Show HN: Block yourself from the Internet until you write or code each day - <AUTHOR> http://www.blockr.me/ <comment><USER2> If what you're working on is important enough and you love it enough, you would never need this.

If not, then maybe you're working on the wrong thing.

Let's stop treating the effect of poor work habits and deal with the cause: find something better to work on.

[EDIT: I'd stay and reply to your great responses guys, but I'm not here anymore. As compelling as this discussion is, the real-time CRUD/robot interface I'm writing is way cooler.]

<comment><USER3> This is poor advice. First off not everyone has the opportunity to work on something important and that they love. Sure, it's ideal and probably a goal of everyone but sometimes it takes steps to attain that goal and sometimes people sacrifice their 8-5 hours to provide for their family.

Secondly, not everyone has the ability to get kickstarted each day to 100% productivity. You're very lucky if you do but I don't. I use Focus Booster and it helps but isn't a cure.

<comment><USER4> I had a response written out, but took a step back to see what other people had to say. You've pretty much summed up what I had to say in fewer words. I absolute deplore the parent comment, which is the typical response to these kinds of "hacks". While they're not ideal to actually solve the problem, they may mitigate the symptoms until they can solve the root cause. To each their own, and what works for one will not work for another. Keep on keeping on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know what works well? Just write some code. I use the metaphor "paint every day" which I took from a HN comment years ago, but how does an artist get good at painting? You paint every day.

How do you get stuff done? Code every day. Fix a small problem, big problem, whatever. Just take steps forward every day.

It's how I got <http://reme.me> off the ground. I do something every day. In a couple short months I built the API, site, iPhone, and Android apps all by myself. I only get an hour or two a day maybe to get stuff done, so I just try and do something.

Lately I've been giving myself a list of tasks and either a week or two deadline to hit a "release", but really, that doesn't get stuff done. Just coding something each day does.

Paint every day.

<comment><USER6> I find this very condescending. Not all of us get to work on fun problems, but the work has to get done nonetheless.

<comment><USER7> I think you are missing the point of the OP's comment.

Essentially, he/she is saying that persistence is the key to completing the task, and that is true regardless of whether the task is enjoyable or not. Pound away, day after day, each and every day, and it will get done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> StayFocusd is currently my favorite plugin for this purpose [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji)

However, adding a rewards/gamification system is not a bad idea at all. I like StayFocusd but I end up filling my time otherwise if I don't have a hard deadline. Having goals to reach is a great incentive, enough to keep me focused without a plugin. But the plugin provides a basic physical deterrent effect which sometimes alone can be enough

<comment><USER9> I've looked at many, many of these types of apps. Most are laughably easy to get around. Having one that only works on one type of browser when you have 4 different types is so easy to circumvent, it's not worth doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find the whole "if you love it then you don't need this" sentiment at best naive, and at worst arrogant.

Sometimes we all have to do things we don't want to do. This includes, at times, working on your own project. There's nothing wrong with you, or what you're working on, if you actively try to limit your distractions.

If your project is so awesome you never get distracted, good for you. Kindly, take your hubris elsewhere.

</comment><comment> why-el Does this block all internet? How can you code well without resort to some googling?

Edit: By this I mean it would be preferable if I can leave some sites up, like SO for instance.

<comment><USER11> I had to deal with shitty, shitty Internet once. I downloaded the docs ahead of time when I did have a good connection. Then when you're online later, what you still haven't figured out you attack.

It is not really that hard, I think it is just a culture shock for some to not have the Internet nearby. It was for me.

<comment><USER12> But sometimes completely unanticipated problems come up and you need stackoverflow... I'm not even sure how I did any work pre-internet. I know troubleshooting took me significantly longer back then, but I was also less experienced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I personally use the Chrome Nanny extension to block certain websites during specified hours. This goal-oriented approach is interesting though, as it seems to get at the core issue: "to create more than you consume".

<comment><USER14> I think that's a good observation about how this approach differs: it's not just a technical hack, but a behavioral one as well--the user experience with the tool is to simply do the warmups that they want to be doing anyway. I like that a lot, but it still feels like the tool is missing something to really successfully accomplish that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Prepare a hosts file as

        127.0.0.1   news.ycombinator.com
        127.0.0.1   reddit.com
        127.0.0.1   twitter.com
        etc

A shell script to rename the regular hosts file and this one at will. Add it in cron if you want it scheduled.

<comment><USER16> I did this for a while but I just ended up editing my hosts file every time I wanted to stop working. Maybe I just need to practice more self discipline.

<comment><USER17> A workable substitute for self-discipline is to make it hard enough to do the bad thing that either your laziness or your better nature wins out.

E.g., I don't keep cookies in the house. Instead, I go to the store if I want some. It's pretty rare that I'll overcome my laziness enough to head out for them. And then on the way I often come to my senses.

In this case, I might make it harder to edit the hosts file. E.g., a daemon that puts the block back automatically unless I solve 25 captchas.

I also really like LeechBlock's option to insert a 30-second pause before viewing banned websites. Since it cancels the countdown if the window loses focus, I have to just sit and wait for half a minute. 90% of the time I'll say, "But I don't even want to look at Facebook now," close the window, and get back to what I want to be doing.

<comment><USER16> Do they have LeechBlock for chrome?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lots of people commenting if your code is fun you shouldn't have to restrict yourself, blah blah blah. That's not the problem. The problem is how easy it is to instantly distract yourself. _Taktaktaktaktak_ "Oh hey, I wonder if so- and-so replied on my Facebook, let's just to a quick look.." _5 hours later_ "Oh snap, the time just flew by!"

If you're serious about blocking yourself from parts of the Internet, do it comprehensively. Here's what I do.

Most of the advice on this page is blocking from the browser-level or OS- level. This is easy to bypass, and you have to configure every device. You need to work at the router-level.

Let's talk blocking. A complete blacklist is wrong, you still need some Internet to Google or ask for help. e.g. stackoverflow.com, etc. Similarly, whitelists don't work because you can't possibly list every site you may need access to -- you may not know they exist yet. You need a keyword-matching blacklist.

You need two things:

1\. WRT54GL router ($20-$50) 2\. Tomato firmware: <http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/>

Vendor firmware usually has access restrictions, but they usually limit it to like 10 websites, and it usually doesn't have pattern-matching. You need a 3rd party firmware like Tomato.

Install the firmware per instructions from its website. It's really easy. The firmware has a page called "Access Restrictions". It does keyword blacklists/whitelists. You can block yourself for only certain hours of certain days. Here is an easy video tutorial from their website to guide you: <http://www.polarcloud.com/v/screst.htm>

For example, one keyword I use is "news". BAM! All URLs with the word "news" instantly blocked. Good. I don't need to be reading news when I should be coding. Resources like stackoverflow.com don't usually put "news" in their URLs, so they're safe.

There is the problem of unplugging the uplink from the router and directly into your computer (bypassing the router), or simply reconfiguring the router without restrictions. If you lack that much self-control, which I can understand (as I do too!!!), I recommend locking your router in a electrical enclosure and throwing away the key. Ok, not really. I made a cron job for the router that changes its login password to gibberish at some hour of the day, and X minutes prior it sets it to my normal password. Thus, I have X minutes of access to the router per day, should I need it.

</comment><comment><USER14> A bit of a tangent but: I like Earnest Hemmingway's advice to only stop your work when you know exactly where to pick up again. I don't do great but when I follow the advice I find that it helps me get into flow more quickly.

"You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again."

</comment><comment><USER19> Ok, now that I used this app I'm totally impressed. It even continues blocking after rebooting. Ha! Awesome.

I banged off almost 1000 words yesterday and had to shut down because of an oncoming storm. This morning I boot up and my connection is still locked up. My browser is saying I need to type another 1000 words if I want to get Internet. Nice.

I think your app will do well!

</comment><comment><USER20> This seems like it would be more of a hindrance than a help. Implementing anything to force yourself to code is a good indicator that you really don't want to code in the first place, and is just going to encourage you to write perfunctory code. It will probably also just make you more upset and contemptuous towards work in general. After all, who want's to be forced to something they don't want to do through negative reinforcement?

If you need this, there's most likely a bigger problem and you probably should be doing something else. Additionally, even if this gets the job done, it's going to piss you off to a large extent.

Lastly, this method is antithetical to coding in general. You most likely NEED the internet to code. Without things like Stack Overflow, you won't be able to solve problems as quickly and your productivity is going to go down.

<comment><USER6> > Implementing anything to force yourself to code is a good indicator that you > really don't want to code in the first place, and is just going to encourage > you to write perfunctory code.

The work I do is very boring. I do Drupal development for a series of television stations, and I'm not happy with it. But I need this job to pay the bills, so I have to perform well. Once I start coding, I realize my job isn't the worst thing in the world, and I'll get into a good flow. Starting, though, is the hardest part. These self-controlling applications help give me the start I need and don't let me give up so easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Everyone seems to be talking about the force-yourself-to-code part of this, but I recently read something about "write every morning" and as a tool for that this sounds appealing -- but only because my job is coding, not writing. Sort of like stretching before athletic activity, maybe?

The only thing that worries me is I have to inspect and trust the code to not do anything with potentially sensitive text. something local would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER22> Do commitment devices like this actually work for anybody? I've never known anyone who struggled with procrastination or any other vices that prevent them from getting work done and had their problems solved by a tool like this.

The pomodoro technique seems like it would be more effective for motivating you to work since it immediately rewards your efforts with a short break from your tasks.

</comment><comment><USER23> I saw it on HN a while ago, but I've been liking morphine: regulate distractions

You configure the websites to block, and when you try to access a blocked site it lets you create a 1, 3, 5 minute window to access the site.

really good for a 5 minute break.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fbnpehpbojenlldmfc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fbnpehpbojenlldmfcopeajkichnnjpo)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is cool, nice job. I'm currently working on something similar: a Chrome extension to gamify internet self-control with a configurable mana bar. Tools that allow people to give themselves "bright lines" to guide their own behavior are a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER25> But you can always uninstall the extension. Can we discipline ourselves, is the question.

<comment><USER26> Yes, but you may need to enlist a third party. (Discl: my startup -- <http://beeminder.com> \-- is such a third party!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you really like coding or writing, you shouldn't need to force yourself to do it.

<comment><USER28> Although I think you're baiting, I'll bite.

I really enjoy eating, but if I'm caught up in something I don't always remember to do it. Sometimes I'll go hours past my regularly scheduled meal times. Then I'm sitting at my desk wondering (only for a short time) why my stomach hurts. Oh ya, food.

While this is a extreme example, the logic still applies to coding/writing or anything else. Sometimes the tasks you should do are side tracked by other tasks. And if you're deep in thought, you might not have the internal alarm to switch to something more of a priority. Hence external alarms.

<comment><USER29> It's interesting you bring up food. Everything goes much more smoothly when I'm fasting: I'm way more focused, and the problems that do crop up, I feel I'm able to negotiate more effectively. I tend to look at it as a kind of perverse karmic trade-off, but that's just me...

<comment><USER30> Let me just counter that with my experience. I can focus better and I get things done much better when eat regulary and when I eat well (no fast food, not too much fat etc). If I eat to late or if I only eat a sandwich for breakfast the whole day can become ruined and if I completely skip a meal I'll be worse off for a day or two.

But that's just me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SelfControl[0] is an OS X application that lets you set up a black list. It's free, and works great for me.

[0]: <http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/>

</comment><comment><USER31> Per usual on HN, I think people take simple, fun utilities like this way too serious and try inject some philosophical ideal about loving your work blah blah blah. They dont get it. I like it. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER32> My email address is longer then 30 characters so I had to use javascript to input it. Still doesn't look like it worked though not sure if your no longer accepting new users or if my hack didnt work.

</comment><comment><USER33> I want this but at the OS level (windows in my case) with white lists.

<comment><USER34> If you had contact info in your profile I'd send you this privately, but that's exactly what we've built with <https://monotask.com>. The pro version is free for another few days. Free version will be free forever.

Not trying to threadjack, so if anybody has questions, etc., would love for you to e-mail me directly at firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER35> I'm guessing 'Mac and PCs' means 'Mac and Windows', and you don't support Linux? You seem to send a windows exe to linux users.

<comment><USER34> Sorry about that. Yes. We're working on a Linux version, but wanted to iron out some kinks in the other two first. If you e-mail me, I'll let you know as soon as we have something for you. I'll update that copy on the site, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I prefer to just use a tool that simply removes distraction instead, like Quiet (<http://wireload.net/products/quiet/>).

<comment><USER37> If only it worked on my coworkers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Concentrate (OS X): Pricy, but absolutely invaluable for me <http://getconcentrating.com/>

<comment><USER39> a long time ago, I've stopped using and finding productivity app like this. Just look around when I really have free time. Instead of playing around with this, completing the most important things, others tasks will take care of themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I use this: <http://bumblebeesystems.dyndns.org/wastenotime/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome app. I'll check it out. But I wish it wasn't a browser plugin. Too many browser plugins are bogging up my browsing experience.

</comment><comment><USER41> Can you allow specific site exceptions? I'd like to check specific coding education sites and my local server.

Other than that issue, great app!

</comment><comment><USER42> If I download the Extension without an account I see a giant error page with lots of debug information at /write/.

</comment><comment><USER43> what if i need to search for a solution to something or find out if it's a bug in IDE or it's me doing something wrong? doesn't seems like a very good idea to me personally. just learning to focus on your target would probably help more

</comment><comment><USER44> I occasionally do this with my hosts file. But not right now...

</comment><comment><USER45> The Internet != the web.

</comment><comment><USER46> can u also provide bitbucket integration?</comment>


Dictdiffer: Diff and Patch Python dictionaries - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fatiherikli/dictdiffer <comment><USER2> Some of these capabilities are already built into Python.

See Guido's "dictionary views" described at: <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3106/> In Python 2.7, those dictionary views are exposed as d.viewkeys(), d.viewitems(), and d.viewvalues(). The key and item views both support set operations such as union, intersection, and difference. Also note, the dict() constructor will accept sequences of items as input. Those tool make it trivially easy to express diffing and patching in native Python:

        # diff from d to e
        patch = (d.viewitems() - e.viewitems(),   # deletions
    	     e.viewitems() - d.viewitems())   # additions

        # apply the patch to f
        # dict(f.viewitems() - patch[0] | patch[1])

<comment><USER3> Well, this is quite different in the sense that the "patch operations" can also operate on the values, not just add/delete/replace them. In the example, the patch pushes and pops elements from the lists, rather than replacing them altogether.

I haven't looked, but I guess it is also recursive on values that are dictionaries themselves. In this case the "patch" is a sort of sequence of edit operations on the dictionary tree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is one of those odd corners of the python ecosystem

I have written at least two dict differs, and I suspect they are like web frameworks - everyone has written a half working one.

However we need good tools that get polished and standardised - this looks nice and I like the full circle ability, but in python's own version of Catch-22, until it succeeds I will stick with writing my own.

I hope it succeeds - my meware sucks

</comment><comment><USER5> The list diff is really a set diff, if I understand it right, in that it disregards order and multiple instances? That should only happen if the dict member is a set. Members which are lists should be treated using a Levenshtein-distance style patch. For free you then get patching of string members.

I'm getting ambitious now, but what about tree-edit distance (with patch script) for members which are nested lists?

There is Python code out there for these:

<https://github.com/timtadh/zhang-shasha>

<https://code.google.com/p/py-editdist>

EDIT I have only used the above libraries for distances, not for patchable diffs. But the Levenshtein and tree-edit distance algorithms are amenable to outputting the patch scripts.

</comment><comment><USER6> JSON-patch might also serve: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6902>

Here's a Python implementation: <https://github.com/stefankoegl/python-json- patch>

</comment><comment><USER7> This looks like a perfect complement to a mongo or couch data store. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER8> What might be some of the use cases?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, here is my use case.

<https://github.com/fatiherikli/dictdiffer#why-i-built-it>

<comment><USER8> Yes I already had read that.</comment></comment></comment>


Social seems broken in almost all services. Can it be fixed? - <AUTHOR> https://jeena.net/social-broken

<comment><USER2> The only problem is people expecting niche experiences with large general service platforms.

Want to have engaging and enriching discussions about a topic? There's probably a website for that exact topic. It has a forum or IRC chat room and probably a mailing list. It might have a twitter/facebook account, but those aren't the channels you use if you're really involved.

Want to find those places that have engaging enriching discussions about topics? Stop looking at Facebook, Twitter, et al. That's not where it's happening. And my money is on it never happening. That's not what they're for.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is just not true that there is some other forum or IRC or mailing list for the topics one wants to discuss. One example is local politics, Facebook is the only platform where you can find people willing to discuss topics like that, there will never be a forum or IRC channel to discuss the planned railway tunnel in Varberg, my home city. And it is obvious why, most of the non-internet affine people are already on Facebook but will never install a IRC client.

<comment> mkr-hn There's a retail development here in Barrow County (Georgia) where the Facebook page for it has been the center of discussion and the main source of feedback for the developers: [https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gateway-at- University-Parkway...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gateway-at-University- Parkway/140741965978772)

And who can blame them? Most of the 70k residents are already on Facebook. Anything else would have to be built from the ground up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just a thought or observation, which I have not properly thought through at all...

I don't use social media at all. I have dabbled in the past, but I just gave up relatively quickly. Do I miss out? No. There is useful stuff there, absolutely, but what I have found is that traditional media works as a sort of filter. So, I'm a F1 fan. Lots of F1 people twitter. But, anything important and useful appears in the usual traditional places. So, I have no need what so ever to follow any one on twitter. If something important comes up, it will appear on, say, the BBC's F1 sub-site.

So, these days, I would suggest that twitter, facebook, etc, are like a raw feed, with traditional journalists filtering the information for me. So far, I have not ever missed out.

Is that what's happening in general, or is that just me?

Another thing I have discovered recently is that live news is misleading knee jerk stuff, that in the end doesn't really help _most_ people. The latest example I can think of is the attack in London. So much info was flying about, but most of it was inaccurate and contradictory. My missus was glued to 24hr rolling news and twitter, and frankly talking nonsense, with it changing all the time. In the end, I told her to turn it all of and watch the 10 o'clock new later on, by which time a more coherent picture would have emerged. Which is pretty much what I do now. Do we really need our new instantly? Or is it better quality a few hours later?

I would, of course, accept that this sort of raw live information is very useful to those involved in one way or another. But most of us aren't.

<comment><USER4> _So far, I have not ever missed out._

So you think. And I would agree that Facebook, Twitter, et. al. have failed miserably in serving their purported customers (their real customers are probably more than happy, but I won't get into that). But I think the whole reason those things were appealing in the first place was that traditional media had failed even worse.

At least with social media you have more control. Control over who you associate with and what you pay attention to. What can you do with TV or a newspaper? Turn them off or throw them away; at best you can scan through them while trying to avoid content (including ads) not relevant to you.

There are other alternatives though; take HN for example. It's not unfiltered, but it definitely gives you more (and most likely more relevant to your interests) stories. Aggregators such as HN, ./, et. al have been _far_ superior to anything I've ever experienced from TV or newsprint. Much more relevant, much more in depth, much more accurate (not a high bar to beat), and most importantly, filtered to _my_ interests (who gives two sh _ts about the Hiltons or the Kardashians?). They're not perfect, but they are definitely a step in the right direction. I've discovered so many things via HN, ./ and other aggregators that I_ never* would have discovered via traditional media (or probably FB or Twitter for that matter).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been facing this exact same problem for a while now. I've always wanted a network where I'm not confined by just the "friends" I know or the people I follow. I want content, conversation, not fame driven profiles. This isn't a spam or commercial for my own service. But my friend and I just released our own service to address these issues. We created raveler to focus on "tags", aka categories of content. You follow tags and receive the contents related to that. On top of this, we made sure that everyone (people who follow or not follow the tag) can contribute to the conversation by simply reply. Kinda like HN I guess. Take a look and I'd love to improve the service based on your feedback. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/raveler/id641285606?ls=1&...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/raveler/id641285606?ls=1&mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious - why no discussion of reddits?

<comment><USER7> Reddit is broken.

You have places that are kinda nice. They are few and far between and short lived.

Either you have less than 500 subscribers and nothing happens ever. Or you have 20000+ subscribers and the herd mentality takes over. I think there is a cut somewhere between 10 000 - 20 000. It seems that the thoughtful flee after that, and only the loud and narrow minded are left behind.

Part of the problem is that if there is a subreddit that you find interesting and someone posts something about once a week it's probably buried by the bigger subs in your feed. Subs that are mediocre at best. You can unsubscribe from bigger ones, but you cannot make all of the subs you follow to have just single post on your front page every day. I admit the "res" functionality solves this to some degree.

There used to be periodic complaints how reddit is going worse. That died of as anyone who cared deleted their accounts and headed somewhere else.

Reddit does one thing very good and that is the red letter.

<comment><USER8> I mod an /r/ with 140,000 subs - and it's been a tough thing to keep the community happy and in agreement, neither of which I feel our community currently is.

The difficult thing is that everyone has a different opinion of what makes the community and how it should act.

We need to keep a high-level framework of rules and enforce those rules, but for the most part let the community members hash it out.

I try to take a more hands off approach to modding simply because with our user base you're damned if you do, damned if you don't - and I don't want to censor any content per se...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Social" evolves. Part of that is the society it attracts and part the society infused in increments by the creators of the walled garden.

But here's the real kicker: "Social" is just a badly made forum with an attachment feature. It's just that instead of the focus being on replying to threads, it's now new thread creation with a provision to vote, bookmark and subscribe to others' bookmarks. The more users you have in this forum, the more it gets used (the snowball effect; or rather the opposite of the "Empty Restaurant" problem mentioned by Spolsky).

</comment><comment><USER10> Ahem, emails are not broken yet, from last I tried

<comment><USER11> From a discoverability standpoint they are. There's not really any way to find like-minded people you don't already know and strike up a conversation with e-mail, because everything is private. Which is kind of the definition of "social".

<comment><USER12> Pretty sure that nowhere in the definition of social does it enforce the need to meet or otherwise speak to people that you didn't previously know. Please don't confuse "social" as a general term with "social discovery".

For many people, having something that's pretty easy to use and lets them communicate with people that they already know is a really great thing.

Email really isn't designed as a social discovery tool. There are many other technologies (some of them built on top of email like mailing lists) that _are_ designed for those purposes, and several of them work perfectly well.

If what you're expecting is one tool that both fits and performs well at all possible use cases, then you're going to be severely disappointed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > I am readonly on YouTube, they have in my opinion the most healthy social > community right now

... I assume the author was referencing maybe video responses... the meaning can't be that YouTube comments are the best social community, can it?

<comment><USER14> That was also my first thought. Thumbs Up for you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't it all pretty much worthless? A few years ago I thought with google and 'social media' (hate that term) that no one would ever be misinformed again. But look at 'em, people are dumber than ever. If every social thingamajig and comments section were deleted off the internet I think it would be an improvement.

Yeah, I see the irony of saying that in a comments section on the internet.

<comment><USER16> Human interaction is hardly worthless, regardless of the 'quality' of said interaction. We are social creatures, and the vast majority of people have an innate desire to share their lives and thoughts with other people.

Instagramming the trail when I went for a walk last night^1 didn't make anyone smarter, but it allowed me to share a piece of beauty from my day that could quite possibly have made them feel happier.

That said, I disagree entirely with the idea that people are not more informed because of social media. The first reports of the raid resulting in the death of Osama Bin Laden came from a civilian in Islamabad who was live-tweeting about the sound of helicopters overhead^2. Say what you will about Twitter/Facebook, but they were both instrumental in the Arab Spring and helped revolutionaries topple numerous oppressive regimes.

The news is being broken and made on social media. It's a communication tool unlike anything humanity has ever had access to, so some people will continue to swing it wildly like a child who has just been given a toy hammer, but that does not negate its efficacy in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.

1: <http://instagram.com/p/aHyO-UgngM/> 2: [http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/05/02/osama.twitte...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/05/02/osama.twitter.reports/index.html)

<comment><USER17> mm, Unless social interaction leads to a net negative outcome for the rest of the world: I'm thinking of Nationalism in Europe and Japan for example during the early 1910 and 1930s. I'd argue that the consensual agreement in the sub- humanization of Jews would qualify as worthless human interaction.

As for the instagramming, here's a counterpoint:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_a...](http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_antisocial_network.html)

Sharing what makes you happy doesn't necessarily makes others happy.

And as convenient as social media was in speeding up the spread of news for the OBL raid and coordination for Arab Spring, it's also lead to witch hunts (Boston Bombings), and general spread of false information (politics anyone?).

You're right, some people suck and using social media, and others are very efficient at it. But I think for what purpose someone uses a tool is important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why do we need to fix them? Why cling to social media? Everything has a lifecycle, that's a law of the universe.

Lets chill for awhile and allow something to organically happen.

Seriously, would you or I _die_ if we didn't use any of those social media channels for awhile, or would it create space for something new to evolve?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a odd argument, you could also ask: Who would die if we didn't use electricity? or Who would die if we didn't use toilet paper?

<comment><USER19> ok, maybe no one will die, but it will lead to a serious problems, giving up (facebook, twitter, etc) will not lead to</comment></comment></comment>


So I was doing an online order last night and I noticed something - <AUTHOR>

When I was just about to checkout and enter in all my billing information this ( https://twitter.com/cnizzdotcom/status/256591136074919937/photo/1/large ) overlay came up asking me for a charitable contribution and it got me thinking: Why aren't more online stores doing this? Sure there could be an impact on conversion rates, but that is speculation. It seems to me that socially conscious companies should be doing more of this. Then another thing hit me, what if a web service made this sort of thing easier for all e-commerce sites to implement? This could be a very simple piece of JavaScript code that was implemented into the checkout phases. Plugins could be written for popular commercial and opensource shopping carts like Magento and Xcart. Does this sort of thing exist? If not, then why? If so, why aren't more companies doing things like this? <comment><USER2> And ebay has their partnership with MissionFish, which looks to be exclusive. I think it's a decent idea but the market's too small and the difficulty in doing it inhouse is not significant enough, especially for teams doing well enough to want to implement this program in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a few companies who does this - check out <http://www.dympol.net/>

I do like the idea - but would rather see it on a thank you page (e.g. after subscribing) or (after checkout) not in middle in case a customer bails.

<comment><USER4> Placing that on a thank you page wouldn't be as effective. You have already payed and laziness is a major factor. I think that the middle of paying process is the best spot to place it. It doesn't need to be so big and intrusive, maybe just a checkbox placed above the "Checkout" button would do the trick and still get a lot of conversions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dominos does this too, asking you to round up for charity.

</comment><comment><USER6> Quite interestingly, Godaddy has it on the checkout page.</comment>


Google Truth 1.0, a simpler AssertJ: assertThat(text).contains("test gmail.com") - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/07/truth-10-fluent-assertions-for-java-and.html <comment><USER2> Why `assertThat(...)` instead of just `assert(...)`? There is such a strange tendency to make testing stuff, specifically, read like English.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, not sure how I missed this comment earlier.

`assert` is a keyword in Java, so we can't use it as a method name:

[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/langu...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/language/assert.html)</comment></comment>


Monotouch believes Apple's final 4.0 SDK may give more wiggle room. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mono-project.com/newstouch/archive/2010/Apr-09.html

<comment><USER2> Steve Jobs is not as optimistic: [http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/monotouch/2010-April/00187...](http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/monotouch/2010-April/001878.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> See also this article on AppleInsider : <http://bit.ly/aVCuKz>

I'm not privy to the technical details, but it would seem Apple banning other programming languages than Objective-C etc. was not an ideological decision, but that it was based on the new requirements of the multitasking feature in iPhone OS 4.0.

Can anyone with more technical know-how weigh in on this discussion ?

<comment><USER4> That argument has no weight at all. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253621> has a good dissection of it.</comment></comment>


Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/02/05/quantum-computing-in-the-nisq-era-and-beyond/ <comment><USER2> I looked up Quantum RAM (QRAM) as has been discussed in the review, and I found the original work by Seth Lloyd. But I fail to find any architecture for the QRAM in the original paper.

Would someone knowledgeable enough kindly point me towards it?

Thanks :)

PS -> I've submitted the original QRAM paper in the HackerNews feed.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=16307460](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=16307460)</comment>


What would the Apple Car look like? - <AUTHOR> http://tariq.co/apple-car <comment><USER2> I see you're not familiar with Federal Code Title 49 Subtitle B Chapter V Part 571. In layman's terms that's Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards which regulate among other vehicle specifications the type, location, and angle of projection of headlamps, taillights, and especially High Mounted Stop Lights (the center brake lights on vehicles).

Personally I hope Ive models it after the Jaguar E-Type, making it beautiful within the bounds of federal restrictions and regulations, of course.

<comment><USER3> Concept cars generally ignore regulations, just a fun thought exercise :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm guessing that its charger cord would have a huge head at the plug end to block any adjacent outlets.

And, it would be ungrounded.

<comment><USER3> haha, indeed. The wire would fray in 2 months too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why on earth would anyone make a unibody car? Who wants to replace the entire car body for a ding in the door?

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like a shoe of some sort. Like a clog or croc.

<comment><USER3> haha, coming to think of it...</comment></comment>


The Psychology of the Powerful - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19842100 <comment><USER2> I believe the proper term is narcissist!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some non-engineering must read papers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance"[0].

[0]: [http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...](http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf)</comment>


Welcome Back, Nokia - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/24/just-try-a-windows-phone/

<comment><USER2> TechCrunch did it again. Brutal PR. I mean, 33% (OMG, 33%!!) of a market, which is tiny. In a linked article it says, that nokia sold 1 million (that's rounded up from mentioned .9 mil) devices in Q4. WP7 share is around .5 to 1.5% (range seen on few quickly googled reports).

So, 33% you say?

<comment><USER3> Sure, WP7 isn't much of the market now. The implication is that this is market share of a _growing_ platform. WP7 handsets sell for the same pricepoint as low end Android devices. And, according to most of the reviews, it's a better product. The idea TC has is that Nokia is going to take a lot of those customers.

<comment><USER4> Supported by what? The article was vague, it talked more about the plastic than the apps. What apps? Why did I have to ask that question? Where's any hard data?

<comment><USER3> > Supported by what?

Both sales data, and user agents on the mobile web. This is fairly easily Googlable.

> The article was vague, it talked more about the plastic than the apps. What > apps?

Are you saying app #s would be a more relevant measure of market growth?

<comment><USER4> So now I do the legwork for articles, instead of the author? Great! "All Minnesotans are stupider than Iowans! Look it up!"

Apps may not really be relevant to market grows, but they would be relevant to the article subject, "Welcome back, Nokia". Are they back? Is anybody writing apps for their phone? Why would I want one? All reasonable questions, revolving around apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've always admired the design of Windows Phone, and (despite owning three Android phones in a row) hated Android's "we've made the sale, now we don't care anymore" support model.

But I was never going to buy one of those horrible LG or Samsung Windows Phone devices. They feel cheap and clunky. The 800 is a solid, smooth credit-card- like device. It feels nice in the hand, like the first iPhone did. Once WP8 is released (provided it has some equivalent of W8's WinJS) I think I'm going to buy one.</comment>


Why Are 96M Black Balls on This Reservoir? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=723&v=uxPdPpi5W4o <comment><USER2> This seems like a solution to the bromate problem that in a decade or two will be looked back upon as a mistake as the balls deteriorate and leak plastics into the drinking water? [https://discardstudies.com/2015/08/16/las-shade- balls-the-ec...](https://discardstudies.com/2015/08/16/las-shade-balls-the- ecological-costs-of-plastics-in-water/)

Are there alternatives, like filtering and chlorinating the water on-demand rather than pretreatment and storing in a giant open air reservoir that then needs a bandaid fix like this?

<comment><USER3> That question occurred to me too. They say they last 10 years? Fantastic, that's very reasonable. What happens then? They dredge them all back out of the water and replace them? Because that sounds like a hell of a logistical problem compared to dumping them in.

Your link, however, appears to persist in the misconception that their purpose is to prevent evaporation. Why is it such a common meme?

<comment><USER4> Considering their original cost taking them out of the lake shouldn't comparatively cost a lot. They are all at the surface and can be pushed to the shore and collected.

The bigger problem is that they will start deteriorating and leaking plastic long before their 10 year life time. After all its plastic in under uv light and constantly changing temperature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They keep drinking water in the open air? What did they used to do about birds shitting in it? Even now, some birds can shit on those balls and the drinking water will wash it.

</comment><comment><USER6> They are called shade balls, they are used to reduce evaporation by up to 90%.

<comment><USER7> The video explains that the evaporation reduction was a side effect. The real reason is to reduce the level of cancerous Bromide down to safe levels, which could only reasonably be achieved by blocking sunlight from the water.

They tried a bunch of ideas for blocking the sun and settled on the balls as the best compromise between cost, effectiveness, and safety.

There are a couple of other benefits. They need far less chlorine to manage algae growth and it discourages waterfowl from taking up residence in the pool, also increasing water quality. They expect the balls to pay for about half of their cost over an expected 10 year lifetime from the savings in chlorine and evaporation.

<comment><USER8> Bromide is the safe form. Bromate is the carcinogen, a side effect of sunlight and chlorination, but it also forms if ozone is used to sterilize the water. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromate)</comment></comment></comment>


Fungi Basidiomycetes can be used as computing devices - <AUTHOR> https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2018.0029 <comment><USER2> What is this article saying? That mushrooms might naturally compute, because they transmit signals between each other in response to environmental stimuli, or that mushrooms have properties that can be hijacked and used to build a logical device that computes? Or both?

<comment><USER3> The article seems to imply both. The basis is that wave propagate signals throughout the fungal network. The signals are made of electricity, which acts in a manner where they assume it represents numbers such as 1. Then they define logic. This is to me a pretty safe assumption if the most we have to deal with is a two-state automata that takes in 0 or 1. We can observe from its natural behavior and physical shape from experiments that there's clearly some mathematical optimization going on for well-known computer science problems that define its characteristics. I think of this way: if it looks like math, its probably computing how it forms. If it exhibits a great deal of complexity that can just be because of how it interacts with itself like on a cellular automata basis or a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction-diffusion basis. You can get a lot of complex and chaotic behavior from really simple rules. They tell you how fast the system works and its clock speed basically, so you can compare and relate that to your computer as well.

Nature is the highest programmer because nature can write pretty fluently in just binary. All nature needs sometimes is something activating and deactivating, which can be things living or dying next to each other. And when nature arrives at a proof that a method is optimal, it arrives at it in a probable amount of time/space. When programs are valid and the proof exists, we have that we find it in nature since it gives a natural advantage to its biological host. We do the same thing but way slower and it requires a bunch of chalkboards and silicon sometimes.

The author, has a number of publications that are biological computation models. You can substitute a computer made of billiard-balls for soldier crabs.

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

<comment><USER2> Well, if mycelium can conduct electrical signals, then it's similar to brain tissue, which seems like a more interesting analogy than saying it can perform digital computation, in my opinion. Because then it raises the question of what other qualities it has that might be similar to brain tissue, for example, maybe exhibiting some form of perception, learning, and even consciousness. The total amount of mycelial tissue is a lot more massive than just the mushroom, the mushroom is the fruiting body, it's a small part of the organism. Also, the mycelium interacts with tree roots, which can be viewed as (one of many?) sensory inputs.

<comment><USER4> The idea that mycelium create a "planet internet" is quite interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I find a good start up to apply for? - <AUTHOR>

It's been suggested to me numerous times that in order to get a good perspective on work, I should intern at both a large company (i.e. Google, Facebook, Apple) as well as a small company (i.e. a startup). The only issue I have is that I don't know where to begin my search for startups.<p>Does HN have any suggestions? <comment><USER2> [http://hnhiring.me/](http://hnhiring.me/) which is a way to browse the monthly threads. Some startups, others not.

Then [https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs](https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs)

I am not sure where you are, but there are also smaller-than-the-valley areas like [http://siliconprairienews.com/category/opps-on-the- prairie/](http://siliconprairienews.com/category/opps-on-the-prairie/)

Hope those are a start.

<comment><AUTHOR> I go to school in New York, but am from California.</comment></comment>


IBM Created Google Glass in 2000 (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Flvd5gVT7fg

<comment><USER2> Haha... found this article from 2000 - [http://asia.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/06/30/wearable.pc.id...](http://asia.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/06/30/wearable.pc.idg/)

I guess the technology wasn't ready (Win98...), and also probably the world wasn't ready. Is the world ready for Glass?</comment>


Megacities might not save the planet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/04/megacities-might-not-save-planet

<comment><USER2> No Coruscant for Earth huh?</comment>


Man races London Underground train - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH_Z8Ghuq6E

<comment><USER2> perfect for hyperlapse

<comment><USER3> The video on smooth moving hyperlapse techniques: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA4Za3Hv6ng](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA4Za3Hv6ng)</comment></comment>


Why do VCs insist on only investing in high-risk, high-return companies? - <AUTHOR> http://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/why-do-vcs-insist-on-only-investing-in-high-risk-high-return-companies.html <comment><USER2> >c. When alpha goes below 2, the expected return also becomes infinite, so ERiβ=∞∞. This is an undefined quantity and can't be compared apples to apples to ERm. Are these good investments? What we know is that early stage venture funds seem to have alphas of about 1.95, just below 2 (see the post I referenced above). This is the area where venture capitalists operate.

To me, it seems that there needs to be a better technical model to describe risk reward in the alpha < 2 area. How do you even define beta/alpha for something pre revenue?

Do you know of any interesting conditional expected return models that incorporate time value of money?

Only thing in my mind that makes sense to me is if there was a concept of delta-neutral investing like there is in options market, where you should invest in an incumbent company while at the same time taking a position in a start up that could put that company out of business in the future, while trying to manage the position by taking profit when the value of the incumbent starts to exceed the amount invested in the start up.</comment>


Ampere Altra 80-core ARM CPU - <AUTHOR> https://www.servethehome.com/ampere-altra-80-arm-cores-for-cloud/ <comment><USER2> "What we will note is that Ampere de-rated both the AMD EPYC 7742 and Xeon Platinum 8280 results by 16.5% and 24% respectively. This was done to adjust for using GCC versus AOCC2.0 and ICC 220.127.116.11. Ampere disclosed this, and it is a big impact. Arm servers tend to use GCC as the compiler while there are more optimized compilers out there for AMD and Intel."

If I read this right, they reduce their competitors' benchmarks because they have better compilers? Can anyone justify this?

<comment><USER3> Very little software is actually compiled with AOCC and ICC. Really Intel and AMD are being dishonest by publishing benchmarks that don't match reality. Of course it's different if you're compiling everything yourself, then those benchmarks might be relevant.

<comment><USER4> > It's different if you're compiling everything yourself, then those > benchmarks might be relevant.

And even if you do it's irrelevant. Most common large/important frameworks won't compile with proprietary compilers.

Doing Bench's with ICC, XLC or other is hypocritical and often does not reflect anything useful.

Only the HPC world can afford to recompile everything with proprietary compilers and justify the man power to do so. And even so, they already have passed most compute intensive kernels on GPGPU with cuda a long time ago.

<comment><USER5> No, the correct thing to do is to publish multiple columns showing performance under the different compilers. Large co do use the specific compiler that will give them better performance. I know many big software compiled with ICC. Then, there is the lack of tlak about MSVC. That's one standard compiler used extensively.

In benchmarking you have two choices: publish the real numbers or not. Which option you choose marks you as honest or not.

You can argue about why the numbers for your product are lower in the discussion section of your report. Not in an asterisk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> STH has the slides and some analysis: [https://www.servethehome.com/ampere- altra-80-arm-cores-for-c...](https://www.servethehome.com/ampere-altra-80-arm- cores-for-cloud/)

<comment><USER7> Ok, we've changed to that from [https://amperecomputing.com/ampere-altra- industrys-first-80-...](https://amperecomputing.com/ampere-altra-industrys- first-80-core-server-processor-unveiled/). Thanks!

<comment> Patrick-STH Hi dang. I know you did not have to do that but I just wanted to say from the STH team we appreciate it. Have a great day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 192 PCIe Gen4 lanes in 2P platforms - looks like they're optimizing for next- gen storage bandwidth or potentially GPU / TPU integrations. This could be interesting from a company that's been busy working on their B-to-B sales, hopefully solving for problems that cloud platform providers actually have.

</comment><comment><USER8> For context this is an evolution of the Applied Micro X-gene (I believe this is the 3rd generation). The 1st gen was the famous Mustang, one of the first Aarch64 chips generally available that ran Linux. I still have one in my loft somewhere.

Edit: I should note that if you used the X-gene 1 it was very slow, albeit a reliable workhorse for early 64-bit ARM Linux development. These newer chips have far better performance.

<comment><USER9> Thank You, there were too many ARM Server Startup, merger and acquisition I sort of lost count. I think we are left with Ampere and one from Marvell.

I sort of record Applied Micro were doing POWER as well, is that still the case with Ampere?

<comment><USER10> Yes, seems like Ampere is the big public server player now.

Marvell bought Cavium which has the ThunderX line. (ThunderX2 being a rather HPC-oriented chip, I think there's a supercomputer already built with it.) Marvell also makes networking-gear-oriented smaller chips (e.g. Armada 8k), one of which is in my little ARM Desktop (MACCHIATObin) :)

NXP (Layerscape) and Mellanox (BlueField) also make network-oriented chips that have around 24 Cortex-A72 cores. NXP's is in SolidRun's newer workstation product.

Meanwhile Amazon bought Annapurna Labs and they make the Graviton (2) for the AWS cloud. This isn't something you can touch physically but it's going to have the biggest impact of all things. This is the real confirmation that Arm servers are legit and the x86/amd64 monopoly is over.

There's also Huawei HiSilicon's Taishan/Kunpeng stuff, which you apparently can buy if you're a serious business, but now it's available in the public Huawei Cloud, but only for the Chinese region it seems??

Oh and Fujitsu is making some epic chip with HBM2 memory and the new Scalable Vector Extensions. But that's only available if you're making supercomputers.

And Nuvia is going to be a thing eventually.. they have not announced anything yet, we have no idea which ISA they are even going to use (could be RISC-V or POWER or SPARC for all we know) but a prominent UEFI/ACPI-on-Arm person is now their VP of Software and is still referring to the Arm ecosystem as "we" [https://twitter.com/jonmasters/status/1234734345350369281](https://twitter.com/jonmasters/status/1234734345350369281) :)

And yeah.. press F to pay respects for Qualcomm Centriq and AMD Seattle.

<comment><USER9> >And Nuvia is going to be a thing eventually..

According to techcrunch they have confirmed it will be built on top ARM.

Edit: That is assuming they sort out their lawsuit with Apple.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/15/three-of-apple-and- googles...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/15/three-of-apple-and-googles- former-star-chip-designers-launch-nuvia-with-53m-in-series-a-funding/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> the key issue when compared to Epyc is that this is mono-die, and not much faster (even with metrics straight from Ampere). Mono-die means that the die is huge, the yield is low, it's probably pretty expensive to produce (and the reason why they went for 32MB cache, well below Arm's recommendations, core count is a bigger seller than cache it seems). Unless they get massively better performance (they don't), this has no chance vs a multi-die solution which has a much better yield. Intel is cornered in a similar situation right now. The same applies to Graviton, this stands absolutely no chance in the long run.

Not saying that the future has to be multi-die, but if it is not, then it has to be way faster than the cheaper-to-manufacture competition.

<comment><USER9> >the key issue when compared to Epyc is that this is mono-die,

This die cost metrics is way overblown and its narrative is too narrowly focused. Especially on ARM Server where unit cost dynamics with ARM IP along with much higher margin on server CPU lower the multi die BOM benefits. And the same definitely does not apply to Graviton, which Amazon owns the whole stack.

<comment><USER12> I disagree.

More chips per wafer results in more yield, less chips with potential flaws.

> Dr. Hansch's research at Universitat Munchen for example, shows how as die > size increases manufacturers realize an accelerating yield loss and thus > accelerating manufacturing cost. Using their model, assuming best-case > defect densities, AMD's small chiplet approach achieves 90% yields vs. > Intel's 30%-40% yields from its large, monolithic die approach. [1]

[1] [https://www.barrons.com/articles/amd-stock-can- gain-87-fund-...](https://www.barrons.com/articles/amd-stock-can-gain-87-fund- manager-51566400829)

<comment><USER9> Since you actually did some research and posted a link I will go along with those numbers.

>We estimate Intel's total server die cost at $162 per good server chip while AMD costs about $108 per good server package.

EPYC is 8 Die + an IOD, assuming the massive IOD of ~420mm2 only cost $10 ( That is suggesting GF are selling 14nm / 12nm Wafer at ~$1.2K, even under the AMD WSA with GF would likely not be feasible ), that number suggest the cost per Compute die would be ($106 - $10)/8 = $12, which is again off by quite a bit. Compared to equivalent die size cost of Intel, which is not even accurate because intel do not require the 65%+ Gross Profit Margin from TSMC and it is on an older mature node. And its yield are too pessimistic, we do not have any numbers from Intel on defect per mm2, but taking a guess from Nvidia's massive ~800mm2 die isn't too far off.

So again, let's assume both of those numbers are "relatively" correct. Do you think $62 would matter for an Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8280 Processor with Recommended Customer Price of $10K? Or the same die they are selling at the lower end for $3K?

While it would definitely be good to have those $62 as profits, the reality is on the server market its advantage is relatively minimal.

The bulk of the benefits of Chiplet approach is that you can reuse one or two designs and have it deployed across the whole range of market from Server to Desktop. As design cost increases with Pure Play Foundry such as TSMC this is extremely important for Fabless Design company like AMD, it cost them hundreds of million per design variation. Intel would have that problem down the road but it is mostly migrated for now because all of their design and fabs are in house, and would not cost them as much.

And since the original post was specific to ARM and Server, which has a different market dynamics in cost, you have less R&D as compared to x86 market. In ARM you are paying for IP price on the N1 core and some Interconnect, and those cost of Spread among all ARM players. Hence the conclusion of Chiplet is everything isn't as clear cut and why I said it is too narrowly focused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How long until they shut it down? ARM vendors are infamous for quitting before releasing their products.

<comment><USER14> The category is here to stay, regardless of which company is the first to make it stick. Probably better to give them the benefit of the doubt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious how this will perform vs AMD's Epyc line in terms of performance per Watt on different workloads.

<comment><USER16> It depends on the workload. We tried the ampere emag, and what killed it for us was that TLS performance was nowhere near modern x86-64 CPUs (Intel or AMD)

<comment><USER17> Was that heavily cipher dependent? I wouldn't be surprised if Chacha20 performed much better than AES w/o any hardware acceleration (other than SIMD instructions)

<comment><USER16> Ah, that's interesting. We don't use chacha20. This was AES-GCM

<comment><USER17> The situation is probably better now that ARMv8 has some crypto-specific instructions, but AES-GCM on older ARMs performed awfully without the instructions specifically for doing AES and Galois field multiplication

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be neater if it were the Core Ultra 80-amp CPU

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the point of these wall of text without some hardware-porn?

;)

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks like a company by a bunch of ex-Intel people. How are they doing on Spectre/Meltdown and other bugs caused by the culture of cutting corners?

<comment><USER6> The N1 core was designed by Arm Austin. It includes "The traps for EL1 and EL0 cache controls, PSTATE SSBS (Speculative Store Bypass Safe) bit that supports software mitigation for Spectre Variant 4, and the speculation barriers (CSDB, SSBB, PSSBB) instructions..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Growing sick of the trend of naming companies after famous scientists...

<comment><USER22> You know that's a unit of electricity as well, right?

<comment><USER23> A unit of electricity named after a famous scientist.

<comment><USER22> And?

<comment><USER24> and he/she is growing sick of that, apparently

<comment><USER25> A "he" apparently... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9-Marie_Amp%C3%A8re](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9-Marie_Amp%C3%A8re)

He would be spinning in his grave. Which would generate an AC current.

<comment><USER26> He would be well grounded though having no effective voltage. Bad joke, although, it has potential .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've said this before on HN, but no ARM platform is going to catch on for server use, chicken or egg problem, until people can buy a reasonably priced ATX motherboard and CPU by themselves and build a PC with it. The motherboard needs to have the same complement of I/O and bus ports that you can find on a $90 to $120 category x86-64 motherboard.

There is nothing _anywhere near_ the performance of what I can get right now by buying a $110 motherboard from one of the top six Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, and a $150 Ryzen 3000 series to socket into it.

Linux and *BSD developers are not going to be shelling out $6000 for a 2U rackmount noisy system that's impossible to operate nicely in their home offices.

<comment><USER6> ARM servers already happened; they're in production at AWS and probably MS. Most of the software development is already done; since developers wouldn't buy $6000 machines they just got access to them for free.</comment></comment>


A Lesson in Acceptance - <AUTHOR> https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/1945-lesson-in-acceptance <comment><USER2> This article deserves some kind of award for peak pretentious smugness, a la South Park fart huffing. I'm not sure what the point is. Restaurants are nice. Muh facemasks.

>"restaurants are where life is lived"

As opposed to ... the rest of where life is lived?

>"Restaurants bring humanity to a city. They're central to my memories. "

I'm pretty sure bringing food to a city is more central to restaurantness than bringing "humanity" to a city.

"Eating out in Houston is an exercise in acceptance." -are you shitting me? Do people actually feel virtuous and beatific because they bought a bucket of pork fried rice from someone not of the same race as them? What the hell is going on here?

<comment><USER3> >Restaurants are nice. Muh facemasks.

I wear a mask when I go to a store, and I'm glad I live in an area where people generally do and you don't get harassed for it.

But I would get serious cognitive dissonance if I went to a restaurant or did anything else that met my personal threshold for "not really necessary". I mean, say there's someone who isn't wearing a mask. Can I really complain or feel superior, given that neither of us has to be there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Point of clarification: "Latinx" is not a real word. "Latino" serves perfectly well, and should be used instead of some made-up word created to assuage notions of wokeness.

<comment><USER5> Furthermore it doesn't make any sense in the Spanish language, where it is perfectly normal to have Latinos (n. m), Latinas (n. f), and Latinos (n. n).

It is a word entirely for the American activist class.

<comment><USER6> The point is obviously to disrupt that normality, but it's absolutely a word for and by US activists speaking English.

The word used by activists in Latin America is "Latine", if you're curious. It's actually pronounceable in Spanish!

<comment><USER7> In the Spanish-speaking world you can find the endings -e, -@, and -x. Depending on the area/organization one or other can be used (also, differing ways of pronouncing them; I'm a native and barely have heard any one pronounce the -e versions ever).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Eating out in Houston is an exercise in acceptance. Someone who probably > doesn't look like you—whether that's the waitstaff, the back of the house—is > letting you into their home.

This is just a wild sentence. People don't become less racist after eating foreign food. People should not feel proud about themselves just because they spent money on a bowl of ramen.

> In Houston, most days out of the week, I've found myself in the company of > family that wasn't my own, that's adopted me nonetheless.

There has to be a way to express, "restaurant workers are struggling financially because of COVID", without projecting that the minimum wage workers at your favorite Korean restaurant think of you as an adopted family member.

They just want to do their job and earn a living without contracting a contagious disease. They shouldn't, on top of that, be forced to emotionally validate their customers.

<comment><USER3> >People don't become less racist after eating foreign food

No, I think the point is, people (like the author) _feel_ less racist after eating foreign food among people who don't look like them. Pride is one possible emotion, but relief is one that seems like it would generalize more. The internet is full of faceless people talking about racism, and getting out in the real world and doing normal things around normal people can be therapeutic. Like taking a walk outside the cult compound.

>They shouldn't, on top of that, be forced to emotionally validate their customers.

Well, the point is to describe how they _do_ , whether or not intentionally; do you have a proposal for how they should stop gratifying customers?

You're entitled to find the picture painted _ugly_ , but if it's really shocking, then writing the article may be worthwhile regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting people are still dining out. How effective are the measures taken in dine-out places there? Someone can shed light on this?

<comment><USER10> The chance of getting infected and having serious symptoms is very very low. I don't need restaurant to do any special measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So things are not so bad in the US, if one can still worry about dining-in food. Glad to hear. Media here made it sound much much worse.

<comment><USER12> Lots of places in the US have had less strict lockdowns and earlier reopenings than other countries. That may be part of why the US has had such a worse outbreak than those other countries.

I wouldn't take a single author writing about eating in a restaurant as an indication. Look at the numbers instead; it's pretty bad.

<comment><USER10> If you look the number case, yes it can be considered "high" because the virus spread easily but then again you see vast majority of it is either asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms, it doesn't make sense to lockdown.

<comment><USER12> 172,000 dead.

I'm going to stick with the advice from public health experts, which has been consistent and unanimous, thanks.

For details on how the US's death rates (CFR, per capita, etc.) compare, you can read more here, but it's not good. Other places aren't good either, but many places are much better.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/05/8993658...](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/05/899365887/charts- how-the-u-s-ranks-on-covid-19-deaths-per-capita-and-by-case-count)

<comment><USER10> >172,000 dead

Thats such a low number ~0.05% of the population. This should viewed as good news that the virus is not that deadly.

<comment><USER13> Not to mention hundreds of thousands more with heart damage and other long term effects of infection that are still not well understood. Death should not be the only metric of disease severity or burden.

<comment><USER10> All diseases could cause long term effect in some of the population.

Flu can cause long term damage too.

Do you know what else could cause long term damage ? Lockdown

>still not well understood

Especially when is still not well understood, we shouldn't do lockdown as it surely can cause damage.

<comment><USER13> Lockdown without adequate support to mitigate the known negative effects, sure. We know what can happen from a lockdown and can plan accordingly. We also know the long term effects of flu (not nearly as severe as what known about Covid, so even loosely comparing the two is irresponsible).

We may overreact for the unknown effects of Covid, but it's sure convenient to say we should do nothing instead and oops later if you underestimated (which is interestingly exactly what happened at that start of the pandemic and got us to our current death rates). Sad that your preference is all for the sake of leisure and convenience, perpetuating a system dependent on low wage service laborers that are offered no choice in the matter.

We have other options, but a flat refusal to offer or consider any does indeed leave every man for himself. But careful what you ask for, because when you force people into such desperation they will only put up with so much before deciding to take back or destroy it all.

<comment><USER10> >but it's sure convenient to say we should do nothing

I didn't say we should do nothing. There are things that can be done other than lockdown such as finding vaccine still have to be done, improving treatment method still have to be done, improving health care capacity still have to be done, etc.

>sake of leisure and convenience

Its not just leisure and convenience, people losing job, bankruptcy, mental health problem, suicide, domestic violence, delayed treatment for non-covid cause, kids receiving poor education due school closure, etc

Flu kills thousand every year too, yet we didn't require lockdown.

Likewise be careful when you ask for lockdown, because when you force people into such desperation they will only put up with so much before deciding to take back or destroy it all.

Lockdown maybe justified if the threat is proportional to the severity for covid its not worth it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


SSD Poised to Become Drive of Choice in 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.allion.com/ssd-poised-to-become-drive-of-choice-in-2010/

<comment><USER2> Not much content here, it's a press release mostly stating that Allion is the first official independent SSD test house for the SSD Association. Certainly no additional evidence for the hypothesis put forth in the title, other than stating that USB3 is faster than HDDs can sustain, which shouldn't be news.

<comment><USER3> It's a really terrible press release. First they talk about a collaboration to develop a PCI-based SSD card. Then they start talking about the limitations of USB 3, which shouldn't even apply to a PCI-based SSD storage solution. They even manage to get the speed wrong. USB 3 is 6 gbps, not 5. Don't waste your time reading it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A little misleading, USB 3.0 is only expected to have a throughput of IIRC 400 megabytes/second after protocol overhead. It's entirely possible to get 300 megabytes/second out of a properly configured HDD system. Considering the considerable price difference between a HDD and SSD, 33% faster transfer rate isn't hugely important for the average consumer.

SSD might have some advantages, but it also has disadvantages and I'm still not personally impressed with the drives viability over long periods of use.

Edit: I also fail to see how USB3 is really relevant, especially considering that eSATA is capable of providing up to 6Gb/s, compared to the 3.2Gb/s estimated by the USB 3.0 specification after protocol overhead. Regardless of HDD or SSD, USB3 still isn't the deciding factor if you're looking for high transfer speeds with external drives.

<comment><USER5> I disagree about the long-term reliability of SSDs. Intel's X25-M has a 5 year warranty. They claim that writing 100GB/day for 5 years will not cause it to fail. If we compare the technologies in terms of reliability, flash has three things going for it:

1\. Flash degrades predictably over time. Manufacturers know the average number of write cycles a cell can sustain and design SSDs with "spare" flash and wear leveling. They can engineer the expected lifetime of the drive. Hard drives usually fail spontaneously.

2\. The most common failure mode for flash cells is to fail on write. Even if a cell gets "stuck," the data can still be read. Hard drives fail on read or write, and in most cases all data on the drive is lost.

3\. A 3.5" 7200RPM drive's platters spin at 70mph on the outside edge. The head gap is measured in millionths of an inch, making them very susceptible to vibration and shock. Since SSDs have no moving parts, they're practically immune.

There are really only two disadvantages of SSDs: cost and capacity.

<comment><USER6> Most hard drive faults do not cause an instant loss of all data on the drive. (Look at SMART reallocated sectors/events. Take 50 of your drives that are "working just fine" and I'll bet that 10 of them have reallocated sectors.)

<comment><USER5> From <http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf>

"Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count."

Most drives that fail have no SMART errors. In other words they fail spontaneously. BTW, if you have a drive with even a single error, replace it now or at least make sure you have a spare on hand:

"After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without scan errors."

"After their first reallocation, drives are over 14 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without reallocation counts, making the critical threshold for this parameter also one."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stealing Facebook access_tokens using CSRF in device login flow - <AUTHOR> https://www.josipfranjkovic.com/blog/hacking-facebook-csrf-device-login-flow <comment><USER2> The circle jerk discussion about the rewards paid out by bug bounties on this site is getting ridiculous. It has been talked about ad nauseum and it seems that most people crying that the reward isn't high enough because "you could make so much more on the black market" don't actually know anything about how vulnerabilities are monetized on the black market.

<comment><USER3> I'd be curious to know what those same folks think regular security staff should be paid.

From another thread here, the author talking about the time involved:

>Two to three hours discovering and writing the initial report, couple more hours (unsuccessfully) trying to escalate it using pre-approved apps.

I'll round his estimate up to 6-8 hours, or basically a normal work day:

$5000 / 8 = $625 an hour

$625 * 40(hour work-week) * 50(weeks) = $1,250,000 annually

Let's say it took an entire week's worth of time (comes out at $125/hour):

$5000 * 50 = $250,000

Is that range wildly out of line for what Facebook would potentially be paying for a full-time employee? The actual salary number would probably be lower, this would be including the cost taxes/insurance/perks/etc.

Even as a contractor, where the "expect to bill ~1000 hours a year" rule of thumb is/was common, puts the range at $125,000-$625,000.

Seems as though if you can reliably find organizations willing to pay these amounts and have the skill/luck/grit to grind out vulnerabilities at those companies you'll make a decent living. Or, put another way, these company's are paying bounties comparable to what the same research would have cost coming from a staff member.

<comment><USER4> Why would you calculate hourly rate? I'd rather try to calculate the economic impact that this could have for the company, especially marketing costs to repair bad PR if something like private messages, pictures, info, etc. get breached. Do you think Facebook would spend $5,000 for that? Hell no, marketing budgets are in the magnitude of millions of dollars... I'm in no way supporting to exploit these vulnerabilities, and kudos to the OP (and many others) for finding these bugs and reporting to their companies instead of exploiting. I just think that big tech companies should pay bigger bounties.

<comment><USER3> The hourly rate is to make an apples-to-apples comparison to someone whose full-time job is to do that kind of security work, either salaried or contracted.

Would it make sense to award bonuses to every in-house security researcher based on an estimated, hypothetical worst-case cost? It doesn't take much imagination to see how that reasoning applies to other positions. Do accountants get big bonuses for avoiding multi-million-dollar errors? Lawyers for avoiding costly lawsuits? Operations (IT and otherwise) for keeping infrastructure running? Customer service for assuaging disastrous public interactions? Stretched to absurdity, would you pay for a taxi based on how badly you need to get to point B?

I believe saying "preventing these kinds of problems (doing this work) is what we pay you for" is a reasonable conclusion and paying a market rate for that general value makes more sense versus calculating a kind of commission per individual contribution. That does have a certain appeal (and I wouldn't mind seeing a discussion about it) but I haven't gotten the impression that's the perspective of those who think all* bug bounties should be higher.

*: Added caveat as I'd bet every researcher can name companies that pay poorly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think $5,000 is a joke, this is a serious vulnerability... Despite this, congratulations for finding it and reporting directly to them, the right way. If it's possible to know, how many hours did you spend researching this?

<comment><USER5> I think $5,000 is a lot of money. I'd be pretty happy if they sent that to me. In years past, companies would just give you a nice pat on the back.

<comment><USER6> What if someone else was offering $10,000 for Facebook bugs, so they could exploit them? This bug could probably result in more than $5,000 in damages to the Facebook brand.

<comment><USER7> _But someone isn 't._ That's the point. These bugs don't go for $10k on the black market.

<comment><USER8> That's odd considering the potential monetary damage of such bugs can far exceed $10k.

<comment><USER9> One can smash a car up with a sledgehammer. Is the value of a sledgehammer equal to the value of a car?

<comment><USER8> > _Is the value of a sledgehammer equal to the value of a car?_

My previous post was poorly worded; I didn't mean to imply equality.

To use your analogy, valuing a serious vulnerability on a platform that has 1.65B users in the $5-10k range is tantamount to selling a 30lb sledge hammer for a dollar.

<comment><USER10> But what if producing a sledgehammer only cost 50 cents? Then people would sell sledgehammers for a dollar or less.

<comment><USER8> Rather than torture this analogy further:

Obviously exploit pricing is generally efficient and adheres to free market principles. That said, it's hypothetically possible that an exploit against a large tech company could sell for far more if the circumstances are right, considering the price to damage ratio is so skewed in addition to the unique nature of each exploit.

Therefore, large tech companies don't really have much to lose by paying far more than they currently do on bounties.

Granted, eliminating what's largely a hypothetical edge case is not the primary benefit to paying higher; incentivizing far more white hat researchers is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The black market is a false dichotomy. Either you need the money for your work, then negotiate a reasonable price, or you don't, then disclosing it for free might actually helps someone not to be lowballed by BigCo the next time.

There really should be a bug marketplace, instead of one side having all the power and paying pennies.

<comment><USER12> Markets aren't magical. They route resources, they don't create them from thin air. If Facebook is ultimately the only organization that realizes $5000+ in value from a vulnerability, then no matter how you structure the marketplace, it isn't going discover a higher price for that flaw.

If you believe otherwise, you're missing a business opportunity. Go create a "bug market" for Facebook and Google serversides. It's not illegal to buy vulnerabilities, or to sell them (so long as you're reasonably sure they're not going to be used as part of a specific criminal enterprise --- but don't worry, if you stick a $5000 price tag on a serverside bug, or even a $500 price tag, you can be pretty sure it won't be used by criminals).

<comment><USER11> By submitting a bug through a bug bounty system you place the reward into Facebook's hands. Following the same argument you can say they can offer $1, because they are the only organization interested in the bug. After all exploiting a vulnerability puts you on the wrong side of the law.

However I do believe saying you discovered a pretty serious bug by putting it on a market sends a strong message. Your system is vulnerable and you are too cheap to pay up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Out of curiosity, was there any particular reason why you decided to write a blog post about this vulnerability 5 months after the bug was fixed?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to move from Blogspot to a personal domain, but kept delaying it for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> so you got paid $5,000 ? How long since the first report did it take for that to reach your bank account?

<comment><AUTHOR> The bug was reported on December 8th, 2015 and fixed on February 18th, 2016 which is an unusually long time for Facebook. The bounty reached my account during the middle of March, but Facebook has recently changed their bounty payment processor to Bugcrowd, and now they have weekly payments.

<comment><USER15> Weekly payments as opposed to a lump sum? Why? I can't imagine cashflow is an issue for them.

<comment><USER16> I suspect franjkovic means that there's a queue of lump sums to get deposited to their respective owners, and payments in that queue get processed once per week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well done, i hope you made some €€€ on it...</comment>


Feedback needed for HTML5 game with socket.io and vert.x - <AUTHOR> http://wintheplanet.com

<comment><USER2> We are implementing bidirectional communication for the game using Socket.io on the client side and Vert.x on server side.

Our main concern is to distribute correctly the communication with the users with a AWS load balancer, having more than one server instances for the game.

Any suggestions on how to do that in a scalable way?

</comment><comment><USER3> Great, another page chastising me for using a browser that isnt from"the 21st century". Oh, wait, I'm on a brand new Android device, maybe it's the developer who isn't in the 21st century.

/mobilerant

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, we have the same error page for IE and mobile browsers (we don't support mobile yet).

just changed the message for less sarcastic one U_U</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone run antivirus on their Macbook? - <AUTHOR> If yes, what would you recommend? <comment><USER2> I don't. Been running a Mac laptop since 2003.</comment>


Tests Cast Doubts on iPad and Kindle Restrictions - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/disruptions-tests-cast-doubt-on-fcc-rules-on-kindle-and-ipad-html/

<comment><USER3> I can see the logic in wanting to keep the cabin area uncluttered during landing and takeoff, that debris could really do some damage if it all went flying, but the same logic is true regarding all hand-held electronics and most books too (imagine getting hit in the face with a hardcover copy of The C++ Programming Language)

<comment><USER4> I'd prefer that to having to learn C++ from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reads like terrible journalism. "This is one metric used for safety and this one device can't possibly violate that one metric, so the ban is arbitrary." Taking the words of this one test of one device and then jumping to the conclusion that the FAA restriction is arbitrary is deceptive trolling.

[http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interf...](http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interfere_textonly.html)

"Emissions at the operating frequency were as high as 60 dB over the airplane equipment emission limits, but the other emissions were generally within airplane equipment emission limits. One concern about these other emissions from cell phones is that they may interfere with the operation of an airplane communication or navigation system if the levels are high enough."

I would agree that the recommendations are strongly based in paranoia, and I'm completely ok with that. Being based on inertia, and policy vs the latest science is something no one wants to see, but it will take a lot more than a NYT pseudo-test to change it.

</comment><comment><USER6> While I'm just as annoyed as other frequent fliers in having to turn off my devices, it's not as simple as this article would have us believe - <USER2> example, it's not just power output, it's also the frequency of the radio emissions (do electric razors have quartz oscillators radiating in the MHz or GHz ranges?)

If you get a chance, read through this recent Ars Technica thread discussion these issues (if you don't have time, start on page 4), there's a lot of info, including links to NASA research, about this topic.

edit: to save readers some time, here are a couple of links from that thread-

<http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/publications/callback/cb_237.htm>

[http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2001006...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20010066904_2001108092.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> > The F.A.A. does allow some electronics during takeoff and landing. Portable > voice recorders, hearing aids, heart pacemakers and electric shavers are > permitted during all times of a flight

For pacemakers, do they have a choice? Could the user reasonably turn off his pacemaker during takeoff and landing if he wanted to?

<comment><USER8> Electric shavers are a really odd addition to that list.

<comment><USER9> They are on the list probably exactly because they look like weird addition. Electric shavers were probably first consumer devices that look simple (and thus not relevant for EMI/EMC) but often contain surprisingly complex switched mode power supplies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess I am so jaded by the FAA, etc that my reaction to bringing things to a lab, getting contradictory letters, etc is simply, "..."

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate someone doing the legwork of articulating the inanity of these rules, I truly do. It seems to me though something akin to bringing carbon dating or geographical records to a young-earth society meeting.

</comment><comment><USER11> Meh, this is going to be back and forth. I'm all for this rule, not just because of "undevided attention" but unfortunately there's always going to be some sort of device every now and then that'll throw off navigation equipment because someone messed up.

I've heard a story where the chief pilot for a large company with a fleet of corporate jets banned Blackberrys because everytime the plane was landing and the CEO was onboard, the plane lost it DME localizer (older type of aircraft navigation beacon). No biggie, but in a worst case scenario that could easily become an issue.

<comment><USER12> > _there's always going to be_

If that were true, all terrorists would have to do is keep their devices on. This cell phone rule dates from when the airline wanted you to swipe your card and pay $10 to use the seatback phone.</comment></comment>


The secret world of microwave networks - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion, a couple of days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12862789](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12862789)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Stretching between London and Frankfurt, there is a private, mysterious > network that is twice as fast as the normal Internet

In latency, perhaps. Microwave networks are famous for the minimal bandwidth they provide though.

It's also not even a case of using a shorter route. Speed of light in fiber =~ 2/3c, speed of light in "free space" (atmosphere) =~ 99%. On the exact same route, microwaves will be faster, with one tiny caveat. Light can be regenerated through a site (retransmitted without any delay, ie. pure optical regen), microwaves cannot. So in reality the situation is:

0-50 km: fiber wins, hands down (with one exception: cell antennas. Since you already have power + antenna approval, it can be cheaper to just microwave the signal to a central point versus get a fiber connection) 50-500 km: microwave wins, but wouldn't win on the same route (fiber routes within cities have to take the long and winding road due to approvals and obstacles) 500km+: due to the fact that it isn't known how to keep microwave dishes stable on the ocean that is near-inevitable on these distances, fiber wins

Some time in the future free space optical transmissions over either LEO satellites or solar-powered planes will win out over microwave terrestrial transmissions. Free space optics also have the massive advantage that they do not require approvals, either for the planes (vs very very tall masts for microwave, which definitely need approval and often face local opposition), nor do they require approval for the transmission (microwave transmissions at the power levels required for these distances require approval). Since free space optical transmissions have far greater bandwidth, I'm hopeful that we'll be seeing internet latency reduce as well. Also, while satellites aren't cheap, one satellite has about the same price as 50-100 km undersea fiber. Therefore a 500 satellite constellation is cheaper than laying a single cable from London to New York. Of course, fiber will remain the bandwidth king for the time being.</comment>


Show HN: Verilog RTL Coding Guidelines - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programmable_Logic/Verilog_RTL_Coding_Guidelines

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this after the discussion on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935597).

Feel free to ask any Verilog question or point any rule I missed (I'm sure there are many).</comment>