The Supreme Court Decision That Every Startup Should Know About - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@patrickwyrick/the-supreme-court-s-decision-in-north-carolina-board-of-dental-examiners-v-2e6f3b8e964c

<comment><USER2> One thing about this I don't understand after reading (maybe I missed it) is this:

It sounds like all the state needs to do is put in place the _ability_ to veto any decision of a licensing board. It doesn't actually need to veto anything. The ability for the state to veto alone ensures that the boards are protected from suits. So if a licensing board takes anti-competitive action but the state does not veto the action (despite having the mechanism to do so) what protects the free market in that case? The business would now have to sue the state, rather than the licensing board?</comment>


Quantum Random Number Generator as free webservice - <AUTHOR> http://qrng.physik.hu-berlin.de/download

<comment><USER2> John Walker's Fourmilab has been providing quantum random bits for 14 years already: <http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't really see a use for this. For non-cryptographic purposes such as Monte Carlo simulations, it's hard to imagine an application where a good conventional pseudo-random generator such as a Mersenne twister wouldn't be perfectly adequate. Even for cryptographic purposes, a crypto-standard PRNG seeded from a good entropy source (/dev/random) is usually secure enough, and for the few seriously high-security applications where that wouldn't be enough, nobody would trust a source that wasn't under their physical control.

<comment><USER4> There are two (plus one) market niches that exist, which another random number service (random.org) fills fairly well.

1.) People who don't know anything at all about random number generation, and just want a web form where they can press the button and get a random number.

You hardly need a hardware random number generator for this, or any kind of serious randomness.

2.) Acting as a neutral, trusted third party, for contests, etc. Dooce just did a big Microsoft-sponsored Kinect giveaway PR circus bullshit event, and they used random.org to pick the winners.

Unlike 1, there might be actual money in this, and is one of the few, amusing, businesses where the more money you charge, the higher the perceived utility.

3.) Providing random numbers as an advertisement for your fine line of hardware random number generators. Here it doesn't matter how much money you make, you just want people to buy the hardware that made them. Oddly enough, none of the random number services (and there are quite a few) do this, for some inexplicable reason. There's not even an argument-from-proprietary technology, since HRNGs are supposed to generate perfectly random noise, and there's no way an attacker could stage a replay attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm currently building a high-quality zener diode-based RNG. There's a dearth of good information on the internet about these things, everyone seems to offer a schematic but their explanations don't really show any sort of understanding of the process.

In any case, I think this design qualifies as "quantum" because zener diodes at 5.6V and less work through quantum electron tunneling ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> This isn't useful for cryptography (how can I trust the random data to be random?), but for certain computational tasks this could indeed be quite useful (think Monte Carlo simulations).

<comment><USER7> I've never encountered a Monte Carlo algorithm that required random numbers of this quality. That doesn't mean they don't exist though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really cool.

But is there anything it's useful for as it stands? Or is it better thought of as an experiment in distribution?

<comment><USER9> Assuming the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, it's useful for making decisions.

Make your decision based on quantum-generated random numbers, and you're guaranteed that an alternative-universe counterpart of yourself made the opposite decision. Thus if your decision turns out to be the wrong one you can at least console yourself that there's another version of yourself who didn't make the same mistake.</comment></comment>


Magic Leap One: Creator Edition - <AUTHOR> https://www.magicleap.com/magic-leap-one <comment><USER2> $2k seems unreasonable and I'm having trouble thinking of reasons why that is.

<comment><USER3> Well, somehow you need to justify $2.3B in investments.

Joke aside, I think it keeps people from reviewing it who can easily afford HTC Vive-level priced devices. I think at $2.2k I'd take a more close look at what I can actually do with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Existing discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17715337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17715337)

</comment><comment><USER5> > spatial computing</comment>


VC Non Admissions - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/vcobserver/vc-non-admissions?type=powerpoint <comment><USER2> _SlideShare is down for scheduled maintenance._

Really? You _scheduled_ your downtime for a Wednesday, 9AM Eastern US time?</comment>


Show HN: Floobits-atom — Remote pair programming in Atom - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-atom <comment><USER2> This looks quite neat!

I believe text synchronization relies on Simon Fraser's Differential Synchronization[0], which relies on conventional diff / match / patch and requires that the server hold a full copy of each user's files (and that each client hold a full copy of the server's copy, in addition to its own).

I believe it complicates >2 user editing and re-synchronization after a brief disconnection.

Was there a technical reason to use that instead of Operational Transformation or CRDTs?

[0]: [https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/](https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Really cool -- just got it working in about ~10 minutes on a fresh Atom install. Was able to verify that it works in a web browser session. Very cool, so far. Keep going!

</comment><comment><USER4> Forgive my lack of specificity with this harshness because it's been a long time. Floobits was horribly broken when I tried it in Sublime Text. Why should I give it a chance in Atom when I have Screenhero, which works quite well?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you haven't tried our Sublime plugin recently, all I can do is urge you to give it another shot. My primary editor is Sublime Text 3, so I know how bad it used to be. If you do find issues, please report them! We can't fix bugs we don't know about.

When compared to screen sharing, Floobits has significant advantages. The biggest is that you don't have to use the same editor. Atom users can pair with users of Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs, etc. Since everyone gets to use their favorite, highly-customized tools, it makes switching "drivers" much more pleasant. Another benefit is that you don't have to stare at the same code in lock-step. People can "fork off" and look at separate files. I find it useful even when pairing in person. I can use my own themes, my tiny fonts, my Dvorak keyboard layout... all without bothering anyone else. Likewise, anyone pairing with me can use their own esoteric dev environment without bothering me. In short, it eliminates many of the compromises that pairing typically forces on devs.</comment></comment>


Doctor saves life by sucking urine from man's bladder mid-flight to NYC - happy-go-lucky https://nypost.com/2019/11/22/doctor-saves-life-by-sucking-urine-from-mans-bladder-mid-flight-to-nyc/ <comment><AUTHOR> Incredibly heart-warming story, glad everything worked well.

From a legal perspective, if a doctor makes a mistake on a flight, is he/she liable despite best intentions?

<comment><USER2> At least in the US, no. Legislation called the Aviation Medical Assistance Act only makes airplane first responders liable for gross negligence and willful misconduct.</comment></comment>


How the Kleiner Perkins Empire Fell - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/longform/kleiner-perkins-vc-fall/ <comment><USER2> Something that gets missed out a lot from the conversations about VC firms is the problem of generating deal flow. Good VC firms (and great investors) need to not only know how to invest and support a great company but also how to get them through the door. I suspect it's why socially adept people thrive in VC so much - they can quickly learn how to create a spider's web around them and listen in for deals.

For most of its life, KPCB had a web around the firm. Great companies would come in and pitch themselves. So, for the most part, the job was to "only" pick whom to invest in (picking is just as hard!). As an extreme outsider, it seems that their operating rubric is so focused on this that they've lost the institutional capacity to spin new webs of their own. They are reliant on outsized personalities delivering the win rather than the institution itself pulling it in.

That's a tricky spot for the firm to be in. And it's a tricker spot to navigate out of. They'll have to rebuild institutional knowledge and prospect like other firms now; a mindset shift that could be hard for most veterans to get into as early on this would have been a negative signal in their careers and for their firm. Now, that it's a requirement; it has to be a tough sell to everyone involved (note: I don't know anyone at the firm. I have simply seen this pattern play out a few times).

They can hire fantastic new investors who know how to hunt, but will the firm be able to listen to them? This is a firm where getting rid of nametags was noteworthy enough to make it into Fortune; imagine how hard a sell getting down into the mud must be.

FWIW, such firms eventually recover. Eventually. They're just too big not to. But it is a painful road until that point. I wish the best of luck to them.

<comment><USER3> This is a great point - to some degree this explains the power law in VC - founders hustle hard to get in front of Sequoia / A16Z / Benchmark etc, whereas you can stumble on other VC sites and see a bunch of logos but nothing impressive.

I've been in SF for 3 years now and haven't really heard anything that impressive about Kleiner, but looking at Crunchbase, they've led the A for Rippling, the C for Plaid, the D round for Intercom, the B round for Figma, the E round for Peleton. They have a bunch of other impressive logos that they've also managed to lock in.

To your point about the web - they clearly still have it. Yes, they're out of the loop and aren't getting the early stage deal flow that they used to (to the benefit of many others), but they clearly have a deep moat still and can get an ok return from that.

<comment><USER4> I learned from the article that KP's problem was that their firm bifurcated. They had a growth fund led by Mary Meeker which was likely responsible for a number of those impressive logos you listed.

Meeker's success with the growth fund happened as KP's early stage venture fund went into decline even though it was the original and the stalwart for decades.

The article mentioned that Meeker left last year with her entire team to start her own fund and one of KP's biggest problems has been the inability to keep its own talent. So "they clearly still have it" is likely in reference to people who have left with their 'web' and KP may not have anything.

<comment><USER3> Extremely good point

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is an interview with Andy Rachleff (former VC at Benchmark and CEO of Wealthfront), where he notes that the problem with Kleiner is that the old partners never retired. They just stayed on and did very little actual work but since they owned huge stakes in the partnership they collected much of the carry. Over time new firms (like Benchmark) formed that basically pushed out partners who started coasting. If you are an ambitious young VC which kind of firm would you work for?

<comment><USER6> A top heavy old partner institutional firm is not a bad thing. The they're usually hands off once you invest and take their money. The problem is they're too conservative with their capital, and only invest in trends that have passed by decades ago to pursue the next big thing. As an entrepeneur in the dining and technology space knows how and where I want to grow my company, I'd rather see my angel investment funders come from the old cohort than the younger firms seeking radical changes.

<comment><USER7> In the case of Kleiner, the article puns it on a wrong bet (green energy) rather than being too conservative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [reposting earlier comment reply as a top level comment + edited]

Disclaimer: my whole career is on the consumer software side, so I can only speak to that. I have zero insight on Kleiner as it relates to enterprise.

My first time inside KP was in 2003, working out of their office for a few months during a coding internship at Digital Chocolate. Great snacks and drinks freely available made quite impression on me as a college student.

Second time was in 2011 when I came in to pitch my first startup with Aileen Lee. It was a pre-revenue consumer play, not particularly in her wheelhouse of e-commerce, so nothing came of it. She was pleasant and professional. My only complaint was that she/Kleiner didn't seem particularly "hip". Not that VCs are particularly known for their cool factor, but for some reason I had expected something a little less square based on Kleiner's reputation.

I think this otherwise excellent article does a disservice by not mentioning Ilya Fushman joining on their timeline of key events. (It does mention him later, mostly in passing). I've never worked with him, but we have mutual acquaintances and have probably been to a few of the same parties. From my perspective as a not-total-outsider, Fushman brings some fresh thinking to a firm that is badly in need of relevancy/culture refresh. If they'd had someone like him there in 2011, for example, that would have made for a much more interesting meeting for me and other other consumer-facing entrepreneurs.

Not sure if and when they'll ever regain the kind of dominance they had at their heyday, but I do think being hipster credibility matters for consumer plays, and with Fushman on board Kleiner now has a solid chance to play in this space again.

<comment><USER9> > pre-revenue consumer play

So, translating that into English, you were losing money giving something to individual people, but hoped you could do... what? Start charging money? Harvest data? Get bought before you ran out of VC money? This sort of "founder" bafflegab is annoying.

<comment><USER8> Lol. By all means, make fun of this strategy now, I do it myself, but you have to understand what it was like in silicon valley back in those days, 2010-2011. Facebook was _the_ game in town, and these were the days when for the true believers, myself included, it was going to deliver us from evil (yeah, I know). The "smart money" either were Facebook insiders or wished they were, ie everyone knew that to insist on meaningful revenue before writing a seed stage check meant missing out on the next Facebook.

I was a first time founder who started out as a build engineer, then engineer, tech lead, and PM. I'd been bootstrapping for two years and needed to raise. I didn't know shit about business or venture capital other than that it's apparently how dreams get made. So I figured out how to position the company to get funded, and got it done.

Did I have a proven revenue model? No, but I had a few plausible directions, and that was enough to get to the next phase, so I didn't sweat it.

Would I pitch a pre-revenue startup on Sand Hill in 2019? Unlikely.

Maybe that's obvious to everyone now. But it's a lot easier to be on the outside making fun of failed projects than to actually forego the cushy salary and go for it as a founder.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't commenting on the strategy (which I agree is less than great) as much as the language. "Pre-revenue" as a euphemism for "we're losing money," "play" as one for "likely-to-fail business," etc. I could have called it "VC jargon," but "bafflegab" seemed appropriate, or maybe "Newspeak."

Still, thanks for the explanation. I'm just an outsider looking in.

<comment><USER10> Pre-revenue is a widely accepted term to describe a company, and usually an accurate one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe they should implement OKR's over there and see how it goes for them??

<comment><USER4> I laughed.

I can go glass half-full or empty on OKR's. They obviously have value, but using OKR's at Google is one of the biggest selection biases possible. Google seems to have done so many things in its history that would be death for other org's.

The episode about firing all managers is a great in-depth story of stupidity. Yet Google succeeded because they had and have an absolute lock on the search market.

Dear Doerr, convince me about OKR's another way.

I would also love to see what OKR's looked like throughout some of the products at Google that they have sunset or flopped. G+, RSS, Wave, Hangouts, etc. \- OKR's are a useful tool but they aren't what made Google a $750 billion company.

<comment><USER11> I only jest because I did see John speak and give a presentation about his OKR system while I was working at Airware (now defunct).

I was just fresh from LinkedIn, where OKR's had recently been implemented. I got to see how they systematically eliminated some of the best employees in favor of those who were willing to game the system and create fake goals for themselves.

As I sat in the audience, I thought to myself, "Finally I'm meeting the fabled creator of OKR's."

Airware went out of business a few years later.

<comment><USER4> I would have been mad. Heck, I'm mad just reading that. It's bad management. If you are going to use metrics you have to know that they are going to create perverse incentives.

It's management's job to be vigilant in seeing/hearing and looking for those perverse incentives and then determining if the trade off is acceptable.

<comment> village-idiot I feel like most "X technique led us down a bad path" are actually "we had shit tier management and nobody could fix it" stories in disguise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember about 7-8 years ago seeing John Doerr give a talk somewhere and he literally started desperately fighting back tears because he thought humanity was _imminently_ going to go extinct because of climate change. I realized he'd lost his mind and figured KPCB was toast. Not sure if I'm supposed to feel good about some validation of that.

<comment><USER13> Spot-on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm still under the impression that if you gave the same set of companies to every VC in the world and had each of them bet on the winners, that you wouldn't see that much of a difference in portfolio performance from the very worst to the very best VCs. There's no magic formula for choosing companies that firms like KP have--a lot of it is based on their reputation. Plus, the next Facebook is not going to look like Facebook or whatever that maxim was. The better companies tend to go to the VCs with the better reputation and the cycle continues.

<comment> village-idiot > Plus, the next Facebook is not going to look like Facebook or whatever that > maxim was.

Everyone fights the last war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very interesting take on KP. Anyone from the inside (recent startup founders, ex-employees, etc.) want to chime in? Would love to hear.

<comment><USER16> I was an employee worked for KP invested Startup by 3 extremely smart MIT Phds. Smartest people I ever worked with - one of them can do Analog, FPGA, Linux kernel all the same time. We created a system with 10G interface (15 years ago) deployed in Comcast and generated 40+ million revenue with < 10 employees.

After that, KP installed their own CEO with old analog modem background, fired the extremely experience VP of engr, hire/fire 3 CTOs and hire 160 people to "scale" the company and burn all the cash without deliver one single product in the next 6 years. The CEO also manager to get rid of all 3 founders.

<comment><USER17> NOICE!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My semi outsider observation is that it's a crap shoot which sector you place your bets on. Doerr lost his shirt on green tech when it went out of fashion. We are arguably now in another dotcom style investment bubble: KP lived through the earlier dot com boom and bust and was probably overly cautious in betting on which platform companies would be winner takes all post web 2.0 era. You can only have the midas touch for so long before age and experience gets in the way as much as it helps

<comment><USER19> My vague impression is they were conservative, didn't make the leap to Net valuations based on traffic and little revenues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As usual, the headline is rather sensational. Kleiner is like a Microsoft or Oracle of VC. They're not the latest or sexiest, but they've hardly "fallen" \-- still one of the biggest funds out there in $ terms and will still be around for a long time to come.

Disclosure: previously worked at a Kleiner-backed startup, but have no stake in it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER21> The article didn't mention the spin out of G2VP which was surprising.

<comment><USER22> Is that the cleantech fund? How do you think they will do now?</comment></comment>


Apple will reportedly launch a credit card with Goldman Sachs - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/10/17339632/apple-goldman-sachs-credit-card-report <comment><USER2> This is interesting because I was just exploring this idea around how all companies eventually just become banks. The example I was thinking about though was GE Capital. GE started out making stuff, then they became a bank. General Motors started out making cars, then they became a bank. Many more companies have venture arms which act like banks on a more intimate level. But still..

This makes sense as there are only so many macbooks, iphones, cars, generators, lightbulbs, etc.. to sell. Selling money is much much more lucrative.

<comment><USER3> Please name any bank thats more lucrative than Apple.

<comment><USER3> I have no idea why im beeing downvoted, im directly replying to the parent post which claims "This makes sense as there are only so many macbooks, iphones, cars, generators, lightbulbs, etc.. to sell. Selling money is much much more lucrative."

Im pretty sure, that no bank is in the same profit/lucrative league as Apple.

<comment><USER4> While your point may or may not be correct, it was probably the tone of the comment rather than the substance that people are responding to

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was _just_ looking this morning at the cards I have attached to Apple Pay. It was then that I noticed the new card-like graphics for Apple Pay, and there is language that makes "Apple Pay" sound an awful lot like a credit card. In the information section for Apple Pay there are things like "Card details", which lists it as "Discover Debit" with what looks to be a non-active PIN (it's all zeros). "Some stores may require a PIN to complete transactions with your _Apple Pay Cash card_."

Granted, it's all just verbiage, but Apple launching some kind of financial instrument wouldn't shock me.

<comment><USER6> People can send you money through iMessage and you can then use that money for payments at places that both support Apple Pay and take Discover.

<comment><USER7> FWIW it hasn't worked too well overseas. I tried it in Sweden and my "normal" credit card works but whatever vendor they were using at Pressbyrån did not like whatever setup Apple has (they took discover)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope that also means, that Apple Pay becomes truely available in central Europe. It is currently completely missing in Germany, and in France, while being availabe, it is only via less known banks. If Apple can't work out an agreement with the traditional big banks, having their own offering might help making Apple Pay available. (I have never understood why Apple Pay can't just charge the same credit card, the App Store uses)

<comment><USER9> Apple Pay can't just charge the credit card on file with iTunes because Apple doesn't actually store bare card numbers for Apple Pay payments. They use the card number you input to access the provider's network and get a token, which they then use to actually make transactions. The provider has to have agreed to integrate with Apple's systems to generate those tokens. They have a good write-up of how the system works here: [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT203027](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203027)

Key part:

> Again, neither Apple nor your device sends your actual payment card number. > Before they approve the payment, your bank, card issuer, or payment network > can verify your payment information by checking the dynamic security code to > make sure that it's unique and tied to your device.

Apple Pay requires tight integration with the actual Provider of your card to authorize every transaction.

For contrast, Samsung Pay works by sending the bare card number to card-reader device by emulating magnetic fields. It's exactly as if you swiped the card, which is why it works with almost every card, and almost every card reader. It doesn't have any of the security benefits or guarantees of Apple/Android Pay, though.

<comment><USER10> > For contrast, Samsung Pay works by sending the bare card number to card- > reader device by emulating magnetic fields. It's exactly as if you swiped > the card, which is why it works with almost every card, and almost every > card reader.

This is incorrect. Samsung Pay uses a tokenized PAN (credit card number) over both MST and NFC. It does not transmit the original bare card number. [https://developer.samsung.com/tech- insights/pay/tokenization](https://developer.samsung.com/tech- insights/pay/tokenization)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the correction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple already have a credit card with Barclays (as mentioned in TFA). This is just them moving from one partner to another.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wish Apple hadn't selected the Vampire Squid[0,1]. Are there any ethical financial services providers?

EDIT: Service providers at scale, I mean. It's a serious question. Would you trust Wells Fargo? Bank of America? These criminal organizations get a cut of nearly everyone's transactions. There needs to be an alternative, and it's too bad a company with the resources that Apple has can't or wont do better.

[0] [https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great- america...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american- bubble-machine-20100405) [1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jakezamansky/2013/08/08/the- gre...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jakezamansky/2013/08/08/the-great- vampire-squid-keeps-on-sucking/#25432a5e7df8)

<comment><USER13> No, at a certain scale they're more alike than not. GS is notably heinous because of their absurd scale, they're not unique in terms of approach and ethics. At the scale Apple needs, all of the "good guys" were long since ground to chum; you don't get that big in financial services, ethically.

<comment><USER14> On the contrary they have little or no presnece in the consumer area they only deals with institutions. It seems to me they are insignificant in this space.

<comment><USER15> Goldman Sachs has a consumer presence: [https://www.marcus.com/us/en](https://www.marcus.com/us/en)

<comment><USER16> This is GE capital, which they purchased for this purpose and seems to be the arm they're using with Apple.

<comment><USER15> I realize this is a late reply. GE Capital was a loan organization. Marcus also offers checking and savings accounts, which were built in-house at Goldman Sachs. I interviewed for a job to work on the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to have a final card. I wish I could have just been rolled over into this instead of having to sign up for another card.

</comment><comment><USER18> GS has been pushing hard into retail banking and is also trying to repair their brand perception.

</comment><comment><USER19> Bad idea Apple. The only reason many of us use credit cards is to collect points. Without the incentive of earning points to spend on flights and merchandise, why would I use your card?

<comment><USER20> If you are in Canada, you absolutely need to use 1 credit card to have a decent credit history. Not having a credit history or having a bad credit history means you won't be able to get a mortgage, won't be able rent, won't be able to finance/lease a car. I'm pretty sure it works the same in US as well.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but you may as well choose the credit card with the most advantageous reward scheme. The fact that you need a credit card to establish history doesn't make reasonable to choose a card with suboptimal rewards.

<comment><USER20> But the parent clearly says "The only reason many of us use credit cards is to collect points". Unless, of course only reason means something else.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Comcast gets tax break designed for Google fiber - <AUTHOR> http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2016/02/oregon_created_a_tax_break_for.html <comment><USER2> I love this story. So lawmakers are writing a law specifically for one company to take advantage of (corruption much?) and then are now upset that another company is trying to qualify for it.</comment>


Goldman Sachs is a Harbinger of American Decline - <AUTHOR> http://remarkedly.com/2012/03/15/goldman-sachs-is-a-harbinger-of-american-decline/

<comment><USER2> It is so funny to see these articles in the past few days. As a long time /r/conspiracy buff among other things... people have been saying this for YEARS to deaf ears.

Especially given the catastrophic 2008 crash, which resulted in ZERO convictions (although, it did pave way for an oscar winning documentary, so there's that), as well as the fact that Greece, which has just defaulted and has been in the news for many months as to how bad their economy is doing, is exactly where they are because they hired GS to help them obfuscate financial shenanigans. And guess what -- who is the new PM of Greece? Who is the new PM of Italy?

Both fucking GS execs!! WTF.

GS should be literally drawn and quartered. They are the evil cancer.

<http://digitaljournal.com/article/314642>

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and- feat...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and- features/what-price-the-new-democracy-goldman-sachs-conquers- europe-6264091.html)

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/mario-monti-italys-new- prime-m...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/mario-monti-italys-new-prime- minister)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that there are problems but there are also some good people working at GS and elsewhere - I don't want to just slam them. I'm more curious about what's causing this - what in our society allows people to create tremendous wealth while adding nothing?? It's not like greed was invented yesterday.

<comment><USER2> Greed begets Greed.

With those who know how to exploit the system for their benefit at the top of the power structure where they can remove any and all accountability, you have a self reinforcing greed loop.

THe people at the top aren't going to kill the system, when they can do insider trading with no transparency, and no risk. They get wealthy, and if going after the financial sector would ruin their position -- then hell no - they will die to protect it.

This is exactly what we are seeing. Oligarchy.

The world is farked in its current form. And as soon as the people get TOO upset, they will spark off a war to distract and kill off the complainers.

This is what the Iran issue is - it's the backup plan. If the economy fails further, or the OWS type protests turn violent to where they are a threat to the Oligarchy, US and israel will start war with Iran to get everyone to shut- up.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does this happen? - <AUTHOR> We filled a graduated cylinder with Ever Clear and let it overflow. Then we lit the liquid on fire. To our surprise the flame started running around the base of the cylinder. Why does this happen?<p>http://webmshare.com/m7vb8 <comment><USER2> This is probably more a question for:

[http://physics.stackexchange.com/](http://physics.stackexchange.com/)

or:

[http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/](http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/)</comment>


Google refuses to remove the state-sponsored app used to spy on Russian citizens - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.mos.socmon&showAllReviews=true <comment><USER2> On what grounds should they remove it?

The app is bad and quite invasive, but it should be noted that it is supposed to be installed only in a specific context (covid patients who have chosen to quarantine at home) so it is not much different from e.g. exam proctoring software (which is also very invasive).

<comment><USER3> When compared to the alternate methods of quarantine, which are essentially imprisonment, this seems fairly reasonable. It seemingly even meets the UN nonbinding agreement on quarentines.[1] The security issues are ridiculous though, that might be worth taking it down for.

If this app is used for their QR-code plan it's a huge problem.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine#The_United_Nations_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine#The_United_Nations_and_the_Siracusa_Principles)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This app is for people, who have _confirmed_ COVID-19 and chose to stay at home instead of hospitalization

If you will convince Google to remove it a lot of people will be forced to stay at hospitals even with mild symptoms. Similar app exists in Russia and Poland, probably in other countries too

UPD: better app description

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is some background information I found in English: [https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/04/01/surrender- everything](https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/04/01/surrender-everything)

</comment><comment><USER6> When Larry and Sergey stopped caring about Google, the company lost true north. Now it drifts about, pulled by mercenary winds.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google will do what it can to keep a presence in countries even authoritarian types. Google is a private entity that has to provide shareholder profits.

</comment><comment><USER8> They might not be required to remove it globally.

But _if_ it's against EU law they get into trouble if they refuse to remove it there after being made aware of it.

Also what I'm wondering recently is how far Google can be held responsible for knowingly not removing apps which brake the app store term of services, especially if they have that Google protect/verified mark.

Like e.g. tick tock did at least in the past belong into that category.</comment>


China emerges as leader in cyberwarfare - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0914/p01s01-woap.html?page=1 <comment><USER2> Correction to title: China emerges as leader in botched hacks.</comment>


Teaching Coding from the Metal Up or from the Glass Back? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TeachingCodingFromTheMetalUpOrFromTheGlassBack.aspx <comment><USER2> It's the difference (nearly forgotten) between systems programming and application programming.

You see a strong version of the latter in the gamindustri. Junta Ota wanted to write music for games but nobody would hire him to do it so he wrote his own game and the rest is history.</comment>


The Messy Consequences of the Golden State Killer Case - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/genetic-genealogy-dna-database-criminal-investigations/599005/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how long until someone creates a DNA site where you can upload your DNA, and then get a "reward" if yours is used to locate a suspect, with closeness of relation being worth more. The rewards could be paid for by the money they charge the law enforcement agencies to use the database. If the rewards were high enough, you'd probably get a lot of people signing up for the chance to make money off their relatives. Of course, you'd need some way to ensure people are only uploading their own DNA, but that's probably do-able if you handle the DNA samples directly.

<comment><USER3> Ah, the gamification of citizen law enforcement. What have we come to?

<comment><USER2> We already have rewards for help solving some crimes, this just makes it more of a market. Participants could opt to have their rewards donated to charity. If I knew anything about DNA, I'd probably be very tempted to work on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > At one point, the site secretly allowed police to upload DNA from the scene > of a violent assault—following a personal appeal from the detective to one > of GEDmatch's co-founders.

One thing with these DOJ guidelines is that they will create a 2 tier system of justice. Ordinary victims won't be able to use these genetic databases to try to obtain justice. However, family members and close friends of the executives of these companies will have access to these (If the founder of the company comes to law enforcement and says, "Here are the closest DNA matches for the assailant of my niece." do you think law enforcement will refuse that information?)

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's a big concern because law enforcement will have to refuse the information or the case will be thrown out. They can't just go up and present illegally obtained evidence. Even the crappiest public defenders should catch something like that.

Parallel construction might be a possibility (though still illegal), but it would be difficult in this situation when the criminal isn't a suspect already.

<comment><USER6> Parallel reconstruction. Happened before, will happen again. Confidential informant will suddenly tie the genetic match to the crime scene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is the thread about the same/similar topic from a different source six days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21086866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21086866) .

</comment><comment><USER8> The Golden State Killer was a cop that didn't have his DNA taken, and was used as a justification for cops taking your DNA.

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems like it wouldn't be hard to have hospitals do DNA sequencing after birth so that eventually everyone with a birth certificate had their DNA on file. The data could then be used for medical research, law enforcement, genealogy, etc.

I'm sure this would have terrible unintended consequences but I can't think of any at the moment.

<comment><USER10> False positives. When selecting from a small pool of suspects the chance of a false positive is negligible. If you are searching the entire population it is no longer negligible.

False positives mean a SWAT team knocking down your door and shooting your dog and possibly you. A false positive means your name forever associated with horrible crimes.

Universal DNA databases are an IMMENSE increase in govt power that needs to be matched by greater accountability and oversight.

<comment><USER11> That's being over dramatic. DNA tests are only one component in building a case against someone.

<comment><USER12> Here are some articles with examples of false convictions caused solely on DNA test results:

[https://gizmodo.com/when-bad-dna-tests-lead-to-false- convict...](https://gizmodo.com/when-bad-dna-tests-lead-to-false- convictions-1797915655) [https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/mar/09/forensics- firm-i...](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/mar/09/forensics-firm- investigated-dna) [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/forensics-gone- wrong...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/forensics-gone-wrong-when- dna-snares-innocent)

That being said, there are also many false convictions where the innocent accused people were exonerated after DNA testing became available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So many questions. How did "sexual assault" sneak in here next to homicide? That's not a capital crime. Is the irony of having a one-person opt-in/opt-out box entirely lost on the people running genealogy websites? How can you give informed consent to sharing your data when the entire point of these sites is not knowing what you discover?

And of course the biggest problem of all, which is that these sites are used to discover _third-parties_ not using the site or consenting at all. The article bizarrely omits this, making the whole thing seem like a cookie consent popup.

<comment><USER14> Rape (and related crimes) and Murder are both crimes which have a large external cost and where there is a reasonable chance at repetition.

The value to society of catching the perps in these cases is large enough to make giving police access on a case-by-case basis worth it.

<comment><USER3> And also vicious physical assaults. They can leave people injured for life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really don't like some of the philosophies expressed in this article. The whole "put family members in jail" bit feels like a worthless appeal to emotion.

If your family member is a mass murderer, I really don't care if investigators use information related to you to catch them. Even if that data is your DNA, and it was shared contrary to your expectations.

Nobody wants to see their loved ones go to prison, but the Golden State Killer was an absolute monster, and it's an demonstrably good thing he was caught and faced justice.

I understand that people feel that using DNA information from genealogy services to investigate crimes might feel like a slippery slope towards egregious abuse (and maybe that's true), but the Golden State Killer is definitely not an example of such abuse.

<comment><USER16> I don't buy this justification. It's like the people talking about mass surveillance saying,

"I understand that people feel like unchecked government mass surveillance might feel like a slipper slope towards egregious abuse, but it's worth it to catch all the evil terrorists and pedophiles"

Sure the Golden State Killer was a terrible person, but I'm not willing to just blindly trust and accept that the government should be able to access and use whatever data they want to keep me "safe."

Personally, I fall into the "Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither" camp

<comment><USER17> The good news is - you don't have to! But I don't mind giving my DNA if it means my mass murdering 2nd cousin might be caught.

<comment><USER18> How will you feel when your 2nd cousin is convicted of being a murderer based on nothing more than shed skin cells, and your whole family believes their alibi of being with their mother, but the jury doesn't because mothers lie for their children and DNA transference sounds far-fetched?

That's the nightmare scenario of familial matching and government access to / creation of DNA databases.

<comment><USER17> How many people have been falsely convicted(or even justly convicted) because their skin cells were found at the scene, with no other evidence?

<comment><USER18> How would we know?

Here's a story of someone who came close and probably would have been convicted had their attorney not credibly identified a source of the transference.

[https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed- murder/](https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Death of a Diploma Mill: University of Phoenix Going Down in Flames? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/31/death-of-a-diploma-mill-university-of-phoenix-going-down-in-flames.html?via=mobile&source=twitter <comment><USER2> Education and Healthcare: Two services which should not be offered by businesses seeking to make a profit. I think future generations will look back and ask: "What were they thinking?"

<comment><USER3> I've said the exact same thing many times! There are some things where profit motive works against the best outcomes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article is off base though. You can't call a school with a 9% graduation rate a diploma mill. Online school is hard. It takes a lot more self discipline and motivation than traditional classes. I tended to avoid them in school. I took Computer Organization II online and it was waaaay harder than it would have been in person.

UoP is obviously ripping people off but it seems unfair to the people who worked hard to get through the program to call the school a diploma mill when the facts plainly do not support that. This is coming from a FSU alum so I have no allegiance to UoP.

<comment><USER4> Is 9% UoP's overall graduation rate? According to TFA (and the DoE, where they sourced the data), the online school's graduation rate was 7.3%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> ITT Tech is another company that only cares about money.

<comment><USER4> I don't remember what all of them are but I read an article a while back talking about a number of for-profit schools. The fact that there are accredited institutions that are publicly traded just seems wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The U of P may have some serious problems, but they are certainly not a diploma mill.

<comment><USER6> REPLY-AS-EDIT. Well, they're not. Really. They are accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, indicating that they meet U.S. Dept. of Education standards.

Having been through several similar accreditations at my own school (I'm a C.S. professor at a more traditional university), I can say with some confidence that the accreditation process is not a joke.

So, lots of accusations are made against U. of P. I don't know which of these might be true. Maybe U. of P. is a collection of lying, manipulative thieves who eat babies for breakfast; I couldn't say. But they do _not_ give away meaningless diplomas to whomever is willing to pay the fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not even UoP that are the ones who need to be investigated the most. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten a resume from a vet who got conned out of his GI benefits for one of those "Certification Bootcamps" on the promise that all they need is a cert and they're guaranteed a high paying IT job.</comment>


H-1B visa to green card: Wait time for Indian workers is up to 151 years: report - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/08/h-1b-visa-to-green-card-wait-time-for-indian-workers-is-up-to-151-years-report/ <comment><USER2> I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I think we should hire the best and brightest from anywhere in the world, regardless of race, color, religion, sexual preference, etc.

On the other hand, my current employer has a large number of H1Bs and junior OPT recipients. These guys are happy enough to be in the country and are honestly hired in the name of hiring the best and brightest to keep wages low and keep an environment where people don't speak up.

These guys would rather live in the US than go back to India. They'll put up with a ton of shit that a person born in America wouldn't want to deal with.

I've only worked at a few companies in my career in both tech and non tech companies. It was the same everywhere.

Tech companies with shitty conditions for devs use this to pay less than the industry and keep these guys on call 24/7.

Non tech companies hire them through third party contracting companies who basically eat the majority of their hourly rate.

It's a messed up situation IMO.

<comment><USER3> It won't be a messed up situation if the politicians said what you just pointed. The employers are taking away jobs of americans, not the immigrants.

It will be a totally different debate altogether.

<comment><USER4> If that were true, wouldn't software engineers have trouble finding work? Also, see the effect of immigration enforcement on agriculture in some states... the premise that "you could find an American to fill any job if it wasn't for visas" is flawed.

<comment><USER3> To fix a problem, you need to frame the problem correctly. And at least in the political sphere, money or talent is not even up for discussion. Even after the effects you mention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This projection is based on bad methodology that ignores mortality (and abandonment); the article obliquely references this by mentioning that people waiting will either give up or due before reaching the 151 year delay, but the fact that they will (and thus remove themselves from the queue) is why the delay will never get anywhere close to that long. Any model for the growth of the waiting period has to consider how people increase in likelihood to fall off the list by abandonment or death as the wait time increases, since that will affect the actual increase, and be an increasingly significant factor as the wait time increases.

</comment><comment><USER6> What does it take to be qualified in EB1 extraordinary ability visa?

<comment><USER7> Literally, win a Nobel prize, or you have to "tick" several boxes for "extraordinary ability." I don't think a good professor in an American university will even qualify. It's pretty legit.

Note that that "extraordinary ability" green card is not employer-sponsored. You don't have to have anyone sponsoring you to get it - that means you can be unemployed and Uncle Sam will be happy to pick you up as a permanent resident.

<comment><USER8> Hmmm. There's an article here by someone who claims to have got an EB-1 by being a leading SEO blogger: [https://www.google.ie/amp/s/thenextweb.com/contributors/2017...](https://www.google.ie/amp/s/thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/06/02/heres- get-american-eb-1-genius-visa-according-someone-got/%3famp=1)

<comment><USER6> I remember a few months ago reading on some criteria for EB-1, which if met, was considered to be a good thing by USCIS.

One of them was having higher remuneration than your peers from the same field, a lot higher. Gave me an impression of being 10X more or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems interestingly lopsided. It says EB2 wait is 151 years, while EB3 is 17 years. It used to be the other way round.

So it seems in recent years a lot of folks got the Masters degree to get on to EB2 that the folks with just bachelors now have an advantage.

<comment><USER5> As the root source mentions, the analysis explicitly ignores the fact that anyone qualified for EB2 can also qualify for EB3 and if the wait times in practice were anything like what is suggested, EB2 qualified individuals would file EB3. (Which means the numbers are pretty much meaningless, even before accounting for the giant methodological errors that aren't explicitly noted the way that one is.)</comment></comment>


SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA <comment><USER2> I had the fun of using this system when I was doing my undergraduate thesis. I had done some protein modelling work and ran straight into the problem that there was no way to get the beautiful models into my thesis - we had no printer.

I came up with what I thought was the genius idea of photographing the monitor, the problem was the CRT screen was so curved my models were all distorted. I ended up wheeling the whole SGI computer out into the hall and setting my camera up with a 500mm lens (borrowed from the graphics unit) at the other end of the hall (maybe 50m away). Worked great.

<comment><USER3> These early SGI machines did not have good support for printing. Even if you did have a printer, the only way to print was to take a screenshot, which had much lower resolution than laser printers and did not look good.

My first paid job - this was after the 10th grade in high school - was writing a kind of printer driver for one of these machines. One of the researchers at a local university had the same problem you did, and heard about this kid who was supposed to be good with computers :)

The SGI GL manuals (this was before it became OpenGL) included all the mathematical formulas they used to display the graphics - the rotation and perspective matrices to transform the coordinates, the vector cross products to calculate shading, and so on. I took these and implemented a subset of GL which outputted PostScript commands to a text file. This was then sent straight to a laser printer (Apple, I think). I didn't implement everything that SGI did, of course - no smooth shading and I think I could handle only the simplest types of occlusion. But it was good enough to handle the models that the researchers needed to print.

I still remember the SGI manuals in big 3 ring binders. This is what I learned linear algebra from - thanks guys.

<comment><USER4> I spent a week at SGI UK in 1994. Everyone had at least an Indy workstation as their machine, even for secretarial purposes. But still there were a couple of 486 PCs acting as print servers.

<comment><USER5> I worked at a remote office for SGI in 1992. I called my boss at the home office complaining I didn't have a computer to test software with. He apologized for having dropped the ball and immediately ordered a 16 processor system for me.

I don't remember which model that was but I do remember almost falling out of my chair as it was the top of the line system at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a slightly newer Infinite Reality R10000 sitting beside my desk here in Phnom Penh. A professor in Berkeley gave it to us and somehow we managed to get it to this side of the world. It uses enough power to run an apartment block and yes it is noisy. I will eventually gut it and install a six node linux cluster inside.

I used these boxes in Hong Kong in the early 90's, then later in Japan in the late 90's for a number of projects and I was still using an Indy as my main desktop until 2001.

SGI created hardware that almost took your breath away, you knew you were seeing a future that not many people had the privilege to see back then in person. To me, having the box sitting next to me every day, with "infinite reality" label on the top reminds me of those days when anything seemed possible and all of it was magical. I miss that sense of wonder and infinite possibilities...

<comment><USER7> I wonder if it's still possible to put together hardware that's a few years ahead of current high-end products.

Like, can you arrange, say, ten flagship graphic cards for realtime rendering? Do we have game engines that can scale to that number?

<comment><USER8> I would approach it like this:

1) find some graphics problems which people say are not possible on any near- term hardware

2) study the algorithms and identify low level calculations which, if you could do orders of magnitude more of them, would allow you to solve the problem.

3) get a bunch of FPGAs and try to design a machine which can (very slowly) run that architecture

4) once you've got it working, slowly replace the FPGAs with ASICs

5) build a box with 16-64 of everything.

I would avoid polygons, since the current architectures are all extremely good at filling polygons. SDFs and raytracing are where you may find the "not on current gen" problems.

<comment><USER9> > SDFs and raytracing

An easy one would be: have each GPU raytrace a (say) 320x240 scene, each offset by fractions-of-a-pixel[0] or multiples-of-a-screen from each other, then have a final GPU stitch them together into a full-res video.

0: If you this with 60x1080 resolution, you might be able to replace the final GPU with a dumb hardware multiplexer, though that would make compositing painful at best.

<comment><USER10> That's literally what we used to do for our cluster colour grading systems for films.

We had hardware that the would merge DVI from up to 8 GPUs, in separate nodes, and produce a single image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was very fortunate. This is the machine on which I originally learned OpenGL. It was an undergrad lab job where I was paid $5/hour to eventually write [http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp](http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp) But, in order to do that I had to learn how to 3D at all.

The most fun I had with the machine was playing GlQuake 1 at 1280x1024 on a T1 line and bragging about it on the chat where everyone thought I was lying. Of course, a year later the 3DFX Voodoo 1 would come out and deliver approximately 1/4 the fill rate for 1/1000 the price.

Besides that, it was a fine machine. Lots of cores that I didn't know how to utilize. Occasional bugs in the OpenGL implementation that might have been me accidentally triggering edge cases. Command line compiles, gdb, lots of core dumps.

SGI really lost it's way after this. Years later they would be showing at SIGGRAPH with multi-wall-sized displays, but without the programmable shading that would be all the rage not just right then, but for the next two decades... They went so far as to publish papers showing that with hundreds of passes and temporary buffers using fixed-function shading, you could eventually get mostly the same results as the new-fangled programmable BS...

The brilliant engineers of SGI soon moved on to become founding members of Nvidia, ATI, Imagination and other graphics tech companies.

<comment><USER5> If you mean in 1993, you mean GL, not openGL, I think. I worked at SGI in 1992.

<comment><USER12> OpenGL was founded in 92 and basically IrisGL with bits removed. Anyway by the time quake was released in 1996 OpenGL was very much a thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The VRML demo at 18 minutes in really took me back: [https://youtu.be/Bo3lUw9GUJA?t=18m](https://youtu.be/Bo3lUw9GUJA?t=18m)

I remember how convinced some people were that VRML was going to be the future of the Web. 3D graphics in your browser, all coded with a simple markup language! How could it fail?

Ultimately it was just too complicated for the average web surfer to navigate, especially in the '90s. For a while, though, it really looked like the visions of virtual worlds that cyberpunk fiction loved might show up in your Netscape browser.

<comment><USER14> VRML! I wrote a modest amount of VRML by hand in the early '00s. One project was a 3D model of a castle, which i worked on in large part because it was something i could do together with my then-girlfriend - she would describe how the castle should look, and i would code it up. I learned a lot about how to use parametric prototypes, so i had a kit of parts i could rapidly use, to speed up the feedback loop.

<comment><USER15> I wrote a code called genvrml which converted molecular models from any format (using Babel at the time for conversion) to VRML for display. I converted a bunch of my models for this. I still have them here. And if I dig around, I might even have genvrml as well.

I did believe that this was fairly game changing tech. I showed my 3D models sticking 2m out from a rear projected Reality Wall powered by an IR engine in the Detroit office.

But SGI was beset with inane leadership, and we began our terminal decline mere weeks after I was hired ABD from grad school. I finished up my thesis and developed an autoinstaller code for Irix at the same time. Writing the manuals in LaTeX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Flashback scene begins.

When I was much younger my dad (who has a print business) was tasked with printing panels for F16 jet fighter pilot cockpit to be used in a simulator of the aircraft. The simulator was developed by a private company. One Saturday he took me to their office. They had one of these and gave me a demo of it. Until then all I knew was of standard consumer computers (commodore, pc, macs etc) . In another pretty big room they had a lot of amiga computers used to make the 3d models. I then had a go at the simulator. 180 degree screen, a real cockpit, and pretty amazing 3d graphics.for the time. Flew my jet through a mountain tunnel. I think the only thing that impressed me as much as the simulator itself was the sgi. I've never experienced that kind of futuristic computing power.

Flashback scene ends...

<comment><USER5> I was the systems engineer for SGI mainly to McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis in 1992 for their flight simulators. If you think what you saw was something ...

<comment><USER16> I'm sure my early teen eyes saw only a glimpse. The one I was shown was designed for the Israeli air force. This was the closest I got to sit in an F-16 cockpit, and the closest I got to super computing power even films couldn't show me at the time. I do however remember them totting the 250K price tag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Always loved the IRIX Motif and 4dwm aesthetics, and was lucky to have had access to some Indigo machine in school.

Was really impressed by how responsive the file manager was wrt. the immediate appearance of icons for files created from terminal. It also kept track of which folders were open in other windows, giving them different appearance - felt like one was interacting with actual objects.

Tried numerous times to get the same feel on Linux; there used to be a project called 5dwm to recreate the Indigo Magic Desktop experience, I should check if it is still around for additional kick of nostalgia...

<comment><USER18> I don't know about the SGI Indigo, but the SGI Indy had relatively low latency [1]

[1] [https://danluu.com/input-lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fun times. Could have been the envy of all your engineer buddies with one of those bad boys all to yourself. What a difference 25 years makes.

Personally I find that learning about these machines is a good way to better understand computer architecture because each one was, during its reign, some really smart bunch of peoples idea of what was state of the art. You can see the evolution of ideas that way.

<comment><USER20> What I think is quite interesting about these era of machines is where the power goes. First off, there aren't actually many heatsinks in the machine, and those few that are used, are really tiny. This means that the power used must be distributed rather evenly among all components, even on the CPU boards. The CPUs can at most pull 10-15 W with those heatsinks, meanwhile the big ASICs spread around everywhere can probably sink perhaps 3-5 W with no extra heatsink. Compare this to modern systems, where the (single chip) chipset has a TDP of ~5 W, while the CPU(s) run anywhere from 50 to 100+ W.

So the gap between high-power and low-power components was way, way smaller back then, and I'd wager that a huge chunk of power in these SGI machines went into their high-speed bus systems.

Another big difference is how the power system was laid out. Here are the specs of a SGI Onyx 2 PSU [1]:

        1750 W @ 230 V
        3.45 V, 375 A
        5 V, 85 A
        12 V, 22 A
        5 V, 1 A (probably standby power?)

In that day and age, most of everything in there would've run off 3.3 V. So the PSU _directly_ , centrally provides that voltage and due to the large currents droop and such will have to be considered carefully in the entire system design (and it almost certainly uses remote sensing at the backplane, perhaps even sampling various points in the system). This makes sense, because there are _many_ components and the difference in power between them is kinda small.

Nowadays, a computer PSU provides essentially two voltages: 12 V and 5 V standby. It still provides "legacy" power, like 5 V and 3.3 V rails, but these are derived with simple buck-converters from the 12 V rail(s) in modern designs. Because a modern computer has few components requiring a lot of power, each of them has their own local converter sourced by 12 V to reduce losses.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20170314114558/http://sgistuff.n...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170314114558/http://sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/images/onyx2-psufront-2200.jpg) [https://web.archive.org/web/20170314160011/http://sgistuff.n...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170314160011/http://sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/images/onyx2-psuback-2200.jpg)

<comment><USER21> When Intel released the Pentium with mandatory active heatsinks that was called a big scandal by the industry magazines. Now of course we have smaller CPUs drawing 150W or more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great video!

Not one for nostalgia but I have found myself cooing over old computers the way most react to babies. A BBC B can bring a tear to the eye. If you are in the UK then [http://www.tnmoc.org/](http://www.tnmoc.org/) is well worth a visit. Its like a themepark for nerds.

Working at one of those noisy brutes must have been harsh. It brings back flashbacks of years spent in server rooms. Kids with their cloud computing don't know what they missed!

<comment><USER23> I'm a member of TNMOC and go maybe 2-3 times a year. The Acorn machines RISC OS always fascinates me.

<comment><USER22> Excellent idea, definitely something I want to support. I have just joined too.

I remember using an Archimedes after years of fighting to get my games to run well on a BBC Micro. Wow - it felt like cheating!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I was about 13 years old I had my mom call up SGI to ask if they could send us any information. This was the time of dialup internet / AOL, and info came to our house primarily via snail-mail. A few weeks later a thick package came in the mail, full of beautifully printed brochures and booklets on their machines of the day; Indigo, Indy, Onyx... I treasured those pamphlets, and dreamed of maybe one day getting to actually use an SGI.

</comment><comment><USER25> I used two of these in the 1990s: one for Nintendo video game development (thanks Nintendo!) and one for a Virtual Reality system for Disney (thanks Disney!). Awesome tools, but the functionality is now more or less commodity gaming PCs.

</comment><comment><USER26> We started using SGI Personal IRIS systems which were I think were using 33MHz MIPS R3000 processors in the late 80s. I think they might been able to address a heady 32Meg of RAM. We were developing a graphical operation control system at the steelworks where I worked as an engineer. I remember them costing something like $25-30K each. So to enable enough developers we had to add serial terminals and X terminals. It was actually this aspect that got me involved in finding open source X windows solutions that allowed us too repurpose standard Intel PCs as terminals. Fun times. But the sgi's were ahead of everything else out there. While we didn't have a real work need for their 3D capability it did let you see what the future could hold.

</comment><comment><USER27> The scanlines on the CRT monitor reminded me how good the refresh rates were on that hardware back then. How did we move backwards so spectacularly with LCD panels? It's only now that reasonably priced 144hz monitors are hitting the market.

<comment><USER28> What good would high refresh LCD do you in 1995-2005? From no acceleration at all to barely being able to run modern games at 40 fps (cod2 on 7800GTX in 2005).

CRT need high refresh, because they flash picture content at you. LCD do not flash, they maintain steady picture.

<comment><USER29> The main reason for 144 Hz refresh back then was not to tame normal CRT flicker. It was to get 72 Hz refresh of a stereoscopic pair. You had to use really fast phosphors to make this work and not have severe blurring/ghosting of the left and right images. Monitors intended for non-stereoscopic use could have slower phosphors which helped reduce the flickering effect at lower refresh rates.

Having this rapid refresh helped give persistence of vision for each eye, where if you had subdivided 72 Hz into 36 Hz cycle rates for a pair, you would have very annoying strobe effects visible to most people.

No application was rendering at 144 Hz. They might be lucky to sustain 20-30 Hz, but the framebuffer held both a left and right image and the video output switched back and forth between them on each frame scan. Complex visualizations often got down to 12 Hz or so and considered that acceptable as people would still perceive motion as in an animated cartoon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> We had one of these in Bryan Jones' laboratory in the Chemistry Department at the University of Toronto. We also had the 3D polarized shutter-based glasses as well - it was cool to see small molecules docking into active sites of enzymes right in front of your face. Of course, none of that stuff amounted to anything, and in hindsight it was a gigantic waste of money.

In my lab, we only had one of the SGI Indy machines - it was fun surfing the web on the original NCSA Mosaic browser on that pizza box machine.

</comment><comment><USER31> Man, this brings back memories. I still have an O2 and an Octane system in storage. Been meaning to take them out and set them up again at some point.

My father was generous enough to give me an O2 in the late 90s so I could learn 3D graphics, since I was interested in making special effects for movies. We didn't have any software then but found this thing called Blender which was available for free and worked on IRIX. Still have a bunch of blender books and manuals from back then. Good times!

<comment><USER32> :-) I have a fully working O2 setup somwehere in the attic. Could not get myself to get rid of it. Also have an Indy that won't boot up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I had the pleasure to work with various SGI machines back then (video and animation). Being around Onyx was always a special feeling, even though I prefered thw look of older Crimson chassis. SGI made a poster calendar even, which was set like 40 odd years into the future or something, taking advanfage of periodicity of calendar years. Nice gimmick, nice poster which I lost, sadly.

</comment><comment><USER34> At one point our lab bought an O2 and an Indigo. Mostly these were fashion statements as we didn't do much graphics work. I can't remember them being remarkable performance wise for normal workloads compared to the Sun machines that where our staple.

The machines most certainly stood out in a time where the only options you got for an exterior finish were beige and beige.

<comment><USER35> sgi was the preferred way for departments to blow their year/quarter budget so it wouldn't be cut off next year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> In the mid-90s, a friend of mine described an SGI demo where the player flew a speederbike through a forest. Apparently it was quite impressive for the time. Every time I come across footage of old SGI software, I hope it's in there, but it never is. Has anyone run across a video of this?

</comment><comment> a-dub I had an Indy on my desk when I was in my first paid job in high school. I loved that thing. We also had a Challenge named challenger. I blew it up once.

Years later I interviewed at Google. One of my interviewers turned out to be one of Jim Clark's original grad students. That was pretty crazy.

</comment><comment><USER37> Years ago, Weird Stuff Warehouse (R.I.P.) had a shell of the larger closet- sized Onyx system sitting in the back, and I always thought it would be fun to do something with it, but couldn't think of anything. With a shell of a Cray, you could at least make a couch out of it...

<comment><USER38> It's possible that was my old machine. I donated a lot of old SGI hardware to Weird Stuff in 2008-2009 before moving from SV up to SF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> My father worked in sales for sgi through most of the 90s; what started as him bringing me to the office a few times on weekends turned into me asking to go to the office most weekends. ("don't you have any work you need to finish up?")

Every employee had an an Indy or Indigo2 in their office and most (us included) had one at home too. Very few of the machines at the office had passwords. I never really got very far past playing with the 3d tech demos or surfing the web on Mosaic and Netscape, but it was a pretty formative part of my career in technology.

</comment><comment><USER40> Could anyone use an SGI Indigo 2 Impact (the purple one)? I've got one in Slovenia, ready to part with it for 100€ + shipping. My mother threw away the screen, keyboard and mouse (thinking I won't need them), so it's just sitting around. The box is still fully operational, with Photoshop for Irix installed.

</comment><comment><USER41> The main goal of going to exhibitions like COMDEX [1] was playing a little bit with these computers. Those were strong feelings!

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMDEX](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMDEX)

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh, who could forget the "not PS/2 connectors". I also vividly remember the sysadmin telling me to never ever disconnect they keyboard while the machine is running, or something inside might blow. Not sure if he was just paranoid, but I also never tried... I also remember one German shop buying a slightly used Onyx for half a million Deutsche Mark, and realizing they did not have the key for turning it on, so they had to short the thing. And it was so loud you had to wear earplugs...

<comment><USER43> Early Macs didn't have hot-pluggable keyboards and mice either. It was one of those things where it would usually work, until one time some fluctuation would just brick the controller chip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Interestingly, my Indy Irix "learning" workstation, circa 2001, is selling for more today on eBay then i bought it for back then. I guess it really has become a collectors item.

</comment><comment><USER45> I used these in the computer lab at RPI back in the 90s to do 3D animation. It's crazy to think how much smaller and faster today's tech is compared to these behemoths.

<comment><USER46> And yet, this smaller tech comes directly from SGI: lots of former SGI hardware engineers ended up at NVIDIA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> CMU's graphics lab had a Crimson when I was there as an undergrad - many hours late at night! These models had an accumulation buffer (a way to combine/average screenspace image buffers), which was fun for all kinds of tricks, like motion blur. At the time, it felt amazing to get to use all that fill rate.

Just five years later, the 3dfx voodoo2 did most of what that machine did (without the accumulation buffer).

</comment><comment><USER48> When I was younger I was really into CGI, I remember thinking man, If I ever get to work on one of those to do some 3d rendering, that will be something.

</comment><comment><USER46> Had the server version of this system as my private server in my basement at home; the electricity bill was peppery.

I must have torn it apart and put it back together about ten times, studying the hardware, and must have installed IRIX 6.5.30 on it just as many.

</comment><comment><USER49> It is about $425,000 in inflation adjusted dollars. If we adjust it to the real estate prices then even more.

This price is no wonder considering the amount of the silicon it contains.

What I do wonder is what would be the performance of the same amount of the silicon today.

<comment><USER50> > _What I do wonder is what would be the performance of the same amount of the > silicon today._

Well, aren't there several comparable models from IBM and co?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I have a vivid memory of having to carry one of these up a flight of stairs.

I used the machine as an undergrad, doing some coding as part of the university's driving simulator project.

</comment><comment><USER52> So what would be the modern-day equivalent to this machine?

<comment><USER28> CPU and 3D capabilities were late 1999 early 2000 gamer PC level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wonder how usable this would be with a modern browser.

</comment><comment> dis-sys I tried to search online to see whether DOOM has been ported to Onyx RE2, but couldn't find any video proof. That is really strange.

<comment><USER29> I remember seeing Quake ported to the CAVE environment and demonstrated on an Onyx (well actually an Origin with reality engines) with a 3-wall and floor projection room...

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is the backplane 32 bit VMEbus with an additional central connector? [Edit: 32 bit, not 64 bit]

</comment><comment><USER55> How can we reach this guy? His site currently doesn't work and has a security problem.

<comment><USER56> I think he mentions in the video that his site is down and how to get ahold of him but I don't care to watch it again to verify.

<comment><USER38> iris.cc is the website mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> can you imagine companies spending on insane amount of money on these only to have them become obsolete in 3 years?

<comment><USER28> No, because it didnt happen, commodity hardware got there ~7 years later. You were buying a window into the future, allowing your researchers to do things mere mortals could only read about in science fiction books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm shocked by how crazy the graphics were for back then...I mean seeing the metal logo, I couldn't quite believe that this was possible in 1993. I still have the CGW magazine from this era.

</comment><comment><USER59> We had these and a few SUN systems in our computer lab storage room. We called them the dinosaurs. It's amazing how things changed from 1993 to mid 2000s. From technology rock stars to useless junk in a little more than a decade.

The "lab master" bribed us with pizza to help him clear the storage room. Quickly found out how heavy these things were and what a raw deal we got.

<comment><USER60> I heard somewhere SGI put a big chunk of iron/lead inside the case to make them heavier and add to the expensive impression when handling the machines.

Not sure if that was the case, or if it is just an urban legend?

<comment><USER61> They used cast iron extensively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Could be converted to a cool mini-fridge

<comment><USER63> Let's please stop doing that to interesting vintage computers. Well, at least to working (or fixable) ones. I cringe every time someone shows off that sort of project.

<comment><USER62> While I was not suggesting doing to this particular model I would imagine a good chunk of them end up in a landfill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> We had a maxed out one of those in the company lab. I seem to remember that it was on the loud side.

What a tremendous waste of money.

</comment><comment><USER65> The true victory and underappreciated skill of first world country is in their scalability to earn profit from massively overpriced machines.

</comment><comment><USER66> Why is the dude wearing untied board shorts and no shoes? Is that his signature Thing?

<comment><USER67> It's traditional in some parts of Canadia.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgoEhsJORU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgoEhsJORU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This looks good. A previous video on this channel said there was no WWW in 1993 and I stopped following things. Have things improved?

<comment><USER69> Hi there!

I am Dodoid, the creator of this video. Created an account here to ask you this. Where did I make that mistake? I'm fully aware that there was a world- wide-web in 1993, and if I made the mistake of saying that there was not, I have a post-release correction system and can add a correction to the video.

Anyway, I hope things have improved.

Thanks for the interest, -Dodoid

<comment><USER70> Thanks for the awesome video!!!!</comment></comment></comment>


Cisco Poised to Help China Keep an Eye on Its Citizens  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304778304576377141077267316.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_INTL_LSMODULE

<comment><USER2> "The project sheds light on how Western tech companies sell their wares in China, the Middle East and other places where there is potential for the gear to be used for political purposes and not just safety."

Because, of course, Western governments never use this kind of gear for political purposes and not just safety.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a tricky and complicated subject. Under what conditions should a corporation like Cisco be responsible for censoring or imposing its values, whatever they are, upon clients? For instance, should it be expected to regulate purchases to organizations that support the KKK? That oppose abortion? That support immigration? That support flag burning? That support cap-and-trade? That oppose the estate tax? Certainly some of these are heinous and orthogonal to American values and some are not. The question is: when should a corporate citizen not be neutral?

</comment><comment><USER4> > Should companies be held accountable if foreign governments use their > products for political suppression?

How could a company be responsible for something like a computer, which is capable of doing an infinite number of things? If America feels that strongly about the human rights violations going on in China, I feel that the only way to prevent American made technology from being used in that fashion is to prevent the sale of all technology to China. I'm not saying this is the right thing to do, but it doesn't seem possible to expect technology companies to police how their tech is used in foreign countries.

<comment><USER5> _How could a company be responsible for something like a computer, which is capable of doing an infinite number of things?_

I don't think that anyone is saying that Cisco would be _responsible_. But that's no reason to make things easier for the despots. If they're working with Cisco, it's either because Cisco can do it better or cheaper. Wouldn't someone with a conscience desire to make it either less effective for China, or make them pay more dearly, for such a system?

 _If America feels that strongly... prevent the sale of all technology to China_

How does "America" feel anything? We're a nation of individuals, we do not all feel in unison, or even in agreement. That is why, when _somebody_ feels something, they need to take whatever action they can themselves -- and that includes the Cisco management, board, and stockholders. Conversely, because the government cannot speak for the morals and values of any particular American, regulations like you suggest will always be purely political efforts, easily co-opted by special interests.

<comment><USER4> > How does "America" feel anything?

I should have said the American Government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Given that China seems to be turning itself into Singapore, one wonders why News Corp. is troubled. An authoritarian business-oriented state ought to be something it could adapt to nicely.

<comment><USER7> If they want to help build one here in the U.S., it may help for the sake of rhetoric to make a scapegoat out of the one they have over there. It's just a PR sleight-of-hand.

The title is white-lie misleading. Cisco has been doing this sort of thing for China for as long as I can remember.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Performance and scalability optimizations in a similar project:)

"Police have learned that CCTV cameras all across Moscow streamed prerecorded pictures, ... There are more than 80,000 security cameras in public places in Moscow."

<http://rt.com/news/sci-tech/cctv-cameras-fraud-moscow/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Original article behind a paywall.

<comment><USER10> Here is the copy: <http://pastebin.com/9DfwQfdc>

<comment><AUTHOR> You can also jump WSJ paywall with a quick copy paste of article title into Google search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am sure Cisco has helped many countries build its police state.

<comment><USER12> This gives new meaning to their motto: "Cisco: The Human Network".</comment></comment>