Show HN: My collection of web-apps that I'm finally comfortable in sharing - <AUTHOR> https://zetabee.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I made these for personal use and have been working on them for about a year. I always feel like my apps are incomplete but I think they are functional in their current form. I appreciate any feedback/criticism.

E2V: I use this to get calls when one of my servers go down and whenever my PayPal account is hit. It's a little difficult to setup for regular users (email filters aren't commonly used) but it is pretty reliable. It uses Twilio and Cloudmailin.net. I just created an HN coupon for 5 additional calls: <https://zetabee.com/e2v/?coupon=hackernews>

Text: I use this constantly to note down and plan everything. E.g. here's how I note down random ideas: [https://zetabee.com/text/share?n=1058338736&h=MU54djV5VF...](https://zetabee.com/text/share?n=1058338736&h=MU54djV5VFRGVkE2YjZhbXlkQ2tsZz09)

CashFlow: This app enabled me to plan my departure from my old job without going into a financial crisis. It has a slight learning curve but once you get used to it, you can plan your finances very easily. I run hypothetical scenarios with my wife all the time - can we afford a house worth X in October? Should she switch to part time and get a 2nd contract? How much can we spend on a vacation and when?

<comment><USER2> The text implementation is quite nice. I wish I had seen it before I did this, <https://github.com/boyter/BATF>

One issue I had with it though is I am unable to cut/copy paste multiple rows inside it using standard keyboard shortcuts, but other then that very impressed.

EDIT - For the cashflow, I dont suppose you can add the option to not use pie charts? I find them so deceptive when looking at figures.

<comment><AUTHOR> For multiple rows, press Control+Shift+C, V, X. Since I allowed for autosizing textareas which can store multi-line data, I didn't want to override the normal Control+C/V. shortcuts.

<comment><USER2> No dice, since I have Clip-X installed and bound to that shortcut. Glad to hear you have that functonality in there though. It would have been a dealbreaker for me otherwise.

I will have a go at using it as a replacement for my BATF for a while and see how it goes. Thanks for releasing this!

<comment><AUTHOR> I just realized you could do Control+Alt+Shift+C/V because of how I implemented the keyboard events. I know it's quite annoying to press 4 keys at once but at least it would work.

I've used a text-file myself for years but finally made this last year because I wanted features like access from any PC, sharing, and collapsing that didn't get reset all the time.

<comment><USER3> Ctrl + Alt + Shift + X worked for me on a Macbook Pro/Snow Leopard/Chrome

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really great stuff.

I don't suppose you are looking for a job?

<comment><USER5> Chime, in case you're unaware, you _definitely_ want to at least consider an employment offer from joshu (the creator of delicious).

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the endorsement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny that no one has mentioned E2V. It's the only one that hit the 'I wanted to do that' criteria for me. I think the lesson is that you need to work hard to educate your user to get it to catch on. Think of specific killer use cases. I would recommend going to the nearest business school during interview season and posting a bunch of flyers that say something like "We'll call you when you get the email that's going to change your life". Maybe target med school applicants similarly, anyone who's checking their email every 5 minutes waiting for the big one. Don't target developers, they already know how to forward emails to text message. This is also the easiest to monetize without charging. If people give you 5 email addresses, the domains may well give you insight into what they care about most. Targeting advertising rocket fuel (applying to Goldman, are we?).

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right. Setting up email filters or even realizing why someone would need E2V is not easy to grasp for most typical end-users. I love coding and designing but sales & marketing is something I haven't spent much time on. ZetaBee isn't a startup for me at this point (<http://ktype.net> is my full-time project) so I haven't even thought of how I'd monetize/market ZetaBee. Only reason I even added a PayPal purchase option to E2V is so I don't go broke when someone gets 10000 emails sent to their phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> These are really awesome, thanks for sharing. Expecially liking Cash Flow, though I have two feature requests:

* I'd like to plan multiple scenarios at once, so the ability to save, create new and duplicate different cash flows would be useful.

* I'd like the ability to move multiple rows at once quicker.

* I'd like you to monetise this so I don't feel guilty requesting things, I'd happily pay an upfront fee (pinboard.in style?).

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> All the things you mentioned are in the pipeline if there is enough interest in this app (and judging from this thread, it looks like there is). Feel free to keep using the app. In time, I will add these as paid features. I want the multiple what-if scenario feature myself.

<comment><USER7> Thanks! Keep up the awesome work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Chime, I admire and thank you for letting the HN community take a look at your creations. As a developer, I know I am sometimes reluctant to let my peers see what I'm working on. I really like the simplicity of TEXT and can't wait to try out Email to Voice. I'm about to launch a public application that I have been working on for about a year and will set up a filter to have Email to Voice call me when someone signs up! Here's to hoping my phone rings a lot, and to your continued hacking and success.

</comment><comment><USER9> _Text_ is incredible. It is simple, unobtrusive and everything just works the way one would expect it to. I know how hard it is to design something as clean, simple and functional as Text, so - Great job, Chirag. Thank you for sharing this, made my day.

</comment><comment><USER10> Chime,

Shameless plug: Check out Profile.io. We built this mainly for developers to show the apps/projects they are working on.

Here's the invite link: <http://profile.io/invite/HACKERNEWS>

<comment><USER11> Shamless rip of about.me, also.

<comment><USER10> Our pitch: About.me for developers.

<comment><USER11> This saddens me. I understand the need for such a service, but refuse to take you seriously with such a blatant disregard for originality and uniqueness. Next time a website inspires you, please don't copy + paste.

<comment><USER10> copy & pasted what?

can you point out any of our code from about.me?

<comment><USER12> I think you would have a better argument if the sites graphic design didn't appear to copy <http://about.me>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for sharing! The apps look great and work like I would expect them to.

You've also reinforced the notion that "ideas are worthless, execution is everything". I have had a near mirror of your CashFlow screen on my home office whiteboard since November. I kept saying, "I'll work on that after this semester.." or "I'll focus on that after this major project wraps up at work.." now I find myself saying, "Guess I'll use CashFlow by chime!"

<comment><AUTHOR> If you had made yours before mine, I'd certainly be using your version. I only make something because nobody else has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I poked around ZetaBee Text for the last 5 minutes and am getting excited. I liked the concept, but not the keyboard shortcut style of workflowy.com. This is way closer.

The "How This Works" section is great. I got moving fast.

One gripe (or perhaps an oversight). I can ctrl + select a lot of lines, but I can't delete them. I think the concept here is that I can just collapse things, which mostly I'd do, but there are times when only delete will do and I don't see a way to accomplish this task.

Specifically, I renamed the first sheet "HowItWorks" in an attempt to keep the instructions in case I forget. I went to delete the two example sections below and could not.

</comment><comment><USER14> Dang - you're an app churning machine! I just looked at your profile and checked out all your projects....WOW! Talk about some achievements.

GREAT JOB with these apps! I especially like Text and CashFlow. Very, very usable.

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank you for putting this together. Cashflow is brilliant. I've always been looking for cashflow functionality in online personal finance apps like Mint/LoveMoney/WeSabe etc, but this app does exactly what i need it to do.

The best bit is, i always struggle to put my own spreadsheet together to workout the cashflow, so for people like me who need help with the underpinnings, this is a great solution.

Thanks again

</comment><comment><USER7> Text request: Ability to cross items off, sometimes I want to mark things as done but not totally erase their history. This allows me to review my progress at the end of the week etc and its also fairly satisfying to see stuff that you've completed. Add this as an option if you're worried about feature bloat.

Email To Voice request: Support for UK phone numbers, happy to pay extra for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Text: I've wanted to add check/cross off feature since I built Text. The previous incarnation of Text ( <http://untodos.com> ) had that as an important feature. The problem is how does one log nested completed tasks and show them to the user in a readable format. Say you have 3 nested task: Wedding > Arrange Flowers > Setup florist appointment and you check off the middle or the bottom one. What do I log/show you later when you want to review your checked lists? I thought about logging everything from a task up to the top most parent but that could get weird.

E2V: I just have to dig into Twilio API and then figure out the pricing plan. I've added this to my todo list. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> These are great! Specifically Cash Flow. I've often wished I had an app on had to see what my cash flow will look like in 20 days, or 30.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love the CashFlow app myself as a user. I originally made a non-VBA-code Excel file ( <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/111770/CashFlow.xls> ) to do the same thing and used it for a while before turning it into a web-app. The web-app is faster but the Excel was a lot more fun to make.

<comment><USER17> Man, that excel sheet was so good I'm ashamed of mine. Great work all around. I'm loving Cash Flow so far. QuickenOnline used to have a similar feature, but this is way better. I use "You Need A Budget" to plan and budget, but Cash Flow is way better at forecasting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow I was just thinking I needed something similar to your text app earlier. That is perfect! Cashflow will be handy too!

Thanks a lot.

EDIT: Is there an option to clear a whole sheet? and in the cashflow, you only allow the american format of dates.

Oh and with cashflow, how is someone meant to handle long term use? Update their own balance?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will add options to clear/disable specific rows or entire sheet (with confirmation). I'll see if there is an easy way to switch the date formats at the client-side.

You do have to update the balances manually but if you have something like Mint, that takes minutes. I update the balances any time I want to review my finances. It seems simpler than having users add their bank accounts etc. like Mint.

<comment><USER18> Definitely better than adding a real bank account. I can't use Mint because it's not in my country. (I am in Ireland).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very nice apps. I like the simplicity and focus. I can definitely see myself using these, especially the cash flow app.

</comment><comment><USER20> Text is really a great lightweight outliner implementation.

Indenting works for multiple rows at once, but moving them up/down does not. This would be a key feature for reorganizing nested outline sections.

Also, since I just used the demo, does sharing allow others to edit or only to view?

<comment><AUTHOR> Indenting multiple rows by dragging gets complex and I want to make sure it is stable across the various browsers before I push that feature. For now, it's pretty easy to select rows and copy/cut paste them. I use that feature all the time (with keyboard shortcuts mostly).

As of right now, sharing allows others to only view, not edit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Text is impressive. That's exactly how I write freeform notes in my text editor. Not sure if I could get used to using a web app for this, but I might give it a try. I think perhaps the toolbars are a bit distracting - a more minimalistic design would be suitable for this kind of application.

</comment><comment><USER22> These are really nice and I like the style, I'm particularly impressed with the cash flow one.

I would even say you're too harsh on yourself in thinking your apps are incomplete, compared to many other freely available web apps I'd say they're actually very well rounded.

</comment><comment><USER23> These are really great apps. I especially like Cashflow and Text.

I'm not sure how many times I've recreated a similar spreadsheet that I was never quite satisfied with and never did the awesome that you've implemented in Cashflow.

Great work and thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want a spreadsheet, here's the precursor to my CashFlow webapp: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/111770/CashFlow.xls>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks great. I especially like Text. An export option would be great (maybe .org, .md and pdf).

<comment><AUTHOR> I have export on my todo list. For now, try clicking History. You can copy- paste from that. You can also share a node + subnodes and copy-paste from that or print to PDF. The shared note page prints very cleanly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great stuff.

How about using the pricing model of pinboard.in for each app? I'd sign up :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Just tried ZetaBee Text, it's really great! Switched from WorkFlowy.

Feedback:

1\. Why you have to limit length of the title?

2\. Please add line-based bold, italic and color support. When list gets long I really needed them!

</comment><comment><USER27> Just spent a couple minutes in CashFlow and I'm looking forward using it more. I set up an account with Mint a while ago hoping I could do something similar but this is just so much better for what I wanted to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a heavy Mint user myself. I track my past expenses using their tools. I use CashFlow to predict my future balances. Just remember to manually update you current balances (bank, credit card) on CashFlow any time you want to do any form of analysis. It takes a minute or two for me to update my balances (login to Mint, refresh, copy-paste balances).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Excellent.

Interested in what you think is the next level for these apps.

EDIT: I should have said "next step" instead of "next level"

<comment><AUTHOR> If there is enough interest in CashFlow, I will make it easy to run multiple what-if scenarios (premium/paid feature). I do it all the time myself but it takes a bit of manual labor. I think it would be cool if you could just drag- drop-slide numbers and see real-time charts. Having an optimistic, realistic, and conservative view would be good too.

There's not much I think needs to be done for E2V. It's pretty simple and does what I need easily. It already supports multiple users/emails/phones under a single account.

For Text, I want to improve sharing. Right now it's just a read-only share of a specific note + subnotes but maybe I can make multi-user editing (kinda like Etherpad). The history feature works well but I want to make it as easy as using undo. Maybe an option to have more than 10 notes. Right now you can drag the notes left-right to organize them but some people have asked for the ability to archive old notes. There is no 'check off' button or log of completed tasks either. I've never need to go back to check anything but some users have asked for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Excellent work Chime. Do you have any plans to try and generate income from your apps, or are they just a fun side project?

<comment><AUTHOR> I might make premium paid features when I get some time. For now, they are just fun (and useful for me personally) side projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I love CashFlow and Text. Many places pay bi-weekly, so you might want to add that to your frequency drop down list.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can make it 'week' and put 2 in the frequency. I have gas set as 3 weeks because that's usually how it ends up being for me.

<comment><USER30> I ended up doing that. It is just that its a commonly used frequency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Good on you for launching. Congratulations, i hope you make a nice bit of money for your efforts :)

</comment><comment><USER32> Thanks chime7, I really like your Text app and will have to go give CashFlow a try! Great work!

</comment><comment><USER33> I really like these. Thank you for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER34> Very nice! What did you use to build these?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly JS/JQuery on front-end and PHP/MySQL back-end. Nothing out of the ordinary.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the inspiration to keep moving!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Would like to hear from you how you could realize Zetabee alone through your blog chir.ag</comment>


Gödel Machine - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_machine <comment><USER2> Btw, Jürgen Schmidhuber, who proposed Gödel machines, is also the inventor of LSTMs, an important building block for many neural network designs. Amazing guy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber)

</comment><comment><USER3> Could humans be considered to be a Gödel machine? If not a human, could the entire humanity considered as one entity be considered to be a Gödel machine?

On a different plane could evolution qualify as a Gödel machine as well?

<comment><USER4> I think that's stretching the analogy too much. Basically, we might say cows are spherical objects if we want to solve some problems in classical mechanics, but you won't gain much insights about how cows actually work by assuming they are spherical objects. Same thing here, IMHO.

<comment><USER5> Not so much as you might think. Didn't we invent math and progressively improve it, and then invent computers to automate the math we suck at precisely to extend our problem solving powers? There are a lot of similarities.

<comment><USER6> We have not yet rewritten any of _our own_ code (i.e., DNA), and if we do we still have to prove that the "re-written" person is more capable of re-writing subsequent people in an even more efficient way.

<comment><USER5> > We have not yet rewritten any of our own code (i.e., DNA)

Interpreting "code" as "DNA" is too literal. It could apply to thinking processes and mental models, cultural and social norms, and so on.

A universal Turing machine (UTM) can mimic any other Turing machine via interpretation, including a Godel machine. So an interpreted Godel machine isn't changing the code of the UTM, the analogue of our DNA, but it's changing the interpreted code, the analogue of higher level processes like those I list above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honest question:

Has this been put into practice in any AI to date?

Does TensorFlow count as a Gödel Machine? ML is basically the machine deciding its own weights right? Is that the same thing? Or have we not crossed into "writing its own code" territory?

And if we haven't, why not? This seems like the kind of thing we already have the technology for.

<comment><USER8> In typical ML you just learn the weights. But the architecture stays fixed, and since we don't have an architecture that can realistically solve well enough all tasks, it shouldn't count as Godel machine.

Meta-learning, where you also learn hyper-parameters (including potentially the architecture) are closer to that, see for example:

\- Google Vizier: [https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub46180](https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub46180)

\- Microsoft neural architecture search: [https://github.com/Microsoft/nni](https://github.com/Microsoft/nni)

But this is still far from a true Godel machine.

<comment><USER9> Hyperparameter optimization (including architectures) is not really meta- learning. Meta-learning, also known as "learning to learn", is more like MAML[0], RL2[1], L2RL[2], etc.

0\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03400](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03400)

1\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02779](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02779)

2\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05763](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05763)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It may be too difficult to build one of these directly, but it might be possible to build a machine that then builds a Gödel Machine.

<comment><USER11> Coding an approximation to a Godel machine naively probably isn't that hard, relatively speaking - it would essentially be an extension to a symbolic computation system. What would be hard is running such a thing with any efficiency.

<comment><USER10> Schmidhuber has a great talk where he sets up the GM then drops the boom on practical implementations (I forget the details, but the exponent is ~3000, an impossible lifetime-of-the-Universe search space) and the audience laughs, but then he also points out that the self-improvement search may well find massive speed-ups, and so it is perhaps not as hopeless as all that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Didn't Gödel explicitly proof that there are some statements that cannot be proven this way? Is it just assumed that these will not be relevant for all the hard problems that humans cannot solve or am I missing something here?

<comment><USER13> 1\. rarely does that come up in practical problems 2\. for many reasons (and completeness is one) the machine cannot prove the next version is better, thus must discard it

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this somewhat like what the JVM does with runtime optimizations?

<comment><USER15> I had a similar thought - profile guided optimizations (PGO).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As you folks might have realized, my namesake :)</comment>


Expanded access programs for Remdesivir - <AUTHOR> https://www.gilead.com/stories/articles/an-update-on-covid-19-from-our-chairman-and-ceo <comment><USER2> Stupid question in case anyone here has a medical background.

I was under the impression that covid19 was a two step process. First the virus infects and attacks the protective layer of the lungs (causing cough and fever). Then, the damage done to the protective layer of the lungs results in an infection / pneumonia, and that's where people have respiratory problems and may be in critical condition. But at this stage the viral load is low and the virus isn't the problem anymore, the pneumonia is [1].

This is why I thought Pr Raoult was advocating for the use of chloroquine in the early days of the disease, combined with prompt testing.

But it seems that anti-virals (like the study mentioned in this post and other studies in the US and Europe) are tested on patients in critical phase, i.e. with serious cases of pneumonia. Am I missing something or should we not expect anti-virals to be of much use in those cases, as it is too late, we are not dealing with a virus but with a pneumonia?

[1] see this useful video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtN- goy9VOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtN-goy9VOY)

<comment><USER3> There's a trial[1] whose objective is to determine if chloroquine is actually useful early on in the infection.

With a target sample size of 3000 individuals it would have at least sufficient numbers to show if it's actually viable, helps a little, or does not help at all.

[1] [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04308668?term=hydroxy...](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04308668?term=hydroxychloroquine&recrs=ab&cond=COVID-19&draw=2)

<comment><USER4> Also,in France: [https://www.mediterranee- infection.com/covid-19/](https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/covid-19/)

<comment><USER5> Tho they've focused mostly on care instead of the science (they don't believe in randomized trials), and it's going to be hard to know if the treatment is efficient from those (the EU and Michigan studies should help figuring that out).

<comment><USER6> In the absence of other viable treatments, the efficiency isn't really important.

Frankly, if it is only modestly effective, it should still be given to everyone without contraindications.

Efficiency only becomes important in a year or two when there are competing therapies.

When the choices are Chloroquine or Hopes and Prayers, Chloroquine is the obvious choice (for those that don't have the contraindications, of course -- for those patients, you'd need more evidence to know that the benefits outweighed the risks)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Remdesivir was one of the earliest promising candidates to treat covid-19 since it had promising results - in the lab - against other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS. It did not have results in humans because those viruses went away before in vivo testing could be performed.

Will it work? If it was a runaway success, I would have expected any of the current clinical trials to be cut short as the difference between placebo and non-placebo patients would have been obvious. That hadn't happened. I'm still hoping it has some positive effect.

The drug also had to administered through an IV over several days. It is not a pill you take. If it works, this makes treatment a little bit more difficult. You can't just give patients a pill and send them home.

</comment><comment><USER8> _Gilead is providing the entirety of this existing supply at no cost, to treat patients with the most severe symptoms of COVID-19. The 1.5 million individual doses are available for compassionate use, expanded access and clinical trials and will be donated for broader distribution following any potential future regulatory authorizations. These doses are for treating patients with severe symptoms, through daily intravenous infusions in a hospital setting. Having a potential treatment in our hands comes with significant responsibility. Providing our existing supplies at no charge is the right thing to do, to facilitate access to patients as quickly as possible and in recognition of the public emergency posed by this pandemic._

I'm glad to hear this!

</comment><comment><USER9> >The safety and efficacy are not yet known so while we feel the greatest sense of urgency in our work with remdesivir, we must take the responsible, ethical approach of determining whether it is indeed a safe, effective treatment.

>we continue to provide remdesivir on an individual compassionate use basis for children and pregnant women.

Can someone explain this logic to me? The safety and efficacy is not known, so we're going to give it to the most vulnerable people first?

<comment><USER10> If someone is going to die anyway, a research drug that might save them sounds pretty awesome.

<comment><USER11> But children are of least concern. Or do they mean children who are going to die? How many instances of that are there?

And pregnant women? That's hard to reconcile with common sense.

<comment><USER12> Are you unaware that judgement will be used?

Compassionate uses are hail marys and are used appropriately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As with anything pharmaceutical - they still need to make sure it doesn't have long term side effects. As horrible as it is to prevent treatment and prolong suffering, it would be more horrible if thousands of people suffer from unknown side effects if they would have recovered without it.

<comment><USER2> So you advocate to not use any new molecule until we have studied the effects over 5-10 years?

<comment><USER14> False dichotomy much? This is a nuanced issue, and the parent comment didn't suggest this at all.

<comment><USER2> Well, how do you know the long term effects if you don't study the effects over a long period?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _> Remdesivir is still an investigational medicine and has not been approved by regulatory authorities anywhere in the world. The safety and efficacy are not yet known so while we feel the greatest sense of urgency in our work with remdesivir, we must take the responsible, ethical approach of determining whether it is indeed a safe, effective treatment. This is why multiple clinical trials for remdesivir are underway, involving thousands of patients with COVID-19 across the world._

</comment><comment><USER16> It's surprising and disappointing that production takes 6 months, that's well beyond the peak of the pandemic.

<comment><USER17> See this recent article on HN that addresses how difficult it is to synthesize: [https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/03/26/problem-remdesivir- maki...](https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/03/26/problem-remdesivir-making- it-14665)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Didn't the Japanese rule this drug out saying it's totally ineffective?

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not too glad. From the description, it sounds like it's a massive expense to produce the drug, and if public attitudes force companies to give the results away for free, then there is no expectation of profits for pharma companies to invest for future preparedness for pandemics. I'd like them to charge a lot and make a killing. Governments can subsidize if they want.

<comment><USER20> You should be glad. Pharma companies are well-known historically to have milked monopolies to their own financial favor at the cost of public health, well-being, and welfare. They are not traditionally seen nor acting in congruence with altruism. If a company has decided to do so, that is great. But I think seeing this as some sort of a slippery slope seems completely backwards to me. It's about time pharma companies cut a little of their profits for the benefit of people. The cost of research is far outweighed by their excessive profits that come after the fact.

<comment><USER21> I don't know how you can complain about "excessive profits" for entirely novel products that a drug company brings into existence, essentially, starting from nothingness. No amount of profit is excessive - the profit is the motivation for them to invest in further research and we should all hope it continues to be so. "Profit" directly represents how much value to society their drug produced. If someone cures cancer, are you going to whine about how much money they make from it? Are you going to claim that, because they produced something extremely valuable, society has the right to take it from them for less than it's worth?

This is not the same as, say, an ISP making excessive profits by manipulating the market and building themselves a quasi-monopoly, or a bank harvesting profits by taking huge risks with the understanding that the Federal Reserve will bail them out if everything blows up. The ISP isn't innovating, isn't creating anything, they're merely an engine for spending and allocating resources. The bank isn't creating anything either, they're just moving money around and playing social engineering games with society. Complaints about profits in these industries are totally reasonable, since these companies are basically just middlemen sucking money from the economy in order to maintain the plumbing.

But to complain about excessive profits in an industry whose entire purpose is to discover new things? That makes no sense to me. What alternative would you prefer?

<comment><USER22> > The bank isn't creating anything either, they're just moving money around > and playing social engineering games with society

How would you react to a situation in which small companies discovered new drugs for ~$10 million, building on public research, and then were purchased by larger pharma companies for ~$300 million, and in which the large pharma companies aimed to earn ~$1-5 billion before the patents on the small company's invention expire?

<comment><USER23> I would say that there is a common misunderstanding of:

A) the viability initial drug discovery and subsequent development costs, and

B) The time value of money.

For A) success rates of 5000:1 are not uncommon. Discovery is at the very beginning of this process [1],which can take 12–15 years and cost in excess of $1 billion [2]

B) A 1 to 5 billion dollar return on a 300 million acquisition is likely a loosing proposition for most pharma companies due to risk and the time value of money. If you have a 300m acquisition, 700m additional dev costs, a 50% time discount, and a 50% chance of success, you are already up to 4 billion in revenue needed to break even. This article [3] provides a balanced overview of the finical aspect and is written by a scientist trying to give away a cure for his terminal wife.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_to_lead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_to_lead) [2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3058157/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3058157/) [3] [http://www.cureffi.org/2019/04/29/financial-modeling-in- rare...](http://www.cureffi.org/2019/04/29/financial-modeling-in-rare- disease/)

<comment><USER22> I agree with your comment in general, but I would just underline that the discovery component of a drug is often not paid for by the eventual vendor of the drug, but is instead paid for by taxpayers, other granting agencies, and venture capitalists. Thus the eventual vendor of a drug won't necessarily have 5000:1 odds, but instead will be able to review and purchase the most promising candidate drugs based on data generated by other companies.

It's definitely true that companies also attempt to make new drugs in-house, but I can't readily recall a recent blockbuster drug made in this way.

The expensive part of bringing new drugs to market is testing in humans. Perhaps the US could bear some of these costs while, in exchange, shortening or eliminating patent protections.

<comment><USER23> >I agree with your comment in general, but I would just underline that the discovery component of a drug is often not paid for by the eventual vendor of the drug, but is instead paid for by taxpayers, other granting agencies, and venture capitalists.

In the case of the taxpayers and grants, i think it is important to keep in mind that these are explicitly given without strings attached or rights reserved because society decided that we want to encourage private research. It is fair to argue that perhaps we should change the model moving forward, but I find it fairly offensive when folk claim a retroactive ownership on this basis.

>Thus the eventual vendor of a drug won't necessarily have 5000:1 odds, but instead will be able to review and purchase the most promising candidate drugs based on data generated by other companies.

I wholeheartedly agree. the long >5000:1 is at discovery, i.e. the basic research that is often publicly funded. Once drugs have gone through enough screening to be used, the probability of approval is up to about 10:1 [1]. A lot of the bigger sales take place between phase 1 and 2, which probability of approval is up to perhaps 25%. Research institutions and early developers get paid based on the potential value and risk, and are not taken advantage of. The fact that companies often outsource early develop doesn't invalidate the their claim to their profits.

>The expensive part of bringing new drugs to market is testing in humans. Perhaps the US could bear some of these costs while, in exchange, shortening or eliminating patent protections.

This is an interesting idea. Two additional options that you may want to consider that wouldn't stifle development are expedited approval and government manufacture of generics. Due to the time value of money, faster approval increases the profitability of new drug development and without increasing prices to consumers. For generics, drug profits after loss of exclusivity are so far out that they don't significantly weigh in on the decision to develop a product or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There are a ton of studies ongoing, stock pumping PR campaigns like this aren't responsible until the data is in, and there should be studies breaking their blinds this week. It's fine to ramp up production just in case, but that hardly justifies a press release by the CEO.</comment>


Namecheap won't register domain names with COVID19-related terms - <AUTHOR> https://pastebin.com/DmCCFKfD <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, you can use covid anywhere before your domain name. e.g. covid-19.yourdomain.tld or in the URL. An alternate option would be an account on a different registrar.</comment>


Ask HN: What has prevented you from creating a bucket list? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> For starters, I plan to reverse all of my defects. I am using resveratrol, sulforaphane,, vitamins, amino acids, starting sublingual NMN and will be experimenting with more advanced techniques with time. I am researching gene therapy.

Besides, other folks can complete the things on my bucket list for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Crippling debt</comment>


Kinect automation controller, sparked by HN, adds WebGL, available for purchase - <AUTHOR> http://nitrogen.posterous.com/webgl-new-features-added-to-kinect-powered-ho <comment><USER2> Watched the video. Looks very solid. I'm interested in getting this setup for my HTPC/server and lamps. It could certainly save some energy as well as look cool.</comment>


Trump Supports Bill Basing Immigration on Skills and Employability - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/politics/trump-immigration.html <comment><USER2> Isn't this what pretty much every other country is doing anyway? I was looking at the whole "move to New Zealand" thing, and it doesn't look like it'd be possible unless I have a college degree and "desirable skills." Canada was the same way.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any idea what that may mean for H1B and F1?</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know any software company not placing developrs in an open space? - <AUTHOR>

Despite all research arguing that open spaces hurt productivity, big software companies still place their engineeres in open spaces. Google does, Facebook does, Twitter does, every startup in London I know of does too.<p>Fog Creek is one well-publicized case thanks to Joel Spolsky. Are there ANY OTHER companies in the world that don't place developers in an open space? <comment><USER2> [http://inin.com](http://inin.com) gave almost every developer an office with door (and many with window) when I worked there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Campaign Monitor ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEHC6DkNpRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEHC6DkNpRU))

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, Garmin stuff 2 or 3 developers into an office and believe me, it's much worse than open space.

</comment><comment><USER5> I believe Amazon uses smaller enclosed team spaces.</comment>


5 Reasons Why Flickr & Youtube are Successful - <AUTHOR> http://www.influxinsights.com/?id=904 <comment><USER2> All these points are vague and non-actionable. Here's my take:

If you've been Net Native long enough you probably remember oFoto and Shutterfly and Webshots. What happened to all these sites? Flickr.

Flickr was designed around an open API from the ground up, meaning you could take your photos and embed around the web and in other applications. You could even take other people's photos and embed them around the web and in other applications. It was pretty sweet.

As a result they quickly dominated the photo sharing scene and were bought out by Yahoo! in record time.

Flickr's sustainable competitive advantage was freedom.

Back in June the Flickr team was having an internal debate about whether or not to allow competitors to data mine their site. Flickr's founder, Stewart Butterfield, posted a comment on his blog saying,

*******

"T]his is something that we've never had any set policy on and this thread has sparked a lot of internal debate on the team: some people felt that it was unreasonable, some people felt like it didn't matter since Flickr should win on the basis of being the best thing out there.

I actually had a change of heart and was convinced by Eric's position that we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.

The reasoning here is partly just that 'fair's fair' and more subtly, like a GPL license, it enforces user freedom down the chain. I think we'll take this approach (still discussing it internally)."

*******

This makes sense for a non-profit like Wikipedia but it was a bad idea in this case. Flickr made their money by tapping the differential in the freedom gradient, so by requiring reciprocal openness they are literally forcing the competition to steal their sustainable advantage.

The paradox is they'd be better off just bending over and taking it. That's pretty fucked up.

Or, as Thomas Pynchon says, "If you can get them asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about the answers."

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know. I can't think of any video sites offhand that are _worse_ than youtube in most respects. The player is small, grainy, hard to control. The "community" is full of appalling idiots. The search feature is the worst I've ever seen. They did scale it very well--outages seemed minimal. I'm sure that is the greatest technical challenge for video.

Flickr is a real puzzle. Any jackass could have made that site. I think the stars just aligned for them. People can flippantly say things like, "Oh, Microsoft got lucky" or whatever, because they did get some breaks. But MSFT also did real work, not easily replicated. Flickr--geez. Most online stores have a photograph engine of some sort that does the same thing, as just one tiny feature.</comment>


Bokken: GUI for Pyew malware analysis and Radare reverse engineering framework - <AUTHOR> https://inguma.eu/projects/bokken <comment><USER2> This looks interesting, I've been following the development of Radare for a while, excited for it to get production-ready.

Also for those looking for an alternative to IDA Pro, Binary Ninja isn't bad, and is an order of magnitude cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981742)</comment>


The Google Tax - <AUTHOR> http://nathancampos.me/post/41014392537/the-google-tax

<comment><USER3> > Clearly Orange has no idea how the internet works and what's their > involvement in it. The ISP is just a dumb pipe to connect the user to a > server, nothing more.

Clearly Nathan Campos has no idea how the internet works. Negotiations about charging for traffic is normal business, and has always been.

> The user fees should be equivalent to their connection speed, not their > usage, which apparently is something that ISPs can't understand too.

This is practiced for some land networks (in France, most of them) because the traffic is still good enough and most people are not generating so much traffic, but this can not happen on mobile network because of the much limited capacity. Limiting the rate is the way to guarantee that the mean traffic does not explode, saturating the whole thing.

> French President Francois Hollande warned Google on Wednesday that his > government would legislate a so-called Google tax if the company doesn't > reach a deal with French media companies.

Orange is not a media company, and the rest of the post recognize that and talks about ISP.

</comment><comment><USER4> This sounds like a run of the mill peering negotiation[1]. The unusual thing here is a company getting press coverage for it.

I have no idea how Google's peering arrangements are set up but I doubt that this is the only transit arrangement Google has ever ended up in.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering>

<comment><USER5> My thoughts exactly at first.

There is something nonsensical about this whole matter (as reported by the blogs) that triggers a flag for me.

More info -

(tl;dr; the _peering_ traffic between Cogent and Orange are too imbalanced; Cogent handles Google's traffic)

In this case, the US telecommunications operator Cogent claimed, among other things, that France Télécom was compromising the peering system (enabling exchange of traffic flows between networks, free of charge) used by transit operators, by requesting payment for opening up additional technical capacity for access to Orange subscribers. Regarding this claim, the Autorité considered that in view of the _highly asymmetric nature of the traffic exchanged between France Télécom and Cogent, such a payment request does not in itself constitute an anti-competitive practice inasmuch as this type of remuneration is not uncommon in the Internet industry in cases where a significant imbalance exists between the incoming and outgoing flows exchanged between two networks_ , and is consistent with the overall peering policy adopted by France Télécom, with which Cogent is familiar.

However, the Autorité also noted a certain lack of transparency in the relationship between the domestic network of France Télécom (Orange) and its transit operator business (Open Transit), creating a potential for margin squeezes. France Télécom agreed to make commitments to prevent such situations and enable appropriate monitoring.

[http://fastnetnews.com/dslprime/42-d/4881-france-telecom- fre...](http://fastnetnews.com/dslprime/42-d/4881-france-telecom-free-to- google-youtube-youre-blocked-unless-you-pay)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Google has also been faced with demands for compensation from content providers such as newspapers, who charge the search giant makes lots of advertising revenue from referencing their material."

"Hollande said "Those who make a profit from the information" produced by media companies should participate in their financing."

It's depressing to see so many examples of the abysmal understanding of the internet that so many politicians seem to have. Ignorance can be forgiven to a certain extent, but not even making an attempt to try to understand the situation - just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot will tell you about robots.txt - is inexcusable.

Public and state ignorance of computers and the internet are leading us down a very dark path; there needs to be an effort to try to educate our political representatives, or we risk a future where legislation like SOPA is passed purely out of ignorance of what it means.

<comment><USER7> > just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot > will tell you about robots.txt

So basically your position is binary: Either don't allow your site to be indexed by Google or accept that they are going to profit from your content.

If you don't see why companies and governments see more shades of grey in this situation then the only person who is ignorant is you.

<comment><USER8> >So basically your position is binary: Either don't allow your site to be indexed by Google or accept that they are going to profit from your content.

Nonsense. If you want to put "no access" in robots.txt and then go to Google and negotiate a fee from them for removing it, you're perfectly entitled to do that. But you know perfectly well that the value of search traffic to your site is worth more to you than the value of indexing your site is worth to Google or any other web search engine, so any such negotiation is not going to end with a payment from the search engine to you.

And passing a law _wouldn't even change that_. All it would do is create an explosion of transaction costs as every single website has to negotiate with every search engine to _not_ pay to be included in the index. Which if anything would only cement Google's dominant position in web search forever as any of its smaller competitors are bankrupted by transaction costs. Unless, of course, the law allowed some kind of standard technological means of allowing a site to specify that it doesn't require any payment to be included in the search results... like robots.txt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the most absurd tax I've ever heard of.

Google is not responsible for this traffic, it is the user requesting it. I consume YouTube, search, etc. content because I request it, not because Google tells me to.

I just hope the EU slaps French politicians for this one.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anybody know why Google didn't refuse these charges? This sets a really awful precedent.

<comment><USER11> Orange has a very strong presence in Africa. It leveraged this presence to have Google pay for their Internet trafic in France and Europe: Orange is pivotal to Google's success in Africa.

According to Orange's CEO, Google just can't do without Orange in Africa - <USER2> that's likely to be true.

Sources (in French, sorry!):

[http://frenchweb.fr/trafic-france-telecom-se-fait- remunerer-...](http://frenchweb.fr/trafic-france-telecom-se-fait-remunerer- par-google/94898)

[http://pro.clubic.com/entreprises/orange-france- telecom/actu...](http://pro.clubic.com/entreprises/orange-france- telecom/actualite-535938-google-remunere-orange-trafic-genere-reseau.html)

<comment><USER12> So this is essentially a textbook case of monopoly abuse, with the twist that because it's across borders they're getting away with it?

I'm a little surprised the response wasn't to delist every Orange property from the Google search engine and block access to any Google property for any Orange customer. It seems to me that doing so would effectively render Orange's mobile broadband offerings dead globally, for the five minutes the discussion would last. Presumably someone at Google decided that such a strategy was too risky legally and/or in terms of poisoning relations with ISPs more generally.

<comment><USER11> Orange does have a strategic position in Africa where Google (for the moment) doesn't. I'm not saying Google _needs_ Orange, but it is indeed a strategic partner.

Orange is also an highly trusted ISP in France, and (unlike Free) counts many corporations among its clients. Google probably would not risk alienating those clients by engaging in an open conflict with Orange.

All in all, I don't think any other French ISP would have been able to wrestle such a deal from Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A plausible case can be made for charging Google based on the amount of traffic generated by their products which is initialized outside of the subscriber's control.

The ISP is delivering advertising from which Google benefits and which its users are not explicitly requesting. Charging Google is analogous to a cable provider charging an advertising agency when that agency wants to place ads on behalf of their clients.

Other Google services such as Analytics, tracking cookies, and JavaScript libraries also use capacity without considering the effect on the provider's bandwidth.

Again, this is a plausible position. It is plausible because Google is generating revenue regardless of the ISP's customers' interest and the source of the data is outside the ISP's network.

Charging Google is a reasonable alternative to charging their customers for something which may be of little value to them.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. A user requesting <http://example.com> is that user requesting everything that the webmaster of example.com wanted example.com to include. This includes ads.

The webmaster has decided that the content hosted on <http://example.com> includes some HTML, some off-site resources (maybe images hosted on a CDN, maybe some ads, maybe some Javascript hosted elsewhere).

Are you going to charge CDN owners too given the user doesn't 'know' that websites often use a CDN to host their content? What about jquery.com for hosting the version of jquery the site uses (if they don't host it themselves)?

Why are ads special? Simply because the webmaster is being paid by the ad network? In the CDN case, money flows in the opposite direction -- the webmaster pays the CDN. Why shouldn't the ISP take a cut of that transaction too?

If a website has ads the implied contract is that you get access to this content in exchange for having these ads on the screen. Why does an ISP get to take a cut out of that agreement between the webmaster, the ad network, and the user? They are already compensated by the user to deliver all the bytes the user's computer requested to them.

If an ISP is unhappy with how many bytes the user is requesting, and how many of those bytes come from a particular source (e.g. Google) then they need to renegotiate their contract with the user.

<comment><USER13> Advertising is just the most obvious example of something which other networks - such as cable television - charge the content provider to deliver to their customers.

I am not a lawyer, but the implied contract argument doesn't seem to hold water. Google and the ISP aren't in privity - unless of course there is a contract between them such as the article provides. I'll leave aside the applicability of common law principles to France in regard to the theory of implied contracts required as a premise to the argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Orange knows exactly how the internet works. They're just trying to change it for the worse.

This is the logical consequence of people moving their activities from decentralized, open services (email, IRC, and usenet) where revenues are generated (and cost incurred) at the ISP, to centralized, closed services (Facebook and twitter) where cost, revenue, and control is centralized by the platform owner.

The natural response will be for Google and Facebook to compete (or simply threaten to compete) with residential ISPs, forcing some sort of accommodation by the ISPs, and binding ISPs to the media platforms (Facebook, Google, et. al.) in ways never before seen.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm sorry, but "Google apparently accepted to pay the fees (even worst since the government is also forcing a decision favorable to the ISPs)" is pure nonsense. You misread your source. The French government doesn't give a damn about peering negociations.

The French government supported _media companies_ (which is a nice way to say "old-school newspapers"), or at least tried to pressure Google into reaching an agreement with them. That's a whole different issue, which just happens to be mentioned in the same article.

</comment><comment><USER17> Stopped reading at:

> _"The ISP is just a dumb pipe to connect the user to a server, nothing > more."_

What OP means is:

> _"Ideally, I would like the ISP to act as a dumb pipe..."_

The reality is that ISP's can do whatever the heck they want, subject to the regulatory environment and the level of ignorance of their customers.

ISP's are a lot of things, "dumb" they are not.

<comment> guard-of-terra But they really should be since they can't usually bring any useful service over a "vanilla" internet.

Everything they bring is either crap that degrades your experience and is hard to out out or costs you additional money. Non-exclusive if.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> what a French company gets preferential treatment in France - to quote Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that favoring of national champions is going on in here.

Hint Which companies got raided over the 35 hour week a few years back not French owned ones.

</comment><comment><USER19> a question ..maybe it is obvious.. in the past Mobile OEMS at times have paid a bandwidth fee to telecomms to balance end users having to update an OS on the device..

Are we sure that the event of Google paying Orange referenced in the article is not simply Google paying a small fee due to the bandwidth consumed by the end user when the Android OS is updated on the Orange networks? side note, usually that download is nto counted towards user limits as usually its also sometimes a security update.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so since Google isn't responsible for updating Android phones (except for the Nexus models). That's a job for the OEMs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That is really weird... Especially the warning about president Hollande about the Google tax.

Why is it weird? Because since free.fr badly messed up and decided to give the finger to net neutrality, a french minister did ask free.fr's CEO to come explain himself and to fix the situation as soon as possible with Google.

Basically free.fr was planning to remove Google ads by modifying the HTML served to users and even the socialist running France at the moment thought that violating net neutrality like that was not acceptable (in their own words it was a violation of net-neutrality and france is very much pro-net- neutrality).

And Orange is an ISP, just like free.fr. Not a media company.

So I wonder if the author of TFA isn't confusing two different things: the right to archive / link to french magazines / publications (like Lemonde.fr) and the net-neutrality issue.

IMHO users are paying for a service and companies unable to cope with the bandwith their users are demanding shouldn't use fake adverts to advertize bandwith they cannot provide.

In addition to that: go Google, wire the entire europe with fiber and let's be done with these lame ISPs ; )

<comment><USER21> Those are definitely two separate problems :

On one hand, there is a peering problems between some French ISP and Google and they don't agree on who should pay for the interconnection costs.

On the other hand, some French newspapers are complaining about Google News.

<comment><USER22> To clarify a bit - essentially Google is its own ISP, they are peering with Tier 1 ISPs directly so this case may well be a peering negotiation gone wrong which would have nothing to do with network neutrality.

However, as the case is, it may be very difficult to distinguish between Google the ISP and Google the content provider, and it seems from the article that this might be the case of people confusing Google the ISP with Google the content provider.

<comment><USER3> The article contains great confusion about ISP matters and "content" matters, but I don't see how Orange and Google should give a fuck about "content" matter (including the political circus) when they are negotiating peering agreements. If they do somehow, they this would be in very bad faith, but there is no sign they have done so in this story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Clearly Orange has no idea how the internet works...The ISP is just a dumb pipe to connect the user to a server, nothing more._

Yay! you go and tell them what the internet is and how to run their business since they have no idea <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_%28telecommunications%29>

>> _If their users are using too much bandwidth and the costs are higher than the profits they should start to rethink the price of their service, not go after Google saying that they are evil for transferring all that data._

That's _one_ option, the other is to approach Netflix, Google or whatever and negotiate. NEGOTIATE is the keyword and you need to keep in mind that different countries have different laws.

Raising prices on everyone because xx% makes Youtube Orange's largest bandwidth hog could make the rest of your customers mad.

<comment><USER8> >That's one option, the other is to approach Netflix, Google or whatever and negotiate.

Negotiate implies a free market. There is no free market for access to an ISP's residential customers. They have a complete monopoly over the ability to send packets to those people, resulting in a market failure that requires government regulation to avoid monopoly abuse.

>Raising prices on everyone because xx% makes Youtube Orange's largest bandwidth hog could make the rest of your customers mad.

Do you have some evidence that xx% is actually simultaneously some small percentage of users _and_ still use enough bandwidth as a small minority to require a nontrivial price increase for all customers? Raising prices on all users in order to pay for expansion to meet demand created by a substantial majority of users is not exactly unreasonable. Especially if the remaining minority is offered the chance to buy a less expensive connection with insufficient capacity to stream video, since they by definition don't want to do that anyway.

<comment><USER3> > Negotiate implies a free market. There is no free market for access to an > ISP's residential customers. They have a complete monopoly over the ability > to send packets to those people, resulting in a market failure that requires > government regulation to avoid monopoly abuse.

This kind of theory is ridiculous. It is like saying that there is no free market in the sale of carrot, because as soon as I enter a shop that sells carrot and start to buy some the other shops have no ability to sell some to me at the same time.

Now there are some situation where you get something that looks like more a real monopoly, e.g. watter supply. But ISP in France is nothing like a monopoly. Pretending otherwise with utterly contrived theories is complete lack of good faith.

<comment><USER8> >It is like saying that there is no free market in the sale of carrot, because as soon as I enter a shop that sells carrot and start to buy some the other shops have no ability to sell some to me at the same time.

You are very indignantly failing to understand that there is more than one market in play here.

Some user, Joe Smith, subscribes to Orange as an ISP. That user may have other choices; Orange may have competitors. That is not the market I am referring to.

Once Joe Smith and however many thousand others like him subscribe to Orange, Orange has a monopoly _on those customers_. If you are a content distributor, it is not possible for you to send packets to any of those customers without going through Orange. You must, at some point, connect to their network in order to reach those customers. Other than government regulation, nothing stops them from charging monopoly rents for anyone to make such a connection.

The content distributor has no control over what decisions end customers make in choosing between ISPs. Their choice or lack thereof is completely irrelevant since the content distributor has little if any ability to influence it: _Maybe_ if you're YouTube you could cause an ISP to lose sufficiently many customers through having slow or no access to YouTube, but probably not even then since if YouTube's competitors are still fast customers are more likely to blame YouTube than Orange, and if you _are_ the little YouTube competitor then it's totally hopeless because Orange can just cut you off if you don't pay whatever they ask and the large majority of their customers won't even notice.

Internet service is not a carrot. If you need a bunch of carrots you can still get all of them in one place and if that store mistreats you in any way you can choose from multiple alternative suppliers. If you need to reach the entire general public, each and every ISP can hold you up for access to their subset of the customers, because you don't need 100 carrots, you need 1/100th of every carrot in the world. There is no way for you to go to Free and negotiate with them for access to Orange's customer base. It doesn't do you a lick of good to get twice as much bandwidth to Free's customers if your problem is not enough bandwidth to Orange's customers. You have to negotiate directly or indirectly with Orange, who can hold up all comers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The End of the World - <AUTHOR> http://classic.esquire.com/the-end-of-the-world/ <comment><USER2> Paywall. No thanks.

Edit:typo</comment>


Pika CDN – A CDN for Modern JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.pika.dev/cdn <comment><USER2> Very nice service but how do you manage the CDN subresource integrity (SRI) if the packages are different for each individual user?

It's possible to check subresource with es6 module but only if you know the signature first.([https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45804660/is-it- possible-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45804660/is-it-possible-to- use-subresource-integrity-with-es6-module-imports)).

Even Webpack will not handle it with webpack-subresource-integrity ([https://www.npmjs.com/package/webpack-subresource- integrity](https://www.npmjs.com/package/webpack-subresource-integrity))

Of course HTTPS is strong but not a foolproof solution against man-in-the- middle attack.

<comment><USER3> I could probably google this but I'm not well versed in security stuff. What would a MITM attack against HTTPS look like?

<comment><USER4> There would be a number of ways to do this:

\- Strip SSL by for instance blocking port 443 and hoping they fall back to HTTP.

\- Get your own root certificate installed on the equipment of the user you are attacking. This is fairly common in corporate environments for instance.

\- MD5 collision attacks (although almost every certificate would be SHA signed these days)

<comment><USER5> HSTS prevents the first of these if the client has connected to the server previously.

Chrome also hasn't trusted certs with MD5 since version 65.

<comment><USER6> HSTS Preload prevents that from happening even if they never visited the site

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My company would buy into this if there were some kind of boilerplate contract you sold to a business/institution vs the Patreon page you have right now.

Just FYI, you're missing out on some dollars because of that. For better or worse, the bean counters at my work place won't approve anything less. I have a feeling I'm not alone.

If you can quickly whip up some boilerplate business checkout with an invoice, you'd make more than a few dollars today.

<comment><USER8> Forget the bean counters, the technical people _shouldn 't_ approve of this without some sort of SLA or business agreement. How would you feel comfortable depending on a 3rd party service you have no actual business relationship or SLA guarantees with?

They're seriously leaving money on the table, businesses would have no problem dropping 50k/yr on a service like this.

<comment><USER7> Thats a good point, actually.

This is something we've been looking for at my job, but we don't have the technical expertise to do it ourselves (a CDN is tricky business, not in our core competency). If an SLA that included support and/or customization as well as had a direct line to high level support for feedback, you could easily net 50K or more.

Seriously. I know my organization would be willing to pay even more than that. If you're reading this Pika founders, you should really give this some thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is fantastic - exactly what I've been looking for but didn't know I was looking for it! I've been re-importing libraries by doing something weird like: `import './three.js'; export default window.Three;` so I can use it as a normal module.

I love not having to use build tools for my personal projects anymore - everything feels so light and "old school". Here's my Minecraft-ish clone in native modules and WebGL2: [https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels](https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels). No dot files, nothin' to build... just view source!

<comment><USER10> That's a really neat project! Thanks for sharing

<comment><USER11> Indeed, thumbs up. This should be a post of its own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is very good development for frontend development. Build systems like webpack were useful technology in earlier days. But they are presenting a big hurdle for newer less experienced developers to enter the frontend development space today. I would love to see a future where we can again run a webserver from a folder to serve a frontend in development.

I do wonder how modular css fits into the picture of es modules though.

<comment><USER13> I have been coding frontend, backend and other system things since at least 2007 and the state of web development scares me. I shouldnt need a build tool to get JS on a website. I should be able to just run JS on a website. The web went from extremely simple and usable to "oh my what the hell is this?" It gets worse when you code frontend on proprietary systems that are hard to extend. Ever had to override something in Bootstrap with your own CSS files?

<comment><USER14> I mean, you don't have to use it, right?

I think the reason it is like that is because there were _many_ problems with JS "back in the day", and so people felt they had to come up with solutions.

Just look at Svelte. It's a library about compiling JS to get back to the "just JS" days. I mean, it's more than that, but it's about reducing runtime complexity. So another way to think about it is that writing "old style simple JS" is so convoluted that the author felt the need to write a translation layer from modern frameworks to old style JS. Sort of a mindblower to me haha _(though, I love and agree with Svelte, to be clear)_.

The great thing though is that you can still use plain old JS, right? Nothing has changed for you if you don't want it. So is there really a problem?

This "modern web" stuff is just people solving problems. Some of these problems are the fault of old JS/web. Some of them are problems of our own making. Remember how amazing modern UI frameworks were? It's because we had PTSD from horrible jQuery codebases. A problem of our own making.

So stick with what you like, and other people can use the more complex stuff. It's a win win, no?

<comment><USER15> I did classic server side rendered apps, but experimented with pure JS apps early on where the only way to get persistence was to store things in cookies. The "app" was just a html file on the desktop that you double clicked on to open in the browser. Then came AJAX. and during the last fifteen years more and more pieces have fallen into place to make web apps more viable, like service workers, local storage, add to desktop, etc. But JS apps are much harder to develop compared to server rendered app, because you have to manage state, while server rendered apps are just a snapshot of the database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you've got a site with decent levels of traffic host libraries yourself rather than use a JS CDN.

Retrieving critical content from a 3rd-party CDN has a number of issues:

\- New TCP connection has to be created with added cost of TLS negotiation and it's own slow-start phase

\- If you're using HTTP/2 then prioritisation only occurs over a single connection so it can't be prioritised against other content

<comment><USER17> There are tradeoffs either way. For popular modules it might already be in your browser cache if another app used the module recently. Plus being a CDN it's probably being served by a machine closer to the user. And if your whole site is running of a CDN then you're relying on a 3rd party anyway.

Benchmark for your users.

<comment><USER16> Based on [https://andydavies.me/blog/2018/09/06/safari-caching- and-3rd...](https://andydavies.me/blog/2018/09/06/safari-caching-and-3rd- party-resources/) it seems highly unlikely that a popular module will be in the cache

\- Safari double keys it's cache to prevent 3rd-parties tracking across sites \- Usage of common libraries is just too low for their to be a critical mass

A whole site running on a CDN still involves only one connection, will make use of the throughput growing the TCP congestion window grows, and a decent CDN is likely to be more reliable than the origin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> `curl -i [https://cdn.pika.dev/preact`](https://cdn.pika.dev/preact`) redirects me to a dist-es2019 package (I assume because it detects my user- agent supporting that) but isn't showing anything like a `Vary: User-Agent` header.

Won't this break for any situation in which users with different browsers share a proxy server?

(also tried with Chrome, didn't see a Vary there either)

<comment><USER19> Don't worry - between tls and http2 you don't get to use a proxy anymore anyway... :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So how is that different from any other CDN?

CDNJS is actually orders of magnitude more likely to have a cache hit than this new offering.

<comment><USER21> It describes it in the first paragraph. It acts as a proxy to serve ESM JS files (for any top-level package that's already in ESM syntax) that modern browsers can use natively without a build/transpile step. Looks like they recently added automatic polyfills for older browsers too.

CDNJS is just a standard CDN that serves up files as they're packaged, but if you want a high hit-ratio then [https://jsDelivr.com](https://jsDelivr.com) has the most marketshare currently, and more features.

<comment><USER20> "CDNJS" returns 5X more results in Google compared to "jsDelivr", so you're more likely to get a cache hit.

Are you sure it has the most marketshare?

<comment><USER21> A google search for the name has nothing to do with network coverage and volume of the CDN traffic.

CDNJS is only using Cloudflare, JsDelivr has a bigger network with more partners and support for both npm and github.

<comment><USER20> Google search tells you how popular it is, and that's what matters when getting a cache hit. Network coverage doesn't affect that.

You can also try Google Trends, which tells you CDNJS is around twice as popular:

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=CDNJS,jsde...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=CDNJS,jsdelivr)

<comment><USER22> Google search can only tell you how popular something is to search and how much content there is _about it_. They aren't going to be showing you a website just because there's a src="cdn.example.com" in the code, only if it's in the text.

To actually know then you either need them to report their # of users and trust them, or scrape tons of websites and check their source for which CDN they use.

<comment><USER20> You can also search Github.

CDNJS: 18M references

jsDelivr: 1M references

I showed you 3 different sources that prove CDNJS is much more popular. You showed zero so far.

<comment><USER23> You may be right that CDNJS is more likely to result in cache hits, it's just that _none_ of these figures actually help in finding out the answer.

CDNJS being in 1000 small github blogs could easily be less impactful than a single large website using jsDelivr. We have no idea if the github projects are even used.

Again, it may well be the case that it's better in this way, but these figures show nothing really either way.

Here's a bit of an attempt at looking more at it, though I don't know their methodology:

[https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cd- jsdelivr/all/all](https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cd- jsdelivr/all/all)

[https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cd- cdnjs/all/all](https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cd-cdnjs/all/all)

Ones that jump out there are dailymail and yelp, depending on your expected users you might expect one or the other does better for you.

<comment><USER20> These links also support my claim. Again, you posted zero evidence to the contrary.

<comment><USER21> The thread is about cache hit ratio which is not that simple. A file is either cached at an endpoint or not, regardless of whether it's downloaded once or a billion times. CDNJS only supports ~3k libraries and gets most of its usage from jQuery and FontAwesome.

jsDelivr has an automated backend proxy to support any NPM package, Github repo, or Wordpress.org plugin. It also uses Cloudflare as one of its backends, so at worst it's at parity with CDNJS in cache hits or far better due to more network partners, more global regions, and more packages from more origins.

Anything on CDNJS is also likely cached by jsDelivr, but most of everything cached on jsDelivr is not even available on CDNJS.

<comment><USER23> The other side though is if something is cached at the client, right? I thought that was what people were talking about with cache hits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does it inspect your code for potentially needed polyfills or do you need to specify a list of polyfillable features that you have used?

<comment><USER25> It inspects the code for the package a request was made for and polyfills features it used. You get the module + polyfills in one response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The differential serving sounds like a neat idea. Naturally, everyone not using the newest version of Firefox or Safari will go to hell eventually, but until then it could really improve the web for a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is way cool. I recently started a new app and decided to see how far I could get without a build tool. My early impressions left me wanting to write a blog post "ES Modules Make JavaScript Fun Again." The whole development cycle felt clean and simple. Ultimately though I got hung up on dependencies. For a while I was just including things directly from node_modules/. But npm flattens things so that library location is not predictable (this crops up when en ES module dependency tries to look in its own node_modules/ directory for another ES module dependency, but that dependency has actually been flattened to the top level). So you're basically stuck downloading all your dependencies (and their dependencies) manually. This isn't 100% a bad thing. It pushes you to use smaller dependencies with fewer sub-dependencies. You're also stuck using libraries that export an ES module. Pika could be just the ticket to bridge these gaps.

</comment><comment><USER27> How many bytes are typically spent on compatibility with older browsers? Have anyone made any research into this?

<comment><USER21> It varies a lot depending on the browser features you're using, total script size, minification vs gzip compression, cache hit rate, etc.

My company is in adtech so our final bundles are 14kb (single TCP congestion window) for modern browsers, 30kb for Safari/iOS 10, and 75kb for IE11/IE10. We've seen similar doubling-of-size in other libraries for backwards compatibility, although we can probably drop IE10 soon and cut IE11 down by half.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This wouldn't work with a standard React project though, right? Because you still need to transpile JSX. You could use the development version of React, I guess, which is slower, but can understand JSX, but that's not something you want to ship.

I'd love to use something like this for teaching, tutorials, and even small projects, but there's some things I still need a transpiler for.

I also realize I could use the `htm` package instead of JSX, which gives a lot of benefits over JSX, including not requiring transpiling, but, since it's not widely used by the wider ecosystem, I'd be a little hesitant to include it in my projects.

<comment><USER29> Check out [https://www.pika.dev/packages/htm](https://www.pika.dev/packages/htm) which solves exactly that problem. Personally I like it so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> [https://www.pika.dev/search?q=jquery](https://www.pika.dev/search?q=jquery) \-- so jQuery is not "modern" any more? That's quite surprising, giving for instance the dependency of the [http://semantic-ui.com/](http://semantic- ui.com/) framework on jQuery ([https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic- UI/issues/1175](https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI/issues/1175))

<comment><USER31> jQuery was originally designed and built in a bygone era (on the web / front- end timescale), includes many features that have landed and/or normalized on the web platform and also does not leverage the modern JavaScript module system.

Let's call it "retro"? :)

<comment><USER30> Unfortunately there is still need for libraries like underscore.js, which also covers some jQuery functions (which are not DOM-related).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What is the business model? Where does the money come to pay for the dev and hosting? This is the question I'm left with.

Nothing is free and I didn't find this in crunchbase.

Something is paying for it. Is it tracking people and selling it?

<comment><USER33> It says it right at the bottom of the page!

> Love Pika? Go Pro! Pika CDN will always be free, but you can support the > project with a Pro Membership donation on Patreon. Get early access to > upcoming production-only features.

<comment><USER34> This is wishful thinking IMO.

What if in 5-10 years the volume is too big to be funded by donations? Will Pika sell to a malicious company? Will it shut down and kill everyone that depends on it?

<comment><USER35> Well yes, it will probably shut down just like the official python package repo will shut down if it's sponsors can't meet the budget. Nothing is guaranteed to last forever.

<comment><USER34> The difference being apps are actually pointing to the packages in realtime. If the CDN falls the app stops working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Looks great, but I think the homepage should do more to convince me that I can trust it. Who runs it, how is it funded, is there any guarantee they won't run out of money and shut down, etc.

</comment><comment><USER37> Can anyone explain how the differential serving works?

I get that they might have a User-Agent mapping to features. But how do they know which feature are needed by the loaded modules?

<comment><USER38> Probably based on the polyfill dependencies that are included in the packages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Pika CDN seems to facilitate user tracking by the CDN better than the current JS CDNs can (with simple browser privacy features that browsers should be doing already).

Also, wasn't clear to me whether they support SRI or an equivalent supported by the browser. If they don't, it could also be a centralized vulnerability for user-targeted injection.

(Solution: the best sites will pay to serve their own JS.)

</comment><comment><USER40> I suggest you register all the bit-flipped domains. This is a must for all CDNs, given the ability to serve malicious JS from a bitflipped domain.

</comment><comment><USER41> I love the idea of a more efficient CDN for JS (and code overall!), but it isn't clear to me how this handles the multitude of versions. None of the examples seem to include versioning, which is a huge oversight IMO. A future I see is IPFS for this sort of thing. All objects identified uniquely, but cacheable by multiple entities.

<comment><USER42> Well, the first example looks like it includes a version:

        import {Component, render} from 'https://cdn.pika.dev/preact/v8';

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I built a repo like this but for require (commonjs), where package dependencies was sent along the first request using http2. Only problem was that browsers didnt cache the preloaded files and re-requestsed them. Hopefully browsers will fix this or latency will be a huge problem with several layers deep dependencies.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just a comment on the name: as a Python dev when I saw Pika I immediately thought the RabbitMQ Python package: [https://pypi.org/project/pika/](https://pypi.org/project/pika/)

May or may not be an issue for this project. Just bringing it up for visibility.

<comment><USER44> Yeah that is what came to my mind too, but the CDN part helped me realize that this was something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> When I mention url like that in import, will bundlers like Webpack automatically downloads the js modules?

<comment><USER46> From what I understand, the idea is that you don't use a bundler, but let the browser download all the modules that your app needs - hence some features like the "differential serving" (a.k.a. polyfills added if necessary with UA sniffing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> There's a reference to the "browser's shared module cache". Anyone know what that is?

</comment><comment><USER48> Their example doesn't work for me - it's just blank. Looks like CORS issues?

[https://pika-cdn-example.glitch.me/](https://pika-cdn-example.glitch.me/)

</comment><comment><USER49> Isn't pika where you're eating things you're not supposed to? So by using this cdn your computer is eating things it's not supposed to?

</comment><comment><USER6> It would be great to make the packages immutable, doesn't allow the maintainer of the package to change code on the website, malicious or not.

</comment><comment><USER50> If I would be Google, I would create a service like this, and would slowly inject tracking code in every package served.

<comment><USER9> Well, that's exactly what _every_ CDN does: if you're a CDN you don't need to inject anything - people give away all their users' browsing histories by making them download files from your servers... the analytics are just your log files.</comment></comment>


Behind the Scenes of the Apollo Mission at MIT - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/behind-scenes-apollo-mission-0718 <comment><USER2> Pretty precise seismometers back then!

> The first seismometer was placed on the moon's surface very shortly after > the astronauts landed, and seismologists including Toksöz started seeing the > data right away — including every footstep the astronauts took on the > surface. Even when the astronauts returned to the lander to sleep before the > morning takeoff, the team could see that Buzz Aldrin ScD '63 and Neil > Armstrong were having a sleepless night, with every toss and turn dutifully > recorded on the seismic traces.

</comment><comment><USER3> Five of the apollo astronauts who walked on the moon were MIT graduates, including Aldrin.*

Tech Square was built for the space program but after the Kennedy assassination when the nexus was moved to Houston, MIT put project MAC (later LCS and the AI lab) there; Honeywell had a chunk for Multics, etc. It was just office space though; I don't think the CIA office in 545 was related.

* (Only two Eagle Scouts did; Charles Duke was both.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Remarkably, the I-Lab was briefly under siege during this time, by blockading demonstrators. And at the same time, MIRV, the fundamental US offensive system, was being finished there. Dr. Draper, then in his mid-60s, was basically hated during this period.</comment>


Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman: Post-Quantum Curves [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/413.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> This stuff is mindbending, but the paper itself is pretty impressive. Microsoft actually got this working:

 _We present a full-fledged, high-speed implementation of (unauthenticated) ephemeral SIDH that currently provides 128 bits of quantum security and 192 bits of classical security. This implementation uses 48-byte private keys to produce 751-byte ephemeral Diffie-Hellman public keys, and is currently written almost entirely in C with only a limited set of functions written in assembly. To our knowledge, our library presents the first SIDH software that runs in constant-time, i.e., that is designed to resist timing and cache timing attacks._

<comment><USER2> Can you explain that for non-cryptographers, please?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah. Here's a diagram from a recent isogeny paper:

[https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/736x/0f/92/7f/0f927f795...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/736x/0f/92/7f/0f927f795f3cfa199d474894fa781c74.jpg)

Isogenies are mappings between curves. So maybe one way to start getting your head around isogeny crypto is that you're dealing in higher-order curve structures.

<comment><USER3> This looks like something you'd find in a cult.

<comment><USER4> You should see their (much faster!) subsequent paper. It develops an entirely new mapping to take advantage of Intel vector extensions, then invokes Valefor instead of Bael.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to say that "Supersingular Isogeny" and "Post-Quantum Curves" sound like really good technobabble. You know, like when a car mechanic tells you that the "Johnson Rod" is broke, only in a cryptography context.

</comment><comment><USER6> download: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/downloads/bd5fd4cd-61b6-...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/downloads/bd5fd4cd-61b6-458a-bd94-b1f406a3f33f/)

works fine on x64: TESTING ISOGENY-BASED KEY EXCHANGE \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Curve isogeny system: SIDHp751

      Key exchange tests ........................................... PASSED

BENCHMARKING ISOGENY-BASED KEY EXCHANGE \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Curve isogeny system: SIDHp751

      Alice's key generation runs in ...............................   45806658 cycles
      Bob's key generation runs in .................................   53532976 cycles
      Alice's public key validation runs in ........................   58980241 cycles
      Bob's public key validation runs in ..........................   64155209 cycles
      Alice's shared key computation runs in .......................   42940225 cycles
      Bob's shared key computation runs in .........................   51437446 cycles

TESTING ELLIPTIC CURVE BIGMONT \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

      BigMont's scalar multiplication tests ........................ PASSED

BENCHMARKING ELLIPTIC CURVE BIGMONT \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

      BigMont's scalar multiplication runs in ......................    5950262 cycles

<comment><USER7> I love how this is developed by Microsoft and it doesn't compile on either Windows (VS) nor OSX (gcc, icc, clang) for me.

<comment><USER6> I run Arch Linux x64, compiled asm version with gcc. Works all just fine

<comment><USER7> Well, if you read my comment you'll see I only talked about OSX and Windows - Linux compiles just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks really great. I wonder how long it will be before these algorithms are usable in projects like libressl and GnuPG, as well as how long it will take standards bodies to include them in future versions of TLS and OpenPGP (IIRC we are /still/ waiting on ed25519 to be included in OpenPGP).

<comment><USER9> It'll be a while yet. OpenSSL is still the standard platform for trading research implementations and AFAIK the problem isn't characterised with enough depth to suggest it as a recommended hard problem to base post-quantum cryptographic primitives on. The next few years will be very exciting though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently had the privilege of listening to Brian LaMacchia speak on this and other developments in the post-quantum cryptography space at Microsoft research. What they're doing is remarkable and their commitment to the space is impressive. SIDH is an exciting problem and I'm looking forward to reading more work on implementations and cryptanalysis.

Well done to the people at MSR behind this paper!</comment>


Why OpenStack doesn't need a Linus Torvalds - <AUTHOR> http://fnords.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/why-openstack-doesnt-need-a-linus-torvalds/

<comment><USER2> while i think that the kernel development is fundamentally flawed (just one example: see obscuring of security issues) not only but also because of linus. its governance has some strength. you will not find such horrible code in linux as in other software stacks, say... openstack. wow is that bad code.</comment>


Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different? [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K5SycZjGhI&feature=sub

<comment><USER2> Now there's an idea for healthcare reform: pay doctors the months that you're healthy, and not when you're sick.

<comment><USER3> Yikes, I can't imagine any doctor wanting to take that deal without similarly gaining full control over your diet, drinking, smoking, work and sleep habits.

<comment><USER4> It's already in your self-interest to be healthy. This is simply re-aligning the doctor's interest with your own. Financially speaking, it's in most western doctors' self-interest for you to be perpetually diseased. For example, doctors are often found receiving kickbacks for prescribing medicines or running certain expensive diagnostic tests.

How different would our system be if doctors had cause to participate in your wellness? Encourage people to stop drinking soda, to negotiate bulk gym memberships for all his clients, have a monthly newsletter full of healthful recipes, have a staff person call every few weeks and ask how you've been eating, exercising? Invite everyone on the newsletter to events like hiking, bike riding, nutrition classes, etc?

When you call her up and have questions about improving your lifestyle, diet, and exercise it's suddenly in her interest to spend time with you and give you expert information.

Suddenly doctors everywhere would change their positions on some political issues: AMA would push for better food quality laws (how about restricting hydrogenated oil and HFCS like nearly every other 1st world country has done?). We'd have a better chance to replace sugar and corn subsidies with more healthful alternatives.

Wow; this would be huge... and it'll won't happen anytime soon. Too much money is being made perpetuating the problems.

<comment><USER5> I would still think a doctor could make this work in an individual practice. I would love to have a doctor like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like this is the TED version of his blog post at sivers.org: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668197>

<comment><USER7> He expands on the blog post that gives just the street name example. The combination of methods are different to arrive at the desired outcome. Reminds me of programming and problem solving. Sometimes it helps to rethink the problem. There may be multiple ways - each having their own advantages and disadvantages.</comment></comment>