Pass the Rap Genius Tech Interview, Get $1,000 Cash - <AUTHOR> http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-introducing-the-rap-genius-genius-granttm-pass-our-technical-interview-get-s1000-cash-lyrics <comment><USER2> _" Location—you can't get the true RG cult effect working remotely, so only apply if you live in NYC or are willing to relocate."_

I wish companies would stop saying this shit. The honest translation is usually _" We have no idea what it would mean to run a remote team and there's so much on our plates right now that we're not putting any energy into considering it"_

Which is fine! I'd much rather people say that than this _" It's impossible to be as awesome as we are without sitting next to each-other"_ bullshit. It has the downside of sending the message to others that you might know what you're talking about, via actual experience.

<comment><USER3> It's perfectly possible that they know exactly what it would take to run a remote team, and have decided that the additional overhead isn't worth it for their current stage.

<comment><USER4> It's also possible that they are completely clueless about what it would take. It appears they live and work out of the same space. This doesn't strike me as a particularly mature company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow and here I thought that passing a "Tech Interview" just got you a job offer. Now I learn that this company, unlike every other company full of geniuses, is impossible to join. Makes me want to join them even more!

Reminds me of this other company that called me up out of the blue and said "We're only looking for Rockstars. Are you a Rockstar?" That also made me want to join that company in a heart beat. So many choices...

<comment><USER6> It gets you a job offer and $1000. You get the money even if you don't accept the job.

I think it's a good idea. I wouldn't have considered applying, because I'm not looking for work. But if they were local, I'd apply just for the $1000, and then they'd have a chance to sell me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a nice bunch of kids... I hope they find a business model someday.

All snark aside -- If I were a NYC Ruby guy, my main reservation is that it feels like a road to nowhere. If you want me to join a cult, give me something more than "trust us because A15Z gave us $15M".

<comment><USER8> _> I hope they find a business model someday._

No chance. There is absolutly nothing one can do with a lot of retargetable traffic. /s

<comment><USER9> [http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/rap-genius- enterprise/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/rap-genius-enterprise/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So. Freaking. Lame.

This whole post, the whole idea, just oozes arrogance and immaturity. I have no interest in working for a company that is so proud of how impossible it is to get through their interview process. I respect companies that make the effort to try to understand the individual strengths and weaknesses of their prospective hires and work to slowly build up a diverse team of people that are smart and thoughtful. Rap Genius isn't doing anything that requires every single person working there to be "brilliant" and certainly not as measured by some BS interview process.

<comment><USER11> > Rap Genius isn't doing anything that requires every single person working > there to be "brilliant" and certainly not as measured by some BS interview > process.

Well said. "Are you AWESOME enough to annotate text? Only the BEST OF THE BEST text annotators need apply!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the other hand, you get to work with these people:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo)

<comment><USER13> How is the culture at rap genius? Is there a diverse culture or have they been hiring other people that look and behave like them?

Is it a frat house?

<comment><USER14> > Is it a frat house?

Most startups are

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it just me or are all those annotated links super confusing? I tried clicking on their jobs page link, but it just gave me this slow loading pop up thing with zero helpful or related info. Cool idea on the $1k though.

<comment><USER16> Not just you. I wanted to see the jobs page and failed.

Doesn't take brilliant to fix that...

<comment><USER17> I could be wrong but after spending 2 minutes finding out about them, I think that sort of thing is their actual business, not just a small flaw in a blog post?

<comment><USER18> I guess their reasoning is that since they create one UI "idea" on their main product, it should therefore be used absolutely everywhere. Clearly people want to open popups and click one thing on the popup again when they actually just want to click the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems like a really silly PR stunt. If you're interviewing for a job that pays tens of thousands of dollars, why do you care about $1000?

It'd be like Amazon offering a "Launch a bestselling book, get a $500 gift card" promo.

<comment><USER20> It's just like startups that advertise "join us and we'll get you all the latest Apple gear!"

People who earn SV developer salaries can afford all the latest Apple gear (or as much of it as they want, anyway).

<comment><USER21> That's a little different. In that case they aren't trying to lure you in with the monetary value of Apple gear, what they are really saying is you won't have to worry about working with crappy hardware. It's assumed that you think the latest Apple gear is the best tool for the job. That May or may not be correct, but that's for you to decide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I get the whole eat your own dog food thing, but having to click twice to get to the actual career page can't be good for conversion.

</comment><comment><USER23> Weird thing. I am not even a developer and I felt the urge to try it. My point is: doesn't this give incentive to not-that-good developers who might "just in case" pass it and get $1,000? Therefore increasing noise, which is one of the worst things to deal with in hiring?

If I had to plan a bogus hiring strategy that a spy would implement on a competitor and f*ck it up, this is what I would have thought!

<comment><USER24> I'd agree, but if the interview is very hard then you automatically screen them all out anyway.

<comment><USER23> Probably not "automatically", someone will losing a lot of time screening out this "lottery seekers". And stressing also, which could mess up his ability to find the really good ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this page an example of what Rap Genius does? Because I see two links in the post: one of them pops up a dialog that appears to contain no information; the other link pops up a dialog containing a miniature version of the photo in the post I am looking at. Color me unimpressed.

</comment><comment><USER26> The headline is weird (and misleading).

The body of the post says: "anyone we offer an engineering job gets $1,000 cash".

Just because someone passes your technical interviews doesn't mean you'll extend them a job offer. There's a ton of other factors (cultural fit, attitude, references, experience, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER27> Life imitating art -- it's fantastic that there is a real life Entertainment 720, funded by Andreessen Horowitz no less.

I sometimes can't tell if they're actually serious about this or they're just some bros pulling a prank on the industry.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow, look at how smart these guys are and how awesome it must be to work with such geniuses!

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm now way more hipster just from reading their jobs page.

</comment><comment><USER30> So yes, this is gimmicky - that said, it may work for them anyways. It certainly gets their name out there - it got them to the front page of HN, and it got me to read their jobs page (and be tempted by their perks) - which I probably would've never done under other circumstances.

Anecdote - my significant other found his current job when he heard a startup was raffling off a netbook at their info session. He had no interest in the company - he just showed up to try and win the netbook (which, as it happens, he did) - next thing he knew, they sold him on their pitch, he became engineer #4, and four years later, he's still there.

</comment><comment><USER31> They are so cool [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T92-MTJYmFc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T92-MTJYmFc)

</comment><comment><USER32> somebody gave these clowns $15m. That makes me sad.

</comment><comment><USER33> This could be a new way to bootstrap -- have all your engineers interview at RG.

</comment><comment><USER34> An engineering company with appreciation of Philsophy. That's a first. I'd apply but I don't know any Ruby and I'm not brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER35> Opportunity cost of screening the CV deluge, and interviewing all the people that have actively lied on their CV to get to interview stage?

HUGE!

</comment><comment><USER36> Do you have to accept to get the $1,000. Would be a pretty fun test.

</comment><comment><USER37> What does the interview involve?

<comment><USER38> About 3 hours of exercises out of an upper division CS textbook interspersed with not-so-subtle references to alcohol and cocaine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> how do i win??</comment>


The Innovation Problem, no one else cares. - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.org/2008/05/29/the-innovation-problem-no-one-else-cares/

<comment><USER2> i volunteer to dispense this large tax windfall. i promise i'll do it fairly. i also require a large hat and must be referred to as 'Oh Benevolent One - Giver of Life, Taker of Evil Corporate Profits'. Yeah it's a problem but !=problem doesn't neccesarily = solution, it may just be another stupid problem.</comment>


Looking for sources for a book I'm writing - <AUTHOR> I'm writing a book based on a story I did in the NYT about my ex husband, who was a law firm partner and, sadly, an IV drug addict. He died two years ago. I'm looking for professionals who are struggling with the same issues--substance abuse and addiction, and possibly mental health issues at the same time, to share their stories for a book I'm writing for Random House. <comment><USER2> Adding information to your profile to remove anonymity might better sell the project. Adding contact information there might provide better confidentiality and serve the interests of privacy.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And you can find out who I am here: www.eilenezimmerman.com Thank you.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> please contact me using this email: email@example.com.</comment>


A Trainspotter's Guide to the Future of the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05iht-edkennedy.html

<comment><USER2> I'm confused by the numbers: 1100 km in less than three hours would demand an average speed that is higher than 350 km/h. Not much, but still. And how useful can a train be that seems to stop nowhere? A normal number of stops (say ten) would add at least one hour to the traveling time. But, yeah, that is still damn impressive.

I also don't think that the Munich-Hamburg connection mentioned in the article (somewhat more than 600 km) is very impressive: you will still be in the train for five hours and thirty minutes (you will pay 130 €). Which is not that much faster than the mentioned US connection.

We Europeans have our fair share of problems with upgrading our train networks (as opposed to pretty much starting from scratch). There are dense existing network but those were built decades, maybe even a century ago. Maintaining them is expensive and upgrading them for highspeed trains is probably not much cheaper than starting from scratch would be (new tracks, new course, electrification, etc. – there really is not much you can reuse). Europe is also densly populated, with fewer huge centers. You can't just send a train 600 km through Germany without stopping at least half a dozen times.</comment>


Google Trends - Hot Searches - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&ncol=5 <comment><USER2> It never makes a request to server after loading. It's not real time and it repeats the same queries again after some time. This is just a good looking design, nothing more.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mary Lou from Codrops has a neat tutorial about making a similar grid layout: [http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/06/19/dynamic-grid-with- tra...](http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/06/19/dynamic-grid-with-transitions/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought everyone had seen this 6 months ago when it made the rounds.

This isn't updating in realtime, the typing is faked, they filter results, and the results are based on a ranking system that favors change from the previous day, not most search, and it downranks things that have trended in the past.

Basically this is just a pretty demo page that uses visuals to look more impressive than it is. It is still just google.com/trends in a harder to read wrapper that makes a better screen saver.

</comment><comment><USER5> They did the same thing at the 2000 Atlanta Linux Showcase.

[http://webonastick.com/photos/als2000/mvc-600s.jpg](http://webonastick.com/photos/als2000/mvc-600s.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER6> "How To Close Apps On Ios7" trending on google search... amusing

<comment><USER7> Jumped on that keyword. Hopefully, it will help someone out. No ads or nonsense. Just a $2 contribution to the internet. Haha. I have so many of these that it hurts.

[http://howtocloseappsonios7.com/](http://howtocloseappsonios7.com/)

<comment><USER8> 2$? Where do you get domain names that cheap?

<comment><USER7> Godaddy. Promo code cjcRMN199. Comes out to $2.17 after ICANN fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What do the colors mean?

<comment> mkr-hn It's probably similar to the search volume bar on the normal page: [https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends](https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends)

<comment><USER10> The colours just look to iterate through Red, Yellow, Green, Blue for each search term per box.

<comment><USER11> If this is the same thing I remember, then yes, it's just cycling through the colors.

<comment><USER12> I think it's iterating through queries as well. I can't imagine Hebrew is such a "hot" language and that is used so heavily, so that I see the same query repeated over and over (population of Israel has about 7 million people, where only 5-6 would probably use Hebrew as their main language...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> hmm .. so sad .. would be fun it was real time

</comment><comment><USER13> liked it .. is it really real time?</comment>


Programmers must be literate, Donald Knuth tells IET in Turing Lecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/02/02/245192/Programmers-must-be-literate-Donald-Knuth-tells-IET-in-Turing.htm

<comment><USER2> We haven't gone as far as formally adopting literate coding, but we have, over the past few years, been emphasising more and more that code should be written for the maintainers, and that code quality is inversely proportional to WTFs/min.

This has then been tempered with a huge dollop of common sense. There are places where the code is subtle, and we continue to work on ways of making it clearer.</comment>


Philz Coffee raises $45M Series C - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@JacobJaber/the-culture-of-philz-df9344627756#.mfxe2o8fz <comment><USER2> Sadly, I've found the consistency of their product to be increasingly hit or miss recently. I order the same item every time, and it ranges from bland to "day changing".

I think they've scaled too fast. "Everyday awesome" is tough to achieve particularly when you're hyper focused on exponential expansion. TGP's money isn't going to change the emphasis, but I only hope they don't forget what initially enabled this growth -- a really great product.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anxiously awaiting the IPO.</comment>


Intel should stick to making chips, not proposing legislation - <AUTHOR> https://www.crn.com.au/news/intel-proposes-bill-jailing-execs-who-lie-about-data-privacy-515327 <comment><USER2> The title here is not the title of the linked article.</comment>


JQuery 1.5 promises a better future. - <AUTHOR> http://renesd.blogspot.com/2011/01/jquery-15-promises-better-future.html

<comment><USER2> Here's a great explanation of a) what promises are and b) how the promises/deferreds code in the $.ajax method is being refactored out for general use: <http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/deferreds-coming-to-jquery>

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I was just coming to ask for something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > jQuery is using promises, and not futures.

Can anyone explain the difference between promises and futures? I've always used the terms interchangeably.

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that a future's value is supplied by the function it is created with (which is evaluated in a background thread), whilst a promise's value is delivered by another thread. Both constructs will block if accessed before their value is resolved.

<comment><USER4> This seems to me an implementation detail, are there any observable differences?

<comment><USER5> Futures always start a new thread, whilst a promise can receive its data from an existing thread.

In practise, this means that futures are best used for multi-threaded calculations, whilst promises are best used for handling events from I/O or some other unpredictable source.

For example, we can assign a promise to get a key-press:

        var keyCode = promise();

        document.onKeyPress(function(event) {
            keyCode.deliver(event.keyCode);
        }

But if we tried to use a future, we'd have to do something like:

        var keyCode = future(function() {
            while (true) {
                var event = waitForEvent();
                if (event.type == "keypress") return event.keyCode;
            }
        }

The future is essentially wasting a thread waiting for input, whilst the promise is inert until a keypress occurs.

<comment><USER4> Mmh, I've never seen a "future" like that, it seems to me more of a "worker"...

<comment><USER5> That's pretty much how all futures are implemented. Some implementations have an executor object that determines the size of the thread pool and so forth, but the basic principle is the same.

For example, in Python it's:

        executor = ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=1)
        x = executor.submit(func, arg1, arg2)
        print x.result()

In Clojure it's:

        (let [x (future (func arg1 arg2))]
          (println @x))

In Java:

        ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(1);
        FutureTask<String> x =
            new FutureTask<String>(new Callable<String>() {
                public String call() {
                    return SomeClass.func(arg1 arg2);
               }});
        executor.execute(x);
        System.out.println(x.get());

Basically the same idea; execute some code in a background thread and return the result when asked. If the result isn't ready, then block.

Apparently some languages use a callback to get the result, rather than blocking, but the most common approach I've seen is just to block the thread until the future is finished.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free Idea - Web Pipes - <AUTHOR> http://noeit.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/free-idea-web-pipes/

<comment><USER2> <http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/docs?doc=operators#WebService> ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the key difference is integrated payment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Take XML as a basis for this idea, and you will almost certainly kill it.</comment>


Taco Bell is now one of America's healthiest fast-food chains - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/taco-bell-is-now-one-of-americas-healthiest-fast-food-chains-2016-10?r=US&IR=T&IR=T <comment><USER2> > However, what we really appreciate is that Taco Bell isn't making a huge > deal out of their new health offerings - which could be why you haven't > heard of them.

Or; this article is an example of how advertising works in out modern age. Taco Bell's marketing team helped get this article in BI, and I'm sure are hoping it "goes" viral - thanks to a lot of hard work by the team to make it go viral.

<comment><USER3> For those who haven't read it, this is the premise behind one of pg's best essays:

[http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER4> >Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic.

Well, it was good while it lasted

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aside from the 15% reduction in sodium, are the other changes to Taco bell actually "healthier"? What are the health benefits of cage-free eggs? Are the vegetarian options actually healthier?

Also, if you want to skip the blogspam, the original article is here: [http://www.foodbeast.com/news/taco-bell-has-low-key- become-o...](http://www.foodbeast.com/news/taco-bell-has-low-key-become-one- of-americas-healthiest-fast-food-chains/)

</comment><comment><USER6> No comment about the healthfulness of its food, but Taco Bell is indisputably one of the most vegetarian-friendly fast food restaurants. You can substitute black beans or refried beans for meat in any of their menu items, so essentially the entire menu can be made accessible to vegetarians.

On the flip side, I once went to a McDonald's that was having a half-off promotion on its sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit sandwich. I asked if I could get it without the sausage, but they told me I'd have to pay regular price for just an egg and cheese sandwich.

<comment><USER7> That's funny that you should mention it because "Have it your way" was Burger King's big motto in the 70s for exactly the same reason.

I was a picky eater as a kid and when my family went to McDonald's, it was always a significant extra delay to get a plain hamburger. I guess in some ways, things haven't changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand this quote from their spokesman at all in relation to the headline:

""Us touting ourselves as a health halo - it's not authentic and it's not real," Taco Bell spokesman Alec Boyle says."

<comment><USER9> Meaning that if Taco Bell went out with commercials and ads saying "We're healthy!", nobody would ever buy it, and just isn't part of the Taco Bell image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't most major chains have nutritionists on staff?

</comment><comment><USER7> Taco Bell has a popular reputation for making food that gives you digestion troubles. I never really got that. Is their food cheap? Sure. But it's good for what it is and I always liked it just fine. If anything their menu is too expansive. I don't go often, and usually to the drive-through, so when I do, I'm often overwhelmed by all the new offerings.

It's the same with Arby's. People like to bust on Arby's, but it's always been my favorite, along with Taco Bell.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice Taco Bell ad. Why is this on hacker news?

</comment><comment><USER12> Come on this is a terrible fluff piece. Give me a break. This is not news in any shape or form. This is "native advertising" or "sponsored journalism" or whatever other euphemism you want to use.

<comment><USER13> What makes you think Taco Bell paid to have this article placed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yeah I mean, if you use laxatives with every meal you are going to lose weight.

</comment><comment><USER15> Personally, I find even McDonald's and Burger King to be healthier options than smaller 'hip' burger joints which smoother then burgers in high-caloric sauces and go nuts with cheese...

But ofcourse, since they are not as big as McD's or BK, they don't get the same tough love

<comment><USER16> McDonald's is "healthier" in comparison to local chains because their portions are smaller. The caloric content of the sauces, cheese, etc. is meager compared to the actual meat and fries.

But then, that's like saying a smaller bullet to the chest is healthier than a bigger one.

<comment><USER7> Mmmmm... bullets...</comment></comment></comment>


HTML5 Gaming Performance Test - <AUTHOR> https://www.scirra.com/blog/144/the-great-html5-gaming-performance-test-2014-edition <comment><USER2> Point of order on the methodology here.

This benchmark gets harder the longer it runs. Which is not in itself terribly unusual. It is pretty smooth for the first bit, where the benchmark runs, but right about where things get hard on my iPad Air is when the test stops.

So this raises a question about how the test endpoint was decided. Because of course if you run longer, the performance would be worse, if you run shorter, the performance will be better, etc.

Now according to the previous article [1], this endpoint is exactly 60 seconds, and an average is taken over that entire period except some time at the beginning for JIT. Now 60 is a suspiciously round number to arrive at by trying to hit X many sprites on the screen or numerically deriving some benchmark objective. Probably, somebody just eyeballed what a Space Blaster game looked like and one minute of runtime was about right.

That probably is a reasonable predictor for Space Blaster, but it is quite the leap to use these results to predict "most other HTML5 games" as asserted in this article. Some games will have half the sprites and others will have double, some games will be more spikey, and others will be more well-behaved, etc.

If I was going to use this benchmark to predict my game's performance, I would do what the benchmark designer probably did. I would ignore the results table, run the benchmark until the sprite count/size looked about right, and take my own average of the FPS indicator around that time.

[1] [https://www.scirra.com/blog/107/boosting-mobile- html5-game-p...](https://www.scirra.com/blog/107/boosting-mobile-html5-game- performance-with-webgl)

<comment><USER3> I'd also be concerned that the benchmark doesn't present a realistic performance profile, either in CPU or GPU terms.

It appears to have a low entity count up until the end, and not have any considerable amount of collision detection or other cpu-intensive entity behaviors. This means it's not really stressing a JS runtime and could probably perform great under an interpreter (as demonstrated by Ejecta getting a good framerate)

It also doesn't appear to produce a taxing GPU profile even on a canvas implementation. It draws very few objects, and most of them share the same texture and rendering state, ensuring that even a simple rendering implementation can batch them up into a single draw call with very few vertices. The framebuffer resolution is low and the overdraw is low as well.

A real-world game, even one that isn't 'too complicated' for mobile, would have a dramatically different performance profile.

I think this is a solid benchmark, but it's irresponsible to make claims like 'if sbperftest runs well, most other HTML5 games should run decently as well' and 'The next most common case is usually someone designing or porting such a complex game that even a native engine would struggle on the limited, battery- powered mobile hardware.'

You simply can't make those claims without a broader benchmark suite (which I should note most of the professional mobile/desktop benchmarking suites come closer to offering, with a handful of different benchmarks based on different workloads).

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Perhaps the "if sbperftest runs well, most other HTML5 games should run decently as well" statement should have been inverted, so it reads "if sbperftest doesn't run well, few other HTML5 games will". We develop a major HTML5 game engine, and this statement is backed by quite a bit of testing and profiling of real-world games.

The test is deliberately based on a real-world game (it was adapted from an interactive game) so it's not a synthetic benchmark. No it is not enormously onerous for the CPU or GPU, but if you look at the results many mobile devices still can't quite manage a rock-solid 60 FPS, so I think it serves pretty well to see if mobile devices are fast enough for relatively simple games. There is actually a lot of collision testing in the laser-to-enemy intersection test - all of the objects in the game have custom collision polygons, it's not a simple bounding box test. The explosions use additive blending (or "lighter" composite mode) which actually seems to stress many canvas2d implementations but generally is a lot smoother with WebGL. So it's not _that_ simple a test.

I'm not sure why the 60 second period is important; the most intensive part is the waves of green sprites which should come well within the measured period, and it gets quieter after that when the test ends, so it's not skipping the hard bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great idea. One thing I see is that you're graphing FPS, which means that your data becomes useless once enough of your target devices are able to sustain 60fps.

What I did for my HTML5 benchmarking solution for JSIL games is to instead record the timing in MS for the update and draw stages of every frame. This ensures that even if the benchmark is throttled to 60hz (Chrome does this no matter how you schedule ticks) you can compare timings across browsers on the same configuration and tell whether things have gotten faster.

You can run the benchmark for yourself here: [http://www.playescapegoat.com/?replayURI=/stages2and3.replay...](http://www.playescapegoat.com/?replayURI=/stages2and3.replay&disableSound&fastReplay)

Click 'Show Log' to see the timing data. It's been a very useful tool for evaluating improvements in JITcode quality, GC performance, canvas performance, and various JIT regressions for complex JavaScript. Just running it periodically has revealed dozens of regressions in Firefox and Chrome.

Hopefully with more usable data, your benchmark will contribute to spotting regressions too :D

P.S. feel free to harvest stuff from the JSIL benchmarking code. Everything is open-source.

<comment><USER4> _record the timing in MS for the update and draw stages of every frame_

This tells you nothing about when the frame actually makes it to the screen. It's ok for optimizing your own code, not so useful for comparing across devices, platforms & browsers.

<comment><USER3> Frame scheduling delay doesn't matter for performance benchmarking. Modern browser compositors literally grab the frame you hand them and display it at next vsync. It's irrelevant.

Note that a browser can also run rAF ticks at 60hz even if it's dropping half your frames to hit 30hz vsync. You won't be able to tell.

It is the case that some browser compositors fuck up the presentation of frames (hi Chrome), and that sucks, but you can't programmatically detect it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Comparison to native/CLR/JVM would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER6> The main bottleneck in WebKit was Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty(). It wasn't optimized for the case where the argument is a concatenation of strings, e.g hasOwnProperty("foo" \+ someString).

I landed a fix here: [https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/168549](https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/168549)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, good stuff. IIRC that only happens a lot if Set with forEach isn't supported, and it uses string properties on an object as a fallback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, I was hoping to see an FxOS phone on the charts. I mean, the whole thing is about the web apps, so what else could be a better way to measure it's gaming capabilities than the Construct 2? And vice versa, the FxOS seems to be an ideal (or at least, logical) target for Scirra.

</comment><comment><USER8> I get a score of 35 on my MBP,so hard to believe it runs faster on mobile devices,i'll make some tests later at home.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like software rendering, did you try other browsers or disabling the blacklist? It's actually relatively common that high-end mobiles like the Nexus 5 can outperform low-end or software-rendering laptops/desktops.

<comment><USER9> Also, webgl is disabled by default in Safari. You need to enable the developer menu to turn it on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How do you have a mobile comparison like this without including the 5s, the flagship device from Apple?

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope this is not too much off topic, but is Chrome on Android running natively or in Dalvik?

</comment><comment><USER12> FPS isn't really an issue for web games, it's input latency. Current browsers add something like a 60ms delay to _every_ input event, and there isn't any fast path for translating inputs to events on screen. This makes it very difficult right now to create fun and fast paced interactive games in HTML5.

<comment><USER3> Input latency is an issue, sure, but saying that framerate doesn't matter is just ignorant. The existence of attempts at improving throughput (like asm.js and NaCL and Dart) demonstrates that performance is still a serious concern for developers.

Also, keep in mind that high throughput - necessary for delivering a consistent 60FPS - will naturally reduce input latency by reducing the length of frames and the amount of time spent not pumping input messages.

P.S. It's my understanding that gamepad input in both Firefox and Chrome is not buffered in any fashion, so that's going to be low-latency.</comment></comment>


E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life - <AUTHOR> http://androidos.in/2012/10/e-ink-android-phone-promises-a-week-long-battery-life/

<comment><USER2> I dream of one day when someone will make a minimalist phone that meets my needs. The perfect phone for me would be this:

\- Can make and receive calls and texts.

\- Has a phone book (just a name/number key-value pair).

\- Has a clock and timer/alarm.

\- NO OTHER SOFTWARE FEATURES. Nothing extra other than calls, texts, phone book, time.

\- Small e-ink display.

\- Simple T9 keypad.

\- Rugged construction, should be able to take a lot of abuse. Should not feel cheap.

\- Small and thin.

\- Tons of battery life.

\- Beautiful, minimalist visual design.

\- Cheap enough that you can lose it without feeling bad.

That's all I want - something optimized for calls and texts, nothing more or less. It would be a cheap phone to produce, I think. Would there be any market for this?

EDIT: the Motofone looks like it's kind of like this (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone>), but it has a segmented display (bad for texts), and it sounds like it feels a bit cheap. It could also be prettier.

<comment><USER3> What is wrong with a classic nokia phone? The battery life is easily a week on some of them and other than the e-ink they basically have all of these features.

<comment><USER2> They're pretty nice, but I'd like something thinner and more stylish (not the most critical attribute but it's a big plus).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a crazy idea, how about a touch LCD phone that is:

1) actually small enough to fit in my pocket

2) Not PoS 3 years out-of-date hardware designed so that the phone company can offer a "free" smartphone.

The smaller screen would probably greatly improve battery life.

<comment><USER5> Like, the iPhone? Or maybe a Lumia 800? They both fit comfortably in all mens' pockets (and most women's, assuming they have pockets).

The problem is Android is such a power hungry OS that you need to be constantly updating the specs as hardware and app demands grow higher, and high-end specs require space to fit everything in (including ever-growing battery demands), so small Android handsets have to make compromises on specs. It feels sort of like PCs did 10 years ago - 3 years of use and your top-of- the-line PC was near unusable. I find Windows Phone and iOS don't suffer from this nearly as much.

<comment><USER6> It isn't android. It's the manufacturer skins. AOSP Jellybean runs really smooth on my low end phone. (512 MB ram, 600 MHz processor) But HTC Sense 4 runs like crap.

<comment><USER5> It's a bit of both. The original Galaxy S (which was only a year and a half old at the time, and was a top-of-the-line phone) struggled really hard with stock android ICS for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For what it's worth: Onyx, the manufacturer, only half-heartedly support their current e-ink readers, leaving lots of annoying bugs unfixed. However, there are very concrete rumors that Android is also being ported to the some Onyx e-ink readers [1].

[1] [http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2237483&...](http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2237483&postcount=23)

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish for a dual screen mobile (one side LCD and other side E-Ink)

<comment><USER9> Can one or the other be (more or less) completely transparent? Is it possible to have one screen layered over the other such that the LCD only becomes active when the user is directly interacting with the device?

(Off to the patent office I go!)

<comment><USER10> Take an OLPC with you to help you with the filing. It had those in 2008 (or even earlier). Google "Pixel Qi"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is "week long battery life" really a killer feature? As long as a phone has enough battery to make it through the 16 hours per day most of us are awake, anything more is just gold plating.

Just how big is the "week long battery life" niche?

<comment><USER12> for me this is a feature: not having to think about or doing the effort of putting the phone in the charger every single day? I'll sign for that. (it's also marginally cheaper since you don't waste elektricity if using the charger only once a week vs every day. And it makes it useful in countries not having power everywhere)

<comment><USER13> >t's also marginally cheaper since you don't waste elektricity if using the charger only once a week vs every day

I read recently that recharging an iPad every night costs less than 2 cents per year.

<comment><USER14> I think you are referring to this study: [http://blog.opower.com/2012/09/how- much-does-it-cost-to-char...](http://blog.opower.com/2012/09/how-much-does-it- cost-to-charge-an-iphone-5-a-thought-provokingly-modest-0-41year/)

Which has the iPhone 5 at $0.41/y, the Samsung S III at $0.53/y and the iPad (model unclear, but I guess the 3), at $1.36.

I agree with your point though: the electricity cost of these devices is already negligible, an e-ink display wouldn't make much of a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This could become an awesome secondary travel/camping phone. Sure when I'm home I generally remember to charge my phone every or every other night, but when out and about there are many times when charging is inconvenient of impossible.

<comment><USER16> For camping surely an old nokia will do? I keep one, which isn't much bigger than a mars bar, for this purpose and the battery lasts for ages.

<comment><USER15> Sure, I do the same. But having smart phone features like e-mail and a web browser would no doubt be handy at times. For example looking up bus/train schedules for getting home in case you end up delayed or have to change your route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If it has USB OTG and allows installing custom Linux software, I'm sold.

Current status: [USB Host on the Kindle 4](<http://www.christian- hoff.com/?p=139>)

</comment><comment><USER18> I have been thinking about a responsive e-ink for some time.

What I would love is a responsive e-ink screen to use for text editing, Imagine a large responsive e-ink screen that you can use for coding, reading, etc...

Although for coding it would also need some basic colours.

<comment><USER19> Here's an example of vim running on an eink device (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdmX52SCpG0>). A lightweight, long battery life eink-coder would be a fantastic thing to have when travelling.

Grayscale vim would be good enough for me: [http://sstallion.blogspot.com/2010/10/newsprintvim- pleasant-...](http://sstallion.blogspot.com/2010/10/newsprintvim-pleasant- monochromatic.html)

<comment><USER20> I'm still waiting on my Raspberry Pi (if it ever gets here, I've been waiting 6 months) with the dreams of turning it into a small, Radio Shack-style Vim machine. Building a case with a keyboard, a small display screen, a command line, and a huge battery. When it's connected to the Internet, it would push the changes up, but when it's not it would cache it locally.

Sometimes I like to go camping while I work, for the peace of mind of sitting in nature away from everyone. Really lets me focus. My Thinkpad gets 10 hours of battery life, but that's not always enough. Charging it in my car isn't really congruent with getting away from it all.

<comment><USER21> I have similar dreams but then a battery powered emacs machine. As a homebrew Raspberry Pi powered device will probably needs more power then a hacked phone running linux I'll opt for the latter. If only such a phone had a vizplex e-ink display! There is a PocketBook which supports a bluetooth keyboard, also a nice option.

<comment><USER20> A hacked phone might need less power, but it's also smaller, which means a smaller battery. My phone gets 10 hours of battery life in constant use, and my laptop gets 10 hours of battery life in constant use. Obviously the laptop has a much, much larger battery, and sits in a much, much larger footprint. Imagine phone-grade hardware with a laptop-sized battery.

I'm not criticizing your version of the dream. That's the beauty of open technology, everyone can have their own dream and see that it becomes reality with a little bit of work. What I was thinking of would be about netbook sized with the majority of it being battery. Full sized keyboard mounted in, console-sized display, leaving a huge empty space inside. Without having it in my hands to actually judge battery use, all I can do is dream of a 30-hour battery on a black-and-white, unbacklit display powered by a full sized keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It could be useful in India or African countries with not much access to energy. But I doubt people from developed nations would want this. It most likely offers nowhere near the experience of an LCD device. Remember, besides the lack of color issue, e-ink devices work best when the on-screen image is static, and not changing often.

<comment><USER23> I go on cycle tours every now and then, camping some of the time. I'd love a backup phone for use during tours that could hold a usable charge for 4 or 5 days.

My father does motorcycle touring and would love the same.

I have an old Sony Ericsson M600i symbian phone ( <http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_m600-1425.php> ) I dig out for when I go travelling. The battery is still good for 10 days stand-by. It's such a pain to resync contacts, mail, etc... that all I really do is move the SIM over and use a travel email account.

If I could have the battery life of the old phone with the functionality of a new smart phone, then I'm very willing to sacrifice the screen quality to achieve it.

<comment><USER24> I have a 12V plug on my motorcycle (fused, regulated. I installed it for like 10 bucks). I also have a couple of solar chargers, they hold 2 AA batteries. They take about 8 hours of sunlight to fully charge and can put an iPhone into the 70% range.

<comment><USER25> When there's sunlight, you want to be out riding, not sitting around waiting for your phone to charge! And plugging/unplugging the phone every time you get on/off the bike is annoying.

First-world problems :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The difficult part of making an e-ink Android, or applying an e-ink display to a general-purpose platform is that the way screen-drawing is implemented has not been designed with e-ink in mind.

The display might either seem "flashy" because the full screen is blanked and drawn for every update, or the screen gets "muddy" because the graphics stack isn't keeping track of how many times a screen areas has been rewritten without being reset.

Page-at-a-time updates, like those between pages of a book, are the most compatible with how e-ink works.

<comment><USER27> I've got a rooted Nook ("simple touch"), it handles the redrawing remarkably well. I wouldn't call it production-ready, but the shadowing is small and it's more than usable. Available RAM is abysmal, but that's a separate problem.

The weirder part is how e.g. dragging an icon makes a greyscale-rainbow trail behind it as it redraws pixels. Panning through the app screens is also pretty crappy, and all the little animations are so over the top with a slow screen rate that the results are basically laughable. I wish there were a "never animate anything, ever, for any reason" switch I could flip :|

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Would be useful to have as a second screen. Dual touch maybe? eink for phone functions (60% of the time in my case) and lcd for when you need the fullcolor display (GPS mode, movie mode, web browsing)?

</comment><comment><USER29> I wouldn't buy it, due to not really being able to see photos on an e-ink display. I've just become so use to color. Great idea though, especially for people that travel a lot, go camping etc...

It doesn't seem that snappy right now speed wise. Not sure if thats the phone or Android though (I'm not a big Android user), but nonetheless, cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER30> Not bad at all, but then again a IMOD display would be better: its in color and it has much faster refresh rates so it can play video and use touch UIs just like in any LCD.

It has some downsides compared to regular screens but it looks even better than eInk and has similar advantages like low energy use.

</comment><comment><USER31> My 30 euro simple Nokia phone has a week long battery life, and I'm pretty sure the user experience it offers will be a lot better than an e-ink Android phone.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd take a black and white screen with the promise of better battery life if the display was at least as functional in all other aspects

</comment><comment><USER33> e-ink isn't suitable for anything that moves, so it's only going to be good for a really basic phone + contacts + text messaging device. Android seems like massive overkill and a waste of battery for those relatively simple tasks. I think there is still demand for a high quality phone that is light on features and inexpensive.

<comment><USER34> Overkill, yes. However, it's probably also cheaper than going with anything else. It might have cost them $1 more in hardware to go with 512MB of RAM rather than 256MB but they probably saved $10 in licensing fees.

Yes, 99% of Android apps will be useless, but 1% of a very large number is still a large number.

As for battery, virtually all of it goes into the display and the radio. The CPU is sleeping most of the time, so the OS chosen would have very little impact on that.

"I think there is still demand for a high quality phone that is light on features and inexpensive."

Sorry, not going to happen. In a modern phone, features are a lot cheaper to add than quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd replace my Droid RAZR with one of these in a heartbeat...</comment>


Only 27 percent of college grads have a job related to their major - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/20/only-27-percent-of-college-grads-have-a-job-related-to-their-major/

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty meaningless statistic. It only indicates that college majors don't line up neatly with current career paths, which has been widely known for some time (how well it is internalized by incoming freshmen and their advisors is up for debate).</comment>


Michael Hartl announces the Rails Tutorial Vanguard  - <AUTHOR> http://www.railstutorial.org/vanguard

<comment><USER2> For those who are not familiar with it, this is a well-known approach among affiliate marketers.

1) Give away something really valuable. Make people trust you and love you for it.

2) Build a large list of email subscribers.

3) Offer a premium course for a very large amount of money ($495 in this case). A small percentage will inevitably buy it, leading to large profits.

<comment><USER3> The strategy you outline seems to have a bad reputation in Hacker News circles, though I'm not sure why; as long as the product in Step 1 is valuable by itself, the strategy certainly isn't a bait-and-switch. In any case, that's not what the Rails Tutorial Vanguard is about. I'm trying to keep the Vanguard small (say 5–10 people), and several slots have already been filled at an earlier price, so the Vanguard is not designed primarily as a money-making operation. (I've spent the equivalent of six months full-time on the book, so even a $5000 return would be a pittance compared to the opportunity cost.) Instead, the relatively high price is a way of attracting Vanguard members who place a high value on small-group and individual mentoring. People who don't find such attention valuable should wait for the release of the ( _much_ cheaper) screencast series itself.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I think my comment came across the wrong way. I wasn't criticizing your approach, but rather advocating that it's an effective and well-tested method to earn, potentially, good money. As long as the product is solid, like it is in your case, I really don't see an issue with what you are doing.

<comment><USER3> OK, thanks for clarifying. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One question for Michael or any other rails developers out there: railstutorial.org teaches rails using Rails 2.3.x, but it looks like at least the first batch of screencasts you're putting out will be about Rails 3. How much of what I just learned by going through Rails Tutorial is going to be obsolete in Rails 3 and if I have already started to develop an app using the techniques discussed in the tutorial, should I stop while I'm not far in and start over with Rails 3 or should I keep on with 2.3.6 and try to transition everything further down the road?

<comment><USER4> From what I've seen most of the basic knowledge involved in creating a Rails 2.X app translates well for Rails 3. The basic application structure and the way of thinking about the layout of the application remains largely unchanged.

Some highlight differences difference being:

      # ActiveRecord query syntax
      2.X: User.all(:conditions => {:name => "aaron"}, :limit => 1)
      3.X: User.where(:name => "aaron").limit(1)

      # ActionMailer API now closely matches the ActionController API
      2.X:
        class Notifier
          def user_notification(user)
            recipients  user.email
            subject     "test subject"
            from        "email@example.com"
            body        :user => user
          end
        end

      3.X:
        class Notifier
          default :from => "email@example.com"

          def user_notification(user)
            @user = user
          end
        end

In Rails 3 Gem dependencies are managed using Bundler, which means that you have to explicitly declare all of the gems your application uses, even fundamental things like Rails and Rack. Calls to config.gem need to be removed, and added to a Gemfile instead.

There are quite a few more API changes than what I have listed here, routes in particular will change greatly for complex applications. The full details are here: <http://guides.rails.info/3_0_release_notes.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. That's a lot to pay upfront for an unknown product.

<comment><USER6> I think Michael offers a 60-day no-questions-asked, money-back guarantee, though you should verify that first.

<comment><USER3> That's right. Seriously, if anyone who joins the Vanguard isn't ecstatic about the experience, I don't want to keep their money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> $495 for Rails screencasts?

Last time I checked Railscasts.com was still free and better than any other screencasts I've ever seen, free or paid.

<comment><USER3> $495 isn't for the screencasts; the Vanguard is a _de facto_ training course, and those usually run $500 per person per day. Every Vanguard member will get lots of individual mentoring and attention; people who don't find that valuable shouldn't sign up. (N.B. Ryan Bates doesn't provide one-on-one or small-group mentoring for Railscasts viewers.)

The Vanguard is a group to help _make_ the screencasts; the screencast product itself will probably be over 10 hours and cost around $50, which I think is pretty cheap. And it will be designed to _complement_ things like the Railscasts and PeepCode, which tend to cover intermediate and advanced topics; the Rails Tutorial screencasts are designed for beginners who aren't yet ready for that material.</comment></comment>


The Palm Pilot Has Rivals but No True Competition - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB899329954715175000 <comment><AUTHOR> Thought I'd dig out a Walt Mossberg classic from '98.</comment>


Fork My Code, Please (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.skeeve.com/fork-my-code.html <comment><USER2> Similar sentiments: [https://danielcompton.net/2014/11/19/dependencies](https://danielcompton.net/2014/11/19/dependencies) "Open Source Is Free As in Baby"

<comment><USER3> At first glance I thought the title next to your link was sort of "Free as in Kittens" but it was slightly different and a good article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like to share my projects, it's awesome when it gets featured. But I have to agree, the list of users "suggestions" gets me tired every time.

why would do like this and not like that? like that would be better.

can you add touch support? I don't like using keys.

can you add key support? I don't want to click the screen.

why it's not working on my Android 4.1 version?

</comment><comment><USER5> For some context, Chet Ramey and Arnold Robbins are the maintainers of GNU Bash and GNU AWK, respectively.

</comment><comment><USER6> This link was posted in the thread on Elm: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447)

It makes a nice contrast to the way that the core Elm team pushes back on forks and retains control for themselves.

<comment><USER7> I agree with OP, and also with the Elm post.

But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the _temerity_ to _actually_ create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. My computer can hold multiple incompatible forks without them mutually annihilating. Why can't people's belief systems?

Now, such sentiments often come from the peanut gallery rather than the maintainer. But maintainers could help more. When was the last time anyone saw a maintainer _thank_ someone for creating a fork? Forks should be treated more like Andon Cords ([https://itrevolution.com/kata](https://itrevolution.com/kata)). Creating them is an act of bravery, and even if you don't agree with the reasons they are a valuable source of feedback. These are events to be celebrated and encouraged. A fork that doesn't gain traction isn't a 'failure' to be derided, it is a valuable experiment at worst, a negative result that didn't take away energy from other efforts. At best it actually influenced upstream. Everyone should be enormously grateful.

<comment><USER6> It seems common to me for people to say, "Can you create a fork and make a pull request?"

But it does vary by project. The Linux kernel has tons of forks maintained by random people for random reasons. But Python not so much.

<comment><USER7> Ugh, I hate GitHub for polluting the terminology. There's two distinct senses of 'fork' here:

a) A short-lived branch hosted elsewhere for managing the merge process. This is a technical fork.

b) A long-lived branch that may never be merged back. This is a social fork. Like egcs vs gcc, or Vim vs Neovim.

It's the latter that seems to have stigma attached to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Genuine question here, the post ends with "In that case, you may wish to talk to us (offline) about our consulting rates.".

Without bothering the author, I'm really curious what the price range would be for consulting with recognized open-source maintainers, once you reach them offline ... Anyone willing to try a guess ?

(I'm a consultant myself, thinking about my own fees ... but I have zero significant contributions to Free Software as Arnold Robbin does, just curious !)

<comment><USER9> I've seen that Stallman does consulting at $250/hr, which is interesting when you consider that I, a no-name from a no-name state school with 8 years' experience, am billed to my company's clients at more than 1/3 the rate of someone who's effectively a celebrity.

<comment><USER10> He probably doesn't actually work for that rate though, since he rarely programs anymore and mostly does evangelist work for the FSF.

<comment><USER5> RMS was removed as president of the FSF in September 2019. He is still head of the GNU project, but is no longer part of the FSF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am starting to wonder why Open Source became the standard as apposed to alternatives. Clearly a love/passion/aptitude/... puts people in a position where they contribute time and expertise for some/no reward that matches a cost/benefit. The article list the truth behind volunteering and the consequent constraints.

Why is it that way though?

The planet has public money advancing major scientific interests in an organised though potentially politically aggravated mechanism. Would a lack of action on a subject of possible national security be tolerated due to the rights of volunteers? How about international security?

Is it politics/government/non scientific interests that make open source the most successful answer to by the people for the people?

</comment><comment><USER12> While open source software really shines when lots of contributions work together and when everyone is polite, understanding, and well-reasoned, not every project is like that.

Sometimes it's hard or even demoralizing for the developer to handle all the feature requests that do not take into account the constraints. I've seen some GitHub issues like that and it's disheartening.</comment>


Hiring Guide for startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.hiring.guide <comment><AUTHOR> Dear Startup Founders, please join me in welcoming to the world a brand new Hiring Guide (www.hiring.guide). It is still Beta, things will look better. I decided though to release it already now because I believe there is some useful content. And since it's my first website, well, I was also afraid that I will be never done with improving it ;) Enjoy!</comment>


AMD says Nvidia's GameWorks "completely sabotaged" Witcher 3 performance - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-gameworks-completely-sabotaged-witcher-3-performance/ <comment><USER2> This has always been the point of NVIDIA's propertary game engine technology for more than a decade now - give it away for free or very often for big titles integrate it into game engines using NVIDIA developers (who often come to work on site.) Then once the game is released mention that it works better/looks better on NVIDIA technology than on competitors (AMD/Intel) GPU technology. And of course blame it not working well on AMD/Intel on their "inferior" technology.

NVIDIA must be loving this controversy as it was the whole game plan all along.

<comment><USER3> I read something very similar in this anonymous Slashdot post when Assassin's Creed Unity came out:

[http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6048819&cid=483821...](http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6048819&cid=48382141)

Choice quote: "Nvidia literally doesn't care if bouncing ten simple particles on your screen uses 30% of your GPU performance, so long as the same effect on an AMD GPU takes 80%. Nvidia is this dirty."

<comment><USER4> >So Nvidia 'invented' TXAA- an horrifically bad AA method both in appearance and 'hit' on performance- but a method that runs far better on new Nvidia hardware than it does on new AMD hardware.

Why is that, though? Why can't AMD do whatever Nvidia's doing to make it just as fast on their system?

<comment><USER5> Because Nvidia is playing to their relative strengths. Differences in hardware can't always be overcome in software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chao- There was an article back in March wherein a Stack Overflow (or Quora?) user comment about the hilariously porous boundary between game engines, drivers and actual hardware on GPUs. I'll see if I can find it because as much as I love a good ole shitshow of industry skulduggery, I can completely see a best- intentions effort leading to these sorts of unintended consequences (doing their best to get tessellation working, and so forth).

 _Disclaimer of non-fanboy-ism: I don 't play video games anymore, and only have graphics via Intel on my machine. No stock in Nvidia or AMD either._

Edit: Found it, and my memory completely sucks. It was an article on gamedev.net about lower-level graphics APIs: [http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your- opinions-o...](http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on- dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019)

<comment><USER6> I remember reading that link and thinking about how the standards are not working.

It also concerns me for the future of the open source graphics stack. If the proprietary drivers are being updated to fix game specific problems, how are the open source drivers going to fair when the general rule for open source is not to have hacks within a code base.

I can only hope that the Mesa 3D stack comes to Windows in a meaningful way to ensure a common open 3D graphics library. Vulcan might shift the problem to the game engine from the driver but that's a long way off yet.

<comment><USER7> > . If the proprietary drivers are being updated to fix game specific > problems, how are the open source drivers going to fair when the general > rule for open source is not to have hacks within a code base.

I'm an outsider, so it's easy for me to sit back and make blanket statements. That being said, the responsibility should lie on game developers to insure their games behave properly on hardware. Making proprietary drivers to address specific games is a bad development practice. Hardware markers should be responsible for insuring their drivers are accurately supporting standards.

It just sounds like the whole games industry has fallen into some really bad development practices.

<comment> chao- The thing is, as referenced in the article I linked, there is a blurred line in functionality between what the GPU can do, via what the driver exposes, and what the GPU can do, if only they would write something for you to help massage it a bit and enable in the way you need.

Without access to the engineer's knowledge of the GPU's hardware, it's hard for the open source developers to even know what they ought to be able to implement. It follows that game studios (and consumers) would be crazy to rely on the coin-flip-odds that an open source implementation will figure out the right thing to do for a particular optimization of the GPU's internals

I am also an outsider, but have had a few friends work on various graphics projects (game engines, CAD software, one of them use to have a map of the OpenGL state machine above his bed). To hear them tell it, trying to maintain absolute "best practices" and only use truly cross-platform, cross-vendor code in your libraries while still hitting deadlines for games is like the mythical web startup that somehow ships despite also investing time in 100% unit test coverage, 100% integration tests, with a little bit of mutation testing and generative testing on top to help test-drive the test suite. That is: it's more of an ideal to strive for than a reality to be lived.

As a Linux user I weep at this state of affairs, but given the way GPUs are made, I don't know what could change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> HairWorks is not something to be particularly upset about. Vast majority of players, even on high-end GPUs just keep turning off those "premium" IHV- specific features as they are just so heavy.

BTW AMD kinda started this with their TressFX hairs (notably used in new Tomb Raider).

It had similar characteristics to HairWorks - extremely expensive feature for relatively small overall visual impact, better running on AMD than Nvidia GPUs, but still running pretty bad even on high-end GPUs.

Something to keep in mind: those super-duper features you see at GPU launch events, they are mostly just marketing, "halo effect" features, not practical enough to be used in games for almost everybody.

\</comment><comment>--

We are speaking about miniscule fraction of all players who have GPUs powerful enough to runs all bells and whistles.

Titan X, the only GPU that can run Witcher 3 fast with HairWorks enabled [1], exists in so small numbers that it doesn't even show up in Steam Hardware survey [2].

GTX 980, the next most powerful GPU, is owned by less than 0.5% of all people who use Steam. And GTX 980 runs 1080p ultra with HairWorks just ~37-40 fps.

GTX 970, the next most powerful GPU, the most popular Maxwell GPU, huge bestseller, is owned by ~3% of Steam users. It's the only remaining GPU that can stay above 30 fps with HairWorks on.

So something like 95+ percent of all gamers are not affected by this issue at all.

\</comment><comment>--

[1] [http://pclab.pl/art63116-27.html](http://pclab.pl/art63116-27.html)

[2] [http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/](http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/)

<comment><USER9> > BTW AMD kinda started this

The difference is AMD's TressFX source code is open, which allowed Nvidia to resolve the performance disparity without much fuss.

Whereas the Nvidia's HairWorks source code is closed, leaving AMD unable to pitch in engineering resource for a diagnosis or solution.

<comment><USER10> Also note the dates: Tomb Raider's TressFX happened in 2013 while Crysis 2 and the 'flat-surface tessellation' happened in 2011 (with Patch 1.8 I believe).

Not something one can call a start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> white-flame So this is the screenshot with HairWorks enabled: [https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/sites/3/2015/...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/sites/3/2015/05/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-pc-screenshot-002.png)

Is there a comparable one with it turned off? Because that untextured hair looks completely out of place next to all the other nicely textured & shadowed parts of that scene (well, the chainmail does look amusingly flat where it goes over the shoulder). The hair might move nicely in gameplay, but it looks plain, garish, and low tech in a still.

I suspect this works much better with dark hair, where the texture is not as noticeable as the silhouette.

<comment><USER2> > Because that untextured hair looks completely out of place next to all the > other nicely textured & shadowed parts of that scene

The hair has nice shape and I believe it has physics, but it totally isn't shaded properly. I'm not sure if they are not using the proper Marschner shader ([http://www.ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/max/ornatrix/docs/con...](http://www.ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/max/ornatrix/docs/concepts/expensive_shader.html)) or if the issue is they are not integrating the environmental lighting properly - could be both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> From all that I read, the game itself performs very well on AMD cards. The only exception is the Hairworks feature. But that has such a large impact even on high-end Nvidia cards that this is the first thing that one disables. It is probably the single most expensive setting in the game, and for a relatively small benefit.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to point out the Slightly Mad quotes about working with AMD. I have never heard of a developer having a good experience with AMD. Even Carmak, the man with probably the most klote for a game programmer, has had a hard time getting help from them. Their support for developers has been why I've been choosing them for my PCs ever since I upgraded from my 9800 Pro.

<comment><USER13> > Their support for developers has been why I've been choosing them for my PCs > ever since I upgraded from my 9800 Pro.

Don't you mean why you _haven 't_ been choosing them. Or are you choosing AMD _because_ they (supposedly) aren't nice to developers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nvidia technologies have been heavily used in both these games:

* Watch Dogs

* The Witcher 3

Both suffer from technical problems with the graphics, don't perform as good as they could (across all systems) and look considerably worse than in the previews.

I like Nvidia cards and drivers, but as a developer I'd stay very clear of Nvidia-exclusive technologies. I guess the business guys must like the free advertising.

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope the new low-level API kids on the block, like metal and vulkan, can switch the fight to actually compete in having solid GPU performance, and benefit consumers in the end.

Then, maybe a GPU independent HairThing™/intermediate level toolkits can actually flourish.

<comment><USER5> Why not just DX12?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It should be noted that hairworks crushes the entire game no matter what GPU you have (Nvidia or otherwise) except for one, the Titan X, which retails just north of a thousand dollars.

Everyone else is pretty much forced to turn down some setting or another to hit 60+ fps. And that's just at 1080p! I thought my GTX970 would handle it no problem, but there are still tweaks to be made.

</comment><comment><USER17> What about that mention of recent updates making 7xx series graphic cards performance worse? I have a 750 in my laptop and yesterday I booted pillars of eternity and was having much more performance problems than usual.

</comment><comment><USER18> "...AMD's chief gaming scientist..." this is some fancy position

<comment><USER19> Well he does have a _fancy_ degree in chemistry and that makes him a _scientist_!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Solution: AMD optimizes HairWorks. Reality: complaining is easier.

NVIDIA have always claimed that no exclusivity deals are signed with GameWorks. Others have [supposedly] always been welcome to assist game developers during the phases that NVIDIA gets proactively involved in.

It's just an extension of the systemic AMD problem: they [very likely] have the best hardware but their Windows drivers are horrific and not only do they not have developer support; they actually play the victim because others take the initiative. For crying out loud, even Intel has game developer support/code. _Correction: it turns out that AMD do actually have some open source libraries for game devs._

The problem here isn't NVIDIA. NVIDIA set out to optimize the game as best as they could for their hardware. AMD didn't set out to do anything: once again they sabotaged themselves by not getting involved. If I'm lazy and I get left behind that is my fault, not the fault of the other guy who did what I didn't do.

<comment><USER21> > It's just an extension of the systemic AMD problem: they [very likely] have > the best hardware but their Windows drivers are horrific and not only do > they not have developer support

You are strongly misrepresenting the actual situation. AMD is painfully aware that their drivers lack compared to Nvidia but they disagree with the reason. AMD does not want to put nearly as many hacks into the drivers as Nvidia does. They went quite far (by making Mantle) to make the drivers leaner and more predictable.

Nvidia traditionally detects misbehaving game code and patches it up with various degrees in the driver.

> AMD didn't set out to do anything: once again they sabotaged themselves by > not getting involved.

AMD made the right step and backed the only thing that will evolve the situation from the status quo: Mantle and now Vulkan/DX12. Otherwise they would always end up playing this game of magical drivers that NVidia supports but nobody likes.

<comment><USER20> > Mantle and now Vulkan/DX12

The issue here isn't that at all. The issue is a turn-key hair rendering solution. ~~Which AMD does not provide.~~ Correction: AMD provides TressFX, which had bad NVIDIA performance before NVIDIA stepped in and fixed it. ~~In fact I can't find any graphics code samples on their website, contrasted with the abundance on the NVIDIA website.~~ Correction: AMD does have samples.

<comment><USER21> > The issue here isn't that at all. The issue is a turn-key hair rendering > solution.

That is incorrect. The issue here is hair rendering which AMD has a turn-key solution for it: TressFX.

<comment><USER20> Right, I stand corrected. However, do keep in mind that NVIDIA had similar performance issues during the Tomb Raider launch - and instead of complaining about it NVIDIA stepped in and, as I've been saying, _helped the game developer improve TessFx compatibility with their cards._

<comment><USER22> Do keep in mind that NVIDIA received the code for the game so they could optimize their driver for it [1].

There is no chance of the same happening with AMD and TW3, since at least at the beginning of 2014:

        According to Nvidia, developers can, under certain licensing circumstances,
        gain access to (and optimize) the GameWorks code, but cannot share
        that code with AMD for optimization purposes.

See [2] for the source of that statement.

The situation is _really_ that different.

[1] [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-03-07-nvidia- apologis...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-03-07-nvidia-apologises- to-tomb-raider-pc-players-plagued-by-geforce-issues)

[2] [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173511-nvidias- gameworks-...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173511-nvidias-gameworks- program-usurps-power-from-developers-end-users-and-amd)

<comment><USER20> It seems as though that might have changed[1] (dated 1 year after yours). In truth those in the AAA industry might only be privy to what is actually going on, as I'm seeing a lot of PR bullshit/he-says-she-says from both sides.

If NVIDIA is actively restricting access to the code for HairWorks that is indeed very scummy, however, they would technically still be within their rights.

[1]: [http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/NVIDIA-and-AMD- Fight-...](http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/NVIDIA-and-AMD-Fight-over- NVIDIA-GameWorks-Program-Devil-Details/NVIDIAs-Response)

<comment><USER22> Yes, the FUD seems to be everywhere, I concur. And we'll never know the truth unless a GameWorks contract gets leaked in full, aka never. Business as usual. :)

Intel was still within their right (technically) when it forced their own compiler to compile non-optimized code for AMD CPUs. That does not make it right for us, the customers, this is the point I wanted to make.

<comment><USER20> > That does not make it right for us, the customers, this is the point I > wanted to make.

That's an discussion that's likely to never come to a sensible conclusion :). The AMD/NVIDIA situation is definitely one of the negative outcomes of an open/competitive marketplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was getting stoked about the Witcher 3 when I got some free time. All this talk is making me think twice about the game and not about my AMD card.

</comment><comment><USER24> Don't graphic drivers already optimize themselves for specific games ? I don't really know what's optimized underneath though...

<comment><USER25> From elsewhere in this thread, [http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are- your-opinions-o...](http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your- opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019)

"Optimisation" may include "throw away the shaders provided by the game and replace them with entirely different ones written by NVIDIA for this specific game".

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So what are they going to use on Linux? Supposedly Witcher 3 is being ported. Weirdly, HairWorks uses DirectCompute, which makes it unportable anywhere outside Windows.

May be with emergence of Vulkan, developers won't need to use these vendor specific APIs, since they'll have low level enough access to implement their own physics logic efficiently on all GPUs.

</comment><comment><USER27> If AMD's platform is really as good as they claim, why does everything run on the nVidia one? Also, I don't think this is an issue worth getting upset about, especially if you can just turn the feature off in-game. If the particular engine I'm using runs better on nVidia cards, then of course I'm going to prioritize their platform as a base for my hair simulations or whatever fancy extra stuff I want to have in there for people with high-end GPUs.

<comment><USER21> > why does everything run on the nVidia one?

What is "everything"? PC Gaming is nVidia centric because they put a lot of money behind it. AMD supplies the chips for all next gen consoles so by pure market penetration in the gaming market, I'm pretty sure they are doing quite well.

<comment><USER27> You're right, my wording wasn't clear. I was talking about the market they're complaining about.

I just feel like it would be more beneficial to improve communication and developer support instead of generating negative PR by saying things like nvidia "completely sabotaged" performance when in fact all they really did according to developers is they had a good product and they were always available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Witcher 3 had looked awesome on all press photos and in-game videos til last week. The finished game looks the same on all platforms, a highend PC runs on idle (30% Gpu). Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition (2011) has a pretty similar ggraphic. Assassins Creed Unity looks like a game from the future. Witcher 3 is a good game, but the PR wasn't that good.

@down voter: do you mind to share your thoughts

<comment><USER14> True. The game is great and still looks very good, but considerably worse than the previews. Especially the lighting and the over-saturated colors.

The PR team did good though, because visually the game has the same issues as Watch Dogs, but it isn't getting anywhere as much hate for it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What app should I build using App Inventor? - <AUTHOR>

I don't have access to App Inventor yet, but hopefully I'll get it soon. If I do, I'd like to try to use it to build an app that someone wants.
My only programming experience is 1. Intro to CS class in 2003 2. Currently learning Python using MIT OCW 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
I'm interested in recommendations both from those who think App Inventor is a great idea and those who think it is unlikely to lead to anything of value. Thank you. <comment><USER2> From what I hear, it seems like a good introduction to the principles of programming, if nothing else. I didn't learn to program until my freshman year of college (and had no prior CS experience), but found that some similar- sounding software I had used for a long time had prepared me for actual programming in a surprising way ("Game Maker", for what it's worth). If the App Inventor ends up being anything like that, and actually useful for creating apps, it will certainly be a good reinforcement for basic programming concepts. On the other hand, by its very design it will be limited in what it can accomplish. How much is a matter to be seen!</comment>


Why are all app screenshots taken on Mac/Safari? - <AUTHOR>

Why all web app screenshots are depicted as if they they are taken on a Mac? I sell a desktop software aimed at photographers and Mac sales are not even 10% of Windows sales! People who pay for software seem to be using Windows but since it is considered cool to develop on Mac, developers put up screenshots of Mac. Why nobody puts up a screenshot taken on a PC or that shows some other browser like Firefox or Chrome or even IE? <comment><USER2> Darned easy to screenshot in OS X, one keystroke, a click (or a rectangle defining drag) and file on the Desktop or the clipboard. I know it's not particularly HARD in other OSes, but stupid easy on a Mac.

</comment><comment><USER3> Single data point: A designer for a website I worked on made all the screenshots. That designer used a Mac.

In general, designers may be more into Macs, and thus use them for screenshots?

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the percentage of photographers using macs is > 10%.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sure. But my watermark software has mostly Windows users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> because of the fancy background shadow the mac screenshot thing puts around the app window?</comment>


An introduction to distributed systems (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aphyr/distsys-class <comment><USER2> This is a great outline. Martin Kleppmann's Designing Data Intensive Applications [0] is very much in the same domain as what's in these notes.

Speaking about scale and distributed systems: AWS specific resources I find interesting from their EdgeEngineering/NetEng teams (I haven't seen many other service teams in AWS openly share as much about design as them):

\- [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/category/networkin...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/category/networking- content-delivery/amazon-route-53/) series of articles on Route53's 100% data- plane availability architecture [1].

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8xLxNje30M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8xLxNje30M) colmmacc [2] (seems to be the eng behind AWS HyperPlane [3][4]?) on 10 design patterns for building resilient systems.

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swQbA4zub20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swQbA4zub20) Peter Vosshall (co-creator of Dynamo [5]) presenting "cell-based" design in- use at AWS.

\----

[0] [https://dataintensive.net/](https://dataintensive.net/)

[1] [https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/under-the- hood-...](https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/under-the-hood-of- amazon-route-53-arc408r1-aws-reinvent-2018)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=colmmacc](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=colmmacc)

[3] [https://atscaleconference.com/videos/networking- scale-2018-l...](https://atscaleconference.com/videos/networking- scale-2018-load-balancing-at-hyperscale/)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfEcd3zqPOA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfEcd3zqPOA&feature=youtu.be&t=4661)

[5] Decandia, G.; Hastorun, D.; Jampani, M.; Kakulapati, G.; Lakshman, A.; Pilchin, A.; Sivasubramanian, S.; Vosshall, P.; Vogels, W. (2007). "Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store".

[6] Bonus: The SRE Book [https://landing.google.com/sre/sre- book/toc/index.html](https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html)

<comment><USER3> I haven't checked these links in a few years, but here are some more distributed systems resources; in this case, a list of reading lists.

[https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368](https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The notion of what constitutes a 'distributed system' has become vague. The original meaning implied a high degree of transparency - to the point, say, that if you open a new tab in Chrome (you know, a web browser), it might run _on a different node_. The idea was for the cluster to appear to the user as a single computer. I think Plan9/Inferno was the last example of such system.

<comment><USER3> The Erlang VM presents such a unified view to programs that run on it. The asynchronous messaging built into the language works the same between servers as it does locally.

You can determine whether the process to which you need to communicate is local or remote if desired, but it's unusual to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've lost track of Kyle's work since my last job crumbled, but for anyone unfamiliar with him, it's a pretty safe bet that his material is among the best available on this topic.

His tool Jepsen is the gold standard for testing the consistency guarantees of distributed databases.

<comment><USER5> Material for Jepsen talks are in here - [https://github.com/aphyr/jepsen- talks](https://github.com/aphyr/jepsen-talks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We (backend engineering at Remind) went through this repo over the course of 6 weeks, taking turns leading the discussion. It went really well. We had a variety of participants, from seasoned backend engineers to boot camp grads, and everyone got a lot out of it.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Lots of people use a queue with six disk writes and fifteen network hops > where a single socket write() could have sufficed

This issue is so wide spread in the industry...it makes me sad.</comment>


Ask HN: Are you still profiling CSS selectors? - <AUTHOR>

Ten days ago I submitted a question on StackOverflow: "How to profile CSS selectors?" [1] and I didn't get proper answers. I'm going to repost (and update) that question here
1) Google removed the CSS Profiler [2]
2) Firefox doesn't have one [3]
3) Opera had dragonfly, but now Opera is Blink based... and dragonfly is gone.
4) The only profiler around there in Safari, doesn't work on my 7.0.0 / OSX 10.9. (it keeps recording CSS and I can't stop it)
5) I know about "CSS-Stress-Testing-and-Performance-Profiling" [4] but I didn't figure it out how to use it for my purposes.
The chromium guys say: "CSS selector matching is now reasonably fast for the absolute majority of common selectors that used to be slow at the time of the profiler implementation", well...
I came across some benchmarks on jsperf.com like http://jsperf.com/css-selector-speed/15 and basing on that one I wrote: http://tagliala.github.io/vectoriconsroundup/cssperf/fa400 and http://tagliala.github.io/vectoriconsroundup/cssperf/fa321
I ran those tests (repeating them several times, results may change a lot across different runs) on different browsers and hardware and I got these results: https://gist.github.com/tagliala/7174356
It seems there are still differences and when developing css frameworks you should take care of selectors.
So... are you still profiling CSS selectors? And how?
Sorry for my English
[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19407451/how-to-profile-css-selectors [2]: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=265486 [3]: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=713031 [4]: http://edinborough.org/CSS-Stress-Testing-and-Performance-Profiling <comment><AUTHOR> [https://gist.github.com/tagliala/7175687](https://gist.github.com/tagliala/7175687) for better reading</comment>


How Wikipedia designs for low-bandwidth users - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/11/07/designing-for-low-bandwidth/ <comment><USER2> Thank you for this interesting link. It should be take as an example for other websites or technologies. It is unfortunate that the current technological power is absorbed by graphic effects.</comment>


Comedy vs. Nerds, Comedy Show San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.comedyvsnerds.com/?sanfrancisco

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033503)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now in San Francisco, soon in other cities

<comment><USER3> Are you going to come to new York?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, sign up for updates</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Review Signal - Real web hosting reviews based on social media comments - <AUTHOR> http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting

<comment><USER2> It seems like a good idea, but I suspect hosting companies could either setup fake twitter accounts or get their employees to spam positive reviews. Where as normally they have the dirty practice of logging into a review site and generating plant reviews (something that shows intent), this way they can just claim "Hey, we were just posting positive reviews to all 10,0000 of our own twitter accounts, we had no idea they were being used on Review Signal!".

They say "All messages from people financially or otherwise connected to the company will not be counted in the reviews.", but how do they really know?

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, like SEO, it will be a game of cat and mouse. It's pretty easy to see big changes if a company gets a lot of tweets. Then it becomes an investigative matter and figuring out how to find real vs fake. It's not perfect, it never will be. But I think it's a step in the right direction (I could be biased ;) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This fails for me.

I selected Developer, budget between 101-250, for "something else", while being comfortable managing it myself.

That something else is all my projects/websites essentially, which all differ a lot.

I doubt running that on Shared Hosting is a good idea?!

Besides that, awesome job - I like the idea, most review sites are filled with fake reviews just to make the website owner make the most via the programs that pay most..

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right. Honestly, the hosting recommendation tool is designed more for people that don't know anything about hosting right now. Making good suggestions for developers is hard. It's one of the things that definitely needs improvement.

That said, given what you put in, what sort of recommendation would you expect/want? I have some ideas but I would rather hear yours first before injecting my own opinion.

<comment><USER3> Well, selecting other - maybe a longer dropdown - entering how many sites (and what kind), bandwidth usage, visitors - rough figures obviously.

Some awesome features would be entering X amount of ip's (if you want unique or multiple), and maybe also add something regarding main demographic (should I go for a US provider, Asian, or European).

Should I go for a VPS? Or a Dedicated server? I know, it's tricky to calculate all of this - but it'd be awesome!

Last but not least, I'd only show these options if someone were to select a checkbox for advanced options.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the ideas. I have added them to the feature list. I will see what we can come up with based on your suggestions. The difference between vps/dedicated/cloud is really hard to recommend these days. It's also getting all mixed up, making recommendations even harder. Any ideas on that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems handy. I already knew a lot of the companies within the bounds of the configuration specs I listed, but found a few new ones.

I'd love to see digitalocean.com on there (maybe I missed them?). No affiliation ... just saw someone link to them recently and would be curious how they stack up with the others.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems like the top listing for most categories is mostly there because they seem to do informal support via twitter leading to people responding happily. I'm not knocking them, I've never heard of them and they certainly could be great, but I'm not primarily looking for a hoster that uses twitter as a ticket system.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair criticism and concern. From what I observed most companies are interacting on Twitter and some do it better than others. Do you have any ideas on how to improve the system? I know my way isn't perfect and I am always looking for ways to make it more accurate and representative.

<comment><USER5> I'd be curious to see what sentiment analysis of web hosting talk (or similar?) yielded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> finally a site with enough data to make a credible recommendation on hosting companies, any chance you'll cover overseas markets at some point?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now it's very US centric. As far as covering other countries, possibly on other english speaking countries like the UK. I am not sure I am ready to expand into analyzing other languages, so that would be a major issue for expanding to many markets abroad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> how does it classify tweets into negative/positive?

</comment><comment><USER7> will this last long? with twitter's new "rules"?

<comment><AUTHOR> The change (as far as my understanding goes) is it requires authenticated requests. I don't think it should be an issue, it just means doing everything with Oauth.</comment></comment>


25 years of X - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/354408/4b4c2fce98e785ad/

<comment><USER2> I would argue that the biggest stumbling block to Linux going mainstream is actually X. Get rid of it, start something sensible from scratch that's based on current (i.e. more developed) ideas than what was leading edge 25 years ago. Seriously.

Case in point: trying to configure two screens on Linux is anything between painful to downright impossible. In 2009! Windows 95 had that ability.

<comment><USER3> The biggest stumbling block is not X, not by a long shot. The biggest stumbling block is the lack of a unifying vision.

<comment><USER4> if we're talking about X the standard and not Xorg the implementation, shouldn't the former _be_ the grand unifying vision?

<comment><USER3> X the standard and Xorg the implementation have been one and the same thing for a while.

But X is just a component for the system, and what is lacking is a vision for the system as a whole. Actually, unifying visions have emerged for many facets of the system (as proven by the success on the server and embedded space), just not for the desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting read. The part where they started to break components in the code to see if people were still using them made me raise my eyebrows a little.

</comment><comment><USER6> From a comment: _3) Set pallette_ [sic] _(port 0x3C8 & 0x3C9)_

I grew quite nostalgic when I read that line. I have fond memories of tweaking the VGA palette back in my DOS days. Palette manipulation made it easy to do some kinds of special effects that would take a lot of GPU power today. There was actually an experimental version of tvtime that would wait on port 0x3DA for vertical sync (to work around the lack of sufficient vsync support in X). I tried to convince vektor to keep it in, because that's the best my TV had ever looked, anywhere, on any device.

</comment><comment><USER4> Odd that they don't mention the XFree86/Xorg drama from a few years back.

</comment><comment><USER7> The subscriber-only link seems in bad taste.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, I didn't even notice that! I'm not a subscriber myself, was linked to this page from Tim Bray's twitter feed (<http://twitter.com/timbray>). Regardless, it seems to be sanctioned by the site themselves, if their big advert at the top of the page is any indication.</comment></comment>