Why Silicon Valley innovation has stalled - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/03/why-silicon-valley-innovation-has-stalled/ <comment><USER2> "Using the medical analogy, the current environment in the internet space essentially tells people that they will make more money as a pre-med dropout opening clinics than as a serious researcher looking for a cure for cancer."

You say that like you aren't aware it's a true statement? You have terrible odds of becoming rich being a cancer researcher.

It's a hard problem to solve, though. The obvious answer of "route more money to cancer researchers" produces the obvious social attack of "more marginal people being or simply pretending to be cancer researchers", for instance. It's easy to get "more money" -> "more researchers", it's much harder to get "more money" -> "more _research_ ". (I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's a lot harder than it looks.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Innovation is doing fine. All these whiny bloggers and investors simply can't see the forest for the trees. The reason there are so many trivial startups is because the web is now a mature market and the barriers to entry have fallen to the point that anybody can jump in. Time will show that most of these ideas are worthless and not very many people are getting rich off fart apps, but for now it's a gold rush plain and simple.

Fundamental innovation in tech is in hardware and software standards, neither of these things is suffering. The evolution of web standards is moving faster than it ever has. Hardware is making steady progress. Cloud computing is making big strides. Things are moving just as fast as ever, it's just obscured by the mass market noise that is obscuring the big picture.

Now obviously a lot of this stuff is incremental, but guess what: computers and networks aren't new anymore. The level of innovation from 1980-2000 was special because it introduced the power of general computing to the majority of the population. It's not a matter of simply working on harder problems to replicate that. It's one of a few evolutionary sea changes like mass production/automation, railroads, wired communications, or space flight. Nothing short of the singularity is going to appear that amazing, especially with the compounding effect of nostalgia.

<comment><USER4> Sort of like saying that the era from 1980 - 2000 was about making computers and computation visible, and now we're trying to make it invisible so that we no longer have to explicitly think about computation, it just is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to find ground-breakingly new tech & ideas, don't look at your average 2012 startup. Look at PhD dissertations or the output of Microsoft/Google/IBM research. Those people are paid for new ideas that don't make money. :-)

Real ground-breaking tech comes from deep work & deep knowledge. It also comes from trying out ideas and watching the "99 lightbulbs that don't work". It turns out failing costs money, and groundbreaking work is hard to fund. In general, that is sort of the idea behind research labs not producing monetizing products: all they do is work up ideas. Maybe the ideas are usable, but statistically, most of those ideas aren't going to make money. Think very hard about that. As an investor or a founder, you have to be prepared to lose your money on some faffy idea that might be so far beyond the current worldstate that no one would buy it. The interested reader is advised to examine Common Lisp company history in the '80s for a classic case study. Or, alternatively, the Connection Machine.

Real innovation/groundbreaking ideas are exotic (a priori, this is what makes them the real deal). So there must be some sort of ability on the part of the company to transform the society into being ready for this idea.

Put another way, research is even more black swan than startups.

</comment><comment><USER6> Innovation happens in fits and spurts -- it's highly nonlinear.

More importantly, there is a positive feedback cycle between what the author would consider "true innovation" and "trivial apps" -- before we can make a very large leap in terms of true innovation, we need some societal comfort with the paradigm. Those apps (like Twitter, the one Peter Thiel derided) serve a very important role: they move the bar culturally. These apps help acclimate people to the idea of technology (for example, owning and keeping a smartphone close to you) and make sure that society is ready for whatever next innovation happens. Without the societal leg of the cycle the "true innovation" will be stymied.

<comment><USER7> Honestly? I think that's what investors(and the trivial startups who court them) tell themselves as they tuck themselves in at night.

Innovation, like a new tree, has many branches which can be developed and on which to exploit and make money. Exploiting innovation is lucrative; research is costly. But now we've over-grazed. We got so greedy that we threw everything into harvesting the leaves, forgoing the costly part of sowing new seeds, and now we're navel-gazing and wondering what happened. It's not hard to understand.

In WWII there was a ton of investment into important research and the results were overwhelming. Currently there is a ton of investment into photo-sharing social networks for dogs, and the results are, surprise!, quite underwhelming.

<comment><USER6> Whether an innovation is lucrative or not depends _highly_ on cultural factors. Ultimately to exploit an innovation there needs to be something to exploit, and unfortunately that is almost always _other people_.

Many companies have produced tablets for decades before Apple came in with the iPad. If the iPad were launched in the early 90s, for example, it would not have taken off in the same way it did now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent article. I've seen a lot of my friends get disheartened by the idea of spending the time and effort to do a PhD and instead hoping to make it big by trying a variation of the "chain of clinics". While this is strictly their personal choice to make, I think their intelligence would have served better learning the field more thoroughly; after which they would have probably been an invaluable asset...

A lot of them feel that getting a PhD would make them overqualified to work in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER9> Let's ask a simple question: how many people _really_ want to change the world? Not just disrupt, but eliminate an entire class of fundamental human problems? And how many people would settle for simply being rich? The allure of success can be highly seductive.

The market has spoken, and it's rewarding people with little to no vision. It makes it OK to water down grand visions.

Fix the culture to stop focusing so much on being the top dog. This is a very difficult task.

<comment><USER10> > _how many people would settle for simply being rich?_

Forget being rich, I'm willing to settle for financial security for my family.

<comment><USER9> Isn't that a more noble subset of being rich?

I completely understand, mind you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> " _I doubt there are many, or any, engineers who don't have deep aerospace experience working in the SpaceX engineering department._ "

And yet Elon Musk had no experience in the field prior to founding SpaceX.

He even went to Russia to try to buy a refurbished ICBM before going down the path of hiring aerospace engineers and building rockets in-house.

Excellent documentary on Musk: <http://vimeo.com/38542529>

</comment><comment><USER12> It hasn't stalled, its just hard to quantify, it can't be strictly measured in press and consumer intelligibility.

Likewise, most businesses are not strictly innovative in a scientific/technological sense, merely in having a clever synthesis of preexisting tech that does something people will pay for.

There are a lot of innovative tech / engineering shops being created and or growing each year, but they're a bare fraction of the total number of businesses being created. (And all businesses have a web site these days, so clearly that's not tech ,,:-p )

The kicker is we're kinda already in an amazing future. We actually understand pretty well how much / little we truly know in most endeavors. Sadly, human psychology does get bored and demand ever more exotic novelty.

Being innovative in sci-tech and having a self sustaining business With _RECURRENT_ are not often happily wedded, and every successful fusion should be cause for celebration.

Likewise its actually really hard to evaluate what _IS_ innovative if you're not a domain expert. Etc etc etc

Usual caveat, I'm trying to fix numerical computing at wellposed, so I'm a bit overthinking about innovation always.

</comment><comment><USER13> I disagree with the premise of the article. Yes, there are a lot of people dropping out of college saying "Oh Zuckerberg did it, I should do it too!" without a sane business model. Yes, there are a zillon daily deals startups which will probably all go bankrupt in 6 months. Yes, there are a ton of social media startups that allow you to take a photo and share it for 10 seconds with all your friends. And there are definitely more of these startups than usual, due to the funding environment.

However, there are also many "serious" startups. Tesla, transforming the primary mode of transport for most Americans. SpaceX, reinvigorating space exploration. Palantir, integrating the world's data to save lives. There have, and always will be, these startups doing serious world-changing innovation.

I picture Silicon Valley as a funding pyramid. The best companies are at the top, and always get funding. Then, at the bottom of the pyramid are the daily deals startups. In a less hot funding environment, these companies wouldn't get funded. But in the current climate, a ton of companies at the bottom of the pyramid are getting funding. Since there are way more of these bogus startups than serious ones in the current climate, we just hear more stories about them.

<comment><USER14> >However, there are also many "serious" startups. Tesla, transforming the primary mode of transport for most Americans. SpaceX, reinvigorating space exploration. Palantir, integrating the world's data to save lives. There have, and always will be, these startups doing serious world-changing innovation.

Are any of those actually startups anymore? SpaceX has over 2000 employees. Palanir has over 400. Tesla had it's IPO in 2010.

They're just companies, they've all delivered products to market, and are(with the possible exception of Tesla, depending on their 2012 filings) making a profit.

<comment><USER15> "Once a startup, always a startup" is the rule of the day these days.

Makes me wonder how long HP would be considered a startup if they were born today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On the scale of innovation, it's important to note that a computer program will never be a flying car, or antigravity, or a cure for cancer. It won't be anything physical, by definition. For the most part the total output of any application can be specified as a sequence of pixel bitmaps, and the utility of that sequence is subjectively measured by the person interacting with it. Applications can't do any more than acquire data and generate bitmaps. I only say this to emphasize that it's important to set your expectations before getting "disappointed" in the state of software innovation.

The other thing about innovation in software is the need to distinguish between _application development_ as distinct from _computer science_. Writing an application is very different from writing an algorithm! Much of the "boring innovation" happening right now is about application development, not computer science. Once we accept this we can start making clearer calls about what kind of innovation we think is stagnating.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think is caused so much by fewer people doing truly interesting work as it is by a greater number of people doing fairly trivial projects.

In other words, it's not that resources that could have gone to "serious" projects are being allocated instead to easy projects. The author even says as much, different people are doing those jobs.

</comment><comment><USER18> The innovation in the past 5 years in tech dwarfs the past. Monsterix has a great list of the innovations that have been developed recently and complaining about the lack of innovation is sloth - a lack of willingness to get out and speak with the companies that are building non-linear tech.

<comment><USER19> Not sure what Monsterix is, but I have a feeling that innovation is "new way to bounce stuff on the screens" "new API for X", "new protocol for Z", etc. Those aren't innovations, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That there's a lack of real innovation might just be an illusion that is created by too much focus on stories about how much money this or that startup raised. Same way how if you watch news and read magazines, one might start to believe that the world is in a very sorry state.

</comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps Thiel, Arrington and the author are taking too much of a top down view of the issues.

To stick with Thiel's hyperbole, I think we don't have flying cars because we still haven't fixed the issues with the road bound ones. Its great to have grand aims at revolutionizing the world, but lets not forget the big impact something as small as 140 characters can have. There are third world countries where entire economies have grown out of the ability to text message. Only a few years ago we saw entire swaths of the Middle East get big quality of life improvements thanks to wall posts and tweets.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't think it has stalled. Its actually pretty healthy. Every day I see posts here of people working on greta projects. My own projects are actually pretty innovating (and challenging), so I can personally attest to it.

I do believe that people are now used to a constant supply of groundbreaking news from SV. So, even though we are working at a pretty good rate, theit POV will be skewed from that need to always have their mind blown by some awesome app. A lot of innovation happens under the hood and they never notice. Too bad, though.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nothing directed at the writer of this one single blog post, but who are these bloggers to be talking about innovation? They all use the same blogging platforms and write the same articles. And why have blog posts of this topic started to appear? Arrington writes something and all other blogging websites feel like they have to get a piece of the story trend pie and write a similar post, as well? I'm sorry but these are the kind of posts that make me shake my head.

</comment><comment><USER19> Personally, I'm looking into the possibility to work at SpaceX, exactly for such reasons. I feel like I can't do anything "remotely important" at any job I've found in the silicon valley, and i haven't done any innovation myself that i deem to be "really changing something that I believe in".

So I though, I might as well help a company that does just that, even if I'm not going to be the one designing the actual rockets.

</comment><comment><USER24> I find the most exciting innovation in software happening now is in computer vision and machine learning. To me, these counts as true innovations. Most internet technology however is just engineering with fairly obvious solutions. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not innovations if you're just pushing what's possible on the internet, but not pushing what's possible overall.

</comment><comment><USER25> _in order to push the innovation envelope, people must be working at, or at least have a deep knowledge of the current cutting edge of innovation._

I agree, and that's a full-time job that _has_ to be self-directed. Excellence is a nonlinear phenomenon. A person who excels in 10 hours of his time and subordinates in 30 isn't 25% as someone who gets to be full-time excellent, but possibly 1%.

I spent 6 months at Google, a company that has some awe-inspiring R&D "centers of excellence" but is essentially just a bank if you don't get to work in one. Now, I'm sick of ragging on Google because I think I've overdone that schtick. On the other hand, with the incredible wealth of talent it has got, it can do a lot better. It's the best a closed-allocation company can be, and it has amazing people. But my experience there is instructive on the mediocrity that closed allocation command-and-control creates. If you don't have worker autonomy, you won't get creativity or excellence or innovation.

Google remains awesome because the ~25% who get to be Real Googlers (they can, like Yegge, quit their projects and join better ones, because teams compete for them) have enough autonomy to do really good work and keep pulling the company, but if you're not a Real Googler, you're going to be working on 4th- Quadrant crap. (For the definition of "4th-Quadrant", go here: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth- quadra...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadrant- work/) .)

After that, I worked in a reputable (but diseased) NYC startup-- a VC darling-- with serious ethical problems at managerial levels (multiple people hired into the same leadership role; dishonesty about product direction used to keep people motivated). To my chagrin, the culture there was traditional MBA-style corporate bullshit: closed allocation, supernumerary people with fancy titles who didn't do much, extremely vicious politics (I resigned when asked to sign affadavits disparaging engineering old hands with too much equity).

The Valves and Githubs excepted, these "hip" tech startups are not _culturally_ innovative, and it's the prevalence of the old-style corporate culture that makes them all devolve into grey-goo mediocrity.

Subordination is a genocidal killer of innovation, and the cultures of these "hip" tech startups are often not much different from large corporations in culture, creativity, innovation, or ethics. For every Valve, there are 100 companies that claim to be "startups" but are just as hierarchical and command-oriented. The hierarchy isn't as deep with only 100 people, but it's every bit as dysfunctional.

If we want innovation out of these startups, we have to focus on culture. We have to stop funding culturally retarded people with MBAs just because they're "credible" and, instead, look for people who can lead very smart people (an extremely rare skill).

<comment><USER16> _> We have to stop funding culturally retarded people with MBAs just because they're "credible" and look for people who can lead very smart people (an extremely rare skill)._

With all due respect, you have to articulate better than that. I agree that it sucks that command-and-control types seem to be loved by capital as leaders of organizations. But isn't the real culprit here on the demand side? E.g a problem with the capitalists? How do you convince them that a) cultural innovation is a winning move and b) _you're_ the guy to get it done?

The other issue here is that it's a lot of moving parts. Presumably at a startup you're already innovating in at least one area. Now you're talking about innovating in an orthogonal area. If my experience as an engineer is any indication, introducing one new technology is somewhat risky, the risk for two sky-rockets, and at three you might as well not start the project.

Give a friendly audience the pitch!

<comment><USER25> "Culturally _retarded_ " wasn't intended for offense. Retarded means "delayed" or "behind the times" and I couldn't think of a better word. I am no fan of the colloquial use of "retarded" (making a slight on people who, through no fault of their own, have congenital cognitive problems) but that's not what I was going for.

 _How do you convince them that a) cultural innovation is a winning move and b) you're the guy to get it done?_

These VC darlings grow too fast and hire before they trust. That's their original sin. If you can't trust someone with his own time and effort (open allocation) then don't fucking hire that person.

<comment><USER26> If you are going to retain the ability to fire people, you are still subjecting them to hierarchy. Except now you have a narrower channel of communication--they can only ask: was I fired today or not?

And if you open more communication with the implied threat of firing, you are back to a traditional managerial relationship.

<comment><USER25> Well, I'm a fan of open allocation. People aren't beholden to one manager. They work for the company.

Two cases of firing that I see:

1\. Objectively unethical or toxic. Leakers, people who arrogate power in power vacuums, people who insult colleagues, people who break the law. Fire them. Don't wait a day. This is less than 1%.

2\. People who can't fit anywhere in the organization. You need to get rid of them, but you have time. They might be a solid "5" or "6", but they'll never be a "8". There's just no fit. Give them a generous severance and a good reference. Let them use the office and represent themselves as employed during the search. Treat them as alumni and leave them feeling good about the company.

3\. People who are not doing great where they are. Let them find a better fit (open allocation). If they don't have the initiative for that-- not everyone does-- see #2.

That's the right way to fire people. It's a serious and important function and it shouldn't be used as punishment. You fire because you have no other choice.

Then firing isn't about power. It's a necessary and unpleasant duty that keeps the company from falling to pieces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Frankly, it is extremely boring to read articles like this. The heading "Why ABC innovation has stalled" itself sounds quite artificial.

Here is how innovation seems unfolding itself lately (Both in Silicon valley and outside of it):

Early stages of 3D printing, cars that drive themselves, drones that are cheap and interesting, gestures which lend themselves to web, voice processing and response at higher level, interesting touch surfaces where the buttons grow out of the screen depending on software interface, banking and virtual currency to kick ass of the arcane and so on ...

Here is (probably) the problem of tech blogs apparently. You guys have gone too close to investor community, or have started believing in the hype machine too much. Open your eyes and report on start-ups outside of 'likes' and 'tweets' and 'pluses' (Not that those are not news).

Open your eyes, probably.

<comment><USER27> Down-vote Pandodaily? That's surprising.

<comment><USER7> No, I down-voted you.

The elephant in the room for the valley is that nothing is happening. Randomly select a startup from AngelList and tell me what you think of it. Is it creating something innovative or is it a new application for existing technology? And now we've exhausted permutations for social/sharing/tweet/feeds. It's old.

Yes interesting research areas exist. They always have. But what we're talking about here is the proportion of those, especially in the valley, to what the average startup is working on.

<comment><USER27> > Yes interesting areas exist. They always have.

Okay. So now search for start-ups involved around those interesting areas. Don't just down-vote generally on an article like this which borders on flame- bait.

On the other hand, I also accept your down-vote (it is your karma ultimately, not mine) but that doesn't change a thing. According to me it's just plain stupid to claim that innovation has stalled because one is unable to figure out 5 awesome start-ups from a crowd of 50,000 wannabes. Period.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


OpenGPT-2: We Replicated GPT-2 Because You Can Too - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@vanya_cohen/opengpt-2-we-replicated-gpt-2-because-you-can-too-45e34e6d36dc <comment><USER2> It sounds like all the drama OpenAI made about not releasing the model was all just marketing. $50,000 is nothing for a nation-state or even just a motivated third party. I had always assumed OpenAI had spent well into the 6 or even 7 figures to train the full model.

MSFT has sort of invested $1 billion into OpenAI so I guess it worked!

<comment><USER3> Before they release it, they need to prove to themselves it's safe (I'm speaking morally). I'm not sure why so many on HN seem to think it's the other way around, that you have to prove it's dangerous before withholding it. $500k for reproduction is peanuts for a nation state but quite a bit for many other groups who might be interested.

Even if it is entirely safe, it's still good to withhold it because it helps create a culture where people think about the safety of their projects before releasing them

<comment><USER4> There are two very different questions here: is it good to withhold, and is that sensible for _OpenAI_ to withhold? I think a lot of people on HN view restricting GPT as incoherent by OpenAI, where they might not for another group.

OpenAI's _raison d 'etre_ was democratizing access to AI tools, and preventing them from being abused by concentrated powers like governments. If replicating GPT-2 is trivial for state actors but prohibitive for hobbyists and other private citizens, it's creating the same issue Musk described OpenAI as setting out to oppose. Even the general idea of treating AI tools as hazardous-by-default goes a long way to validating the project's original critics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The cost of training the model from scratch using our code is about $50k."

Still a substantially steep curve for a bootstrapping startup. It's something I continually run into myself. I have somewhat of a weekend project trying to build a search engine but man ... the cost of just the SSDs and GPUs is daunting on a regular salary. As the complexity of these models grows, so does the barrier to entry for a regular joe like me; which is a shame I think. I know in the US it's fairly normal for a data scientist to pull 100k+ / year, but in the Netherlands salaries pretty much stall at 40k (and angel investment in IT/AI is at an all time low). More generally I fear this will become a bit of a sociotechnical issue if complex AI models will be out of reach for entire economies (especially for cases like language because not everyone speaks English and "minor" languages like those in EU countries are a massive market to explore, yet hard to get into).

<comment><USER6> And they're just "two masters students, with no prior experience in language modeling" with $50k lying around for training a huge model.

<comment><USER7> They mentioned they spent $500k (in research credits) on all the experiments to actually find the hyperparameters.

<comment><USER8> Where did you see that?

Also how do two masters students with no experience in NLP get $50-500k in compute credits? How do I get that deal?

<comment><USER7> It was in the article last night, they deleted it for some reason after my comment.

One of the authors has a peer reviewed NLP publication [1], the other has several publications in computer vision. I don't know how they got research credits from Google.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.13153](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.13153)

<comment><USER8> Well that is pretty dubious. That completely changes the metric of how much money and how difficult this costs. (And I definitely believe you because there's several other comments with that same number). Could be a typo? But I feel like that's something you'd say. Then again, these are masters students.

<comment><USER7> It's $50k per _training run_. Their main contribution has been finding the optimal hyperparameters, not described in the OpenAI paper. Obviously you need more than one training run to to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It may be high time to discuss what AI policy has actually done so far. From what I can tell, not much other than letting social scientists get in on the deep learning gravy train.

Meanwhile, misuses of ML are proliferating without limits, and 'AI policy' is apparently mostly used as a fig-leaf to collect good-will, marketing, and buy a seat at the table for future regulations. As usual, regulations will protect incumbents, so my as-usual cynical read is that OpenAI's policy interests are about protecting its own future interests. From that perspective, the entire GPT-2 stunt was highly effective.

Now depending on your outlook, that may be an argument that we need more people in policy, or fewer. Or different ones.

<comment><USER10> _Meanwhile, misuses of ML are proliferating without limits_

Are they? Where?

For all the hype I haven't seen any obvious abuses of AI. I've seen better speech recognition and a few other useful things. I've seen stuff that's wrong but ultimately kind of trivial like auto-generated porn with celebrity faces, but that's the worst stuff so far.

I haven't seen clear, unambiguous cases of abuse beyond that. I've seen a lot of _allegations_ that AI is being abused e.g. "Russian bots" but on investigation these stories usually evaporate.

If anything I've been kind of disappointed by AI so far. Amazing demo videos abound, but I'd guess 90% of the impact of AI in my life has been Google improving their already quite good services. Better translations, better search results etc. All very welcome but not really life changing.

<comment><USER11> > better search results

Funny you say that. I was recently searching for a e-scooter lighter than 10Kg and all Google could find was the max allowed weight of the person riding the thing (around 100-130kg). Not to mention that it didn't understand how to make a conjunction and show me light e-scooters with suspension. It's just matching keywords without understanding anything about the relations between them.

I am disappointed at the current quality of Google search, especially in shopping related queries where money is to be made. Instead of stuffing my pages with irrelevant 'personally' targeted ads and tracking my every move they should make an effort in that particular moment when I actually want to buy something and give me a good suggestion.

<comment><USER12> Coincidentally, this kind of "modelling the question" is what IBM's Watson is/was supposed to be uniquely good at. It seems like Google hasn't even really considered entering the same space. Maybe each query has too high a incremental cost to run for them to be profitable right now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's worth noting that, like other attempted replications, the perplexities of this model mostly aren't as good as GPT-2. Given that the title of the GPT-2 paper was "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners," I'd be interested in a lot more metrics before I'd believe GPT-2 has actually been replicated. Especially because every other time someone says this, metrics show otherwise. Until then, this is just a really big model.

<comment><USER14> I made the WikiText-2 and WikiText-103 datasets they compare against and held state of the art results on language modeling over PTB, WT-2, and WT-103 not too long ago.

OpenGPT-2's results are near equal to GPT-2's in zero-shot language model perplexity on multiple datasets [1].

The zero shot perplexity results are also exactly where we'd expect the 1.5 billion parameter to be, markedly better than OpenAI's 775M GPT-2 model[2] (the second largest model OpenAI trained) that they released in the last few days.

To me this is about as close a replication as you could expect, especially given OpenAI didn't release many of the exact training details. If OpenAI retrained the 1.5 billion parameter GPT-2 model I wouldn't be surprised to see the same variance in performance simply due to the random initialization of the parameters.

[1]: [https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/1*h1JoiQq9f1qOHS- rN4u57A.pn...](https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/1*h1JoiQq9f1qOHS-rN4u57A.png)

[2]: [https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Language-Models-are- Un...](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Language-Models-are-Unsupervised- Multitask-Learners-Radford- Wu/9405cc0d6169988371b2755e573cc28650d14dfe/figure/3)

<comment><USER13> That's true, but isn't the point of GPT-2 that it's a strong at many tasks? It did really well at a lot more than just the four perplexity measures reported in OP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's it take to actually run a model like this, hardware-wise? I've been toying around with a gpt2 discord bot ([https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/gpt2-discord](https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/gpt2-discord)) using just a CPU calculation, and already it takes up 2 GB RAM (and is slow obviously) on the 345M model. I might be able to get the 774M model running, but there's no way I can afford the full model, assuming linear RAM use. And that's just for CPU compute, I can't even begin to imagine how expensive GPU would be.

<comment><USER16> Inferencing on this model works fine on Google Colab which gives Tesla K80 GPU with access to 12GB of GPU RAM. You can buy a used K80 for probably about $850, but it's not really ideal for putting in a home computer because of the cooling requirements.

[ deleted reference to 2070 Super ]

<comment><USER7> Used K80 can be had for $350 [1] Not bad actually (it's probably as fast as 1080Ti, and has 24GB of memory).

[https://www.ebay.com/itm/NVIDIA-Tesla-K80-GDDR5-24GB-CUDA- PC...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/NVIDIA-Tesla-K80-GDDR5-24GB-CUDA-PCI-e-GPU- Computing-Accelerator-Card/193033951488)

<comment><USER17> K80 is 2 GPU chips with 12GB, so it's not always as good as one newer/larger GPU. Much more affordable though :)

<comment><USER7> If I remember correctly K80 memory is actually 24GB, not 2x12GB. This is a pretty important distinction in this context (training GPT-2).

Also, you can get at least 6 K80s for the price of a single RTX Titan (also 24GB). So it would be faster (I don't think RTX Titan is 6x faster than K80) and 6x more memory for the same price. It's a very good deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Twitter thread by a Research Scientist at OpenAI addressing OpenAI's policies in response to this discussion here: [https://twitter.com/Miles_Brundage/status/116495932263331840...](https://twitter.com/Miles_Brundage/status/1164959322633318400)

</comment><comment><USER19> Without context, this article reads like something generated by machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER7> They spent $500k replicating it. But sure, you can do it too /s

<comment><USER20> They used research credits, and even that aside, with their code and training tips, you can redo it for $50k on cloud instances or less on dedicated hardware + patience. And look at ImageNet training progress: you can train a near-SOTA ImageNet CNN in like a minute for $20-40 after a lot of optimization work. We've already seen a lot of improvements in LMs over the past 2 years... (For example, the main barrier to training GPT-2 is just the bloody memory use from the Transformers exploding at runtime, which pushes you into high-end hardware like cloud TPUs on GCP. Do Sparse Transformers fix that?)

<comment><USER7> Wait, how can I get to near SOTA on Imagenet in a minute (!) for $40?

<comment><USER20> OK, I exaggerated a little because I was recalling from memory: the old fast.ai approach actually takes <18 minutes ([https://www.fast.ai/2018/08/10/fastai-diu- imagenet/](https://www.fast.ai/2018/08/10/fastai-diu-imagenet/)). My bad. (I'm sure it's improved since then but I don't know how much.) I was also thinking of [https://myrtle.ai/how-to-train-your-resnet-8-bag-of- tricks/](https://myrtle.ai/how-to-train-your-resnet-8-bag-of-tricks/) which does CIFAR-10 in 26s but I'm not sure offhand what CIFAR-10's SOTAs look like so not sure how far away that is.

<comment><USER7> Actually this is still very good. Thanks for the links. I'll be timing some of these tricks tomorrow for my Imagenet experiments. By the way, I believe this is the current SOTA for Imagenet: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11946](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11946) (84/97%). CIFAR10 appears to be essentially solved (99%).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's fun to feed it the first paragraph of the Sokal affair paper:

Prompt:

 _There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post- Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal '' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method._

Completion:

 _Before one can explore these ``objective '' principles and procedures, one must do something important, namely, invent the objectivity -- or, more precisely, the objectivity-transcendent properties -- of the ``subjective'' functions of ``man" (as a species of ''objective'', or something-in-itself- independent, human, being). Since the 19th century, this has been done on a literal or phenomenological level, the metanarrative of psychoanalysis. However, the ultimate test of what constitutes an objective fact or structure is the statistical discovery of reliable facts or structures residing in the human mind or body. That is what the discipline of psychology is for. The distinction between the subjective and the objective is therefore necessary for the discipline of psychological science, which is by no means a waste of time, which is today a flourishing field of scientific inquiry, and which might contribute a great deal toward furnishing a genuinely complete theoretical understanding of human behavior and psychical experience.

In short, the philosophical implications of the post-Enlightenment philosophy of the sciences and of psychical psychology are -- when considered in the context of both human existence and human thought -- deeply unsatisfactory. Once we abandon the most basic postulate of scientific rationality -- that subjective knowledge and belief and behavior are not to be said to be existent but to be, not to be, knowable -- there is nothing left to suggest that the content of human knowledge and experience is dependent upon our conscious perceptions or personalities. We might describe that content as ineffable (it is irreducible to language, outside the experience of individual thinkers), or inconceivable (that which is not one's own consciousness, but is beyond the realm of conscious experience). In either case, there is no genuine need for an objective world, or, at least, no need for an objective foundation. In that sense, it is erroneous to assert that the scientific standpoint is a paradigm of objective reality; rather, it is the antidote to the paradigm of irreducible subjectivity and self-consciousness.

Unsupported by this analysis of the problem of scientific knowledge, the field of psychical science is often rejected by younger scholars, for whom the study of the human condition and its ineffable psychology is regarded as a particularly enticing but very unapproachable form of mysticism. They regard this section of the theory and practice of modern scientific inquiry as a kind of metaphysical theory-cracking rather than as a vehicle for the discovery of objective facts. Such a view can only be sustained on the basis of the strictest adherence to the doctrines of empiricism and fundamental materialism, respectively, and it is by no means fruitful for the real progress of science. Let me explain.

The residual emphasis on irreducible subjectivity in modern Western thought (and only by the residual emphasis) is a legacy of the metaphysical concept of objective reality which, to my mind, is still embraced by the cognitivist movement of the 20th century. It is an unfortunate legacy. Irreducible subjectivity and subjectivity-dependent, subjective perceptions were at the root of the metaphysics of Buddhism, and these beliefs now constitute the dominant conception of reality in contemporary Western philosophy, particularly Kantian, Descartesian, and Hegelian thought, which are each deeply indebted to Aristotelian theories of subjectivity.

While both these views of reality are patently absurd, and since the scientific revolutionary of the middle 19th century was able to disregard or repudiate them, the followers of Kant and Descartes were able to maintain that there is no need for a foundation for the science of knowledge. They could do this because they held to a primitive, problematic conception of objectivity, based on the notion of an objective, external world, in which human consciousness, thus independent of any particular body, mind, or culture, was inchoate, mutable, and subject to change or speculation. There was therefore no need to search for a theory of experience. Science and experience were simply different approaches, of which each was as good as the other, and they both..._

</comment><comment><USER21> Prompt:

 _The jig is up. And what now? Where do we go from here?_

Completion:

 _Where Do We Go From Here: In the aftermath of the fall of the German Republican party, we now have a significant degree of instability across the earth's systems of government and finance. The almost complete collapse of systemic forces in the Eurozone and limited success at stabilizing the system means the question is not if but when, what do we do next?

The answer is simple. We must move beyond the localized, bubble-like, and short-termist "get involved," tactic of getting into the scene and trying to control it in some way. We have to come up with a way of shifting the socio- political power in the world, the prime place for transformation is worldwide at the supra-system level and not just the economy and finance. We must cast out the old dominated system, of which we have been just a part and recognize that we need a new dominant system that serves human interests, and the meta- level global system must serve human interests.

The fact that the global status quo is collapsing of its own weight shows us that the system is structured in such a way that the group of big players who have dominated and still dominate, are in ever-decreasing danger of losing both power and integrity.

The question now is, how? How do we avoid degeneration into chaos and conflict when the anarchic nature of the system leads inevitably to greater and greater competition among and frustration and anger in the younger generations?

This is a society, this is a planet and we live in the first global century of human history, which the young will pass from generation to generation in the next twenty years, or perhaps not. When we see the events of the last weeks and days, you can just imagine what will happen to this planet, to this planet and human society in the century ahead, and you can just imagine what the future will bring to this and subsequent generations.

When history describes the past, it sees the collapse of an old political establishment, of the traditional hierarchies of power, of society, of economics and finance. It sees a collapse in the old order of power and in the equilibrium it has created, which was grounded in constant growing jobs and the prosperity it produced. We are in the middle of a permanent expansion of capitalism, which also creates ever-growing wealth and prosperity for a small population of wealthy earners, while social polarization and inequality increase and older people depend on each other more and more desperately.

The forward and downward momentum of all these forces has created a situation in which there is almost no limit to the volume of the day to day, or minute to minute production and consumption, and in which there is no single concern about the future of the planet Earth. We have become so insatiable, in need, addicted to this ever increasing appetite for consumer goods, that we destroy the planet with it.

You see this just from what we feed our children, the choices we make, and the products we consume. You see it in our greedy attempts to buy as much as we can, even if it leads to ecological ruin. You see it in our drive to consume new and ever more lavish luxury products, materials, tools, devices, insatiable lifestyles, modern-day imperialism, racism, cynicism, competition, greed, consumerism, hubris, and endless pursuit of personal ambitions and leisure.

See how when push comes to shove, the social and economic growth created by the continued expansion of capitalism is now a life or death matter. See how the political establishment has failed us, all of us, and how we turned in desperation to another self-serving-self-protective-petty, self-interested- philistine mass-mediator, in the form of Mr. Romney, in order to maintain the old sources of power, to make the old social structures fit to serve human needs and the system could be kept going.

And now he has packed his bags and wants to leave, so there we are, stuck here with those of us who have found a way to provide for ourselves and live peacefully and prosperously, without the brutality and violence visited on us by politicians and corrupted systems. That is, unless we fix these broken systems and deliver an alternative based on human needs and human compassion.

How do we do it? How do we get there? Stay tuned and we'll let you know.<|endoftext|>This exciting book is an overview of a phenomenon that started in the 1970's, and became the most spectacular of all the urban myths. It combines all things the paranormal in this feature length book, from scientists to aliens to experimental reports.

William Kean is an astronomer working for NASA. One evening he is on his way to a remote overlook on a Martian hill. Suddenly, he is teleported to the top of a fifty story building, two thousand feet in the air. The building_

<comment><USER10> The sudden lurch into paranormal book review at the end is interesting. I guess it's because it went down the path of, _" How do we do it? How do we get there? Stay tuned and we'll let you know."_ ... that last sentence is probably very likely to occur in conspiracy theory/paranormal/UFO texts.

It's very interesting that the model generated a basically coherent speech that could have come from any left-wing event or politician, given nothing more than "things are bad, what next" as a starting point. GPT-2 has correctly learned that Marxist thought is based on a form of catastrophism, as anyone who has read Marx will confirm.

It's going to be fascinating to see how people use this. My guess is "that sounds like an AI wrote it" will become an insult meaning predictable and content-free.

Even more fun will be putting the model into reverse and calculating a predictability score - if given the starting point of a real human written speech, GPT-2 rates each next word as highly likely, the overall speech can be said to be only N% insightful, where N is an actual scientifically defined measurement.

Many people seem to adopt dystopian catastrophism about AI but I feel somewhat optimistic. In the same way that automated spelling and grammar checkers can help people write better, a GPT-2 run in reverse could help people write clearer prose that gets to the point quicker, or perhaps even force people to accept when they don't really have anything new to say. If a speaker doesn't use it then someone in their audience will, after all.

<comment><USER21> Notice that "<|endoftext|>" delimiter. A lot of the samples I generated had that, and would then rapidly switch into a whole different tone or style. Maybe there was an error in their training where they somehow didn't separate training samples properly? I don't know enough about machine learning to say.

I also find it interesting that this sample got -4 points where the Sokal affair sample I posted got +4 points.

I imagine it has more to do with the emotions each sample evokes in various hackernews readers. Could it be that hackernews readers are likely to have a distaste for postcolonialism, but are likely to be fans of materialist rationalism? I think so, based on years of reading their comments :)

<comment><USER22> On the <|endoftext|>: GPT-2 and this model were trained by sampling fixed- length segments of text from a set of web pages. So if the sample happens to start near the end of one page then it will fill in the rest of the length with the beginning of another page. The model learns to do the same. TalkToTransformer.com hides this by not showing what comes after the <|endoftext|> token.

<comment><USER21> That explains why sometimes the talktotransformer samples are so short!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I skimmed the article and stated reading the last paragraph to get an idea of what it was about. I was v confused..</comment>


Ask HN: Negative Signaling with Pioneer.app Accelerator - <AUTHOR> Taking a quick look at pioneer.app remote  accelerator. They offer a small reward package to the winners, including a trip to SV.
https://pioneer.app/offer
BUT, they now discuss an optional funding package of $50K-$100K for 5%. The problem of course is that some winners might not get funded. Which is a pretty horrible situation to be in. You try to raise, but your accelerator is not keen.
Any thoughts ?! <comment><USER2> Yes, seems like it would have that problem. I know YC is very careful about that, for example they participate in every YC company's series A, and I think I read somewhere it's to avoid that signalling risk</comment>


Want 1.5TB of RAM in Your PC? It Will Cost You - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/want-1-5tb-of-ram-in-your-pc-it-will-cost-you/ <comment><USER2> If you're an enterprise that needs a single CPU server with 1.5TB of RAM (to run SAP HANA or some other in-memory DB most likely) then the RAM cost, or really the entire hardware cost, is probably the smallest line item in the entire business case, more or less a rounding error. The author seems to be approaching this from the standpoint of someone building a home rig for some reason.

<comment><USER3> I have been buying 1Tb+ servers for years now, most recently to run Redis. $50k for a box is nothing when you consider we used to spend 10-20x that on Sun or SGI boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ___I 've done some shopping around, and the best pricing I can find puts these 128GB RAM at about $1,500.

Each. Yes, each.

Some back of the envelope math -- or math in your head if you are good at that sort of thing -- put the price of 1.5TB of RAM at a cool $18,000._ __

If my memory serves me well, I routinely bought 1Mb RAM modules for 5.500 Spanish pesetas (33 Euro). This was around 1987-1990 I believe. If my math is right, that would be more than 4 million Euro for 128GB RAM.

<comment><USER5> In 1993, one of my first tasks in a new job as a sysadmin was to install 256MB of RAM into a DEC Alpha 3000/500\. I remember the RAM cost on the order of $20k... I don't remember the exact price, but I remember thinking that the RAM was worth more than I was, and I'd better not screw it up.

<comment><USER6> graph of "Historical Cost of Computer Memory and Storage", [https://jcmit.net/mem2015.htm](https://jcmit.net/mem2015.htm) . Memory data at [https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm](https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm) .

1994 prices are US$30.0/MB or $8K for 256MB of PC-grade memory. Looks like the DEC machine used 200-pin SIMMs, says [https://www.memoryx.com/ms15da.html](https://www.memoryx.com/ms15da.html) (listing 64MB for $200). Don't know how that compares.

BTW, $400 for a DEC Alpha 3000/500 at [https://www.ebay.com/itm/DEC-DIGITAL- ALPHA-SERVER-3000-500-P...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/DEC-DIGITAL-ALPHA- SERVER-3000-500-PE50A-A9-54-21149-02/173871227547) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fun fact, it gets even more expensive (per GB) when you want to add RAM over 1.5TB, because Intel will crank up the cpu price just for higher ram support. Off the top of my head, the same cpu accepting 4TB was twice the price of the 1.5TB version, going at around $18000.

AMD's new epyc supports 4TB without artificial price increase, IMO some healthy competition for the server market.

<comment><USER8> Yeah people who need large RAM to compute will be buying lots of AMD.

I'd like to see how the flash-as-RAM devices work out for some of these apps, i.e. is it purely single-threaded random access or can it be batched/cached?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it just me, or is it becoming too commonplace for an article to have a video attached to it that is vaguely related? The video attached to this article is how to upgrade the mac mini to 32GB of ram. Interesting, but just left of adjacent in terms of how it's related to this article.

<comment> safeplanet-fesa I have an even broader question: why do articles talking about some subject, have a random image representing the subject attached? For example, if an article talks about coffee, there will be a picture of a random cup of coffee or a random coffee tree field. I have never understood the point of it, but this has always existed in all forms of journalism.

<comment><USER10> For the print edition, the image is there to catch the eye of people that are interested in the general topic as they scan through the publication to determine what they want to read. I suspect it's mostly vestigial for the one- article-per-webpage digital edition, but it still helps convey some branding in the particular choice and style of image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r I want to know why ECC RAM isn't more common. With the amount of RAM going into today's computers, it's insane not to protect it.

<comment><USER11> It's a market segmentation issue for Intel, which AMD has started undermining but has not yet frontally attacked - perhaps they still have plans to (ab)use it themselves.

<comment> mark-r ECC is exactly why my last system build was a Ryzen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> tldr: 1.5TB costs $18,000

That's only about three times more expensive than if you'd extrapolate from regularly sized DIMM modules.

</comment><comment><USER13> While each node of a server farm of these can be relatively cheap by enterprise budgets, an entire cluster of these machines is not (at $200k+ that's the budget for an FTE, after all). Which is why I'd want to check if an Optane drive could be a strong consideration to shave some costs off for a reasonable trade-off in performance. Not sure if 10+ TB of Optane is viable enough to be at least an order of magnitude larger than the RAM capacity.

Also, 1.5 TB RAM became somewhat commonplace around 2014-ish. LinkedIn had to have Dell custom build them a 1 TB RAM machine around 2009. So 10 years later for the same build to be passé is fully reasonable when a lot of the market is doing massive or very latency sensitive graph calculations that won't accept the variances of distributed algorithms.

<comment><USER14> Last I checked Optane still cost more than RAM up to about 2 TB/server (dimms or drives). It does scale significantly higher in drive form though.

<comment><USER13> Optane is at $5k for a 1.5 TB drive while the OP quotes $18k for 1.5 TB of RAM. [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/memory- stor...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/memory- storage/solid-state-drives/data-center-ssds/optane-dc-ssd-series/optane- dc-p4800x-series.html)

Being able to reach 12 TB+ with something like Optane is much more likely than with RDIMMs though, and memory latencies would probably get insane enough that Optane would start looking viable anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _" It will cost you"_

Well, less than any other time in history. Not sure I get the point here.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a use case where persistent memory really shines. Its about 10x slower but you can get 1.5TB or it for less than $10,000. You don't have to use the persistence - you can treat it as RAM.

<comment><USER17> with VROC or the Threadripper equivalent NVME CPU RAID, you can get 7Gbps read speed from a RAID5. Thats DDR2 speed.

Unless you truly need DDR4 speeds, I would think you would be better off for your money using CPU Raid and NVME. More drives, more speed. One guy used 8 drives and got 28Gbps.

[https://i.imgur.com/AuCWq3r.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/AuCWq3r.jpg)

<comment><USER18> The throughput is amazing. The screenshot shows 28,375 MB/s — the capital B typically indicates Bytes whereas a lowercase b indicates bits, so your Gb/s translation is a little confusing. The latency is still much higher than main memory or Optane, but that might be fine for many applications.

<comment><USER17> youre right, I didnt look closely at the buttons, I just assumed bits based on the all caps used all over the interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dis-sys in case you don't have $18,000 to buy those fancy brand new DDR4 RAM -

second hand 64GB DDR3 ECC REG RAM is about $100 each, a dual socket c602 motherboard such as my Z9PE-D16 has 16 memory slots, having 16 x 64GB = 1TB RAM in such a workstation costs you $1,600.

bargain!

<comment><USER19> Does the Z9PE-D16 actually support 64gb DIMMs though? ASUS claims it only supports 32gb for a total of 512gb, but that could easily be because they didn't update their marketing material rather than a technical limitation.

<comment> dis-sys my understanding is that memory controllers are in the processors, motherboard just provide the slots, it shouldn't be a limiting factor to stop you using 64GB DIMMs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 1.5TB ram is grand and all, but the high end dell r9xx servers take a full 6 or 12TB for full load... fun note, the Xeon sp M models support the full ram...

<comment><USER21> Supermicro also has boards for up to 12TB DDR4... Even workstation boards that support 4TB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just want to know why anyone will personally need 1.5TB of ram in their personal PC today. I'm not saying that 128gb is all we need. I'm sure in the future, we might all have 32TB in our future portal device. But what sort of work load or app could you possibly need 1.5TB of ram for?

On my personal desktop right now. I have 20gb of ram and over 250tabs open on Firefox, spotify, VCode, Postgresql, pgadmin, multiple evice & fbreaders, rabbitMQ, some nodejs servers, 2 linux containers, 1 docker container, mysql server, 10+ xterm sessions, a few screen sessions and I'm using 14Gb.

<comment><USER23> I would love it for development (I work from home on personal HW) - multi- socket NUMA machines behave differently enough that being able to continually see how in-development software versions behave. And I just find it less productive / more painful to do detailed performance work remotely. Latency is one part, added time due to having to sync up code / build another, but there's more that I can't really pinpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems the price hasn't come down much since 2015 ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9582497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9582497))

</comment><comment><USER25> From the experience with servers, having all DIMM slots populated(usually over two-thirds) clocks down the memory frequencies. Not something that you want for the maximum performance.

Its unclear what is this article about, yes large modules are expensive, but in DDR3 era 128gb dimms did not exist. You're paying the early adopter tax. If you want to get huge-ram systems for cheap, there are a lot of used 4-cpu servers, the whole system can be assembled for under $5k.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you're going to flip over the cost of RAM at the high end then you don't want to hear about all the expensive proprietary stuff that clearly only costs pennies to make. I'm talking the special torque wrenches to remove motherboards or other chassis stuff.

It's like Apples new Mac Pro and display. Those prices are just dialed that way to keep them out of home offices. It's infuriating, yes, but prevalent.

</comment><comment><USER27> I decided to put 32 GB of Ram in my home desktop some months back. I knew I didn't need that much, but I figured macOS (it's a Hackintosh) would use it for file caching or some such.

To my disappointment, it goes completely unused more often than not. According to Activity Monitor, I currently have around 7 gb just sitting idle.

<comment><USER28> Does Activity Monitor report the page cache/UBC size? Most of the time, basically all of the memory I'm not using directly is filled with page cache. The other big thing large memory typically does for me is delay GC in the JVM.

Typically the only time I use enough memory that my working files don't fit in the page cache along with the application memory, is when I build Android.

It's possible you just don't have that much on your disk that you use.

<comment><USER27> As of right now, 5.2 GB of RAM are being used for "Cached Files" according to Activity Monitor (still 25/32 GB in use overall).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I had a PC with 32mb back in 1997 when 16mb was he norm. Felt pretty nice. Now, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've not owned one of those mini-macs. Was a bit surprised how it was put together from a servicing perspective. Way too much work to do something as simple as replacing the RAM, which I guess is what the intent was. I guess I should be more surprised it was not soldered to the mainboard.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hardware is dirt cheap today. 256GB RAM fits into normal high end workstation.

<comment><USER19> The 2011 Mac Pro sitting under my desk has 128gb of RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can't get enough to keep Android Studio happy.</comment>


Halt and Catch Fire - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series) <comment><USER2> If you were put off by the first few eps of this show – or in my case, the first 20 minutes – and abandoned it, please reconsider. It's one of the best shows I've ever seen about business, creativity, working in a team, and of course, the computer industry. Season 1 takes some time to get going, but it's well worth the effort.

Fans of books like The Soul of a New Machine and Dealers of Lightning will find a lot to like here. Yes, it's a little unbelievable that the same small group of people somehow get involved in every computer revolution in a decade, but no more so than Don Draper apparently writing every good ad in the 60s and 70s. And the fact that the characters are drawn as real people rather than caricatures is a sign of the show's maturity and great writing.

<comment><USER3> My experience too. I started it once and didn't continue past the first few eps. Years later I was casting about, looking for something to watch and decided to give it another go. Now I consider it in my top 5 shows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of my all time favorite shows. Very underrated in my opinion. Also the first season is based in my hometown so that is neat. There is very much a silicon prairie culture in North Texas that doesn't get talked about too much.

Texas Instruments

HP (formerly EDS)

Dell (formerly Perot Systems)

Raytheon

id Software

Lockheed Martin

Bell Helicopter

Match.com and Hotels.com

RealPage

I know I'm missing a bunch others

</comment><comment><USER5> HCF is really good, but you need to go into it with the correct mindset. It is NOT a documentary — it's more like a modern film student's imagination of what things might have been like back then, loosely based on the facts. For example, they make references to things like a BBS being a "social network", which is not the correct term to use for things in that time period.

It is a very good and entertaining show, but be warned: if you're the type of person who was bothered that type of things they did in CSI was not "real science" or technically accurate, you may be bothered by this as well. TV shows are meant to be entertaining and convey an overall story and concept.

<comment><USER6> I remember the term social network being used in the BBS era. Sure, maybe it wasn't called like that all the time, but it's not a term from the 2010s either?

<comment><USER5> The BBS era (and the setting of HCF) was in the 1980s and 1990s. The term "social media" was first used in 1997 as a reference to AOL. What we call a "social network" today as a concept simply didn't exist back then. You can say a BBS was sort of like a social network, but that is retroactively applying a label that just didn't exist at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I loved this show. You can watch purely for the opportunity to drool at Lee Pace even if for no other reason, and there are PLENTY of other reasons. It's a great story and gives a very insider look at the early days of the commercial web, online gaming, the PC, etc. etc. . . . Deals very well with sexism in the industry without being hectoring about it. And did I mention Lee Pace? I think I might have . . .

</comment><comment><USER8> Truly a great show. As mentioned, one of the inciting incidents takes place in the first episode. Although it's a bit much and makes you want to hit stop. I promise it's worth it. It's like a Forrest Gump of the tech industry and tackles so many current issues that we are still dealing with along the way.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is one of my all-time favorite shows. I am so glad I found someone recommending it about a year ago. If you are on the fence give it a go, you won't be disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a great show, thought indeed it takes a few episodes to find its footing. If you can suspend your disbelief a little about the liberties taken for the sake of storytelling, you will find it a compelling drama.

It should be noted that it has a proper ending, it doesn't simply come to an abrupt stop due to cancellation.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hadn't heard of it! In the UK it seems to be available on Amazon Prime and I will give it a try

</comment><comment><USER12> Just watched the trailer for season 1.

Whoever posted this has my eternal gratitude! That show was not on my radar before. Fingers crossed.

Any other suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER13> Excellent show. Highly satisfying ending.

</comment><comment><USER14> Amazing show. I need to rewatch it ASAP

</comment><comment><USER15> This was so good and it just got better for every episode and every season.

</comment><comment><USER16> HCF is such a good show, I highly recommend it.</comment>


Amazing libraries from around the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/12/05/amazing_libraries_from_around_the_world_in_the_book_reflections_libraries.html

<comment><USER3> Here are two more (from the US) that I've always thought were especially impressive:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisel_Library#mediaviewer/File...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisel_Library#mediaviewer/File:Geisel- Library.jpg)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_Building#media...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_Building#mediaviewer/File:LOC_Main_Reading_Room_Highsmith.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER4> Gorgeous. I'll throw in mentions for two more, both in London - <USER2> Library and the Reading Room at the British Museum.

<comment><USER3> Wow. I'm sure it's not everyone's taste, but I think the Peckham is great. I hadn't heard of it before.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Next Step for Monetizing our Site - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN: I'd apprehiate some feedback on taking our site in a new direction.
http://www.ecalc.com
We have a great online scientific calculator called eCalc (been around for about 1 year).  We have a steady amount of users each day (around 10k) and recently released a new version of the calculator with a downloadable version for Windows and Mac ($15).
However, the conversion of the download product is very low and most people are not downloading the product from our site at all, instead they just use the free online version (but who wouldn't right?)
We'd like to make a monetization model from this product.
1.) Should we handicap the online version with a nag screen to encourage downloads?
2.) Should we try to sell ads on the site(note: average user is on page for 5-6minutes)
3.) Should we create a subscription model for say ($10 a year to use the calculator).
4.) Lower the price of the product to say $5
5.) Add more features (graphing, variables, sharing)
Any advice is much apprehiated... <comment><USER2> Before understanding the best option, you should examine your user base a little more.

10K a day sure, but what's the breakdown? Do you have 2K that visit the site 5 times a day, every day? That lends itself well to the subscription model. Are most of your visitors in and outs from google, with no recurring vistis? Ads might be the better option here. Are most of your visits coming from .edu domains? There may be an opportunity for school sponsorship here. Etc, etc.

You need to fit your monetization model to your particular user base.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great information. Does Google Analytics break down if they are coming from .edu domains or do I need more powerful analytic tools? Thanks

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure to be honest. I think it may. You're basically looking at a reverse DNS lookup, and that's not exactly accurate, but might put you on the right path.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe throttle the number of advanced functins or calculations unregistered users are allowed to do per day (or session, or other time period) and have a countdown/tracker displaying the number they have remaining along with a link to register.

Buy the desktop version, get unlimited access to the web version.

Put an identifier cookie on their machine and display the number of calculations performed over all time along with a link to the purchase. You know, guilt.

Maybe have a few of the more esoteric but ridiculously useful functions disabled and only enabled either in the pro or just by viewing a nag screen - click sin and get a popup (the first time this session only) that says "We're glad you like this, hey there's a free version). Only nag them a very small percentage of the time, but every now and then nudge them a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonderful Ideas... I'm thinking of trying just a nag screen to start that shows "buyNow", "free trial", and "continue using online"... If people still don't purchase it, then I will have to punish them more....

<comment><USER4> I suspect some users might prefer a paid advanced version online instead of having to download a desktop app. You could either try a monthly subscription of $1 or a one time fee the same as your downloaded version.

To see which wording of "BuyNow" or "free trail" etc works best you should do some A/B testing using something like Google Web Optimizer. Hopefully it will speed up the process of finding the correct wording/strategy/layout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As you've said, why pay, when you can use the free version on-line? You have to give them something for their money. You have to differentiate between the free version and the one they pay for.

Graphing is one option, but you'll need to think of more. There's also the problem of people paying, downloading, and then giving it away to others. Do you not worry about this? Or do you somehow "lock" the download to that user. Be very, very careful about preventing someone for using something they paid for. If their machine breaks and they get a new one, with the program still work? How can they move it?

And so on.

The real point is that people will only pay if they get something in return. Think carefully about what that might be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, these are all good points. I really want to find a way to keep the online version for free. The advantage of the download (desktop version) is that users can run in a borderless window with six color schemes and the ability to close the side palette.

I'm sure there are many students in poor countries that enjoy having a nice powerful online calculator that is easy to use, but nice is not a good business model.

We don't have a good way to prevent pirating and my thinking was that even top products like Adobe get cracked pretty quickly and distributed (so I figured it was a lost cause...)

Anyway, we have plenty of great ideas for additional features that we can add into the palette. Maybe we make a "pro version" that has these extras...

<comment><USER6> Isn't the $15 download already the "pro" version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, maybe we need the "Super Pro" that includes Graphing and other cool features. Or take away some online features and wrap them into the "Pro Only" package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> \- Analyze what calculations your users are doing and serve related ads. Example, for someone doing compounding interest 12 times, you show books related to investments. Or someone using some mathematician work, a link to his biography book;

\- Contact a company and ask if they want to sponsor a contest. The first 5 users to complete some math problems will earn whatever the company is offering (essentially that's an advertising campaign for the company);

\- Run a contest between your users. They pay 5 bucks to enter, and the winner gets the money (after your share ;). A tournament perhaps?;

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like some great geek stuff... thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are already graphing sites out there, but they're more data oriented than calculation oriented (not sure if that makes sense). But basically if you could hook the calc up to a graph and make them really easy to create and share you would be able to get some virality. If you had a ton of graphs out on the web with ads on them you (like millions of them) you could make some money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great Idea. InstaCalc.com has this sort of thing for sharing spreadsheet like calculations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seriously, if you have that much traffic, just use adsense.

And kill your downloadable product - it serves no purpose business-wise except to tempt you to take steps that will reduce your traffic and by extension your ad revenues.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've tried using Adsense and the payout is really bad. I can't post specific's but selling one calculator a day is a lot more revenue that any adsense we've seen.

I'm thinking that the word "calculator" may be too generic for adsense and so we are SOL in seeing that as a revenue stream...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> iPhone app?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a valid idea - though there are already a ton of calculators on the iPhone store and so we'd be competing against a saturated marketplace. One reason we did this project was the fact that most online calculators have terrible user interfaces and don't support things like complex numbers, or a traditional stack.

<comment><USER6> Just because there's a ton, doesn't mean its saturated. Moreover, do the owners of those apps have the ability to direct 10k users daily towards downloading their app? I would seriously look into it. Same with Android. Its silly to dismiss the iphone just because there are competitors. You can kick their ass even though they were first.

Edit: I should also add, the iPhone/mobile apps would likely far outstrip the sales of the $15 download, because people are used to buying iPhone apps, and Apple has made it much easier than buying from you. I would even suggest reversing the flow, so to speak, and talk about how iPhone users can find a free version online from their home or work computers whenever they want.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. We created this calculator using just JS and CSS so it should be really simple to port to the new Pre, which is our plan. However, our background is not in programming so starting up iPhone programming might be a bit of a trip...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> can try going for affiliate links for graphic calculators, but I don't think it'll monetize that well

<comment><AUTHOR> We tried creating a calculator store and linking to Amazon, but the conversion is pretty bad there as well. If people are looking for an online calculator they don't real want a handheld... Thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment>


Should Dropbox & Co be Killed? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rootshell.be/2011/04/25/should-dropbox-co-be-killed/

<comment><USER2> I think you are over-reacting. Regardless of if it is in the TOS, Dropbox and every other company on American soil has to follow the rules set forth in the new TOS. If you want to ensure privacy of files stored on Dropbox I suggest you encrypt them with Truecrypt, or Keypass. Both tools work well with Dropbox. I for one would not suggest leaving my encryption implementation, key management and so forth to an unsupervised third party anyway!</comment>


Bitbucket now lets teams organize repositories into projects - <AUTHOR> https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/projects-792497956.html <comment><USER2> This is great! I really love that Bitbucket is focusing on important stuff and not things like displaying GeoJSON and IPython Notebooks!

<comment><USER3> We try to encourage others to do those sorts of features via add-ons ([http://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/12/29/file-viewer-for- bitbuck...](http://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/12/29/file-viewer-for-bitbucket/)).

<comment><USER2> And this is the proper way of doing things in 2016! Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Show IN: Routable – Reverse Proxy as a Service – Starting 0$/month - <AUTHOR> https://routable.launchaco.com/ <comment><USER2> You have some grammar issues on your site that you may want to check on.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your secrets to growing your side project? - <AUTHOR> Hey all! I recently started working on a little side project, and its jumped to 35 users! So, I wanted to see what the wise folks of HN do to keep their project growing, in any capacity or using any metric they see fit! <comment><USER2> My key recommendation is to think in terms of building an audience, rather than marketing your product. Who are the people interested in buying your product? Create a community around the content that appeals to these prospective customers. Provide genuine value.

Once you establish yourself as an authority in that field, or at least someone who can reliably provide useful advice, selling your product becomes significantly easier. In some cases, people will even want to give you money just to support what you do.

If you sell a product or service for, say, wedding photographers, create a blog that covers topics relevant and radically useful to this particular niche of photographers. Perhaps make a YouTube channel on the topic, hang out in the forums and groups where wedding photographers are, leverage social media, etc.

Find out what they need and satisfy that need, not just with your product but with your content as well.

And how do you aggregate/consolidate your efforts through various channels? Mailing list. Nothing beats email.

Make sure you collect emails from day one and keep your list warm by providing great content regularly to those who subscribe.

Occasionally, you'll drop in a soft sale and special discounts for your loyal subscribers. You'll be surprised at how many will buy from you because they know who you are and trust you on the subject manner.

There are of course paid strategies if you have the budget, but I would first focus on organic audience building.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Side project checklist?

[https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/marketing- checklist/](https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/marketing-checklist/)

<comment><USER4> There were two discussions when this came out, oddly with the same number of comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002079) (Aug 2017, 68 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902) (Aug 2017, 68 comments)

A list I compiled of 4 HN user authored books on marketing and their launch discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14041248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14041248)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Posting your project on HN can help, but I think you already know that.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> By the way, you can checkout my little corner of the web here: [https://learnsearch.xyz/](https://learnsearch.xyz/)

<comment><USER6> Your site loads nothing with JavaScript disabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, good point. I should circle back and fix that

<comment><USER7> You are asking the secrets to growing your side project while answering to a post about "make it work without javascript". Priorities. There will be this "small" population that browse the web with js disabled (I don't necessarily blame them) but don't focus your time on them for now at least. Grow this project with everyone else and if someday you get big enough to care, then care about this elite group. I say this as someone who hates too much js bloat on sites but hey, it is about market and growth. So don't get your priorities mixed up in the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Based on our experience, once you finished the MVP, you should focus on SEO, HN can drive some traffic, but it won't last long. Good Luck!

<comment><USER9> I want to tell you, our network are blocked totally by China government. I cant use VPN now, so I can't login Gtalk. I tried to sent email, but I'm not sure you'll receive it, So i leave message here.

Most important, I don't know, how long will it continue. So sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Facebook Ads with job title targeting.</comment>


Introduction to the DWARF Debugging Format (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://dwarfstd.org/doc/Debugging%20using%20DWARF-2012.pdf <comment><USER2> For me, dwarf's state machine debug encoding was a direct inspiration for my work on the Android Dalvik dex debug data, which I made sure to recognize in its documentation:

[https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/dex- format.ht...](https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/dex-format.html)

Encoding the dex debug data this way meant we could keep all the debug symbols on our early devices with limited storage, which helped a lot during 1.0 development.

I always thought people in our industry should loudly shout out their references more. I'm glad I did.</comment>


Palm introduces Palm Pre Plus: 16GB, coming to Verizon on January 25th - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/07/palm-introduces-palm-pre-plus-16gb-coming-to-verizon-on-januar/

<comment><USER2> I don't live anywhere near the US and I really really wish Palm would actually release some form of the Palm Pre where I live. It's been... what, a year since it was first launched and still no version for the South East Asian market.</comment>


U.S. Inquiry Finds Toyota Electronics Not at Fault - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/business/09auto.html

<comment><USER2> I feel vindicated, I must admit: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169952></comment>


Ask HN: Our first employee decided to leave. What should we ask him? - <AUTHOR> Our first employee decided to leave the company to keep pursuing his studies. We want to learn the most from his decision. What questions would you ask him? What do we have to keep in mind until his last day ?<p>Thanks ! <comment><USER2> I would ask the following 1)what lead him to the decision of going back to pursue his studies. I 2)What was his over all experience at your company 3)What he liked what he disliked. 4)What could you improve upon. 5)Ask about the quality of training and mentorship he received. 6)Ask about how he feels about your product or service. 7)Ask about his experience with co workers and management.

Depending on his position ensure that all his files are saved on a server for you to access after he goes. If he is working on any projects be sure to get a status update on where he is are and what needs to be done. As for his last day be sure to get any company issued property back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ! That's a nice start.

He came to learn and I'd love to show him somehow all he learned. It's a lot and sometimes it's hard to explain it without perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ask him to create a detailed transition document for anyone else taking over his projects. List out any helpful tools, tricks, processes to get the job done.

Assuming that you need to back-fill this position, it might be worth asking him a professional referral. Who do you know that would be an ideal match for this role?

Finally, if he's amenable and there's good tonality-- a fair/favorable review on Glassdoor.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ask if he would like to join again when he is done with his studies and if you can support him in any way during his endeavor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure ! Our doors will be open and we want to make everything as easy as possible. We want him to leave with the best taste of the company.</comment></comment>


Planetary Transfer Calculator - T-A https://transfercalculator.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you're interested in this kind of stuff, the NASA General Mission Analysis Toolkit (GMAT) is open source and is actively used to do navigation analysis for multiple missions which are currently flying.

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

</comment><comment><USER2> A mouse over description for TMI MTO MCO and MOI would be great, those acronyms are meaningless to me. Edit - found as labels under ΔV Breakdown heading

<comment><USER3> Could also use an explanation of what it means to "calculate a transfer". Like, the ΔV? The travel time? All possible parameters? Frustrating that if you click on "What It Does", it doesn't clarify.

<comment><USER4> Most orbital calculations are "optimizations." You are looking for either the best time or most efficient orbit that your craft can achieve. Most of the time you are guessing at initial conditions that will produce a desired orbit and then moving down a gradient to a local optima.

Other times you are looking to predict the velocity and position of an orbital body at a certain time. Since there are many large planets in the solar system this requires non-linear differential equations that can only be solved (at this time) using an approximate calculation using methods such as the Euler or Runge-Kutta method in a computer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've often seen artist renditions of how our solar system looks, and a lot of people complain that it isn't a flat disk, that all of the planets are trailing behind the sun as it flies through our galaxy. What I've always been interested in is what that then looks like in our section of the galaxy. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4V-ooITrws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4V-ooITrws) is probably the best example of the trailing nature that I've seen. Does anyone have suggestions for the movement through the galaxy bit as well?

<comment><USER6> That video has some flaws which are covered in this helpful article from Phil Plait [https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/vortex-motion-viral- vid...](https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/vortex-motion-viral-video- showing-suns-motion-through-galaxy-is-wrong.html)

<comment><USER7> > It's wrong. And not just superficially; it's deeply wrong, based on a very > wrong premise.

If you read further down in Phil Plait's article, the video is based on a conspiracy-theory-style paper written by a crazy guy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm writing a Sci fi novel and I can use this to help me build narratives! So cool!

</comment><comment><USER9> Track Starman and his Tesla from the Falcon Heavy test, and the Monolith from 2001. Switch to "The Expanse" mode and calculate transfers with Epstein Drive.

A++

</comment><comment><USER10> Greetings. I'm a complete idiot when it comes to space. Still trying to wrap my head around "direction," navigation and just how to see or look in space. Would love a portable version of this program. Finally, can someone offer up the difference between Planetary Transfer Calculator and Space Engine? Thanks

<comment><USER11> Someone already mentioned it upthread, but I highly recommend playing "Kerbal Space Program" to gain a better intuition of orbital mechanics. I'm no rocket scientist but that game really helped me wrap my head around how things like orbital transfers work without actually learning any of the math behind it.

<comment><USER10> Thank you very kindly. I will take a look at it post haste.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does that use the real trajectories of the planets (such as give by the JPL ephemerides) or or eliptical approximations ?

</comment><comment><USER13> Interestingly a transfer from Earth to Jupiter ends up with Jupiter coming up on the ship from behind at twice it's velocity - I would never have guessed that to be the case, one always imagines a ship arriving at a somewhat relatively static object.

<comment><USER14> Basically, everything in space is a moving target.

If you'd really like to nail home an almost intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics, I recommend Kerbal Space Program. Imagine Minecraft NASA. You plan, build, launch, and fly space missions using a simplified physics model. It's insanely fun and addictive, as long as you can get past the frustrations of early failures.

I cannot recommend this game enough. I've got hundreds of hours in, and I'm at the point where I've got huge spreadsheets carefully planning out mission parameters to spec the requirements for my new heavy launch platform to colonize the solar system. I'm even assembling a long-term research station in orbit that will eventually be parked around a gas giant.

<comment><USER15> What you actually want is KSP modded with Principia to give you an n-body simulation of the solar system.

[https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/Principia](https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/Principia)

<comment><USER16> The existing SOI model is still good enough to give a more intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics. Also did they ever fix the Jool system in Principia? Never played with it but iirc there was an issue with Jool where one of the inner moons would very quickly be ejected from the system.

<comment><USER17> Given that it's a toy solar system, it's entirely possible that there's no stable configuration for Jool's system with its full set of moons :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fun! A way to add gravity assist and multiple gravity assists would be a great feature.

</comment><comment><USER19> Still gotta wait for 11 years approx to reach Saturn even travelling in high speed.Long wait will try to post a reply back from Saturn once i land there safely.

<comment><USER20> You know Saturn is a gas giant, right?

<comment><USER21> WFSMC? Working from Saturn's Metallic Core?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _Stellarium_ [0]

[0] [http://stellarium.org](http://stellarium.org)

<comment><USER23> Stellarium is a planetarium software. It doesn't help you calculate interplanetary transfers, so if you're just mentioning it because it's a tangentially related and undeniably great piece of software, you might want to elaborate a bit.</comment></comment>


Startups (And Angel Investors) are a Girl's Best Friend - <AUTHOR> http://www.women2.org/angel-investors-a-girls-best-friend/

<comment><USER2> When do you plan on launching?

<comment><AUTHOR> We start rolling out Beta invites tomorrow!</comment></comment>


What The Hell Just Happened At Google? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what-the-hell-just-happened-at-google.php

<comment><USER2> "A powerful, dangerous company careening out of control."

Wow really? Missed earnings and botched press releases are not great news but aren't the end of the world either.

<comment><USER3> Google is literally out of control. We tried to stop it. I'm so sorry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "...as much Internet activity has shifted to walled gardens, like Facebook, and to mobile devices and apps - worlds that Google does not dominate."

Lolwut? They only have 68% market share and second place is 17%.</comment>