The New Law That Killed Craigslist's Personals Could End the Web as We've Known - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-new-law-that-killed-craigslists-personals-could-end-the-web-as-weve-known-it <comment><USER2> The whole Web showed up for net neutrality and this bill was completely ignored until they took down Craigslist personals. What the hell happened?

<comment><USER3> It's because most of the left shuts down critical thinking if you say a bill is for ending sex trafficking. It ends their ability to think rationally or challenge the rest of it. It's the reason politicians use the: "it's for the children," bullshit - it ends debate & challenges. That same contingent, mostly the left, were the ones protesting ending net neutrality.

You had the NY Times and Washington Post both supporting the Cloud Act as a good idea, by pushing pro opinion pieces.

<comment><USER4> Just like the right goes crazy when using "but muh freedom", or "they want to take your guns".

<comment><USER5> Don't get them started!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Governments value higher control and tighter laws over anything else. There will be more.

<comment><USER7> We should go for decentralized platforms that are harder to control. We should go for local. One Facebook is easier to shut down than 10.000 chat rooms.

<comment><USER8> Are they? A chat room with 1/10,000th the income of Facebook is "only" $1.5 million profit per year. Is that enough to avoid being made an example of? And would the first set a precedent for the rest?

<comment><USER9> There could be a loose collective here that decides to defend against these sorts of things collectively, whilst still allowing independent operation.

Heck, that isn't very different from the concept of insurance.

<comment><USER8> I was thinking about insurance as I wrote my previous comment. All it takes is one that doesn't have it when the risk is a new precedent. Government would just go after them. (And that's assuming the government doesn't just pass a new law, which is non-zero risk, but which I will overlook for now because sometimes one bit of a government will do things against the interests of another bit, such as a recent case in the UK where a specialist was recruited for the NHS and kicked out by the Home Office).

<comment><USER7> Why doesn't "government" go against bittorrent? Oh, I forgot, they can't! Nevermind.

<comment><USER8> If any government cared enough (except perhaps the American one), it could ban the the protocol. They don't care, and the people who do care are satisfied with the existing options for suing copyright infringers.

TOR is much more likely to be regulated than bittorrent, given the whole point of the latter is to remove control from governments.

<comment><USER7> They used to care pretty strongly. That's a fact. They also didn't do much about it. Also a fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand the panic about this law. Mens rea is appropriately considered in the law. Unless they can prove that you built your site with the intention of facilitating sex trafficking, you still aren't on the hook for what your users do.

And, if you become aware of sex trafficking on your website and you don't do anything about it, you are absolutely complicit. This is hardly rocket science, and it doesn't seem to overreach the way everyone is screaming that it does.

<comment><USER11> I could be wrong but I think mens rea can encompass acting recklessly or acting negligently, not just acting purposely. An example of something people have been convicted of that may fall there is involuntary manslaughter.

Edit: see also willful blindness. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness#Precedent_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness#Precedent_in_the_United_States)

 _A famous example of such a defense being denied occurred in In re Aimster Copyright Litigation, in which the defendants argued that the file-swapping technology was designed in such a way that they had no way of monitoring the content of swapped files. They suggested that their inability to monitor the activities of users meant that they could not be contributing to copyright infringement by the users. The court held that this was willful blindness on the defendant 's part and would not constitute a defense to a claim of contributory infringement._

It would seem ridiculous for courts to start charging e-mail providers, for example, as facilitating sex trafficking though, even if they must suspect their services are used for such activity. I wonder how it will play out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love how we can pass laws like this but nothing was done to Equifax or now, Facebook. Seems like they are closely related problems.

<comment><USER13> Why would we do anything to inhibit useful and compliant surveillance companies that both inevitably serve to widen the poverty gap?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This could be just a short-term demonstration. The ads are still there, just inaccessible -- if you go to Renew an existing ad via your account, it appears normal from the account side and gives no error.

A genuine ad's "hidden" URL gets rerouted to a FOSTA message. Change the ad number, and you get a 404 instead.

<comment><USER15> Not necessarily. The backend system still has to be there in order to support all the countries where personals are still available. It's possible they just haven't finished disabling it in the US properly yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Meta but mods: please edit the title. It's missing a word and looks sad.

<comment><USER13> The New Law That Killed Craigslist's Personals Could End the Web, as We've Known (For Quite Some Time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know this is likely to be an unpopular opinion here, but I'm not sure that websites ought to scale in the way we've been building them to. One of the biggest causes of frustration and concerns is that websites that are operated by only a handful of people are used by millions of people, with no serious way to seek relief if problems emerge. Think of how disastrous security oversights have been, from companies too small to adequately compensate those who have been wronged. Or think of how disastrous technical glitches or mistakes can be (such as deleted Google accounts or Facebook privacy setting glitches). Or think of how Uber seems to have rushed to reduced the human oversight of their autonomous cars before they were ready. We are giving far more responsibility and social power to companies than they are truly capable of handling.

The power of computers to make transactions and interactions more efficient is great. But I'm not sure that efficiency needs to come at the limit of our technological capacity instead of at the limit of human attention.

<comment><USER18> You're hinting at a deep problem with our current economic system. It really does produce monopolies or oligopolies with far too much concentration. History documents this functionality: the Trust Busting of the late 1800s was a reaction to clearly concentrated markets, for instance.

The solution is clearly to produce more things closer to the demand source. But I don't see many examples of that.

As a crude suggestion, maybe carbon adjusted energy costs would incentive local production with shipped-in raw materials.

<comment><USER19> Large factor is that few companise being able to give away product for free kills competition. Gmail being free (and good) and without ads made competition of many smaller companies impossible. Few companies being able to operate products at loss for years makes competition impossible for smaller players.

<comment><USER20> Google is dying. They bubbled themselves. Trading "free" for market share only works for a finite time. See FB. Their pivot to skynet will only accelerate it. If google wants to survive, they better shape up and put their awesome software contributions front and center, remove the broken pillars, and stop trying to weaponize their 3 letter control grid. Everyone knows they are social engineering the search results, all the way down to their stupid doodles. It's an open joke.

<comment><USER19> Yes, but in the meantime smaller companies can't compete. And meantime here is over dozen years.

There is also something to be said about (looking back) astonishing naivete of tech people who bought the whole "don't be evil" motto and who sincererly believed that since founders are tech school graduates, they are guaranteed to be ethical unlike those evil business majors.

<comment><USER20> Right on. Lets not let the problem-reaction-solution cycle fix it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Now, why would Facebook's Sandberg openly support FOSTA? further, who else is in favor of this kind of attack on the Web?

</comment><comment><USER22> The web as we knew it ended some years ago. The thing that exists now is... well... it's nice, I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER23> Ronald Reagan liked to describe the sequence of actions that government typically takes toward private business: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."

<comment><USER24> The same Ronald Reagan who subsidized the crack cocaine and Latin America democracy industries?

<comment><USER25> I guess they must have stopped moving?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ironically it's just these kinds of laws which may finally create a broader popular drive to re-decentralize. Those people looking for sex and drugs and whatever else aren't going to just say, "well shit, the government said no, let's head to church." They're going to look for alternatives, and alternatives will be there for them. It won't be glossy Java-heavy "Web 2.0" of course, it will be Tor, Mastadon, and encrypted communications.

That's the real strength of the internet, you cut of F a head and two more grow back. If more stringent laws are passed, that just creates more drive for alternatives. It's going to be ugly, but I remember when the internet was ugly, but worked. It won't make people filthy rich overnight, but that's not the net either. People still want to hook up, buy guns and weed, and just talk without Big Brother breathing down their neck. It will start small, and grow fast; after all we have a few decades worth of roadmap.

People who've moaned about people needing to look past a handful of sites are possibly going to get their wish. The total inability for governments to field sustainable technical solutions to shutting down commas has not changed.

So fight.

<comment><USER27> _" It won't be glossy Java-heavy "Web 2.0" of course, it will be Tor, Mastadon, and encrypted communications."_

The problem is that unless these alternatives are made brain-dead easy to use securely, they won't be used by the majority, or they'll be misused.

It's the same problem as with PGP, which is too complicated and too much of a pain for most people to use -- even for relatively computer savvy people to bother with.

Without many people using them, they won't be very effective or appealing alternatives.

<comment><USER28> If they're the _only_ viable alternatives, people will adapt. And I'm sure that usability will also improve.

But yes, the potential for privacy-compromising security failures is indeed troubling.

<comment><USER8> The adaptation can just as easily be sour grapes ("I can't get it therefore it is undesirable") as anything else. People don't always yearn for freedom, just as they don't always yearn for a strong leader to take control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Censorship of the internet is inevitable, and traffic that cannot be censored will be dropped.

<comment><USER30> It's a positive. We'll re-discover the real world.</comment></comment>


A Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions of Dollars from Unsuspecting Boomers - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc <comment><USER2> > The fake celebrity scandal hinted at in the ad is the hook that gets people > to click so they can be pitched on what appears to be a no-risk, product > trial for a small shipping fee, such as $4.99.

Maybe it's different for people who didn't grow up on the internet, but this checks nearly ever box in my automatic this-is-a-scam heuristic. It reads as not even trying; it's practically a cliche at this point. Amazing that it still works at this scale.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of this article from a while back: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad- scamme...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad-scammers- need-suckers-and-facebook-helps-find-them)

I worked for a company that hired media buyers that came from this shady world, most of them are the most degenerate people I've ever met. They target people in lower-income parts of the country with "530 FICO Scores" (in the words of a previous coworker). 9 out of 10 times, they couldn't legitimately market a product to save their life if they couldn't rely on scare tactics, snake-oil/miracle cures, and other shady tactics such as "free trial re- billing".

They view running an online business as "building a cash printer" and view customers as prey to target. They have a million tactics to keep FB campaigns going such as amassing more credit cards than you'd think a bank would issue (since FB blocks cards from offending accounts), relying on off-shore account farms for fresh Facebook ad accounts, cloaking their landing pages, etc. I once heard a story about a marketer that would pay college students $100 and give them a free laptop with TeamViewer running as long as they stayed logged into facebook and could create ad accounts on their behalf.

Needless to say my time at the company was short, as I was not a fan of the aggressive tactics being used to market the products. Most of the media buyers had substance abuse problems, and the sick mindset turned me off to digital marketing completely until I had the opportunity to network and work with more ethical advertisers and founders of ecommerce brands.

These people ruin the internet and slow progress by damaging customer trust in shopping online.

Background: I'm an engineer, but I joined a DTC brand startup a couple years ago doing basic front-end work just so I could be in that environment every day learning the problem space and getting domain expertise in ecommerce and B2C customer acquisition. I've worked with more legitimate brands, and I'm currently building a product for the industry (on top of Shopify's platform), but I can't wait for the day that these scammers are completely rooted out.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Credit card companies also play a key role by largely refusing to grant charge-backs to people who have been roped into a subscription without their knowledge, according to Baker."

If you get rolled into subscription without agreeing to that isn't that the same as someone charging you for what you didn't order, so aren't the credit card companies supposed to refund you ?

</comment><comment><USER5> > Dr. Oz also dedicated an episode to a different San Diego company that was > using an image of the show's host, Dr. Mehmet Oz, to sell weight loss > supplements.

Dr. Oz must be a great target since he sells a lot of junk as it is and his viewers eat it up.

</comment><comment><USER6> From a cursory search, it appears the CEO died in March in a helicopter crash along with other employees. Wondering why this article is coming out now, if somehow everything got unveiled due to the deaths?

[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/kenya-helicopter-crash- tr...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/kenya-helicopter-crash-tragic-end- young-entrepreneur-s-ultimate-experiences-n979286)</comment>


Drones - <AUTHOR>

With 35+ years flying model airplanes, from stick-built rubber powered planes to "high start" launched RC gliders, glow-powered planes, jets, electrics and and helicopters I've been watching with some degree of horror the evolution of drones.
Flying RC meant learning aerodynamics, control, design and more. It wasn't uncommon to discuss airfoils, drag buckets, laminar/turbulent flow, flight dynamics, etc. I met luminaries in the aerospace industry and became friends with many of them at model airplane meets.
We knew our hobby is dangerous. We have seen or suffered injuries. And we've crashed many aircraft. And behave accordingly. This means membership in the Academy of Model Aeronautics and one of thousands of clubs around the nation. AMA comes with rules and clubs enforce them. It also comes with liability insurance. We don't fly outside the club's official flying field.
Then drones happened. A hobby of enthusiasts with rules became a free-for-all. Anyone could buy one and fly without skills, rules and a social contract. We now see them flying above crowds, roads, airports and fire-fighting aircraft.
This degree of irresponsibility, carelessness and lack of consideration does not reflect well on who we are as people.
It's a disaster we are watching on TV waiting for bad things to happen. Dropping a drone on an infant is no different could kill them. No different from using a gun. A full-scale aircraft accident could kill hundreds. Yet "normal" people think nothing of placing others in danger with drones. Why?
The solution wont' be easy. Perhaps a ban on flying outside approved flying sites, a $10,000 fine per incident and 1 year in prison? I hate over-regulation. Yet if people won't behave with civility there might be no alternative.
We don't need to control all drones owners, just those who might tend to behave without civility or care. That, to me, means flying only within approved sites unless a permit or license allows one to do otherwise. <comment><USER2> umm, what planet are you from?

There is zero difference between drones and RC planes. Some are tiny and light, some are large.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't get your point. Why is this important?

And, BTW, there's a HUGE difference between RC planes and multicopters (what people generally mean when drones are brought up). One of those differences is that one of the two is a flying brick.

Still, I am not sure what you mean by "there's zero difference between drones and RC planes". If that were true, what's your point?

The other question is: What, exactly, bothers you about what I said?

I'd like to know so we can discuss. Insulting me might feel good but does nothing to solve the problem.</comment></comment>


SyncPad: A real-time collaboration app for visual presentations - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/video/2011/03/01/syncpad-a-real-time-collaboration-app-for-visual-presentations/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, but why is there such a huge lag between touching and something being drawn _on the same machine_? There's no excuse for that.

Viewable on the demo video here: <http://mysyncpad.com/>

<comment><USER3> That video is pretty outdated, I should really find the time to shoot one with the latest version (about 5 updates since that video). Now it's much much faster.

Edit: To be precise that was the very first version released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting stuff, but no real sharable content yet, as far as I could tell.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean?</comment></comment>


Why iPhone Xs performance on JavaScript is so good - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1049082262854094848?s=21 <comment><USER3> @steipete puts it pretty well: JavaScript really made it. We now tweak CPUs to make it faster.

[https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1047415826083729408](https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1047415826083729408)

<comment><USER4> That was a trick Dave Fotland used in the '80s to make his Go program, "Many Faces of Go", faster. He donated some key code from his evaluation function to SPEC and they used it as one of the parts in the SPEC integer CPU benchmarks. CPU makers tweaked CPUs to do well on those benchmarks, and hence on his code.

<comment><USER5> I've talked with him about those days... Though I haven't chatted with him about Go since AlphaGo flipped the whole world over.

I worked very hard on pulling the same trick at Sony. We'd made Vegas scriptable, and, once it was part of Bapco's Sysmark, we received immense support from chip vendors. Machines, engineers, tools, instructions added to instruction sets... It was a nutty time.

Of course, the biggest wins worked everywhere, like the 6755399441055744 single precision rounding trick, or the use of memory mapped file regions to cache the rendering tree. Still, becoming part of a performance benchmark is a great way to get attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This instruction cannot result in a significant performance improvement for any js code that isn't absolutely perf bound on just converting floats to integers. If your code is successfully making that your bottleneck your code has problems. None of the major benchmarks (I can't even think of micro benchmarks that could really achieve this) are spending significant time doing double to integer conversions.

And as a nail in the coffin for this nonsense: javascriptcore does not use or even emit this instruction: [https://mobile.twitter.com/saambarati/status/104920213252247...](https://mobile.twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616)

<comment><USER7> > If your code is successfully making that your bottleneck your code has > problems.

I disagree. My use cases involve loading, processing, rendering, and saving point clouds with millions to billions of points. For precision and file size reasons, coordinates are stored as 3 x int32 instead of 3 x float or 3 x double. Every time I load the points from disk I have to convert them to floats for rendering, or doubles for processing. Vice-versa for storing the processed results to disk.

Just because you don't need it, doesn't mean nobody needs it.

<comment><USER8> > For precision and file size reasons, coordinates are stored as 3 x int32 > instead of 3 x float or 3 x double

I get storing them as float instead of double but into instead of float for size/precision doesn't really make sense to me. A float is 32 bits, so will be the same size as an int(32). If it's precision you're worried about,you're going to lose the precision as soon as you convert it from an int to a float to use.

<comment><USER7> Single precision floats loose precision as coordinates get larger, hence "floating" point precision. Point cloud data often consists of outdoor/aerial scans covering multiple kilometers and floats cannot accurately represent large coordinate values like that. Translating to origin and/or rescaling only works to a limited extent and isn't a very robust solution.

Integers on the other hand can be used to represent coordinates in a fixed precision. E.g. if you want to store coordinates in milimeter precision, you multiply your double precision meter coordinates by 1000, and then cast the resulting coordinate to 32 bit integers.

> If it's precision you're worried about,you're going to lose the precision as > soon as you convert it from an int to a float to use.

Yes, that is why you convert ints to doubles for processing and only use floats for tasks where limited accuracy is okay, e.g. rendering.

<comment><USER8> > Single precision floats loose precision as coordinates get larger, hence > "floating" point precision.

I've plenty of experience with floating point numbers.

> Translating to origin and/or rescaling only works to a limited extent and > isn't a very robust solution.

Curious as to why you think this isn't the solution? double precision just kicks the can farther down the line, whereas a fixed point offset origin gives you the "best" of both (albeit with slightly more code)

> Yes, that is why you convert ints to doubles for processing and only use > floats for tasks where limited accuracy is okay, e.g. rendering.

Right, so you store as 32 bit values, and do the processing in double precision, but convert to single precision for rendering (from double precision)? So you were never going to store them as float on disk.

<comment><USER6> Presumably they don't think that's the problem because doubles already exceed the precision of the integer types they're using.

I do get this decision - point cloud data for scanned geography tends to be uniformly separated over a large area, a 32 bit float very rapidly starts to accrue significant error if the geometry is large. Presumably he olde fixed point arithmetic would be more precise (for this specific purpose) than a 32bit float (which has thrown away significant amounts of precision for the exponent).

But again, 64bit float has 53bits of precision, which is larger than int32 that is in their data format. It's also probably enough precision for more or less anything outside of extreme ends of science :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jeff Atwood/DHH's conclusion regarding Speedometer 2 is not completely true according to Filip Pizło ([https://webkit.org/blog/author/fpizlo/](https://webkit.org/blog/author/fpizlo/)): [https://twitter.com/filpizlo/status/1049132270773198848](https://twitter.com/filpizlo/status/1049132270773198848)

In this case I'd trust Filip more :)

<comment><USER10> As I said in my reply to that, it could also be in combination with the much faster memory / caches on A12 -- see [https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max- re...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review- unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://developer.arm.com/docs/100069/latest/a64-floating- po...](https://developer.arm.com/docs/100069/latest/a64-floating-point- instructions/fjcvtzs) (FJCVTZS: Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero) is the instruction they're talking about. One main difference (vs FCVTZS) is that it sets the Z flag depending on whether the conversion was exact, and it's mod 2^32 on overflow.

<comment><USER12> I think this is the point where it starts being hard to argue that ARM is RISC anymore. x86 has BCD support and special facilities to handle NUL-terminated strings (i.e. C-strings) but now ARM has instructions with "javascript" in the name. At least Jazelle was a separate extensions.

I mean I suppose it makes sense for them to do that, especially if the performance benefits are as huge as outlined in this tweet, but damn it feels dirty.

I assume the reason for this is that in JS, as far as I know, all numbers are stored as floats right? So you keep casting everywhere when you need an integer? I assumed that JS implementations where a bit more clever and kept them as ints whenever possible but maybe it's not as simple as I had imagined.

<comment><USER11> Not all numbers are stored and operated on as doubles, no. They are treated as if they were though. V8 and Spidermonkey (idk about the others) store and handle integers that fit in 32 bits as 32-bit integers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Without clicking the link i knew this was going to be Jeff Atwood - <USER2> about iPhone's JS performance seems to crack him up perpetually! :) Also see Dan Kaminsky's reply -

"I took a quick look at Speedometer 2.0 and it seemed to be driven by the speed of the browser cache implementation, as in how much was explicitly in memory, what poked the file system, how async was implemented. Not CPU bound."

<comment><USER14> That's pretty serious, right? Changes the entire conversation if this is not truly improving execution speed?

<comment><USER13> Yes - and if it does it doesn't matter for this particular benchmark which isn't CPU bound.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 2008: I never thought I'd be walking around with a full Unix machine in my pocket.

2018: I never thought I'd be walking around with a full Symbolics Lisp Machine in my pocket.

<comment><USER16> 2028: Why does battery life still suck?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So Apple has its own browser, its own JIT compiler(1), which emits its own instruction sets, which then run own its own CPUs.

Heck let's propose the JPU (JavaScript Processing Unit) for server-side codes.

1\. [https://webkit.org/blog/5852/introducing-the-b3-jit- compiler...](https://webkit.org/blog/5852/introducing-the-b3-jit-compiler/)

<comment><USER18> Imagine if Apple had its own operating system running its own static compiler!

<comment><USER19> With the end of Moore's law, that may be the way forward, making cpus with more of the software implemented in hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> According to [https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max- re...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review- unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4) reason is new memory subsystem. The new chip is not just fast at Speedometer 2 but %40 faster almost all at other benchmarks. Also, all iPhone devices are fast with iOS 12 JavascriptCore.

<comment><USER10> Per [https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13392/SPEC2006-eff_575px.p...](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13392/SPEC2006-eff_575px.png)

SPECint2006 -- 36.93 --> 44.92 is about 20% better

Speedometer2 -- 90 --> 125 is 38% better

That is nearly 2x what SPECint would predict. (It's also not changes in Mobile Safari / iOS 12 because every device benchmarked was on the same version of iOS 12).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This says Webkit doesn't emit these instructions yet: [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184023](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184023)

</comment><comment><USER22> Kind of ironic given that safari continues to lag behind in the context of implementing web APIs. Heck, they still don't even support IntersectionObserver, which was introduced in like 2014. I really do share the sentiment of others in calling Safari the new IE; developing for safari on iOS is a total drag. I guess the performance team and specs teams must be compartmentalized :)

</comment><comment><USER23> I think that it's inevitable path of processor evolution. When it's hard to increase performance, processors will include more useful bits of functionality for popular runtimes.

</comment><comment><USER24> As if double to int/ptr was js-specific.

<comment><USER25> No, but this does it the way JavaScript wants it. FCVTZS has always been therr. FJCVTZS[1] is new.

[1]: [http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....](http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dui0801g/hko1477562192868.html)

Did someone say ARM is RISC?

<comment><USER26> Indeed, it could be said that ARM _not_ being pure RISC is what keeps it competitive with x86. I wonder how long it'll be before x86 also gets a similar set of instructions...

<comment><USER27> The instruction is just specifying particular semantics, that doesn't really disqualify it from being RISC. The instruction doesn't do _more_ than the baseline variant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If there are any twitter devs here, clicking Greg Parker's tweet breaks the back button for me.

<comment><USER29> What browser? Working in latest stable Chrome on Windows.

<comment><USER28> Detailed steps: Firefox on windows.

1\. Click to get to jeff's tweet from hacker news.

2\. Click Gregs tweet.

3\. Click back (works and we get to jeffs tweet)

4\. Successive back clicks never get to Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Fixing javascript with hardware? Its not exactly genius but it seems worth it.

Only Apple had the #courage.

<comment><USER31> ARM did it, not Apple.

<comment><USER32> Apple did it, not ARM.

Apple designs the chips:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple- designed_processors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors)

Specifically,

        Apple has an ARM "architectural license", which is for
        companies "designing their own CPU cores using the ARM
        instruction sets. These cores must comply fully with the
        ARM architecture. Companies that have designed cores that
        implement an ARM architecture include Apple, AppliedMicro,
        Broadcom, Cavium (now: Marvell), Nvidia, Qualcomm, and
        Samsung Electronics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Licensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Licensing)

<comment><USER31> Again, ARM did it, not Apple.

ARM designed that JS-optimized instruction. Apple just follows (and it has to) ARM specification in Apple's own way.

Don't confuse between ISA design and its chip implementation design.

<comment><USER33> Don't think for a sec that ARM doesn't design ISAs without talking to vendors like Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hardware instructions created to handle JavaScript specifics makes me so very sad. What a terrible state of affairs.

<comment><USER35> I agree.

All the things we could be doing and we're making CPU improvements for the flaming pile of hot trash that is JS? Why?

<comment><USER36> Maybe because it's a considerable part of the code that CPU's are executing these days? Certainly UI stuff that should be responsive and fast.

Even many 'native' apps, mobile or desktop (electron) are written in javascript, and how much of your time do you spend in your browser or electron apps every day? Think vscode, atom, Spotify, Slack, facebook, reddit, twitter, ...</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Polly Podcast – Listen to blog posts at work - <AUTHOR> https://pollypodcast.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

I've been working on Polly Podcast for a few months and I'm excited to share it with the community. I made this so that I could listen to articles while at work or during my commute.

Once I got into building the platform I found this incredible voice synthesis community in NYC, which led me to Recess Labs[0], which is where I am now while I work on building my own voice model based on the recent Tacotron 2 paper[1].

Would love feedback and I'm happy to answer any questions or talk about voice- tech.

[0] [http://www.recesslabs.com/](http://www.recesslabs.com/) [1] [https://research.googleblog.com/2017/12/tacotron-2-generatin...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/12/tacotron-2-generating- human-like-speech.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Great work. It's a pleasure to use. A few questions:

1\. Have you heard of Narro (narro.co)? It does the same thing, but it's been around longer and has many integrations.

2\. Can you share the tech stack currently powering your voice synthesis? Since it's called PollyPodcast, are you currently using AWS Polly for TTS?

3\. Is this something you intend to monetize?

4\. It seems like you offer unlimited readings for free. Do you have an abuse prevention strategy? This could become a hole in your wallet if you're paying for a charged-per-character TTS service.

5\. Creating custom voices is a great differentiator. What are some problems you have to solve to create them and how is this effort progressing? Do you have quality and performance goals?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Great questions!

1\. Narro is really, really, great.

2\. The app itself is on Rails with AWS Polly transcribing most of the requests. x% of the transcriptions are routed to a Flask API that runs a neural TTS engine + with token-based SSML rolling out slowly for some heavy- users.

3\. I have no plans to monetize Polly Podcast.

4\. Unlimited readings.

5\. I'm working now with large publishers to figure out what the costs look like to generate new synthetic voices at scale. Hope to release this publicly as soon as I get the go-ahead.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out in email =]

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great work - It would make a great wordpress plugin on websites

</comment><comment><USER4> This is perfect for listening to articles while running or commuting!

Pretty cool product.</comment>


YouTube Repair Guy Calls Apple on Their Shit - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gallery/i4BwB <comment><USER2> I like this guy's fighting spirit. But he's tilting at windmills. Apple will still sell millions no matter how much he complains. The real fix is to pick a competitor's product than has the repair characteristics he admires and focus on that company's product. Apple will eventually get the message.

<comment><AUTHOR> After this I looked at a few of his videos and he makes this specific point. That Fanbois and Apple-haters are as bad as each other, and the real point is that you should use what works for you. As a repair-guy Apple doesn't work for him he's saying and really that if you want your device to be repairable you should think twice about Apple.

Far from tilting at windmills he's proffering his point of view as an influencer. He's got quite a large following and many, including myself would take his thoughts on board when making a purchasing decision.

If enough highly respected people speak up against what they believe is wrong or unfair, it will influence people's purchases to the point that Apple will eventually get the message (-:

I think that last point could be far more generalised beyond Apple ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Am I lost -- is this Reddit? I don't understand linking to giant gifs of captioned clips on imgur, and certainly not when YouTube is in the title so it's worse than a reblog.

Flagged since I cannot downvote a submission.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm not sure why you object so strongly to this.

The medium is atypical of HN posts, however if you take the time to inspect the content it is very much in line with reader interests. I will concede it's not the original content but a video isn't perhaps as friendly to the typical reader here (I certainly prefer something I can scan quickly and get the nuts of without having to listen to some guy whining for 3 minutes).

Since you specifically mention flagging I had a quick scan of the HN guidelines and I see nothing here that contravenes these:

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

With regards to the last line there, I actually went and looked at a couple of this guys videos, and from the point of view of a nerd who likes to get his hands dirty I found them enthralling.

I probably should have appended `[image]` to the title. Sorry I'm new to this and will remember for the future.

Finally, you yourself should review the submission guidelines I think:

 _Please don 't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link. If you think a comment is egregious, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top. (Not all users see flag links; there's a small karma threshold.)_

 _If you flag something, please don 't also comment that you did._

 _If your account is less than a year old, please don 't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills._

<comment><USER3> > _not sure why you object so strongly to this_

You have 72 days here. After 2,532 days, you'll understand the strong objection.

Also, the flagging reason was hinted: HN doesn't much like reblogs. This amounts to a reblog.

As you noted yourself, an inquisitive mind would rather land in the original author's channel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What channel is that?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it's probably this guy … [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVAmnV65_zw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVAmnV65_zw)</comment></comment>


Redundancy in Y Combinator's Startup Portfolio - <AUTHOR>

My friends and I have been thinking about a startup for about 6 months now, but we just noticed that Y-Com has funded a company trying to build out a similar technology. Our idea is different way of approaching the functionality we want to achieve than what this other company had done. We think we know a better way to organize users around the functionality that will lead to easier fluency with the technology and consequently a much more scalable product.
Does anyone know anything about Y-Combinator dealing with redundancy in its portfolio? Is it averse to redundancy? To be fair its not exactly redundancy, but a fraction our target market certainly overlaps with this other startup's target market
Any advice or commentary is most appreciated <comment><AUTHOR> @dannyr thanks for pointing that out!

I think your right - if the target market is large enough, eg online photo sharing, YC is willing to fund indirect competitors to pre-existing investments

</comment><comment><USER2> Picurio and Divvyshot are similar in a lot of ways and they were both funded by YC albeit in different cycles.</comment>


Designer's guide to DPI - <AUTHOR> http://sebastien-gabriel.com/designers-guide-to-dpi/ <comment><USER2> I was expecting an article about DPI (as in raster printing dots), but it ended up being about PPI (as in screen pixels).

DPI in print is something I see many get wrong, and most don't understand the difference between DPI, LPI and PPI.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it hilarious that on a page about cross-platform design the left menu hides part of the article text on the ohh-so-common 1920x1080 displays.

I guess to some people cross-platform means "works on my imac 5K _and_ my MBP retina"...

</comment><comment><USER4> > This statement is true for the range of devices' screen size it's used in, > but as the screens are getting better and better, our eyes are now trained > enough to perceive the pixels - especially for rounded UI elements.

I'm not quite sure where this thinking has come in. The "Retina" moniker applies to displays based on the resolution, the size of the display and typical viewing distances for devices of that size and type. What science has suggested that our visual systems get better at resolving detail as display densities increase?

<comment><USER5> Think of when you used a retina display for a while and then looked at a non- retina one:

"ew, why is this disgusting now?"

I think that's what he's trying to say: not that our vision physically improved, but that we started to notice the roughness of lower-res displays.

Imagine a future where all displays are "Retina" at 1-inch distance; you'll be annoyed that when looking at a lower-res display it won't show someone's nose hair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know it's picky and this article is trying to be simplistic, but pixels do have a physical size. That is why there are optimal resolutions, starting with a 1:1 representation of physical to software.

Edit: Actually the first paragraph of "Resolution, pixel and physical size" kind of really causes confusion, since he is trying to redefine standard definitions, and then tries to provide reasoning for the redefinition. This is mainly a note of caution.

<comment><USER7> Where / in what way is it implied that pixels don't have size? What is "redefined"? I think the article explained the concepts very well.

<comment><USER6> From the article:

"Asking someone what the size of a pixel is is a good way to confuse him or her because it's a trick question. A pixel has no size, no physical value or meaning outside of its mathematical representation. It is a part of a relationship between the physical screen size, expressed in inches, the screen resolution, expressed in pixel per inches and the pixel screen size, expressed in pixels. Laying it all out, it looks like this:"

"As you might have noticed in my explanations, "Resolution" stands for PPI, in this case "109" but not "2560x1440", like you might commonly see everywhere on the web."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is no date on this post, but few details point this to be bit outdated.

Lot of mobile assets are now svg (Android), pdf (iOS) or programmatically created. Most of the time if you design in Sketch, you don't really need to worry about the pixels since all the assets are in vectors. You can just spec everything in pt and export the assets in svg or in the desired 2,3x, whatver-x as needed.

<comment><USER9> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=designers%20guide%20to%20dpi&s...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=designers%20guide%20to%20dpi&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Seems the oldest submission is at least 3 years old.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Share data between HTML5 browsers - <AUTHOR> http://servletsuite.blogspot.ru/2013/11/web-pair-share-data-between-html5.html

<comment><USER2> If I understand this correctly, the pushed information by the master isn't stored on the server (hosting the application) and _then_ retrieved by the slave device?

But can the pushed information be intercepted by the server?

Does anyone know if there are more applications/experiments like this? I really like this idea (if I've understood the concept correctly).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we tried server-less system on WebRTC. The problem is an actual support for WebRTC in mobile browsers. It is even less than HTML5. So, just wait for a moment.

<comment><USER3> Wait, so isn't it server-less? What HTML5 features are in use here?

Do you just send the message to the server and back to the other client?

How is this different than chat rooms we had 10 years ago?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is server-based. Server-less version will be later as I wrote. Yes, it is like chat rooms, it is like client-server and it is like web. There is a web session actually :). We've tested a way for linking (pairing) two devices. From HTML5 there is File Reading API

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We have been using a variant of this using websockets at work for about a year.</comment>


Bilingual people are twice as likely to recover from a stroke, study finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/bilingual-people-are-twice-as-likely-to-recover-from-a-stroke-study-finds <comment><USER2> Strictly anecdotal, but I'll mention it anyway:

My grandfather was bilingual, but his native tongue was Arabic. He held off dementia until his 90's, but when it finally set in, it hit hard. It got to the point where he often gave up trying to speak because he couldn't finish the sentence without forgetting a word he wanted and getting frustrated.

Surprisingly, however, he often remembered the word in English and started speaking that instead. To use a computer analogy, it is as though the sector of his brain where the Arabic was stored had become corrupted, while the English sector was still readable.

<comment><USER3> The same happens with my grandmother but the other way around. She doesn't speak her second language anymore, she has returned to the one of her childhood, but it seems like she understand it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not quite related, but I'm wondering what it means to be bilingual. I mean, does the use of English on internet count? For instance, I'm French and I spend most of my time on the "english" internet, including YouTube, reddit, HN, IRC... I'd say 95% of my activity on the web is in English. I also watch american TV series and movies without subtitles.

I understand english quite well and yet, I haven't spoken English for many years. Does that count?

<comment> a-l-c-o I'm in your exact situation.

And as a consequence (or cause) I am now seeing French as inadequate. It's such a verbose and slow language.

I don't deny its rare beauty when used ideally (think poetry, good writers, Francoise Hardy singing).

But in practice, what twisted collective mind could come up and stay with "Qu'est ce que c'est ?" (What is it ?) ? That monster literally translate to "What is this that it is ?".

In a fast and unifying world I am positive French is doomed.

When arguing this with people I always get rebutted with the likes of "French is very rich.. It is just different..but none the less valuable.." I don't think so. English is an efficient superset of french. You can express as much or more subtlety, feelings or facts in English. Take only the vocabulary : It's just larger in English ! (And in fact contains a good chunk of the French).

<comment><USER5> > But in practice, what twisted collective mind could come up and stay with > "Qu'est ce que c'est ?" (What is it ?) ? That monster literally translate to > "What is this that it is ?".

The same one who came up with "Au jour d'aujourd'hui". And "sociétal" in place of "social". The usage of any given language is bound to evolve over time into such... monsters.

Sarcasm apart, french is indeed a difficult language to learn (as a native and as foreigner) according to my PhD linguist friend but the movie english, the book english and the internet english is a poor subset of english. It's a simple english like the basic english everyone speak around the world.

<comment> a-l-c-o > The same one who came up with "Au jour d'aujourd'hui".

That one is indeed beyond stupid. And even "aujourd'hui" is long and strangely build. Its english counterpart "today" on the other hand couldn't be shorter.

> but the movie english, the book english and the internet english is a poor > subset of english.

I'm confused by your statement. Especially on 'book english'. Where else would you find proper, complete English ? Maybe you meant that today's litterature is poor ? And even concerning 'internet english' I find that in places like HackerNews or Reddit one enjoys a high level (from my limited point of view) of language. And, returning to my point, I find that equivalent people (in this case middle-class higher-educated STEM) use a strinkingly broader lexicon on the english side compared to the french.

<comment><USER5> >> The same one who came up with "Au jour d'aujourd'hui".

> That one is indeed beyond stupid. And even "aujourd'hui" is long and > strangely build. Its english counterpart "today" on the other hand couldn't > be shorter.

You might find this tidbit of information interesting regarding « Aujourd'hui » : [http://french.stackexchange.com/questions/727/evolution- du-m...](http://french.stackexchange.com/questions/727/evolution-du-mot- aujourdhui) and [https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/aujourd%E2%80%99hui](https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/aujourd%E2%80%99hui)

If you don't read French - pardon me if you do - it states that « aujourd'hui » is already a pleonasm where « hui » stands for « today », « this day ».

> I'm confused by your statement. Especially on 'book english'. Where else > would you find proper, complete English ? Maybe you meant that today's > litterature is poor ?

My mistake. I should have been more precise and stated that I was referring to the current state of popular YA literature. I read a Stross book and Ready Player One this summer and even as a non-native speaker I found some weird grammar (I confirmed it by asking a native later). But it's true I also find today's literature quite poor (at least the one making the headline).

> And even concerning 'internet english' I find that in places like HackerNews > or Reddit one enjoys a high level (from my limited point of view) of > language. And, returning to my point, I find that equivalent people (in this > case middle-class higher-educated STEM) use a strinkingly broader lexicon on > the english side compared to the french.

I believe it's a bias and we are (you, me and surely others) in a kind of bubble. I notice my English grammar is getting less and less good over time. So I believe I make a lot of mistakes that people won't correct - out of kindness or tolerance - and that I certainly don't catch them anymore [0]. For instance there are more and more sentences in posts I can't figure out because the punctuation makes no sense or a verb is clearly missing. HN being a polite place I don't correct the author or ask for a clarification (edit: and the author could be on mobile and correct it later). I can't be the only one who reacts that way though.

It surely has to do with the fact HN - and the Internet at large in the Western world - is an international crowd and non-natives end up using some kind of common English. Native English speakers sometimes can easily deduce what is a person's native language from (written) grammatical or vocabulary quirks but I couldn't (except for Indians, go figure).

I also believe the same thing happens with my native language: Internet is lowering its users' language capabilty.

With that said HN is the only place I know of where comments are both interesting, well thought out and well written. I am pretty sure most of us come here for the comments.

[0] Which means that as time goes by I restrain myself from making complex sentences. Which kind of bothers me because I love making them in french :].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter Abstract of referenced journal article

Background and Purpose—Bilingualism has been associated with slower cognitive aging and a later onset of dementia. In this study, we aimed to determine whether bilingualism also influences cognitive outcome after stroke.

Methods—We examined 608 patients with ischemic stroke from a large stroke registry and studied the role of bilingualism in predicting poststroke cognitive impairment in the absence of dementia.

Results—A larger proportion of bilinguals had normal cognition compared with monolinguals (40.5% versus 19.6%; P<0.0001), whereas the reverse was noted in patients with cognitive impairment, including vascular dementia and vascular mild cognitive impairment (monolinguals 77.7% versus bilinguals 49.0%; P<0.0009). There were no differences in the frequency of aphasia (monolinguals 11.8% versus bilinguals 10.5%; P=0.354). Bilingualism was found to be an independent predictor of poststroke cognitive impairment.

Conclusions—Our results suggest that bilingualism leads to a better cognitive outcome after stroke, possibly by enhancing cognitive reserve. (Stroke. 2016;47:00-00. DOI: 10.1161/STROKEAHA.115.010418.) Key Words: aphasia ◼ dementia, vascular ◼ language ◼ risk factors ◼ stroke

[http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/early/2015/11/19/STROK...](http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/early/2015/11/19/STROKEAHA.115.010418.full.pdf+html)

Original press release

[http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2015/stroke-191115](http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2015/stroke-191115)

<comment><USER6> This is probably some kind of testing artifact. Table 1 shows that 64.3% of monolinguals were literate compared to 92.9% of bilinguals. Then in the supplemental methods we see that illiterates took a different test than literates. They defined cognitive impairment as a score of under mean - 2*SD measured from groups consisting of ~80% literates:

>"The process of adaptation included culturally appropriate modifications of the original English version of ACE-R by examining each item for cultural relevance, translatability, comparable difficulty and adaptability with an aim of tapping the domain identical to the original version. Translations and back translations, and pilot testing were done based on standard procedures.3 ACE-R was adapted for the illiterate population by modifying literacy dependent items.4

Normative data and cut off values in the local languages- Telugu and Hindi were developed by administering the test to healthy controls. Telugu control group subjects consisted 907 literates and 199 illiterates, and Hindi control group subjects consisted 436 literates and 109 illiterates. Mean and SD for total scores and sub-scores in each domain were calculated across 4 age groups (20-39, 40-59, 60-79, 80 and above), and three education levels (>12 years, 4-12 years, 0-3 years), using standard formulae of Mean-2SD. Impairment in cognition was defined if the score on the ACE-R sub-domains was less than 2.00 SD below the mean level of age and education-matched norms."

Then we have the arbitrary age groups and education levels which makes this look p-hacked, there needs to be some assessment of how much those arbitrary choices affect the conclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _This switching offers practically constant brain training which may be a factor in helping stroke patients recover._

Another hypothesis would be that being in better neural shape to being with allowed them to become bilingual. Can someone... obtain the full pdf? Do the authors try to control this factor?

<comment><USER8> I'd wager most bilinguals are so not because they thought it would be a cool self-improvement project. I speak English because all the good movies are made in the US, and German because I live in Germany, and Swedish because that is what my mother and father spoke to me.

<comment><USER9> I would support your statement as well. I know three languages: one as my native language, other as my country's only official language, and the last one (English) is my general purpose language, meaning I use at to surf web, to study books, to watch films/series, to code, etc..

Would I learn any other language if I would be born in English society and English family? Doubt it. Maybe some other mainstream language just for fun, but it wouldn't count as bilingual as I wouldn't push myself hard enough to learn it.

<comment><USER10> As a native English speaker, born and raised in the US, it is a lament of mine that I can't justify the enormous time and effort needed to become bilingual. I guess I could learn Spanish, but why? It would be primarily recreational. And the time spent could almost certainly be more productively used picking up some other useful skill. Maybe I should just do it anyway in light of the more abstract benefits that the article touts.

<comment><USER11> "I guess I could learn Spanish, but why?"

Where are you from in the US? Im from the Atlanta area and bilingual spanish/english. Most people I know from georgia, florida, even alabama can at least understand spanish just from being around it so much. I really think to not know spanish you would have to actively try to avoid it - especially if you are young and from the city. In atlanta you can easily live without knowing any english, when friends came from south america we always found people fluent in spanish most native (at Starbucks, McDonalds, Grocery Store, shopping, etc).

<comment><USER10> I'm in Florida now but I did live in Atlanta for a few years and, if pushed, yo puedo hablar espanol suficiente para un conversacion simple. La problema es que no tengo oportunidad para bastante practica para fluente. So, I'm kind of in this half and half limbo where I can understand and speak enough Spanish but not enough that any native Spanish speaker would actually want to have a conversation with me. And for the other person who brought up the buying and selling to Spanish speakers aspect, the vast vast majority of Spanish speakers I've ever came in contact with speak a hell of a lot better English than I speak Spanish so that doesn't really make sense in practice either.

<comment><USER12> >the vast vast majority of Spanish speakers I've ever came in contact with speak a hell of a lot better English than I speak Spanish so that doesn't really make sense in practice either.

Don't forget that part of the reason that English is well known across the globe is because the US is a media powerhouse. The web is practically english, US blockbusters are seen worldwide, and it's essentially the language of international business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My gut reaction would be to control for wealth or income, which they do not.

I am not very familiar with Indian demographics, but I would assume monolingual people represent the poorest of the population?

<comment><USER14> My gut reaction: "metric used to measure stroke recovery favors bilinguals"

The article mentions cognitive tasks that are likely to benefit on some level from "thinking in language". Duo clearly unrelated tasks like motor control also correlate? Is this really about brain activity keeping the system "fresh" and more capable of repair, or is it maybe just a simple matter of someone with "more words" pre-stroke having "more words" post-stroke?

My wildly uneducated guess, illustrated with computer analogies: when the brain has to cope with multiple languages, "language thinking" overflows from dedicated to general purpose "hardware" and due to some evolutionary dice roll, the dedicated stuff tends to get taken out first in a stroke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "even after taking into account other factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and age" But not IQ and social status,bilingual people are more likely to score higher on both and this could be an aspect of healthier cognitive functions rather than how many languages you know.

<comment><USER16> Came here to say the same. Correlation is not indicative of causation. Bilingual people are more likely to be more upwardly mobile, and therefore likely have access to better care. Neurology probably has nothing to do with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of people in India speak both English and Hindi, plus a host of other regional languages.

"even after taking into account other factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and age"

Did they take into account that people who speak multiple languages are potentially more financially secure and thus would have a healthier/more nutritional diet/lifestyle?

<comment><USER18> In Hyderabad, people even with little education tend to converse in Telugu and Urdu/Hindi to a level a fluency. Ability to speak English is reflection of better social or economic status. You can still find a lot of people who speak two languages and who are not well off in HYD.

<comment><USER17> It just seems like a contentious area to test this on. America would be better considering many people are monolingual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you want a lot more information about stroke and linguistics, I highly recommend the book "One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir" It's about an older married couple, both wordsmiths by trades (linguistics professors? I can't remember). The husband has a stroke leaving him with a single word vocabulary.

It documents what they did in his recovery process as well as mentions the various types of language impairments that can come with stroke. It's a great book - touching and educational.

IIRC, the book mentions that strokes affect single native language, dual native languages, and post childhood acquired languages differently. And that if you want to be able to communicate after a stroke you best bet is to learn another language. Though it's been several years since I've read the book.

</comment><comment><USER20> It looks like there are multiple referenced sources of bilingualism contributing to "cognitive reserve". Pretty cool if there are direct tangible health benefits to learning!

But twice as likely is a very big number in this context. It sounds like the population sample was all from Hyderabad, not a global sample. Is it possible environmental factors are present? Or perhaps socioeconomic factors -- I'd speculate that bilingual people are probably on average wealthier, leading to a wide range of possible benefits, including healthier diet, and better living conditions and location. I know it's armchair critique, but I just can't help but be a little skeptical of this headline.

</comment><comment><USER21> great, I know both HTML and CSS, and some javascript.

seriously though, I think it would also apply to programmers using both functional and procedural languages.

<comment><USER22> I think most programmers can learn a new programming language to reasonable "fluency" in a few weeks, for natural languages it's more like a few years. Totally different except when you think of formal terms like vocabulary, syntax etc. which can be found in both and may have led to the term "programming language".

<comment><USER23> The chairman of the department of English at my local community college told me that it takes the average student of English as a second language 7 years to get good enough that a native English speaker might want to have a conversation with the student.

<comment><USER24> It depends on which languages you know. For native English speakers there is for example this ranking of language difficulty

[http://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.go...](http://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Si. Es muy bueno.</comment>


My favorite day of the month is bank statement day at my company - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yanismydj/the-worlds-most-epic-bank-statement-6-months-later-6e749c100435#.p00hj1asb <comment><USER2> Silicon Valley Bank is a bank that happens to be in Silicon Valley. It's a "Valleyesque" outlier in terms of bank _policy_ — they are terrific at working with startups in unusual situations. (Your average bank equates "unusual situation" to "just hang up the phone".) But their _technology_ isn't like the Tesla of banking or anything. Though they did buy Standard Treasury, so perhaps that'll be an interesting direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> absolutely. First Republic and SVB are the only two banks that know how to work with startups. The more mainstream banks really don't understand the challenges of being a startup. They'll ask for things like your businesses tax return from the previous year when you try to open an account... and then get confused at what to do when you explain to them that you have only existed for 2 weeks.

<comment><USER3> Calling BS on this. I've started several companies and opened Wells Fargo accounts for all of them within days of incorporation. Now, if you are talking about _borrowing_ money from the bank I think it makes sense to have to show some businesses financial history. Simply to open an account : in my experience all you need is the relevant incorporation paperwork and some money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can only speak to my experience and those of my friends who have started companies. This is the kind of experience we had

<comment><USER4> I realise theres a proclivity to be anal here but there's a lot of companies incorporated in the US every day and generally one of the first thing every business does is open a bank account. I'm not saying what you said isn't true, but I sincerely doubt it's representative. Borrowing, I agree is a different matter.

<comment><USER5> It's quite interesting in Poland, where you formally have to have a company bank account in order to register a company and banks refuse to open one for you unless you give them your company registration numbers (which you get after registration). So basically, you have to lie.

<comment><USER6> What did you have to lie about?

Did you lie about the company registration number to the bank? If so, how did it happen to match the one you were eventually assigned?

Or did you lie about the bank account number when registering the company? How did you guess the one the bank eventually was going to assign to you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Silicon Valley Bank gives us no paperless billing option for our account

I find that absurd. A bank that primarily serves the tech industry doesn't have paperless statements. My banks, all of which are the very definition of entrenched corporations, offer paperless statements.

<comment><USER8> My company is with SVB because we couldn't find a good alternative that had decent rates for international transfers (US 100% remote company, international founders).

Open to suggestions...

<comment><USER9> How about a combination of any other US bank + Transferwise? This is what I do (using Bank of America in the US). The transfers to Transferwise go through their US account (thus can be done as a no- or low-cost ACH) and the rates by Transferwise are pretty close to market rate.

<comment><USER8> Considered it, then SVB came back with a better offer. "Other banks" not being that attractive or much better than SVB in the first place, either, and having to deal with two systems rather than just one.

Wish there was something like Simple / N26 for businesses.

<comment><USER10> Simple _seems_ great, but its daily/monthly transfer limits are really scary. I'm not in the habit of wanting to exceed them, but I can think of some one- off events where you might want to (restructure your investments, do something with your bonus, buy a car, buy a house, etc) and the idea that you straight- up _can 't_ should give anyone pause.

<comment> saiko-chriskun Where are you getting this 'straight up can't' from? You can just call them and they will temporarily raise it for you.

<comment><USER11> And, when/if they say no?

<comment><USER12> That's pretty much the state of banking in the US, already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > E-statement takes 30+ minutes to download because it's huge and their > servers are really slow!

They're lucky that they're able to download after all.

Some years ago I used an AmEx to order 1000+ items every day on Amazon, which after a while locked me out of the account pages of both companies. Most probably some database query in the background was timing out due to the volume of transactions.

To add insult to injury, I remember it was almost impossible to explain the issue to the support staff on either side. They kept on getting back with canned responses about what browser I was using etc.

<comment><USER14> > I remember it was almost impossible to explain the issue to the support > staff on either side

Yeah, is there some kind of standard escape sequence to use in these circumstances? Like "I must speak to the manager" or some analog without sounding mean? I know these folks are incentivized to not escalate, but...

<comment><USER15> the escape sequence is to anticipate all the questions they're going to ask you and answer them in the first correspondence. try two different browsers, try it in incognito, etc. If you can prove you've isolated the problem, you get to skip the back-and-forth required to isolate the problem.

And actually _do_ all that stuff, don't just pretend you did so you can cheat at customer service. because maybe it is just your browser, and if you insist it isn't they're just going to hang up on you and you're going to deserve it.

<comment><USER16> I wish this worked... It does occasionally, but I stopped even trying these days.

My online chats with support usually go something like this "Hi, I'm trying to do X, but get error Y. It doesn't depend on A, B, C. Tried your FAQ Z already. Can you fix or do X for me, please?"; "Hi, this is Bob, how can I help you today?"; "<repeat>"; "Have you tried doing Z as described in the FAQ?"

It's so annoying/insulting when they give you a box to summarise your whole issue, but nobody cares to read what you put there.

<comment><USER17> I've found calling people to make the given solution succeed at a much higher rate than chat boxes, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> US banks seem so backwards in so many ways as an outside observer. Transferring money between accounts of different banks, the prevalence of contactless payments, digital communications as standard, even the fact that cheques still exist.

This is all stuff we take for granted in Aus and it just blows my mind each and every time it comes up that US banks are so behind the times.

</comment><comment><USER19> I worked on a project migrating a telco to a new billing system. Somehow the new system churned out, for only one guy, 144 copies of his bill. No idea how a gross became a thing in a computer, but it did.

The mailhouse, rather than do the sensible thing and call us to see why, did optimise the delivery and collect all the copies together and post in a single box. Crazy.

</comment><comment><USER20> And its called "Silicon Valley Bank" on top of that. You would think they would be the first to adopt tech, not the last. Do banks still have any legal reasons to not allow paperless statements ?

<comment><USER21> >Do banks still have any legal reasons to not allow paperless statements ?

The more procedures and services offered means a much greater scope for compliance issues. Running a financial institution means having to put a lot of manpower into regulatory compliance.

<comment><USER22> Ye olde <hand-waving> "compliance". There's no need to go without paperless statements. If it's written in law then the law should be fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For those who don't know, Silicon Valley Bank provides merchant banking services for a pretty big fraction of Bay Area start-ups. They have a reputation for "getting it," in terms of being able to support venture-backed pre-revenue companies. This does make the giant paper statement even more ironic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct, in fact there is probably no one better for a startup's first bank account (it was my first startup's bank account)! But be careful, if your transaction volume gets too high you might need to invest in a sizable mailbox ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Check the comment on the article:

        Recommended by Yan Lhert (author)
        Go to the profile of Silicon Valley Bank
        Silicon Valley Bank
        5 hrs ago
        Got it. We're looking into it.

</comment><comment><USER25> That's the dumbest thing I've seen in a very long time.

Also, if it's costing the bank $41 per month this must surely be getting passed on to OP somehow - they can't be making a loss on his account? I wonder what OP pays the bank?

<comment><USER26> From the blog post: "We do hundreds of thousands of searches with the DMV every month, who charge us a fee by credit card for each transaction"

$41/100,000 credit card transactions = 0.041 cents/transaction. So as long as the fees per transaction to the DMV are higher than that they're still ahead

<comment><USER25> Still crazy - I'd accept a reduction in my bank fee in return for them not posting a tree out to me once a month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How about just having your company use a non-SVB credit card (or debit card) and just pay off the bill via the SVB account? Have you tried calling up SVB and resolving it with them directly?

<comment><AUTHOR> but then I wouldn't get my monthly laughs in!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "We do hundreds of thousands of searches with the DMV every month, who charge us a fee by credit card for each transaction, and gives us no other payment method"

This is retarded. DMV should offer a one-off monthly subscription for unlimited searches, or just save each search and produce a bill at the end of the month. I'm sure banks are making an absolute killing on those searches.

"Silicon Valley Bank gives us no paperless billing option for our account"

Is this 2016? Or 1970?

</comment><comment><USER29> 30 minutes to download the bank statement? No paperless billing?

so many questions about this amazing bank.

<comment><USER30> my guess: somewhere lurks an AS/400

<comment><USER31> > my guess: somewhere lurks an AS/400

Not a bad guess. Of course, they're flawlessly receiving their statement, every month, without fail — so my guess is that somewhere lurks an AS/400.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> " _Silicon Valley Bank_ gives us no paperless billing option for our account"

... sigh

<comment><USER33> It's all about scale.

<comment><USER34> Do things that don't scale!

.. like shipping paper bank statements..

<comment><USER35> Seems to me like shipping paper bank statements scales quite well -- linearly in fact!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm suddenly nostalgic for the annoying buzz of dot matrix printers.

<comment><USER37> Ah it's not a buzz. It's a loud impacting sound.

Thanks Epson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> US banks (and consumers) are stuck in the stone age. Paper cheques, magnetic swipe cards, it's pretty bad.

<comment><USER39> In France, you can only pay certain government filing fees (driver's license for instance) by using "fiscal stamps" which are postage-type stamps only available at certain retail outlets. They won't accept cash, check, or credit card, only stamps.

<comment><USER28> Same in the UK, I was exchanging my EU licence for a UK one, and the only way to pay for it was to either include a cheque(I have literally never seen a cheque, I asked my bank how to get a cheque book and I would have to wait 3 weeks for one so I said no) or go to the post office and buy a "postal order" for the same amount and send it to DVLA. Most other things you can pay for using a debit card though.

<comment><USER40> The GDS/GOV.UK are at least trying to change that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Millions of dollars a month in DMV records searches, that's the more interesting part to me. Background checks? Carfax but for the past owners of the car?

<comment><USER42> There's only a few million drivers in PA. Soon they'll have queried them all.

<comment><USER43> True, although the fact that one validated a driver's license last month does not mean that the license is valid this month.

<comment><USER44> But like file permissions, just querying the filesystem (or drivers liceense database) the result is potentially invalid by the time you actually get it. You ultimately have to actually use the filepath or drivers license and let any failure be the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> My favorite part is that the transactions are printed _single-column._ Look at all that white space.

<comment><USER46> from the animated-gif it seems like the back sides are blank as well. Just think of how much cheaper it would be to ship that statement with the proper small condensed monospaced font, multi-column, and and double sided. Welcome to the 1990s SVB!

<comment><AUTHOR> yep! it's single sided. the box is also filled/packed with the side tearoff stuff (not sure the name for it) which you can sort of see in the gif. Must have been terrible to have to rip it all off for this many pages!

<comment><USER47> Perf strips! That's what we called them anyway.

Brings back fond memories...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The strangest part of the story to me is that the state charges for each search individually. PA.gov appears to require the creation of an account, so they could save themselves a big chunk of money by charging the customer once a month. I was formerly employed at a portal similar to PA.gov in another state, and this is exactly what we did. I can't think of any good reason to charge by the drink, so it's probably some well-meaning but boneheaded state reg.

</comment><comment><USER49> Relevant: [https://priceonomics.com/what-startups-think-about- silicon-v...](https://priceonomics.com/what-startups-think-about-silicon- valley-bank)

Personally I've been very happy with Capital One business banking for my startup. One time painless in-person setup at a branch, everything done online ever since, paperless from the start, free checking, savings, and business credit cards for everyone. 1% APY on our balance.

<comment><USER50> Capital One business banking has a caveat of having no shared database between branches and some other twilight zone interpretations of compliance regulations.

Every time I needed to do something in person, it HAD to be at the Capital One I originally opened the account at.

<comment><USER51> What happens if they ever close that branch?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> You can open an operational credit card account at a traditional bank outside of SVB and keep your primary banking relationship with them. I would expect American Express will give you the month-to-month cash flow and paperless billing while SVB can give you the larger line of credit and growth capital. Plus, think of all those credit card points.

<comment><USER53> 100% agree. We put most of our business transactions on Amex. You can buy some significantly cool items and/or experiences when you generate hundreds of thousands of points per year! I am surprised the OP is not already doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> We use SVB and luckily don't have this many transactions :)

We once had a Bell Atlantic (that's Verizon now) phone bill delivered that took 1/3 of a UPS truck. 600 line hunt group that they broke so that instead of being a hunt group, it was don't-answer-call-forward from the 1st to 2nd, 2nd to 3rd, and on up. At a cost of $.08 per hunt. So if lines 1-599 were busy that'd be 599 $.08 charges. For each accepted call to our modems. And each charge itemized one per page. On little index card sized phone bill pages. Mid month they called and asked if we could take our bills on reel-reel tapes, which I guess should have been an early warning sign...

So anyway, thus was the 400,000-ish printed page phone bill.

</comment><comment><USER55> Off-topic: What are they doing that requires "hundreds of thousands of searches with the DMV" every month?

<comment><AUTHOR> DMV appointments as a service

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Which banks _do_ provide paperless billing for business accounts, and what specific policy reason -- compliance? Record keeping? -- prevents SVB from doing it?

You know, the people responsible for printing and shipping? The expense/hassle is not lost on them. I'm curious to know more.

</comment><comment><USER57> Before I moved to Seattle, my old three-branch credit union in Podunk County, Flyover State had paperless statements, and that was years and years ago. "Silicon Valley Bank", in 2016, doesn't?

</comment><comment><USER58> Did you check that the statement is correct? Feels like someone is bound to drop a piece of paper or ten when refilling the printer. You can probably even do it by weight, 1g ~= $10-100.

</comment><comment><USER59> Reminds me of when I look at my cell phone bill and see nearly every transferred KB itemized. At least it's paperless.

<comment><USER60> Early iPhone bills (from AT&T) frequently ran to hundreds of pages for heavy users, sparking at least one viral video:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300-page_iPhone_bill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300-page_iPhone_bill)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> it seems to me that taking time out of your day to put down some one who is a partner to your business would be better spent making your business better

<comment><AUTHOR> SVB is a great bank and I don't mean to say anything too negative but it doesn't mean that they don't do some silly things sometimes. It gives me a laugh that they do this so I thought I'd share. I hope my tone was "friendly poking fun" and not "putting someone down". The startup I founded used SVB and I had a great relationship with them.

The DMV on the other hand....</comment></comment>


Why iOS Apps Are Getting Bulkier - <AUTHOR> http://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/features/apples-app-store-has-a-big-problem-that-no-one-is-talking-about-1735433 <comment><USER2> If I were paranoid, I would conclude that Apple is deliberately trying to force iOS customers to upgrade to more expensive models with more memory. As usual, the truth is probably more nuanced. However, developers could help to alleviate the problem by avoiding Swift until the tools and packaging are more mature.</comment>


How to Use Quora to Advance Your Career  - <AUTHOR> http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2011/04/08/how-to-use-quora-to-advance-your-career?s_cid=rss:outside-voices-careers:how-to-use-quora-to-advance-your-career

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems pretty obvious but I'm surprised to see that a major publication like US News giving so much weight to it.</comment>


The Intel Edison: Linux Maker Machine in a Matchbox - <AUTHOR> https://www.linux.com/learn/intro-to-linux/2017/3/intel-edison-linux-maker-machine-matchbox <comment><USER2> The Edison is a great piece of hardware completely hamstrung by the idiotic yocto linux distribution and tool chain. Despite being "x86" it's near impossible to add custom drivers or rebuild the OS. What's the point of being "x86" if you can't make use of the ecosystem? The Rpi has much better support. Don't waste your time. Intel isn't serious about these products, can't be bothered to actually support them, and won't open them up for use outside of their walled garden.

<comment><USER3> Darn, I got excited for a bit because I hated how I had to do a bunch of ARM nonsense to bring up my Pi gadget.

What's Yocto and what are they doing wrong?

<comment><USER4> I'd suggest Yocto is the de facto standard for this kind of embedded device. It's a bit complex behind the scenes but general building and updating packages is fairly straightforward.

Bringing up the edison is very easy. The bootloader supports DFU, so you can simply connect USB, reset, and flash the system images.

If you're coming at it from a higher level, it has a node.js and ssh services running by default, so it's easy to start tinkering.

<comment><USER5> Buildroot is good too and seem fairly simple. I used it for RPi project and comes with support for many boards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately intel devices are too expensive as compared to ARM and other SoCs. For most use-cases you can find an ARM board in $5-$20 range. Intel does offers higher compute power, but most applications do not need it. Their only advantage is being x86, on which you can run a closed-source operating system like windows. But then I donot see why one would prefer windows over Linux on an IoT device.

<comment><USER7> You can run Windows 10 IoT Core on a Pi 3.

<comment><USER8> I could. Why should I?

> The makers will be able to download and use the first public release of > Windows 10 IoT Core at no cost, although this require access to a > "development machine" with Windows 10.

Can I have a Windows that is really a core (memory usage)? Can I flash it by the means of a simple 'dd'? Requiring a Windows to develop is a big no for many.

<comment><USER9> > I could. Why should I?

Probably to get automatic security updates so you don't have a million hacked IoT devices on your network...

<comment><USER8> I don't think security is something automatic, but I'm open to other opinions about this.

If a firm is not willing to update my device anymore, why does an "automatically updated base" make me more safe? Without updates to the upper layers of the software stack I'm still vulnerable..

Is there a real advantage over Yocto plus un update mechanism such as rauc [[https://github.com/rauc/rauc](https://github.com/rauc/rauc)] or mender [[https://github.com/mendersoftware/mender](https://github.com/mendersoftware/mender)] ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have worked closely with Intel Edison for quite some time. For $50 it's quite alright, if you take built in wifi onto account.

The real problem is lack of Intel's support. Edison runs an ancient kernel, the yocto image source is full of hacks, which do not suggest big interest in prolonging the device's actuality. Instead, Intel decided to add Arduino compatibility to a x86 Linux board, god knows why.

<comment><USER11> You can buy ESP8266 boards with wifi built in for less than $3, so wifi doesn't justify the price tag. The Edison is certainly a lot more more powerful, but most IOT applications simply don't need that power. And if you do, Raspberry Pi Zero is still far cheaper.

But this actually proves your larger point that Intel just aren't that interested. If they were, they would sell Edison at a loss for $5, which would spawn huge community support around them.

Intel they are suffering the classic innovator's dilemma, where competitors grab the low-end with products so cheap that no-one cares about their inferiority. The competitors then slowly improve their products (see the ESP32) and gobble up most of the market. Inel will rule the high end for a while yet, but I think they recognise they have already lost the low end.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

<comment><USER7> I'm assuming you already know, but in case you don't, there's now the Pi Zero W. Less than £10, but it's a Pi Zero with wifi (802.11n) and Bluetooth (4.1) with integrated antenna.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having built custom hardware breakouts for the Edison. I'm more more inclined to go for a Raspberry Pi.

The straw that broke the camel's a back was the connector between the Edison and the board. It is a nightmare for prototyping. It pretty much requires a pick'n'place to get it right.

Broken out headers for rapid development are a must in any device that claims to be for Makers.

<comment><USER13> > Having built custom hardware breakouts for the Edison.

There exists a breakout board for the Edison by Intel:

> > [https://www.arduino.cc/en/ArduinoCertified/IntelEdison#toc4](https://www.arduino.cc/en/ArduinoCertified/IntelEdison#toc4)

There also exists a kit with Arduino headers if this is what you prefer:

> > [https://www.arduino.cc/en/ArduinoCertified/IntelEdison#toc3](https://www.arduino.cc/en/ArduinoCertified/IntelEdison#toc3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those that may not know: last year Intel released the Edison's successor: Intel Joule ([https://software.intel.com/en-us/iot/hardware/joule/dev- kit](https://software.intel.com/en-us/iot/hardware/joule/dev-kit)) based on a newer 14nm Broxton architecture, it should be quite a bit more powerful. It also includes an Intel HD Graphics GPU.

Unfortunately, a bit too pricey in comparison to the ARM ecosystem (the whole dev kit for the cheaper x550 variant is at $287 on newegg).

</comment><comment><USER15> Too pricey, hard to work with for average Joe because of connectors, expensive "blocks". I can't find any single advantage over countless ARM boards with prices starting as low as 5$..

<comment><USER16> Twice the cores, roughly twice the single-core performance, twice the RAM, 4GB of relatively fast on-board storage, two wireless protocol interfaces, and you "can't find any single advantage"? Maybe not for your use case, but this is a far beefier board than even the Pi 2, let alone the Pi Zero.

<comment><USER7> The Pi 2 isn't current, the Pi 3 is available in standard and module (inc a Lite variant without on-board flash).

<comment><USER16> List price on the Pi 3B is higher than the Edison, and it still lacks the on- board storage. I don't know where you are getting that the Pi 3 has "on-board flash", as all it has is an SD card reader.

The post I was replying to was trying to claim the Pi family provides the same features for much less than the Edison. That isn't the case. The Pis that are cheaper than the Edison are also much less capable, and the Pis that can match the Edison in features and performance cost as much or more than it does.

Edit: clarified that I was talking about the Pi 3B, not the base Pi 3 (which is somewhat cheaper than the Edison).

<comment><USER7> You completely misunderstand the Pi families and current line-up, and that's caused you to misinterpret my comment.

There aren't "A" variants for the Pi 2 or Pi 3.

There's the Pi Model A and Pi Model B, A+ and B+ (which are slightly upgraded versions of the original Pi), the original Compute Module ("CM1", based on the Pi but in an SO-DIMM format with 4GB eMMC Flash), the Pi 2, the Pi 3, the Pi Zero (upgraded to v1.3), the Compute Module 3 and 3 Lite ("CM3" and "CM3L" based on the Pi 3 but in an SO-DIMM format, with and without 4GB eMMC Flash respectively), and the latest addition, the Pi Zero W (Zero with built-in Wifi and Bluetooth).

The Pi 3, CM3, CM3L, Zero, and Zero W are what I'd consider current. But you can still get Pi 2, or the A+, on RS for example.

In the UK, the bare Edison module is £47.34 on RS. The bare CM3 (with the 4GB eMMC) is £26.99, the CM3L is £21.99. The Pi 3 is £32.99 (which is directly usable as it has ports already on it.)

I'd bet you a Pi Zero that the Pi 3 would piss all over the Edison in sysbench CPU if you ran both the Edison's 2 main cores against the Pi 3's 4 cores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is Atom/Edison suddenly back after the announcement of the Compute Card at CES? Does anyone really care about either at this point?

[https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-unveils-intel- compute-...](https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-unveils-intel-compute-card- credit-card-sized-compute-platform/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Ended up dropping it in favor of the rPi-- the primary reason was that the sdcard (I was using the arduino-compat board) just randomly sets the filesystem to readonly anywhere from minutes after boot to days.

It's also expensive relative to the rpi3 when wifi's built-in. The community is alright, intel's responsive but it's not similar in any fashion wrt size and established articles on how to get stuff to work. Their flash update program also rarely ever worked for me.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's so sad this thing is $50, because I don't think there's anything that comes close to being the same size. While a subjective conclusion, I think the SD card version is cute (for example, [https://wi- images.condecdn.net/image/7aDlgBynO8X/crop/1620/l...](https://wi- images.condecdn.net/image/7aDlgBynO8X/crop/1620/landscape) and [http://cdn1.alphr.com/sites/alphr/files/images/dir_414/it_ph...](http://cdn1.alphr.com/sites/alphr/files/images/dir_414/it_photo_207253.jpg)).

That said, once attached to the necessary peripherals, overall size would increase, which is sort of annoying, and makes the price tag even more irritating.

FWIW, there was a small craze of Wi-Fi SD cards a few months/years ago, and the Linux systems on (one of?) those was reverse-engineered to some extent. IIRC with one of them you could only connect to it via Wi-Fi (which generally isn't 100.00% reliable); the SD pins proved too difficult to commandeer.

<comment><USER20> The orangepi zero is 48mm x 46mm (~1.9 in sq), so pretty small.

Has both regular 100mb Ethernet and WiFi.

[http://www.orangepi.org/orangepizero/](http://www.orangepi.org/orangepizero/)

$9 total, shipped to the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Intel edisons are not great for power constrained solutions since they either have full power or are off. Would be really nice to have the ability to scale the CPU frequency for lower power situations

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting analysis of fuzzing on Edison (previous generation?) [1]. For my uses, the ARM boards like ODROID and Raspberry Pi have superior value. But it's good to see Intel competing here.

[1] [http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/edison_fuzz/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/edison_fuzz/)

</comment><comment><USER23> The only reason I would go x86 for a project is if the thing runs DOS.

That being said, has anyone managed to get FreeDOS on the edison?

</comment><comment><USER24> It's nice it has storage, WiFi, bluetooth all rolled in. The $50 isn't actually the part that ruins it for me, more of the extra I'm guaranteed to spend more money on any and all extras I'd need.

</comment><comment><USER25> I get these are much more powerful, but I'd love to see a Quark X-based board to compete in price/capabilities with a Pi.

</comment><comment><USER26> The ESP32 is a better (support, reliability) and cheaper alternative when what you really need is wifi/bt/gpio.

</comment><comment><USER27> Could the Intel Edison be used to make a laptop?

<comment><USER28> It has no video hardware, so it couldn't drive a monitor / panel for a laptop. It's more like an Arduino than it's like an RPi.

<comment><USER29> Sorry for being pedantic here, but despite lack of video hardware I would argue it has a lot more in common with the PI than an Arduino. It runs Yocto Linux and you can pretty much use the full suite of Linux tools to program it.

<comment><USER28> That's fair, I didn't mean to suggest that it wasn't a general-purpose computer running Linux, just that it wasn't really built to be used as a desktop. That said, I'd personally choose an RPi Zero W (which isn't much larger, costs 1/5th the price, and can drive a monitor, if you need it to).

<comment><USER7> It could also be run headlessly and combined with a Pi. The Edison running an X client (server) or RDP server, the Pi connecting into it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Face-To-Face Request Is 34 Times More Successful Than an Email - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-face-to-face-request-is-34-times-more-successful-than-an-email <comment><USER2> Well, the assistant professor of "Organizational Behavior" forgets that the scientific method consists in repeating experiments in order to find counterexamples to a claim. Science is not about seeking to prove anything to be true. It is about doing exactly the opposite. That is why "Organizational Behavior" is not science, has never been, and will never be.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a big difference between a request to fill a survey and corporate communication with a paper trail. For important requests, I've found the opposite to be true -- formal email requests get way more follow up than verbal ones.

<comment><USER4> YMMV. In business I've found the headline seems about right - I can send a two-paragraph email that sets out precisely what's needed, but wasting half an hour of my life on a meeting tremendously increases the chances they'll bloody do it.</comment></comment>


Police investigate death at Apple headquarters in California - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-death-idUSKCN0XO2A3 <comment><USER2> Ongoing post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583039)</comment>