Why file2hd.com rules - <AUTHOR> http://www.file2hd.com The other day someone posted link to academic earth.com , which is a great site aggregating some of the best university lectures available.  However, a lot of times the flash video feeds are choppy crap.  No problem!  Just feed the URL you want to file2hd.com and then you can download it directly! <comment><USER2> So, uh, what's up with the 1x1 iframe?</comment>


Show HN: A simple offline-first app to track your reps in the gym - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/riker/id1196920730?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> Developer here. Thanks for checking out my app, Riker. In case anyone is curious, the iOS app is native, written in Obj-C. The Riker web app is written using React and Redux. The REST API is written in Clojure and the backend is Postgres.

Although there is also a fully functional web version of Riker, the app is preferred since it supports offline mode, provides Watch App and integrates with Apple's Health app.</comment>


Amazon Launch Event - p-pat-ni https://www.amazon.com/oc/launchevent/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to get downvoted for this, but this video is hilarious when you imagine they're trying out some sort of sex toy attachment. Just watch it again with that in mind.

<comment><USER2> That works too well. I found the comment "that's pretty damn intuitive" the most funny with the image of it being a sex toy in mind.

<comment><USER3> "I would use that _alot_ " Caused me to actually crack up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All the head moving made me think back to Jonny Lee's wiimote headtracking 3d display.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid- Uw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw)

Perhaps Amazon have an eye tracking system which can do the same with out the need for the user to be wearing infra red leds?

<comment><USER5> Yeah I was coming here to say the same thing. Seems like it is definitely doing some sort of motion tracking.

<comment><USER6> I'm actually thinking this is either "Kinect" on a tablet and/or eye tracking. The application specifically talks about additional sensors. being used to build apps. I'm not sure head tracking is a strong use case for additional apps. But something with the depth of MS's Kinect or eye tracking could be really interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They will be launching their smartphone. Source: [http://bgr.com/2014/04/15/amazon-smartphone-photos-specs- kin...](http://bgr.com/2014/04/15/amazon-smartphone-photos-specs-kindle-phone- exclusive/)

<comment><USER8> "he device houses an additional four front-facing cameras that work with other sensors to facilitate the software's 3D effects."

I wonder how the battery life of this will be like.

<comment><USER9> I was thinking that 4 cameras seems a little excessive when you only really need one for head tracking. But maybe it has 4 and uses one at a time - switching between them when/if one is covered.

<comment><USER10> Well, you need only need 1 camera for lateral tracking, but I believe you need at least 2 cameras for depth tracking. Possibly a third for eye tracking and a fourth for Skype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The questions here in the form certainly give some hints about what it's about:

 _" Are you interested in developing apps utilizing a new type of sensor?"_

 _" Describe an innovative way in which you have used gyroscopes, accelerometers, or other device sensors in your app development."_

<comment><USER12> The clue is in the title: it is the drone!

Those people are just watching some wild footage of it on some tablet, the teaser is there to just throw people off the scent, gyroscopes etc: must be the drone.

Should I place a bet on that or would I be best to go with the 3d eye-tracking kindle-phone?

<comment><USER13> You do know that most (maybe all) modern smartphones and tablets have accelerometers in them, which are often gyroscope based, right?

<comment><USER14> Further, the mass production of such parts due to their inclusion in phones is essentially the reason why inexpensive drones are viable today.

Chris Anderson famously called it the peace dividend of the smartphone wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Talk of amazon phone with multiple cameras:

[http://www.cnet.com/news/rumored-amazon-phone-six-cameras- su...](http://www.cnet.com/news/rumored-amazon-phone-six-cameras-summer- launch/)

and: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6485698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6485698)

Going back more than a year: [http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-said-to-be- developing-3d-sma...](http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-said-to-be- developing-3d-smartphone/)

</comment><comment><USER16> From the head moving and what they're saying about it, it's definitely this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K39Q9zvQoE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K39Q9zvQoE)

<comment><USER17> Yes, I would definitely use this often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there anything discernible in the reflection on the hipster-glasses at 0:42?

... enhance ...

<comment><USER19> [http://i.imgur.com/oe2f1pP.png](http://i.imgur.com/oe2f1pP.png)

Tough to see much, but you do see a shadow of her hand and the proportions indicate to me a tablet-sized device not a phone.

<comment><USER20> It's definitely a phone in the video: [http://i.imgur.com/MgBcxMw.png](http://i.imgur.com/MgBcxMw.png)

You can see its top at the bottom of the photo.

<comment><USER21> Yep, it's definitely a phone sized device, and you can see her scrolling with her finger in the reflection, so it's a touch screen. Now, what's actually unique about it that separates it from the millions of similar devices, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Perhaps the display stays square to your head? I mean, if you're viewing the screen at a slight angle, it skews the perspective to look straight?

[http://i.imgur.com/ExL1OqV.png](http://i.imgur.com/ExL1OqV.png)

There's a quick photoshop of a phone at an angle and the display square. Now, you wouldn't purposely use the phone at such an extreme angle, but when you're typing, playing games, in bed, etc, it might make things easier to use. Fairly straightforward, it would just be tracking the location of your head, and adjust the perspective of the display.

<comment><USER22> clever idea, but that just seems like a really small, inconsequential feature to play up that much...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Everyone is tilting their head or the device. Definitely something related to a 3D interface, but it has to be something more that just a 3D interface.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am specially intrigued by "Do you have machine learning experience?" question in the developer section for the invitation request.

</comment><comment><USER25> At this rate, one day I'm going to buy a house on Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER26> Link to video: [https://d3d73dg4t65dlz.cloudfront.net/videos/customer_tease_...](https://d3d73dg4t65dlz.cloudfront.net/videos/customer_tease_0603.mp4) (it was in the source-code)

</comment><comment><USER27> Split discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7847951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7847951)

</comment><comment><USER28> It's a phone. You can see the top of the device in their promo video at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erUZQ9GK0sE&t=41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erUZQ9GK0sE&t=41).

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpVCE7aCMAA_DDJ.png:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpVCE7aCMAA_DDJ.png:large) has a tweaked screen capture.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady It's rumoured to be a phone with a 3D display - but I don't see why I would want that. It's certainly a cool USP but it seems like gimmick that will quickly lose attention. Maybe they've found a use for it I haven't thought of but I don't know anyone who has been requesting a 3D display on their phone.

<comment><USER29> > I don't know anyone who has been requesting a 3D display on their phone.

Well, 7 years ago I didn't know anyone who was asking to eliminate physical keyboards from phones.

I'm less skeptical of the merit of the idea (whatever exactly it turns out to be), than I am of Amazon's first generation implementation (based on owning 1st gen versions of Kindle eReader and Kindle Fire).

<comment><USER30> The thing is 3d screens have been a tested quantity (both on things like the 3DS and on a lot of phones in Japan). It's been far from a hit.

<comment><USER31> So does the phones without physical keyboards, using touch pens, until Apple figured out how to eliminate that damn pen and just use fingers and here we are today. I give it a benefit of doubt - I doubt that what has been done to 3d displays is all what _can_ be done ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Pause at just past 0:41. Woman is wearing a blue top. You can see a very-much phone like device, with a headphone jack.

<comment><USER33> Indeed. Here's a screengrab:

[http://i.imgur.com/b1edNBJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/b1edNBJ.png)

She's clearly using something that looks like a phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Paraphrasing a friend from Amazon:

"Man, we have no clue what they're going to announce. Whatever it is has been completely black-boxed. I'm guessing it might be a 3D projecting phone, but that's based on exactly nothing. Plus, I'm not invited, so... hah."

</comment><comment><USER35> If there's anything i've learned through the years, if something is actually industry breaking revolutionary... they have no need to hype the launch. It'll get the press after the event.

I'm reminded of the time Opera "Changed the internet"

</comment><comment><USER36> Summoning user?id=nilium

Please make your wallpaper [1] work for this phone.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843664)

</comment><comment><USER37> 3D effects are neat, but I'm betting Amazon is more excited to get a high fidelity eyetracker in your phone.

Instant heatmaps, new types of ad creatives, new ad conversion modes, ...

</comment><comment><USER38> Judging by all of the head tilting in the video, perhaps something with 3D or "holographic" projection?

<comment><USER39> That would be consistent with previous reports of 3D "sensing" tech on the phone (not sure whether that means gestures, glasses-free 3D screen, or something else).

Sources: [http://bgr.com/2014/04/22/amazon-smartphone-specs-details- ki...](http://bgr.com/2014/04/22/amazon-smartphone-specs-details-kindle-phone- exclusive/) [http://bgr.com/2014/05/01/amazon-smartphone-photos-kindle- ph...](http://bgr.com/2014/05/01/amazon-smartphone-photos-kindle-phone-images- exclusive/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Prediction: launching a Kindle Phone for a $30/m phone plan, free data for Kindle/Amazon streaming.

<comment><USER41> Hmm methinks you did not watch the video...

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What video is everyone talking about?

<comment><USER43> There is a video under "June 18 | Seattle" on the linked page

<comment><USER42> Weird. I don't see it. Could be Ghostery or some similar ad blocking plugin I guess.

<comment><USER44> You don't need any add-ons to selectively block flash nowadays on Firefox... Menu - Add-ons - Plugins - Flash "Ask to activate" instead of "Always activate"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Looks like it will be a lot like this: [http://www.getmoju.com/](http://www.getmoju.com/)

<comment><USER31> I hope not - an application that does something that looks almost like video already available to any modern phone and requires motion to be displayed? Hardly worth the launch event, hype, marketing money&effort and doesnt seem any way revolutionary or cool to me. But of course, I might be absolutely wrong about it and that's cool too.</comment></comment>


Was Citibank hacked? - <AUTHOR> https://my.citybank.com/

<comment><USER2> The URL is Cit __Y __bank, not Cit __I __bank, so maybe it 's a phishing site.</comment>


Mozilla Wants Heads-Up from FBI on Tor Browser Hack - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/05/12/mozilla-wants-heads-up-from-fbi-on-tor-browser-hack/ <comment><AUTHOR> I do not follow security vulnerabilities very closely, but I have no recollection of any major security vulnerabilities coming to light from voluntary law enforcement disclosures. Is this something that EVER happens?</comment>


Death of M. Rocard, former French PM, hero in the fight against software patents - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zdnet.fr%2Factualites%2Fmichel-rocard-heros-victorieux-de-la-lutte-contre-les-brevets-logiciels-39839198.htm&edit-text=&act=url <comment><USER2> There were quite a few articles on ZDnet like this:

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-we-need-software-patents- an...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-we-need-software-patents-and-yes-im- smarter-than-you/)

Which were pushing software patents for all they were worth (not much), in recent years.

Keep in mind that this is one of those 'retry until you get it' subjects, that will be pushed over and over again until the ratchet clicks and then you're stuck with them forever.

We owe M. Rocard a great debt for keeping Europe free as much as possible of this nonsense and it's sad to see him go.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rocard was into politics to try and make the world a better place. He was one of our strongest allies in the software patents fight.

I remember standing at the entrance of the Strasbourg parliament with a megaphone kindly saying to all members of parliament arriving: "Please vote Buzek-Rocard-Duff. Thank you very much!"

Makes me think of [http://free765.wikidot.com/](http://free765.wikidot.com/) . I never spoke to him in person like I did with other MEPs, but friends who were in the parliament while we were canoeing tell me he really really appreciated that.

Rest in peace, Michel.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some interviews of Michel Rocard are now available (in french) on various news sites. One funny detail is that he ALWAYS mentions the fact that politics has become incredibly difficult to do properly because of the small time available in medias to explain things in depth to the people. He usually points at the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death)) to explain why. That is quite an unusual opinion for a politician. (especially when you compare with media experts, such as Nicolas Sarkozy).

</comment><comment><USER5> For French speaking people, original article is [http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/michel-rocard-heros- victorieu...](http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/michel-rocard-heros-victorieux- de-la-lutte-contre-les-brevets-logiciels-39839198.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is what a democratic Europe looks like: Parliament standing its ground and rejecting special interests pushing bad legislation coming from the executive, like it happens in the best democracies. And at a time when the European Parliament was even less powerful than it is now.

<comment><USER2> Note that Rocard's opponent in this issue, McCreevy also tried to get copyrights extended to 95 years on behalf of the major labels and was one of the bigger wheels in the EU part of the real estate crisis because of his incessant pushing to relax the rules governing banking.

<comment><USER7> Note, that people who have a clue about why the EU came to be at all are either dead or have been managed away. BXL became a parking place for second rate politicians (understatement). Manipulators like Cameron, Farage know this too: and this is the tragedy.

McCreevy, déçu de voir ses arguments taillés en pièces, ne prenne la parole, le visage rougeaud, sur un ton énervé:

"Monsieur Rocard, si c'est la guerre que vous voulez, vous allez l'avoir."

Réponse de Rocard, d'un ton posé et ferme: "Monsieur McCreevy, des guerres, dans ma carrière, j'en ai déjà arrêté deux. Mais ce n'est pas parce que je suis un homme de paix que je céderai à l'intimidation. Je maintiens donc mes positions."

<comment><USER6> _> BXL became a parking place for second rate politicians _

This is primarily the fault of national governments, for which BXL is a convenient scapegoat for their own mistakes, and secondarily of voters who ignored European elections for too long. Post-Lisbon, MEPs do have significant powers and ultimately designate the Commission President, so it does matter who you vote for AND that you vote at all.

For McCreevy in particular, the Irish government should shoulder _a lot_ of the blame for nominating him, at a time when Commissioners were extremely powerful. These days a Commissioner so divisive would likely get shut down by EuroParliament. Also, I might be partisan but the last three Commissions were mostly a reflection of centre-right parties (EPP etc), which still command a majority in EuroParliament as well as in the Council. As long as people keep voting right-wing, we will get right-wing policies.

Like with all democracies, we get the politicians we deserve, not the ones we need.

<comment><USER7> We are talking about the same thing: those managed away from domestic power get compensated by a bxl holiday if their blackmail powers warrant it.

The Parliament was and still is weaker than the Commission and the Council, the latter two usually work in tandem anyway. (Actually, the swpat rejection by the EP wasn't about values, but rather an attempt to demonstrate capabilities, unseen before or after for that matter, see belgacom).

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/07/nsa-gchq- surve...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/07/nsa-gchq-surveillance- european-law-report)

What was the consequence for those behind?

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/security- and-l...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/security-and-liberty- theresa-mays-surveillance-plans)

In a democracy you need to be informed (see NHS campaign). That is incompatible with W. Lippmann's Society of the Spectacle, privacy and freedom of thought.

<comment><USER6> The Parliament now has veto powers on almost all directives, as well as a (not practiced yet) right to send packing the entire Commission.

It does not have executive powers, so it cannot "take action". To be fair, it does need additional powers to initiate legislative action rather than just blocking or shaping laws that Commission and Council introduce; but that's blocked by euroskeptics who think BXL already has too much power and proposals should be left to national governments.

The reason EP and Commission/Council don't lock horns that often is that, when you get down to details, pretty much everyone agrees that European Directives are right in principle (i.e. harmonizing this or that) and it's just about hammering out details (which are often just guidelines anyway and are left to national parliaments to sort out) and trade a few horses. Swpat and copyright extension were among the very few subjects that were simply too controversial to pass, so MEPs put the hammer down - at a time when their hammer was much smaller than it is now.

As the EP gets a bigger role, it's on the electorate to send better-prepared MEPs. After 2009 old practices should be on their way out, as long as we push for this change to continue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Translation of the very pertinent first comment of the article:

No one can deny the role of this political giant in this epic battle, but it would be very improper to speak of victory so far. 25 years later, Maastricht has not kept its promises, and Rocard still openly confessed it a few months ago, stating that they had "missed the boat" in Europe. Somewhat paradoxical given that it is nevertheless his government and his buddies who sold us the baby ...

Beyond this basic finding it's especially pertinent that TAFTA Treaty is being negotiated in secret with the US, which is very worrisome. As Mr Asselineau (UPR) in his youtube videos, our former allies want Europe in their pockets, to face the other 2 major blocs. This is all the more urgent and decisive for them to submit and satisfy the European nations, with NATO on the military side, and Europe for the civilian side, the Chinese are trying to win points quickly, and everyone already knows that China will concentrate a very large part of global production in the next 20 years, which will not help at all our economies, artificially abused ...

Forced sale in stores, mobile, cloud and its derivatives, are only the top of the iceberg for Washington, Europe MUST become an American colony and controlled subject in itself. Just observe the successive zeal, and still more evident of our elites since the 80s!

Between $ ironing ticket which runs idle since the end of the gold parity / dollard, and an abysmal debt, it increasingly relegates Americans in the background, the Treaty TAFTA is even more dangerous for us Europeans, it may lead us to the bottom with our former ally of 39-45. When Mr. Pierre Sprey, father of the F16 and A10, openly calls the last lighning F35 II "Turkey" (Turkey), one realizes that even in their own defense, and despite defense budgets in hundreds of billions of $ (!), the americans are completely off track!

Finally, when I read the obstacle course that Mr. Mamère's has to simply follow to access a part of the ongoing negotiations TAFTA (cf. [https://lesmoutonsenrages.fr/2016/06/26/les-incroyables- prec...](https://lesmoutonsenrages.fr/2016/06/26/les-incroyables-precautions- pour-cacher-le-traite-tafta-aux-elus-du-peuple/) for example), and with reports that are apparently not the same on both sides of the Atlantic, there are many more battles ahead, and not just in IT. We can certainly recognize Mr Rocard for having a rare piece of political courage, that became sporadic in our elites. The fact remains that software patents as the rest will eventually be back on the table, and there is absolutely no doubt. In politics, there is never victory: just battles won in their time ...

</comment><comment><USER9> While Mr Rocard did a fantastic job trying to understand the consequences of software patents, he was also a supporter of software patents through the backdoor of a central patent court.

In fact, the directive was rejected at the call of large companies that did not want to see a Parliament voting against their interests. Their argument was to push for a central patent court, which they managed to get only 6 months after the 6 july.

Now we are 10 years later, and their plan is near completion, only the Brexit has slowed down their plan.

But the goal is still the same, validate software patents Europe-wide.

</comment><comment><USER10> One result of the anti-patent fanatics is that more important technology is now a trade secret. We don't know how Tesla's "autopilot" works, even though it's a shipping product. We don't know much about Google's automatic driving technology. We don't know what Intel's management processor is really doing. We don't even know how to maintain a modern John Deere tractor.

The price of weak patents is mysterious, undocumented technology, often made resistant to reverse engineering.

</comment><comment><USER11> Having grown near the city he was a mayor (Conflans St Honorine) his influence on french politics has lead to a severe turn of technocracy and denial of democracy.

His (in)famous disciples are [0] Macron, A. Richard, Valls, Sapin, DSK that are all famous for priming business accounting based decisions other the people's choices. A very capitalist/market friendly turn of socialism, that makes US democrats looks like hardcore communists.

Valls (Val d'Oise federation) and Richard (St Ouen l'Aumonne) were famous for their interest in politic agenda and despising the people.

I do regret that some google washing has been made on his keyword in google because right now, all his obituaries are saying how human and nice this man was, and I can't factualize my memories.

He was also a great artisan of the European Union, I may say in the direction most europeans maybe a tad mad with: the one where enlightened freaks and crony technocrats can lead 300 millions people to a destiny they did not choose.

For the software patents he was like for a lot of things choosing direction randomly by reading techno-prohecies and as coincidence happens, he happened to be right on this.

With his death, we remember that my generation scarified to the altar of the greater good envisioned by the 68' generation may have one day the power to choose their destiny ... democratically now that these people begin to die.

He did great things still, like helping to solve the post colonialist kanak situation in new caledonia and was at least a convinced pro-peace and pro- friendship between people, even at the cost of an heavy jacobinism.

[0] [http://www.slate.fr/story/85937/rocardiens-pouvoir-valls- mac...](http://www.slate.fr/story/85937/rocardiens-pouvoir-valls-macron-sapin)

<comment><USER12> Let's not abuse the fact that most of the readership here know nothing about French politics, please.

Here is a text written by Rocard on the topic of software patents:

[http://www.sens- public.org/IMG/pdf/SensPublic_MRocard_Patent...](http://www.sens- public.org/IMG/pdf/SensPublic_MRocard_PatentsLiberties.pdf)

I'll just let those interested here compare your _slightly biased_ description of him with his writing.

<comment><USER11> He had nice ideas and was a wise men.

It does not mean that all praise should not come with a little of objectivity on its political bias: his _slightly biased_ opinion of the people in the process of making political decision.

He was a techocrat -even though he was a gifted one. And technocrats have been so far strongest heralds of unfair IP laws that is the very first reason of the existence of free software.

Free software is a walk-around technocratic decisions. Technocracy is much more a problem to free software than regulations.

Regulations that can be changed by the people matters more than «right» decisions taken by some sort of deaf aristocracy.

I will agree his essay was on spot. I will still spot his strong will to undermine democratic process and his distrust of the people.

1 right can be undone by a small wrong that is more important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> so...this is probably one of the reasons im being paid zap for this work and have to skirt regulations to get anywhere. meanwhile the folks in the us earn over a hundred thousand each year, inventing new software and getting proper recognition for their work. maybe the hero of open source fanatics (i like open source. i just mean certain fanatics) and perhaps consumers, but certainly not my hero. of course its sad that another well intentioned person passed away.

<comment><USER3> You can always go work in the US or sell your product there.

Rocard - may he rest in peace- and so many others did make a difference, for the better.

The software patents battle is one of the reasons we have less patent trolls in the EU versus the US. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_Eastern_District_of_Texas#Patent_litigation)

What few people seem to know is that the software patent battle was also an important in tilting the balance of power between the EU commission, the EU council and the EU parliament towards the democratically elected parliament.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure bout how easy it would be to move to the US, but it's not surprising many of our best software engineers and innovators choose that option. Not wanting to belittle the guys achievements, yet the balance between EU parliament and the commission is still way off, which is one of the only legitimate reasons people have to dislike the EU. i understand that the patent system has downsides and of course 'fewer patents' means 'fewer trolls'. however nothing significant in software (esp. outside of open source) has come out of the EU for a long time. Our innovation model needs to change.

<comment><USER14> How have software patents helped any of the big growing companies over the last 10 years?

Maybe explain it using the various startups which are quite a success: Whatsapp, Instagram, Wechat, Twitter.

Your entire comment reads like a false dichotomy. [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FalseDichotomy](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FalseDichotomy)

<comment><USER13> For one thing those are/were based in America and china, not Europe. If anything the cases of startups with European founders moving to the USA to found their companies helps my argument. As for companies which have benefitted: microsoft gets paid for android. because of stuff they invested in a long time ago. Motorola getting bought by Google because they invented a lot of things. oracle is of course a very big company and the only thing that keeps it alive is their IP. All those big companies rely on the patent system to make investment decicions. to put someone on a project which takes a long time before it will yield results. If there are no patents, you will not have these kinds of R&D based corporations. And that is a big loss for Europe. As for whether this particular dichotomy is false, it may be so but i doubt it. history has more or less already spoken.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inko (a gradually-typed object-oriented programming language) 0.4.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://inko-lang.org/news/inko-0-4-0-released/ <comment><AUTHOR> Due to the length limit of HN titles, here is a short summary of what Inko is about:

Inko is an object-oriented, gradually-typed, safe programming language that lets you write concurrent programs, and is inspired by languages such as Smalltalk, Erlang, and Rust. For more information, please take a look at the website: [https://inko-lang.org/](https://inko-lang.org/)</comment>


Quora comparison... really? - <AUTHOR> http://www.horizoncareservices.com/online-question-answer-resource-health-care-florida

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what your question is, but this seems to be the SOFA q-and-a plugin for wordpress.

[http://themeforest.net/item/sofa-qanda-knowledge-base-wp- the...](http://themeforest.net/item/sofa-qanda-knowledge-base-wp-theme/180802)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> just like quora, this is pretty much the same thing as stackoverflow... watch out!</comment>


Why is no one discussing Airplay? - <AUTHOR>

No one is discussing Airplay. As a developer who makes a living from web, mobile, TV, and desktop applications I find the Airplay feature of iOS 5 to be the single most disruptive technology since the first iPhone. TV is important. Google heavily promoted Google TV at their conference a year ago. Apple released two iterations of the Apple TV. All of the cable, set-top box, satellite, and TV manufacturers are gearing up to take on the inevitable huge TV app and content market. But still, no one is really discussing Airplay.
I can't possibly be the only person to see how Apple could immediately disrupt the gaming console market upon the release of iOS 5. For the first time iOS 5 will have cordless screen mirroring. What you see on your screen will be displayed on your TV wirelessly. Now consider the fact iOS 5 will also allow you to use your TV as a second display. You will be able to display something different on the TV than what's on your iOS device. Your iOS device could become the controller while you play your game on the TV. Now take it one step further and assume you wirelessly connect a bluetooth game controller to your iOS device while it powers your TV display. You now have a fully-fledged gaming console, completely powered by your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The games are affordable, the console is with you at all times, and Airplay makes it easy to utilize your TV.
iOS graphics are inferior to consoles you say? This is true yet I'm not sure it will matter when you consider the fact that you can buy 5-10 games on iOS for the price of 1 console game. The graphics may not be as good but they're nowhere close to 5-10x worse. Also, let's not leave out the fact that companies such as OnLive are quietly waging war against the console market to stream games over the net which would give a device such as the iPhone the ability to provide games that are visually competitive. iPhone 5 + Bluetooth Game Controller + OnLive + Airplay (TV) = something to get excited about. <comment><USER2> Oh I think it will be huge. One of my favorite "ideas I have no time to implement" right now is a collection of games that rely on AirPlay. I'm thinking variations on games like SceneIt, Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, etc.

My favorite is a "never-ending trivia" game based on Wikipedia data/info.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think part of the reason may be that AirPlay is little more than a closed version of DLNA which has decent acceptance from hardware manufacturers, but unfortunately hasn't hit the mainstream use from consumers.

</comment><comment><USER4> if you want to see disruptive you should check out haxenme.org - it is based on Haxe language, which is ECMA based.

it's open source and it's a 4 year old technology.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's maybe not as disruptive as you think - not yet. To display on your tv you require a computer or apple device plugged into the tv. Not many people do that yet.

It'll all be super locked down like Apple's typical developer bullshit. It's not like Apple is going to let developers make use of this, it'll just be a built-in feature of iphone + apple tv. And it'll all be geared toward selling tv shows and games specifically for this capability.

In 6 months the same feature set will be available in Android.

If Apple starts to roll out their own line of tv's, then they might really start changing the living room landscape. Got an iPhone, now get an iTV and play all your games on it, that sort of cross marketing.

<comment><USER6> >Not many people do that yet.

Apple has sold millions of AppleTVs.

>It'll all be super locked down like Apple's typical developer bullshit. It's not like Apple is going to let developers make use of this

Developer's are already making use of this. Check out Firemint's Real Racing 2, which supports 4-player split-screen using Airplay. It's trivial to enable Airplay mirroring in your application. So there's no reason that every single game on the app store won't at least let you play on the TV as a large screen.</comment></comment>


Narc on your friends to the FBI - <AUTHOR> http://publicintelligence.net/fbi-suspicious-activity-reporting-flyers/ <comment><USER2> Weren't tactics like these employed by...oh...the Soviet Union? The Nazi Regime?

I'm getting so fucking sick of this shit.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1984 all over again. My favorite part of it is the disclaimers in italics that contradict the bulleted text. Anyway, I am sure everyone on HN is suspicious according to that project.</comment></comment>


Feds are Suspects in New Malware That Attacks Tor Anonymity - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/freedom-hosting/

<comment><USER2> We really need to come to the internalized understanding that our government is increasingly becoming a threat to its people and a danger from within; a saboteur, a spy, a traitor to it's own people.

As Peter Swire has pointed out in a PBS Frontline interview: "General warrants was part of the reason for the American Revolution. It was that the king's agent could go in and search a house everywhere, search a whole neighborhood with one warrant. And the Boston people said: 'We don't like that. [...] We'll fight you.' We said no." (redaction to avoid erroneous similarity)

<comment><USER3> Is this really that bad? They used a clever exploit to reveal the identity of people attempting to be anonymous on a server that hosted a boatload of illegal content.

<comment><USER4> They used a clever exploit to blatantly infect and gain unauthorized access to a blanket set of machines...which may or may not have been doing something illegal.

The FBI hacked PC's technically, and with no inkling of due process...they should be held liable for it.

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure this action runs afoul of DMCA..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is Mozilla on the vulnerability: [1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/08/04/investigating-s...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/08/04/investigating- security-vulnerability-report/) It would seem that Tor released Tor Browser Bundle (TBB) with 17.0.7 on the 26th of June: [2] [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-browser-bundles- and...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-browser-bundles-and- tor-02414-alpha-packages) (note: lack of an Obfsproxy bundle!) 17.0.7 is the Firefox with the patch for the JS bug that was exploited, assuming [1] is correct.

 _IF_ this was what is exploited, then it would seem that the _latest_ non- obfsproxy Tor Broswer Bundle [2] will be ok. It seems that Tor released a new TBB the day after upstream Firefox vulnerability was patched.

Double check though.

Here's what seems to be the original security advisory [3] [http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2013/mfsa2013-53.ht...](http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2013/mfsa2013-53.html)

Also, Tor have responded here: [4] [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden- services-current-eve...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services- current-events-and-freedom-hosting)

<comment><USER6> Update: Tor have issued a security advisory (TL;DR: anything "Vanilla" post July 8th is ok, everybody else upgrade) [https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- talk/2013-August/...](https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- talk/2013-August/029218.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Might be worth keeping in mind that the State Department has a significant interest in TOR's continued existence, contributing roughly 60% of the TOR Foundation's annual income. Unsurprising, because TOR is a powerful tool for activists, journalists, and intelligence sources in the Middle East.

Doesn't mean the US doesn't want to weaken TOR, but it might not be that simple.

[https://www.torproject.org/about/financials.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/about/financials.html.en)

<comment><USER8> The ideal outcome for the USG is that TOR provides anonymity to its users from everyone on the planet except the USG. Then people who do things they like can be protected while people who do things they don't like can be punished.

<comment><USER9> Right, then if the non-US find out, they change their practices, and the surveillance may become useless. I think this is what the GP meant by saying it is complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > FBI special agent describing Marques as "the largest facilitator of child > porn on the planet."

Is it just me or is "facilitator" a PR weasel word?

They would have said "distributor" or "seller" if they could.

Does "facilitator" mean in the same sense that BitTorrent "facilitates" illegal MP3 downloads? Or in the sense that Verizon and Comcast do? Or in the sense that HTTP does?

i.e. Is this RIAA/MPAA style spin, or is their more substance to it?

(Not rhetorical questions. Although cynical and suspicious, I genuinely don't know.)

<comment><USER5> It's quite obvious that the child porn aspect of the case is just an excuse to take down/tap what was probably a communication hub for all sorts of fun stuff the NSA would like to hear about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is illegal right? Can we use the CFAA against them? Give them a taste of their own medicine for once.

<comment><USER12> It's not illegal when you're above the law. Law enforcement in the US (well, the entire executive branch of the federal government) seems to think the law doesn't apply to them. "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal..." In the present climate, it's "When the President does it, or authorizes someone to do it..."

<comment><USER13> This atmosphere of apathy is a major cause of said present climate. LE isn't meeting much material resistance, even now. There's lots of media coverage, but nobody does anything. Insisting that nothing can be done is worse than saying nothing, because it inspires the attitude of inaction that has brought us to this state.

I think mtgx has got the right idea. Challenging the government in the courts, even if ultimately unsuccessful, sends a much more powerful message than the censures that have, time and time again, caused no change. Surely there are some lawyers browsing this site who can evaluate mtgx's idea.

<comment><USER14> To be honest, I've found that the ones most apathetic are the ones complaining about apathy. If you don't like it, DO SOMETHING.

Campaign for increased privacy. Give solid, concrete examples of how the USG needs definite barriers after tearing the ones constructed during the inception of the Constitution. Spread the word, organize rallies, and do whatever you can.

Don't stick your nose in the sand and complain about apathy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article is a bit light around the details of how it works; is it true that it only targets Windows machines?

<comment><USER16> From [http://tsyrklevich.net/tbb_payload.txt](http://tsyrklevich.net/tbb_payload.txt) \- yes. It uses Winsock routines and WinAPI stdcall calling conventions.

<comment><USER17> What does the code actually deliver in the HTTP request, and what path does the request travel?

Is the exploit that the request is made _outside_ of the TOR proxy (thus revealing the true origin IP) or that it gathers information about the host and sends that via TOR to some machine?

<comment><USER18> The code is described as grabbing the MAC and hostname and sending them via a raw HTTP request to Virginia.

Since it is a Windows executable, this is done outside of TOR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Should read "suspected" \-- suspects seems to mean they are being investigated for criminal activity. I'd be interested to hear what an editor as to say.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yet another reason to use linux.

<comment><USER21> It'd be trivial to change the payload to work with Linux.

<comment><USER22> So logically, someone probably has.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I learn Elixir or Erlang first? - <AUTHOR> I quickly checked Elixir and I was surprised by how beautiful seems the language. I have been attracted by Erlang since ages, now I have the time to learn it. But Elixir seems great, so: should I go Erlang first or can I jump directly to Elixir? What do you suggest? <comment><USER2> I highly recommend reading Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong first. It's a great read, it's quick, and it will make you a better dev, regardless of language. Once you've read it, then go write Elixir. Elixir's syntax and string handling address the primary complaints about Erlang. And, having read the Erlang book, you'll have a better idea of what is going on under the hood. That will will serve you well if you end up off in the weeds, or need to use an Erlang library for something.

<comment><USER3> I really can't recommend that book enough. I tried to learn Erlang last year with another book, but eventually I got bored and moved on. This year I decided to give it another try, so I bought Programming Erlang and I absolutely love it. The material is presented with the pacing and skill of a master craftsman teaching an apprentice. Joe's writing style is flowing and entertaining, but not silly ( _cough_ ), so I really enjoy reading every chapter. And the exercises at the end of the chapter are perfect. If there's not a lot to really do, he doesn't throw filler in there. But if there's important things to understand, there will be plenty of unique problems to solve.

Such a great book, and such a fun language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been learning Elixir first and have found that understanding Erlang "as I go" is much easier. Start with Elixir and "keep an eye on" Erlang, it's fine. Eventually I noticed that I was already pretty good at reading Erlang, just by "light exposure" via Elixir. I would even argue that learning Elixir first HELPED ME to understand Erlang!

I still strongly prefer Elixir syntax, of course!

As in most things, you should "do what feels right" and not worry about it too much

</comment><comment><USER5> If elixir seems easier to learn, try it first. Both Elixir and Erlang use OTP, so after diving into Elixir it will be much easier to learn prolog-like erlang syntax. Also in elixir you can call erlang modules, so you can get familiar with erlang when using elixir.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, very ponderate and effective answer.

I was actually thinking about go Elixir-first, but I was in a need of a kind of "validation" about the order from someone that already wrote some code for both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd say jump into the non-OTP language features of Elixir first to get the basics of Elixir/Erlang's approach to FP. Maybe do some of your own process spawning and linking/monitoring. After that dig into "Learn You Some Erlang"[0] and/or "Erlang/OTP in Action" to learn what OTP is and how to use it.

I definitely recommend Elixir first, though. The development tooling are so good that they get out of the way while you learn the language whereas in Erlang you'll be immediately confronted by its lack/complexity of tooling.

0 - [http://learnyousomeerlang.com](http://learnyousomeerlang.com)

1 - [http://www.manning.com/logan/](http://www.manning.com/logan/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Elixir is more complex language than Erlang, simply because it has more concepts, similarly like Scala introduces much more concepts than Java. Yet to productively use Elixir you need to have basic understanding of Erlang, BEAM VM and OTP - correspondingly for Java it will be Java, JVM and some app server like Tomcat, Spring, Play, OSGi, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Elixir is more approachable so I'd start there, but you're going to have to pick up Erlang along the way, at least being able to read it, so take it as it comes.

</comment><comment> c-rack I would strongly recommend to start with Elixir. It is much easier to learn and once you get used to Elixir, learning Erlang is not a big deal anymore.</comment>


Just Delete Me – A directory of direct links to delete your accounts - <AUTHOR> http://justdelete.me/ <comment><USER2> It's fairly understandable that delete from a retailer is hard. In many places retailers are under obligation to store records relating to transactions for things like tax compliance, agreements with credit providers, anti-fraud and accounting laws. i.e. Amazon

What does delete even mean in these circumstances? The best they're able to do is just remove your public profile (if such a thing exists) whilst leaving everything else intact.

It's also understandable that collaborative works have no real delete (as the end user perceives it). The very nature of a collaborative work means that removing some contribution from the past could alter the work as it stands today. i.e. Wikipedia

What's really surprising are the media outlets on the list with the high level of difficulty. The EU data protection laws only permit a company to retain that data which is necessary to provide a service, for as long as the service is provided or the company is obliged (by law) to keep the information. Those outlets (Gawker) seem to hide under the collaborative works stuff, but if you've an account but never made a comment then deletion shouldn't be objected to.

General rules:

If there was a monetary transaction they're going to keep your info but might delete your public profile.

If it's a collaborative work you might get your profile deleted but all of your contributions will remain as a public record.

If it's an interaction with the government you're never going to get it deleted.

<comment><USER3> What they can and should do is remove all you data that relates to you excluding invoices (which should just copy your data and not simply reference it) and logs that you need to keep per some law.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Since I can buy on some internet retailers without creating an account, there is no logical reason why another retailer can't delete my account. I understand that they need to store the invoice, but that could be stored separately from the marketing database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The way I'm going to use this list is to look up services before I sign up.

I'd also be interested to see if user satisfaction correlates with ease of quitting. It seems like companies which make it hard for users to quit do so because many users want to quit. Anecdotally this holds true for the handful of companies on that list I've used, but I'd like to see some actual stats.

<comment><USER6> > The way I'm going to use this list is to look up services before I sign up.

You should try the Chrome Extension [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/justdeleteme/hfpof...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/justdeleteme/hfpofkfbabpbbmchmiekfnlcgaedbgcf/details) I wrote using the JustDelete.me data. It adds a traffic light to the omnibar indicating if the site is hard to be deleted off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Deleting an account from Quora, including deleting all your contributions, is not easy. It requires sending an email and waiting for them to run some script which can take a long time. So unless Quora changed this, which I doubt, that page needs to be updated.

<comment><USER8> I requested removal from Quora last week. 27 hours later someone from user operations emailed me confirming it was done. Perhaps they did improve the process recently.

<comment><USER9> Did they sent you a report showing all the items that were deleted as proof, or am I just being too paranoid?

<comment><USER8> No report, the email they sent said:

...

We've deleted your account information from our end.

However, if you are already in a search engine like Google's search index, they won't know to drop you from it until they try to re-crawl your page, and unfortunately we don't have any control over when that will happen. The best thing to do in the meantime is to directly request removal from Google itself here: [https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals). Once you have submitted your request(s), you will need to wait for Google to reindex the pages — this often takes a few days.

...

<comment><USER10> Why doesn't Quora request the removal of such content? It's former content from its own site after all …

<comment><USER11> Because Google will remove it from their index when they revisit the page organically. If Google provides a way to programmatically send removal requests, I'd be happy to hear about it and I will pass it along to the team that deals with account deletions so we can make it part of our flow.

Right now, I am only aware of the Google webmaster tools where you have to input each individual link you want removed, and even that request is queued and takes time, with no guarantee that they will reindex the content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Starbucks has an odd one.

        They will not delete your account but upon request they
        can "scramble all of your information so that you don't
        receive emails and none of your information is available
        to [them] for potential fraud".

<comment><USER13> Makes sense. Their customer database is likely mostly for supply-chain management and affiliate marketing. They don't want to _remove_ people, because it screws up the statistics (e.g. number of visits in the last month.) So they just irreversibly anonymize your data instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also useful is namechk.com. I didn't even know I had an account on some of these sites. It turned out I had a 5 year old reddit account, a 6 year old account on ebay, and more. Of course, I deleted most of them.

</comment><comment><USER15> Previous hn entry: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265613)

</comment><comment><USER16> healthcare.gov should be a good addition to this site, if it's possible.

</comment><comment><USER17> Out of context though but the same story was submitted to HN 4 months ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238053), yet today it clicked. Reminds me of [http://blog.ploki.info/what-if- successful-posts-on-hackernew...](http://blog.ploki.info/what-if-successful- posts-on-hackernews-are-just-luck-post-mortem-of-what-if-successful-startups- are-just-lucky/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Skype freaked me

      Contact customer services. You'll need to know 5 contacts from your contacts list,
      the month you created your account, and your signup email address.

<comment><USER19> Yup, the redder the flag, the sooner you should quit.

Facebook is also on that list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is it impossible to delete an HN account?

<comment><USER11> pg has commented on this on HN before, the basic gist is that HN is like a newsgroup, you've submitted your comments in the public and just like Usenet, they are there to stay. Separate to that, if you were to delete your account and its comments, it would leave existing threads confusing and incoherent.

<comment><USER20> Do it like how Reddit does it, simply replace instances of $username with [deleted].

<comment><USER11> This is one way to do it, but it still creates stark discontinuities in discussion threads.

<comment><USER4> But you can delete threads, right? I frequently see '[deleted]' with replies to the deleted thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Comments from previous discussion. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265613)

</comment><comment><USER22> [http://www.accountkiller.com/en/](http://www.accountkiller.com/en/) is another great site.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool directory. Now if only I could remember all the sites I've set up accounts with in the past. :-/

</comment><comment><USER24> Absolutely love this.</comment>


How to achieve low latency with 10Gbps Ethernet - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-achieve-low-latency/ <comment><USER2> There have been a spate of articles lately that sum up to one fact: out of the box, all Linux distributions are tuned for nothing in particular. With some configs you can reduce your latency by an order of magnitude, increase your MySQL ops by an order of magnitude, etc. This is one reason why I, as an application-level programmer, am glad to work at a company big enough to have someone else dealing with the platform on my behalf. I don't want to spend ten years slowly discovering traps like default window size tuned for T1 speed, default min_rto tuned for interplanetary traffic, not enough PIDs to support a 96-core machine, etc.

<comment><USER3> > all Linux distributions are tuned for nothing in particular.

Which is good, because often tuning means making trade-offs. A lot of those things like polling and interrupt shuffling have side effects and might for example negatively impact other scenarios -- presumably not everyone out there is running single client-server ping-pong with small UDP packets.

Yes a lot of parameters have retained default values from back in the day when system characteristics were different. Switching defaults drastically might break existing code that relied on them. Perhaps those are better updated during major distro version upgrades (RHEL 6->7 for ex).

In general though, I would say Linux is tuned for average throughput not latency. Sometimes they go hand in hand, sometimes they don't. Over the years there have been patches and forks related to operating on low latency environments (stock trading, media processing, hardware control, graphics in desktop environment). Those range from parameters tweaks in /proc to kernel patches, to almost full kernel bypass via things like DPDK for Ethernet for example.

<comment><USER2> Sure, they are all tradeoffs of some kind or another. It's crazy to think that one person deploying a linux box on AWS would be aware of them all, though. For example what is the default file-max on Ubuntu? Why?

<comment><USER3> Well you have different use cases and you have a large panel of nobs and switches you can adjust. You need someone who knows what the knobs do and what effect they have.

So perhaps there is a use case for wizard like configuration tool for intermediate users. It can ask you questions like -- how many clients do you have? How many concurrent connections. Would you rather have higher average throughput (say for downloading files) or lower packet latency (say for audio processing). Would you rather use your memory for a file cache for for your application data. And so on.

Next step up -- a self tuning system. It monitors your usage pattern then decides what settings to use. Monitors again, and adjusts a bit and so on.

<comment><USER4> I've always been somewhat wary of the self tuning systems. The challenge is that the runtime profile of a well-utilized machine is not always predictable especially if it is multi-tenant and/or running a mixture of different workloads in a container like abstraction. I think a level higher is easier to manage and understand, so, we're dealing with and managing multiple machines or multiple containers of vm's as processing units. As a whole, that seems more manageable as a self tuning system.

<comment><USER3> Tuning profiles could be suggested and an human would apply them. But yeah, that was more of a pie in the sky idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's an absolutely wonderful article - perhaps one of the best I've seen regarding latency tweaking on a linux stack - but I don't understand why so little about the final step, _" Since we have a Solarflare network card handy, we can use the OpenOnload kernel bypass technology to skip the kernel network stack all together:"_ was discussed. That was like the major punch line of the entire article, and it was given a minor "oh, by the way, " sort of treatment.

Great article regardless. I'm wondering what the latency would have been if they had _started_ with that step.

<comment><USER2> What are the tradeoffs? Is there any downside to this userspace network stack, or is it pure win?

Edit: other than needing the thousand-dollar NIC, I mean.

<comment><USER6> It's open-source but patent-encumbered, which is a strange state. It's not a user-space TCP stack but a "card-space" one: it's offloading all the work into the card.

<comment><USER7> It's not offloading ALL the work onto the card. With 'offload' people often think about feature like computing checksums in hardware, but that's not a big deal on modern hardware. OpenOnload definitely leverages the cards capabilities, notably packet buffer handling which is exposed in their ef_vi API (there's a comment about this on the article's page); the flow steering (mentioned in the article) is a big help too. OpenOnload is a user space network stack built on top of ef_vi.

But so much the win come from being userspace and tunable. OpenOnload also accelerate pipes, loopback UDP/TCP and epoll, all of which are unrelated to their hardware. Indeed, having unaccelerated fds in the same epoll set as accelerated fds kills performance because it needs to ask the kernel for the status of the unaccelerated fds.

That said, I think you need to have a SolarFlare card for OpenOnload to work at all, even if you just use it for local communication. I've not tried it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> NUMA pin the DMA buffers too. I didn't see that in the article. With the app I worked on getting the PCI bus/CPU/memory/interrupt all pinned to the "right" node gave us a good 30% performance improvement.

Put another way, identify which socket the PCIe bridge and device are attached to, then make sure the DMA buffers, and interrupt handler are pinned to that node.

Also, don't touch the buffers from the other socket. Strangely enough touching the DMA buffers from the other node just once was enough to cause a performance fall off.

<comment><USER9> Probably because the cache line changes from Exclusive to Owned in MOESI.

<comment><USER8> Yah, that is the obvious choice, but it wasn't as clear cut. Especially with the behavior we were seeing where the performance problems would remain long after the lines were flushed from the CPU caches. I spent a fair amount of time looking at Intel docs on snoop filters and the like and never really satisfied myself that I knew exactly what was causing the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 10 GbE is often good enough for most use-cases. For same datacenter same-floor gear and if there is a pressing requirement for low latency, deploying 1-2 generations old Infiniband (IB) gear is likely a smarter approach because the cost point approaches 10 GbE and the latency is sub-microsecond-scale (0.5-0.7 us vs 20-30 for 10 GbE, which is a factor of 40-60x). Deploying OFED can be a pain unless using a distro like Rocks, don't mix-match different vendors' gear (stick to all Mellanox or all QLogic) and be sure the specific bios versions of everything are supported. For Linux Rocks clusters support / deployment, we've used the cool & helpful folks over at StackIQ (was Cluster Corp).

</comment><comment><USER11> Really important point: this is measuring baseline latency of sending one packet at a time. They're not measuring latency under load where queueing delays are possible. The picture there usually looks pretty different and some of the settings they're changing here may be harmful or irrelevant to that case.

<comment><USER12> Also why upstream smart batching is so important. If you only have 1 packet shovel it off. But maybe wait 1-2 micros and see if you can combine 10 packets (up to MTU) to decrease overall latency.

<comment><USER11> It depends some on what layer you're talking about. Nagle's algorithm makes a lot of sense in a lot of situations. But if you've got a complete packet that's ready to encapsulate in an ethernet frame and send over the wire, you only want to try for batching if you're actually hitting a CPU limit from interrupt frequency or something like that. Unless you're dealing with WiFi where extreme amounts of packet aggregation are necessary to get close to the theoretical throughput.

<comment><USER12> Well if you use smart batching ala ( [http://mechanical- sympathy.blogspot.com/2011/10/smart-batchi...](http://mechanical- sympathy.blogspot.com/2011/10/smart-batching.html) ), you don't really have the same kind of hit that you would with Nagle's or a more simple minded batching algo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The extreme measures (bypassing kernel etc) allowed them to shave ~20 us off the latency, which corresponds to a few kilometers. So this could indeed make a difference for latency-bound apps talking to eachother inside a data center.

</comment><comment><USER14> step one should be 'we move drivers to userspace and bypass kernel completelly'

edit: finished reading, its the last step :/ and ~halves best case they were able to achieve with tweaks.

<comment><USER15> That's still not easy enough to do. UDP is simple enough but doing TCP in those drivers is still a pain. There are DPDK with LWIP or with some BSD tacked on top but so far I didn't find something that I can just take for a ride in that area.

For the extreme cases you really want to control the packet allocation for receive and make the buffers your app uses be also used for the network transmit so you get a real zero-copy.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Bootstrapped, Not Profitable *Yet*, & Proud: Pagify - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on an app in my spare time for about the past 6 months in between my day job and taking care of my 10 month old daughter. I'm launching a beta today and would love to get the communities feedback. It's called Pagify and it's an app that allows you to build custom Facebook tabs using their new iframe method.
I'm quite proud of the fact that I actually got this out the door. This past year my life has been quite hectic. Let me know your thoughts and give me a "Like" if so inclined :). Thanks
View the app at http://pagifyapp.com Skip the Marketing stuff and go straight to the app at http://app.pagifyapp.com <comment><USER2> Such a cool product. The Wordpress for Facebook pages. Great stuff. Hats off.

Some small hints while using it.

* When editing your page it automatically saves, at least that is what the message tells you. But after clicking the upgrade banner top left and going back, my changes are lost. Using the latest Chome stable on Mac btw. After publishing the page, my changes were there though.

* Open the page result in a new window, so I can easily go back and tweak more

* When clicking on a header in the final page, I would like for it to close so I can easily open the next one.

* I am missing a feature to delete the whole page

* (Pro version?) I would like to rename the page as well as the page icon

* (Pro version?) Would love to add and edit more pages

* (Pro version?) Be able to change the style of the page (colours, fonts, borders ,..)

<comment><AUTHOR> thx for testing it out, this is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for. I'll look into the changes not reflecting when hitting the back button. Also thanks for the other suggestions I'll look into to implementing these. I know you can change the tab name in Facebook now by editing the app from within your page.

<comment><USER2> Not a problem. Send me a message if you want to me look at a later version.

And yes I know you can do it on Facebook. But I am using your app to make my life easier. It is impossible to find anything on Facebook these days as an admin. Help me solve that problem! That is a nice mission for your app, right :)

<comment><AUTHOR> good call ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just tried this out for <http://thinkery.me> and it's pretty cool. An option to change the color scheme would be great.

Here's the facebook page: <http://www.facebook.com/thinkery?sk=app_141947329155355>

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome, yep that's an upcoming feature:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very cool. When you do decide to start charging, I would charge > $5. Super easy to use. I would buy right now :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jeff for your input :)

<comment><USER4> Sure, let me also suggest a "save" or "update" button. It was unclear if I needed to do anything else once I added the widget.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like it a lot! From the design, to the music accompanying the video, to the way it looks so simple to use! Looks like you've done a great job.

To be honest, we'll probably use it ourselves!

</comment><comment><USER6> this is a wonderful and easily monetizable application. Hope you're successful in bringing this to the mass. Two very minor aesthetic suggestions: (1) when I hit the play button, it should play automatically instead of just bringing up the popup, (2) plan & pricing ... I think it is better you say something about the plan rather than "free for now".

<comment><AUTHOR> thx, those suggestions do make sense. I'll implement those tonight:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks very nice. Did you do all of the design work, or is this a purchased template? It looks great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks everyone for the feedback so far! I did the custom design work, but I'm using a WooTheme - Inspire as the base: <http://www.woothemes.com/2010/05/inspire/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great work. I just tried it out and the process was very simple and easy. Keep it up. Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> great, thx for trying it out. after bustin my ass for 6 months it's nice to know the process works:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great work. Looks professional and polished.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable <http://pagifyapp.com>

</comment><comment><USER10> Congratulations, nice idea.

</comment><comment><USER11> Glad to see this go live.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great design!

How are you taking payments?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx, I'll be implementing Recurly.com , I should be finished with that in a few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> great app</comment>


Paul Buchheit: "Perfect" is the enemy of "good enough" (also, the future of entertainment) - <AUTHOR> http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/04/perfect-is-enemy-of-good-enough-and.html <comment><USER3> Interesting point. I agree that the biggest procrastination inducing disincentive to _starting_ creative work is the preconception in the creator's mind that "this will be a great thing - I will make it perfect", etc. I learned while designing in architectural school that the key to good design was to strip away all preconceptions about a problem before starting - <USER2> is dramatically harder than it sounds. The preconception of a quest for perfection before starting is the most important one.

However, once you have "programmed" your conscious mind with the problem, allowed your subconscious to crunch on it and give you the first draft of a solution to the problem, the quest for making it as good as possible is key to actually having it be good. With that first solution, you can then refine it, with the idea of making it increasingly better. The question then is when do you stop (or go live) - a very important point. The beauty of web development is that you can think of the project as an evolution toward being very good from somewhat humble beginnings. This makes it that much easier to come to the good-enough point faster than in the past stand-alone application days, but then continue improving as long as the project continues to be exciting. The "lets make it better" drive is a really important motivator, at least it is for me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Enjoyed the post, Paul. I recently sat in on a discussion with Jen-Hsun Huang (NVIDIA Founder/CEO) where he placed very substantial emphasis on the threats of "good enough." Coming from the chip business, he's got a point.

From brain surgery to semiconductors, it sounds like the importance of "good enough" is relatively context-sensitive.

</comment><comment><USER5> He's right. In July, I promised someone I would do a video on YouTube before the end of August 2006. And, it was easy and fun. There was no pressure to be perfect.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there an rss feed for "Ask HN"? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The RSS put out is only for the front page

This site is making Atom based feeds available for HN [http://hnmob.com](http://hnmob.com)

Disclaimer: I made it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try: [https://news.ycombinator.com/rss](https://news.ycombinator.com/rss)</comment>


The Art of Negotiation - <AUTHOR> http://www.wifcon.com/pubs/artofnegotiation.htm

<comment><USER2> huh. so how many people just start out with the actual price, rather than fucking around?</comment>


Here's what every S&P 500 company pays in taxes - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/does-corporate-america-need-a-tax-cut-heres-what-every-sp-500-company-actually-pays-in-taxes-2017-12-04 <comment><USER2> Since the Senate tax bill only affects Federal Income Taxes, shouldn't their comparison focus on effective federal income tax rate as opposed to all forms of taxes lumped together?

<comment><USER3> Probably neither reported nor easily derived from SEC filings.</comment></comment>


Why I don't play McDonald's Monopoly - <AUTHOR> http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~susan/surprise/Collector.html

<comment><USER2> McDonalds monopoly doesn't work that way. If it was random, they couldn't limit the number of prizes that could potentially pay out. It would be trivial to set up an online trading forum and get the tiles you needed. Instead, there are "magic tiles". For example, everyone gets "Park place" but no one gets "Boardwalk" because there's only one (or an extremely limited number).

I think there are 5 concurrent games running. Just figure out the 5 tiles that win these games and watch for them. It will be easy to get the others in that set if you get one of the winners.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right in pointing out the lack of uniform probability distribution across the different pieces in McDonald's Monopoly game.

My goal in sharing the link above was to show that McDonald's Monopoly game is significantly more costly to win when compared to the Coupon Collector's Problem, which has an expected cost of O(n log n).

Still though, I think its pretty interesting that the folks who run the McDonald's Monopoly game have to factor in economics when setting up all of the probabilities as pieces get traded over the Internet (which is against the rules, but still happens as in [http://cgi.ebay.com/2009-McDonalds-Monopoly- NORTH-CAROLINA-A...](http://cgi.ebay.com/2009-McDonalds-Monopoly-NORTH- CAROLINA-AVENUE_W0QQitemZ300356411370QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0))

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Really? If I thought my chances were THAT good I would definitely play...</comment>


Baltimore school system aims to make the fountains safe again - <AUTHOR> http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-school-water-20170707-story.html <comment><USER2> Link broke.</comment>