TV piracy groups formally adopt h264 - <AUTHOR> http://scenerules.irc.gs/t.html?id=2012_SDTVx264r.nfo <comment><USER2> Personally, I find it fascinating that this band of merry pirates is so organized, so rules-based. Out of a purely anarchic environment, they've managed to accept this kind of self-discipline. If only web-standards committees had that sort of power...

<comment><USER3> The (movie/audio/warez/demo) "scene" is not anarchic at all but rather a very well organised distributed processing machine. You probably know these guys organise into "groups" but there is lots of other stuff you likely do not know. I will describe below aspects of the warez scene, as it was some 10 years ago. I believe most observations continue to hold today and are probably mirrored in the movie-release scene. So:

"The scene" is made up of groups and each group is made up of specialists: suppliers provide material for release, crackers (or rippers, depending on context) remove copy protection and sometimes optional "filler" material, coders write useful helper software for the group and couriers distribute releases around the internet. Not all groups fill every role and some may have other roles I did not describe here (hackers, carders, hardware suppliers to name a few). There are sometimes partnerships between groups with different specialities; usually this occurs when there is an overlap in membership. For example: a release group may have close links with a particular courier group and those guys handle all their releases.

The distribution process is actually quite interesting. Each successful release group aims to have a small list of affiliations with well known and prestigious underground boards/ftp-sites. The quality and prestige of a board depends on the speed of its connection, its capacity, its group affiliations, the standing of its admins in the community and the speed with which new releases are uploaded to it. Each well regarded site is allowed _only one_ particular kind of affiliation: a games group affil, an apps group affil, a courier affil, an ISO affil -- you get the idea. The important thing is that there is only one of each. Affiliations carry prestige for a site and being affiliated with the best sites raises a group's prestige, so there is often heated competition between sites and groups for affils. This is the case at least in the so called "zero second" scene where releases are "traded" (i.e. re-uploaded) by couriers within seconds of being first uploaded. Once a release has been traded among all zero-second sites, they slowly filter down to lesser and lesser sites until eventually making their way to the Internet at large.

So why would you go this all this trouble? The reasons are myriad but usually it comes down to prestige: for example, among couriers there is a longstanding weekly and monthly competition between groups that prove their chops by trying to dominate each other. Similar competitions exist among release groups. There is huge pressure to be the first to release a highly anticipated game or well known application. Additionally, there are strict rules about how to release something -- what to keep, what can (and should) be omitted, how to package everything up, the inclusion of .nfo and .diz files and so on. Failure to comply with these strict standards renders a release invalid and causes it to be "nuked" (deleted) among the top sites. This process amounts to a public shaming of the group responsible and makes it possible for competing groups to snatch the credit by doing a "proper" release.

I could go on and on but I think that's enough for now. Hopefully I've convinced you that pirates aren't an anarchic bunch ;)

<comment><USER4> Thank you for insight on how scene works. But my main question - where is profit? I.e. what drives this scene and what these groups compete for?

<comment><USER5> Topsites can offer a pay to leech scheme. It's often a hushed topic and people don't like to talk about it (because it is insecure). Many topsites are at it.

A lot of scene members react badly to topsites like this, and often people infiltrate such sites and public a "scene notice" about them containing siteop nicknames, hostnames, IRC/FTP details, and screenshots.

Scene notices are like the news system of the scene. They allow people to publish messages that will disseminated to all the other scene topsites.

<comment><USER6> Let's not forget about hardware donors. Donate a hard drive? Get an account and some credits! Sites such as LSD and LOOP did this.. and many more still do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if the producers of the content they distribute will ever get that such a high level of quality.

DVDs are often full of interlaced content (even for short movies), broken subtitles, letterboxed pictures, jerking menus; sometimes they even resize the video to 4:3. The rare downloadable videos are often over compressed or barely compressed (thank you for the 2GB file to this 20 minute show). Similar things happens with bought music: I have paid for many albums distributed as badly- encoded MP3s in zip files with __MACOSX directories and ._DS* files.

<comment><USER8> That's because there is no competition for those releases, so there is little care for quality.

If content producers released their raw sources and content monetizers had to compete to produce the best possible downloadable and distributable versions, you'd see much better commercial releases. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They are so slow, anime groups seems most innovative and use Hi10P (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles>) since almost a year.

<comment><USER10> For the longest time, xvid was the standard for these guys. They still have standards requiring that all releases be packaged into multipart RAR files, "in 15, 20, or multiples of 50 MB". In other words, they are kind of inflexible and hidebound.

Anime fansubbing groups, in contrast, have no common standards except for -- to paraphrase the IETF motto -- rough consensus and regular releases. If some group wants to encode with Hi10P to get the same video quality at 2/3 the file size, they don't have to ask permission from anyone. Competition between groups gradually pushes forward the rough consensus, which is how they switched from xvid to x264, from container formats like AVI to the more flexible MKV, from SD to HD, and so on. The freedom to _not_ live up to a community standard of quality gave them the ability to exceed it.

There's probably a broader lesson in all this.

<comment><USER11> I remember reading years ago (possibly on Wikipedia's Scene article) that the multipart RAR thing was for faster distribution among the network of servers: Other servers can start downloading parts before the current server has finished fetching everything.

There's many layers of hierarchy (from the release groups themselves down to the hoopleheads at the bottom) so it speeds up releases significantly.

<comment><USER12> That may have been true at one point, but it is a totally obsolete practice due to Bittorrent.

<comment><USER13> What are you talking about? Do you think the cappers are seeding the torrents themselves?

A lot things happen before you start leeching from tpb...

<comment><USER14> Bittorrent isn't used just on public sites; you can use the same technology to share between a very select group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The title is a little misleading. This is a new standard for SD content.

<http://scenerules.irc.gs/t.html?id=2011_X264.2.nfo>

<comment><USER15> Thank you. I was a bit surprised by the mp4 container (instead of matroska), as well as DTS not being allowed. Now it all makes sense, and it's not really a big deal at all.

SD content is mostly being used on smartphones and tablets. For iOS users, this would require a lot of extra work to convert the files to the limited container choices.

<comment><USER15> A part of me would like iOS users to deal with the inconveniences of their more locked down platform, and also show some love for matroska. Conforming to restrictive policies is a good way of allowing restrictive policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder why they have this rule for the Audio: "Nero and Apple encoders are recommended. FFmpeg is banned."

What's wrong with FFmpeg?

<comment><USER17> Internal ffmpeg aac encoder is still experimental and tends to create broken AAC streams at times. The other options:

A) libfaac / libvo_aacenc are pretty bad in terms of quality and have problems with multi-channel audio B) libaacplus only encodes up to 64kbps in less supported AAC+

So Nero and Apple are pretty much only quality free audio encoders for AAC available right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apparently, some pirates are upset even threatened to boycott(!?)

[https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirates-go-nuts-after- tv...](https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirates-go-nuts-after-tv-release- groups-dump-xvid-120303/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I love the fact all warez groups stick to the old tradition of only making the 'i' lowercase in their names.

</comment><comment><USER20> Finally, pirates are using ISO standards instead of gross hacks like DivX. RAR is still lame and using the tag "HDTV" to refer to SD downsamples of HD sources is still misleading, though.

<comment><USER21> HDTV indicates source, not release quality. It's the same with bluray. The naming standards (and everything else for that matter) are highly regulated which is an impressive example of order by consensus since no one can give out orders.

RARs are an artefact of FTP transfers during which files would get corrupted, and not-so-fast connections of the past which made re-downloading the whole release somewhat inconvenient and wasteful.

<comment><USER13> I thought that rar was used so that the capper could split the archive across multiple files and begin uploading the content before the show was over.

<comment><USER22> I believe it's for non-torrent sharing methods such as NNTP (since you can't, I guess, upload hundreds of megabytes of data to a newsgroup in a single post).

<comment><USER23> This has nothing to do with NNTP, BT, P2P. All FXP to distributed FTP servers. The RARs are split so that if one server in the farm goes down, the whole release isn't corrupted. Same for transferring the data.

"Racers" move the els to multiple servers. Split RARs allow for multiple people to be moving parts of the same els at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I noticed this today on Usenet. I've switched to downloading all my TV from torrent sites to Usenet because it's much more reliable. Everything old is new again. It's nice to see that the animated shows I enjoy like Family Guy are available in HD resolutions at roughly the same download size as their previously available SD counterparts. I assume animation is really efficiently encoded with h264. Anyway, smaller files and higher quality = happy me.

</comment><comment><USER25> About time!

But requiring mp4 as container is a bad idea in my opinion. To playback an mp4 file you need to have it wholly (please correct me if I am wrong) so you cannot start watching before you downloaded it all. MKV would be so much better.

Please do not blindly reply with "But my XYZ device does not support MKV". Scene rules/standards have a lot of impact and might help making vendors support Matroska.

<comment><USER20> If the MP4 is "fast start" the index is at the beginning so you can "stream" it.

I suspect scene standardization on MKV would probably encourage Apple and Sony to deliberately _not_ support MKV (instead of not supporting it out of laziness, as they currently are).

<comment><USER26> When DivX made their H264 codec, DivX 7, they actually chose the matroska container. Of course, DivX has lost a lot of the brand name recognition they once had (their logo used to be on nearly every DVD player), so the penetration of matroska in this respect isn't that high. There is also WebM, of which the container uses part of matroska, which might help penetration (of course, its people like Apple and Sony who aren't likely to implement WebM).

Other then that, only a few embedded products support mkv (TVs, set top boxes). These are pretty much impossible to update, so it is pretty much impossible to recommend matroska at this point, since a large amount of people would watch these videos on such products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What makes it beneficial for ripping/distribution groups to coordinate like this? I've previously seen them agree on a common standard for the number and size of rar files a release is to be broken up into, and other things i can't remember the specifics of. Why do they do it?

PS: About time with dropping xvid for h264.

<comment><USER28> From reading many of the curiously well-informed comments, I suspect that the reason for standardization has to do with _speed_ and _validation for credit_. Since it sounds like "scene" people arbitrage new releases across scene FTP drop sites for upload credit, a standard method of "settling accounts" via scripts/bots would be useful. Arbitrage would be less efficient if files had to be transcoded between FTP sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wondered why I was suddenly seeing x264 instead of AVI for TV files. I thought it had to do with the lockers going down.

Well, in a way this will make things even worse for the CopyNazis. No longer will people have to convert from AVI to watch on their tablets and phones.

<comment><USER15> I suppose you mean mp4 instead of avi, as avi is only a container. So the discussion is two-fold, the container format (mp4, mkv, avi) and the encoding of audio, subtitles and video, of which the latter, h264 is pretty much the standard, and xviD/Divx are and have been for almost a decade, deprecated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Who watches SD anymore anyway?

Although I can just imagine all the pirates whining about "h.264 (or mkv as they call it) doesn't play on my dvd player, bring avi (as they call xvid) back".

I can't believe pirates are still burning crappy SD rips to DVD.

Someone I know stopped doing that when he wanted to watch a movie for the second time and realized it was quicker to leech a 1080p bluray rip than search through his mountains of VCD and SVCD discs for the one he downloaded just a couple of years back.

This pirate friend of mine welcomes the change, for the maybe 1 SD show he watches.

Although he personally wishes people paid more attention to sound codecs, nothing worse than downloading something broadcast in 5.1 and finding out the file only has a stereo downmix.

<comment><USER31> I do, for two reasons:

1) I watch it in the corner of my screen, so I'm fine with 320. 2) Here in Australia, we pay for usage. I'm not going to download something in a high quality if I'm near my limit

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone knows a good way to convert old xvid tv shows to h264 in batch?

</comment><comment><USER33> Much better than Xvid

</comment><comment><USER34> The main question is, with all this technical skill, are they going to release any films of their own?

<comment><USER35> Very little about film making has to do with x264 encoders and torrents. Anyone can do those things... Louis CK figured it out, anyway.

<comment><USER34> My point was that there is a large community that has gathered around the idea of sharing films. Large enough to make them want to issue standards. All I'm saying is with that size of community dedicated to sharing film, they should be producing more films. Especially if they dislike the current paradigm enough to remove themselves from its market.

<comment><USER36> If the skillsets overlap, that kind of shift towards production does happen. For example, the 80s game-cracking scene also became the 80s demoscene, because the various skills they acquired in cracking copy protection overlapped a lot with the kinds of skills that were useful for producing interesting interactive-art type software. It's not clear that x264 encoding and distribution produces skillsets that a particular helpful for film production, though, so I don't see a strong reason to expect them to start producing films.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Generating a HTML QR code - <AUTHOR> http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/html-qr/

<comment><USER2> If you're looking to generate QR codes, you can also use google charts api:

[https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr...](https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr&chl=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F&choe=UTF-8)

You can embed this into your webpages as images.

<comment><AUTHOR> Works fine as long as you don't want to generate new QR codes when you're offline. I have to admit, if you're intending to generate QR codes only online, the charts api is the better way to go, since it's more likely to have users with JavaScript disabled than users with image tags disabled _g_

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On Chrome 15 Win there seems to be some tiles alignment issue when browser zoom is set to something else than the default value. On the other hand recent FF and IE render just fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> saving the qr code doesn't add the .png extension (it just downloads a "download" file, not "download.png"). I'm using Chrome 15 on Win7.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! I know and I also know that this isn't nice. It is because QR-Designer is using the HTML Canvas' toDataURL function to save the image. The download then gets initiated by setting the dataurl as the document.location.href. Unfortunately I can't control the file name with that technique. I'd really appreciate any hints on how to solve that better (without a server)

Edit: By the way if you're wondering what he's talking about. It's QR- Designer: <http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/qr-designer/></comment></comment>


Copyright Holders Try to Stop Ravel's Bolero from Entering Public Domain (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160503/12070334335/copyright-holders-try-to-stop-ravels-bolero-entering-public-domain-using-co-author-trick.shtml <comment><AUTHOR> In French publishing, the role of Disney's "Mickey Mouse" is played by Maurice Ravel's "Bolero".

The work ultimately did enter public domain on Sunday, May 1, 2016:

[https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/1940369/copyr...](https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/1940369/copyright- expires-ravels-bolero-worlds-most-famous-classical)</comment>


Beyond data and model parallelism for deep neural networks - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/06/12/beyond-data-and-model-parallelism/ <comment><USER2> A bit late to the party, but just FYI, this research uses Legion, a next- generation runtime system we're developing for distributed task execution [1]. Part of the subtext of this paper is that Legion is just much, much more efficient than TensorFlow's execution engine....

[1]: [https://legion.stanford.edu/](https://legion.stanford.edu/)</comment>


The future of communications is passive. - <AUTHOR> http://laserlike.com/2008/08/03/the-future-of-communications-is-passive/

<comment><USER2> I think he raises two really interesting points

* How do I choose which things I want to share when most sharing becomes more ambient?

* How do we filter which things we want to see?

I think the second problem is being worked on a lot more right now than the first.

I also think that we should consider the issue of privacy. In order to give better recommendations a company needs more data, where is the balance between the best recommendations and handing over too much information to one company. Is there a way of providing recommendations with distributed data so that no one company has access to it all?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's a strange that some of the most liberal people in the world (bay area hippies, yay!) are also some of the biggest advocates to break down privacy barriers. For better or worse, I am personally in this camp as well.

But good post, I totally agree that the current phase of communication is going to be passive broadcasting. I think a more interesting question is ... what's next?

</comment><comment><USER4> How does he get his del.icio.us feed into Facebook?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can do it in any of these four ways (and likely many more).

1\. There is a Delicious FB application. That's how I have done it historically.

2\. Facebook added FriendFeed like features into its core functionality. I now have a direct Delicious feed into FB.

3\. You can feed Delicious into FriendFeed and then install the FriendFeed application into FB.

4\. You can get an RSS feed for your Delicious bookmarks and use that to directly feed into FB, FriendFeed, etc...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: One of the YC Demo Day companies has built my idea, what should I do? - <AUTHOR>

I was watching the YC Demo Day coverage with interest, seeing a few cool new companies emerge.
My heart sank when I saw one particular company (I won't name names). They had pretty much built the app I've reserved the next 3-or-so months to create.
I'm wondering what I should do. The market seems big enough to support two (or more) competitors, but ideas are a dime a dozen.
Should I pick something new, or stick it out and try to kick ass? <comment><USER2> After I started working on my idea, I found a firefox plugin with over 1 million downloads doing something extremely similar. And they had 12 guys with angel investment working on it too. Yesterday I found Google has a plugin to do it as well, with over 60k users who love it, and another startup apparently has 4.5 million downloads of their plugin, also in the same space (partially at least).

And yet, all it does is motivates me to "kick ass", as you put it so well. Let it motivate you as well. Having competitors:

1\. Validates the market for you

2\. Makes you work harder and faster than you otherwise might have

3\. Let's you see where they went wrong and avoid their mistakes and do what they did right, but better

<comment><USER3> 3 is a great point. Having competitors washes out to a boatload of free R&D. A bunch of mistakes you don't have to make. Learn everything you can about what your competitor has done and move forward. Who knows -- you might hit on something interesting mid-way through and pivot to an even better idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is always room for a competitor. I think you should launch as soon as possible. Don't worry much about your competition. They already have edge on you but you can build a better product or carve some useful feature.

Good Luck!

<comment><USER5> Fact.

No such thing as a market with just one company. Just make sure you do it better!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It depends - are you sure this isn't a winner-take-all market and do you have something that gives you some unique advantage over them?

Perhaps you have unique insights into the market which they don't understand? (Eg, Foursquare vs Google Latitude)

Perhaps you have a launch strategy that gives you something better users (Eg, Facebook vs MySpace)

Perhaps you can do a better job (eg, Dropbox vs every other previous backup service, Google vs every previous search engine)

They have money, first mover advantage and the advantage of YC contacts. Are you advantages enough to win?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting points, and some food for thought. Thanks for that.

I'm not sure it's a "winner take all" market - there's no real "social"/"viral" aspect, just the usual "word-of-mouth" that people aim for.

We have no money (don't need it), no YC contacts and it seems we'll be entering later - so we better have some other (big!) advantages ready.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We've recently invested in 4-5 companies that are very similar to startups in this latest batch of YC companies...and it has happened before. Sometimes it makes me queasy, but I usually take it as a confirmation signal that there is a market opening. Competition should not discourage you unless you're in a tiny market. And there are very few 'tiny' markets.

Unless you have a more compelling idea, I would "stick it out and try to kick ass" ;-)

Best of luck to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I guess I should say the same to you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Competition is indeed overrated. Everyone wants to be first/fastest/biggest, but quicker/cheaper/smarter competitors always pop up regardless of the industry you're in.

</comment><comment><USER9> Are they hiring? Being the first employee at a company which is working on an idea you're excited about might be almost as good as being the founder.

<comment><AUTHOR> This means I'd end up with 5% of the company (if I'm lucky) according to most of what I've read (could be wrong, of course).

The theory over there seems to be that the founders keep as much of the equity as possible, and pass it out the 1st/2nd/3rd employees in very small parcels.

Normally when I build a product here, it will be more of a 3rd/3rd/3rd split (Design/Dev/Business), or at least 20%/20%/60%.

I guess that means I'd prefer to be a founder, take on the extra risk (and the chance of extra reward!)

<comment><USER10> Still, maybe they'd prefere sharing with you and getting a great other cofounder then facing your awesome app in 3 months :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been waiting for a YC company to build a competing product to mine and I was delighted to hear about it this demo day.

I think it's time to keep calm and carry on.</comment>


Show HN: New version of Monod, the markdown editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TailorDev/monod/releases/tag/4.0.0 <comment><USER2> Project home: [https://monod.lelab.tailordev.fr/](https://monod.lelab.tailordev.fr/)</comment>


YouTube's thoughts on Flash and the video tag - <AUTHOR> http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting that the people whose business model actually rely on video distribution (Hulu, YouTube) have opinions that are the opposite of the common user consensus in Redddit or Hacker News ("Flash is dying", "HTML5 is ready", etc).

<comment><USER3> Maybe HTML 5 isn't ready for YouTube or Hulu, but for people who just want to post a video of their cat on their blog, it is a lot simpler to use the video tag than a Flash solution.

<comment><USER4> _for people who just want to post a video of their cat on their blog_

The simplest way is via a YouTube embed. So if it isn't ready for YouTube, it isn't ready for the web.

<comment><USER5> There's a distinction to be made here though. The reason it's not ready for YouTube is because HTML5 doesn't support things like content controls (e.g. DRM). Most of the videos on YouTube don't have that.

It's disingenuous to say that HTML5 isn't ready for YouTube; it's far more accurate to say that HTML5 isn't ready for _content providers_. I mean, I can't blame them. HTML5 video in its current state would turn YouTube Rentals into a free movie download service within minutes. Still, the core of what's being uploaded to YouTube is perfectly satisfied by HTML5's current offerings.

Perhaps what would be needed in that case is some kind of encumbered meta- format, one for which codecs could be installed on the local system that would provide the 'content protection' that copyright holders want so badly, without needing Flash as a bloated overlay. It wouldn't be much better than Flash, but it would be a start.

<comment><USER6> Are you saying all the points in the article, besides the DRM one, were untrue?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >For YouTube Rentals, video owners require us to use secure streaming technology, such as the Flash Platform's RTMPE protocol, to ensure their videos are not redistributed. Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this.

[clicks link]

>This rental is currently unavailable in your country.

Geographically segregated, non-redistributable content: just what the web needs!

<comment><USER8> Geographically separated content isn't unique to flash/rtmp, a user's ip address can still be matched with a region when retrieving content over http.

<comment><USER9> Nobody said it is unique to flash.

The original reasoning was, that without RTMPE they would be unable to provide such content.

Well, at least for me, they are still unable provide such content, so from my POV this argument could be removed from debate and nothing would change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Google, Mozilla, and Opera have all committed to support WebM, and we have > already started making YouTube videos available in the WebM format. Adobe > has also committed to support VP8, the video codec for WebM, in an upcoming > Flash Player release.

If Apple isn't going to support it for iPhone and iPad, and you seek a common video encoding, you might as well say straight out that it isn't viable.

The cover-all solution for video is exactly what YouTube uses right now - Flash and H.264. There is absolutely no chance in the foreseeable future of eliminating the H.264 piece, because of Apple. There is some chance of eliminating the Flash piece, depending on IE9 becoming widespread and Firefox either relaxing their stance on H.264 or becoming irrelevant some day.

These facts make people upset, but they are facts.

<comment><USER9> You are overestimating the power of Apple.

If Youtube uses native webm, with flash fallback for browsers that do not support webm and native application with low-resolution for iPhone (i.e. status quo on iOS), where do you see the problem?

Apple will have to provide a very good reason why they are sole platform vendor refusing to support webm in any way.

<comment><USER10> > where do you see the problem?

1\. iOS isn't just iPhone, but includes one of the fastest selling devices in tech history.

2\. low-res for the iPhone isn't going to cut it either anymore.

3\. Apple's customers are precisely the people who are most willing to pay for products. Treating them as second class web citizens is the worst business decision possible.

<comment><USER11> Apple's has a minority share of the mobile device market. You are drastically overestimating the importance of a vocal minority. iOS already doesn't support Flash; won't support Flash; can't support Flash because that would threaten the closed App Store. And the rest of the world has gotten along just fine. Indeed, the only people Apple's refusal to support Flash hurts, are Apple users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this." Indeed... <http://i.imgur.com/NWJut.png>

Also, is it so difficult to not use PR-speak in a blog?

<comment><USER13> Which specifically PR-speak are you referring to? I thought it was very direct.

<comment><USER14> The word 'excited' in press releases needs to die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I particularly like this part:

"While WebKit has recently taken some steps forward on fullscreen support, it's not yet sufficient for video usage (particularly the ability to continue displaying content on top of the video)."

I.e., we need to put ads over the videos.

<comment><USER16> Or annotations. Or the playback controls...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the things I'm surprised by on my iPad is videos on the web that won't play. By that I don't mean that most videos won't work because the iPad doesn't have flash - quite the opposite. I'm surprised when a video won't play _because it so rarely happens_.

Maybe I just browse all the wrong sites, but 90% of the video I come across on the iPad works just fine without jumping through hoops. Some of that is because YouTube videos are ubiquitous, but even going to a site like Penny Arcade for the first time on my iPad got me video that worked well and looked good.

HTML5 may not be ready for YouTube, but for sites that don't need (often- draconian) content controls, HTML5 is here already.

<comment><USER17> It's not surprising that someone on HackerNews won't be affected by the lack of video options - this simply isn't a creative arts forum.

But for creatives like myself, Apple's restrictions are difficult to bear. My own blog, vj.tv is difficult to view on my iDevices because half of the embedded videos are unplayable (vimeo only offers HTML5 playback directly from their site).

It's painful to have a hardware/OS/music company dictate the terms of how we can access our stuff when clearly the "standard" is lacking. I and others appreciate someone from YouTube coming forward and supporting our views and needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Following the link in the Content Protection section: "This video is not available in your country." (I am in Russia) Feels like discrimination.

Also if the video is streamed to my computer, which I have full control of, there is always a way to capture and redistribute it. That "content protection" is cheating both publishers and viewers.

<comment><USER19> > _"Feels like discrimination."_

It should, because that's exactly what it is.

Copyright agreements explicitly created the right to discriminate based on locale, so that copyright holders can set prices for individual countries based on local willingness and ability to pay to ensure maximum revenue at the expense of consumer rights and product value.

Vote with your currency of choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> >Concerns about patents and licensing have prevented some browsers from supporting H.264; this in turn has prevented the HTML5 spec from requiring support for a standard format.

I thought this was an odd statement since the original "standard format" was not H.264 but Theora. It seems you could equally rephrase that as "Concerns about profits and licensing have prevented some browsers from supporting Theora".

</comment><comment><USER21> I was expecting YouTube's thoughts in a video!

</comment><comment><USER22> John Harding, Software Engineer,

He is more the Engineering Manager for APIs, Mobile, and other aspects of Syndication at YouTube.

What's wrong with Google/Youtube using wrong titles in blog posts ? Do they tried to make us believe that even the low software engineer in the chain can publish under the Company's name ? Lame.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why it matters so much to you, but for the record, most managers in google are also software engineers. John's earned that title, let him use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Changing the policy of a large corporation is like turning a tanker ship at sea. To avoid upsetting the balance, one has to go verrrry slowly.

This was a load and clear signal that Youtube knows full well that the time of HTML5 is coming soon.

<comment><USER2> Or maybe a loud and clear signal for people to stop assuming they're doing it just because of their beta HTML player.</comment></comment>


When Computers Were Human - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/when-computers-were-human <comment><USER2> I wonder if there is any reason why those computers were all women. Or is it just a highlight from the article?

In any case, congratulations to all of those brave souls, who did a tremendous job back then!</comment>


Dropbox down? ...And now up! - <AUTHOR> http://dropbox.com/

<comment><USER2> According to their Twitter, they're doing a DB Upgrade:

<DropboxOps> We're currently upgrading our database server. We'll require about 30-45 minutes of maintenance until everything's back up.

<comment><USER3> Confirmed on the forums and status site.

<http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=35092>

<http://status.dropbox.com/>

I'm a relatively new user (past few months) but do they usually send out any notice on downtime?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm debating whether it would be a good idea to have the dropbox client be aware of planned downtime and inform the user accordingly.

<comment><USER5> Inform the user why? What are they going to do differently as a result? I use Dropbox precisely so I don't have to concern myself with server downtime, database upgrades, etc. and I'm guessing most other users are the same way. Just sync it when the service is back up, I'm okay with not knowing.

<comment><USER6> This morning, my dad made a few changes to his files in dropbox at home, as usual, turned off the system and went to office. After a couple of hours, he calls me and asks me why his files weren't synced as they were everyday. Our initial thought was that he turned the home computer off before dropbox could sync, but as you might have guessed, it is because dropbox was down.

Not sure about everyone, but my dad could've definitely used some warning that dropbox would be down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Works now. That was quick.

</comment><comment><USER7> the power of Kevin Rose?</comment>


Tech Jobs Aren't Recovering - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-jobs-especially-down-outside-tech-hubs-2020-7 <comment><USER2> Why should this come as a surprise? The US is losing a third of its GDP this year.

So many junior software jobs were recently incentivized to be little more than button pressers reliant upon tools and frameworks to do the job. There is very little value in that and such value is mostly superficial. Once employers realize they can get by with fewer developers when those developers aren't afraid to write original code those over paid lost developer jobs aren't coming back.</comment>


Natural language processing of Federal Open Market Committee meeting minutes [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.twosigma.com/uploads/SV_05_16.pdf <comment><USER2> Where is the business value here?

No shit the FOMC talks about the kind of stuff that is in this report.

Two sigma accuracy just doesn't cut it. Real world business processes aim for six, ordinary manual processes can reach three easily.

Just because academic ML people have a party when they get one sigma accuracy doesn't mean two sigma is good enough for commercial applications -- it just means you are always a bridesmaid and never a bride.</comment>


Ask HN: Please Try Out My Reddit-Like Map - <AUTHOR> http://www.trailbehind.com/upload/upload_gps <comment><USER2> You should really grab someone off the street and seat them in front of your app, with a notebook or recorder in your hand.

You seem to have done a good deal of work, and have some neat stuff. However, after a couple of minutes digging, I can only surmise it's about hiking trips, and it should somehow be possible to see foot trails - if I could get the inscrutable markers to do something ...

<comment><AUTHOR> I do certainly do some "man-on-the-street" testing :), but, I'm always looking for more feedback just like yours.

I'm sorry I dropped you on this page for your first go. You might find the experience of using the site less confusing if you go to the home page: <http://www.trailbehind.com>. There is a legend for the markers, and we display hiking trips. This page is just for adding data to the map.

In response to your bugs:

1) I should add the home page legend to this map, which is no problem, just an oversight

2) There are trails on the map, at zoom level 15 and above. We're working on showing them earlier, but browsers choke on our method of display right now. We have many ten thousands of GPX files indexed.

<comment><USER2> _This page is just for adding data to the map._

Ah, mystery explained. I usually read the URL, but it's late here ...

P.S. Have you thought of mining a series of pics with geo data ? With the newfangled kit out there, should make the 'upload' pretty easy for anyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I am working on a feature that merges a GPX track with a Flickr set based on timestamps. One of the sites we index to our map actually does something similar: www.everytrail.com. They merge tracks with photos, but don't use Flickr.

Also, we already show Flickr photos for places on the map via the Photos tab. We are typically be able to show photos of places based on that alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you know a good webpage about a park, trail, or other outdoor place, please attach it to that place(s) on the map.

First, you select stuff on the map.

Last, you can add a link, Reddit-style, or write a report using our site.

I would really appreciate any feedback!

All these pages get indexed to the TrailBehind Map (<http://www.trailbehind.com>), and they show up in Recent Reports, (<http://www.trailbehind.com/new_stuff>), which sort of looks like a Digg or Reddit with a map.

<comment><USER3> is there a way to "correct" a marker? the marker for a lake near my house is about 7 blocks away from the actual lake =P

also...I can't find a way to add content...

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no marker correction right now. We pull the data from geonames.org and USGS waypoints, and it's supposed to be pretty accurate. But I'll file a bug about doing something like that.

Also, to add data to the lake, simply click the lake. Then click Save Map. That will create a trip page with a "File A Report" link, and you can add a link or report or whatever.

<comment><USER3> perhaps label the button as "edit map" then....I had the impression that "Save Map" means to save the map at its current state, a la MS Word.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead? - <AUTHOR> Tired of other discussions dominating the front page? Tell us what you're working on right now, and please include a link to actual code. Let's get back in touch with hacking! <comment><USER2> Right now I'm working on adding extensions to Chrome. The majority of the system is in this directory:

[http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/brows...](http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/extensions/)

And what I've been working on most recently is the code that renders little HTML-based toolbars. My most recent change fixed a race that caused them to not render correctly on the first run:

[http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=...](http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=14914)

I think one of the coolest parts of the system is the way that api methods are routed from JS running in extension processes to the browser process and back. The core of that is here:

[http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/brows...](http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/extensions/extension_function_dispatcher.h?view=markup)

</comment><comment><USER3> Two projects. One is scraping and indexing data on corporations registered in tax havens, mainly for the purpose of helping transparency researchers follow the activities and connections of businessmen, politicians, etc. I've done Panama, and am now working on a couple of others:

<http://ohuiginn.net/panama>

[http://www.ohuiginn.net/mt/2008/12/opening_up_a_tax_haven.ht...](http://www.ohuiginn.net/mt/2008/12/opening_up_a_tax_haven.html)

The second project is building a decent interface to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The current edition is online, charging ~$200/year for access, but the first edition is out of copyright, sitting on archive.org, and just waiting for somebody to make it accessible without the need to download several GB of scans.

<comment><USER4> Those are both great ideas. Please consider a donate doohickey for each project. I would gladly contribute to both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been working on my Z-Machine interpreter library again. It basically started as a project to turn Frotz into a Ruby extension (Frotz, probably the most popular interpreter, is written in C).

The code has undergone quite a few transformations now. Frotz uses a lot of static memory -- it's basically setup to run a single zcode program at a time. Which makes sense, of course.

For my library, I wanted to be able to run more than one program (or multiple copies of the same program) at the same time. So, I basically rewrote the core of Frotz. All the memory for a Z-Machine is broken up into structs which are passed around.

There were some fun memory management issues related to running multiple programs. The typical zcode program consists mostly of static memory (lots and lots of strings and code), so that static memory can be shared between programs. I have a test where I load something like 100,000 copies of minizork into memory and the process size "only" jumps to 118MB. Of course, normal code doesn't need that many simultaneous Z-Machine instances so garbage collection keeps memory pretty reasonable.

Last time I worked on dorothy, I setup a demo webapp here:

<http://ifrotz.org>

Which illustrates why I wanted to be able to run multiple programs. The demo runs minizork, dynamic memory is dumped and restored between requests. The hints, exits, and history feature is possible because the server "listens in" on your game and the games others have played.

Lately I've been working on more memory inspection stuff, and now I have to work on some of the unfinished Z-Machine features (I've only implemented the v3 screen model).

The code is on Github:

<http://github.com/eki/dorothy/tree/master>

</comment><comment><USER6> Right now (please call me on this sometime, it'd help me) I'm working on a clone of Burp, the industry standard web penetration testing tool, in Cocoa. I started with RubyCocoa, but I've ditched it for Objective C. It is (surprisingly) liberating to work in C after spending a year in Ruby; any time something looks expensive or naive, you just tell yourself, "what I'm doing here can't possibly be more expensive than what MRI Ruby would have done", and you go about your day. Highly recommended.

The last code I managed to publish was Ruckus:

<http://github.com/tqbf/ruckus/>

(a better description: <http://wiki.github.com/tqbf/ruckus/crash-course>)

Ruckus is a Ruby DSL replacement for Peach Fuzz, Mike Eddington's famous Python fuzzer library. It is distinguished by being about 100 times slower, using a DSL instead of XML, and providing a DOM-style interface to any packet format (you can tag fields, arbitrarily nested in a tree structure, with classes and id's, and then fuzz them using CSS selectors).

I have a JDWP JVM debugger (or rather a thin protocol driver) written in Ruckus if anyone's interested in seeing what it actually looks like. We never get to publish the actual protocols we build with this.

My programming "day job" (I'm one of 4 developers on the project) is Playbook:

<http://runplaybook.com>

<comment><USER7> Never had I felt more like I was tricking software into doing what I want to do than when I was trying to use Peach. I mean Michael's a nice guy, but you email the peachfuzz list or him personally on issues you're having and he convinces you that it's you not using the tool correctly and that you _really_ don't want the feature you're asking. Modifying code was hellish because it's just thousands of lines of kludge, written as far from Python's usual styles as possible.

Good stuff on the Burp clone. Any plans to publish it eventually?

\--

As for me, the last project I was working on is a complex structure analyzer plug-in for HexFiend along with basic plug-in functionality to support it.

<comment><USER6> I'm planning on wiring Ruckus into Hexfiend, so you can highlight hex characters Ethereal-style and using CSS selectors from packet formats.

I don't know what I'm going to do with the Burp clone, but if you ask me for it, I'll hand it over. =)

<comment><USER7> I'd like to take a look at the burp clone, not sure if I'll contribute.

Do you want help on wiring to hexfiend?

<comment><USER6> I just used RubyCocoa, but I haven't done much of the UI stuff yet. My contact info's in my profile, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm working on a programming language that has builtin support for reloading code at runtime. It'll also support various ways of modifying code at runtime, like with visual interfaces. The primary usage is for making interactive graphical apps, like games.

Intro is here: <http://andyfischer.github.com/circa/intro.html>

code is here: <http://github.com/andyfischer/circa/tree/master>

<comment> cool-RR Wouldn't it be better to modify an existing, popular language to support this feature?

<comment><USER8> It would be better, but I want to do some cool things that I'm not sure if I can support in an existing language.

One thing is automatically preserving state across a reload. This is really hard if I allow the programmer to store state any way that they want- I can't tell which things I should preserve. So the language forces the programmer to declare their stateful things in a special way.

Another thing is introspecting on code. I want to be able to click an image and then see all of the calculations that went in to that image's position (maybe so that I can change them). But this is pretty hard in most languages. Aliasing makes it hard. So this language discourages operations which are hard to introspect.

So I could theoretically support Ruby or something, but it would turn out to be "not really Ruby", because there would be a lot of stuff you wouldn't be allowed to do.

<comment> matthew-wegner Unity is a game engine that uses Mono as its scripting languages. You can recompile on the fly (you frequently play the game in-IDE during development). All public variables are exposed to its inspector and survive this recompilation.

It's a great engine in general: <http://unity3d.com>

<comment><USER9> Mono is not a scripting language. The Unity Scripting language is similar to ECMAscript, but is not standard and does not have comprehensive documentation. It is true that you can interact with the mono / .net 2.0 system libraries.

... and you have about a 1/3 chance of it crashing if you are using the recompile on the fly as you edit.. command p, alt+tab, save, alt+tab, command p...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cool-RR I'm actually looking for a new name for my project, so maybe someone here will have a good idea?

It's a framework for writing, running and analyzing simulations. It could take any kind of simulation: Physics, game theory, epidemic spread, electronics, whatever.

It's in Python.

This is where it currently lives:

<http://github.com/cool-RR/physicsthing/tree/master>

(Keep in mind it's still a very young project)

The readme there was written when I had mostly physics simulations in mind. Now I've generalized the project to take any kind of simulation. I'll update the readme soon to reflect that, but I would really like to find a good name. Maybe something with a suffix or prefix of "Sim", but maybe not.

Anyone has any ideas?

<comment><USER10> Fake Snake (a different way of saying "python simulator" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A .NET interpreter for embedded/constrained systems where MS.NET or Mono aren't suitable: <http://www.dotnetanywhere.org/>

It now implements most of the core .NET 2.0 spec, a usable subset of the base class library, and an implementation of a Graphics device suitable for embedded devices.

Not the fastest of .NET runtimes, but its disk/memory footprint is surprisingly small, and it (mostly) works!

<comment><USER12> I will have to give this a shot :) I've been looking for good high level ways to program embedded boards (like the Beagleboard)... definitely going to give this a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Right now I'm working on a natural language task management system. Basically you enter something like "12 page paper in project hist201, due apr 23 est. 8h high priority" and it understands what the hell you're trying to say: project, deadline, estimated time, priority. It also checks similar tasks (using naive Bayesian classifiers) and gets you a probability distribution of velocities (estimated / actual / relevance for a word), and supposedly, but I am still working on it, will show you a probability of finishing it on time given past history of similar workload.

The goal is to be able to either Tweet your new tasks, add them in bulk (several lines), or even do something like "<http://taskulus.com/12> page paper in project hist201 due apr 23 est 8h high priority" and then receive a lot of analysis.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great idea, I have a ton of one-off side projects I'd love to share (and get some awesome hacker critique as well)

I've written a simple ruby worker management "framework" known as theman, which is a thin wrapper atop rufus-scheduler and god: <http://github.com/jcapote/theman>

Also, there's fieldy, a simple fixed-width field reader/writer library for ruby exposed as DSL: <http://github.com/jcapote/fieldy>

Lastly is AtomLog, a way to parse and expose ruby's Logger output to an atom feed: <http://github.com/jcapote/atomlog>

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm working on an interactive fiction framework with a web framework flavour. It's my first Ruby project and depends on Shoes for cross-platform UI. Defining rooms, items, and non-player characters is done in YAML.

I'm about midway through the project and, as a test and demo for the platform, am converting the 1978 game "Pirate Adventure" to the framework. Once the framework is done my partner and I plan to use it to create an adventure game based on the fashion world. This will inevitably lead to a movie deal and untold riches.

All in all, it has been fun, educational, and a nice break from my day job wrangling Drupal.

The code (so far) lives here:

<http://github.com/mcantelon/fashion-quest/tree/master>

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm working on an experimental semantic web browser for Android called Mosembro. The point of the project is to show that semantic meta data can be used to make some tasks much less painful to perform while using a mobile web browser.

Project page: <http://lexandera.com/mosembro/> Source code: <http://code.google.com/p/mosembro/source/browse/>

</comment><comment><USER16> Rudy! It's a development and deployment tool for Amazon Web Services that's configured via a Ruby DSL. It helps organize EC2 infrastructures into environments and roles (plus some other cool stuff).

<http://github.com/solutious/rudy>

        environment :stage do
          ami "ami-5394733a"
          size 'm1.small'

          role :app do
            positions 2
            addresses '184.108.40.206', '22.214.171.124'

            disks do                 # EBS volumes
              path "/rudy/disk1" do
                size 2
                device "/dev/sdr"
              end
            end
          end

          role :analyzer do
            ami "ami-6aff24aa"
          end
        end

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm working on implementing a hyperspatial text classifier in Haskell. It's conceptually similar to the hyperspace classifier in CRM114 (essentially a weighted nearest-neighbor search), but shouldn't crash as much or corrupt its data files. I've thought of some interesting problems to point a fast and effective classifier at that aren't spam detection.

I'm also working on a library/framework in Clojure for apps that process a folder full of files in some way. The idea grew out of a Clojure program I wrote to make a folder full of images greyscale (<http://github.com/zakwilson/imagesieve/tree/master>).

<comment><USER18> Zak, by classifier I hope you mean "categorizer". i.e. given a text and a list of categories, return which categories the text belongs to, along with a confidence number.

If so, I say chase that thought a bit. You might save me from actually messing with NLP.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I do. The usage is essentially identical to the Bayesian probability classifiers commonly used for spam detection. I compared several of the classifiers available in CRM114 and found hyperspace to be the most accurate as well as being much faster when checking a large number of categories.

<comment><USER18> Amazing. This is pretty cool :-)

The thing is 100% statistical right? It doesn't know anything about the grammar of a natural language (say, English.) right?

<comment><USER17> It's entirely non-statistical. It works by measuring the Hamming distance between samples using features consisting of single tokens, sequences of tokens and sequences of tokens with gaps. For example:

The

The quick

The quick brown

The quick ... jumped

would all be features of the input "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog".

It doesn't know anything about grammar, though as a performance optimization it might be useful to limit the length of features to detectable sentence boundaries. I intend to make that behavior optional. More information here: [http://crm114.sourceforge.net/docs/KNN_Hyperspace_Filters/KN...](http://crm114.sourceforge.net/docs/KNN_Hyperspace_Filters/KNN_Hyperspace_Filters.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm working on improving eventlet: <http://devel.ag- projects.com/~denis/eventlet/>

Eventlet is a networking library that uses greenlet, Python implementation of coroutines [<http://codespeak.net/py/0.9.2/greenlet.html>] to handle asynchronous events in a synchronous way. Greenlet can be thought as an analogue to Python's enhanced generator, however, without "yield" keyword and the limitations it brings.

For the applications that are network-bounded it effectively brings Erlang- like scalability in Python: you can spawn as many greenlets as you like (they're cheap) (e.g. one or several per incoming connection), control their execution, etc.

If that sounds unclear, just look at the examples:

[http://devel.ag-projects.com/~denis/cgi- bin/hgweb.cgi/file/t...](http://devel.ag-projects.com/~denis/cgi- bin/hgweb.cgi/file/tip/examples/connect.py) [http://devel.ag- projects.com/~denis/cgi-bin/hgweb.cgi/file/t...](http://devel.ag- projects.com/~denis/cgi-bin/hgweb.cgi/file/tip/examples/twisted_server.py) [http://devel.ag-projects.com/~denis/cgi- bin/hgweb.cgi/file/t...](http://devel.ag-projects.com/~denis/cgi- bin/hgweb.cgi/file/tip/examples/)

Compared to the original eventlet (home - <http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Eventlet>) our branch has \- a number of bugs fixed and "onions" removed \- twisted integration - you can use any twisted reactor or twisted protocol or any other feature you like (this part is heavily influenced by corotwine) \- proc module for advanced coroutine control (spawn, link, waitall, etc)

</comment><comment><USER20> Another programming language: <http://www- student.cs.york.ac.uk/~anc505/code/hasp/hasp.html>

I'm not doing any fancy compiler stuff - the target language is Haskell so that's all done for me.

*Edit: And I should probably say something about it :) Its an s-expression based language so it looks like a Lisp and you can use macros on it, it also reads by indentation if you want it to look like Python, and then the rest of it just comes from Haskell :)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm working on a short product(license) key generation and validation framework for Mac OS X based on elliptic curve digital signatures. The goal is to write a replacement for AquanticPrime (which uses long RSA signatures). It's based on OpenSSL.

Code: <http://github.com/dchest/ellipticlicense/tree/master> currently in pre- alpha stage.

Would love to get code/security review!

Also I recently wrote a very simple Bayesian classificator for spam in Python: <http://github.com/dchest/pybayesantispam/tree/master>

</comment><comment><USER22> I am working on a Ruby wrapper for the GitHub API. It's called octopi (contraction of octocat and api):

<http://github.com/fcoury/octopi>

Documentation will be updated here as well: <http://rdoc.info/projects/fcoury/octopi>

</comment><comment><USER23> Working on a messaging client that integrates Twitter and GTalk... And I mean really integrates. The end user doesn't know the difference between IM and twitter but the context in which the user sends a message decides the service to use. It's C# and WPF.

<http://github.com/jcbozonier/alloy/tree/master>

<comment><USER24> That would be a really useful thing. Keep us posted when that goes live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Mentioned in some comment thread, but I just fixed LuckyTubes (<http://www- personal.umich.edu/~swolchok/luckytubes/>), my YouTube search/download/rip tool using youtube-dl and ffmpeg, to correctly rip the audio stream from the downloaded video without transcoding to 64 kbps MP3 (oops). It's called LuckyTubes because it does a "feeling lucky" YT search for the terms you type in. Code is at <http://github.com/swolchok/luckytubes/> .

No code for this project, but UmBus (<http://mbusreloaded.com/umbus>) is my pet project to let UMich students get the GPS-estimated arrival times for the uni buses via text messaging. If I weren't so late to the party, I would try to compete with www.nextbus.com .

</comment><comment><USER26> Back-testing a support vector machine -based text classification system that models daily stock news, looking for mispriced volatility. A big stealth project, with just the Ruby option pricer here:

<http://tinyurl.com/chmk7p>

Need much more realism than Black-Scholes for the model training!

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm developing a CSS generator called Stylish. It's pretty rudimentary right now, but progress is relatively quick (for me, anyway).

Code: <http://github.com/ionfish/stylish>

Docs: <http://ionfish.github.com/stylish>

<comment><USER28> You might want to consider naming it something else since there is already a firefox addon called stylish: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/2108>

Yes they are different products but I still think there might be some confusion...

<comment><USER27> There are a limited number of good names in the world! :)

To nitpick slightly, I wouldn't call my library a product. If you have any suggestions for alternative names I'd be happy to hear them.

<comment><USER28> I guess that the firefox addon isn't really a product either; it was a late night.

Here are a few names off the top of my head:

      * Stylee

      * EaseSS (Easy Style Sheets? :))

      * Flair ease

      * Stylify (Style-ify, Styleify)

      * Chic Sheets

Good luck and happy coding!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm working on an interactive US map using canvas. See <http://gregstoll.dyndns.org/marriagemap/>

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm working on a program that renders Julia/Mandelbrot set fractals using the GPU. I know there are a few other such programs out there, but I'm trying to make gpufrac really configurable. It has a bunch of features already (normal mapping and orbit traps are my favorites).

<http://github.com/emezeske/gpufrac/tree/master>

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been working on a couple of javascript projects.

The big one is best described as iTunes for Flash games - a rich internet app for creating and managing a library of Flash games - <http://www.webalon.com/gamemanager/>

The second thing that I have been working on is a resizeable javascript image carousel featuring a variety of transitions - you can see it in action at: <http://www.webalon.com>

I hope to open source the latter when complete

<comment><USER32> You've created some really awesome stuff!

<comment><USER31> Thanks mate. Glad you liked it. You working on anything interesting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A music recommendation engine: <http://theperceptron.com> (code: will be open sourced soon).

A site for writing your autobiography in songs: <http://playmary.com> (code: <http://github.com/maryrosecook/playmary/>)

<comment><USER12> Your domain name - are you using neural networks for your recommendations?

<comment><USER33> Ah, no. I bought the domain name because, for a while, I was going to call my new band The Perceptron. I ended up calling it something else, but figured I could reuse the domain for the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A tree-based forum visualization using js and canvas. It is intended to make it easier to follow longer discussions.

Link (using proggit as test data): <http://www.webnodes.org/reddit>

Source: <http://github.com/csytan/webnodes/tree/master>

<comment><USER35> I like this a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm writing my own compiler and designing my own programming language, just like everybody else!

Practical, no. Fun, YES.

<comment><USER18> Practical, yes.

I am going back to 5 year old notes on instruction scheduling and using the same code and algorithms to deliver targeted advertisement on the net.

<comment><USER37> As a former compiler junkie that sounds interesting, can you elaborate?

<comment><USER18> [Edit: Sorry man, this is my bread and butter. Excitement got into my head and I barfed out a few things I should have left out.

I hope I don't come across as rude and evasive if I said "sorry, can't give any more info; just think hard about it" :-) ]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've been working on K7, an extension library/framework for linking the V8 javascript engine with existing C/C++ libraries. Kind of slow going since work has gotten busier, but hoping to get back to it soon.

<http://github.com/isaacs/k7>

</comment><comment><USER39> For the last 6 months or so I've been working on a 'wikipedia for images' type site. I'm trying to fix all the UI deficiencies that bug me about other image sites. As a personal project with no deadline I've had a lot of fun premature- optimising the crap out of it! For example the thumbnails are in strips of 50 for a huge reduction in http requests. Here's the test set I've been using-

<http://imagecorpus.com/marylin-monroe>

My plan is to initially scrape a lot of hard-to-browse public domain image sets, for example the Library of Congress daguerreotype collection <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/daghome.html>. And then I'll solicit contributions from the public to bulk it out.

I was going to wait till I was ready to launch before posting here, but that could be a while... Any criticism/suggestions or offers to help are very welcome!

</comment><comment><USER40> It's a Good Day to Start Hosting for Tips

<http://ourdoings.com/2009-04-14>

I'm using tipjoy to create an innovative revenue model.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm developing a wysywig web development tool - <http://www.leapdesigner.com> Version 1 is up, Version 2 will enable you to create interactive web sites.

<comment><USER42> Bingo! A well written tool is a huge necessity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm working on integrating the Windows 7 bootloader and some of its new functionalities with Linux and OS X as a part of EasyBCD 2.0

<http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1>

</comment><comment><USER44> My project is InfoML (<http://infoml.org/>), a proposed standard for storing "chunks" of (human-readable) text and annotating it with various useful metadata, including tags and bibliographic information. I hope there will eventually be a community of developers who will find InfoML useful and will build a variety of software tools for manipulating data stored in this format.

<comment><USER45> I think a microformat schema or schemas would be more beneficial for this kind of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> On the computer animation front, I am currently finishing up work with my group on our animation, Rumble in the Roses. We should have our final, rendered short done in a week or so.

<http://cloud.cs.berkeley.edu/~cnm190/roses/>

</comment><comment><USER18> I am trying to keep online advertising fun by doing it in Lisp.

I "write" one web server a day, mostly customizing hunchentoot in some way. I have it malleable and obedient; nothing like having total mastery over your tools. I am at the point where I can look at a Lisp web app and I can _see_ the cost of each form; thanks to weeks of disassembly, tweaking and benchmarking.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> e.g. Here is the code for my Extension Methods rewriter:

[http://github.com/raganwald/rewrite_rails/blob/master/lib/re...](http://github.com/raganwald/rewrite_rails/blob/master/lib/rewrite_rails/extension_processor.rb)

Context:

[http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-04-2...](http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-04-28/extension_methods.md#readme)

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm working on the API for my PDF/Web Form site <http://www.doculicious.com>. The initial release will allow reading of saved entries and posting of new entries. This is cool, 'cos it will let people use their own HTML forms to submit data and create PDF's from the templates they've created.

</comment><comment><USER48> Meta comment: _everyone_ is using github!

<comment><USER30> Git won me over when I found out that I could make all kinds of commits willy- nilly. I make a lot of small commits to my local repo throughout the day. At the end of the day I then take the time to go through them, merging related commits and removing stupid commits before I send my changes upstream. I've found that it's much easier to avoid breaking the build this way.

<comment><USER49> Another way to not break the build is to add a local git hook that compiles your project before allowing a commit. Assuming you compiled and tested your change already (you did right... :) the compile hook will take no time at all. Using this I have only commited broken builds once or twice when it built on my macbook, but not on Linux (case insensitive file system) Wrote up more details on hooks along with some examples here:

<http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2008/10/git-hooks.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Not _right now_ , but here's last night's foray into TKinter (plus explanation):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=585714> (edit: code in the pastebin link, but not much use if you don't know why you can't type into the textbox).

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm working on a AWS stack based web crawler. It uses S3 and SimpleDB to coordinate instances. It's implemented in Python/Twisted, and extensible via plugins.

It has a low cost of entry in terms of code and costs and scales horizontally, so it's useful for all sorts of aggregation.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm currently working on a mp3tag-like tag editor for Linux called puddletag which you can find at puddletag.sourceforge.net. Don't download it yet though. I'm releasing a update tomorrow with a large number of bugfixes and improvements.

</comment><comment><USER53> Last night, I was browsing the Digital Mars D compiler source to see how they detect and convert files in all the various UTF encodings to UTF-8. This is for a C++ pre-processor that I'm writing in D.

I'm also trying to get a basic OGRE 3D app up and running on my MacBookPro. I want to use D + OGRE to build my personal editor / IDE. It has to be PC/Mac/Linux.

I'm slowly finishing an update to my iPhone app, iLightning <http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning>. Right now I'm working on some animated transitions between the main view and the prefs screen.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm building tools for myself and other web developers at www.binaryage.com:

      FirePython - realtime logging from Python into Firebug

      Visor - Quake-like terminal.app - took Visor by Blacktree and pushed it further

      FireRainbow - javascript syntax highlighting for Firebug

      xRefresh - browser refresh automation

My most ambitious project is www.hashpage.com, which will be web-based tool for creating mashups. Imagine WYSIWYG grid based editor for visual prototyping + Bespin for coding on top of GitHub, sites are published in the cloud (App Engine).

</comment><comment><USER55> A very basic embedded operating system for an ARM7-based microcontroller. I'm still in the early stages.

I have no illusions that I'm going to write anything better than the other RTOSs out there; it's just for the kicks of working on the bare metal. Sort of exhilarating to apply voltage to a microcontroller, and know that only _your_ instructions are running.

A number of EE/CS programs have a course where you do this over a semester - I'm afraid I'm going to take a while longer on my own!

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm working on a blog (codeinput.com) and also a site to improve hackers discussions, it'll be about discussing only and not link sharing, I hope you all join it :D

</comment><comment><USER57> In my spare time:

Structural engineering software. Python-C++ mix. Wish I could say more, but can't. :)

</comment><comment><USER58> Unfortunately, no code to show off but... I'm working on a site for my wife where she and her friends can post photos of themselves trying on the same outfit. I've been wanting to learn Ruby on Rails so I've been playing around with it the past couple weeks. Domain is bought, code sort of works but needs a lot of love (and javascript, ruby magic, a design) before it'll be ready to launch. Hopefully I'll get motivated and get something out there shortly.

To be honest, I've been more interested in Rails and Capistrano/Deprec than the project itself. Bought a 256mb slice at SliceHost and have been reloading the thing every week playing with configurations.

</comment><comment><USER59> Ventrilo tracker: <http://www.ventstatus.com>

Another Ventrilo tracker, but this one allows people to search for usernames, games played, etc. Also can generate a timeline of past users online.

Examples

Status: [http://ventstatus.com/servers/status/bladeradio.clanvent.com...](http://ventstatus.com/servers/status/bladeradio.clanvent.com:5090)

Timeline: [http://ventstatus.com/servers/timeline/bladeradio.clanvent.c...](http://ventstatus.com/servers/timeline/bladeradio.clanvent.com:5090)

What I've learned for this project so far

\- CodeIgniter

\- Database optimization

\- PHP CGI

\- Character encoding

</comment><comment><USER60> At work I've just been writing a testing framework in Matlab (mostly for fun, but it actualy seems to work!). And I have next week off, so I thought I'd have a go at building something in rails.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm been getting in to erlang, xmpp, web.py and twisted.

</comment><comment><USER62> Webapp, will prototype with Drupal, so no real hacking at first. Counts? Then Railsification. Me: Industrial/UX designer (and food lover) who loves DIY, but needs products for laymen, not just dev.s. Story: Our local (Maine) farmers market needs a site. Hell, why not build a build-your-own farmers market site platform/app? So that's the deal. Comments, recipes welcome.

</comment><comment><USER63> Handcoded XPath-like scriptlet interpreter for JDI and it's UI as eclipse plugin. Now giving finishing touches.

Code: <http://github.com/niravthaker/evars/tree/master> Short Intro: <http://evars.googlecode.com/files/evars.swf>

</comment><comment><USER42> Right now I envy all of you :D

I wish I could list here my own project too but lately I just take input all day without producing anything ...

</comment><comment><USER64> A new type of database where the schema is open and flexibly restructures depending on the data you put in. The change allows anyone, from 8 to 80, to structure their data without knowing that's what they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER65> No code to show, but I'm working on a one-off remote controller for pole cameras for an indie filmmaker. It should enable "aerial" shots like the pros, but at a small fraction of the cost. Version 1 is in testing.

</comment><comment><USER66> Something like the Creative Commons License Picker (<http://creativecommons.org/license/>), but for the open source licenses offered by Google Code.</comment>


Clojure, Implemented Atop Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Tko1/ClojureRS <comment><USER2> Fun! I use Rust at work, and have always enjoyed tinkering with lispy languages, such as Racket, Guile, Clisp, etc... But Clojure is one I never really got into because I don't like how closely it's tied to the Java ecosystem. This definitely makes it more appealing to me.

<comment><USER3> Clojure has an official JavaScript port named ClojureScript for running in the browser, which should serve as a good case study for how and to what degree the language is runtime-independent.

<comment><USER4> Is that supposed to be more attractive? I'll take Java over JavaScript and something else over both.

<comment><USER3> It's supposed to allow you to use the same language on the front that you do on the back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this in standard safe Rust? If so, how is the heap and GC handled?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is super exciting!</comment>


Show HN: IoT: Boon or Bane? What you can loose if you get hacked? - <AUTHOR> https://www.skillsire.com/read-blog/298_internet-of-things-boon-or-bane.html <comment><USER2> Security is the "S" in IoT. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL! If you mean the "S" which is not there, then you are right. But then there is no such thing as absolute security on Internet. It can only be hoped to be improved.</comment></comment>


Oracle Java SE FAQ Servers and/or Cloud deployments is $25.00 per month or lower - <AUTHOR> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaseproducts/overview/javasesubscriptionfaq-4891443.html <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/22/oracle_announces_ja...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/22/oracle_announces_java_se_subscriptions/)</comment>


Cocoon Cam Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> https://cocooncam.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm so sad. I love this product. I'm not ready for it to shut down. The manufacturer app is horrible. Why do they maintin the current version and let users move on when done?

I know 10+ people in my feed ship group currently using this... it's so disappointing

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We used this with our youngest. It's a decent product but now it's turning into a brick at the end of next month when they kill the app. Guess we need to figure something else out.

</comment><comment><USER3> They gave instructions in their email with a link on how to use it with the new app from the manufacturer.</comment>


Ask HN: Where is bank money digitally stored? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> In the Database, as someone working in the bank, I can tell you that we store it in Microsoft sql server for the last 13 years. A simple insert command into the RDBMS determines your balance with the bank.</comment>


Sony's Bread and Butter? It's Not Electronics - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/global/sonys-bread-and-butter-its-not-electronics.html <comment><USER2> The issue is a simple one. What brought Sony down is the thing that brings down all huge companies: they failed to adapt.

All Sony's great successes were in hardware. _Mechanical_ hardware. The walkman, etc. were all mechanical devices, without any software. Sony was the king of beautiful mechanical electronics. Before the computer age took hold.

The iPod, etc. are software devices. Yes, they also have beautiful industrial design, but Sony is capable of that. But Sony is not capable of software.

By the way, Nokia is going down for the same reason.

<comment><USER3> >By the way, Nokia is going down for the same reason.

Given that Nokia was able to adapt enough to come up with Nokia Maps [1] (Decent mapping app with free offline maps), Nokia Music, Intuitive camera apps; I must disagree with that statement.

[1] <http://here.com/>

[2] <http://www.nokia.com/us-en/support/product/nokia-music/>

<comment><USER4> Nokia bought NAVTEQ. Is Maps because of adapt Nokia engineering or because of this acquisition?

<comment><USER3> Both. They did get a foothold from the acquisition of NAVTEQ but a lot of missing features such as real-time traffic, street view and satellite imagery needed to be integrated. This was completed with the help from Bing.

The offline maps is truly a blessing. Running low on battery but still en route? Switch off 4G and Wifi, the biggest battery suckers, and the navigation still works without any hiccup. The last time I was visiting a foreign country and had no data service, it came in handy too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "That profitable part of the business is what Daniel S. Loeb, an American investor and manager of the hedge fund Third Point, wants Sony to spin off to raise cash to resuscitate its electronics business."

I find this quite interesting. We have a business that is supplying goods and paying it's employees. Let's chop it into one part that will survive and make me money and another part which will most likely die meaning all the employees are fired.

I can understand the logic from one point of view but I'm not really sure the decision would benefit anyone other than a small number of investors (not all of them!) and ... I guess the lawyers and bankers always get their cut.

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, keeping the bleeding part alive with money from another part of the company means that the prices in the electronics market will be artificially low, which makes it harder for all other makers of electronics. Maybe it's better that some electronics makers disappear from the market and let the remaining ones make a little bit more money, freeing some more resources for developing new innovative gadgets (or, admittedly, just making the owners wallets fatter), and maybe hire back some good engineers.

tl;dr: Keeping operations that can't live by themselves alive with external funding distorts the market, whether it is the government or the corporations that do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think they lost it after the big successes, and got this megalomaniac mindset that they could establish market standards at will. Their consumer segment losses due to insistence on things like minidisc or memory sticks must have been tremendous.

<comment><USER8> I think they had a lot of tunnel vision as well. In their local Japan market, they DID set the standards. You had MiniDisc players integrated in cars, etc. They just didn't have the international perspective required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sony is into electronics, movie/music production, and insurance?

Reminds me of the Onion story: "Yamaha CEO Pleased With Current Production Of Jet Skis, Alto Saxophones, Snowmobiles, Power Generators, Scooters, Golf Carts"

Quote: "At the Yamaha Corporation we're focused on one thing and one thing alone—quality sound chips, ceiling brackets, editing software, race-kart engines, sport boats, flugelhorns, ATVs, sequencers, outboard motors, conference systems, golf clubs, projectors, MIDI controllers, lamp cartridges, portable recorders, subwoofers, component systems, and motorcycles."

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/yamaha-ceo-pleased-with- cur...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/yamaha-ceo-pleased-with-current- production-of-jet,6871/)

<comment><USER8> Samsung does the same (they even make cars, and run a chain of gas stations) and they're doing great in many fields.

<comment><USER10> You forgot Samsung engineering (make buildings), Samsung military engineering (make military warships), Samsung... I think Samsung manufactures everything you can imagine.

<comment><USER8> Yep. In Korea it's called Chaebol - LG, Daewoo are other examples. In Japan it's called Keiretsu - for instance Mitsubishi produce almost anything under the sun (they make everything from beer to the Japanese defense force's version of the F-16)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _"The problem is that the board is still absolutely focused on fixing > electronics"_

I hope they do. I see a board focused on fixing a problem less concerning than a board in denial. I have a feeling that, as their electronics preeminence waned, they were probably in denial for a long time. They have decades of engineering experience, and now that they've hit bottom, it would be a shame to see them throw it all away.

</comment><comment><USER12> Arrrrgh! Out of the miserable swamp of gigantic glowing touchscreen devices, the xperia mini pro came like a beacon of hope with it's ideally sized qwerty slider keyword and android upgradeable to ICS.

Nokia, my first love, has already collapsed hopelessly. Not you too, Sony! If nothing else just keep making fucking phones!!

<comment><USER13> I have to agree. I did love nokia devices (and they are still great, except for the OS) . Now Sony... :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Their previous CEO was a content guy from Hollywood; Maybe he focused mostly on the content and insurance stuff and forgot to lead the electronics division or just didn't have a compelling vision? I always wondered why they would take a Hollywood guy instead of more of a product guy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sony is losing a lot in the TV market, same as Panasonic. I am not sure you can "fix" the TV market, since the TV's role is still changing, and hardware innovations become less and less important, so there's no way to go back to the boom of early LCD. I personally would like to have a "dumb" instead of a "Smart" TV, basically just a huge display to which I can hook my PC or whatever box I want. But it'll take some years in which the big guys will desperately try to keep the old ways alive.

e: previous version of this comment said Sony's Imaging division was quite healthy, while they are losing money too. But as mirrorless is a new market, I guess it's worth to lose money to establish a good market position.

<comment><USER16> Would you really buy a separate Roku or whatever if your TV had one already built in? Moreover, what if you could program your TV as easily as your Roku? This seems, to me at least, a pretty compelling proposition. Stick a PC in my TV as soon as possible, please!

<comment><USER17> > _Would you really buy a separate Roku or whatever if your TV had one already > built in?_

Yes, because the TV is a couple years old and doesn't run today's apps, even though it has the right number of pixels which haven't changed in a decade.

> _Stick a PC in my TV as soon as possible, please!_

No. Because the pace of development in screens is notably less than the pace of development in devices, and the cost of building (a probably underpowered) PC into the TV would end up being a significant portion of the purchase price without much benefit.

AirPlay changes the equation. Use whatever latest personal device you have, tap a button to see it on the TV.

It's redundant to have multiple apps with multiple UIs and preferences scattered across multiple devices, when the tech exists today to have a primary personal device that you could look at anywhere.

TVs need to get out of the app business, just display HDMI + AirPlay (works from Android using Twonky Beam, iMedia Share, PlayTo, etc.), and focus back on visual quality.

<comment><USER16> > Yes, because the TV is a couple years old and doesn't run today's apps,

What are you talking about? What apps? All you need for the darned thing to do is stream media from some wireless storage device (or the internet)!

<comment><USER18> My TV is from 2008, and has exactly zero apps, but still has a fairly nice display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't fully understand what brought Sony down. They have a strong synergy between their markets (content production and consumption, for instance), and their electronic products are still high quality, well designed pieces of consumer electronics, both on the engineering side as on the product design side.

They're a company that has tried weird, new kinds of devices, like head- mounted 3D displays, tablets and ultra-portables. Sure, their attempts at these things didn't create high-volume markets, but at least it shows to me that the company is trying hard to innovate, with strong, more traditional products to back it up.

I find it a bit saddening how Sony fails to sell enough of its products.

<comment><USER20> You can innovate in the lab all you want but if no one is buying your product because it doesn't answer the right problems is it that innovative. I thought the AIBO robot was interesting but not thousands of dollars fabulous, you can get a proper, pedigreed dog for that price.

They have a nasty habit of bringing things to market to fast and then not properly supporting it. Then when the consumers walk away they blame everything else but themselves.

<comment><USER21> AIBO was a big missed opportunity. The unit cost was too high, and the software not advanced enough. But those things can't have been having a huge effect on their R&D budget. They could have kept the same mechanical design, but increased CPU/memory each year, with corresponding work on the AI for minimal pain, reducing the price and improving the utility each year. If that work had continued constantly, we would have some truly remarkable AI pets available by now, which would make the ultimate toy for young children that live in apartments. That same technology could then have been applied to home automation robots. Instead we have Roomba.

<comment><USER20> Like you, I thought AIBO was far ahead of its time. So far that I assumed Sony was using it to improve their AI and would release better products based on the feedback. Except, they never did. They had a product that everyone saw wasn't going to sell well and just killed it when exactly that happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Contrary to popular belief Sony's electronics products while perceived as being "superior" or "top of the line", rarely are. Sure, they have a few SKU's here and there that might be notable. However, the rest of the lineup is filled yawn-inspiring cookie-cutter products.

From the outside it sure seems like they keep making the wrong product decisions.

I never knew Sony even had an insurance arm. Profitable too. It sure seems like they ought to make a swift exit from electronics and focus on insurance.

<comment><USER8> Their competitors are also yawn-inspiring, but still profitable.

<comment><USER22> Perhaps the message is that hyper-commoditized products isn't the best place to be. The brand means just about nothing to those who understand the marketplace. I am sure there are folks who still buy Sony TV's and amplifiers thinking they are the best. That just proves branding can go a long way. I quit buying Sony a very long time ago. I can't even remember the last time I thought Sony when shopping for a consumer-electronics product.

<comment><USER8> It CAN be a good place to be - clearly Samsung are doing well. But it seems like competing in a commoditized market isn't what Sony do well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see this as very depressing, when not even Sony executives understand where their money came from...

Yes, Sony electronics give a loss, but it is NEEDED.

Why it is needed? Well, because this is how Sony pushes to their bread and butter clients buy the other stuff.

Sony is profitable making movies, music, and selling equipment for those, Sony Vegas is profitable, Sony 3D cameras are profitable, Sony Blu-Ray recorders are profitable.

Now, why Sony would need to sell Blu-Ray recorders, if they did not pushed for Blu-Ray with the PS3 sold at loss?

Sony eletronics business, was always about pushing technology that results in content producers needing to pay Sony through their nose to make the content that match Sony consumer tech.

If you split Sony, you will get a electronics division that gives loss, and a movie and music division that cannot push the market to where they want anymore, resulting in the failure of both.

I don't understand much of insurance business, so of course I won't comment on that.

<comment><USER8> > I don't understand much of insurance business, so of course I won't comment > on that.

If people don't drop a large TV on their feet, they have no need for insurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Living in Japan for 10 years, Sony was always perceived as closer to the Virgin Group -- Sony offered a series of consumer friendly services all wrapped within a unique marketing spin of 'fun, hip, young.' Only some of those services were electronics related. Their insurance product was marketed at young women, IIRC, and had good differentiation. Not unlike Virgin Bank I guess, something UK readers might know something about but which hasn't hit the States, and likely won't.

Sony's goals aren't the same as Apple or Microsoft and that seems to have confused the author: Sony sees diversification as a core competency and might be better off compared to say GE, rather than just a consumer electronics company:

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732397500457849...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323975004578499333200342540.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Sony's electronics division has always been hampered by custom media formats, restrictive DRM (a side-effect of their media empire), and expensive licensing schemes. They're an ecology of one, which doesn't make for much of a market.

They did it to themselves.

</comment><comment><USER25> IBM did this a long time ago. They analyzed the company, saw services were where they made all the money, and went all out after that. They sold their printer division, their laptop division, their storage division. The laptops, the ThinkPad line, actually had a really good name for themselves and some businesses and consumers that only bought them. It took some serious balls to get rid of it. I guess that's the position Sony is in now. It would be good for the company to drop the unprofitable electronics division, but it's probably more than they are capable of doing.

</comment><comment><USER26> Oh Sony. What happened?

Oh well, my xperia z tablet should be arriving this week.

Don't let me down.</comment>


Swift Gradient in 4 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@adriano_87556/swift-gradient-in-4-lines-of-code-6f81809da741 <comment><USER2> Pretty misleading title. This isn't a bit of graphical code golf using Swift. It's a single call to a gradient API, and even that is independent of Swift.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well yeah, it's a few Core Graphics calls, just like it has been from Objective C since OS X was born. This is something CG has built-in, not a feature of Swift.</comment>