Infinity is not a number - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Calculus/Infinite_Limits/Infinity_is_not_a_number <comment><USER2> The problem is that "a number" is meaningless.

Is i (square root of -1) a number? Is x? Is 3/2? Depends on your perspective. You can define the integers, the rationals, the real numbers, the complex numbers, and plenty of more exotic systems. What about C[x], the ring of polynomials in one variable. Are these "numbers"? There is no _a priori_ reason to say no. The integers mod 7? Quaternions? Etc. etc. etc. And, yes, you can define the "extended real number line" (cf. the Wikipedia article of that title) which includes infinity and satisfies a list of axioms which you can write down.

This article is dangerously misleading. "Numbers" is not a well-defined set and there is no way to say that infinity does or does not belong to it. As is often the case in mathematics, you need to make the discussion more precise before you can reasonably answer questions.

<comment><USER3> _The problem is that "a number" is meaningless._

No it isn't. It's fairly clear from the article that in this context a number is _something which you can have that many of_. You can have 3 dollars. It even makes sense to have -2.5 dollars. Ok, an irrational number of dollars is pushing it a bit, but you don't need to go that far to see that infinity doesn't work when trying to count things consistently.

A lot of the comments here are getting hung up on trying to pin down the mathematics of what you can and can't do with infinity. That's fine, it's been keeping mathematicians busy for centuries, but this article is for the layman who doesn't know about rings, groups, algebras or any other mathematical structure which you might call 'numbers'. It's for someone who thinks the obvious when someone says 'number'.

<comment><USER4> In this context, infinite limits, I think the distinction is beginning to become important. I agree that colloquially it often doesn't matter, but I think it does here.

"Something which you can have that many of" is a terrible definition: You can have sets of infinite size. Do you mean physical things? What, then, is a "thing"? I can have infinity intervals of different length on my arm. So are intervals not a "thing"? You appear to think irrationals are numbers, so what physical thing can you have an irrational number of?

This is a dangerous path to walk down, but that doesn't make it an unimportant one. And that's why this article is ultimately flawed. The idea is important though. We need to understand how to operate formally on mathematical objects. If there's one thing I learned in my Philosophy of Mathematics class as a math undergrad, it is that we shouldn't struggle over defining what it means to be a number. We can just use them. I'll leave the philosophy to the philosophers.

<comment><USER3> I pretty much agree with you. I'm just worried that with all the comments about 'what is a number?', and 'sure, we can make infinity a well defined number', it will dilute the message of the article. Which is that infinity is not a 'number' (in the sense of real numbers). It's important to understand why it's not a number and what it means when we write it on one side of an equality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article deals with the infinity symbol as it is used in calculus courses. With such a usage in mind the infinity symbol is not a number and does not represent a number. The usage of the infinity symbol in calculus is merely a shorthand notation for a more complicated statement.

Suppose that we have

Lim x->5 f(x) = infinity

What is meant by the use of the infinity symbol is that the limit is not bounded in the real number system. More specifically that given any large real number I can find a number d such that whenever |x - 5| < d then f(x) > M.

Here the use of infinity is not meant to be as a number though making such an association is helpful to beginners in terms of visualizing what is going on. Students have trouble with the precise definition of being unbounded and so it's convenient to say "it's infinity" and treat the symbol as a number.

</comment><comment><USER6> The argument "Addition breaks" proves just as well that zero "isn't a number", since it breaks division rather badly. (Yes, division is a badly-behaved version of the more upstanding multiplication. The article uses subtraction in what is nominally a complaint about addition). It doesn't address ordinal numbers at all, since addition works just fine with infinite ordinals, exactly the way the article claims you'd expect (what have I missed?).

The immediately obvious uses of infinity in calculus (the topic of the wikibooks article) are, according to wikipedia, termed the "affinely extended real number system" (I learned to just refer to the "extended reals"), which heavily implies that the points within are considered extended real _numbers_. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_reals>

The terms "cardinal number" and "ordinal number" both definitively include infinite quantities -- infinitely many, even.

The IEEE standard for floating point defines two infinite numbers.

Essentially, I'm in full agreement with tokenadult; the only relevant question is "what do you mean by number?". But we can easily observe that varying infinities, including the calculus uses of infinity, are referred to as numbers all up and down the chain, including in the most unimpeachably correct sources, and that it walks and quacks like a duck, even if it may not quack in the precise manner of Anas Platyrhynchos.

<comment><USER7> > The argument "Addition breaks" proves just as well that zero "isn't a > number", since it breaks division rather badly.

Mathematically, numbers (be it natural, rational, real, or complex) are defined as a field. Fields (or, more accurately, rings, which all fields are) are defined by addition and multiplication, not both. [1]

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(mathematics)>

<comment><USER8> Sometimes you may use a "number", but you just want ordering properties from it.

You may not want addition and multiplication in such a "number".

This may be the case in numbers used for ranking outcomes, or counting, or optimization. Using infinity in this context does not cause problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It turns out that treating infinity like it _is_ a number is very convenient (e.g. in convex optimization).

I think these black and white statements are not a good way to explain things. Just start with the set of real numbers. Point out infinity is outside the set. Then introduce the extended reals (R + infinity), with special rules for arithmetic involving +/-infinity. This theoretical convenience extends to the computer when the rules for Inf are implemented correctly. Follow the rules and you might sensibly get an Inf result, break them and you should get a NaN. It's all implemented in IEEE 754. In fact Inf is in your computer but not all the reals are. So there.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's worse than that. "Infinity" isn't even a single concept.

There are at least two distinguishable uses of infinity (there may be more, but I haven't figured them out yet, not that my opinion counts for much). There's the adjective "infinite" that refers to a property of sets. This is the type that Cantor studied, and it turns out to have many different types, which are pretty strictly ordered into layers. Then there's the noun "infinity" which is either a point or a location that points can exist at, and while it's usually possible for there to be several such infinities in several different directions, they don't come in layers. I believe Rider of Giraffes refers to these as "set-theoretic" and "geometric" infinities, respectively.

For the first definition, it's easy to distinguish between it and traditional numbers: an infinite set is bijective to a proper subset of itself. However, it's also useful to consider it a generalization of numbers, so you can count forever.

The second definition is more problematic. Here, infinity is just a point, just like all your other points. You can choose to add it to your set, or not. It usually behaves a little funny (like it makes certain operators not invertible), but you may have to get subtle to define it, or a set that contains it. Sometimes, it's not different than normal points at all, and sometimes it depends on the context. For example, if you take the real line and add +/-infinity, in topology you just get a closed interval like [0,1], whereas in analysis based on metric spaces you get something outright broken (fails to satisfy the axioms of the objects being studied).

</comment><comment><USER11> "Most people seem to struggle with this fact when first introduced to calculus..."

When I took calculus in college, I _did not_ struggle with this idea, despite at that time not having had any deeper background in advanced mathematics. Intuitively, the idea that you _approach_ some absolute as you edge the denominator ever larger made perfect sense to me.

Formally, my instructor made it clear that the _limit_ as you approach something was, in nature, different from any particular fixed value (of x). So, in a clearly defined manner, as you _apply the limit operator_ to the left side of the equation, the right side correspondingly behaves differently.

This concept never troubled me. As other comments here imply, this is an idiom specific to (differential) calculus. The only caveat might be in the use of strict equality, since limit operations by definition indicate asymptotic behavior. One could argue that a different type of relation is described (such as 'approximately equal': ≈). But then it's not infinity itself which is at issue.

</comment><comment><USER12> Infinity can be _relative_ and can be _defined_ unlike a division by zero which in undefined (as in ... it can't be relative to anything else, and can't be used in a formula).

And hence infinity can be used in a formula and can cancel out with another relative infinity...

Example:

1) There are an infinite amount of real numbers between 1 and 2.

2) The amount of real numbers between 2 and 4 is _twice the amount_ of real numbers between 1 and 2.

I would guess that if numbers are defined in terms of relativity/relationship, then infinity is a number.

But it seems that people wrongly define numbers in absolute terms, as if they exist outside the mind, and are separate from one another. Like the Universe cares about 1.24545434 and 7656.45433477.

But that's just my guess.

<comment><USER13> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the cardinality of the two sets you describe are equal, as there exists a bijective mapping between them, meaning there are an equal "number" of real numbers in both.

<comment><USER12> For every real number between 1 and 2...

1) I can find that number also in the set between 1 and 4.

2) But I can't find that number in the set between 2 and 4.

To myself numbers are always relative to one another, don't exist outside the mind, and the set between 2 and 4 is twice the set between 1 and 2.

But like I said, it's a personal spin on it.

<comment><USER7> Where 1 <= x <= 4:

f(x) = (x-1)/9 + 1, maps bijectively from [1,4] to [1,4/3]

g(x) = (x-1)/9 + 4/3, maps bijectively from [1,4] to [4/3,5/3]

h(x) = (x-1)/9 + 5/3 maps bijectively from [1,4] to [5/3,2]

Therefore, [1,2] must contain three times as many numbers as [1,4], right?

It doesn't work like that.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what you are doing with the above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Javascript and I both disagree. Type the following into your JS console:

      typeof Infinity

(Obviously I'm joking. I'm not going to argue with the mathematics on that page)

</comment><comment><USER15> The article only shows it is not an ordinal number.

<comment><AUTHOR> _The article only shows it is not an ordinal number._

Because I'm a Wikipedian, I've learned that whenever I visit an article on Wikipedia, Wikibooks, etc. I can visit the article talk page too. Many of the usual misconceptions about infinity can be found in the talk page of that article. Another article showing that infinity is not a number

[http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/10/infinity_is_not_a_n...](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/10/infinity_is_not_a_number.php)

which has previously been submitted to HN

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=331581>

evoked discussion that illustrated confusion about what a number is, as did a different HN submission

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728026>

of a very interesting article

<http://nrich.maths.org/2756>

by a young mathematician with some demonstrated chops in mathematics.

The last discussion of this issue on HN, which appears to have been from about two years ago, was interesting, so when I saw the article submitted here today (while looking up sources for the teaching I do), I thought I'd invite HN participants to discuss the issue again.

Two follow-up questions:

1) What do you mean by number?

2) Supposing the claim is that infinity is a number, how would that claim be verified by accepted principles of mathematics?

<comment><USER5> I'll discuss various aspects of the issue.

I think it is fair to say that a number should be an object of a ring. I'm an algebraist though. That is, there should be an addition operation and a multiplication operation that satisfy certain conditions.

1\. Calculus. One sees in calculus things like

Lim x->5 f(x) = infinity

In this case infinity is not a number but rather a shorthand notation for a more complicated statement. What is meant by the use of the infinity symbol is that the limit is not bounded in the real number system. More specifically that given any large real number I can find a number d such that whenever |x - 5| < d then f(x) > M. Here the use of infinity is not meant to be as a number though making such an association is helpful to beginners in terms of visualizing what is going on.

2\. There are ordinal numbers that are infinite. That is, that represent the order type of an infinite well ordered set. Ordinal numbers do not for a ring but they do have an arithmetic defined. They do form a semi-ring though. If one wants to say that objects of a semi-ring are numbers then there are infinite numbers. This also applies to cardinal numbers.

3\. There is the extended real number system which has the symbols -infinity and positive infinity attached to the real number system to form a compact set. Think of the compact closure of the reals. Again not a ring though.

4\. That said, there are infinite sets. An infinite set is one that is not finite. Or, in more precise terms, and infinite set is one that can be put into 1-1 correspondence with a proper subset of itself. Cardinal numbers and cardinal number arithmetic deal with comparing sizes of sets. Mostly useful for dealing with infinite sets. Some infinite sets are bigger, in a meaningful way, than other infinite sets. The set of reals is much bigger than the set of integers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What about nonstandard analysis?

Or, to put it another way, Infinity is a hyperreal number.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The discussion that has begun in this thread suggests that the Wikibooks chapter submitted here could use some more work. (Its last revision was a 9 October 2011 reversion of I.P. edits to restore a version from 22 May 2011.) Evidently, not every reader of Hacker News is convinced that infinity is not a number, despite several websites by mathematically learned people who say exactly that,

[http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/10/infinity_is_not_a_n...](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/10/infinity_is_not_a_number.php)

<http://nrich.maths.org/2756>

so equally evidently, some readers here are not convinced that there is a rationale for drawing a distinction between infinity and numbers. Does it help to take a look at a discussion of "not a number" concepts

[http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/12/nullity_the_nonsens...](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/12/nullity_the_nonsense_number_1.php)

as they are implemented in computer science? What I see here, from my view as an educator in primary mathematics (in a program in which I can define "primary" to include topics like Hilbert's Hotel), is that some readers here have had educational experiences in which they "remember" seeing infinity treated as a number. The classic case, which prompts the Wikibooks chapter, is taking the limit of a rational quantity as the denominator approaches zero. This appears (based on previous HN discussion

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728026>

from more than two years ago) to suggest that physical quantities can be divided by zero with a quotient that becomes infinity. Perhaps this is an example of how an engineering calculus course isn't always interpreted by learners quite the way it was presented by teachers. (I presume all but the tiniest number of teachers of engineering calculus would agree that infinity is not a number, and that no one can divide any number by zero.)

What would be a good way to clarify the point so that people are communicating with one another well as they speak about infinity and about what numbers are?

AFTER EDIT: impendia's kind top-level comment here

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3592101>

has sent me looking at a Wikipedia article, the talk page of which leads to a WolframMathWorld article,

[http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AffinelyExtendedRealNumbers.htm...](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AffinelyExtendedRealNumbers.html)

and there is a discussion of the affinely extended real numbers. Does the limit example in the submitted Wikibooks chapter fit the characteristics of that number system fully?

<comment><USER17> (Check your link to the WolframMathWorld article)

> _Evidently, not every reader of Hacker News is convinced that infinity is > not a number, despite several websites by mathematically learned people who > say exactly that_

Like impendia said, it depends on the context.

To give a simpler example: at elementary school I was told that I couldn't write "2 - 3". Essentially my teacher was saying that numbers less than zero did not exist! She wasn't lying to me. She was telling me that we were working with natural numbers only, and that our operation "-" was supposed to be closed on the natural numbers.

In the context of calculus, infinity is not a number. lim(n->c) foo = ∞ is just another way of saying that "foo does not converge as n goes to c".

But in realm of surreal numbers (or combinatorial game theory), infinities are first-class numbers. You can add them and subtract them alright! Besides, in that realm ω + 1 is not the same as ω. It is greater than ω, as expected. I can even show you a children's game -- that is, we can teach kids how to play it without ever uttering the words _sets_ and _cardinals_ \-- that has positions with such values.</comment></comment>


NSA Claims It Doesn't Engage in Economic Espionage-Engaged in Economic Espionage - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150629/16134031494/nsa-despite-claiming-it-doesnt-engage-economic-espionage-engaged-economic-espionage.shtml

<comment><USER2> > The NSA has long claimed that it does not engage in "economic espionage."

Not wittingly. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Clapper#False_testimo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Clapper#False_testimony_to_Congress_on_NSA_surveillance_programs)</comment>


CMU 15-721: In-Memory Databases / Advanced Database Systems [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXja7K1hjZ01UTVDnGQdx5v5U <comment><USER2> Great lecture so far. Haven't had the time to watch the whole lecture, but one thing I want to mention is that there are techniques to improve the buffer manager performance as for instance described here by Goetz Graefe: [http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p37-graefe.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p37-graefe.pdf)

I've implemented an even simpler solution for my Open Source Data Store ([https://sirix.io](https://sirix.io)) in that each page stores a number of references, which are itself lightweight pointer objects (in Java) and it simply stores an in-memory reference as well as a pointer to the location to fetch it from disk/a flash drive. If the buffer manager has these Objects as keys on eviction we can simply null the reference to the in-memory page instance.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also check out other courses from Prof. Andy Pavlo [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnBsf2rH-K7pn09rb3qvkA/pla...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnBsf2rH-K7pn09rb3qvkA/playlists)

</comment><comment><USER4> I find it hard to reconcile the incredible generousity of making this material available for free on the internet with the cringeworthiness of Andy Pavlo's style. I love the material but the "6th form humour" is really off-putting and he doesn't need it.

See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m72mt4VN9ik&t=781](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m72mt4VN9ik&t=781) for an example of what I mean

<comment><USER5> > he doesn't need it.

Nobody needs anything. You didn't need to write your comment. And neither did I have to write this one. That's terrible criteria to judge anything, if it even means anything sensible at all.

<comment><USER6> I'm fine with "it's down to taste".

"This course video doesn't need juvenile jokes" is an expression of taste. And some people enjoy the jokes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Check out the CMU database group for all the other content and the multiple courses: [https://db.cs.cmu.edu/](https://db.cs.cmu.edu/)

Here's their Youtube channel: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnBsf2rH-K7pn09rb3qvkA/fea...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnBsf2rH-K7pn09rb3qvkA/featured)

</comment><comment><USER8> I've watched some of these and the material and teacher are awesome. Two questions come to mind:

1\. A ton of effort seems to be spent on making things run in parallel, but that introduces quite a bit of overhead too, so how well does a sequential baseline actually perform? By sequential baseline I mean a single thread that just executes all incoming transactions one by one in sequence.

2\. This course seems to spend a lot of time on things that the teacher says are things you shouldn't do anyway. For instance there is an entire lecture on skip lists and Bw-trees, and at the end the teacher mentions that these are terrible. This is interesting from a historical perspective, but not only does this take a lot of time, I also lose track of which things you should and which things you shouldn't do. It'd be interesting to have a compressed course that spends less time on things you should not do, perhaps by adding annotations to the video to skip sections that are about things you should not do.

<comment><USER9> Do you have the link to lecture on SkipLists and Bw Trees?

Thanks

<comment><USER8> Lecture 7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Amazing material as always! feeling proud to be an alumni.

</comment><comment><USER11> That prof got sprayed on by a lady asking for 200 dollars (lecture 1, 13:00). Anybody knows the background?

<comment><USER12> That has to be a joke, maybe meant to keep your attention. He has made cuts so why else would he have kept it in?</comment></comment>


A Gentle Introduction to Multi-Stage Programming [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.rice.edu/~taha/publications/journal/dspg04a.pdf <comment><USER2> This is quite old. MetaOCaml has been rewritten since (the new version is linked in another comment)

A better ressource to learn about multi stage metaprog in OCaml is Jeremy Yallop's course on advanced functional programming:

See "staging" sections: [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1415/L28/materials.html](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1415/L28/materials.html)

Interactive notebook: [http://ocamllabs.github.io/iocamljs/staging.html](http://ocamllabs.github.io/iocamljs/staging.html)

<comment><USER3> I was confused by the fact that you only linked to the first notebook. There are actually several notebooks related to staging in the course outline.

Anyway, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anytime I read about multi-stage I'm reminded of this absolutely fascinating project to turn stage 0 code into stage 1 code: [https://scala- lms.github.io](https://scala-lms.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can somebody shed some light on how this is different from delayed/lazy evaluation? I thought languages like Scala and Haskell already support these patterns, but I haven't heard the term 'multi-stage' applied to them...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is more like hygienic lisp macros, .net expression trees, jvm bytecode generation, etc. You are generating and compiling code instead of just deferring the evaluation to the last minute.

</comment></comment><comment> iso-8859-1 Note that the last release of MetaOCaml was in 2006. This paper is old too, but I don't know exactly how old. But probably about 10 years.

<comment><USER6> A re-implementation of MetaOCaml was released last year ([http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/MetaOCaml.html](http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/MetaOCaml.html)).</comment></comment>


Minibonds: Matching up lenders with middle market borrowers - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c515b048-8c10-11de-b14f-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=782015c4-f2e3-11dd-abe6-0000779fd2ac.html?ftcamp=rss&nclick_check=1

<comment><USER2> This was what I hoped Prosper and the other P2P startups would turn into. Sadly, rather than targeting businesses frozen out of traditional financing, they ended up going for B2C credit. B2C credit is an extraordinarily efficient market in which most good credit risks can borrow money absolutely painlessly, for close to nothing.

The added headache ("Instead of typing five pieces of information into the computer and instantly getting issued a credit card, I think I'm going to write up an eBay style listing of myself, submit my financial details to be wrangled over by strangers, and babysit the auction for a week") and expense in borrowing from Prosper restricted it to mostly high risk borrowers who the banks had spurned. And, as it turns out, banks were largely not rejecting them out of whim or caprice.

</comment><comment><USER3> break the pay wall:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=These+are+extraordinary+times...](http://www.google.com/search?q=These+are+extraordinary+times+for+lenders%2C+borrowers+and+savers.+There+are+huge+disconnects+that+make+no+sense+and+it+will+require+corporate+financiers+with+imagination+to+solve+the+conundrum.&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en- US:official&client=firefox-a)</comment>


Implementing SIP Telephony in Python (2008) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://39peers.net/download/doc/report.pdf <comment><USER2> The SIP stack implementation in Python is good. But RTP part - Python can't keep up with real time requirement of RTP, bursting out packets every few milliseconds. Even after depending on C code for encoding/decoding. There once was an attempt to code softphone (shtoom - [https://sourceforge.net/projects/shtoom/files/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/shtoom/files/) ) in pure python by Anthony Baxter and was later abandoned. There are some jobs that python can't cut it.

<comment><USER3> Oh boy, I just wrote a 100 line client and another 100 line server that is able to do real time voice communication, comparable to the likes of telegram. (In python)

Albeit it uses portaudio (python-soundevice) for the audio IO which is not written in python, and opus which isn't written in Python either. But all the glue and udp communication is pure python.

And P.S. - pulseaudio uses more CPU than my thingy.

Talking about production, I suspect the guys at OnBeep are making use of python a lot, just looking at their GitHub repo

[https://github.com/OnBeep](https://github.com/OnBeep)

(The python opus bindings are created by them)

I'm just tired of people underestimating the speed of python. Its often a matter of not using it correctly...

<comment><USER2> This is different than doing pure python implementation. Python acting as glue is most suitable solution when heavy lifting is done by C code. I have used pjsip/pjsua lib with python bindings which performs beautifully.

<comment><USER3> Maybe "pure" python can't do fast sound processing, I can accept that. You have to at least use scipy/numpy. But his claim of "Python can't keep up with real-time requirement of RTP, bursting out packets every few milliseconds" seems bogus to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First of all, thanks for sharing this - it's a very thorough guide to implementing SIP.

Second, the author says that he has implemented a SIP client in JS as well. But my experience with open-source JS SIP clients (WebRTC) has been that their performance is significantly worse than the free version of xlite. (Both SipML and JSSIP have more frequent packet drops on the same systems than xlite).

Are there better JS implementations that are at least as robust as xlite?

<comment><AUTHOR> >>> (Both SipML and JSSIP have more frequent packet drops on the same systems than xlite)

What kind of packet drops are you talking about? if this is about media/audio that's entirely on the webrtc browser engine which is C++. SIP signaling on the browser goes over websockets ([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7118](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7118)), so I'd not expect any kind of 'packet drops' on signaling either.

In short, I doubt your problems were due to the SIP stack in JS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember browsing the directories of a Broadsoft Broadworks application and network servers back in the early 2000s and being shocked at just how much of the product was implemented in Perl. Many fortunes have been made on the back of interpreted code.

<comment><USER6> There's not much in the SIP protocol itself (I'm not talking the RTP streams here, just SIP) that can't be handled with adequate performance in higher level languages (whether interpreted or not). At the end of the day it's a bunch of XML over TCP sockets, a lot of your function/method calls are going to be into libc (networking), something like sax (xml), and likely database access (libpq/whatever), the coordination of these with perl is going to cost you some CPU time but likely not enough to justify the extra expensive (man hours) doing it in C or something similar.

The RTP streams, that you may want to handle in a lower level language since you're talking soft real time being a must.

<comment><USER7> UDP sockets, not TCP ones. And don't forget about the bunch of MIME and Internet Message format that precedes the XML. (-:

<comment><AUTHOR> SIP works over a variety of transports, both TCP and UDP are used. You can tell UDP is certainly more common but any RFC-compliant stack is supposed to support both because large UDP packets (> MTU) are supposed to be sent using TCP.

The bulk of the protocol doesn't require XML at all actually, it's the SIP SIMPLE and presence extensions that do. But for the core SIP spec and your run of the mill VoIP call setup, no XML is needed.

<comment><USER7> Apparently I was being too subtle with the gentle reminder not to forget the MIME and Internet Message stuff.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why we use D3 and Ember for Data Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://simplereach.com/blog/why-use-d3-ember-for-data-visualization/

<comment><USER2> Did you consider using Angular?</comment>


OffensiveCon19 – Alex Ionescu – Keynote – Reversing Without Reversing - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D9ExVc0G10 <comment><AUTHOR> In this 2019 Register article:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_res...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_research_kernel_claim/)

"ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer"

We read that:

"Axel Rietschin, kernel engineer at Microsoft, has claimed that ReactOS, an open source operating system intended to be binary-compatible with Windows, is "a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel that Microsoft licensed to universities."

Rietschin, who is currently "Senior Software Engineer (Windows Base Kernel, Container Technologies)" according to his LinkedIn profile, made the claim in late 2017, where it was apparently little noticed at the time, and has backed it up today with a post on Hacker News.

"I think it's a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel that Microsoft licensed to universities under an agreement that was obviously violated by some, as the code has been uploaded to numerous places, some of it on GitHub.

"I glanced at the ReactOS code tree, and in my opinion, there is absolutely no way on Earth this was written from a clean sheet only from the available public documentation," Rietschin wrote.

He says that "internal data structures and internal functions, not exported anywhere and not part of the public symbols, have the exact same names as they appear in the Research Kernel."

In his recent post, he presents further arguments against ReactOS being a "clean room" implementation done without reference to the source code. "Macros names, parameters, etc. never appears in the compiled code. It is … almost surely impossible that a clean-room reimplementation ends up using macros for the same things, let alone macros with the same or similar names."

Well, this video can be thought of as the rebuttal by Alex Ionescu to Axel Rietschin.

And quite the rebuttal it is!

See, without the proper deep understanding, one could easily believe that what Axel Rietschin is alleging is true, as it seems believable enough.

But watch the video by Alex Ionescu, and see if you don't believe otherwise at the end...

I think the following quote captures one of his key points:

"o For malware, you usually don't have symbols (usually!)

         -*For Windows, you do*"

But apart from Windows, there's also deep lesson in what Alex is saying, and it is as follows:

 _If there 's a black box; a mystery, somewhere, wherever that is, whatever form that takes -- if one is willing to do the necessary research on it over long periods of time, and accumulate piecemeal pieces of information over that time, and do the necessary homework and legwork (in whatever forms those take), then eventually that mystery box will be opened._

This would also be equally true for mysteries in Math, Science, Physics, Engineering, and other areas in life too...

Alex, I applaud you in your work and diligence!

This is my new favorite video on HN!

<comment><USER2> I suppose its possible that somebody did the reverse engineering. But Occams Razor says, it's more probable that it was as Rietschin is right?

<comment><AUTHOR> You might want to have a look at this old HN article, and the corresponding video:

"How Diablo Was Reverse-Engineered Without Source Code"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340406)</comment></comment></comment>


Ideas for philanthropic web services? - <AUTHOR>

I sometimes find it difficult to tell myself that web ideas of mine actually provide a degree of value. I feel like most of them are just insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I don't want to create my own little niche world on the web, and draw income from it. I was to build something that actually helps people at large.
I've been brainstorming ideas on how to make a web service that can provide some degree of utility to people wanting to help others or people wanting to make this world a better place. I'm researching most of the current "donate to X charity"-type websites, such as yourcause.com, and am looking for ways that I feel they come up short. Perhaps I can pick up where they've dropped the ball. Most models for these sites are just about keeping you informed about these charities and helping you to donate money to them. I think a lot of them fail at showing you your impact when you do actually donate - so I'm thinking about targeting that side of it all.
Does anyone have any insight into this field, or any suggestions about things you've seen that could be helpful to somebody that just wants to "help out however they can"?
Thanks <comment><USER2> Im a social entrepreneur currently involved with non profits doing exactly what you are talking about. Theres actually endless ideas for this so the challenge isnt which idea the challenge is to decide that you really want to do it.

Personally i decided it was worth it and now have more projects then i can handle all or most of which are focused on helping a larger group of people through services related to education and health and other "cause" oriented topics.

If you want to talk more send me an email. And if you want to help out with any of the projects let me know as well.

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'd like to know more about the projects you're involved. I checked your user info but I don't see your e-mail.

<comment><USER2> It should be there. But if its not for some reason, its firstname.lastname@example.com. Id be more then happy to tell you about them. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tackle something boring.

Most non-profits tend to be operationally very poor due to lack of management, operations and organizational skills. Sit down with some local non-profits and see how they work on a day-to-day basis. Most have no metrics to measure performance, don't use a CRM system to track donors, volunteer and task management tends to be done on an ad-hoc basis, etc.

Non-profits have exactly the same problems as for-profit companies have, why not build them the tools that help solve these problems for them?

</comment><comment><USER5> Tread lightly. There seem to be dozens, hundreds of new philanthropic web services, and almost all of them have an incredibly difficult time of distinguishing themselves.

My suggesting is to stay very narrow to one field. Better yet, join one of the others (Clojurerocks seems nice). You don't need your own charity business to be useful, especially when so many good ones already exist and are trying to innovate themselves.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was thinking about same thing last month and came up with an idea to raise money for charity and other noble causes through e-commerce. I will be doing this as a side project when my current side project completes. You can also give it a try.

Idea - Develop and market a website that sells t-shirts with good design and social awareness messages on it such as anti-smoking, anti-corruption, AIDS awareness t-shirts. Also, tie up with relevant NGO and donate 50% of the profit to them. Make it clear on the site that 50% of the profit goes to NGOs. Many people buy t-shirts online and they will definitely buy such t-shirts if the design is cool. There will also be a feel good factor of doing it for noble cause.

Benefits for buyers - They get cool t-shirts at same rate as on other sites + feel good factor of doing it for noble cause.

Benefits for NGOs - They can raise funds without doing anything and by just allowing their name to be used on website. They get a free online fund-raising system.

Benefits for site owner - You have 50% of the profit to use it in any way you like, to expand your business or anything else + You're contributing to improvement of society + recognition + Something nice in your portfolio.

Benefits for society - Indirect contribution by supporting social activities of NGOs through fund-raising + direct contribution by spreading purposeful educative messages on t-shirts.

A Win-Win idea.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your top 3 developer and power users tool? - <AUTHOR>

I'm just curious about what the pros devs are using in their every day jobs. <comment><USER2> Nothing special,

\- Sublime

\- Fish Shell

\- An array of browsers

<comment><AUTHOR> Fish Shell? ... Glorious VGA Color ... sold!

<comment><USER2> It's awesome ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> \- Launchy at work

\- Sublime/Notepad++

\- Fiddler

</comment><comment><USER3> \- Alfred

\- MacVim/Vim

\- CodeKit

<comment><AUTHOR> Alfred? Ah, kind of like Launchy, cool, thanks!</comment></comment>


Twitter: What Happens When a Startup is Retweeted to 100k+ People - <AUTHOR>

So... today was an interesting day for us at Blogvio(http://www.blogvio.com).
Cendrine, a Twitter user, reviewed Blogvio on her blog and shared the link here: https://twitter.com/cendrinemedia/status/397851160976961536
She has little over 5000 followers. The craziness comes next. :-)
--
We start to get quite a few retweets and decide to see what's the buzz about. We didn't do anything special to promote Blogvio yet, so what's up?
Using TweetDeck we respond quickly to all comments and tweets, then we dive deep. What we find out is that the tweet has been retweeted many times, and combined was sent to more than 100k users in just 6 hours.
One: https://twitter.com/TheTysonReport/status/398070101934497793
And Two: https://twitter.com/AnnettaPowell/status/398054249277300736
This came as a surprise, since we tried two days ago to buy Twitter Ads and were not able to (not in US).
So we went straight to Google Analytics. And the question is.. what do you think has happened, especially since Twitter just went public today? :-)
Then we'll share some screenshots from Google Analytics every day. But I'd love to let you guess. :) <comment><AUTHOR> The trend seems to be going up, but I am really curious to know what kind of traffic you guys expect when 100.000 somewhat targeted followers see a retweet about Blogvio, a tool they potentially can use.

Here's the first screenshot, next one coming on Monday: [http://o7.no/1bikU1r](http://o7.no/1bikU1r)

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't plan to share any numbers yet. We think it makes it more interesting to hear your expectations first.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is my conversation with Marta from Twitter. Her answer was no. [http://o7.no/1c0diR2](http://o7.no/1c0diR2)

Interesting that we got the eyeballs out of chance two days later. :-)

</comment><comment><USER2> One trivial guess is a huge spike in your number of visits.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try another guess. :)

<comment><USER3> Twitter is full of bots so retweets mean nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. :)

It surprised us as well. We were expecting to have quite a spike in the traffic, since 100k users is a lot. And it is also the reason why Twitter went so big with the IPO in the first place.

What happened instead is this: [http://o7.no/1dgSQg7](http://o7.no/1dgSQg7) (only 29 clicks from Twitter directly)

[http://o7.no/1dgTkCR](http://o7.no/1dgTkCR) (I will attribute this growth to Twitter for the sake of helping them look better, although it isn't - we've been approaching different user acquisition hacks)

But now I'm actually wondering how many of these Twitter accounts are real. I'd guess 5% tops, or lower. Is it actually worth advertising with Twitter at all?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bank of America is looking for Ethereum developers - <AUTHOR> http://careers.bankofamerica.com/job-detail/17051863/united-states/us/java-developer-card-and-payments-technology <comment><USER2> I can't in any way see how this ad means they are looking for 'Ethereum developers' other than it being a desired skill. Please refrain from posting misleading titles to articles.

<comment><USER3> You have to understand that a lot of people is expecting to get rich with cryptos, so they need to create a lot of hype, even if that means fabricating false news from a job posting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't give a damn how much they would pay, no way I'm working for Bank of America. They can suck it.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Ethereum - Frontier/Solidity and IBM Hyperledger/Fabric

translation: IBM talked them into a pilot program using Hyperledger Fabric, which IIRC uses the smart contracts functionality from Ethereum.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, it's not. It's just a desired skill, not a required one.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if this coincided with them joining the Ethereum Alliance?

<comment><USER5> BofA's been messing around with talk of various blockchainy projects for a while now, though little visible result beyond overexcited articles in the Bitcoin blogs.

<comment><USER7> The COBOL that's been running their systems for the last 50 years doesn't even have blog articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lovely work on high tech new technology at an old fashioned Bank. Having worked at a financial institution with a bank, talk about generation gap...

</comment><comment><USER9> So... they want to figure out how to cheat at smart contracts like they do with paper ones?

</comment><comment><USER10> What's a midrange developer

<comment><USER11> A senior dev who's getting ripped off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 5 years of Ethereum development experience is longer than Ethereum has been around. These boilerplate Wanted ads won't attract developers with bleeding- edge skills.

<comment><USER13> The ad does not ask for 5 years of Ethereum development experience.</comment></comment>


19 Surefire Signs That Your Business Is Failing - <AUTHOR> http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/19-surefire-signs-that-your-business-is-failing/

<comment><USER2> The title is misleading - in this description there is no business to fail. It's a start-up that's not going to succeed, not a business that's failing.

Having said that, all the points are valid, but they're all made by Paul Graham in his essays, and mostly better.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html>

<http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html>

<http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html>

<comment><USER3> Yes, the article only has one sign (hubris), spelled out repetitively in 19 numbered paragraphs.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: As an English iOS Developer, how can I make the move to NYC? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
Like I said in the title, I'm an English iOS Developer. I visited NYC a while ago and really enjoyed it. I'd like to return :)
My issue is finding a job with a company that takes on foreign workers. I took a look at the usual job boards and most ads either flat out say you must be able to work in America, or don't say anything at all.
After reading around HN for a while, it does look as if a number of companies do support H1B visas (at least around these parts), but elsewhere I can't tell.
Does anyone have any advice on how to go about all this?
Thanks <comment><USER2> a) keep working in England. b) blog about the apps that you are working on so that the world recognizes you as an iOS expert c) attend a conference in the USA, preferably somewhere from Chicago eastwards to maximize the number of New Yorkers in attendance d) make it known to everyone that you, the well known English iOS blogger and developer, are looking for a job in New York with a company who will sponsor your visa. e) when somebody bites, be ready to suggest a New York immigration law firm who specializes in helping companies through the process because chances are this will be the employer's first experience with visa rules.

And while you are doing all that, do keep an eye on [http://newyork.craigslist.org/sof/](http://newyork.craigslist.org/sof/) for jobs and write inquiries to see if they would hire you on a visa. Also get a good education on US visa types because H1B are hit and miss. A visa that leads to a green card is a better bet. If you can identify any agencies (ad or design) that have offices in London and New York, ask them if they hire iOS developers and if so, would relocation be possible. Internal transfers in a multinational company are the easiest way to go.</comment>


How are sexually-confused insects helping small farmers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11694374

<comment><USER2> Relevant: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution></comment>


Profitably Unemployed - <AUTHOR> https://blogofjake.com/2020/08/03/profitably-unemployed/ <comment><USER2> > People's general focus on the hose rather than the hole is well demonstrated > by the fact that anyone you ask will be able to tell you how much money they > make by some unit of time but almost no one will be able to tell you the > same in terms of their costs.

I mean, this is just because most people have 1-2 income sources and way more expense sinks, so this is just rhetoric.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the income is usually straightforward, but measuring the expenses requires some work and discipline.

It is not that difficult, though -- the greatest problem is to develop the habit. You need to make a note whenever you pay for something (there are smartphone apps for that), and have some simple categories defined (that you can refactor later). At the end of the month put your notes together with your online banking reports in a spreadsheeet... and you have the entire picture, which you can later compare to other months.

People who did this usually found some surprises, and were able to save some money. But it takes some time, and if you are employed and have kids at home, time is scarce; it is better to develop the habit sooner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When you do get back your time, you also don't feel the need to spend so much. What happens is that after being stuck 8h at a job, you tend to overcompensate and spend money to gain some of that time back.

<comment><USER3> The more you hate your everyday life, the more you are willing to spend on a vacation that would take you far away from it all. (Sometimes you really want to visit a specific place, but often the motivation is just "anywhere but here, the further the better".)

Also, many expenses are directly caused by having a job: commute to the work and back, or the lunch you eat with your colleagues (which sometimes costs more that cooking a meal for your entire family would).</comment></comment>


Android Will Seize 45% of Smartphone Market by 2016, Says ABI Research - <AUTHOR> http://www.abiresearch.com/press/3651-Android+Will+Seize+45%25+of+Smartphone+Market+by+2016%2C+Says+ABI+Research

<comment><USER2> 45% might even be understating it. Android's share of the smartphone market is already around 30% in the US ([http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and- Wireless/Android-Tops-iO...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and- Wireless/Android-Tops-iOS-RIM-with-29-Smartphone-Share-100765/)). That's a bigger piece of the pie than either iPhone or RIM. Unless Apple aggressively targets the low end, a majority Android share (50%+) of the smartphone market shouldn't surprise anybody.

<comment><USER3> Unless Apple has no interest in the low end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Of the newer entrants in the smartphone OS arena, Windows Phone 7 and Samsung's Bada are both aimed at low- to mid-range handsets."

Er... WP7 definitely isn't aimed at the low-end ( [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Windows_Phone...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Windows_Phone_7#Minimum_requirements) ) and Bada seems to be aimed at all varieties of phones ( [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bada_%28opera...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bada_%28operating_system%29) ).

<comment><USER5> But once WP7 is installed it becomes a low-end phone.

<comment><USER6> Don't judge the platform now. Look at iOS when it started or even worst, Android in the G1!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To say that Android will seize some percentage of the market by 2016 is baseless, especially if you're basing it on yesterday's numbers. "Research" like this is fatally flawed for one simple reason: 2016 is five years away.

The way that tech is moving these days, in five years most of the current platforms will either be replaced or will have evolved into something entirely different. Keep in mind that five years ago we didn't even have iPhone at all.

This is the same reason that I laugh when I see a company planning to "overtake Product X" in five years -- it shows a misunderstanding of how quickly this market is moving. The future is rarely like the past, and unless you're innovating, you're losing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Somewhat myopic prediction focused only on one subportion of one market when the "device" market is much larger.

I'd guess that in 4 years, Apple will still have >80% of the tablet and portable media player markets.

And those customers, especially those who had iOS devices prior to smartphone ownership, are likely to want iOS phones. That usage funnel will likely continue - if the PMP space hasn't seen any compelling Android inroads as of yet, why do people think the "large PMP" tablet space will be any different?

<comment><USER9> The number of people unwilling or unable to own a phone that costs more than $200 will remain huge for years to come. Apple will never sell a sub $200 phone, Android already does. All of those people with their $50 Nokia's are not going to replace them with $600-$700 iPhones, but they might replace them with a $100 Android phone.

<comment><USER10> Don't forget that Apple usually sells the previous generation iPhone 8GB for cheaper. You can now get a 3GS for $50 on ATT. I still use a 3GS, and it's still a great phone.

<comment><USER9> That is $50 with a very expensive monthly plan. I was talking about prices for unlocked phones on a pay as go plan.

<comment><USER10> Ah. That was unclear from your post. I know a few people who have gotten the Samsung Intercept on Virgin Mobile and are fairly unhappy with it. It feels really slow and the built-in apps aren't that great, according to my friends (especially, calendar and contacts). It's still a $200 phone. Perhaps the LG Optimus is better? I also have an original DROID running 2.2 and am not very impressed with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This might be true. What I'd like to see is a website that keeps score of everyone's predictions. The reality is that anything could happen in 5 years. Phones are easy to replace. Not much lock-in.

<comment><USER12> _Phones are easy to replace. Not much lock-in._

Phones, yes. Phones with apps, not so much: Now you have an obstacle to changing platforms.

<comment><USER13> Never thought of that, and it's clearly an interesting point, but, given that software companies are _generally_ distributing apps across platforms, how much lock in does really exist? If I'm using app A on an iPhone, then switch to an Android device, I wonder if it's in the best interest of the app provider to provide some sort of sync service?

<comment><USER10> For free apps, the lock in is minimal. But if someone has an investment of $100 or however much in paid apps, that's another story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Will we even be still talking about 'smartphones' in 2016 - a term made up by analysts after all. These are all just a particular size of wireless tablet computers.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure why anyone bothers to read let alone make these predictions. Last week's was how WP7 would overtake iOS phones within a few years, the basis of which seemed to be to replace Nokia's Symbian numbers with WP7 units. Yeah, in-depth research there.

Frankly I'm more willing to bet money on Nokia fading into irrelevance.

Message to Elop: if someone needs to pay you billions of dollars to do something, it's probably not a good idea, especially when that other party will be getting most if not all of that money back in licenses anyway.

Another fallacy with such "analyses" is that they assume static goalposts. To me--and I suspect to Apple--smartphones are no longer what matters. In this sense they're much like the MP3 market. Sure, Apple dominates that market but it's just not of primary importance anymore.

The real prize isn't smartphones (IMHO), it's tablets. A tablet is much more of a general purpose device than a phone. I use my phone for calls, messages, checking my email and the maps/directions. I use my iPad for Web browsing, reading, research, watching movies, playing games and, well, basically _everything else_.

I think Android got a real leg up in the phone market because if you give someone a phone that makes and receives phone calls and SMSs then you've given most people what they need most of the time. Not everyone (with a smartphone) is into buying apps, music and other digital content on or for their phones.

Tablets strike me as different because that ecosystem is _far_ more important. The availability of digital content, the suitability (eg hardware consistency) as a game platform, etc all advantages that are going to be extremely difficult to match anytime soon (IMHO).

Apple sold 15M iPads in 9 months last year. This year predictions are running at 40-50M (if not more). We'll start to get a better idea of this when Apple releases their earnings report in late April (and a much better picture in July).

I would put the competition for the iPad at _at least_ 1-2 years behind the iPad and I'm not sure what'll happen first: 100M iPads (likely by the end of 2012 easily) will have been sold or 10M of _everything else_.

Back to the phone market: I think this is actually a reasonably conservative estimate in that I believe in 5 years it quite likely there'll only be two games in town (meaning with >10% market share), being iOS and Android, so I fully expect Android to have 45% of that.</comment>


Ask YC: Info. on Tech Coast Angels? - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
I just attended the business plan competition kick-off we have here at UCI, and one of the sponsors is Tech Coast Angels. They claim to be the biggest seed investor firm in the nation, and they talked a pretty big talk. I was wondering if any of you have had any experience with them or have heard anything about them. I have not heard anything about them before, and perhaps some of you have.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Seems to operate on a chapter-basis with different operating team behind each group. Not rated very highly, called a social club for part time investors.</comment>


The Up-Goer Five Text Editor - <AUTHOR> http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ Can you explain a hard idea using only the ten hundred most used words?  It's not very easy.  Type in the box to try it out. <comment><USER2> This is great. Featured on The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/shortcuts/2013/jan/22/u...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/shortcuts/2013/jan/22/up- goer-five-thing-on-computer)

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks like the entire story is hashed in the url.</comment>


Tic-tac-tic-tac-toe | tic-tac-toe with a multiplayer twist - <AUTHOR> https://tic-tac-tic-tac-toe.firebaseapp.com/#a

<comment><USER2> Same rules/board as Ten, though not as nicely designed:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ten/id669964112?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ten/id669964112?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea of splitting the teams with the twitter/github signup :D</comment>


Schumer and Sanders: Limit Corporate Stock Buybacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/opinion/chuck-schumer-bernie-sanders.html <comment><USER2> Like most such proposals, there's very little chance of anything happening. Still, it would amount to a $15/hr minimum wage for companies that are doing well and want to return value to shareholders (unless doing so via dividends would be more efficient). Alternately, companies could just sit on the profits until a friendlier administration came into power.

Why not just pass a $15 minimum wage if that's the policy goal? Asking this question as a Democrat. This seems like an unnecessarily complicated way to achieve the outcome.

<comment><USER3> _Why not just pass a $15 minimum wage if that 's the policy goal? Asking this question as a Democrat._

US Senate Democrats don't have the power to do this. You do see this in local governments where they do (like NY).

I might also wonder if this is the true policy goal nationally, or if they are just floating ideas out there to see the public opinion on them. e.g., If a $15/hr minimum wage isn't passable in their careers, maybe this would be and is a step in that direction.

Additionally, saying something new like this gets their name in headlines, which tends to be a goal for national politicians (especially when not attached to a scandal).

<comment><USER2> _US Senate Democrats don 't have the power to do this._

They don't have the power to limit buybacks preconditioned on $15/hr wages either. Their lack of power to effectuate a national minimum wage doesn't seem to explain the choice to float this policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something I wonder about here.

Isn't this idea that corporations should not buy back their stock a consequence of the idea that company shares are for speculation, not to get the company operating capital?

What about a company that sells shares, builds a business, makes a profit, and fulfills their mission? Can't such a company then return some or all its value to its investors by redeeming--buying back--its shares?

That's what happens when a company is sold. VC investors expect it.

Another model of company responsibility is to account for externalities. For example, if a company pays such poor wages that workers need public aid (SNAP/"Food Stamps") to feed their families, that's an unaccounted externality. The company's profit in that case comes at a cost to the government's human services operations.

Similar arguments apply to exhaustion of natural resources, and to pollution.

All that being said, the speculative framework for company valuation is certainly the entrenched model. All big companies are basically financial entities with a side hustle in some kind of product or other.

For what it's worth, Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet and colleagues) rescued General Electric on the condition that they definancialize and stop treating their products as a side hustle.

<comment><USER5> > What about a company that sells shares, builds a business, makes a profit, > and fulfills their mission? Can't such a company then return some or all its > value to its investors by redeeming--buying back--its shares?

As long as it didn't do so by paying people less than $15/hour and provide no sick leave, Sanders and Schumer don't seem to have a problem with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few paragraphs deep in the article: "Our bill will prohibit a corporation from buying back its own stock unless it invests in workers and communities first, including things like paying all workers at least $15 an hour, providing seven days of paid sick leave, and offering decent pensions and more reliable health benefits."

</comment><comment><USER7> They might be off base on this one....

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/buyback-derangement- syndrome-15...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/buyback-derangement- syndrome-1534460606)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's amazing how many of our current awful cultural and financial trends can be traced back to "during the Reagan Administration."

</comment><comment><USER9> From the article: President Trump promised the typical American household a $4,000 pay raise as he pushed for his tax giveaway to the rich. The reality, however, is that from December 2017 to December 2018, real wages for average workers have gone up by just $9.11 a week.

While I agree with Schumer and Sander's viewpoint, I think it's a little disingenuous to compare a per year value to a per week value.

<comment><USER3> Not at all. 9.11 * 52 = 473.72. At the very least, it's _very obviously_ somewhere between $468-$520/yr, just over 1/10 of what was promised. There's no insincerity nor obfuscation...

<comment><USER10> Well, except 'household' is not the same as 'worker', and 'typical' is not falsifiable so it could mean anything. When you take a 'typical' household, say 2 employed parents 2 kids and they own a home or other assets it's far from an unreasonable estimate.

But this isn't about reasonable estimates, of course. Hence the deceptive per worker per week comparison. You got played by the household versus worker they snuck in there.</comment></comment></comment>


Japanese peer-to-peer (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://jmoiron.net/blog/japanese-peer-peer/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's no surprise that Japan has evolved these anonymous networks, considering the legal pressure its media companies applies to its filesharers. Even Perfect Dark's users have been arrested, implying its security has been broken.[1] Maybe we elsewhere can draw some lessons. Reposting a comment of mine:

\-----

I actually submitted the Perfect Dark wiki article to HN after reading about Isamu's passing:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_(P2P)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_\(P2P\))

Screenshots: [https://www.google.com/search?biw=1097&bih=609&tbm=isch&sa=1...](https://www.google.com/search?biw=1097&bih=609&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=perfect+dark+p2p)

Basically, you dedicate some space on your hard drive to the program, which then stores chunks of unidentified files there and constantly uploads to other clients - it's true decentralized file storage with a degree of plausible deniability. You can search for files you want, and after you've downloaded them, you can vote on them to extend their lifespan or bury them.

It was a cool setup when I tried it back in '08 or so, giving off a very cyberpunk[2] feel with its anonymity/tripcodes, spartan plain-text-on-black- background UI, and the scrolling chatstream of Japanese comments (often with SJIS text art) posted by other users. In the end I didn't actually use it for anything, but it felt like a futuristic BBS.

It would be interesting to see a global equivalent emerge, maybe built upon bittorent DHTs/magnet links. Maybe one already has, e.g. on Tor?

\----

[1] The Japanese network security firm NetAgent announced last year that it was able to decrypt Perfect Dark's security and thus be able to compromise the anonymity of the network. [http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-06-10/2nd-man- arre...](http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-06-10/2nd-man-arrested-for- uploading-anime-via-perfect-dark)

[2] Considering that PD v1.02 is codenamed "Stand Alone Complex", a reference to the fictional emergent phenomenon of stand-alone individuals spontaneously acting in concert without coordination (coined by the Ghost in the Shell TV anime), its cyberpunk inspirations are quite evident.

<comment><USER2> Why don't these P2P apps store the file chunks in your hard drive's free space? The fact that commands like `shred` exist means that you can readily read/write from it, and your OS will automatically overwrite the cache contents when you need to use space (and it doesn't matter because P2P networks are fault tolerant anyway).

That way users don't have to face the idea of "giving up" their disk space to be part of the network.

<comment><USER3> There is no generalized way to access the free space of a mounted and mutable file system.

What you'd be better off doing on Unix type OSes is creating a large empty file, deleting it but keeping the file handle, and reading/writing that. That's a traditional way to make a self erasing scratch file.

It doesn't work on Windows, though, because Windows won't let you delete a file that's open.

<comment><USER4> If you do that the space is still occupied. And the file deletes itself whenever the service is restarted, which is also undesirable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i was a raw capper of japanese TV from about 2000-2008.

article is pretty much spot on. we started out on winmx, with huge userlists. the fun thing about winmx it downloaded in order, it didnt grab multiple pieces of random parts of the file.

i could start a download, startup my FXP ftp client and start uploading immediately (would have to cap it so it didnt complete the upload before the download completed).

after a few years winmx started to die out, the familiar reputable uploaders we kept eyes are gone. (probably arrents and some people retiring).

then came winny, it was a little harder to use but then we figured out you can just search the hash for the uploader and started grabbing all their content with ease. it was pretty nice.

used share, didnt like it as much as winny.

winny eventually came to an end, well the uploaders were gone like winmx.

by the time perfect dark came out, we already invested in local japanese residents to cap the streams directly and we no longer needed to use japanese p2p software as a source of some of our caps as we could cap anything in hd.

</comment><comment><USER6> It looks like a great app and something I'd use (though the majority of content available likely to be Japanese?).

The only other down-side I can see off the bat is that it runs only on Windows machines.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_\(P2P\))

Anyone aware of an OSX version?

<comment><USER7> It seems like protocol is pretty much deciphered (for forensic purpose, more likely.) I never heard any existence of it outside of Windows.

I've once tried to run it on Wine while ago, it looks like it incorporates quite a bit of environment checking (so to prevent someone from modifying network parameters?) and I remember it was having problems running -- not sure if it's still the case with later version of Wine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I found fascinating about this is not only technological aspect of it, but the social aspect of it.

Apparently, there's some sort of hierarchical social structure, especially prevalent in anime uploads; basically people with higher "caste" would upload more popular anime.

I have heard of stories where those who are not complying these systems, or people trying to get out of the system (especially higher ranked ones) are shunned, either by giving anonymous tips to police, etc. (It has been rumored sporadic arrests being made by police, despite larger user base, are because of this.)

<comment><USER8> Pirate Anime Yakuza? Sounds like an actual anime show.

<comment><USER7> Almost like that!

Maybe worse... These people can get pretty nasty. After all, you are dealing with people who would try to locate you from a set of pictures. (Some people's obsession goes so far locating someone's residence from a set of pictures, examining time it was taken, and angle of shadow, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty sure this article is totally wrong on all it's assumptions on security being broken.

All arrest to my knowledge were from people posting hashes in a public way.

Statements like this are definitely wrong, this is NSA style stuff, if possible at all. I though there are only a handful (One?) md5 collisions found.

"The relative weakness of md5 has led to hash spoofing attacks on the WinNY network."

</comment><comment><USER10> There's this really annoying ip filter that blocks non japanese ip from connecting though....

</comment><comment><USER11> On the upside, western internet users mostly ignored Usenet in favor of BitTorrent, which made Usenet a real pleasure to download from for years. Copyright holders are starting to catch on, though, so this is going away.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's with japan and tripcodes?</comment>


Why the Android Platform is Failing - <AUTHOR> http://eepurl.com/ngjZX It's no secret that malware & other problems plague android phones.  What happened and why? <comment><USER2> Spot on. I love the features and technology in my Android phone, but its a giant mess. I basically have to reboot it every few days to maintain functionality. The stuff that I have on it works decently, but I limit my apps to a music player, a ssh app, a vnc/rdesktop app and facebook. I am a much more conservative consumer of apps than most, and if I have to deal with this BS, I'm sure other users are constantly facepalming. If I were to make a scurrilous comparason, Google set out to make a Linux phone and ended up with a Windows 3.0 phone.

What I'm saying is - Apple, please make a phone with a real keyboard, don't make me use a MS phone.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1 million phones per DAY, 365 million per year - more than Microsoft activates new PC's with Windows in the same time, and it's _failing_?

The upgrade process is a mess, but it certainly shows no signs as "failing" in the market.

<comment><USER2> Its failing because they're not making money on them, they have to pay MSFT for every phone activation; MSFT is making a mint off of Android, Google is not.</comment></comment>


Indexes Beat Stock Pickers Even Over 15 Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/indexes-beat-stock-pickers-even-over-15-years-1492039859?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170413&utm_campaign=ritholtz <comment><USER2> Recent paper giving new insight why indexing works so well.

Why Indexing Works, Heaton , Polson and Witte, 2015. [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2673262](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2673262)

The distribution of returns in the stock market is very uneven. There is significant positive skew. Just handful of well performing stocks at any moment account make significant gains in market.

> The risk of substantial index underperformance always dominates the chance > of substantial index outperformance, with the difference being greater the > smaller the size of the selected sub-portfolios. It is far more likely that > a randomly selected (small) subset of the 500 stocks will underperform than > overperform, because average index performance depends on the inclusion of > the extreme winners that often are missed in sub-portfolios.

Index funds pick these winners every time. Active funds start as underdogs even in the stock picking game.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for the paywall folks; if anyone is interested in reading the original research WSJ is reporting on, this is it: [http://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year- end-20...](http://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2016.pdf)

The Cliff's Notes are these:

* 82% of _all_ U.S. funds trailed their respective benchmarks over 15 years.

* 66% of large-cap actively managed funds trailed benchmarks.

* 89.4% of mid-cap actively managed funds trailed benchmarks.

* 85.5% of small-cap actively managed funds trailed benchmarks.</comment>


Capitalism, modernity's most beguiling and dangerous form of enchantment - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/capitalism-is-modernitys-most-beguiling-dangerous-enchantment <comment><USER2> From the article: "The pre-modern belief in the enchantment of the world – modernised in Romanticism, blending scientific rationality with Hopkins's conviction of God's worldly grandeur – offers a more humane and generous account of our place in creation, and it provides the most compelling foundation for opposition to capitalism."

The pre-modern world was by definition pre-scientific method. Ex, arguendo, the capitalism component the author rightly critiques, retreating to a pre- Renaissance scientific (and technological) world would be a return to a time of ignorance and delusion.</comment>


A Classic of Soviet Engineering - The Typhoon-class sub - <AUTHOR> http://mockingeye.com/a-classic-of-soviet-engineering <comment><USER2> For all the mocking you have to hand it to the Russians, they designed that thing on a budget that was probably a very small fraction of what the design of its American counterpart cost and it was just as deadly.

Don't underestimate engineering because it is done in a less than elegant way, if the problem got solved and the device fulfilled the requirements and it was within the budget then it was a good design.

As for the under water stab at the MIG 29, that was a design where the Russian designers probably outdid their Western counterparts in many ways.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxx3T53TxM>

<comment><USER3> _Don't underestimate engineering because it is done in a less than elegant way, if the problem got solved and the device fulfilled the requirements and it was within the budget then it was a good design._

The old Soviet defense design houses benefitted tremendously by being the follow-on developers. They could see what US defense contractors did, then figure out how to do it cheaper and more reliably.

That said, the Soviets have had an amazing record of _comparable, cheaper, more rugged, more reliable_ dating from World War II. Where a US cargo plane requires infrastructure, a comparable Soviet cargo plane would be able to land on unpaved airfields and include a manually operated fuel-pump. Where German designers would require over 20 parts for some doo-dad in an artillery piece, the US equipment would accomplish the same functionality in about 3/4ths of the parts, but the Soviets would undercut them by another 3 or 4 parts.

James Dunnigan discusses this in his classic _How to Make War_.

Being the follow-on competitor is actually a great way to avoid overengineering.

<comment><USER4> While this was a useful design criteria (make it dead-simple and dependable) it also led to a great deal of over-engineering of many components to provide the level of durability required. The question that is left unasked here is "why?" A part that is twice as large as it needs to be will be dependable and you can create masterfully simplistic designs with them, but it will have more limited capabilities for a given weight/mass. The reasons were two-fold: Soviet manufacturing was not up to the task of delivering consistent quality near the bleeding edge of materials science, and Soviet troops were mostly conscripts who would horribly abuse equipment through poor training and lack of education.

From WWII through the late 70s this strategy served the USSR quite well, but by the 80s their "cheap and simple" approach was leaving them further and further behind. At the low-end of the performance and design spectrum this left them with some very nice tools, but the high-end was owned by the west and in the early to mid 80s an inflection point seems to have been passed where high-end units could completely dominate a particular battlefield.

<comment><USER3> True, but this is mainly true for so-called "conventional" warfare in Europe. For asymmetrical warfare, especially in parts of the world with less than stellar infrastructure, "cheap and simple" has been much preferred.

I suspect there's at least one valuable analogy applicable to startups here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You're probably better off looking at pictures of an actual, unromanticized Typhoon/Akula, even if you don't read Russian.

<http://community.livejournal.com/ru_submarine/17486.html>

<comment><USER6> These two are decommissioned and are being cut apart.

<comment><USER7> That explains why they're in such awful shape.

I was a submarine officer in the US Navy and we would never allow any boat to look like this; literally rusting all over the place. That said, holy s __t the Russians built _huge_ boats.

<comment><USER8> The Soviets had to build huge subs. Their missiles and reactors were larger than the US versions. Also, their reactors weren't nearly as reliable, so they put two in each boat. They are impressive to look at, though.

<comment><USER9> I lol'd when I first read that, thinking that by 'not reliable' you meant their reactors tended to melt down, spike, or blow up, in which case adding a second one wouldn't really help but would nevertheless fit the American perception of the Soviet ethos (they pretend to pay us so we pretend to fix the problem).

<comment><USER8> By not reliable I mean were much more likely to need to be shut down to avoid something really bad happening. The second reactor allowed them to easily return to base (or even continue their mission) if they were forced to shut one of them down. An American sub with a reactor failure would be more or less stuck, and if it were under the icecap or something like that would be in big trouble.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I know what you meant, I just thought my initial misinterpretation was funny enough to comment about. Maybe not...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On the subject of "Classics of Soviet Engineering", what about the Soyuz rocket family:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_%28rocket_family%29>

Still going strong after 40+ and its first launch due from ESA's spaceport in Q4 2010:

<http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Launchers_Home/SEMXN619Y8G_0.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> A visit to Wikipedia actually confirms this story (I was sure it was a joke before): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_class_submarine#Descrip...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_class_submarine#Description_and_history)

"Typhoon class submarines feature multiple pressure hulls that simplify internal design while making the vessel much wider than a normal submarine. In the main body of the sub, two Delta class pressure hulls lie parallel with a third, smaller pressure hull above them (which protrudes just below the sail), and two other pressure hulls for torpedoes and steering gear."

<comment><USER12> On a tangent: I wonder why wikipedia doesn't list the articles on boats by their original Russian names, but uses their NATO calling instead. Now you have the article "Typhoon sub" which is actually about Akula class submarines, and the article "Akula class submarine", which is about a submarine the Russians call "Shchuka".

<comment><USER2> Part of that is that wikipedia is US centric (even it it tries to be NPOV in things like names this definitely leaks through), another part is that the majority of the editors would not be able to verify source in Cyrillic.

The same happens happens with the names of towns and of people all over wikipedia so it's no surprise to see it happen with the names of classes of submarines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's like the PHP of the cold war. Ugly as hell and patched together by barely fitting parts. But it gets the job done.

<comment><USER14> Depends how noisy it was and would the USA/UK be able to sink it before the shooting starts.

<comment><USER15> Quite so. In reality, almost all of the Soviet nuclear missile subs were nearly continuously shadowed by American hunter killer subs, but the reverse wasn't true. In the event of an actual nuclear war very few of the Soviet missile boats would have survived, while almost all of America's would have.

Nevertheless, it turns out that land based ICBMs can also be made highly survivable so even given this any US/USSR exchange of nuclear weapons would have been devastating to both sides, regardless of how many subs survived.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ok, just to reiterate: there is a gym and a pool on board.</comment>


Show HN: Semi – AI helps you reply emails in a few taps - <AUTHOR> http://www.yoursemi.com

<comment><USER2> Warning: your site produces the following (I use Sophos)

High Risk Website Blocked

Location: [http://www.yoursemi.com/](http://www.yoursemi.com/)

Access has been blocked as the threat Mal/HTMLGen-A has been found on this website.

Return to the page you were previously viewing.

Please click here to submit this site for reassessment by SophosLabs.

Reassessment request link: [https://secure2.sophos.com/en-us/threat- center/reassessment-...](https://secure2.sophos.com/en-us/threat- center/reassessment- request.aspx?PRODUCT=SavMac&URL=aHR0cDovL3d3dy55b3Vyc2VtaS5jb20v)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I am looking at this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to see more information about what this actually does, what it works on, and when it will be available. At the moment, with my cynics hat on, I'm assuming it's vaporware and that they're testing to see if there's a market by seeing how many people bite.

Can anyone confirm that it's real? Maybe I'm just a nasty, suspicious old bastard.

<comment><USER4> What's the problem if it isn't made yet?

This is a better strategy, see if theres a big enough market. They're also building the list so that their launch will be good and they don't have to spam it everywhere else, they just alert the people who already expressed interest.

There's nothing wrong with finding demand first, smart startups do this all the time.

<comment><USER3> Personally, I'm thoroughly fed up of the tactic. So many things look interesting, and then never see the light of day. Once bitten, twice shy, I don't bite any more.

Speaking with some of my friends and colleagues, I'm not the only one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems that the AI can save me time searching through emails, can't wait to try it!</comment>


Please critique my startup: FuseCal.com - <AUTHOR>

Hi folks.  We've got a new web app at http://www.FuseCal.com that lets you pull calendar events out of a regular web page and into your personal calendar.  No microformats needed... it looks for event-like patterns right in the HTML document (kind of like Dapper with AI, for events only).<p>We're pretty new, far from perfect, and looking for your standard agonizingly-critical feedback... Please tell me how we can make FuseCal more useful to you.  Thanks a lot! <comment><USER2> It's a good idea with an intuitive UI! You could offer a simple API/javascript button that event organizers (eg. Boston Symphony Orchestra, Ticketmaster or StartupSchool.org) could place on their websites. A guest clicks on the button and gets the opportunity to add the event to his/her everyday calendar app.

<comment><USER3> FuseCal developer here. We've gone ahead and rolled out a new release with that capability for you... no i kid, we've already got it :)

Check out <http://fusecal.com/welcome/publishers> or log in and click on the Publish Calendars tab in the upper right. <http://fusecal.com/publisher/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I only had a quick look but to me it looks great. Not really the sort of thing I would use but it seemed to work well with the example calendar. My only gripe was it added all the found events straight off the bat. Personally I would prefer it to add none and give me the option to add them all or just a select few.

My only real critique was the audio on the demo video. It really sounded cheap. You'd get a lot more "wow" factor using a proper microphone.

All in all looks like your creating a great app there.

<comment><USER5> To remove all and then hand pick the ones you like, it seems that you can "select all" and then move them over, then add the ones you like.

I guess a better way to do this would be to default everything to "not accepted" and then ask the user: "what do you want to import?" with the option: "Everything!"

<comment><USER3> (FuseCal Developer) We're working on a revamped event selection UI right now which should be out in a couple weeks. It will make the simple cases of selecting all the events or just a few of them much easier.

<comment><USER6> On the example calendar, I think it would have been better to have the green box on the left and the red box on the right. Drag and dropping things from left to right rather than from right to left is more instinctive from a users point of view because one would normally read from left to right (most of your target audience would anyway).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks pretty cool, although I couldn't get it to work with the first site I tried. It's one I use for local events: www.thecornernews.com. It worked if I selected a date and used that URI, but I couldn't find a way to get all of the events on every day from the front page to load up.

On the plus side, I dig your design and that's a pretty nice domain name, too.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really like this application. It works very well for the stage it's in.

I want to point out a simple error I found. Use the link <http://www.canyons.edu/Offices/PIO/NewsReleases.html> to see events on that page. These are the news releases for my college. Notice that the application doesn't find all of the events on the page.

If I could tell the app "This area includes an event not already found. Please add it." then I could work with any events that are missed (and there will always be one somewhere that doesn't work).

A feature suggestion along this line is a way to see the events in the source preview (maybe highlighted in some way) so I can see what the event is and get any background information from it.

Good luck with this. I really like this idea!

</comment><comment><USER8> Hey! It looks like you are building something great!!

First I tried the page your website suggested and everything worked just fine. Than I decided to hit back and try another site. I typed the calendar URL I wanted and than I just couldn't hit Ok. It wasn't working. So I had to reload the page and than Ok button was working. Well, I'm using Firefox 3 maybe is because of that but you should check it out.

Also I tried to add <http://www.core77.com/calendar/> and I couldn't because the only thing I got was the processing status bar for more than 10 minutes.

Have you ever thought about building a Firefox plugin for it? It would be a great tool.

Well, I can say is that your work is really pretty dam good! Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback! Speed is a significant issue that we are working on, especially when a bunch of people hit the site at once.

A FireFox plugin will also definitely happen in the not too distant future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really nice idea. I've hacked countless snippets of perl to do this for me in the past, so would love an app that would relieve me of this task.

One suggestion -

I used [http://www.junction.co.uk/HTMLTemplates/whats_on/music/dates...](http://www.junction.co.uk/HTMLTemplates/whats_on/music/dates.htm)

but it kind of got the wrong idea about which bit of text was important.

How about extending the post-process ("Events I want / Events I don't want") page so that I can give some hints to the app about which bit of text represents the event name / date / time etc.

keep it up, guys.

</comment><comment><USER10> Picking up on an earlier article, I really like the way you (don't) do user accounts. Well worth a look by others who want to see how this _should_ work.

I wouldn't have bothered looking at it if I had to log in _, but this was just easy. And now I have seen how well it works, I might just use it :)

_ Or watch a web cast. It's amazing how many people don't have Flash, or hate Flash, or are on limited bandwidth/transfer, or just don't like video. And if you try and use some other format it just multiplies all the above by a factor of ten.

</comment><comment><USER11> This worked well grabbing toronto concert events from <http://www.rotate.com/tickets.php>

I had problems importing into Google Calendar though. It worked, but it imported 4 calendars, and eventually timed out and showed a FuseCal.com error page.

Other than that - great service, although it seems limited for a startup unless you add some widgets.

<comment><AUTHOR> weird... i'll put this into our bug db. if it happens again, can you send me feedback via the form in the app (so we can followup via email)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I tried a MySpace band page (hoping it would import tour info) and instead got all the comments as "events". Oops. Perhaps you should consider the domain name, it can indicate certain kinds of calendars worth importing.

It's really slow, unless it's also overloaded right now.

This is a hard problem though, and you deserve credit for attempting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you can currently do to get MySpace events is click the "view all" link next to Upcoming Shows on the profile page. The URL of the events-only page will harvest correctly.

You might be onto something with the idea of a rule system to handle things like that automatically... I hadn't considered it before. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, but not working for me.

I imported a calender from another Webs which seemed to go fine.

But when I try to embed the FuseCal calender on my site, nothing appears.

On my FuseCal calender list page, it tells me, "Error processing this URL", but no details on just what this error might be, or what can be done about it.

<comment><USER13> Follow up: A series of E-mail exchanges with someone from FuseCal got things sorted out.

They were very nice and helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Website looks really good. When I parsed this url

<http://www.fortmason.org/calendar/2008/03/week4.shtml>

it only listed the first event to follow the date pattern and sometimes listed all the events as one.

You guys are off to a great start!

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the concept. In addition to all of the other excellent suggestions below, you really should tackle speed when processing the calendar - it is too slow.

I would think not just about end-to-end latency: which you should think about, but also progress indication so the user has an idea of how things are going.

<comment><AUTHOR> did you get a chance to try the UI for registered, logged-in users? we're thinking about making the workflow for guest users more similar to that.... do you think it would help the perception of latency?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow! Great site. I agree with Hates_ in that you get a lot more bang for the buck if your demo had better sound.

Having said that, awesome website. Great logo and a very nice layout. I tried it my library's home page and it worked very well.

I certainly will be using this. Great work! Thanks, and good luck...

</comment><comment><USER17> That's really neat. I really need a bookmarklet for it though. It shouldn't be hard. Let me know if you need help on that.

It would also be great if this could work within Gmail somehow, that's where I most often get frusterated that I can't easily add things to my calendar.

<comment><USER3> (FuseCal Developer) Bookmarklet on the way. We have had a ton of folks ask us for email integration so it's definitely on our horizon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've had the pleasure of consulting to the FuseCal team. The problem they are solving - bringing structure to unstructured events - is really tricky stuff. Fortunately they are super smart and dedicated. FuseCal is definitely a startup to watch in '08.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much, folks... this has already been way more helpful than I was expecting!

I'm planning to get back to each of you very soon, but in the meanwhile, let's keep these awesome suggestions coming!

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks good! On the "import calendar" page, I would put the source page below the detected events, and separate it from the rest of the page (by adding a border).

<comment><AUTHOR> hey! great minds think alike!

our latest mockups have had them reversed like you're suggesting. it was a little weird for us at first, because we'd gotten used to the way it currently is, but it's definitely better with the source viewer on the bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> 1\. The page is too wide

2\. The address bar breaks with <http://fusecal.com> as input.

</comment><comment><USER21> The audio in your screencast could use some help. It sounds generally dead, and sometimes goes high, or low, or skips.

<comment><USER22> I went to the screencast first, and the audio quality struck me as well. You're too close to the mic. Gotta back up (physically) and keep your record levels near the top of the green. As you speak, try to modulate your voice. If you're not recording in a studio, a simple trick is to put a blanket behind the mic. This will let you back up from the mic and raise your levels without catching reverb or background noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This worked well grabbing toronto concert events from <http://www.rotate.com/tickets.php>

I had problems importing into Google Calendar though. It worked, but it imported 4 calendars, and eventually timed out and showed a FuseCal.com error page.

Other than that - great service, although it seems limited for a startup unless you add some widgets.

</comment><comment><USER23> make it so I can forward an evite email to you, and you'll follow the link for me, and do the processing. when done, send me an email giving me a simple way to pick and choose which events to add. If I had already set it up, it'll auto pick and add events to my calendar.

</comment><comment><USER24> great work guys; i've been really impressed with it so far. it's been super helpful for me!

yes, everyone's being pretty nice here, but it's well deserved. you guys definitely have something going here.

</comment><comment><USER25> This would be cool as a bookmarklet.</comment>