North Korea's Missile Launches Were Failing Too Often - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/insider/a-eureka-moment-for-two-times-reporters-north-koreas-missile-launches-were-failing-too-often.html <comment><USER2> Note: The linked article basically chronicles how the story took shape. This appears to be the actual story here:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea- mi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile- program-sabotage.html)

-

In retrospect, invading North Korea in 2003 would have been a far better choice than Iraq. NK didn't have nukes back then, we'd have avoided destabilizing the Middle East, and the defense industry would still get its blood money.

Not to mention North Korea continues to pose an actual WMD threat, they have concentration camps in dire need of liberation, their general populace is basically an ongoing humanitarian disaster, and they continue to pose an ever- increasing threat to global security.

All the US had to do was say NK was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda and had provided material support for 9/11 or something. War fever would've done the rest.

Granted, an estimated 100,000 civilian casualties from shelling in Seoul during the opening hours of the war is a hard pill to swallow. Today's threat however is the same deal plus nukes.

Then again, we had no qualms blowing away about 6500 Iraqi civilians with our surgical "shock and awe" campaign.[0] Turns out when you drop 2,000lb GBU-31s on civilian targets in the middle of a densely populated urban environment, it tends to kill a whole lot of people. Who knew! The fireworks look pretty on CNN though.[1][2]

Of course, enemy civilian lives tend to be far less valuable than allied civilian lives.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe#Casualties](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe#Casualties)

[1] [https://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/4.htm](https://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/4.htm)

[2] [https://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/10.htm](https://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/10.htm)

<comment><USER3> > In retrospect, invading North Korea in 2003 would have been a far better > choice than Iraq.

This sentence sounds very alien to me, am I alone? It suggests that USA had to invade _something_ , just for the sake of invasion.

Maybe the scars of the two WW are still a little too fresh where I live (France) for me to understand such a point of view. I'm trying hard to put an adjective on that mentality, but all that comes is _alien_ , as in _inhuman_.

<comment><USER2> > _It suggests that USA had to invade something, just for the sake of > invasion._

Correct, at least with the administration at the time. Iraq was invaded on the flimsiest of pretenses, and was done in a fashion to maximize profit.

For example: Critical infrastructure was targeted under the pretense of rapid dominance largely for the purpose of creating incredibly lucrative reconstruction contracts for that administration's criminal friends. It's not like we needed to take out power and water for months.

Not to mention lucrative private security contracts, privatized logistics for the military, munitions and weapon systems. Attempts at privatizing Iraq's oil that only served to further fuel the brutal insurgency. The list goes on.

> _Maybe the scars of the two WW are still a little too fresh where I live > (France) for me to understand such a point of view. I 'm trying hard to put > an adjective on that mentality, but all that comes is alien, as in inhuman._

It is inhuman, when the motivations are profit. On the other hand, there's people suffering in North Korean camps that endure Holocaust-like conditions right now, as we speak. Liberating those people would be a moral justification for war if I've ever heard one.

<comment><USER3> > On the other hand, there's people suffering in North Korean camps that > endure Holocaust-like conditions right now, as we speak. Liberating those > people would be a moral justification for war if I've ever heard one.

You said yourself that it would be at the expense of hundreds of thousands casualties, not even counting the consequences of possible nuclear war. That's a pretty bad argument for a _moral_ justification for an invasion, don't you think?

<comment><USER2> > _You said yourself that it would be at the expense of hundreds of thousands > casualties..._

It's probably a worst-case estimate. It really depends on the efficacy of allied counter-battery fire and air capabilities versus enemy artillery positions.

There's also room for creativity. Park a carrier battle group off the coast of Seoul and fake a serious reactor event during a period of easterly winds, with mandatory evacuation southward in the days prior to the invasion.

> _...not even counting the consequences of possible nuclear war._

If you're referring to North Korea: I'm not advocating invasion presently, merely lamenting that NK was not confronted prior to acquiring nuclear weapons. Invasion today only works with absolute assurance you can neutralize NK's nuclear capability, and that's extremely difficult if not impossible.

If you're referring to China and Russia: I'm pretty sure that to them, North Korea is squarely not worth risking nuclear confrontation with the United States over.

> _That 's a pretty bad argument for a moral justification for an invasion, > don't you think?_

No, I don't. There is an almost equal number of people languishing in hellish prison camps—some their entire lives—with a far greater amount in the general population living meager, miserable existences.

The very nature of it should transcend simple body count calculations in all but the most extreme cases of disparity. The civilized world has a moral obligation to wield its power in such a manner that doesn't allow such suffering to exist, even if doing so incurs a heavy cost.

Can you imagine if World War II had a different outcome, with Nazi Germany contained yet retaining its statehood? The term "Holocaust survivor" probably wouldn't be present in the modern lexicon. Such fiction isn't too dissimilar from the plight of North Korea's political prisoners today. By and large the civilized world doesn't give much of a shit about them.

When airmen go down behind enemy lines, the forces available to rescue them don't say "Well, we ran the numbers and it's not worth the potential cost of a rescue mission. So, we're just going to forget they exist instead." _Esprit de corps_ ensures a moral obligation to do the right thing regardless of the risk.

I'm simply advocating for the same ideal on a basic humanitarian level.

<comment><USER3> I get your points, some makes sense.

However I will stick to thinking that NK is a problem that must be handled by SK/China/Russia/Japan. If the humanitarian crisis is really that bad in NK, then it's the role of their neighbors to see that it ends.

If said neighbors don't act, then the role of the _rest of the world_ is to apply sufficient pressure on them.

USA is not the _de facto_ leader of opinion you seem to be suggesting that it is (no offense intended, I just try to state my mind). It has the military/economical power, yes, but as a country it stands as equal to others. It has no legitimate mandate to solve the NK humanitarian crisis.

If you really want USA to be a benevolent dictator, then you should wish for USA to take on the third world problem (give an end to extreme poverty and uncontrolled population growth), or tackle the energy equation (seek unlimited/low-cost/co2-neutral sources).

That would be applauded and praised (but this is clearly not the path chosen right now...).

USA going into NK (deterrent/mass-destruction weapons or not) would simply repeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Irak: a even more divided world where more and more humanitarian crisis will emerge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So Russia and China may now worry that we'll make a first strike because we could disable their counterattack. And we have to worry about them doing it to us. This was the whole reason the US & Russia tried to restrict building anti- missile defense systems in treaties - because it increased the chance someone might think a first strike could work. If true, this is bad.

<comment><USER5> The US and Russia have a special relationship because we've been to the brink and backed away respectfully. I hope that experience continues to instill mutual trust that we won't annihalate each other.

No such trust exists with DPRK or Iran, which makes them dangerous.

China doesn't seem particularly worried about nuclear attack, otherwise they would be more cooperative when it comes to DPRK.

Disclaimer: I am not even close to an expert on this subject and my opinion is worth what you paid for it.

<comment><USER6> China is the main supporter of the DPRK regime. It acts as a buffer against the US sphere of influence in the region.

<comment><USER7> One possibility of what would happen if there were a war/conflict would be China would take over NK and create a buffer Chinese state, possibly another country in the Two System, One Country philosophy. China is becoming increasingly intolerant of DPRK's actions, as evident by their stopping importing of coal due to the killing of Kim Jong-nam (which will hurt DPRK's economy as it is a large part of their exports). My guess is that the buffer country would be a compromise, since SK doesn't want China directly at their door and vice versa, but SK wouldn't be able to really support NK's terrible economic situation as their economy is too small, and the US wouldn't want China's influence in the region to too much grow. I could see another part of that compromise would be to allow NK citizens to go to SK to be with family, be reeducated, etc, as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article that this discusses appears to be [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea- mi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile- program-sabotage.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> If we look past the North Korean missile program, has the U.S. opened Pandora's box by using malware to affect another country's missile launch?

We used to talk about Stuxnet infecting Iran's underground nuclear computer systems which destabilized their centrifuges, but now we're talking about malware affecting the "left of launch" of a missile. If this is the future of stopping a potential nuclear attack from another country then is everything that used to be stable about the nuclear order now in disarray due to the "cyber age"? During the Cold War, The U.S. and the USSR knew where each other's missile were located and generally shied away from operations within the other's command and control systems for the most part.

Are we not inviting other major powers to play around in our nuclear systems? It's one thing to try and stop the North Koreans from launching a missile at California, but if the Chinese, the Russians, and the U.S. are inside each other's command and control centers, does this not undermine the mutually assured destruction doctrine? It could help make a country be so sure of its capabilities that it would be willing take a bet and never suffer any proportional retaliation.

<comment><USER10> > Are we not inviting other major powers to play around in our nuclear > systems?

Not really. We're just acknowledging the fact that they can and will.

I don't believe the US has the most advanced "cyberwarfare" military apparatus at this time... but that's another topic.

<comment><USER11> Who do you believe to have a more advanced cyberwarfare military apparatus?

<comment><USER12> Probably the one who manufactures most of the computing and telecom equipment in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This might make sense if North Korea hasn't mastered onboard inertial guidance yet. Early US ICBMs, the Atlas, and (probably) the Titan, were radio guided from the ground. The Minuteman and Polaris were and are completely self- contained after launch. That took a lot of development, much of it done at MIT's Draper Labs.

Today, you can buy fiber optic gyros on Alibaba. The accuracy might not be good enough for hitting a silo, but it should easily keep a rocket roughly on course. It's surprising that N. Korea doesn't have reliable full onboard guidance by now.

<comment><USER14> NYT's original scoop hints that the missiles or the systems controlling them were compromised by malware similar to Stuxnet, which worked by tampering with parameters used to control industrial hardware. That kind of attack could work regardless of the accuracy of NK's guidance systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why cannot the west deescalate its relationship to North Korea? Sure it is fun to read about "cyberhacking" and secret missions but would diplomacy and trade not be the more constructive path?

North Korea must have a fundamental interest in setting on the same path of growth as all its Asian neighbours; something that has happened without changing the political regime of these countries. And we in the west would clearly benifit from that and have already seen the rise of Japan, South Korea and China without military conflict.

I know the explanation is that they are "crazy" and "irrational". But those are traits of individual persons; I find it hard to believe that can apply to a whole country.

<comment><USER16> You make it sound like we're the source of antagonism to the North. We're still technically at war and last I checked we're not the ones firing missiles and gloating about "setting Seoul or Los Angeles in flames.

The thing about economically aiding dictatorships is that there's no guarantee you're actually helping the non-'crazy' innocent folks - the dictator is in control so you might just be enriching him and lengthening the people's suffering.

<comment><USER17> That's nonsense, just as much nonsense as saying that economic sanctions against a dictatorship hurt that dictator more than it hurts the people there.

Of course it doesn't.

The guarantee is that the dictator will not eat one truffle less and that the people _will_ suffer more.

The best way to attack a dictatorship is to fund a middle class with something to lose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it wise for reporters that discover a covert program to disrupt North Korean missile launches to disclose the information? Seems like they want the credit for breaking a significant story more than they care about the delicate and dangerous situation with a rogue country that has nuclear weapons. I suggest they STFU.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, North Korea was just waiting for the NYT reporters to give them up-to- date intel on why their launches were failing. That's really the only reporting Kim Jong Un trusts, so I hear.

<comment><USER20> On a less sarcastic note, the fact that Western governments have such a difficult time gathering credible intelligence in North Korea is evidence that the North Koreans have a robust intelligence apparatus.

What the whole Abdul Khan episode brought to light some years back was how Western agencies underestimated the technological and political skill and motivation of many so-called "third world" countries. Arguably that blind spot was caused by the deep-seated racism and cultural elitism of Western countries. There were plenty of opportunities to discover the illicit trade; we just weren't convinced they were capable of it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Our leaders never took it seriously because their expectations were that these countries were still too backwards.

Yet another example of why we really need to face prejudice head on. We simply can't accurately assess the state of things if we're blinded by so many poor assumptions, particularly the ones girded by racist attitudes.

If American culture continues casting Asians as uncreative copycats; Muslims as radical fundamentalists; Africans as irredeemably corrupt; and South Americans as hopelessly socialist; then we're in for decades of more wild and very much unwelcome surprise.

<comment><USER21> That's a lot of assumptions. You could say that the lack of another 9/11 type attack in recent history and the high failure rate of these missiles shows that the US Intelligence community has already overcome this prejudice.

<comment><USER20> Also, I think it was only in the past few years that everybody finally accepted that North Korea has the bomb. As late as, what, 2013, we were still half-way convinced they were blowing up boxes of high-explosives to fool us. Even in 2016 some outlets were still hedging.

Now, maybe the intelligence community came around much earlier. But certainly Congress was still having trouble coming to terms with the reality. Why? Because it was just so difficult to believe (and still difficult to believe) that such a repressive society could achieve such a feat.

It is, admittedly, difficult to believe for me. But I understand part of that difficulty is because Westerner's believe that such feats aren't possible without a culture of individualism that unleashes individual initiative. Maybe such a culture is superior. But it clearly isn't necessary. And that should make us question much about what we think other countries are capable of, and when they'll be capable of it.

<comment><USER22> _As late as, what, 2013, we were still half-way convinced they were blowing up boxes of high-explosives to fool us_

I think that's an exaggeration. I'd note this 2013 NYTimes article[1], which notes that all US intelligence agencies agreed that North Korea tested a bomb in 2006, but were unable to come to a consensus view as to if they were capable of miniaturizing it enough to put on a missile:

 _an assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that it has "moderate confidence" that North Korea has the ability to shrink a nuclear weapon and fit it into a missile warhead surfaced at a Congressional hearing. That conclusion was disputed by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who issued a statement later in the day saying that it did not reflect "the consensus" of the nation's intelligence community._

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/world/asia/contrasting- vie...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/world/asia/contrasting-views-on- north-korea-underscore-sensitivities-and-lack-of-evidence.html?_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Every year (I think they were cancelled once or twice) the US and South Korea hold military exercises. Around that same time North Korea does something to flex their muscles.

In writing the comment I just looked up when the last US-South Korean military exercise. I was surprised to learn it started March 1st. [http://www.dw.com/en/us-south-korea-launch-large-scale- milit...](http://www.dw.com/en/us-south-korea-launch-large-scale-military- exercises/a-37757202)

</comment><comment><USER24> This was covered on today's edition of the NYT podcast, The Daily, too. I highly recommend listening to it. It's my one 'must-listen' podcast. It's hosted by the guy who did the Times election podcast, _The Runup_ , but offers far better production value. Give it a whirl: [https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-daily](https://www.nytimes.com/column/the- daily)

</comment><comment><USER25> speculation as to why the rocket test have been failing? 88% failure rate is pretty dramatic.

<comment><USER26> Apparently, the prevailing theory is a program to cyber-sabotage the launch systems[0].

[0]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea- mi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile- program-sabotage.html)

<comment><USER27> I wonder if they could go the next step and make it fall back on Mr Kim's compound --then he'd suspect one of two things, his own people were trying to get him or-- as adversary had critically compromised his systems. Both scenarios would be equally devastating for his goals.

Scuttling them at sea is nice and all --having them go up and straight back down would present the regime with quite a problem.

<comment><USER28> That would be an interesting solution to the North Korean problem if the missile was armed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hope someone has said this: "Perhaps it is a biased sample? Defective missiles are being sent to the "known" sites to make you underestimate their capabilities."

<comment><USER30> This makes no sense if you want the missiles to work as a deterrent. I'm quite sure North Korea isn't actually planning on going to war (and winning it); they just want to give the impression that going to war would be too costly for their enemies. Giving the impression that their missiles don't work is counter-productive in this context.

<comment><USER31> "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you _keep_ it a _secret_! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Someone forgot to task Detachment 2702.

<comment><USER33> Best Comment ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is there an ideal number of times for North Korea's missiles to work?

<comment><USER35> I would think zero is a number we could live with.</comment></comment>


Stylish Briefcase BBQ Turns Meetings Into a Cookout - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5918962/stylish-briefcase-bbq-turns-meetings-into-a-cookout

<comment><USER2> A perfect gift for your favorite dad as it's "Father's Day" here in the U.S. Hint, hint. Did you hear me kids? Are you listening?

Oops ... the chance of my kids finding HN is pretty remote! I'd better go post this on Youtube.</comment>


Unit Testing Best Practices in AngularJS | via codeship - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codeship.io/2013/10/31/unit-testing-best-practices-in-angularjs.html <comment><USER2> Pretty good, thanks for sharing. I'm learning angular and this was really useful to me.

One comment I have is I don't agree with some of the advice about integration testing. Integration testing shouldn't mock anything (except maybe truly external 3rd party stuff like analytics). If your app is interacting with your own internal services, for example to do user authentication, you should interact with a real instance of that service, not a mocked one. This way you don't run into the situation where the interaction between the angular code and the authentication service is broken, but your tests think everything is fine.

I used to unit test extensively, and I still do, but I now prefer integration tests as my primary form of testing. It's more important to me to know that major features that span across modules/service layers are working. Most of the time the low level testing isn't as necessary if I know that things are working at the higher level.

I think mocking in integration tests is a cop out. First, it's by definition not an integration test (but I hate those conversations or blog posts where people haggle over the definitions of "unit test", "acceptance test", "integration test", "smoke test", etc). Second, you should take the time to set up an actual environment that mirrors production as closely as possible, and run integration tests in that environment. This means running integration tests against services deployed to real servers that hit real databases.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow ! Really a good one. One problem I faced was missing a good test reporter for AngularJS unit tests.</comment>


Rand Paul Bill Would Curb NSA on Phone Records - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/rand-paul-bill-would-curb-nsa-on-phone-records/

<comment><AUTHOR> Text of the proposed law:

 _" The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States Government to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause."_

[http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/documents/EAS13699.pdf](http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/documents/EAS13699.pdf)

("Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013")

<comment><USER2> Is that the entire bill?

Seems extremely narrow-scoped and with no terms defined. IIRC, the ongoing spying is not even warrantless - they're operating under a broad-scope warrant issued by FISC, so this bill would do absolutely nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the entire rulemaking part.

It's true the Verizon spying had a secret-court FISA warrant, but was that warrant required to have "probable cause"?

<comment><USER3> I believe the answer might actually be yes to that as well. Remember the NSA treats analysis (search) of information as different from collection of information.

Doesn't matter though, the proposed law talks about search of _American_ phone records which the NSA is already forbidden (even with PRISM) from looking at.

In other words the new content of this law would be exactly zero, if that's all it purports to add.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This bill would do absolutely nothing at all legally. Here is the operative part of the bill:

       The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution shall not
       be construed to allow any agency of the United States
       Government to search the phone records of Americans
       without a warrant based on probable cause.

The 4th is part of the Constitution. Congress cannot change its meaning with a mere bill. Changing the meaning requires a Constitutional amendment. So, no effect from Paul's bill as far as that goes.

The courts interpret the Constitution, and due to separation of powers, Congress can't tell the courts how to interpret it. So, no effect from Paul's bill here, either. Separation of powers also prevents Paul's bill from having any effect on the executive branch.

To make this sort of thing work, I think you'd have to go to the laws that actually created or authorized the agencies whose behavior you want to change, and amend those laws.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't you straighforwardly strike the "Fourth Amendment... construed" part and leave the core "no agency of the US government... [shall]"? Because that's be solidly in the purview of Congress. And my flimsy understanding of law is that, if SCOTUS were to look at this, they would do something like what I said -- respecting the _intent_ of the legislature as closely as possible -- rather than throwing out the whole thing.

I think this bill isn't expected to pass anyway, so it makes sense if it's been optimized for rhetorical, not legal, power.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 'waterphone' \-- your comment history appears benign and helpful, I think you deserve to know you've been hellbanned. The automated filter on HN will hide your comments from most users. It is a waste of your time to comment if this is not fixed.

(reply to invisible comment): You're welcome!

<comment><USER5> Thanks. I noticed, and it's been happening off and on, but prior to today, comments I was making were eventually being unhidden after a few hours. Not so today, it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those of you missing the point, this "bill" is a bit tongue-in-cheek. He's simply saying "Hey everyone! read the f$%^ing Constitution!"

<comment><USER7> He's pandering to a simplistic interpretation of the Constitution. Back in 1979, the Supreme Court explained why searching phone records did not require a warrant or constitute a search under the 4th amendment.

<comment><USER8> Simplistic, or honest? And do you mean "explained", or "rationalized"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nothing will be curbing, you all think you have some level of control over this process but you don't.

Stop trusting people who don't have motivation not to mess with your life.

What happens to the people behind these debacles? Nothing, absolutely nothing; in addition, having them fired would just open up the position to more people who would make the same actions.

A state will always seek to expand, and you will always go lax and let them, it's best to just forego the whole pot of pain to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER10> Like father, like son. Don't expect Rand to actually get legislation passed.

<comment><USER11> I think that's more an indictment of the status quo than an indictment of their ineffectiveness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Funny how stuff like this only starts getting action from politicians once it's politically expidiant to do so.

<comment><USER13> That's what's significant about these recent disclosures and subsequent wave of interest. Informed people may not have found them surprising, but to say "what's the big deal?" is a mistake. The big deal is the state change in the political discourse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Statements from the President assert:

      "What you've got is two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been
      repeatedly authorized by Congress. Bipartisan majorities have approved them. Congress
      is continually briefed on how these are conducted ... Congress has been briefed 13
      times on the programs since 2009."

So why haven't _any_ members of Congress spoken up about this program? Rand and Ron, where were you?

<comment><AUTHOR> _So why haven 't any members of Congress spoken up about this program? Rand and Ron, where were you?_

Some _did_ speak up, pretty loudly. Did you read this story (Wyden & Udall) when it came it out in 2012? I did.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/us/politics/democratic- sen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/us/politics/democratic-senators- warn-about-use-of-patriot-act.html)

Here's follow-ups from this week, linking their warnings to the current stories:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/politics/senators- wyden...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/politics/senators-wyden-and- udall-warned-about-surveillance.html)

[http://www.denverpost.com/politics/ci_23406958/sen-mark- udal...](http://www.denverpost.com/politics/ci_23406958/sen-mark-udalls- warnings-federal-domestic-spying-have)

Rand and Ron? I'm reasonably confident they've been against this from the start (it's part of their core ideology), but Rand Paul was never on the secret Senate committee that was allowed to know about this, nor Ron on its House counterpart:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Select_Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Select_Committee_on_Intelligence#Members.2C_113th_Congress)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Permanent_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Permanent_Select_Committee_on_Intelligence#Members)

Wyden and Udall were (on the Senate side), and they did inform the public. Sort of. The public doesn't really care that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Fourth Amendment Restoration Act,"

Congrats to Paul for titling a bill with the name of what it actually does, instead of these "Orphan and sick elderly relief act"s that end up doing 73 other things completely unrelated to orphans or the elderly.

Also congrats for such a small bill.

Both of these factors together lead me to believe that this is just grandstanding, and the bill has no chance of succeeding. But still, here's hoping other Congresspeople follow his lead and start making all bills like this: single issue, clear, readable legislation that the public can openly and clearly debate.

</comment><comment><USER16> Until they ignore it, just like they ignored the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Or, in a secret legal opinion, construe "phone records" to not include mere metadata about whom called whom from where for how long.

You can't get around the need to identify the people attempting to circumvent the very explicit restrictions placed upon them and exclude them from the levers of power.

<comment><USER17> They didn't ignore FISA. FISA (as extended after 9/11) is the basis for a lot of the surveillance which is done today.

<comment><USER16> "this program operated without the judicial oversight mandated by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act"

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I applaud the attempt, but after reading the text of the bill, will this do anything? They obtained a court order authorizing this. Wouldn't it be better to make it illegal to issue broad warrants for large numbers of people and instead require one warrant per person?

</comment><comment><USER18> Rand Paul, killing it again.

</comment><comment><USER19> Would it even? Whose to say it would be followed?</comment>


Show HN: Dependency CI – Continuous testing for your dependencies - <AUTHOR> https://dependencyci.com <comment><USER3> This is a very interesting service, thank you!

May I ask you for some little thing that might change the (development) world? Would you _please_ like to introduce a folder, where people might put their dependency.yml file - this is an effort to finally stop the spreading cancer of "put one more config file into the project root".

I would like to suggest to call that folder simply "config" \- all the projects and tools out there should have no problem with that. Optionally there could be _one_ top level config file called "config.rc" \- this file points to the actual config dir if it is not "config".

It would be verrry nice if one service just starts with that and hopefully all the others will follow and it will become a defacto standard. The pollution of the top level project directories really must stop.

Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, I'll definitely the ability to move your dependencyci.yml file into a .github folder like the issue and pull request templates: [https://github.com/blog/2111-issue-and-pull-request- template...](https://github.com/blog/2111-issue-and-pull-request-templates)

<comment><USER4> How about .meta? Hopefully we can encourage github to support this, too. Maybe .meta/github/ could be a thing, too.

<comment><USER3> In the config.rc file you could call that folder however you want.

I personally do not like ".meta", because it is not clear what kind of information it may contain. "Meta" might be anything, documentation, description, website, design papers, everything is meta. It is a bit like using "Information" as a menu entry for a website.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like we should probably all get together and write a draft RFC for this. Choosing a good directory to toss everything into would be grand.

I'd prefer .well-known since there's already an RFC for it, but maybe .dev- extra would be more appropriate?

<comment><USER6> Do you really want to type either of those prefixes thousands of times? Brevity and lack of special chars in the name would be nice to have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on Dependency CI along with [https://libraries.io](https://libraries.io), the service that powers it, in my spare time for the past few months, it's great to finally get it out into the real world.

Dependency CI works like Travis CI but for the dependencies of your application, checking them for license and status issues every time you push to GitHub.

I've written a up a post on medium with more details: [https://medium.com/@teabass/introducing-dependency- ci-e859fa...](https://medium.com/@teabass/introducing-dependency- ci-e859fa138eb6)

It's 100% free for open source projects and there's a 14 day free trial for checking private github repositories too.

<comment><USER7> Hey, Nimble creator here. Just wanted to ask, are there any reasons why it's not currently supported on Dependency CI? (apart from just lack of time on your side :))

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Dom, it's mostly because I've not written a parser for the .nimble manifest file, if you feel like adding it to [https://github.com/librariesio/bibliothecary](https://github.com/librariesio/bibliothecary) then it will be easy to add support for it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've known Andrew for a few years and what I love about this is how it reflects him as person: someone who loves bringing people together. Dependency CI seems to me to be a manifestation of that. Hopefully one effect of Dependency CI, if (when) it becomes popular is that it raises the bar for the stability of projects that other people depend on. We're all in this together. Keep up the great and inspiring work Andrew!

</comment><comment><USER9> Similar to Greenkeeper or requires.io, but with a larger range of languages supported. Very interesting.

As a side note, I recommend creating a separate github account when granting permission to this kind of 3rd party. Don't grant them full read/write on your repos, create an account that's temporarily admin, then make that account read only.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Debian project's Continuous Integration project [1] re-tests all dependent objects whenever a dependency within the Debian archive changes. This way, changes that might negatively affect dependents can be caught early.

This is immensely useful, especially to the maintainers of libraries.

In order for them to be tested, dependent objects have to declare their testability using the autopkgtest [2] interface.

[1] [https://ci.debian.net/](https://ci.debian.net/)

[2] [https://people.debian.org/~mpitt/autopkgtest/README.package-...](https://people.debian.org/~mpitt/autopkgtest/README.package- tests.html)

<comment><USER11> I was hoping that this would be a similar service, but it doesn't appear to be.

<comment><USER10> It appears to me that Dependency CI is focused on dependency metadata, focusing on the state/version/license/etc the dependency declares.

Debian's CI focuses on actual run-time testing, specifically what it calls "as-installed" testing (as opposed to build-time testing). You don't test a specific build result, but whatever is installed in $PATH, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and so on.

Because the tested objects also use the as-installed dependencies -- libraries, modules, etc. -- whenever one of the dependencies changes, the dependents can automatically be re-tested for compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are plenty of other services in this space (see below for a couple). I hadn't heard of Dependency CI and what immediately impresses me is the number of different package managers supported.

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

[https://www.versioneye.com/](https://www.versioneye.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> OP- Do you have a roadmap to supporting this outside of GitHub? I think the people that benefit most from it, due to corporate policies and outdated deps, are the people least likely to be using GitHub!

Everyone else - Is this a general problem with people locking these (very cool) tools to GitHub? Is there a generalised solution to the problem of source control integration?

<comment><USER14> its bad decision making. but to be fair dependency ci will add gitlab and bitbucket in the future. it still sucks that awesome tools like this are github first, git is a central tool and tools arround git should not depend on any hoster at all - <USER2>

<comment><USER15> What alternative decision are you imagining? A service like this can't depend on Git alone. It needs to know when the repo is updated (e.g. GitHub's webhooks) and has to publish its results somewhere (e.g. GitHub's commit statuses). So it only really works with hosted repos.

Since each hosting service has a different API, each integration needs to be built individually. And it makes sense to integrate with GitHub first because it's the most popular repo host.

<comment><USER13> It's the most popular repo host on HN for sure, but think about all the private repos behind corporate firewalls etc!

<comment><USER16> Some of which are Github Enterprise :p

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For JavaScript and Python developers, there is a newish service called Doppins (from Norway!) that I've really been enjoying for my open source projects: [https://doppins.com/](https://doppins.com/)

No conf required other than your normal requirements.txt, sends you a PR whenever there are new versions available. Cracking stuff.

</comment><comment><USER18> Having gotten to know Andrew a bit over the last few months, I can wholeheartedly say that he cares a lot about the open source community. DependencyCI and Libraries.io are labours of love and craftsmanship!

</comment><comment><USER19> Great work on this, looks very useful. Does it only work with GitHub? Would love to have this for my private GitLab instance

<comment><USER20> Yep. Same for Bitbucket. Or just support all git repos that are accessible via the public internet.

Github's pricing model means that lots of people can't use it for private repos - 'per repo' pricing isn't fun if you prefer lots of small repos.

<comment><USER21> Github changed their pricing model to per user pricing with unlimited private repos:

[https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great idea! My company requires external libraries licenses to be revieved every half a year and it usually takes a couple of days to do so. Your project could be a real time-saver. Unfortunately the integration with Maven does not seem to work in most cases, if it did I would already have sent the link to our CTO.

<comment><USER23> You could use the VersionEye Maven Plugin for that: [https://github.com/versioneye/versioneye_maven_plugin](https://github.com/versioneye/versioneye_maven_plugin). It checks your dependencies against a license whitelist on the VersionEye server and if there is a violation it breaks your build on your CI server. That way you can enforce a license policy continuously. It's much better than just checking licenses once a year ;-)

I'm working on VersionEye since a couple years, it's a similar project and I open sourced it last week: [https://blog.versioneye.com/2016/06/28/versioneye- goes-open-...](https://blog.versioneye.com/2016/06/28/versioneye-goes-open- source/). I'm following Andrews activities since a while and like what he did with libraries.io. Great job! As both projects have a big overlap and are open source now I'm open for collaboration :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't this the actually the wrong solution? I thought I was told I should be pulling my dependencies into my own cloned repos. Then my project uses my clones. When I want an update I test it out, update the cloned repo and update the project to use the latest tag/hash of my cloned repo. Isn't that what pretty much all the top projects do?

This way everything is under my control. What good is it if I'm told my dependencies has been deleted? And then I what? Copy my old dep from my dev machine to a cloned repo and point to that? Isn't that the same step as above?

Or maybe I just don't get it.

<comment><USER25> You're not wrong, but you can use that technique and benefit from Dependency CI too.

Typically, you can define your dependencies in a file specific to a certain package manager. NPM uses `package.json`, RubyGems uses `Gemfile`, etc.

It is a reasonable practice to "vendor in" your dependencies, as you suggest. But given the declaration of your dependencies in some manifest file, Dependency CI can give you valuable insights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cool concept! Is the spec for the dependency.yml file open source? Would be cool to see something like it become a standard: it's a concern for the project owner, but also for the project clients/users.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's in the works, very little documentation at the moment: [https://github.com/dependencyci/dotyaml](https://github.com/dependencyci/dotyaml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What would be really interesting is a service that would tell me the build status and code coverage metrics for each version of a dependency I use in my project (and each dependency they use their projects and so on).

Even more interesting would be something that would attempt to force code coverage analysis on projects that use a standard testing framework, have a certain amount of tests present, but don't have CC configured in their project.

At first I was thinking that is what this service did but it doesn't appear to be the case.

</comment><comment><USER28> There's also a somewhat similar service a friend and myself evaluated a couple of months ago, we had similar ideas but we eventually let go of our prototype because of "fear" of said competition ...

DepdendencyCI already did better than us in that regard and it seems like they are doing an an all-around great job (I especially like the multi language support)! :)

 _Hattip_ to the team!

</comment><comment><USER29> I added my project and the service claims it has 0 dependencies (Listed in the build.gradle file).

Bug?

[https://dependencyci.com/github/RichTeaLang/RichTea](https://dependencyci.com/github/RichTeaLang/RichTea)

<comment><AUTHOR> Will investigate that for you shortly, I've only just added support for gradle, might be skipping some sections of file

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> For python developers - why does not any CI out there support Conda - out of the box.. :(

</comment><comment><USER31> Very interesting, but I can't seem to sign up for the trial to use on private repositories.

</comment><comment><USER32> Great idea! Would love also MVP version of that which help you pick better dependencies.

<comment><USER33> Thats the authors other project libraries.io :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This would be super useful for making sure left-pad is still functioning.

</comment><comment> Pirate-of-SV Would be cool if it could support Puppet modules.

</comment><comment><USER35> Very proud of Andrew's tenacity and ability to offer a simple solution to a problem that strengthens the open source community rather than ruminating and/or grand standing about it.</comment>


Creative's Super X-Fi headphone AMP goes on sale in US - <AUTHOR> https://us.sxfi.com/products/sxfi-amp/ <comment><USER2> Just get a Schiit Magni and don't bother with creative shit.</comment>


Do not run this script, ever - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Do-not-run-this-script,-ever!.aspx

<comment><USER2> I don't generally keep scripts like that around where people can run them and if I must I change #!/bin/ksh to something else like #!/bin/cat.

If I actually had to worry about working with someone like the guy in the article, I'd go further and create my own "shell" that would pretend to run the commands but would otherwise syslog/page me whenever someone actually ran it.

<comment><USER3> We actually encrypted the code of dangerous tools (we wrote in Perl back then) like this one with a password so the customers (telecoms) tech people, who were mostly clueless, wouldn't be able to play around with our tools.

The program was just a tiny bit of code describing the tool, prompting for a password, tried to decrypt the code of the original program using the password and evaled the code.

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea. You would think the database user/password and a few grant/revoke statements would be sufficient to prevent issues like the one in the article.

<comment><USER3> The problem was the clients support staff had root access on all the machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the author really meant "do not ever run this script", he should have deleted it. Instead, he added a comment. When comments disagree with code, code wins. Rather than taking responsibility and learning this, he blames the stupidity of a newbie.

<comment><USER5> It's useful to have those scripts around, you might want to do another installation somewhere or it might just be useful to see how the tables are meant to be if they get screwed up.

<comment><USER4> Well, sure. But then he didn't really mean what the comment said, which was "DO NOT EVER RUN THIS SCRIPT". There are any number of strategies he could have used to prevent what happened. The one he chose was to add an inaccurate comment to code and assume that every subsequent programmer would read it, understand its meaning, and do what it said. That's not just one fundamental mistake but several.

<comment><USER6> No. It was not just comments. Did you read the line that says 'exit 1'?

<comment><USER4> Fair enough. He also disabled run permissions on the script. But my point isn't really about "just comments", it's that good programmers take responsibility for failures that arise from their work. In this case, printing "DO NOT EVER RUN THIS SCRIPT" and exiting without doing anything led to misunderstanding and problems in the hands of a curious and inexperienced successor. Here the author had a choice to make. He could look at how his rather hokey strategy contributed to the failure or he could hype up the stupidity of the other guy.

<comment><USER6> Guess what's funnier?

The back-ups were his saving grace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's why there are development environments and production environments.

</comment><comment><USER8> <post>

 __* THIS IS MY POST __*

 __* DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT OR YOU'LL DIE!!! __*

exit 1

(you'll die anyway)

</post></comment>


Dynamic Periodic Table (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://ptable.com <comment><USER3> I'm currently rebuilding this from the ground up mostly to replace my handmade animations with CSS transitions. Both the old and new were built with no JS frameworks or libraries and the one you're looking at does well in IE6, to give you an idea of how long ago it was refreshed.

<comment><USER4> There are a couple of very strange usability problems with the overlay, it seems to fade out while dragging the edges and clicking on the things inside the iframe leave you floating in a wikipedia page that you can't go back to the original content from easily. Also dragging the overlay in circle maximises it which was a surprise!

Good luck redoing this in CSS!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this resource for learning about the elements, esp. the drill-down, which makes it fast to go back-and-forth. Also the "Wide" view is cool - <USER2> don't remember how long it took me initially to realize that the lanthanide / actinide rows actually belong in the middle of the other ones. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> This one is much prettier and no ads: [http://www.rsc.org/periodic- table](http://www.rsc.org/periodic-table)

<comment><USER7> It is also much less useful, requiring you to hover over an element to get any information, including the name of the element.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just recently discovered the Table of Nuclides [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides)

</comment><comment><USER9> I prefer this more regular style of presenting the periodic table:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Extended_periodic_tab...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Extended_periodic_table_\(by_Fricke,_32_columns,_compact\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Periodic_table_blocks_spd...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Periodic_table_blocks_spdf_\(32_column\).svg)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Periodic_table_(metals%E2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Periodic_table_\(metals%E2%80%93metalloids%E2%80%93nonmetals,_32_columns\).png)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:32-column_periodic_table-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:32-column_periodic_table-a.png)

This one is even more different:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Periodic_table_(left_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Periodic_table_\(left_step\))

<comment><USER3> The first link is available by clicking Wide in the top right on Ptable. The second is available by clicking the Orbitals tab on Ptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I saw this first back in school in 2013 and was instantly blown away. It was like the perodic table came to life. Perhaps this is one of the influences that eventually led me to become a software dev

<comment><USER11> and not a chemist? :)

<comment><USER10> I was awestruck by the tool web "app" and not the stuff that it covered. I am just as impressed today as I was years ago by looking at the different interactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> master-litty I took a chemistry class back in 2012 or 2013 and used this a lot :) It's been around for longer than 2017, as the title may imply.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice resource, I personally found it very handy during Gen Chem (especially the orbital listings for each element)!

</comment><comment><USER13> Very nice. This is how a cheat sheet, er, reference should be.

</comment><comment><USER14> Good old useful page with a single banner ad. Takes me back.

<comment><USER3> Actually a point of pride for me that I've never attempted to put more than a single ad, never allowed pop-unders, fly-outs, etc., and don't bother or block ad-blockers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using it for over a year. Great resource.</comment>


Stitch Fix is laying off 1,400 in California, 18% of workforce - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/stitch-fix-is-laying-off-1400-in-california-18percent-of-workforce.html <comment><USER2> Austin, TX (where I currently live) and Minneapolis (where I have lived in the past) are not cheap places to live. Lower COL than SF, sure, but hardly inexpensive.</comment>


College is broken - <AUTHOR> http://rianjs.net/

<comment><USER2> Here's the money shot:

       1. Have classes year 'round

       2. Let students test out of any class in the curriculum

       3. Get rid of mandatory, off-topic courses

       4. Get rid of unnecessary computer labs

       5. Offer all courses that can be reasonably be offered online, online

       6. Make co-op mandatory, and based on ability as measured by progress through the program (see #2)

       7. Reward teaching excellence rather than research excellence

<comment><USER3> In other words, take the world's best higher education system, flawed though it may be, and smash it.

No thanks.

To take the above points:

1\. Down time is useful for, oh, things like co-ops.... It's also part of the research university way of doing things, which 7 wants to abolish.

2\. Some places like MIT let you test out of many/most classes; if appropriate, you can take the final and that counts, whatever the result.

3\. "Mandatory, off-topic courses" are all part of the ideal of a liberal vs. vocational education. While I feel that's been mostly perverted into modern liberal/radical indoctrination and note that outside of MIT and Caltech the reverse doesn't hold (as of the late '80s the math "requirement" at Harvard was proving you could do algebra), I strongly believe there's value to it and would prefer reform to abolishing the concept if that looks at all practical.

4\. From my science, CS, programming and sysadmin background I can't comment on this one.

5\. Offline is an increasingly interesting option, but I think we're a _long_ way from it being a substitute for good versions of the real thing (a involved student body, people with a clue doing the teaching, etc.; plus there's the issue that US broadband is a less than ideal platform to attempt this from).

6\. Co-op is again vocational in focus, and one wonders if the author is aware that taking all this too far will be eating our seed corn by not producing the next generation of academics.

7\. In my and my friends experience, a real world class researcher who's also serious about undergraduate education (if not always entirely competent in doing it) is vastly superior to mid-tier school professor who's research is nothing to write home about and who envies his betters. At the "bottom", the community colleges and their one step about 4 year equivalents where the professors are their to teach with no pretenses about doing serious research can provide some truly _excellent_ education in well established areas.

But with the following caveats:

In the case of those needing post-graduate education (e.g. for those fields where a Ph.D. is the minimal level of education), the single most important thing is that those doing the graduate school admissions to know who's recommending a student.

In new fields like CS where we don't agree on which end is up, the results are likely to be very mediocre. E.g. do you want to go to a Javaschool or one which will teach you the foundations that will allow you to learn the languages and paradigms de jour as needed?

Bottom line: fix what's broken rather breaking everything and starting from scratch. There's going to serious leverage here as the US higher education bubble starts popping and I suggest ruthless use of that.

<comment><AUTHOR> "1. Down time is useful for, oh, things like co-ops.... It's also part of the research university way of doing things, which 7 wants to abolish."

Most students have no interest in doing research. Most students have no interest in grad school, aside from paying the idea lip service. Higher education needs to reflect this reality. (And of course accomodate those that who _are_ legitimately interested in these things. It's not really a one or the other thing.)

I'm also not proposing "no vacation". You could easily have 4 week breaks between each of the trimesters, for example. I think having no breaks at all would be a disaster.

"2. Some places like MIT let you test out of many/most classes; if appropriate, you can take the final and that counts, whatever the result."

Most students don't go to MIT, and most schools don't allow students to test out of anything except intro classes, and even that's only through the AP program, which is not available in all high schools. Choosing a university that educates maybe 1/10 of 1% of college students and holding it up as though this is readily available to everyone else isn't terribly useful. And it doesn't indicate that the majority of the system is broken.

"3. "Mandatory, off-topic courses" are all part of the ideal of a liberal vs. vocational education. While I feel that's been mostly perverted into modern liberal/radical indoctrination and note that outside of MIT and Caltech the reverse doesn't hold (as of the late '80s the math "requirement" at Harvard was proving you could do algebra), I strongly believe there's value to it and would prefer reform to abolishing the concept if that looks at all practical."

You lost me at "liberal/radical indoctrination".

Anyway, the point was that taking classes doesn't make you well-rounded, because those that have a hunger for knowledge will pick it up anyway, and those that don't, won't. In short, it's a waste of time for both parties.

"5. Offline is an increasingly interesting option, but I think we're a long way from it being a substitute for good versions of the real thing (a involved student body, people with a clue doing the teaching, etc.; plus there's the issue that US broadband is a less than ideal platform to attempt this from)."

US broadband (or lack thereof) is largely a red herring. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be good enough. And it is, for most of the population. There are rural areas that are underserved, sure, but most people have access to broadband if they want it.

"6. Co-op is again vocational in focus, and one wonders if the author is aware that taking all this too far will be eating our seed corn by not producing the next generation of academics."

Doing co-op does not preclude becoming an academic. In any event, there are far more grad students who hope to be professors than there are slots for them on the other end.

"7. In my and my friends experience, a real world class researcher who's also serious about undergraduate education (if not always entirely competent in doing it) is vastly superior to mid-tier school professor who's research is nothing to write home about and who envies his betters. At the "bottom", the community colleges and their one step about 4 year equivalents where the professors are their to teach with no pretenses about doing serious research can provide some truly excellent education in well established areas."

Yes, this is the point.

"In the case of those needing post-graduate education (e.g. for those fields where a Ph.D. is the minimal level of education)"

Are the tiny minority of students.

"Bottom line: fix what's broken rather breaking everything and starting from scratch. There's going to serious leverage here as the US higher education bubble starts popping and I suggest ruthless use of that."

That's not a particularly fun thought exercise. ;)

<comment><USER3> 1\. Most students may not be interested in research, but my question WRT to that and the research university model is, are they best served by a facility that does real research?

I think so, at least in those fields where cargo cult science/engineering/humanities/etc. don't have a strong hold. Professors who are doing real world stuff have a variety of advantages ... then again, in too many schools too much instruction is handled by callow grad students.

2\. I use MIT as an example as an example. I.e. what's _your_ excuse for not doing this (directed at those schools that don't do it). We are talking about reform, so I'm drawing on my knowledge of what works and what doesn't.

3\. We'll have to agree to disagree.

5\. I'm not so sure enough of the country has it, especially if this further saturates the overloaded satellites that serve a lot of rural folks.

I don't think it's a red herring, I think you should acknowledge it's an issue that needs quantification and workarounds. E.g. satellite learning centers that have good connections that those who don't have broadband or good enough broadband (which includes more than you'd think of Silicon Valley) can go to each day when they need that much bandwidth.

However, the above compromise loses the ... immersive aspect of residential undergraduate education that I think good broadband could provide a version of.

6\. If co-op is mandatory is precludes e.g. doing real research in a professor's lab during the summer. Which could be addressed by defining co-op to include that.

Let's take my major, chemistry. One friend did a co-op at Exxon working on figuring out why one of the four huge oil coking ovens they had built was producing "gunk". She learned a lot, found it valuable. I would have preferred doing academic research, since that was the path I was going on. She wasn't wrong and I probably wasn't either.

7\. I'm not sure acquiring a Ph.D., or at least a Masters, is only for a _tiny_ minority of students. There are a lot of engineering fields that need more than four years of instruction. In the sciences, not getting the Ph.D. relegates you to a dead end of lab work at the direction of others. However, in these fields you _do_ get paid to do your post-graduate work, which tells us something.

In other fields I don't _know_ , but we can be sure many are producing too many doctorates. Or undergraduates for that matter. But if someone wants to pay their own way, who are we to deny them? Many of the current excesses there should get rung out as the higher education bubble pops.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lisp hacker writes an outstandingly popular book - <AUTHOR> http://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm?book_number=2128 It's a novel! <comment><USER2> He has programmed in Lisp, Java, Perl and a few other languages. I don't see the connection though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spam.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really don't get it...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> First novel by a former lisp hacker gets top reviews. May become a classic book. You first heard it here.</comment>


Reed Hastings: Comcast no longer following net neutrality principles - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/reed1960/posts/10150706947044584

<comment><USER2> There is some ambiguity about where bandwidth accounting should take place: on the last mile link between the customer and Comcast or the transit link(s) between Comcast and the Internet. Comcast claims that anything coming from a server inside Comcast itself (e.g. Xfinity) should not count against the cap because it causes no congestion; this assumes that the cap exists only to prevent congestion on the transit side. I suspect that this is all just post facto justification, though.

<comment><USER3> Does this mean that I can just limit my Bittorrent client to only connect to peers in Comcast's network, if I don't want Bittorrent traffic to count against my quota?

<comment><USER4> This sort of thing has certainly been the case with the quota-free peering agreements here in Australia in the past. Do Comcast provide for unmetered traffic in their accounting tools? If so it should be relatively easy to test.

The OP really doesn't sound that suspicious really, not really worth the title. If a service provider serves popular content locally via their own client to reduce the hit on their external links what's the problem? Is there some commercial advantage they're gaining from it other than not having that bandwidth eaten up?

<comment><USER2> A service that doesn't count towards the cap is perceived as "cheaper" and thus more desirable.

<comment><USER4> If a latency-sensitive service decides to host closer to part of its customer base, does that mean they're not respecting net neutrality too? At what point does something stop becoming more convenient for customers and the company (like locally hosted unmetered traffic) and start becoming a neutrality issue?

Maybe I look at it differently being from a country that has always had caps, where the introduction of peering agreements and ISP hosted content meant you got more value (all downloads being 'paid for' to some of that now being 'free'). I suppose if you look at it from the perspective of going from a culture of unlimited data to capped downloads (all downloads being 'free' to most being 'paid for' and some free as it was before).

It's not like they are artificially prioritizing their own content.

Edit: On reading some of the other comments it sounds like it isn't just the same content via different clients, it's actually buying the same content off Comcast? Is this the case? The OP wasn't exactly a wealth of detail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems the entire world is facing erosion of freedom and equality when it comes to accessing the net in an unobstructed and private manner. Great forces are at play, from politicians to capitalists, who own the wires and the antennae. The facts are clear: the internet is going to be controlled and manipulated for power and profit. What do we do about it? What can we do about it? Can we build an information network that is unbiased, universal and fair? A network of information trasmission that can be resilient in the face of such attacks?

<comment><USER6> <http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/darknet>

<http://www.reddit.com/r/i2p>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Principles". Part of the problem is that the definition of neutrality is very ad hoc and untestable. Like pornography, we know it when we see it.

(Side note, obviously Reed is not unbiased from a financial perspective.)

I understand the instinct. But the fact that it took weeks for anyone to call this non-neutral is evidence that after arguing this for x years, we still don't have a testable definition.

Yes, this move by Comcast is non-neutral. It was non-neutral when Facebook offered something similar over mobile: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/facebook- launches-0-faceboo...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/facebook- launches-0-facebook-com-a-mobile-site-that-incurs-zero-data-fees/)

CDNs? Not neutral.

The problem is that caps are reasonable (even if we prefer otherwise). And offering bits for free is hard to argue against, for the consumer.

So if two reasonable acts constitute a violation of net neutrality, what does that say about our definition?

<comment><USER8> > "Principles". Part of the problem is that the definition of neutrality is > very ad hoc and untestable.

Really? I may be naive here, but I thought it was very clear and straightforward:

1) Packets are not routed differently based on content or source.

2) Packets (or bits) cost the same amount regardless of content or source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From what I understand, Xfinity is delivered from Comcast's own network, so it's not exactly equal to the other sources he describes. Still, this highlights how mixing network providers and content providers gets messy. It opens up the door for ISPs to use their position in an effective monopoly to favor their own content sources over others.

</comment><comment><USER10> We started a petition for Comcast to comply with net neutrality and apply caps equally, or not at all. Please sign if you agree and share: <http://pblk.dm/IVLlza>

<comment><USER11> The actual link the above obfuscated link points to:

[http://publikdemand.com/d/comcast/stop-violating-net- neutral...](http://publikdemand.com/d/comcast/stop-violating-net- neutrality/6dd7e574-8755-11e1-9622-123139080280)

<comment><USER12> It wasn't really obfuscated. pblk.dm is obviously publikdemand.com's own url shorter.

<comment><USER11> Would you be happy with the term minified, rather than obfuscated?

I agree there isn't one accepted definition for what obfuscated means wrt urls. I use the term to mean any link that is changed to be less readable.

There wasn't any harm or judgement intended:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Past HN discussions:

* <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3766284> (The new Comcast Xbox Xfinity app is the first nail in net neutrality's coffin)

* <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3505922> (Free Wikipedia in Africa and Middle East (first step against net neutrality?))

</comment><comment><USER14> Akamai installs their blades directly inside ISPs. This covers Netflix and Hulu. What's up now, Comcast?

<comment><USER15> It seems that Netflix stopped using Akamai. The other discussion thread here has some great links: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3845098>

<comment><USER16> That's not true. Netflix uses all three major CDNs and the client picks the best one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Comcast never followed net neutrality principles.

</comment><comment><USER18> I understand that there's more to the Comcast /Netflix dispute, but soon or later the "dumb pipes" are going to want a cut, especially for heavy usage.

Until that's solved (lobbyists are rubbing their hands!) speed etc are irrelevant. Who cares that you can download at 50mb/s when the limit is reached after a few minutes /hours of full usage?

<comment><USER19> It occurs to me that as we move towards "dumb pipes", they should be treated more or less as a public utility--if even a metered one--just like actual water and sewer pipes.

<comment><USER18> Metered it is right now (see caps) but if you want 24/7 ESPN and HBO and I just want to email and access CNN.com a few times a day why should I pay for you?

The "internet" has changed, it was pages and images, now it's videos and with Xbox, Hulu and Netflix it's also cable. The net providers have a point, it costs a fortune to lay, expand and maintain the pipes as demand increases. Not sure how it's solved, but Netflix and others have to shell a few bucks, the money they are saving by not mailing DVDs might come in handy

<comment><USER19> I would prefer meters to caps. Caps say if you use more than x gallons of water we shut off your tap, but pay us $100/mo regardless. Meters say, hey, use all the water you want, but you're paying for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Comcast is currently filtering www.slutload.com [NSFW obviously] as well. I really hate their monopoly.

<comment><USER2> "It has absolutely nothing to do with content; ... it is part of a (large) IP range temporarily blocked to curb a DoS attack." [http://vi.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/sackm/til_comcast_is_act...](http://vi.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/sackm/til_comcast_is_actively_censoring_the_internet/)</comment></comment>


Y Combinator putting on special event called AngelConf for would-be investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.angelconf.com/

<comment><USER2> This is a brilliant idea for YC. Having gone thru the YC experience and demo day, I would say that the scarcest resource for YC companies is that bridge between "just launched" and Series-A-fundable or profitable.

A lot of companies can be lean enough to survive this phase on their own, but a lot teams/projects are capital intensive (or slow to get revenue) amd need seed-stage help. There are precious few VCs that focus on this stage (True Ventures, First Round, USV, SoftTech, etc).

<comment><USER3> Not just for YC companies. I've gradually come to believe that the number of viable startups is more a function of the amount of angel investing going on than any other factor. VCs are useful in getting really big, but without angels startups don't survive to the point where VCs are willing to invest.

<comment><USER4> "Have you thought about investing in startups, but didn't know how? [...] How do you pick winners?"

Why not raise a side fund and do full fledged seed investing if you can pick winners?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are the Glengarry leads.

<comment><USER6> Can someone explain what this means?

<comment><USER7> It's a memorable line from a monologue delivered by the Alec Baldwin character in the movie 'Glengarry Glen Ross'.

[scene] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI>

[transcript] <http://www.whysanity.net/monos/ggr2.html>

(Language is NSFW... unless of course your workplace is like the one in the movie.)

<comment><USER8> A more modern, work-safe version from SNL:

[http://www.hulu.com/watch/3362/saturday-night-live- glengarry...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/3362/saturday-night-live-glengarry- glen-christmas)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm hoping someone is going to post videos (if permitted).

<comment><USER3> Justin.TV just agreed to webcast it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good idea! This seems like the type of thing that will really help stimulate the economy and help liquidity start flowing again.

<comment><USER11> Probably not all that much, in the big picture, where billions of dollars are the order of magnitude that things seem to be happening at, but it's cool to see in any case.

<comment><USER12> I dunno - the logistics of investing are _hard_ and the sample documents are just a start. If you give people step-by-step directions and access to the right professionals, you may very well see a demonstrable increase in angel investing.

Things like this are why the Valley's so important. You'd think someone somewhere else would have done this, but noooooo. You just know that if someone else had done this, they'd have tried to make a buck on it. This is a completely altruistic move on YC's part - hell, they're setting up additional competition for the YC program.

<comment><USER11> Oh, I agree it's really cool and all, but compared with job losses in the 10's or 100's of thousands... I'm just not sure that it'll make much of a difference in terms of "help stimulate the economy and help liquidity start flowing again".

But that's no argument against it, or saying it's not important; just that perhaps getting a few more people investing is not going to fix the economy overnight.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but if we got funding, what would we do? _We'd hire people._

<comment><USER11> So the way to figure out whether that means anything at a large enough scale to matter, is to look at how many angels might invest how much money. I honestly have no idea, but here are some random numbers:

10,000 investors invest 10,000 dollars each is 100 million dollars. You could vary that to 1,000 investors doing 100,000 of investment each. 1,000 investors each doing a million dollars would be 1 billion dollars. What relationship do those random numbers bear to reality? Has YC even spent a million dollars on all the companies involved? And there are several people investing in YC, so I think it probably comes out to less than a million a head, and they've been doing this for a while now.

The real impact of startups is not likely going to be in hiring in any case, but still, it's worth looking at some numbers to get an idea of the order of magnitude that we're talking about.

<comment><USER13> For the first part of your math, YC has spent at least 1.5 million (~300 founders * 5000). Team sizes vary, but if we hold them at 3 members, we get another half mil. So by my very back of the envelope calculations they've invested about $2 million.

<comment><USER14> ~250 founders of 102 companies: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHlj3xKyChg>

We need to add another 100 ghost founders to account for the extra $5,000, so that makes it: ~350 founders x $5,000/founder = ~$1.75 million invested, so far.

Y Combinator has (I personally believe, but do not necessarily know to be true) additionally sunk capital investment into:

      * Beans and rice
      * A building and associated land in Boston
      * A building and associated land in Mountain View
      * Utility bills
      * Travel expenses
      * Legal fees (including 102 incorporation-fee packages)
      * Accounting fees
      * Misc.

<comment><USER14> _~350 founders x $5,000/founder = ~$1.75 million invested, so far._

Was there something incorrect, or otherwise objectionable, about this comment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I sure hope that this isn't a one time event. If this gets popular, raising funding will get easier for all of us.

</comment><comment><USER16> The big question is whether this event is for accredited investors only or not?

My means don't allow me to invest much money at all (say $5K), and I am not accredited (I wish I was of course). So I'm like an amateur in the game but very interested. I can't tell if the event is for me or not.

<comment><USER2> If you aren't accredited and you are investing in a company, a lot of times you are doing them a disservice. Have you read up on the consequences of taking on non-accredited investors?

I'd love to be an angel investor, too-- but if you can't pass that particular test, you really shouldn't be in the game.

And, honestly-- $5k isn't worth the cost of the legal paperwork necessary to take you on as an investor.

If you want to be in the game, try to get an advisor role with a tiny sliver of stock.

<comment><USER17> Do you have to file some paperwork to be officially accredited, or is simply meeting the wealth or income criteria sufficient?

<comment><USER16> The precise definition is at <http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm>

Either you are, or you are not. There is no paperwork or exam (is that constitutional to seggregate based on wealth?)

For most individuals, the requirement is:

a natural person with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000

or

a natural person who has individual net worth, or joint net worth with the person's spouse, that exceeds $1 million

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd love to finally know how to tell if a startup will succeed! Please post the knowledge afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER19> So what kinda people are you looking to attend this event. I'm interested, but i'm a developer. Nevertheless, i don't mind or wouldn't mind helping someone else out in the hope someone might do the same for me one day. Make sense? I have zero accreditation in investing.

</comment><comment><USER20> > March 5 2009, 1:30-3:30

You're going to get through that whole program in two hours?

</comment><comment><USER21> Can I get an invite. :D

</comment><comment><USER22> any confirmation this is an official YC event?

<comment><USER11> You can do a whois on the domain name. It's registered to a Paul Graham. It was reported on TC. So either it's real, or an elaborate ruse to kidnap a bunch of wealthy people.

<comment><USER23> Why can't it be both? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fundraising 101 brought to you by Lil Wayne:

"Start with straight shots and then pop bottles. Flirt with the hood rats and then pop models."

Translation:

Do a few startups, then build a Google. Talk with the angels, then do series A with VCs.

Citation: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ3I4YY4YJA></comment>


Why isn't CPU time more valuable? - <AUTHOR> https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/03/07/cpu-time/ <comment><USER2> You could look at this as "CPUs are cheap, of course we can afford to leave them idle." But a more interesting angle is, "For one programmer's hourly cost, you could run 4000 CPU cores continuously. Can there really be no practical way to apply _thousands_ of cores to boosting the programmer's productivity? What are we missing?"

For instance, couldn't [https://github.com/webyrd/Barliman](https://github.com/webyrd/Barliman) develop into something that makes computing worth spending on at that level?

<comment><USER3> What practical problems can 4000 CPUs solve that 16 CPUs can't?

You get less and less been benefit for each additional CPU you add to the problem, unless the CPU is the main bottleneck.

Also if something requires 4000 CPUs, it is going to start getting expensive if you need to double the output. These types of problems don't scale well.

<comment><USER4> One obvious answer is parallel builds. It's an immense waste of developer productivity to force builds on developer machines.

<comment><USER5> At sufficient speed too. A build on our build farm takes 2 hours, my local mac does it in 50 minutes.

<comment><USER6> Am I reading this right that a build farm is slower than your local development computer? Shouldn't that launch a re-evaluation of the build farm?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You could say the same about many things. My car is idle most of the time. I usually only use it for 1-2 hours a day during the week and less on the weekends. I could use Uber or Lyft instead but I don't. I could rent out my car when I am not using it but I don't. It is idle because I want to use when I want to use without coordinating with anyone.

The same is true of my computer. I once worked at a Unix shop where people would routinely log into other peoples computers to do builds. It locked the machine up (this was in the 90s) and made it hard to do anything else on the computer. The whole point of a personal computer it to have all of the power there for your use when you want it.

<comment><USER8> > My car is idle most of the time. I usually only use it for 1-2 hours a day > during the week and less on the weekends. I could use Uber or Lyft instead > but I don't. I could rent out my car when I am not using it but I don't. It > is idle because I want to use when I want to use without coordinating with > anyone.

That's such an interesting comparison that I relate with. If availability and startup time are good enough, I'd be happy to use a shared resources for both CPU and cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article contains the answer to the question: the CPU time is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the time of qualified people turning real-world problems into the code and interpreting the results. And this time is expensive.

<comment><USER10> Which, by the way, is also why we don't have dynamically reconfigurable FPGA coprocessors like was once dreamed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A large part is the fact that memory access is comparatively slow. Getting the data to the core is the challenge. Most processing is so fast that the operation you want to perform is latency-limited by IO issues. Some have suggested offloading compilation to other machines; this works, but efficiency depends on having large enough compilation jobs that this results in net benefit. Similar arguments apply to data analysis - moving the data is too expensive, so you move the code to the data instead.

</comment><comment><USER12> John is confusing CPU time with CPU-core time. I assume he gets the $0.025/hour figure from "a1.medium", which is 1 core ("vCPU") with 2GB RAM.

As a result of competition, the price of any service tends toward cost of the service. So a $2000 computer with 8 cores that lasts 4 years + $500 for power/year + $500 for support/year is $1500/year or $0.17/hour. That's $0.021/core/hour, and the difference is a small amount of profit for Amazon and a buffer for when the CPU is idle.

<comment><USER13> >So a $2000 computer with 8 cores that lasts 4 years + $500 for power/year + $500 for support/year is $1500/year or $0.17/hour. That's $0.021/core/hour, and the difference is a small amount of profit for Amazon and a buffer for when the CPU is idle.

The other factor is power. That $500 for power for a year won't be $500 if the CPU is running full-tilt all the time, it'll be much more. Modern CPUs are designed to be power-efficient when idle, and then be able to perform many computations quickly when demanded, even if this actually exceeds the hardware's ability to dissipate heat (in which case the CPU throttles itself to avoid overheating). For computers used interactively by people (i.e., laptops, desktops, but not servers), the workload tends to be extremely bursty, with the CPU doing nearly nothing most of the time waiting for the user to do something, and then suddenly having to do a lot of work quickly when demanded (e.g., rendering a bloated webpage or watching a video).

In short, CPU time isn't just being "wasted"; modern CPUs are explicitly designed to be used this way.

<comment><USER14> Where I live (Texas) electricity costs about $0.08/kWh, which means $500 per year will buy about 700 watts of continuous power. That's much higher than the TDP of any 8-core processor on the market. Even if you have more expensive power and account for cooling costs, it's hard to see how you could end up spending much more than $500/year to power a single machine.

<comment><USER15> Just for comparison, where I am (Massachusetts) it's $0.23/kWh or so for residential service.

<comment><USER16> It's $0.05 here in Florida. Cost of living is no joke.

It's only a penny for the big industrial users.

<comment><USER15> $0.05 for both generation _and_ transmission charges? I would have expected that to be more like $0.09 or $0.10 for Florida... Still a good bit better than MA, of course. :)

<comment><USER16> There are some extra things, like a fuel charge. It comes to about $0.08 or $0.09 adding those things in, plus about $8 per month just to be connected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Human brain has equivalent of at least 30 TFLOPS of computing power [1]. To get same computing power with CPU at $6.3/TFLOPS in AWS it would cost $189/hr [2]. So renting a human as "general AI computer" is more than 27 times less expensive at the moment.

Also, don't forget that humans also come with powerful high precision mobile actuators and unmatched sensor arrays. And that humans come pretrained in large array of complex skills including object recognition, text to speech etc. My question would actually be reverse of what is posed in the article: Why isn't Mechanical Turk far more lucrative business than AWS?

So in conclusion, if you have $1M lying around, you more likely to find more profitable endeavor by renting humans than same amount of compute capacity in cloud. Price of GFLOPs is falling however at about 10X every 13±3 years. So possibly in 20-30 years things might be different.

[1] [https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in- flops/](https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/)

[2] [https://aiimpacts.org/recent-trend-in-the-cost-of- computing/](https://aiimpacts.org/recent-trend-in-the-cost-of-computing/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Because cost does not equal value. This is called the consumer surplus, the difference between how much you're willing to pay for a product and the market price. For example, most people would be willing to pay more for internet access than they currently do.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think he hit the primary reason in this paragraph from the article:

 _We might need hundreds of hours of CPU time for a simulation, then nothing while we figure out what to do next, then another hundreds hours to run a modification._

Now that CPU time is so readily available vs. the mainframe era or even just the pre-cloud era, there's far less capacity-forced "figure out what to do next" time unless you've got an extremely computationally heavy problem or are very resource-constrained. As such, there's a lot less unmet demand for compute out in the world, which naturally brings cost down.

</comment><comment><USER20> This always bothered me too. Both when computers were expensive to me and now cheap. I get paid a good amount of money during the day to use a computer to compute things, display/interface with me, to communicate to humans and other computers. Then my computer is idle/sleep when I am not there. This feels inherently wrong to me. How is that I cannot come up with something useful for my computer to do when I am not there to make real contributions when I resume work? (disclaimer, engineer who programs but not a computer scientist)

<comment><USER21> Isn't this the point of Folding@Home, SETI, etc...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think the answer is that CPU time doesn't have consistently high value to the CPU owner, and isn't a free market as CPU time is non-transferable due to security concerns.

It isn't practical to buy compute power from a diverse set of CPU owners, because any of them may be malicious, and this problem only increases with scale. The only exceptions are cases where you can afford or mitigate malicious CPU owners, which doesn't lend itself to general computing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Part of the problem is that most entities who use CPUs have more then they need. If you want to make money with your CPU then you need to use it either to produce a good or service worth more then a few cents an hour. The issue is that everyone else also has CPUs, so whatever you do can't be trivial.

At that point you're optimizing for the market of your good/service relative to it's cost, and not optimizing for CPU usage.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's commoditised very effectively. So the cost is capital(buy computer) + operating(electricity+sysadmins) + margin(tiny).

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't really understand why you'd expect CPU time to be more valuable. If anything you'd expect it to be cheaper, given how the majority of CPU time goes unused for anything useful.

Many decades and untold billions in R&D went into modern computers. I wouldn't expect them to be anything but extremely cost-effective, and they are.

<comment><USER26> The author of the blog entry is looking at things from a different angle. He knows the cost is low because demand is low. He's trying to figure out why demand is low. He wants to find a way to make that idle time useful time that produces value greater than the cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fuzzing is a great use of spare CPU time…

<comment><USER28> We do have an energy constraint (i.e. catastrophic global warming), and idle CPUs use less energy.

<comment><USER29> I tend to agree with you, but CPUs only use a percent or two of our energy and idle CPUs still use power. It seems to me that there are lower hanging fruit that we should pluck first.

<comment><USER30> Overuse reduces the lifetime of CPUs. I'm pretty sure unning a CPU at full throttle for a week will burn it out.

<comment><USER23> I'd like to see a source on that.

With most electronics, CPUs and GPUs included, the killer is heat. As long as you have the heat under control you're fine. Some applications such as laptops can't keep the thermals undercontrol at sustained 100% CPU usage, so those are obviously at risk.

The only other form of "wear" is electron migration and I HIGHLY doubt you'll kill a modern processor "in a week", even if you left it running at 95C .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yeah but what about GPU time? It has unfortunately become an arms race in AI and everyone who doesn work for big co is essentially precluded from making research/innovations

<comment><USER32> GPU time is available by the minute from AWS/GCP/etc and it's dirt cheap. If you think it's expensive, I envy your youth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Hey! With the article about Cringely and this mentioning Condor ([https://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/](https://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/)), it's flashbacks week.

It was originally designed to soak up CPU cycles on unused desktop machines, but I usually used it in dedicated clusters.

I suppose the modern batch-processing hotness is Docker/Kubernetes, which are very heavy-weight for that usage.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's an abundance of CPU power. Access to those CPU's is one problem but essentially why two-sided marketplaces exist. They've emerged for this exact problem in other categories (as pointed out in other comments) such as AirBNB/VRBO (housing), Turo/GetAround (cars), liquidspace (offices), boatsetter (boats).

I wonder if access was democratized, would demand increase? Jevon's Paradox in action?

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if this isn't why Moore's Law appears to be slowing down. Maybe there are still huge gains to be made but the economic drive is not there.

<comment><USER13> It's slowed down for several reasons:

1) We hit a brick wall with silicon clock speeds. Silicon apparently can only go 3-4GHz; after that, there's too many switching losses, too much power used, etc.

2) Because of #1, we jumped on the multi-core bandwagon. This worked OK for a while, but most tasks can only be broken up and run in parallel so much. You can't just throw 1000 cores at every problem and expect it to scale. For anything with user interaction, this is especially true, so there's no point in having more than 4-8 cores on a single-user machine.

3) For the stuff normal people do, there just isn't much demand for more speed any more. How much faster do you need MS Excel to calculate your spreadsheet, or PowerPoint to show you slides?

<comment><USER36> I'd also argue:

4) cpu speed isn't the limiting factor many times now. Disk, memory, network, user input etc all are much more impactful honestly.

Sure getting a Blender run down 10% is huge, but what is that time saved compared to how long setting up the render took?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If my computer didn't overheat and throttle the CPU any time you push it over 50% for more than 5 minutes at a time, I might buy this.

</comment><comment><USER38> Depends on what you mean by speeds, but there's a huge confluence of reasons that processors are where they are today.

If you mean the clock speed specifically, then it's largely due to the inability to manufacture smaller gate widths in silicon. The Core 2 architecture by Intel, for example, uses a 45 nanometer gate width for transistors in each core. Core 2 was part of the Penryn family. The latest family is Nehalem, and it, too, uses 45 nanometer gate widths. Core i5 and i7 belong to this family, among others.

Since the gate widths didn't shrink from the Penryn family to the Nehalem family, the power consumption of a single state change in a given transistor didn't decrease. Since the heat dissipation (and, therefore, power consumption) is proportional to both the gate width and the clock speed, this new architecture couldn't change the state of the transistors any faster than the previous one. Therefore, core clock speeds remained pretty constant.

Getting to 45 nm was really tough. Going to the next frontier, which will likely be 32 nm, will be even tougher. So tough, in fact, that STMicroelectronics, Freescale Semiconductor, NXP Semiconductor and Texas Instruments have all decided to stop their process research. An article in 2007 claimed that Intel, IBM and Matsushita, AMD and Renesas would be the only organizations still pursuing R&D in this area. That's a vastly reduced set of brains and dollars on the gate width problem.

If your question about "speed" is more general, well, then there's another discussion around multi-core architectures that's also fascinating. The primary technical advances in Nehalem versus predecessor families are its multithreading, caching, bus and memory management schemes. If you keep each core at 3 GHz, how can you efficiently use two 3 GHz cores to get, say, 1.5 times the speed of a single core? How can you efficiently use four 3 GHz cores to get, say, 1.5 times the speed of two cores? in this respect, processor speeds have increased significantly in the last 5 years, and will continue to do so as software is written to take advantage of these new architectures.

But, then again, when was the last time you really found yourself waiting for your processor? It was probably your disk, your network or your brain that was the bottleneck in the first place. :-)</comment>


Packaging gone crazy - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Packing-Done-Right.aspx

<comment><USER2> One of the Dept. of Defense's logistics systems did something comparable. Is it still doing that? (Sending individual batteries with ridiculous amounts of packaging?)</comment>


Deep Learning Chip Upstart Takes GPUs to Task - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/08/deep-learning-chip-upstart-set-take-gpus-task/ <comment><USER2> Um. An hour after this appeared on HN Intel bought them. Spooky.</comment>