Corporations and Hypocrisy: Inconvenient truths about Google - <AUTHOR> http://counternotions.com/2010/05/31/hypocrisy/

<comment><USER2> > _"Google never denied and, when caught red handed, never admitted to > snooping WiFi data either."_

This is an absolutely disingenuous claim. Google had an accidental bug in software that stored captured packets. Said packets were never looked at, nor did anyone know these extraneous packets were being sniffed and stored. Upon finding this error, they publicly admitted the error and fixed it.

To characterize this as "snooping WiFi data" means either:

A - The author has a axe to grind against Google.

B - The author is not technically competent enough to realize what actually happened.

Personally I neither love nor hate Google, and to be honest most of the other content in that post is not something I have followed closely. If this gross misrepresentation for his own case is consistent over the rest of the blog post though, the author has no credibility.

<comment><USER3> Proving that someone has zero credibility takes a bit more than that. Hurt his credibility, perhaps, but saying that he has zero credibility is hyperbolic.

And 'snooping' is only a gross mischaracterization if you believe the meaning of the word strictly excludes unintentional unauthorized access to data. Which I don't think it clearly does.

<comment><USER2> You're right - he doesn't have _zero_ credibility. As someone who has not read the blog before, and who did hear about the Google/WiFi thing before today, it made me want to close the tab out of disgust. That is a bit more than a little bit of hurt credibility, I think. For someone to rail against Google for their hypocrisy, it's a terrible shame that he has to bend and distort the facts to this degree to do so - and he ends up hurting his case more than he helps it.

"Snooping" in any colloquial use implies intent. I'm pretty sure we can't get away from that, and perhaps I'm being less charitable than I should be, but I think this implication is exactly what the author was going for.

After all, saying that Google actively intended to spy on WiFi users would be an outright lie, yet implications are okay?

<comment><USER3> He might have, and given the context, he has a plausible motive. But it's worth considering that many news outlets have called what Google did 'snooping', as a Google search will reveal. (The CNET article he linked to actually calls it 'spying', which is arguably more insidious-sounding.) And I can't think of another word that succinctly captures the idea of accessing unauthorized data, intentionally or no.

At any rate, the man is responding to what he believes was a gross mischaracterization of himself (the idea that he 'hates' Google). Out of anger and in haste, he may well have overreached. But one can overreach and not be without merit. On the basis of what is only plausibly a mischaracterization, one can't dismiss everything else a person says out of hand.

There just isn't enough here to warrant this degree of outcry and dismissal.

<comment><USER4> > And I can't think of another word that succinctly captures the idea of > accessing unauthorized data

Definition of "To Snoop":

      To be devious and cunning so as not to be seen
      To secretly spy on or investigate, especially into the private personal life of others.

I don't think that even slightly covers unintentional collection of data...

If they did it intentionally: sure, snooping. Otherwise the word is basically designed to make it sound nefarious :)

<comment><USER3> I'm not an expert, but the first search result for 'snooping' on Google turns up this page:

[http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid14_gc...](http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid14_gci1131831,00.html)

It's got some obtrusive ads, so I'll just quote it all here:

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>----

Snooping, in a security context, is unauthorized access to another person's or company's data. The practice is similar to eavesdropping but is not necessarily limited to gaining access to data during its transmission. Snooping can include casual observance of an e-mail that appears on another's computer screen or watching what someone else is typing. More sophisticated snooping uses software programs to remotely monitor activity on a computer or network device. Malicious hackers (crackers) frequently use snooping techniques and equipment such as keyloggers to monitor keystrokes, capture passwords and login information, and to intercept e-mail and other private communications and data transmissions. Corporations sometimes snoop on employees legitimately to monitor their use of business computers and track Internet usage; governments may snoop on individuals to collect information and avert crime and terrorism.

Although snooping has a negative connotation in general, in computer technology snooping can refer to any program or utility that performs a monitoring function. For example, a snoop server is used to capture network traffic for analysis, and the snooping protocol monitors information on a computer bus to ensure efficient processing.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/05/30/Feelings-A...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/05/30/Feelings- About-Companies#p-3) "What About Apple? · Hating (or loving) them seems about as equally unreasonable. I've been vocal about my loathing for their app-store regime but they're my favorite computer manufacturer ... Apple as a whole? I look into my soul and honestly can't scare up much in the way of feelings, positive or negative."

Kontra responds: "This, incredibly, is the same man who started his Google "evangelism" gig with the words "I hate it" referring to Apple" -- a deliberate misquotation. Here's the phrase in context: [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining- Go...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google) "The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it." Credibility dented.

It appears that Google's twin hats, advertising (from which it profits) and software distribution (from which it doesn't, significantly) make it difficult for critics to 'play the ball' in arguments over software distribution. Sure, it's easy for Google to take the perceived moral high ground in a space that is not seen as crucial to its success. That's a legitimate argument (although it contributes nothing to the actual debate). Drawing analogies to its other businesses such as search, advertising and maps, and sneering about how those are not 'open' is not legitimate argument. It's distraction.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like a troll to me...

flag it and move on.</comment>


Donor Advised Funds get big tax breaks but little oversight - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/silicon-valley-community-foundation-philanthropy/560216/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I set up a DAF when Google went public in 2004. I've spent 25-50% of it in the intervening 13 years, despite best intentions. I sure took that full tax break in 2004 though and have compounded the value of that annually. So in my case the DAF has not worked as a great way to funnel money to actual charities. It just sits idle, compounding. The tax break I got seems to outweigh the public benefit.

The psychology of having the DAF is funny. I sort of feel the virtue of having donated to charity every single year, just looking at the balance. When I do make a grant from the DAF I don't really feel like I'm doing anything more worthwhile. Also it's a bit impersonal because you have to recommend the grant then wait several days for the DAF to actually allocate. OTOH it's nice having a pile of money I've already "spent" that I can use to give to things at a whim.

I think the solution is to require DAFs spend some large portion of their balance every single year. Charitable foundations are required to distribute something like 5%, but I think 10% or more makes more sense for an individual's DAF. There's also a strong argument that charitable donations shouldn't be tax deductible at all, remove this whole tax gimmick and economic distortion. I'm not sure I fully buy it (and the transition would be brutal) but it is worth reading: [https://www.economist.com/briefing/2012/06/09/sweetened- char...](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2012/06/09/sweetened-charity)

<comment><USER3> I really wish non-profits could have for-profit endowment components in them, instead of having to ask for money every year.

Rather than giving now or giving later, we could be giving forever by only spending the interest on the capital.

<comment><USER4> Germany has/had some old institutions [0] that work(ed) that way. The keyword is Stiftung [1]. There seems to be nothing comparable in the US though, and you don't get a tax break for the donation, even though any business it conducts in the states is treated like a 501(c), provided it would be classified a 501(c) if it were a US based institution.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCrgerspital_zum_Heiligen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCrgerspital_zum_Heiligen_Geist) [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung)

<comment><USER5> A number of funded charities are setup that way. Carnegie made many of them. Bill Gates is actually a bit unusual in terms of the ultra rich setting up foundations - most wanted their institutions to carry on indefinitely. However BillG is adament the money is spent completely shortly after his death as he doesn't feel the dead should control the future.

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

[http://carnegieendowment.org/about/pdfs/carnegie_trusts.pdf](http://carnegieendowment.org/about/pdfs/carnegie_trusts.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a weird article. It strongly implies that donor advised funds (DAFs) are storing money indefinitely and not distributing it, but the average disbursement for DAFs is about 15% per year. In general, people committing the money to charity now even if they haven't decided what they want to fund is something I strongly support, because it means they can't later change their minds and keep the money.

The article also seems to evaluate DAFs primarily on how much they spend in the Bay Area:

        And even when it did give out money, the
        Silicon Valley Community Foundation often
        spent it outside of California. Last year,
        it gave out $436 million in grants to the
        nine-county Bay Area, which was just 34
        percent of the $1.3 billion in grants it
        dispersed.

The Bay Area is one of the richest regions of one of the richest states of one of the richest countries. There are definitely people in the Bay Area who need help, but overall I think it's really good that donors are becoming more interested in figuring out where their money can do the most good as opposed to only donating to organizations targeting the region they happen to live in.

<comment><USER7> Except the region they happen to live in is dealing with endemic homelessness, and they're directly contributing to it. Maybe they could try and mitigate some of their impacts.

<comment><USER8> First, they aren't _directly_ contributing to it. They are indirectly.

Also, depending on charity from global corporations to solve local community issues is not a great strategy.

The big tech companies _do_ contribute tax dollars to public organizations whose _job it is_ to solve matters of local public health and safety (i.e. homelessness). They're called state and local governments. Could they be the ones dropping the ball here?

<comment><USER7> I'm not depending on global corporations to solve local community issues. I'm suggesting that the billionaire investors and owners of local corporations to solve issues in the communities where they are based. The big tech companies actively employ tax strategies to avoid paying as much of their taxes as possible.

Yes, it's mostly a state, local, and federal, and international tax policy issue, but that doesn't change my point that it would be awfully nice if they tried to mitigate their impacts on their local communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> DAFs are great for giving.

The 2018 tax law changes increased the standard deduction and limited itemized deductions. This is certain to depress charitable giving, and DAFs are one thing that will help protect it.

The reason is they allow donors to separately time the tax benefit from fund disbursement. Say you wish to donate $10k a year to charity. In 2018, this may not provide any tax deduction! However a DAF allows you to make a much larger donation of $100k, realize a tax deduction, and then dish it out in $10k increments over the years.

DAFs also shields donors from providing contact info to the charity, allowing donors to escape the never-ending solicitation mail and calls. (Charities really dislike this, for obvious reasons.)

The concerns about money sitting in DAFs is overblown. A charity with an endowment also has money that "sits" and isn't being spent, but you wouldn't describe that as a "black hole."

<comment><USER10> Seems like a large donation wouldn't be deductable due to AMT? Particularly when there are high state taxes.

<comment><USER11> In addition to charitable deductions being deductable for AMT, you may also want to know deductions for state and local taxes are very limited in the 2018 tax year (and beyond), so AMT is likely to mostly disappear (if it wasn't abolished for individuals? There was some talk of that, but I didn't follow up, because state tax was my big deduction)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My Fidelity DAF is the linchpin of my family's giving strategy -- I don't know how we could achieve what we want to achieve without it.

The plan has been simple: put 5% of our monthly income into mutual funds through the DAF until it hits 100k, then start additionally supporting charitable organizations from the annual interest forever, without ever donating the principle.

I view the impact of this account as probably my lasting legacy on Earth and enjoy the idea of passing it's stewardship on to my children.

So it troubles me to read that this giving strategy is somehow contentious. And I don't yet understand whether what I'm doing is somehow abusing the original intent of the vehicle, or why it would upset people that we give in this way.

<comment><USER13> The issue is that, maybe not in your case, but certainly in the cases of wealthier people, they're getting the tax break, but the money isn't actually going to anything charitable. If the money isn't actually going to charity, then why are we, as a society, giving a tax break for it?

<comment><USER14> DAFs can invest the money or make grants to charities. All the money eventually goes to charity except for management fees, but any investment account pays management fees. That's why there's a tax break.

<comment><USER13> Does it? What's the thing that forces it to eventually go to charity, as opposed to laying around in limbo for ever?

<comment><USER11> All the DAFs I researched had a policy that if their overall granting wasn't at 5% every 5 years, they would enforce that level on each DAF; I had recalled a larger grant requirement, but on further review I was mistaken, so I've edited my comment.

Some of the other comments have mentioned funding a DAF with a DAF, though, which seems like it could workaround the distribution requirements, but also seems readily closeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The two major problems with DAFs stem from the fact that they are designed to give advantages to donors immediately but not require any further interaction.

Problem - the organization most benefited by DAFs seem not to be charities, but Vanguard/Fidelty/etc that take management fees for the DAF for the next 10 years. Just running a ballpark with 4% interest and a 1 percent total management fee, putting 500k into a DAF makes the manager about 70k, and grows the fund about 170k. Not bad, but the benefit goes almost entirely to the fund manager.

Problem - Giving to organizations is deferred to a later point in time, leading to grander visions. Theoretically, this should result in charities in the future receiving large checks, which is good. One problem with this, however, is that as numbers being donated get larger, it seems that charitable giving becomes more 'results' or 'mission' oriented. People give big chunks to bigger picture, systemic problems like curing cancer, fighting climate change, etc. These are good things. But the charities working on day-to-day problems get marginalized. My argument is certainly not that we should look for structural fixes to problems like pandemics, homelessness, or institutional racism. But a society that only gives to research universities to look for cures for pediatric cancer, and doesn't also help fund something like St. Jude, is a society with deep problems.

DAFs have significant advantages and good things. But perhaps we have, as an American society, gone the wrong way to give incentives to high-net-worth individuals to give mainly to big causes, and not to day-to-day problems.

<comment><USER4> You are implying that Vanguard takes 1%. It's under 0.14% for the Total Stock index, which broadly goes f or marketcap weighted US stocks. If the DAFs broker takes that much of a premium, they have the wrong broker. E.g. at the volumes you are talking about, Motif Investing seems to have significantly lower costs. Please don't think that these are what you should choose, they are just an example for what I'd potentially (depending on what the specific goals are) choose if I'd be running a DAF in the US.

<comment><USER16> Vanguard Charitable charges a 0.6% management fee* on top of the mutual fund fees: [https://www.vanguardcharitable.org/individuals/fees_and_expe...](https://www.vanguardcharitable.org/individuals/fees_and_expenses)

*assuming you have <$500K

<comment><USER4> Yes, and I did not mention Vanguard as a broker, due to them not being nice fee-wise for small fish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I enjoy backseat driving as much as the next person. It's fun to tell someone with money that they should spend it on X and not Y. But it's probably not productive, though it does lead to lots of clicks and outrage.

Would it be more productive to simply promote specific unmet needs in the Valley?

<comment><USER18> The outrage isn't over what these people do with their money, but over a tax loophole that allows rich people to get tax breaks for effectively doing nothing.

As for promoting specific unmet needs in the Valley, there's no shortage of that, but apparently the rich would prefer to get big tax breaks than actually meeting those needs.

<comment><USER19> It's not "doing nothing". It's legally pledging the money for use on charitable purposes, rather than buying mansions or yachts. And they only get a tax break _on that money_.

<comment><USER18> That pledge is worthless if that money never actually gets spent, which is apparently just what's happening with a lot of these "charities".

In those cases the pledges help no one except rich donors, who get tax breaks.

<comment><USER19> Even if the money is never spent, those rich donors are still worse off than if they had kept the money. So I have to wonder what you think is their goal.

<comment><USER20> I am not convinced that's always true.

They are double dipping on tax breaks. If you invest 1$ and it's worth 1,001$ you would normally pay taxes on that of 15% federal + state. However, if you 'donate' it you get to take a deduction on other incomes for the full 1,001$ and those incomes could be taxed at 39.6% federal + state. So it costs you 850$ - state taxes to save 397$ + state taxes.

California is 13.3% so I am not 100% but I think that works to spending 717 to save 530$ net cost 187$. So, the question is can you make back more than 187$ from a 1,001$ donation. Our president for example would host charitable events at his golf courses which could likely cross that threshold. But, political donations seem like a good option also work, even just employing family is a classic.

PS: If the numbers are a little different aka you are taxed at 39.9% not 15%, then it's a clear net gain. Other possibility is something which is nominally worth X, but you would have trouble liquidating for the full value.

<comment><USER16> You cannot make the required $187 from your donation if you let it sit in a DAF forever, which is the behavior the article is questioning.

<comment><USER20> Ops, I though the Johnson Amendment had been repealed, but did not realize it failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I must be missing something about the benefit. Given that these funds charge a fee, what is the benefit of them, over just making charitable contributions directly to non-profits? It's not a tax benefit, is it, since the contribution size can be written off either way?

<comment><USER22> They do provide a tax benefit. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor- advised_fund#Tax_efficie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor- advised_fund#Tax_efficiency_example)

<comment><USER23> It seems like that tax benefit is really reducing taxes on the donation itself, rather than enriching the donor (as implied)? Am I understanding that right?

<comment><USER24> That is correct.

You can donate appreciated assets (such as stock) to a charity directly, and you get to deduct the current market price on your taxes without having to pay capital gains on the asset.

Donor advised funds simply make this process simpler. You can donate your appreciated asset to a donor advised fund (which acts as a 'charity') and immediately realize the tax write-off, and then later decide what charity to give the money to.

This article seems to be making a big issue out of the fact that there are a lot of donor advised funds in Silicon Valley that are waiting to give the money out, or giving it out over time instead of making one big donation immediately. I fail to see the issue - this is just people moving money around to optimize for taxes - the money will still be given to a charity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The unappreciated risk in a setup like this is that multiple donors could inadvertantly give the DAF sizable impact in voting shares. As I understand it, the Fund, not the donor, owns and votes any donated shares.

If two cofounders sign the Giving Pledge and each give 50% of their voting shares to the same, local DAF, the DAF winds up with more shares than either donor. And it can vote them as a block.

<comment><USER26> "Generally, a DAF and its disqualified persons together may own no more than 20% of the voting stock, profits interest, capital interest, or beneficial interest in a business enterprise."

[http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/donor-advised- funds/](http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/donor-advised-funds/)

<comment><USER25> Interesting. It appears there are two big loopholes to the 20% limit: a general five-year exception that allows DAFs to wind out of large donations, and a new exception where the DAF acquires 100% of the voting interest.[0]

[1][https://clarknuber.com/articles/private-foundations- receive-...](https://clarknuber.com/articles/private-foundations-receive- excess-business-holdings-relief-bipartisan-budget-act/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I found it odd that the article talked throughout about "dispersal" of funds, which sounds a bit like scattering money to the winds. Is this a standard use with which I'm unfamiliar, or did the author mean "disbursal?"

</comment><comment><USER18> TLDR: _" tax-subsidized contributions are being set aside indefinitely -- subject to no obligation for them ever to be put to active charitable use"_

</comment><comment><USER28> Another thing ruined by businesspeople optimizing for numbers...

<comment><USER29> Businesspeople optimizing for numbers is the reason enough money exists that some can be given to charity.

<comment><USER18> "Charities" that exist only to give tax breaks to their rich donors.

<comment><USER29> Some of that money does get to the public.

<comment><USER18> Enough to justify the tax breaks?

Without transparency, it's hard to tell -- which is the other problem the article is about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> DAFs let you get a nice fat tax break with your startup windfall that you can then promise to the college of your child's choice.

This is not charity.</comment>


Exploitable Vulnerability in libotr - <AUTHOR> https://www.x41-dsec.de/de/lab/advisories/x41-2016-001-libotr/ <comment><USER2> >In order to successfully trigger the vulnerability, an attacker must be able to send a data message of more than 5.5 gigabytes to a victim

Well, at least it's not trivial.</comment>


Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit - <AUTHOR> http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html

<comment><USER2> Being one of the really classics, this papers is now too old and the techniques almost obsolete (non-executable stacks etc)

</comment><comment><USER3> This dates from November 1996</comment>


Ara: A 1 GHz+ Scalable and Energy-Efficient RISC-V Vector Processor - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.00478 <comment><USER2> > Ara runs at 1.2 GHz in the typical corner (TT/0.80 V/25 oC), achieving a > performance up to 34 DP-GFLOPS. In terms of energy efficiency, Ara achieves > up to 67 DP-GFLOPS/W under the same conditions, which is 56% higher than > similar vector processors found in literature.

I wonder if it supports vectorized 8-bit multiplies and, if so, what its performance and efficiency is on those.

I've been looking around at AI accelerators a bit recently. They AFAIK only do 8-bit operations and are rated in TOPS (tera-operations-per-second). Google's Coral USB Accelerator (with an Edge TPU chip) claims 4 TOPS, at 2 TOPS/W. The Gyrfalcon Plai Plug (with a SPR2801S chip) claims 5.6 TOPS, at 9.3 TOPS/W. It'd be really exciting to have an open architecture chip match or exceed that. The Kendryte K210 is a RISC-V AI accelerator chip announced recently, but it only claims 0.25 TOPS, or 0.8 TOPS/W.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. A lot of people here seem to focus on Computer Graphics I'm also wondering about potential application Machine Learning and Neural Networks.

Like how would it fare against today's FPGAs, DSP, NPU and TPUs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before I can be bullish on RISC-V, I really need to see a set of basic bitwise instructions -- minimally, popcount and count-leading-zeros (i.e. integer log- base-2).

When I last looked at the (tabled) bitwise extensions, they had been bloated out of all reason with really wild bit-shuffling apparatus.

I understand those last are very useful to some people, but if they interfere with getting a fast popcount in the core ISA, we can't afford them.

<comment><USER5> The whole point of Risc is to avoid instruction complexity for rarely used instructions. Popcount and family are most likely microcoded to expand to a loop anyway, so why add this complexity to silicon?

<comment><USER6> > The whole point of Risc is to avoid instruction complexity for rarely used > instructions

Yeah, that was true 20-30 years ago.

> Popcount and family are most likely microcoded to expand to a loop anyway, > so why add this complexity to silicon?

No, you can just make a network of small adders. You could easily build a CPU that has throughput of 1 popcount per cycle (or even better, if SIMD and/or multiple execution ports supported this ALU operation). Silicon area is not a problem anyways anymore. Power and heat on the other hand...

<comment><USER7> >Silicon area is not a problem anyways anymore. Power and heat on the other hand...

Yes, so then why are ARM chips in mobile devices approaching x86 performance with an order of magnitude less power? C̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶a̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶u̶n̶k̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶r̶a̶r̶e̶l̶y̶-̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶i̶l̶i̶c̶o̶n̶ ̶e̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶s̶u̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶s̶i̶g̶n̶i̶f̶i̶c̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶a̶m̶o̶u̶n̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶o̶w̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶b̶e̶c̶o̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶d̶o̶m̶i̶n̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶e̶x̶c̶e̶s̶s̶i̶v̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶l̶a̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶s̶c̶a̶l̶e̶s̶?̶

<comment><USER8> That's not the reason, especially not in this day and age of clock gating. It's because those ARM designs are optimized for low power, at the expense of not having headroom to take advantage of higher power envelopes if they are available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Commentary? What's the difference between a GPU and a vector processor? Is vector processors being open-source a desirable quality (compared to general attractiveness of open-source)?

<comment><USER10> In order to render current games / 3d with reasonable performance you need dedicated texturing hardware. Intel's Larrabee had it even though it never shipped as a graphics card. And early plans for the PS3 involved adding texture units to a Cell cpu, but Sony went with a Nvidia gpu instead.

<comment><USER11> Sampling/texturing helps but I can't help thinking that the software stack is the critical factor. You might make a great new open ecosystem but if I can't Port my OGL/OCL/etc benchmark to your hardware easily, I'm probably not going to waste my time.

<comment><USER10> Apparently this was the big thing that held Larrabee back as a GPU. The hardware was capable, but they never got their drivers to the point where they could do a good job with existing OpenGL, Direct3D, etc. code.

<comment><USER12> Is there any strong evidence of the claim that Larrabee HW had the potential of being a capable GPU, and that it was just a SW issue?

Despite being increasingly programmable, GPUs still have very fine-tuned hardware for graphics, and this goes deeper than just adding some texture mapping units here or there.

A good example of this is the fact that both Nvidia and AMD keep on adding new modes in HW to streamline graphics primitive processing with varying degrees of success (see mesh shaders and primitive shaders.)

To me, this signals that a free-for-all software approach as championed by Larrabee is simply not efficient enough in a competitive environment where GPUs are declared winner or loser based on benchmark differences of just a few percent.

<comment><USER10> Tom Forsyth's write up seems to make mostly reasonable claims. Though even he notes that it wasn't competitive with the high end at the time.

"So let's talk about the elephant in the room - graphics. Yes, at that we did fail. And we failed mainly for reasons of time and politics. And even then we didn't fail by nearly as much as people think. Because we were never allowed to ship it, people just saw a giant crater, but in fact Larrabee did run graphics, and it ran it surprisingly well. Larrabee emulated a fully DirectX11 and OpenGL4.x compliant graphics card - by which I mean it was a PCIe card, you plugged it into your machine, you plugged the monitor into the back, you installed the standard Windows driver, and... it was a graphics card. There was no other graphics cards in the system. It had the full DX11 feature set, and there were over 300 titles running perfectly - you download the game from Steam and they Just Work - they totally think it's a graphics card! But it's still actually running FreeBSD on that card, and under FreeBSD it's just running an x86 program called DirectXGfx (248 threads of it). And it shares a file system with the host and you can telnet into it and give it other work to do and steal cores from your own graphics system - it was mind-bending! And because it was software, it could evolve - Larrabee was the first fully DirectX11-compatible card Intel had, because unlike Gen we didn't have to make a new chip when Microsoft released a new spec. It was also the fastest graphics card Intel had - possibly still is. Of course that's a totally unfair comparison because Gen (the integrated Intel gfx processor) has far less power and area budget. But that should still tell you that Larrabee ran graphics at perfectly respectable speeds. I got very good at ~Dirt3 on Larrabee.

Of course, this was just the very first properly working chip (KNF had all sorts of problems, so KNC was the first shippable one) and the software was very young. No, it wasn't competitive with the fastest GPUs on the market at the time, unless you chose the workload very carefully (it was excellent at running Compute Shaders). If we'd had more time to tune the software, it would have got a lot closer. And the next rev of the chip would have closed the gap further. It would have been a very strong chip in the high-end visualization world, where tiny triangles, super-short lines and massive data sets are the main workloads - all things Larrabee was great at. But we never got the time or the political will to get there, and so the graphics side was very publicly cancelled."

[http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...](http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20didn%27t%20Larrabee%20fail%3F%5D%5D)

<comment><USER12> Thanks for that!

> it was excellent at running Compute Shaders

On one hand, that statement supports my belief that there is more to graphics than just a lot of raw compute flops.

> It would have been a very strong chip in the high-end visualization world, > where tiny triangles, super-short lines and massive data sets are the main > workloads - all things Larrabee was great at.

But this goes the opposite way. :-)

Because you'd think that a lot of small primitives would make it harder to deploy those raw compute flops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Has the vector spec been finalized yet? I think it will be critical to bring graphics to RISCV.

<comment><USER14> Graphics is much more subtle than just vector instructions as can be seen from the failures of Larrabee.

<comment><USER15> Note that RISCV vector extension also supports matrices, tensors, etc. So at least for GPGPU compute applications, it feels quite modern (e.g. Volta has tensor cores).

Also, Larrabee had fixed-width 512-bit wide vectors (it did not support SSE 128-bit wide or AVX 256-bit wide vectors). RISC-V has Cray vectors of dynamic length (e.g. need a 128-bit vector, no problem, need a 4096 bit one? no problem either).

I think the main issue for programming CPUs to solve GPU problems is that our programming models for CPUs don't expose the memory hierarchy, while the ones for GPUs do that in a much more finer grained way.

<comment><USER16> Memory bandwidth is another issue holding CPUs back

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> RISC-V sponsors need to spend the money on developers getting ISPC to target whatever the RISC-V Vector spec ends up being.

Without that, you'd have to rely on auto-vectorization and that's not great for anything but HPC applications using OpenMP.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's really happening

</comment><comment><USER19> Does it have speculative execution vulnerabilities?

<comment><USER20> There doesn't look to be any speculation in this architecture.</comment></comment>


Is the iPad changing books forever with popups, games and more? - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/27/games-pop-ups-3d-and-more-the-ipad-is-changing-books-forever/

<comment><USER2> Books are books. Electronic texts, and anything else on an iPad is not a book.

At most it could be said tablets are changing how people consume textual information. But same can be said for everything from papyrus, woodblock print, Gutenberg press, computers, Internet, etc.

Hyberbolic titles to drive traffic to your shitty site suck.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not my site. I found the article interesting.</comment></comment>


Why Retro Rules - <AUTHOR> http://www.explorminate.com/#!Why-Retro-Rules/c15kj/209B957C-CFA4-41C7-B83A-B3C81576750D <comment><USER2> Interesting that "imbalanced" and "unfair" have come up a couple of times in the past couple of days in game discussions on HN. I'm thinking of this article about Jeff Vogel: [http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/the-original- indie-dev-how...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/the-original-indie-dev- how-one-man-made-22-games-in-22-years-mostly-from-his-basement/2/) as well as a recent discussion of NetHack and it's infamous YASD.

Sometimes, games being capricious is exactly the right thing. Though I find it frustrating when I feel like a game is "cheating" (like other Civs science advancing at a much higher rate than mine in Civilization games). There's some kind of balance in doing imbalance right. It maybe needs to go both ways...bad things and good things need to happen in surprising ways.

I haven't spent a _whole_ lot of time thinking about game design, and the only games I've ever actually made were for the C64 and Apple II nearly 30 years ago, but reading this, and the article about Jeff Vogel's games, and thinking about the kinds of games I play forever...Nethack, Civ (including older Civs now and then). They are games that can be vicious and shocking in their lack of concern for the player. I dunno what that means about me or about game design. But, I kinda want to play some Nethack now.

<comment><USER3> Many modern games are so meticulously balanced, that it makes decisions seem pointless. Compare nethack, to dungeon crawl stone soup. In DCSS everything is so carefully balanced, that you can choose A with caveats or choose B with caveats and it amounts to the same. Choose heavy armour, and have less agility? Or light armour and more agility? Who cares, your overall impact is the same. By trying to get rid of "no-brainer" decisions, they have made the decisions that you do make seem meaningless. Nethack by contrast, could be completely imbalanced but so much more atmospheric and fun to play as a result.

DCSS tried to be like chess, nethack feels more like an actual place that might exist without the player.

This also applies to modern 4X games, like endless space. Perhaps that is one reason for the success of Dwarf Fortress, you definitely get the feeling that the player is an afterthought - right down to the very UI, the game hates you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's important to also note, that retro designs where quite frankly a lot more simple than modern designs. One of our inspirations for [http://rivalz.io/](http://rivalz.io/) was the Mac OS 1 (1984) because it easily organized all of the features you wanted, without any extras or bloat.

Today's design is so superficial, that a large chunk of applications/games/ui is just fluff and sometimes distracts from the main experience.

</comment><comment><USER5> explorminate.com: This has to be the most poorly designed website I've ever visited outside of some one off hobbyist crap and random AOL properties...</comment>


The Virtual Accelerator – A place where anyone can plant the seed of an idea - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/a-home-for-new-ideas-23ccffecf659#.d2edcwyaw <comment><USER2> Please vote for our idea - Open Provenance

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice animation video</comment>


Ask HN: What do you look for in resumes when recruiting? - <AUTHOR> I want to do a quick holiday side project and thought I'd make a online resume builder.(Yes, I know there are thousands already, but I want to build one that's slightly different, and won't harass you for your email before giving you your resume.)
What I want to know is what do you, person responsible for sifting through these things, want to see when going through resumes?
What format, how much information, what information... Things like that? What pisses you off about a resume, what makes you appreciate it?
I basically want to make a kickass resume-making service that both applicants and hiring managers would appreciate. There's more secret sauce to my idea, of course, but I want to focus on the resumes first and foremost. <comment><USER2> Separately be sensitive to cultural issues as I don't know where you are developing. In my professional resume editing business based in Shanghai, I wanted to set up a really polished resume site where employers could screen my clients since they've been through my full process (resume, LinkdedIn Profile enhancement, interview coaching) and a top notch candidate. I found people are afraid of their stuff being too accessible in public due to being targeted by criminals and ID theft. It's a damn shame really. Good luck!

Vince Fulco, CFA, CAIA vfulco[@]weisisheng.cn

</comment><comment><USER3> Clean format. Don't get too fancy. It should be super basic and completely focused on content.

Don't get too fancy with words. Don't use acronyms or get too technical, save that for the interview. Put what you accomplished in layman's or business- terms ("Improved speed of X by Y%, causing Z" vs "Improved image processing in DFE by leveraging FGFR then post-processed with FESDG")

Shorter is better. Giving a really good tasty morsel is way better than a 5-course bland meal.

</comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, github and video screen are way more informative. Usually through cyclops.io so we can jump into whiteboarding or screen sharing.

If there was a way to have a single hosting platform. Where candidates could create 90 second video intros of themselves. Describing their projects, interests and personal and professional philosophies. With links to demos, apps, etc. A lot like YCombinator startup candidate videos. I think that could be tremendously useful! Best of luck ;)

</comment><comment><USER2> I was super disappointed about jsonresume.org never getting their pdf issues worked out. So many others have tried (they tried and failed? they tried and died...Dune reference ;-) ). That was about the closest I have ever seen to a standard which could be used to semi-automate writing them.

Most services seem to stumble with consistent PDF or MS Word formatting. Rarely can you get a service that provides both easily.

Check them out for some trailheads though.</comment>


Boffins achieve 'breakthrough' in random number generation - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/18/boffins_achieve_breakthrough_in_random_number_generation/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11719543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11719543)

</comment><comment><USER3> Boffins... Lol

<comment><USER4> Boffin is what The Register calls proper scientists. By contrast, pseudo science is carried out by 'trick cyclists'</comment></comment>


Britain's delusions about the green belt cause untold misery - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21716626-solve-its-housing-crisis-country-must-learn-love-urban-britains-delusions-about <comment><USER3> The utility of building on the green belt is questionable. The London green belt is so far away from the city center that you'd be better of living in Birmigham and taking the train than trying to get in from there. The UK's biggest issue that the government housing stopped being built in the early 1980s and the number of privately built housing never increased. There has been a deficit of 200,000 housing units a year for over 30 years. Even now almost all housing that is built is built for the top end of the market and will do nothing to bring housing prices down.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. What we need is for money to be put into affordable housing on brownfield sites in and around the cities. People don't want to live miles away from anything. Why ruin undeveloped land when there is an abundance of land (and buildings) that sits unused. The reason is because the real estate companies don't want to lose out on profit by building affordable homes on high value land. If the government actually enforced affordable housing requirements (or heaven forbid actually invested in housing directly) then that would be worth something. Instead they are pushing 'garden towns', which whatever the hell it means will probably result in facility deserts and degenerating estates as well as the unnecessary destruction of the countryside.

<comment><USER5> People don't want to live in the London green belt?

Let's lift the restrictions and see if that holds true, shall we?

I think you vastly underestimate the suffering millions of people in the UK are enduring as a result of the housing crisis, and the range of alternatives that would be considered an improvement for those people.

<comment><USER6> >People don't want to live in the London green belt?

I'd rather live centrally. If _height_ restrictions were eliminated and councils started building pretty much everybody who wanted to, could. The housing crisis was entirely a deliberate creation of both the Tories (and to an extent, New Labour).

>I think you vastly underestimate the suffering millions of people in the UK are enduring

I think you're vastly overestimating the effect this would have on alleviating that.

Corbyn's approach (let councils start building again) is a far more rational approach than this.

<comment><USER7> > Corbyn's approach (let councils start building again) is a far more rational > approach than this.

Leaving aside the question of where the money and land comes from (both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last few GEs, and nobody's even come close to hitting them), doesn't this run afoul of parliamentary sovereignty?

If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give them all away again as electoral bribes?

My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment. That's certainly not the only problem, but it's addressable relatively cheaply via macroprudential measures and tax law, so I'd like to see uk.gov start there and then see what further action is needed.

<comment><USER6> >Leaving aside the question of where the money and land comes

The money would come from "people's QE" and lifting the housing revenue account cap.

Building UP, as I mentioned before, is a better way of packing more people in than creating sprawling suburbs in the green belt. For a city its size London's density has been ridiculously restrained.

>both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last few GEs, and nobody's even come close to hitting them

Neither Blair's government nor the Tories have ever had any intention of building council housing, instead setting targets for the private sector.

>If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give them all away again as electoral bribes

Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you want.

>My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment.

The financialization of housing exacerbated the problems caused by the shortage of housing, they obviously didn't create them.

<comment><USER7> > The money would come from "people's QE"

Oh, yet more printy printy. Wonderful.

> Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you > want.

No, I wouldn't prefer that. I'd quite like an affordable home of my own at some point before I die, thank you very much. I believe social housing - <USER2> from the inflationary incentives of the PRS - has an important role to play in keeping the PRS honest, much like (AUIU) the NHS does a lot to keep the UK's private health sector honest compared to the situation in the US. But after the past few decades I don't trust uk.gov to treat social housing as an asset in the long term.

> The financialization of housing exacerbated the problems caused by the > shortage of housing, they obviously didn't create them.

I don't think that's at all obvious. When some "investors" are buying houses and leaving them empty while they appreciate, that seems to demonstrate that this is _at least_ as much a demand-side problem as a supply-side one. Where I live, new high-rise housing is going up everywhere you look, and prices for a 1-bed are still stuck at around 15x average earnings.

I know I sound negative. 20 years of watching this madness unfold will do that to you. I have a kneejerk suspicion of "just build on brownfield land" \- it's the housing equivalent of "we'll improve services _and_ reduce taxes by cutting red tape and reducing government waste" \- sounds nice, doesn't frighten anyone, but if it were really that easy you'd think it would have actually happened the last 20 times someone said it.

<comment><USER6> >I know I sound negative. 20 years of watching this madness unfold will do that to you. I have a kneejerk suspicion of "just build on brownfield land" \- it's the housing equivalent of "we'll improve services and reduce taxes by cutting red tape and reducing government waste" \- sounds nice, doesn't frighten anyone

Of course it frightens people. Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall in value is terrifying. Building a vast amount of housing will do that.

I've watched this madness for 20 years as well and it's painfully clear to me that high house prices was a deliberate choice. The "crisis" made the ultra- wealthy very happy and a large part of middle England were fairly okay with it too.

<comment><USER7> > Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall in value is terrifying. > Building a vast amount of housing will do that.

Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry whenever anyone even starts looking sideways at the green belt. _Nobody_ is terrified of brownfield, which is why I strongly suspect that brownfield alone isn't going to make a damn bit of difference; to steal a phrase, "if building on brownfield changed anything they'd make it illegal".

> it's painfully clear to me that high house prices was a deliberate choice

Yes, very obviously. And not just in the obvious "pandering to donor builders and smug homeowners" sense, either; debt creation through mortgage lending is at the heart of UK monetary policy now. Probably the most extreme example I've ever seen of jam today at the cost of long-term disaster.

<comment><USER6> >Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry whenever anyone even starts looking sideways at the green belt.

The kinds of the people who start looking sideways at the greenbelt (the Economist _very_ much included) implies to me that it's more about building big expensive houses for the wealthy in a nice green area than it is about building affordable housing for Londoners.

The very fact that the Economist would lobby for this while simultaneously slamming the "ultra left wing" Corbyn policy of "just build more council housing" ought to be a sign that something is amiss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This might be a problem down South, I don't dispute it; but over here in the North, it's anything but. There is still a huge amount of brownfield to regenerate, and we desperately need to hold on every little bit of greenfield the Victorians failed to build mills on.

The urban developments this pieces glorify, like New Islington, compound the problem by being completely unbalanced towards the young and childless: small flats built for profit, not for people to live in with kids. Medium- and High- rise are also very much at odds with typical English individualism, and people simply won't live in them if they can afford anything else. A lot of these fancy new towers around Manchester are half-empty.

What we need up North is a serious policy of brownfield cleanup. Give local authorities more money to dispose of all shit resulting from 200 years of environmental abuse, instead of enabling _more_ abuse on what little good greenfield is left.

</comment><comment><USER9> What an odd article, lambasting green area's and pushing that they must be built upon. Sorry but we like to have cleaner air as best we can and think of the green belt as the UK's Amazon.

When you view it like that then you see how silly this whole article is.

<comment><USER10> Who's this "we" you speak of? I guess it's Fuck-You-Got-Mine baby-boomer Tory brigade, who bought cheap suburban houses in the 1970s and 80s and have watched them rocket in value ever since.

Because it certainly isn't the rest of us, who have no prospect of ever buying a home, or getting a pension, but are still expected to pay hundreds of thousands in taxes to subsidise over our lifetime the retirement of the aforementioned baby-boomers, while listening to their lectures about how we don't work hard enough, and don't value the precious green belt that keeps their house prices buoyant.

England is ~10% urban[1]; the figure is even lower in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The green belt isn't about protecting some dwindling remnant of unspoilt land, it's about propping up the house prices of people too stupid and selfish to even admit to themselves how stupid and selfish they're being.

[1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096)

<comment><USER6> >are still expected to pay hundreds of thousands in taxes to subsidise over our lifetime the retirement of the aforementioned baby-boomers

It's curious how the 0.1% can mysteriously grow fabulously wealthy, cut pensions that older people rely upon, cut NHS funding which older people rely upon, jack up tuition fees, jack up rail prices, trigger the largest financial crisis in decades, price younger people out of the housing market and yet still manage to convince the younger generation that their own parents are obviously the ones who ripped them off.

<comment><USER11> While also convincing the parents that all their and their children's worries can be fixed by doing whatever the 0.1% wants and that they should call anyone who disagrees an out-of-touch metropolitan elite, even/especially those never- going-to-own-houses kids

(Disclaimer: I have been guilty of anti-boomer rhetoric elsewhere lately, but I read your post and you are probably right.

It is still frustrating, though, to hear older people, comfortably retired mortgage-free in houses with 3+ spare bedrooms, tell us that if only we worked harder and didn't eat out occasionally we could surely save up for a house)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No, it's time to stop trying to cram everyone into the same primary cities. It's time for secondary cities to shine. We can help by leaving the stone age when it comes to transportation infrastructure. Planes like the Dreamliner means former backwaters can be connected to other sides of the planet directly. We all know the benefits of broadband. There's no reason to keep trying to cram into primary cities.

</comment><comment><USER13> Neither the article nor the comments here have said anything about foreign money coming into London and buying up property as a hedge against problems in their own countries. And then the houses and apartments sit vacant.

Is this a real, widespread, problem, or does this only apply to a small number of expensive properties in the most desirable parts of London?

</comment><comment><USER14> Never going to happen because it would lower the values of peoples' houses. End of story.

I can't afford a house in the city I work in. Everyone I know lives outside and commutes by car which is a waste of time for everyone (add cost of petrol, pollution etc.). This is stupid.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very little of Britain is actually built on - 2.7% according to this BBC article ([http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096))

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't see a byline for the article, so I can't Google to see what sort of connections to the UK real estate industry that the author has. Oh well.

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't it be better to address the article on its own merits, whatever those may be, instead of looking for the author trying to make an ad hominem argument?

<comment><USER4> It is difficult to read past the potential for bias here though.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Adds 'Kodi' to Autocomplete Piracy Filter - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/google-adds-kodi-to-autocomplete-piracy-filter-180328/ <comment><USER2> >Google has banned the term "Kodi" from its autocomplete feature, meaning those who look for information on the set-top box will have to type out the full term in order to search, as reported by TorrentFreak.

>While Kodi is a legal set-top box for streaming, it supports a myriad of third-party add-ons that provide access to pirated media.

Kodi is not a "set-top box". Kodi is software. A set-top box might be _pre- loaded_ with Kodi, but it is not Kodi, anymore than a phone is an "Android". As far as I'm aware, the Kodi team doesn't even sell or officially endorse any pre-loaded hardware set-top box.

This sort of mangling is disappointing from a tech-focused news outlet like The Verge. It also reinforces the implicit association between Kodi and piracy, which is the very thing that caused Google to remove Kodi from search results in the first place.

<comment><USER3> > This sort of mangling is disappointing from a tech-focused news outlet like > The Verge. It also reinforces the implicit association between Kodi and > piracy, which is the very thing that caused Google to remove Kodi from > search results in the first place.

This sort of mangling is exactly how exaggerated misrepresented news gets spread. Google didn't remove Kodi from their search results. You can type Kodi and it's the first thing that pops up.

You can type home theater software and get Kodi in the search results, or open source media player and get Kodi.

All they did is remove Kodi from being autocompleted. It still even comes up for autosuggestion.

<comment><USER4> Right, but... imo google can fuck right off. I'm really not sure who wants corporate interests nudging them like this.

Google is allowed to curate thisr autocomplete to remove links to 6degree piracy topics, and even promote a candidate by removing negative results like they did for Clinton - and I'm allowed to consider them actually-evil for doing so.

<comment><USER5> Yep. Previously it seemed like they valued their search's integrity over everything else, but they must be so comfortable with their power now that they're not really worried anymore. It's not easy to prove either, so hard to regulate. I wish we could forbid it and it might be something the EU may try in the next few years, but it'd likely involve an external audit of the holiest systems - something they would likely fight against hard.

What individual users can do in the mean time is using independent, less corporate services: DuckDuckGo comes to mind.

It is however hard to ignore that Google really has a monopoly on _good_ search (well, decliningly so for me). Maybe we should also start to use Bing to fuel competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel so bad for the Kodi project. They've done amazing work over the years and their reputation is being destroyed so quickly by people taking their open source work, adding a bunch of piracy addons, and selling a set top box.

I have no idea what they can do to combat this. I don't see how they can distance themselves from this any more than they have.

<comment><USER7> Equally sad as the existence of the terrible Kodi piracy boxes is that the legitimate set top box/"smart TV" industry is completely ignoring it. I'm not aware of any TV manufacturer building Kodi into their product, instead they invent their own junk, which is usually much worse.

Does anyone know why the consumer electronics industry is ignoring Kodi?

<comment><USER2> Because Plex actively courted the Roku's and the Amazon's of the world while Kodi was content to just make great, free software.

To boot, Plex began as a fork of XBMC (Kodi's name at the time). Which, given Kodi's GPLv2 license, probably puts Plex out of compliance.

<comment><USER8> >> Plex began as a fork of XBMC (Kodi's name at the time).

Ah, XBMC... I still have an original Xbox that I modded to specifically run XBMC collecting dust in my spare room. It definitely has come a long way.

<comment><USER9> The original Xbox was way ahead of the other media centers I knew of at the time (2004-2010,roughly): * CD/DVD player * upgradeable HDD * 1080i output (though I mostly used RCA connectors, and I don't think you can decode 720p+ with it) * quite cheap compared to a fully fledged computer * trough XBMC, integrated games library management, with native and emulated titles * and of course, the plethora of add-ons and protocols Kodi supports to this day

And though it was big and heavy, it had an integrated PSU.

This was before raspberry pi was a thing, mind you. The alternatives were expensive (~€200) hard disk enclosures that couldn't do a fourth of this. I would have kept on using if it wasn't for its inability to cope with HD formats, and wouldn't be surprised to learn that it helped to promote the console quite a bit.

<comment><USER8> > And though it was big and heavy, it had an integrated PSU.

It was noisy as hell (from the fan) too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In a similar vein, Amazon refused to publish an Alexa skill I wrote to control Kodi (basically a voice remote). They cited piracy as the only reason. When I'd press them on why they allowed one for Plex since they are both just video players, they would just refuse to acknowledge the question and deny me again.

It's their right to do so, but it's stupid and defies logic.

<comment><USER5> Should it be their right? They are becoming so prevalent that perhaps they should be regulated like infrastructure ...

<comment><USER11> I remember when computers were programmable :(.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google's mission statement: [https://www.google.com/about/our- company/](https://www.google.com/about/our-company/)

 _"Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Since the beginning, our goal has been to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible.

Not just for some. For everyone._

To decrement something would appear to be contrary to making it universally accessible.

<comment><USER4> Are you just figuring out that google is actually evil?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Quite ironic when you can use YouTube + Chromecast to watch entire episodes of many shows and many full length movies.

You can't ban software makers for the illegal use of their software by users when your own users and services are the same...

Why don't they remove "full episode" from YouTube's autocomplete? (We all know the answer to that one.)

<comment><USER14> > You can't ban software makers for the illegal use of their software by users > when your own users and services are the same..

The sad thing is that yes - they can, and yes - they do. And there's little we can do to stop them from doing that, apart from raising concerns and stopping using their service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In other news: "Google removes 'Chrome' from its search autocomplete in anti- piracy effort"

<comment><USER16> Been there, done that: [https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/google-demotes- chrome-in...](https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/google-demotes-chrome-in- _n_1184734)

<comment><USER5> Now that's brilliant. Why do I often feel like one Google doesn't know what the other is doing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How is it that software makers are culpable when their product us used to commit a crime but not gun manufactures?

Is it that copyright violation is such a "heinous" crime that special rules apply?

<comment><USER18> Unlike victims of gun crimes, the victims of copyright violation have the money and lobbying power to effect change.

<comment><USER19> No, unlike gun owners and manufacturers, software developers have no effective lobbying organization and get treated liked 2nd class citizens. No one fears angering software developers before an election.

<comment><USER20> > No, unlike gun owners and manufacturers, software developers have no > effective lobbying organization

They just haven't been clever enough to organize their own _customers_ , or some other mass front, politically the way the gun industry has.

<comment><USER19> I think your reversing that, as the customers are out front. That's the mistake that keeps getting made by the NRA's opponents. The NRA is only effective because its people over industry. Industry-lead groups need a whole lot more funding to be effective.

Any software developer that is looking for leadership from the software industry is going to be very disappointed. Often, the industry doesn't really have the best instance of developers in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How ironic, given that Kodi is a GSoC project.

<comment><USER22> Google punished Chrome before. So I wouldn't call this ironic.

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/google-demotes- chr...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/google-demotes-chrome-in- _n_1184734.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What a terrible "journalist". Didn't even do the most basic research to understand the topic they're discussing.

</comment><comment><USER24> That is frankly one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. I have used Kodi since it was XBMC. And MAYBE back in the day when you had to break DMCA section 1201 to install it on an original Xbox then you could have argued there was something questionable about it. But now it's just a general media player that looks good on a TV.

I am sure this is a total coincidence that the ability of Chrome to cast local files was showed off literally yesterday, and they seek and destroy the competitor that makes Chromecasting look like a cavemans solution the following.

</comment><comment><USER25> I feel that such anti-piracy filtering is counter-intuitive because it promotes awareness. I had no idea what 'kodi' was until today.

<comment><USER26> The good old Streisand effect

<comment><USER25> indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So does that mean they should remove all android devices that play Kodi? Oh, that hurts Google bottom line.. oh nevermind then.. let's just villanize Kodi developers.(Who have done a hell of a job I might add since the Xbox original with a modchip). This is grandstanding for show. Google is without a doubt the largest contributer to piracy via their indexing of, well, everything. Android should be worried about why their sandbox security is so terrible it allowed Facebook to gather sexting archives rivaling only that of Snapchat.

</comment><comment><USER28> Unless Google removes Wikipeda too, it really doesn't matter what they remove.

Example; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_\(software\))

All links there =) Anytime official site changes, this pages updated.

Wikipedia is your Search Engine, when Google fails.

<comment><USER29> They only removed it from autocomplete/suggestions, not from indexing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Somehow "sci" still suggests "sci hub". Isn't that even more direct piracy than Kodi?

</comment><comment><USER31> Google continues in its quest to be completely useless for actually finding what you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER32> Doing this _without any signal to users performing the search_ seems dishonest to me.

<comment><USER33> How do you think they should signal users?

<comment><USER34> > "Search results for "Kodi" have been removed because you might use it for > illegal stuff"

<comment><USER35> But results for "Kodi" haven't been removed. Autocompletion when you type "kod" or "ko" has. I'm trying to think of a non-disruptive way to pop up "we would have completed this term with 'kodi' but oh hey nevermind you went on to type 'koala'" and I'm failing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> At what point do filtering or targeted omissions become considered anti- competitive practices? It is one thing for a government to issue and companies to uphold gags because governments are not in competition.

</comment><comment><USER37> Next, they will detain/arrest Kodi developers at airports.

</comment><comment><USER38> Alternative title: Bing expands their market, now your go-to for both porn and piracy.

Edit: also note that it's just the autocomplete, not the actual search results

</comment><comment><USER39> btw, searx.me is a really fantastic search engine

<comment><USER6> Tried to search for "kodi" on it. [https://i.imgur.com/Eew8wA7.png](https://i.imgur.com/Eew8wA7.png)

<comment><USER40> I did too and I got "Kodi | Open Source Home Theater"

On [https://www.searx.me/](https://www.searx.me/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The cynic in me thinks google wants you to watch illegal streams on youtube.

</comment><comment><USER42> Streisand effect, anyone? I had not heard of Kodi before this.

<comment><USER43> For what it's worth, unfamiliarity might have something to do with the fact Kodi has only existed under that name for a couple years.

Prior to that, it was known as XBMC ("XBox Media Center"). Under that title it's been around since 2003.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> kodi with a space still provides relevant search results fyi.

<comment><USER45> I think that's expected. Typing "Ko" will not suggest "Kodi" after this announcement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Url changed from [https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176894/google- removes-k...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176894/google-removes-kodi- search-autocomplete-anti-piracy), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER47> Google's talking about piracy, everyone else is talking about privacy.

Google can do whatever they want to please their masters within the industry on the piracy front. I moved to DuckDuckGo years ago. If I want to check Google results I get them through the Startpage bang.

Google & Facebook belong in the same category of no-go, invasive privacy offenders. Which is piracy in my book. Hopefully their next preventative measure in that regard is to remove google.com.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is standard operating procedure for Google, and presumably all other major search engines. They apply the same filtering to other "objectionable" content and are the sole arbitrators of what fits this definition. How is this news? Is there some other way to solve the very real problem that Google is addressing?

<comment><USER49> You could always support other search engines -- but as the former CTO of blekko, I'm not going to ever ship an autocomplete that by default returns nasty stuff for [blacks are] or [why do blacks] or a large number of other phrases which produce terrible, terrible autocomplete results.

<comment><USER48> Yeah, that was my point. Why would google have autocomplete options that give them a bad image? Why should anyone other than google decide what a good image is?

<comment><USER49> Ah, I misunderstood your point. Yes, it's an editorial thing, and even as a personal fan of unfiltered results, I can't bring myself to ship horrific autocomplete suggestions.

Unfortunately the existence of an autocomplete filtering system does lead to increased pressure to use it for more than just racism and porn.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Precision FDA: FDA launches community platform for NGS assay evaluation - <AUTHOR> https://precision.fda.gov/ <comment><USER2> Very cool! This is very much needed, I hope it takes off. Open, iterative approach, using open source tools, and early beta with clear objectives, this isn't the FDA I'm used to.

They seem to have taken the concept of forking apps from Github, but it's strange the open/public apps wouldn't just integrate github into the backend.</comment>


Ask HN: Monetizing free job board site, ideas? - <AUTHOR>

I've developed railsjob.com as my very first learning project on Rails ~5 yrs ago. It has been running and let anyone posting jobs for free since then. I get about 30-40 jobs every month, it's probably making $100 per year from adsense.
I know most profitable job boards charges $100+ per job and they are often linked to sites with large followers.
I'm just wondering what I should do to make this site more profitable than it is. Should I add more features, or look for partnerships with bloggers or just simply charge for job posting? <comment><USER2> I think you should include a search/filter feature, full/part/telecommute options, and also include a salary field as part of the job post.

\- search/filter feature will help users to filter out opportunities better. \- salary will help users to seek viable jobs, and also allow you to collect data on the salary of rails employer. You can use these data to price your job post if you decide to take that option in the future.

Lots of rooms to grow really.</comment>


DDD, Event Sourcing, and CQRS Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://cqrs.nu/tutorial/cs/01-design

<comment><USER2> Some quick points on DDD/CQRS/Event sourcing from my perspective. I've been involved in a project and have a number of concerns:

Firstly, the main drivers of this i.e. Greg Young/Udi Dahan/Particular are trying to sell a product and consultancy. While there is nothing wrong with this, there is a significant cost and the motivation to use this architecture is marketing driven rather than logical gains. Make sure it is appropriate for your organisation. 95% of organisations it probably isn't. It wasn't for ours but overzealous architecture proponents bought the marketing.

The cognitive load is immense compared to a smaller system architecture. Every change results in masses of friction, cost and time. Your agility will be destroyed pretty quickly. Also due to the cross-cutting concerns, there is no escape from it other than to port everything away.

The products to support it are generally immature, low quality and opinionated to the point that it's impossible to integrate cleanly on anything but a greenfield. Expect friction.

There are better gains to be had from changing your architecture to a purely service model (I hate the term, but microservices) and skip the whole concept.

However if there's one thing I have learned that Command-Query Separation is a good model for isolation. The Event Sourcing bit, not so much.

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'm really interested in your experience. Could you tell me a little bit more about the cognitive load and cross-cutting concerns?

<comment><USER4> I am not buffoon but I have used CQRS with event sourcing for a reasonably large system written and maintained by around 10 developers. Additionally I have used event sourcing without CQRS on two other systems.

I found the cognitive load to be less than with other service based architectures I have worked on. I could jump into any area of the code base and because of the naming conventions for commands and events I could see what was going on - this has never been my experience with a service oriented architecture.

The main change in developer thinking that is necessary is that you don't record state you record state transitions. Once that is internalised development is easy, a new feature requires new commands and handlers, new events, new queries and an updates to aggregates.

I had absolutely no problem with cross cutting concerns - security for example was handled in command handlers where needed. Other system components of our system that didn't use CQRS - for example reporting, general ledger, third party integrations - received data from the event stream and injected commands back into the system. So in no way was our organisation infected by CQRS / ES.

<comment><USER2> Yes it's definitely a YMMV. Your system may have been better suited to the architecture than ours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like Greg Young's talks on CQRS and Event Sourcing.

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

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXqrBySgX-s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXqrBySgX-s)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am a big user of both CQRS and Event Sourcing, but not in the very narrow sense implied by DDD/CQRS/ES advocates. In particular, there are two main tenets that I feel are not sufficiently justified.

One is the idea that commands are write-only (they are not allowed to return information). The reason for this restriction is fairly unclear, and there are several pieces of information that I believe can be legitimately returned:

\- Has the command finished executing?

\- Was it successful? If not, what was the exception thrown?

\- If the command created something, what is that thing's identifier?

\- For distributed systems, what is a vector clock after the command's execution?

Another idea is aggregates, especially the fact that each event is bound to a single aggregate and that two aggregates process their associated events independently. I can see how this can be useful, in a NoSQL-ish kind of way: by sacrificing the ability to enforce invariants across multiple aggregates, it becomes trivial to distribute event streams, to quickly compute the state of a single aggregate among millions, and to write to several aggregates in parallel without a global lock.

Still, sacrificing those invariants is costly. Many domains will have constraints on uniqueness (e.g. each e-mail address may belong to only one user) or relationship arity (e.g. each student may have at most one internship, each internship may have at most one student), and from my experience, expressing those constraints in an aggregate-based system usually ends up in:

\- creating a "lock" aggregate with "Locked" and "Unlocked" events, or

\- ignoring constraints and providing an user interface to manually resolve violations.

I would rather express simple constraints with simple code and have to work hard for optimizations later, than to have to write complex code just to solve an unconfirmed performance issue.

</comment><comment><USER7> A nice resource for those exploring a completely event sourced, domain driven, responsibility segregated application.

I really do loath the acronyms.

<comment><USER8> > I really do loath the acronyms.

I like to pronounce CQRS as "suckers". Though I find utility in the concept itself :)

<comment><USER2> An apt analogy. Many architectures are marketing driven. It scares me exactly how often this is bought into by short sighted people who rank highly and want a week off for training.

I'm currently dealing with a proverbial balls up which is the outcome of an inappropriate application of CQRS and then microservices architecture fads. They have packer, vagrant, ansible, AWS, all sorts of random things half- plugged into a .net solution. Which makes little sense as this is a Microsoft shop who owns their own paid up datacentre estate and it's a monolithic project that doesn't suit this model nor justify the cost of conversion.

Let me clarify fad here: these architectures work well for specific cases like netflix, amazon and other flag waving success stories but not for general cases like standard LOB stuff.</comment></comment></comment>


MailSlurper, now with documentation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mailslurper/mailslurper/wiki <comment><USER2> Another good one is MailCatcher[0] - it includes a nice API and clean ruby gem client.

* [0] [http://mailcatcher.me/](http://mailcatcher.me/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Brings to mind one of my favorite pieces of Python code:

[https://github.com/kennethreitz/inbox.py/blob/master/inbox.p...](https://github.com/kennethreitz/inbox.py/blob/master/inbox.py)

A mail server in 64 lines of code.

It doesn't store to a database as Mailslurper does, nor does it have many of other features of Mailslurper.

</comment><comment><USER4> Mailinator has a Saas option for this (api, private domain, etc).

[http://mailinator.com/featurematrix.jsp](http://mailinator.com/featurematrix.jsp)

<comment><USER5> As does Mailtrap[0] which is apparently used by GitHub and Atlassian among others. (No affiliation, just happened to see their customer list and was somewhat impressed.)

[0] [https://mailtrap.io/](https://mailtrap.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've used MockSMTP (a Mac app) for this purpose before, this looks like a good candidate for shared dev/test/staging environments.</comment>