Ask HN: Personal photo library recommendations? Open source, browser-based - <AUTHOR> I'd like to move away from Apples Photo.app to open-source, self-hosted, and browser-based application that may run on a NAS or Linux server.<p>There seem to be lots of alternatives out there (Nextcloud, Piwigo, ...) but I'd love to hear about recommendations and experiences. <comment><USER2> Shameless plug: I'm currently working on a solution called Photonix, though it's still very much pre-1.0 at the moment.

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

Installation is fairly simple with Docker, frontend is web-based (React), backend is Python with a sprinkling of Tensorflow. So far auto-tagging of photos by location, object detection and colour is fairly decent. UI is progressing and is useable on most devices, though quite minimal.

Please feel free to check out the demo site and the GitHub issues. I'd really appreciate feedback and help. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Will you have support for handling duplicate images? People are either super organised, or the complete opposite. When you have multiple copies for backup and then want to consolidate to a library you want to hide your messiness.

I've been struggling to find a tool that handles that handles the duplicates problem within a web interface. I've been experimenting with some approaches including perceptual hashes and was wondering if that's something you'll include?

Is there any way to use metadata from Lightroom Catalogs, or enable people tagging in your current implementation?

<comment><USER2> I definitely hear you regarding duplication. This whole project evolved from a script I wrote to do just that. There is a concept of multiple versions (files) of an image so different edits with the same metadata timestamp will show only once and you'll be able to select the preferred one. I prefer to handle things this way to start and then suggest deletions based on same hash rather than deleting up front.

I don't have any experience of Lightroom but I can have a go at reading the files if you think it's useful.

<comment><USER4> I have something that works fairly well for duplicates and automatic organization based on date. It's python, so you can try integrating it, but it's not a module, just a single file script.

[https://github.com/jonathankoren/photo- autorganize](https://github.com/jonathankoren/photo-autorganize)

<comment><USER2> Thank you. I'll definitely check it out.

<comment><USER4> Reach out if you want help

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personal plug: I'm working on PhotoStructure, after trying many, many open source photo projects (and being a committer for years of one of the most popular, "gallery.")

PhotoStructure is browser-based (using Vue), and scales to hundreds of thousands of assets over millions of files. Your library can be created on a Mac, saved on your NAS, then later opened and managed by a Linux box, seamlessly. Raw images have highlight restoration before rendering previews. Videos are auto transcoded for mobile and desktop web use. Corrupt images are detected automatically and culled. Image source sets are used to minimize network data and maximize viewing quality. XMP sidecars are imported for metadata. Importing aggressively coalesces duplicate images and videos using direct and inferred metadata, so even your downsized Google photos takeout will be deduped with your originals.

Once you've got a huge library, though, it needs a novel UX. Scroll-reverse- chron and a search bar shouldn't cut it. PhotoStructure has a couple novel and unique approaches to navigation, which you can read about here: [https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing- photostructure/](https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/)

It scales down to odroids, and up to as many CPUs as you can throw at it, and self-throttles CPU during library sync so the machine is still useable. Installation takes under a minute, and updates are automatic.

It's closed-source because it's how I want to pay for my food and clothing, but it's a corporate mandate to open source in case of business closure, which is also explained in that blog post.

I'm sending out another wave of beta testers later today, and during the beta it's free. I'm giving heavy discounts to my beta testers that share feedback.

I'd love to hear what you think.

<comment><USER6> Personally I don't like this response. The post specifically asks for Open Source software, and the top response is a closed-source service?

I am not making any judgement on the service, just that it is not an appropriate reply for what is being asked here.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I hear you.

Having written many open source libraries (my rubygems have been downloaded several million times, my node packages are close to that, and I've contributed to other libraries for over a decade), I personally will choose open source projects over closed-source because I don't want to be victimized by abandonware or corporate whims.

It seems like photo software (both closed and open source) is especially prone to dying on the vine. It's a common need, and it's easy (and fun) to write a simple script that makes thumbnails from a folder of images. I seen countless photo projects on github, but as complexity ramps up quickly, the installer script (if there is one) breaks, updates fail, there aren't any tests, and the author gets bored and moves on.

I guess I felt justified here because a) it is self-hosted, and b) I'd added my corporate mandate to open-source the codebase in case of business closure. (I don't remember a corporation doing this open-source-on-close before, do you?)

I've actually already open-sourced some of the trickier bits: [https://exiftool-vendored.js.org/](https://exiftool-vendored.js.org/) and [https://batch-cluster.js.org/](https://batch-cluster.js.org/). I expect that to continue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I created NasPics specifically for this reason. I wrote it in pure Go with no dependencies for ease of cross compilation since my NAS runs a weird old Debian based distribution of Linux on ARM. Running it is just cross compiling a binary, copying over and executing. For restart across boots, I just added a simple SystemD service file.

[https://github.com/srinathh/naspics](https://github.com/srinathh/naspics)

(edit: some data destination paths are probably hard coded since I wrote it for myself but can be easily broken out into command line options if needed)

<comment><USER8> I appreciate the "no dependencies" but it seems the client still needs NodeJS:

> It is build on React using the Create React App tool, written in Javascript > and requries a NodeJS development environment.

<comment><USER7> It's needed just to build the front end on dev machine. The front end HTML JS and resource files are embedded into the binary executable during compilation.. so i literally just copy over a binary

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to find one that incorporates the functionality that Picasa (windows desktop) circa 2000 i.e. face recognition/matching.

It was way ahead of it's time, and actually worked!

Best of all, it did everything locally... not cloud based and thus retained privacy of your personal photo collection.

<comment><USER10> Picasa was so useful, so of course Google had to kill it.

It took multiple disparate photo directories and presented everything in a timeline of folders. And because everything was local, that happened quickly, rather than waiting for your browser to get the next 100 photo results from a javascript call or whatever.

Are there any photo clients for windows that present multiple folders as a single coherent timeline? And can manage tens of thousands of pictures? I've got stuff going back to the late 1990s and would love to be able to find all those old cat pictures or whatever.

<comment><USER5> > Are there any photo clients for windows that present multiple folders as a > single coherent timeline?

PhotoStructure does this (and I believe is the only software that does robust time zone inference, as well). (I've posted elsewhere here with more details).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not specifically for photos, but I have been a user of Perkeep, a long running project from one of the golang maintainers that focuses on long term storage of one's data:

[https://perkeep.org/doc/](https://perkeep.org/doc/)

<comment><USER12> Although it's no longer actively maintained (IIRC) and some of the importers are currently broken for me (Mastodon importer can't talk to Pleroma, Pinboard has a JSON error, Twitter gives random "account not found", etc.)

Which is a shame because I really like Perkeep/Camlistore as a concept.

<comment><USER13> Could you try to troubleshoot some of the issues and open PRs? It doesn't take an army to resuscitate a project...

\-- Edit --

Actually on checking, it doesn't seem like Perkeep is at all dead. I'm seeing several updates in the last month...

<comment><USER12> I was going off [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/perkeep/Kqvh2dJVmoo](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/perkeep/Kqvh2dJVmoo)

Which seems to me fairly definite about it no longer being actively maintained. There haven't been any updates to that posted on the @perkeeporg Twitter at least.

<comment><USER13> Sounds just like their full time maintainers got busy. May well be able to find another one, or even have a few folks fill in.

I'm actually going to check out perkeep when I get a chance and see if I can't help out some.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I did exactly that a couple of months ago. After exporting my pictures, I ran fdupes to find duplicates and then imported all images into Shotwell.

I can still take pics on the phone which will be synced via Dropbox and Shotwell picks them up immediately. The sync is faster than I'm used to on iCloud and finally I just have files that I can tag, again.

Shotwell is also super fast, has a similar UI to photos.app (automatic events for example), but it also had hierarchical tags which it can even write to the files itself. So it's very simple and yet portable without lock-in. Couldn't be happier. Of course ymmv.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Lychee [1] on a vps with good results.

It looks pretty good, has multi-user capability, metadata editing, etc. It would be nice if it had some geotagging integration and ability to group albums into sets.

I filed a bug report and the developers/maintainers fixed it very quickly.

[1] [https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee](https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee)

<comment><USER16> I've been helping on the laravel v4 project. The devs are pretty friendly and I haven't found anything with a better UI than lychee. Three project doesn't do everything but what it does do, it does well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do any of these open-source solutions support Apple's Live Photos and videos alongside ordinary photos? I don't really want to have multiple applications for my family memories stuff. Just want to toss them in a directory and let on-photo/video-file metadata tags sort it out. Face auto-tagging and geo- and time-based grouping a must. Otherwise, can (ideally, would, in fact) just serve up dead-simple ugly HTML, if it's gonna be a web-tech thing, to minimize the developer workload if I have to take it over because the project dies.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was excited about MediaGoblin[0] for a while, but it seems development has mostly stalled. The last release was in March 2016(!). Things were going smoothly until they seemingly started devoting their resources to implementing federated sharing instead of developing the core media hosting functionality.

[0] [https://mediagoblin.org/](https://mediagoblin.org/)

<comment><USER19> Media Goblin is one of those projects that I really WANT to like, but I can't. The project goals are admirable. And when it's up and running it's great. But it's incredibly finicky to maintain and it's quite challenging to install.

<comment><USER18> > The project goals are admirable. And when it's up and running it's great. > But it's incredibly finicky to maintain and it's quite challenging to > install.

Agreed. I guess I could've been more specific in my original comment, easy of installation/maintenance are the things I wish they'd have worked on before worrying about federation. At this point I'm thinking about what will e the least painful way to migrate from mediagoblin to something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I haven't tested it but [https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism](https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism) looks promising.

</comment><comment><USER21> One more option...

[https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos](https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos)

Have not had that weekend to try these options myself.

</comment><comment><USER22> I tried out a few options a couple of years back and I've stuck with Piwigo since then. It seems to work well enough for my needs and the export functionality built into digikam seems to make it simple to sync up photos between my desktop and server.

<comment><USER23> Me too. For me, it was important to be able to point it to my folders (well, symlinking to them) and 'syncing' so it read the metadata and generated the thumbnails without the need to upload them anywhere. Also the calendar view has proven useful. My collection of around 90k photos works well with it, even with my meek Atom-based home server.

One feature I'm missing at the moment is raw conversion support. It would be great if thumbnails and previews of raw photos could be automatically generated. I've solved this via generating previews with ImageMagick, but native raw support in Piwigo would be better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there any of these that can be pointed at a photo library on a NAS or harddrive, instead of having the application copy all the images into it's own location/database (which therefore required double the harddrive space)?

<comment><USER25> The static gallery generator sigal([http://sigal.saimon.org](http://sigal.saimon.org)) supports this. You can configure it to include the original images in the file tree it builds, but instead of copying the images just make a symlink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm looking for the exact same thing. Seems to be few and far between. I have a Synology which has two photo products but they can be a little clunky. The challenge seems to be a sensible way to add an import.

<comment><USER27> rsync and then reindex worked well for me. But I'd agree that's not really a sensible solution for non-technical users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I should explain what I've tried.

Nextcloud photos is not a photo application. It's basically a shared gallery with thumbnails. There's no metadata support or editing. No true multiuser access other than granting sharing through Nextcloud like Dropbox. The only good part is you can autoupload from your phone.

I've looked at several webapps, like Piwigo. Most of them feel like a single user application or have limited upload and metadata support.

The closest I have found is Digikam using external SQL, but this requires a local application carefully configured with a DB and a fileshare.

<comment><USER29> > I've looked at several webapps, like Piwigo. Most of them feel like a single > user application or have limited upload and metadata support.

Piwigo definitely supports having multiple users. What kind of metadata do you mean? It supports tagging and reads and displays EXIF data. It has extensions/plugins for adding capabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I use Lychee: [https://lycheeorg.github.io/](https://lycheeorg.github.io/)

easy to set up, looks decent, even shows exif data like exposure time, lens used etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> For those willing to use local (non-browser) apps, Photosync (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS) will transfer photos between mobile/desktop/cloud and a private central NAS. From there, you can mount the NAS or sync folders to another mobile/desktop device, for use with local apps.

[https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html](https://www.photosync- app.com/home.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> Try digiKam. Its GPL-licensed and runs on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OSs. The developers are readily available via a mailing list and a new version just came out. I've used it for years and find is quite good. It is very full- featured though, so you might need to spend some time getting to know it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I really like thumbsup: [https://thumbsup.github.io/](https://thumbsup.github.io/)

It generates a static web site, creates thumbs, etc. I just run it on my laptop and rsync to my personal nginx server. You could probably host the output directly from S3 or similar.

</comment><comment><USER34> Seems like a lot of people have their own solution, I'll add mine to the pile: [https://github.com/pR0Ps/PhotoFloat](https://github.com/pR0Ps/PhotoFloat)

Screenshot: [https://i.imgur.com/F6w8Ixz.png](https://i.imgur.com/F6w8Ixz.png) (just took it now so I redacted some info)

It consists of 2 parts:

\- a Python script to parse metadata from photos into json files and create thumbnails.

\- A JS-based frontend that consumes the json files and thumbnails to provide a UI.

Features:

\- Can be hosted completely statically making it ideal for low-power servers

\- Serves up your photos in the same file structure as they are on the disk

\- Works with many types of photos, including most raw files

\- Parses and displays common EXIF data

\- Works well on slower connections (minimal HTML+CSS+JS, small thumbnails, placeholders, preloads images as you view, etc)

</comment><comment><USER35> If you don't end up finding what you want, then you could start with scoping out what you intend to find or create (..and post it somewhere find-able :)

For example, I've gone back to Shantsel's UX research several times over the course of thinking through app designs, eg:

* [http://shnatsel.blogspot.com/2012/08/irc-client-new-tab-mock...](http://shnatsel.blogspot.com/2012/08/irc-client-new-tab-mockup.html)

* [http://shnatsel.blogspot.com/2012/03/true-app-center.html](http://shnatsel.blogspot.com/2012/03/true-app-center.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> Bonus question: I, like a lot of other people, did a full Flickr export due to the reduction in hosted pictures. I now have all the metadata - is there a way I could import or use this locally?

(I did take a brief look at it, it's fairly normal json)

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been unable to find an open source multiuser local photo product. I'd love for my whole family to upload cell phone photos and SD cards to a central place we could share and tag from, without it belonging to Google.

<comment><USER37> I run a small linux server that acts as a NAS. I rsync everyone's phones to a home directory, manually, and then pull that into a shared directory.

I just went through and renamed all my pictures by the exif create date, adding any unique names to exif UserComment.

I'm working on scripting all of this, but it works for me and I can pull data from anything into the directory. Everyone in the house can access it via samba and view the pictures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've been tinkering on something adjacent, to replace my Instagram usage rather than Photos.app. I was thinking of a sort of "album as a blog post" concept using Ghost, which could be a single image per entry, or a series of images with optional prose interspersed. The idea is to take an album and auto-generate a blog entry with inline photos that can be edited in Ghost. It can also pull out photo metadata and create a map, etc.

Unfortunately Ghost isn't as modular as I hoped so it is involving lots of edits to the source, and automatically extracting album metadata from Photos.app has also turned out to be difficult.

<comment><USER39> Hey Mnutt,

My passion project, Odyssey, accomplishes something similar to what you're describing here.

With Odyssey, you can create stories that combine videos, photos, text, and drawings all on a digital canvas.

If you're interested, I encourage you to sign up for the closed beta. I'd love to get your feedback :)

[https://theodyssey.app/](https://theodyssey.app/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Any particular reason for the browser-based requirement?

I've used Lightroom and CaptureOne to manage my photo library but ended up using digiKam in the end because I can just mount a volume and use it from any desktop.

</comment><comment><USER41> Many years ago I was dumping all my photos into Coppermine [1]

It was/is very good. But patching it and PHP became a chore and I eventually migrated away to a messy matrix of Dropbox, Flickr, Google Photos and Apple Photo...

I should look into consolidating them all. Always tempted to write my own, aimed at photo albums for non-photographers... but it will probably not move beyond a readme.md...

[1] [https://coppermine-gallery.net/](https://coppermine-gallery.net/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Check out Koken. Pair it with Lightroom for editing if desired. Self hosted and quite powerful.

[http://koken.me/](http://koken.me/)

<comment><USER43> Unfortunately not under an open source license, and the license can be revoked or changed "at any time, for any reason, without notice."

(EDIT: clarified that the issue is the license; the source is readable)

<comment><USER42> So basically it satisfies all of trbfred's specified requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've been looking for the same thing. An Apple Photo clone would be perfect, as I like this product very much, but I would like to have control over my photos.

<comment><USER45> Yeah, I'm in the similar boat here too. I have an iPhone, and a Mac, but any interface between the two is needlessly completely busted unless you use iCloud. I want out of that game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Try Shimmie2. It works like the danbooru or ouroboros style imageboards. Requires LAMP stack and php-gd, and ffmpeg if you want video thumbnails.

\- Stores files by md5 hash and doesn't allow duplicates.

\- Database is used to store tags and support searching and is not very large.

\- Can tag pictures and search by tag.

\- Is fast. Can handle large number of images and large number of search results.

\- Can enable pools feature and arrange pictures in a pool.

\- Can enable wiki feature, which while primitive, is nice for adding notes.

\- Is multiuser.

</comment><comment><USER47> Shameless plug: if you are want a library for videos, I created an MIT open source _Video Hub App_ \- nearing version 2.0.0

[https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App](https://github.com/whyboris/Video- Hub-App)

Sorry unsure about good photo alternatives, but my first place to research is [https://alternativeto.net](https://alternativeto.net)

</comment><comment><USER48> I used [https://galleryserverpro.com/](https://galleryserverpro.com/) many years back. It was one of the better ones back then. I switched to Amazon Photo as I didn't want to deal with another server and backing up my precious family photos. Looks like it's open sourced now, which is even better, if you don't mind .Net and SQL Server.

</comment><comment><USER49> With online photo galleries either private or work related for many years I'm always relaying on piwigo. It's great, handy and easy to setup after the first try. We're hosting even big internal photo archives with upload via ftp, and piwigo does a great job at handling it.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is there one that can import Mac photo libraries an remove duplicate pictures by the way?

<comment><USER51> I am looking for this exact feature. Identifying duplicates from multiple back-ups. Is there a cool way?

<comment><USER52> Exiftool allows you to handle dupes while organizing photos.

[http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/](http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I haven't tried [https://github.com/agile-leaf/50mm](https://github.com/agile- leaf/50mm) yet. But am curious about it and similar solutions.

</comment><comment><USER54> I wrote Photobomb to solve this need for myself:

[https://github.com/davidbanham/photobomb](https://github.com/davidbanham/photobomb)

</comment><comment><USER52> I wish iOS photos app would allow me to sync to my server (SMB, sFTP, whatever). It is the only app allowed to sync in the background without using the location hack.

</comment><comment><USER55> Drawing Parallels - really would be happy if there was an application that could use Object storage as backend.. and could be hosted with AuthN and AuthZ

</comment><comment><USER56> Out of all these tools posted here, are there any that provide a way for you to authorize friends to also upload photos to your library?

<comment><USER57> mediagoblin is multiuser

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm surprised none of the suggestions seem to have anything for user-inputted tags.</comment>


Oracle Reports Exploits Release – Full Disclosure - <AUTHOR> http://netinfiltration.com/

<comment><USER2> what is up with the formatting of this site?</comment>


Why does Google Finance shows yesterday's OMXS30 data as real-time (in Sweden)? - <AUTHOR> Yesterday the index fallen 4% and at first I thought it's falling today as well.<p>https://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXNASDAQ:OMXS30 <comment><AUTHOR> If I google for "omxs30" then I see real-time value "OMX Stockholm 30 INDEXNASDAQ: OMXS30 - 9 Feb 08:11 GMT-5"...

</comment><comment><USER2> Probably a stale cache somewhere...perhaps your browser or a CDN.

<comment><AUTHOR> The data changes real-time, but I guess they use some older reference point to calc % change so Google Finance shows -5% while Yahoo Finance shows -1%.

Edit: the absolute value is actually correct, it's the reference change that scared me.</comment></comment>


It's time to update the software update process - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/3000809/software/its-time-to-update-the-software-update-process.html <comment><USER2> This article takes multiple frustrations and goes completely the wrong direction. As an OWNER of the system I should have complete control over what updates I do and don't receive and never should software disable my access to the network under any circumstances unless I purposely setup such access controls. Maybe they're highly recommended, but there's very specific reasons why you don't go auto-updating all of the devices when you know you have something working. On top of that the author even suggests that paying for updates is okay, even though it's the companies responsibility to update the product if security/stability issues affect the devices performance. If they don't then they can be required to recall devices, or suffer lawsuits.

<comment><USER3> These things need to take into account at least two very distinct user types: the power users like you or I who want and sometimes _need_ the control over updates fir various reasons and understand the full potential security/stability/other implications, and the man-on-the-street who knows no better and wouldn't update anything if it wasn't automatically done or somehow more irritating not to than to.

<comment><USER4> You can usually get all the control you like through Enterprise Configuration Management (e.g. deployment profiles, Group Policy, etc.) Bigcorps have real, business-level needs for doing their own update rollouts, and they're willing to pay to get that feature—and many others—included.

Really, the way to be a "power-user" in the modern era is to set yourself up on your device as an "Enterprise" of one. Otherwise you're basically part of the default "Enterprise" controlled by the manufacturer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So in order to fix the annoyance of push updates introducing unwanted or unusable functionality, his proposal is that push updates should also disable the device until accepted by the user?

Not quite clear on how that's an improvement

<comment><USER6> Not just that, but also:

> Hey—charge me for the damn upgrades if they can come bereft of some insane > advertising model that somehow underwrites your cost.

I find the thought of my device being held for ransom to be incredibly disturbing. Although, even if updates were free, bricking my device until I accept them is, itself, unacceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If it is my computer, I'd like the right to not update it and keep using it just the way it currently is.

I don't think the proposed solution is reasonable because it violates a lot of assumptions about the things I own and use.

<comment><USER8> I feel the same way. However, it is interesting that effectively zero Chrome users complain about auto-updates, presumably because they are stable, seamless, and very conservative with user-facing changes.

What I would prefer to see is seamless updates by default, with limitless ability to roll back and freeze updates. Unfortunately, the business case for this is negligible, outside of specific enterprise requirements, and especially complex to implement when considering external factors like APIs and file formats.

<comment><USER9> You make a good point that when they are seamless it doesn't bother users. When I do come across things that break with chrome's frequent updates it annoys me greatly. One other thing to point out is that we aren't locked into using Chrome so there is less pain from automatic updates. If my smartphone forced me to update automatically for instance this would be a much bigger issue as they lock me into using their software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In my view the crappiest part of software updating is that it is all-or- nothing. You have to take the bad if you want the good. Maybe I'd like to update my software so that I can get all the latest security patches and bug fixes, but I'd rather not have yet another UI re-design or a load of new features I will not use. Currently, for most software, if I want the fixes, I have to also swallow the features. Either upgrade to version 2.6 or stay on 2.5, you have no other alternatives. It would be great to be able to cherry- pick only the bits I want. Probably not an easy problem to solve, but it's a pain point for a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER11> You know who does this? Sony. PS3/4\. Author should have done some research before proposing such a ridiculously stupid idea. If I was legally allowed to, I would hurt them physically for for imposing this shit on me when I just want to play videogames.

EDIT: Not to mention it obviously doesn't improve security. This is Sony we're talking about here.

<comment><USER12> Of all the walled gardens, Sony's is the most infantilizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This problem is almost non-existent on any system that uses a decent package manager.</comment>


The Social Browser Has Landed - <AUTHOR> http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/netscape-navigator-9-released-the-social-browser-has-landed34352.html <comment><USER2> I'm like, uh, totally underwhelmed, to be honest...</comment>


Capturing PAL video with an SDR, and a few dead ends - <AUTHOR> http://www.windytan.com/2019/08/capturing-pal-video-with-sdr-and-few.html <comment><USER2> This is the same person that was listening to a clip from a news helicopter on YouTube and heard some "weird interference" in the audio. She went on from there to do some audio processing and eventually realized it was the chopper transmitting some information. That information was its Latitude & Longitude, after which she plotted its flight path on a map.

[http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopt...](http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopter.html)

Windytan has hearing that puts a bat's to shame.

<comment><USER3> Oona is great, and her blog is the perfect example why I fid RSS readers indispensable: she posts four or fives times per year at random intervals, yet each post is worth dozens of average articles. The "firehose of information" model is simply not adequate for these cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In reading this I'm reminded of some efforts to produce a software decoder for Laserdiscs by using a ADC sample the exact data on the disk [1]

1: [https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978](https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978)

I wonder if there's some way to tweak the now seemingly common SDR adapters to provide a plain ADC (ie: without demodulation). When folks are capturing old consoles, generally the RF output is avoided because of the extra noise injected. It would be ideal to work directly with the composite video.

Working with the composite video also would have implications for archiving VHS and other tape-based analog footage: right now, folks tend to use hardware devices called TBCs (time base correctors) to correct issues in the video signal from a VHS player. These are all obsolete at this point and growing increasingly expensive, so it would be nice to replace this hardware with software.

<comment><USER5> The domesday project is much more important IMHO for VHS and Beta captures, than for console captures. Consoles tend to have a stable timebase.

Tapes tend to, especially if copies were made tape-to-tape, be _very_ jittery. These could be almost flawlessly fixed in the domesday software, much better than any TBC.

Since the capture is at the "almost RF" stage early in the tape player, the overall quality is very good too. There is the potential to view VHS in better quality than anyone has ever seen it, even back in the day.

<comment><USER6> Is there anyone using this hardware for VHS or Beta captures? Seems the original project itself is very targeted, and I'm having difficulty searching up different uses of the project. I'd considering purchasing one to do high quality VHS transfer, but I'd want a community I could turn to with problems.

<comment><USER5> One of the committers have submitted VHS patches, so there is a community of one so far. :-)

Currently it can decode to black and white I think.

I am very interested also. I bought a high end consumer JVC deck unopened in box, just for this purpose in the future. But the thing is, only the mechanical transfer needs to be good, and the heads OK, the rest of the machine need not be high end at all. It really has the potential to get better VHS rips than any pro lab today in existence can achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > [PAL colour] was designed in the 1960s to be backwards compatible with > black-and-white TV receivers.

Fun fact: unlike for NTSC, this technically isn't true, because there is not a preceding black-and-white format that PAL was compatible with. Rather, PAL's black-and-white format (the line count and refresh rate) was defined at the same time as the colour standard. They chose their number of lines (625) to avoid having to do NTSC's 29.97fps thing.

Or so I think I have heard. Please correct me if I am wrong.

<comment><USER8> It's complicated and I don't know the full history, but the reason it's 625 lines is so that the horizontal refresh rate is approximately the same as for NTSC, allowing monochrome sets to be relatively easily converted. Also, 625-line television was developed at roughly the same time as early colour but I'm not sure they necessarily arrived at the same time depending on the country.

<comment><USER9> Standupmaths has a good video on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GJUM6pCpew](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GJUM6pCpew)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really cool experiment. I'd love to see how much the performance could be improved by offloading a bunch of the filtering to the GPU, though I suspect that might be a bit tricky due to driver constraints (and in particular how bad OS X drivers can be). Typically pixel shaders are quite capable of doing filtering and convolution even if you aren't ready for compute shaders - a mid tier GPU can handle doing filters with 29 taps or more per pixel pretty easily at 60hz.

Ideally that'd get the CPU and power usage way down, freeing up CPU for things like streaming.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is interesting as it highlights how easily we lose arts. You could tune PAL video on cheap Brooktree ASICs 25 years ago, and code for decoding PAL video on the USRP has been available forever.

<comment><USER8> Brooktree was effectively spun off as Conexant, who made direct successors to many of those ASICs for quite a while including updated single-chip USB and PCIe versions. I don't think they're still around now that analog broadcast is dead though.</comment></comment>


CPU virtualization techniques - <AUTHOR> http://penberg.blogspot.com/2010/04/cpu-virtualization-techniques.html

<comment><USER2> nice article. after reading that i found that this virtualbox article - <http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_architecture> \- made a lot more sense (it goes into implementation details for vb, which isn't addressed in the original article, but which dynamically switches between emulation and virtualisation as necessary)

<comment><AUTHOR> I only skimmed through the VirtualBox article but it seems to me it's simply explaining how QEMU works (VirtualBox is derived from QEMU).

The "switching dynamically between emulation and virtualization" is simply what I referred to as "hardware emulation" using dynamic binary translation. Of course, when the host and guest CPUs are the same, you end up running bulk of the original native code pretty much as-is. But because you're dynamically generating the code, you end up causing a trap to the hypervisor for the corner cases.

The VirtualBox article is not clear on what it does when hardware supports virtualization (Intel VT-x ("Vanderpool") and AMD-V (SVM) support) but I am guessing it also does what QEMU does, which is to use KVM (or whatever the equivalent is on other platforms than Linux).

What these extensions do is eliminate dynamic binary translation completely. You only trap to the hypervisor on PIO and MMIO accesses and few other minor cases. But all this is controlled by hardware and KVM kernel subsystem and the hypervisor itself doesn't touch the guest instruction stream.

[ Disclaimer: I'm not that familiar with KVM internals so the above explanation is probably a slight over-generalization. ]

<comment><USER2> vb is, as far as i understand things, similar to qemu + qvm86, if that's any help.

[i've since re-read both and i don't really understand your point. you describe 3 approaches: emulation, [hardware] virtualization, and paravirtualization. qemu (alone) does emulation; qvm86 does virtualization; vb does both (like qemu + qvm86). i get the impression you're correcting some mistake i've made, but i can't see what it is...]</comment></comment></comment>


The 4 kinds of side businesses you can start - <AUTHOR> http://justinmares.com/the-4-kinds-of-side-businesses-you-can-start/ <comment><USER2> Articles like this...it really should be titled: "The 4 kinds of side businesses people like Justin can start". I don't think most people constitutionally are cut out to be the kind of hustlers required for success at this sort of stuff. And yet many people do start businesses and become successful, myself included. So maybe we need to figure out a common language to separate out side businesses that are built slowly, deliberately over time using a specific skillset, vs. side businesses that become successful because of aggressive marketing tactics.

<comment><USER3> I agree is does take a hustler kind of attitude to execute on some of these but others such as buying an existing Shopify app on their exchange just requires due diligence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like how he subtly puts his biz in the blog. Smooth.

<comment><USER5> I find it fine. Here, read my article, and links to my work. Fair trade.</comment></comment>


CloudFlare enabling free SSL by mid-October - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/google-now-factoring-https-support-into-ranking-cloudflare-on-track-to-make-it-free-and-easy

<comment><USER2> Please note that using Cloudflare, even with free SSL, is not an increase to the security and privacy of your users. On the contrary, Cloudflare records information about your users (this cannot be disabled) and, by default, blocks users who attempt to view your site through privacy-enhancing software. I would suggest that people looking to install SSL on their website (this should be everybody) instead get their free SSL certificate from gandi.net or StartSSL, who do not spy on or block your users.

<comment><USER3> Gandi is free for a year and then expensive after - Namecheap may not be free but renewals and initial costs are much lower. StartSSL is free but revoke-ing costs money.

<comment><USER4> just checked now, Gandi is 40€/yr, not that expensive compared to big names like Verisign & co. I have used in the past RapidSSL, but it is same price, 50$/yr. I've just checked Namecheap and it's reselling other SSL like Comodo or Geotrust, but it looks less expensive, so yes, probably it's the best price.

<comment><USER5> At Gandi, a single-address standard SSL cert is $16/12€ per year. The $50/40€ applies to multi-address certs (3 addresses)

The full SSL price list is here: [https://www.gandi.net/ssl/grid](https://www.gandi.net/ssl/grid)

<comment><USER4> you are right, I read the wrong line!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most of the websites wont encrypt the link from Cloudflare to the server, ultimately defeating the purpose of SSL aside from a better search ranking.

<comment><USER7> Could you elaborate on this. My impression was that connections between data centres (e.g. in the case of using an EC2 instance with Cloudflare) were already very secure and therefore do not require SSL.

<comment><USER8> Depends what you're trying to protect against. Those links are notably very insecure against the NSA.

<comment><USER9> It's reasonable to suppose that the NSA have a whole bunch of private signing keys for a whole bunch of CAs, and will just MITM anyone they please regardless of our puny efforts.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that's a safe assumption and, regardless, an active MITM attack is a much bigger deal than passively collecting traffic as it flows past you in the clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there more actual implementation details somewhere? Sounds like selecting the ssl context based on the clients SNI request. This (obviously) would predicate client SNI support, as opposed to anycast IPs or similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> CloudFlare's CEO says that free SSL will use SNI with ipv4 [1] and possibly non-SNI with ipv6 [2]. A CloudFlare engineer has discussed splitting the SSL handshake between servers so their many edge nodes don't need to keep customer secret keys in memory [3]. However, this sounds slightly different than the lazy loading behavior in the blog post.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7910849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7910849)

[2] [https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/478369486643658754](https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/478369486643658754)

[3] [http://www.slideshare.net/cloudflare/running-secure- server-s...](http://www.slideshare.net/cloudflare/running-secure-server-sw-on- insecure-hw-without-parachute)

<comment><USER11> Non-SNI over ipv6 seems pretty pointless since anything supporting ipv6 is going to have sni anyway.

<comment><USER12> Not true; Windows XP supports IPv6 but not SNI.

<comment><USER13> While that's technically true, XP doesn't enable IPv6 by default, so virtually no one uses it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does it bother anyone else that when you try to visit the Google post explaining that they are using HTTPs as a ranking signal via https it redirects to http?

[http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https- as-...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking- signal_6.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> what I just paid 20/month for the SSL....

Update: I have another concern I just found out.

For example, I do a lot of web scraping through my domain and I see that I was automatically opted in to use [https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/scrapeshield](https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/scrapeshield), something that is supposed to block scraping.

There's a huge conflict of interest if it turns out that the cloudflare network actively aims to help block scraping.

I know you guys said you will be on the neutral side but if the cloudflare is helping Scrapeshield become more intelligent about scraping by monitoring my scraping actions, I really don't know if it's wise to stay with cloudflare, as much as I love it.

<comment><USER16> We'll be adding some cool new features to our paid plans at the same time, so I hope you'll decide to continue paying us the $20.

<comment><USER17> Good to hear - I just signed up and put in the $20 myself (not a very large barrier), and I'm glad features like custom certificates (& other things) will be available as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. CloudFlare seems like a great product so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do not announce things until done. This is just shameless marketing stunt.

</comment><comment><USER19> I presume that customer private keys need to be stored on Cloudflare servers to implement this. Has that just made Cloudflare servers a legitimate prime NSA target?

I.e. all your keys belong to us

<comment><USER20> We have a product, "keyless ssl", which is used by some customers to retain on premise custody of their asymmetric key material, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cloudflare throwing it down with authority...well played. In the end the consumer really doesn't give a hoot. They want simple.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why are people up-voting an ad?

</comment><comment><USER23> Are EV certs going to remain Business/Enterprise-only?

<comment><USER16> No.

<comment><USER24> I would have guessed EV certs to remain business only. Well, perhaps not _business_ only, but still requiring additional validation. How do you believe EV will be handled? Thanks!

EDIT: I didn't realize you represented cloud-flare. I'm genuinely curious how EV certs will work. Thanks!

<comment><USER16> You'll have to supply your own EV cert, but you'll be able to use custom certs (EV or otherwise) at the Pro ($20/mo) level.

<comment><USER24> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> CloudFlare is the coolest free CDN out there.</comment>


Google's Answer to EU Antitrust Complaints on Android - <AUTHOR> http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2016/04/androids-model-of-open-innovation.html <comment><USER3> On the one hand, Google using it's app store advantage to strengthen search seems to me like it might be a monopoly abuse.

On the other hand, Google gave away an OS and built a whole ecosystem to protect their search (to the benefit of consumers). Consumers are actually winning from the arrangement (and aren't anti-trust laws supposed to protect consumers?). The losers are corporations that are less generous and less innovative than Google.

Since I'm a consumer, and not Yandex or Microsoft, I'm cheering for Google.

<comment><USER4> The problem with that is that it is a self perpetuating cycle and that the current situation is only better for consumers in the short run.

Google is better because they have more data from consumers, which gets them more installs, which makes them better.

It would be better in the long run for consumers if there is a real credible second source of search, since it keeps both parties honest and competing on the quality of the results -- and stuff like pushing your own sites doesn't start to creep in.

<comment><USER5> > The problem with that is that it is a self perpetuating cycle and that the > current situation is only better for consumers in the short run

The "short run" is typically the scope relevant to laws and regulations, for good or for bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Any manufacturer can then choose to load the suite of Google apps to their device and freely add other apps as well.

"Choose" is probably not the right word here.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. If you don't sign Google's agreement and include Google's app bundle, your product fails in the market. You cannot successfully sell an Android smartphone today without Google Apps, unless you're in China where Google Apps isn't available.

<comment><USER8> In other words, consumers really like Google Apps, and the alternative apps are not desirable.

What can Google do about that?

<comment><USER9> Give away their apps for free without any agreements, apparently. It's like trying to force Tesla to give everyone their motors, because customers want Tesla motors but can't get them without buying a product from Tesla - therefore Tesla should be forced to let other other companies build cars with their motors /s.

<comment><USER10> People liked IE. Not everyone and not forever, but people really liked it. We all know how did that end.

As an Android user, I couldn't give less fucks about G+, Hangouts, Music, Books, Sheets, Docs and probably some other me-too product launched by Google and still I have them installed in my phone and Google keeps trying to shove them down my throat. I don't need any of these for the Play store to work, that is the only place I can install software from unless I downgrade my phone's security, but apparently you imply I do.

Also, Tesla is not a de-facto monopoly on several European markets, which is the problem here.

If Apple or Microsoft had >80% of the market and provided the OS needed by every manufacturer (but two), then they could face similar issues.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious how you'd be downgrading your phone's security by installing software from a different app store or repository (or even just directly downloading it from the developer and installing it).

The way I look at it, the base Android OS is free to port to whatever you want/can but to get some commercial Google products like the Play Store and some of their apps, you need to follow some other terms that allow them to make money from these commercial offerings.

Either way, I find it much easier to run a Google-less Android than an Apple- less iOS and somewhat easier than a MS-less Windows. The fact that I _don 't_ have to "jailbreak" or otherwise exploit security holes to install software from other sources than the OS maker is a big reason I tend to use Android on mobile devices.

<comment><USER10> > I'm curious how you'd be downgrading your phone's security by installing > software from a different app store or repository (or even just directly > downloading it from the developer and installing it).

I have to enable "install software from other sources", which opens the door to ANY source other than the Play store. I've got the Amazon App Store on my phone too, and for that to work I have to permit installation from any source. That's downgrading my phone's security.

> Either way, I find it much easier to run a Google-less Android than an > Apple-less iOS and somewhat easier than a MS-less Windows. The fact that I > don't have to "jailbreak" or otherwise exploit security holes to install > software from other sources than the OS maker is a big reason I tend to use > Android on mobile devices.

That is true. The difference is most probably the market share and how the OS is licensed to hardware OEMs (iOS is not licensed - Windows Phone I've no idea).

<comment><USER12> > I have to enable "install software from other sources", which opens the door > to ANY source other than the Play store.

You still have to click the .apk and install it. Same as clicking an .exe and installing it on Windows.

Why would a "Store" made by Joe Random be more secure then downloading an .apk and installing it ?

<comment><USER7> Amazon is not "Joe Random".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not smart enough to know whether Google is breaking antitrust rules or not but if they are I don't see how Apple aren't too.

<comment><USER14> Because Apple builds its own phones and nobody else can use iOS. Google wouldn't be subject to this investigation if it didn't licence Android. If it built its own Nexus phones they would be in the same position Apple is. Instead it's in the position Microsoft was in the 90's.

<comment><USER13> So if Google were less open then they wouldn't have to deal with this?

<comment><USER15> Licencing an OS is being open? Because, remember, on (for example) a Samsung mobile only the Android frameworks and the kernel are open. The rest, including kernel drivers (SoC, etc), built-in apps, the Google frameworks and apps, etc are completely closed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > In order to get the Play Store, an OEM has to agree to install all the other > 'required' Google apps including Google Voice Search, Gmail, Google > Calendar, Google Talk (now Hangouts), Google Maps and so on.

>The most important clause states that "Devices may only be distributed if all Google Applications... are pre-installed on the Device." Google apps are an all-or-nothing affair. If you want Google Maps or the Play Store, you must also take things like Google+ and Google's network location provider.

<comment><USER17> You do realize though, there's an intentional segregation there. Android is not the play store or any of those apps. Not at this point. Android is that OS itself and just the OS. If antitrust is an issue, then the case needs to be made against the distribution of apps that require licensing (google's apps and the store), not against android itself, which is fairly unrestricted.

<comment><USER18> _> Android is that OS itself and just the OS._

Actually, Android is a Google trademark and you have to do what Google says if you want to use it.

Amazon uses AOSP but it can't call it Android.

This makes sense. Anyone could take AOSP and make it incompatible with Android (TM). If they could call it Android, that would mislead consumers.

The problem is that if you ship a single Android phone with Play etc, you are not allowed to ship any phones based on AOSP. In fact, Google just made Acer cancel the launch of an AOSP phone aimed at the Chinese market because it is already shipping genuine Android (TM).

This is not "fairly unrestricted" ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There comes a time when the only competition for a massive corporation is governments. And you can't win that one (AT&T) even when you do (Microsoft).

Tread carefully Google (and Apple...)

</comment><comment><USER20> Some of the commissions objections are outlined here, does anyone have a better source?

[http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-16-1492_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-16-1492_en.htm)

<comment><USER21> [http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cf...](http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cfm?proc_code=1_40099)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Uh-oh.

Google don't understand the EU if they believe that the way to fight the EU is to use a press release.

<comment><USER7> So far, Google's way of fighting antitrust suits has been to pretty much claim that the government is wrong and then not change anything. Some countries where Google doesn't like the results of a government ruling, they've just left or closed the relevant service. Google seems to have a questionable understanding that they're supposed to comply with the law.

But I'm not sure they can afford to lose the whole EU market.

<comment><USER23> > Some countries where Google doesn't like the results of a government ruling, > they've just left or closed the relevant service.

Apart of Spain with Google News, and it was a law that was criticized by everyone but the big newspapers can you give us examples of Google closing services when they "don't like the result"?

<comment><USER10> In Germany they were going down the same route as in Spain, but finally reached an agreement.

<comment><USER23> No, in Germany they complied with the law, they didn't pull off the service

<comment><USER10> I don't know why would you say that, but that was pretty much a win for Google and not a defeat:

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/5/7160587/german- publisher-a...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/5/7160587/german-publisher- axel-springer-google-news) [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-axel- sprngr-idUSKBN...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-axel-sprngr- idUSKBN0IP1YT20141105)

If you have any evidence that Google is paying that "tax", please show it.

<comment><USER23> I didn't said that Google paid the tax or that Google lost. IO said that Google didn't pulled off the service from Germany. They complied with the law and didn't put snippets

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can see arguments around Google Search impacting multiple startups and businesses of all kinds. Startups, carriers or whoever.

However, try making Google Maps your default map provider on Apple - <USER2> Chrome...

Very hard to make a case it's practice in apps in general is an issue here.

<comment><USER25> If Android is the dominant OS (80%? of smartphones) do iOS apps have a significant impact on what Google's Apps are doing in general?

*Though I guess the fact that the Google apps are not on 100% of Android installs affects that number again.

<comment><USER24> There are just two players in the market and the business practices of both should be used to determine what is common practice or anticompetitive.

Google started just a few years ago way behind ios. It got the share because of improvements in services - maps, mail, browser, notificaitons, and it's OS. Apple has had a far more closed system around it's default apps. While Apple's apps have gotten shitter, Google's default apps have gotten better.

I'd argue not the place to hit them. Focus the investigation on search- narrow the scope to that. They've got like 5 pending cases and it's coming off as trying to stop US tech from "encroaching" on established EU businesses.

As a guy whose had to raise money- I get the "Google" question in almost every pitch. So I get there is an issue around search- but fuck their apps are good. I wish Apple would be forced to swap them out like Google Allows.</comment></comment></comment>


A First Taste of InvokeDynamic - <AUTHOR> http://blog.headius.com/2008/09/first-taste-of-invokedynamic.html

<comment><USER2> Best line in the article: "Dejected, Billy sulked away and became a Lisp programmer, living forever in a land where data is code and code is data and everyone eats butterscotches and rides unicorns. He was never seen nor heard from again."

I hope billy recovers from his time spent with java trying to make a silk purse out of a pigs ear.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wheh its good news that jruby will get a lot faster, but that article went straight over my head. Not enough coffee yet.</comment>


Application development - <AUTHOR> http://inquesearchke.co.ke/ <comment><AUTHOR> we are a newly started technology firm in Africa and want to teach the rest of the continent how to efficiently use technology, we are also Looking for partner companies. we have an efficient team to work with.</comment>


Github: The New Locus of Software Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.scalevp.com/github-the-new-locus-of-software-development

<comment><USER2> I think the opportunity for developers to showcase their work to the world has also been one of the biggest factors in Github's success.</comment>


TargetContact Goes Live! - <AUTHOR> http://app.targetcontact.com Hey guys, i've been working diligently these past months to bring you TargetContact.
Here is some marketing blurb from our corporate site: Newsletters have long been a powerful marketing tool that builds brand awareness and offers improved communication with customers and prospects. But, busy professionals can't afford the time it takes to create a professional looking piece. The solution is TargetContact!
In 2007, TargetContact, Inc. set out to create a simple and affordable marketing platform for professionals looking to increase their visibility. The objective was to create something that required very little time and ongoing maintenance, but provided real results. The founders of TargetContact knew that if they could create this tool and offer an engaging monthly newsletter that professionals could put their own brand on, it would be very valuable.
Today, TargetContact serves Insurance Agents, Attorneys, Accountants, Loan Officers, Realtors, Consultants and many other types of professionals nationwide. With its easy to use campaign manager and engaging newsletter, TargetContact provides its customers with a high value marketing tool at an affordable price.
sign-up and let me know what you think.  i'm dying to get some feedback!  We've put so much effort into making this app really solid, useable and affordable.  At the moment we're offering a 30 day free trial so if you actually have a need for something like this you get 30 days to evaluate it.
./rm <comment><AUTHOR> We just went live, this is the culmination of the last 6 mo of my life, hopefully you approve :) It would be great to get some feedback, below is some marketing blurb from our corporate site to give you an idea of what it is we do:

Newsletters have long been a powerful marketing tool that builds brand awareness and offers improved communication with customers and prospects. But, busy professionals can't afford the time it takes to create a professional looking piece. The solution is TargetContact!

In 2007, TargetContact, Inc. set out to create a simple and affordable marketing platform for professionals looking to increase their visibility. The objective was to create something that required very little time and ongoing maintenance, but provided real results. The founders of TargetContact knew that if they could create this tool and offer an engaging monthly newsletter that professionals could put their own brand on, it would be very valuable.

Today, TargetContact serves Insurance Agents, Attorneys, Accountants, Loan Officers, Realtors, Consultants and many other types of professionals nationwide. With its easy to use campaign manager and engaging newsletter, TargetContact provides its customers with a high value marketing tool at an affordable price.

<comment><USER2> Good idea and description - too bad the description isn't on your website (typically i click on the link first before i go to comments).

btw how do u deal with potential abusers of your service (a la spammer)?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah you're looking at the actual application there is a corporate site www.targetcontact.com. the reason you didn't get comments unfortunately is because i failed to read the submission instructions hahaha

<comment><USER3> It sounds like you're already off to a great start.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We reduced our Docker images by 60% with –no-install-recommends - <AUTHOR> https://ubuntu.com/blog/we-reduced-our-docker-images-by-60-with-no-install-recommends <comment><USER2> Noiz</comment>


SproutCore Presentation - <AUTHOR> http://www.sproutcore.com/2008/08/13/sproutcore-at-oracle/ <comment><USER2> Things like SproutCore really are the future of the internet. Within five years, I think the true web operating system will be born; and it's not like YouOS or any of those other pseudo operating systems in browsers. Why do you need contextual menus and a proprietary file system inside a browser? That's what the desktop operating system is for.

The internet operating system is going to be driven by these richly interactive and dynamic web applications built on top of Javascript in a web browser. Finally, it seems people are starting to realize that there's no reason for the user interaction and interface gap between desktop and web applications.

Sadly, even though the internet is relatively young, the interface paradigms of how web apps are supposed to be built have already been engrained in the minds of web developers. Still, I hope someday there will little difference between a Cocoa app and a Web app. MobileMe and 280Slides are just the first batch of these.

<comment><USER3> Agree, though I also think:

\- SproutCore may not be the best, most persuasive or most powerful example of / driving force behind this \- this evolution will see less apps mimicking native desktop-OS-imposed widgetry (like 280slides trying to look like MacOS), resulting in a soup of shades-of-gray --- and more like the many usability- centred, colourful web apps out there. Desktop apps will rather tend to mimick that than the other way around. \- There is no good reason for 280Slides and other Office-on-the-Web solutions to so closely resemble the desktop experience of 90s-style applications (other than, perhaps, customer expectations and user acceptance). GUI is something that can, and should be radically rethought and evolved, all-the-time.

<comment><USER4> I agree... a friend turned me onto EXT, and it's quite impressive but hardly gets the same attention and coverage as some of the other frameworks simply due to its cost (which is extremely high! _tears_ ).

<http://extjs.com/products/extjs/>

<http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/desktop/desktop.html>

<comment><USER5> You might wanna read this: <http://pablotron.org/?cid=1556> and this: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9878693-16.html>

<comment><USER6> No, it's not completely Open Source, but it is if you pay up, or if you're not making money off it. What's all the confusion?

I think it's a clever move ... the result is more economically feasible than "real" open source, and a lot more libre than secret source.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Henry Baker's Archive of Research Papers - <AUTHOR> http://www.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/ <comment><USER2> Articles on linear logic are must read. Quite clear explanation of relatively complex concept.

Also I like his "cross-science-field" papers, like one about garbage collector and thermodynamics.

</comment><comment><USER3> For other CS collections, there's:

Matt Might's archive of books grad students should read [http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for- gr...](http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-graduate- students/)

Jeff Huang's best paper award winners from the last 20 years [http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html](http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html)

<comment><USER4> Interesting to see that Microsoft is on top of the best-paper award list with 43 points, and MIT is third on the list with 30 points. IBM and Google are way further down the list, just to name a couple.

This is why Microsoft deserves much more credit than it gets. Especially compared to Apple, which isn't even to be found on this list.

<comment><USER5> They probably would have, if the list went ten to fifteen years further back. The Advanced Technology Group was closed down in 1997 ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Gr...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Group)).

One could argue that neglecting fundamental research will be their downfall in the long term, and that may be true, but looking at what happened to Apple since 1997, one could also argue that focusing on the shorter term gave them enough resources to buy technology, if needed. So, instead of having to guess what technologies will become important, they can wait and see and then buy them (of course that has its risks, too; they may have to place too many less risky bets to ensure that they have the winning bet, or someone might not want to sell a truly disruptive invention)</comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb leverages Craigslist in a really cool way - <AUTHOR> http://www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2010/11/airbnb-leverages-craigslist-in-really.html <comment><USER2> Implementation details aside, this is a fantastic use of metrics in two ways: it exposes them to the user in a way calculated to improve their experience, _and_ it provides hard data that this feature is printing money hats. It also establishes a baseline for further improvement (I would be tempted to pull a Zynga and show the user a progress bar at 95% saying that they are almost done and the one little thing they can do to complete their listing is to make with the clickyclicky.)

<comment><USER3> "make with the clickyclicky"

Most delightful phrase I've read in weeks, thanks for the chuckle. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Craigslist allows posting through it's api for housing things, guessing that's how airbnb does it.

If you've ever used thumbtack, a marketplace for services, they have an auto post to craigslist as well that is pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any idea how Airbnb actually implements the craigslist posting?

Yes it's auto submission, but with craigslist's new security measures and login requirements, that looks really hard to do purely from a URL standpoint. I'm almost wondering if there is some private API they are using or if they have some sort of partnership going on.

Any ideas?

<comment><USER6> auto submission is a myth. someone is typing in the captcha, whether that be the end user, airbnb, or someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would imagine they're using the Craiglist Bulk Posting API:

<http://www.craigslist.org/about/bulk_posting_interface>

<comment><USER8> Right now it seems AirBNB posts appear on CL as either "sublets and temporary" or "vacation rentals." ([http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/hhh?query=airbnb&sr...](http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/hhh?query=airbnb&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk=&bedrooms=))

The page linked above states that "sublets & temporary" is one of the "categories for which bulk posting is no longer supported." Vacation rentals is not one of these though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's not enough detail and investigation in the article, but this appears to qualify as a third-party posting service, which is a no-no in Craigslistland. I don't see any other way they could offer one-click posting where the airbnb client didn't already have a Craiglist account (and not even then, either). If this is indeed what is happening, Airbnb should tread lightly lest they get the banhammer, and this is doubly true if the resulting Craiglist ads appear to be Airbnb ads, and/or the ads are posted out-of-area.

<comment><USER10> It auto fills in the data for the user, and the user manually submits the Craigslist listing. Nothing illegal with that...

<comment><USER11> From a cursory look I did on this a while back, I believe it does the initial submission for you, and then redirects you to the confirmation URL. Could be wrong, but if that's correct, it's probably going to look to Craigslist like a single server is doing a lot of auto-submissions...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think they just construct the url for the Airbnb member and fill in all the details. (Just a guess. Not on Airbnb.) The user would have to be the one to click the confirm.

For example, <https://post.craigslist.org/nyc/H/sub/brk> is the first step in creating a posting for temp place in Brooklyn. I assume they have a way of defaulting the other form values.

<comment><USER13> Wow, did you see the field names on that form? They're encoded as long alphanumeric strings. Never come across that before. Looks like they're pretty feisty about people using their forms.

I guess this also explains why they set no-cache and no-store pragmas on their posting pages, which caused me to lose a lengthy post when I accidentally dragged something into the browser window. Jerks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really don't understand why everyone thinks Craigslist will have a problem with this. They do not profit off of Housing/Sublet submissions. This will only increase traffic to their site, and some users that aren't too familiar with Craigs will possibly use the site for something Craigslist does make money (e.g. jobs).</comment>


Show HN: I got bombarded with ads by note sharing sites, so I created this in 1d - <AUTHOR> https://nnote.cc <comment><USER2> It's plain and simple and pretty nice. I like that I can paste in an image from the clipboard.

I was also excited to see indent and unindent buttons, but they don't seem to do anything. Coming from OneNote, I use indentation all the time to organize my notes, and basically none of the other note taking apps around these days offer it. Markdown doesn't support it as far as I can tell.

I also learned abruptly that if you don't save a once-saved note before leaving the page, your most recent changes will be wiped out. It reloads the saved copy when you return to the page. If the note has never been saved, it doesn't reload it on return, leaving the existing note still available.

Also, one needs to keep track of the URL given when saving before going to a new note because the previous URL is no longer shown. I hit the back button and got it back.

Does this save to local storage? Any plans to export a note?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reviewing. I will add history & local storage in the next version. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Existing note sharing tools are full of ads (some are not safe for kids, family or office) So I created this simple site that lets anyone create & share notes from anywhere with no ads, no sign-up required.

Please share your feedbacks to help it become better. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Agreed! I tried shrib lately and it has so much noise! What's the tech stack here?

<comment><AUTHOR> it's React, tailwind on UI, the Backend is nodejs, express, mongodb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it persistent notes and not possible to remove them?

<comment><AUTHOR> It persists what you typed and clicked Save. If you clear everything & click Save again, it will persist empty content (same as deleting that note).</comment></comment>


Support for ChaCha20-Poly1305 released in OpenSSL 1.1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/304 <comment><USER2> "SSL/TLS state machine, version negotiation and record layer rewritten" from the release notes sounds scary.

The changelog says:

      *) State machine rewrite. The state machine code has been significantly
         refactored in order to remove much duplication of code and solve issues
         with the old code (see ssl/statem/README for further details). This change
         does have some associated API changes. Notably the SSL_state() function
         has been removed and replaced by SSL_get_state which now returns an
         "OSSL_HANDSHAKE_STATE" instead of an int. SSL_set_state() has been removed
         altogether. The previous handshake states defined in ssl.h and ssl3.h have
         also been removed.
         [Matt Caswell]

<comment><USER3> I would like to see these folks analyze the new code, considering their success in finding problems in this area before.

[https://www.smacktls.com/](https://www.smacktls.com/)

(I think there is also another group in the UK that works on this problem and also got important results.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Chacha20 is nice, but I think the key exchange is a bigger problem right now. What's the situation with Curve25519 in here?

Weak DH and ECDHE using NIST curves concerns me far more than AES-GCM which is readily available for example. Configuring DH properly requires extra effort for administrators and ECDHE relies on NIST curves which are prone to implementation error and some have even called into question the NSA-NIST relationship behind the "random" curves.

<comment><USER5> Curve25519 is what's going to happen. The IETF/IRTF process is a clusterfuck of monumental proportions, and has slowed adoption down, but Chrome and Firefox will support Curve25519.

The NIST P- curves in TLS ECDHE have sound implementations in Chromium and Firefox. Nobody should be using conventional DH in preference to ECDHE; if you can't trust a browser's P-curves, you can't trust their GCM either.

<comment><USER4> > if you can't trust a browser's P-curves, you can't trust their GCM either.

Is that true though? I mean, from what I've read GCM seems much easier to implement than a full ECDH. I mean, have a look at some of the things published by Bernstein and Lange, [https://www.hyperelliptic.org/tanja/vortraege/20130531.pdf](https://www.hyperelliptic.org/tanja/vortraege/20130531.pdf)

They do certainly have a horse in the race, but it's still interesting. They and others have also raised concerns about potential backdoors in the NIST curves, which is, while still unproven another reason why one might avoid them. They failed to do things as basic in the cryptographic community as using "nothing up my sleeve" numbers, it just seems sketchy at best to me. The random curves at least. The others are probably still just fine but the random ones are the most popular in TLS.

<comment><USER5> GCM is extremely tricky to implement safely.

ECDH itself is very easy to implement; it's just DH (which is probably the simplest algorithm in cryptography), but in a different group.

ECC (the group) is hard to implement safely. The NIST P-curves are tricky to implement relative to Curve25519.

But there's also a lot more study of how to safely implement the NIST P- curves than there is for how to make a constant-time GCM.

I don't know. They seem like comparably difficult tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has this been standardized yet? The latest draft I can find still has a bunch of 0xTBD values for the cipher suite numbers.

[https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls- chacha20-pol...](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls- chacha20-poly1305/03/)

<comment><USER7> Well, the submission literally begins with the words "ChaCha20-Poly1305 is modern, high performance cipher working in AEAD mode. It was standardized recently as RFC 7539." [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7539](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7539)

<comment><USER6> RFC 7539 documents the cipher itself. It's mostly just enshrining the existing specification as an RFC, except for changing the size of the nonce and block count to meet recommended nonce sizes.

There are some additional details required to use the cipher for TLS. In particular the new modes must be assigned entries in the TLS Cipher Suite Registry, which contain the official names and the numeric values used in the wire protocol. The current draft also specifies how to construct the nonce from the record sequence number and a shared secret, to avoid having to send a nonce with each record.

<comment><USER7> Ah, you meant standardization for use in TLS? I thought you were referring to the specification of the cipher. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is OpenSSL 1.1.0 really released? The comment linked does not say so, only that the feature has landed in vcs.

Edit: [https://openssl.org/news/newslog.html](https://openssl.org/news/newslog.html) says "Alpha 1 of OpenSSL 1.1.0 is now available"

<comment><USER9> They probably should have changed "released" to "will be included".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Public shout-out to Andy Polyakov. As a grizzled veteran of assembly coding from way back in the day, I find his work on openssl hugely impressive.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are lots of interesting features and changes in this (alpha 1) release. Release notes and full changelog: [https://openssl.org/news/openssl-1.1.0-notes.html](https://openssl.org/news/openssl-1.1.0-notes.html)</comment>


The French cafe is dying - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/world/europe/23cafe.html?em=&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I'm surprised by this article. I live in Toulouse, France and quite the opposite appears to be happening. Almost all of the run down cafés in the centre of Toulouse have undergone extensive refits in the last year and are now packed.

The article does make me wonder to what extent these bar owners are failing to update their run down bars and hence they are losing their clientele. My experience of the French is that they do love to complain about things not being like they used to be, perhaps these people should look to Toulouse as an example.

<comment><USER3> It may be that refits require loans, and loans are hard to get now; moreover, the article may have been talking more about cafes in smaller, less busy towns, which banks may be less willing to lend to.

<comment><USER4> It has nothing to do with loans. Over the past few years, the French government has banned smoking in public places and virtually banned drinking as well. If you can't smoke nor drink, what's the point of going to such a place?

<comment><USER5> Being with other people?

What have they done about drinking? Italy banned smoking, but not drinking. Austria has yet to ban much of anything anywhere, and thus it's impossible for my wife and 6 month old daughter to go out for coffee and cake with friends in a pastry shop and not come home reeking of cigarette smoke, which is pretty gross (babies should not smell like smoke).

<comment><USER4> > What have they done about drinking?

You just can't drink and drive any more. I'm not saying it like it's a bad thing, but it explains why people don't go to bars after work as much as they did before.

Regarding smoking bans, I think owners should be free to decide if they want to accept or ban smoking inside their property. You'll have family-friendly places with no cigarette smoke, and adult-friendly places with no loud babies; everybody would be happy!

<comment><USER5> > You'll have family-friendly places with no cigarette smoke, and adult- > friendly places with no loud babies; everybody would be happy!

Well, except you don't. Owners are free to decide here in Austria, and people smoke _everywhere_. We have located three places that are smoke-free here in Innsbruck: Ikea, McDonalds, and Burger King. People who are ordinarily very polite, always stopping at cross-walks and such, think nothing of lighting up in front of a pregnant woman or a baby.

I think this is one of the most interesting solutions I've seen to the smoking problem:

[http://oxonomics.typepad.com/oxonomics/2008/02/the- economcs-...](http://oxonomics.typepad.com/oxonomics/2008/02/the-economcs- of.html)

Which would be more likely to create the outcome you cite than either a blanket ban, or no rules at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not about the economic crisis in any way. The magazine just put that in to get a bit of the feeling of this being something related to now.

This is about a culture of young people that is changing. I spent a lot of time in Paris during the summers, and the young french people are no longer really Cafe people. When you think Cafe, you think of sitting down to relax and socialize and talk, but nowadays, who does that anymore?

The cafes are run by unfirable waiters who are no fun. The french cafe business seems the same as it always has been, but times them are changing. The business needs to adapt to the changes, and it's not really doing so.

The Cafes in Berlin are WAY more comfortable to chill out at than the french Cafes, because they offer a bit more than just a wooden table and a cup of coffee.

And of course, the internet means that you don't need to meet people to catch- up anymore, you can just send them a message.

Cafes are not entertainment for young people anymore. They need to bring back the entertainment factor.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is tragic, one of the delights of travelling in France was you could stop off in any small village, walk in to what looked like a café-bar and get the most amazing tasting simple food - an omlette that would make you go "wow".

</comment><comment><USER8> I live in Paris and I love these cafés, there are everywhere, you never have to remember a place like you would do with a restaurant. It's only about sitting at a table with friends, drinking a very regular coffee...

About privatization, I was surprised that in Manhattan, there isn't any Café, only Starbucks coffees, on every corner. I guess Paris' cafés will change the same way.

<comment><USER9> Paris, and the Parisian life-style are very different from the rest of France. The article was more about cafés in small towns/villages. I don't think parisians are going to replace their cafés by Starbucks within the next 20 or 30 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Disclaimer: I don't know anything about France_

This is a response to PG's comment about social, behavioral change. It is worth understanding the fundamental economic underpinning of this.

Two observations or assertions: a) People have more debt than a generation ago b) People have less leisure today than a generation ago.

These two assertions seem broadly true world-wide. As an example, young people can observe how many of their college-educated peers are graduating with excessive levels of debt. These two are connected - in fact, I believe (a) causes (b), to the extent that you can determine causation in social science.

Now who caused (a) i.e the culture of debt? Answer: Government policy, in particular central bank policy. Ultimately, money is credit in a fiat system, so when we talk about "Fed creating money out of thin air", they are really creating credit (i.e debt instruments) out of thin air. Eventually, cascading layers of debt entraps most of the population - corporations and individuals alike.

Debt causes serious cultural and social changes. Keynes had this right:

 _There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose._

</comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps I'm missing something. How does the state of cafe's in France even remotely relate to Hacker News?

<comment><AUTHOR> What I found interesting about it is that it shows the increasing tendency toward social fragmentation is even affecting France. Robert Putnam noticed this change in 1995 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone>). Networks will make the problem (or at least the trend) much worse. My wife and I have a couple friends staying with us at the moment, and it's striking how often all 4 of us are simultaneously sitting using laptops.

Historically this is quite a big change. The last social changes on this scale were probably the ones caused by cars. Though indeed this is partially caused by cars too.

<comment><USER2> I don't wish to criticize you or your friends, but this is similar to the problem of having multiple TVs in a house. The only solution to this problem is to put the computers away and talk to each other.

In my house we have computers in an office, we have a TV in one room, but we have strict hours for the TV for the kids, we all eat meals together with no books, TV or computers allowed.

BTW I think it would be more healthy if the four of you sat in front of one TV and watched a program together (especially if you laughed at it, talked about it).

<comment><USER12> I don't think it is exactly like TV. You aren't talking to the TV. You are actually 'talking' when online, just not with your mouth.

My son often asks to 'do letters' on <http://starfall.com>

I was fixing a bug the other day, and when I said we couldn't do letters, he assertively said "close computer!"

Pretty insightful for a 21 month old.

<comment><USER13> If he's programming before he's potty-trained, it's all your fault. ;)

<comment><USER12> He has taken a remarkable interest in robots, so it's a pretty close race at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's a shame, particularly if this effect becomes pronounced elsewhere.

There's been a lot written about the psychological/sociological role of places like cafes and bars: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Place>

</comment><comment><USER15> What about the ban on smoking that happened two years ago? Couldn't that also be part of the problem?

<comment><USER16> Yes. That's mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This shall be a much lonelier depression than the last one, and all thanks to our electronic distractions. It is sad.

<comment><USER18> Not necessarily. Social isolation is caused largely by the privatization of social objects. E.g., when everyone can afford their own barbecue they no longer need to go to the country club or town park to make dinner. If people have less money then theoretically there should be more demand for social objects to be socialized. In practice though even if a society shifts from being more gesellschaft to being more gemeinschaft, there are a few different forms this can take, not all of which would ameliorate the problem.

<comment><USER19> Good article on the subject:

[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/16/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/16/depression_2009_what_would_it_look_like/?page=full)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good God, the smoking nannies have got to France, too!

</comment><comment><USER21> All cafés won't die. But no surprise if the redundant, dark, sad ones that serve bad coffee, do.

</comment><comment><USER22> In Norway most cafés actually got more visitors after smoking was banned. Even the smokers themselves preferred the clean air.

This article about the poor French café's is just plain nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yeah, French culture of complaining at the bar in the NYT !

Our culture is spreading in the USA !

<comment><USER13> No, thank you!

You can take your good food and functional health-care system _elsewhere!_

<comment><USER4> Yes, as we all know it's the best health-care system that will ever be devised in the whole universe for the centuries to come. The only (minor) problem is that's it's _slightly_ expensive (can you spot France on this graph? <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotisations_sociales> )

Actually, it's so good a system that a lot of young qualified workers like me left this paradise to work abroad, just to spread the word and tell other countries how wonderful it is!

You're right about the food, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who's got experience with the haXe meta language? - <AUTHOR>

I like the idea that it can generate both Javascript and PHP code.  Does anyone have experience with the language?  Can you describe something useful/cool you've done with it? <comment><USER2> Haven't done it myself, but I know you can use haXe to make webOS apps/games. [https://developer.palm.com/distribution/viewtopic.php?f=70&#...</a>

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a neat example of Flash integration, and it's cool in its own right: <http://www.earslap.com/projectslab/otomata></comment>


A Beginner's Hip Hop Playlist - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/zmatilsky901/8485ba3c2a06c02e0a031cd52add4de6 <comment><USER2> I would have liked to see less mainstream artists and more underground artists.

Hip hop, by definition, at least to me, is more of an underground culture evolving from jazz, funk and poetry. I also think most people have heard these songs because they are pretty widespread on the radio, like Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Outkast, Drake, Beastie Boys... etc.

A better introduction would be to move through different hip hop periods to show how the sound has evolved as the genre has matured, including artists that are actually in it for the art and not solely for the money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very fair criticism, I think when I was putting this together I went the mainstream route because I wanted to get broad appeal from people who had never even given the genre a chance, but thinking more about it your suggestions make a lot of sense (i.e. moving through different periods).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a really shitty intro to hip hop. Clearly the author is like 16 years old as he neglected to include anything pre-1996 except Sabotage.

<comment><USER4> It's not totally terrible, but I do think its lacking without some Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul or maybe even The Roots for example - its quite Rap based and Rap != HipHop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestions, definitely all worth checking out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a decent list, though I'm not sure why Dave made it over Wu Tang or A Tribe Called Quest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wu Tang and Tribe definitely should've been included, bad oversight on my part... I included Dave more because I thought it would be interesting for people to see an international artist, not because I thought he was better than either of those groups. I guess I did have that covered with Skepta though.

</comment></comment><comment> norea-armozel The list needs some Kool Keith, MF Doom, and Aesop Rock, but I'm biased.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the omission of Aes was pretty bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's skewed heavily to really really new stuff (and they're on the money with Kendrick, Chance, J Cole) but …

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qpbd- fHbMyfWXlWPRA_X...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qpbd- fHbMyfWXlWPRA_XfgzYayc8cIjn8J9CuL-aNpE/edit#gid=0)

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ewEzXRHj8LGvUB3g9Qbn...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ewEzXRHj8LGvUB3g9QbnIK_m89I2Q5Y2LzsgqKOG6Xg/edit#gid=0)

The best place to start is [https://reddit.com/r/hiphopheads](https://reddit.com/r/hiphopheads)

<comment><USER8> Lists can't cover everything, even your best albums list is lacking. Where for example are Critical Beatdown, Hard to Earn, Stunts Blunts and Hip Hop, 2000, Paid in Full, Funcrusher Plus, Unfinished Business, Breaking Atoms on that list?

<comment><USER7> not my list, that's the standard response in r/hhh to the same question

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People being over critical here. Hip hop is great in all forms from underground to more popular artists, mumble to conscious.

Not sure what your goal of putting this together and posting on HN was though.

<comment><USER9> Post edit:

black thought is the GOAT though, how many rappers got a salaried day job on a talk show

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah I definitely should have had the roots on there, there were a few major omissions here that people have accurately pointed out. to answer your earlier question, no particular goal in sharing this on hn, just thought it would be fun to encourage people to listen to music that they may have avoided in the past and get feedback from hip hop fans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is more of a meta-comment, but is this being upvoted because it's on github? I think this is a great list, but there are many similar to it not hosted on github.

<comment><USER11> I'd say it's being upvoted because people think it's a good list. I don't recall seeing other such lists submitted to HN (which doesn't mean there haven't been, just that my memory's not perfect and I haven't seen every submission), and what hasn't been submitted can't be upvoted. I don't think where it's hosted has anything to do with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice playlist!

Shameless plug, but you can also check out a collection of my favorite songs on my Juicebox: [http://www.juicebox.dj/lawrence](http://www.juicebox.dj/lawrence)

It's mostly hip-hop, deep house, and experimental music.

</comment><comment><USER13> Upvoted this only because I feel that hiphop is a genre that doesn't appeal much to the hacker news crowd, which, from my experience, is more focused on metal, electronic or classic.

Good playlist but ultimately (and predictably) incomplete

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get why people use GitHub for their random lists of shit they like...</comment>


The Great Failure of Wikipedia (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808 <comment><USER2> Except for the fact that more than a decade later this great failure has not managed to make Wikipedia any less useful the vast majority of the world's population.

The fact of the matter is that regardless of the OP's whinging, a new model for encyclopedic knowledge was desperately needed for the late 20th century. Britannica and World Book were hopelessly embarrassing themselves with out of date content, and their vision for an online model of the products looked remarkably similar to their dead-tree models, including huge lead times to get changes made to specific entries.

Wikipedia, for all it's tribal bullshit, remains the gold standard of knowledge retention. And if it turns of people like the OP from contributing, that stinks. But it's better than the handful of editors EB or WB had.

</comment><comment><USER3> "This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It's that there's a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of twiddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders."

This. Best description of Wikipedia I've read so far.

<comment><USER4> Also this:

"A very large amount of maintainers leads to infighting, procedural foolishness, and ultimately a very slow advancement schedule."

Sounds like the no-confidence vote that many wikipedia editors signed last week.

<comment><USER2> I think that had to do with a board appointment with serious lapses in moral judgement when he worked at Google. That, as best I can tell, has little to do with the no-confidence in how editing is handled.</comment></comment></comment>