Ask HN: How do you make yourself productive after a tiring day at work? - <AUTHOR> I've found it very difficult to resist the temptation to surf endlessly through Youtube videos or watch Netflix, after long hours of coding at work which kinda drains all your willpower.<p>This prevents me from working on my side-projects or spending time learning something worthwhile after work. How do you find the motivation to work on stuff that matters, even if you are craving for some mindless entertainment? <comment><USER2> 1\. Get good quality sleep over quantity.

2\. Set a schedule and stick to it as good as you can, but don't torture yourself if you blow it sometimes.

3\. Wake up earlier, do some work on your side hustle in the morning hours. This helps motivate you later too, and gets some of your creative time in on the side hustle before you start the day job.

4\. When you get home, chill, eat, shower, watch an hour or two of TV or whatever helps you veg, and then get to work.

5\. Set some short term goals, 1 month, 3 months etc.

6\. Set a work area in your house so that you don't have distractions immediately accessible.

7\. If you have decent vacation time built up or "unlimited".. Schedule taking off every Friday for a month to kick start things, that'll give you a three day weekend to work. If they don't like that do every Wednesday for a month, or Monday etc. Take one day for a month each week and dedicate it to your side hustle.

Don't beat yourself up over wanting to enjoy life some too, if you are all work and no play/relax you'll fail at it all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great pointers. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> After a tiring day take a break, visit with friends and family, exercise go for a bike ride or a walk, then shower and see if you're recharged and ready to learn/work on a side project.

If not, relax and watch some TV enjoy some mindless entertainment or get to bed early.

Try getting an early start instead, some of my most productive time is early morning before the world is up and moving.

</comment><comment><USER4> You don't. Make sure you don _not_ get tired at work. Work less. Switch to part time or take a sabbatical.

edit: I quite liked this talk about sabbatical [https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_tim...](https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been pondering about this option quite a lot recently

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's nothing wrong with listening to your body! Someone once commented something to the effect of "if you work with your mind, relax physically, and if you work with your body, relax mentally", and I've been trying to implement that change. Maybe something similar for you (sports/cardio/weights/taking a walk around the neighborhood) might work.

The problem with extracting the maximum amount of mental energy from each day is that you might drain more energy than you can feasibly regenerate from a limited amount of rest per day.

Otherwise, my advice probably is to kill distractions, and block out time in your schedule for projects, and plan the details before you start to actually implement stuff, it might save you a good amount of time while implementing the project.

Also, sleep better if you're not getting enough, people who sleep long enough can maintain a train of thought with much greater ease than who are sleep deprived. Sleep deprived people don't even realize that they're losing focus.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should look more into physical relaxation I guess. I'm getting maybe just around 6 hours of sleep a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My trick is to not use any willpower. Your side project should excite you, not tire you.

My goal is to push one update a day live, whether it's small or big. That means when I have more time, I work on fixing up the infrastructure so that I can push updates without code, such as setting up a dashboard. If the updates are too big to fit in one update, I still push it to server as a matter of principle, but it might be commented out.

Instead of finding the right way to build something, you figure out how to see the results as soon as possible.

We spend most of our day building safe things; side projects are there to go crazy and have fun.

Same goes for learning. Learn new things that interest you, and not some targeted path to further your career. Pick up small, fun things, and very often they lead to bigger things.

</comment><comment><USER7> Another idea to try is to reverse the problem : Wake up earlier, work for yourself first and go to work after.

Do nothing productive after work, reserve it for sport / family.

It does a bit of getting used to but it avoids the emotional exhaustion of the day

</comment><comment><USER8> Work less, and use the time you save for your own purposes. Nobody will care if you are leaving a bit early. Your productivity probably will not even decrease. Most programmers work more hours than they can actually sustain productively.

Most people work until they are tired, and then go home, arriving even more tired. To arrive home with some energy, leave work well before you are tired.

Don't forget to use some of that extra time for fun.

<comment><USER9> Just leave early? Simple as that?

<comment><USER8> Yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Forming a habit

[https://www.dannav.com/rituals/](https://www.dannav.com/rituals/)

</comment><comment><USER11> You don't-- rest up and move slower, all good things take years regardless.

Check out [https://algodaily.com/lessons/how-to-have-a-slow-and- boring-...](https://algodaily.com/lessons/how-to-have-a-slow-and-boring- successful-career) for more on this.

</comment><comment><USER12> You need a physical activity to reset you brain. Can be as short as 30 mins ( even better if its outdoors).

</comment><comment><USER13> How long is your commute? If your commute is short and/or fast-paced (e.g. speed walk, bus/train that is on time), then you can often carry forward the productivity from work for a bit at home.

This often works for me, but as soon as I eat, I'll have to take a few hours break in the evening, then become productive again in the late evening.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm most successful when I'm able to force myself into a non-brain intensive activity before attempting any additional work.

It could be a short workout or yoga session, a walk, a dance class.

Then, timeboxed (with a timer!) work session.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have found that doing some physical exercise (gym or sports) in the evening helps me offset some of the mental fatigue and create bandwidth for other stuff in the evening.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. I've never thought of this before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I set small and concrete goals. I also disabled my netflix account.

</comment><comment><USER17> Work in the morning.</comment>


Inverted Polymorphism With Pattern Matching - <AUTHOR> http://deliberate-software.com/inversed-polymorphism/

<comment><USER2> Without actually saying the words, this post makes a good introduction to the [expression problem][0], trading the ease of adding types for the ease of adding behaviors.

[TINSTAAFL][1], but what a functional programming paradigm takes away it replaces with brevity, concision, additional type safety, and greater opportunities for the compiler to restate your algorithms in a form more conducive to parallelization and concurrency.

[0]: [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExpressionProblem](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExpressionProblem)

[1]: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch)</comment>


Flurry of Lawsuits Fight Repeal of Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/technology/net-neutrality-lawsuit-attorneys-general.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront <comment><USER2> What can they even sue for though? By definition the downgraded classification is not in effect yet, so I would think it could not have an impact on any of the complainants.

The A&C argument seems rather weak to me, but I guess that is left to be seen.

I for one feel that the _Start Your Own ISP_ route is a healthy thousand times more helpful than suing the government for not wanting to stand behind a minute classificatory nuance that somebody gave a pet name.

<comment><USER3> > What can they even sue for though?

I am reasonably sure the Attorney Generals of several dozen states have a much better understanding of the law than armchair lawyers of HN. Hell, probably even real lawyers as well. If you are not in the USA think Minister of Justice (although the US version is more hands on).

My understanding is they won't argue for Net Neutrality -- instead they will tear apart the process leading to the decision: it'll come down to falsifying and then ignoring comments because that means an "arbitrary and capricious" decision making process which makes the result unlawful.

<comment><USER2> > _My understanding is they won 't argue for Net Neutrality -- instead they > will tear apart the process leading to the decision: it'll come down to > falsifying and then ignoring comments because that means an "arbitrary and > capricious" decision making process which makes the result unlawful._

Is mere incompetence, laziness, or lack of resources in administering what is _otherwise_ a functioning process sufficient though? My understanding is that they didn't _ignore_ comments, but rather they _failed to ignore_ comments of dubious origin. As for the claim that it is "otherwise contrary to law", well, I guess I'll just have to wait and hear and see the hearings and opinions, good luck even defining "law" in the general sense, we don't even have an accurate count of the number of sentencing guidelines and statutes in current effect. ;- )

The plain language of the regulation does not, to me (a layman familiar with the topic, the audience of plain language), indicate anything contrary to the FCC's actions; especially since the reclassification during the Obama administration was not ordered by a court.

As for my qualification to comment on the merits of a case, sure, I'm not a lawyer; but I know there are plenty of cases (even ones with facial merit) motivated primarily by politics, and secondarily by an inkling that it might just work. For Mozilla, there is a clear political benefit to even just filing such a suit.

<comment><USER3> The ruling didn't quote any comments. My understanding is they will be torn apart based on that.

<comment><USER2> > _The ruling didn 't quote any comments. My understanding is they will be > torn apart based on that._

Ahh, well that actually changes everything. I really wonder why FCC (and the people who are allegedly corrupting them) would overlook that, seems really risky.

Thanks for responding productively.

<comment><USER3> You need to understand the FCC have chosen to gather these comments instead of holding hearings. Then the NY AG have asked, _repeatedly_ what's up with those using the stolen identities of NY residents. He also asked the FCC to postpone the ruling until his investigation into this is done. Once again, the emphasis was on identity theft not Net Neutrality. Schneiderman argued for Net Neutrality in interviews but not in legal documents (up until December, I haven't read the current suit yet). He knows what's he's doing. He doesn't have much of a standing Net Neutrality wise but he certainly does in identify theft and breaking the law describing the federal rulemaking process. Roughly it'll go down like this "Your Honor, this comment was submitted in the name of X.Y. who resides in New York and here's a sworn affidafit she didn't submit it. I have a few thousand more should you want to see them. The FCC was aware of these because I repeatedly drawn their attention to it. They had a duty to take public opinion into consideration and they couldn't because many of the comments were submitted under false identities..."

The FCC have ignored this -- as they ignored everyone else to serve their corporate buddies. They can do that but you need to be an idiot to completely stonewall a state AG. No wonder he came back with more than a few of his buddies. It's going to be oh so funny when this ruling will be thrown out not because Net Neutrality but because they rushed it...

<comment><USER2> > _The FCC have ignored this -- as they ignored everyone else to serve their > corporate buddies._

So they're just incompetent? Because if I were trying to serve my corporate buddies, I'd do a satisfactory job of it instead of jeopardizing the whole darned thing.

<comment><USER3> Of course they are. Have you seen that video that idiot of a chairman put out? It looks like something College Humor would do expect he made it seriously.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Raspberry Pi Model B+ - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-3-model-bplus-sale-now-35/ <comment><USER2> Why was the title changed? It's misleading right now since there's already a Raspberry Pi Model B+ available for ages. Should be "New Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+" just like on the blog post.

<comment><USER3> in general, i find the aggressive title changing on hacker news confusing. it's been happening a lot recently where i can't find a post by eye where i know i _knew_ the title or where the title was changed _away_ from the exact title of the linked post or article.

<comment><USER4> Indeed it is quite frustrating and I often wonder why someone would waste energy in updating titles for no apparent reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> PXE booting is sweet. I develop an OS (Crankshaft) for the Pi, and a lot of times it just has been waiting to write a new OS to the SD card, waiting, plugging it in, realizing I forgot to do something, so I had to repeat. Each time it was 15 minutes of waiting. Pulling the card out and putting it back in, especially with the ribbon cable on the way (and a case too) has been really painful. PXE boot is going to solve that. So I'm very, very excited for this.

In the blog, they mentioned the possibility of having a Pi3A too, so I look forward to that as well. The project I have has not much need for lots of USB ports and ethernet, so having to pay for and power a hub and an ethernet port only add to the power requirements with no added benefit. The Pi3A will be the prime target for me if they release it.

The only thing I wish they had is microphone input (we need the mic input for "OK Google") but I don't think it will happen, so that's one more thing on the wish list.

<comment><USER6> Or you can use the u-boot bootloader[1], and boot a kernel and root filesystem from TFTP, right? [1][http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot](http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot)

<comment><USER5> For any problem, there is always someone who could come up with a brilliant solution and makes me feel like a dummy. That is a great idea I haven't thought of!

PS: Upon further inspection, PXE netbooting is already possible on the 3B under the name of "USB booting," it's just not the default in the hardware, and there might be bugs that are fixed in the new version.

<comment><USER7> But remember you can always put the very latest bugfixed version of bootcode.bin standalone on an SD card and use that instead of the version in your Pi's bootrom. This also works for older models (Pi/Pi2) that don't have PXE support in their bootrom.

<comment><USER8> Even with the new bootcode.bin, Pi 3 firmware netbooting has been extremely unreliable for me.

And at this point, if you already use an SD card for the bootcode, might as well put the whole U-Boot onto the card (which I did)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm always so impressed with the supply chain of the Raspberry PI foundation. I woke up today, saw the HN story, and during lunch went to a local store and picked one up. I live in a small-ish town in Sweden. I know it's not like a iPhone release or whatever, but still impressive that they manage to get it out to my local store on release day.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Just over two years ago, we released Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. This was our first 64-bit product"

Very unfortunate that their in-house developed and promoted OS ("Raspbian") only supports armv7, thus leaving the vast majority that doesn't know about the existence of (or how to use) archlinux ARM an the likes with a 32 bit os. Am I the only one that doesn't get the sense out of this here? Debian supports Aarch64 out of the box I think.

<comment><USER5> To me, that makes a lot of sense. Having only one architecture to support and one image to rule them all across the product line is quite a great thing to have.

The other day, there was a person who had a "reddit gold" bounty for the first person who can help them get the Pi 0 online. The person basically couldn't get the Pi Zero on the wireless network. They had no USB-OTG adapter or mini HDMI adapter they could use to debug the Pi Zero. I was thinking something along the line of making the Pi USB port a USB-serial gadget, but it was still cumbersome. The "accepted solution" was to pull out the SD card for the Zero, put it into a Pi3B they had, get the 3B online, and put it back to the Zero. I think that was such a brilliant idea.

Making it easy for users to achieve such tasks is often overlooked by us who "know too much" to not care about the efficiency of the new hardware. I don't think it was an accident that the Pi is so ubiquitous in education: They made a lot of right decisions to make their product easy to use.

<comment><USER11> I'd love to give reddit gold (if I had any) to anyone who could point me to a source for the Pi Zero at the price point it was originally supposed to be selling at: $5.00

I have yet to find it - you can get them cheap, but no where near what the RPi Foundation advertised them at when they first were announced/launched.

<comment><USER12> It depends where you are. Microcenters generally have them for $5 ($10 for the 'W'), although for Pi Day they're both on sale for $3.14. Sadly, there aren't any near me, but I had a relative who is near them pick up a literal handful last time they came down.

Several online places have them for $5, but shipping 'kills the deal' as they say.

<comment><USER13> MicroCenter is where I buy them. I happen to have one close by.

They also sell the normal RPi3 for $29.99 instead of $35.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish they would finally expose the data lines for the second camera in their "hobbyist" boards as well. Currently the dual camera setup is supported only by Compute Module, but it's cumbersome to use because the bulky I/O board (and expensive).

The foundation is overlooking the most unique feature of the Broadcom chipset, the 3D video support. They already have implemented the software/driver side, so only thing required is just exposing the pins from the SOC and adding second camera connector – very low hanging fruit. (The Zero board may not have enough space for routing but the bigger boards definitely have.)

<comment><USER15> That is interesting, I didn't even know that was a feature that was capped on the RPi.

I can see that being made into very compact 3D Scanners very quickly after launch if that was added as a feature.

<comment><USER14> To clarify, the "3D video feature" is nothing more than being able to record simultaneously from two cameras and merge the video inputs into side-by-side H264 stream. Combined with hardware H264 encoding with delay of ~100 ms, this is very useful for certain applications (in my case, live 3D video broadcasting from UAV). I'm not aware of any other "tinkerer-friendly" board capable of that.

<comment><USER16> The hardware accelleration for H264 sounds interesting. Although 100ms is not as ideal as I want but it's reasonable. Is it actually possible to use this feature in practice? Are proprietary drivers an issue?

Also is it possible to browse the web and e.g. watch videos on youtube with adequate performance on an RPi? (different topic)

<comment><USER14> > Is it actually possible to use this feature in practice? Are proprietary > drivers an issue?

I've streamed 3D video over wifibroadcast¹ to OSVR headset, no fundamental issues. The exact lag depends on resolution, fps, etc settings. It would be superb to cut the delay to sub-50 ms range, but that's probably not going to happen as it would require major rewrite of the H264 stack, as currently there are always two full frames in the pipeline, e.g. in 30 fps it makes 1000/30*2 -> ~70 ms delay². (Note that I'm not the author of the befinitiv website.)

The foundation has released open-source driver stack³ (raspivid etc), but AFAIK they have rather limited resources for software development (single ex- broadcom developer?) and limited access to proprietary features (documentation?) of the Broadcom chipset. Many things work but I think the capabilities of the SOC aren't yet fully utilized.

> Also is it possible to browse the web and e.g. watch videos on youtube with > adequate performance on an RPi? (different topic)

No personal experience, but RPi 3 should be okayish for lightweight desktop use (YMMV) with 1 GB of RAM being main limitation for multitasking.

[1] [https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/wifibroadcast-analog-like- tr...](https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/wifibroadcast-analog-like-transmission- of-live-video-data/) [2] [https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/latency- analysis-...](https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/latency-analysis-of- the-raspberry-camera/) [3] [https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland](https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A new Pi released on Pi-day, how fitting. Instead if "Pi 3 Model B+" they should have named it just "Pi 3.14" :-)

<comment><USER18> You can simplify that to Pi^2

<comment><USER19> Call up Pypy, there's a marketing opportunity for next year.

<comment><USER20> Already taken! [https://pypy.org/](https://pypy.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 2GB of RAM would've been more important to me than all the listed changes.

<comment><USER22> For this(and other) reason, the Asus Tinker Board looks like the superior choice, for very little more money than the Pi3:

[https://www.asus.com/uk/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker- Board/](https://www.asus.com/uk/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-Board/)

<comment><USER7> The last time I checked out the Asus Tinker it was still suffering from horrendous software support and cost nearly twice as much in the UK (which it still does, £32 vs £55). So unless you NEED those extra features, I strongly disagree.

<comment><USER23> I bought one and played with it over the holidays and there are a ton of OS options now. There's Armbian support now, which wasn't around at first, and it seems to be very stable and feature complete. The board is significantly more powerful than a Pi 3 with emulators and compiling and just about everything.

<comment><USER7> I had so many problems with Tinker OS and I wasn't the only one. Never tried Armbian so maybe it's better, how's the graphics performance with that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am always impressed at how people can buy a fully functional computer for $35. That said, as an engineer I often cringe at the compromises made. Like "Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0". Since the top bit rate of USB2.0 is 480Mbps and GbE is 1250Mbps, USB 2 only has about 1/3 the bit rate to support it.

Now it will be faster than 10/100 ethernet connections but don't expect to send a 100 megabytes/second through it.

<comment><USER25> wait, since when can gigabit ethernet transmit more than a gigabit per second?

<comment><USER26> Are you referring to this?

"GbE is 1250Mbps"

1.25Gbps is the "gross" bit rate for 1000BASE-T Ethernet. This is because it uses 8b/10b encoding on the wire (meaning there is a 25% overhead): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding)

1000Mbps is essentially the "net" bit rate available to the Ethernet protocol.

<comment><USER24> exactly right. Different standards claim different things, but ethernet tries to do the "right" thing and have the number in the name be the actual number of bits per second you get through the thing. Unlike say serial ports where 9600 bits per second isn't 1200 8 bit bytes per second, its only 960 8 bit bytes per second because of a start bit and stop bit. This can be even worse on serial protocols with forward error correction where up to a third of the bits going across the wire are for error correction and/or clock recovery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Here's a long post. [...] If you don't have time to read it all, we > recommend you watch this video

The video is 1 minute long. The article is ~84 lines, ~8 KB of text. Is that really long?

<comment><USER28> If you're not a native English speaker, I imagine the video may be preferable to the article.

<comment><USER10> As a non-native English speaker, I doubt that. In general listening to English is quite complex for someone that has learnt English only from school; listening to a non native language (especially a quirky spelled one like English) requires quite a bit of excercise to fully understand the various accents and how the words pronounced often illogically associate with those words you've learnt from books. I personally found vastly simpler in the beginning to read text instead of listening to a native speaker talking. That's also why captions in movies help a lot someone learning the language.

<comment><USER29> I really wish it was easier to find movies in other languages to help learning. I've been half-heartedly trying to learn French the past few years but it's deceptively hard to either find a decent streaming service, or to find torrents with French audio + subtitles.

Strangely it was quite easy when I had a stab at Swedish a few years ago; a number of their TV channels have a free streaming service that you can access from anywhere.

<comment><USER10> Maybe you may have more luck using legal services such as Netflix. I'm quite sure they have subtitles for most of the languages they support; at least, I'm sure they have them for English, German and Italian. Torrents are often a poor choice with regards to captions, because either you manage to find a source that ripped them from an source in sync with video (such as the DVD), or you have to resort to fan dubs or that kinds of sort.

<comment><USER30> For some idiotic reason Netflix geofences their subtitles. Here in Sweden you're lucky if there are even the original English subtitles available for the thing you're trying to watch.

I've even managed to find a few shows where they didn't even bother to allow disabling the subtitles!

<comment><USER31> > For some idiotic reason Netflix geofences their subtitles.

Same clusterfuck as with other copyright things. Different companies have the rights to the subtitles and it depends on what terms Netflix got. One of the reasons [0] I mentioned why piracy is still superior even for someone paying and wanting to pay.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360517)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >We use a magjack that supports Power over Ethernet (PoE), and bring the relevant signals to a new 4-pin header. We will shortly launch a PoE HAT which can generate the 5V necessary to power the Raspberry Pi from the 48V PoE supply.

This is nice though I personally wish they used the same Silvertel PoE module as Arduino which you just solder onto the board. Plus their PoE hat has a spinning fan.

<comment><USER33>
      Plus their PoE hat has a spinning fan.

Looks like it's directly above the CPU - might just be to compensate for the worse airflow from the obstruction of the extra board?

<comment><USER34> From pictures it looks like the fan would definitely be needed. The hat is very low clearance to maintain compatibility with the official cases.

[https://blog.hackster.io/the-new-raspberry-pi-poe- hat-823de8...](https://blog.hackster.io/the-new-raspberry-pi-poe- hat-823de8a8f5f)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've been using Pis to stream video from webcams for various experiments and the built-in wireless on the 3 and Zero W was game changing. All the usb WiFi adapters I had tried previously were unreliable or had too much latency. Very excited to try out the improved wireless on this board

<comment><USER36> > the built-in wireless on the 3 and Zero W was game changing

Definitely, the Pi Zero W is now my go-to controller for almost anything that needs one. The fact that Microcenter frequently sells them for $5 seals it.

I pair them with a $15 aMLC (MLC in SLC mode) industrial MicroSD card[1], and they've been rock solid, no FS corruption on power loss, no Wi-Fi drop outs.

The ability to add the Pi Camera board and have a tiny full HD networked camera with trustworthy "firmware" is a killer feature though, pre-made IP cameras at any price tend to have outdated insecure or even malicious firmware that may or may not be replaceable.

[1] [https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/atp-electronics- in...](https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/atp-electronics- inc/AF4GUD3A-OEM/AF4GUD3A-OEM-ND/5361062)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > If you've been a Raspberry Pi watcher for a while now, you'll have a bit of > a feel for how we update our products.

Model B... Model A... Model B+...

When can we expect to see the Raspberry Pi Master and the Raspberry Pi Master Compact?

<comment><USER38> Raspberry Pi Pro

Raspberry Pi Air

Retina Raspberry Pi

<comment><USER39> Im prepping for Raspberry Pi X

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Power over Ethernet is terrific, this means only one cord is now needed for a fully functioning pi (assuming you have the proper Ethernet setup on the other end).

<comment><USER41> But PoE isn't actually built-in to the Pi, it requires an external hat, purchased separately, and using a PoE hat has been possible on previous versions, yet they decided to announce it now, it's confusing.

<comment><USER42> They are not announcing PoE now. It is listed next to this particular model's features. The new/updated functionality is even bold (and power over ethernet is not).

<comment><USER41> I'm aware of the fact, it was just strange how they announced it in the video [0], as if it was a new feature. PoE has been possible on previous versions with a PoE hat aswell, so nothing really new.

0: [https://youtu.be/i62xdD4QKtA?t=44](https://youtu.be/i62xdD4QKtA?t=44)

<comment><USER43> Weren't previous PoE hats just ethernet splitters that also had a 5V output to the Pi rails, but still required another Ethernet cable to connect to the Pi's actual Ethernet port?

<comment><USER44> Funny thing is you don't even need a HAT, there are passthrough extractors and they're cheap (30 bucks for a pack of 4): [https://www.amazon.com/ANVISION- Splitter-Adapter-Compliant-R...](https://www.amazon.com/ANVISION-Splitter- Adapter-Compliant-Raspberry/dp/B079D99Y3Y)

Let's see how much the official PoE HAT is, but it better be cheap or I know what I'll be buying (more of)

<comment><USER22> This is definitely not PoE, just a hack on top of normal ethernet infrastructure. If you use one of these with a normal PoE switch you will fry whatever is connected on the other side, as it won't step down the voltage from 48V to 5V. Both sides need to be using this, but then real PoE is guaranteed to work even on 100m long cables, with this your 5V will end up being <4V with a 100m long cable and potentially useless.

<comment><USER44> Nope, this is not the ghetto "Passive PoE" variety which uses the 4 wires not needed for 100Mbps to carry power. This is an actual 802.3af/at compliant adapter.

I have 2 in my home (not the exact model I listed because I'm on the other side of the Atlantic, bought them off Amazon Germany), hooked to a Netgear GS110TP (8 PoE copper ports, 2 SFP ).

Actually there's so much stuff drawing power (2 Pi, 2 Ubiquity APs) that I'm starting to worry about the load on the switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> A bit worried by the increased power usage for certain applications. For instance I used to power my PI with a cell phone battery pack without any trouble.

<comment><USER46> Those models still exist, along with the even lower powered pi zero.

<comment><USER47> You can also adjust the CPU power and timing frequencies to underclock your pi for better battery life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is a nice minor upgrade, good job. That said, I'd love to see a new model with more memory. That would require Broadcom (or some other organization) to develop a revised SoC that supported more control pins, but in a large sense that's a small change, and memory is cheap enough that adding some more memory wouldn't significantly change the price. But it would greatly extend what software the Pi can usefully run. Most software developers don't care very much about memory size, leading to bloat in size. As a result, the little memory limits what applications the current Raspberry Pi can use, including many programs useful for education. I wish them luck!

<comment><USER49> Or perhaps some kind of storage connectivity beyond USB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Gigabit ethernet over usb 2? Will never reach gigabit speeds...

<comment><USER51> Disappointed that there still isn't a dedicated Ethernet controller. I would rather have that at 100Mbps than "gigabit" over USB.

<comment><USER51> Why the downvotes? It's a legitimate criticism. USB Ethernet is slower and consumes more CPU cycles.

<comment><USER2> But it is cheap and good enough for the foundation's goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Still Ethernet via USB 2.0, which means it is not actually gigabit.

<comment><USER53> I also noticed that. It's only ~280 megabits so seems a bit dishonest to call it gigabit. I guess what they mean is "gigabit ethernet standard" i.e. 1000BASE-T.

Also how does it act once its internal receive buffer is full? Is it possible to get the sender to slow down, or does it have to start dropping frames? Will important things such as ARP broadcasts and DHCP requests just risk getting lost?

<comment><USER54> There is nothing dishonest about their announcement: they are explicit that speed is limited by the USB bus:

> While the USB 2.0 connection to the application processor limits the > available bandwidth, we still see roughly a threefold increase in throughput > compared to Raspberry Pi 3B.

Followed by a table showing 315Mb/s bandwidth, three times that of the 3B but a third that of full-speed Gigabit. And this isn't tucked away in a footnote, it's up front in the middle of the article.

<comment><USER53> The article yes, not the technical specification chart that is probably what most people see before buying it.

<comment><USER54> The product page, which is probably what most people see before buying it, simply says 'faster Ethernet':

> 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, dual-band wireless LAN, Bluetooth > 4.2/BLE, faster Ethernet, and Power-over-Ethernet support (with separate PoE > HAT)

I'm a bit cross because of the casual assumption of bad faith, when it seems to me they've gone to some effort to do the opposite: make the limitations clear instead of relying on a buzzword.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> What I'm missing is on board flash. Even 512MB would be such useful for many usage scenarios to put OS there. SD cards are biggest source of problems on long run RPi's without some tweaking. There are almost none SBC with built in flash (BeagleBone is shiny exception).

<comment><USER56> It doesn't exactly fill the same niches as the regular RPi but the RPi Compute Module 3 does have 4G of emmc builtin. You can get a compute module and breakout board for $136 on Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 They should have called it the Raspberry Pi 3.14, considering which day it is ;)

</comment><comment><USER57> +1 for PoE support

<comment><USER41> PoE support has always been available with a seperate PoE Hat [0], I found it to be a strange announcement.

0: [https://coolcomponents.co.uk/products/pi-poe-switch-hat- powe...](https://coolcomponents.co.uk/products/pi-poe-switch-hat-power-over- ethernet-for-raspberry-pi)

<comment><USER58> I was confused by that too. "You used to require a separate board to use PoE. Now you... still need a separate board to use PoE." Oh well.

Also, as possibly the only person left who really doesn't care at all about wireless... I'm glad there's a refresh, sure, but... I'm meh. I've been pxe booting my pi3s for a while now.

Now, if it had official "clean" debian support (not "raspian") that would be something!

<comment><USER29> Possibly it will make the official PoE board cheaper? The existing one I have, which works rather well actually, cost almost the same as the Pi, which kinda limits its usefulness (when a PSU costs ~£6 max)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Feel like RPi is heading to a commercial upgrade direction: more cores, higher frequency, faster processors, faster networks, etc. Wasn't RPi originally designed to teach programming and to make a hackable gadget? With that goal, I think a simple (and therefore maybe low performance) system is easier to learn and to hack than more and more fancy and complex architecture. From that perspective, BBC Micro bit is doing the right thing IMO.

<comment><USER60> Why not upgrade it, though? Keeping it a system for teaching/hacking while improving performance is a win-win, as far as I'm concerned. For commercial applications, I'd think the Compute Module would be a better bet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm a big fan of the Raspberry Pi community in general and have used it for multiple applications over the years; most recently as a media center TV box. However, the hardware now feels old and I wish for more of an update from the Pi foundation.

If anyone hear is looking for a true upgrade on the Pi, try the ODROID C2, it's years ahead of the Pi in terms of performance.

<comment><USER62> Lots of people say there are superior devices - however the community size and support for Raspberry Pi cannot be overstated.

The price of an Odroid XU4 is significantly proportionally higher and I have no guarantee that certain features or projects are feasible on it. First result from Dec 2017 when searching for "XU4 Kodi" is someone having a problem installing and then saying "I would prefer a version with long term support and wide use base." Well my answer to that is RPi.

I'm merely implying that RPi has a higher chance of certain things working simply because its more popular. I'm not disputing that there are higher performance platforms for "similar" money but it's reliability and a little more certainty that some people are after.

I would love to try one of the ODROID devices, I simply don't have the time. And I love seeing suggestions for these other devices so please don't stop posting them :)

<comment><USER61> I agree with you, the ODROID XU4 is significantly more expensive and doesn't have nearly as much support as one can expect from the Pi community.

However, the ODROID C2 is priced similarly to the Pi and has more support than the XU4. LibreELEC has out of the box support for the C2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Reminds me that i have a 3B sitting around that i have yet to do anything with.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm still waiting for an inexpensive Linux board with proper sleep support. Suspend, hibernate, etc., and come back within milliseconds instead of dozens of seconds, and under $30 USD.

</comment><comment><USER64> > 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM

When are they going to upgrade the memory? All of that is nice, but what I've really wanted is one with at least 3-4GB.

<comment><USER8> When Broadcom has a less shitty SoC for them…

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> No full gigabit ethernet :(

</comment><comment><USER66> I'd really want to see a benchmark between this and Odroid C2

</comment><comment><USER67> I'm looking forward for the Pi 3 Model B+Xv2.0

</comment><comment><USER68> Happy kodi server update day

<comment><USER69> Amlogic S905X boxes are the better choice for Kodi these days. You can installi LibreElec, they are cheaper than a Raspberry Pi 3 and they support 4K & HDR and have hardware acceleration for H.265 (HEVC) and VP9.

<comment><USER70> I've never been entirely comfortable with these HTPC boxes with factory-issued OS, especially connecting to a local network.

Do you have any advice or feedback on Amlogic S905X-based boxes that can have the OS flashed to something more generic (Debian-based, ideally)? Thanks!

<comment><USER69> Yes. The box comes with Android 6 on it and you replace it with LibreElec. I think they all work with LibreElec these days - no guarantees!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> TL;DR: The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is a nice update that provides, better networking with WiFi now 802.11.b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2/BLE and Gigabit Ethernet (although limited to 300Mbps). For Makers, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has made it easier to incorporate the RPi3B+ into end products keeping the RPi3B+ in production until at least January 2023 and providing "modular compliance certification" for the wireless module.

Source: [https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/blog/new-raspberry- pi-3...](https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/blog/new-raspberry- pi-3-model-b/)

WHAT IS THE SAME: \</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

\- Same mechanical footprint as both the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. \- Same GPIO pinout, so no need to change your hats/shields/daughter boards \- Same power supply recommended (5V/2.5A DC via micro USB connector) \- Broadcom BCM2837B0, Cortex-A53 64-bit SoC (System on a Chip), but this time clocked to 1.4GHz, which yields roughly a 10% performance increase over the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. The chip now has a metallic heatsink and bears the markings BCM2837B0 1FSBG, TA1738 P20 W39-01 N2 W.

WHAT IS NEW: \</comment><comment></comment><comment>

WIRELESS MODULE:

The product briefing document from the foundation states that the onboard wireless module now supports dual-band 2.4GHz/5GHz IEEE 802.11ac and both Bluetooth 4.2 and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy).

The wireless module in the RPi3B+ is not mentioned in the product briefing document and is hidden under shielding. Prying open the shielding revealed a Cyprus Wireless CYW43455 (datasheet).

\- The CYW43455 supports the following WiFI standards: 802.11ac/n/a/b/g/d/h/i \- Security: (WEP/ WPA Personal / WPA2 Personal / WMM /WMM-PS (U-APSD) /WMM-SA / AES (hardware accelerator) /TKIP (hardware accelerator) / CKIP (software support) \- Proprietary protocols (CCXv2, CCXv3, CCXv4, CCXv5, WFAEC \- IEEE 802.15.2 Coexistence Compliance (on-silicon solution compliant with IEEE 3-wire requirements) \- The CYW43455 supports the following future IEEE drafts/standards: 802.11r (fast roaming between APs), 802.11w (secure management frames), 802.11 Extensions:, 802.11e QoS Enhancements (as per the WMM specification is already supported), 802.11h 5 GHz Extensions, 802.11i MAC Enhancements, 802.11k Radio Resource Measurement

The CYW43455 data sheet states that the Bluetooth core supports:

\- Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR \- Bluetooth 3.0 \- Bluetooth 4.2 (Bluetooth Low Energy)

The Wireless LAN module now has "modular compliance certification", which allows the board to be designed into end products with significantly reduced wireless LAN compliance testing, improving both cost and time to market.

NEW GIGABIT ETHERNET _:

The new RPi3B+ has support for Gigabit Ethernet using Microchip's LAN7515 (_which is a USB 2.0 to 10/100/1000 Ethernet Bridge with 4-port USB 2.0 Hub). The LAN7515 supports a max number of 6 downstream USB ports and 1 Ethernet Port limited to a maximum throughput of 300 Mbps. The LAN7515's ethernet controller supports numerous power management wakeup features, including Magic Packet™, Wake-on LAN (WOL) and Link Status Change.

POWER:

The RPi3B+ is Power over Ethernet (PoE)–enabled, but requires the purchasing of a separate PoE HAT.

PRODUCTION LIFETIME:

If you're thinking of incorporating the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ into another product, the Raspberry Pi foundation has committed to keeping the RPi3B+ in production until at least January 2023.

HEAT MANAGEMENT:

Due to the BCM2837 now running at 1.4GHz, the RPi3B+, runs relatively warm. The foundation provides the following warning: "This product should be operated in a well-ventilated environment and, if used inside a case, the case should not be covered". Given the optional "open lid configuration" of the official Raspberry Pi case I asked for clarification, and their Director of Product Management came back with: "It only means if you have it in a case the case itself should not then be covered".

<comment><USER72> > This product should be operated in a well-ventilated environment and, if > used inside a case, the case should not be covered

Does this make the B+ model more dangerous in case of overheating?

I have a couple of Pis running inside official Pi case they hold between 35 - 53 degrees. ( 35 meaning unheated room ). I would be sad if I upgrade the devices and then loose my sleep in case of overheating.

<comment><USER73> >Does this make the B+ model more dangerous in case of overheating?

3A has similar issue, when it overheats it automatically drops CPU clock to afair 60% of normal until temperature drops down.

<comment><USER74> And it's actually covered in the article: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2018/03/sysbench-2.p...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2018/03/sysbench-2.png)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Language of Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-language-of-science/ <comment><USER2> These days the language of science in popular media always remind me of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World with science as a candle in the dark and while corpora analysis is cool to create a bunch of word stats I believe modern science (supported by the recent steady lack of change in its language as shown in one of the article graphs) has inherently a problem of discourse and not of words to be clearer to the layperson. Discourse in the storytelling sense that appeal to their specific audience, but also not like those flourish articles that start like a romance which are pretty preposterous. In that way, perhaps, dunno, it's impossible to have a language of science that is efficient today while at the same time trying to appeal to everybody as it would be impossible to have an universal discourse that appeals equally to a person on minimum wage and a trader with a nice suit... in the end any universal language of science no matter how well its words are selected will fail, due to bad discourse IMHO.

<comment><USER3> "in the end any universal language of science no matter how well its words are selected will fail, due to bad discourse IMHO."

Can you clarify on what you mean by bad scientific discourse, and why it is inevitable?

<comment><USER4> In my words, because I agree: We are all entangled and entrenched in our self- interests and group interests, and cannot undermine the profit motive or the need to win. Scientists are just players in a vast field of this entrenchment who do not always get the last word, nor win, nor able to always stick strictly to the science to begin with.

<comment><USER3> Self interest, group interest, and profit are, in my opinion, part of the picture of producing good science. Something would be amiss without them. Good science happens at some desirable equilibrium between those and other factors. Perhaps we have deviated from that equilibrium, but it's not because of bad faith, adversarial sabotage. In my opinion, the root of the problem is that the very system for communication and exchange among scientists needs to be updated.

Any good system keeps malincentives in check. In the political realm, that would be America's system of checks and balances. Perhaps it needs updating, but it has served us very well. Critically, America's political system does _not_ fundamentally remove the desire for competitive sabotage. It takes that desire and channels it into something good, while precluding the worst outcomes through a system of checks and balances. Those checks and balances are themselves adversarial in nature. America's founding fathers implicitly took the view that everyone is capable of wrong. Rationality is an emergent product of competition. We have to be careful not to pin too much blame on competitive behavior, even if it seems polemical, domineering, and protective. The system of scientific discourse requires more attention. Moreover, we have to fundamentally believe that it can be improved. If we don't, then we won't start to improve it, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All that being said, I'm talking about improving something that is already very good. The progress in almost all fields of science in the last 10-20 years has been mind-blowing. Some of it has already born fruit, and some areas of research, like graphene perhaps, will amaze the biggest cynics in the future with their transformational output.

<comment><USER4> Two issues.

First, no math problem or physics problem or chemistry problem or science problem involves politics or ethics. Give great scientists a great problem, and they will solve it. It's always up to the administrators and managers and executives to tell them when to stop, often by cutting funding or firing. These are not the scientists, though they may be made to represent them.

Ethics and politics is a completely separate discipline from logic and science. But often those doing the logic and science aren't given a say. They are just placed in their labs and made comfortable.

Second, most scientists know when they are right. You can check your work. You know how you did it. You are aware of what you understand. And being right is mostly enough in a purely scientific context.

But in the real world, you have the Donald and an endless army of careerists who don't mind serving for a naked king that get to decide what is right.

For the most part I don't believe scientists have much of a communication problem. They trade information and are happy to make progress. That's about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The truth is not enough. It needs promoting and needs to be fought for. But the best paid promoters and fighters can win regardless of how true anything is, allowing those with the power and money to select the truth that suits them. And rarely are scientists good fighters.</comment>


No Venture Capital Needed, or Wanted - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/business/smallbusiness/no-venture-capital-needed-or-wanted.html <comment><USER2> This is the money quote.

 _"I don't remember seeing a company going public on the Nasdaq in the last 20 years who arrived at the I.P.O. with only management owning the company," he said. "It's almost a rite of passage."_

Why would you sell a business that you owned 100% of that was able to be bootstrapped to $100 million in revenue. What possible business that you could invest the proceeds in that would be better than this?</comment>


Things You Should Shout at Brilliant Web Developers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jonathanmarkwell.com/587493 <comment><USER2> > How dare you assume that your competitors have the time and skill to copy > you.

Unfortunately your competitors don't need your skills to copy you; once you make your thing public, everybody will see how to do it and copying your product becomes trivial. But the good part is that only successful projects are copied, so you really shouldn't worry about it -- when people start copying you, it means you are on the right track.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you ever worked on a rebuild? Copying is surprisingly hard, almost never trivial. Check out how bad Rocket Internet's products are compared to the services they copy. They are pros at copying and still they can't get it right.

People copy when they know it's worth the risk. That's why successful projects are copied. I agree with you that it is a very good indicator that you are on the right track. :)

<comment><USER3> Sometimes this is true, but many products are trivial to copy, like Instagram, or twitter. Most of us here could probably copy either of those in a weekend or two.

<comment><USER4> Copy basic functionality perhaps.... I doubt the majority here could scale nearly as effectively as both of those companies have....

<comment><USER5> I don't know. Scaling as effectively as Twitter doesn't seem like a particularly high bar. They spent a year or so after they got big being down almost as much as they were up. The "fail whale" was just about the most common thing to see on twitter.com.

Of course, now that Twitter is established, you cannot repeat their mistakes if you want to succeed.

<comment><USER4> Relevant[1] front-page discussion.

[1][http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture- tw...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-twitter-uses- to-deal-with-150m-active-users.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Compressing all the questions into one: "How dare you want to be a web developer instead of being a businessman?"

Well, being a businessman sometimes makes sense.

But usually I deliberately pick being an engineer and _not_ a businessman. Doing business takes a different mindset and a lot of time; it's not easy to do both, and often not fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great observation.

If the title of the post was longer it would have been "10 Things You Should Shout at Brilliant Web Developers Who Are Building a Product for Financial Independence"

Once you have financial independence or don't want a product of your own you don't need to be a business person.

The great thing is, once you successfully get past this ugly bit of doing business you can start ignoring this advice and making products that are better in your eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It took me a while to convince myself that this wasn't a joke. Obviously, nobody wants to ship a crappy product, and obviously if you insist on perfection your product will never ship. Deciding when a product is "good enough" is a judgement call.

Shouting "how dare you" at people who disagree on this judgement call is just stupid.

<comment><AUTHOR> I probably failed to set the context. :)

I felt an extreme position was needed to respond to brilliant but highly principled people (who I wished were joking) but I felt were saying things like:

"How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that won't work with JavaScript turned off."

"How dare you suggest that I would charge for something that doesn't even have feature X."

"How dare you suggest that I would ever let a design loose that I hadn't spent 6 months refining."

"How dare you suggest that we shouldn't spend the last of our savings before we launch finishing the product."

"How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that wasn't web standards compliant and passing every accessibility standard."

Maybe I should write a joke post that uses some of these?

<comment><USER8> > "How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that wasn't web > standards compliant and passing every accessibility standard."

As long as some web developers feel that accessibility is optional, even for a minimum viable product, they will continue to discriminate (howver inadvertently) against some users. In some cases, these users will then be barred from completing some task that is required, because they can't use a particular application, e.g. an application that's required by a particular job or course. Please don't contribute to this problem by suggesting that accessibility is an optional nice-to-have. For users with disabilities who need to use a particular application, it isn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> It makes me very happy that I am never going to convince people like you that accessibility is optional. I can't convince myself of it either when it comes to profitable products.

We need more people like you running profitable businesses and ensuring that it is never optional in the (misguided) name of lower costs and more profits.

Unfortunately when you build an MVP for the 100% you build it for no one. If accessibility is the most important thing for you then make your product and therefore your MVP for with people with disabilities as your primary audience. I would suggest a much narrower focus than that as its sadly far too big a market to start with.

<comment><USER8> EDIT: improve phrasing in a couple of places; link to a better blog post to make my point

I'll try to be less confrontational in this reply.

It seems to me that you're setting up this false dichotomy: either developers working on MVPs can ignore accessibility because 90% of people have no significant disability, or they can try in vain to make an MVP for 100% of people. Of course it makes sense that one can't do the latter; when developing software in general, but an MVP in particular, one has to pick and choose which categories of users to target. One has to choose which features to implement and which to leave out or save for later. But it still seems wrong to suggest that one can ignore a set of potential users who might be a good fit for the application in every way, but happen to have a disability through no choice of their own. To get an idea of the consequences when accessibility is ignored, check out this blog post:

[http://blindaccessjournal.com/2005/02/opportunity-lost-to- te...](http://blindaccessjournal.com/2005/02/opportunity-lost-to-technology- inaccessibility/)

Maybe I'm just too close to this particular issue. after all, I'm visually impaired myself, and my boss and most of my coworkers are totally blind. Nonetheless, I believe that accessibility shouldn't be a nice-to-have feature, but something one just expects to be there, like security. A commenter on another sub-thread pointed out the absurdity of suggesting that a developer can ignore security even for a prototype. I think the same holds for accessibility. Browsers, toolkits, and frameworks can do a lot to make it more likely that an application will be accessible by default, but I think that as with security, some level of consideration from the application developer will always be necessary.

Agreed about "people with disabilities" being too broad a market to focus on. Too many different disabilities. Where I work, we focus on making our software maximally usable for blind people.

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries. I was confrontational in my post.

Let me clarify: I'm not saying MVP (or pre-profit product) developers should ignore accessibility. I'm saying they shouldn't spend too high a portion of their time worrying about it. If a product fails some measure of accessibility it has a bug which will need to be fixed at some point. Just because it's a bug that you are aware of and it's easier to detect than other bugs doesn't mean that it should stop you from trying to sell the product. A buggy product with some income is more likely to succeed than an apparently bug-free product and no income.

I've worked with blind coworkers in the past and have tried using screen readers myself so I have some appreciation of the challenges. Thank you for the link, it's always good to have a reminder. It sounds like the employer in question and Siebel should have had legal action taken against them. They're both clearly of a size where they can and should be doing better. This is another example of why we need brilliant web developers building businesses that can destroy backwards companies like those.

How do you get on with Hacker News? I just put it through a checker and it appears to be pretty appalling. Would it be better if pg shut down Hacker News completely until the issues it found are resolved?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great post. I think a similar issue is when an engineer feels they need a certain set of infrastructure or algorithmic features before they can start building their program. If you end up finding out that most potential users have a different problem though it can all be for waste. I've met many programmers who seem to have forgotten (or never learned) how to prototype, and can't imagine building something with a fundamental security or scalability flaw.

There's also a far more difficult one to become aware of, which is building an overly complex solution when a simpler one exists for the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. It's not just in the name of 'design' and 'user experience' perfection that developers overly delay their first product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >When you spend weeks or months perfecting your product in the name of 'user experience' or 'design' before selling it, you are doing more harm than good for your users and yourself on your quest to be financially independent

Some of us are serious about delivering quality. You are trivializing 2/3 of the web application right there. If it looks like shit and confuses people, no one is going to use it, unless it meets a serious pain point and has absolutely no competition yet, which, is not the case for most of us.

<comment><AUTHOR> People who are serious about delivering quality are brilliant. I want people like you to have a proper chance at doing what you do _sustainably_. That way the world will have less bad products built by people who are only good at sales and marketing. Quality is very important and very hard, but it is not 2/3 of a web application. At best quality is 1/3 of a web application, with 1/3 core functionality and the final 1/3 sales and marketing.

When your product is not profitable you need to let your customers decide if it looks shit and confuses them. You'll know it's ready when they pay for it and keep paying. I want people to stop leaving it too long before measuring that by giving people the opportunity to buy. Too often developers leave it too long and don't have the time, money and energy to invest in all the things you also need to get right.

<comment><USER11> Isn't there a risk that releasing a product too early could cause a negative first impression and by the time you have gotten around to improving it, everyone has lost interest?

Also quality is something which is difficult to define and pin down, and will also vary depending on the product.

For example , a backup solution which blows away everything else in terms of innovation and usability but corrupts my data 1% of the time isn't going to get bought. And even if they fix the 1% corruption bug I'm going to remain skeptical for a very long time.

<comment><USER4> Yep,

The negative impact of releasing an unfinished project is almost always enough to make a developer wait until their product is finalized.

Most intelligent people realize that they are most likely not the MOST intelligent person in the world; therefore releasing an incomplete product, when they unsure of a final release date, only opens them up to the risk of being copied and outdone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is this specific to web developers? All ten things are applicable to anyone selling a product.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't have to be. That said if I made it more abstract the result would likely be less web developers reading it. I've met more web developers that need to hear these things (probably because I spend more time with them than other people building products).

<comment><USER12> Thanks. I just thought people other than web developers should read it too. It's a great list of thought-provoking questions we should all ask of ourselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very happy to hear that. Please feel free to re-write/copy chunks of it for another audience, all I ask is that you link back to it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great post, Jon. I real all these "How Dare You" statements as exhortations for developers to _question_ perfection. That questioning is useful, maybe even necessary. Questioning default assumptions is powerful.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you want to learn about Vue.js? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on very complex apps with Vue.js for a few years now. I thought it would be helpful to share what I know by helping you guys understand concepts or fix issues you're having in your Vue.js apps.
If the answer to your questions is short, I'll do it in the comments here, otherwise, I'll write a blog post about it.
But please try to generalize the question you have because I can't dive into each one's code and figure out how to fix it (this will require too much time).
I'll try to answer as many questions as I can.
I hope I can help you all guys :) <comment><USER2> I'm curious how the new 3.0 functional api makes Vue faster while leaving backwards compatibility.</comment>


Instagram Is Testing Getting Rid of Likes - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/instagram-is-testing-getting-rid-of-likes.html <comment><USER2> I can't imagine Instagram without likes

If they gonna do it, I believe their users will become happier overall</comment>


Why Mailjet's Email Delivery Service Is Not Concerned by #Prism - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailjet.com/post/52791848963/why-mailjets-email-delivery-service-is-not-concerned

<comment><USER2> If you are sending email to people in the US, i'm sure they'd be able to interecpt the messages so it's a moot point. Most recipients are using one of the big mail providers like gmail or yahoo, which, if the reports are to be believed, are under the purview of PRISM.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, yes: nothing is perfect. It's the same problematic for personal email, if you choose to run your own server (or use any free alternative prism- break.org), your recipients will still be using the classic big providers. However, even if nothing is perfect, you can take the decision to try to make it right (and if everybody does the sames, it ends up working :) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> who should be concerned about Prism?

If Mailjet was served a warrant for information in Canada, wouldn't they provide the relevant information?

<comment><USER4> Of course we would, but as stated in the post, the process is stricter (an independent Judge is needed...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good article if you are concerned about emailing

<comment><USER6> Or if you're selling an email product and want to get your front page slot by throwing #prism into a headline.

<comment><USER4> We never communicated about this before. So sure, the context is key. But it was always included in our strategy.

Quite a few clients asked us questions about all this... Just hope it's useful to share our point of view.

<comment><USER6> It was a little tongue in cheek. By all means, if this prompts companies to be more transparent and they can use that as a marketing differentiator, more power to you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Search across every word from 25 years of the Simpsons - <AUTHOR> http://benschmidt.org/Simpsons/ <comment><USER2> Frinkiac does pretty much the same thing but in a more entertaining way: [https://frinkiac.com/](https://frinkiac.com/)

<comment><USER3> Very cool that site, well done. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It appears I can now confirm that the Sea Captain's name is only mentioned by a character (Lionel Hutz) in one line in Season 4. It does also appear to have been used in a caption in season 11, though not mentioned by a character. His first name is given as Horatio according to the Simpsons wikia but that doesn't seem to appear in the show as far as I can tell.

</comment><comment><USER5> It would be nice if the search was case-insensitive! E.g. 'she' returns different data than 'She'.

<comment><USER6> there's some settings in the top right corner that allow you to change case sensitivity

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I jumped straight to, "dental plan"

<comment><USER8> Didn't Lisa need braces?

<comment><USER9> dental plan

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it interesting how "Homer" has experienced a constant, steady decline in usage over time.

<comment><USER11> I'm surprised that Marge is consistently higher ranked than Lisa.

<comment><USER12> Moreover, Homer > Bart > Marge > Lisa > Maggie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cromulent. Is the raw data available or is that unpossible to legally distribute?

</comment><comment><USER14> So donut returns quite different results than doughnut. Is this just the script writers using their preferred spelling for doughnut, or does this come from transcription data (thus indicating a preferred spelling for transcribers)?

</comment><comment><USER15> "This is great! And all I've done is enter my name-Thrillhouse!"

</comment><comment><USER16> The word "Doh" doesn't even show up until season 8. I'm guessing it's not written out in the closed captioning?

<comment><USER17> The official written form is "Annoyed Grunt": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27oh%21#Origin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27oh%21#Origin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Search does not appear to be case insensitive, nor does it group common words.

EDIT: apparently others discovered this an hour or so before me!

</comment><comment><USER19> A few interesting trends: Fox, McBain, Poochie

</comment><comment><USER20> What about us braindead slobs ?

<comment><USER16> You'll be given cushy jobs!

<comment><USER21> Monorail

<comment><USER22> Were you sent here by the devil?

<comment><USER23> Nobody gonna finish it?. fine

No good sir I'm on the level..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is the data on which this based freely available?

</comment><comment> gm-conspiracy tomacco?

</comment><comment><USER25> Probablie

<comment><USER9> upvoted for reference sickness index

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> All good people should already have seasons 1-8 memorized. What else would anyone need?

<comment><USER11> My friend and I used to be unbeatable at Taboo, and similar games, because we could use Simpsons references to get to just about any word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> there are no tick marks on the x axis.

</comment><comment><USER28> This would be better if it was only 10 years of the Simpsons.</comment>


Ampere EMAG 64bit Arm Workstation - <AUTHOR> https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-workstation.html <comment><USER2> I've used a machine with this chip (remotely). It's not terrible; Daniel Lemire blogs about some early performance impressions here [https://lemire.me/blog/2019/03/26/hasty-comparison- skylark-a...](https://lemire.me/blog/2019/03/26/hasty-comparison-skylark-arm- versus-skylake-intel/) and I've ported simdjson to it ([https://github.com/lemire/simdjson](https://github.com/lemire/simdjson)).

I'm definitely not at the stage where I can say anything definitive about performance. For a SIMD-intensive task, a preliminary run on a 3.3Ghz eMag core gets about 400 megabytes/second of JSON parsing relative to 2.2 gigabytes/second on a 4.0Ghz Skylake. This may come down to having a maximum of 2 x 128-bit NEON operations per cycle vs 3 x 256 AVX2 operations per cycle, as well as some clock speed differences. Will eventually post about this at branchfree.org when I don my Nomex long johns (required whenever doing any benchmark that might imply to anyone that any processor runs faster or slower than any other processor).

<comment><USER3> Just tested the Daniel's tests against our 16 Core LX2160 that is still only clocked at 1.9Ghz (will be 2.2Ghz final production). These are our numbers

binarytrees: 37s mandelbrot: 13.6s fasta: 0.9s

I will give your benchmark a run once I have some time.

<comment><USER3> Okay I couldn't help myself, waiting for a build to finish.

./parse jsonexamples/twitter.json

Min: 0.00171284 bytes read: 631514 Gigabytes/second: 0.368695

<comment><USER2> Whoa, thanks. 368, huh? That's pretty impressive given the 1.9Ghz clock speed... By coincidence, the 'twitter.json' file was the one I was using as my slender data point.

Do note that at this stage the benchmark is so preliminary as to be largely meaningless - I haven't really done much more than eyeball the results. But as a preliminary data point, that seems to be a stronger showing clock-for-clock than the eMag one.

<comment><USER3> let me know if you want this data in github. Just testing our overclocking bring cpu clock up to 2.4Ghz and DDR to 3200

Also building with gcc 8.2 not I needed to change -march=native to -march=armv8-a+crypto

Min: 0.00111424 bytes read: 631514 Gigabytes/second: 0.566768

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Packet also has eMAG for $1/hour in the cloud if you want to try before you buy: [https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c2-large- arm/](https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c2-large-arm/)

Geekbench scores: [https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/11678329?baseli...](https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/11678329?baseline=12589322)

<comment><USER5> Looks like Packet is sold out in all regions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Out of personal interest, I did some very unscientific benchmarking by timing a build of the Yocto core-image-sato distro for the BeagleBone. All sourcecode was downloaded beforehand, so that does not factor into the results. All the machines were running Ubuntu 18.04 Server except the A10, which runs Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop.

Here are the results:

       34m9.347s  EPYC 7401P   24C/48T 2.2GHz       (Packet c2.medium.x86 bare metal server)
       75m14.661s eMAG         32C/32T 3.3GHz       (Packet c2.large.arm bare metal server)
       96m31.901s i5-8259U      4C/8T  2.30-3.80GHz (Intel NUC8I5, NVMe SSD)
      139m52.184s ThunderX     96C/96T 2.0GHz       (Packet c1.large.arm bare metal server)
      194m52.745s A10-6800K     4C/4T  4.1GHz       (Old self-built desktop, slow-ish SSD)
      535m52.642s Celeron N3150 4C/4T  1.60-2.08GHz (Gigabyte Brix, SSD)

I assume the eMAG results will improve somewhat once its support matures, but the difference to the i5 is disappointingly small. Both ARM machines performed reasonably well when all cores were used, but the relatively weak per-core performance showed whenever utilization fell. But although the ThunderX was slow, looking at 96 cores in htop felt pretty good...

</comment><comment><USER7> That case surprised me. I just built an Intel based Linux system using that exact case; it's a "be quiet!" Pure Base 600 Black [1]. They "debranded" the case in the photo with a low-effort edit.

[1] [https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68V57M4...](https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68V57M4892)

<comment><USER8> Slightly off-topic but what do you think of the case at this point?

<comment><USER9> Looks ugly, and why not buy a rack?

<comment><USER10> Racks are terrible as desktops

<comment><USER9> Why?

<comment><USER11> Generally rack based equipment is designed with less vertical height and strict front to back airflow. They are also often designed for relatively high input temperatures, so they are designed for high airflow rates. These combine to be very loud and often crazy inefficient. Read that as consuming significant power to cool the equipment.

Mini/Mid/Full tower cases generally are designed to take advantage of heat wanting to raise. So the intakes are often large and low (140mm is not unusual), and the top rear for the exhaust. Even 200mm isn't unusual for the exhaust. Air moving efficient increases quickly with fan size. 1U fans often move at 15k rpm and make more noise and vibration than anything else. Desktop fans are often 1200 rpm or lower and just take a few watts to dump substantial heat.

As an example the Fractal Design Mini C (a small, quiet, under $100 case) has room for 2 x 140mm in the lower front, and 2 x 140mm on top. It's a smaller case, so there's only 120mm in the rear. With $80 ish for the case and a few extra fans (Fractal design isn't bad, but not quite class leading) you can easily dump a few 100 watts quietly.

Find a rack mount case that can move as much air as quietly is challenging and when possible often prohibitively expensive and/or crazy loud. Last time I build one to house a single socket motherboard and a GPU (much like a desktop) it included 4 delta fans that I needed ear protection on to be in the same room.

<comment><USER9> I don't see your point. Maybe it is true for off the shelf stuff. I may assume that a lot of YC readers build their own system.

I just build a rack for my desk. I have not really put it under load, but I have to see the GPU, Power supply or Case fan spinning yet. For now I only have only once fan for the case. The only fan that moves, but silent is the CPU fan. The only thing that you can hear: The 10 TB HDD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The only available CPU from Ampere EMAG seems to be the 8180, so I think this workstation also uses this.

Wikichip: [https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ampere_computing/emag/8180](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ampere_computing/emag/8180)

AnandTech: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14141/ampere-emag-in-the- clou...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14141/ampere-emag-in-the-cloud-32-arm- core-instance-for-1hr)

TL;DR: 32 Cores, up to 3.3 Ghz boost, 32MB L3 cache, 125W TDP

<comment><USER4> Where have I seen that model number before... oh yeah: [https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/120496/...](https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/120496/intel- xeon-platinum-8180-processor-38-5m-cache-2-50-ghz.html)

<comment><USER13> Speaking of Xeon, you could probably put together a much cheaper workstation with an older Xeon over the eMag. I just don't see myself picking this up, at its current price point.

<comment><USER14> Without knowing what the perf is like, it is really difficult to say. 32 cores @ 2.8-3.3 GHz sounds like quite a lot, I don't think getting 32 core Xeon would be anywhere near as cheap as this.

<comment><USER15> there is a chinese motherboard that'll drive 2 xeon processors. It fits in a E-ATX case. It should be ~ $250 USD shipped.

I used some cheap ($20 USD!) Xeons (E5-2620v2) and have 24 cores.. so it's doable for $500.

<comment><USER16> To which model of motherboard dost thou allude?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there anything similar but more hobbyist priced? DIY would be fine, but all motherboards that I know of don't have ram slots or other desktop like amenities

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/03/29/clearfog-itx- worksta...](https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/03/29/clearfog-itx-workstation- ultimate-arm-developer-platform/)

<comment><USER17> That link whined at me for denying targeted advertising instead of showing me the article so I guess I wont ever know what its about...

<comment><USER3> [https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/clearfog- itx/](https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/clearfog-itx/)

better :) we just announced it.

<comment><USER18> Hi, I posted a comment on cnx-software but it's awaiting moderation, reposting here:

> work with Linaro on the work they did for the MCBin to get a UEFI plugin > that uses a QEMU emulation layer for supporting booting Video Card BIOS

Linaro? I thought the EDK2 for the MCbin was maintained by Semihalf :)

Anyway, 16 cores and dual-channel RAM for $500 is a lot more interesting than 4 cores and single-channel for $269. A few questions:

Will the EDK2 tree be fully open source? There was that one blob on the MCbin…

Will the core be overclockable?

<comment><USER3> Semihalf is maintaining the tree and patches, but I believe the original work done to support using a GPU on the platform was done by Linaro. I could be mis-remembering but I believe that is how things happened.

We are waiting for the final release of the EDK2 tree from NXP. I will refrain from promising anything until that is integrated.

The cores are not overclockable. 2.2Ghz will be the limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At this price I would rather buy a Raptor TALOS II or Blackbird.

<comment><USER18> With Talos II, you'd get a workstation with only _4 cores_ at this price. Blackbird board + 8-core CPU bundle is a bit better, but now you're limited by the small form factor.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I'm not sure what performance looks like on 4 POWER cores vs 32 ARM cores; seems like it _might_ win. Genuinely curious; would love to see benchmarks.

<comment><USER20> Those 4 POWER9 cores (16 threads with its 4-way SMT) will obliterate this ARM. Depending on the benchmark, this 32 core ARM box will do 1/2 the single thread performance and about 2.5x the multithreaded performance of my venerable Sandy Bridge i7 desktop (so it does 2.5x the MT performance with 8x the amount of physical cores). This is a hardware class from 2011, which you can usually pick up for under $250 from eBay in second-hand corporate desktops. On the other hand, the POWER9 in the Talos II can go toe-to-toe with Intel's Skylake in both single thread and especially multithreaded use cases.

The reason to buy a workstation like this is not performance, but rather being able to natively develop ARM software locally. That's the only real killer feature it has over Intel/AMD/IBM processors, but a legitimate reason to buy it given the availability of ARM servers at cloud providers.

<comment><USER18> [https://lemire.me/blog/2019/03/26/hasty-comparison- skylark-a...](https://lemire.me/blog/2019/03/26/hasty-comparison-skylark-arm- versus-skylake-intel/)

Daniel Lemire's single-threaded Mandelbrot benchmark: 15s on the Ampere eMAG (Skylark), 24s on a 4GHz Skylake. (Also wins in bitset_count.) It's definitely faster 1/2 of Sandy Bridge.

eMAG will have a disadvantage in SIMD, but for normal workloads (make -j32 on a huge project :D) it should be plenty fast.

<comment><USER20> I don't think that that Mandelbrot benchmark is single threaded. It would mean that this processor is _much_ faster than Skylake in computational instructions per clock, which would be a huge game changer (and it clearly isn't). That 25s vs 18s figure makes a lot more sense if the benchmark is multithreaded, since Skylake is around 1.7x to 2x faster than Sandy Bridge.

Moreover, the benchmark source code [0] clearly uses OpenMP to parallelize the benchmark tasks.

[0]: [https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...](https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/program/mandelbrot-gcc-6.html)

<comment><USER18> His code [https://github.com/lemire/Code-used-on-Daniel-Lemire-s- blog/...](https://github.com/lemire/Code-used-on-Daniel-Lemire-s- blog/blob/master/2019/03/26/mandelbrot.c) does not use OpenMP.

Different benchmarks favor different processors… Here's another one, now multi-threaded

My quick run of `sysbench cpu` (something with prime numbers) shows:

Skylark 3.3GHz 32core (at Packet; Ubuntu 18.04):

        events per second: 44287.87

Zen 3.85GHz 8c16t (my desktop; FreeBSD 13-CURRENT):

        events per second: 14632.61

And with a single thread, 1386.24 vs 1740.91. Divided by clock speed, it's about 93% of the performance.

<comment><USER21> You can't really benchmark anything on FreeBSD X-CURRENT. There is a ton of debug code there which slowdowns whole system including its libc. Very unfair comparison be warned!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there some context on what is notable about this?

<comment><USER23> I've never seen a high-performance workstation based on an ARM cpu before.

<comment><USER24> Thunder X2 Arm servers came out first. But its good to see competition as always.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know where this machine would stand with regards to Respects Your Freedom [1] certification barriers?

[1] [https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects- your-f...](https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom)

<comment><USER26> I cannot comment on this chip in particular, but my experience is that most arm platforms have unavoidable non-free firmware.

</comment></comment><comment> dis-sys "As low as £2,255.00"

GBPUSD is trading at 1.3

</comment><comment><USER27> just wondering, is any US based shop selling similar machines?</comment>


US recession will dwarf dotcom crash - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/money/2008/01/28/ccusecon128.xml&ref=patrick.net

<comment> patrickg-zill Then all of us who went through the dotcom crash (I started my hosting and colocation company in 1999) are well suited to survive this crash.

</comment><comment><USER2> I was telling a friend that a slowdown in the economy is the best time to hack because no one is pressuring you to make money and implement <insert catchphrase>.

A recession may actually be good because I'm guessing the true believers will stick through with it and the next evolution of the web will come out of it.

<comment><USER3> More generally, life in a recession's actually not too bad. It's the adjusting to it that is hard, but that goes for adjusting to anything.

This is a good place to repeat one of the most interesting comments I've seen on YC News: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40558>

"The 1930s are often seen as the "golden age" of the motion picture, because no matter how hard up they were for cash, people still went out to the movies. Walt Disney got his start then. Bootleggers and bordellos also did well during the 1930s."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley is a notorious pessimist.

For the record, I agree with almost everything he says here, though.

<comment><USER5> Well then at least it probably won't be worse than the articles take.

:-)</comment></comment>


A Simple Explanation Of How Money Moves Around The Banking System - <AUTHOR> http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/a_simple_explanation_of_how_money_moves_around_the_banking_system

<comment><AUTHOR> Also see [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLS_Group](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLS_Group)</comment>


High Frequency Trading "Quote Stuffing" Visualized - <AUTHOR> http://www.zerohedge.com/article/its-not-market-its-hft-crop-circle-crime-scene-further-evidence-quote-stuffing-manipulation-

<comment><USER2> Pretty much everyone doing "real" trades will look at things like VWAP (volume weighted average price) rather than just the pure bid/ask quotes because everyone knows bid/ask might not reflect the true market value. Indeed in many circumstances you may well be required to benchmark your trades against something like the VWAP to prove you're acting in the best interests of your client (getting good deals rather than pushing deals to your favourite brokers who give you the largest kickbacks).

Some exchanges do in-fact prohibit such actions by having fill ratio requirements (a certain percentage of your quotes have to convert into done deals) or minimum quote times (your quote has to be dealable for at least x milliseconds before you cancel it) and just kick off anyone who breaches them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article, and some really nifty graphs, but stay away from the comments section.

More seriously, could someone with a bit of experience in this sort of thing speak to the actual import of these patterns? It's not entirely obvious whether or not there are shenanigans at work.

<comment><USER4> In my opinion, this is almost certainly not shenanigans, but simply algorithms behaving in ways their creators did not expect. I believe this for several reasons:

1) If you wanted to deliberately manipulate the markets, you'd come up with something less obvious than this. You might even come up with a pattern that is non-periodic or even put a few calls to rand() into your code just to spice things up.

2) If you were doing anything in the markets on purpose, you'd try to be unpredictable. And by "unpredictable", I mean "hard for a human to look at a graph and guess at". Once you trade predictably, the other guy can exploit you.

3) I've come up with trading strategies myself that generate "crop circles" in simulation. It's never on purpose, and I'd certainly never be permitted to put such things into production.

Sometimes algorithms behave in ways you didn't expect. For instance, you might compute a quantity f(t), place a buy order when f(t) > 0.5 and cancel it when f(t) < 0.5. If f(t) oscillates wildly from 0.4995 to 0.5001, you will wind up doing "quote stuffing" yourself. Of course, most of the time f(t) winds up oscillating from 0.631 to 0.632 or something like that, and things work normally.

If your system is designed well, some monitoring system further down the line will prevent this. Not all systems are well designed.

<comment><USER5>
      but simply algorithms behaving in ways their creators did not expect

That's possible, but if the owner of the algorithm doesn't monitor it or shut it down, someone should and the owner should be punished for the behavior of the algorithm. Currently, that doesn't seem to be happening, which means this becomes a pretty good excuse for letting your algorithm behave like this on purpose.

<comment><USER4> The owner should be punished? What for? Who is harmed by a visible "crop circle" in the trade data? Also, I don't understand why you think the owners would allow their algorithms to behave like this; a "crop circle" doesn't make money and it does expose you to risk.

Incidentally, if your algorithm spams the exchanges too much (i.e., your fill rate goes way below 1%), your broker will shut you down. So while there may be crop circles out there, no one person is responsible for more than a few of them.

<comment><USER5> Because of the first paragraph of the article:

      [..] quote stuffing by HFT algorithms in tens of stocks, in which thousands of
      cancelled quotes would reappear each second with a definitive periodicity
      and regularity, [..]. Aside from the fact that it is illegal to indicate a
      quote without a trade intent, this form of quote stuffing is in fact
      manipulative when conducted by HFT repeaters in specific "shapes" as it
      actually moves the NBBO actively higher or lower, in cases pushing the
      bid/offer range up to 10% higher without even one trade ever having
      occurred, [..]

_Incidentally, if your algorithm spams the exchanges too much (i.e., your fill rate goes way below 1%), your broker will shut you down_

Except that that doesn't happen if you essentially _are_ the broker, as is the case with large enough institutions. JP Morgan's broker isn't going to shut them down.

<comment><USER4> All quotes on an exchange have trade intent, since if the exchange fills you, a trade occurs. You don't have the ability to back out after your quote is accepted.

If the NBBO moves around on a thinly traded stock and no trade occurs, so what?The bid ask spread on some thinly traded stock fluctuated for a few minutes, and no one bought or sold stocks? Oh noes, the horror! If we don't put a stop to this, someone might offer to sell a coke bottle on ebay for $10000 and no one will buy it!

Also, if you are a broker, the exchange imposes similar requirements on fill rates. The matching engine gains nothing if you place lots of unfilled orders, and if they allow too much of it, customers who do make trades (i.e., the people who actually pay them) are likely to switch to other matching engines or dark pools.

<comment><USER5>
      You don't have the ability to back out after your quote is accepted.

But you have the ability to back out on a majority of your quotes, if you submit so many that they couldn't possibly be fulfilled in the time before you cancel them. Despite the fact that they are cancelled, they still have their effect. [http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-hft-quote-stuffing- caus...](http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-hft-quote-stuffing-caused- market-crash-may-6-and-threatens-destroy-entire-market-any-mom)

      Also, if you are a broker, the exchange imposes similar requirements on fill
      rates

Then why aren't these algorithms being banned?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It also might be a self-organized system composed of multiple algos from different shops: i.e. like a "Life" game.

For example: one algo put a bid of X, a nanosecond later another algo steps and put a bid X+1. The first algo cancel X and put X+2, etc. Until it reaches a threshold of X+T, then all bots cancel and start again from X.

You can see this behavior with human traders in after-hours sessions or in other illiquid markets. But of course in case of humans we are not talking about nanoseconds ;)</comment>


The Anti-Trump Protests in LA Were Larger Than We Thought - <AUTHOR> http://www.designbynumbers.io/trump-protests/ <comment><USER2> Nice work estimating for yourself.

Did you try manually counting a strip of the street and then comparing it to your density estimate?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not, good idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They should stop protesting. It was a democratic vote.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think more than anything it was just to voice ppl's emotions.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best headset for working from home in noisy environment - <AUTHOR> Can folks recommend a better headset for working from home that has a noise cancelling mic? I have two children 6 and 3. Thank you! <comment><USER2> Related from 4 month ago, though back then the question about the microphone didn't come up.

Ask HN: Best Noise Canceling Headphones - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21563355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21563355)

Ask HN: Which headphones are you using? - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289035)</comment>


Study: Usability vs Beauty for Online Shops - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.de/2012/05/is-beautiful-usable-what-is-influence.html

<comment><USER2> is it just me or reading this article in whatever reader it is kinda ugly?</comment>


Ask HN: Okay to post a link to a kickstarter? - <AUTHOR>

I'm writing software for a 2.5 ton musical instrument that breathes fire.  Like most large scale art projects, it is funded in part by grants, and in part through fundraising efforts.  One of our fundraising efforts is through kickstarter.com, an all-or-nothing funding website for creative endeavors.<p>Would it be appropriate to post a link to our kickstarter on HN?  The project definitely falls within HN guidelines, but I'm uncertain about posting a link that is soliciting contributions. <comment><USER2> Does the project have a homepage of its own? Why not post that, and put a link on that page to the kickstarter page?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like a neat project. I wouldn't mind seeing a link to it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't upvote, but wouldn't flag it either, and I think it'll reach the frontpage.

Now, if you put some videos of the construction, some diagrams, some thoughts about the piece, I mean, information about the creative process and its labor, now that's something worthwhile of upvoting.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have videos, photos, and cad of the ongoing development process. Per pg's suggestion we're going to link to the project web site, just waiting on an update to the blog that references the Kickstarter.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Posted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328169>

</comment><comment><USER5> yeah, do it!</comment>