Why have CPUs been limited in frequency to around 3.5Ghz for so many years? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ngv50/why_have_cpus_been_limited_in_frequency_to_around/ <comment><USER2> The answer is 'simple' it comes in four parts;

1) Transistors dissipate the most power when they are switching (this is because they transit their linear region). So the more they switch the more power they dissipate, thus the power dissipation of any transistor circuit is proportional to its switching frequency.

2) Silicon stops working reliably above 150 degrees C, this is due to thermal effects in the silicon overwhelming its electrical characteristics. One way to think about it is that at 150 degrees C the silicon lattice structure is vibrating so hard because of heat the electrons can't move anymore.

3) Lithography and manufacturing techniques have increased the number of transistors per square millimeter of silicon exponentially over the years so the number of transistors has been observed to double every 18 months or so.

4) The ability to channel heat from silicon to the outside air is limited by the thermal conductivity of silicon and the ceramics used to encase it.

So those four parameters create a 'box' which is sometimes called the 'design space.' If you build a chip that is inside the box it works, if one of the parameters goes outside the box it fails.

In the great Mhz race of 1998 clock rates were pushed up which caused heat dissipation to go up, and transistor counts were going up too, so you got an n^2 effect in terms of heat dissipation. The race was powered by consumers who used the single number to compare machines (spec wars). It was unsustainable.

The end of that war occurred when AMD introduced multi-core (two cpus for the price of one!) architectures. And Intel had the largest design failure in its history when it scrapped the entire Pentium 4 microarchitecture after realizing it would never get to, much less past 4Ghz as they had promised.

AMD proved that for user visible throughput, multiple cores could give you a better net gain than a faster CPU. This side stepped the n-squared problem by having twice the number of transistors but running at the same clock rate, so the heat only went up linearly rather than exponentially.

It was a pretty humbling moment for Intel.

That begat the 'core wars' where Intel and AMD have worked to give us more and more 'cores'. The heat problem was still there, but it was managed with transistor design since the frequencies were staying flat.

Recently, some new transistor designs and system micro-architectures, have combined with the inevitable flattening of performance gains from multiple cores (see Amdahl's law), to give us 'turbo-boost' type solutions, where only one core runs at higher speed (side stepping Amdahl) at the expense of down clocking or even turning off other cores (sidestepping the frequency component of power increases).

Another technology on the horizon (which used to be only for the military guys) is SoD or Silicon-on-Diamond. Diamond is a wonderful conductor of heat and so if you make your processor on a diamond subtrate you can pull lots of heat out into an attached cooling system. Get ready for 7" x 7" heat management assemblies though that attach to these things. Or alternatively a new ATX type form factor that includes something that looks like a power supply but is a chiller that attaches via tubes to the processor socket.

<comment><USER3> It wasn't the multiple cores that allowed AMD to steal market share from Intel. It was the original Athlon chips around the turn of the century. They were the first chips that ran at a lower clock speed but produced far superior benchmark numbers in just about any benchmark. Combine that with the much higher prices that Intel charged for inferior products and AMD had a great run until Intel ditched the Pentium 4 line.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon>

Dual core chips came along much later.

<comment><USER4> The original Athlon was all about clock speed and the race past 1Ghz. The P4 quickly surpassed it, though, and left the Athlon competing on the basis of cost (P4s required RDRAM, which was much more expensive.) In the fall of 2001, the P4 hit 2Ghz and added DDR SDRAM support before the Athlon XP showed up at 1.5Ghz, and the Athlon XP was never really able to clearly beat Intel's fastest. It wasn't until the Athlon 64 that AMD was able to win across the board with significantly lower clock speeds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm probably in a very small minority but I think that the 'free ride' we got from Moore's law in terms of transistor density leading to an increase in clock frequency has caused us to be locked in to a situation that is very much comparable to the automobile industry and the internal combustion engine.

If it weren't for that we'd have had to face the dragons of parallelization much earlier and we would have a programming tradition solidly founded on something other than single threaded execution.

Our languages would have likely had parallel primitives and would be able to deal with software development and debugging in a multi-threaded environment in a more graceful way.

Having the clock frequency of CPUs double on a fairly regular beat has allowed us to ignore these problems for a very long time and now that we do have to face them we'll have to unlearn a lot of what we take to be un-alterable.

I'm not sure about much about the future, the one thing I do know is that it is parallel and if you're stuck on waiting for the clock frequency increases of tomorrow you'll be waiting for a very long time, and possibly forever.

<comment><USER6> I think we would just have run into _Amdahl's Law_ earlier.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law>

.

Basically you don't get a free pass for parallelising things.

.

If 90% of a task is parallelizable then the maximum speedup you can get with _infinite cores_ is 10x

<comment><USER5> You're right, there is no free pass.

Let me give you one example of how the wrong habits have become embedded in how we think about programming because of the serial nature of former (and most current) architectures:

One of the most elementary constructs that we use is the loop. Add four numbers: set some variable to 0, add in the first, the second, the third and finally the fourth. Return the value to the caller. The example is short because otherwise it would be large, repetitive text. But you can imagine easily what it would look like if you had to add 100 numbers in this way, and 'adding numbers' is just a very dumb stand-in for a more complicated reduce operation.

That 'section' could be called critical and you'd be stuck at not being able to optimize that any further.

But on a parallel architecture that worked seamlessly with some programming language what could be happening under the hood is (first+second) added to (third+fourth). You can expand that to any length list and the time taken would be less than what you'd expect based on the trivial sequential example.

Right now you'd have to code that up manually, and you'd have to start two 'threads' or some other high level parallel construct in order to get the work done.

As far as I know there is no hardware, compiler, operating system or other architectural component that you could use to parallelize at this level. The bottle-neck is the overhead of setting things up , which should be negligible with respect to the work done. So parallelism would have to be built in to the fabric of the underlying hardware with extremely low overhead from the language/programmers point of view in order to be able to use it in situations like the one sketched above.

Those non-parallelizable(sp?) segments might end up a lot shorter once you're able to invoke parallel constructs at that lower level.

<comment><USER7> FPGA's is where parallel processing is alive and well.

I've done a lot of real-time image processing work on FPGA's. The performance gains one can create are monumental. One of my favorite examples (one that parallels yours) is the implementation of an FIR (Finite Impulse Response) filter --a common tool in image processing.

How it works: Data from n pixels is multiplied by an equal number of coefficients, the results are added and then divided by n. There are more complex forms (polyphase) but the basics still apply.

Say n=32. You multiply 32 pixel values by 32 coefficients. Then you sum all 32 results, typically using a number of stages where you sum pairs of values. For 32 values you need five summation stages (32 values -> 16 -> 8 -> 4 -> 2 -> result). After that you divide and the job is done.

Due to pipelining this means that you are processing pixel data through the FIR filter at the operating clock rate. The first result takes 8 to 10 (or more) clock cycles to come out of the pipe. After that the results come out at a rate of one per clock cycle.

If the FIR filter is running at 500MHz you are processing five-hundred million pixels per second. Multiply that by 3 to process RGB images and you get to 1.5 billion pixels per second.

BTW, this is independent of word width until you start getting into words so wide that they cause routing problems. So, yes, with proper design you could process 1.5 billion 32 bit words per second. Try that on a core i7 using software.

For reference, consumer HD requires about 75MHz for real-time FIR processing.

A single FPGA can have dozens of these blocks, equating to a staggering data processing rate that you simply could not approach with any modern CPU, no matter how many cores.

This is how GPU's work. Of course, the difference is that the GPU hardware is fixed, whereas FPGA's can be reconfigured with code.

My point is that we know how to use and take advantage of parallelism in applications that can use it. Most of what happens on computers running typical consumer applications has few --if any-- needs beyond what exists today. When it comes to FPGA's and this form of "extreme parallel programming", if you will, we use languages like Verilog and VHDL. Verilog looks very much like C and is easy to learn. You just have to think hardware rather than software.

The greater point might also be that when a problem lends itself to parallelization a custom hardware approach through a highly reconfigurable FPGA co-processor is probably the best solution.

The next major evolution in computing might very well be a fusion of the CPU with vast FPGA resources that could be called upon for application specific tasks. This has existed for many years in application-specific computing, starting with the Xilinx Virtex 2 PRO chips integrating multiple PowerPC processors atop the FPGA array. It'd be interesting to see the approach reach general computing. In other words, Intel buys Xilinx and they integrate a solution for consumer computing platforms with API's provided and supported by MS and Apple.

<comment><USER8> FPGAs have been the next big thing for at least 15 years, during which time the consumer GPU has made huge performance increases, and is turning into a general purpose parallel vector unit. Still seems to me the GPU is on track to fill this role and the fpga will stay niche, has anything changed to change this?

<comment><USER4> What's changed is the definition of GPU. 15 years ago, the most programmability a GPU had was a few registers to switch between a handful of hardcoded modes of operation. For the past several years, GPUs have been something like 80% composed of Turing-complete processors that can run arbitrary software, and they've more recently gained features like a unified address space with the host CPU, and the ability to partition the array of vector processors to run more than one piece of code at the same time. These features are 100% irrelevant to realtime 3d rendering.

GPU architectures don't exactly resemble FPGAs when viewed up close, but for the right kind of problem, an application programmer can now deal with a GPU in the same manner as an FPGA. (In fact, with OpenCL, you can use the exact same APIs.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> High(er) Frequency means that you have to run at a higher core voltage (this is, in part, because gate propagation delay is inversely proportional to bias voltage, i.e., the voltage corresponding to a 'high' or 1 bit). You have to decrease the propagation delay so that the clock tick gets everywhere in the processor quickly (one part of the clock doesn't lag the other parts, called clock skew). So in order for things to run faster, you'd have to run it at a higher V(bias). Now that means that there are higher thermal costs (things get hotter) - heat produced is proportion to voltage.

So its now mostly a thermal management problem. This is the primary problem in the newer chips. Even though we can pack in more transistors, we can't get signals among them faster without higher V and making it run too hot.

Therefore, our solution is to use the extra transistors to create a separate new processor, running with a different clock, so the 'tick' doesn't have to reach all parts of this rather big chip, but just needs to be synchronized intra-core.

<comment><USER10> I'm curious if asynchronous logic will get brought back in as time goes on. Multi-core is essentially desynchronising the individual cores since (iirc) clock generation and distribution is one of the most expensive parts of the processor, in both energy and size.

Historically, it lost out because of the added complexity of handshaking/synchroniser logic scattered all over the place, and the mess a mishandled metastable condition propagating through the system could cause. How that we've got transistors to burn, however, and routing is no longer done on large empty floors with crepe tape...

<comment><USER11> Well, Handshake did make an asynchronous ARM core not too long ago, and Achronix has a nice business in async FPGAs, so the idea isn't dead. That said, I'm not sure (though I'd love to be proved wrong) that the idea will really go big again. Synchronous chips are still easier to reason about.

By far the most expensive real estate on a typical processor is on-chip RAM, and that really does need a clock. Sure, clock-tree synthesis is complex enough that you may even still be able to start up a company selling a tool for it, but it's still possible for a few reasonably competent engineers to do within some weeks.

<comment><USER12> Chuck Moore also has recently released a clockless asynchronous chip, 144 core.

Though it has to be programmed in an obscure dialect of colorForth...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a good example of why science isn't a popularity contest. The top voted reply makes some vague noises about vt-scaling and leakage. It then claims that we "don't get a very good "off" if the threshold voltage is too low". This is incorrect. Leakage doesn't degrade the logic values for CMOS- style logic, which is the vast majority of the digital logic in the world.

The real issue which the OP may or may have been trying to get at is that leakage power eats into the chip's power budget. Since we'd rather not burn our budget on leakage, we reduce leakage by increasing the threshold voltage. But unfortunately, this comes at the cost of frequency.

The other very important issue is that of power-density. There's a famous graph that Shekar Borkar of Intel [1] made showing that if we continued to ignore power dissipation issues like in the past our chips would run ridiculously hot (IOW, they wouldn't work at all because they'd just burn themselves to death).

There are also other issues like the fact that your wires start acting like antennas at 5+ GHz and that reliability concerns like electromigration and dielectric breakdown are getting worse with newer technologies.

A much more recent and reliable (not to mention highly-cited) reference on scaling and power issues is [2].

[1] I found a copy here: <http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/id1762_1.jpg> [2] <http://www-vlsi.stanford.edu/papers/mh_iedm_05.pdf>

<comment><USER14> While I agree that power is the primary issue leakage does have a correlation with "degrading the off" value.

Specifically the effects of drain induced barrier lowering becomes very significant in the sub-threshold region as the channel length is reduced. This has the effect of both increasing drain current (leakage) and making the transistor more difficult to turn off, that is a larger gate bias is required to turn the transistor off.

While "leakage" isn't the cause, you do get leakage and a harder to turn off transistor at the same time, at least for this type of leakage.

<comment><USER13> Hmm. In a CMOS structure with a weakly turned off device, you'd need the effective off resistance to be more than 1/20th of the effective on for the logic value to degrade by roughly 5%. Did we have such leaky transistors for 130nm/90nm when the shift happened?

A quick calculation I did with a 90nm model for I have some parameters with vt=0.3, vdd=1.2, subthreshold slope=90mV/decade and dibl coeff=0.1 seems to suggest that leakage would still be < 1/100th of the on current.

<comment><USER14> I believe we're talking about two separate issues, maybe this will help: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drain_Induced_Barrier_Lowering>

<comment><USER13> I don't think so. The effect of DIBL is an increase in leakage current with the drain to source voltage.

The first-order model I was taught in school was that leakage current not considering DIBL used to be proportional to exp(vgs-vt) but thanks to DIBL leakage is now proportional to exp(vgs - vt + eta*vds). The eta here is the DIBL coefficient, which AFAIK is 0.1 or thereabouts.

<comment><USER14> The first-order model falls apart as channel length decreases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We've gotten very close to physical limits. Quick back-of-the-envelope estimate: if electrons traveled at the speed of light through silicon (they don't), then in 3GHz, an electron could travel .1 meters. In reality, electrons in silicon travel quite a bit slower than that. Net result: electrons can barely cross the diameter of the chip in one cycle, even without gate propagation delays and other factors limiting work done per cycle.

So, if you want data from a tiny distance away, such as a local register, you can grab it and do something simple with it in one cycle. If you need data from any further away, forget about it; cache takes longer, another core takes even longer, and memory takes _far_ longer.

<comment><USER16> Fun fact: electrons in an metallic wire under a potential difference move only in the order of mm/s. See e.g.[1]

As electrical signals still travel at about half the speed of light, that seems besides the point. However, electrical signals do not need to span the entire width of a chip in order to have an effect. That is true for your example of accessing memory, but not for the actual calculations happening inside the CPU.

On each clock cycle, all transistors are 'fed' by the transistors before it. The state of a transistor only depends on the states of the immediately connecting transistors on the clock cycle before it. That means the signal only has to travel the length of a single transistor on each clock cycle. We could have CPU's working at 3THz and a much larger focus on the difference between CPU-bound and IO-bound tasks.

[1] <http://amasci.com/miscon/speed.html>

<comment><USER5> The easiest to understand analogy to illustrate this that I've found to date is to imagine a tube full of marbles, push one more marble in on one end and another one will pop out _instantly_ on the other end. As long as the marbles are all the same colour it is as though the marble you pushed in has miraculously teleported to the far end of the tube. It appeared to have moved at the speed of light even though in reality all the marbles have shifted only an amount equal to the diameter of a single marble.

<comment><USER16> There is a problem with that analogy: if you only apply pressure to a single marble, the marble at the other end will _not_ be pushed out instantly. In fact, the 'signal' will travel with the speed of sound in the material of the marbles and you can measure the time difference it takes for the last marble to move after the first one has moved. The marbles will be slightly compressed and decompressed while moving, accounting for the extra length needed to accommodate the 'not moving instantly'. [1]

A better analogy would be one where all marbles are pushed simultaneously. That is more like what happens in logic circuits.

[1] People doubting relativity often try this thought experiment: I have an incompressible metal bar of a lightyear long. I press on one side. The other side must move instantaneously and not after 1 second (or longer). In fact, this proves the reverse: relativity is incompatible with the existence of incompressible metal bars. As we know, all metal bars are in fact compressible, so that is not a problem. And with compressible metal bars, the thought experiment fails, because the push will travel with the speed of sound.

<comment><USER5> That's true, but it is only an analogy, and like every other analogy it breaks down at some level (after all, it isn't the 'real thing').

The fact that there is a pressure wave set up in the materials is possible because marbles are made of some material (glass, stone, metal, whatever). If you wanted a 'perfect' picture you'd have to explain about electron migration in detail and then we're looking at a completely different picture.

You'd not have a pressure wave in an electron to begin with, and they're not 'pushing' against adjacent electrons either.

But it serves well to show how a slow move can have an apparent instantaneous effect at a distance.

<comment><USER17> _[Electrons are] not 'pushing' against adjacent electrons_

Sure they are. Like charges repel.

Charge density in this case plays the same role as mass density does in the case of a sound wave. It's a very good analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> According to the Sandia's Cooler whiter-paper pdf: [http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access- control.cgi/2010/10025...](http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access- control.cgi/2010/100258.pdf) the limit is due to a "Thermal Brick Wall". Basically due to a lack of progress in heat exchanger technology.

I have visualized this "Brick-Wall" as a graph with data from Wikipedia pdf: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3215373/Thermal-Brick-Wall.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER19> Donald Knuth on multicore (2008):

Andrew: Vendors of multicore processors have expressed frustration at the difficulty of moving developers to this model. As a former professor, what thoughts do you have on this transition and how to make it happen? Is it a question of proper tools, such as better native support for concurrency in languages, or of execution frameworks? Or are there other solutions?

Donald: I don't want to duck your question entirely. I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won't be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.

Let me put it this way: During the past 50 years, I've written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can't think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading. Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX.[1]

How many programmers do you know who are enthusiastic about these promised machines of the future? I hear almost nothing but grief from software people, although the hardware folks in our department assure me that I'm wrong.

I know that important applications for parallelism exist—rendering graphics, breaking codes, scanning images, simulating physical and biological processes, etc. But all these applications require dedicated code and special-purpose techniques, which will need to be changed substantially every few years.

Even if I knew enough about such methods to write about them in TAOCP, my time would be largely wasted, because soon there would be little reason for anybody to read those parts. (Similarly, when I prepare the third edition of Volume 3 I plan to rip out much of the material about how to sort on magnetic tapes. That stuff was once one of the hottest topics in the whole software field, but now it largely wastes paper when the book is printed.)

The machine I use today has dual processors. I get to use them both only when I'm running two independent jobs at the same time; that's nice, but it happens only a few minutes every week. If I had four processors, or eight, or more, I still wouldn't be any better off, considering the kind of work I do—even though I'm using my computer almost every day during most of the day. So why should I be so happy about the future that hardware vendors promise? They think a magic bullet will come along to make multicores speed up my kind of work; I think it's a pipe dream. (No—that's the wrong metaphor! "Pipelines" actually work for me, but threads don't. Maybe the word I want is "bubble.")

From the opposite point of view, I do grant that web browsing probably will get better with multicores. I've been talking about my technical work, however, not recreation. I also admit that I haven't got many bright ideas about what I wish hardware designers would provide instead of multicores, now that they've begun to hit a wall with respect to sequential computation. (But my MMIX design contains several ideas that would substantially improve the current performance of the kinds of programs that concern me most—at the cost of incompatibility with legacy x86 programs.)

Source: <http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856>

<comment><USER20> Knuth comes across as living in a bit of denial here... Sure the frequency speedups were much nicer, but faced with hardware limits that make this impossible, he should point out that the future lies in finding algorithms best suited to multicore. They surely deserve their own volume of TAOCP, and I don't see how this would be wasted research for the next 10+ years.

There are some amazing lock-free data structures/algorithms out there which should be taught in any CS curriculum.

Intel has been releasing some great tools to aid with multicore development since they realized years ago that this was the only way to get more performance.

<http://software.intel.com/en-us/parallel/>

<comment><USER21> _Knuth comes across as living in a bit of denial here... Sure the frequency speedups were much nicer, but faced with hardware limits that make this impossible_

It's easier to say "the hardware guys are dropping the ball" than to acknowledge silly things like "Physics".

Now, he could try to argue that hardware should be responsible for paralleling things under the covers, and that would be a bit more reasonable- though I would still have to disagree. CS folks are the ones supposed to be discovering algorithms; find them, and have the hardware guys stick them in once they are known.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wish people would quit asking this question. This is just another case of the Mhz myth. Who cares what the clock speed is if modern CPUs can execute instructions 2-4x faster per clock than they did 30 years ago.

Go look at the Bulldozer design, 2 hardware decoder/scheduler engines, 4 integer ALUs, 2 fp ALUs, all per core...

A shared L3 cache per socket that is owned by the memory controller and is socket-local to other sockets (ie, all memory controllers conspire to cache system memory efficiently and synchronously know what is cached across all sockets)...

And the memory controllers also accept memory requests from ANY core on the Hypertransport bus, no matter which socket, and multi-socket boards commonly have one memory bank per socket, thus 4 sockets of dual channel DDR3-1600 would indeed give 820 gbit/sec of bandwidth that can be accessed (almost) in full by any individual core[1]...

The ALUs have execution queues, and any thread (currently 2 per core) can schedule instructions on it to maximize ALU packing...

And you can now buy Bulldozers for Socket G34 that have 16 threads/8 cores per socket, and G34 boards usually have 4 sockets.

So again, who cares what the mhz is?

[1]: A 4 socket setup has 4 or 6 Hypertransport links, on AM3+ and G34+ sockets this would be HTX 3.1 16bit wide links running at 3.2ghz, or 204 gbit/sec per link.

On a 4 socket ring, that would be 204 gbit/sec off each neighbor's memory bank, plus another 204 gbit/sec (also the speed of dual channel DDR3-1600) from the local memory bank, thus leading to 612 gbit/sec that could be theoretically saturated by a single core.

On a 4 socket full crossbar, it would be the full 820 gbit/sec.

<comment><USER23> _Who cares what the clock speed is if modern CPUs can execute instructions 2-4x faster per clock than they did 30 years ago._

If you could increase clock speed on these modern processors twofold, would their performance improve?

<comment><USER24> Not necessarily. The fact is that you _could_ probably do just exactly that by making the pipeline deeper. But making the pipeline deeper has a price: your control logic becomes much more complex and emptying the pipeline is more expensive. The question is then: does the price you pay become larger than the gain. As this is not happening I have a good guess :)

Historically, the Pentium 4 is an example of a Mhz-oriented design. The pipeline was made ridiculously deep. This meant that when you had heavy floating point intensive work, then the Pentium 4 was very very fast. Essentially this was because you could fill up the pipeline in the CPU and you have relatively few jumps in that code. It was just a processing job. On the other hand, the P4 suffered for almost any other task. Even to the point where a more beefy Pentium 3 (Tualatin) could beat it. Intel chose a path which was based on the P3 design for their Pentium-M CPU and that is the design which guided Core, Core 2 Duo, Core i7 and so on.

So it is possible, but it is not a given it would lead to faster CPUs. Mhz is but one of the knobs you can turn. The problem we are facing is that all the parallelism we can squeeze out of a sequential program has been done. Modern CPUs dynamically parallelizes what can be run concurrently. But to gain more, now, you need to write programs in a style where they expose more parallelism.

Welcome to parallel programming :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Because scaling limits. The stuff we're already getting uses very highly doped silicon. You could go smaller or faster if you could dope it more to keep the field characteristics viable, but more doping would screw up the silicon lattice. "More" also generally means an orders-of-magnitude increase.

There are a few alternative processes and materials, but they're costly as all hell and hard to do in bulk.

</comment><comment><USER26> The main problem is that leakage current has started to become a problem[1]. Back in the day designers could just scale down features and rely on the reduced capacitance of the smaller areas to lower power usage enough to let them put in more logic. Unfortunately that only reduces active power, not leakage power. Transistors have started leaking more now that they're smaller. You can reduce leakage by lowering the voltage your processor operates at, but that also causes a reduction in the frequency that your transistors flip at because your logic voltage becomes smaller with respect to the transistor threshold voltage, meaning less current but unit of charge you have to move. Modern devices are also tending to run up against saturation velocity[2] now, limiting their switching speed still further.

You certainly could increase clock speed by increasing the voltage you put into a chip, and just accepting that you're going to have more leakage current and more wasted power. But we're already close to the edge of what chips can dissipate right now. You can try having less logic between clock latches, meaning you have a higher clock speed for your switching delay. However, this increases the ratio of latches to everything else so its a matter of diminishing returns. It also means that you've pushed your useful logic further apart, and now you have more line capacitance too. Finally, you can decrease the temperature of your silicon to substantially reduce the amount of leakage you get. This will let you raise the voltage safely, letting you attain faster switching speeds. The only problem is that this requires expensive cooling devices.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leakage_%28semiconductors%29> [2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_velocity>

</comment><comment><USER27> So what confuses me is that we've seen tech demos (and overclockers) push CPU speed to 4 to 10ghz. Are those gains so artificially made that they just can't be replicated at scale in the public market?

We can get them to go faster, just seemingly not for the public.

It was weird to buy my new Macbook Pro and after 3+ years, it was .2ghz slower than my old one. Now of course it has more cores, better instructions, etc... but it was still a weird thing.

Apple's done a great job of explaining the benefits of new ones to the consumers - they don't. I'm not being sarcastic. At the end of the 90's (and still largely today for most PC companies) its all about specs. Apple sold what you can do with each computer instead in a good, better, best format. I bet a large amount of computers sold at the Apple store never have the sales associate mention the clock speed.

<comment> j-g-faustus Here's an article describing what it takes to reach those speeds: <http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/5-ghz-project,731.html>

The article is a few years old, and the clock limits have changed, but the principles of reaching them are the same.

As for replicating it at large in the public market, I don't anticipate that liquid nitrogen feeds will be ubiquitous anytime soon :)

<comment><USER28> The top IBM POWER7 CPU is clocked at 5ghz and isn't cooled with liquid nitrogen.

<comment> j-g-faustus As I said, it's a few years ago. Today you can get 5 GHz with Sandy Bridge on air (although it might entail testing a few dozen CPUs to find one that can reach that high).

But the OP was referring to speeds up to 10 GHz, those still need something special. Here's a current Guiness record, 8.4 GHz using liquid helium: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKN4VMOenNM>

Other materials might potentially clock higher, an IBM research prototype chip reached 500GHz: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5099584.stm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> >What would happen if you added a second compressor loop with its cold side on the hot side of the first one? What if you added a third one? You've now got 3 stage cascade phase change(compressors cool stuff by compressing gas into a liquid, then letting it suck up thermal energy while decompressing/evaporating back into a gas elsewhere, i.e. phase change) cooling on one end, and a spectacularly inefficient heater on the other.

Now wait a second... that's not just wrong, that's precisely the _opposite_ of reality. If you have a heat pump, it _must_ be _more_ efficient than a simple heating element. If it at _all_ cools the processor, by the simple laws of thermodynamics, it must heat the room more than any process which simply converts the work directly to room heat.

</comment><comment><USER30> CPU speed isn't a bottleneck anymore. These days improving caching, threading, and increasing the bus/memory speed have been the primary contributors to speeding up a computer. Once those bottlenecks close a bit you'll see those numbers begin to rise again.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm regularly impressed with the mods over at /r/asks Jen e and how high they've been able to keep the SNR.

<comment><USER31> That would be /r/askscience. Thanks iPhone, helpful as always.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> this is why:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=c+%2F+3.5+Ghz>

that's a theoretical maximum. you increase Ghz, you have a shorter theoretical maximum length of path electricity can take through your chip. An i7 is not that small. You would have to shrink things further and further to get a smaller chip with shorter paths in it, which is what new fabrication methods have been about.

Obviously this is very difficult. Sure, chips could be even faster if they were just a few atoms across, but who would expect you to do meaningful computation in that size, or to be able to manufacture that.

<comment><USER33> This is completely false. You can read why in the comments above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> No idea. I have my E8400 still kicking ass at 4.2Ghz on air.

<comment><USER34> Ok, let me explain to the downvoters.

As the top comment on reddit currently states, there's no issue with speed of light, the issue is with heating. And there's no "3.5Ghz" limit, stock, mass produced heating solutions limit us.

People get all sorts of crazy clock speeds by improving their cooling, mine's on Zalman 9500 fan and has no stability issues to run at 4.2Ghz (stock 3.0Ghz).</comment></comment>


Hacking the Hyperlinked Heart  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323374504578217973101313736.html?mod=ITP_review_0 <comment><USER2> This is a great story, and suggests lots of terrific ideas for gaming the dating field. Where is the service that has collected and modeled a lot of profiles from a given service, and then rates your profile for success? Or rewrites your profile for you? There are certainly machine learning models on the dating service side working "against" you to tantalize you but keep you in the service for a longer period.

I have a friend who likes Latin women, reasonably good looking, speaks flawless Spanish, and lived in Mexico and Spain for years. He discovered Colombia a while ago, joined the premier online dating site, and started collecting "favorites" all over the country. I wrote some scraping scripts to capture all his favorites. He wrote a two line generic message "Coming to Colombia <date>. Send me your cell and I'll call when I'm in town." I picked out the Bogota women, for example, and did a "bulk IM" to his list. He converted at about 20% from a cold IM into cell number in hand.

Another way to hack the system is run your own Adsense ads. A few years ago I _accidentally_ got more than a thousand one cent clicks in Colombia from a dating ad test. I was only testing how closely one can geo-target, and I forgot to turn off my one cent bids and $1/day budget.</comment>


BoiledCarrot - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/bliki/BoiledCarrot.html <comment><USER2> _> I'm reliably informed that there's no way to cook squirrels so they are appetizing to anyone who isn't desperate_

Misinformed. Squirrels are pretty tasty. Need a few, though.

More to the point of the article, I appreciate that Fowler calls out stored procedures as something often misused but secretly pretty awesome. If you are working in an environment where you can handle a SQL database as a canonical datastore--and of course there are literally kajillions of opportunities for that--then sprocs can do a lot to isolate business logic at a level lower than the application. I wouldn't use them in every case, but I've had good success using them in many cases.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, most database abstraction libraries and ORMs have the effect of reducing available database capabilities to the lowest-common denominator.

For example, look at how many ORMs have facilities to add commonly-required conditions to every query (e.g., "is_active = true"), but lack the ability to use views.

<comment><USER2> Use better ones. =) I'm a big fan of Sequel, for when I'm in an environment where I can deal with having models schema expressed via introspection of the database itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Knowing that this was something written by Martin Fowler, I knew it wouldn't be about _this_ particular Carrot [0] but hopefully someone disrupts this area.

[0] [http://www.introducingcarrot.com/](http://www.introducingcarrot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem in my experience is that people will emotionally defend their style of carrot boiling, to the point that they loudly and forcefully attempt to convince me that carrots come out of the ground pre-boiled, or that if I try to cook the carrot another way it would still come out equally mushy.

The problem here, as always, is people. Pointing this phenomenon out to someone causes cognitive dissonance (e.g. "Rails doesn't suck, so I must suck?") which is often harder to deal with than eating boiled carrots.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish this article had a more descriptive title, it's really an important read. I've come across so many over-boiled carrots in my career.

Almost every time I've encountered an ORM it's been an over-boiled carrot. I think I've just had bad luck, though.

<comment><USER7> > Almost every time I've encountered an ORM it's been an over-boiled carrot. I > think I've just had bad luck, though.

Not just your bad luck. Personally, at this point, I consider ORMs an anti- pattern.

<comment><USER8> They're a bit like sugar, in that the first taste can be really appealling, but after a lot you end up feeling sick and regretful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honest question from someone who's been using stored procedured with sourcecontrol for 15 years:

What exactly is the problem? :)

<comment><USER10> Also, software development lifecycle tools surrounding stored procedures aren't as mature: unit testing tools, automated builds, linters, etc.

This puts them on more-or-less the same level as shell scripts to me. They're fine if they're tiny, in source control, and unsurprising.

<comment><USER11> I'm just going to leave this here...

[http://sqitch.org/](http://sqitch.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I came here to post a link to Ron Jeffries' "we tried baseball" article [1] but that's already linked at the bottom of OP. Since it's a good read, but slightly tucked away, here it is anyway.

[1] [http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/](http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/)

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra What's more interesting to me is why previous generation of people were content with cooking food that just isn't tasty.

Seriously, why?

<comment><USER13> The tastiness is in the preparation. Boiling all the nutrients and flavor out of a vegetable, and then discarding the cooking liquid, is the height of stupidity.

In this case, _steam_ carrots.

(Apologies for not adding anything to the actual discussion!)

<comment><USER14> Yes! I hate most boiled vegetables. Makes potatoes seem slimy and flavorless. Funny thing is I actually love eating carrots raw. They have a lot of flavor uncooked.

(might as well keep the off topic in the same thread)

<comment><USER15> Please try undercooked carrots. Just a bit soft but still with a spine. Super delicious!

<comment><USER16> what's wrong with you people? brushing them with olive oil and sprinkling dill on them, and then roasting in the oven is the only way to go!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Several friends of mine commented how stored procedures were a disaster > because they weren't kept in version control

There are pre-made tools to do this, and its relatively easy to author your own extracting of the DDL from all DB objects into a tree and commit them into revision control.

There is little difference between SQL and other languages in this context.</comment>


You appear to be advocating a new IDE. Here's why it will not succeed - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/munificent/9749671 <comment><USER2> Yeah! People should never try to build new things that fit their needs/philosophy. I'll stick with Eclipse 1.0 thankyouverymuch.

Or not. Discouraging people who build or discuss interesting things without actually offering a better solution is petty and a waste of everyone's time. if someone thinks that building a new IDE where you type upside-down that only supports Arc, good for them. One of those people might come up with Visual Studio or intelliJ, and then save tons of people countless hours.

<comment><USER3> > Yeah! People should never try to build new things that fit their > needs/philosophy.

Correct. Certainly in the software world.

Software for young white males is done to death. And although this article is pure humour it makes an important point.

As if the IDE is going to be fixable on a whim. It's used and thought about by every person who writes software most days, as if there are any magic bullets left to implement.

And if you get put off by a humours article which you don't get the points on, you're doomed to failure anyway.

Go off and try something different. If people can't think of reasons why you shouldn't do it, then there's a chance it's a good idea that might have some lowing hanging fruit on it.

<comment><USER4> To quote ESR, "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." For me that truism underlies the passion that gets all good hackers into designing and implementing software. It's the very linchpin of what makes a good software engineer. Someone who's driven to build something, even if its yet-another X. It's "the bug" that I expect to see in any half- decent job candidate for an entry-level position.

Dismissing that seems, to me, tantamount to taking all the fun out of programming.

That being said, I do find atom kind of silly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand the frustration of the author of this list, but do still believe there's room for improvement in the field of IDEs. Light Table is the most promising new IDE that I know of, do think it has a decent chance of bringing benefits to coding, partly because it seems to focus on the one important area that I still feel lacks any real polish in many current IDEs, which is in debugging.

<comment><USER6> I got the impression that the author wasn't frustrated, but rather mocking the common responses new IDEs like Light Table or Atom inevitably get.

EDIT: To reiterate what leoc posted below, the format this is presented in is a well-used "meme" in the tech world.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps, but there are plenty of barely original or language-specific IDEs out there, so it's fairly possible the author was being direct.

<comment><USER7> I think the humour of the original spam-solution form [https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt](https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt) was always meant to be double-edged, and it was usually taken as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You think you're being clever with your checklist dismissiveness. But your smug cynicism actually makes you one of history's greatest monsters, because...

...

</comment><comment><USER9> Versions of this have always applied to creating editors -- or for that matter, any new {language, system, product}. And yet, new ones are created all the time, some even become widely successful. Your finality is drastically overstated, and fundamentally negative in value.

<comment><USER10> You know, I get the feeling that you are just not taking this seriously enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Atom could have been Github his expansion. Its final monopoly settlement. A web based IDE so modernly written it would only work on Chromium nightly (for few months). A business model in which your IDE is in the cloud backed by Github. One private repository for free, public unlimited and after that maybe $0.99 per private repository/IDE-project or something. Synced all across the cloud, responsive, adaptive, buzzwords alike.

You log in to atom.io and boom there is your IDE. Partner with Google for Chrome OS. But no, instead we get some poorly optimized, hacky IDE with half of a Sublime Text look-and-feel. In Javascript. On the desktop.

This could have been it. They had all the ingredients. Too bad. Maybe in the future.

<comment><USER12> nope.

See, web ides have two fundamental fails that no one has figured out yet.

1) your browser context is not isolated; you have _other tabs_ that kill performance, you have browsers you need to restart periodically (dns cache), or die because of dev javascripty things (eg webgl).

Restarting your ide all day? yeah, no.

2) no access to local files without a stupid plugin.

enough said.

There are some not terrible run-your-own-local web ides, but how is that any better than a fat client?

Its not a wasted chance; its that what you want currently _cant exist_ in a form that isnt _worse_ than the current solution.

<comment><USER13> 3) not using the terminal, which is the best way to have a shell nearby, and the shell with its extensible toolset is necessary for any serious coding task.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hi! Perhaps the people of HN can offer some advice:

I've happily been using Emacs for about a year now, with loads of customizations from where I worked. Now that I no longer work there, the customizations don't really make sense for my own projects. I started from scratch today, and now I totally hate emacs! I want to just start coding, and not spend a whole day setting up my IDE. Do you have any suggestions for other IDEs/reasons for me stick it out with Emacs? (I'm on a mac, doing mostly rails and node development btw)

<comment><USER6> You're looking for Sublime 2:

[http://www.sublimetext.com/](http://www.sublimetext.com/)

(Note: I personally use vim, so I'm not plugging Sublime based on any bias.)

<comment><USER15> Actually, Sublime Text 3 [0] (although in Beta) is quite stable and already has massive support within the community. I was lucky enough to get started with ST in my early days (not too long ago, tbh) and I haven't felt the need for a full-fledged IDE yet and I whole-heartedly recommend it for someone looking to move from (IMHO) bulky IDEs like Eclipse to a more minimalistic editor.

ST3 + SublimeIntel + SublimeLinter and suddenly, I feel like a keyboard ninja. Believe me, for a newbie, that is a massive boost of confidence! :D

[0]: [http://www.sublimetext.com/3](http://www.sublimetext.com/3)

<comment><USER16> Do this support C++11? there's already some days I'm looking a new IDE/text editor with real C++11 support to I switch to. Also, I can change the theme too, right? this black isn't very good to my eyes.

<comment><USER17> It's just a text editor, so there isn't much to support.

<comment><USER16> So there's no any text editor with C++11?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Add to this list - good window docking system, and by good I mean Visual Studio, because what's built-in Qt is not enough, and while QT Creator is great, and it's very well suited for laptop use, I can't use all my monitors at work as much as I want to.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is this in response to anything in particular?

<comment><USER20> [http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html](http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html)

<comment><USER21> Was the "your new anti-spam system sucks" checklist based off of this, or the reverse?

<comment><USER22> The reverse, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [ ] No one really believes that your IDE is faster than: [ ] Eclipse [ ] You have reinvented Eclipse but worse

I doubt it

<comment><USER24> I don't think there is an IDE slower than Eclipse.

Even NetBeans is faster.

<comment><USER25> You haven't had the pleasure of using VS 2012/2013 with Resharper, I see. My cursor lag while I type. Occasionally the entire IDE sputters to a halt, becoming unresponsive for seconds at a time, because Resharper decided to perform some static analysis on a 200-line Javascript file. On an 8-core, 32-GB RAM machine with an SSD.

Let that sink in for a second.

Yeah.

<comment><USER26> That's exactly the experience I had with Resharper when I installed it (and subsequently removed it for good after a few days) years ago when I still wrote C# code. I never understood the "Resharper is essential" attitude. Plain Visual Studio was just fine.

<comment><USER27> VS2012 and 2013 have caught up to Resharper's features. I still use Resharper's refactoring and Alt-enter shortcuts though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> amusing.

I particularly liked 'no one believes your new IDE is any faster than any of the other successful new IDEs other people have made'.</comment>


Mutiny at HQ Trivia Fails to Oust CEO - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/14/trivia-game-of-thrones/ <comment><USER3> Ok, so this is Startups for Employees 101. The warning signs to get out were here 1.5 years ago [1]. And they are:

1\. Nut-bar egomaniac CEO bordering on the delusional; and

2\. A business that probably should never take VC money. Producing content (which is what HQ Trivia does at the end of the day) is a notoriously hard business to scale. I can remember years ago when Rovio (remember when Angry Birds was a thing?) took VC money. Huge mistake. HUGE. It is seriously detrimental to your long term viability as a business that generates an income.

So yeah, stay at your own peril.

[1] [https://www.thedailybeast.com/ceo-of-hq-the-hottest-app- goin...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/ceo-of-hq-the-hottest-app-going-if-you- run-this-profile-well-fire-our-host)

<comment><USER4> To play devil's advocate, why not take the money?

Of course it won't work out in the long run, but in the short term it might be fun and it'll employ some people for a few years. When the money runs out everybody can jump ship to other, equally nonviable, startups and do it over again.

<comment><USER5> There's a bit of a phenomenon in Sydney (possibly elsewhere, I wouldn't know) of companies doing this.

I call them VC-bait or grant-bait. There's a handful of grants you can get for startups here, so they'll get all of those, get some free hosting from Microsoft, put up a landing page etc. If they're lucky they'll get a few tens of thousands from private investors, then fall over a few months later.

I'm not sure if it's intentional or if people are just clueless, but in any case they make a bit of money, pad out the CV a bit and move on. I wouldn't got so far as to say they're defrauding investors

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember a previous post saying that the Host Scott Rogowsky would have an extreme pull in the company and would present a big risk if he ever left the company. I guess this company could try to pivot onto someone else but I'm not sure they have the ability to do so. (they cite themselves in the article)

<comment><USER7> Calling it here.

Rugowsky will end up leaving the company and be given his own Jeopardy-style trivia show by Amazon.

<comment><USER8> Or maybe even Jeopardy! itself, given the recent news about Trebek. Unlikely, but possible.

<comment><USER9> I think he could handle Jeopardy sure, but I'm not sure the venue gives his talent the place to truly shine. If he inserted the comedic portion of his talent then Jeopardy would kind of become a different show, while not doing so would lose the quality that make him such a compelling host.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought HQ was incredibly polished when it launched. Props to the tech team regardless of the management mess.

<comment><USER11> It had terrible lag issues though for quite a long time after release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't know their old CEO died of drug overdose...wow! That's crazy to think... bad luck? I wonder if VCs have C levels take any drug tests or carry pretty thorough background check on founders who they invest into?!

<comment><USER13> Drug use is rampant in silicon valley. You wouldn't be a very successful investor is drug use was a disqualifying factor.

Of course it depends what kind of drugs. Potheads don't make very good CEOs and Cocaine is usually associated with destructive behavior. A lot of people in tech do the occasional hallucinogens or ecstasy without much issues.

<comment><USER14> Has there ever been a large scale, well controlled study evaluating CEO performance under the influence of THC/coke/anything else vs. sober? Absolutely not, because as you say, these are only baseless behavioral associations to character flaws.

If you are concerned about character flaws, evaluate that directly. Failing a drug test ruins peoples lives worse than smoking that joint ever did, and there are plenty of terrible people who've been sober all their life.

<comment><USER13> They say Donald Trump doesn't drink — which is surprising when you think of his reputation as a womanizer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lots of drama here, but the real problem was obvious from the start: no path to making money. They literally gave it away daily. Anyone with half a brain could see where this was headed.

<comment><USER16> The app typically shows 350k - 500k participants in their nightly shows. They're giving away usually $5000.

Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune have around 10 million viewers each with over 30 years of history. Jeopardy gives away around $23k each day, I believe WoF rings in a little higher. They air 5 days a week and clock in around 200-230 episodes per season. Back of the napkin math puts that at $0.53 per viewer per year.

HQ is still at $4.29 per viewer per year. At their current rate they still need about 10x growth to match J! or WoF. But HQ is also only 2 years old on a somewhat new media format (live interactive entertainment).

Those numbers are just for the prize money. Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek each earn north of $10 million per year (and Vanna White somewhat less, but still in the millions), and the shows almost certainly have larger staffs. The actual value difference is probably closer to a 3-4x multiplier rather than 10x.

That said, since HQ is phone based there's a good chance the viewers are more valuable to advertisers since they can collect more information than on broadcast television.

I don't think HQ would/could have a path to profitability (setting aside internal business politics), but it's a matter of 1) convincing businesses that a new media format is worth their advertising dollars, 2) keeping players long-term, 3) finding effective ways to advertise in the more limited format that the game affords.

<comment><USER9> And as it relates to cost per viewer, HQ doesn't scale well. Doubling or tripling their viewership would result in winners getting paid significantly less, thus decreasing the appeal and losing viewers.

While scaling prizes with viewership will keep the same approximate cost per viewer. They'd need to scale advertising rates/sponsorships faster than both in order to beat this curve, but I don't think a doubling of the audience will result in _more_ than a doubling of the ad prices.

The could do more ad spots per show, but again that risks alienating viewers.

They could make the trivia questions harder, thus keeping prizes larger and mitigating the problems with low prize amounts, but the difficulty increase also risks alienating viewers. It's much less fun to play when you get only 3 or 4 rights and feel you have no chance of actually winning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also a funny side note: Why do people who seemingly care about public opinion so much always screw up their public opinion? I'd argue torturing people is more in their interest than actual public opinion. With the latter they just try to stay above zero as long as possible to continue with their actual addiction, getting hard-ons from watching people suffer.

That's also why such people can under no circumstances really succeed with businesses. It's not the same kind of personality as Steve Jobs for instance. Jobs also hurt people, but the goal was always to increase public opinion and make money.

The differences between a sociopath (Jobs) and a parasite (this dude here).

And knowing that he's a parasite and not a sociopath, why keep him on as a CEO? The secretary or toilet cleaning person would have a lower chance to screw everything up.

<comment><USER18> > Also a funny side note: Why do people who seemingly care about public > opinion so much always screw up their public opinion?

Its more common than you imagine.

Its incredibly clear that the CEO dude is super insecure person who feels some kind of inadequacy and a constant need to control everything. If you read the daily beast article showing the actual interaction, it shows. If he stopped thinking all about himself for a little while he could have done a much better job. But he has so far not faced consequences for his toxic behavior (his co- founder sounds shady af too and that person actually died of a drug overdose... what a mess).

<comment><USER19> +1

And on top of that, he probably thinks that thing that what got him "here" will also get him "there".

Maybe being vocal made it to the first mile so if he continues his act (and get louder) he believed it would get him to the finish line (the one he has in his mind).

One f-bomb makes a comedy. A thousand make zero ratings and lawsuits. He didn't realize he crossed the line being a sociopath and making is increasingly difficult to receive the messaging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Apparently the other founder had some harassment issues in the past too.

[http://fortune.com/2017/12/20/hq-trivia-losing-investors- sex...](http://fortune.com/2017/12/20/hq-trivia-losing-investors-sexual- harassment/)

</comment><comment><USER21> This article is gross. Very one-sided, no attempt to paint an objective picture. If someone did this about a person, it'd be scummy, but about a company it's okay?

I am sure the company is messed up, but come on.

<comment><USER22> Companies aren't people. I think a lot of people are curious about what happened to HQ trivia, and I think it's sad that the company seems to be falling apart.

(Ps, I think The Witness is one of the best games ever made and everyone should buy it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> At this point, why wouldn't you just quit? I get that there's equity on the line, but the average tenure is probably around a year (if that) given how new the company is. It was clear from the WSJ article on the drama between the two founders up to the other one's death that the current CEO is a textbook sociopath.

Convinced the only reason why talented rank-and-file employees would petition instead of leave is because we live in a world where we're all expected to become grossly emotionally attached to our work, despite how toxic work environments can be.

<comment><USER24> Because you need to pay the rent?

Seriously, this is the risk aspect of working for a startup that people seem willing to ignore when justifying VC getting preferential treatment to employees.

If you have a non-C-level job at a startup you likely need that to pay your rent, to buy food, to have health insurance (become HI system in the US actively fights freedom of employment).

The best you can do is delay while you find jobs elsewhere, as the article said the people who had an easy time working elsewhere have already left - <USER2> first step in employment in tech is to know people at other companies so you can skip the randomness of standard recruitment. I cannot imagine that the remaining people in this startup aren't actively searching for or negotiating new jobs.

<comment><USER25> yeah, 100%. not everyone can just bounce or put up with a significant amount of downtime between jobs. But still, a petition is a terrible idea in a startup. Its just going to make things worse.

> If you have a non-C-level job at a startup

even C-level people need to pay their rent, especially in early stages where its likely the founding c-team is likely compensated mostly in stock.

<comment><USER26> Being compensated mostly in stock would make it easier to leave if you are just worried about paying rent.

<comment><USER24> I guess what you're trying to say is that "if you're being paid mostly in stock then you're earning so little cash you're not really losing much cash if you quit".

This is a fundamentally incorrect assessment. If your cash salary is lower it is _harder_ to leave the company. Being able to leave a company without a replacement job lined up requires having enough saved _cash_ (not unsaleable pre-IPO stock), but if you're being paid less cash you have less to save after paying rent.

Put very simply, you're interpreting a "low cash income given actual market rates" and "no cash income" as being somewhat interchangeable. Hopefully when phrased that way it should be obvious why that isn't the case if you have mortgage/rent/healthcare to worry about.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Started a new business, need to keep track of finances.  - <AUTHOR>

I know Quickbooks is de facto standard with most businesses to keep track of finances. But before I commit to something, I really want to evaluate all potential solutions. What do you use for tracking your finances, and what do you recommend? <comment><USER2> As a basic income / expenses tracker, I've used both Less Accounting (<http://lessaccounting.com>) and Outright (<http://outright.com>). Outright flowed better for me, but YMMV. This was for a single-founder startup, with very modest requirements.

I'm about to start managing the finances on a startup I'm founding with a partner, and in order to keep the books in order, we'll be using QuickBooks. It's possible that Outright or Less could handle our needs, but I want to make sure that everything is recorded properly, including paychecks and whatnot. This is important when running a solo operation, of course, but since the income is all pass-through, it's not as big a deal. When there are multiple founders, I'd recommend something more substantial.

</comment><comment><USER3> We liked freshbooks more than quickbooks, so I can say that it's a nice product.

But right now, I'm a big fan of what's going on over at Less Accounting. I think he's on the right track to the perfect small business solution. And the support level is unreal.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have mentioned, but I am looking for a solution that scales. I've checked out freshbooks before, and I think that it would be easy to outgrow. Plus, I am not just looking to invoice clients...I want to keep track of all of our finances.

I will however check out Less Accounting.</comment></comment>


Chainmail: A secure, distributed communications platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jonasacres/chainmail <comment><USER2> This is just documentation, not a project with any implementation. The last commit was six months ago.

It's extremely hard to develop serverless/decentralized applications without writing and deploying code as you go. Usually there's some incentives/spam/DoS problem that you didn't consider; sometimes fatally so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's still really early in this project, I just linked it because I found the ideas interesting in their own right.

I did see some indications that more work might get done on it soon, though. We'll see if that materializes or not.</comment></comment>


This is what it's like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/wp/2016/05/25/2016/05/25/13-right-now-this-is-what-its-like-to-grow-up-in-the-age-of-likes-lols-and-longing/ <comment><USER2> This is what it's like to grow up _in a rich suburb of DC as a white girl_ in the age of...

<comment><USER3> Excellent point. It's also about a popular, good-looking girl who's good at sports (so popular that she can effortlessly grab 1000 points on her new Snapchat account in one day) - the kind of kid who is probably at the top of the social hierarchy and not getting bullied by her peers.

I'd also be surprised if boys are as obsessed with social media as girls are, since in the days before social media it was the girls who seemed to be much more concerned about social status in school (which popular classmate liked/ignored them, etc.).

And it's probably no accident that the author chose to write her story about this particular kid, since a random kid wouldn't have had nearly as good a story line if you wanted to write an article about "how obsessed kids are with social media these days".</comment></comment>


H.264 patents: how much do they really cost? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=2122

<comment><USER2> Here are the relevant FYIs:

1\. Microsoft is one of several companies behind H.264. To the extent that H.264 succeeds, they along with Apple et al. benefit directly.

2\. zdnet.com is owned by Microsoft.

3\. The above article is a piece of thinly-veiled MS propaganda.

4\. H.264 is NOT an "open" standard. This is a patently false assertion.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting read on why Firefox won't ship with H.264: [http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_fr...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html)</comment>


What's worked and what hasn't: Commission on payments - <AUTHOR> http://reinventing.schoolofeverything.com/whats-worked-and-what-hasnt-commission-on-payments/

<comment><USER3> The comparison to eBay is a good one - this sounds similar to the reasons touted for eBay not integrating (or, ultimately, receiving value for) their Skype investment.

When you make it easy to put the seller and purchaser in a relationship - <USER2> teaching / tutoring basically does that as part of the product - then you make it easy for them to pay each other direct. They're not being unethical - it's just that it's harder for them to pay you than not, which isn't a great position for you to be in.

I look forward to the stories of other models. Thanks for sharing.</comment>


Is Amazon S3 too big to fail? Would it need a bailout? - <AUTHOR> http://highdefnow.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/is-amazon-s3-now-too-big-to-fail-would-it-need-to-be-bailed-out/

<comment><USER2> This ~post~ doesn't exactly lay out a conceivable scenario, but... It might serve as a reminder of Hamlet's guidance:

"Believe none of us. We are errant knaves all."

Or at least all business operations are subject to unknown/unforeseeable weaknesses.

In the post-Hamlet era it's: "In God we trust. The rest we backup elsewhere."</comment>


Command Return for Web Developers and Users Alike - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mattg.me/posts/36

<comment><AUTHOR> I built this because I really want other web apps to support command+enter for submitting things such as Twitter's new tweet view.</comment>


An Unexpected Python ABI Change - <AUTHOR> https://eklitzke.org/an-unexpected-python-abi-change <comment><USER2> Having multiple sources for the same program is bad enough. When said program is a system utility and is a dependency of other stuff, chaos really ensues. This is why the Debian team recommends against adding other repositories[1], the wisdom of which I learned the hard way. Nowadays I gladly suffer outdated versions as the price I pay for not having the ‼fun‼ of breaking my OS.

[1] [https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian](https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian)

<comment> cup-of-tea The best way seems to be using something like pyenv to install multiple versions of python and not touching the system versio at all.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Stock Market SMS Alert Service? - <AUTHOR>

I've got a new idea for a startup. I need your help.
1) What do you think: a service that lets you creates sms alerts for various stock market events? (For instance, text me if GOOG drops below X in the next Y hours.)
2) I've only found a few sites that do this now. (ex: http://www.acestockalerts.com/home/) I'm not too familiar with the stock market. Is the dearth of such services because they're not useful? Would this service in fact be useful?
3) If it would be useful to investors, what features would you recommend I start with?
Please be absolutely, painfully honest. <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1600812></comment>


Apple's App Store Polices Mean Xbox Game Streaming Not Allowed - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-explains-why-xbox-game-pass-is-not-on-iphone-2020-8 <comment><USER2> I suppose we should think ourselves lucky that Safari doesn't limit us only to websites that have been individually listed, reviewed and rated by Apple.

<comment><USER3> Safari is not available on the app store.

<comment><USER4> Technically no browser is allowed on the app store, just skins around safari.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "The App Store was created to be a safe and trusted place for customers to > discover and download apps, and a great business opportunity for all > developers," an Apple spokesperson told Business Insider. "Before they go on > our store, all apps are reviewed against the same set of guidelines that are > intended to protect customers and provide a fair and level playing field to > developers."

I am pretty skeptical about this being anywhere close to the whole story.

<comment><USER6> It isn't. And to be frank, this is getting really old quickly. It's always the same predictable marketing text, with slight variations depending on the current circumstances.

It's absolutely not about the user or the customer here. It's about them, and only them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What else is new? When you buy an iOS device, Apple only wants you to use software that benefits them. If you want to use and control software of your choice, don't buy mobile devices or computers from Apple, end of story.

<comment><USER8> inb4 apple launches their own competing video-game streaming service

<comment><USER9> Apple Arcade

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One more data point in the long list of data points supporting the idea that Apple should no longer be allowed to run its App Store however they see fit, as they are clearly doing so in an anti-competitive way.

</comment><comment><USER11> Huh, their explanation makes no sense. Do they review every single Spotify song or Netflix movie and show? I don't see how this is any different.

<comment><USER12> The article mentions that the difference between movies/songs and games is that the later is interactive while the former aren't.

Movies and songs don't offer (yet?) "in-movie"/"in-song" transactions, therefore they aren't a potential source of revenue.

<comment><USER13> So basically, they want a piece of the cake and their argument is pretty much made up?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It sounds to me like they want to limit competition of their arcade.

I understand that in a way this Xbox thing would be like an AppStore within the AppStore and you'd be able to circumvent Apple's policies as long as you find Microsoft's more appealing. I can see how that part could be a genuine concern for Apple, but this also being a direct competitor for the arcade just makes it look bad.

<comment><USER15> It's less like an AppStore inside an AppStore and more like a movie inside Netflix or a purchased TV show inside the Amazon app.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but also no. It is more like an AppStore because it offers interactive content (games) that is 100% like what the AppStore already offers and wants to audit and control.

I am not saying that Apple should not allow this in the store, I can just see a legitimate angle as well as the more fishy angle that I mentioned.

Also, if Netflix were to start offering porn lets say, I bet Apple would have concerns there too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> crooked-v Steam Link already exists on the platform and allows streaming arbitrary games from your own Steam library on a desktop, so something seems a bit weird here.

<comment><USER16> Sounds like pretty standard Apple App Store "reviewer roulette" to me. Each reviewer seems to read Apple's rules differently and consistency is not clearly enforced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> in an ideal world game steaming would get popular enough to where people switch to buying android phones in order to do it.

but in this scenario apple might actually cave and twist their rules hypocritically</comment>


Append "_nomap" to your AP's SSID to opt out of Google Location Services (2011) - WD-42 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/greater-choice-for-wireless-access.html <comment><AUTHOR> This post is already a few years old:

      Posted: Monday, November 14, 2011

<comment><USER2> That's a great catch and something all of us (in our default anti-Google mode) missed. Feel silly now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Once upon a time the default privacy model used to be "opt-in". Which then became "opt-out" thanks in large parts to Google. Of course it helped that very few "lay people" take active steps to opt-out.

It appears "rename and opt-out" is the latest model. I'm guessing even fewer lay users will take this step.

Technically this allows Google to claim it gives people an easy way to opt out, but in practice nothing much is likely to change as those who were worried about privacy were probably not broadcasting their SSID publicly to begin with.

<comment><USER3> Also once upon a time people knew what they were talking about before launching into a nonsensical speech filled with privacy cliches.

They are mapping public WiFi APs, public data, it's well within their right and that of other to do so. Offering an opt-out is just going over and beyond to appease the stubbornly misinformed.

<comment><USER4> Why are you slandering anyone who thinks google is a shitty company and doesn't want them profiting on their data?

<comment><USER3> What does that have to do with the correctness of the statements?

And since when is publicly broadcast SSIDs are anyone's private data?

It's very unfortunate that zealots and hateful people are increasingly finding a home on HN.

<comment><USER5> How is a signal generated by something owned by me, located inside my private residence, intended for use inside my house by my family and guests only, considered "publicly broadcast"? Are cordless phone transmissions publicly broadcast? Baby monitors? Burglar alarms? Home automation devices? Bluetooth headsets?

<comment><USER6> > intended for use inside my house by my family and guests only

"Intended" is a description of your subjective mental state, not an objective quality of the broadcast.

> Are cordless phone transmissions publicly broadcast? Baby monitors? Burglar > alarms? Home automation devices? Bluetooth headsets?

If they aren't encrypted, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ehh... It's pretty fucking ridiculous that I should have to change my networks SSID in order to NOT be mapped.

What if I had some established nomenclature. My old SSID was Nikola with a password some variant of Tesla... Nikola_nomap just doesn't have the same spark.

<comment><USER8> Stop broadcasting a unique identifier unencrypted on a public unliscensed band into the middle of your street, then.

Google is doing nothing wrong here.

<comment><USER4> No, they are. Sorry. The population of wifi users that overlaps with HAMs is pretty minimal. This shit is fucking evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How about you only opt-in people who add "_map" to their SSID?

<comment><USER10> Because that would make their service completely useless, because not enough people would opt-in. I think ideally they should have some easier way to opt- out -- maybe submit your SSID/BSSID for removal directly to Google.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I shall submit "linksys".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there something that makes this newly relevant? To be honest, I don't really understand the objection to mapping SSIDs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why should I have to ruin my naming standard for them? Personally I don't mind them mapping my SSID.

<comment><USER14> Why do you have to ruin anything? You aren't forced to use a technology that broadcasts your identification to everyone. If you do choose to use Wifi you can choose a name that Google won't track. Since the technology does broadcast it publically anyone else and every other company CAN track it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Shouldn't it be the other way around? Opt-in instead of Opt-out: Append "_map" to your AP's SSID! Idiots.

<comment><USER6> Arguably, broadcasting an ID _is_ opting in to people recording that they received the broadcast and where that occurred.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Heh, after "Do Not Track" we now have "Do Not Map".

This hack does not resolve the ethical conundrum of indexing a huge amount of publicly available data for private use. We already have technical solutions if we want to make hidden access point, not having to rely on the good faith of an outsider.

What's next, if I don't want google street view to photograph my house I paint "Do Not Photograph" on the wall?

I don't even understand why google took steps to implement that. It means that they acknowledge there's a potential privacy issue but at the same time offer a solution they must know won't satisfy anybody who's concerned about this issue.

</comment><comment><USER17> Everyone who's saying it should be opt-in need to realise that the majority of people won't care that people can collect this publicly available data. I don't care either. It helps people navigate more accurately. If you really care, you wouldn't be broadcasting your SSID.

e: spelling

</comment><comment><USER18> I really dislike the new standard of making location tracking opt-out, not opt-in.

There's a startup that tracks the location of customers across stores using the MAC addresses of their cell phones, without their knowledge. In order to opt-out, you have to register your MAC address with them: [http://nomi.com/privacy/](http://nomi.com/privacy/)

The key to both Nomi and (to a lesser extent) Google is that users _don 't even know_ when they are being tracked. Opt-out only makes sense when there is a reasonable expectation that the user knows that the tracking exists.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone know a way to query the API for your BSSID and see if you're in their database, or do they just respond to queries with a location rather than per- network confirmations?

<comment><USER20> How to do the queries yourself: [https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/business/ge...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/business/geolocation/#wifi_access_point_object)

How to look for access points near you (view this from a mobile): [http://test-geolocation.appspot.com/](http://test-geolocation.appspot.com/)

Or just use curl! Put in a mac address to query for:

curl -d '{version:"1.1.0",request_address:true,wifi_towers:[{mac_address:"00:00:00:00:00:00"}]}' www.google.com/loc/json

<comment> WD-42 You need a Geolocaiton for Business API key which requires a credit card as far as I can tell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No. If there's someone on the street outside my home whose lost and can't get a GPS signal, I want them to stay lost!

Even though I'm happy with my AP broadcasting it's identity in the clear, the idea that anyone else might find that useful is just wrong and infringes on my privacy or something.

Screw those guys!

</comment><comment><USER22> That's rediculous and ugly. How about a website where we can submit our BSSID to a blacklist.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm pretty sure that SSIDs have a maximum length of 32 characters. If your SSID is already 32 characters long, then you can't append "_nomap" to the end of your SSID, since that would be too long.

</comment><comment><USER24> How about simply "fuck off Google". We shouldn't have to do that and then reconfigure our piles of client devices.

Also isn't it about as useful as the do not track header? What about other vendors mapping it and data sense etc?

I moan on behalf of others as my network is ethernet due to things like this.

<comment><USER25> Did you even read what this does? It's used to aid geopositioning. No data from the network is logged, other than its SSID/MAC address and its approximate location.

<comment><USER24> Yes I understand it entirely.

There are enough AP's around me for Apple Maps to know if I'm in bed or having a poo. You can see the marker move.

More services like this are bad.

They already know who I am.

What could possibly go wrong?

Edit: when I say more services are bad like this I mean we should be opt-in for both collection and usage rather than opt out.

<comment><USER26> That problem is entirely due to you choosing to run Google/Apple software on a network attached computer that you carry with you everywhere (even, apparently, to poo).

Mapping the source of radio signals is common and expected. Your Wifi router is basically a big bright lightbulb that flashes with a unique pattern, and can be seen through walls. You can't legitimately ask the rest of the world not to notice it, the same way you can't request that no one use your porch light as a landmark.

<comment><USER4> No. It shouldn't be expected that a $410b market cap company is out mapping this data and selling it to advertisers. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Not a trustworthy company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Would it be possible to randomize the (non-vendor part of) the AP's MAC address periodically to defeat this? Perhaps getting AP manufacturers to add this as a feature would be difficult, though.

<comment><USER20> That would be semi-trivial seeing as how changing your mac is easy with Linux and many of the access points run Linux. The hard part would be reconnecting all of the clients each time you change the mac address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Do they map wireless networks that do not broadcast an SSID?

<comment><USER29> No.

<comment><USER30> Why _wouldn 't_ they, and how could we verify that they don't?

(I suspect they don't, but again, who knows?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you play your stereo loud enough to be heard on the next block, appending _nomap to it will not stop the police from coming to visit you.

</comment><comment><USER32> I keep my SSID hidden. Not sure if that "blocks" Google from using it or not.

</comment><comment><USER33> What about _mapmeplease to opt in.</comment>


Kali NetHunter turns Android device into hacker Swiss Army knife - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/kali-nethunter-turns-android-device-into-hacker-swiss-army-knife/

<comment><USER2> You can find the tool itself (and some documentation) on [http://nethunter.com/](http://nethunter.com/)</comment>


Hackers Delight - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackersdelight.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> This book is an awesome collection of bit-level hacks. One practical use is for fast arbiters / one-hot bit priority and round-robin encoders for FPGAs and ASICs:

[http://www.fpgarelated.com/showthread/comp.arch.fpga/61833-1...](http://www.fpgarelated.com/showthread/comp.arch.fpga/61833-1.php)

<comment><USER2> It's really a great reference. There is also some neat explanations of a few error correction/error detection algorithms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh one other thing I forgot: it shows how to implement full-word (or less) flags in C for simulators:

[http://sourceforge.net/p/exorsim/code/ci/default/tree/sim680...](http://sourceforge.net/p/exorsim/code/ci/default/tree/sim6800.c#l142)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Hacker 's Delight_ is a must have book that should be in the library of every serious programmer. Other works in the same genre include some portion of Don Knuth's _Art of Computer Programming_ (especially Volume 4) and the classic _Hackmem_ report from MIT.</comment>


I sent an email to a monk in Nepal and my blog was hacked by the Chinese - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/669572/i-sent-an-email-to-a-monk-in-nepal-and-my-blog-was-hacked-by-the-chinese-government/ <comment><USER2> Is is just me or was the authors transition from "How I got hacked by the Chinese" to "Here's some analysis of articles on Medium" kind of jolting?

I would have liked to see some analysis on the prevalence of these attacks on blogs instead.

<comment><USER3> Came here to say this - your comment showed up after I submitted mine. Can anyone else explain the extreme change of topic?

<comment><USER4> Apparently the article has a linkbait title, and the Medium analysis/advertisement is the primary thesis.

This is disappointing to say the least.

<comment><USER5> You know, HN was supposed to be this "no click-bait allowed" place, but it's almost exactly the opposite, everything here is clickbait and almost nothing on the front page is ever worth actually clicking and reading.

<comment><USER6> I'm subscribed on the HN page on Facebook so I see the front page articles on my feed. I always check the HN comments first before I decide to read the article. Saves a lot of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > short but brutal DDoS

> blog was deluged with thousands of comments

> the target was the shared hard drive

It would be nice to know what the actual attack here was. Was it really a DDOS? Did they take advantage of an out-of-date version of Wordpress to get access to the hosting account and cause some actual damage? Or did they just post a lot of spam?

<comment><USER8> And how on earth did "thousands of comments" lead to "about €3,000 ($3400) in various fees", unless the author _seriously_ overpaid a security consultant?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The content left little doubt on the origin of the attack. I had sent an > email to one of the most notorious opponents to the Chinese regime. It > retaliated mercilessly.

Wait what?

Your blog becomes the target of common everyday run-of-the-mill comment spam, and you just immediately assume this is a State Sponsored attack? Please... you, and your blog are really not that important.

And we're supposed to just accept the Chinese government monitors all monk's email inboxes, and then launches attacks against anyone who dares email them? Ya right... If the Chinese government was going to go through that much hassle, why not just shut down or intercept/delete all inbound email coming to the monks? Or prevent the Monks from responding?

The much more plausible narrative is this blogger had an outdated Wordpress install, and some bots pwned his server in a completely unrelated scenario.

Checking his blog, he is indeed running an outdated Wordpress install (even after the attack!)[1].

[1] [http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fmondaynote.com%2f](http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fmondaynote.com%2f)

<comment><USER10> But wait...he spent $3400 on a WP "security pro" to fix everything for him!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm confused ... the article starts with an account of the "hack" (although it seems to have actually been just comment spam) and then ends with a rant about WordPress and then a data analysis of the posts on Medium ... ?? ... am I missing something?

<comment><USER11> The problem is "Hence my interest in Medium." is a non sequitor. The story doesn't speak to whether Medium is better at repelling spam than standalone Wordpress or an alternative like tumblr, blogger, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So basically the fact is, two weeks after the author sent an email to this monk, his blog got spammed by comments in Chinese.

And the conclusion is his blog was hacked by the Chinese. Maybe there are some correlation here but it seems too quick to jump to the conclusion that the email caused the Chinese government hacked your blog?

Maybe it is because of something you posted on your blog rather than the email?

</comment><comment><USER13> Confusing piece. Not hacked, DDoS'd. Wordpress is bad for non-techies. Medium is _drastically_ limiting the number of tags on articles.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just to note that the "a monk" he emailed is one most well-known monks in the world, so I'm really unsurprised that his communications are being monitored. Certainly not close to fame as the Dalai Lama, but he's well known if you read even a little about meditation, tibetan buddhism, or the science of meditation.

Mattheiu Ricard has written a lot about the intersection of meditation and neuroscience, etc. Really fascinating stuff. Here's a TED talk he gave: [https://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_h...](https://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_happiness?language=en)

</comment><comment><USER15> > For instance, adding a feature to perform a specific function means you will > have the choice between literally thousands of plug-ins.

Therefore I prefer not having the option to add custom features.

What?

</comment><comment><USER16> > It turned out to be the most costly email I ever sent to anyone.

Not 100% applicable, but worth thinking about IMHO:

One dissident in the Soviet Union, I think Joseph Brodsky, said not to talk about the abuses that oppressors inflict on you. You only magnify their impact: They do those things to scare and intimidate, and every time you repeat the story you help them do it again, to an ever wider audience (who themselves will repeat it). Let their attempts to terrify their victims die, without an echo, in the room where they occur.

It's hard to oppress hundreds of millions or billions of people; you can't really control them all if they don't submit. Terror is a tool for keeping them in line.

(In fairness, it doesn't necessarily apply to this situation, and sometimes talking about things helps people organize, find support, and alert the world to the abuses. But how many people who read this story will now hesitate to help a critic of the Chinese government?)

</comment><comment><USER17> So are there accounts of state sponsored DDoS followed by cracks that have been managed/diverted on Medium or is the article just saying journalists should use infrastructure and not self-host?

</comment><comment><USER16> > _As a publisher, the experience made me realize the potential in a service > like the one from Ev Williams's Medium._

Is this an ad?

</comment><comment><USER18> Him sending an email to the .np cctld has nothing to do with the hack he's talking about. More likely, his plain text email was intercepted 'on the wire' and would have been the same to whichever cctld he would have sent to.

</comment><comment><USER19> >The content left little doubt on the origin of the attack.

That's quite a leap.

</comment><comment><USER20> Do DDoS and comment spam count as hacking now?

</comment><comment><USER21> Really? clickbait on hackers news? GREAT

</comment><comment><USER22> Monks read email? A big part of Buddhism is getting rid of all materialism.

<comment><USER23> Sure, they're not cavemen.

<comment><USER22> This was a legitimate question. A big part of Buddhism is getting rid of all materialism. They aren't even allowed to cook their own food, and can only eat before noon!

<comment><USER24> What about email implies materialism?

You're also mixing different traditions here, that all have their own perspectives on what monks can and can't do.

Materialism in the Buddhist sense is about mental attachment. Desire (attachment) stems from the mind, not the object itself (attachment is not a property of the object), and different meditation practices have different techniques to work with that mental attachment. Reducing your possessions is a very effective strategy in reducing attachment--but it certainly doesn't do anything without developing mental renunciation simultaneously. I'm curious if this is an American or Western perspective on poverty--that poverty itself is somehow liberating.

In terms of email, there's nothing luddite about Tibetan Buddhism. Technology is embraced as another avenue for speech, which the mind can be attentive to.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


More than 7000 refrigerators found online with default user/password - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/08/industrial-refrigerators-defrost-flaw/ <comment><USER2> The companies are trying to shift blame to more than likely entirely technically illiterate customers. How hard would it have been to randomly generate passwords for each unit and have them attached to the door?

<comment><USER3> These aren't consumer refrigerators, these are industrial refrigerators, most likely exposed to the internet intentionally for remote monitoring purposes by sysadmins who should know better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://youtu.be/A48AJ_5nWsc?t=231](https://youtu.be/A48AJ_5nWsc?t=231)</comment>