GraphQL Best Practices - <AUTHOR> https://jsjaspreet.com/blog/graphql-best-practices <comment><USER2> I've never used GraphQL and have a question. If you're at a larger company with many services, how many GraphQL servers are running? Who owns them? Is it a server per product? Per org? One for the whole company?

Obviously there's no set rule, but I'm curious how its playing out.

<comment><AUTHOR> At my current workplace we're moving to GraphQL slowly and use it as a Gateway to front our backend REST APIs.

Backend feature teams own their APIs, but are all consumed by one GraphQL API which is the nexus of backend communication for things like periodic tasks and our client applications. None of the APIs call each other directly.

I think it's working out really well for the front end teams and aligning well with our engineering organization as a whole. As for who owns the GraphQL repos, everyone contributes to it but we rely on engineering leadership to keep an eye on changes as the system solidifies.

<comment><USER3> Although we're not a very large company, we do something similar, using it as a gateway for everything but file uploads and some other special cases. It feels like a cross between a system-wide statically typed interface and HTTP routing. The tools (graphiql, graphdoc, apollo, the apollo eslint plugin) are really good and they help make the API feel discoverable and flexible.</comment></comment></comment>


Review my startup: Social news reader Twingly.com open for business - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twingly.com/2010/07/01/you-are-now-able-to-create-channels-at-twingly-com/

<comment><USER2> Some criticism:

You should have a language tag for your channels or feeds and make sure you only put english ones on the front page. Right now 2 of them are non-english.

You should put up a demo video or slides or something. Your front page is not compelling enough right now for me to register.

The news items in your channels don't have preview pics. With the space- liberal layout of your site, this is very lacking, it was my first thought as I scrolled down. OR use compressed headlines, and use favicons. But put up some pics, it looks very boring this way with text only.

As one of the commenters here pointed out, the default channels are so general as to be useless. You'll need to think of some interesting subjects. Right now you probably should concentrate on early adopters like us, so create some interesting channels like Python or Django or whatever is hip these days.

I'd consider rethinking the layout (I'm looking at /tech right now). It looks like a generic blog, but it should look like a CHANNEL, so make it look like one! Get rid of the noise on the right side (Sources, Subscribers), use the space for a layout that's not boring and makes me want to use the site.

I should be able to create a channel without signing in. It could be the hook for later signup.

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for the excellent feedback. Pics and vids are next up, via oEmbed. I agree there is much to be done about the layout. The noisy items in the right hand column are going at the bottom of the channel.

As for the selection of channels, we are seeing a lot of interesting channels set up by users, over 200 new channels only today!

Again, thanks! We'll try out different ways to increase sign up rate. A video or the possibility to create channels without signing up are great suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My $0.02: I think the concept is interesting, but the domain name makes it hard for me to love the startup. The domain name obviously has nothing to do with your vertical, has no story behind it, and was seemingly chosen only because it's pronounceable.

Likewise, the accompanying logo doesn't provide any insight into what your service does. What does reflected text tell me about your service? What does that odd, semi-rectangular polygon tell me about your service?

I read your FAQ: I don't think you should market it as a search engine, but rather as a social RSS reader. More people will be familiar with using RSS readers to get news than using search engines to do so.

Like I said, I think you created an interesting product, but I wanted to give you some food for thought.

PS Isn't the social news reader market fairly saturated? What, besides billing yourself as "spam-free" (in the FAQ) can you do to differentiate yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi thank you for the input! It is greatly apreciated and I think it is given that we should address your concerns in the FAQ. Twingly actually comes from being a search engine for blogs, now moving into the social news space. You can try the blog search engine here: <http://www.twingly.com/search>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Checked out the "Tech" channel and it's definitely not something I would use. I'm on a 1680 rez monitor and I can see _three_ headlines on the "Top Stories" page. I can't handle Digg b/c I can only see six, maybe seven headlines without scrolling. As a first time user, I immediately close the page thinking, "#$#% that - I'm not scrolling just to read the headlines." FWIW I like the more spartan "headline only, please" styles of HN or reddit so I realize you may not be trying to appeal to me.

From a content perspective, I have no idea - wasn't worth it for me to check it out since I wasn't interested in scrolling x times to see what you offered.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think your service is lacking "stickiness" Martin. If it's going to be a social news reader, there should be a "social" element to it. Add conversations to the mix, or maybe a retweet/reply feature. Or perhaps a bookmarking functionality. Something that will help me interact with the content and make me want to come back.

Also, I love the channel idea. Make finding, adding and creating channels the central focus of your service. Add more multimedia (video/audio clips etc) and exclusive member channels (subscriptions to these channels might be your business model). The static links look muy boring. Yuk.

If you call it a "channel", make it LOOK and sound like a channel!

TVitter.com: Joost, Twitter and Delicious in a blender. Yeah Baby!

<comment><USER6> Reading your post, it stuck me that being able to follow someone else's RSS feed would actually be very useful. I imagine a scenario where someone provides a "linux-news" channel which is basically a meta-RSS feed filled with interesting Linux articles from around the web. There could even be a "hacker- news" channel where popular stories on HN are listed.

After digging around the site, there are a couple of things I noticed: no channel search (not really necessary _yet_ ) and the design of the "channels" themselves is not very appealing. I'm imagining a more Twitter-esque design with some kind of box around each entry in a channel with the metadata displayed (retweets and that kind of thing) in a minimal fashion near the border of each.

I'd focus on building, first and foremost, a beautiful RSS reader that emphasizes content and then afterwards add a minimal "social features" framework. Don't worry about features, just do a couple things and do them right.</comment></comment>


Sefaria for Democracy - <AUTHOR> https://democracy.sefaria.org <comment><AUTHOR> and their explanation of what it is, for those who haven't spent time in the world of jewish texts.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vREoqWlYLC68jScm...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vREoqWlYLC68jScm2yBO2cZY1SbLOjj67Tu59VdVVYf1lbnNIxiKG07GSNKlg6p77kIpauiqPRZsSsk/pub)</comment>


Brace yourself for a very very fake internet - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cipheredtrust.com/2018/12/brace-yourself-for-very-very-fake.html <comment><USER2> Just like drivers on the roads, the only way to police the internet is to license those who use it..

for instance a government issued access ID as the only way to access to the the internet...

but could this even work?

<comment><AUTHOR> Government issued ID would fall under the heavy-handed approach...There is a better way:

[https://www.cipheredtrust.com/doc/](https://www.cipheredtrust.com/doc/)</comment></comment>


Numpad in PuTTY while using vim - <AUTHOR> http://cialug.org/pipermail/cialug/2005-June/003060.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is probably a case when the backward compatibility guarantee can be annoying to the majority.</comment>


Recent programming books - <AUTHOR> http://programmingzen.com/2010/06/21/ten-recent-programming-books-that-will-make-you-a-better-developer/

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised to see Programming Collective Intelligence on the list. Not to say it's not a good book - it absolutely is, I've got a well-thumbed copy sat next to me - but I can't say that it's as generally applicable as the rest.

<comment><USER3> It is more specific than the others, but a majority of my readers are web developers, so I thought my bias for this book would be shared and welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've found anything in O'Reilly's Beautiful series to be worthwhile</comment>


Cryptic consciousness - <AUTHOR> http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=132

<comment><USER2> The being with the fully-cryptic (or almost fully cryptic) consciousness is described in the novel "Solaris" by Stanislav Lem - two movies were made after it, one by Andrei Tarkowski, the other by Steven Soderbergh.

It's a great book anyway, regardless of your interest in the issue of consciousness.

<comment><USER2> Oh, BTW, the movies are good too.

The one by Tarkowski is a classic and has an almost cult following (almost impossible to criticize it in certain circles). It is a remarkable movie, but I've found it a bit bombastic at times.

The other one, by Soderbergh, is the movie that opened my eyes to the art of cinema - or rather, to telling stories with the image, framing, and camera motion. It's hard to explain, it was like a revelation. I used to be very much focused on music, sound and words, and was almost blind to visual arts. Seeing Soderbergh's "Solaris" was a turning point to me, along with other major changes in my life at that point. I guess I was just getting ready and seeing the movie was probably the catalyst. Now I can actually take pictures in a conscious way and am able to "say" something by just framing the image in a certain way.

I read the book decades ago, when I was a high-school kid. It had a major impact on my thinking. It's a lot more philosophical than what you would expect from a sci-fi novel. Reminding of Borges in a way.

<comment><USER3> Solaris by Tarkovsky is not uncriticizable, in the sense that "yes, it could have done what it tried to do better".

But a lot of what makes Tarkovsky's film sometimes bombastic is also what makes it work.

Solaris is ultimately about encountering something that you don't understand. The ppl studying it have theories, and draw conclusions, but its nature is ultimately a mystery that resists investigation.

Edit: so much so that essentially it's just a mirror (as mentioned)...the theories people have expose much about their own thoughts and preferences but don't seem to be getting any closer to understanding it...

The film is pretty obviously constructed to make you really appreciate the experience of interacting with the incomprehensible, by being deliberately obtuse and devoid of explanation.

Watching the film is as close as most of us might come to being stuck alone on a spacestation dealing with a high mystery; it's long, uncomfortable, wearying, and ultimately unsatisfying, as you don't come away from it with anything resembling a sense of closure...you end up knowing perhaps less than you came in with.

On the one hand, this makes it a crap movie in some ways: you never find out what 'the answer' is (what is solaris? why is it doing this?) or even a comfortable sense of the end (what happens to kris?). On the other hand, if the point of the film was not so much to tell a story as to communicate an experience, then many of the drawbacks and flaws can be seen as working towards that goal.

Contrast with say the monoliths from 2001: there's some kind of 'mystery' in the sense of 'who built them, how do they work', etc., but that's a very shallow mystery; it's understood / hinted at / explained (in the books, at least) almost exactly that they're artifacts that look for conscious life or the possibility of it, and then give it 'forward nudges' as needed.

So there's still a small mystery: 'who, exactly, built these things? how, exactly, do they work?' but for supposedly incomprehensibly advanced artifacts constructed by incomprehensibly advanced beings the reader walks away comprehending almost everything...

You have to decide upfront: is a film something that tells a story, or is it something that provides an experience...assessment will vary depending your choice there.

<comment><USER2> Good points. That is also the theme of the book - the mystery beyond comprehension. The echoes of Borges (the staggering fictional encyclopedism) serve the purpose of suggesting the titanic struggle of the mind to grasp the unknowable anyway.

Soderbergh's version avoids dealing with the mystery (well, it's pushed in the background) and focuses instead on psychological exploration. The scope is much more narrow, and it's a very simple movie - in a way. But it does what it set out to do very well, it's very focused on its goal and taut. And the images and the camera work are mesmerizing - I was "tripping" mouth agape all the way to the end.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, keep in mind Soderburgh had a budget; Tarkovsky did his on a shoestring budget, and some of the wtfs (like the driving sequence) result from budgetary issues.

Soderburgh certainly improved a lot on the cinematography, no argument.

For people with a lot vested in their critical opinions I'm sure criticism of solaris is a no-go; for a lot of others, though, it's one of those films where you can see how it could be so much better if remade with less budgetary constraints (we don't need a cgi planet, really, but just a second-draft to get it right)...and Soderburgh being Soderburgh he got his chance.

One thing that's worth remembering is just how narrow Tarkovsky cut the book: the book goes on at great length, but Tarkovsky cut everything down to the core human drama:

\- you're sent to investigate the mental health of people out on this space station investigating this incomprehensible object, b/c they've basically stopped communicating

\- you get there and instead of anything you expect to find, you find your long-dead wife

\- that's a pretty incomprehensible thing, no? It's something Lem included as a pretty smart move, but you could -- literally -- write a whole novel or make a whole film just trying to work through the psychological reactions that'd produce

By restricting that attention it humanizes the encounter with the incomprehensible:

\- you get to 'cheat'; a cgi orange planet is obviously a cgi orange planet, and thus not really 'mysterious'; using interpersonal relationships for your mystery lets you tap into very primal emotional hooks

\- but at the end it's still left deliberately opaque enough to remain an encounter with the incomprehensible

If you have read more by Lem you'll see his pet peeve is comprehensible mysteries -- just about every story he's written can be interpreted in some way as a kind of parable of how even 'explorers' are mostly uninterested in or incapable of encountering or appreciating anything they didn't already know or understand.

Fiasco fits the bill, as does 'Return from the Stars' (though it's harder to pick out, there). Lem was pretty prolific.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LSA: A Solution to Plato's Problem - <AUTHOR> http://lsa.colorado.edu/papers/plato/plato.annote.html

<comment><USER2> I can comment on this, since I did my PhD work with Landauer and Kintsch and was the webmaster of lsa.colorado.edu for a while.

The current scene of statistical semantics is very active right now. I'm not sure that the SVD is easier to implement than the probabilistic versions (LDA, topics model). The svd code LSA uses required sparse matrices, and the code runs using the Lanczos algorithm; it also needs to place the entire matrix in memory at some point. This limits the scale of the corpus you can deal with. The probabilistic versions are iterative, and while they may take more CPU and time, they are not memory bounded.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe that PLSA is generally preferred over LSA, and LDA is preferred over PLSA. PLSA is equivalent to LDA when you assume the prior is a uniform Dirichlet distribution. I guess LSA is probably the easiest to implement since it just involves a singular value decomposition, but I don't know how often it's actually used in practice anymore.

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

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation></comment>


Ask HN: Is Azure reliable? If not, what is the best place to create windows VMs? - <AUTHOR> I have been using AWS since 10+ years. Today I decided to try Azure. Eventual consistency with severe lag is apparent all over their UI. At the end of signup, they threw an error. After a few refreshes I could see the portal. Then they wanted me to signup for a subscription, but the error for that was in Portuguese (which is neither related to my locale, nor any preferences). Finally I somehow signed up for the subscription after multiple tries, but it took almost 10 minutes to reflect in the Azure portal. I wanted to use the cheapest 128 GB RAM machine which has 16 cores. However they have 10 core limit. I raised a support request to increase the core limit but it hasn't been handled for almost 8 hours and I am stuck because of this.
Are they really so bad! I am really disappointed. If they are dropping the ball with something so clearly in their control, I am not sure how much help they would be when there is a serious issue.
Should I think about another provider? Which other cloud provider, will allow to me run more than 128 GB RAM Windows VM, where all the data persists between restarts. I intend to use this machine 2 hours per day and keep it down when not in use. Couldn't find an easy way to make this happen on AWS. <comment><USER2> Hey there, @timewarrior! I work on Azure, and would like to hear more about your signup issues so that we can resolve them and improve the experience.

Could you please send an email to email@example.com?

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't speak to Azure, but why is this difficult on AWS? You can stop and restart your instances, and you'll be charged only when they're running. Your data will need to be on EBS volumes.</comment>


The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn't: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176132/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_exhibit_one_in_any_future_american_war_crimes_trial/ <comment><USER2> Before, we were told how tough it was on a person to be waterboarded.

That it was so debilitating that it was only used in extreme cases.

Now this guy is waterboarded 3 times a day for a month, basically at every meal (if you want to think about it in terms of frequency).

It seems clear that it is not rare; and that it doesn't really deliver results.

Again and again, we have been lied to about waterboarding, how often it is done, what level of use we get out of it, etc.

And, this is just 1 example - there could well be other methods of torture and many other cases of incompetence... makes you want to say "you know what? Let's just scrap the whole thing..."

If waterboarding was a piece of software it would be considered too crashy and unreliable and a replacement that worked better would be sought immediately.

<comment><USER3> Well it didn't deliver results, because none of it was true. So how could the guy give up any information that didn't exist?

<comment><USER4> Imagine you had a scale, onto which you put a weight labeled "100kg". You know it weights 100kg because it says so right there. The scale however, only registers 85kg. You take it off, you put it back on, the scale always says the same thing. You try different scales, they say 85kg, but you _keep going_ because it's 100kg and you're going to find a scale that's accurate! Eventually you find a scale that says what you want.

This straw man illustrates that at some point, it isn't the tool, but the process that's flawed. Even if your tool is accurate, if you don't believe it, you can't get at the truth, and if you work hard enough you can find a broken tool to tell you what you want.

So perhaps there is some truth to the idea that torture can extract true information from people, but if the whole process operates like the above straw man, it totally invalidates the use of the tool.

<comment><USER5> It's more like, you will extract information, but only in hindsight can you ever know if it was worthwhile, accurate, a trap, etc. You will also kill some people, some people won't break easily, and some will babble anything and everything. You won't know which is which in the moment, and usually you're torturing for time-sensitive information.

What you get is what happened during WWII, when the resistances knew they just had to withstand torture for 24 hours, 48 at most. It's amazing what motivated people can do when they have a goal, and that goes for the tortured as well as the torturers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article will not change anything. By the time our day end we will have been bombarded by so much other information that it will just be one more forgotten thing.

And there's so much things that are revolting that our brains are just shutting down as a self defense mechanism.

Sociopaths in power don't even need to hide anymore, they know they are hidden in the noise.

I mean look at Turkey : they help ISIS, they shoot Syrian refugees crossing the border, they kill their own Kurdish population and they denies a genocide ... barely a blip in the news.

<comment><USER7> One reason this won't cause a blip in the news is because it's really sensationalist and biased.

The article implies that the government was totally wrong about Abu Zubaydah and, therefore, he was totally innocent But to prove that the article cites to the court memo that says the US government doesn't alleged Zubaydah was a member of al Qaeda.

But the government still alleged he ran an independent terrorist training camp that was affiliated with al Qaeda. The gov't just didn't "contend that Petitioner was a 'member' of al-Qaida in the sense of having sworn bayat (allegiance) or having otherwise satisfied any formal criteria that either Petitioner or al-Qaida may have considered necessary for inclusion in al~Qaida. Nor is the Government detaining Petitioner based on any allegation that Petitioner views himself as part of al-Qaida as a matter of subjective personal conscience, ideology, or worldview. Rather, Respondent's detention of Petitioner is based on conduct and actions that establish Petitioner was 'part of' hostile forces and 'substantially supported' those forces."

<comment><USER8> If he wasn't innocent, he would be judged by an independent court, and be given the chance of challenging the evidence against him. The US is a democracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's time to confront the reality that we have a serious asshole epidemic in America. It has gone unchecked for a few centuries and it has reached a fever pitch of state sanctioned torture and Donald Trump supporters.

Much like idiots, assholes cannot possibly realize that they are being assholes. It's one of the symptoms. They're actually completely confident that what they're doing makes total sense. It's a touch-and-go sorta thing; how do you openly confront assholery without becoming a huge asshole? I call this the Snowden dilemma. It's a real problem.

We are well past the point of occasionally waking up to find feces on the kitchen table. The majority of this country is subsisting entirely on a diet of pure shit. I don't want to seem elitist - I regard myself as a world class dummy - but I do know what shit tastes like and I understand that eating it is bad for you. I don't have any answers but I think we're in a lot of trouble here.

"Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. [...] It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world." \--H.L. Mencken

<comment><USER10> I don' think there's a magic bullet to asshattery. There has to be a cultural shift away from asshattery as acceptable behavior. The same way there has been a cultural shift away from domestic abuse and racism being acceptable (though they both have their stragglers).

The problem is that the diet of pure shit serves a purpose. It keeps people both agitated and docile at the same time. The kind of agitated and docile you would recognize in a cranky 80 yr man who shouts at clouds. Angry and uncomfortable, but ultimately harmless; miles away from taking an AK-47 and marching on Washington, and ultimately willing to pull the lever for the blue or red party, or best, not vote at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The sad part is: despite reading this article and fully agreeing with it, conservatives in this country will just shrug and say: mistakes happen, let's not dwell on it. And they feel justified in taking this view because they know deep down that it would never happen to a white person in today's US. Case in point: John Walker Lindh -vs- Jose Padilla. JWL (a white guy) was actually fighting against the Americans; was taken prisoner, treated well, immediately put on trial and sentenced to 20 years (he'll be out in 7). Jose Padilla (a Hispanic male) was tortured for years in a Naval brig, without charges.

<comment><USER12> _conservatives in this country will just shrug and say: mistakes happen, let 's not dwell on it._

Apparently so will our Liberal president:

 _I hope that today's report can help us leave these [torture] techniques where they belong—in the past._ [https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2014/12/09/state...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2014/12/09/statement-president-report-senate-select-committee- intelligence)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If they can do this to him they can do it to anyone. The saddest thing is the example the "free world" is giving to all totalitarian torturers.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sometimes I question whether there is the possibility of change, here. The CIA has started openly torturing people - they have no doubt been covertly torturing people for years; we've been showing this in our fiction for decades, and this is probably largely the public's view of how the CIA is - unsavory characters who do the "dirty work" that needs to get done to keep us safe.

Why do we accept this notion of torture as a heroic virtue, when it's obviously not? I think we're unable to assimilate the alternative - that our national myths are all false, that we are subject to an evil torture state, that our security apparatus is beyond democratic control or the rule of law. All of these are horrific, monstrous possibilities that we can't confront, so it's much easier for us to rationalize them away by suggesting that the CIA's actions are not, actually, evil.

Determining otherwise requires an act of national catharsis, a revolution in our understanding of ourselves as a political entity. We are not safe, good, democratic. We are venal, aggressive, evil. Making this confrontation will take more than just a factual understanding.

</comment><comment><USER15> You would expect this to happen. Things like the Geneva Conventions are artifacts of roughly symmetric wars, where one could reasonably expect treatment & retaliation to be reciprocal. This explains things like restrictions on, eg, hollow point bullets - it's easy enough for everyone to use them, and it only serves to increase the severity of the conflict with no change in relative outcomes.

Now that the US doesn't actually fear having large numbers of troops captured, and even if they did their opponents have no desire to reciprocate treatment, they're "free" to engage in whatever horrific behavior they would like, and vise versa.

Lind is good on this: [http://www.amazon.com/Generation-Warfare-Handbook- William-Li...](http://www.amazon.com/Generation-Warfare-Handbook-William-Lind- ebook/dp/B017IP1JM2)

</comment><comment><USER16> Well if he didn't hate the CIA before then he probably does now.

<comment><USER17> Good point. The argument could be made that the CIA agents involved have provided material support for terrorism.

<comment><USER18> [http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx_GOM4Jcjo](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx_GOM4Jcjo)

Reminds me of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Speaking as someone who served in the U.S. military - this is not how a prisoner should be treated.

<comment><USER20> Well no shit; there's the Geneva convention and shit that makes practices like torture and such illegal. The US can waltz right over that though, because what is anyone going to do?

<comment><USER19> I understand that some people argue that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to members of terrorist organizations; that it only applies to members of a sovereign country's military. Regardless, it reflects badly on us.

Torture is wrong; no matter who is doing it or who it is being done to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think their discussion of "learned helplessness" is interesting in this context. I think it also applies to most Americans in the feeling that this will occur in our name, without our consent or approval, regardless of what we do. I don't think this is truly the case but it is hard to shake the feeling that it is and be as outraged by this as we absolutely should be.

</comment><comment><USER22> I notice that the article places all the blame on the Bush administration--yet it says the Obama administration quietly dropped the charges but did not release Zubaydah.

<comment><USER23> Charges is not the right word, he has to this day not been charged with anything whatsoever. He's held based on suspicion, allegations, stuff like that. Essentially awaiting a fair trial for over a decade, while being tortured in the process. It's quite insane.

<comment><USER22> _> Charges is not the right word_

Yes, good point, I should have said "dropped the claims being made" or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a free member of the western world, happily able to pursue "the dream," and unexposed to the direct effects of war and humanitarian crimes, what am I to do? If you think about it, the domestic conditions in the US, relative to many of the places in the non-western world, are such that we have no incentive to ACTUALLY do anything to change things for the better. Sure, we get upset about reading articles like this. But is getting upset for 5 minutes, writing an article, making a movie, or even settling into the mindset of being jaded and skeptical about our own country's leadership really the toolset we are left with at the end of the day to cause change? Is there revolution in the modern west? Or are we neutered by the relatively great living conditions we take for granted?

<comment><USER25> So here is a false choice, but consider which one would have a greater and longer lasting impact:

A) You dash to the rolltop and feverishly write letters to every politician you can think of. You then get on a bus with a bunch of other upset people, go to DC and wave signs with clever catch phrases. You then live in a tent on public space for several weeks.

B) You consider this information, your feelings, and your prior model of the way the world worked. Methodically you reexamine long unchallenged precepts related to morality, the role of the state, and the logical consistency of the entire endeavor. After a while you find that things make a lot more sense, you are no longer experience the effects of cognitive dissonance when new information hits your brain. You share this new understanding, through example (maybe by pestering strangers online, either or).

Clearly I favor option B, but one could easily deride it as slacktivism - though the self reflection is not something you often see in #Kony2012. Every example of positive change that I can think, involved marching and rhyming slogans, would not have been possible without a great deal of uncomfortable self examination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The historical purpose and utility of torture is to produce made-up confessions and bullshit "intelligence" to lend some veneer of necessity to whatever course of action the high and mighty have already committed to.

Just about anybody with a Middle-Eastern-sounding name and the slightest plausible connection to or proximity with "Al Qaeda" (conveniently defined and delimited by the torturers themselves) would have been equally useful for this purpose. _There is no "right" man, no "wrong" man._ That's torture. It's a show, a blood pageant. It's reading the Tarot or goat entrails.

That's the system, the procedure you defend when you apologize for torture.

</comment><comment><USER27> The CIA is not known for its intelligence.

<comment><USER28> Agreed, they've come to be known for lack of oversight, being involved in corruption, being involved in drug production and trafficking, overthrowing democraically elected governments, installing despots, grabbing people from their home countries and torturing them in absolutely vile ways, and more.

The 3 letters 'CIA' now strike fear into the hearts of innocent people across the globe.

<comment> saiya-jin I would say disgust rather than fear, just another entitled bunch of a __holes who think they can do whatever they want all around the globe and they actually have means to do so.

but then comes fleeting moment of satisfaction when some of them are shot, kidnapped etc... yeah, that's how despised they are

<comment><USER28> > just another entitled bunch of aholes who think they can do whatever they > want all around the globe and they actually have means to do so

I think that understates things a bit - I'm not aware of any other group in history that has freely wrought global havoc for so long, torturing, killing, trafficking in drugs, destroying lives, destroying whole _nations_...

Honestly, they are _terrifying_.

<comment><USER29> Yeah. I wonder if there's a way to tally up their death toll... it's possible it'd be in the millions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Same article on a website that is not _awful_

[http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176132/tomgram%3A_rebecca_go...](http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176132/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_exhibit_one_in_any_future_american_war_crimes_trial/)

<comment><USER31> Good thing I clicked on it before it was changed. I have the complete opposite reaction. The Nation's page has a nice picture to set the theme and uses a wider space with a bigger font, while the TomDispatch page looks like something from 1999.

<comment><USER30> I agree that the _design_ of the nation's site is better/more modern. However, when I landed on the site, I was able to read the first sentence before a modal subscription form popped up. I clicked the little x button in the top right of that modal, and it did a full page load redirecting me to an article about hillary clinton, and then popped the subscription modal again.

I clicked the x button again and it did the same fucking thing, so I gave them the email address email@example.com, found the article I was trying to read and noticed that it was sourced from the link I dropped above. That page loaded quickly and showed me what I wanted to see, the content.

/rant

<comment><USER31> That does sound like a bad experience indeed. I didn't get that myself, and can't seem to replicate it now in incognito either. Perhaps geo-targeting?

Pop-ups suck, and I wish my browser's pop-up blocker would also block these inline e-mail asking dialogs in every site.

<comment><USER30> I've been meaning to whip up a browser extension that streamlines the Open web inspector - find offending node on page - delete div element work flow.

There are some out there that sort of do what I want, but I really just want to right click on the annoying popup/ad/whatever and select delete from the contextual menu, or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The website comes up with a pop-up when I try read the article, but when I hit the 'x' to close it I get dumped at the homepage.

Here's the Google cache version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Itp90I0...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Itp90I0NOLMJ:www.thenation.com/article/the- cia-waterboarded-the-wrong-man-83-times-in-1-month/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER33> On my phone it is a scrolling advertisement. To get past it don't click on it just scroll using the page around the ad and once you get past it you can scroll again! Desktop I'm not sure about however

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Bush is a war criminal

</comment><comment><USER35> Well, that should teach these non-terrorists not to be easily mistaken for terrorists any more.

</comment><comment><USER36> Trevor would be so into this story

<comment><USER37> Imagine the patches with cool Latin slogans!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Interesting implication from the title of the article: that it would be 'right' to waterboard some other men. Who are they, and what justifies their torture? And before someone says it, I don't think "gathering intelligence" is a sufficiently moral or practical justification. People being tortured don't tell you valuable information; they tell you whatever they think will make the torture stop.

The CIA is a sickening and surprisingly amateurish organisation. Their actions over the past decades have ruined the United States' international moral authority. It's laughable whenever some US politician goes on TV and proclaims that America is some magical paragon of liberal democratic virtue. It's a sick joke.

<comment><USER39> >Who are they, and what justifies their torture?

>People being tortured don't tell you valuable information; they tell you whatever they think will make the torture stop.

You're already asserting your position, and disguising it as a question. Virtually everyone seriously condoning torture believe it is effective. If they were to believe it wasn't effective, they wouldn't order it to be done.

You may think it's not effective, but that should be argued on its own merit. You're assuming the conclusion, then pretending that everyone else does and are therefore unjustified.

<comment><USER40> > Virtually everyone seriously condoning torture believe it is effective.

I think a very high number of "torture proponents" are simply in favor of hurting the "bad guys" and don't even care that there might be information to be had.

Donald Trump said it best, to an arena full of cheering supporters:

"If it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway, for what they're doing"

In his mind, and the minds of his constituents, the "information gathering" aspect is a sly wink at the other sadists in the room.

<comment><USER41> Donald Trump and his supporters are not the individuals who ordered the torture/enhanced interrogation (T/EI). If one watches/reads General Hayden's comments on the topic, he's disgusted by any call for punitive T/EI. He begins talking about this at about 34:50. [https://youtu.be/GBx- ECt6vUo?t=34m50s](https://youtu.be/GBx-ECt6vUo?t=34m50s)

The discussion on the US' RDI program begins at about 30:25.

<comment><USER42> T/EI ?

What a cute military acronym.

<comment><USER41> I just made it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> While "waterboarding the right man 83 times in 1 month" would of course be a very honorable occupation.

<comment><USER44> "Justified" is the word you're looking for.

We want it to be justified, not honorable. Nobody gives two shits about honor as soon as it is about "them" (whoever fits that definition currently).

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure this kind of disgusting behaviour can ever be justified.

<comment><USER45> "Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe torture can be justified to extract information from suspected terrorists, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll ... Only 15 percent said torture should never be used ... The Reuters/Ipsos poll included 1,976 people. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2.5 percentage points for the entire group" [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-torture- exclu...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-torture-exclusive- idUSKCN0WW0Y3)

<comment><USER46> We can see physical or psychological torture used effectively in many TV series. I have read that in real life, torture was very ineffective to make people tell something they want to hide. Generally people die without speaking or do not know any valuable secret.

Remember at school. When one child get punished, all the other childs of the class become quiet. The main desired effect of torture is manipulation of population. They do not care if the tortured guy speaks or dies, they want to inspire fear.

I think it is the only way to understand how something so barbare and so ineffective (in its direct purpose) is still used. TV series should stop disinformation (pretending torture works and presenting torture as acceptable).

Torture is unacceptable.

<comment><USER47> > We can see physical or psychological torture used effectively in many TV > series.

Almost exclusively by the heroes, and it always works almost instantly. It says something about the people writing them.

I can't wait for the episode of Daredevil where he spends a month and a half torturing someone for information.

Remember all of those scenes in movies from the 70s and earlier when halfway through the rape, the woman starts to get into it, and when we cut to the morning after she's like "never leave me," and now the viewer is expected to sympathise with the rapist and his victim against the world?

It's a snapshot of the mindset of elites.

> Remember at school. When one child get punished, all the other childs of the > class become quiet. The main desired effect of torture is manipulation of > population. They do not care if the tortured guy speaks or dies, they want > to inspire fear.

This is only way torture is effective. Except, in this context, the more accurate term for it is terrorism.

<comment><USER48> >Remember all of those scenes in movies from the 70s and earlier when halfway through the rape, the woman starts to get into it, and when we cut to the morning after and she's like "never leave me," and now the viewer is expected to sympathise with the rapist and his victim against the world?

Actually, no. I've seen plenty of old movies, but I don't recall many rape scenes, much less such rape scenes where the rapist is meant to be sympathized with, or where the rape victim takes pleasure in it.

<comment><USER49> Old James Bond movies at the very least come close to that. I was rather shocked watching over on a plane recently.

<comment><USER47> James Bond and Pussy Galore - is this rape?

[http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1570613-...](http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1570613-James- Bond-and-Pussy-Galore-is-this-rape)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What to Do When You Want to Say "I Don't Trust You" (Hint: Don't Say It) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/coaching-notes/what-to-do-when-you-want-to-say-i-dont-trust-you-hint-don-t-say-it-3923890194dd <comment><USER2> What does the trend to reduce the need for trust in human interactions say about the institution itself?

<comment><AUTHOR> Which institution are you talking about?

<comment><USER2> Trust.</comment></comment></comment>


Important [info re 2018-01-03] Windows security updates […] and [A-V] software - <AUTHOR> https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4072699/important-information-regarding-the-windows-security-updates-released <comment><AUTHOR> Even more information:

* [https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4073707/windows-os-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4073707/windows-os-security-update-block-for-some-amd-based-devices) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16107555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16107555))

* [https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4072698/windows-ser...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4072698/windows-server-guidance-to-protect-against-the-speculative-execution) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108356](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108356))

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Even more still:

* [https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/01/09/...](https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/01/09/understanding-the-performance-impact-of-spectre-and-meltdown-mitigations-on-windows-systems/) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16107777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16107777))

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Microsoft's title was too long for Hacker News' submission interface.

More information:

* [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/184wcDt9I9TUNFFbsAVLp...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/184wcDt9I9TUNFFbsAVLpzAtckQxYiuirADzf3cL42FQ/htmlview?sle=true#gid=0)

* [https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4072698/windows-ser...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4072698/windows-server-guidance-to-protect-against-the-speculative-execution)

* [https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4056892/windows-10-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4056892/windows-10-update-kb4056892)

<comment><AUTHOR> Microsoft has since shortened the title somewhat. It used to be _Important information regarding the Windows security updates released on January 3, 2018 and anti-virus software_.</comment></comment>


A time in 1994 when Steve Jobs got to use a device like an iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://www.cake.co/conversations/6bNY8PD/that-time-in-1994-when-steve-jobs-got-to-use-a-device-like-an-iphone <comment><USER2> I'd have to say that the General Magic user interface (Magic Cap) was much more similar to the user interface in Microsoft Bob than an iPhone.

>Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a "house", with "rooms" that the user could go to containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications—for instance, a desk with pen and paper, a checkbook, and other items. In this case, clicking on the pen and paper would open the word processor.

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

Here's a short overview of a device running Magic Cap and it's user interface for comparison.

[https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=37](https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=37)

<comment><USER3> It's always really cool seeing designs like this, just a reminder that nobody really had any idea what they were doing when building these UIs back then since it was totally unexplored territory

<comment><USER4> If anything, they had a better idea what they were doing than people do now. Windows 95 is a case study in good design. They got there by testing it and iterating on it a ton. [https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing- windows-9...](https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing- windows-95s-user-interface/)

<comment><USER5> Win95 and Win2k where in my opinion the high water mark of Windows UI, everything since has mostly been different or worse.

Though with touchscreens I can see why that pattern would have dated badly.

That said, 16 year old me would have zero issues with using Cinnamon how I have it setup 22 years later.

Well after he stopped pointing at the screen in amazement and trying to get his head around a laptop with 4x2.8GHz cores and 8 threads.

Hell he'd even recognise a thinkpad in 2018 mostly because 16yo me _really_ wanted one.

<comment><USER6> Win 2k really was sharp. Xp eventually was able to get close but by then it was replaced by Vista, and I switched to Mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I worked at Motorola on the team building the Envoy GM device.

When GM first proposed the idea of a handheld digital assistant in the immediate pre-WWW era, e-mail was catching on as the hot new novelty, and GM's pitch to its partners was that you could go to the store, buy a device and have an e-mail account by doing little more than turning the thing on. Easy enough for Grandma to do was the idea.

When I came aboard the project was 18 months along and they thought they were on the verge of shipping. But the software was buggy and the API unstable, so partners had a hard time integrating it with their hardware.

Another 18 months went by before devices finally shipped, still buggy. But in that time AOL had grown exponentially and captured the concept of easy e-mail access in the minds of the masses. GM had no compelling alternative story they could replace their original pitch with, and their partners had lost patience and interest. Motorola put only minimal money into marketing the Envoy device.

That's my recollection of the dynamics that led to GM's failure.

<comment><USER7> At the time pagers had hit huge in the consumer market, and Motorola was making a mint selling them. Motorola had also developed the first practical wireless modem and was trying to market a sort of super-pager using the modem to enable two-way comms and longer messages than a pager allowed. But it was literally the size and shape of a brick and marketing wasn't going anywhere.

Motorola bet on GM as a way to extend their pager winning streak with a more consumer-friendly device and more savvy marketing. The Motorola Envoy team was given the mission of miniaturizing the modem enough to fit in a smaller, more attractive package.

They largely succeeded, but the shipping delays also allowed growth of miniature cell phones to take hold, and Motorola saw their future there more than with extensions to the pager paradigm. That contributed to Motorola's loss of interest in marketing the Envoy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is first time I'm learning about this company. Interesting read.

This part:

"General Magic came to an excruciating end. Tony went on to build the iPhone, Andy Rubin built Android, Pierre Omidyar built eBay, Megan Smith became VP of Google and then America's CTO, Kevin Lynch built apple Watch…I could keep going."

Reminded me of Jorodosky's Dune and how the team he gathered went on the do iconic films/art

<comment><USER9> The Wikipedia page about General Magic draws this comparison between GM and Fairchild:

> Magic's engineering team is viewed as one of the most talented in the > Valley's history, and Magic is generally seen as the Fairchild of mobile, > social and ecommerce—the fountain from which much of today's smartphone and > online communication and commerce technology sprang, just as Fairchild > Semiconductor spawned Intel, National Semiconductor, AMD and the rest of the > Valley's semiconductor industry.

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic#Legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic#Legacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting timing for this article and documentary to emerge, while a modern company with so many parallels, Magic Leap, is apparently releasing their device in the coming days. As General Magic was an ambitious and visionary precursor to the iPhone, so it seems Magic Leap may be the ambitious and visionary precursor to a mainstream spatial computing headset of the not-too- distant future.

With recent leaks of the 40 degree FOV and headset footage, it seems that Magic Leap, like General Magic, has not yet been able to deliver the technology necessary for widespread appeal. This time around, at least Magic Leap has raised a war chest so large, perhaps they can move forward with a far improved version 2 and continue operations and development, given only modest sales.

Hopefully Magic Leap can learn a lesson here and avoid becoming a General Magic (although, if it does, it was still a worthwhile effort to push the field forward, as General Magic did).

<comment><USER11> I don't see how Magic Leap and General Magic have anything in common besides the name and the eventual failure. Magic Leap hasn't innovated anything new compared to the HoloLens or other AR devices (see Leap Motion's AR device), while General Magic seemed to have pioneered portable touch screen communication devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nokia 9000 is another old smartphone from 1996. Features a web browser, email client, telnet, etc. Grayscale 640x200 display.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator)

<comment><USER13> The 9000 was part of our "on-call kit" in my SA team at the time. I remember being out on a hike in Atlanta one weekend when I got paged while I was on call and trying to use it to ssh in to fix an issue. It worked, but barely. I wish I could remember the exact details, but all I recall is that I was able to fix the problem and didn't need to end my hike early.

The wiki page doesn't say anything about ssh, but I'm almost certain it had it. This may have been around 98 or 99 though.

<comment><USER14> Well, the first version of SSH was released in 1995, so it probably wasn't widespread enough to be included in the first Communicator. Even though they are both Finnish inventions.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. We were commonly using telnet in those days.

Slightly amusing side story. Some of the guys had gotten those Motorola Timeport pagers with the screen and qwerty keyboard. One of them had rigged up some scripts so that he could send a text message with a Unix command, and his workstation would text him back the output of the command.

Hilariously insecure, but a pretty cool demo at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> et-al Sidenote: the author of the post (Chris MacAskill) is also the co-founder of SmugMug which recently acquired Flickr. And apparently he also runs [https://advrider.com/](https://advrider.com/). Quite the renaissance person.

[https://www.cake.co/users/Chris](https://www.cake.co/users/Chris)

</comment><comment><USER16> A new book came out recently about the history of Silicon Valley called "Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley". I've been working my way through the audiobook and it tells the story of General Magic in there. Would 100% recommend- it filled me with the same excitement as reading Steven Levy's original "Hackers".

<comment><USER17> I also bought this audiobook and just started it. Finished the first chapter. I found it a bit difficult to follow the format with so many quotes though. Is the rest of the book structured like the first chapter?

<comment><USER16> The book format is definitely unorthodox with it being constructed from quotes (the whole book is indeed all quotes, like the first chapter.) I found the change in style odd at first, but I found it easier to follow as I continued to listen. I actually really fell in love with the format after a few chapters.

<comment><USER18> So basically it's an oral history of SV? Sounds awesome I'll check it out thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love the part about telling Steve that Sculley owned the same Mercedes. That's pro level trolling right there.

</comment><comment><USER20> I had one of these SONY-branded devices, in Italy, gifted to me by an American relative when I must've been 13 or 14. I absolutely loved it even though it a bit less functionality than my PSION 3a. Ultimately it met a gruesome end when a school bully purposefully smashed its screen in an act of jealous spite.

<comment><USER21> Ouch, that's rough. But dropped in to say I still think fondly of the last PSION I owned m, the PSION Revo.

<comment><USER22> Have you seen Gemini PDA? [https://www.planetcom.co.uk/](https://www.planetcom.co.uk/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Having owned one, the Magic Cap OS is nothing like an iPhone. Plus, it crashed a lot. I loved the idea and Telescript is an under-copied language, but the Newton with the cellphone (Motorola Marco) was a better attempt at what the iPhone would be.

</comment><comment><USER24> Thomas Dolby [0] has a great anecdote about meeting Marc Porat and Bill Gates in his autobiography 'The Speed of Sound'

"Marc Porat and I were eyeball-to-eyeball as he continued to fill me in about his company. Marc didn't notice, but across the table, Bill Gates was ignoring the sycophants to his left and right, and straining to eavesdrop on Marc's jargon-laden elevator pitch. Gates seemed to be getting more and more agitated, and was poking at his beef Wellington. As Marc explained his technology in more detail, Gates began rocking nervily back and forth in his chair.

"You'll have these intelligent agents, as I call them," said Marc quietly, "scouting and negotiating on your behalf, pulling in data from all over the Net. Eventually you won't really need a PC, because all your work will be in a sort of cloud."

Suddenly there was an explosion from across the table. "MARC, THAT'S FUCKING BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT!" It was Gates.

His tie was too tight and the veins were bulging on his neck. In the wake of this high-decibel outburst, a deadly silence descended on the room. Startled faces at both tables turned our way. Even the waiters froze, silver ladles in their hands. Amid the hush that had fallen, Marc Porat visibly shriveled in his seat, looking like he wished a hole would swallow him up."

The whole book is worth a read.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dolby](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dolby)

<comment><USER25> Fascinating! I didn't know that. Telescript was the networking software and it's not even mentioned in the movie. I thought it was crazy when I worked there. It had the structure of a virus.

<comment><USER26> Telescript was an amazingly cool idea. I almost quit a very good job to go to work for GM and work on Telescript. In retrospect, it was indeed a language whose purpose was writing [benevolent] viruses but it had no security whatsoever (or at best very little).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> FYI, the cofounder of this website/product (Cake) is also the author of the post. So this has some similarities to content marketing.

<comment><USER28> Hi, I also work for Cake.

For what it's worth, we were surprised to see this hit HN today. None of us submitted it, and we don't know the submitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know you guys either! Just thought it was an interesting post to share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Throwing it out there for those who aren't aware of it

Clint of "LazyGameReviews" did a fascinating retrospective on General Magic a while back

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64)

</comment><comment><USER30> I really enjoy hearing what really happened behind closed doors of what is, to me, one of the most interesting times in computer history.

What a gift to be a part of it! Keep these coming Chris!

</comment><comment><USER31> I had one of the Sony backlit devices. It was a poor purchase decision, perhaps, but it was quite advanced.

AT&T pulling support for it was my first experience with "the cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away".

Paired with a more modern cpu and battery though with some updates, it could be quite useful even today, though...

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting story, but comes off as self-obsessed and a little bit not credible as a result of comments like these:

"...to what they called the cloud,"

"Placing a thumbs-up icon on a message to show that you liked it felt like something which could catch on"

"My favorite was maps from StreetLight that gave you turn-by-turn directions. Oh my God. That felt like an app everyone would love"

<comment><USER33> >"My favorite was maps from StreetLight that gave you turn-by-turn directions. Oh my God. That felt like an app everyone would love"

This is interesting, since Elon Musk has claimed to have written the first ever point-to-point directions software at Zip2, founded in 1995:

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005596879848030209?lang...](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005596879848030209?lang=en)

>At Zip2, I wrote entire V1 of software for drawing vector maps & calculating point to point directions anywhere in US (first ever company to do so), as well as white pages & business listings w reviews (an early Yelp). Also wrote V1 of classifieds, autotrading & real estate apps.

<comment><USER34> Didn't Nextbase Autoroute released circa 1992 have point to point directions and vector maps?

<comment><USER33> Apparently released way back in 1988! Thanks for that, TIL.

[http://www.laptopgpsworld.com/3562-history-autoroute- streets...](http://www.laptopgpsworld.com/3562-history-autoroute-streets- trips)

[https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-ditches-two-map- sof...](https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-ditches-two-map-software- products-favor-bing-maps)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Here's an earlier thread about the movie [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16897690](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16897690) and an article apparently inspired by the release of the movie [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16897690](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16897690)

</comment><comment><USER36> How can I see the documentary referenced at the end? The trailer is 2 years old, there are some reviews but not rental options ...

<comment><USER37> The documentary hasn't been released yet. I was at the West Coast premiere of it in California Theatre in downtown San Jose last week. Maybe Netflix, Amazon or Hulu will get the rights for distribution soon until then I'll have to wait to watch it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why is this particular presentation format better than a good old fashioned blog post?

<comment><USER37> I enjoy reading in this format since the story can be told over time and through separate posts. Each post is like a mini story of its own. Also it is nice to see a discussion referencing specific posts. It is different, but I like it.

<comment><USER39> Except in this particular case each post was barely a minute apart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm curious about what was the hiring process at companies like General Magic and Paypal. What do they do (from interview questions perspective) that they end up with so many game changing folks?

</comment><comment><USER25> A film was made about General Magic that was a pretty big hit at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. There was a showing in a big theater in San Jose last week but it sold out. They have another showing at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View this Friday. Let's hope it gets on Netflix.

<comment><USER41> The CHM event on Friday is also sold out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hmm, Steve Jobs also killed the Newton, which did many of the same things, and was released in 1993.

</comment><comment><USER43> Programed in Telescript.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_\(programming_language\))

</comment><comment><USER44> The YouTube channel LGR has a great video on General Magic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64)

</comment><comment><USER45> Bill Fallon in the article responded in the comments with this:

"Chris: There were probably some hard feelings a couple of decades ago but none lingering, not even those that may have been there wouldn't have been squarely aimed at you.

Since you were in charge of dealing with 3'd party developers I think I always realized you had a hand in the onboarding of AOL, though until I read your post I always assumed the idea originated with Sony. In the end it didn't really matter - the presence of AOL on SONY MagicLink's did not generate device sales any more than our name did, and ultimately AT&T PersonaLink was utterly dependent on device sales and unlike AOL, spent a fair amount of money to actually attempt to actually generate device sales. As you'll see in point 2 below we saw an urgent need to diversify into a PC application about a year before the MagicLink launched, but as we both know that idea died a slow, agonizing death.

There are two somewhat related points that I don't recall if we discussed or not which could have possibly (though not probably) reversed the fortunes of at least our part of the General Magic universe.

1\. AT&T spent all that money developing what we would today call a cloud based platform for "communicating applications using General Magic's Telescript technology." Our deal with General Magic obligated us to be the first to develop any application that had anything to do with Telescript, and that was the GM/PersonaLink messaging application. If all General Magic wanted was a then current state of the art e-mail network, we could have made that available a week after our initial meeting with Marc Porat, Rich Miller and Bill Atkinson when they first visited us at a Bell Labs facility in NJ. No, it had to have Telescript.

To my recollection no 3'd party apps were ever developed using Telescript, including AOL's. In truth there wasn't much Telescript in the PersonaLink Mail application - I think it was primarily tied to authenticating users and providing a rather clever user directory, but it was a start, and again, a core contractual item we were obligated to meet.

While AT&T certainly had an issue with AOL, we never quite understood why General Magic didn't have an isssue with it (at least when we thought it was all Sony's doing), as it substantially compromised the value of it's whole Telescript proposition, which, despite various public pronouncements to the contrary, was obviously a distant second in importance internally to MagicCap. Various Magicians have indicated their disdain for John Sculley and Apple for upstaging General Magic's device - can you see the similarity AT&T saw for the introduction of an AOL messaging app on MagicCap devices to Apple's action? We had a similar reaction to Motorola's tie up with an outfit named RadioMail. Perhaps you were involved with that one also.

2\. We campaigned long and hard for a MagicCap for PC's sofware app as it became apparent that Sony's $800+ device wasn't likely to fly off of store shelves and Motorola's $1500+ device might not ever make it to market, along with the phantom devices of other alliance members Panasonic and Philips. Rich a company as we were, AT&T could not afford to dole out Sony MagicLink's for free or very little to tens of thousands of customers, but we easily could have and would have distributed software to millions of customers for free, which we believe would have put tens of thousands of users on the PersonaLink network, generating revenue for both AT&T and General Magic, and perhaps providing a "tandem" device-computer solution that would have benefited device partners - which was ultimately the architecture that won that generation of handheld devices.

Our requests went nowhere for quite awhile, and were ultimately undertaken by a too little, too late internal effort at General Magic that never produced a viable product."

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting to learn what inspired the Apple Newton - it ironically focused a lot more on handwriting recognition, which Palm would do a much better job with Grafitti in terms of day to day use.

<comment><USER42> The Newton came out before the Magic Cap OS.

<comment><USER6> General Magic might have released after the Newton but appeared to be under development prior?

The article referenced this:

"Steve's nemesis had made General Magic possible by allowing Marc Porat to spin it out of Apple. Sculley served on General Magic's board. He had been considered a marketing genius when the Mac regained momentum after Steve was forced out.

He became General Magic's villain too when he surprised us and released the Newton, which competed with us and discredited the category."

<comment><USER42> Interesting. I knew General Magic had many ex-Apple employees, but thought the Newton had been in development since before General Magic existed. Sculley's Knowledge Navigator video was from 1987. [https://youtu.be/hb4AzF6wEoc](https://youtu.be/hb4AzF6wEoc)

Pretty weird that he was on the board of a company that he went on to compete with. He must have had inside info about General Magic's schedule that allowed the Newton to beat it to market. Pretty scummy.

<comment><USER6> I forgot about the knowledge navigator. Makes a little more sense that so many core Apple employees left to start General Magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> /rant Interesting story, however the format is horrible. It's my first time coming across posts like this and it was a struggle to read till the end (much like Twitter threads are a mess). The whole story will make for a great blog post.

<comment><USER28> Hi! I work on Cake.

This is fair criticism. Cake currently only allows one photo per post, so splitting the story across multiple posts is one way people can tell a story with multiple photos. We have more advanced multi-image support on our roadmap, we just haven't gotten to it yet.

<comment><USER47> I actually found this format refreshing so keep doing a good job!

<comment><USER28> Thanks! I appreciate the positivity. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fractional Shares - <AUTHOR> https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2019/12/12/fractional-shares-and-more-new-ways-to-invest <comment><USER2> Ah, shares of shares. Through Robinhood no less. Sounds like a great plan for the platform which has had how many comically massive mistakes over the past few months? Are they going to let r/wsb leverage these 100x as well?

Don't get me wrong, I love some of what they're doing....I just don't trust them with my money.

<comment><USER3> I've been with Robinhood for over 3 years and I have had zero issues with my portfolio or any features around managing my account day-to-day. The only thing that tripped me up was the transition from Apex to their own clearing house, so I had some extra paperwork to file w/ the IRS during that transition year.

I see a lot of people saying things like "I don't trust Robinhood with my money". I am curious what scenario you see unfolding with Robinhood that could result in loss of your assets. Especially scenarios impacting Robinhood uniquely. Are you aware that Robinhood, as well as virtually every other brokerage in America, provides SIPC insurance up to 500K USD on all (non- crypto) investment accounts? This is on-par with the same kind of protections you get with any FDIC-insured checking or savings account. In order to even qualify for this kind of insurance, Robinhood had to essentially sell its soul to the various auditors and regulators. Regulations around these kinds of businesses are incredibly stringent. You would probably feel a lot more comfortable with any arbitrary brokerage if you had to sit through one of their audits, or were simply made aware of how extensive it is.

There is certainly a lot of "controversy" around Robinhood in the press lately (surely no competitor would stand to gain from running hit pieces against a zero commission broker), but from a purely academic standpoint, it is just noise and doesn't impact the ability of the firm to carry out its fiduciary duties in a reliable and consistent manner.

<comment><USER4> Not the parent you're replying to, but I don't think I'd say I wouldn't trust Robinhood with my money. As you say, they're a SIPC-insured, regulated entity.

What I _would_ say is that I just don't trust Robinhood as a company. They feel scummy to me, and their marketing and UX pushes practices that I would not consider good investment advice. I can only assume that pushing frequent trading (and poorly-described options trading) on unsophisticated investors makes more money for them. But it's likely at the expense of those investors. Even if I "know better" and could just take advantage of the platform as-is, I don't care to support that behavior.

Take that and pile that on top of -- for example -- their misleading and factually incorrect announcement about their quickly-pulled cash management product last year... yeah, no thanks, I'll pass.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. They've adopted the addictive UX patterns of other applications, which is irresponsible for an investment platform. It encourages gambling and making poor trading choices.

Push notifications are a prime example of this. They encourage users to act on short term news rather company fundamentals, which is a dangerous mindset for novice investors. Fortunately for them they've been operating solely during favorable market conditions but when the market does crash I fully expect them to face backlash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The whole idea of "shares" is a pointless legacy concept. What really matters is the fraction of the company you own. Back when trading was conducted using physical paper stock certificates it made sense to have discrete individual shares but the concept has now outlived its usefulness. In the future it would make more sense to just say, for example, that you can invest $12345.67 to purchase 0.0000000058% of company XYZ.

<comment><USER7> you are very wrong on this. Shares still matter very much, for reasons of legal ownership (each share has a value assigned to it, and can be sold as a discrete entity, a fraction of something does not), voting and share priority rules (who gets paid first in the event of bankruptcy) and when dealing with dilution, new issue and stock splits.

The entire legal system around equity investment is built around these concepts, and while you might take a different approach to the whole thing if you could "do a full re-write of the codebase", that's not really how laws work. There's also the fact that the same or very similar rules are applied worldwide, allowing like-for-like laws to apply cross borders. A Chinese share can be described by US laws. Do you know how hard it would be to toss all that global legal framework out and replace it with something else?

And you've not really explained why you think your system is better, either. I'd say the discrete units of shares that make ownership laws simpler are worth the hassle, on their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> FYI, Folio has been offering fractional shares for over a decade. They're terrible at marketing and don't have as slick an app, but they control their full stack down to the DTCC. They cover their traces in patents, so I'm not sure Robinhood is doing the same thing as Folio has battle-tested [https://www.folioinvesting.com/folioinvesting/brokerage- feat...](https://www.folioinvesting.com/folioinvesting/brokerage- features/dollar-based-investing-and-fractional-shares/)

(I do not work for Folio)

<comment><USER9> M1 Finance already has fractional shares too. They're newer than Robinhood but they're built to be more of a long-term investing platform. Robinhood's UI feels more like a gambling platform to trade hourly on IMO. M1's "Pies" feature is very compelling. [https://www.m1finance.com/how-it- works/invest/pies](https://www.m1finance.com/how-it-works/invest/pies)

(I do not work for either. I've used Robinhood for 4 years.)

<comment><USER10> Problem that m1 is going to have imo now is the once a day trading window. The value proposition for this market has seriously changed with the big player move to free trades, and fractional shares are a good wedge since the bigger players don't have that. But now m1 is a smaller player with more restrictions than m1, and it's going to be tough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do you really own anything, or are you just lending money to Robinhood? Does your fractional buy get reported to the transfer agent for the stock? Do you get the annual report? Voting rights?

<comment> grey-area Most retail investors don't want an annual report or voting rights, nor do they mind if they own the share if the asset they buy tracks it sufficiently well.

<comment><USER12> It's still necessary information to know, regardless of what retail investors want. If they were up front about it, it wouldn't matter, but they don't seem to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This isn't really a new thing, DRIPs have had this forever, but nice to see it available especially when looking at purchases like AMZN where maybe you can only afford purchase 2.75 shares or something.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't quite understand the appeal of investing via phone app. Investing my life savings (any any amount really) is one of the few things I would absolutely _not_ want to do on a phone touchscreen.

When I heard of Robinhood I thought it would fail for sure... I guess that shows how much I can predict startup success.

<comment><USER15> I don't use Robinhood anymore, but it's definitely had an effect on retail brokerages. Foremost, it has attracted a younger crowd than most other brokerages have been able to.

The $0 commission is now pretty universal, and most brokerages are pushing better mobile apps. I don't really trade from my phone, but you have to admit it's convenient for when you're not always near a desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm really curious if this is a legitimate growth driver for brokerages and what % of trading volume is represented by a buyer looking to buy < 1 share in a certain company.

It feels very incremental to me.

It also feels like a feature that is representative of something that would only happen at the "top" of the market.

<comment><USER17> Actually I think this is huge, not for existing investors but precisely for people who _aren 't_.

For a teenager who wants to invest $100 to "dip their toes in" when a share of Amazon is over $1,700?!?! And Google over $1,300?

Back in the days when stock regularly split it wasn't a big issue. But now that a bunch of companies think it's somehow unfashionable to split their stock (e.g. Amazon and Google), all this does is exclude smaller investors. Fractional shares solves this problem.

A single share of stock shouldn't cost more than a MacBook, sheesh.

<comment><USER18> Do we want to encourage teenagers to buy stock in individual companies? Index funds I could see.

<comment><USER16> Why not?

Mainstream personal finance advice is pitiful.

There's wide consensus that ETFs are a bubble. On the other hand, the notion that buying an individual stock is equivalent to gambling is nonsense.

<comment><USER19> Can you expand on how index ETFs are a bubble? You say that there's wide consensus, but when I researched it the consensus seemed to be that indexing was the right strategy for most people (and even sophisticated investors like Warren Buffett have instructed his trusts to use an indexing approach).

Beating the index is a zero-sum game, for every winner there must be a loser. Of course you can make educated choices based on the fundamentals but the same is true for sports betting too. Unlike sports betting, you are directly competing against a large number of pretty smart people who play this zero-sum game as a full time job. And some of them even have inside information.

Not that it's impossible to win of course. I can easily imagine someone with deep expertise in a certain area having a key insight about a specific company that others don't, or someone who analyzes company balance sheets and business fundamentals to come up with an independent valuation being above-average at that. It's hard to imagine that either of these groups represent the average person who will trade fractional shares on Robin Hood though.

<comment><USER16> If everyone just buys the index, then the underlying stocks that make up the index are propped up in a way that wouldn't be the case if that individual stock was not a part of said index.

(This is not hypothetical it is actually happening)

<comment><USER19> The idea with index investing is usually to buy a total stock market index. The whole stock market is in the index, so saying the index is in a bubble is basically the same as saying the stock market itself is in a bubble.

Which could be, but isn't an argument for buying individual stocks instead of the index, since that doesn't avoid the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Half a decade ago I researched starting a fractional trading platform, and I gave up on the idea because I decided it was illegal.

Now in this thread people are saying multiple such platforms exist. Did I make a mistake or get something wrong? Or are they applying some kind of workaround? I can't remember why I thought it wasn't allowed.

<comment><USER21> > I decided it was illegal.

how did you somehow decide (unilaterally) it is illegal?

<comment><USER20> When you are alone, then any decision you make is unilateral. Making a decision is quite easy, you just gather information until you feel your argument is well supported, and then you assume your theory is correct and act accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many investors have been switching from Robinhood to M1 Finance but maybe this announcement is intended to slow the flow.

</comment><comment> caleb-allen I heard Robin Hood earns revenue by operating a trading dark pool. Is this true? And if so, wouldn't using Robinhood be like jumping into a shark tank?

</comment><comment><USER22> Here's hoping this prompts Schwab to do the same. They've already made a public statement saying it would be in the works.

</comment><comment><USER23> So, what is the actual "vehicle" with which the shares will be purchased?

And is this something that exists outside of Robinhood?

<comment><USER24> It exists outside of Robinhood:

\- Sofi: [https://www.sofi.com/invest/fractional- shares/](https://www.sofi.com/invest/fractional-shares/)

\- Schwab: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/schwab-in-bid-for-younger- clien...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/schwab-in-bid-for-younger-clients-to- allow-investors-to-buy-and-sell-fractions-of-stocks-11571334424)

I'm not totally sure how it's structured, but I imagine RH "owns" the shares and offers you the corresponding fractional amount of value/dividends, etc.

<comment><USER8> Folio has been doing it for over a decade ([https://www.folioinvesting.com/folioinvesting/brokerage- feat...](https://www.folioinvesting.com/folioinvesting/brokerage- features/dollar-based-investing-and-fractional-shares/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Article from BI: [https://www.businessinsider.com/robinhood-stock-trading- app-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/robinhood-stock-trading-app-rolling- out-fractional-share-trading-2019-12)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is good if you want to invest in BRK.A.

<comment><USER27> You already have BRK.B

<comment><USER28> just a small note: brk.a is different in terms of voting power. but for small investors this is probably negligible anyway.

<comment><USER29> It's not like fractional shares are going to give you any voting rights anyway.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reddit came close to becoming decentralized last year - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/06/reddit-came-close-to-becoming-decentralized-last-year/

<comment><USER2> "Each user has an app, the reddit app, which connects to the reddit p2p network. For most users, the app is a normal web app. Each user funds their own app with a small amount of bitcoin. In order to download content"

I imagine they also baked in some sort of percentage that Reddit will get on top of the transaction for managing it. It's a way of sneaking in a way to make money and I seriously doubt it would have worked.

To me, Reddit is pretty much worthless in terms of dollar amount. They copy links from all over the Internet, which pretty much anyone can do.</comment>


Secret History of Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo <comment><AUTHOR> >"And so the Valley blossoms in the mid-1950's -- it becomes _Microwave Valley_..."

[https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=2739](https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=2739) (approx)</comment>


Modern GPU - <AUTHOR> http://nvlabs.github.io/moderngpu/ <comment><USER2> The title here, although it matches that of the linked page, conveys little information to anyone who doesn't already know what it's about.

("Modern GPU is code and commentary intended to promote new and productive ways of thinking about GPU computing. This project is a library, an algorithms book, a tutorial, and a best-practices guide.")

Perhaps something like "Modern GPU: NVIDIA's guide to making effective use of CUDA"?

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. However every single time I've tried to editorialize a title like this one to make it better the mods have changed it back to the page's title. I imagine a lot of people have given up on even trying to make informative titles. It's the worst part about this forum in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> And the suggestion to make a blog post about it, then submit that, is really just encouraging blog spam, which typically gets flagged into oblivion. I know that I will do so - a one or two sentence blog post should not IMO be submitted in lieu of the article itself. I personally thought the ability to editorialize with only flamebait titles being changed by the mods was way better. Yes, it led to arbitrary decisions by the mods, but I see two problems with the current system:

\- Information is often missing from the original, as it is here

\- The mods are not always so quick to rename, and it's frustrating to see an article that I previously read changed to another title, resulting in confusion when I see it.

Further, The current system actually incentivizes over-editorializing the title to get a post boosted onto the front page, knowing it will be causally re-titled by the mods in due course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's my site. I didn't realize it was even posted here (I did post it at reddit).

To address some points:

The title of the site is kind of vague, agreed. I'm going to write an abstract for the index page to describe the gist of the design methodologies.

It's not part of an NVIDIA sales pitch, at all. I work in NVIDIA Research and have a lot of autonomy. I like doing programming patterns and algorithms research. At some point I had amassed a lot of stuff and thought it would be nice to share everything with the community.. no coordination with the marketing folks. My employer was nice enough to let me release it, but this is my project, not an official company one. This flexibility is one advantage of working in research.

I don't want to get dragged into a vendor or API debate. The MGPU project is about programming concepts. It wouldn't be hard for a developer to translate all the functions into another API--"hackability" is a goal that I talk about in the introduction. I chose CUDA because it's succinct (important for code readability) and its what I use on a daily basis.

<comment><USER6> Cheers for the great work, I'm really looking forward to working through this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those interested in articles like these, there's a really great course on iTunes U (and YouTube, among other places) from UC Davis titled "Graphics Architecture", taught by John Owens. [1]

I clicked on it being tangentially interested in GPUs and ended up watching all the lectures within the next few days with rapt attention. The topic ended up being far more interesting than I thought and was delivered in a very approachable way.

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/graphics- architecture-w...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/graphics-architecture- winter/id404606990)

<comment><USER8> There's also a GPU programming course being taught at Udacity:

<https://www.udacity.com/course/cs344>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it CUDA only or can we submit code written in OpenCL, DirectCompute or C++ AMP etc?

<comment><USER10> It looks like NVIDIA is hoping to highlight CUDA here. You can always try though.

<comment><USER11> To be honest, for the target audience of this book, CUDA is the only thing that matters right now. OpenCL and DirectCompute will possibly be significant in the future if AMD and Intel can catch up with NVIDIA in GPGPU performance.

<comment><USER12> Here's a question you might be able to answer... what exactly do Nvidia cards do better than AMD cards? In the bitcoin and litecoin worlds, Nvidia is horribly outclassed for hash algorithms like sha-256 or scrypt. In the gaming world it's closer, but ATI's 79xx series still wins. (Especially when you consider in the cases a single 7970 isn't enough, which is true for several games, you can get 2 7970s for less than the price of a GTX Titan and win that way. Or a single 7990.) 32bit and 64bit floating point benchmarks favor AMD, the openCL Sala and Room benchmarks in Luxmark favor AMD... (Not exactly fair for that one since it's not CUDA, but the difference is enough that a performance boost from CUDA likely wouldn't close the gap.)

I suspect Nvidia's advantage is their proprietary software like PhysX and other software used in high-end computing or scientific-computing, and possibly they scale better (or simply there are Nvidia-supported solutions) when you want to add dozens of cards together. Is this the case? Because I don't see how one can claim AMD needs to "catch up" in performance if you're looking solely on a card-by-card basis.

Edit: Comparing [http://clbenchmark.com/device- info.jsp?config=14470292&t...](http://clbenchmark.com/device- info.jsp?config=14470292&test=CLB40200) and [http://clbenchmark.com/device- info.jsp?config=11905561&t...](http://clbenchmark.com/device- info.jsp?config=11905561&test=CLB40200) (easier comparison: [http://clbenchmark.com/compare.jsp?config_0=11905561&con...](http://clbenchmark.com/compare.jsp?config_0=11905561&config_1=14470292)), the only ones where Nvidia trounces are on Mergesort and memory usage of Gaussian blur; mergesort is mentioned in the submission. So what about the rest? And factoring in being able to buy two 7970s for the price of one Titan?

<comment><USER13> Drivers, ISV certification and SDKs. Ask any user of AMD on Linux workstations what it's like. Then compare the experience of nVidia users.

AMD has the superior hardware in many ways, but their software just isn't quite there yet in my personal opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So how do I use this with the new and modern Radeon HD7990 card?

Hmm looks like there is no CUDA library for it...

(flagging post for misleading title)

<comment><USER15> To the best of my knowledge, CUDA is Nvidia only. You would need to look at OpenCL or something similar. I guess the techniques presented in the article could be ported to OpenCL.

<comment><USER16> I think that's the point... The title conveys a more general article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Guide looks very well written, and I'm actually studying parallel programming right now...bookmarked.

Side Note: Maybe this is Nvidia's way to promote sales, since AMD cards sold like crazy cause of the mining craze.

<comment><USER18> It's not reactionary: nvidia invested heavily in getting to market first and advertising to the HPC crowd and they have been reaping the rewards of a monopoly for a few years now. Their latest high-end cards are dramatically more expensive (vs AMD at the same raw computational power) while offering completely crippled GPGPU capabilities. I recall incredulity on IRC when people found that their new 6xx cards were a step _backwards_ from the corresponding 5xx cards for their GPGPU apps. Pro media & HPC users fork over the cash for Tesla because they can't jump to AMD due to their legacy CUDA code. Gamers don't care since they don't use double precision arithmetic.

The bitcoin community was the only one nimble enough to switch to AMD. For those of us in academia, we'll be paying the piper for the foreseeable future :/

<comment><USER19> Bitcoin miners flocked to AMD because the SHA-256 algorithm utilizes a 32-bit right rotate operation that AMD cards could execute in one clock cycle, while NVidia cards took ~3 cycles to do so.

At this point it doesn't really matter since GPU mining is obsolete.

Also, what's wrong with NVidia's GPGPU capabilities? The last time I had to write GPU code, I found that CUDA was much more mature - and much more pleasant to write than the equivalent OpenCL. Also, the benefits of being able to run OpenCL code on multiple compute platforms were being realized by CUDA with the development of a PTX to x86 compiler.

<comment><USER18> >Bitcoin miners flocked to AMD because the SHA-256 algorithm utilizes a 32-bit right rotate operation that AMD cards could execute in one clock cycle, while NVidia cards took ~3 cycles to do so.

That would have made the difference even larger, but even at 1:1 instruction timing AMD would have had a large price advantage so long as we're talking about the last 2 generations of cards or so. If the price/performance optimum lies further back than that, it may well have fallen at a point in time when AMD / NVidia were closer to price/performance parity.

To clarify, by "performance" I mean "performance for my needs" which means "double precision float performance."

> Also, what's wrong with NVidia's GPGPU capabilities?

The price per double-precision FLOP was off by a factor of four at the consumer level last time I went shopping and the number of DFLOPS available at the consumer level was capped lower. It seemed like a move to force penny- pinching CUDA-dependent academics to upgrade to teslas.

> The last time I had to write GPU code, I found that CUDA was much more > mature - and much more pleasant to write than the equivalent OpenCL.

It still is, but the gap has closed for many use cases (including mine). I'm not saying that CUDA isn't/wasn't a reasonable choice, especially a few years back, just that we are now paying the hidden price that comes from allowing a monopoly to develop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Previous HN discussion:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004446>

The url linked there redirects to the new site, but the old site is still available through the Wayback Machine:

<http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.moderngpu.com/></comment>


Make the Web HTML Again - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tefielQeHZY&feature=push-u&attr_tag=h0wG24asl_U0U9hz-6 <comment><USER2> "Make the Web HTML Again"...presented as a video. Never mind then.</comment>