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I know this wasn't an entirely honest question, but yes, absolutely. You probably see Vimeo videos every day without realizing it, because most of the viewing isn't done on vimeo.com. It's videos on other sites, and the customers can pay to have their branding, not Vimeo's, so if you're buying something online and it has a product video... might be Vimeo. Or one of those websites that have big header splashes with full-video backgrounds. Or a subscription "channel" like Martha Stewart TV with mobile and smart-TV apps. Or a million other things.

Once at Vimeo, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I was working on putting out the fires of an extremely weird operational issue where a bug in a cloud provider's software-defined networking stack led to corrupted HTTP responses, which got stored in CDN caches, causing persistent playback issues for users (playback not starting, or locking up in the middle). The cloud provider had reported it as a "packet loss" issue, because for the most part the misdirected packets would get rejected by the receiving TCP stack for having the wrong sequence number or whatever, but one time in a billion they would get through and wreak havoc... and we were moving enough traffic that those one-in-a-billion flukes were happening constantly.

I was musing in the shared chat with one of our CDN partners that, with no real way to tell what files were affected, the only way to fix the playback issues for everyone (short of waiting a month for all the cached objects to age out) would be to simply purge the whole cache. I immediately got a bold all caps DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT in response. If we flushed the whole cache, the origin traffic to refill it would have saturated some internet links to the point of DoSing other customers and probably getting on CNN that evening. And that was then. Traffic levels got significantly higher later on.

Lots of custom infrastructure. A bit of losing money as well, but moderately profitable on the whole. They were a publicly traded company in their own right from 2021 to 2025, so you can look at the 10-Ks. There was a massive boost in business from COVID in 2020 and early 2021... which meant that the spinoff in May 2021 left investors in a position to be perpetually disappointed, sort of like Peloton.

In a parallel universe, they switched to RFC6979 in 2013, but the implementation had a bug that wasn't detected for years, allowing compromise of lots of keys. In that parallel universe, HN is criticizing them for following fashion instead of just leaving an already-proven piece of crypto code in place.

It's an unfortunate bug, an unfortunate oversight, but I think they made a perfectly reasonable choice at the time.

Plasma Antenna 7 years ago

For normal people... pretty much nothing. You need power to keep the plasma hot, it's a safety hazard, and it's not cheap. For electrically-small antennas it looks like it might be slightly more efficient than a wire antenna of the same size (or slightly smaller than a wire antenna of the same efficiency) but most of the advantages listed pertain to military applications, and that seems to be who's driving the research.

Oh, did this just launch today? That's funny, I thought I only noticed it today. In any case, I'm using it already. I was going to build SAML into this app that we have deployed on GCE, so that employees can access it over the internet as long as they're authenticated, but instead I put it behind an IAP, and our Google auth already talks to our SAML server, so Google is effectively doing the same work for us.

Which is a disingenuous answer since he's not even using the SDK. The ChromeCast at least notionally supports an open protocol (DIAL). Only it doesn't, because if you try to use it with software other than Google's, it breaks.

I've been using MightyText in beta for months. It doesn't resemble iMessage in any way, and it's not supposed to. I have no idea where the headline came from. It's not an IM service. It is, simply, an app for sending and receiving text messages through your phone from a PC. So if you're at a computer and you receive a text, or you want to text someone, instead of taking your phone out of your pocket and using the little screen and the little keyboard, you do it right on the computer. Simple, useful, end of story.