Barney Frank: here's how to not waste your time pressuring lawmakers - <AUTHOR> https://mic.com/articles/167878/barney-frank-heres-how-to-not-waste-your-time-pressuring-lawmakers#.JnUQHPOt0 <comment><USER2> I think point (1) is there not because it matters but because Barney Frank wants you to be registered to vote. Having made a _bunch_ of calls over the past few weeks, and having made some first- and second- hand contacts with staffers: I don't believe they really check anything at all, at least not on issues that lots of people are calling them about.

The impression I have is that on big-ticket issues, they're just taking a yes/no tally of calls and letters, and that's it.

<comment><USER3> They check. Especially the closer you get to home.

Try to schedule a meeting out of district (city, county, state, fed). Even when you're lobbying on an issue they care about (a bill they cosponsored), you'll probably need a local with you to even get on their calendar. When you're out of district, you might get an automated "contact your own rep" reply, if you're lucky.

For hot issues, as you say, it's just triage.

Actually, it's all triage. Legislating is an information processing problem with attention being the scarcest commodity.

<comment><USER2> How would they check? They don't ask for name spellings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr

1\. Make sure you're registered to vote — lawmakers check.

2\. Lawmakers don't care about people outside of their district.

3\. Your signature — physical or electronic — on a mass petition will mean little.

4\. The communication must be individual. Email, Letter, Phone call.

5\. Know where your representative stands.

6\. Communicate — even if you and your representative disagree.

7\. Say "thank you" \- to reinforce the behavior you want

8\. Enlist the help of friends in other districts. - they write their own reps

<comment><USER5> Strangely, he forgot to mention:

9\. Donate lots of money.

A study found members of Congress are way more likely to meet with you if you've paid them [0].

> "The offices who just thought they were being asked to meet with normal > constituents, we almost never got a meeting with a member of Congress, or a > chief of staff or a legislative director — the most powerful people in > congressional offices," says Broockman. "On the other hand, when we reveal > that the attendees were donors, they were more than three times as likely to > get those meetings."

[0] [http://www.npr.org/2014/03/26/294361018/how-to-meet-your- con...](http://www.npr.org/2014/03/26/294361018/how-to-meet-your-congressman)

<comment><USER6> its really surprising that he forgot that because he nailed the other main ways to force change:

Be thankful and only talk to people who represent you (no one).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some additional perspective from a Congressional Staffer > [https://twitter.com/i/moments/798297193559904258?lang=en](https://twitter.com/i/moments/798297193559904258?lang=en)

<comment><USER8> This is interesting content, but the format is atrocious. How is Twitter still relevant when posts like this must be made one sentence at a time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The most important way to not waste time "pressuring" lawmakers is this: have money, connections, and influence over those connections.

None of the items on that list comes even close to that one.

<comment><USER10> It's true that money, connections, and influence will win against an unorganized electorate. The equation changes significantly if there's a coordinated effort by voters.

<comment><USER9> That's a fairly broad statement and entirely dependent on the context. I'm struggling to think of an example in recent history where "a coordinated effort by voters" got some meaningful traction in the sense of this article. I'm far from omniscient, though, so this could very well be a huge blind spot in my own news information maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> #5 is great and should be amended to include understanding what interests the representative has in taking a particular stand.

Barney Frank is the same guy who was actively fighting (1) against George W. Bush's initiative to tighten up lending requirements ahead of the Great Recession; Barney Frank was against it due in part to then boyfriend, who he helped get a job, being on the executive committee (2). Getting him to change his opinion would have been night impossible.

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW5qKYfqALE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW5qKYfqALE)

2\. [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/26/rep-frank- admits-...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/26/rep-frank-admits- helping-ex-lover-land-job-fannie-mae.html) I know it is Fox News, but only quick-link I can find to support my claims.

<comment><USER12> That's a specious argument.

You linked to short, mild a speech on the House floor from 2005 encouraging primary home-ownership as a means of investing, and a Fox News report about responding positively to a question about hiring a qualified ex-lover for an entry-level job 14 years prior to that speech.

Neither has anything to do with the advice or article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if this current environment is anything like a previous time regarding influence of a voter. For example the vote on Davos seems to have been more influenced by nearly $!M than any number of communications. For my own state Rubio got $100,000 in contributions to ignore what we in the state care about.</comment>


The Ukraine crisis: John Kerry and Nato must calm down and back off  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/02/not-too-late-for-ukraine-nato-should-back-off <comment><USER2> This opinion piece is insane.

Sending troops in unmarked uniforms with unmarked vehicles to annex the Crimean Peninsula under the pretense of protection from ethnic cleansing, which anyone with access to Facebook and Twitter can easily see is completely manufactured by the Russian propaganda machine, without buy-in from the international community, is an obvious act of aggression. Putin keeps upping the ante because nobody ever bothered to call him on his bluff. The international community consistently let Putin cross boundaries with impunity, and he's been getting more and more insolent with each incident. There comes a time when enough is enough.

<comment><USER3> You may buy uniforms and any attributes in near by shops. It's simple as that and doesn't go father than a lot of Hollywood movies with fake cops. We will never know for sure who did what, why and when.

<comment><USER4> You obviously either Russian bot or have absolutely no clue what you talking about. You cannot buy missile launcher or basically ANY military weapon in nearby shop. And this is what Ukrainians saw in numerous occations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was confused by the claim that Kerry threatened "to expel Russia from the G8." I clicked the link and went to the other article, which had the following quote from Kerry: "He is not going to have a Sochi G8, he may not even remain in the G8 if this continues."

Am I mistaken in assuming that the G8 is not under American control? At worst, Kerry could recommend that the US not take part in the Sochi-hosted G8, but that's it, correct?

I'm also confused by the writer's characterization of the situation in the Ukraine as "a crisis that can easily be contained if cool heads prevail."

If you drill down to the basics, any crisis could "easily be contained" if all parties involved are calm and willing to sit and talk indefinitely.

In this particular situation, it doesn't look like that would happen given that Ukraine is essentially in the middle of a civil revolt (war?) and there are a large number of parties who would have to be comfortable having some kind of draw-down talk.

<comment><USER6> Australia has also talked of removing Russia from the G8, which is now being called the G7, I'm sure just as a sign of the members being serious.

I suspect all it takes is for G7 countries not to invite Russia to the meetings.

They have been uninvited to the G20 meetings in Australia.

<comment><USER5> I'm still really confused because according to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G8#Annual_summit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G8#Annual_summit), the next summit is supposed to be held in Sochi.

Nobody's going to be able to uninvite Russia from their own summit, so if the US and Australia "remove" Russia and don't attend the summit, doesn't it just become a G6 (G8 minus the US and Australia)?

In order to "remove" Russia, all seven countries would have to agree to not go to Sochi and also to have the summit somewhere outside of Russia.

<comment><USER7> Australia is not in the G8. The G8 is the G7 plus one. G7 agree to roll back is the idea.

<comment><USER6> You are correct, my apologies. I'm still new to Australia. Australia is hosting the G20, and there is discussion here regarding Russia's role in the upcoming G20 meetings. [http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political- news/ukrain...](http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/ukraine- tony-abbotts-g20-summit-threat-to-russia-20140303-340gn.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm Russian, I hate Putin, I support our troops in Crimea, and the article is right that Nato just doesn't want to lose influence right under the Russian border, that's all western hysteria is about.

However I think news like this probably should be posted on reddit than here.

<comment><USER9> I'm curious, what makes you support the invasion?

I think it's obvious to everyone that NATO would love to have influence on the Russian border, and that Russia would prefer if that didn't happen, but that doesn't make a military invasion okay. The "Western hysteria," at least what I've seen from over here in the good old US of A, is about the possibility of a significant (which it would be even if nobody else gets involved) war in Europe.

<comment><USER10> I am not him and I'm not qualified to speak with any kind of authority about this particular event. However the use of the word 'invasion' is pretty loaded. Keep in mind that the entire area was once a larger whole - the USSR. Imagine if the US broke apart into its constituent states. Places like St. Louis would feel mighty strange. Again, I'm not defending this particular situation, but I can see how Missouri sending troops into Illinois might not need be termed quite as harsh as an _invasion_ , though still an aggressive act. So far as I can tell, so far there has been more violence in Kiev during the protests than during this 'invasion'.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure if Missouri and Illinois were independent nations, either one would be understandably upset about the other sending armed soldiers into its territory unasked. Actually, the idea that they had been part of a whole before would make me even more wary, particularly if it were California or Texas (i.e. one of the more "dominant" US states).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think it's possible to over-dramatize a sovereign nation's cities and airports being occupied by its neighbor. This isn't a little misunderstanding or an "oops, somebody flew a few miles off course and wound up in your airspace."

<comment><USER11> I think you have a read a lot of media hysteria. First, Crimea people and region parliament took control over region with no respect to Kiev before any army forces. Second, it's not neighbour in airports / cities but Army of Crimea(former army members / Kiev troops taken Crimea side / former Berkut members etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> However, John Kerry and other agressive imperialists must calm down. But as it's HN, we should talk about hackers responsibility to calm down media hysteria supporting aggresive politicians. Personally I would like to have following tools to prevent brain-washing:

1\. Browser plugin(or at least web service)showing "yelowness" of an article and whole site as well. There are some semi-formal attributes of yellow article: exaggerating(e.g. "peaceful protesters" vs "provocateurs"), controversial sources, non-representative opinions(e.g. a crying woman with children speaks for the whole country) etc.

2\. Some kind of facts graph. While the most yellow media has no links to sources at all, slightly better option is just quoting source w/out any links(and you have to spend a lot of time to check). Good media have links, but reader have to check them(and source could qoute some controversial and non-representative opinion). We should give users some kind of software able to find root sources for all facts in an article immediately and build linking/quoting graph.

</comment><comment><USER12> The thought that Russia would do this was raised during the 2012 US Presidential campaign and was mocked in the press and by the current administration. I think we are seeing the effects of that attitude in the response. I am not confident that the US has a good answer or one Putin would believe.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does Kremlin have shills even on HackerNews? They're really going all out.</comment>


The Man Who Forgot Everything - <AUTHOR> http://newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/10/henry-gustav-molaison-the-man-who-forgot-everything.html

<comment><USER2> This part made me sad

"My interest in Henry had always been primarily intellectual; how else would I explain why I had stood on a chair in the basement of Mass. General, ecstatic to see his brain removed expertly from his skull? My role as a scientist had always been perfectly clear to me." This was no time for sentiment or reflection.

How terrible that a man who had been so wronged by "science" had a caretaker that viewed him more as an intellectual pursuit than a person who had just passed without anyone by his side that truly loved him. While I understand the remarkable learning that came about as a result of this man volunteering his life to science, you would hope that there is another part of the story that wasn't written about the people around him that truly mourned his passing.

<comment><USER3> Well, he was dead so he didn't care anymore...

<comment><USER2> I guess you could argue after a few hours he wouldn't care any more either because he didn't remember it. I was hoping that ultimately he wasn't just a science experiment to the people that surrounded him and that he was treated accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of an incredible story about jazz guitarist Pat Martino. The gist is, he was a brilliant jazz guitarist who had a brain aneurism and lost virtually all of his long term memory, including how to play the guitar. He spent several years after this relearning everything, from old recordings and stories from other people. Eventually, he was able to regain his stature and virtuosity! He is a really amazing person, and I'm suprised so few people have heard his story. See [http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=29896#.UmL6vZ...](http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=29896#.UmL6vZS8A0w) for a summary

<comment><USER5> There's the case of Clive Wearing[0], who suffers anterograde and retrograde amnesia. In effect, he has a 30 second memory.

The notes from his diary are particularly frightening.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> In the less cinematically attractive "anterograde amnesia"

Disagree. I find Memento to be the most successful film related to memory loss. Maybe I'm just biased because it's in my top 5 but its 2 Oscar nominations and #34 ranking on IMDB don't hurt. HIGHLY recommend this film to anyone fascinated by this story.

EDIT: finished the piece, author [briefly] references Memento

>> he put notes in his wallet telling him that his father was dead and that his mother was in a nursing home

Have studied this guy in the past but every time I read this, it's heartbreaking

>> Columbia Pictures is planning a movie from Corkin's point of view.

I reaally hope they don't romanticize the relationship between Corkin and HM. It's fascinating as is.

<comment><USER7> Memento may be hugely successful, but can you think of _any_ other examples of cinematic success with anterograde amnesia? Or even attempts at depicting it?

Meanwhile, retrograde amnesia is a very popular trope.

<comment><USER8> Anterograde amnesia is definitely a greater challenge for a storyteller than retrograde amnesia because the amnesic character is essentially static in the story, and that's one of the reasons that Memento is such an extraordinary film.

For another example, while it's not central to the story, Finding Nemo features a supporting character who has anterograde amnesia (Dory the fish).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A much better article is "The Brain That Changed Everything" [1], by the grandson of the surgeon who erased H.M.'s memory. It has lots of details that I've never seen anywhere else.

      There was one TV series he loved to watch, too. A sitcom. All in the Family.
      It is a show, essentially, about a man who is mystified by a world and culture
      and family that change all around him while he remains the same, a man who
      digs in his heels, who holds on to the past, refusing to be dragged into the
      present.

The part that gets me the most is when they wake H.M. up and ask him what he was dreaming about (at this point no one even knew if he DID dream), and he says "what I could have been ..."

[1] [http://www.esquire.com/print-this/henry-molaison- brain-1110?...](http://www.esquire.com/print-this/henry-molaison- brain-1110?page=all#)

</comment><comment><USER10> > "On August 25, 1953, with a cheap jury-rigged hand drill, Scoville carved > two holes in Molaison's skull, one just above each of his eyes. Molaison was > given only a local anesthetic, so that he could be awake to report on his > sensations when different cerebral areas were stimulated. Scoville lifted up > Molaison's frontal lobes with a spatula and reached far into the center of > his brain. Then, using a silver straw, Scoville sucked out fist-size chunks > of the medial temporal lobes on both sides of Molaison's brain. The excised > tissue included most of the sea-horse-shaped structure called the > hippocampus, as well as the parahippocampal gyrus, the uncus, the anterior > temporal cortex, and the almond-shaped amygdala."

This is horrifying on an extremely deep and unsettling level. It's easy to forget how recently "medicine" was just another name for barbarism.

<comment><USER6> shuddered at the mental imagery of "sucking" brain chunks with a straw. Hello, Fear Factor.

<comment><USER11> I pretty much held my head and mouthed swear words silently while being unable to stop reading that horrible passage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't like this kind of nonsense arrogance: "In a period when eugenic theories still circulated, Molaison's doctors reportedly told him that he shouldn't have sex, since he would likely reproduce children who were similarly damaged." We're still in that period and it's probably a good thing. In America you can still go to prison for having sex when there's a high risk of passing on genetic problems to your possible children, specifically by both partners being close relatives.

<comment><USER13> I think it's marvelous when our society takes care of our existing mentally and physically ill. But encouraging those with major genetic problems to reproduce is asinine. A close friend of mine is very religious, over 40, chose to have a 3rd child, chose not to have the doctor recommended amniocentesis test, and had a child born with Down syndrome. In the end, the medical bills and stress on the relations wrecked their family.

The kids a sweetheart and occasionally has happy moments, but I am sure there is absolutely no way I would want to be born under his circumstances. Until we've reached a stage where we can correct genetic defects after the fact, there is nothing wrong with warning people about the risks their DNA may carry on to their children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Those of us who study the cognitive neuroscience of memory have been waiting for Dr. Corkin to publish this book for a while. I'm looking forward to reading through.

Regarding another commenter's concerns about ensuring that severely amnesic patients are fairly compensated and participating of their own free will, this is a complex issue that those of us who study such patients deal with frequently. I can say of my own experience that patients we work with volunteer their time willingly, are remunerated for their participation, and can discontinue any task at any time. It's a privilege to work with people who have such a focal neuropsychologial deficit, and we take our responsibility for each patient's welfare during their time with us very seriously.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I haven't studied in nearly the magnitude of depth as you have but as a Cognitive Science major, I've always been fascinated in his story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hope the scientists did not take advantage of him and paid him for all the experiments they performed on him.

This also shows something that athletes have known for a long time: there is a "muscle memory" that is quite distinct from our conscious memory and that muscle memory can help us perform tasks with great precision, as long as we practice.

<comment><USER7> I don't think the surprise was that there exists such a thing as "muscle memory". The surprising fact was that the mechanism of creating and storing muscle memory differs enough from the mechanism of creating and storing normal long-term (or even recent) memory that it ends up in a different part of the brain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> UCSD Brain Observertory sliced and imaged his brain [http://thebrainobservatory.ucsd.edu/hm](http://thebrainobservatory.ucsd.edu/hm)

</comment><comment><USER16> well, i will read this later. for now, i'm just gonna say, awesome username!</comment>


Berlin: at least nine dead after truck crashes into Christmas market - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/berlin-truck-crashes-into-christmas-market <comment><USER2> And an assignation of an Russian ambassador in Turkey by their policemen ... it will be one of those days. again.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many Europeans must die for this "cause"?</comment>


Social Builder: Social embedding made simple - <AUTHOR> http://www.mojotech.com/social-builder

<comment><USER2> Nice interface and design. The Twitter logo however is out of date. [https://about.twitter.com/press/brand- assets](https://about.twitter.com/press/brand-assets)

</comment><comment><USER3> This site is a mess on mobile though

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks a little bit like Hull.io</comment>


What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcworld.com/article/3569182/whats-wrong-with-intel-and-how-to-fix-it-former-principal-engineer-unloads.html <comment><USER3> This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong.

Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more.

He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the presentation is also just disorganized enough, fixated on certain details enough, and a scattered collection enough that I can't tell whether these factors matter.

Of course I'm sure an expert in the field could tell instantly.

I've seen enough interviews of former engineers (usually retired guys) of whatever <xyz> company who know about a very specific fault of the product/tool/etc and can claim convincingly up and down that it will cause catastrophic failure, fundamental strategy misstep, etc. But will it really be a major factor for overall outcome?

He proceeds from analysis of the smallest die area detail to the opposite end of the spectrum, the problem with MBAs + Marketing, within 1 minute. With typos. Also, the guy doesn't have a long history of posting analysis of this type, and he's honest about his info being 8 years old. Not sure what his motivation for making the video is. So it's hard to put too much weight on it, as if were like a Ming-Chi Kuo predicting Apple's next iPhone form factor or something like that.

I would love to know what industry people here think, and then I might study the video / findings with more attention.

<comment><USER4> Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish.

Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Server - SKX - isn't great).

The biggest meta-problem with AVX-512 is that due to process issues, the pause button got hit _just_ as it appeared in a server-only, 'first cut' form. AVX2 had downclocking issues when it first appeared too - but these were rapidly mitigated and forgotten.

I personally feel that SIMD is underutilized in general purpose workloads (partly due to Intel's fecklessness in promoting SIMD - including gratuitous fragmentation - e.g. a new Comet Lake machine with Pentium branding doesn't even suport AVX2 and has it fused off). Daniel Lemire and I built simdjson ([https://github.com/lemire/simdjson](https://github.com/lemire/simdjson)) to show the power of SIMD in a non-traditional domain, and a lot of the benefits of Hyperscan ([https://github.com/intel/hyperscan](https://github.com/intel/hyperscan)) were also due to SIMD. Notably, both use SIMD in a range of ways that aren't necessarily all that amenable to the whole idea of "just do it all on an accelerator/GPU" \- choppy mixes of SIMD and GPR-based computing. Not everything looks like matrix multplication, or AI (but I repeat myself :-) ).

AVX-512 is a combination of fascinating and frustrating. I enthuse about recent developments on my blog ([https://branchfree.org/2019/05/29/why-ice- lake-is-important-...](https://branchfree.org/2019/05/29/why-ice-lake-is- important-a-bit-bashers-perspective/)) so I won't repeat why it's so interesting, but the learning curve is steep and there's plenty of frustrations and hidden traps. Intel collectively tends to be more interested in Magic Fixes (autovec) and Special Libraries for Important Benchmarks rather than building first-rate material to improve the general level of expertise with SIMD programming (one of my perpetual complaints).

You more or less have to teach yourself and feel your way through the process of getting good at SIMD. That being said, the benefits are often huge - <USER2> only because SIMD is fast, but because you can do fundamentally different things that you can't do quickly in GPR ("General Purpose Register") land (look, for example, at everyone's favorite instruction PSHUFB - you can't do the equivalent on a GPR without going to memory).

<comment><USER5> I've worked on a project to compile a domain-specific description language down to both SIMD (by using Intel SPMD Program Compiler) and GPGPU (by using CUDA and OpenCL) Monte Carlo simulation code. We also have a Scala/Java interpreter for debugging.

Are there workloads that benefit from very wide SIMD vectors that aren't good fits for GPGPUs, as long as the GPUs support 64-bit floats close enough to IEEE-754 for your needs? I understand the overhead in shuffling data between main memory and GPU memory, and synchronization overhead, but most code I'm familiar with that does heavy number crunching suitable for very wide SIMD tends to do that number crunching off on threads that don't have much synchronization with threads doing more general-purpose computation.

On a side note, ISPC's input language is deceptively close to C, but little traps lie in wait. I remember helping an intern debug his port of some of the Java code I wrote over to ISPC, but it turns out that mulitplying a long long by a double in ISPC results in a long long. Our attempt to scale down a random 64-bit integer to the range [0.0, 1.0) was always resulting in 0.0. I get that integer calculations are faster, and I could understand disallowing implicit casts, but making a language so close to C, but with different implicit casting rules is just asking for trouble.

<comment><USER4> You're in a bit of a different domain - I've never really done all that much stuff with heavy number crunching (I've done a bit of work on random forest traversal, but that's more about logic than about FP). And I have never worked with ISPC.

I think number crunching workloads are typically quite suitable for GPGPU - I'm certainly not trying to "debunk GPGPU", just saying that there are a lot of integer/logic intensive workloads that involve rapid switching back and forth between control/GPR-based-logic sides and "SIMD tasks" (e.g. Hyperscan switching between NFA/DFA simulation and "acceleration", which was SIMD-based character skipping).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is a bit odd that there is no mention of the awful security problems like Spectre and Meltdown which mostly hit Intel and was very poorly handled by them.

As a consumer i care way more about my CPU actually working as advertised and not some Specre mitigation killing the performance.

The price performance ratio of AMD is just better, nobody cares about some weird extension if i can have a Threadripper with a bazillion cores for less money doing the same stuff. Even only for marketing reasons.

And GPUs stole the vector cake years ago anyway.

<comment><USER7> > It is a bit odd that there is no mention of the awful security problems like > Spectre and Meltdown which mostly hit Intel and was very poorly handled by > them.

I recall him mentioning exactly this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> None of that matters as long as Intel can't ship their 10nm and 7nm nodes. This guy doesn't seem to have an opinion on what's wrong at the fabs but that is the big life or death question for Intel right now.

<comment><USER9> I am glad to hear Intel is dabbling at TMSC (they have a plan B if not an actual business plan) but it is painful to see Intel talking as if nothing was wrong while congressmen are waking up to the reality that we might not be making chips in the us anymore.

And that's what is scary. Intel is failing left and right but the rap track from Intel sounds like an ad for Disneyland.

<comment><USER10> Wonder if the fabs being developed in China are or will be competitive to Intel in the ~near future?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not knowing how much of this things are true, but isn't it ironic that AMD has more benefits from SMT because they have less pipeline optimizations (and similar), but exactly this pipeline optimizations (and similar) seem to be at least partially at fault for some of the Specter style attacks and make it harder to put more cores into the system (as this additional optimizations are likely need more silicon space...).

Sometimes I'm wondering if the best (but software side maybe impractical) design for (non Threadripper level) consumer PC's would be something along the line of.

\- 1 single non SMT core with most advanced pipeline optimizations and highest clock speed which only always runs one thread pinned to it (many consumers tend to only run one "costy" applications with need for highest performance at the same time, e.g. a game main event loop).

\- around this 4+ SMT enabled cores which are (mostly/reasonably) specter save and have less max. clock speed (other open applications, other threads from the current game, should be good enough for most applications)

\- 1+ very low power cores which might have another arch (for the background maintenance tasks of the OS and programs like e.g. update jobs, slow long polling, always-on/connected features etc.)

\- 1+ crypto core with integrated hardware security module, used to thinks like signing AES keys and similar (e.g. setup but not run TLS)

Through it's probably unrealistic as e.g. thermal regulations for high speed threads is optimized by "bouncing" the logical thread between cores and software tends to not want to do things like write the background maintenance code for a different arch then the rest of the software, well phone OS probably could force this. Microsoft + Intel kinda can't.

<comment><USER12> You are more or less describing the architecture of the PlayStation 3: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specif...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specifications#Central_processing_unit)

The problem with this type of system is both the software and OS have to be aware of what is or isn't a "main thread" job. You have to architect your whole program around job systems to spread your data between the main thread and sub-processes which was a major complaint of gamedevs for the PS3. There's also the fact that many consumer software developers just don't care and will flag all of their processes as high priority jobs.

It worked out decently well on PS3 because it was such a locked down system, but for a general purpose desktop it would be utter chaos.

<comment><USER13> Wasn't Linux installable in early PS3s, and some labs (US military?) used stacks of PS3s as distributed superishcomputers? I wonder if anyone had analysed general computing performance in CELLs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So Linus, and this guy is saying AVX512 was a bad idea.

""The state of software out there is really not favoring going larger vectors," Piednoel said in the video. "In fact, you can see clearly in Cinebench for example—that is not one of my favorite benchmarks, especially for a laptop where it doesn't make any sense—but you can see that AMD is winning the battle of throughput. It's because they have more cores and they can afford to have more cores.""

But in other places I've seen a lot of hype for it but without much discussion on actual use cases.

With now people saying that it isn't useful except to give intel leadership in benchmarks.

Is anyone here actually using it and seeing a benefit?

<comment><USER15> AVX-512 is Intel's best vector ISA to date and it is definitely useful beyond benchmarks.

In fact, _too low_ penetration of AVX-512 has been a problem, rather than too much: for a long time it has only been available on server chips, not laptop (a small fraction of laptops have gotten it recently) or destkop (outside some low-volume "extreme" parts, which were really just rebadged server parts).

It would also be quite unusual that some instructions could be very useful in benchmarks that are based on real-life, heavily used applications, but not in real life. Outside of small, easily gamed benchmark that doesn't seem plausible: if the CPU is good a video encoding benchmark, it will be good at video encoding, with high probability.

The main problem with AVX-512 is lack of software exploitation. Unlike with frequency boosts, increased cache sizes, better branch predictors, etc: this speedup doesn't come for free. Either compilers have to use the new instructions, or people have to use them by hand. The former has been very limited because these instructions cause a frequency drop (so-called "license based downclocking"), so compilers have mostly disabled their use by default: otherwise, a single AVX-512 instruction could cause a large impact on surrounding code which doesn't use AVX-512.

So by-hand exploitation remains, and penetration has just been too low and the people with the skills to do this are limited.

<comment><USER16> I'm sure AVX-512 is wonderful and you can easily produce examples where it makes loops go N times faster. That unfortunately is missing the point.

Microprocessors implementation is an extremely careful balance and effectively everything is a trade off. The area, power, and complexity of features comes at a non-zero cost to code that doesn't use it.

The fact that AVX-512 isn't on every processor _AND_ the performance benefits are FAR from obvious (as the core clocks down when using it) really hinders its adoption, which in turn lowers the value; a downward spiral.

Intel is in a fine mess of their own making. I'm no fan of either company and AMD gets perhaps a little too much credit as things would have looked a lot different had 10 nm succeeded on the original schedule, but I bought my first AMD processor since Athlon 64 because it's better.

<comment><USER15> I'm not missing the point as I was responding to whether AVX-512 is useful in practice. It is. It is some badly designed extensions where the earlier ones were great: it's arguably better than the earlier ones.

Now adoption has been poor and there is a chicken-and-egg effect as you point out, but that's separate from the question of whether AVX-512 is useful in practice. It is.

The point about tradeoffs is well taken. It's not like Intel (or any other vendor) is rolling back progress in other areas to add larger vector units: rather they try to progress along all viable axes at once.

<comment><USER9> AVX-512 isn't "bad in practice" but in the context of AVX-128, AVX-256, and AVX-1024 it is a very bad practice because the inconstant availability of the vector unit means that it doesn't get used, or you use a least-common denominator of what worked on Atom 10 years ago.

Look on the bright side: if you don't use AVX-512 you have 10% extra heat sink and heat soak on your CPU so you can turbo higher. AVX-512 makes the chip easier to cool.

<comment><USER15> Yes, although this gets better with time.

People who care enough to want to use these units have figured out CPU dispatch by now, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From the article: _Piednoel didn't spare words for Intel's culture, which he said has changed drastically and promotes MBAs over those with technical prowess._

The current CEO is a finance / MBA type, so it's no surprise that the current culture favors that.

In Intel's defense, the previous CEO _was_ a process engineer. But, unfortunately, he couldn't keep his weiner in his pants. He also was probably the wrong choice as CEO since, under his watch, Intel process development apparently went to shit.

Oh, well. Intel was a great company for many years. Perhaps it will reinvent itself.

<comment><USER18> As somebody noted, when you have cornered a large part of the market, you don't feel as much technical pressure, and success in selling becomes key. So sales and MBAs start to run the show, because it makes the business sense, and while doing so risk to lose the sight of the technological advances that made the dominant position possible.

Intel's founder, Andy Grove, used to say: "Only the paranoid survive". (He personally survived under a false identity in Nazi-occupied Hungary.) I'm afraid Intel had stopped being paranoid enough before it started to stumble more and more seriously.

<comment><USER19> This seems to be a reasonable explanation. Even with sales and MBAs running the show, they know that they will always need something competitive to sell. For the longest time Intel relied on shrinking dies and single-threaded performance advantage. They didn't continue to race ahead with shrinking and as noted AVX-512 is not the hit to save them. They need more but may have misjudged that or believed too much of their own sales/marketing lacking sufficient paranoia.

The future will be more consumer appliance-like devices rather than PC-like products. I would much rather use a laptop/OS that suspended/resumed like an iPad with low power consumption (cool/quiet) and extended battery life. Apple has a way to this future. AMD can run on servers and gaming rigs. Intel needs something like a ChromeOS or Fuchsia to do everything (a cloud desktop rather than a browser) to be mainstream. I would use Clear Linux if it was more than an academic experiment--had a good desktop and repos that had a maintained useful fraction of Ubuntu packages (i.e. packages are up to date, used, have good defaults, etc).

<comment><USER18> I find Clear Linux quite nice, but I don't know if it could replace the lost CPU revenue :-\

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I disagree that Intel has "lost focus" to the detriment of its core competencies, after all, Intel is a large company that spends billions on R&D every quarter. Rather I call it Intel expanding its focus to expand its addressable market to include 5G, AI, autonomous driving, advanced memory, software-defined networking, etc. I think Francois is focused on Intel being a CPU manufacturing company, when Intel sees itself as a data-processing company.

It's important to note that these aren't totally unrelated pushes (a la Google X), but rather all of the new areas leverage Intel's core competency in silicon manufacturing. (Though, many of these products are due to be fabbed at TSMC, according to rumors.)

"Xeon should dump unused core space" \- Intel already does this. Intel has two CPU microarchitectures - Sunny Cove[1] (used for desktops, laptops, workstations, and beefy servers) and Tremont[2] (used for low-power clients and specialized servers). Tremont ditches the AVX instructions. Notably, Tremont is used in specialized server SoCs that target the storage, networking, and IoT/embedded markets.

Could Intel differentiate its product lineup even more? At the core level, one should ask, Are there IPs that should be added to Tremont or subtracted from Sunny Cove? Can some IPs be added at the SoC level?

[1]: [https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/sunny_...](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/sunny_cove)

[2]: [https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/tremon...](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/tremont)

</comment><comment><USER21> Whining about "MBAs" is almost always technical person speak for general discontent about company direction, often from the non-business parts. You don't see complaints about CEOs of Apple, Google, or Microsoft much, though they all have MBAs.

<comment><USER22> MBAs improve numbers, engineers create new products. The mentality of MBA crowd is to get the numbers right eat the cake and when things go sideways move on to a new job.

Intel is a hardware tech business, its a complicated space that needs deep knowledge to understand it before you shape the future of it.

Technical people might not be the only ones that should run business but they should be the core of it.

I have same view as the video, engineers need more power and decision making not less to win. Intel will not fight back by cutting down cost of production by 5%. But by creating next gen chip.

<comment><USER23> Same happens to Boeing.

When they have engineers - we get 737, 747 and many more. when they have MBAs - we get 737-MAX, 787.

<comment><USER22> Thats a great direct example of the thought process. We will save x% by doing workarounds and call it MAX instead of biting the bullet spending money and creating next iconic plane design.

<comment><USER23> 787 is another great example because EVERYTHING is outsourced to other companies.

As result - when things (elements) are trying to getting work together they fail spectacular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Speaking of AVX-512: I find it very odd, that they still produce deaktop CPU's without AVX (not even AVX2) at all (10th gen Celerons), yet they are pushing AVX-512 into laptops at the same time.

<comment><USER25> They produced a few low volume 10nm laptop parts so they could say 10nm has finally shipped. They can't produce enough volume to move their whole product line over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Link to the video that the article is summarizing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiKjzeLco6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiKjzeLco6c)

The creator's Twitter can be found here [https://twitter.com/FPiednoel](https://twitter.com/FPiednoel)

<comment><USER14> [https://twitter.com/FPiednoel/status/1290874265705697280?s=1...](https://twitter.com/FPiednoel/status/1290874265705697280?s=19)

Looks like his video is him promoting himself to investors to try to get himself on the Intel board of directors.

<comment><USER26> That's fair. I mean if he wants to change that he has to be in the board. But I think investors like less risky ways to make revenue (i.e. by cutting costs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've always wondered, if I compile an application and don't specify the architecture as explicitly having AVX, just say x86 64bit, will alternate code paths be in the binary for processors with AVX? Or alternatively, if I do specify AVX support on the command line, then what happens if the binary runs on a CPU without AVX? The reason I ask is I use commercial tools for circuit simulation, and they run on a wide range of CPU architectures, but it would be a shame if thst CPU compatability comes at a performance hit when run on a more capable CPU architecture

<comment><USER28> Depends on the compiler. Gcc compiles to the lowest common denominator while icc offers "Processor dispatch technology performs a check at execution time to determine which processor the application is running on and use the most suitable code path for that processor. Compatible, non-Intel processors will take the default optimized code path."

For HPC they will always compile to use the full set of instructions and see how it performs. For some software there will be explicit checks and loading the right compiled code(compression, video effects etc). On a desktop most things are compiled for the minimum processor though. The CPU might still be able to use its new features like wide registers of the instructions are in just the right order.

If you run something with instructions your processor doesn't have it will crash.

<comment><USER29> > If you run something with instructions your processor doesn't have it will > crash.

I would be very surprised if the processor itself crashed. I haven't encountered it in actuality so far, but as far as I'm aware, illegal instructions raise an interrupt that the OS can catch. On Unix, this should result in the corresponding user space process receiving SIGILL.

It appears that SIGILL is actually preemptible. Could this be used as a poor man's CPU feature detection mechanism?

<comment><USER28> I meant the process crash not the CPU, you are correct. Also, my gcc knowledge is outdated.

People have mapped out the millions of "undocumented instructions" by trapping SIGILL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just a heads up, this site is impossible to read on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER31> Except AWS and Apple can and do recompile the ocean, even over to ARM. AVX512 free chips and gutting legacy X86 are worth it, perhaps an x86_64_2020 target?

</comment><comment><USER32> I am honestly not enthusiastic about x86 anymore. It seems like basically an entrenched legacy architecture at this point.

What are Intel's plans for HSA or RISC-5? How good are their AI products? RealSense seems pretty exciting to me.

Is there going to be a successor to the PC design? My crazy hope is that we will get some type of module system where you don't have to open the case and can just plug in something like M.2 modules but with a superfast nextgen bus.

Is there an upstart chipmaker that can help push Intel out (I wish)? I have heard good things about Nuvia.

When I hear about a company that is not run by engineers making bad decisions and pissing off engineers, I am actually eager to see them die. Just like I wish Boeing would die for similar reasons. But I know that both are very unlikely to go away. One can always dream.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Ryzen's "Hyper-Threading" looked good because of poor single-threaded > performance

So if my CPU is one of the worst in single-threaded performance, then multi- threaded performance will be the best? That make no sense and this guy doesn't seem like he knows what he is talking about..

<comment><USER16> He's completely right. Hyperthreading is all about putting idle functional units to work when you can't extract instruction level parallelism from single threaded code. His claim is that Intel processors did better and thus only got a small relative boost from HT (IIRC it used to be 10%, maybe it's 20% now). If your processor does poorer at ILP extraction, you get relatively more out of HT.

This all agree with the benchmarks in which Intel still generally is ahead on single thread performance. For a more extreme case look to older POWER processors which were 4-way threaded, presumably because they were even worse on single threaded code.

<comment><USER33> > This all agree with the benchmarks in which Intel still generally is ahead > on single thread performance.

citation needed. benchmarks that I've seen [0][1] there is not that big of difference between the two.

[0] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon- grav...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon- graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd/5) ZEN1

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd- gen/9](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen/9) ZEN2

<comment><USER16> [https://browser.geekbench.com/processor- benchmarks](https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks)

Even normalizing for the frequency isn't enough to explain the difference

<comment><USER34> You need to look at turbo frequencies. Geekbench runs at turbo speed almost all the time.

<comment><USER16> Like I said, I did account for that</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Corrupted Blood Incident - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident <comment><USER2> It was certainly an interesting phenomenon, however I'd be wary of applying any scientific significance to it. In a videogame, there is no penalty for death, and it was expected for players to infect others "for the lulz", which wouldn't be the case for real world epidemics.</comment>


Ask: I have a built web apps and want to participate with Y combinator. but... - <AUTHOR>

but I can't leave my job for 3 months (I know I may not get accepted, but I need to think ahead) between June and August(I have a big family to support, and i need my "ok" salary to support daily life). I am willing to give up some % of my company for free Y combinator advice.<p>What can I do? Is it possible ? What options can I have? <comment><USER2> I'd reccomend passing on at least this round of Ycombinator.

Your family's welfare has to come first- Not only is there the loss of income to think about, but health insurance.

Instead, I'd suggest spending the next 6 months living below your means, and putting the money aside. You don't need much, but enough to comfortably live on for a few months, supporting your family.

Price out private health insurance- This is cheaper in regulated states such as Massachusetts, but your situation and location will vary.

After you have a few months salary put aside, then you'll be in a stronger position to take time away from a job to start a company.

<comment><USER3> The biggest regret in life will be passing on the very few opportunities we are lucky enough to have. The advice of waiting 6 more months or just giving up because of what's outside of your control rubs me as something bordering on: You cannot do [dream] because you are just a [class|race].

And has anyone considered the cost of maintaining your ability once you've settled into the corporate world? Go for it while at the top of your game, if possible.

<comment><USER4> Well, hungry kids and eviction notices are no picnic either. Ever see "The Pursuit of Happyness"?

The advice was still to work on a startup, but given the situation, to use a different strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Get free YC advice here. Post a link to your built web app. You might get advice from smart hackers, YC-funded founders, and even YC principals.

2\. Unless you have a good reason to incorporate now, just get a doing- business-as license (or Massachusetts Business Certificate, or whatever your state calls it). If you get into YC later, they'll want you to incorporate using their documents.

3\. Track all your expenses. Startup expenses can help your taxes even years later, whenever you start getting revenue. (I just learned this last week.)

4\. Tie your success to the success of existing YC companies. I've integrated with disqus, adpinion, snipshot and clickpass. You show them off; they show you off.

5\. Talk about your project with your family. As far as possible, make it something that includes them rather than competing with them. I sat down with two of my kids and showed them how I write web pages. My 10-year-old wants to do the same thing when she gets older. Amusingly, the page I made sitting with them ended up in production, which is OK.

<http://ourdoings.com/lemondrops.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> good points. Thanks. I am actually from canada and i have insurance covered here. I can afford working up to 6 hours after work to work on the venture everyday. The only challenge I have it I do not have the luxury to take 3 months off during the period.</comment></comment>


They Who Control Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://qvault.io/2020/08/12/they-who-control-encryption/ <comment><AUTHOR> Bill 4050 mentioned in the article really is a piece of shit - "To improve the ability of law enforcement agencies to access encrypted data, and for other purposes."</comment>


Seek HN: Seeking India based real entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR>

Hi _Everyone_
Folks, _sorry_ for creating an 'India' centric post, but hell didn't know a better place meant for this.
Bio: I'm 25, an engineering undergraduate from one of the NITs and _most_ importantly I hate my sucky job.
Frustrated by my mostly failed searches for an equally  passionate and committed hacker/entrepreneur, I've finally decided to go the 'Seek HN' route. What I'm looking for can be easily summed up best by http://founderdating.com/about.
More _importantly_ just let me know if this fantastic post by Mark Suster (http://goo.gl/mXBC) rings-all-bells and connects-with-you-like-nothing-before.
E-mail me at email@example.com and lets see how it goes from there.
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> I did like see more of your credibility on HN . Do you have a regular id that you post from ? Dont get me wrong , I do not go by NIT tags or IIT tags. Street cred has more value.

<comment><AUTHOR> I second that. Believe me we're in the same boat when it comes to the 'tags'; its almost like the rest of the world lost their right to breathe when you graduate from a 'tagged' college.

Coming back to the lack of 'cred' you just pointed out, this actually is my only HN id.

I'll be honest with you, I created that email id minutes before this post, just to conceal my heavily used gmail id. There are people from the place I work at who visit HN. I'm not ready to quit my job yet but eventually I will.

As much as I'd like to display my HN cred, at the moment I just can't but I'm looking forward to work on that front.

Say, something tells me you're based out of India?</comment></comment>


The to-do list problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.funkykaraoke.com/2012/09/the-to-do-list-problem.html <comment><USER4> Slightly off-topic, but _never_ auto-play video (or audio) content on a website. If I want it to be played, I click on it, otherwise it's just annoying.

<comment><USER5> I'm glad someone beat me to this. This is the first thing I thought when I went to the post. It soured my opinion of the whole article before I even read it because of that small usability mistake.

<comment><USER6> "It soured my opinion of the whole article before I even read it"

Seriously? The fact that an embedded video started playing soured your opinion of the article? Maybe you guys should chill out a bit. Sometimes comments like this lead me to believe the author wants recognition at somebody else's expense.

<comment><USER5> I'm not saying I didn't read the article because of it but it does just start the article off with a bit of annoyance. You can't argue that anywhere you enjoy going in the online or physical world is determined by emotional responses.

Imagine when you got to a restaurant that has music annoying loud. You may still enjoy the dinner food, but you had a bad experience eating the good food because you were annoyed with the music. That scenario similar to this article. You could still enjoy the article content but you were annoyed because of the bad experience. And after so many of those bad experiences you may just think "you know what, I'd rather eat somewhere not as good just because I won't be annoyed by loud music."

If you don't think that small things like this (that can easily add up over time) do change how your viewers see your site/company (regardless of the content), then you need to think again.

However, I could be wrong. I mean, everyone did love the animated images, colors, and sounds on GeoCities which lead to their industry takeover and incredible success. ;)

<comment><USER6> "However, I could be wrong. I mean, everyone did love the animated images, colors, and sounds on GeoCities which lead to their industry takeover and incredible success."

Let's not just assume that all annoyances are created equal. One is an integrally bad user experience, the only way out of which is to stop using the service wholesale. The other amounts to mousing-over a large area of the screen and clicking a button.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough. I will give you that. It was a bit of a extreme on that example. But I imagine you do understand what I generally mean about the small things having the ability to add up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate to-do lists. The worst are the ones where others can pile up things for you.

The problem with most to-do lists is that they treat your time as infinite. You just have to take one item after the other and chunk trough it. You're just the CPU executing the tasks you've been handled trough like a puppet. Soon enough the list becomes a big graveyard of things you didn't have the time to do and it's depressing.

It's better if the system forces you to filter tasks upfront. Like a tweet, there is only so much you can fit in a day. Get over it, you won't have the time to do X, just forget about it. It's important to have quality over quantity.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that merely a case for periodic pruning and reordering of the list(s)?

I'm not very dedicated in my usage of to-do lists (probably to my detriment), but I think people who use them consistently revise their list at lunch and again at the end of the day... perhaps at breakfast too. Unless they have an assistant who does all that for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did any of the previous commenters actually watch the video? Ignore the title, it's not about to-do lists. If you ever want to be successful at a startup, watch the video. Understand what he's saying about those three things that are required to get action from someone. Then look for his other work on Captology explaining how computers can manipulate people (in both the good and bad sense).

Seriously, WATCH THE VIDEO.

<comment><USER10> YT link for easier control and downloading: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYE3Jal7Yaw>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I've replaced the video with this one to avoid the auto-play issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree that one needs motivation and ability to complete a task. I'm not sure any app or electronic service is going to supply that. If it did, you'd find a lot of people out of work.

As for this quote:

"How about having a reminder showing up when you get an email from a relevant person that can help you accomplish your task, or a reminder showing up when a relevant person is calling [through vox.io of course]."

I think you're falling into the trap that most tool-builders fall into- over- thinking the problem. Most people are pretty simple. That's why we still keep pads of paper and post-it notes next to our $1500 workstations. For a lot of tasks speed and simplicity provide far greater benefit than any expertly- engineered web service ever could. In any case, why would I want a reminder to complete a task if I am getting emailed by somebody related to that task? In that regard I hate to say it, but email will win out over an integrated task list. Why? Because the email itself is serving as your reminder. A secondary service nudging you to complete the task after the email seems superfluous.

</comment><comment><USER11> > To build an intelligent to-do list it will take more than polished pixels, > so please start putting more intelligence in your to-do tools. Your users > will be thankful and will hopefully have much shorter to-do lists.

After trying many things, I have now switched to Trello. Using it I've become convinced that "intelligent to-do lists" are a fallacy, what we need are _dumb_ todo lists. Something not much smarter than a whiteboard or a piece of paper.

For reasons I don't understand, those just work.

<comment> mth- Totally agree. I have used index cards as a planning tool and a to do list for a long time. Trello, in all its nothingness, is the only thing that has come close to the efficiency of a pencil and stack of cards.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. I have used the same method since about 1985 and it works wonderfully. The only optimisation has been change to a mechanical pencil.

I've lost my card stack a couple of times in those years and there has been no negative effect.

I've played with and written various bits of software but it just doesn't make it any better either.

This problem is solved already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the problem that GTD tries to solve. Omnifocus is a great piece of software that's built on this methodology

[http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free- Produc...](http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free- Productivity/dp/0142000280)

<http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/>

<comment><USER14> I read GTD and practiced it for a few years. I always felt on top of my tasks, but gradually seemed to fork off my own system, although, I definitely still track tasks in a list* wrt context, due date, and time estimation.

One cautionary note with GTD is that it's easy to get caught up feeling like you're cranking widgets and lose sight of the forest in favor of the trees. I welcome suggestions for this.

With respect to BJ's talk / the Fogg model:

\- Triggers: The GTD system helps you capture all your task triggers in one place. This is a great idea that works well in practice.

\- Ability: The most common behaviors for interacting with your GTD system are adding new tasks, deferring tasks, and reviewing. The concept of a universal inbox accomplishes task insertion very easily, but one must build the habit of processing the inbox into their own GTD system __daily__ to really trust it. That was difficult for me in practice.

\- Motivation: The weekly review system provides a renewal and closure based on what you've done recently and have upcoming. The higher-level reviews "20,000 to 50,000 feet" are a harder habit to form since practiced so infrequently. I never really became great at this.

* I use one plain text file for tasks. I group with headers based on the date I plan to work on each task. Some items have hard due dates, but most don't.

      # TODAY
      x completed task
      - uncompleted task 0.5h /* estimate of how long it'll take */
      - another task (due 9/8)
      - ...

      # TOMORROW
      - ...

      # NEXT WEEK
      - ...

      # NEXT
      - ...

      # SOMEDAY / MAYBE
      - ...

And 3 separate lists for errands, groceries, and calls:

      # @GROCERY
      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - etc.

<comment><USER15> I built a very simple todo list + week planner based on a similar concept, that I use every single day now. Check it out sometime - <http://weekis.com>

<comment><USER14> Nifty. I'd love to see your iOS concept. The pain of editing my text file on the iPhone causes me to glance, but rarely update on mobile.

Listary ($0.99) has a nice synced list implementation that works well if you don't mind dividing the lists into separate files, but it doesn't support due dates. I didn't consider separate files a realistic option for my purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem is that there are multiple workflows people use and dont want to change. I for instance rely on invox zero and calendar, so they function as todo list. Many people i know use other methods.

On the other hand, some people argue that if tou cant keep your todos in your head, you have a bigger problem ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> To be effective, your to-do list should also include when and where beside the task.

The post assumes humans are bound to sense habits and gives little credit to the power to making decisions - where one can change their mind and act upon that decision.

All you need is a mental transition between the previous activity and the new activity. How? Well, the problem has existed as long as humans, so just figure out how parents convince kindergarteners to go to school, why some cultures pray before eating food (try to think beyond thankful-for-food reasons), and how famous leaders can led entire movements. The common denominator to all these will be your answer.

</comment><comment><USER18> Primitive version of GTD. GTD solves the issues raised in this post and more. Many todo apps work with a GTD workflow. I use Toodledo (web app) and Due Today (Android), they sync perfectly. Re-reading the GTD book every 6 months or so helps to be consistent with applying it, because the devil is in thinking 'oh I'm just going to skip this or that task for now', or not being diligent in e.g. assigning contexts. For GTD (any system, really) to work, you need to hammer it into your habits until it's stuck so snugly that it feels weird to do things any other way.

<comment><USER19> I'm really glad that this works for you, but it sounds like hell.

<comment><USER18> Not half as bad as _not_ having a system, and having to spend significant mental resources on keeping track of what to do, what to prioritize, when to do them, etc. _Not_ having to think about that meta-information frees up resources to actually do things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just last night I was thinking that Reminders needed a "remind me at sunset" option to remind me to round up the animals. As it is I have to change the time of that reminder every month.

There are probably a ton of triggers that could be useful. Off the top of my head: time, location, weather, the people you are currently with (4sq checkins), current call, recent texts, or emails. I'm sure a bunch more.

I'm not sure that I'd call this a todo list, but it does sound like a GTD support system.

<comment><USER20> This article discusses what can be done with just time and location, if you just treat them with a bit more smarts: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4489121>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very closely related to Fogg's behavior model of "trigger", "execution", "motivation", Charles Duhigg in "The Power of Habit" writes of the steps of the habit loop as "cue", "routine", "reward".

Habit is coming up to be a big topic in app design and development.

"The Power of Habit" is a good read which systematically lays out some science behind what habits are, how they work, and how to leverage them.

</comment><comment><USER22> It has never worked for me. I ended up creating a not-motivated-to-do list.

</comment><comment><USER14>
      import willpower
      # ...</comment>


The Age of Unicorns - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/the-age-of-unicorns/ <comment><USER2> About this:

"When Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee coined the term unicorn as a label for such corporate creatures in a November 2013 TechCrunch blog post, just 39 of the past decade's VC-backed U.S. software startups had topped the $1 billion valuation mark. Now, casting a wider net, Fortune counts more than 80 startups that have been valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists."

Again, this is because interests rate, in general, are very low, much lower now than they were during the original Dot Com boom, which is why valuations are higher. The math on this is simple.

Suppose you have a company that makes $1 million in profits. The question then is, at what point does it make sense to invest in something else? When prevailing interest rates are 10%, then $1 million is 10% of $10,000,000, so the company is worth $10,000,000 (excluding a million other factors for the sake of a simple model). If the company demands more than $10,000,000 to buy it, then it makes sense to invest in something else instead. If a company wants less than $10,000,000 for ownership, then it is a hot deal.

But when prevailing interest rates drop to 1%, as now, and since $1 million is 1% of $100,000,000, then for same level of profit, the value of the company has gone from $10,000,000 to to $100,000,000.

Again, there are a million other factors you could consider (do you trust the management, can they scale, how fast are they growing) but I'm going with a simple model here to demonstrate the basic driving force of modern valuations: when interest rates go down, valuations go up.

Of course, that doesn't explain why a web startup with no profits would be valued more than, say, a mature company like GE, which has known profits. Some of the wilder valuations are obviously being driven by speculation about wild growth rates.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree that low interest rates are to blame for these high valuations, but your numbers example seems off. By that logic, shouldn't company valuations shoot to infinity if interest rates reach 0% (which they effectively have).

<comment><USER4> The interest rate in question here is probably the long-term rate, which is unlikely to go to 0. That would indicate a wide-spread belief that interest rates will remain at 0 for the foreseeable future, in addition to current interest rates being at 0. It's difficult to imagine a situation in which this would be true.

<comment><USER5> > It's difficult to imagine a situation in which this would be true.

Japan.

<comment><USER4> All the data I can find points to their long-term prime rate sitting at ~1.1%. Yeah, that's low, but it's also pretty clearly non-zero.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Taken by themselves, it is hard to say which one is overvalued. But looking at the entire class, I think they are definitely overvalued. The trick will be to figure out which one of these companies is the Amazon among the Webvans....

<comment><USER6> Are you sure the class, as a whole, is overvalued? If, in 1999, you had invested $1000 each in Google and 49 flops, you'd still have come out ahead.

<comment><USER3> What I mean by 'class' is the slew of companies now valued at 1B+. Not sure what googles valuation was in 1999? I am guessing it was still well below 1B.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel a terrible unease about these companies. It's not the bloated valuations, but rather the motivation for running companies in this way. The plc has many critics, as a model of risk sharing and financial transparency it's got huge holes right through it as Enron (and other car crashes) showed. But who has a clue about what's happening in these companies, and who, and what (banks, pension companies, taxpayers, plc's) are being taken for a ride?

Caution...

<comment><USER8> I get you. Just yesterday I was thinking about how _valuable_ everything these companies give us for free is, and how Google specifically has completely distorted what people's perceptions are on the value of software, especially email. Google can have 50 loss leaders that completely obliterate the ability to profit in certain segments for other companies, and they're so massive they don't even feel it.

<comment><USER9> This is actually a very common problem we see with our service. Tons of 1 star reviews in Play/iTunes because we dare to withhold (valuable) features in order to make enough profit to run the business. Once a week we get very very negative (read: swearing) emails to customer support about needing a paid account to do certain things. Kinda a shame, considering the sheer value we offer 98% of our free users because 2% actually pay.

Preaching to the choir I am sure :)

<comment><USER8> Actually right now I'm geocoding about 100k addresses for completely free via Google's APIs. Something that would have cost a few hundred dollars a few years back, at the very least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Consider Facebook's valuation and then consider how they actually make money. Do they even make money outside of advertising, and is that advertising over valued? How many advertisers have already pulled out of Facebook ads due to ineffectiveness?

A lot of these companies are valued solely on the number of users, and little to due with anything else. Maybe someday they will spin it and turn all those users into profit, that seems to be the dream. It's not always a viable reality.

<comment><USER11> The amount of data Facebook is able to collect on their users is the difference for them, and the value of data for hundreds of millions of users is hard to quantify.

<comment><USER12> facebook's core offering is slowly walking towards the exit: [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F02y1vz](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F02y1vz).

Much of that valuable data stands to stale.

(edit: how do i link.. oh man)

<comment><USER13> That seemed pretty convincing, but then I added some comparison terms like "instagram" and "snapchat"... they are hardly a blip. I think that argues that the world is going mobile, but then maybe google trends isn't a fair way to measure who is walking where.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's quite a few more billion+ venture backed start-ups not on the unicorn list.</comment>


I'm sick of Chrome eating all my RAM – it's time for me to ditch it for Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://www.techradar.com/au/news/im-sick-of-chrome-eating-all-my-ram-its-time-for-me-to-ditch-it-for-firefox-or-even-edge <comment><USER2> Discussed earlier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856836)

</comment><comment><USER3> You know what eats up RAM? Having auto-playing videos, translucent overlays and Javascript.

Techradar takes 65MiB of RAM to display, including ad blocking by pi-hole and several add-ons. Hacker News takes a bit more than four. Sure, Firefox will eat less RAM, but with sites like these, any browser will eat RAM like crazy.

Want to stop browsers from eating RAM? Make better websites. No news website should require 6MiB of RAM just to store Javascript.

<comment><USER4> ^^^^ This!

How about we strip all the crap first and then complain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not a good quality article I don't think. It's just venting and opinion, there is no data or insights.

And I have bad news for the author: Firefox is usually the #1 consumer of RAM on my machine.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most modern websites end up allocating an absurd amount of RAM. Although there are certainly some that are more lightweight.

I have found that Firefox uses less RAM than Chrome for my workloads. That being said, if you have limited RAM, the amount used by either is still extremely high. I suggest installing Auto Tab Discard [1] for Firefox or The Great Suspender [2] for Chrome. These will allow you to discard tabs and reload them later without closing them. Please do note that any state on the page, aside from scroll position, will be lost. This usually includes text entered into complicated forms.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab- disc...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/) [2] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER7> Author's using Windows..

Latest FF on Windows seems to have issues with rendering.

Loading up posts on old.reddit.com leads to the DOM glitching after a few seconds and elements disappearing.

Happens frequently on pages with lots of comments. Something glitchy going on.

<comment><USER8> Your graphics driver is likely faulty, as I have not noticed any such issue with AMD Radeon Vega 64.

Try toggling GPU acceleration off in settings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> People who complain are always the ones with 100+ tabs at all times. Just use bookmarks

<comment><USER8> It just takes one. With Gmail open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would switch to Firefox if they managed to support the basically unlimited amount of tabs I can open on Chrome without any slowdown or degradation.

There's probably a better way to manage it, but when you're going down the rabbit hole of stackexchange and Google to try and figure something out, it's an extremely invaluable tool for me personally.

<comment><USER11> I always have 7 Firefox windows open across 4 virtual desktops with over 100 tabs across them. Never crashes on Linux and never eats all my 16 GB of RAM. Right now it's using about 4 GB of RAM. When I run Chromium in 1 window with 4 tabs, within hours it's using all available RAM and the tabs start crashing, one at a time, as they fail to allocate more RAM.</comment></comment>


The new Windows logo is out of perspective. Here's how it should look. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tarng.com/post/17775576898/the-new-windows-logo-is-out-of-perspective

<comment><USER2> I like microsoft's version better. The square one looks stubby and a little awkward.

I would say that perfectly square windows are just as rare as windows that are wider than they are tall. This is silly.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I feel people are arguing just for the sake of proving they understand perspective better than the design team at Windows. I highly doubt Microsoft only did one version of the logo, there were probably many variations, including some that were perspectively perfect. It looks like Microsoft went with what more people thought was aesthetically pleasing, which is a nice sign from the Windows design team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The square perspective design just looks out of proportions. Purely on an first impression basis, given a choice to choose between the two, I would choose the one by the MS team. Maybe they tested , and found that people liked the rectangle one better. Again, why is this nit pick important anyway?

</comment><comment><USER5> A much better take on the lack of perspective in the Windows logo: <http://imjustcreative.com/windows-8-logo-design/2012/02/18/>

<comment><USER6> That was the first thing I noticed. It's constantly bugging me when looking at it. Makes it feel half 3D and half 2D, like one of those impossible stairs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is this useless, pedantic piece of fluff in the front page?

<comment><USER8> probably because there's nothing else interesting today to fill the front page. there's nothing wrong with a little fluff from time to time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can not understand why, in Microsoft's blog post, they posted a Quality 20% JPEG of their new logo ([http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs- filesystemfile.ashx/__key/Com...](http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs- filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components- WeblogFiles/00-00-00-59-23-metablogapi/6201.Win8Logo_5F00_01_5F00_thumb_5F00_23669D8A.jpg)). It's compressed so much that there's a slight green hue around the blue borders.

</comment><comment><USER10> Or perhaps it was intentional. Most people don't have square monitors...

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe Microsof prefers the modernist horizontal "square": you could put hundreds of those slightly stretched windows side to side to form a horizontal band of windows throughout the whole floor of a building. That is probably the way Microsoft wants to vision Windows' style of adoption.

</comment><comment><USER12> Microsoft's logo makes sense. The logo matches with the windows (see the screenshot). It completes the pattern. [http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/windows_...](http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/windows_8_ui_01.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER13> i guess microsoft has enough money to buy the best designers around. maybe they have an idea or two about perspective and also a couple of ideas about when to break those rules in exchange to something that simply looks better, and this is the case.

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://habrastorage.org/storage2/e50/481/34a/e5048134a61b496...](http://habrastorage.org/storage2/e50/481/34a/e5048134a61b496e5019386fba18e4ee.png)

</comment><comment><USER15> So, MS don't know shit because windows are square.</comment>


Show HN: Covid-19 mortality rates per 100k persons (updated) - <AUTHOR> If anyone is interested in how their state or country is doing per capita. These are the latest Covid-19 mortality rates per 100,000 persons. Accurate as of roughly April 18th. I've broadened the group to include more nations vs my last post.
Belgium 47.4, Spain 43.9, Italy 38.4, France 28.8, UK 23.8, the Netherlands 21, Switzerland 15.9, Sweden 14.8, Ireland 11.8, United States 11.6, Luxembourg 11.6, Portugal 6.6, Denmark 5.9, Austria 5, Germany 5, Canada 4, Slovenia 3.5, Norway 3, Estonia 2.9, Ecuador 2.6, Iceland 2.5, Turkey 2.3, Romania 2.1, Dominican Republic 2, Israel 1.9, Czechia 1.7, Finland 1.6, Serbia 1.6, Lithuania 1.1, Greece 1, Peru 1, Poland 0.9, Chile 0.67, Mexico 0.51, South Korea 0.45, Argentina 0.29, Australia 0.26, Latvia 0.26, New Zealand 0.25, Slovakia 0.2, Singapore 0.19, Japan 0.17, Thailand 0.06, Taiwan 0.02
US states (segmented):
New York 68.5, New Jersey 45.7, Connecticut 31, Louisiana 27.5, Michigan 23, Massachusetts 22.6, Rhode Island 13.7
Illinois 9.9, Indiana 8.1, Maryland 7.7, Colorado 7.2, Delaware 6.9, Pennsylvania 6.5, Georgia 6.4, Vermont 6.2, Mississippi 5.2, Nevada 5.1
Ohio 3.8, Florida 3.6, Wisconsin 3.6, Oklahoma 3.5, Kentucky 3.2, Alabama 3, Virginia 3, Kansas 2.9, New Hampshire 2.9, Missouri 2.8, California 2.7, Arizona 2.5, Idaho 2.5, New Mexico 2.5, Maine 2.4, Iowa 2.3, South Carolina 2.3, Minnesota 2.1, Tennessee 2.1, *Puerto Rico 1.8, Oregon 1.7, North Carolina 1.6, Texas 1.5, Nebraska 1.4, Arkansas 1.2, Alaska 1.2, North Dakota 1.1
West Virginia 1, Montana 1, Utah 0.8, South Dakota 0.79, Hawaii 0.64 <comment><USER2> Thank you.

Nevertheless: this is meaningless.

Protocols for counting deaths are different in different countries. Plus they are, in my opinion, absurd.

In Spain only those deaths that a. happen in a hospital _and_ b. were tested positive _before death_ are counted.

Needless to say, testing is scarce and has been for the past two months.

Better source of actual deaths caused by the epidemy in Spain is the following:

Mortality Excess for all Causes Report (in Spanish): [https://www.isciii.es/QueHacemos/Servicios/VigilanciaSaludPu...](https://www.isciii.es/QueHacemos/Servicios/VigilanciaSaludPublicaRENAVE/EnfermedadesTransmisibles/MoMo/Paginas/Informes- MoMo-2020.aspx)

And still one has to take into account that the Justice administration is collapsed as well (i.e., deaths are not reported timely [note the dark "confidence interval" around the daily death toll in the graph; also read last paragraph in the report]).

Note that this counts deaths by all factors, including health system collapse. (Which, in my opinion, are result of the epidemy, and its mismanagement.)

 _Similar_ but _different_ accounting is used in other countries.

It's a mess.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is wide understanding it's a mess and that nations use different methods of counting Covid deaths. These are obvious things at this point in the pandemic.

It's not meaningless. The 20,000 death count in France is not likely to be missing another 50,000 deaths. If they're missing 5,000 deaths, the 20k scale is still extremely useful. In many of the hardest hit nations we can use these counts as floors if nothing else and go from there. It provides a very reasonable ballpark understanding of what's happening in many (not all) nations and states.

If a nation is reporting thousands of deaths, we know they're being hit by it - regardless of +/\- counts - and can pay closer attention accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for this. Can I ask where you've obtained the stats from please?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Johns Hopkins University (CSSE dept) data on nations and the individual US state websites (which all have dashboards updated typically daily).

This site: [https://covidtracking.com/](https://covidtracking.com/)

is excellent for US state data and is usually updated multiple times per day (they also have a running history per state). I typically combine that with double checking state sites to see if there are any more recent updates available for the date I'm locking in (eg for a post like this).

And of course the population figures are then used for each location to arrive at the per 100,000 number (the per 100k mortality data isn't provided like this anywhere else that I have found).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I have a zero day, what should I do? - <AUTHOR>

I informed the company about this security hole many months ago. It is still open. Their customers are being affected.  I want them to fix it, but they won't fix it, maybe they can't.<p>What should I do? <comment><USER2> It's hard to offer advice without knowing more details, but I think it's good that you're not providing many details in a public forum like this.

Some issues can be fixed quickly; others take a long time. The AWS signing bug I found, for example, took over 6 months to fix, because Amazon had to create a new signing scheme and then update a _lot_ of code to use it. Because of this, I would hesitate to specify a hard expiry date; my usual approach is to ask for periodic status reports and only "turn up the heat" if it sounds like the issue isn't being taken seriously.

If they don't seem to be taking the issue seriously, there's two possibilities: 1. They're not taking the issue seriously; 2. They didn't take _you_ seriously and never actually looked at the issue. In either case, it might be useful to work through someone who has experience in vulnerability handling; myself and tptacek come to mind as people who could help here.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a very difficult problem to solve. I do know that. It's been about 9 months since I first informed them of the issue. I sent them source code that illustrates an attack. Many of their customers are being affected right now, by something. I can't prove that this is the mechanism behind the current wave of attacks, though I can prove that this mechanism would allow a hacker to compromise sites exactly as is being described by victims.

They did take me seriously. I believe they aren't fixing the problem because they will have to rewrite a lot of their code, their customers will have to rewrite code, and many will be forced to find another provider all together, which means the solution has negative financial impacts.

Not solving it means negative financial impacts on their customers in lost time to rebuild affected data. It's very well possible that malicious people know about this and are using it right now to gather usernames and passwords for later attacks. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of databases may have been siphoned off already.

How do you "turn up the heat" ?

<comment><USER2> _How do you "turn up the heat" ?_

Start saying things like "if you don't start making progress on this, I'm going to publish details". Contact Mitre and ask for a CVE #. Write to CERT, CERT-FI, or NISCC and ask them to help you. Write a blog post about the issue and send it to them saying "I'm going to put this online on Monday unless I hear from you first".

Then put the blog post online on Wednesday.

EDIT: Also, try different communications channels. Sometimes a phone call is far more effective than an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sell it to TippingPoint (<http://www.zerodayinitiative.com/>) and let them deal with it, having a major security company approach them will force them to take it seriously.

</comment><comment><USER4> Inform them that your obligation to approach a mutually convenient solution discreetly is about to expire within 48-72 hours (depending on scope; your call); after which you will disclose, and syndicate the security hole to the public at large.

Inform them that you're dissatisfied by their manner of handling sensitive customer data, and the hole might already have affected existing customers without their knowledge.

And finally, inform them that should they be willing, but unable to provide a fix in timely manner, I'm available for security consultation, and implementation; e-mail me at sdrinf [at] gmail for a free initial consultation ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're still wondering about this, contact me directly (my info's in my profile).

My advice would be not to try to sell it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry, kind of off topic but IF I am to trust wikipedia, wouldn't this not be called a zero day. It would be called a 9 month?

"The term derives from the age of the exploit. When a developer becomes aware of a security hole, there is a race to close it before attackers discover it or the vulnerability becomes public. A "zero day" attack occurs on or before the first or "zeroth" day of developer awareness, meaning the developer has not had any opportunity to distribute a security fix to users of the software."

-<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day_attack>

<comment><USER7> It would be a zero-day if exploits had already started at the time of discovery. The OP implies that attacks are already underway, possibly predating the discovery, but doesn't mention having solid proof of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Talk to the company. Find out why they haven't fixed the issue. Talk to an actual engineer at the company. Maybe they are working on it but are having a hard time resolving the issue properly.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this company an employer, or a business partner, or is it just some random company that we are talking about?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am one of their customers. I believe I have been affected by this issue in the past.

<comment><USER9> Good grief. Take up the offer of the HNers that have replied to you offering to front the issue for you.</comment></comment></comment>


The Lean Resume - <AUTHOR> http://blog.resumereview.me/

<comment><USER2> How do people feel about the lean Resume? Do you struggle perfecting your resume? How do you go about editing and tweaking?</comment>