Intel to Develop Discrete GPUs, Hires AMD's Raja Koduri as Chief Architect - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/12017/intel-to-develop-discrete-gpus-hires-raja-koduri-as-chief-architect <comment><USER3> The connection between "AI" and "GPU" in everyone's mind is a testament to the PR chops of NVIDIA. You don't need a GPU to run ML/DL/neural networks, but NVIDIA have GPU tech so they're selling GPUs. What you need is the massive ALU power and, to lesser extent, the huge internal bandwidth of GPUs. There are huge chunks of GPU die area that are of no use when running NN-type of code: the increasingly complex rasterizers, the texture units, the framebuffer/zbuffer compression stuff, and on the software side, the huge pile of junk in the drivers that allows you not only to run games from a decade ago, but also run them better than last year's GPU. If you can afford to start from scratch, you can lose a lot of this baggage.

<comment><USER4> And yet Intel seems to be wanting to make GPUs for machine learning now...so I guess Nvidia's PR worked against Intel, too?

But as I said in another comment, the truth is Intel doesn't seem to be knowing what it's doing, which is why it's pushing in 5 or 6 different directions with many-core accelerators, FPGAs, custom ASICs, neuromorphic CPUs, quantum computers, graphcores, and so on.

By the time Intel figures out which one of these is "ideal" for machine learning, and behind which arrows to "put more wood," Nvidia will have an insurmountable advantage in the machine learning chip market, backed by an even stronger software ecosystem that Intel can't build because it doesn't yet know "which ML chips will win out".

If I would describe Intel is a sentence these days is "Intel doesn't have a vision." It's mostly re-iterating on its chips and rent-seeking these days by rebranding weak chips with strong chip brands, and adding names like "Silver" and "Gold" to Xeons (and charging more for them, because come on - it says _Gold_ on them!), as well as essentially bringing the DLC nickle-and-diming strategy from games to its chips and motherboards.

Meanwhile, it's wasting billions every year on failed R&D projects and acquisitions _because_ it lacks that vision on what it really needs to do to be successful. Steve Jobs didn't need to build 5 different smartphones to see which one would "win out" in the market.

<comment><USER5> Non-incremental advances require a lot of wasted-path R&D. If any of Intel's projects creates a generational leap, it will pay off handsomely. When the way forward isn't clear, I like to use the concepts from path finding algorithms to drive strategy. Assuming you can afford multiple parallel efforts.

It's not clear if doing this in-house, or closely monitoring the state of the art and then buying a company that develops a winner, is superior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can't fight them on price? Fight them on talent.

Whoever at AMD who refused to match the offer probably made a terrible decision. This is about the worst time to lose that talent right after inking a gpu die deal which, in light of this news, will only be temporary. AMD just got played.

If I were AMD, I would review Mark Papermaster's comp and incentives to ensure he doesn't leave.

(I'm long AMD)

<comment><USER7> I don't think this was all about money. Raja had been trying to run Radeon Technologies Group like an independent company and pushing for separation from AMD for a while. HardOCP did a good piece on this -> [https://hardocp.com/article/2016/05/27/from_ati_to_amd_back_...](https://hardocp.com/article/2016/05/27/from_ati_to_amd_back_journey_in_futility)

I think the recent Intel + AMD custom chip was probably the last thing Raja did before he got pulled RTG got the reins put back on and now he's hoping ship to peruse what he's wanted all along. To work with more independence.

<comment><USER8> What leads you to think Intel will give him more autonomy? Or is their integrated graphics team setup differently than Radeon? I would suspect the old ATI boundaries after 11 years would still be stronger than something Intel has homegrown over the past 20.

<comment><USER9> Well, he wouldn't go there if Intel wouldn't give him what he wanted, whatever that might be.

<comment><USER10> And if it's not corporate structure, maybe it's a boat.

More power to him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Raja, if you are reading this make sure your Intel GPU has two things that competition doesn't:

1) FP8 half-precision training: NVidia is artificially disabling this feature in consumer GPUs to charge more for Tesla / Volta.

2) A licensed / clone of AMD SSG technology to give massive on-GPU memory: NVidia's 12 GB memory is not sufficient for anything beyond thumbnail or VGA sized images.

My experience with Intel Phi KNL has been miserable so far, I hope Raja has better luck with GPU line.

<comment><USER12> > My experience with Intel Phi KNL has been miserable so far, I hope Raja has > better luck with GPU line.

I'd love to see the Phi approach taken further. I'm not a huge fan of having different ISAs, one for my CPU, one for the compute engines of the GPU (to say nothing about the blobs on my GPU, network controller, ME). I'd prefer a more general approach where I could easily spread the various workloads running on my CPU to other, perhaps more specialized but still binary-compatible, cores.

Heck... Even my phone has 8 cores (4 fast, 4 power-efficient, running the same ISA).

<comment><USER13> When you've got a huge out of order engine the extra effort it takes to decode x86 instructions is lost in the noise. When you're going with the flock of chickens approach and you have a huge number of very small cores then the overhead is killer. Intel tried to solve this by using medium cores with big SIMD units but SIMD is just less flexible than a GPU's SIMT is.

Power and area generally scale as the square of the single threaded performance of a core. The huge number of "cores"/lanes in a GPU are much smaller and more efficient individually than even your phone's smaller cores. And the x86 tax gets worse and worse the smaller you try to make a core with the same ISA. Intel wasn't even able to succeed in competing with the Atom against medium sized cellphone chips.

<comment><USER12> > but SIMD is just less flexible than a GPU's SIMT is

There is nothing preventing the x86 ISA to be extended in that direction. As long as all cores (oxen and chickens, as Seymour Cray would say) can shift binaries around according to desired performance/power, I don't care.

Binary compatibility is awesome for software that has already been written and for which we don't have the source code. Pretty much everything on my machines has source available.

The OS may need to be more aware of performance characteristics of software it's running on the slightly different cores so it can be better allocated, but, apart from that, it's a more or less solved problem.

Atoms didn't perform that much worse than ARMs on phones. What killed them is that they didn't run our desktop software all that well (even though one of my favorite laptops was an Atom netbook).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am not convinced that Intel can win here. They seem to not succeed with home grown GPU tech and other big bang approaches. Now if they were to acquire decent GPU tech then I would bet on them. Just the homegrown route seems to not work out for them.

I suspect part of the reason is the long time frames for dev of this tech. I suspect it is at least 2 years for this to see the light of day. That is forever in this space.

Intel failed with Larrabee and itanium. Maybe this will go better?

<comment><USER4> It looks like Raja will lead the development of machine learning-focused GPUs. Isn't this Intel basically admitting that their Xeon Phi, Nervana, and Altera GPU efforts to win the machine learning market are all a dead-end?

How many machine learning strategies is Intel going to try? Does it even know what it's doing? Spending billions of dollars left and right on totally different machine learning technologies kind of looks like it doesn't, and it's just hoping it will get lucky with one of them.

And even if you think that's not a terrible strategy to "see what works", there's still the issue that they need to have great software support for _all_ of these platforms if they want developer adoption. The more different machine learning strategies it adopts, the harder that's going to be for Intel to achieve.

<comment><USER15> Intel needs a CEO that skates to where the puck is going to be, not where it was three goals ago.

<comment><USER16> That's scary of that's what is required of a ceo. You would either need to be an oracle and predict where the industry will go or you'd need to _make_ the industry go the direction you're taking the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The link is incredibly light on actual content but this seems to be good news for AI enthusiasts as perhaps now we'll get a reasonable competitor to CUDA/CUDNN and their associated hardware for running GPU accelerated machine learning. Intel seems to be taking the ML/AI space seriously and this move seems very likely to be related. Yes I'm aware of OpenCL as I am also aware of it's level of support with libraries such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, Theano -- it isn't the first class citizen that CUDA is. While those libraries aren't perfect they offer the experience of writing the experiment on your laptop without a GPU, validating, then running the full experiment on larger hardware.

In my ideal world competition from intel would force NVidia to play nice with OpenCL or something similar, and encourage competition in the hardware space instead of driver support space. Unfortunately the worst-case looks something more like CUDA, OpenCL and a third option from Intel with OpenCL like adoption. :(

<comment><USER18> Only armchair spectators are still talking about OpenCL. It's as dead as disco.

<comment><USER19> I still use OpenCL on the daily, it allows me to program for both NVidia and AMD GPUS simultaneously with the minimum amount of pain. And you can still use it for mobile GPUs and specialized chips like the Myriad.

Do you have another open, cross-platform, widely compatible GPU programming framework to recommend?

<comment><USER20> Same here. What else can you do to ship GPU acceleration to AMD and NVIDIA people?

The alternatives recommended here aren't even serious IMHO. I'd rather switch to CUDA and wait till Intel/AMD sort out a REAL compatibility layer than deal with those.

Unless I'm mistaken, HIP still requires a separate compile for either platform and what runtime do they expect end users to have exactly?! At least CUDA and OpenCL are integrated in the vendor drivers.

Vulkan compute with SPIR-V seems to be the only real solution, but even that is still very early. Sill waiting for proper OpenCL 2.0 support in NVIDIA drivers :P

<comment><USER21> You simply don't ship. Enterprise deep learning doesn't ship their training code - large models are trained on purpose-designed, dedicated hardware. Hardware compatability doesn't matter, software does. Even that's flexible if it's significantly faster.

(The models can be executed on low-powered, commodity CPUs. No need for any GPU there.)

<comment><USER20> _You simply don 't ship_

That's totally an option for our product, great idea! Why did I never think of this!

No seriously we _are_ shipping, using _OpenCL_ and it gives about a 20 times performance advantage for most users regardless if they have AMD or NVIDIA hardware. If something that's actually better than OpenCL comes along (or if AMD RTG goes out of business) I'll switch to it no heart broken.

But that hasn't happened yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting, given that just 2 days ago it was announced [0] that Intel was going to start to use AMD for some of their integrated graphics. Now they're going to complete against them in the discrete graphics space.

Also, Koduri recently left AMD after what many felt was a disappointing discrete graphics release in Vega.

[0] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/12003/intel-to-create- new-8th...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/12003/intel-to-create-new-8th- generation-cpus-with-amd-radeon-graphics-with-hbm2-using-emib)

</comment><comment><USER23> Wowza. If I moved to a direct competitor like that, my employee contract "non- compete" clause would be brought out immediately. And I'm no C-level executive, just an individual contributor. I wish Washington had California's non-compete law.

<comment><USER24> Haven't read much on it, but this happening right after the integrated GPU deal with AMD just strengthens the "teaming up against NVIDIA" theme going on.

<comment><USER25> It's like an Age of Empires FFA where the losing players always team up against the leader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm excited. I don't care if Intel wins. I just want a video card that doesn't suck and works perfectly with linux. Even if I unplug my monitor sometimes... Even if it's a laptop and it switches GPU for different outputs... Even if I want to use the standard xrandr and normal ass linux tools for configuring my monitor.

<comment><USER27> Maybe that would happen if kernel developers were not such divas and thought it was appropriate to use coarse language in public discourse. Nvidias graphics drivers work perfectly on windows and they have the only OpenGL implementation that is not a total joke on Linux.

<comment><USER28> Why do you say the Mesa OpenGL is a total joke?

<comment><USER27> This is a bit outdated [http://richg42.blogspot.de/2014/05/the-truth-on- opengl-drive...](http://richg42.blogspot.de/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl- driver-quality.html?m=1) overview of driver status by a game developer, vendor A is NVIDIA and as the article points out they are the only one with a performant relatively bug free implementation. Also notice how he mocks Intel for having two driver teams: That Linux expects to get special treatment by integrating the driver into their Graphics abstractions leads demonstrably to worse performance and less features than if you bypass all those abstractions and use essentially the same driver for all kernels.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for that link. I must say I deem it maybe not completely outdated, but at least worthy an update.

But I'm in awe of the what one can read there.

"This vendor[Nvidia] is extremely savvy and strategic about embedding its devs directly into key game teams to make things happen. (...). These embedded devs will purposely do things that they know are performant on their driver, with no idea how these things impact other drivers.

(...)

Vendor A[Nvidia] is also jokingly known as the "Graphics Mafia". Be very careful if a dev from Vendor A gets embedded into your team. These guys are serious business."

So, basically Nvidia is sabotaging OpenGL to fuck up the specs and then implement other working variations and make the game developers use their version? If that is true, fuck Nvidia.

"On the bright side, Vendor C[Intel] feeds this driver team[Windows Driver Team] more internal information about their hardware than the other team[Linux Driver team]. So it tends to be a few percent faster than driver #1 on the same title/hardware - when it works at all."

What the fuck is going on in this industry? Intel is sabotaging its own Linux driver team? Why?

"I don't have any real experience or hard data with these drivers, because I've been fearful that working with these open source/reverse engineered drivers would have pissed off each vendor's closed source teams so much that they wouldn't help.

Vendor A[Nvidia] hates these drivers because they are deeply entrenched in the current way things are done."

That, now finally, makes sense. Nvidia is strong-arming developers to not support Mesa because they are afraid of it. Nvidia is afraid of Mesa. I think this should be more widely known.

<comment><USER27> The way I read this was a bit different: NVidia actually is the only vendor that offers a performant, complete and relatively bug free implementation. For example if you consider this [http://gdcvault.com/play/1020791/](http://gdcvault.com/play/1020791/) presentation then it is relatively clear that most major innovations were first available as OpenGL extensions by NVidia. The playing field might have levelled somewhat with the introduction of vulkan, which eliminates a lot of code that had to reside in the driver before. The main reason why Mesa is unlikely to catch up is because the backend compiler code is platform specific, so unless NVidia decides to publish their platform specification, it is unlikely that they will achieve meaningful success. Even if NVidia did publish a specification and left driver development to the community it is unclear to me who would be willing to do the free work for them.

<comment><USER29> Keep in mind that the blog post is from 2014. Since then AMD has rewritten their Linux driver (fglrx -> AMDGPU) which didn't really pay off before their 4xx series (released 2016).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > GT4-class iGPUs, which are, roughly speaking, on par with $150 or so > discrete GPUs.

Erm. Nope. No Intel iGPU is on par with the 1050 much less the 1050 Ti.

[http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Iris- Pro-580-Mobi...](http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Iris- Pro-580-Mobile-Skylake-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1050-Mobile/m132950vsm211022)

(I compared mobile chips since the most powerful GT4 can only be found in the mobile chips.)

It's only slightly behind the 1030 which costs $73.

<comment><USER3> Look at it another way: no Intel iGPU is on par with any discrete GPU, because in price segments where iGPUs appear, discrete GPUs tend to vanish in a matter of 1-2 years. There used to be a significant number of NVIDIA Geforce MX420/440s, 5200s and 6200s. Then much fewer 730s. Now 1030s are practically only in laptops. Intel has been nibbling away at this market slowly, but steadly for a decade.

<comment><USER31> If driving FHD display is all that you want then integrated GPU is fine. But we start getting 4k/UHD nowadays...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Finally! Intel has a lot of catching up to do.

As GPUs continue to evolve into general purpose vector supercomputers, and as ML/deep learning applications emerge, it seems clear that more and more future chip real estate (and power) will go to those compute units, not the x86 core in the corner orchestrating things.

<comment><USER33> > Finally

Why on earth would you think Intel extending their near-monopoly is a thing to celebrate?

<comment><USER34> They don't have a monopoly in add-on GPUs. There are two strong competitors, and Intel's current on-chip GPUs are comparatively pitiful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _> With his hire, Intel will be developing their own high-end discrete GPUs._

With Intel and AMD backing Mesa, things on Linux will get very interesting.

<comment><USER28> I am sceptical about the consequences for user-controlled computing. AMDs GPUs have made a positive development in the past, while Intel is unfriendly to users control over the hardware they buy.

<comment><USER35> Intel GPU drivers are open on Linux. How is that worse than what AMD are doing?

<comment><USER28> Intel does more than integrated GPUs.

<comment><USER35> AMD too, but were are talking about GPUs in this case.

<comment><USER28> Yes, and because of the above mentioned, I am sceptical about the consequences. I don't consider it likely that the new GPU will work without proprietary firmware nor that the documentation will be better than AMDs now.

<comment><USER35> AMD GPUs also need firmware unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Damn, this is a major loss for AMD, losing Raja is definitely not the right move. It would have been interesting to see the next iteration of AMD graphics with Raja on board.

Threadripper, and the Zen architecture, put them back on the map, that's some serious hardware for the price. I wish they had just kept iterating on the CPUs and GPUs.

Vega is not a bad product, it just doesn't beat nvidia's offering in the bar charts, doesn't mean it's bad, it just means it's second place which is fine since it's cheaper as well. Technology needs to be iterated on. Something must be going on at AMD at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER37> Can someone explain this to me: Isn't the GPU industry all about Patents and trade secrets (enforced by NDAs). Won't all Rajas expertise be tied up in that?

<comment><USER38> Intel has a both a large patent portfolio and a lot of legal firepower in that space, so no, I don't think folks like Nvidia will be able to "threaten" Intel with patents. Nvidia might be able to threaten them with the monopoly card (clearly Intel is using its dominance in desktops and laptops to move into an adjacent market) but they have been doing that for many years with the integrated GPUs so I would expect it to be a weak play.

<comment><USER37> I must have expressed myself poorly. He's coming from AMD/RTG, everything he knows is presumably what they use/own. Nothing to do with NVIDIA

<comment><USER38> No, I understood, I just called out Nvidia because they are so often on the other side of a patent dispute with Intel. AMD and Intel have broad cross patent licensing deals in place because of previous fights over patents on the frontside bus, the instruction set, etc.

From a strategic markets point of view I see it this way;

Discrete GPUs gives Intel a shot of owning both pieces of high margin silicon in a laptop / tablet design win (GPU & CPU) and potentially it gives Intel additional ammunition to go after Nvidia or to mitigate their encroaching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Intel is all in on becoming a "data company", with the recent design wins in self driving cars & the AMD deal I'm confident that they will come out of the AI HW race in strong shape. This move just reaffirms that.

</comment><comment><USER40> It isn't clear that AMD's GPU architecture has been really competing with nvidia. We'll have to see how big a deal this is when AMD's APUs come out. I expect them to be quite a bit better than intels integrated product.

This seems to be more of an direct competitive attack on AMDs integrated product than it is competition with nvidia. It feels to me like building discrete GPUs is almost a misdirection.

</comment><comment><USER41> An interesting counterpoint here. I have a friend who works for Intel as an algorithms engineer for their self-driving vehicle acquisition (Mobileye). Currently, he's using 2 1080TIs w/ TensorFlow to perform deep learning. It is possible that Intel could be looking to develop a chip used specifically for this purpose (a bet on self driving cars) and not for mass-production/sale outside of that tech. Either way, all of the GPU/CPU updates in the past year is just going to create more competition, which is better for the consumer in most cases.

<comment><USER42> Well, the whole point of Mobileye acquisition was for Intel to have a competing chip for autonomous cars. But it is possible that they are also looking to compete on 1080Ti level. Which would be very hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Nvidia is lightyears ahead in the GPU market besides if this GPU push is aimed at the Deep Learning market Intel will have competition from the likes of Xilinx too. IMHO they need to provide great software to go with their GPUs. Traditionally hardware manufacturers have shipped barely usable software. They should perhaps try to use opencl and keep the rest of the tools and libraries open source.

<comment><USER44> This is what many people outside the AI world don't seem to understand. Nvidia has a stranglehold in the form of CUDA and Cudnn. There isn't any open source equivalent to Cudnn. AMD is trying to push OpenCl in this direction but it will be a long time before DL libraries start migrating to OpenCl. Like tomorrow by miracle if al alternative GPU which is as good as the 1080ti popped up, it would be useless in the AI market.

<comment><USER45> No it won't. Especially if the price is competitive. Say for the price of 1 1080ti, if i can buy 1.5 units of comparable performance graphics card, i'll surely buy it. There are already resources being spent on OpenCI based ML/DL platforms ([https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml](https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml)). The architectures keep getting bigger and training time keeps getting longer. I think you underestimate this factor. I need as much gpu computing power as i can buy within the budget.

<comment><USER44> True, I would love for some alternatives such as plaidml. However, I can't seem to fathom that Plaidml will be a worthy alternative to lets say Tensorflow or Pytorch or Caffe. I hope I am proven wrong.

<comment><USER45> I think support for OpenCI will eventually come to other frameworks. But the main problem is the fact that AMD is still far from the NVidia in terms of performance. Vega couldn't reach the performance of 1080Ti, and with Volta next year, the gap is gonna drastically increase. If only AMD can fill the gap, the support, i'm sure, will soon come after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It will be interesting to see how "discrete" thses GPUs will be. I'm assuming they will only be "descrete" in the sense that they are not on the same chip, but rather same package (via EMIB).

Either way surely this is a move by Intel to take away from Nvidia's consumer share (which makes up the vast majority of their income) as Nvidia make inroads into the data center market?

<comment><USER47> The big win that discrete GPUs provide to the cloud/backend marketplace (that Intel sorta plays in via Xeon Phi) is from large banks of VERY fast memory coupled with fast-clocked vector processors. But without a bunch of HBM or something similar, the discrete GPU won't be able to do training at the scale that NVIDIA and AMD do.

<comment><USER46> One would assume that in the data center for discrete cards Intel would do something with their Nervana acquisition and HBM, or possibly (but less likely) MCDRAM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I don't know too much about Raja Koduri, but is leaving AMD and immediately joining Intel not... really shady?

<comment><USER49> How is it shady to change jobs? This notion that you should be jobless for a period of time is ridiculous.

<comment><USER50> they are companies directly competing...it is very possible AMD engineer could bring proprietary information to INTEL. as in this literally recently happened and received massive press coverage with UBER and WAYMO- resulted in intense legal action.

<comment><USER51> The fact is that people have to have job mobility, and need to be trusted that when they leave a company, they leave behind that company's secrets. Many companies make you sign a document that attests this: if you have any company data, you destroy it, if you have any company equipment, you return it, if you have any company knowledge, you forget or neglect to discuss it.

Most people, honest people, have no problems understanding these obligations and abiding.

Dishonest people, who lie about destroying documents, are why we have Uber and Waymo battling it out.

<comment><USER52> _if you have any company knowledge, you forget or neglect to discuss it._

Given how the human brain works, that's very much impossible to do... "standing on the shoulders of giants" and all that, as the saying goes.

I'm sure some companies would love to be able to "reformat" employee's brains when they leave, but (fortunately) that's not the reality.

<comment><USER53> > standing on the shoulders of giants

Of course. No question that you take the sum of your education and experience with you to each new job. The "company knowledge" limitations are around specific trade secret inventions or verbatim recreation of such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> remember when project larrabee could raytrace quake in real time? hope this will be another stab at an hybrid gpgpu

</comment><comment><USER55> Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Unclear what AMD thought they stood to gain with the Monday announcement - <USER2> it didn't take long to have it play out in their disfavor.

I'm guessing Intel's GPU will never support OpenPower and Arm servers, and will never ship on a CCIX-enabled adapter.

</comment><comment><USER56> Can someone explain how I'm supposed to interpret this along with the other recent article on Intel & AMD creating a joint chip of some sort? Are they competing or cooperating?

<comment><USER57> They're not creating 'a joint chip of some sort' - AMD will be selling GPUs to Intel who will package them with their CPUs via EMIB.

[1] [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Also here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15651848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15651848)

</comment><comment><USER58> Since the days of Chips and Technology, intel has vacillated between going the full hog and retracting from GPUs.

Wonder if this time they will stick with it for the long haul.

</comment><comment><USER59> I am not sure everyone here knows about Raja. He is a talent at a totally different level. Big loss for AMD. AMD should have done all it could to keep him.

</comment><comment><USER60> Intel pick the wrong guy and wrong path.It just don't work.

I think Intel should acquisition Nvidia, and let Jen-Hsun Huang lead the new company.

</comment><comment><USER61> Brings back memories of Larabee their last attempt at making a GPU before they scrapped the project and wasted everyone's time.

<comment><USER62> I was on the room at GDCE 2009, where they were praising the vector instructions while presenting a session on Larabee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> intel once tried to do this with larrabee[0] some years back. hopefully they learn from what went wrong there.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_\(microarchitecture\))

<comment><USER51> Larrabee was an attempt to see if the x86 architecture could power a GPU. The answer was "not very likely", but it got turned into a product of its own anyways because it turned out to be very interesting for other compute-heavy use-cases. Larrabee's descendents became "Knights", which became the Xeon Phi product line.

Keep in mind Intel currently builds GPUs - just of the integrated variety. What's new here is that Intel is deciding to build discrete (standalone, like those you'd plug into a PCIe port) GPUs.

<comment><USER64> It was definitely being targeted to compete with other discrete graphics products, and at some point in the program they figured out that they would never meet the performance necessary to compere effectively. So in order to not have completely wasted several years of development, it was re-purposed as a product targeting HPC (the first generation Knights/Xeon Phi product)

<comment><USER51> Intel really doesn't mind "wasting" time on innovation - they make tens of billions of dollars a year and they're on top of the market. They can afford to go down blind avenues, especially when the research spills out so well, as it did in this case.

It definitely wasn't a "saving throw" that Larrabee's architecture got repurposed. There were several teams at Intel working in similar directions - one team worked on a "cloud on a chip", one team worked on high bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnects, one team worked on on-chip networking... they all came together and formed the Knights Ferry research project, which then got turned into the Xeon Phi.

The "core" of Larrabee, its quick little Pentium-derivatives, went on to be repurposed in the Quark product line and its lineage (e.g. the Intel PCH has a "Quark" inside). The 512-bit instruction set got parted out and became AVX512 in is various incarnations. They definitely got their money's worth out of Larrabee.

Nobody is disagreeing with the fact that Larrabee didn't turn into a discrete GPU despite their attempts make it so. (It's also not surprising, seeing the carriage turn back into a pumpkin with Cell and other Many Core architectures fail to pan out to be good at graphics workloads). But that's a separate issue from Intel building GPUs, since they have a _completely other team_ that works on building productized and shipped GPUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Wow, this might save Intel. They are floundering in the server market right now because they won't put enough PCIe lanes on their platforms, because that means lower sales. If they can grow up in the GPU market, then that means they basically win over AMD's latest maneuvers.

</comment><comment> dis-sys This again shows AMD is not ready for the battle with Intel.

Ryzen's chief architect left in 2015, now the master mind behind its GPU is leaving. You need to be really religious to believe that AMD is going to get any better in the coming competitions with NVIDIA and Intel.

</comment><comment><USER66> Ah, they sort of half-assed in trying with Real 3D. Was that Larrabee?

</comment><comment><USER67> Never mind, for me it seems raj has too much of higher expectations, which makes him a bad hire. Hope AMD finds someone committed and a real enthusiast to do the job.

</comment><comment><USER68> Nice! this will be a great win for Intel

</comment><comment><USER69> Interesting timing for this announcement, given Nvidia earnings tomorrow. Looks like intel is back its underhanded shenanigans.

</comment><comment><USER70> Trojan horse 101 lesson for AMD

</comment><comment><USER71> What is a discrete GPU?

<comment><USER72> A discrete GPU is a GPU that's not on-die with the CPU. A discrete GPU is usually something you stick in a PCIe slot.

A GPU on the CPU die, non-discrete, is often referred to as an "integrated GPU" or "integrated graphics." They're typically not very powerful, though they run common non-gaming applications just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Nvidia and ATI should develop x86 cpus for the balance's sake.

</comment><comment><USER74> Larabee reloaded.

</comment><comment><USER75> I can't wait for the twist in tomorrow's episode.

</comment><comment><USER76> What? Is there no noncompete clause? Strange

</comment><comment><USER77> what a coup this was.

Raja: "I'm...um...going on sabbatical." Lisa (CEO): "OK." Intel: "We're hiring Raja!!..." Lisa: "WTF".

<comment><USER78> At the risk of turning HN into Reddit, I'd like to politely suggest to keep jokes, puns, and other shenanigans off of Hacker News. If you have nothing constructive to add to the discussion, please refrain from commenting. Thank you :)

<comment><USER77> why do we all have to be so stoic and serious? can't we have a bit of fun?

<comment><USER78> Most people on HN are not looking for fun. They're here for information, intelligent discussion, and constructive criticism.

Use Reddit for fun! There is plenty of fun on the internet. Like Reddit, hackers don't want [Serious] tag.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Much Equity For An Idea? - <AUTHOR> I have a friend who is an idea machine. He is seriously talented at coming up with tech ideas that are original. However, that is all he brings to the table. No funding, no coding, no project management. Just the idea and wireframes.<p>He wants me to run with the idea but he wants (and deserves) something for the idea. Has anyone been in this situation before and how did you solve it: a small amount of equity? cash outright? He mentioned 5% equity. That sounds reasonable but I thought I'd ask here. <comment><USER2> Virtually no "ideas" are worth more than the price of the dinner you discuss them over. Wireframes strike me as much closer to professional services, which have market rates. If they're napkin levels of quality/fidelity then the market rate approaches the price of the napkin.

</comment><comment><USER3> My friend and I recently encountered a similar situation -- we decided to put out a mobile game together, and we have a third friend that we knew was interested in joining the project. He could have given us lots of ideas, but little or no productivity.

My test for deciding if you want to bring an 'idea man' along is this:

Imagine that you and your friend -- the idea man -- work together at a nice day job. You both make a good salary. One day, your boss tells you that he wants to fire your friend (who wouldn't take a pay cut) unless you're willing to take a pay cut. Your have two choices: (1) take the pay cut, or (2) your friend gets fired. How big does that pay cut have to be before you let your friend get fired?

For me, it's less than $1,000/yr. I love my friends dearly, but I'm not going to pay a buddy just to hang out at work and keep me entertained.

Unless your friend's idea is going to make you wealthy enough that you no longer have to work, then you probably don't want to give him 5% of your company just to be your friend.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends on the idea. If the idea is based on real world data, strong feedback and statistics - then, why not.

Otherwise is a complete zero. I personally have ideas for 10 lifetimes of work and that is just the top which I don't scrape after a brief analysis.

As others said - ideas, in their initial states, rarely worth anything. Experience shapes idea into an unrecognisable state and even the right ideas, without the correct offering, may fail.

\---

Sometimes an idea can be worth a lot. Image a working company in a bottleneck situation on their concept. They have a problem that blocks their scalability. If you bring up an idea, that will fit their situation and be an elegant solution - they this can be worth a lot. But this requires a tremendous experience in the field.

</comment><comment><USER5> As someone who has always heard, "Ideas are worthless without execution" and who was recently told, "Just because you have an App in the iTunes Store doesn't mean that you're not still at the idea stage" I'm going to say his idea isn't worth anything.

If I'm going to give 5% of my company to someone, it will be to my very first Dev who built V1.0 for very little money to build out his portfolio and because he liked the "idea". Without him I would never have had the opportunity that I do today.

<comment><USER6> Serious question to you - if the idea is 0% and the v1.0 is 5%, what's the other 95%?

<comment><USER7> I'm not the original poster, but I believe the most important part is finding, creating and executing on the business model (value proposition, finding channels, CUSTOMERS), the coding is just a small part of the execution:

[http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first- princ...](http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/)

[http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/businessmod...](http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/businessmodelgeneration_preview.pdf)

If your iOS app is just relying on the App Store as its channel, and the coding involved more than just writing to spec then maybe it's worth more than 5%, but the main value is in finding the spec, not coding it :) - if part of the value or the main part is having a good execution and user experience, it's also likely worth more than 5%, but it's maybe better for a VC-backed startup to just pay employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm guessing 0% unless the "idea" is more of a complex engineering theory of some kind.

For example, If the idea is "A better battery." Nothing. If the idea is "A new doping scheme using recent research in unrelated chlorine molecules that can drastically improve lithium ion battery life" then the person deserves equity.

</comment><comment><USER9> Most people know that ideas are dime a dozen, even good ones, hence they hold little intrinsic value.

With that said, you are considering investing in the idea, so that means you think there is some value in it, at least to you.

Offer/give what _you_ think is fair. If it makes you feel more comfortable, maybe do 5% up to a preset maximum?

</comment><comment><USER10> Conceivably, you could take your friends idea-- do some customer discovery and the idea morphs into something altogether very different. Where's your friend then? Do what you can to keep him as a bud. But a business partnership with equity requires a different level of commitment.

</comment><comment><USER11> 5% actually sounds about right to me, just based on gut.

If he continues to be involved, even in just an advisory capacity, I would think about issuing him more shares over time -- you might argue that at that point he's starting to provide product management assistance, or call him an advisor.

</comment><comment><USER12> Read/watch this advice from Derek Sivers. (The answer is 0)

[http://sivers.org/multiply](http://sivers.org/multiply) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgaBvEO2LYY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgaBvEO2LYY)

</comment><comment><USER13> Can you have your friend send some ideas my way? I've been looking for a good idea for a long time now.

</comment><comment><USER14> 0%

The original idea will inevitably morph into a completely different thing.

Edit:

If you must give something ( because it strikes your fancy) , then ensure they are non-voting shares and that he cannot prevent any ( and I mean any) amendments to the by-laws, shareholders agreement or the articles of incorporation. ( to the full extent of your laws)</comment>


The cronjob that generates $4 million a year - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/4540b0cde584?hn=true

<comment><USER2> The tile should be how buffer scale.</comment>


British Spies Replace Terrorists' Online Bomb Instructions With Cupcake Recipe - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/03/british-spies-terrorist-bomb-cupcake-recipe_n_870882.html <comment><AUTHOR> its all bake and no shake</comment>


IRS considers taxing perks at Google, other tech firms - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22982220/irs-is-looking-into-whether-free-meals-at <comment><USER2> I don't see why this is unreasonable. Right now it's basically a pretty easy way to evade taxes with freebies.

Don't have enough money for the payments on your house? No problem, just offer to take a pay cut and move into a "free" house provided by your employer. Alcohol sales tax too high in your state? No problem, just open a bar with "free" alcohol and charge an entry fee to the premises at the door.

In The Netherlands where I reside my employer provides "free" meals but they have to charge me 2 EUR for each one as a matter of law. In some other countries if you give out "free" beers to people you have to pay a mandatory minimum fee for each one etc.

If you don't do that then the optimum financial endgame for a company like Google is to basically turn into some mega corporation that pays its employees almost minimum wage, but provides "free" meals, housing, food, transportation etc. which they don't have to pay any taxes on because it's not being sold to anyone and can all be written off as internal costs.

Compensation isn't just handing someone a dollar bill.

<comment><USER3> Right, except the IRS has included perks such as housing, automobiles, even frequent flier miles[1], as "income" for over 60 years.

I think the outcry here is that government has much bigger fish to fry than hounding taxpayers over a few thousands bucks worth of free food every year. Your slippery slope argument isn't too far fetched though: this same sort of tax policy is exactly how the U.S. ended up with its ridiculous employer-paid health insurance scheme.

[1] In some cases. See 91 F.3d 72

<comment><USER4> >I think the outcry here is that government has much bigger fish to fry than hounding taxpayers over a few thousands bucks worth of free food every year.

I know the article repeatedly talks about employees paying additional tax, but at glance such taxes would seem to be paid by employers?

Also, to go off on a bit of a tangent - I've noticed that the perceived size of the "fish to fry" has a way of changing in line with the predilections of the source of the outcry.

Present the same person with the same dollar value as tax increase/break, spending cut/increase and watch their impression of the relative size and opinion of the change turn on a dime.

<comment><USER5> > I know the article repeatedly talks about employees paying additional tax, > but at glance such taxes would seem to be paid by employers?

It would be paid by the employees. Such expenses are tax deductible by employers regardless of whether it's a taxable benefit or just a cost of doing business.

Of course the incidence of the tax may be different, for example if, due to market forces, employers have to give people raises to cover the increased tax liability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're interested in what the IRS actually has to say about the taxability of meals and other perks:

<http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html>

 _Meals on Your Business Premises

You can exclude the value of meals you furnish to an employee from the employee's wages if they meet the following tests.

They are furnished on your business premises.

They are furnished for your convenience.

This exclusion does not apply if you allow your employee to choose to receive additional pay instead of meals._

Assuming AmaGooFaceSoft have prominent, enforced "These meals are provided to be consumed on the premises" signs, they're golden. (I assume that if they don't, they will shortly.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't entirely understand the arguments against taxing the perks made in the article. On one hand they're talking about how incredibly valuable to the company the free meals are, and on the other talking about how taxation would lead to these perks being killed.

If the meals really do provide that value, the company can trivially pay the tax on behalf of the employees.

<comment><USER8> _"If the meals really do provide that value, the company can trivially pay the tax on behalf of the employees."_

How exactly? You could estimate that meals were valued at $250 a month and then bump the salary of every employee by $250*(marginal federal + marginal state)taxrate so that when their W2 came they would owe tax but they would have the money. But what about people that withhold 10% for a 401k, so the money you bump up has 10% of it contributed to the 401k so you have to bump it an additional 10% to make sure the employee cost hit is neutral. So now you're providing funding to the 401k effectively. And then there are employees who bring their meals and then don't incur the cost but they get the paybump, do they file for a reduction in gross income because they didn't eat the meals, and then just pay marginal tax on the income bump? What about when their spouse came to visit and they ate a meal too, extra bump in income? extra tax? discount?

It isn't "trivially" possible to do anything except kill the benefit. That is "trivially" possible. And the people pushing for this aren't the IRS it's the companies that don't give their employees free food. I believe the free soda perk cancellation at Apple was before the web so it doesn't show up in archives but at one time all the soda machines on the Apple campus were free, and the IRS swooped in and told them to pay tax on them, and the soda was then "not free." I was at Sun (where food and soda was not free) but beer busts were, and thought that would help with our co-workers being poached. And it was part of the reason Sun killed the beer busts according to Crawford Beverage (no lie, that was his name!) who was the VP responsible.

Do you follow through and tax free laundry? sports equipment? medical visits? store discounts? swag at product launches? If you really wanted to nitpick it you could kill a lot of stuff at Google. You don't think some "not Google" company wouldn't prefer to level the playing field a bit?

<comment><USER9> > How exactly?

On December 31st, you gross up everyone's pay by say $10k, and pay taxes that are the marginal rate for YTD income.

Of course this doesn't fully cover the taxes for dual income high earners, and it can create some additional taxes for employees that have other income, because now their base is $10k higher. In this case, the change will cost these employees up to a few hundred dollars.

A tax change that _may_ cost someone a few hundred dollars, pretty quickly get's lost in the noise when you are talking about multi thousand dollar raises and bonuses.

<comment><USER10> "you gross up everyone's pay by say $10k"

It's nice to pretend that it as easy as waving your hand and saying everyone got $10k worth of perks, but what about people who didn't? Really, not everyone is eating the corporate food every day. Not everyone is going to the corporate happy hour. It is not fair, or possibly even legal, to just amortize the costs across everyone.

When faced with the accounting and legal overhead, companies are going to throw these perks out the window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And people wonder why some people think the government is basically a bunch of brainless fuckups who couldn't pour water out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.

This is, simply put, one of the most absurdly brain-dead stupid things I've ever heard in my life. And I've heard some _really_ stupid ideas in my life.

Whether this goes through or not, it's a perfect example of why we need to end the income tax and eliminate the IRS.

<comment><USER12> Why is it a stupid idea?

Company A pays an employee $100 per day, and provides a lunch which costs the company $10.

Company B pays the employee $110 per day, but the employee has to provide her own lunch.

Is it really fair that Company B has to pay more tax than Company A? Compensation is compensation, whether in kind or in cash.

<comment><USER13> The cost of the lunch is $10, but is the value to the employee $10?

The problem with taxing a product is that the actual value is unknown. In your example, taxing the lunch as $10 of income is actually giving the benefit to Company B due to the "reverse inequality of exchange". IE if you buy a $10 lunch, you actually value it more than the $10.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but the cash has the value of being flexible. For example, if you were looking to save money, you could brown bag a lunch from home and pocket the extra $10.

That flexibility might be more valuable to the employee than the nice lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have heard that when Google negotiates salaries, they often chime in about the value of the perks, and that employees should be willing to take a lower base bay because of the perks.

Google tells the IRS it is non-compensation, but tells prospective employees to value it as compensation.

<comment><USER14> This seems similar to touting "You get a Macbook Pro as your work laptop!" in recruiting materials (which I've seen countless times in recruiting pitches), even though that's undeniably a work expense when dealing with the IRS. This isn't a zero-sum game; just because a free meal at Facebook may be a net gain to Facebook (employees don't need to go off campus to work and thus can be more productive) doesn't mean the employee gets no benefit out of it and shouldn't consider it as a plus.

<comment><USER14> That should say "go off campus to eat", rather than "go off campus to work"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the shuttle necessarily a perk, though? It may just be compensating for the negative effect of their location on employees who would rather be in SF than Mountain View.

</comment><comment><USER16> These meals are actually profitable. Because I have free and good meals at Google, I always have my lunch there instead of leaving office and spending an extra ~30 min to go some place near (NYC office so I have that option), wait for service etc. My pay rate for this half-hour is higher than the cost of any meal that I would buy, regularly with my own cash; so I fail to see how Google is "spending". Not to mention the days when thing are busy enough so I take the food to my desk and eat it while working [instead of eating it at my desk while reading HN as usual :)]. It's also common for coworkers to have lunch together, or having visiting customers for lunch and other "business" scenarios.

Also, I know how much $ Google spends with food per employee, and it's a significantly lower number than what I would pay for the same amount and quality of food anywhere -- a small part of that due to no sales tax, but the bulk of savings comes from big economies of scale, very efficient operations, and no profit margin.

I am a Brazilian, and there most companies provide complimentary compensation as food coupons that are subsidized by not paying income or payroll taxes (both are very high in BR). Even higher-salaried employees get these coupons, usually in a value that's proportional to the salary; for an engineer that's high enough you can feed your whole family... when I lived alone I couldn't hope to spend all my coupons, so whenever I had a lot of accumulated excess I'd donate that to a charity. Now THAT is an obvious loophole to increase wages at the expense of taxes. Compared to this, the free food in companies like Google is available only to the employee, only at office, and it has no relation to your salary -- everybody gets the same food and other office perks.

There's an important element of healthcare too. Companies that can afford to provide free lunches are always also, companies that subsidize most or all of their employee's health insurance, which is a huge cost. The company has interest in managing employee health to minimize costs of insurance and sick leave; and Google certainly does that, they use lots of tricks and tactics to promote a healthy diet.

To summarize, this is much more complex than just "giving freebies" like some other posters think.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone know if the IRS serves free coffee in its break rooms?

<comment><USER18> I'm in DoD and we don't. Actually I'll take it a step further, I'm in the __NAVY __, where we joke that the whole Navy runs on coffee, and we make the government employees bring in their own snacks/coffee/etc.

Some random employee brought in their Keurig machine and lets the other employees use it. That what passes for "perks" for the rank-and-file.

<comment><USER19> I'm reminded of the government's TP Pool Regulations [1] in Neal Stephenson's _Snow Crash_.

[1] <http://soquoted.blogspot.com/2006/03/memo-from-fedland.html>

<comment><USER18> I actually did almost buy TP the other day after an unpleasant encounter with the new post-sequester personal hygiene equipment. But I forgot as soon as I sat down at my desk and apparently the bad TP was an accident and not actually due to the budget crunch.

But yeah, the memo is spot-on in many respects (15.62 exact == smartass) but unrealistic in others. For example I haven't seem this many words correctly spelled in a memo since I was on submarine duty, and no one here would be able to figure out how to word logic as twisted as that described.

Instead they would probably omit major details that need deciding while repeating minor details, slightly differently each time so that you can't be sure whether it's a unique requirement or not...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd be curious to see how much revenue this would generate for the government. I can't help but wonder if this is only a target because of its visibility. Even if this brought in an extra $1,000 per each of 10M IT workers in the US, that's only $10B. However, it's likely to not even be close to that. Meanwhile, the 0.0034% transaction tax only brings in less than $2B in revenue from financial trades. The proposal to increase that tax to 0.5% would bring in as much as $200B. I might be bias, but it seems like Wall Street should pay more taxes before silicon valley.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax#Unite...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax#United_States)

</comment><comment><USER21> In China, we get something like 20 RMB a day for lunch; this is a government- specified benefit that the company can give us tax free, which is why Microsoft, which doesn't otherwise offer free food in Redmond, will give us this benefit in China.

On the other hand, we must pay tax on our health insurance, as the PRC laws on this subject are still too ambiguous.

</comment><comment><USER22> So the IRS wants Google to get taxed to buy the food and then the employees to get taxed for eating the food?

</comment><comment><USER23> Given how mean my employer is I'd be in line for a substantial rebate!</comment>


Embrace Bad Ideas and No Business Model - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/835eb815eeb4

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this as an investor but I think the concept applies to startup founders too. In my friend Yariv Sadan's words " The corollary for entrepreneurs: work on ideas that seem bad and that have no business model. If your idea is obviously good it's probably too late to build it because that obviousness is predicated on the success of other companies, which have already captured the market."</comment>


Apple Could Look to Acquire Disney Amid Stock Drop - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/apple-could-acquire-disney-stock-drop-analyst-says-1284475 <comment><USER2> This is just the word of one analyst without any inside knowledge of neither Apple nor Disney. They're just mentioning them because those two brands draw eyeballs.

If this was actually Apple's content strategy, you would imagine they would have bought Netflix or HBO ages ago when they first decided they wanted to get into streaming.

<comment><USER3> Buying Disney would be a huge mistake for Apple by creating a massive distraction from the platform services that must be top notch. Adding Disney's executives and staff to the roster would dumb down Apple to a degree which is unacceptable.

<comment><USER4> Sorry but the idea that Disney's execs would dumb down Apple is just ridiculous. I'd thoroughly recommend you look up what analysts think of Disney's performance as a company. They kick butt. Just because they run theme parks and make movies instead of producing little blocks of aluminium and glass doesn't make them stupid.

<comment><USER5> They may not be dumb, but culturally, the companies are miles apart. Disney is incredibly bureaucratic and is does a very poor job of developing and deploy technology. Most of the impressive displays of tech you associate with Disney were licensed or acquired, with a Disney label slapped on them. There is a permanent cold war between VP-level execs who seek to undercut each other.

Source: former mid-level technology manager in IT at Disney Parks and Resorts who had a weekly audience with VPs and SVPs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard similar stories from other Disney IT employees. It does seem like the tech coming out of the Research divisions continues to be extremely impressive though. Curious to get your thoughts on that.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apple wants nothing to do with the theme parks, which is a huge part of Disney..

<comment><USER7> Maybe rights to all Star Wars content for future streaming services? Everybody watched the Mandalorian and that was just 1 part out of more than 180 books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> absurd on its face

<comment><USER9> the idea of buying disney reminds me of when matsushita (panasonic) bought mca (universal) and then promptly sold it off a few years later because the relationship was so fraught with conflicts [0]

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/01/business/company-news- mat...](https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/01/business/company-news-matsushita- is-said-to-be-eager-to-sell-off-its-mca-division.html)</comment></comment>


Report: World trending to hit 50% renewables, 11% coal by 2050 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/report-world-trending-to-hit-50-renewables-11-coal-by-2050/ <comment><USER2> It seems pretty dubious to project this out 32 years. I find it more enlightening to look at some of the data this is based on. For example, official US government figures for historical energy consumption:

[https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_6.pdf](https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_6.pdf)

You can see that even in the past 15 years, there were several inflection points that were probably unpredictable beforehand. Coal went from flat to declining, natural gas went from flat to increasing, petroleum rose then fell again, renewables were flat before rising up to a current rate of 11% of US energy consumption.

I'm rooting for renewable energy here and the future does seem bright. But any sort of high-level prediction that claims to project out for 32 years just isn't the right way to analyze.

<comment><USER3> Hear, hear. In fact, anyone who can disregard the history of past predictions (in energy or almost anything else) so much as to bother with a 32-years-out prediction, seems untrustworthy.

Also, unlikely to persuade anyone of anything. It's a pretty well-known feature of human psychology that distant prospects don't motivate us the way they should. Actually, maybe the unreliability of long-term predictions is part of why we evolved to be like that...

<comment><USER4> Just finished reading that chapter of the The Black Swan. True, the 32-year year number is useless, but the slope is probably still good for the next couple of years. Of course the negative uncertainties still dominate.

The more interesting question is how do you expose yourself to the positive uncertainties involved (e.g. a carbon negative power technology)? This requires investment in research in parallel with your infrastructure investments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From what ever little I know, this is the most optimistic and best case scenario and the central assumption of the report seems to be we are going to get a battery miracle and that will make S&W much more practical for day round and year round production and consumption cycle.

From the report: Germany sees rapid change to 2025 with coal and gas generation falling 29%, nuclear phased-out and renewables topping 70% of generation. \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Germans are burning more coal than Pre-Fukushima days and Munich is 48N latitude.. good luck with Solar. That production efficiency from massive solar installation thus far is not that impressive.

<comment><USER6> The increases in coal consumption are lagging indicators because the regulatory process for building a new one starts at about 5-10 years before it is powered up. Technological progress and changing economies of scale in solar, natural gas, and wind have done a real number on energy investments over the last few decades. You're looking at the consequences of investment decisions made 10-20 years before it was obvious how fast solar/wind would reach parity with coal or how plentiful a much cleaner fuel like natgas would become.

<comment><USER5> That is why I picked 7 year time line of Germany. Of the 33% renewable in Germany 7% comes from biomass that is a free for all definition that includes at times burning wood.

Right now, Biomass is 7% compared to 6% of Solar. Germany is known to have massive solar (read it.. not from there).

From 33% to 70% in span of 7 years - that is something.

I am not rooting against it, if that is the impression my post gave. My point is the report is too good to be true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The 50% point at 2050 seems very late. Renewables are becoming cheaper already and on present trends will be noticeably cheaper in say 5 years (2023) and then there's not much problem cracking ahead. Already "Renewable energy now makes up nearly third of all electricity generated in UK" [https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/uk-renewable- energ...](https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/uk-renewable-energy-third- electricity-generated-wind-solar-panel-any-other-forms-mentioned- coal-a8122921.html)

<comment><USER8> Don't worry, linked graph shows 64% renewable energy generation. 48% Wind / Solar, ~2% other, and ~14% Hydro.

I know bad reporting is common, but this is ridiculous.

<comment><USER6> You can mine the materials, fabricate, and deploy solar panels or wind turbines without significantly impacting ecology (even when drastically increasing shade in deserts) but dams completely change the landscape and flow of water with consequences reaching as far as tidal pools and tributaries fed by rivers that are damed hundreds of miles away.

It's becoming more and more common to exclude hydro from the list of renewable energy sources because the ecological impact of dams is huge and largely irreversible - something that has only begun to enter popular conscience (at least in California) over the last few decades. The point of renewable energy is to avoid exhausting natural resources at an unsustainable rate and that includes ecological diversity.

<comment><USER8> I don't see how existing dams are going to harm biological diversity any more than they already have. So, that argument seems excessive.

More directly, solar may be more harmful to the environment than nuclear. Renewable means something specific, pretending it must be good for the environment has noting to do with it.

<comment><USER9> > solar may be more harmful to the environment than nuclear.

Wow. What?

<comment><USER8> Nuclear _can_ be very self contained. They both take quite a bit of mining, but solar needs more land area.

Sure, rooftops works for single family homes, but that does not scale for high rises. Unlike Wind you can't grow crops under solar, so you end up changing habitats that would have been untouched.

Granted, if you fuck it up Nuclear can cause more problems. But most of it's issues are for Humans with our longer lifespans and higher cancer risks. Just look at all the wildlife in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. And, the area around Fukushima is rapidly turning into wilderness.

<comment><USER7> You can grow crops under solar sometimes [http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/12/doubling-up- crop...](http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/12/doubling-up-crops-with- solar-farms-could-increase-land-use-efficiency-by-as-much-as-60/)

<comment><USER8> That's rather low density solar and still requires extra farm land. But, point well made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not enough. We need to go faster if we can't get down further.</comment>


Lisp in a Startup: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - <AUTHOR> https://www.slideshare.net/vseloved/lisp-in-a-startup-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly <comment><USER2> Direct PDF link: [https://www.european-lisp- symposium.org/static/2018/dyomkin....](https://www.european-lisp- symposium.org/static/2018/dyomkin.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a recorded talk of this? Because these slides don't cut it alone.</comment>


Rails 3.2.13, 3.1.12, and 2.3.18 have been released - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2013/3/18/SEC-ANN-Rails-3-2-13-3-1-12-and-2-3-18-have-been-released/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for the fixes guys. The string of security fix releases go both ways in my head: on the one hand, I'm happy that people are actively tackling the issues as they arise, on the other hand I feel that the handling of JSON, XML and YAML looks overly complicated and that some intrinsic aspects of Rails make it even harder to keep under control (as exemplified by the half-dozen fixes over the past few weeks).

Anyway, Rails is now more secure than it was yesterday, that's a great thing so yeah, thank you very much.

</comment><comment><USER3> Major thanks to the committers who volunteer and work very hard on these releases.

You're making Rails safer, each day, bit by bit.

<comment> grey-area Yep, kudos to tenderlove and others for putting in the work to make this framework secure by default. The changes in Rails 4 should help more with this as well (strong parameters in particular).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those that found it obnoxious, this should remove the "Rack::File headers parameter replaces cache_control after Rack 1.5." warning you may have been seeing occasionally when booting Rails.

<https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/8812>

<comment><USER5> Thank you. Someone should start a blog of all the deprecation warnings Rails gives which are un-blockable and not able to be remedied by the recipient of the warnings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> can anyone comment as to ruby 2.0 and rails 3.2.13 ? Ruby 1.9.3 was still recommended for the 3.2.12 release of rails and was wondering if this was changed with this release.

edit: I actually found in the changelog : Feb 24, 2013:

Sikachu: Rails 3.2.x is now compatible with Ruby 2.0.0

thanks

<comment><USER7> Yes, please report anything that does not work on Ruby 2.0.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> on a southwest flight and any website I visit that is not under https, has dozens of add on advertisements... makes me wish more of the web was secured... visiting the site above for security patches and seeing the hashes for those released files, reminds me that because that site isn't https someone could modify those hashes... tried downloading the files and southwest modified the binaries corrupting them... anyways good to see security releases being pushed out just wish we had better security on the delivery...

<comment><USER9> My announcement emails contain the hashes and I sign the emails. If you don't trust the blog, you can verify my signature against the announcement emails:

[http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby- talk/...](http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/405934)

<comment><USER10> Some of these patches involve dates that are quite old. For example, [https://rubyonrails- security.googlegroups.com/attach/6c2482d...](https://rubyonrails- security.googlegroups.com/attach/6c2482d4ed1545e6/3-0-jdom.patch?view=1&part=3) bears a timestamp of Fri, 8 Feb 2013 02:48:22 +0000.

Is this indicative of the time the vulnerability was reported?

Is it normal procedure for a patch for a security vulnerability to delayed for 36 days?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is that a real Jason Fried comment or a troll?

 _Yet another freak'n patch again. Ridiculous!

At this rate, you might as well just make an official "patch Monday", so that we can expect to have weekly security bugs fixed._

<comment><USER12> Not a real Jason Fried.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, just noticed it in the other announcements. I guess I never look at the comments. Nevermind!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone else getting a uninitialized constant Mocha::Integration since updating to Rails 3.2.13

I am using test unit and this seems to be related to mini test so I am not sure what is going on?

<comment><USER7> There are some issues around `uninitialized constant Mocha`: <https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/9478>

If that's not the same as yours, please file an issue.

<comment><USER13> Cool Thanks

<comment><USER14> I'm also seeing this issue - if you open a new issue, please link to it.

<comment><USER14> I created one - here's the link for anyone who wants it: <https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/9783>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> why-el Anyone using Rails 4.0 in production?

<comment><USER15> Here at 500px we are using it for one of our services. No major problems, but we've had to send out a couple pull requests for side gems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is a regression in JSON and UTF8 encoding, sometimes manifested as `invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII` or as non-escaped utf8 characters in JSON output.

If this causes problems and you want a quick fix, this gist does the job.

<https://gist.github.com/sandstrom/5199891>

</comment><comment><USER17> Anybody else unable to to upgrade via bundler? I can report also seeing the following behavior: <https://twitter.com/jamesgolick/status/313751280210288641>

Not sure if this is a rails, bundler, or rubygems issue, at this point.

<comment><USER18> I had this issue as well. My hacky workaround was to add the version to the Gemfile, bundle update rails, remove the version from Gemfile, then bundle update rails again (to remove the hardcoded version in the lockfile).

Yuck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can we change the title to include "[SECURITY]" ?

</comment><comment><USER19> I love how Jason Fried, the most self-important man in software (who can't code) is first on the list to diss the security patches. Fuck you, Jason. Learn to code. Then you can diss.

<comment><USER20> I'm quite certain it's a troll.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I do not understand, why they are overcomplicating things so much - why isn´t there just ONE rails framework? Issues with backwards compatibility vs. new features? Or what was causing this "forks"? In three years, will there be six rails versions?

<comment> eric-hu If you have a large application, upgrading it will not be trivial. Suppose your company spent several months developing their app on Rails 3.1.x. Rails 3.2.x comes out and some gems you're using break when you try the upgrade. Your company still has other bugs to fix and features to produce, so they switch back to 3.1.x and just make a note to check compatibilities periodically.

The 3 versions patched are not forks. They're just different versions of Rails. In three years, they'll probably still support about 3 versions and drop support for older versions once they hit a certain age.

<comment><USER22> Spot on. We were still running 3.0 a couple of months ago when a vulnerability came out with the indication that this would be the last patch version of 3.0. We made it a point to upgrade to Rails 3.1 right then—it took about two days, which we didn't really have, but we needed to do. Since then, we've taken another 3-4 days over the last couple of months to upgrade to 3.2 (and start using features that will make a migration to 4.0 much easier).

<comment> eric-hu You mind if I ask what 3.2 features will make 4.0 migration easier? I haven't kept up with the 4.0 changes

<comment><USER7> We offer strong_paramters as a gem for Rails 3.2 apps, and generally tell anyone doing greenfield development to start with it to make the transition easier, and because it's simply better.

You can check the upgrading guide for more details about what's changed, and a third party is selling an ebook that has a ton of good info as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android 4.0 (ICS) ported to Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1700

<comment><USER2> Interesting, though chromeos was ported recently as well. I just wished the Pi had the option to add more memory as that would open up so much more.</comment>


Strange Plants of Socotra Island - <AUTHOR> http://www.binscorner.com/pages/s/strange-plants-of-socotra-island.html <comment><USER2> Oh, this is really annoying! During my around-the-world solo sail I was warned to stay away from Socotra, described as a den of pirates. Being alone on my boat made me particularly wary of such places, but based on the linked pictures, it seems I missed an amazing experience.

The nearby African coast is now the site of many more recent pirate attacks, including the attack on which the movie "Captain Phillips" is based.

An account of my sail: [http://arachnoid.com/sailbook](http://arachnoid.com/sailbook)

<comment><USER3> I remember coming across your book at 10pm one night a while ago, and becoming so engrossed in it that I finished it in one sitting. Highly recommended!</comment></comment>


Zuckerberg commits Facebook to $10m donation to groups working on racial justice - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/01/mark-zuckerberg-commits-facebook-to-10-million-donation-to-groups-working-on-racial-justice/ <comment><USER2> It's so messed up that if I gave $20 that would have more of an impact on my finances than his donation would.</comment>


How oil did not corrupt Norway - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0.html#

<comment><USER2> Plenty of countries are natural resource rich and do not run into major issues.

Canada, the US, Australia, and yes - Norway, all come to mind. Usually, the factor that enables a country to resist corruption from natural resources comes from having a proper governance system already in place.

Even something that many perceive as trivial, like tax collection, is essential. Because what often happens is, a nation will not collect taxes and instead say they will let the riches from natural resources trickle down to the citizenry. This enables dictatorships/political elites to remain entrenched at their expense.

You also need government agencies in place to make sure that surveys are being conducted properly so that the auction process can be optimized.

I remember a story about an African nation that needed to auction off mining rights. Their data was well over 100 years old, whereas some MNC mining companies had state of the art testing, as a result there was asymmetrical information that worked against their government.

One way to circumvent that lack of information is to auction permits in a rolling manner. So you auction off the ability to only mine in one small area. Then, if there is a discovery, you can raise initial prices for future permits in the surrounding area.

<comment><USER3> _Plenty of countries are natural resource rich and do not run into major issues._

That's certainly true. I think most of those countries are countries that have healthy economies independent of natural resource exploitation. This is certainly true of your examples, even, to some extent Norway (about a quarter of Norway's GDP comes from the petroleum industry according to Wikipedia). This is not to discount the importance of proper governance, as you say. However, I think there's a case to be made that part of the reason that many nations rich in natural resources have problems is because their extractive industries account for such a huge proportion of their economies.

<comment><USER2> Yes, finding having a boom in natural resources does have the effect of crowding out other industries. I agree with you. That's "Dutch Disease" and you can find it in many well governed resource rich nations.

The poster above brings up Alberta, you bring up Norway.

But Dutch Disease is just one detrimental 'symptom' of the resource curse.

Some of the more adverse symptoms are increased levels of conflict and corruption and those are precisely the fears you need to have when looking at Afghanistan's potential mineral wealth because there is a lack of proper governance in place.

Now going back to your example, Norway -- and Alberta too. It is precisely because of their governance systems that they can harness natural resource wealth at more optimal levels than nations with the curse.

Norway for example has one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. That provides a mechanism for reinvesting the natural resource wealth into other industries. I am no experts on SWFs, but from my reading, Norway's SWF has a pretty good reputation.

To contrast that, look at some of the resource rich conflict nations in Africa. They don't have formal laws and organizations to structure transparent SWFs, they have swiss bank accounts that they use to raid government revenues and sometimes fund militias.

So it is good governance that helps minimize the friction caused by new found natural resource wealth and redistribute it in an optimal manner.

<comment><USER3> I pretty much agree with you. In the case of Afghanistan, though, I'd have to say that poor governance is already a serious problem, and in fact it could hardly get worse. The U.S. would like to improve this situation (as long as we've got troops in the country, anyway), but I've yet to see any evidence that we know how.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although there is very little corruption in Norway, we certainly have some issues as a result of the oil and gas resources. There is a lot of concern that Norway's economy has "Dutch disease" - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease>

Norway is also politically more socialist than the US. This is one area where I admire the US more, because the US has more opportunities for innovation, tech startups and in general a more agile and productive economy outside of the oil industry.

PS: I'm Norwagian...

<comment><USER5> I'm not so sure you should admire the US so much. There is certainly an entrepreneurial spirit there, but income mobility is much higher in Scandinavia. Better chance of becoming rich if your parents are poor.

Also, Norway is usually at the bottom of the Nordic countries in corruption rankings. Usually this is attributed to the oil sector.

Dutch disease might be a problem, but /I/ think it will be quite mild, because we are so aware of the possibility. Salary increases have not been totally out of proportion this year, unless you start thinking about the countries around us with actually sinking salaries....

/also Norwegian

<comment><USER6> It's important to look on social mobility vs financial mobility. Even though you have high income mobility in a rich country like Norway there is still poor social mobility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reposted from 288 days ago (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794116>) because I found it relevant to the just discovered mineral deposits in Afghanistan.

<comment><USER7> Except that the mineral deposits weren't 'just discovered' [http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/no-the-military- didn...](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/no-the-military-didnt-just- discover-an-afghan-mineral-motherlode/)

Considering the US position in Afghanistan, this seems like a strategic plant on behalf of the Pentagon/govt to justify our continued deployment there. The NYT has certainly played a willing role in the past (google Judith Miller and Iraq).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. My first reaction was similar, followed by "Who will profit", and I see the Wired article poses pretty much the same questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've never heard this story before. Didn't expect to get a history lesson on Hacker News about my country :) Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like Farouk found the perfect job for him. What an amazing and empowering thing to do. Being successful is often the reward for finding the perfect match like this.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, talk about right place right time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A great article, but I think it's pretty easy to delineate enough major differences between pre-oil Norway and current-day Afghanistan to render the comparison moot.

</comment><comment><USER12> If the Norwegians feel guilty about having too much money, they are welcome to buy a round for their friends in Denmark.

<comment><USER13> We do, gladly - det er dejlig å være norsk i danmark!! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's indeed an interesting article, but I failed to understand what Norwegians managed to do differently than other states to achieve success. It seems article doesn't go into much detail about it.

<comment><USER15> First step was to have their own state owned oil company that would take part in exploration and drilling, rather than allowing foreign companies to take control in hope of 'trickle down effects'

Step two was to introduce a regulating body with strict policies (the policies were written by the subject of the article). The policies included extraction rates, technology standards, environmental standards etc.

Third step was that the regulating body treated the government owned oil company just like any other when it came to tenders or exploration licenses - which minimizes corruption in government (or just shift corruption to this regulating body, really - but I guess they have some form of parliamentary oversight).

Further step was that all profits from exploration and drilling went into a sovereign wealth fund which would divest the wealth of the nation into foreign markets - smoothing out economic cycles domestically and providing a future fund.

All of these policies together contributed to a system that has less of a corrupting effect on both the local government and local economy. It is a best case example of how to maximize the overall benefit from resource wealth that would usually only benefit a selected few people or just a select sector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> lol. Uncorrupted? What happens when their oil runs out in 10-20 years?

<comment><USER17> They'll stop pumping money into the national oil fund, a bunch of people in the Norwegian oil industry will have to look for new jobs, and the cost of living will probably slowly trickle down to the same level as the neighbouring countries.

The oil industry contributes a large part of the GDP of Norway, but it's not a large employer.</comment></comment>


Startups: beware of 'A Passion for Development' when hiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.darendavidtaylor.com/startups-beware-of-a-passion-for-development-when-hiring/ <comment><USER2> Passion ... such an _unfortunate_ word choice. Or perhaps not - perhaps this tells more than meets the eye: [http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/passion](http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/passion)

</comment><comment><USER3> If your a me too company than I would say follow that advice. If your a tech company that wants to attract the best your going to need to have a good platform that stays update. good developers want to experiment and learn.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> yeah, many of the Synonyms ring true, fury... hahah.</comment>


Papyrus Watch - <AUTHOR> http://www.papyruswatch.com/

<comment><USER2> First they came for Comic Sans, but I wasn't a 41-year old administrative assistant and mother of three…</comment>


Why Experiment Server-Side? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.optimizely.com/2017/05/04/experiment-server-side/ <comment><USER2> AdBlockers are blocking more trackers and third party js than ever before. I've seen multiple pricing tables, call to actions and forms be entirely screwed up by an ad blocker trashing VWO, Optimizely or similar.

Server side tests obviously sidestep this and are likely both more performant and more accurate.

</comment><comment><USER3> One reason to consider keeping your experimentation on the server side is that the browser is an untrusted computing environment and can be easily manipulated by hostile agents.

This is a general problem with client-side code, I'm surprised it doesn't come up more often.

<comment><USER4> For example, I once knew a site was using A/B/C/D testing to derive a demand curve for their product and just kept wiping my cookies until I got the product for 1/3 the cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Question, why use Optimizely for server side testing, you're going to pay a lot of money for something that has a ton of open source alternatives, and really isn't rocket science.

Their client side stuff was revolutionary, marketing can run tests by themselves FTW. The grid in this article goes into that.

On the server side, you're going to need to add triggers for goals etc in your development environment, just feels like shoehorning Optimizely in their non core competency is a mistake.

</comment><comment><USER6> My company is actually very interested in using Optimizely server-side, but unfortunately there is no Go SDK. Would love to see that happen.

<comment><USER7> Why not just write it yourself? The api has been stable for a while, so it should only take you a couple hours to get something basic for your internal needs.</comment></comment>


Bypassing Gmail's malicious attachment filter with "one weird trick" - <AUTHOR> https://warroom.securestate.com/bypassing-gmails-malicious-macro-signatures/ <comment><AUTHOR> Saved you a click: Gmail is grepping for the string "powershell" in a malicious macro. Splitting up the string evades detection.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you read an article or its comments first? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering because I tend to read the comments first. The comments on HN work like a kind of machine that extracts all the relevant information and sums it up in a souccient way (well sometimes anyway). What I mean is the comments are so good on HN they often outstrip the quality of the articles. <comment><USER2> Comments first: it can save you a lot of time and I find that having knowledgable and/or expert contributions can really augment the linked article's content.

One must exercise caution, however, lest the comments will prime your opinion- making circuitry and cause you to form their opinion instead of your opinion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Comments first, unless the article is extremely appealing.

Sometimes I never read the article at all, just the comments.

</comment><comment><USER4> Article first.

Side note: this should have been a poll.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but polls are currently disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the title is link-baity I read the comments first.</comment>


The Virtual Machine - <AUTHOR> http://virtualmachine.topholt.com:5000/

<comment><USER2> For the author's challenge about injecting code: I was able to get it to execute arbitrary code by making the compiled code longer than 128 bytes. When that happens, execution runs right into your data memory, which you can populate with the opcodes you want.

<comment><USER3> I'm the author. Just wanted to say: Cool :-) Have you played Microcorruption?

<comment><USER2> Nope, but I've performed plenty of memory corruption over the years. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Reasons why is Apple trading at such low levels - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/28/chart-of-the-day-apple-valuation-edition/

<comment><USER2> I am afraid that it's #6. Sad but true. Personally, I've never owned an Apple product, but sometimes I have a feeling that Mr. Jobs has more to do with my Android phone than anyone else (of course Google ripped off iPhone, but that's life).</comment>


Facing 169 years in prison, US judge orders detention of VW executive - <AUTHOR> http://m.dw.com/en/us-judge-orders-detention-of-vw-executive-oliver-schmidt-as-serious-flight-risk/a-37977551 <comment><USER2> As written, the title means "[The judge who is] facing 169 years in prison..."</comment>


Review of Amazon Connect - <AUTHOR> I wrote a review of Amazon Connect. I hope this helps you in determining if this is something you want to use. If you have any questions let me know. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/review-amazon-connect-gordon-campbell <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/review-amazon-connect- gordon-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/review-amazon-connect-gordon- campbell)</comment>


Master Ruby Web APIs Is Out - <AUTHOR> http://master-ruby-web-apis.samurails.com/ <comment><USER2> Looking forward to checking it out!

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks awesome so far.</comment>