Computing Fractional Fourier Transforms - <AUTHOR> http://algassert.com/post/1710 <comment><USER2> It might be helpful to see how this can be interpreted as a rotation in the time-frequency domain,

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Fourier_transform#A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Fourier_transform#Application)

before reading the article. Pretty neat imo.

<comment><USER3> This is pretty cool. I wrote a program once to simulate the nonrelativistic schrodinger equation, and I noticed that if you put a periodic boundary condition in there (so the right edge wraps around to the left edge) what you appear to get is that the wavefunction runs through a fractional fourier transform to the fourier transform of the original signal, then back again to the original. Has anyone else seen this? Is the schrodinger equation just a fractional fourier transform?

<comment><USER4> Could you elaborate why you think it looks like a fractional FT?

If you solve Schrödinger's equation with periodic boundary conditions on the potential what you get are Bloch functions, which are the product of a phasor and a periodic function.

<comment><USER3> I thought so because the evolution of the waveform looked exactly like this: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/FracFT_R...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/FracFT_Rec_by_stevencys.jpg) (from the wikipedia page on a fractional fourier transform)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learning Wi-Fi Connection Loss Predictions for Seamless Handovers - <AUTHOR> https://umr-ds.github.io/seamcon/ <comment><USER2> This should be easy to implement at the OS level. Protocols like HTTP/3 would work out of the box with quicker network switches and MPTCP should work just fine as well.</comment>


Co-founder of SideQuest (Shane Harris) on helping VR devs succeed [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://anchor.fm/kosmosschool/episodes/11---Shane-Harris-SideQuest-on-the-future-of-SideQuest-and-helping-developers-succeed-eds9js <comment><AUTHOR> Shane Harris is the co-founder of SideQuest. SideQuest helps gamers find and install games and apps for the Oculus Quest that are not on the official Quest store. SideQuest is growing in popularity and as of today has over 280,000 monthly active users.

Some of the things we talked about:

\- How SideQuest got started

\- Solving the discovery problem on SideQuest

\- Oculus Quest store curation strategy

\- Making SideQuest work as a business

\- Fighting piracy

\- Finding the best ways to support developers

\- Next use cases for VR after gaming

\- Future iterations of the Quest and other VR headsets

\- Oculus' potential plans to support indie devs more

\- Importance of social presence in multiplayer VR games</comment>


Why I won't reenlist as a Yale alumni interviewer - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1011-orlin-yale-alumni-interviews-20151011-story.html <comment><USER2> Just went through the whole application process with my daughter. It was horrible. It's a mess. It's sinister in the way it affected our family.

Pursuing a university degree should start with an exploration of: \- "What am I good at, really?" \- "What do I love, really?" \- "What matters to me, really?"

But what we saw all through high school was simply: \- "What can I do today that will improve my chances of getting into Harvard?"

Humans are prone to wanting the wrong things, and especially so when misperceptions lead us to believe they are the right things. I don't know how to ultimately fix the college-chasing-helicopter-parenting-test-prepping- personality-skewing of today's admissions process, but I've started by reinforcing to my younger daughter that what matters is her, not the the university she goes to.</comment>


Meet the drain sock – a simple pollution solution taking the world by storm - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-09/drain-sock-kwinana-pollution-solution-takes-world-by-storm/11190266 <comment><USER2> They just should have called it the thneed. Oh well...</comment>


Japan Will Make Its Last VCR This Month - <AUTHOR> http://mentalfloss.com/article/83427/japan-will-make-its-last-ever-vcr-month <comment><USER2> My nostalgia towards VCRs comes not from the inherent features of the format, but rather the circumstances around its usage.

Specifically, I fondly remember the days when all you needed to record TV was to push the 'record' button. You didn't have to indefinitely rent a set-top box from your cable provider; your video storage was easily expandable (just buy more tapes), there was no such thing as unskippable commercials or 'sorry you're not authorized to record this channel'.

It was a simpler time.

<comment><USER3> > It was a simpler time.

Until you try to program the vcr to record a show while you're watching another show.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101587/quotes?item=qt0238698](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101587/quotes?item=qt0238698)

<comment><USER4> Or program a VCR at all. That is literally a phrase that is used to refer to difficult and arcane tasks.

<comment><USER5> I am surprised at the number of comments to this effect on a site where I am normally in awe of the depth and breadth of technical knowledge, and the willingness to learn by doing, that is displayed. I found VCRs easy enough to use and only ever got caught out by Programme Delivery Control.

<comment><USER6> There's a major difference between people on this site (who likely had no issue scheduling a VCR) and the average consumer.

A sizable chunk of humanity, from my experience, is scared to even try.

<comment><USER7> My aunt used to have two VCRs and an alarm clock. She'd use the alarm to remind her to hit record. She struggled with the timer, but I don't think she trusted it to record what she asked it to.

It's now 2016. She's got two DVRs... and an alarm clock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is crazy "Many collectors consider VHS to be the vinyl of analog video recording, and think the future could see them hoarded just as enthusiastically"

I can sort of get the melancholy/nostalgia for vinyl records, despite the crackles and pops... But low def video? How can someone think it's superior to modern alternatives? I can understand not being enamored with seeing people's warts on high def... But aside from faces, high def is demonstrably better, no?

<comment><USER9> >How can someone think [VHS Video is] superior to modern alternatives?

There are two camps of people in the legacy-media market, collectors/nostalgists, archivist. There are many nostaligists who enjoy vinyl for the warm feeling it psycologically imparts and similarly so for VHS video.

Where the legacy-media market splits is when it comes to archivist. There are many archivist who prefer the vinyl medium over digital because of media-rot issues. The robustness of vinyl is exceptional compared to other medium [1] If you want to play back a CD you are reliant on a CD player and all of it's integrated circuits working properly to extract the information. With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail. This is attractive to archivists.

The closest equivalent of vinyl in the video domain is film: super low tech play back (heck you can even look at it) it's longevity is worse than vinyl though.

[1]probably due to it's low information density and how the data is sequenced. I.e. one aberrant perturbation of the medium or read head doesn't cause large chunks of the data to be lost or unreadable.

<comment><USER10> "With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail."

All you need something that rotates and a thin nail?

It is really hard to make something that rotates well enough to play vinyl discs. I know because I made my own DIY vinyl player as a young engineering student. In the end it was way simpler and it did sound better to make a contactless(optical) head with air blowing to remove the dust. Even then it did not sound as well as the real thing.

It takes a couple millions of dollars to replicate an old vynil player with similar quality. Those plates are balanced and big. The head needs micromachined components.

Companies spent an enormous amount of capital in order to do it right, and every unit is expensive to make.

It is way simpler to read a CD today than to read a Vinyl. Normal players also destroy the discs over time. How many optical Vinyl players you see? How much them cost?

Reading CDs is super simple. They are pots or no pots, zeros or ones. We could do it with simple step motors today and cheap lasers.

One aberrant [and multiple] perturbation on the medium in digital is easily fixed with CRC checking. Also with digital there are millions of disc with the exact same information. For archivists this makes incredible simple to restore all the information.

It is in analog where you lose data. First, every disc, or film or tape is different from the others, you can only guess what is original and what is noise, degradation and so on.

In Vinyl, if the head jumps too fast your sound saturates and you lose everything in between. Dust , scratches, a hair, everything could harm you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cowboy Bebop--"Speak Like a Child"

We're going to lose a lot of history when we can't read VCR tapes anymore.

<comment> nv-vn This was my first thought seeing this post :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Watching them on VHS is closer to the old drive-in or grindhouse theater, the way the director intended it to look." Practically no director intended for the films to look terrible on VHS tapes, it was a limitation of the technology. I understand enjoying the look of the technology as a consumer and I doubt the producers cared for it.

<comment><USER13> Maybe they didn't care about it, but I guess they accounted for it. For example, the medium can hide costume or makeup elements that would otherwise break the suspension of disbelief (personally I find this to be the case when watching HD remasters of older scifi).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was under the impression that there was no way to stop VHS tapes degrading for every time you watch them. Or does that only apply to recording?

I remember taping music videos from MTV on VHS when I was a kid, like a mix tape of videos. And that tape was pretty worn out after just a few re- recordings, the quality was noticeably affected.

<comment><USER15> I found that stuff you recorded yourself was lower grade than what you bought prerecorded. I had some purchased movies that were watched many dozens of times and were still fine. And Blockbuster did, for a while, have a great business in renting out tapes over and over again, and I don't recall ever getting a noticeably degraded copy from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Used pro-grade VHS VCRs are getting expensive. That's what you want for transcribing old VHS tapes to some other medium. Pro units have timebase correction and lack Macrovision copy protection, so you can get a clean signal out.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Their VCRs are made in China and sold in many territories, including North > America, under brand names like Sanyo..

The title is misleading as it seems they are ceasing their production in China (likely already ceased in Japan).

Further, with 750,000 units sold worldwide by them, there is enough of a market for China to continue manufacturing (a quick search also shows some on Alibaba making VCR/DVD combo players).

</comment><comment><USER18> One peculiar thing in the last few years of the VHS era, was that they were really cheap.

They were so much more mechanically complex than DVD players, but still as cheap as the cheap no name DVD players - although they must have been much more expensive to manufacture.

The margins must have been infinitesimal.

<comment><USER15> The engineering was initially more complex. But once the production tooling was done, it probably didn't cost a lot to churn them out.

The quality of the components in a cheap VCR is also shocking. Compare a early Sony Betamax deck to one of the $49 VCRs you could buy at the end of their era.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I still have a VCR that I very occasionally use to watch some old VHS tapes. Nostalgia nite, with buttered popcorn. The OP article will probably be the kick in the butt I need to send those tapes off for copying to DVD.

When my VCR finally dies, I'll probably miss most the flashing green "12:00". It indicates that in 31 years, I never did RTFM to figure out how to set the time. And never will. One finds one's inner rebel in the least significant places....

</comment><comment><USER20> Its not so much the vinyl comparison, as it is there is a a lot of content that never made it to DVD, let alone blu-ray. It took decades for the Osamu Tezuka Unico films to get a release on DVD, and some movies may never see one. The cult animated series The Bionic Six has yet to see such. While youtube exists, it's vulnerable to releasing edited or incomplete versions of the originals.

</comment><comment><USER21> I got a lot of movies on VHS rated G to R movies in a box in my basement. Last VCR I had ate tapes and I had to quit using it as I didn't know how to fix that.

I know there are DVD and VHS hybrids that were able to copy VHS tapes to DVD-R disks. But that can't be done with copy protection in the VHS tapes.

My wife and I have our wedding in 1997 on two VHS tapes, I haven't had a capture card to convert it to MP4 files or whatever. We got a lot of tapes in 8MM format and the advanced format that replaced it using video cameras as well. I don't make much money because I am disabled and trying to get better so I can write code again. So paying a professional to transfer it would cost too much.

In Thailand they quit using VHS tapes and went to the VideoCD format as CD players are cheaper to make than VHS VCRs, plus when they pirate a movie it is on VideoCD format using 3 or 4 CDs to play the whole movie. In the USA we went to Video DVD disks (Red Box or Family Video, etc), or BluRay disks.

</comment><comment><USER22> > At the time, the machines cost $50,000 apiece. But that did not stop orders > from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Mr. > Pfost. "This represented an amount almost as great as a year's gross income > for Ampex," he wrote[1].

Now, that's a hockey stick.

[1][http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/technology/the-long- final-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/technology/the-long-final- goodbye-of-the-vcr.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER23> I have no nostalgia toward VHS tapes. They degrade too easily.

In fact, I made digital backups of all my dvds and got rid of the physical media.

Backup is easy and I can stream my entire collection to every room in the house (or my computer/phone when I'm outside).

</comment><comment><USER24> > _last year's figures reported just 750,000 sales worldwide_

Hacker, you chew on that while you struggle to sell some half-decent and useful app to twenty people. :)

</comment><comment><USER25> 750 000 units per year still looks like a decent figure. At $100 a piece they'd still be making $75M in sales...

<comment><USER26> They don't even go for $100 a pop at retail, much less at white-box wholesale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > but last year's figures reported just 750,000 sales worldwide...

Wow.

I can't see anyone mourning the passing of VHS. Dreadful quality. Whereas in the audio arena CDs didn't improve on Vinyl, DVD technology was way better than VHS.

</comment><comment><USER28> Obligatory video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4iw8Ppo1o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4iw8Ppo1o)

</comment><comment><USER29> Funai owns sanyo, magnavox, emerson.

[http://www.funai.us/](http://www.funai.us/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Can a VCR record HD broadcasts? I've never really thought about this because my use of the 2 never overlapped.

<comment><USER31> No, VCR can only record SD.

Although I believe you can use a digital converter/tuner.

<comment><USER32> What defines the definition in VCR tape? The size of the magnetic grains in the tape or something like that? Is it possible to manufacture a special magnetic VCR tape that could write DVD-quality definition?

<comment><USER33> In practice it'd just be the standard of the signal that's being recorded (PAL/NTSC/SECAM). Wouldn't surprise me if the actual tape is capable of handling more..

<comment><USER15> Consumer VHS VCRs could not reproduce the full fidelity of a broadcast NTSC picture. Commercial VCRs, which typically used Betamax, were better and used by broadcasters until digital took over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I still have a Funai VCR I use to record a few programs. Works with 720 scan lines and savescthe cable DVR fee.

</comment><comment><USER35> A lot of great memories - RIP!

</comment><comment><USER36> That's good for the _free software community_, as most of the VCR's ship with proprietary, closed source software. Notice how I didn't say open source software. The term open source software is beginning to be a marketing term. You have "open source software" companies like GitLab, who claim they are an "open source company", but their primary product is closed source.</comment>


Pre-Launch Tips for Your Startup - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/pre-launch-tips-for-your-startup-aedf4bd4393c <comment><USER2> I had this entire giant post written out for you.

I looked at your history and you are growth-hacking your HN. You admitted the game in this post.

You are re-posting old content like it is new content, to build your points.</comment>


4 Steps Towards Total Life Transformation - <AUTHOR> http://www.tryary.com/news/538/4-steps-towards-total-life-trans

<comment><USER2> step 1 quit job step 2 buy corvette step 3 drive to reno step 4 lose it all playing blackjack</comment>


A Call to Arms: Supporting Matrix - <AUTHOR> https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/07/a-call-to-arms-supporting-matrix/ <comment><AUTHOR> (oops, the blog link melted under all the attention but it's fixed again now).

Just wanted to say that of all the communities on the 'net, HN has been one of the most enthusiastic about the potential of Matrix. Trying to build an entirely open decentralised network that can support better-than-Slack style collaboration is a tonne of work; I'd estimate it's about 6x more work than building the equivalent centralised service. Plus the amount of effort that we've put into decentralised end-to-end encryption ([https://matrix.org/git/olm/about](https://matrix.org/git/olm/about) etc) is _enormous_ , and now very nearly complete, having got solutions in place for (optionally) sharing message history on demand between devices, handling race conditions during splitbrains, etc.

In short, we've put a lot of work into Matrix and we really want to continue doing so with at least the same level of momentum we've had to date. But as of next week, this is going to require support from the community - <USER2> donations and corporate sponsorship, at least in the short/medium term. So if you believe in the promise of decentralisation and restoring power over communication back to the users, your support would be _hugely_ appreciated.

Also, folks may be specifically interested in the 'Reflections' section at the end of the post, which points out that in the near future Matrix is going to be forced to address an even bigger issue than open comms - namely the ability to handle propaganda and let users filter their content (to avoid spam, propaganda, abuse, etc) without being trapped in an invisible filter-bubble or echo-chamber. This stuff is still vapourware right now, but could be literally world-changing if we get it right.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks to those who consider supporting directly.

\-- Matthew / Arathorn

<comment><USER3> As a competitor (or "competitor," I don't think decentralized services actually compete with each other in the traditional sense), I just want to say:

Matrix is an amazing project with an incredibly hard-working team. If you can afford to, please stop what you're doing right now and give them money. Or code. Or both. We can win this thing!

\-- Urbit

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the things that gives us (Matrix) enormous hope for the future is the shift we've seen in the Decentralised Web community over the last few years, where projects who in the past might have competed now support each other.

In the end, there is an _incredibly_ small handful of developers working on decentralised infrastructure, who generally share very similar ideology and goals, pitted against an entire industry which defaults to holding users hostage in silos. We gotta stick together to prevail :)

So, Urbit: huge thanks for the support - we really appreciate it. And good luck on your side too!

<comment><USER3> I agree - I see this Benjamin Franklin ("if we don't all stand together, we shall all hang separately") attitude everywhere.

But I don't think this new attitude is an accident. It's not just because we're good people, or even good engineers. It's an inevitable consequence of what we're trying to do.

Fundamentally, _all decentralized systems are one big federation_. If two decentralized systems can't talk to each other, that's because no one needs to connect them yet. There is never a question of whether the connection _can_ be made, as with centralized systems.

In short: for decentralized systems, the n in Metcalfe's law ("the value of a network is proportional to n^2, where n is its user count" \- I think it's more like n log n, but whatever) is the number of users not in any decentralized network, but in _all decentralized networks_. (It also should add any centralized networks that you can gateway to.)

What this means in practice for Urbit and Matrix: if both Urbit and Matrix succeed, a gateway is inevitable. It's inevitable because (a) it will be demanded and (b) no one can prevent it. Then, Urbit will benefit from Matrix's network effect and vice versa.

So economically, we're not competitors. We're colleagues. So building a positive relationship is a professional no-brainer. In the new decentralized world, the only reason to be a jerk to someone else is that you're actually a jerk. You'll see this, but it isn't common -- at all.

(However, our domain is googleable and yours isn't. Owned! We'll just have to link to you :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thank god we can finally give money to support you folks. For the past year I've been waiting for the day that I can fund the development of Matrix (for context, in the past they made it clear that they didn't feel they needed funding because they all had jobs working on Matrix).

I have just pledged 50EUR a month (kudos for providing _two_ free software systems for donations -- though GNU Taler would've been another nice addition). I would also pledge my time if I wasn't already working overtime on other free software work. To everyone who just reads HN comments and skips the articles -- if you have the means, donate: { [https://patreon.com/matrixdotorg](https://patreon.com/matrixdotorg) ; [https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg](https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg) ; 1LxowEgsquZ3UPZ68wHf8v2MDZw82dVmAE }.

Matrix is truly a very revolutionary piece of technology, and they deserve far more support than they're getting. I'm gladly investing now in the hopes that the Matrix of the future will deliver on what I see them doing. I'm really hoping that one day people will switch _to Matrix_ because of its features and not because I badgered them to do so. Here's hoping.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thank you cyphar! That is very generous and hugely appreciated :) We will be doing everything we can to keep Matrix growing and evolving as fast as we possibly can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is Matrix?

Matrix is an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication over IP. It can be used to power Instant Messaging, VoIP/WebRTC signalling, Internet of Things communication - or anywhere you need a standard HTTP API for publishing and subscribing to data whilst tracking the conversation history.

Matrix defines the standard, and provides open source reference implementations of Matrix-compatible Servers, Clients, Client SDKs and Application Services to help you create new communication solutions or extend the capabilities and reach of existing ones.

What is Matrix's Mission?

Matrix's initial goal is to fix the problem of fragmented IP communications: letting users message and call each other without having to care what app the other user is on - making it as easy as sending an email.

The longer term goal is for Matrix to act as a generic HTTP messaging and data synchronisation system for the whole web - allowing people, services and devices to easily communicate with each other, empowering users to own and control their data and select the services and vendors they want to use.

<comment><USER6> Isn't HTTP already a generic messaging and data synchronisation system for the whole web?

How will Matrix be anything other than another stack in the field of silos?

Genuine question. I'm not trying to be combative.

Edit: After doing some more reading through the matrix docs, it seems that the goal is to make an _extremely_ easy to implement/setup endpoint that any 'silo' can easily include. This Matrix endpoint will automagically connect to the Matrix endpoint on other 'silos' to facilitate message transfers.

Is this accurate?

<comment><AUTHOR> HTTP itself doesn't give you any standard way to synchronise blobs of real- time data (IMs, VoIP signalling, etc) between servers, or even really between servers and clients.

Sure you can write a webapp which uses some combination of long-lived GET, PUT, websockets, HTTP/2 Push etc to 'push' realtime messages around the place, but there's no standard way of doing it; each app makes up its own fragmented and proprietary set of APIs.

So Matrix fixes this by defining a standard HTTP API (which can also be used with other RPC transports if you prefer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Creator of Ruma (Matrix apps/libs built in Rust) here. If you're not already familiar with Matrix, this article won't help much in convincing you to support it. I'd recommend reading our Introduction to Matrix[0] and Why Matrix Matters[1]. Keep in mind they are written for a largely non-technical audience and are intended to explain what Matrix is conceptually without a lot of implementation detail.

I generally don't think Patreon is a good way to fund software development, but I will be contributing anyway because the work the Matrix team is doing is critical. Open, secure communication on the Internet is one of the most important and relevant issues today.

The Matrix team has been great to work with in developing Ruma. As Matthew mentions in the post, our development has been slowed somewhat by lack of updates to the Matrix spec, but they've had the Ruma team's full support in prioritizing end-to-end encryption in Riot, as it's simply a more urgent priority than enabling independent implementations of the spec. It's been clear to us that the only thing preventing improvements to the spec is the lack of bandwidth on the Matrix team, and in that sense, today's news is actually good news, because now we have a chance to help increase their bandwidth beyond what their parent company could provide.

[0] [https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/](https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/) [1] [https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/why/](https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/why/)

<comment><USER8> What advantage does Matrix offer over IRC?

<comment><USER9> Server-side history storage, optional end to end encryption, mobile clients with push notifications (the client doesn't have to maintain a persistent connection), voice/video chat, file uploads (and embeds for certain filetypes)... among other things.

<comment><USER10> Also it cleanly bridges to IRC so it's not a one-or-the-other situation. Was really impressed when I looked at it a while back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope this works well. I love Matrix and Riot. It's what I dream XMPP would be.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'll do a donation, if anything, to show my support to what you are trying to achieve. I wish Matrix and anyone working on it the best.

Arathorn, links to matrix.org and riot.im on Patreon are all plain HTTP; is it voluntary? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> oops, the Patreon wysiwyg HTML editor was autolinking to plain HTTP; now fixed. thanks. (and thanks for donation!!)

<comment><USER12> Awesome, thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Please accept donations through OpenCollective as well. I'd prefer to donate through another open source project that I have great faith in.

[https://opencollective.com](https://opencollective.com)

<comment><USER4> Note that libreapay is also a free software payment system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why not do an ICO?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're considering it - there are some places where it fits very nicely (e.g. paying to prove you're not a spammer; providing a token for apps/widgets/bots with Matrix; money transfers within Matrix)... but we also have our hands _very_ full with the core tech of Matrix itself without opening another battlefront.

Meanwhile in the short term, we're hoping that Patreon/Liberapay donations and corporate sponsorship will let us focus on the current work to be done immediately.

<comment><USER15> Are those things really comparable in scale?

It looks like the typical ICO with a half-decent execution and product backing it raises a few million dollars.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, you're right that Patreon-style donations are typically $1K-$10K a month, whereas an ICO can produce millions of ether or bitcoin. So it's a tricky compromise: whether to pause core Matrix work to pursue an ICO (on the assumption that the ICO bubble doesn't pop in the next few months)... or whether to try to get corporate funding/sponsorship and Patreon-style donations in order to keep laser-focus on the Matrix core.

As per the earlier post: we haven't closed the door on an ICO; it will likely depend on how much sponsorship we get in the next few weeks.

<comment><USER15> I agree it's a hassle - it would be nice if there was something like a kickstarter for ICOs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How We Deliver Global SSL with Let's Encrypt - <AUTHOR> https://fly.io/articles/how-we-deliver-global-ssl-with-lets-encrypt/ <comment><USER2> Would greatly benefit from explaining why they couldn't do dns-01 challenges successfully.

This an issue all the way from individuals with crappy or misconfigured DNS locally to whole TLDs (fortunately no really major ones) with non-working DNS. But it's often a teachable moment, something others can learn from.

<comment><USER3> DNS challenges weren't broken, they technically worked just fine. But they added an additional step to our setup process, and we were losing customers during signup because of it. We can still do the DNS challenge it's just not how we guide people through our setup.

Basically with the DNS challenge, we had to send people away to make DNS changes, have them come back and confirm they were approved, and then we sent them away _again_ to make another DNS change. It was kind of brutal.

(edit: we also tweaked the article to not imply "broken"!)

<comment><USER4> Why would you need to send them away twice for DNS changes?!

<comment><USER5> I'm assuming mrkurt meant that you send your users once to create a dns record (in case you haven't already) - you can add any hostname you want on Fly, it doesn't have to exist, yet. Then you go and create a DNS challenge for Let's Encrypt. Obviously, these 2 steps are orthogonal, but this is the reality of user onboarding.

<comment><USER4> But why would that need to be in two steps?

<comment><USER3> Well, it's two DNS entries. You could do them both at the same time, but people were getting that TXT record wrong pretty frequently, which would have meant https connections getting an invalid certificate had they changed their actual hostname at the same time.

Since we control the http response once DNS changes, we don't have that problem. And it's simpler for people to create CNAME/ALIAS records.

<comment><USER4> Erm ... you had people create TXT records? Why would you do that? Wouldn't people then have to manually update the TXT record on each certificate renew?!

Why not have them create a DNAME, a delegation, or just two CNAMEs?

<comment><USER3> txt records are the only way to do the dns-01 challenge with certbot/Let's Encrypt.

The http-01 challenge is simpler, we can get people setup with one CNAME/A-record.

Once we're serving traffic, we can do all renewals with an http challenge and they don't need to change DNS ever again.

<comment><USER6> This is an often overlooked option, but you can indeed solve the DNS challenge by having someone create a CNAME record for _acme-challenge.example.com that points to a domain under your control, and then serve the TXT record needed to verify the challenge from that domain. acme-dns[1] provides a nice implementation of this idea, as well as a more detailed explanation.

[1]: [https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns](https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns)

<comment><USER7> Whoa really? I didn't know this option existed. This would make these types of configurations a lot better.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, not trying to mock you, but I'm really curious how you (or anyone else on this thread who seems to be surprised by the possibility) managed to not know.

I mean, assuming you do know that CNAMEs are a thing, this reads to me like "well, yes, HTTP can do redirects, but I didn't know you could also redirect requests for images!" ...

I guess what I am wondering is: What is/was your mental model of CNAMEs that they could redirect DNS resolution, but then it's somehow surprising that they can redirect DNS resolution!?!

<comment><USER3> I don't think we'd considered a CNAME to redirect the specific txt records that Lets Encrypt requires. It's not intuitively obvious that they support redirects for those lookups.

<comment><USER4> But how is it not?! I mean, apart from the fact that you never know whether software is buggy, of course.

CNAMEs are not a feature of application software, but rather a mandatory part of the DNS specification that any standards-compliant resolver has to implement. As they claim to be using DNS, that obviously implies the claim that they implement what the DNS specification defines, and that would necessarily include following CNAMEs.

<comment><USER7> Part of it was that I'm not very familiar with the internals of the challenges and I didn't know that `_acme-challenge` was _the_ record name for the dns-01 challenge. (I probably could have put 2+2 together if I realized this much.)

Another part was that I've never read the dns rfc and honestly I've only ever spent enough time messing with dns until it worked. And I've never seen a CNAME for a record that's resolves to anything but A (or AAAA or another CNAME). So I suppose it was a combination of a failure of imagination, lack of knowledge, and lack of experience. Or maybe, "I dunno I never thought about it".

But now I know! CNAMEs work for all records regardless of type, forwarding the entire lookup elsewhere, which I guess is why they require no other records exist with that name. Pretty cool.

I suppose I could have learned that with a bit less incredulity but hey, it got me here in the end. I guess a link to the RFC might be relevant here [CNAME 1]. I'll probably look through it later, maybe there's some other cool features I didn't know about.

[1]: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting product - fly.io

It's essentially a reverse proxy as a service. Sort of like Cloudflare but with what looks like a nicer API, and custom domain name SSL eg. for multi tenant apps.

It was a bit pricy when I plugged in how many requests we get per month on our servers, easily in 5-figure per month. Having said that, internally we built most of their selling points already.

<comment><USER9> I agree with the pricy bit. I've made a calculation, and it would cost me 1200$ a month to run what Cloudflare does for free.

Now, I get that free is not an option. 50/100$ a month is probably OK. But that's beyond reasonable. And prices change depending on where people visit you from (!?)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what kind of app you're running, but our product/pricing are targeted almost entirely at SaaS apps that need multiple hostnames — which is $2500/mo min on CF: [https://fly.io/mix/custom- hostnames](https://fly.io/mix/custom-hostnames)

It's really expensive to do that on top of CloudFlare, and most apps like that aren't using a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

We're not _yet_ a great option as a general purpose CDN replacement (both pricing and featureset) but we're getting there, and are pushing prices down continuously. It's more expensive to buy bandwidth and power in certain cities, too, hence the different pricing per region.

If you're willing, I'd love to know what your traffic breakdown is and how you got to that $1200/mo number. You can email me if you'd like! (firstname.lastname@example.com)

<comment><USER8> Agree it is not a trivial task to build out the infrastructure for custom SSL. We've done it ourselves and it's just now another service component we have to manage. ie. more time sink for something that isn't our business core feature

For others who are reading this, the whole process involves reading and storing private keys using asymmetric ciphers and all that. Definitely more stuff than we'd like to be responsible for.

Will definitely keep an eye on fly.io for new features! Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> LE is awesome.

Clients want an SSL server and it lets me set it up in 10 minutes without additional costs.

<comment><USER11> Yes this is a delight compared to the old way of having to hand over $10 or whatever to someone for a certificate that one had to remember to renew in a timely fashion versus just using a cron job now with LE.

<comment><USER12> Why use a cron job? I have certbot running in one Docker container, the .well- known route directing to the one dedicated Docker host running certbot, and whenever certbot renews the certificate, it writes the cert to the NAS share that is only mounted on the LBs and then triggers a SIGKILL to the haproxy docker containers (which causes haproxy to re-read the cert file and configuration).

Fully automated, no cronjobs to fail. In addition, I have a monitoring on all LBs that verifies the expiration time - it has never hit so far. That cronjob/monitoring is something everyone should have anyway because a well working monitoring system can alert you to so many other possible failure states...

<comment><USER13> _> I have certbot running in one Docker container, the .well-known route directing to the one dedicated Docker host running certbot, and whenever certbot renews the certificate, it writes the cert to the NAS share that is only mounted on the LBs and then triggers a SIGKILL to the haproxy docker containers (which causes haproxy to re-read the cert file and configuration)._

Is this really more stable than a simple cronjob? It is far more complicated, for sure, so there should be significant benefits to make up for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On a side-note, ManageEngine Key Manager Plus can automate certificate management (request, acquire, deploy, track and renew) for public facing websites.

Video link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYelZided-E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYelZided-E) [https://www.manageengine.com/key-manager/](https://www.manageengine.com/key- manager/)

Disclaimer: *I work for ManageEngine

</comment><comment><USER15> It's a x.509 certificate, not ssl. Also, the ssl protocol has been deprecated in favour of tls.

I'll let tls certificate slide but ssl certificate just triggers me too much.

<comment><USER13> What's the point of this nitpicking?

The title is perfectly fine for its purpose.

First, thanks to the terminology used by almost all commercial CAs, "SSL Certificates" is still the most commonly known term for that. Like it or not, but if you want to reach a wide audience, you need to say SSL in addition to TLS.

Second, even fewer people know the term X.509, insisting on that is like insisting on saying RFC-7540 instead of HTTP/2.

Third, in the very first sentence the article sets everything straight:

 _> We've been hard at work making Let's Encrypt TLS certificates as simple and safe as possible for developers and creators of all kinds_

So ... is this an instance of commenting before actually having had just a tiny look at the article?

<comment><USER16> Because it is important that everyone understand that SSL is dead and TLS is the replacement. SSL/TLS is forgivable, saying SSL is sort of like writing a headline "How this company uses VHS" when you actually meant Betamax. It's misleading.

<comment><USER13> I still don't get it. This is clarified in the very first sentence of TFA. Why do you think it needs to be stuffed into the title?

<comment><USER17> We wouldn't need to have this conversation if the title said TLS.

<comment><USER18> You're correct, but you're fighting an uphill battle: [https://certsimple.com/blog/ssl-or-tls](https://certsimple.com/blog/ssl-or- tls)

<comment><USER19> When talking to management, I try to avoid the acronyms (SSL, TLS, HTTPS, etc.), and in this case, I've coined a phrase that I find be equally understood by management, devops, and sysadmins alike. I tell them that we need to "encrypt server X with a secure certificate" (or "secure cert" depending who I'm talking to, which is as short as the shortest acronym syllable-wise). It's vague enough to cover the spectrum of acronyms in a timeless (for the foreseeable future) way, but unambiguous enough that everyone understands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sorry a little off topic, but any idea when Let's Encrypt will (if ever) support wildcard SSL certs? We provision ([https://commando.io](https://commando.io)) a subdomain for each of our accounts (thus thousands of subdomains) using a wildcard DNS A record. Willing to pay, as long as it is less than the $99 a year currently paying through NameCheap.

<comment><USER5> LE still says Jan '18 - [https://letsencrypt.org/upcoming- features/](https://letsencrypt.org/upcoming-features/)

<comment><USER5> for the time being, you could try to issue SAN certs with LE (from their website):

"If you have a lot of subdomains, you may want to combine them into a single certificate, up to a limit of 100 Names per Certificate. Combined with the above limit, that means you can issue certificates containing up to 2,000 unique subdomains per week."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Completely unrelated, what is the blog framework / cms you are using the the fly.io blog? It is amazing!

<comment><USER5> Thanks! We're using ghost.org and of course all our illustrations are done by Annie ([https://twitter.com/annieruygt](https://twitter.com/annieruygt)) :)

<comment><USER5> Oh, and we use the basic Ghost theme, Casper, with some design tweaks.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the insight! Really appreciate it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Clearalias.com is another service that provides SSL multi-tenant apps and SaaSes that want to provide secured custom domains for their customers.

There's only one step required by the customer which is to point their DNS to Clearalias, no API calls or extra set up by the app or the customers.

<comment><USER5> Ohai! Yeah, you can do the same thing with Fly (which is what most of our customers do - just point DNS at Fly). I cannot stress enough how nice it is being able to build on top of Let's Encrypt! _bows_

The API is mainly for people who'd like to automate the process, because they want to provide custom domains for their customers (so more for B2B use-cases) ;)

<comment><USER23> The grandparent post means that the customer hostnsmes also work without any API calls if configured properly.</comment></comment></comment>


The Forgotten Legend of Silicon Valley's Flying Saucer Man - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek <comment><USER2> The actual article: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-19/the- forgo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-19/the-forgotten- legend-of-silicon-valley-s-flying-saucer-man?srnd=businessweek-v2)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Terribly sorry about giving the wrong url. I loved the article and thought others would enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-19/the- forgo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-19/the-forgotten- legend-of-silicon-valley-s-flying-saucer-man)</comment>


Ask HN: Where to get icons for virtual gifts? - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
We're adding virtual gifts to Ramamia, and looking for the best way to get icons for Virtual Gifts.  Is there a good place to get icons (for cheap) that can legally be resold as virtual gifts?  Any experience with specific designers or design sites (ie-99 designs) for this?
PS- If you're a designer that specializes in this, shoot us an email: email@example.com .  PG is probably right in that it's something worth paying someone good. <comment><USER2> I wouldn't be surprised if it was worth paying a designer to make them. They're supposed to seem valuable.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the route we'll go. We've looked at services that offer virtual goods as a platform, but they own the content. This means if they go out of business, our users lose what they paid for.

Trying to see if any other HN users have designers they've used that do really well with designing gifts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've used these design contests from the following forums. You'll be surprised of their quality. <http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=94> <http://www.webmaster-talk.com/graphic-design-contests/>

</comment><comment><USER4> You guys look into someone like Viximo instead of inventing your own system from the ground up?</comment>


EXE Icon Extraction with PHP5 - <AUTHOR> http://mrkmg.com/extracting-the-icons-from-an-exe-in-php-on-linux/

<comment><USER2> Based on the title I was expecting to find PHP code that parses the exe PE header to extract the icon files of the resources. icoutils will not be available or possible to install on every web hosting.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, kind of disappointing. I was expecting cringe-inducing bytestream parsing in PHP. Booh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title should be "EXE Icon Extraction with icotool and wrestool".

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious, what was your use case for this ?

<comment><USER6> Let's say you build a file explorer in PHP, with this you could show the proper icon for .exe files</comment></comment>


US Copyright Office Wimps Out on Right to Repair - <AUTHOR> http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/06/us-copyright-office-wimps-out-on-right-to-repair.html <comment><USER2> Every time you buy instead of pirate, you fund the people responsible for this, enabling them to buy even worse laws.

<comment><USER3> (Disclaimer: violating copyright is not equivalent to stealing. This is just an analogy.)

By your logic, people in the US should almost never pay for anything. A fraction of almost all of our purchases goes toward creating anti-consumer laws.

<comment><USER4> That would be excessive and impractical; just because you can't go the whole way toward doing something, it doesn't mean that any measure along the way is useless. Supporting copyright less is better than supporting it more, as I'm sure GP would agree.

<comment><USER3> > _That would be excessive and impractical_

That's the only reason not to steal everything? Just that it's impractical? Not because only a fraction of it goes to bad laws, whereas most of the money goes to paying the people who created it?

I think you missed my point entirely. My point is that when you buy absolutely anything, you're giving money to something bad. You can't control how producers of goods/services will use your money.

Copyleft advocates spend a lot of time defending their circumvention of copyright laws, but what about the actual content producers? Where is all the energy being spent to make sure they're still making money?

I'm not talking about big studios. I'm talking about directors, animators, musicians, etc. Why is there so much more effort put into BitTorrent clients than into something like Patreon to support those people?

<comment><USER5> > Why is there so much more effort put into BitTorrent clients than into > something like Patreon to support those people?

People generally don't want to pay for anything. They shape their moral narrative to match that. (Obviously I'm generalizing, and there's always exceptions)

<comment><USER3> Exactly. My point is that, if this is an ideology, it's not consistent. If people want to live in a world where things that are easy to duplicate (music, movies, etc.) are created by talented people who need to make a living, then there has to be a way to pay for it. We need a replacement for copyright.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sweet drug clears cholesterol, reverses heart disease–and was found by parents - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2016/04/drug-clears-cholesterol-reverses-heart-disease/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450451)

</comment><comment><USER3> Since that was yesterday's HN I want to just say that as a parent who's son died of cancer at 12 that this shows how little resources in time and money is spent on children with "Small populations" of patients.

This includes every single childhood cancer out there. The kids get 4% of the federal research money and $0.01 from every dollar from American Cancer Society (Light the Night) (Notice they don't have any pictures of children for 4 years now due to parents being so mad at being the poster child that got the least.

Childhood cancers are different then adult cancers and adult cancer treatments don't work for the VAST majority of the kids due to their whole body is growing as fast as the cancer. Adult treatments kills kids. So we now have 1 new drug int he past 20+ years! Ok enough of a rant.

<comment><USER4> Only about 60%[0] of the American Cancer Society revenue goes to charity to begin with so that is to be expected. Most of the cancer charities I've seen (Susan G Komen et all) are rather bad.

[0] [http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...](http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=6495)

<comment><USER3> Well the issue specifically is Childhood Cancer Research funding.

This link will state a good pissed off parents stance on ACS. They raised funds for their daughter and asked people to donate to ACS instead of flowers. Then they realized where their money was going after ACS pulled funding of summer camps across the nation with out any warning.

[http://curechildhoodcancer.ning.com/profiles/blogs/my- though...](http://curechildhoodcancer.ning.com/profiles/blogs/my-thoughts- about-the-american-cancer-society)

<comment><USER5> ok, can someone explain the best places to donate? I've donated to Fred Hutch in the past:

[http://www.fredhutch.org/en.html](http://www.fredhutch.org/en.html)

Who's effective with the money and doing great research?

<comment><USER4> I like this article myself: [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what- is-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the- greatest-good/395768/)

<comment><USER5> That article has nothing to do with cancer research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The paper in Science Translational Medicine:

[http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/8/333/333ra50](http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/8/333/333ra50)

This does sound promising. The compound (2-Hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin, or CD) was approved by the FDA in 2009, but only for compassionate use in children for treating Niemann-Pick disease intravenously (IV). Clinical trials are ongoing for non-compassionate access (again, only for treating Niemann- Pick).

However intramuscular (IM) use for treatment of atherosclerosis in the general population probably will have to go through the entire Phase I-II-III clinical test cycle before CD will become available to that end. That's likely to take another 5-10 years, since such trials have not yet begun. I can't guess whether the Niemann-Pick trials might expedite acceptance of CD for a secondary target using a different delivery method (IM vs IV). Maybe.

</comment><comment><USER7> Small discussion from yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450451)

</comment><comment><USER8> The parents want to try a novel method of delivery to treat their kids' shared disease.

Their _twin_ kids.

You see where I'm going with this? I'm going to go sit in the corner now, and think about why the first thought that came to my mind was so horrible.

<comment><USER7> Another way to look at it is only risking harming one of them, so I'm not so sure it is horrible to consider starting out only treating one of them.

(In this case the drug doesn't seem to be a big risk though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a great PBS series to watch if you want to learn more about cancer.

[http://www.pbs.org/show/story-cancer-emperor-all- maladies/](http://www.pbs.org/show/story-cancer-emperor-all-maladies/)

It's based on this book, which I have not read: [http://www.amazon.com/The- Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperor-All- Maladies-Biography/dp/1439170916)

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems like in many cases, just trying many things on many tissues is whats needed to find solutions. I know there are groups like Opentrons and there are groups out there working on snythetic tissue generation, but I wonder is the bottle neck tissue availability, researcher examination time or studying long term effects. Seems like we need to open all these bottle necks up to really iterate.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would like to know what the side effects of using this as an anti- cholesterol treatment are.

It seems like this drug could be a general benefit to the population.

<comment><USER11> From the sounds of things there's nothing really when taken orally, though I'm not sure if taking this orally helps with cardiovascular issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > the parents kept digging into the research

That wasn't probably in the cards when it meant spending days or weeks in libraries, with fewer chances of hitting gold.

It's almost enough to pay for all the rest of the "net experience".

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if simple compounds like this get forgotten because they are not patentable, so there is no monetary drive to do the research.

<comment><USER14> It likely wasn't picked up by Big Pharma because the research was for a disease that affects a couple hundred people in the states. There's no money in that disease, but if the research had been in cardiovascular disease, Big Pharma would have been all over it (which it looks like is now the case).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How many more compounds are out there with valuable research behind them that we haven't realized?

<comment><USER16> Many! Science exists because the world is not yet fully known and isn't likely to be anytime soon!</comment></comment>