Comparing Google's TPUv2 against Nvidia's V100 on ResNet-50 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.riseml.com/comparing-google-tpuv2-against-nvidia-v100-on-resnet-50-c2bbb6a51e5e <comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing and very insightful. Guess the TPUs are the real deal. About 1/2 the cost for similar performance.

Would assume Google is able to do that because of the less power required.

I am actually more curious to get a paper on the new speech NN Google is using. Suppose to be 16k samples a second through a NN is hard to imagine how they did that and was able to roll it out as you would think the cost would be prohibitive.

You are ultimately competing with a much less compute heavy solution.

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing- Clo...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-Cloud-Text- to-Speech-powered-by-Deepmind-WaveNet-technology.html)

Suspect this was only possible because of the TPUs.

Can't think of anything else where controlling the entire stack including the silicon would be more important than AI applications.

<comment><USER5> Half the cost? Where are you reading that? Yeah on demand rental in AWS is expensive, but both long term and buying V100 yourself is significantly cheaper. Cloud companies have pretty fat margins on on demand rentals.

You can't buy a TPU, it's a cloud only thing. They also show it's not a huge difference in both perf and time to converge (albeit only one architecture)

I would say kudos to V100 and this benchmark that breaks the TPU hype.

<comment><USER4> The chart has 6.7 per hour for 3186 images Google and 12.2 per hour for 3128 AWS.

Or maybe reading it wrong?

That is close to half has much to use Google is it not?

BTW, The TPUs are also about twice as fast also.

Sounds like Google is pretty far ahead of Nvidia. Which really just makes sense as Google does the entire stack and just going to have the data to optimize the silicon.

About half the cost is hype?

I want in the cloud and not have to deal with updating, etc. Would think most are the same for anything of any scale. Could not imagine any longer building up rigs and dealing with all the issues. Plus much harder to scale.

<comment><USER6> It's more a comparison of AWS vs. Google Cloud pricing than Nvidia vs. TPUv2.

<comment><USER4> Strongly disagree. If Google is able to offer at about 1/2 the cost using their own silicon versus AWS using Nvidia that is all about the silicon difference.

But we also have the V1 TPU paper and can see the TPUs are able to use less joules per inference compared to an older Nvidia architecture. Was not that close. Just makes sense Google V2 TPUs would do the same.

Hope Google does a V3 TPU and then will share a V2 TPU paper like they did on V1 of the TPUs.

What is far more impressive of the TPUs is

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing- Clo...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-Cloud-Text- to-Speech-powered-by-Deepmind-WaveNet-technology.html)

If really doing 16k a second through a NN and at a price you can offer generally now that is incredible. I want this paper even more so.

<comment><USER7> Maybe, maybe not. They have the advantage that they make the hardware, so they're not paying as much retail as nvidia is charging them for their cards. I don't think there's any way you can say the TPU is cheaper compared to buying your own system. If Google decides to release it to the public, that's a different story. Also, keep in mind that Google allows you to mix and match the CPU core count to GPU, whereas AWS doesn't. It's possible that the Google cloud price with fewer CPU cores will be much cheaper than the AWS instance.

<comment><USER4> That is true. But the cost of running is where all the cost is at really not so much in making the chips.

Yes I can say it is a lot cheaper. That is what this article is all about.

You can do about twice the images per dollar using the TPUs with GCP versus using Nvidia with AWS.

Or what am I missing?

BTW, Google has released to the general public. What are you talking about?

"Google's AI chips are now open for public use"

[https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/12/googles-ai-chips-are- now-...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/12/googles-ai-chips-are-now-open-for- public-use/)

<comment><USER7> You misunderstood. They released them to the public _on GCP only_. Nvidia's cards are released to the public as a hardware device that you can customize around. Big difference.

<comment><USER4> Yes in the cloud as you would expect in 2018. Available to the general public.

<comment><USER7> They announced in 2016 they had TPUs. So no, I would not expect that 2 full years later they're just now being available in the public cloud. These are not new products to them; they likely just don't want to deal with supporting them in different configurations.

<comment><USER8> > they likely just don't want to deal with supporting them in different > configurations.

It is a lot of work. But mainly that TPUv1 only did inference while TPUv2 does training+inference.

<comment><USER7> Exactly my point. It's a lot of work. That's the reason why Nvidia has such a large team doing it, and also why they spent 3 billion dollars to build the V100 ASIC.

<comment><USER4> Big difference is Google does the entire stack and also has scale to conceptually be able to create a better solution. But that is theoretical.

Here we can see the results where the Google TPU gets almost twice result per dollar over Nvidia. But then Google should be able to iterate more quickly.

Take the move from using CNN to using capsule networks. The idea for Capsules came from Hinton and Google is going to be there first to optimize in hardware. This is the benefit of playing in all layers of the stack.

Or the using NN for text to speech and offering at scale. Google just has inherent advantages over Nvidia and now we get to see a little more concrete results. But hope we get a lot more similar and see if the Google advantage holds up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi, author here. The motivation for this article came out of the HN discussion on a previous post ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16447096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16447096)). There was a lot of valuable feedback - thanks for that.

Happy to answer questions!

<comment><USER10> I found it interesting that they are so close together in performance - I mean what are the odds that they end up within 2% of each other?

<comment><USER4> The TPUs are doing almost 2x the images for the same cost.

That is not all that close is it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Slower alternative: "fastai with @pytorch on @awscloud is currently the fastest to train Imagenet on GPU, fastest on a single machine (faster than Intel-caffe on 64 machines!), and fastest on public infrastructure (faster than @TensorFlow on a TPU!) Big thanks to our students that helped with this." \- [https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/988852083796291584](https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/988852083796291584)

<comment><USER12> One machine with 8 V100 GPUs. If you consider one TPU pod a single machine the TPU is faster. Those numbers also show that 8 GPUs are slower than 8 TPUs (so same conclusion as the article)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> An important hidden cost here is coding a model which can take advantage of mixed-precision training. It is not trivial: you have to empirically discover scaling factors for loss functions, at the very least.

It's great that there is now wider choice of (pre-trained?) models formulated for mixed-precision training.

When I was comparing Titan V (~V100) and 1080ti 5 months ago, I was only able to get 90% increase in forward-pass speed for Titan V (same batch-size), even with mixed-precision. And that was for an attention-heavy model, where I expected Titan V to show its best. Admittedly, I was able to use almost double the batch-size on Titan V, when doing mixed-precision. And Titan V draws half the power of 1080ti too :)

At the end my conclusion was: I am not a researcher, I am a practitioner - <USER2> want to do transfer learning or just use existing pre-trained models - <USER3> tweaking them. For that, tensor cores give no benefit.

<comment><USER14> How did you get your hands on Titan V 5 months ago? I still can't find it anywhere in retail in EU...

<comment><USER13> It was in stock on and off and I was able to order it directly from Nvidia US.

After 59 days of playing with it, I sent it back (initiated return on 30th day, after I already figured out it doesn't live up to the hype, then had another 30 days to actually send it back).

With $3,000 I can buy 4 1080ti's, while only two are necessary to beat Titan V (in Titan V's best game). I only bought one though. NowInStock.net helped with buying 1080ti directly from Nvidia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nvidia is currently in cashing out phase. They have monopoly and money flows in effortlessly. The cost performance ratio reflects this.

AMD will enter the game soon once they get their software working, Intel will follow.

I suspect that Nvidia will respond with its own specialized machine learning and inference chips to match the cost/performance ratio. As long as Nvidia can maintain high manufacturing volumes and small performance edge, they can still make good profits.

<comment><USER4> "The cost performance ratio reflects this."

But the TPUs are half the cost per this article?

Plus Google does the entire stack and can better optimize the hardware versus Nvidia. So it seem Google can improve faster I would think.

If there ever was a huge advantage doing the entire stack it is with neural networks.

A perfect example is Google new speech doing 16k samples a second with a NN.

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing- Clo...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-Cloud-Text- to-Speech-powered-by-Deepmind-WaveNet-technology.html)

Do not think Google could offer this service as a competitive cost without the TPUs.

This new method is replacing the method that was far less compute intensive so to offer at a competitive price requires lowering compute cost which suspect is only possible with the TPUs.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what you mean by google does the entire stack. Nvidia writes all of the major CUDA libraries used behind the scenes in the NN libraries, such as cuDNN, cuBLAS, etc. Nvidia can likely improve their hardware significantly faster/more efficiently than Google can because their entire business depends on it. Google has incentive for improving their TPU for internal use, but they don't make any money by selling TPU time on GCP yet.

<comment><USER8> > I'm not sure what you mean by google does the entire stack.

Consider that Google has some of the best machine learning researchers, compiler engineers, hardware engineers, and infrastructure in the business working on this.

<comment><USER7> Huh? Machine learning and infrastructure Engineers, yes. Compiler and Hardware engineers? No. What gives you reason to believe they have a lead in either of those departments other than they have a lot of money? They're forced to use the same foundry as Nvidia, and their Hardware team is likely significantly smaller.

<comment><USER4> Google been buying up AI resources well before anyone else and has the strongest and deepest team at this point.

It is why so many of the break throughs have come from Google. Great example is winning at Go almost a decade earlier than anyone thought possible.

They probably two of the strongest teams with one the Brain team and then the Deepmind team. But all the other engineers and infrastructure is first rate at Google.

Really at this point do not think the $100B cash is as important as Google already built the team and now experinced resources are far more difficult to get.

The other advantage for Google is their ability to attract the top engineers in addition.

Google just got started a lot earlier on all of this.

<comment><USER7> Google got started a lot earlier on this? Did you read what you are saying? Nvidia has been making hardware longer than Google has been a company. No, Google does not have a better hardware team. Google has the luxury of making a device that is used for a single purpose that they control. Nvidia made a device that can be used for far more and works on commodity hardware. By the way, deepmind/alphago uses Nvidia GPUs, so that was an extremely bad example.

<comment><USER4> Hardware optimize for NN. Nvidia dominate focus had been graphics. Big difference which we can see the results in this article.

Plus benefits not having the baggage that Nvidia would have.

But never going to be able to use a TPU for graphics.

In the end it is about results.

<comment><USER7> Tensor cores are hardware optimized for NN. You call it baggage, Nvidia calls it extra revenue. Because some people need double precision, and those people are willing to pay a lot of money. So the V100 continues to be the cheapest way to train and do inference on NN because you can actually amortize the server cost over time. With tpu, you pay the hourly price forever. TPU are better only in the case of NN jobs that are short in length or you don't have the capital to buy a server. Anything longer, you can buy a Titan v and come out far ahead.

By the way, the Tesla cards have no graphics output, so I'm sure why you'd say they have graphics baggage.

<comment><USER4> The problem for Nvidia is they do NOT do the entire stack. So Google has the ability to better optimize and here we are seeing those results as using TPUs is about 1/2 the price of Nvidia hardware.

Baggage is a company thing. Google really has been an AI company since in the late 90s when Larry Page was asked about using AI to improve search and he replied he was using search to make AI happen.

Ha! When you amortize you are still spending money and you saying this really bothers me and is such a problem.

Too many look at things like you do and why companies get into problems. Capitalizing is not magic.

BTW, Google is also going to be able to iterate much quicker as the AI breakthroughs happen and come out with new versions that should stay well ahead of Nvidia.

The dynamics of the chip business have changed. Use to be companies bought chips from someone and then put them in to servers and sold the servers.

The problem is the company making the chips are NOT running the chips and do not have any skin in the game or the data needed to improve.

Now we have companies like Google making the chips and also running the chips and why we see power footprint being the focus far more than the past.

We will see all the big operations including Amazon make their own chips more and more.

A perfect example if Capsule networks replacing some uses of CNNs. Google with Hinton developed the Capsule network approach and will be supporting it far faster then you will see from Nvidia.

Then there is the canonical framework for AI being TF.

All of this was theoretical advantageous for Google and now we get to see they appear to be real with the pricing of the TPUs being about half of the cost of using Nvidia.

<comment><USER7> You still haven't given a single example of what you mean by "doing the entire stack". I'm assuming that's because you don't have one?

You seemed to have completely missed why Nvidia's stock has gone up 17x in 4 years while google only 3x. The dynamics of the chip business have not changed; you are focusing on a single market, DNN, which is a small piece of the entire science/engineering community. Google made a chip that accelerates DNN. They also chose not to make an API to use that hardware with outside TF. So if you could buy a tpu and put it in your own server, it would beat the V100 in performance/watt. You can't do that, so nvidia wins, because I can buy a V100, and in 51 days the price I bought it for ($8K) has already been burned through in GCP. If you need me to do the math to help you realize that now your only recurring cost on the v100 (power) is more than 100x less than the TPU, I can do that for you. But hopefully you understand now that the TPU is for a niche market outside of google, and it will never be a large source of revenue for them at $6.50/hour.

TF is not exclusive to google. Nvidia has engineers working on TF.

Your capsule example is again extremely poor. You think google can respin an asic quicker than nvidia? Not only does history say the exact opposite, but they both use TSMC.

<comment><USER8> > Nvidia's stock has gone up 17x in 4 years while google only 3x

Not sure the market cap or the P/E are apples to apples there.

Also:

> [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/secretive-chinese-bitcoin- > mi...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/secretive-chinese-bitcoin-mining- > company-may-have-made-as-much-money-as-nvidia-last-year.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >For GPUs, there are further interesting options to consider next to buying. For example, Cirrascale offers monthly rentals of a server with four V100 GPUs for around $7.5k (~$10.3 per hour). However, further benchmarks are required to allow a direct comparison since the hardware differs from that on AWS (type of CPU, memory, NVLink support etc.).

Can't you just buy some 1080s for cheaper than this. I understand there is electricity and hosting costs, but cloud computing seems expensive compared to buying equipment.

<comment><USER17> Yes, you can. The problem starts when "you" are a large company -- NVidia restricts "datacenter" use of consumer GPUs (see previous HN discussion of that one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983587) ). A single Titan V is somewhere in the 90% range of a V100 at less than 1/3 the cost, and a 1080ti, if you can find one, likely offers a slightly better price/performance spot. 4-GPU training may suffer due the lack of NVlink, but not enough for it to matter too much. As you scale, though, the lack of NVlink will hurt more. And, of course, all of these things come with a capex vs opex tradeoff, and a sysadmin vs cloud tradeoff, that will appeal differently to different situations.

<comment><USER18> Hire people to buy 1080 in retail. This problem is solvable easily.

<comment><USER17> It's not about getting the cards (though supplies are limited because of cryptocurrency mining, but you could buy Titan V's off the shelf in batches of 2). It's about whether or not you're big enough of a target for Nvidia's lawyers if you violate the agreement and actually build a datacenter out with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Excellent! Thanks for these numbers, I wanted to see exactly this kind of benchmarks! Do you plan to try different benchmarks with the same setup for different problems, like semantic segmentation, DenseNet, LSTM training performance etc. as well?

<comment><USER9> Happy to hear the benchmark is useful to you! We'd love to try different setups and further models/networks. On the other hand, such benchmarks are a LOT of effort (which we underestimated it initially), so we'll have to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excellent work. Do you have plans to open source the scripts/implementation details used to reproduce the results? Would be great if others can also validate and repeat the experiment for future software updates (e.g. TensorFlow 1.8) as I expect there will be some performance gain for both TPU and GPU by CUDA and TensorFlow optimizations.

Sidenote: Love the illustrations that accompany most of your blog posts, are they drawn by an in-house artist/designer?

<comment><USER9> Happy you like the post! The implementations we used are open source (we reference the specific revisions), so reproducing results is possible right now. We haven't thought about publishing our small scripts around that (there's not much to it), but it's a good idea. There's also work towards benchmarking suites like DAWNBench ([https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/](https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/)).

The illustrations are from an artist/designer we contract from time to time. I agree, his work is awesome!

<comment><USER8> > The illustrations are from an artist/designer we contract from time to time. > I agree, his work is awesome!

Kudos to them; they are awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What they're not saying is that one can't use all nvlink bandwidth for gradient reduction on a DGX-1V with only 4 GPUs because nvlink is composed of 2 8-node rings. And given the data parallel nature of this benchmark, I'm very interested in where time was spent on each architecture.

That said, they fixed this on NVSwitch so it's just another HW hiccup like int8 was on Pascal.

<comment><USER9> For this benchmark, NVLink and gradient reduction isn't the bottleneck. The performance scales almost perfectly linearly from one GPU to four.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for this, just a minor thing:

You have price per hour and performance per second. Thus that ratio is not performance per image per $, you need to scale that. Also, the metric is not "images per second per $", but just "images per $".

<comment><USER9> Thanks for catching this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How much detail do we know about the TPUs' design? Does Google disclose a block-diagram level? ISA details? Do they release a toolchain for low-level programming or only higher-level functions like TensorFlow?

EDIT: I found [1] which describes "tensor cores", "vector/matrix units" and HBM interfaces. The design sounds similar in concept to GPUs. Maybe they don't have or need interpolation hw or other GPU features?

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system- architecture](https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system-architecture)

<comment><USER4> Great paper on the Generation 1 TPU. But Google has not shared much details on gen 2 and in some ways kind of hid information.

Suspect we will need a gen 3 to get a paper on the gen 2.

Here is the gen 1 paper and highly recommend. Pretty interesting using 65536 very simple cores.

[https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1704/1704.04760.pdf](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1704/1704.04760.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great work, RiseML. This benchmark is sincerely appreciated.

I wonder whether NVLink would make any difference for Resnet-50. Does anyone know whether these implementations require any inter-GPU communication?

<comment><USER9> They don't require it but some of the ResNet-50 implementations can make use of it (e.g., the ones in the Docker containers on the Nvidia GPU Cloud). But even the ones without seem to scale to 4 GPUs pretty well. This may be a different story for 8 GPUs and larger/deeper networks, e.g., ResNet-152.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Was this running the AWS Deep Learning AMI or did you build your own.

Because Intel was involved in its development and made a number of tweaks to improve performance.

Be curious if it actually was significant or not.

<comment><USER9> On AWS this was using nvidia-docker with the TensorFlow Docker images. Probably, the AWS AMI Deep Learning gives very similar performance (with same versions of CUDA, TensorFlow etc.). There's only so much you can tweak if the GPU itself is the bottleneck...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> >For the V100 experiments, we used a p3.8xlarge instance ( _Xeon E5–firstname.lastname@example.com 16 cores, 244 GB memory_ , Ubuntu 16.04) on AWS with four V100 GPUs (16 GB of memory each). For the TPU experiments, we used a small n1-standard-4 instance as host ( firstname.lastname@example.com two cores, 15 GB memory_ , Debian 9) for which we provisioned a Cloud TPU (v2–8) consisting of four TPUv2 chips (16 GB of memory each).

A bit odd that the TPUs are provisioned on such a weaker machine compared to the V100s, especially when there were comparisons which included augmentation and other processing outside of the TPU.

<comment><USER9> All of the computation, including pre-processing, is offloaded to the TPU. The weak machine is really just idling. A bigger one will only cost money and have no measurable effect on the performance.

<comment><USER26> What is the cost difference between the CPUs on the google cloud vs AWS? How would adjusting for it effect the cost/images ratio?</comment></comment></comment>


Canary Analysis Service - <AUTHOR> https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3194655 <comment><USER2> We are sorry ...

... but we have temporarily restricted your access to the Digital Library. Your activity appears to be coming from some type of automated process. To ensure the availability of the Digital Library we can not allow these types of requests to continue. The restriction will be removed automatically once this activity stops.

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Please contact us with any questions or concerns regarding this matter:

<comment><USER3> What's even worse, clicking on the "[email protected]" link right underneath it gives this:

 _Email Protection You are unable to access this email address acm.org

The website from which you got to this page is protected by Cloudflare. Email addresses on that page have been hidden in order to keep them from being accessed by malicious bots. You must enable Javascript in your browser in order to decode the e-mail address.

If you have a website and are interested in protecting it in a similar way, you can sign up for Cloudflare._

Javascript _is_ enabled. Thanks Cloudflare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious about how users of this system go about investigating FAIL scenarios that could result in your change being rolled back. How frequent are false positives? Can you override the decision?</comment>


Why Email Newsletters are so Valuable, Case study on StartupDigest - <AUTHOR> http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/07/05/email-newsletters-valuable-case-study-startupdigest/ <comment><USER2> This was a post we wrote up in follow up to this HN thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488170>

Gives our personal account to why email lists are so valuable and some of the metrics we collect to track this.

<comment><USER3> Good stuff! May I ask what your open-rate is? The trend I've seen at a few places I've worked at is that Facebook has become the dominant traffic driver (Twitter in 2nd) for bringing people back to the site. Lot of factors behind this (demographics, ad teams abusing email lists over the years, etc), but I'd pretty much written off email since I know so many of our addresses are people's middle school Hotmail accounts (which I'd remove, but the ad team wants to claim they're sending to X-thousand people). Glad to hear it's working for you. Subscribing now!

<comment><USER2> Open rate varies a lot city to city but we see anywhere between 20%-60% opens across all of the issues.

We still use twitter/facebook to spread our blog posts, archives, etc but email is our main channel of distribution. For us we see twitter bringing ~30% of our subscribers, facebook doesn't do so well for us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Startup digest is smart because it just sends out lists of events. While it does take some effort to do the research to find these events, it seems like it would be easier to put together than a full fledged magazine like most of these newsletters are ( thrillist, dailycandy, etc ).

It could be expanded to other niches: wine festivals in your city, folk concerts in your city, etc

Ive been trying to brainstorm other newsletter ideas that could be built without a huge time investment every day to produce the newsletter.

Some I've thought of: \- 'Techmeme' newsletter. Build a 'techmeme' for beekeepers or some other niche and send out the links to the best stories & blog posts on beekeeping in a weekly digest post.

\- some deal newsletters could also be mostly automated with scraping

</comment><comment><USER5> Email lists are undervalued. You can get some unbelievable % responses in the Retail business. I would think a startup company that you can create a web blog from an email would be the perfect candidate for this type of marketing.

<comment><USER2> actually a big opportunity is to be able to take newsletter archives and turn them into blog posts. It's actually a big problem in the email world.

If you are interested in this space email me chris at thestartupdigest.com

<comment><USER6> Couldn't you just CC posterous? And for the archive, forward the mails to posterous?

I may be perhaps missing a finer point on why conversion is better.

<comment><USER2> I actually tried that (I thought it was that simple too) but the formatting came out all strange.

I sent a note to Posterous support, and they said that Posterous was not meant for email newsletter archives and I should not use it for that reason.

Weird but for some reason it doesn't quite work and they seem to not be focusing on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> sweet!</comment>


China's Bitcoin miners scoop up greater production power - <AUTHOR> Chinese Bitcoin (BTC) miners are now responsible for controlling as much as 66% of global hash rate, a new report claims. Hash rate is a measure referring to the overall computing power involved in validating transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. According to a study by London-based digital asset manager CoinShares, China's Sichuan province is accounting for over 50% of the global hash rate. Other leading crypto mining centers in China include the provinces of Yunnan, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. <comment><USER2> Assuming China had not become a liberal market economy with free capital flow and strong property rights while I'm typing this, doesn't that mean, the Chinese government effectively controls BTC because it can seize the global majority of mines at any time and put them under direct government control?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> for me the greatest holder of BTC was China.</comment>


Kueri: A Natural Language Interface for Databases - <AUTHOR> http://kueri.me <comment><USER2> Database developer's dream. And it's FREE. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks fantastic! Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Disclosure: The Anatomy of a Remote Code Execution bug on Disqus (0day) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sucuri.net/2014/06/anatomy-of-a-remote-code-execution-bug-on-disqus.html

<comment><USER2> The post is not very clear, but disqus already released a patch for it last night (included on version 2.76).</comment>


Burning Man Is Its Own Worst Enemy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-31/burning-man-is-its-own-worst-enemy <comment><USER2> Benson: "The agency, she says, has approved new oil and gas leases, including the controversial Dakota Access pipeline that runs through the Standing Rock American Indian reservation."

What a ridiculous response. First of all, the Standing Rock Sioux reservation is over _1200 miles_ from BRC. Secondly, the Dakota Access Pipeline project does not even _touch_ the SRS reservation at any point, let alone "run through" it.</comment>


Dungeons and Dragons Saved My Life - <AUTHOR> http://newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/07/dungeons-dragons-saved-my-life.html <comment><USER2> _A forthcoming documentary about the game characterizes D. & D.'s origins as akin to Facebook's: "A cautionary tale of an empire built by friends and lost through betrayal, enmity, poor management, hubris and litigation_

I have to object to a statement like this. While it seems about everything that America invents winds-up in the legal system, the idea that D&D could have been an "empire" is just wrong-headed. D&D expanded regardless of TSR's smooth moves or missteps because it has always been a very player-driven game, the ultimate user-generated-content-game really. Just as much and for the same reasons, D&D never had that much potential to become that much larger than it did become. Only a certain type of person would play the game and not very much would stop them from playing. Some company might make more or less money from this culture but the size of the culture pretty strictly limits the profits involved.

It's worth noting that D&D 3.5 was released with an "open gaming license" and thus the game was forked by the Paizo company who maintain their Pathfinder system closer the original game than the present D&D 4.0 released by now- Hasbro-owned Wizards Of The Coast, which just reinforces that no single company is likely to create or destroy D&D-like role-playing.

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

<comment><USER3> > D&D never had that much potential to become that much larger than it did > become.

See, for contrast, Games Workshop which is a pretty big deal in the UK with shops on many highstreets.

<comment><USER4> It's still roughly the same social niche though. And the Warhammer miniatures wargame may be semi-mainstream, but its RPG manifestation is much less popular and so only fitfully supported by GW.

<comment><USER3> That's kind of the point: the same social niche had the power to create a company with shops on many high streets playing tabletop games with little figures and lots of dice.

So for parent comment to suggest that it's obvious for D&D to have stayed so small is a bit odd. It had potential to be much bigger than it was.

I'm not sure if the not-great animation series helped or hindered D&D uptake.

<comment><USER2> My point isn't that D&D stayed small. The entire US roll playing milieu is fairly large. My point is that the size of this milieu wasn't very likely to effected by how well the owners of D&D managed a supposed budding empire (the original quote compared the Games' growth to Facebook's, remember).

Just as much, you're exaggerating a bit the size of Games Workshop. It's just a game store that also publishes some games [1]. It's got the size of both things but that's about it - it's hard the ups and downs appropriate to those two uncertain businesses. Everyone in the table top game business faces the challenge that once they successful sell a package, their customers can play for years and never pay another penny. This makes game-selling a labor of love rather than empire building, as anyone in business should be able to sell you.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Workshop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Workshop)

<comment><USER3> > Just as much, you're exaggerating a bit the size of Games Workshop.

From the Wikipedia link you provide:

> _The group reported revenues of £123.1 million in 2011.[28] This is a > reduction in revenue of £3.4 million on 2010 but still translated to an > operating profit of £15.3 million. In 2011 the company averaged 1,901 staff > across all activities._

Not too shabby, especially when they didn't have the Pokemon juggernaut to help them out for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This wasn't really the focus of the article, but I'm annoyed by how so many articles feel the need to "defend" D&D. The 80's and the height of D&D hysteria was over 25 years ago.

If there's anyone who seriously thinks D&D is harmful in some way, they are fringe elements. Even the designation of D&D players as losers is losing ground. A lot of people that I would never think of as the type to play a table-top game have joined my campaigns.

I don't even hear very much about censoring violent video games anymore. It's time to let go of the persecution complex.

<comment><USER6> My mom still believes that D&D is some kind of dangerous anti-religious thing. Not that it disproves your point. And the "nerd" stereotype definitely still exists.

<comment><USER7> Definitely. I used to play RPGs as a teenager, but now when I see 20 or 30-somethings playing RPGs (or announcing it on FB), I think "OMG nerd".

When I want to relax I read or play casual games, but other than that I'm just too busy with, y'know, life.

<comment><USER8> You seem fairly busy with signaling to others how cool you are. That's sort of an ironic turn of events if you were willing to play RPGs in high school.

<comment><USER7> Huh? If you think I'm a bragging idiot/hipster/wannabe cool guy, you obviously don't know me at all. And wow, did I hit a nerve there, with all the people downvoting me. Insecure much?

I'm just saying, I prefer (or choose) not to play RPGs any more, because I have my priorities elsewhere. If you like RPGs, then good for you. It's just the kind of people I see announcing RPGs, well, they certainly seem very nerdish, and this is me, Mr Nerd, speaking, so go figure what other, "normal"/"average" people think.

I was mostly seconding Houshalter's commend about "the "nerd" stereotype definitely still exists." Yes, it does. Very much so.

<comment><USER8> I don't know anything about you, I'm just telling you how your comment came off. Personally I have no skin in the game because I've never played an RPG, so you should put your defensive accusations of insecurity on hold for a second and consider whether there really was something about your comment that made it come off the way I interpreted it. Hint: it wasn't simply agreeing that table top gamers tend to be nerdy.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. I was only sharing my thoughts and impressions, thus the phrasing "I think" and similar words.

My preference doesn't in any way imply I think less of others that like playing games. I generally like playing games/watching movies/reading books, it's just my priorities that often direct me otherwise.

Yes, maybe the OMG Nerd sounds offensive to some, but then that's just life. It's how others see you if you happen to be a nerd. I am also a bit nerdy, so I also have to accept that reality sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you are interested in the history of D&D, war gaming, and other role- playing games, I highly recommend Jon Peterson's encyclopedic _Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures_ :

[https://amzn.com/0615642047](https://amzn.com/0615642047)

</comment><comment><USER10> Good article. My own experiences with the game are a near mirror to the author.

</comment><comment><USER11> My first thought was "Was this article written by Fat Neil???"

I'll get deservedly downvoted for an off topic joke, but this time I don't care :)

<comment> 2Pacalypse- Apparently even HN can't downvote a Community reference!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Please. The people who played D&D at my high school were really tortured outcasts, and I don't think they had a good time. I doubt D&D was that great for anyone.</comment>


Where are the unhappy founders? - <AUTHOR>

[excuse a belated post about startup school]
I've been mulling over the differences between  YC startup school and academic conferences.  Startup school left me with a feeling I have not experience before....  It's hard to fully articulate, but perhaps "thrilling" is the best adjective.  Founders I met dream big, they're excited, and those feelings are contagious.
Am I crazy?  Are startup founders really as excited as perceived?  My primary fear is a selection effect.  Those interested and excited in startups, attend things like startup school, those who feel bitter, tired, or bored with startups, don't.
Still, the same could be said of academic conferences, yet, I have never felt the same air of excitement at one.  Why?  Am I missing something?  Did anyone else experience the same sensation?  Anyone interested in sharing their thoughts?
I'm utterly confused.  It's easy to drone on with my own hyperbole here.  I guess I'd rather hear yours.  :) <comment><USER2> I think optimism and near-limitless excitement for your project are generally pre-reqs for doing a startup. Without them, it's pretty hard to justify bootstrapping//low pay//14+ hour days//no weekends//no benefits//the likelihood of failure//etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> On the academic side, it depends on which academic conferences you go to. When I started going to quantum computing conferences (mid-1990s) there was a huge buzz in the air. It was thrilling, better even than the best startup events I've been to. The same cannot be said of quantum computing now - it's become oversubscribed, which is why I've left the field, and am working on a startup.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, you're seeing the selection effect at work.

I've started two startups now. While I'm very nearly the most even-keeled person I know from an emotional standpoint (I've been described as "a robot", "mellow", "a cold fish", and worse), a couple of years of running a startup is like being bipolar. Perhaps for folks who are already bipolar without outside influence, it's even worse, I dunno.

Here's how I think it goes for most startups:

 _Stage 1_

Great idea(s). I have a blinding flash of insight--first time my insight was "the Internet is too damned slow!" (in 1999, this was a pretty good insight). This time, with Virtualmin, it came as the gradual dawning of a Many Faceted Great Truth rather than a flash. These feelings are akin to messianic visions of the past. If they weren't we wouldn't be willing to quit our real jobs and spend three to seven years tilting at windmills to make them happen. This is exciting and very uplifting. I bet Jesus felt pretty good, too, when he woke up with the flash of insight that he was the most important human on the planet (and a god to boot!).

 _Stage 2 (where most folks start showing up to events)_

Talking about the idea with friends and peers. Taking this leap of committing to the idea enough to share it with others and defend it feels like an accomplishment, which is emotionally rewarding. You get some validation, and you maybe spot a few problems and you work through them, which also feels good.

Still feeling great at this point. But you haven't actually done anything.

 _Stage 3_

Now you've got to build something. A demo, if you just want to get to that next stage of big validation that is raising money. This one is harder. If you don't actually have the level of skill you thought you did (and we all hit this sometimes, no matter how great we might be at some areas) you run into roadblocks to completing this stage. This is where folks begin to drop out of the event scene and start to think maybe this whole startup idea wasn't so great after all. I've occasionally run into roadblocks that took me weeks or months to resolve, either by learning enough to scale the wall or by hiring or befriending someone who happened to have just the right knowledge (this is harder than it seems). And these are the worst parts of the ride.

 _Stage 4 (wherein validation reaches new highs)_

Money. Some folks get addicted to raising money, and never actually get around to building their product (these are the same people who never actually succeed, by the way). When you raise money, not only is someone saying, "Yeah, that's a pretty cool idea", they are saying, "I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and I'm placing a huge bet on you being a big success."

However, before you get to that validation you will get numerous "no" responses, and that's usually a big downer: people are saying your baby is ugly, and kinda stupid. And you can't punch them in the mouth for saying so.

And at this point, you cycle between Stage 3 and Stage 4 until you fail or build a real company that makes money. This cycle is somewhat arbitrary as to how you'll be feeling at any given time...but the first two stages are action packed excitement all the way. Nothing can go wrong until you actually start doing something. Of course, nothing can really go right either...but you'll feel like everything is going right and clicking into place, because humans are funny that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great post. Two questions:

1) So, presuming you were at startupschool, did you notice the people who were there tended to be more enthusiastic than is typical? If you did not attend, was it because you are just too busy and/or tired/grumpy?

2) Isn't "no" common for almost all successful ventures? I guess I don't understand why being constantly rejected for funding is any different between any two different fields.

<comment><USER4> 1.

Yes, I was at Startup School. More enthusiastic than is "typical" of whom? Startup people in general, or of the whole population?

Events for people starting startups are full of optimistic and enthusiastic people. I try to go to about one per month. Last month it was Startup Camp, this month it was Stirr Deal Hacks, and I pretty much always attend YC events because they're among the best of the lot--though I got overwhelmed and exhausted this year with the StartupSchool events (I'm an introvert and crowds make me tired) and ended up skipping the after-party.

Anyway, I go just to keep perspective: we're not alone, we're not astonishingly brilliant and unique, and we're not crazy. By this, I mean it keeps things in perspective from both sides of the coin, by being both a reminder that we aren't the only people who could do what we are doing so we have to move fast and effectively, and also being a generally fun and validating atmosphere.

2.

Of course. You asked about startups, so I told you about startups. Rejection happens in every aspect of life. From cliques in school, to college applications, to getting your first job, to raising money for a startup, to getting a date with the pretty girl that works at the book store, etc. The difference might be that when you're the messiah and you're going to change the world, and someone tells you you're not and you can't, it's harder to take. I'm not sure why some people take rejection by investors so hard (maybe harder than other forms of rejection), but they do. As I mentioned I'm a "robot/cold fish", and so I don't take it personally, but many startup founders do.

And, of course, some of the best businesses have been rejected dozens of times by investors. One rejection per idea is bad enough...dozens probably starts to wear you down. I imagine authors have the same problem before they reach a certain level of success, since one story may be rejected by dozens of people. At least in the rest of life, each rejection is independent: The girl at the book store says "no", but that's the only "no" you'll ever hear for that one idea (the idea being "get a date with the cute girl at the book store", and honestly, it's not a very big idea, anyway...she's cute, so many others have probably had the same idea). Likewise for a job. You want to work at Google, they say "no", OK, you move on. With a startup, you have a lot more invested in the idea--often months or years of your life. Again, like a writer with a story that she can't get published.

<comment><USER5> Rejection by potential customers or investors is not the hard part. Folks who can't face that don't typically try and start something new. Here are some things that are much more difficult to face: laying off employees (not firing poor performers, letting good ones go because you can't pay them), shutting the business down and negotiating with creditors, and getting fired by your investors (or co-founders). These are not uncommon outcomes that get much less press, conference time, and blog posts. I don't say these to discourage anyone from an entrepreneurial career, I mention them because many founders seem less mindful of the real possibilities of failure: most of the really painful mistakes are made after initial success.

<comment><USER6> Agreed--from experience. It hurt when our startup failed(after initial success), and really hurt for a few months. Laying people off (mainly ourselves), shutting down the business....it's very deflating. You hear statistics like "90%" of startups fail--but you don't hear much else about failure. Rarely are the gory details revealed. On the other hand, _every_ success is well documented and the intricate detailed are talked about ad nauseam. It's very rare to talk about failure with anyone at these Startup Events, IME.

One thing I can say about failure: being young definitely helps. We had a lot less to lose than older people and plenty of opportunities to do different things when that didn't work out. It wasn't easy to fail but I've bounced back and am happy working in the non-startup world(though I've still been working on side projects still, mostly for fun).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


State paid $22K each for Internet routers - <AUTHOR> http://wvgazette.com/News/201205050057 <comment><USER3> To be clear, from the article, the routers themselves cost $7,800. And, if I'm rolling out a state infrastructure, and wondering what I can put in place for the next 10 years to serve as a foundation, you could certainly do worse than the 3945 - it's a very flexible ISR, and, all-things being equal, it's probably not worth the hassle of putting 2921s in some locations and 3945s in others. Who knows how much bandwidth you'll want on these high-speed fiber connections 5+ years from now - the 3945 is rated for 350 megabits/second (with features), the 2921 tops out at 75 megabits.

Amortized over 10 years, I would have chosen the 3945 everywhere versus sticking 2921s in some places (the ISR that would have been an alternative) and 3945s in others. Single Security Policy. Single IOS update Policy. Zero doubt as to what features will run in a particular location.

I think what most people have difficulty with is that they are comparing this decision to roll out a state communications infrastructure with the fact that they can go connect a $60 linksys wrt54G in their house and serve a dozen people without breaking a sweat. And get wireless as well! The issues involved in scaling that across the state, while looking to the future, and managing all that gear is a different challenge though.

I don't see any huge scandal here.

<comment><USER4> This is pure, unadulterated nonsense. There are plenty of ways to manage everything you mentioned with a tiered approach to the IT needs of the municipalities of the state without resorting to grossly over accommodating _every_ location. Hell, they could've even used some of that money for regional IT management positions, putting people back to work.

Shame on you for justifying this nonsense in any way shape or form. This is textbook waste ala bureaucratic laziness.

<comment><USER5> Ten years of IT wages seems a bit more costly than some fancy hardware, particularly when you remember the pension.

<comment><USER6> Does that in any way change his argument that the money could have been put to better use?

<comment><USER7> I don't think it does. In the example put forth in the article, the library had only four computers! In the case of just this one library, they could have had: ipads, kindles, more computers, more books and other media.

I think it's kind of a no-brainer that this is a prime example of incompetence in government.

<comment><USER8> They would also need to hire someone to manage those devices which would cost maybe 2x the router year after year. It'd suck too (not going to get a competent person in that position).

<comment><USER6> My company provides free I.T. services, support, and sometimes equipment to non-profits and other community organizations. We would be happy to be the on- call techs for stuff like that.

I would be surprised if there wasn't somebody in their area that does the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "West Virginia Homeland Security chief Jimmy Gianato, who's leading the state broadband project, defended the $24 million router purchase last week, saying the devices "could meet many different needs and be used for multiple applications."

"Our main concerns were to not have something that would become obsolete in a couple of years," Gianato said. "Looking at how technology evolves, we wanted something that was scalable, expandable and viable, five to 10 years out. We wanted to make sure every place had the same opportunity across the state."

Wow. I've spent some time in West Virginia libraries, and yes the internet connection was slow, but it's not due to the router. And in most towns, libraries and schools are not going to be serving anyone outside their walls with some kind of WAN. Best case will be public wireless near the building.

And how is it that the "West Virginia Homeland Security chief" is "leading the state broadband project"? Seems like bureaucratic overreach, technical ignorance, and budget authority all wrapped in.

Why not spend $50 for a router for libraries and something less than $22k per school?

<comment><USER10> What decent router costs $50? That blue soho router your thinking of is for your mom's house not a statewide installation.

<comment><USER9> A router that can handle 5-30 clients at current internet speed standards within a library setting. Yes, bigger installations could benefit from a $20k router, but the vast majority of these routers are a complete waste of money in WV outside of Charleston and Morgantown.

Unless there is some big backbone being built that can service a mostly small- town and very mountainous state, spending $20k (each!) now so that your routing infrastructure within schools and libraries won't be too slow in a couple years is kinda crazy.

<comment><USER11> I run my office network off of a $50 router quite happily. But that's because I'm right there to take care of it. Earlier this year, for example, our network got a fever:

[http://nerdfeed.needfeed.com/blog/2012/02/our-network- has-a-...](http://nerdfeed.needfeed.com/blog/2012/02/our-network-has-a-fever/)

If I needed to cover 1,000 widely scattered locations for the next decade, there is no way I would try to do that with a bunch of consumer-grade stuff. Especially when trying to manage a bunch of existing T1s and a conversion to fiber.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I the only person that is (not really of course!) tempted to put on official-looking clothing and confidently walk in with a laptop and Cisco console cable, nonchalantly telling the librarian their "Internet box" "needs a service upgrade".

And then quietly replace it (after dumping the config and replicating the configuration) with a $100 half-depth Supermicro server bought off Ebay, running OpenBSD?

And then walk out, like the Grinch after he artfully puts Cindy Lou Who to bed, with a nice new 3945 for my own use?

EDIT: forgot to mention, I need a CF card reader also to get the config off the Cisco flash.

<comment><USER13> If you then sold the router on the second-hand market and gave the money to the library to spend on materials that they actually needed, your plan could do some real good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the article: "I'm not an expert on the technical side," [Gianato] said, "but these have all kinds of capabilities and applications."

Earlier: "Gianato acknowledged that he didn't heed Dunlap's advice or wait for an evaluation.

'The routers already had been bid out,' Gianato said. 'I think John was looking at our needs now, not looking at our needs into the future."

\---

So not only does Gianato admit he doesn't know anything (which means he's not even suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect), but he also admits that he's not sure what his IT advisor was thinking about, but, eh, it doesn't really matter because the people who are the experts obviously don't think about the long-term and I'm not going to bother asking them about it anyway, because as we all know, bids are binding contracts. Right.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised this article actually does a decent job covering both sides of the story. When you look at how flexible the ISRs are, and the likelihood these devices will be in service for probably the next 10 years or more, it's not not the worst investment they could make. They're actually well sized for the high schools and other larger sites. Obviously any 3900 series is going to be overkill for a little library but you do have to look at support costs, service contracts, future requirements, future upgrade costs, etc to get the full picture. This is not a 'bridge to nowhere' situation.

<comment><USER16> You can get an ASA 5505 firewall with all the features you'll ever need for a small library installation for about $1200 retail (hell of a lot less if you're buying, say, 50 of them), and any network engineer who can't handle ASA configuration in his sleep should be fired immediately for gross incompetence.

There is no excuse for this insanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a buddy who sells routing equipment at this level. Doesn't have a degree in Fahrenheit, but just cleared a mil in his bank account, owns his 6 bedroom Connecticut home outright and keeps a beach house in Mystic. He's 38. I'm 36, a doc, and still paying off student loans and working for Uncle Sam.

</comment><comment><USER18> Private sector FTW. Please, please I hope everyone who reads this begins to understand that governments are not meant to allocate resources. The idea (promoted by politicians, mostly democrats) that we should give the government our money and they will spend it wisely "for the betterment of all" is purely, simply and fundamentally flawed.

Out government should be small. It should perform a few basic functions like making sure we are secure, our trading interests are promoted and our banking and financial markets are healthy. It should educate our children to the best standards in the world. Finally it should make sure we are energy independent and our food and water is uncontaminated. That's pretty much it.

<comment><USER19> Please don't make this a democrat/republican debate. This is the crooked way that all of our US government is spending our tax money. We need corporate money out of politics if we want to prevent these outlandish contracts from being awarded to the corporations that donate enough money to campaigns.

It's not a democrat/republican or big/small government thing. It's about corruption of the system.

Out of your comment, I agree most with that our government needs to help educate our children. Without an educated population, things only get worse.

<comment><USER20> how is this not a big/small government thing? We gave away billions of dollars in a stimulus program with little to no oversight that is very clearly getting wasted here.

While the republicans are certainly guilty of lots of spending and many things, democrats are clearly the party that is guilty of more spending and even bigger government.

<comment><USER21> There are plenty of countries whose governments are _far_ to the left of the Democrats who spend money much more wisely, so I don't see it as inherently tied. For example, the Scandinavian countries have much larger governments proportionally, but generally spend more wisely, and have more transparent bidding/provisioning of their state-funded services, so they get more service and less waste in return for their money.

<comment><USER20> They probably do spend more wisely, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are spending on something they should be. For example in this case buying the cheaper routers would be spending more wisely, but could pretty easily be argued that this isn't something we should be spending money on. Certainly not at the federal level. Why is my tax money in Tennessee being spent on routers in WV?

There are a few components to this particular screw-up. 1 is big government spending (with little oversight) and 2 is one idiot in WV with a big budget who failed miserably at spending it.

<comment><USER22> But it could pretty easily be argued that it's something that we _should_ be spending money on. The existence of an argument against a course of action doesn't, on its face, preclude taking that course of action. Such a line of thinking is, well, bizarre.

 _"1 is big government spending (with little oversight)"_

The _obvious_ problem here isn't "big government" spending. It's spending _without oversight_. This problem occurs all the time everywhere, in sectors both public and private. To claim that private businesses are immune to this by nature of their ability to fail and thus inherently a better mechanism than government is an absolute farce.

Take ownership of your government. To view the elimination of government as a solution to bad governance is both a lazy approach to problem solving and toxic to proper governing.

<comment><USER20> Private sector isn't immune, just not as bad.

Nobody said anything about elimination of government, just less of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Gianato said putting the same size router in every school was about "equal > opportunity."

A little known fact in the tech community is that a $7,800 router provides exactly 16.016 times more opportunity to a student than a $487 router.

<comment><USER24> All the tubes have to to be the same size. It's only fair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Spending other people money is so easy. But $22k apiece instead of the $485 solution quoted in the article - that's madness. It can't be just gross incompetence.

I guess someone involved in the decision got some kind of kickback, gift, or will have a nice cushy job offer waiting for them at Cisco when they get fired as they should be.

Remember this article next time some liberal ask to raise taxes and justifies this by saying how stimulus money is important, and why everyone should have the same opportunities (quoted in the article - as if a 22k router gave any kind of opportunity to people browsing the net in a public library in WV).

And cry when they get trashed at the end of their lifecycle without having ever been connected to optic fiber.

<comment><USER26> "Remember this article next time some liberal ask to raise taxes..."

Unless I misread, the article is talking about West Virginia. I would hardly call WV a bastion of liberal thinking.

Never attribute to malice (or political leaning) that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or incompetence)

<comment><USER27> You're right. This isn't a "liberal" failing. Wasteful government spending is an affliction that spans the entire political spectrum.

<comment><USER28> Democrats controlled two of West Virginia's three House seats, both Senate seats, the Governor's mansion, and the state legislature (which they have held since 1928).

One of West Virginia's two current Democrat senators, Joe Manchin, was governor at the time of the stimulus and appointed Mr. Gianato.

The executive branch of the federal government in 2009-2010 was controlled by the Democrats, along with both houses of congress. The federal stimulus was passed with no Republican support.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/us/politics/29obama.html>

The entire chain of custody from the grant through request for bids through the eventual approval was controlled by Democrats. The only people involved in this fiasco without a (D) after their name are those people who will have their taxes raised in order to pay for these routers, because of course they were not paid for with existing revenue.

This is very much a failing of Democrat administrations at a federal, state and local levels.

<comment><USER29> Democrats in West Virginia are hardly liberal - they're sort of a party on their own compared to the Democratic party elsewhere in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> why do military closets cost 5000$ a piece? because it costs a sh#tload of money to sell the military a closet. i don't know where i read this but it is a great analogy.

i have been - in my time (2000? 2001? 2002? 2003? 2004? ...) - involved into selling the national austrian television their first video streaming solution (think: free (as in free beer) windows media streaming server) - it took man- years. man-years cost money.

<comment><USER31> I want to punch you in the face. ORF's IPTV stuff has been 100% unusable until the Mediathek came along.

I could further elaborate on the reasons why this matters to me, but I'm just relieved that it works OK now.

<comment><USER30> yeah, i felt guilty for years. glad it's gone now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> HN-ers

I'm not a programmer or technical person, I'm an end user who uses R, LaTeX and processing now and again. I hack an awesome spreadsheet. I have a degree and I do a professional job.

I _could_ be a manager in a public service or an elected representative. Perhaps in a small rural authority.

Given the lack of consensus in this discussion thread, and evidence in the article of a similar lack of consensus between the various offices involved, how am I supposed to reach a decision?

Is there a case for some kind of planning toolkit or requirements estimation software? Is there an opportunity here?

PS: I and other colleagues did once have to help a senior manager spend out a £250k capital grant in 10 days. The idiotic spending deadline was due to delay in award of funds in a competitive funding round. We did ok but could have done better with another month or two to think through detailed requirements.

<comment><USER33> You use your intelligence. The Cisco person says you can do what you want with $500. Then do you continue to spend $30k instead? Do you think your small town library is going to grow into a college campus (as the other pro-mega-router people are expecting)

<comment><USER32> OK, I have to admit that looking at the picture in the article, I personally would have tried to vire some of the money for the super-router into a less fancy one and some decent all-in-one lcd desktop pcs for that table. The space saved by the all-in-ones could have provided a 'quiet table' for someone (and the PCs could double as DVD players).

I would have to make a spreadsheet (good at those) of all the sites and then include a rating for current traffic and then expected traffic growth over the life of the project. Yes, a library with 4 PCs is not going to have a lot of growth...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Our main concerns were to not have something that would become obsolete in a > couple of years

No you fool! These are designed to handle large loads, not protection from obsolescence!

</comment><comment><USER29> Interestingly, the CEO of Cisco is from West Virginia and went to WVU - <USER2> believe he's one of the largest donors to WVU. (only know this because I'm also from WV, not suggesting any conspiracy here)

</comment><comment><USER35> Sounds like a buffoon was in charge of the operation. Gianato suggesting that the unused/unneeded T1 interface cards could still be used for "video conferencing, wireless Internet and "voice over Internet protocol." is just painful to read. I am not sure how they can be used for such things if you don't actually stick them in a router!

I would still like to see a breakdown of the costs and what services are provided with the routers before I call it a total waste though. If it was just the routers then it was a waste. If it includes other things like a long term warranty & onsite service, then maybe not so much.

<comment><USER36> Some one should request a detailed FOIA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> West Virginia Homeland Security must be planning for a truly unprecedented expansion of libraries and schools, based on the capacity of the routers and the number of them allocated to sites with a handful of users. This is heartening, especially during a period of massive cutbacks to public education. ;)

</comment><comment><USER38> When a public school/library buys a 22K router with government money, sounds like an overkill (handout) of massive proportions. Someone's cousin here was probably on the Cisco + Verizon sales team. This is frustrating.

I remember a few weeks ago PB made a comment that at least social networks and alike make it easier to spread the news, which eventually will lead to greater good (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890543>). At least that's true, but doesn't feel like it's enough.

</comment><comment><USER39> Hacker News, you continue to disappoint me. Every time I read an article, I know the comments are going to be filled with people arguing for the sake of feeling superior. And once again, they are.

No. This is not okay. No twisted sense of reason that only you have makes it okay. A $60 consumer router that needs to be upgraded every year is still cheaper than this. Even with support costs. People have been rolling out tiered infrastructure for years.

</comment><comment><USER40> I describe this as 'funny money'. The government is spending other people's money.

I imagine the government worker that signed off on this purchase worrying a lot more about a dollar increase in the local lunch special than millions spent on equipment.

<comment><USER41> It is also funny money because the marginal cost of producing one of these routers is more like $500, not $20k. It is just a transfer payment to the company, it isn't the same as if the government burned $20k worth of barrels of oil. Nothing near that amount in resources was actually wasted.

<comment><USER42> Not quite. Cisco will probably take this purchase as a signal to produce more unnecessarily large routers. Those people paid to make the unnecessary routers could have used their valuable skills elsewhere. They may convince more people to learn how to build unnecessary routers instead of something more valuable. It's waste all the way down.

<comment><USER41> Not exactly, unless you think those people will literally use their salaries from the activities you described to buy something and go out and burn it. It might be a mis-distribution, and it might spur misguided investment in an area, but it isn't all squandered to the tune of exactly $20,000 or anywhere close to that. The marginal cost is a much more accurate measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> i live in a developing country. I am thinking what would happen here if a state offical had 24 million in his hands to spend on the infrastructure? The official may be corrupt and this thing may never go to proper bidding. So official and a company would share say 10 million as the profit. But 14 million would still go to something useful.

In this story, at least 20 million of the money seems to be completely wasted. (Higher capacity router does not mean better internet access for 4-computer lib.)

Wait, not finished. So our corrupt official has 2 million in his hands. He may buy a car or a house, but probably he would spend it for something useful. So much of the value would return to the market. This is also true for the vendor company. But in the US case, the value is gone. it is like you burned the cash.

Moral of the story: stupidity is more dangerous than corruption. You may want to have a corrupt offical than a stupid one.

Finally, that stupid would never have survived in the relatively corrupt but wild political system of my country.

<comment><USER44> Yours is the most bizarre, vaguely chauvinistic straw man rant that I've ever read.

<comment><USER43> where is the straw man?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Time to connect the entire neighborhood to those machines and share the cost /administration.

</comment><comment><USER46> Well... at least they got high-powered routers for $22K apiece. But, it's a shame there isn't a law on the books that selling the government something at 50X the market price / need is fraud.*

* Yes, I realize this would bankrupt half the military contractors as well.

<comment><USER20> Can't blame them for selling them something they asked for. Who's to say they were even told what they were for. This is government waste and incompetence, nothing more.

You are correct on the military contractors as well though. Lots of government waste and incompetence there as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I see a lot of posters argueing about the type of cisco router that should have been used or if a soho Linksys router should have been used instead.

Assuming that the government has some rules that requires them not to deploy soho or open source products and they have to spend the money on some big brand company: how come Juniper was not taken into consideration (or other known network vendors)?

I would argue that Juniper could provide cheaper equipment of simmilar of higher spec (let's ignore for a moment if that is oversized or not) - and it becomes even cheaper if you consider the simpler licensing terms and upgrade support.

Isn't the government supposed to run open tenders? Is cisco mandatory in the US?

</comment><comment><USER12> Verizon has successfully siphoned a bunch of money from the govt and by extension, taxpayers, yet again.

Anyone familiar with telecom and living in PA, WV, other states that have Verizon as the ILEC, knows this.

</comment><comment><USER48> What piece of technology will stay relevant `5-10 years out`?!?

</comment><comment><USER49> This is why I'm a libertarian.

</comment><comment><USER50> Most of these places don't know what the box is and when Johnny down the street comes in to fix their internet it will be replaced by a blue soho router. There will be theft and waste and probably 20% of these will be missing within a couple years.

A librarian will notice a computer missing, but an expensive router replaced with a cheap one won't even be noticed for years.

</comment><comment><USER51> Similar story in India would be like "State paid $20k each for Internet routers worth $20"

</comment><comment><USER52> wow.

somehow i doubt these sites have multiple uplinks, so they certainly don't need BGP routers. even if they're doing IPSec between some locations this can be handled by an old piece-of-junk $100 computer running _BSD or_ nix, e.g. with isakmpd and pf.

stuff like this is why america's infrastructure is crumbling: dodgy contractors looking for an excuse to upcharge municipalities for irrelevant gear and services.

<comment><USER10> You really want to advocate installing "old piece of junk" routers across the entire state? Have you ever managed a project this large? And if so did you use old piece of junk equipment?

<comment><USER53> $500-1k appliances with Atom CPUs running pfSense, please, not $100 clunkers with spinning drives and dust-laden fans.

Anything more than that for a moderately large library or most schools is an outlandish, shameful waste of money and equipment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is absolutely disgusting to me. The people that run big and small government in this country are complete idiots.

</comment><comment><USER10> The price includes maintenance and support correct? It is not 22k for the metal only?

</comment><comment><USER55> it's sad, but nothing new. either verizon is lying about who asked for the specific model, or some inexperienced network "architect" decided not to do the due diligence to spec out what was required, and just asked for the moon.

</comment><comment><USER10> The price includes maintenance and support correct? Its 22k for the metal only?

</comment><comment><USER56> Smh, so much waste.

</comment><comment><USER57> Regarding planning for the future, this seems like someone who was used to buying machinery was put in charge of buying technology. Sure, in five years the library might need a gigabit of bandwidth, but by then the Linksys WRT may well handle it for $100. It's not like you're buying a work truck, which may well serve the government for 5, 10, or even 15 years (assuming low usage), or a lathe that might be used intermittently for 35 years.

There's a lot to be said for uniformity in deployment, but that's why you would define, say, three tiers of supported hardware instead of kitting out everyone with top-of-the-line.</comment>


Location-based ads are growing - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-location-data-is-being-soldoften-without-your-knowledge-1520168400 <comment><USER2> Location based ads are growing? All the singles waiting to meet me in My City, CA will be happy to know that!

I remember working on a feature for an ad network in the early 2000s where advertisers were demanding the ability to include the viewers city name in the copy text.

</comment><comment><USER3> A success story about location based ads: some time ago, my fat cat went on an adventure. She is a house cat, never been outside. She managed to jump from the 1st floor window (second floor for US peeps) and went wandering around the back gardens. I could not find her that evening and there were some bad storms coming in + a people told me there are foxes around.

I created a fb page about my missing cat and used my ads credits to promote that page around the area I live. Second day after I did this, I got a phone call from one of my neighbors that she saw the cat and that evening I had my cat back home.

It turns out that my neighbor's daughter was visiting and saw the cat in their backyard. Then she saw the ad on facebook and told her mother to call me.

<comment><USER4> Thank you, cases like this really make me want to disable uMatrix.

If there was a way to make all the ads actually display the kind of thing I like, even if it's via some network-specific checkboxes or something like that, I'd gladly disable uMatrix and any ad blocking.

But then I remember the ads with sounds, or the mining ads, or ads that don't even have anything to do with the websites I visit nor the one I'm currently in... no thanks.

<comment><USER3> Like this? [https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_s...](https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_settings_screen)

<comment><USER4> I don't use Facebook but yes, from the url I think that's exactly the sort of thing I want. I think Google lets you tailor their ads too, but these giants are more like the exception.

Some websites use different ad networks, so _ideally_ I'd like something like that but as a browser setting. For example some predefined list of topics (the same way there's a list of TLDs), and making the browser send a header like "Advertising: 1,20,6,78,9481" and then ad networks would adhere to those categories.

Of course that's way too idealistic and there's no way something like that will ever happen, but if people want me to disable my ad blocker, that's the only way I'd agree to it. Otherwise is an instant "no".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good that I have location switched off then... I never saw the need for any website to know where I am at the moment I make a request. They can glean some of it from the IP address but in that case they'd think I always post from exactly the same location as all my traffic goes through a VPN.

<comment><USER6> I find it mildly creepy that if I log into Google Maps when I'm connected through my usual VPN of choice, it still pinpoints my location. I know why of course; it's figured it out from my Android phone in my pocket. Makes me wonder what other apps are managing to track that data cross-network though, and what they're doing with it.

<comment><USER7> Huh? Google Maps on PC to Android? Are they using the same WiFi router? If so, Google probably has that router's MAC address in its geolocation database. But anyway, using VPN services on machines with WiFi is rather pointless, if you want to keep your location private.

<comment><USER8> Google does not only deduce your location from your connection. It keeps data on you.

If for example you have some residual information (cookies etc.) on your browser or you've logged in to your account, google will probably continue to show your last location known by it.

Google might even query local devices as you suggested, who knows?

It is really aggresive on getting location data.

<comment><USER9> It is really aggressive getting any kind of data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A few months back I walked by a Steinway piano store, stopped for a few moments to window shop, and went on my way, without ever mentioning anything about pianos explicitly on a computer (like I'm doing now). A couple days later, I got an ad in the mail offering a discount on a Steinway.

<comment><USER11> I hear stories like this a lot in the context of "Facebook is listening to my conversations through my phone microphone"

I think more likely is that we forget how many ads we're exposed to in a day. The odds of occasional eerie coincidences is high.

<comment><USER12> I completely agree in terms of people saying FB 'listens' as in records audio.

But one thing people often overlook with hyper-local geo ads are bluetooth beacons which are tracked at most major retailers these days. Doesn't help that Apple trying to help people use wireless headphones now likes to turn bluetooth on every day (the lock screen bluetooth button defaults to 'off until tomorrow')

<comment><USER13> Combined with the fact that, as of the most recent version of iOS, "turning off" wifi or bluetooth in the quick menu just disconnects you from whatever network or device you're connected to, it doesn't actually disable either despite the visual indicators (and past behaviour) suggesting that they are disabled.

unpaired bluetooth and unconnected wifi are gold for anyone wanting to track you around a space.

<comment><USER14> I don't get it, how would you identifity someone with their wifi turned on ?

<comment><USER15> If the WiFi is on, you broadcast your MAC, which is uniquely identifiable unless you root your phone and install software to change this fact.

<comment><USER16> IIRC current android and iOS devices will probe Wifi using a randomized MAC and only use the real mac once connecting for realsies.

<comment><USER17>
      researchers found that "the overwhelming majority of
      Android devices are not implementing the available
      randomization capabilities built into the Android OS,"
      which makes such Android devices trivial to track.
      [...]
      Apple, meanwhile, introduced MAC address randomization in
      iOS 8, only to break it in iOS 10. [...] its network probe
      broadcasts to include a distinct Information Element (IE),
      data added to Wi-Fi management frames to extend the Wi-Fi
      protocol.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomi...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomization/)

      four scholars from the US Naval Academy say they've
      managed to track 100% of all test smartphones, despite
      the devices using randomized MAC addresses.
      [...]
      The novelty in our method is that we are sending RTS
      frames to IEEE 802.11 client devices, not APs, to
      extract a CTS response message which we derive the true
      global MAC address of that device.

[https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-b...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers- break-mac-address-randomization-and-track-100-percent-of-test-devices/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why can't Apple have sone sort of WiFi annonimization so I'm not broadcasting a unique signal all the time?

<comment><USER19> iOS 8+ and Android 6+ devices do use a random MAC address for Wi-Fi scanning:

[https://blog.mojonetworks.com/ios8-mac-randomization- analyze...](https://blog.mojonetworks.com/ios8-mac-randomization-analyzed/)

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/android-6-0-marshmal...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/android-6-0-marshmallow- thoroughly-reviewed/5/)

<comment><USER18> Apparently not very well

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomi...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomization/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wasn't that the plan since iBeacons were introduced back in 2013? With GPS probably even earlier? TBH, I never saw the business case and always thought it's way to intrusive and a huge privacy issue.

</comment><comment><USER21> ... with the speed of search engine providers confining users into small worlds. For certain areas of interest Google made the Internet the size of a village.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I had to carry a smartphone, I'd make sure that it had hardware switches for camera, mike, WiFi and radio baseband.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure that exists, unfortunately. Unless you want to build your own with a Raspberry Pi and a USB radio module.

<comment><USER23> It's in the works: [https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/)

Relevant quote: _Hardware Kill Switches for Camera, Microphone, WiFi /Bluetooth, and Baseband_

Disclosure: Not affiliated, but am interested in the phone.

<comment><USER7> Yes, thanks. That's the one that I was thinking of. But I'd forgotten the name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://outline.com/qTC6P5](https://outline.com/qTC6P5)</comment>


TripDibs - <AUTHOR> http://www.tripdibs.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> TripDibs was founded 3 guys who have known each other for a long time. We were hoping to get some guidance via YC program, but we didn't even make the interview cut. Through the process, however, I've learned to respect the feedback from Hacker News.

Please take a look and comment on our site. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Hi! Idea seems fantastic, but some of your front page promotions say "sold out" when I click them. I feel a little cheated that they're still up there having sold out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Yid. We're expecting several more hotels to sign up within a few days. When we get the new inventory, the sold out deals will disappear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks really clever: good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Why Apple's move from Intel to ARM means we should stop buying Macs - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcworld.com/article/3563892/why-apples-move-from-intel-to-arm-means-we-should-stop-buying-macs.html <comment><AUTHOR> Summary: The Author's contention is that Apple will abandon support for it's existing lineup sooner rather than later based on the history of it's prior platform transition to intel. So, why bother buying a Mac now when it's going to be abandoned sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER2> Apple supported other transitions nicely, and for a reasonable time. That prior history was reasonable.

They have little to gain by not doing exactly that again.

<comment><USER3> Last time it was 3 years to obsolescence at a time CPUs sped up by a factor of 2. This time you will be switching to slower CPUs and maybe reaching 1.5x in 3 years.

<comment><USER2> The difference being plenty of Intel options available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Past performance doesn't predict future returns, as they say.

Losing OS support in Apple-land isn't the end of the road. There are an additional two years of software updates because the previous two versions retain maintenance support. Also, apps rarely require the latest macOS to function.

Meanwhile, the iPhone 6s is getting iOS 14. The App Store works fine on an iPhone 5s. iOS 9 got a security update last year, and iOS 12 got one this year.

</comment><comment><USER5> My concern is more of how apples walled garden will be applied to the new form factors.</comment>