The sad truth about Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/24/the-sad-truth-about-the-facebook-movie.html <comment><USER3> Two things. One positive and one negative.

Positive. The author understands the gist of what's going on. Places like YC focus on Minimum Viable Product and doing just one thing that people want. These are great and wise strategies for both investors and entrepreneurs, but there's also another term for it that's not as flattering: bottom-feeding. Going after the little bits of value here and there, not being a hunter, existing by providing the least amount of value possible. There are huge bottom-feeders! Facebook is one of them. But it's little tidbit work. Stuff like reminding me when I like to scratch my nose, or a service for recommending dog groomers.

Negative. The problem here is that the author seems to think he knows where technology is headed, and that's always a foolish bet. His view is that we should be making complex things and solving hard problems. While I agree that hard problems need to be solved, I don't think you can decide ahead of time which problems are going to be the ones that gain traction. This is like the government or VCs "deciding" that one area of effort is going to give more results than another. Nobody knows. This is the risk of startups. It's why the smart move is to do the little stuff.

More to the point, there are two kinds of innovation (to steal from Kuhn). There is "normal" innovation, where people take existing tech and put it together in new ways to make trivially more usable things than existed before. Then there is paradigm-changing innovation, where completely new things appear.

By far, normal innovation is the norm. Probably 99.9% of all innovation is normal. Maybe more. Systems change from the ground-up, not from the top-down. Eventually a bunch of little things reach critical mass and a paradigm- changing innovation occurs. But hell, most of the time you can't force the little innovations to work, much less the big ones. I love the contrarian tone, but it's just not a realistic article.

<comment><USER4> That read like two negatives to me.

<comment><USER3> I agree with the author's critique of the trivial nature of most start-ups. Lots of guys are simply trying to make widgets more shiny, and that's a shame because they could do so much more.

I disagree that there is something we can do about it. It's the natural state of affairs.

(My rewrites always take 400-word explanations and turn them into 2 sentences. Writing is much like code golf. Sigh)

<comment><USER5> I agree that things seem more shiny than innovative. Maybe "easy" problems are a natural way of increasing our general software competency across the general population. Before we can get to the big-problem innovation in things like AI and nano tech we have some steps to take. That probably explains why it a seems so natural.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"Facebook lets you keep in touch with your friends; for this profound service to mankind it will generate about $1.5 billion in revenue this year by bombarding its 500 million members with ads."_

This statement seems very indicative of the author's cluelessness or hypocrisy. $1.5 billion from 500 million members means that they bombard each member on average with $3 worth of ads every year. I'm bombarded with more ads when buying three issues of Newsweek.

Facebook lets you keep in touch with your friends for $3 a year. That sounds like quite an impressive feat to me. There is much that is wrong with Facebook but I don't think that they are making their money with ads is one of those things.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not only is the author a troll -- as pointed out, he runs the Fake Steve Jobs blog -- his primary source, Nathan Myhyrvhvhlodold, is a troll.

Let me clarify:

Nathan might be a genius, but he's a genius whose words we can't ever risk taking seriously because of the raging conflicts of interest that imbue his every interaction with the press or social media.

His company:

> "Intellectual Ventures is a private company claiming to invest in "pure > invention." Their business model has a focus on developing a large patent > portfolio and licensing these to companies with infringing products."

Myhrvold brings smart scientists and thinkers into a room, picks their brains, and then he and his own very smart people sit down and come up with as many patents as they can.

They aren't driven by malice. They're driven by rational self-interest: presently, with our broken patent system, people who aren't actually going to go out there and try to solve the world's problems can sit in a room all day coming up with ideas and make money from that.

Let's run his statements through a conflict-of-interest filter: "Silicon Valley is working on easy problems" translates to:

> Hey world, it's only cool to work on things that require large up-front > investment on PATENT-FRIENDLY products, so people with lots of patents can > make money by attaching ourselves to the necks of people who are actually > making the world a better place instead of talking about it.

Tempting, Nate.

More to the point, it's tempting to get sucked into rebutting individual points, such as the fact that those heroes of the valley would have killed to have the resources available now to anyone with a credit card, Linode and Twilio.com. Or the fact that he's essentially complaining about low barriers to entry.

Or the fact that things that start easy and trivial, in the early stages, quickly get deep and techy. It's easy to mock things that look facebook-y, but it's hard to solve, say, 10k or 100k continuous connections, or to write fast evented code or contribute to libraries that make the whole world faster. We start simple and get smart.

But if you start rebutting these things, you've been sucked into a hole.

The issue is, he wants people to work on patent-friendly stuff. Fin.

<comment><USER8> But _you can't patent an idea_ \- you have to have an implementation!

Srsly - you have fundamentally misunderstood what a patent is. If it's "a method for mangling widgets" then you have to have built a real, working widget mangler too, and include the blueprints in the patent application.

<comment><USER9> This is not how the patent system currently works. Patents with broad application are constantly issued that don't have nearly enough informations attached to build a prototype of the invention (and the existence of said prototype is not verified by the patent office).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of people here seem to be calling foul. But whenever I read a list of startups that YCombinator has funded the formula in every case is:

Clone of (X) Targeted For Audience (Y)

The article is correct about a lot of things. Angel investors (including YC) don't really seem interested in investing in really game changing technology, they're interested in following a trend by buying lotto tickets for a few thousand dollars with the hopes that several will hit medium to large sized jackpots in the shortest possible time frame.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't believe the expert quoted in the article is none other than Myrhvold. Now, I don't know the guy, but I understand that his current line of work is something to the effect of: Abuse the current software patent mess by suing people who, you know, are actually creating things.

</comment><comment><USER12> Talk. About. A. Troll. (edit: ah, no wonder. the author is fake steve jobs blogger)

This is almost as good as the article from the 90s making fun of the Internet and how useless it is.

 _...a place where smart kids arrive hoping to make an easy fortune building companies that seem, if not pointless, at least not as serious as, say, old- guard companies like HP, Intel, Cisco, and Apple._

"Easy fortune" huh? That's what you call those 15-20 hours days many founders pull? This writer owes an apology to the Valley.

Just another version of old dudes complaining about the new gen.

<comment><USER13> If you're not aware, most of the old guard companies pulled 15-20 hour days starting out too. And making a physical product is generally MUCH more frustrating than anything in web app land. Hurrying up and waiting, for a flawed product messed up by the machinists. Also much higher startup capital costs for anything nontrivial like semiconductors. Expensive equipment, office space, manufacturing space, all this stuff you need to start. Not just two or three guys with open source software working in a dorm.

Studying the physical sciences is also more mentally taxing than coding PHP. I've gotten paid for both. You can't compare designing aircraft in CAD and Excel (what I do) that could kill someone if done improperly, with setting up email verification for your social networking site. Not even close.

<comment><USER12> Nothing I said belittles the efforts of past Valley heroes.

As for it becoming cheaper to do a start-up now versus previously, well _doh_. That should not be an excuse to belittle today's start-ups as the author does so recklessly.

And where is the discussion headed anyways? I am sure it was harder for entrepreneurs in 1900 than 1950 on the whole.

 _Studying the physical sciences is also more mentally taxing than coding PHP._

You make it sound like that is all a start-up is: some php code. Most _successful_ start-ups are _a lot_ more than php code.

Also, having to _walk_ ten miles before we had a means of transportation was more taxing than taking cars. What are we gonna do about that? Attack the whole world for not having it as hard as when folks had to walk 10 miles?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Complete poppycock.

Running Hackers and Founders SV, I think I have a pretty decent picture of what Silicon Valley is like on the ground floor, and as far as I'm concerned it's pretty frigging amazing.

There's tons of small teams doing amazing things with Big Data and real time analytics like Factual (making Open Data easier to manage and use), MixPanel (Real Time analytics for applications). There's a number of companies doing really interesting things with cool languages like Clojure and Erlang, even if they are "silly companies".

There's companies like Justin.TV which is the largest real time video streaming company in the world. Real time video streaming is very, very hard to do at scale.

AirBnB is revolutionizing the hospitality industry, and last I read are the largest provider of rooms in New York.

There are amazingly cool companies working on SSD database appliances, and on databases optimized specifically for SSD's. SSD add on cards for your PCIE graphics slot that give you 6x the throughput of a SATA port. Those companies don't exactly make for exiting reading in Newsweek, so they don't get a lot of press, though.

Yeah, there's a lot of people making Facebook apps. Sure, you can mock twitter because on it's surface it seems silly and trivial, but they have invented an entirely new communication protocol which companies like StockTwits are leveraging to allow individuals to broadcast their recent stock trades. And, not only that, but the article says that Twitter hasn't figured out how to make money yet. In fact, Business Week reports that they were profitable in 2009: [http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc200...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc20091220_549879.htm)

Sure Zynga makes somewhat whimsical addictive games, but if you stop and crunch the numbers, Farmville's digital economy is probably mlarger than the real world economies of many developing nations.

So, if you'd like to believe that Silicon Valley has lost it's way go right ahead. But, from where I sit, things are just beginning to get interesting. Silicon Valley is just starting to fire on all cylinders since the tech bubble popped in 2000. If you want to know how I'm seeing Silicon Valley: I'm strapping in and getting ready for a great big ride.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, this is one of those debates that's going to generate a lot of heat, but not much light. Because, frankly, for every guy who thinks that it's a crime that the valley isn't 95% about battery technology and semiconductor startups, there's a guy who wants to breathlessly pronounce Twitter a _"new communications protocol"_ (Twitter is a web service -- it uses the same protocols as everyone else on the web -- and it's only "profitable" because it made a few sweetheart, short-term deals with unclear renewal prospects).

There are certainly a few companies in the valley that are doing interesting R&D, but I tend to agree with the article that the vast majority of the _crap we hear about_ on a day-to-day basis is fluff. It may be "Big Data" fluff, but it's still fluff, and popularity doesn't make it less fluffy.

From a technology perspective, cranking out database-backed web pages is a completely uninteresting problem. For that matter, so are most of the common "big data" applications (grinding through log files), or revolutionary companies (where the "revolution" usually boils down to killing a more traditional market...with a database-backed web app). Meanwhile, industrialists in other countries are developing more efficient wind turbines, new electronics manufacturing techniques, battery chemistry with greater capacity, and they're also investing hundreds of billions of dollars into pharmaceutical research. From a technological perspective, it's not even in the same universe.

<comment><USER14> I certainly understand and respect that these technologies are uninteresting to you.

At the same time in the past month, I've talked with government officials from 2 fairly developed countries, because they are trying to learn what makes Silicon Valley tick. In both cases, they understand that they will never be able to compete with Silicon Valley, but at very least, they want to cross pollinate their technology sector with ours.

I noticed that your profile says that you work at Yelp. I'd respectfully suggest that I haven't seen tons of interesting R&D happen up in San Francisco. There are an inordinate number of social media companies and iPhone app companies up at the tip of the peninsula. But, I tend to hang out in Mt View, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Palo Alto, and there's a much different flavor to the companies down here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe this article is a PR piece. But I agree with that 'social' and non technology-focused startup ideas are overvalued currently by young enterpreneurs, by the media and by investors. As if those problems which existed 10-20 years ago would not exist anymore. As if those problems currently solved by 'old companies' and generating incredible amount of money, could not be solved better by some startups. Not enough startups are competing _directly_ against those old products like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc... Not enough young companies are based on deep technology. Almost everyone want to be rich quickly adding very little technology-wise to exisitng open-source stuff like Ruby on Rails. To use Zed's terminology I am half a 'long beard' half a 'product guy'. So I am trying to create something which is a product for people, but potentially can go quite deep technology- wise.

</comment><comment><USER17> Build things that people will ultimately find useful...

as opposed to products that are conducive to a quick sell to the angels and VCs.

Build a product that can potentially make money on its own merit. A 2 million dollar series A round should not be considered as a sign of a successful startup.

This article does raise some valid points (regardless of the intentions of the writer). Strike the part about Intellectual Ventures because it unfortunately overshadows the main point.

</comment><comment><USER18> While I think there is some truth in the article, and the lack of innovation in SV, one should probably remind the author that some of the more interesting pure technology startups are still SV based. To pick two close to my interests

Complete Genomics: <http://www.completegenomics.com/> Pacific Biosciences: <http://www.pacificbiosciences.com/> Tilera: <http://tilera.com> (started out of MIT but now in San Jose)

There is a lot more "noise" out there just because it's easier. I suspect it would have been the same in the past if the capital required was lower. That said we should be asking ourselves if what we are doing has a purpose? I meet too many people with a good "idea" but no purpose, and in the long term that might become a problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> This article is full of it, but for more reasons than have been articulated so far.

One problem is that the article mistakes light for heat. Just because they get less press than Facebook doesn't mean that old-school high-tech engineering startups don't exist. Facebook _et al_ are focused like a laser on getting their names out. That is what social networking _is_ : word-of-mouth viral publicity. Whereas most hardware startups are born below the radar, and the majority die below the radar, and many of the successful ones get bought out by bigger companies and never rise above the radar under their own name. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. Some statistics would have been nice.

The balance of companies has shifted a _lot_ over time, but that's because computing has grown and matured. Back in the 1970s Silicon Valley's only customers were nerds. That meant a lot of emphasis on nerdly products. H-P calculators. Oscilloscopes. Chipsets. After thirty years of work on mobile phones, broadband networking, and UX design, we've improved computing to the point where there are now many Valley firms whose customers are non-nerdly iPhone owners and Web users. That's a huge number of people. And it turns out that you can make as much gross revenue by selling a $2.99 app directly to 2 billion people as you can by selling a $2.99 part to a firm that will make 2 billion mobile phones, but the former requires much more marketing and makes a lot more noise.

But the big problem with this article is that it is trying to blame a forest- management problem on the individual leaves. If the USA is not investing enough resources in "alternative energy, better batteries, and nanotechnology", don't blame Silicon Valley startup culture. That's putting the cart before the horse. Entrepreneurs go where the money is, and who controls how much money goes into cutting-edge hardware research? The government, mostly. Either directly (by giving out research grants) or indirectly (by providing an artificial "market" with a single customer -- often the Department of Defense, but sometimes an entity like NASA -- that happily commits to spending money on the very latest high-tech toys; or by creating and enforcing the incentives that drive the market for, e.g., alternative energy).

The Internet got developed because the government commissioned it. Rocket technology got developed because the government commissioned and bought it. H-P and Intel became big companies by selling equipment and parts to the high- tech companies that sold to the government. The nanotech researchers I know are paid by the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, or the National Science Foundation. Biotech research? Funded by the NIH or the DoD. Alternative energy? The size of our research efforts have tended to wax and wane with the size of the DoE budget; the economics of deploying alternative energy have everything to do with the cost of oil and gas (determined by forces outside of an entrepreneur's control, like taxes, and tax-funded highway projects, and tax-funded transportation projects, and zoning policy, and tax-funded military maneuvers, and government-mediated international agreements) and the extent of environmental regulation (determined by government and politics).

If you want to address these problems you must first analyze them correctly. If you're a rag like _Newsweek_ it's easy and fun to pick on Mark Zuckerberg, but the real problem is economic and research policy: We've got an economy with flat or declining demand and lots of excess capacity (I, for one, could certainly be talked into applying my Ph.D. in EE to alternative energy problems instead of to PHP applications... if the price was right) yet our government officials are perversely engaged in an effort to further _depress_ demand and _raise_ our excess capacity by cutting spending. I wonder if there are any magazines that are ostensibly devoted to discussing problems in society, government and policy, instead of trading in mindless gossip, cheap shots, and PR hit pieces?

<comment><USER20> > If the USA is not investing enough resources in "alternative energy, better > batteries, and nanotechnology"

It's not the government's primary job to fund innovation. What we are seeing is that innovation is unable to sustain itself without government money.

There is a marketplace for alternative energy, better batteries and nanotechnology. This reminds me of AI. AI is all around us, yet, we don't call it AI anymore except for marketing purposes. So will AE, batteries and nanotech.

<comment><USER21> _It's not the government's primary job to fund innovation. What we are seeing is that innovation is unable to sustain itself without government money._

You've got this backwards. It is specifically the government's job to fund innovation is currently is commercially untenable. Otherwise, who else would do it? Often times after the government's grant expires, the innovation is still commercially untenable. This makes sense because the research is exclusively targeting projects whose commercial viability is unclear. But other times we get things like the Internet, GPS, etc.

Now we can have a long and interesting discussion about specifies; i.e., whether said research is worth it in the long run, how soon should certain technologies be cut off, etc. But the fact that the government is funding technology that isn't able to sustain itself without government money is not a negative thing; that's exactly what the government is meant to do.

<comment><USER22> I suppose everyone has forgotten about all the privately developed and deployed networks before the internet as we know it - BIX, Prodigy, MCImail, Fidonet, UUCP, Telenet, the BBS systems, etc. To presume that without the ARPAnet there would be no internet is a huge stretch.

<comment><USER21> All the networks you listed are circuit switched, centralized networks; they really don't have anything to do with the Internet at all. The claim that without ARPAnet there would be no Internet is almost self evident, considering how fundamentally different the networks you listed are from the Internet. There's no way a commercial entity would have had the same design philosophy [1, Section 3] because a commercial entity has much different motivations.

As an aside, the best example that you could have given would have been Minitel (but still, centralized and circuit switched).

[1] [http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark...](http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf)

<comment><USER22> Most of those networks also evolved gateways to interconnect to each other. The history of technology is often one that starts out with proprietary interfaces that evolve under user pressure to standardized, open interfaces. We see that playing out yet again in the iPhone vs Android competition.

As soon as there were two computers, people tried to connect them. The more they got connected, the more universal people wanted those connections to be. If commercial companies wouldn't do it, non-commercial entities would (after all, look at linux and the enormous success of free software). Heck, even _I_ worked on hooking computers together back in the 70's using ad-hoc parts and wires and (never having heard of arpanet at the time) even sketched out how a decentralized "web" might work.

The idea that a decentralized fault tolerant network is such a novel concept that it required a government to think of it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even the telephone system is decentralized. There are decentralized fault tolerant systems all around us as examples.

<comment><USER21> _The idea that a decentralized fault tolerant network is such a novel concept that it required a government to think of it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even the telephone system is decentralized. There are decentralized fault tolerant systems all around us as examples._

It doesn't require the government to think of it, it requires the government to implement it. It would be a massively stupid decision from a business point of view to implement the Internet as it exists today. There's much more money in centralized networks. I think this should be obvious from the fact that (1) at the time all commercial companies were building centralized networks and (2) today text messages cost upwards of $1k per megabyte. The only reason why the Internet is architected the way it is today is because of government funding. One the government set the Internet in motion towards a decentralized, packet switched network, it could not be overcome by commercial companies.

<comment><USER22> FidoNet is the counterexample that shows the government was not required to implement a global, decentralized, fault tolerant network.

Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols.

<comment><USER23> _Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols._

Which phone network are you talking about? Certainly not any I'm familiar with.

I'm no evangelist for government-financed R&D, but I don't think you could possibly have picked a worse example (<http://www.corp.att.com/history/history3.html>) for your argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's kind of amusing to watch the ad-hominem arguments take flight.

While it's true Daniel Lyons is Fake Steve Jobs and that Nathan Myhrvold runs a company focused on thinking up ideas that could lead to products _after_ some research and patent them before spending a dime making any real progress beyond writing them down, while at the same time extorting those who do, the argument against companies like Facebook or Zynga stand: what are they doing to improve the human condition? Are they doing more or less than companies like HP, Intel, Cisco, Apple and Google?

<comment><USER24> Not sure if you were paying attention, but Zuckerberg was on Oprah, and he is giving the state of New Jersey $100 million in Facebook stock, in a matching grant.

How much stock has Google given NJ?

</sarcasm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Reads like a PR piece written by Myrhvold...

</comment><comment><USER26> "If we distract people with the lure of easy money... we're going to wind up derailing the thing that has been driving our economy"

It seems to me that if one were sincerely worried about this, the concern would be better directed at Wall Street, where many of the world's best minds go to be wasted on creating the next CDO or HFT/computerized-frontrunning technique while contributing nothing back to the world.

</comment><comment><USER27> "the unknown engineers and professors who have good ideas. Are those people going to get funded or will they be talked out of it and told they should do something like Zynga, because virtual goods is where it's at these days?"

</comment><comment><USER28> One reason I like HN is that comments seem to lean more towards the Perceptive (vs Judgmental) end of the scale in the Myers-Briggs sense, compared to other sites. So it's sad to see many of the responses in this thread. Myhrvold/Lyons/Newsweek aren't the issue here, the issue is what you choose to do with your life.

In 1983 Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi's president to Apple by asking him to choose between changing the world and selling sugared water. Much of Valley's current output is closer to sugared water than to the Macintosh.

<comment><USER24> _In 1983 Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi's president to Apple by asking him to choose between changing the world and selling sugared water. Much of Valley's current output is closer to sugared water than to the Macintosh._

Beautiful summation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm sure that the message of both the movie and this spin-off piece are skewed towards fantasy and there is great work coming out of SV all the time.

But let's face it innovation doesn't decide to shack up in one place, settle down and have a couple of kids, calling one place home for the rest of it's existence.

Hubs of both engineering and social innovation will dwarf SV in coming years. The only question is where...

</comment><comment><USER30> Newsweek, a/k/a the poster boy of declining circulation, (from 3.1 million in 2007 to 1.5 or less in 2010) lecturing others on how to run their business?

(source: [http://idsgn.org/posts/newsweek-can-a-redesign-save-a- dying-...](http://idsgn.org/posts/newsweek-can-a-redesign-save-a-dying- magazine/) )

</comment><comment><USER31> I think Twitter has immense value. And I would be happy to see it go public and achieve $billions in market cap. Cant say the same thing about facebook or zynga.

sometimes i feel like facebook is that waste-of-my-time show that i get pulled into when i switch on my tv. it sucks up time from my life i will never get back.

<comment><USER32> Twitter has a strong impact on our culture, but without a rational business model, and several quarters of profitable growth, an IPO will never happen. I certainly wouldn't buy stock in a company which doesn't know how to make money, no matter how impactful their product is.

<comment><USER31> my bet is twitter will figure out monetization. im sure they have something in the works. look at ad.ly for instance - instream advertising. they seem to be doing well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So essentially his argument is that he prefers industry work to flashy consumer plays. I can't say I disagree. The only thing is that there's no indication that the "serious" stuff is any less significant than it was 50 years ago. Yeah, you have Madison Ave layered on top now thanks to the mainstream adoption of the internet, but should _everyone_ just leave that money on the table in the name of "science"?

</comment><comment><USER34> _Twitter is a noisy circus of spats and celebrity watching, and its hapless founders still can't figure out how to make money._

Anybody who says this is clearly just trolling, since everyone knows they are making a ton of money selling the data to the search engines before they even get started on the advertising, which they are working on. And as for "twitter is for celebrity watching", that meme died a year ago.

</comment><comment><USER35> One might point out the irony of this being posted on a site called "Hacker News" where many of the most popular posts are about venture capitalists, investment, business models blah-di-blah-di-blah.

</comment><comment><USER36> Geeze, does this guy understand the word prosperity?

We should be happy that "the computer problem" is solved (at least for now). Computer technology has plateaued and there is no hard engineering required right now. This is a good thing! It gives us time to experiment with software. So Silicon has gone the way of Northeast Steel. So what if the world changes?

If you want to do hard engineering, you go to the fields that require it - <USER2> inc. (looking for more efficient ways to kill our neighbors), space flight (the modern space race is exciting), industrial automation (eventually the populace of Asia will want to climb out of indentured servitude and we need to replace them with something). These fields still need smart engineers and big $ startups.

</comment><comment><USER37> A response: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729035>

</comment><comment><USER38> Don't we have to first establish that Silly Valley has lost its stride before talking about how it happened?

</comment><comment><USER39> > We've already fallen behind in areas like alternative energy, better > batteries, and nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology? You can't fall behind in vaporware.

</comment><comment><USER40> Stopped reading at "says Nathan Myhrvold".

</comment><comment><USER41> Yeah, it would be easier innovate on hard problems, Mr. Myhrvold, if you you weren't trying to strangle startups and small tech firms every chance you get with your _Intellectual Ventures_.

<comment><USER42> I'm not sure, but is his company every sued any startup for patent infringement. I read about his company in super-Freakonomics and he seemed to be genuinely caring about solving hard, big problems. He may be amassing patents to get protection but unless he actively screws small companies by buying patents, I'm not sure I would call his company a patent troll.

<comment><USER43> They create and acquire patents for revenue, not defense. They don't need protection from infringement suits because they don't sell any products (and their research should fall within US patent law's exemption for that purpose). There's also speculation they have backed some infringement suits raised by shell companies.

I'm torn. There ought to be some way to compensate researchers for actually solving hard problems (here I'm excluding a lot of poorly-examined software patents which basically claim the whole problem via the obvious solution) yet doesn't involve giving them an exclusive stranglehold on anyone using their work even accidentally.

<comment><USER4> The cure is worse than the disease at this point, the situation is such that the patents to tend to go overwhelmingly to those that troll rather than to those that have ideas and actually implement them.

That's kind of logical too, after all having an idea and writing it up in a patentable form is much less work than following through so while the 'doers' are stuck on their first one the 'patenters' are on their 10th or more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Myhrvold is a known patent troll, even going so far as to sue the same companies multiple times under shell companies: <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml> Why anyone cares what this guy says is beyond me. The author says Myhrvold runs 'an invention lab'... yeah not exactly. A better term would be patent extortionist: [http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/17/nathan-myhrvolds-patent- ext...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/17/nathan-myhrvolds-patent-extortion- fund-is-reaping-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars/) Here's another article for good measure: <http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060626/1011256.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER45> SV innovation was once about creating the technological infrastructure that we all take for granted. Now, it's about using that technology in new, interesting ways to see what might happen.

I have met and spent time with Dan, before he became such a cynic. He was excited about the idea of being near startups and wanted to come up with an idea for his own. What I see when I read his pieces is sadness, disappointment. While I can't blame him, we should understand his point of view in context: he could-a been a contender.

</comment><comment><USER46> Nathan Myhrvold is also a patent troll:

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/132174/ubuntu_microsoft_is_pa...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/132174/ubuntu_microsoft_is_patent_pal.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> finally, someone who shares my opinion!

</comment><comment><USER48> A powerfully retarded article, if I may say so

</comment><comment><USER49> Someone was having a bad day or something...

<comment><USER50> Couldn't get the kids off his lawn? I can totally sympathize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The correct URL for this piece is actually:

<http://bit.ly/Daniel-Lyons-Link-Bait>

HTH.YMMV.VWP.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite cryptocurrencies? - <AUTHOR> Personal favorites; Stellar and Status. I think HN community would have much better view on the altcoin projects, so I wanted to hear your thoughts. <comment><USER2> Zcash and FileCoin seem most technically innovative to me.

(I own some Zcash, don't own FileCoin but would like to.)

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) Request

2) Ripple

3) Stellar

4) Cardano</comment>


Zuckerberg: Facebook revenue growth 'really strong', still hiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/zuckerberg-facebook-revenue

<comment><USER2> > Facebook had about 800 employees at the end of 2008, up from about 450 at > the beginning of the year. That's less than the 1,000 he supposedly > projected to end the year with on that same conference call.

what the hell are they all doing?</comment>


Sophia – An embeddable key-value database - <AUTHOR> http://sphia.org/index.html <comment><USER2> I know it seems superficial but beautiful docs are one of my most trusted heuristics when I'm considering using a library. If the author cares about the aesthetics of the docs, it often means they care about the aesthetics of the code, which really does matter a lot. We can make ugly things or we can make beautiful things. I really respect people who take the time to make beautiful tools.

<comment><USER3> Was that intended to be a compliment of this project? I had the opposite reaction. I accept that English is often a second language, but this page was off-putting.

Sophia is a modern [should add comma] embeddable key-value database designed for a high [should hyphenate] load environment.

It has a unique architecture that was born as a result of research and rethinking primary alghorithmical [sic, should say "algorithm"] constraints associated with a [sic] getting popular Log-file based data structures, such as LSM-tree [should say "trees"], it's [sic] variations based on Fractional Cascading ideas and a B-Tree. (see architecture) [run-on, meaning unclear]

It is very fast. (see benchmarks)

it [sic] is easy to use. (see documentation)

Implemented as a small C [should probably hyphenate, or just rewrite] written, BSD [should probably hyphenate] licensed library.

<comment><USER4> It's quite clear English is not the primary language of the author, and I think it's in poor taste to criticize grammatical errors that are clearly sourced in this.

English is not an easy second language to learn as an adult, and technical English doubly so.

<comment><USER5> These are basic grammar mistakes. Mastery of basic grammar is achievable with a small amount of dedication; if the author does not have the time, they could ask an English-speaking acquaintance to proof-read their docs.

The author's primary (and perhaps only) contact with users is through their documentation. Incorrect capitalization and apostrophe use is distracting and will put off some potential users. The author looks sloppy and uncaring because these types of mistakes are preventable.

Being a non-native speaker is not an excuse for basic errors (excepting novices). Proof-read your docs! If you're not confident in your language skills, ask someone else to!

<comment><USER4> To be blunt: do you speak a second language fluently? If not, I don't think you have any idea how much dedication you're demanding.

Instead of bashing someone on hnews comments, you could send them an errata patch.

<comment><USER5> The onus is not on me to make this project's documentation presentable: it is on the author. My language skills are immaterial! The author's language skills do not excuse lazy presentation, they only help explain it.

<comment><USER4> They are material when you say that the author is being lazy for not writing English better or finding someone to contribute. It implies you don't know the difficulty of what you're asking, so why are you calling him lazy?

But of course you want to make it clear that you feel no obligation to contribute despite your criticism. So it's lazy for him, but not for you?

<comment><USER5> The grammatical errors exist regardless of whether I speak one, three, or a hundred languages fluently. Better to ask the number of projects I have documented...

Note I comment exclusively on the author's presentation, not thrir personal behavior: obviously they are not lazy. I have no obligation to contribute, no: ncome from or personal interest in this project. I contribute to the projects which benefit me and people who I care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone know anything about how this compares in practice to Lightning MDB (which uses a memory mapped B-tree, I think, and is apparently insanely faster than most of the other enbedded key-value stores people normally examine)?

<comment><USER7> This one copies, and it has no concept of transactions from the looks of it (not even LevelDB-style snapshots)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having just gone through the exercise of picking an embedded key-value store for a project, some things that would be nice: how does it compare to other things besides leveldb (which, to be frank, isn't a stellar performer)? In particular, how does it compare to Tokyo/Kyoto Cabinet, Lightning MDB, or Sqlite4's LSM? Does it support data compression (either with a single pre- selected algorithm like LevelDB and Snappy, or in pluggable fashion like LSM)? How does it deal with concurrent access by multiple processes?

<comment><USER9> I've gone through picking embedded key-value store, too.

What really concerns me is why never in benchmarks they perform on already filled database (like, 14G, 28G, 60G)? Because "add 100k random keys into an empty database" is very different from "add 100k random keys into a large database". And that is where more novel algorythms start to shine.

Yes, read speed of leveldb (and, i assume, sophia) with its fancy sst's is lower than of plain old b-trees or hashtables (kctree/kchash), but it is still high enough for most tasks. Write performance of kc* (and btree-based libraries in general) is, however, unacceptable, at least on hard drives, and even with a reasonable-sized database (~90% of RAM) it degrades to a couple of random write per IOPs (so, 200-300 writes per second on a consumer-grade HDD, or up to 1000 on a 2x10k sas hdd in raid-0, if i remember correctly)

It may be reasonable to use kc* on SSD, but i did not test that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For Java / Android, I've been using H2's MVStore, which is log structured and uses counted B+-trees. It's nice not having to go through JNI for good performance in Java.

[http://www.h2database.com/html/mvstore.html](http://www.h2database.com/html/mvstore.html)

<comment><USER11> Funny - H2's slowness (either with a standard storage system or with MVStore and a standard key format) is the main reason we're moving back to a hand- rolled data storage system that's specific for our data on Android.

<comment><USER10> Thomas Mueller, the author of H2 / MVStore, gives some thoughts on H2's performance issues under Android here if you are interested:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/h2-database/Q8K-nbCh...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/h2-database/Q8K-nbChf1w)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I saw that. The main problem for us is that we need on-disk encryption due to regulatory issues and the encrypted SQLCipher build was causing us no end of grief. And we don't really _need_ a SQL database, it's just what the developers of our iOS app were doing and--it being our first Android mobile app--we thought it was a good idea to do the same. V2 is ripping that out both for perf and for code-sanity reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Typography is hard to read.

<comment><USER13> Seconded: that font at that size strains the eyes a fair bit.

<comment><USER14> It looks great with javascript disabled, maybe the font in the examples was a mite small.

I turned on javascritp and it looked a lot like a man-page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cute website. Some random thoughts:

Concurrency:

\- No mention of it. There appear to be spin locks in the source. No multi- threaded tests.

Stability and data safety:

\- Github has 2 days of history, and 4kLoC of test code. Why should I trust my data to you?

"high load environment":

\- So what exactly does it do in a "high load environment"? How do you define "high load" in the first place? CPU load? I/O load from other processes? What shortcomings of the competition under a "high load environment" are you trying overcome?

Backup:

\- How do I do hot backup?

Benchmark:

\- LevelDB is not a fair comparison as it offers additional non-trivial functionality (snapshots) that cannot be built up on top of Sophia. LevelDB APIs are also safe for concurrent use, which adds overhead. Kyoto Cabinet would have been more suitable as a peer to benchmark with.

\- 3 million records with 16-byte keys and 100-byte values is not really an interesting benchmark dataset.

\- Iteration over a static database is not interesting, either. Is there any alternative other than locking an entire mutating database for the duration of iteration?

</comment><comment><USER16> I, for one, wouldn't trust my data to a library by somebody who uses the same text decoration for hyperlinks as for plain text.

<comment><USER17> Computer scientists aren't known for their design chops. I'd take that as a sign of authenticity.

<comment><USER18> REAL computer scientists do not use CSS. Bonus points if they use FONT tags (in caps of course!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really guys, can you give more constructive or at least more (not based in bullshit assumptions) comments? if not, just shut up..

This is a non-trivial effort, and all people do is to complain about the font face or if the punctuation was right?

First, in the benchmarks it just crush leveldb, this is already by itself a great achievement. can you confront the benchmarks? you do it one yourself with a different configuration? no?

Second, if you are not a database expert and can create proper critics (constructive or not), just keep it to yourself.. i wonder how so many people get up with all of this conclusions so fast, without a proper look at the source code and to have a reasonable amount of time to know what are they talking about.

its very hard to create things like this, but very easy to critisize without any background.. dont forget about it

if you have something to say about a small thing, that do not have a direct relation to the product or thing itself, if theres already one comment about it, that enough! do not spam, answering it, or creating new comments about it, this is just so rude and unrespectful..

really, things are getting creepy on HN.. and its not only in this thread

<comment><USER3> You: Making the documentation readable and easy to parse adds no value to projects! Everyone who disagrees should shut up.

If I'm being kind to you, HN commenters (myself included) should do a better job of commenting politely, and spend more effort making sure their criticism comes off as constructive rather than just whining and aggressive... ...but I think you make it sound like criticism of anything outside of the source code itself is creepy, rude, and disrespectful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It says that the benchmark source is on github, but I can't find it.

It doesn't appear to be in their primary repo.

I would like to try and do my own test against another embedded data store like Berkeley DB but I want to know more about the conditions on the test. How many threads were used, that kind of thing.

<comment><USER21> [https://github.com/pmwkaa/sophia_benchmark](https://github.com/pmwkaa/sophia_benchmark)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very cool. As a suggestion, increase the link size under the main title, wasn't clear to me what the next step was at first after reading the introduction text.

</comment><comment><USER23> In case any of the devs read this:

1\. Can multiple processes use the same database concurrently? (Separate address space processes, not fork()'d)

2\. Have you tested this with uClib/cross compiler? (I would like to use it on a MIPs embedded router)

The reason I ask this is because I recently had the displeasure of having to hack a non-volatile RAM library to work with shared memory / thread safe and something small like this would be a perfect replacement with a lot less pain.

</comment><comment><USER24> Was this man's computer use being charged by the key stroke? I mean I understand using a few abbreviations here and there, but i.c ? At least name your files descriptively.

I would avoid using this for realzies if only for the fact that if something broke trying to fix it in that code base would be prohibitive

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks nice, but note this doesn't appear to support consistent reads (unlike LevelDB snapshots)

</comment><comment><USER25> I love the simplicity of the site and the C code. I will definitely use it, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've got a need for something like this, but would like to have the keys and values delta encoded to achieve simple, yet effective, compression.

<comment><USER27> How about [http://github.com/Tokutek/ft-index](http://github.com/Tokutek/ft- index)? It's embeddable (BDB-like API), has compression built in, and is a similar data structure to this but with more mature features like transactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Had a quick, 30 min bash at a win32 port using msinttypes and pthread-win32 but no luck yet :( Would love to see one though...

</comment><comment><USER29> Something for Mozilla to consider using inside Firefox inplace of LevelDB ( If that was ever landed )

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd be far more interested in benchmarks versus BDB (and maybe even sqlite).

</comment><comment><USER31> Snapshots? I could find it in the documentation..

</comment><comment><USER32> any word on support for unicode keys?

<comment><USER33> Keys are arbitrary data (you pass in pointer to data and length in bytes), so you can use anything that makes sense for you as keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Awesome work, congratulations!</comment>


Pentagon Fears Confirmed: Climate Change Leads to War, Refugees - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/pentagon-fears-confirmed-climate-change-leads-to-war-refugees <comment><USER2> 7.5+ billion people and counting, some of which enjoy the highest standard of living our species has ever known. Those that don't enjoy that standard of living want it, drawing down from a pool of finite resources.

Now throw in the ramifications of climate change like drinking water shortages, food and resource scarcity, and migrations from coastal cities - the opportunity for conflict will only rise amongst people and nations.

My concern is that this can lead to large scale nuclear war. Yes I'm aware of MAD, but that doesn't protect us from everything. Look at Vasili Arkhipov, Stanislav Petrov, Boris Yeltsin and the Norwegian Rocket Incident. They are just a small number of publicly known incidents where large scale nuclear war was almost triggered due to computer glitches and/or miscommunication. The proliferation of nuclear weapons adds additional challenges in maintaining the peace and we must also deal with existing nuclear actors experiencing wide swings in political leadership - like what has happened with the US presidency.

We live in interesting times.

<comment><USER3> It's not the resources that's the limiting factor, it's the _side effect_ from our consumption

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It focuses on the middle east, where the US (& allies) / NATO have been the driving forces behind most of the recent "conflicts" that led to forced migrations (Iraq, Libya, Syria), and then says "climate change had a significant impact"? Do generals at the Pentagon get too war-happy when it's too warm on average in any given year? Or is it that plunging Libya and Syria into civil war and leaving Iraq close to it wouldn't have mattered as much if it wasn't for that sea level rise?

<comment><USER5> "The ongoing Syrian conflict, which began in March 2011, has drawn attention from both the scientific community and the media to the question of how climatic conditions can contribute to political unrest and civil war. Recent studies of the Syrian uprising have shown that growing water scarcity and frequent droughts, coupled with poor water management, led to multiyear crop failures, economic deterioration and consequently mass migration of rural families to urban areas (Gleick, 2014; Kelley et al., 2015). Rapid growing population, overcrowding, unemployment and increased inequality put pressure on urban centers and finally contributed to the breakout of political unrest"

That's the introduction paragraph. "Blaming the US" for all turmoil in the Middle East is far too simplistic.

<comment><USER6> I don't doubt that you can find something statistically significant (once you control for everything else) but every time this comes up, the relative sizes of things seem vastly under-emphasized.

If 5% less rain does bad things for stability, and what surely matters is food per mouth, then what's 4x the population doing?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+syria](https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+syria)

<comment><USER7> 5% rain doesn't mean 5% less crops. It's a nonlinear relationship that could mean 1% less crops or 90% less crops.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely, and I pulled 5% out of thin air, too.

Here's a graph with the famous Arab spring 2011 drought... about 10%, for one year. You can debate how much of that you wish to attribute to what cause. But note that this is also the population growth _since 2011_ alone.

[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.PRD.CREL.MT?location...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.PRD.CREL.MT?locations=EG)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My favorite thing is when Republicans - so supportive of the military and focused on practical matters of safety and defense - are the ones continuing to deny climate change. Even though the military is publishing statements and studies saying "no, actually this is a thing we're very worried about and actively taking steps to prepare for".

<comment><USER9> Support our troops! (Unless they have ideas which threaten our world view...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Click bait. The article is clear... "political conditions play an outsize role. If it's too authoritarian or too democratic the results are different."

</comment><comment><USER11> Not explicitly mentioned: The research they reference links droughts in the middle east during 2009-2012 to the migration and refugee situation which has played out in last decade from the Arab Spring.[1]

The casual factor that I don't see talked about much: increased local food prices[2] caused by droughts, which in my opinion very much provided the kindling of the "Arab Spring", whose consequences are still very much being played out today.

Related aside: When learning about ancient Rome, it stuck with me that the emperors and ruling elite were acutely aware of the importance of providing sufficient "bread and circuses" with the goal of quelling revolution and uprising. When the political situation is not popular in the first place, revolutions are often sparked when food and basic necessities suddenly become difficult to acquire. This has been true since antiquity. [3]

When looking at the impact of climate change, I am very concerned about what the impact of a small number of poorly placed natural disasters could do to the world's food supply and prices. Much of the world's food production is concentrated in a small number of breadbaskets, and global commodity markets can be very sensitive to relatively small changes in supply. These breadbaskets are often close together, represent only a small amount of the world's land area and when conditions are good are highly productive.[4]

I'm sure the security agencies of the world are aware of this and are deeply concerned about this, but unfortunately I can only see our global situation getting worse before it gets better. At some point we need to realize this as a serious, shared issue that ignores borders.

[1] [https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190123-climate-stress- dr...](https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190123-climate-stress-drove-wave- of-arab-spring-refugees/) [2] [https://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change- the-a...](https://www.americansecurityproject.org/climate-change-the-arab- spring-and-food-prices/) [3] [http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/plebians.html](http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/plebians.html) [4] [https://myweb.rollins.edu/jsiry/agrcultint.jpg](https://myweb.rollins.edu/jsiry/agrcultint.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER12> Every 80s and 90s post-apocalyptic movie taught me this.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would rather blame overpopulation than climate change for the upcoming wars and refugee waves

<comment><USER14> The problem isn't "overpopulation" it is resource consumption.

How can it be too many people when a person in one country uses 20x as many resources as a person in another?

<comment><USER15> It's both. Unless we plan to stop, by force if necessary, the rest achieving a developed life.

If 1m have profligate Western lifestyle, the planet and climate would cope just fine.

If 7bn desire and are advertised at to desire a profligate Western lifestyle, then the climate is going to break long before all get there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does the Pentagon "fear this", or more likely "yay this"?

</comment><comment><USER17> loving this new Civilization 6 expansion, cool mechanics

</comment><comment><USER18> What if this is the insidious reason those in power refuse to address climate change? They know they can make money off of the chaos and war.

<comment><USER19> Never underestimate the profits of established industries from continuing business as usual...

Climate change is not just some "use electric cars" thing, it's also "change whole industries", "stop producing/selling as much crap" thing, and that flies in the face of constant magnification of everything...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is a pesky little fact that all the climate models have thus far been wrong and there is still no scientific proof that CO2 drives temperatures.

The best research on the table at the moment shows we may be facing a super maunder minimum and possible mini ice age. This research will pan out or not in the next 2-5 years as it is actually falsifiable.

No falsifiable claim = no science

<comment><USER21> Your foolish fringe-science delusions and intellectual arrogance are going to drive your descendants to despair and death. But I have no doubt you'll go to your grave unconvinced no matter what the evidence points to, blissfully leaving the outcome of your decisions to future generations. It's ironic that you mention falsifiable claims, since literally no amount of overwhelming evidence can ever convince deniers that their claims are false.

Climate models are not "wrong" or "right," they are models based on finite variables which resemble reality within an expected margin of error. Thus they will always have slight but expected variance from actual measurements in the future. Science doesn't reveal absolute truth, it gets us fractionally closer to absolute truth. Right now 97% of scientists have reached a consensus that even based on the most conservative extremes of the margin of error of our climate models that anthropogenic climate change is real and is marching towards catastrophe. That's a higher degree of certainty than plenty of other scientific concepts that we have put into practice. You are claiming to have better knowledge than the utterly overwhelming majority of evidence and expert observation. Is it because you are miraculously the smartest person on earth, or is it because you are a deluded crank? It's pretty obvious which it is to everyone but yourself and other conspiracy peddlers.

<comment><USER20> Ad hominem attacks are the sign you have left logic at the wayside and are running on emotion. It is often a sign that your belief, true or not, has been reinforced with false logic, as when confronted with true logic you are unable to appropriately respond. Don't worry, we all get better with practice.

<comment><USER14> Falacy Falacy. It's not nice that the meanie head called you names, but where is your actual citation? Where are actual studies to back up your claims?

You just repeat yourself here, as elsewhere, that somehow an "ad hominem" by your opponite supports your view? That's not how this works and is in fact, ironically, an ad hominem attack.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AMD Announces 307% Increase in Q3 Earnings - <AUTHOR> http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/amd-earnings-stock-price-q3-results-2017-10-1005485288 <comment><USER3> I really don't understand the negative market sentiment on expectations of future cashflow. AMD has been building compelling GPU and CPU chips and this is a rising tide market driven by new solutions to longstanding problems (AI/robotics/driverless cars/drug prediction/VR/AR/big data). These technologies will applied to every industry on the planet including huge industries like agriculture that are today the least digitized of all major industries. Exponential growth in IoT devices and AI2AI interactions will generate tremendous amounts of data as well as the meta data that sits on top of that. Then there is bitcoin. I think people are massively underestimating the TAM. This era will require massive new computing power and especially for big data centers it makes sense to diversify your supplier. It's a rising tide that will be much higher than AMDs last high watermark. AMD is a measly $10b company, compared to NVIDIA ($110b) and Intel ($160b). A 10% move by NVIDIA exceeds AMDs entire market cap. Would love to hear some counter opinions on this.

Disclaimer: I own both NVIDIA and AMD.

<comment><USER4> AMD isn't in nearly the same breadth of markets as nvidia. Some examples: automotive, super computing (which they dominate due to CUDA), and game streaming services. Also, AMD's driver support on Linux platforms has historically been pretty weak and often broken, further limiting any consideration of uses outside of gaming.

<comment><USER5> AMD is a clear winner now on Linux. Nvidia will become an underdog, if they won't open source and upstream their driver, which is very unlikely. Nvidia was and will be plagued by integration issues, while AMD already nearly caught up performance wise, and will overtake Nvidia soon enough.

<comment><USER6> I've pinned my compute hopes on AMD for about a decade now. They've been able to hang in there performance-wise, but their solutions on linux just haven't been as stable as NVIDIA's. I hope that's changing, but I'm pretty reluctant to believe it.

<comment><USER7> The amdgpu driver really changes that. With NVIDIA you have to choose between an open source driver (nouveau) that has quite some problems or a proprietary driver that does not really integrate well with the rest of the platform. E.g. for a long time you could not use Wayland with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers because they had implemented a different API for device memory allocation (via EGLStreams) [1]. In contrast, AMD is actively contributing to the open source amdgpu driver and builds their proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver on top of that.

I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau, there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other problems. The FirePro with the amdgpu driver on the other hand works completely flawless on my machine.

[1] [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-Device- Memory-API)

<comment><USER8> > I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. > I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau, > there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other > problems.

nouveau was always pretty awful, but the nvidia binary drivers always Just Worked, across many models for many years, whereas with AMD it's always been a crapshoot whether a given card would work properly or not.

The binary drivers always kept up with the important things (indeed they were well ahead of AMD in terms of doing accelerated video decoding on linux via Xvmc and later vaapi, their xinerama integration was always better...). Sure, they don't support Wayland, but that's a solution in search of a problem; if and when there's actual value to be had by using it I have confidence that nvidia will support it.

<comment><USER9> Just worked? The amount of security advisories for Nvidia kernel module or Nvidia X module are staggering.

X is also insecure from the ground up, that alone is enough incentive to move away from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some of that is my cash. I bought into ryzen recently, breaking from a decade of intel on all my home machines. The chip is working. It is very fast. Maybe I'd get a few more fps from intel, but not at the same price.

<comment><USER11> I've been AMD only since 2004. Feels good.

<comment><USER12> Do you run Linux with your AMD cards or just Windows? Wondering what the Linux experience is like these days with all the Linux driver improvements AMD has made.

<comment><USER13> I recently bought an HP laptop which has a AMD A10-8700P APU and was very surprised to find out that basic display functionality is very glitchy under Linux (backlight would flicker, or in some cases it wouldn't work at all). I tried with Debian unstable first, then with Ubuntu (17.04 and now 17.10) and none of the vanilla kernels in these distros worked for me (with the amdgpu driver, ), so I'm now running 4.9.51+ from [https://github.com/M-Bab/linux- kernel-amdgpu-binaries](https://github.com/M-Bab/linux-kernel-amdgpu-binaries) (the most recent versions crash when I use HDMI output).

You can read more about it in:

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6m2jvn/eli5_of_amd_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6m2jvn/eli5_of_amd_dcdal_issues/)

* [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/754uh6/update_on_dcd...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/754uh6/update_on_dcdal_support_on_linux_for_amd_cards/)

* [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-1...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-120-More-For-DC)

* [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-D...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-DC-More-June-Work)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand why this good news translates into the stock being down over 12% after hours.

<comment><USER15> The direction a stock moves after an earnings announcement has nothing to do with how good the earnings are in absolute terms. What matters is where they ended up relative to what the market was expecting. If AMD announced a 300% increase in earnings, but the market was expecting 400%, their stock is going to go down because 400% was already priced in. Similarly, a company's revenue can be down 300%, but if the market was expecting it to be down 400% the stock will rise.

<comment><USER16> In other words: your share price is a function of the emotions of fickle investors and their expectations (regardless of plausibility) rather than how well your company actually did.

<comment><USER17> Share price is an estimation of future performance, not past or current performance. Specifically it's supposedly the net present value of all future cash flows, discounted appropriately.

<comment><USER18> How do you respond to the comments of stock market investors that suggest the market is frequently irrational?

<comment><USER8> The market is inherently volume-weighted, and there is much more "smart money" than "dumb money".

<comment><USER18> To give an example of something a smart investor would do, Warren Buffett supposedly only invests in industries he understands in depth:

[http://www.investopedia.com/articles/05/012705.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/05/012705.asp)

What proportion of investors would you suggest show such restraint? Over half?

<comment><USER8> The proportion of "investors"? Low. The proportion of market capital allocation, among people doing active allocation for long-term buy and hold strategies? Very high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Article with figures: [http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Advanced- Micr...](http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Advanced-Micro- Devices-Inc-Announces-307-Increase-In-Q3-Earnings-1005488192)

110m profit vs 27m, year on year for the quarter. Revenue is up 27% over the same period

</comment><comment><USER20> So are machine learning framework developers going to stop being so subservient to CUDA and start supporting OpenCL now?

<comment><USER21> I would give the framework developers some credit, they shipped and the field made a lot of progress on their tools. Getting good performance out of GPUs (CUDA or OpenCL) is quite difficult, cuDNN has historically been the only good low-level deep learning library, and NVIDIA makes great hardware. My company is building a fully open source low-level framework called PlaidML bringing OpenCL support and other benefits to the existing frameworks. We're starting with Keras, first code was posted last Friday: [https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml](https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> And additionally they made Intel up their game - honestly appreciate that!

<comment><USER23> I really hope Intel doesn't fix it's game before AMD and Arm seriously sandwich them out of the consumer market.

5 years of decline in PC/x86 sales.. Intentionally terrible product lines of a monopoly not wanting to canabalize any higher pricing potential. Insubstantial profits available if they ever get their mobile chips on track after some terrible attempts. CPUs based on cheery forecasts of the high 5 years ago should be hitting the end of their pipelines.. A Microsoft that isn't reaĺly sure if/why it still does desktops.

As someone who has been more occupied with Arm CPUs, I wonder what someone who was paying more attention to Intel would notice and I look forward to being able to scale up straight from Arm64 to genuine AMD64.

<comment><USER24> I hope Intel does step up their game, but assuming that there's healthy competition with good ARM and AMD chips. Competition is good for the consumer.

But I also want to see ARM based laptops from both Microsoft and Apple (Though Intel has Apple by the ears with Thunderbolt until USB 3.2 becomes a viable alternative on the low end.)

<comment><USER25> Dunno about Apple, but i find it unlikely from Microsoft. They have tried again and again to go beyond x86, only to find that they can't escape the weight of win32.

Our best bet would have been ChromeOS, as it is a platform with no legacy to deal with. But even there new models are now Intel based rather than ARM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can someone please update the headline, or update the link? They're out of sync. Alternate link: [http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Advanced- Micr...](http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Advanced-Micro- Devices-Inc-Announces-307-Increase-In-Q3-Earnings-1005488192)

</comment><comment><USER27> I´m very excited for upcoming AMD EPYC enabled dedicated servers and what it means for the market. The number of cores and memory channels is unmatchable by Intel

<comment><USER28> And PCIe lanes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> AMD vs NVidia novice here.

My untested understanding has been that even though AMD is performance-to- dollar higher performance than nVidia, it is plagued by not having a stellar software support that nVidia enjoys either via CUDA and consequently to cudaNN, software drivers not as fully compatible with games as is nVidia. AMD has OpenCL but I understand that most vendors / users are not exactly great supporters for OpenCL.

Since the hardware is just the trojan for software and nVidia has solved that problem, will not having the s/w support be a great factor for AMD not getting the same value as nVidia? Unless AMD puts in great effort to get its software game as good as its hardware, is it still DoA?

<comment><USER30> (Disclaimer: I work on AMD's Mesa driver)

There's also ROCm, which is AMD's attempt at an answer to CUDA. It's hard to unseat the incumbent just because it's always hard to get people to change their software environment, but I think we're getting there.

<comment><USER29> Thank you. This is the first time I heard about ROCm.

I sincerely wish that ROCm adoption takes off - been a AMD / ATI fanboy - <USER2> have been wanting to see AMD make a great dent.

Any numbers / etc to get more info on adoption of ROCm? Are there any specific usecases where ROCm well suited / performs on par / or above par cuda?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.nasdaq.com/article/advanced-micro-devices-inc- ann...](http://www.nasdaq.com/article/advanced-micro-devices-inc- announces-307-increase-in-q3-earnings-20171024-01609)

</comment><comment><USER5> Vega had a bumpy start. Rather limited availability, lack of custom design models and etc. I'm still waiting for Sapphire to make one.

<comment><USER31> I just bought a Sapphire 56... is it just a rebranded AMD board?

<comment><USER5> Yes. Compare it to their Nitro models for Polaris chips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder how much of this is due the huge demand for AMD GPUs for mining cryptocurrency coins

</comment><comment><USER33> Let's see what they do with 60G WiFi.

</comment><comment><USER34> what's up with the article title?

        AMD says its going to see a big drop in revenue, shares sink (AMD)

It seems to have an anti-amd bias.

<comment><USER35> It's 100% factually accurate. After hours trading is down 10%, and drops in revenue were announced. How was it biased?

<comment><USER36> Well AMD has a cyclical business, and a Q3 to Q4 drop is always expected. But Q3 outperformed and Q4 guidance was raised, while both are massive increases from last year.

Simplifying an announcement that exceeds expectations and raises revenue trends to "a drop in revenue" is absurd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is a misleading title, and the poster has a clearly biased stake in AMD. Hopefully no one made any rash decisions to buy stock because of this post, as of trading day close, AMD is down 12%.

<comment><USER38> I am curious how do you know that the poster has a clearly biased stake in AMD?

Business Insider did have an article with that exact title.

The results were announced after hours and the stock had already dropped before this posting.

<comment><USER37> Click the article link. What does the title say?

<comment><USER39> The correct question is: What did the title say at the time of submission?

<comment><USER37> No, the reason why I asked you to look at the title and see that the title had been changed is to understand the fact that the original title "AMD Announces 307% Increase in Q3 Earnings" was misleading. If it was a good summarization of the news, why then, did the author change it? Because it's fundamentally flawed.

Yes, AMD did see a significant increase in earnings, but the profit was far below expectations. Additionally, AMD during their investor statement lowered their guidance for Q4 profitability by over 10%. Do you see how such a title might be misleading?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If the earnings bump is really driven by the Threadripper CPUs, then earnings mean very little as AMD cost are much higher due to much larger die and lower yields. For every $100 worth of CPU sold, Intel is making orders of magnitude more profit.

<comment><USER41> Threadripper is a multi-chip module composed of two Zeppelyn dies (the same 8-core die used in the desktop part). There is no larger die or lower yield problem. This is the whole value proposition of the Zen microarchitecture — high yields, low per-CPU costs, typical MCM drawbacks (high interdie latencies, duplicated functional blocks, etc).</comment></comment>


Nanodegree Plus: Get hired within six months of graduating, or tuition refund - <AUTHOR> https://www.udacity.com/nanodegree/plus <comment><USER2> Reminds me of a scam surrounding recruitment (in armed forces) in India. 100s of potential recruits come to the recruiting event. So scammers would go around pitching their services: give us 1000 rupees, and we'll get you in. If you are not selected, all your money back.

In reality, they did nothing. If the guy got selected, they kept the money; if he didn't, they gladly refunded it. Easy money.

<comment><USER3> For $299/month, Udacity does a lot of work. I took a couple of their courses (could not complete) and those courses take substantial effort to complete. If someone is motivated enough to go through their (in my view) rigorous program, I could see how potential employers would be interested. More over there seems to be a shortage of solid Android/iOS developers. Solid training with Udacity's Nanodegree would be a definite plus.

<comment><USER4> Could you name a specific course you found too difficult to complete?

My experience was the exact opposite - most Udacity courses seemed (disappointingly) lightweight. I remember taking their Object-Oriented JavaScript course, which is marked on their website with "intermediate difficulty", and completing it all in an evening.

<comment><USER3> It was JavaScript Design Patterns. Its not that the courses are difficult. Its just that they take time and good amount of effort to complete

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Udacity will help you find you a job (as defined in the program Terms and Conditions) at a partner company, land you a paying internship, or secure for you the opportunity to make money through Udacity's global mentorship or freelancing programs. We will achieve this within six months of your graduation date, or refund your full tuition."

Paying Iinternship or "freelancing programs" is a bit slippery. You freelanced once that is a job! This being said Udacity should be commended for taking a step forward and putting money up in a way to back up their service.

<comment><USER6> Yeah. It is really saying "One of our partners will take you for _something_ " without any real guarantee the results are in line with the expectation of the student.

Then again, Udacity is really trying to be a Software Dev Technical School so that is par for the course imo.

<comment><USER7> Well it does set a minimum

> Further, in your new job Udacity guarantees that your gross income from such > job will be in excess of your cost of tuition (pre-tax) within a 3 month > period following job placement

But given you are paying about 3600 for the degree, that comes out to making minimum wage.

<comment><USER8> Looking further at the terms:

"* Graduate has not rejected any job offers."

<comment><USER9> Probably to fix a pretty obvious loophole:

* Obtain degree

* Turn down all jobs for 6 months

* Get refunded, then get a job.

<comment><USER10> So, you forgo 6 months salary, in order to get $3-4k tuition back. I guess if you didn't want to work anyways...

<comment><USER11> Backpacking through the world for 6 months while earning a bit of money? Count me in.

<comment><USER2> Refund of your own money is not "earning money"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here are the four Nanodegrees that are eligible for the Nanodegree+ program: Android Developer, iOS Developer, Machine Learning Engineer, and Senior Web Developer.

The name scheme is interesting because it tells you what you will become rather than what you will learn. The ML and Web Developer Nanodgrees are pretty new, but we already have reviews for the first two:

[https://www.class-central.com/certificate/ios-developer- nano...](https://www.class-central.com/certificate/ios-developer-nanodegree-- nd003)

[https://www.class-central.com/certificate/android- developer-...](https://www.class-central.com/certificate/android-developer- nanodegree--nd801)

<comment><USER13> Machine Learning Engineer? Seems on a pretty different level that iOS Developer or Android, but things are pretty hot right now I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm really fond of Holberton's tuition scheme, where you pay 25% of your salary for two years after graduation. In this scheme, everyone is incentivized to help the student get a high paying job, so the school simply can't become a degree factory.

<comment><USER15> That makes sense for a full-time in-person school that costs a lot of money.

But Udacity's part-time remote program is $299 a month, [https://www.udacity.com/nanodegrees/nd009](https://www.udacity.com/nanodegrees/nd009) so charging by percentages is less worthwhile.

<comment><USER14> You could charge something like a quarter percent for only a few months as a placement fee, and keep the standard $200 rate for all classes, with placement services as an option. While that's not as attractive as a full refund, it does avoid the issues pointed out in some of the other comments (like counting a freelance job as employment).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I graduated from their front-end developer nano degree program last year when it first launched. It doesn't feel great that none of these new "guarantees" applies to me.

<comment><USER17> Did it result in a decent job (if that was your goal)?

<comment><USER16> I was already employed as a FED, but it feels like they keep introducing these "enticements" and don't really care about the other cohorts.

<comment><USER18> They actually care about their alumni more than most universities care about theirs. The university I went to pretty much pretended I didn't exist, except for the once-a-year mandatory letter that said "Give us $100 to maintain your status in our alumni network." The benefits I'd get were basically socializing with other alumni, which I had no interest in doing.

If you graduated already, and therefore stopped paying tuition, it doesn't make sense for you to expect any additional services. I'm really grateful that, even a year past graduation, they still review my resumes and other professional documents. I haven't paid them a penny since I've graduated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I once went through something similar years ago in London when I was looking for my very first IT job.

Although I was already quite technical (already running Debian as my OS of choice, back when it was not as frendly as it is now) I had a totally non- computer-related degree, so I decided to get some paper certs to get me started.

I found a recruitment company in London that also did training on the side - technical and also job application coaching. The deal came with a guarantee: job within 3 months paying £20K+ (at the time a very reasonable entry salary) or your money back.

I thought it was a great system - the company got a pool of candidates that they got to know well over a few months and supervised their training and we got a lot of help getting that entry job (more difficult at the entry level in my experience than later as you move higher up).

In the end I got a job before the end of the course and through a different agency but it was still a useful experience.

</comment><comment><USER20> One complaint: "Nanodegree" is awful branding.

"Nano" implies "really small." So am I too understand that this degree will get me a really, really, really tiny bit of knowledge about the subject?

I think using the traditional term "certificate" is a better bet. It's also an easier thing to sell employers since they're already familiar with that language.

<comment><USER21> I disagree. To me, certificate sounds like something tiny. I.e. you're a certified .NET developer.

Traditionally, a degree can be very broad. For example, a CS degree can cover a lot of classes in different areas of Computer Science in addition to other non-major classes.

In contrast, a Nanodegree, sounds like a specialized degree to me. The Nano implies that it is small, but degree has that well known definition to most people. Together, it brings a sense of being a highly specialized program.

<comment><USER22> focusDegree would sound better imo and address your points.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What I like most about this is the incentive it places on Udacity to actually create a curriculum that employers find attractive.

It's far from perfect and students shouldn't expect miracles, but it's a step in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER23> It would be great to know what the curriculum actually is. "Senior Web Developer" is for "intermediate front-end developers" \-- does that mean it's front-end focused? Maybe I'm missing the links to the syllabi, but if not I'd like to see them.

Edit: I feel dumb now. If you scroll down on the detail page, there is more information. For some reason I thought it was just the footer down there.

</comment><comment><USER24> The linked page has a testimonial from someone who received offers from top tech companies to be a software developer. Although I'm a fan of Udacity (and completed one of their nanodegrees) I was surprised.

When I clicked through, it turned out that the person had also completed a 'B.S. in Computer Science at UCLA'.

</comment><comment><USER25> What an evil and misleading testimonial. They're trying to imply that he got a job at google because of the nanodegree, while you find out after the clickthrough that he simultaneously got a CS degree from UCLA.

<comment><USER26> I agree. I am one of the Nanodegree holder from first cohort in Front End Web Dev with healthcare background and healthcare related degree. I completed Nanodegree around 6 months ago. All I can say is I am facing a big hurdle to get an entry level position.

<comment><USER18> We were probably in the same cohort. Send me a note and I'll see if I can help you out.

rasheed [dot] bustamam [at] gmail [dot] com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sounds good, so long as they don't pull what some bootcamps do, which is hire former students

<comment><USER28> Why?

Is it wrong for boot camps to do that?

I am genuinely asking since I'm not familiar with that. What exactly goes on and why is it bad?

<comment><USER29> Two reasons come to mind:

1\. People who just graduated from a 12 week bootcamp are not really practiced and skilled enough to be mentoring others, imo.

2\. It sounds like a way to inflate the bootcamp's placement rates, which seems really sketchy and borderline false advertising to me.

My friend is considering this bootcamp around here called DevMountain and was telling me that the placement rate is supposedly around 90-95% within 3 months of graduation. This is for a 13-week program that costs over $10,000 I think. It might be a great program, but it sounds expensive to me and that placement rate sounds too good to be true. I warned my friend that they've probably found some way to manipulate that number, like people getting short-term contracts or something. My friend hears "90% placement within 3 months" and thinks he's got a 90% chance of getting a good, full-time job within 3 months of finishing the program (which is probably what the bootcamp wants him to think).

<comment><USER30> I don't recall which one, but one of the bootcamps does an independent jobs report where they hire some firm to track down how a cohort does. The 90-95% rates could be accurate, but probably for a 6 month period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Did anyone take the "Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree"?

How was it?

Did it change anything in your life?

</comment><comment><USER32> Aaand - ignoring all the other insightful comments: It's one of those...

\---

I am an international student. Why is this restricted to the US?

We hope to expand this program in the near future to other countries. Stay tuned!

<comment><USER33> They didn't answer the question, but I'd guess it's because it rests on their relationship with "partner" organisations. If those companies largely reside in the US, and if most students can't be expected to get a working visa in the US, then Udacity could find themselves paying for a lot of students' courses themselves, rather than having some "employer of last resort."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Their title is misleading. You are not guaranteed a job, just a refund of tuition if you fail to get a job. Still, this is a lot more than your average university will guarantee you.

<comment><USER34> Isn't that what a guarantee is? They are giving you a guarantee which in this case is getting a job (or your money back).

<comment><USER35> guarentee != guarentee or your money back

otherwise why would people bother stating the "or your money back" part?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's a good place to work in Toronto? - <AUTHOR>

Hoping to move to Toronto within the next month or so, but I'm not really sure where to focus my job search efforts.  I'm looking to work in web development, preferably at a startup or smaller company.<p>Anyone have any suggestions? <comment><USER2> idearebel, bnotions ?

<comment><AUTHOR> BNOTIONS seems cool, I'll hound them for a while. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Advice for US Troops Sent to the Mexican Border in an Age of Terrible Leaders - <AUTHOR> https://taskandpurpose.com/advice-troops-mexico-border/ <comment><USER2> The comment thread is everything. Wow. shoot the messenger and "after the first sentence because I disagreed with it I didn't bother reading or thinking about anything else" and "TRAITOR" shouts.</comment>


Google Transparency Report - <AUTHOR> https://transparencyreport.google.com/?hl=en <comment><USER2> For those curious, the spike in National Security takedown requests in 2016-2017 seems to have been largely driven by requests from the Russian government (which have since petered out), not the United States.

[https://transparencyreport.google.com/government- removals/by...](https://transparencyreport.google.com/government-removals/by- country/RU?hl=en&country_request_amount=group_by:reasons;period:;authority:RU&lu=country_request_amount)

Somewhat interestingly, the biggest takedown requests in the U.S. seems to be due defamation lawsuits, and they come from the judicial (not executive) branch.

[https://transparencyreport.google.com/government- removals/by...](https://transparencyreport.google.com/government-removals/by- country/US?hl=en&country_request_amount=group_by:reasons;period:;authority:RU&lu=country_item_amount&country_item_amount=group_by:branches;period:;authority:RU)

Not sure what to make of this; but it's interesting. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> The "domain by % encryption" table[0] is really cool - effectively a "name and shame" for still having old or misconfigured software.

0: [https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer- email/overview?h...](https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer- email/overview?hl=en&encrypt_region_table=region:001;encryption_level:RED,YELLOW&lu=encrypt_region_table)

<comment><USER4> And for email that's only looking for Opportunistic Encryption.

On the deliver-to-Google side that's only checking if they bothered doing TLS, and doesn't try to guess whether they'd fall back to insecure delivery if it was blocked, whether they check certificates, whether they allow archaic old ciphersuites and other configuration that's unsafe or anything like that.

On the accept-mail-from-Google side that's not penalising them if they don't have plausibly trustworthy certificates, or they don't speak any modern ciphersuites or protocol versions, only if they literally can't accept TLS.

Google offers an envelope versus postcard analogy, and that's exactly appropriate. Opportunistic encryption, like the envelope, means probably a postal delivery worker didn't bother reading your letter, it'd be a hassle. But anyone who is in the snooping business, like an intelligence agency or a direct adversary, OE doesn't stop them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The political advertising section is fascinating. You can see exactly what ads each entity ran, when, and how many impressions they received. Surprising to see the GOP dominate the spending overall!

I could spend hours here.

<comment><USER6> I find impressive that on a longer period of time, the US still spent 20 times more on political advertising than all of Europe

Edit: It's far from perfect; if you filter by France you get only belgian, german, and spanish advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's kind of funny that China has tried to get over 10,000 items removed, with the majority of government takedown requests happening in the past two years it seems[0], given that Google is officially banned in the country.

[0]: [https://transparencyreport.google.com/government- removals/by...](https://transparencyreport.google.com/government-removals/by- country/CN)

<comment><USER8> Probably for Hong Kong and Macau, which are outside the great firewall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Adding a link to Facebook Transparency Report: [https://transparency.facebook.com/](https://transparency.facebook.com/)

<comment><USER10> Facebook and a lot of others are listed at the bottom of Googles page.</comment></comment>


For 99 Years, Oxford English Dictionary Got It Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/oxford-english-dictionary-got-siphon-definition-wrong-for-99-years/19472844

<comment><USER2> Both are right.

The force that makes water want to go from one end to the other of the siphon is gravity. However what pushes the water _up_ the siphon is atmospheric pressure. And if the middle of the siphon is too high for atmospheric pressure to push water up to the middle, then the siphon won't work no matter what height differential exists between the two ends.

So both gravity and air pressure are involved.

<comment><USER3> I initially doubted you however <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphon> agrees.

Nice catch.

<comment><USER2> However <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/31098/> which was written by the physicist that submitted the correction to the OED claims, contrary to wikipedia, that the tensile strength of water is relevant.

Anyone have the ability to run a siphon and pull the middle up about 50 feet in the air? If atmospheric pressure is key, it should stop working at something like 30 feet high. If tensile strength is key, it should go several times that height.

 _Edit:_ I accidentally said that the tensile strength of water was said to be irrelevant, not relevant.

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia also says that the tensile strength of water is not relevant.

<comment><USER2> I wrote irrelevant where I meant to write relevant. Thanks for catching it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, and children are still taught that Bernoulli's principle is the reason why planes can fly. There are a lot of interesting physics misconceptions that have become widely accepted, but because physics (and perhaps science in general) is not a major focus of our culture, no one really worries about these misconceptions being out there.

Well, no one except the physicists :).

<comment><USER5> I have heard so many different explanations of why planes fly that I doubt that anyone really understands it. There was a memorable moment towards the end of my engineering degree, when after being given yet another explanation of why planes fly a classmate shouted out, "I think we've heard enough theories about whether planes can fly".

Apparently chemists encounter a similar thing when studying chemical bonds - every new academic year you are told that what you learned the previous year was such a gross simplification that it's basically wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone ever read the history of the OED? It's a fascinating and ill conceived project that took 70 years to actually yield a product (mind blowing when you compare the time and growth of Wikipedia).

If you know a little about it's history, it's pretty easy to see how mistakes were made. Wikipedia has mistakes too.

</comment><comment><USER7> Local link that correctly identifies the university Hughes works for - [http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/qut-physics- professor-s...](http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/qut-physics-professor- siphons-knowledge-to-rewrite-oxford-dictionary/story-e6frfku0-1225864889509)

One of my life dreams is to add a word to the OED. I would definitely be happy with adjusting an existing definition as well !

</comment><comment><USER8> The first entry doing define: siphon on Google also gets it wrong. I'll look it up in my old Webster's Unabridged when I get home. If Noah got it wrong _,it's possible the error dates back to Samuel Johnson.

_ There have been intervening editors since Noah Webster's time.

<comment><USER8> Better yet I found Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary online.

<http://www.1828-dictionary.com/d/search/word,siphon>

A device, consisting of a pipe or tube bent so as to form two branches or legs of unequal length, by which a liquid can be transferred to a lower level, as from one vessel to another, over an intermediate elevation, by the action of the pressure of the atmosphere in forcing the liquid up the shorter branch of the pipe immersed in it, while the continued excess of weight of the liquid in the longer branch (when once filled) causes a continuous flow. The flow takes place only when the discharging extremity of the pipe ia lower than the higher liquid surface, and when no part of the pipe is higher above the surface than the same liquid will rise by atmospheric pressure; that is, about 33 feet for water, and 30 inches for mercury, near the sea level.

It seems the error traces back to Noah (but he correctly points out the receiving side must be at a lower elevation). Johnson's definition is simply "a pipe to convey liquors through".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In other news, scientists say they are 'appalled' to discover that _Physical Review Letters_ does not instill good prose style among its readership, before going on to characterize their emotions with several other superficial and unnecessary adjectives (N > 3).</comment>