New Record Bid Set for World's Cheapest Solar, Undercutting Coal - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-03/solar-developers-undercut-coal-with-another-record-set-in-dubai <comment><USER2> Bloomberg News reports[1] that David Keith, a Harvard professor of applied physics and public policy, used to be a solar power skeptic but has reexamined the economics of current solar power and now expects solar power to be important because the economics have changed.

Professor Keith's recent essay on solar power, "Cheap Solar Power,"[2] shows the facts and calculations to explain why solar power now beats several other sources of primary electricity for many applications. It is very likely that many industries will move to places where solar power is especially abundant and inexpensive.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/harvard- sc...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/harvard-scientist-a- former-solar-skeptic-now-sees-the-light)

[2] [http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog-1/cheapsolarpower](http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog-1/cheapsolarpower)

<comment><USER3> This is the best quote imho: "If we can get CO2 from the air at 125 $/t-CO2 then the idea of making fuels at prices of order 1 $/L looks plausible over the next few decades."

It's uplifting to me, both for the high value on a ton of CO2 and the (still) low resulting price of fuel. Solar beats fusion (chance * impact)!

<comment><USER4> Solar is fusion-at-a-distance, though...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One very important thing missing is that solar is not dispatchable. It does not serve the same purpose as coal and it is an apples to oranges comparison between solar and coal.

Coal provides baseless power--coal plants are designed to run at a relatively steady level for more than 90% of the time. Reliable power is critical for things like server farms which draw power all the time. Solar cannot serve the same purpose without battery or other backup.

At this time of year in places like California, solar doesn't help meet peak demand either. [http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20160503_DailyRenewa...](http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20160503_DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf) Solar has a role, but comparing it to coal is misleading.

<comment><USER6> There's something I never understood though. Technically there's always a side of the Earth that is under the Sun, so why can't countries make some sort of equal-sharing energy agreement to avoid needing batteries, if not at all at least hugely decreas the need for them? So that when it's night on one side of the Earth, everything just runs off the surplus on the other side?

Is it just too hard to move electricity so far away?

<comment><USER7> So you are saying run a power line across the ocean, so the US can power Europe and Vice Versa?

Maintaining fiber optic cables can be hard across the ocean. How about a power line that has a diameter of 50 feet? I can't even imagine the engineering of that.

Info on losses here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses)

No idea on the math for what % of power we would lose across the ocean.

Seems local batteries would win out..

<comment><USER8> The article says that a 100-mile 765kV transmission line loses 1.5% to 0.5%. Let's be optimistic and assume we can get closer to the latter and deliver 99.5% of original power over 100 miles. NYC-LON is 3,466 miles on the shortest possible path. Let's call it 3,500 miles. Over that distance, we'd deliver 99.5% ^ (3,500 / 100) = 83% of our original power.

The circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901 miles. Halfway around the world, we'd deliver 29% of original power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's been some discussion of solar generation cost vs storage cost here, with the idea that any generation project is necessarily coupled to storage. But is that really the case? I can see a model where generation and storage are completely decoupled businesses.

Large, somewhat unpredictable fluctuations in the cost of generation (solar and wind) should lead to large fluctuations in price of generated electricity, down to minute-by-minute. Ideally, generators want to sell every kwh they can at peak production, even at a lower cost. With modern computer controls, this makes a delightful opportunity for an arbitrage market.

Storage providers - and this could be giants like lake-scale hydro, or dwarves like the batteries in electric cars - could buy electricity from generators when it's cheap, and sell it when it's expensive (the sun isn't shining, the wind isn't blowing, hot day spikes demand, etc). _This can be fully automated_. Just plug your car into the wall at night. It might decide to buy electricity, or sell electricity, depending on the price at the time. Aggregators could pool capacity across many small providers. Large storage systems could benefit from economies of scale and long-term contracts.

Create a smart grid that can support this, and let the free market solve the pricing problems for us.

<comment><USER10> There is already an large arbitrage opportunity. The difference between peak and baseload pricing is pretty high.

If it was clearly economical, someone like Exelon (who owns nuke plants) would probably be doing it.

Then again, at lest several utilities claims they were going to buy Telsa powerwalls to do it. So maybe the pricing is getting to the point where it's profitable.

<comment><USER9> Building something genuinely new, like caching electricity, is fraught with technical risks, financial risks, and regulatory hurdles. It's the kind of thing that can put a billion-dollar enterprise out of business. So expect a decade or more of research, small-scale experiments, political negotiation, and more, to bring storage online at any sort of scale. It's really, really hard, and really risky.

Nuclear plants, as you probably know, are almost pure base load solutions. They can't just be scaled up or slowed down arbitrarily. A volatile, arbitrage-based market efficiency would be pretty hard on the existing nuclear base, and could render a lot of plants unprofitable.

Meanwhile, the gas-fired peak load plants are tremendously expensive, because they have so much downtime and are inefficient. One or two decades ago, competing against them with storage was economically impractical. Now, it's becoming feasible. Especially once we start building gigawatts of sitting capacity anyway, in the shape of EV cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Discussion yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988)

</comment><comment><USER12> It's not cheap because the costs of building it is cheap, the companies are willing to undercut each other for the benefit of getting the contracts. The question is whether they will ever be profitable at this level.

<comment><USER13> Why would someone bid at a price like this before the project is set up if it was not the least bit feasible?

<comment><USER14> PR? Hidden subsidies? Lucrative maintenance contracts? Desperation for revenue in a competitive market? Overly aggressive sales staff? Contract loopholes for cost overruns?

<comment><USER9> High risk, high reward investment by individual actors who don't have to answer to boards and regulators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I work in solar, and here's some quick facts:

1\. 1 out of 78 jobs created in the U.S. last year were solar jobs[1].

2\. There are more solar employees in California than utility employees[2].

3\. Soft costs (non-hardware) were recently 64% of the installed cost of solar[3].

4\. Solar is expected to reach a load defection point (i.e. cheaper to leave the grid) in most places in the next 10-15 years[4].

5\. Energy over the next 25 years is a potential $200 trillion opportunity[5].

Like OP's article states, this industry's hardware has gotten really cheap, but the software in the industry hasn't kept up in places. So much so, in fact, that an entire startup accelerator program in the bay area, Powerhouse[6], has been created to try and attract tech entrepreneurs into the solar industry to make the next generation of solar software. My startup recently went through the program, and being a part of this industry is one of the most empowering and rewarding things I've ever done. It's one of those extremely rare instances where you can have a solid business model and a positive impact on the world.

And we need all the help it can get. Solar expected to grow 100-200x over the next 25 years[7], but it won't happen if smart people don't join in. Smart grid, machine learning, energy storage, demand response, customer acquisition, logistics, energy efficiency, inventory tracking, IoT, security, and many more software areas are currently in the dark ages in energy. Solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, storage, and other clean energy sources have to replace 87% of the worlds energy in the next 32 years[8]. PLEASE HELP US!

If you're a tech entrepreneur, and want to do something that matters, please please please consider doing a startup in solar or other clean energy industry. To start, if you're in the bay area, there's a hackathon next weekend around solar software[9]. I encourage you to come and learn more about solar and software in the clean energy sector.

[1]: [http://energy.gov/eere/articles/1-78-new-jobs-america- solar-...](http://energy.gov/eere/articles/1-78-new-jobs-america-solar-job)

[2]: [http://www.calseia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=art...](http://www.calseia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=231)

[3]: [http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/reducing-non-hardware- costs](http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/reducing-non-hardware-costs)

[4]: [http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2015_04_07_report_release_the_econo...](http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2015_04_07_report_release_the_economics_of_load_defection)

[5]: [https://www.citivelocity.com/citigps/ReportSeries.action?rec...](https://www.citivelocity.com/citigps/ReportSeries.action?recordId=41)

[6]: [https://powerhouse.solar/](https://powerhouse.solar/)

[7]: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/the-way- hu...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/the-way-humans-get- electricity-is-about-to-change-forever)

[8]: [http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next- internet/](http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/)

[9]: [https://suncode.splashthat.com/](https://suncode.splashthat.com/)

<comment><USER16> Most people will find leaving the grid very inconvenient, whatever the saving. Here in South Africa, rolling blackouts caused chaos. Yet very few people left the grid.

<comment><USER17> I'm surprised a domestic solar installer hasn't grabbed market share. South Africa should be an ideal market, like Hawaii.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember a few days ago when we had a thread about an Indian minister saying the same thing, and everyone was being skeptical and negative. Well look now, seems like he was right.

</comment><comment><USER19> In the USA heating, HVAC, etc.. account for half of the energy used in residential buildings. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy) Direct solar water heating (passive) has been used for quite a while and has a maximum efficiency of solar thermal systems are between .46 & .74. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating)

That compares to a solar panel efficiency of .15; and I guess a lot less when applied to water heating due to conversion. And implementing in dense urban areas, passive is not as viable as active. If we were serious we would first implement passive systems. But we don't. I guess there's something I don't understand.

<comment><USER20> Why would you expect physics to dominate economics?

For investors, a big power station like this is a purely economic decision (will it be profitable or not).

For a homeowner, a few dollars a month for hot water is not a significant motivator to make a change (replacing a thing that works to save money after several years is not exciting).

It would probably be a good idea to figure out how to incentivize rental property owners to increase building efficiency. Or maybe just pay for it directly in exchange for a few years of not capturing the benefit in the rent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's nuclear power from a remote reactor, and it isn't too cheap to meter but is heading that way.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wait, these are still projected costs, right ? How can they guarantee they'll be able to recoup their costs and honour their prices?

<comment><USER11> From the discussion of this yesterday, I understand that most other companies could also meet these costs, if they had the same access to very cheap loans. These bids are supported by near minimal cost loans, that are being offered to help kickstart the industry in these areas, and to acquire skills and knowledge. Plus in the hope that the continued improvement in solar panels, rather than relying on the tech they can get their hands on today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The potential desalinisation this could lead to is also pretty exciting

<comment><USER24> Desal is not the panacea many believe it to be. There are serious environmental consequences associated with all the brine discharge.

<comment><USER25> Can't you just dump it back in the ocean where it came from?

The sea critters are already happy to swim around in it, and you're not going to meaningfully change the concentration of the ocean. You could mix it with sea water near the exit point to avoid temporarily raising the concentration there.

<comment><USER24> Nope, not if it's not carefully dispersed. Brine is denser than saltwater. It tends to sink to the bottom, where there is little wave action or tidal flow, and remain there. It's believed that many marine organisms are negatively affected by the increased salinity, although the overall impacts are not well understood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Based on Dubai's recent history, I'd speculate there is some slave or slave- like labor involved to make it viable.

<comment><USER9> Slave labor doesn't help much for high-tech projects. Slaves are mostly useful for manual labor that doesn't require literacy or complex skills.

Remember, before we invented tractors, if you wanted to move a thousand tons of rock a mile, it had to be done largely by hand. _That_ is a use case for slave labor. Before we invented harvesters, cotton had to be picked by hand. That is a use case for slave labor. Domestic servants are a use case. But the invention of powered machinery made most slave jobs obsolete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is great news in terms of econometrics, but I think the major looming questions still exist.

1/ Can solar impact CO2 emissions beyond single digit percentages?

2/ On what order of magnitude would battery storage capabilities have to improve to match performance characteristics of natural gas peaker plants or dare we say Oil/Natural gas?

3/ Don't the fluctuations in peak demand make solar less attractive because they require rapid natural gas peaking plants when there's increases in usage? (Outside of summer is a great example)

4/ What would be the desired performance characteristics of batteries that would make Solar a no-brainer for the environmental impact and actual viability? Cost, capability, and reusability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Comprehensive annual report on the state of various deployable grid storage technologies - and answer to your questions here:

[http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2016_01_21_how_much_does_storage_re...](http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2016_01_21_how_much_does_storage_really_cost_lazard_weighs_in)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Everyone is talking about storage, but why not route power to need? Put 4000 square miles of solar in the Mexican desert and sell the power to to the northern US and Canada all winter. Run power over Siberia and Alaska to get across time zones.

<comment><USER29> Ideally, yes we would do that! But see other comments about the cost and efficiency of power transmission for the physical challenges involved.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628965)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I recently came across an interesting new approach to store renewable ebnergy by moving large masses on rail cars up a slope. Here is some more information on the approach [http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/](http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Are these articles on how solar is poised to make it big Real Soon Now (tm) an instance of pg's submarine? [1]

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER20> This is the far more common someone-wrote-a-press-release-that-makes-for-a- headline.

[https://www.dewa.gov.ae/news/details.aspx?nid=1689](https://www.dewa.gov.ae/news/details.aspx?nid=1689)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > _the Dubai Electricity & Water Authority, the utility for the Persian Gulf > emirate_

Curious that Bloomberg opted for the Persian, over Arabian, Gulf when referring to the United Arab Emirates.

<comment><USER33> > The body of water is historically and internationally known as the "Persian > Gulf". Some Arab governments refer to it as the "Arabian Gulf" or "The > Gulf", but neither term is recognized internationally.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> And yet trying to work out the finances in my condo building, its not adding up... We can get solar and do the right thing, but it will still cost us.

<comment><USER35> Is your condo located in an extremely sunny desert?

<comment><USER34> No the northeast. (massachusetts). Brick building. Flat roof that gets good sun.

<comment><USER35> That additional 20°s of latitude makes a big impact on the amount of sun you'll see, regardless of how suitable the site is.

<comment><USER34> For us its that the common part of the building doesn't use a lot of power. Individual units do use more than we can generate. So we have to plug the solar into individual units, which can be problematic and kind of a pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is it this cheap because it is subsidized by oil revenue tho'?

</comment><comment><USER37> Big giant government projects never have cost over runs.

<comment><USER38> Actually they do, but they also result in dramatic changes (Railroads, Highways, Apollo, TCP/IP, etc).

<comment><USER39> However for every Apollo, there's a dozen Solyndras.

<comment><USER40> Hmmm, looks like the US Government made the money back from that one. As a whole, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is MAKING money from the loans.

Even Solyndras is just one tiny failure in a massive pool of wealth-creation with regards to the entire program. US Government makes money from the loans. US citizens created jobs for each other. Solar energy development got accelerated.

The only answer to Solyndras is... damn, that was a single battle lost (0.5 Billion loan default), but the US definitely "won the war" on the $800 Billion program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada grabbed international headlines recently with a simple explanation of a cutting-edge technology called quantum computing."

While dodging a question about his understanding of economics. Forgive me, I'm just a bitter Canadian upset that we're now running a huge deficit and passing the buck on to our children.

<comment><USER42> I can tell you as an American, that after a while you get used to the feeling of a huge national deficit and multi-trillion dollar debt. It becomes something like a warm blanket of guilt that helps you sleep at night.

<comment><USER43> Issuing debt is just an accounting trick to maintain credibility of the currency (i.e. That we aren't just printing dollars willy-nilly to fund the government)

The huge chunk of debt is owed from one part of the government to the other.

No one ever cut their way to growth. The key is almost always to grow the GDP faster than you grow the debt on average. The nominal debt number will never go down - ever - but it should stay fixed or shrink relative to GDP if possible.</comment></comment></comment>


Improving G1 out-of-the-box performance - <AUTHOR> https://kstefanj.github.io/2020/04/16/g1-ootb-performance.html <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or does all garbage collector development seem to go through an endless loop of:

* We've optimised this release for throughput

* We've optimised this release for latency

* We've optimised this release for minimising memory usage

...and each release causes a regression in the stuff they weren't optimising for, leading to another future release picking one of the other three targets.

Java and Go seem to have gone round this cycle more than once...

<comment><USER3> I don't really see that cycle. I think Hotspot's latency and memory usage has always been atrocious, and they have slowly been working to improve that with ParallelGC->CMS->G1.

I don't think there is a black/white world like Hotspot people tend to claim about these things. You can have your cake and eat it - acceptable latency <10ms/1ms AND good throughput/memory usage is possible without excessive manual tuning. golang is an example of this, as are GCs in other language runtimes. In every other managed language I've worked in, I never even think about the GC 99% of the time. Whereas with Hotspot you have to tune and think about it 100% of the time. Hopefully it will get there one day and make working on JVM projects less painful.

<comment><USER4> Go's GC's throughput is significantly lower than that of all OpenJDK's GCs, and its latency numbers are misleading because they don't account for throttling. To give you an example, a GC that works as follows -- allocate by pointer bumping from a thread-local buffer, and when it runs out, freeze the thread forever -- would count as having zero latency according to Go's metrics, because this infinite pause is per-thread rather than stop-the-world; of course, the throughput will eventually drop to zero, too, but they don't report throughput. Why, then, do you see Go applications performing more-or- less OK? Because of two things: they allocate fewer objects, and they just run significantly more slowly than Java, except this slowdown is paced. In terms of algorithm, Go's GC is pretty-much a simplified version (no young generation) of OpenJDK's now-defunct CMS plus throttling. G1 is a generation beyond that, and ZGC is two.

<comment><USER5> Generational garbage collection doesn't help much with a language with value types, stack allocation, and decent escape analysis.

"It isn't that the generational hypothesis isn't true for Go, it's just that the young objects live and die young on the stack. The result is that generational collection is much less effective than you might find in other managed runtime languages" [https://twitter.com/davecheney/status/1019430967054819328](https://twitter.com/davecheney/status/1019430967054819328)

Go's GC improvements are revealed in P99.9 latencies of servers over time, not just in the raw numbers of how long it's stopping the world.

<comment><USER4> That doesn't change the fact that Go's GC is a simplified CMS. It is true that Go does have an easier life -- Java does do escape analysis and allocates on the stack, but it doesn't have value types just yet, and so the allocation rates are higher, which is why Java is not _drastically_ faster. I.e. a cruder GC that's similar to OpenJDK's GC from two generations ago works OK for Go. Despite Go having an easier life, Java 14 performs noticeably better than Go, partly due to having a better compiler, but also because its GCs are just better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The effect is that out of the box a 1 MB region size will be used, while for > the fixed heap case the region size will be 2 MB. It might sound like a > small difference, but the benchmark uses a significant amount of large > objects that need special treatment when using 1 MB regions. This special > treatment leads to a lot of memory that can't be used, which in turn leads > full collections and a poor overall experience.

This means the same problem as before can be observed, you'll just need slightly bigger objects to get there.

<comment><USER7> That's what I thought too. perhaps this should be profiled and adjusted on- the-fly (probably a massive undertaking)?

<comment><USER8> The Java way is more about selecting a reasonable default, and then exposing a tuning parameter for those whose use case falls well off of what was designed for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great to see progress in this space. I remember trying out G1 for the first time years ago and almost immediately noping out of it as the performance was terrible.

Working in low-latency space the angle for me is much more about GC latency (in microsecond-level scales). I've never seen anyone doing a thorough evaluation of GC times across different implementations.

Does anyone here have any interesting sources to share?

<comment><USER10> I haven't spent much time in the world of JVM tuning, but if latency is your main concern the relatively new ZGC should be your jam: [https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/zgc/Main](https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/zgc/Main)

<comment><USER4> Yep. ZGC will soon offer _worst-case_ pauses of <1ms (it's around 2-3 now).

<comment><USER11> Is ZGC production ready? Specially with JVM11?

<comment><USER4> It will be declared non-experimental in 15, but people are running it in production on 14. GCs, and performance in general, tend to improve quite significantly between releases.

<comment><USER12> Great news. How about the rival Shenandoah GC?

<comment><USER4> They're both non-experimental in 15: [https://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/15/](https://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/15/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not that[1] G1.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Dream)</comment>


Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/3/27/soviet-moon-mystery-solved-by-nasa-50-years-later <comment><USER2> Fascinating chap Sergei Korolev, denounced to the NKVD by colleagues over what sounds like office politics, tortured and sent to the Gulag for 10 years (including the awful Kolyma gold mining camps, which were some of the worst) rehabilitated and goes on to become arguably the greatest ever rocket designer - with a legacy that includes the ancestors of todays most succesful launchers used by the Russians and ESA.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev>

<http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESAhistory/SEM7PZP11ZE_0.html>

<comment><USER3> "Following the fall of the NKVD head, Nikolai Yezhov, the new chief Lavrenti Beria chose to retry Korolev on reduced charges in 1939, but by that time Korolev was on his way from prison to a gulag camp in the far east of Siberia, where he spent several months in a gold mine in the Kolyma area before word reached him of his retrial. Towards the end of 1939 he was sent back to Moscow, but he had already sustained injuries and had lost most of his teeth due to the labor camp's brutal conditions"

And I thought my life was hard!

<comment><USER2> I can recommend Anne Applebaum's history in addition, of course, to Solzhenitsyn's works:

[http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-A-History-Anne- Applebaum/dp/1400...](http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-A-History-Anne- Applebaum/dp/1400034094)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The offical LRO announcement from March: [http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/539-Mare-C...](http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/539-Mare- Crisium-Failure-then-Success.html)

</comment><comment><USER5>
      the spacecraft had tipped over as a result of its landing

I can only imagine the frustration of the engineers and scientists.

<comment><USER4> Yeah though not as much as that of the Mars Climate Orbiter team who's mission failed due to using imperial rather than metric units in a navigation program.

<comment><USER6> That failure was somewhat more subtle than that. Someone produced a data file with no information about what the numbers in the file meant. Someone else made an assumption about the meaning of the numbers.

Using a single system of measurement would certainly reduce the chance of negative consequences from such sloppiness, but the sloppiness was the problem, not the units used in the data file.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Sorry I phrased my comment poorly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2012 - 1974 == 50 ?

well, not according to google [https://www.google.com/search?q=2012-1974&pws=0](https://www.google.com/search?q=2012-1974&pws=0)

</comment><comment><USER8> What ! Russia landed a probe on the moon _during_ Armstrong's moonwalk!

Incredible. The moon, or Times Square? Who could tell.

<comment><USER9> Well, I guess they didn't quite land it.

Something tells me that NASA had a team devoted to watching Luna 15 as it orbited and watching out for funny business. Imagine the disaster that could have occurred if the Soviets had decided to use the probe to interfere with Apollo 11.

Of course, judging from the fates of later Luna missions, I doubt they could have pulled that off anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article seems a bit hastily written??? To say the least?</comment>


Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2020/07/23/intel-grew-revenues-20-to-19-7-billion-in-q2-but-manufacturing-upgrade-delayed/ <comment><USER2> 20% YoY Revenue increase, 43% YoY Growth in Datacenter Segment. 76% Growth in Non-Volatile Memory solution, _another_ 7% YoY growth in Client Side computing.

This is truly amazing results.

I get stabbed over at Anandtech every time I made an argument _for_ Intel as an AMD investor. The Internet is full of Intel bashing comments but reality is Intel has been making record revenue quarter after quarter.

For the not so good part.

> _The company 's 7nm-based CPU product timing is shifting approximately six > months relative to prior expectations. The primary driver is the yield of > Intel's 7nm process, which based on recent data, is now trending > approximately twelve months behind the company's internal target._

The most important bit is that last part, _12 months behind Internal target_. To put this into perspective.

Intel original 7nm, ( on the assumption it is still the same 7nm because Intel has already changed their 10nm spec) was suppose to be slightly better than TSMC 5nm+, but not as good as TSMC' 3nm. ( In terms of transistor density, by no means it is the only metric it should be judged on ). It was scheduled for 2019, pushed to 2020 then 2H 2021, and are now looking at 1H 2022, which means in terms of consumer getting their hands on it, it would be more like 2H 2022 assuming no further delay.

Given TSMC has never missed a beat in their execution and has iPhone SoC production. It is highly likely by the end of Calendar year 2022, TSMC would have shipped more 3nm Wafer than Intel's 7nm for the whole year.

I am waiting to see AMD's results.

<comment><USER3> Why hasn't Intel given up on their internal process nodes? Their advantage is clearly not in owning their process nodes at this point. Dump them and adopt TSMC.

<comment><USER4> Who would they order from? Keep in mind they are slightly behind Samsung in ic volume. Samsung is #1 and Intel #2. Almost double the volume of TSMC. It takes a few years to build a new plant.

Literally impossible without a very long term plan... and when it's over they lose control of their destiny. They can beg TSMC for more chips if they want to meet their sales targets, but maybe they'll sell to Apple or Nvidia instead.

<comment><USER5> Where are you getting that number for Intel? Everything I see has Samsung, TMSC, then Micron as the top in terms of wafer production. Intel is like 1/3 of TMSC which is still alot. [https://www.eetindia.co.in/over-half-of-global- wafer-capacit...](https://www.eetindia.co.in/over-half-of-global-wafer- capacity-held-by-five-companies/)

<comment><USER6> Raw wafer counts aren't particularly relevant here, because you can't really re-tool a NAND or DRAM fab into a competitive logic fab. Based on those numbers, about a third of Samsung's wafer count is logic, putting them slightly ahead of Intel (logic and a bit of NAND). TSMC's wafer count (all logic, AFAIK) is higher than Samsung+Intel, but not all of that is on leading- edge nodes. TSMC 28nm and 16nmFF nodes are going to be sticking around for many years to come.

<comment><USER7> The numbers are even more tilted in Intel's favor if you consider that the foundries do a huge part of their volume business on outdated nodes. Intel doesn't do that. They have many times the capacity of TSMC in their market segment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Intel's 10% stock drop is all about losing investor confidence. They've been given a pass for delaying 10nm for years in part because there was no competition and assurances that it was a one-off thing and they have learned their lesson. This delay threatens that narrative and instead suggest that Intel hasn't learned from their 10nm debacle.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there any reputable reporting, or even just wild gossip, about why Intel is behind?

The cynical answer is "they were focused on profit margins and didn't invest in process", but is it possible they bet hard on some technology that didn't pan out? Ultraviolet lithography? Some exotic indium gallium arsenide magic that didn't work in mass production?

<comment><USER6> There seems to be consensus about their 10nm failures: they were trying every trick in the book _except_ switching to EUV lithography, betting that they could get ahead and stay ahead while EUV power levels creeped upward toward what's needed for volume manufacturing. But Intel bit off more than they could chew and ended up with a process that simply didn't work (cf. the disabled iGPU on Cannonlake). So Intel scaled back their ambitions and spent more time working out the kinks, and they're apparently still a year away from having a 10nm desktop CPU.

I'm not sure if we have any good clues as to what's going wrong with Intel's 7nm efforts, but it seems reasonable to guess that they weren't putting as much effort as their competitors into getting ready for EUV.

And given how long Intel's had these issues at this point, it seems pretty clear that they have some broader management issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have any insider accounts of the 10nm debacle emerged, or is it still too soon?

<comment><USER11> This is 3rd hand, but I heard that the 14nm was rushed with a crazy schedule, and as a result the greybeards who actually knew everything all left. Intel is having to rebuild all that institutional knowledge from scratch again.

<comment><USER12> The account I just read (linked from the other thread) suggested it was more just that they happened to set really ambitious targets and make a lot of big bets in 10nm, some of which simply did not pan out. Sounds like they may have ended up in a situation where diagnostic and investigation tooling also wasn't working properly due to the use of cobalt, so they'd have ended up with fabrication failures that were then difficult to investigate, as the debugging tools also weren't working. Painful.

<comment><USER11> IMO, that sounds exactly like the greybeards weren't there to advocate for "one step at a time" and "get the debug tools working first".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apple's timing here is spot on. If Intel was firing on all cylinders, it would be a lot harder for them to pull off a processor change.

<comment><USER14> If all Apple cared about was faster chips, they could easily call up AMD and move their platform there. It'd be a lot less work for them.

Moving to their own ARM chips lets them gain tighter control over the platform, and not be beholden to Intel or AMDs roadmap or desire to implement specific features Apple wants.

<comment><USER15> > If all Apple cared about was faster chips

Everybody _wants_ faster chips, but for most people, the chip is in idle state 99% of the time. Outside of the data center and serious gamers, chip speed has been fairly irrelevant for years.

<comment><USER16> I agree with you. My frustrations centre around wait times after starting an app.

Am I waiting for CPU? No. Storage? No.

I am waiting for some friggin call-home/update-check/irrelevant network request.

Edit:brevity, removal of profane words.

<comment><USER17> > I am waiting for some friggin call-home/update-check/irrelevant network > request.

Is that right? Any examples? I feel most of the times I'm waiting is for the network because everything is online now. Even my work is all done on a remote VM in a data center. I connect using vscode over ssh. And the app is snappy af except when it needs to do a network opeation.

<comment><USER16> For some basic apps: Notepad++ annoys me most. Modern, updated regularly. But wants to update plugins before even appearing it seems?!?

iTunes(thanks to iWife) annoys me with it's updates. It checks for updates after you've started the program, pops up to get in your way and doesn't give you an "Install on exit" option.

Paint.Net does it right. Opens up, lets you get things done, checks for an update, gives you the option to install on exit. More should be done this way.

Playing games, Steam and all the many games with their own servers etc. Example of bad, It takes me roughly 2 mins to get into GhostRecon:Breakpoint.(not that good a game really but that's another day).

Example of good, Rocket League. Starts up, gets you going. (Disappointingly not a League of actual Rockets but good fun anyway. :-))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder to what extent a six month delay could influence hyperscaler decisions for compute purchasing. Every major cloud now offers AMD Epyc instances at a discount relative to Intel's 14nm(\\+)* offerings. It seems unlikely Intel will be competitive until 2022. It seems unlikely any of the top three cloud providers would go all AMD for new instances but I could see the ratio shifting heavily in AMD's favor.

<comment><USER19> Nobody can flip their whole fleet suddenly -- the TCO-positive lifespan of a datacenter computer is way longer than most people assume -- but at least some of the hyperscalers operate a "machine of the day" process, where 100% of new machines are identical. In that sense, whoever gets the design win gets all of the orders.

<comment><USER20> But that just means it's on a delay. If AMD gets the design win in 2020 or 2021 then it means more trouble for Intel even if they're competitive again in 2022, because then they're the ones waiting on the next redesign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Aren't these node sizes mostly marketing BS that can't be compared across manufacturers anyway? If Intel's products can compete on performance or price or power consumption then who cares what they call it?

<comment><USER22> The objective metrics are things like: transistors per square millimetre, power per billion transistors, frequency, SRAM bit-cell size, etc...

Marketing calls it "7nm+++super", engineers get graphs of power-vs-frequency.

E.g.: comparing transistor densities:

        Intel     14nm    38 MTr/mm^2
        TSMC       7nm    97 MTr/mm^2
        Intel     10nm   100 MTr/mm^2
        Samsung    5nm   127 MTr/mm^2
        TSMC       5nm   173 MTr/mm^2
        Intel      7nm   "higher than TSMC 5nm" (planned for 2022)
        TSMC       3nm   290 MTr/mm^2           (risk production in 2021)

This should make it pretty clear why Intel is going to struggle to be competitive: The majority of their products are stuck on 14nm, which has 22% of the transistor density of TSMC's bleeding edge product. They can't compete with the likes of AMD and Apple with such outdated tech.

It should also make it clear that Intel's 10nm node is basically the same as TSMC's 7nm.

However, from what I heard (I'm not an expert!), Intel's 10nm node is a "pain in the ass" to manufacture. The design phase is complex, the yields are low, etc...

For comparison, TSMC's 7nm is supposed to be a relatively "straightforward" process, and 5nm is actually an _improvement_ in manufacturability. That is, it's easier to design and make a 5nm TSMC chip than a 7nm TSMC chip. That's actually a pretty big advantage, something Intel doesn't talk about much...

<comment><USER23> You are spot on on 10nm fab, it's why Apple shipped an update with split 14 and 10nm chips on different models, it wasn't large enough or cheap enough to update all models.

A notable thing about TSMC's 5nm is it is shipping in _three months_. Thats a massive gap and there is little proof that Intel 7nm is 'much' more than 5nm.

And thats before you consider other upsides seen in the TSMC chips such as cost, or the incredible power management tactics seen in the Ax series chips that are easily generations ahead of Intel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm still waiting for them to move to 10nm.

<comment><USER25> Haha. Yeah, me too. Still no 10nm pro laptop cpus, desktop cpus or server cpus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This has got to be interesting for folks like AWS, Google, MS. Is this the opening for AMD? Or will we see things like AWS ARM chips take off? They should both be close to entering production on 5nm chips once TSMC gets enough Apple chips knocked out. Are we going to see more specialization in the form of custom chips as process nodes are stalled out?

</comment><comment><USER27> "Yes, we missed 10nm... and 7nm... but we assure, we will be ahead with 5nm"

History says otherwise...

<comment><USER23> Totally agree though 7nm brings them to UVL which will make that step much easier. But they will still be at least a year behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Intel is a company that's living on it's distribution legacy. Ask yourself - why do regular people still buy Intel PCs?

Because they are easy to buy. A _great_ non Intel hardware and software laptop+aio by AMD or someone else would be a mortal wound on $INTC.

<comment><USER29> This is a 2000s view of Intel that is not accurate in 2020. Look at the numbers.

\- 7% growth for consumer (the "Intel PCs" you mention)

\- 43% growth for data centers

\- 70%+ growth in nonvolatile storage (SSDs)... much of which goes into high end servers in data centers

Will there be more data centers And cloud offerings in 3 years, or less? Many More!

Will there be more or less PC sales in 3 years. For Intel it's less or the same (Apple is 8-10% of the market that is disappearing and PC growth is flat to slightly up. So 3 years out it will be roughly the same)

Also keep in mind the margin on Xeons vs The laptop chips That go in a $599 plastic Dell.

Intel as a "PC" company is dying. Intel as a data center provider (SSDs and heavy processors) is ascendant

<comment><USER30> A single socket AMD threadripper 3995WX (the "ECC" version just released) is likely going to destroy a dual socket Xeon 8275+ (the ones used for the Amazon C5 metal instance) in most benchmarks like the 3990X did, while running at roughly the same power and a fraction of the price. Once AMD convinces cloud providers that its ECC works just as well as Intel's, there's really nothing holding AMD back from taking a huge chunk of the server market.

<comment><USER31> Threadripper is priced for workstation like Core XE that priced usually way cheaper than for server even though actual chip is same.

Anyway EPYC is performs far better than Xeon in same price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> To be honest Intel is always late with manufacturing updates (and manufacturing in general).

</comment><comment><USER33> Not like they are under any pressure...

<comment><USER34> Can't tell if you being sarcastic, but AMD is working Intel these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At some point Intel should just dump their own process nodes and go with TSMC. This is getting ridiculous.

<comment><USER35> As much as I enjoy seeing Intel falter for all of the anti-competitive practices it has employed in the past...

I think them moving to outsourced foundries would be a huge move in the wrong direction for fab consolidation.

<comment><USER36> I feel the same about Samsung's Exynos mobile SoCs. While they are definitely worse than Qualcomm's, if they went away Qualcomm would be the only chip maker for Android flagships (excluding Huawei, but without Google play services they don't really count).

<comment> Iwan-Zotow MTK anyone?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Do You Optimize Your Intake of Information - <AUTHOR> As someone with varied interests, I feel myself being pulled in a thousand different directions of things I want to know more about.
This leads to a sense of anxiety and dread as I realize life is much too short to pursue all my interests.
Ideally, I'd make peace with that fact and choose one or two parts of the Universe to really care about, but my mind just doesn't seem to work that way. I'm not even sure I'd want it to. <comment><USER2> Very good question. I'm also interested in a multitude of things and really need "input" as I like call it to stay satisfied.

One way I moderate my information intake is by relying on some types of media and hardware while ignoring others.

For example I never watch TV and I don't own a smartphone to keep my sanity and moderate the onslaught of bad news and redundant fluff.

The evenings are usually "screen free" time when I try to reduce my information intake but also read books on my favorite topics, sometimes several at once.

I also read magazines that only cover topics I care about. I also use crowdsourced filters like HN, Twitter etc. when online.

When you ignore day to day politics, celebrity culture, marketing (which 90% of "content" is about) you end up only consuming what really matters.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's usually better to make a bad decision than no decision at all.

Really the internet makes it too easy to have too much choice by making it easy to consume so much shallow information, and the real value comes from cutting through the noise.

Consider exploring interests serially rather than in parallel and going deep for a few months on 1 topic whether that seems the best or not.</comment>


Ask HN: Buying a wireless N Router with USB and with Print Server? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to gift a new router for my Startup family with my little savings. I'm low on budget.
I need a very customizable router i.e supporting Tomato/dd-wrt and Wireless N Surfing, has Qos Bandwidth Management, and has USB ports - for Centrally sharing Portable HDD's and USB ports for a Print Server. Will save lots of our productive time.
I can only think of Asus N16 router, which has all this options available.
Click-able Link for Asus N16 router - http://www.amazon.com/RT-N16-Wireless-N-Maximum-Performance-single/dp/B00387G6R8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321602290&sr=8-1
Do you prefer for any other routers? Cheaper and more versatile?
All help highly appreciated. <comment><AUTHOR> Click-able Link for Asus N16 router -

[http://www.amazon.com/RT-N16-Wireless-N-Maximum- Performance-...](http://www.amazon.com/RT-N16-Wireless-N-Maximum-Performance- single/dp/B00387G6R8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321602290&sr=8-1)</comment>


Ebola vaccine is 'potential game-changer' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33733711 <comment><USER2> A friend of mine was one of the primary researcher working on the vaccine in the Winnipeg lab. I remember going out to dinners past few years and keep hearing about him his work on this vaccine. One thing that really bothered me was how the government handled it at the end and how the vaccine was handed to NewLink (Which latter licensed it to Merc) for pretty much nothing.

From what I remember, a year or so before the outbreak and just after the development of the vaccine was pretty much done Health Canada decides that there will be no money in an ebola vaccine since they didn't foresee an outbreak and even if it did happen it would be in a third world country with not much money to go around.

So they put a warp on it and hand it to NewLink for $200,000. Apparently there were emails going around between the lab and the government trying to convince them that this is a shitty deal, but the end response was 200K is the most we'll ever get out of this.

a year later, the biggest outbreak in the history and NewLink licenses the Vaccine to Merck for $50M USD.

My main issue with it isn't that the vaccine was gone for $200K vs $50M, if you have spent god know how many millions and how many years developing a vaccine as part of government program, don't let it go for 200K, are we as a nation really hurting that much to have to recover that 200K? I just can't make any sense of it. and if you were thinking they sold it so it could be mass produced and developed then you are mistaken since NewLink did exactly nothing with it until they licensed it to Merck.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canadian-ebola-vaccine- develop...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canadian-ebola-vaccine-development- taken-over-by-merck-1.2847128)

<comment><USER3> What hit me most today after is saw the news. For many years ebola killed people and only after it hit mainstream media and it could have been an potential threat to the western world. Money just magical appears and we have a vaccine in less than a year.

<comment><USER4> Huh? That's kind of funny because it has been in the media since the 1970s. There was even a movie about an Ebola like virus in the mid 1990s

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_(film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_\(film\))

It's always been out there, you just didn't notice.

<comment><USER5> I think you misinterpreted the comment you're responding to.

<comment><USER4> No, I didn't. The scare of an epidemic in the U.S. has been real for decades.

This sort of snide comment has been made before. In fact, in the "malaria thread" just a few days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940354)

Ma8ee wrote: "Considering the nature of market economies and how the wealth is distributed in the world, it is not particularly surprising that most most medical research is aiming to cure ailments that affect white western men."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are other hemorrhagic fevers with no vaccine. I don't think we should get too carried away with Ebola just because it has, roughly speaking, a higher mortality rate, and has been kept in the news by this latest outbreak.

The ability to make a vaccine that looks promising a year after a major outbreak occurs is good, but not so impressive. A better achievement is, will be, developing processes to create vaccines for viruses, even previously unknown viruses, rapidly, being able to target viruses in places and stages current vaccines can't handle[1][2], and developing ways of testing a vaccine's efficacy without waiting for a large outbreak.

Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague (readily found by searching for the title in combination with epub) chronicles some encounters and research with various pathogens including several hemorrhagic fevers.

[1] Rabies still kills tens of thousands of people a year in Asia and Africa, in places where "get vaccinated" is not the standard response to getting bitten by a wild animal (the major vector of Rabies there is feral dogs); by the time symptoms appear it's too late. That's more people dead of Rabies _per year_ than have died in the known history of Ebola outbreaks.

[2] Or, for example, HIV.

</comment><comment><USER7> To me the main benefit of the vaccine is that it will calm the hysteria around Ebola. It's a nasty disease but the infection rate is fairly low. The media play a dangerous game crying wolf every month on what end up being relatively minor outbreaks. The list is now pretty long: Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Mad Cow disease, Ebola. Every time they bring back the spectre of the Spanish flu which wiped out a hundred million of people.

HIV kills about a million people a year. It might be old news but that's several orders of magnitude the scale of Ebola.

</comment><comment><USER8> The question is, who is gonna pay for vaccinations? I don't believe that Western aid organizations can and will put up the money, and most African countries will not be able to.

Another problem is that many people are led to believe by their religious authorities that vaccines are the devil, white men are the devils... how are these parts of the population going to be protected to prevent creation of virus reservoirs?

<comment><USER9> The virus reservoirs of Ebola are in monkeys and bats, humans die too fast to be a long term reservoir. Survivors are not contagious.

Anyway, "Who will pay the bill?" is a good question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This vaccine is for prevention. There is no cure for the infected.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yet more evidence that vaccines do work and the anti-vaccine people are idiots of the highest order.

<comment><USER12> "highest order" is a bit strong, no? It's not totally inconceivable that vaccines could have negative health effects.

<comment><USER13> No, it's not strong. We've forgotten what a true pestilence like polio does because vaccination programs have all but eradicated it. Those diseases killed and maimed - only idiots without understanding of history and suffering would oppose vaccination programs. Bad things happen to people, and sometimes due to medical errors, but vaccination programs are the few things that are simple to implement and reduce human suffering

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So we're not supposed to be afraid of Ebola anymore?

Or will the new vaccine conveniently save a Western country from a sudden, mysterious outbreak of Ebola?

The new Ebola vaccine is produced by Merck, and.. Oh look! _Former CDC Director Now President of Merck 's Vaccine Unit_:

[http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/08/0...](http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/08/02/merck- flu-vaccine-conflicts.aspx)

>> _In the summer of 2011, Merck president Julie Gerberding said in a news interview1 that she 's "very bullish on vaccines," as she recounted the various ways she helps Merck sell its products. What she didn't divulge was her motivation for leaving her job as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—an agency charged with overseeing vaccines and drug companies—and join Merck in the first place, back in January 2010._*

I'm sure that's completely unrelated. Nothing to see here, peon, move along!

EDIT:

It gets even "better":

>> _The CDC disseminated extremely exaggerated data on the 2009 H1N1 "pandemic" and urged almost everyone in the U.S. to take the new, untested vaccines. When questions arose, they blocked CBS's requests for samples of the swine flu cases and added obstacles to getting information. Despite the many dangers that have since been linked to the hastily developed vaccine—including the confirmed link to narcolepsy—the H1N1 vaccine is now part and parcel of the "regular" seasonal flu vaccine, although most people are completely unaware of this fact. And the CDC is now, for the first time ever, urging the seasonal flu vaccine on everyone in the country, from six months' of age until death.

>> Even more disturbing, the CDC withheld data on miscarriages from the H1N1 vaccines under Gerberding's lead, while insisting that pregnant women be put first in line to receive it._

But you've been told that "anti-vaxxers" are a bunch of conspiracy loonies, so you should just keep laughing and sneering at them, yes?

<comment><USER15> Well, Pandemrix was never used in US.

The mechanism of narcolepsy was quite interesting. Note that it was linked to surface proteins of the virus itself:

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24772-flu-vaccine- hel...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24772-flu-vaccine-helps- unravel-complex-causes-of-narcolepsy/)

The fact that GSK vaccine managed to replicate exactly those surface proteins exactly that way (I guess better than the virus itself?) was quite unlucky. Maybe that could have been caught in more extensive clinical trials (I don't know).</comment></comment>


Measuring the Maturity of a CD Pipeline - <AUTHOR> https://qntm.org/cd <comment><USER2> Missing tiers 6: After hours.</comment>


Instagram for non-believers - <AUTHOR> http://fr.anc.is/2012/04/13/instagram-for-non-believers/

<comment><USER2> This is slightly off topic, but the reason I never started using Instagram is related to the reason I quit Facebook: the continuous stream of ego-stroking, look-at-me status updates and photographs was just tedious. The narcissism in all these updates, check ins, and shares is unbelievable.

I can fully understand why Instagram was worth $1B. It enabled enhanced ego- stroking because it took tedious photographs and made them look like they were cool without any effort.

<comment><USER3> Frankly, this says more about the people you follow than the platforms themselves. If you aren't following ego-maniacs (and, admittedly, stay out of the "popular posts" type sections) then there should be no problem.

Don't blame the platform for enabling people to be who they really are.

<comment><USER2> _Don't blame the platform for enabling people to be who they really are._

I think the issue here is that McLuhan was absolutely right when describing how the medium actually transforms and filters the messages that are sent through it. It's worth reading "Understanding Media" (or "The Medium is the Massage") because one of his key points is that the apparent content of the messages being sent across a medium is a distraction for what's really going on (the societal change brought about by the medium itself).

In the case of social networking the medium is broadcasting a message that it's normal to continuously stream updates, pictures etc. about your daily life as if the people following you cared about that. The fact that they do care about it is simply a sign that the medium is shaping society to the social network's particular medium.

Also, it's worth considering the difference between a one-to-one sharing of something (let's say a picture of your child shared with your mother) and the broadcasting of information to a chosen social group.

The former is a personal interaction which has many subtexts (proud parent showing off their child, wanting to connect with your own parent), whereas the broadcast does not have the same depth. It's just "look at me".

<comment><USER4> Let me start by saying that I have the same gut reaction that you do.

On the other hand, isn't this position essentially saying that because the things in your life are similar to others and not surprising, they aren't valuable and worthy of documentation?

What's wrong with "look at me?" Am I not worthy of being looked at by my friends because I haven't done something remarkable? Just because my kid isn't really all that different from every other kid, or thousands of other people were also at that concert (and my photos are mediocre at best). . .

And if I share something actually remarkable that I've done, it's just "bragging," right?

I don't log in to facebook very often. But when I do, what else should I expect to see but what's going on in their lives?

My instinct is the same as yours--to hold back and be private. To not share my life with others, because they might be bored. To not document my everyday triumphs and failures, because they're not really that different from anyone else's.

But I have a sneaking feeling we might be wrong about this one. Maybe our boring human lives _are_ worth documenting and sharing.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you in some regards and I think this is a great point (not because I agree with you, of course ;) .)

However, I think jgrahamc and you are speaking to different things. There is documentation, much like our parents did when we went to the beach as a toddler and we took that picture with mom and the sandcastle, and then there is personal curation that lives in narcissism and strikes me as dishonest (or too honest, perhaps).

There is sharing triumphs and failures, and then there is bounding triumph and failure with one's personal accounts as to make the world about the documenter instead of about the documenter as part of, well, the world.

I'm not sure I have this idea completely worked out as this seems subjective and who can really judge another's motives with absolute certainty. All I know is there is a fine line and we would be careful to hold ourselves to a standard that encourages sharing life without making life about ourselves.

After all, you can't be open source (which we LOVE) when you're all closed- sourcey yourself.

Anyway, just a little food for thought that came into my head with your observations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _For non-believers: Instagram removed features to make sharing pics simple > again_.

Nope, I still don't get it.

I've never used Instagram, so bear with me: when I take a picture with my phone, I click on the share button, pick where I want to share (Facebook, Twitter, email, text) and I'm done. Pretty simple. What is Instagram removing from that process to make sharing more simple?

Now maybe I can explain why people are astonished with what Instagram was bought for: they built an apparently amazing product, but it wasn't something that couldn't have been built by Facebook (or any other number of companies) rapidly and cheaply. It was the user base. Essentially, Instagram sold your "attention" to Facebook for $1BB.

<comment><USER7> > What is Instagram removing from that process to make sharing more simple?

You mentioned three steps.

1) > I take a picture with my phone

2) > I click on the share button

3) > pick where I want to share (Facebook, Twitter, email, text)

With Instagram

1) take the picture

Done, filters are optional, and the sharing is built in. Also, reducing the size (to i think... 600*600 pixels or so) makes it incredibly fast to upload even in crappy edge/gprs networks.

<comment><USER8> Uh, what? I don't even get to decide whether or not the photo is worth sharing after I take it? That's actually worse.

<comment><USER9> Didn't you read the article? Damn the worth! We're all unique snowflake rockstars and all our meals and coffee mugs are blessed by our specialness. Share all the pictures!! (insert crazy meme guy with a paintbrush) Join the photo revolution man.

<comment><USER10> It's a girl. It's a brush. It's from Hyperbole and a Half.[1]

It's the overly used image that bothers me most because that person needs the traffic and their image is pretty popular yet they never get accreditation for it.

[1] [http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/this-is- why-...](http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/this-is-why-ill- never-be-adult.html)

<comment><USER9> Omg that is hilarious. Like a billion times more hilarious than a funny but mindless "it's hilarious because everyone is in on it" meme. Thanks for pointing me in that direction.

Ironically this is relevant to the discussion. Memes are kind of like Instagram (I imagine there are other similar phenomenons). They share the instant gratification of a trigger-like social connection between a huge mass of people, but lack all the fulfillment and self-discovery that REAL content can bring. But it's really not surprising that things like Instagram and memes thrive in the digial-social space. Most people will generally get a much higher response to a "MY CAT HAZ GLASSES!" fake polaroid, then to share something like "Hi all my friends, I read this insightful 5 page article on adulthood and I think you all might get something out of it too."

It sort of reflects a broader-scale problem with people just not having time (or not wanting to bother) with discussing things like sex, politics, art, religion, relationships... They'd rather just share some Ha-Has, small talk and get drunk. I think this is especially pronounced in North America and in large urban centers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What I think many Instagram critics misunderstand, is that Instagram is not about the filters. Sure, they're added value for many people, but at some point they'll go out of fashion, and I'm sure the people at Instagram know that damn well.

The real value of Instagram is the social network behind it. Photos are the easiest way of sharing what you're doing. You don't need to write a word, you just hold out your phone, snap a picture and upload it. And from the other side it's exactly the same, you don't even need to read to know what your friends are doing, you just glance over the picture stream.

Obviously you can do exactly the same on Facebook and Twitter, but by focussing on just photos Instagram has cut away all the clutter. And if you want to share what you're doing (or should I say seeing?) with friends who are not on Instagram, you can still flick the sharing switch.

</comment><comment><USER12> I disagree.

Instagram is not about making the photo production process easier. It's about making the photo consumption process easier, so that the photos you take get more attention from others (and you have more fun).

You could share your photos to Facebook or Twitter instead, but when users view their streams from those other sites, they're confronted with either a sea of text (Twitter) or a sea of mixed content in non-standard formats (Facebook). Catching up on your Facebook feed is impossible, so nobody does it. Twitter is a bit better because the posts are in a standard format, but still, reading tweets takes a bit of time.

Contrast this with Instagram. I'm following over 200 people and I can catch up on an entire day's worth of photos in about 5 minutes. Because it's faster to view an image than read a tweet, and because of the standard post format, Instagram is literally the fastest way possible for me to see what my friends and family have been up to.

To me, that's the real value of Instagram.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not a heavy Instagram user, but I like the author's assertion. Instagram is so popular because of what it isn't - it's not another photo manager. It's just a totally frictionless way to share photos.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't put it in the blog post for fear of making it too long, but one example of where "no choice" is a better option is in the image format: Instagram eliminates the question of "Should I shoot this in portrait or in landscape?".

<comment><USER14> That's a "feature"? It's probably the most aggravating characteristic of Instagram for me, and it's the reason I don't take all my pics with the app...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> ISTM that Instragram appealed to FB simply because Google+ has a very convenient automatic upload of all pictures taken by the phone. You can then easily choose which circle or person(s) to share these pics with, or not share them at all and just know they're safely tucked in the cloud. AFAIK FB didn't have this feature. I'd say that at $1bln they overpaid, though.</comment>


fast search - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/08/microsoft-has-announced-a-takeover-bid-for-fast-search-transfer-priced-at-12-billion/ <comment><USER2> One interesting comment there: _If you look at FAST's management team, the FAST CFO used to work for Steve Ballmer. No doubt this was one of the reasons why they managed to negotiate a better deal than could be expected._</comment>


Nomly - A New Way to Discover Things - <AUTHOR> http://nomly.com

<comment><USER2> I think it might make sense to put a little bit more of a description as to what the site does... What kinds of things does it let you discover? it seems like outdoorsy stuff?

I might assume a site with a name like nomly would find me new places to eat

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks, i added a subtitle after your feedback :)</comment>


Ayn Rand-loving CEO destroys his empire - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/

<comment><USER2> The problem with an article like this is that the authors want to make a broad stroke claim against an argument which is far more nuanced than they claim.

And this works both ways; just like taxation and subsidies aren't cures for the things they support with tax revenue or subsidies.

The truth is that people do act selfishly; we just don't understand the "why", a great example is people lining up for the latest gadget, many people question this as crazy but step into the shoes of the people in the line and they have made a very specific decision that at and during that moment they are better off doing what they are doing than doing anything else.

To the onlooker who thinks the people are crazy, this is completely irrational, but to the person in the line, they are making a very rational decision based on what they want.

People will always do things that are in their best interests, and that doesn't mean people wont donate to charity, or help out the community or exhibit 'selfless' traits, its important to understand that these traits are an important part of who the person is, and they can be selfish, in undertaking selfless acts because it furthers their goals which may not be entirely money driven.

The trillion dollar question is why do people make the decisions that they do; entire industries and careers are dedicated to trying to find this out.

A CEO destroying his company is more more evidence of a certain philosophy being wholly wrong, than North Korea is an example that all forms of government are horrible and will eventually lead to a North Korean existence for it's citizens.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Lampert took the myth that humans perform best when acting selfishly as > gospel, pitting Sears company managers against each other in a kind of Lord > of the Flies death match.

Sounds a bit like how Microsoft was structured [1].

[1] [http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2011...](http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/microsoft-org-chart.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER4> > discredited free-market economics

This is the problem with what Salon has become. Little digs like that that are not citaed, vague, and just loaded with the author's biases. I don't remember any part of Atlas Shrugged where death match style, internal bickering was promoted as a management style.

Whatever opinions you hold of Rand and Libertarianism, this was a pretty poorly written article.

</comment><comment><USER5> My first visit to Sears was the Oakland store mentioned in the article, about a year ago. It was close to our hotel so I thought I'd check it out. Stayed for about 2 minutes, it resembled something between a squat and a jumble sale.

<comment><USER6> I grew up in the sixties, when their motto was "Sears, where America shops." I don't know if they can say that with a straight face today, but back then it was largely true. The end of every summer we made the trek to the other side of the county for school clothes for me and my sister.

I have no idea when's the last time I was in Sears, but I can't imagine ever wanting to.

Businesses come and go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the article...

'''Even Rand acolyte Paul Ryan (R-Wis) is now distancing himself, calling his well-documented enthusiasm an "urban legend."'''

I'm guessing urban legend really mean "political inconvenience" in this context?

<comment><USER8> We all grow up, some just wait until they're running for President.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "His hedge fun is down 40 percent". Typo or clever dig?</comment>