instruction stringlengths 4 105 | output stringlengths 8 56.7k |
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"How-Tos" for Rolling Your Own Short URLs? | jlees: Create your own URL shortening service with Heroku and Shorty: http://brad.posterous.com/create-your-own-url-shorteningSome useful stuff to go on there even if you're not using Heroku. |
"How-Tos" for Rolling Your Own Short URLs? | simonw: I wrote up my experiences building a vanity short URL service a few weeks ago: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Apr/11/revcanonical/ - algorithms and code included |
"How-Tos" for Rolling Your Own Short URLs? | mdakin: I would associate each URL with a sequential number. And express the number using base-36 (0...9 + a...z). I don't see the need to use obfuscation for this application but if desired I'd hash the URL + a secret and prepend that fixed-length hash to the base-36 sequential number. I'd express the hash in base-... |
"How-Tos" for Rolling Your Own Short URLs? | chacha102: Here is a related question. Is creating a hash of letters and numbers instead of just using an ID beneficial in anyway? |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | natch: e) Am I fucking crazy?Maybe yes, but taking a leap into the unknown is the kind of crazy thing that more people should do. Progress, unreasonable man, and all that. Go for it! |
real world examples of numbers with 3 decimal places | izak30: Sales Tax in my city is 6.5% so as a decimal it hits the mark. |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | malbiniak: live in the east bay (oakland, berkeley, alameda), not the city. look for roommates, not a studio. move near a BART station. whenever someone starts the sentence with "hey want to go..." involuntarily say no. |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | zaveri: Check out the Hacker House v2 http://tinyurl.com/cvtgyu. Pretty reasonable rent. |
"How-Tos" for Rolling Your Own Short URLs? | ivankirigin: I made one for Tipjoy where I mapped a content ID to short string, and loaded a frame like the Digg Bar where people could donate to the site and view the content. For example: http://tipjoy.com/2w/Here is the python code I used to "shrink" and unshrink the content ID. def shrink( id ):
validCharact... |
Multiple Browsers to manage multiple sites | johns: Chrome briefly had profile support in one of the dev builds but it has since been removed. I hope they add it back soon as I found it very useful for this sort of situation. |
Albums or songs? | kleevr: When I'm (attempting) a critical listening of music. I prefer to explore it in it's larger context (typically as an album). Some 'albums', definitely not all CDs, have a greater architecture than any one song can completely embody, and thus the work is more meaningful in the larger context. (Think conceptua... |
"How-Tos" for Rolling Your Own Short URLs? | ashleyw: 1.to_s(36) #=> "1"
10.to_s(36) #=> "a"
100.to_s(36) #=> "2s"
123456.to_s(36) #=> "2n9c"
Ruby. Where the number is the id of the record in the database or something. |
Albums or songs? | silentbicycle: Some albums are very deliberately structured to have a narrative, or otherwise stand as a whole, while some really are just a collection of individual songs. It depends more on the particular album than anything, though.Also, there are other factors affecting the album format besides just the musicians' ... |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | gtani: Random thoughts:If you're looking for summer sublets around universities, have you considered Davis? It's an hour and some away with no traffic, but cheaper, and uh, a lot hotter. I don't know anything about the department but I've been impressed by UC Davis recent grads in CS /EE i've worked wtih.people start... |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | jf: b) Inside San Francisco proper, probably. Outside San Francisco, possible for sure! (I suggest living near BART or CalTrain so you can get around without a car.) |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | pz: Living on $1k in the city sounds rough. You'll probably be so stressed for money and busy that you won't even be able to enjoy it. If you're focus right now is building your website, don't distract yourself with contract work and city life. I would recommend just staying with your folks and getting down to it. ... |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | trekker7: Live near UC Berkeley instead, and take BART to SF whenever you want. |
Albums or songs? | Tangurena: I usually purchase CDs.I've had hard drives fail. I've had removable (and USB) hard drives stolen. I've lost user accounts to online stores (when they tied them to email addresses I haven't used in years) so I can't reauthorize or redownload what I already paid for. When I lived in South Florida, I found tha... |
What do I need to know before registering a 2 person LLC on Legal Zoom? | charlesju: That the LLC form is really 1 page and 1 follow-up form. This will cost < $100 in total if you spend 10 minutes googling how to do it. (I'm not a lawyer, but this is what I know)1. LLC FAQ
http://www.sos.ca.gov/business/llc/llc_faq.htm2. LLC Form (1 pg)
http://www.sos.ca.gov/business/bpd_forms.htm (search fo... |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | notphilatall: Beware that a lot of networking events take place in 21+ places (read: bars) so that may or may not be a problem.You're planning ahead a lot more than most kids that move to SF for a summer. Most end up homeless on haight street before calling their parents for a ticket home (I've hosted two separate stre... |
What do I need to know before registering a 2 person LLC on Legal Zoom? | phn1x: Legal zoom charges you on top of state fee's. Your state will normally charge you 4-500 bucks. Legal zoom will charge you 100-300 + state fee's.The forms are easy enough to fill out yourself. |
What do I need to know before registering a 2 person LLC on Legal Zoom? | dennykmiu: One thing to keep in mind of a LLC is that the annual franchise fee is not limited to $800. If you start to make money, you will need to pay a fee calculated based on the "gross" revenue, not "net" revenue (which is sales minus expenses). Also, you will need to pay self-employment tax on any money leftover... |
What do I need to know before registering a 2 person LLC on Legal Zoom? | rms: It's really easy to register an LLC in Pennsylvania, you can actually mostly do it online. |
What do I need to know before registering a 2 person LLC on Legal Zoom? | pz: First, I'll echo other people's advice: just file the forms yourself. Yes, its annoying having to handle physical paper and envelopes.However, since you have a partner in this LLC, the really important thing is to set up your "operating agreement". This will decide how the company is controlled, revenue shared, w... |
What do I need to know before registering a 2 person LLC on Legal Zoom? | gojomo: Splitting ownership exactly 50-50 risks deadlock in worst case scenarios. Give someone 50+1 or give a mutually respected third party a tiny share to break ties if all else fails. You probably won't need it, but it's there just in case. |
Best free SEO tools? | SwellJoe: Your brain: Use it to write useful content.We've made zero SEO effort, and our sites are PR7, and get a total of several hundred thousand uniques per month, and they mostly come from natural search results. Our products are boring system administration tools, and we don't worry about traffic (we care about s... |
Nerd - Climbing; what mountains to start with | Tangurena: Here in Colorado, there are peaks called "fourteeners." These are peaks higher than 14k ft. Some are pretty simple hikes. Some are scary. Some are on public land. Some are on private land (so you'll get in trouble if you don't get permission).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenerhttp://www.14ers.com/ (dis... |
Firefox plugin for reading Chinese websites? | lastkarrde: Ubiquity has in place translation for Chinese and other languages. |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | dmolnar: Suggest working on how you're going to meet people now -- figure out which events you'll want to go to, which places to hang out, etc. That will help with contacts, which in turn should help with picking up consulting or a formal internship. You can then use this to help plan where you want to live and whether... |
Did bit torrent really become popular by releasing porn? | wmf: Bram Cohen did test BitTorrent in the very early days by seeding some porn, but I wouldn't attribute BitTorrent's success to that. |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | octane: My honest advice to you is go to college and do drugs and drink booze and have sex, 3 things you've probably never done before in your life. College is an excellent place to do all those things for the first time. The corner of Geary and Polk is not.Get that shit (into and) out of your system before you move ... |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | rmaccloy: I moved here when I was 18 (in 2006) with $1500 in the bank (and no parents to fall back on.) It's tough but doable. I ended up taking a job with an existing startup, but at the time my first priority was being able to eat :)If I were you, I would not move here to do the solo founder thing without having plen... |
Nerd - Climbing; what mountains to start with | dfranke: The Adirondack High Peaks are a nice range for newbies and casual climbers (which probably all I'll ever be). Wright and/or Algonquin Peak via Avalanche Pass is a stunningly beautiful hike. Wright Peak, the easier of the two, is a little tougher than I'd recommend if you've never been up a mountain before, b... |
Any tips for living cheaply in SF? | neilk: I wish you well, and I don't think your plan is totally crazy, but I think $3K is not enough runway for SF. $5K is better. But at $3K, everything has to go right. A single disaster would ruin everything, like:- Your freelance gigs not paying you in time
- Finding that your new roommates are impossible to live wi... |
Unique usernames in educational software | duskwuff: This is the sort of idea that tends to end badly. Given that this is an educational tool, just make the user's graduation year a mandatory part of their username. jsmith is probably not unique, but jsmith2012 is more likely to be. |
What do I need to know before registering a 2 person LLC on Legal Zoom? | reasonattlm: That if you're looking to raise funding, being an LLC will be a continued point of annoyance that will become worse as the level of funding rises. You'll be forced to convert to an S corp as soon as any experienced angels or VCs become involved beause they simply won't do deals with you otherwise - which c... |
Firefox plugin for reading Chinese websites? | robin_reala: A quick trawl through http://addons.mozilla.org/ threw up these:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9931
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11077
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9144I’ve no idea about their respective quality as I don’t speak Chinese, sorry. |
How does a non-hacker get into a start-up? | axod: Learn to hack? At least a bit. That'll give you a bit of street cred.In the early stages you need to be able to quickly 'muck in'. Learn some linux sysadmin, apache setup, email setup, html/php/mysql etc It'll certainly come in useful. |
How does a non-hacker get into a start-up? | andrewljohnson: There is room for fund-raising and marketing at start-ups. If you think you can help start-ups with your skill set, apply for appropriate jobs, and try and network with the industry you want to work in.Or you can start writing some code, and see what happens. Do you have a website? |
How does a non-hacker get into a start-up? | SwellJoe: This has been done to death:http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+b...http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+i...http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+n...And a dozen variations on the theme.Edit: The link filter is stripping the quotes off of thos... |
How does a non-hacker get into a start-up? | octane: Have cash or the ability to get it. That's what all those other activities you mentioned really mean. |
Firefox plugin for reading Chinese websites? | trevelyan: Yes! We produce one with a dictionary of over 200,000 terms. This is the largest and highest quality dictionary available.http://popupchinese.com/tools/pluginAdditional Controls:1. Highlight new words to add them to your dictionary.2. Hit "A" to add any word to your online vocabulary list.3. Hit "D" to chang... |
what do you think of my new blog | RiderOfGiraffes: Included to make it a link:
http://codeinput.comDidn't you post pretty much exactly this a few days ago?(quick search) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583009 |
How does a non-hacker get into a start-up? | tracy: Technology startups require very specific knowledge about particular topics. For example, general business marketing is very different from marketing on the internet. You may think you know it, but if you've never done it, you don't know it. So how about starting a website or something online, and trying to gain... |
real world examples of numbers with 3 decimal places | skwiddor: RDA's and food labellinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_Daily_IntakeThen you can hide the fact they are doing math while teaching them about healthy eating.Incorporate things like http://www.sugarstacks.com/
and http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-200-calories-look-like.htm
and you can have some interest... |
How does a non-hacker get into a start-up? | joeconyers: Sales, business development, and community management are all options. |
How does a non-hacker get into a start-up? | anamax: What value do you add? |
How to fix overwide pre text? | mrduncan: The following seems to take care of the issue in Firefox at least, I haven't had a chance to check in other browsers. pre {
max-width:500px;
overflow-x:scroll;
padding:2px;
} |
How to fix overwide pre text? | noodle: pre{ display: block; width: 95%; overflow: scroll; }
works for me |
How does a non-hacker get into a start-up? | qaexl: Have you looked at Steve Blank's Customer Development stuff that has been making the rounds here? Blank formalized a process for developing customers that has the same impact that formalizing software development process has on software development (reduces risk).Using his process, the technical team will have t... |
How to fix overwide pre text? | teej: Right now, your css reads as follows: pre {
overflow:hidden;
padding:2px;
}
Changing it to the following works for me in both Firefox and Safari: pre {
overflow:auto;
padding:2px;
max-width:500px
} |
What do you need to communicate with a remote team? | thesethings: Right now Google Docs is an invaluable tool for me to collaborate with remote people and teams. It often reduces the need for screensharing software (We all have the same Doc up on our screens, getting editing and updates in realtime).If your tool could have integration with Google Docs, it'd be awesome. ... |
Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges? | _pius: There's jealousy sometimes, but ultimately if you've got skill commensurate (or better) with the name brand of your degree, it's not a problem at all. Most people are cool. If you're an arrogant ass, you'll get treated like one. If you got hired by management based on your school, but you can't code very well... |
Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges? | mmc: Hopefully I know enough about a co-worker's skills to form a good opinion of them before I find out what college they went to. If you bring it up in our first conversation, I'm going to wonder why.On the other hand, if you went to grad school, research is such a small world that this kind of thing comes up more of... |
How to fix overwide pre text? | Caged: Given you've already fixed it with max-width I can't test this, but CSS 3 can also help out. The benefit of this approach is that the container can remain liquid: white-space: pre-wrap; /* css-3 */
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap !important; /* Mozilla, since 1999 */
white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 *... |
Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges? | edw519: "Hackers are some of the most meritocratic and egalitarian people I know..."Maybe you need to meet some new hackers.I have never seen this. Ever.30 years. 90 companies. 1,000,000 lines of code.Maybe it's just because people who know me know better than to bother with details instead of issues.Your "pedigree"... |
Unique usernames in educational software | trevelyan: If people are automatically going to organize themselves into small groups, you don't have a disambiguation problem. Make the email address unique, not the username. |
Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges? | russell: A brand name helps in getting job interviews and it helps open doors. Backlash is very uncommon, unless you are a jerk. |
what do you think of my new blog | wooby: I think it's a good start, and I like the layout.The easiest thing for you to blog about will be your current problems and interests as they're related to software.If you post things like that, without worrying too much about whether the posts are "interesting," at the very least your blog will stand as a person... |
Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges? | ashishk: It's a good question, but tough to answer because its impossible to generalize the behavior of "hackers".That said, I have heard of backlash against 'name-brand' colleges at a startup, but it was, interestingly, not by hackers but by business dev. people.I think at the end of the day, you're a jerk if you judg... |
Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges? | philwelch: I'm more worried whether there's a bias against hackers from non-name-brand colleges, especially in the startup community. |
How does a non-hacker get into a start-up? | bayareaguy: Not all hackers are programmers. If you really are really enthusiastic about technology then you may already be a hacker. You just need to find your niche. You're probably not going to be the next Linus Torvalds but with a whole lot of effort you might just turn out to be the next Guy Kawasaki.I think you... |
Is there a bias against hackers from 'name-brand' colleges? | grinich: It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.
-... |
Tomato or DD-WRT for my router? | jong: Tomato without doubt. Don't get me wrong, DD-WRT is good, tomato is better! Especially for QOS. Here's a howto on setting up tomato on asus 520guhttp://www.society9.com/an-easy-guide-to-installing-tomato-o... |
What do you need to communicate with a remote team? | HalcyonMuse: Etherpad is pretty cool, too. |
What to do with a worthless law degree? | wmf: The legal industry is fat and ripe for disruption; with CS and legal knowledge you could be doing the disrupting. See Agree2 as an example. What is a startup topic that non-lawyers are afraid to touch? |
What to do with a worthless law degree? | rdouble: RPX in SF is looking for hackers to automate their patent trolling business. A lawyer-hacker would probably be even more valuable. If you're into evil, might as well go all out. No half steppin'.I worked on infirmation.com back in the day and the lawyer who started it sold it for tens of millions of dollars. S... |
What can I do about someone wrongfully threatening trademark infringement against me? | inerte: Ask a lawyer.You might want to avoid the court, but they might not. Play it safe, ask a lawyer. |
What can I do about someone wrongfully threatening trademark infringement against me? | olefoo: Are you sure you aren't infringing on their trademark? Ask your lawyer, and if he agrees with you, get him to write a letter to the threatening party.And really it depends on who is doing the threatening. It's your call as to whether they are serious or not; but if you have a lawyers opinion that you are not in... |
What to do with a worthless law degree? | inerte: Have you ever seen someone writing IANAL on /., Digg, Reddit, or even here?Start seeing it as $$$$$. Unless you want to do pure technical stuff, than the law degree doesn't have much value, indeed. But there's a huge intersection between law and tech, and few people that really understand both.Heck, setup a blo... |
What can I do about someone wrongfully threatening trademark infringement against me? | russell: What kin of threat, email from the webmaster, letter from a lawyer? Specifics, including the URL, will better shape the answers here. In any case, advice from a lawyer trumps advice here. |
Any users of SimpleCDN? | DanRayburn: At StreamingMedia.com, we hear directly from thousands of customers each year who use various CDN providers. I must get at least one call per week from angry SimpleCDN customers. They are by far the worst when it comes to support or following through, based on the feedback we hear directly from customers. N... |
real world examples of numbers with 3 decimal places | oomkiller: Fractions of time would probably be full of fail, since it uses a different scale since it's time.Try to think of an example using video games, maybe some RPGs use three decimal places somewhere for stats.Somehow as a civilization we must have decided somewhere that 2 fixed floating point places was plenty f... |
Feedback on my book proposal | edw519: "Please comment if the description and concept are interesting enough that you would pick up the book..."Sure they are, but that doesn't matter. What matters to me is who tells their story. I'd rather hear about the failures of someone who eventually succeeded that someone who's still struggling.Make it like ... |
Feedback on my book proposal | skmurphy: There may be other ways to package this knowledge depending upon your goals. Can you structure 10-15 key points as a 45-60 minute talk? How about in an interview format? Are there sample chapters or example content in either http://bwatson.typepad.com/ or http://www.manyniches.com/ If you want to do a book th... |
Will Twitter replace RSS feeds? | jdp: How would they? The main reason I use RSS is so I can see the whole article, not a Twitter-sized blurb of the article. That feed actually seems a lot like HN and Reddit, where it aggregates headlines and links, and provides comments. |
How do you manage your news reading time? | transburgh: I actually read HN way too much while at work (case in point). I just cant help it. |
How do you manage your news reading time? | vaksel: I usually skim the titles to see if there is anything interesting. If I find something interesting I read the first paragraph to see if its actually interesting or link bait |
How do you manage your news reading time? | chancho: One good way to stave off a news site addiction is to enthusiastically participate in comment threads. After being drawn into 2 or 3 good flameouts you'll curse the whole medium. |
How do you manage your news reading time? | wlievens: I often skim the comments here before I read the post itself. It's a decent filter. |
How do you manage your news reading time? | nsrivast: Since I'm about to start a non-tech job, I'm looking hard for ways to compress my ~30 min daily update (including politics, science, tech, blogs) into <10 min.I'm thinking of setting up a system that gives me certain amount of "online cash" every week, and whenever I'm "over-budget" it donates the balance to ... |
How do you manage your news reading time? | morpheism: I find it's best to enforce a time limit. I use LeechBlock (a Firefox add-on), in particular.https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476 |
How do you manage your news reading time? | sireat: I use HNs no procrastination feature, but still find myself refreshing the page too often as the 3hour self imposed limit draws closer.
I am thinking of upping minaway: to 240, but raising maxvisit to 30... |
How do you manage your news reading time? | pasbesoin: I notice a lot of repetition across the sites I frequent. I'm asking myself, who are the best aggregators, of both story and comments. If they are a bit behind some of the other sites in timing (e.g. Slashdot), perhaps that is a good thing, as it lets the "truthiness" gel and the counterpoints to accumulat... |
How do you manage your news reading time? | abyssknight: I subscribe to 55 different feeds including Hacker News. I use Google Reader as it is the fastest, most portable option and it isn't blocked at my office. To be honest, I don't find balance. I just let it roll. I find that no matter how much time I spend on either work or "sharpening the saw" (to borrow a ... |
How do you manage your news reading time? | buckler: If you have certain areas that you're particularly interested in, make a customized feed. For example, I've used Yahoo Pipes to create a feed to filter out Delicious Popular items that contain words (topics) that do not interest me (e.g. Twitter, Illustrator, etc.). I simply load the customized feeds on Google... |
How do you manage your news reading time? | justlearning: I used to refer the first page as the "to-read" links, but found more than few times that first-page-links can be misleading.Now I skim thru the links, then check out the comments and decide if it is my-click-worthy.But I usually find few 'unworthy' link-comments where many of us here pour our hearts out... |
How do you manage your news reading time? | zzzmarcus: I created a site that pulls news from my favorites (HN, TechMeme, /. etc.), uses some smart(ish) processing to figure out what might interest me the most, combines duplicate stories and puts it all in one place. It's sort of a meta aggregator, hence the name--Meta.li. It looks for things like how many times ... |
Need Realty Web Site | omarchowdhury: this is equivalent to asking if anyone here can develop a "cool website that you can do stuff on"you're just being very vaguewhat exactly is one supposed to do on this website? what is its purpose? display of real estate listings for a certain area? from a certain realty group? listings based on pricing?... |
How do you manage your news reading time? | sidsavara: The abridged version:I use Google Reader and delicious. I make liberal use of starring articles (rather than reading them inline) and then as a secondary filter I also will tag them as "Read tonight", "Read this week" and "Read someday" in delicious on the second pass.I have had to let go of a lot of tempora... |
How do you manage your news reading time? | radu_floricica: It's a big problem. My solution (which amazingly worked, after I unsuccessfully tried several) was to block reddit in the router. Why reddit? Because on HN I saturate reasonably easy. Not so many new posts, and it's harder to absorb the information. Why in the router? Because re-activating it would requ... |
Need Realty Web Site | jvanderhoof: You might want to check out Boston Logic (http://www.bostonlogic.com/one.php). |
Should I care to support IE6? | satyajit: Browser statistics link: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp |
Should I care to support IE6? | pclark: You have no idea if a fifth of IE6 users will use your products: for all you know they could all use it.My advice: support IE6 entirely, launch, iterate, then once you have users (= market) then make the choice to scale back IE6 development.As a young startup you'll have plenty of reasons why users won't stick ... |
Should I care to support IE6? | mcav: If it's easy, dedicate a little code to give them a reasonable experience. But any substantial effort in that arena would be a waste of time: Focus instead on creating a great product that will bring forth a few more people who use updated browsers. |
How do you manage your news reading time? | csbartus: I became very sensitive to my I/O rate. I feel I'm spending too much reading News and too little producing (code, writings, etc.)As a trade off I've created a lifestream blog using Google Reader as backend for aggregation.So when getting input I'm immediately producing output. |
Has anyone here experienced tolerance with Modafinil? | replytoburned: 6+ years, 200mg daily, no detectable tolerance. |
Has anyone here experienced tolerance with Modafinil? | idlewords: I've noticed I can have different physiological responses to the same dose (same batch, same time of day, etc.) I took the stuff regularly for several weeks and mostly stopped because of two side effects - false sense of urgency about everything, and waking up unusually early the day after taking a dose (I... |
Explain AWS | delano: Every EC2 instance has about 150GB of transient disk space. It works like a regular disk but once you shutdown the instance (or in the rare event the instance fails) the disk is gone forever. To solve this problem, Amazon provides EBS volumes ("elastic block storage"). These are like raw disks that you can crea... |
Explain AWS | lrm242: Each EC2 instance comes with a certain amount of transient storage. It is transient because it does not persist beyond instance termination. Amazon also has persistent storage for your EC2 instances called Elastic Block Store. EBS volumes will persist beyond instance termination and can be attached to any runni... |
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