Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof - <AUTHOR> http://www.drcraigwright.net/extraordinary-claims-require-extraordinary-proof/ <comment><USER2> If by some extremely small chance he is Satoshi And his identity was close to being revealed (I think his name was first lingering in the ether around August), this could be a truly beautiful sleight of hand.

Purposely release 'proof' you know could be quickly refuted. Get the papers covering you with lots of photos and unnecessary blurb about companies you have been involved in. Drag the whole ordeal out over a week or two. Would come across as a complete loony, attention seeker in the tech community no? Quickly forgotten about and dismissed as Satoshi for a long time.

Do note! I do not imagine this is the case, but wouldn't it be great if it was?

<comment><USER3> The only thing greater would be if he actually was both a complete loony _and_ all his claims were true. It would be interesting to have something as important and useful as Bitcoin have an origin such as that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Watching this unfold is simply fascinating to me from a sociological point of view. The number of scammers, liars, and pure weirdos that have gravitated to Bitcoin is incredible. I am simultaneously entertained, and saddened that people like this are able to wield such power over the community.

<comment><USER5> It's reaching the point where you have to consider external motivations to damaging Bitcoin's credibility. The only thing keeping me out of full-on tinfoil hat mode is that this stuff just felt shady and douchebag riddled from day one.

<comment><USER6> The fact that coins could be "mined" was the problem from day 1. This created a pyramid scheme/gold rush system that tainted everything.

Of course, if you are holding a large chunk of the initial coins, this is exactly what you want. In addition, there are always lots of people willing to fall for pyramid schemes, so it's good to bootstrap adoption.

Once Bitcoin finishes being "mined out", we'll see if it has any value. I suspect that answer is "not".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All we need is a signed message. That's all, Craig.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a prime opportunity for skeptics to identify for themselves, _ahead of time_ , the clear conditions where

1) If Wright meets them, they will accept he is Satoshi 2) If Wright doesn't, then they will not

A great exercise in avoiding the moving of goalposts, by setting a clear expectation ahead of time.

<comment><USER9> Just sign a message using the pubkey in the genesis block and I'll admit it. No questions asked.

Just like Charlie Lee did for Litecoin here: [https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/727157971428331520](https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/727157971428331520) (he did it to show just how easy and provable it is)

Anything less and I have to question it or call bullshit. Current state is complete bullshit.

Moving coin from early blocks is not nearly as good. Bitcoin was publicized early on a few mailing lists so it'd be entirely possible he's just an early user trying to game himself up as the creator. Statistical evidence combined with moving early coin could be semi-convincing, but still not as simple and absolute as a single signature using the pubkey in the genesis block. Proving this is dead easy and that signature is the on/off bit for me.

<comment><USER10> What if, and this is a big IF, he is Satoshi and somehow "lost" that key?

Heck what if the real Satoshi lost that key, how would he make us believe him if he were to step out of the shadows?

<comment><USER11> Then Satoshi is, for the purpose Bitcoin, dead. If there is no way to prove who Satoshi really was, what other term could we use?

<comment><USER12> > Then Satoshi is, for the purpose Bitcoin, dead. If there is no way to prove > who Satoshi really was, what other term could we use?

"Satoshi's identity is unknowable" would be a more accurate description of that scenario that "Satoshi is dead".

<comment><USER10> Well, speaking of dead, here's an interesting theory.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hnbli/did_someone...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hnbli/did_someone_rule_out_kleiman_wrights_dead_friend/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't need any more proof that transferring BTC from a block that Satoshi controlled. Don't need reams of explanation or blog posts or anything else.

<comment><USER14> True, but possession of private keys does not prove identity. Having Gavin confirm that this is indeed the person he spoke with thoughout the years is also important. We'll just have to wait and see what happens next. Craig has certainly left us with a cliffhanger...

<comment><USER15> He really hasn't. His _ordinary_ proof has already been debunked, repeatedly and in detail, so now he's spinning a bunch of bullshit to convince the foolishly credulous they should trust him in spite of the plain facts of the matter.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure. Gavin has high reputation, and he has not yet revoked his support for Craig's claim. Maybe there will come irrefutable cryptographic proof around the next days. Or maybe not.

AAMOF, in yesterdays post, he talked about crypto, but he did not claim it to be proof for anything. Today he is announcing proof for the next days. We'll see...

<comment><USER17> Do we have any explanation on why Gavin hasn't revoked his post yet? He seems to be tweeting supportive articles as well. Are we still going with the "account was hacked" theory?

<comment><USER18> People who get scammed are usually reluctant to admit it, even to themselves. I expect he'll come around in the next few days if and when there's no public proof forthcoming from Wright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The guy is clearly an attention seeker, he has provided literally zero proof he's anyone noteworthy so let's move on. He will likely continue to trickle these convoluted and increasingly desperate blog posts as people gradually forget about him.

<comment><USER20> This is reminding me of watching a free energy scam unfold. Lots of big announcements, pending big announcements, some half ass attempts at validation, some more news of tinkering and delay, etc, etc. He still can't come up with the signature or the excess energy.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. Everything about the way this has been handled raises the classic red flags of a scam, pseudoscientific or otherwise. The evasiveness, the obfuscation, the private controlled circumstances under which "proof" is provided.

He has a claim that would take five minutes to conclusively prove, but he keeps spinning it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This thing stinks _exactly_ like when those two guys claimed to have shot and killed a bigfoot, and "within a few days" they were going to "prove it" once and for all. They ended up of course having a rubber costume in a freezer. This post has totally hammered it home for me. I have everything I need to know that this guy is a scamming compulsive liar.

</comment><comment><USER3> > For some there is no burden of proof high enough, no evidence that cannot be > dismissed as fabrication or manipulation. This is the nature of belief and > swimming against this current would be futile.

Regardless of whether his claims are true or not, this portion seems self evident. People have too much invested emotionally in the outcome of this, for some reason, to allow this to be settled easily. One only needs to look at some of the discussions regarding this on HN to see people pointing at a single piece of evidence that can be interpreted multiple ways to make absolutist claims about this subject.

<comment><USER22> Given the context, a trustless cryptographic system, the phrases "self evident" and "the nature of belief" are really out of place. This could all be easily settled - no faith required.

<comment><USER3> Given that I was referring to the irrational behavior of the people involved in the discussion as a sociological event, and was not referring to the cryptographic system at all, I don't think they are out of place at all.

> This could all be easily settled - no faith required.

My point is that I think there will be some people, far more than we should be comfortable with, which at this point have invested themselves so much emotionally in the outcome, that no proof will be enough. There's always some possible explanation, no matter how outlandish.

<comment><USER22> > ...behavior of the people involved in the discussion...

It is the context of the "sociological event" that I refer to, not the discussion about the discussion that you seem to have in mind.

> There's always some possible explanation, no matter how outlandish.

You are describing the satisfiability problem, where a lot of contrived problems are obviously impossible to satisfy. That isn't emotionally driven goalpost moving, that is a strict adherence to reason.

<comment><USER3> > It is the context of the "sociological event" that I refer to, not the > discussion about the discussion that you seem to have in mind.

Then let me clarify my intent. That "for some there is no burden of proof high enough, no evidence that cannot be dismissed as fabrication or manipulation." see,s self evident from my experience in seeing how people are treating this discussion, and the "evidence" being put out to support or discredit any specific claim, not just of Craig Wright, but of those just putting forth possible explanations for his reasoning for his actions, in cased presupposing him as both a fraud and as Satoshi. I think this has less to do with it being about a cryptographic system than it does with people really liking the mystery, and wanting to hold onto their belief in it.

> You are describing the satisfiability problem, where a lot of contrived > problems are obviously impossible to satisfy. That isn't emotionally driven > goalpost moving, that is a strict adherence to reason.

I wouldn't call the belief the moon landing was faked a strict adherence to reason, and I think the same underlying motivations are at play. This will play out, and the vast majority of people will come to the same belief, but I believe, through what I've witnessed so far, that there will be a core the refuses to let go of some of the more outlandish possibilities.

<comment><USER22> I'm sorry, but your clarifying statement left me even more uncertain about your message. I think we'll just have to leave it, the comparison of any party in a discussion to moon landing conspiracy theorists pretty much shuts down the conversation in a Godwin like fashion.

<comment><USER3> I think you really are misinterpreting me. I wasn't using belief of the moon landing hoax in a terribly disparaging way, and I wasn't comparing a single party of a discussion to people with that belief, but multiple people from both sides (if you think I was taking a side, I urge you to re-read my comments considering that I most definitely _am not_ ). That doesn't make them stupid, it just means they have a narrative that they believe, and are invested in, and that makes certain ideas that others would consider not worth considering much more likely to be true in their eyes. Everyone does this, some of us have a narrative that's more likely to match with reality in some instances than others, but by the nature of the problem it's very hard to know if that applies to yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If Dr. Wright is indeed taking us for a ride, he doesn't seem worried that the "real" Satoshi won't come out and expose him as a fraud (like he did a few years ago with Dorian Nakamoto). Although the circumstances were different then, the chances of this happening are absolutely non-zero, and it could happen at any time. Why continue pushing the issue and drawing attention, which only adds to the risk of this happening?

I'm not saying at all that this is indicative that Dr. Wright is Satoshi, but IMO it's definitely interesting.

<comment><USER24> Did he really? The message was in March 2014 from the "Satoshi Nakamoto" account on p2pfoundation.ning.com:

[http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topic/listForContributor...](http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topic/listForContributor?user=0ye0gncqg772o)

which at one point (probably) belonged to Satoshi, but by September 2014 (almost certainly) belonged to someone else. The account was only used three times before that, in February 2009, to write a post about Bitcoin and two replies. It's certainly possible that if one non-Satoshi person gained access to the account between 2009 and 2014, multiple people could have, and that the person who sent the March 2014 message was just an unrelated kindhearted person who wanted the paparazzi to stop bothering Dorian Nakamoto.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > For some there is no burden of proof high enough

later:

> You should be sceptical. You should question. I would.

So he's saying people are being too skeptical, and then he says people should be skeptical. This guy really has no idea what he's talking about. There's no way he's Satoshi, he reads like a con-artist.

</comment><comment><USER26> Well, if he really is, he has something like a billion dollars worth of Bitcoins. There are still all those early blocks that never move.

"Soon, I will provide proof" sounds religious, not factual.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it possible he is making an offer to Satoshi? That he's willing to take on the persona permanently (and maybe at a cost)?

</comment><comment><USER28> If he is lying, what does he gain by all this?

<comment><USER29> From a redditor:

"I posted this detailed analysis describing a likely motivation for Craig needing to "prove" he is Satoshi. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w9xec/just_think_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w9xec/just_think_we_deserve_an_explanation_of_how_craig/cxuo6ac) The short version is that he made fictional investments in a company by claiming to have transferred his personal "interest" in $29m of bitcoin to the target company. (I.e. no blockchain transfer, just a legal document claiming to transfer that amount of bitcoin.) He then claimed substantial cash R&D credits from those transactions. Australian taxation office (ATO) began investigating. He has paperwork showing the transactions, but knows that ATO might dig around and want to see verification that he truly owned $32m of bitcoin. To cover that, he claims he put all his bitcoin in a trust, where the trustee was another early bitcoiner. Unfortunately, that friend has now passed away, and the private keys are lost. In order for the BS to be even vaguely plausible, he needs to show that he originally had access to $32m of bitcoin. This is why he pretends to be Satoshi."

<comment><USER30> Doesn't seem that smart to preempt the investigation though. Seems better to lay low and submit "proofs" quietly to ATO and hope for the best...</comment></comment></comment>


The death of PC - <AUTHOR> http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/27833.aspx <comment><USER2> I'm so tired of hearing about the "death of the PC." Yes, paradigms are changing. Technology is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives. Smartphones are changing the way we interact with internet. Tablets are changing the way we consume content. But what about the creators? I'm a firm believer that for the foreseeable future computers will be the king of content creation.

<comment><USER3> I'm the same. Technology isn't the zero-sum game it's made out to be --- there's a place in the market for both tablets _and_ `traditional' PCs. There's also a not-tiny segment of the market that actively prefers laptops to tablets (I'm one of them).

When it comes to creating professional-quality work, I really think the tablet is a long, long way from being a viable replacement for the full-blown PC. It's almost impossible to imagine _Game of Thrones_ being edited on iPads, for example. Taking it to the lower end of the market, even independent film- makers are likely to use a PC to edit their films, no matter how low-budget they may be. The same applies to music, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In an attempt to show that PC is still alive, I will point out that there no minorities in that picture.... Ok, bad joke.

Not sure why I want to make this parallel, but I feel like if a thing like Linux can last as long as it has, and looks like it will go on well in to the future, so will the PC.

Also, I find it interesting that while a laptop can do everything a PC does, even transform in to a PC with a docking station to give you a big monitor, keyboard, mouse, storage, etc, it has not wiped the PC out.

My worry is that PCs will begin to sell less and there for go up a lot in price. But, then that didn't happen in the face of laptops. So, Im not even slightly sure about that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ya, as usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The PC industry has matured. Compare it, if you will, to those boring utility companies. Yes, they still do make a lot of money, but there's nothing inherently exciting about them.

microsoft today is one of those boring utility companies. Whenever I watch one of their ads full of young, energetic people dancing and clicking, I try to imagine my local water company trying to market itself this way, and I can't stop laughing at that point.

The future is Apple, Google, Mozilla, and a fourth company that hasn't yet been created.</comment>


Which of These Habits Are Keeping You from Being a Great Communicator? - <AUTHOR> https://ideas.ted.com/which-of-these-habits-are-keeping-you-from-being-a-great-communicator/ <comment><AUTHOR> "If your mouth is open, you're not learning." -Buddha</comment>


Intel's 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake SoC Detailed - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-tiger-lake-soc-detailed-superfin-willow-cove-and-xelp/2 <comment><USER2> I won't be buying Intel CPUs for years to come. Haven't upgraded since 2016. Years of "incremental" improvements while still advertising $1000+ CPU prices has deterred me for quite some time. Intel fanboys might eat it up though.

Given their history of significant delays in the current roadmap, how does this compare to their competition who is quickly advancing on 10nm?

Also what is this internal naming schema?

> The 14nm process node has been Intel's most profitable manufacturing node to > date, and continuous intranode enhancements over the years (14+, 14++, > 14+++, 14++++*)

This reads like a satire article.

<comment><USER3> Intel's CPUs today are _still_ king when it comes to single-thread workloads, like gaming. The main difference in the past two years has been that AMD has taken the lead in multi-thread performance, and that's scared Intel so much that they've significantly improved multi-thread performance and price across the board.

The difference is quite stark, in both directions [1]: AMD destroys Intel in anything that benefits from multiple cores at the same product tier (Ryzen 9 3900x vs i9 10900k), in some workloads as high as 50%. But, Intel wins when gaming; usually by around 5-10%.

The more measured position is: If you're just looking for the best value brand right now, AMD is the way to go, even if you are gaming. The 10900k _is better_ than the 3900x for gaming, but its also a ~$120 up-sell: At similar _pricing_ tiers, the single-thread performance difference is likely quite similar. But if you just want the best at any price, that's still Intel: More cores won't save every workload.

[1] [https://www.pcworld.com/article/3543993/intel-10th-gen- revie...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3543993/intel-10th-gen-review- core-i9-10900k.html)

<comment><USER4> By the time you subtract all the sub-prime performance from their vulnerabilities, this isn't actually true on properly patched operating systems. They took a sub-prime loan on validation, sacrificing security in the process, and the result is chips marketed and sold as something they are not. There really should be government-level lawsuit and restructuring at intel right now.

<comment><USER5> It's worse, isn't it?

From what I've heard, Intel likes to run their benchmarks with many (most?) mitigations disabled... but Windows ships with all of them enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Analysis by SemiAccurate on SuperFin: [https://semiaccurate.com/2020/08/13/intel-talks- about-10nm-s...](https://semiaccurate.com/2020/08/13/intel-talks-about-10nm- superfin-and-packaging/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a Intel i5 2500 that I paid $209 for in April 2011. I'm looking at new i9 desktop chips and they're like 50% faster. 10 years? WTF? The laptop chips are barely faster.

[https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel- Core-i9-9900-vs-...](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel- Core-i9-9900-vs-Intel-Core-i5-2500/m816115vsm517)

<comment><USER8> Things have indeed slowed down but you're cherry picking numbers. +50% single- thread but +200% in multi-threaded!

<comment><USER7> Agreed but I dont think I do much that would keep more than 4 cores maxxed out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Aside from the pressure from AMD, I think there's another force at play here.

There are quite a lot of people now that just use a web browser on their desktop or laptop. For them, a 5 year old (or older?) CPU is good enough that they don't know they are missing anything. Especially if they have enough memory and an SSD.

<comment><USER10> > There are quite a lot of people now that just use a web browser on their > desktop or laptop.

As opposed to the people who used to use their computer for email and spread sheets?

I would argue that the resource needs of a web browser has absolutely been increasing over time. The 4GB of RAM in that old laptop just does not work for the modern web. And considering how many web site now require the client to run tons and tons of JS just to work, I can see a need to refresh your CPU regularly.

<comment><USER11> 4GB of RAM on a machine (regardless of OS) is absolutely fine for browsing the "modern web".

<comment><USER12> Windows alone uses like 2GB, open some tabs and you are already out of ram. I think 8 is the new minimum.

<comment><USER11> I have 30 tabs open in Chrome, real tabs, on youtube, PDFs, and code/API docs, and I just cycled through them all to make sure they are loaded, and Chrome is at 600MB.

The phase "open some tabs and you are already out of ram" is a bit of an exaggeration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When i read comments here i'm wondering how and why people are either for or against intel?

IF i need to upgrade, i will check the current situation and will buy the best cpu in comparison to my needs and price.

If it means that i need tons of core because of my workload i might choose a threadripper. Do i need to compile often and i know a specific intel cpu will save me ton of time waiting but it costs more? Fine.

Do i wanna play games? lets see what i can get for ~150$ bucks range.

/shrug

<comment><USER14> When you're a business, you can't make turn-on-a-dime decisions like that. You commit to business-equipment purchase/leasing/upgrade agreements with a particular OEM; who in turn usually commits (for economy-of-scale reasons) to one CPU supplier or the other. So, if you're stuck with an OEM who's in turn stuck with "the wrong" CPU supplier (right now Intel), that can make you cross, at the potential performance that's being left on the table.

But even for the individual, unless you're buying sealed non-upgradable appliance devices, you've still gotta consider the fact that in building a PC, you're choosing a _motherboard socket_ , and thus _potentially_ making it cheap to upgrade to later-gen CPUs that stay compatible with that socket.

In that mindset, it makes sense to be happy with the CPU maker you're "stuck with" for a while when they provide good, high-ROI upgrade options; and to be angry with them when they don't.

<comment><USER15> >in building a PC, you're choosing a motherboard socket, and thus potentially making it cheap to upgrade to later-gen CPUs that stay compatible with that socket.

I'm curious how common it is for people to upgrade just the CPU or motherboard.

I tend to upgrade / replace my personal PC's every 4-6 years. At that pace, it's always seemed worthwhile to upgrade both motherboard and CPU at the same time, because of platform improvements. But maybe I'm an outlier.

<comment><USER14> One oft-stated reasoning is that people who currently don't have much money (e.g. college students) can build a PC with a motherboard socket targeted by both low-end and high-end CPUs; and then select, for now, the (cheap) low-end CPU. Then, a few years later, when they're working and have more money, they can replace it with the high-end version.

I'm not sure how common this actually is in practice, but it seems logical.

<comment><USER16> it's great if you decide to upgrade your CPU a couple years later and you motherboard is still compatible, but imo this is not a good reason to choose a particular platform in the first place. you never know when the CPU manufacturer is going to drop support for that chipset. even if the new CPU does support the old chipset, you might be sacrificing some new features or leaving some performance on the table. plus if I'm going to buy a high-end cpu, I'd like to pair it with a high quality power delivery also, which you probably aren't going to find in a college student's budget build.

<comment><USER17> AMD is pretty good about sticking with motherboard sockets and maintaining firmware compatibility. The motherboard I got with my 1st generation Ryzen is handling my 3rd generation chip just fine, though admittedly I'm missing out on PCIe 4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know where Intel's codenames come from? They're... supremely weird.

"Ivy Bridge" and "Skylake" evoke images of fantastical locations—chasms transversal only by green bridges woven of ivy, or serene bodies of water that float among the clouds. "Willow Cove" is similarly suggestive, if somewhat more mundane.

But, Tiger Lake? Coffee Lake? SuperFin? Is there a formula here?

<comment><USER19> _> "We have a formal process for what types of things are lakes vs. bays vs. peaks," Tripp told us. However, he didn't elaborate on what that process was. "Different components are named after different geographic areas."_

[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/decoding-intel-code- names](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/decoding-intel-code-names)

<comment><USER20> Just about every product since 2015 has been a lake. I'd guess "lake" is the code word for "just overclock last year's chip and call it a day"

<comment><USER21> The CPUs have been lakes. Their memory and storage division uses stream, pass and -dale. Server chipsets are -burg, Ethernet controllers are -ville. All of these suffixes are still in active use for new or upcoming products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Intel advertised a bunch of fancy transistors and process improvements well after it was clear 10nm as a whole was a bust (COAG, Single Diffusion Break, probably more)

Color me skeptical.

<comment><USER17> Charlie, the arch Intel skeptic, was convinced and if he thinks they managed to fix their problems with 10nm I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

[https://semiaccurate.com/2020/08/13/intel-talks- about-10nm-s...](https://semiaccurate.com/2020/08/13/intel-talks-about-10nm- superfin-and-packaging/)

<comment><USER22> I'll believe it when I can finally buy 10nm at retail in volume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-hires- over...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-hires- over-100-TSMC-engineers-in-push-for-chip-leadership)

"As a company, TSMC competes to our fullest within the law, but we do not slander our competitors and we respect the intellectual property rights of others. Similarly, we expect our suppliers and other companies to respect TSMC's intellectual property rights and will take appropriate protective actions."

I remember a Taiwanese news said TSMC ask their suppliers not to sell TSMC's custom machines to others.

a while back on Hacker news someone said TSMC have no choice but to build a fab in the U.S. because TSMC needs suppliers like Applied Materials but it doesn't seem that way because everyone can have the same suppliers but Intel and Samsung is struggling while TSMC charge ahead.

[https://wccftech.com/samsung-lost-5nm- snapdragon-x60-snapdra...](https://wccftech.com/samsung-lost-5nm- snapdragon-x60-snapdragon-875-orders-to- tsmc/#:~:text=Mobile%20%E2%8B%AE%20Rumor-,Samsung%20Has%20Reportedly%20Lost%20Qualcomm%20Snapdragon%20X60%2C%20Snapdragon%20875%20Orders,Due%20to%205nm%20Production%20Difficulties&text=Now%2C%20according%20to%20a%20report,because%20of%20these%20unnecessary%20delays).

</comment><comment><USER24> Is Intel deliberately making its branding and specs as confusing as possible now?

<comment><USER25> What do you mean "now"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So this CPU is about to compete with AMD Ryzen 4000 laptop series?

<comment><USER27> It will be competing against the AMD Ryzen 4000, and most likely losing that competition.

<comment><USER28> I'd take the other side of that bet. According to the article and other related ones, both the Xe graphics architecture and the 10++ nodes are substantial bumps.

But it'll be a close race, which is a piece of awesomeness we've never had in laptops before.

The Ryzen 4000 is a 2019 vintage. Slightly losing against Intel's 2021 design is no shame. Comparing Tiger Lake against the Ryzen 5000 is a fairer comparison.

And then come the questions of volume -- if Intel can't manufacture in volume they can win on paper and lose on the ground.

<comment><USER29> AMD has little stopping them from moving to 5nm or 6nm TSMC next year, possibly sooner than Intel can ship this. AMD could do a small run to win on both paper and ground.

The real factor here is the third competitor, Apple, walking in with what is expected to be a 5nm 'no cost limits' CPU that they will ship on every machine based on A14 architecture. Because they own the design and just have TSMC do Fab it's likely that Apple will intentionally put what would be a $500-$1000+ monster core-count cpu spec in every base product, stealing the war. and possibly deflating the market for victors here.

<comment> ben-schaaf I don't see that happening. Apple needs to make money and they do so by having huge margins. They can certainly increase the CPU budget by taking out the Intel cut (though really they've just swapped that for the TSMC cut), but they're not going to chuck a $1000+ CPU in a ~$1200 laptop.

This may be my lack of knowledge in CPU manufacturing, but from what I understand larger dies get you more performance not more efficiency, so considering their inability to build adequate cooling solutions and fondness for reducing thickness even if they chucked a 32core bohemeth in there it won't be running very fast.

On top of that, since AMD are using the same nodes I don't really see how they wouldn't be able to compete. Especially considering Apple probably won't be selling their CPUs separately, leaving out large parts of the market.

<comment><USER29> So by Mega-core-count I mean more than 10 and I'm including their big.little architecture (so maybe 6+ high performance, 8 efficiency, remember that Apple can use all cores grouped however, asymmetrical).

The chip design and margin advantages here are massive. Apple sell's phones at $399 with the A13 (7nm) that outperforms (by any metric we currently have), some of Intels > $300 notebook processors, building using iPhone cores as a base means your margins are subsidized by one of the largest selling products and most massive R&D budgets in the world. Then you have the efficiency of all of this: sure, larger Dies won't get better efficiency but Apple's chips use massively modular power operations. They can bring cores on and offline dynamically, you can chop the GPU, core by core, when you don't need it. They could (important: _could_ ) ship chips that use 4, smartphone power-level cores in normal operations but can flash on 64 core performance for a second and lose it just as fast. Thats how the iPhone's A13 works right now. Notebook (unsustained) performance in a smartphone with no fan. It's why the iPad Pro outperforms the 13 inch MacBook Pro at video rendering. It's the advantages of ARM chip design in 2020 and I imagine they will play to every last one of their strengths.

All the real money is in pre-built systems. AMD sells a ton of units but nothing like Qualcomm or even Intel with their notebook stronghold. I'm sure theres space, just that I believe the market will be decreased in size and if Apple is over there frying everyone, then it's gonna be hard to advertise your hard work beating Intel. I'm not saying all of this will happen or even will happen next year, it's just that the forces here are somewhat massive advantages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can I get this particular Intel rig without the Intel ME backdoors courtesy of the Talpiot program?

No? OK then, I'll stick with Ryzen.

<comment><USER31> ...Which itself has similar "backdoors"

<comment><USER30> Not according to security researchers.

<comment><USER32> This is nonsense. AMD has it's equivalent of the ME and it's under a lot less scrutiny. If it didn't have "backdoors" it would be a miracle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sweet title.</comment>


What makes great kids' picture books great? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@choosenick/the-janet-and-alan-ahlberg-product-portfolio-teardown-58d0f6faa9af <comment><USER2> Interesting that this is focusing on what makes them great from a "product design" perspective, and not the more subjective "artistic" or "book" perspectives. If you're interested in great picture books (with "great" defined more in terms of the art and storytelling), you might check out the Wikipedia list [0] of Caldecott [1] books. Never expected to be telling this story on HN but I'm the visual inspiration for the main character in Flotsam [2], the 2007 winner. One drawback to the Caldecott is that it only considers books drawn/written by US citizens; is anyone familiar with similar medals in other countries?

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Medal#Recipients](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Medal#Recipients)

[1]: [http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/caldecottmeda...](http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/caldecottmedal/caldecottmedal)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flotsam_(David_Wiesner_book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flotsam_\(David_Wiesner_book\))

<comment><USER3> In the UK the Carnegie and Greenaway Medals are the closest related types of awards to the Newbery and the Caldecott respectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "But there's also much to be inspired by and learn from — recurring motifs, the product matrix"

I saw this and frowned. Because a lot of children's picture books are that. Predictable and targeted for best sale.

Children's picture books are a strangely risk averse market. Realistic fiction rules the segment, with publishers opting for extremely simply stories and wording and nice, but uncomplicated illustrations. There's been a real turn in the past few years away from thought provoking or older age fully illustrated books along the lines of Chris Van Alsburg and others in the form of a very early reader style. And this, unfortunately, has really stifled some of the more creative titles we used to see.

I remember seeing this quite clearly when my wife and I attended the Bologna Book Fair a couple of years ago. Her being a fantasy illustrator, we scheduled a large number of portfolio reviews, and from each of them, the message was the same. Too fantastical, too complicated. Stick with what sells, and target younger kids. So your picture books remain "Jimmy learns to poop" or something about animals.

I suppose you have to identify your market, but it was disappointing in hearing this, because your really "artistic" picture book seems to be a dying trend.

</comment><comment><USER5> Too dry, too focused on the business of selling books. The Albergs are nice but there are an incredible number of children's book authors not mentioned as examples of 'great': e.g. Peepo is clearly influenced by Tove Jannson's _The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My_ (1952).

A better article would be, what makes crap children's picture books crap?</comment>


Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60 - <AUTHOR> https://www.jpost.com/International/Israeli-doctor-in-Italy-We-no-longer-help-those-over-60-621856 <comment><USER2> [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/italy-elderly- coronavirus/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/italy-elderly-coronavirus/)

<comment><USER3> This is from 16 March. The article was published today.

<comment><USER2> True. I also googled to find corroborating reports but could not, so I remain skeptical of the characterization in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Peleg said that, from what he sees and hears in the hospital, the > instructions are not to offer access to artificial respiratory machines to > patients over 60 as such machines are limited in number.

In other words Peleg merely surmises what's going on, and has not received an order directly.

I get that this is a rapidly-evolving situation, but this kind of claim should be corroborated by the reporter.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article seems to apply to _one_ hospital. Extrapolating that to the entire country seems an exaggeration at best.

Though that being said, it seems that Italy still has a lot of pending cases still (that is, that have not been discharged or ended otherwise).

</comment><comment><USER6> Would more inter-european coordination and solidarity make a difference here? Some countries are currently much better off than others (infection rate- wise). Are there good reasons for not taking in patients from different countries as long as capacity remains available? Not being able to do _anything_ for (apparently) a large number of patients is a terrible situation.

<comment><USER7> > Are there good reasons for not taking in patients from different countries > as long as capacity remains available?

I don't know about Italy but I do know that german and swiss hospitals are taking in patients from Alsace (the easternmost tip of france) which is currently very hard hit.

<comment><USER8> Where factually correct, the numbers are... smallish:

"Two hospitals in Basel and one in Jura, in northwestern Switzerland, said they would each take two French patients after the Alsace authorities sent out a distress call for help. The French region has been particularly badly hit following contagion among a large church service last month.

Hospitals in Germany are also providing help along with the Swiss hospitals that say they are providing help in the spirit of solidarity and international cooperation."

Understandably so, since the rush is just hitting Switzerland itself.

We're even preparing for a complete lockdown, I (this weekend) received an official document that allows me to travel between my home address and work.

<comment><USER9> > We're even preparing for a complete lockdown, I (this weekend) received an > official document that allows me to travel between my home address and work.

Interesting, are you in Switzerland? After the press conference on Friday I thought the federal council does not want to go to the direction of complete lockdown because it would not be useful because it would not respected.

<comment><USER8> > are you in Switzerland

Yes. And as said: this is preparation. When the infection doubling rates do not go down (nicely displayed here: [https://interaktiv.tagesanzeiger.ch/2020/covid-19-ausbruch-i...](https://interaktiv.tagesanzeiger.ch/2020/covid-19-ausbruch- im-vergleich/?nosome)) from about 2.7 to > 3 days, it will come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll believe it when I hear it from an Italian source, in Italian. The information in this article presumably went through a linguistic game of telephone consisting of: Italian --> Hebrew --> English.

</comment><comment><USER11> How come the industrial capacity of the _world_ is not sufficient to produce enough equipment?

Is it too specialized, too complex to be produced by commonplace manufacturing methods?

<comment><USER12> In Canada the constraint is going to be the number of doctors that we have, not the number of ventilators or the physical space to house patients.

<comment><USER13> As far as I understand (from random reading on the net) its more or less the same bunch of procedures for most patients. After a day or two everyone in the ICU probably knows what to do.</comment></comment></comment>


OSTree – Robust OS upgrades for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://blog.verbum.org/2013/08/26/ostree-v2013-6-released/ <comment><USER2> The point that nobody seems to be making is that this degree of rigour is essentially a requirement for some classes of systems, ie. the OS platform upon which you deploy applications becomes a named, versioned, tested entity with its own repo and changelog, which can be rapidly provisioned at any of its versioned states, rolled back, and have specific versions of specific applications tested against it. This is not always required, but is definitely good practice in all cases.

This is the part where I suggest docker people broaden their scope to include such... "devopsy" concerns around virt deployment. In my own system used internally within my company we have this distinction .. the platforms are called PEs (platform environments) and the applications are SEs (service environments). Combining both produces a SIN (service instance node) on a particular CP (cloud provider).

While I really support docker and they probably get annoyed at me always commenting on their project and coming across as being slightly critical, in all honesty docker irritates me because it leaves all this sort of business out of scope. But I think they are possibly also heading in this direction. :)

<comment><USER3> That stuff is being built by CoreOS which is technically a different project but I suspect many people will end up using CoreOS and Docker together for maximum DevOps. Since Chrome/CoreOS and OSTree have different philosophies it might be worth exploring both ways to do it.

<comment><USER2> Ahh yes, I forgot about that. CoreOS looks interesting but doesn't seem to handle paravirt, which is a serious limitation if you need to run non-Linux systems, plus it's based on vagrant, which falls in to the class of IMHO misconstrued sysadmin-automation software I refer to as PFCTs (post-facto configuration tinkerers). PFCT based instantiation is IMHO epic-fail versus cleaner methods such as cloning a blockstore as it opens large classes of potential bugs that are otherwise avoidable.

Basically, it seems like CoreOS might replace Ubuntu as the default host environment for the docker userbase, however the issue of supporting more exotic environments is apparently not being tackled.

<comment><USER4> > plus it's based on vagrant, which falls in to the class of IMHO misconstrued > sysadmin-automation software I refer to as PFCTs (post-facto configuration > tinkerers).

Huh? I thought the point of vagrant was to just boot up a known image. Then you have veewee which can build an image suitable for vagrant from kickstart or whatever. Can you elaborate on your concerns? Thanks!

<comment><USER2> There is a fallacy in here...

 _Provisioners in Vagrant allow you to automatically install software, alter configurations, and more on the machine as part of the vagrant up process.

This is useful since boxes typically aren't built perfectly for your use case. Of course, if you want to just use vagrant ssh and install the software by hand, that works. But by using the provisioning systems built-in to Vagrant, it automates the process so that it is repeatable._

It's the last part of the final sentence. You can't prove something is repeatable if it's potentially accessing the internet, date and time logic, etc. Cloning an image is a lot more repeatable (and known quantity) than re- massaging one in to existence.

I term the class of IMHO misdirected systems administration tools that attempt the latter PFCTs (post-facto configuration tinkerers). Vagrant is on the better end of these (at least it focuses on one-time instantiation versus constant modification). Other tools such as puppet could be construed as encouraging long term modification without a clean reference at all, thus potentially resulting in configuration drift.

It seems clear to me that this class of tool grew somewhat organically from classical systems administration and is not the most rigorous of approaches in this era of cheap virtualization and instant cloud-based provisioning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (disclaimer: I'm a developer on the Image Packaging System project: [https://java.net/projects/ips/](https://java.net/projects/ips/))

I think there's been some editorialising of the title as I don't see that the author of OSTree claims that it's a "robust" solution (alone).

With that caveat, without filesystem snapshot support, OSTree really isn't a complete solution (as the original author points out).

On Solaris 11+, there are generally two update scenarios for package upgrades:

1) pkg update [name1 name2 ...]

      no packages have new or updated items tagged with
        reboot-needed=true
      pkg will create a zfs snapshot
      pkg will create a backup boot environment
      perform update in place on live root
      if update fails, will exit and tell admin name
        of snapshot so they can revert to it if desired;
        will also print name of backup BE
      if update succeeds, will destroy snapshot and exit

2) pkg update [name1 name2 ...]

      one or more packages have new or updated items tagged
      with reboot-needed=true
      pkg will create a zfs snapshot
      pkg will clone the live boot environment
      pkg will perform update on clone
      if update fails, will tell admin name
        of clone BE so they can inspect it and exit
      if update succeeds, will activate clone BE,
        destroy snapshot, and exit telling admin name
        of new clone

Put another way, on Solaris 11+, the "default practice is the best practice." This is the advantage of integrating the package system with the native features the OS itself supports.

<comment><USER6> If you think OSTree _needs_ filesystem snapshot support, you aren't understanding how it works. Or perhaps we don't have a shared definition of "robust" \- for me, assuming correct behaviour at the filesystem and block layer, I believe deployment changes to be atomic.

How do you determine reboot-needed=true? Is that something assigned by the package developer statically (i.e. kernel is reboot-needed=true)? Determined dynamically at update time (like in the package metadata for a specific revision?)

Do you attempt to control for local configuration?

Is the X server package reboot-needed=true?

<comment><USER5>
      If you think OSTree needs filesystem snapshot support, you
      aren't understanding how it works. Or perhaps we don't
      have a shared definition of "robust" - for me, assuming
      correct behaviour at the filesystem and block layer, I
      believe deployment changes to be atomic.

While OSTree itself may not need filesystem snapshot support, for "robust OS upgrades" (the original title of the ycombinator story) you do need some sort of snapshotting mechanism. Whether that's in the form of ZFS-style snapshots, or boot environments is up to the implementer.

Also, I'd argue that assuming correct operation at the filesystem and block layer is a pretty big assumption :-) Even if the software itself works correctly, time has proven that trusting the hardware is not a good thing.

With that said, yes, I think OSTree _needs_ filesystem snapshot support if admins are to rely on it to provide "robust" OS upgrades.

      How do you determine reboot-needed=true? Is that
      something assigned by the package developer statically
      (i.e. kernel is reboot-needed=true)? Determined
      dynamically at update time (like in the package metadata
      for a specific revision?)

Currently, reboot-needed is determined by the package creator at the individual item level by tagging individual "actions" in a package manifest. It's a way for a package creator say "this component can't be safely updated on a live system, so force the creation and use of a boot environment clone when updating it."

Further refinement of this functionality is planned when applied to specific types of actions found in a package manifest, such as "driver" actions. But it will be handled by the package system transparently.

      Do you attempt to control for local configuration?

In what sense? pkg(5) allows an admin to force the creation and use of a clone boot environment as part of any package-modifying operation.

If you're talking about service configuration, that's handled via SMF (the service management facility) which has its own snapshot system that services use.

If you're talking about legacy service configuration that uses flat files on- disk, then package creators have the option of using service actuators to trigger a restart or refresh of the service whenever the configuration file changes.

You'd have to be more specific.

      Is the X server package reboot-needed=true?

No, because any files that the X server needs are already loaded into memory so updates to the on-disk files won't generally affect it. Any changes made to the X server binaries and libraries on-disk won't take effect until the X server is restarted.

An incompatible change in the X server itself (such as a protocol change, which is very rare) will likely come with a related kernel change which would require a reboot. But again, the package creator is in control of that.

Also, the "reboot-neededed" tag doesn't force a reboot per se; it just forces the update of a given component to be performed in a clone boot environment.

<comment><USER6> > With that said, yes, I think OSTree needs filesystem snapshot support

I'm happy with the fact that it allows admins to choose whatever they want at the filesystem and block level, the same as dpkg/rpm do. For example in a cloud environment, block level redundancy may be more easily provided at the infrastructure level for guests.

For those who do need redundancy, you're free to choose BTRFS, XFS+LVM, or hardware raid, whatever suits you.

As for the rest of your reply around the reboot-needed flag; it basically sounds like it's fairly manual, but maybe that's "good enough". I have a particular paranoia about race conditions though, so were I to design a system that attempted to do live update applications, it'd be a whilelist, not a blacklist as reboot-needed effectively is.

<comment><USER5>
      I'm happy with the fact that it allows admins to choose
      whatever they want at the filesystem and block level, the
      same as dpkg/rpm do. For example in a cloud environment,
      block level redundancy may be more easily provided at the
      infrastructure level for guests.

While it may provide admins with choice, it doesn't provide them with "robust OS upgrades". Again, that's my only quibble here.

      For those who do need redundancy, you're free to choos
      BTRFS, XFS+LVM, or hardware raid, whatever suits you.

There's a large variance in those solutions that doesn't provide the same end- user experience (or even result), and without integration with the package system, doesn't really provide the sort of safety net most administrators are looking for.

      As for the rest of your reply around the reboot-needed
      flag; it basically sounds like it's fairly manual, but
      maybe that's "good enough".

It's only "manual" in some sense for package creators; not administrators. For administrators, it's a transparent decision about what's safe to update and what's not.

As for actually being manual, not really. The package system provides package creators with a tool called pkgmogrify, which allows them to set rules that cause transformation of actions based on patterns at package publication time. As an example, Solaris has a set of rules that say that, by default, any files delivered to /kernel should be tagged with reboot-needed=true.

I won't claim it gets the OS 100% coverage, but as has been said before "perfect is the enemy of good."

      I have a particular paranoia about race conditions though,
      so were I to design a system that attempted to do live
      update applications, it'd be a whilelist, not a blacklist
      as reboot-needed effectively is.

While I understand the paranoia, a whitelist is not actually a practical option. The vast majority of content delivered onto a modern UNIX or UNIX-like system doesn't require a reboot when being updated. man pages, header files, and most userspace binaries and libraries can all be safely updated without a reboot.

For example, on my desktop workstation, ~289,806 items have been installed by the package system. Of those, only 857 have been determined to require a reboot if they are updated.

That means that roughly 0.37% (yes, < 1%) of the items on my system have been determined to require updates to be performed in a clone boot environment (require a reboot).

For enterprise-level customers, minimising the number of reboots needed to enact change is paramount. Any downtime at all can often cost them millions of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would not be complete without a mention of Nix: [http://nixos.org/](http://nixos.org/)

<comment><USER8> Absolutely true; fortunately the article already provides one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I like the idea of atomic upgrades, the idea really should be made to work without requiring a full reboot. The update procedure could be something like:

1) updater makes a private snapshot of the filesystem

2) updater writes its changes to the private snapshot while the rest of the system gets served by unchanged FS

3) updater stops affected services

4) the updated snapshot is swapped in (atomically)

5) services are restarted

<comment><USER3> A wise man once said there is no such thing as a bootable system, only systems that have booted. Many OS updates will change something in the boot process (maybe the kernel, maybe some init scripts, etc.) and you need to reboot to be sure that stuff is still working. Likewise any change that would require the user session to logout/login might as well force a full reboot.

<comment><USER2> _Many OS updates will change something in the boot process (maybe the kernel, maybe some init scripts, etc.) and you need to reboot to be sure that stuff is still working_

That's precisely why a manual upgrade process should not exist for system environments. Instead of live upgrades, you name, version, and test a newer and known-good image of the environment with the applications required on it on test infrastructure prior to final staging/deployment.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that some of this stuff is designed for near-zero-admin desktops, not just the cloud.

<comment><USER2> Fair point. Strange anyone would bother though, I always thought PXE was the best desktop solution... maybe for often-offline nodes or laptops.

<comment><USER3> Sure, PXE imaging is great for enterprise desktops but people don't use it at home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this relate to what I've been reading about lately with docker and "containers"?

<comment><USER11> Docker applies similar concepts (change management at the file and directory level, a chrootable filesystem as the unit of delivery, atomic and revertable deployments), except it applies them 1 level higher in the stack.

Instead of rebooting machines into a new filesystem, docker spawns processes directly into them, using the sandboxing capabilities of the linux kernel. So you get a much more powerful and flexible deployment mechanism. But of course, you need a machine to exist in the first place, which docker isn't designed to do.

So OSTree is a good companion for Docker, because you need a machine to run docker. A good workflow is probably: pack the bare minimum on a physical machine, using ostree. Then put everything else into docker containers. That's the approach of new "just enough" distros like CoreOS.

<comment><USER6> Right, this is a pretty good summary (that docker is 1 level above).

One fundamental difference is that OSTree has a custom serialization format for trees (inspired by git), whereas from what I can tell from the code, docker is just tar (I assume whatever the host /usr/bin/tar serializes to). For example, OSTree explicitly supports extended attributes, so it can support SELinux (and SMACK). Fedora ships a patched tar but...the tar format is a really serious mess.

I would further add though that OSTree does, providing the OS is compatible with it, allow booting a separate "deployment" as a container. So for example if you have Debian in /ostree/deploy/debian/90cd266 while you're booted into /ostree/deploy/fedora/562d0a, you can easily just systemd-nspawn /ostree/deploy/debian/90cd266 and boot the same OS as a container.

But the emphasis right now of OSTree is indeed on bare metal deployments, and I'd like to push hard to integrate with package systems.

<comment><USER11> > _you can easily just systemd-nspawn /ostree/deploy/debian/90cd266 and boot > the same OS as a container_

Perhaps we should be looking at integrating ostree and docker then? :)

> _I 'd like to push hard to integrate with package systems._

How would that integration work exactly?

<comment><USER6> > Perhaps we should be looking at integrating ostree and docker then? :)

It might make sense for docker to be able to store containers as OSTree commits in addition to tarfiles. But I haven't used it myself. On the HTTP side, OSTree may be less efficient or more efficient than what docker does on the wire for updates; I don't know. Static deltas will help significantly.

> How would that integration work exactly?

This section describes it very briefly: [https://people.gnome.org/~walters/ostree/doc/adapting- packag...](https://people.gnome.org/~walters/ostree/doc/adapting-package- manager.html)

Basically this is something you can do on a build server _or_ on a client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From [https://people.gnome.org/~walters/ostree/doc/ostree- package-...](https://people.gnome.org/~walters/ostree/doc/ostree-package- comparison.html):

> OSTree only supports recording and deploying complete (bootable) filesystem > trees. It has no built-in knowledge of how a given filesystem tree was > generated or the origin of individual files, or dependencies, descriptions > of individual components.

Um-m, isn't this what snapshots (e.g. LVM snapshots) are for? Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER13> What he's saying is that if you had (say) a FS image with nginx, mysql, and rails installed on it, the system has no idea of what files belong to mysql and what files belong to rails. So you wouldn't just be able to take said image and tell OSTree "remove mysql and replace it postgresql".

Docker works in a really similar way, actually -- it creates file system images and tars them up, and then uses AUFS to separate changes in each container from the base image. Docker added metadata to describe how to build images; if you want to change the components (AFAICT) the "right" way is to change the metadata and then do a full rebuild.

<comment><USER11> > _Docker added metadata to describe how to build images; if you want to > change the components (AFAICT) the "right" way is to change the metadata and > then do a full rebuild._

Correct. And Docker implements caching of build layers, so you get the _semantics_ of a full rebuild, but in practice are only rebuilding the interesting parts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of [http://camlistore.org/](http://camlistore.org/)</comment>


Here's the story of a game I made in 1994, when I was 12 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/rickbrewpdn/status/1210023029087985664 <comment><USER2> I remember getting into QBasic as a kid. I played Gorillas, and noticed a variable called 'banana' in the source code, which seemed to correspond to the fact the gorillas threw exploding bananas at each other. So I thought replacing it with a variable named 'baby' would cause the gorillas to throw exploding babies at each other. Unfortunately, it turned out game programming is not so easy, and hence began my lifelong foray into coding.

<comment><USER3> I learned with GW-BASIC and made a text based adventure game. I wish it was still floating around the internet today but alas I believe I wrote it before we got online and it didn't survive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beautiful! Strangely enough, when I was about 14 I used to make music using Reason 3. My friends and I would upload it to a shared MySpace. Two of them went on to become professional musicians, and a couple of years ago when browsing a forum for their fans I found someone had uploaded a .zip of songs ripped off the old MySpace, including songs I had made and lost!

</comment><comment><USER5> I grew up in the country around 1980, with a Vic 20, then C64. I read about dial-up services and eventually the BBS concept, but they were totally out of reach. Aside from the quite great manuals that came with the computer, I'd buy computer magazines when possible. I wrote a lot of simple video games, it was a great escape. I remember writing a Dig Dug style game in a jag while my family was away.

By 1985 I'd moved to the big city and had access to dial-up. I wrote a sardonic platform video game called "Can You Get to the Very Top of the Thing" which I shared with friends. By then we had access to every video game as they were released, they were becoming incredible productions. Fortunately my attention switched to writing BBS software.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's quite amazing how the only physical copy of the game ended up copied on archive.org.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ok, I beat the game into submission with the Fighter. Wizard and Thief are more difficult.

You have to flee every strong enemy and farm weak Goblins/Orcs. When you have enough money buy the best armor. After that you should win every fight and buy enough health potions to get over 20 hitpoints. Search for the white robed man (looks like a snow man on the map) and fight him.

You can save with alt-s and drink potions with h on the map. s is the statistics screen. Help screen is F1.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I was around 10 years old I made Use Map Settings (UMS) maps for Starcraft. Freeze tag, Aeon of Strife clones etc. I lost them all and don't think I'll find them again.

I also made maps for Half-Life and Counter Strike. I had them uploaded to my Geocities page but have since lost them. Never found my webpage (cool_kirby77) in the various Geocities archives either.

Those creations only exist in my memory now (and maybe others who played them at the time). Sometimes I wonder if what I created was really as spectacular as I thought it was.

The only thing I have saved from my childhood is a single-player map I made for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The only reason I have it is because I searched years later, and apparently someone took many of the custom maps from the community over the years and uploaded them to some German website. So I could download the .bsp, but the original .map was lost so I couldn't make changes if I wanted to.

I downloaded the map, installed MOHAA and recorded a playthrough so I'd never have to worry about losing it again: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhPK__EgsC4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhPK__EgsC4)

I made that map because I hated how in MOHAA (and most other games like Quake, Soldier of Fortune etc) you were 1 man vs a million. I wanted an FPS where you actually had (useful) allies that helped you throughout the game. Not much longer after I released the map, a number of employees left "2015" (the company that made MOHAA) and started a new company, Infinity Ward. Their first game, Call of Duty, was very similar to MOHAA, but you were actually surrounded by friendly troops that fought with you!

So I like to think that my map was a pioneer that launched a multi-million dollar franchise and cultural phenomenon ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love these. A couple of years earlier I was writing games in HyperCard, of a similar quality. I found the disks recently, but have no idea how to play them. I don't believe those old Mac floppies will even play in any standard disk drive.

<comment><USER10> Maintainer of the HyperCard stacks collection on the Internet Archive ([https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks](https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks)), here.

If you're able to make a disk image, you can use the uploader site at [http://hypercardonline.tk/](http://hypercardonline.tk/) to upload stacks to the archive. If you need help reading the disks in the first place, contact me (firstname.lastname@example.com) and I can see if I can help.

<comment><USER9> That's awesome, thanks. I'll have a look when I'm next at my mum's house. They've probably got all kinds of rubbish on them, but should definitely have some of my HyperCard creations

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I took a major hit to my ego when I tried to make a game and failed. Actually, I didn't fail, I implemented exactly what I was thinking of doing, I just was too young to realize I wasn't incapable I just hadn't thought up a plan... Which I guess was incapable in a sense, but not in technical skill, but just overall creativity and execution. It took me a long time to remember all of that and go easy on my 7 year old self.

</comment><comment><USER12> Kudos aside, it must have been cool owning a computer in that year and at that age!

<comment><USER13> It was! :) But things are mostly better now. One striking difference is that in the PC world back then, getting a sane programming environment was quite hard if you didn't have someone to show you how to do it. Many compilers/IDEs were commercial and too expensive for kids who just wanted to try out programming. I had a PC but I had no idea that Perl, Python or Scheme/Common Lisp even existed.

<comment><USER14> _Many compilers /IDEs were commercial and too expensive for kids who just wanted to try out programming_

This is true, but on the other hand, every installation of MS-DOS came with some version of BASIC, so there was really no friction, just type QBASIC and you're immediately in really quite a good IDE with excellent on-line help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At least there were BBS's and magazines back then for some lucky people, especially in the US I guess. In the beginning of the 80s I had 1 book (it came with the computer) and just the help of some friendly older hackers at a 'local' (fair bit away; my parents had to drive me) event. There were no magazines in any local shops yet, books were expensive and mostly not geared towards learning and they were in English (not my native language; although I am sure I aced English on my final highschool exam because of reading mostly English day in day out).

The first years I had to learn like this and from experimentation. After a while I had 'viditel'[0], which allowed downloading short programs and games which I could study. I remember spending weekends just changing the source code until I understood what it did; this was especially painful with poke/peek; trying to figure our what addresses did what was painful without help as exploring would more often than not hang the computer.

The advantage was; when you knew things, you were sure they would not be different next year (or 20 years later for that matter) on that computer. So once you got the hang of things, you basically could do them 'forever' (the IBM PC was there but it was garbage compared to some of the homecomputers and as a kid I couldn't see that ever taking off :). Very different from now. It was not really possible to 'update' the OS (although I still have my eprom writer from that time and it still works, so I could definitely install new hacked versions of basic, but that was a lot later).

When the BBSs became normal here, things started to go a lot quicker. I ran my own one and worked with people to write our own BBS software in turbo pascal.

Really quite a shame all the source code of the games, demos and bbs software got lost. I sold my second computer and foolishly sold all tapes + disks with it, also from my first system (which I still have, but without my own software). I didn't care as I was going to upgrade to an Amiga so I did not want that old stuff anymore.

[0] [https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viditel](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viditel)

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow. Amazing work. Bring backs lots of memories of early "Personal computer" programming days. Kudos for actually finishing a game project at 12. Thanks for reminding me of happy childhood programming computer memories.

</comment><comment><USER17> When I was 13-14 I made games on a TI-83 plus in TI-basic. Made poker, blackjack, pong, some dice games. The biggest project was a version of space trader, I think I just had two commodities and two worlds but it worked.

<comment><USER18> Some of my earliest coding experience was making games on my trusty TI-82 in high school. I had home-made blackjack, slot machine, fly-spaceship-through- randomized-asteroid-field, and a favorite among my fellow students, Russian Roulette, complete with gruesome graphics. It was silly, but it was a great way to get into coding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I still Paint.NET a lot on my windows devices. That's funny to see the guy who authored it with a Rick & Morty avatar.</comment>


Dynamiq – A simple implementation of a queue on top of Riak 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Tapjoy/dynamiq

<comment><USER2> > You should account for this in your design by either managing your own de- > dupe solution (such as using Memcache to hold the keys you've seen from a > given queue, expiring with the visibility timeout on the queue) or design a > system which self-defends against duplicate messages.

At that point, why not just use beanstalkd or redis? You're already centralizing part of your queue elsewhere, and the point of Riak is decentralization.

However, if you _can_ tolerate duplicate messages, then this seems like a cool system. I didn't get from the README how it actually orders the jobs/messages though. I get it uses an index range scan, but on what values? Is it an ID, and how does the client generate these?

<comment><USER3> Hi, thanks for the feedback.

Before I respond, let me say that I'm one of the core developers of the system, and that I am a big fan of Redis, and conceptually of Beanstalkd (never used it, but I know someone who is a big fan of it).

The reason you wouldn't use Redis of Beanstalkd is because they are inherently singular systems - Things exist to make them behave in a distributed fashion (for Redis, anyways - not sure about Beanstalkd?), but they are not. You're not going to scale them past a single box / node (although I will admit, I am not up on my Beanstalkd news, so possibly they've made strides there?).

Dynamiq leverages the amazing work done by Basho to build a rock solid distributed data store. By providing a light layer of coordination and logic at the edge of the system, it allows you to treat Riak (in all of it's AP glory) as something like a queue (this dovetails into your question about order, below). Riak is distributed to the core, and Dynamiq uses that to it's advantage. Need more capacity? Add more nodes. It'll handle the rest.

On the subject of dupes, they are technically "rare" once the system is running at an even keel. Only when nodes enter / leave or when you alter the configuration of a queue will you be likely to see dupes. Otherwise, the only "dupes" you'd see would be when the timeout expires and "out for delivery" messages become naturally available again (but we do not consider those "dupes").

The system in no way shape or form guarantees, offers, or even implies order. You will likely get a very loose order so long as you are always keeping up with the rate of messages in, but thats it. Never assume order, and in general you should strive to build systems that are resilient in the face of a lack of order.

The range scan operates over an ID that Dynamiq itself assigns to the message, by generating a random int64 using the golang secure/crypto library. The client cannot specify the ID. However, and this is what we do internally, we assign the message an internal, application specific ID prior to publishing it to Dynamiq. So each message ultimately ends up with 2 IDs - 1 for Dynamiqs own use, which you use to ACK once you're done, and one application specific ID which may or may not mean anything to the consuming service.

<comment><USER2> Cool, thanks for the answers, and great work. I understand there's a trade off between distribution and strictness, seems like Dynamiq actively chooses distribution, which is actually a very cool choice to see a queue move into (most or all queues I know of tend to favor consistency).

To answer your questions on beanstalkd, the answer to scaling past a single node is sharding, much like a traditional SQL database (although no replication exists). There really is no HA option. Redis is similar, although it does support replication, so you do have more failover options.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Planning a trip to Europe - <AUTHOR>

Alright, I need your help. After spending the weekend on different sites and trying to find the package I am sorta lost.
I am planning a trip to Europe and my plan is to visit London (and surrounding area), Paris and then Frankfurt..
All the sites that I have checked out give a one-destination deals.. however I am planning to spend around 2 weeks in these three cities all together.. looking for at least 3.5+ star hotel.
any idea which sites can I use to create and plan this trip? <comment><USER2> Very much agree with the first poster. Distances are generally much shorter then in the US.

You can fly into London and then actually use the train to get to Paris and from there to Frankfurt (and Brussels and Amsterdam and Zurich and lots of other places). It may make sense to check out European rail deals.

<http://railteam.com> may be a good start to check on trains. Alas, they where never able to implement ticket sales into the site, it may be a good for general information. <http://tgv-europe.com> is the mothership of the French high speed train network. They do sell tickets. Not sure, though, if they send them overseas.

Flying is certainly the other option.

As for hotels. I made good experiences with <http://hrs.com>, <http://booking.com> and <http://hotels.com> are all fairly good and often offer specials (compare all three, if you have a hotel in mind).

Anyway, have a lot of fun and plan ample time for your visit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info. I will definitely use the suggestion to choose one city as a hub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Heathrow has the highest airport taxes in the EU. Fly into Frankfurt or Amsterdam instead. You can take the eurostar from there or Paris to London. I've had good luck using tripadvisor.com to find hotels. Stars are fairly meaningless when most people are more concerned about the location and price. (I believe you get a star for onsite drycleaning even if you are in a shitty neighborhood)

And if you want to start and end a trip in 2 different cities talk to a travel agent. The sites are fairly good for single destination returns. Anything more complex needs a human being. I've always found the prices to be about the same.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hotel stars are fairly meaningless, unless the number of mini shampoo bottles in the bathroom is an important metric for your holiday experience.

At least in Paris I've stayed in perfectly decent 2-star hotels with great location, comfortable room, free WLAN, etc. -- but of course it's best to read some reviews first. The other end of the 2-star range could well be staggeringly bad.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know of any sites, but can give you a tip: It's probably easier to use one city as a hub (say London), and then take return short hop flights + hotel deals starting from that city.

<comment><USER6> Paris would probably be preferable to London as a hub, since it's more central that will save you quite a bit of time flying. It's a good idea though.

Anywhere that easyjet flies to is probably a good spot, they're a dirt cheap carrier in Europe.

<comment><USER2> "Anywhere that easyjet flies to is probably a good spot, they're a dirt cheap carrier in Europe."

As always, this depends. When you can book well in advance then you'll usually get a good deal. If you fly on short notice or during busy times, however, you may pay the same prices as the old boy airlines.

Just as any airline EasyJet are masters of yield management. If they can sell you a ticket for 400 quid, they won't sell it for 40. Also, it's no frills whatsoever (OK, neither is any other airline nowadays).

<comment><USER6> True enough. High speed rail is another option to be considered by the way.

<comment><USER5> +1 for rail, particularly if the hub is Paris.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Masterbranch scrapes github, pretends I'm using their site - <AUTHOR> https://www.masterbranch.com/eduarddit-project/1023028

<comment><AUTHOR> The link to my project is not clickable, and masterbranch tells visitors they need to sign up to talk to me.

Classy.

<comment><USER2> Hey, it worked for GetSatisfaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Visitors can't contact users which are not registered. We did it in the past, but you're right, it was classy, and we changed it. [http://blog.masterbranch.com/post/3570253595/were- listening-...](http://blog.masterbranch.com/post/3570253595/were-listening-to- you-weve-made-changes)

The project page is under review and we'll link to the original page for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> From your blog post: "Unclaimed profiles are now NOINDEX. We've also changed profile URLs so that indexed profiles by search engines will start being de- indexed."

Not true--your contentless scrape of my github project is the second result for that project name in google. I just made the project yesterday, so it's not a case of the project being already in an index.

I don't want to "claim" my project--it already has hosting, a mechanism for contacting me, and an issue tracker.

<comment><USER3> By "profiles" I meant user profiles, not project pages... as I have already said, this pages need to be improved, and the aim is not to supply the original page but to complement it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, softpedia does this too. A shame.</comment>


Ask HN: A Bolivian TV station stole my web app. What should I do? - <AUTHOR>

I just gave my lil' moustache app a bit of a facelift and then decided to see (via google) what was happening in the world of online moustache apps. I then came across this site: http://www.reduno.com.bo/bigote/
Pretty much a complete rip off of my facetache.com! (Their copy is based on an earlier version. http://20.facetache.appspot.com)
I'm somewhat miffed at the whole thing. Partially amused and partially a bit cranky at their audacity.
Anyways HN, what would your response be? <comment><USER2> send em an email you could either get credit or they could completely ignore you the only difference is the color scheme and thier logo

</comment><comment><USER3> > Anyways HN, what would your response be?

Unfortunately I don't know anything about Bolivian copyright law. Under U.S. rules, you might have a good chance to argue that it's not a derivative or satirical work, it's a straight-up copy and therefore not a protected use -- you might have the right to compensation.

But in the international playing field, this is not so clear. Prosecuting such a case would be expensive.

The other post in this discussion suggests asking for a note of credit on the copied page. Under the circumstances, that's not a bad idea.</comment>


Show HN: Dab detector – Pose recognition to detect when you dab - <AUTHOR> https://caballerocoll.com/experiments/dab-detector/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone! I made a simple thing that detects when you dab and gives you an explosion of emojis and some sound. It's made using ml5.js [0] and p5.js [1].

I made this as a way to play a bit with machine learning, and I was quite surprised how easy it is to get a cool demo like this working! The code used is in the website, so I encourage everyone to give it a try if you know a bit of JS and Vue.

[0] [https://ml5js.org/](https://ml5js.org/)

[1] [https://p5js.org/](https://p5js.org/)</comment>


Dasung Paperlike Pro: E-Ink Monitor with HDMI connector [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj2Lvuc28k0 <comment><USER2> A purpose-built laptop that just runs emacs at init and uses one of these as the display. I would buy one so hard.

Hoping the ReMarkable will be simple enough hack that I could hook it up to my own cloud and use it as a terminal device. Would be nice to sketch lemmas in my handwriting and have a gesture recognition system pick it up and run it past a theorem prover, get back results. etc.

I'm awaiting the arrival of e-ink displays on laptops.

<comment><USER3> You speak my language. Another thing I want is an e-ink only phone. I think for sure there is a market for that type of device.

<comment><USER4> I loved my Motofone[0], it was dirt cheap (paid £10 for it without contract or SIM) and lasted ages (~2 weeks) on battery.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was an early backer of their last USB based monitor, it is truly useless - very poor refresh rate, highly overpriced, poorly written drivers, clunky construction and the list goes on and on.... it ended up as quite a large waste of money.

However, I do hope that the new version will succeed, I love reading on eink screens and I truly wish I had a decent, high resolution / DPI, fast refreshing eink display that would take DisplayPort and 'just work'.

<comment><USER6> Hey a sibling backer!

I agree, it quickly became a gimmick, and such has been face down on a counter top since I got it.

It is slow, it seems to use more CPU, and the stand that came with it is a joke. At least they had VESA mounts on it, that kept me interested another week.

One problem is that it gets this greasy look after an hour or so and you have to manually interact with it to clear it up with the buttons.

It would be nice to use an existing display cable, HDMI, DP, whatever, and plug it in without a further thought. Let the GPU shuffle the bits around the wire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this for real? "1233% funded on July 2, 2016", and they're not shipping 11 months later. They're not making e-ink panels; they just add a bezel and controller. The actual display may be an E-Ink Mobius.[1] That's 1600x1200 pixels on a 13.3" panel. The prototype they're showing may come from the dev kit for E-Ink. They'd just need to add an HDMI interface and repurpose a case from some other display.

E-Ink is a neat technology, but it still costs far too much per unit area compared to competing technologies. That's why big E-Ink displays are so rare.

[1] [http://www.eink.com/display_products_mobius.html](http://www.eink.com/display_products_mobius.html)

<comment><USER8> I think they have more problems to solve. I'm not sure how well eInk will survive the relatively extreme refresh rates that a PC interface would require even if you cap it at 30hz/fps it would still be orders of magnitude more than what any eInk display currently on the market will experience.

Early LCDs had similar problems with pixels getting stuck and dying, from the data sheets which are available (they are quite old) for eInk displays their life span simply cannot coexist with a PC UI interface.

Even if the life span improved I'm guessing these guys had to optimize a lot of things including adding a scaled and a composer that would only refresh the pixels that absolutely must be refreshed in order to get any reasonable lifespan from these.

And I'm still not sure these would last anywhere near the time frame one would expect from a 1000$+ monitor with daily use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder why Pixel Qi didn't become popular enough to fit this niche and not die as a company - seems to have many benefits over e-ink, including refresh rate and some colors:

[https://the-digital-reader.com/2015/01/12/reports-death-pixe...](https://the- digital-reader.com/2015/01/12/reports-death-pixel-qi-somewhat-exaggerated/)

<comment><USER10> I tried to follow pixel qi closely, my guess is that they were focused more on the portables market and not getting enough traction in that area. Outside of being sold in the OLPC, they were sold at small volumes on sparkfun as diy panels to install into netbooks and in the nearly failed notion ink tablet, they were also in some ruggedized windows tablets made for industrial/military use.

I'd have to find the old videos with Mary-Lou Jepsen, but before they went out of business it was around when the iPad retina came out and they were focusing on retina screens. As far as the screen itself, while it seemingly had some trans reflective properties it was also doing it on a TN, not IPS, panel, so it had that problem where holding it vertically would introduce that odd gradient across the screen.

Today I'm more curious about clearink which showed up out of nowhere at the society for information display conference this year with a new outdoor readable technology: [https://youtu.be/9aEYT79-vuo](https://youtu.be/9aEYT79-vuo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you wish to use an e-ink screen to avoid eyes strain, I've recently learned that a video projector does have the avantages of a classic monitor (colors, good refresh rate) without having to watch directly at the source of light, thus avoiding eyes fatigue. I consider it to be a better tradeoff than working with an annoying delay as if you were using a 10 years old computer.

<comment><USER12> How does backlit of reflected make a difference? Light comes of the screen/projection and hits the eye. I don't see how the light would change with that bounce by projection.

<comment><USER11> It's notre direct light - starring at the sun (extreme example) severly hurt your eyes while watching at shadows is not a problem.

<comment><USER13> For a non-PWMed high DPI monitor adjusted to match the e-ink's brightness and contrast, the only difference in the light hitting your eye is the spectrum and the polarization. It's not completely impossible for these to matter, because of interactions with optical imperfections of the eye, but I've never seen any evidence that it actually does matter.

<comment><USER14> What about blue light? I've been hearing about that being a problem lately.

<comment><USER13> Blue light stimulates intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, which influence sleep. Visually identical white lights can have different spectra and different effect on these cells. Eg. "warm white" made from RGB with the blue channel turned down, eg. as with f.lux, will probably stimulate those cells more than sharply long-pass filtered (eg. with a dichroic filter) broad spectrum light of the same color temperature.

These cells are also responsible for light aversion, at least in animal models, eg: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23078956](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23078956) , so it could theoretically make a difference to eye strain, especially at high brightness levels.

However, if you read the e-ink under fluorescent or LED based lighting it's probably going to have a similar peaked spectrum to the LCD screen and there will be no difference if the brightness and color temperature is the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A review from one year ago

[https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/16/second-gen-dasung-...](https://the- digital-reader.com/2016/05/16/second-gen-dasung-paperlike-e-ink-monitor-ships- now-available-at-retail/)

the price tag seems to be $1300

<comment><USER16> For an older model, which didn't have HDMI. The linked blog actually discusses Dasung's third-generation product at [https://the-digital- reader.com/2017/06/02/dasung-paperlike-p...](https://the-digital- reader.com/2017/06/02/dasung-paperlike-pro-monitor-features-faster-response- times-video-carta-e-ink-scren/) and mentions that the previous gen's product price was $700 on Indiegogo, and says they don't know what this unit's price will be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems like it'd be a good screen for a system that's intended for use outdoors. A lot of surveying hardware hooks up to a conventional laptop, but it's difficult to see laptop screens in full sunlight, and you either have to put a shade over the screen or leave the laptop in the cab of the truck.

How does E-Ink compare to LCD in temperature range?

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's their real website: [http://www.dasung.com/english/](http://www.dasung.com/english/)

I cannot wait for the day when large e-ink displays are cheap, or as cheap as normal screens, and have faster refresh rates.

<comment><USER19> I just want an 8.5" x 11" version that is portable, runs Linux, and can open PDFs. For reading papers you wouldn't be able to beat it.

<comment><USER16> Sony makes one, [https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper- notepad](https://www.sony.com/electronics/digital-paper-notepad) for $700 but it's a product being sold to consumers, so tinkering with the underlying OS (reputed to be Linux, in the form of Android) isn't supported.

(There are a number of other 8.5"x11" eink PDF readers out there.)

<comment><USER19> The Digital Paper Notepad is a discontinued product. What other 8.5"x11" eink readers are there?

<comment><USER20> 13.3", 2200x1650 pixels [http://ereader-store.de/en/77-onyx-boox-max- carta.html](http://ereader-store.de/en/77-onyx-boox-max-carta.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone interested in e-ink displays may also the PrintLess Plans product of interest:

[https://www.printlessplans.com](https://www.printlessplans.com)

</comment><comment><USER22> > "No blue light"

Well no light of any type really. If your room light source has blue light then you get blue light. The difference here is that you normally can't adjust the colour balance of your room light. You usually can dim down the blue light on a light emitting display.

<comment><USER23> BTW, Phillips Hue lights, which do let you adjust the color balance of your room light, are great. Even if you don't go for obviously colored light, just being able to change the color temperature of white light is nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone know if there's a hack for Kobos or Kindles that allows for similar? Or connect a keyboard.

I'd love to be able to attach a tmux session on my Kobo Glo HD and write with a bluetooth keyboard outside in the summer.

<comment><USER25> Kobos have proven to be pretty hackable, IIRC someone on the mobileread developers forum got Debian running on one, so ssh/tmux should be possible.

The refresh rate is pretty low though, even for a text based terminal, I suspect interactive use would suffer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is an ACME's user wet dream.

</comment><comment><USER27> Gosh. I would buy this in a second if the price was a bit less and I was sure the durability/lifespan was good. The reduced eye strain benefits. I really want this.

<comment><USER13> What's the mechanism of action behind the reduced eye strain, and why is e-ink needed to achieve it?

Lack of flicker? True of any non-PWMed monitor.

Reduced brightness or contrast? Conventional displays can be turned down to match e-ink.

Lack of subpixels? High DPI displays make subpixels invisible under normal circumstances.

Smoother spectrum white? I doubt this makes a difference, but it's not completely implausible, because the eye does have some chromatic aberration. But greyscale LCDs are available.

Lack of polarization? Polarization is visible (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger's_brush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger's_brush) ), but it's a very minor effect. It seems unlikely that something so difficult to see could cause eye strain. OLED displays don't show this effect.

<comment><USER28> Reduced brightness at maintained contrast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> One place I worked had indirect solar spectrum light that bounced light off the ceiling. That really seemed to keep my eyes from getting tired.

<comment><USER30> Can you describe that in a bit more detail? Links? I'd love something like that.

<comment><USER29> This was a very old workspace. About every two cubicles there was a 15"x15"x8" box that sat on top of the cubicle wall and took about a minute to come up to full brightness. The top of the box was open and light reflected off the ceiling tiles down to the work area. I don't know who made them. They generated a fair amount of heat, but not enough to be uncomfortable. Twenty years ago they were probably twenty years old. In the five years I was there I never saw one burn out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The new Onyx book will get HDMI too at the end of the year. Plus you can use it as an android tablet with pen.

</comment><comment><USER32> Perfect for an xlib based window manager.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 I wished they made bigger versions for digital signage.

</comment><comment><USER32> DIY Alphasmart clone here I come.</comment>


The city of the future is one with way less parking - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90273563/the-city-of-the-future-is-one-with-way-less-parking <comment><USER2> Not really addressing the transportation issue.

>"We could bring as many as 3 million new residents to the city without anyone really noticing a difference, except there's less redundant spaces for cars to sit all day," Karalis says.

A redundant parking space has a car sitting in it? Are there really all kinds of empty parking lots that are just hanging around undeveloped? Who owns these lots and why do they want their property empty?

How about working on the hard issues surrounding ubiquitous, clean, higher density transportation.</comment>


Should the super-wealthy pay more taxes? - <AUTHOR> http://forums.intpcentral.com/showthread.php?t=40126

<comment><USER2> "Tax the Rich" seems to be a popular sentiment (probably because the majority of people aren't rich and would rather anybody but themselves pay more in taxes), but is it effective? The richest 1% of the population already pays for 40% of the US's total Federal Income Tax revenue, and the top 5% pays for over 60%. (<http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6>). And because of the Laffer Curve (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve>), increasing taxes to the rich could very likely result in LESS revenue.

<comment><USER3> I have no opinion on the matter, since the subject of how to use other peoples' property is none of my business.

<comment><USER4> There is no developed society on earth in which there's not taxation for public services. No serious suggestions have been made on how to have a society remotely resembling our own without taxation and redistribution of wealth. The only question is over how to do it. Thus it's a perfectly valid question and, in a democracy, the business of all of the citizens.

<comment><USER3> I would like to see society evolve to a point where people interact on a purely voluntary basis, without the threat or use of force. That's my vote.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Agents of influence: How reporters have been "weaponized" by leaks - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/is-russia-using-journalists-as-weapons-does-it-matter/ <comment><USER2> politically opinionated BS.

they try to frame Greenwald by implying he benefited from hiding sources intent, when he did mention the sources clearly on all reports (he just refrained from guessing the intent, which is good)

then proceeds to call the russian media manipulation on the DNC email leak as the "first" (!) time a state influenced another State's democratic process. Erasing some decades of history since WWII for their narrative convenience.

this is sad. arstechnica used to be a good source of news. now they are part of the machine preaching for more government secrecy when that is in fact the only reason fake leaks are hard to protect against!</comment>