AMP pages displaying your own domain - <AUTHOR> https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/instant-loading-amp-pages-from-your-own.html <comment><USER2> I can't believe there is no way to opt out of AMP as the end user. The UX is so terrible. Often times I will search for something and have a Reddit result come back. When I tap the link, I get the AMP page which:

* does not show all comments, often ones I am actually looking for

* does not let me collapse comment sections

* uses the default white background theme which burns my retinas if I am looking at my phone in a dark environment

* shows overlay ads for the Reddit app that cover about 40% of the screen for no goddamn reason

* requires 2-3 separate actions to get to the original page

Yet I cannot find a browser extension or setting to tell AMP to fuck off. Honestly AMP might be what finally gets me to switch search engines after many years of using Google.

<comment><USER3> You won't see AMP if you switch search engines.

<comment><USER4> Bing implements AMP, and there's nothing technically stopping other search engines from adding support.

Also, links in the Twitter app default to AMP as well.

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't mind AMP as a feature as long as Google let me specify that I don't want it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Using the signed exchange mechanism means you allow anyone to serve your content. You will no longer know when it has been served and by whom. Instead, Google will know more about what your users are consuming on your website than you - despite HTTPS!

Also, there is no mechanism to limit who is allowed to serve your content for you.

I see no technical reason why the content has to be prefetched from Google instead of your own server.

It's also confusing for users and administrators. Want to block access to a website in your network? Guess what: Your block will not be effective because Google will proxy the data unbeknownst to the firewall.

<comment><USER6> The reason it has to be prefetched from not-you is to protect the users privacy. Until they click a link it is not considered acceptable to leak their search to the potential destination. Links have to be fetched from a third- party who the search engine trusts not to share the data, that at the moment is Google but will hopefully expand.

<comment><USER7> Google already can do this by preloading a cached page from its own domain. So this specification is unnecessary.

I think the real reason is that Google wants to build a walled garden, but doesn't want the walls to be noticeable. Even with AMP, they display a header that looks like a browser's address bar [1]

Also, on that page Google admits that it uses AMP Viewer to collect information about users:

> Data collection by Google is governed by Google's privacy policy.

Which is probably their real motication for creating AMP.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about- amp](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp)

<comment><USER8> > Google already can do this by preloading a cached page from its own domain.

That's what AMP already did. This spec is better because it ensures publishers retain control over their own content, and doesn't confuse users by showing "www.google.com" in the URL bar for content that didn't originate from Google.

<comment><USER7> Publisher might want to display their URL in the address bar. But as a user I want to see the actual URL, not what Google or publisher want to show me. I don't want to see "example.com" in the address bar while I am actually connected to Google via a TLS connection signed by Google's key and my IP address is collected according to Google's privacy policy.

What confuses users is Google displaying a fake address bar [1] or browser displaying the wrong URL.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/images/amp0...](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/images/amp07-signed- exchange.png)

<comment><USER8> The URL you see _is_ the actual URL. It doesn't matter where the content was initially loaded from because the page is signed by the publisher's private key (the publisher has full control over the page contents, Google can't alter it).

<comment><USER7> The content is served from Google's servers according to Google's (not publisher's) privacy policy. While Google cannot alter the content, it sees the unencrypted HTTP request. I don't want neither Google nor publisher to control contents of my address bar.

<comment><USER8> Google already knows the unencrypted contents of the page, and they know you clicked on a link to it (from their search results page). The signed exchanges system doesn't reveal any information to Google _or_ the publisher that they don't already know.

Your browser controls the contents of the URL bar, not Google or the publisher.

<comment><USER9> But Google controls my browser.

<comment><USER10> Have you tried changing browser? -- Written from my Chromium browser installed from the Fedora Linux package repository.

<comment><USER9> I actually use Firefox and avoid Google products where possible, but for the majority of users Google _is_ controlling their browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is such a strange reaction from HN. The AMP cache URLs have been a top 3 complaint about AMP here. "I can't copy-paste URLs, it's hard for users to understand which site they are on, it looks like the content is provided by Google rather than the real provider", etc.

Now there's a solution that preserves the preloading and validation benefits of AMP caches but maintains the original URLs, in a way that's cryptographically sound, in the process of being standardized, and controlled by the publisher. This gets launched much faster than one would have expected. And suddenly everyone pretends that the AMP cache URLs were never a problem and this is some kind of a power-grab.

<comment><USER12> My biggest quarrel with this is that its just another way for google to take control over the internet. Does any other search provider than google use AMP? Does any browser other than googles own support this? How busy are you? You can't wait 0.5 seconds for an HTTP request? And you think its worth feeding google with more precise data about your movements online than they already have? And as a business integrating AMP, loose control over your own content and platform? Why?

<comment><USER13> [https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster- Blog/September-2018/Introdu...](https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster- Blog/September-2018/Introducing-Bing-AMP-viewer-and-Bing-AMP-cache)

Disclaimer: I work at Google, nothing related to AMP or search.

<comment><USER14> Bing is the best thing that ever happened to Google. It's the fig leave that protects you from antitrust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let's hope AMP, like most google products, is shut down within the next 2-3 years

<comment><USER16> What's wrong with it exactly... beside being weird. I'm not a fan of manipulating the URL the way they do with this change, but couldn't you just opt to not use AMP if you don't like it?

Ideally people would develop fast sites on their own, but apparently they need the help of Google.

<comment><USER17> If you don't use AMP your search engine placement suffers. Often dramatically, as all the pages in Google's top-most carousel are all AMP pages.

And AMP is a pain in the ass. It's sold as being "just HTML" but it isn't, really. You can't even use an  tag, it has to be <amp-img>. So you have to generate two versions of every page. Achievable for large companies but if you don't have a lot of resources that's a big overhead. As is so often the case, it helps concentrate all web traffic to a smaller and smaller number of sites/publishers and shutting the rest out. That's not good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We need to decouple two things that are mashed together in this post:

Web packaging and Signed exchanges seems benign and beneficial, you can sign a particular page inside a package (let's say a zipped folder of some kind) and now anyone can cache that data and show it, while both the browser and the user knows that it's safe to display it. Since the AMP format is similar, it seems quite beneficial to now have all your AMP content support this feature. And anyone who made some of their pages AMP can use that same process to support other Signed Exchanges (such as p2p networks or CDNs) . This is great since it makes distributed caching much easier.

The bad part is that google search uses this signed exchange format not to show the actual URL but rather put it in an iframe inside chrome (and only chrome). The real question is whether we will be able to use this functionality outside search, if I have my own site and show a large iframe with signed exchange page, will I also be able to change the browser url bar? mmph, probably not.

<comment><USER19> There is a little confusion here, understandable. Google search will not show these signed exchanges in an iframe, the pages are full frame.

Try it for yourself. Using Chrome 73 or later (you probably already have this), and a mobile browser (either a phone or mobile emulation), try the query [amp dev success stories].

It will only use signed exchanges in Chrome because currently only Chrome supports signed exchanges. The search engine explicitly looks for the browser to state that it supports signed exchanges in an Accept header, like any other new technology.

Yes, any page can use this. So, for example if you went and fetched a signed exchange from [https://amppackageexample.com/](https://amppackageexample.com/) (or any other site that supports one, this is just an example), you could then serve that from your own server, more or less just like any other file (the less is that you need to set the right Content-Type header, but it otherwise works just like serving an image or a zip file).

Then, if a user visited the URL on your site [https://yoursite.com/cached- copy-of-amppackageexample.com/](https://yoursite.com/cached-copy-of- amppackageexample.com/) then the browser would display [https://amppackageexample.com/](https://amppackageexample.com/) in the URL bar, as though that URL had 301 redirected, but without the extra network fetch.

Google search does exactly this, just loading a cached copy of the Signed Exchange, and any other cache (or even any website) can do the same.

<comment><USER20> Forgive my lack of know-how, but does this theoretically mean I could download this _signed package_ to my computer along with the signature and use it later to prove that the information was provided by the source according to the signature?

<comment><USER21> Yes. You can see this among other planned use cases for the web packaging spec here [https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin- webpackage-u...](https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-webpackage- use-cases.html#rfc.section.2.2.2)

<comment><USER22> I'm not quite following which parts were or weren't needed for what's been enabled in the post here, for the usecase of delivering a single offline package that can be opened like a website, is there something that works yet? Or a repo I should be following other than the spec?

Once I can create webpackages and deliver them to clients a lot of thing I want to do become hugely easier and nicer.

<comment><USER21> I believe Chrome has already shipped an implementation, I don't know any more details unfortunately. It's still in the standardization process.

I know it's not exactly easy to follow but the only implementation repo I can think of to follow right now is the Chromium repo.

<comment><USER22> Oh interesting! I'll see what I can find there, thanks!

I also had a look in the blog and the "progressive web apps" might be the right thing to look at. There's probably something subtle that's different but I think I can use these to solve the actual problem I have.

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/03/nic73?hl=h...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/03/nic73?hl=hi)

edit - damn, I don't think this is right at all. Frustrating as it seems pretty perfect but I have to serve from my own domain for 30s before a user can install it :( I just want a single file way of delivering web content! It seems like all the features are basically there, just with restrictions to focus on different use cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's ridiculous. Google wants to keep users at its domain so much that it invents a whole technology to substitute address bar contents. This shows how harmful it is when a company has a significant market share in several different areas (browsers and search engines).

I hope at least Mozilla doesn't adopt this technology and will show the true URL.

This technology is complicated. Browser vendors have to implement all of this only to please Google.

<comment><USER23> Indeed, Google just has too much market share.

Last week I blocked Google from my domains (blog: lucb1e.com/!130), hopefully others will follow suit and degrade the search quality until people get better results (at least for some more obscure content) elsewhere, or perhaps until Google notices we are really not okay with their behaviour.

<comment><USER24> Are you blocking GoogleBot by IP range or User-Agent match? Why aren't you using your robots.txt file to block GoogleBot instead or in addition to your server-side logic?

<comment><USER23> Robots.txt was my first thought as well, but that is said to not actually block your site from appearing in the results. They'll gather from other sites what the page is about (think how to knit a sweater) and show that as title without page summary. Maybe if it looks like the site is down, they won't bother.

Blocking is based on user agent, they seem to set that reliably and the IP addresses change. You can do some reverse lookup magic but this was way easier than looking up every single IP that visits my site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Remember the talk about how the Chrome team was going to "rethink" the navbar, and what domain and site identity really mean? And people were a little worried about this?

Turns out people were right to be suspicious. This is hot garbage. You can no longer ask a user "What URL does your navbar say you're at?". It is no longer a source of truth. They will actively be lied to.

<comment><USER26> But what does it mean that you are on a particular URL?

For a long time already it's not being connecter to a particular physical server. Now it's the next step - to be completely decoupled from the server and just mean content instead.

<comment><USER27> This is meant to offload tracking from just Google Analytics and SERP clicks, which is used to track user behavior (but can be blocked) into services that cannot be blocked beyond Google domains.

If Google hosts the website and is masking the resulting url, they're able to have more visibility than Google analytics. They'll likely give this AMP some SEO boost temporarily and that will get web admins to adopt the technology.

It's just like reCaptcha, which is used to track users across the web (requires google.com + gstatic.com urls to load, which drops its own cookies or scans existing ones), blocking recaptcha will break core web functionality... and recaptcha v3 is even worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This sounds terrible. Does it mean that browsers will begin lying to users and say that the users are visiting the website's server when they are really visiting a restricted version of the website that is hosted in Google's cache? I don't want my content restricted or hosted in Google's cache.

AMP _doesn 't_ load in a privacy sensitive way. It's on Google's servers and it takes many seconds to load if you have JavaScript disabled.

Also, the feature only works on Google Chrome and possibly Edge, which gives another point to the article below.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google- has...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has- sabotaged-firefox-for-years/)

AMP is a fundamentally bad idea that needs to disappear.

Edit: Mozilla has marked Signed HTTP Exchanges as harmful.

[https://mozilla.github.io/standards- positions/](https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/)

<comment><USER19> The browser displays the URL from the origin that digitally signed the unmodified content.

A browser already doesn't show you what server delivered the content. That would be your wifi AP, cell phone tower, or ISP node. The internet has already long established that we can trust content without trusting intermediaries.

There are two elements that are important: integrity and privacy. The content integrity is protected via a digital signature, the "signed" part of "signed http exchanges". The signature proves that the document hasn't been tampered with.

Regarding privacy: The intermediary (a search engine in this case) already has the content being delivered as a result of crawling it. It also knows the user clicked on a link to get that content, and knows the user's ip address. Even without AMP or Signed Exchanges, the privacy situation is the same. Once the page is loaded, all further interactions with the origin are normal https traffic, so later requests are not different in privacy either.

What this enables, for search results, is the ability to load the bytes of the content before the user clicks a search result. If the browser prefetched those bytes with the origin's awareness, then the user's privacy with respect to the search query would be violated, making prefetch problematic. With this setup, documents can be prefetched while preserving user privacy and after the user clicks all browser behavior continues as normal from that point forward.

<comment><USER29> AMP allows Google to see exactly how you interact with every page on the internet.

Just from the text of the pages you visit they can build a profile around you. What your interests are, how much of an article you're likely to finish, whether you're the type of person to highlight text as you read, etc.

Unless you live on an island with a poor satellite connection AMP is useless as anything more than a corporate user data collection tool.

<comment><USER19> AMP documents don't share user data with Google, which can be trivially seen by inspecting the network events that the page generates.

If the publisher chooses, they can send logging to Google Analytics, but this is not part of AMP.

The typical argument otherwise is that the AMP javascript is loaded from Google's cache, however these javascript resources allow for a very long cache lifetime (1yr if the page came from the Google Cache), so relatively few page loads will actually end up fetching them from the network for most users.

Edit: These resources are also on cookieless domains.

<comment><USER7> > AMP documents don't share user data with Google, which can be trivially seen > by inspecting the network events that the page generates.

Is there anything preventing Google from changing this later?

<comment><USER30> No, if Google can change the way web works from day one they can change anything they want. Don't forget Google is killing imap and dns already. Why not http to?

<comment><USER7> Also, Google explicitly states that it is collecting data in AMP Viewer [1]:

> The Google AMP Viewer is a hybrid environment where you can collect data > about the user. Data collection by Google is governed by Google's privacy > policy.

I assume they collect information from HTTP request the browser sends when requesting an AMP page.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about- amp#a...](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp#about- google-amp-viewer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel like Google is pushing AMP and components too hard. I've started to balk at the idea of using them even for explorations.

<comment><USER32> AMP is like Brussels Sprouts. If it's forced on you when you are young, you will grow up hating it.

<comment><USER28> Brussels sprouts are good for you. AMP is more like medical experiments performed on you during an alien abduction.

<comment><USER33> What's up with this extreme hatred for AMP? I personally love AMP.

<comment><USER34> Most people do not like to be forced to do things a certain way. Especially if they have a working site already and now have to remake it from the ground up just because some other actor decided it isn't good enough to get visitors.

Just you wait until you notice you can't go to town in your car any more. Only teslas are allowed into city.

<comment><USER33> That's a bad example for me personally since I think all cars should be banned (except maybe electric cars but I haven't done the necessary research to see the actual environmental impact). I haven't used my driver's license in years and always take the train (I've also stopped flying).

But anyway, that's off topic. I understand that it's a pain for developers but for users like me who are often on a bad connection it's a life saver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems like a reasonable idea. The content server says "here, you hold this for me", and the address bar only shows who originally signed it.

One could imagine replacing the serving layer with something like BitTorrent or IPFS.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, I think this feature and the signed exchanges standard both sound great. It allows CDN-like servers to host content without having to be trusted to not modify the content. That sounds like an improvement over the current CDN situation.

Also, sites that link to other sites can preload the linked site's content into the user's browser, without leaking the user's IP to the linked site, so if the user doesn't follow the link, nothing about the user is revealed to the linked site. That sounds like a performance and privacy improvement wrapped up into one. I'm finding the rest of this discussion thread extremely disappointing as it seems like most of the posts here are just "amp=bad and amp people like this so it's also bad".

<comment> dane-pgp Signed Exchanges could also remove some of the concerns around JavaScript crypto, because there is a (potentially offline) key that signs the web app you're running, so you're not vulnerable to hacks of the hosting environment itself.

What's really needed is a way for the browser to lock a given web app/package to a specific version (and hash), so that even if the signing key becomes compromised, the app can't auto-update to a newer version containing malicious code.

Combining this with something like Certificate/Binary Transparency would allow browsers to check that they are not being uniquely targeted with a specially altered version, and you could set a policy saying "Only auto-update to a newer version of this web app if its hash has been published in a log for more than a month (and/or endorsed by signatures from N out of M other organisations I trust)".

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rob-olmos Semi-related, I think Web Packages and Signed Exchanges could have some usefulness outside of Google's caches. One of their spec examples was for verifiable web page archives.

Another idea it could be used for a wifi "drop box" (drop station?) when there's no internet connection around. That isn't uncommon at some popular spots up river into the woods in the US.

The idea is that as people enter the area, they can update the drop station automatically for things like news or public posts with whatever they've cached recently.

I'm pretty sure I read about this idea before the spec was drafted but I couldn't find or remember the site, something like vehicle-transported data.

<comment><USER19> You may be thinking of this use cases section here: [https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin- webpackage-u...](https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-webpackage- use-cases.html)

<comment> rob-olmos Thanks. IIRC the site I saw was from a few years ago, before the spec was drafted. (I updated my post to be more clear). Pretty sure there was a few photographs on the page out in the flat grasslands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> AMP pages take forever to load, I hate seeing a white screen > 1 second. with amp that's all I see on mobile. A white screen burning my eyeballs, seemingly forever. And then I snap out of it and hit back to escape from AMPs empty void.

<comment><USER38> I read in probably another HN thread that using an adblocker will actually slow down an AMP page - there's a hardcoded 3 second CSS delay which is cancelled if (via JS) it's detected the page is loaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I would _pay_ google to be able to disable AMP permanently on mobile web results. The experience is the absolute worst. I'm fine with them wanting to ruin mobile web (that's their choice), but PLEASE let the users be able to disable this terrible "feature."

<comment><USER40> This, x1000. I just can't believe there is no setting to turn it off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I want Google to die already.

It's so obvious why AMP is on the main google.com domain.

They're collecting your shit.

They're doing the same thing with ReCaptcha, also on the main google.com domain.

Break this shitty company apart.

</comment><comment><USER18> After reading all of the comments here, this seems like a good thing.

This fixes the main UI issues with how AMP is currently used in google search - mainly the url not properly showing where the content is.

If secure exchange is treated the same as AMP pages in google search, I.E. SXG content will be preloaded whether or not it's AMP, it would get rid of the second complaint of AMP - that google's preloading of the content is an unfair playing ground and that the only reason it's fast is because it's preloaded.

If SXG is treated the same as AMP in the carousal then that would fix the last and most serious complaint about AMP.

As far as I can tell, google do seem to be moving in that route, so this should be applauded not derided (the original fiasco that is AMP non- withstanding)

</comment><comment><USER42> Probably time for a congressional and/or DOJ inquiry into whether AMP is an example of Google abusing its monopoly power in the search engine space.

</comment><comment><USER43> The headline is an outright lie: these AMP pages are loaded from Google and not your domain.

The new feature is that Google's browser displays your domain, obscuring the fact that Google is doing the serving. The change is what is displayed, not the server.

<comment><USER44> At this point, if you ignore the amp aspect, how is this any different from plain http caching?

<comment><USER45> the consumer is being lied to about who is serving their request and who is tracking their online activity as a result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I hate AMP. Not just for google thinking they own the internet. They never seem to load right on my phone and crash a lot too.

</comment><comment><USER47> So, when will Google roll out signed exchanges for plain HTML content? That's much more interesting, and if combined with e.g. a restriction such as a Lighthouse speed score of > 60, it'd be in all measurable ways better than AMP.

Faster than AMP, more open than AMP, and all the benefits of AMP.

</comment><comment><USER48> Does nothing for publishers' needs for deeper control and analytics. Just a "feel good" gesture that results in additional complexity for everyone involved. Google is not the only company in the world that knows how to load a page efficiently.

<comment><USER19> The publisher's cookie-based analytics will operate on the origin in the URL bar in this case. The document (though not the delivery server) will have access to publisher origin cookies.

Conceptually, you can think of a signed exchange as a 301 redirect to a new URL which has already been cached by the browser (so there is no 2nd network event). The cache was populated by the contents of the signed exchange, assuming the signature validates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if Google is self-aware to the fact that majority of webmasters don't give a shit about AMP.

<comment><USER50> I wonder if any webmasters are self aware that their users like amp

<comment><USER51> Users like pages that load quickly, which amp is not a requirement for.

Amp is designed to tighten googles grip on the web, nothing more.

<comment><USER52> No it isn't. It's designed to make the user experience better on sites that frequently host Google ads (and also often contain a ton of bloat, 3rd party js, poorly constructed DOMs, awful CSS, etc).

The only way Google could proactively "solve" this problem was by creating a "standard", and then also offering to absorb end user traffic for sites that adopted the standard. FWIW, AMP is an open standard not solely owned or contributed to by Google.

[https://amp.dev/](https://amp.dev/)

<comment> abc-xyz Why is that the only way? Seems like they could easily have achieved the same result by significantly penalizing sites based on load time and number of external requests.

<comment><USER53> This question cuts right to the heart of the matter.

I've yet to see a Google engineer, executive, or "fanboy" address this question adequately.

This thread will be no exception. Queue the crickets.

<comment><USER21> Because users want relevant search results much more than fast websites. Google already factors in a website's performance in their rankings, but weighing it too much over content relevance will make search results worse.

<comment><USER54> By that logic then, what's the point of AMP if Google is saying page load speeds aren't really that big of a factor? Why go through through the trouble of _deriving a whole new subset of HTML_?

<comment><USER21> I discuss this in another reply chain: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19681408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19681408)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> With the peerweb.com platform I will be providing a free-for-non-commercial- use polyfill for Signed HTTP Exchanges which can be used for distributed p2p content offloading.

Peerweb helps sites automatically offload all resources (including streaming ugc video) to a decentralized p2p network.

ETA: ~1yr

</comment><comment><USER56> This feels like it solves the biggest _user_ complaint with AMP, which was the ugly URLs and having to click an extra time to get the "real URL" for sharing.

It also at least helps slightly address one of the complaints of publishers, which is that cookies and some analytics will work now.

But it still doesn't address the biggest complaints of publishers.

I'm guessing Google cares a lot more about the user experience than the publisher experience, since users make up most of the traffic and all of the ad consumption, so this is certainly good for them!

</comment><comment><USER57> Alternative title: why you shouldn't be using Chrome.

Split Alphabet already.

<comment><USER58> Yep, I'm off to the Firefox world. I hate amp with a passion. Straight garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'll just say this:

        Cache-Control: no-transform

<comment><USER60> Signed Exchanges are basically that but with cryptographic guarantee of no transform by caches. See [https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainer.md](https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainer.md)

[Working on AMP at Google]

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> So now you can spoof a domain as long as you have the private part of the certificate even though you don't have control over the domain?

If I understand this right then this seems to open up some doors for some new email phishing scams.

<comment><USER19> This is true with TLS as well, though it also requires man-in-the-middling (MITM) the connection. MITM is usually rather easy compared to stealing a private key.

<comment><USER61> Yes but it is much harder to MITM if the users are in different parts of the world.

Someone can buy a lookalike domain name using similar-looking UTF characters, send out a bunch of email spam with an URI that looks like the original, and once the user visits the webpage it instantly loads the AMP and suddently the URL is authentic. There will only be a very quick url change from the punycode url to the original that I doubt many will notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I found Cloudflare's post on this topic to be more useful: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678693)

</comment><comment><USER63> If you're going to break the way the web works, you might as well break it _hard_. At least that seems to be Google's philosophy with this unasked-for inserting itself between people and publishers.

</comment><comment><USER64> Who is going to be in charge of the signing process? Can I sign the content myself? Will Google eventually only sign content it deems appropriate? Can we trust Google to always do the right thing?

<comment><USER19> Good question. The signing is done by the publisher, using the same digital signature infrastructure that is used for TLS (https). So, the publisher alone has the signing key, and any browser can verify the signature by comparing to the public certificate, signed by a certificate authority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I 've stopped using google because of AMP. Only google can sabotage google at this point, and I think this is how it will happen if they keep going this way.

</comment><comment><USER66> I found the Cloudflare announcement to be more useful: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real- url/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real-url/)

I'm not entirely a fan of this, though it could have uses in other places;

Debian for example, could use this to enable HTTPS-like security without requiring mirrors to upgrade their security to the late 2000's.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's the real question - how is this implemented in chrome? are signed exchange website that are clicked in google search page and whose url is switched is still running the google search page's code?

If this is so, and it only works for google search's page and not some generic web strategy, this is a massive breach of browser/web-content separation, bigger then even the auto-sign-in to google from chrome.

<comment><USER19> Good question.

Conceptually, you can think of a signed exchange as a 301 redirect to a new URL which has already been cached by the browser (so there is no 2nd network event). The cache was populated by the contents of the signed exchange, assuming the signature validates.

There is no "reaching into the document" from the previous click or anything weird like that.

<comment><USER67> I just wanted to say a quick thank you for going out of your way to answer to many questions here. Despite the obviously hostile environment (I have some reservations about AMP myself), your answers have been very clear, informative and level-headed, so thanks for that.

<comment><USER19> I appreciate the comment. My goal here is simply to correct some of the misunderstandings about the format, rather than express opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is just something about AMP that reeks of soylent drinking hipsters. Everything from thinking requireing devs to use some abitrary CDN and tons of obfuscated scripts for the most mundane things (like forms?) to the emoji in the  tag... Eh no thanks. I get that exchangeable signed website packages might be a good idea for various purposes. But no thanks I don't measure my life in seconds.

</comment><comment><USER4> So now there's literally no way to 'break out' of the AMP version and get the real webpage. Great.

</comment><comment><USER68> Can any Google engineers comment on the the large amount of negativity towards AMP found in these HN comments (and pretty much every other HN forum discussing AMP)? I can't imagine working on a project and seeing so many people (especially given the average education level on HN) who can't stand it. I want to hear from you guys about this!

</comment><comment><USER69> one of the biggest issues i had with AMP is the URL (Which cause some of the users in our site a confusion)

Implementing AMP while keeping my website URL is great. Glad to hear that Cloudflare is already supporting this.

Will implement it now in my sites.

</comment><comment><USER70> Does AMP run on Firefox? I've been using Firefox since the Quantum launch and haven't seen any AMP lately. I had completely forgotten this nightmare once existed.

</comment><comment><USER71> This calls for several billions EU fine...

</comment><comment><USER72> Seems dangerous for the web to mess with the URL bar, I get why Google wants to do this.

</comment><comment><USER73> For people who don't like AMP, avoiding it is really easy:

Don't use Google search.

That's all. That's really all there is to it. You should give it a try!

<comment><USER74> I've also seen HN users share AMP links ...

One example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19679136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19679136) , luckily someone also provided the non-amp equivalent...

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> what is happening?!!

<comment><USER30> We lost Google but it's hard to let go

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Ah okay so Google is the new Facebook walled garden.

<comment><USER77> Google is trying to turn the entire internet into their own walled garden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Wtf? I guess it's time to blacklist Google and their web of worthlessness. I mean, using Google Search is literally "give me advertisement in disguise" these days, and I don't understand what people expect from using it. An effective remedy also seems to block all script; serves as a useful filter for actual content rather than ad-infested clickbait, and the script-ladden pages you can't view aren't worth your time and bandwidth anyway.</comment>


I don't want a real job [from Introversion Software] - <AUTHOR> http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=1344&sid=c6a866d59dbc2acc133503bf86b3513b

<comment><USER2> Every technical car guy aspires to making the fastest, most respected car in town, and every technically savvy gaming geek aspires to "learn how to program computers and make a game", because that would be "awesome".

I'm the geekiest geek in my meatspace circle, so I've been asked questions like this a few times, especially by older kids / young adults that have been introduced to me by their parents who believe that I'm "good with computers" (ugh). Perhaps I'm jaded about it, but I don't have a lot nice to say about this type of question.

Asking the naive question "How do I start a gaming company?" is intellectually lazy. If you don't already understand the foundations of business (i.e. "How do I start a company?") the pieces of wisdom that a gaming mogul would be able to give you would be lost on you while you're thinking "Oh, I have to go to college? I hate math! I don't care about accounting, I just want to draw levels!"

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that there are also people who are genuinely interested in the foundations of starting their own gaming business, who are willing to work very hard, and who are simply looking for a little guidance. When you're first starting out, the whole concept of "creating a game" is very nebulous. There unfortunately isn't a definitive guide, or even a general one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's amazingly difficult to make a game that gets traction these days because of all of the competition, but it is definitely getting easier to make money without license fees and subscriptions if you manage to hit paydirt. There is a gold rush going on to start new game companies and make new games to run from the browser (java or flash mostly - maybe Silverlight too in the future). The newer games are getting more and more sophisticated and free to play.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think there is a window right now where indies can get pretty far with a low-budget game before this new space is completely swamped.

<comment><USER3> "...before this new space is completely swamped."

I don't think we'll reach that point. At least, not very soon. Digital distribution has removed part of the need to cater to publishers. It takes a lot of work for a small team to create a game, but at least it's _feasable_ to do so today. A few years ago, it wouldn't have been. So I don't think it'll be 'game over' anytime soon for indie developers, especially with a platform like Steam to advertise their creations on.

<comment><USER5> * It takes a lot of work for a small team to create a game, but at least it's feasable to do so today. A few years ago, it wouldn't have been.*

COME ON, we've had 1- or 2-people teams creating games since the 80s!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Yeah he was about as useful as tits on a fish._

I've always wanted a port of chicken breasts to other platforms.

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh from Introversion? (introversion.co.uk)?

Who are Introversion? Am I supposed to know them?

Apparently they're an games company. They made Uplink, which I've played, and I specifically remember because seemed more like a bad tech demo than a piece of entertainment.

If you're going to trade off a name for karma, it better be a good one.

<comment><USER8> Introversion are my heroes. They make AAA games, dripping with gameplay, originality and style. The company consists of a handful of people and they have no publisher. If it wasn't for Introversion I would have given up hope for the whole industry.

It's OK you think Uplink was a bad tech demo. Their games aren't aimed at everyone. That's why they're so fucking AWESOME!!!111 :)</comment></comment>


Security for startups - <AUTHOR>

I have been thinking about this for a while. Here I can see tons of startups fast delivering their products with tight schedules and security is usually left behind.
Security is both: difficult and time consuming. So, how can  designers and a very specific set of developers deal properly with security? Usually they base the security on intuition and usually they overkill "just in case". That is expensive for two reasons: you don't usually need so much security, and they trust on basic online security manuals.
On the other hand, how is an startup going to spend so much money in a CISO? That is again overkilling and expensive so we have thought in bringing you: CISO as a Service.
You just contact us with your problems and we will analyse them and we will have an skype interview with the best fitting solution.
Our areas of expertise are: risk analysis, risk investments, security in SDLC, security architecture for your apps, information security for your enterprise, regulation...
We have a landing page we are willing to improve with content, but you can contact us through it:
www.kibytes.com
Best regards <comment><USER2> If you operate a startup with traction that has the sort of high-level security questions that might be addressed in a Skype call, you can also try just asking security consultancies for advice. The good ones will give it to you for free, because in the long run, you're going to end up needing technical work too, and that technical work is much more lucrative than the advice.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't want to provide only "consultancy", we provide actual technical work. But what we really provide is an easy and affordable way to start thinking in security and bringing it into your day to day, from decision making to your SDLC.

If an StartUp actually need technical work to be done, we can provide it as well, or, if it really need a big amount of security work to be done we will work with them to keep a track that fits the enterprise.

Also, we really believe security adds traction and sexiness to StartUps since more and more users have a better security consciousness and they want their services to be secure as well.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link:

[http://www.kibytes.com](http://www.kibytes.com)</comment>


Mining the Web with Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/11/8/mining-the-web-with-clojure.html <comment><USER2> Another pretty good Clojure library for for scraping is enlive which is normally a templating language based on selectors. But using the same model you can easily scrap the web in an idiomatic way in clojure.

<https://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial> this is probably one of the best places to start learning.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks like something I might want to check out.

I've been writing modest little web bots/crawlers in shell script for quite a few years now. I think it was a comment on HN just yesterday that prompted an impulse purchase of Michael Schrenk's _Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers_ (ebooks at nostarch.com currently 1/2 the dead-tree version price). Even though I knew the platform going in (PHP w/ the CURL lib), at every page I can't help but gasp at what an awkward platform this is for the task. I'm only 1/3 of the way through, so I'm still hoping to learn some advanced techniques that I haven't thought of yet. At the least I hope to walk away from the book with some new ways to look at the problem space.

Anyway, as someone who's wanted to learn and dig into Lisp, this library sounds really cool. I'm not a fan of anything which depends on Java, so maybe the libray can be ported to something more scriptable like ECL, NewLISP, or SLisp. I will, however, install Clojure and give it a spin.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks useful for scraping the web and shows a now common pattern: start with a Java library, wrap with Clojure making the APIs nice to use.

<comment><USER5> Even though every Clojure book out there says something like "We're telling you, wrapping Java libraries in Clojure functions isn't _idiomatic_!", I think this is the way Clojure will go. (And good for it.)

Why?

1\. No one likes calling Java in an imperative or OO manner from Clojure ("easy" as it may be -- it really just isn't Lisp that way).

2\. A lot of people who are now interested in Clojure once coded using Ruby. We Rubyists wrap _everything_.

<comment><USER6> For sure, guys, you are exactly right.

However, a couple things to add based on the fact that Java libs usually stink pretty bad, and there are usually 10 for a given task.

1) One step is to find the 1 in 10 libs that is remotely close to being sane. This often takes a bit of time, trying to figure out which project is strongest from an engineering perspective, mavenized their jars, has some tests, and has an api that is close to being usable, etc.

2) We've had a number of java libs crap out on us after some time. There are 10 libs for everything, and none are complete - that is the general rule. So there is this pattern now of wrapping a java lib, evolving the wrapper layer, and then replacing the underlying lib once you find to many limitations. We've done this with libs like Rome and even Lucene and we're about to do it again for our linear algebra (but will try using Mahout first).

<comment><USER7> Lucene crapped out? Can you elaborate? We're using it in a project since it seems like a very popular library for indexing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't know if that compare to using htmlunit and lxml.html? I found a lot of html parsers with issues with malformed html. And htmlunit is one of the best for scraping javascript/ajax sites...</comment>


Braintree's Payments Platform Launches Across Europe And Canada - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/29/braintree-payments-platform-launches-across-europe-and-canada <comment><USER2> Server Density has recently finished integrating into Braintree having had awful experiences with Netbanx (aka Optimal Payments) in the UK.

Our existing provider, Netbanx, have terrible customer support often taking days to reply to e-mails and refusing to answer questions over the phone. They have no out of hours support for critical issues and continually change their backend and API without informing customers. This meant we often had failed payments because changes Netbanx made which were undocumented and broke our integration. Having a stable and trusted payment processing partner is essential and Netbanx failed to get this right.

Braintree support has been excellent for the few times we've needed it (their dev docs are great, as are the libraries for each language) and it means we now combine our merchant account and payment API in a single provider, one control panel, one set of rates and one location for support.

<comment><USER3> Netbanx personifies awful. I'm surprised it's still around.

Background: Lost two clients because of Netbanx foul-ups in the past 16 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great to see things finally starting to move in the EU payments space!

However with the amount of paperwork required to apply and opaque "contact us" pricing (which includes significant monthly fees if it's anything like the US counterpart) it doesn't sound like they are interested in small clients.

Sticking with FastSpring for now, despite their huge transaction fees.

<comment><USER5> Really? Seems fairly transparent to me.

<https://www.braintreepayments.com/pricing>

Fastspring charges 5.9% + $0.95 (or optionally 8.9%) and then holds your money for 2 weeks at a time.

The paperwork and $35/month fee (with $75 minimum in transaction fees) are the reason that Braintree can charge their rate.

The lack of those is why Fastspring charges what it does.

<comment><USER6> This is Kristi from Braintree.

@huxley - this pricing <https://www.braintreepayments.com/pricing> is for U.S. based customers.

@entropyneur - we've not published international pricing because we work with multiple banking partners throughout the world who have different pricing structures and accept different merchant types. We're working on standardizing this and making it easier for you. We have a ton of other improvements in the pipeline that will continually improve our offering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the article:

Supported countries are now: the U.S., the U.K., Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Ireland, and Italy.

(As a Swiss citizen, I'm feeling non-european again...)

<comment><USER6> We're currently working on additional countries as we speak! Braintree should be available to our Swiss friends within 30-60 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> GoCardless [1] based out of London is looking like it'll be the Stripe of the UK.

[1]: <https://gocardless.com/>

<comment><USER9> One of the best features of Stripe was actually "invented" by Braintree - [https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintrust/client-side- enc...](https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintrust/client-side-encryption) <https://www.braintreepayments.com/docs/javascript>

What's great about this is it allows you to host all your payment pages and post them back to your server for processing/validation, without having to worry about PCI compliance apart from the most basic level as you never touch the credit card details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So much welcome to Europe! It's amazing it has taken so much years to have a decent solution for the continent.

Stripe next?

</comment><comment><USER11> Does somebody has experience with them or knows how they compare to SaaSy/Fastspring? From a first glance they both provide a complete solution for payments, including a gateway for tacking credit card, merchant account, recurring billing, invoicing and stuff like that.

<comment><USER12> SaaSy from FastSpring is an all-inclusive, full service offering that requires far less development work to obtain the key functionality needed for a serious SaaS business. SaaSy has no monthly charges, handles global tax management (VAT included), the order pages are translated into 20+ languages, has paypal integration, order & billing support for clients' customers, reseller management, avoids having to deal with anything related to PCI compliance, has a built-in shopping cart, integration with Google Analytics, Adwords, and countless other 3rd party services, has a future bill testing GUI, supports on-demand subscriptions, pre-bill (annual) notifications, and the list goes on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How do they compare to Stripe?

</comment><comment><USER14> For perspective, it is interesting to observe whats happening in the low-end space for payments as well. There is a firm called eko - referred to as "India's Square" - payments done using simple SMS.

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought Braintree was also looking at launching in Australia during Q3? Was hoping to find that in this release as well, as the only real alternative (pin.net.au) is still in private beta.

<comment><USER16> We'll be in Australia soon as well. Keep an eye out!

<comment><USER17> You should come to Singapore / Hong Kong ... which is gateway to other Asian countries!

<comment><USER16> We'd love to. We're definitely not done introducing our product to other countries. If you go to <https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international> and click on the link to the right that says, "Not in Canada or the EU?" that will put you on a notification list for when we are in your specific country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> No plans/prices?

<comment><USER19> Processing costs are interchange (the market rate set by Visa and Mastercard) + .70 basis points. If the interchange rate is 1.20%, you will pay 1.90%, for example. Monthly pricing is 100 EUR/GBP per month. That includes your first 1000 transaction fees for free. Starting from your 1001st transaction, you will pay 0.10 EUR/GBP per transaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hopefully a payments provider can come to the Latin America and Caribbean Market soon...</comment>


Open Source All the Things  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sparkfun.com/news/735 <comment><USER2> You really have to admire these guys. They've managed to make money and give away everything they've designed at the same time. This is the critical mass I want OSHW to achieve, and we're seeing it happen more and more. I know a few folks who are getting ready to release OSHW versions of their hardware products soon and this just shows them that it can be done -- and their business can still stay afloat.

</comment><comment><USER3> This link seems to 404 now. You can see the article in the news on the front page of sparkfun.com, but the permalink doesn't seem to work.</comment>


Best product tours for conversion? - <AUTHOR>

We're prepping our website for launch, and are building our product tour page right now (for a SaaS app). What are some of the best product tours you have seen for conversion? <comment><AUTHOR> *More information - we're selling a business product, and we all agree to like the following tours: <http://highrisehq.com/tour/> <http://optimizer.builtwith.com/tour.aspx>

Other good examples are welcome! Thanks guys!

</comment><comment><USER2> Are you only looking at "take a tour" pages?

I really enjoy concept video. For example the ones at soluto.com, dropbox.com and evernote.com really explain well "difficult to understand" concepts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks knes - I've seen the dropbox.com videos, but never soluto or evernote.

Yes, only looking at "take a tour" pages. We've solidified our landing page, contact page, plans & pricing... need to put together the "magical" tour page. Tour rather than features page seems to break down idea of functionality vs. usability, and the suggestions you provided are good starters.</comment></comment>


AOL acquires Thing Labs (Brizzly) - <AUTHOR> http://corp.aol.com/2010/09/28/aol-acquires-social-software-start-up-thing-labs-inc/

<comment><AUTHOR> If one of AOL's goals was to announce multiple acquisitions in a single day in order to get exponentially more coverage than if they had announced them all days apart, then I'd say mission accomplished.

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow! I was wondering what would happen to Brizzly after Twitter's new web interface. Brizzly has nice interface for in-stream media and so. I thought their key point was user interface. And I was thinking what would a startup (client) do, whose core selling point is better UI, in case when a platform itself comes up with a better UI.

I wonder how these acquisitions happen? Probably Brizzly knew they will die soon? So they wanted to sell it off? And they have some connections with AOL somehow, and get the word out that they are on sale? Any ideas?

<comment><USER3> I use Brizzly on a daily basis, but I might switch to the "new" Twitter. And I too wonder if they'll die off.

What I love that the new Twitter UI has: * infinite scroll * in-line media (embedded videos/images)

Why I might not make the switch yet: * their mute feature (useful when following someone who's tweeting way too much irrelevant stuff) * they crowd- source explanation of trending topics (offers a quick way to find out what's going on w/o doing a search)

<comment><USER4> #newtwitter has a "hidden" way of muting people actually: <http://praxx.is/post/1207623920/muting-users-in-newtwitter>

<comment><USER3> thanks, good to know. i'm def. switching then... when i get it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> AOL doesn't want to die alone.

<comment><USER6> "Everyone dies alone."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In an interesting choice of words, the Thing Labs blog (blog.thinglabs.com) refers to this as a "merger".

"We are pleased to announce that as of today, Thing Labs is merging with AOL. This deal has been in the works for a little while, and we've been dying to tell you all, but today it's official!"

<comment><USER8> Arrington also called Techcrunch's sale a merger at TC Disrupt this morning.

<comment><USER7> Ah, is it normal for the acquirer to refer to it as an acquisition and the acquired to refer to it as a merger?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does this complement or replace AOL SocialThing? (now AOL Lifestream) What do you think is AOL's strategy?

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/14/confirmed-aol-acquires- life...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/14/confirmed-aol-acquires- lifestreaming-service-socialthing/)

</comment><comment><USER10> With their record of taking cool companies down the drain, I worry about this AOL shopping spree.

<comment><USER11> Really? What cool companies are you referring to? I only know about AOL acquisitions which have been reasonably successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't have much in the way of product, but AOL: you are more than welcome to acquire Robot Mode.</comment>


Books on Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://fivebooks.com/best-books/silicon-valley-ramesh-srinivasan/ <comment><USER2> All book links are shrouded affiliate links (tag=fivebooks001-20).

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you expand on how a link to a bookseller adds or subtracts from the article's content?</comment></comment>


The Netflix Backlash: Why Hollywood Fears a Content Monopoly - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/netflix-backlash-why-hollywood-fears-928428 <comment><USER2> Hollywood is just getting it's comeuppance, just like cable and taxis, for trying to remain 20+ years in the past. Seems like they should be worried less about a monopoly and more about becoming bloated and obsolete. Cry me a river, Hollywood. You lagged behind in technology and overcharged people on mostly garbage content laced with lots of advertising. Bet you're real pissed that a few newcomers have better digital products, are cheaper, and produce far better content than you do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hollywood has had so SO _SO_ many chances over the years to have Netflix's business: streaming content to customers under reasonable terms.

If Hollywood took all past energy spent on DRM, lobbying, finding ways to limit user's rights, and suing customers, they might not be in the situation they're in now.

<comment><USER4> "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The word "Hollywood" itself refers to a monopoly. This article reads like a status quo that is accustomed to power and resistant to sharing it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am surprised that the article didn't once mention the lack of advertisements on Netflix. The are inherently selling a different product than television by not having ads

<comment><USER7> > I am surprised that the article didn't once mention the lack of > advertisements on Netflix. The are inherently selling a different product > than television by not having ads

By "different product than television" do you mean "different from broadcast and basic cable television in _exactly the same way_ that premium cable television is".

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure most 'premium' cable channels include commercials. Unless you restrict that to things like HBO only. If so, then you left out a bunch of channels that are cable only and outside of the 'basic' grouping.

<comment><USER7> The distinction between "basic" and "premium" cable is much muddier these days, because what is classically "basic" is no longer a single pacakage but a bunch of tiers, and what is classically "premium" is no longer sold on a channel-by-channel basis (e.g., HBO used to be one channel, paid separately) but in its own packages (e.g., all HBO, Cinemax, and Starz channels together as one package) by cable providers.

But, yes, "premium cable" channels are things like HBO, not things like BBC America, even if the latter is only available on the top 3 of 7 tiers from a given provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> TV shows (though calling them that may itself now be an anachronism) have become a commodity. Netflix, HBO now, Amazon Prime video... these are the future. This is the destruction of the middle man monopoly in the form of the cable provider. A new monopoly based on more cheaply and effectively providing consumers with content they want will fall (assuming it does come about) just as easily as it was made if price gouging and lack luster content take hold. Consumer choice, not Hollywood relationships, are the new drivers of success. Adapt or die.

<comment><USER7> > This is the destruction of the middle man monopoly in the form of the cable > provider.

Right, instead of the cable provider as the middle man between the content service and the viewer, the ISP (often, the same actual firm as the cable company) is the middle man between the content service and the viewer.

Its only even a little different if net neutrality sticks.</comment></comment>


Here's how you really use your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzQLRPwZjIo

<comment><USER2> More than how you really use your iPhone:

This is the way you really make a commercial for the iPhone.

That was absolutely amazing. I have no beat-box skills, no rhythm and no music, and I still want to buy that app.

<comment><USER3> Fully agree. I will probably buy it and play with it for a couple of hours, and then forget all about it.

<comment><USER4> I'll buy it for my kids. They would get much better mileage out of it than I will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the way I assumed making music worked when I was four. Glad to see it realized :)

<comment><USER6> Before digital technology, you just got 4 pickers in the living room. If you wanted to record, you had them huddled around a mic. Sound balance? You just told the louder ones to move away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think I will go get the app just because that video was awesome.

If every iPhone app did something along those lines, showing someone actually doing really cool stuff with the App, they would probably sell more apps. Then again, if you could do really cool stuff with most Apps on the iPhone, that might also sell more apps....

</comment><comment><USER8> If I'm not mistaken he spits 8 bars of perfect English gibberish. So that's what we sound like to foreigners.

<comment><USER9> If you want to hear what English sounds like to foreigners, take a look at [http://www.bakadesuyo.com/what-english-sounds-like-to- foreig...](http://www.bakadesuyo.com/what-english-sounds-like-to-foreigners)

<comment><USER10> That does sound like English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> neat app. Here's the link in itunes [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/everyday- looper/id333298831?m...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/everyday- looper/id333298831?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER10> Why would you do this on your phone and not on your computer? He's already sitting in front of a computer with a video camera, mic, and audio output, after all.

<comment><USER12> Creativity can strike when a computer isn't near you? Not everyone has a computer? It's just s toy? There are lots of reasons to do this on a mobile device.

<comment><USER6> By doing it with a Touch, he has a much better chance of getting chicks in a bar.

<comment><USER13> I think you have to have the headphones on otherwise the feedback will ruin it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I need this for my didgeridoo!

</comment><comment><USER15> Awesome!I've always fancied myself as a bit of a beatboxer... anyone know if it's available on the android?

<comment><USER13> The Android sound API is unfortunately very far behind the iPhone. There is as of yet no low level native API for sound whatsoever.

<comment><USER16> The way Apple has been able to attract developers to making all kinds of applications is really amazing. And this is despite all the bad press over the App Store's review process.

Having a strong developer community is typically where Microsoft has excelled. What happened?

Even the biggest incumbents have already been left in the dust. I've been looking for some 'cool', high-quality symbian apps, and as far as I can tell there aren't very many.

<comment><USER17> The iPhone has market share. Developers go where the market share is. Microsoft's desktop developer community is so strong because they own such a dominant slice of the desktop market. The iPhone is no different.

The Android market is making a really strong showing. It's not to the scale of the iPhone app economy yet, but with stuff like the N1 and Desire coming out, the potential for Android's market share to increase is quite strong, and with that come developers. If Android phones were to become popular enough, I have no doubt that developers would desert Apple and its punishing app store policies and gateways in record time.

<comment><USER16> There must be something else. Symbian still has the lion's share of the market (47%). Apple only has 15%: <http://www.canalys.com/pr/2010/r2010021.html>

Is it much easier to develop for the iPhone over Symbian phones? Are iPhone users more willing to pay money? Or perhaps Apple makes the payment process easier for developers, who no longer have to set up their own payment processing?

I don't know what the answer is, but it's not just market share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Isn't that basically just changing your IPhone into a Kaos pad?

</comment><comment><USER19> I have a boss rc-2 loop station, I'm pretty sad now :(

</comment><comment><USER20> Let's just hope nobody records anything obscene so that our Apple overlords don't remove it from Their store.</comment>


Fractalide: Simple Rust Microservices - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fractalide/fractalide <comment><USER2> An author here: we're working on the nixcrates project to remove cargo and allow for closer integration between nix and crates.io, so far you can check out the project at [https://github.com/nixcloud/nixcrates](https://github.com/nixcloud/nixcrates) (joachim and paul are super people, hit them up if you're interested in contracting them) the net/http stuff is currently incompatible with the most recent changeset, I'll get working on it tomorrow morning HKT to make it work, I have to refactor it to suit the new stabilized API. Anyway, this attention was a bit earlier than expected, still have a couple of weeks to go before stabilizing. I hope you guys can kick the tires, tell us what you don't understand and please comment on the API because we want something sensible. We're using the late Pieter Hintjens' C4 so please hop on board and collaborate!

<comment><USER3> Why do you have "remove cargo" in your roadmap?

<comment><USER2> There is too much cognitive dissonance between nix and cargo. It might be better to get nix, a package manager, to do the job of cargo, a package manager.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most documentation is in the form of README files within the subdirectories; here is the code auto-docs: [https://docs.rs/fractalide](https://docs.rs/fractalide)

Looks like knowledge of the nix distribution system is required to use. I don't know how hard it would be, but a neat auxiliary project would be a cargo plugin that supports fetching packages though nix.

The "net/http" fractal definition [0] references the repository [https://github.com/fractalide/fractal_net_http](https://github.com/fractalide/fractal_net_http), which is where the rust microservice code actualy lives.

There is an example TODO app in the [https://github.com/fractalide](https://github.com/fractalide) root dir (split between fractal_app_todo_{,model,controller}).

Upon further inspection, this seems to be "simple nix microservices" that happen to be implemented in rust. One of the goals is to "remove cargo", and they use `nix-build` over `cargo build`. Also, a lot of implementation is in their 'flowscript' language within a lot of *.nix files [1] [2].

Interesting project nonetheless. Good luck to them!

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/fractalide/fractalide/blob/master/fractal...](https://gitlab.com/fractalide/fractalide/blob/master/fractals/net/http/default.nix)

[1]: [https://github.com/fractalide/fractal_app_todo/blob/master/c...](https://github.com/fractalide/fractal_app_todo/blob/master/components/todo/patch/default.nix)

[2]: [https://github.com/fractalide/fractal_app_todo/blob/master/c...](https://github.com/fractalide/fractal_app_todo/blob/master/contracts/todo/default.nix)

</comment><comment><USER5> Not to discount any of the work being done here, but I'd love to see a stable rust grpc implementation.

<comment><USER6> Same. Right now rust feels pretty isolated on the network. There's no great RPC support. No thrift, grpc, etc. The http libraries are good for low level, unsecured, stateless services. However they lack lots of more complex features.

<comment><USER7> What do you think of Capn' proto?

<comment><USER8> It's very different to grpc, lacking streaming semantics but offering capabilities, which are certaintly nice.

<comment><USER9> True, streaming is not a baked-in feature of Cap'n Proto. Streaming can, however, be implemented on top of capabilities, as with this ByteStream interface: [https://github.com/sandstorm- io/sandstorm/blob/v0.197/src/sa...](https://github.com/sandstorm- io/sandstorm/blob/v0.197/src/sandstorm/util.capnp#L69-L117)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks incredible. I for one cannot encourage enough, dataflow competitors to the current JVM lockdown on this space. A few questions:

a) will Fractalide support dynamic dataflow graph change at runtime?

b) For reasons of clarifying your objectives further, could you elaborate on your target market's current occupants? Is this Kafka / Flink for Rust?

c) What is your estimated timeframe for a feature-credible, testable release, even if beta?

<comment><USER2> a) yes it will, we'll have to do some design on the `fvm` to make it hotswap. It won't be ready for this stabilization release. The functionality is already there it just needs

b) I'm not really focusing on other market occupants. We need this system to solve some pretty hairy problems 100TB problems.

c) 'feature-credible, testable release' primarily this is dependent on `nixcrates`, documentation and maybe getting a few more services examples. I'd say a couple of weeks.</comment></comment>


Traditional C "Hello World" working in NaCl - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/native-client-discuss/lT5bsW1ZlKQ/WsXJ5y_2s54J

<comment><USER2> As a side note, why is it that I have to sign in to Google in order to be able to see this? Is registration /really/ necessary for Google Groups?

<comment><USER3> You are right. It's very annoying. It's even worse than having links that are behind a paywall, because at least a paywall usually indicates that funds are flowing to the person (reporter, etc.) who created the content. The google groups situation is quite different, and quite annoying. I _never_ login to google groups to see something listed on HN. I wonder whether HN could provide an option to let readers avoid such items, by removing them from the listing or flagging them?

<comment><USER4> You are only being asked for a password because you're (partially) logged in to a Google Account already. Either log out, or open Google Groups links with "open in incognito window" if you use Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone please explain to me why running native code coming from a web site is a good idea?

Because I see this as "Google's ActiveX"

<comment><USER6> Read the paper. It's a subset of x86 that retains better security properties for distribution.

[http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/data/docs_tarba...](http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/data/docs_tarball/nacl/googleclient/native_client/documentation/nacl_paper.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Very interesting. The security features are very thorough.

Of course, until someone finds a vulnerability, or a way through the validator, or an exploit on an abstracted function.

Still, it's a good security model

<comment><USER7> The good news is its being very actively pro-actively fuzzed and fixed.

Worth looking at too: zeroVM <http://zerovm.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a fan of fast native code, but I worry that this promotes sneaky code in the background once it gets widely adopted.

With javascript we basically have open-source web apps. I often skim through js source to learn new tricks - and obfuscation doesn't really stop me (apart from google's java-translated js) . With compiled NaCl I probably wouldn't be able to find out a lot.

I'm not talking about "stealing user data" when I say sneaky code. No, with compiled native code a whole new game is started: computational-intensive code. It wouldn't be that difficult to include code that gets a job to work on for a few minutes: breaking captchas, brute-forcing passwords, anything that shift computational effort from a server to a client.

<comment><USER9> I would assume the NaCl apps won't run by default. Maybe you get that "click to activate" thing that firefox is implementing for Flash and Java

<comment><USER8> It doesn't run by default. But remember it's Google who's pushing this, and their browser has momentum. I'd guess it's just a matter of time before they run it by default. They already cashed out for security bounties for NaCl in the past[1] and seem to have increased resources recently[2] since it's quite a lucrative market for gaming.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/native- client/community/securi...](https://developers.google.com/native- client/community/security-contest/faq) [2] m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/google-bringing-high-end-gaming-chrome-via- native-054102268.html

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder when we will see the first obfuscated C for NaCI code contest.

<comment><USER11> Just a note, it's NaCl, spelled NACL, as in the molecule "sodium chloride" (and the abbreviation of the name "Native Client").

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how it handles a bogus printf format string.

<comment><USER13> The same way the underlying printf implementation does? This isn't wrapping printf(3), just the underlying write(2).

Are you trying to ask if it catches, e.g., format string vulnerabilities? I think the answer to that is: Native Client's aim is to be a safe x86 VM, so — hopefully. But to me personally, it seems unlikely that they've thought of everything.

<comment><USER14> The important part of the design - the bit that makes it achievable - is that it's _not_ a general x86 VM. It only accepts a limited subset of valid x86 object code, a subset chosen to make validation a tractable problem. This requires a modified compiler be used.

The unlikelihood that the original design was perfect is probably why they had the "Native Client Security Contest" a few years ago - and indeed independent researchers found several flaws. Personally, I'm a lot happier with it now that they've fixed everything that Mark Dowd could find wrong with it ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you generate your changelogs? - <AUTHOR> Manually, by markdown or do you have a dedicated app, or via some github solution? <comment><USER2> my impression is that changelogs have become old-fashioned.

everyone thinks merely putting stuff on github is sufficient.

i think that's silly. but it seems to be what people think.</comment>


The brutal decline of Yahoo (infographic) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/brutal-decline-of-yahoo.jpg

<comment><USER2> My my.. I'm surprised how the company lasted so long.

I still remember using Yahoo! for my searches in the beginning. But that was just for 2 years. Since 2002, I got hooked to Google and have never looked back.

As @variety states above, the company does not have an identity any more and the infographic depicts that.

Real depressing...

</comment><comment><USER3> From the very beginning I could never see the point of that company.</comment>


ACM Queue: Revisiting Network I/O APIs: The netmap Framework - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2103536

<comment><USER2> This is nice to think about, and maybe even implemented in specialized environments, but as a drop-in solution to e.g. the sockets API, a great deal of functionality is lost. First and foremost, in order to achieve the kind of throughput advertised, the kernel cannot do much of any checks on the data sent from userspace, which means userspace must be totally trusted to have access to the network interface.

Van Jacobsen toted a very similar scheme for Linux around 2006, named Net Channels. Googling around the various LWN.net articles on the topic reveals many enlightening comments, e.g. <https://lwn.net/Articles/169961/></comment>


The thriving unregulated market for human body parts - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-brokers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just in time for Halloween:

"Some funeral home directors are saying, 'Cremation isn't paying the bills anymore, so let me see if I can help people harvest body parts.'"</comment>


Ask HN: YC application Mobile First Demo - <AUTHOR>

What is the best way to submit a demo for a mobile first company whose app is not yet live in the Apple Store? <comment><USER2> Go sign up for TestFlight right now... it is going to save you hours of time, and countless emails/headaches.

<http://testflightapp.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> you can do ad-hoc distribution, can't you? I do not remember really good, maybe you needed the device UID?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, exactly we can do ad-hoc distribution but the device UDID is required. For applications that applied to yc in the past, did you submit a link to download the .ipa file or a video demo of the app? or both?</comment></comment>


Change of basis in Linear Algebra - <AUTHOR> http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2015/change-of-basis-in-linear-algebra/ <comment><USER2> The TLDR intuition of a change of basis is this: you have a vector of length L that points from the origin up towards the z-axis. If you'd like to rotate your perpendicular measuring sticks like x->x', y->y' and z->z' (ie, rotate your coordinate system, maintaining perpendicular-ness and vector length), then you've changed your basis. Say you rotate your coordinate system 90 degrees about the y-axis, now your vector points in the new x-direction (so x-> -z, y->y and z->x, and your vector is (1,0,0) instead of (0,0,1)).

You can do that with a matrix operation (M*v = v'):

[0 0 1]___[0__ __[1

[0 1 0]___0__=__0

[-1 0 0]__1]__ __0]

In fact, this matrix rotates any vector 90 degrees about the y-axis.

Basis vectors can also be more abstract than that. For instance, they're useful in quantum mechanics for simplifying the schroedinger eq (sometimes from a second order diff eq to a first order one) by changing from a position basis to a momentum basis, in effect rewriting your derivatives from a different point of view.

<comment><USER3> > rotate your coordinate system, maintaining perpendicular-ness and vector > length

Not necessary for every change of basis.

<comment><USER2> Yes, it has to be a normalized orthogonal basis to maintain those properties :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always particularly liked the bra-ket notation for making this sort of problem intuitive, typically used by quantum physicists. (There's a wikipedia article on this notation, though I don't think it does it justice.)

In that notation, a vector |a> which is basis independent has components <i|a> in some basis |i> , where (say) |i_1> , |i_2> are the basis vectors. Then to change to another basis <k| the "operator one" (which is the outer product of a basis, i.e. sum over i of |i><i|) is inserted to get <k|a> = sum over i <k|i><i|a> , which turns into the matrix mechanics.

(Each of the outer products e.g. |1><1| is a "projection operator" which projects a vector onto that basis vector. The sum of all of them projects onto the whole space spanned by the vectors, which is the same as doing nothing, which is therefore the identity operator.)

Once you get your head around the connections between coordinates (i.e. a_x = a_1) and the dot product with a basis vector (i.e. dot(i_1, a) = <i_1 | a> = <1|a>), this notation can make the whole thing intuitive and mechanical.

I have an explanation of this online at [http://cs.marlboro.edu/talks/bra_ket.pdf](http://cs.marlboro.edu/talks/bra_ket.pdf) .

</comment><comment><USER5> Given the frequency (pun intended) with which Fourier transforms and series come up here at HN it might be worth noting that they are essentially a change of basis for the vector space of functions. Think of functions as infinitely long vectors with each argument defining a component.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see a clear explanation of this. Always hated trying to learn and re- learn it during my quantum days.</comment>


How to suck at raising angel investment - <AUTHOR> http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/06/how-to-suck-at-raising-angel-investment.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fpetewarden+%28PeteSearch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> One way to suck less is to raise angel money after you've made some progress, such as demonstrating some technology viability, some market traction, or at least commitments from other people to join you if you get funded.

<comment><USER3> Definitely. At the end of the day, the best way to get any kind of funding is to make people worry that they're missing the boat heading towards a ton of money. Demonstrating real customers, and everything else that falls under 'traction' and 'momentum' is the way to achieve that.

If I had to do it again, I'd completely forget about the money-raising and spend the three months focused on the product, and worry about everything else much later. That's not a great fit for the Techstars program, though some of the most interesting companies to come out of it have ended up boot-strapping, eg Occipital/Red Laser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aaron Patzer was a single founder at Mint.com and there are many more examples.

<comment><USER5> So I hear the single founder thing thrown around a lot, and as I'm currently working on an idea I struggle with the fear of taking on a second founder simply to get around the stigma of being a one-man team. I am a highly technical business man. I can code, I can do strategy, I can read a P&L. Design is the only big gap in skillset and it seems like bringing on a co- founder simply for design work would be over the top. I do wish I could find someone to work with on this project, but I don't know anyone personally that I would consider for the job and I don't know that I want to start a business with a stranger. What to do? Anybody else in Colorado in a similar situation? :)

<comment><USER6> Find a co-founder: <http://fairsoftware.net/search-cofounder-web-developer>

Unfortunately, no one is running the equivalent of the co-founders meetup in Colorado (<http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/>), but you are welcome to start one if you want to. TechStars would indeed be a great anchor, but you don't have to ask permission to start such a meetup.

<comment><USER7> Boulder New Tech is an excellent place to find what you're looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Best way to suck: don't even start. Figure its hopeless and keep your day job.

<comment><USER9> Great point. Most people can't even get over the fear of starting, as it's safe not to start - this way they can't fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't see what's so bad about eating alone at restaurants. I do it sometimes if I want time to myself.</comment>


Dvorak being Dvorak - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/29/dvorak-apple-should-pull-the-plug-on-the-iphone/ <comment><USER2> The third comment down links to this YouTube video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ>

In short, he admits to intentionally playing the Mac community in order to get hits. So if people just stopped giving him attention, all of these false predictions would stop.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, didn't follow the links, fell prey.

I feel so... violated.</comment>


Ruth Porat to Join Google as Chief Financial Officer - <AUTHOR> http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2015/03/ruth-porat-to-join-google-as-chief.html

<comment><USER2> Not particularly remarkable news but good for her I suppose. Being the CFO for a big Investment Bank is pretty much the most stressful job imaginable.</comment>


Revolutionizing Optics:Nanostructured Metasurfaces and Liquid Crystal Technology - <AUTHOR> https://scitechdaily.com/a-new-lens-on-the-world-revolutionizing-optics-by-combining-nanostructured-metasurfaces-with-liquid-crystal-technology/ <comment><AUTHOR> >Optical properties of metasurfaces infiltrated with liquid crystals

[https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/08/06/2006336117](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/08/06/2006336117)</comment>


Apple intervene as a defendent in Lodsys lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/10/apple-steps-up-in-lodsys-lawsuits-files-motion-to-intervene/

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised enough by this to say 'Way to go, Apple!' I don't often cheer for corporations, but Apple is actually sticking their neck out on this one, and I have to applaud them for that.

I'm sure they have ulterior motives (developers might leave if they fear lawsuits) but Apple could easily have ignored this and gotten away with it, I think.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What would you think they're supposed to do, wait till all the devs succumb?

Now as Apple's a defendant, win or lose, it doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do not mean to be mean but past history has proven that FSOSSpatents is an astro-turf Lobbyist for Microsoft with at times many of its so-called expertise being somewhat wrong and devoid of factual basis.

<comment><USER4> True, he's biased and HINAL.

Still FOSS PATENTS does report the story first, so pretty hard to avoid sourcing it. Acquire facts, disregard opinion if you may.</comment></comment>


Create HTML5 apps using only C# and XAML - <AUTHOR> http://www.cshtml5.com

<comment><USER2> How does this compare to Xamarin?</comment>


Show HN: Embit – Signals from Technosphere - <AUTHOR> https://embit.ca/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN, I built this originally to scratch my own itch. The way I would like to get my news.

Would really appreciate your feedback and ways to improve it.</comment>


The World Map of Billionaires by Country and Money Origin - <AUTHOR> https://howmuch.net/articles/billionaires-map <comment><USER2> So does that make most young Germans a brat.</comment>


Fresh Findings from Cassini (Presentation at AAS-DPS) - <AUTHOR> https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6976 <comment><AUTHOR> (American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Science meeting in Provo, Utah)</comment>


Ask HN: Fastest way to build a crud app? - <AUTHOR> Any language, any framework, any paradigm. Both frontend and backend. No complex UI, no fancy extracurricular services, just standard crud. <comment><USER2> [https://scotch.io/tutorials/build-a-crud-web-app-with- python...](https://scotch.io/tutorials/build-a-crud-web-app-with-python-and- flask-part-one)

</comment><comment><USER3> Google sheets ([https://jeffreyeverhart.com/2017/08/12/creating-crud-web- app...](https://jeffreyeverhart.com/2017/08/12/creating-crud-web-app-google- sheets/))

Other online office suits such as Office 365 may have something similar.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/490/creating-a-simple- crud...](https://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/490/creating-a-simple-crud-app- with-yii2-revised-12202013)

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is a way to generate a backend for your app. [https://github.com/diegohaz/rest](https://github.com/diegohaz/rest)

</comment><comment><USER6> Flask, 5 lines to get started with a working route

[http://flask.pocoo.org/](http://flask.pocoo.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Oracle APEX. Hosting via MaxApex

</comment><comment><USER8> Rails or Laravel

</comment><comment><USER9> Ruby on rails</comment>


My start up business uploaded its new website today Comments welcome  - <AUTHOR> http://www.potatomou.se/

<comment><USER2> The [http://www.taichiwarwick.co.uk](http://www.taichiwarwick.co.uk) has a ton (actually all but the index.php) of broken links.

I found the [http://www.open2innovate.co.uk/](http://www.open2innovate.co.uk/) site confusing. There are so many horizontal lines that it takes me a few seconds to orientate myself and even then I lose focus on what is important.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly the Tai Chi site isn't yet finished, I'll take that away to avoid more confusion.

The Open2innovate site was down to the clients descriptions and design ideas! What the client wants, the client gets!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice work - really like it. I'm definitely digging the clean layout and presentation of everything.

Only small gripe I had with it was that the navigation was a little small which could be somewhat cumbersome for some users but overall, you guys did great!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the comments! It's a learning process, and we're going to be making some changes here and there as time progresses!

Please recommend us if you, or anyone else is in need of a website!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> the design is very clean and looks nice, but doesn't come off as very creative

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments, I'll be sure to keep these in mind!</comment></comment>


Jason's Machine Learning 101 - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kSuQyW5DTnkVaZEjGYCkfOxvzCqGEFzWBy4e9Uedd9k/preview?imm_mid=0f9b7e&cmp=em-data-na-na-newsltr_20171213&slide=id.g168a3288f7_0_58 <comment><USER2> This seems a bit 100 than 101 but if anyone's looking for something more next- level, check out this ML Crash Course by Google (featuring Peter Norvig and many other Google engineers) [https://developers.google.com/machine- learning/crash-course/...](https://developers.google.com/machine- learning/crash-course/ml-intro)

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I highly recommend the MLCC by Google if you want to go deeper technically speaking and more hands on. My deck was aimed at complete beginners (even those with no / limited math background). Having taken courses like the MLCC myself way back when I found that there were some gaps in my own knowledge before I could appreciate that in its entirety which is in part how my deck came about to being.

<comment><USER4> Nice job, man. By the way, how do you create those animated gifs for explaining?

<comment><USER3> The GIFs for the product demos such as the ones I have for Soli etc can be made by dragging an MP4 into Photoshop and then exporting for web as GIF after resizing. You can then drag those into Google slides and resize as needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Minor correction: the Boston Dynamics robots don't use machine learning. This is a common misconception, but almost all robots today still use hardwired control laws. We don't really know how to make robots that can teach themselves how to do things yet.

<comment><USER6> Sure- Boston dynamics has bleeding edge controls.

However, I would be really surprised if they didn't use machine learning! Their robots have strong perception systems. How do they accomplish that without machine learning?

<comment><USER7> See this Quora question by a research engineer at Google Brain:

[https://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-learning-algorithms- are-u...](https://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-learning-algorithms-are-used-on- Boston-Dynamics-robots)

It doesn't look like they are using a classifier to do object recognition, although I confess I've never heard of the "sequential composition of cost funnels" the post is describing, neither do I claim to have understood it at any depth just from that post.

In any case, it does look like most of their AI (if you would even call it that) is hand-crafted. I understand that this is the done thing in robotics, in general.

Note also the various announcements by prominent deep learning groups, like DeepMind and OpenAI, about teaching robots, or robot hands, to manipulate various objects of limited shapes and forms. If deep learning and deep reinforcement learning was particularly successful in training robots to interact with real-world environments, you can bet you'd see a lot more announcements advertising this, with titles like "We taught a robot to peel potatoes using deep learning" etc.

It would be interesting to see if other machine learning techniques are often used with robotics. I am aware of one paper [1] that uses Inductive Logic Programming for robot vision, but robotics is really not my field so I'm probably missing lots of other work.

__________________

[1] _Meta-Interpretive Learning from noisy images_

[https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~shm/Papers/logvismlj.pdf](https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~shm/Papers/logvismlj.pdf)

Full disclosure: one of the authors is my PhD advisor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sharing because this is a nice intro deck that new people on our team (Kaggle) have found useful for coming up to speed on ML

<comment><USER8> I see this is referred to as a deck, but I don't know what that means. What is the specific meaning of deck in this context? Where do I see more decks like this?

<comment><USER3> Reference is to slide deck. A deck of slides. This presentation was created using Google Slides (slides.google.com). I am sure others exist but its up to the creator to make them public / shared for others to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a god damn treasure trove of info for people new to ML. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER10> isn't everyone tired of these beginner crash courses in ML?

<comment><USER11> Clearly there's still demand. Maybe there's a need for something better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can't download or print (chrome/safari). Working for anyone else?

<comment><USER3> This was on purpose. This is a "living deck" so will be updated from time to time and didn't want to maintain several copies. If you have the Google Drive app I believe you can download for offline viewing and then it will sync automatically when connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> astonishingly devoid of references, and it ignores multiple decades of computer science

<comment><USER14> "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER15> You're one to talk.</comment></comment></comment>


Website detailing difficult guest experiences on AirBnB called "AirBnB Hell" - <AUTHOR> https://www.airbnbhell.com <comment><USER2> Watch out for trademark-related takedowns against your hoster and registrar.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I just thought it was interesting. I'm assuming you're talking to me? I appreciate the comment and I would remove the article if it were possible. Not trying to cause a problem.

Admin's if you want to take this down - that's no problem.

<comment><USER3> If this is your project maybe it's better as a Show HN.

The parent commenter though was saying you can't really brand something Airbnb Hell, as that is potential trademark infringement. I don't know enough about trademark law to tell you if they are correct but it's certainly plausible.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not. I thought I missed the point of the previous comment.

Someone sent it to me...they were complaining about their last experience. That's all.

Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was just reading this good one [http://www.bigworldsmallpockets.com/is- airbnb-still-a-good-t...](http://www.bigworldsmallpockets.com/is-airbnb-still- a-good-thing/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been burned with Airbnb rentals a few times. Never again. I deleted my account, I'd rather pay a bit extra and get a real hotel without wasting half my vacation dealing with these clowns.</comment>