BitTorrent users don't "act in concert," so judge slashes mass P2P case - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/08/bittorrent-users-dont-act-in-concert-so-judge-slashes-mass-p2p-case.ars <comment><USER2> Every time a judge does something like this I have some hope that we will move past the current copyright legislation to something more appropriate for the digital age.

I'm sure that copyright has had its use, and in many ways still has uses today. But I'm also sure that the time of 'easy money' by the simple act of reproduction will come to an end, and as far as I'm concerned that can't happen fast enough.

Copyright, like any tool is a two edged sword, and the one edge has been systematically blunted whereas the other has been systematically sharpened. There was a balance where there is now a very strong imbalance and judges like this help to at least temporarily restore that balance, until we can move past the current implementation.

I hope it will happen somewhere in the next 50 years, sooner is better. The closer we are to a balance the bigger the chance that we can move on. So thanks to this judge.

<comment><USER3> _I'm sure that copyright has had its use, and in many ways still has uses today._

My housemate, and his friend, have both told me copyright is a bastion in their industry- pharmaceuticals. It's not like they are Big Pharma shills either- he just graduated 2 months ago, and they both work for a tiny almost- company sheltered by a University.

In general it seems to be this way in every industry that doesn't yet move as fast as computing. Which has long suggested to me that what computing needs is not copyright abolishment or even sweeping reforms, but simply drastically shortened duration, perhaps in the range of 3-5 years.

<comment><USER4> Copyright? I think you must have misheard. Copyright has to do with creative works, not with physical substances. The pharmaceutical industry mainly relies on patents AFAIK.

<comment><USER3> Gah, I'm sorry. That's like the 3rd time I've conflated the two on accident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could this be? A brief flicker of hope for the fact that maybe tech-savvy judges might be able to do something sane?

I have to wonder, though, how long it'll be before everyone starts just opening their wifi as a "it wasn't me" defense. And how long that will last.

<comment><USER6> Many wifi passwords are trivially guessable, so the access points are already open. A more frightening question is, "how long until access points contain spyware to incriminate the owner in court?"

<comment><USER7> You don't need spyware; routers already keep logs. I'm not sure what discovery is like in civil cases in the US, but requisitioning the MAC addresses of all computers in the defendant's possession, as well as the router logs, would be sufficient to establish identity (or at least which computer was used). The fact that this doesn't seem to be widely used suggests to me that it exceeds the plaintif's rights to request said logs.

<comment><USER8> Mac addresses are trivial to change on most operating systems.

<comment><USER7> The vast majority of people don't know that. As civil cases have a much lower standard of proof than criminal, a mac address that matched the router logs for the downloads in question, and belonged to the owner of the connection, would likely be enough to establish identity. Given that a simple IP address is accepted by most courts as sufficient, MAC addresses would probably be icing on the cake.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Interning with the Airbnb Payments Team - <AUTHOR> http://nerds.airbnb.com/interning-airbnb-payments-team/

<comment><USER2> Too cool!</comment>


Paternity leave at startups: designing a policy for new parents - <AUTHOR> https://www.kapwing.com/blog/paternity-leave-for-startups/ <comment><USER2> I look for policies like this to see how I'm likely to be treated by a company in general.

Even more critical are terms of employment. Over the past few decades, companies often went from a healthy relationship (long-term employment, companies own IP in the domain of employment created on work hours) to a rather unhealthy one (3-year stints combined with abusive terms -- overreaching non-disclosures, non-competes, IP ownership, etc., digging deeply into my personal life).

Then there's background checks. These went from reasonable due diligence (I got my degree and worked where I claimed) to digging into past salaries and using those in negotiations (salaries get shared through data brokers like Equifax, often in violation of state laws), looking at credit records, etc.

There are policies around emergencies -- what happens if a relative dies and similar?

And there's the practical: How often do employees get legally threatened or sued on the way out? I've now had this happen to several friends; it's surprisingly common. In all cases, they settled on the company's terms (which were always without merits) since litigation would have cost years of life and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A job is kind of like a marriage. Even if they don't effect you directly, these are pretty good indicators of whether you're getting into a healthy or abusive long-term relationship.

<comment><USER3> > sued on the way out

Extraordinary - on what alleged grounds?

<comment><USER2> In one case, an employee was going to work for a startup developing a new (completely novel) product in the same industry as former company. There was a non-compete clause in the employment contract. It was cheaper to wait a year before joining the startup than to litigate. I know both companies, and the claim of competition was tangential at best.

In another case, an employee hadn't signed the current employment agreement which was far more overreaching than the terms of employment they originally agreed to (but which were needed for the organization to pursue its new -- somewhat sleazy -- business model).

The organization fabricated criminal allegations and told the employee they would press charges if the employee didn't sign away their rights. That's criminal extortion, but if such threats are verbal, it's not something you can really prove. Best case outcome for employee was a (very public) mud throwing match against an organization with an extensive PR/press department. A lawyer took that one pro bono, but I think that cost that employee 3-6 months of their life, and in the end, they gave up on their next startup too (which was, again, in the same industry as their former employer, and difficult to do with new terms).

Both were big organizations (ones you would have heard of, and one of which is held in extremely high esteem as an 'ethical' organization). Both settlements involved signing away rights to talk about those settlements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow. This reminds me why I am happily living in Sweden. Government pays me and my partner for 480 days off for every child. To split as we see fit more or less. My employer (startup with 16 employees) tops up what the government pays me such that end up having 90% of my normal salary.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, American policies around this are incredibly bad. Even the nominally "good" ones are pretty terrible compared to other developed nations.

<comment><USER6> Because Americans think if you have a need for this type of government support, well you just haven't worked hard enough and you're "part of the problem" (whatever that means).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is generous of Kapwing.

It's worth noting that, outside the United States and a very small number of other countries, parental leave is usually publicly funded through taxes and administered through social security. Companies can then augment these social security payments.

For example, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey all fund parental leave through social security. Others as well. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great!

I wonder if we can generalize this to a 'life-choice/situation' based time-off policy. Not all employees want kids and it's weird that companies can choose to sponsor/accommodate the choice of having kids but not the contrary.

And it's not just for the single/DINK life; some people have elderly parents that need assistance and that can take a lot of time.

</comment><comment><USER9> I shudder to think what would happen in some places if a father actually took paternity leave for a newborn. Probably get fired or downranked in some way with long term advancement consequences.

Hopefully more directors do research on the matter. Maybe it could help with that "skills shortage" they are so often complaining about.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there any value in having different paternity vs. maternity leave or primary vs. secondary caregiver?

Wouldn't something like X weeks paid for anyone parenting/birthing/adopting. (i.e. a paid family leave) be a simpler design?

You could expand this over time to include caregiving for elderly people etc. And it could support various family types (i.e single parents, adoptions, same-sex couples, surrogates etc.)

Genuinely asking because it seems weird not to have just a simple inclusive policy.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's one of these huge gaps between the USA and Europe (the other two being free or near free university education and medical care). Seriously, how worse can it be? Oh yes, it can: holidays! From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country):

> Some employers offer no vacation at all. The average number of paid vacation > days offered by private employers is 10 days after 1 year of service, 14 > days after 5 years, 17 days after 10 years, and 20 days after 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think I've seen this "primary" and "secondary" caregiver distinction before. Seems like bullshit to me.

<comment><USER13> Salesforce does this. I had a co-worker that took 6 months off for the birth of his child. The distinction effectively means anyone can take the time off. In the case the dad takes time off to be with the child, he becomes the primary caregiver by definition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Kudos to Kapwing for being attentive to their employee's family and emotional lives. However, it's irritating that parents receive perks at the expense of single and childfree employees (who don't get weeks of time off for _their_ families, and who are expected to cover for the parents on leave). IMHO, all employees should get the same amount of time off, regardless of whether or not they have children.

<comment><USER15> No. Having children is, well, literally the activity most essential to the survival of society and our species itself. Of course people should get extra time off to do it.

The problem isn't that we have too many natalist incentives. The problem is that we don't have _enough_ of them! The replacement rate is below replacement in general, and it's worse in cities.

If children, fine. But I don't begrudge people who do.

<comment><USER16> That suggests that "more people" is an unmitigated good, which I don't believe. There has never been a time when you were more able to avoid unplanned childbirth. The number of children in foster care has been increasing since 2013.[0]Whatever good could be done by having a child could be done better by acknowledging some of the people already in this world and giving them a real shot. We're all responsible for any situation that becomes a "tragedy of the commons", and we need to start behaving like it.

[0]: [https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2017/11/30/567615510...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2017/11/30/567615510/number-of-american-children-in-foster-care-increases- for-4th-consecutive-year)

<comment><USER15> There's nothing wrong with wanting your kids to be your own, nor with the desire to ensure that part of you makes it to the next generation. I'm sick of anti-humanism backlash against doing the thing that every organism ultimately exists to do.

<comment><USER16> Considering humans are the demonstrated reason for climate change, I'd argue some anti-human sentiment is a bit overdue. Nature's going to be fine. Life will recover once we're gone. It's us humans that are going to suffer because of our humanist entitlement.

<comment><USER15> The idea that some environmenal metric is more important than human suffering is bizarre and vaguely masochistic. The environment is an instrumental good for humanity's use, not a legitimate moral object in itself. Human extinction is a maximally bad scenario no matter how well the environment does afterwards

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So this "perk" does not even meet legal minimum for large companies. Just hire remotely if you want to attract top talent.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is form of discrimination against older workers who get no paid leave to care for their ageing parents.

I went through hell 5 yrs ago where I was on a death march project and had family situation involving a parent.

I will not support any of this until they change this into a 'life situation' leave instead of parent leave.

<comment><USER19> Older people are allowed to have kids as well, and so are just as eligible for paternity/maternity leave. Even if women are past the age of child bearing, they can adopt children and be eligible for maternity leave.

For your situation - were you not eligible for the FMLA?

<comment><USER20> FMLA is a joke. All FMLA actually says is the company can't outright fire you if you need up to 12 weeks to deal with family matters. The company is under no obligation to do anything else for you and if you can't afford to take time off without pay, well sux to be you.

<comment><USER19> Depends on the state. What about the business? They hired you for a reason, and you want them to keep paying you while you are not doing anything for them. What if the business can't afford to pay in a state where it is mandated? Well, sux to be them.

<comment><USER21> The business also wants me to come back after leave instead of moving to a less expensive place while looking for another job. Paid leave is an investment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pace of modern life: UK v Denmark - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23494970 <comment><USER2> If there ever was an article written and filled with mis-information and a completely superficial look at the pros and cons of the Danish society and it's merits, it is this article.

The claim that Danes are ambitious is flat out wrong. The younger generation more so, but there is a reason why danes are the "happiest people" in the world and it's not because of their ambitions.

The Danish model is under huge pressure and haven't escaped the reality of globalisation and automatisation.

But because wealth gets distributed the way it does, it doesn't feel the heat too much just yet.

In other words the Danish system is a thing of beauty as long as it works. Unfortunately it doesn't work anymore and somethings gotta give.

Edit: Was asked to be more specific.

Out of 6m people:

Almost 0.8m people on some sort of social welfare

Almost 0.8m people are working in full time positions for the public sector.

In comparison 1,9 in the private sector and it is shrinking rapidly.

It is notoriously easy to start a company in Denmark but notoriously hard to grow it among other things because most Danes don't have those ambitions and are very very risk-averse.

We are long past the point where more people are depending on the state than on the private job market and as those jobs disappear because of the named automation and globalisation and because Denmark is just too expensive, it will be hard for any government to promise the elaborate system we have now.

This is already starting to show as the latest government scramble to lower taxes for corporations and reduce the number of entitled benefits Danes can expect.

Furthermore Denmark took the wrong educational strategy and unfortunately like most of the european countries believed that knowledge worker meant book reader.

The result of this is that we have a large over educated part of the population who will have a very hard time finding a job.

<comment><USER3> Every time there is a US/UK article about how much better things are in Scandinavia/Netherlands/Germany, someone from the latter pops up and starts listing a number of negatives, usually with a strong right-wing/libertarian bias.

None of these are false in themselves, but these same issues are largely common to all Western societies (the US being a bit of an outlier in some aspects), and not a sign of total failure of a specific model.

Name one Western country that isn't struggling with public spending, globalisation, automation and education issues.

<comment><USER4> Whenever one of these US/UK articles pops up, it's usually from a left-leaning angle, emphasising the left policies of these countries as the cause of all the goodness there - so it's only natural that the counterpoint would be right-leaning.

> not a sign of total failure of a specific model.

It's not that it's a total failure, it's more that the scandinavian model isn't the utopia it's made out to be by its (mostly left leaning) proponents.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that the counterpoint doesn't have very much to do with issue at hand. It's like a number of people read "Denmark" and thought "Let me tell you what is wrong with Denmark!". This is exactly the type of political discussions that should be avoided on HN, because when arguments are vague and with little relation to the article the quality of the discussion will suffer.

<comment><USER4> Bringing Denmark up as a model country (as the OP does) is an inherently political statement. There is nothing "hack" about the BBC article. I agree this doesn't belong on HN, but one of the reasons politics on HN is so dangerous is that it's so easy to get dragged in - which I am clearly guilty of here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's always interesting to see the reactions to articles like this here: "They may be happy now, but it can't last!"

But, as Keynes said, "In the long run, we're all dead." Do you plan on listing your git check-ins on your tombstone? Will your epitaph be "He was ambitious?"

Most of us on this forum are fortunate enough to enjoy most of our work and are well-paid to do it. Much of our work has novel interesting and innovative results. Many of us are happy to keep working as long as we can. All the greater shame on us for not having the imagination to visualize what life is like outside our fortunate circle.

<comment><USER2> I fail to see how you reconcile those two claims.

I grew up from fairly humble means and have seen my father being fired, our house go on foreclosure, him struggle with 3 jobs to make enough of a living and my mom being stuck as a cleaning lady.

Perhaps you never experienced life outside the fortunate circle, but I certainly did and I have no ambitions of ending there again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be intrigued to see a breakdown between London and the rest of the UK in the "working very long hours" stakes, especially when you add in commuting.

It's entirely possible to have a successful career working 9 to 5, with a sensible commute, in vast swathes of the UK. I've spent 4 years in Edinburgh and have always lived within a 10 minute walk to work, often within a World Heritage Site.

The childcare costs are however a good point of something that other Northern European countries tend to do better at. Though our recent government spat over the ratio of staff to children shows that the public just aren't rational on the issue so changing it would be hard.

<comment><USER8> Childcare is insane in London. I do, however, take some comfort from knowing that (in my case at least) it's the most expensive part of my 18-month-old son's education. At £15,000 a year his nursery school costs £5,000 more a year than a university degree from Cambridge.

<comment><USER9> It's one of the thing that is ludicrously depressing about living in London. I'm Norwegian, and my brother has two children in Norwegian nurseries. Even with the current atrocious exchange rate, he pays about GBP 6k/year combined for the two of them...

If it hadn't been for work situation (especially that his mom is a UK solicitor with a big firm and wouldn't stand much chance of getting a decent job in Norway), it'd have paid off massively to move "back home" for a few years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Ambition" is probably a less useful frame, in the article and in the comments, than "expectations."

I've only been to Denmark a few times but I think the feeling I got is that they are happier because they have managed to largely sidestep the otherwise ubiquitous trap of perpetually escalating expectations.

The American/capitalist model is that each achieved goal is a platform for the next goal. Growth is what matters. Being satisfied with a decent job and a peaceful context in which to love your family is not any less ambitious than desiring to get rich or "change the world." It's just ambitious in a different direction.

Americans, for example, optimize for economic performance. Danes, I think, optimize for happiness. The tantalizing, troublesome idea that captivates me as an American is that money as an abstraction of 'value,' when survival is assumed, might only be desirable as a tool for being happier.

And if the pursuit of money, on a societal level, interrupts the pursuit of happiness, that implies that we capitalists are doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER11> I lived in Denmark 1.5 years. I do not know how the country is managing things so well given that:

1\. Taxes are ridiculous (my friend is in the 65% bucket, sixty five, after 2 years of work experience).

2\. There is a huge amount of people living on welfare State.

3\. The University system is far from ideal. Not much competition, grades are given almost randomly and tend towards a political 7 (average)

4\. You pay 180% (one hundred and eighty) of taxes on top of the value of a new car (180%...) when you buy it

5\. The cost of living is high, very high

6\. Foreigners, if they are not from US, are not very welcomed (say what you want on this, it's been my and others impression). Compare this with, say, Germany, and you see a big problem right there

7\. There is not really much good work. I get it, 5-6 mln people, but finding a work in Denmark without Danish is like finding the eldorado

Overall, I would not take this country as a "model". If you want a model, take Germany. Germany managed to get out total destruction (world war II) and the whole West/East mess without asking help to anybody. Germany today is probably one of the most open countries to foreigners. The Police in Germany is great with everybody (I had my bad experiences with the Danish one doing absolutely nothing wrong...).

Sometimes you need to look deeper to see what's really going on in a country. "Working hours" should not be the only way we measure things.

<comment><USER12> Germany got significant help from the US; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan)

Taxes are maxed at 57% for income above $70000/year. It is around 40% for income less than $70000. The initial around $10000 are not taxed. You'll never get to 65%.

A huge amount of people living on welfare is not by itself a bad thing. It is better than having the running around in the streets looting to survive.

Both the University of Copenhagen and of Århus are on the world top 100 list. [http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world- uni...](http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university- rankings/2012) . I don't know why you think grades are given randomly or politically, or why you are missing competition.

Cost of living in Denmark is lower than e.g. Norway... It is also not necessarily a bad thing. Salaries are also higher.

Danish is the official language. I suspect you'll have as much difficulty finding a job in Germany where you don't have to speak German, or in France w/o French.

With that said, it does sound like you had some bad experiences in Denmark.

<comment><USER11> I am not looking at the overall tax burden, I am looking at the margin. If 1000 of salary increase brings you 350, the incentive of being "ambitious" is drastically reduced.

I agree with you on universities, but they do not foster, in my opinion, healthy ambition and innovation. Danish students know they will have a job and a good income _no matter what_ and that's not helping growth. On top of that, you also have fake ones like Via which I still wonder what they are doing exactly.

Local language requirements are a fast way to see how a country/region is open to foreigners. Denmark is not. Will it be? I do not know. Of course, you get asked German in Germany too, but here they do not have 94% of the population speaking very good English.

With that said, my experience in Denmark was great! I am just tired of this glorification of Nordic countries just to justify broken spending oriented public policies (look where did they bring us...).

<comment><USER12> > I am not looking at the overall tax burden, I am looking at the margin.

It is still 57% not 65%. But also still too high in my opinion.

> If 1000 of salary increase brings you 350, the incentive of being > "ambitious" is drastically reduced.

Likely true and the topic of an ongoing discussion in Danish politics.

> Local language requirements are a fast way to see how a country/region is > open to foreigners. Denmark is not. Will it be? I do not know. Of course, > you get asked German in Germany too, but here they do not have 94% of the > population speaking very good English.

I am not sure I understand you. Should Denmark have more English speaking jobs than Germany, because Danes are better at English than Germans (or is it the other way around?)? That aside, I know many bilingual workplaces in Denmark, and I think the number is growing.

> I am just tired of this glorification of Nordic countries

Nordic countries are expensive to run and are glorified for their welfare system. Other countries are glorified in the media for low taxes, growth, culture, food, environmental friendliness, etc.

Something is always better somewhere else...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ignoring most of the specifics in the article I found the word: "janteloven"[0] interesting. Australians would call it tall poppy syndrome and the Brits....

Well the Brits have an institutionalised system of honouring people who achieve.[1] Everyone from sports people to business people. Obviously it's incredibly political but it is taken very seriously.

[0] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante) [1] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_honours_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_honours_system)

<comment><USER9> It's worth pointing out that Scandinavian culture values achievements. There's just a general suspicion of those who openly seek recognition for it. We tend to expect people to be hard working, but self-deprecating about any achievements to the extent of almost appearing embarrassed about it. Someone who is sufficiently self-deprecating might even be celebrated for that, but someone who is perceived as boasting will very often be viciously cut down to size.

A good illustration of the extreme importance of being self deprecating is how a big part of Norwegian mythos around the Norwegian royal family is how the then king took a tram when wanting to go skiing in '73 during the fuel crisis, and "even" took out his wallet to pay (During a period, using private cars during the weekends was illegal, and while the royal family almost certainly would've gotten dispensation, they judged it to send a bad signal). Google even autocompletes "kong olav trikken" (king Olav tram) for me if I type in "kong olav", and you'll find pictures of it in most Norwegian history books...

(The hilarious part is that this was partially staged: the press heard he'd taken the tram, and nicely asked if they might be allowed to come along _next time_ and were given the ok by the palace; had people in general been more media savvy at the time, it'd likely have had the opposite effect)

<comment><USER14> I was rather surprised to find out that the current Norwegian royals were actually _elected_ in 1905 :-)

<comment><USER15> The democratic vote was over whether Norway should become a republic or a monarchy. Prince Carl (to be King Haakon) was already chosen as a candidate at that time, and had agreed to the seat as long as the the Norwegian people would accept him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Although the author with the Indian name doesn't mention it, Denmark, among Western European countries, is known for its racism toward non-white immigrants.

So if Denmark is in some way "better," it's only better for those who are allowed to join the club. Of course, that doesn't mean others can't adapt Danish ideas about education and redistribution to our country.</comment>


New chips for machine intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.jameswhanlon.com/new-chips-for-machine-intelligence.html <comment><USER3> Software. Software. Software. Just two companies, Google and NVIDIA, have publicly launched a viable service or software stack. Just two companies have successfully written a "sufficiently advanced compiler". Just two companies actually have a product. And Google refuses to step into the arena and actually compete with NVIDIA. Man, what a time we live in.

And no, AMD doesn't count. ROCm is a mess.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if WebGPU will reduce dependence on CUDA, esp as Tensorflow is being ported to WebGPU. With WebGPU's improved performance and utility and the fact that it runs on top of Vulcan, Metal and D3D with any GPU that has drivers for those, I wonder if DL folks will find it more tempting to use TFJS/WebGPU via Electron or the browser and just be done with CUDA (i.e. break or soften NVIDIA's monopoly)

<comment><USER5> I've never heard anyone suggest that WebGPU would be appropriate for ML training workloads. Maybe inference, but not training.

<comment><USER4> Well, the memory limit of a WebGPU process would be the limiting factor for training. In addition, the bandwidth between the nodes and the parameter server, if doing training in data-parallel fashion, is another limiting factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some of the numbers in that table do not make any sense and makes me question the quality of the entire article.

Where are the numbers for the Cerebras chip coming from?:

\- How do you have a TDP of 180W for an entire wafer of chips?

\- Why is there a peak FP32 number when they are clearly working with FP16?

Each of these chips is a completely different architecture and it makes no sense to compare them at this level. The only meaningful comparison is actual performance in applications because that reflects how the entire system will be used.

<comment><USER7> One of the numbers that jumped out at me as being very unusual about the Cerebrus chip was this one: "Speculated clock speed of ~1 GHz and 15 kW power consumption."

15 kW power consumption for 1 chip?!?

<comment><USER8> Reportedly, it's an insanely large (whole wafer) single chip. But, then, why is it listed with a size that's not commensurate with that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And this is ignoring all the bit players, some of which are doing crazy things like using analog multiplication.

[https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2755/analog-ai-startup- mythic...](https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2755/analog-ai-startup-mythic-to- compute-and-scale-in-flash/)

That's currently just slideware at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER10> Huawei looks like it has a strong game here:

"Ascend 910 is used for AI model training. In a typical training session based on ResNet-50, the combination of Ascend 910 and MindSpore is about two times faster at training AI models than other mainstream training cards using TensorFlow."

[https://www.huawei.com/en/press-events/news/2019/8/Huawei- As...](https://www.huawei.com/en/press-events/news/2019/8/Huawei- Ascend-910-most-powerful-AI-processor)

edit: The software framework "MindSpore will go open source in the first quarter of 2020."

<comment><USER11> When I read about it first I wondered if it would be a mobile chip - <USER2> apparently not (with a TDP of 300w)

I wonder how brittle the performance will be vs other models such as transformers and DRL vs CNN and ResNet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Small corrections:

> I'm focusing on chips designed for training

TPU 1 is designed for inference AFAIK.

> TPU v2: 45 TFLOPs

I think it would be great to clarify that what is commonly referred to as "TPU v2" (e.g. on GCP pricing, also what is shown in the image in this article), consists of 4 such modules with 8 cores total, which gives a more commonly quoted value of 180 TFLOPs.

</comment><comment><USER13> FYI: "DISCLAIMER: I work at Graphcore, and all of the information given here is lifted directly from the linked references below."

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm excited to see how the Habana Labs Gaudi performs in the real world:

[https://www.jameswhanlon.com/new-chips-for-machine- intellige...](https://www.jameswhanlon.com/new-chips-for-machine- intelligence.html#habana-gaudi)

They claim to have some great features. Anyone know when if a consumer version is coming / any release dates promised?

</comment><comment><USER15> Are deep neural networks really that widely applicable that it's profitable to design custom chips for them? What about other models of AI that involve, say, discrete math or graph search?

<comment><USER16> Yes. They are far beyond any other AI technique in speech recognition, speech synthesis, translation, OCR, object recognition, playing Go, and many other diverse tasks. And their performance continues to increase with added computing power with no limit that we've seen yet, so custom hardware improves results.

<comment><USER17> Alas, you do not usually train models from scratch. I think that transfer learning will dominate, and it does not need this power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Will there be a customer grade TPU in the near future?

Or won't they be able to be as price/performance efficient compared to (nvidia) GPUs?

<comment><USER19> Apple's neural engine in their A-series of SoCs.

<comment><USER20> This article is about hardware for training neural networks, not the inference chips that are in most phones today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This list is missing mobile phone chips that are specially designed for Deep Learning.

<comment><USER5> Existing mobile phone chips are designed for inference, not training. The list is explicitly restricted to chips that are designed for training.

<comment><USER21> there is lot of training happening on the edge (mobile devices) as well, look up 'federated learning' [https://medium.com/syncedreview/federated-learning- the-futur...](https://medium.com/syncedreview/federated-learning-the-future- of-distributed-machine-learning-eec95242d897)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-make-your-own-deep- lea...](https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-make-your-own-deep-learning- accelerator-chip-1ff69b78ece4)

How to make your own AI chip

</comment><comment><USER23> > Intel NNP-T TSMC 16FF+

Intel has stuff made by other foundries?

<comment><USER24> Stuff they acquired. This is something originating from Nervana Systems and I think there are also some Altera chips out there. Intel's custom foundry offering has historically been poor so chances are anyone they buy will have been using someone else (why take the risk and change that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> '''CONCLUSION Graphics has just been reinvented. The new NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture is the most advanced and efficient GPU architecture ever built. Turing implements a new Hybrid Rendering model that combines real-time ray tracing, rasterization, AI, and simulation. Teamed with the next generation graphics APIs, Turing enables massive performance gains and incredibly realistic graphics for PC games and professional applications.'''

Quoted from Nvidia Turing datasheet

</comment><comment><USER26> I am surprised Amazon has not jumped in the game, renting out an accelerator like Google does with the TPUs

<comment><USER27> AWS gpu compute is extremely expensive. If this is due to datacenter licensing costs, I hope they come out with their own hardware soon to reduce these costs. If on the otherhand, it's because their value-add is not in renting out the hardware but burst scalability, then I'm less optimistic that they'd cannibalize their own cloud product.

Currently, it only takes about 1 month to break even if you buy a consumer gpu like the rtx 2080ti, compared with AWS time. For training purposes it doesn't seem to make sense.

\- just looked up the numbers and google tpus are pretty similar in terms of pricing. I think any aws equivalent would probably be just as expensive compared to a diy pc.

<comment><USER28> That's because NVIDIA's EULA requires you to buy a NVIDIA Tesla in datacentre developments; and Teslas are marked up by thousands of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> what are your thoughts on how federated learning might change the HW landscape for edge devices?</comment>


Go Long on Web Components - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@velmu/go-long-on-web-components-b1e0689f64e4 <comment><USER2> I've never understood what real problems Web Components solve with all their complexity. In _theory_ shadow DOM and Custom Elements are useful - but the implementation in Web Components leaves a lot to be desired for people trying to actually build applications in the real world.

They punted on important things, like inter-component communication, state management, and even code organization (templates, styles, and scripts are all in the component together? Seems great until it falls over in apps of any consequence)

At the end of the day, frameworks like React, Vue, and even Angular are solving the problem for application developers more comprehensively.

I just don't see a future for web components, other than for folks who want the latest and greatest thing and care more about mastering complexity than delivering apps quickly.

Edit: One other thing that I think will prove, in time, to be a bad idea, is this notion that everything must be its own component. Apps are interconnected, and most "components" are not going to be re-used in practice. Why enforce this segregation when 90% of the time it's a hindrance? By all means de-couple when there are re-usable bits, but that's just not true most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very reasonable, but I dispute the implied notion that React and Web Components are competitors, or that React is in any way obsolete because we can use Web Components.

As the React docs state:

> React and Web Components are built to solve different problems. Web > Components provide strong encapsulation for reusable components, while React > provides a declarative library that keeps the DOM in sync with your data. > The two goals are complementary. As a developer, you are free to use React > in your Web Components, or to use Web Components in React, or both.

[https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/web- components.html](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/web-components.html)

The author seems to understand this, but still seems to indicate that Web Components lessen the need for DOM view frameworks, when actually they just make it easier to encapsulate widgets.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I think one can create application with lets say preact + polymer, or vue.js + vue-web-components just fine. I see these solutions working together.

<comment><USER5> There's Aurelia as well.

[http://aurelia.io](http://aurelia.io)

<comment><USER4> Aurelia has a way to output web components?

<comment><USER6> Sort of? It's kind of built out of almost web components, if you squint, and there's an export tool, mostly together: [https://github.com/aurelia/web- components](https://github.com/aurelia/web-components)

The Aurelia argument seems to be that it's the Web Component spec that's not entirely all together still, not Aurelia's version of web components at a somewhat orthogonal angle to the spec.

This thread from the developer: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8950360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8950360)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://jonrimmer.github.io/are-we-componentized- yet/](http://jonrimmer.github.io/are-we-componentized-yet/) [https://platform- status.mozilla.org/#html-imports](https://platform-status.mozilla.org/#html- imports)

HTML Imports are only implemented in Chrome and it is going to stay that way, Firefox and Safari aren't having it. This is arguably a bummer but not critical for Web Components.

What is critical is that Custom Elements and Shadow DOM (V1) are in the latest Chrome and Safari but not on the horizon for Firefox and Edge. Supposedly it is planned, but unclear when it will actually arrive. 2018?

<comment><USER4> According to announcements made by google guys on few conferences both IE and Firefox actively work on implementations.

<comment><USER8> The Browser Support chart on webcomponents.org shows that they're working on it[1]. I think it's a pretty good way to track web component compatibility (outside of caniuse).

[1][https://www.webcomponents.org/](https://www.webcomponents.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The use case I'm most excited about for Web Components are those producing reusable components (like YouTube embeds you describe). Building the same components for different frameworks no longer makes sense when you consider that you could publish a web component instead that would work out of the box with most modern frontend frameworks. I'm incredibly bullish on them now, and we're going to be turning Ionic components into WC's so we can work with all frameworks people want to use (because, there hasn't been one single framework that has "won" the frontend market)

<comment><USER10> > consider that you could publish a web component

Is there any place you can go look at Web Components built by others and contribute your own? plus a package manager to include them easily in your projects would be the best way for them to come to light.

<comment><USER11> [https://www.webcomponents.org/publish](https://www.webcomponents.org/publish)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are there any good ways to keep your data in sync between a model and the DOM with Web Components? Something similar to what Vue or React have?

<comment><USER13> Polymer.

Check out [https://github.com/arqex/freezer](https://github.com/arqex/freezer) if you like immutable data, it works very well with Polymer. All you need to do to integrate them is something like this: [https://github.com/myfreeweb/micro- panel/blob/34aeb46600fab5...](https://github.com/myfreeweb/micro- panel/blob/34aeb46600fab5ebfb24f72777e723675dadc34b/src/micro- panel.js#L59-L65) (the itemModified stuff is extra, specific to my app) Then just pass the freezer object or its children down the component tree with one- way bindings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Joe Gregorio has a great video presentation that answers some of the questions I see posted here:

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

</comment><comment><USER15> I want to go long on a component paradigm that targets the web (server or client rendering) and native iOS/Android views, only one framework has strong support for this (React). It speaks highly of its design

<comment><USER5> The Web Component paradigm will target (pseudo-)native through progressive web apps and ServiceWorker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> React and Vue.js are actually used in production for many real projects.

Who uses Web Components? (Besides, apparently, the YouTube rewrite in 2017.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Web components are essentially syntactic sugar. It's not so much a technology in and of itself as a way to help web developers avoid copy & paste strain..

So of course they work with anything and are "natural". There is nothing in them! It's a macro or preprocessor system if you want..

<comment><USER4> Not entirely true - you get things like shadow dom with them - which means "proper" encapsulation.

<comment><USER13> And custom elements provide a way to actually create, well, your own DOM elements. Libraries like React provide their own "fake" components that are only usable from within the libraries. With Custom Elements you can actually provide a DOM API for your element, that can be used from plain JS.

And HTML Imports provide deduplication. They're a solution to the "I have four copies of jQuery on my page" problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If a time machine is ever built, could someone please go back and steer the young Brendan Eich towards a career in medicine or medieval literature? And Berners Lee, while you're at it. Then call John Ousterhout or someone like him, and tell them to get cracking. Imagine the boatloads of nonsense we could be without today.

<comment><USER19> This may be off topic, but is there a word for a compliment the acceptance of which necessarily disparages someone else?

<comment><USER18> There must be. There simply must.

Mind you, I'm not disparaging Eich and Berners Lee, only their products. Web technology is a mess. I was horrified when I saw my first html all those long years ago. I'm horrified still. And saddened to think what might have been.</comment></comment></comment>


Nissan Beefs Up LEAF Battery Warranty to Cover Capacity Loss - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/cars/nissan-beefs-leaf-battery-warranty-cover-capacity-loss-will-others-follow.html

<comment><USER2> _"This policy change tells us a few things: First, Nissan is very confident that its batteries won't suffer from too much capacity loss within those 5 years or 60,000 miles."_

Depends what you consider "too much". If your battery can only be charged to 9 out of 12 bars after five years (which is considered acceptable under the warranty), that means you've lost 25% of your battery capacity, or 25% of your car's range.

Since after five years it will only get worse (and the warranty will have expired), it also suggests that nobody will want to buy your five year old Leaf unless you discount the price by the cost of a new battery (several thousand dollars).

Gasoline powered cars don't have either of these problems, which suggests that electric cars will remain a small market unless the price of gas goes up sharply.

<comment><USER3> "Gasoline powered cars don't have either of these problems, which suggests that electric cars will remain a small market unless the price of gas goes up sharply."

 _or_ battery technology improves substantially which seems likely either in capacity or price, but probably both.

<comment><USER4> Not sure what battery technology improvements are on the horizon but unless they are order of magnitude improvements electric cars are still impractical for my needs, and I suspect for many other folks as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there some technological difference, which allows them to provide such a warranty, compared to the competition? Or it's just different spin, on how you communicate the expected lifetime of the batteries?

<comment><USER6> To be honest, I don't know the answer to your question, but I do know that battery capacity is heavily influenced by the following : -thermal cycling -maximum temperature -charging parameters

I would hazard that Nissan has performed a number more tests on the leaf batteries in the last couple years and developed a better model for battery decay based on their enforced management of the above listed characteristics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate not having a second parking spot. A $199/mo lease on a Leaf seems like a no-brainer in California: HOV lane access, free parking and charging in a lot of places, and enough range for pretty much anything inside SF/Oakland/Berkeley that I'd do. Keep an ICE car for anything longer. It's probably enough that if you lived in San Mateo County, you could go everywhere you'd normally care about (SF to San Jose), round trip.

</comment><comment><USER6> What the article is _really_ saying is that Nissan expects the Leaf to deplete to 80% capacity by year 5 outside of extraordinary circumstances.</comment>


Ask HN: Opinions on Talky.io - <AUTHOR> I've been reading about WebRTC lately and found https://talky.io. (I'm in no way affiliated with them.) The service seems solid, and it's free for up to 6 members. (The company providing the service sells access to a network of TURN servers along with a React frontend that simplifies client dev.) With all the talk here of Zoom/Jitsi/etc, I'm surprised I haven't seen it mentioned here, and I'm wondering what Hacker News knows that I don't. (As an aside, I'm also sutprised by the relative lack of mention of https://whereby.com, another WebRTC service that I'm also not affiliated with, but for my money, has good UX and does all the right things in terms of engineering WebRTC infrastructure.) <comment><USER2> heats my mac</comment>


HN meetup: Johannesburg - <AUTHOR>

Anyone keen to meet up in the near future? <comment><AUTHOR> I'm Morningside so anywhere in the area is fine. Sunday noon good for everyone?

<comment><USER2> away for the weekend, i'll have to catch you guys next time

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems there's no interest from the others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is quite surprising. I didn't expect other Joburgers on here.

</comment><comment><USER2> i'm keen as well, where? Rivonia/Fourways?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm keen.</comment>


Ask HN: How open source contributions helped you land a job - <AUTHOR> So I have been consuming hackernews daily. I have seen many great open source projects that were shared on hackernews and I have even used those project. but the real question is how open source contributions helped you land a job at your dream company or just in general.<p>Furthermore,Can open source contributions help you land a consulting gig. <comment><USER2> Participated in Google Summer of Code back in 2011. Worked on a project that involved adding a large-ish new feature to an existing open-source project. Helped me land a job in the US straight out of college. Otherwise, I don't think anybody would have even looked at my resume, considering that I am not from the US, don't have a CS degree and went to a no-name school outside the US.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nicee

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Others can answer your actual question, as my personal getting-hired experience predates open source.

I have however hired many people over the years, so I will comment from that point of view.

The key word in your question is Help. just having done some open source isn't some sort of magic bullet. But it does open the door to discussing what you did, how it helped you, what you learned and so on.

In other words it supplements your "experience" factor. Especially for folk starting out it's an obvious solution to the "but how do I get experience if everyone only hires experience?" question.

Put another way, given unemployment you can either do nothing, or find a way to add value to something for free.

When it comes to hiring - for a small shop - the willingness to add real value, and the demonstrated ability to do so, goes a long way to getting hired.

But it's only one of several factors, not the only factor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed Very well written answer. I'm just waiting for more people to comment on this so i can hear different perspectives</comment></comment>


Why the Elixir language has great potential - <AUTHOR> http://adrian-philipp.com/post/why-elixir-has-great-potential <comment><USER3> I've been a long time Rubyist (10 years now) and I'm really enjoying Elixir. What got me hooked was the simple syntax and wonderful documentation, both from the project itself and in the Programming Elixir and Programming Phoenix books.

The ease of navigating an Elixir project is a huge benefit. If I want to know where a function is defined, it's very easy to find it. There's none of this class-reopening or meta programming malarkey that you get in Ruby (where is a Rails controller's render method defined exactly?)... it's all right there in the module.

Another thing that I love is that it's trivial to separate processing of several pieces of data into separate Elixir processes. To do something similar in Ruby, I would probably need to either use concurrent-ruby or spin them off into a background job with Sidekiq. In Elixir, it's baked right in.

Elixir is well-designed, the community is very friendly and it's just a pleasure to develop in.

<comment><USER4> > The ease of navigating an Elixir project is a huge benefit. If I want to > know where a function is defined, it's very easy to find it. There's none of > this class-reopening or meta programming malarkey that you get in Ruby > (where is a Rails controller's render method defined exactly?)...

I would view Elixir as an improvement (iteration?) of Ruby built on Erlang. The article points out it was written by Jose Valim . It derives its structure from the documented shortcomings of both parent languages.

<comment><USER5> Other than some superficial syntax similarities, I find Elixir to be nothing like Ruby. Pattern matching, immutability, OTP, and the actor model feel like building blocks from a whole different universe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I share the author's optimism. I work for a start-up, and we just released a mobile app that uses Elixir on the back end. I'm the architect on the project, and this was my first time using Elixir professionally. I've been blown away by the speed and stability of the product, the ease of hot deployments, and the intuitiveness of Elixir's syntax. Behaviors are amazing, and for the first time in my career, concurrency isn't a huge pain in the ass. The codebase is extremely easy to maintain and organize, and Elixir just takes baby sips at our cluster's resources. Elixir has far exceeded my expectations, and has provided me with one of the smoothest product launches of my 27-year career. I cannot speak highly enough about it.

Regarding learning Elixir, I thought LearnElixir.tv was great, but wasn't nearly as impressed by LearnPhoenix.tv. The latter is good, and definitely worth the money, but it didn't feel like it went into nearly the depth and breadth that LearnElixir.tv did. I also recommend the books "The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook," by Benjamin Tan Wei Han, and "Programming Elixir," by Dave Thomas. Elixir School ([http://elixirschool.com](http://elixirschool.com)) is great online resource, and the Hex docs ([https://hexdocs.pm](https://hexdocs.pm)) are clear and well organized. Finally, "Take Off with Elixir" ([https://bigmachine.io/products/take-off- with-elixir/](https://bigmachine.io/products/take-off-with-elixir/)) is a great video/book offering.

<comment><USER7> Which package are you using for deployments?

<comment><USER6> Exrm.

<comment><USER8> Author of exrm rewrote it as Distillery and says that will be where all future development goes.

<comment><USER6> You are correct. We will be updating our deployments within the next few weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm having a lot of fun with it, can't wait for winter vacation to build stuff :)

There's a lot of niceties you get out of the box (mix is pretty nice and the testing framework is included, the REPL is good, love that they improve the error messages and consider an unclear error message a bug). I'm already used to pattern matching from Prolog so that's a great plus (I wanted to use Erlang initially but Elixir has won me over). I also feel like I'm thinking in a functional way much clearer (I'm using the PragProg book and this video tutorial [https://bigmachine.io/products/take-off-with- elixir/](https://bigmachine.io/products/take-off-with-elixir/) which both stress it, both resources highly recommended).

Once I start dipping into OTP I'm sure I won't be looking back anytime soon. It's been a while since I was this excited about a language.

Phoenix (web framework) is also pretty awesome. The abstraction of chaining a request through a bunch of functions to generate a response is very fitting. Plugs make sense.

tl;dr: Try it!

</comment><comment><USER10> Another one that wasn't mentioned: optional types. Sometimes you don't need / want em, but it's good to have the option available for when you do.

Aside from that... Elixir feels really fun. Maybe it's a silly metric, but that's just my biased opinion.

The last feature that caught my attention was their deployment tools. I haven't used em yet, but based on a conference video I watched, it looks like they have pretty sweet setup. They claim to have very easy zero downtime upgrades / downgrades. And I think preparing a release automatically bundles dependencies, so everything is contained in a single compressed file.

<comment><USER11> > Aside from that... Elixir feels really fun. Maybe it's a silly metric, but > that's just my biased opinion.

I'd argue that from a hacker's perspective, this is the most important metric. It's what keep you returning to the language, and what gives it vi(r|t)ality. Don't underestimate fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Elixir as a new language doesn't have to reinvent a lot of things because of its ability to transparently call erlang (for instance, to use crypto I could just do :crypto.strong_rand_bytes(32) |> :base64.encode_to_string ). This is an awesome advantage to have.

</comment><comment><USER13> Coming from the Clojure world, every time I read about about Elixir, the similarity of the two langauges' values always surprise me: immutability, macros, dynamic and gradual typing, concurrency, and on.

I've yet to touch Elixir (or Erlang, for that matter). Does anyone have experience using both? Thoughts? Has anyone crossed from one language to the other over any strong preference?

<comment><USER14> I have used both (though Clojure less). I have not built distributed applications in Elixir yet, so I do not focus on those features in this comment. I prefer Elixir because:

1\. My brain thinks in terms of editing lines, not s-expressions; I didn't get the hang of paredit, and editing without paredit required really tedious edit operations.

2\. Elixir's understanding of types matches Erlang's and the host VM, while Clojure invents its own uni-typed IObj but runs on a typed VM. Interop with Java required adding type annotations. Elixir/Erlang interop seems to be almost entirely pain-free.

3\. Elixir has a lot of syntax niceties like triple-quoted strings that automatically remove indents. And pattern matching everywhere.

4\. I can feasibly (and in fact, have) audited and built all of my Elixir and Erlang dependencies from git repositories, while doing the same with the Maven dependencies needed for a typical Java project would be almost impossible. I wouldn't even know where to begin with bootstrapping all the necessary Maven plugins.

5\. Elixir/Erlang has per-process garbage collection and memory limits, though I haven't taken advantage of these yet.

<comment><USER15> > My brain thinks in terms of editing lines, not s-expressions; I didn't get > the hang of paredit, and editing without paredit required really tedious > edit operations.

In my experience, learning and then working in Common Lisp, starting with paredit is tough. I disabled paredit for a while until I got the hang of thinking in s-expressions as you say. After a while when I tried paredit again, it was glorious.

Early on I did set up % as a global key that goes to the matching parenthesis if on parenthesis, and otherwise inserts the character typed.

Also, I hope you were setting [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ShowParenMode](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ShowParenMode)

Just my 2¢.

<comment><USER16> I use Vim for editing Lisp. Basic :set lisp mode that dates back to ancient Unix implementations of vi and the % command for jumping between matching parentheses. In Vim, selecting a range and typing = re-indents it, and == indents the current line. I set shiftwidth to 2. When I need to move the indentation of a whole block I use select and < or >. Or << and >> for the current line. With those basics, I comfortably do 95% of all Lisp editing.

For instance to move an expression: put cursor on one parenthesis, type v for visual select, type % to jump to the other paren, then x to delete. Move somewhere, p to paste. Adjust formatting here and there, done.

I edit C and other languages in pretty much exactly the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Working with Elixir professionally for year and the half, having deployed more than one app on production I can honestly say, that it's just awesome. Not a silver bullet, will not solve your problems, but the way it makes you think is great. It's been the most impactful and satisfying learning experience of my short career.

</comment><comment><USER18> Last time I went to look at elixir it looked nice, is there an accepted user- mangement system for phoenix yet? User auth is a combination of the three things I least want to implement myself:

1\. Security. Small non-obvious mistakes are easy to make and very important.

2\. High visibility. Risky, and if it goes wrong it's a major thing your customers notice.

3\. Dry. It's just not particularly interesting for me, it's certainly solved in other frameworks (e.g. devise). I'm aware this last point is extremely selfish of me, however.

<comment><USER19> Because of the points you mentioned, I've been wondering why I haven't been able to find a framework-independent, open-source user management and authentication system. This seems like the sort of thing that should be solved in a standard way and not reinvented by every framework (or worse, application) that needs user management.

I've come across some paid services (e.g., stormpath, auth0) that seem to do what I'm talking about. It would be really nice if there were a free project along those lines though.

<comment><USER20> The API gateway approach has a lot of the upsides you mention:

1\. [http://microservices.io/patterns/apigateway.html](http://microservices.io/patterns/apigateway.html) 2\. [https://getkong.org/](https://getkong.org/) (a few auth plugins) 3\. [https://github.com/auth0/nginx-jwt](https://github.com/auth0/nginx-jwt) / [https://www.stavros.io/posts/writing-an-nginx- authentication...](https://www.stavros.io/posts/writing-an-nginx- authentication-module-in-lua/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've just recently started learning Elixir and have really been enjoying it.

Subjectively speaking, I really like the terse yet expressive syntax. It's also nice to have a smaller codebase.

There's an awesome package that creates HTML docs out of your comments. It's really useful for creating documentation on the fly. Elixir's official docs are made this way.

I'm about halfway through a course I think is very good for beginner-level programmers ([https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-elixir-and-phoenix- bootca...](https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-elixir-and-phoenix-bootcamp-and- tutorial/)).

Elixir School is also a good resource.

Phoenix shows a lot of promise too, I haven't taken to JS so it would be good not to have to use it as much as possible.

<comment><USER22> I really rate [https://elixirforum.com](https://elixirforum.com) although for some reason Google never seems to find results on it even when there are lots of relevant examples.

I signed up for the digest there and it's one of the few "bulk" emails I get that I actually read.

<comment><USER21> thanks ill check it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here is a repost of a comment I made a while ago about why I love Elixir:

The thing that constantly gets me about Elixir and Phoenix is the default tends to be the correct way of doing it. Let me explain.

For example, the other day, I was looking at filtering a next parameter to remove the domain (for security- you could redirect someone to fake login box on your host after they log in)... however it's unnecessary as redirect/2 in phoenix if passed a URL rather than a path will throw an error by default. As an aside different exceptions will return different HTTP error codes - <USER2> example a database not found exception from Ecto will cause a 404. There are hundreds or thousands of these little decisions that are the correct/simpler decision.

Elixir and Phoenix, for want of a better way of saying it, show great programming taste. So to say it's a coat of paint is a bit harsh; it's the right coat of paint, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am a self taught Ruby/Rails developer who has recently started dipping my toes in the world of Elixir and Phoenix.

I am having a lot of fun as I find it to be a refreshing approach to web development.

Elixir's guide is quite exhaustive. You can easily start building a toy app over a weekend.

I have open sourced the source code for my blog/web-shop that I built using Elixir/Phoenix. I am not an Elixir expert and this is not the best written Elixir app, but if anyone wants to look at the code for a simple CMS and shop built with Elixir and Phoenix, here is the link - [https://github.com/authentic-pixels/ex-shop](https://github.com/authentic- pixels/ex-shop).

Here is a link to the live website - [https://www.authenticpixels.com/](https://www.authenticpixels.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Read the blog post and then the thread, and was really starting to get excited at the prospect of using elixir. Then i wondered what was the pace of adopting new technologies in elixir, and found this thread about http2 support (which started to gain adoption last year, and increase peroformances a lot)

[https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug/issues/258](https://github.com/elixir- lang/plug/issues/258)

So, for a language that's primarely based around webserver, i find it really woorying that http2 support wasn't a primary concern, and depends on donation to a third party developper...

I guess it means the language is still young and so is the ecosystem.

<comment><USER25> This isn't elixir fault per se.

Elixir leverages Cowboy quite a bit and HTTP2 requires substantial rewrite of Cowboy.

This will be completed in the release of Cowboy 2.0

If you want to read why Cowboy needs to be majorly refactored, read the link below

[https://ninenines.eu/talks/cowboy-2/#/](https://ninenines.eu/talks/cowboy-2/#/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just anecdotal evidence but I've been running Elixir in production for half a year now for an app called Sleeperbot (95% of our backend is written in Elixir)

Our websocket endpoints, our app servers, and other services all run on Elixir, and pretty much without any incidents.

Erlang/OTP is battle-tested and it's really the first time I could comfortably sleep at night without worrying about stuff going down. Personally I think Elixir past the point of just having "potential" and is my default go-to language to solve any problem as long as it makes sense to solve it with Elixir.

<comment><USER27> Hey I don't personally use sleeperbot, but I play fantasy bball. "Is there a basketball equivalent of sleeperbot?" is a very common question, so I assume you're doing something right.

Just curious, what other languages/frameworks have you tried in backend? Are you running Phoenix?

<comment><USER26> Next season there will be. It'll actually be a full fantasy platform that hosts season-long leagues as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Has anyone used both Elixir and Go enough to give a comparison of the feel/productivity for backend web dev?

(I know it's apples to oranges... but for some tasks, like backend / high concurency microservices etc., both an apple and an orange are perfect fit, so it's worth comparing. I've heard of Ruby or Python people jumping to Go or Elixir, but not of any comparison.)

<comment><USER8> I'm actually in the process of writing a detailed blog post on that subject. Just trying to make sure I cover all of the bases.

Both are very similar in their underlying approaches. The biggest difference is that you have to write a lot more error handling code for Go.

The other thing is interfaces. With Go if you want to be able to pass multiple different types of structs to a function you have to define an interface that fits with both by showing each have a field named X of type Y. Because of that you end up needing to define a lot of interfaces.

Elixir accomplishes the same thing with pattern matching. You can define a function that shows parts of a nested hash in the argument and in order to call that function the hash you pass has to have those keys. It's much more flexible and less clunky IMO.

The other thing is Go's compiler strictness about making you remove any library from the import that not in use. When doing development or experimenting with a new library it gets really old having compiler yell at you about this because you commented something out. With Elixir, the compiler WARNS you about it. You still get a great big "get rid of all this stuff that isn't used" on compile, but it doesn't interrupt your development workflow.

Details like that, better package management, etc make me significantly more productive with Elixir. Phoenix is excellent and it's view layer is extremely fast and flexible - probably my favorite view layer that I've ever dealt with across many languages. Contrast that with Go templates, which to me felt a lot more like JSP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The big reason I won't use Elixir is there are similar and arguably better options on the JVM. The whole Server B column in the article can easily be replaced with JVM instead of Erlang.

For example you could use JRuby and Akka and probably have something comparable to Elixir (I haven't tried it as I prefer Java and Scala). And you could then use any Scala or Java library.

The only big issue I have with the JVM is that it is a memory hog and thus expensive. Consequently the most compelling thing about Elixir is that is on the erlang vm but I still prefer static typed languages. If Elixir were typed I might be more excited about it.

Don't get me wrong I love more options and we even use Erlang in my company but the JVM just has more flexibility.

<comment><USER30> I have written apps in both Scala Akka and Erlang / Elixir. You can't directly compare JRuby + Akka vs Elixir. The former is just an insane stack. Akka is plain ugly in Java and gets you nowhere near the simplicity of Elixir / Erlang. Elixir isn't emulating Ruby, the syntax is based on Ruby. That's it. I also do not find Akka as pleasant to work with as Erlang / Elixir.

Regarding the types on BEAM, there are types: maps, records, binaries, atoms, numbers, booleans... there's no classes but one does not need classes. Actors replace objects perfectly fine.

<comment><USER29> I agree that Akka is ugly (my company doesn't even use it) and I totally agree that you don't need classes (and you don't really have to in Scala and Clojure... even in Java you can just uses classes as though they were structs).

I only mention JRuby as many folks switching from Elixir are Ruby shops.

Personally I find the actor model too heavy (programming wise) for local concurrency and rather use some other message passing for distributed programming (zeromq, rabbitmq, kafka, etc). I know people hate damn queues and reactive programming but that is what I know (and I admit it is less efficient and more error prone than builtin green threads (go) or actors).

I realize now Elixir makes it damn easy because it is all in one package it is just a shame that there isn't some ML like language that compiles to Erlang bytecode.

<comment><USER31> > it is just a shame that there isn't some ML like language that compiles to > Erlang bytecode.

There is! [https://github.com/alpaca-lang/alpaca](https://github.com/alpaca- lang/alpaca)

It's very new, though. I wouldn't write production stuff in it just yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We're using Elixir for the back-end of our web application, and so far I'm very happy with it.

Probably the biggest issue we have with Elixir right now is libraries, but it's a more subtle problem than "there isn't a library that for this thing I want to do". To the contrary, I've been pleasantly surprised at how many libraries are available and how good they are.

The issue with libraries that _I_ see is that because the language is so young and the core libraries are changing so rapidly (for the better!) a lot of useful third-party libraries have trouble keeping up. So we frequently find that a new feature has been rolled out to a core library that we really want to use, but upgrading it breaks a dependency in a third-party library.

It's sort of to be expected, right? The language has captured enough mindshare that people are building useful libraries left and right, but it hasn't gained quite enough adoption that there are armies of developers who can devote time to keeping those libraries updated to the minute - you don't have 100 developers behind a given library, you have 10 or 2 or 1.

</comment><comment><USER33> Programming languages, being technologies, are subject to the Lindy effect ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)). This means that the younger a language is, the lower its life expectancy. This is why the neomania in JavaScript framework land is so chaotic. Even if a _better_ framework emerges and takes off in popularity over a few months, it's unlikely to last in the mainstream for another year. When I'm choosing something to study programming-wise, I use this heuristic as part of the decision-making process. For example, studying algorithms and data structures is more robust than studying Vue.js or GraphQL, which are not likely to be around in a few years.

Elixir was just released 5 years ago, and despite some success, has not taken off as much as the absolute top programming languages released around that time. For example, Go, released just 2 years earlier, is by far the most successful of new languages from the last 10 years.

Given my skeptical mindset towards neomania, it might surprise you to hear that I'm a huge proponent of Elixir! Here are my reasons for studying Elixir and using it exclusively for my non-work projects, despite there being countless other recent, appealing languages:

\- Although the language is young, it's built on Erlang, which is 30 years old. Even if Elixir fails, there is a lot of knowledge transfer between the two languages (probably 90% of what I learn from using Elixir transfers directly over even if I switch to exclusively Erlang).

\- Web applications are a fantastic use case for the Erlang VM (BEAM). Take a look at this article ([https://joearms.github.io/2016/03/13/Managing-two- million-we...](https://joearms.github.io/2016/03/13/Managing-two-million- webservers.html)) by Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang, written earlier this year.

\- Elixir is quite a bit different from other languages I'm familiar with. It's compiled and functional, has powerful pattern matching, uses lightweight processes and the actor model, and comes with OTP, a complete set of tools that I can use for free. This means even if/when the language dies, I've added a lot of new skills to my programming toolbelt.

To anyone that has decided, like I have, that Elixir is worth putting some time into learning, I'd like to recommend the book _Elixir in Action_ ([https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in- action](https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action)) and the blog of the author of that book, which has infrequent but outstanding posts ([http://theerlangelist.com/](http://theerlangelist.com/)).

<comment><USER34> > Erlang has this sort of huge cognitive overload with it's syntax, making it > take longer to learn, for no obvious benefits.

Actually the adoption is quite good considering there is no industry giant backing it. There are plenty of companies using it in production and there is a job market for it.

Comparing the adoption with Go/Swift is a bit unfair.

<comment><USER35> Putting aside how the whole relationship with Ericsson allows to sell it to management.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The biggest problem with Elixir imo are the horrible error messages.

Especially around using macros, but also other lexing errors like missing closing delimiters, ...

Line numbers are often non-existant or wrong, and the terminal output is hard to read.

Devs should take some inspiration from Rust. Wonderful error messages, and mostly accurate line numbers even in expanded macros.

Otherwise, Elixir is definitely interesting though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I've never come across a situation in which the line numbers in the error message were incorrect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm also a huge fan, been using it for 6 months. 0.2s for my entire testsuite that touch the database are amazing.

</comment><comment><USER38> Elixir is definitely interesting and one to keep an eye on. But I'd guess that for startups to use this, is still very risky especially at this stage. You may likely run into scenarios where you need some library/package and you can't find one for it and that could be a potential deal breaker for some startups.

I'm interested to hear though, can anyone care to comment on their experiences with Elixir's package ecosystem? How much developed is it and/or how much more to go to be suitable for most major projects?

<comment><USER3> I think that the package ecosystem is well developed, and getting better every day. For the most common things, there's already packages out there. You want to talk to a database? Use Ecto. You want to check code quality? Use Credo. You want to respond using JSONAPI? Use ja_serializer. You want to talk over HTTP to something? Well there's two main options out there (HTTPotion and HTTPoison).

If you can't find a package then you could try looking it up at [https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir](https://github.com/h4cc/awesome- elixir) or asking on the elixir slack ([https://elixir- slackin.herokuapp.com/](https://elixir-slackin.herokuapp.com/)) or on the #elixir-lang channel on Freenode.

After all that if you can't find a package that suits your needs then it's very easy to create one. "mix new (your project)" and away you go.

That's what I did with my elastic package ([https://github.com/radar/elastic](https://github.com/radar/elastic)) when I couldn't quite find something that suited my exact needs. There's Elastix and Tirexs out there (those are the ones I know of) but neither really suited what I needed, so I just built my own.

I don't know how it could be a deal breaker if a package didn't exist already. I'd encourage you to build whatever you don't find already existing and contribute back to the community.

<comment><USER39> Man, there are things I like about Ecto but for anything beyond simple selects the documentation is lacking and the experience is kind of painful.

As an example, I hit the issue recently where a changeset wouldn't accept nil for a relation via put_assoc. That seemed like an very trivial problem to be hitting for a project that's been around so long. And I hit a number of issues that had that sort of feeling.

Another thing was that, if you update a thing with new relation data, you have to force-reload the relationships from the database again. That was pretty surprising and seemed like it should be unnecessary.

I think there's room for an Ecto alternative that tries to be a bit less fancy and gains a lot because of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Adding to the list: macros.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've heard great things about it and currently have both of those books under my Christmas tree. One discussion I have had often recently is the split in the web community that appears to be emerging. Around (Less than in my opinion) half of the community seems to be going the way of full oo while the rest are going fp. Personally I feel fp is the right direction and will quickly become the new hot item

<comment><USER42> You'll find that Elixir/Erlang is a mix of FP and OO at the end, which is why I find it amazing. While people debate FP vs OO, it takes the good parts of both. You can read more about the OO aspects of Erlang from the author himself: [http://tech.noredink.com/post/142689001488/the-most- object-o...](http://tech.noredink.com/post/142689001488/the-most-object- oriented-language)

<comment><USER41> Thanks for the reply! That is a good point. I guess my original intent was strict oo (ex: typescript) that takes away the quazi FP properties js has. Very excited for elixer though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's great to see another PHP/Js developer enthusiastic about Elixir. Usually it seems PHP devs pick Go as their next stack / interest.

The Ruby-inspired syntax have helped the language to gain traction amongst Rails developers but for somebody like me who only exposure to Ruby is Capistrano it doesn't do much.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have not used Erlang or Elixir, and wanted to start with Elixir (I want some experience with a functional language, I'm to biased with Java to use Scala as a functional language). However, I read somewhere that Elixir can be successfully used only with Phoenix if you don't know Erlang. As I understood, sooner than later interactions with Erlang libraries is needed, and that requires Erlang knowledge. Can somebody please confirm? That Elixir is basically oriented around Phoenix and Erlang is a requirement?

<comment><USER45> I'm not sure who told you that, but it's patently false. Phoenix is just another OTP application, you can build a Phoenix app without knowing Erlang at all. It is a practical reality that you will eventually dig into Erlang to some degree, but I wouldn't say it's a requirement by any means. Perhaps what was meant is that you will need to understand OTP, the Erlang standard library (because Elixir avoids wrapping it as much as possible), and some of the semantics of Erlang interop such as the binaries vs charlists, the use of records instead of structs, etc. For just getting started though, much of that can be avoided, and you can tackle it as the need arises.

<comment><USER44> Thanks. I'm not sure where I read, it was probably some article or comment here on HN. That's what I wanted to hear, it is possible to attend to those issues on-the-fly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I remember reading Phoenix had templating (eg HTML). Is Erlang/Elixir good for this? Or is it something better suited for NIF?

<comment><USER47> Phoenix uses IO lists for very efficient templating.

Read more here [https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/elixir-and-io-lists- part-1...](https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/elixir-and-io-lists- part-1-building-output-efficiently/) and in part 2.

<comment><USER46> Thanks. This helps a lot even though I don't use Elixir or Erlang.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Does Elixir even support step through debugging ? This is a necessity for a production language.

</comment><comment><USER49> What is the relationship between Elixir and Erlang? I had thought Eixir was a framework?

<comment><USER50> Elixir is a programming language that compiles to Erlang bytecode and runs on the BEAM with no performance penalty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> How does it compares to Java and C in performance?

<comment><USER52> For math type benchmarks of the order of 2-10x slower [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/erlang.html](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/erlang.html)

For this web framework test Phoenix (Elixir) does almost as well as Play (Java) [https://github.com/mroth/phoenix- showdown](https://github.com/mroth/phoenix-showdown)

The benchmarksgame's site quotes "Most (all?) large systems developed using Erlang make heavy use of C for low-level code, leaving Erlang to manage the parts which tend to be complex in other languages, like controlling systems spread across several machines and implementing complex protocol logic."

So it depends I guess.

<comment><USER51> Thanks Tim, this is exactly what I was looking for. It seems to be no big draw to use elixir to web development compared to java and C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Found the great site exercism.io from this article. Thanks to Adrian for posting about it !</comment>


Auto-Tuning Compiler Transformations with Machine Learning – Dr. Biagio Cosenza - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7iLb-znxgU <comment><AUTHOR> Slides (PDF): [http://biagiocosenza.com/talk/LLVM-Berlin-Meetup- Nov2017.pdf](http://biagiocosenza.com/talk/LLVM-Berlin-Meetup-Nov2017.pdf)

Description: [https://www.meetup.com/LLVM-Social- Berlin/events/244936204/](https://www.meetup.com/LLVM-Social- Berlin/events/244936204/)

"To deliver higher performance, today's computer architecture has evolved in complexity. Hardware design is taking an irreversible step toward parallel architectures, which burdens application programmers in porting and tuning their codes. It is desirable to write programs that execute efficiently on highly parallel computing systems, but peak performance is notoriously hard to reach, and the valuable cost of wasting these precious resources motivates application programmers to devote significant time to tuning their codes.

Program automatic tuning (autotuning) is an emerging approach that relies on automated search or machine learning to off-load the traditionally time- consuming manual tuning of applications, and while it can apply to very different scenarios, it has become particularly important for parallel architectures.

This talk will show how machine learning can be a powerful tool to design portable and efficient autotuners. Machine learning application to this context is challenging and requires to address very specific problems (encoding, modeling, and training data availability). I will show practical examples of such autotuners for vectorization, loop unrolling, heterogeneous task partitioning and stencil computations, and which have been applied on a variety of compiler infrastructures such as LLVM, GCC, Insieme, and Patus. In particular, I will show how modeling can be greatly enhanced by structural learning methods that adapt to the structure of the problem."</comment>


Why Electron is the best development platform? - <AUTHOR> http://jayesh.me/2017/01/31/why-electron-is-best-platform-for-dev.html <comment><USER2> Surprised that "because all my users have computers with infinite amounts of RAM" didn't make the list.</comment>


If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Turns out it's just chance. (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/ <comment><USER2> The automatic assumption between "smart" and "rich" is a link made by stupid people or the just plain intellectually lazy.

I've met smart people who enjoy intellectual challenge but are low in industriousness so don't desire the process of monitizing the intellect

Smart people who are low in orderliness so they are too chaotic to focus enough to monitize.

Smart people who have particular skills that a capitalistic society doesn't value.

And what is the definition of "smart" here? The article spouting off IQ numbers is the bare minimum effort to try and quantise something that in reality has multiple dimensions - fluid intelligence, domain knowledge, wisdom, originality, creativity, all of which are dimensions of smart but not always connected to wealth

All that "Smart == Rich" does is create entitlement and bitterness among the lazy intellectuals and should be stamped out - if you want to be rich, being smart can help, but so much more is required.

<comment><USER3> A very common thing I see is smart people with low self-confidence/self- esteem. They have a belief that they're not good enough to "make it" or that they're not deserving. They will of course not get rich, because they never really try.

Conversely I see not-so-smart people who do make it, because they're confident and believe they'll make it.

I think success is much more dependent on mentality than smarts, but people focus on smarts because it is somewhat quantifiable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While this is undoubtedly true, the 80/20 rule doesn't apply to wealth -- at least not anymore. Today, the top 1% of the world's population has more wealth than the other 99% combined.

<comment><USER5> This is a contradiction. There can't be greater than 100% of the wealth in the world.

<comment><USER6> Not a contradiction.

Imagine a pool of 100 people. The richest person has $100, everyone else has $1.

There's a total of $199, and the richest 1% have more than half the total wealth with $100.

I'm not saying this is the distribution of the real world, but that statement alone is not a contradiction.

<comment><USER4> While disputed, here's the article[0] where I got those numbers (2016). It's definitely not 80/20.

[0][https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35339475](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35339475)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're so rich then why aren't you smart?

<comment><USER8> Turns out: It's just chance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you are so healthy, why did you get cancer?</comment>


Why Art Could Become Currency in a Cryptocurrency World - <AUTHOR> http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cryptocurrency-world/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a follow up to an earlier article on the idea.

[http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document- coin/](http://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/)

TLDR: Bitcoin is made of CPU-time, this cryptocurrency is made of art. Double spending is not technologically restricted, just socially unacceptable.

Unlike Bitcoin, art money reserves a place in the deep future for human values.</comment>


Extremely rare Apple Macintosh 128K with 'Twiggy Drive' listed for $100K on eBay - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/04/12/extremely_rare_apple_macintosh_128k_with_twiggy_drive_listed_for_100k_on_ebay.html <comment><USER2> My nose says fake. An extremely rare (but otherwise well documented) item offered for an online-only auction with _absolutely no_ history of the item provided? No auction house would touch this.

The case is probably authentic (the differing signatures pointed out below by joezydeco are good evidence, as is the difficulty of faking 30-year-old, authentic-looking injection molded plastic), and maybe the logic board. The drive could be anything: my memory is that the twiggy thing was just using off the shelf DSDD full height disk hardware (i.e. an IBM PC/XT drive) with a custom controller.

<comment><USER3> Here is a decent article written by Andy Hertzfeld. He was one of the original people working on the Macintosh. The story explains they there were in fact Twiggy drive Macintosh machines but they found the drives expensive and unreliable which forced them to switch to the 3.5 inch Sony drives.

<comment><USER4> Did you mean to include this link? <http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Price_Fight.txt>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That Mac should have a black and white screen. Anybody cares to come up with plausible reason how come in photos looks to be color?

<comment><USER6> Phosphors and white point fashions being what they were, the original Macintoshes had bluish screens. The camera appears to have gone with that and compounded it with some poor decisions about scene lighting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i check ebay a lot for interesting old stuff to put on the Shelf of Dreams here at work.

wish this wasn't $100k.

</comment><comment><USER8> The picture with the signatures...?

<comment><USER4> Early Macs had signatures of team members molded into the plastic inside the case. It's stock :) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_128k#Credits>

<comment><USER9> That's odd that the signatures on the panels don't match up. Were they rearranged between proto and production?

<http://photos.appleinsider.com/ebay-120412-2.jpg>

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Apple_Ma...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Apple_Macintosh_128Kb_naked.jpg)

<comment><USER4> Oh, interesting. According to [http://www.digibarn.com/collections/weirdstuff/mac-case- sign...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/weirdstuff/mac-case-signatures/) the panel shown on Wikipedia matches a very early one. Maybe the other one is later.

Edit: Here's the story from Andy Hertzfeld, one of the signers, explaining why they might have changed over time: [http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Signing_Party.txt&topic=Apple%20Spirit&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date)

<comment><USER9> It _is_ weird that the prototype has the "February 10, 1982" engraved in the mold just like the image on DigiBarn and Folklore. However perhaps the engraver was following the image so correctly that they copied that as well. On the OTHER hand, that date engraving looks almost too detailed to be real.

The molder and engraver did and still do exist. Funny thing, they're not too far from where I'm typing this now. Small world.

<comment><USER10> I don't see the date on the auction image, where is it?

<comment><USER9> Sorry, it's on the production machine image from Wikipedia. The prototype is legit from all indications.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Markets down 4.6% today and down 10% from its highs. Is it time to buy the dip? - <AUTHOR> https://www.financeoholic.com/buy-dip-markets/ <comment><USER2> No. Dont do that.

There are many sharks that will bleed you dry.

You can't buy the dip, just enter the market at a time that suits you,</comment>