Kodak Shifts into Drug Production with Help of a $765M U.S. Loan - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/kodak-lands-765-million-u-s-loan-in-start-of-medical-supply-chain-fix-11595930400 <comment><USER2> This actually makes a lot of sense. Back when I worked it a lab, a lot of our chemicals had "Kodak" labels. There is a lot of chemical synthesis involved in photographic chemical production and often a _massive_ scales.

I have no idea if Kodak still has a lot of the production facilities, but it would be awesome to be able to repurpose that capital equipment.</comment>


French woman wins disability grant for 'gadget allergy' - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/french-woman-wins-disability-grant-gadget-allergy-181535392.html <comment><USER2> Not to be exceptionally rude, but perhaps people that claim to have EHS should just stay within a Faraday cage at all times.</comment>


Making PostgreSQL Realtime - <AUTHOR> https://realm.io/news/making-postgresql-realtime/ <comment><USER2> Trying to solve this problem with a Postgres => CouchDB & PouchDB solution currently. I got pretty excited when I saw this, only to be disappointed to find it only works with their Enterprise edition.</comment>


White House Iraq page: Fascinating scrolling layer effects - <AUTHOR> http://1.usa.gov/t8o0L3

<comment><AUTHOR> Make sure to scroll the page (wheel or arrow keys) rather than page up/down.</comment>


Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/where-are-the-hardest-places-to-live-in-the-us.html <comment><USER2> I am from Bell County, Kentucky, ranked 3110 out of 3135 counties. I no longer live there, but my parents do. I was there just yesterday for Thanksgiving.

It may be tempting to dismiss the problems plaguing this region as being self- inflicted, a mere product of backward ways and a collective refusal to catch up. These problems, however, are infinitely more complex than that. Countless politicians at every level of government have tried to find a solution.[0] In the end, they all failed.

It occurs to me as I type this that I don't have a precise thesis for my comment, other than to say this: It is not easy. If it were easy to fix, we would have.

[0] [http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9518](http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9518)

<comment><USER3> > Countless politicians at every level of government have tried to find a > solution.[0] In the end, they all failed.

You can lead a horse to water...

As long as people insist on believing that the earth is 6000 years old, that lowering taxes on rich people is going to make their own lives better, and that the best way to preserve freedom and peace is unfettered access to firearms, there is only so much you can do for them. At the end of the day you simply can't help someone who steadfastly refuses to help themselves.

<comment><USER4> What a ridiculous comment. So if they don't subscribe to liberal values they deserve their fate? You sounds like lke the rednecks i've met. "Those dumb city folks just don't know any better!"

<comment><USER3> Science is not a liberal value.

<comment><USER4> Looking down on folks who don't think like you apparently is.

<comment><USER5> Facts are non-negotiable.

<comment><USER4> Treating people with respect should also be non-negotiable.

I'm always amazed at the folks who are "open-minded" and at the same time feel a need to "correct" anyone who doesn't think the same way they do.

What is the harm if folks have different beliefs than you?

<comment><USER3> The problem is not that their beliefs are different. The problem is that in places like rural Kentucky, doggedly clinging to beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is widely considered to be a virtue. That is not an attitude that is conducive to problem-solving, and so, unsurprisingly, problems tend to go unsolved.

I don't think that pointing this out is in any way disrespectful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm from Lexington, KY, the blue dot in a sea of orange on the map. You hear a lot about Appalachia's woes (the stories on the local news from Bell County, Bath County, etc are depressing beyond words), but it's been hard for me to understand _why_ Appalachia is the way it is: chronically, horribly and uniformly poverty stricken.

So I just read this PBS author interview which tries to put some reasons to it: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings/duncan.html)

The main takeaway, as I read it, is that in cities and other rural areas there is a middle class and even some upper class folks around and the resources they bring along (and maybe even the example they set... sorry if that's offensive) is a positive influence on the extremely poor. In cities, obviously you have better municipal services and programs and a professional class of doctors, lawyers, etc. In rural farmland many families own their land which has some value and there are some wealthy landowners with large tracts sprinkled in.

In Appalachia, there's none of that. The land isn't worth anything and it's just poor poor poor as far as the eye can see (which is large, geographically, unlike inner cities).

Except for coal mine owners and operators. That, I can't explain. Do they live in the area? Do they not contribute to the communities? The PBS article goes as far as to say they actively held the poor down to keep them working in the mines, but I'd have to see more evidence to believe that wholesale.

In any case, it strikes me that this wasteland of poverty with very few middle class or wealthy folks is the opposite effect of tech hubs. Brad Feld and others have written about how the density of entrepreneurs and angel investors with deep pockets is what makes a tech hub viable (very liberally paraphrased). From a general perspective, it seems like a normal curve where the outliers at the top are places most uniformly non-poor and populated densely and the outliers at the bottom are uniformly poor and populated sparsely.

<comment><USER7> It's a bad cycle. Imagine you're the "wealthy" person in a town of poor, jobless people. What local businesses do you spend you time and money in? Groceries and gas? Both are probably not locally owned, so most of what you spend leaves the area. You drive 2 hours on weekends to get to the nearest Walmart to buy clothes, so again most of your money leaves the area: and none of the places you're spending at employee lots of people and/or pay them lots of money. Most of the jobs servicing those industries will be part-time anyways.

For the people who work in the mines, they make more money, but they honestly don't really know what to do with it...and there's nothing in particular to spend it on locally anyway.

Even worse, arable land is a rarity, it is a mountain area! So it's hard to even build a local agricultural economy. It's isolated from transport links, landlocked and hard to navigate. If you pick a route from anywhere East of Appalachia, and take it to San Francisco or L.A., you'll be routed entirely around the area in favor of a Northern or Southern route.

I didn't grow up in Appalachia, but I grew up in an area not too different from it. Honestly, if we hadn't been within commuting distance of a major city, my career options would have been farm work or gas station attendant. There wasn't even enough of a commercial sector for "retail clerk" to make the list.

It's a useful thing to drive through that area: it's stunningly beautiful, but you start to get a feel for why there's so little going on there.

<comment><USER8> Tourism might work, the area is plenty beautiful. Of course, those jobs aren't really that great. Most cities in mountainous regions are built in valleys for that reason.

But really, mountainous areas just can't support that many people, so they shouldn't be that populated anyways.

> Even worse, arable land is a rarity, it is a mountain area!

In Asia they terrace a lot. Not sure if that is a good idea though, and definitely not necessary in the states where there is plenty of good agriculture land (much of China is mountainous, so it is necessary).

<comment><USER7> There is, lots of ski resorts, hiking, that sort of thing. The kicker is that those same places will actually hire in lots of Europeans to work the facilities, so not only are the employees not local, they aren't even from the same country!

It's a shame, there's a kernel of some great culture there, a unique dialect, great music, entertaining local history and color, some beautiful folk art.

Local dialect

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU)

The traditional music is a descendant of Celtic folk music, but unique enough to be interesting.

Here's a fantastic documentary on the music

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXh8SDp0H-E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXh8SDp0H-E)

All it would really take would be for some kind of Appalachian Music to become wildly popular and I could see the region getting popular music centers people would come to visit. Their main possible export market is all cultural.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i was in arkansas last week for my father's passing. i've been writing about his life as a way to cope, and my trip was a stark reminder of the marginal lives of the working poor in this country. mind you, these are not people asking for a handout or who see themselves as poor. but their 40 hours of work (if they can get it) certainly provides much less for their families. they have jobs implicated in all sorts of health problems that are barely being managed by a mediocre health system. they worry about foreclosure and repossession and deal with payday lenders and pawn shops. phones and other utilities get cut off for non-payment and they're charged fees they can't afford to reinstate service. they're not unhappy so much as they have much harder lives than those of us in the professional ranks. it's simply not fair.

</comment><comment><USER10> Urbanization. The trend is continuing and is going to continue and as it does the rural areas of the country are going to see more and more resources drain to urban centers. Eventually the rural population will be entirely composed of maniac bandits driving burnt out plymouth dusters with mounted machine gun turrets and terrified hill people raising rabbits for food in their back yards.

But for serious, as we see urbanization pick up, the rural areas are going to continue their downward slide. And as the trend toward suburbanization has reversed we're going to see the suburbs become the new "burnt out inner city"—because inner city is no longer synonymous with poverty and crime.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure this forecast is based on the data in this article. Rural land is actually ridiculously valuable and increasing in value rapidly. I passed up an opportunity to buy some prime farmland in 2008 at what I considered an exorbitant price. The same land today is worth triple. Anyway there's a bunch of very empty, very rural counties in the top decile of this analysis. Just look at Iowa where there are lots of top counties including Story County. Then look at Wyoming which looks really good in this analysis.

To some extent I think this analysis is plagued by law of small numbers. It seems like the ranking is highly influenced by the fraction of disabled people but there's a lot of quantization noise in that figure, especially when a county like Teton County, Wyoming contains only 22000 people. I think the same thing is probably happening in rural eastern California, for instance in Mono County (pop 14000).

<comment><USER12> Define valuable. I live in Northern Virginia, where a good acre of land can cost a million dollars. Yet, I can drive 3.5 hours and get to land that's worth under $1,000 an acre.

<comment><USER11> Prime farmland (USDA class 1 soil capability) in Iowa costs 10-12 thousand dollars per acre. In 2006 such land cost 3-4 thousand. Ref: [http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c2-75.h...](http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c2-75.html)

<comment><USER5> Which is currently driven up in price by cheap money that has nowhere else to go for safe yields (after the stock collapse in '00 and the real estate collapse of '08).

[http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are- update/files/articles/V15...](http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are- update/files/articles/V15N1_3.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is Loudoun County, Virginia so prosperous? It has a median household income of $122,000, but I don't see any meaningful employers in the area, and it's a large population of around 350,000 people.

<comment><USER14> That's Northern VA where tons of tech companies are and was the veritable center of the internet before Silicon Valley. (AOL is or was headquartered in Dulles which is in Loudoun County). It still houses a massive amount of technology companies, data centers, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's up with Wyoming? Some of those counties have median incomes above 70K.

<comment><USER16> 0% state income tax, so if you are rich and have 5 homes, the Wyoming one is a good primary residence.

Also, lots of ranches. These are usually run off someone's personal taxes, so high income and high deductions/expenses. $500k/yr income isn't that great when you need to spend millions every decade and high annual operating expenses too. A lot of ranching or timber is about early capex leading to income down the line.

Ski stuff.

<comment><USER5> > the Wyoming one is a good primary residence.

Something to note: Wyoming doesn't shield either traditional or Roth IRAs (although ERISA-protected assets like 401ks are) from creditors, unlike other no-income tax states such as Texas and Florida.

<comment><USER16> Interesting, although probably largely irrelevant for the mega-rich. IIRC Wyoming _does_ have a homestead exemption, so your house can't be taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The bible belt continues to have some of the worst (or hardest) places to live in US. If find this very interesting, as many in this area continue to shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible.

<comment><USER18> > shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible.

Which passage in the Bible tells Christians to shun higher education?

<comment><USER19> > Which passage in the Bible tells Christians to shun higher education?

\- He/She never said that any biblical passage tells Christians to shun higher education. Nice straw man.

He/She said "many in this area continue to shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible." But, since you are asking the question, lets look at an answer:

\- How about all of the passages justifying rape/slavery/violence in the Old Testament? All of these, while not outright shunning higher education, do so implicitly. Just one example among many:

"However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way." (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)

Something else to look at - "Anti-intellectualism in American Life" (Richard Hofstadter). A great book. His tale begins with itinerant Baptist ministers traveling through the bible belt, denouncing those "New England intellectuals". Anti-Intellectualism and organized American religion in the South are very good and old friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> These results need to be taken with a big ol' hunk o' salt. The outliers are all teeny tiny counties. #1 ranked Los Alamos county has only 17,000 residents, and last-place Clay county has 21,000. The bigger the county, the more likely it is to simply regress to the mean.

Actually, the most interesting result is that Los Angeles county, which with ~10M people is the most populous in the U.S., is not closer to the middle than it is.

<comment><USER20> That doesn't appear to be accurate. #3 Fairfax County, VA and #9 Montgomery County, MD both have over a million people which puts them in the top 50 counties in the US by population. The others are smaller, but many are still much larger than Los Alamos. #4 Loudoun County, VA has 350,000, #6 Howard County, MD has 290,000, #2 Arlington County, VA has 227,000 and #7 Alexandria City, VA has 140,000.

It's also worth mentioning that those six counties are all contiguous with each other. That's a combined total of over 3 million people. That's far too many to dismiss as simply a statistical outlier.

<comment><USER3> I'm not saying that these results are completely invalid, just that they can't simply be taken at face value. You have to take things like population into account when interpreting the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guess "hard" is subjective. I was guessing the hardest place might be rural Alaska where you have no electric power or water unless you provide it yourself, and you have to spend most of the short summer cutting firewood so you don't freeze to death over the winter, and growing vegetables, fishing, and hunting so you don't starve.

</comment><comment><USER22> When you compare it to this dot map which shows population density you can see a relation to high density in rural areas to the worse areas on the other map. [http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/](http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Very interesting data, also compare it to the Racial Dot Map:

[http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/](http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Inside some of those prisons looks extraordinarily harsh. The ones where there is no law and brutal crimes go unpunished every day.

</comment><comment><USER25> Where's cost of living in the metrics? Without that, unemployment and median income paint a very incomplete picture.

<comment><USER26> Agreed in regards to median income, but COL wouldn't impact life expectancy, obesity, unemployment or education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There seems to be some stark contrasts in South Dakota.

<comment><USER28> Also in New York City. While Manhattan is ranked #365 out of 3135, the Bronx is ranked 2324, Brooklyn is 1306, Staten Island is 601, Queens is 390, Westchester is 98, and Nassau county is 66. One city (and suburbs) runs the gamut from poverty to extreme wealth.

<comment><USER29> Having grown up in the Bronx, I am actually really grateful. I can tell you some horror stories, but the best part of it was that there was still access to opportunity just an affordable train ride away in Manhattan.

Further up in Westchester and Rockland you find areas that are really deep in poverty but don't have easy access to reliable public transportation to places where jobs are more easily found.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Kentucky truly is the worst state in the US.

<comment><USER31> California has the highest cost of living adjusted poverty rate in the United States.</comment></comment>


How is the work quality at Blizzard as a developer? - <AUTHOR> How is the work environment at Blizzard and what challenges are you facing there? I wanted to apply 2 years ago but then I gave up cause someone told me it's not what everyone expects.<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> > someone told me

The problem, ultimately, is that every place is made up of people. People are fallible, limited, and not gods. They're just people. They have to eat and sleep. They like having interpersonal relationships. Sometimes they're jerks.

When I joined Microsoft as an intern in the Mac Business Unit back in 2002, my biggest surprise was that the people I worked with—the first real software engineering organization I'd ever been exposed to—were just people. They weren't perfect, and sometimes they got grumpy when a certain over- enthusiastic 19 year old wouldn't shut up.

Anyway, back to your question: Blizzard is probably an interesting place to work. They maintain the biggest(?) MMORPG, they have a huge amount of history, and I expect having a role at Blizzard on your résumé looks great. But, since it _is_ the games industry, you should probably expect endless death marches, crappy pay, and incredible amounts of churn in between projects.

tl;dr: check Glassdoor and see what employees have to say. If you have unreasonable expectations about a workplace, you _will_ be disappointed.

<comment><USER3> I would also add that a largish company isn't one place, it is many smaller places that only looks the same from outside.

Once you're past that 150 number or so, you will have multiple cultures and environments. There will be the small hot next thing, the big incumbent, the team everyone is waiting on, the hasbeens, the guys in the corner no one knows what they're doing, the guys everyone has to work with even though no one knows why, etc. Some traits will be the same, but environment varies a lot.

See recent discussions on Amazon for instance. Some people disagree completely on their experience.

<comment><USER4> Relevant (explanation of "150"): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing to keep in mind is that employers in 'creative' (film, games, etc) industries often treat their tech employees worse than employers whose main source of income is the tech itself. I haven't worked at Blizzard specifically, but I've spent time at other game shops and VFX shops, and my experience is that you are expected to work for longer hours and for lower paychecks than your friends writing REST apps for web oriented _startups_ (let alone established players like Google, Facebook, or even Apple).

Are you interested in Blizzard because you only see yourself developing games and games alone? Are you interested in graphics and '3D math' and find Blizzard appealing because they need those skills? Will you be happy being a 'tech' employee without the tech paycheque?

<comment><USER6> This varies a lot from place to place, a big part of the cause of the problem is supply side. For a lot of people working in GameDev or doing artistic work is a "dream job" so there tends to be no shortage of fairly talented young folks who are willing to put up with anything just to get into the business. And often that labor pool is abused by big companies. But that's not always the case, it's just more common than elsewhere in tech.

<comment><USER7> I'd say that another big factor is the financial part. Take your average game studio, even large-ish ones always have a very uncertain future after their next game. When your ability to make payroll depends on getting your game out at the deadline agreed with/imposed by the publisher, this is going to mean plenty of crunch time. And then you may get laid off once the game is out, because the studio doesn't need a lot of programmers during the pre-production phase of their next game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I currently work at blizzard and it is an interesting company to work for. Lots going on, many small teams and a little growing pain from wow but improving bit by bit. Email me john, mchandler@[company].com and i can tell you more and get you in touch with the right people.

<comment><USER9> If you get him hired, does Blizzard give you a referral bonus?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My last boss, CTO of a fairly small YC start-up, was ex-blizzard (SCII player matching infrastructure + D3 launch) and he's hand's down the most amazingly technically skilled person I've ever worked with. He did have a few brutal stories from the trenches at Blizzard, but to be 100% honest I'd probably take a 15% pay cut there vs a typical large SV company just based on what I heard (and saw).

<comment><AUTHOR> Judging by their work, I am sure they have some top talent. Most of the products are well polished. How would a brutal story go?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well according to my 6 year old information from WoW, they used C++ for their servers and have a bit of a NIH streak.

So I am guessing it's probably still a C++ heavy shop like many gamedev places.

<comment><USER12> Somewhat related, CppCon 2015: Ben Deane "Testing Battle.net (before deploying to millions of players)" : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPoZWnYIcP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPoZWnYIcP4)

<comment><USER8> Ben deane is a very smart guy. He gives a lot of talks internally as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't work at Blizzard but know someone who recently went there. I have not spoken to her yet about her experience but I would imagine that by "not what everyone expects" is probably related to the fact that at the end of the day it is still a business, gaming or not, they have bills to pay.

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel like Blizzard would have been really sick to work at when WoW was actually a growth business

</comment><comment><USER15> Have you looked on Glassdoor?

</comment><comment><USER16> Working at Blizzard is awesome - you will love it there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you saying this because you work there or you heard about it?</comment></comment>


Archived White House website from 1995 - <AUTHOR> https://clintonwhitehouse1.archives.gov/ <comment><USER2> I pretty much miss the 90s, Bill Clinton presidency and this cute website. What happened to the internet</comment>


Book Release: Machine Learning Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://aiweekly.substack.com/p/book-release-machine-learning-engineering <comment><AUTHOR> If you intend to use machine learning to solve business problems at scale, I'm delighted you got your hands on this book.</comment>


Content is not King: Publish and be damned - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Why-content-is-not-king-pd20100409-4BSZX?opendocument&src=rss <comment><USER2> Sometime successful entrepreneurs don't understand the fundamental of their business and what they're really selling.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's amazing to me how fiercely the doomed will blindly build their Maginot Line, doomed only because they refuse change. Change is the blood of life on Earth. No one's business model is sacrosanct, no matter what The Congress or the Treasury Department fantasizes.

<comment><USER4> Dunno what the treasury department has to do with this . . .</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Yahoo Buzz as Traffic Supplier - <AUTHOR>

I have a question for this community since I can't seem to figure it out on my own.  I was interested in leveraging the promise of Yahoo! Buzz, and in looking at their "Business" section, it would appear that you didn't need too many votes to get onto their section page.
Upon further review, the bulk of the links are to Yahoo! News stories.  There's an odd TC or GigaOm article, but for the most part, it's big name news sites.
Has anyone had any luck using Yahoo! Buzz, and their buzz chicklets, to successfully drive traffic from Yahoo!? <comment><USER2> You might have better luck with this if you post it in the morning M-F (US hours)</comment>


The Owner of World's Largest Coffee Cup Lid Collection on Consumerism and Design - <AUTHOR> http://dailycoffeenews.com/2015/02/05/the-owner-of-worlds-largest-coffee-cup-lid-collection-on-consumerism-and-design/ <comment><USER2> This makes me want to design a coffee cup lid... I could never drink my coffee fast enough because it was too hot, then I found a technique that let me drink very hot coffee very fast without burning my mouth. I should incorporate that method into a new lid.</comment>


It's now illegal to throw out rechargeable batteries in New York State - <AUTHOR> http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/12/a_jolt_to_consumers_--_its_now.html <comment><USER2> I believe this is the wrong approach. The law is mostly unenforceable, and I imagine it won't lead to a significant reduction in disposed rechargeable batteries as most people won't encounter the law on a regular basis. A better approach would be to do something similar to what is done with recycled goods; apply a tax to the product when it is first purchased and refund that tax if the product is returned at an appropriate facility.

<comment><USER3> While I agree that this is the wrong approach and your solution is an improvement, I don't think it's much of an improvement. It shares the same flaw in thinking as the fine: you are attacking the problem from too many angles. Every single person has to alter their behavior for it to work.

I think a much easier to implement, less wasteful, and much more likely to work solution is single-source waste disposal and recycling. Charlottesville, VA has this: you throw away everything, and the city outsources sorting and recycling to a single-source waste disposal company. Their job is to recover as much money as possible from recyclables.

And the best part is that to improve the efficiency of single-source recycling, you only need to improve your sorting and recycling technologies. You don't need to improve the accuracy of every human who throws away recyclables, which the history of recycling tells us is highly costly while also highly ineffective.

<comment><USER4> You mean that people just don't sort their garbage at all, the company does it for them? Is it technically plausible, with decent material recovery levels? Don't the recyclable materials lose value by putting them together with regular garbage?

<comment><USER3> > You mean that people just don't sort their garbage at all, the company does > it for them?

Yes, precisely. The usual caveats apply: no hazardous waste (hazardous chemicals, biohazard waste).

> Is it technically plausible, with decent material recovery levels?

It seems to be, based on Charlottesville's experience. I don't know the recovery levels. That is a good topic for research.

> Don't the recyclable materials lose value by putting them together with > regular garbage?

They do, but my understanding is the lost value is much less than relying on residential pre-sorting of recyclable materials. The idea is not to compare the efficacy of single-stream with a hypothetically perfect human recycler, but with recycling rates in actual practice among residents after decades of attempted recycling education.

I was told by a reporter in Charlottesville that single-stream compares favorably, but I am having trouble finding actual rates for comparison in my quick Googling today. So if you're interested, take my comment as a basis for further research into the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the fee goes to pay for say a monthly home pickup of hazardous waste, I'm all for this.

Most people don't know about what they're throwing away, and often don't care - they just want it gone. I don't blame them - the right way to get people to do something is to make it easy to do.

<comment><USER6> I do like the idea of using fine money to benefit the perpetrators and/or mitigate the offense. Otherwise, for crimes that aren't serious enough to warrant jail time, the revenue can become a misincentive/conflict of interest for those who should be providing justice to engage in extortion.

Let those who receive the benefit of enforcement pay for it (i.e., taxes).

The specific case I usually think of is speeding tickets. In my opinion, those fines should be ear-marked for passing lanes, rumble strips, guard rails and other projects to reduce travel times while increasing safety for motorists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised. For as long as I can remember, disposing of any battery was only allowed in special places/bins. Batteries never belonged into the trash for me.

And .. quote:

"The act does not cover batteries or battery packs weighing 24 pounds or more; batteries used as the principal power source for cars, boats, trucks, tractors, golf carts, wheelchairs or other vehicles; batteries used to store electricity from solar or wind-driven generators; or batteries that provide backup power an an essential part of an electronic device."

Doesn't this basically make this one giant mess, defeating the good intention? So any normal battery, any rechargeable battery that you loaded from a solar panel, the real messy big ones etc. - are still unrestricted? Hilarious.

<comment><USER8> My clock radio has an internal battery that lets the clock and alarm operate even when unplugged. Presumably it recharges. How are consumers going to even realize that such a battery exists, when throwing the device in the trash? Are they to be expected to disassemble the device and remove the battery?

<comment><USER7> Well.. You probably won't like my answer, but here it goes:

Don't throw that stuff in the trash in the first place. Really.

I understand that this is common in lots of places (here in Tel Aviv recycling seems to be a joke as well), but I think that stinks. I'm not a nutjob or a treehugger, but really, some things should be handled differently (and with care) if you want to dispose it. It's relatively easy to do it on your end (if the relevant education is in place. Talking about dos and don'ts - no offense or derogatory meaning implied) and a hard and messy job on the other side of the trash processing.

What would I do in Germany? Well, trash is already separated in special plastic things (the yoghurt you just ate? The container is not trash) and 'normal stuff' (think everything non-toxic that remains).

If you want to throw away big things (furniture, TV): Call the municipality, they'll come to your home and get it. For free, a couple of times per year (free is a lie: That service is already paid for by you anyway).

Want to throw away smaller things? Batteries? Shops that sell batteries have to take back old ones. Every now and then you'll have the opportunity to drop off small gadgets and related things, usually at a van/truck that goes around (and helps educating about recycling as well).

Last option: You can drive up to the (no idea how you'd name this correctly) garbage place and bring your stuff. They'll let you (free of course, with the same caveat from above) dispose everything and show you where to place wood, where you'd drop electrical devices, where metal should end up.

It works. Germany's not that small and I don't think it's too much effort for the individual (again: I'm lazy. And not a tree hugger in any way). I know that a lot more countries do comparable things.

This law that started the thread? It sounds weird if you have the background described above. It looks like a crappy half-baked idea - neither particularly helpful nor enforceable. And obviously, as you just proved with that question, going against the general public's idea of how to handle your garbage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reading the text of the law[1], I'm surprised battery manufacturers haven't already filed an interstate commerce lawsuit.

States can usually place all the restrictions and requirements they want on retailers and residents, but trying to force out-of-state manufacturers to perform in-state acts like this is sticky.

[1][http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/batterylaw...](http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/batterylaw.pdf)

<comment><USER10> The regulations for CAFE -- car emissions -- are far more onerous than this, and they've been completely litigated and found to be Constitutional.

IIRC, it was found that so long as there's a strict hierarchy of standards (i.e., non-disjoint), it's OK, because a manufacturer can aim for the most- strict regulation, and thereby be legal everywhere. The problem would be if the standards were such that two _different_ products needed to be created in order to satisfy the requirements of different states.

<comment><USER9> You're talking about a related but distinct legal issue. CAFE is an exercise of Congress's commerce clause power, and as part of that power, they have _allowed_ states to set stricter standards. Had they not specifically done so, states would not have that authority, as federal law would preempt them in that area.

The issue here is that there are, in fact, certain federal laws regarding toxins in general, and batteries in particular, that might lead a court to conclude that federal law has preempted state law in this area. Congress's choice _not_ to require battery manufacturers to take certain steps is not the same as Congress abdicating that authority to the states.

I'm not saying this is cut and dried, or that they'd likely win, I'm just saying it's sufficiently fuzzy that I'd expect the lawsuit to be filed.

<comment><USER10> _Congress abdicating that authority to the states_

That's an odd phrase, in the presence of the 10th Amendment:

 _The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people._

The Congress doesn't get to decide what power it will exercise, and leave the crumbs for the States (at least not in theory). The States and the People have decided what powers to grant to the Federal Gov't, and so Congress is limited to that scope.

(Yes, I'm aware of preemption in various matters, I'm objecting to the implication in your statement that Congress gets to decide what the States' rights are.)

<comment><USER11> Congress gets to decide which rights the states get when those rights are originally given to Congress, as is the case with interstate commerce. Nothing in that post implied that Congress can do this with everything.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Signal and Giphy - <AUTHOR> https://whispersystems.org/blog/giphy-experiment/ <comment><USER3> This is a clever way to do this, but it still seems like someone caring about their privacy should just do without gifs.

Edit: I should rephrase - I mean someone with a larger-than-usual need for privacy, someone paranoid for a reason. This is great for the typical privacy concious user. But if I was sending documents to WikiLeaks, I would not sum them up with a cute GIF.

<comment><USER4> Except that history has shown us that theoretically secure but feature deficient systems lose out to less ideologically pure systems that provide what users want, leaving the sum total amount of security provided to be less.

<comment><USER5> EDIT: Deleted the comment because the of attacks in responses, which I can't respond to due to "Submitting too fast".

@dang: If you want users to be able to actually discuss things, allow them to respond to comments attacking them. This is a retarded system.

<comment><USER6> Basically everything in your comment is wrong.

> The prebuilt Signal APK might in fact be completely malicious, you can't > verify anything.

[https://whispersystems.org/blog/reproducible- android/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/reproducible-android/)

This is already more then for all other options.

> And as Signal only tries to copy the features WhatsApp and co already have

Thats simply not true. WhatsApp does not support gifs, for example. Signal also has some features that others don't.

> they'll get exactly the same security with WhatsApp, Telegram or Threema, > and exactly the same features.

Telegram is less secure by miles. Threema is less secure by yards. WhatApp is less secure by inches.

> "You can create your own federated server"

Signal has never claimed that you can "federate" the server. They only mentioned that this is a feature that they might work on in the future. Since they have publicly said that they are not gone do so.

<comment><USER7> > Telegram is less secure by miles. Threema is less secure by yards. WhatApp > is less secure by inches.

Depends. For me closed-source is a no-go for security, that's why IMHO

Signal (open client and server) > Telegram (open client) > Threema (open NaCl lib) > WhatsApp

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good

They know that for a bigger adoption they need those usability improvements, at the same time, they make sure additional features don't compromise the security expected from their app

<comment><USER9> I've been really impressed with Open Whisper's focus on usability and functionality. So many privacy products take the stance of "if you care about privacy, you won't want to do this", and it seriously harms uptake.

<comment><USER10> Meanwhile, people are accidentally leaking their phone numbers and their contacts' phone numbers because Signal replaced fingerprints that could safely be posted publicly with QR codes that can't, and didn't explain it: [https://twitter.com/webster/status/793657469381713920](https://twitter.com/webster/status/793657469381713920)

<comment><USER9> Shit, _really_? I hadn't published any QR codes, but I sure didn't realize that was part of the new system.

That's a pretty bad round of dropping the ball... Normally I respect that OWS explains security stuff in detail if you care, but also has a product that "just works" if you use defaults without much knowledge. This is pretty much the exact opposite of that, where they released a dangerous default with minimal explanation even for people who _do_ read their stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a federated and/or self-hosted alternative to Signal with similar privacy and security properties? Even if it supports fewer platforms?

I've been getting more and more interested in running my own (and perhaps my friends') infrastructure, but I haven't found anything better than IRC for chat.

<comment><USER12> I run a Synapse server ([http://matrix.org/](http://matrix.org/)) which is federated and works very well. There are many clients but the nicest at the moment is Riot. Full encryption is now available in the Riot webclient and it's coming to the app soon.

<comment><USER13> I'm just a Matrix (and Signal) user, I haven't yet had a look into its encryption implementation yet, but for those who are interested, I think these are the docs:

[http://matrix.org/speculator/spec/drafts%2Fe2e/client_server...](http://matrix.org/speculator/spec/drafts%2Fe2e/client_server/unstable.html#end- to-end-encryption)

<comment><USER14> There's also [https://matrix.org/docs/guides/e2e_implementation.html](https://matrix.org/docs/guides/e2e_implementation.html) for those interested in the guts of Matrix's E2E and [https://matrix.org/docs/spec/olm.html](https://matrix.org/docs/spec/olm.html) and [https://matrix.org/docs/spec/megolm.html](https://matrix.org/docs/spec/megolm.html) itself. We're currently reviewing the PRs for E2E on the iOS & Android SDKs, and after they land apps like Riot will have (beta) E2E across all of Web/iOS/Android :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _" For instance, if someone messages you with an invitation, you might want to write back with a message that says "I'm excited." With integrated GIF search, you could instead do a GIF search for "I'm excited" and send one of the results instead."_

What? Why? Is it some kind of attempt to become a new "cool" app? Sounds totally useless function to me, but if it helps to get more users, well, maybe that's a good thing.

<comment><USER16> Why? Because lots of people like sending gifs and prefer to use messaging apps that support them. If it's totally useless to you then fine: don't use it.

<comment><USER17> It clutters the UI with unecessary stuff. Wire also provides such a misfeature. I would rather disable it, but cannot.

<comment><USER18> You have to specifically click a button to use it. That's a good compromise between jumping through hoops to enable it if opt-in.

<comment><USER19> I think it would be acceptable if these types of things were on by default, and have the option to disable it or opt-out.

<comment><USER18> Yeah perhaps, but that would complicate the app development quite a bit. I'd rather see company invest developer time in other ways - maybe bringing desktop client support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It would be interesting for services to publish a public encryption key, so the signal client could encrypt the payload with that.

However, that has very limited usefulness, so I don't see it happening soon.

<comment><USER21> That's more or less what TLS+pinning does. Also DNSSEC+DANE+TLS if you want to argue about that.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but it's done at a lower level, which enables a host of attacks, like the announcement says. What I'm talking about would just encrypt the payload, so none of the metadata would be encrypted (and thus preserved).

Although I guess you'd also need to specify a "reply" public key in the encrypted data, so this is becomes more of a protocol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can I, as a receiver, turn off this feature? Ex : get text messages instead of gifs.

<comment><USER23> We do not always search for exact phrase so the text might not convey the emotion..

<comment><USER22> Unless the API can somehow place proper phrase instead of image. If text would be matching all images, this should work fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The GIPHY service could use subtleties like TLS session resume or cache hits > to try to correlate multiple requests as having come from the same client, > even if they don't know the origin.

How would a cache hit mean same user tried to search? TLS session resume, I can understand but cache hit only means same resource was accessed not same user tried to access.

<comment><USER20> You cache a unique ID and then see if you get a hit.

<comment><USER23> Which unique id? I thought the point of sending it via Signal was to not include any user id or any other id.

<comment><USER20> I don't know which attack the Signal guys had in mind, but usually how this works is that the server serves a file with a unique ID to a person, sees that it gets requested, then serves the same thing again in a subsequent request to a suspect, sees that it's not requested, and treats that as evidence that the two accounts are actually the same person.

It's obviously easier when you can correlate this with a single account, but that's the gist of the attack.

<comment><USER23> Ah!

But this will correlate one file to that person and will not be able to correlate multiple file requests that they all belong to the exact same person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great! Now that these easy, low-hanging-fruit features are taken care of, maybe we'll get some of the more involved security oriented ones, like, IDK, having an indication if I verified a contact or not so I can, you know, know whether I should verify or not when the opportunity presents itself.

</comment><comment><USER25> Now if only my friends would use the service!

</comment><comment><USER26> Reading this title I thought it was a word play on "Signal and Noise" and it'd be a post about how /giphy adds noise to Slack conversations.

</comment><comment><USER27> It makes me sad so see that they waste time on decoration like gif search but they don't have a client I can use on my PC for example.

<comment><USER28> Not perfect, but: [https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal- desktop/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop/)

<comment><USER29> I've given up on Signal (for now at least). Yes the encryption and privacy is great but without a decent desktop client it's hard to get others in my network to switch to it.

Two things bothered me about the desktop application - it runs as a Chrome application rather than in a tab (not sure if there is a technical reason for this?). If I care enough out privacy to run Signal then I probably don't want to broadcast to anyone watching my screen that I'm running it (like a boss walking past etc) and would rather bury it amongst my other open tabs. I also couldn't find any obvious way to sign out of or lock the desktop client - <USER2> this isn't just user error then it seems like a significant oversight for a secure messaging app to not allow the user to control access if someone else was able to access the computer.

It also really bothered me that signal doesn't give me better control over what contacts can see my phone number. When I signed in I could see phone numbers for a contractor I had used for remodelling my home. The desktop client had them listed as someone to message on the default page. It's not a huge deal in this situation but if the phone number was for someone I no longer wanted to be in touch with (a former partner etc) then there was no obvious way in either the Android app or desktop client to block them. I assume that the other user can also see my details - security should include having control over who can see your phone number.

Edit: Screenshots from the desktop app as a response to comment below:

[http://imgur.com/5nK07ER](http://imgur.com/5nK07ER) \- the default screen [http://imgur.com/mmEyQWH](http://imgur.com/mmEyQWH) \- the settings UI

[http://imgur.com/gjdyPsF](http://imgur.com/gjdyPsF) \- showing Signal in my dock for all to see.

<comment><USER30> There is a desktop client. It's packaged as a Chrome app. Some people downthread think a "decent" desktop app must be (more) standalone. You seem to think a "decent" desktop app should live inside a browser tab. It's hard to make everybody happy. People need to stop claiming there is no desktop app just because the very clearly existing one does not fulfill their own arbitrary set of criteria.

I don't know if you can sign out within Signal desktop (I assume you can, but I can't verify at the moment); you can sign out existing Signal sessions from within the mobile app.

The phone number is Signal's account identifier. You don't see somebody else's phone number because you've got them on Signal, you're seeing them on Signal because you've got their phone number. So you're worried about people having access to your phone number who _already_ have access to your phone number. Signal using phone numbers as account identifiers has it's issues, this is not one of them.

<comment><USER29> I don't mean to be negative about Signal. I appreciate the work they have put into it and understand that the platform is maturing - as you said, they can't please everyone.

The chrome app vs tab is definitely a minor issue related to user preference. It's not a deal breaker for me personally but others in my network (who are less concerned about privacy) will not switch if it's not easy. Not being able to sign out is a possible deal breaker and seems like basic functionality that has security implications.

Thanks for the information about the phone numbers - I understand that they aren't a "contact" in the sense that we added each other. I do think the issue of having control over who can see my phone number is a valid one though. How would I block someone I no longer want to have contact with without changing my phone number? Again, this seems like basic functionality for a platform that is concerned about security and privacy.

Here are screenshots from the desktop app showing the only options I can see:

[http://imgur.com/5nK07ER](http://imgur.com/5nK07ER) \- the default screen (includes the contact that I mentioned in my first post as someone I can message right now.)

[http://imgur.com/mmEyQWH](http://imgur.com/mmEyQWH) \- the settings UI

<comment><USER31> On Android there's a button in the conversation settings to block the other party.

<comment><USER29> Thanks - I see it in there now. For anyone else looking for it, it's under options/conversation settings when you are in conversation view. Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is what Canonical did with Amazon searches on Unity, they proxified them.

<comment><USER33> How is this the same? Canonical proxied _every search term_ you've ever typed to Amazon. In Signal, you have to explicitly click on a button for anything to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Still no desktop client?

<comment><USER13> The desktop app is available since almost 1 year (in closed beta at the beginning), and recently apparently it's also working with iOS

[https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal- desktop/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop/)

It's also a real app[1], independent from the phone's: after the initial key exchange, you can send/receive messages even when your phone is off

[1] Compare with the Whatsapp webapp, which solves/sidesteps the E2E encryption among multiple devices conundrum by simply routing everything through the phone. The Signal app is also written with web technologies, so it might not be palatable for everyone, but it's a good compromise imho

<comment><USER34> Are you kidding me? Do you consider this Chrome extension as a 'real app' (sic!)?

I won't install Chrome just to host Signal extension.

<comment><USER35> Almost every modern desktop chat app is a web app, which is what a chrome app is. It's how something like franz is possible: [http://meetfranz.com/](http://meetfranz.com/)

<comment><USER34> I all cases of 'modern desktop chat app' you are talking about, I can use it by opening its website with any modern browser.

Signal is the only one which requires me to install one particular browser.

<comment><USER13> If you open them in a browser when you're offline, you won't be able to load/read your messages (yes, I know about HTML5 manifests for offline data... but that's a mess), but with Signal you can.

Moreover, being able to vet/verify the updates (which you can apparently even block altogether) before running the app is of paramount importance for a secure app like Signal.

With a run-of-the-mill webapp that's also impossible.

Again: tradeoffs. I'd prefer if Signal desktop was built on something different, but I still happily use it as is everyday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Oh great, they are catching up with Wire ([https://wire.com/](https://wire.com/)).

Now if they would just resolve real bugs (like many people not being able to register to Signal), that would be maybe cool (but as they implemented Signal Protocol to WhatsApp and others (if we can trust code we can't see) I can't say I see any point in it).

Maybe I am wrong, but it lost that appeal it had some time in past.

<comment><USER37> Wire transmits your plaintext GIF search terms to the Wire server. Their privacy policy even allows those searches to be logged. Combined with Wire's already bad e2e encryption and metadata story, I don't see how you could consider this "catching up."

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> That fake video on top is interesting. If they can't even get that right what does it say about their Privacy and Security claims?

<comment><USER39> Empirically, absolutely nothing. You can't judge the security of a software based on its marketing material.

<comment><USER38> But you can determine that nobody at signal has used or even seen an android phone.

<comment><USER40> What? Signal/OWS seems to develop new features on Android first, and that animation up top is an Android phone...

<comment><USER38> It's not an Android phone. Android has either on screen Navigation Bar or Physical Navigation Bar not both.

<comment><USER41> What are you on about? You can enable on-screen buttons while still having physical capacitive buttons.

[http://m.imgur.com/u5hcJYQ](http://m.imgur.com/u5hcJYQ)

Many 3rd party custom ROMs have the feature, including CyanogenMod, the most widespread open-source build of AOSP.

<comment><USER38> Not on stock Samsung phones.

<comment><USER42> So they made a screencast and blended it with a video of a hand touching a phone to avoid shadows and improve image quality. Is that really your takeaway from the article?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Parenteeno parental monitoring goes FREE - <AUTHOR> http://www.parenteeno.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, we just switched to free plan for up to 1 device.

As we're 2 dads who are bootstrapping this with no funding whatsoever, it would be great if you could check it out and provide some feedback.

Thanks</comment>


A cool idea: Using Parser-Generators for Protocols Like SMB, RPC [LtU] - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2496

<comment><AUTHOR> This problem was my life for a lot of years; particularly when you're trying to write fast network code, and everything's a state machine, _everyone_ has wanted some easy abstraction to write the protocol spec instead of a zillion little callbacks.

I thought about this idea a long time ago, but after writing a bunch of parsers, I always figured that the things that make some languages hard to model in Yacc would make arbitrary protocols (invariably more sloppy than languages) even harder.</comment>


Senet: the original board game of death? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/original-board-game-death <comment><USER2> Anyone else reminded of the shadow games in the original Yu-Gi-Oh manga/anime? There's even a card which art depicts a Senet board! [https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Senet_Switch](https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Senet_Switch) As a kid, I remember getting really into Egyptian history from the show, and was surprised many times finding such connections.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've gotten into ancient games recently, and I've tried Senet with various rule variations- I think it's kind of boring. I like much better the Royal Game of Ur-

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I)

I've also been playing with Indian Pachisi, two player is kind of boring, but I still need to try four player / doubles.

</comment><comment> m-watson This game has come up twice now in my online reading in the last few days. Smithsonian Magazine covered this game and some others. Worth a read through if you are interested in Senet. [0]

[0] [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/best-board- gam...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/best-board-games- ancient-world-180974094/)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're ever in San Jose, the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum mentioned in the article is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER5> everything is more exciting when you add "... OF DEATH" to the end of it. "This is my new keyboard... OF DEATH", "how is your girlfriend... OF DEATH". "What is your favorite git client... OF DEATH". See. The jokes write themselves.

<comment><USER6> I mean, when you don't read the article and realise `of` is more like `about`, then sure!</comment></comment>


Facebook Usage Declines for the First Time in Infinite Dial History - <AUTHOR> https://www.edisonresearch.com/facebook-declines-first-time-infinite-dial-history/ <comment><USER2> My mind is boggled that technology analysts still haven't figured out that Facebook the company completely expected that Facebook the product would eventually wane.

So they acquired what they thought would be the future and would push growth there, which is exactly what is happening.

<comment><USER3> What's to say "technology analysts" haven't figured that out? All we're seeing here is that _a thing happened_ and somebody is reporting on said happening.

<comment><USER2> It's certainly possible that reporters know this and are leaving it out of reporting intentionally, because it would make the story less juicy. In which case they are intentionally making a story that lacks context in order to drive clicks and should be called out as such.

Or they don't know it and are lacking in contextualuzation.

Either way it's bad journalism.

<comment><USER4> Is it? This is about Facebook the product. Suggesting that this is planned by Facebook is not based in fact or supported by sources.

As best I can tell this is not a news organization, they're simply showing an interesting data point

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I keep thinking I should go and short Facebook, even though I never trade individual stocks. It's just so clear to me that Facebook will crash and burn in the next couple of years. They are like Nokia in 2008: Still a high market share, but doomed.

Then I remember that Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp. They're doing great, partially because nobody thinks of Instagram as Facebook.

<comment><USER6> Oculus Quest is coming soon too. Unlike all other VR offerings, this one might actually breakthrough into the living rooms across the world because of the balance between performance and ease of use.

<comment><USER7> HTC Vive is so much better than Oculus but anything that drives VR adoption I appreciate. Vive is set up so much quicker, has a wireless capability now and has a bigger platform in industry.

A competition between Vive, OR, and hololens in the AR/VR market would be much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >> A total of 2,000 persons were interviewed to explore Americans' use of digital platforms and new media. From January 4, 2018 to February 11, 2018, telephone interviews were conducted with respondents age 12 and older who were selected via Random Digit Dial (RDD) sampling for both cell phones and landlines.

That's it? 2,000 people surveyed? I actually don't doubt the conclusions, but given the shoddy website, old publication date, and duplicative pieces with negative outlook ([https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite- dial-2019/](https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2019/) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322448)), this seems like the work of someone with an ulterior motive.

I would bet serious money with even odds that this article was upvoted with fraudulent HN accounts. I wish I could help investigate.

<comment><USER9> This are how polls are conducted. You don't need to ask the entire country cause statistically all you need to do is survey a diverse enough subset. A low single digit margin of error is simply not worth surveying orders of magnitude more people over.

This is similar to how presidential approval ratings are conducted, for example, by Gallup in which their sample sizes are even smaller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think I read in another study they are just moving to Instagram.

<comment><USER11> You are correct.

From their study, they show that while Facebook dropped, Instagram increased (34, 36, and 39% from 2017 - 2019, respectively).

WhatsApp doesn't have tracking data for 2017/18, but 2019 shows it at 18%.

Here's their downloadable presentation with additional info: [http://www.edisonresearch.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/03/Inf...](http://www.edisonresearch.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/03/Infinite-Dial-2019-PDF-1.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Am seeing early signs of an instagram decrease. People are deleting their accounts, posting less, and unfollowing people.

I think the switch to stories had an impact. Positive at first, but negative indirectly, as it introduced the "mute" mechanism. At first you could just do this with stories, but now you can mute someone's posts while still "following" them.

Before, on instagram, if someone followed you, you really knew they followed you. So people sort of self-policed their posts, as they knew they'd get unfollowed if they were excessive. And there was a lot of engagement on posts, because 100% of followers saw it.

But now you can follow but not follow. So on the one hand some people are pushing more posts, on the other hand you have a lot of non-genuine followers. This discourages posting.

I have more followers but fewer likes than before, and I also follow more people and see less. The platform feels more hollow than it used to, in the same way facebook does.

<comment><USER13> I left Instagram for 8 months. I came back last month and noticed every 3 or 4 posts is now an ad. That was not the case when I stopped using it. As ads increase the hallow feeling increases. This is the same as visiting a blog or site with zero ads vs the extreme of visiting a site with ads in every nook and cranny. I am not against ads but there should be a conservative approach to embedding paid messaging.

Also similar to FB, the instagram algorithm is always changing. The fact that your feed is less real-time removes part of the essence of instagram. I liked knowing that my feed was a 1:1 connection to the real world. Now it is less that and more a collection of posts from the people I follow. One of my core ideas around young folks leaving facebook is for the same exact reason.

When you are in grade school, life moments occur everyday and sometimes within a few hours. Think of nailing your first skateboard trick, joining bands, or making the varsity team, etc. Those are all potential posts on any social channel. If you are the consumer of those posts, assuming the same age as the poster, you want to see them in a real-life sequence. It would feel fake or hollow to see the posts (that happened in your school, maybe at your game) contextualized against ads or in a wrong order.

<comment><USER14> I came to say the same, I can already feel myself being pulled towards removing my account as the ads are lame and the algorithm sucks, I miss things I wanted to see all the time.

I like it but it's also being filled with drivel and self-promotion to the point of becoming monotonous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > the portion of Americans reporting that they currently ever use the service

Am I dumb or does anyone else not understand what "currently ever use" means exactly in this context? How is that different than just saying "currently use"?

"Ever" implies independence of time, but matched with "currently" it means what?

(English is my first and only language; I might just be dumb)

<comment><USER16> One interpretation: "ever" as in "anytime in a time interval", "current" as in "the last 60 days".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Facebook will just buy the new competitors. Just like they did with Instagram and WhatsApp.

</comment><comment><USER14> This was published a year ago!

</comment><comment><USER18> Dated 21 Feb 2018.

</comment><comment><USER19> where are the facebook users going to?

</comment><comment><USER20> I didnt read the article, but has anyone else noticed a ton of ads for the Facebook app lately?

<comment><USER21> You're asking the wrong forum.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Examples of startups that failed due to moving slowly? - <AUTHOR> Conventional startup advice is to 'move fast' and 'pump out features.' Are there any startups that created a great new thing that was growing and then failed because they were improving too slowly?<p>How slow is too slow? <comment><USER3> I am aware of multiple companies that died because they were forced to "grow too fast", rather than growing slow.

One was a search engine ahead of google in its category that would have been an ideal google acquisition target (in fact, google is still doing a poor job in their area of search.)

Another was a company that invented a key gaming technology, but was ahead of the market by a couple years.

In both cases the VCs forced them to make compromises to to the product to chase the current fads... rather than invest in the parts of the product that their customers wanted (and would have paid for.)

Both companies had identified markets that would be extremely fast growing and are today worth many billions of dollars, and in both cases, to date no company has really done what they did.... though the market has shifted to get by without them.

VCs focus on growth because it benefits them. Finding the market and addressing it benefits the company. IF the timing is off by a couple years, then its "too late" for the VCs. This was the case even though it was obvious that there was a massive market coming-- in both of the above examples, the hockey stick had started.

VCs would apparently rather have a $30M valuation in year 2 than a $1B valuation in year 6. The VC funds last 5 or 7 years, if I recall.

<comment><USER4> 10 out of 10 VCs would take the six year $1 billion acquisition over the two year $30 million acquisition in fact. Your numbers are way off. It would have to be closer to $500 million in two years, versus $1 billion in six.

<comment><USER5> When looking at $30 million today with a probability of 1.0 vs $1 billion in six years with a low and unknowable probability, then taking the $30 million today might make sense for the VC, depending on what their books look like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> According to Joel Spolsky, Ingres lost to Oracle due to slow growth: [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth- equal-...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow- death.html?partner=fogcreek)

Discussion on a previous thread also suggests that Fogbugz suffered the same fate due to growing slower than Atlassian: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920668)

<comment><USER7> My take-away from that was that Atlassian had a proposition that made companies customers before those companies could afford Fogbugz. ($10 for 10)

<comment><USER8> Yep. That's my personal experience as well. Looked at FogBugz several times, but the pricing always put us off. Eventually Atlassian came around and made a good enough product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hashable. One of the startups that I believed in the most just crashed and burned. Right out of the gate they got plenty of feedback. Lots of hate. Some amount of love. Much confusion. But the people who got it, really got it (that's my criteria for great new thing). I still long for a contact management tool like that. When I first started using it, I kept giving feedback to the team to the point that they sent me stickers, a button pin, and a tshirt. Yey for #swag. And I kept giving feedback. And then they went dark. No replies. Sporadic tweets. Updates rarely. It was like they just gave up. And then I got the mail that they were closing down. They stopped because they "couldn't make it good enough"

[https://twitter.com/mikeyavo/status/223263315038711808](https://twitter.com/mikeyavo/status/223263315038711808)

Side note - That was also the first time I understood the risk of putting content into a closed eco system that's using non open standards for data. <sad face>

</comment><comment><USER10> MapQuest. They achieved the marketing Holy Grail of reaching the Verb Status ("Let me MapQuest it") only to lose it. It was stale in features while Google pushed forward rapidly.

</comment><comment><USER11> Osborne computer?

Either they were moving too slow or announced new product too early (killing demand for the model they were actually selling). They went bankrupt before new model came out...

Apparently not entirely true, but that was the takeaway. it got a name: the "Osborne Effect"

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

<comment><USER12> I'd argue that Osborne moved too quickly, he was announcing the future (and they didn't deliver it too slowly, they just announced it too quickly) and subsequently committed suicide (figuratively, of-course.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Competition and profitability aren't your only reasons to move fast. _VCs_ may judge you on your speed as well.

Our company bootstrapped for the first 2.5 years before raising an angel round. This raises eyebrows. Some investors assume there is a problem if you are looking for a small round after so much time has passed. It's a rare stance to encounter, but something to be aware of.

(Personally, I'm proud of what we were able to accomplish before taking outside investment.)

</comment><comment><USER14> >How slow is too slow?

That depends entirely on your financial structure, your product, and your own lifespan. If you never on-board investors and never depend on a loss-leader strategy for capturing market, you can small-business yourself from you mid- twenties to retirement and beyond. A lot of trade professions do exactly this sort of slow expansion; my neighbors is self-employed plumber and he's been routing tubs for the past two decades.

</comment><comment><USER4> Jaiku, Pownce, Gowalla, Bing/MSN search, Posterous, Windows Phone

There are tons of them. You'll see a lot of responses that claim all of these companies didn't die due to moving slowly, but for other reasons - that will also always be true though, even in cases where a startup moved too slow. For example, Windows Phone was both backwards, and slow to match the iPhone once it became obvious consumers loved touch.

In many consumer spaces, it's: 'winner take most.' If your competition gets to critical adoption first, most of the time you're toast. So even if Gowalla was growing slowly, they were too far behind. If your competitor takes 60% of the market, you've previously been growing fast but are now growing slowly, and you're now down to 14% of the market - the outcome is most likely that your future growth will be extremely difficult, and eventually you'll burn vast resources just trying to acquire each point of market share thereafter. Microsoft and Google have both delivered rare, extremely expensive examples of this behavior over a long-term basis (in search for Microsoft and social for Google), funded by their prior dominant products.

<comment> michel-slm I still miss Jaiku. I wonder if they would have survived if either they didn't get acquired by Google, or if Google keep supporting them instead of acquihiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> AWS launched in 2006, while Google App Engine launched in 2008 and Google Compute Engine launched in 2012. But Amazon has always moved significantly faster than Google in the IaaS market, introducing the most comprehensive suite of infrastructure services and relentlessly undercutting on price. AWS has been consistently innovative while Google has long played catch-up at far too slow a pace.

<comment><USER16> App engine is largely useless. People wanted virtual machines. Google only just worked that out last year. Useless POS could not even allow TCP connections. No long running processes. Dog slow io. So many limitations. Sure it is a different product so I am not comparing apples to apples but Google said 'you want this' and amazon gave us what we wanted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Digg, Delicious, Mixx - lost to reddit

Plaxo - lost to LinkedIn

Bebo - social media space became too crowded

Geocities - died of natural causes

Netscape - slow to adopt after v3

<comment><USER18> Delicious was a different product from Digg or Reddit, so that doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER19> And Digg lost for several reasons, but one of them wasn't that it moved too slow. More the opposite, really. They released a buggy version too soon, when the users were already angry and considering leaving.

<comment><USER5> Yup. Digg should be the poster child for why "move fast and break things" isn't always the best of ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Failed" sometimes means bankruptcy, but you should also include those companies that survived but remained tiny, while one of their competitors became huge.

Circa 1995, many companies tried online retailing, but none of them could match the speed of Amazon, and so Amazon slowly won out over all of them.

MySpace lost to Facebook, partly by not matching what became popular features on Facebook, such as "The Wall".

And it's not just startups that fail due to moving slowly. The USA auto companies have been losing market share since 1960, partly due to their slow adoption of new techniques.

Toyota in the 1950s was a super nova of new ideas. They invented kanban and "just in time". Oddly, they got some of their best ideas from an American who could not get an audience in the USA:

"Interestingly, important elements of the Japanese production system were enhanced by the work of W. Edwards Deming, an American who developed a system of statistical quality control for the U.S. war effort during World War II. After the war, he was assigned to General McArthur's staff overseeing civilian transition of Japanese industry, and introduced his system of quality control throughout Japanese industry, but especially in the automobile sector. Largely ignored in the United States after his return, his methods were only adopted by U.S. manufacturers after 1981 when he was recognized by Japan for his contribution to the country's economic revival."

[http://www.mbca.org/star-article/july-august-2013/putting- it...](http://www.mbca.org/star-article/july-august-2013/putting-it-line- mercedes-benz-us-international-mercedes-production-sys)

<comment><USER21> _MySpace lost to Facebook, partly by not matching what became popular features on Facebook, such as "The Wall"_

That is a gross over simplification of why MySpace lost to facebook. One of the main reasons I think MySpace lost was that they never seemed to have a grand vision like Zuck and fb seemed to have developed around '06-07. Not to mention, MySpace was an offshoot of a super shady marketing company, not a technology company. That became more and more apparent as MySpace suffered constant performance and security issues.

<comment><USER22> Facebook was about real life, myspace was about the internet. Facebook was about statuses, groups, uni life, wall to wall convos and organising your life. It's where I heard about climbing club trips, or socials, or that someone in halls was watching top gear on their tv and the price of entry was 1 slice of pizza ordered.

Then of course there was the user experience. Facebook was plain, simple, uniform and quick. Myspace...

        -Click on myspace page
        -Wait 10 secs for background to load
        -Really loud obnoxious music is playing
        -Animated page background starts going
        -Quizzes load
        -A wild photograph appears
        -You can see an embedded youtube now - hit pause
        -It wasn't the goddamned youtube making the noise, now you've got two things running you idiot
        -Try and pause the youtube again
        -page freezes
        -audio player loads
        -manage to stop everything playing
        -have epileptic fit from background
        -forget why you came here anyway

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Crossing the Chasm_ (Moore) suggests different phases in adoption - <USER2> entering the mainstream (after enthusiasts's love of the tech itself, and visionary's grabbing the tech's benefits ahead of everyone else) pragmatists wait until they see who will win. Therefore, in this phase, speed of acquiring marketshare is everything - not tech, not benefits.

Moore generalized this theory from actual startups, so he has lots of examples, but from decades ago (like apple and oracle when they were new). I'd think it would apply to today, just faster - though no one ever seems to cite it.

eg IBM lost RDB to Oracle, even though they invented it. Perhaps all the competitor's to pg's viaweb, who lost to it (note: they employed an expensive PR firm; it wasn't just lisp tech).

</comment><comment><USER24> There are lots of examples of startups that failed due to moving too slowly. The problem is that you probably won't know about them because they often don't get multiple rounds of financing (and hence don't make the news). Uncountable numbers of startups fail all the time in relative obscurity.

Your question is hard to answer, though, because it depends on where your funding is coming from. Part of your pitch for your business probably included an exit plan (if it didn't, then you should probably figure it out now). You need to get your business to wherever it needs to be to deliver that exit plan. Now you work backwards. What conditions need to be met to make that exit work? For a business that is built mostly on technology, what do you need to have in place to meet those conditions. Then you need to allow time to iterate your development because I can pretty much guarantee you that whatever you think you need now is almost certainly wrong. So you need to deliver early enough to allow yourself time to figure out what is wrong about it and what you need to do to make it right.

I've been in this industry long enough (and been with enough startups) to say that most founders don't understand what they are doing to the extent that they can make a coherent plan. Therefore they simply push to move as fast as possible and "pump out features". This is not necessarily a bad strategy if you are good at reacting to failure and adjusting your plan accordingly. The faster you fail, the more time you will have to discover what will succeed.

This strategy will only work for so long, though, and you need to be able to change your strategy at the correct time. This is very difficult and my experience tells me that most people get it very, very wrong. Sometimes even if the founder can do it, the people they hire to search the solution space (by banging out features one after another) are incapable of building a coherent product. To off-set this problem some startups adopt a demo-only strategy. Their goal is to build a disruptive demo and get bought out by one of the big boys (and probably buried). They have no intention of actually building a viable product. This can actually work well, depending on the prevailing economic environment and how scary you can make your demo.

If you want to build a sustainable business, though, my suggestions is to avoid the "pump out features" track (and the developers who are good at only doing that). Instead build more slowly with very strategic experiments and a very flexible code base (along with programmers who have experience building real products this way). If you can find the programmers who are able to do it, then you should have a higher rate of success. The "if you can find the programmers who are able to do it" part may be limiting, though. You may be forced to go the "bang out features and react to failures" route.

<comment><USER25> This is something I'm seeing too; having a committee design a product has resulted in feature after feature being put together in an incoherent way. Pump out features can't work for long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Lyft maybe this? The other groupon competitors? Foursquare?

<comment><USER27> Could not agree more on Lyft. In a winner-take-all market where an all-out land grab is critical to the long-term success of the marketplace, moving quickly and being the first to reach that golden scale of monopolistic ownership of supply and demand is absolutely key.

Not a perfect comparison given Lyft was founded 2 years after Uber and therefore was already at a disadvantage, but had they grown faster, they might have been able to overtake Uber's position.

In any case, the outcome of the Uber / Didi battle in China should be a great data point for this question.

<comment><USER28> I don't think Lyft has failed by any means, it's a 4 billion dollar company and growing. Also, it seems they're quite quick to innovate. IIRC, they were first to come up with the carpool system that Uber then rapidly appropriated into UberPOOL. It's just hard to overtake a company executing as brilliantly as Uber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd argue that HipChat, Campfire and Yammer all "lost" to Slack because they weren't moving fast enough.

This Google trends line is interesting: [https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%2C%20hipchat%2...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%2C%20hipchat%2C%20yammer&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B7)

<comment><USER30> Slack is a way to common term to gather any information from these trend lines.

<comment><USER31> I'll forever think slackware when I hear slack.

<comment><USER32> Nice surf move there

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Linode?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9852245](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9852245)

<comment><USER34> Since when is Linode a failed startup? Last time I checked they're doing well and expanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wife pointed out one. Hotmail. The glory days of internet. Sat on its ass. It's actually great now (outlook.com) and I prefer it over gmail now (bring out the flame throwers). But it took a long long time to get there.

</comment><comment><USER35> Friendster, MySpace?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would argue they were not moving slowly, but in the wrong direction.

<comment><USER36> Yes and you could almost say Myspace moved too fast, chased after local maxima (rapid A/B testing) and pursued vanity metrics (registered users). In contrast, Facebook stepped back enough to have a real vision, and carefully chose the right metric (active users). DAU and MAU are industry standards today, but back then it was a bold and careful decision by Facebook.

<comment><USER37> What's DAU and MAU?

<comment><USER38> Daily / Monthly Active Users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> For investors, time value of money is more important than lowering the risk profile of the portfolio. Also growth is easy to sell to other investors including retail on IPO. And it sexes up the whole portfolio with brand recognition. So get big fast is the accepted 'wisdom'.

Really depends if your building a growth engine vs job creation machine vs small cash generator - that will dictate your approach to growing and funding and of course exit, or not.

</comment><comment><USER40> If the growth rate is slower (or faster) than the optimal growth rate then the management has made a mistake (assuming they have any control over this). When you frame it this way what you are asking is have any startups failed for making mistakes which is does not need to be answered.

What you are really asking is it possible to workout in real-time (no hindsight) what the optimal growth rate should be for each company and if this is always "as fast as possible". This is very hard question to answer. My feeling is the optimal is more often than not close to the "fast as possible" level, but it will depend on the company and industry.

<comment> mark-r No, what they're asking for is concrete examples. Real-life examples are always more illuminating than theoretical discussions.

<comment><USER40> How can there be any "real-life" examples of failure for this reason unless you first determine what the optimal growth rate of the company should have been? If you can't answer this question then any discussion about the reason for failure is a "just-so" story made up after the fact.

The more important question to answer is how can you work out what the optimal growth rate should be of any startup.</comment></comment></comment>


How to write a "GPUs are Awesome" paper - <AUTHOR> http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=3736

<comment><USER3> hmmm. this is a little unfair. i've got around a factor of 30 speedup using a cheap GPU (some old nvidia card i had in my machine) compared to a fairly meaty xeon at work.

the important difference is that the kernel (written in opencl) was much more than just "taking the sine". once the data are on the gpu you don't want to move them back until you've done as much work as possible.

and there are different "kinds" of memory on the gpu. simply taking the sine of every value in an array is not using that memory efficiently (you're not using the equivalent of the gpu's L2 cache (and is cpu cache explaining the increased speed on the cpu?)).

so this would be io limited - all the test is doing is comparing memory transfer to the cpu with memory transfer to the gpu, and coming up with similar numbers.

i guess the fairest thing you can say is that if you're not going to put the effort into understanding how best to use gpus, leave them alone.

(incidentally, unless you need 64bit fp, or are really limited by pci slots, it makes much more sense to buy commodity graphics cards rather than the new top-end fermi made-for-compute cards - for us switching from an "old" graphics card to a c2050 gave an extra 20% speedup, iirc, which is peanuts compared to the factor of 30 from moving off the cpu; also, nvidia support for the expensive cards sucks, so opencl is worth the extra effort for the peace of mind that you can try something else)

<comment><USER4> Not only that, but, Matlab? Seriously? I don't know the internals, but I'm fairly sure that there's going to be some switching between the CPU and GPU for Matlab to be able to run code there.

If you want something to run fast on the GPU, you code it in a language that can run entirely on the GPU. Not Matlab.

<comment><USER3> the code i ported was originally matlab. if you can write the operations without explicit loops (using matlab's builtins) then it should be able to translate things fairly well to multiple processors. i don't know much about matlab's gpu support (when i looked, you needed third party libs - looks like that has changed?) but again, if it's standard transforms and matrix operations they should be able to make it fairly efficient.

in our case the matlab code had explicit loops (in a sense i was lucky - <USER2> inner kernel operations were messy enough to need explicit coding, but regular enough to be handled efficiently on a gpu) and that's what really kills you (because you're bouncing out of optimised c code into their interpreter). just moving from matlab to c (on the cpu) also gave us a significant speedup.

what i'm saying, in a slow rambling way, is that calculating a bunch of sines should be as fast in matlab as in hand-coded c or opencl (on gpu and cpu respectively). because that _can_ be expressed as a vector operation and matlab will have invested a lot of time and effort into making that code fast.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. I checked the manual after my post above and they do execute sines entirely on the GPU, however you do still need to jump in and out for most coding. It does invalidate my point for his example, though (but it doesn't invalidate any of the other points).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're only doing one mathematical operation on each of the 100 million numbers and then you need to read them all back to the CPU, of course the GPU will be slower. However, if you need to do 1,000 or 10,000 mathematical operations each on 100 million numbers, and then get back a smaller answer of maybe a million numbers, then the GPU is going to blow the CPU away.

The ultimate answer to this post is a couple of steps down the AMD Fusion roadmap, where the GPU is a coprocessor like floating point units were back in the day. The GPU and CPU will be on the same die with unified memory and caches. When that architecture is fully realized, these problems will go away.

</comment><comment><USER6> Amusing blog, but an unfair example. Intel did a more extensive analysis of this issue in "Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU myth" [[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.170...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.170.2755&rep=rep1&type=pdf)]

</comment><comment><USER7> All points touched in the article are valid. However, calculating sine of 100M numbers is simple but not very representative case for GPGPU programs. Leaving data in GPU memory as long as possible between kernel invocations and avoiding transfers is one of the first optimizations that must be considered.

<comment><USER8> His points may be valid (that some people cut corners to get the best numbers for their papers); however, as someone who spends a _lot_ of time writing GPGPU code[1], I'll point out that MATLAB isn't the best way to benchmark GPU- based code. I'm not knocking MATLAB here, but simply pointing out that MATLAB is going to have overhead compared to, say, CUDA. Given that most GPGPU kernels run pretty quickly (less than a second, and probably under 100ms) even a little bit of overhead is going to severely affect your results.

[1] See my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Separate to the whole GPU issue: when timing code in Matlab it's best to use a more careful routine than tic/toc, like timeit.m (by a Mathworks employee): <http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/18798>

<comment><USER10> Thanks, didn't know about this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> His problem is that you need an O(n^2) or higher algorithm to really see the advantages. Something like the n-body problem will go much, much faster on the GPU than on the CPU for large n.

<comment><USER12> There have been some GPU implementations of the Barnes-Hut algorithm [O(nlogn) n-body problem].

<comment><USER11> How do they do against CPU implementations of same?

I imagine you've really got to know what you're doing to compete, because that seems like a pretty branchy algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a pretty laughable basis for comparison - anyone with more than a trivial knowledge of GPUs knows that the largest bottleneck is the bandwidth between system memory and GPU memory, and you are always supposed to design your program with this in mind. Doing a trivial benchmark like taking the sin of one number is not only a pointless operation to attempt on the GPU, but not even a good benchmark of real world GPU applications. GPUs are only good at certain things, and tend to rely on producing data on their end (procedurally), or working with the same set of data over thousands of frames or instances. If you took the sin of the results recursively, and did this a million times over, the GPU would blow the CPU out of the water. What you are claiming is like saying that one CPU is faster than another because one reads from memory and the other from the harddisk.

</comment><comment><USER14> By the way, the term for the ratio "arithmetic computations per memory access", which a lot of the comments here are referring to, is "arithmetic intensity". (We used to say "computational intensity" but that term is even more confusing.) Low arithmetic intensity problems are going to be bottlenecked on memory transfer time, especially for GPGPU, and I'm surprised to see that the GPU doesn't come out quite a bit worse in the comparison for this low-arithmetic-intensity problem. Maybe he should have picked a simpler operation than sine if he wants to make his CPU look more awesome — reciprocal, say. Take the reciprocal of 10 million random numbers.

<comment><USER15> > Low arithmetic intensity problems are going to be bottlenecked on memory > transfer time, especially for GPGPU

True in absolute terms, but it might still be worthwhile doing that anyway. You're still offloading computation to the GPU, and the data transfer isn't going to tie up all of your CPU's cores. While you're sending data across, the rest of your CPU could be doing other tasks it's better suited for (branchy code, virtual function calls, recursion...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone who is doing serious work with GPUs already knows the performance hit you cop when shuffling data to and from the card.

If your solution relies on moving data back and forth from host memory to device memory, you probably won't get the speed boosts you were hoping for.

I can create a solution where the CPU beats the pants off the GPU, and conversely the GPU absolutely smashes the CPU, but for my actual real problems (Data copied to the card once, many iterations, multiple calculations per iteration, results copied back to host), the GPU gives one hell of a boost.

</comment><comment><USER17> I really don't understand the point of this article. The author seems to be honestly interested in exploring GPU computation, and is clearly reasonably well-read in the field. The sarcasm is just really off-putting, though, and the article really presents ver little of actual value--this one trivial computation happens to be slower; so what?

</comment><comment><USER18> The moral of the story is Amdahl's Law:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law>

</comment><comment><USER19> Try it with a 1024X1024 matrix multiplication and suddenly GPUs are much more useful.</comment>


Unify – Unicode support on browsers and devices - <AUTHOR> http://unicode.johnholtripley.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> This tells you which devices support which Unicode characters. By what is meant by "support"? Does it mean that the user will see a correct glyph image with the default installation, or something more?</comment>