Show HN: Spider Pro – easy and cheap way to scrape the internet - <AUTHOR> https://tryspider.com/ <comment><USER2> While looking at the tool I've realized that I've built something similar many years ago. I wonder if it's worth digging up the source code, polishing and publishing it. Does the market need more of these tools? Are there features in this type of tool on the market that seem to be completely missing or inadequately implemented?

And it's likely that running these as a server-side application is ultimately more appealing than this simpler (to implement) automation inside the user's browser, right? Seems that many companies providing similar (server-side) scraping tools have been successfully sold off... Is that an indication of (still existing) high demand for these?

EDIT to add: The tool and the accompanying website look fantastic, by the way. Congratulations on the 1.0 launch, Amie!

<comment><USER3> Does the market need yet another browser extension scraper like this? No, I don't think it does.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/scraper?_category=...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/scraper?_category=extensions)

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/search/?platform=wi...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/search/?platform=windows&q=scraper&type=extension)

<comment><USER4> 25 is not very many on AMO, there are only a few that seem relevant and most are unmaintained. The only one that really seems usable is the webscraper.io one. Maybe ScrapeMate but the author has left and is working on the Python/cloud ScrapingHub. Similarly Chrome has Web Scraper Plus w/ poor maintenance and the rest are wrappers/helpers for various websites.

The extensions market isn't particularly lucrative, they're like mobile apps but with only 33% of users even knowing they exist. The SaaS companies don't have a growth limitation hence their success. But if you want an extension for a resume item or something getting a few thousand AMO users or Chrome reviews shouldn't be hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that their demo screen cast shows Zillow. Zillow is fairly aggressive in applying anti-scraping defensive measures.

<comment><USER6> .. which may be the reason why their demo screen cast shows Zillow.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the problem is that Zillow imposes IP bans on you when you've been found to be scraping their site.

<comment><USER7> Which is why any serious effort involves rotating pools of proxies.

<comment><USER8> Not just rotating pools of proxies but sometimes shady gray market residential proxies, so that you can appear to be coming from hundreds or thousands of unique geographically distributed end-user DOCSIS3/ADSL2+/VDSL2/GPON/whatever last mile end user customer netblocks.

If you want to go down a rabbit hole of shady proxies run on compromised/trojaned end user SOHO routers or PCs, google "residential proxies for sale"

[https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=res...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=residential+proxies+for+sale&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

<comment> core-questions Once worked for a place using this to scrape search engines.

It's amazing how easy and comparatively cheap it is to get access to thousands of residential IPs. Is it via spyware running on people's machines? Shady people working at ISPs doing nefarious things for cash? We never knew....

The key thing to know is that if you want your traffic to come from an IP "in" some other country (according to geolocation databases anyway) it's really only a few bucks a month to get a proxy. Most of them have poor IP reputation so they suck to use on Google, but work very well for everything else out there...

<comment><USER9> > Is it via spyware running on people's machines? Shady people working at ISPs > doing nefarious things for cash?

Might be as simple as [https://hola.org/](https://hola.org/) & [https://luminati.io/](https://luminati.io/) \- "unblock a website, download our VPN client", meaning you "unblock" by using somebody else's line. And the also sell access at luminati. Most users aren't aware of the implications.

<comment><USER8> It's a combination of three general things:

a) The type of "services" luckylion mentions where people have opted in to a shady gray market thing reselling proxies through their connection.

b) compromised home routers/gateway devices/internet of shit devices

c) compromised home PCs (mostly windows 7/10 trojans/botnets)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As an aside, it looks like this was created by one person, which shows an amazing level of talents in design, UX, programming, marketing, and presumably devops. Kind of scary.

<comment><USER11> is that a bad or a good thing?

<comment><USER12> Well it makes them a damn unicorn so... good thing?

<comment><USER13> Depends on the unicorn. Some can spin up the full stack, put it under source control, wrap a CI/CD pipeline around it, and have it deployed to a TLS- encrypted public website in under an hour.

I think you can actually find the above level of developer - what many would classify a 'unicorn' \- in approximately 1-2% of the workforce.

That doesn't mean they understand your business or products, know how to work well with other individuals, etc. There are a lot of other factors beyond just the productivity angle.

Now, the above developer _also_ with the ability to fundamentally understand the business, as well as interact with all of the key people while performing said productivity stunts _on a consistent basis_... I think you are getting into the .1-.01% range.

<comment><USER14> Wut. If you think someone can build the OP product in less than an hour, this is a new level of HN delusion ...

<comment><USER15> I imagine that "full stack" in this context refers to the equivalent of a Hello World project wrapped around a CI/CD pipeline.

<comment><USER13> Correct. Not an actual complete project, but the boilerplate required to begin implementing & delivering features.

<comment><USER14> Ah, yes, good and experienced engineers can do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ah it reminds me of Kimono Labs. I miss that product, it was fantastic.

<comment><USER17> I was trying to remember the name! I set up an incredible amount of automation with Kimono Labs.. that was one of the best products I've ever used. I remember when they shut down, but only realized now they were acquired by... Palantir?

<comment><USER18> Me too. Absolutely one of the best products I've ever used. It's also the product that taught me that I can't trust a SaaS business with important work. Wish they still existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> webscraper.io is free and has more functionality. I've used it for a quick and easy way to scrape data off multiple pages.

Probably has a slightly higher learning curve but once you get past that it's easy.

</comment><comment><USER20> Any comments on using Gumroad as your payment processor? I went with Paddle for a Chrome extension - it seems more flexible (e.g. you could do team subscription plans with custom pricing) but I think Gumroad is a lot easier to integrate (e.g. they have a simple license check API).

</comment><comment><USER21> Unfortunate that the contact us page doesn't work. I'm interested, but I wanted to ask if a FF extension is planned, since that's my primary browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, firefox is supported! Though not distributed through the webstore - I'm planning to move it to the store sometimes soon.

<comment><USER21> Awesome, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is scary good and easy to use. Clever idea with the Chrome extension too.

<comment><USER23> Clever, but how long until sites learn to detect the extension and block the user?

<comment><USER24> Detection is always a cat and mouse game. Using an extension in a real browser (instead of electron/headless chrome) is probably one of the hardest to detect because it requires running a "real" browser.

Of course somebody will find a way to detect it, then the extension maker will patch it, and the cycle will continue.

<comment><USER23> Correct me if I'm wrong, but is it not still as simple as knowing the "chrome- extension://" unique id of the extension? I'm aware of the cat and mouse aspect of scraping and that was one of the pitfalls I've been wary of as a fingerprinting vector.

<comment><USER25> I'd be surprised if sites had permission to read a chrome-extension:// URL. That'd be a sizable privacy leak.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure about the chrome-extension protocol, but this API still seems to be present: [https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/runtime#method- sendM...](https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/runtime#method-sendMessage)

<comment><USER24> I just tested in chrome 77, and I could only do `chrome.runtime.sendMessage("clngdbkpkpeebahjckkjfobafhncgmne", {},{},console.log)` from within the Stylus extension page, not from an external page like hacker news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems to work well, but it appears that you can't re-scrape a site without starting from scratch, it's a one time deal.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, it needs a lot of additional features.

I hope this isn't one of these "abandon-ware" kind of deals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The DRM scheme could use some work. Here's a simple crack (run from the extension license page):

        chrome.storage.sync.set({
            spider_valid_license: {
                key: 'No license (00000000-00000000-00000000-00000000)',
                lastChecked: new Date('Jan 1 3000')
            }
        })

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm not familiar with web scraping but have been looking for feed(s) from shopping sites (e.g. deals.ebay.com, deals.amazon.com etc.). In good ol' days they used to publish RSS, but not any more. Can I use this for what I'm looking for? Will eBay and Amazon end up banning me? Alternately does anyone know of a good service that aggregates shopping feeds?

</comment><comment><USER30> This has a nice UI. It reminds me of Kantu (now [https://ui.vision/](https://ui.vision/)) which I've used with varying degrees of success. That works by recording Selenium scripts; is Spider Pro entirely custom?

</comment><comment><USER31> This is lacking clarity in the payment schedule... Is it One-time? Monthly? Yearly?

<comment><USER32> EDIT: snippet from the website to help answer this question without requiring you to click. I didn't intend this to be a rude answer, I don't think it deserves downvotes.

" \+ No server involved (zero subscription fee for you!)

...

Unlike other web scraping softwares, it requires only one time payment to scrape for unlimited time and data. No more subscriptions or huge fee for your small data analysis projects! "

<comment><USER33> How is this at all sustainable as a business model? My company is in charge of scraping a few TB/week. Would we be allowed to use your service?

<comment><USER34> This is a browser extension that takes the place of copy/pasting from web sites (ie manual scraping), what you're looking for is probably more automated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Error info: _contact us_ at the bottom shows _page not found_.

<comment><USER36> This is quite ironic, since crawling its own website is surely one of the best ways to detect broken links.

<comment><USER37> its not a crawler.... its a browser extension to extract data from an optionally paginated list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> good-time to showcase given this was recently in the news. Looks awesome thanks for sharing [https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data- security/insi...](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data- security/insight-linkedin-data-scraping-case-9th-circuits-trigger-for-cfaa- liability)

</comment><comment><USER39> Since the extensions are being distributed via Gumroad, how would updates work?

</comment><comment><USER40> Have a look at dashblock.com, they went through YC recently

</comment><comment><USER41> Nice example of Tailwind CSS website as well.

</comment><comment><USER42> How is it the cheapest if it is not free? There are plenty of free scrapping tools out there

<comment><USER27> How many are offline-only?

Almost everyone one chrome web-store are online-based and "freemium" only.

<comment><USER43> Sorry, maybe this is obvious, but what is an offline web scraper?

<comment><USER44> Probably meant installed and running locally

<comment><USER27> Yes.. It felt silly writing "serverless".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Nonsense - beautiful soup is free.

Don't pay for something you can program yourself.

<comment><USER46> Sure, everyone's time is free too, after all.

(Alternate smart-ass reply: Surely you coded the browser, operating system, and network stack involved in posting this response by yourself, right?)

<comment><USER47> [https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/](https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/)

I mean...

soup.find(id="link3") # Tillie

Is this hard?

<comment><USER46> For HN's audience, no, that's not hard. But this product is clearly not only for us, and you've also cherry-picked a very simple example.

There's also the aspect of downloading the page in the first place and dealing with things like authentication and bot detection which a product like this helps solve.

I personally don't have a use for this product right now, but I won't be so bold as to say I'll never find a case where using it wouldn't be easier or more cost-effective than hacking up my own solution.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the root of this agile image? - <AUTHOR> I encounter this image in some resources about agile. Do you know the root?<p>http://i.hizliresim.com/bDyvnm.png <comment><USER2> Isn't it better to contact those resources?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will try.</comment></comment>


Reporter goes rogue on RT, blasts "horrific" homophobia - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/08/21/james_kirchick_reporter_goes_rogue_on_rt_to_bash_network_for_coverage_of.html

<comment><USER2> Government should not invent laws out of some theoretical concepts. Laws work only when they formalize, cement and enforce the established practice and traditions. In this case, we can unfortunately only tell that the anti-gay law is good. The vast majority of Russian people, and other peoples populating Russia, are strictly against any diversity in this field. It is not mr. Putin or the government, it is the Russian people that is the problem, and the free world should better learn it and take into account than try to fix.

<comment><USER3> so you're saying the laws in favor of slavery, and against homosexuality, should have been kept? Because they were the established practice and tradition...

<comment><USER2> Both were results of societal changes, not laws. First traditions changed, then did the laws. Attempt of government to 'teach the people to be good guys' through laws only alienates people from the government. While of course, i have nothing against gays, but i have a tooth on the Orthodox church and other institutions which makes Russians so much like cavemen.</comment></comment></comment>


The moving sofa problem (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~romik/movingsofa/ <comment><USER2> 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17527702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17527702)

2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296502)

<comment><AUTHOR> and welcome to 2019! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Back when I had a truck and a good back I helped friends move their couch into an apartment. It was close but I somehow managed to get it in. They told me later that they weren't able to get it back out no matter how hard they tried. Is this an example of the moving sofa problem?

</comment><comment><USER4> I was expecting the new problem to be a turn with an varying angle (not 90°).

</comment><comment><USER5> So where can I actually buy one of these sofas? I want to shock my mathematician friends.

<comment><USER6> The true "problem" with moving a sofa is finding available friends on a weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pivot! Pivot! Pivot!</comment>


Show HN: triggerFS – A realtime messaging and distributed trigger system - <AUTHOR> https://triggerfs.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

I am the author of triggerFS and I am super excited as I am finally launching my new application I have been working on for the past 9 months.

triggerFS is a message passing and trigger system. You deploy "workers" on your servers and make requests to those workers. triggerFS means messaging in a service-oriented fashion. Every worker is available as a service. The workers make use of plugins written and compiled in go (golang) to execute any kind of task. Writing your own plugins is super easy and makes fun.

You can group workers together by using another feature like "services" (sort of proxies). You can loadbalance tasks, do them in serial or parallelized. The amazing triggerfs-cli module provides you with an interactive shell to configure your triggerFS platform.

Map your configured workers and services to so called trigger-files with the "fs" module. Now your services are available as regular files mounted on your filesystem with the help of FUSE. Writing to a trigger-file triggers a request to a service.

Build teams, join other teams, invite users, share resources and many more features.

AMA!</comment>


Lightelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.lightelligence.ai/ <comment><USER2> As questionable as some of the design decisions on it are, that website is stunningly beautiful.</comment>


Genetically Engineering Yourself Sounds Horrible – This Guy Is Doing It Anyway - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/genetically-engineering-yourself-sounds-like-a-horrible-1820189351 <comment><AUTHOR> The DIY CRISPR kit was crowdfunded 333% two years ago, here's an article discussing it ([https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mail-order- crispr...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mail-order-crispr-kits- allow-absolutely-anyone-to-hack-dna/)). You can still buy these $159 at Zayner's company, Odin ([http://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr- kit/](http://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/)). It comes with detailed instructions to do a project: modify E. coli so that it can grow on streptomycin, which normally kills bacteria!

This story is the textbook definition of "scientific innovation story that's creating mixed feelings": On the one hand, the whole thing sounds like a Hollywood adaptation of Bioshock, the heavily tattooed unconventional PhD experimenting on himself, biohacker stickers that say "Create Something Beautiful", etc. You know _exactly_ where this will end from the first 10 minutes.

OTOH, part of me _loves_ this! If you think about it, basic humanity has changed little over the past couple of thousand years, you can probably timejump the Egyptian pharaoh Narmer (c 3100 BC) to today and he will get most of our daily lives: we still sleep, eat meals, fall in love, have sex, get angry over petty stuffy, etc. We have covered tremendous ground with our _tools_ , e.g. behold the iPhone X, but for all practical purposes our basic drives and bodies are the same. I think human society will attain the next level of sophistication only with biohacking.</comment>


How to Build and Use a Multi GPU System for Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> http://timdettmers.wordpress.com/2014/09/21/how-to-build-and-use-a-multi-gpu-system-for-deep-learning/ <comment><USER2> The direct-to-network stuff is very cool and useful in this scenario. I should point out that for those of you experimenting with deep learning, you'll probably not be writing your own code from scratch. There are various open source libraries (pylearn2, torch, caffe, others) that make things _a lot_ easier when you're getting started. They still have something of a learning curve though.

I should caution also that not all of the libraries work as well with the latest or earliest GPUs, so the model of GPU you buy still makes a big difference. And it should be NVIDIA--the deep learning community has largely standardized around their hardware. This is a state of affairs that is constantly changing.

Pertinent self promotion: my company ([http://www.ersatzlabs.com](http://www.ersatzlabs.com)) provides a cloud GPU deep learning solution, which I'd argue is an even easier way to get started with deep learning, particularly in visualization and prototyping phases.

But anyway, if anyone's curious about deep learning and just getting their feet wet, I'm always happy to talk about it, my email is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article contains good tips for building a GPU cluster with RDMA. One thing I would like to add is that there are two types of GPUDirect depending on CUDA versions. Previous CUDA supported GPUDirect through CPU memory, and now CUDA supports "true" GPUDirect between the RDMA device and the GPU memory. However, some chipsets may not support the "true" GPUDirect very well, and two of our old machines had up to 20x times of throughput asymmetry with GPUDirect (which is, send was much slower than recv.) There are several papers that discuss this limitation. Our work, GPUnet[1], overcame this performance issue with GPUDirect by using fairly recent chipsets, but you can probably imagine our pain when we saw around 150MB/s throughput with GPUDirect, when 3GB/s is the expected one.

[1] GPUnet: Networking Abstractions for GPU Programs, OSDI 2014 [https://sites.google.com/site/silbersteinmark/GPUnet](https://sites.google.com/site/silbersteinmark/GPUnet)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious about the author's experience with ML. He mentioned one of the Kaggle competitions, and from my understanding most of the people doing Kaggle are using R, Python, or some other language which provides a large degree of support for ML type tasks.

I wonder if the author also uses those and CUDA/GPU makes up a relatively small part of his solutions, or whether it's largely done at such a low level. It'd also be interesting to see how some of the other people who place highly in Kaggle competitions do their coding.

<comment><USER5> I mainly use python and sklearn for Kaggle competitions for my initial models. If I understand the problem better I use some of my own deep learning solutions in python (built on gnumpy and cudamat). However, sometimes my own C++/CUDA implementations come in handy, especially if the data set is large.

Other Kaggle competitors that use deep learning mostly use python libraries like pylearn2 and torch7 for their deep learning models (which are also built on CUDA/C++).

In general it is not so easy to use deep learning on problems other than object recognition. So yes, I do not use deep learning in all of my Kaggle competition simply because it is hard to get them to work well. Using different simple models and to then ensemble them yields often better results for the time invested.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for posting that. It gave me some interesting things to look into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was recently surprised to learn that they make server systems with up to eight PCIe x16 slots.

We were looking at this particular beastie [1] to host some Nvidia Tesla K40s for some simulation software. It would be a very expensive box, but the sim software costs a lot more.

[1] [http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/4027/SYS-4027GR...](http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/4027/SYS-4027GR- TRT.cfm)</comment>


An Inconvenient Truth: Intel Larrabee story revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.brightsideofnews.com/print/2009/10/12/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed.aspx

<comment><USER2> Fantastic article. This is the best piece I've seen written on this subject so far, with lots of context and a good background on what's happened over the last five years.

One thing I don't see mentioned, and which has been a huge red flag for me, is Intel's seeming pre-occupation with raytracing. As a graphics programmer, I find it absurd that Intel would hope to mount a technological disruption on an industry that has been following a very steady course since SGI and Pixar were founded in the mid-80s. I suspect that the Larrabee approach, as a whole, is a case of arrogance in believing that they can jump ahead of everyone else without having to slog through the hard, painful work of incremental improvements that has been taking place at nVidia and ATI/AMD.

That being said, the author correctly points out that Intel has invested in many technological mistakes in the past, and always eventually recognized their mistakes and changed course.

<comment><USER3> I think they may have a plan B ready:

<http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1826.htm>

It's not trivial to engineer a massively-multi-core general-purpose processor. I would try it with MIPS or ARM instead of x86, but I guess this is not an option for Intel.

AMD, however, doesn't need to preserve the x86 ISA's status as an industry standard. Quite the contrary: anything they do to hurt Intel will only make them stronger. And they have some folks with massively-multi-core expertise in-house.

<comment><USER4> That chip appears to be worse than Larrabee in every respect. In particular it is much harder to program, which would just make Intel's late drivers later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Building 100 or so millions of lines of code for the driver part is a herculean task, but the sources at hand claim that they are working on target"

That's quite a driver!

<comment><USER6> It's lots of test code, and lots of microcode that gets loaded onto the board when it inits.

Most of that code isn't going to be running directly in the kernel's address space in the shipping driver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Same author says "Apple ditches 32nm Arrandale, won't use Intel graphics":

[http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/12/5/apple- ditches...](http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/12/5/apple-ditches-32nm- arrandale2c-wont-use-intel-graphics.aspx)

If this rumor is true, it is quite an extreme move. Is 3D graphics _that_ important nowadays? I thought most laptops were bought for work, not games.

<comment><USER8> Apple's likely looking to unify their gui rendering path to the greatest degree possible, and moving things OpenGL is the easiest way to do this and have things still be nice and fast. They might might lose some on a $10 or $15 increase to the BOM on a laptop, but the potential savings in engineer hours might be tremendous.

There's also the chance that a desire to use OpenCL more widely for internal applications means that having a gpu that can run CUDA or the equivalent is becoming a defacto requirement for all macs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this someone's attempt to be hired by TechCrunch?

<comment><USER10> Seems like they are aiming at a different target. This article goes very deep with very specific inside knowledge of long-span development projects. TechCrunch is more current events across the industry.

<comment><USER11> Or current "rumours", in some cases!

This guys article is much much too in depth to be a TechCrunch article, IMHO.</comment></comment></comment>


Godot 3.2 beta 1 - <AUTHOR> https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-3-2-beta-1 <comment><USER2> I have been using Godot since recently and I sincerely think that Godot has one of the finest programming experiences, not only for games, but for any kind of visual programming.

It is easy and has a flexibility that is unmatched, and some things that are cumbersome to do in other engines are a breeze to do here.

I sincerely recommend that anyone with a mild interest try it, it only is a 60mb download with no installation needed, it comes with its own text editor and docs, so it comes with everything you need to start tinkering.

<comment><USER3> > _it comes with its own text editor_

You were listing off so many positive features, I'm glad you included a negative as well.

<comment><USER4> FWIW you can easily open up the text files in VS Code. Last time I was messing with it, I tried to find a way to integrate it more, and I think you can set it as the editor's default text editor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if there's anything approximating release notes for 3.2 yet, but one big feature I'm aware of is support for Oculus Quest. Most people are using Unity and Unreal for that, so it's good to see an open alternative.

EDIT: Should have read more carefully, the post links a preliminary changelog [https://gist.github.com/Calinou/49aefe52ce8f67ffa3f743932123...](https://gist.github.com/Calinou/49aefe52ce8f67ffa3f743932123d14f)

<comment><USER6> Now we just need an open alternative to the Oculus Quest.

<comment><USER5> It's far from an OSS platform, but it's at least much better than the PS4/XB1/Switch ecosystem. Anybody can sign up for a free developer account and sideload software to it.

And if someone else makes a more open standalone VR headset I'm sure Godot will support it ASAP.

<comment><USER6> "Whatabout these other worse ecosystems" isn't the strongest argument. At least those other ecosystems are in competition with each other, whereas the standalone VR market only has Quest. I invested years of my life developing a VR game, and despite a number of customers begging to be able to buy it on Quest, and despite having developed a custom Quest version, there is a company sitting between us saying "no."

<comment><USER5> I'm not arguing that it's a good situation, I'm just saying that's how it is and at least it's not worse. Betting your game isn't on PSVR either?

Have you considered putting it up for sale through itch.io? There are some Quest games on there, Air Brigade for example.

<comment><USER6> I would actually love to put it up for sale through itch.io, but what happens when someone actually buys the game? They have to lie to Oculus and say they're a developer, and we all have to hope that Facebook doesn't Alter The Deal. I wouldn't trust that arrangement after taking someone's money, and I won't give the game out for free either.

Really the answer here is competition. If Quest had a competitor, I could take my game there and tell customers to buy that product instead. But it would be even better if the competition was open source.

<comment><USER5> Maybe the best you can do is price it low to account for the risk, and put big warnings that it'll only work as long as Facebook continues to allow side- loading. If people still want to buy it, that's on them.

Looked at your profile and I assume we're talking about Soundboxing?

Did Oculus give any feedback on why they won't put it in the store? Looking at your website, I'm thinking it makes heavy use of user-created tracks with the audio being pulled from YouTube (based on the VEVO thumbnails)? Is YouTube ok with that kind of embedding?

The Quest store just put Synth Riders up this week, so clearly it's not a complete ban on games that play unlicensed user-sequenced tracks. But those have to be loaded into a folder on the device from your computer instead of "HAND MADE CHALLENGES" with a Daft Punk song prominently featured in the marketing material.

<comment><USER6> No, in the many discussions I've had with Oculus, they've not given me a solid reason. If you talk to other developers, it is apparently their policy not to give feedback.

My game embeds a full browser, and can navigate to YouTube pages - it really is a full browser though, showing ads and dutifully registering tracking impressions and everything. But the browser is actually just background noise, the actual challenge is a motion captured artistic performance, and that drives everything in the game - this is well-protected by fair use.

The browser state is just made to sync up with that performance, and the side- effect is that, if the creator of the mocap moved reasonably in line with the music, you feel as if you're moving to the music too, when in fact you're actually interacting with the motion capture.

<comment><USER5> You might consider feeling out r/oculusquest to see if people would be interested. Or maybe a limited free itch.io version that's restricted to a defined YouTube playlist?

There's a pretty big crowd of people in that community set up for sideloading. Main reasons being Beat Saber mods, Pavlov beta, Tea for God, Virtual Desktop with SteamVR streaming, and probably others that I'm forgetting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good progress on Vulkan support.

Meanwhile Unreal engine removed parallelized Vulkan renderer item from their future plans:

[https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and- linux](https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux)

Does it mean they won't work on it anymore?

</comment><comment><USER8> Godot was great when I tried it, it's much simpler and nicer to use than Unity for 2d games.

The cons were there are some minor Mac IDE bugs (seems like maintainers mainly use Linux), but the biggest issue is the godot plugin ecosystem is much smaller than the unity plugin ecosystem and writing native bindings e.g. for an ad sdk is non-trival and you'd have to do it for each platform and each external sdk you integrate with.

<comment><USER9> The plugins were new to Godot 3 if I'm not mistaken so I'm not surprised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So I tried Godot recently for 3D, and it seems pretty interesting. Followed some tutorials, made some basic FPS controls and movement. Checked out some other demos, etc.

However it's surprising that no serious 3D game has ever been made with it, except a few demos. Why is this the case? I already noticed some sound issues in heavily scripted demos, is this engine very limited for 3D?

<comment><USER11> There are a couple of them, though it depends on what you consider "serious" or not.

I think Godot as it is now is reasonably capable for 3D (adequate for what most small indie devs would want to do at least) but it is definitely behind Unity/Unreal in featureset, performance, and availability of 3rd party modules. And of course everybody has already spent years learning the other engines. 4.0 should be bringing a lot of major features and big performance improvements but that's a fair bit away.

i.e. [https://store.steampowered.com/app/992860/Intrepid/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/992860/Intrepid/)

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/467090/A_Game_of_Changes/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/467090/A_Game_of_Changes/)

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/818620/Music_Boy_3D/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/818620/Music_Boy_3D/)

[https://victordelima.itch.io/way-out](https://victordelima.itch.io/way-out)

still in development: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/824090/TailQuest_Defense/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/824090/TailQuest_Defense/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> An interesting question to address is whether there is space for developing a low price commercial version of Godot. What feature would you be willing to pay for?

<comment><USER13> Documentation and templates and placeholder assets.

<comment><USER12> Can you be more specific? Documentations: tutorials, a book like learn godot in 24x7, or a set of tutorials= Templates: mini-games, reusable piece of logic? Placeholder assets: can you provide some examples?

Thanks

<comment><USER14> Parent might mean export templates. Godot has export templates to build games for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, macOs, and HTML5. But there are also third- party companies that offer export templates for PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.

<comment><USER13> I appreciate and have used a few of the export templates, and they're great! I have even created my own based on an existing one. The process isn't so bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been waiting for this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Godot is a game engine.

</comment><comment><USER17> Last time I evaluated it to do casual games Godot was lacking production ready ads component. Is it now something fulfilled?

<comment><USER18> Lacking an ad component is a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER19> This isn't a helpful comment. Ads are a fact of the current game industry. It's a valid critique

<comment><USER18> If it supports ads, shouldn't it also support microtransactions, shareware keys, Steam/GOG/Epic integration, etc? There are a lot of monetization paths, why should ads get special support?

<comment><USER19> Fair enough, but saying the engine not having ads is a feature is not productive. If it's out of scope, it's out of scope, but that's not what you said

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had never heard of godot before. When I clicked this link, I was expecting something golang related (possibly something that processes dot)...

how wrong I was.</comment>


Games blamed for moral decline and addiction throughout history - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/games-blamed-for-moral-decline-and-addiction-throughout-history-123900 <comment><USER2> when did parents stop taking responsibility for raising their children?</comment>


Int 80h (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://www.int80h.org <comment><USER3> Per the Internet Archive, this page is _at least_ fifteen years old - <USER2> looked like this as of the first snapshot taken on February 1, 2001 ([https://web.archive.org/web/20010201152900/http://int80h.org...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010201152900/http://int80h.org/)). A lot has changed in computing since then.

ARM became dominant in mobile computing, which was barely a glimmer back in 2001. x86-64 became commonplace. Just targeting Intel and ARM processors now necessitates writing code for four architectures: x86, x86-64, AArch32 and AArch64 for a full range of compatibility.

While MS-DOS syscall numbers were documented and often _required_ assembly to use, the opposite is true on modern Windows - Windows system call numbers are undocumented and change from release to release, requiring programmers to link against Kernel32.dll or equivalent to stably call into the OS.

Compiler technology has advanced significantly, and processor manufacturers now often optimize towards patterns employed by compilers rather than by humans (case-in-point: the x86 "loop" instruction, while extremely convenient for handwritten code, is significantly less performant than a cmp-jmp loop).

Code has gotten more and more complex. Whether this is a good thing or bad, the reality is that hundreds of millions of lines of assembly would be required to replicate complex modern programs like web browsers - projects of that scale will always require powerful HLLs to manage abstraction, something that assembly does not and cannot provide on its own.

View this page as what it is - a historical artifact. Although assembly programming definitely still has its uses, the arguments this page makes in favor of it are largely no longer relevant.

<comment><USER4> Performant is not a word. Use a word more specific to your meaning, perhaps "efficient" in this context.

<comment><USER5> I basically cringe and stop taking an author seriously when they use the non- word "performant", but I've kind of given up pointing it out. Brother, we're losing the fight to people who think it's perfectly cromulent to embetter the language by innoventing their own words.

<comment><USER6> Where do you think language comes from anyway? If we'd adopted prescriptivist ideas like this early enough, we'd still be grunting and pointing

<comment><USER7> <\--- hrugh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Secondly, there is a common myth among programmers that assembly language is > very hard to use and that it takes much longer to code the same program in > assembly language than in a HLL. [...] An experienced assembly language > programmer can and does code as fast in assembly language as an experienced > C programmer does in C. It is simply a matter of familiarity.

I don't really understand this argument. If a few lines of c can generate dozens of lines of assembly, how can it not be faster to have the compiler write assembly for you?

<comment><USER9> Something like "(x _3+(y /20)_5)" will generate a few lines of assembly (about 3 to 5 in this case, assuming registers are pre-loaded). But usually no, there won't be much more code. For example "while(1){..." equals just one instruction, and "for(x=10, x<0, x--){..." is 2-3 instructions.

edit: idk how to put a asterisk up there in the example above

I have no idea where people get the idea that one line of C equals 10 lines of asm.

PS Assembly is not hard at all, and is good to understand/read assembly when coding C. The only thing is that it is a bit rough to start coding in it (no good tutorials is one of the two-three difficulties).

<comment><USER10> > I have no idea where people get the idea that one line of C equals 10 lines > of asm.

Because coding in asm takes more than just the raw instructions.

x86 doesn't have many registers so you're shifting around stuff across registers and memory all the time, not to mention stack setup/teardown and the error checking (e.g. div0, overflow) you are supposed to do after operations.

<comment><USER9> C doesn't check for overflows..

I also disagree with "shifting around stuff across registers and memory all the time". An "average" function doesn't really have all that many variables and x86 has 8 GP registers (16 on amd64). You don't even have to declare variables, you just take a register (and/or a location in memory) and use it as you wish.

I'm now sitting here thinking what can be done in C that would end up being a lot of instructions, and i can't think of anything. Going over an array does not, neither does recursion (recursion is just syntactic sugar in the end). What else.. i can't think of anything. Macros ? But macros are cheating in this comparison (not to mention that the flat assembler has actual macros, that are extremely powerful)

<comment><USER11> _C doesn 't check for overflows.._

This is one of the things where (x86) Asm is definitely easier: divide overflows naturally cause an exception which will get handled automatically, and add/subtract/multiply overflows can be checked with one extra (JO or JC) instruction. In C, this is all undefined behaviour.

 _I 'm now sitting here thinking what can be done in C that would end up being a lot of instructions, and i can't think of anything._

Crypto algorithms come to mind, but like you said, macros can take care of that easily... and on this page is an AES-256 CFB implementation in Asm that is around the same size of source as others in C (but much smaller binary):

[http://reimagery.com/fsfd/encrypt.htm](http://reimagery.com/fsfd/encrypt.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note that for modern x86 processors there are the fast systemcall instructions syscall/sysret (AMD64) and the older sysenter/sysexit. In contrast to int 80h, those instructions do not bear the full interrupt overhead. I couldn't find this info anywhere on the website.

See e.g. [1] for a more comprehensive overview concerning the handling of system calls on Linux.

[1] [http://blog.packagecloud.io/eng/2016/04/05/the-definitive- gu...](http://blog.packagecloud.io/eng/2016/04/05/the-definitive-guide-to- linux-system-calls/)

<comment><USER13> For those interested, Linux has a remarkably interesting way to determine whether to use the modern sysenter/sysexit routines or the ancient 0x80 interrupt vector. [http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/08/linux- gate/](http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/08/linux-gate/) discuses the system quite nicely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Actually, Int 80h is a op-code in x86 assembly language inherited from the Intel 8008 and 8080 8-bit processors. The post announces a Free BSD assembly language tutorial for the x86.

</comment><comment><USER15> Please, next time add a description to the title, like " \- BSD assembly language".

</comment><comment><USER16> "But times have changed. For better or worse, the absolute majority of computers in existence today are built with the Intel family of microprocessors. Thus, portability is much less of a concern."

I'm guessing this article is somewhat out of date. The systems where performance matters most - those most likely to be constrained in some way, where coding in assembly would yield the most benefit - are mobile platforms, which invariably means ARM not x86.

</comment><comment><USER17> I remember coming across this article back then, in 2001, or maybe it was even 2000. I found it fascinating at the time and wrote lots of little programs that talk to the syscall interface directly. It was a good learning experience.

I think the emphasis on the 0x80 interrupt was to draw parallels to the old DOS calls - int 21h - and make a point that nothing technically stops you from doing the equivalent on Unixy system. (A few years after this the sysenter thing came along and so now int 80h is a legacy path..)

Sadly a lost art, all of this. Talking about this is a great way to get blank stares from many people.

</comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon Sorry to rant for the nth time about this, but why does Chrome offer you to make this wonderful, CSS-free, content-oriented document "mobile friendly"? That is, why ask for permission? Can't browsers render documents as they see fit when there are no CSS rules? As far as I can tell, the only difference once you accept is more generous margins as well as a gray background for <code> elements... I'd say it _does_ look more readable, maybe even on the desktop. Chrome, Firfox, IE, Safari, et al: be bold (or otherwise styled) with CSS-free documents!</comment>


2014 Meteor Challenge raising money for CodeNow (YC W14) - <AUTHOR> https://challenge.meteor.com/

<comment><USER2> Is it allowed by GitHub to offer a reward in exchange for repository Stars?</comment>


How Software Development Works - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/2021/ <comment><USER2> I love this one. Also, I often get asked if I can use part of a project as a "leg up" on a new project. I've tried various metaphors for why it won't help:

"This bulldozer engine and that motorcycle drivetrain can't just be smashed together to make this new type of flying ambulance the client is asking for."

But I always get the feeling that people think I'm exaggerating the difficulty. I'm not. A client-side JS UI library is _not_ going to give us a "leg up" on a CRUD API on the server...

...unless you mean "leg up" in the sense of how dogs urinate on things.</comment>


Show HN: ccPing, a secure messenger - <AUTHOR> http://ccping.com With the 2 prominent features: - Encrypted Chat: your chat will be encrypted with a password so only when you type in the correct password then it will be unlocked.<p>- Ephemeral Chat: your messages will be self-destructed after a few minutes. <comment><USER2> 99% of people don't know that they don't know enough to know this is providing a false sense of security. People running illegal underground charities in West Whereisitstan are almost certainly not crypto experts, and are all probably fairly naive in the way one has to be naive in order to do charity work in West Whereisitstan. "Caveat emptor" doesn't cut it.

Single DES is absurd in this day and age, and password-based encryption is worse. Jack the Ripper renders this no stronger than a secret decoder ring, and a thousand times more dangerous because of the false sense of security.

Edit: I'm probably overly sensitive. One of my ex girlfriends has several uncles, three of whom went to prison for not belonging to the state religion. Thankfully they didn't live in one of the countries where such things are currently capital offenses, and were able to immigrate to more tolerant countries.

Perfect forward secrecy needs to be the default, perhaps with an option to switch to a stored history mode. Use 256-bit AES in GCM mode.

For the stored mode, don't use password-based-encryption, but rather generate a GnuPG key pair on each device the first time the client is used. 4096-bit RSA/El Gamal or 256-bit ECC should be the minimum key sizes. The first time a new device is added to an account, upload its public key and tell the user they need to "authorize" this device from one of their existing devices in order to see past conversations. When they log in from another device, ask them if they've really added the new device, and if they respond that they have, have the old device add the new device as a recipient to all of the existing messages. This can be done by sending only the preamble of each message to the old client for it to decrypt the symmetric key, and re-encrypt the session key for the new recipient, and send the encrypted session key back to the server. Don't take any shortcuts. If a conversation is between Alice and Bob, and Alice adds a new device, never ask Bob to re-encrypt old conversations for Alice's new device, because Bob's answer will always be "Mein StasiPhone? I dunno if Alice added a new device. Fuck it, sure, why wouldn't I give Alice's new phone access?"

If your product as currently implemented gets many users, it's a statistical certainty that some of them will go to prison due to the false sense of security you're giving them. I hope they're all going to nice prisons in respectable countries and for doing things that are objectively evil.

<comment><USER2> Oh, and the right way for Alice and Bob to prove to each other that the holders of their public keys both know the secret password is to use an Augmented PAKE [1] (Password Authenticated Key Exchange) protocol, replacing the password with Scrypt( Concatenate(Alice's public key, Bob's public key), Password ). (The concatenation of the public keys is used for the Scrypt salt.) That way, at the successful conclusion of the Augmented PAKE exchange, Alice and Bob haven't proved to each other knowledge of the password, but rather have tied the proof to their two public keys, and each can be assured that the holder of the other public key knows the password. If there's later a flaw found in the Augmented PAKE algorithm you choose that leaks the "password" used for the Augmented PAKE protocol, at least you've only leaked a memory-hard password hash of the real Password.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password- authenticated_key_agre...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password- authenticated_key_agreement)

Don't get creative and start rolling your own zero-knowledge proof of passwords here. It's really easy to get wrong. Use a very-well peer-reviewed Augmented PAKE algorithm.

THE NAIVE WRONG WAY for Alice to prove to Bob that she knows the Password (but might look good at first glance) is for Alice to send to Bob HMAC(Password, Alice's Public Key) because then if Bob doesn't know Password, he can still start bruit-forcing guesses without further interaction with Alice. On average, it will take the Stasi an afternoon to bruit-force Password after pretending once to be Bob, and after that they can impersonate Alice when talking to Bob. It's very unlikely Alice will ever mention to Bob the one failed authentication, and nearly impossible that she'll mention it within the window of time they have before the Stasi bruit-force the password.

Use an Augmented PAKE instead of a balanced PAKE, because you should use an Augmented PAKE for users to authenticate themselves to you, and that way you can share one implementation for both purposes and expose yourself to half the potential bugs. With a Balanced PAKE, if an attacker gets read-only access to your server's password store, they could immediately authenticate themselves to your service and upload more public keys as the user. An Augmented PAKE in this case would slow down an attacker by forcing the attacker to bruit-force the passwords, and would completely save the 1% of your users who use passwords with 80 or more bits of entropy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, but without any technical details I'm not going to use it.

There isn't even any mention of it being encrypted.

</comment><comment><USER4> A highly detailed explanation on how encryption is used and what type etc, is most definitely needed on the products website to make anyone vaguely trust this.

IMO, the app interface needs improving.

</comment><comment><USER5> "secure"

I weep for all the claims this makes about security.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you can elaborate more on this.

<comment><USER6> Okay, what form and key size of encryption is in use? What implementation is it? Does it do PFS? is it salted? Where/for how long/how are messages stored? Who has access to the encrypted form of the messages? What block mode is being used here? How are you handling the iv initialisation? Per message? per person? per conversation? What are you using to determine the IV value?

<comment><AUTHOR> The encryption use is PKCS #5 (5.3 PBE with MD5 and DES). The algorithms are outdated but in the subsequent release we can update it to SHA-2 and AES-256.

We cannot do PFS because we have the feature that a person can login to different devices and can still see the same messages and continue the chat ( given that he knows the chat password)

<comment><USER5> This alone should have blocked your launch. Crypto done right is innately pluggable, by virtue of being composable primitives.

Between this and your "but we totes destroy ciphertext after T seconds" (which is just flat out untennable, and unprovable) I'm pretty spectacularly weary.

I'm also pretty curious to know how you're deriving keys from the users passwords. How is the exchange of key material handled?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can have closed-source or you can have secure. This is the former.

</comment><comment><USER8> "ONLY you and your partners, who know the password, can access the secure messages"

Maybe I missed something, but how exactly is this "secure"? I'm assuming ccPing will still store these messages in a database which will be vulnerable to attack.

I mean, is this going through the TOR network or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> The message will be encrypted on the client side (iphone , android or PC ) , so the message sent over the network are already encrypted using the password provided by the user. So only when the user type in the correct password then he can decrypted it. If he forgot the password , so sad, the message cannot be read anymore.

<comment><USER8> Could you go into more technical detail? How are the messages encrypted? I mean, is it subject to a brute force?

<comment><USER6> Given way the password is distributed, I doubt the encryption is salted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What type of encryption is this using?

<comment><USER3> I believe there isn't any, the word encryption isn't even on the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are using PBE for the messages in the secure chat ( you can choose whether to start a normal chat or a secure one ).

The encryption is done on the client side, so the message going through the network ,storing on the server are all encrypted. Only when you type the correct password then you can decrypt the message.

<comment><AUTHOR> An example: [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=263620283790579&set=...](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=263620283790579&set=a.263620280457246.1073741829.263590463793561&type=1&theater)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yet another closed-source "secure" messenger. That's interesting, but if I was a chinese dissident I would never trust a closed-source messenger.

(btw I would try it for sure if you'll port it to BB10!)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to see a similar project developed by a foundation such as FSF, Mozilla or EFF</comment>


Show HN: TagOverflow - Stack Overflow topics visualized - <AUTHOR> http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/?site=stackoverflow&size=32

<comment><AUTHOR> Description: [https://github.com/stared/tagoverflow#tagoverflow](https://github.com/stared/tagoverflow#tagoverflow)

Also, try it for other sites (e.g. [http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/?site=biology&size=32](http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/?site=biology&size=32)) and for questions only with a given tag (e.g. [http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/?site=stackoverflow&size...](http://stared.github.io/tagoverflow/?site=stackoverflow&size=32&tag=javascript)).</comment>


L.A.'S Wildest Cafeteria Served Utopian Fantasy with a Side of Enchiladas (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/cliftons-brookdale-cafeteria/ <comment><USER2> I been there. I once ended up there on a Saturday night and it was a night club with people dressed up straight out of the roaring 20's. Apparently it turns into a club at night. If you get the change it is worth checking out. If you are in the area walk over the "The Last Bookstore", also worth a look.

<comment><USER3> It's only a club now, as far as I'm aware. I went there once when it was actually a cafeteria and it was...pretty gross.

<comment><USER4> Nope, there is 100% still a cafeteria. They renovated a few years ago, restored the exhibits, and it's now pretty nice again. The food's good (like, throwback cafeteria food good, not "good" good. Get the meatloaf.) There's also a tiki bar on the top floor. Unfortunately in an annoying LA trend the door to the tiki bar is hidden behind a mirror.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I ate at Cliftons some years ago, before the remodeling. It was pretty cool but also pretty worn out. Standard cafeteria fare, nothing really exciting. Mostly it was about the ambience. Some of the interior decoration (i.e. the fake animals and natural settings) looked like it had inspired Disneyland's designers.

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 That was an interesting article.

I don't know much about life in LA. Is downtown still a no-go?

Also it looks like the Clifton's website was hacked and filled with Thai blog posts? [https://cliftonscafeteria.com/](https://cliftonscafeteria.com/)

<comment><USER3> Downtown is fine.

Here's the website: [https://www.cliftonsla.com/](https://www.cliftonsla.com/)

<comment> 52-6F-62 Well that's bizarre! I got that other URL from the article and it contains some info. Maybe its just old.

Anyway, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The predecessor to Rainforest Cafe?

<comment><USER7> Thanks for reminding me of awesome times as a kid at rainforest cafe!

<comment><USER8> Same here! What a fun place back in the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember eating at a Cliftons in Lakewood as a kid before it closed in 2001</comment>


An App That Moves Sports Fans to Better Seats - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/225785#

<comment><USER2> > " _A fan logs into the app, which determines through geolocation the user's > exact position within the venue..._ "

In terms of the indoor venues/stadiums/etc. I have ever been to ( _honestly, quite a few_ ), I ALWAYS have absolutely HORRIBLE reception on my iPhone ( _AT &T_). I feel like this could be a massive issue for this sort of app. How can I use it, if it can't even figure out where I am or display the data inside the venue?

 _Possible solution:_ It would be nice if the venues that they teamed up with started offering free WIFI to help with this problem of poor reception or no data. Almost always, the venues have WIFI, but it is password protected. Maybe there are security concerns for having public WIFI at places like this that I am unaware of?

 _EDIT:_ I will also add more of a "real world" example of this. When I use Foursquare, I always have to "check-in" outside of the venue, because it can't even find where I am when I'm inside. Luckily, Foursquare's model allows you to do these "check-in's" manually ( _by searching_ ), or before/after you attend the event. I think that is why they can get away with it, unlike an app like this. It seems like a big problem they would need to figure out before they launch.

<comment><USER3> Most modern stadiums are moving that direction -- [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/03/the-49...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/03/the-49ers-plan-to-build-the-greatest-stadium-wi-fi-network- of-all-time/)

<comment><USER2> That is true, there are some moving that way. What about the hundreds of other stadiums that are not upgrading anytime soon, though? Again, seems like a big issue they have not addressed or mentioned.

<comment><USER4> Yeah connectivity is going to continue to only slowly get better. The cost of upgrading the infrastructure is just so high and older venues don't always have the room for upgrading DAS systems.

It'll be another 3 years before things are really ironed out in the newer buildings. Not sure how older ones will manage to deal with the situation.

<comment><USER5> Zach from pogoseat here. You guys bring up a great point about connectivity and it certainly is something worth noting. To help address we do our best to make the app as lightweight as possible. Additionally we look to partner with venues that have solid connectivity and thus far have had no issues in this area with our deployments at Stanford and the GS Warriors.

Cisco is helping improve the situation as well although it is expensive as was noted earlier. <http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/sports/stadium_wifi.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me, this is similar to the music industry/pirating example. Find a black market, go to the source of the problem, improve the experience so that users will choose your legal method as the best alternative. In music/movies, it's providing easy-to-access, high quality streams and downloads; here it's providing a way to improve your experience at the ballpark.

Finding the right prices will be key, and take some time, but even less than optimal fee (from the stadium's perspective) will recoup some of the otherwise lost revenue.

How much can stadiums realistically expect to earn a night? Several thousand?

<comment><USER7> Potential is there to make much more than. depends on the size of venue & unsold / unused # of premium seats, type of event, sport, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great idea, but it's bad news for me if it picks p at the stadiums I go to. I am always one of those "seat pirates" and with the app, the situation for me will change for the worse: instead of getting cheap tickets and then switching to a $200+ seat for free, I would have to pay for this from now on.

<comment><USER9> This is an example where, I hope, market equilibrium comes into play and works for the best. Like a hotel, a stadium would rather get >$0 for that $200 seat, even if they can't get the full $200. Right now, when you hop into it, they're getting $0 and you're hoping an usher doesn't check your ticket. It's sort of like jumping into an empty 1st class seat on an airplane, only you're (currently) less likely to get caught in a stadium.

Ideally, you should pay an amount that's fair to you and fair to the team without going to either edge case -- you paying $0 and "stealing" the seat, and you paying full boat.

The trick is finding that equilibrium price - and sometimes the stadium won't act logically. In theory, they should take anything >$0, but if they charge too little then people will stop paying full price in advance and just wait until the last minute. If they charge too much (I.e $150), it won't have any effect and they'll be right where they are now.

The illogical part is that they might not actually care about "revenue maximization" in the way a hotel or airline does - which is where this could all break down.

<comment><USER5> hit the nail on the head nlh. finding that equilibrium price is something we are constantly analyzing data to refine. we need to be careful not to have the upgrade cost so cheap that it cannibalizes ticket sales but also need to make it cheap enough that it makes sense. currently we take into account your original seat value plus time-based price decay. it's up to a venue what percentage discounts they want to apply across their inventory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There seem to be a couple of these services popping up. This one (<http://www.findexp.com/>) services the Braves games at Turner Field in Atlanta. I can't really see more than one of these businesses taking off and I would think Ticketmaster would get involved if it proves lucrative (either by integrating it into their own app or acquiring one of these companies).

<comment><USER8> I'm sure being acquired by Ticketmaster is an exit all of these guys dream about.

<comment><USER11> For sure, their entire "service" depends on APIs from ticketing services being open and accessible.

The code change needed to make this work (auctioning / dynamic pricing / after event start upgrading of ticket) would require the ticket provider to enable this, they might as well not even bother buying a startup if they have to add all this to their own system.

<comment><USER5> So far we have had a positive response from the various ticketing services in regards to partnering. We are currently deeply integrated with Ticketmaster's Archtics ticketing system and are working on completing the same for Tickets.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _the fee may actually be lower than the difference in ticket price_

Isn't the main point of getting a cheap ticket and then moving to a more expensive one to not pay the price of an expensive ticket?

<comment><USER5> It may not always be about getting a better view, at times you may just want to escape a bad seating situation or impress a date/client/etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This model works pretty well if you have plenty of empty seats, this could be a problem for fans who come a little bit late to the game. How do you handle fans that come late to a game?

Last year, I went to a baseball game a few innings late (maybe 2nd inning), how do you determine the time at which point to sell the seat? I would be upset if I paid $64+ bucks per ticket to have my seats sold based on getting to the stadium a little late.

<comment><USER14> The article didn't mention reselling seats that had already been paid for. Some venues always have unsold seats. (This may sound odd to those of us in places like Boston, where the Red Sox like to brag about selling out Fenway for NNN days straight.)

<comment><USER5> Correct. We don't just grab seats that are empty and sell them. We currently offer only the venues unsold seat inventory. In the future we plan to allow fans and other third parties to upload their inventory into our system as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, it's nice to see that these guys are still going. They posted here a while ago, about not getting into Y Combinator, but that clearly didn't stop them.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2507662>

I think it's an interesting read, and it puts things in perspective.

<comment><USER5> Thanks lgray! Those were definitely the early days of pogoseat and I don't think we had quite fleshed everything out well enough at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Makes me think of the not-so-fun idea that stadiums would need to prevent "seat pirates." Ushers get an app that indicates if there is a butt in a seat for a ticket that was never used. They just need a sensor on the seat to indicate the status.

Much easier to enforce when you don't have to ask people to see their tickets. Everyone hates that.

<comment><USER17> This made me think that thought as well. Judging by the number of ushers usually at events like this, in practice they probably wouldn't even need sensors on the seats. The ushers probably know the system better than anyone, and given a list of seats that should be empty, I'd bet that it would not take them very long at all to check if someone was sitting there.</comment></comment>


What is a Kanban board and why you should use it? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@omkar_80824/kanban-board-b42daf7578e9 <comment><USER2> Two great kanban tools to try are Trello[0] and Codecks[1]. The latter is sold as a tool for game devs but there's nothing about games in it and we use it for enterprise software dev. Interestingly, kanban was invented by Toyota who used it to revolutionize their company's accuracy and productivity[2].

[0][http://trello.com](http://trello.com) [1][http://codecks.io](http://codecks.io) [2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban)</comment>


Show HN: One Car Payment – Using AI to turn your car bills to 1 monthly payment - <AUTHOR> https://www.onecarpayment.com/ <comment><USER2> Hi icechai,

Our BC platform "VINBlock" is designed to keep the public informed of the "vehicle services" performed on the vehicle itself. e.g.: Carfax but alot simpler, factual, and free. CF isn't 100% factual, it doesn't tell you if the oil/brakes/tires are OEM or AfterMarket, or the front fender is OEM/new/used, or the registration type is "new, used, salvage".

Our platform brings out alot of problems consumers face when buying a car/truck on face value, by providing that information to you free but importantly as fact.

Idea is to bring value back into an asset that loses value over a period of time, but also educating the public on the car there going to purchase either from it's born date to the day it's sitting on a dealership lot.

There are other features on our BC platform where launching, e.g: payments, insurance policies, maintenance, dmv services, etc..

Thanks Rudy Ferraz Founder | CEO One Car Payment

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN

Since 2017, we've been building One Car Payment to change how consumers finance and maintain their vehicles.

What We Do: We leverage AI to combine all your car costs into one simple monthly payment. Then we use Blockchain tech to publicly store data on all cars on our system in providing the public with trusted vehicle information.

Our Team: Our 15 person team consists of people who are veterans in their fields with at least 20+ years of experience; Including an former MARSH consumer insurance CEO leading our operations, former Google/WAYMO product developer leading our product team, former NASA senior computer scientist leading our security team and former NYSE cyber securities expert developing our unique Blockchain & AI platform.

Validation: We're an alumni of the Founders Space accelerator. And in the next couple of weeks we will be raising $15 million in seed funding at an $85 million valuation.

We're posting here to today to spread the word on our crowdfunding round. If you're interested, you can check it out here ([https://www.onecarpayment.com/kartoken- sale/](https://www.onecarpayment.com/kartoken-sale/))

Thanks for your time

-Anthony and Rudy from OCP

<comment><USER3> Is this a real problem? Can you explain what you actually need blockchain for?</comment></comment>


Accounting for Tech Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> Dear hackers and tech entrepreneurs,
I want to start my first software company. Unfortunately I don't know anything about accounting. I want to acquire the most important skills to manage and analyze companies financially and to understand the most important concepts of the accounting language.
Can you recommend an online course?
I have found the following courses. Are these two courses sufficient to realize my plans?
Course1:
https://sps.northwestern.edu/post-baccalaureate/fundamentals-accounting/index.php
Course2:
https://sps.northwestern.edu/post-baccalaureate/advanced-accounting/index.php
Thanks very much! <comment><USER2> I've found beancount's documentation to be a good intro to double entry bookkeeping:

[https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1RaondTJCS_IUPBHFNdT8...](https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1RaondTJCS_IUPBHFNdT8oqFKJjVJDsfsn6JEjBG04eA/mobilebasic)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to learn the fundamentals of accounting, the best intro I've seen is "Frank Wood's Business Accounting Volume 1".

For analysing companies, start with "Principles of Corporate Finance" which covers both the investment question (what the company should do) and the financing question (where to get the money to do those things).

For more on analysing companies, check out study resources for the CFA, or anything written by Aswath Damodaran.

But you should probably spend your time on more core activities for now. You would be better off focusing on the content of:

\- Disciplined Entrepreneurship

\- Venture Deals

\- any blog post about SaaS economics (CAC, LTV etc.) regardless of whether you're starting a SaaS company</comment>


Wrong notes and syntax errors: The joy of improv in music and code - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/05/14/writing-music-coding.html

<comment><USER2> This is one of the things I love about some of the Turing tarpits. Pretty much any input works, for some definition of works.

It's also the reason why I have a soft spot for (some) visual programming languages (the one for old Lego Mindstorms, for instance).</comment>


Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank - <AUTHOR> http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full

<comment><USER2> The article makes some interesting points, but overall I don't find it terribly convincing.

\--- While they do comment that retractions are just the most extreme version of this problem, the retraction rate of .02% they mention near the beginning does not strike me as a crisis in science.

\--- I'd also like to see more acknowledgment that the degree of this kind of problem depends pretty heavily on the field instead of just lumping everything together as "science." Physics has had its share of frauds (e.g J. H. Schon[1]) and certainly puts some weak papers in big journals, but I have found that publication in one of the big journals really is meaningfully correlated to quality on average.

\--- Earlier sections of the paper criticize the higher unreliability and lesser quality of papers in high impact journals. Much further on, there's a paragraph or two acknowledging that these papers, by dint of being in these journals, typically have more novel results and receive way more scrutiny than typical papers. Thus it would be unsurprising if the true error rate actually were higher, and certainly one would expect the error detection rate to be much higher for these articles. Further, I expect this meta-result (big papers come up short more) would persist even if you got rid of the journal model like they propose.

\--- That last bit is something I don't feel they address at all. Any model of "filter, sort and discovery" is going to produce papers which are more successful/visible than others. The career incentives of scientists will still be essentially the same in a new system. Setting aside the path-dependence problems of switching to a new model (when basically all of the present actors are well calibrated to the old system), I'm very skeptical that their proposed solutions will actually prove less gameable than the current one.

[1] This is a pretty good book on the subject: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_Fantastic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_Fantastic)

<comment><USER3> I thought it was a bit stronger than that, the core message I got from it was that "value" of 'rank' offset the cost of cheating. Which is to say that the expected value of getting your paper into a high rank journal offset the expected value of getting caught cheating. This in turn made the science in high rank journals more suspect which is counter intuitive.

While I agree that 'impact factor' is probably not a good thing per se, there are also a lot of really sketchy journals out there, so some sort of rating is useful. Mixing in the tenure computation and if leaves no independent variables to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> AFAIK, In economics there's pretty much a consensus of journal ranks amongst researchers.

If you want to be a tenured professor, you'd usually be expected to have at least a certain number of publications in the top journals.

Also, I remember an interesting comparison amongst the Top 10 Econ departments, that compared grad students and the amount of top-journal publications they had 5 years after graduation.

The bottom line was that the Top 5 students in MIT\Harvard really have much more publications than any other grad student. But, the median Harvard\MIT one doesn't perform better than any grad from tier 1 school

</comment><comment><USER5> People don't realize how much science is crap.

The title for the typical paper in medicine should be "we didn't use a large enough sample size"</comment>


I fixed a bug in one of the U.S.'s systems for detecting nuclear explosions - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/vaurorapub/status/1265335071130566656 <comment><USER2> cool. This serves as a reminder why both human intelligence and machine automation to control weapons of mass destruction from launching and killing us all are so vulnerable and need to be denuclreaized before its too late.</comment>