Who Writes Wikipedia? - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia <comment><USER2> So, in the article it's claimed that Wales wanted to do a study using this method, and (implied) if appropriate, revise his conclusion.

This is four years ago, anyone knows if that happened?

Edited to add: One thing that has been annoying me a little, is when articles, regardless of their quality, are deleted because they lack notoriety. If these deletes adhere to the conclusions in this article (written by an outsider, then deleted by an insider, rather than both written and deleted by insiders), this strikes me as an example of a policy that should be changed in face of this evidence, since capturing the knowledge of these drive-by contributors seems more important than "saving space".

<comment><USER3> Wales admitted he was wrong to me through a mutual friend. I don't think he ever publicly recanted, though.

<comment><USER2> That is rather disturbing. Well, as PG says, there's still room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica.

<comment><USER4> I don't find it disturbing. I think it's very much in Wales' character; starting out in soft porn, co-founding Wikipedia, and then passing himself off as founder, rather than co-founder. Every time I see his face at the top of a Wikipedia page, it sickens me, and similarly every time I see him described as "founder". Thus, the Wikipedia banner sickens me twice.

AdBlockPlus element hiding rule: wikipedia.org###siteNotice

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the AdblockPlus rule!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a moderator of a wiki-project, I can confirm Aaron Swartz's results. After we had gained enough popularity, most of the articles were written by outsiders and core community was there only to maintain -- categorize, wikify, create interlinks here and there, delete garbage and, last but not least, have flamewars in the discussion pages.

<comment><USER7> It's only logical- the people best suited to write articles are people who are well-versed in the subject, and the core community can't possibly contain experts on every subject.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that is always accurate; WP simply summarizes content available in reliable secondary sources.

For most topics it is possible to do so without expert knowledge. Of course; some areas have always needed experts to write. I'd never touch a medical article, or macro-biology, for example as it is all double dutch to me :) But, say, history is often easy to write if you have the source material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A key takeaway for me is that you can't just take crude metrics, make some inferences and run with them. Jimmy Wales has been running his organization under a wide reaching and _completely wrong_ understanding. That's because he equates number of edits with importance of contribution.

It's a basic psychology 101 concept, but one thats easily missed: don't equate your operationalized variables with the phenomena you are trying to measure.

<comment><USER10> That's a danger with any management - it is all too easy to overvalue what is easy to measure and more or less ignore what is hard. I have read about problems caused by that in everything from the military through software engineering in the present. It is also referred to as "you get more of whatever you measure".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Felipe Ortega wrote a Ph.D. thesis devoted to this topic. "Wikipedia: A Quantiative Analysis", available at <http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/phd- thesis> His conclusions were featured on a Washington Post article, "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages", discussed here <http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10403467-93.html> and here [http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-...](http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors- Leaving-Wikipedia-In-Record-Numbers)

<comment><USER12> Second opinion (with stats) by Wikimedia Foundation Data Analyst Erik Zachte:

[http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/12/new-editors-are- joining-e...](http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/12/new-editors-are-joining- english-wikipedia-in-droves/) (addendum: [http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/12/why-i-changed-the- title-o...](http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/12/why-i-changed-the-title-of-my- previous-blog/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article's dismissal of an editor by complaining that "[his] edits were all deleting things and moving things around" is a perfect illustration of why "bytes added" is just as bad a contribution metric as "edit count". We're not in 2001 anymore. The Internet is not short of bytes about Alan Alda or Anacondas, and nor is Wikipedia short of people who add bytes about them.

Newly-added bytes may be true or false. They may be useful or not useful even if true --- readers do not want every byte about a given topic, they want a few tens of thousands of the most useful ones. (This is entirely orthogonal to the inclusionist-deletionist debate about what _topics_ should be included. Some bytes may be useless in the context of a main topical article about Alan Alda himself, but they would be very relevant to a subtopical article about Alan Alda's dental health).

For a popular topic, you'll have dozens of people adding bytes of varying quality. Insiders subtract the false or useless bytes (an action easily captured in statistics and then maligned on the internet by pundits), but also look at the true and useful bytes, fact-check them, and then _leave them in place_. This contribution --- curation --- is not captured in any statistics, but it is an important part of the mechanism by which you can have 1 expert and two enthusiastic amateurs stop by every few weeks on their lunch break to expand an article with no centralised notice or approval, without having have the place turned into a mess by the 97 vandals and well-meaning incompetents who came by in the meantime.

The real problem Wikipedia faces is in the long tail of topics, where there is only one person adding the bytes, and that person is either grinding an axe, self-promoting, or afflicted with incurable "nerdview". The well-meaning, harried, underinformed Wikipedia insiders inevitably screw up when they try to distinguish useless vs. useful bytes on these topics, but I wouldn't call the outsiders who added the bytes in the first place "experts". Unfortunately both sides' conduct may be scaring away the people who _are_ actual experts on those long-tail topics ...

<comment><USER14> _Insiders subtract the false or useless bytes (an action easily captured in statistics and then maligned on the internet by pundits), but also look at the true and useful bytes, fact-check them, and then leave them in place. This contribution --- curation --- is not captured in any statistics. . . . Unfortunately both sides' conduct may be scaring away the people who are actual experts on those long-tail topics._

Correct. But not just long-tail topics, but any topic that can only be properly treated by deep immersion in the subject, and especially any topic that is controversial. A lot of point-of-view pushers on Wikipedia do a lot of their POV-pushing by "framing," just making sure that some wikilinks to articles they like persist, while others are deleted, or that navigation templates or article categories play up the articles that best represent their point of view. And that's before we even get to the issue of deleting reliable sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Out of curiosity, how many HNers write on Wikipedia? I do it every so once in awhile, but only only on a few topics I'm intimately familiar with, or to fix obvious vandalism.

<comment><USER16> I started doing so, until I realized the only way you could really contribute an article was to enlist for a lifetime of janitorial duty. Otherwise, whatever work you did quickly degenerates into run-on sentences and trivia.

The article's point resonated with me, because it seems that the whole process is based on the assumption that you're a no-lifer who spends all day patrolling Wikipedia.

They advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases".

<comment><USER17> _They advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases"._

Adopting the concept of forking, distributing the whole thing, and making it easy to push and pull in changes from any source would be a great goal.

Someone already started hacking on a tool for converting the dumps to Git repos, which may or may not be a suitable base to build upon: <https://github.com/scy/levitation>

<comment><USER18> how would they distribute the thing, if not through the dumps? I mean, using an scm to distribute it (I asked the freebase guys the same thing) would save time/bandwidth but it's not a conceptual improvement.

Also, how would forking be useful in any way? It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right? Could you explain the advantages ?

<comment><USER17> Forking would be the key to eliminate the gatekeeper problem, so that for certain topics people could publish their own articles or make changes to existing ones without needing the approval of some opinionated moderator or admin. On the German Wikipedia this problem is so bad that earlier this year we had a really big discussion that even extended from the blogosphere to the major news outlets.

What I mean is that Wikipedia could learn from GitHub how a lot of forks plus easy pull requests can exponentially increase participation and generation of new content while still being able to retain quality.

 _It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right?_

Why not? You could extend an article or contribute some new articles for a topic, publish the content yourself, and try to get it into the main project. Then on the main site there could be a list of forks, and even a network graph exactly like on GitHub.

<comment><USER18> sorry I do not understand: who is in charge of importing the data anyway, if not the gatekeeper?

Also, i mean that the difference with forking source code is that you can work on something that will not get accepted into the mailine, but is useful to you, or your organization.

It does not seem to me that you can have a private wikipedia to which you refer people, it would be useless. Same with forks, if an officially blessed fork does not exist, you get anarchy and all of them become unreliable, cfr the rails foreign key plugins for reference: when strong active and clear leadership miss, projects fade into failure.

OTOH if you just want "easy merge" that does not seem to replace the gatekeeper, you just made him more visibile.

But if I am missing soemthing, I'd be happy to understand :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fascinating analysis, using a different metric and coming to a completely different conclusion than Wales did. If he's right, it'll be interesting to go back and reread what various people have written about Wikipedia. Four years later, has anybody run the larger-scale analysis he suggests here?

</comment><comment><USER20> What are some examples of policies that would be detrimental to casual contributors?

<comment><USER21> There's a huge problem with the current Wikipedia community being almost outright hostile to new editors. Edits that are either poorly formatted or poorly written are often reverted rather than improved, and the edits of unregistered editors are very likely to be reverted. Mostly, this is due to the desire to fight vandalism, and fairly strong xenophobia.

With tools like huggle, it becomes trivially easy to scan hundreds of edits an hour, and reverting is as easy as pressing 'r'. The problem is, vandal patrolling with huggle is _really boring_. You're on the lookout for things to revert, and can quite easily misinterpret someone changing a number ("512" to "568") as subtle vandalism. So, someone comes along, fixes a figure that was wrong, and within 1 minute, their change is reverted. It presents a really uninviting face to the uninitiated.

As for xenophobia, the wikipedia community is almost paranoid when it comes to outside influence. This distrust isn't unwarranted, as there have been many instances of various groups plotting to have wikipedia reflect their reality. What this means, however, is that external calls to edit a particular article will likely wind up at AN/I (Administrator's Noticeboard / Incidents, basically where you go to tell on people), and the first thing any new editor would be greeted with would be a notice saying a diplomatic version of "we're on to you".

Policy itself isn't the problem; it's the community. Policy both reflects and shapes community dynamics. However, Wikipedia is a "Jimbotocracy". Jimbo can, has, and will continue to, overrule the community and do whatever he wants, usually in the form of banning / unbanning / stripping or granting of privileges. In addition, ArbCom, the "Supreme Court", if you will, defers to Jimbo. While Jimbo doesn't set policy directly (although he reserves the right to), he does heavily influence it. His views on what policy should be are often taken as passed down from the mountaintop on stone tablet, so it matters what he thinks and why he thinks it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I found the followup at the bottom of the page equally interesting: <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/writefp>

</comment><comment><USER23> There is that girl from Indonesia, and Jimmy Wales. And some other people. According to the ads.

</comment><comment><USER8> The problem is; neither method alone is a good measure of value.

Plenty of articles I come across have "drive by additions" of some length that are unreadable, repetitive and disturbingly worded. There are contributors whose sole purpose is to go round and copyedit that content, which they may do in a number of edits... but change (by comparison) very few words. It can still take hours of effort.

A Wiki article is the sum of all those edits.

</comment><comment><USER24> One of the primary reasons that Wikipedia is written by such a tiny percentage of its users is that the process of writing and editing is arcane and shrouded in one of the most insular online cultures in existence.

I don't know if greater access to its priestly class would mean a better or worse site, honestly. I'm sure there are thousands of people who are experts in their fields and could improve the content of the site greatly - but I can imagine that opening the floodgates and working to democratize authorship and editorship could also drag it further into the gutter.

<comment><USER25> The article that we are discussing is actually saying quite the opposite: that the bulk of Wikipedia is written by many, many users. The bulk of the _edits_ on the other hand, are written by the few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here is a dump I made sometime ago but just posted. I am torn on what to think. These companies know more about their products than the general public, and thus are more qualified to talk about them, but there's that little cynic in me saying they shouldn't. Take it with a grain of salt because some of them are legit.

[http://www.christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-...](http://www.christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-024331;comments:1)

</comment><comment><USER27> Even though I disagree with his views on just about every political issue, Aaron is an inspiration for me. I would love to be in a position where I don't have to worry about money and invest significant amount of time in things that interest me, without worrying about money.

It seems like ever since I started working for myself, I don't have time for hobbies at all - everything I do has to go through a prism of _how will this affect my bottom line_...

</comment><comment><USER28> 2006

</comment><comment><USER29> I came across many self appointed _editors_ in Wikipedia.</comment>


Reading list for distributed systems - <AUTHOR> http://reiddraper.github.com/distreader/ <comment><USER2> Another good one (from someone who worked at Amazon) is Pat Helland's "Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion" which details more generally how a system might work without a global transactions. Part of which boils down to delivering idempotent messages to services.

I thought it was interesting because there are a lot of parallels with how REST works but also service orientated architectures.

The paper (and presentation) can be found here (which I'm sure has a few more gems on the page): <http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2007/program.html>

<comment><USER3> Here is a summary of the paper from [http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2011/04/life-beyond- distrib...](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2011/04/life-beyond-distributed- transactions.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Akamai also has a decent list of publications that provide some insight on how they do things: <http://www.akamai.com/html/perspectives/techpubs.html>

I recommend the following from that list: * Keeping Track of 70,000+ Servers: The Akamai Query System * Improving Performance on the Internet * The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications * Scaling a Monitoring Infrastructure for the Akamai Network

</comment><comment><USER5> Might be gauche, but I'd like to plug an intro to concurrency and distributed systems I wrote a couple of years ago:

[http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/04/dismal-guide-to- concurrency....](http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/04/dismal-guide-to- concurrency.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Related: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-resources-for- learni...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-resources-for-learning- about-distributed-computing-Why)

</comment><comment><USER7> Evan Weaver (systems engineer at Twitter) put together a great list of distributed system papers as well. His list is categorized and every paper in it is awesome.

distributed systems primer: [http://blog.evanweaver.com/2009/05/04/distributed-systems- pr...](http://blog.evanweaver.com/2009/05/04/distributed-systems-primer/)

distributed systems primer (update): [http://blog.evanweaver.com/2010/08/12/distributed-systems- pr...](http://blog.evanweaver.com/2010/08/12/distributed-systems-primer- update/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I found this site recently and it has a nice set of recent distributed systems papers: <http://www.systemswemake.com/>

It's a good complement because it focuses more on system design rather than theory.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/> contains summaries of important cloud computing papers.</comment>


Questions you should ask about prediction APIs - <AUTHOR> http://www.programmableweb.com/news/6-questions-you-should-ask-about-prediction-apis/analysis/2014/09/12

<comment><USER2> I think prediction APIs are a joke at this time.

The assumption here is that the hard part is running an SVM or a deep network or random forest or something like that.

The hard part is really defining the problem, cleaning the data, figuring out the features and parameter tuning the system. This involves building models many times, and if (i) the clock is running on the algo, and (ii) you don't know enough to implement the algo, you stay safely on the wrong side of the commercialization valley of death.</comment>


Rivals Intel and AMD Team Up on PC Chips to Battle Nvidia - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/rivals-intel-and-amd-team-up-on-pc-chips-to-battle-nvidia-1509966064 <comment><USER2> This is like, "Hell has frozen over" kind of news

Am I the only one who smell this as very "Apple" wanted?

I dont think AMD will be giving up any GFX secret, more likely this is AMD shipping Intel a Mobile Gfx Die to be integrated within the same CPU package.

But in any case, Why not just have Intel ship a Mobile CPU without iGPU and a Separate GPU.

And AMD, why now? When Zen is doing great, has great roadmap and potential, along with much better GFx then Intel. Why?

Edit: OK, I didn't read carefully, while this is WSJ, it is still a rumor, nothing has confirmed.... yet.

Edit2: It is confirmed now.

Edit3: Yes AMD will be shipping die to Intel, and it is EMIB at work. [https://www.pcworld.com/article/3235934/components- processor...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3235934/components- processors/intel-and-amd-ship-a-core-chip-with-radeon-graphics.html)

<comment><USER3> > _But in any case, Why not just have Intel ship a Mobile CPU without iGPU and > a Separate GPU._

Power, manufacturing costs, integration and testing costs, design size...

> _Am I the only one who smell this as very "Apple" wanted?_

Why would Apple care about NVIDIA? They're already beating them in the kind of performance that matters on products Intel will be competing for.

<comment><USER4> My theory on why Apple prefers AMD over nVidia:

AMD hardware at a specific price point is more powerful than nVidia hardware at the same price point. However, nVidia has superior drivers that eliminates the difference.

And since Apple prefers to use their own drivers, nVidia loses their main point of differentiation.

But of course the "Apple" drivers for video cards are basically vendor drivers with Apple doing QA & release management. But the driver is nVidia's secret sauce, they're not going to show it to Apple, since Apple is now a very competitive GPU manufacturer. At some point Apple will probably put their own GPU's inside Macs, so nVidia doesn't want to give them a head start.

AMD cares less about giving Apple a head start because they care more about the short term than the long and competing against nVidia.

<comment><USER5> The new Vega boards lag nvidias 1080ti apart for some edge cases of interest to cryptocurrencies

<comment><USER6> Though to be fair, they also are significantly cheaper than the 1080ti. Well, if you can find one at MSRP at least.

<comment><USER7> Coding with Vulkan directly seems to eliminate the nvidia perf advantage in many cases, so...is it still the hardware or the software lagging?

<comment><USER8> Vs. coding for nvidia or vs. coding for DirectX independent of card-maker?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Much better source: [https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/new-intel-core- process...](https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/new-intel-core-processor- combine-high-performance-cpu-discrete-graphics-sleek-thin-devices/)

credit to trynumber9: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635771)

</comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a lose lose and a net negative for everyone.

1) AMD must be preventing Intel from in future building similar integrated GPUs using anything like AMDs patent portfolio in GFX.

2) Intel will be able to 100% push out any vendors from moving to Ryzen for presumably faster integrated graphics.

3) Nvidia doesn't have an x86 CPU and last time I looked - all PCs and Mac laptops were using x86.

As some have speculated maybe this is Apple telling their suppliers to jump and Intel and AMD said how high...

I'm going to be interested to see if we ever get a jump to Apple using ARM and internally designed GPUs, I have a feeling that Jonny Ive must be wetting himself over making a reasonably powerful laptop that thin.

<comment><USER10> No, I think it is win-win.

1) AMD can sell chips in high end systems where it can't compete with Intel on CPUs or Nvidia on GPUs.

2) Intel can ship a high end graphics experience without dGPU which gets them a level of graphics in a form factor they couldn't otherwise achieve.

3) Ryzen is a low/mid range chip. Even if it could match Intel's performance it could never match Intel's brand, and Intel doesn't want to match AMDs price so they will stay in different market segments. Ryzen sales will not be hurt.

4) AMD gets valuable brand recognition by getting Radeon into more premium devices which could actually boost sales for cheaper Ryzen/Radeon devices down the line.

5) Shafts Nvidia which is a win for both sides.

6) Opens lines of communication for possible future merger or fab deal, which is not so much an issue from an anti-trust standpoint when you look at the total competitive landscape of ARM, Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, etc and the shrinking relevance of x86 in the big picture.

<comment><USER11> Regarding 3): most benchmarks I've seen quote 2-7% difference in IPC to Intel. I wouldn't call that low/mid-range. Am I misunderstanding something?

<comment><USER12> From the parent: "Even if it could match Intel's performance it could never match Intel's brand".

<comment><USER13> Not with that attitude.

(i.e. argued that way this would be more like "setting up for failure" on AMDs part.)

<comment><USER10> Brand perceptions can definitely change but the reality right now is that for the past 5 years AMD has been shipping non-competitive parts and has had zero premium design wins and very little money spent on advertising.

For the average consumer, every high end system they have seen in recent memory is Intel, and every ad they have seen is Intel, and if they have seen AMD at all it has always been positioned as a budget product.

That is going to take a long time for AMD to turn around assuming they can sustain performance parity with Intel.

That is also why AMD is focused on servers and semi-custom where they are selling to technical people who are evaluating based on price/performance and not based on brand perception.

<comment><USER14> I am pretty sure the current PS4 and Xbox count as premium design wins for AMD.

<comment><USER15> There's nothing "premium" about those gaming consoles, maybe the PS4Pro/XboneX could be considered "premium" for the console sector.

Imho parent was talking about the PC sector and in that regard, AMD has been sadly trailing way behind Intel/Nvidia for quite a while now. AMD has struggled to oppose Intel's i5/i7 dominance. Similarly, they still have no real competition for the high-end NVidia GPU's, like the 1080's.

If money is not a limiting factor, then you will be hard-pressed to come up with a build that does not include an Intel CPU and at least one Nvidia GPU.

<comment><USER16> > If money is not a limiting factor, then you will be hard-pressed to come up > with a build that does not include an Intel CPU

If money is not a limiting factor, you probably look at AMD EPYC now.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, the PCIe lanes alone are killing it, never mind the increase in CPU performance. Intel doesn't have much to offer to oppose this dominance, and their at a wall with process technology (can't go much smaller than 7nm without massive power leakage) with a 3 to 4 year pipeline just to get a new chip out. Making one chip takes 9 months end to end, assuming the design is ready now, hence the long pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some thoughts from anandtech: "The agreement between AMD and Intel is that Intel is buying chips from AMD, and AMD is providing a driver support package like they do with consoles. There is no cross-licensing of IP going on: Intel likely provided AMD with the IP to make the EMIB chipset connections for the graphics but that IP is only valid in the designs that AMD is selling to Intel"[1]

[1][https://www.anandtech.com/show/12003/intel-to-create- new-8th...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/12003/intel-to-create-new-8th- generation-cpus-with-amd-radeon-graphics-with-hbm2-using-emib#comments)

<comment><USER19> If EMIB is that valuable, then they should expand it to main system memory as well as NVMe flash/XPoint storage.

<comment><USER18> EMIB requires that all components can fit on a die that can be connected to the other components like the CPU using an embedded channel through the substrate. Expansion of the substrate to accommodate other components is not without costs.

<comment><USER19> For laptop purposes, wouldn't Intel just stack 8 or 16GB of main memory DRAM, like they would HBM?

<comment><USER18> Umm, probably, but NVMe is still connected via PCIe. The whole point of this deal is the EMIB connecting RAM and GPU. And its hard, EMIB connections is mostly to do with power dissipation and throughput.

I am probably out of my depth guessing why companies are doing this with NVMe. Maybe its just that the market does not exist for it maybe its just the cost...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Intel + AMD should get together in offering a CUDA alternative/compatibility for Deep (Reinforcement) Learning/AI where NVidia is experiencing exponential growth for the past few years and they are simply non-existing there full of half-baked efforts.

<comment><USER3> AMD and Google IIRC are already working on a CUDA implementation for AMD GPUs.

<comment><USER20> How much do I need to wait until TensorFlow can run stable and at the same speed as on cuDNN on AMD hardware? I can't even contemplate buying AMD right now (gaming is not very important to me).

<comment><USER21> AMD's performance deficit is about to get a lot worse. Nvidia's upcoming Volta architecture is massively optimised for deep learning - they're touting a 12x performance increase for training and 6x for inferencing over Pascal.

I think Intel have a better chance of catching up with Nvidia at this stage. They've been on an acquisition spree and have picked up a huge amount of DL- related IP. They have immense R&D and fab resources at their disposal.

[https://wccftech.com/nvidia-volta-tesla-v100-gpu-compute- ben...](https://wccftech.com/nvidia-volta-tesla-v100-gpu-compute-benchmarks- revealed/)

<comment><USER22> That's only if you use Volta's Tensor cores however.

AMD's 16-bit packed performance with Vega is more than respectable vs NVidia's 16-bit packed performance in Pascal.

In the future, all AMD needs to catch up to Volta's Tensor cores is to build Tensor cores themselves. That doesn't seem like a major technical hurdle. I'm fairly certain that Google would be the primary patent holder on Tensor-cores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Worth noting: Skylake and Kaby Lake have been horror shows for Intel Integrated GPUs driver crashes. To add to this, some paths (like DXVA) are actually slower than Haswell.

I wonder how much of this is a fix for GPU reliability rather than GPU performance.

<comment><USER24> > Skylake and Kaby Lake have been horror shows for Intel Integrated GPUs > driver crashes

My experience with Intel iGPUs on skylake and kaby lake is quite different. They work very well on Linux.

<comment><USER23> I guess I should have clarified: Win7

<comment><USER25> Skylake and Kaby Lake aren't supported by Windows 7: [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/03/micro...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/03/microsoft-is-getting-ready-to-block-windows-updates-for- old-windows-on-new-chips/)

<comment><USER23> Skylake is supported, as mentioned in the article you linked to.

Kaby Lake's GPU is not a change from Skylake, so I expect the same problems, just in Win10 instead of 7.

<comment><USER25> >only security fixes for Skylake systems running Windows 7 and 8.1

I don't think a security fix is going to address your GPU issues. You should update to a supported operating system.

<comment><USER23> It's only been two months since the last Intel driver was released in Windows Update on Win7. The GPU is supported just fine thanks.

Also, we build systems which run our application suite controlled by a custom control panel, and we have yet to manage to fully tame Win10's intrusiveness into the operator's workflow. Even if we do fully tame it, maybe the next version will change the number of things needing tamed. I'd use Windows Server instead, but it isn't supported by ASUS on desktop motherboards. We're in a dead end and seriously thinking about Linux at this point.

<comment><USER24> I suggest just using the superior OS at this point: Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm not super familiar with the law in this area, but doesn't AMD+Intel teaming up get into antitrust territory? The x86 architecture still basically has a monopoly on the desktop, laptop, and server space. Could someone a bit more familiar in this area elaborate?

<comment><USER27> I think this would be Intel+Radeon division and not the AMD CPUs, Intel would still compete with the AMD CPU division

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Any chance this is try before you buy for Intel?

<comment><USER29> Close to zero chance of Intel being allowed to buy AMD, unless they open up x86 for others. Although if alternative architectures like ARM start gaining some actual ground on desktops/laptops, say in 20 years, then it might not trigger anti-monopoly bells as hard.

Then there's the option of Intel buying just the Radeon parts of the company. However seeing as the GPU market seems to be growing fast, it would have to be quite the offer for shareholders to agree.

<comment><USER30> They might be allowed to buy Radeon Technologies Group, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For those who are excited about AR/VR Mixed Reality headsets that Microsoft recently released, I think being able to use them with more laptops or maybe even thin and light laptops will be a great option. If you haven't tried the floating 2D desktop inside a 3D VR of the computer you're using is an interesting experience.

</comment><comment><USER32> AMD should focus on getting great support for their existing tech. If their current GPU lineup would be better supported by Tensorflow & the likes that would greatly increase their adoption. Also, more RAM per GPU guys. Memory is a big bottleneck for many models I use.

<comment><USER33> Check out the Radeon ssg. Its a gpu with a directly addressable 2tb ssd built into the gpu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Next new desktop / graphics card purchase (hell, throw in a VR headset/gun- style controller, an android horse[0] and a real Mongolian saddle[1]) = _Mount & Blade: Bannerlord_[2], IMHO set to be the best game in decades. No bandwidth for thought until then. :)

[0] Played a cowboy game on one of these in a Shenzhen VR house, most fun I've had in years! Just don't look at the video of yourself playing afterwards!

[1] Cheap realism.

[2] [https://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/](https://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Is this really going to be Intel with AMD GPU, or Intel simply paying to AMD for patents instead of Nvidia, while still making their own GPU?

Somehow I doubt, AMD want to give away their APU competitive advantage to Intel.

<comment><USER36> [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/intel-will-ship- proc...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/intel-will-ship-processors- with-integrated-amd-graphics-and-memory)

AMD GPU Die + Intel CPU die on one package.

<comment><USER35> Interesting. Given it's Intel and AMD, I hope it will work seamlessly on Linux, unlike the Optimus horror.

<comment><USER37> PRIME offloading on laptops with same combination worked flawlessly for years. Its obviously work on desktop as well between GPUs with open source drivers.

<comment><USER35> Not on combination of Intel + Nvidia though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Genuinely curious. I wonder how a partnership between competitors like this usually starts off? Someone near the top (i.e. mamagement) of each company say "Hey, we are behind on this. Can we borrow it?". Or their staff talk and suggest it up? Or else? Does this happen all the time but few would only make it through? Or these discussions rarely happen?

</comment><comment><USER39> This prove how dominant Nvidia is, Intel and AMD is literally shaking in their boots to even consider partnering up to attempt to defeat a common enemy

<comment><USER40> Is Nvidia that dominant? I don't have any numbers, but I'd be surprised if they had more GFX cards installed than Intel. In the high-end market, sure, but that's not a very big part of the whole story.

And as for game consoles, both Xbox One and PS4 uses an AMD. Only the Switch uses NVidia.

<comment><USER41> Comparing dedicated graphics cards to integrated graphics and then claiming intel has more chips installed than Nvidia is asinine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ok, I haven't read the article, on mobile... But Intel and AMD shouldn't be aligning on anything. This sounds extremely anti-competstive.

Nvidia should get an automatic x86 license.

Actually, I have a proactive anti monopoly idea. Any company that is the predominant player in a market cannot use patents to limit the ability of a competitor to make a compatible product.

This would mean anyone could make x86 chips w/o a license.

<comment><USER43> There are rumours and speculation about this, but my reading into it is that this is going to be a single SKU (maybe 2 or 3 variants), possibly for a single customer.

My best guess is Apple -- they were already using Intel CPUs with AMD GPUs, and they probably opened up their checkbook to make this collaboration happen. It should give them performance and power benefits, and Intel and AMD sell the same number of CPUs and GPUs, respectively, as before.

Not sure why you think this is so anti-competitive. Who knows if NVIDIA was offered the same deal and declined? They are much less prone to making "semi- custom" parts for third parties, while AMD already has a track record of doing this for Sony with the PS4 and Microsoft for the Xbox One.

<comment><USER44> Given that gaming was specifically mentioned, I'm assuming it probably isn't Apple. It's probably for products more similar to the Razer Blade Stealth. The concept of something like that is cool, but the integrated graphics are definitely the bottleneck.

<comment><USER45> I doubt gaming is really their endgame here, there are many reasons to want integrated GPU and CPU on the same die beyond gaming that would be relevant to Apple for desktop and mobile (integrated pipelining, higher memory bandwidth)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is fantastic for AMD! Intel has the largest market share for GPUs with integrated graphics. While I haven't looked into it too much, it sounds like an opportunity for Intel's market share on top of what they already have. Let's just hope that Intel doesn't pull any legal tomfoolery and steal AMD's IP.

</comment><comment><USER47> Oh, so still not confirmed officially.

Why would AMD agree to this? This would massively eat into Raven Ridge laptop sales.

<comment><USER48> Probably next Apple release cycle is the main motivation, but who knows?

<comment><USER49> I'm actually quite surprised Apple didn't go with Ryzen/Threadripper already in their Mac Pros, considering what a huge multi-thousand dollar margins that would have offered them (at least if they went with the same absurd prices as the Xeon Mac Pros). And they could've still claimed a significant boost for their Mac Pro performance compared to the old Intel chip in the last generation.

They could've also replaced all of their dual-core laptops with quad-core Ryzen APUs for about 2-2.5x increase in both CPU multi-thread performance and GPU performance. And I don't think it would've cost them more, or not significantly more at least. AMD seems to price their cores at 50-60% of Intel's cores.

<comment><USER50> Isn't thickness and therefore heat dissipation and power consumption paramount in Apple's laptop line? AMD struggles in all those areas as far as I know.

<comment><USER49> AMD's latest chips and APUs are more efficient than Intel's. You should do a hard reset on everything you know about AMD's chips that is older than a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I just got a G702ZC - basically a desktop Ryzen in a somewhat portable package.

The keyboard is crap. It has a dedicated key for a 'Look! This is my current system load. You can even connect a mobile to see it on your phone!' ROG key where a numlock would be. It doesn't have a End key, which infuriates me. There's a power button in the top right of the keyboard which I WILL press in the future. It's just a failure about to happen. The keyboard is utterly flawed.

Well.. I at least have a Ryzen 7 with 8 cores, right? Yeaaaaah... Right now the braindead EFI interface (you can switch between 'ez' (sic) and advanced mode) doesn't seem to expose a method to enable AMD-v. So ... Yeah. I have 8(16) cores to .. I don't know. Watch YouTube I guess.

AMD and Asus really dropped the ball here. The keyboard is unacceptable. The AMD-v issue is .. low. So fucking low.

Don't buy this laptop?

</comment><comment><USER52> Non-Paywall link [http://archive.is/X3vJN](http://archive.is/X3vJN)

</comment><comment><USER53> So, this might seem like strange bedfellows, but recall that AMD and Intel are both competitors and each other's customers.

AMD licenses x86 from Intel, and Intel licenses x64 from AMD (because Itanium failed to win the 64 bit market).

</comment><comment><USER54> First of all, Intel and AMD are not rivals. The only reason AMD is alive is because Intel lets it live. Intel would pretty much become a monopoly in the server line if AMD were to disappear.

<comment><USER55> > The only reason AMD is alive is because Intel lets it live.

Didnt Intel play dirty with AMD by forcing OEMS to use Intel chips instead of AMD?

<comment><USER54> That was a long time ago when AMD might have been a threat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> And the stock goes wild in exactly 10m on market opening.

<comment><USER57> AMD has a decent bump of being up over 6% so far today (markets open for 15 min). I was going to go in but read this news too late. Amd is too volatile and random to her short term they'll go up more than the current 6% bump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Superman carrying Kryptonite with him?

P.S AMD K series were named after kryptonite as Intel's pentium series were considered to be superman.

</comment><comment><USER59> Great news. The only way we will see progress w/OpenGL, and eventually Vulkan, as well as Wayland and its litany of Wayland enabled compositors is with open source drivers.

Intel and AMD seems to have seen the light of Linux. I wonder who's next - Microsoft perhaps ditching Windows for Linux and building a super GUI on top of Linux to make it an OS X killer?

</comment><comment><USER60> I honestly can't see this going anywhere; Intel have no skin in the discrete graphics game, so what do they have to gain from this? They're not really competing with nVIDIA, except perhaps in the emerging AI hardware market?

<comment><USER49> Intel has already displaced Nvidia in most laptops because its integrated graphics got "good enough". Some OEMs continue to add low-end Nvidia graphics to Intel-based laptops, even though they have the _same_ or _less_ performance than Intel's graphics, simply because they don't want Intel to think they are their exclusive supplier and can raise prices at will.

What this deal will do is allow Intel to become the de-facto leader in the _growing_ "laptop gaming" market, displacing both Nvidia and AMD from that market. AMD had a chance to dominate that market now with multi-core Ryzen CPUs and its dedicated GPUs, but it seems they've just decided to hand that market over to Intel on a silver platter.

Such a huge mistake from AMD. This is why I would rather AMD would be acquired by someone like Samsung or Broadcom to give AMD the money it needs than do stupid deals like this one with Intel because it's so strapped for cash.

<comment><USER20> I guess AMD is betting on EPYC; desktop is not progressing much and they are non-existing on laptops either, possibly blocked by Intel on the vendor level, so it's better for them to get a few % of profit instead of none from this segment.

<comment><USER61> Exactly my thoughts. I posted in a comment below (also responding to mtgx). Essentially, the laptop chips AMD can produce are still slightly better (well, cheaper) - it's just they can't get into the market for a few years until vendors are up again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Why doesn't NVIDIA build a CPU? They'd have to license x86 from Intel/AMD (since most Windows apps are built for x64) but AFAIK CPUs are far less complex (in sheer amount of transistors) than GPUs.

<comment><USER63> Because x86 is a patent minefield, AMD has a license but other companies would have to negotioate with Intel about those patents before they can do x86.

<comment><USER64> And then AMD for x64.

<comment><USER62> Yes, that's why I mentioned that in the question.

As an aside: I know it's not the done thing to complain about down votes, but I do find an honest, polite question - not even a statement - being modded to oblivion somewhat unusual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This will probably go down as AMD's biggest strategic mistake in the past decade (other than the Bulldozer architecture).

Did they at least revise their licensing deal where Intel basically adds a requirement that AMD can't be sold to other companies? If not, then AMD's leadership must be clueless. They should've revised that clause the first chance they got to make another deal (like this one!) with Intel.

<comment><USER65> As a "strategic mistake" counter-argument: It is possible that AMD would go under without this deal.

<comment><USER66> Leading AMD must be emotionally exhausting. Can you image leading a company that for so long is fighting for survival?

<comment><USER67> This is basically every startup. Many of the quiet successes take decades.

<comment><USER68> This is most _businesses_ in general where healthy and creatively destructive competition takes place.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The insane amount of backward compatibility in Google Maps - <AUTHOR> https://www.tnhh.net/posts/google-maps-insane-backward-compatibility.html <comment><USER2> "In short, it has no easy way to connect to the Internet at all. In order to get the thing to connect to the Internet, I had to fucking emulate a Dial-up Modem over Bluetooth using a Raspberry Pi."

I was more impressed by the author getting this to work than the entire article about Google maps backwards compatibility.

That dedication ._.

<comment><USER3> It is not that hard to setup using bluez if you know that you want the modem emulation mode (ie. DUN) and not the native ethernet over bluetooth mode (PAN or BNEP). Probably biggest issue is getting the pairing to work without some kind of desktop environment (modern bluez expect dbus service that handles the UI).

In 00's this was the way to connect palm devices to internet wirelessly, there even were ready made "bluetooth accesspoints" that did exactly that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish I knew that piece of information before wasting hours just to figure out I had to use the DUN profile instead of PAN/BNEP.

After another half a day I decided that there was no chance I could understand bluez system in the Raspberry Pi to make it provide DUN via the USB Bluetooth dongle. So I thought to configure my HC0x Bluetooth dongle to provide DUN via serial tty. So I went the alternative route of hacking the HC06 Bluetooth module to HC05 (or the other way around) because I only had the wrong kind laying around. I needed to wire 30 wires from the desktop parallel port to the dongle to reprogram it. And had to install Windows XP 32 bit on the desktop because the firmware programmer only likes that. It took days to get the Palm to connect to the Internet.

It was a crazy journey & deserves a long blog post by itself :)

<comment><USER3> I just wrote post to facebook about the only time I had seen BNEP working at all (and in the most complex configuration possibly and on top of that reliably), also something worth of series of blog posts (I'm somewhat fuzzy on why exactly we built that, I remember clearly that there was some bussiness reason for spending whole day on that, which either means that there was some real problem that got solved by that or it was just part of qualification test for Thinkpad T60).

In my experience whether the dongle is connected through USB or as native UART is mostly immaterial from the bluez PoV. Another thing is that when we started playing with this disconnecting USB BT dongle reliably caused deadlock in kernel (on linux 2.4.25 or something like that, about half a year before first realy usable 2.5.x kernels)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For years I refrained from doing a post like this because I feared (and still fear) that somebody at Google will notice what is going on and shut the old APIs down.

"What? server XYZ still works!? Mel was supposed to turn it off in 2010!"

The J2ME midlet has been very useful in the past years and I really don't want to lose it. (Ah, the pain and sorrow of relying on somebody else's service.)

<comment> Paul-ish Could this kind of backwards compatibility really be accidental?

<comment><USER5> Of course! With some defensive programming, e.g, the client ignoring unrecognized elements in the XML response while still reading the ones it does recognize, and not changing the API endpoint URLs, so long as the API output contains the values the client is looking for, there shouldn't be any reason why this stuff would break.

If the client used tilemaps versus vector data, I would expect the tilemap data to be out of date, but the directions would still be valid.

<comment><USER6> I agree it could be, usually.

But this is Google. They deprecate things with last week's milk. I feel like they have a pretty good idea of what's still running, and shut it down if it doesn't make them at least half a billion a year. I still miss many products, and I wasn't even a Reader user (so no, it's still other stuff I'm disgruntled about).

These days you can't even do a Youtube search without an account, and an account needs a phone number of course, so you have to resort to HTML scraping to do simple stuff like just using the top hit (so you can fire off a tab with some song in the background, without waiting for it to load and click a result with the mouse). There used to be an API for simple things like that.

<comment><USER7> If it's not costing like > $5MM / yr, it's unlikely someone would waste the time to turn it off, TBH.

<comment><USER8> This is exactly what everyone thought about Reader, and Wave, and Picnik, and Revolv...

<comment><USER9> If Reader was running on old infrastructure, it's very possible it could have cost more than that just to maintain status quo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This post is very interesting in a number of things besides the Google Maps.

I still have an old iPod touch, the iPad 1, and dayly use my iPad 3 (iPad with Retina). I also own the new iPhone X. But especialy on the iPad I have no use case on updating it besides it is running this old iOS, for which no update is available anymore. Because there is no update all the apps for it are also not anymore updated, because Apple requires in Xcode a minimum iOS version for compiling. So I am more and more cut off from many services just because a newer iPad does not provide more except to stay up to date with the services I use.

Comming from an industrial background where systems are running for 20 years, 30 years, and more that is really frustrating, when even 5 year old technology doesn't run for other use cases.

<comment><USER11> The first gen iPad still works with Netflix, Hulu, Plex, Spotify, Crackle, Google Drive, and all of Apple's iWork apps. Of course these are all older versions. It supports AirPrint and AirPlay.

<comment><USER12> Can you actually download any of those apps if they aren't already on your iPad today?

<comment><USER11> Yes. I reset my first gen iPad last year and redownloaded all of those apps. If the newest version is not compatible with your iOS version, It gives you the option of downloading the last compatible version.

On another note, when Apple first implemented two factor authentication, they didn't make it well known, but you could enter your password+authentication code for older iOS versions. Later, they actually added that to the password prompt.

The only caveat is that you can only download previous versions if you have downloaded any version of the same app previously. If you haven't, you have to download the newest version from another device first or you have to download it via iTunes and then you can download it from the App Store on the older device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It makes me laugh that 'insane backwards compatibility ' now adays means that 10 year old software still works.

<comment><USER14> It may make you laugh, but when I was homeless, someone gave me an outdated iPad thinking that would help me out. It was essentially useless.

A lot of people who have old phones have them because they can't afford anything newer. The pressure to constantly update to newer hardware is a hardship for poor people. It de facto is one of the ways they get excluded from modern life.

I am also real freaking tired of Google apps being a suite on my cheap phone that constantly updates and threatens that you may break other apps if you disable this one. It makes it very challenging to add any apps to my phone. And my wants and needs are not huge. But Google is eating a large share of the storage space and eats into my time for clearing the cache, etc, to keep the phone functional.

<comment><USER15> That's interesting; I still use a Nexus 7 (2012) as my main mobile device. It's occasionally frustratingly slow, but I haven't found almost anything that wouldn't actually run on it. Is the iOS ecosystem worse in that regard, or was the iPad even older?

I agree with the Google Apps thing, though; my employer gave me a new but cheap phone with just 4GB of internal storage, and I'm always having to cleanup so I can install anything new. And an SD card barely helps, lots of stuff simply can't be moved.

<comment><USER14> I don't remember how old the iPad was and I no longer have it. But it was old enough that support had been discontinued for its os and I was having trouble finding ways around that. Perhaps someone more technical could have found a solution. I did ask around, but to no avail.

<comment><USER15> Thanks. Experiences like yours are why I'm always wary of the pushes to make access to services exclusively online. They're usually an attempt to cut budgets by throwing the people who need it more under the bus.

<comment><USER14> A lot of libraries don't have the latest software. Internet access is often limited to 2 or 3 hours per day on public computers. Public computers frequently do not allow for even temporarily saving images or other files to the desktop, which seriously limits what you can do in them.

I love the internet. It makes my life vastly more workable. But it makes me crazy that there is so little effort to keep the bar for entry low in terms of money and technical savvy.

Why does my cheap phone need so many apps that I don't use, that cannot be disabled and that promptly update again after I delete all the data off of them, forcing me to delete the same data repeatedly? Is this really necessary? Come on.

<comment><USER16> Some tips, just in case they help. When disabling apps, you can generally ignore the warning that other apps may break. Do not disable Google play services, though. Also, go into the account settings and make sure sync is turned off for everything, you can sync manually when needed. Finally, disable auto-update in the play store. Google apps update frequently but will generally continue to work for quite a while if you refuse those updates.

<comment><USER14> I had no idea I could turn off auto update in the app store. I couldn't find a way to do it on my phone, so I thought it could not be done. That alone should make this more manageable.

Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh man, I had the Sprint Treo and Centro and the Palm Pre. I even remember using maps on a trip I took for work to New York City, even before Apple's phone was released.

Palm OS crashed a lot too. No memory protection either. Their IDE was based on Eclipse though. That was a different era for sure.

</comment><comment><USER18> I had this same experience the other day with Google Maps for PocketPC. Still works. Smart API cross-compatibility is something we should strive for, within reason.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how much of this backward compatibility is because of the Google Maps API? I'm not sure if these products use the API themselves, but even if they don't the discipline required to have and support an external API means you don't just break old URLs without consideration. There have been deprecations in the Maps API but not many, and each with long lead times.

<comment><USER20> The JS api is more of an SDK so it doesn't expose urls or anything and doesn't have all the features of the site. There are url endpoints but they are pretty limited and I'd highly doubt it's dog fooded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is really neat, but at the same time, Google Maps/Navigation and Google Search are easily two of the slowest apps on my 2013 Moto X.

I guess what it comes down to is: they have a confined, well defined feature set (maps + navigation), which only requires a simple API to maintain. The functioning of the different versions that talk to that API is independent of that API.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is really quite impressive.

<comment><USER23> what is impressive? the technical result? nah.. the sheer will to support things like the Treo? yep

<comment><USER24> It really should not be though. It is saddening how fixated on "new" the vally mentality is.

<comment><USER25> > It really should not be though. It is saddening how fixated on "new" the > vally mentality is.

That's not a fair characterization - it is impressive regardless of the industry. I was impressed just the other day reading about Mercedes classic has stock of spares for old cars (not all parts). I would like to think the number of generations of Mercedes cars is comparable with the number of generations of Maps APIs that have been rolled out. Maintaining support for old products takes effort, and is unlikely to be profitable (directly), one is justified in _not_ doing that without fixation on the "new".

<comment><USER8> Even the usual car parts stores (Autozone, Advance auto, etc.) stock a lot of parts going back at least 30 years. My car is over 20 years old and I'm surprised how many basic parts I've been able to just walk into a store and buy (radiator, alternator, starter, etc). The amount of warehouse space in those stores does not seem that big but they manage to keep a very useful selection of parts spanning several decades. Much more convenient than going to a dealership and paying 3x the price and waiting a week because they don't actually stock the parts anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sadly, I wish all that backwards compatibility extended to keeping access to the old web client. The last few years have seen a steady decline in web client for my purposes. For example, the max of 10 via points on a route, or lately seasonal closures make certain routes impossible, even when I set the route date to a date when the road isn't closed. I also wish panoramio was still around and the photos were visible on the map. The current design for showing photos on the map is much less useful.

</comment><comment><USER27> If only we could revert to how Google Search was X years ago...

<comment><USER28> Have you tried DuckDuckGo lately? If not:

As a personal experiment (starting a bit over a week ago), I switched all of my browsers' default search engines to DDG and it's so far been surprisingly pleasant. To me, it actually _feels_ faster than searching with Google. Results seem easier to read through too.

Be sure to read about the !bangs feature and take full advantage of it - it's probably the feature that won me over most easily but the rest of it is good too: [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

<comment><USER27> I'm using DDG for probably 95% of my queries already, but thanks for the tips

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have a first-gen iPod Touch, bought in late 2007 a week after launch. Maps app still works!

</comment><comment><USER30> I wish this were really as true as the author suggests. Unfortunately about two years ago Google turned off the backends that deliver public transport directions for older versions of Maps (in particular, the version that runs on Gingerbread), forcing me to switch to the (much less stable, much slower) CityMapper to find my way around town.

</comment><comment><USER31> > The phone runs Palm OS 5. It doesn't understand Unicode. Of course, it has > no idea what an "emoji" is. When you send it a text message that has one > character outside of the printable ASCII range, it freaks out and corrupts > the whole message.

When you have one character outside of the ascii [1] range, the whole message needs to be encoded in UCS-2 [2], so it's not surprising that the whole message is illegible, since the phone doesn't understand unicode.

[1] it's more likely to be the gsm-7 range, although ascii sms is possible

[2] or UTF-16, which is outside the SMS spec, but works enough, and enables emoji, so....

</comment><comment><USER32> This is not strange at all. It is due to Google wisely use versioning APIs.

</comment><comment><USER33> If you program a modern custom web app (let's say with vue) with Google Maps you will also start to curse at it because it's complicated and frustrating to deal with. Nothing against legacy support (it should stay!) but sometimes you want to work with things easily with modern techniques.

</comment><comment><USER34> Huh, a factcheck: there was a built-in Google Maps app on iOS until iOS 6, when Apple Maps became the default: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps)

<comment><USER35> Hence this quote:

> How about iOS? Google Maps for iOS 1.0, released late 2012, still works just > fine. [And] That was [just] the first version of Google Maps ever released > as a standalone app _after_ Apple ditched Google's map solution on iOS

<comment><USER34> On re-reading, I finally get it: it's Google Maps 1.0, not iOS 1.0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The functionality of Google Maps hasn't changed much either though.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Whatsapp actually has a time-bomb programmed in the app of some sort and it will kick you out if it realizes that it hasn't been updated recently."

</comment><comment><USER11> Apple Maps backed by Google on iOS 3 - the last iOS version that works on the original iPhone/iPod Touch from 2007 still works.

</comment><comment><USER38> I mean as long as the apps are still available on the respective app store why would they stop working?

I imagine with every new major version they switched to a different Web API Endpoint and left the old ones intact. So app-wise nothing really had to be changed or maintained over the years.

</comment><comment><USER23> meh... it's all server side stuff. The underlying data is pretty much the same throughout all of those years. They just kept adding on the layers. Should be trivial for an old client to only consume subset of data that is only relevant to them.

<comment><USER39> If it's so simple, then why isn't it more common?

You say "should be trivial", but in practice that doesn't seem to be the case for most applications.

For example, Google Calendar changed their API some years back which caused the calendar display on Samsung refrigerators to fail.

Why did that seemingly trivial task of calendar synchronization fail?

<comment><USER40> The thing is that Google maps is so old and the api is so domain specific, it doesn't need to change. The data required is just maps.google.com/v2/<z>/<x>/<y>.png

There are new things like vector tiles with multiple layers of vector data, so we will definitely see more breakage with clients using that.

And the routing is response JSON also had a stable layout. It's not hard to continue to support these api because the type of data they send doesn't change. Google also versions, and accounts and charges for the api usage.

I wish there was more standardization for calendar data but many calendars, including Google, like to mess with the the underlying data and functionality, and there is not ground truth like xyz to really ground them =)

<comment><USER41> I suspect the YouTube API is similarly simple. Search to get a lost of video IDs. Look up video ID to get thumbnail, title, description, list of video stream URLs.

But they still discontinued the old API and broke all the first-gen smart TVs.

<comment><USER42> Yea, I bought a smart Sony LED TV in 2011 with inbuilt Youtube. TV still works excellent, but Sony/Google had to retire the youtube app.

Guess it was because it couldn't support Ads?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Today, APIs don't keep working for a month because someone thought replacing careful design with a bad emulation of SQL is the new hotness. They call it _GraphQL_.

<comment><USER44> Can you name an API that was deprecated in favor of GraphQL? (Considering that article is about maintaining backward compatibility while continuing to innovate)</comment></comment>


Imagining College Without Grades - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/22/grades <comment><USER2> Many top business schools today have grade non-disclosure policies that stop employers from asking about grades and stop students from sharing their transcripts. The students love the policies because they claim it increases collaboration and teamwork, but my own experience suggests that the students also love not working hard. The undergrads at a place like Wharton (who have grade disclosure) often look for classes with loads of MBA students (who don't) because the MBA students pull the curve down.

When people are going to school to learn, I don't think removing grades will hurt performance, but learning can suffer when people go to school for credentials and a job. Career-oriented students seem to listen and learn more when there's a meaningful grade waiting for them at the end of the semester.

<comment><USER3> I don't give a shit about my grades, but I still go to class and work hard because I want to learn more. I want to be the best. This is because, ultimately, my success in the startup world will depend on what I learn.

But I may be an exception.

<comment><USER4> _But I may be an exception_

You're not the only one, buddy.

<comment><USER3> It's good to hear that.

<comment><USER4> This atlas ain't gunna shrug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think they should at least move away from reporting overall GPA. I know too many people that were taking easy classes or professors to keep their GPA up. No one else benefits from that move. Moving away from grades probably makes sense too. Unfortunately classes are too unique to have simple objective standards and there is no way for anyone to make useful sense of them.

The overall goals of grades, to measure students knowledge of the subject is only useful if you are comparing a student with another student who took the same class from the same professor. Since no one really needs that limited of a comparison, a more objective standard is needed.

That's why programs with specific

<comment><USER6> There are some students who are now saying that paying attention to your overall g.p.a. is counter productive. Cal Newport just recommends that students find the best way to learn the material, and focus on grades from tests and homework. In other words, focus on the process and use the short term results for feedback, don't stress about the long term results

He wrote a book on doing well in college, and interviewed about fifty straight-A students. Oddly enough, the ones who payed the most attention to their overall g.p.a, for example dropping courses before they affected their g.p.a., did the worst. Link: [http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/11/14/the- unconventional-sch...](http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/11/14/the- unconventional-scholar-ignore-your-gpa/)

<comment><USER7> I knew a kid who desperately wanted straight A+'s. He was really sharp, and took physics and math. But when he got to third year, quantum mechanics loomed ahead, and, reportedly, he wasn't sure if he could ace it. He abandoned physics, and switched to chemistry.

He did, in fact, get a perfect 4.3 GPA. But I think it left marks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The age-graded system is a dehumanizing legacy of the industrial revolution. It has nothing to do with teaching people how to think but was purposed to shoehorn people into "productive" career paths. "Liberal arts" education today is structurally flawed in such a way that people only receive incoherent bits of information without ever learning to think cohesively.

So you end up going to class and learning to recite Maslow's theory in Psychology, History, Poli Sci-- they just dump information on you without seeing how any of it is inter-related.

I'm just hopeful that the new economic reality will reveal the education system for what is really is-- in most cases-- doing more harm than good.

<comment><USER9> I agree that grading has nothing to do with teaching people how to think, but that doesn't mean it's not useful. As a student, I would hate not to get feedback on my performance. Also, I've definitely gone over and above on assignments when extra credit was possible, and that has often forced me to learn more than I would have if things were, say, pass/fail. Sure, I could have had the discipline to go above and beyond anyway, but honestly, having an artificial motivator is nice sometimes.

And if I were an employer, it would make it much harder to determine who to interview. If you remove "dehumanizing" numbers like grades and test scores from resumes, how does Google (for example) know whether to interview you, who had a 3.8 CS GPA and a 1550 SAT, over the guy who slept through class, turned in code that didn't compile, and can't explain the difference between = and == (yes, I knew people like this as an undergrad)?

That said, this is all from the perspective of an engineering student. I suppose it's much harder to quantify performance for the liberal arts (which is probably part of what initially pushed me towards engineering, now that I think about it).

<comment><USER8> Yes, feedback is hugely essential. It's more of a question whether feedback should come as an impersonal mark on a paper that provides minimal direction, or if it should come from a person who knows your unique strengths/weaknesses and can direct you in a way that will help you thrive.

As for SAT/GPA, they are terrible indicators of an individual's effectiveness. Hackers know this intuitively. (because so many of them drop out!) It's this use of artificial measurements that makes "MBA types" so despised.

If those 4 years has been spent developing real projects and interacting with real people (more like an apprenticeship than modern corporate-education) then you wouldn't need artificial measurements because people would graduate with a body of meaningful work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why "imagine" college without grades, when there are plenty of (healthy, well- functioning, accredited) colleges without grades out there, with decades of experience?

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but don't those also tend to be schools with vastly different curricula and non-traditional teaching methods?

For instance, I know about Hampshire College. I know there are other examples. But if you're a traditional school, the prospect of removing grades but not changing too much else may be too difficult to fathom. They might, rightly, see grades as tied to their identity. Change one and you change the other. That may sound absurd, but I understand it especially when institutional inertia often spans tens of decades if not over a century or more.

<comment><USER11> Brown is one of the more famous universities that offers something of the sort.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_University>

<comment><USER12> Brown does offer grades -- A, B, C and No Credit. No Credit in a course does not appear on the transcript as a fail, it simply disappears. If you didn't get credit in the course, you didn't get credit, no penalty for trying something and bailing.

[Edit: Additionally any course may be taken Pass/Fail, so students who prefer a no-grade experience can have it.]

It's a good compromise between grades and no grades. There's still numerical feedback for those who need it (and for those whose future grad schools or employers need it) but it is in broad buckets.

It's not that hard for professors to group their students into a couple of broad categories. I always felt when I got a B or C that I knew exactly why.

As a result of the relaxed system, Brown is one of the happiest and most curious campuses among its traditional peers. The psychological difference between the students at Brown and friends who would visit was always striking. It reminds me of pg's controversial essay about the differences between hacker employees and hacker founders.

Of course, I went to Brown so keep your salt shaker handy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yale Law School, which is consistently rated as #2 after Harvard, has pass or fail w/no grades. The implication is that getting in is enough to "signal" your "quality" on the market. Compare this all other law schools where students are mercilessly ranked based on a bell curve.

<comment><USER14> I always thought it was Harvard which was consistently rated #2 after Yale.

<comment><USER13> You are right; I had it reversed. I will add that Harvard Law is switching to a pass/fail system in 2009.

<comment><USER15> And Stanford Law switched this year. They have a no-pass/pass/high-pass system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd rather imagine college with a reasonable grading system. Your grade should be EITHER the average (weighted, perhaps) of your homework and test scores (like most grades are now) OR the average of your test scores, whichever is higher. This would allow people who understand the material to not waste time doing homework so long as their test scores are satisfactory. Also, assignments and tests should be hard enough that getting a 50% on them isn't considered failing; grade inflation is rampant and frankly stupid. Letter grades should be done away with, or only used as a shorthand way of expressing a final grade: making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic. GPA should be done away with. Nearly all university grades are done on a computer, and computing the average of a decimal percentage is no harder than assigning a score for letter grades and computing the mean of those on a scale of 4.0 (or 5.0, etc.). Also free beer at college would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER17> Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

\-- Emerson

</comment><comment><USER18> My medical school, like most top medical schools, did away with grades in the first two years. Every student _does_ take the same class from the same professor. The professors can still calculate an ordinal rank order of the students because they have all the test grades. And it's mostly trivial anyway because the residency programs aren't nearly as interested in your grades as they are in your standardized test scores.

The only thing that happened when we did away with grades was that the students lost the only quantitative feedback they had. We even had professors in the beginning refusing to give us our test scores.

<comment><USER6> How has this affected acceptance into residency programs? Do students mostly use recommendations while applying?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I went to The Evergreen State College, which is the only public gradeless school I know of. Instead of grades, everyone writes narrative evaluations of themselves and their cohorts. Nearly everyone takes one fulltime multi- disciplinary course at a time.

What often ends up happening is that professors will attempt to be rigorous by tying awarded credit in a section of the class with the % of the work you turned in -- but then if they take credit, they excise the portion of the evaluation that would have described your failings.

</comment><comment><USER20> So because of grade inflation, colleges want to get rid of grades. Ok, sure, rather than give the grades earned and hurt those poor freshies' feelings (and get the calls from mad mothers), we'll just give some sort of general evaluation of success. Oh wait, now professors are inflating the evaluations.

</comment><comment><USER21> As a related question:

Could you learn as much taking a free course online (MIT OpenCourseware or Stanford's free courses)? No grades, no need to hand in assignments, no mandatory exams.

I'm trying it as an experiment right now. Any bets on whether I finish the course and/or learn anything?

</comment><comment><USER3> My experience is that your parents and teachers _won't allow you_ not to care about your grades. I'm in an elite school right now and am trying to ignore grades. However, I'm finding the powers that be are really trying to stop me from learning for its own sake.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd love to see grading and ranking and sorting separated from teaching and learning. IMO grading (as opposed to guidance and correction) is destructive to real learning.

At the least, we should separate the teacher from the grader. To me it is just nutty that the person who teaches should be the one who proclaims how well the student has learned.

</comment><comment><USER23> In other news, people standing on their toes makes measuring height meaningless. Therefore, we should stop measuring height.

<comment><USER24> Clever analogy, but it oversimplifies the problem. There is a precise standard unit for height, but it's impossible to create a precise standard unit for knowledge.

<comment><USER23> Problem: measurements are noisy, biased, and sometimes vague.

Solution: stop measuring stuff?

Height is a good measurement because it is standardized and objective: I stand on my heels, fully erect, adjacent to a ruler. The marking parallel with the top of my head is my height.

What we should be doing is trying to bring grading to a similar level of objectivity and standardization, not throwing it away completely.

<comment><USER24> I thought that standardization would be the solution, too, until I realized that that would just make it worse. There are whole industries around getting people higher marks on standardized tests like SAT, LSAT, MCAT, etc.

It really depends what role marks play. If they are used exclusively as a guide to the student of how much they are absorbing, then they could be useful because people would have no incentive to game them.

<comment><USER23> For a sufficiently well designed test, the easiest route to higher marks would be actually understanding the material. The SAT sucks, and is easy to prep for. The only way to prep for the "standard" (1) calculus exam given at most universities is to actually get a basic understanding of the material.

If people are standing on their toes in a height test (perhaps because Princeton Review told them to), the problem is not the use of standardized inches. The problem is that we aren't forcing people to stand on their heels. And even a bad test isn't useless; most people on their toes are shorter than me on my heels, and the bad height test will reflect this.

(1) Even though there is no official inter-university standard calc test, they are pretty much all the same.

<comment><USER24> Ok, I agree on that point. As long as the institutions are honest (or dishonest institutions are punished), a test that forces students to stand on their heels is a good solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The problem with not having grades is that the students who are best at social interaction will tend to do better than those who are not. Scores need to be objective, not subjective, and scores are necessary to give an impression of a persons ability, when he later applies for a job.

<comment><USER8> But the real problem here is that we treat everyone the same. Who wants a C- doctor vs. an A+ doctor?! If you really cared about the unique differences in people then one person would take 2 years, and another person would take 6-- but when they finished they would be competent. Unfortunately, treating people like machines by grading them is really just a form of _moralism_ that tries to categorize and rank people. We love to justify our existence by comparing ourselves to others, and "objective standards" provides nice self-validation.

<comment><USER25> If a guy took 6 years to learn how to program and another guy took 6 months, the 6 month guy will be more productive when we decide we are going to use a brand new language. People ARE machines - but a lot less reliable and much softer. It's not moralism to want to categorize people, it's efficiency. The process of categorization is weak, but it's better than none at all.

I much prefer that I be ranked on my grades objectively, than I be ranked on something else like 'he attended oxford', because the second is likely due to the wealth and influence of my parents.

When a professor gets to subjectively evaluate a student, who do you think will fare better, the student who speaks like him, also plays golf and whose parents attend the same country club, or the other ghetto dressing slang talking student?

An exam is hard and objective. It speaks the truth, because it's judgment is cold and not affected by any preconceptions.

Excellence should always be as objectively graded as possible, because humans have too many biases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When I was a kid-nerd, adults would ask me what I would like to do when grown- up. You know, in the manner they do this to be polite. And I figured, when I respond "I want to go to university and study!" they would smile and be happy. So there I had my slogan. Thing was: I also meant it. I imagined a place where I could work on projects of my own choosing as opposed to the stuff the teacher would come up with. That's what I thought means "to study". You are completely free, choose your subject and fight to master it and achieve great things that are a blessing for humanity. Oh, well.</comment>