Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day - <AUTHOR> http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/15-web-services-we-rely-on-every-day/

<comment><USER3> I'll second that Xero is an excellent service and it really doesn't get as much press as it deserves in the states. They're very easy to use and have done an heroic job building out both the software and support.

HOWEVER, their entry-pricing is incredibly irritating. For $228/year you can't add any more than 5 invoices or reconcile more than 20 lines of bank statement per month. For the entire price of quickbooks every single year you should be able to at least use your accounting system.

<comment><USER4> But for only $29/month you can. How much is your time worth? If the service saves you even an hour per month, surely it is worth it.

<comment><USER5> >How much is your time worth?

I hate this argument. It's so narrowly focused (and for some reason, often regurgitated). Money adds up a lot quicker than that one hour of your time. If you save yourself 10 hours of work per month because of a couple services you pay for, but end up spending an extra $300/month while your startup isn't making any money -- is that actually smart time/money management?

There are more factors involved than simply how you value your time. The stage your business is in, how much money you're pulling in, how many other things you need to get done per day, is your startup bootstrapped, do you still have a day job, etc.

<comment><USER6> two words - "opportunity cost".

<comment><USER5> Why do you think that opportunity cost is specifically applicable to this situation? If it's "just in general" then I don't believe that opportunity cost is a good argument for continuing the meme of "How much is your time worth?" in these kinds of discussions. If it is applicable, it would have to be on a case-by-case basis to even make sense, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not convinced about the need for SendGrid. Learning to set up an email server isn't that hard in this day and age, and we seem to get very decent deliverability with our own SMTP server - and don't pay a penny for any emails sent.

I'm planning to build an email subscription feature for swombat.com soon, and was looking at options like SendGrid, but I just can't justify the cost. When you send people a sign-up confirmation email, they expect it right now. If it's not there in a couple of minutes, in my experience, even the least tech- savvy have learned that they need to check their spam folder.

<comment><USER8> I was talking to the guys from mailgun.net recently, which provides a similar service to SendGrid, but also makes it easy to receive e-mail via webhooks. They told me a ton of interesting things about how this stuff actually works.

Getting high deliverability is actually incredibly complicated. You need a dedicated IP address to send mail from, which you need to be whitelisted by the big ESPs (E-mail Service Providers). To get it whitelisted, you need to "warm it up" before you start using it properly. You need to be very careful about setting the right headers. You need reverse DNS configured correctly, you need SPF and DomainKeys set up, you need to make sure the IP/domain you are sending from hasn't previously been used for spam... and even after all that, you probably need to set up a relationship with AOL/Gmail/Yahoo etc to make sure your stuff gets through. You also need to watch for their bounce / rate limit notifications and dial back your sending rates to match.

There's a whole lot more to it than just setting up an SMTP server.

<comment><USER9> _Getting high deliverability is actually incredibly complicated._

Urban legend.

 _You need a dedicated IP address to send mail from, which you need to be whitelisted by the big ESPs_

That is nonsense. Nobody reaches out to the ESPs to have their IPs "whitelisted" in advance. You reach out when, if and _after_ you've been blacklisted, in order to get _unlisted_.

 _To get it whitelisted, you need to "warm it up" before you start using it properly._

Nonsense.

 _You need to be very careful about setting the right headers. You need reverse DNS configured correctly, you need SPF and DomainKeys set up_

Yes, there's a few things to watch out for, but it's all pretty well documented nowadays and you only have to do it _once_. SPF is pretty easy with <http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html>

_you need to make sure the IP/domain you are sending from hasn't previously been used for spam_

A quick check at a few of the largest blacklists (spamhaus et al) takes all of 5 minutes. Another 5 minutes that you have to spend exactly _once_.

 _[..further marketing pitch for MTA SaaS snipped..]_

Well, to sum this up.

It seems many people have a strong misconception of what SendGrid, MailGun and friends actually _do_. You don't magically get higher deliverability only because your mail is passing through them. They don't have mythical "whitelist" slots at the ESPs. They're not even on the radar of the ESPs.

What you get from SendGrid et al is a (hopefully) properly configured MTA and DNS, to push your mail through. From there your outbound mail is suspect to all the usual blacklisting and scrutiny at the receiving endpoints. And that's all - no black magic at work here.

<comment><USER10> > That is nonsense. Nobody reaches out to the ESPs to have their IPs > "whitelisted" in advance. You reach out when, if and after you've been > blacklisted, in order to get unlisted.

That's nonsense, lots of people do that. Only you don't usually go direct to the service provider, see following links:

<http://www.returnpath.net/commercialsender/certification/>

<http://www.spamhauswhitelist.com/en/>

<http://www.certified-senders.eu/csa_html/en/266.htm>

<comment><USER9> _That's nonsense, lots of people do that._

Lots of people also believe in astrology. Anyone is free to do what they deem good for their karma, you just shouldn't expect a measurable impact towards your deliverability. The big ESPs don't look at these lists.

<comment><USER10> > The big ESPs don't look at these lists.

Some of them do.

AOL uses GoodMailSystems.

<http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.Whitelist.php>

<http://www.goodmailsystems.com/>

Hotmail uses ReturnPath.

<http://mail.live.com/mail/services.aspx#Safelist>

Yahoo seems to run their own. I remember them using one of the big ones but I can't find any mention in their help pages now.

<http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html>

Google only asks for best practices, but it's possibly they look at some of the whitelists for more data.

<https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=81126>

<comment><USER9> Oh my, do I have to put it even more bluntly to get the point across: These commercial whitelists are effectively extortion scams and affiliate rings.

Their sole purpose is to extract money from you. They're businesses, that is their business model.

The value they provide in return is rather minimal - unless getting e-mail out is at the very core of your business and you need to pull every last string to absolutely maximize it.

Otherwise there are cheaper ways to get reasonable deliverability even at AOL and Hotmail. The _default_ deliverability is already quite good, which is what services like SendGrid largely bargain on. I firmly doubt SendGrid signs each of their customers up for the aforementioned whitelists. They probably offer "assistance" with the process, which probably amounts to sending you a link to a nice HowTo document, and which probably yields them a small affiliate kickback when you actually follow through.

<comment><USER10> > Oh my, do I have to put it even more bluntly to get the point across: These > commercial whitelists are effectively extortion scams and affiliate rings.

You made a few points.

First is that nobody reaches out to get themselves whitelisted in advance. Lots of people do that and some ESPs even offer their own whitelist request forms.

Second is that none of the big ESPs look at third-party whitelists. AOL and Hotmail say they do.

Third is that even if the above is true, the impact on deliverability is minimal. I would guess you are right about that but I'd love to look at some data.

Intermediaries like SendGrid would be well within reason to be paying for such services. I don't think they have to signup their individual customers on the whitelists. They just say they are intermediaries and promise to vet their customers.

I think anyone sending low volumes of email is much better off using an intermediary. They get to use well-configured mail servers, IPs with good reputation, etc. Doing it yourself, IMHO, is not worth all the trouble compared to paying $20/month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As usual, the only people who make money on the gold rush are the shovel sellers

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL. I guess we make shovels too though. So no biggie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow. Looks like you have outsourced every imaginable job when there's a webservice for it. Are you doing this because of bad experiences when servicing your own or did you do this from the start? Did you compare the running costs/reliability between outsourcing and self administration with a positive result into outsourcing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I think most of this stuff is not a core competency for a startup.

I guess my responses are:

1\. Zendesk We needed a good _system_ , not really outsourcing of support. So, we do our support in-house but we use the Zendesk SaaS system to manage it.

2\. GetSatisfaction As above.

3\. SendGrid Email deliverability was not a piece of expertise we had in- house, especially when we were 2-3 people. Now we're 10-ish, our sysadmin guys STILL don't want to do this stuff.

4\. MailChimp Hand-coding HTML emails more than once was boring.

5\. Apigee This is something we were on the fence about. The metrics visualization probably swung it.

6\. String No-brainer :)

7\. ExpressionEngine Still a bit of friction in the decision between self- coding or using EE. But it's the 'annoying' stuff that swings it like plugin availability for new functionality, rather than do-it-yourself.

8\. Chartbeat Couldn't do this ourselves.

9\. Mint Could do this ourselves, too cheap to bother.

10\. PivotalTracker As above.

11\. Salesforce Industry standard, makes sense to outsiders, reliable.

12\. RightSignature Awesome. No point building ourselves. Legal worries too if we did.

13\. Gotomeeting Yeah no way we want to build this.

14\. Xero The non-enterprise stuff we do is billed through our own app. But Xero makes sense for invoicing and proper accounts. Risk is, if you build it yourself, you need to know GAAP inside-and-out AND still it's a concern for outside auditors I think.

15\. Dropbox Yeah no way.

BONUS: Office Glico Well, we could get an intern to go to the mom&pop store every week. But no.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for this long version! Might learn to stop trying to maintain every solution on myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, having used EE, I always thought it was cumbersome to use, prone to running out of memory very easy, and did not offer much over regular php or Drupal/Joomla.

</comment><comment><USER14> >Salesforce is basically just a very flexible database with hundreds of custom fields, i.e. to a programmer it seems like a $25/user version of phpmyadmin... but it's money well spent.

That is the most underwhelming endorsement of salesforce.com I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER15> +1 for apigee - we just migrated our web services and the stats, graphing and real-time debugger are excellent. Migration was super easy.

<comment><USER16> This looks really cool. I'm glad I found it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use a few in that list too, but in particular SendGrid and DropBox have really been life-savers (paid user of both).

They both solve a problem that is otherwise quite complicated and boring to solve, in a very simple, hassle-free way.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems like SendGrid caused the _vast_ majority of comments so far. I feel like Xero, Apigee and RightSignature should get more love. What do you guys think?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'll add to the list my favorite service I don't ever hear talked about. SpamStopsHere:

<http://www.greenviewdata.com/spamstopshere/index.php>

The killer feature for me is a very low false positive rate. Very few legitimate emails get blocked, based on the way they are filtered.

</comment><comment><USER19> We use RightSignature to handle the signing of all internal/external documents. I'm biased, but I think it's the best SaaS document signing application available :)

</comment><comment><USER20> I prefer uservoice to getsatisfaction, it doesn't have as many features, but it's easier to use. I think that's more important for a social support tool

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone recommend any SendGrid alternatives? They look good, I'm just wondering if anyone has had success with another provider also.

<comment><USER22> Postmark App (<http://postmarkapp.com>) has worked well for me in terms of sending large quantities of emails in the past. Easy integration, good team, active development.

<comment><USER23> I've just used PostMarkApp on a site, I love their interface, all works great but they only allow 'transactional' emails, which I guess is like 'click here to activate your account', whereas my site was sending out alerts to people (kind of like facebook does, but not as often), which they didn't seem to like too much.

Does sendgrid allow this? I've signed up to SocketLabs which seems to do it but haven't been able to get SMTP sending working correctly yet, haven't spent much time on it though.

For the record, the amount of hassles I've had with SMTP servers these services are very handy, especially for logs etc like postmark has

<comment><USER24> In our usage, Sendgrid never complained. No particular knowledge about specific usages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The two I love most on this list are SendGrid and Dropbox. Both solve a real pain point in a simple way.

</comment><comment><USER26> Blog is down... "Site Error: Unable to Load Site Preferences; No Preferences Found"

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be OK now. 600 concurrent users is big for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like getsatisfaction. It makes it really easy to aggregate user voices about your product. I also use Mailchimp for a couple of clients - <USER2> recommended.

</comment><comment><USER28> I recommend Piwik for real-time statistics alternative to Google Analytics. It's free also.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yeah, office Glico is the besssssttt!

<comment><AUTHOR> Finally, some love for the Gleec.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who uses SQLite database in production? - <AUTHOR> We're using SQLite database in production without any issues. However, we keep having to defend that decision. Our databases are not huge. There in the 10s of MBs in size.
The massive advantages that we see are -
1. Extremely quick backups which run twice daily, since they are just file copies.
2. Very fast data integrity resolutions as we can quickly download the database and parse it for fixing invalid data.
The only downside I see is the extremely rare DB lock error since SQLite uses file based locking. But usually that's due to bad programming than anything else.
I was wondering if others are doing the same thing.
What advantages and drawbacks do you face? <comment><USER3> "SQLite is used by literally millions of applications with literally billions and billions of deployments. SQLite is the most widely deployed database engine in the world today."

[https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html](https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html)

notably Airbus, which may be (one of) the companies

"At about that same time, some avionics manufacturers were expressing interest in SQLite, which prompted the SQLite developers to design TH3 to support the rigorous testing standards of DO-178B.

The first code for TH3 was laid down on 2008-09-25. An intense effort over the next 10 months resulted in TH3 achieving 100% MC/DC on 2009-07-25. The TH3 code continues to be improved and expanded."

[https://sqlite.org/th3.html](https://sqlite.org/th3.html)

[https://www.sqlite.org/qmplan.html](https://www.sqlite.org/qmplan.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> We use SQLite in lieu of large REST transfers when transferring large amounts of temporary data internally in our application between services. It means the structures are already in a format where you can work with them, etc. Once the file is in S3 you can use it with an unlimited number of worker processes, it's very easy to add new steps to a pipeline when you don't need to worry about extra impact on your database server.

We also use SQLite for read-only data caches (i.e. points of interest in a 3d model) and these are exposed via REST API. This saves database space as there are tons of models and we can just effectively store an unlimited number of SQLite databases in S3 or whatever storage mechanism we want.

I think for a situation where you prepare the document once and then read from it as much as you need, it's a really good option. I'm not sure I'd want to do something like what you've described where (I assume) the workload involves reads and writes by users.

Of course, you know your app and customers better, but consider this - <USER2> adversary can just write a script to update some data constantly (i.e. changing their password) and with enough threads you can lock the database for updates. You won't have that problem with a database server.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use SQLite, although like you I also do not have huge databases with a huge number of accesses. I run a NNTP server with SQLite for the data storage. Also, Fossil uses SQLite, so anyone (including myself) who is using Fossil repositories also has SQLite. And many other programs also use SQLite for their own data, including Firefox and many others.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shout out to fossil too. It's hands down the best DVCS I've ever used

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been there a few times myself. I don't have time now to go into details (weekend) but if you know your app is going to stay small and simple and single server forever

1\. Congratulations for your foresight skills :-)

2\. You can stay with SQLite

In any other case move to PostgreSQL (or MySQL if you really have to) because you'll be hit by things you can't do or that you can do at a cost higher than migrating to a proper db and managing it.

Downsides: simple and few data types, lack of advanced SQL functions (MySQL too) and features, single server, write lock, poor CLI tool.

Be really sure you don't have and want to grow your app.

<comment><USER7> > "forever"

You can always migrate later, and avoid the extra overhead now. No decision is forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > However, we keep having to defend that decision

Why? Do you encounter legitimate issues when using it that would warrant using a different DB? If so then the criticism is valid and you're probably using the wrong tool for the job.

</comment><comment><USER9> My little project [http://solarpi.tafkas.net/](http://solarpi.tafkas.net/) runs on SQLite for over five years now. Never had any issues.

</comment><comment><USER10> I do for a slack app. I have to queue the writes to avoid lock related errors but writes are relatively rare for the app so that's no problem.

I also use SQLite for data analysis. If the data isn't very big I always prefer it to ORC of Parquet because it enables full SQL. SQLite let's you keep every table in a separate file and then use "attach database" to reference them into a query . It's pretty ideal.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really interesting! SQLite never ceases to amaze. Have to look into that kind of implementation

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For website use, I think the right person to ask such question is Pieter Levels (user pieterhg here). If I'm not mistaken he uses it for remoteok.io and pretty much everywhere he can lol; oh I love this guy so much ^_^ !

</comment><comment><USER12> The new version of TaxPrep, one of thepopular professional tax software in Canada, uses SQLite as part of its save file format. It replaces dbisam which was used in previous versions.

</comment><comment><USER13> Self-hosted version of our BI tool ([https://www.seektable.com](https://www.seektable.com)) uses Sqlite for storing user accounts, data sources configuration, saved reports and other metadata. It works just fine with .NET Core (we use Microsoft.Data.Sqlite wrapper). Strongly agree that backup is damn simple as this is just a file in docker volume + custom data import/export is quite simple with sqlite3 cli.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not the same domain but almost all smartphones today probably have at least one application using SQLite. In iOS, for example, Core Data is built on top of SQLite.

</comment><comment><USER15> We used it for a while, and when we started running into locking and performance issues, we upgraded to Postgres. It was pretty great while it lasted though.

We still use it for a bunch of internal apps, which we've mostly forgotten about since it keeps on trucking.

Personally, I love SQLite, and I still use it for crunching data when a CSV/spreadsheet will be too complicated.

</comment><comment><USER16> "extremely rare". At some point is a pretty big number. If it's one and a million and your doing a million transactions per day .. maybe that's ok but as it becomes hourly or every minute is it still okay? I guess depends on how much time it takes to recover from the locking event...

</comment><comment><USER17> The Google Drive mobile apps and enterprise desktop app use SQLite for storing metadata.

</comment><comment><USER18> Firefox uses sqlite for various things

<comment><USER19> And many mobile apps do. In such cases, SQLite is merely used as a serialisation format for nonconcurrent applications (like JSON but better tailored to the relational needs). That's a huge productive "market" for SQLite.

As others have said, SQLite can also cope with a server load. The website of SQLite has great documentation about that, too.</comment></comment>


I made a text-based zombie survival mmorpg - <AUTHOR> https://www.zapoco.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi All, you may be interested in Zapoco, text-based browser game I created. Set in a zombie apocalyptic setting where you can build and upgrade safehouses, train, scavenge, fight other players, trade and do a bunch of other cool stuff.

I built it to be fully browser based lets you play from any device with a web browser for free, no downloads or personal details required!

I've been working incredibly hard over the past few months on this, and am very proud of what I've been able to accomplish with it, and I hope for some of you to be able to play it and enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it! I'll also gladly address any comments, questions, criticism, concerns, or anything else you may have (I apologize if this isn't allowed to be posted here, if it's not, feel free to remove it). Thank you.</comment>


New augmented reality horror game is terrifying because it maps your house - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/games/new-augmented-reality-horror-game-is-terrifying-because-it-maps-your-house-1621794/ <comment><USER2> The horror movie tie-in practically writes itself.

It may just be a better idea for a horror movie than an actual game.</comment>


2001: A Space Odyssey – 50 Years Later - <AUTHOR> https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/04/02/2001-a-space-odyssey-50-years-later/ <comment><USER2> When I watched this movie for the first time, I was underwhelmed. The slow pace made me impatient. Then I realized, it's not the movie, it's me. The new age fast paced movies had made me an Adrenaline junkie equivalent of watching films.

Such movies have to be enjoyed with patience and preferably alone. It's an experience similar to listening Indian classical music (I am from India).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm currently reading this on an Austrian Airlines plane, and they're playing The Blue Danube as passengers board... makes me think fondly of 2001 every single time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Be grateful the airplane toilet is easier to operate than the one on the Pan Am flight in the movie. :-) [1]

[1] [https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/aso/zeroGtoilet.html](https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/aso/zeroGtoilet.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the best movies ever. I'm glad it hasn't been redone.

<comment><USER5> Shhh! Don't give them any ideas!

Seriously, Hollywood's love affair with remaking movies is just sad. Of course, it's not completely new, they were doing it even back in the early days, but not to the extent that they are now. They just aren't coming out with that many new and innovative movies like they did in the 70s and 80s. Where's the "Alien" or "Blade Runner" or "Ghostbusters" of today? Movies like that just aren't being made, but remakes or sequels to these decades-old movies are.

<comment><USER4> True, I just finished reading Bruster's millions. Which has a 1985 movie adptation. At least that's what I thought. It turn's out it was a remake. It has been released 8 times in English and 4 times as a foreign film.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Might be an unpopular opinion but I feel the ape scene at the beginning lasted way too long</comment>


Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-hides-www-and-https-in-the-address-bar-again/ <comment><USER3> I would have no trouble with hiding "[https://"](https://") in the address bar, as long they show it for other protocols (including http). It might help move us to a world with https everywhere even faster.

I still prefer Firefox: protocol, subdomains and path are greyed out but still clearly legible. This way I can eyeball "on which site am I?" quickly (and read google-secure-payments.google.via.net as via.net for example) and still have access to the full URL in 0 clicks.

<comment><USER4> It seems that Firefox stopped copying [http://](http://) (when I want to copy URL) which is very annoying to me.

I need the whole address when copying.

<comment><USER5> I have the opposite complaint: when I highlight a portion of the url in chrome, it prepends the [http://](http://) anyway. If I have the whole thing selected it would make sense to prepend the [http://](http://)

<comment><USER6> I can't reproduce what you say, it doesn't prepends [http://](http://) in my case. Are you on Windows?

<comment><USER5> Yes, on Windows. You do have to select the first part of the url, but I often just want the host and port, ie localhost:8080 instead of [http://localhost:8080](http://localhost:8080)

<comment><USER7> This is so minor but it slows me down working every day. If I didn't select it, don't copy it. If I clicked in the center on a specific spot, drop the cursor right there instead of selecting a section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of how Windows frustratingly hides file extensions by default. This sounds low-upside/high-downside to me, but it's the sort of thing with simple arguments-for (easier for clueless users! Cleaner!), and nuanced arguments-against (eliding rarely-useful details in special cases causes ambiguity, and can lead to confusion is some cases, particularly for clueless users).

<comment><USER9> Finder on macOS does this too. It's maddening...

There was an article recently about "hostile architecture" and this is similarly a "hostile software design" to prevent users from doing something the developers don't want them to do.

<comment><USER10> Its hostile for power users but it prevents grandpa from renaming 'IMG_144.jpg' to 'Idaho_grandkids', hammering enter on the 'are you sure you want this' nag screen and then wondering what broke his picture.

<comment><USER11> This was never a problem with classic Mac OS.

Files had a type code and a creator code. The type code told application whether they could open the file. The creator code told the Finder which application to open when the file was double-clicked.

It was impossible for the user to change either (in the stock OS).

<comment><USER12> > It was impossible for the user to change either (in the stock OS).

That's... much, much worse than dot extensions.

<comment><USER13> He's mis-stating it slightly. You couldn't fiddle with a file's creator code, but there wasn't much reason to.

The type codes were editable, in the sense you could choose the default app you wanted to open files of that type, which is really what you'd want to modify most of the time.

<comment><USER11> I don't remember this being the case. I don't think it was possible to change either a file's type or creator code without a tool such as ResEdit that wasn't included in the OS.

BTW, I think you're referring to the 'creator' code, not the 'type' code. The 'creator' code determined which application would open a file when it was opened. And it was per-file; I don't remember any mention of a system-wide 'default application' or anything like that.

This was actually rather nice in practice. It meant a JPEG image created by e.g., GraphicsConverter would be opened by GraphicsConverter when double- clicked; whereas one saved by a web browser would be opened in the web browser. But either could be dragged into either application in order to open the web-browser-saved image with GraphicsConverter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google must really hate URLs. My search results recently stopped showing the full path of the URL, just the domain name. It was a huge pain because I was looking for an item at Ikea and couldn't tell if a result went to their American site or to their UK, Saudi Arabian, Qatari, etc. site (apparently the same item can have small differences in different countries— I almost bought the wrong lightbulbs because the UK version of my lamp uses a different size bulb).

<comment><USER15> Google sees folks falling for google-secure-payments.google.via.net type URLS. They see all the gaming people do with URLs in search results (including abusing the names of other brands like Amazon).

There are lots of developers who like distinguishing these subtle topics. I can tell you in a larger enterprise deployment most of these changes will be welcomed (yes, people do still click on bogus URLs believe it or not - <USER2> more often than I would expect). Or think that the url amazon.lowprice.com is an amazon website in a search result.

Folks claiming google is hiding the owner of the website forget that the actual owner of the website is reflected by the END of the domain name, not the earlier parts. In some shared hosting situations this is confusing, but in the end whoever controls the end actually is in control.

<comment><USER16> > Folks claiming google is hiding the owner of the website forget that the > actual owner of the website is reflected by the END of the domain name, not > the earlier parts.

Perhaps this distinction could be made more clear by switching to reverse domain name notation.

<comment><USER17> There are lots of security manuals for beginners suggesting to look at the _ends_ of URLs. Imagine the amount of confusion it will introduce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> URLs represent and identify content,controling them means you control content. In the short term these changes mean little but in the long term this will benefit google immensely. Google just loves slippery slopes.

Identity and payment are extremely important to any ordered system of social interaction. More than content itself,controlling them helps one control everything else.

I am trying hard to avoid believing conspiracy theoris about Google.

Maybe a legal requirement for intetnet standards compliance makes sense?

<comment><USER15> The focus of this change is to improve the identification of content. This coupled with payment has been subject lots of fraud where users misled about the owner of a website.

google-payments-secure.via.net is not a google payment website despite the google in the domain name. The key part that signifies the ownership / identify of the person hosting the site is the END of the domain, the google.com part. That is the owner of the web property, not whatever appears before that.

<comment><USER18> That's what google uses as an argument too and I am too familiar with the problem.

The problem here is that _Google_ is in control of the solution and the solution is designed by them without consulting everyone else and in a way that would be advantageous to their long term dominance and prosperity.

I don't trust google and they certainly don't have my consent to shape the way I and the society I live in interact with each other.

I will say it a million times if needed. I do not trust google. Period. They ask forgiveness instead of permission and they love slipperly slops and bait- and-switch psychology tricks to get their way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm certainly not a fan of the new URI scheme, but it is worth pointing out that Safari has already made the same change. Furthermore I'm not convinced said change is a net-negative for the average consumer.

Safari added the setting "Show full website address", which does just that. I wouldn't have a problem if Chrome followed suit and defaulted to the new scheme, but gave us the option to show the full URI.

<comment><USER20> Safari only shows the domain name. Chrome still shows both the domain name (minus "www.") and URL path.

<comment><USER19> Check your Safari setting "Show full website address". Checking it will show the full URI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a giant AMP scam.

The next change will be that it will trick users into thinking they are on are on a real site like example.com but will instead be on Google.com/example.com.

But chrome will remove google.com just like http/s.

<comment><USER20> Chrome on Android already hides the "google.com/amp" URL prefix for AMP URLs: [https://blog.amp.dev/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-amp- pages...](https://blog.amp.dev/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-amp-pages/)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the tip, I haven't used Chrome on my phone enough to notice this.

This is really sad and dangerous for the web. I don't know why people aren't up in arms over this kind of devious behavior from Google.

If Microsoft had pulled this in the late 90s early 2000s there would have been senate hearing and talks of breaking up their monopoly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> To place this in context -- Safari _already_ does this and even more, hiding the path after the domain as well.

Firefox does something in the middle where it makes the "[https://www."](https://www.") and path lighter gray, while the domain name is black.

I think this is just about ease of use and displaying the most relevant information. Regular users think of it as "google.com", not as "[https://www.google.com"](https://www.google.com"). And the full URL is still there whenever you click through to select or copy.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is "mobile-first" mentality in a malignant retroactive form, where it is taking away functionality and behavior that is already established in the desktop environment to better match user expectations set in the mobile space.

Mobile browsers often elide the protocol and trivial hostnames from domains in order to economize on precious screen space of phones. Desktop browsers do not face the same constraints. A desktop browser can play to the strengths of desktop computing—taking a "desktop-first" point of view—and display the full URL with the abundant space available. See Firefox's display of the full URL with a highlighted color for the domain. Alternatively, they can be made subservient to mobile and adopt conventions established from constraints that do not exist in the desktop space.

Mobile-first is frequently damaging to new desktop software projects, but in my experience it's atypical for mobile limitations to be back-ported to established desktop software.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's just so bizarre how strongly the Google product people continue to insist that this change is beneficial to users when so many users themselves simultaneously insist that it's not. Combined with the fact that their explanation is dubious at best (i.e. www is not a technically a "special case"), I find it very hard to believe they do not have additional, confidential reasoning for making this change.

<comment><USER25> Yeah forums where the company "interacts" with users is great.

"This change is beneficial." "No, it isn't." "Yes, it is." "But it isn't!" "We respect your feedback but we're implementing it anyway."

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "The Chrome team values the simplicity, usability, and security of UI surfaces.

This change is the complete opposite of simple. Simple is showing the real URL. Complex is trying to remember in what cases Chrome hides part of the URL and trying to guess what website you're viewing.

<comment><USER27> Simple is showing the full http headers. Simple is showing iframe urls.

Of course it isn't. URLs are largely made of useless and incomprehensible information for most users.

<comment><USER26> If the bar was called the "http headers bar" then simple would be showing the full http headers, but it is called address bar, so the simple thing to do is to show the address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I work for well-known tech company [redacted] and visiting our website with the www omitted does not work from within our network. But if you've just updated Chrome, it would now be unclear whether you typed the site name right.

My previous employer [redacted] had its marketing site on www and actual SaaS application product on www-less. Again a case where mis-typing would be made more confusing by Chrome.

<comment><USER29> Those both seem like implementation issues.

<comment><USER28> They're not good practice on the part of the website operators, for sure, but they are real examples of the root and www domains being different. In my experience there are also lots of old or government sites that just plain don't work without the www.

And when the person phones up tech support "ma'am, does it show the www. in front of the website?" "no" "sorry you need to retype" "it still doesn't show www." is going to happen.

Or someone will write down the URL from the screen, and when someone else types it in, it won't work.

Oh, right, and there's the same issue with sites where [https://](https://) has a different site to [http://](http://)!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ah yes, this fun bug: [https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1037810122603421696](https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1037810122603421696)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is extremely annoying for a project I'm working on that involves subdomains. If I set nginx to redirect `example.com` to `www.example.com` I want to verify it in the browser.

<comment><USER31> my chrome hasn't updated yet, but my understanding of this change was that you could display the full unmolested URL by simply clicking in the address bar. is that not the case?

<comment><USER32> double clicking. but still.

<comment><USER33> Wow, that is mad. So glad I switched to Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can someone help me understand why this is a big deal? Safari has had this change for a while and I haven't felt like I'm missing anything. Where's the slippery slope? Does have to do with AMP?

<comment><AUTHOR> It has nothing to do with AMP. There's a lot of reasons why, but one reason is for example, two different sites can technically be hosted on www. and the non-www version, if the site isn't set up to redirect the www to the non-www, for example. So this could, in certain scenarios, pose a security risk in that if you pretend that www and the non www are the same sites -- when they're not -- it can make it easier for those that hijack one or the other to get away with it. Now, that's fairly extreme and esoteric. But there are actually times in development when you use subdomains, which this makes more difficult, and there's other subdomains they're considering trivial which, in fact, aren't. This is really good discussion on the topic and why this change just simply ignores so many technical issues, best practices and simply realities: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=881410](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=881410)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is great and all until you (like me) need to be able to differentiate www.example.com from example.com and [https://](https://) example.com versus [http://](http://) example.com. My website doesn't forward example.com to www.example.com (due to errors on my part that I don't know how to fix, my email is in my profile and if you can help I'd greatly appreciate it).

I don't know if there are any scenarios in which a properly-configured website (mine isn't) needs to differentiate example.com from www.example.com. But I liked the ability to do so easily.

<comment><USER31> >need to be able to differentiate ... [https://](https://) example.com versus [http://](http://) example.com

this requirement is handled by the "not secure" badging, which is much more obvious that requiring users to pick out the "s" in the middle of a string.

[https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards- more-...](https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-secure- web.html)

</comment></comment><comment> _o-O-o_ What a slippery slope. I imagine a future when the entire URL itself has disappeared and we live in some sort of Google-controlled walled garden environment, like what they're trying to do with AMP[0]. Some sites _only_ work with WWW prefixed as the APEX DNS record is misconfigured and points to nothing. I've even seen some sites point to `0.0.0.0' but had a CNAME record for WWW and I could then view the site.

[0] [https://developers.google.com/amp/](https://developers.google.com/amp/)

<comment><USER36> Then these websites are broken and needs to be fixed. In the end, the most of the people would probably search for it in the first place.

<comment><USER37> broken according to who, exactly?

It's entirely reasonable to choose to host http/https traffic on a www subdomain and host entirely different services at the non-www domain.

The internet is not just http traffic. Full fucking stop.

There are plenty of systems and industries where the actual web front-end is an after-thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> A coworker and me got bit by this just today.

I introduced him to a new tool I built for internal development, and wanted him to access the locally running instance of our codebase.

Took us some time to figure out that chrome was trying to connect to [https://](https://) instead of [http://](http://), which wasn't enabled. I think it said something in the error message about that, but who reads these anyways.

</comment><comment><USER39> This behavior will train users to believe that the www in domains isn't important, when it actually serves a very important purpose.

You can't cname example.org, which makes it very hard to use a CDN to serve it unless the CDN provides anycast ips or you delegate DNS to the CDN.

If they're intent on making the address bar useless, they may as well go full hog, like Apple does in desktop Safari -- the address bar shows the domain only, until you click.

<comment><USER36> But it's definitely not important for an average user typing "facebook.com" into the address bar. Safari proved that.

<comment><USER39> If the url isn't important enough to display, then they shouldn't display it. They can display just the domain. They shouldn't display almost the url, but they removed an important thing.

Edit to add: if you type in an almost url from the screen or a screenshot, it's likely to not take you to the same page, and you'll be confused as to why. If you type in the domain only and go to the home page, that's not that confusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Google's business model ultimately revoves around deception. They need their assets to not know or care where they really are or who they really are talking to or who is reviewing thier words and movements.

I had to laugh when they started parading thier fake-human avatar "to call and lie to people".

But really, their big value item is language engineering.

</comment><comment><USER41> There's a user story that can be filled:

"As a ____, I want to get users to our []-controlled version of our site, without alerting the user aware they are on our []-controlled version of our site."

So in this sense there are points for filling it. It's still the correct domain, so this is quite a niche user story.

</comment><comment><USER42> I absolutely do not want it to hide any URI schemes or subdomains at all. (I am able to change these settings in Firefox, at least. I could also disable Unicode rendering for the domain name, but to disable Unicode rendering for the filename I had to write an extension.)

<comment><USER20> By default, Firefox's address bar hides the [http://](http://) scheme but shows the [https://](https://) scheme (to emphasize that the connection is secure). Firefox users that want to see the [http://](http://) scheme can set the "browser.urlbar.trimURLs" about:config pref to false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I find this really annoying. We have an internal SPA with buggy routing where it'll render for both http and https but the requests made by the client fail because they mirror the protocol when hitting the backend.

It's a pretty trivial issue that has sat around for a while. While I run Firefox, I would normally distinguish what version of the site a user is on by the green lock.

While http does show a "Not secure" segment next to the URL, everything just shows as black and white in dark mode, making it harder to distinguish at a glance.

</comment><comment><USER39> I guess the responsible thing to do is to redirect www to vvvvvv

<comment><USER44> https.llwww, you mean?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Only issue I have with this is it removes a bit of useful information when I'm asking users for screenshots when reporting errors on websites!

<comment><USER46> http/https is already given by the lock/"Not secure" icon FWIW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> First "bug" raised this morning about naked domain not redirecting to www...

SEO departments in my experience still insists that the www subdomain is necessary (e.g. they have no idea so better not touch it), yet Google instead of publicly coming out saying that it's pointless goes as far as hiding it. I don't get the point.

</comment><comment><USER48> If I have one webpage with different languages and want my visitors recognize it from url, what are the options? Previously I could have www.example.com/en/ and www.example.com/fr/ etc If subdomains are not possible there's no hope that visitors using Chrome would see it?

<comment><USER49> Subdomains in general still show, just not www. Also, in the case you mentioned, the subdomains are the same. The path still shows.

<comment><USER48> Thanks for correction, I confused that with technically handicapped Safari Browser then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> We all know why they really did it - to hide AMP page prefix in the future, to silo all internet (=Googlenet) users on their servers and won't raise much suspicions from them.

</comment><comment><USER51> Google wants a world where eventually all internet is hosted and controlled by Google.

To get there they have to disassociate what's shown in the URL bar with how and where the content comes from.

</comment><comment><USER52> Google wants nobody to know URLs exist, and that everyone is forced to search Google for everything, even sites they know, and there visit fake AMP-sites portraying to be from a server they are not, all while Google tracks every single keystroke you make.

This is just another tiny step in that overall plan, and it is 100% evil.

Don't waste your time trying to talk the Chrome-team into reason. You are not their customer, nor their employer. They will not listen.

If you don't like what Google is doing, use other products. Firefox, DDG, iPhones etc.

<comment><USER53> Firefox and Safari already made similar changes. Safari made the exact same change, and Firefox hides [http://](http://) already, but not [https://](https://), chrome is just using a lock icon to represent the [https://](https://) instead of the actual string.

<comment><USER42> As mentioned, at least this setting can be disabled in Firefox. (I don't know if this is possible in Chrome.)

<comment><USER54> Since nobody replied, I mentioned this in another comment that you can revert this in chrome://flags

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20631676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20631676)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm not a Chrome user, but this seems like a good thing. Address bars have been getting crowded the past few years.

</comment><comment><USER56> It's obvious that this is a dark pattern to increase the usage of Google search versus just typing in an address.

</comment><comment><USER57> This is so pointless. Why? To make the URLs prettier for the average user who they assume is too stupid to function or something?

Meanwhile most URLs around the web have UUIDs or other garbage appended to the end for the sake of tracking, which I doubt they intend to do anything about any time soon, so what even is the point of hiding the protocol and a single subdomain? Just leave the URL alone.

</comment><comment><USER58> I don't understand why you have to click twice to show this info. That's just bizarre.

<comment><USER46> Simple UX: don't move things around more than necessary. I honestly don't understand why people think this second click is unreasonable; the power-user shortcut (ctrl-l) already expands immediately anyway.

<comment><USER58> It's unreasonable because it violates user expectations. One click already makes the field editable and selects the text, having a second click change the text has no precedent whatsoever. It's also confusing because this means that clicking to position the insertion point suddenly moves the text out from under where you clicked (thankfully it does still place the insertion point at the right location, but that location is no longer where you're looking and pointing).

There's also just _no reason_ for this. It's unnecessary overhead to showing the full URL and there's no benefit.

<comment><USER46> The point is that the most common thing people do when clicking the URL is typing something else in the search bar, and the second most is copying the URL. In both cases, having the URL change is a problem, because this includes people who _don 't_ know what the [http://](http://) means or what a subdomain is, and _don 't_ immediately understand when a URL is the same as another. Your extra click saves my mother, and millions like her, much more confusion than the click costs you.

You probably mostly know technically fluent people, and think 'my mother' is a euphemism, but it's not. If we can get to a world where she can see an unfakeable padlock and read 'facebook.com', rather than remember whether it was 'https:' or 'https.' in the URL bar, and which parts of the string of letters to skip, we've made her life less hostile.

The corresponding problem you're complaining about is incredibly trivial in comparison. If you're actually editing the URL, you see the whole URL. If you need to know these implementation details, they're _vastly easier_ to find than, say, HTTP headers.

<comment><USER58> If you type something in the bar it doesn't matter what it shows.

If you copy the URL, the fact that what you copy is literally different than what you're looking at is confusing. You copied "example.com", so why does the clipboard now contain "[http://www.example.com/"](http://www.example.com/")?

> _If we can get to a world where she can see an unfakeable padlock and read > 'facebook.com', rather than remember whether it was 'https:' or 'https.' in > the URL bar, and which parts of the string of letters to skip, we 've made > her life less hostile._

Whether the URL bar shows "https" or a padlock has nothing at all to do with the unnecessary confusion inherent in Chrome requiring a second click on the URL bar to reveal the full URL.

Nothing in your comment even begins to explain the benefit in presenting a fully-editable text field that allegedly shows the URL, except it's still hiding information that is only revealed once you try and perform another text editing action. If someone looks at the URL bar and sees "example.com", and they click on it and it immediately turns into "[https://www.example.com"](https://www.example.com"), that doesn't harm them in any way. In fact, that's exactly how mobile browsers such as iOS Safari have worked for years and nobody's complained. Chrome is deliberately doing something different than all precedent and there's no obvious reason for this beyond their desire to be unique.

<comment><USER46> I gave a straightforward argument: it keeps these complexities away from people who don't understand them as much as reasonably possible, while still leaving them within trivial reach when they are necessary. If you don't like the argument, whatever, but acting like Chrome is making this a double click instead of a single click because of some kind of differentiation strategy or ego or whatever is just silly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is absolutely stupid. The www subdomain and the bare domain are not equivalent and should not be treated as such.

Hiding the protocol is also stupid if it's still shown for other protocols, like ftp or http.

</comment><comment><USER60> Good riddance to www

</comment><comment><USER61> Hiding the subdomains doesnt make any sense!!

</comment><comment><USER62> Off topic : there seems to be a disconnect between the chrome devs and users. Another instance was the automatic signing in to chrome incident. I've lost trust in the chrome team and have switched to Firefox full time and honestly there's nothing that I miss. The firefox devs seem to better understand their users, frequently blog about changes that positively impact users. I have a lot more faith in firefox even though it's not perfect (mr. robot incident and others).

<comment><USER63> Have they though? How many of their users understand what "www" or "https" mean? For those that have a vague idea, how many ever look?

I don't like the change either, for a variety of reasons, but I don't think I'm their average user either. For the average user, seeing the domain and nothing else likely improves security.

<comment><USER21> This isn't about users, it's about a scam to trick people into thinking that something is being served from their site, but it's not, it will be from Google. (ie, AMP)

<comment><USER63> Like I said, I'm against it for several reasons, but I replied to this:

>there seems to be a disconnect between the chrome devs and users

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I just opened this page on safari and I see just "bleepingcomputer.com" with a lock icon.

Its great chrome will do the same. Every browser should. Low level technical details and historical artifacts should go die in fire.</comment>


What would happen in the ocean if we went quiet? - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/science/what-would-happen-in-the-ocean-if-we-went-quiet/

<comment><USER2> Military sonar is probably the biggest offender. Obviously, it's going to be pretty hard to get the USN to abandon sonar altogether. However, perhaps there are ways they could modify operating procedures to reduce the impact on marine life. Whales surely show up on sonar, so it would make sense to reduce ping volume when they are near whales in non-combat situations. Focusing on more sensitive microphone technology might allow the Navy to use weaker pings without compromising range. Passive listening techniques, such as those used by submarines, could probably be used to a greater extent on the surface too. Quieter propellers, outboard pickups (probably already in use), or simply stopping when using sonar might also permit the use of lower volume pings. All that is really needed is for the Navy to make lower noise one of their design priorities.

Likewise, commercial traffic probably considers fuel efficiency to be top priority when designing propellers, etc.. Quieter propellers are probably less energy efficient, so regulations would likely be required to encourage commercial ships to reduce their noise emissions.

<comment><USER3> I could be wrong here, but I think quieter propellers may be _more_ energy efficient. Since noise is just energy, it's wasted on noise rather than propulsion. Case in point: Formula 1 engines this year are turbo, and are much quieter. Many fans complain because they are too quiet! But they are more efficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article piqued my interest so I googled for recordings of underwater sounds. Here is a gallery of underwater audio clips from various mammals, invertebrates and more: [http://www.dosits.org/audio/agsummary/](http://www.dosits.org/audio/agsummary/)

The lightning really does sound like a phaser!

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't gonna happen, if the USN keeps up with its ways:

[http://www.wired.com/2014/07/war-of-the- whales](http://www.wired.com/2014/07/war-of-the-whales)</comment>


Tips Sought to Shorten Sleep Inertia - <AUTHOR> I would love to increase my early morning (~5AM to 7AM) productivity. However, my thinking is relatively sluggish in the hour up to two post waking up. Do you have any tips on how to shorten that period of natural sleep inertia that occurs when you wake up early? To let you know, I currently take a cold shower and drink bulletproof coffee. <comment><USER2> First, catch up on all your sleep. Then start going to bed at 9:30pm or so. You'll probably start waking up naturally, fully rested, at 5-6am. (Note that this is also easiest to do at times of year when the sun rises at 5-6am.)

The natural and fully rested wake up will leave you quite alert.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't drink coffee. I'm much more functional in the mornings since giving up caffeine. The mechanism by which your body acclimatises to a new baseline of caffeine is known -- you're inflicting those hard mornings on yourself. (And if you're not going to be correspondingly earlier in the night -- consider giving your brain the sleep it is telling you it needs. There's little to no evidence that you can train your mind to be high-performing while short- changing it on sleep. On the contrary, plenty of evidence exists that you perform worse when you under-sleep, but you also lose the ability to notice you're performing worse. Your sleep dep is moving you to a worse place in Dunning-Kruger space)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wake up naturally when rested. Your "sleep inertia" is your body trying to get a bit of the sleep you deprived it of back.

</comment><comment><USER5> read the news ;-)</comment>


Tesla Battery Swap Is The Hoax Of The Year - <AUTHOR> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/21/the-tesla-battery-swap-is-the-hoax-of-the-year/ <comment><USER2> Oy. Tesla has shown good faith in building up the infrastructure for fast charging and demonstrating battery swapping technology, even if the infrastructure for battery swap is not yet there. They have picked up the slack where the government has failed to provide infrastructure. Surely carbon credits were designed to incentivize this kind of innovation and manufacturing, and as far as I can see Tesla is the best example of a company that stands a chance of bringing fast charging electric vehicles with battery swap technology to the mass market . In short, the carbon credits system is working, it is incentivizing the kidn of innovation we need.

This person has a political axe to grind and a personal agenda....apparently because they are a climate change denier.

<comment><USER3> I don't have an understanding of this whole credits system, it just never clicks properly with me but that's my fault, I couldn't find a proper source to analyze it.

While I totally agree with you, he does have a tiny point. If there are no actual battery swap faculties, then why should Tesla be getting the credits worth tens of million of dollars from the government or aka from our tax money?

I rather Tesla get an actual loan from the government to test the battery swap concept rather than trying to game the credits system if that is in fact that they're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At the risk of sounding Ad Hominem, "whatsupwiththat.com" is primarily a climate change denial website and scientific conspiracy theory blog. I'd take any claims with a grain of salt.</comment>


Coronavirus death rate falling in hospitals - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53192532 <comment><USER2> Might be worth adding 'in England' to the title, as BBC does a lot of world reporting and the headline might be mistaken for a general rather than a local trend.

<comment><USER3> Death rates are falling all over the globe. Italy and the United States have reported similar. Italian doctors claim the virus is weaker, Americans are claiming it is due to younger patients.

<comment><USER4> I imagine it's likely that the most vulnerable parts of the population that were easily accessible (easily accessible isn't even saying much, since let's face it - it seems not many countries have been able to prevent the virus from reaching nursing homes) by the virus have died.

<comment><USER3> That is a main reason in my mind. The virus burned through the easy to infect really quickly. There is also something to be said for the evolutionary benefits of being less deadly, as a virus.

<comment><USER4> I'm interested in the excess mortality that ends up accumulating at the end of the year, would be interesting to see if a large chunk of the pandemic ended up being like the reaper coming a few months early for the most elderly and vulnerable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading the posts from NYC doctors at the peak. I think automatic intubation based solely on pulse ox has stopped. They found patients indicating pulse ox in the 60's who were not in distress. Where as before they would go straight to ventilator based on that reading.

Also the studies about Vitamin D. Doesn't hurt to increase the intake, especially for those chronically low. Many of those folks are in high risk groups.

Less concern about surfaces and more focus on avoiding stale air.

So many learnings came from the field.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a good article in that it acknowledges the several possible causes of a lower daily death rate; patient demographics, standard of care, mutation of the virus to a more moderate form, or something else entirely.

At this point there's a definite effect but the cause(s) are only speculative.

<comment><USER7> I'm sure policy changes are also helping, for example no longer forcing COVID-19 patients into nursing homes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My guess is better management of cytokine explosion with steroids to prevent viral pneumonia.</comment>


Show HN: Open-source Telegram bot for music sharing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/szastupov/musicbot <comment><USER2> Nice. I'm really curious to see how messaging emerges as a UI for more and more different things.

I'm curious about the specific use cases for this bot. Is the idea that it could be the primary place that a person stores and shares music with people? Or do you think it would be more short-term and focused - for example putting together a collection of tracks for some event or to share with a specific group of people? Why use this bot instead of something with, say, a traditional graphical UI?

I don't mean to sound negative or dubious, I'm just curious about the vision behind it.

I think for really basic functionality - like finding specific artists and tracks - the messaging UI is great. And if I could basically treat it like a friend with really good knowledge and taste in music and ask it put together a playlist along a specific theme or for a specific situation then the messaging UI would be a fantastic fit. However, for functionality in between (e.g. managing playlists, and tags, and discovering new music) then maybe typing a lot of text would be less convenient than a GUI. I dunno.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest it's just a hack, something I thought would be interesting to implement. It's like some weird combination of lego pieces (Telegram API, aiotg, MongoDB) that fit together. Telegram is amazing platform and I'm looking forward for their next moves.

> Is the idea that it could be the primary place that a person stores and > shares music with people?

That's the main idea, right. A global searchable catalog. Other use cases are harder because, as you mentioned, text is a pure UI for managing playlists. I'm thinking about turning it into a radio with recommendations based on likes. But for now, I just want people to fill the catalog with independent music.

I must admit, that the current generation of bots is quite dumb and we need to move towards natural languages and learning. I also don't think that bots are viable "app platforms". Bots should either be interfaces to bigger services or stand alone smart assistants.

<comment><USER3> Hi Stepan! I Love your project. I appreciate: 1 your code/architecture approach (I de in Ruby) 2\. MusicBot as application example as a possibly "disruptive" Telegram bot! Not the usual game-bot.

BTW, I'm an "indipendent music maker myself ([http://solyaris.altervista.org](http://solyaris.altervista.org)) and I debate since many years about copyright/copy-left realms. I unfortunately think your good idea, could be abused easly, as someone pointed out :( I'll feedback you later in different comment about this hot specific point.

Anyway, I fully agree with you, when you say that:

>Telegram is amazing platform and I'm looking forward for their next moves.

Absolutely! I think Telegram is moving really great designing the big picture "communication" architecture including: 1- p2p chats 2- groups & supergroups 3- channels 4- bots 5- bots integration in groups and channels

In my opinion this integration of bots INSIDE groups and channels (humans), open new services scenarios, not games! Instead service apps useful for people, in business/application scenarios A real revolution: integration of robots and humans services. I'm serious about it and my twitter microblog: www.twitter.com/solyarisoftware is about that. I wote some ideas about in my draft/raough doc here: [https://github.com/solyaris/BOTServer/blob/master/wiki/servi...](https://github.com/solyaris/BOTServer/blob/master/wiki/services.md)

> I must admit, that the current generation of bots is quite dumb and we need > to move towards natural languages and learning.

I fully agree!

> I also don't think that bots are viable "app platforms". Bots should either > be interfaces to bigger services or stand alone smart assistants.

Yes, but: I feel nowadays visual-paradigma/web-interface based/mobile apps are in many cases poor in suppluing real services. I'm basically perplex regarding nowadays glorification of (mobile) web interface as "THE way" (to communicate/to get services/make business). I feel instead that next generation(Telegram) bots could be instead a real revolution in man-machine interfaces for services apps: the (Telegram) chat as prevalent way to communicate for users (see very young people habits...). Now as a text-based chat, in a near future, I see phone-calls + video-calls as front-end (along with text-based chats).

What I mean, and I think I agree with you, is that a possible very interesting world is build-up "intelligent chatbots" machine-learning enabled, astep forward nowadays dumb bots that responds to basic /commands or enabled by some finite state machine dialogs (my project now).

What do you think ?

respect giorgio

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll check out your music ;)

> A real revolution: integration of robots and humans services

Exactly! And Facebook understands it, Facebook M is a pretty interesting project.

<comment><USER3> Yes, BTW, you know, there is a debate about the fact Facebook M if fake artificial intelligence, but instead M hidden a usual help-desk by humans. It doesn't matter... I believe in services exactly made by collaborations amongs bots and humans... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Inspiring example, thank you!

I had a look at the source to your aiotg package for writing such Telegram bots. IIUC, you run a single Python process using asyncio, and that uses coroutines to handle all requests (in and out).

What is your experience w.r.t. scalability in practice, for example with your music bot? (iow have you run into any issues with large numbers of users interacting with the bot?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! asyncio and aiohttp works well so far. But this particular example (music bot) uses synchronous bindings to MongoDB so it's not fully async. There are asyncio bindings for Mongo, but I haven't tried them.

I have another bot ([https://github.com/szastupov/whatisbot](https://github.com/szastupov/whatisbot)) which is a client to wikipedia and asyncio makes much more sense in this case.

In general, think asyncio is inevitable in current world of APIs and micro- services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is stopping me from using this to illegally distribute copyrighted music?

<comment><USER6> Whatever's stopping (or not stopping) you from using anything to illegally distribute copyrighted music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this will go the way of Kazaa, messed up by poor quality uploaded file, possibly even with virusses and/or weird noises. Or is there an auditing/rating system?

</comment><comment><USER8> So basically xdcc for telegram?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 176 lines of pure disruptive code

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool, reminds me of DCC warez bots!

</comment><comment><USER11> does this break telegram TOS?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no such thing as Telegram TOS, but theoretically the bot can be blocked if someone files a complaint. I'm aware of such possibility but I hope that the bot won't be abused.

It's kind of a grey area and a subject for long debates, but as an artist and a fan, I believe there should be easy ways to share music. For example, Russian social network VK has allowed to do this for years and that's how a whole generation discovered new genres and artists. But this days, even VK has to comply with corporations (VK music is disabled on iOS). I'm just trying to replicate this user experience for Telegram.

Let's just see how it'll work. I don't mind removing and blacklisting some artists if necessary.

<comment><USER3> Yes, Stephan, possible long debates about the overall scenario of peer-to-peer music sharing. We have experience about what happens in past. Big majors won (until now).

Now as I said in my previous comment, I'm me too an indipendent "artist" sharing my music in a compromise between free/no-free after long struggle with myself.

So MusicBot is great if used by artists/listeners fully aware about intellectual rights of posted contents. Long story. Generally, unfortunately, this is not the common case (awareness). The big risk I see, is that malicious (or simply ignorant/naif) users could post famous music (not necessarly good music), protected by copyrights. Boring Issues alla involving actors!

If I'm not wrong, quickly reading your beautiful synthetic python code, you store music in your server (as a MongoDB blob). ins't it ?

Smart. Superb I could say!

But a possible issue could be that you store music (possibly copyrighted) in your own server.

A possible workaround/proposal is to test your project, avoiding to store stuff in your server, but leaving digital contents in Telegram Servers! if I well remember, until now Telegram do not officially say when file will be purged after upload... Ok that's a "volatile contents" solution. Just an idea, maybe always interesting for sort of "auto-deleting" sahring, as secret messages (but could be wrong).

Another approach, could be, again to do not store anything in your server, no file upload/download, but just manage links to external repositories/specilized websites. An example ? just share links to youtube.com contents; in that way you "delgate" all copyrights possible issues to youtube censors ;-)

BTW, I quickly tested MusicBot looking for an artst and title, I noted that search functionality could be developed to understand better what user are looking for, but this is not a criticism of your excellent work, just a feature for a future implementation!

Thank again for sharing MusicBot respect giorgio

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words!

> If I'm not wrong, quickly reading your beautiful synthetic python code, you > store music in your server (as a MongoDB blob). ins't it ?

Nope, the bot only stores track title, performer and id. Actual media is stored on Telegram servers.

> Just an idea, maybe always interesting for sort of "auto-deleting" sahring, > as secret messages (but could be wrong).

Yes, I'm thinking about it.

> I noted that search functionality could be developed to understand better > what user are looking for, but this is not a criticism of your excellent > work, just a feature for a future implementation!

Sure, I'm open for any suggestions and criticism :) I'm thinking about how to improve it.

<comment><USER3> > Nope, the bot only stores track title, performer and id. Actual media is > stored on Telegram servers.

good idea ;-) BTW, do you have any recent news about Telegram decisions about uploaded files persistence on their server ? [https://core.telegram.org/bots/faq#can-i-count-on-file- ids-t...](https://core.telegram.org/bots/faq#can-i-count-on-file-ids-to-be- persistent)

> For the moment, file_ids for your bot's outgoing files may be recycled after > several thousand files have been sent. This may be changed in the future. > Inbound file_ids can be treated as persistent.

About searching on MusicBot (using web interface: [https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@MusicCatalogBot](https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@MusicCatalogBot))

I noted that:

1\. inserting an author name, by example:

Alice Coltrane

?! :-)

I got all tracks related to any "Alice", by example

Moby - Alice some other Cocteau Twins track, etc.

no track related really to "Alice Coltrane", that's probably because you just do an OR on your query, ok, clear.

2\. in the web client, in result track list, song names appear truncated... by example I'm not able to read the Cocteau Twin complete title track, in the above example.

<comment><AUTHOR> >no track related really to "Alice Coltrane", that's probably because you just do an OR on your query, ok, clear.

That's right, it's OR operation, but all you need to do to perform AND search is to specifically use quotes.

>in the web client, in result track list, song names appear truncated... by example I'm not able to read the Cocteau Twin complete title track, in the above example.

Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it. I mean I could truncate it myself but the bot doesn't know anything about UI.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nintendo Bans Online Services for Prominent Hacker's Switch Console - <AUTHOR> http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/05/nintendo_bans_online_services_for_prominent_hackers_switch_console <comment><USER2> The count is now two prominent hardware hackers. SciresM just had a console banned as well.

[https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/998855817511165953](https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/998855817511165953)

</comment><comment><USER3> When someone says they can't tell you why they banned you, immediately reply with a subject access request.</comment>


World's best introduction to sed - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/worlds-best-introduction-to-sed/

<comment><USER2> Seen on this news <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3084195> 115 points by pkrumins 19 days ago</comment>


Tweebler: a free alternative to Tweekly - <AUTHOR> http://tweebler.xyz/

<comment><USER2> Very, very cool. I was really bummed when Tweekly started charging for their services. Just signed up for your service; looking forward to my weekly updates again!</comment>


ALEC Wants You To Pay 750 Percent More For High-Speed Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/12/04/20/alec-wants-you-pay-750-percent-more-high-speed-internet <comment><USER2> Don't get me wrong. I love cheap, fast internet as much as the next guy. But fair is fair... Why should the government be allowed to offer a service below its actual cost to market? No competitor can possibly hope to match, let alone beat their prices, at least without losing money. I am not a republican, but this is model is extremely unfair to the free market.

<comment><USER3> Why shouldn't a government offer such a service?

In fact, most large cities in America already do--parking! Most parking in America is priced well below the market value. (Slightly more arguable but still true: all non-toll (and some toll) public roadways.)

Another example are the quasi-governmental agencies that run mass transit systems; none of them approach full revenue recovery in America that I know of.

Perhaps an example closer to the "information" and "technology" bent of public broadband? Public libraries function at a loss, in that the direct fees they collect through fines and other revenue generating services come nowhere close to their cost to operate. There are very few (almost none) direct calls for state governments to ban local public libraries and nearly every decries attempts by book publishers in their attempts to crowd out libraries by restrictive, number of check out limited DRM on eBooks.

We have long accepted in America, for many arenas, that if a government (whether local, state, or federal) chooses to provide a service at a below market price because they think it's a net benefit to their community. Most private companies don't even complain that much normally, since they can compete against the government at better service or quality, of course. People are willing to pay a premium for that. This is an especially odd place to defend the companies attempting to restrict governments from providing services to their residents, when Telecoms have received huge government subsidies and government sanctioned monopolies for years that allowed them to create a huge infrastructure and head start.

If they're really doing so poorly that they feel threatened by much maligned (everybody remember DMV jokes?) local government, they've just been horrible companies and it is a proper place for governments to step in and provide better service.</comment></comment>


Recreating Facemash to kickoff a branding project - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jamesfuthey/recreating-facemash-to-kickoff-my-company-s-branding-project-7a88005e7aca <comment><AUTHOR> Demo URL, if you're interested: [https://bittitan- branding.firebaseapp.com/](https://bittitan-branding.firebaseapp.com/) (Don't worry, your interactions will not be saved to the database).</comment>


PyPy-STM 2.5.1 released - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2015/03/pypy-stm-251-released.html

<comment><USER2> > It is a Python in which you can do minor tweaks to your existing, non- > multithreaded programs and get them to use multiple cores. You identify > medium- or large-sized, likely-independent parts of the code and to ask > PyPy-STM to run these parts in parallel. An example would be every iteration > of some outermost loop over all items of a dictionary.

This is very neat! Obviously it's not a magic drop-in, but still.

Relevant bit from the docs: [http://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/stm.html#transaction-t...](http://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/stm.html#transaction- transactionqueue)

<comment><USER3> The main point is that at first, your code will be slow (as in bound to a single core) and then you can optimize it to provide better performance. This is as opposed to threads, where your code will be immediately fast, but buggy. The difference comes from the fact that 90% correct is still buggy, but 90% paralellizable is kinda good.

<comment><USER4> Is there a transaction module that provides a null/no-op implementation for compatibility with CPython?

<comment><USER3> yes, normal transaction.py should just work :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I might be way off here, but does PyPy-STM works at all with the new stdlib asyncio?

I mean, the whole purpose of asyncio is running non-blocking I/O in a single thread and delegate blocking CPU-bound executions to other threads (with the run_in_executor method), but it would be awesome to share the asyncio loop event between multiple threads. I don't know if this is possible though.

<comment><USER3> asyncio would need some work in order to be trully parallelizable on top of pypy-stm. You would need to go around and eliminate all the global state that all the elements are modifying. But in principle it should work (requires work though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazing! I'd really want to try this out in production if you guys can bump python3 support to 3.3 and have a 3.3+STM version. So looking forward to that!

<comment><USER3> that should be very easy, since STM is mostly a project that is independent of the interpreter (e.g. you can use it in hippyvm or pyrolog). Good project as a start of contribution ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is PyPy basically going to replace the regular CPython runtime that people currently consider "Python"?

<comment><USER8> In PyPy's FAQ, the answer to the question "Is PyPy a drop in replacement for CPython?" is "Almost!"

... followed by a few paragraphs of details about why it is "almost".[1]

Their caveats seem to match up to several of Guido van Rossum's reservations about PyPy back in 2012 (summary here [2])

In the last 3 years there have been significant improvements with PyPy3 and C extension support, so it's getting closer but I would imagine it will take a few more iterations to from "almost" to "definitely".

I personally believe in PyPy's long-term future, they've done amazing work and think it is worthwhile even if CPython remains the reference platform.

[1] [http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/faq.html#is-pypy-a-drop-in- rep...](http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/faq.html#is-pypy-a-drop-in-replacement- for-cpython)

[2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12867263/why-wasnt- pypy-i...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12867263/why-wasnt-pypy- included-in-standard-python/12867349#12867349)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great work, thanks !</comment>


Journey – how jumping can be emotional - <AUTHOR> http://www.edge-online.com/features/opinion-designing-rapture

<comment><AUTHOR> This is already one of my favorite articles about videogames, ever.</comment>


College Daily brings Chinese students in U.S. news with nationalistic undertones - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-post-truth-publication-where-chinese-students-in-america-get-their-news <comment><USER2> > "Most people just read to kill time. Who is going to investigate? No one > will. It only passes your eyes—there's no need to pin down if it's real or > fake."

> "Correctness doesn't exist, because it's always relative,"

> I asked Deng why he thought the piece had resonated with such a large > audience. "It's purely made up, to be honest with you," Deng replied. "It's > all made up. I'm not sure if I did the right thing. My boss asked me to > write it. I think, if a new-media outlet wants to move people, you have to > make them feel that it's real."

OK, I think I get it now. "Post-Truth" content is how you cultivate nihilism in both your readers and writers while simultaneously making a buck and increasing the stability of your authoritarian government. What a corrosive enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER3> America is really fucked if we can't curb the spread of disinformation by bad actors. Does anybody know if any there is any action being taken by politicians and lawmakers to work on a solution for this? It's becoming increasingly clear that total freedom of speech does not work in the modern world.

<comment><USER4> More speech? Maybe the older generation that fled after Tiananmen need to fund something with clickbait and memes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To other mainlanders, just add this filter to your ublock and go on with your life. Life is too short, and there's too much interesting stuff to learn, to spend time arguing this stuff.

news.ycombinator.com##div.comment:has-text(/China|Chinese|Trump|Hong Kong/) news.ycombinator.com##.itemlist>tbody>tr:has-text(/China|Chinese|Trump|Hong Kong/) news.ycombinator.com##.itemlist>tbody>tr:has- text(/China|Chinese|Trump|Hong Kong/) + tr news.ycombinator.com##.itemlist>tbody>tr:has-text(/China|Chinese|Trump|Hong Kong/) + tr + tr

<comment><USER6> You can't stop the signal, Mal.

<comment><USER7> Is this an Inception reference?

<comment><USER6> It was a Firefly reference.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tutorial: SSH into ec2 with one simple keyword - <AUTHOR> http://wesleyzhao.com/tutorial-a-slick-way-to-ssh-into-your-aws-ec2

<comment><USER2> Why use a shell script instead of adding to ~/.ssh/config?</comment>


Thankyou all for support, game is finally launched   - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/candy-pot/id477454901?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><USER2> Hey! Nice work! I liked it! Downloaded the Lite version and will buy the full one as soon as I have some money in my account.</comment>


Manchester's hilarious attempt at reinventing London's Oyster Card - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sushilnash/a-beginners-guide-to-using-my-get-me-there-manchester-s-hilarious-attempt-at-reinventing-london-s-70a6d1dde246 <comment><USER2> Why does the local authority have to fund this anyway? Isn't 'innovation' one of the reasons public transport outside London was sold off?

</comment><comment><USER3> What's really shocking is the very last entry on the FAQ page [1], which appears to imply that UK Govt has mandated _every_ location outside of London should use some "standard" which is far, far inferior to the tried and tested Oyster system.

[1] [http://www.getmethere.com/help.php](http://www.getmethere.com/help.php)

</comment><comment><USER4> Classic example of a government system built by an army of contractors and consultants who don't really have the "built a fast, simple, useful, profitable" mentality.

<comment><USER5> That's not really fair to Transport for London, the government system they built (Oyster) _is_ fast, simple, useful and profitable. And still the only one in the world to work with a normal contactless card (or phone).

<comment><USER6> What do you mean? The vast majority of transit cards I've experienced work contactless

<comment><USER7> I think the OP is stating that it's the only transit system that lets you use a contactless credit card / ApplePay / etc. rather than a dedicated transit card (I didn't realise no other transit system had that! It seems like such an easy win)</comment></comment></comment></comment>