Ask HN: How do you find the energy for a side project after a 9-5 job? - <AUTHOR> I've heard/read that some people work 4-5 hours in the evening/night after their full-day job (for a side-project or hustling for their startup). After a day of work, I feel totally exhausted and can't seem to focus on work. Though I can read (books/articles) and walk/exercise a bit. Weekends too go in haze or watching some Netflix. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> I have the same question. Sometimes it seems like everyone on HN is reading a non-fiction book, a fiction book, exercising regularly, has 2 kids, just defeated depression, is 2 weeks away from finishing their side project, and has a $150k/year job.

<comment><USER3> You read like 100 posts and then your mind conglomerates them all into one "person" the "other HN poster".

Reality is that most of the good tech people are super weak and out of shape. Parents are sleep deprived and just get a boost from coffee and post something optimistic, etc.

Some side project they spent 100 hours on is just some CRUD app. The non- fiction books are just pop psychology stuff with 5 pages of ideas and 100 pages of trite filler.

Just blaze your own path, live healthy, take idea from this awesome community. Never compare yourself though, at least anymore than a surface comparison.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b What worked for me is one hour every morning. I would wake up and jump onto the computer before breakfast. I was very productive for that hour. The mindset to keep is "let's try to do as much as possible during that hour".

If you manage to keep it every day, your project will advance fairly quick. One of the key thing is that when you hit a snag, you won't see it until the next day when you may have a completely different way of thinking about it. So all in all, it's a lot easier than working 4 hours in a row.

</comment><comment><USER4> After my workday, I used to (the habit is broken and I'm trying to restore it) go for a good, hard workout. Initially runs, later I added BJJ and wrestling. These completely reset my mind by the end of them. I'm focused on something not work, not technical. When I'm done I feel _physically_ exhausted, but usually just need water, a meal, and a 30-minute rest to be mentally ready to go again.

Also, don't commit to it daily, but commit to it more days than not. When I was really keeping up the gym habit, I had 2 1/2 social nights a week (Monday, Wednesday, sometimes Friday). I'd usually have time to bring a book to read or a notebook to write in between the gym and the social obligations. It helped that I lived near my gym in a downtown area near where I usually met people, I had a _ton_ of time freed up not commuting.

</comment><comment><USER5> My trick is just showing up. I put in 2 minutes a day into my project. You can't work on it without showing up. When you do show up, you won't want to leave. Don't try to do more than 2 minutes.

Make it 2 minutes every day, consistently. It's short enough that you won't have an excuse not to. Don't waste it on planning; it has to be something that actually moves the project along, but you can plan later.

I used to be exhausted after work too, especially with a 3 hour back and forth commute. The side project should energize you, not fill you with dread. There are times when you physically need rest, and you should.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think a lot of us have been neglecting our health. Side projects get even harder to balance when you take your health into account. Everyone needs to exercise as well. It's hard to find a balance.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very sound advice already posted on this thread. I've done this for the last year, so I'll reiterate some tricks that have enabled me to do so:

1\. Yes, it's only the mornings that have worked. After a full days of work the mind can't quite switch context back to the side-project, so getting this done first thing in the morning is best.

2\. Take a detailed note before switching context out about what were you thinking and the next steps. Read that back to get a jump start. Repeat.

3\. Sleep early. Completely ditch alcohol. Cancel Netflix etc subscriptions. Limit coffee. Sound, restful sleep in dark and quiet (earplugs if you have to) is essential for pulling 10-11 total productive hours a day.

4\. Exercise. Outdoors, in fresh air. Even a bit of cycling will do. Fitness and stamina go a long way in building focus and working those extra hours. I cycle to work (well, before Covid and after) to accomplish this specifically to keep fitness levels sound.

5\. Turn off distractions. Phones off/flight mode with screen facing down. Told friends and family that they shouldn't tempt or distract. Even had to let one-two friends go because I realised I was always fixing problems for them and they had come to expect them to be fixed in x hours. Email/chat apps off. Anything that can prompt a notification is off. Issues can always wait a couple of hours.

6\. Solitude. Or noise cancelling headphones just turned on.

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't beat yourself up. Everyone has their own circumstances and its not even like you can expect 'high performers' are actually telling the truth. It's like people who lie on their Resume or those who 'do nothing but look busy' at work. Most are just trying to build impressions. Try to squeeze whatever time you can comfortably out of your schedule until you find the idea that truly excites you. Then you will find the extra energy you need. It won't always go smooth. You will be exhausted at times, which is ok, that's just a signal to take a break; for few hours or few days. If you can't get going at all, you are probably working on something that sub-consciously you know isn't worth the pain. Having a good co-founder or being part of a community helps and can make things move faster. But remember, most of the times when people say they launched something in 3-4 weeks while working 12-18 hours a day; they are skipping the part where they spent months in stress and no/low productivity until they finally stumbled upon the idea (and figured out the logistics) that got them going!

</comment><comment><USER9> Do you really really really want to have a side project?

As someone who works a full time job that I love but drains me, I need to be really motivated about something and curious about it to work outside hours!

Right now for me it is Java+Spring and Golang, I did some contributions to big OSS projects (mind you, the contributions were very minor. Like typo in docstrings). And am also doing a small side project (mind you, I got the springboot crud tutorial to run with my POJOs and bought a domain!)

If for some reason it becomes an energy drag I will drop it. I have already dropped more than 20 domains of side projects and that's OK. I will playing video games for a while or watching netflix.

If I am not getting paid to do it then I really have to enjoy it! I usually scratch an itch for a while and then give up, maybe when it happens that I don't give up in one idea of side project is because I truly enjoy it and it can become a full time thing to me!

</comment><comment><USER10> If I'm working on a side project, it's usually a challenge that keeps me up at night. Like a really interesting problem. Maybe it's a problem I faced everyday at work, and nobody wants to fix it. Sometimes it's a prove them wrong attitude, other times it's a "hmm will this work".. and that pattern is kind of what keeps me motivated. I just want to see it work. And I think about it all the time. When it comes to execution, morning is the best time. Nights are for reading and thinking. New feature? I think about the architecture as I fall asleep. Laptop stays under my bed, when I wake up, I just sit up and get right into it. Just run. (sometimes I get carried away and am late for work)

</comment><comment><USER11> I think we should consider the inference of side project, the desire to make money. A lot of people spend time working in their garden. We don't call this a side project.

My advice is if you or your family need more money then do a side project. If not I've two suggestions;

Have a hobby instead of a side project and take the pressure off.

Invest more time in your friends and family.

I have had side projects for 20 years. Born out of necessity, then supported by my employer, now the backbone of my startup, [https://whoohaz.com](https://whoohaz.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> "Weekends too go in haze or watching some Netflix."

Just don't do that. That might sound flippant but it really is the answer. The most productive people I know simply do not lose weekends to hazes and Netflix binges.

<comment><USER5> It's weird but I used to waste lots of time on things, and when I stopped, I didn't. There's an awful lot of things we do for relaxation that aren't relaxing, and things we do for entertainment which aren't fun. But the brain tends to fall back on that one time when we enjoyed a show on Netflix and just do that over and over.

I tried dialing back on bad entertainment and it didn't work because there was nothing filling the void. Instead just do the side project more, and you'll find yourself just not having time for things you don't really enjoy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the trick is to instead wake up early. If you delay any serious work for the evening it's a lot harder. You're winding down and trying to enjoy the rest of the day.

Waking up early seems to be one of the main traits of those who end up making side projects or some good amounts of money.

The only problem is learning how to wake up early. Every time I wake up early it's like I forget the reason why I did it.

<comment><USER14> That's basically the whole point of "What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast"([https://lauravanderkam.com/books/successful-people- do/](https://lauravanderkam.com/books/successful-people-do/)): do important things early in the morning, before they can be delayed by other commitments.

I recommend the book, its short and enjoyable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am by no means spending 4-5 hours on project(s) in the evening but I will spend odds and ends on it, I document my roadmaps pretty extensively and even on the times when I don't feel like head diving into the code, there's _always_ a unit test I could write or an edge case I can think up and write about (documentation, not code)

</comment><comment><USER16> Put yourself before your job. That doesn't mean to not do your job, it means set up a daily routine where your own self care and interests get top billing, while leaving enough space to do your job. So if doing a side project is your most important personal goal right now, set aside daily time, earlier in the day, to work on it.

<comment><USER17> This also applies to working remote, in my experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's normal, sometimes I can find the energy and sometimes I can't. On my side it's not exactly lack of energy but lack of motivation from time to time. I also waste one weekend day on games/movies/books just to relax a bit and accumulate motivation.

</comment><comment><USER19> I purposely pick side projects that I'm excited to use myself. That helps a lot. It helps even more when it's a project that me + at least friend wants to use then I get energy from bouncing ideas off them and using the project myself.

</comment><comment><USER20> YOu got to sacrifice something: either your sleep, time with your family or your work-out sessions. And do it in the morning, I have no chance to complete my project at night after work.

</comment><comment><USER21> When the 9-5 job is not intense there is plenty of energy for a side project during and after work. I can say that as some with teenage children and two separate employers.

</comment><comment><USER22> I guess that is a good or a bad sign? Either you like your work and give it 100% or you get pushed too hard by your employer.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's really hard to give good recommendations without knowing your particular circumstance but here is the thought process I have gone through around the same issue.

First of all, I think the standard advice of get enough sleep, eat healthy, exercise and stay within a reasonable weight (15%-20% body fat - lower if you can manage it) will solve the physical aspect of the energy equation. If any of those are off balance for you, get those sorted out. It will help you immensely in all areas of your life.

I also will assume you have strong motivation for working on your side- project. If it's to hopefully launch your product, learn a new skillset or whatever, if the idea of working on it doesn't itch in your brain all the time then sort that out. I think if you don't have a strong internal motivation for working on your side project there is no way that you're going to spend one hour a night, let alone four to five.

I'll go with the idea that you're trying to build a software product (let's say some kind of SaaS). Come to peace that building the product cannot and will not have the momentum of a rabbit but will be the lowly turtle or the snail. Accept this and be ok with it.

I think the biggest factor of success when working on the side on something is planning beforehand. I believe to build motivation for working on the product in your free time you have to know that you are making progress and there is light at the end of the tunnel. Planning is a critical aspect of this. To achieve this, you have to put on your product manager/architect hat and really figure out what the feature set you are building needs to be for the MVP, how much of what you are doing is going to involve learning new tech and/or how much you can do with what you know.

If you can validate your idea beforehand in some concrete way it will automatically be a motivation booster. If you cannot, focus on the most basic MVP that you can go to market with and accept that it may go bust. From this a good set of development tasks can start to be developed. Put an estimate on each of these and try to come up with a rough enough of hours. Let's say it's a 1000 hours of effort. Now, you can break that down into a date based on how much you can commit.

In terms of how much you can commit, I think we all know ourselves best. I certainly can't work 4-5 hours on my side project on top of a full day of normal work. I also certainly don't view those people with any kind of admiration. I need time with family, to exercise, get enough sleep, hang out with close friends, to chill, etc. and those take time. For me, I can't neglect those things. Be true to yourself and look at your schedule. Be critical about it. Realistically, how much can you commit using the week as a guideline and not daily. Can you do 4-5 hours a week? Great, do that. Start with that. There is good possibility that you will increase your weekly hours once you see progress.

Assuming the 1000 hours and 4-5 hours a week, now you kind of have a target date that you can measure your progress. Take your high level development roadmap and start breaking it down to a point where you can start actual work. Break it down into steps. These can be coding, reading, design work, researching, whatever that involves the side-project.

Personally, for me, I use a simple markdown file, open in Vim with the following:

# Next Steps [ ] Item one [ ] Item two

# Completed

Date [x] Item three [x] Item four

Date [x] Item five [x] Item six

# Review as Needed [ ] Task or design decision that is important but not relevant right now

# Defer [ ] Task that was part of next step but for whatever reason is deferred. Reason is provided.

When I am working, I will move items to the the Completed and add new items in the Next Steps near the end of the work session. I found this is the simplest and completely ceremony free. I tried Trello and other sprint planning type tools and I'm not that type. At the end of the day, you need to start working on your side project. If Trello or some other planning tool works for you then use it. For me, I realized I was wasting more time with the tool versus doing real work. The simple file gives a great overview of how much I've already done and when I start working again, I just look at the first line in the Next Steps and get going.

I think personally what has been the most effective for me is to just start working on it with a plan in place. I know that it's going to be months before I reach my development goals but I'm ok with this. As long as I can say, that I made progress during the week however incremental, it was a good week.</comment>


Ask YC: what are the best books to learn CSS and XHTML from? - <AUTHOR>

Today I almost bought the Agile Web Development with Rails book, until I remembered some posts here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104745 a.o.) that you should The Rails Way instead. So now I'm getting that one :-) But also, I'm looking into the frontend of developing web apps, so what would be the best choices for books on XHTML, CSS, etc.? <comment><USER2> I advise people to get the oldest books possible. The reason for this is that the books don't get thicker but they have more topics to cover and tend to concentrate on the most whizzy features. If you get an old book then it'll cover the basics in more detail.

<comment><USER3> This might make sense in some cases (i.e., C programming), but I don't really know that it does in the case of HTML. I wouldn't want waste time learning, in this day and age, how to make table-based layouts that are strictly compliant with the HTML4 spec.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No idea what there is to learn about HTML, it's CSS that's the problem. I've never found a resource that explained CSS well.

CSS still surprises me almost daily. I'll be probably fluent in Haskell before I ever get CSS. What would really help me is having the source code of a well- written, high-level CSS rules engine - written for educational purposes, not for performance.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've bought several CSS books over the years but the only reference I use consistently is the actual CSS specification from the World Wide Web Consortium: <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/>

Also, it's free and you can keep a copy of the PDF on your computer and search it when you need something specific. It's more conversational and has more illustrations than most internet spec documents. However it doesn't tell you what parts of CSS aren't implemented correctly by specific browsers or give thorough examples.

The W3C HTML and HTTP documents are really good too:

<http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html>

<http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Dan Cenderholm's "Bulletproof Web Design" is a must read.

<http://www.simplebits.com/publications/bulletproof>

</comment><comment><USER7> It's very much paced towards a beginner, but I know a lot of people who love the head first HTML book: [http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-HTML-CSS- XHTML/dp/059610197...](http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-HTML-CSS- XHTML/dp/059610197X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204642166&sr=8-1)

If you're more advanced or just looking for a brush up i second Dan Cederholm's book aimdave recommended.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like CSS Mastery:

[http://www.amazon.com/CSS-Mastery-Advanced-Standards- Solutio...](http://www.amazon.com/CSS-Mastery-Advanced-Standards- Solutions/dp/1590596145/)

It does a great job of calling out CSS bugs in specific browser versions and describes how to work around them.

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://w3schools.com/> is all you need, the best way to learn is just start working and then look up anything you don't know how to do.

</comment><comment><USER10> Recipe-book style, light on theory but good for solving problems:

<http://www.sitepoint.com/books/cssant1/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Personally I learned HTML and CSS from the specifications and some experimentation while doing a project... I don't see why you'd need books to learn those.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The HTML Dog looks pretty good, right? <http://www.htmldog.com/book/>

</comment><comment><USER12> CSS: The Definitive Guide (O' Reily)</comment>


2019 Abel Prize to Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck - <AUTHOR> http://www.abelprize.no/nyheter/vis.html?tid=74161 <comment><USER2> Dupe.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429724)

<comment><USER3> Well, a different article, but the same subject. Should definitely only be one discussion.</comment></comment>


Fire at Google I/O conference injures 3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/fire-at-google-io-conference-injures-three/ <comment><USER2> > _The Google I /O, the company's annual developer conference, was disrupted > Thursday afternoon by a fire that sent three people to the hospital, > authorities told the local CBS TV station._

"was disrupted"

Well played, well payed indeed.</comment>


Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 <comment><USER2> There have been previous submissions and discussions of this intriguing article, but comments are now closed on them. Anyone interested in reading the previous thoughts of the HN collective wisdom can find (some of) them here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11780565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11780565) (50 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13399004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13399004) (7 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13388686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13388686) (1 comment)

Other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13504110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13504110)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13480186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13480186)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13479902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13479902)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13392426)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12147060](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12147060)</comment>


ShowHN: BootstrapWP, Bootstrap theme for WordPress - <AUTHOR> http://rachelbaker.me/bootstrapwp/

<comment><USER2> Thank you for BootstrapWP Rachel, looks fab. Great timing BTW - I was just pondering using a Bootstrap 2.0 WP theme for a project and thought to check HN ...</comment>


When CEOs' Equity Is About to Vest, They Cut Investment to Boost the Stock Price - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2018/02/study-when-ceos-equity-is-about-to-vest-they-cut-investment-to-boost-the-stock-price <comment><USER2> In other news, people are found to act in their own self interests and game whatever rules and systems are in place for their own personal advantage.

Further research reached the surprising conclusion that CEOs are people too, and game the system just like any other person.

[Edit: adding color, as my comment lacked substance to abide by HN's guidelines]

Snark aside, this is a great example on how we need to design robust incentive systems that minimize the chance of gaming them. People are amazing optimizers, and will find any loopholes or gaps that allow them to use any system to their advantage.

CEOs delaying investments, CFOs colluding with industry analysts, rushing product launches, technical debt, etc. are all examples of the same symptom.

"Detecting Earnings Management", by Richard Sloan (a former professor of mine) is a great article that shows the same behavior as this article: managers will anticipate or delay earnings and investments in a way that maximises whatever metric they are evaluated on.

This is further exacerbated by the non-linearity of the market response to earnings surprises. Unsurprisingly, the distribution of earnings surprises over time are not symmetrical to the average market return.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but your comment breaks the HN guidelines, which ask:

 _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._

It also breaks this guideline, since you've ignored the substantive core of the article:

 _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize._

We all know how easy and satisfying it can be to fire off a bit of snark into the internet, but it makes for poor discussion, and actually causes harder systemic problems than outright personal attacks and the like. So please don't post like this to Hacker News.

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

<comment><USER2> I added some content making it more useful, thanks for the feedback :)

<comment><USER3> Much better—thanks!

<comment><USER4> Dang!

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I will show myself out now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is one of many bits of data that I add to support my personal hypothesis that public equity markets are increasingly failing at their job of being an efficient way for our economy to allocate capital.

<comment><USER6> They almost certainly can't be too efficient. There's a proof that if markets are efficient then P = NP.

This isn't really about whether markets are or can be efficient. This is about corporate governance. Boards of directors should not permit CEOs to play these games, and compensation of CEOs should be structured to not create such destructive incentives.

<comment><USER7> Perfect efficiency does not exist. Some efficiency does. There are three variants of the hypothesis: "weak", "semi-strong", and "strong" form. [1] Insider information isn't some conspiracy -- people have gone to jail over it year after year. With information disparity, efficiency is always going to be a fraction of what it could be. Just think about two parties -- one thinks the stock should be high because of insider information. And lets say they are also mega-rich big bucks. The other party is people without the insider info, they think the stock should be low. So Mr. Mega-Rich buys a lot of shares, the stock goes up. Then it falls back down because no one else wants to buy it at that high price. These oscillations will continue as Mr. Mega-Rich takes advantage of his insider information - and the more trading volume on the buying end, that he provides, the more choppy the market for that equity will be. If Mr. Mega-Rich is continuously buying, that choppyness won't go away - lest other parties take his actions to be information itself, and adjust their appraisals.

Wall Street I and II aren't the most accurate pictures, but they certainly aren't fiction. If you aren't the shark, you're getting sharked. But because of 21st century prosperity, you still might be happy with your returns, even while paying the tax of giving money to those with better information.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient- market_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis)

<comment><USER8> > If you aren't the shark, you're getting sharked

People say this a lot, but I think it's misleading to most who hear it. This is certainly true in a trading context (i.e. where the buy/sell time horizon is short enough where the underlying asset's economic value doesn't change, though the market price might), but not in an investment context (where it's expected that the inflow of capital will create economic value and the stock price will reflect that).

The takeaway is that you should leave daytrading to the pros, and instead bet on humanity improving the means of production over long time horizons. Unless you're actually a pro and have good reason to believe you can beat the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can you blame them? People act in their selfish self-interest.

It's the same thing with cops and firefighters. Their pensions are calculated based on the earnings of the last few years of employment. So that save vacation days the last few years to inflate their earnings the last few years.

If there is one thing you can count on, it's human greed. And I'm not pretending I'm above it myself.

The problem is that the system is set up to be exploited by the CEOs/etc.

<comment><USER10> Can I blame them? Yes, the same way that I can blame a thief for stealing a car even though society "gave him an incentive to steal it."

One of these is an ongoing source of considerable societal damage. The other is illegal.

<comment><USER11> Making something illegal does create incentives against it, and if stealing cars weren't illegal I'm sure we'd see much more of it.

<comment><USER12> Generally stealing cars is clear-cut and easy to prosecute. The opposite is true for insider trading. As a result, things that look an awful lot like insider trading occur all the time without any interest from the SEC.

I'm not very equipped to judge legally what is or is not a crime, but it does seem like there's a lot of leeway for people in control of public companies to effectively take money from their investors.

<comment><USER13> Yes but it's important that the "crime" of "insider trading" exist so that investors might imagine that executive _aren 't_ doing that every single day. Also it's important that the crime is totally discretionary so that prosecutors can punish every single non-executive who somehow gets wind of non-public information while never bothering executives who donate to the right PACs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interestingly, it's well known that the stock of firms with high levels of investment does worse than the stock of firms that do not invest as much -- see [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X1...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X14002323). One possible reason for this is that managers may channel investment funds into unproductive empire building.

<comment><USER15> This is cross-sectional returns over a month so it basically confirms the OP, don't invest money if you want the stock to up in the next month (or quarterly report).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Neat fact: the publishing of this article has caused its headline to stop being true. Since CEO equity vesting schedules are public, all it takes is a few algorithmic traders acting on this to make the strategy stop working.

<comment><USER17> Algorithmic traders focus on short-term market movements. The investment decisions described in the study are about long-term foundamental of companies. As long as enough investors prefer cash flow to capital reinvestment on the earning report, the strategy will continue to work.

Cutting costs and investments can easily dress up short-term financial performance at the cost of long-term productivity. But it will look good for investors who don't understand the underlying matter and rely on simplistic metrics to make investment decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of the interesting things which has egged on the current bull run has been the abundance of cash. I need to find the exact link but it seems lot of companies are buying back stocks which then masks the nonperformance under the garb of market beating EPS growth.

<comment><USER19> What's the under or non-performance? If a company is generating enough cash to buyback its shares, that's every bit as much a real return to shareholders as a dividend would be.

If a company retires 10% of its shares from a buyback, each investor now owns ~11% more of the company than they did before.

<comment><USER20> It's not so simple. In a perfect market, the market value of the company will go down when company buys back stock. Why? Because the value of the cash is now gone. So in your example, each stockholder just owns a slightly larger piece of a slightly smaller pie.

Of course markets are not perfect, and nobody knows for sure if the market value of the company is fair or not. When a company engages in stock buybacks, it's essentially saying that it believes its stock to be undervalued, which is why stock buybacks sometimes have the surprising effect of elevating the stock price, at least in the short run. After all, who has better information about the company and its prospects than itself?

But as they say, the market is a voting machine in the short run, but a weighing machine in the long run. If it turns out that the market value of the company is higher than its intrinsic value, then stock buybacks are actually destroying shareholder value. The cash would have been better spent buying shares in an index fund.

<comment><USER21> >It's not so simple. In a perfect market, the market value of the company will go down when company buys back stock. Why? Because the value of the cash is now gone. So in your example, each stockholder just owns a slightly larger piece of a slightly smaller pie.

That's not right. You have a larger piece of a smaller pie, but you have the same amount of pie.

Edit: the confusion is you are talking about total market cap while the parent is talking about share price. Total market cap is irrelevant to stockholders. Share price is all that's relevant.

<comment><USER20> _You have a larger piece of a smaller pie, but you have the same amount of pie._

Yes, this was my point. Stock buybacks are value neutral if the market value of the company is correct. Ie. the share price stays the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone read the paper? What is the effect size? I'm assuming the author means "statistically significant", which is worthless from any decisionmaking perspective (e.g. policy).

<comment><USER22> Effect size is ~0.2% of annualised net investment in R&D ($2m for median firm size) per standard deviation in vesting equity (unvested equity and remaining vested stock have minimal effect on equation as specified). So not huge but not trivial.

Paper is pretty thorough, including looking at changes in actual measures of firm efficiency, forecasts by friendly analysts vs actual earnings growth and an attempt to defeat the reasonable alternate hypothesis that boards time vesting decisions according to when they think massive investment is no longer needed and earnings growth will kick in.

It does however focus on [estimated per quarter based on annual info] vesting schedules and not actual share sale decisions. Actual share sales are found not to be statistically significantly related to investment drops (likely due to a variety of other reasons for offloading and reluctance to offload if the investment drop is due to short term dips)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Somewhat relevant topic into how many of these CEOs got to where they were: "New Study Reveals How Many CEOs Fast-Tracked Their Way To The Corner Office" [https://goo.gl/Bz8fP5](https://goo.gl/Bz8fP5)

<comment><USER24> Actual URL: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhall/2018/03/01/new- study-r...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhall/2018/03/01/new-study- reveals-how-many-ceos-fast-tracked-their-way-to-the-corner-office/)

I think URL shorteners are frowned on here.

<comment><USER25> Not to mention, Forbes "articles" are frowned on.

It's a rewrite of [https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-job- acco...](https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-job-according- to-a-10-year-study)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >> Could the investment cuts actually be efficient? Perhaps stock price concerns are motivating, because they induce the CEO to make tough decisions, such as cutting wasteful investment. If so, we would expect the CEO to improve efficiency in other ways as well, such as increasing sales growth or cutting other expenses. And we find no evidence of that.

I imagine looking for ways to increase sales growth and cut costs is something a good CEO does on a regular basis, so maybe there's not much low hanging fruit in that respect. I honestly don't see an issue with the explanation that CEOs are simply more motivated to cut wasteful investment prior to their equity vesting.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is well known. Mostly what (public) companies spend money on these days is share buybacks. Especially for retail, they'd be better off in the long term paying benefits for their hourly employees.

</comment><comment><USER28> Doing this would be foolish since they are taxed as income when they vest but capital gains after. If their aim was to unfairly take advantage they should wait until right after vesting not right before.

<comment><USER29> The article address this: "Only once this period is over can they sell — _and they typically do, to diversify their personal investments. "_

CEO's have a great deal of exposure to the upside of their company doing well, they want protection from the downside of it doing poorly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> They missed the real fix for the problem--change how vesting works.

They are talking about changing vesting from 3 years to 5. Instead, how about take that pile of options and split it into 5 piles. Pile 1 vests in 3 years. Pile 2 vests in 4 years and so on.

The point is to spread it out over time--they'll do better with a long term approach.

</comment><comment><USER31> Relevant to the impact of stock based compensation in real terms for CEO's:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-blackstone- schwarzma...](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-blackstone-schwarzman- pay/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting way to play with stock options for public at large too.

<comment><USER33> Like most things, you get what you optimize for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think that is a clever way to tease out causality.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is why the public ownership model is bound to fail, and already the most successful companies are avoiding it as long as possible or entirely.

<comment><USER36> Alan Greenspan, on his way out, famously said

> he had made a "mistake" in believing that banks in operating in their self- > interest would be sufficient to protect their shareholders and the equity in > their institutions. Greenspan said that he had found "a flaw in the model > that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the > world works."

It's not a stretch to apply it to all C-levels at all public companies: they will absolutely manipulate the company to benefit themselves at the expense of the shareholder.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/greenspan-my-faith-in-banks- a-m...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/greenspan-my-faith-in-banks-a-mistake/)

<comment><USER37> This is my sister's observation after 20 years in manufacturing. All her experiences at the executive level were of folks manipulating the company to get their bonuses regardless of the damage they did. They'd simply move on when a company failed.

She got sick of it all after 20 years, and now runs a chocolate shop in semi- retirement.

<comment><USER38> > They'd simply move on when a company failed.

And often the failing company would even pay for the outplacement consultants.

<comment><USER36> That and a ginormous exit package.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Apple A13 SoC: Lightning and Thunder - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro-and-max-review/2 <comment><AUTHOR> Chart from the next page is very telling: [https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/spec2006-a13.png](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/spec2006-a13.png)

Summarized by this paragraph in the article:

> Last year I've noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU > cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel > have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still > roughly 15% behind.</comment>


LibreOffice 5.1 new feature videos: Calc, Impress and Writer - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrWPfWSuLSA&list=PL0pdzjvYW9RHSwdRnZfaxAWICrkBrQl7k <comment><USER2> LibreOffice 5.1 released today: [https://www.libreoffice.org/download/release- notes/](https://www.libreoffice.org/download/release-notes/)

</comment><comment><USER3> nice video, super short, highlights features that probably would have taken longer to explain in the typical release notes pages.</comment>


_why's site updated - <AUTHOR> http://whytheluckystiff.net <comment><USER2> From the about page:

> NOTE: For some reason, I've been getting a LOT (like more than 1, which is a > lot for me considering how long this site has been going) of messages from > people asking me if I'm some kind of famous programmer called #why from > Pittsburg or something.

> Whilst I wish I was this famous and did get this much attention, > unfortunately I'm not. I'm just a dude trying to turn his life around and > take a bit of control over what's going on.

> In saying that, please feel free to send me any gifts that you were going to > send this dude and I'll be more than happy to have them :-)

Not sure if trolling, but it doesn't sound like _why.

</comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't seem like THE _why, and according to wikipedia, it isn't.

On 5 January 2013, _why's site[7] was found to be back online,[8] though as of October 2013 it was only serving a blank page.[7] In March 2014, the site re- launched as the personal blog of an anonymous individual from Australia with no apparent connection to _why. Apparently not being aware of the site's previous owner, the new owner notes on his contact page that he has received a lot of mail asking if he is "some kind of famous programmer called #why from Pittsburg or something"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff)

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://whytheluckystiff.net/contact/](http://whytheluckystiff.net/contact/)

From the owner of the domain:

NOTE: For some reason, I've been getting a LOT (like more than 1, which is a lot for me considering how long this site has been going) of messages from people asking me if I'm some kind of famous programmer called #why from Pittsburg or something.

Whilst I wish I was this famous and did get this much attention, unfortunately I'm not. I'm just a dude trying to turn his life around and take a bit of control over what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER5> That doesn't sound or look like _why...

Someone must have hijacked the domain?

Well, unless this is some kind of epic troll attempt by _why... But even as a troll it doesn't strike me as his style.

</comment><comment><USER6> The moment the header image rotated to one which was a different height and made the content move around as I was trying to read it, I knew it wasn't _why.

</comment><comment><USER7> Someone bought the domain and is using it. Old news.

</comment><comment><USER8> _why seems to have lost his edge.</comment>


GitLab 12.5 - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/11/22/gitlab-12-5-released/ <comment><USER2> I've struggled to understand how the ultimate plan can be priced as high as $99/user/month. What kind of company can afford this service price?

It's the only way to have access to epics, a feature quite standard for Ajile project management. As a result, we're sticking to the Community Edition, so it's a loss of business for GitLab.

<comment><USER3> GitHub enterprise is much higher and doesn't even include CI/CD. In addition other CI tools I've seen quoted in the $300/seat range.

Gitlab is a steal at a $99 price point compared to other tools.

<comment><USER4> what? github enterprise is 1/5 that cost. and what about github actions? they provide 50k minutes/month for enterprise [https://github.com/features/actions](https://github.com/features/actions)

<comment><USER5> To be fair, GitHub Actions is a relatively new thing and I'm not even sure it was already opened to the general public (that is, to anyone who didn't signed up for the beta). It's understandable if GitHub Actions isn't yet a part of the general public's mental landscape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am wondering when merge approvals will come to the community edition. To me this seems like a feature that is "essential to running a large 'forge' with public and private repositories". This would mean that it should be made available to the community edition according to their stewardship page[0].

[0] [https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/](https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/)

<comment><USER7> GitLab community advocate chiming in, I just wanted to share a n Epic with plans from our team regarding this issue and future releases. [https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab- org/-/epics/1887](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1887)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can't wait to try out the Sourcegraph integration, as well as the improved rebase. At our place the rebase button on GitLab is so slow that no one uses it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Every release of GitLab is not newsworthy. Let interested parties sign up for email notifications.

<comment><USER10> They're a YCombinator company and get the benefit of extra coverage. Stripe is another company with a constant stream of product announcements on HN.

I've wondered if applying to Ycombinator might be valuable simply for the ability to advertise to and recruit engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like that there is a focus on being able to deploy in k8s. Nice work!

However, some teams (ours) already run their own k8s clusters and would probably want to deploy gitlab in a namespace in there.

I hoped there would be simple example k8s manifests for doing this, but last time I checked I could only find helm charts. We don't use helm and don't want to use it.

If anyone knows some k8s manifests I can cut and paste to get started I'd appreciate it. Otherwise, it's going be be a job of creating it all myself, which right now is what's stopping us evaluating gitlab properly.

<comment><USER12> Helm charts are just templated k8s manifests, you can have it spit out the final manifest and use it manually.

<comment><USER11> Thanks. Maybe I will try that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've set up teamcity, Jenkins, CircleCI for past projects and companies. Tried to use gitlab with all their built-in DevOps feature and found it extremely frustrating to get to a good setup.

I dig the idea of all in one but think it really needs some polishing

<comment><USER14> I am glad you said it. Right now, the setup is so opinionated that it's limited and suffers from the mile wide and inch deep problem. In particular, they are still behind the Jenkins default setup in terms of standardized xunit output parsing, tracking and visualizing test trends over time - and since they have all the git topology information at their disposal there are amazing possibilities there and its a real shame. They are light years away from large scale project management capabilities of JIRA + plugins and I wish they would improve the core source control + build pipeline experience before tackling that space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does Sourcegraph's pricing [0] come in to play with self-hosted, paid GitLab plans?

For example, if you pay for GitLab's self-managed "Starter" package, and assuming you spin up your own private Sourcegraph instance [1] to go along with your self-managed GitLab instance, what Sourcegraph features do you get? Will you get code review intelligence, which Sourcegraph charges $29/user/month for?

On Sourcegraph's pricing page, it says the open-source edition is missing features like "Single repository definitions and references" and "Cross- repository definitions and references". What does that mean for private GitLab instances?

[0] [https://about.sourcegraph.com/pricing/](https://about.sourcegraph.com/pricing/)

[1] [https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph](https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph)

<comment><USER16> Sourcegraph CTO here.

> For example, if you pay for GitLab's self-managed "Starter" package, and > assuming you spin up your own private Sourcegraph instance [1] to go along > with your self-managed GitLab instance, what Sourcegraph features do you > get? Will you get code review intelligence, which Sourcegraph charges > $29/user/month for?

The GitLab pricing tier has no bearing on Sourcegraph features—it is the Sourcegraph pricing tier that determines what Sourcegraph features are available. $29/user/month is the Sourcegraph Enterprise tier, which includes full code review intelligence (jump-to-def, find-refs, hover tooltips).

Note also that Sourcegraph customers are only charged for _active_ users, so if most of your team doesn't end up using the features provided by Sourcegraph, you aren't charged for them.

> On Sourcegraph's pricing page, it says the open-source edition is missing > features like "Single repository definitions and references" and "Cross- > repository definitions and references". What does that mean for private > GitLab instances?

"Single repository definitions and references" means go-to-def and find-refs work if the code you're trying to jump to is in the same repository. "Cross repository" means you can jump through to code in upstream and downstream dependencies.

If you're running a private GitLab instance, you'll need to deploy a Sourcegraph instance (runnable as either a single Docker image or Kubernetes cluster) and pay for the appropriate license (free if you're under 10 active users and just want single-repository code intelligence, $29/user/month if you're over 10 active users or want cross-repo code intelligence).

Sorry about the confusion here—does that answer your questions?

<comment><USER15> Yes, that makes things very clear!

The only confusing thing is that the open-source version doesn't even have "Single repository definitions and references" code intelligence? Trying to understand what would be gained by spinning up a Sourcegraph instance. What extra functionality does that bring to GitLab if you're already paying for a self-managed GitLab instance and thus already have cross-repository search, indexed search, etc. (provided via GitLab)?

Thanks very much for taking the time to spell it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I ran my own personal GitLab EE on EC2 and it cost a fortune per year to use an instance type with enough memory. Then I realized GitLab.com private is... free and unlimited? How is that even possible?

<comment><USER18> When on the private, free, you get the features of the unlicensed EE (which behaves as the opensource version).

You can still pay us money if you want, by going with one of the paid tiers, which gives you access to other features and additional CI minutes.

But "free GitLab" is, really, good enough for personal use and small / medium companies when they are starting their digital transformation, or can afford to some manual inefficiencies.

The extra features on the paid tier become more important and urgent as you grow, so by having you already familiar and invested in the product, it becomes more obvious and easier the choice of becoming a paid customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sourcegraph is the same company that hijacked the langserver.org domain to almost completely remove credit for the original author of language server protocol.

Not a good team to be on.</comment>


Idea Dump | willgrant.org - <AUTHOR> http://willgrant.org/idea-dump-3

<comment><USER2> If This Then That - <http://ifttt.com/> \- is a good step toward filling the Social Sync hole, even if it is a little clunky (since you'd need to set up a separate recipe for every sync scenario).

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree - it would be nice to have a site that 'just works' though, with less/no flexibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I use a proximity (WiFi) app on Android - it's pretty decent - phone doesn't lock and password manager active when connected to my specific WiFi node & MAC address.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting - do you have a link / app name?

<comment><USER4> I think he/she means this: [https://market.android.com/details?id=com.benhirashima.unloc...](https://market.android.com/details?id=com.benhirashima.unlockwithwififree)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Calling it a 'dump' seems rather downbeat (a dump is "a site for depositing garbage"). Something like idea corner' would be more encouraging.

<comment><USER6> It's a good analogy, IMO. You don't want to start a garden of those ideas, you want to throw them out of your head, dump somewhere where they won't disturb you and someone else may just take them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previous instalments: <http://willgrant.org/category/ideas/></comment>


Planetary – a music sequencer that looks like a simple landscape - <AUTHOR> https://infovore.org/archives/2020/03/01/planetary-a-sequencer/ <comment><USER2> Although the music isn't much, I love this project and shows that there's a lot of creativity and expression possible with this approach.

It reminds me of a few things:

1) of some music I wrote for a 3D game back in the 90's that used DirectMusic (is it still part of directx?) where you can create your own samples and mix them using midi in real time. I used it to change the music based upon what was happening to the player. It also changed tempo and volume and using 3D spacial would hint at where the interesting action was taking place (eg behind you, to your right, etc would have a theme variance/extra tracks playing and would rotate as the camera moved)

2) auto-generated 3D infinite landscapes

3) Modal music of traditional Greek/ Turkish etc which describes each of the modes as a landscape that is explored musically. I spent a month in Crete learning about it.

Together, I'm sure these ideas could generate something pretty fantastic as well as visually stimulating... and the crux of it is in this little project.

Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a new instrument in Reason called "Beatmap" which also shows an imaginary landscape while generating beats for you.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V9GCxbILaw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V9GCxbILaw)

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a music making app called "isle of tune" which _looks_ like a Sim City style builder game where you are placing roads, cars, houses and buildings. But in fact you are sequencing music. The idea is quite delightful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice work! That first graphic on your page instantly brought back memories of playing 'Battlezone' in the arcades as a kid - one of my favourite games! :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Side note: Can we just appreciate / shake our heads at the "Archives" menu in the footer? I don't know if it's more efficient, or an anti-pattern of footer design.

</comment><comment><USER7> That Gondry video for Star Guitar is fantastic.

<comment><USER8> I didn't understand it until I saw that the landscape was being selectively repeated to match the music. It took me quite long to realize this; it's very well done.</comment></comment>


Please recommend a book to read. List for 2015 - <AUTHOR>

I want to make a list of books to read in 2015. Can you please recommend some that you think are most impactful or you like the most? Thanks <comment><USER2> I plan to read this: "If Truth Be Told: A Monk's Memoir" [http://www.amazon.in/If-Truth-Be-Told- Memoir/dp/9351368068/](http://www.amazon.in/If-Truth-Be-Told- Memoir/dp/9351368068/)

" In the 1990s, an eighteen-year-old headed to Australia to realize his worldly dreams. With little money or support, he struggled to survive there. Two years later, he was earning an annual income of $250,000; by the age of twenty-six, he was a multimillionaire. Yet, worldly success was merely a way station on a journey that began years ago. As an eight-year-old, he saw a vision of God in a dream, an experience that left him with a sense of deep joy and peace. The dream triggered off his desire to meet God, to see a manifestation of the Divine. He practised astrology, intense meditation and tantra, yet God was nowhere in sight. Deeply frustrated, he dived into materialistic pursuits to distract himself from the restlessness within. After years of living the good life, he found he could no longer ignore the old restlessness; worldly pleasures just couldn't fill the void within. He moved back to India and finally did what he had always yearned to do: renounce the world and become a monk. In the Himalayas, in terrifying silence and solitude, Om Swami practised intense meditation. Death was always close as he confronted starvation, the fierce elements and wild animals. Finally, his sadhana brought him to the ultimate "

</comment><comment><USER3> From Ruby Rogues 184 RR

"JESSICA: Alright. So, I am going to echo one of Greg's picks because it was on my list but for a different reason. 'Seeing like a State' is an amazing book. And I think it's drastically changed the way I look at software, not for the same reason as Greg talked about but because it shows why what we do is hard. 'Seeing like a State' talks about all the subtleties of human systems and human interactions at the local context level. It talks about all the improvisation that everyone does on a day-to-day basis and how in real human communities, we're constantly changing the system to adjust to a slightly different reality, to corner cases we hadn't seen before but now we have. It's shifting and it's not well-defined. And suddenly it makes complete sense that the hardest part of software is figuring out what we want to do. That's it. It's a great book."

[http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain- Condition/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain- Condition/dp/0300078153)

</comment><comment><USER4> I just bought 4 books off of Amazon and got them today:

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning. Highly recommended overview of math by some HNers so I figured I would check it out.

Venture capitalists at work. I didn't realize there were more "at work" series books other than coders and founders, so this one sounds right up my alley.

Information Rules, a book that's supposedly dated on economics and how it applies to the internet world. Recommended on Chris Dixon's blog and looked interesting. Thought I might get some new insights to bitcoin or something with it.

And Walter Isaacson's new book, the innovators.

</comment><comment><USER5> I just started Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, it's interesting.

<comment><USER6> Another vote of confidence for GEB

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm really enjoying 7 concurrency models in 7 weeks. I'm about 2/3 through it. It has covered examples in Java, Clojure, and Elixir so far. As someone trying to learn a functional language (Clojure), I've found it to be a great introduction to the concurrency benefits of functional programming.

</comment><comment><USER6> Books I imagine will have 'tremendous' (what a prior, lol) effect

Non-fiction;

Slavoj Zizek's _Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism_

Evgeny Morozov's _To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism_

Fiction;

William Gibson's _Neuromancer_

Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought)_

</comment><comment><USER8> Rapid Interpretation of EKG's.

Really. It's fascinating. You not only learn how to read EKG's (obviously, after reading the book, you're still not qualified to argue with a seasoned practitioner), but you also learn a lot about how the human heart works.

Much more accessible than I thought.

<comment><USER9> Written by a confessed child pornographer as well! [http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2001/12/07/fine-print-redux- be...](http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2001/12/07/fine-print-redux-beneficent- doctor-made-child-pornos/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any one book? Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan

Any one series? The Foundation series, Isaac Asimov

Other personal favourites include: The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho The Book of Disquet, Fernando Pessoa The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safron Foer Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

</comment><comment><USER11> American Soccer Fans: _Love Thy Soccer_.

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

</comment><comment><USER12> NO BULLSHIT guide to MATH and PHYSICS --- a calculus and mechanics textbook for adults; also covers high school math.

disclaimer: I'm the author

</comment><comment><USER13> The Personal MBA - Josh Kaufman The First 20 Hours - Josh Kaufman So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport The 4-Hour Workweek - Tim Ferriss The 4-Hour Body - Tim Ferriss Stop Acting Rich - Thomas J. Stanley James Altucher - Choose Yourself

</comment><comment><USER14> let me know if you guys find better replacements, but this is what I got on my list:

O'Reilly - Scott Murray - Interactive Data Visualization for the Web

Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook

A First Course in Probability

Rails AntiPatterns - Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring

Bayesian Data Analysis Andrew Gelma

The Pragmatic Programmer

Code Complete

Bishop - Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

O'Reilly Mining The Social Web

<comment><USER15> Probability Theory: The Logic of Science

[http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-The-Logic- Science/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-The-Logic- Science/dp/0521592712)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You can try "Steal like an Artist" if you are looking for a quick and easy read.

</comment><comment><USER17> _The Four Steps To The Epiphany_ \- Steve Blank

 _Neuromancer_ \- William Gibson

 _Predictable Revenue_ \- Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler

 _The Fountainhead_ \- Ayn Rand

 _The Ultimate Question 2.0_ \- Fred Reichheld

 _The Singularity is Near_ \- Ray Kurzweil

 _Moonshot!_ \- John Sculley

 _Zero To One_ \- Peter Thiel

 _Republic_ \- Plato

 _Meditations_ \- Marcus Aurelius

 _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ \- George Orwell

 _Fahrenheit 451_ \- Ray Bradbury

 _The Mysterious Island_ \- Jules Verne

 _Discipline of Market Leaders_ \- Michael Treacy, Fred Wiersema

 _False Memory_ \- Dean Koontz

 _NOS4A2_ \- Joe Hill

 _Revival_ \- Stephen King

 _Barbarians At The Gate_ \- John Helyar and Bryan Burrough

 _Into Thin Air_ \- John Krakauer

 _How To Measure Anything_ \- Douglas Hubbard

and any collection of the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

</comment><comment><USER18> patti smith just kids</comment>


Espresso Machine Powered by Tcl/Tk - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.tcl/TsTbDVx8tUQ/kbejHvzuEgAJ <comment><USER2> I have used Tk (through Python's tkinter) for several touch-based "kiosk" applications. It is surprisingly useful and productive for that. What you need is small (~100 lines) custom ttk style which adds larger padings to buttons and such and maybe makes it look "modern", flat and colorful and that's it. It certainly makes more sense than making such things web-based.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's me on the video. I'm a long-timer Hacker News reader, and happy to have a geeky chat here about what I'm up to. -john

<comment><USER4> I'm curious about your measured pressure drop between the pressure at the pump, and the pressure at the group head. Since coffee machines are low flow and travel through a short distance of presumably stainless steel pipe, my quick calculations indicate a minimal pressure drop compared to the expected 9 bar of pressure used to pull a shot.

Temperature is another kettle of fish as you have demonstrated.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that your mental model of how a boiler based espresso machine works is not how they are actually wired.

Here is how they actually work: 9 bar of pressure are generated between the pump and a flow constrictor which is placed before the boiler, pumping _cold water_ into the boiler. This cold water then displaces the water in the boiler, which then gets pushed to the espresso.

Thus, the final pressure depends on the compressibility of the steam (or airspace) in the boiler. In practice, you get about half a bar less at the espresso than the pump got behind the boiler. But, the real numbers depends on lots of factors, many of which are invisible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tcl/Tk is one of the cooler tools out there, though I wish it were not so... string-based.

Much like Clojure took a bunch of neat stuff from recent programnming languages (first class hash maps! immutable data structures!), I'd love to see a Tcl variant that takes some inspiration from recent trends.

<comment><USER6> > Tcl/Tk is one of the cooler tools out there, though I wish it were not so... > string-based.

Tcl was designed in a different time when memory was scarce.

The point of being so "stringy" is that you could parse it in place in the same amount of RAM as the original "string program" took up.

I really would love something with similar constraints as the old Tcl for microcontrollers. BASIC used to run in 4K RAM with 4K ROM--I really wish we had a modern equivalent that I could connect to with a UART.

Quite often my constraint on a microcontroller is waking up and waiting for a sensor, transmitter, etc. -- I have _forever_ to run interpreted code. A small language would be really nice.

<comment><USER3> Ironically, because Tcl was made to run GUIs on very limited hardware (old Unix machines, 30 years ago) it runs really nicely on slow Android tablets.

Its focus on asynchronous programming, rather than relying on threads, really helps, as does the small memory footprint (105mb of RAM used for my app).

Java-based apps on the same tablet that I supply with the espresso machine run at a crawl, whereas my Tcl app feels normal.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't help that Google did a pretty lousy job with Dalvik.

If those tablets were running something like Aicas Java runtime, it would be much different.

<comment><USER3> "Androwish", which is Tcl/Tk ported to Android, runs mostly on the C layer sitting on top of Linux. As such, it's way more "performant" than Java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very nice!

We at our university chair also wanted to have a touch-pad kiosk for our drinks (coffees etc). So far it is just used to do the accounting, i.e. count which user drinks how much, and whether he has paid.

I decided to use Kivy instead of Tcl/Tk, because I thought I can have some nicer animations, and it would feel more modern. I was quite happy with the result. Here with screenshot: [https://github.com/rwth-i6/drink- kiosk](https://github.com/rwth-i6/drink-kiosk)

The next step which we planned was to actually wire this app with our coffee machine, and allow drinks only via the kiosk app. But we never got to that so far, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER9> Historic precedent [http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Coffee.html](http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Coffee.html)

<comment><USER3> Two very fun coffee RFCs:

1) Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) [https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt)

2) Definitions of Managed Objects for Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware Devices using SMIv2 [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2325](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2325)

\--- Especially amusing as I was thinking of adding SNMP support to my coffee machine, so the humorous RFC above might actually be relevent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Extremely interesting YouTube talk also. You learn a lot about making good coffee.

</comment><comment><USER11> My first job was working on a product called qacafe cdrouter, which is an entire product written in Tcl. (but not tk.)

It is amazing what you can build if you rely on organization and convention. I had nothing to do with creating it, but I really learned a lot from some really amazing people the years I spent there -- how designing a thing is generally the first requirement for scaling a thing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very timely... I recently picked up an old Miele fully automatic espresso machine (grinds, tamps then expells) that's controlled via an 8Mhz 6502 like CPU.

I'm in the process of overriding the cpu with my own controller and adding my own GUI to control/tweak the process.

I enjoyed John's talk and can relate!

</comment><comment><USER13> Google groups now require a login.

<comment><USER14> I just tried viewing the link in Private Browsing and it seemed to work. Not sure why you would be getting kicked to login.

<comment><USER15> Google Groups has a weird state, if it detects some account cookies, it forces you to login, but it works fine if not. It's been around for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shows that Tcl/Tk is still relevant in various contexts. Impressive work!</comment>


A Little on V8 and WebAssembly [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://ia601503.us.archive.org/32/items/vmss16/titzer.pdf <comment><USER2> > MVP (Version 1.0) expected to be shipped this summer

Yay!</comment>


Plink is a multiplayer music experience with a super intuitive user interface. - <AUTHOR> http://labs.dinahmoe.com/plink/

<comment><USER2> I'm getting the error message that I need the latest version of Chrome, which I'm already running on Windows 7. Is it only me?</comment>


Facebook is basically designed like a lobster trap with your friends as bait - <AUTHOR> http://news.gilbert.org/OutsmartingFacebook

<comment><USER2> Honestly, this is way over-dramatized.

>1\. The Facebook upsides are much smaller than we think.

When I joined Facebook, back in the 'college-only' days, there weren't that many people there. It was about linking together with my dorm-mates, writing silly things on each other's walls (which were just overwriteable textareas), and generally wasting time. While the political motivations of the Facebook creators are debatable (I've heard bad things), on the simplest level, it's just a site where you post some information. They don't own your personal information. It's not a f __ __ __trap. It's not the only one (Orkut, Myspace, Friendster, etc). At the end of the day, I don't care if an advertiser knows that I am friends with X and I like rock climbing. If they want to market pertinent offers to me, who knows? I might actually be interested.

This entire article is such a massive vortex of nothing ("Post stuff elsewhere, too") that it is evoking an emotional reaction from me. Who needs to be told this stuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> From experience, I know that the directors of nonprofits need to be told this stuff!

I've run into a downside he doesn't touch on: On Facebook it's plainly obvious to users when people aren't engaging with you -- there's a reverse network effect.

<comment><USER3> _On Facebook it's plainly obvious to users when people aren't engaging with you -- there's a reverse network effect._

Please tell me more. I want to be sure I understand what you are saying here.

<comment><AUTHOR> With a normal web presence, it looks the same no matter how many people are visiting it.

With Facebook and other social idioms, it will be clear from the first pageview if noone showed up or if everyone left. The page/group's point in the hype cycle and demographics are obvious too.

Users can identify a failed launch or a ghost town at first glance, intuit that there's nothing there, and click away -- all without looking at your content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nick-dap As an online organizer I can say that this is the best website I've discovered in ages. I am craving for this information and have been unable to find much sources that focus specifically on the issues that I face. Thank you for linking to this site! Really, thank you!

The article itself couldn't be truer. I see organizations going head over heals into social media thinking that there is some mother load of new "activity" at the middle of it. In reality all they are doing is waisting time that they should be spending doing "traditional organizing".

Community organizing is by far time better spent. I will submit to the experiences of a community organizer any day of the week. These people are the ones making any difference. They are the ones nurturing real connections with real people. By contrast, friending on Facebook is close to meaningless. We, online organizers, are here for a ride trying to figure out what to do with this relatively new medium (the Internet in general). The best tool an organizer has in her arsenal is a face to face meeting where you can build a real connection. This tool is taken away as soon as you move online.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just posted this link on Facebook, and told a friend who works for a nonprofit organization that has a Facebook page about it. This is important information for people who support nonprofit organizations.

</comment><comment><USER4> For me, Facebook functions the same way my address book does: I pick it up when I want to contact somebody, and never for any other reason.</comment>


Building High Quality Backlinks with Dofollow Relationship - <AUTHOR> http://www.seo-theory.com/2013/11/18/building-high-quality-backlinks-with-dofollow-relationship/

<comment><AUTHOR> A tour de force article by SEO's cryptic genius. Michael Martinez loves to write headlines that everyone wants to read then tear apart all the assumptions usually associated with said headline. This time he drops the bomb on link building, a huge part of SEO consulting.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you go for adhoc/freelance design resource? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all
We're hitting a stage in our product development where we're looking for some design work to be done (layouts, icons etc) and I was just wondering if anyone has any recommended design/ux specific sites (like elance.com for example) that they have used to get bits and pieces done??
TIA <comment><USER2> For icons just do a search on google for icon libraries. Some are free and some others are cheap for what you get.

Do not pay for custom icon design unless you absolutely need to.

For site design your best bet is to look at CSS galleries. Tons of designers put their portfolios up there.

Also check out deviantart.com for a huge selection of freelance art.

Be forwarned that good designers are usually very busy and/or very expensive. A lot of overseas designers are pretty decent and a little cheaper (Asia/Eastern Europe). In 10 years as a programmer Ive had better luck finding top coders than top designers.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://coroflot.com> can be a great resource. Also, if you are near an art school you can find a lot of great/affordable talent there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Talk to the people in the art/graphics design department at your local university. There's a big pool of talent there that is (a) affordable, and (b) starting out, just like you. So you'll be helping somebody else with their career, and may find someone who you can bring in-house as a designer once they graduate.

At the very least, you'll know someone 'in the industry' who has a very positive impression of you (and your company), and who can pass talent to you down the road.

<comment><USER5> That's actually the very best thing the poster can do.. but probably not the kind of answer the poster was looking for...

<comment><USER6> Just keep in mind that while a lot of artists are able to create some great looking designs, many are not versed in human cognition and user interface design concepts. You may end up with a great looking interface which is largely unusable, or at least irritating to use on a regular basis. If you're going to go down this route, make sure that someone on your team has a good grasp on UI/UX basics in order to vet the designs that are proposed and suggest changes as needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use odesk.com. Its especially useful if you have a lot of smaller tasks since you can develop relationships with freelancers via the project mgmt tool that tracks their time and manages payment.

</comment><comment><USER8> CrowdSpring is another nice option in my experience.

<http://www.crowdspring.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> I used <http://www.crowdspring.com/> with success.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate all the responses. Will check out the suggestions!!!

</comment><comment><USER10> I used 99designs.

<comment><USER11> I second 99designs.com.

In fact, I will go so far as to say this: most design projects should begin with a contest at 99designs.

There are reasons for this: you get to see a large sample set of competing designs rather than being restricted to whatever designs the neural pathways of your dedicated designer can come up with. You go with 99designs in order to see 100 designs (or 500) sitting on a page. After that, you take one or two designs and you run with them. In my opinion this is bar none the most effective way to start any design project. Make 99designs.com your first step as it gives you a breadth of design options. Then choose one and work on depth and polish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I'm liking the look of 99 Designs, especially as you say the fact you get a broad range of initial designs which gives you a nice perspective on the directions possible.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: 1000 Slack Groups Online – in a year this number increased by 2.5 times - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/standuply/the-full-list-of-1000-slack-communities-2c412054ea30 <comment><AUTHOR> We gathered 1000 Slack groups active at the moment. Would love to get your feedback and add more Slack groups if we missed something. You can see the full list at [http://bit.ly/1000slack](http://bit.ly/1000slack)</comment>


The Disaster Poet - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/disaster-poet <comment><USER2> The occasion for "The Tay Bridge Disaster" was also the occasion for a poem by Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), which, however, is held in high regard: "Die Brück' am Tay"

German: [https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Die_Br%C3%BCck%E2%80%99_am_Ta...](https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Die_Br%C3%BCck%E2%80%99_am_Tay)

Link to "Norman Barry's English translation": [http://www.johnmaynard.net/RelPoems.html](http://www.johnmaynard.net/RelPoems.html)

A side-by-side presentation with another translation: [https://lyricstranslate.com/en/die-br%C3%BCck-am-tay-when- we...](https://lyricstranslate.com/en/die-br%C3%BCck-am-tay-when-we-shall- meet-again-bridge-over-tay.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank goodness! I _finally_ understand Douglas Adams' mention of "the second worst poet in the English language" in the Hitchhiker's series, which I first read ( _Restaurant_ , anyway) around age six or so. I finally _get_ it!

<comment><USER4> Not so fast. While he probably did want you to think of McGonagall (who's infamous for his bad poetry), Adams wrote, "The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England in the destruction of the planet Earth." This was changed from Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, who complained about the use of his name and address. Paul Johnstone was a classmate of Adams and apparently did write poetry.

There's an H2G2 page: [https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Paula_Nancy_Millstone_Je...](https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Paula_Nancy_Millstone_Jennings).

Paul Johnstone biography: [https://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/163180](https://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/163180)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's funny how many of these terrible poems sort of work if you imagine Ad- rock and MCA from the Beastie Boys rapping them back and forth.

<comment><USER6> Boyeee

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> More of this guy's poetry here: [http://www.mcgonagall- online.org.uk/works](http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/works)</comment>


India's first MOOC went live this month - <AUTHOR> https://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/explorer

<comment><USER2> Are you sure it's the first MOOC? NPTEL has hundreds of courses available online already...

[http://nptel.ac.in/courses.php](http://nptel.ac.in/courses.php)</comment>


Temporary tattoos fitted with electronics make flexible, ultrathin sensors - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/08/temporary-tattoo-electronics-flexible-ultrathin-measurement-devices.ars

<comment><USER2> I think it's time to bring up the Mark of the Beast. Nothing like a good moral panic get the blood flowing.

Panics aside, this is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> This will be instrumental for gamification.

See: [http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the- bo...](http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box- presentation/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I could see this becoming very popular as a heart-rate etc. monitor at high- end gyms. Slap on a tattoo that will interface with whatever machines you use, then wash it off in the shower.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice, but how scalable is the fabrication process?

<comment><USER5> To answer my own question, there was an article in Science yesterday which goes into much more detail on this project. The backing appears quite scalable if there aren't any hidden gotchas that they didn't discuss. The electronics are probably the tricky part, but they still look doable.

MC10 is doing the commercialization.

<http://mc10inc.com/pages/tech_overview.php></comment></comment>


Air-Purifying Road Surface Eats 45% of NOx Pollution - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100706082058.htm

<comment><USER2> There are two problems with this that I can see right off the bat.

1) There is already a large problem with excess nitrogen runoff due to fertilizers, which is causing massive algae blooms in oceans, destroying aquatic life. This would have a similar effect from my understanding

2) Titanium Dioxide is kinda nasty to manufacture, in that it uses large quantities of chlorine. Also, it has been classified as a potential carcinogen.

With those being said, as long as the net effect is a reduction in harmful pollutants or carcinogens, rather than an increase, it's a win-win. It's just a bit difficult to understand that without probably rolling it out widespread.

<comment><USER3> Titanium dioxide is only suspected to be a carcinogen when inhaled in considerable concentration.

As it stands today, I wouldn't want to breathe concrete or tarmac dust in high concentration. Adding or refusing to add titanium dioxide will not alter my feelings on that. :)

<comment><USER4> I hadn't heard of this. Aren't many paints' pigmenting these days based on TiO2? Would sanding painted surfaces pose a risk?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How nice would it be to have the negative aspects of vehicle use directly affected drivers?

The roads in the communities where they drive become toxic. Maybe we can create a diaper on exhaust ports of vehicles that is then scrubbed clean in their own drinking water.

</comment><comment><USER6> Take the runoff water from the road with high nitrates and collect it in ditches with algae or Hydrilla absorbing CO2. Convert the algae/aquatic plants into bio diesel or dry it and make soil for plant nurseries.

Edit: Taken from Wikipedias Hydrilla article, "This abundant source of biomas is a known hyperaccumulator of Mercury, Cadmium, Chromium and Lead, and as such can be used in phytoremediation."

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

</comment><comment><USER7> Can someone tell me, definitively, why we are trying to reduce NOx?

Yes, it comes out of tailpipes, and the stuff that comes out of tailpipes has always been deadly.

Yes, in high concentrations, it probably plays a part in LA's smogscape of the late 1900's.

Yes, my first car which made excessive NOx had a distinct smell and made me feel happy...

But did you know that NOx uses sunlight to produce free oxygen in a catalytic cycle? This free oxygen then reacts to produce ozone. Aren't we kind of having an ozone shortage right now?

<comment><USER8> Ozone near the earth's surface (which this road surface attacks) is a health risk, and contributes to smog. Ozone higher up in the atmosphere (of the famous "hole") blocks UV radiation.

<http://www.policyalmanac.org/environment/archive/ozone.shtml>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "...converts them with the aid of sunlight into harmless nitrate"

Genius! As soon as I read the article title, I realized the potential... Just think of all the energy the black road surfaces around the globe absorb!

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, that energy is pretty low-grade and not very usable. Thus that heat absorption mainly just contributes to the "heat island" effect, which among other things increases air-conditioning costs. Better is to turn roads and roofs into reflecting surfaces, which generally improves the quality of urban areas.

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

<http://www.epa.gov/heatisld/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Scrubbing atmospheric pollution off with paint on the road is one of the stupidest ideas ever. Do they really think they can clean up such huge volumes of air like this? Some local authorities in London have already wasted a load of money trying to do this. Now the Dutch are at it.

<comment><USER8> One reason to battle the NOx at the road surface is that the concentrations there are higher, near where vehicles emit it. Thus you don't have to scrub as large a volume of air in order to get the same effect.

One HN-oriented analogy is conditioning heat out of a data center. If you wait till the heat coming off your servers mixes uniformly throughout the entire room, you have to process a lot of air. If on the other hand you catch the air just as it comes off the servers, you have to process less air in order to remove the same energy.

Pushing the analogy further-- at normal temperatures (for data centers and for the ultimate place they reject heat to, the outdoors), processing a small amount of air that starts at a high temperature can be done more cheaply than a large amount of air that starts very close to the temperature you want to maintain. By analogy, it's probably true that scrubbing a fixed amount of NOx is easier when you start at a high concentration, than when you have a greater volume at lower concentration.

<comment><USER9> Your data center analogy would make sense if we were talking about treating the exhaust at the tailpipe. Once the NOx is out in the atmosphere, it's already too late. NOx disperses very rapidly.

Further, think about the ratio of boundary layer (or even at a lower height) air volume to the surface area of roads. Plus, there is no suction happening here. It's literally just the air touching the surface of the road. I would love to see some numbers on the efficiency of this process, but my gut tells me it's pretty poor.

<comment><USER8> To get to your core comment, I agree that my analogy makes no claims about this scheme's efficacy. The posted article claims 25% to 45%, but who knows how ideal the conditions have to be to reach that level.

You are also absolutely correct that treating at the tailpipe is even better (for exactly the reasons my analogy makes clear).

That said, I will defend my analogy. My point was that dealing with NOx at the road surface will likely be more effective than dealing with it more generally in the atmosphere-- in part because the effective volumes aren't as huge as you might think (see the comment I was responding to), and in part because you're dealing with the NOx at higher concentrations.

I'm sure you're right that NOx disperses rapidly, but I'd bet that concentrations still are demonstrably higher at the roadway surface than, say, a block away. For example, this study found a factor of 5 difference between NOx at the side of a busy intersection, versus that some distance away: [http://www.atmos-chem- phys.net/10/2745/2010/acp-10-2745-2010...](http://www.atmos-chem- phys.net/10/2745/2010/acp-10-2745-2010.html)

Second, I bet the boundary layer isn't all that thick at the road surface. After all, by definition you have cars passing along, stirring up a lot of turbulence. (Besides, even in quiescent conditions, you still get diffusive transport through the boundary layer, due to concentration differences-- and destroying NOx at the surface will set that up for you.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Peer-to-peer online volunteer community WorkForWorld - <AUTHOR> http://www.workforworld.com <comment><USER2> Should have more infos about the people behind it then just "We are a couple of enthusiasts".</comment>


SiFive to Introduce New RISC-V Processor Architecture and RISC-V PC - <AUTHOR> https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200914005108/en/SiFive-To-Introduce-New-RISC-V-Processor-Architecture-and-RISC-V-PC-at-Linley-Fall-Virtual-Processor-Conference <comment><USER2> It looks like SiFive is making a vector processor, to potentially compete with GPUs (Nvidia makes chips with dozens of multiprocessors on them, each with arbitrarily many cores)

Super exciting!

<comment><USER3> I'm getting confused. You mention this is a product to eventually compete with GPUs. So is this a quasi-gpu that's being announced? Will there be a opengl or vulkan driver to interface with it? Is this a regular accelerator? Your comment does not add much clarity.

<comment><USER4> If it is in fact a CPU designed to be used like a GPU, that'd be very akin to Intel's (dead) Project Larabee.[0] As I understand it, it was supposed to be a GPGPU[a] that internally was just an x86-64 processor with massive vector units. So, in theory, one could offload practically an _entire game_ onto a Larabee card (save for IO probably) and do computations there. Compare that to a GPU where computations must be sent back and forth between the CPU and GPU.

Linus Sebastion (of LinusTechTips) managed to get his hands on one and made a video on it.[1] It's been a while since I've seen the video, but, IIRC, they weren't able to get it to work, so the video was a bit of a letdown.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_\(microarchitecture\))

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-1fAVU1OQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-1fAVU1OQ)

[a]: general purpose GPU

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It all reads extremely vague. What do these all mean? Is there anything in R-V other than the constant hype propelled by sifive?!

<comment><USER5> What is "R-V"? Please use correct non-ambiguous terminology.

The press release says nothing, but 740 suggest it's based on the 74 which is a dual issue core with the vector extension. The latter is a big deal (basically doubles the silicon area for one metric), but ISTM that it's not the OoO core, so not in the same class as eg. BOOM.

<comment><USER4> "R-V" is pretty clearly "RISC V"

<comment><USER5> It's not clear to me. The big new thing in the 74 core is the vector extension (thus, RV64GCV) and in the context of the question it might very well have been that the OP was asking about. Clear and effective communication benefits from the absence of ambiguity lest we just end up with a bunch of TLAs that ATM seems FTW, but might raise a "WTF" for someone else. YMMV.

EDIT: reworded

<comment><USER3> Did I touch a sore point when I wrote R-V? From your reaction It seems like I did. Is the term R-V perceived as detrimental? Does R-V not sound cool? I think it does.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What happens when a 18 years old buys a mainframe - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11376711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11376711).

Good post; sorry you lost the submission lottery. It evens out in the long run if you keep submitting good stories. But we also plan to change HN's duplicate detection to privilege the first submitter more often.</comment>