A Link Between Probiotic Use and Brain Fogginess - <AUTHOR> https://neurosciencenews.com/probiotics-brain-fog-bloating-9659/ <comment><USER2> I've learned the hard way that the best thing to do for your gut is to just eat plenty of vegetables. Roasting vegetables is as easy as making toast.

</comment><comment><USER3> Huh, maybe I'll reconsider my kefir and yogurt habit. I have been having a cup of kefir every morning because of its purported health effects, and occasionally I add yogurt to the mix. I haven't seen any downsides, but I haven't been doing it _that_ long, so if it only becomes a problem when it accumulates, I'll just reduce how much I consume.

I guess I need to find a replacement with a reasonably high amount of protein (I've been using it as a pre-workout drink). I'm hoping I can fit lentils in there somewhere.

It seems that one serving a day of yogurt is probably fine, but two a day (about what I have been having) is probably bad long-term. I'll probably continue having yogurt, but I'll only have it once a day and get my protein elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have to admit that I once fell for the probiotics advertising while I was sick with a digestive problem. The probiotics I took made everything worse and they made my thoughts muddy and confused, which meant I continued to take them, like an idiot. I think I'm still suffering from exacerbated digestive issues due to probiotics and I wish I could reverse their effects now.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is actually kind of exciting because at least the probiotics are doing _something_. If they're strong enough to make you brainfoggy if you take too much, then maybe they actually can help you recover from depression/anxiety like some of the very popularized but yet still controversial research proposes.

</comment><comment><USER6> interestingly, the "International Scientific Association of Probiotics & Prebiotics" have an article published 2 weeks later called: "'BRAIN FOGGINESS' AND D-LACTIC ACIDOSIS: PROBIOTICS ARE NOT THE CAUSE" [0] along with letter to Nature mag: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41424-018-0057-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41424-018-0057-9)

[0] [https://isappscience.org/brain-fogginess-probiotics-not- the-...](https://isappscience.org/brain-fogginess-probiotics-not-the-cause/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I eat a metric fuck ton of yogurt, drink the occasional kombucha, and otherwise eat random fermented or brewed items like miso, soy sauce, tofu cottage cheese, cultured cheeses of a number of varieties, and so on. Every once in a blue moon, I might eat pickles, or some kind of pickled item, or vinegar product, like apple cider vinegar.

I don't really drink a lot of beer, but when I do, it's usually thick stouts. I don't drink much alcohol at all anymore. The days when I did, it was more or less a contest or a dare among friends, when out and about.

I drink absurd amounts of coffee. Coffee has some anticeptic aspects, but what role that plays in its interaction with my gut flora is anybody's guess. I have to figure my microbiome has evolved adaptations to cope. Or not. Maybe it's just constant churn, who knows?

I fart constantly. I'm not shy about it. I let silent ones rip all the time. Most of the time, it's odorless air. But when it's not, I crop dust my co- workers shamelessly. They can deal with it. Smell my innards. Inhale the fumes of an ecological menagerie roiling inside me. Gas isn't really an unhealthy thing. It's just a perception of rudeness, like body odor, nose picking and so on.

...oh yeah, I pick my nose too. Like a fiend. Is that considered "bad" or something? Whatever. I look at is as another form of seeding the microbiome, applying the latest patches and AV updates, to harden my system against intrusion.

My shits are huge. They are solid and a brown, like some hue Bob Ross would concoct for the trunks of his trees. When I'm sick, it creeps into an acidic yellow, like vomit, but with an acrid stench.

As for mental fogginess, I can't complain. Maybe the coffee sobers me up.

Reading between the lines, with the gas and the bloating and the fogginess, I'd guess this resembles a drunkenness that draws parallels with anaerobic production of alcohol. Take it too far, and you might be brewing a lightly alcoholic mix, not unlike how kombucha requires ID, even though it's hardly comparable to beer.

<comment><USER8> I have never been ID'd when buying kombucha, and I buy it quite often.</comment></comment>


How the Meat Industry Thinks About Non-Meat-Eaters - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/08/meat-industry-meatingplace/538077/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> > _" they're in the business because they see what they're doing as something > more than just making meat products. They see themselves as feeding people, > feeding the world, feeding their community"_

Ahhh, except there are multiple states in the US where it's illegal to film inside an industrial meat-farm. Even if the video shows illegal acts, the person taking the video will be charged, not the doers of the crime.

When it's come to that, I think it's pretty obvious the people involved know they are not "feeding their community" like it gives them warm fuzzies or something.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "But fundamentally, one thing about people in the meat industry is that > they're not going to be in the meat industry by accident. It's a self- > selecting group. People who work in the meat industry, whether it is on the > line or in the small butcher shop, or on the ranches, or in the big > processing plants with all kinds of robots and things, they're in the > business because they see what they're doing as something more than just > making meat products. They see themselves as feeding people, feeding the > world, feeding their community."

This is highly presumptuous of him to imagine all the people in the industry as a self-selecting group, and ignores how the poorer classes usually get into it, because they aren't able to get anything else, for long hours of highly repetitive work in an environment that poses various kinds of risks, physical and emotional.

> "And the other thing is that people in the industry know the science. > They're in the barns with the birds, or with the animals, and they know how > the birds wind up on the shackles, on the production line. They've got > degrees in this, and they know what the meat science is, and they know what > antibiotics are for, and why they're used. So a lot of people in the > industry wonder why they have to defend themselves when people who do not > know as much as they do about the science of meat processing are telling > them they're wrong."

Again, generalization does not help. Claiming that they're all experts and know what they're doing, as if to allude that it isn't harmful in different ways (it affects all other people due to the relatively higher environmental destruction too).

> "Have you ever seen the eyelashes on a cow? I mean, they're just adorable. > Big eyes, and these long lashes—how can you do anything to harm this little > creature? I get it. Even people who really love meat don't want to talk > about how it gets to their plate."

This ending is probably the most honest part of the entire interview. And this attitude applies to many other ills that humans create for humankind.

<comment><USER4> *Her

<comment><USER3> Thanks for pointing that out. My comment is past the edit window now, and so I can't change it. I'm embarrassed to have used the masculine pronoun without paying attention because I wouldn't want to assume or make incorrect inferences. I skimmed through the article and didn't pay as much attention to the introduction and names of the interviewer and interviewee. Lesson learned! Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought the article would be about how the meat industry feels about vegetarians. Instead, it was a general overview of the meat industry, it's declining employment, and a description of of the working environment... I would be interested to know what meat producers really think of non-meat eaters. Do they look down on them? I'm a vegetarian and take an "each to their own" approach to other people's eating habits. Yet, every so often, I'm made to feel a bit awkward at social gatherings when the host has prepared mostly non veg food, or if my friends have picked a mostly non veg restaurant. They take it almost as an insult that I won't eat the food, or sometimes I get the impression they think I'm just trying to be difficult!

<comment><USER6> Eh, that's normal human behaviour.

I've found that if you're engaging in a behaviour that has a positive value judgement associated with it (dieting or eating healthier, exercise, etc), if people find out and do not share that behaviour, it often puts them on the defensive (they're not doing it, too, therefore they are somehow lacking).

This is exacerbated by the fact that a vocal subset of people engaging in those behaviours talk about it in order to either virtue signal or brag to others those who don't.

After that it's all about protecting the ego. The vegetarian is seen as an inconvenience. The dieter is teased for not eating desert with everyone else. The people who don't go to the gym start explaining all the reasons why they hate gyms and the people in them.

And I'm hardly immune. One of my friends is extremely fit and I caught myself teasing him about it as a consequence of my own envy and insecurities. I hope I've since stopped but it's a pretty basic human behaviour as far as I can tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article shares little-to-nothing about its headline claim.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it's an interview with the editor of a magazine that's targeted at the higher-ups in the meat industry. They talk about the state of the meat industry, risks, developments etc.

The only statement in regards to non-meat-eaters is that the "anti-meat-folks" are better at marketing than the meat industry, because the meat industry never really had to do advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _NB_ : This is part of a new series on trade publications that the author is ramping up:

"The conversation that follows is the first installment of "Tricks of the Trade," a series of interviews with the editors of trade publications, and it has been edited for length and clarity."

It could be a good series to follow depending upon the publications.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would like to assume, but can only hope, that this kind of article in a not too distant future will be read by all with the same kind of shuddering disgust which it already provokes in some of us - a horrifying reminder of an asshole era. "They killed on a hyper-industrial scale, without mercy, without refinement, but with high tech, and they were proud of it".

<comment><USER3> I've recommended this one before - the mockumentary "Carnage: Swallowing the past" [1] is a good take on such a future. Those in the UK can watch it on BBC. [2]

[1]: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6667360/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6667360/)

[2]: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04sh6zg](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04sh6zg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wish the interview talked about how the meat industry can make the slaughter process as pain free as possible. We are talking about billions of animals, and any improvement in the process could reduce a lot of suffering.

<comment><USER12> It's a big topic and a business line for manufacturers. CO2 stunning, for example: [http://m.meatpoultry.com/Writers/Other-Contributors/CAS- syst...](http://m.meatpoultry.com/Writers/Other-Contributors/CAS-system.aspx)

<comment><USER11> That was a good article. I've come across Temple Grandin before. She seems to have a positive opinion of CAS with the important proviso that induction is done right.

If such efforts at reducing suffering become the industry standard, with the standards backed by legislation requiring pain free death, it would be a very, very big deal.

Even for humans, many people fear the pain associated with death more than the death itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ad-blocker hostile.

<comment><USER14> works fine here with uBlock.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Letter for visa for YC interview - <AUTHOR>

The good news is that we got selected for the YC interview, the question is - will they issue an invitation letter for visa/immigration formalities? We would be coming over from India. <comment><USER2> YC does issue invitation letters for founders traveling from outside US. We interviewed with YC and 2 of our co-founders flew in from India (they already had their B1 visas).

Just write to them and they should be able to send you the letters through HelloSign.

Good luck for your interview!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks PNR. We got our invitation letters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They say in their question and answers that they don't help with visas...

[http://ycombinator.com/faq.html](http://ycombinator.com/faq.html)

Also, congrats on the interview!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We just need the invitation letter and not help with Visa per se. All of us have worked/lived in the US before so the Visa shouldn't be a problem, just that we need a letter to make a case for the travel.

<comment><USER3> Right. Gotcha. Good luck with it!</comment></comment></comment>


Dresssed: Beautiful Themes built on bootstrap for your Rails App - <AUTHOR> http://dresssed.com <comment><USER2> Definitely beautiful, but the price point seems a bit strange. It definitely surpasses ThemeForest territory, but it's still built on an existing framework and has that "cookie-cutter" vibe to it. Considering a few hundred more bucks will get you a completely custom Bootstrap theme on oDesk, I wonder about the target demographic for something like this.

I think the killer app for this will be a bootstrap theme where a few easy parameters (so easy your grandma can do it!) can dramatically change the look and feel to make something actually feel unique. If that is possible, I can really see this taking off.

<comment><USER3> Creator of Dresssed here.

You can get much cheaper themes specifically for Bootstrap here: <https://wrapbootstrap.com/>.

But what I've noticed is that every theme based on Bootstrap is incomplete. Focus of my themes is to provide everything you need to build an app. Re- branding every component was a lot of work and trying to make them not look like Bootstrap was even more work.

<comment><USER2> Please don't misunderstand my comment for a lack of excitement about this domain. I'm going to keep a close watch on this to see where it goes. Absolutely agree about the state of Bootstrap themes, which is why I tend to go pure custom with outsourcing. One suggestion I would have is to really hit hard about how yours stand out. Clearly, they are well designed, but someone who would be a buyer at that price point (doesn't need custom, but needs something nice and flexible) may not be educated enough to know why they should choose yours over the cookie-cutter $30 theme. The custom form and tables are particularly nice, but they are buried in the demo. I've spent a lot of time digging through bootstrap themes, and it took me awhile to figure out what made this one more compelling; less experienced users will surely have the same issue.

Good luck though; this is definitely an interesting space and I think you'll get some good results over time.

<comment><USER3> Very good point! You are totally right. I did hit hard about those points in the emails I sent before launch and they have been very successful. But not on the site yet. Will do that. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this sort of stuff turning application development into a commodity?

You can spin up a Rails app, Bootstrap it, and them theme it off the shelf with about 30 minutes work nowadays. 10 minutes later you can have it running on a PAAS such as Heroku.

Each of those jobs would have taken a number of different specialists many days in development, design, and sys admin work just a few years ago.

The average simple CRUD SAAS app that is presented here is _such_ a low barrier to entry and becoming increasingly so.

<comment><USER5> Yes? This is good thing, right?

<comment><USER6> It depends. Is it good that I don't need to know how to get an Apache server on a *NIX box up and running just so I can play with Ruby? Absolutely.

Is it good that even though I suck as UI design & colors, I can see something I like, drop a little cash and deploy it? Again absolutely.

Is it good that it's now super easy to write a CRUD app that is nothing more than a digitized form? I'm not sold here.

I get the allure, and I take advantage of these options as much as possible. But what I want to see is software helping solve a problem. If all you're doing is digitizing a form, I'm not convinced you've really solved a problem.

<comment><USER7> The entire internet is a CRUD app filled with digitized forms. It is nice not to have to think about that, and instead think about workflows and affordances that help people get stuff done. Making this basic crud easier allows more brain space for the more interesting problems to solve.

<comment><USER6> True, my concern is more that people will just stop with the CRUD app.

Geocities did some good for letting people having their own page. But the HTML was horrendous, and left many thinking they're doing amazing stuff. I don't really want to see that repeated.

The problem, however, is at the developer level and not the tool level, I suppose.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't worry about people "stopping". As long as companies have use-it-or- lose-it budgets, they'll find a way to spend the money somewhere.

And as for geocities, untrained people putting content out there for the rest of the world to see was pretty amazing stuff at the time, even without semantic web concepts in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good to finally see a nice theme on top of Bootstrap that actually changes things to make it look individual, as expected from a quality site, while keeping the good parts that you initially picked Bootstrap for. Thumbs up for the theme and the business idea!

Not everyone is using Rails though and even the Rails coders might want to use other plugins, are you going to offer themes without all the Rails customization as well?

<comment><USER3> Yes! At some point I hope to offer non-Rails versions of the themes. But the focus now is to make more themes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have you considered integrating with the GitHub API, and adding customers details to the repo upon purchase? (if they want).

That way, it makes it easier for customers to submit bugs to you, talk about suggestions, and even provide their own improvements if necessary.

HackerEngine wrote about doing this here: <http://blog.hackerengine.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Not the Creator of Dressed here.

The point of Bootstrap is to make it "so easy your grandmother can do it" so why would I pay $149 for your layouts when inevitably it's going to require some form of customization you haven't thought of. Great job at taking advantage of the internet sheep, I will give you that.

<comment><USER3> Your grandmother knows HTML & CSS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Preview is broken (<http://dresssed.com/themes/gimlet/preview>)

      "The page you were looking for doesn't exist.
       You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved."

And you're missing a Favicon.

<comment><USER9> Also experiencing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very nice looking theme, and a good idea.

It makes me think though, so much effort lately is going into "dressing" UI and very little attention seems to be paid to improving UI structure. The old list - page hop - view pattern is feeling pretty out dated. Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am looking for a way to sell ready-made websites to small businesses. Does anybody know of a solution that would take basic infos (company name, some presentation text) and produce a nicely designed (such as those themes) website ?

<comment><USER14> Webby or nanoc or some other static-site generator tool?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm honestly surprised we've not seen more of these. Bootstrap is great, it's a good set of nice tools to get you going and then a truly creative designer can take it where it needs to go.

Look forward to seeing more themes appear!

<comment><USER16> I think the reason there aren't more themes is the sheer quantity of work involved in styling all the bootstrap elements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> These are not optimized for iPad3 (retina).

</comment><comment><USER18> Love the idea.

Small issue - when I mouse over the Buy Now button, the popup/hover box shows up for about a second, then disappears.

<comment><USER3> Creator of the project here. Thx :) What browser are you on?

<comment><USER19> I'm having this issues too with the current Google Chrome Stable 19.0.1084.56

<comment><USER3> Should be fixed now, thx!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great theme !

Please add support to django framework.

<http://www.djangoproject.com>

</comment><comment><USER21> It's weird, I pressed the close on the preview video, but the audio keeps going...

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it retina/high-resolution ready?</comment>


7 Networking Tips Everyone Should Use (But Most People Don't) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Smartcasual/7-networking-tips-everyone-should-use-but-most-people-don-t-2cc5a971f15b <comment><USER2> People-networking, not computer-networking. (It wasn't clear to me from the title.)</comment>


Ask HN: Founder/Co-founder exit with share holding - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I have been one of the 3 co-founders/founders (all 3 have equal share holding) of a seed funded low revenue startup for about a year now. I have decided to leave the company while my partners are carrying on with the company with full blown effort to raise next round of funding. My partners expect me to leave the company with no share holding. While I want to leave gracefully and don't want my presence in the company to be a VC deal breaker for my partners, I also want to stay connected with the company in the future with a negotiable share holding as this is as close as I can get to be a non-trivial owner in a company and stay in close connection with workings of a starup/company. What options do I have for exiting from my startup as a cofounder and retain non-trivial share holding (perhaps a single digit number)? Do I need to hire a lawyer for this situation? <comment><AUTHOR> Just wanted to add a piece of information that the company and we founders are India based.</comment>


MacOS finally gains external GPU support - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/30/macos-finally-gains-external-gpu-support/ <comment><USER4> There's an amazing website and community if you are interested in external GPUs at [https://egpu.io/](https://egpu.io/) . Both for Mac and PC you will find guides, explanations etc.

There's also an eGPU subreddit and I wrote a sticky on U series chips, PCIe lanes and Thunderbolt 3 [https://www.reddit.com/r/eGPU/comments/7vb0gg/u_series_chips...](https://www.reddit.com/r/eGPU/comments/7vb0gg/u_series_chips_pcie_lanes_and_thunderbolt_3/) which is more interesting for PCs than Mac.

<comment><USER5> I've heard that external GPUs have too much latency to be that useful for a lot of applications.

What I'd like to see is a Mac with a nice big fat Nvidia GPU. Why can't I buy a Mac with a 1080 ti? My suspicion is that Apple wants to get into the GPU game themselves, and bring some of the expertise from their mobile GPU team to laptops and desktops.

That'd be great, if they actually released something competitive. So far, they haven't, and Mac users, who would love to pay for better technology, are left out in the cold as a result.

<comment><USER6> >My suspicion is that Apple wants to get into the GPU game themselves

My suspicion is that they barely even want GPUs, which they seem to see as annoying sources of heat and noise, getting in the way of their ultimate vision of an imac so thin you could use it as a kitchen knife.

(I wish I were kidding about this, but I am not.)

<comment><USER5> Their investment in Metal and their own mobile GPU hardware suggests to me that they do, and that they want to own the technology from top to bottom.

[https://developer.apple.com/metal/](https://developer.apple.com/metal/)

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/12/the-new-iphone-8-has-a- cus...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/12/the-new-iphone-8-has-a-custom-gpu- designed-by-apple-with-its-new-a11-bionic-chip/)

<comment><USER6> Are mobile GPU efforts relevant to MacOS and desktop GPU work?

<comment><USER5> They will be if they start putting them in Macs.

<comment><USER6> I think we agree on that. I'm certain they will. But that also agrees with my initial statement, no?

For Apple, they want thin and light. Mobile is both things, and the thought of designing a system that can cope with the 200W+ draw of desktop GPU parts doesn't even factor in to their thinking.

They're tossing a bone to the users who need actual heavy-duty GPU power by talking about the ability to use external cards, but (in my opinion) considering the cost and performance issues that come with that approach, it is more an admission that they truly don't care about that segment of the market than an actual solution.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/specs/](https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/specs/) — released just a few months ago.

The AMD Vega 64 has got to push a few hundred watts.

Microsoft has the Surface Book 2 with GTX 1060 and they must be looking at that as competition for the high end MacBook Pro.

<comment><USER6> I did a little poking around out of curiosity.

According to: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/11717/the-amd-radeon-rx- vega-...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/11717/the-amd-radeon-rx- vega-64-and-56-review/20)

Vega 64 has a board power rating of 295W.

According to the imac pro tech specs from the link you provided, it has an idle draw of 64W, and a peak draw of 370W for the entire system.

Unless I'm mistaken, that seems to imply that there has to be a good deal of throttling between the CPU & GPU to come in at that power budget. (The specs also note an additional 50W(!) of potential draw for fans alone if the imac is operated in a warm environment.)

Am I mistaken?

Not arguing, just hashing out my understanding. Your point regarding the Surface Book 2 and the 1060 makes sense. It does look like I was technically incorrect about them not engineering to a 200+ watt GPU, although I do wonder what sustained draw it can handle thermally compared to a full desktop part, and how much that would affect performance.

<comment><USER4> > Vega 64 has a board power rating of 295W.

John from Mantiz reported 650W peak. Surely only for milliseconds but still. [https://egpu.io/forums/implementation-guides/2014-mac- mini-v...](https://egpu.io/forums/implementation-guides/2014-mac-mini-vega- rx-64-akitio-node-apple-tb3-tb2-adapter-macoswin10-rolfl/#post-18787) it is absolutely not in the interests of an eGPU chassis manufacturer to report figures which hinder their own sales so I believe him.

Similarly, someone with an awful lot of AMD knowledge (AMD employee?) on the egpu.io forums pretty much begged people not to try the Vega 64 in a Sonnet 550 hinting at similar problems [https://egpu.io/forums/thunderbolt- enclosures/sonnet-says-th...](https://egpu.io/forums/thunderbolt- enclosures/sonnet-says-that-350550-will-not-support-vega/#post-22333) and saying a solution is in the works.

Sonnet [http://www.sonnettech.com/support/kb/kb.php?cat=524&expand=_...](http://www.sonnettech.com/support/kb/kb.php?cat=524&expand=_a2&action=b914#b914) says the Vega 64 is only supported in the 650 box -- which was just released pretty much because of the necessity to support the Vega 64. Something is rotten in Denmark: 650W power supply supports up to 375W card (up to 8-pin + 8-pin power connectors) plus provides additional 100W of peak power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is speculation, but I'm betting that we will see a GPU-backed external display (sort of an iMac minus the Mac) sometime in the next year. Apple never builds out support like this unless they plan on having a product to sell.

And they seem to generally "dislike" putting discrete GPUs in laptops, going all the way back to the Titanium G4 days.

<comment><USER8> It could happen, but from Apple's own announcements it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development, which Tim Cook constantly tells us (for AR at least...) is something he's super excited about for the future of computing. Not arguing this is the sole reason, but it definitely seems like a feature to cover high end edge cases like this for the time being.

Much of Apple's own discussions on the eGPU feature at WWDC/the marketing blurb for their own eGPU devkit refer to VR a lot too. Apple added VR support to Final Cut Pro at roughly the same time as well.

> And they seem to generally "dislike" putting discrete GPUs in laptops, going > all the way back to the Titanium G4 days.

Not so sure I'd agree with this - every single Titanium PowerBook model ever made had a discrete GPU. Even the iBooks had dedicated GPUs. It wasn't until the adoption of Intel processors that integrated GPUs was even an option for Apple really.

<comment><USER9> >> it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development

As well as ML development, which is a pain w/o a local CUDA-compliant GPU. Yes, you could do it on the cloud, but sometimes it is easier to do ad-hoc stuff locally without having to spin up GPU machines and remember to spin them down.

<comment><USER10> Ding ding ding.

I use OS X for all software development _except_ CUDA at the moment. This is huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple has a pretty decent summary of the feature in this support article: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT208544)

Seems to be limited to AMD GPUs at this time.

<comment><USER12> And limited to Macbook Pro. Damn, I was hoping they would include support for Macbooks.

<comment><USER13> Macbooks don't have a TB3 port

<comment><USER14> Which is a shame. This is the only reason my wife still uses old 11" Mac Air. She has an Apple Thunderbolt screen which she doesn't want to replace and is unusable on the Macbook. Pros are just too big for her, so she keeps on using the old Air.

<comment><USER15> The current MacBook similar size bigger screen, but wow is the dongle life a horror.

<comment><USER16> It's not only a horror, it's idiotic and completely avoidable.

Some people say it's an upgrade, but I don't see why they couldn't upgrade and keep the other ports around, since people need those daily.

For sure I've used my 89-euro dongle a lot more than I've used the USB-C port (which is never), until I got sane again after 8 years of getting overcharged by Apple and switched to Microsoft hardware running Xfce Linux (which are both wonderful).

<comment><USER17> What dongle is €89!?

<comment><USER16> The one I bought with the laptops so that I could use my external monitor and plug my cell phone.

<comment><USER17> This one is $69 and has USB C, HDMI, and USB A: [https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c- digital-a...](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital-av- multiport-adapter). Does it not fit your needs?

<comment><USER16> Why does it matter, and why is it so important to you? Does it change anything?

It was the only adapter I could buy at Juice in Florence, Italy (where I bought the laptop) that had HDMI at the time.

The laptop was EUR 1799 ($2,150), the dongle was EUR 89.

After 2-3 months the keyboard started failing. It was replaced by Apple--along with the battery which they found out was faulty, and it started failing again (missed keystrokes, registering twice) after a short while. They replace it _again_, then after 3 days the logic board dies, taking all data with it. Apple replaced it, I sold that piece of shit of a laptop for EUR 1,000, and the guy called me after 2-3 days that the logic board died again and Juice (no Apple Store in his area) would give him a new one.

That was my about 5th and last Apple laptop.

I read lots of reports of these things happening to lots of people, but not getting a lot of attention anywhere for some reason, despite the fact that those things cost $2000 and you should absolutely be able to type for more than 2-3 months without replacing the keyboard.

<comment><USER18> When the third failure/warranty claim happens, you have a right to refuse the repair, return the item and ask for the money back (the same amount that is on the bill). So by selling to the third party, you took the loss.

<comment><USER16> In Europe..? I wasn't aware of that. I mentioned returning it to Apple and they said the could give you a new one at the most, but only after multiple repairs for the same problem failed.

<comment><USER18> Yes, in Europe. It happened to my brother, but with Asus (so they didn't try to talk him out of it). After third warranty claim, he took the money and got an Thinkpad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it true that they disabled support for TB2 eGPU and in doing so broke many people's current setups (on pre-2016 hardware)?

<comment><USER20> There are reports from 2 weeks ago that it was removed from the 10.13.4 beta.[0] I haven't seen reports about the status in the release.

[0]: [https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/14/thunderbolt- thund...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/14/thunderbolt- thunderbolt-2-egpu-compatibility-purged-from-macos-high-sierra-beta-5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been using an eGPU for a few months now and It's fantastic. It's a bit annoying to deal with all of the workarounds for libraries like pytorch/tensorflow so you can use the latest version but other than that it's great.

<comment><USER22> Can you point to any blog post or any other link of a setup description for deep learning?

<comment><USER21> So there I didn't really follow any blog post or anything, there's a lot of gists about setting it up but they become relatively out of date fairly quickly and are usually specific to their setup.

I would checkout: [https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/wip-nvidia-egpu-support- for...](https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/wip-nvidia-egpu-support-for-high- sierra/)

A lot of people have put in a lot of work to make it as easy as possible to setup. I would just make sure you setup things one at a time and don't immediately jump to trying to get TF or pytorch to work after installing the drivers/ following any sort of guide. Verify your Cuda installation first by building the sample programs and running them. (see [http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-mac- os-x...](http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-mac- os-x/index.html))

Other than that maybe checkout: [https://gist.github.com/jganzabal/8e59e3b0f59642dd0b5f2e4de0...](https://gist.github.com/jganzabal/8e59e3b0f59642dd0b5f2e4de03c7687) [https://gist.github.com/smitshilu/53cf9ff0fd6cdb64cca69a7e28...](https://gist.github.com/smitshilu/53cf9ff0fd6cdb64cca69a7e2827ed0f)

The main thing is just getting the GPU drivers setup, after that installing tensorflow requires some modifications to the source (relatively trivial find and replace), and I don't think you have to do anything special for the latest version of pytorch.

Other tips:

1\. Make sure you're using a thunderbolt 3 cable with whatever egpu you have, other cables will not work even if they're usb c. (USB 3.1 != Thunderbolt 3 != USB C) Read about the differences.

2\. I would recommend the AKITO Node enclosure as it seems like most people use it and the community is really small already so if you aren't it might be more difficult to debug issues, but I wouldn't say you couldn't use something else.

3\. You'll want to have a docker container that has the CPU version of tensorflow/whatever so you can use that when you don't have the GPU readily available as tensorflow won't work if you installed it with GPU support and your GPU isn't there.

4\. If you're trying to use Nvidia-Docker I'm not sure if anyone has gotten that to work on mac because device binding isn't supported on mac for docker. You might be able to get this to work by modifying the docker VM but I'm not sure.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the detailed response :)

<comment><USER21> No problem (:

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> CUDA support is pretty critical for a lot of media production. I'm thankful that official support is here. The downside is a Mac Pro looks like a rats nest of cables with external video I/O cards, 10GbE cards, eGPus. It's a much larger physical footprint than a tower with a lot more technical troubleshooting resulting in making sure a crappy thunderbolt 2 cable is seated correctly.

<comment><USER24> NVIDIA cards and thus CUDA are still not officially supported.

<comment><USER25> I have a older MacBook with an nVidia card specifically for CUDA development. I get my drivers from nVidia. Could this work the same way?

<comment><USER24> Yes, external NVIDIA GPUs already work this way and will continue to do so. This announcement is about official support which only applies to a few specific configurations. The only GPUs supported are Polaris/Vega and the only Macs supported are 2016+ MBPs, 2017+ iMacs, and the iMac Pro.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT208544)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Apple doesn't want to release a mid-priced ($2000?) desktop for content creators, as that would cannibalize the market of the $8000 Mac Pro and iMac Pro.

Now they seem to be realizing they're losing that segment of the market to PC side of things, and that people in that segment are often thought leaders. If content creators have PCs, content usually ends up working the best on a PC.

<comment><USER27> Don't think anyone who moved would be wanting to move back just because Apple now supports a GPU dongle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> On the MacOS install page for TensorFlow, we have this goodie:

Note: As of version 1.2, TensorFlow no longer provides GPU support on macOS.

Will eGPU support help change that?

[https://www.tensorflow.org/install/install_mac](https://www.tensorflow.org/install/install_mac)

<comment><USER29> Probably not, since Nvidia eGPUs are not currently supported by Apple.

Although, it is possible to compile TensorFlow from source with CUDA support for macOS. You have to make a few tweaks to the source code and symlink some libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can anyone comment on whether this will be useful for training neural networks?

<comment><USER21> So I've been using an eGPU for about 3 months now and it is amazing. This isn't officially supported so you end up having to do a lot of work arounds to get things like tensorflow/pytorch working.

It doesn't let you hot plug your eGPU into your computer (you have to restart for it to work) but for officially supported eGPUs you're now able to do that.

I've trained various models using a Titan XP and it's so awesome to be able to maintain the portability of your laptop and still get all of that power. A large benefit is also not having to move training data around between servers and other machines if you have it on an external drive or just on your laptop.

After you get everything up and running there isn't that much maintenance or anything you have to do regularly to keep it working. The speedup is incredible and it was definitely worth it for me personally, however it's not a walk in the park to get it set up initially.

<comment><USER31> Neat. Have you tried it with any games?

<comment><USER21> I've tried it with an external monitor which works great but I haven't tried it with any games. From looking at the eGPU forums it seems like people aren't running into that many problems with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have an Akitio Node - Thunderbolt3 eGPU enclosure which says it accepts full size cards and works with High Sierra with AMD GPU's. ([https://www.akitio.com/expansion/node](https://www.akitio.com/expansion/node))

What is a good GPU for a budget for someone that just wants to experiment with GPU's like OpenCL or some machine or deep learning?

If I didn't have a budget what would a better card be? :-)

<comment><USER33> There currently really are no good cards to get from AMD because of the inflated prices caused by miners. I've heard that Nvidia GPUs work just fine with the Nvidia drivers installed. I'd totally recommend AMD any time of the year, but you cannot get their cards at MSRP anywhere.

AMD got the following models (mid-range, kinda high-end): RX 540-580 and Rx Vega 56 and 64. The RX580 got an MSRP of around $200, but you can only get them for $400+. Same problem for the other models.

Nvidia got the following ones (mid-range, high-end): GTX 1050-1080 and Ti models meaning a boost in power. You might be able to pick up a GTX 1060 for $200-300 which is still more than the $200 MSRP, but that's what you can get.

<comment><USER32> A GTX 1060 would still be useful for someone who wants to learn more about GPU programming, practice and start working on ideas they might have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have a crazy question, why don't we put the big gpus in the monitor instead of putting them in the laptop? It is ok to have a small low performance gpu in the laptop like the one i have in my MBP but instead of buying an external gpu i would pretty much buy a large screen with a gpu in it. Maybe it is just me.

<comment><USER35> Unfortunately while a pretty concise solution, it's been the case over the past 10-15 years that the GPU market has moved at a much faster pace than the display market.

So the main thing that would worry me is to have a monitor that is capable, far longer than the GPU that's integrated within it. Like a inverse Mac Pro - where currently the internals are sound for the majority of use cases - <USER2> the exception of the GPUs which are quite poor performers at that price point.

Now we seem to be in pretty good shape to accomplish such a solution - <USER3> technologies are there with thunderbolt 3 offering enough performance now to accommodate a high end GPU with not too much performance loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What is the point of this if it doesn't support any GPUS with a osx driver? I was under the impression that PCI-E was supported by TB3 - the little squabble between Nvidia and Apple needs to stop.

<comment><USER17> As others have mentioned in this thread, Nvidia provides drivers for their graphics cards on macOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> PSA: If you are using a DisplayLink based device, this update will break your setup. They have a beta driver on their site that will re-enable clone mode, but not extended desktops, etc. Through the 10.13.4 beta the rumor was that changes to support eGPU's broke something they relied on.

Edit: 184.108.40.206 is not a version of macOS.

</comment><comment><USER38> Very cool! Does anyone know if you can do SLI within any external enclosures with Mac or is that a pipe dream given there is no official driver?

</comment><comment><USER39> I've always been curious about this. How can I try it out if I already own a GPU?

<comment><USER13> You will need to buy a TB3 eGPU enclosure. These range anywhere from $200 to $500 and typically come without a GPU. There are some more expensive options (like the Aorus Gaming Box with a GTX 1070/1080 or RX 580) that already come with a GPU installed.

Here is a nice comparison of the eGPU enclosures available today: [https://egpu.io/external-gpu-buyers-guide-2018/](https://egpu.io/external- gpu-buyers-guide-2018/)

My personal recommendations are the Akitio Node Standard/Pro or Sonnet Breakaway Box 350/550/650\. These companies are reputable companies in the Thunderbolt hardware realm.

Note that I am not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Mac VR here we come. About time; this will be one of their bigger errors.

</comment><comment><USER41> Are you able to use an external GPU to drive a MacBook Pros display?

<comment><USER42> Do you mean loopback mode?

<comment><USER41> Yes, thank you, now I know the correct term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is there something like this available for Linux and Windows PCs?

<comment><USER44> Yes, Mac is the last to support it

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Perviously

</comment><comment><USER46> "How to downgrade your 1080Ti to 1060 by paying additional $400"

<comment><USER47> Why would this downgrade?

<comment><USER48> The OP is being a little disingenuous because I'm not sure Nvidia is supported anyway, but you lose some (not enough to go from 1080TI to 1060) performance. Something like 5-10%, depending on if you send the video signal to an external monitor or back to your laptop's screen.

<comment><USER24> More like 20-30% on high end cards. But it's also very workload-dependent.

[https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs- thunderbo...](https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs- thunderbolt-3-egpu-internal-display-test/)

<comment><USER46> For gaming. Also don't forget the annoying latency. But if you need to transfer from/to GPU memory all the time, like in large Deep Learning training datasets, you downgrade your GPU significantly; that's why I wrote 1080Ti -> 1060\. You already have high end PCIe GPUs starved and waiting on memory transfers in Deep Learning all the time.

You could have observed something similar with e.g. SATA 1/2/3 SSDs and M.2 PCIe. For normal workloads, each new generation was slightly better performing, i.e. booting OS etc. But once you went into processing 4K RAW video, only M.2 PCIe was usable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Heh, why make another Mac Pro when they can sell a egpu dongle?

</comment><comment><USER50> Wanted external GPU support while traveling some to be able to do deep learning on the road. Too bad this is only AMD support.</comment>


Introducing Gradient Ventures - <AUTHOR> https://gradient.google <comment><USER2> IMO this has significant appeal. Lots of firms can provide capital, but few can provide relevant expertise let alone training.

They seem to be trying to cover all bases with the Google Brain Residency the Machine Learning Ninja program, standard VC funding, and now this. If you have talent in ML/AI there is a way Google can help you succeed in the style of your choice. Want to be a founder? Excellent! Want to be a founder but also kinda part of Google? Sure! Are you super talented and experienced in other disciplines and want to explore AI and maybe contribute a 2-5% improvement to one of our model's performance? Yes! We have that!

<comment><USER3> Actually a 2-5% improvement over state-of-the-art is a research contribution in its own right.

<comment><USER4> In some problems this is incredible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google (and other large tech companies that have invested in AI internally) are probably the most valuable investors, because they have access, and can purchase, the largest and best data sets available. It's hard for AI start-ups to do anything without access to the right data sets, and large companies can and have better access to that data.

<comment><USER6> > they have access, and can purchase, the largest and best data sets available

Google might have an advantage in personal data, that can be used for advertising and health, but when it comes to general data, such as image datasets and NLP datasets, they can be found in the public domain and are growing fast. There is just a specific, limited advantage to Google in datasets. Mostly for ads.

<comment><USER7> The largest, most interesting recent public datasets in image and NLP were released by Google.

For example, here are some of their recent NLP datasets: [https://github.com/google-research-datasets](https://github.com/google- research-datasets)

In images, OpenImages is theirs, and there are assorted ones derived from YouTube.

Stanford's SNLI is the most recent non-Google NLP dataset which is getting used a lot. Babi (from FB) too, if you count that as NLP

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought this was odd, from the about page

> We can help you find and incorporate data sets into your first models. From > cleaning data to extracting the most important features, our team can help > you get your production models to market.

While realizing the hardest part of a startup is everything _but_ the tech, it seems odd they're telling _AI companies_ they'll help with the hardest parts of the technical side, the ones that need to be done right well before anyone can tell if your tech has any merit.

I'd hate to be a first-pass reviewer for all the pitches they're gonna get. "I have this amazing idea, I just need someone else to build the AI behind it!"

<comment><USER9> Honestly, if the answer to that is that they invest in you and you use their money to buy google cloud ml services, and you go out and find customers, that doesn't sound bad.

<comment><USER10> there is nothing that requires you to use GCP, Google ML services or anything along those lines. This was a surprise but true.

source: i am part of the Algorithmia team.

<comment><USER9> Right, I just meant in response to GP that said they didn't want buisinesses that wanted/needed much of their ML built for them. Google might be okay with that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really scary to see Google's maneuvering for total control of AI tech.

<comment><USER12> Somewhat related: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/artificial...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/artificial- intelligence-economic-inequality.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _[https://cogniac.co/](https://cogniac.co/) The demo over here seems to be fabricated. Even if you provide wrong labels interactively, the performance of the classifier keeps increasing ...

_ Picked up from [https://gradient.google/portfolio/](https://gradient.google/portfolio/)

<comment><USER14> I don't think they are trying to pass it off as a real demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Extremely impressed with the investment partners behind this fund. I worked with Shabih during my time at Google and saw his work KPCB; he's a deep thinker and also relentless advocate/supporter for the companies he backs. Anna Peterson is also a legend at Google. Think they'll end up being the strategic VC of choice behind every major AI company.</comment>


Sonos is getting rid of its controversial "recycle mode" - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/5/21166777/sonos-ending-recycle-mode-trade-up-program-sustainability <comment><USER2> For those looking for an alternative solution, I'm currently running Mopidy on a Raspberry Pi connected to a old Logitech iPod speaker dock that also has an aux input, and have a music library on a home NAS (Helios4 from kobol.io).

Mopidy acts as a jukebox, streaming files from the server and locally managing playlists and a queue. It enabled me to reuse my old speakers, put a RasPi to good use, and offers a responsive web UI to manipulate the queue from our phones. It was the best low-requirement open source solution I found.

[https://mopidy.com/](https://mopidy.com/)

<comment><USER3> What I want to do is plug multiple pi's into aux speakers, a pi to Bluetooth speakers, and then airplay whatever from my iPhone. All the speakers would play the same thing.

How can I do what you're doing but with airplay and multiple speakers?

<comment><USER4> This is why I liked Google Audios. It gave me this exact setup, but they sadly discontinued manufacturing them.

<comment><USER5> Didn't realized they stopped making them... love the devices myself, have two as well as a couple chromecasts, and a couple nvidia shield tv devices. Only thing missing is a nice home media server interface for them, but I haven't looked in a while, someone may have one or more now.

70% of the time, I'm on the shield playing video from my nas in kodi... most of the rest, casting to audio + speakers in the bedroom with rain/storm sounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good decision by Sonos. Customers can use the trade up program to get a discount on new gear, and keep using the old gear (or sell it / give it away / whatever). Obviously a win for customers but this also feels like a win for Sonos - they get to sell more new gear to existing customers, while potentially getting new customers buying into the Sonos ecosystem.

<comment><USER7> > while potentially getting new customers buying into the Sonos ecosystem.

Perhaps.

While I was unlikely to buy Sonos gear in the first place (because I avoid purchasing IoT stuff like that), if I were in the market for gear like this I would certainly not buy Sonos gear now. This step they took was good, but it doesn't erase the memory of their behavior leading up to this.

<comment><USER8> As a parent, I can only laugh at this concept... I mean, I don't care what you buy, but this one strike and your out culture... There wouldn't be a living human being if we went by that as a society.

<comment><USER9> When it comes to a company like Sonos it's not one strike and they're out. Their whole stupid "recycling" program came from a series of stupid decisions inside the company and then someone signed off on it! No one got fired for it so everyone in their decision making tree is still in place, waiting to strike.

Sonos has a bunch if opportunities to signal they realized they made a mistake and correct it. Instead they doubled down.

The fact the policy is _still_ in place means they think everything is fine. I think their policy is stupid and so they're not going to get any of my dollars.

<comment><USER10> > Their whole stupid "recycling" program came from a series of stupid > decisions inside the company and then someone signed off on it!

Moreover in my perception it signals company's predatory and anti-customer philosophy and I'm convinced that sooner or later they will come up with similar "clever" idea - only difference will be that next time they will try to sell it better or just hide it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sonos speakers have beautiful sound but the constant loss of connectivity is a nightmare. Just few days ago I had to reset the system once again and despite the fact that I am logged in none of my services and settings are remembered. I am very dissatisfied with Sonos and I will not buy any of their future products.

<comment><USER12> I had never-ending problems, and it was always, "There's a network issue." These are speakers, and when I get home from work I'm an audiophile.

I do not want to hook PagerDuty up to my home audio system and manage it like my home is a NOC, thank you very much. I threw out my Play:1s, and my Play:5s are now connected by ethernet. They work just fine, but only in the one room of the house close enough to the router to run CAT5.

At some point, this arrangement will no longer be useful to me, and when it does, these speakers are on their way to landfill.

I get what Sonos were trying to do, but the experience felt like running a PC in the 1980s: Too much incidental complexity for an appliance.

I ditched Sonos's software as well, and firewalled the speakers off from phoning home. I play my audio through Airplay 2, and Life is Fine.

<comment><USER13> What brand is your wifi? I've seen numerous reports of issues with UniFi and Sonos, so I went straight to wired. However it seems quite possible that other vendors could cause problems too. Ubiquiti forums and /r/'s have ways around the issue, but I'd prefer wired so didn't go there.

<comment><USER14> I'm 100% Ubiquiti and have not had any problems with my Sonos. I even have my Sonos across the house from my AP and it's fine.

<comment><USER13> I haven't had problems either and I'm all UniF too. But as the Ubiquiti forums and reddit subs have numerous stories about problems, I wired them. It seems that wiring one can solve issues with them all. [https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-STP-and- Sonos/7f72d...](https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-STP-and- Sonos/7f72d9cf-6511-42f6-b6bc-d9b5efb7cb19?page=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > When triggered, Recycle Mode would start an irreversible 21-day countdown, > after which the device in question would cease functioning. Sonos said it > went this route to ensure that consumer data was being erased on recycled > products.

What a crock of shit. Credibility? What's that?

</comment><comment><USER16> Oh Sonos, you have caused me so much joy and pain.

I have multiple wifi access points in my (solid brick) house, because nothing seems to be able to penetrate these walls.

When Sonos works it's great. When it doesn't, I end up spending half an hour having to reset everything to get my randomly disappearing speakers back.

Some are wired, some are wifi, some are on powerline adapters. It's quite a hodge-podge, but none of my other devices have any issues with the setup, so why does Sonos decide to die randomly from time to time?

I've gone through the trouble of switching wifi channels, trialling different ones, just to see if anything improves the situation, but there is no regularity in the failures. It either happens, or it doesn't.

I also do not appreciate that Sonos is seemingly all about streaming services. I wish local NAS playback wasn't treated as second-class citizen...it's the only way I use Sonos.

</comment><comment><USER17> Man... any good alternatives for adding Sonos multi zone functionality to a traditional stereo?

<comment><USER18> I may be misunderstanding your question but I'm a big fan of Denon (or Marantz) receivers w/ HEOS. Their AVR line can support up to 3 zones and can be paired together. I have 11.2 and 9.2 powering 18x speakers and a sub in my house. You can use a single receiver to play music outside by our pool and simultaneously play 5.1 over the living room for sports or movies. It also handles the connection to Spotify (et al) directly so I can take a call or leave the house with my phone and the music will continue to play.

<comment><USER17> This is probably the option I would (like to) go for. I just want a stereo receiver that lets me control all the same "dumb" speakers I own in multiple rooms from my phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's a good move, but honestly they're moving in a direction that is less interesting to me.

Ten years ago, Sonos was the sine qua non of easy home audio, becuase they were ahead of the game on interface AND gave you a great way to access your music library anywhere in your house. The extra bonus feature was their usage of a proprietary mesh network, so the music didn't stream over your increasingly-overburdened regular wifi network.

Well, most of those advantages have kinda gone away. Moving in reverse:

\- wifi is way better now; I never have dropouts anymore.

\- The Sonos interface is now way, way, way behind the Apple music interface IMO. My nontechnical wife never warmed to Sonos at all, but she can use iTunes on her phone with aplomb, and playing music in the living room uses the same interface as playing music on her headphones.

\- Library access was a sticking point, given that Apple formerly relied on a convoluted approach here, but by subscribing to Apple Music the problem is completely sidestepped. I pay for this mostly so I don't ever have to plug my phone into the media box and sync files -- for me or for my wife. That's worth the price right there, to be honest, but in addition to that you get access to nearly anything. It's rare I can't find what I want there. (We DO still buy CDs locally, but only because we live in a place with a real indie record store.)

The tl;dr is that we were already kind of Done with Sonos when this whole kerfluffle started -- we have sunk costs here, but as these devices stop functioning we'll move to something else that plugs into the Apple infrastructure better. Even if we have to revert to local music only due to some Apple failure, there are still better/easier options than Sonos at this point.

<comment><USER20> I just got a Sonos beam a few months since it seemed like a decent soundbar for the price. I also use Apple music and I just airplay music to my Beam. Does that not work as well when you have a multi-speaker setup?

<comment><USER21> Sonos AirPlay devices are pretty new. Supposedly you only need one, and it can stream to all their devices, but the devices form a cluster, and I'm not sure how intelligent they are about making sure the device that can airplay is the device that's always the master.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Recent and related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086)

Also [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E10%20Sonos&sort=byDate&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER23> How do you unbrick the ones already in "recycling" mode? Or is it too late for these and they're now landfill fodder?

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm pleased that Sonos was convinced to stop doing the obviously terrible thing that it was doing.

</comment><comment><USER24> Edit: earlier comment was full of shit :)

What's with companies dictating what we can do with our stuff when it's EoL?

People who buy this shit: Stop buying it and they'll stop forcing it on us!

Please... just stop.

<comment><USER25> Most of their customers probably couldn't care less, or don't know any better. It's likely the majority of their customers will still buy this shit, regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> HOLY MOLY

NSFW tag, my friend.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think Sonos did the right thing by _creating_ Recycle Mode and the over- reaction to this was amazing.

Telling customers to just send the bricked device to the local recycling centre in exchange for a discount seems fair.

Apple also has a trade-in program except they expect you to send them the device. Sonos took the cheaper approach by offloading the actual recycling to a local centre. But people want to have it both/all three ways: feel good about recycling, get a discount on a future new gadget _and_ sell/give the functioning old device to somebody. Amazing.

<comment><USER28> >>Telling customers to just send the bricked device to the local recycling centre in exchange for a discount seems fair.

No, that's literally insane by every definition of the word. They took perfectly fine, working products, and destroyed them in order to give their customers a discount. Which part of that seems "fair" to you? Imagine if a car manufacturer would give you a discount on a new car, if you took your old one to the scrapyard first - everyone would immediately how this is a huge waste of resources if the car was still working. How is this acceptable with speakers??

Other companies somehow manage without this madness fine - if you are verified as an actual customer, they give you a discount for more stuff. What usually happens then is that you either sell or give away the old device, and someone else might get into the brand and potentially purchase more devices from it as well. It's a win win for everyone. This stupid recycling thing serves no one, except like you said - people feeling "good" about recycling, which is nonsense, a fully working device should be reused first.

<comment><USER29> That was almost exactly what the Cash for Clunkers program was doing. Under the Gov. contact, the dealer had to pour an engine seizing compound through the caurborator to get the discount reimbursement. Kept functional vehicles from ending up in the hands of the poor.

<comment><USER30> That's because it was designed _specifically_ to remove more environmentally damaging vehicles from being used. It's purpose was to give people incentives to get them destroyed.

There is no similar environmental incentive here.

<comment><USER31> The purpose was to prop up the auto industry while having an eco cover story.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Arcade Rats on the Moon - <AUTHOR> https://paleotronic.com/2019/02/27/arcade-rats-on-the-moon/ <comment><USER2> Battlezone had an interesting bug that may have been able to actually damage the hardware.

If you timed it right, you could arrange to be on your last tank, with a shot from the enemy tank on its way to you, when a guided missile would be sent. If you then let the shot from the enemy tank kill you before the missile reached you, the game would end.

It would then go into attract mode and show some pre-scripted gameplay to lure in players.

Just one little problem...since your game ended before the guided missile reached you, the guided missile was not destroyed. It continued on in the attract mode game where it would happily kill the demo tank.

Apparently, the demo code was not at all ready for the demo tank to get killed early before the script called for it, and the game would then crash.

When we made this happen on the Battlezone a friend of ours owned, with his permission and with him watching, the crash evidently set the video system to some mode that exceeded the specs of the CRT and it fried things.

I have no idea how consistent this result is, because the owner made us promise to not do any further experiments after he fixed the game.

<comment><USER3> If the video timings are software-controlled, as a lot of them are, then out- of-spec settings can absolutely damage monitors.

[https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can-...](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6614/can- the-wrong-sync-frequency-really-destroy-a-crt-monitor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was great! I can't imagine how many quarters I dropped into those things when I was young.</comment>


Apple Updates Air, Pro Laptops, Kills Off the MacBook - <AUTHOR> https://tidbits.com/2019/07/09/apple-updates-air-pro-laptops-kills-off-the-macbook/ <comment><USER2> Discussion from a similar post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20393236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20393236)

</comment><comment><USER3> Macbook Pro "improvements" over the last 3-7 years:

* No more matte display

* RAM soldered to the board

* SSD soldered in

* remove all ports except USB-C

* make keyboard worse

* remove function keys, replace with touch surface that's redundant at best

But it's very thin!

And even thinner was the recent Macbook, and if the law of "diminishing returns" matters as little as the usual defenses of all the above tradeoffs in pursuit of light/thin imply, you'd think that that'd be worth keeping.

Maybe there _is_ a limit, and Apple's actually reflected on that?

Or... maybe it's just a recognition that the Air and Macbook had come to a place where there was little distinguishing them. And that really, the MBP is less and less designed/deployed with actual professionals in mind and more and more meant for a prosumer subsegment. In which case reducing focus to two models (general purpose consumer laptop, light netbook) makes sense.

<comment><USER4> I really (really!) appreciate how thin they are. The new 15in is as heavy as the old 13in. Really nice when you have to carry it around all the time. The biggest pain point is the lack of ports (4 ports including power) is not enough. The older models had around 5+ ports and still required dongles. Everything else aside from the keyboard is a minor issue (e.g. getting more ram today versus in the future is just a question of deferring costs).

<comment><USER5> > getting more ram today versus in the future is just a question of deferring > costs

Not really. I had a 2011 MacBook. In 2015 I was able to upgrade the RAM to chips that didn't exist in 2011. Technically they weren't supported, but they worked just fine. I couldn't have done that if the chips were soldered to the board.

I also upgraded the drive from spinning disk to a much larger SSD. Again an upgrade I couldn't have done otherwise.

It allowed me to keep using the machine until 2017.

<comment><USER4> I meant that were the chips upgradeable, you would still spend the money, only you would do it later. With the components soldered on, you have to spend the money today, not 4 years later.

I'm also of the opinion that hardware today is going to improve rather little in the coming years. For instance, with the option of having 16/32gb of ram, I don't see the need to upgrade the laptop on account of the memory for a good 5 years, at least. Even the new SSDs have 2gb throughput, _much_ higher than the SSD you installed into your 2011 MacBook.

Finally, Macs have always had amazing resale value. You can always sell a 5 year model for a few hundred dollars and invest in something that will be much better.

<comment><USER5> > I meant that were the chips upgradeable, you would still spend the money, > only you would do it later.

Yes, but my point was that I couldn't spend the money up front even if I wanted to, because the thing I upgraded to didn't exist. It's not "deferred cost" if you get something better later. It's only deferred cost if you get the same thing but later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's Courage. For real this time, one of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple was that he slashed the product line and killed off a ton of things so that the company could focus on what truly mattered; building great computing devices.

I am positively encouraged that Apple has grown to the point where they took feedback critically and have returned to a more Jobs-ian way of operating. As they should have been all this time. They've renewed their emphasis on general computing, created new devices, and are iteratively getting out of the hole they'd dug themselves into. This is a turnaround that's taking place before a drastic turnaround needed to take place. And that takes Courage™

<comment><USER7> Not sure if the whole post or only part is /s, but IMO they need to have the courage to drop the Touch Bar. Everything else I can live with, but now there's literally no MacBook Pro I will buy. I have the 2016 Function Key model, and maybe my next upgrade will be to a 2015 Pro... or to a non-Apple laptop (sigh).

<comment><USER8> I'm certain people who are OK with the touch bar don't care about it as much as the people who hate it, but I for one prefer that they are iteratively innovating on the keyboard for macs. I'd rather they do that than make a thick brick of a laptop with a row of mostly useless function keys that a vocal minority has been harping for.

<comment><USER9> my 2015 Pro is so much better than mycompany 2017 Pro w/ touchbar

like people are saying, most people just don't care about the touchbar. It does get annoying at times (as a vim user). Why WHY do they hide the esc key and have it take two inputs to increase the volume/brightness by more than 1 tick (sliding is terrible).

Other than that, I totally agree, the real focus should be the keyboard. Because it's shit. Here aresome of the awesome problems I go through on a daily basis at work.

\- space bar double spaces all the time. Turned off key repeat and also whatever other suggestions I could find on Stack

\- backspace deletes too many characters

\- keys double type or are just not responsive (space, left shift, fucking / for some reason)

yeah, real fun using it especially while I'm on call right now and working on prod servers!! WORK ON THE KEYBOARD APPLE

<comment><USER10> For your keyboard problems, just get it repaired. It's free under a four-year warranty, and it usually only takes one day: Just drop it off at an Apple store, and pick it back up the next day.

(Also, if you're a vim user, you should really remap Caps Lock to Esc. There's a pane in System Preferences for it, and it should be done whether or not you have a touch bar.)

<comment><USER11> Caps Lock is better remapped to CTRL in my opinion. However, with Vim I always use CTRL+] instead of ESC because I think it's easier to reach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's because the new Macbook Pros are actually MacBooks. No I/O, no upgradability, gimmicky and useless touchbars, etc

<comment><USER13> But finally quad core with a screen that actually fits on a lecture desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why the fuck is Apple getting rid of the option to not have a touch bar on Macbook Pros? They already made it so high-performance macbooks require them but at least you had the option to pick a worse performing model with the actual keys.

Does the touchbar really do that well in focus groups? It is pretty universally reviled among all the techie people I know. It breaks one of the most basic principals of a keyboard interface which is that you don't need to look at it to know which button you're pressing. That would be fine if it was just settings like brightness/volume you don't change very often but putting the escape key there was just such an idiotic move

I used to consider myself a big macbook pro fan. I would probably continue buying reskins of the 2013 model forever as long as they kept updating the hardware. I would rather the product stagnate than have apple repeatedly make it _worse_

<comment><USER15> I'm starting to think Apple is being subverted by high level employees who are carrying out directives from someone else, possibly a competing company.

<comment><USER13> They sure do have a knack to keep tumbling down the stairs every single product release since Jobs passed on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> RIP Macbook. You have been my favourite machine for a long time.

<comment><USER17> The 11" Air was one of my all time favorite laptops and the 12" rMB was such a great replacement.

<comment><USER18> The 2015 11" Air was the best performance / value macbook Apple has ever made.

<comment><USER17> Mine was a 2010 base model, but by 2015 I had grown weary of it's limitations.

The form factor was just amazing, and even though the Core2Duo CPU wasn't anything special, with the SSD (at the time, they weren't very common) it was still a very usable machine. The battery life was my biggest complaint, only about 4 hours, and they didn't fix that until 2014.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In a twisted way I welcome these news.

If they had released a model without touchbar and with improved keyboard I would be really tempted to buy it to replace my XPS.

Given their insistence on the touchbar is good way for me to accept that: a) the last good MacBook for me will remain the 2015 model and b) I will have to make do with Linux and XPS.

</comment><comment><USER20> For all the devs wondering how to replace their MacBook Pros: I highly recommend running Linux on a Lenovo X1 Carbon. I've also heard good things about System76.

<comment><USER21> Contrary view: [https://medium.com/@hkdb/ubuntu-18-04-on- lenovo-x1-carbon-6g...](https://medium.com/@hkdb/ubuntu-18-04-on- lenovo-x1-carbon-6g-d99d5667d4d5)

<comment><USER22> How is that a contrary view. That guy seems very happy with the Ubuntu and X1 combo. Though he does spend a _long_ time obsessing about the battery, after his initial take was "yup, it's good enough for me".

<comment><USER21> The guy initially declares "everything works out of box." But then he spends a long time "obsessing about the battery" because without good battery life, a laptop is useless as a laptop. As Apple understands, alleviating battery anxiety is key to selling laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why does choosing an Apple product always require a degree in Apple marketing and design? I generally like their products but you need to do so much research about everything from the weird ass product names (does Air even mean anything anymore?), to where exactly in the product cycle each product is. Am I about to buy something that will be upgraded in a week?

<comment><USER24> _the weird ass product names_

IME, Apple's product names make more sense than virtually any other computer maker, or auto maker.

Currently computers from Lenovo are:

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 6

Yoga C930

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 5

ThinkPad X1 Extreme

Legion Y740

MacBook (RIP), MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro make complete sense comparatively.

<comment><USER25> Why do names of tools need to make sense? I don't go around calling my screwdriver with cute names. It has a job to do. It needs a unique identifier to distinguish from other screw drivers.

<comment><USER26> > I don't go around calling my screwdriver with cute names. It has a job to > do. It needs a unique identifier to distinguish from other screw drivers.

Screw drivers also aren't regularly re-designed to hop on current design trends and bump specs (or, rather, if manufacturers try it then people ignore it). Car models are probably a more apt comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> After having the Touch Bar model I almost wish they kept the "Touchbar Escape" model. At least the choice is easier now - Apple NoChoice.

</comment><comment><USER28> Considering a 128Gb SSD costs $47 and a 500Gb SSD costs $78 Apples's $400 "upgrade" to 500Gb over the base model's 128Gb disk represents a 6-fold price hike on its market value. Why do we put up with this? Now it's soldered on so we don't even have the freedom to upgrade our own machines.

<comment><USER29> The SSDs used in Macs outclass most other offerings. It's not fair to compare them with random SSDs on price alone, you need to compare with the best the market has to offer. The gap used to be an order of magnitude even against the 'best' SSDs commercially available. This is why they initially used their proprietary interface, then NVMe. The gap is getting smaller but it is still significant. And that's against SSDs you can buy - not the SSDs other companies will stuff on their laptops.

What rubs me the wrong way is that Apple outfits all their cheapest devices with unpractical storage sizes, so you are essentially forced to upgrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hope they release a fanless version of the Air to make up for the lack of the Macbook. Are there any other fanless laptops on the market?

<comment><USER31> The current Air might as well be fanless. The fan is nowhere near the heatsink on the CPU, once it finally kicks in it only pushes the air through the case, its impact on the CPU temperatures is minimal.

<comment><USER32> "It has a fan, but the fan is useless" is worse than merely having a useful fan :/.

<comment><USER33> Also worse than no fan, since you could fill that space with battery if there wasn't a fan there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> On the bright side, as Apple continues to pervert the formerly most used *nix laptop, we may see a surge of interest in Linux.

Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu and has an OSX-like aesthetic and simplicity that might appeal to newcomers wanting to switch.

</comment><comment><USER35> Still has the unreliable keyboard

Still has the annoying Touch Bar

Still doesn't have a physical ESC key

Still has an annoying port situation requiring a half dozen dongles

Still is no user serviceable RAM / SSD / battery

= Still not a "Pro" laptop

</comment><comment><USER36> I feel like they are making way for the 16" MacBook(Pro).

<comment><USER37> Is there some credible info about this somewhere, or is this just speculation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Was expecting this. I imagine the Air will also be the first to make the switch to their in-house ARM processors.

<comment><USER39> Once they move all products to the ARM (is it even possible? I mean Apple is Apple but they can't put as much effort into CPUs as Intel or AMD - take a look at the latest Ryzens for example :o) will it kill Hackintoshes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is the final "fuck you and fuck off" to professional developers from Apple. I expect the next generation of MBPros (and MBAirs) that are rumored for later this year to continue in this direction giving us developers the middle finger and likely it will continue into next year and beyond. Apple doesn't care. The laptops look great from the outside and most people don't know any better. Everything that makes this machine a laptop is indeed garbage (keyboard, touchpad, screen, cooling) as far as computing is concerned, but when you're a fashion company, computing is almost an afterthought. On the bright side, I'm looking forward to "smart" socks and underwear coming out in a few years from Apple. /s

<comment><USER41> If Apple was working on a complete redesign of the MBP with a new keyboard, how long do you think it would take them to release it?

And if Apple were indeed working on that wouldn't it make sense to ditch the 12'' MB since it could not accommodate a thicker keyboard?

I'm bitter too about what has been happening on the Mac front for the last 5 or so years, but I think Apple is correcting course albeit slowly.

<comment><USER13> Prev gen mbp was 2013-2015. The one before that was 2009-2012. This one is 2016-2019. I'd say we are due for a redesign any day now. Hopefully we drop this butterfly experiment and return to good old fashioned scissor keys and ports for pros.

<comment><USER41> Nitpick: the first 15'' retina was introduced in 2012 on which the 2015 model is based on.

Anyway I agree, a new MBP _has_ to be in the works. Hopefully it will be released this year without the butterfly keyboard and the touch bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Now, there's no macbook without screaming fan noise.

<comment><USER43> I started using "Turbo Boost Switcher" recently. You can enable/disable turbo boost from the system bar which keeps the MacBook quiet. Love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The price is not even that outrageous. When specified similar to the top-of- the-line ThinkPad X1 Carbon it's only $200 more, and you're getting a better display.

<comment><USER21> The X1C6 is pretty expensive unless you're doing some Lenovo EPP swindle.

<comment><USER45> The X1C7 just came out so the price will be dropping like a stone on the 6th gen pretty soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Ha, I was waiting for them to update it so I could buy a new one. It has been over 500 days since an update, which was unusual.

</comment><comment><USER47> Anybody run XCode on the Air? How is it? It's pretty tempting as a MBP no TB replacement.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm almost ready to stop hating on the donglebook now that all my devices use wireless connectivity

Even my hardware wallet is bluetooth and I'll tolerate that

Inconclusive on my DSLR-form factor cameras, but I plan to axe them for the iphone's camera in a year or two as well, for how I use them

<comment><USER49> So when Apple releases their new Apple Display Air with 60GHz wireless Thunderbolt4, and the new MacBooks finally get wireless charging, we'll reach the nirvana of a totally port-less device.

With some more work on the keyboard, it could even end up being totally coffee-proof!</comment></comment>


Getting specific about generics - grey-area https://emilymaier.net/words/getting-specific-about-generics/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is the best outline of the Go generics issue I've seen. As an outsider to the language (for now), thanks for writing this.

What's the current conversation on sharing binary code? Unless I'm missing something, this is fundamentally incompatible with generic functions that are optimized at compile time. Either the compiled version has to have implementations for "every valid type" or the shared code must be recompiled at the time it is consumed, right?

It looks like the Go ecosystem tends to discourage distributing precompiled binary packages, so maybe this is not a real issue.

<comment><USER2> Going meta regarding tech articles, I find that it is easy to read some text- heavy articles (this being one of them) while my eyes glaze over other text- heavy articles (I couldn't easily follow Dave Cheney's article on the same topic of Go generics a few days back, though with a slightly different focus and much shorter). I've wondered what is it about specific pages/articles/writing that make them flow nicely and make it easy to read -- is it the layout of the page (font/font-size/other styling) or is it how the writing flows together or is it a factor of how much thought the author put into presenting what they are thinking or is it me (time of day, interests, etc). Maybe it is just everything!

<comment><AUTHOR> While the typesetting helps here, I think a lot is due to the writing style. Writing easy-to-read content is difficult, and it's usually not that obvious when you're reading it, because you're absorbing the concepts rather than struggling with the language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The author promotes code generation as a practical solution to some problems — but doesn't mention the huge drawbacks for generics, which is why it's generally not used.

The reason is that while you can generate a specific implementation when you need it, all the _client_ code will still be using non-generic code. You can't write a function that takes a Set(T) as argument, returns Set(T) as a return value, or receives a Set(T) from a called function — unless you make _that_ part of your code generation pipeline. So the code generation becomes viral, infecting each piece of code that wants to be generic. The entire language needs to be transpiled.

You could lower the barrier considerably by supporting some kind of pluggable preprocessing ("//go:preprocess my_generics_syntax_plugin"), but you'd still run into the problem with combining packages from multiple sources that all wanted to share the same generic types. They would all have to be transpiled the same way.

<comment><USER4> Within go this is not an issue, because go dependencies are source based. Outside of go, assuming compiling a c compat lib, is more tricky, but I don't immediately see why go generics can't reduce to the intuitive pattern you'd get from selective/sparse template instantiation in your dependency before it's included.

<comment><USER3> They're source-based, but that still requires that the caller (calling into a package that's using generated code for generics) use the exact same transpiration tech to generate its own code; if it doesn't, it can only interface with the concrete instances of the generic types (e.g. Set_int or whatever).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> She mentions the C approach, C++ approach and Java approach. But I think she should have added the C# approach: taking all the advantages of the Java approach, without the slowness of casting.

<comment><USER6> I think the author is a woman, from the name Emily.

<comment><USER5> fixed, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pointing to inlining and saying "problem solved" isn't really a solution because inlining can lead to code bloat just like templates can. They amount to generating the same thing at runtime.

For this to be an implementation detail, the compiler needs to be able to choose not to inline sometimes.</comment>


Show HN: Copiny – Getting closer to the Customers via an online community - <AUTHOR> http://copiny.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Ni HN!

A few years ago I had a problem - how to became closer to my customers. I asked myself what tools I could use for solving that problem? Traditional forums are not user friendly and very complex. Feedback form much better, but its not about longtime relationships with customers. So as most of you I decided to make my own solution and today I would like to share it with you.

Copiny.com is a customer community platform that allows companies to have a dialogue with their customers on the site. By using our platform, companies reduce support cost up to 20% and get x15 times more customer feedback.

For example, Evernote uses our platform in Russia for customer service and, according to them, Russian Evernote community is one of the most effective in the the World because they have reduced support cost by 40%. It's possible because our platform has some features and mechanics that differ us from traditional forums, FAQs and others.

I hope you like it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Promotional votes and comments are not allowed on Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it competitor of "User Voice"???

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really, Copiny is more similar to GetSatisfaction. UserVoice has a feedback form and a help desk, but it hasn't a powerful community functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great tool to build LoveBrand! )</comment>


Show HN: Counting Foot Traffic Over IP Webcams - <AUTHOR> https://www.byu.io/2017/12/07/counting-people-with-ml <comment><USER2> BTW, most of the insecam cams (so no need to scrape them), plus some more are available in my c4 list. Though it might be a bit out of date now. Incidentally, I had the same idea but never followed through.

Now we just need someone to design a Samaritan-esque UI for it ;-).

\- c4: [http://git.io/c4](http://git.io/c4)

\- info: [https://github.com/turbo/c4](https://github.com/turbo/c4)

\- Samaritan reference: [http://personofinterest.wikia.com/wiki/Samaritan](http://personofinterest.wikia.com/wiki/Samaritan)

</comment><comment><USER3> The HN title 'Counting Foot Traffic Over IP Webcams" caught my eye because, whilst counting people in a static image is doable with YOLO, counting foot traffic (i.e. how many times people enter a scene, or how many times people leave a scene) requires more calculation, as you need to know whether someone in frame t is the same person who was in frame t-1.

But when I clicked through, the title of the article was 'Counting People with Machine Learning', and it's just counting presence, not foot traffic :(

<comment><USER4> I understand and agree with your nuance.

If I had a store, though, I would count someone walking past one way and then they other as two potential visits.

I would imagine that "people in room at time t" and "people in room t+1" is quite a good proxy for "number of people present all day", it is certainly an upper bound.

<comment><USER5> It's not as simple as that. The problem is that YOLO can process ~100 FPS, where a frame is something like 250x250 pixels. If you want to process high resolution, you have to sweep a 250x250 "window" across the high res image and run Yolo on each. Then you have to figure out which objects were multiply counted due to the windowing. Even if the windows don't overlap (which they should) Yolo might detect the left half of a person in one window and the right half in the next.

Once you've done all that, a top end GPU can handle about 4 FPS (assuming 1080P input).

Then the problem is that YOLO will occasionally miss blindingly obvious objects. That combined with the fact that you've only got 4 FPS means that detecting the direction of a person is hard - they tend to move across the camera's field of view before you've got enough data to be confident what just happened. A person walking from left to right looks the same as someone walking off the left of the frame and then someone different walking onto the right of the next frame.

At some point its easier, cheaper and more accurate to install an IR laser beam and count the breaks. You'll save about half a kilowatt too.

Another interesting point is that YOLO is pre-trained on hundreds of object classes. This feels like a waste. I wanted to retrain it with all but the people class removed from the training set. My learned colleague suggested that was a stupid idea because YOLO learns general info about how to separate objects from backgrounds from all the object classes. Not showing it surfboards makes it worse at detecting people. Crazy.

<comment><USER6> YOLO's a bad way to do it. I tried a bunch of facial recog libraries, had overall bad success for larger frame sizes and framerates. I also don't have a CUDA/OpenCL card for my laptops. So it's CPU for me.... Alas.

OpenCV's facialRecognizer class is one of the fastest I found. And it's what I used in my program.

Primarily, it does a LBP cascade finding "any face", including ones that look like walls. Thankfully it has False positives, but almost never false negatives. Then, I use each region of interest's area and do a haar cascade for eyes. If theres at least 1 eye in the region of interst, I pass it to the classifier.

From there, the classifier then runs the image zone into the classifier. If its not there, it adds it. if it is, then it adds this as another sample to further prove the face.

I can get 15 FPS@1280x720 on a Thinkpad T61

<comment><USER3> If the same face is in two consecutive frames, do you pass it into the classifier twice?

<comment><USER6> Sure do. Doing that increases the quality of the classifier for that face- hash. That also helps if they show up a bit later with slightly different lighting.

I also implemented a "no more than 50 samples per matched face" to keep the size of the face-hash-db down.

[https://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your- ne...](https://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-next-con/)

and my old code's currently on gitlab, gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser . It's pretty crappy as it was a weekend hack. I need to separate the engine from the GUI, and make the GUI web accessible. There's a few more pieces to do that, but I was looking at selling it for various purposes.

<comment><USER3> Awesome. Thanks for the clarification re the 50 sample limit. And thanks for sharing the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really cool. I actually wanted to train and use YOLO on my data from Python for a research project I am doing but didn't know how to run it from Python and I only know very limited amount of C. So far I am using RCNN from TensorflownObject Detection API. Would you mind if I copy your C to Python code and maybe shoot you an email if I need help using your code?

<comment><USER8> Maybe this can help :) [https://github.com/thtrieu/darkflow/](https://github.com/thtrieu/darkflow/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is clever! I admire the hacker spirit in this... seems pretty interesting, and anonymized person data / trends would definitely help restaurants / other businesses who need to staff part time folks to fill out shifts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response! It might be a bit of a stretch, but I remember reading a comment on here about someone who used satellite imagery to count the number of cars in store parking lots and used that data to inform investment decisions. Perhaps something like this could be applied to that use case.

<comment><USER10> There are numerous NewSpace companies with that as their business plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just an FYI, Panasonic is offering a commercial product that offers analytics derived from 360 degree camera images. I saw a demonstration of this system a couple of years ago at the National Restaurant Show.

[http://www.security.us.panasonic.com/feature/ultra-360-camer...](http://www.security.us.panasonic.com/feature/ultra-360-cameras)

</comment><comment><USER12> Great write up and really loved the approach you took and the learnings you left with. Keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER13> DIY NSA

</comment><comment><USER14> This is cool technology and all, but I wonder if the people working on it ever stopped to think about the moral and ethical implications of what they were doing.

 _Although I was initially creeped out by Insecam, I was fascinated with the idea that I could peer into so many different corners of the world just by clicking on a couple of links._

If it sounds creepy, and probably is. Go with your gut on this kind of thing. Then again, maybe it's better to have the tech out in the open.

</comment><comment><USER15> Thanks BYU! The surveillance state thanks you!

It's very patriotic, just like all that top secret work you used to do with the Eyring Research Institute!

<comment><USER16> Pretty sure that this guy, an undergraduate student in Virginia, has nothing to do with Brigham Young University projects from the 1970's-80's. So, byu.io != byu.edu

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha very true. Although I did receive an offer to buy my domain name from a Brigham Young University IT guy. True story! :)

<comment><USER15> Ok, but I still feel good calling it BYU so I'm gonna leave that.

<comment><USER15> Calling out _</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Brand Could Become Casualty of FBI Tussle Over IPhone Hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/apple-brand-could-become-casualty-of-fbi-tussle-over-iphone-hack <comment><USER2> Oh please. Despite all the cop-show propaganda on the glass teat, many Americans have stopped worshipping the G-man supposedly saving them from terrorists. From the article:

> _So far the impact in the U.S. is evenly split: 24 percent of 1,002 > respondents in an online survey told Piper Jaffray they viewed Apple more > favorably as a result of the FBI tussle, while 23 percent said their view > was less positive than before._

Not so bad, really.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what the poll results would have been if the question had been: "Do you think Apple should be ordered to make a special, less secure version of iOS for the FBI, to unlock this phone?"

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh shit, what if they think there's something more important than their "brand"? That'd be terrible.</comment>


Analytics of a wedding engagement - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/07/analytics-of-an-engagement.html

<comment><USER2> Morbid curiosity.. what do the numbers look like for the reverse state-change?</comment>