AI Failures in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://syncedreview.com/2017/12/23/2017-in-review-10-ai-failures/ <comment><USER2> Some of these are pretty eh.

"Facebook chatbot shut down" doesn't really show anything. It was a everyday failure of training that got overblown in the media.

"Google AI looks at rifles and sees helicopters": This wasn't new at all. Black box attacks have been around for a while. The paper purported to show a much more efficient attack, but it's not really a huge advancement.

In general, most of these aren't really what I would call "failures" of AI. Some of them are illuminating parts of ML that are problems (copying society's bias, adversarial attacks), but most of the rest are simply things being overhyped/regular design errors (anything to do with Alexa/google home).

<comment><USER3> Nonsense. These types of problems have been "illuminating" researchers for the last 5 decades. These are real shortcomings and will not be solved for another 5 decades or more. It's unbeliebable how much in denial the AI folks are in.

<comment><USER2> Could you elaborate on what you consider these "problems" are? The way I would break down these "problems" are:

Overhyped marketing (Face ID, Las Vegas self-driving bus, HSBC voice id, "AI imagines a Bank Butt sunset")

Questionable design choices (Amazon Echo, Alexa)

Adversarial attacks ("Google AI looks at rifles", street sign hack)

Bias (Allo turban emoji)

wtf is this (Facebook chatbot)

ML does have real shortcomings, but the problems in this list does not exemplify them well.

<comment><USER4> Adversarial attacks are a bit more than just that : they reveal how much we don't have any intuitive knowledge on what the algorithm understands. In the sense that we cannot build any intuition on what the 1% mistakes cognitive ML- based algorithms will be triggered by.

Aka : If a gun could be mistaken for an helicopter just by altering a few invisible pixels, then the behavior of that system is by definition not similar at all to « vision » in its common sense. And so if it's not, then what is it ?

<comment><USER5> They changed a lot of pixels in a way that led a human to classify the image as not notably changed but led one AI to classify it as a different type of object. Of course the same thing is possible with human and AI reversed, there are images that are obvious to some AI but that would be misclassified by humans.

Humans do have the advantage that our vision system can draw on a huge repository of real-world knowledge and has been fed with decades of high resolution training data.

<comment><USER4> Humans also have the advantage to understand what world they're living in, and be capable of reasoning. The way you describe human cognition using ML terms makes me think you're confusing the map with the territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I read anything about "AI" that's not just hype or some "futurist" predicting that we're on the cusp of something huge and it's just around the corner, it makes me think we still have a long way to go before it's actually "intelligent" and nothing more than PR/marketing.

<comment><USER2> We do have a long way to go, but AI has made huge strides over the past few years, irrespective of the hype/marketing. Notably this year, AlphaZero, advances in generating images ([https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans](https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans)), voice synthesis with Tacotron, etc. were all very impressive results. Not to mention all the recent advances in the theory of deep learning.

It's good to be on watch for the bullshit (the news stories about Facebook's chatbots' "language", most futurist's predictions, any hype about general artificial intelligence, replacing x% of jobs in y years), but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

IMO, unlike blockchain, AI/ML is undoubtedly here to stay, and it will have a huge effect on everything.

<comment><USER7> IMO even the blockchain is here to stay. But more in the toolbox of useful datastructures than in the realm of "hip company ideas".

<comment><USER8> I think blockchains are here to stay, and that's fine; they're extremely interesting. I feel that at the moment they suffer from the problem that a few technologies suffered: they're a solution looking for problems to solve. By that I mean that currently there's a trend towards applying blockchains to solve every problem regardless of a solution for it not requiring blockchain at all. Do you want to make a transfer? Blockchain. Do you want to manage inventory? Blockchain. Do you want to help starving children in Africa? Blockchain. Do you want to transfer files? Blockchain. All of those are problems and they're problems that don't need a blockchain to be solved and a blockchain is arguably not the best way of handing them but because blockchains can be used as part of a solution, because it's a trendy technology, there's a huge effort towards applying it to solve them.

I don't think it's a bad thing to try and apply new solutions to old problems but it just feels that we're trying to apply it too much to problems that are otherwise already solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The most interesting thing about this is that it's not interesting. None of these cases are very bad. The self driving car accident is the most severe, it was a minor accident and the car wasn't even at fault.

<comment><USER10> I mostly agree, however regarding the bus accident the problem is that AI out of the box has to be way better than the human in order to gain widespread acceptance. That means it needs to be able to make tough calls, and do it better than the humans it is meant to replace (or complement). The description of the incident in particular shows why self-driving AIs have such a long way to go.

<comment><USER11> This may not be so. I expect many people would see the good in technology that prevents accidents and deaths even if it isn't perfect in its first release and that those who don't feel this way at the start might be brought around by good arguments.

Speaking of which, there's a study by some RAND Corporation researchers (described on RAND's blog [0] and here [1]) about how it is likely a good idea to get the technology out even before it is perfected, not only to save lives now, etc. but also to speed up the perfection of the technology -- the rubber needs to hit the road, so to speak.

[0] [https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting- for-p...](https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting-for-perfect- autonomous-vehicles-may-cost-lives.html)

[1] [https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2150.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2150.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Bkav simply scanned a test subject's face, used a 3D printer to generate a > face model, and affixed paper-cut eyes and mouth and a silicone nose.

Ah yes, simple as that!

> a BBC reporter's twin brother was able to access his account by mimicking > his voice. The experiment took seven tries.

That's actually extremely impressive!

</comment><comment><USER13> You can make similar lists about "Airline Industry Failures in 2017" or "Software Failures in 2017" and so on. No one is stopped flying or using software.

<comment><USER14> It appears there were no crashes in the commercial Airline industry in the US in 2017. There was 1 near miss.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_and_incidents_in_the_United_States_in_2017)

AI and software engineering probably have a long, long way to go before they are in the same category of dependability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > passengers on the smart bus complained that it was not intelligent enough to > move out of harm's way as the truck slowly approached

Didn't someone point out in the thread for that, that backing up would've technically been breaking the law?

<comment><USER16> One thing you have to realize about the law, it doesn't translate to a rule set, as understood by computers, at all. If that were the case we could just implement the law in code, there would be no need for judges or lawyers, and every case should be clear. But the law isn't just a bunch of logical statements, that you can run any given situation against, instead it constantly leads to edge cases or even contradictions. People practicing the law are interpreters, that often have to argue about how a real world situation even fits into this rule set.

It's weird if you think about it, but from a logical standpoint, whether or not you broke the law is often undefined.

<comment><USER17> Yes people in tech often have his misconception about the law, and they think they can find clever loopholes or gotchas where a judge would really say 'that's clearly not a reasonable interpretation'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Meaningless, entertainment listicle.

</comment><comment><USER19> was FaceID a failure? It was engineered to the same allowances as touchID: a determined, relatively well resources adversary can bypass it.

<comment><USER20> Do you think you could fool a human intelligence with some paper printouts taped to your face?

<comment><USER21> Bouncers are fooled by fake IDs all the time

<comment><USER20> Bouncers are fooled by people wearing paper masks of the people depicted on a photo ID?

When bouncers let people enter a bar with a photo ID that does not match the person in question they are not failing to identify a human. They are failing to give enough of a shit to carefully examine the picture in question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Alexa one is confusing. Alexa asks for a PIN when you buy something. Maybe the little girl knew the PIN, but the newsreader's voice would not have accidentally triggered any actual purchases.

<comment><USER23> How do you type the pin? Just say it? What if there are people in the room? Tell them to get out?

<comment><USER22> You just say it. I guess the theory is that you trust anyone you invite into your house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well I won't say the HSBC voice ID one was a failure, identical looking guy with similar voice can fool any human being.

<comment><USER25> Sure, but a trained human would probably pick up that something is not quite right, especially if family situation has been revealed earlier.

My neighbor has an identical twin and one day his twin came visiting, but I had no idea he was coming. He was standing in front of our intercom that's been broken for years looking bewildered when I got home from work, and since I'd heard about my neighbor's identical twin before it didn't take me long to piece together what was going on, even though I'd never met this guy before and I had no idea he was going to be there.

<comment><USER24> "something is not quite right" is called intuition, machines can't have intuition, once they have they won't be machines anymore.

<comment><USER26> What do you think a trained neural network classifying seemingly random noise as an image of a panda is?

<comment> xkcd-sucks Schizophrenia?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Those paint color names are an AI success.

<comment><USER28> They certainly made me laugh out loud! It reminds me of the kinds of unexpected language one finds in experimental poetry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Democratisation and solving some local problems are the convincing bread and butter of the most recent progress in the AI field. Generalization efforts are nowhere near the hype and the mediatic bs yet but AI is dangerous enough already if used by malicious parties. All in all, it is a case of mediatic smoke because there is some fire already.

</comment><comment><USER30> At least they did not include @Dropinin. Phew. I liked it's replies though until it got shut down by Twitter.

[https://imgur.com/mCeAV1b](https://imgur.com/mCeAV1b)

</comment><comment><USER31> We as humans can try to make fun of robots and AI as much as we want. However, the list of AI failures will shrink year after year.

<comment><USER32> I would guess there will be a lot more failures as AI is deployed more widely. But there will also be way more successes.

<comment><USER33> More AI = more successes and more failures. Isn't that stating the obvious?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Haha, the last one is so stupid I think the newspaper should be better off closed. Clearly non-AI people writing about what they don't understand.

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe the biggest failure is to call it 'intelligence'. It seams just a ball trained to fall in a certain sink. Maybe call it artificial selection? Experiences with 'selection' in human history didn't had the nicest outcome. Curious what the artifical one will produce :o

<comment><USER36> "Selection" is responsible for all good outcomes, including the entire course of natural history that led to your comment. Natural selection got us mitochondria, eyes, legs, thumbs. Sexual selection gave us a brain capable of reasoning about itself. Machine learning is just the next step in that progression. It's amazing that the culmination of 3.7 billion years of selection is a mind that can come up with elaborate ways to cast aspersions on the selection mechanism that spawned it.

You know why I love machine learning? It's immune to anti-intellectual fads. It speaks the same truth that children do. While you can _make_ an algorithm spit out the answers you want, you have to explicitly train it to do so, making the selective blindness and hypocrisy we demand crystal clear.

<comment><USER37> Machine learning is not immune to biased data collection. Poor data in, poor models out.

I am really curious though, how did sexual selection help us evolve our brains?

<comment><USER38> Smarter males were more able to get mates (perhaps through control of resources among other things)?

Smarter mates were, or were able to make themselves appear, more attractive?

To me it's fairly evident that sexual selection played a large role in brain development.

<comment><USER39> You are probably not wrong.

<comment><USER40> He is likely right, because genes for intelligence are very often on the X-chromosome:

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201109/the- incredib...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201109/the-incredible- expanding-adventures-the-x-chromosome)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Formal Verification is truly needed especially on this.

<comment><USER42> It seems difficult to combine formal verification, which is rooted in symbol manipulation, with deep learning, which is based on high dimensional stacked distributed representations.

<comment><USER2> While his reply seems like a hammer in search of a nail, his general point has merit, and is something that has been a topic of contention recently in deep learning (with Ali Rahimi's NIPS talk).

What he calls formal verification is what we would call regular math in machine learning. Deep learning is sorely lacking hard bounds for all sorts of things (generalization, etc.). It's something that's gotten substantially better over the past year, but is something that needs a lot of work.

<comment><USER42> Generalization bounds aren't even hard, though. They're in the form of "probably approximately correct", - there's no way to guarantee that any particular example won't be misclassified.

<comment><USER2> I think I'd still consider those bounds in the form x% chance that the result is within epsilon of optimum as hard. Otherwise, you'd have to discount the entire field of randomized algorithms as not having hard proofs.

<comment><USER42> With randomized algorithms you can get within an arbitrarily small epsilon chance of getting a wrong answer, and it's not unusual to get on the order of machine error in practice.

PAC guarantees are very different. They generally rely on:

\- Data proportional to 1/eps^2

\- Only reduce the "variance" component of the "bias + variance" (you'll never fit a linear model perfectly to a nonlinear dataset, regardless of PAC)

\- Get worse as you decrease bias

\- Assume your data is IID and identically distributed to the test data. In TFA, several of the examples of bad behavior come from data which is distributed differently from training data (adversarial examples or automated cars not moving out of the way)

<comment><USER2> I don't think we're really disagreeing here. Afaik, hard bounds aren't a well defined mathematical concept, and it's fine to have different ones.

What I initially meant by "hard bounds" was any kind of mathematical proof more rigorous than "well, dropout kinda makes your neural network not rely on one feature so that's why it generalizes".

As for your points, I don't think they're really criticisms of PAC bounds.

I'm not familiar with the first point, but it'd be surprising to me if most PAC bounds had that, considering PAC is a framework and not a specific technique...

Your second point is irrelevant to generalization. You're looking for theory about capacity I think? I think learnability also comes into play.

3rd: that is indeed what the bias variance trade-off would imply. It's also why most classic PAC bounds are vacuous for neural networks.

4th: I think that's a fair assumption to make for any meaningful study of generalization.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cyc – Whatever happened to its connection to AI? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Cyc started in the mid-80s when rule-based AI systems were the norm. Everything in AI looked like a theorem prover back then. However, in the 90s, statistical methods began to produce better results as techniques were refined and computing power increased. What's better: a system that produces the correct (or good) results 85% of the time, or one that produces no result until the database has a necessary rule added? Industry prefers the former (although there are definitely uses for the latter).

Its connection to AI still remains, but the field has largely moved away from the rule-based paradigm Cyc is based on. I mean, you can throw a whole wikipedia segment into Doc2vec (a lightly supervised deep-learning technique) and it can discover non-trivial links between semantic objects with a few days work. If you tried that with Cyc, it would take longer.

</comment><comment><USER3> It was a bad approach to the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps it could be made into a good approach if it were reworked in terms of topic modeling or clustering categories and them feeding them through a machine learning KNN or bayesian model enabling prediction.</comment></comment>


People, personalities and profiles that I have learnt to stay away from - <AUTHOR> http://wantfood.in/people-personalities-and-profiles-that-i-have-learnt-to-stay-away-from/

<comment><USER2> Wow, this matches perfectly with what I see here in Brazil too!

"Fake investors", "Fake Serial entrepreneurs" and "Startup enthusiasts", I've seen all of them!! Great post.

I would like to add that, most of times, these people are not deliberately malicious. They really believe they "role on the ecosystem". I think this may be a consequence of reading too much Silicon Valley stories, specifically the vanity ones, usually on Techcrunch and Medium these days.

They read someone from SV with a history and grasps only the "glamorous superficiality" of what they have to say. So people emulate roles without actually knowing the real actions and real values one should have.

A "Fake investors" is emulating what he thinks how an angel investor acts on YC demo day; a "Fake serial entrepreneur" emulates how he thinks Steve Blank became successfull (as startups is a quantity game, found enough startups and you be able to say "My total score is: two large craters, one dot.com bubble home run and several base hits." one day); a "Startup enthusiast" emulates what he thinks someone, anyone, who frequent cafes and events in SV does and says.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to learn electronics design. Where should I start - <AUTHOR> Hi, I have a software background and I want to lear to design electronic systems (PCP, manufacturing technologies etc). Any ideas. Thanks <comment><USER2> One good project if you're familiar with Arduino is to build your own AVR based Arduino clone. Some thorough examples:

* [http://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/make-your-own-dm...](http://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/make-your-own-dmn-board-part-1-layout/)

* [https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-eagle-schematic](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-eagle-schematic)

* [https://learn.adafruit.com/boarduino-kits/overview](https://learn.adafruit.com/boarduino-kits/overview)

It's also good to know the lower level concepts of directly programming an AVR:

* [http://hackaday.com/2010/10/23/avr-programming-introduction/](http://hackaday.com/2010/10/23/avr-programming-introduction/)

* [http://highlowtech.org/?p=1695](http://highlowtech.org/?p=1695)

</comment><comment><USER3> I found this an excellent resource, it literally starts from the basics of electricity - [http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/](http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> There are a lot of tutorials on the sparkfun website.

[https://learn.sparkfun.com/start_a_project](https://learn.sparkfun.com/start_a_project)

I find some of the articles on PCB Design magazine to be useful for PCB layout.

[http://design.iconnect007.com/](http://design.iconnect007.com/)

Note that a lot of hobbyists use 'Eagle' which is free(ish) as in beer. Profession tools are $$$, though Altium offers [http://circuitmaker.com/](http://circuitmaker.com/) (which I can not speak for).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this. I am looking for more advanced or expert oriented resources that go beyond the simple concepts of electronics.

<comment><USER5> You should probably start by saying what you already know so we can tailor the responses. For example

Basic: [https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Electronics- Forrest-M...](https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Electronics-Forrest- Mims/dp/0945053282)

Intermediate (with a heavy RF slant): [http://www.arrl.org/arrl- handbook-2015](http://www.arrl.org/arrl-handbook-2015)

Advanced: [https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design- Handbook/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design- Handbook/dp/0133957241)

And then there are the various subcategories: low level precision analog, high power motors and switchgear, basic digital and microcontrollers, high speed processors, etc... you're asking a wide open question.

Even Manufacturing is not a simple question to answer unless given some direction. You want to make a first PC board in your bathroom, or build complex electromechanical assemblies?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. To narrow down the scope. Something like the raspberry pi is what I have in mind. I want to lear for example how to read and understand a hardware board design.

<comment><USER6> There's some demand for niche accessory boards for the RPi. Relatively easy to design, too - get a basic copy of Eagle or KiCAD.

I don't know if any single tutorial is going to give you what you want. I'd just dive right in, figure out what you want to do with your board, select some parts at Digikey, and start designing. Google questions as they come up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's really what electronics magazines are for! Elektor still exists, but old issues can be even more valuable to get a feel for circuits. This resource should keep you occupied for some time: [https://archive.org/details/radioelectronicsmagazine](https://archive.org/details/radioelectronicsmagazine)

</comment><comment><USER8> They also have some cool project ideas at instructables.com

</comment><comment><USER9> find and hire an expert who you get on with to guide your self-study.</comment>


Twitter Opens Up Its Analytics Platform To The Public - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2013/06/13/twitter-opens-up-its-analytics-platform-lets-everyone-review-the-performance-of-their-tweets-for-free/

<comment><USER2> This is cool. I just gave a little talk at the place I work about blogging and tweeting, and I wanted to give them an idea of what sort of content is the most popular. I used TopTweet to analyze my tweets for that talk, but I would have used this if I'd known, as it does a pretty good job at finding the "best". Here's a screenshot of what I see: [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10998095/Screenshots/8net~het47rh.pn...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10998095/Screenshots/8net~het47rh.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a weird thing going on with the sticky header on my Windows desktop (Chrome 27): when I scroll and the sticky headers disappear, the table is shrunk and the columns do not match their headers.

Also, all of the links I've posted on my account show 0 clicks. I'm pretty sure at least one of the last 100 links have been clicked at least once... Or else I'm unpopular :P Most likely, there's a lower limit to the number of followers or clicks for the stats to show.

Anyway, great tool.

<comment><USER4> _> Also, all of the links I've posted on my account show 0 clicks._

My company's account has tens of thousands of followers (all organic) and we also see "0 clicks". We know we get a high CTR when including a link in a tweet as we measure it both on Bitly and the site's analytics. I guess the service is still rough around the edges, but looks promising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is actually a lot less interesting than I was expecting it to be. I wonder if the "open to the public" version if not as robust as what you get if you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was around for at least a week or two, what's news?</comment>


Ask PG: Necessary to be a technical founder to be accepted in YC? - <AUTHOR>

I have some knowledge related to programming, although not enough to actually build an app. It is, however, sufficient for communicating what I need to developers. I am also familiar with various web technologies, workflows, and stacks.<p>If I got a developer (non-founder) to build an app based off of my idea would I still be considered for admission to YC? Assume the app is live (in beta) with some traction. <comment><USER2> Chuck Norris can get funded by YC without a cofounder who can code. Others we decide on a case by case basis, but the odds are a lot better if you have a hacker cofounder.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by "can code?" What about a co-founder who simply knows how to whip up a CRUD web app in PHP, with no computer science background whatsoever?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1768209></comment>


Ask HN: What are good questions to ask during the first week of a new job? - <AUTHOR>

I start a new job this week and would like to set myself up for success. What are some questions I can ask of my colleagues and manager to get things off on the right foot? <comment><USER2> Ask about almost everything. Workflows, who to talk to to make things happen, etc. Seriously, ask about everything. It doesn't make you look bad (unless you keep repeating the same question and don't get any work done).

</comment><comment><USER3> Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison for oneself.

</comment><comment><USER4> What world leaders do we currently spy on and how?

</comment><comment><USER5> How about 'okay, who is for tea and who is for coffee?'

Hopefully you can make a fantastic cup of tea. There is skill to it, believe me. You would also be amazed at how many people really appreciate a quality cuppa. They will thank you for it. In so doing you have a great opportunity to make friends, make sure you are able to get names right, put people at ease and start building relationships.

You can't go straight up to the boss and ask who really runs the show around here, however, make a few beverages, get to know people, gossip, banter, have a laugh, share some great jokes and, before you know it, you will be privy to pertinent information. You are straight onto 'water cooler chat' and that is that.

Just do what you can to break the ice, and, best of luck with your new job!

P.S. You are allowed to ask the same question about something three times. Any more than that and people will wonder if you are retarded.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm actually being very picky and asking lots of detailed questions before I accept a position. Especially things concerning team dynamics.</comment>


HDMI 2.1 Announced: 10Kp120, Dynamic HDR, New Color Spaces, New 48G Cable - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/11003/hdmi-21-announced-supports-10kp120-dynamic-hdr-new-color-spaces-new-48g-cable <comment><USER2> Wow that is a lot of bits. Seriously, that is a LOT of bits. Its almost like they said, "We're sick and tired of people complaining the cable is holding them back, here beat that suckers." :-) I guess the margins on 4K televisions have done better than expected, certainly as a 'feature' driving upgrades they have out performed '3D'.

For me it starts to push up against the question of whether monitor resolution has hit the top of the s-curve. A 9600 x 5400 (10K) screen at 200PPI is 48" x 27". That is a 55" High DPI screen. And while glorious and amazing as that would be, I'm wondering if that would be "main stream" any time soon.

<comment><USER3> I think 4K has ended up being a bit of a whiff in most respects. I just bought a 60" TV for my living room, where we are about 7 feet from it, which is pretty close (it's the narrow dimension in my rectangular living room), and I can't tell much difference between putatively 4K content and clearly-1080P (from Bluray). It's hard to be sure, because all my putatively-4K content is streaming-based, and there aren't that many sources willing or able to ship enough bits to clearly distinguish between 1080p and 4K.

That is, in a 1080p v. 4K streaming contest, if you dedicate the same larger number of bits to the 1080p content as the 4K content, you'd get a better 1080p signal, too. With lossy compression, pixels aren't directly comparable, they have a quality, and low-quality 1080p pixels v. low-quality 4K pixels makes it hard to tell what differences are the format, and which are just the low quality in general.

(In other news, I consider the idea that streaming is obviously superior to disks to be a bit crazy. What disks have is _higher quality pixels_ , and I expect that to continue to be true for a while. I've seen Bluray 1080p streams that are clearly superior to putatively 4K over-the-internet streams. And I've got DVDs that upscale to a higher quality than putatively 1080p streams of the same content.)

Far more important is the increased color gamut and HDR support, which _does_ provide a noticeable increase in image quality. Even from those aforementioned dubious-quality streaming sources; the higher-gamut HDR images are a visible improvement over the NTSC-sunglasses we were all wearing without realizing it.

<comment><USER4> Amen. Like about 50% of the population, I wear glasses. I absolutely can't make any noticeable difference between 2K and 4K at normal viewing distance. Most cinemas nowadays are 2K only, and nobody cares. Because most people older than 40 simply can't see.

Heck, for 10 years I've seen people watching 4:3 TV on 16:9 screens, horribly stretched. People are almost blind, seriously. They'd tolerate about anything.

HFR and HDR on the other hand, are great. I've seen HDR/HFR demos in 2K at Amsterdam IBC and it looks much better (much more realistic) than standard 4K.

8K? The NHK makes 8K demos, and they can only show almost still images, else you only have extremely detailed motion blur at ordinary framerates. They even give you a magnifying glass to look at their 8K screen. That's impressive, but I don't plan watching movies through big lenses to catch the details, anyway. What's the point, apart from planned obsolescence?

<comment><USER5> If the glasses are the correct one for you, you should have normal eyesight (that's the point of glasses).

<comment><USER6> It's also almost never 100% true. Even if the glasses are perfect, they also have to be perfectly clean or you get a bit of a blur anyway. Small enough to not be noticeable, but strong enough to blur the benefits of such a higher resolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Among other things, the new standard will support the game mode variable refresh rate (GM VRR). Nowadays, AMD already supports FreeSync-over-HDMI using a custom mode and with the HDMI 2.1 everything gets a little easier."

Oh, that'll be nice. Now that almost every interface is using 3D rendering tech under the hood, regardless of how it looks, I've noticed tearing has spread from something only gamers see very much of to something I'm seeing everywhere. Hopefully this helps drive the tech to push this everywhere and tearing will, in perhaps 10 years or so, be a thing of the past.

<comment><USER7> Silly thing is that tearing is a non-issue as long as one has vsync enabled. But games often disable vsync to get that "lovely" raw FPS number...

<comment><USER8> I don't disable VSync for FPS. I disable VSync because it reduces input lag.

<comment><USER9> The input lag can be a serious issue with certain monitors and video cards. It's very noticeable to me when playing and FPS.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Overwatch in particular has felt a lot more snappy since disabling it. I'd been out of FPSes for a while, but that game made me acutely aware of it.

<comment><USER10> You should try vsync with triple buffering and make sure to set:

flip queue size / max pre-rendered frames to 1 (depending on AMD/Nvidia)

<comment><USER8> Most games I play these days are DirectX 10+, which seems to preclude the use of the pre-rendered frames setting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A somewhat related question -- why is the industry able to agree on a single standard for how data will move over a wire from a device to a display, but yet can't come up with a single standard for doing it _without_ a wire.

I can take my Mac laptop or my PC laptop and roll up to my TV and with a single cable make pictures and sound come out of the TV.

But yet neither one can talk to the TV without a cable, unless I get a special device (which is different for both and ironically uses the same cable).

And even worse, if I had a Samsung phone, _it could_ connect to the TV wirelessly.

Why can't we have a single wireless display standard? Is there a technology problem I'm missing, or is it really just walled gardens?

<comment><USER12> Miracast is such standard. Thousands of devices support it. However two major players ( Apple & Google) dont. Apple has traditionally been a closed system, so it is not a big surprise. What surprises me is that Google also removed support for Miracast from Android and started promoting their proprietary casting protocol.

<comment><USER13> Miracast is heavily broken on many devices and rarely works at a reasonable level. Netflix and Google worked to create a good streaming standard names DIAL. Google took the idea and ran with it to create the Cast system which ended up working really well.

<comment><USER11> But the Cast system doesn't send arbitrary bits to the TV. It's a protocol for handing off authorized streams which are then processed by the TV (or in most cases the device connected to the TV by, ironically, HDMI).

So it's not really a method to stream arbitrary visual and audio data to a TV.

<comment><USER14> Well, you _can_ do screen mirroring with Cast, at least on Android. In my experience though it has fairly high latency and will occasionally freeze for a few seconds at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this mean TB3 (with "only" 40Gbps bandwidth) won't be able to support all the features/resolutions of HDMI 2.1? This is of course assuming that the HDMI 2.1 spec is designed to fully utilize the hardware level bandwidth.

Also I wonder what exactly is making the 48G cable special. Is it using additional pins while maintaining backwards compatibility?

</comment><comment><USER16> And I was here, hoping HDMI to disapear and be replaced by USB-C.

<comment><USER17> I guess the HDMI folks thought USB-C insufficiently ambitious on the bandwidth front. 48 Gbps might hold us for a while on the video front.

[edit]I too wish USB-C was the single connector, but it is such a confusing standard with all the Alternate Modes and different cables on the market.

<comment><USER16> You don't say. Right now I'm trying to buy a new cable to charge my XPS 15, I already bought 2 not working.

<comment><USER17> Its friggin unreal. I'm trying to do a cable order and have no clue what the heck to buy. I just want something that works. I swear these alternate modes and charging-only cables are going to be the end of me.

<comment><USER18> It might be worthwhile to check out Benson Leung's (Google engineer) reviews on USB-C cables: [http://amzn.to/2hX3cMZ](http://amzn.to/2hX3cMZ)

Previous post from last year on the subject about his work: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508494)

<comment><USER17> Things have changed a bit, now I have to worry about Thunderbolt 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder which causes more pain for consumers: new cables with new connectors (USB-C) or new cables with backward compatible connectors (HDMI 2.1).

While the former definitely makes consumers unhappy in the short term, it seems like in the long term the latter's confusion around what cable you have vs what cable you need is worse.

<comment><USER20> USB-C is actually the latter because there are several different flavours of USB-C cable that support different protocols.

This is going to suck.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, it's gotten to the point where I'd rather just buy Thunderbolt cables (despite the extra expense) because it's the only easy way to be sure that I'm getting a cable which fully supports all the features of the USB standard. (Thunderbolt cables are compatible with USB-C connectors, USB 3.1, and USB Power Delivery.)

<comment><USER21> Even THAT isn't good enough, since not all thunderbolt 3 cables support the necessary wattage. (for example [https://www.amazon.com/Belkin-F2CD081bt1M-Certified- Thunderb...](https://www.amazon.com/Belkin-F2CD081bt1M-Certified-Thunderbolt- Compatible/dp/B01CEFESRO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1483647457&sr=8-3&keywords=thunderbolt+3+cable))

I'm really hoping this is just a transitionary period and soon all USB-C / TB3 cables are created equal. When type-A started being used for charging there was a time with similar inconveniences.

<comment><USER7> > When type-A started being used for charging there was a time with similar > inconveniences.

Meh, that problem is still there. On top of how Apple has their own take on signaling that the charger is "dumb"...

<comment><USER21> I remember in the early days you could fairly easily fry a USB port on your computer if you plugged in the wrong thing. I think they are far more tolerant these days, though the recent USB Killer doodad that's been going around shows that extreme abuse can still break things.

It is one thing for things not to work if you plug them in, but when shit gets broken by doing so then that's just inexcusable.

<comment><USER7> I don't think i have ever seen a USB port get permanently fried from having a device draw too much. I have however managed to fry a cheap thumbdrive by reversing the connector on the motherboard...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can somebody please introduce the HDMI Forum to semver. While I'm looking forward to what this will enable, it's a little overzealous for a point release.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. As a consumer, it's a bit odd that HDMI 1.x and 2.0 used the same cables, but 2.1 requires a new cable. That seems like a good reason to bump the major version number.

<comment><USER24> It's the same with USB; USB 2.0 and 3.0 were compatible, but USB 3.1 (more commonly known as USB C) is not compatible with either of them.

EDIT: Actually, from consulting Wikipedia[1], it's even worse than I remembered. Apparently there's USB 3.1 gen 1 and USB 3.1 gen 2, where USB 3.1 gen 1 is literally just USB 3.0, and USB 3.1 gen 2 is what you get with a USB C cable (where the letter evidently denotes the port size/shape and the version number denotes the rate of transfer).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.1)

<comment><USER14> > and USB 3.1 gen 2 is what you get with a USB C cable

Nope, it's even more confusing than that. USB-C is just the connector type. Some USB-C cables only support USB 2.0.

<comment><USER24> > Some USB-C cables only support USB 2.0.

I don't even want to know why somebody thought that was a good idea...

<comment><USER25> Apple does it with the USB-C cable which needs to be purchased separately from the 87w power adapter for the 15" tbMBP. The cable is only USB 2, but since it's meant for power only, you'd probably never notice. It's quite annoying though that it's a separate accessory, and won't function as a "normal" TB3 cable or even a USB 3 cable, and likewise most normal USB-C or TB3 cables won't work with the 87w power adapter at full power delivery rates.

Such a mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've always thought 2.0 was a relatively disappointing upgrade over the previous standard. It felt like it should've had at least twice the bandwidth it ended up having. This is looking much better.

Also, considering how disappointing 2.0 was, yet it still got the "2.0" name, this should be at least a 3.0, especially with a new cable coming. The only reason I see them using "2.1" is because they don't want TV and laptop makers to yell at them for making their devices look awfully obsolete just a few years later. But it's probably going to confuse users and it's going to hurt adoption of 2.1-enabled devices.

</comment><comment><USER27> Intel has some nice cables delivering 30GB per FRAME[0]. [0] [https://www.cnet.com/uk/videos/intel-demos-worlds-first- walk...](https://www.cnet.com/uk/videos/intel-demos-worlds-first-walk-around- vr-video-experience-ces-2017/)

<comment><USER28> I think he said 3GB per frame, not 30GB, but that's still pretty insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That bit about different functionality when using different cables etc have me worried.

<comment><USER29> Good thing we're all switching to USBC for everything, apparently, since it doesn't have that problem.

[http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-devices/usb- typ...](http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-devices/usb-type-c-not- all-cables-are-created-equal/a/d-id/1323293)

Oh.... :-/

<comment><USER30> Yeah, my head started to hurt when you add Thunderbolt 3 to the mix. Then you've Type-C for USB 2, 3, 3.1 -- and 3.1 gen 1 is really 3.0 re-branded. You need to look for "USB 3.1 gen 2" for the 10 Gbps support in the cable, and don't forget charging requirements -- the Belkin cables they sell at the Apple Store only support up to 60 W, but others, such as [https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/TkAnhK84TT7](https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/TkAnhK84TT7) claim support for 100 W or more. Then you've Thunderbolt 3, where you can theoretically hit 40 Gbps, but where cables that support those speeds are basically 0.5m, except one Belkin that's 2m but doesn't support DisplayPort or USB 3.0. And finally, the white USB Type-C cable Apple sells and ships with its power adapters is called a Charge Cable and doesn't support data, like connecting two Macbooks together to do Migration Assistant. But that's okay, because even if you do connect two computers together with a 0.5m Belkin TB3 cable, you won't hit 40 Gbps. Using Migration Assistant, copying 256 GB off a disk capable of 3.1Gbps should take about 11 minutes, but it always takes 2 hours when using cables between two 2016 MBPs -- Ethernet gave me the same speed as that 0.5m TB3 cable -- and it's about a half hour shorter if you use Wi-Fi for a direct connection. Given that, I can't wait for the day when we replace all these confusing cables with new directional wireless standards...

<comment><USER7> One of the missed opportunities of WIFI Direct was that they didn't specify a transfer protocol as part of the spec...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why do we still have or still need HDMI when we've got USB 3.1 Type-C?

<comment><USER32> USB 3.1: 10 Gbit/s

DisplayPort 1.4: 32 Gbit/s

HDMI 2.1: 38 Gbit/s

Thunderbolt 3: 40 Gbit/s

<comment><USER33> HDMI 2.1 is 48 Gbits/s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It keeps mentioning improved frame rates (very little about refresh rates?) - will HDMI now be able to support 144hz monitors?

<comment><USER35> DisplayPort works very well for high-resolution and high-refresh-rate monitors (and also support things like FreeSync), why would you want HDMI?

<comment><USER36> For some reason all my kit comes with HDMI rather than DisplayPort. It also works with "televisions" (which these days seem to run Android)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Didn't see any mention of power. Are the TV sticks going to be able to ditch the plugs?

<comment><USER38> Powered HDMI existed before 2.0 didn't it? I know it wasn't in 1.0.

Since these things tend to be backwards compatible I'd assume 2.1 would still provide power.

I suppose it may not be mandatory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> As for the new cable business, is there a way for the devices to detect the version of the cable (maybe resistor strapping or something)?

The reason I ask is because HDMI cables are passive, so any cable with all of the pins populated should be able to work, provided it's able to satisfy the bandwidth requirements. In other words, I'm wondering if these new HDMI 2.1 cables are just regular HDMI cables with better electrical characteristics. If so, then I bet older HDMI cables will work as long as they're kept short.

I also wonder how this variable refresh rate thing relates to the recent AMD FreeSync over HDMI thing...

<comment> j-walker I imagine it is like PCI-Express where they link up at the lowest bandwidth possible (x1 in the case of PCIe) and then keep attempting higher bandwidth modes (x4,x8,x16) until the the transceivers can no longer link and then step down one mode.

<comment><USER40> Is this what windows was trying to do when I hooked it up to my TV the other day? For some apps it kept trying to cycle through resolutions (and never found a stable point).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Just from the title, it seems this is aimed at the emerging 8K television segment -- with a little overhead.

As such, I don't find it "wow" at all. Maybe more "just in time."

</comment><comment><USER42> I find it really annoying that cables with the same connectors at the ends and same basic standard have a version today.

Imagine if back in the day it was like: "ohhh headphone jack 1.3 eh? Well these headphones only work on 1.4 or greater"

Or: "Wow you only have RCA 7.6 you'll have to get a TV with rev 8 to hook up your NES"

It's a friggin' cord with some connectors and some pins, how did we wind up having different versions be even possible?!

<comment> ryanplant-au The cables aren't versioned. They're just rated in categories for attenuation exactly like copper phone wiring is and named for the connector type just like USB-A, USB-C, micro-USB, etc are. You don't have HDMI 1.3 and HDMI 1.4 cables, though; cables bought years before a HDMI version is announced can still work with any of that new version's features that work within the bandwidth that cable can carry. The version is for the HDMI spec which the receiver must support. HDMI isn't just a cable, it's also the hardware encoding and decoding signals, and the different versions define new and different ways of encoding and decoding digital media.

As for 'headphone jack 1.4' and 'RCA jack 7.6'\-- back in the day we had analogue audio and video signals and invented new types of jack, connector, and cable to carry them. You had RCA jacks, and 3.5mm jacks, and 1/4" audio jacks, and component video jacks, and S-video jacks, and SCART jacks, and coax jacks. Now we have digital audio and video and consistently use HDMI to carry it; instead of inventing new connectors we update the HDMI spec and say "Systems meeting the 1.3 spec can only transmit 1080p over their HDMI cables, and systems meeting the 1.4 spec can transmit 1080p over those cables." Isn't that better, and simpler? Instead of 20 types of cable with different features, we just use one type of cable, and add features to it over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So they are announcing variable data rate streams and Display Stream Compression support. I thought until now HDMI had a fixed data rate except for the control channel, unlike DisplayPort which is fully packetized. Can someone more knowledgeable chime in on whether HDMI will now be packetized too, or how they support variable data rate modes?

</comment><comment><USER43> Hmm. To make actual use of this, it seems you would need to be sitting right on top of a ginormous (120"?) screen.

You might actually need to use a whole wall, which leads into immersive environments.

</comment><comment><USER44> How does this relate to Apple's advanced USB connectors on the new MBPs? I thought, they were supposed to replace all other types of connectors for video. Will we have HDMI for TVs and USB for monitors?

<comment><USER45> They're not "Apple's advanced USB connectors" \- they're the USB-C standard. They support (per the standard) what are called alternate modes, HDMI being one of them. HDMI 1.4b is currently supported over HDMI alt mode, which is unsurprising given that USB-C has been in the wild for a while and HDMI 2.1 is brand new.

<comment><USER46> Well they do support Thunderbolt 3 too, so they're not _just_ USB.

<comment><USER38> Thunderbolt 3 is standardized on using the same USB-C connector.

Much like Apple used the DisplayPort connector before for Thunderbolt 1 and 2.

<comment><USER46> I know. But a USB 3 Type C port won't support Thunderbolt 3 by default. It has to be a Thunderbolt 3 port.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Still no daisy chaining though, unlike with DisplayPort which uses packeted data. Why isn't DP replacing it faster? Is it too expensive to become ubiquitous?

<comment><USER48> It's a matter of targeted use case. DP is for PCs, while HDMI is for point-to- point AV. There aren't many non-PC HDMI sources that support multiple displays (mirroring or expanding), and this is by design. Chaining makes no sense in the home theater nor building video dist use cases.

<comment><USER47> The point is, DP offers a superset of functionality and is also supposedly free of license fees (from what I've heard), while HDMI requires the manufacturer to pay for the license. So why isn't everyone ditching HDMI for DisplayPort which is better on all accounts? May be manufacturing cost plays a role, but I have no idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This will be great for VR basically.

</comment><comment><USER50> I wish companies would start rolling with HD-BaseT.

<comment><USER22> Their current chipsets top out at 10.2Gbps (HDMI 1.4a) for the video signal, which is somewhat limiting today.

It's also worth remembering that while historically it's done a pretty decent job at assisting with distance transport it's a 'standard' made by Valens to sell their chips. The use cases for it also make up a minuscule component of the overall display source/sink device market so there's little benefit to manufacturers having to roll the additional cost into every device they make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Just keep making things more complicated for no good reason.

         4K   4096 / 2160 = 1.8962962962962964
         5K   5120 / 2880 = 1.7777777777777777
         8K   7680 / 4320 = 1.7777777777777777
        10K  10328 / 7760 = 1.3309278350515463

Thanks a whole lot.

<comment><USER51> > 4K 4096 / 2160 = 1.8962962962962964

What most people call "4k" is 3840:2160 (typical 16:9 = 1.77… aspect ratio). At least that's the amount of pixels in most TVs/Monitors I've seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> One of the more ridiculous arguments in favor of the new MBPs was a refrain of "HDMI is on its way out", "HDMI is old tech", "New equipment won't use HDMI".

<comment><USER53> I've never heard this argument in favour of the new MBP.

In fact, one of the best arguments in favour of the new MBP that I've seen is that USB-C can replace every port we're using right now, and often with the same or fewer dongles as before. For example, USB-C supports 'HDMI alternate mode' which is a simple way to provide an HDMI signal over a USB-C port/cable:

[http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/HDMIAltModeUSBTypeC.aspx](http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/HDMIAltModeUSBTypeC.aspx)

<comment><USER54> Exactly. Dongles can suck, but it's pretty sweet that you can buy a new dongle to upgrade to a later spec or different port. I'm sure we'll see TB3 HDMI2.1 dongles.</comment></comment></comment>


The First Bug on Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0462/ <comment><USER2> From "REALLY REMOTE Debugging: A Conversation with Glenn Reeves" (2010) [0]:

 _We did see the problem before landing, but could not get it to repeat when we tried to track it down. It was not forgotten nor was it deemed unimportant. Yes, we were concentrating heavily on the entry and landing software. Yes, we considered this problem lower priority. Yes, we would have liked to have everything perfect before landing. However, I didn 't see any problem, other than that we ran out of time to get the lower priority issues resolved._

 _We did have one other thing on our side -- we knew how robust our system was because that is the way we designed it. We knew that if this problem occurred, we would reset. We built in mechanisms to recover the current activity so that there would be no interruptions in the science data (although this wasn 't used until later in the landed mission). We built in the ability (and tested it) to go through multiple resets while we were going through the Martian atmosphere. We designed the software to recover from radiation induced errors in the memory or the processor. The spacecraft would have even done a 60-day mission on its own, including deploying the rover, if the radio receiver had broken when we landed. There were a large number of safeguards in the system to ensure robust, continued operation in the event of a failure of this type. These safeguards allowed us to designate problems of this nature as lower priority. We had our priorities right. _

[0] [http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/really- remote...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/really-remote- debugging-a-conversation-w/228700403)

<comment><USER3> I don't understand. Flip a flag. That was the bug fix. They instead tested around it, considered it a reasonable risk, launched a rocket to Mars _without flipping the flag_. What could they have been thinking.

<comment><USER4> First, note the phrase "could not get it to repeat when we tried to track it down." Secondly, I'm pretty sure that that flag wasn't just labelled SERIOUS_RUNTIME_ISSUE_ACTIVE; there were presumably other good reasons for the flag to be set the way it was, and other serious problems that flipping it _might_ have caused, as far as they could determine pre-launch.

<comment><USER3> Nope. It was a semaphore, and it had a flag, and it was set wrong (contrary to policy), and they noticed it and documented it. Whether or not they could reproduce the problem _they had already predicted_ the only reason NOT to fix the bug was, institutional inertia. I.e. can't change code because the process says we cant without an elaborate ritual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me that finds this 'article' completely unreadable? There are diagrams given with very little explanation and there seems to be very little to guide the ready through what the problem was and how it was solved.

</comment><comment><USER6> On a side note, I'm guessing many of us have seen the movie "The Martian", but whether you enjoyed it or not, I would highly recommend the novel. The detail that goes into how he survives is amazing, which is somewhat missing in the film.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the book is great.

The movie had other good things, like PVS/Lisp code in a spaceship ;-)

[http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/115255/what- program...](http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/115255/what-programming- language-is-used-in-the-martian)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/3nnvnp/fluff_anyone_e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/3nnvnp/fluff_anyone_else_notice_lisp_in_some_of_the_code/)

[https://github.com/nasa/pvslib/blob/master/power/exponentiat...](https://github.com/nasa/pvslib/blob/master/power/exponentiation_aux.prf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title is borderline clickbait considering the search for life on Mars.. It's really the "First [Computer] Bug on Mars".

<comment><USER8> I assumed that if life had been found on Mars, I wouldn't be hearing about it from an un-famous blog on Hacker News. It's just a pun, and that doesn't make it clickbait, just good headline-writing.</comment></comment>


For the first time, less than 10% of the world is living in extreme poverty - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/05/for-the-first-time-less-than-10-percent-of-the-world-is-living-in-extreme-poverty-world-bank-says/ <comment><USER2> How come nobody has ever heard the term "extreme poverty" as a sensible metric before? Even forgetting the fact that defining extreme poverty as an absolute number is completely meaningless, they had to change the metric numerous times to show a positive result. [http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing- gr...](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great- poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html)

Also a country is awarded money if it displays good metrics even if they don't make any sense. [https://books.google.gr/books?id=rH5UCAAAQBAJ&pg=PT178&lpg=P...](https://books.google.gr/books?id=rH5UCAAAQBAJ&pg=PT178&lpg=PT178&dq=world+bank+financing+stopped+after&source=bl&ots=0dpWPwlG7T&sig=uUUqm1zDzxd_0B6ZKF_q39_IyBE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNmNnRgeDJAhUFCBoKHXV- BocQ6AEIOTAF#v=onepage&q=world%20bank%20financing%20stopped%20after&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this really an improvement, or are more people plugged into our global economic system? Here's a hypothetical story. All names & circumstances are fiction.

Take Tan Bao, who lived in a pastoral barter system in his homeland in north- western China. Tan's family had the same trade over many generations. Their flock consisted of 63 sheep, 3 horses, 28 geese, 6 ducks.

Tan Bao made $0, yet was able to support his family. Everybody pitched in to subsist.

Now developers bought the land that Tan Bao's family has lived on. Tan Bao & his family are evicted. They move to Xi'an. Now, Tan Bao makes $2 a day working in a shoe factory.

Hooray! Tan Bao is no longer living in extreme poverty. Yet he & his family miss their ancestral homeland & old way of life.

<comment><USER4> When I was young I remember most of my country was considered extreme poverty, but to be honest I was never really hungry, there was no people dying of hunger, people were happy and they appreciated little things. I would not like to see those times come back, but while it was difficult for everyone, it was easily survivable by just doing some jobs.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure where you're from, but my understanding is that "extreme poverty" literally means that people are dying of hunger. So, if you are able to consistently secure food, you're not living in extreme poverty, but of course, you may still be very, very poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> China is what makes most of the difference.

Even taking into account the democratic and freedom deficits, we have to admit that the achievements of the Chinese are impressive.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good stuff. I was brought up with images Africans starving on the TV and Live Aid. Horrible stuff. Glad to see progress.

</comment><comment><USER8> In all seriousness, can somebody please help me understand what can be bought for $1.9 and how they came up with this arbitrary number?! I don't know if anybody can even get (or cook) one full meal a day for that... maybe I'm missing something?

Why even have such a measure unless it's going to be at least $10/day as one likely needs at least that much just to feed themselves the cheapest possible food they can find.

<comment><USER9> You can actually buy 10lb / 5kg bags of rice for $5 in the US. [http://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Long-Grain-Enriched- Ri...](http://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Long-Grain-Enriched- Rice-10-Lb/10315399)

That's enough for 50 servings, meaning you could feed yourself for $0.20 a day. Of course this ignores PPP, malnutrition and other factors, but don't underestimate how cheap food actually is.

<comment><USER10> A few years ago, I realized that several Asian cuisines are actually very cheap. Indian dishes are a great illustration of how you can make wonderfully tasty meals with very little of the expensive ingredients, and cheaper than fast food—not to mention way healthier.

<comment><USER11> It's not hard to be cheaper than fast food, other than possibly dollar/value menus.

All of the "staples" are insanely cheap - potatos, rice, etc. Most vegetables are as well. Toss in som emeat of whatever was on sale and you can easily cook a meal for 4 for 10 dollars, if not quite a bit cheaper.

<comment><USER12> Also, be willing to eat canned vegetables.

<comment><USER13> Frozen veggies are healthier and cheaper. Plus you get to cook them to your taste, rather than what the canner decides (cooking too long, adding salts, etc.)

[http://www.heathernicholds.com/nutrition/frozen-vs-canned- ve...](http://www.heathernicholds.com/nutrition/frozen-vs-canned-vegetables)

<comment><USER14> Frozen veggies definitely win if you have access to refrigeration -> access to energy. Canning is a revolutionary preservation technique in that it allows for long-term storage of perishables at room temperature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this take into account inflation? If not, isn't it a pretty unfair graph?

<comment><USER16> Yes, it does: the graph says all figures are at 2011 PPP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> thx bill gates u did it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Really? Because I don't think I've read hunter-gatherers being exceptionally poor.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ahem, money == interest-bearing debt created in a computer by private, non- democratic institutions for maximum profit, in case someone missed that little glitch in the system.

<comment><USER20> That would be currency, not money.

<comment><USER21> I've heard people making this distinction before, but can't say I understand the difference, can you explain it to me?

<comment><USER19> As I said, banks are creating _money_ , digital debt credits, in their computers. That _money_ is largely regarded as equal to currency in the prevailing global financial system, since everyone uses the banks transaction system (SWIFT, Visa, etc) and trusts the value of the debt credits.

The real currency are the notes and coins, the "legal tender" printed by the government, which comprises less than 3% of the money supply.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Designer's Designer - <AUTHOR> https://www.filfre.net/2018/11/the-designers-designer/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an article about the work of Danielle Bunten Berry (nee Dan Bunten) who created several of the most influential games of the 8-bit era, including Seven Cities of Gold and M.U.L.E. I remember playing both of those on my Commodore 64 as a child and absolutely loving them.

She was a remarkable visionary in terms of multiplayer games. It's really sad that she died just as the Internet was taking off. Over the ten years since her death in 1998 we've seen multiplayer games played over the Internet go from a small niche thing to completely dominating the industry, but she was trying to do this stuff in the 80s and early 90s!</comment>


Ask HN: Would you check into a hotel if they gave you a local smartphone? - <AUTHOR> Would you choose a particular hotel if they gave you a free mobile travel assistant that you can use for Internet, Google Maps, currency conversion, discounts on food, drinks, activities as well as Wifi hotspot for your phone?
We're aiming to make global travel easier and the first thing we want to do is help people get access to Internet beyond the free public wifis, without the need of looking up local SIM providers, renting a pocket wifi and no roaming fees.
We think this solution will be useful but in order to make it free for travellers, we're partnering with hotels. We're also looking at potentially partnering with AirBnB hosts and help them make their host experience better and generate extra revenue. <comment><USER2> I think this seriously discounts how "personal" these devices are for people. It would be like loaning a toothbrush to someone who already has one of their own and expecting it to be returned.

At best, perhaps a loaned portable WiFi device that provided a walled-garden branded for the particular Hotel's services would be more likely to be accepted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, effectively that's what the smartphone will function as - a loaned portable Wifi device.

We don't expect that people would use our devices for personal use? I'd expect them to use their own devices for their own personal apps.

<comment><USER2> I misread your original submission-- so I'm wrong on what you were offering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the confusion - what did you originally think it was?

<comment><USER2> Read "mobile" and confused it with the noun some use for a mobile-phone instead of an adjective describing something else.

English is a pain sometimes. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What guarantee would there be that you don't backdoor the phones before handing them out? (not saying you would, but it's a potential attack vector)

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess you're thinking what if the phones get hacked by someone else and steals personal information?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not just make an app instead of loaning out a physical device</comment>


Why have personalized news startups failed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Why-have-personalized-news-startups-failed

<comment><USER2> People already have feed readers (RSS/etc.) and use them to generate personalized news.

The rest either don't know about it, or aren't interested.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because most consumers value a curated experience more and the cost of clicking from one site to the next is zero.</comment>


Multivariate Dependence Beyond Shannon Information [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/mdbsi.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. If you haven't seen this paper before, take a look at Tables I and II, which show two simple, discrete, probability distributions for three variables, each of which consists of two bits (i.e., each variable can take four possible values, 00, 01, 10, and 11). In each distribution, the three variables depend on each other.

The distributions are different, but if you take a look at figures 1, 2, and 3, you will see that their Shannon Entropy diagrams are the same, and that a directed acyclic graph _cannot_ represent either distribution.

Let me repeat that: today (1) there is no consistent way to measure the information of the three variables in these toy distributions, and (2) no Bayesian model can measure their dependencies. In short, probability theory cannot cope with these toy distributions.

Wow.</comment>


How The Legend of Zelda Changed My Generation - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/06/17/legend-of-zelda/

<comment><USER2> One of the better articles about the cultural impact of the Legend of Zelda. In my head I put Ocarina of Time as a classic fairy tale and forget sometimes that it was a video game from the 90s</comment>


Welcome to Estonia's Isle of Women - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/travel/kihnu-estonia-women-unesco-folk-culture-tourism.html <comment><AUTHOR> "How do you welcome in the modern world, but keep this ancient culture alive?"</comment>


How I Learned To Quit The iPhone & Love Google Voice - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/09/how-i-learned-to-quit-the-iphone-and-love-google-voice/

<comment><USER2> I got google voice about a week ago.

The only feature that I cared about on the iPhone was visual voice mail. Google voice is many, many, many, many, MANY times better than visual voicemail.

I will not be getting an iPhone now, thanks Google!

</comment><comment><USER3> _no carrier will ever have a stranglehold on me again._

except google, apparently.

<comment><USER4> and T-Mobile?

<comment><USER5> Is there a way to have a wifi phone yet?

<comment><USER6> You could install sip droid on an unlocked android like the adp1 (or install unknown sources on a carrier phone) or go with any number of sip clients for pdas. Then you still need to provision a line for the other end of the sip connection, but you'll have a pda that can make calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like TechCrunch switched to reruns. I hope All in the Family comes on next. That Archie Bunker is so fresh.

</comment><comment><USER8> didnt know number portability was available yet...

<comment><USER9> I think porting to a number is only available to well connected web- celebrities right now. Supposedly it's coming in the fall to us plebeians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Flagged. I've had enough of cheap tabloids on HN.

</comment><comment><USER11> Arrington, you ignorant slut!</comment>


LemonGraph – A log-based transactional graph - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/lemongraph <comment><USER2> At this point I really have to wonder how many people have written graph engines on top of lmdb! In the past month I've seen two from the same bank built on top of lmdbjava. Instead of reinventing this same wheel over and over it'd probably make sense for somebody to sitdown with lmdb and tinkerpop [1] and bang out one decent implementation.

...actually this has been done [2] but the project looks abandoned. So NSA guys you should get right on this.

[1] [http://tinkerpop.apache.org/docs/current/reference/](http://tinkerpop.apache.org/docs/current/reference/)

[2] [https://github.com/pietermartin/thundergraph](https://github.com/pietermartin/thundergraph)

<comment><AUTHOR> At least, this one is in Python. My dream would be to have a transactional graph database written in Python which is used as back-end for NetworkX ([https://networkx.github.io/](https://networkx.github.io/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks interesting. I have to say I find it amusing that the NSA has a GitHub.

<comment><USER4> And that they use Adventure Time puns to name things. I guess the NSA techs are just a bunch of nerds with government contracts

<comment><USER5> A bunch of nerds with government contracts _that smoke weed on the way to their interview_

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d737mx/the-fbi- ca...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d737mx/the-fbi-cant-find- hackers-that-dont-smoke-pot)

EDIT: oops that was 2014, apparently the FBI isn't having that issue anymore

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aepj4p/fbi- mariju...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aepj4p/fbi-marijuana- weed-hackers-hiring-weedweek2017)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's a use-case for this? Is it like Neo4j or some other niche usecase (e.g mass surveillance graph, given the source)

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's like Neo4j but based on the in-memory database LMDB, presumably to provide high performance running on a single machine.

The link mentions that its use case is streaming seed set expansion, which allows you to identify communities based on a set of seeds. I wrote more about that in this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17335873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17335873)

<comment><USER8> Quibble: LMDB is a memory-mapped file database. It is not an in-memory database, although it generally outperforms all other in-memory databases.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, this is the first I had heard of LMDB.

I actually love the idea of a memory-mapped database, I've often thought memory mapping isn't taken advantage of enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why is adding properties to a node significantly faster (153k/s) than adding edges to a node (25k/s)?

<comment><USER10> Indexes? Seems to be there are indexes fromNode, toNode and for edges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> for laymen like me: what is this, and what are the perfect use-cases for this?

"..log-based transactional graph (nodes/edges/properties).. ..primary use case is to support streaming seed set expansion." \-- I'm totally lost.

I know these kind of software is targeted at developers, but it won't hurt to give analogy like "Uber for XXX" like in startup pitches. e.g. "It's like <put popular product name here e.g. MySQL> but <differentiating factors>".

<comment><USER12> Graph databases are a really neat thing that liberate you from the need to figure out your database schema at the outset and also allow much faster searching than traditional table-based queries across huge datasets. They're ideal for sparse data or for collections of data whose structure/relationships you're not sure about, and also allow very fast searches because the number of steps between different nodes typically grows more slowly than the number of records between different table entries.

There are a bunch of them on the market, Neo4j is probably the most popular (and has lots of good quality introductory text on the website and on youtube). Graph databases are key to many major internet services, eg Google, Twitter, and Facebook are all just really big graph databases.

This particular graph database stores all its data in a single file trading speed and simplicity off against flexibility. I'm not an expert but it seems like it would work very well for search queries, but poorly for tasks involving a lot of contributors like a chat server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The NSA released a graph database. I wonder what they use it for. /s

</comment><comment><USER14> Unix commands: awk - AWKWARD. When you write in awk you become awkward. sed - When you write in sed you become extremely sad.

<comment><USER15> Wrong thread?</comment></comment>


New GMAIL Looks to be written in php - <AUTHOR> https://amonnyesigye.blogspot.com/2018/04/new-gmail-looks-to-be-written-in-php.html <comment><USER2> Those tools use what are known as heuristics. You can't reliably detect such a thing except by the return of an X-Powered-By header that denotes php specifically. Anything else is just guesswork.</comment>


Canaan Partners is at the Cross Roads in India: To Be, or Not To Be? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextbigwhat.com/canaan-partners-india-297/ <comment><AUTHOR> I hope they don't. Isn't all that great for Indian startups as it is.</comment>


Analog Devices AD9361 – when microchips are more profitable than drugs - <AUTHOR> https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-ADC-65nm <comment><USER2> The assumption the author has made is that each chip has an R&D spend proportional to the revenue that it generates (~20%). This is clearly false. Some chips are relatively simple but sell in huge numbers so the R&D per revenue is extremely low. An SDR is one of the most complex chips you can make with a wide range of expertise going into the design. I can easily imagine $20+ million being spent on R&D for this chip and the market for it is pretty limited (not for consumer products). Even at 100,000 sales the R&D costs alone would be $200 per chip.

Pricing for these sort of niche low volume products is guided much more by what the market tolerates paying rather than the production and development costs. A large number of these types of chip never recover their R&D spends.

<comment><USER3> To add to this, I imagine chip companies don't look at it as plainly as whether a chip recovers its development costs. If the development costs lead to techniques or designs that can be reused, the next chips will be not only better (due to incremental improvements) but also cheaper.

<comment><USER4> In my experience designing electronics, EEs and the people handling logistics/manufacturing are extremely risk averse actors who make many decisions based on trust and personal relationships. As a contractor, my deadlines would often only allow for at most two or three prototypes before I had to deliver a working design and that did not leave much room for error. If my client or I had an existing relationship with a vendor that always supplied parts on time, fast samples/dev kits, or if I knew their reference designs to be more reliable than most, then that vendor would be the preferred source for parts even if their other offerings weren't the best or the most cost efficient.

You can also often get great pricing for low/medium volume orders if you have built up a history so I've had situations where I had to design a significantly more complex board with a microprocessor that normally cost 10-20 times more than the CPU I would have chosen (from another vendor). The client's supplier for the other most expensive part on the board had too much inventory of a soon to be discontinued processor (that was pin compatible with a newer one, also very expensive) and the account manager's boss was willing to sell us everything we needed at an 80% discount _off high volume pricing_ with pricing guarantees on the newer parts for several years, all to meet some regional sales quota.

As another example, microprocessors often have arduous power up requirements where different voltages have to be supplied in a specific sequence within annoyingly specific timing tolerances. In a project using Marvell microprocessors, it was much faster to just use Marvell's power chips and existing reference design than to waste precious time on modifying designs for cheaper chips from other vendors. The power parts cost five times as much as they would had I chosen my favorite vendor but because the board was a mixed signal design it was extremely expensive to make changes and test prototypes.

A vast catalog of parts is an especially powerful market force if you are a company like TI that has a well developed software tool like WEBENCH which can spit out _dynamic_ reference designs for most of their power chips. Unless I have an existing reference design from a vendor of a major part (like the CPU above), I usually go straight to TI's tool to design any power supplies I need so I can focus on the meat of the PCB. If TI also has parts that do something else I need on the board I will often just choose them instead of researching other vendors (unless it's a really expensive component) and that compounds as I make more and more PCBs, each time becoming more comfortable with TI parts at the expense of others.

<comment><USER5> Sales factors (discounts) and vendor lock in's/preferences (with good reason or not).

Oddly some of the same stuff happens with drugs! [https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/pg7ez9/pharma-reps- are-...](https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/pg7ez9/pharma-reps-are- basically-bribing-your-doctor-study-confirms)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it accurate to refer to the average wafer price as "manufacturing cost" rather than "materials cost"? Shouldn't the amortized cost of the fab be included as part of "manufacturing cost"? Or is that captured in any part by "R&D"?

Either way, the drug comparison is apt. The chip/pill is a tiny thing with negligible marginal cost. The plant costs billions. Pricing seems arbitrary, but these huge expenses do need to be recouped somehow.

<comment><USER7> The fab cost is "NRE"

<comment><USER8> No, NRE is masking and tooling cost. Fab costs would need to be amortized separately. (Because fab costs get spread across many, many products; the 1000 wafers used as a guesstimate in this article is tiny compared to what a fab produces over its life.)

If anything, the Fab costs should be included in the cost-per-wafer.

<comment><USER9> Analogue fabs are highly customized. You could probably make some back of the napkin comparisons but you wouldn't be able to actually manufacture it in another fab without a lot more R&D spend.

<comment><USER10> That's true of any advanced node, though.

<comment><USER9> The difference is with analogue everything is a full custom, with digital it's only the trailblazers. Also linear devices require an order of magnitude more control and characterization than digital even when full custom.

<comment><USER8> I think we're mostly in violent agreement. There's a lot for an analog IC - those mid-manufacturing test pads are a great example of pain. Testing costs are going to be higher, there will be extra NRE on custom test harnesses, and all the rest you allude to. But they'll be able to get multiple projects out of the basic investment in litho gear. I think it depends where one draws the line at the (very large) CapEx of "the fab".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is worth mentioning that drugs are only so profitable because of their legal status. Drugs themselves are very cheap to make - additional cost is simply the risk of getting caught, security and so on. I think those factors don't exist for microchips, so the title is a bit misleading.

<comment><USER12> The title is very misleading. Had the author stuck to legit pill making, it could've made a fairly apt comparison, but they mentioned drug cartels which implies a very different set of costs / risks. I'd further argue drug cartels have a wider price differential between raw material and wholesale product too, but don't have a source to back it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd wager you are correct. Still it is an interesting read and I wanted to share.

<comment><USER12> Turns out, if BusinessInsider is correct, the raw coca plant leaves needed to make 1kg of cocaine base costs about $650. The same article claims you can get kilos in South America for about $6,500 with purity around 85%. Prices go up the closer you get to the final destination, but as do the risks too of course. If those numbers are accurate, would indicate a gross difference of 10x, not the 172x from source article. I'm surprised the coca leaves go for so much!

<comment><USER13> Remember that final prices of drugs are "street prices" in quantities of use. So you might have 25,000 USD of a drug, and it might be 2 kilograms, but when you split it up into 2-4g packets, the individual prices are much higher and you might get "one millions" in street value, which is what the police and media like to report. It makes the amount seem so much bigger.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I know street value. I also know stateside wholesale price too. I just didn't realize the markup was so huge between source and destination vs raw material and finished product.

Also, cocaine isn't usually sold in 2-4g packets in most places. Usually it's 1g or less. Otherwise (but much less often) it's ~3.5g.

<comment><USER13> It's usually sold by a teener (1/16 oz) or eightball here (1/8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> ADI is a remarkable company and they seem to be doing very well these days. If you'd told me ten years ago that in 2018 all of the old-line semiconductor companies (ADI, TI, etc) would be trading at all-time-high stock prices I would have thought you were nuts but here we are. Hardware is still quite valuable.

<comment><USER15> Too bad they destroyed the Hittite and LT web sites. Those were for engineers. The AD web site must be laid out by some marketing goob; totally painful to use.

<comment><USER14> At least the AD website usually works on weekends. Many of these companies' websites apparently need constant manual correction to continue operating, with the result that i often find I can't download datasheets on Sundays. Bad for the hobbyist for sure.

<comment><USER16> I have trouble with slow page loads and can't order samples from Microchip on weekends.

<comment><USER17> This is universally the case for hardware companies I've found, even suppliers. We get Farnell, CPC and RS outages at the weekend here in the U.K.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some pictures looks like photos of futuristic cities taken from an airplane or from a drone.

I find them fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER19> I didn't understand anything but man those pictures were beautiful. Would be pretty cool to print them out and hang them on a wall.

<comment><USER20> You might like these shots of the classic 6502: [http://visual6502.org/images/6502/index.html](http://visual6502.org/images/6502/index.html)

<comment><USER19> A- _maze_ -ing. Sorry couldn't help it. Jokes aside, these are great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 65nm process can be either 200mm or 300mm wafers.

At 21mm2 on a mature process, yield should be much higher than 50%. More like 90% is reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER15> What the process? The tear down says mostly FET based, so I assume a BiCMOS?

The AD9361 require front end filtering, as the 5th harmonic of the 2m ham band falls in a national LTE band; horrible interfence from that wide open front end.

<comment><USER17> Surely 5th is down enough dB for that not to be an issue?

<comment><USER15> It's not the 5th being down. The 5th LO harmonic mixes the LTE band down to the 2m band. That's just inherent in a Gilbert cell mixer. There is a high powered, 20 MHz wide (OFDM) signal pretty much everywhere at 715 MHz.

<comment><USER17> Ah gotcha. That makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Now I finally understand why Apple is making more and more of chips and tech in house.

</comment><comment><USER23> This chip has been a boon to SDRs. It moves the challenge of building an SDR to the filter banks and power amplifiers (the input and output conditioning circuits). Although these days most of the new transceivers have a low end in the 300Mhz range. It is somewhat easier to mix up the low frequencies into the 300+ Mhz range to cover them.

</comment><comment><USER24> clickbait title. not even a good analysis. i do like that the author wasn't in any way complaining about the price or arguing that it wasn't reasonable. in electronics (compared to drugs) there isn't unfair pressure in the marketplace. so double phoo on the title.

</comment><comment><USER24> i wonder if the new sds100 is built around this chip. timing is right.

<comment><USER25> Since the frequency range doesn't match what the chip is capable of then probably not. The chip was released in 2013 so I'm not sure what you mean by timing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Drugs aren't profitable if you can make money any other way.</comment>


Ibloc Independent News site - <AUTHOR> http://ibloc.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is something I've been working on for fun. It's made with PouchDB/CouchDB and JQuery for the most part and runs on a DigitalOcean server.</comment>


This is How a Society Dies - <AUTHOR> https://eand.co/this-is-how-a-society-dies-35bdc3c0b854 <comment><USER2> It is good to not minimize the problems. But this article goes to the opposite extreme, and maximizes them.

We're in a death spiral and Europe isn't? Is that why they've been rioting on the streets of Paris for months? They're better off than we are? Is that why Greece is doing so well?

In saying this, I do not want to minimize the problems we have. They are serious, and they look like they're gaining on us. But Europe, taken as a whole, is not this shining example of how to make it work, either.</comment>


How Google Stole Apple's Thunder And Became Our Favorite Tech Company Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/How-Google-Stole-Apple-s-Thunder-And-Became-4302841.php

<comment><USER2> Bored during a recent commute home I decided to pay attention to the gadgets people were using. Then, in conversation with my sister it dawned on me: "Apple products are for old people!". My sister agreed, elaborating that "old people just need a simple device they can use for making phone calls plus the middle-class/post-middle-age have the money to buy into the Apple 'it just works' dream. 'It just works' is another way of saying 'simple' and that is what they want."

Although there are a gazillion web designers/web coders out there sat in front of their allegedly hip MacBookPros that will disagree with me, take a look at the Apple demographic on your next commute. Whilst you are at it look at the 'Samsung' demographic (including those with other Android devices). Apple products are the conservative choice, the safe bet for those of a certain 'elderly' demographic.

On the desktop Apple products do spare people of the tedium that goes with a classic Windows PC - ages to start up, lots of virus dangers and lots of 'reboot to install this pointless upgrade' scenarios. However, Google, with their Chromebooks have shown that there is another way and the choice is no longer Apple or really-boring PC.

The bit I like about Chromebooks is how everyone says the Google Pixel is 'a very expensive browser'. The bit they don't see is how Google have moved on from the classic 'WIMP' desktop metaphor that is now many decades old.

ChromeOS is not a 'skuomorphic metaphor' in the way Apple OSX is, it is a pure web experience, the future now. Sure you cannot run ye-olde-desktop-programs with it, however, there are much better collaborative tools for creating content that are almost here. ChromeOS forces you to work with these new and improved tools because you cannot work with Wordperfect/MS Word any more. It is great and it is no tragedy at all that those gatekeepers of yesteryear - Microsoft and Apple - haven't really got much to offer for this brave new world.

<comment><USER3> Excellent comment, and I'm a fan of most of what Google does, as well.

But I cannot support Chromebooks with my consumer dollars. (Nor do I like their self-driving car project.) My fiance and I are both in IT security.

The way we see it is- if your PC data is stored "in the cloud" instead of on discs YOU own and control, you're vulnerable in many ways.

Network connectivity goes down for a period of time? Can't do your word processing! Ectetera, etcetera.

I use all kinds of Google web services (including Gmail and Google Docs). I sometimes develop websites for clients that are hosted on third party web servers. I integrate Dropbox with every device I own, and I love it.

But my local discs sync with Dropbox as much and as often as they can. And I would never put something I don't want people to see (pirated media, "sexy" photos of myself, etc.) into my Dropbox folder.

I use "cloud services" but I always back up my content to discs I OWN and CONTROL, and my private stuff never sees the Internet. If something is on a web server you don't own, always assume other people (even if only employees of the company that owns the web server) can see it.

And if network connectivity fails, even if only briefly, it shouldn't be able to stop you from accessing your everyday PC data and engaging in activities that shouldn't have to have Internet access to work.

Noooo... I'd never buy a Chromebook. And I normally love Google and I'm definitely a Linux geek.</comment></comment>