The New Fast Food - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/05/the-new-fast-food/ <comment><USER2> Google's 2013 revenue is 20x greater than Chipotle (~$60 vs ~$3.2 billion).

To insinuate that Chipotle's higher P/E ratio says something about fast food vs tech is silly. It's because Chipotle is so much smaller than Google that it's easier for Chipotle to increase revenue than Google.

In 2004, Google had about the same revenue as Chipotle did in 2013 but a P/E ratio of ~100, far higher than Chipotle does today.

<comment><USER3> It's like their mind being blown that Rackspace has a 60 pe ratio, or that Amazon and Twitter and LinkedIn have roughly infinite (or negative) pe ratios - and then concluding that must mean investors love the 7th place (?) cloud provider more than Google, and a profitless social network business model more than Google's ad + search monopoly. It's an intentionally bogus conclusion meant to do nothing but set up an article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Article author here...

The critique about comparing P/E's is fair, but my point was really that Sprig & friends are restaurant chains vs traditional tech co's--and restaurant chains actually have decent P/E ratios, which totally shocked me. I was expecting restaurant chains to have P/E's in the 1-10x range, not 30-70x!

From a VC perspective, investing in a restaurant chain looks like a good idea if you can actually make the E in the P/E (ie turn a profit). I don't know about you all, but this was surprising to me.

Also, to address another point that some people made: Sprig & SpoonRocket use the delivery drivers as mobile storage units carrying pre-prepped & heated meals in the trunk. They don't do point-to-point pickup & delivery, which is how they can deliver so fast, cover so much geography and leverage their smaller real estate footprint.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's hard to see how these new startups can compete with existing restaurants. There already are restaurants in cheap-to-rent locations, and it doesn't seem like Sprig et. al. can compete with the prices. I guess my point is that I don't see Sprig doing anything that new, so I don't see what new value they'll bring. But good luck of course, the restaurant business seems to be one of the harder markets out there.

<comment><USER6> I haven't tried Sprig yet, but Munchery's business model is awesome. They are not trying to be a fast / cheap food service. They hire top notch chefs who prepare high end food. The cost of meal is b/w $10-$15. The quality of the food is what you will expect in a high end restaurant. They are basically getting rid of all the real-estate of a high end restaurant and delivering awesome food directly to you (lots of economies of scale). I am spending roughly about $500 per month ordering food from them. Highest quality food, delivered to you at very reasonable prices (I'm pretty sure I'll pay at least 50+% more for the same food if I went to a high end restaurant).

<comment><USER7> This makes a lot more sense if you're right about the numbers. It's not the single meal they are targeting but 2-4 meals. That will drive down the number of meals they have to deliver to make a profit. If the meals are of superb quality this idea works. But it might be tough if they are delivering: food doesn't travel well -- your food is guaranteed to be sitting for 5-15 minutes.

<comment><USER6> I think they are targeting dinner for families. I always order 2 meals since they don't deliver lunch. You have to order food before 10am and they deliver b/w 3-6. My food is definitely sitting at least 1-2 hours because it is being delivered from SF to Mt view. I believe they have proper storage in the delivery vans - I don't know the details though.

<comment><USER8> In SF proper you can order Munchery as late as 4pm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think one thing that's missed, here, is that (e.g.) the company that owns "MacDonald's" doesn't actually operate fast food locations: they're franchises. Instead, the company (which has the high P/E spoken of) operates gigantic commercial kitchens-slash-factories and ships patties and other materials to the franchisees. Operating MacDonald's restaurants isn't a cost they bear. In this sense, these large franchises are already even more streamlined than Sprig, et al.

<comment><USER10> This is not true. McDonalds has plenty of corporate stores in the US (I worked for one as a teenager); not all stores are franchises. In countries like China they do not franchise at all; instead every store is owned by a joint venture.

And of course Starbucks will never franchise (well, Marriott, but look at how that turned out)...they aren't even very happy about joint ventures.

<comment><USER9> Hm. I had thought that all the large chain fast food stores were essentially franchised. Interesting; thanks.

<comment><USER11> Your assumption is in line with the underlying principle - money made from collecting licensing and franchisee fees actually _is_ more profitable than money made from selling burgers. This implies that over time large fast food operators should tend to become more and more franchised, and we see this playing out in the market place right now [1].

The reason why fast food brands aren't 100% franchised already is because they need to constantly learn about their customers/products/operating environments/fast moving trends etc. The best way to do this is to actually operate your own stores where you can experiment and learn very quickly. The younger the brand, the few outlets it has, the more it still needs to learn, so corporate ownership will be higher. As the brand matures over time that number is expected to come down to e.g. 15-20%.

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230458770...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304587704577333443052487330)

<comment><USER10> Its not really just that. McDonalds is pretty international, and some countries are franchise unfriendly, hostile even. So they do a joint venture in China as well many other countries. McDonalds is at 15% today, but much of the 85% is organized under JVs outside of the US.

Also, while the costs and risks are higher to do a corporate store, they also make more money on it, and since they have capital, why not invest in the business they know rather than outsource in an otherwise finite-growth market? I would expect the opposite to happen: over time, the company collects capital and moves to own its brand rather than lend it out. In contrast, a young company that lacks capital will see franchising as much more appealing as it allows them to extend their brand and reach while sharing risk and investment.

Starbucks was, is, and always be corporate. That they are forced into JVs and partnerships sometimes is completely political (China; Marriott won't let them run stores in some airports where they have exclusive contracts; etc...).

<comment><USER11> You are right that some environments have draconian franchising rules, and force fast-food operators into alternative operating models (i.e. corporate/JV owned outlets). An important distinction for me is that those alternatives are _forced_ onto brands, and if they had a choice they would swap to the franchise model. We see this playing out with McDonalds in China - as soon as franchising rules have been relaxed slightly, McDonalds went into high gear recruiting traditional franchisees to fuel growth in China [1]. Of course there are other places where operating directly makes a lot more money, but those are very very rare (e.g. Russia).

In regards to McDonalds investing back into the business they know, you are right again. However, what they know best is not running restaurants but investing into property. The self-proclaimed description of McDonalds' business model is that they are in real estate, not hamburgers [2]. The latest available annual report shows that the 7,000 company stores generated ~$3B profits, but McDs made as much on royalties and _twice_ as much on renting out properties to their franchisees [3]. Further, store margins are going down fast while royalty/property margins are going up. This year more than half of McDonald profits will be from collecting rent - flipping burgers and selling royalties is a nice side hobby. So to maximise their core business, they have to maximise how many renters they have, i.e. increase the number of franchisees.

[1] [http://www.worldcrunch.com/business-finance/supersize-the- fr...](http://www.worldcrunch.com/business-finance/supersize-the-franchise- mcdonald-039-s-new-china-strategy/kfc-fast-food-rivalry-catering-restaurant- franchisee/c2s15258/#.U7lYi2SJ-wE)

[2] [http://money.howstuffworks.com/mcdonalds2.htm](http://money.howstuffworks.com/mcdonalds2.htm)

[3] [http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/content/dam/AboutMcDonalds/Inv...](http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/content/dam/AboutMcDonalds/Investors/McDs2013AnnualReport.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For an article focused on "new" there was little regarding the difference over the "old".

They made comparisons to traditional food businesses, but not to more similar, delivery-only businesses of the past.

 _That 's_ what I'd like to see.

\-----

for reference, here's a 2006 era opinion on the business model.

[http://franchisepundit.com/i-wouldnt-buy-it/delivery-only- re...](http://franchisepundit.com/i-wouldnt-buy-it/delivery-only-restaurants/)

clearly, the difference in 2014 is Mobile devices.

\-----

Upon further though, these new fast-food companies are more like on-demand catering companies.

</comment><comment><USER13> The P/E comparison at the beginning sucks but it's an eye-catcher for the average reader.

I guess the real question is whether you believe, at the same value point, delivery costs will be less than prime real estate + customer service costs. At the moment the answer is no. Delivery is expensive at the scale and speed necessary to compete with going out to grab a meal. But if you believe in a future where autonomous cars are delivering people and shipments in a highly efficient way, mixed with a future of resource abundance (ie robots taking all the boring jobs) where human time becomes incredibly valuable... then it's not unlikely that a service like Sprig would beat out the traditional fast food model.

In fact, it's not unlikely that restaurants and most other brick and mortar business would just become API's on top of the delivery model.

However, I personally think Sprig is way too early to the game. Given an autonomous, speedy delivery system is (more than) a few years out, they must be handing out their investors' money trying to compete in the food business in today's market while waiting for the distant future. I bet order-taking companies like GrubHub end up partnering with Uber to fill this gap in the market early on, rather than a startup trying to do food + delivery at once today. But that's just my 2 cents.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting article. I usually view fast food consumers as people who are poor, working multiple jobs, and don't have time for preparing healthier and much less expensive meals themselves. (The excellent documentary "Fed Up" makes this point.)

That is, for my wife and I part of being affluent is having time to enjoy preparing fine meals ourselves. This article made me realize that a lot of people who are well off financially are not well off as far as having lots of free time - thus the market for companies like Sprig, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> > delivery ain't cheap — Sprig pays their SF delivery workers $16 an hour.

It's odd that they have their own drivers. Why hasn't someone (uber) commoditized moving things via car within a city on no notice? I'm surprised at least that there's no app integrating various services that require drivers. If you can drive people, can't you drive a pizza?

<comment><USER8> Sprig drivers carry a supply of the evenings 3 hot meal options (in a heater?) and then are dynamically routed based on incoming orders (or at least this is what I assume is happening based on the regular sub-10 min delivery times to my neighborhood far from downtown.) This seems harder to Uber-ize than point- to-point trips: your drivers would need special equipment to keep the food hot, and would need to be available for an extended period of deliveries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would love to see a business model like this that accepts EBT. Everyone should have access to these kinds of meals. Plus it would give Sean hannity something to get upset about. "How poor could they really be if they have refrigerators and good food?!?!"

</comment><comment><USER17> How is this a new thing? There are dozens of companies like this... in Russia of all places.

</comment><comment><USER18> long-term strategy: get established now, ready for when legal drones/self- driving cars shrink delvery costs.

but also kinda reminds me of webvan...</comment>


Why is America so costly? - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/09/why-so-costly/ <comment><USER2> Try Australia then, you will think US is bargain basement</comment>


Cruel way to promote a product - <AUTHOR> https://duck.co/topic/promoting-duckduckgo-with-htaccess

<comment><USER2> This is pretty bad. Much of the time, your page (which the user clicked on in Google, for instance) won't be near the top of DDG at all. You're essentially saying "You don't want to go to my page, try one of these other pages instead." It also takes an unreasonable amount of time for DDG to load results, compared to whatever site the user was using.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Not to mention that a non-technical user would view this the same as an ISP's DNS redirect page, and think the site doesn't exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I click on a link in Google's results and immediately get a search page, I will assume that the entry in Google is a bogus one that a clever SEO operative has convinced the algorithm into placing above actual relevant content. I will hit the back button and tell Google to filter out results for that site in future.

Feel free to do this if you are happy to keep people like me away from your site.

</comment><comment><USER5> Please note that the poster is not associated with the company.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm actually surprised this doesn't happen more often in the world of SEO spam. The obvious way to solve this is for the Google bot to give sites a Google referrer string when it comes to index them. That way the bot would see those sites just as a search user does. Of course that means in the long run, Google bot would also have to pose with a fake USER_AGENT identifier to make sure it actually gets the real content.</comment>


PostgreSQL Hardware Performance Tuning (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/hw_performance/

<comment><USER2> I wondered what year that was from (it discusses IDE vs. SCSI drives), and a comment in the HTML says "Converted with LaTeX2HTML 2008 (1.71)"

<comment><USER3> Interesting, but dated, deep dive. There is also no mention of NUMA, and SSDs certainly must have been rare.

<comment><USER4> They've changed around the buffer cache as well, so it's not nearly the issue that it used to be.

Also, main memory in Megabytes. In a db server. How Quaint.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: My company wants to move towards AI and blockchain. Should I stop them? - <AUTHOR> My company is planning to make investments into AI and blockchain solutions. I am very confident in saying, that the people who plan this, do not understand how these technologies work or when they can be useful.
All the while a big chunk of our operations is under heavy load and if it wasn't for dedicated colleagues, things would start to fall apart.
Should I make an effort educating my managers or can moving towards new technologies fix old problems? <comment><USER2> It is "sales pitch", whether is it to raise external funds or to make the CEO sound funky. It is just marketing bullshit.

People love "magical" solutions to problems. The less they know the better. If the company said "It will take 10 years of hard work to change the culture and improve our operations" the CEO would be fired. Compare that to "We are going to focus on the most advanced and exciting technologies available, Blockchain and AI". It is a much better story.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think these are your options:

1\. You do not care about the company (Looks like this is not the case here): a. You have no emotion towards the company and your work doesn't get affected for the foreseeable future. b. You have no interest in the area and want to stay away from it.

2\. Educate them how to do it right (You love the current company): You are in the company for long time and/or you know the people will take it in right spirit! a. It is possible to convince the managers! b. "dedicated colleagues" might be of help here.

3\. Say goodbye: a. You see that they are doing it in the wrong way. Managers won't / dint consider your opinion. b. Your career gets affected by it.

4\. They might be right: a. They might be right either technically or to get some funds. Finding out which one might be useful.

Unless you have more details to share about the company, I think you are the best judge which path to choose.

Overall, I feel it is not worth putting effort in educating them unless you know its taken positively and your growth in the company isn't affected. In other words, do you feel it is "worth investing your _life_ " for? There is always a new company where you could be more happy about your career is what I feel!

</comment><comment><USER4> It is not your job managing the managers, is it? As an employee, you will gain nothing from speaking sense against the tide. It may also be that the entrepreneur in chief or the CEO is seeing something you can't or aren't allowed to, and want to have a go?

</comment><comment><USER5> I think you should. People are always attracted to new shiny objects and most folks don't understand the complexities of blockchain and AI. While I think it's worthwhile to educate your management team, I think the best way to do this is to align their blockchain / AI aspirations to core competencies for your company.

Deploying technology for technology's sake is a problem I see often--this comes down to people's attraction to new shiny objects; and it's extremely important to make sure that this tendency doesn't have a negative impact on the core business. I work for a leading AI and blockchain behemoth and I see this all the time--quite honestly it benefits my firm's sales but it's a massive problem for shareholders.

My advice for most leadership teams is to focus no your core business. Blockchain and AI are all the rage right now, but they are complicated to implement--especially in production! AI systems are very brittle and AI-Ops is not simple. There is a great paper from google titled "Machine Learning, the high interest credit card of technical debt", I suggest you have a read.

In terms of your company, if you believe these solutions will improve your core competencies and provide a competitive advantage then you should absolutely invest in these capabilities. However, it's really important to get the basics right before moving onto fancy new technologies that aren't well understood.

There is a great meme/cartoon that I like to show folks that depicts a teacher and a few students in a class where the teacher is demonstrating basic arithmetic on the blackboard and one of the students raises their hand and asks "when do we get to machine learning." I like to use this cartoon when I discuss these types of solutions because it helps me to put things in perspective.

</comment><comment><USER6> Moving towards new processes can fix old problems. technology only helps if it slots into a process bottleneck and 10x it.

But changing processes is way more about the human capital than it is about any technology solution. People have vested interests to do what they're doing, or to keep doing what they've always done, or to angle for this position or another.

Frankly, if they're already at the staging of planning to make the investment, I wouldn't bother. People are telling a story, about who they are and who they will be, and they're buying out of that story. If they're already bought into that story, they don't want education.

Sorry, I know it sounds defeatist, but it'll save you aggro by just shrugging and accepting that's where they're at.

</comment><comment><USER7> It isn't really _your_ company unless you own it. If its owners and the managers they employ don't listen to the workers they pay for actually having a clue that's their fault, not yours. Unless the company fails and you can't find another decent job it isn't your problem either.

</comment><comment><USER8> In my opinion, bad or troublesome processes cannot be fixed by new technology. Especially not by hyped technology like AI or Blockchain.

Now, whether or not you should make an effort to educate managers, is hard to tell. i would say it depends a lot on your relatioship with said manager, and how you think he will react to critisism. If your manager is a driving force behind th epush towards AI and blockchai you already lost.

I usually did not keep my mouth shut in such instances. And long-term, I was more often right than not. In the short term, I was also more often looking for a new job than not. I would be cautious about open critisism and wait for the right moment. But I would expect that question to be _very_ political.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd assume it will fizzle out on its own without any intervention if things are as you describe.

At a lot of companies, the management is constantly talking about how they're going to do trendy new things, as that tends to be what upper management or investors want to hear. A lot of the time it's pure lip service, or they spend some money on it and then quietly kill it.

</comment><comment><USER10> While you could clearly do that (educate them), it's all about - are they willing to listen?

If you're asking here, my take is that they're not. (Also, the fact that they're thinking into investing into this, just shows how clueless they are.)

So probably - just silently look for a job and leave while you can.

</comment><comment><USER11> What does the company do?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an IT service provider.

<comment><USER11> Do the opposite, encourage them.. Because it is on one level a good idea.

Show them things like AutoML. Mention that Machine Learning isn't 100% accurate, and it will be a while yet until it is.

Explain how blockchain is an older technology and how things like proof of resource is a better way without needing expensive ASICs to keep the network secure.

Talk about hashing algorithms, ecc, which ones are the best etc. Get a promotion, make sure its done right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Don't bother. Companies dumb enough to pursue this route are also the kind where dissenting opinions are punished.

</comment><comment><USER13> What is your role in the company?

Can you "stop them"?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a security analyst.

I could possibly educate them about common use cases and misunderstandings.

<comment><USER13> Education is probabbly the best route, don't tell them you're there to dissuade them, just show them what it can and what it can't do ;)

I've only been in a few situations where "Oh man this is a terrible idea." and education works.... sometimes even if to direct all that energy into something more benign. Sometimes "Ok now they're going to waste a bunch of energy on X ... but at least X isn't going to hurt Y." is a win ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nope.

Anything less than rapturous enthusiasm will get you branded as a pariah and spike your tenure at that company.

I've never been able to convince anyone to not blow their own foot off. And when things do go south, as they always do, the truth sayer becomes the scape goat.

Advice I got from Luke Hohmann in the 90s: You have to let people fail on their own. Meanwhile, prepare plan B, if you want to pick up the pieces afterwards.

My advice: Take notes, play amateur ethnographer, anthropologist, socialist. Learn how these fads, cults, groupthinks play out.</comment>


Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems – LaTeX and Word - <AUTHOR> http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0115069 <comment><USER2> I question the validity of their methodology.

At no point in the paper is exactly what is meant by a "formatting error" or a "typesetting error" defined. From what I gather, the participants in the study were required to _reproduce_ the formatting and layout of the sample text. In theory, a LaTeX file should strictly be a semantic representation of the content of the document; while TeX may have been a raw typesetting language, this is most definitely _not_ the intended use case of LaTeX and is overall a very poor test of its relative advantages and capabilities.

The separation of the semantic definition of the content from the rendering of the document is, in my opinion, the most important feature of LaTeX. Like CSS, this allows the actual formatting to be abstracted away, allowing plain (marked-up) content to be written without worrying about typesetting.

Word has some similar capabilities with styles, and can be used in a similar manner, though few Word users actually use the software properly. This may sound like a relatively insignificant point, but in practice, almost every Word document I have seen has some form of inconsistent formatting. If Word disallowed local formatting changes (including things such as relative spacing of nested bullet points), forcing all formatting changes to be done in document-global styles, it would be a far better typesetting system. Also, the users would be _very_ unhappy.

Yes, LaTeX can undeniably be a pain in the arse, especially when it comes to trying to get figures in the right place; however the combination of a simple, semantic plain-text representation with a flexible and professional typesetting and rendering engine are undeniable and completely unaddressed by this study.

<comment><USER3> _At no point in the paper is exactly what is meant by a "formatting error" or a "typesetting error" defined._

No, and they clearly don't mean it in any way that a designer would find intelligible. Let's compare the two in terms of things like kerning, hyphenation, text figures, ligatures . . .

[http://www.zinktypografie.nl/latex.php?lang=en](http://www.zinktypografie.nl/latex.php?lang=en)

In some sense, it's not even a fair comparison. TeX is a typesetting system, which Word makes no claim to be. You can do some primitive "formatting" in Word, but you can't layout a book or an article to the standards required by contemporary book/journal design.

I have lots of books on my shelf that were designed using either TeX or LaTeX (though InDesign is far more common). I have exactly none that were designed using Word.

<comment><USER4> > Word, but you can't layout a book or an article to the standards required by > contemporary book/journal design.

Of course you can. Plenty of books are done in Word and many papers and conferences release word templates for paper submissions.

<comment><USER5> Many books are indeed initially written and edited using Word, but aren't they generally passed on to someone who does the final layout in InDesign/QuarkXpress before printing?

In contrast, authors using LaTeX often produce camera-ready copy themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is quite interesting, and given my experience with LaTeX (I am a post-doc and prefer working with LaTeX), I often wonder if it is all worth the trouble. Although I have only used Word (and LibreOffice Writer, odd the article doesn't even mention it) sporadically over the last years (and only for simple documents), I do wonder how Word and friends perform in settings that were not part of the experiment that is reported here:

* Large documents (50+ pages) (I remember having to deal with file corruptions, figures appearing at random places, formatting suddenly has a free will, ...)

* Lots of figures that get updated during the writing process

* Collaborating: merging several documents into one big report, especially if other authors do not follow formatting guidelines etc.

* Citations and references

* The authors mention it in the conclusions, but I think the test should also have included a scenario based on using templates instead of building something from scratch.

Other aspects why I prefer LaTeX:

* Version control with plain text files is rather convenient. And so is collaborating.

* Comparing different versions of the same document(s) is much easier with plain text (diff), although you can do something similar with PDF's

* I agree to a certain extent with the authors that scientific content is more important than the form, but I do prefer a traditional LaTeX look over Word documents. By far.

* I always use templates, and this speeds up the writing process significantly. Ideally, you can forgot about the formatting in those cases.

I think the authors make a good point though. Maybe we should invest in smarter/better/more productive LaTeX editors?

edit: formatting, added citations point...

<comment><USER7> i used word for a large project (undergrad project report of 100+ pages with 4 member team) in 1997 and even then word had features for most (if not all) of the items in your list:

* large docs can be handled by splitting them into master-child documents. You can format across all child documents from the master.

* figures can be edited in-place or embedded from original source.

* collaboration was possible then with child and shared docs, it should only be better now.

* citations and refs are supported, although I dont know if all styles of citations are.

* templates have been in word from a long time and imo are quite natural because they're prototype-based (ie, you can make any document AFTER you create it into a template. other documents that use that as a template inherit all styles and so forth)

* the visual "View changes"mode in word is quite natural and even allows for some offline discourse with your collaborators as each user's comments and changes are marked with a different color and comments are allowed.

*words symbol editor (which also existed pre-1997) is quite up to the task of most equations (again, imo; i've not done a lot of hairy equations)

word is just a better tool for large documents, and i say this asn ardent anti-ide guy. my preferred setup for code documentation is sublime text and markdown; but when you want to Just write a document, word it is.

<comment><USER8> Citations and refs are good until someone tries to copy paste them between documents. This wouldn't work in latex either but the visual temptation to do so with word is much easier to fall into, what is worse is that after pasting the ref looks OK but once you try to update reference numbers your copied references will get broken.

Track changes is the pest and its use has actually been banned at all companies I worked for. It only works when you want to show the most recent changes but it actually breaks standard document comparison which means you can no longer compare version 1 with version 3 of a document. I won't even comment on how horrendous the diff view in word is, even on a qhd display the 4 small panes you get are so confusing that I'd rather diff it manually with 2 documents open aide by side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _The participants were instructed to reproduce the source text within thirty minutes._

Given such a visual task, it's no wonder a WYSIWYG editor like Word would make it much easier to get things looking exactly as they were instructed to. In other words, many of the LaTeX users probably spent a lot of time trying to "reverse-engineer" the formatting, something that very _very_ rarely occurs in practice.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. If you ask a Word user to reproduce any of research papers in pdf format, they might end up spending days without success. Getting pretty 2 column layouts, properly aligned headers, spacing, figure numbering etc that doesn't look like a letter from your bank is very hard, if not impossible. Exactly reproducing Word like document in TeX would be similarly hard because you might also have to reproduce all the alignment oddities and layout uglyness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a long-time LaTeX user, I'm a little disappointed to read these results, but I fully believe them. I've spent countless hours fighting against the layout algorithm to get images to go in the right place, among other frustrating issues.

Efficiency aside, using LaTeX is expected in fields like physics and math, and if you write your paper in Word, readers will be biased against it (consciously or subconsciously). On the ArXiv, the vast majority of papers are typeset using LaTeX, and of the non-LaTeX papers, a large fraction of them are low-quality or written by cranks, hence the negative association.

<comment><USER12> > if you write your paper in Word, readers will be biased against it > (consciously or subconsciously)

I've found that happens mainly with papers that are not only in Word but formatted a bit weirdly. Those can be avoided by people who use Word regularly, though, and in that case you usually have to look pretty closely to tell if something was done in LateX or Word, if they both use the same template (e.g. the Word vs. LaTeX versions of the ACM paper template).

Telltale "Wordisms" that I run across fairly often, and probably do have a negative reaction to: 1) large spaces due to justification in two-column formats without hyphenation (solution: turn on auto-hyphenation); 2) a paragraph being in a totally different font or font size from those around it (solution: paste without formatting); and 3) PDF title set to something like Paper.docx (solution: set a title when exporting to PDF).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The point of LaTeX is to not worry about format, just the content. "Reproducing a document" is rarely done by normal LaTeX users. Most people just use a template that is appropriate for the task, and let the algorithm taking care of the format.

Basically, the study set up a straw man to attack, and it doesn't not have any ecological validity.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looking over their data, it seems that they coded incomplete text as an error. So, for example, participants 34 and 37 completed none of the table exercise and were coded as having produced 513 errors (both were LaTeX users). This accounts for the vast majority of the variation in the observed errors. I think they've convincingly shown that Word is more productive than LaTeX for some of the study tasks, but not that the resulting output is more correct.

That being said, I don't doubt that LaTeX is harder to use and more error prone than Word. Since I find myself frequently writing mathematics-heavy text, I personally prefer LaTeX ...

</comment><comment><USER15> It's strange they didn't show side-by-side comparisons of the resulting PDFs. Do Word and (La)TeX produce equally pleasant results? Last I checked, Word- papers looked pretty amateur.

Also, it came across as two people with an axe to grind. For example, are the LaTeX people using editors with automatic spell checking or correction? Which system was used to come up with the examples? Which system did the person creating the examples normally use?

</comment><comment><USER5> Almost all scientific papers have more than one author, so collaboration and version control features are also important, but were not considered in this study. (For example, since .tex files are plain text they can be conveniently managed with git)

Also, if the intent is to determine which system should be used to "save time and money", the cost of licensing proprietary software must also be considered.

<comment><USER12> Although I mainly use LaTeX and prefer its semantic markup, the revision control is one thing I do prefer about Word, at least for my workflow. There are cases where I could imagine the git tooling/workflow being superior, but for me personally it hasn't worked well. Whereas Word's "track changes" mode works well for me as a way of suggesting, commenting on, and integrating revisions (replacing a lot of email traffic).

<comment><USER16> Agreed! "Track Changes" and master-child documents made it really easy for me to work on 50+ page documents with more than just another collaborator.

Personally, after doing several large documents in LaTeX and only then trying Word, I'd go with Word most times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What's still missing in the LaTeX ecosystem (to my knowledge) is a visually pleasing writing environment. The end result might look great but code editors are simply not made for prose. Even editors specifically designed for LaTex do not invite to write - they invite to code.

Until then I stick to my iA Writer --> Markdown --> pandoc--> Word workflow

<comment><USER17> Actually, there are a variety of LaTex editors which I think must meet most people's standards. When I decided to write a book last year, I couldn't face doing it in Word (or anything which would not allow me to view the formatting codes). I was spoiled for choice when it came to LaTex editors. I settled for TexMaker, and within 6 months I had produced a 500 page book, complete with tables, charts and several thousand footnotes.

I'd never used LaTex before in my life. But I wanted the book output as PDF and it was important that the book looked professionally produced. I was really quite happy with the results. Before biting the bullet and using LaTex itself, I had looked at pandoc and other technologies which could output to PDF (e.g. python's ReST). But after some initial tests, I realised they were quite limited in their ability to output a complex PDF document.

TexMaker allows one to have the LaTex source and the PDF end result open in adjacent windows. MikTex/TexWorks was another editor which functioned in a similar fashion. With TexMaker I could jump from a line in the PDF to the originating line in the LaTex file (and vice versa). One can go to images.google.com and search for screenshots of LaTex editors to see the variety available.

The only major enhancement I would like, is if the LaTex editor would allow one to hide all the LaTex codes (perhaps colour-coding the text in the editor to indicate that a paragraph section contains hidden formatting codes). I do find the Latex markup distracting as I try to read the text. However, being able to read the PDF output and then jump to the LaTex source does mitigate this to some extent (I have a large monitor which permits me to have 2 A4 document windows open side by side).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what I'm talking about: Distracting formatting codes, too wide text width (by default), mono-spaced fonts (by default), ... Yes all of this can be dealt with but it would still be great to see a LaTeX editor that assumes writers and not coders as its user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One important point of software that is forever sidelined is that the emotional experience is equally as important as the usability side.

Was this properly weighted?

The abstract does mention this with a single line:

> however, more often report enjoying using their respective software.

Whereas the results involving usability/functional output accounted for about 90% of the text summary.

<comment><USER19> They attribute the increased emotional satisfaction of LaTeX users to cognitive dissonance. Page 12:

"A striking result of our study is that LaTeX users are highly satisfied with their system despite reduced usability and productivity. From a psychological perspective, this finding may be related to motivational factors, i.e., the driving forces that compel or reinforce individuals to act in a certain way to achieve a desired goal. A vital motivational factor is the tendency to reduce cognitive dissonance. According to the theory of cognitive dissonance, each individual has a motivational drive to seek consonance between their beliefs and their actual actions. If a belief set does not concur with the individual's actual behavior, then it is usually easier to change the belief rather than the behavior [6]. The results from many psychological studies in which people have been asked to choose between one of two items (e.g., products, objects, gifts, etc.) and then asked to rate the desirability, value, attractiveness, or usefulness of their choice, report that participants often reduce unpleasant feelings of cognitive dissonance by rationalizing the chosen alternative as more desirable than the unchosen alternative [6, 7]. This bias is usually unconscious and becomes stronger as the effort to reject the chosen alternative increases, which is similar in nature to the case of learning and using LaTeX."

<comment><USER20> I find that conclusion gratuitous. It's much more likely that there are legitimate reasons underlying the satisfaction which they didn't consider.

Ironically, the authors' move to rationalize away this unexpected finding as cognitive dissonance could itself be characterized as an instance of cognitive dissonance. The authors probably started out with a particular belief, and the findings didn't agree; instead of accommodating the data, they attempt to neutralize it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So their conclusion is that LaTeX is best saved for documents with much mathematical content. But it's also worth considering that LaTeX workflows offer better compatibility with revision control systems. The change tracking features in MS Word have never impressed me the few times I've worked with them.

</comment><comment><USER22> Fascinating! I wonder if these findings scale to larger documents. As a novice user (both self-professed, and by the standards of the report) of both packages I've long found that Word becomes rather inconvenient once you pass a certain number of pages. Its internal structure is rather opaque, so sometimes when formatting goes awry it turns out to be quite difficult to fix. And it won't put non-text items in sensible places itself, though of course if you don't mind carefully positioning each one by hand then you can do that.

I actually much preferred using latex, even though it was so comically horrible in many respects (my Makefile had to run pdflatex 3 times, for example, and needed a whole other step to pre-convert PNGs into PDFs beforehand). More upfront investment, but less ongoing bother.

Or cognitive dissonance, perhaps that was it?

<comment><USER23> When formatting goes awry, press Shift+F1 to open the 'Reveal Formatting' pane.

<comment><USER22> That just shows you the properties though, doesn't it? My usual problem is that the style properties seem OK, but the styles themselves are being applied to the wrong bits of text. Then when I try to fix it by removing the unwanted style from the incorrectly-styled portion, the section that _was_ OK loses its style too! It's as if word's internal record of where each block of formatting begins and ends has got out of whack somehow, and when called upon to change a part of one styled section ends up changing the whole thing. (Or perhaps my mental model is wrong? But most of the tine, this sort of thing does work...)

This doesn't have to happen that many times to become really annoying...

<comment><USER24> It was critical for my mental model to note that Word applies styles to the trailing carriage return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The paper does not mention Word Perfect, which some people seem to prefer in some cases. I'm not a user (or affiliated in any way) but I was researching document editors for a project when I found this epic comparison of Word vs WordPerfect in real world use:

[http://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/showthread.php?22433-Word- Vs.-W...](http://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/showthread.php?22433-Word- Vs.-WordPerfect&s=)

<comment><USER17> 25 years ago, I was a secretary. I used WordPerfect, Ami Pro, Word, DisplayWrite and other WP programs. Microsoft Word was just about the worst of the bunch. If it hadn't been for Microsoft's criminal monopolistic practices (OS + office suite), Word would never have become the de facto word processor in the world.

Even 15 years ago I was working as a systems administrator in a company which still insisted on using WordPerfect because of its superiority. A Microsoft fanboy became the IT Director, and WP was phased out for Word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Read the article quickly and they mention that they actually tested LaTeX with the editor used by the participants (not just LaTeX), but they don't mention if they used the orthographic and grammar correction in the editors. I know the one provided by Word is excellent, so if the other editors' are not as good, that might explain some of the difference in textual errors.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is my experience with LaTeX, it's very powerful but I spend more time thinking about formatting in it than I do in Word.

</comment><comment><USER28> Try using Word with a makefile. I published a book using Latex with a makefile / scripts. When the printer came back and said two pages were off (wanted colour pages at the centre of the book), a simple update did the trick. Copy- and-paste with Word? No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't understand LaTeX or TeX or their relationship or how to use them. I tried to. I'm on Windows, so latex-project.org suggests [1] I download proTeXt.

The proTeXt website [2] tells me that "the self-extracting protext.exe file ... is well over 1GB". In fact it is 1.7GB.

Considering Office 2013 Professional Plus x64 clocks in at under 1GB I rofl'd my way out of there straight back to Word. And Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and OneNote.

[1] [http://latex-project.org/ftp.html](http://latex-project.org/ftp.html)

[2] [http://www.tug.org/protext/](http://www.tug.org/protext/)

<comment><USER30> Most of the size come from optional packages. There are lean and mean distributions under 15MB of download.

<comment><USER31> And most of that is documentation of the optional packages IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> " _The participants were instructed to reproduce the source text within thirty minutes. "_

As a Latex user I would never use it for writing a 30 minutes text. I will use LibreOffice for that.

If the source text is made in Word of course it is going to have errors, defining error as "a different outcome that original word document text generates".

We DO use Latex for writing 300+ pages books, and Latex is great for it:

-It is not proprietary.

-Very easy to program and use different UI programs to modify the same document. We write using mostly voice, we edit it visually.

-Very easy to interface with our own software, for example for creating automatic graphs from sensors.

</comment><comment><USER33> Efficiency in LaTeX vs Word always depends on what you are doing. At one job I was using bash, Powershell, pdftk and LaTeX to extract data from PDFs, VLookup using Powershell, and then annotate the PDF with the result using LaTeX transparencies (remember to run twice). Really simple stuff. It was a shit task to do before it was scripted with LaTeX. (five hours of mind numbing work vs 15 minutes of run time, plus it gave me a window of time for a coffee run). Use the right tool for the job, which in my case, turned out to be a Rube- Goldberg machine.

</comment><comment><USER34> no. I like being able to manage the data as text readable. I like fine control over my formatting... and I especially like not being tied into a clunky 'ide' to manage the document.

<comment><USER35> How is being tied to a clunky text editor different from being tied to a clunky GUI? No matter which alternative text editor you use, apparently it's still clunky (slow) according to that somewhat limited research.

<comment><USER36> Text editors are clunky? If a text editor is 'clunky', it is almost assuredly not clunky in the same sense as an IDE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Alternative:

Write it in markdown/commonmark (possibly with an extension for tables a la knitr).

Pick your favorite text editor and just type away merrily. Use latex ($\gamma$) when you want formulas.

Then compile it to PDF with pandoc (which will deal with the intermediate latex step). Then, resist the urge to endlessly play with the formatting and just work on the simple markdown text.

<comment><USER38> Does pandoc support commonmark?

<comment><USER39> I don't think it currently does, but it almost certainly will in the future. The primary author of Pandoc is the primary author of CommonMark.

<comment><USER38> Yes, I've been wanting to ask John for quite a while now about it, just always kept forgetting. The reason I doubted is because there's already pandoc- markdown...

Has he stated anything about the future between pandoc and commonmark? I imagine support for commonmark is likely, but is pandoc-flavoured markdown then doomed?

(I don't know how similar commonmark is to pandoc-markdown, but when I checked out commonmark at an early stage, it did handle lists differently, so I have reason to believe there would be more differences. [But I actually prefer how commonmark handles lists though.])

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What i miss in the discussion is that using latex you concentrate on the content and not on the formatting. If you are looking for good layex editors there is one that outshines them all : emacs.

<comment><USER19> Yes, that's the theory, but in practice I find that I spend much more time futzing with the formatting in LaTeX than in Word, especially in two-column mode with figures. The article and various comments here suggest I'm not alone in this...

I'd love to have a system that actually delivers on the latex philosophy of separating content from formatting.

<comment><USER41> I find in Word I don't try too hard on formatting, especially in 2 column situations, because it is just going to look ugly no matter what I do. Using latex, in contrast, I really focus on aesthetics, which means some more time spent for decent results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Why in a world, a person that is going to write an academic paper with charts, tables, graphs and stuff would choose LaTex? What is the point of comparing them? Even LaTeX says that it is not a word processor. Do not compare damnt.

Quote from LaTeX website: "LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content."

If you are going to write a philosophical article or a big novel, choose LaTeX, if you want to draw charts and graphs choose Word. Cristal clear.

<comment><USER43> If you _draw_ graphs/charts, then use a WYSIWYG program like Word. If you _generate_ graphs/charts from data, then use a compiler like TeX, which nicely integrates into a build process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> word is easier to get started, however, as the document grows, you will miss latex badly. image and table positioning are equally annoying if not worse than latex.</comment>


Analytics and A/B testing For the 21st century - <AUTHOR> https://volument.com/?b1p <comment><USER2> Website looks amazing and the analytics software really COOOl

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Play6,

Thank you! :) Here you can learn the problem in general analytics:

[https://volument.com/learn/problems-in-general- analytics](https://volument.com/learn/problems-in-general-analytics)

<comment><USER2> Thank you i will definetly have a look at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What kind of infrastructure is needed for a video sharing service? - <AUTHOR> I know Netflix and Twitch used Amazon's servers, but what kind of operating costs are to be expected for this kind of service? For a whole year of operation?
Or if one is to have a service to share up to 3 minutes of videos max, what kind of costs does one have to expect, per year of operation? Should one use the same CDN provided by the hosting service or use Akamai like Facebook?
And what are the data centers and CDNs that are interesting for small to medium video sharing startups?
How does Azure compare to Amazon? Does anybody know about any relevant and interesting whitepapers out there? <comment><USER2> With a video sharing service, you have large amounts of data transfer, and data storage. You're basically pushing large BLObs around your servers and to your users.

If you have a relatively simple page, you could get by with low compute - you're just transferring HTML, CSS, and the binary. HTML5 video players are simple and easy to find, I've done it in just a few lines for a demo. I actually had more problems converting the video than getting the HTML5 player to work.

What resolution would that 3 minutes of video be? That might impact your plans. And how many people do you expect to see a single 3 minute video? Multiply the video size (in MB) by the number of expected downloads to get an idea of the bandwidth for that video. Multiply that bandwidth by the number of videos to get an idea for how much bandwidth you'll need for the whole site. Of course page loads and overhead will add to that, I'm not sure exactly how much but I'd add 20% to your bandwidth estimates just so you have some spare bandwidth.

You should absolutely look into CDNs. They reduce the load on your servers while getting stuff to your users faster. I think Cloudflare might have a free tier, and other CDNs might too.

Azure isn't as well-known as Amazon; if you're expecting to be able to Google blog posts when you have problems, I'd go with Amazon. And there are other cloud hosts, ranging from nearly Azure size, to much smaller.

You might choose a lower-cost more-distant datacenter, and a low-cost or free CDN, to start your MVP. If you're interested in using .NET or IIS, then look into Bizspark.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer. I was more curious about what kind of costs are associated with apps like Periscope, Mixvid or Vine rather than simple web pages, but thanks again for taking the time to provide an answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At a recent startup I was helping with we had a video and image service. We utilized the video storage from both youtube and vimeo rather than hosting it ourselves. The application itself was more in line with a Vine or Periscope (in fact, a lot like Periscope).

As part of our agreement with youtube and vimeo we had to handle some video processing. We had about 300,000 users, spread across just about every continent. We ran 12 front end web servers, 10 processing servers, a mongo cluster, used s3 storage, and Amazon CloudFront for CDN. Our bill for those 300,000 users was about $12,000 a month. Again, we did not actually STORE the videos, we allows youtube and vimeo to do that.

The price also did not scale as one might imagine. The more users you have the higher the cost per user gets. This is because the more users you have, the more traffic you seem to get to each video and so bandwidth, which was by far the highest cost, would go up quite a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for replying. Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? Or did you have another way to monetize?

<comment><USER3> Well yes and no. That is a very complex question and one that might be better for an actual conversation. Youtube and Vimeo want to make money. They don't take kindly to you hitting their revenue streams which are, generally, ads. However, they do work with people very well, though it is slow and bureaucratic. So to give you the simple answers:

Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Hell no. But it was possible for us to monetize the videos.

Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Yes

Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? We worked with them to accomplish something like this yes.

Or did you have another way to monetize? Yes, this too :)

We made a bit of money on this system we built and it was more or less self sustaining. The issue was that it actually wasn't that profitable. We had another product which was almost like a little helper we made internally for ourselves that turned out to be a TON more lucrative so we gave up on the video and image network and eventually shut it down. Sometimes you have to just know when to fold them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. That was a great and helpful answer. Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [Update] Used Bing and found those articles. I'll add more when I find more of them.

[https://gigaom.com/2010/03/19/how-much-did-it-cost-to- start-...](https://gigaom.com/2010/03/19/how-much-did-it-cost-to-start- youtube/)

[http://www.wired.com/2014/01/secret-snapchats- monetization-s...](http://www.wired.com/2014/01/secret-snapchats-monetization- success-will-surprise/)

[http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/12/02/much-cost-build- worlds-h...](http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/12/02/much-cost-build-worlds- hottest-startups/)

[http://www.slideshare.net/gwendal/live- stream-46092521](http://www.slideshare.net/gwendal/live-stream-46092521)</comment>


Show HN: Naked Wines Launches "Text for Wine" Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.nakedwines.com/sms/register.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> I pitched an idea to the rest of the company. They loved it so much they asked me to implement it. We've officially launched today! I'd love feedback from the HN community.</comment>


How to learn to Code - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/better-humans/3513115bb18d

<comment><USER2> I think this captures both what I enjoy about coding, and what is also so frustrating. It's hard to explain why this gives me joy to people that don't like to tinker.

``` Don't know what to do?

Good! No one does.

The second thing to learning to program is dealing with failure. Programming is automating, once something is done it's done, you'll only ever deal with things that are broken, when something works your job is done. ```</comment>


Three of Apple and Google's former star chip designers launch NUVIA - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/15/three-of-apple-and-googles-former-star-chip-designers-launch-nuvia-with-53m-in-series-a-funding/ <comment><USER2> How do people start new ventures like this without falling afoul of past non- disclosure agreements?

<comment><USER3> Late reply: we don't know the details but it's entirely possible that part of their knowledge from their experience at Apple is allowed to be used so long as they do not compete with Apple products using that knowledge; and the server / enterprise target is clearly the one space where Apple is de facto absent in tech.

If I were to bet, I'd say it's actually a mutual understanding of 'taking A-chips' to their full potential for these use-cases. It's also smart to make it a startup, because why spend the full power of a corporation when a small tight band is actually better. Sort of a separation of concerns; friendly relationship, possibly deals between the two entities — I'm sure Apple's datacenters could use some A-chip mojo in their blades.

<comment><USER2> A reply from the future: looks like Apple is unhappy.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21752781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21752781)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Assuming they are well connected to ARM, I wonder if they get to be working on uArc based ARMv9?

And I think this also shows that Apple has no intention to build an ARM chip for its Desktop and Mac Pro products. Had this been the case I think the three would not have jump the chance for its own Startup.

<comment><USER5> They could've possibly done this move to get acquired by Apple for a larger sum than plainly working there

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> NUVIA =~ NVIDIA. That's a bad name.

<comment><USER7> New VIA? It looks like VIA are still producing CPUs: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Technologies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Technologies)

<comment><USER6> That's even make things worse!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also Jon Masters, ex Red Hat.

</comment><comment><USER9> my question to the group is:

How will this affect Apple's ability to innovate going forward? Were these executives a crucial part of Apple's competency?

</comment><comment><USER10> Tech Crunch has the foulest of cookie control systems. Not reading that.

<comment><USER11> Someone please create a mirroring service for HN submissions.

Even Reddit has one

</comment></comment><comment> rough-sea I wonder if they are considering RISC-V. Probably not - they don't sound like risk-taking people. But given the timelines of chip production, I would think a couple years from now a solid RISC-V server might be very much in demand.

<comment> Tuna-Fish The RISC-V ISA is pretty awful for high-end designs. No competitive servers can be built with it.

Plenty of people seem to have been caught up in the hype of RISC-V taking over the world and doing everything, but that's never going to happen. The ISA is heavily optimized towards making very low-end devices very cheap. Like, don't think cellphone chips, think appliances. This is not a bad call, as it's the area where greenfield designs with cost advantage have the best chance to get market share. However, there is no path of extending the ISA that will make it competitive with ARM or x86 on high-end devices. The only way to do that is to design RISC-VI, that abandons most of the things that RISC-V what it is.

<comment><USER12> Interesting view. The SIMD, Vector, and Hypervisor RISCV extensions, as well as things like OoOE seem to contradict your claim. Are you saying they intended to target the high end, and failed? Or that they never intended to target the high end?

<comment><USER13> There are a lot of things about the RISCV design that come from a very ideological place and hurt in a high end design. Yes, there are extensions and designs with high end features, that's certainly true, and I'm sure people someone will be making a high end version at some point. But the ISA isn't very well suited to it compared to Power or ARM.

By default, code density on RISC-V is pretty bad. You can try to solve that by using variable length instructions which many high end RISC-V projects intend to do but having variable length instructions means your front end is going to have to be more complicated to reach the same level of performance that a fixed width instruction machine can achieve.

More instructions for a task means your back end also has to execute more instructions to reach the same level of performance. One way to do better is to fuse together ISA-level instructions into a smaller number of more complex instructions that get executed in your core. This is something that basically every high end design does but RISC-V would have to do it far more extensively than other architectures to achieve a similar level of density on the back end which makes designing a high end core more complex and possibly uses extra pipeline stages making mispredicts more costly.

And more more criticisms here: [https://gist.github.com/erincandescent/8a10eeeea1918ee4f9d99...](https://gist.github.com/erincandescent/8a10eeeea1918ee4f9d9982f7618ef68)

EDIT: But in fairness it looks like conditional move might be getting added to the bit manipulation RISC-V extension which would fix one big pain point.

This isn't to say that RISC-V is bad. It's simplicity makes it wonderful for low end designs. It's extensibility makes it great for higher level embedded uses where you might want to add some instruction that makes your life easier for your hard driver controller or whatever in a way that would require a very expensive architecture license if you were using ARM. It's open, which would be great if you were making a high end open-source core for other people to use except the Power ISA just opened up so if I were to start a project like that I'd use that instead.

<comment><USER14> > By default, code density on RISC-V is pretty bad.

Code density _with the C extension_ is competitive with x86, which is _very_ good for a RISC. And the C extension is not even that hard on the decoder, since most or even all 'compressed' instructions have a single uncompressed counterpart. It's _easier_ to implement than what ARM32 does with Thumb.

> One way to do better is to fuse together ISA-level instructions into a > smaller number of more complex instructions that get executed in your core.

Insn fusion has in fact been endorsed by the designers of RISC-V as an expected approach in high-end designs. The RISC-V spec even gives "suggested" sequences for things like overflow checking, that can be transparently insn- fused if an implementation supports it.

<comment><USER13> Yes, RISC-V's instruction compression is easier to use than Thumb. But there's a reason no arm server uses compressed instructions and ARM dropped it from A64.

<comment><USER15> Enlighten us: what is that reason?

<comment><USER13> As far as I can tell the reason is that with variable length instructions you have a mux layer between fetch and decode that sends the right set of bytes to the right decode slot. Your first set of 16 bits is certainly going into the first decoder but your fourth might be going to the second, third, or fourth depending on previous decoding. Or maybe not, I've only worked with fixed width instructions when getting into the weeds of processors and only entirely designed a simple five stage classic RISC myself. So don't take the above too seriously.

What you should take seriously is that three of the four big RISC ISAs - MIPS, ARM, and POWER - all have extensions for variable length instructions. They all use them in embedded systems where program memory size is a big factor in your bill of materials and reducing that can save you money. But none of them use it on their high end processors. So I think we can conclude that the power/transistor cost of fetching a number of variable length instructions per clock is higher than the cost of expanding the L1 instruction cache to deal with full size instructions.

<comment><USER16> At most, you're looking at an extra pipeline stage for all of that. The less I$ pressure is almost certainly worth it.

The real cost you're looking at is the complexity for instructions to straddle cache lines and MMU pages, but even then it's less of a deal than you might think.

<comment><USER17> Nope, done right the cost is a layer of 2:1 muxes and some control logic to pass data between decoders, and 16 flops to hold a partially decoded instruction between fetch bundles

<comment><USER15> It's more complicated than that if you want to decode multiple instructions per cycles, which you have to for high-end designs. I still agree with monocasa that it's almost certainly going to be worth it for the reduced I$ pressure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wish him good luck. The more the merrier for us, consumers.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's sad is that he had to exit Apple and found a company. Maybe to sell it back to Apple in the future.

It seems symptomatic that he couldn't inside Apple.

Sad that it's so hard to do some things inside humongous companies. Even when you're obviously incredibly talented and accomplished.

<comment><USER20> I don't see it as sad, the existence of NeXT as a separate entity allowed many possibilities. I.e. it left room open for a completely different startup to roll new tech directions back into Apple and NeXT to end up as new direction at SGI, HP or whatever. Even if the end looked a lot like the status quo should have looked, a wider range of possibilities shape the industry and individual motivation.

<comment><USER19> The fact that Jobs had to found another company is unfortunate and symptomatic to me.

There's no reason why huge companies can't foster innovation, besides bad management. See Bell Labs and Xerox Parc.

You would think a place with almost unlimited money for R&D would be perfect for nurturing an ambitious project, but instead most go for VC.

What's sad to me is that it's cheaper and easier to buy a startup than to fix broken culture, given a large enough company.

<comment><USER20> Bell and Xerox are great examples of why. If the ideas were separate entities, Bell or Xerox could have decided which to buy back and run as a business. They didn't decide anything and each idea had to be stolen by a visitor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related and recent: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21547850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21547850)

</comment><comment><USER22> Alternative to RISC-V? [https://archive.is/fFw5T](https://archive.is/fFw5T)

</comment><comment><USER23> Is it possible or probable they'll go into mobile chips to compete with Qualcomm?

In any case, best wishes and godspeed. I believe an increase in competition in the CPU space is good for humanity and only improves our chance of surviving as a species.

<comment><USER24> Apple is already doing this(mobile chips part), opening or expanding offices in San Diego/Austin for chip design based on public announcements, job openings, personnel changing companies.

<comment><USER25> They're not really competing with Qualcomm though, since they don't sell their chips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let's be honest. They aren't building a company to take on Intel and AMD. They are at most "building a company" to either be an acquisition for one of the major chip producers (maybe even Apple) or to be acquihired.

<comment><USER27> Building a company to sell is a very bad thing to do. There is no guaranty it will even happen. You should always build a company with the idea that you will go public as doing so forces discipline in how you do things (there are a ton of internal processes, accounting, etc.). Having that work done and clean makes you more attractive to someone that would want to acquire the company and also gives you a better negotiating position. In an ideal world, you build it to go public and are at a point where you are starting the paperwork, and someone makes an offer which you can then shop to their biggest competitor in the space. A bidding war starts and you are sold for IPO price++++, a number that is 12 months down the road from where you think you would be after the IPO. You have just made a ton, and removed a years worth of risk.

<comment><USER26> _You should always build a company with the idea that you will go public as doing so forces discipline in how you do things_

How did that work out for Uber, Lyft, and closer to home DropBox? They all went public and still haven't shown that they have any idea how to become profitable.

<comment><USER28> It worked out very well for the founders of all of those companies.

<comment><USER29> While I admit that I'd take the money and run too, that kind of approach when viewed from afar looks like a genteel pump and dump.

<comment><USER26> I don't begrudge them their money. But I feel a lot more at ease depending on a company whose business model is I give them money and they give me stuff and that they are doing so profitably. That's part of the reason that I'm a big fan of companies like Backblaze and JetBrains.

I worked as a dev lead for one company where we were our vendors largest customer (over 60% of their revenue). I recommended that we either don't depend on that vendor for our new implementation when contract renewals came or that we insisted on them putting their code in escrow in case they were sold and they abandoned the software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> While I like this idea, I think supporting a full x86-64 instruction set for high-performance applications, from scratch, is likely years out. This company will need a 10-year runway to see any market impact.

<comment><USER31> Where is x86-64 mentioned? I assumed they were building ARM chips.

In any case, they don't mention any secret sauce. Intel has strong channels, fabs and the x86-64 ISA with massive software compatibility on the server side. Even with better performance/power, Intel can simply undercut the competition to drive them out of business. If Qualcomm's sales channels couldn't dent the server space, I am sceptical about upstarts, unless their [power, performance, cost] is significantly better than Intel.

<comment><USER32> Are there any chips which support multiple ISAs? Could a single chip decode both AMD64 and ARM instruction streams? Or could the memory models not be unified so it's not possible?

<comment><USER33> Yes there are chips that support multiple ISAs...although typically one ISA is more native. At least, I believe NVIDIA Denver qualifies as that[1]. Also I believe some Itanium chips had a (slow) x86 hardware decoder that changed the instructions into the native EPIC instruction set[2].

However, unifying the memory models sounds like a performance disaster for the ARM code. And having multiple decoders in hardware (as well as having enough of them) doesn't seem like a justifiable use of silicon real estate.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver)

[2] [https://www.techsupportalert.com/pdf/r1048.pdf](https://www.techsupportalert.com/pdf/r1048.pdf)

<comment><USER34> The x86 hardware decoder on Itanium turned out to be slower than a JIT, and was removed from hardware pretty quickly.

Also note that the x86 memory model is a perfectly valid implementation for an ARM chip, as it's a superset of the ARM memory model constraints. And the performance impact isn't that big really.

<comment><USER33> Yes, I agree with you. Many of the barrier instructions will end up as internal NOPs. Performance wouldn't be terrible. Power may suffer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> TechCrunch has more details than Reuters does. Such as confirming ARM ISA, but custom arch. [https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/15/three-of-apple-and- googles...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/15/three-of-apple-and-googles- former-star-chip-designers-launch-nuvia-with-53m-in-series-a-funding/)

<comment><USER21> Ok, we changed to that from [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nuvia-tech- idUSKBN1XP19V](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nuvia-tech-idUSKBN1XP19V). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nuvia like the ring ;)

</comment><comment><USER37> Any news from Mill computing?

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder what Apple thinks once they will see their IP exfiltrated like this

<comment><USER39> I'm sure that would be the first thing the VCs would ask about before putting $50m into the business.

The three worked on mobile chips at Apple and Google, and are now focusing on enterprise data centres. So it's not exactly the same.

> That said, what's interesting is that while the troika of founders all have > a background in mobile chipsets, they are indeed focused on the data center > broadly conceived (i.e. cloud computing), and specifically reading between > the lines, to finding more energy-efficient ways that can combat the rising > climate cost of machine learning workflows and computation-intensive > processing.

> The company's CMO did tell me that the startup is building "a custom clean > sheet designed from the ground up" and isn't encumbered by legacy designs. > In other words, the company is building its own custom core, but leaving its > options open on whether it builds on top of ARM's architecture (which is its > intention today) or other architectures in the future.

<comment><USER38> It can simply be a form of risk-management by Dell/VCs. How likely is that Apple going to sue them? How likely the company going to succeed and deal with the issue?

It's rarely black or white.

We have seen it with the case of Uber and the self-driving cars.

In their own words, they said they will reuse knowledge from ARM and Apple (including Desktop CPUs).

As public investor of Apple, yes I think it's a very legitimate question.

<comment><USER39> Of course it's a legitimate question, it's an obvious question, which is why the CMO mentioned clean room building it and the founders having worked on a combined 100 patents. VC's do plenty of due-diligence, they don't invest blindly when there's such an obvious risk.

The Uber case was quite rare and egregious. It's not as simple as working on similar stuff.

Uber directly acquiring a company (well after raising hundreds of millions) made by someone who worked at Google to work on the exact same thing which is far riskier than working on a completely different product category you're building from scratch. But even then the case against Uber heavily relied on the fact he _stole_ IP directly from company computers and used that as the base of the product.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fun with Javascript and function tracing. - <AUTHOR> http://ebobby.org/2013/05/18/Fun-with-Javascript-and-function-tracing.html

<comment><USER2> At Google we built a tool for this that presents the results graphically on a timeline: <http://google.github.io/tracing-framework/>

It's been invaluable for us on Maps to be able to graphically trace the execution of our code.

<comment><AUTHOR> You guys definitely have more time for that than I do :)

When I started doing this I had a lot of ideas, even sample profiling, etc, etc. But realized that in order to make it actually useful and being able to trace everything without slowing the crap down of everything I would had to do some sort of plugin or module, ala Firebug. Not a weekend project anymore.

But apparently you guys already did it! very cool. I'll check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is also the nifty "Break on ... Attributes modification" in the web inspector.

Just go to the element in the "Elements" tab, right-click, "Break on ..." and choose what kind of breakpoint you want.

I just tested it with jQuery.hide() and it works wonderfully.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this, did not know that could be done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this. Will probably add a bookmarklet or something to load it and use it when debugging.

My only question is how it works with prototyped or nested functions, such as the `hide` method that you mentioned. Would you just call Tracing.trace('$.fn.hide', 'Object.static_method', 'Object.prototype.object_method') for example to get access to those particular methods?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, exactly. So far it can only access functions that it can traverse directly by name when passed the name as a string as you suggested.

Local functions as in nested inside another function, or directly assigned to a local variable, or passed as a function argument the lib cannot hook into because there is no way I can address them since I am not in your lexical context and if you pass them to the library you pass only the reference to the function, not a reference to the reference.

In that case I guess it may be possible for the library to hook your code into them only if you pass them to the library and the library returns a new function for you but that is a little too cumbersome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice one. Looks very useful, will try it for sure</comment>


Ask HN: Is Magic Leap just vaporware? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I call it "struggleware."

Some of their tech is awesome (as confirmed by friends who have tried it), but they are struggling to solve the final technical issues and get it to market.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not technically vaporware, it is more like "Duke Nukem Forever"-ware.

Ref: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever)

<comment><USER4> Not even that really. They got series A funding in 2014. Releases this August. That's less time than most Rockstar games.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but they're delivering something so far from what was promised to get funding, and from the bulk of their patents that DNF is a better comparison. They promised the world, photonics magic, and they're delivering a strikingly sub-par HoloLens.

<comment><USER6> Correct. The 2.3B in funding (according to Crunchbase) was for something completely different.

<comment><USER4> You may notice that nearly half their funding was gained in the last year, well after the existence of their current product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a silly question. It just passed through the FCC and is launching next week.

<comment><USER7> I watched the livestream they did on twitch demoing some of their libraries and it looked terrible.

The AR mapping looked like what snapchat had a year ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The more appropriate question is "Is Magic Leap's Virtual Retinal Display just vaporware?"

The Magic Leap One does not fulfill the brand promise that garnered the company all the VC it has. That would make it vaporware.

<comment><USER4> Lots of confusion over this device, which can be chalked up to all the FUD spread around about it. Nearly half the 2 billion they got was in the last year alone. Investors like Google have been there since day one and not left.

<comment><USER8> I suppose it is possible that the Magic Leap One could be providing cover for another thing they are working on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I threw mine out in garbage couple of yrs ago. Haven't followed up with it since then.

<comment><USER10> How did you get one a couple of years ago? Are you talking about the same thing?

<comment><USER9> Oh sorry. I was talking about leapmotion.

<comment><USER11> I get the two confused a lot of the time as well. It always seemed like shocking branding to me.

I guess at this point leapmotion is far enough in the past that it's meager ripples have basically vanished.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Zuckerberg's Visit to Montana to Discuss Climate Change Just Got Very Political - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/amazon-blue-apron-acquisition-history.html <comment><USER2> Getting a 404 error as of now...anyone else notice this also?</comment>


Do independent web apps have a future in world divided into walled gardens? - <AUTHOR>

Today, most computation is still done with general-purpose computers. These machines, primarily laptops and desktops, are "open" in that you can install and run on them whatever you like, and you can build for them whatever applications you like and distribute them in whatever manner you like. The inherent openness of these platforms has also served to make them incompatible with each other and even with themselves; just getting an application to run on different versions of the same platform (eg windows) can be a pain. For this (and for other) reasons, over the last few years much application development has shifted to the web.
But now it seems the tide has begun to recede. Application development is heading back towards native apps, particularly native apps for a single, closed platform. It appears we may be entering a future where the whole technological landscape will be partitioned into any number of walled-gardens.
My question is basically this: if the future is the iOS and other closed platforms like it, does it still make sense to build a business based on web apps with the expectation that such a business will still make sense two, three or five years from now, or is one better off taking the plunge and basing your business on a platform like the AppStore instead? <comment><USER2> I just addressed an aspect of this issue today: [http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/its-not-the- device-...](http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/its-not-the-device-or- the-file-its-the-internet-stupid/)

And it's worth reading the App Store post on the front page of HN (which is also linked to in my post).

I think apps are crutches and I think even Apple understands that. I wouldn't bet against the Internet at all. How much traction do you think any device would get if it could access only a portion of the Net? (DoCoMo in Japan has been an exception, but Japan does things differently anyway. And there's the fall of Minitel in France as one example.)

</comment><comment><USER3> There are advantages and disadvantages to throwing in your lot with a closed system like the App Store. I wouldn't agree that either closed or open systems are likely to dominate the other in the future: as long as enough people value either, there will likely be both.

</comment><comment><USER4> VC Mark Suster has written a must-read post about this topic: [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/02/17/app-is-crap- wh...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/02/17/app-is-crap-why-apple-is- bad-for-your-health/)</comment>


How fake accounts constantly manipulate what you see on social media - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/how-fake-accounts-constantly-manipulate-what-you-see-on-social-media-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-139610 <comment><USER2> I keep hearing the narrative about social media being "toxic". But what exactly is the toxic part?

> Perhaps most importantly, use social media sparingly, like any other > addictive, toxic substance, and invest in more real-life community building > conversations. Listen to real people, real stories and real opinions, and > build from there.

Is the issue that people are not spending enough time talking to their neighbors? What is the non-toxic solution to social media?

<comment><USER3> Depending on what you want to include under social media:

Social media is ripe for propaganda campaigns.

Anonymity makes people borderline sociopathic.

Anonymous registration makes it ripe for bots.

It creates echo chambers by encouraging confirmation bias.

It also presents a false picture of other peoples lives which has been linked to depression, suicide, and other psychological ailments.

To drive clicks, the algorithms optimise for rage bait.

All of these interact with each other in various unsavoury ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> > To drive clicks, the algorithms optimise for rage bait.

Indeed, the author expands on the rage bait part here:

"More than just fanning disagreement, trolls want to encourage a belief that truth no longer exists. Divide and conquer. Distrust anyone who might serve as a leader or trusted voice. Cut off the head. Demoralize. Confuse. Each of these is a devastating attack strategy.

Even as a social media researcher, I underestimate the degree to which my opinion is shaped by these attacks. I think I am smart enough to read what I want, discard the rest and step away unscathed. Still, when I see a post that has millions of likes, part of me thinks it must reflect public opinion. The social media feeds I see are affected by it and, what's more, I am affected by the opinions of my real friends, who are also influenced.

The entire society is being subtly manipulated to believe they are on opposite sides of many issues when legitimate common ground exists."</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: S3 down in us-east-1 for everyone, or just mostly everyone? - <AUTHOR> Taking bets on whether status page begins to reflect actual status before the problem is fixed. <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15251469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15251469).</comment>


How brain-scanning technology is redefining criminal culpability - <AUTHOR> http://www.miller-mccune.com/legal-affairs/a-mind-of-crime-8440/

<comment><USER2> That's a long but very good read.

The law is multiple decades behind science.

And the death penalty makes the US seem quite brutal.

It's weird how a judge would bar evidence for fear that it might sway jurors, effectively the judge declares the defendant guilty by selecting the evidence.</comment>