Ron Graham has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=6244 <comment><USER3> Very sad to hear about this. Graham apparently was the informal "administrator" who awarded the remaining prizes for problems set forth by Paul Erdős.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> Throughout his career, Erdős would offer payments for solutions to > unresolved problems. These ranged from $25 for problems that he felt were > just out of the reach of the current mathematical thinking (both his and > others), to several thousand dollars for problems that were both difficult > to attack and mathematically significant. There are thought to be at least a > thousand remaining unsolved problems, though there is no official or > comprehensive list. The offers remain active despite Erdős's death; Ronald > Graham is the (informal) administrator of solutions. A solver can get either > an original check signed by Erdős before his death (for memento only, cannot > be cashed) or a cashable check from Graham.

I wonder if anyone else will continue the tradition.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s)

<comment><USER4> Maybe his wife, Fan Chung, who was also a close collaborator of Erdős (13 joint papers), or one of Ron's students will continue the tradition (maybe Steve Butler).

Very sad news in any case.

</comment></comment><comment> rough-sea In 2002, I was an undergraduate in mathematics at UCSD. I had taken Fan Chung's graph theory class and was captivated. I asked her if I could help with any projects, said I knew perl and python. She handed me off to a graduate student who ask me to build a web crawler. They wanted to analyze the www graph. I was introduced to Ron in the hallway by Fan. I knew of him - <USER2> was one of the most famous professors in the department. I was honored to shake his hand. I never made much progress on the www crawler. I regretted my laziness later in my subpar grad school.

That's all. Just a small memory from a random person.

<comment><USER5> I was there around the same time and I took a discrete math course he taught.

I wasn't a math major and had no idea who he was, but I remember some students mentioning that he was a well-regarded mathematician. He was a good teacher as well.

Fan, who was also Ron's wife, has a webpage about him: [http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~fan/ron/](http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~fan/ron/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very sad. If you haven't seen them, many of his Numberphile videos are quite interesting:

[https://www.numberphile.com/videos/ron-graham- playlist](https://www.numberphile.com/videos/ron-graham-playlist)

Here is the one on his famous, eponymous number:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8bihEe3nA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8bihEe3nA)

<comment><USER7> Brady posted a nice tribute: [https://www.bradyharanblog.com/blog/the-day-i- met-ron-graham](https://www.bradyharanblog.com/blog/the-day-i-met-ron-graham)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> He co-authored Concrete Mathematics, which has been recommended by readers on HN:

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

</comment><comment><USER9> Ron was a wonderful guy - approachable, kind, creative, engaging, and brilliant. He's a model for all of us: welcoming to novices and experts, communicating with clarity, and encouraging a sense of whimsey. I will miss him deeply.

</comment><comment><USER10> Besides being a famous mathematician he was an avid juggler. He inspired Steve Mills to invent what is known as Mills' Mess. Here is an old quote from him regarding math and juggling:

 _" The applications aren't the point," Graham says. "I look at mathematics pretty globally. It represents the ultimate structure and order. And I associate doing with [sic] mathematics with control. Jugglers like to be able to control a situation. There's a well-known saying in juggling: 'The trouble is that the balls go where you throw them. 'It's just you. It's not the phases of the moon, or someone else's fault. It's like chess. It's all out in the open. Mathematics is really there for you to discover."_

\-- Ronald Graham

Quoted from:

[http://juggling.org/bin/news2html/1996/02/05-220104](http://juggling.org/bin/news2html/1996/02/05-220104)

<comment><USER11> > The trouble is that the balls go where you throw them. 'It's just you.

Ditto for computer programs: they always do exactly what you tell them to do, which is rarely what you really want.

<comment><USER12> > Ditto for computer programs: they always do exactly what you tell them to > do, which is rarely what you really want.

I guess this is a joke since I think you are good at programming, but on a more serious note if anyone actually has this problem they might want to change to a different language.

With a few different languages I actually feel they do what I want 99% of the time or more.

I'll leave out naming any names here as I'm not trying to change anyone who is currently happy where they are.

<comment><USER11> Every bug _ever_ was a computer program that did exactly what the programmer told the computer to do but not what was intended. I'd like to meet the guy or girl that never coded up something with a bug, even the greats mess up.

Donald Knuth famously wrote: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.", see also: the doctrine of testing.

<comment><USER13> > Every bug ever was a computer program that did exactly what the programmer > told the computer to do [...]

Ironically, the first ever computer bug does not fit your claim [0].

[0]: [https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/september/9/](https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/september/9/)

<comment><USER11> I knew someone would mention that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Concrete Mathematics was recommended to me as a fresh grad by my first mentor, and it had a profound impact on how I approached problems and improved my mathematical literacy immensely. It is probably the most approachable "high level" maths text I own, and after spending some of my career doing technical writing involving mathematics the one thing I've learned is that it takes a masterful mind to be a communicator of the abstract, and Ron Graham was one of the greatest masters of that skill of our time.

Truly a loss.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ron was great. I'll cherish our emails back and fourth.

what he did to facilitate Erdos' way of life has always made me envious of his altruism. I wish I could be that good of a fellow human.

<comment> core-questions Anywhere I can read on that?

<comment><USER16> Somewhat in the book The Man who Loved Only Numbers[1], it's a biography of Paul Erdos who was mostly homeless and spent his life travelling around other mathematicians' homes staying with them a few days at a time, and Ron Graham did a lot of looking after him and his life, pay, bureacracy, etc, so gets quite a few mentions.

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

<comment><USER17> Read this a while ago, quite an enjoyable read. Recommended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know what he died of?

The Reddit discussion at [https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hmngx7/ron_graham_pas...](https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hmngx7/ron_graham_passed_away_earlier_this_evening_at/) has comments by puleshan aka Steve Butler giving the time and place of death as 7:30 PM Monday night in La Jolla. But nowhere can I find a cause of death.

(The obvious guess given his age and the times being COVID-19...just like Conway.)

<comment><USER19> He commented "his health had been in decline for the last few years but accelerated dramatically in the last few weeks. Not covid." [[https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hmngx7/ron_graham_pas...](https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hmngx7/ron_graham_passed_away_earlier_this_evening_at/fx6yklp/)]

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's via Ron that I have my Erdos number (of the first kind) of 2. He was warm, welcoming, kind, enthusiastic, engaging, and a wonderful person to be with, let alone work with.

I wrote[0] about how I first met him, and while we didn't meet often, it was always a pleasure, and he always greeted me warmly. I'm sad to think I won't see him again. I'll miss him.

[0] [https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/MeetingRonGraham.html?tg08hn](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/MeetingRonGraham.html?tg08hn)

</comment><comment><USER21> I took his discrete math course :) He was an amazing professor and it was such an honor to learn from him. He showed off his juggling skills on the last day of lecture and it was also quite impressive!

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, I didn't know this was the same Graham as the Graham's Number[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number)

<comment><USER23> WaitButWhy has a great longform piece explaining how big Graham's number is. Like, make your stomach drop, big. Bonus, it contains an explanation of Knuth notation.

[https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams- number.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html)

<comment><USER24> And then you get Tree(3) which when compared means "[Graham's number] might as well be 1".

[https://joshkerr.com/tree3-is-a-big-number-i-mean-really- big...](https://joshkerr.com/tree3-is-a-big-number-i-mean-really-big/)

Maths is wacky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow, very sad to hear this. I am a big fan of Professor Graham. I owned many of his books - Magical Mathematics, Rudiments of Ramsey Theory, Concrete Mathematics, Handbook of Combinatorics. I attended an AMS conference in San Diego a while back and asked him to sign my Erdos on Graphs book after listening to his talk. Professor Chung happened to be around and he waved her over to sign my book too.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just here to pay tribute to this incredible human being. So many accomplishments. Brilliant mathematician and juggler. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER27> While he was never my professor at UCSD, the respect the faculty had for him was palpable. His name must've been mentioned a dozen times throughout my undergrad, so much so I decided to look for his (empty) office in the CSE building one day. We're all fortunate for his contribution and my prayers are with his family.

</comment><comment><USER28> My M.S. thesis was based upon his pioneering paper, the first paper to analyze the performance of a heuristic, "Bounds on Multiprocessing Timing Anomalies.", 1968. Thank you, Ron Graham! I was also privileged once to review a random graphs paper from Fan Chung his wife!

</comment><comment><USER29> I recall reading about him as a teen in the great little bio book [https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-People-Interviews- Donald...](https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-People-Interviews-Donald- Albers/dp/1568813406) There's a brief preview you can find in the Look Inside Amazon feature, navigating to the table of contents, which lists Ronald L. Graham on pg 105.

Very entertaining read.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wow. Conway and now Graham.

</comment><comment><USER31> Paul Hoffman talks about Ron Graham's house and Erdos in this interesting talk about The Man Who Loved Only Numbers:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9634A0iBw7w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9634A0iBw7w)

</comment><comment><USER32> [http://archive.is/GyARs](http://archive.is/GyARs)

</comment><comment><USER33> Thank you for all of it, Dr. Graham!

What a life.

</comment><comment><USER34> He's a great teacher. I miss him. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER35> :-(</comment>


Sorting functions implemented in C as std qsort() format - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/p1v0t/Sort <comment><USER2> The overview table should list some important properties I find myself comparing when selecting a sort algo: (a) stack usage, (b) heap usage, (c) whether the algo is stable.

E.g., I am a big fan of heap sort, because the implementation is very simple, and non-recursive (O(1) stack), uses no heap, and has worst-case time O(log n). It is almost perfect, but it is not stable. Now, mergesort fixes that stability issue (and its implementation is usually also very simple), but is often recursive (like this implementation) and it usually requires 'malloc()', because it cannot easily be run in-place. In an overview list, this dilemma would be nicely visible.

</comment><comment><USER3> Repo has no license.

<comment><USER4> That is a problem. Thankfully, the language in Github's terms of service mitigates this a bit, although it'd be still ideal for the author to add a license too:

"If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking)."

[https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of- service/#4-...](https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of- service/#4-license-grant-to-us)

<comment><USER5> I've never heard a less realistic / more cop-out licensing policy. You can reproduce it, but only on github. You can't even clone it locally (as the license still applies to your fork).

It's only there so you can't sue GitHub for not detecting the lack of license and disabling the fork button.

<comment><USER6> There's nonprivate repositories with a disabled fork button?! I've never seen that. I didn't think it was possible to disable forking on github, I know that you can on bitbucket.

<comment><USER5> That's my point :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder why the better sorting algos are never compared, like for small integer indices counting sort is linear, for larger indices radix sort is optimal and for parallel sorting there exist also special variants.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool! The function pointers bother me a bit, but hey, I'm a C++ programmer, and maybe link-time optimization is there now.

<comment><USER9> I've grown to like the plain C version. It has a very modular interface (doesn't require the sorted items to implements a certain protocol, i.e. "operator<"), and doesn't compile new code for each new type. (Often code size is the most important).

I think the worst case I measured is a factor of 2 in std::sort vs qsort on bare integers. On larger types it will be less. That's acceptable to me. Sorting is seldom the bottleneck (it's only important to _do_ sort in many situations).</comment></comment>


9-year-old kid sells his Apple shares to buy Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/kid-sells-apple-shares-buys-bitcoin/

<comment><USER2> I think the exact moment I knew housing was a huge bubble was when I saw a 9 year old on tv waving $50K checks around saying how easy it was to flip houses.

<comment><USER3> Its easy to call it a bubble/scheme because most things usually are. The fundamental difference with bitcoin is that it is unlike anything the world has ever seen. Given the limited quantity and proven utility of it, many people believe it is still undervalued and maintain price targets in the tens of thousands upwards to hundreds of thousands. These targets are derived from simple calculations.

The only question is whether or not bitcoin will maintain its utility going forward. As long as it does then the value will continue to rise.

Do yourself a favor and hedge your one-sided, possibly wrong opinion and own some BTC sooner than later.

<comment><USER4> Here's my concern about the "utility" of bitcoin. It's just as valuable at transferring money over the internet if it's worth $1000/btc or $0.0001/btc. The utility is unaffected by the price.. and there's not so much scarcity that people can't "use it" to transfer money no matter what the price is.

So even if you're right that this is a super useful invention for transferring wealth, I don't see why that would drive the price up.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should you stick with java 8 in the enterprise? - <AUTHOR> As a startup working on a java-based application with components to be deployed on desktops in enterprise, should I stick with java 8 ? It is somehow obsolete, but still seems to be the default. What do you think ? <comment><USER2> Java 8 is end-of-life. You can't get updates to security issues unless you pay oracle.

Either move to Java 11, or move to another platform.</comment>


FlipCode is back, after 7 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.flipcode.com/misc/fc3_announce/ <comment><USER2> I can't upvote this enough. Flipcode had some really great programming articles on it, especially for the intermediate programmer. Many of the articles are applicable to much more than game programming. Really good practical stuff, not what I see on many blogs that people attempt to sell me on as replacements for learning things from books.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agree. So much good stuff there. I can't even begin to name home many times I've referenced articles there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good stuff! I loved flipcode back in the days...

For old time's sake, there is also the wonderful page of Hugo Elias - <http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/> \- still relevant...

</comment><comment><USER5> This is fantastic. I started out learning from flipcode's articles years ago, and they were always great (I keep a personal mirror of the articles just to go back and read now and then). I'm just really glad to see a site that was so important to me brought back, especially since I hadn't found any other community that really took its place. GameDev.net was useful, but the community seemed impenetrable and often hostile to newcomers. I hope flipcode turns out as awesome as it was back then.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congrats, Kurt! An entire generation of game devs bestow their most humble appreciation for showing us the path to enlightenment. Hopefully the new content will reflect the changing state of the field, for example: OpenGL ES 2.0 hacks for smartphones and WebGL.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great news. I wrote some articles and made other contributions back when Kurt had it live. Had a shirt too! My #1 hangout for that time, invaluable resource for aspiring coders. Today's game DEV landscape has really widened, though. Years ago you could be certain that a C++ vector class was used by anyone, but today there are flash and webgl and iOS and android... Makes me wonder if there's still a common thread at a code level.

</comment><comment><USER8> A lot of the content on flipcode has found new relevance in JS/canvas games and demos where many classic software rendering techniques can be implemented on top of the 2d context. In many ways I find the challenge of implementing a renderer from top to bottom far more interesting than twiddling with high- level APIs such as WebGL.

</comment><comment><USER9> Flipcode had some amazing stuff, and taught me a lot. I can't believe it's been away for 7 years.

</comment><comment><USER10> I remember the day when flipcode closed down. I used to visit everyday to see the image of the day (before gamedev had it). Hope it attracts an active community again

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm flipping somersaults! I love Flicode, and was very active there during it's peak. Looking forward to it's return.

</comment><comment><USER12> Will we see the return of IAMBRIANFELLOWS?

</comment><comment><USER13> perhaps its time to bring "the game programming megasite" back, too</comment>


I'm shocked how hard it is to generate positive text about Muslims from GPT-3 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/abidlabs/status/1291165311329341440 <comment><USER2> Based on what I see on news websites, this isn't really shocking. It is sadly a reflection of how Muslims are reported on in the English speaking world. GPT3 was trained on this kind of data.

<comment><USER3> "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

― Anaïs Nin</comment></comment>


2009 flu pandemic in the United States - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_in_the_United_States <comment><USER2> The CDC's worst case estimate was 214 Million Infected, 1.7 Million Dead

[https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case- coro...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coronavirus- model-210m-infected-1-7m-dead.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure how they got 1.7 million dead as the worst case scenario. That implies a mortality rate of 0.7%.

Mortality rates for Covid19/SARS2 are estimated to be closer to 3.5% by the WHO, a 35x jump. At 214 million infected, the worst case scenario should be at least 7.5 million. But I believe the 3.5% estimate also assumes that hospitals are able to provide intensive care for all critical patients.

The US only has 100k ICU beds, and SARS2 has an ICU rate about 10%. SARS2 patients typically need 2-4 weeks, meaning that the entire US healthcare system can only handle about 2 million SARS2 infections per month. In order to keep a mortality rate of 3.5%, the US would need to spread out those 214 million infections over 9 years.

Conclusion: The CDC's worst case estimate of 1.7 million deaths is completely incongruent with their worst case estimate of 214 million infections.

<comment> _-___________-_ 3.5% just doesn't make sense based on any of the case-fatality-rate data we've seen so far combined with the estimates of what proportion of infections are being detected as cases. The UK government's chief medical adviser expects the real fatality rate to be around 0.6%, which is a lot easier to explain with the data than 3.5%.

<comment><USER3> [https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/6/20-0320_article](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/6/20-0320_article)

"The case-fatality risks, when adjusted for a 13-day lag time from reporting to death, were 3.5% in China; 0.8% in China, excluding Hubei Province; 4.2% in the group of 82 countries, territories, and areas; and 0.6% for the cruise ship (Table). Our result for China, excluding Hubei Province, is similar to a previous estimate of 0.9% (95% CI 0.6% - 1.3%) by using a time-delay adjusted case-fatality risk for the same area"

This is the only research data I could find. Do have other data? I have multiple sources citing the WHO estimating 3.5%, but I was unable to find any first hand material from the WHO that said 3.5%.

The information above - from the CDC, which I consider to be biased and underplaying the situation - has 0.6% as the lowest number, and 4.2% as the highest number.

But honestly none of the data I just went digging through felt comfortable.

Another thing to remember is that the case-fatality-rates we are seeing in most areas are because the hospital infrastructure can keep up with the number of infections. If the US gets over 1 million infections, the hospitals will not be able to keep up and mortality rates will spike significantly.

<comment> _-___________-_ Wait, you're talking about case fatality rates. I thought the above discussion was about the real fatality rate. Obviously CFR is going to be higher because you're excluding all the infections that didn't become cases - which are also the infections least likely to lead to death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without quarantines, COVID-19 will be 280 million infected and 6 million deaths in the US alone.

<comment><USER5> 1) Why are you assuming it will be 280 Million and not stop at around 59 Million like before?

2) Why choose a number like 6% when it's currently at 3.8%?

3) Why are we experiencing so much more panic over this virus?

<comment><USER6> > 3) Why are we experiencing so much more panic over this virus?

Italy's CFR is over 7%. They've implemented triage in Lombardy where they won't even consider someone over the age of 65, because they're out of beds and ventilators and want to ensure patients with the best chances for survival make it.

Amongst those with symptoms, this virus has an 80% hospitalization rate.

This virus is a test, and we're going to be found severely unprepared.

Give me a moment and I'll go dig up my citations.

Edit: I was wrong about the hospitalization rate. It appears to be 20% [1]

One source cites a CFR of 5% in Italy as of two days ago. [2]

[1] [https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/people-have- been-...](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/people-have-been-trying- underplay-why-coronavirus-different-flu-n1156801)

[2] [https://www.livescience.com/why-italy-coronavirus-deaths- so-...](https://www.livescience.com/why-italy-coronavirus-deaths-so-high.html)

<comment><USER7> 80% of symptomatic cases needing hospitalization seems very unlikely. That sounds like a biased testing sample that's not even testing anyone that isn't extremely sick. South Korean data seems vastly more comprehensive. Most data I've seen puts the upper bound on hospitalization rate at 20% which is still insanely high given how high the R0 is.

<comment><USER8> Avg age of tests in S. Korea are around 25, avg age in Italy around 65. That makes ALL the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are 2 things happening at once that seem to be causing a rift in online discussions:

1\. It seems like people are severely underrating the flu and always have been. Remember when we closed all restaurants and bars and suspended all sports events when the flu killed an estimated 1 million people in 1968-1969? No you don't because society seemed to have shrugged that one off. Ditto for many years when the flu kills upwards of 600k worldwide [1] 2\. The reported CFR (Case Fatality Rates) across different countries is all over the place causing a lot of panic and overstated mortality rates. Countries like Italy report almost 7% whereas in Germany and South Korea, the CFR makes Covid-19 look like no big deal (Closer to 0.1%). I suspect that's because Italy is well under counting the true denominator, while countries like SK have tested thousands of people per day making their data much more comprehensive.

There's something unique about this year's outbreak that seems to resonate deeply with more people. Ultimately it's definitely not "just the flu" but it's closer to that then a guaranteed death sentence.

We may see more damage from the secondary effects (people losing jobs, runs on medicine and supplies causing people to die) than from the virus itself.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H3...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H3N2#Hong_Kong_Flu) [2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019%E2%80%9320_cor...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_outbreak_data)

<comment><USER10> What I believe unique about this year's outbreak is that it is the first "social" pandemic; where in everyone is connected to a nonstop stream of both information and misinformation regarding its development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> From How the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic Compares with COVID-19:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-10/how- co...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-10/how-coronavirus- compares-with-2009-s-h1n1-in-spread-and-Freaction)

For example: Why was H1N1 allowed to spread around the world more or less unchecked, while countries are going to far greater lengths to try to halt Covid-19? Why did the WHO call H1N1 a pandemic but not Covid-19? Isn't 12,469 deaths a lot worse than the 26 that have been attributed to Covid-19 in the U.S. so far?

That last one is the simplest to answer: Covid-19 is near the beginning of its spread in the U.S., and thus cannot be compared with H1N1's effect over a full year. If the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 is only 12,469 a year from now, that will likely be counted as a great success. The legitimate worry is that it could be many, many times higher, because Covid-19 is so much deadlier for those who get it than the 2009 H1N1 influenza was.

How much deadlier is still unknown, but of the cases reported to the WHO so far 3.4% have resulted in fatalities. That's probably misleadingly high because there are so many unreported cases, and in South Korea, which has done the best job of keeping up with the spread of the virus through testing, the fatality rate so far is about 0.7%. But even that is 35 times worse than H1N1 in 2009 and 2010. Multiply 12,469 by 35 and you get 436,415 — which would amount to the biggest U.S. infectious-disease death toll since the 1918 flu. Hospitalization rates are also many times higher for Covid-19, meaning that if it spread as widely as H1N1 it would overwhelm the U.S. health-care system.

That's one very important reason governments (and stock markets) around the world have reacted so much more strongly to Covid-19 than to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Another reason is somewhat more hope-inspiring. It's that public health experts generally don't think influenza can be controlled once it starts spreading, other than with a vaccine, whereas several Asian countries seem to have successfully turned back the coronavirus tide, for now at least.

Influenza can't be controlled because as much as half the transmission of the disease occurs before symptoms appear. With Covid-19 that proportion seems to be lower, meaning that even though it's more contagious than influenza once symptoms appear, it may be possible to control by testing widely and quickly isolating those who have the disease.

</comment><comment><USER12> Gosh, the memories. Swine flu caused me to black out for a whole day and yet it seemed to bounce off other people as if it were the common cold.

That's the biggest unknown about the new coronavirus disease for me: how ill am I actually going to get? Flu seems so unpredictable.

<comment><USER7> the level of viral load in the initial exposure has a lot to do with how sick you will get. If a sick person coughs in your face that's much worse than just touching a lightly contaminated cardboard box and getting it that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why? Why is this relevant?

It seems the reason for this is to downplay covid-19. As if that outcome is what the whole world is freaking out over.

If anything you should see those numbers and ask yourself. What if it were exponentially worse?

That is also under the assumption that hospitals will not overrun. Which they will.

Don't plan on having any injuries this year.

<comment><USER14> To the contrary. That one was _that_ bad and everything points to this being significantly worse. That's a good reason to post it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I felt when someone pointed me to the article. I noticed people were still going to birthday parties and other social events when they really should be practicing social distancing.

Even a milder flu like in 2009 could reach 59 million and COVID-19 can be exponentially worse. That is really the only take away. We need to discuss this in the open to bring that truth to light. I agree with some of the folks here who said many could see it another way and take light view of the situation. What exactly can make them see it differently though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> COVID-19 is nothing like flu. There are still many unknowns about this virus. We are still not sure of its origins. We have no idea of the long-term effects of it. Some of those who "recovered" already in need to have lung transplants, many have severely damaged lungs. It is difficult to predict how many of those who recovered would live long and healthy lives.

If you are scared shitless and panicking - you should be. Protect yourself and your loved ones. Stay home.

<comment><USER16> > COVID-19 is nothing like flu.

It is precisely a variant of coronavirus flu. Why do you think otherwise?

<comment><USER17> It isn't any kind of "flu".

Coronaviruses are in a family that typically causes what we call the common cold. Flu is caused by influenza virus, which is a completely separate family of viruses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I came across this tweet from Stephen Schwartz which he posted after the global health security team was disbanded by John Bolton:

[https://twitter.com/atomicanalyst/status/994696175575068672?...](https://twitter.com/atomicanalyst/status/994696175575068672?s=21)

"When the next pandemic occurs (and make no mistake, it will) and the federal government is unable to respond in a coordinated and effective fashion to protect the lives of US citizens and others, this decision by John Bolton and Donald Trump will be why."

And he links to the following article.

[https://t.co/iMSzopSRaI?amp=1](https://t.co/iMSzopSRaI?amp=1)

The tweet is creepily prescient.

</comment><comment><USER19> Coronavirus vs. swine flu (H1N1) – 2009-2010 Swine flu is the same strain of flu that wiped out 1.7% of the global population in 1918. It was declared a pandemic again in June 2009, and an estimated 11-21% of the world population contracted it.

Fortunately, the CFR is considerably lower than in the previous pandemic, with 0.1-0.5% of cases resulting in death. 18,500 of these deaths were laboratory- confirmed, but estimates are as high as 151,700-575,400 globally.

50-80% of severe cases were found in people who had underlying conditions such as pregnancy, asthma, diabetes, and cardiovascular disorders.

Compared to swine flu, coronavirus:

\- is less widespread \- has caused fewer deaths \- has a higher CFR \- has a longer incubation period \- affects young people less

[https://about.futurelearn.com/blog/covid-19-how-does- coronav...](https://about.futurelearn.com/blog/covid-19-how-does-coronavirus- compare-to-other-outbreaks)</comment>


Show HN: Room.sh – a simple online meeting space - <AUTHOR> https://room.sh/?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, co-founder of room.sh here, happy to answer any questions.

We started out building online tools for education but soon began using them to have our own meetings. Behind the scenes, things are powered by a CRDT (specifically, [https://github.com/y-js/yjs](https://github.com/y-js/yjs)) and we're using Janus as a WebRTC SFU.

It's not peer to peer, but this brings some advantages (simplicity, more reliable connections, better support for large rooms) and a few disadvantages (bandwidth usage, among others). We're still in beta and working on new features and bug fixes so any feedback is greatly appreciated!

<comment><USER2> That's cool. How many people can be present simultaneously in the meeting at most?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment, it's limited to 8 with AV. Without AV though, we've tested past a few hundred with no problems.

We've got a pretty long pipeline of features, one of them includes a better setup for things like webinars, with one presenter and a large number of consumers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One feature that's either missing or I just couldn't find was screen sharing. It's my understanding that screen sharing can be done with WebRTC on modern browsers (except Safari?) Other than that, this looks really fantastic.

<comment><USER4> Hey Lowkeyloki, if your browser supports it, you should be able to find the Share Screen button in the bottom left-hand corner of your video feed (the monitor icon).

<comment><USER5> I think that screen share ability should be mentioned in features in prominent place, I was skimming website in order to find out what is it and seemingly non-existent screen share was the reason why I discarded it immediately without even trying anything. Now I'll give it a second look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nicely put together. One minor thing to consider is for drawing lines in the whiteboard the current approach seems to be line drawing starts with a ctrl+click. In other applications (e.g. gimp) it seems more natural to trigger line drawing via the end location (e.g. shift+click draws a line from the last drawn point to the cursor location).

Since I've seen the latter behavior more frequently it seems to be the more intuitive/usable option, though that's just my experience.

</comment><comment><USER7> Minor detail: Black background swallows the eraser icon.

Looks really nice and runs smoothly. I've been working on and off on something that is vaguely similar in terms of kinds of tech being used: a vtt for DnD 5E. The link is in my profile if you are curious.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks really great. Another cool feature is adding would be adding codepen-like features if the file is set to javascript, with an export to codepen/gist functionality. Or something similar to repl.it

</comment><comment><USER9> "All features are available for free during the βeta period! " I like that!

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks awesome. Can't wait to test

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks awesome- cant wait to test</comment>


The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ <comment><USER2> > 4\. Ability to work with poorly defined goals.

This is the most difficult part of a PhD for me.

Note: This quote is from the article on which this thread was pointing to before it has been changed by mods. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382223)

<comment><USER3> _" Ability to work with poorly defined goals."_

Poorly defined goals should not be unfamiliar or scary to anyone who has done at least one IT project for money. Actually, I haven't encountered many well defined goals in my professional life after graduating high school many years ago.

<comment><USER4> I think the difficulty the parent poster mentions is really meant to be read as:

"Ability to work with poorly defined goals AND almost no one knows about this subject you are discovering".

So of course you could start a new Web App for a customer and have poorly defined goals (good luck with that!), but the problems you might encounter have solutions already fleshed out by millions of other Web App devs (Stack Overflow). Something tells me undergoing a PhD is not quite the same, as the 'resources' in this context are a few orders of magnitude scarcer, and the subject matter a few orders of magnitude more complex ...

(I am not a PhD, please forgive me if this is wrong)

<comment><USER2> Yes it is a little bit of that.

In industry goals are maybe poorly defined, but at least you have directions, and people that can answer the questions you may ask. If the contract is about creating a website, at least you know what you are going to achieve, even if you may have to fight with the customer to understand what he wants/needs on this website and what problem he is trying to solve.

Using the image of pushing the boundary: Doing a PhD is like wandering within some heavy fog. You want to push the boundary, but first you have to find the boundary. You don't know in which direction is the closest boundary as you can not see further than 10 meters from you. Maybe also the closest boundary is on top of a 8000 meters high mountain that you don't have the capacities to climb. So at the end you spend you time trying to figure out in which direction to go. Some PhD students may have supervisors that are guiding them through the fog, as they already explored the area and know it, but some other are on their own, trying to figure out a boundary to push that is accessible for them.

Situations of all PhD students are probably different, but this is my feeling about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not mentioned in the article is the strange workings of scientific publishing. In my 20s I found writing open source software much more interesting than writing scientific papers describing the software. Whereas to me at that time it seemed everyone else was describing the buggy collection of Matlab code in articles without publishing any of the code (or datasets used), making it impossible to reproduce their results.

The topic of my unfinished PhD was finding structure in musical pieces with AI.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd just like to say that a master's degree makes you a better leader in the same sense that reading a book does. Knowledge is great but knowledge alone doesn't do diddly-squat for becoming an effective leader. That takes soft skills. I know, I have a master's myself. It taught me nothing about what a tech lead or manager needed to understand.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is old and has been out there for ages. Regardless it's still one of my favorite simple communications of a concept.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is the dichotomy at the end of the Might's article content accurate? It seems too black-and-white to me, but I didn't go through a CS curriculum. Do MS/CS students not have to do original research or read research papers?

<comment><USER9> I have a MS in computer science that I got at UC Berkeley. I had to take a lot of classes and write a thesis. Primarily, the thesis involved the design and implementation of something interesting (at the time, at least), and then I wrote about what it was, how it worked, and so on.

I _also_ got a PhD in science education at UCB, and that required writing a research proposal, carrying out a six-month classroom intervention, and a lot of other work on both sides of the research (design and framing the work, analyzing the data). The amount of work was very different. The number of classes was not too different - I had about the same number of credits.

All that said, my experience in academia (and out) has taught me that a degree is only one indicator among many. I've had doors open to me because of my degree, advisors' connections, and where my degree was granted, some doors I did not particularly deserve, but the degree itself only shows that I can do a certain kind of work when I want to. I've met plenty of other people who can do the same kind of work who don't have the same kind of (or any) degree.

So, it feels like one of those 'neither necessary nor sufficient' sorts of things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ah, the mighty diagram. It's been a while.

It reflects the mainstream and very unfortunate view of academia inside academia. (Disclosure: I'm a PhD student)

<comment><USER11> So what's your view?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somebody had explained this to me in words long ago. Interesting to finally see the visual representation!

</comment><comment><USER13> I pointed out that this guy failed to properly attribute the work, and he blocked me on Medium.

What a piece of work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Really like how minimal but not ugly that blog is

</comment><comment><USER15> "A PhD degree equips you to do original research and potentially lead R&D teams."

No you don't need a PhD to lead R&D teams...you don't even need a degree to do that. And no you don't even need a PhD to push human knowledge. Too few of those who did push it, did it through a PhD. In fact its just "possible" that a PhD will push the boundary. Usually it does not.

<comment><USER16> He didn't say that you can't lead an R&D team without a PhD. He said it equips you to do so. There's no claim about it being the exclusive path to leading an R&D team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The content of this article is lifted entirely from Matt Might's famous post; I'm not sure what value the author intended to add by rehosting it.

[http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in- pictures/](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/)

<comment><USER18> It looks like someone changed the post's link to Matt Might's now.

<comment><USER19> Yes, a mod changed it from [https://thebittheories.com/masters-versus- ph-d-2b26ef33f883#...](https://thebittheories.com/masters-versus- ph-d-2b26ef33f883#.qatl5reqn) a little while ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems a little nefarious to blanket copy Matt Might's article, lead it with some emphasized and bolded statements that give the impression that the article is the work of the poster and distract from the plain text attribution.

It looks like a bunch of hand-waving that results in a person skimming the article believing that the poster is the author.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, the author of this repost doesn't even bother to fully follow all the license guidelines from Matt Might. Ironically this would be considered plagiarism in any academic setting.

<comment><USER13> Great ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> so just Matt Might's article.

great. :|

<comment><USER11> For completeness, here is the link to the original: [http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in- pictures/](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/)

<comment> j-pb Seriously? Did the mods also fuck with that link? I don't care if the other post was a ripoff I still would like to read it.

<comment><USER2> I don't know if the link above has been changed by mods or was a mistake, but here is the link to the original article:

[https://thebittheories.com/masters-versus- ph-d-2b26ef33f883](https://thebittheories.com/masters-versus- ph-d-2b26ef33f883)

The original content is licensed under a CC license [1], and _now_ (it probably has been updated) the reposter is respecting the terms of it:

        1. Please attribute the original work to me (Matt Might) and link back to this page in your reproduction: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ as The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.

        2.When you attribute, please also link my name, Matt Might, to http://matt.might.net/

        3.And, don't forget the "Keep pushing," at the bottom!

So I don't see any reason why the original link can't be shared in thread's comments, especially because people should be allowed to see by themselves the original article in order to forge their own opinion on discussions happening here.

[1] [http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in- pictures/#licen...](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in- pictures/#license)

<comment><USER11> > and _now_ (it probably has been updated) the reposter is respecting the > terms of it

The reposter still doesn't link back to the actual article as requested, though that's just a "please" clause. I guess naming (and even linking) the author and giving the title suffices to satisfy the attribution clause of the license.

<comment><USER2> > The reposter still doesn't link back to the actual article as requested, > though that's just a "please" clause. I guess naming (and even linking) the > author and giving the title suffices to satisfy the attribution clause of > the license.

Indeed, I thought there was a link to the blog post, but there is not any. The situation is different than before though, as the real author is now at least credited.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


10nm versus 7nm - <AUTHOR> http://semiengineering.com/10nm-versus-7nm/ <comment><USER2> I've been following the semiconductor news in the last year closer than ever before. It really feels that the 7nm node will be the end of Moore's law. As a software engineer it intrigues me the constrains is going to impose to our craft in the next decade. We've been riding the performance exponential growth that allowed us to be sloppy programmers and still produce increasingly complex software. I work on the VR space and the conventional wisdom is that headsets and GPUs are going to get drastically smaller and powerful every year. I think this is not a given anymore and as a software practitioners we will have to step up the game and be much more careful about using resources. How is the end of Moore's low going to affect the cost of Software Development? The top software companies will be those that best use the hardware. Performance optimizations usually makes software more complex and increases the rigor you operate in. Many people have been able to got from 0 to make relevant contributions after learning programming in a few months or going through a coding bootcamp. That might get harder and harder since you will need deeper knowledge to produce competitive software. Is this going to increase the barrier of entry for developers? Is the developer pool going to shrink? Salaries go up? Is it going to be more a and more expensive to produce competitive software? Will it make software startups more capital intensive, since gluing 4 pieces of existing code around a good idea won't be enough to be successful?

<comment><USER3> Moore law is about number of transistors per chip (IC). You can make transistors smaller, you can make chips larger, you can stack chips and you can make integrated circuits from several parts.

I think your feeling is wrong.

<comment><USER4> What you are saying is PRECISELY why Moore Law ended with 7nm.

Mind you, performance improvements didn't ended, we can still find other ways to do things...

But 7nm is the smallest physically possible transistor (well, theoretically it is 5nm, but that one can't be actually manufactured).

So, you hit 5nm, then what? Your only choice would be make chips larger... but if you do that, you limit your maximum clock (example: a 5cm processor, if it allowed data to travel at light speed, and had perfect cooling, would still be limited to 6ghz)

Or make them taller, but then you can't cool them easily.

That is the problem, Moore Law, as in transistors per chip, ended with 7nm, there is nowhere to go after that, the only thing you can do is add more chips and make them communicate with each other (ie: multi-cpu... see what AMD has been doing in their recent research, trying to figure how to make an API to allow infinite amount of GPUs in the same calculation in a way 100% transparent to the developer).

But making more chips is not improving Moore's Law.

The only thing that can be done now, is invent something else, silicon transistors are done for, you can't improve them much anymore, you can only change the tech (use something else other than silicon transistors) or find novel ways to use current silicon tech (better architectures, multi-chip systems, better code, etc...)

<comment><USER5> >Or make them taller, but then you can't cool them easily.

Haven't you answered your own question? Your other points are about impossibility - the one I just quoted, about making chips taller, is about difficulty.

If I were the head of Intel I would say "Well. Hmmm. All right. I guess we'd better start making them taller."

Moore's law is not a question of "how hard can it be". As you've pointed out, on the current approach it's a question of "It is physically impossible for us to increase transistor count without dropping the clock rate or moving out of roughly a plane. No thanks to Einstein. (My favorite link on this subject: [https://www.google.com/search?q=c+%2F+4+ghz](https://www.google.com/search?q=c+%2F+4+ghz) )

You say "Or make them taller, but then you can't cool them easily." Well then, make them taller and cool them with difficulty. Nobody said it would be easy. Off-hand you could:

-> Immerse the taller chip in insane cooling

-> Fabricate little duct work between layers and liquid cool at high velocity

-> Figure out a way to reduce heat waste usage, e.g.: different substrate, not silicon (pretty insane)

-> Possibly combining some of the above points, make it a superconductor.

These are insane ideas from me. But then again, I'm not the head of Intel and you've heard a few minutes of thought on me on this topic, where I'm not a chip designer.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however [difficult], is your [roadmap.]"

<comment><USER6> Without getting into semantics, Moore's Law roughly assumes that things will get cheaper or you'll get significantly greater bang for your buck. "Nobody said it would be easy" is a casual dismissal of the fact that consumers won't pay for this, unless someone conjures a materials revolution.

And no, we can't just assume the head of Intel will conjure up a materials revolution solely to adhere to an industry observational law.

<comment><USER5> I don't know, man:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Moore.27s_second_l...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Moore.27s_second_law)

This talks about an _exponential_ increase in R&D costs which is expected by Moore. With stuff like cloud computing, I don't see the need for denser and denser CPU's going away any time soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "It will take chip designers about 500 man-years to bring out a mid-range > 7nm SoC to production," Gartner's Wang said. Therefore, a team of 50 > engineers will need 10 years to complete the chip design to tape-out. In > comparison, it could take 300 engineer-years to bring out a 10nm device, 200 > for 14nm, and 100 for 28nm, according to Gartner.

My mental model of this process is completely wrong. I thought they'd have a Verilog code base, and moving to a new process was basically a recompile.

What are they doing for 100/200/300/500 man-years, and why do the smaller processes take longer?

<comment><USER8> If you are speaking of the digital designs, yes, what you say is absolutely right.

But you need to keep in mind the analog designs. While a typical CPU, a typical GPU or a typical cryptographic IP chip (for a example) can be developed in just Verilog since they are just pure logic, when you move to the Mixed Signal IP, you can't use only Verilog, you have to manually design parts of the chip (creating the schematics of the designs at the transistor level and converting them to layouts).

Examples of mixed signal IP are USB, HDMI, MIPI, Ethernet, PCIe, and so on.

We don't have tools capable of synthetizing really fast PLLs, DCOs, Band Gaps, most of the high speed analog blocks.

But I think the article was exaggerating on the "50 engineers will need 10 years to complete the chip design to tape-out". I work at Synopsys and we are already working on the latest process nodes (10nm, 7nm, 5 nm) and we already have some solutions ready for silicon and it didn't took us 10 years.

All these articles make it sound so dramatic that it's nowhere near the reality. The process of designing the analog blocks again in 10nm, 7nm, 5 nm and so on, it's exactly the same every time. It is very much like porting your C++ code to Python: sure you have to do it from scratch but the process and the fundamental concepts are exactly the same.

It's not rocket science nor quantum physics, it's easier than it sounds. The main problem is the huge cost of the tools and of the technology from the foundry. If you are past that, you just need time and some knowledge in micro- electronics.

Don't be fooled by these over dramatic articles, the hard part of digital and analog design is not getting the knowledge to do it, it's getting the money to have the proper tools to do it.

<comment><USER9> Great response. Got a question for you then: are we actually hitting the end of Moore's law here or are we just before a new technology transition for CPUs, such as away from silicon.

<comment><USER8> We are indeed hitting the end of Moore's law.

The companies that provide IP are watching the market splitting into two: the companies that want the latest process node to show off technology (for example, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, etc) and the companies that want older but stable process nodes (IoT companies and the automotive industry).

When most of the articles speak of the newest process nodes (for example, the 5nm process node) they only touch the economics part of it: "it's expensive, it's costly". But they don't mention the many problems that come with it: it's unstable, there is much more current leakage which increases power consumption unexpectedly, it is not suitable for long longevity and the architecture of your analog blocks have to take into account all these problems which don't exist in the older process nodes.

It is possible to produce solutions in 5 nm, but the question is no longer about if we can do it or not. The downsides os these nodes go beyond the engineering resources and the economic resources that are needed to achieve them.

That is why the automotive industry is not interesting in these kind of nodes. They want the stable and cheap nodes like 28nm and 40nm, they know that these nodes are well tested and have long longevity.

We are also reaching a point in which we already have enough advanced technology for our needs, we need to start to get rid of the need of reaching the next process node in order to have better hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > TSMC is moving from a 2D layout scheme at 16nm to 1D technology at 10nm. 1D > layouts are easier to make in the fab, but they involve more restrictive > design rules.

What is a 1D layout? Surely it must be something of a misnomer, as the only way I can visualize it is as a barcode, where each material you place has to span the entire width of the chip - and that seems utterly worthless.

<comment><USER11> Some high end processes only allow you to pattern a bunch of parallel, narrow lines (hence 1D). These are subsequently "cut" in a useful way, and you can connect to them using a different layer above or below.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could anyone help me understand why is it 9 times more expensive to design a chip at 7nm than 28nm?

I would have naively thought chip design is fairly automated, but a 9x increase makes is sound like every gate and path is delicately hand-stitched like a Persian rug.

<comment><USER13> I think it's because at that point they can't use a single "mask" for the lithography and have to do multiple exposures with different masks. The equipment is also fabulously more expensive. The D1X site will have $6 billion invested: [http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2012/10/24/intel- pl...](http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2012/10/24/intel-plans- massive-expansion-to-3b.html)

<comment><USER12> I can understand the dramatically increased costs with chip production. But the article makes it sound like the 9x increase is with the design of the chip (e.g., with an HDL simulator).

<comment><USER14> The design cost is increasing. It's not as in software where you write high level code (Verilog for IC) and let the compiler do its job, and in most cases you're done. For IC design, there's a two part process: the front-end design in Verilog, and then the back-end design to map this to the process implementation. With old nodes, the back-end was a simple affair and mostly automated --- software like. But with more advanced nodes it's no longer the case. The tools need proper constraints to generate something that will work (like timing constraints), and this need human input. And at the most advanced nodes, it's common that when you reach the back-end work one realize that the design is not good enough and need to be tweaked to let the tool generate a good implementation. This creates round-trips between back-end and Verilog level design. And these are slow and expensive round trips (synthesis, tests in the loop are heavy).

So it's far from fully automatic. There's a lot of work done on the tools, but there are also a lot of additional constraints to deal with with each new nodes. It's a real complexity explosion, and this is what makes designs on advanced nodes so much more expensive. This a highly simplified description but hopefully enough to get a feeling for what's going on.

<comment><USER15> Simply not true as a general statement. There is a completely automated path from Verilog to GDS through modern EDA tools. While the back end complexity has increased, the folks at Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor have solved all of the problems for the designer (IR drop, cross talk, DFM, OCV, etc). Good designs have fully automatic flows with a turnaround time from RTL to tapeout of less than 24hrs.

<comment><USER16> In theory but not in practice. 24hr RTL to GDS has been the promise, but the design and process complexities keep growing.

Depending on the complexity of the chip, the backend process takes several months. It's an iterative process. A reasonable complex chip has to be split into several partitions. The size of the partition determines the turn around. In the designs that I have worked on, we try to limit the turnaround time (RTL->GDS) to be one week for the larger partitions.

I would change your statement to say that the EDA vendors have created tools that allow Physical Design engineers to address the design challenges. It is still a gruelling, iterative, painstaking process.

<comment><USER15> Agree with you. Taping out chips is still like going to the dentist for a root canal. Still, we may have to disagree regarding the absolute numbers. For every one of our chips so far, we made RTL changes less than 24 hours before tapeout. (clearly this means our basic blocks are very small and we don't have a lot of them).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Smaller line size doesn't mean more compute power any more. Clocks maxed out around 3GHz some years ago. For CPUs, getting rid of the heat has become the limiting factor. (Yes, with aggressive cooling you can go faster, but most systems don't go there.) Electromigration is starting to limit component lifespans.

But that's for CPUs. Memory, especially mostly-inactive memory such as flash devices, still has a few iterations ahead. Memory devices can tolerate and recover from bad cells and bad rows. There's also the option of going 3D and stacking memory. That doesn't work for CPUs because getting the heat out of the middle is very tough.

The other big problem is cost. Fabs have become multi-billion dollar projects. The article says that designing an SOIC for 7mm costs upwards of $200 million. (Why? Design tools? Mask making?) If cost per gate declines, we can still get more compute power by making bigger parts with more CPUs. Single CPU performance probably isn't going to climb much more, though.

Fortunately, most of the things we want to do in machine learning and AI can be done in parallel. This problem isn't going to keep us from getting to AI.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wait, did I read this right - Intel is going to be the last one to get 10nm?

> Samsung, for one, plans to ship its 10nm finFET technology by year's end.

> TSMC will move into 10nm production in early 2017

> Intel will move into 10nm production by mid-2017

<comment><USER19> Yes, that's what a lay reading gets you - and why I was disappointed with the article. Is the author just clueless or are they trying to make one of Intel's competitors look better? Everyone who follows these things knows that the other guy's 14nm node is more comparable to Intel's 22nm node. Apparently a nanometer is not always a nanometer...

<comment><USER20> The only thing you should be disappointed with is your reading comprehension. There are three paragraphs dedicated to your complaint.

>"Not all 10nm technologies are the same," said Mark Bohr, a senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration at Intel. "It's now becoming clear that what other companies call a '10nm' technology will not be as dense as Intel's 10nm technology. We expect that what others call '7nm' will be close to Intel's 10nm technology for density."

>It wasn't always like that. Traditionally, chipmakers scaled the key transistor specs by 0.7X at each node. This, in turn, roughly doubles the transistor density at each node.

>Intel continues to follow this formula. At 16nm/14nm, though, others deviated from the equation from a density standpoint. For example, foundry vendors introduced finFETs at 16nm/14nm, but it incorporated a 20nm interconnect scheme.

<comment><USER19> Missed that, I withdraw my complaint. The snark is not necessary though, not everyone has time to read the entire article, I read the top and skimmed the rest.

<comment><USER21> And you start your comment with:

 _Yes, that 's what a lay reading gets you - and why I was disappointed with the article._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think people are really underestimating how poor CPU performance improvement has been recently; it's been totally masked by I/O (SSD) and RAM improvements.

Before SSD it was common to see a CPU wasting >50% of its time waiting for IO. Now you rarely see iowait being a problem.

</comment><comment><USER23> > For a 10nm chip, it takes $120 million for the design cost, plus 60% for the > embedded software.

I don't understand: 60% of what? What embedded software?

<comment><USER15> Put simply "stuff". Take a look at Fred Brooks, mythical man month if you haven't ready it already. The projects that cost $250M will have over 1,000 engineers involved. Running a tightly coupled engineering project of that size is impossible in my opinion, thus the cost. Figure that 50% of the budget goes to communication overhead, 25% to management overhead, and you are left with 25% of true engineering costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pain Points at 7nm also an interesting read [http://semiengineering.com/pain- points-at-7nm/](http://semiengineering.com/pain-points-at-7nm/)

</comment><comment><USER25> One interesting consequence is that this will probably impose a ceiling on Google's growth.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Then, there is the cost-driven decision. This is for foundry customers who > may have lower volume products. They may not recoup their investment at > 10nm. So, it makes more sense for them to skip 10nm and move to 7nm.

Why is it cheaper to design a 7nm chip for a given performance than to design a 10nm chip? The article mentions the yields on newer processes are lower, so I would've expected them to be the performance option not the cost option.

<comment><USER27> It isn't. But if you move straight to 7nm you only need to recoup the costs for 7nm, not 10nm + 7nm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if this will create create a market asics and FPGA when the lasts drops of perf has been squeezed out of the cpus (and GPU)?

<comment><USER29> Once we hit the wall of general CPU performance we will probably retrace a lot of old school custom hardware design. Expect a lot of the parts integrated into a CPU today to move back out, but simultaneously we will have to start shipping more sophisticated cooling solutions for denser CPU chips (since the main reason bridges were integrated were because dense cores were getting too hot for copper / aluminum fin heat transfer like most heatsinks).

It will take a really long time to actually squeeze out CPU optimization. We are still contending with most software not even properly scaling to four cores, let alone well implemented job queue systems for arbitrarily scaled cores. And once the chips start dropping in price as the node standardizes and companies can lay off the intense R&D investments, we can start introducing more heterogeneous compute clusters to drive performance cheaper even when the silicon itself is stuck until graphene takes the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Moore's law is dead" is mostly false every time it's written. I would expect fixed costs to drop for 7nm so that more designs can go ASIC and benefit from lower cost per transistor and higher performance. Seems like even if we were locked at 7nm, decreasing NRE for custom SoCs will yield performance improvements for a long time coming.

<comment><USER31> I mean, that's like saying it's not really a car accident because even though the front of the car is crushing into the divider wall, the rear of the car is moving at almost the same speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone else getting a 404?

<comment><USER33> Yea, I am too</comment></comment>


The owner of WeChat thinks deepfakes could be good - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/28/1005692/china-tencent-wechat-ai-plan-says-deepfakes-good/ <comment><AUTHOR> For those who have trouble with the link:

[https://archive.is/wT9Uo](https://archive.is/wT9Uo)</comment>


Socialcam launches an API - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/04/socialcam-opens-api/

<comment><USER2> I'm not a big fan of containing metadata and paging info in the response body. Why does the meta response have a code attribute? That should be available from the HTTP status code. I think pagination info should be in the headers instead of in the response body. <http://socialcam.com/developers/rest_api_overview>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comments. Also, we decided to go that way to make it more practical. It doesn't change anything for the developer and can just provide more value in some case. Especially when using some weird clients.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> link to Socialcam developer site: <http://socialcam.com/developers></comment>


How I Handle Trello Support - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogcreek.com/four-million-to-one/ <comment><USER2> If Brian or others at Fog Creek read this, I'd suggest considering adding a way to provide more feedback when a user clicks on the 'I did/not find this article helpful' buttons; in another software package I use, when you click on the 'helpful' button it pops up a dialog asking 'Thank you for your feedback. We'd love to know what you liked about this page (text box here)'. When you click on the 'not helpful' button, the dialog says 'What were you trying to do in the software, and what would make this page more helpful? For example. "I was trying to fit data to a curve, but I think this variable is spelled wrong." (text box here). In both cases, they also have a text box 'May we contact you for more information? (Email)'. This way the support/doc team gets immediate actionable feedback, and instead of just an email the ticket can go right into your system, tagged with any useful information you want to gather (page in question and its rev #, OS, browser, user account info, etc). Keep up the great work Brian et al! *BTW if you noticed someone who just voted down the 'Getting Started' page, that was me - I was just testing out if it asked for more information :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really inspiring.

There are certainly some more complex professional products that probably warrant a higher support burden, but I've always felt that a lot of support costs are essentially consequences of software design not being quite right.

I think this example shows that with proper attention to design, detail, and user feedback, you can reduce the burden of support for most software. The one person filling the role, because there will always be SOME questions, and you'll always miss SOME improvements, can serve as a conduit to the team to improve the software.

Of course, if you already have a high support burden, transitioning could be challenging, but not impossible.

<comment><USER4> I develop a massively complex healthcare system for running medical practices / small hospitals. We have two support staff members. I think you have it right when you say "a lot of support costs are essentially consequences of software design not being quite right".

There's a number of things that I think help:

* Clear UI

\- don't have rows of icons with no text

\- try to compartmentalise areas of the application so users can build a 'mental map' of the application (for example we have 'patient home page', 'appointment home page', 'consultation suite', 'accounts home page'. So whole areas of the application work almost like documents.

* Explain everything in clear English

* Make sure the most commonly used actions always 'visible'

* Consider how the user will interact with your product. Healthcare especially is one where you must get this right, an extra click can drive the users crazy. It can be small things that really make a difference, I added a tag-cloud to the top of the medical-record for example, which really helps clinicians when the next patient walks through the door.

* Where possible make good decisions for the user, whether it's pre-selecting options, or removing clutter.

* Don't surprise users - They should never worry about what will happen if they click X

* Don't remove features unless you have properly explained why you're doing it

* Don't change a feature unless you're clearly making it better, or have again got buy-in.

There's probably loads more, but that's just off the top of my head. Then there's the standard stuff like: Never go offline, be fast, etc.

I think also most people would be surprised at how effective 'shiny stuff' is. Making it look pretty goes a long way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> ISO 8601 ftw, chaps!

I find the screenshot showing two columns - 4/22/2014 and 4/21/2014 - culturally interesting (I'm from Australia, but see this date format frequently).

You kind of take it for granted that everyone (else) in IT, especially those who produce something used by foreigners, ie. the makers of any web app, will have already embraced 8601. Or, at the very least, offer this as a locale / display option for their users, even if they themselves use an unsortable, ambiguous, region-specific format inside their own systems.

One of the very few things that continues to frustrate me with Trello is that every date shown to me is locked in the format "Mmm dd, yyyy at hh:mm", with no facility to modify that.

<comment><USER6> Well, it looks like it's a perfect case for contacting support.

<comment><USER5> Good point. Done. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I totally agree with the idea that calm serenity is the symptom of a software process done right.

What I would like to plead for is hosted Fogcreek and other products in the EU only. Data protection laws here make getting government work awkward if you use hosted services outside the EU. It's painful. please host here !!!

ps anyone else in same position?

<comment><USER8> Hosting in the EU would not change much as far as the NSA's reach is concerned — as long as it is a U.S. company, your data is accessible to government agencies.

It's a very real concern, but I don't think hosting in the E.U. solves anything.

<comment><USER7> Maybe I was not clear - this is not about stopping the NSA reading my support emails (I pretty much assume anything I do that is digital is caught, even if not read)

My concern is winning business with UK public sector - the Data Protection Act and ICO are clear on processing data only inside legal regiemes that share the same data privacy protections - in other words EU companies must process inside EU borders.

Or rather we don't have to but it's a pain in the arse to explain why not and I have enough to do so please please please either stick processors inside the EU or can I find a bunch if similar parties who fancy shouldering the cost of doing same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The linear scale on your first plot undersells your accomplishment. The two red pixels, if calibrated by the 4,000,000 users at left, correspond to 25,000 support staff. It sounds like there's only you.

A logarithmic scale, like this: [https://flic.kr/p/nyf11i](https://flic.kr/p/nyf11i) shows off your feat more- completely.

Thank you for making Trello. It's made my life more organized and efficient.

</comment><comment><USER10> Having set up something similar yesterday for webhook.com here's what I ended up going with.

1\. Using zendesk for incoming emails and a knowledge base. 2\. Installing tissueapp plugin for it to allow you to convert a zendesk email into a github issue. Even better, wherever you respond from (email, zendesk, or github), the other instances get updated and alert the user. 3\. Pipe out hipchat notices (zendesk has an option for this) into our chat room whenever issues/tickets are updated.

Ended up working really well and doesn't get our engineering team out of the tools they already use.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite Ted talks? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> ObNitPick: TED, not Ted.

That aside, my favorite (though I've never figured out _why_ , exacly) are Aimee Mullins':

"The Opportunity of Adversity": [https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_the_opportunity_of_a...](https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_the_opportunity_of_adversity)

and "My Twelve Pairs of Legs": [https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetic...](https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics)

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies - can't edit the post, sadly, maybe a moderator can?

I haven't heard of these ones before, but excited to check them out, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have only watched a few, so I cannot give a great answer.

But I have a good queue of ones I want to watch, which I build from ones recommended in the TED book on public speaking written by the current head of TED.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do programmers hate dependencies? - <AUTHOR>

<i>Especially</i> C developers, but also, for example, the Go backend devs don't want a dependency on llvm or gcc so instead have their own IR <comment><USER2> Now, in the case of programming languages, it is quite understandable, because the target machines (be it called "native" or "virtual"), and intermediate representations are target machines, may lack features and thus render expressing the code of the source language more difficult than it should be.

If we take only one example, examine the fundamental difference between two languages like C and Lisp, where it is assumed that the bit patterns in memory representing values are "untyped" in the case of C, but "typed" in the case of lisp. That is, a given bit pattern can be interpreted in C depending on WHERE it is found: if found in a variable of type int, it will be interpreted as an integer modulo 2^32; if found in a variable of type double* it will be interpreted as a pointer to a double floating point number. On the other hand, in lisp, the bit pattern is "typed", and it will be interpreted the same, wherever it is copied to. Unfortunately, unless you have the chance of running a Lisp Machine, you will run your lisp programs on hardware that is designed and optimized for programs written in C, where bit patterns in memory are untyped, and therefore the lisp compilers will have to implement this abstraction adding a layer of interpretation. Specifically, usually a few bits in each word are reserved to store a type tag, so that one may distinguish words containing pointers from words containing pointers of a certain type, or pointers of another.

Now consider LLVM, and consider implementing a language which requires typed data like lisp, and you'll realize that LLVM matches the C kind of machines with "untyped" bit patterns more than the lisp kind, and that therefore it won't make a good IR for lisp-like languages (python, ruby, javascript, etc).

This is not to say that it's impossible to target LLVM when writing those language, on the contrary. But it would be considered as a target language, and evaluated as such, and not as an intermediate representation on which significant and meaningful (for the lisp programs) optimizations can be performed.</comment>


Sizing VMs and NUMA nodes - <AUTHOR> http://frankdenneman.nl/2010/02/sizing-vms-and-numa-nodes/

<comment><USER2> VMWare ESX centric, but a general problem for any hypervisor: how do you minimize memory access costs when you have a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture under your SMP abstraction (AMD for a long time, Intel starting with the Nehalem processors).</comment>


Europe will not accept US verdict on 737 Max safety - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49591363 <comment><USER2> I don't think I will get on one in the near to distant future, regardless of whatever any "safety" body says.</comment>


Reasons Not to Use Apple (2012-2018) - <AUTHOR> https://stallman.org/apple.html <comment><USER2> Tomorrow, Apple will try to convince you 'the developer' that they are your 'friends', whilst iOS 14 and macOS 10.16 will sherlock and kill a bunch of similar apps out there. Stallman still has documented Apple's past behaviour, but the App Store issues are the tip of the iceberg.

Even previous WWDCs (pre-2010 'Mac OS X' days), it was nothing like any of this. Now every WWDC, they're becoming increasingly hostile and antagonistic towards developers.

Apple is not your friend.

</comment><comment><USER3> I bought an Apple 2e in the 80s, but haven't spent a penny on Apple since. I don't understand why people like the company so much. Stallman's views on Apple don't all make sense to me, but most of them do. I don't like the idea of doing business with them.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Apple appears to be censoring all bitcoin apps for iThings. It should be > illegal to make or distribute computers which are platforms for censorship.

The sensationalist language is pretty off putting to me. Does this guy know what censorship means? Publishing apps on the App Store isn't an act of free speech, which you can then pretend is denied when your app is denied.

Regardless this is still an important aggregation of Apple's conduct, sensationalism aside.</comment>


It costs 1.62 cents to make a penny. - <AUTHOR> http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=2889002ad89d45ca21f50ba46&id=100162f868

<comment><USER2> Statements like "..., it's cost slightly more to produce a penny than the one cent it is worth, leading to a loss of of about $20 million dollars, total, in 2009." are wrong minded. If every penny cost exactly one cent to make, we wouldn't be "breaking even" -- we'd still lose one cent per penny produced in production costs. The cost of producing money compared to its monetary value is irrelevant (though there is a problem if you can extract more than a cent of profit from melting them down).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a loss for the Mint, which sells coins at face value to the Fed. The Mint is taxpayer funded, so there really was a $20MM loss of taxpayer money in 2009.

<comment><USER3> It's a cost to the taxpayer for a tactile service to the economy. Paving our roads was an enormous cost to the tax payers, but that doesn't bother anyone. Whats the difference between having roads to drive on, and having physical money to trade with?

<comment><USER4> If the government could change the way they pave roads to save money while still having the same quality of road, it would be good for them to do so.

If they could make pennies for cheaper, it would be good to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like an easy way to compromise... get rid of the penny and make a new zinc based coin with abraham lincoln on it that is a 20 cent piece

</comment><comment><USER6> The real problem is the enormous inconvenience costs associated with using pennies. Next time you get one, leave it on the counter and you'll be money ahead. Never take them and never give them, maybe we can start a movement.

</comment><comment><USER7> $180K in lobbying seems beatable.</comment>


Information Theoretic Learning Auto-Encoders - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cnel/itl-ae <comment><USER2> Very poorly documented. I could not figure out what the goal of the project is although it sounds like a codec that uses machine learning.

<comment><USER3> Not affiliated, but I found the paper. First link to gitxiv is the abstract of a paper on arxiv. Here is the paper with more detail:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.06653](http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.06653)</comment></comment>


Google Doc For Tracking Facebook/Twitter Shares for any URL - <AUTHOR>

Hey Hackers,
I saw this thread a little while back:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347428
Which shows a bunch of free API endpoints for tracking social media mentions (FB, twitter, linkedin, SU, reddit, delicious, gbuzz).
I'm not a serious developer so I coded up a Google Docs that can call the APIs for you:
https://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?authkey=CLbYuv0E&hl=en&key=tfYPkMHydrl5Xb9Ovn7TEcA&hl=en&authkey=CLbYuv0E#gid=0
(you'll need to be logged into Google, just click file -> make a copy and then you have a your own copy of the spreadsheet to use as you want).
I wrote up a few more details about the technique here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-track-your-social-media-strategy
Hope this is useful for a few non-technical hackers :) Tom <comment><USER2> Great work, Tom! As a fellow non-technical hacker, I have to say I'm really impressed. I had no idea that Google Docs could be used in this way. I've always used Yahoo! Pipes for similar manipulation of APIs, but as a spreadsheet junkie I think your approach is far superior. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problems - glad you like it :)

One really annoying thing to note is that Google Docs doesn't play nicely when calling YQL and Yahoo Pipes. I'm not sure if it's Google or Yahoo screwing things up but it's annoying as hell because a combination of the two would be very powerful</comment></comment>


IPhone App disappeared - <AUTHOR>

I released my first iPhone app to AppStore today. After waiting for an hour, it was on the app store, so I submitted the iTunes URL to all review sites and reviewers. All of sudden, the app just disappeared from the store!
This is the iTunes URL : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/outliner7/id520827199?ls=1&mt=8
And website: http://wwww.ambiapps.com/outliner7.html <comment><USER2> Corrected website link: <http://www.ambiapps.com/outliner7.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> If I follow the iTunes link, it says "this is not available in the UK store but it is in the US store".

<comment><AUTHOR> It said it is not available in US Store for me! Anyway, it is strangely back now. I sent a support request to Apple using iTunes Connect. Not sure why it happened!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did you check iTunes Connect? Are there any details/explanation there?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did. I kept refreshing iTunes Connect and it didn't give me any new information. I clicked on the appstore link and it just said that this app is not available in US App Store. Strangely, it is back now. I hope it stays alive when someone reviews the app! Lesson No.2782 : Wait for sometime before sending out link to reviewers.

<comment><USER4> How long did you wait? It does take some time for things to propagate across the iTunes CDN (though usually it's not very long).

<comment><AUTHOR> After releasing the app in the morning, I waited for half an hour and it appeared in iTunes. I used the link to update my website and posted it to several reviewers. Close to evening, it disappeared, and appeared again in another couple of hours!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An interactive tutorial on cracking Vigenère's cipher - <AUTHOR> https://www.simonsingh.net/The_Black_Chamber/vigenere_cracking.html <comment><AUTHOR> Note: the interactive parts starts at [1]. The link that you're referred to shows some needed context on who cracked it and a little bit how it was cracked.

It was quite fun! I did it mindlessly, without thinking mathematically and I still understood the general idea behind it!

[1] [https://www.simonsingh.net/The_Black_Chamber/vigenere_cracki...](https://www.simonsingh.net/The_Black_Chamber/vigenere_cracking_tool.html)</comment>


The dollar, the RMB and the euro? - <AUTHOR> http://mpettis.com/2011/03/the-dollar-versur-the-rmb-and-the-euro/

<comment><USER2> I have been watching the ins and outs of China and the EU in relation to the U.S. for some time. My take is that we are essentially involved in currency wars. Developed nation vs. an 'undeveloped' nation threats of war, sanctions, etc, but developed nation vs. developed nation is an economic fight.

I think the EU and the U.S. are in cahoots to use and prevent a possible china emergence. The U.S. has the reserve currency, with the RMB tied to it. The U.S. gets to determine the rules of the game, which makes their success all the more likely. The economic size and military weight of the U.S. gives it an additional huge advantage.

Inside the U.S., laws have been re-wrote or ignored in a way that they can prevent, delay, or hide problems that would make the economy seriously unstable. They can essentially print money as needed, even if they call it by another name, determine how much and how fast deflationary factors such as housing can proceed, and use their international advantage to help prevent it from getting out of control.

What the FED is doing does not make sense in terms of just U.S. economics, but if you see the global game, it makes a lot of sense.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some acronyms in the article I had to look up:

RMB: Remnibi, the currency of china. Individual denominations are 1 yuán = 10 jiǎo = 100 fēn GFC: Great Financial Crisis

</comment><comment><USER4> This is an abbreviated excerpt of a larger article.

</comment><comment><USER5> can someone paste the text? this site is blocked from within china....</comment>


Farmers Fable - <AUTHOR> https://www.farmersfable.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a great interactive demonstration of a general mathematical and economic principle: if you have a process that grows and shrinks over time with multiplicative upsides and downsides (e.g. every time period you grow or shrink by a percentage), pooling your resources with someone else who is not perfectly correlated with you will improve both of your growth rates and move you closer to exponential. You insulate each other from the risk of downturns because you don't both have downturns at the same time, and then you share the benefit of the resulting larger upsides.</comment>


Would you trade Star Wars cards on the blockchain? - <AUTHOR> https://www.ascribe.io/app/editions/1H9GHJKsnyZEALAbVqWTmDhHeNPyPPqScw <comment><AUTHOR> We're creating a marketplace that lets you collect and trade real items, with ownership recorded and secured by the bitcoin blockchain. I'd love some feedback!</comment>