The Facebook-Loving Farmers of Myanmar - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-facebook-loving-farmers-of-myanmar/424812/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> How people actually use technology, part XXXIV:

> But Facebook is most popular? Yes. Everyone wants? Everyone. Do people have > email addresses? No. He makes the email addresses. Has a stack of pre-made > Facebook accounts at the ready. He pre-installs the app and pre-loads > friends. Facebook is for news, he says. Popular now but maybe not popular in > six months. But for now, he installs it on every phone.

Furthermore:

> The Farmers don't use their real names ("I used my son's name," Farmer > fourteen told us. Why? "Because it's a good name!" he said smiling and > patting his 1-year-old son on the head.) They don't have email addresses and > so often don't know their logins. If they get logged out they have > someone—often the village Facebook guru—make them a new account.

:-O

<comment><USER2> I am from Myanmar and my mom still lives there. My mom, in her late 50s, uses facebook everyday and I actually set up an account for her a few years back (opened a gmail for that, but my mom never checks her gmail, so she's entirely reliant on me to retrieve her account info if she changes/loses her phone).

Facebook certainly is the king of mobile and social in Myanmar at the moment (another popular app is Viber). All my friends from high school and older people of my relatives have fb accounts. That got me thinking how in the world they set up or use facebook whereas a majority of them don't even use/have emails. Now, this article explains it all. :) It's fascinating that people in my country (at least in my social circle) care very little about securing their account because for them, facebook accounts are dispensable/replaceable.

<comment><USER3> "My mom, in her late 50s, uses facebook everyday and I actually set up an account for her a few years back (opened a gmail for that, but my mom never checks her gmail, so she's entirely reliant on me to retrieve her account info if she changes/loses her phone)."

heh... I do the same exact thing for my mom, except she doesn't live in Myanmar, she's in Flordia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They buy data in 25MB packages and we put a 3x icon in the app that is like 2MB! I'm feeling guilty for ignoring people with such limited access to data when I make apps and websites! :(

</comment><comment><USER5> You most likely know it as Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me. Bonne chance, Elaine. You there on the motorbike! Sell me one of your melons!</comment>


Amazon EKS Windows Container Support Now Generally Available - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-eks-windows-container-support-now-generally-available/ <comment><USER2> ...and the crowd goes mild!

Does anyone actually use Windows containers? How is it? I'm not the most connected person, but I really want to know who's actually using this?

<comment><USER3> The only legit use-case I've ever seen is "lift-and-shift" out of a self- hosted IIS environment to a container that can be hosted publicly. Now your business has a "SasS Offering"!

We had MS in our office a few weeks ago and even they were steering people away from windows containers unless you really had no other choice...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know there a business use cases usually targeting legacy software. Are there any open source projects that run mainly on Windows? I am wondering how the code bases may differ, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Last time I looked at Windows containers the layers were multi-gigabyte downloads, is this still the case?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, although something called Nano Server is pretty small. [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Containers/A-smaller-...](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Containers/A-smaller- Windows-Server-Core-Container-with-better-Application/ba-p/382412)

<comment><USER7> Still significantly larger compared to most Linux container images, and even more so than something like Alpine.

<comment><USER8> Is Alpine 8MB containerized?

<comment><USER7> Yes and roughly 3MB compressed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does licensing work for this?

<comment><USER10> Windows Server (Standard and Datacenter editions) licenses include permissions to run unlimited windows containers on top of them. So you would only need to pay for the licenses of your hosts.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/product- licensing/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/product- licensing/windows-server)

<comment><USER11> AFAIK there's a significant caveat to that, which is that you only get unlimited windows containers, if you're using process isolation.

If you're using VM isolation, you need licenses for the containerized applications.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't call that a caveat so much as SOP for Microsoft licensing. A Windows license does not entitle you to run unlimited Windows VMs on top unless you pay for the more expensive edition.

The "hack" of buying a small number of super beefy servers to save on licensing costs was plugged looooong ago.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple is becoming a camera company - happy-go-lucky https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/15/apple-iphone-11-shows-transformation-to-camera-company.html <comment><AUTHOR> That's because all smart phones are essentially only differentiated by battery life and cameras. Nobody really cares about the other features</comment>


Server-Side Validering Med PHP – Free Ressources - <AUTHOR> http://gustavs.dk/php-inkluder-mange-filer/

<comment><USER2> This looks ontopic, but this is a English speaking forum, so the submission will probably get ignored of flagged, unless it has some very interesting material that is not available in English.

The autotranslation destroys the code, so I have to read the translated text and the original code: [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&u=http://g...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&u=http://gustavs.dk/php- inkluder-mange-filer/)

Do you have an English version? With a little of luck it will be more popular here.</comment>


Linux performance monitoring tools - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/xw8aH8g.jpg <comment><USER2> This image originally comes from [http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html)</comment>


There Are at Least 36 Intelligent Alien Civilizations in Our Galaxy - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2020/06/15/there-are-36-intelligent-alien-civilizations-in-our-galaxy-say-scientists/ <comment><USER2> This assumes life can develop on any old Earth-size planet at the right temperature.

But if the planet has to have a big moon to keep things stirred, and prevent tidal locking to the sun as happened to Venus, there may be many, many fewer viable planets.</comment>


Gravity Light - Alternative form of lighting to replace Kerosene - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/282006 <comment><USER2> At perfect efficiency, this seems to give you about 55mW for a hour, if I asked Wolfram correctly (for 20kg lifted one meter):

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=20+kilogram%E2%80%90for...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=20+kilogram%E2%80%90force+meters+in+milliwatt+hours)

So probably a hoax.

(Wolfram fun fact: thats roughly the energy of the weight of a typical snowflake in oil (~4mg))

<comment><USER3> I don't think they ever said how _bright_ the light is, so it might "work" in a very technical sense.

<comment><USER4> Kerosene lamps are not bright. It is hard (but possible) to read by one. I'd love to see a calculation that takes this into account. How long would this device set at the brightness of a typical kerosene lamp last?

<comment><USER5> Depends on the kerosene lamp. I have a flat-wick lamp that I picked up for about $10 (at the supermarket as an "emergency lamp") with about the same size and with a similar chimney as this one: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SwissKeroseneLamp.jpg>

It is very easy to read by, easily lights up the whole room in a decent warm glow.

The lamps that people use in these countries are very different from that, being made with makeshift wicks and founts and generally no chimneys. Even so, the light they put off is much better than your average candle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kerosene has already been replaced; batteries are cheaper than fuel, and LED lamps are cheaper than kerosene lamps. The rest of this page looks pretty scummy; it says "780 million women and children inhale smoke which is equivalent to smoking 2 packets of cigarettes every day", which blatantly fails basic sanity-checking, and as others have pointed out the duration and brightness numbers for this don't add up either. So this is at best a well- intentioned but stupid waste of money, and at worst a scam.

<comment><USER7> Do you have any cites? Here's what the World Health Organisation say (Sept 2011):

(<http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/>)

> _Around 3 billion people still cook and heat their homes using solid fuels > in open fires and leaky stoves. About 2.7 billion burn biomass (wood, animal > dung, crop waste) and a further 0.4 billion use coal. Most are poor, and > live in developing countries._

> _Nearly half of deaths among children under five years old from acute lower > respiratory infections (ALRI) are due to particulate matter inhaled from > indoor air pollution from household solid fuels (WHO, 2009)._

etc etc

This isn't to say that the device is any good.

<comment><USER6> Heating and cooking != lighting. LEDs obviously can't replace stoves, but then, neither can this.

<comment><USER7> That link mentions use of kerosene for lighting. Do you have any cites for the number of people using kerosene for lighting?

(<http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/9/08-057505/en/>)

> _Paraffin, also known as kerosene, is among the most frequently used fuels > for cooking, lighting and heating among people living in low-income > communities lacking electricity in low- and middle-income countries._

> _The homes themselves were modest. Almost none had running water and most > were constructed of some combination of tin and wood. They averaged 2.0 > rooms and 1.4 beds. Although more than 80% of participants had electricity > in their home – often through illegal tapping of community electricity > sources – they also reported paraffin as their primary fuel for cooking > (36.6%), lighting (27.4%) and heating (95.6%). Most (92.8%) participants > reported daily paraffin use, and all but one reported at least occasional > paraffin use._

Kerosene is still used by very many people for lighting, (even among people who have some access to electricity). The use of kerosene for lighting causes harm.

<comment><USER6> That link is a survey of two towns, conducted in 2007. LEDs are a recent enough invention that 5 years is a very long time ago. And it asked "what is your primary fuel for lighting?", not "do you use fuel for lighting?"

<comment><USER7> I agree that my sources might be poor. But they are the best I have.

I'd like to read any sources that you have.

Do you have any sources?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the idea, but I dislike the "we'll distribute this for free" attitude. Distributing any kind of stuff for free has major economic impact, especially in poor countries where you replace or obsolete parts of the economy[1]. It's very common in the poorer parts of africa (Mozambique, Zimbabwe, ...) that people make their living of buying fuel at the gas station and reselling it by the liter for use in cookers and lamps or by collecting and selling wood.

A better way to go would be to validate the concept and find a way to produce the lamp and as much parts of it in the target communities, helping them to become self sustainable. The current idea just replaces local economy with earnings for a {american, european, chinese} manufacturer, effectively funneling funds away from the people that you want to help. So the goal is laudable, but I can't support the approach they're taking.

[1] other examples include food help which drives the local farmers out of business or donating clothes. Clothes often get sold for cheaper prices than the locally produced ones. Both may be useful in very specific circumstances, but are harmful in large scale.

<comment><USER9> You are right that the money will go out of the local economy, but this is not excuse for making better tools and technology.

For example I live in Europe, and when I get an iPhone... the money goes to the US, but this is not a problem as its technology and its an extra in my life.

But see when you have to buy basic things for living, like food, fuel etc... from non local companies its a problem.

Especially the poorness of Africa is deeper subject and i don't think that tools like that are the cause of it.

This thing can be applied my many more places that lacks electricity and its rather good than bad to have it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > LED bulbs do not attract mosquitos like conventional bulbs.

False, and the authors should be ashamed of themselves for posting this lie in a page meant to attract investors:

<http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/38761/PDF>

Also, a wound-mainspring arrangement would be much more effective as a low- cost, practical third-world product. It would be lighter, less costly to produce, and would require much less space. This gravity angle looks like a gimmick, possibly to avoid infringing someone's patent.

<comment><USER11> It's great to correct their error, but I wouldn't immediately presume malicious intent.

<comment><USER10> I didn't. I simply said they were lying. Lying is now so common that malice doesn't need to be assumed.

<comment><USER12> They were wrong, factually incorrect. That is not lying. Lying implies intent to deceive. Speaking factually incorrect things if you believe them to be true is honest but incorrect.

Do you shame your kids by calling them liars every time the get something wrong on their homework? Do schools kick you out for violating the code of conduct (which usually includes some language about honesty with faculty and administration) every time you get marks off on a test because of factual incorrectness?

Are people who write code with bugs just dirty liars, because the documentation says it will do this, but a bug means that in some cases it fails?

<comment><USER10> > Speaking factually incorrect things if you believe them to be true is honest > but incorrect.

In ordinary conversation, yes, of course. But not in advertising copy. As to the latter, one cannot claim ignorance.

Try your position in a court of law after someone holds you responsible for an "innocent misstatement of fact" in advertising copy that leads to sales based on a false premise, and/or that causes injury.

Interestingly, about the difference between false statements and lying, this played a part in a scandal at West Point a few years ago, in which some students didn't realize the point you make about ordinary conversation -- lying must be intentional falsehood, with knowledge that the statement is false.

Nevertheless, someone who writes advertising copy can't claim this protection.

> Are people who write code with bugs just dirty liars ...

That's not the same at all. A programming bug isn't an intentional statement, whether true or false. A closer comparison would be someone speaking a word in a language he doesn't actually understand, and not realizing he's used the wrong word.

<comment><USER13> You are moving the goalposts from "lying" to "being accountable". "I did not lie, so I should walk free" is not, in general, a valid argument in court (but it can work in defamation suits. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#Defences>)

"You lied, so you should be convicted" isn't true, either. If it were illegal, why do people have to take an oath in court?

Lying may be morally or ethically bad, but in itself, the law is fine with it.

<comment><USER10> > If it were illegal, why do people have to take an oath in court?

A number of reasons:

* So they can't claim ignorance of the law.

* Because lying in court is such a commonplace that the court system decided a timely reminder would be wise.

* Finally, some statements that are lies can't be prosecuted, for example, anything not material to the issues being discussed. On that basis, the oath stands as a clarification of what is legal and illegal in that specific context.

In spite of the above, lying under oath is very common. It's a rule of thumb that judges will rule against liars rather than try to prosecute them.

> Lying may be morally or ethically bad, but in itself, the law is fine with > it.

Yes -- except (two examples) under oath or while filing a police report.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was living in India last year, an Australian tech founder who rented a room in my apartment said we was tackling the kerosene problem too with solar. His company (Barefoot Power) wasn't highly technical, but rather put together components for an efficient solar powered light. The solar panel doubled as a mobile phone charger (phones are ubiquitous in India, even in the slums, so this was a huge selling point) and was enough to power the light for a full night.

I don't remember all the economics, but the cost of kerosene for x months would pay for the entire setup. Also, the light was an order of magnitude brighter than a kerosene lamp. But the interesting part (again, there's nothing highly technical here) was the business model.

It had a social/micro-finance bent in that he would source investors, who'd invest in shipping containers of these systems, which they'd sell on consignment to local entrepreneurs in poor areas. Those entrepreneurs would pay a fixed interest rate, so the investment was for-profit, and the local entrepreneur would profit from the rest. I remember him talking about building a Kiva-like interface where you could track your investment, right down to the shipping container, village and entrepreneur.

The best thing about this guy moving in was that my co-founder (of Flightfox) was just preparing for an expedition across the Gobi desert and needed solar power for her Macbook so she could blog about the expedition from the desert. All went well and she (Lauren) spent 52 days, trekking 1,000 miles, with full power and ability to blog over satellite the entire time. All using solar panels small enough to fit in a backpack.

That said, love the concept of the gravity light. For anyone who's spent a lot of time off grid, even dim light makes all the difference.

Edit: this system cost about $20.

</comment><comment><USER15> this seems a lot like [http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/gravity_l...](http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/gravity_lamp)

<comment><USER16> There's an interesting comment about super-efficient LED bulbs in that museum of hoaxes article. However, the numbers look marginal for this GravityLight even with super-efficient LED bulbs.

Quick back of the envelope calculation, using what few numbers are given in the article.

Ballast: m = 10 kg (1)

Height: h = 3 m (2)

Energy stored: E = mgh = 300 J

Time: 30 min = t = 1800 s (3)

Wattage available: P = E / t = 0.17 W (4)

Notes:

(1) Article says you can hang anything weighing about 20 lbs.

(2) No numbers given in the article, but the pictures make it look like ceiling height (8 to 10 ft., I took the larger)

(3) Article says light for half an hour.

(4) With current LEDs this is the equivalent of about a 2 W incandescent bulb, i.e., pretty dim. The light in the pictures in the article looks like the equivalent of about a 40 W incandescent bulb, so the numbers come up short by a factor of about 20. That would indeed be "super-efficient" for an LED; I'm not aware of any even on the drawing boards that are that efficient.

[Edit: The numbers actually are _not_ too low compared to kerosene lamps, which are what this light is supposed to replace. See exchange downthread with xd.]

<comment><USER17> Your math assumes you have a magical 100% efficient generator to convert potential energy to electrical.

In reality, you will be lucky to get 50% back, and that's with a _very_ good generator.

<comment><USER18> Electric generators can get up to 95% efficiency, meaning electrical output as a percentage of _mechanical_ energy input. In the current case, the relevant input is mechanical energy produced by a slowly dropping weight, so there would be losses from friction. But overall, I'd expect much better than 50% in the conversion of gravitational potential energy to electrical energy.

However, in commercial power generation, the mechanical energy usually comes from some sort of heat engine, the heat for which is provided by fossil fuel combustion or nuclear fission. There is a big haircut in that step. Heat engines are generally only 35 to 60 percent efficient.

Hydro power does much better, but it doesn't use a heat engine; it's just a much larger scale example of converting gravitational potential energy into electricity.

I think the reason this contraption is valuable is that LEDs don't need much power to produce enough light to please someone used to kerosene lamps.

<comment><USER17> Link to a generator with 95% efficiency please.

> _I think the reason this contraption is valuable is that LEDs don't need > much power to produce enough light_

Actually, that contraption cannot produce enough light, unless you have a crazy weight, a lot of elevation, and a magical efficient system that converts energy to electricity, and then transforms it to whatever voltage/amperage appropriate for you LED lights.

<comment><USER16> As posts upthread have shown, the light output will be comparable to a kerosene lamp, which is what these lights are supposed to replace. It doesn't take a "crazy weight" or "a lot of elevation". And the difference between 50% efficiency and 100% efficiency is only a factor of two; that's well within the range of making reasonable adjustments in the weight and/or height.

As far as voltage/amperage is concerned, I would expect the generator to be low voltage DC, matched to some voltage in the range the LED light could support. AFAIK LED lights are fairly tolerant of a range of low DC voltages, so I don't see this as a major issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Meta comment: I read the article and then did a back-of-the envelope calculation on how much energy you'd get out of one of these. Then I clicked through to the comments and saw that three other comments addressed this.

Good idea, but the physics doesn't work yet. A heavier weight might fix the problem, though. (I use a 5W LED lamp in my apartment that I keep on all the time. It's almost enough for reading and it's certainly enough for walking around at night.)

<comment><USER16> _A heavier weight might fix the problem, though._

And/or more height. The numbers are comparable to the low end of kerosene lamps as given.

<comment><USER13> Neither would fix it. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)> gives 909W for _"peak output power of a healthy human (nonathlete) during a 30-second cycle sprint at 30.1 degree Celsius."_

This thing talks about a 1:600 duty cycle (3 seconds of charging for 1800 seconds of lighting), so, at the very best, it could use a 1.5W LED. Looking a a more realistic 100W human power output (Tour de France riders do 6W/kg or so sustained), it's gets down to .1W or so.

A heavier weight, more height, or more frequent charging all will increase the amount of light produced, but it also means less time to enjoy it.

In the end it all boils down to the fact that a kWh is a lot of energy for a human to produce.

<comment><USER16> If you're trying to produce light equivalent to what we're used to in first world countries, yes, you're right.

If you're only trying to replace kerosene lamps, you don't need much power. A tenth of a watt with an LED gives a light output comparable to a kerosene lamp. See the numbers elsewhere in the thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> >It takes only 3 seconds to lift the weight which powers GravityLight, creating 30 minutes of light on its descent.

Why does every crackpot "revolutionary" energy gizmo make this same kind of nonsense claim? "Minute" is not a unit of energy, luminous intensity, or any other measure that is actually useful in evaluating the practicality of this.

<comment><USER12> Whether or not the device works - this usage of minute is also apparently unit of radio power or backlight luminosity, if cell phone makers and reviewers are to be believed. Declaring crack-pot status based on that usage is kind of over-the-top, unless you're here to argue that cellphones don't exist and are mere crack-pot theories as well.

<comment><USER3> If you take careful note of my wording, I said that _every_ crackpot makes this sort of claim, not that _only_ crackpots make this sort of claim.

The reason I know this is crackpottery is that, as others have pointed out, the physics just doesn't add up. Assuming perfect efficiency, you'd be looking at somewhere on the order of 1% of the light output from a standard 40 watt light bulb.

<comment><USER16> See the numbers below. It's about the equivalent of a 2 W incandescent bulb, or 5% of a 40 W bulb; but more importantly, it's comparable to a kerosene lamp, which is what it's supposed to replace. So I don't think a "crackpot" charge is warranted.

<comment><USER20> It is warranted because the physics doesn't work out

<comment><USER16> Um, did you look at the numbers? The physics _does_ work out, at least to a rough order of magnitude. That may not be enough to make it a practical success, but it's enough to make "crackpot" unwarranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks like the half an hour duration is only good for powering a LED at a small power. The light seen in the video at the 55 seconds mark, shows the LED at full power and the weight drop speed is about 0.7 cm per two seconds (again, aproximately from the video), thats about 4-5 minutes for a meter of height.

<comment><USER16> _Looks like the half an hour duration is only good for powering a LED at a small power_

Yes, about a tenth of a watt (see the numbers upthread). However, that gives an LED light output that's comparable to a kerosene lamp. So it could be worth it for the target users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Abbey Road studios was partly powered by descending weights when the Beatles were recording there. At the time, it was the best way to implement a constant speed motor for the price.

</comment><comment><USER23> So what's the motor made out of that it can be guaranteed to last a decent amount of time before breaking?

<comment> guard-of-terra Plastic? The motor in my CD drive is made from plastic and it doesn't seem to break at all.

<comment><USER24> Ahh, that's because CDs are broken technology and should never be allowed into ones house or possession.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Cool idea. It looks like light itself needs some work though. The light is bright, but it doesn't seem to shine in a very efficient or useful way.

I think that'd be easy to fix though.

This has me wondering how much energy a larger scale application could store and what its efficiency would be.

<comment><USER26> At larger scales, you are typically limited by the efficiency of whatever is lifting it. A large generator can convert kinetic energy to electric energy with very high efficiency (over 95%).

Also this is very poor energy density each kg moved 1m results in 9.8 joules or ~2.7e-6 kWh. So one metric ton moving 1km would generate 2.7 kWh.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra So basically it will work exactly like mechanical clock with weights (and cuckoo) do.

Hell, they should combine this thing with clock: a clock with weights that is also a lamp when needed.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like the idea, but what kind of sick, twisted mind thinks it's a good idea to put the video in a player where they've disabled / hidden the controls?

</comment><comment><USER9> I hope those guys make it successful

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a hoax. Mathematically and physically impossible.

<comment><USER16> No, it isn't. See the numbers upthread.

<comment><USER17> I did see the numbers. They don't support your point.

<comment> guard-of-terra Did you see the video? They tell you how there are various modes of operation.

<comment><USER17> Did you see Spiderman? This guy can shoot spider web from his hands!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world but didn't - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/before-the-ps2-nuon-famously-tried-and-failed-to-combine-dvd-and-game-consoles/

<comment><USER2> I've been following it and even done some development around 98-99. It was a bizarre system with tools that were not at the level even with the 5th/6th gen consoles available at the time. You pretty much had just a gcc port with some serious bugs, an optimizing assembler (it's VLIW so the assembler had -O option and the bigger number you put there, the better it will optimize, at 6 though it was running out of memory on any non-trivial code) and a broken debugger, written in XLisp for some reason, which I never managed to use productively.

The thing had 4 PUs, each with local memory and a DMA controller to access system and video memory. You could run one of them in a CPU emulation mode, where local memory was used as cache and it was the only target the C compiler supported. If you wanted local memory and/or more than 1 PUs - you wrote assembly and debugged by writing into the frame buffer.

Even then I was wondering how it's going to compete with the DC/PS2 it was coming up against but my bosses told me it's fine because it's going to be in every DVD player and everybody is going to by a DVD player pretty soon so the game consoles are pretty much already dead.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the reality check :-)

It's really funny, because all throughout reading that article I was thinking "this thing never had a chance". A custom architecture based on principles that are notoriously difficult to write tools for (VLIW), probably adding 50% to the BOM of very price sensitive consumer electronics, and an attempt to create a gaming platform by a company with no capability of producing first party titles and no commitments from credible publishers to do third party games either. How could that not fail?

But then the article ends with all of these people believing - even with 15 years of hindsight - that they genuinely were just on the verge of breaking through. Their technology was just too far ahead of its time and people didn't yet understand it!

<comment><USER4> Game developers go where the market is, regardless of the technical challenges, if they got their chips shipped with enough dvd players, people would start making games for them and it would snowball. Would it replace dedicated gaming hardware? Probably not, but it certainly could of eaten some of the casual market like the iphone did to the gameboy.

<comment><USER3> Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular. But that requires millions of units at a minimum, and even that might not be enough (what was the state of desktop Linux gaming in 2012?). For this path to work, the platform needs to become popular first. For the PC the early value proposition was productivity applications. For the iPhone it was good mobile web browsing, maps, etc.

A gaming system (which this was) can't wait for that popularity to happen through some other means. The games are the raison d'être of the system, the only reason for people to buy one. What was the end-user pitch here that'd get one of these to the hands of millions of consumers? "You can buy some other DVD player for $200, or this one that might some day play games for $300". Not very compelling, when both of them do an equally good job with the main task you're buying a DVD player for.

<comment><USER5> _> Yes, non-gaming platforms will eventually get games just by being popular._

I wouldn't say this is an inevitability. Look at Nokia feature-phones.

Sure, from what I've heard and read an incredibly poorly designed ecosystem and lack of carrier interest, but you can't tell me Snake was the best the market could come up with...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is fascinating to me. It's worth noting this was from the same console generation as the PS2, Xbox, Dreamcast, and GameCube.

I found some specific information about it here [1]

> The technology in the few available NUON DVD players raised the price around > $100 over comparable players.

> Only eight games were ever released for NUON. The graphics are comparable to > early PlayStation 2 games and are most notable in Iron Soldier 3, a mech > combat game.

Here's a video showing the Iron Soldier 3 graphics [2]

> The best game is generally regarded to be Tempest 3000 (many sources > consider it the only truly playable game)

The wiki also lists 16 homebrew titles including an Atari 800 emulator and Doom.

On the NUON-Dome site [3] there's a homebrew release announcement from 2014, as well as Amazon links where you can still buy some discs and hardware.

It also features a "Video Light Machine" [4] which as far as I can tell is Winamp-style audio visualization.

[1] [http://www.giantbomb.com/nuon/3045-85/](http://www.giantbomb.com/nuon/3045-85/)

[2] [https://youtu.be/0nypv2_qvSg?t=173](https://youtu.be/0nypv2_qvSg?t=173)

[3] [http://www.nuon-dome.com/](http://www.nuon-dome.com/)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nJlY4Z8v-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nJlY4Z8v-A)

<comment><USER7> One of the main developers hired to write games for Nuon was actually the legendary Jeff "Yak" Minter, he of the Attack of the Mutant Camels fame. He wrote Tempest 3000 for it, as well as the Video Light Machine. Both were sequels to previous work; Minter wrote the original Tempest 2000 (itself a sequel to Tempest), and the VLM for Nuon was version 2.0 of a synth he did in the 90s.

<comment><USER8> I wanted one just for the VLM, to replace the one from my Atari Jaguar :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 3DO came out with a multimedia machine that played music CDs, photo CDs, could play video CDs with a daughter board. The original 3DO player was released in 1993 making it the first non cartridge video game player by several years.

The M2 was being designed and prototypes built in 1995-1996. M2 featured a dual core powerpc and was designed to ship with a DVD player making it truly the next generation player. The plans to the device were sold to Matsushita, they demoed it at E3 in 1996 but failed to bring it to market.

3DO suffered a lot of the same troubles as Nuon except about 5 years earlier. 3DO went out of the hardware business in 1996 but continued publishing some very successful and revolutionary game titles before finally going out of business completely in 2003.

Point being this has all happened before, and it will happen again.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds a lot like Philip's CD-i [1] but a decade later to the party. In was in the living room with games, video (VCD) and internet access...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_CD-i](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_CD-i)

<comment><USER11> It had a competitor, the Commodore CDTV (basically an amiga). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV) Pretty cool machine, CD rom drives were sparse in 91.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Techno-optimism at its silliest. Even if it had succeeded it wouldn't have "changed the world."

</comment><comment><USER13> Interestingly the converse (game consoles that also play DVDs) were much more successful. Not sure how much that feature was really used, and today it's pretty much moot because online streaming has supplanted physical media for most people.

<comment><USER11> When it came out the PS2 was a rather cheap DVD player considering it also was a gaming console. I think the PS3 was among the cheaper if not the cheapest bluray player when it was released. And I found pretty cool that my ps1 was able to play audio cds with a neat interface.

<comment><USER5> This has always been a strength of Sony. I remember it was one of the reasons I ended up getting a PS2.

Not sure how you'd do that now given that the cost of adding Netflix or streaming support is negligible, but Sony definitely made smart moves with their timing and put forth the proposition that "For a little more than a DVD/Bluray player, I can get a PS2/3."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think it's pretty interesting that people at Sony were upset with Kutaragi for putting DVD functionality in the PS2. People argue today that it was a small part of the mass adoption of the format. Perhaps, along with the disastrous unveiling and launch of the PS3, it contributed to his downfall at the company.

</comment><comment><USER15> The controller fail got me smiling:

[https://youtu.be/3lpViVaMtrM?t=570](https://youtu.be/3lpViVaMtrM?t=570)

</comment><comment><USER16> I worked there in 2000 as a graphics engineer - it was an interesting tech, lots of bright people.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how this affected Toshiba's own processors -- MeP, then Cell. Some of MPEs (Nuon's processing units) only had access to its small local memory and needed DMA to access the main memory. This is kind of similar to Cell's SPEs. Each SPE has only 256 KB of directly accessible memory and required DMA to get to the main memory. You can say it's not uncommon in DSPs, but it's still interesting Toshiba has been involved with these.</comment>


Behold the data tsunami: IEEE begins work on 400Gbps and 1Tbps Ethernet - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/134757-behold-the-data-tsunami-ieee-begins-work-on-400gbps-and-1tbps-ethernet <comment><USER3> As a hardware designer I'm worried about this more and more. PCB technology hasn't really advanced all that much in the past ~10 years, although the line rates are going higher and higher. Back in the ~100Mhz days a 1ns edge was about 6 inches long in HR370-based circuit boards, which was long enough to barely matter. Now, at 10Gbps, your bits are half an inch long, and your high- end harmonics are on the scale of your via lengths. PCB design has gotten appreciably harder in the past few years as a result - maybe three years ago, when I laid my first 10Gbps traces, I remember thinking that this was bleeding edge stuff, and some of the techniques we used were pretty exotic for the time. Now, 10Gbps is run-of-the-mill and 28.05 is on the horizon (maybe even coming into town!). It seems like we've really taken up all of the slack in PCB tech and I wonder what will happen next. Maybe academia's optical dreams from the last millennium (silicon ICs with on-die/co-die optical xcvrs) will finally be realized. Without a revolution in the way PCBs are processed and designed I doubt we'll be able to push much past 28.05Gbps in copper.

</comment><comment><USER4> Clearly, there is pent-up demand from US businesses and consumers for such high speeds, but AFAIK the country's long-haul and last-mile infrastructure is nowhere near ready for handling end-user traffic at 400Gbps, let alone 1Tbps.

On the long-haul side, service providers like Level 3 Communications appear unlikely to invest aggressively to add a lot more capacity any time soon, because they are still dealing with the financial consequences of their over- investment during the 1990's telecom boom (remember Worldcom?). On the last- mile side, service providers like Comcast also appear unlikely to invest aggressively to add a lot more capacity any time soon, because their traditional business models are under threat from companies like Netflix -- our last-mile providers _fear_ higher speeds.

So, we have demand for ever-faster speeds on one hand, and constrained supply on the other hand. Economics 101 suggests Internet service pricing is bound to stabilize or even (gasp!) _increase_ over the coming years.

<comment><USER5> This is not for end users, it's for datacenters. Consumer hardware never has fiber ethernet as it is, because there's simply no need. Not only do consumers have no use for that amount of bandwidth, typical hardware has trouble saturating a gigabit connection anyway. Adding more unusable bandwidth isn't going to help. Of course, for some crazy reason consumer hardware often has fiber _audio_ jacks. People are weird.

In core routers, the landscape is entirely different. It's actually very easy to saturate a 40-gig connection coming out of a major interchange, and there are lots of BGP tricks to work around that. Individual ISPs routinely only have one, for political reasons. It would be difficult to saturate 400. (For now.)

<comment><USER6> Fiber audio (TOSLINK) isn't for bandwidth or even distance (both suck on TOSLINK for the record), but for allowing a ground isolated digital audio connection.

Plus the red LED looks cool.

<comment><USER7> For the truly lazy: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The implications of this are fascinating to me. I'm really, really interested in how Comcast is going to figure out how to make sure the US never sees this technology widely deployed.

<comment><USER9> Well we're not still on dial-up are we?

<comment><USER10> No, but that was due to the '96 telecom act. They wanted it to be able to get into long distance, but that backfired. As soon as others started making meaningful inroads in deploying DSL, they were crushed. Essentially the cat was let out of the bag, but it did cost tax payers billions in subsidies for fiber to the home that never happened and the 'duopoly' of cable and DSL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The transport definition is nice and all but I'd love to see what the plan is for routing/switching at these speeds. Given the speed at which 100Gbe has limped into the market I wouldn't expect to see anything capable of handling single links at these speeds for quite a long time. 1Tbps with with a 1500MTU is ~83 million packets a second. Just for illustrative comparison a CPU at 3.5Ghz would have 42 clock cycles per packet[0].

[0] I know a general purpose CPU would never be used for something like this, just putting the numbers into context.

<comment><USER12> You might be selling general purpose CPUs short. To me the computing hardly seems like the daunting part, it's the IO (both the wire interface, and all the internal buses).

To verify that intuition, I just did a quick experiment with an Intel 10Gbps NIC and a Xeon E5506. The workload was roughly similar to switching: read packet, parse the headers, extract some fields from the headers and use that as a key to a hash table lookup, write packet out to a different interface.

This was done using code from a much more complicated system that I didn't spend any time tuning for just this case, so it's absurdly wasteful (e.g. spending 10% of the runtime just on useless calls to RDTSC).

The result was 4.3 Mpps, or about 500 cycles / packet. That seems far from 83 Mpps / 42 cycles, but it was using a single core and a single rx queue on the NIC. Make it parallel with 16 cores / queues, and you're in the right ballpark. And then remember that we're talking of a 3.5 year old CPU, which was already low end when it launched.

<comment><USER13> You're right that it's the IO (buses and memory) that the main limit. The problem is that a design around a central CPU doesn't scale, there's not enough IO, not enough pins, if you want to DMA packets from 24 interfaces onto main memory and have different cores operate on it is just infeasible with current designs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool. I still remember arguing for 100Mbit ethernet at Sun and being told that it couldn't be done, use FDDI.

Personally, I'd love ethernet to be used as the interconnect for more stuff. USB is kinda weird to me, I'd much rather have my disk drives be POE devices.

<comment><USER15> iSCSI + PoE. Sign me up please.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, something like that. I was arguing for that when iSCSI was pretty new so I went with a remote DMA model that was somewhat simpler.

I had a whole startup sketched out, it's pretty obvious when you think about it.

Desktops get a software only version that will do reasonably well and is cheap.

Power users/small servers get a slightly more expensive (maybe 2x the cost of a PCI card) that does the remote DMA in hardware; this card is one ethernet port and only handles one DMA at a time.

Big servers get a multi port card that will run multiple streams at once.

I tried to get the disk drive people interested because there already is a processor down on the drives that is a general purpose CPU (there are two, one that controls the disk arm, that's special, and one that manages the cache, read ahead/write behind, that could run a stripped down Linux or whatever and do the other side of the protocol).

The drive people never got excited because the cost savings of el cheapo ethernet wasn't enough to offset the cost of the extra memory they felt they would need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In 2005, Jeff Atwood reported that 100M ethernet is 10x as fast as 10M ethernet, but 1G ethernet is only about 30% faster than 100M, even for a simple loopback test.

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/07/gigabit-ethernet- an...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/07/gigabit-ethernet-and-back-of- the-envelope-calculations.html)

Is this still true? What's the bottleneck?

<comment><USER17> Assuming you arent CPU or memory limited, the bottleneck was originally largely due to gigabit Ethernet's support of unswitched hubs and as such uses CSMA to detect collisions. In order for this to work there is a minimum transmit timeslot to ensure that collisions can be detected at the full round trip delay of a ~100m network.

Effectively a 1Gbit Ethernet node must transmit at least 512 bytes during its timeslot. If it has that much to send then it all goes out at 1gbit. If it only has a few bytes to send (a tcp ack for example) then it must idle for a bit to make sure there wasn't a collision.

In theory gigabit Ethernet should perform at 1gbit for sustained transfers but much worse for workloads with more sporadic sets of smaller packets. In practice, especially on core switches and routers, modern techniques like frame bursting (sending multiple small packets going to the same destination back to back) even things out more.

10gbit Ethernet and above get rid of the carrier sense collision detection support all together and require the entire network to be point to point with switches. It has no minimum timeslots or packet lengths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The sad part is that on the consumer side, we are still paying what we were paying in 2005, for roughly the same amount of bandwidth. If consumer-side speeds kept a similar pace, either the costs should be halving every 18 months (modulo a certain fixed infrastructure cost), or the speeds should be doubling every 18 months at the same price point.

Google Fiber is a great first step, but I think the only long-term viable solution is to have Municipal Fiber (in dense cities like SF and NY). There is no reason why we (I live in SF) should not have access to the same speeds as folks in Seoul and Tokyo, at similar prices.

There's a nascent effort in SF to bring Municipal Fiber to the City (I am just a mailing list subscriber): <http://sffiber.info/> It could sure use some love.

<comment><USER19> In the Bay area we are finally starting to see a bit of competition at the $70/month level. Comcast will either deliver you 30mbits/second or AT&T (if they've hooked up your neighborhood yet) - will send you 24mbits/second.

I was paying $150/month for 2x64 ISDN in 1998/1999. So, my price went from .85 kilobits/1$ to 434 kilobits/1$. 500x increase in price performance in 13 years, which is a bit better than the expected 256x increase over 13 years.

Things have plateaued recently - but I expect to see 1 Gigabit to the home to be pretty standard in the bay area by 2020 for $70 - which is completely in line with 18 month price performance doubling. (33x improvement) - it's just a little bursty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone explain how these speeds, if possible, are even useful? For example, the bandwidth of L2 cache on a core i7 is about 70GB/s, which doesn't come close to Tbit's theoretical 125GB/s.

<comment><USER13> Imagine you have a rack of servers. Around 40 of them fit in a rack, you equip each of them with 10Gb ethernet, they're running HDFS. You plug these 40 ethernet cables into one switch, so they can all talk to eachother, serving files to its clients, shuffling segments around etc. Now you want to connect that rack to another rack of 40 servers, on another floor of your building. Doing that with 1 10Gb cable, and you do not have full bandwidth between all your 80 servers. Even bonding a handful of 40Gb links will not be enough - <USER2> it'll be a lot of cables you have to manage. Doing it with 1 Tb link and you start having full bandwidth. Or just imagine connecting 2 buildings. Fewer cables. Higher bandwidth. The clue is you don't feed all this into 1 server running a commodity CPU and OS, you feed it into blinking boxes that will distribute the data to/from a high speed link onto many lower speed links to reach ordinary servers. Switches/routers can do that at line-rate if you implement this properly in hardware.

<comment><USER21> I can imagine it as I am building out a 30 node hdfs cluster with 10g BNT switches. How do you design 40 nodes to a rack? Just curious...

<comment><USER13> Racks come in all heights, we have 3 42u racks here populted with 1u boxes. There's also many designs around smaller half depth servers, enabling you to fill servers from the front and back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> About time really.

</comment><comment><USER23> Tsunamiii!!</comment>


In Praise of APL: A Language for Lyrical Programming (1977) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis77.htm <comment><USER2> > I am firmly convinced that APL and LISP are related to each other along an > important axis of language design and that acquiring simultaneous expertise > in both languages is possible and desirable for the beginning student. Were > they unified, the set of tasks that succumb to terse, flexible and > expressive descriptions will enlarge enormously without overly increasing > the intellectual burden on the student over his initial 16 week contact > period.

In the context of setting the objectives for education in computer science for general students, I like the idea that the objectives are to (a) understand the limits and potential of computation and (b) achieve fluency in programming such that one can conceive of and describe computational processes for a wide range of tasks.

He explicitly suggests that fluency in using other people's programs not be an objective. Perhaps this is a bit idealistic since most programming in the wild today consists of glueing together other people's programs. But it seems like the right objective when possible—-in some ways it is a view of computer science as a liberal art.

<comment><USER3> There's another link between Lisp and APL in the article:

 _" Some years back, we had a visit at Carnegie from a person at MIT whose name I've forgotten. He started to give us a lecture in a little office about some programming issues in LISP. He went up to the blackboard and he spoke LISP. Everything he wanted to describe, he described in terms of parentheses and CONS and CARS and CDRS. He found himself quite capable of expressing his ideas in the language in which he programmed. Not once during the half hour or so that he lectured to us did I see the inevitable block diagram, the flow charts that show up on the blackboard with things written in semi-English. He didn't need them. And at the time I said to myself, "LISP has a very precious character, if indeed there are some people who can express programming ideas to other people in the language in which they program._

 _" I can't do that with ALGOL; never have I been able to do it with ALGOL. Whenever I've programmed in ALGOL and I've wished to make some statements about the program I was writing, I was forced to go outside the language and use English, or mathematics, or some block diagrams or what-not._

 _" In APL, I find that to a far greater degree than any other language that I've used, I can make statements about the programs that I'm writing, in APL -- actually not exactly APL, but APL with some nice little extensions that I dream up at the moment but would never think of implementing. But by and large, I find that the language allows me to express myself, in the language, about the things I'm dealing with. I find that a very precious property of a programming language."_

<comment><USER4> > but APL with some nice little extensions that I dream up at the moment but > would never think of implementing.

Does this mean APL without extensions is quite limiting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> APL's are a special beast. A very interesting article that got me hooked "Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages"

[https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/ruins-of- forgo...](https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/ruins-of-forgotten- empires-apl-languages/)

<comment><USER6> Nice one, thanks so much!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related article posted on HN recently:

APL is more French than English [[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18640451)]

<comment><USER2> > But at that time APL was not running on any computer; and he stoutly > insisted that it was unnecessary that it ever run on a computer. It was for > him a notation with which he could express algorithmic concepts; and for him > at that time, that seemed sufficient.

Indeed. Because both APL and Lisp began as languages for describing computational ideas, it stands to reason that they would be particularly fit relative to languages that evolved under other fitness criteria.

I was intrigued to not the opposition to APL mentioned in the article by Djikstra and others on the basis of a different mental model of computation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In college, we had a class about high-level languages and the teacher decided to go with APL. Many of my colleagues complained they'd never use APL professionally and that some other language, with more ready practical use (we already had FORTRAN and everyone was fluent in BASIC) would be a better choice. They were right, of course, in that they'd never use APL professionally. They were stupendously wrong in that it was a profoundly enlightening experience.

Once you learn APL, you gain a super-compact mathematical notation in which to express computation.

You also learn the value of extensive comments and of avoiding being clever - if you try to be clever, you won't understand your program 5 seconds after having written it.

And, if you are really lucky, you'd have learned what a beam-spring keyboard feels like. :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> Now that I feel the bite from my sedentary lifestyle on my bum, I'm more and more attracted by the idea of a language taking 1/10th the typing compared to what's typical today. However, afaict languages following APL's suit specialize in math, so I wonder if the approach could be adapted to more general kind of coding.

Even though the set of short symbols has to be limited, don't we currently have a few dozen often-repeated operations in language keywords and standard libraries? (Especially in the approach of e.g. Clojure, relying heavily on combining standard transformations on strictures.)

<comment><USER3> I personally question the utility of such terseness, and much prefer the verbosity of the Lisp family of languages, where cultural norms make for function names like "number-to-string" and "expand-file-name", rather than the norms I've seen in languages like APL, K, J, Q, OCaml, and Haskell, which seem to love more mathematically-inspired single-letter names like "n" or "k", and various operators in a similar vein.

The Lisp-like way of programming is more appealing to me because it makes the programs very easy to read. You can mostly get a sense of what they're doing just by reading them like ordinary English. I've found this especially useful when I'm trying to understand code I'm not already familiar with, or when looking at my own code months or years from when I wrote it, and it's especially important these days when polyglot programming is commonplace -- I don't need to remember nearly as much of how to do something in Lisp because it's so easy and straightforward and doesn't have the overhead of remembering a whole bunch of specialized syntax.

Contrast this with the terser, more mathematically-inclined languages, where specialized syntax and single-character names are widely used. These tend to be more write-only languages for me, where I have to be constantly steeped in the language in order to make understanding it relatively natural, and if I go away from them for a while, it takes quite a bit of effort to get back in to them enough to make sense of what was written, and reading other people's code is much more of a chore than it is for me in Lisp.

In the old days, or perhaps on embedded systems these days, when one had to closely watch the byte count of one's program lest it not fit in to memory, perhaps such terseness was useful. But these days, I'm not yet convinced of its utility outside of a mathematical context, where the mapping of such terse names and operations is more natural.

For me clarity trumps terseness.

<comment><USER9> The notation can yield very dense programs. Significant systems have been written that can be expressed on a screen or two of code (search Arthur Whitney APL for "the legends").

When we learn to read, we learn to "sight read" words. APL/J/K constructs can be "sight read" as well.

<comment><USER3> Sight-reading is a great analogy because as with music, in order to stay fluent and make one's performance (or sight-reading) easy, one has to stay in constant practice.

I'd argue that much less of this is required for languages like Lisp, unless, of course, you step away from practicing reading English, in which case maybe the very English-like programs of Lisp will start to seem foreign to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Above all, remember what we must provide is a pou sto to last the student for 40 years, not a handbook for tomorrow's employment."

At least around here, this strikes a nerve. Especially 40 years later. All of the colleges in town prep for the local market of tech rather than the fundamentals that may be advantageous overall and potentially financially more so out of market. I know stellar remote and small / mid size shop engineers in this part of the south, but by and large the schools are completely myopic about this and perpetuate the microcosm of low paid enterprise focused sweatshop cubework. I realize to paint it with such language is hyperbole but it's certainly not the exception to the rule.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can imagine that a fork of GNU APL, re-written in FORTRAN with multi- threaded and maybe distributed computing support, would be an amazing mathematical tool. Something that's super fast and scales really well, and makes mathematical operations really easy.

<comment><USER12> I think KDB might be what you're looking for. It's very efficient and widely used in finance. It's pretty expensive, but I believe you can use it for personal use for free (there might be a single core restriction I think).

As an aside, KDB devs make bank, like salaries >500k

<comment><USER13> I've always been curious how people get into this. I've been interested in KDB ever since I read [http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320](http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320), but it's not exactly a language they teach in college or you'd pick up in independent study. Do people just apply to fintech places with relevant experience and then get training for kdb?

<comment><USER14> Re how to get started: what was effective for me was to pair kdb+/q with another language and constrain how much I tried to do with q itself. q-sql for joining, filtering, pivoting and grouping (particularly date grouping and grouping with custom aggregate functions) is incredibly fast and powerful and also easy to learn. (though certainly, q experts will be able to point out all sorts of sub-optimal things in your queries)

Initially, we used F# to shovel data into kdb and to orchestrate queries and process results -- while keeping our q-sql simplistic -- and still saw astonishing speedups in our data processing. Over time, wherever we needed more speed, we'd do more and more in q itself (the 'Q Tips' book is very helpful).

One can get a lot of power with just a little kdb+/q.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > First appeared in SIAM News, 1977-06.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for pointing that out! Year fixed above.</comment></comment>


Possible cooked S-boxes in Kuznyechik & Streebog..Russian cipher & hash - <AUTHOR> https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/4PmssKzCBsxTmLCieDgqD7Nynwg <comment><USER2> The sentence which seems critical in his posting is maybe this one: _Arnaud Bannier proved in his PhD (see also [3]) that an S-box preserving a partition of the space into additive cosets in such a way that it interacts with the linear layer was necessary to build some specific backdoors._

I am not a cryptographer or a mathematician. These words do seem very worrying to me. He seems to be saying the primary quality, the preservation of a property across sbox and linear layer was demonstrated.

</comment><comment><USER3> These are both GOST R (ГОСТ) standards, which is the Russian equivalent of NIST standards.

</comment><comment><USER4> I know some of these words. This sounds Bad.</comment>


Hillary Clinton Email Archive - <AUTHOR> https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/ <comment><USER2> So Qaddafi wanted to create a gold backed currency to complete with the French Franc? Tisk tisk, that's how wars start.

[https://wikileaks.org/clinton- emails/emailid/12659](https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12659)

<comment><USER3> Qaddafi did a bunch of other stuff too. Not sure the currency was a big deal.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure that America had no problem with it, they having the De-facto world currency and all...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://github.com/wsjdata/clinton-email- cruncher](https://github.com/wsjdata/clinton-email-cruncher)</comment>


Resilience engineering: Where do I start? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lorin/resilience-engineering/blob/master/intro.md <comment><USER2> Readers beware -- this particular taxonomy of robustness vs resilience is not a pervasive or even common one. Often these terms are used completely synonymously. And often they are used with different subtleties that distinguish them.

For example, some distinguish between the two terms in that robustness refers more to staying functional in the face of failures, where resilience refers more to the capability to work around failures (neither having anything to do in particular with whether the unknowns were unknown).

The blog post author says that this taxonomy come straight from David woods, so there's no problem. Just keep in mind that most people don't use these terms in this particular way.

<comment><USER3> > Readers beware -- this particular taxonomy of robustness vs resilience is > not a pervasive or even common one. Often these terms are used completely > synonymously. And often they are used with different subtleties that > distinguish them.

> For example, some distinguish between the two terms in that robustness > refers more to staying functional in the face of failures, where resilience > refers more to the capability to work around failures (neither having > anything to do in particular with whether the unknowns were unknown).

> The blog post author says that this taxonomy come straight from David woods, > so there's no problem. Just keep in mind that most people don't use these > terms in this particular way.

Can you go into more detail with specific examples between the two that highlight the differences? "Working around failures" and "staying functional in the face of failures" sound borderline synonymous to me, so I'm curious how that plays out in practice.

<comment><USER4> > "Working around failures" and "staying functional in the face of failures" > sound borderline synonymous to me

One is going around the iceberg, the other is ensuring the Titanic can sail on with a couple of huge holes in it's hull.

<comment><USER3> If the Titanic does not hit the iceberg, it does not enter a failure mode. That doesn't sound like "working around failures" but "avoiding failure" which seems very different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great overview. I would also recommend Dekker's book The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error [1]. It's a bit easier to read than Drift Into Failure, which I found to be _very_ dense.

1: [https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human- Error...](https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human- Error/dp/1472439058)

</comment><comment><USER6> The team I work on at AWS wrote a paper on this [https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS- Reliab...](https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Reliability- Pillar.pdf) covers concepts such as Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC) etc

<comment><USER6> this is a good one as well, show how humans and our societal systems act around disasters (we are happy to live on volcanoes even after we see they blow up) The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them) [https://www.amazon.com/Big-Ones-Natural-Disasters- Shaped/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Big-Ones-Natural-Disasters- Shaped/dp/0385542704)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the work by NN Taleb on Fat Tails, Black Swans and Antifragility at least deserves a mention on this list.

Edit: also this USCSB youtube channel has some cool info on disaster engineering [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXIkr0SRTnZO4_QpZozvCCA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXIkr0SRTnZO4_QpZozvCCA) (see also [https://www.csb.gov/videos/](https://www.csb.gov/videos/))

</comment><comment><USER8> I love small concise mini-syllabi's like this. Just give me the big papers and set some context.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been trying to implement and apply these principals at my $job. It's so helpful to have an intro guide published with all the supplemental reading. I'm going to send this around to all my teams.</comment>


Poland puts computer game "This War of Mine" on school reading list - <AUTHOR> https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/06/18/poland-puts-computer-game-this-war-of-mine-on-school-reading-list/ <comment><USER2> This is amazing. There are other games of this quality and artistry, but IMO no other games with the kind of impact TWOM has. There's something special that happens when you play TWOM that isn't possible in other mediums. It manages to actually create circumstances where you feel like you're making hard choices.

IMO, only two other games accomplish something comparable. Portal (as a masterpiece of gaming in every respect) and Stanley Parable (as being another masterpiece that has a "message" inexpressible in any other medium).

If you'd add to that list, I could do with more maximum quality games to have played ;)

<comment><USER3> I found Detroit: Become Human to be quite thought-provoking.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but it's a bit on the nose...

<comment><USER5> Depends on your play through

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Jonathan Blow gave an interesting talk yesterday about videogames and the future of education: [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/678729516](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/678729516)

<comment><USER7> Starts 24:30

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting move. Sadly kids nowadays (at least in Poland, where I live) don't like reading books and tend to skip even very important titles. This may be a good way to bring some interest in the history via a genuinely entertaining medium.

<comment><USER9> > don't like reading books and tend to skip even very important titles

That's because the list of mandatory [1] reading in Poland is 90% haphazardly thrown together nationalistic martyrdom bullshit with terrible state-mandated interpretation.

I used to _hate_ literary analysis, partly because of the works we were studying and how we were forced to interpret them. Then, years after leaving school I've discovered that this can actually be interesting and intellectually stimulating, especially if you care for the work, and doubly so if you're actually explained the point of this sort of analysis in the first place. Every single peer of around my age that has gone through the same system has had the exact same experience, regardless of school or district.

[1] - as I've experienced it 10 years ago

<comment><USER10> In your neighbouring country Germany some of the entries for our 8th grade group reading and analysis project were:

\- book about an anorexic girl (which IIRC was assigned by the lottery to the recovering anorexic girl in my class)

\- book about a teenage boy falling in love with a drug-addicted girl and falling down into that swamp as well (names "Einbahnstraße" => "one-way street")

\- some other books about adipositas and fat kids/teenagers hating themselves for being fat (IIRC some even contemplating suicide)

\+ a bunch of other books in the same vein

Needless to say that was a very fun few weeks while presenting the books and their analyses...

<comment><USER9> Our literature teacher did have some spare student-time to throw in some of her selected books (in 10th grade I think?), and one of her choice was "Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo". It was certainly a formative experience, so I kinda do envy the program you went through :).

<comment><USER10> I vaguely remember we had to read that as well but I don't exactly remember when that was during school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To be honest, when I first played This War of Mine, I wanted to throw the controller. The thing is, as your characters' health decreases, becaue they get wounded or the are hungry or sick, etc, they start dragging their feet- literally. They take ages just to go from one room to the next. So play suddendly morphs into long stretches of just pushing a stick (or a button, I guess) to advance at a snail's pace.

I fully appreciate that this is meant to get you into the spirit of the game, but in the end it just ends up breaking immersion completely and makes you wonder what the hell you're doing in your life, pushing virtual people around a virtual house for hours on end.

I gave up on playing the game after a few tries, when I realised this was going on. I picked it up again a few months later and I enjoyed it much more, precisely because for some reason I didn't experience the same slowdown. I don't know if the game changed, possibly I was more aware of the things that could make my characters slow and managed to avoid them- but I'm not 100% sure.

I've had similar experiences with other games. Sunless Sea, forced me to push a virtual boat around a virtual sea in what felt like real time, because it was the game creator's vision that travel should be slow and you should go over the same empty tracts of sea again and again and again and again, always at a teribly slow pace, even with the most expensive engine upgrades. I didn't pick that one up again, after I found out that this was actually a design feature (I think I read an interview with the creator, or some thread in the game's forums on steam?) (edit: I think this was the thread: [https://steamcommunity.com/app/304650/discussions/0/14832329...](https://steamcommunity.com/app/304650/discussions/0/1483232961041375775/?)).

Merchant of the Skies, that I've been playing a lot recently can also be tedious though, honestly, not that much. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, well I guess that was a walking simulator and it's my fault for playing it for as much as I play it. The list goes on for a bit.

Just, don't take away from my time to live and give me nothing back in return, mkay?

</comment><comment><USER12> Playing "This War of Mine" was one of the most powerful and emotionally stirring experiences that I have ever had with a video game. It really is a beautiful work of art. Highly recommend playing it.

<comment><USER13> It's a different gameplay experience, but I highly recommend Valiant Hearts for another emotionally stirring experience about people going through war.

<comment><USER14> Seconded, an absolute masterpiece of a game that was.

I would really love to have a save feature in TWoM, I feel like its sorely missing.

<comment><USER15> Not being able to save is kind of the point though, isn't it? You don't get to save when you're stuck in a bombed out city under siege...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The thing that I found very important in this game is that there is no clearly defined end-goal like "survive for 100 days" - this really helps the game capture the feeling of "will this never end?"

Having a defined end date would make things easier psychologically.

There is also a board game ([https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188920/war- mine-board-ga...](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188920/war-mine-board- game)) that I've heard good things about.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am surprised why it took school system so long. And despite the apparent collapse of traditional education, it is surprisingly resistant to change. I would also include some works from Demoscene, some newer electronic music (at least from the 80s :)).

<comment><USER18> The Demoscene definitely needs some artistic recognition, but maybe not in the form of being put on the _reading_ list ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Respecting video games is great, but like you don't respect a movie as "the best meal I ever had", you also don't respect a game by putting it in a "recommended reading list".

<comment><USER20> It's certainly a valid position to interpret games as text to be interpreted. In fact, if structuralism and semiotics have taught us anything it is precisely this.

In danish education we have the concept of an "udvidet tekstbegreb" that means any references to texts can also refer to any other kind of cultural medium.

If we look outside Denmark, the European institutions also have this view. If we, for example, look at the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), they give us this exact definition of text [0]:

> _Text_ is any sequence or discourse (spoken and/or written) related to a > specific domain and which in the course of carrying out a task becomes the > occasion of a language activity, whether as a support or as a goal, as > product or process.

[0]: [https://rm.coe.int/1680459f97](https://rm.coe.int/1680459f97), pp. 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They should put Deus Ex on the list

<comment><USER2> DX is one of the few games I've played through more than once. DX is a lot longer, and is fundamentally a FPS. It's a work of art of gaming, and were this a school on game design, I would absolutely agree with you.

TWOM is a work of literary art. If you haven't played it, do so, but be warned: it hits hard, emotionally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's about time that games get their due as great literature/media. Love it. So many great stories.

</comment><comment><USER23> This was a very difficult game to play. The difficulty was not in the gameplay, but in the emotional content of the game. If the other games help in escapism, this is the opposite where you can feel what the characters are going through in a war zone.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've had this game sitting in my backlog for months.

I've got a few days off work this week so need to give it a shot. I was never sure looking at videos and screenshots what sort of game it actually is.

<comment> augusto-moura Nothing that new in terms of gameplay, but the art style and the background story (inspired in real conflicts) are something else

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think they could also try movies analysis, there's ton of great content and it's more approachable.

</comment><comment><USER26> The German translation would need an alternate title.

<comment><USER27> Why?

<comment><USER28> Mein Kampf.

<comment><USER29> Couldn't they use Krieg or am I wrong / is this is just joke?

<comment><USER30> "Kampf" means "battle" and can also have, like in "Mein Kampf", the metaphorical meaning of "struggle". "Krieg" means "war". E.g. WW2 is Weltkrieg 2, not Weltkampf 2.

Having not played TWOM I don't know which translates would be more appropriate. The GP is however most likely a joke (and not a bad one IMHO).

<comment><USER31> It about trying to survive in a city in a fictional country during a war (similar to the Yugoslav Wars). So I think that krieg is appropriate but I haven't taken German in nearly 30 years so I'm rusty!

<comment><USER27> It would be "Mein Krieg", not "Mein Kampf". Source: I'm German.

Also, "Kampf" would be active fighting, and this game is about people who are in the opposite situation and become subjects of violence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It reminds me I have to finish this beautiful game

</comment><comment><USER33> I fail to see why this is news. I had games we played 20 years ago in school which taught me tons of stuff, math blasters for example.

Putting a game on a school reading list when there is already 100's of games on there, is not really news.

Kind of just seems like a ad than anything else.

<comment><USER34> Give the article a read, or play the game if you have time - it doesn't make sense to compare the qualities of This War of Mine, educational or otherwise, to those of Math Blaster. The fact that it's on a "reading list" should be the first clue. It really is a pretty interesting decision.

<comment><USER33> Your comment sound better if you where not implying I did not read the article (because I did multiple times).

"It doesn't make sense to compare the qualities of This War of Mine, educational or otherwise, to those of Math Blaster. The fact that it's on a "reading list" should be the first clue. It really is a pretty interesting decision."

Is much better. People take away different things from articles all the time.

<comment><USER35> How many times you had to read the article to understand it?

<comment><USER33> Ouch...

Obviously going to ignore the rather aggressive undertone. I clearly missed something in the article so I reread it. There is nothing wrong with that.

My comment was in reference to the guidelines, which clearly state

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read > the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions > that."

<comment><USER35> That's why the question...2 Times? 3 Times more? I mean its not Peace and War or Dr Schiwago ;)

<comment><USER36> Don't be an ass

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The education system, as always, sends the signal that should be received with great suspicion and scrutiny. Here the case is slightly more complex: any game, however rich, is a closed system with predictable outcomes, while real life is all about choosing opaque options, rarely obvious.

Academia likes and itself all about first type: actually it is just another computer game, especially with recent remote/online movement. Surviving in real life situation like that, is nowhere near the computer game, but quite the opposite.

<comment><USER38> I think you're missing the point. That game doesn't teach you anything about survival nor does it aim to, I think. It's more like a book about the people who go through some hardship, you read about how they cope and maybe learn a lesson applicable in everyday life. That is the point with some narrative literature in the first place.</comment></comment>


WeWork Rivals Pitch to Win Back Market Share, Try Not to Gloat - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-04/wework-rivals-pitching-to-win-back-market-share-try-not-to-gloat <comment><USER2> I'm not quite sure if I really agree with the premise of this article. This isn't some type of Uber vs. Lyft analogy. WeWork dwarfs all the other coworking spaces. Customers aren't going to leave WeWork because they fear it going out of business (after-all that's the point of month-to-month). The turnover happens from unhappy customers.

This also seems to imagine given all their recent troubles that WeWork isn't going to dramatically improve operations. WeWork has never gone back to make things efficient since inception, so it wouldn't be a huge surprise if there's a lot they've left on the table. WeWork owns so many leases from landlords; the landlords might be strong-armed into concessions.

It's not unreasonable to expect a lot of their metrics are going to improve (and cut costs drastically down), especially with a new set of management.

I just signed up for WeWork in Lima, Peru this week. There's definitely customers. Everything is clean/organized. Although, the music is definitely a bit distracting ...

<comment><USER3> Exactly, WeWork is turning into a normal business with competition. I think of them as similar to a hotel chain. Hotel chains basically own or lease real estate that they rent out on a per night basis to individuals. The reason the hotel business has multinationals owning large amounts of hotels world wide is because that kind of scale provides certain benefits in terms of operational cost, brand recognition, etc.

WeWork bootstrapped a multinational with hundreds of locations world wide using investor money and are now serving hundreds of thousands of users that apparently like them enough to pay a premium for using their space. So far so good. But it's something that others can copy and there are a lot of smaller and bigger competitors starting to offer similar services that are showing healthy growth.

The premise of WeWork's valuation is that it can continue to charge a premium because of their scale. However, if other competitors emerge, it becomes exactly like the hotel business and they'll be competing on price and quality. Given enough competing spaces, their customers will simply flock to the ones with the best price and offering.

That is going to limit the ROI for investors and probably is causing them to have second thoughts about dumping billions in it. Hence the IPO withdrawal.

<comment><USER4> > Given enough competing spaces, their customers will simply flock to the ones > with the best price and offering.

Just waiting for "Expedia for coworking spaces" to come and commoditize them :)

<comment><USER5> > Just waiting for "Expedia for coworking spaces" to come and commoditize them > :)

I've been waiting for this too, but the more I think about it, the less likely I think it'll actually happen. People spend at least 5 days and 40 hours a week in their work environment, often across many years. In contrast, when traveling, you spend just a handful of hours in a flight or a few days in a hotel. When you're spending a short time on something, you're less likely to see details, and commodification is easier. When you spend days, weeks, years in a place, tiny minutea jump out and no two spaces are exactly the same.

As a comparison, think about residential real-estate. There still has been very little commodification of residential real-estate, because neighborhoods, amenities, schools, safety, light, and even the color of the grass play a factor.

Work-spaces are less extreme, but similar dynamics play out. Even if thousands of WeWork copy-cats pop-up around the world (as is currently happening), I wouldn't expect serious commodification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always been extremely skeptical of commercial real estate investment schemes based on the heuristic that the AM airwaves are full of advertisements for them.

WeWork has been outed as a fraud for months, probably longer [1]. But hey Adam Neumann proves the greater fool theory is still alive and well, so there's that.

[1] [https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-19/they-are- guarantee...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-19/they-are-guaranteed- go-bust-wework-founder-cashes-out-700m-ipo-looms)

<comment><USER7> Zerohedge also said that Tesla and Deutsche Bank were frauds.

<comment><USER8> Give them time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Using VC backing to predatorily price your product (like the free rent in this article) is basically dumping, isn't it? I don't know how long we'll tolerate that kind of behaviour.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\))

<comment><USER10> It's not dumping because it's the primary market. Dumping is leveraging your primary market capacity to expand to another market. No one has ever successfully kept their prices low, drove out the competition, and then raised them.

<comment><USER11> Being sarcastic here, but many companies' primary market these days is the cash-burning-pocket investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Their IPO disclosure said they _could_ profitable if they halted growth, so t seems we'll get a chance to see what happens when they try and hit the "profit" button. Hopefully it's a big button. And the should have, like, a whole bunch of people help them hit that button really hard? Maybe twice, just to be sure.

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://outline.com/FTzKZw](https://outline.com/FTzKZw)

</comment><comment><USER14> WeWork is going to keep doing their thing for a while.

I wouldn't expect there to be much opportunity for rivals until WeWork has to start cutting amenities to cut costs and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER15> How are the CEO's actions not illegal? Renting your own spaces to your own company, cashing out before IPO, loaning yourself company money - none of this is illegal??

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand the title.

<comment><USER17> Have a comma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there anybody here who actually uses these spaces? How do you justify the costs?

If I was an early investor in a company, and I learned that they were spending those sorts of amounts on office space, I would be furious.

<comment><USER19> Amazon using doors as desks back in the day is in stark contrast to startups using WeWork space now.

<comment><USER20> Amazon using doors was an expensive thing to do _that they mainly did for the image it brought them_.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133408)

<comment><USER21> I don't think it's that expensive? Hollow core doors are cheap (~$30 at HD), flexible, huge, durable, and feel nice. I love my door desk.

<comment><USER22> How can something be flexible and durable? As someone who accidentally punched a hole through a hollow core door, I can definitely say I'd never consider placing expensive equipment on one.

<comment><USER21> I meant flexible in terms of what it allows you to do (although it does flex a bit as well).

But to your question, ductile (non-brittle) metals tend to be more durable than brittle ones.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>