just as well, eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks awesome. Quick question, what happens when I do not look at the page in respect to ad impressions?

<comment><USER8> It's not actually loaded, it's prerendered. The rough details are here: <http://blog.chromium.org/2011/06/prerendering-in-chrome.html>

The salient bit seems to be: "The browser fetches all of the sub-resources and does all of the work necessary to display the page. In many cases, the site simply seems to load instantly when the user clicks."

I'm not sure if impression tracking gifs would be loaded (I'd hope not), but it doesn't seem to run any of the JS.

<comment><USER9> I imagine this as Chrome middle-clicking on links Google thinks you may want to see. They're opened in an invisible tab that replaces the current one if you click the link.

Just as Google Instant made AdWords more confusing, it sounds like link prerendering will affect all sorts of analytics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If(CTR_of(resutxyz)>80%)) pre_render(sitexyz);</comment>


Show HN: Project Maya - <AUTHOR> Project Maya has started! For those who haven't read about Maya, please look here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103344
Our goal is to build an open source application that can run in your browser and on iOS/Android without being dependent on app stores.
We currently have a working "sneak preview" version viewable over here: http://frontend2.com
Want to dig into the source? https://github.com/SchizoDuckie/project-maya
We recommend you to check it out in Google Chrome/iOS/Android.
Our team currently consists of 5 people. If you think you'd be a good addition, please shoot me an email, firstname.lastname@example.com
Feedback so far is more than welcome! <comment><USER2> Basically, our initial sneak preview does the following:

      * generate wav files of words via the google translate api
      * save these wav files into the database (base64 encoding was an (unfortunately failed) experiment
      * do initial setup and fill of the words database
      * showing an html5 clickable grid with words and an icon, based on the database query, of all the words found.

todo:

      * create multiple pages from database, list them and switch
      * allow queuing of multiple phrases, and play them as a sentence
      * add custom words via web ui and a little php servicelayer
      * html5 offline storage for all wav files
      * get tablet browsers to fix data uri's for the <audio> tag!
      * have a proper design with customizable icon lib

Not bad for a project kickstart in half an evening. Are we infringing on any patents yet?

<comment><USER3> _Are we infringing on any patents yet?_

Don't even think of looking, and sing loudly with your fingers in your ears if anyone tries to inform you. Otherwise you are willfully infringing and the damages are trebled.

[http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals...](http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/gmlr10&div=11&id=&page=)

<comment><USER4> *tripled

<comment><USER3> Same thing. <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trebled>

<comment><USER4> Interesting.

 _Treble_ is favored in a few specific contexts (in the game of darts, for instance), but _triple_ is generally favored everywhere else. Even in British English, where _treble_ is most common, _triple_ appears approximately three times for every instance of treble. In American English, _treble_ is almost unheard of except in relation to sound and music.

From here - <http://grammarist.com/usage/triple-treble>

<comment><USER3> I use both, often without noticing. I think I tend to be more likely to use treble or trebled at the end of sentence and triple or tripled in the middle of one. Note, I am not claiming this as any sort of sensible usage, am just commenting on how I tend to use the words. My pronunciation of words like grass or bath is also similarly scattered. This confuses folk when they try and work out what class background I am from, which is something of an obsession for many people here in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You are cool people.

Right now the grid buttons can't be unclicked, it seems (on a Galaxy Note/Android 4.0.3 here). Is that intentional? I can't scroll either. I assume a reset button will be coming eventually, along with a play-phrase button. How are you thinking of organising the words into panes?

In its current state I can't see this violating any patents, since it's essentially a soundboard. ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundboard_%28computer_program%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundboard_%28computer_program%29) ) It would be hilarious if it turned out soundboards (those programs/pages that play funny phrases and sounds when you click on buttons) actually violated PRC's patents.

Will you (eventually) be bundling the app as .apk/.ipa for distribution? That seems like a great way to ensure it stays out in the wild forever (better still if the audio can be included, so it won't break).

<comment><USER2> There is already a simple sqlite database that holds info on all the sounds. a name, an icon, a backgroundcolor, and the page it's on.

Pages haven't been coded yet, but are already available in the database. A simple sqlite crud interface should suffice for that.

More important, as you notice is the UI. Right now it just show the toggle, gets the wav file and hits play. This will be fixed hopefully tonight, so that you can gather a couple of audio files in a que to form a prhase. Should be peanuts, but is was 02:30 am for me last night. This is the progess up to that.

And indeed, it's just a sound board, but in my opinion so is the software that started all this.

We haven't decided yet on packaging, but since i believe everyone on the team are mobile developers, that should not be a problem at all.

<comment><USER5> > And indeed, it's just a sound board, but in my opinion so is the software > that started all this.

Agreed, and that's why this is the Lord's work you're doing. Heck, you might invent some better methods for users along the way. Keep going man.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickables.

Previous HN post about Maya's story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103344>

Preview: <http://frontend2.com>

Github: <https://github.com/SchizoDuckie/project-maya>

<comment><USER2> I've just put a new version on github. <https://github.com/SchizoDuckie/project-maya/commits/>

Features:

      * Massively cleaned up codebase. Removed images folder, pure css3 styling.
      * Created a words list, that holds tiles to build a sentence
      * Created play and clear button to operate on the words list
      * Hacked around with setTimeout to play next in queue because audio onended is not fired??

More to come soon :)

</comment></comment><comment> Tim-Boss This post has restored some of my faith in humanity. The world of software... no, screw that, the ENTIRE WORLD would be a better place with more people like you guys in :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I believe you should be using MOAI for this:

<http://getmoai.com/>

The reason is that its a high-performance cross-platform tool that can be used to target Android, iOS, NaCl (Chrome), Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. You can write one codebase which will run on all of those platforms, and I think you will be _very_ much more productive with this toolkit, which is designed for exactly this kind of use (multimedia/graphics/audio content - i.e. games).

Please check this out, honestly. MOAI is the perfect tool for this application - HTML5 is _not_ , due to the problems with audio playback involved in HTML5 clients right now.

<comment><USER2> I seriously disagree. HTML5, even though it has it's (workable) shortcomings at the moment, can do this. Why would you base an opensource project on a non- free, non-standard framework that nobody heard of?

Sure, what it promises is nice, but no.

<comment><USER6> Well, I'm using MOAI, for starters, and see its power.

Plus there's that whole "sound is utter crap in HTML5" thing, yo.

Also, moai can run where html5 cannot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great Idea,

visting your frontend2.com-site, I encountered, that I am not able to scroll in Chrome and that I am not able to activate a sound twice.

So "give me more and more" would not be possible.

But keep up the great work, please.

<comment><USER2> It's a very first start. I worked on getting the basics done, hopefully tonight i can update it with pages, flowing, queuing, etc. Thx for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is a list of tasks I have setup for this project for myself (I'm one of the engineers working on):

-List of milestones/tasks so other people can work on this as well -SCM (Bug Tracking etc) system setup (Any suggestions for a hosted free version of SCM Systems HN?)

Hopefully I will have this done tonight. I want to get as many people involved as possible as I think we can do a lot more than just help these people!

<comment><USER9> Pivotal tracker is still free for open projects, I think and integrates with github, so you may want to look at that.

<comment><USER8> Thanks sir! This looks like exactly what we need. I will be setting something up tonight!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great (and I'm glad you are doing something practical to help), but I was wondering if you have reached out to Maya's family to see if this tool you are building will fit their particular needs?

I remember reading that they tried out lots of different products before settling on SfY, so there may be issues that aren't immediately obvious to people who don't have a lot of experience with AAC.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been in contact with her family, and SfY :). We want to make this as user friendly as possible.

<comment><USER10> Brilliant, that is great to hear.

SfY brought the cost down significantly but I really hope this project could make it available to even more people. Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Appreciate what you guys are doing. Tested it out on Samsung Galaxy note running ICS. Quick feedback:

The application detected that I was a first time user and injected some sounds into the database +1

There is a 1-2 second delay between the tap and the sound.

Guess you guys are already working to sort these out. Looking forward to see this application in its full glory. Any twitter handles to follow ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, you can follow me here <http://twitter.com/samgranger> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great project, I +1 this.

I was looking into hacking google translate myself, but failed, or perhaps did not spend enough time. Can you guys post a code on how to tap into word translation speech in google?

<comment><USER2> It was almost too simple to be true:

[https://github.com/SchizoDuckie/project- maya/blob/master/aud...](https://github.com/SchizoDuckie/project- maya/blob/master/audio/speechgen.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> cool project

now another approach: you could produce all the wav-s in-browser. see my (100% open source) mvp at <http://lalo.li/> \- yeah, you would need to do a lot of tuning/optimization of the speech-synthesizer to get a decent voice, but it would be possible.

think in the long term it would be a much more scaleable approach ... there are a lot of words out there .... than storing wav-s in the browser.

<comment><USER2> Lalo.li is awesome, but unfortunately, you're using WebWorkers and TypedArrays, that's too high-tech for tablets. Also, this would require loading a waveform on a tablet from a data uri, which is also not supported, according to my tests on either iOS or Android with Crome :(

My original prototype (that worked) was to store the wave files as a base64 encoded data URI into the database, but that's been rendered obsolete by this. Now we'll have to rely on pure wave files. Nothing that we cannot overcome, but it would have made the whole concept even more portable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really nice initiative,

When you have some free time, do you mind organizing some milestones and tasks on github so random people can help without being active on the project?

I would not mind adding/fixing planned things from time to time.</comment>


Linux.BackDoor.Irc.16 – A backdoor for Linux written in Rust - <AUTHOR> http://vms.drweb.com/virus/?_is=1&i=8566997 <comment><USER3> Rust is just a tool, so it's no surprise it will be used by Dark Side too. But there is almost no info about the trojan on the page, so it's difficult to know if it really exists at all (this could also be a marketing attempt - <USER2> saying it is, just that we don't know).

</comment><comment><USER4> Now that stack overflow is memory safe!

</comment><comment><USER5> If it doesn't have any self-replication code, then how can did DrWeb get a copy? Did somebody drop in on a Tor hacking forum, or is it being distributed through a separate system, or did they just make it up for marketing, or what?

(The last point is not to discount the plausibility of this. If malware authors are using Lua nowadays, Rust is nothing to them.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Rust has now known sin.

</comment><comment><USER7> what is this, 2002?</comment>


Apollo: Open platform for autonomous driving industry - <AUTHOR> http://apollo.auto/ <comment><USER2> Chinese backdoors is just what I'm looking for in my next self-driving car.</comment>


Clojure's Noir releases 1.1.0 with full set of docs - <AUTHOR> http://www.webnoir.org/tutorials

<comment><USER2> Very nice, thanks for creating this. Looking forward to playing more with Noir, and using it for my own little clojure side project: <https://github.com/ekoontz/italianquiz> .

Comments: 1\. Make "your welcome page" a link to "/welcome", and also some text indicating that we need to edit the file src/noirsite/views/welcome.clj.

2\. How do we get ring (or maybe it's jetty) to not cache pages, so a reload will reflect updates to welcome.clj?

3\. deleting: "[noir.content.pages :as pages]" from welcome.clj (as the initial startup page says to do) gives me an error:

<http://pastebin.com/ZwvpqJw8>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if you have any questions and, as always, any feedback is greatly appreciated!

<comment><USER3> I've been using Noir for a couple of small projects and it's been really enjoyable so far.

No real questions, I guess - just a thank you!</comment></comment>