Ask HN: What is the best process to learn a new language? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to learn Spanish. I live in Costa Rica right now so that helps a lot, but there are so many different language learning apps + websites + guides + books etc. I am learning a decent amount but I am struggling to keep up with the speed of locals talking.
I watch a decent amount of Netflix shows in Spanish, but most speak super quickly as well.
I'm in between using Memrise (free) or Lingvist (paid... quite pricey for an app too) right now. <comment><USER3> After trying a few different approaches I've found an optimal method that works really well for myself.

1) Memrise (paid). This gives you a solid vocabulary and a decent intuition on grammer/sentence structure.

2) Pimsleur (torrented, one 30min lesson every day). This is crucial to actually put all your knowledge from Memrise to use and make it instinctual. This also helps develop a very natural accent.

I did this for 45 days (~2 hours a day) before going to visit family in Italy with zero prior knowledge. My italian wasn't pretty but I could hold a wide range of conversations

I've been doing this for about 4 months for Spanish with just as much success. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am learning Sanskrit which is much harder to learn than Spanish because getting exposure to Sanskrit in every day life is significantly more difficult. Here's what I do on a daily basis.

1\. Watch Sanskrit news and shows on Youtube. 2\. Read Sanskrit magazine and newspaper. 3\. Write a blog in Sanskrit. 4 Always have a Sanskrit contemporary fiction book that I am reading. 5\. Speak to other Sanskrit speakers whatever broken Sanskrit I can speak (I have joined a group). 6\. Teach Sanskrit to others using Google Hangouts / conference call etc. 7\. Practice writing Sanskrit on a whiteboard that I bought. 8\. Refer to grammar books whenever I am in doubt about the correct grammar usage. 9\. Constantly look up new words that I don't know the Sanskrit counterparts to (both online and in a physical dictionary). 10\. Actively recall verb / noun forms whenever I have free time or I am waiting on something. 11\. Take a Sanskrit book with me to work and go to break room and spend 15 minutes reading during lunch / break time. 12\. I have three different Sanskrit apps on my phone that I occasionally refer to when in doubt about some concept.

Doing all the above things daily has significantly improved my Sanskrit language skills. My recommendation is you follow similar technique. The key thing is to do it every single day and not feel bad about making mistakes.

<comment><USER5> What motivated you to learn Sanskrit?

<comment><USER4> 1\. I think it is very cool to know a 2000 year language, read ancient texts in the original and interpret them on your own rather than relying on other people's interpretation which often have religious and cultural biases.

2\. It is beautiful because it has very precise rules. You can construct new words for things that didn't exist before (like computer) without violating the rules of the language.

3\. You can say things very concisely in Sanskrit.

<comment><USER6> What did you come up with for "computer" ?

<comment><USER4> I did not come up with it, others did. सङ्गणक (saṅgaṇaka - <USER2> transliteration). It is composed of three parts - a prefix, root verb and a suffix -

सम् + गण् + ण्वुल् = सङ्गणक

sam + gaṇ + ṇvul = saṅgaṇaka

The prefix imparts the meaning of doing well. The verb means to calculate. The suffix converts the verb into a noun that performs that action. It literally means an entity that is adept at calculating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my experience, the more exposure you get and the more variety you have - the easier it becomes to learn.

1) Use apps (Duolingo is my preference)

2) Read grammar books to learn and understand the underlying structures.

3) Read children's books when you have a big enough vocabulary from (1) and then advance to older books as you expand your experience.

4) Listen to media (Netflix, audio books, tv, radio etc). there should be a lot around you in Costa Rica.

5) Practice - use it as must as you can in every day interactions with actual speakers. If speaking with people in person is scary at first there are a number of services online you can find to match you up with a tutor/practice partner.

<comment><USER8> Related to reading children's books - It can be pretty rewarding and educational to actually speak to children.

I moved to Finland two years ago, and I've found my level of language is good enough to communicate with 3-4 year olds. After that they know more words than I do, but still we usually make ourselves understood.

The best thing I've found for my learning is time though, I'm definitely better at hearing the difference between "o" and "ö" now I've lived here for a long time, and heard them spoken. Listening to Finnish (metal!) radio has also helped me out even though most of the vocabulary is unknown to me, just having people speak at "full speed" and hearing it is useful.

Immersion, I guess, is the key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I posted this a few months back, I had a lot of success learning Italian using the fluent forever method (with ANKI) and am now learning french to use the same method.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508440](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508440)

</comment><comment><USER10> Watching children's TV shows in that language helped me :) They're usually educational (though you don't always notice it as a child). Just a suggestion on top of what other commenters have said; it's a nice way to supplement what you know or at least get started.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been researching this a lot lately as I have a strong interest in learning Spanish, and came across this method: [http://www.jonkenpo.net/method-listening- reading/](http://www.jonkenpo.net/method-listening-reading/)

Basically you read a book in the language you want to learn, that also has your native language next to it (parallel texts) while _also_ listening to the audiobook in the target language.

The original thread it was documented in from an old forum looks to be written by a fairly...eclectic person but overall it seems like a powerful way to learn through mass exposure.

There's a site I found called diveintoespanol.com that enables this method, going to give it a shot this weekend.

<comment><AUTHOR> really neat concept. cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you use subtitles, make sure they are also in Spanish. Also as petecox points out, Spanish varies wildly from country to country, so TV may not be the best, but I wouldn't avoid it entirely -- it's also a good source of cultural knowledge.

I'm personally very distrustful of language learning apps. Some may be better than others, but reading / translation based systems should come after you have a pretty solid conversational fluency.

What you really want is immersion. You need to form relationships in the target language. I'd look for immersion classes or just general meetups in hobbies of your choice. For example, Friday night magic :)

When in doubt listen to as much Spanish as possible.

</comment><comment><USER13> For the duration of your stay I'd actually recommend throwing away your netflix subscription! Each country's culture, accent and slang will vary so if you're in Costa Rica watching content from perhaps Spain, Mexico or Argentina each night it might be a tad confusing. e.g. From my experience, a Mexican gangster movie where they call each other "Pendejo" is little help on the streets of Bilbao or Jujuy!

I'd recommend conversational classes. Depending on how much free time you have, a small group of learners, 8 weeks, 90 mins, 3 times a week. I don't know what your financial situation is like but it may be the best several hundred dollars you ever spent - think of it as an investment. It's a commitment to seriously learn a language (because you're paying for it!) in a supporting environment that reinforces what you'll hear in real life.

Develop a daily routine in your local community. Visit the same coffee shop for breakfast and read half a chapter each day of your 'fluency in 25 lessons'. After a few tongue-tied attempts at conversation they'll naturally revert to practicing _their_ English. Explain to a sympathetic ear that you're really keen to speak the language - perhaps only 1 of 4 employees in a café may persevere but that's okay - you then have 3 English speaking friends and one person you only talk in Spanish with. And it's a cliché but be kind to the monolingual elderly lady in your building - she may have a granddaughter she'll fix you up with!

As nerds we may think technology will solve everything but learning apps will only supplement human interaction, so get out there! :) You're in a Spanish speaking country, which is a great start.

</comment><comment><USER14> For training your ear, I'd recommend finding Colombian shows, which tend to speak slower and are usually easier for new learners to engage with. The boundaries between words are not as clear as we perceive them to be in our native language, and speech segmentation is actually a fascinating process. Training your ear comes down to practice and having a large enough vocabulary for your brain to start the segmentation process. Someone recommended Michel Thomas's courses, and I'd highly recommend you check those courses out as well.

Formalized lessons through something like iTalki might be a good investment too if you can't find a good language partner.

Apps can be a good tool and people tend to be fairly happy with Duolingo and Memrise. If you feel like you're getting to the point where you can get through reading the news and some basic books, I'd recommend giving an app I just released a look, which is called Langliter. In my biased opinion it's one of the best way to build your vocabulary and break past the intermediate plateau a lot of people get stuck at.

</comment><comment><USER15> _I am learning a decent amount but I am struggling to keep up with the speed of locals talking._

You need to develop an ear for it. I have heard that listening to tapes while you sleep can help.

You are also probably being slowed down by translating to English as you listen. You need to learn to understand it without translating it.

One way to work towards that is to transliterate. This is a word for word translation that does not reorder words to create correct (English) grammar.

When I took Greek, we studied the Bible and everyone had an interlinear Bible that had one line of Greek and the English translation of each word below it.

Transliteration can help you get more comfortable with the grammar of the new language and can speed up your mental translation until you are more fluent and can understand the words as meaningful in their own right without translation.

</comment><comment><USER16> There is no one best way.

I needed the structure of class. I live in Norway, and folks are quick to speak English with me until I got firmly into an intermediate level... and it still happens. Oh well :)

But even without classes, I suggest getting a few language learning books designed for adults learning Spanish as a second language. Work through the workbooks. Many come with web support as well. The ones I used covered basic everyday situations, helped with sounds, and covered grammer slowly.

Around here, there are language cafes that help folks get speaking practice.

Childrens shows helped me, as the speech is simple and clear. The TV station has transcripts as well - I found this very helpful. Watch once, view transcript and translate, and watch again. Listen to television/radio as much as possible. Play this stuff as background sound when you are working on things. The exposure trains your ear.

Speak when you can, even if you are repeating after the children's shows you are watching. Try to speak every time you go to the store, for example.

Read. Children's books at first, perhaps. Harry Potter is also a good: You are probably familiar with the story and it repeats words quite often. Move to novels once you tire of children's books but before you feel you are "ready" for them. They'll be hard at first, but at least you can pick things up you are interested in. Newspapers are handy as they introduce information that you might not be interested in. You might be able to find news for children online or something like that as well. Or one that is easy to read (I found that in Norwegian). Write down words you don't know - and their translations - even if you never look at the list again.

Write, especially if you have a local that can read it and correct things for you. Rewrite with corrections. Copy newspaper articles. I suggest writing by hand instead of typing at first, but eventually you'll want to type as well. When typing, make sure you have a spell check on your computer that can spell check spanish.

Apps are helpful for building vocabulary.

After you get a good vocabulary base, make sure you start studying idioms. These color the language.

Google translate isn't always spot-on, but still very helpful. You might have to type more than one word to get a proper translation - it is like this in Norwegian because some words might mean one thing yet when combined mean something completely different.

</comment><comment><USER17> So, I would preface any advice with being clear on what your goals are and what you mean exactly by "learn Spanish." Do you mean get by conversationally? Are you looking for fluency certification? Do you want to attend a Spanish- speaking university or work in a Spanish-speaking office? Do you need to read and write Spanish, or just speak it? All of these things will have different needs, different vocabulary, and different methods.

My advice here is mainly for learning conversational Spanish.

Work one-on-one with a language tutor. For vocabulary practice, use a spaced- repetition system like Fluent Forever (I think Memrise has the same system).

But the biggest thing you can do to learn - speak the language. That's the most important part.

</comment><comment><USER18> My wife is mexican and I am telugu. We can speak a bit of both now by forcing each other to converse it in it couple of days a week. Spanish Sunday, Telugu Tuesday :D.

I would find some local and pay them a little money to hang around and talk to you and correct you.

</comment><comment><USER19> Everyone here has some great suggestions but as far as I can see no one has mentioned the Michel Thomas courses. I have found his way of teaching quite smart especially if you speak English. I mostly listened to his course and practiced a bit with Duolingo(didn't find it that helpful but it was ok) before going to Spain, and I have to say Michel helped me a lot in recognising structures and phrases. If you combine it with learning some vocabulary it'd be really good.

But as most seem to say and I have to agree, the best thing to do is find people and speak the language as much as possible (native speakers, tutors, other learners).

<comment><USER14> I second the Michel Thomas recommendation. What it gives you is a good ear for more complicated grammatical structures. There's no getting around putting in the work to build your vocabulary, but it really helps bridge the gap between the grammar rules you read in a book and recognizing and using them in conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anki, Memrise or Duolingo, Pimsleur audiobooks, and Rosetta Stone along with having someone to interact with (which you have). I've been slacking but for Spanish I speak with my girlfriend (Argentinian, but speaks English fluently so sometimes I have to force her to use Spanish as she finds my Spanish frustrating) and coworkers. Trying to incorporate new words or linguistic concepts (tenses, idioms) into the conversation each week.

I picked up a frequency dictionary for Spanish and entered in the words from that into my Anki deck. I also got a college level Spanish 101/102 textbook to work through to reinforce the grammar. I find the grammar rules themselves stick well with the way my mind works (probably why I took to math and CS in the first place), though vocabulary requires the deliberate practice. So the textbook gives me the framework (grammar) to fit the vocab onto and I can focus on the vocabulary by itself having already (more or less) learned the grammar and syntax.

Others are saying avoid Rosetta Stone. I don't know, it was a gift to me from my parents. I have found it useful because it's so much already created verbal content so my listening (though not speaking) improved greatly by using it.

Memrise and Duolingo: I find these easy to use for a few minutes a day. I couldn't get anywhere near fluency doing just that, but it is good practice. Really nice for use on the go. I'll use it for however long I have between when I get to the gym (between 5:30 and 6) and my class starts (6). And a few other times throughout the day. I don't feel like I'm interrupting a lesson when I stop with it, it's just taking a break until I'm free again.

Anki is something I run through entirely in one go. I couldn't stick with it when I used it multiple times a day for fractions of the deck. I usually use it first thing in the morning.

Pimsleur also improved my listening and my speaking skills. I don't pirate it, I already subscribed to Audible and each month I get a credit which covers the cost of a week of lessons. Audible seems to have frequent 2-for-1 deals (use 1 credit for 2 books) so I've only paid for maybe half of them, if I count the subscription as part of my cost.

</comment><comment><USER21> What I did when I lived in Spain was watch a lot of movies in Spanish with English subtitles. This helped me immensely with my listening comprehension. Without subtitles, it was much more difficult to decipher words.

Also, if you're there for some sort of exchange, try to live with locals if possible and make it a point to speak in Spanish with your fellow exchange students/people, even if it seems awkward at first and would seem easier to just speak in English.

Other than that, there's no substitute for practice and exposure. Talk and actively listen as much as you can.

</comment><comment><USER22> My experience: there's a quandary if you avoid face-to-face conversation because your listening comprehension skills aren't very good, because you need conversation and interaction to improve them. In conversation you can read body language and ask for clarity/to slow down/explain things differently. The pressure, heat of the moment etc forces you to really pay attention. It's easy to fall in to a passive listening trap watching movies, listening to songs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anki flash cards used as described in this article [https://qz.com/1211561/how-to-learn-a-language-use-spaced- re...](https://qz.com/1211561/how-to-learn-a-language-use-spaced-repetition/)

Im learning Macedonian in Macedonia s-l-o-w-l-y and have just arrived at this approach.

For motivation, keep in mind how much more you'll get out of the conversations you hear and overhear!

</comment><comment><USER24> Find a family that natively speaks the language and live with them for a year. Especially a great idea if you're young.

</comment><comment><USER25> Big fan of the app clozemaster. Duolingo was great to begin with, but now seems so slow and has ads after every lesson. Clozemaster has a lot more variety in terms of vocab.

And it offers lots of different languages:

[https://www.clozemaster.com/languages](https://www.clozemaster.com/languages)

</comment><comment><USER26> I combined Pimsleurs, a one year coursebook, spaced reptition and 12 hours of training a day for 3 weeks to learn Mandarin. My listening skills were weak but reading and writing were strong. Got up to about 800 characters and 1300 words. This was enough to get around comfortably in China and add to my vocabulary.

</comment><comment><USER27> For romance languages that don't have declension:

0) Figure out how to read/pronounce words in that language

1) Learn important irregular verb conjugations in present tense (to have, to be, etc.)

2) Learn how to conjugate the different forms of present tense verbs

3) Look up list of most commonly used verbs + nouns. Memorize those.

4) Layer in conjugations for new tenses

5) Practice with native speakers

</comment><comment><USER28> My steps for learning French and Spanish were: 1) 1/2 months nonstop on Duolingo 2) Cartoons/books for kids 3) Spending free time with French/Spanish speakers (gotta mention that I was lucky because my native language is romance and I lived in both France and Equador)

</comment><comment><USER29> Get exposure to content not made for learners or beginners (native content) ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER30> There is no one best way. Just get out there and start absorbing information. There is no one magical book, website, or resource that will make you fluent. I would avoid Rosetta Stone though(personal bias).

</comment><comment><USER31> I found Duolingo OK for revising vocabulary but not much use for anything else.

If possible, play back audio at a reduced percentage. I find 90% makes everything a lot more comprehensible.

And, of course, constant practice & revision.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you have a movie or TV series which you watched so many times that you remember most of it, then try watching it dubbed in Spanish.

</comment><comment><USER33> Along with other suggestions I recommend the free Language Transfer podcast. It's a quite good starting point for new languages.

</comment><comment><USER34> Years ago, I had a French class that used "French in Action". Video lessons were a pretty new thing, then, and it had 52 half hour videos that included a running story that kept the viewer engaged. I found that worked very well for me. I was supposed to learn one college year's worth, over about 7 weeks. Instead, they had to place me into third year French when I was done with that course. (Which, to her discredit, rather pissed off the department head -- I'd taken the French in Action class elsewhere.)

"Destinos" is a similar program that came out for Spanish, a couple of years later. Actually, due to some recent events, I'm using it right now -- this time without a class/instructors -- and I'm finding it likewise useful and effective. Its story also spans the globe from Spain to Argentina to Puerto Rico and finally Mexico, so the viewer gets some exposure to a variety of accents/dialects.

[http://www.learner.org/resources/series75.html](http://www.learner.org/resources/series75.html)

The videos are free to stream, at least in the U.S. If you have any trouble, shoot me an email with "HN" included in the subject line, and I can provide you a bit more direction including possible alternatives.

Through used sales on Amazon, I picked up the textbook and workbooks in quite good condition for about $10 - $15 each. Note that there is one "edition" of the videos but two editions of the text and workbooks. There is also an "alternative" version of the text and/or workbooks. "Alternative" means its content is varied and directed more towards group activities suitable for a classroom or other group learning experience. (So I gather from my own research into what to buy.)

P.S. Also, keep watching the shows and such. A lot of language learning happens before the words; the sound of the language. That includes different languages emphasizing different frequencies of sound; your brain needs to learn to pay more attention to those frequencies and not disregard them as part of its filtering and processing.

Also, find some Spanish language/lyric music you enjoy listening to. I did that with German and French.

In addition to getting your ear used to the language's sounds and rhythm and all, it's fun when you suddenly grasp a new part of the lyrics. And it starts to plug you into the culture surrounding the language.

I don't have much of a playlist for Spanish, yet, but I hooked onto Bomba Estereo a few years ago when a world music show in my area played one of their songs that captivated me.

You can find their stuff on YouTube. I heard "Pure Love", and thereby found their album "Elegancia Tropical". Etc. Might not be your speed. But you'll find things you like.

Good luck, and enjoy!

P.P.S. Both these classes were made in significant part with grant money by foundations and had significant aspects of "public good" in their generation.

They are part of what convinces me to continue to advocate for "public education", including at the post-secondary level.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonderful! Appreciate the resources and will for sure check out the music :) thanks!</comment></comment>


Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved - <AUTHOR> https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved-auid-1302 <comment><USER2> I apologize if I am misrepresenting the article points, but in this kind of discussion often the only thing I see is "If we take unnecessarily strict dictionary definition of terms then obvious things become false"

There are interesting ways to look at consciousness, e.g. you can look at it in terms of how the psychology of an individual evolves over time, or you can study apparent and emerging structures in the psyche and its illnesses (personally I am a fan of Jung's approach).

I am not even saying that this article is unnecessary by itself. The author is not straw-manning the opposition, it is just that the whole debate looks like a caste in the sky we would be better of dropping.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article sustains that for consciousness to exist, it should have an evolutionary advantage. It could be something emergent from the complexity of the brain, having a language or different capabilities (pattern matching, cognitive biases, story telling, etc) that enable us to make sorts of long term future predictions, to name a few. And all of them do have evolutionary advantages.</comment>


"define:" search does not work on Google anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+test

<comment><USER2> I clicked your link and it still works just fine for me:

test/test/ Verb: Take measures to check the quality, performance, or reliability of (something), esp. before putting it into widespread use or practice. Noun: A procedure intended to establish the quality, performance, or reliability of something, esp. before it is taken into widespread use.

<comment><USER3> It also worked for me. Maybe it's because I'm in Canada?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It works only in that it returns a single result. It used to be a whole SERP of definitions. Sad that.</comment>


Goldman Sachs bets on gang members staying out of jail - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-08/goldman-s-bullish-on-boston-bloods-staying-out-of-jail.html

<comment><USER2> Goldman actually makes a huge number of these kinds of investments every year, and has since at least 2001.

[http://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/investing-and- lending...](http://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/investing-and- lending/urban-investments/case-studies/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> What will happen when profit-seeking priorities conflict with the social good? What happens if they discover that a more just solution or one that provides more benefits to society costs more than what they are doing?

(However, I only skimmed the article ... maybe that was addressed and I missed it.)

</comment><comment><USER4> well if Goldman just offers them their old job back, that should cut down on the recidivism rate substantially.

<comment><USER3> Maybe the most cost-effective solution is to better regulate Wall Street, which would prevent the economic crises that lead to high unemployment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If Goldman also paid off the police they could make a killing on this.</comment>


Excessive Video Gaming to Be Named Mental Disorder by WHO - <AUTHOR> https://www.usnews.com/news/health-care-news/articles/2017-12-26/excessive-video-gaming-to-be-named-mental-disorder-by-who <comment> recursive-algo That's fucking ridiculous, let's just pick and choose attributes societally deemed less desirable and throw them right in the dsm-5. At what point do you recognize a dichotomy between personal difference and mental conditions. I'd classify excessive gaming as a symptom of another undiagnosed condition or social problem i.e. (dysfunctional family, child abuse, bullying, Asperger's...). While we're at it lets throw excessive cell phone use into the dsm-5 as I abhor cell phones and practically all forms of social media.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why single out video games? I'm guessing the WHO is targeting gaming since its more common among children and adolescent, an age group that is not among their ranks. Will we see a seperate additional disorder of Excessive Facebooking in the future.</comment>


The Title Would Be Hello World If We Weren't Aiming Higher - <AUTHOR> http://redbeacon.github.io/2013/10/20/The-Title-Would-Be-Hello-World-If-We-Werent-Aiming-Higher <comment><USER2> What do you guys plan to do differently than services like Angie's List?

Also, why so much SASS/CSS? Those line counts seem awfully high</comment>


Blu-ray  - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=335

<comment><USER2> Good post. I have always been of the same opinion: high-def DVDs are doomed to the same fate as the high-end audio formats. I assure you that HDCD and DVD- Audio discs sound really great on a high-end stereo system, but they don't sound great enough for the mass market to actually give a damn.

 _I can't even guess what mass movie downloading would do to the internet's overall structure, but I'm sure it will adapt._

It is just not that big a problem. There are only so many movies in the world -- the good ones take time and money to make -- and 1TB hard drives are now cheap. Let's see... Netflix claims to have 90k titles. An HD-encoded movie seems to average 20-25GB. Let's call it 25GB. By my calculations, that means I need something like 2200 TB to hold the entire Netflix library in HD form. That's like $200k worth of drives, and shrinking fast... and that's for one copy of _every film in Netflix_. I don't think the idea of putting one such server in every city, or even every few city blocks, is particularly radical at this point, and it will seem even less radical in six years when the cost is down to $13k (with, one hopes, concurrent shrinkage in energy usage and support costs).

We'd have done this already if it weren't for the licensing issues. The BitTorrent hobbyists have been pretty darned successful already, considering that using BitTorrent to swap commercial movies is not only kind of complicated (relative to, say, TiVO) but also illegal.

<comment><USER3> I do love some DVD-Audio, but the selection is so limited. Makes me wish I was a bigger Bjork fan.

The Gorillaz concert DVD is great. I realize it's not the same, but listening to Ibrahim Ferrer sing Latin Simone in 5.1 is pretty awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I personally own one DVD, because there's only one movie that I sometimes > suddenly feel like re-watching without having to drive to Blockbuster or > wait a few days to get from Netflix.

I'm almost paralyzed by my desire to know what that one movie is. Totally irrational, but I MUST know. I've discovered my purpose in life. I suppose there's a little Asperger's in all of us.

<comment><USER5> Either intuition or a memory of a previous Matt Maroon article makes me pretty confident that it is the Big Lebowski.

<comment><USER4> Lebowski seems like a pretty safe bet: <http://mattmaroon.com/?p=52>

I guess if you only own one movie, that's a pretty good one.

<comment><USER6> I've never been able to relate to Lebowski for some reason. Loved many of the other Coen bros films, though. Using Matt's criteria for movie greatness, I can name several other movies off the top of my head that are much more quotable than Lebowski: Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers, Airplaine, Holy Grail, Fish Called Wanda, Napoleon Dynamite, Pulp Fiction.

...I must be significantly older than Matt, I guess.

<comment><USER3> I've seen all of those. Maybe we just have much different conversations, because I never find anything from Ghostbusters to be apropos.

Pulp Fiction and Napoleon Dynamite are pretty high up my list for sure. Pulp Fiction might actually be number 2.

<comment><USER6> Ghostbusters has many good quotes (e.g., no dick), but here's a few that I've actually used in conversation:

"Don't cross the streams"

"It would be bad"

"Yes, have some."

"I don't have any Tylenol, but I do have some acetylsalicylic acid."

"Listen... do you smell something?"

"Where do the stairs go?" "They go up"

The last one usually isn't quoted directly. Rather some variation, such as "I wonder what's behind that door." "A room."

<comment><USER3> It seems a little too generous to attribute "It would be bad." to Ghostbusters. Or the last one, which is basically Vaudeville. You might as well say you're quoting Earth Girls Are Easy every time you say the word "the", because it's in that movie at least once.

<comment><USER6> Vaudeville: True enough. In fact, I can only use that around close friends who are already familiar with the original quote. If I said something like that to anyone else, they'd think I'm being an ass.

It would be bad: You have to use it in the proper context as a gross understatement. As in every atom in your body exploding at the speed of light would be bad. True, the same line has been used as an understatement in other movies, but the Ghostbusters instance sticks out for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would not say, that PS3 was a flop. Sale numbers are in the millions. And, since we are talking about high-def video, as high-def player PS3 whoops ass (in sales) compared to any other high-def player.

I also do not agree completely about irrelevance of high-def format. If it's not that important, then why were Toshiba and Microsoft pushing with their own format ?

</comment><comment><USER8> Great post.</comment>


Has Mobile Killed The Fast Follower Strategy? Sure Looks That Way… - <AUTHOR> http://hunterwalk.com/2013/09/09/has-mobile-killed-the-fast-follower-strategy-sure-looks-that-way/

<comment><USER2> I think you missed the biggest reason, social lock-in. If all my friends are in XYZ app I will go their to share photos, check-in etc.</comment>


Time Team: the rise and fall of a television phenomenon - <AUTHOR> http://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/time-team-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-television-phenomenon.htm

<comment><USER2> Time Team is the only example I'm aware of where proper scholarly research was created as a by product of popular television on a regular basis.

As the article states, "It is to the Channel's credit that it did this [pump £4M into British archaeology]] despite much of that outlay being channelled into post-excavation work that never appeared onscreen."

<comment><AUTHOR> As well as the 225 scholarly reports, plus additional articles, on the dig sites. They exceeded almost all universities and archaeology units in the UK on an individual institution basis for output and quality of work. It may have been a TV series, but the folks doing the work were serious archaeologists who did real work, making a real contribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To me it feels like a case of a network sabotaging its own show. Step 1: be incredibly inconsistent with air times and play around with dates, step 2: dumb the program to capture a larger audience by making sweeping changes, introducing younger presenters and disturbing a well-oiled team that people have come to love, step 3: ax show when ratings fail to climb because bogus strategy didn't work.

A terrible loss for archeology, not just in the UK. Twenty seasons is a massive achievement though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The technical advances used in archaeology illustrated over the past twenty years of this program have been phenomenal. While a trowel is still mandatory, the use of geophysics technology has advanced and assisted in fieldwork in so many ways. Highlighted by Time Team, its a shame to see that this won't be as public anymore to such a wide audience.</comment>


Cornell to Digitize a Rich Hip Hop Archive - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2014/12/10/369841627/cornell-to-digitize-a-rich-hip-hop-archive <comment><USER2> This is terrific.

Would be great if someone could do the same favour for Jungle music, another genre that had many tunes exist solely on dubplate.

</comment><comment><USER3> There aren't many forms of music I cannot listen to, but Hip Hop is one of them. Can't really call it music to be honest, its just agony to listen to, nothing to feel good about, mindless unintelligible lyrics, caustic sounds, and 'singers' who can't sing to save their life (no autotune does not make you sound any better!).

<comment><USER4> "There aren't many forms of music I cannot listen to, but Hip Hop is one of them."

No beef, that's an opinion.

"Can't really call it music to be honest...mindless unintelligible lyrics..."

That's wrong and silly at best, closer to closet racism/classism at worst.

<comment><USER5> >closer to closet racism/classism at worst

I wouldn't go that far, but mindless and unintelligible? Have you been exposed to the variety of hip hop that is out there?

Aesop Rock, Action Bronson, Deltron 3030/Del the Funkee Homosapien etc etc

Here is an interesting post that classifies hip hop artists based on their vocabulary and word usage:

[http://mfdaniels.tumblr.com/post/93313634355/updated- rappers...](http://mfdaniels.tumblr.com/post/93313634355/updated-rappers- sorted-by-size-of-vocabulary-20)</comment></comment></comment>


Ben Huh of "I Can Has Cheezburger" is quietly building a humor empire - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/cheezburger-fail-ben-huh/ <comment><USER2> "Rule #6 If you want to be a CEO, get close to other CEOs"

I came to this same conclusion the last time I was job seeking and it was a critical decision factor for me, coming from a larger company where I had little contact with any decision makers. The job I wound up taking was the one where the CEO met me for coffee to discuss what the company was all about.

That CEO who met me for coffee was Ben Huh. Working at Cheezburger has been one of the most satisfying jobs I have ever had.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quietly?

[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916286,00....](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916286,00.html) doesn't seem too quiet, and on the internets he's extremely famous.

</comment><comment><USER4> What I see in Ben is how much responsibility he takes for his failures and having to fire his employees. This was a very refreshing interview.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very timely. Just as I start work on a community site...

The point I came away with most from this was 'listen to your community'. I think that to an extent you really need to be a part of the community on your site for it to be successful.

I think PG & Hacker News are a good example of this...

<comment><USER6> If you've ever seen any of the comments on failblog/cheezburger etc, you'd realise that Hacker News isn't a good comparison.

Having said that Ben seemed like a nice guy when he had a drink with us in London last year.

<comment><USER7> Hacker News isn't here to make money, and it attracts users because people come for YCombinator. Managing a community is much different when you don't have that, and it's very easy to trip up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good mission statement: "We want to make you happy for a few minutes each day."

[http://failblog.org/2009/09/30/thank-you-for-2-years-of- the-...](http://failblog.org/2009/09/30/thank-you-for-2-years-of-the- cheezburger-network/)

<comment><USER8> Could be a perfect user of a micropayment service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Top of page: "If you like this interview, vote for it on news.ycombinator.com --Andrew"

<comment><USER10> I'm a big fan of Mixergy-- Andrew's interviews are terrific and from the perspective of aspiring entrepreneurs. Definitely a site that will be of interest to HN readers.

<comment><USER11> It should also be noted that Andrew is an active HN member and goes by the screen name AndrewWarner.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AndrewWarner>

I also love his mixergy interviews, very inspirational.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Inspirational dialog

</comment><comment><USER13> Hi Andrew,

I like your site and find your interviews generally insightful. However, must you shill for karma points? Not sure what others here think about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got the karma points. And there's nothing wrong with submitting your own stuff anyways.

<comment><USER13> Good point, my bad! You're absolutely right, there's nothing wrong with promoting good stuff.</comment></comment></comment>


The Step-by-Step Guide to Startup Customer Acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://onboardly.com/customer-acquisition/the-step-by-step-guide-to-startup-customer-acquisition-infographic/

<comment><USER2> I hope HN isn't getting large enough that we start to see more infographics like this.

<comment><USER3> Looks like a fairly concise roadmap to me. Doesn't take up that much space compared to many infographics.

While I myself would prefer a text summary, this is a fairly unobjectionable infographic.

And I bet you wouldn't mind as much if it was screenshots of a kanban board at different stages of roadmap ;-)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Craft.cash – Minecraft on Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://craft.cash <comment><AUTHOR> This encodes voxel data in a binary format using OP_RETURN outputs of bitcoin transactions. With this design we can then look back into time to construct a world up until any Bitcoin block, effectively creating an immutable decentralized voxel world. Using BitDB and BitSocket as a "backend" to query for transactions we can keep our map updated with any changes, making it semi- real-time as well.

I'd love to hear any feedback. This project was very fun to develop and is completely open source if you want to take a peek at how it is implemented.

</comment><comment><USER2> It's things like this that clearly demonstrate the power of a blockchain. It should also serve as a reminder that if you allow your blockchain to scale, smart people will make it useful, thus giving it value.

As much as I love good old BTC, the entire ecosystem seems to have gone stagnant the past few years. Meanwhile, I can't even keep up with all the new stuff being built on Bitcoin Cash.

Apparently BCH now supports tokens too. I just hope the devs don't lose focus and will continue building "peer to peer digital cash" as described in the Bitcoin whitepaper.</comment>


Becoming Freelance - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for advice on becoming a freelance programmer. My main expertise is in automated tasks, Python scripts, web scraping, and some database management with SQL. I'm a finance grad but realized I should have went CS when I took a CS course as an elective when I was a senior so I'm self taught. I currently work in commercial real estate doing data mining and various "gray hat" lead acquisitions. So my questions...<p>How difficult is the journey?
How hard is it to win contracts?
How did you build your portfolio to get started? (because everyone want to see a portfolio) <comment><USER2> You seem to have a specialisation which would be in demand.

In my experience the key to success in freelancing is sales ability. You need to find customers who could benefit from your expertise. When you get to meet them you need to demonstrate the value you bring to them. Having sold them, your technical skills are used to deliver and then you need to collect the money.

A portfolio and/or references are useful in establishing credibility. I would suggest having a "sampler" app running on a tablet to showcase the "solution" that you can deliver. I find successful test drives help the sales process along more than anything else I've tried. Even if what you showcase is only marginally relevant, it often still is sufficient to start the requirements elicitation process. That is, find the need and show how you can satisfy it.</comment>


Appvm: Thin easy-to-use hypervisor-based sandboxing software - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jollheef/appvm <comment><AUTHOR> There's also an initial implementation security-focused OS based on the tool. [https://github.com/jollheef/appvm/tree/master/os](https://github.com/jollheef/appvm/tree/master/os)

Live ISO is available in the GitHub Actions artifacts: [https://github.com/jollheef/appvm/runs/379254878](https://github.com/jollheef/appvm/runs/379254878).</comment>


The End of x86? An Update - <AUTHOR> http://fernstrategy.com/2012/12/21/the-end-of-x86-an-update/ <comment><USER2> After reading about great performance of newer ARM-based offerings I was surprised when I compared real-world performance at the same clock speed recently: ARM doesn't even come close to any recent-generation x86. This is certainly one very important measure of architecture.

A quick sunspider test with a US Samsung Galaxy S3 1.5GHZ snapdragon on Jelly Bean's likely highly-optimized browser shows performance very comparable to a first generation intel 1.66GHZ Atom 230 single core on the latest Firefox. Granted it's a mostly single-threaded test anyway but the ARM has both cores available and the test is pretty cpu-bound after it starts.

I'd estimate the latest i7 is at least 3x faster per-GHZ on this lightweight but fairly general (cpu-wise) test.

For heavy lifting, a recent i7 with it's cache size, memory bandwidth and accompanying i/o would probably compare to an ARM that is running at about 5x the clock speed.

I don't think that ARM can be suddenly declared the best at anything other than maybe performance-per-TDP.

Performance-per-cycle is the more difficult problem to solve... ask AMD how hard that's been since the original Intel core series appeared on the scene in 2006. Prior to this and after it wasn't just a chip clone maker, AMD dominated this metric.

<comment><USER3> But performance per TDP is what matters. Battery technology is getting better much slower than CPU technology. We're already at the point where CPU speed is "good enough," but we're not at the point where battery life is "good enough."

I've downsized from a Core 2 MBP to an iPad. It has 1/4 the RAM and runs at half the clock speed. Do I care? No! Web browsing is fast and fluid, photos load plenty fast, editing documents in pages is plenty fast. And it lasts through my whole 12+ hour workday, letting me leave the charger at home and often not even bothering to charge it every night. That's huge and much more important to me, and I'd imagine most people, than whether it can be imperceptibly faster.

<comment><USER2> I agree for typical single-user applications, but it's hard to call that the end of x86 as in the article. If ARM were matching x86 cycle-by-cycle in performance for less power that might be a credible claim that servers were next. Also high-end x86 devices run higher clock speeds with more cores so the gap in absolute performance is at least 1000% percent wide. I just don't see ARM displacing Intel when batteries or at least small form factor aren't involved. I don't expect to have an x86-based phone or tablet either.

<comment><USER4> My opinion (and I suspect the authors) is that the market for chips where batteries or form factor are not a concern will no longer be large enough to support a company of the size of Intel. RIM makes the finest high security physical keyboard phones anywhere. That is now a market sized for a company 1/10th their current size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh the horror. What a bunch of random, clueless and non-technical crap. I especially like the part where he compares the operating costs of Intel (a company owning a number of multi-billion-dollar fabs that are far above the competition in capabilities) and ARM holdings (a comparatively tiny intellectual property shop).

Unfortunately, it is exactly by the advice of such "strategically thinking" MBAs our industry is often run :-(

<comment><USER6> I like how he quotes the 7.6 billion primitive chips (embedded processors just a notch above a bunch of random logic gates) "shipped" by ARM to the high- margin (for Intel) PC market.

<comment><USER7> Even ARM's "embedded processors just a notch above a bunch of random logic gates" are fully-fledged 32-bit microprocessors with hardware support for preemptive multitasking, running at fairly respectable clock speeds. And that's the sub-dollar embedded stuff!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whenever I read about modern desktops, I think about the graphs in the Innovator's Dilemma. [1]

The incumbent players (Intel, Microsoft, Dell, HP) are all competing on the established metrics of performance & price, but those are no longer the metrics that matter. ARM is pushing the power efficiency angle. Apple is winning on industrial design.

The entire computer industry (excluding phones, which has obviously already been disrupted) is right on the verge of being flipped on its head. There were hints of that with the netbook wave, but they weren't quite good enough. The iPad and subsequent high end Android tablets are close, but not 100% there. But we are just about at the point where ARM vs x86 is equivalent for the mass market, and that really is going to shake things up.

[1] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Dis...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Disruptivetechnology.gif/450px- Disruptivetechnology.gif)

</comment><comment><USER9> Missing from this post is any sort of discussion about how modern x86 CPUs are poorly designed for the types of programs most people are developing these days.

Managed language runtimes represent the bulk of programs people are running on servers (think: Java/Scala/Clojure, PHP, Python, Ruby). These environments not only lack "mechanical sympathy" but also have requirements above and beyond what x86 can do.

To take Cliff Click's word for it, managed language runtimes consume 1/3 of their memory bandwidth on average zeroing out memory before handing objects to people. If x86 supported an instruction for doing just-in-time zeroing into L1 cache, this penalty could be eliminated, and that 1/3rd of memory bandwidth could be used for actual memory accesses instead of just zeroing out newly allocated objects. In an age where RAM is the new disk, this would be huge.

Unfortunately the amount of time it takes to get a feature like this into an Intel CPU is a bit mind boggling. Azul started talking to Intel about hardware transactional memory early last decade, and Intel is _finally_ shipping hardware transactional memory in the Haswell architecture in the form of transactional synchronization extensions.

<comment><USER10> > Unfortunately the amount of time it takes to get a feature like this into an > Intel CPU is a bit mind boggling.

I think this is an unfair feature comparison. Zeroing L1 cache is way simpler operation than TM which has been designed to support two modes of operation [legacy -- which only speeds up traditional LOCK-based synchronization -- and true TM], must support transaction aborts and restarts, etc. Also, 10 years ago, TM was still a very active _research_ area -- i.e., people had no clue about which ideas were performant and scalable and, not the least, feasible to implement in HW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Working in microprocessors, I hear this a lot, but, in the long run, Intel has a fundamental advantage over ARM, and ARM doesn't seem to have a fundamental advantage over Intel [1].

People talk about RISC vs. CISC, and how ARM can be lower power because RISC instructions are easier to decode, but I don't hear that from anyone who's actually implemented both an ARM and an x86 front-end [2]. Yes, it's a PITA to decode x86 instructions, but the ARM instruction set isn't very nice, either (e.g., look at how they ran out of opcode space, and overlayed some of their "new" NEON instructions on top of existing instructions by using unused condition codes for existing opcodes). If you want to decode ARM instructions, you'll have to deal with having register fields in different places for different opcodes (which uses extra logic, increasing size and power), decoding deprecated instructions which no one actually uses anymore (e.g., the "DSP" instructions which have mostly been superseded by NEON), etc. x86 is actually more consistent (although decoding variable length instructions isn't easy, either, and you're also stuck with a lot of legacy instructions) [X].

On the other hand, Intel has had a process (manufacturing) advantage since I was in high school (in the late 90s), and that advantage has only increased. Given a comparable design, historically, Intel has had much better performance on a process that's actually cheaper and more reliable [3]. Since Intel has started taking power seriously, they've made huge advances in their low power process. In a generation or two, if Intel turns out a design that's even in the same league as ARM, it's going to be much lower power.

This reminds me of when people thought Intel was too slow moving, and was going to be killed by AMD. In reality, they're huge and have many teams working a large variety of different projects. One of those projects paid off and now AMD is doomed.

ULV Haswell is supposed to have a TDP ~10W with superior performance to the current Core iX line [4]. Arm's A15 allegedly has a TDP of ~4W, but if you actually benchmark the parts, you'll find that the TDPs aren't measured the same way. A15 uses a ton of power under load, just like Haswell will [5]. When idle, it won't use much power, and will likely have worse leakage, because Intel's process is so good. And then there's Intel's real low power line, which keeps getting better with every generation. Will a ULV version of a high-end Intel part provide much better performance than ARM at the same power in a couple generations, or will a high performance version of a low-power low-cost Intel part provide lower power at the same level of performance and half the price? I don't know, but I bet either one of those two things will happen, or that new project will be unveiled that does something similar. Intel has a ton of resources, and a history of being resilient against the threat of disruption.

I'm not saying Intel is infallible, but unlike many big companies, they're agile. This is a company that was a dominant player in the DRAM and SRAM industry that made the conscious decision to drop out the DRAM industry and concentrate on SRAMs when DRAM became less profitable, and then did the same for SRAMs in order to concentrate on microprocessors. And, by the way, they created the first commercially available microprocessor. They're not a Kodak or Polaroid; they're not going to stand idle while their market is disrupted. When Toshiba invented flash memory, Intel actually realized the advantage and quickly became the leading player in flash, leaving Toshiba with the unprofitable DRAM market.

If you're going to claim that someone is going to disrupt Intel, you not only have to show that there's an existing advantage, you have to explain why, unlike in other instances, Intel isn't going to respond and use their superior resources to pull ahead.

[1] I'm downplaying the advantage of ARM's licensing model, which may be significant. We'll see. Due to economies of scale, there doesn't seem to be room for more than one high performance microprocessor company [6], and yet, there are four companies with ARM architecture licences that design their own processors rather than just licensing IP. TI recently dropped out, and it remains to be seen if it's sustainable for everyone else (or anyone at all).

[2] Ex-Transmeta folks, who mostly when to Nvidia, and some other people whose project is not yet public.

[3] Remember when IBM was bragging about SOI? Intel's bulk process had comparable power and better performance, not to mention much lower cost and defect rates.

[4] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/6355/intels-haswell- architectu...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6355/intels-haswell-architecture)

[5] Haswell hasn't been released yet, but Intel parts that I've looked at have much more conservative TDP estimates than ARM parts, and I don't see any reason to believe that's changed.

[6] IBM seems to be losing more money on processors every year, and the people I know at IBM have their resumes polished, because they don't expect POWER development to continue seriously (at least in the U.S.) for more than another generation or two, if that. Oracle is pouring money into SPARC, but it's not clear why, because SPARC has been basically dead for years. MIPS recently disappeared. AMD is in serious trouble. Every other major vendor was wiped out ages ago. The economies of scale are unbelievably large.

[X] Sorry, I'm editing this and not renumbering my footnotes. ARMv8 is supposed to address some of this, by creating a large, compatibility breaking, change to the ISA, and having the processor switch modes to maintain compatibility. It's a good idea, but it's not without disadvantages. The good news is, you don't have to deal with all this baggage in the new mode. The bad news is, you still have the legacy decoder sitting there taking up space. And space = speed. Wires are slow, and now you're making everything else travel farther.

<comment><USER12> The 10W chip will be a weaker SKU, probably even weaker than current 17W IVB CULV chips. They are not magically lowering the TDP from 17W to 10W for the next generation.

Cortex A15 will get the benefit of pairing up with A7. ARM says on average the energy consumption should be about half, compared to Cortex A15 alone.

Also Haswell is rumored to cost 40% more than an IVB Core. That's close to $300 for a CULV. That's simply not sustainable when it comes to the new market that is forming for tablets. $300 is more than the _whole_ BOM for your typical $500 tablet. I doubt you'll see that chip in anything cheaper than $800, at a time when you get "good enough" tablets for $200 whole. Intel's competitor to ARM simply isn't the Core line-up. It's Atom, for better or for worse.

And as I said, Intel will lose not because of lack of expertise in making chips, but because of an unsustainable cost structure and business model (they now have to compete against several ARM chip makers at once, including Apple). The fact that they also have no momentum or market share in the mobile market doesn't help.

<comment><USER13> >Also Haswell is rumored to cost 40% more than an IVB Core. That's close to $300 for a CULV. That's simply not sustainable when it comes to the new market that is forming for tablets. $300 is more than the whole BOM for your typical $500 tablet. I doubt you'll see that chip in anything cheaper than $800, at a time when you get "good enough" tablets for $200 whole. Intel's competitor to ARM simply isn't the Core line-up. It's Atom, for better or for worse.

In terms of OS for an x86 tablet, you're looking at Windows 8, or Linux with a custom shell, and that's it. There's an unofficial x86 port of Android, but I wouldn't stake any real product on that without any support from Google.

Since MS has already established the baseline price for the Win8 tablet around $800, and they're marketing it more as a tablet PC that can do everything you do with a normal desktop or laptop than an iPad, is this really that much of an issue?

<comment><USER14> There is an official port of Android(done by Intel) on x86, it powers the several Atom phones out there(Orange San Diego & etc). You can even download an emulator build for Atom, which perform great(it has support for virtualization extensions).

<comment><USER15> The first gen Google TV platforms (Sony Bluray player, Logitech Revue) were also x86 based.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem is 2-fold ARM is being supported by a lot of companies - Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, etc.... vs Intel by itself on x86 basically.

Second, ARM chips are too cheap. Intel's biz is built on $100+ chips. ARM chips are like $10. If intel's chip prices drop to say $25, they don't have nearly the money for R&D.

X86 won't die, but it can't grow and over time that's going to hamstring Intel.

Call it peak x86.

<comment><USER5> Why can't it grow? Server builders still want the fastest CPUs. For them, x86 still gives the best performance per watt and dollar. Yes, ARM servers are starting to appear but I don't think they're up to par with Intel yet.

And the cloud needs servers. Lots and lots of servers.

True, Intel faces stiff competition here. But folks are sometimes forgetting Intel wasn't always a monopoly in its field. It had competition, lots of it over the years. I wouldn't bury them just yet.

<comment><USER17> But compared to notebooks, laptops, tablets and smartphones server will always remain a small market.

<comment><USER18> All that data needs to be stored somewhere...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ever since I've read the innovator's dilemma around 2006 or so, I've tried to watch for other examples of disruptions happening in the tech industry, including laptops (disrupting PC's), iPhone/Android phones (disrupting Nokia/RIM smartphones), iOS/Android (disrupting Windows/Mac OS) and a few others.

But while you could still find something to argue about in some of those case, especially when the "fall off a cliff" hasn't happened yet for those companies (disruption takes a few years before it's obvious to everyone, including the company being disrupted), I think the ARM vs Intel/x86 one has been by far the most _obvious_ one, and what I'd consider a "by-the-book" disruption. It's one of the most classical disruption cases I've seen. If Clayton Christensen decides to rewrite the book again in 2020, he'll probably include the ARM vs Intel case study.

What will kill Intel is probably not a technical advantage that ARM has and will have. But the pricing advantage. It's irrelevant if Intel can make a $20 chip that is just as good as an ARM one. Intel made good ARM chips a decade ago, too. But the problem is they couldn't live off that. And they wouldn't be able to survive off $20 Atom chips. The "cost structure" of the company is built to support much higher margin chips.

They sell 120 mm2 Core chips for $200. But as the articles says, very soon any type of "Core" chip will overshoot _most_ consumers. It has already overshot plenty, because look at how many people are using iPads and Android tablets or smartphones, and they think the performance is more than enough. In fact, as we've seen with some of the comments for Tegra 4 here, they think even these ARM chips are "more than enough" performance wise.

That means Intel is destined to compete more and more not against other $200 chips, but against other $20 chips, in the consumer market. So even if they are actually able to compete at that level from a technical point of view, they are fighting a game they can't win. They are fighting by _ARM's rules_.

Just like Innovator's Dilemma says, they will predictably move "up-market" in servers and supercomputers, trying to chase higher-profits as ARM is forcing them to fight with cheaper chips in the consumer market. But as we know ARM is already very serious about the server market, and we'll see what Nvidia intends to do in the supercomputer market eventually with ARM (Project Denver/Boulder).

As for Microsoft, which is directly affected by Intel/x86's fate, Apple and Google would be smart to accelerate ARM's takeover of Intel's markets. Because if Microsoft can't use their legacy apps as an advantage against iOS and Android, that means they'll have to start from scratch on the ARM ecosystem, way behind both of them. Apple could do it by using future generations of their own custom-designed ARM CPU in Macbooks, and Google by focusing more on ARM-based Chromebooks, Google TV's, and by ignoring Intel in the mobile market. Linux could take advantage of this, too, because most legacy apps work on ARM by default.

<comment><USER19> The biggest difference is that Intel has consulted closely with Christenson, and is not afraid to cannibalize their own market to retain dominance. The Intel Celeron came directly from their consultations with Christenson. The Celeron signficantly dented Intel's profits temporarily but was the beginning of the end for AMD.

And certainly the price is a very significant factor. But remember that ARM sells an order of magnitude more chips than Intel does. So if Intel is successful, they can make it up on volume, at least to a degree.

<comment><USER20> I dont recall Celeron being a major problem for AMD. The things that did hurt were

a) Intels effectiveness at preventing AMD SKU's from hitting markets

b) The Core 2 family from Intel

c) AMD insisting on shipping 'native' dual / quad cores with worse yields - there wasnt any advantage to the end user and I would imagine the yields were worse

d) The TLB bug

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought one of the major advantages Intel held was that it owned its own manufacturing, allowing it to iterate more quickly. However, this article seems to claim it needs to shed itself of that. Is it not really an advantage in x86 then? If it is an advantage in x86, why isn't it here? Or is this just a case of blindly copying ARM's business model?

<comment><USER22> Thinking purely objectively, it's always an advantage to have the most money in the bank, the largest customer installed base. Owning the best semiconductor foundaries is a big advantage for the forseeable future.

But so once was also owning the world's largest battleship. Things change. How often do the most disruptive changes come from or favor those with the largest physical plant?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not sure about the end of x86 but he is right about one point I've been shouting about for years; mainstream computers are _far_ too powerful for the average user. My mother reads mail and watches pictures of kids/grandkids with her computer; what is the i7/8gb/500gb with a crapload of gpu cores for? Why pay for that kind of power while a cheap Android laptop would easily suffice? My parents, grandparents, uncles or even my siblings and cousins have 0 need for that power nor for Windows. None of them. They notice the difference when they have/touch an iPad or Android pad/computer; they find it easier to wield; they use a handful of apps anyway. So because it has manufacturing advantages, Intel, in my eyes, doesn't have to strive for power or compatibility for the future chips; they just need to use almost no battery. Only thing I hear non computer savvy people talk about is battery life and 'clear screen'. So high res (nexus 10) screens, screens you can view without squeezing your eyes in bright sunlight, solar cells invisibly built in and a few days battery life for a <= $500 price and you'll be selling until silicon runs out.

Even for coding you don't really need all that power most of the time; if you are compiling big source trees, sure, but why not just do that in the cloud at EC2 or a dedi server? So you can freely work on your laptop. Game playing and very heavy graphical or music work I can see you need a fast computer in front of your nose for, but further?

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder when we'll start seeing apps running on ARM capable of matching current x86 based content creation apps?

2 years? 3?

Intel will catch up with power consumption. The biggest thing going for ARM is price, and because of price their user base is blowing up much faster than Intel, on more types of devices, and in more parts of the world. Most of the developing world's contact with computing is/will be ARM phones and tablets, and the number of people developing software for ARM will skyrocket

</comment><comment><USER25> I was disappointed when I tried a fractal simulator on my Nexus 7 recently, and it couldn't zoom smoothly. Perhaps not the most common task in the world, but I think there is still demand for more computing power out there...

<comment><USER26> There's one on iOS that uses a gpu shader to render and it's plenty smooth.

<comment><USER25> Interesting - so maybe there is still something to develop for Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Companies are different from instruction sets, and the disruptor is the ARM instruction set... on Qualcomm. QCOM is already called "the Intel of the mobile world" and, as the world is going mobile, thar be the disruptor.

</comment><comment><USER28> Analyses that repeat the "post PC" mantra in its various forms may be correct in doing so, but the mantra is getting threadbare. Since I've read this sort of thinking so many times (desktops are dead, Intel is doomed, ARM is the new hotness, etc.), I don't find it terribly interesting to hear the same restated. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the detailed analysis provided by the author, but the thesis is unsurprising.

Here's what I would like to read if a technology journalist could dig it up: What kind of strategic planning is going on within the halls of Intel, Dell, HP, Lenovo, et al with respect to keeping the desktop PC relevant? Put another way: I find it astonishing that several years have been allowed to pass since desktop performance became "good enough." The key is disrupting what people think is good enough.

The average consumer desktop and business desktop user does consider their desktop's performance to be good enough. But this is an artifact of the manufacturers failing to give consumers anything to lust for.

Opinions may vary, but I strongly believe that the major failure for desktop PCs in the past five years has been the display. I use three monitors--two 30" and one 24"--and I want more. I want a 60" desktop display with 200dpi resolution. I would pay dearly for such a display. I want Avatar/Minority Report style UIs (well, a realistic and practical gesture-based UI, but these science-fiction films provided a vision that most people will relate to).

I can't even conceive of how frustrating it is to use a desktop PC with a single monitor, especially something small and low-resolution like a 24 inch 1920x1080 monitor. And yet, most users would consider 24" 1920x1080 to be large and "high definition," or in other words, "good enough."

That's the problem, though. As long as users continue to conceive of the desktop in such constrained ways, it seems like a dead-end. You only need so much CPU and GPU horsepower to display 2D Office documents at such a low resolution. There was a great picture CNet had in one of their reports (and I grabbed a copy at my blog [1]) showing a user holding and using a tablet while sitting at a desktop PC.

In the photo, the PC has two small monitors and is probably considered good enough to get work done. But the user finds the tablet more productive. This user should be excused for the seemingly inefficient use of resources because it's probably not actually inefficient at all. The tablet is probably easier to read (crisper, brighter display) and faster, or at least feels faster than the PC simply because it's newer.

Had desktop displays innovated for the past decade, the PC would need to be upgraded. Its CPU, GPU, memory, and most likely disk capacity and network would need to be beefier to drive a large, high-resolution display. So again, what are the PC manufacturers doing to disrupt users' notions of "good enough," to make users WANT to upgrade their desktops? I say the display is the key.

[1] <http://tiamat.tsotech.com/i-see-the-problem>

<comment><USER29> In general I agree with your ideas, but I think there's a missing component: general use case. Most people only need their computers for email and web browsing. We can further simplify that and just call it - communicating.

Sure, a developer or designer salivates at the idea of more screen real estate, but that's because there's a practical use for it. PC Manufacturers follow, not decide, the needs of their users.

I love my screen real estate because I actually need it. If I just browsed Facebook, wrote a word document, and maybe planned out my finances with a spreadsheet - I'd have a hard time justifying some giant monolith of a monitor. I think this is a largely overlooked factor in the success of the mobile market.

I don't know if everyone's forgot this already but when the iPad first came out, most people were thinking: what in the actual eff is Apple thinking. Sure we all knew it'd sell because, well, Apple is Apple. But if I recall correctly most people were scratching their heads asking, "so, it's a big iPhone right?"

And guess what? It is just a big iPhone! And it succeeded NOT because it was the next "cool" thing but because it was designed to do what most people needed their computer to do, namely, send pictures of their grandkids to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> PC sales, even with the release of Windows 8, did drop 21% compared to one year ago...

OK. But would it even be remotely possible to consider that year-to-year China is in recession, a lot of european countries are in recession and U.S. is not in a great position (e.g. the manufacturing sector is firing people left and right), Japan is in a terrible situation, etc. and that this _may_ be playing a role on the number of PCs sold?

Year-to-year sales of cars in France has gone down by 20%.

When people enter a recession they tend to try to save money: cars and PCs are expensive things. Smartphones not so much (especially with all the "plans" luring people who cannot count in).

I think that smartphones and tablet did play a role in the "minus 21%" that TFA mentions but I'm also certain that the worldwide recession is playing a role too. People don't afford what they see as "expensive" that easily.

$100 + five-years-unlimited-plan-and-i-can-rape-your-children, they don't pay that much attention and so smartphones tend to be more "recession proof".</comment>


Hong Kong protesters occupy legislative chamber - <AUTHOR> https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/07/01/breaking-hong-kong-protesters-storm-legislature-breaking-glass-doors-prying-gates-open/ <comment><USER2> I'm honestly surprised it took this long to see something like this. I remember the day Hong Kong was turned over to China. I watched it live on the news. The Hong Kong people were most definitely not happy.

I'll bet at least 1/3 of the protestors weren't even born when that happened. But they have access to both oral and written history about how things used to be.

Information is a powerful thing. I hope they succeed in pushing back on China's takeover.

<comment><USER3> twenty years ago, many believed in the idea "One country, two systems", "50 years unchanged"

<comment><USER4> No they didn't. People left in droves to Canada then.

<comment> dan-robertson I don't see how this comment (or rather the second sentence of it) and the one above conflict: Many people didn't believe it and went to Canada. Many people did believe and didn't go to Canada.

These don't feel mutually exclusive to me.

<comment><USER5> Many people didn't believe and weren't in positions to leave

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You might almost think it was _intended_ to provoke a reaction.

So much so it smells like a false flag op. They were left pretty much alone for about 12 hours, while they broke windows and shutters, since the first reports of broken windows came last night.

To justify the "entirely necessary but unavoidable" reaction coming soon?

<comment><USER7> The last time the HK police used force there was a massive backlash and the police were angry the government put them in that position to take the brunt of the people's anger.

There are very good non-conspiratorial reasons for the police to take their time, this time around. Plus there's always a subset of protestors who just want to destroy property and take a more aggressive stance (usually the younger ones), regardless of the predictable way it will be spun by opponents and perceived by the more moderate public. Not every act of violence or property destruction can be blamed on police provocateurs.

<comment><USER6> The last time police used force they used tear gas and rubber bullets, without warning, against an entirely peaceful demonstration. Like nkoren said previous demonstrations have been extra careful to consistently keep it peaceful.

This time they wait until the protest has effectively finished trashing the legislature, then go in with tear gas and have a big sign stuck on riot shields of "WARNING: TEAR SMOKE". Both police and protest seem to be taking a dramatically different approach. The peaceful demonstrations that have continued appear separate.

Maybe it is as presented, but it sure makes me suspicious given history.

<comment><USER7> Sure there's will always be people that are suspicious which is a good thing. More eyes watching. But doesn't mean it's true or more plausible than alternative theories.

The evidence you presented could be spun either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So protestors wear yellow and white helmets?

Press wear a more heavily reinforced helmet w/ possible other colors? If True, thats so cool that they are organized enough to agree the protestors wear helmets!

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/07/02/breaking-tear-gas- depl...](https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/07/02/breaking-tear-gas-deployed- police-clear-admiralty-protesters/)

The protesters had left and the police has reclaimed the building.

Apparently the police are also rounding up people leaving via the metro.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any time protesters start throwing "unidentified liquids" my mind makes some gross assumptions. Maybe I've spent too long in SF.

<comment><USER11> Piss is probably preferable to acid.

Throwing acid is not exactly unheard of in HK - often cases against women.

Thankfully there's no indication of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> FWIW, the BBC World Service coverage of this has been... disappointing.

During the time the protestors were raising the British flag in the legislative chamber, the World Service was doing an in-depth report on Taylor Swift's latest social media rant, and interviewing some blogger about Ivanka Trump.

I remember when the BBC was the go-to place for breaking world news.

<comment><USER13> What exactly is the sentiment of raising the old British HK flag?

Is it like that would be a preferred status of HK?

Is is like a reference to former puppets running HK, who now report to Beijing instead of Britain?

Is it just trolling?

<comment><USER14> From what I understand, they largely romanticize the times when Hong Kong was a British colony. However, it seems clear that what the protesters are asking for is ideologically more in-line with a British/Western conception of a democratic society. And because Hong Kong will _never_ be independent and the CCP _never_ democratic, raising the British HK flag is the last thing they can hold on to.

I see it as a testament to their desperation.

<comment><USER13> Interesting.

When I talk to HK citizens I don't really get the sense of desperation. I get the sense of complacency and imaging everything is going to be okay. Carrie Lam has certainly crossed an ideological line, I still think we are projecting our perspective of how Hong Kong citizens are supposed to feel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I watched (on reuters) the police come in with tear gas and beat sticks and riot shields and beat/gas the entire crowd away, with a sign reading 'WARNING: TEAR GAS'. Even though the legislative chamber seemed relatively empty compared to the large crowd outside milling about and continuing the peaceful protest...

<comment><USER9> Those protesters, trying to avoid arrest, left before the police re-occupied the building.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it was just strange to see the police marching on the streets like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really hope Hong Kong gains independence from China. They do not want to be part of that regime. Hong Kong currently participates in some United Nations committees, but is not recognized as a country.

Have there been any political leaders in Hong Kong who have publicly opposed returning to China or who have requested recognition by other UN member States?

<comment><USER17> This sounds like a complete no-go. Would the rest of the world accept HK as an independent state? Look how they're accepting Taiwan. Now add that China has actual agreements on the status of HK and Macau.

<comment><USER18> >> During talks with Thatcher, China planned to invade and seize Hong Kong if the negotiations set off unrest in the colony. Thatcher later said that Deng told her bluntly that China could easily take Hong Kong by force, stating that "I could walk in and take the whole lot this afternoon", to which she replied that "there is nothing I could do to stop you, but the eyes of the world would now know what China is like".

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

The eyes of the world indeed do "know what China is like". They do not care. Should HK move towards independence, tanks will roll south and the world will do nothing.

<comment><USER10> It amazes me when suddenly something matters or it doesn't. There were outcries over Crimea until there suddenly weren't. There were no outcries over Syria until there suddenly were.

<comment><USER19> I feel like the situation at hand is very different. Crimea, unlike Hong Kong, isn't an alpha+ city that is one of the most important financial hubs in the world. While capturing Crimea by RF was extremely reprehensible, there was not much at stake there for any side not directly involved in the conflict. All there was in Crimea situation is just a geopolitical projection of power. With Hong Kong, the stakes are way higher, and I don't think that straight up capture of Hong Kong (Crimea-style) will go over nearly as well.

P.S. Also, not that it makes the situation any less reprehensible, keep in mind that heavy majority of Crimea population at the time of capture was ethnically Russian and was supportive of RF actions. Hong Kong residents, on the other hand, seem to be way less supportive of PRC.

<comment><USER2> The unfortunate truth is that Hong Kong isn't nearly as important to global banking as it once was. China has a done a really great job handicapping them, for this very reason. So that it would be easier to absorb them.

<comment><USER19> That's the real leverage. Hong Kong's true potential is still there to be uncovered, and people remember how flourishing it was back then. Imagine how it could all blow up to even higher highs if the PRC rule was completely gone from Hong Kong. I feel like if that gate opens in the near future (i know, wishful thinking), HK will have its new golden age, as companies and individuals will not need to worry about PRC influence on HK anymore.

<comment><USER20> HK used to flourish because it was the access point between China and the West. If they completely severed ties with China there is no value proposition anymore... what "higher highs" are you anticipating, exactly?

<comment><USER19> >If they completely severed ties with China there is no value proposition anymore

Becoming independent from China != completely severing ties with China. Also, I think these days a better served purpose of HK is as the access point to the whole Asian/SEA region, rather than the access point to China alone.

Also, HK seems to be (from an outsider perspective) one of the most (if not the most) "westernized" cities in the region, with the proliferation of English language and all, so I can totally see it becoming the central hub in the Asian/SEA region for a lot of companies from the west.

<comment><USER4> What is it about post-colonial westerners that makes them not able to grok that the world, but especially Asia, no longer exists to serve westerners?

Should there be a most "easternized" city in the heart of Europe that should have a prolific Mandarin speaker base?

<comment><USER21> You've been repeatedly crossing into flamewar on these topics. We've asked you many times before not to do that, and even told you we'd ban you if you did it again. Would you please stop doing this on HN? It's abusive, no matter how wrong and ignorant others' comments are or you feel they are.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "To say that nothing is true, is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted, is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic." \-- Assassin's Creed

</comment><comment><USER22> These kids fucked themselves so hard. Entering LegCo will enable the government to identify (and punish) the most radical elements under HK riot law. Covering their faces won't stop the government from identifying every mobile device that entered the building via cell tower, GPS and wifi router records. Throwing bricks in the public and blending in with the crowd on the street is one thing, entering an easily geofenced government building with identifiable mobile devices is another.

<comment><USER23> They probably used burner phones. At least, that's what people do in Germany.

<comment><USER24> German people break into the German parliament?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're > evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or > disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's > probably off-topic.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

This is 1) political, 2) on TV news constantly, 3) not really new since they've been protesting for days now</comment>


The Economics of Science Fiction - <AUTHOR> http://hanson.gmu.edu/econofsf.html

<comment><USER3> One thing I believe sci-fi seems to always miss is the 'information economy.'

Sci-fi typically depicts contact with other races through spacefaring on FTL ships, and then trade being established through that channel. But I think it's exponentially more likely that rather than developing the means to travel into the stars, we (first) develop the technology to allow FTL or instantaneous communication. And from there we'd pick up other civilizations' signals, and soon we'd work out the protocols and have access to some sort of galactic internet. Communication technology has been advancing faster than locomotive technology for a long time now.

People always talk about the internet reaching a point where we all work from home - well there should be a corresponding 'work from your home planet' notion.

<comment><USER4> You've just been reading the wrong science fiction.

One of the great concepts in _Fire Upon the Deep_ by Vernor Vinge is a galaxy wide internet and the malevolence in it is effectively just a super virus. _Snow Crash_ by Neal Stephenson has something what you describe also with a great "information economy", albeit earth based.

<comment><USER5> Also, in _Deepness in the Sky_ , it goes into the Qeng Ho's practice of broadcasting an encyclopedia of general technology throughout known space, to accelerate planets' development until they were advanced enough to trade with. It's sub-light, but so is travel, at least in that zone.

<comment><USER4> Oh yes forgot that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People usually think of money as a symbol for "stuff" because we trade money rather than stuff (yay! no more barter system!). But really, if you think about it, stuff is merely a symbol for energy. Wheat, or some sheep, or a sword or whatever is really a symbol for the energy that goes into producing such a thing.

When we talk about vast interstellar empires of thousands of starships travelling faster than light, we really should think about the vast expense of that. No doubt, the amount of energy required to build and maintain a fleet of such things would be tremendous, therefore it would be _expensive_. Consider this, the vast energies required for even a single ship to approach c (I believe I read someplace it would take the mass of Saturn to drive a resonable size ship to those speeds), now multiply that by any notional fleet. We have no modern notion of how to even convert that much mass (and drag it around).

In other words, sci-fi economy:modern economy::sci-fi energies:modern energies

Sci-fi economics could be truly fascinating as a sub-genre, but I don't know of any texts that do a decent job of it.

<comment><USER7> I'm rather fond of the Culture - forget resource allocation through messy things like economics and rely on manners and good taste (not to mention the indulgences of God-like AI entities).

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

<comment><USER6> Added to my reading list! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previous posting and discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=819449>

</comment><comment><USER9> Not directly related but topically relevant link to Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman's paper on "The Theory of Interstellar Trade":

<http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf>

<comment><USER10> It's linked to in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want to talk economics and science fiction, maybe we should ask ourselves how relativity affects compound interest?

Like, suppose you deposit your money in a bank account at, say, a couple percent interest, then head off for about ten years at something near the speed of light. You only age five years, and return looking forward to ten years' worth of interest on your priciple, only to learn that the bank "adjusted" the compounding rate, so you only got the five years' worth reflecting the time you yourself experienced.

Who's right? What if it were a loan you took out, instead?

It's kind of interesting, if a little contrived. Relativistic effects between stock exchanges might be a _little_ more relevant at the rates computers are starting to trade, these days.

<comment><USER12> I would expect arbitrage between timeframes to force interest rates to be calculated from the point of the slowest timeframe.

Fundamentally, interest is set by what can be done with some capital - <USER2> high yielding investment can be made with it in the allotted time period for the loan. If there's some booming technology which offers returns of 12% (because it's just that awesome) per year, but my factory only offers 3%, why would the banker lend me money at <3% when he could make his loan to someone in the tech field and get <12%?

Similarly, if I'm hopping on a rocket to go mine on Alpha Centauri and time dilation cuts my years in half to just 5 years of work, then why would the banker give me money when he could give it to someone who will stay home and get 10 years of work done? I might be the better deal, but if so, I had better return with some awfully expensive rocks 10 years later.

Of course, this implies that investing and then going on a relativistic cruise is a good idea. But why not? That capital you are investing came from somewhere. Where did it come from? It came from someone working hard and then _not_ consuming. Someone(s) chose to work hard and generate $1 million of value, say, but then chose not to go out and hold an orgy of buying $1 million of chocolate and flatscreen TVs. That $1 million of value remains and presumably circulates and supports further investment and growth, which themselves will compound and compound. When that investor returns centuries later, he deserves whatever is left of his investments.

(Given the past few centuries, I wouldn't place high odds on his investment growing to Bill Gates sizes, or there being anything left at all. So such investors would be doing us an even bigger favor than it seems.)

<comment><USER13> If you think that there is a slowest timeframe, then you do not understand the theory of relativity.

That said it is obvious that the reference frame that will be chosen is the fixed reference frame of the distant stars.

<comment><USER14> I thought I did, and I would see the fixed frame of the distant stars as a "slowest timeframe," although I suppose there is obviously a slower one. Is that what you meant, or am I missing something entirely? Give us a clue!

<comment><USER12> No, it has to be the slowest timeframe with actors/agents/people in it, because they're the ones who are setting limits on what interest can be by being the most productive.

Let's take an example - imagine our slowest timeframe is at X and our fastest timeframe Y is dilated to 1/10 of X. And let's say the current ROIs per man- year in X are at 3% (it's a mature well-developed economy, the home planet) but ROIs in Y are an amazing 20% per man-year. X bankers will _still_ prefer to lend to Xers rather than Yers. Imagine they lend to a Yer. 10 X years later (1 Y year later), Yer repays the loan with 20% interest. Great. But imagine they had lent to a Xer. 10 years later, the Xer repays the loan with 34.39% in interest! (3% compounded annually.)

And the exact same logic applies if the banker lives in Y. Xers are _still_ better investments. A Y banker loans to an Xer for 1 Y year, and a year later gets the loan back with 34.39% interest, as compared to the best his fellow Yers can do, which is just 20% per year.

So interest rates need to scale with the dilation. If they scale too little, then all money will flow to the slowest timeframe. If they scale too much, the money flows to the fastest timeframe. Modulo the cost of moving between timeframes. (Imagine if Yers got returns of 40% per Y year/per 10 X years. Then X bankers would be clamoring to lend to Yers.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's disappointing to see a lot of highly speculative interstellar mentions, but nothing about solar system commercial development, that we have started seeing in our lifetimes.

The link about doomsday nonsense seemed promising, but it was some mathematical speculation the kind the article started criticizing.

<comment><USER16> > but nothing about solar system commercial development, that we have started > seeing in our lifetimes

Is this really happening right now?

<comment><USER15> Artificial satellites. Next steps will take longer...</comment></comment></comment>


Bisecting Floating Point Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://squishythinking.com/2014/02/22/bisecting-floats/

<comment><USER2> Nice quote:

 _When should I stop bisecting?, is when there are no more floating point numbers between your lower and upper bound_

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Discussion thread of the post on julia-users: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia- users/PGwWdXcU...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia- users/PGwWdXcUWBQ)</comment>


Blogger rigs Google to catch Goldman code seekers - <AUTHOR> http://trueslant.com/nancymiller/2009/07/08/blogger-rigs-google-to-catch-goldman-code-seekers/ <comment><USER2> As funny as this is from a law enforcement point of view it is useless, doing a google search and clicking on a link is hardly a bad thing in anybodies book.

Still to be caught with your pants down in such a trivial sting is embarrassing, and I'm sure that all those caught up in the net will be boning up on tor and anonymizers.</comment>