100-year old fruit cake found in Antarctica's oldest building - <AUTHOR> https://www.nzaht.org/pages/100-year-old-fruit-cake-found-in-antarcticas-oldest-building <comment><USER2> Amusing that the cake was in excellent condition, while the metal box it was stored in was partly decomposed. Once again, reality has one-upped all the jokes.

<comment><USER3> Even the microbes don't want it.

<comment><USER4> "100 year old fruit cake tastes just like new fruit cake." /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazing that after all this time it remains inedible.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand why everyone doesn't love fruit cake. Maybe most people have only ever had crappy cheap grocery store fruit cakes?

Fruit cake is literally one of my favorite foods, and I don't really feel like I have esoteric taste in the general case.

<comment><USER7> For my part I've never understood why people want fruit in cakes at all. I live in the UK where it is a national obsession to put fruit in cakes. I'm used to much more extensive use of cremes (egg, vanilla, regular), possibly combined with berries in Norway, but not nearly as often with fruit (we do get some, especially apple pies, but I at least perceive the selection as much more varied, where it's often a challenge to avoid pastry where the filling isn't meat or minced fruit in British bakeries...

(don't get me started on how limited British bakeries are - the only saving grace is a slow increase in French and Eastern European patisseries)

<comment><USER8> >For my part I've never understood why people want fruit in cakes at all.

How do you think your patisserie's finest extensive use of cremes cake would look after 100 years in a hut?

<comment><USER7> Our patisseries finest cakes would have been eaten, rather than left behind, as they actually taste good enough to be something you want to consume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's just as good as any fruitcake passed around at Christmas. It never gets opened. It stays perfectly preserved. When you receive the fruitcake at Christmas, you leave it wrapped, and gift it to someone else next Christmas. Only a finite number of fruitcakes need be manufactured. Thus resources are conserved. Only a finite number of fruitcakes ever had to be purchased. Again, resources and economics. It's economical because when you receive the fruitcake as a gift, you have a free gift to give someone next year without spending money. It can be passed around almost indefinitely Best if used by August 9, 2047.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if it goes down to the level of physics. I posit a fundamental Law of The Conservation of Fruitcakes.

Specifically, of a fruitcake is destroyed another one is created, and vice versa. This also means that the universe was created with a fixed number of fruitcakes...

<comment><USER11> "If you wish to make a fruitcake from scratch, you must first invent the universe?"

<comment><USER12> And then you still accidentally find one someone left lying around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The weirdest part about all this is that they have to keep it frozen the whole time and then at the end of it all fly it back down to Antarctica, trek it out to the hut and then leave it there.

They did the same with a crate of whiskey they found a couple of years ago. [https://www.nzaht.org/pages/shackletons- whisky](https://www.nzaht.org/pages/shackletons-whisky)

</comment><comment><USER14> Still every bit as edible as the day it was forged, I'm sure. Those things are _terrifying_. But apparently they make very durable emergency rations! On the one hand, they can last a century, and on the other, you can be sure no one will molest them absent desperate necessity.

<comment><USER15> Much like dwarven bread in Discworld?

"A traveller can go for miles, just knowing there's dwarf bread in their pack. A traveller can think of just about anything to eat rather than dwarf bread including their own foot and even pumpkins"

<comment><USER14> Very much like. I want to say I recall somewhere seeing an interview or similar in which Pratchett mentioned fruitcake as an inspiration for his dwarf bread, but I can't find a cite for that, so may misremember.

<comment><USER15> The wiki says its a take on food like hardtack, but given the description fruit cake might fit

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My girlfriend has done some work in Antarctica before, she said that it wasn't uncommon to find food ten or twenty years past its use-by-date. This is kind of the next level though.

<comment><USER17> We found 30+ year expired food in my mother's pantry not long ago. I doubt that's particularly rare in the West.

<comment><USER18> If it's pasteurized, sealed in a can and stored at room temperature there's not much to make it go bad.

The molecules that make up living things (e.g. corn or Spam) are stable at the temperatures at which those things live. If you remove the bacteria that primarily breaks things down there's not going to be much change.

It's no different than a house with 200yo timbers.

<comment><USER19> I don't know, I wouldn't want to eat this - [https://youtu.be/Kx0obvzqh0Q](https://youtu.be/Kx0obvzqh0Q)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It does rather remind me of the cakes that seemed to be popular in the UK in my youth (1970s) that only seemed to be given as presents - nobody ever seemed to eat them.

<comment><USER21> I wonder how many of them were regifted and just passed around for ages.

<comment><USER20> I think they were passed around until someone needed a wedding cake and then they were covered in marzipan and Chobham armour like icing. These were cut up and sent to people to say thanks for giving wedding presents - I can remember eating the marzipan but never the cake or the impenetrable icing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Jay Leno ate some of a 125 year old fruitcake on his show in 2003 - [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/maybe-he-shouldve-let-it- breathe...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/maybe-he-shouldve-let-it-breathe/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Cake, instant. Type two. Nice.

[https://youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA](https://youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA)

<comment><USER23> "Nice hiss." They really should mail it to him considering it smelled OK. I think he'd try eating a bit of it. I doubt it'd be the worst thing he's tried on that channel, even if the nuts are a bit rancid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It looks better than some of the stuff in my fridge.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hahaha I read the title with fruitcake as the slang for lunatic: really old lunatic found in Antarctica's oldest building :)

<comment><USER26> Where is this considered slang for lunatic? I've only heard this as slang for homosexual.

<comment><USER8> It's common in Britain. As far as I know the thinking is: nut (head) => nut case / nuts / nutty etc. => "nuttier than a fruitcake" => fruitcake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I once visited a whaling station down there and it was quite cool to see all the "steampunk" tech laying around, though rusting.

Also there was a British (I think) outpost that had canned food on the shelves from the late 1950s, was a bit surreal.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've always been amused by Americans' hate relationship with fruitcake, all I can assume is that they've never ever had good fruitcake

</comment><comment><USER29> I'll wait for the video of Ashens eating it

<comment><USER17> Hadn't heard of Ashens but "Steve" opens a lot of MREs including a 1969 Vietnam war cake, [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVOIgPrDH7E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVOIgPrDH7E).

Edit: Ashens cake from 1 year later, [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2zXt6irnOg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2zXt6irnOg).

<comment><USER30> This guy ate a cracker from the time of American Civil War.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5JrN9DrVI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5JrN9DrVI)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> y-haminator They should send a piece of it to steve mre

</comment><comment><USER31> Does fruit cake get better with a century of age or is it still terrible?

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm pretty sure that's normal for fruitcake.

</comment><comment><USER33> Apparently nobody liked Fruitcake 100 years ago either

</comment><comment><USER34> Why does it come in a metal box?

<comment><USER18> You don't just wrap a cake in a bag, toss it in the bottom of a ship and expect it to be in good condition when it arrives on the other side of the world.

Metal and wooden crates/boxes did the same job then as cardboard boxes do now.

<comment><USER7> Well, clearly they should have made the box from fruit cake rather than metal, since the cake looks to be in better shape (no, I'm not entirely serious)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Just as well-conserved as the Huntley & Palmers website: [http://www.huntleyandpalmers.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.exe?a=fi...](http://www.huntleyandpalmers.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.exe?a=file&p=huntley&f=huntley.htm)

<comment><USER36> I wonder what's that hixclient.exe

<comment><USER37> Probably some awful CGI VB6 or C app.

I've had to maintain some of those.

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

<comment><USER38> > awful CGI VB6 or C app.

I'm starting to have flashbacks to the various C web CGI applications that I used to develop and maintain now... Awful is not the descriptor that I'd have used. These things were abominations, more so by todays "standards." I don't remember all of the details, but I do distinctly remember that user input was an absolute nightmare to deal with, as well as sending/receiving files.

Another nightmarish memory from those days: I once had a co-worker develop the backend to a web CGI in bash (!) and, before I knew he had done it, he was kicking it over the wall for me to finish. I ended up demonstrating why this would cause poor performance and then re-wrote it as C. Yikes. I'm really glad that we've moved beyond all of... that.

<comment><USER39> > I once had a co-worker develop the backend to a web CGI in bash

I did that once with Fortran 77 on Linux back in the 90's, but just as a joke. IIRC, there were some issues, like you could never suppress all of the console output it produced or something. In general, though, I think it's good to still have a lowbrow CGI option if you just want to throw something together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> In before the cake rots.

<comment><USER40> Jeez this place is joyless</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do my speakers make a weird noise near a phone? - <AUTHOR>

What does this represent?<p>It usually starts when someone is about to call. But sometimes it goes off and no one's calling(that's scaring me). <comment><USER2> It's electromagnetic radiation from your phone. When you're about to be called, it will pick up the call request from the cell station and answer the request. The EM radiation from the phone induces a current in nearby cables, which is transformed to sonic waves by the speakers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm I'm kinda concerned that someone might be spying on me :)

But yes, I saw both your comments and "sometimes it does it for no reason" is still scary to me.

<comment><USER3> Could be your phone being pinged in order to keep tabs on your location. I would throw the phone away and change your identity. You must have upset someone in the government.

That or its nothing at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is the "GSM noise" (<http://www.corporatetalkradio.com/thatnoise.html>).

Slightly OT: One of my favorite easter eggs in Grand Theft Auto IV is that the GSM noise plays just before the in-game cell phone rings. That really had me confused for a second.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ages ago, I had a Nokia phone with a now defunct U.S. provider called Voicestream. I could hear the callers talking before I picked the phone. Sometimes I would hear "He is not answering", but in a few occasions, I heard horrible things :-)

I don't even know how that's technically possible. I held on to long after the handset was out of fashion.

</comment><comment><USER2> Oops, I forgot: Sometimes your phone will make contact with the cell network for no apparent reason. Don't be scared! =)

</comment><comment><USER6> What type of phone and what brand / model of speakers? The iPhone is kinda known for doing this to speakers.

[edit] [http://www.iphonematters.com/article/speaker_interference_th...](http://www.iphonematters.com/article/speaker_interference_the_real_iphone_buzz_217/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have heard you can remove that noise by putting magnetic snap things over the power line of the speakers you have. It looks like a capsule that opens halfway and then you snap the cord in between. I have a ton from old plasma/lcd installs as most people just throw them away in the box.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've owned some Sony Ericsson models (the old T610 comes to mind) that were actually well shielded and wouldn't cause any audible interference with speakers.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, but that just doesn't make much sense. The phone "wants" that radiation to go out, since it uses it to "speak" to the cell network. Shielding that radiation would be like gagging yourself and then trying to talk to someone... What makes a difference to the audible sound are mostly carrier frequency, pulse frequency and, yes, field strength (but you still wouldn't want to suppress that by shielding it).

<comment><USER8> Whatever the case, that phone never caused any audible signals in my speakers :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah..this also happens with my phone. Usually just about 5 secs before a call or SMS is received.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cdma phones don't do this.</comment>


ESA LEO satellite forced to manouver avoid collision /w SpaceX constellation Sat - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/esaoperations/status/1168534065118679042 <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861508).</comment>


Launch HN: Superb AI (YC W19) – AI-Powered Training Data - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I'm Hyun, one of the co-founders of Superb AI (https://www.superb-ai.com) in the YC W19 batch. We use AI to semi-automatically collect and label training data for tech companies, and help them implement machine-learning based features faster.
Almost all the magical AI features that we see are actually built using training data powered by humans. Companies build software tools and farm out to a bunch of people to click and type things repeatedly to label the raw data. That's how training data is made, and that's a very large portion of what an AI is, up to this point. It has worked well up to now, but the process is not very fast and often prone to error. Moreover, the size of training datasets has increased exponentially over the past few years, as it almost guarantees a higher AI performance. AI engineers are now handling datasets as large as tens of millions of images, and thus there is a great need for a better way to build training data.
We started out as a team of five — Hyun (myself, CEO), Jungkwon (CTO), Jonghyuk and Moonsu (AI Engineers), and Hyundong (Operations), and after about a year, we are now a team of thirteen members. We have backgrounds in robotics, computer vision, data mining, and algorithmic programming, and we all worked together at a corporate AI research lab for around two years. While working on various projects from self-driving to StarCraft game AI, we experienced first-hand how building the training data was one of the biggest hurdles for developing new AI-based products and changing people's lives. We initially tried to solve this problem from an academic perspective and published a research paper on using coarsely labeled training data for machine learning [0]. Soon, we decided to work on a more practical and widely applicable solution to this problem and that's why we started this company.
So how do we use AI to solve this problem? There are largely two approaches we take. The first is, we try to automate as many pieces of the data building pipeline as possible using AI. To do so, we split the process into many smaller steps. If we take an image-labeling task, for example, putting bounding box labels around each object can be split into 1) scanning the image to find the type and location of each object, 2) drawing bounding boxes around each, 3) refining and validating all annotations. Some of these smaller task chunks can be completely automated using AI. For others, we build AI tools that can assist humans. And for really difficult ones, we do have human workers to do it manually. It's a tricky problem because we need to understand what kind of tasks AI can do better than humans and vice versa, and carefully choose which tasks to automate.
Secondly, we try to improve our AI components throughout a given data building project using a human-in-the-loop AI approach. The key is that we bootstrap and feed portions of the training data we make back into our AI so that we can fine-tune them on the fly over the duration of a project. For example, we may start a project with a baseline AI ("version 1"), and for every 20% of a particular training dataset we make, we iterate and keep fine-tuning our AI so that by the end of the project we will have AI "version 5" that is specifically trained for the project. So as our AI components improve, human contribution gets smaller and smaller over time, and in the end, we will need very minimal human intervention. Ultimately, we want to make it like how humans learn. We see others do something for a few times, and we quickly learn how to do it ourselves. As our technology improves, our AI will be able to learn from only a few examples of human demonstration.
We found out that using AI in these two approaches not only makes the process faster but also more accurate. One of the reasons there is an accuracy problem with existing manual labeling services is that humans have to do too much. They spend hours and hours doing the same clicking repeatedly. But by us making it almost painless for humans to figure out what to do, they not only get through more data but they are not as exhausted or cognitively loaded.
Our current customers, including LG Electronics, are from industries ranging from autonomous vehicles and consumer to physical security and manufacturing. A large majority of tech companies have a shortage of AI experts and need to develop machine-learning based features with a very limited number of them. As a result, these companies do not have enough resources to build their own automated data building pipeline and often rely on outsourced manual labor. We can deliver training data much faster and better than these vendors that extensively rely on manual labor.
We are extremely grateful to have the chance to introduce ourselves to the HN community and hear your feedback. And we're happy to answer any of your questions. Thank you!
[0] http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/kim17a.html <comment><USER2> If your AI can accurately label my training data, why wouldn't I just use your AI for my application?

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'm Jonghyuk, one of the co-founders. One point I would like to add is that a 90% accurate AI model may not be very useful for an application, but with the right data pipeline and well-designed system, we can extract quite a bit of boost out of it for data annotation.

<comment><USER4> Numerically, how much is "quite a bit of a boost"?

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on how accurate our AI performs on a particular task, but as a back-of-the-envelope calculation, if we had a 90% accurate AI that means human annotators only have to work on the remaining 10%, giving us 10x boost. Obviously, there is some overhead not accounted for in this calculation, but with our current technology we can boost up to 10x depending on the type of data.

<comment><USER5> How do you know which are the 90% it got wrong and which is the 10% it got right?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have both AI-assisted and manual inspections in the pipeline. A good analogy would be an assembly line where humans and machines collaborate not only for building things but also for the quality control (ie. vision inspection system + manual inspection)

<comment><USER6> Do other training data providers use ML/AI to do initial screens?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know, some do but most don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations on your launch! I think this space is going to be super interesting and allowing companies to build products like this by simply adding an API to their pipeline is awesome. I had a question, how would you point out the differences between you and Scale API[0]?

[0]: [https://scale.ai](https://scale.ai)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Scale is doing great especially in the autonomous vehicles vertical. We are different in a few ways from Scale or other data annotation companies -- one, we really focus on building AI tools that can automate data annotation all the way from label proposals to quality control, and two, all annotations are done in-house without relying on any crowdsourced labor. We think it's difficult to guarantee quality with crowdsourced workers and we see this a lot with Amazon Mechanical Turks. We can do this because our AI tools give a huge speed boost and our in-house workers can go through the data a lot faster. And also, we also collect and provide raw data (limited to images at the moment) to companies that do not have their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the more interesting startups to come out of W19 in my opinion.

How big is your human-in-the-loop piece? Staff size?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much! The human-in-the-loop piece really starts to kick in for larger volumes of data where we can iterate the fine-tuning process several times. As an example, we were able to achieve +30% speed boost for a client after a few cycles of the loop. We are a team of 13, including 9 engineers.

<comment><USER8> Very cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great. Thank you for posting.

What humans do you have tagging the images, after the AI portion? Are they the 13 employees you have now?

Do you think that you will need to focus on a couple of verticals, so that your AI will have more of an impact?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the interest! We have a team of ~50 in-house annotators that use our AI tools and we are looking to expand out to Southeast Asia, namely Vietnam or the Philippines, to set up our annotator workforce there in the near future.

As you mentioned, we see that some data labeling companies focus on a few verticals like autonomous vehicles. These verticals are very data hungry and we actually do have clients in these sectors, but I also see a huge opportunity in the less "AI-savvy" verticals such as consumer electronics, physical security, factory automation and so on. They not only have a huge need for AI, but they also lack the AI talent to build AI themselves. So, one natural possibility is that we extend our service and actually deliver the AI built on top of the training data we make. To do that, we will need to automate that piece as well using AutoML or Meta-Learning which the co- founders already have experience with (AI building AI!). It's also possible that we stay focused on just the training data piece for a few of these verticals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Speaking from my previous experience of running a software testing company, I am skeptical about scaling In-house professional team. Is In-house workforce cost effective ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing this out. Although using crowdsourced labor could be the most cost-effective, we don't think it can guarantee the level of quality we get from in-house team. We believe our AI will be able to automate a lot of the pieces and make our in-house team cost-effective. I'm sure you have a lot of experience in terms of scaling workforce, please let me know if you have any advice for us!

<comment><USER11> Bespoke, artisanal data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool! What are the differences between SuperbAI and ScaleAPI?</comment>


Most common Windows random number generator cracked - <AUTHOR> http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/419

<comment><USER2> Interesting, but "cracked" may be a bit strong. It only works if the attacker has already gained access to the process through some other vulnerability.</comment>


High DPI Web Sites - <AUTHOR> http://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/ <comment><USER2> This dates back to Apple's original obsession with Resolution Independence, which slipped from the releases of 10.4 & 10.5, and wasn't even attempted for 10.6

[http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/UserExp...](http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/HiDPIOverview/Introduction/Introduction.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> April 2006</comment>


A pixel is not a pixel is not a pixel (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/04/a_pixel_is_not.html

<comment><USER2> Another interesting read about pixel here: [https://medium.com/@brucewangsg/the-story-of-pixel- density-a...](https://medium.com/@brucewangsg/the-story-of-pixel-density-and- touch-interface-afd97e8f78fc)

</comment><comment><USER3> A pixel is not a little square...

[http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf](http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf)</comment>


Mathematics for Computer Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.topcoder.com/community/data-science/data-science-tutorials/mathematics-for-topcoders/

<comment><USER2> Whats the argument against Mathematics for Computer Science? Can't think of any...</comment>


Show HN: ExhibitionNest.com a social network for artists - <AUTHOR> http://exhibitionnest.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I started this site as a way to learn nodejs and play with new technologies. The side project turned into an almost 2 year journey of learning.

Right now the site has just shy of 1000 users and I have no idea how to make money from it :)</comment>


Description of classic and modern C64 graphic modes - <AUTHOR> http://www.studiostyle.sk/dmagic/gallery/gfxmodes.htm <comment><USER2> The 8-Bit Guy has some great videos about how graphics worked on the older systems (including C=64): [https://youtu.be/Tfh0ytz8S0k](https://youtu.be/Tfh0ytz8S0k)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're interested in coding something for C64, there are screencasts at [http://64bites.com](http://64bites.com) (by mehowte).

</comment><comment><USER4> "Modern" meaning 1999, of course!

It looks like there's some more info and links at [https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Graphics_Modes](https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Graphics_Modes)</comment>


Swift's Evolution - <AUTHOR> https://carpeaqua.com/2017/06/02/swifts-evolution/ <comment><USER2> I think the author misses the fact that Swift wasn't truly 'done' when it was introduced, (and still isn't). Objective-C had some 30+ years to evolve, but Swift can't have 3?

I get that if you're shipping Swift in production you want to refactor as little as possible, but it is pretty hard to come up with the ideal design straight out of the gate. Swift can stop evolving, but it will be THEN when it loses the reason to exist. If Swift is just going to be ObjC with a nicer syntax, (or the features that YOU personally find desirable), then why bother with it at all? Swift is trying to get its design right and that takes time, at the same time I wouldn't want to be stuck with a poorly designed language for the next 30 years, so it's worth the current turbulence for me.

(Rust was the same way 2011-2015 to a MUCH bigger degree and it did in fact eventually stabilize as promised.)

If it's that much of a problem, ObjC isn't going anywhere, it's your choice.

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

<comment><USER3> Anyone shipping swift code one day one had to be pretty masochistic. I just couldn't understand why people were doing it. It was obviously not ready for production use, and still isn't.

But I'm happy that people are playing with it and the language is being refined so that I can start using it in a few years.

<comment><USER4> Why isn't it currently ready for production use?

ABI stability is the only real issue I can see now.

<comment><USER5> I'd say it's ready, but it's a bit iffy because of the tooling. The compiler is way too easy to crash, the debugger is often worse than useless, and larger projects can be _extremely_ slow to build.

You can put up with these, and I think it's worth the tradeoff, but you should definitely consider them carefully before putting a lot of effort into build a real-world Swift code base.

<comment><USER6> > larger projects can be extremely slow to build

Ironically this forced me to start using Swift Package Manager more and to split my projects into frameworks.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, the rise of frameworks has led to another, often ignored problem: app startup time. Carthage and CocoaPods, while great tools, became enablers and I'm hoping static library support will be announced this WWDC.

<comment><USER6> I dislike both Carthage and CocoaPods with passion. Fortunately SPM doesn't link dynamically.

<comment><USER8> Too bad there's no package manager for ObjC libraries.

<comment><USER6> Embrace the future and never look back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm actually pretty happy swift moves the server side story forward, because i'm convinced the "next big language" will have to run on mobile and server. Actually, i think they don't go fast enough, especially regarding concurrency ( which on the server goes beyond just providing async await, as lattner said they were aiming at something closer to the actor model).

I don't think the "maybe objc is still relevant for new project" trend we've been seeing the last few months on HN is going anywhere. I'm currently in the process of converting a large codebase from objc to swift, and there is absolutely no doubt that the language is WAY better, and brings a lot of safety enhancements as well.

The only big remaining pain point now is clearly in the tooling, but now that they're stabilized the language a bit more, it's probably going to get better fast.

<comment><USER10> > which on the server goes beyond just providing async await, as lattner said > they were aiming at something closer to the actor model

I'd be interested in further information about this, if you can share some link here.

<comment><USER11> [http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us- lmandel...](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us- lmandel/lattner.pdf), page 52:

 _" Async/await are effectively proven at this point and would fit well with the Swift type system and structure, we should probably just do it.

Erlang/Akka have proven actor models. Swift providing syntax yields a declarative model which enables programmers to reason about what mutable state goes with each task. Each actor is effectively a DispatchQueue + state it manages + operations that act on it.

Actor approach also generalizes well to future. It could be a great way for handling heterogenous compute (e.g. GPU tasks), distributed compute, etc since each async "call" to an actor really is a message send (thus could be DMA or IPC)."_

I don't think a video of that talk is available online. [https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_subp...](https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_subpage.php?id=6940) doesn't mention it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author mentions that Apple often nudge their idea of the future forward each year at WWDC. I see no different with Swift: the introduction of Playgrounds, teaching resources, finesse over small details, etc - to me indicate Apple wants to make this a language that the next generation of developers grow up learning and using.

Quite a good move on their part if it is successful. If kids start learning Swift at school, they get exposed to Apple devices (not necessarily but this is where the teaching resources are aiming), and they've got developers in their arena from an early age.

Yeah, Swift needs ABI stability, but I also understand that they don't want to screw it up by adding it too soon. Because the goal of Swift seems more long term oriented, short term ABI stability isn't worth risking a 10 year goal for.

<comment><USER11> _" Quite a good move on their part if it is successful."_

I haven't used it, nor do I work in education, but what I have read of it, it at least is successful in the sense that those who use Apple's Swift training material find it to have good quality.

For example, [http://www.speirs.org/blog/2017/6/1/a-year-of-teaching- swift](http://www.speirs.org/blog/2017/6/1/a-year-of-teaching-swift):

 _" In times past the experience was that, if you were an able student in Computing, you would get your programs working. If you were not an able student, your experience would be almost insurmountable challenges to get anything working. Working or not-working was the differentiator in the class.

In the Learn to Code curriculum, I found that everyone got something working. The difference between the stronger students and the weaker students then was more to do with evaluations of the complexity of their solution, the understandability and style of their solutions or other factors like memory and time efficiency.

I have never really had these kinds of conversations in classes at this level before. It has been an incredibly satisfying year to get the opportunity to debate which of three possible solutions is the 'best' for a given problem and, further, what definition of 'best' we should accept."_

It also is good to see that Apple expands its offering. [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/06/swift-playgrounds- exp...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/06/swift-playgrounds-expands- coding-education-to-robots-drones-and-musical-instruments/):

 _" Apple is working with leading device makers to make it easy to connect to Bluetooth-enabled robots within the Swift Playgrounds app, allowing kids to program and control popular devices, including LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3, the Sphero SPRK+, Parrot drones and more. The Swift Playgrounds 1.5 update will be available as a free download on the App Store beginning Monday, June 5."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use Swift daily in a mixed application of both languages. I worked with ObjC since back in the NeXT days and I used to like the language but today nothing could ever drive me back. Xcode on the other hand is nightmare I despise daily but that's a different issue. The sooner ObjC goes away the better.

<comment><USER14> I'm the exact opposite. I have been forcing myself to use Swift daily to rewrite utilities and help with an iOS app. I hate their take on the Smalltalk-style selector (the unnecessary parentheses is a pain) and other parts of the language. I'll use it, but it is much like Transact-SQL or Perl was for me (become an expert but not really like the language or programming in it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you follow the Apple dev community, there is a group of folks that make their living on books and speaking. That's fine, but they are using the platform differently than someone shipping software. They are also often the authors of some of the more ideological, less pragmatic proposals. This has a large impact on the disconnect the author describes - which incurs a cost on folks who ship software. I do wish the Swift team said no more often, but as with any dependency, you're never gonna get 100% alignment.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm in the wrong part of the Apple dev community, but I don't know of anyone who makes a living on books and speaking. I know many who write books and do a lot of speaking, but there isn't enough money in it for it to be anything more than a side gig.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, there's certainly some people who would _like_ to make a living on books and speaking, but every single one of them that I know of has a job as an iOS (or macOS) developer of some sort and no one's even in the range where they can pretend that maybe one day they'll be able to quit their day job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very distracted by the lack of the accusative case in the name of the site. Unless he is instructing the water to seize, I think it should be carpe aquam.

</comment><comment><USER18> I didn't have a really rough time with the Big Rename but some subtle differences bit me, simply the way how strings are constructed for example:

       var someId: Int!

       ...

       let urlString = "\(baseUrl)/\(route)/\(someId)"

Result in Swift 2:

       "http://ac.me/products/123"

result in Swift 3:

       "http://ac.me/products/Optional(123)"

Happy hunting! Some of this ended up in production :(

They've changed it to a warning in later versions of Xcode 8 at least. But that was too late for me.

Apart from that it's a big step forward, less wordy than Objective-C yet it's still "readable language" instead of a bunch of almost random generic English words.

I'm not sure about async / await. Whenever I deal with it in .Net languages I never find it that intuitive compared to blocks. But you know every programmer suffers from Stockholm Syndrome at least a bit so it could just be my mind warped to not only accepting but even glorifying the flaws in a language.

There are people out there that genuinely like JavaScript for instance!

<comment><USER19> You should be using the methods on the URL struct to compose a URL, rather than string interpolation. You wouldn't use string interpolation or concatenation to compose an SQL query, would you?

<comment><USER20> What's the advantage of using URL versus strings?

The networking libraries I've worked with just use string interpolation:

[https://github.com/Moya/Moya/blob/master/docs/Targets.md](https://github.com/Moya/Moya/blob/master/docs/Targets.md)

[https://github.com/Alamofire/Alamofire#routing- requests](https://github.com/Alamofire/Alamofire#routing-requests)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nothing wrong with swift but the build tool team. I can tolerate method name convention that always changing. And also still not support async await.

Xcode build tool is the worst. Compiler time is the most hurt. Very slow. Android, react and xamarin already support hot swap compile.

Migration tool is not working. I'm not sure this year xcode able to refactoring rename method

</comment><comment><USER22> And I thought 2017 is the year when I start a new app in swift... guess will be sticking to objc and react native depending on what makes sense where.

<comment><USER23> as much as I like swift, wait for it to become stable. Don't subject yourself to the pain yet. That said do take advantage of using literally all the things that have been added to Objective-C for compatibility as they provide useful information and diagnostics.

<comment><USER24> It is stable. I would wager that more people are building professional apps in Swift today than Objective C.

<comment><USER22> While renaming for loops? Even js is more stable than this...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This post hits it right on ... the renaming thing and the removal of traditional for loops ... I'm just bewildered by it. When I saw it, my reaction was ... WHY??? The incompatibilities between swift 2 and swift 3 made me thankful I did not invest the language prior to 3. While I stepped into it at this point, and think the language has a lot of potential (not changing the damn language .. I mean having a large eco system of useful libraries around it). Apple still has an opportunity if they don't screw it up further.

<comment><USER26> > the removal of traditional for loops […] When I saw it, my reaction was ... > WHY???

For all of these reasons, at least: [https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposa...](https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposals/0007-remove-c-style-for-loops.md)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for sharing that link. I found it quite an interesting read. (I much prefer Swift to ObjC after a conversion of about 10k lines in an iOS app).

C style for loops come pretty early in most programming tutorials, but I wonder how much non-C programming does actually use them nowadays (from the Community Responses, it seems not much Swift courtesy of other options). Usually, a C style for would be to loop over an array, and a safer way to do that probably could have stopped countless vulnerabilities & bugs occurring over the years.

<comment><USER28> > C style for loops come pretty early in most programming tutorials

Meh. Many languages don't have c-style for loops in the first place. Neither Python nor Ruby do for instance. I don't think Rust ever had them either[0].

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2957fg/can_i_request_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2957fg/can_i_request_a_c_style_for_loop/)

<comment><USER29> I agree. Looping over a numeric sequence is simply a specific case of looping over any collection. A language should reflect this. It feels so natural to write:

        for thing in collection: process(thing)

and very easy to move from that to a functional style:

        map(collection, process)

or

        collection.map(process)

The number of times I also need a integer counter is fairly small.

<comment><USER5> When you do need an integer counter, the best way to have it is to create a new collection consisting of (index, element) pairs. Swift (and many other languages) make this easy:

      for (index, element) in collection.enumerated()

There are some cases where the C style for loop is the most natural way to express something. For example, looping over NULL-terminated array of pointers is nicely expressed with one (Swift 2-ish pseudocode):

      for var cursor = ptr; cursor.pointee != nil; cursor += 1

But these situations are really rare, and when you do encounter them, it's not a big deal to transform them into a while loop:

      var cursor = ptr
      while cursor.pointee != nil {
          defer { cursor += 1 }
          ...do stuff...
      }

<comment><USER28> And you can trivially package the process into an iterator anyway if it's a case you encounter often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > The biggest travesty was the "Great Renaming" which touched every line of > Swift code I had and burned a week of my life on tedium

The sheer amount of churn in Swift between v1 and v3 was what has kept me on the sidelines. It was only that Apple plainly stated last summer that they were done radically changing the language that I was willing to get into Swift at all.

</comment><comment><USER31> Will Kotlin Native be able to compete with Swift on iOS? The syntax is very similar and it would make for a nice cross platform PL. I was holding off on Swift to see where it was going, but I'd like to add iOS to my dev targets. Objective-C was too verbose for me years ago, but I've heard it has changed a bunch.

<comment><USER32> Kotlin Native doesn't exist beyond pre-alpha software at this point, so the the question is a bit premature.

In 3-5 years Kotlin might be where Swift is now, but there's nothing guaranteed, just coming up with a GC solution alone is a gigantic engineering effort -- Kotlin, like Scala, Clojure, etc. all benefit from world class GCs, just by being hosted on the JVM. With LLVM you essentially start from scratch, same for porting Java libraries, there's a ton of work involved.

tl;dr; for now it's separate languages for iOS and Android unless you cut some corners with React Native to avoid writing the same app twice.

<comment><USER33> Please nobody cut corners with React "Native" or other some such nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The author says they lost a week of their life to the Swift 3 renaming but wasn't there a utility that helped with that?

I agree that Swift has seemed to been infected with the disease so many open source projects get; focusing on over polishing instead of big picture and innovation but it's still my favorite new language.

Edit: I missed the author mentioning the utility sucked. Sorry!

<comment><USER14> The automated tool couldn't even automate the conversion of the Apple examples on their developer cleanly. Those examples were fundamental demonstrations (e.g. table with views), so that indicates a pretty big problem if you are trying for a complicated app. It also makes it difficult for people just starting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The biggest problem Swift has is breaking changes from a version to another. Took me about 10 days to manually convert a Swift 2.5 project to Swift 3 to find out that Swift 4 will also introduce at least two breaking changes.

I'm all for progress and modern ideas in a programming language, just don't break my old code!

<comment><USER36> They were pretty clear about this from the beginning... Sometimes you need to break a few things here and there to make it a more pleasant language for the decades to come.

<comment><USER37> And for the skeptics, C++ evolution is a strong statement for why keeping old cruft just for the sake of the early adopters maybe is not the right thing to do.

I prefer the Swift way, and had to move 2ish to 3ish code myself and it didnt suck that bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Apple's path with Swift doesn't seem to solve the problems I have as a day- to-day iOS developer. "

That's the key take-away for me.

Of course Swift has an easier time with some syntactic issues than Objective-C, which is two languages crashed into each other. And yes, Objective-C was way, way overdue for a better replacement. Heck, just dropping the "C" part from the language syntax and reducing it to type annotations in a nice typed Smalltalk (see Strongtalk, or TS) would have fit the bill.

It's not as if there aren't lots of problems (and your list will almost certainly be different). For example, applications are no longer just code, non-code resources are just as important, but support for them is at best rudimentary. So with pluggable scheme handlers and polymorphic identifiers, we could write

        checkBoxImage := img:checkbox.

And have the "img" scheme handler statically check resource availability against a list automatically imported from Xcode's resources (pluggable, see F# type providers). Of course, the internet also happened, so

        shoppingPage := http://amazon.com/

should also work, because why should obtaining resources outside your machine have so much extra ceremony. Abstracting should of course also work:

        scheme:amazon := ref:http://amazon.com asScheme
        shoppingPage := amazon:/

And of course you can compose scheme handlers, so you add JSON or XML decoding and then use the resulting scheme handlers as if the original data source

Then there is keeping UI and model in sync. There were bindings, but these were hacky, somewhat unreliably, undebuggable etc. Much better to generalize and integrate a constraint mechanism into the language:

        -<void>setupTemperatureConverter
        {
            ivar:f |= (9.0/5.0) * ivar:c + 32 .
            ivar:c |= (ivar:f - 32) * (5.0/9.0).
            ivar:k |= ivar:c + 273.
            ivar:c |= ivar:k - 273.

            ivar:c =|= ivar:celsiusTextField/intValue.
            ivar:f =|= ivar:fahrenheitTextField/intValue.
            ivar:k =|= ivar:kelvinTextField/intValue.
        }

That's actual code for a temperature converter app, setting up relationships that get automatically maintained. And if you make constraint handling support pluggable as you should, you also have a proper syntax for writing autolayout constraints. And Makefiles.

Together with composable scheme handlers (see above), this gets rid of the vast majority of your view controller code.

Then there's the nib vs code dance. Or storyboards. All semi-solutions to problems that are largely (but not entirely) architectural in nature. All can be aided tremendously by good linguistic support, putting to rest many of the recurring problems we have with these technologies (or conversely with not adopting them).

Swift does nothing for any of this.

</comment><comment><USER39> No mention of when it manifested human form and became a successful pop singer.</comment>


Show HN: Music Time for Spotify – song recommendations to get you in flow - <AUTHOR> https://www.software.com/music-time <comment><USER2> Cool plugin but please give details on this domain

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. Expected the domain to belong to some big corp.

</comment><comment><USER4> How much did software.com cost?!</comment>


Look for an in-app chat SDK recommendation. I have to switch away from layer - <AUTHOR> I was using Layer (www.layer.com), but their monthly plans just went up drastically, and it would break the bank for me to stay with them.<p>Can anyone recommend any other Chat SDKs? <comment><USER2> I'm one of the founders of TalkJS ([https://talkjs.com](https://talkjs.com)).

TalkJS has transparent pricing, polished out-of-the-box chat UI components, robust infrastructure and a best-in-class email/sms/push notification system.

We're a bit less low-level than Layer, so if you built lots and lots of custom code on top of Layer then we might not be the easiest company to switch to. At the same time, if your use ase fit the default TalkJS chat UIs well, then you're live in just a few hours.

Curious what you think!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, skrebbel

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Layer decided to shut down all operations, you can migrate your data from layer to MirrorFly([https://www.mirrorfly.com/layer- alternative.php](https://www.mirrorfly.com/layer-alternative.php)) chat solution without any data loss. Run your overall operation in the same application with upgrades in features, design and performance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, David for your comment</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get funding for a stealth startup - <AUTHOR> How to get funding for a stealth startup if some of the investors youre going after have already funded your competitor, and your startup has valuable IP that if gets in the hands of the competitors is total failure for your startup? As far as I know investors dont sign NDAs, but even if they do it would be really hard to prove they leaked info right? <comment><USER2> You don't have a business if it can be replicated that fast. It's worth nothing. Your secret blockchain proof of stake or work or whatever is also worth nothing, it's about platform adoption.

</comment><comment><USER3> >some of the investors youre going after have already funded your competitor

Why would you target those investors? Should target investors that don't have clear competition already in their portfolio.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our main competitor who might steal the IP has 60 investors already. Its in the cryptocurrency biz. The IP has no way of being patentable for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whatever it is, no one is going to rip you off. It takes near insurmountable effort to get funding, build, and get traction.

If you want funding, get traction. Build and MVP, or a landing page, and start growing 100% every month.

</comment><comment><USER5> > valuable IP that if gets in the hands of the competitors is total failure > for your startup

It is not IP then. "P" stands for "property", something thats definitely yours (as proved by patents, trademarks or copyrights) and cannot be used by others.</comment>


Mars Madness: The DIY explorers who dream of a 35M-mile trek - <AUTHOR> https://story.californiasunday.com/mars-madness <comment><USER2> Amazing couple. Hard to believe they'll ever get off the ground. Musk has a real chance to make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice story about interesting people worth a read</comment>


How I Decide Who Gets Banned on OkCupid - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/02/banned-from-okcupid-sexting-moderation.html?mid=nymag_press <comment><USER2> From the article: > A user's wife wrote to OkCupid requesting we disable a "fake" account that was "posing" as her husband. Since using someone else's photo is against site policy — the woman's husband said the account wasn't his — we banned it, choosing not to mention that all of the account's network traffic was coming from their home.

Would this choice had been taken to avoid legal issues, to avoid further queries/dramas, or due to some, for lack of a better way to put it 'I got your back, bro' type of morality?

<comment><USER3> Who cares what the truth of the situation is? The person who either owns the account, or is being impersonated by it (depending on who you believe), wants that account to be closed. The obvious solution is to oblige them. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I was surprised anyone could have such a poor understanding of asterisks.

Amazing :-)</comment>


Amazon will launch thousands of satellites to provide internet around the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18295310/amazon-project-kuiper-satellite-internet-low-earth-orbit-facebook-spacex-starlink <comment><USER2> With the number of companies planning on launching satellite internet constellations, I wonder if there would be enough customers to keep them all afloat? Or would we likely see a consolidation similar to what happened with Sirius and XM radio?

This type of system would be great for people in unconnected areas, but those are typically low population density. For customers in cities, I'm not sure there would be enough bandwidth to server million+ city populations. And in cities you can typically get better bandwidth / lower latency using landlines. (Of course, there is the case that SpaceX made about thing like London to New York being faster over satellite).

<comment><USER3> London to New York is not faster over satellite, as there is a 25 ms penalty to pay just getting in and out of SpaceX's system.

<comment><USER4> Where does the 25ms penalty come from?

<comment><USER5> Low Earth Orbit (LEO) birds have ~30ms round trip latency.

[https://www.telesat.com/sites/default/files/telesat/brochure...](https://www.telesat.com/sites/default/files/telesat/brochures/telesat_leo_- _real-time_latency_rethink_the_possibilities_with_remote_networks.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


McDonald's Europe: Computers to Replace Cashiers - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestreet.com/story/11122512/1/mcdonalds-europe-computers-to-replace-cashiers.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN

<comment><USER2> "The touch-screen platform will be implemented in around 7,000 McDonald's restaurants in the United Kingdom, according to reports, in an effort to improve efficiency and speed up customer service times."

Here's an idea: create a Chipotle-style ordering app. You'll improve efficiency, speed up customer service times, cheaper capital investment than buying all those touchscreen kiosks, still get the benefit of looking technologically savvy, increase your brand recognition by getting your logo on millions of phones, and most of all, keep all those cashiers employed and contributing to the economic growth of Europe--a win-win for the long term health of McDonald's and their shareholders.

</comment><comment><USER3> They have an order kiosk here at the local Jack In the Box (California). I've enjoyed using it simply because most people seem to want a human to take their orders; I'm comfortable using the computer, so I can step right up to the unoccupied kiosk and place the order.

It's convenient.</comment>


Facebook Goes Back to School to Develop Personalized Learning Software for K-12 - <AUTHOR> https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-09-03-facebook-goes-back-to-school

<comment><USER2> Facebook is building apps for charter schools... why?</comment>


Semantic Web Is Not Dead. It's Having an Identity Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scrape.it/semantic-web-is-not-dead-its-having-an-identity-crisis

<comment><USER2> I think semantic web could benefit from not using a blanket definition. it could be driven down further, like semi-structured query language, or aggregated data collection etc.

<comment><USER3> doesn't change the facts that it is expensive and the benefits are useless.

<comment><USER4> Is the World Wide Web useless? If the answer to that question is "No" then its contradictory (albeit inadvertent) to presume a Semantic World Wide Web is useless.

Granted, the messaging behind the Semantic Web meme is simply as bad as it gets, especially for something so important.

The World Wide Web was a Semantic Web from inception. The Semantic Web meme should really have been presented as a new formalized insight into what already existed, since Web inception.

Links:

[1] [http://bit.ly/evidence-that-the-world-wide-web-was-based- on-...](http://bit.ly/evidence-that-the-world-wide-web-was-based-on-linked- data-from-inception)

[2] [http://kidehen.blogspot.com/2014/03/world-wide- web-25-years-...](http://kidehen.blogspot.com/2014/03/world-wide-web-25-years- later.html) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It baffles me how much of a pain we put on ourself to maximize our SEO efforts, but in contrast how lazy we are when it comes to putting structured data out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's an incentive problem. SEO means more profits but putting structured data is costly.</comment></comment>


StackOverflow closed as not constructive - <AUTHOR>

How soon before the StackOverflow editors shut down the whole site as not constructive.
I am tempted to ask this as a question on StackOverflow but I am concerned they will shut it down as not constructive.
Maybe there is an opportunity here. Someone could create a StackOverflow clone except editors are not allowed to close discussions prematurely. And this could be a place to discuss the best book for Groovy, the best web scraping library for Clojure, the best place to host Python, and all the other topics closed as not constructive on StackOverflow. <comment><USER2> No, SO really isn't a good place for those questions. Mods are just applying the rules set there long time ago.

But exactly for questions like you're asking, there's programmers.stackexchange.com - see these questions which are in the same category as the ones you listed: [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/do- you-t...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/do-you-think- that-gae-alone-is-enough-to-justify-learning-python-over-ruby) , [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/22019/whats-t...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/22019/whats- the-cheapest-way-to-host-hobby-projects) They're upvoted, not closed there.</comment>


GnuTLS, copyright assignment, and GNU project governance - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/529522/854aed3fb6398b79/

<comment><USER2> Copyright assignment has a major purpose that is not acknowledged in this article. In some jurisdictions (I know that this used to be the case in the state of New York) it is the case that, by default, all software produced by employees who are software developers belongs to the employer, whether or not that software was developed on personal equipment, away from the office. In those jurisdictions it is also the case that many programmers who labor under this oppressive legal regime are entirely unaware that their time is not truly their own. They may therefore contribute to open source projects, and claim licensing on software, that is not truly valid.

The FSF copyright assignment process stands as a guarantee that GNU software, at least, will never encounter any issues based on these legal facts. You may use GNU software with assurance that the legal status of that software is very, very clear.

What about the rest of us? Well there is a defense for copyright infringement that basically says, "I relied on reasonable assurances that I was not, in fact, infringing." That covers your past infringement. But not necessarily future offenses. But the risk is still low. As a practical matter, companies rarely sue over this type of issue, and if they do, they generally have little interest in suing every innocent bystander who accidentally infringed. So many may find the risk acceptable.

But Stallman is an absolutist. He wants absolute guarantees. And copyright assignment helps him get there.

Please note that I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

<comment><USER3> It's worth noting that the ASF also requires copyright assignments.

<comment><USER4> No, AFAIK it requires copyright licenses given through a contributor agreement, which are not the same.

<comment><USER5> I can confirm that it's a Contributor License Agreement: <http://www.apache.org/licenses/#clas>

> Except for the license granted herein to the Foundation and recipients of > software distributed by the Foundation, You reserve all right, title, and > interest in and to Your Contributions.

<comment><USER3> Oops. My recollection was of paperwork but I got the nature of it wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One particular nitpick:

> One of these [scenarios for relicensing GPLed softwar] is relicensing to a > later version of the GPL. This scenario is in most cases already covered by > the default "or later" language that is usually applied to software licensed > under the GPL.

That language doesn't actually cover the case in question. The "or later" clause lets the _licensee_ choose which version of the GPL they want, but the FSF's interest in relicensing to a later version is often that it wants to impose the stricter terms of a newer GPL version on licensees. A licensee could avoid the GPLv3 patent restrictions on software licensed "GPLv2 or later," for example, by choosing to stick with the GPLv2.

<comment><USER7> _A licensee could avoid the GPLv3 patent restrictions on software licensed "GPLv2 or later," for example, by choosing to stick with the GPLv2._

... unless he want to use a newer version of the software which RMS has decided should be licensed under the GPLv3 only. FreeBSD has run into this problem with gcc, for example: We could no longer backport bug fixes, but instead had to "clean-room" re-develop them.

<comment><USER6> Right, I'm saying that's intentional on the part of the FSF, and an "any later version" clause doesn't let them do that. Obviously, that's not helpful for you, but if that's what they're trying to do, they need to be able to relicense in order to do it, which means either copyright assignment or agreement from the copyright holders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find Richard's response perfectly reasonable. The work was donated to, copyright-assigned to, and done under the auspices of the FSF / GNU Project for years. Resigning from GNU and forking the project is one thing, but trying to remove the project from GNU is something else altogether.

<comment><USER9> Reasonable, but dumb.

The maintainer will fork the project under a new name, and continue to work for it. GNU will be left with a piece of software that slowly bitrots and becomes outdated, unless it can attract someone else to take it over.

<comment><USER10> If the project is important enough for free soft in general, they'll find someone. If not, oh well, the cost for waste disposal of bit-rotted software project is rather small, no?

<comment><USER9> They had someone, who seemed to be doing a good enough job. Now they have to find someone else to do that job, while competing with a new fork of the code.

And the cost of obsolete code is not a bit of web storage; it reflects on the project as a whole. The GNU userland tools have been important for Linux. But what happens if people move to different user land tools?

It's not super important, but it is a shame that people leave projects.

Perhaps if free software and open source software had invested in a bunch of diplomats to translate the flames between De Raadt, Torvalds, Stallman, etc things would look very different today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hm. According to european copyright/authorship rules a transfer of copyright is simply impossible as we have the "Droit d'auteur" principle that makes authorship rights inalienable. This is a known major difference between european and US style copyright.

Therefore I question the transfer of copyright in this case but IANAL.

This simple fact is the reason that FSFE adopted the fiduciary license agreement <http://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/fla.en.html> to emulate the FSF approach under european laws.

<comment><USER12> Knowing a bit the background of the FLA, I think that was a just an additional way to convince lawyers to understand the free software licensing model. The patrimonial rights can be transferred in Europe too that's clearly what you do when you make the transfer of copyright in US. As the common ground of the Berne Convention has been ratified by US and Europe, the transfer of copyright (on the patrimonial aspect[1]) is based on a common legal ground.

[1] Concerning the "moral rights" in software/computer program, it's usually not legally applicable for software.

<comment><USER13> No, in Europe economic rights are not always transferable, either. The classical example is the German Urheberrechtsgesetz, which does not allow for the transfer of either moral or economic rights [1]. General practice is to grant the publisher a right to use the work (which can be exclusive or non- exclusive, perpetual or time-limited, etc.).

This is a subtle, but important distinction. Because such a grant does not entail unlimited rights to relicense the work and the author retains a number of unwaivable rights associated with the work. (German law intentionally aims to protect authors against various exploitative practices by publishers, making it very difficult for authors to sign rights away.)

The Berne Convention does not make it necessary for the signatories to allow for such a transfer, either. It only says that if economic rights can be transfered, moral rights remain with the author.

Also, moral rights most definitely apply to computer programs in many jurisdictions.

[1][http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Urheberrecht#.C3.9Cbe...](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Urheberrecht#.C3.9Cbertragbarkeit_des_Urheberrechts)

<comment><USER12> There are also many jurisdictions where moral rights are excluded to computer programs. Moral rights on computer programs are usually limited to "practical" rights like claiming being the authors. It's not really in opposition to the transfer of economic rights.

You are correct about the German case for moral rights but that was the main issue with the FLA. The FLA was mainly designed by a German lawyer thinking about his national legal framework.

In my perspective, we should avoid the over-legalization of (free) software development. And transfer of copyright/"patrimonial rights" is one of them, there are many way to exercise your rights as a free software author. I sponsored and supported for many years the FSF but I personally think that they made a big mistake, they underestimated the capacity of the "copyright mess" to secure free software (the Linux kernel is one of the example, you won't be able to find all the authors if you want to change the license to a non-free license). I know that seems to be a contradiction but as free software is relying on copyright, you can use also benefit from the multiple ownerships from the same artwork/computer program to secure free software. A single entity and a transfer of ownership can be even more risky...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MobileLab: Highly accurate testing to prevent mobile performance regressions - <AUTHOR> https://code.fb.com/android/mobilelab/ <comment><USER2> Seems impressive, is this more accurate than the standard?</comment>


Sparse Matrix Transposition: Datastructure Performance Comparison - <AUTHOR> https://www.karlrupp.net/2016/02/sparse-matrix-transposition-datastructure-performance-comparison/ <comment><USER2> Interesting analysis. I did some similar research a while ago around sparse matrix multiplication and came to a similar conclusion. The memory access pattern offered by CSR (and CSC) is startlingly effective.</comment>


How can I keep learning on my 1.5 hr commute? - <AUTHOR> I drive about 1 to 1.5 hrs to work lately and am bored with my music and the radio.<p>I'm the one driving so no video.  Are there any good audio podcasts out there on web dev, web news, media? <comment><USER4> There is a company that makes language CDs _specifically for drivers_. Put "Behind the Wheel" into the Amazon search box to see what's available.

About 5 years ago, I had a 60 minute commute each way for about 6 months. So I learned French.

It worked really well. Lots of listening and repeating, both in French and English. Increasingly difficult levels. And stuff you'd actually use. I went to Paris and surprised myself. All that repitition in the car actually paid off.

The best part is that you learn without sacrificing safety or focus on your driving. Just start the CD and follow the directions. That was the most impressive part to me.

I'd like to learn Spanish now, but my commute is only 5 minutes. It's just not important enough to take time away from my other work. But converting lost time in your commute into a new skill is a no brainer.

<comment><USER5> Did you have any problems with only hearing the language and not being able to see it?

I tried Pimsleur and couldn't stand not seeing the words--I felt like I was both adding and missing letters.

<comment><USER4> _Did you have any problems with only hearing the language and not being able to see it?_

No. But I forgot to mention that Behind the Wheel is strictly a "conversational" program. I seriously doubt if I could read Victor Hugo after going through it. But in everyday conversational situations, the repetition and training, like weight lifting, paid off nicely. The conversation flowed, almost effortlessly. I even surprised myself, finding the right word (except the time I ordered a sidewalk sandwich) and properly conjugating all the verbs. Pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Audiobooks dude. Just buy yourself a few and you'll never go back. It's just learning without the hassle of staying seated and having books in your hand.

While I was commuting I listened to so many that literally changed my life. My favorite being Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazi

(You can also download a few mixergy interviews).

<comment><USER7> Yes. Very yes. Very, very yes.

I use audible.com. Started with a gold account, and jumped right to platinum. Been using it for more than a year, and I've been incredibly happy. The only complaint is that the site sometimes feels slow. But I'm not on it often. Usually just once a month to get my new books, though I've been buying books as well recently to fill in gaps.

Couple audiobooks with podcasts and you'll do fine. I like stuff from Twit.TV. And then the d6Generation does a good podcast, too.

I find the audiobooks and podcasts are great ways to handle not only the commute, but most mundane activities I need to partake in. Folding laundry, shopping for groceries, cleaning the house. Anything where I don't need to think, I'm usually listening to something.

<comment><USER8> It should be noted that Audible's content is under DRM.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it is.

I had a problem one time, as I'd authorized my iPod one too many times on many different computers, and forgot to deauthorize the iPod on them. I contact Audible and they reset the authorizations back to 5 without a problem. At the same time, they also let me download the audiobooks again if I want, even if they get a new, higher quality version in.

I look at Audible as Steam for books. Steam is DRM I'm willing to accept. So is Audible.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not dismissing your comment. It's a valid and reasonable point.

I should also point out that the cost of books through Audibles subscriptions are massively lower than if I bought them from a retailer. The cost is significantly lower that the DRM doesn't feel unreasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No one said NPR, so I am going to say NPR. The only bad side effect is that you will become very cynical about politic. But seriously, sometimes a 1.5hr hour commute seems like too short when I am listening to NPR. I commute 2 hours each way and NPR is how I roll.

<comment><USER10> Totally love NPR too, except during pledge drive season :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem with the internet is that you can find endless sources of interesting new information that would be wonderful to learn. Unfortunately, unless you have some kind of weird memory talent, you probably forget most of what you hear and read. If you really want to remember something, you have to study it at more than one sitting. Your commute is perfect for that. While you drive to work, you can talk to yourself about whatever you learned last night, as if you were talking to a different person. Recite foreign language vocab lists, practice your grammar, summarize the last section of the book you're reading, or think of ways to learn the new Unix command you just learned.

Unfortunately, I only have a fifteen minute commute, so I can't personally vouch for what it's like to do this every day, but I've done it a few times when driving to other cities, and it seemed to help a lot.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have a 40 minute commute (each way) that is mostly a train ride. When I first started with this commute I was very worried about wasting that much time every day, so I brought lots of printed material with me and would try to study on the train. Now that I've been doing it for 3 years I've completely abandoned that - I just use the commute as a mental break. After a hard day of work ~40 minutes of daydreaming is just what the doctor ordered before making the most of my evening.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is going to seem like both a troll and off-topic - sorry about that - <USER2> I've never understood, why do people tolerate a commute like that? Especially a driving commute (as opposed to public transport, where at least you could read or something).

<comment><USER14> Many reasons come to mind, such as not wanting to live in the area you work (maybe you have kids the schools are bad, or the neighborhood isn't real good). It could be that living close to a family member is more important than living close to where you work, like maybe your wife is taking care of her mother or grand mother while you are out working (or the other way around).

There are lots of good reasons. These days you just might be stuck in a mortgage because the value of your house has fallen below what you owe. Given the current "economic climate" it's very easy to have gone from a 70% LTV to 110% LTV.

<comment><USER15> All good ones. I personally find it not worth moving closer because I am in a long term mortgage as you mentioned.

I have another friend with a long commute because he lives close to where his wife works.

Another person I know used to have a commute of over 2 hours. His job location, like some others, was deliberately located away from population centers for security and safety reasons. Moving significantly closer would have been very difficult and meant being a long way away from everything in his life other than his job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The FLOSS Weekly podcast is excellent <http://twit.tv/FLOSS>

This Week in Tech can be good - even if it is often dominated by talk about Twitter and Facebook.

For non tech podcasts I can also recommend:

\- The History of Rome (<http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/>)

\- 12 Byzantine Rulers (<http://www.12byzantinerulers.com/>)

However, for driving I find that nothing beats unabridged books from Audible - just finished "The Big Short".

</comment><comment><USER17> I used to have an hour commute back in the day and encountered the same situation. I finally ended up getting a "Learn To Speak German" audio series. Did that for a while and then just started downloading German news podcasts. Nothing like learning a language for a couple hours every day.

</comment><comment><USER18> Look into webcasted lectures from major universities. MIT, Yale, etc all have them. My favorite is Berkeley, where all webcasted lectures have an audio-only option.

<http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php>

Ones I especially recommend:

History 5 The Making of Modern Europe, 1453 to the Present [[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906...](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978513)]

Economics 113 - American Economic History by Brad DeLong [[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=...](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2008-D-22585&semesterid=2008-D)]

</comment><comment><USER19> There are a whole boatload of awesome podcasts available at the Australian ABC Radio National. They're all extremely accessible and quite thought provoking.

I particularly recommend:

The Philosopher's Zone: <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/>

All in the Mind: <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/>

The following two are fairly Australian-based, but quite interesting if you're into this sort of thing:

The Science Show: <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/>

Ockham's Razor: <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/>

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a good list of tech podcasts over at StackOverflow: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1644/what-good- technology...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1644/what-good-technology- podcasts-are-out-there)

</comment><comment><USER21> For learning languages, everyone I know who has learned from the LanguagePod101 Series has enjoyed it.

<http://languagepod101.com/>

I went through maybe 20 of the JapanesePod101 lessons and it helped my grammar and expanded my vocabulary a bit. A friend liked the ChinesePod101 which he was listening to in Taipei at the same time as taking formal Mandarin Chinese lessons.

There's a full access no billing info required seven day trial, and you can download as many as lessons as you want during that time. They're fun and easy to listen to, worth checking out if there's a language you'd like to brush up on or get introduced to.

</comment><comment><USER22> WNYC Radiolab <http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/>

</comment><comment><USER23> Digital voice recorder, dragon transcription at work; you can do a lot of thinking out loud in 90 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER24> Not quite the web dev / web news / media that you're requesting (you've had other suggestions better than I could provide to that effect), but perhaps you'd consider the Feynman lectures on physics? They're available on CD, and they're honestly quite entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've found these to be pretty good:

Mises @ itunes u (austrian economics) <http://itunesu.mises.org/>

The teaching company: <http://www.teach12.com/teach12.aspx?ai=16281>

<comment><USER26> +1 for The Teaching Company. I've spent many hours sitting in traffic while learning about music, linguistics, economics, philosophy, any many other topics. These are recordings of lectures for college-level courses, purpose- made for canned consumption.

Also consider regular audiobooks. I have a subscription to Audible.com (site is lame, product is good). These aren't limited to the latest thriller novel: there are plenty of good non-fiction books available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The Startup Success Podcast, ThisWeekIn Startups/VC/Cloud Computing, Railscasts, Mixergy.

</comment><comment><USER28> This American Life and Radiolab are great podcasts you can find online for free. No commercials, no pledge drives to interrupt your listening, and thought-provoking, interesting content that makes long drives go by remarkably quick.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a 3 hr daily commute to work. I normally just take a nap or listen to soft music. Occasionally though I listen to Are We Alone <http://radio.seti.org/> podcast.

</comment><comment><USER30> <http://Techzinglive.com> 2 guys with startups and still keeping their real jobs just talking about almost anything. Once in a while an awesome guest.

</comment><comment><USER31> Stanford University put out a really good podcast series from their Entrepreneurship Corner program:

<http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html>

</comment><comment><USER32> This American Life

Edit: now I read _web_ news. But still this is an excellent show.

</comment><comment><USER33> 6 hours into this question and I'm amazed that <http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/> hasn't been suggested yet. IMHO, its content seems like it would be pretty relevant/interesting to the HN crowd.

BTW: The only way I've found to browse (not search) through old episodes is paging through the twitter feed <http://twitter.com/itconversations> Does anyone know a better way?

</comment><comment><USER34> Pimsleur CDs. They are great for car driving, because the programs are organized so you listen in a continuous play (as opposed to normal language CD books that assume that you will be holding the rewind button to repeat the last sentence). They also leave pauses so you can speak without having to pause the audio manually. And no workbook to follow, so you can keep your eyes on the road :)

Of course such course will not make you fluent, but it's excellent to put you on a good path.

<comment><USER35> agreed fully! Pimsleur is really a terrific program for starters. Blows Rosetta Stone out of the water.

<comment><USER36> It's certainly more useful than Rosetta while driving, but that's a pretty subjective statement.

I am an American native learning Chinese as my first additional language. I found Pimsleur to be marginally useful, but I am now almost done with Unit 1 of Rosetta and for me, Rosetta is much better than Pimsleur...

It really depends on a combination of things, such as your learning style, and perhaps which language you are learning.

One thing of note, is that Rosetta is more about the long haul. If you just want to learn a few conversational pieces it might be better to go for Pimsleur... Rosetta doesn't give you much you can use conversationally at first, it spends a lot of time teaching you things like "this is a girl" "this is a girl and her dog playing" and what not.

Also, if you used Rosetta v2, from what I understand v3 is leagues ahead of v2. I have no personal proof of this however, since I just use v3.

If you want to get somewhere approaching fluency without going to classes, I don't think it can get much better than Rosetta Stone + Flash Cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is my favourite: Stanford's Entrepreneur Thought Leaders

<http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html>

</comment><comment><USER38> I've found that decent programming podcasts are few and far between. The ones that promise to be most useful - as in, actually teaching you how to do X - suffer from the flaw that they are people talking about code. And, obviously, if you are driving or running or whatever it is you are doing such that you are listening to audio podcasts, you can't see the code. If they get into any level of detail, it all falls down.

Imagine: "well, the code is like this - open brackets defn whatever open brackets map open brackets list open brackets whatever clsoed bracket closed bracket" (for Lisp) or "well, we created a class with a method called foo that iterates through the 'bar' argument, and returns a array of strings" (for Python/Java etc.)

I tried listening to a podcast like that (about Python IIRC) when I was on the Eurostar train once. I did have my computer with me, but I just couldn't follow it without being able to see the code. At the point I realised this, I was deep under the English Channel, so couldn't exactly log on to the blog and see the code samples...

The closest things I've found are either things like RailsEnvy - now reborn as The Ruby Show and not IMHO as good - which provided some useful news each week about new libraries and plugins for Rails. Or there's some higher level best practices, software engineering type programmes which often seem to be people preaching to me about how I need to be more and more test-infected and agile and (insert methodology buzzword of the week).

It's actually quite difficult to find good, geeky/programming-related podcasts that don't either just descend into general news chit-chat or end up with someone trying to sell me a new engineering methodology. It's a very hard balance between being too technical for audio-only and not being technical enough. A lot of the newsy podcasts like TWiT are way too damn long and rambly.

I mostly don't bother with tech podcasts for the reasons I've just described and stick to things like In Our Time, and quite a few course podcasts on philosophy and other interesting stuff - quite a lot of universities are now doing podcasts: Oxford, UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford etc. There are thousands of people now following along with lecture courses remotely using podcasts - <USER3> [http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi- podclass24nov24,0,7889...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi- podclass24nov24,0,7889823,full.story?coll=la-home-center?sr=hotnews)

</comment><comment><USER39> Try some language course of the Michel Thomas series, each lesson is roughly 60 minutes and audio _only_ , it's aimed at the development of the spoken part of the language and so there are no books exercises to do. Perfect while driving. I've listened to a few CDs of the japanese and mandarin courses, really well done.

</comment><comment><USER40> I love listening to the current week's "The Economist" podcasts (promptly/free on TPB) to get high-quality / succinct insight on the world. The format is great for commutes: you can get through the magazine in a week's driving and the articles stand by themselves - as opposed to audiobooks which are long- format.

</comment><comment><USER41> The Moth podcasts are usually really good.

<http://www.themoth.org/podcast>

</comment><comment><USER42> Skeptics Guide to the Universe: <http://www.theskepticsguide.org/>

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: <http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh>

</comment><comment><USER43> Software/Techie...

       HanselMinutes
       Stack Overflow (inactive, but might come back)
       Security Now

Just interesting...

       In Our Time (BBC Radio 4)
       Stuff You Should Know (How Stuff Works)

<comment><USER44> Definitely "In Our Time". Fascinating stuff, that will likely broaden your horizons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> You could listen to the pipeline by Dan Benjamin. <http://5by5.tv/pipeline> 30 minutes long interview with interesting folks from the web industry.

</comment><comment><USER46> Take the train! and stare out the window. The time spent on self reflection will be more valuable than the random facts you can pick up when you're dead tired and going to work

</comment><comment><USER47> [http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/1_Top_10_Universities_With_Free_C...](http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/1_Top_10_Universities_With_Free_Courses_Online.php)

Also check out ted.com

</comment><comment><USER48> Public transport + 3g + laptop. Use an hour each way for work and cut down on the time in the office - more free time in the evening or morning.

</comment><comment><USER49> I listen to business audio books and Mixergy interviews. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER50> www.econtalk.org

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, lots of great ideas. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER51> iTunes U is another source.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think it's dangerous for you and the folks around you to be doing something other than driving your car and paying attention to the driving environment.

So instead I'd recommend to try shortening your drive or switching to a passive commute like a bus or train.</comment>


Apple's most expensive Mac Pro costs over $52k - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/12/10/21003636/apple-mac-pro-price-most-expensive-processor-ram-gpu <comment><USER2> I feel like this isn't too unlike the old Xserve's that could get up to a price this high. They're machines with a very, very limited use case, and budgets to match.

</comment><comment><USER3> What will be use cases for such machine ? Training ML Models ? 3D Rendering ?

<comment><USER4> Same as any other workstation-class desktop out there. Also, a cool box to have. Wouldn't you want one if it was, say, $2,000?

<comment><USER3> Sure, If somebody gift me. But,

32 GB RAM - ~$124, Intel Xeon Octa-core (8 Core) 3.20 GHz Processor - ~$400 256GB SSD - ~$65

$589 for above three, rest I guess is for Apple Experience.

<comment><USER5> Look up the price for 1.5tb of ram in the required size - it's insane.

Similarly the maxed out GPUs are "pro" GPUs which costs thousands each (I have no idea why).

CPUs seemed high to me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a real-world workload that would need 1.5TB of RAM?

<comment><USER7> I'm sure redis would find a way to use it

<comment><USER8> I want to speak to the person who is running redis directly on top of macOS.

Stand up, reveal yourself. We promise no harm will come to you or your home directory.

<comment> the-rc Probably somebody at Yale!

<comment><USER8> You misspelled "Georgia Tech", they're just crazy enough to do it. :P

<comment> the-rc I was only half joking. Yale used to have a cluster with Xserve machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 999 for the monitor stand?!

</comment><comment><USER9> $400 for the wheels</comment>