Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system <comment><USER2> When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark.

Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly, that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and important.

A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher. Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).

<comment><USER3> Sorry, but your argument loses serious credibility beginning with the first sentence. The _last_ thing, really? How about, say, making cardboard boxes for a living? Flipping burgers? Don't get me wrong, I understand the point you are making, in part because it's been made more articulately by others many times already. But you are simply wrong when you say that "there is no such thing as a senior researcher". I personally know at least four -- late career academics who still engage deeply with research, have their own ideas, write single -author papers, and all the rest. It's true that many others do go the route you have described: possibly more than is optimal, though there is some value in a field having a few caretakers (or managers as you call them) which I rarely see mentioned. But the situation is not the cartoon that you make it out to be. Not by a long shot.

<comment><USER2> > The last thing, really? How about, say, making

> cardboard boxes for a living? Flipping burgers?

Or working as a patent clerk, maybe?

Yes, pretty much _anything_ outside the academic process was what I meant, so that your livelihood does not depend on the outcome of your research, because then you have to tailor your research directions towards the safe and accepted. And so your straw men actually would work, though suboptimally because the income is probably too low to allow you free time.

Also, misquoting me by leaving out the "really" makes your argument disingenuous, because the "really" made clear that the statement is not a 100% but a trend (if a somewhat overwhelming one), and 4 exceptions (names?) don't exactly disprove a generalization.

It would also be interesting if you see your four examples as holdouts from a different era, or general exceptions. I'd wager they're more of the former rather than the latter, and that their number is dwindling.

<comment><USER4> > Or working as a patent clerk, maybe?

Does it still work though? In the days of Einstein, I imagine you could slack off easier in such a position than nowadays.

The problem these days is that we're inundated with busywork not only in academia, but in most occupations.

<comment><USER5> Reddit (and to some extent HN) are proof that there are plenty of white collar jobs with oodles of free time.

<comment><USER6> It's not the right _kind_ of time, though. Reading and occasionally posting usually don't require sustained concentration -- they can mostly be done as a break from that. (Of course there are times when an interesting and difficult topic shows up, or a debate arises that one wants to participate in.) So for the most part, it's a break from work. Switching from one nontrivial technical task to squeeze bits of a much more difficult task into one's day is much harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can feel him. It is not just in science, but in business as well. People want results, not understand their problems. And they want them yesterday, despite only telling you about it today. In some regards it's just a trick to keep you working hard for them. But still it's neither fun nor actually productive.

It's great to work with freelancers though, since from the good ones you can learn how to handle that situation: Don't give users, customers, management enough information to really control you, understand that you are the one providing the results or not, and don't talk about your work but only about that part of the results that they actually care about. This way they don't consider you unproductive or incompetent, but that they need you. They still hate you, but they hate you because they need you. And that you can use to actually solve problems, take the time you need, and thereby provide the results they really need.

<comment><USER8> > but in business as well

I think business is more ruthless. It won't let you waste too much time in a false belief that your product or science will become successful. That leads to faster iteration.

<comment><USER9> In the pharmaceutical business at least, huge sums of money are frequently spent on strategies that even graduate students could point out as being unlikely to succeed. The reasoning behind these unproductive decisions is almost always "markets".

<comment><USER10> Can you elaborate on how this works? Do you mean there is (in effect) some kind of market for vapourware, so companies work on things that sound good even though they predictably can't work? Who benefits?

<comment><USER9> The people who benefit are those who can raise funds/support for the next round.

It is more difficult to obtain objective evidence about biological sciences and its subset, medicine, than other fields such as maths or chemistry. This is due to the inherent complexity and poorly understood processes by which living organisms thrive, or not.

So, there is abundant interest from non-experts (i.e. potential investors or market analysts) in gaining a slice of attractive markets such as currently unmet conditions e.g. lung cancer or Alzheimer's disease. Such people are sometimes more easily swayed by the proclamations of "famous professors" than graduate students might be.

So, yes, there is in effect a lot of "vapourware" in the drug business. And much of it succeeds precisely because there is insufficient expertise on the behalf of investors, who get their knowledge of the underlying science third hand, or worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Peter Higgs published about 5 scientific papers after his Nobel-winning work in 1964 until his retirement in 1996, none of which were particularly impressive. I think this is below any reasonable standards, not just below contemporary academic standards. Therefore, barring special circumstances like an exemplary teaching record, in my opinion Edinburgh University would have been right to sack him and replace him with a more productive person. In short: I don't think that Higgs nearly getting sacked is an accurate indication that academia has too much of a 'publish or perish' culture.

<comment><USER12> This is a truly idiotic thing to say.

"none of which were particularly impressive"

First who are you to judge quality of his work, that guy has a Nobel. Imagine if they did follow your utterly idiotic suggestion and did kick him out, other universities who recognize importance of his work and would instantly hire him. Years later when he would actually win the prize, Edinburgh University would look crazy for kicking out a Nobel prize winning physicist.

So no Peter Higgs is a genius, he knew importance of what he had achieved and took leisurely path, nothing wrong in that. Edinburgh University knew importance of his work and correctly decided that keeping him was a great investment.

The fact that you think that a researcher who won a Nobel prize somehow did not work "hard enough" in later years and should have been fired is a great indicator of dysfunctional academic culture.

<comment> Ar-Curunir Beyond his Higgs Boson papers, the rest haven't been cited particularly much. Not indicative of a genius. Sure, no-one is calling him stupid, but there are potentially many other people who have changed the field as much, or more than him. Just because he won a Nobel Prize for one work doesn't make him immune to criticism.

<comment><USER12> There is valid criticism, and then there's "this guy did not do anything after making a Nobel worthy discovery, should have been kicked out".

Also "haven't been cited particularly much" is utterly bullshit. Unless the goal is to optimize for mediocrity (3 papers each year with 20-50 citations each) being better than one break-through Nobel worthy work. Frankly citations are very very easy to game if you are a professor with reasonable means at a good university, and are a really really bad indicator of success.

Since he already had a very successful paper maybe he wanted to write risky papers. In any case that's not worse than other researchers who write cookie- cutter papers adding extra terms to equations that are guaranteed to be cited by the next guy adding even more terms. By finding these minor faults with a Nobel award winning researcher, you are displaying the same dysfunctional thinking that has plagued academia.

<comment> Ar-Curunir I'm not sure why you have this idea that academia is resistant to paradigm shifts; they happen all the time. Any papers that are "risky" enough to start such paradigm shifts end up getting cited _tons_.

<comment><USER12> Its not me but rather its you who has the wrong idea that all papers with 50 citations are good. Or rather the more citation == better research.

Frankly almost 95% of papers are crap and better off not having been written, had it not been for publish or perish culture, or "lets count papers/cites to shame a Nobel award winning researcher culture" that you espouse.

Citations are a self reinforcing metric. Once a community starts counting them, the only way to succeed is to publish more which in turns leads to higher counts.

There is nothing wrong in publishing a good thorough paper over 4 years maybe slowly updating it as a working paper as done in economics.

<comment> Ar-Curunir I am not saying that all papers with citations are good; rather, that most good papers get tons of citations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We expect senior professors to train students. How do you train students? By getting them to do work and write papers. If they haven't published by graduation time, they can't prove they can get the job done. This is the main reason that senior people produce a lot of papers - they have a lot of students.

I've written a bunch of papers - I don't care any more about quantity. But I want each of my graduating students to have a publication or two so they can get a job. So we turn out a bunch of papers every year, and no, not every one is earth-shaking, partly because roughly every second paper is a student's first one and that's what they were capable of at the time.

It's easy to miss this kind of dynamic from the outside.

<comment><USER14> This is a great point. Although I would wager that the large quantity of mediocre papers your students have produced have not exactly harmed your own career. So, while your personal motives may be beyond repute, there will be many academics who think "This is the main reason senior people have a lot of students- they produce a lot of papers." Which is one of the dynamics that is troublesome. The marginal value of another PhD student to a senior professor is almost always fairly positive. Which means senior professors have an incentive to maximize the number of PhD students. This has two problems:

1) The value of the senior professor's mentorship to each PhD student diminishes (maybe almost linearly) with each PhD student added.

2) If each senior professor hires on average X PhD students per generation, approximately (1/X) of the those PhD students can become senior professors if the rate that academia grows is negligible compared to growing X times as large per generation. (And right now, X must be at least 20.)

<comment><USER13> Don't forget that a prof has to raise the money in ferocious competition to fund every student. Only successful profs can get enough money for a lot of students.

<comment><USER14> Success defined how? By publication record. Which leads to the rich get richer dynamic I think is troublesome. The more students you have, the easier it is to get funding for more students.

<comment><USER13> Rich-get-richer sounds unfair, but if you controlled studio time, would you give it to Radiohead or Vanilla Ice?

Some people have proven themselves to be really good at things, and it makes sense to give them the resources to do it well.

Most countries also have special funding contests only for young researchers to bootstrap themselves into the main contests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Jean-Pierre Sauvage (chemistry Nobel price 2016) said exactly the same thing recently. Working without pressure for 30 years in a state funded facility was central to his achievements.

<comment><USER16> How can he know whether that's actually true? Everyone is troubled by the current state of science. How can we know whether that's not the standard old man's wish for the good old days?

<comment><USER17> I don't believe that's true of Higgs, since he said it of a period in which he was still 'in the system':

        > Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department
        > when they did research assessment exercises". A message
        > would go around the department saying: "Please give a
        > list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would
        > send back a statement: 'None.' "
        >
        > By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable
        > with the new academic culture.

<comment><USER18> He retired in 1996, but judging from his CV it looks like he stopped doing research in the 1960s or 70s. [1] His last research paper was published in 1979, and the paper before that was published in 1966. Perhaps he was an excellent teacher, but it doesn't seem like he needed to be in a research university.

[1] [http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter- higgs](http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter-higgs)

<comment><USER17> I read it as yours being exactly the view he disliked; that his lack of published research papers did not correspond to any lack of his doing research.

<comment><USER18> I don't know if he was doing research or not. (And I'm not trying to judge him either way, since I know almost nothing about him.) But when he was doing his Nobel-winning work, he was publishing on average about one paper per year. Then he published one paper in 13 years, and then zero papers in 17 years (and never again). He could have been doing research but unsuccessfully.

He didn't lose his job. (One might argue that he should have, but I won't.) He just said that he would have a hard time finding a different job. Isn't that obvious? If you are looking for a new job at a research university with zero publications for 17 years, you can hardly expect departments to be dying to hire you.

I think most people in that situation are not doing any research. Most researchers with ambitious research projects still manage to publish occasionally, not just for "the system" but for themselves. You want to know that you are making at least a little progress on something. Andrew Wiles, for example, published every year or two throughout his work, with the exception of one four-year gap. [1] No 17-year gap.

[1] [http://web.math.princeton.edu/WebCV/WilesBIB.pdf](http://web.math.princeton.edu/WebCV/WilesBIB.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This may be a symptom of the hyper-connective world we live in today. You observe this phenomenon elsewhere outside of academia as well. There is an intense pressure to distinguish oneself from the greater body of people occupying the same industry as yourself.

Consider that a vibrant Github profile is essentially a prerequisite to be considered as an engaged professional in software engineering these days. It doesn't matter if you have ethical qualms about Github, or spend most of your day doing... your day job.

A 22-year old shouldn't have to fret about not having enough public repositories or not having contributed enough to open-source. I'd expect any craftsman to start producing their best work well into their career, and not at the start of it.

<comment><USER20> Ethical qualms about Github? Could you explain? Should I worry about hosting my code there?

<comment><USER19> Beyond uptime concerns (which Github manages very well) is the fact that it is closed source, and whenever you use a closed system but that provides very good services for free you yourself is the commodity.

Beyond that, dozzie's remark is very much on point, the host could become tainted in the same way as for instance SourceForge. Fortunately, the distributed nature of Git means that you are unlikely to "lose" your source- code.

But really you have no control over your code, it is their liberty to censor it if they please.

The primary issue, as far as I am concerned, is that while I can clone and go elsewhere is that Github is the centralized hub for (FL)OSS today. Everything lives there. If you are not on there, you are de facto invisible.

A better alternative, as far as I am considered, would be a distributed net of "self-hosted" Gitlab instances.

I am not comfortable with all the bad press that Github has suffered regarding gender equality, but I feel that I am suffering from vendor lock-in due to the success of the platform.

<comment><USER5> If GitHub censors your code, or even if they don't, you can publish it elsewhere

<comment><USER19> Absolutely, but that is part of the ethical qualm. You are perpetuating the use of Github as the dominant (code) social network by using it.

If you continue to use it after Github has performed an act of censorship (or anything else that violates your values) and you continue to use the service then that act goes unpunished as they will keep their market share and may repeat that act again. After all, there weren't enough negative consequences to avoid doing so in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The core problem are grant procedures. Universities get a 20%+ cut of grants a professor eecieved. Therefore they wants professors who receive lots of grants. Grant awarders are judged on their ability to choose applicants that create value using those funds. An easy metric is papers produced. And those who publish lots of papers in the past is a good predictor of future production. So these are the applicants that get funded.

Another problem is the lack of funds for professor positions relative to the number of trained applicants. With so many qualified academics, departments have to use some metric to base decisions, and publications is more measurable (grant $$$) than scientific value.

<comment><USER22> 20+% is optimistic. Overhead rates (at R1s in the US) are closer to 50-70%. I've heard tell of places with extremely specialized facilities (like deep-sea research vessels) that charge nearly 100% overhead (i.e., to spend $50,000 on "your" research, you need to bring in at least 100,000).

<comment><USER21> Yes. But there is variability per institute and so was trying to be conservative in the lower threshold of the percentage cut.

The university cut does make some sense. There are a lot of services on which PI's rely. Administration to handle hiring processes. Building maintenance and plumbing. But per usual, instead of just covering costs, it is viewed as revenue on which to grow the university (and admin pay).

Actually, I am not sure whether university cut factors into funding decisions at NIH and the like.

<comment><USER22> Sure, I just wanted to put the actual numbers out there because 20% or so actually seems pretty fair for keeping the lights on, taking out the trash, etc, while 70+% is....a lot. On top of this, a lot of the....infrastructure is still fee-for-service. The university may fund the initial purchase of an MRI scanner (or whatever) out of overhead, but individual labs still pay $400+ an hour to use it.

I don't know if the NIH or NSF takes overhead into account, but many of the most successful grantees also have some of the highest overhead so probably not.

On the flip side, I've heard someone claim that their department chair _strongly_ encouraged applying for NIH grants, because the NIH-negotatied overhead rate is much higher than other funders (also, allegedly more prestigious, but you'd think $500,000 spends about the same, regardless of where it comes from).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> He is probably right. The current academic environment is terrible and drives talented young researchers out of basic research. But still, it delivers. The question for me is, does it deliver more, less or the same amount of knowledge than during Higgs's time?

<comment><USER23> I'd say it produces enough. At the cost of the health of the researchers. Many people (including me) leave not because they do not like research, but because they have grown to hate the environment.

<comment><USER24> I can relate to that. I would go as far as hate, but definitely disappointed. As an PhD in CS I've seen my share of pressure and I agree completely that it's just not a way to do meaningful research as much as it's mass production of small incremental steps. It's debatable whether big breakthroughs Van happen this way

<comment><USER25> Big breakthroughs too are really just a collection of small incremental steps -- but the observer isn't aware of the intermediate steps.

<comment><USER26> Well, this is isn't always the case. Most of the time they are not really hidden, they are just a huge amount of new results not correlated with each other, that everyone knows about. Then someone comes and finds the thing that correlates them all. Think about special relativity and what will probably happen when we will finally solve the general relativity/quantum theory riddle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I ditched my academics career and went into public service. I expected to do actual science, instead I ended up studying bad papers which cost huge piles of money. I feel sorry for the naive and the burnt-out young academics. Potential wasted all the way.

</comment><comment><USER28> A strong will is needed to do research in the dark, you are going to sacrifice a lot and as an outsider you will almost always be looked down, very often rightly so (because you miss the day-to-day peer review that at the very least avoids you methodological or execution mistakes).

</comment><comment><USER29> It was cruel and unusual punishment by whoever it was that recommended that a scientist who doesn't watch television should watch that awful scientist insulting sitcom.

</comment><comment><USER30> The problem is that universities and journals are ranked.

Rankings are based, in part, on metrics related to publications and citations and that's the utility function they try to optimize.

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

</comment><comment><USER31> "He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn't impressed."

... [ _choppy panted laughter_ ]

<comment><USER32> "...to this day he owns neither a TV nor mobile phone, and only acquired his first computer on his 80th birthday."

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter- higgs-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs- interview-underlying-incompetence)

Perhaps he used his computer to watch it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Eventually, the biggest consequence of a focus on incremental advancements may be that there will be no more 'Einsteins' or Higgses in a role-model sense.

</comment><comment><USER34> A sign of the higher freq / lower amplitude of todays era ?</comment>


ARM based processors coming to Linux netbooks - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2009/01/07/new-freescale-processors-target-linux-netbooks Freescale's ARM based i.MX515 will have the capability to power machines with up to 8 hours of battery life, with a display as large as 8.9 inches. Sporting an ARM Cortex-A8 core, the chip performs from around 600mHz to 1 GHz.<p>Seems like a clash between Intel and ARM is imminent. <comment><USER2> _All we know at this point is that these computers will almost definitely be running Linux - these chips just can't provide enough CPU power to run any Windows operating system, including netbook standard XP._

I thought the reason was that Windows doesn't run on ARM.

<comment><USER3> Windows Mobile certainly does:

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

but, yeah that's not really windows for most people.

Also, even if MS ported Windows to ARM (it shouldn't be _that_ difficult), the problem would really be the applications, which would either need emulating (on an already slowish computer) or recompiling.

<comment><USER2> Sure, not counting Windows CE variants here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool, ARM are so much nicer to work with than Intel. Really well designed CPUs.

<comment><USER5> As a normal user, how would I notice any difference?

<comment><USER6> If you are a normal Linux user, then you'ļl be fine, and modern ARM plus support chips should be less power hungry than Atom and chipset, although Intel has been making progress. I think it is about 9Watts average on Atom with newer chipsets, compared to first Atoms which use older chipsets and are consuming 26Watts. That "new" AMD chip for netbooks is an atrocity (IMHO) using about 45Watts.

If you want to run Windows, then you'll want to pass on ARM netbooks.

<comment><USER7> PowerTOP on my Atom-using MSI Wind netbook shows a hair under 10 Watts total consumption at idle, and up to 13 Watts used under heavy load. There are probably some tweaks I could do to drop that even more but I think I've hit diminishing returns in that respect. I'm getting about 5 hours of real-life usage on the 6-cell battery.

Incidentally, the backlight on this thing is almost _too_ powerful. I keep it on the lowest setting even on AC power because it's just that bright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Cortex-A8 is pretty spiffy (SIMD extensions, extra compressed instruction mode, ~GHz clockspeeds), but looking down the road, the Cortex-A9 intrigues me. All the same goodies of the A8 but it goes to 4 cores instead of 1.

The other change to look for in the next few years is cheap OLED displays. A 1 watt CPU, bridge chip, and a fractional watt display will change the battery life equation dramatically. Current displays make all the light a display could need to all white all the time and then throw most of it away. OLED displays only make the light you need. Say hello to the '80s and green text on black to stretch your battery for coding.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the article, "this chip will have the capability to power machines with up to 8 hours of battery life, with a display as large as 8.9 inches". We can finally hope for a long lasting laptop without having to weigh 4kgs (or 9 lbs).

</comment><comment><USER9> Someone should make something closer to the form factor of the Radio Shack Model 100, with the same instant-on capability and ability to run freaking forever on ordinary alkaline batteries.

</comment><comment><USER10> Netbook with a browser that can't run Flash.

Outside this place they're not going to sell many of those.</comment>


Hong Kong Protestors Using Mesh Messaging App China Can't Block: Usage Up 3685% - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/09/02/hong-kong-protestors-using-mesh-messaging-app-china-cant-block-usage-up-3685/#1fa45f4135a5 <comment><USER2> There is another post with more discussion. Hong Kong Add oil.</comment>


Hobbit behind the scenes video blog - showing off 3D using RED cameras - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/nov/04/hobbit-peter-jackson-video-blog

<comment><USER2> Two interesting things jumped out at me:

1) Even Jackson says that "Reds eat color".

2) Two guys can sit next to each other and draw the concept art for the right and left eye of a 3d shot, just by looking at what the other is drawing. Thats freakin' superhuman.</comment>


Geoblocking: Consumers not breaching copyright by circumventing with VPN - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-29/geoblocking-consumers-do-not-breach-copyright-by-circumventing/7369714 <comment><AUTHOR> A link to the actual report, including an informative "Main key points" section.

[http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/current/intellectual- property...](http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/current/intellectual- property/draft)</comment>


Show HN: Inside Python Dict – an explorable explanation - <AUTHOR> https://just-taking-a-ride.com/inside_python_dict/ <comment><USER2> _Python lists are actually arrays — contiguous chunks of memory._

Just wondering here, is this guaranteed to always be the case? Practically it probably is, but does the Python spec (as in: the laguage, not one of it's implementations) say a list must be implemented using contiguous memory of slots with Python objects? That seems so low-level and C-ish. Or does the OP actually mean _CPython_ here for instance?

<comment><USER3> According to this post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18707403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18707403), "Lists aren't called arrays in Python because they're not arrays. Next!".

I really am confused now. Is it an array, or is it not?

<comment> joatmon-snoo Strictly speaking, lists are not arrays.

I'm not aware of what the specification for a list would be, this is the closest I'm aware of: [https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#objects-v...](https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#objects- values-and-types), 3.2 > Sequences > Mutable Sequences > Lists, "The items of a list are arbitrary Python objects. Lists are formed by placing a comma- separated list of expressions in square brackets"

CPython implementation is here: [https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/e42b705188271da108de4...](https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/e42b705188271da108de42b55d9344642170aa2b/Include/listobject.h#L23-L40)

If I'm talking about arrays with someone else, I would expect us to be thinking of arrays in the sense of C. Both C++ and Java use the same definition. Other languages that I'm aware of (e.g. Javascript, Go) have their own notions of arrays that you can't conflate with the C notion of an array.

From the C11 spec, §220.127.116.11: "An array type describes a contiguously allocated nonempty set of objects with a particular member object type, called the element type."

<comment><USER4> Lists are very often used in the way arrays are, though.

The heterogeneous use-case (that in C, etc. is usually a struct) is often filled by either tuples or (ordered) dictionaries in Python.

If you really want something a bit closer to a C array, you can fairly easily create a UserList that enforces the non-empty requirement and only allows items of a particular type.

<comment><USER5> If you want some closer to C arrays, you can use Python array.array, which is part of the standard library.

[https://docs.python.org/3/library/array.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/array.html)

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/176011/python-list-vs- ar...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/176011/python-list-vs-array-when- to-use)

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I had forgotten about that module.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks. Slowing realizing some of the benefits of dicts and trying to use them more in my code where I would have otherwise defaulted to another data structure.

They really are quite useful and intuitive to work with once you understand basic structure

I do sometimes worry about speed relative to other options though, especially in large chunks of data

</comment><comment><USER7> Related: [https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2017/modern-python- dictionaries...](https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2017/modern-python-dictionaries- a-confluence-of-a-dozen-great-ideas.html)</comment>


The evolution of cheating in chess - <AUTHOR> http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8362701/the-evolution-cheating-chess

<comment><USER2> Even if the eNotate software is magically unhackable, it sounds like there's no verification during the tournament that players are actually running eNotate instead of something else with the same appearance. The best way to cheat would be to write something that looks like the eNotate UI to a casual observer, but that doesn't have any of its security measures. The custom software could take the moves as it gets them and feed them into Fritz, giving hints when some secret button is pressed.</comment>


Ask HN: What will be the stock of the 2020s? - <AUTHOR> So the 2010s were an uninterrupted bull-market in stocks and had Netflix delivering +4.000% in return. What will the best performing S&P500 stock of the 2020s? <comment><USER2> Writing this for myself to check in few years:

Energy breakthrough making it cheaper - everything needs energy to function, that's probably an obvious pick.

Internet in rural places - access to internet is needed for everything: new jobs, entertainment, services, goods etc. If there'll be a way to access internet in rural places all over the world - it'll probably be one of the best companies (thinking starlink or something similar, since preferably you'll need low latency).

Content production or content delivery - people will always want entertainment, ie games, movies or streams. It is very far from ideal both in production and delivery. Solving it will give insane reach and insane amounts of money.

Reimagination of hiring and changing professions.

Probably another social network - people are not satisfied, someone has to try.

<comment><USER3> > Probably another social network - people are not satisfied, someone has to > try.

What do you expect out of the new social network?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > What will the best performing S&P500 stock of the 2020s?

If you had asked the same question 10 years ago, no one would have guessed Netflix... because it wasn't in the S&P500 at the time.

</comment><comment><USER5> If we knew then it wouldn't return 4k%. Anything that's already known is priced in.

</comment><comment><USER6> My take is on health tech related companies. Similar to frequency therapeutics and their fx322. I think this decade we will see the commoditisation of health improvements.

</comment><comment><USER7> This probably isn't the right audience for a discussion involving speculation about speculation :)

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a once a decade question so I am hoping it is alright ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> AMD and many other semiconductors. I'm up 500% on my semiconductor portfolio and it's still early, there's a lot of emerging smaller companies getting involved now, from FPGAs to potential x86 competitors. The foundries and supply chain are doing great too

<comment><USER9> I'm putting together a spreadsheet of semiconductor and other hardware manufacturing stocks and weighting them by Glassdoor rankings of company culture, those will be my long-term picks. So far Analog Devices and Cirrus Logic are looking very strong. And Apple of course.

<comment><USER8> I've been building a position in Lattice since $6, it's $19 today. Jim Anderson left AMD to be CEO there. I bought on the chance there's a future merge/acquisition but they're doing great work regardless

<comment><USER9> Wow, you might be right, but I've never seen a P/E ratio that high (125). Do you think it might be due for a correction?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> MCD - McDonalds will manage to eke out a small gain over the decade, and be the winner of the 2020's.

Following a recession, all new investors will panic and withdraw all their money and keep it out for years. They didn't know the market could be down two years in a row. Boomers reach a phase in their lives where they are only taking money out of the stock market, and spending it on Chinese goods. Inflation picks up, and smart money moves from stocks to gold and then bonds. This combination will lead to one of the worst decades for stocks since the great depression. 2028 and 2029 sees money starting to go back into the market. But the decade as a whole sees low gains.

But even in a recession, people still treat themselves by eating out at McDonalds and their new $5 Keto menu.

</comment><comment><USER11> Some AI startup.

<comment><USER4> Very unlikely.

1\. The probability of some paradigm changing breakthrough in AI over the next 10 years - the kind that can potentially give you the massive market returns - is extremely low.

2\. The breakthroughs that will happen will most likely come from the big companies with massive budgets and talented research teams.

AI startup are fighting a losing battle.

<comment><USER11> What you said has always been true, in every field.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook - all of them competed with big companies when they started and none of them relied on any single paradigm changing breakthrough, yet they managed to change paradigms.</comment></comment></comment>


Startups Don't Die, They Commit Suicide (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/27/startups-don%E2%80%99t-die-they-commit-suicide/

<comment><USER2> Don't know about startups... but definitely seems true for romantic relationships (by and large).</comment>


FBI examined Google records to see if anyone had knowledge of Guccifer persona - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/kpoulsen/status/1255585290380443648 <comment><USER2> Everybody's worst nightmares when it comes to surveillance keep coming true. I've started to suspect the "I got nothing to hide" attitude that many privacy advocates criticize is at some level a defense mechanism for the realization that you're completely owned and completely powerless. In other words, they know that if they really sat down and thought about what was in their Google searches, DNS lookups, or credit card purchases they would be very disturbed, so they choose not to think about it to maintain sanity. People are smarter than we give them credit for.

Because many on HN know and consciously recognize the facts here, my question would be: how do you all cope with surveillance?

<comment><USER3> As an Aussie it's becoming increasingly clear that my wish to run my own servers in order to maintain some semblance of privacy is quite likely going to become a massive liability to my freedom, if the current state of affairs continues much longer. To be clear, by hosting a website I'm liable to "authorities" wanting to access everything anyway. By using a website in this increasingly fascist world, it becomes increasingly likely that my websites/mail servers will look "interesting", simply because I'm not "toeing the line"

<comment><USER4> > _To be clear, by hosting a website I 'm liable to "authorities" wanting to > access everything anyway_

In America at least, a search of this nature has to be very narrow in order to be valid, even the secret ones.

<comment><USER5> Court orders are a last resort. Often, law enforcement will just ask providers to kindly share the information they want access to, and the providers comply. No warrants needed.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but asking politely is hardly the mark of tyranny, and has nothing to do with the sort of scenario I'm replying on.

<comment><USER6> "Oh, your new office building looks nice. Did your construction firm get all the necessary permits? Are you sure? All of them? Oh, and I see you have a lot of new employees. A lot of them. I bet it would tie up your HR department for quite a while if the INS came by and requested documentation that all those employees are authorized to work in the US, wouldn't it?

"Anyway, I've come to ask whether you could do a favor for us."

<comment><USER7> "Say, that's a nice business you have there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it."

And it's the organised crime that is associated with mafia tactics...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The most likely explanation here is that Google was conducting its own investigation into Russian disinformation and discovered the suspicious search queries. They then turned the anonymous query records over to the FBI with the understanding that they would then generate the necessary court order to request Google de-anonymize them. That is why the second sentence explicitly says "records from Google."

I've done this dance before. It is the cleanest way to turn over evidence of a crime that is discovered in a private investigation.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's the scary part to me. They say they identified searches from certain networks and make it sound like those were the ONLY searches for those terms. However, it seems obvious they took his IP address, went through his search history, picked relevant terms, and presented it like they started by finding out who searched for specific terms.

I call bullshit. There's no way he's the only one that searched for those terms in that time period, right?

<comment><USER8> At the time the terms likely did not have statistically significant search volume. I'm not going to say he was the only one, but the other three might have been people who then corrected their search from "dcleaks" to "dc voltage leak" or something.

If you search for "[government agency] mailing address" three days before they receive anthrax in the mail, it isn't a slam dunk case. But if it was also mailed from your zip code, you had placed 6 phone calls to that agency in the prior month, etc. it makes you a pretty damn good candidate.

<comment><USER9> What was the search volume? That's relevant and they should have to list it.

<comment><USER8> I don't know. But everything the FBI got from Google was also given to the defense. If it was a popular set of terms, the defense would have raised that argument.

<comment><USER10> It wouldn't be popular if they also filtered it to a suspect's geoip range or other qualifiers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow. Quote:

> But I can't think of a prior case where the feds unambiguously acknowledged > using Google search logs this way: to, apparently, zero in on people who > searched the wrong word at the wrong time.

<comment><USER12> They're not actually using it to zero in on someone, though. What they're doing is using it to build a case against someone they already suspect: Roger Stone.

<comment><USER13> Today, sure. Tomorrow, it may be what OP said.

<comment><USER8> Today, federal police randomly snatch protesters off the streets in to unmarked vans. Tomorrow, who knows...

You can always make a slippery slope argument, but it doesn't make it reasonable.

<comment><USER10> I can't imagine what you are trying to insinuate.

What's the difference between a trend and a slippery slope?

<comment><USER12> All changes are trends. Assuming that the trend will extrapolate to its logical extreme without supporting evidence is unreasonable, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of reading "Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter" where they used his real correspondence to make it look convincing like he was some kind of American vampire hunter. It was amazing.

The reality is that when you have unrestricted access to anyone's life, you can make them a criminal, whether by framing or surreptitiously surveillance. There's a reason why a principle of our legal system is that you must first have _reasonable_ suspicion of a crime before you investigate.

</comment><comment><USER15> There is a glaring legal disconnect with popular web services, where they are not responsible for the content you post, yet the content does not really belong to you, for if it did belong to you, the service would have no right to give it up to police, that information being your property. This double standard allows tech giants to profit precisely at the expense of our fundamental rights. For further proof, ask yourself why they can arbitrarilly censor users despite claiming no responsibility for that content, because "they can do what they want with their platform". It is one or the other: they act like tbey own and are responsible for content, but without the legal ramifications of that reaponsibility.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can someone answer whether this includes deleted search histories? I specifically go through and delete my search history. I've never searched anything illegal to my knowledge. But according to this you never know what will be illegal in the future.

<comment><USER16> It does. Deleting your search history disassociates it from your Google account, but it is still associated with the first 24 bits of your IP address (this is considered anonymized because there are usually many different people who use IPs in that range.)

<comment><USER9> Anonymous enough that it doesn't prove you're innocent, but specific enough for the FBI to use it to identify you. Awesome! /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can someone ELI5 this for me and explain why I should/shouldn't be outraged about it? Neither the link nor the existing commentary seems to help.

<comment><USER18> Don't bother (or maybe bother if you really want to get into both "US politics vs. Roger Stone" or "FBI/Google vs privacy of the individual")

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I mean you can see from Google Trends that a ton of searches for Guccifer were happening in that time period: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=guccifer)

</comment><comment><USER20> I suspect these IP address ranges are used for Mobile data as well so probably shared between multiple users. I recognised the TMO IP because I've used TMO 4G proxies that have IP addresses in a similar range. It should disturb you that someone in Florida may have searched for 'wrong' terms and then that was used as justification to investigate another person in Florida who happened to share the same IP range as the wrong searcher.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is why switching from google to duckduckgo isn't as effective as switching to a search engine based in europe.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sigh.

"Don't be evil" presumes a lot when there are organizations that have machine guns and legal jurisdiction over you, and a public, decades-long track record of doing evil.

<comment><USER23> TBH, I think this is the wrong situation to trot out "Don't be evil."

Law enforcement has _always_ been able to subpoena this type of information. From phone companies, credit card companies, ISPs, etc. If Google wants to legally operate in the United States then they don't have any choice but to comply.

The bigger issue, IMO, is that nobody has any idea who else has access to this information. Google can share this information with anybody. It's entirely on good faith that people trust them not to.

<comment><USER2> Here's what non-evil thing to do with this information is: don't collect it. If you collect, don't store it. If you store it, try to de-identify it.

<comment><USER24> And when the government finds out that they can't conduct investigations, they'll just pass regulations that require collection of data.

Take private owner gun sales. You have to collect the information of the person you're selling it to. You can't _not collect it_ , and if you take the attitude that you won't, you yourself can be held criminally liable.

If we had cryptoanarchy -- unbreakable encryption, with everything on device, anonymous, and any server services using some future form of fully homomorphic encryption, and with financial transactions done with pseudo-anonymous cryptocoin, you'd find this to be a very unstable situation, and most world governments, even European governments, would quickly pass laws to require the ability to track identity, de-anonymize, and subpoena logs.

There is no way any of the Western democracies are going to move to a system where all records of activity are ephemeral and un-subpoenable.

<comment><USER25> You're right – but at least when the government passes regulations that require collection of data, there is a public debate and a public record of precisely what must be collected and why.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data alignment for speed: myth or reality? (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2012/05/31/data-alignment-for-speed-myth-or-reality/ <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that Daniel was testing scalar loads and stores up to 64-bits (8B). Unaligned loads for 16B and 32B vectors can have slightly more of a slowdown when they cross 64B cachelines. Unaligned stores across cachelines are somewhat worse, but usually not enough to really hurt you.

But _note bene_ , unaligned vector stores that cross 4K pageline boundaries are so slow that they can destroy performance despite their rarity. Here's what the Intel Architecture Optimization Guide has to say:

      11.6.3 Prefer Aligned Stores Over Aligned Loads
      There are cases where it is possible to align only a subset
      of the processed data buffers. In these cases,
      aligning data buffers used for store operations usually
      yields better performance than aligning data
      buffers used for load operations.

      Unaligned stores are likely to cause greater performance
      degradation than unaligned loads, since there
      is a very high penalty on stores to a split cache-line that
      crosses pages. This penalty is estimated at 150
      cycles. Loads that cross a page boundary are executed at
      retirement. In Example 11-12, unaligned store
      address can affect SAXPY performance for 3 unaligned
      addresses to about one quarter of the aligned
      case.

[http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...](http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures- optimization-manual.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> At a glance this appears to be running linear reads of memory with different alignments and performing the same work. Thus the only difference between the two for any algorithm which fits within (even L1 cache in this case) would be a single additional memory read.

<comment><USER4> exactly, his "unaligned" test does exactly ONE unaligned read per whole array .....

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not mentioned how that test program was compiled nor assembler code is given. Might be some kind of an optimization made by the compiler. At least on ARM, unaligned access really does affect performance negatively, even the company itself[1] states that: _" [Unaligned] Accesses typically take a greater number of cycles to complete compared to a naturally aligned transfer."_

1\. [http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ddi0333h/Cd...](http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ddi0333h/Cdffhdje.html)

<comment><USER6> The first line of the code shows how it was compiled.

The end of the essay says "Recent ARM processors do support unaligned memory accesses though it is unclear what the performance penalty is." and points to basically the same documentation you did.

<comment><USER2> _The first line of the code shows how it was compiled._

'kbart' does have a point: it's always risky talk about hardware behaviour as if C++ code actually specifies what processor is doing. And while the first line shows the flags, one could argue that without the version number for g++ you still don't know what the compiler has done. But in this case, it does seem that gcc-4.7 and gcc-4.8 both produce more less the code that you'd expect when compiling with -O2.

But to show that compiler behaviour is not just an idle worry, icpc 14.0.3 -O3 produces much faster times by realizing it can combine the loops and completely omit the reads. And g++ -O3? Oh, it segfaults, because it tries to optimize to a 128-bit 'movdqa' (Move Double-Quadword Aligned) that requires 16B alignment.

While unhelpful, I think it's technically legal for it to do this, as (incredibly?) reading an unaligned int directly from memory is actually undefined behaviour. But I guess I'd prefer if it just used the equally performant 'movdqu' (Move Double-Quadword Unaligned) instead, so it worked rather than crashing.

Separately, here's a more recent post coming to the same general conclusion as Daniel: [http://cdglove98.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-performance-of- una...](http://cdglove98.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-performance-of-unaligned- simd-loads.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An offset counted in single-digit bytes doesn't seem to be particularly 'unaligned' to me.

<comment><USER8> It's the offset from a memory location at a multiple of 4/8 bytes. So you only get 3/7 different states of unalignedness. Unaligned memory accesses below the byte granularity are quite rare, I guess.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Contacting companies whose websites are bad/ugly? - <AUTHOR> 2 points by botera 2 hours ago | past | web | discuss Hi everyone! I have question for freelance/agency web developers what do you think about contacting companies who have bad/old/ugly websites to offer them web dev services as freelancer?<p>Have you ever done something like that? Thank you <comment><USER2> Post your email address, maybe some YC readers may also be interested in making their websites look better.</comment>


Sellyourmac and shyp - <AUTHOR> I'm trying `sellyourmac.com` and `shyp.com` together for 1st time. So far it's great. I got $200 more for an old 2011 iMac I want to throw out than I thought I would and I don't have to package it. Shyp comes to my location and boxes it for me. <comment><USER2> They are offering $1125 for a MacBook Pro (in good condition) that I paid almost $3000 for last January. Doesn't sound like a good deal at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> well every situation is different, but this was an old 2011 imac I was hoping to get $300 for. They offered me $500. And Shyp. Wow. I didn't even have to package the box.</comment></comment>


Android Emulator – AMD Processor and Hyper-V Support - <AUTHOR> https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/07/android-emulator-amd-processor-hyper-v.html <comment><USER3> This is enabled by some new APIs we've been working on in Windows: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/api/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/api/). These allow third-party use of the Windows hypervisor from unprivileged user- mode processes (such as qemu). This is similar in spirit to KVM's ioctl interface and macOS's Hypervisor Framework.

<comment><USER4> > _and macOS 's Hypervisor Framework_

Tangentially and asking the crowd:

What products on the market use macOS's Hypervisor Framework? Virtualbox apparently doesn't [1], but Docker For Mac does [2]...

Edit: and QEMU added experimental support in 2.12 [3], released in April

[1] [https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/14217](https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/14217)

[2] [https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/docker- toolbox/](https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/docker-toolbox/)

[3] [https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/2.12#Host_support](https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/2.12#Host_support)

<comment><USER5> There was Veertu Desktop, but seems that it's dead project now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's worth mentioning that the AVD (emulator) always worked on Linux - it uses KVM there and has no problems with AMD chips.

The issue was on Windows (and macOS) where it used Intel HAXM which obviously didn't work with AMD cores.

<comment><USER7> > The issue was on Windows (and macOS) where it used Intel HAXM which > obviously didn't work with AMD cores.

there weren't really that many "official" mac products with amd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft's WHPX is closed source: we are stuck with an incomplete instruction emulator, no guest debugging support and other shortcomings. All of this locked to a single host OS. Same thing goes for Apple's HVF. Each vendor seems to care only about their own software and hardware.

I'm afraid that the ecosystem of hypervisor APIs are going the same way as with graphics APIs, e.g. _thanks_ to Direct3D and Metal. I believe we should disregard such APIs in favor of cross-platform open alternatives such as Intel's HAXM: Support for Linux and AMD SVM is planned on my side, as it serves as basis for my PS4 LLE emulator.

<comment><USER3> I just want to point out that you are free to use your own, more complete or faster instruction emulator with WHP. We exposed an API for the one we use in Hyper-V to make WHP easier to use out of the box, but it has no special advantages or hooks into our hypervisor.

I'm curious what you mean about no guest debugging support. Also curious about the other shortcomings so that we can prioritize appropriately. We have only just shipped our first version.

On API divergence, it's an interesting point. MacOS, Windows, HAXM, and KVM all have slightly different philosophies about what a hypervisor should do. Maybe over time we can work toward more convergence.

<comment><USER8> _> I just want to point out that you are free to use your own, more complete or faster instruction emulator with WHP._

True. This is an unimportant rant on my side, since it would be nice to have a complete emulator out-of-the-box. But it's true it can be solved in userspace (EDIT: now I wonder how could we inject exceptions back into the guest, should they occur during emulation in userspace).

 _> I'm curious what you mean about no guest debugging support._

This would allow the host to introduce software/hardware breakpoints and single-stepping through the guest. This is extremely relevant to debug bootloaders/microkernels, or in my case, closed-source kernels that do not support debugging. Some hypervisors, e.g. KVM (and soon HAXM), support this: check "KVM_DEBUG_GUEST" at [https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt)

 _> Also curious about the other shortcomings so that we can prioritize appropriately._

The API provides no way to add/override/hook arbitrary MSRs while handling guests's rdmsr/wrmsr instructions, or override CPUID leaves/subleaves. This is required to run certain kernels are designed to run in specific x86 processors. Of course, most hypervisors lack this feature and I understand that WHPX is fairly recent so I'm not complaining about the lack of it. My issue is rather that closed-source implementations are not helpful for researchers since shortcomings like these means the whole library is no longer usable for us. Comparatively adding such features to (say) KVM or HAXM takes just few hours.

Also, don't get me wrong. I feel it's incredibly valuable having finally an API allowing developers benefit from Hyper-V in userland. I'm just concerned about the current trend of hypervisor APIs, as every vendor eventually just ships a closed hypervisor library for its own platform, and developers have to put up with 5 different ways of doing the same thing.

(PS: I've invested quite some time on HAXM, but I'm __not __affiliated with Intel in any way)

<comment><USER9> > The API provides no way to add/override/hook arbitrary MSRs while handling > guests's rdmsr/wrmsr instructions

Isn't that what this is for?

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/api/hypervis...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/api/hypervisor-platform/funcs/msraccess)

Or are you looking for a higher-level API or something?

edit: and for CPUID:

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/api/hypervis...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/virtualization/api/hypervisor-platform/funcs/cpuidaccess)

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's exactly what I was looking for! I might overlooked it last time I checked around May (was that documented at that time?). Thanks a lot for pointing it out. :-)

<comment><USER3> Yes, I was frantically adding some of these features at the end of the release, so the docs came a little later :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Finally, I've been avoiding AMD processors for the better half of the decade for exactly this reason. No reason anymore to continue so, especially in lieu of the recent security issues that have mostly affected Intel CPUs. Great work here Android team!

<comment> m-p-3 And they really catched up on Intel performance-wise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great stuff, I am so happy we've gotten this support on Windows when Hyper-V is there. Kudos to everyone involved across borders that made it happen.

FYI for anyone using Visual Studio & Xamarin, we've added support for this in Visual Studio 2017 15.8 Preview 1 or higher with the Mobile development with .NET (Xamarin) workload installed.

Miguel posted details in this blog post: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2018/05/08/hyp...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2018/05/08/hyper- v-android-emulator-support/)

Happy coding folks.

(disclaimer - I work at Microsoft)

</comment><comment><USER12> Still doesn't solve the core problem with the Android emulator - performance. Android needs a "simulator", not an emulator running the entire stack. iOS handles this wonderfully.

<comment><USER13> >Still doesn't solve the core problem with the Android emulator - <USER2>

When was the last time you used the emulator?

<comment><USER14> I'm not OP, but I last used it a couple of years ago and it was pretty slow (I was using an i5-2500).

Has it improved markedly recently, and if so, how?

<comment><USER13> It now uses Intel's HAXM on Windows to increase performance tremendously. It also allows for the saving of snapshots to launch the emulator almost instantly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


You Are Good Enough / Eres Lo Suficientemente Bueno - <AUTHOR> http://donpottinger.net/blog/2015/02/16/good-enough-lo-suficientemente-bueno.html

<comment> D-Train The Meme GIFs are on point!

Reminds that at end of the day, if you just try, you can surprise yourself. I don't think I push myself enough to surprise myself as to what my true capabilities are.

However, it's only when we push ourselves and put ourselves in foreign territory do we have a chance of rapid learning. It's like learning through immersion.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there no standard way to display PDF documents in all browsers? - <AUTHOR>

You'd think that it would be possible to display PDF documents in web browsers by now.
But there is not yet any way to build a web application that integrates PDF documents, because it is not safe to assume that any browser can display PDF.
Why is this?  Surely it's in the interests of Adobe to ensure PDF documents can be seamlessly integrated into websites? <comment><USER2> PDF _is_ a standard, see ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008.

And Adobe has done some work to make it work everywhere. There is a PDF plugin for the big three OS's (and Solaris). However, no one ships an OS with this plugin installed by default.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is no assurance that any plugins would be available on all browsers on all major platforms. Sometimes it is political not technological (like Flash on iOS)

</comment><comment><USER4> scribd does do HTML5 and flash. They do provide an api, but I'm not sure how useful, then get embed code.</comment>


LinkedIn to Open Platform in Response to Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/24/linkedin-to-open-platform-in-response-to-facebook/ <comment><USER2> I think this is where the non-hacker founder can get completely trounced by a hacker-founder.

As smart as the guy is, Reid Hoffman has dragged his feet on letting people insert third party applications even since MySpace widgets started exploding. I don't think he really gets the leverage these platforms give a programmer, because he's not one.

Hoffman was also an investor and on the board of Friendster. Another company that totally missed the boat on becoming a social platform.

Now perhaps he finally is starting to get it. Too bad he's not a hacker and is therefore at the mercy of his development team, which is going to need 9 months to release anything.

<comment><USER3> This isn't really a hacker/non-hacker issue, its just an issue of having vision, and having good people with good ideas. A company that relies solely on its founder for innovation is not a healthy company.

I don't have much love for third party widgets. Their inclusion on Facebook has cluttered up the service. For people who are using websites as tools to accomplish tasks, I don't see 3rd party widgets as a compelling feature. Like Facebook, LinkedIn is also a social network, but it differs as it is fundamentally a tool rather than a toy.

So far widgets have been toys, some of them excellent toys, but toys none the less. Its a hell of a genie's bottle to open up in exchange for apps like TopFriends, iLike, and the option to draw a mustache on your friend's profile picture. I realize that the creation of tool-widgets is possible, but I am still waiting to see if the effort of developing a public API is worth the return in tool functionality (LinkedIn will probably survive without the inclusion of TopConnections, and ConnectionsIdTotallySleepWith apps ;).

To address a few other points, Friendster failed to get on the boat because it had immense technical problems leading to its stability/usability plummeting like Wall Street trader jumping out of a window on black Friday. They probably would have also missed the boat on developing an API, but this is what happens at poorly lead companies: they fail catastrophically. My last thought is that after a company becomes sufficiently large, having a hacker leader who wants to build the public API by himself may be less of an asset than a disaster. Facebook released their API quickly, and they released it incomplete and with shoddy support and documentation. They've happened to get a blankcheck for good publicity... but others may not be so fortunate.</comment></comment>


U.S. lawmakers propose $22.8B in aid to semiconductor industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-semiconductors-idUSKBN23H39M <comment><USER2> Next generation computing is worth way way more than $23B, Congress should invest much more. I'm hopeful about the $100B NSF proposal.

[0] [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/us-lawmakers- unveil-...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/us-lawmakers-unveil- bold-100-billion-plan-remake-nsf)

<comment><USER3> I'm curious what Europe would say about this move. I like it for sure, but it might invite accusations of subsidization.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not even an accusation is it? Are government subsidies for chip makers prohibited or frowned upon?

<comment><USER4> Apparently only when china does it. Imagine the hypocritical hysteria if this was about the chinese government. Not just from the social media propagandists but also our elected leaders - many of them in congress supporting this "aid".

The internet was a government project. Silicon Valley is a government creation. The internet nor silicon valley exists without government funding. Government investment can be a good thing as long as they allow space for the private sector.

The EU should also look into subsidizing their tech stack ( hardware and software ) like they did with Airbus. Hopefully india will follow soon after and eventually ASEAN and africa. The more competition and diversity of options, the better.

<comment><USER5> Uh, what? China is already making state investments in domestic chip fabrication; it was in the news recently and even discussed on HN.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/china-semiconductor- smic/chi...](https://www.reuters.com/article/china-semiconductor-smic/china- semiconductor-fab-smic-gets-22-bln-investment-from-govt-funds-amid-global- chip-spat-idUSL4N2D019Y)

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/04/china-ramps-up-own- semicondu...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/04/china-ramps-up-own- semiconductor-industry-amid-the-trade-war.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't trust China with very much, but I'm also a proponent of free trade, generally. I'm not sure how I feel about it

<comment><USER7> Governments all around the world push economic sectors with aid... This isn't anti free-trade, this is what governments do to boost economic activity.

<comment><USER8> it's surely related to anti-free-trade because the US is in the process of prohibiting semiconductor firms of doing business with Chinese companies, which is hitting their revenue.

This isn't just R&D spending, it's also plainly a bribe from the government to the private sector while it interrupts supply chains.</comment></comment></comment>


Fund me and I'll remove the ads from core-JS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/balibebas/core-bs <comment><USER2> The author Denis Pushkarev (zloirock) of core-js is an example of what not to do as an author of a popular library; he's spamming people's install logs with his own job advertisement and blocking anyone on github who express opinions other than his own views. The advertising might also be a violations of NPM's policies. Never ignore community feedback, particularly if your package is being used as a dependency for thousands of other packages.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> more info here: [https://github.com/zloirock/core- js/issues?q=is%3Aissue+spam...](https://github.com/zloirock/core- js/issues?q=is%3Aissue+spam+is%3Aclosed)</comment>


Is Tokaido dead? - <AUTHOR>

https://github.com/tokaido/tokaidoapp<p>The last commit was 5 months ago and only a "prerelease" was ever available. <comment><USER2> As with the Greek gods in the Martian Chronicles: the answer to your question is indubitably no, since you, at least, still have interest in it and since the source is available on github. However it is apparently comatose. All you need do is start working on the code and it will magically spring back to life.

One of the many advantages of open source.

However: why did you ask on HN and not ask the lead developer directly?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yehuda Katz's response to this same question 7 days ago on twitter:

[https://twitter.com/wycats/status/415598092918853632](https://twitter.com/wycats/status/415598092918853632)

I'm sure if you followed up with him he could provide more details. The sub- project tokaido-build seems active and unblocked.</comment>