Gangstalking: A New Type of Internet Conspiracy Cult - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/invisible-illness/gangstalking-a-new-type-of-internet-conspiracy-cult-ab0a4fc7b85c <comment><USER2> The subtitle sums up the smugness of the article pretty well: "What Happens When Mental Illness Becomes Coordinated".

Later in the article: "For example, people who believe they are being gangstalked point to the many verified extensive surveillance forces that institutions use on the general public. These can range from the collecting and selling of internet data to the NSA's overzealousness that was exposed by Edward Snowden. Conspiracy theory believers are not wrong to have concerns about these issues. They cross the line, however, when they think their thoughts are being read or that the car they saw with the tinted windows was sent specifically to monitor them". So the author thinks that anyone who is paranoid of the government is a "conspiracy theorist", more or less. The author obviously _knows_ that mind-reading is a myth, because if mind-reading were possible, the author would have already known about it. Anybody practicing mind-reading would have published their protocols, and because the author has not heard about such protocols, they do not exist. Further, if you believe that a car is following you, you are apparently a conspiracy theorist, because cars do not follow people.

Here's another bit from the article: "For instance, "Psy-Ops" refers to a type of surveillance operation that supposedly remotely transfers information to the brains of targeted individuals to affect their emotions and logic — in other words, mind-control".

This is simply false. The author didn't even bother to read the wikipedia article on the subject [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare) .

In conclusion, this is a bunch of drivel and just another useless hit piece on people who distrust their government, who the author claims are mentally-ill conspiracy theorists.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know about paranoid people or the extremes this article speaks about. But group stalking is a thing,usually with an end goal but also for some sick psychological satisfaction.

It's much like how they get a person (usually a female) to install a remote access trojan and basically mess with them and share videos,webcam recordings,etc... On forums (pretty sick stufd,they call the victims their "slaves"). Haven't confirmed it first hand but I can see people coordinating cyberstalking. But in person stalking takes too much resource for me to believe it's done for the sole reason of just messing with someone.</comment>


The Incredible Growth of Python - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/06/incredible-growth-python/ <comment><USER2> It seems surprising that Ruby's popularity is going down while Python is increasing. Any insight as to why that would be?

<comment><USER3> I suspect the educational use of Python is having an effect -- many universities are using it as the introductory language rather than Java these days and it is even showing up in high schools. Except for the mostly moribund Shoes project, Ruby never really went for the educational niche.</comment></comment>


First FOSDEM video recordings uploaded - <AUTHOR> http://fosdem.org/2012/news/first-video-recordings-uploaded

<comment><USER2> This isn't easy to navigate right now…

Here are the schedules for saturday and sunday: <http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/days/sat> <http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/days/sun>

If the talks are in the first three rooms, they are in these three directories respectively: <http://video.fosdem.org/2012/maintracks/janson/> <http://video.fosdem.org/2012/maintracks/k.1.105/> <http://video.fosdem.org/2012/lightningtalks/>

If they took place in H.1301 or H.1302, they are in this directory: <http://video.fosdem.org/2012/crossdistro/>

Otherwise they are in one of these thematic directories: <http://video.fosdem.org/2012/devrooms/>

</comment><comment><USER3> For those who have been there, which talks do you recommend?

<comment><USER4> I guess the recommendations will depend a lot on what people are interested in.

I'm interested in talks where people don't talk about their project itself, but about how they solved the problems encountered while developing it (i.e. where I can learn something for my own project).

I'll offer a recommendation: "Optimizing Firefox: Why Large Applications Start Slowly" which was useful even if you don't care for Firefox.

Any others like it?</comment></comment>


The Unitarihedron: The Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1537 <comment><USER2> For a while I thought he was making a joke about how if you continue to abstract a given theory, you end up "encompassing" everything eventually, but not in a useful way. To put what I mean in programmer terms, if you take a Javascript framework, and just keep abstracting and abstracting and abstracting, to a pathological degree, you ultimately can end up with your "Javascript framework" consisting of:

        eval(x)

where the user supplies x. It is literally the most powerful Javascript framework ever!... and yet, obviously, also not useful. It trivially encompasses every possible Javascript program, at the price of not saying anything useful about any of them.

But then he threw me when he linked to what appears to be a real proof. I read through it, and found no signs it was tongue-in-cheek itself.

So I'll admit I'm at an impasse here; if he's got a real mathematical construct that is usefully better than what was presented, I don't get the tongue-in-cheek tone; if it really is tongue-in-cheek, I don't get what the real proofs are doing there, unless the proof is itself the best-disguised joke I've seen in the math world. (Generally I've got a pretty good eye for mathematician humor, even in fields I know little about.)

<comment><USER3> This is the machine learning principle that the more a model explains the less accurate it is.

<comment><USER4> That principle might be a good rule of thumb, but it's not universally true. Sometimes a new model comes along that both explains more _and_ is more accurate. General Relativity is an example. Fundamental physics is funny that way.

<comment><USER3> Einstein always seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't quite get it.

After looking at the linked to papers, I'm assuming this is not a joke, and he is not putting down (making fun) of the Amplituhedron, nor making up the Unitarihedron (just abstracting his work with a media-friendly name to itit).

What he is joking about is simply that mathematicians should named their work as a (insert-something-here)-hedron, as that would cause the media to pick it up and report on it.

Is this correct?

<comment><USER6> I don't know either, what a brick. I really hate expressions where you need context to understand it's intentions, or die stupid.

He could have given context but prefered being condescending.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sadly, the joke's lost on me. Is he making fun of the other "hedron" and this Unitarihedron is a joke too? Which is too bad. I was having high hopes for the future and I wasted time reading an inside joke.

<comment><USER8> I think he's genuinely suggesting that if journalists are getting so excited about the amplituhedron, they should get even more excited about this, and probably can only do that if they have a fun word for it. No joke.

(If it was a joke, the paper he linked to -- [http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pp.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pp.pdf) \-- probably wouldn't be exactly what he described it as.)

<comment><USER9> If you read some of the links in the first paragraph you'll get a feel for the intent of the article. Aaronson probably expects his audience to follow traditional physics sources. See for example:

[http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6260](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6260)

Yesterday in QFT class the professor [0] explained the name by saying that the guy who came up with it was a "very good salesman". The reality is that probabilities can in a great deal of cases be expressed as the volume of something in some phase space, for a trivial example, consider the area under the curve between two x-values on the normal distribution's probability density function -- it's the 2-volume of a section of the Gaussiohedron.

So after branding quantum information science as the study of the "unitarihedron", Aaronson dragged out one of his more miraculous results, which is that PP is closed under union and intersection as a direct result of PP = PostBQP, where PostBQP is a complexity class derived from BQP using an idea called _postselection_. That proof was actually in his dissertation (if I recall correctly), written in 2006, and it was an extremely impressive proof which did not use a word like "unitarihedron" to describe its methods.

So, while it was a joke, if you read the article in the context of the physics community's reaction to the amplituhedron story, the included proof really just helps to drive the point home.

The methods now called "amplituhedron" have been under continuous development for the past ten years or so. My QFT professor[0] seemed sort of enthusiastic about the development. They do seem to represent a step forward in our understanding of quantum field theory, though the reaction of the media has been, in the eyes of some commentators, characteristically buzzword-driven.

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

<comment><USER10> Are you sure your professor authorised you to quote him on calling one of the most powerful persons in his field: 'a very good salesman' on a public forum of sorts?

<comment><USER11> This particular professor, as far as I am aware, would probably not be considered as active in QFT. He has been working on turbulence and chaos recent (albeit, employing techniques from field theory). At any rate, I don't really see the quip as taking a knock on these guys (he is known for his witty banter). This is really good salesmanship and the media are having a filed day with it.

<comment><USER10> Just checking, sometimes people banter, but they don't want to see such banter spread in print.

FWIW I have met Arkani-Hamed and he didn't strike me for his salesmanship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can someone help enlighten me a bit here. From a layman's standpoint after reading all the comments associated with the Amplituhedron article, it seems both from a semi-professional standpoint and layman standpoint it was an unique discovery. Now that a true professional has responded, is Scott here simply mocking at the marketting success of the Amplituhedron or is actually making a point about the existence of such mechanics prior to the discovery of Amplituhedron? Thanks.

<comment><USER13> Both, but since he hasn't mnaged to come up with any pictures of how elegant BQP/unitarihedron is, his point is lost.

<comment><USER12> If that's the case, he just sounds sour ಠ_ಠ

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I had taken away as the big impact of the original "amplituhedron" article was that the researchers had found a way to replace long calculations with a shorter, _geometrical_ calculation. Which, unless there's some profound connection between quantum complexity classes and geometry that I'm not aware of, wouldn't be the case with the "unitarihedron." So perhaps Aaronson isn't giving the amplituhedron concept the quite credit it deserves?

(Disclaimer- I haven't the background in complexity nor physics to have any idea, obviously. But geometrical calculations playing a key role in a theory that "did away with space" seemed like a wonderfully cool paradox.)

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't usually like scott aaronson, (although I like his casting of QM as complex-valued probability space) - but this blog post was a gem.

<comment><USER16> Casting QM as a complex-valued probability space is how it's usually done.

<comment> loup-vaillant Calling "probability" something that's out there in the world. What a confusing thing to do…

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/)

<comment><USER16> I'm not really sure what to make of this response.

> The Bayesian says, "Uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory. In > the real world, the coin has either come up heads, or come up tails. Any > talk of 'probability' must refer to the information that I have about the > coin—my state of partial ignorance and partial knowledge—not just the coin > itself.

See, QM doesn't actually work like this. There is no hidden variable. This has been proven[1].

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem)

<comment> loup-vaillant Generally, when you know everything there is to know about an experiment, it makes you quite certain about the outcome you will observe.

Yet this is not the case when you send a single photon through a half-sieved mirror. Even when you know everything there is to know about this experiment, you just don't know which sensor will go off, and if you repeat the experiment, you will find that previous results tells you _nothing_ about the next one. Perfect independence.

When total knowledge of the setup yields only partial knowledge about future observations, one is very tempted to look for "probabilities" in the setup itself. But it's a cop-out, a non-explanation. The fact that there is no hidden variable does not mean amplitudes (or their squared norm) are probabilities.

So, what to make about our uncertainty about the perceived outcome of quantum experiments? Well, it's simple: the laws of physics as we know them are deterministic. When you send a photon through a half-sieved mirror, the actual result is always the same: the world splits in half. There will be one blob where the photon hit the first sensor, and one blob where the photon hit the second one. Subjectively, the result is the same: we still observe the Born statistics. But step further from the amplitudes as probabilities cop-out: the Born statistics are now more of an anthropic problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Baj. Jumbug. Their hedrons are only special cases of my 42-dimensional Universahedron, which certifiably and undeniably contains everything, including all possible universes. The proof is too small to publish in this post.

</comment><comment><USER18> The Simon's Foundation version with discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6403285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6403285)

</comment><comment><USER19> I had a unitarihedron hanging from my rearview mirror in high school. It was pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER20> _Though, in recent months, my research has focused even more on the diaperhedron_

Damn, we should compare notes, we're researching the same thing :-)

I need to make a mental note that if the mathematician or physicist tries too hard to get on TV /news and sell something, he might not be as great as others.

</comment><comment><USER21> The article is definitely satirical and points out the futility of any -Hedron based device regardless of its theoretical truth. You can't calculate the volume of a fractal in fact some fractals can be proved to have zero volume!</comment>


Your privacy is your freedom (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://51elliot.blogspot.ca/2008/07/your-privacy-is-your-freedom.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This was written a few years ago but seemed relevant to recent events and the whole privacy / freedom / security conversation.</comment>


Treating performance as a product: The technical story of Asana's rewrite - <AUTHOR> https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite/ <comment><USER2> I can't believe they are patting themselves on the back for performance. I'm running a brand new macbook pro, latest chrome, fiber internet AND asana fully cached. It still is a 6 second initial page load and then every single UI interaction is slow, slow, slow. My entire companies biggest pain point with asana is how insanely slow it is for a simple product.

<comment><USER3> This was my largest gripe with Asana and why I was so happy when we moved away from it.

The simplicity of Asana is nice BUT the web app is terrible in how bloated it feels.

I hated clicking Asana links to a task because it would have to load the entire app and wasted what felt like so much time.

<comment><USER4> I appreciate that you're not trying to advertise for their competitor, so I'll be that guy... What did you switch to?

<comment><USER3> We moved to JIRA. Lost the simplicity but its a lot snappier and I believe there was some organizational benefits as the company grew.

I am happy that I can click a JIRA link and see a page within a second.

<comment><USER5> Thats probably dependent on the hardware and size and complexity of workflows and DB size. Our JIRA install is one of the slowest webapps i've seen in a while. Can't wait to move on to something else.

<comment><USER6> Would you mind sharing the approximate number of issues and active users in your JIRA install?

<comment><USER7> It varies widely. We have ~300 users, 30 projects, probably on the order of ~20k tickets. Performance has been up and down, occasionally things slow way down and we have to file a ticket and then they come back with some excuse about re-indexing or relocating the instance. Normally it's pretty acceptable, but it feels like there are a _ton_ of a variables that go into its performance day-to-day and minute-to-minute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this already in production? Because until a few months ago, Asana's network performance was crap. Now it's just mildly bad, but the UI has become almost unusably slow.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is already in production for most views. Can you elaborate on your issues?

<comment><USER8> I type a sentence into the UI and it takes about 30 seconds for the text to appear, one character at a time. If I click anywhere else before the text has finished displaying, the text input continues from there, resulting in bizarre fragmentation.

Scrolling jumps under my mouse. It sometimes takes 3 or more tries for the UI to register that I've gripped a handle to drag a list item to a different location in the list.

This is in the latest Safari on a recent Mac laptop on a symmetric 50mbps connection.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting us know. That sounds like an exceptional case from our metrics. Would you be willing to share your Asana user ID so we could learn more?

<comment><USER9> It looks like a standard dark pattern in React, you are re-rendering more components than needed on certain inputs changes, you should ask him in which input he's typing, it would probably more useful than his user name

<comment><USER10> Not trying to start a flame war, but do you know for sure "he" is a "he"?

<comment><USER8> You're right, it's not really germane to the primary topic of conversation in this thread, but thank you for noticing and pointing it out anyway. Fwiw, I'm a "she".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem we face at my company is that it's very difficult to get people to use these kind of tools.

My team is remote so we use slack and other apps all the time, but getting customer service or other depts to use a simple chat is difficult. Implementing something like Asana or Basecamp is impossible.

How did you implement those tools in your company?

<comment><USER12> If the boss says use X, they refuse?

<comment><USER11> No, they use it the first day, and then progressively less. Since this has happened a few times with different tools management has abandoned hope.

<comment><USER13> I've dealt with this in the past and am dealing with it again with a very simple trello board.

"What is the status of issue X?"

"What is the IssueID?"

"I didn't create one"

"Create an new entry in the tracker and we can all track progress of issue X"

Repeat as many times as necessary.

edit: I also try to create a trigger or other automatic action in the tool. For example, our issue tracker updates the release notes when items are modified or marked as completed. If you can get people to use the triggered tool it will create an incentive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If anyone from Asana is out there, the fonts on your site look /very/ weird on my machine - Debian 9.1, Chrome 60.0.3112.78. [https://my.mixtape.moe/qpziak.png](https://my.mixtape.moe/qpziak.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> That definitely looks like a bug. Thanks for reporting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's a video of the Laszlo Webtop Calendar [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97KLyHzpkro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97KLyHzpkro), from 2008. This was written in a hybrid of XML and our own dialect of JavaScript, that compiled either to Flash byte code, or to a subset of JavaScript compatible with major browsers. (JavaScript in 2008 was nowhere near as healthy as it is now.)

The reason I mention this, apart from the similar time frame and similar-ish functionality, is "They named the framework Luna (after Dustin's cat)." The Laszlo company and framework were named after our Peter's cat. (The cat, in turn, was named after László Moholy-Nagy.)

<comment><USER16> My cat's name is Computer. (Adopted, came with the name.) Not great for naming my frontend framework though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Phips and I'm one of the engineers behind Luna2. Please let me know if you have any questions!

<comment><USER17> Can you say anything about the challenges involved in creating a unified My Tasks view that shows all your tasks across all organizations to which you belong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> After using Asana/JIRA/Service now for some time I switched to simple issue tracking in self-hosted Gitea.

No javascript framework to load, page loads are measured in milliseconds. It maybe has 10% of functionality but it "just works"(tm)

</comment><comment><USER19> It's kinda surprising how frequently rewrites occur across tech companies; considering rewrites can essentially stop the development of any new features in the product. I was recently part of one such huge rewrite, albeit it was truly necessary since we were porting from a 1970s COBOL based Mainframe to a Java based Middleware solution. This rewrite itself caused blocked any other development projects for the last 6 months and sucked in a lot of resources.

Isn't sticking to a stable tech stack that helps run production smoothly and let the developers have their peace of mind better? Rewrites might be essential, but only in the cases where your technology is seriously ancient.

Is this only due to the crazy front-end and JS frameworks world or am I missing something else here?

<comment><USER20> I can't speak for every case. At my work, we've done some rewrites. On the back end, we've seen 20-100x improvements in performance and the code is easier to maintain after switching many projects from Perl to Go. On the front end, we had to switch because the framework was no longer getting security updates (simple js and html from a symfony back end to an API driven SPA). I can't talk to the benefits of the front end rewrite aside from allowing us to dog food our APIs and allowing the front end teams to use tooling of their choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Question out of curiosity. Since Asana has started using react - are you using route based chunking/code splitting[1] to significantly speed up page load times?

We have started using it for some pages (with some complex UI flows) and it has sped up the page load times by an order of magnitude. Makes the first interaction super snappy while the other stuff loads in the background.

[1] - [https://medium.com/@addyosmani/progressive-web-apps-with- rea...](https://medium.com/@addyosmani/progressive-web-apps-with-react-js- part-2-page-load-performance-33b932d97cf2)

<comment><AUTHOR> We have not yet but it is the goal we're working towarss. Migrating our legacy Luna code to be compatible with "use strict" and not rely on implicit global variables has been a grueling endeavor. We're actively testing a Webpack based bundle in production right now. If that works, we'll start testing both chunking and code splitting.

Do you have any data on the page load performance improvements? We would appreciate any insight.

<comment><USER21> Sure. We are a B2C company. We have multiple customer flows to place orders on our website.

Majority of our users use mobile phones to place orders. Thus, performance of our webapp on mobile is critical.

Our users have slow 3G connections to access it. And we ran experiment to speed up one of flows to use route based chunking/code splitting.

We got a 10x improvement. The uncached gzipped page load speed went from ~30s to ~3s on a 3G connection. We used chrome's throttling (both network and CPU) feature to test and build the app.

We had to modify our user flow a bit to allow render the first page super fast, but it was well worth the tradeoff. The biggest reason of the speed up was just the smaller initial bundle size (the first chunk only contained react and react-dom plus the first component to render) and the fact that the render only needed that to get started with the first paint.

There is still the problem that the other chunks are not loaded until the subsequent components are actually asked to be rendered - so now we are working on a way to asynchronously preload the other chunks in the background while the user is interacting with the first component, thus making the subsequent interactions super fast. Still a WIP though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds great and inline with our thoughts. I'd love to see a blog post with more detail when it works!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The slow loading speed was definitely the primary reason that I stopped using Asana. I just tried Asana today on Firefox, and it felt faster than before, or at least the perception of it was faster.

I hope that they work to optimize the iOS app as well. I know the op is about web and not iOS app, but iOS app is just painfully slow, and takes awhile to load a simple page with 1 single task! My other gripe is that it won't work in off-line mode, when I don't have internet access. Anyway, being slow really ruins the user experience.

<comment><USER8> Interesting, I for one find the iOS app very snappy and the web version often unusably slow. And the iOS app does work offline too. Have you upgraded recently?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A great writeup! A lot of startups face the situation that you need to do significant architectural changes to pay the technical debt and re-enable development speed, or improve the performance and scalability of the service. At the same time, stopping feature development altogether for months is impossible.

Incremental rewrite is often the only way to go. I liked how you approached the rewrite with adapters. I'd be very interested if somebody would collect these kind of "rewrite war stories" to a book form and maybe synthesize common patterns from the stories.

<comment><USER24> I would love a resource like that! We went through a very similar process on my team [0], and I was pleased to see this post validating some pain points we had seen.

> In hindsight, we chose the correct trade off.

This is key, and I think it's almost something you have to blindly follow when going into the transition. It's a lot easier to justify the decision to incrementally rewrite in retrospect than it is to get excited about it in the process. I think more examples would help shift that.

[0]: [https://heap.engineering/migrating-react-mobx-while- shipping...](https://heap.engineering/migrating-react-mobx-while-shipping-new- features/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish Asana had better support for Sprint cycles. Otherwise, I just love using it. The only task management tool I've actually ever liked. I've tried several popular ones - primarily Trello, JIRA, Basecamp & GitHub Issues. Kudos for the rewrite, hope you folks continue improving it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Our hope is that Luna2 enables developers to more efficiently improve the product. While performance is still a top priority, more engineers can now focus on the product experience.

<comment><USER25> We are facing a similar situation in my company. Our current stack (just React) is not able to handle the complexity of the project, and refactoring existing features or building new ones has been a pain. We are slowly but gradually moving the code to React + Redux + Flow. We are already seeing gains with this move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "The final principle was simple over easy."

This is a great principle and really good to see in this article.

Usually when I've seen rewrites it _goes the other way_. There is some simplistic component that gets rewritten in some new language/framework/etc and end up being much more complicated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your kind words! It took a lot of effort but we're happy with the result.

<comment><USER10> I would love to see actual examples of this. It's something that sounds interestint in theory but difficult to know how to render into practice (especially to validate that is the correct priority).

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll try to turn this into a blog post. It definitely is a skill that takes practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "[B]uilding a native application for each platform was untenable for our size at the time. As a result, we...developed an in house versions (sic) of Firebase, RxJS, and React."

Something tells me that shipping a macOS app, a Windows app, and a decent web client would've been easier than what they did. So what's the real story? Did the scope of the project keep getting bigger, and they stayed the course due to loss aversion?

<comment><AUTHOR> The statement was for 2009 when we had ~5 employees. I'm not sure what the timeline would look like if we had chosen the path you suggested. It does seem likely that we could have avoided an incremental rewrite. As mentioned in the post, a large reason for the rewrite was the tight coupling of UI and data fetching code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Something is not right about asana. This article is so filled with buzzwords and meaningless "values", "principles" that I want to puke. Even in this industry, I've never heard anyone talk like this, except when I attended an asana hiring info session a few months ago.

<comment><USER12> What are some examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I did a quick Inspect in Chrome and noticed that instead of doing request/response, the server is sending a list of everything that has changed since the last request (or at least it appears so). Do you care to talk more about your client/server API design?

<comment><AUTHOR> Were you looking at the XHR (Luna) or WebSocket (Luna2)? We can do a follow up blog post on sync if you're interested.

<comment><USER29> Both look interesting, although clearly Luna2 is the evolved version. I would definitely enjoy a post on your sync strategy! Thank you for being so open!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Bad performance is a misfeature. Performance as a product would have to either put you below the limits of perception -or- 10x faster than the closest competition.

</comment><comment><USER31> Just wondering what are your team's thoughts on Elm?

<comment><AUTHOR> I deeply respect Elm and think many other teams members do as well. The fractal architecture concept was one of the influences to how we write Luna2 code. My main concern with Elm for Asana is long term risk. Choosing Elm means choosing a framework and a language. You can see more of our thoughts here: [https://blog.asana.com/2014/11/asana-switching- typescript/](https://blog.asana.com/2014/11/asana-switching-typescript/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks like a paragraph is repeated in the article.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is the UI still terrible? That's why I dropped it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just use Pivotal Tracker and be done with it.

</comment><comment><USER35> i haven't used asana in a couple years.

I just signed up for a new account, and it seemed pretty snappy. I might give it a try again.

</comment><comment><USER36> I like Google keep. It's fast :P

</comment><comment><USER37> > When we started development in 2009, few rich web applications existed. And > with so few examples, there were no best practices to follow.

I think what you need is not best practices. You need principles.

If you take performance as a matter of principle from the get go, you will never ever ship a slow product.

Most startups nowadays seem to value design more than performance. They even value the design of their landing page more than they value the design of the actual product.

Another thing they seem to value is _perceived_ ease of development, at the _expense_ of performance.

I say perceived because, in my experience, what you may perceive initially as a productivity boost ends up becoming a productivity burden as the code size grows.</comment>


Instrumentl (YC S16) Is Building a Database of All the Grants in the World - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/08/instrumentl/ <comment><USER2> Very cool!

A killer feature, if you don't already have it, is to have researchers answer a set of questions then leverage their answers to apply for many grants at once or pre-populate 70% of an application.

We've been working on the other side of this problem, improving how research labs track and spend their funding effectively.

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

Feel free to reach out as we're both trying to reach a similar set of people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Angela here, one of the cofounders of Instrumentl. We'd love to hear your feedback about what we're building to bring efficiency & transparency to research funding. Have a grant horror story? Let's hear it!

<comment><USER4> How will Instrumentl generate revenue? Taking the person from Italy that found a grant through you, what did that mean for Instrumentl in terms of income and how?

How will those looking for grants find you?

<comment><USER3> Our customers pay us ~$30 per seat per month just like other saas models. Customers range from individual researchers to entire research organizations. Couple strategies for user acquisition: SEO, direct sales to universities, content marketing. Thanks for the Qs!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At a glance it looks like you might also do some management of grant proposals. Do/will you help proposers publish those proposals? See eg [http://riojournal.com](http://riojournal.com) and [http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...](http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002027)

<comment><USER3> Yes, we plan on encouraging researchers to share their proposals and help one another. Great article - thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> might be of interest: [https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/Default.aspx](https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/Default.aspx)

<comment><USER3> Thanks - that is a lot of $$$

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> are you guys open to intros from orgs? We have a couple institutions we work with in NYC who would love this

<comment><USER3> absolutely - email@example.com</comment></comment>


London Home Supper Clubs - <AUTHOR> https://www.dorsia.io/cities/london/articles/london-home-supper-clubs-trend <comment><USER2> This website is beautifully designed and very readable. Good to see there are still websites that care about the users experience.

<comment><USER3> The design is impeccable and it's pleasurable to read; a rare combination.

<comment><USER4> I found the font strange, and a bit narrow.

Looks like it's called "begum" [https://www.typewolf.com/site-of-the- day/fonts/begum](https://www.typewolf.com/site-of-the-day/fonts/begum)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I went to one of these about 9 years ago, and to be honest I had no idea they were still a thing. They were very talked about back then but I hadn't really heard of them again until now.

It was an enjoyable experience, and it was when I first moved to London for my first job so it felt very trendy and cosmopolitan and grown-up to me. Maybe I should look into it again...

</comment><comment><USER6> I have enjoyed the supper-clubs of Buenos Aires in the past, partly because it was much cheaper and better food that the restaurants (from what I understood, it was very difficult to get a kitchen and/or liquor license) and partly because it was an interesting way to meet people. I think this is an international space that AirBnB is successfully filling with their experiences?

</comment><comment><USER7> We do a private version of this with friends a few times a year, each household takes turns hosting a full dinner party, sometimes with a theme and sometimes not.

It's a good way to exercise one's hosting skills, keep in practice in the kitchen, and socialize.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a website that anyone uses that focuses on the United States?

<comment><USER9> have you already tried EatWith ?</comment></comment>


MegaBots: Live-Action Giant Robot Combat - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/megabots/megabots-live-action-giant-robot-combat

<comment><USER2> This looks cool but I think you guys will need more money :)</comment>


LPS: Lightweight Portable Security Linux distribution - <AUTHOR> http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

<comment><USER2> I've played around with this a bit. It is a real bondage-and-discipline distro. Seems designed to prevent access any local storage of any sort. Probably a good thing for the DOD, but a bit extreme for my purposes. I don't mind being made to think when I access a resource, but I like to at least have the option.

<comment><USER3> LPS is based on thin linux, and I found it interesting to try it out. I used the rather neat windows command line program that comes with the iso to make a bootable USB stick. I found an old 512Mb stick worked fine.

I downloaded the 'fat' version which gives you a basic (way basic) desktop with OpenOffice and Firefox. On an old Thinkpad T42, it had the right wifi drivers (I can imagine the selection is limited) and you can save work on a second USB stick. The VESA graphics drivers can't match the 1024by600 resolution on my netbook, so I find I use it less now.

The 'minimalist' no distraction people might find the distro useful. I got quite a lot of writing done with it one afternoon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think Tails (<https://tails.boum.org/>) is a great alternative to LPS for the non-DOD user who is attentive to security.

</comment><comment><USER5> I believe there is at least one case of compromise where a trusted liveCD will not help: a hardware keylogger connected on the keyboard circuit. (I think i saw this in some movie, and I liked the idea very much).

So even if your kernel is trusted, your network stack is trusted at all layers, your communications are cryptographically secure, the words you are writing can be seen by an attacker through this device. Perhaps in or near realtime.

<comment><USER6> Bring along your own keyboard? A good Model M doubles as weapon and/or body armor for the enterprising agent.

On a more serious note, while it's probably a bit harder to "infect" a system with, you probably can hook something up to the USB circuitry, in which case this wouldn't help.

Unless you continue the one-upmanship and have your HID transmissions encrypted on the hardware side, then it's just semi-random garbage for any logger. A software driver in the distro then makes it usable.

Something like that might even exist, for paranoid bluetooth users...

Edit: Silly me, bluetooth does feature encryption, of course. Not sure how strong/well implemented that is in the case of most keyboards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had the LPS project roll a version of this for my unit. I have tried to find it useful and failed many times. Great idea, the developer working on is doing good work. But the big problem is that so much of DoD has bought products that depend on brittle WinXP and IE (Citrix, Juniper, etc).

A far more promising development in the near term has been Thursby's and Apple's progress with FIPS 140/2 certification for iOS and OS X, respectively. This means .gov and .mil smart card (CAC card) users can access web apps secured with DoD and .gov PKI infrastructure.

Right now, that's limited to Outlook webmail (only confirmed test "sat", I've heard about so far), but presents a huge enterprise market for Apple developers to target. Thursby has an API for developers.

<http://osdir.com/ml/general/2012-04/msg43528.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm just curious as to how just accessing local resources would compromise a live CD environment ..

<comment><USER9> It actually serves two different purposes: prevents information leakage from the remote (secure) networks to the local node, and prevents possible malware stored on that local node from migrating into the remote network.</comment></comment>


Poor Man's Cluster - <AUTHOR> http://www.regressionist.com/2020/07/05/poor-mans-cluster/ <comment><USER2> Any ideas on how to get GPU compute on the cheap? I see some old teslas on ebay but not sure if that would be more effective than newer geforce cards.

Not for commercial use

</comment><comment><USER3> Glad to see Moosefs mentioned, I've used it a fee years ago to reuse old PCs for storage. If you aren't hosting data with strict SLA, a master and standby nodes work great.

<comment><AUTHOR> MooseFS is great. I actually tried LizardFS first, and it was painfully slow. Only later, after settling on MooseFS did I read that erasure coding can slow things down, and erasure coding was the only thing I tried with LizardFS. So, I still can't say for sure that MooseFS is faster. Anyway, it appears to be better supported at the present time, although I did like that LizardFS can have multiple hot masters without paying for the pro version.

<comment><USER4> Have you looked at Ceph ad a storage backend? It allows per-file erasure coding configuration and has a lot of cool features. It can also manage raw block devices from what I'm told.

It's really awesome you've gotten a chance to build up this cluster. I wish more startups realized that, despite the initial price tag, some of this is way better than what you'll get from AWS. Your NVMe is likely 10x to 100x faster than premium ssd storage at a fraction of the price. If you ever use GPUs you'll be saving loads of money.

It's hard to convince people though that bare metal isn't scary.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't tried Ceph. It didn't seem as appealing, judging from comments I found (mostly on Hacker News): [http://www.regressionist.com/2020/06/20/reviews-of- distribut...](http://www.regressionist.com/2020/06/20/reviews-of-distributed- filesystems/) But it's also hard to tell exactly what people are reviewing. Evidently CephFS is less mature than Ceph object store.

But, yeah. This just all seems so much cheaper than AWS. There are other advantages, too. Like, a lot of stuff is better with the low latency that comes with having the cluster on-location. Python plots are more pleasant to interact with (ssh -X). NoMachine remote desktop is faster, etc.

Also, it's a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet. You pay once, and then you can just relax and enjoy. I have enough storage now that I don't need to stress about costs before deciding to cache intermediate data. And I don't need to worry about whether I really need those older results that I still have saved on disk that I'm paying each minute to store on AWS. Those kind of thoughts are just gone.

I do have one GPU now, a 1080 Ti ($450 on eBay). I am ready to house a total of 6, but I'm waiting to buy more until I really need them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Researchers present Iron Man-like robot with flying abilities - <AUTHOR> http://modrenscienc.blogspot.com/2017/09/researchers-present-iron-man-like-robot.html <comment><USER2> Like this iron man suit?

[https://hothardware.com/news/gravity-is-developing-a-real- ir...](https://hothardware.com/news/gravity-is-developing-a-real-iron-man-jet- pack-suit)</comment>


Ask HN: What is your background and how often do you get rejected in interviews? - <AUTHOR> I came out of school with a CS degree about 8 years ago.
I've built up solid experience since then, have a pretty decent career as full stack engineer. Currently working in Bay Area.
I've been getting rejected in pretty much every interview for the past 2 years, and I am feeling hopeless.
Here's the count:
- Airbnb (got rejected 2 times during onsite) - Pinterest (got rejected on phone screen) - Google (got rejected 2 times, 1 phone screen, 1 onsite) - Facebook (got rejected on phone screen) - Square (got rejected onsite) - Uber (got rejected 2 times on phone screen) - Flexport (got rejected on phone screen)
Each and every time, I feel like I'm closer, but not close enough.
I've been studying 3~4 hours daily for the last 4 months, doing whiteboarding exercises, and trying to stay current with latest tech.
For those that work in these companies, how did you do it? <comment><USER2> Confidence and practice are huge factors. For the latter I can't recommend leetcode enough, it has problems exactly (like those) from interviews, and a lot of them. For confidence I recommend interviewing first at companies you're not particularly interested in. Try to time your interviews in such a way that you have your 2nd-choice interviews 1-2 weeks before your 1st-choice ones. Eventually having an offer helps you in the negotiation part.

Check this out for more links (many links in the issues as well) [https://github.com/andreis/interview](https://github.com/andreis/interview) or this thing that was on HN recently [https://github.com/jwasham/google- interview-university](https://github.com/jwasham/google-interview-university)</comment>


EU Court: Open WiFi Operator Not Liable for Pirate Users - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/eu-court-open-wifi-operator-not-liable-for-pirate-users-160916/ <comment><USER2> So you can offer free internet access at your business in order to attract customers (e.g. Starbucks or McDonalds);

      The Court holds, first of all, that making a
      Wi-Fi network available to the general public
      free of charge in order to draw the attention
      of potential customers to the goods and
      services of a shop constitutes an 'information
      society service' under the directive on
      [electronic commerce]," the decision reads.

However copyright holders can still obtain an injunction forcing the provider to institute some measure of access control which must collect the identities of end-users to provide a deterrent. TFA does not mention any requirements on retention or access to this tracking data.

      "The Court nevertheless underlines that, in
      order to ensure that deterrent effect, it is
      necessary to require users to reveal their
      identity to be prevented from acting
      anonymously before obtaining the required
      password," the ruling adds.

So in essence they want to treat open WiFi APs as a type of mini-ISP. I'd say this is extremely problematic.

If you have to disclose your identity in order to use free WiFi it pretty much kills free WiFi. The court seemed to understand that terminating the service was not an appropriate remedy, but then proceeded to shoot it in the back.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why this kills free wi-fi. I use free wi-fi all the time that wants my name and email address.

<comment><USER4> You live in the time before someone has been indicted for accepting bogus names and email addresses.

I used to live in a time where you could book a hotel without providing a valid ID.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suspect this logic can also apply to tor exit nodes, which is more troublesome.

<comment><USER6> There are ways to configure your tor exit node ExitPolicy to be responsible and to be pro-active against malicious activity and abuse.

If you would like to read more: [http://tornull.org](http://tornull.org) [https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReducedExi...](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReducedExitPolicy)

With a minimal amount of work and upkeep. You can cut down on abuse fairly easily.

<comment><USER7> I was under the impression that this was a dangerous thing to do, because by using custom filtering you implicitly accept responsibility for what illegal content slips through your filter.

<comment><USER7> I can't edit my post anymore, but I couldn't find a source to back this up. According to the Tor Blog, it should be fine to have a reduced exit policy.

For reference: [https://blog.torproject.org/running-exit- node](https://blog.torproject.org/running-exit-node)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Enabling Cross-Lingual Conversations in Real Time - <AUTHOR> https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/translator-052714.aspx

<comment><USER2> At a hackathon back in April (which was sponsored in part by Microsoft), some friends and I made a very similar working version [1] relying on Google's line of products and the results were astonishingly good. Alas, it only works on Chrome due to the speech api used is the built in chrome one.

It seems that Microsoft did something very similar to our implementation, by simply daisy chaining existing language processing tools they had to make this addition to Skype.

[1] [http://goo.gl/3wC6b7](http://goo.gl/3wC6b7)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

</comment><comment><USER4> From the demo, that doesn't feel like real time to me. I was more impressed years ago by Google Wave's realtime translation via text far more than this because it enabled what felt like 'normal' speed conversation (albeit via text)...whereas this felt like you were conversing through a translator (which doesn't feel like conversation at all). I may be missing the technical achievement here, but in terms of end result, it feels very underwhelming.

Demo: [http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/05/27...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/05/27/microsoft- demos-breakthrough-in-real-time-translated-conversations.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER5> Related discussion from TechNet announcement: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7808505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7808505)</comment>


Penango - Secure Webmail - <AUTHOR> https://www.penango.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to hear the thoughts of anyone who has used / looked at this before... I'm a bit shell shocked I think regarding trying to 'encrypt my life' so I'm finding it hard to trust anything!</comment>


The Road to Learning Web Development 2016/2017 Edition - <AUTHOR> https://coggle.it/diagram/Vz9LvW8byvN0I38x <comment><AUTHOR> OP Here, I found this as part of the video 2016/2017 MUST-KNOW WEB DEVELOPMENT TECH [1] and thought this was a really neat thing to share. Check out other videos by LearnCode.academy. That's how I got started with React.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBzRwzY7G-k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBzRwzY7G-k)</comment>


Why I'm disappointed in React Native - <AUTHOR> http://reefpoints.dockyard.com/2015/01/30/why-i-am-disappointed-in-react-native.html

<comment><USER2> I agree 100%. This completely defeats the point of web technologies - you must as well write C# and use Xamarin.

I don't want to learn yet another HTML-type spec plus a CSS fork. The whole point was to use _web_ technologies: JS + HTML + CSS to develop mobile and web apps that _look the same_. WebViews are finally improving to the point where great PhoneGap apps can be written. Instead of improving PhoneGap and web technologies further we'll end up with the equivalent of Python + wxWidgets, and we all know how that turned out for the desktop = the lowest common denominator. The mismatch between declarative React UI and imperative native components is gonna bite you in the ass sooner or later. It's completely different to HTML which is declarative to begin with.

Whats the deal with native looking apps? Why are devs so desperate to make apps look native? The great thing about the web is that all web apps look different, they have their own branding and UI flow and there's nothing wrong with that. Look at the best mobile apps: Uber, Airbnb - they dont look native, and they try to look the same on all platforms. I thought that was the future of the web. Because if it isn't, I might as well learn Swift.

</comment><comment><USER3> They don't want to make the web better, they want to make their apps better. Personally, I want to write apps in JavaScript that don't suck. And as they point out in the first video, web apps with a native wrapper over them suck. So, I am pretty excited to try it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I agree with the author. It's not like React for the web is going to go away, if anything this is lowering the barrier of entry for web developers to develop native mobile experiences for their web applications.</comment>


Hackers target Starbucks mobile users, steal from linked credit cards - T-A https://bobsullivan.net/cybercrime/identity-theft/exclusive-hackers-target-starbucks-mobile-users-steal-from-linked-credit-cards-without-knowing-account-number/

<comment><AUTHOR> why does anyone pay with a mobile device? That really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

You can avoid being tracked by paying with cash.

Do you know why I don't fly on airplanes? It's not for the usual reason that one is afraid, such as not understanding how wings generate lift.

It's because today's passenger jets are generally computerized. Not so much because I fear computers, but because I fear computer programmers.</comment>


Is Cyberpunk Dead? A Conversation with Bruce Bethke - <AUTHOR> https://www.markeverglade.com/iscyberpunkdead <comment><USER3> The book "Void Star" is an interesting one. It has a William Gibson style plot very similar to Neuromancer but instead of 1980s aesthetic choices, it has 2017 aesthetic choices.

So instead of ninjas you get MMA jiu jitsu guys, US tech mega corporations are dominant rather than Japan, aftereffects of climate change rather than nuclear disasters, cartels rather than Yakuza, and so on. It's like 2017 future is extrapolated out instead of 1984 future.

But the plot is extremely Gibson-esque: a woman hired as a consultant on a strange project for a mysterious ultra-wealthy client, rogue AIs, interactions between mega corporations and the criminal underworld.

So if you take cyberpunk to mean just the synthesizers and neon and chrome aesthetic, then it is getting sort of tiresome. But you can update all that stuff to something slightly fresher and still tell the same kind of stories and it works.

<comment><USER4> > US tech mega corporations are dominant rather than Japan

At the risk of going way out into tangents: Gibson's books had a fascinating mix of tech mega corporations, not just Japanese, but some of the big players were European in origin, and a share of US tech mega corporations.

Gibson absolutely has a kawaii bug about Japanese culture, though that's not his only over-fascination (arguably _more_ of the Neuromancer trilogy is bound to voodoun fascination than Japanese culture fascination), but the important point at the time, and still a useful timeless quality to Gibson's books was how much Gibson got right about the increased _weird_ of a global mega- culture. Much more so than most of his contemporaries, Gibson's cyberpunk much more accurately captured the feeling of the internet before the internet: one minute you might be watching K-Pop on TikTok and then some dude with a Voodoo- based handle sends you some weird files on Discord, before you hop over to Facebook for the latest Eurovision memes.

Gibson used the prominence of Japanese mega corporations not just because a lot 80s tech stock pundits (possibly wrongly; though Sony et al still have a large market presence) thought the Japanese would dominate the future, but as a part of a larger cross-cultural package that the future of "punk" wasn't just white-bread American but a stew waiting to be stirred of global culture. In that Gibson is an interesting comparison to pick when comparing timeless versus time-bound components of cyberpunk, as Gibson's Japanese focus I think was by far one of his most timeless additions to the genre.

<comment><USER3> sure, that's a fair point. Neuromancer trilogy has European family offices, it has an American media/tech company Sense/Net, Zeiss and Braun are mentioned.

but the books really do feel like Japan is the dominant economic power, in a way that seems very stuck in the 1980s (the Nikkei still has never recovered to its peak in 1991). the way this gets translated is always rainy city streets with neon signs in kanji, and synthesizers. a lot of work that is heavily derivative of Neuromancer just copies these choices blindly rather than trying to convey the same spirit as it tells the story. i liked Void Star because it did the opposite.

another thing underappreciated about Gibson is that much of his world is not particularly futuristic. there's implied to be plenty of buildings left around from the 21st century. the bars, hotels, motels, and restaurants are mostly described as being like normal restaurants today. stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 seems to miss this.

<comment><USER4> Cyberpunk 2077 has a very interesting position, there's a lot of interesting architecture detail and layers in what little I've seen of Night City so far (we'll see when the game comes out), including some parts of the city that look usefully old. It just has its own layers of the fact that Night City is an American city, here being designed by mostly Polish artists giving it a strange (accidental?) European sensibility, combined with the idea that in the source fiction (the RPG), Night City was a planned city that didn't ever exist before (the future year) 1994 (Cyberpunk itself was written in the 80s). So there are at least 70-ish years of layers and tarnish to put on the thing, but the fact that it is entirely distinct from a real place was a fictional conceit from the 80s fiction it inherits.

Which is to say, that I think Gibson is absolutely correct that most "future places" are and will always be built on the tops of the bones of the old places. No one is going to demolish _all_ of San Francisco or DC's haunts and landmarks. But also that's not a criticism that I think directly applies to Cyberpunk 2077 as a specific example because the fiction intentionally wanted and built a young city, with some of the EPCOT feels of the setting an intentional planned commentary of a different sort than most of the space Gibson enjoyed inhabiting in his books. Gibson did his own bits of entirely new construction such as space stations, too, to make various points/contrasts. Corporations building modern "cyber" company cities is a rich tradition of its own in cyberpunk fiction, evoking and reminding readers/players of the past dystopian company towns that did exist in a previous American century and could easily exist again.

[https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Night_City](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Night_City)

<comment><USER5> The original Blade Runner is a great example of a film that depicts the changing architecture of a city - while we see sweeping shots of mile high sky scrapers throughout the film, on the ground we still see the remains of historic architecture, repurposed and built over - the police station was built within Los Angeles's 1939 Union Station, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House makes an appearance as Deckard's apartment, and of course the famous Bradbury Building was used as the set for the film's finale. The end result is a city that still feels like it has a history not too dissimilar then the Los Angeles of the real world, extrapolated out to 2019 based on 1980's fears of overpopulation and such.

Something it's sequel wasn't really successful with, where instead the city looks unrecognisable, with architecture that looks alien rather then anything actually realistically plausible. If it wasn't for the frequent Coca Cola and Sony product placement you could be convinced the city was Coruscant from Star Wars or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I mean maybe in books, but Deus Ex and the remakes are as fresh as a few years ago now we have Cyberpunk 2077 coming out and Detroit Become Human is fantastic from a story setting. Not to forget The early 2000s telling of Ghost in the Shell and the the most recent ones from 2016ish to now.

Less story inclined but just as cyber punk being the Watchdog games.

Cyber Punk and it's ideals are very much alive, however the medium of expression has changed to ones more fitting of Cyber Punk IMO.

<comment><USER7> His point is that, with some exceptions (Ghost in the Shell), much of the modern work you cite is a regurgitation of the earliest ideas of the genre which have themselves hardened into tropes.

Gibson found the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer exceedingly retro and 80s because its imagined future repeats anxieties and themes which were most relevant in the 1980s, when the genre first appeared.

The return to these "ancient futures" isn't really punk, it's kitsch. But to do the thing those early authors did would be to continually approach the present with the same mindset for interrogating it and see what appears.

<comment><USER8> > regurgitation

Somebody's an essayist.

In any case, I'll grant you that the 80s cars and CRT theming are retro- futuristic, but those are all surface-level, as Gibson himself points out. However, I think the criticism loses steam if you try to apply it below the surface, even just a little.

Social media, political troll gangs, cheap drones, and military + police robotics played a big part in Watchdogs, and those are all modern or forward- looking. Deus Ex's human augmentation is still forward-looking. AI integration in Detroit Become Human is still forward-looking, even if it isn't terribly imaginative. The interactions of technology, poverty, and crime common to all of these are still forward looking, even if in hindsight they failed to predict some big trends (e.g. social media boosting conspiracy groups and the "traditional hustles" of self-help and alternative medicine).

Regardless, the artists are still using their imaginations. It's the critics who see an 80s car, call it kitsch to get engagement, and miss everything of substance.

<comment><USER9> But the concerns expressed in those works were the same as the ones expressed forty years ago; that's the point the original article is making. Bethke himself used the phrase "self-referential metafiction" in describing sci-fi authors in the late 70s. I think a lot of the current cyberpunk work is the same, commoditizing an art movement into a fashion dressing to tell the same kind of stories we always get.

Vast corporations doing what they want to the helpless working class started as an 80s fear in opposition to a largely hopeful view of companies from the 50s and 60s. Just because it's come true, or is still a fear, doesn't mean that it's still exciting or exploring a new frontier.

Bruce Sterling was writing eco-fiction thirty years ago, about humans struggling to survive post-climate-change... except that wasn't a phrase that meant what it means to people today. The edge he was riding on in his work has now headed towards the middle.

Vernor Vinge writing about true names in the early 80s was predictive; Become Human commenting about it now isn't.

It doesn't make it bad or not worthy or anything, but it definitely is a move away from the bleeding edge of a predictive SF movement.

"Snow Crash" and "Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson are interesting books in this sense. "Snow Crash" works best if you're a cyberpunk fan already, if it can relax into the tropes you already know and make an action movie out of it. "Diamond Age" moves away from that towards a definitely post-cyberpunk place with people who aren't criminals trying to make a buck but maybe good people trying to change the world with the power of technology. It's already shedding the trappings and trying to get somewhere else.

It's gotta be a little weird for these authors to see their "movement" co- opted into big media properties that make millions of dollars for big companies. Somebody else said it in these comments; that's not very punk.

<comment><USER10> Don't blame authors, blame society for failing to break out of the neoliberal (or other epithet) trap started in the '80s. If we had fundamentally different struggles and anxieties now, and perhaps a different, more idealistic outlook, then different genres would emerge.

 _It 's gotta be a little weird for these authors to see their "movement" co- opted into big media properties that make millions of dollars for big companies. Somebody else said it in these comments; that's not very punk._

It's not weird at all. Consumerism has co-opted and commodified every single ideology; there's nothing wiser or more edgy or purer about cyberpunk that would have prevented this from happening to it. If anything, it's very apropos.

<comment><USER11> > _there 's nothing wiser or more edgy or purer about cyberpunk that would > have prevented this from happening to it. If anything, it's very apropos._

But that never happened to punk musi... oh, I see your point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm confused - is this complaining about the genre as a whole being less popular? Or just books? I think with one of the most hyped and games of the year being a cyberpunk game (with "Cyberpunk" literally in the name) - <USER2> definitely premature to call the genre as a whole "dead" If this article is just lamenting the absence of Cyberpunk books - well surges in popularity in one media can always carry over to others...

<comment><AUTHOR> The article isn't about either of those things. It's about the original ideas of cyberpunk (which were rooted in the 80s) being turned into cliches and repeated ad infinitum since and whether a new 2020-era genre is needed.

<comment><USER13> > _whether a new 2020-era genre is needed._

The idea that a new genre could be created because critics concluded that one was "needed" is the daftest and most out-of-touch thing I've ever heard...

<comment><USER14> The idea that a random person on a message board could inspire someone to write software because someone said they needed a tool is the daftest, most out-of-touch thing I've ever read.

Oh wait, that has happened multiple times.

Granted, a genre is bigger than a tool. But this free-floating hatred for commentators of all stripes literally blinds people to reality.

And it isn't some Critic-On-High making pronouncements and waiting for followers to act. It is observational.

<comment><USER15> > The idea that a random person on a message board could inspire someone to > write software because someone said they needed a tool is the daftest, most > out-of-touch thing I've ever read.

A tool already describes a solution to a problem in mind, it's clear cut. If the analogous problem here is "I want new genre fiction", then a) that doesn't describe what's desired, and b) that already exists (qua all the "punk" suffixed derivatives among other things), it's just not as popular, and therefore we can surmise the wrong question is being asked.

Stephenson once had a talk where he suggested that sci-fi writers should effectively return to optimistic stories, but he hasn't done that himself. He could literally solve the problem he described. We want what we want, and write what we want to write.

<comment><USER16> I've been re-reading "The Hobbit" recently, and this passage struck me as relevant to your comment. From Chapter 3, "A Short Rest":

"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway."

During the stay in Rivendell, nothing much interesting happens - so Tolkien doesn't bother with telling us about it. The exciting, interesting stuff is when our heroes are in peril or experiencing great trials and tribulations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is an interesting take, but once you look beyond the obvious, the critique is reminiscent of "Nothing new under the sun" trope ( they phrase it as a minor insult -- Akira fan fic ). Not exactly compelling argument in my mind.

Personally, I think interest in Cyberpunk may have declined ( and oddly increased in mainstream DND ), because, frankly, we seem to be living in early Cyberpunk universe ( powerful corporations, nascent augment technology.. ).

edit: Then again, Cyber 2077 may re-ignite mainstream interest in the genre.

<comment><USER18> I think we've been in "early cyberpunk" for about 15 years already (if not 20). The renewed interest, imho, is due to a combination of factors, but mostly two: the generation that grew up reading it as kids is now old enough to be in positions of power over artistic output, so they will use those influences in their own work; and some of the societal shifts cyberpunk speculated about, are now recognizable by pretty much everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wasn't William Gibson (author of Neuromancer) roughly quoted saying: "I don't write 'cyberpunk' dystopias anymore...because we are living them. They are our reality today. So I just write contemporary fiction." ....somebody help me out on this...I might be off the mark.

<comment><USER20> I suspect you are thinking of a different writer. I've never read a Gibson interview where he said anything like that, though I have not read every Gibson interview.

<comment><USER21> This article has similar quotes from Gibson: [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william- gibson...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was- losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was)

<comment><USER20> Not really. He doesn't describe our world as a cyberpunk dystopia in that interview. Whatever world we have today I don't believe he has ever referred to as cyberpunk-esque.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A couple of things:

1\. I wouldn't call The Matrix cyberpunk. That's the first time I heard that; and

2\. I don't see cyberpunk as having died in the 1980s, so much as it was simply the zeitgeist of that era and there have been lots of those in sci-fi (and more generally).

For example, if you look at sci-fi from the 1960s you have lots of material about mental powers (eg telepathy in Stranger and a Strange Land). Star Trek was a utopia that mirrored a rosy view of America. All of this in an era of personal freedom and society wrestling with the lingering injustices of slavery a century earlier I think is no accident.

What happened in the 1980s was the rise of Japan and the loss of manufacturing jobs in America. This stoked fears that corporations would replace governments and we'd face a dystopian but technological future. I still see cyberpunk as interlinked with anti-Japanese xenophobia.

So the issue with cyberpunk is that this xenophobia faded, the genre didn't really evolve (and probably peaked with Blade Runner) and apart from the Internet virtually nothing predicted in cyberpunk came to pass. We still have governments. We don't live in a dystopian future (mostly). There are enhanced humans with implants.

But I wouldn't describe it as dying. We simply moved on.

<comment><USER23> > I wouldn't call The Matrix cyberpunk

Why do you say that?

Also, cyberpunk broke into the mainstream (Blade Runner, Neuromancer) at a time of fascination with Japan. I say fascination because there was a spectrum - from philic to phobic.

That attention was, of course, a result of their (at the time) massively increased economic strength, relative to that of the USA.

That same spectrum of attention exists in the body of cyberpunk, in toto. There is not an anti-Japanese xenophobia that exists in the corpus either pervasively, or inherently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Everything about UNIX sounds silly. We're talking about an OS with commands like chown, awk, and grep here and where 'zombie children floating in the pipe' is a legitimate description of an error state."

— Bruce Bethke — _Headcrash_

</comment><comment><USER25> It's been replaced by whatever genre you would describe Black Mirror as. A reflection of the modern dystopia we live in within the context of the current year.

<comment><USER18> I agree that Black Mirror is one of the few original attempts at doing proper scifi about the near future, that we've had in quite some time. I wish it were not so utterly depressing, my mental health can barely stomach a single episode every month or so. If that were a genre, I would call it "cybercynical".

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> No need to panic guys, I'm still alive. And this Bruce guy hasn't even spoken to me -- so take his opinion with the appropriate amount of sodium chloride.

</comment><comment><USER27> Considering a teenager recently commandeered the Twitter accounts of a number of world leaders, and then used this awesome power to run a two-bit scam with electronic money, makes me think cyberpunk is indeed dead because it is now reality.

</comment><comment><USER28> "A…depressingly mountainous amount of the self-identified cyberpunk fiction I see now is stuck firmly in the 1980s. It's not new, fresh, or original. It's paint-by-numbers Imitation Gibson. It's Blade Runner fan fic, or Akira fan fic, or worse, wannabe Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2077 media tie-in fic" I read a large amount of new cyberpunk and this is depressingly accurate

</comment><comment><USER29> What are, in the 20's, the big concepts that "cyber"[1] was to the 80's?

Ecopunk has apparently been done, in 風の谷のナウシカ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24298259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24298259)

[1] we started with Tron and wound up with "I put on my robe and wizard hat."

<comment><USER30> BioPunk?

Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" is an interesting take on this.

The most concise take I've seen for the core defining aesthetic of cyberpunk is: "high tech, low life."

With that in mind, I don't think it _really_ matters what the tech is, so long as the story is about those on the fringes of society and their interactions with it; how _alien_ the world is to them, and how alien they are to the world.

<comment><USER31> I would add "Blindsight" by Peter Watts to the list of great biopunk novels.

<comment><USER10> Watts's work is great also as an existentialist hard sci-fi cosmic horror. It's got all of the Plutonian depths, malevolent antediluvian creatures, unfathomable aliens, degenerated humanity, and posthuman body horror of Lovecraft, just not the omnipotent space gods. Plus, he even continues cyberpunk tropes to their natural dystopian conclusions- in Rifters, "N'Am" is a continent governed by the power company that sends PTSD-afflicted veterans and abuse survivors to maintain deep sea geothermal generators, gigacorp execs are literally called "corpses", and the internet is completely swallowed up by A.I. spam bots.

<comment><USER32> How would you rate the Rifters trilogy vs the Firefall trilogy? (I thoroughly enjoyed _Blindsight_ , hobbled my way through _Echopraxia_ , and it's unlikely I'll read _Firefall_ )

<comment><USER33> _Firefall_ is just an omnibus edition of the two. Great hardcover though :)

<comment><USER32> Thank you for the clarification. In the context of our discussion, your nick begs the question.... Peter?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Cyberpunk is sort of what we're living through now. It's like being the proverbial fish who does not notice the water around.

</comment><comment><USER35> Mr Robot is the best cyberpunk story of the current generation.

</comment><comment><USER36> At it's best, sci-fi is a great canvas for social commentary. You can use present day concerns and take them out to their ultimate conclusions to highlight the risks and rewards of taking our society down a certain path. That also means sci-fi is very much a product of the time it was created. If cyberpunk is getting less relevant, it's only because our society's concerns have moved on from corporate skepticism to corporate embrace and from techno- fear to techno-love. The cyber tech itself has gone from new to mundane. The next anxieties will produce the next sci-fi.

</comment><comment><USER37> The seminal "cyberpunk" novel is The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, from 1975. He didn't use the term, but all the key themes are there.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm gonna be honest, I only like cyberpunk for the aesthetics, not any of the themes. In 2020 most of the messaging behind the cyberpunk genre seems trite and obvious in hindsight (probably because of how accurate a lot of their social predictions were). I think most people agree that are into cyberpunk today are into it more for the neon signs than the social commentary.

</comment><comment><USER39> A friend said a line that I have been stealing:

"The way things are going in the world, by the time Cyberpunk 2077 comes out it'll be redundant."

</comment><comment><USER40> Cyberpunk isn't dead - we're living it.

</comment><comment><USER41> With all the discussion so far, it's kind of strange no-one has pointed out modern "CyberPunk" bands like GUNSHIP.

eg:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC5TBv3sfU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC5TBv3sfU) \- Tech Noir

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ruvzfXQoE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ruvzfXQoE) \- Dark All Day

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQaH3lh- CA4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQaH3lh-CA4) \- Art3mis & Parzival. Pretty much a music clip for Ready Player One.

They have tonnes more: [https://www.youtube.com/user/GUNSHIPMUSIC/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/GUNSHIPMUSIC/videos)

Yeah, I'm a massive fan. :)

If there's no GUNSHIP music in Cyberpunk 2077, something's definitely gone wrong. ;)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Bethke coined the word _cyberpunk_ and here's a little essay about it:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130716211015/http://www.bruceb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130716211015/http://www.brucebethke.com/articles/re_cp.html)

<comment><USER42> Thank you. The word Cyberpunk may have come first, but there is no question that Gibson defined what it means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> _> I would dearly love to see a new form of SF emerge that reflects the baseline of now, and begins a whole new series of extrapolations that creates a new consensual vision of a different future._

I think VirtuaVerse does it pretty well. It has that classic cyberpunk style, but it explores very contemporary ideas. I.e. it's not stuck in the '80s.

See:

* [https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse](https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse)

* [https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/virtuaverse-ost](https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/virtuaverse-ost)

</comment><comment><USER44> Cyberpunk 2077 should change this.

</comment><comment><USER45> Part of it became the news, other part became so overplayed it became cheesy and the rest was always cheese to begin with.

This happens all the time, Cyberpunk is not above the "laws" of time.

</comment><comment><USER46> Polite reminder that the original Cyberpunk RPG took place in 2013.

</comment><comment><USER47> from page 2:

> Bruce: wannabe Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2077 media tie-in fic.

so yeah, basically an elitist point of view filled with "no true scotsman" kind of platitudes.

that'd be like saying every fantasy sucks because it's just a lord of the ring tie in.

> Bruce: I would dearly love to see a new form of SF emerge that reflects the > baseline of now

if only he was a writer. oh wait.

</comment><comment><USER48> This comment section is as rich as the article. Thank you hn'ers.

<comment><USER18> Cyberpunk is to the early internet generations what beat literature was to boomers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I've lost track of how many times cyberpunk has died and been resurrected with new cybernetic parts grafted onto its corpse.

</comment><comment> donkey-hotei Kill Cyberpunk. Long Live Solarpunk

</comment><comment><USER50> The single most awaited game in history is about to release, titled "Cyberpunk 2077".

<comment><USER51> After the (disappointing) release of Duke Nukem Forever, the title of the single most awaited game in history was overtaken by Half-Life 3 (or, maybe, Half-Life 2: Episode Three).

<comment><USER52> most != longest

I don't think a lot of people are still holding their breath for HL3, especially without any official acknowledgment of its development and the release of Half-Life:Alyx. HL2 was also so long ago (16 years) that most young adults don't even have a connection to it, as they didn't grow up with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It happened.

</comment><comment><USER53> No, as per Betteridge's Law of Headlines[0].

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER54> No it is not.

</comment><comment><USER55> Cyberpunk 2077</comment>


Cybercrime for dummies: cracking internet passwords is as easy as 123456 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/21/cybercrime-hacking-internet-account-passwords <comment><USER2> Two Factor should have deployed before we hit mass market. It's much easier to fill a vacuum than push technology aside (mike lesk, he did uucp)</comment>


Microsoft and HP to reveal slate PC ahead of Apple - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/ahead-of-apple-microsoft-and-hp-to-reveal-slate-pc/

<comment><USER2> It makes sense for HP to offer a PC alternative considering they have had multitouch tablet PCs and desktops for well over two years now. I have one of their multitouch tablets, with Windows 7 on it (native multitouch gesture support) and BumpTop for a 3D multitouch environment. It'll be interesting if they have something even more novel up their sleeves, without the commercial 3rd party software I had to buy.</comment>


Pegatron likely to land new MacBook orders from Apple, say sources - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/29/pegatron-to-make-arm-based-apple-macbook/ <comment><USER2> I know Apple has gone through these transitions before (68K -> PWR -> Intel). But if there is a move to ARM this is the first time they have moved away from a currently dominant ecosystem (yes, to another popular one in this case; but the earlier moves were all abandon ship style transitions). I don't see a lot of motivation for pre-compiled open source projects (such as R/CRAN) to maintain two copies of their software (one Apple AMD64 and one Apple ARM64) during the transition. Yet another thing that is going to make Macs less convenient for research and development.

<comment><USER3> I would expect that Apple would bring back the Rosetta component for such cases (i.e. the same interface to the OS, but now a component doing Intel->ARM dynamic binary translation rather than PWR->Intel dynamic binary translation.)

Actually, maybe _dymamic_ binary translation wouldn't be needed all that often. A new Rosetta would likely also be helped out quite a bit by the fact that modern macOS binaries contain embedded copies of their their LLVM intermediate representation; you could transpile that IR (by patching Intel- targeted intrinsics with ARM polyfills) and then run it through the LLVM optimizer again, and then cache the result. That's a fully static binary translation, and the resulting binaries would probably be pretty fast.

(You'd still need dynamic binary translation for anything with its own JIT, but maybe there are few enough programs with their own JITs—and all such programs are "big" enough in terms of development resources—that Apple _can_ require these to ship an ARM target. In which case, maybe they don't need to build a new dynamic binary translation component at all!)

<comment><USER2> The translation stuff may be okay for user code (and I know Apple has done it before). But for scientific code it is just too much cost and too many things to break. I know scientists are not Apple's target market, but this just makes getting a Linux laptop a much better proposition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On one hand it's cool to have more effort into desktop CPUs (ie high single thread perf) that are not x86.

On the other hand, although the ISA is public, I'm guessing the whole boot- process & platform will become more and more closed as apple moves towards custom chips all the way down.

Is there any chance you can still run linux on mac hardware in 5 years ?

<comment><USER5> I could see them going Intel for pro and ARM for consumer.

<comment><USER6> Yep. I see this too. Mac app store apps have been dual architecture for a long time. 32 bit and 64 bit. Adding ARM as another compilation target will take some work but is doable.

Maybe they go to three architectures in the app store, or maybe they only support ARM after 32 bit is dead. Which works out nicely with the recent deprecation of 32 bit apps.

<comment><USER7> Since the iOS simulator is an x86 target it might not need any work. Adding a compiler target for ARM OS X may just be a matter of allowing the configuration.

Also, given the Intel OS X project was cooking long before they announced the transition, it's likely safe to believe that full blown OS X on ARM is already running somewhere in a lab at Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is day one of ARM-based MacBook ownership going to be like for a software developer?

Do we open Terminal and go to `brew install` a bunch of development tools... and then it hits us... this machine is cool and all, but half the stuff we need to get work done does not build or run on arm64?

<comment><USER9> Apple has done this before for PowerPC software on Intel hardware and Microsoft is doing it right now for Intel software on ARM hardware: Compatibility modes (or how you'd call it - they enable the software to run without modification, albeit at lowered performance).

<comment><USER10> When Apple did the PowerPC -> Intel switch, they were going to a higher performing CPU, so the efficiency loss in having to emulate was somewhat offset by the higher performance processor. In this case, they will most likely be taking a step down in performance, compounding the loss of efficiency in having to emulate.

<comment><USER9> Yet Apple has enough ecosystem power to force most developers to switch quickly. And if they don't the worst customer complaint will be the app running slowly. But I'd expect them to release a tool chain months before they start selling an ARM mac.

<comment><USER11> Plus, the Mac App Store makes this a lot easier this time round. Apple will have a big "optimized for Air" sticker on the App. 99% of common apps will switch in no time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe it'll be called the iBook.

<comment><USER12> Could be why they renamed iBooks to Apple Books at WWDC.

<comment><USER5> Yep. I think this is it.

<comment><USER13> I get the feeling since the whole 'i' thing is iOS that iBook might be an iOS portable and we'll get some other name for the Mac. An iOS portable would compete fairly well in schools where Chromebooks are winning and iPads are not.

<comment><USER14> <$250 is still a long way from >$750 for schools with thousands of students, Chromebooks will probably win more often than not.

<comment><USER13> I don't disagree, but given the iPad price and the price of Intel MacBooks, I would hope they come in a lot less than $750.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This has been speculated for a while, but it was bound to happen at some point, Apple has one of, if not _the_ best chip design teams.

<comment><USER16> What would make them the best?

<comment><USER17> Beside the benchmarks showing their mobile SoC leading the market since their custom SoC (A6?) and being the first to 64-bit ARM?

The upcoming ARM A67 SoC evolution is expected to be behind Apple soon to be two year old chip: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/12785/arm-cortex-a76-cpu- unve...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/12785/arm-cortex-a76-cpu-unveiled-7nm- powerhouse/4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can see low cost ARM based MacBook (savings from not paying Intel tax) marketed as long battery high end hardware replacement for ChromeBooks. It can still run modified OS X which allows for Mac App Store apps (MS Office just announced Mac App Store support), browser, email etc. Throw in native iTunes/iPhoto with cloud storage and you got a pretty nice offering.

<comment><USER6> A modified OS X? It will be macOS or it won't be a Mac. I don't see any need for modification beyond a new major release.

The term "modified OS X" makes it sound hybrid, but I don't see space in apples line for something between a Mac and an iPad.

There's not technal reason to not go with full macOS. It's Unix and it runs on ARM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The writing has been on the wall for ages with this one.

Intel's CPU limitations are at the heart of most of the complaints about Apple's computer line (power vs performance tradeoffs).

Apple will always choose thin (poor heat dissipation) over fast.

Is anyone doing OSX development? Is Apple collecting the LLVM intermediate code for OSX apps like they do for iOS? Its been a few years since I've done OSX/iOS dev, I could be off base. But it has often occurred to me they could use the intermediate code to retarget apps to different

<comment><USER14> I dev on macOS. Mostly node and related though. Almost everything I use will be unaffected... Video/Photo creative types are likely to see an exodus if it happens though.

I think this would be a great time for Adobe to partner with Canonical as a supported platform for Creative Suite. With improved funding and work towards getting NVidia and AMD support top of line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any x86 emulation layer to support natively x86 executables on ARM without shedding any performance?

<comment><USER6> Do we even need emulation? All supported software can be recompiled. All the rest is unsupported.

It's not nice for those with unsupported software bit I don't see this holding back Apple.

<comment><USER14> I could see this being a time for Adobe to partner with say Canonical to do make a linux commercial release supported.

<comment><USER21> Not sure I see the relevance. Mac OS US installed base is about 46 million, Linux is about 5.8 million. (Based on browsing data for share of total installed base of about 350 million in the US.)

The actual numbers can be sliced and diced different ways of course, but by any accounting the Mac is small compared to Windows and Linux is much smaller than that. I just don't see the economic motivation for companies like Adobe, particularly when you add in the diversity of Linux versions that would have to be supported. Whether or not Adobe can generate working code on a platform is only a small part of the cost of releasing on that platform. Don't hold your breath...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems) [https://www.statista.com/statistics/670172/united-states- ins...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/670172/united-states-installed- base-desktops-laptops-tablets/)

<comment><USER14> I don't know for certain, but I'd venture to guess half of Adobe's users are on Macs, and that an ARM based architecture won't work well for creative works (heavy image manipulation, video editing and encoding). And that could lead to a lot of Mac creative types looking for somewhere to go.

It could be an opportunity for Adobe, if they played their cards right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pretty old rumor

</comment><comment><USER23> will it have a Retina display?

</comment><comment><USER24> Url changed from [https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/29/pegatron-to-make-arm- ba...](https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/29/pegatron-to-make-arm-based-apple- macbook/), which points to this.

<comment><USER25> And the new url is not working (site being unavailable or something), thank you very much.

<comment><USER24> Ok, since it's not working for everyone, we'll change it back and keep the original source's title.

p.s. Please don't be abrasive when posting here. It's against the site guidelines ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).</comment></comment></comment>