Ask HN: Who was Joseph Fourier? - <AUTHOR> Of course, Wikipedia tells us Joseph Fourier lived 1768 until 1830, but what I don't understand is how could he invent the tools that are so important in digital signal processing today? <comment><USER2> For his analytic theory of heat, he was working with differential equations to express heat propagation.

Those equations are especially easy when applied to trigonometric functions like sine and cosine (because their derivates are easy to express in terms of each other).

He didn't really have a way to solve the equations for other functions directly, but he tried to approximate them by sums of trigonometric functions. He noticed that he could actually do that for all functions he wanted to analyze, and wrote about that in his book.

Later, other mathematicians qualified the circumstances that make such a transformation possible, formally proved its properties and named it "Fourier transform" in his honor.

Because of its applicability to problems involving differential equations, the Fourier transform was also used in other domains of physics e.g. to analyze vibrations like sound.

Because of those many uses, people needed a way to compute it quickly, so they optimized the algorithm to create the Fast Fourier Transform.

So those "tools that are so important in digital signal processing today" were not invented by Fourier singlehandedly, but are associated with his name due to him kicking off the initial development.

Actually, Gauss used a variant of the FFT in his astronomical work even before Fourier published his own results, but because Gauss didn't publish, he is not associated with the discovery.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, i see... i read about travels to Egypt, and then curiosity on heat transport. back in that time, heat was understood differently than today, but interesting to see how the fluctuations in temperature of day/night of month/year follow a bit of sinusoidal pattern indeed. do you recall what those basic heat equations were back in that time, and why it was different from theories back then? just in case you have some more time to write on this.... thanks!

<comment><USER2> The Wikipedia article on the heat equation has a section on using Fourier series: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation#Solving_the_heat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation#Solving_the_heat_equation_using_Fourier_series)

I assume that except for the adaptation to modern notation, the general idea of the argument has been preserved.

Note that sinusoids are only used because they make the calculations convenient, and not because of the day/night cycle or actual sinusoidal heat distributions empirically observed in nature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole)

George boole lived in 18th century. He came up with boolean algebra which is used extensively in digital circuits.

Euler, Newton, and Gauss all lived from 16th - 18th century and they are responsible for a large chunk of the math we have today which a reason we have computers.

We stand on the shoulder of giants.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a startup that allows me to charge without a merchant account? - <AUTHOR>

I don't want to use paypal. I want to accept credit cards on my site. I like the concept of pulleyapp.com but it uses paypal. Is there anything like that, which allows you to accept credit cards on your site? <comment><USER2> It depends on if you want recurring (subscription) billing, and what countries you need to support.

Checkout by Amazon and Google Checkout both support you not having a merchant account. I've also used 2CheckOut in the past.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe check out FastSpring: <http://www.fastspring.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> You might take a look at Amazon Payments.

</comment><comment><USER5> hey rurro - working on something you might be interested in. do you mind emailing me? fsimmons at gmail.</comment>


SLAC Theorist Lance Dixon Explains Quantum Gravity - <AUTHOR> https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2015-11-18-qa-slac-theorist-lance-dixon-explains-quantum-gravity.aspx <comment><USER2> Mr.Susskind has a Stanford lecture on this topic detailing the physics in his own unique & awesome way [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9crggox5rbc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9crggox5rbc)

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's a great lecture! It really seems like the pieces could be coming together on not just unification, but a fundamental (though very non- intuitive) understanding of how spacetime works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If your theory is not "predictive", it's not a theory, just Aristotelian wanking.

People that have been working on quantum gravity for two decades and haven't made a single testable prediction?

Some point you have to accept you've been led down a blind alleyway.

<comment> semi-extrinsic AFAIK there are currently no predictive theories that combine quantum mechanics and gravity. Should we just give up then, stop researching the topic?

And I must say, this article was a refreshingly down-to-earth break from the breathless stuff that usually comes out of university PR departments.</comment></comment>


The Death of Adventure Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

<comment><USER3> Oh, wow. OMM, talk about memories (the linked article is from 2000.) Among other things Chet and Erik were famous for the Time To Crate system of reviewing games by how long it took from starting the game until you saw a crate. Since this was the late 90s/early 2ks, it was generally zero seconds. This was in comparison to real life, where I frequently go years at a time without seeing a single crate, but then again, I am not a genius game designer.

<comment><USER4> Chet and Eric got jobs at Valve, where they helped design a game that has an inanimate crate as one of its most memorable characters.

<comment><USER5> The companion crate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the iOS platform is helping the revival of adventure games. Just the ones I've personally played on the iPhone over the last couple of years:

\- Monkey Island 1 & 2 Special Edition (remastered graphics)

\- Broken Sword special edition

\- Hector: Badge of Carnage: EXCELLENT original game (if somewhat short)

\- Flight of the Amazon Queen

\- Beneath the Steel Sky

\- Gobliins

I'm sure I'm missing something... There's also some games that are available on the iPad only, and I think the trend is there: adventure games are coming back.

<comment><USER7> Actually, I would say this is more thanks to ScummVM (an open source re- implementation of many adventure game engines), as well as the people who ported it to iOS. The last three games listed probably use ScummVM without modification (citation needed), and I would be surprised if the Broken Sword and Monkey Island remakes were not heavily inspired by the efforts of ScummVM to revitalize interest in the games.

<comment><USER8> I thought that ScummVM was GPL. Doesn't that run against Apple's rules? Wasn't there a case of a 3rd-party dev team in Europe embedding ScummVM into a Wii game for EA (or some large name) and it had to get pulled due to Nintendo's licensing rules (which conflicted with the GPL).

<comment><USER6> Apple wouldn't allow a ScummVM app into the app store (that it would play any ScummVM game), but games made on ScummVM platform are ok.

<comment><USER8> I thought it was a matter of licensing, not a matter of 'something that can run code.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hahaha, beautiful article. I'd love to see someone attempt to secure cat hair to their face with maple syrup.

Having to jump through hoops like forging a mustache onto someone's passport before applying a fake mustache yourself in order to impersonate said person is the reason sites like gamefaqs.com exist.

Another stunning realization is that after deciphering that web of absurdity someone took the time to write it down in a guide instead of just shutting the program down, ejecting the disc, dousing it in gasoline, and lighting it on fire.

</comment><comment><USER10> Decent graphics are murder for adventure games. With some of the oldest adventure games, there were only a few places you could plausibly click on and see a result. Hunting for the interactable object in a 3D textured and shadered world is less intuitive.

<comment><USER11> Cel shading gets around this problem somewhat, and also, IMO make the game "Feel" more like an adventure game.

What shits ME about modern adventure games is when they decide that interactive objects need to be shiny.

<comment><USER12> An adventure game in the Borderlands art-style (and perhaps the world) would be pretty fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Syberia I & II, The Longest Journey/Dreamfall are a couple of amazing adventure game series. Neither are exactly recent (2004 and 2007 respectively), but they're still full of atmosphere and enjoyable to play.

<comment><USER14> I continue to hope that Ragnar Tornquist will make another game as brilliant as The Longest Journey. If he can manage to inject some of the creativity of that game into his upcoming Lovecraftian MMO The Secret World, it could be superb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Adventure games continue to be released by indie companies. Some of those are pretty good. For example, Gemini Rue was released just a few days ago. A Tale of Two Kingdoms came out couple of years ago. Both were polished and quite innovative in their own ways. This is more than I can say about many AAA titles today.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think Scribblenauts + adventure game storylines would actually resurrect the genre in an amazing way. Imagine a harry potter style game where you can create anything to solve simple puzzles.

Would be amazing.

</comment><comment><USER17> Pretty funny, but point and click adventure games are still popular. There are several titles on Steam released this year for PC.

The NintendoDS has several successful titles: Trace Memory, Hotel Dusk, and others. A new Professor Layton title topped sales for the 3DS, recently released in Japan.

The genre is probably as popular now as ever.

<comment><USER18> Hmm, as popular as ever? I dunno. King's Quest, Myst, 7th Guest, these were the 'Call of Duty's of 80s/90s PC gaming.

<comment><USER19> They might not be as popular percentage-wise, but what are the sales totals and revenue like compared directly to those titles, I wonder? The total market must be a lot larger than it was back then.

<comment><USER20> Myst is still one of the biggest sellers (in units total) even today, IIRC it sold 6 million units.

<comment><USER21> Layton's sold 9.5 million, and Phoenix Wright is not far off with 3.9 million.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Before I clicked, I thought it meant text adventures. Clearly they're deader than corduroy if graphical ones are now 'old'.

<comment><USER23> The graphic ones took all the depth out of the text adventures, but offered eye candy. So the trend goes...

<comment><USER24> Actually, much of the Myst series' "eye candy" provided _considerable_ depth, with all the journals and their diagrams, video segments, and (sort of) interactive points. While the environments were largely static (read: empty, dead), the back story found in the journals and other elements was interesting enough to keep going, at least for a while.

Depth in graphic adventures may be tough, but it's doable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Old man murray was the best content site ever. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER26> They are not dead, just less popular. Check out Gray Matter (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Matter_(video_game)>) or 999 ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999:_Nine_Hours,_Nine_Persons,_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999:_Nine_Hours,_Nine_Persons,_Nine_Doors)) - very good and recently released adventure games.

</comment><comment><USER27> I used to be a humongous fan of 2D adventure games. Most notably the Space Quest series. If you've never played them start out with Space Quest 4 and then play SQ6. The audio dialog in the game is unrivaled humor. Full Throttle was also one of the mega-classics of 2D adventure games. I think the downfall of these games came when the studios tried to go the 3D route.

<comment><AUTHOR> In general, I agree. However, Grim Fandango (1998) was both 3D and brilliant.

<comment><USER28> The story, characters, art direction, music and puzzles were brilliant. I'm pretty sure the interface could have been better, though. Steering Manny through the environments felt like driving a malfunctioning tank at times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> ars technica had a very recent and in-depth article about the Rise and Fall (and re-rise?) of the genre. Definitely worth a read: [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2011/01/history-of- gra...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2011/01/history-of-graphic- adventures.ars/)

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the relaunch of Monkey Island on the iPhone proved that adventures are far from dead. Are they still mainstream? Maybe not, but I definitely see elements of adventures in modern games. Games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock rely heavily on storytelling. You could argue that some sandbox games like GTA San Andreas (haven't played IV, sorry) are technically adventure games or have adventure components. While I think the point and click (and text-based IF) adventures of years gone by are no longer mainstream, to say that it's dead is like saying that RTS is dead because there's no more fixed-view overhead style Command & Conquer games - they've just evolved.

<comment><USER31> > Games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock rely heavily on storytelling.

Compare Bioshock to System Shock 2 though; Bioshock is extremely simplified in order to still be playable on point-n-grunt console platforms.

<comment><USER30> The more I think about it I think you're right, but if you look at the way that games are made now, the costs and the audiences they have to reach, making a highly cerebral adventure game is quite risky. I don't see EA ever doing it for example.

I can see adventures working well in the casual gaming space, but I think that the mass appeal side probably needs to be there too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Double Fine's new game Stacking on xbox live arcade is definitely reminiscent of old-school adventure games, and it's great!

<comment><USER33> Satcking is not a Telltale game. It's made by Double Fine, the people who made Psychonauts. Double Fine is run by Tim Schaefer, who helped create many classic adventure games like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, etc.

<comment><USER32> Yup, you're right!!! Fixed my comment, I get mixed up because I love those companies and both of them have ex-lucasarts people

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> They trash Gabriel Knight III, but I would go back farther and trash Gabriel Knight II and other games of that era. That was when it first became technically possible to have a significant amount of multimedia in a game, so it did things like make you watch your avatar walk excruciatingly slowly from the car to the edge of the screen everytime you wanted to go anywhere, and you had to listen to a bunch of interminable bad acting.

I wouldn't know about Gabriel Knight III because I didn't bother to play it, or other Sierra games, after getting burnt by their earlier CD-ROM era games.

</comment><comment><USER35> Check out AGDinteractive : <http://www.agdinteractive.com/> They remade the KQuests and QFG2 and are building brand new adventure games.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's not entirely dead. I grew up with adventure games and the best one I've played to date was actually a platformer. Highly recommend Psychonauts to anyone mourning the death of the genre.

<comment><USER9> Psychonauts is a great game, but it wouldn't be categorized in the adventure genre - at least not in the vein this article is referring to (old school point and click puzzle solving).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Superbrothers are trying a fresh approach to adventure games with Sword & Sworcery EP: <http://www.swordandsworcery.com/>

</comment><comment><USER38> It's ironic to see this article just days after the release of Gemini Rue, which is an outstanding adventure game. But I agree with the general message.

</comment><comment><USER39> I hate puzzle games, personally. Diddle the widget so that the frobulent gibbers the foomatic - extend the prior implication chain a few levels - <USER2> gets more than a little old.

I really enjoyed an interactive text-based fiction game recently. But that palled - I realized I could be coding and being productive. >..

</comment><comment><USER40> 11 years old and still relevant.

As commercially available products, they're definitely not dead. Studios keep churning out point-and-click adventure games, just check out www.jayisgames.com, the Nintendo DS, and the smart phone app stores.

However, innovation within the genre is on life support and in critical condition, but it has been like that since long before that article was published.

They still largely depend on puzzles with only a single correct solution, even if you have items in plain view on the screen that in reality would solve the problem (this is the "dream logic" mentioned in the linked article). They also rely on pixel hunting. Nothing has really changed.

</comment><comment><USER41> There are some good flash adventure games. "Alice is Dead", "Hansel and Gretel" to name two.

</comment><comment><USER42> Sanitarium was weird, frustrating, surreal, fascinating. I loved when the boss tossed you out of the barn with a complimentary wrench, just what you needed to wire the tractor battery to the gas drum or whatever, and blow up the barn.

</comment><comment> DanI-S Perhaps they'll be back soon. Point and click would work well on the iPad...

<comment><USER19> Definitely, RPGs and adventure games work well with touch screen devices that lack traditional game inputs (game controllers, keyboards), especially compared to action or platform type games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> FMV killed adventure games

</comment><comment><USER43> The article's over ten years old, and since then there's been a sorta revival of the genre. There are all the Telltale games, the Monkey Island remakes, and more recently the brilliant Machinarium. Digital distribution services like Steam have helped, of course.

<comment><USER44> Problem is that games like Machinarium are still just "hunt the live pixel". You have to hope you get close enough to the active object in order to notice it/grab it/operate it. On a larger resolution, this can be quite maddening.

Game Designers: How about making the useable objects more noticeable (like a glimmer or something). Also having the puzzles make sense goes a long way.

<comment><USER45> I think it was in Simon the Sorcerer: a hotkey that highlighted all clickable objects.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, that's the route we took with Scarlett on the iPhone as well — there's just an icon you can touch to highlight everything of interest. I'm not sure why it hasn't been a standard feature of the genre; maybe some people enjoy pixel-hunting?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Review my startup: circcle.com - <AUTHOR>

Circcle.com is dedicated to news videos. We just launched the new UI last night, and would love to have your comments and feedback. Thanks for the help. <comment><USER2> I really like the "Stories" tab - because it groups everything into quite discrete topics. Is this going to be extended to the broader categories? Eg. Within Technology each video is grouped based on their topic, for example "Google".

</comment><comment><USER3> It doesn't load on my Windows Phone 8, just so you know.</comment>


Multi-user VR experiences with A-Frame (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/multi-user-experiences-with-a-frame/ <comment><USER2> I think beyond even VR, just having this standard markup language for building 3D scenes is amazing. My biggest gripe over modern game engines is the lack of a programmatic means for building scenes. You always end up with massive proprietary binary "scene" files that are a pain to put in VCS.

<comment><USER3> This is a necessary evil unfortunately. When loading 3D content from disk, every cycle counts. Therefore storing and parsing this content in plain text is just too inefficient. A number of 3D scenes are quite large in size as well, and benefit highly from compression.

<comment> 52-6F-62 This is admittedly a naive question— but wouldn't something between the two work well? (A-Frame is arguably akin to that already)

A 3d markup language that can be compiled? At least for prototyping, it might be useful, no?

Does that exist? Or is it a problem that's already been tossed around and buried?

<comment><USER4> This exists, it's very common to have a human readable format for development and storage in version control that gets converted to a binary format for release. What doesn't really exist is a common inter-engine format.

<comment><USER5> How about glTF? It's a JSON based scene description which uses inline data or references to external binary files, with an option for a single binary "glb" data file.

[https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF)

[https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/tree/master/specificati...](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/tree/master/specification/2.0#glb- file-format-specification)

<comment><USER4> glTF is already gaining some traction as a model format. But it's scene support is more what you'd see for modelling software than what you'd have for a game engine where the scene description is more about the game entities and the data glTF provides is usually abstracted out.

glTF is a great idea for providing a sensible interchange format for models though. Even this data usually gets converted into a custom binary format for the runtime engine to consume depending on use. Although as you note glTF has its own binary format and I understand it's going to be improved with support for compression like Basis so perhaps that will reduce the need for custom formats for all but the most optimised cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Time is a flat circle. I remember being obsessed with VRML in 1997 and specifically there was a site called CyberTown which you could chat in a 3d world.

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for posting! networked-aframe is great, can't wait for it to continue to improve.

We're the creators and maintainers of A-Frame and just went through the last YC batch as Supermedium ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16318151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16318151)). Let us know if you have any questions!

</comment><comment><USER8> > Compatibility > The sharedspace component requires a browser with WebRTC > support which means any recent version of the most popular mobile and > desktop browsers.

Just a cautionary note... let's see, how to put this fairly...

When Mozilla announced the general availability of WebVR, they meant _on Windows_. Around that time, WebVR on Linux had achieved a milestone... of sometimes crashing immediately after starting, instead of always crashing before. It's been described as 'caring so little about Mac and Linux, that even the awareness of non-support has been limited'.

And even on Windows, Mozilla described WebVR as ready for use something like a year ago. And yet there's a thread here today, about trying A-Frame on Firefox, and being made sick, and this being a known problem.

So least at some points in the past, Mozilla's blog posts about WebVR's usability, have been... aspirational. Motivational. And not full and fair disclosure.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome! Somebody just a few months ago show us how they built a WebRTC multiplayer VR A-frame game.

The got the 3D world to permanently persist too, demo here: [https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/962013903004684288](https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/962013903004684288)

Ready Player One's "Oasis" seems to already be real!

<comment><USER7> Thanks! We created A-Frame and are now also building Supermedium (YC W18), a fully VR browser. If you're interested in RPO, we build an OASIS in a week (with A-Frame) featured on Supermedium: [https://supermedium.com/blog/oasis](https://supermedium.com/blog/oasis)

People hunt for an egg among hundreds of generated worlds to receive a prize and access to the code ("take control of the OASIS"). Though someone found it yesterday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know how a-frame compares to OpenCroquet/Cobalt/Qwak/etc. ?

The latter seems to be way more developed, with P2P networking, "3D hyperlinks", integration with XMPP/VNC/etc., integrated IDE for live-editing, etc. Those were all in Smalltalk rather than JS, but there are also JS ports/successors like Virtual World Framework, 3dicc, etc.

<comment><USER7> A-Frame's just a general ECS-based JS/VR framework on top of three.js with access to any Web API. It's extensible and modular so P2P networking (or Websockets or Firebase) have been done as community components. The community is active, and it mirrors web development (versus like trying to do a Unity in the browser).

3D "hyperlinks" have been done, they can take whatever shape or interaction you want (e.g., portals [https://supermedium.com/blog/oasis](https://supermedium.com/blog/oasis)), just have some event trigger a window.location change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just last night I tried using A-Frame with a Vive but was disappointed by the performance. The framerate is fine but there seems to be a tiny lag, between the time when the headset position changes until the worldspace camera is updated. Made me feel a little nauseous.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps try narrowing the optical field of view? You might test by holding the HMD away from your face. Or by unlocking the Vive side disks and adjusting the display outward. Or by using a thicker pad. A comfort-mode-like restriction of peripheral vision.

If it's your own page, you might try putting the Vive camera video in background. Doing passthrough AR, I regularly used Vive (and now WMR) down around 30 fps. But I displayed the browser directly in the HMD. So no WebVR display latency. And I don't do lens correction (old laptop with integrated graphics), which has a bit of a "comfort mode" effect. And no predictive tracking, so the rendered graphics have lag, but no judder. And displayed directly, it was easy.[1] So YMMV.

Depending on your level of desperation, there's my largely-abandoned WebVR- like stack for Vive on linux. But I didn't get around to supporting A-Frame, just Three.js. But by keeping it simple, some things the complex native WebVR stacks have struggled with these last 2 years on Windows, were much easier.

[1] [https://cdn.rawgit.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt- stack/master...](https://cdn.rawgit.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt- stack/master/packages/ew-vive-camera-video/examples/raw.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For small values of "Reality".

There are many far better multi-user VR experiences. Sansar. SineSpace. High Fidelity. Even Second Life. It's easy to do the simple demo, and really hard to do a full large virtual world.

<comment><USER7> Definitely multi-user tooling is still early, and the blog post was meant as a simple demo, but rapidly improving. At least "bunch of people in a world" is extremely feasible (syncing heads/hands). The community is still growing too. But I think there'll be more unique multiuser experiences coming from the Web versus Second Life recreations owned by companies.

The actual world creation part isn't too bad. We built hundreds of generated interlinked worlds and dropped in multiuser in a week ([https://supermedium.com/blog/oasis](https://supermedium.com/blog/oasis)). But still improving.

Are you an active user in those applications? What's your favorite part about them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> VR social experiences are by far the best ones.

Once eye tracking is implemented, social experiences will take on a new level.

<comment><USER14> Eye tracking is already there.

Tobii showed vives retrofitted with eye trackers, and snapdragon 845 vr devkits with integrated trackers.

I tried both and it works really well.

I'm not so sure that it will completely solve the social interaction problem though. I've tried the demo where you can see your avatar in the mirror and observe the eyes move, but there was still something off about it. Maybe it was just the art style, but I suspect that eyeball movements are not the only part of equation - there's a lot of very mobile musculature around the eyes that tends to change the shape of the eye as people make expressions with their faces - and that part was not there in the demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone have any thoughts on JanusVR (which also offers multi-user VR web experiences)?

<comment><USER16> VRchat is basically the same thing but better. Janus has its own kind of markup language which is pretty cool but nobody has done anything huge with it yet. If it was developed to fill in where VRchat doesn't, it may be better. the decentralized nature is pretty nice.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A website that converts any IPFS file to HLS and reups it to IPFS - <AUTHOR> https://ipfs-converter.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi this is Tim. I made this website. It's currently running on a $5 droplet on DigitalOcean so conversions will take a while. I'm testing out the waters here on HN to see if there's anyone interested in it. Please let me know if you have any questions regarding it.

Github: [https://github.com/TimDaub/ipfs-hls- converter](https://github.com/TimDaub/ipfs-hls-converter)

Edit: I haven't chosen I license for this yet, sorry.

<comment><USER2> Why are you transcoding all the time? You could probably save your little droplet a bit of heartache by using ffprobe to check if the video is already h264 (or h265)+aac and just do -c copy in that case.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great suggestion. I'll add that to my list of todos!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Question from an IPFS noob:

When I run the demo, the video plays as expected. However, I wanted to check the network tab to see what it's doing under the hood.

Based on the description, I expected to see a bunch of HTTP GET requests to ipfs.io, fetching the different segments of the movie. However, instead, I see a varying number of websocket connections to ipfs.team, soundclart.com and libp2p.io.

Could someone explain what is going on here? Is this just another IPFS-to-web proxy (based on websockets instead of http) or is this already part of the HLS streaming mechanism?

<comment><USER4> The ipfs.js library requests the files through WebSocket, and those various domains you see are different IPFS gateways. (for redundancy/latency I'd assume)

<comment><USER3> Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the utility of this? The site is down and github doesn't really explain why you would do this.

<comment><USER6> IPFS is a distributed p2p filesystem. The idea, I believe, is that you can put your big media files on it, to share bandwidth and (iiuc) reduce censorship risks; but it's better to do it with a stream-friendly codec, so this site will turn your file into that first.

<comment><USER7> The acronym is for Inter-Planetary File System, with the main idea being getting a file from the closest person who already has it, so you don't have to request it from a central server that is potentially _very_ far away.

The main benefit on earth, as far as I understand, is reducing bandwidth required of a single person to share media by distributing hosting, similarly to torrents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this one of the first examples of an IPFS-based API? This is very cool.

I like that you can take something that is effectively on your disk, ping some endpoint, and it will get "pulled" by the service as a peer and process it.

Next step could be to make the "ping" step as an IPFS pubsub thing.

<comment><USER9> No, I don't think it's the first example. [https://www.eternum.io/](https://www.eternum.io/) was one that was before, but I'm sure there are others.

We keep a list of some applications and other things over here too: [https://awesome.ipfs.io/](https://awesome.ipfs.io/)

<comment><USER8> "One of" :)

I'd argue eternum is not quite at the same level since it just takes an IPFS object as an input (but no IPFS output). Op made a thing that takes an IPFS object as an input and produces a different IPFS object as an output.

There are certainly many IPFS-based _apps_.

<comment><USER10> I would agree with this, Eternum isn't so much an IPFS-based API as an API for helping with IPFS pinning.

I'd say IPFessay ([https://gitlab.com/stavros/IPFessay](https://gitlab.com/stavros/IPFessay)) is much closer to an IPFS-based API, since it can run entirely on IPFS with no outside servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing that doesn't make sense to me is that you say any file but then seem to be doing video-specific stuff to it. So did you mean to say any _video_ file?

Also, what is HLS?

<comment><USER12> HLS is HTTP Live Streaming, an open, pure-http approach to live streaming video with support for adaptive bitrate delivery. first popularized on iOS circa 2008 as an alternative to Flash and other proprietary streaming systems.

<comment><USER13> He's referring to the title which says it "converts _any_ IPFS file".

<comment><USER14> The OP also asked 'Also, what is HLS?'

<comment><USER13> Oh, completely missed that. My apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool project! Love IPFS usage :)

</comment><comment><USER16> So this is going into the land of RPC, have anyone work together on the load this would demand on a bigger scale than one man's $5 box.

Already a seed of thought in place for this: [https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/116](https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/116)

</comment><comment><USER17> Does this require resources on your server? (Apologies because I don't understand what this is.) What's to stop me from uploading 10TB of video files and using all your resources?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it requires resources. I currently run FFMPEG for every video I get.

Currently nothing is stopping you from uploading a 10TB video except that maybe my DigitalOcean droplet would run out of space and crash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why HLS rather than DASH? Is there some way that HLS is a better fit for IPFS? Or is HLS easier to use, or more well supported? (Doesn't YouTube use DASH?)

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand in which situation I should be using that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I built this mainly because I was feeling the pain while implementing a website for a customer that is allowing their users to upload and stream files in the browser.

As the file upload should accept any kind of input, but the streaming only allows for certain files to be played back in the browser I researched different codecs that are available on the web for streaming and came across: [https://github.com/ipfs/js- ipfs/tree/master/examples/browser...](https://github.com/ipfs/js- ipfs/tree/master/examples/browser-video-streaming)

I though, why not make this a SaaS.

<comment><USER19> So your customer is using IPFS on his site? How do you manage that? Do you run the IPFS node for him and put the uploaded videos on your node?

Is your SaaS fetching from IPFS, then reuploading because your customer's visitors upload using js-ipfs, then you fetch from your node, totally unrelated to the website's backend?

Just wondering.

<comment><AUTHOR> My customer is using ipfs-api-js on their website and it uploads to an ipfs node (in our case Infura). In the future we might run a node if the customer requires it. For now Infura is very convenient.

My Saas is fetching from IPFS, then reuploading so that the upload and conversion of the file both could potentially be triggered on the client side. Many Dapp architectures I've seen so far have no backend component.

<comment><USER19> Oh, so Infura let's you pin stuff for free? How does that work?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know Infura let's you pin for free yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Awesome work, I'd try to check it out once it's up again.

</comment><comment><USER21> Blank page with JS disabled.</comment>


A failed technical interview with a Fortune500 company - <AUTHOR> https://vncz.js.org/fortune500-interview/ <comment><USER2> If you get rejected for a code sample don't take it too hard. You're probably being graded by an engineer who views this part of their job as a distraction and tries to get it done as fast as possible. Sometimes code will fail to run due to some issue on their machine vs yours. Sometimes you'll hit their hobby- horse issue and be rejected for trivial reasons... Not that any of this is malicious. Grading the code sample is a one-way code review for a piece of code put together on the spur of the moment, with a tight deadline and no prior context. How many times have you received feedback on a PR that you've disagreed with? That disagreement gets resolved (or not) via discussion. But for a code sample there's no discussion, and everyone is trying to set the bar high, so one "slip up" is sufficient to reject the candidate.

Sometimes I read rejection comments and realize I would never pass the interview process at my own company, at least with certain individuals. It's depressing but that's just the way things are.

</comment><comment><USER3> I totally agree</comment>


Google, Facebook, Twitter halt govt data requests after Hong Kong security law - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/6/21314900/google-facebook-twitter-hong-kong-government-data-china <comment><USER2> So had they been complying with govt data requests from Hong Kong up until 5 days ago? I have no idea what China's policies on ex post facto laws are but does this mean there are political dissenters in Hong Kong who will likely be punished for this new security law based on info given to them from these companies just 2 weeks ago?

Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely grateful these companies are taking this stand. But I'm so frustrated that it's always a reactive measure. Would they have still done this if the law hadn't gotten this much international attention? Are these companies actually doing this because it's the right thing to do, or because they would suffer a PR storm if they didn't? I wish these companies would have been more proactive about doing something to support the people of Hong Kong because this is literally the first news I think I've seen, in the entire 1.5 years of the ongoing protests, where a major US company actually did something to help them.

<comment><USER3> Most of the major U.S. tech companies that handle user data provide transparency reports that include aggregate statistics on the number of user information requests they receive and respond to, per-country:

\- [https://transparencyreport.google.com/user- data/overview](https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview)

\- [https://transparency.facebook.com/government-data- requests](https://transparency.facebook.com/government-data-requests)

\- [https://transparency.twitter.com/en/information- requests.htm...](https://transparency.twitter.com/en/information- requests.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The same move was made by Telegram: [https://hongkongfp.com/2020/07/05/exclusive-telegram-to- temp...](https://hongkongfp.com/2020/07/05/exclusive-telegram-to-temporarily- refuse-data-requests-from-hong-kong-courts-amid-security-law-terrorism-row/)</comment>


Claim of Superconductivity Above 0C - <AUTHOR> http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/claim-of-superconductivity-above-0.html

<comment><USER3> As a lapsed superconductivity physicist, I hate to burst the bubble. In the community there has been a long-standing joke about USOs, Unidentified Superconducting Objects, and it is well known that just because you see "Signs of Superconductivity" does not prove that something is superconducting.

There are really three questions at hand: 1> Does the sample show the Meissner effect, 2> Does it show zero resistance, and 3> Is it stable under addition of impurities. It turns out that for most ceramic compounds, even if 1 is true, 2 and 3 are often not true. For example, the Cuprates (the first to cross the 77K mark) actually have a higher resistance close to the critical temperature than copper. Point 3 is especially damning as sensitivity to impurities also means you can't draw these things into wires (certainly not wires you can bend) as the very act of bending may introduce defects that change local concentration of ingredients and hurt the superconductivity.

So the burden of proof remains very high, and the small blurb is very underwhelming.

<comment><USER4> I have no idea why you are getting upvoted. You're not bursting any bubble, you're just parading your cynicism and knowledge of a specialized field before a technical audience. The post <http://www.superconductors.org/276K.htm> contains a whole bunch of data which may answer your 3 points. How about you go through it, or email the author who has "released [the details] into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research" and get back to us? You ask, "Does the sample show the Meissner effect" and I ask you does the information provided supply you with the answer? In which case you should write, "the published research information does not provide any information regarding the Meissner effect" because otherwise it sounds like you didn't even look closely at the article. And 10 out of 10 for not explaining what the Meissner effect is by the way. The top graph on the linked to page has a portion of the plotted function circled and labelled Meissner transition, is this what you mean? From Wiki P: "The Meissner effect is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state. Walther Meissner and Robert Ochsenfeld discovered the phenomenon in 1933 by measuring the magnetic field distribution outside superconducting tin and lead samples."

Is (Tl4Pb)Ba2MgCu8O13+ a ceramic compound? If not, why mention them? They are claiming superconductivity, so this implies zero resistance doesn't it? We can worry about impurities when we make enough of the stuff to extrude and bend it.

<comment><USER5> I for one am grateful he commented on this at all.

He has professional experience in this field, and his hunches are worth a thousand completely uninformed responses such as yours.

If you want him to dig through data, email the author, and look up stuff on Wikipedia for you, then how about you _pay him_ before indignantly demanding that he do it?

After receiving backbiting chastisements from the popcorn gallery, I wouldn't be surprised if he refrained from commenting at all next time some similar announcement in his field of expertise came up.

That would be a pity, as his expertise, insight, and any time he cares to spend explaining his field to us are certainly valued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I want to believe this so bad. I'm just ... leery of one-man research being published on a blog.

<comment><USER6> Then, too, I also badly want to believe in the concept of one-man research published on a blog.

<comment><USER7> Sorry to burst your bubble, but I have to ask: why?

I believe a great deal in the capability of individuals to accomplish great things, but I don't care how ingenious the methods, how confident the claims, how insightful the theory... I want to see science as a group activity.

Because no matter how good you are, you need replication and criticism, and constant skeptical feedback. I'm not saying it's impossible to get that by yourself, but I certainly don't believe in it so much.

<comment><USER6> Science as a whole can only be a group activity, of course - <USER2> replication of findings, it isn't really science (just _mad_ science).

But the peer review process as it stands necessarily entails a certain barrier to entry. While we all would like to believe that every deserving idea gets peer review, in practice, most people don't have the time to bother with a submitted paper unless it's coming from an institution they've more or less heard of. How could it be otherwise? There are huge numbers of crackpots out there, and institutional affiliation is an efficient way of filtering them out.

My wife wants to do theoretical physics research (she's qualified: she has a doctorate in theoretical physics) but unless she's affiliated with an institution, it's unlikely she'll get anything published, or so she says. The problem is that unless you're a rock star, affiliation with an institution entails teaching, which in turn translates into all-out effort for roughly 22 hours a day by my own observations of the past semester. The resulting Catch-22 is that my wife can't reasonably do research at all, and that's illogical; she needs no resources but time and access to books and preprints, which she has at home.

So I'd like to see some research done using these new-fangled informational access tools we have now - research that is both sound and eventually makes its way into traditional peer review simply on the basis of its soundness, and not because the institutional affiliation of the researcher makes it plausible. This is one more thing that I think the Internet can do for us, and I'd like to see it happen.

Of course, the romantic in me just likes the idea of the lone mad scientist in his lair discovering room-temperature superconductivity, because _that is the twenty-first century I signed up for_. Today room-temperature superconductivity, tomorrow super-intelligent lab rats and cheap immortality. It's all good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is momentous news, if it's reproducible... at 277K, we're 6-12 degrees away from the ground temperature ~10ft below almost anywhere in the world ( [http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/geothermal_basics.htm...](http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/geothermal_basics.html))

</comment><comment><USER9> This sounds pretty exciting, but I havent seen any confirmation other than blog posts. Without a paper or technical-report, I remain skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER10> Out of curiosity is "superconductivity" an "all or nothing" phenomenon?

ie. Is there such a thing as semi-superconductive?

<comment><USER11> Yes, all or nothing.

Resistance does go lower as temperature drops, but when you hit the transition temperature it suddenly drops to zero.

There are other unusual things that happen too, and only with superconductors.

One of the main ones is that Meissner effect they talked about - that's the exclusion of magnetic fields from inside the superconductor, and regular conductors don't do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "This discovery is being released into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research. "

Think of the thousands (millions?) of useless patents that are created for no other purpose than to extract monetary gain, at the cost of slowing down economic and technological growth, and read through the details of this detailed process that has been released for all to improve on.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm somewhat ignorant of superconductors. I know that it's a material that has zero electrical resistance, so a current flowing along a loop of superconductive material will flow forever, or something like that. But what are the implications of finding a superconductive material over 0C, other than it's really cool to play with?

<comment><USER14> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductor#Applications>

No offense intended but it definitely is a more complete list than what I could come up with off the top of my head. There's a wide variety of very practical applications, if a practical one can be found.

It should also be noted that while "room temperature" is the holy grail, there's a gradient of practicality that ranges along the necessary refrigeration technology. Even a superconductor that only require conventional refrigeration (ie, no liquid nitrogen or helium involved) could be put to good use, if it can be made practical in all necessary ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'll believe it when it's peer reviewed and reproduced.

<comment><USER16> It has been reproduced and journallized by Sharif University in Iran.

It looks legit, but his spec sheet does indicate that there are problems with commercialisation. <http://www.superconductors.org/276K.htm> indicates how to reproduce and what results to expect. A regular freezer can sustain -5C to 5C. An ammonia freezer can go as low as -27C, so 3C is easy to hold.

And the fact that he has been known for good results in the past shows, at least to me that this is the real thing. But of course, always the skeptic in these kinds of claims. At least it's not cold fusion, yet ;)

<comment><USER17> > It has been reproduced and journallized by Sharif University in Iran.

I see. Well I'll just wait for additional confirmation from the Great Leader's University of North Korea.

<comment><USER18> The chair of Electrical Engineering Department of Stanford University has announced that: "Without a doubt the finest university in the world preparing undergraduate Electrical engineers is Sharif University of Technology in Tehran" -[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharif_University_of_Technology...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharif_University_of_Technology#International_recognition)

<comment><USER5> That's interesting, but what does it have to do with world-class physics research?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I never understood why a vacuum isn't considered a superconductor. Surely there's nothing to resist the motion of an electron in a vacuum. Would anyone be able to explain that to me?

<comment><USER20> A vacuum isn't even a conductor, so it can't be a superconductor. Sure, the electors are unimpeded, but you have to boil them off something to get them into the vacuum. Conductors have a sea of electrons that moves very easily along the material. Which brings up a second point: once in the vacuum, the electrons travel in a straight line (except in the presence of electric fields). In a conductor, they follow the surface, which often bends.

Furthermore, a super-conductor excludes magnetic fields; vacuums do not exclude magnetic fields (otherwise Earth wouldn't have the Van Allen Belts).</comment></comment>


AI and Deep learning resources (FREE) - <AUTHOR> http://popsnip.com/topic/982/ <comment><AUTHOR> If anybody has any resources to add to this list, please do or post your links in the comments. I just added Ian Goodfellows link to their html book. I would like to have a solid list of deep learning resources. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Wow, HN can't get enough of AI/ML lately! Here's some more links:

[http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/)

[http://deeplearning.net/](http://deeplearning.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I added them.</comment></comment></comment>


'Collapse OS' Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywaqbg/collapse-os-is-an-open-source-operating-system-for-the-post-apocalypse <comment><USER2> > Collapse OS on a Z80 CPU

I think several cockroaches could have come up with a better decision to choose a CPU and OS that will survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

IBM ThinkPad running GNU/Hurd.

</comment><comment><USER3> So the supply chain collapses before 2030...that means that everything post-Z80 vanishes in a puff of smoke? Why stop there, there are still (small- ish) warehouses full of vacuum tubes - we need schematics and software for computers built out of them.

<comment><USER4> The argument was a silly one - the z80 doesn't have a lot of transistors and post apocalypse we could theoretically make them again faster than modern computers.

Also this project isn't terribly ambitious in what it considers a usable system either. Cp/m is almost a better choice</comment></comment>


The Consciousness Deniers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/ <comment><USER2> > to reduce consciousness to behavior and dispositions to behavior is to > eliminate it. To say that consciousness is really nothing more than > (dispositions to) behavior is to say that it doesn't exist

I beg to differ. Consciousness is a vague, "suitcase word". It is close to intuition, but resists being put into words or being explained in a scientific framework. But what is concrete and observable is behaviour, environment and reward signals. They are the basis of the constant environment-adaptation (homeostasis) that we call consciousness.

I would not deny consciousness, just put it aside as a vague concept and replace it with Reinforcement learning. RL has had great results in AI recently (AlphaGo) and can explain everything including qualia. In my view, qualia is the evaluation of the current state with regard to future rewards (how good a state is for the agent). Qualia is necessary in order to select appropriate actions depending on the situation. It's not just a "what it feels like" first person thing.

My critique to those who support the views of this article is that the concepts of "qualia" and "consciousness" are stuck and lead to no progress. It has been 2000 years since philosophy has been grappling with this problem using introspection and pure thinking. We need to go back to the data and observe environment, actions, values and rewards. These concepts are much better, they are concrete and implementable in software. They are much better intuition pumps that explain human, animal and AI behaviour. I think trying to create a separation between behaviour and consciousness is a wrong path to take.

RL puts much more emphasis on the role of the environment in the development of concepts and intelligence. The environment is often overlooked by philosophers who look for neural correlates of consciousness in the brain. In fact the brain is a distillation of the environment, a model that depends a lot on the input data it learns from. Consciousness cannot be understood outside of its environment, it makes no sense outside, it's always consciousness of something, not consciousness in itself. In the end, it's all a game of life and death, a game of self replication and competition played by consciousness, the genes and the memes.

What philosophers need, in my opinion, is to take a look at RL, deep learning, game theory and complexity theory. They explain how everything comes together in a more rigorous and parsimonious way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nonscientific philosophers should probably stay out of the business of neuroscience.</comment>


What's the size threshold for inline vs. external css and js? - <AUTHOR> http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/inline-vs-separate-file <comment><USER2> Inline Javascript should just be for initialising objects. And inline CSS only if a element's style is never going to be used anywhere else, like in blog posts.</comment>


The Funded's Adeo Ressi Arrested After Virgin America Flight Incident - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/03/the-fundeds-adeo-ressi-arrested-after-virgin-america-incident/ <comment><USER3> The problem, as I see it, is that flying has become an utter evil to be avoided at all costs unless absolutely necessary. It used to be that flying somewhere was a trip in and of itself. Now it is a nightmare. Now, everything from pre-boarding security (which is an absolute joke) to in flight (non)service to hoping that your luggage makes it to your destination at the same time you do to being cavity searched by customs upon arrival is and everything in between is an absolute horror show.

Truth is that there are no good airlines. Just functional airlines. At this point I am just thankful to arrive at my destination in one piece.

Frankly, I don't know why foreigners still come to America. If I showed up at JFk and got the third degree from some rude lackey on a power trip then got fingerprinted along with my wife and child I would turn around and never come back. (I know, separate issues but I'm venting.)

<comment><USER4> Why is pre-boarding security an absolute joke? The phrase "security theater" gets thrown around a lot, but I have not heard well articulated arguments as to why current security procedures are ineffective, and more importantly have not heard _constructive_ suggestions on how to improve pre-boarding security.

How would you design security procedures? Which procedures out of the ones that are used currently are ineffective and why? Which ones are effective and why? Which ones should we add that aren't being used currently? Will they reduce average pre-boarding time per customer? Increase it? How will that affect overall air traffic and scheduling? Will they improve safety? Reduce safety? How do you go about quantifying that? What standards are you using? How do you propose to train the security personnel in the new procedures? How much will it cost? Is there a cost/benefit analysis? Is it a qualitative matter where cost benefit analysis does not apply and it's a question of ideology? In that case, are there other ideological issues with the current system of government we should rather spend our time and resources on fixing?

With all due respect, it seems that every time I see people make an argument about airport security online, they blow the inconvenience completely out of proportion, make hand-wavy arguments that appear appealing on the surface but have absolutely no substance, and reduce a very complex problem to what does not appear to be a viable solution even at the slightest scrutiny. It's easy to criticize a working system someone has built. It's much harder to design a better one that can be reasonably implemented in practice.

<comment><USER5> Well, the two procedures that get my goat are: (1) everybody take off your shoes because one guy tried to blow up his shoe ten years ago; (2) the asinine rules around liquids and gels because some nutcases in the UK were chattering about JITting themselves some explosives but never actually got close to figuring out how. Both of these rules seem premised on the idea that terrorists are clever enough to come up with _those_ diabolical schemes, but too stupid to concoct any _new_ ones, so we can just plug yesterday's holes. Since that's obviously dumb, who are the rules really designed for? Who else but the general public? They (we) are the ones who heard about those plots and in whose minds the images stuck. In other words: security theater. Note also that the most recent such dude tried to blow up his underwear, yet no rules involving underwear have been promulgated. Why the inconsistency? Public sensibility: we're willing to tolerate our shoes being inspected but not our panties. It's difficult otherwise to explain why the security repertoire should be organized around something terrorists did 10 years ago rather than what they did 6 months ago.

Someone (Schneier?) said that two things have contributed to genuine security post-9/11: locked cockpits and passenger alertness. I've heard a number of airline industry people say the same thing, e.g. that pilot guy who writes for Slate. This makes sense to me. But what do I know? I'm just a guy who stands in the line fuming at the stupidity of it all, reminding myself to breathe deeply and not say anything sarcastic lest I get hauled off to the back room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This headline seems rather prejudicial to Ressi in light of what he says was the story, and in light of the fact that he was interrogated for an hour, not arrested - there's a huge difference. "Arrested" means Ressi did something terrible enough to get booked, and there will be corresponding inferences about what happened on the flight. Ressi was "detained", not arrested.

<comment><USER7> Michael Arrington: _That's not really how things work._

See, an unsensational headline of "First-Class Emailer Challenges Grumpy Flight Attendant In-Flight" wouldn't generate any clicks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it unreasonable to conclude if he had just closed his laptop the incident would have never happened? Landing is a very stressful time for the flight staff. It's really not the best time to do the "just a second" routine which inevitably turns into 1-2 minutes or more. Maybe the flight attendant overreacted but I feel like we're missing some basic human courtesy here. We shouldn't be making someone's job harder and more stressful at the worst time and then act surprised when they get mad. I tend to side with the figure of authority in those situations. You know in the flight attendant's mind they're playing out the scenario of coming back 1-2 minutes later and asking again just to be told "one more second" again knowing if they fail to do their job they might get into trouble. Maybe they're not too tech savvy and truly believe these devices pose some real safety risk. They're on edge anticipating the passenger making an ugly scene. In this case there was a follow-up incident which probably came across to the flight attendant as baiting. In the end it was resolved without any real harm?

<comment><USER9> There are other ways to reprimand someone. Do we really need to arrest someone for "not closing their laptop quick enough"? Should we start arresting people who drive 5mph over the speed limit? Seems like when we're in the air, there are certain flight attendants that lose all their common sense. I have a feeling this stuff never happened before the "security theater" created from 9/11.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A minor linguistic point, but, the use of "reached out to" in this and similar articles really bugs me somehow. Why say that TechCrunch "reached out to Virgin America for their position" when what actually happened would be better described as: "TechCrunch asked Virgin America for their position"? There was no touchy-feeling "reaching out" going on; it was closer to a corporate request for a position statement from one company to another, whatever spin you want to try to put on it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there any actual reason to turn off electronic equipment during takeoff/landing, or is it just because of government policy based on FUD?

<comment><USER8> It's hard to predict what a malfunctioning radio might do. Maybe you could build a device to DoS specific flight control frequencies? Aren't the transmitters/receivers inside the plane? If the external antenna is picking up -80dB and you're blasting out 100dB 20ft away from the reciever who knows? There are probably other precautions to stop this but aviation safety employs a lot of redundancy.

<comment><USER12> To be honest although, they don't go around meters to detect radio transmitting devices. There are tons of people who forget to turn off the cell phone inside their carry on in the over head compartment, yet that test case hasn't shown a single flight problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> He did quite a few things himself that didn't help the situation. Leaving the overhead bin open because he was in a rush is silly; it doesn't take more than 2 seconds to close. Telling the attendant to go ahead and call the cops is unnecessary, arrogant, and childish. Showing the attendant his computer turned off lifting it off the table as if he/she needed a tutorial in how to tell if your computer is powered off is also childish.

Both parties here contributed to this situation.

<comment><USER14> I would agree that the guy didn't act with the best courtesy or thoughtfulness, but it's a far cry from the behavior of the attendant calling the cops. Assuming that this description is accurate, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The CEO of Virgin America and I spoke briefly on the phone after he wrote the following email. The situation is still not resolved, but he is looking into the matter and plans to have a resolution by Tuesday evening.

We discussed that my situation was not the first incident of its kind, and I will leave it at that until the matter is resolved. For those travelers who feel that they have been mistreated by airline personnel, this incident will hopefully lead to less stressful flying experiences. - <USER2>

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

Dear Mr. Ressi—

I was sorry to hear of the incident aboard your flight to New York last night. Rest assured that I am directly involved sorting out how things went so badly as are senior members of my staff. We are currently waiting to interview the crew members that worked your flight and I would like to wait until afterward to respond to you directly. My best guess is that we should have this wrapped up in a few hours.

I would be happy to give you a call at that point if you would give me a convenient number and time. Alternatively, if you would like to discuss this before then, feel free to call me on my personal mobile at xxx-xxx-xxxx. If it goes to voicemail, I will get right back to you. I am traveling, so noise might be an issue.

Thanks

David

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is something seriously wrong with the mindset of the individual ITL - and the culture of airline staff - when someone as just-minded, good-natured and principled as Adeo is getting escorted off a plane.

The great irony is that it is Virgin supposed to be disrupting the industry.

[edit disclaimer as this got downvoted. I did Founder Institute with Adeo. He is intellectually fierce, but even when he's ripping a new one in you he's still good-natured. ]

<comment><USER16> It's probably not as one-sided as you think. Sometimes people just need to vent.

When you argue instead of listening, things tend to escalate.

<comment><USER9> Yeah well, is it really necessary to arrest someone over an argument? If there were really no laws broken, then it sounds like some distressed worker decided to go on a power trip.

Hopefully Virgin America does the right thing and fixes their social media nightmare.

<comment><USER17> He wasn't arrested. He was escorted off the plane, questioned by the police, and then let go. Arrest is taking you to the police station in a cruiser, mugshot, at least a short time in jail cell, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As I understand it, he said that he needed a few seconds to get his email out. If you can't get some sort of business leeway, what's the point in flying first class? As I understand it he's not talking about carrying on all the way through the descent, nobody's died from having a laptop on during the descent, why go first class then?

</comment><comment><USER19> I actually drive SF to Seattle (and any shorter distance; there is zero chance I'd ever fly SFO-LAX or SFO-LAS) to avoid commercial flights.

I've met Adeo many times (as a student in the Founder Institute) and I'm impressed that he kept his cool as well as he did. I'm also amused to learn just how long his name really is :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Some of the other comments here have described air travel as nightmare. I can't agree with that. Though I don't enjoy most aspects of domestic US air travel -- I do love some of it. I wouldn't call it a nightmare, that's rather extreme and lacking in perspective. Annoying and stressful at times, sure. I also find that once I can start sipping a cup of Vodka & Diet 7-Up in my plane seat, even the annoyances fade away for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> Queue the Louis CK Everything's Amazing & Nobody's Happy clip :)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

Me, I think they're just buses in the sky... except for all that economic and personal friction we pay to ride them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > I looked up, nodded and indicated that I needed a second to finish an email, > and he walked past me into coach.

That's a pretty douchey and self-ish thing to do on his part, however. I mean, there's probably a safety reason why they have that rule. You have a plane in the sky thousands of feet in the air, travelling hundreds of miles per hour, and if you're supposed to shutdown that device, you do it. Other people's lives are on the line here as well. Of course, nobody knows the details of what really happened, but when you're supposed to turn that shit off, you turn it off. Email can wait. Email can be resent or rewritten if needed. Show curtesy for fellow passengers and the law.

<comment><USER20> There is no safet issue here. His laptop was not a threat. The entire anti- electronics thing has been nonsense firm the beginning. Most of these laws are not actually laws, as they exceed the authority of the constitution.

<comment><USER21> This one's most certainly a law: FAR 91.21

<http://www.risingup.com/fars/info/part91-21-FAR.shtml>

It was written back in 1961 when the primary means of navigation was high- frequency omni-directional radio beacons, and from a technological standpoint is very likely to not be necessary. However, it is the law of the land and neither Virgin nor the flight crew is interested in sticking their necks (and certificates) out so that you can use your laptop below 10K feet.

Most air carriers have adopted a policy ref 91.21.b.5 that permits the use of approved electronic devices for the portion of the flight above 10K feet. On most flights, you'll hear a random single chime [same sound as the seatbelt chime] a few minutes after takeoff; that's the pilot letting the cabin crew know that the aircraft is climbing through 10,000 and the cabin crew will then make the annoucement that approved PEDs can be used.</comment></comment></comment>


What subdomain of IT have you found the most interesting to learn? - <AUTHOR> Where interesting is a relative term. It can mean challenging or just appealing. Looking to make use of the prolonged quarantine period in an interesting way!<p>Answers might look like: binary exploitation, programming in rust, functional programming, etc. I guess just saying "security" would be too broad... <comment><USER2> LISP and Smalltalk</comment>


Let's Encrypt Milestone: 100M Certificates Issued - <AUTHOR> https://letsencrypt.org/2017/06/28/hundred-million-certs.html <comment><USER2> I love "Let's Encrypt"!!!

I've been struggling to get my CouchDB to use the cert for a domain name I setup but I've not went to the support forum for help on it yet, I'm trying to learn with what's out there and get as far as I can before I do that.

But all my other domains are set up and it was easy peasy to do, saved me some cash, and after hearing about Comodo I felt pretty good about making the switch.</comment>


Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos used to be just like you - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/12/6/16728982/daniel-gross-y-combinator-cue-apple-ai-machine-learning-kara-swisher-casey-newton-decode-podcast <comment><USER2> I didn't go to Wharton or Princeton for undergrad.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you just want to startup, then apply YC.</comment></comment>


AMD drops Mantle - <AUTHOR> http://community.amd.com/community/amd-blogs/amd-gaming/blog/2015/03/02/on-apis-and-the-future-of-mantle

<comment><USER2> This sounds more like "Mantle 1.0 will have a lot in common with DX12 and glNext, but expect even more from the later 1.X versions."</comment>


Areni-1 Winery - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areni-1_winery <comment><AUTHOR> While you are on it, see also the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areni-1_shoe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areni-1_shoe)</comment>


Show HN: Search Engine ranks the web by social shares - <AUTHOR> http://theenginuity.com

<comment><USER2> Very cool.</comment>


Review my startup (a student collaboration platform) - <AUTHOR> http://www.studentrevolt.com

<comment><USER2> Hi Jmathai, Best feedback about this sort of thing is often some questions.

I guess my main question for you would be: Why would people do this on Facebook when most educational institutions (Stanford included I suppose) already offer curriculum management software?

Cheers Dan

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Dan,

Thanks for the feedback. We're aware that many universities already use software like Blackboard and Moodle. They are, however, a pain to use. The systems are also disconnected from the student's normal activities. If you're friends with students on Facebook you'll see that they often try to collaborate using their own status updates.

So to answer your question: students would do this on Facebook because they already are. It's not that our service does anything better or more efficiently (though I believe it does) --- but we're deployed on platforms that give us tremendous leverage (Facebook, iPhone (coming), etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this last week in the middle of the night but have put the screencast on our home page. Hoping some of you are actually awake to provide some feedback :) -- Thanks.</comment>


Fibonacci: The man who introduced us to numbers and created modern finance - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201108124

<comment><USER2> As much as I love NPR and Science Friday, that website is tough to use. I tried poking around to see if I could find a transcript or something and then gave up when I all I could get were a dozen options to share the story. _sigh_

If anyone else has links to great stories on Fibonacci, please share them here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been reading a lot about the history of money, finance and economics. It is a topic I find interesting. All of the biographies about money mention Fibonacci.

I would recommend the following (you can get most of these books in kindle edition and most of the documentaries are online in one form or another:

Web:

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci>

* Liber Abaci, his most famous book: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Abaci>

* History of money: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money>

* More on Liber Abaci: <http://liberabaci.blogspot.com/>

* More again on Liber Abaci: [http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/software/java/fibonacci/libe...](http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/software/java/fibonacci/liber-abaci.html)

* This American Life episode on the invention of money: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/423/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/423/the-invention-of-money)

Books:

* The Ascent of Money: [http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177)

* The Origins of Value (hard to find): [http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Value-Financial-Innovations-Cr...](http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Value-Financial-Innovations-Created/dp/0195175719/)

* History of Money (I haven't read this yet, but plan to): [http://www.amazon.com/History-Money-Ancient-Times-Present/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/History-Money-Ancient-Times-Present/dp/0708317170/)

Documentaries:

* NOVA's 'The History of Money': <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/history-money.html>

* BBC's 'The Ascent of Money' series: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money>

* The Secret History of the Credit Card: this was PBS again, can't find it online but if you Google around I am sure you could find it somewhere.

There is a lot more out there - if you follow links, wikipedia, amazon recommendations and reviews etc. you will find a lot of good sources. A fascinating topic and fascinating characters involved in the creation of money (like the Rothschilds and their involvement in toppling governments and funding conflict).

Every financial instrument we use today - from bonds, stocks, notes, interest, credit, debit, trade finance instruments etc. have an interesting story around their origin.

Fibonacci bought over the Arabic number system, base 10 notation (which makes interest easier to calculate), and set formulas for conversion, standard units of weight etc. It was a bit like an early draft standard for merchant traders.

With the history, you soon realize that money is just a promissory note or a debt, and that all money is borrowed. With a wallet full of notes what you have is a promise from the US Government that the notes can be readily exchanged.

The more recent fascination with gold-backed currency seems a bit ridiculous if you understand the history and why we went into gold and then back out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of the poorest usability designs I've ever seen.</comment>


China Finds Zen: Begins Production of X86 Processors Based on AMD's IP - T-A https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-zen-x86-processor-dryhana,37417.html <comment><AUTHOR> Just a small observation. "Dhyana" in sanskrit means "meditation" or, in Chinese context "Zen".

<comment><USER2> Dhyana was Sanskrit, Chan was Chinese, Zen was Japanese I thought

<comment><AUTHOR> Zen - the word and concept originated in China. From there it spread to Japan. It's roots are in Buddhism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps legal documents need to spell out the spirit of the agreement to try to close some of these unintended loopholes.

<comment><USER4> Then you'd have the speculation about if the spirit or the mechanics of the contract are to be upheld. Also if it's a spirit then who's evaluating that?

It's a rabbit hole that leads to a world of problems that are unfamiliar to those who live with 'western' contracts. Verbal/handshake agreements might be closer to what your proposing.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. If the spirit in this case was no convoluted work arounds that would be interpreted by a reasonable person that would seem to stop this while preserving the normal use cases of license use. This convoluted ownership structure is clearly designed to circumvent and seems to to have no operational purpose. Besides, securities regulations take this principles based approach all the time.</comment></comment></comment>


Steal Customers from Your Competitors Using Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://socialsearch.io/

<comment><USER2> Doesn't using that information to make unsolicited contact violate German Law? (I ask because of this english translation: [http://www.iuscomp.org/gla/literature/heidenreich.htm#D6](http://www.iuscomp.org/gla/literature/heidenreich.htm#D6))

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very interesting point.. and thanks a lot for posting this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Relevant, steal customers using HTML: [https://github.com/bramgg/pouch](https://github.com/bramgg/pouch)

/plug</comment>


Ask HN: How to find your passion? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN, I need some life advice.
I'm a freelancing software developer who builds full stack web applications, apps and more. But something's wrong.
I'm 20yo and study computer science for 2 years now (although I'm not very committed bc of the following): It drives me mad when I visit clients e.g. web shops and see all those programmers sitting in front of their computers. They may be happy, but I can't imagine to do this. I also don't want to be a consultant working 80-hour-weeks doing legacy SAP maintenance or building yet another website to manage some documents.
I'm always seeking for opportunities to build a start-up. I've got chances to get "CTO" positions (you know what that means in early start-ups) and significant shares. But the problems weren't interesting or meaningful.
I'm into that "crazy professor" style of working i.e. solving challenging problems while being in a project for just a short amount of time (only some weeks). That would suit my style bc I despise routine. I can imagine to optimize workflows (digitalization) where I just analyze the processes, make them faster and go to the next project. I'm currently doing this for a company and it's exciting to see the direct effect of my work. - I've built several bots (e.g. solving reCAPTCHAs, simulating user interactions, nothing sketchy), but I don't know if that's a direction I want to really dive in (it's pretty simple).
I'm also interested in ML and currently learning it, but without good ideas for applications it's just another thing in the tool belt. But I don't want to do R&D, I want to use it.
So here I am, wondering if software is even the right field for me - I don't want to build compilers, websites or maintain legacy codebases. The "sexy" stuff e.g. web dev is something I can do but don't like. I can sit 3 days in a row and build applications - but I don't want to wake up in 10-15 years and ask myself: "wtf am I doing? my life can be reduced to LOC." <comment><AUTHOR> I would love to hear your practical tips on how to find your passion. I also play some instruments and want to solve challenging problems (that don't have to be technological) and I'm interested in politics, business development and psychology. There has to be something I can develop a deep passion for.

I don't want to make the mistakes that Smith talks about here: [https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_smith_why_you_will_fail_to_h...](https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_smith_why_you_will_fail_to_have_a_great_career) (tl;dr - don't find my passion)

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't know that passion is something you can find. I think you need to iterate on things you enjoy doing and over time you can find the common thread. It sounds like you don't want to get stuck in a routine so I'd recommend working for a design studio that has a track record of bringing in a variety of projects. I also recommend doing the Clifton/Gallup Strengthsfinder test as that will give you valuable insights.</comment>


The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/

<comment><USER2> Seriously, how is this getting so little points. I would upvote a thousand times if I could.

Truly interesting read about the real 'Next Big Thing'. The future is not about how someone made yet another cheap hosting or another programming language or cat website startup.

It's right here: _in the ideas_.

> just a single idea stands between us and the breakthrough

And yet, no one seems to care.

</comment><comment><USER3> Conway's Law: prov.

        The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler". The original statement was more general, "Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." This first appeared in the April 1968 issue of Datamation. Compare SNAFU principle.

        The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The name 'SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them.) There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: "If a group of N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes. Someone in the group has to be the manager."

</comment><comment><USER4> > This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical > object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by > some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time > and memory.

But here's the thing: arbitrarily-fine detail may not be good enough. So much of physics ends up being chaotic, to the point where, well, "A consequence of sensitivity to initial conditions is that if we start with only a finite amount of information about the system (as is usually the case in practice), then beyond a certain time the system will no longer be predictable." [Quick quote from Wikipedia - it explains it better than I can.] The brute-force "just simulate everything" approach only works if you can get information about the system at a deep enough level to mitigate the sensitivity of initial conditions - and if there is no such "deep enough" level...

</comment><comment><USER5> > Yet it has also been one of the most self-confident fields in prophesying > that it will soon achieve the ultimate breakthrough.

It was the journalists and futurists who were and are prophesying it. Nobody in the field said that, all said the opposite - there is no way it's gonna happen anytime soon.</comment>