Gigabyte ThunderXStation is the first ARMv8 workstation PC - <AUTHOR> https://liliputing.com/2018/03/gigabyte-thunderxstation-is-the-first-armv8-workstation-pc.html <comment><USER2> Interesting. Regarding "competitive" pricing, I've always found that "call for quote" is synonymous with "unaffordable".

I wish this blogger would've called for a quote, it seems like a minimal amount of "journalism" to bring a real addition to the article beyond regurgitating a press release.</comment>


Technical angel - <AUTHOR> https://www.boldport.com/blog/?p=475

<comment><AUTHOR> So, is there a need for formalizing this kind of role?</comment>


Announcing HAProxy 2.2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.haproxy.com/blog/announcing-haproxy-2-2/ <comment><USER2> I have enjoyed using HAProxy for my own projects. Currently on 1.9.15. I tried moving to 2.x, but my ACL's broke when I changed to HTX. "%" started matching everything. Maybe I just need to escape it now. The silent-drop no longer closes the connection silently on my side in 2.x. (5.7.7 kernel may be part of this equation). I've not had time to debug it really. I would love to move to 2.x for the enhanced options around caching.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, that is the first I have heard of a "%" matching problem. You might want to join the community on IRC/Slack and share your config. I'd be more than happy to give you some pointers around upgrading to 2.x.

<comment><USER2> Thankyou, I will certainly look into joining the IRC channel.

<comment><USER3> Freenode #haproxy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very exciting times! Author of blog post here I'd be more than happy to answer any questions about this release.</comment>


To deflate the cryptocurrency token bubble, fix the market cap indicator - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sia.tech/want-to-deflate-the-token-bubble-fix-the-market-cap-indicator-d50f7f1e1ec4 <comment><USER2> If you want your token to be used as money, the only relevant metric is liquidity: how many USD/EUR/etc. are deposited into exchanges, bidding on/selling for the token in question right now?

To prove my point, imagine I have created a crypto currency with 2^128 currency units, and I sell you one currency unit for a thousandth of a cent. Result: my crypto currency is now the "biggest" in the world, with a market cap of ~10^35 USD.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been following Siacoin development very closely for the last couple of months. Their devs seem like one of the few remaining people in crypto that actually care about developing a working product/coin, vs just abusing the unregulated market and getting filthy rich.

Kudos to the team for getting on the front page of HN. I'm sure this will raise awareness of their product at least a little bit. Just looking at the coin itself, looks like it jumped 10 points since this blog appeared.

<comment><USER4> For those that aren't following it seems that siacoin is looking to provide an efficient distributed storage network made up of individuals that offer a contact to store data. To offer the contract the host puts up collateral that will be given to the renter if the host fails to provide a proof of storage (my guess before reading the paper is that the contract gives a hash and a file size and the host is responsible for giving a file of that size and that hash if there is a dispute).

Seems cool. I have an always on computer & ~100 GB free, I might experiment with running a node.

<comment><USER5> >my guess before reading the paper is that the contract gives a hash and a file size and the host is responsible for giving a file of that size and that hash if there is a dispute

Close! Sia uses Merkle trees to construct the storage proof. The storage contract specifies the Merkle tree root hash. The host must then provide one of the "leaves" of the tree (64 bytes of actual data), along with the other subtree roots in the tree necessary to construct the root hash. The consensus algorithm can then verify that by hashing the leaf and combining it with the other subtree roots, the top-level root can be obtained. This is a lot more compact and efficient than sending the entire file contents. The only trick is selecting _which_ leaf to demand from the host -- if it could be predicted in advance, the host could cheat and store less data. But it can't be purely random either, since all nodes on the network need to pick the same leaf to arrive at consensus. So the leaf is chosen using existing entropy in the blockchain (e.g. the hash of the last block), so that it's both deterministic and difficult for an attacker to control.

<comment><USER4> Neat!

When I first learned about bitcoin I spent a fair bit of time navel gazing about how to make something like siacoin. Excellent to see an ostensibly well made implementation.

Any experience actually using it for storage?

Also any other coins actually doing some innovative work?

A friend of mine got excited about Golem, but somehow I don't have a good feeling about that, wish I could easily short it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are these valuations really that outrageous compared to startups? Yes they're really early, but the ETH platform is a huge force multiplier in terms of decentralized scaling engineering that you don't have to do, not to mention the intrinsic benefits it has.

If you think in terms of valuing based on how far a project has gone it seems crazy, but if you think in terms of valuing based on how far away it is, that actually lines up reasonably in my mind. $100M for a decent shot at eating a big chunk of a $10-100B industry in 2-3 years? I've seen crazier things in SV.

Obviously a lot of these are scams, but there's some good ones, and I mostly agree with which ones the market has picked.

<comment><USER7> > but the ETH platform is a huge force multiplier in terms of decentralized > scaling engineering that you don't have to do

Well, we will see about that. To date, eth has been a security nightmare, and most of the experts in the Bitcoin system do not think eth has any chance of achieving decentralized scalability.

That's all fairly tangent though. What venture capital investor would grant a $1B valuation to a company with a team of 10 with no product, with a well funded competitor that has better tech (by my appraisal) and a larger general userbase, and itself only a valuation of $140M?

Ethereum itself is only worth $8B. Seems like a stretch to me to suggest that Gnosis is worth 1/8th of that, and in fact if you assume that the average speculator is not considering dilution, you end up at a much more reasonable valuation of $50M or so.

I mostly disagree with every valuation that the market has currently ascribed to any token with massive inflation or massive dev-ownership.

<comment><USER6> > most of the experts in the Bitcoin system do not think eth has any chance of > achieving decentralized scalability

Most of the experts in the natural gas industry do not think solar power has any chance of achieving scalability, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lots of people are seeing these ICOs as easy money. It is unbelievable how many people will invest their money (mostly bitcoin gains) into unproven teams without a product and barely a white paper. Unhappy investors from events like this may draw more attention of the SEC or CTFC.

<comment><USER9> It's not mostly Bitcoin gains. Lately people are buying over 100,000,000 USD worth of Ether per day with mostly fiat (and not Bitcoin) in order to invest in these ICOs.

<comment><USER10> Do you have a source for that statistic?

<comment><USER9> [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/#markets](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/#markets)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Spanish Price Revolution: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Price_Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Price_Revolution)

</comment><comment><USER12> "Market cap" is a basically ridiculous measure to use of crypto assets. It implies a realisability of price that really just isn't there.

Trading is too thin and the price is too volatile, even for the most-traded one, Bitcoin. Consider the recent Bitcoin flash crash on GDAX, where BTC dropped from $1184 to 6 cents - this was courtesy about 100 BTC of trades.

Then there's the Bitcoin "price", which is a weighted average ... including exchanges like Bitfinex, where the USD "price" includes a huge premium because you literally can't get hard currency out of Bitfinex for the foreseeable future.

It's a hyped number to pretend this stuff is worth more than it is and attract attention.

<comment><USER13> GDAX example is not a good one. They started up trades after the maintenance shutdown and they did it incorrectly. They allowed market trades before order book had a chance to fill up.

<comment><USER12> My point was how thin the order book turned out to be. This is why the Bitcoin price is so ridiculously volatile. Single trades, even on the Chinese exchanges, _frequently_ send the price up or down tens of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Enterprise value is better than market cap. Market cap doesn't accurately reflect currencies, which is why they have M numbers like M2.

The point in this article is that, currently outstanding currency tokens relationship to future inflated outstanding tokens is wildly different between currencies, and not accounted for in the "market cap" measurement. Thus, what many should be looking at, and aren't, is the known future inflation of the particular system.

When you understand that you're going to be diluted, your current tokens ecosystem price should reflect that knowledge. Their suggestion for better understanding what the "value" of a cryptotoken should be understood as is good.

</comment><comment><USER15> I keep smelling "pump and dump" when it comes to cryptocurrency. Perhaps when the bubble bursts the honest people will be able to get to work developing something worthwhile?

<comment><USER16> Traceability and reversibility are _features_ of our current monetary system that most users really like.

The only users who don't like those features generally don't want to have to cough up their ill-gotten gains when they get caught.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there a reasonably safe/reliable/cheap way to short Gnosis? I'm guessing not, because there's a pretty easy $10-20 million to be made here and some hedge fund probably would have done it already if possible.

I wonder if a smart contract could be created on Ethereum to securely borrow Gnosis. Perhaps with Eth as collateral. Anyone with experience building Ethereum contracts care to enlighten me?

<comment><USER18> You can margin trade on exchanges like Poloniex right now. Whether or not it's a bright idea is another matter. Even if you assume that it's presently overvalued, how can you know when (or even if) the bubble will pop?

<comment><USER17> Well that's always the risk with shorting I suppose, I just meant as safe as shorting can reasonably be :)

Thanks for the Poloniex tip though, looking into it now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is not a bubble. Gnosis value has been cut to $100MM. The markets are working efficiently and punishing ICOs on valuation. Many ICOs have failed and not raised money. The market is focusing on these mega projects and not looking at the whole picture.

<comment><USER7> This comment proves the entire point of the post. The Gnosis token is currently trading at more than 3x what it sold for during the pre-sale. It has gained in value A LOT, and people don't even realize that Gnosis is a success story. The price hasn't been cut at all.

The originally advertised $300M valuation included the dev tokens. The $100M you reference does not. To compare to the dev tokens, check this chart (putting the current full valuation at $960M):

[http://coinmarketcap.com/assets/views/market-cap-by-total- su...](http://coinmarketcap.com/assets/views/market-cap-by-total-supply/)

<comment><USER19> I apologize. You are right. I don't think Gnosis is healthy for the market. The incentives of the ICO were very misaligned. However, I still think the team is very strong and the potential is there. The market roots out companies that aren't up to snuff. Once you go below the top 20 crypto assets, the market starts dropping off fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sorry, what is this about? The first 2-3 paragraphs are almost incomprehensible.

<comment><USER21> The context is tradeable tokens that are built on top of cryptocurrency platforms like Ethereum.

<comment><USER22> So nonsense squared, then.

<comment><USER17> There is $30+ billion currently invested in cryptocurrencies. While the masses may still not know very much about it, I think we're beyond the point where any individual educated in how they work can reasonably call it nonsense.

<comment><USER23> Really? During the housing bubble a lot more money was bet on nonsense. During the first Internet bubble a lot of money was bet on nonsense. $30 billion is nothing for the purveyors of nonsense.

<comment><USER17> That's a fair point, $30B is certainly not sufficient to disprove nonsense. However, I think it does raise the bar somewhat for the amount of evidence needed to claim nonsense.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Public APIs Collection - <AUTHOR> https://public-apis.io/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of xmethods.net back in the day: [http://web.archive.org/web/20020124061759/http://www.xmethod...](http://web.archive.org/web/20020124061759/http://www.xmethods.net/)

When I saw that I knew APIs were going to be a thing. Wasn't in a position to capitalise on that belief.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is amazing. Thanks for sharing me this link. I'll explore more about this website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very nice. Also, check out [https://github.com/public-apis/public- apis](https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis). There might be some new ones to add.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'll check this out for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good job! Reminds me of this: [https://public-apis.xyz/](https://public- apis.xyz/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Would be cool if you could filter by open-source projects

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted. I'll add these filter options soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there an API?</comment>


Does Engineering Education Breed Terrorists? - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/Does-Engineering-Education/235800 <comment><USER2> This is the dumbest headline I have seen in a while on hackernews!

<comment><USER3> How do you feel about it in the context of the article.</comment></comment>


Rate my App HN: Minimal daily journal app. Just start typing. - <AUTHOR> http://motodiaryapp.com

<comment><USER2> Super simple. It just works. Given that it's a journal, it might be worth thinking about how you would suggest to users that this service will be around for longer than a few months, or how they can export their data to another service in the event that this goes down. I wouldn't want to start keeping a journal on a site that may be gone tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to force my hard-disk to sync every half-second. Not so very desirable on a mobile device. For reference, I am:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.59 Safari/534.3

Please do email me if you'd like more details.

<comment><USER4> It says that it's saving my work to local storage once per second. I do love having seamless backups of my deathless prose, but this seems like overkill to me. There are limits to how many brilliant thoughts I can type per second. Every ten to fifteen seconds is probably fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear you guys. Just trying to avoid the situation where you type something, then close the tab shortly thereafter and lose what you typed.

<comment><USER4> I said to myself "man, isn't there a way to catch the tab close event in JS"? And, lo, Google provides:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/138411/catching-a-tab- clo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/138411/catching-a-tab-close-event- in-web-browser)

Mind you, I'm not the one who is going to have to debug this stupid idea cross-browser, so please forgive the suggestion if it turns out to be stupid. ;)

<comment><USER3> And a Jquery specific question/answer, as I note that our friend is using that library: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1631959/browser-window- cl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1631959/browser-window-close-event)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went to click the "Sign In / Sign Up" link. It turns out that these are _two_ links. The visual design and wording had led me to expect otherwise: They're sort of close together, and worded with that alliterative wording and the slash in between, and not distinguished by color or design.

Then, worse, I didn't have a link from the "Sign in" page to get to the "Sign up" page. Even the classic, cheesy "if you do not have an account yet, please sign up" sentence would have been welcome.

Fortunately I know about back buttons. But it is still a small rough spot in an otherwise silky-smooth design.

</comment><comment><USER5> Could you explain what you see as the value over something like a google doc. Not trying to be negative, just curious where you see it going.

<comment><AUTHOR> Simplicity -- Just one entry per day, automatically time stamped. Security -- Your entries are encrypted using JS before being sent to the server, so I, as the sysadmin, can't read them and harass you as some google employees are known to do.

<comment><USER6> Don't you as the sysadmin have access to the keys though? Even using an evercookie or something like that -- I fail to see what prevents you (Your malicious twin lets say) from seeing these?

<comment><AUTHOR> The key (which is generated from the password), is stored using localStorage while the user has the app unlocked. I could certainly send myself the key somehow, but the concerned user should be able to snort that out fairly easily. I guess one option would be to opensource all or part of the js.

<comment><USER6> So if I blow away my local storage I'm hosed?

<comment><USER7> Doesn't sound like it. The key would probably be regenerated from the password and stored in localStorage again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I dig the UI. Very clean.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI for those of you who are curious how many hits you get from a post like this: 816 so far. (posted 2 hrs ago).

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not much of journaler, but I think the execution is excellent. Only suggestion: include OpenID or OAuth option for sign up and sign in, so you can have single click access if you want your own account. Should help keep that streamlined feel.

</comment><comment><USER10> A small suggestion: allow for European date formats, or change the date format so it is not ambiguous (10/1 = 1-Oct or 10-Jan?). Non-US users get their knickers in a knot about things like that. Especially when they later want to sort the data.

</comment><comment><USER11> I clicked "Try now", it didn't asked for my email. YES!

<comment><USER11> What about putting the front page as the initial content of the journal, and skipping the "Try now" part?

<comment><USER12> You could have the initial text all highlighted, so after reading the user can literally start typing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Your use of browser detection scripts frustrates me. You should test for features instead if you want to get conclusive data.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe shrink the vertical space a bit so the "try it now" button is guaranteed to be visible without scrolling..

<comment><USER14> Also, support Firefox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do :(. Right now there isn't great local js storage support in FF.

<comment><USER15> You MUST say this on the website, otherwise, it's purely frustrating. My first thought was "how dumb", and you really don't want that. Had I known this was the reason, I would understand and try another browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done.

<comment><USER16> i tried on IE8. no luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have chrome frame installed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anybody have suggestions as to how to market this app?

</comment><comment><USER17> A tiny, tiny nitpick - it's 'no one', not 'noone'.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone use discord for team chat? - <AUTHOR> We are a remote team of 8 or so, and we tried discord yesterday
It's amazing, and aside from the integrations, and teen theming, it seems way better than slack. Anyone else using this for dev teams? <comment> who-knows95 in my private life i use discord exclusively, it's great for organising all the different groups/clans/communities i'm part of.

it would be perfect for remote workers, if you have a group, and then channels. you can set access laws, to restrict who can access what. plus live chat space and other groups.

i use slack professional, but we are all in the same space, and if i wanted i could walk to a team mater, rather than slack them.

sorry if a bit rambly.</comment>


Developer Must Read: Objective-C Blocks. circa 1998. - <AUTHOR> http://users.telenet.be/stes/block98.html

<comment><USER2> uh oh. that's written by David Stes, a major troll. he made comp.lang.objective-c completely unusable for years.

if he found out that Apple had finally implemented blocks, he would definitely be finding some problem with it, rest assured. that guy hated Apple for some reason.</comment>


Existing US Tax Code Hurts American Firms - <AUTHOR> http://uplift.theepoch.com/existing-u-s-tax-code-hurts-american-firms_2325514.html <comment><USER2> Must be why they all have hundreds of billions in free cash flow doing nothing.</comment>


What are young men doing? - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/07/what-are-young-men-doing.html <comment><USER2> I dropped out of University, to build my startup called ContractIt. Peter Thiels' words about feeling like he was on a very straight-forward path with his law career, really stood out to me, and shook up my feelings about my own education and what I really wanted from my life. I had pursued entrepreneurial ventures before, but nothing had struck my consciousness as much as going to Burning Man and getting to know my friend Ismail in Uganda - I just felt like I could make a difference in the world if I built ContractIt and never gave up.

My big vision, is I believe, that we can use "productive data values" captured from contractual activity on our platform to provide the equivalent of a guaranteed minimum income for everybody on the planet. I have built a large team on a 0$ budget. We're in Alpha, a month or so away from our beta.

It's exciting, and anxiety-inducing to be working full-time on ContractIt - but I feel like I get a lot of credibility for dropping out of school and quitting my job to make it happen.</comment>


Pence Says Google Should Halt Development of Chinese Search Engine - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-pence-technology/pence-says-google-should-halt-dragonfly-app-development-idUSKCN1ME20H <comment><USER2> Wall Street Journal article on the same topic: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/pence-calls-on-google-to- drop-m...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/pence-calls-on-google-to-drop-mobile- search-project-in-china-1538680844?mod=e2tw&page=1&pos=1)

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember when Google moved their Chinese search service to Hong Kong in 2010 to end its censorship of search results. Now it sounds like they are not only working to bring back censored search, but also to link users' queries to their phone number such that the government could more easily track what an individual has searched for. If censorship was wrong in 2010, what makes this OK now?

<comment><USER4> Google needs growth. They are a public company, investors want growth. You won't grow without more revenue, you won't get Google kind growth in revenue on their home turf, over-saturated markets. This all leads to abolishing moral constraints, moving into new markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > U.S. Vice President Mike Pence sharply criticized what he said was China's > theft of U.S. technology

What? By Google wanting to enter this market? That's not theft it is called capitalism. Ever heard of that Mr. Pence?

> Pence said in a speech that business leaders are now thinking twice before > entering the Chinese market "if it means turning over their intellectual > property or abetting Beijing's oppression."

It is not like China needs any of this from Google. China is #2 in AI patents, what is remarkable given that their country consisted of a bunch of farmers and no economy at all just a few decades back. It is not like China is asking Google for help it is just the case that China suddenly is an extremely attractive market in regards of advertising cash.

> "For example, Google should immediately end development of the 'Dragonfly' > app that will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the > privacy of Chinese customers."

What do you care for Chinese citizens privacy? If I recall correctly you guys built an entire intelligence agency to collect everything possible on anyone in the world.

Awesome times we live in. Stick to writing children's books, Pence, as shitty as that was, it was better than this attempt at a public statement.</comment>


Cell phone use may affect health: California health department - <AUTHOR> http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article189586129.html <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting tidbits: they advise to never carry cellphones in your pocket, and that cell phones can lead to increased risk for brain cancer, low sperm count, headaches, impaired memory.

</comment><comment><USER2> Link to the PDF that this story was based on:

[https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/EHIB/CDPH%20Do...](https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/EHIB/CDPH%20Document%20Library/Cell- Phone-Guidance.pdf)</comment>


Abstraction, Or, the Gift of Our Weak Brains - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/abstraction-or-the-gift-of-our-weak-brains/ <comment><USER2> I've been a Hal Abelson and Sussman devotee for many years but I've been on the fence about the whole, "executed incidentally by computers," idea this year after Mike Acton's talk and digging into the data-oriented design philosophy.

As a long-time Lisp user it's quite comfortable to think of the world in abstractions and having a programmable programming language allows me to bring the domain to my code in a way that no other language can.

However one always hits the non-theoretical limits of the target platform. At that point it becomes a challenge to remove all of the abstractions to gain performance back or find difficult bugs in generated code.

It always comes back to data.

The challenge for engineers trying to decipher the intent behind code is that the intent went undocumented. It's too challenging and costly to encode those things in the source of a program. For a system like Voyager one must make conscious concessions about the data and use every trick they have to perform the transformations they need with the chips they have on that device. I don't think a sufficiently high-level language is going to help much -- even one that can synthesize a program capable of running on Voyager's hardware.

It is crucial, I think, to be able to describe and document your data. You can re-create the program from the data.

Synthesis might be one avenue if machine learning is capable of producing models that can generate their own ideas and theorems. Until then the problem space is still too large, I think, to move it out of NP. Maybe if we get the graph isomorphism into P.

But if we get that far I don't think we'll need programmers anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like their original quote doesn't support the rest of the article:

> it's time to turn back to old documents to figure out the logic behind some > of the engineering decisions. Dodd says it's easy to find the engineering > decisions, but harder to find the reasoning.

It's not that they don't understand what the code is doing. It's that they don't understand _why_ the code is doing what it's doing. Abstractions do not help with _why_. Documentation does. This is why I try to include as much of the why in the form of comments and long commit messages. Including alternatives considered and why I chose not to use them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Abstraction and conceptualization are at the core of what makes us human. Some people think technology is cold and hard and inanimate, but when I look at it I see the exact opposite.

A great way to be motivated to write abstract code is to first understand how cool it is!

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes! I often find that I am much worse at holding tons of information in my brain than my peers. I seem to be better at finding abstractions, and I think that's in large part due to necessity imposed by that comparative limitation.

</comment><comment><USER6> The phenomenon described here is spot on but the OP is being generous when suggesting that it is merely a "noblesse oblige" for the "smart" developer to write clearer code. In my experience these developers very quickly lose creative control of their own spaghetti -- primarily because of the combinatorial complexity that always stacks up when one doesn't value simplicity.

Its as Rich Hickey pointed out in his now-famous Simple Made Easy talk, "A juggler can juggle 3 balls. A really good juggler can juggle 9. No juggler can juggle 90 or 900." I know the "smart" developers the OP describes very well and they aren't just doing a disservice to his fellow programmer but to their own creative possibilities with their code.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the thesis about abstraction, but the example of the Voyager code base is a little bit contrived.

1) technological limitations, namely in processing and memory probably play a large role in some of the decisions made.

2) software engineering best practices such as DRY, KISS as they relate to abstraction have evolved considerably in the 30+ years (perhaps to some extent because the limitations of observation 1 have been lifted).

Obviously the Voyager code base still has the same technological constraints today since hardware can't be updated on a probe currently traveling on the fringes of our galaxy.

It would have been nice to have a more modern example to elucidate the point regarding empathy for peers.

In fact, the same could apply to the thought process in creating a new programming language. Take for example PHP, it was originally intended as a "Personal Home Page," taking PERL and CGI as its model. Method signatures are inconsistent, and not a lot of thought was made early on to certain points that might have been made, had the creator of this language not intended it for his own personal use. In my own experience, PHP offers less empathy for peers because many of the decisions made are from a single-minded use-case. Contrast that with other higher level programming languages where the introduction or removal of new operators is a subject that is heavily deliberated upon from the perspective of or empathy for peers.

<comment><USER7> That being said, I think it has as much to do (perhaps more) with laziness and hubris as it does empathy for peers.

citation: [http://threevirtues.com/](http://threevirtues.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think Von Neumann failed to make an abstraction, I think using the time to impact is about exploiting the structure or symmetry of the problem, and does not provide a good example of an abstraction being made.

</comment><comment><USER9> Abstraction not only has a play on science but also on the social part of our lives.

Take money for instance. When you see a great amount of cash you're immediately amazed, or when you see someone purposely burning money you get confused.

In physical reality it's all just paper. You see such paper as value (and not as _valuable_ ) without even thinking about it (we don't "process" the abstraction).

</comment><comment><USER10> > Imagine an alien race with the cognitive faculties to reason about > individual electron trajectories. Would those aliens fall back to the same > abstraction?

How am I to answer that if the assumption there are individual electrons is wrong?

<comment><USER11> Additionally, how are we to answer that if the assumption that aliens _could_ or _should_ possess such faculties is wrong? There is no finite amount of processing power that makes individual electron trajectories feasible or rational to reason about in the general-case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't have any comments about the content, but I really liked that there was a TL;DR at the top of the article to set the stage regarding what I was about to read. I wish more articles would do that!

<comment><USER13> Which is called an abstract. An abstract on an article about abstraction. Reminds me of a paper I read once:

[http://www.ppig.org/papers/20th- blackwell.pdf](http://www.ppig.org/papers/20th-blackwell.pdf)

<comment><USER14> "Null" is such a great name for a cat.

<comment><USER15> It's short for Devnull.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


iOS 12 beta performance drop on Antutu benchmark - <AUTHOR> Performance drop from 200k-ish to just 149k<p>Page 1: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tSX5Pex9lg0m7G6Dt9pdi5xoBGqhpznE Page 2: https://drive.google.com/open?id=11oCxbwk70it4QWoQ3wNX3Rh9puAQHgBD <comment><USER2> Compared to what? It's an early beta and thus probably not optimized.</comment>


Jet.com changes business plan, drops membership fee - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/an-amazon-rival-jet-com-eliminates-its-membership-fee/?ref=technology <comment><USER3> I just checked their site, and they act less like a hungry startup, and more like a don't-care near-monopoly.

Three examples:

\- You can't see prices for many items without logging in. For a site that is geared towards price-conscious consumers, this is such a silly move. Alternatively, they consider login/registration as a worthwhile conversion (otherwise they could show you the price when you add something to cart.)

\- Yet, their registration page doesn't let you create an account with Facebook, Google or anything else. If you care about conversions, act like you care!

\- Their Help is an email address or a phone number. Seriously? No chat? No FAQ? Even Comcast has this figured out. If your LTCV is > $500, there is no reason to skimp on support when you don't have traction.

<comment><USER4> It's not just on the customer side. My mom, an Amazon seller, has been trying to get in to list her stuff since about two weeks after Jet went online. No response at all.

<comment><USER5> They were at Channel Advisor Catalyst, a trade show for e-commerce channels and services. We do shipping auditing and were exhibiting; they wouldn't give me much chance to chat with them. Not that they need to talk to me, but for the nature of the trade show, it felt like they were less interested in talking to vendors and potential partners (the point of that show) than press (since the show is b2b, not b2c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One can read between the lines quite easily that they likely didn't think they could get people to sign up for the monthly fee so their original projections must have been way off. Obviously they are trying to spin it a different way in the press. For such a huge bet to totally change its business plan at the last second is quite worrisome for the future of the company, especially since the CEO was boasting just a few months ago that this was a brilliant plan and the only way they would make money.

Now they basically are just trying to go head to head with Amazon, but without the revenue stream Amazon has via Prime. I fail to see how that's not just doomed to be an incredibly expensive bust.

<comment><USER7> would appreciate if you could post a reference link to: "the CEO was boasting just a few months ago that this was a brilliant plan and the only way they would make money." Thanks!

<comment><USER6> "We only profit from the $50 membership fee"

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/21/our-prices-are-cheaper- than-a...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/21/our-prices-are-cheaper-than-amazon- jetcom-ceo.html)

<comment><USER8> Are all of the CNBC hosts that aggressive?

<comment><USER9> Yes, on average, they are fairly aggressive with the companies they invite on their shows. They are not as aggressive with the financiers they invite on their shows.

I have no direct data points to back up those statements, they are simply my subjective thoughts from watching CNBC almost every day for the last 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting fact that most people might not know - Jet.com is powered by .NET specifically F#!

[http://techgroup.jet.com/blog/2015/03-22-on-how-jet- chose/](http://techgroup.jet.com/blog/2015/03-22-on-how-jet-chose/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Why anyone would build a startup on the Microsoft stack is beyond me, but there's a lot about jet.com's strategy that I don't understand. For the time being I'll warm up some popcorn and watch in amusement as they blow through their investors' wads of cash.

<comment><USER10> Why? How about $600k of free hosting via Azure vs $100k w/AWS in the early days and a large market to hire talent from as you need to grow? You don't even need to be running .NET or Windows - whatever language/operating-system floats your boat. Who? Well here's some pretty amazing global startups based out of Sydney, Australia that use .NET:

\- [http://campaignmonitor.com/](http://campaignmonitor.com/) \- [http://rokt.com](http://rokt.com) \- [http://invoice.2go.com/](http://invoice.2go.com/) \- [http://ansarada.com](http://ansarada.com) \- [http://gofundraise.com.au/](http://gofundraise.com.au/) \- [http://ozforex.com.au/](http://ozforex.com.au/) \- [http://sphealth.com/](http://sphealth.com/)

If I've left a company out, please share!

<comment><USER11> I agree with your parent. The ecosystem on *nix is larger, more robust and cheaper. There's just so many more tools around that you'll end up running a mix-environment, which is obviously not ideal (but certainly not impossible).

<comment><USER10> I'm a UNIX guy at heart actually that works in an mixed-environment. Don't completely agree w/comment about mixed-environment being undesirable - <USER2> shops are heading down this path anyway of anything goes with the micro- services route. Completely agree with you on tooling, things are getting better in this department namely [http://octopus.com/](http://octopus.com/) && [http://getseq.net/](http://getseq.net/) which funny enough are also Aussie. My main concern re: .NET are the attitudes of companies and software developers that use the technology generally are anti open-source by default. That does however make it very easy to become noticeable from an employment perspective vs the nodejs/ruby/python/java community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had never visited Jet.com until I needed another pair of shoes.

The shoes I buy are normally $100 - 20%, at Shoebuy.com. Total was $83 shipped back in 2013.

Was all prepared to buy them at Shoebuy.com, then Jet.com came up in Google shopping search.

Same shoes, $60 at Jet.com.

Coffee filters. Normally pay $3.69 for 100. Two bags of 400 filters (800 filters total) was $7.18 from Jet.

Cat treats. The big 6.3oz bags of treats are about $3.50 at stores. Got three bags for $5.37.

 _This company will not be in business very long. Go there and find stuff to buy!_

<comment><USER13> Second that. I discovered this company less than a week ago when I needed a new bike tire. They were 35% cheaper than every other retailer. I know for a fact that the amount I paid is well below the wholesale price for that item. Shipping was free. It's like 1999 all over again. If bubble-crazed VCs want to flush their money down the toilet, who am I to stop them?

<comment><USER14> They're buying much of their selection from another retailer after you purchase at retail pricing. I can't find the article but someone figured out at launch that they were fufilling many orders at 2-5X the actual price sold (only cost of goods sold... not including shipping and logistics). They'll burn through half a unicorn in a year or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting as the membership fee was their primary/only way of making money by doing everything else at cost or at a loss to gain advantage.

There's always space for more ecommerce companies but this feels an awful lot like the VC subsidized pets.com bubble.

<comment><USER6> Especially since the "lower prices" they boast of have been shown to be mostly fake.

i.e., They just buy the stuff at a higher price elsewhere and resell it at a lower price. There's burning VC cash and then there's burning VC cash!

<comment><USER16> Are things really cheaper? I never saw any prices that made me want to buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I ordered a new wifi router from Jet.com yesterday. It was cheaper than Amazon, then there was a coupon on the site for another $15 off the order. It shipped free and arrived this morning. Based on the packaging, it appears they bought it from a Newegg marketplace seller and had them ship it to me. I have to doubt they made any money on that order, but from the consumer side I got a great deal and will be checking jet.com alongside amazon.com any time I shop online.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's never wise to boast as a startup regardless of your funding and prior success. I get the vibe that they expect success. This is such a terribly bad mindset to approach a new venture with. Starting with that much funding is as much a liability as a guarantee of winning a market.

</comment><comment><USER19> The problems I had when trying jet.com were that they didn't have a lot of the things I was looking for, and when they did, it was the same price as ordered from Amazon Prime.

That being said, I'll look again now with this announcement.

I'm not sure what their play is now without the membership fee. Like some of the other posts, my take is just to use their service to grab some discounts until they've burned through investor money.

Cynically I think this is rolling the dice to try to achieve some critical mass of users in the hope of being bought by someone like Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER20> Jet has been pretty great for me in San Francisco, but I hadn't thought it would be worth the membership fee unless you live in a bigger home with a family or roommates (I live in a studio). It's pretty great for household stuff, medicinal items, and name brand packaged food, not necessarily because it has cheaper unit prices than Amazon (I haven't actually checked), but because you can get smaller quantities of things than you usually can from Amazon Prime. I also found a few pretty good deals on other items.

</comment><comment><USER21> Weren't they were giving away a free membership for a limited time? Now, the membership is always free.

I'm not sure if they "discovered" that free is the right price for membership, or if the "giving away" part was always just a marketing gimmick / viral growth motivator. Did anybody ever actually pay for a Jet membership?

edit: I might be mis-remembering what their initial marketing was, but this feels like part of a strategy to never really make any money from charging for membership.

<comment><USER16> Probably not but I think the problem was that many people signed up as I did and never really found a reason to even make that first purchase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >But Marc Lore, the company's chief executive, said in a blog post that customer response to Jet over a three-month free trial period had exceeded expectations. The average amount of items per order was twice what it expected, for instance, he said.

So if it exceeded expectations, why do away with the membership fees? And they raised more than $200 million? Just interesting.

<comment><USER23> i guess the number of orders was less than half of what it expected haha

<comment><USER22> @Volaski, I suppose. But how did they raise that massive amount of money without a single customer? I am curious to know how much everyone employed there is making.

<comment><USER8> Raising money is marginally related to how many customers you have. The most important thing in raising money is the personal connections of the person raising it. In this case a "serial entrepreneur" with multiple high dollar value exits.

<comment><USER22> @AndrewKemendo, you are right with your post. Time will tell if we are wrong in this thread about jet.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how the guy who used ads to got those 100,000 stock options feels. I was one of the folks who got a "lifetime membership" to Jet which I already knew was worthless once I saw the prices on the site, but I also didn't spend money to get my "lifetime membership."

</comment><comment><USER25> Many of the comments on here are pretty negative.

I'm pretty sure it is partly because most startups are started in some Garage without 250 million in runway. That doesn't mean this won't work. The fact that they are in New York/New Jersey and not in San Francisco might be another reason but that also does not mean this won't work.

Just because you can't understand it does not mean it won't work, in fact it probably means it's more likely to work.

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/11/a-month-after-launch- discou...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/11/a-month-after-launch-discount- shopping-site-jet-com-becomes-4-marketplace/#.7mel8w:SgFf)

They already passed some big names in this space.

They are clearly doing something right. The near 100% growth month over month they quoted today on some of these articles is also pretty good indication that things are probably working, the fact that they had a reported million dollars in sales in their first day of opening the site is probably another good indication that they might be onto something.

[http://recode.net/2015/07/22/jet-the-new-amazon- competitor-h...](http://recode.net/2015/07/22/jet-the-new-amazon-competitor- hits-1-million-in-sales-on-launch-day/)

It's too hard to tell with these kinds of things but this is a smart decision to not lock themselves into a Prime/Costco only model and certainly not an indication that things aren't going to work.

They have only actually launched and been live for two or three months their trial memberships were probably not even up yet considering they gave everyone like six months or a year free.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is that they now have no clear path to be a real business. The growth figures you point to are irrelevant when you read the articles about how they are actually doing sales. Anyone can buy stuff and sell it for less than they bought it for and use VC money to make up the difference. People will buy as much as they can from such a sucker until the game runs out.

Their original business plan was crazy ambitious but if they pulled it off (i.e. Got enough subscribers to make a profit) it was theoretically possible. Now there's no clear plan. They have to compete with Amazon, a company that barely makes any money on retail despite having like 40+ million people paying $100 a year to subscribe to the site.

They're spending crazy sums of money blasting into a market where there is no "money left on the table." Business 101 says that's a suicide mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That was fast. I met them pre-launch at Channel Advisor Catalyst earlier this year. Wouldn't it make sense to at least go a year? They had a fancy booth, fancy swag, and they have a fancy website. No traction?

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm just curious, any success stories where business dropped membership fees or started offering free plans instead of starting with free plans and later switching them off?

</comment><comment><USER27> Everything I was about to purchase from Jet was more expensive than Amazon, even without prime. I unsubscribed from their emails and gave up with them.

<comment><USER28> There must be a heavy price difference depending on location because for me I was able to find many things that were 10% or more cheaper than Amazon. I ordered a blender for nearly half the price of the same model on Amazon for example.

<comment><USER27> Everything I looked at was technology or electronics. I don't really buy anything else on Amazon to be honest. You got an amazing deal though holy crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> These guys suck... All the products are way more expensive than on Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER30> Changes their ALLEGED business plan. Jet's products seem almost universally more expensive than their counterparts anywhere else.

We don't have any evidence they were really counting on that subscription income.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I do with WhatIsTheUSCreditRating.com? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
Yesterday I bought the domain http://whatistheuscreditrating.com because I had big dreams of making it go viral. My initial attempt at putting together a joke site didn't go anywhere last night. So now I'm thinking I would like to use the domain for truly educational purposes and try and contribute in some small way to getting people informed on the United State's financial situation and what can be done about it. I have some ideas but I'm looking for some additional ideas on what could be done with a domain like this.
Obviously the financial problem is a huge one and decisions need to be made from the top down but I still believe there must be things that we as citizens can do to work towards a long term solution.
I'll take the feedback I get and try and put something simple together tomorrow.
Thanks <comment><USER2> * Do your best to summarize the implications of the US downgrade on Friday.

* Maybe put together a quick video for easy sharing.

* Use the free $80 AdWords gift certificate to run a 5-day , high-CPC campaign (strike while the iron is hot).

* Put up AdSense for a small amount of income and put links to your main site or other projects to take advantage of the traffic.

I'm no expert in finance, but take a look at some relevant KhanAcademy videos [1],[2],[3]

[1] [http://www.khanacademy.org/video/treasury-bond-prices-and- yi...](http://www.khanacademy.org/video/treasury-bond-prices-and- yields?playlist=Finance)

[2] [http://www.khanacademy.org/video/banking-12---treasuries-- go...](http://www.khanacademy.org/video/banking-12---treasuries--government- debt?playlist=Banking%20and%20Money)

[3] [http://www.khanacademy.org/video/american-chinese-debt- loop?...](http://www.khanacademy.org/video/american-chinese-debt- loop?playlist=Currency)

<comment><AUTHOR> I love these suggestions. Thank you for the feedback. Specifically the Khan videos I think are really helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think that's misleading. There are 3 agencies, and only one of them felt that the US debt wasn't the highest investment grade status.

Maybe you should mention that, as well as what the credit ratings are (S&P, Moody's, Fitch), what goes into the decision, and how it affects normal people. Start with a reliable wellspring of information. Then I could send it to some of my friends who ask me about the whole situation.

Then put some ads :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Write the entire site in Mandarin Chinese

(I kid, I kid)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, Genius idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe post the ratings from the other relevant agencies as well? The US is still rated AAA by several other nationally recognized credit rating agencies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point. I will add those as well. Important context.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I had more friends before Facebook. Anyone agree? - <AUTHOR>

First, I don't have a blog, and if I did no one would read that blog...but I had an interesting thought today, and having been a daily reader of HN for about 2.5 years, I felt this was the most appropriate place to share it, and ask if anyone else agreed.
The title says it all, but I will explain. Before Facebook, there was Myspace...but to be honest, most of my real friends weren't even on Myspace, or if they were, they weren't constantly updating their status on a daily basis...maybe every couple of days at most I would see something from them. Before Facebook, when I wanted to know what a friend was up to, I had to call them. I could text, but it would take so many texts to have a decent conversation that I would simply prefer to call my friends. I can remember as early as 4 years ago I would talk to many friends on a daily basis for sometimes many hours. Actually talking to my friends would cause us to want to meet up for lunch, or just to hang out. So I would constantly be hanging out and talking to people, I was just way more social to be honest.
If you fast forward to today, in a Facebook-minded society, all of my friends that I used to call on the phone now update their status on a daily basis, and even provide me with pictures which before I could only see on my tiny 2 inch cell phone screen.
I know what all of my friends did yesterday thanks to Facebook. I know what all of my friends are doing today thanks to Facebook. And I know what all of my friends are doing tomorrow, thanks to Facebook. It seems so much more social right? I mean, it is called a social network? Yet, I feel more anti-social than ever! I can still call my friends - but what will I talk about? Hey, saw you went to the movies, how was that? .... I'm sorry, but already knowing the details of everyone's life just makes it impossible for my analytical mind to justify calling them.
I wonder if anyone else agrees? If anyone else has any further thoughts they could add to the discussion? Is it just me...am I the one being anti-social? <comment><USER3> How old are you? I'm tempted to chalk this up to cointegration between you losing friends (like many others) while growing older and Facebook's popularity increasing.

Its harder to make friends as you grow older, and you grow apart from friends over the years, so your net # of friends declines with time. Meanwhile, we're growing up while Facebook becomes more popular. Thus, it's easy to blame FB for a traditional phenomenon related to the passage of time in one's life.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may be right..although I do believe Facebook is partially to blame at least. I am 26...and I've got friends who have moved away, friends who have gotten married, etc...BTW I've been married myself, but I never allowed marriage to keep me from having friends

<comment><USER4> It's likely the age. At 26, friends start drifting away and it's hard to make new ones. People have less time and inclination to spend hours on the phone at this age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've help organize a number of events in and around Phoenix, AZ, and my favorites have always been the ones where there was little planning and lots of room for socializing and discussion.

Most of the time the info presented at these events could be found on the 'Net, likely faster and in more detail.

If information efficiency were the goal then that would be the way to go. But at the better gathering the talks or presentations are just a ruse to trick people into getting away from their homes or cubicles and interact in real- time with actual flesh and blood people. Serendipity takes over from there. That's why the best conferences have short talks and lots of breathing room; you want to prod people into talking to each other.

I can see the same thing with getting all your social info from a Webs site. Sure, Facebook will tell you when someone has seen a movie, but without that real-time, F2F (or even phone )conversation you miss the meandering dialog that bounces around into all sorts of areas you didn't even think to talk about until that moment.

The digital life can end up being awfully clinical. Lots of data, not much information.

<comment><USER6> One might argue that knowing all these "catch-up" details beforehand (through Facebook) could allow for more deep conservations when people meet up - <USER2> can immediately dive into the deep stuff and skip the catching up part.

Yet, as you've mentioned, small talk leads to many more tangents than what you'd usually get online. And, if you actually eavesdrop on conservations (or even look at your own), they usually start slow with small talk but eventually build up momentum towards deeper issues.Sometimes we just need time to settle in a conservation and those "what's up" starters usually help in that regard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Finally, we're starting to see through the mess that Facebook is causing. It seems so innocuous and fun at first, but it takes years until we look back and realize exactly what you're saying now. I remember having hours of conversation with friends prior to Facebook via the phone. Now, it's like it's expected that I'll "just know" what my friends are doing (after all, they took the time to post it, so they almost take it as a form of offense if I don't know what they're up to. "What? You didn't see my post about my gardening project?").

I really hope our generation figures out how to get out of this quagmire somehow. I fear, however, that just as innocently as we started this project now known and accepted as "social media", we will be too far down the rabbit hole to reverse course, let alone even recognize what we've done to our true relationships with internet communication.

<comment><USER8> _I really hope our generation figures out how to get out of this quagmire somehow."_ What is one thing we could do the reinvent the Social Network concept?

I recently asked _What to build into a better social network_ (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2586836>) I'm on a mission to build a bigger, better network.

I'm starting to see that people are longing for a social experience that is truly social. Better algorithms just aren't cutting it. What will?

<comment><USER5> _Better algorithms just aren't cutting it. What will?_

Make things harder rather than easier.

I mean, I do not want 5-line bot scripts slurping up my associations. I do not want it to be easy for Joe Blow to learn what book I last read or what foods I like. I do not want to be fodder for every Social Media expert.

Having some sort of speed bumps might help filter out the frictionless-friends from the real friends.

Facebook had that initially, to some extent, by requiring a school. Now they're icing the roads.

I don't have a clear idea on this other than a gut feeling that making some things at least slightly troublesome might go a long way to helping evolve real social networks.

<comment><USER8> _Make things harder rather than easier._ Got it.

Social media "experts" need better ways to spend their time and starting at schools with .edu addresses will help to build concentrated user bases. So, THAT won't be a problem.

Based on feedback, maybe FB's problem is simply that it's no longer theFaceBook. Its not exclusive, hardly worth my time and the structure is vastly overbuilt for what its meant to be: a people directory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can relate. I have an old high school friend that I used to maintain pretty regular contact with via email since I moved interstate. Early on in the Facebook rise we both had accounts, she still uses her's but I lost interest in it. However, to her online social interaction = facebook and we no longer email each other.

I find Twitter is a bit different though, since it is not like putting your whole life up on a page, it can just be short catchups fairly regularly. Maybe it's better in this respect because it doesn't try to take the place of things like phone calls and email in the way Facebook does.

</comment><comment><USER10> could it be you were younger?

to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld (badly) you get to a certain age and don't take on any new friends. that's it you're full

</comment><comment><USER11> That's more or less the thesis of Sherry Turkle's recent book _Alone Together_ , which you might find interesting. It's also interesting because Turkle was quite techo-optimist in the '80s; _The Second Self_ (1984) was much more positive on the role of computers (and things like the then-new BBS scene) for interpersonal relationships.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting..I will definitely check that out especially if I can find it on Audible. I would say I'm the same way. I love technology and I love social networks...I've got many friends to join Myspace back in the day, and even Facebook today...And it's only now that I've even had this realization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with you completely, and I've even said it before here on HN: Facebook (as it is now) inhibits active social behaviour. (At least among those that aren't your close friends.) Why chase down or call up "random friend X from college" to see how they are and what they've been up to when you can get the digest version on Facebook?

</comment><comment><USER13> I hardly ever log in to my facebook account. It's not really my cup of tea. Nonetheless, I can somewhat relate to your experience in that at one time I had a good friend online who stopped emailing me and then popped in out of the blue to comment on something I had posted on my website. It turns out this person had begun following my website and that apparently met their needs and they felt no need to actually engage me in conversation. This was kind of an icky moment for me. The friendship later ended.

I continue to wrestle with my relationship to such things. You can only have so many actual close friends. There are only so many hours in the day and close friendship requires sustained, on-going interaction to maintain. For this reason, I tend to think "social networks" are doomed to be shallow affairs. Yet, paradoxically, I find that I share a lot more info online than I do with most folks I know in person. I'm not shy there just isn't enough time in the day to explain some things to everyone I meet, so I just don't want to open up some can of worms. Still, I wrestle with this process where I seem to gradually be working on developing an online audience where the relationship is inherently lopsided: Other people often know a great deal more about me than I know about them. But this isn't really what I think of as friendship and I like having friends, which have been a tad scarce of late (remaking your life usually causes you to shed friends).

I don't have answers for you. Just sharing some of my own internal questions, FWIW.</comment>


Tesla Model 3 plows into overturned truck on highway [video] - tech-historian https://twitter.com/jsin86524368/status/1267304975069261824 <comment> tech-historian Likely on autopilot, since the car made zero attempt to slow down or avoid the obvious obstacle.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reading this has reminded me of the tragic accident in Florida for a truck jackknifed and the Tesla could not discern the side of the trailer with the road</comment>


Can Conversational AI bring 500M Indians online? - <AUTHOR> http://forbes.com/sites/sindhujabalaji/2018/08/26/how-this-ai-startup-is-developing-a-virtual-friend-for-indias-semi-urban-markets/ <comment><AUTHOR> India ranks 2 in the highest smartphone penetration, recent developments through Telecom Operators and low-priced smartphones have created a wave in the country, bringing ever more users online. Giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon are betting big.</comment>


Upmem Puts CPUs Inside Memory to Allow Applications to Run 20 Times Faster - <AUTHOR> https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/upmem-puts-cpus-inside-memory-to-allow-applications-to-run-20-times-faster/ <comment><USER2> This is really interesting, but note the power increase seen inside the DRAM modules.

Anandtech have an excellent analysis: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14750/hot- chips-31-analysis-i...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14750/hot- chips-31-analysis-inmemory-processing-by-upmem)

> The operation itself [inside the dram module] actually requires 2x the power > (20 pJ compared to 10 pJ [inside the main CPU]), but the overall gain in > power efficiency is 170 pJ vs 3010 pJ, or just under 20x

> One thing that this slide states that might be confusing is the server power > consumption – the regular server is listed as only 300W, but the PIM > solution is up to 700W. This is because the power-per-DRAM module would > increase under UPMEM's solution.

I'm assuming that those numbers represent "peak" power, and that when idle the compute parts of the DRAM can be power/clock gated. The implication being that if you are doing lots of in-memory analytics, you'll get a power saving, but if you switch to "something else" and don't get good utilisation of the in- memory compute, you'll probably ruin your power/energy efficiency.

I guess that means the future improvements will involve bringing the power consumption of the modified DRAM modules back in line with their "normal" cousins.

<comment><USER3> Watts are Joules / second. If you're doing operations that take 1/20 as much power each but you're doing them 20x faster, it takes the same amount of power in Watts. For a better comparison you'd need to measure Watts * seconds for a given task.

<comment><USER4> *1/20 as much energy

<comment><USER5> Joules measure energy, Watts measure power

<comment><USER3> skavi is right, in context I should have said that each operation takes 1/20 as much energy. The amount of power depends on how often the operations are done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Venrays did this in 2012 with their TOMI Borealis PIM but it didn't catch on.

[https://hothardware.com/news/cpu-startup-combines- cpudramand...](https://hothardware.com/news/cpu-startup-combines-cpudramand-a- whole-bunch-of-crazy)

<comment><USER7> I'm glad to see that you mentioned this. I had the pleasure of working with Russell Fish on a different project, and I immediately thought of TOMI when looking at the parent article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems to me that a full CPU is overkill for this; a hybrid approach where you just have some arithmetic on vectors, with no program counter or branching really, could be effective without adding a bunch of complexity.

Also seems like concurrency and data consistency issues could arise pretty drastically when each memory unit is potentially making changes independent of the processor...

And what about CPU cache coherency?

<comment><USER9> It uses a custom CPU and ISA that's specialized for the application: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14750/hot- chips-31-analysis-i...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14750/hot- chips-31-analysis-inmemory-processing-by-upmem/2)

> Internally the DPU uses an optimized 32-bit ISA with triadic instructions, > with non-destructive operand compute. As mentioned, the optimized ISA > contains a range of typical instructions that can easily be farmed out to > in-memory compute, such as SHIFT+ADD/SHIFT+SUB, basic logic (NAND, NOR, ORN, > ANDN, NXOR), shift and rotate instructions

Re. CPU cache coherency, they have a software library that automagically hides that: [https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14750/HC31.UPMEM.FabriceDe...](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14750/HC31.UPMEM.FabriceDevaux.v2_1-page-018.jpg)

Not exactly sure how it works, I'm not super familiar with the internals of CPUs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The concept of "smart memory" is good (though not new), but I think the devil could be in the process-technology details; DRAM and logic are not that compatible.

But let's hope they've figured it out.

<comment><USER11> You do have eDRAM where big blocks of DRAM are put on board a CPU as a last level cache, like in the POWER7. It does special processes features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> First incarnations of this I heard of were SLAM, Scan Line Access Memory [1]

"A SLAM consists of a conventional dense semiconductor dynamic memory augmented with highly parallel, but simple, on-chip processors designed specifically for fast computer graphics rasterization. "

and PixelPlanes[2].

[1] [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=13358](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=13358)

[2] [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0c1b/8ffdf7074a73883139da41...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0c1b/8ffdf7074a73883139da41882d1e05653123.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> This sounds sketchy. Either the rest of the industry is incredibly incompetent or they are deliberately omitting a huge drawback of this solution. And I don't see lack of expandability as a drawback, just buy a bit more RAM to start with.

Then there are NVIDIA GPUs and Intel Phi (i.e. Knightslanding)... So they are trying to sell us that neither AMD, NVIDIA or Intel have though of this "ingenious" decision to increase the efficiency obtained by co-locating CPU and memory? The fact that they deliberately avoid addressing this elephant in the room makes me super skeptical.

<comment><USER3> It requires significant changes to the compiler, so this RAM would not make any difference to existing binaries. This is a really big change in the way computers are structured, so it's no wonder it hasn't taken off before. And this isn't the first attempt; look up computational RAM, IRAM, RADram, smart DRAM, processor-in-memory.

<comment><USER14> No pun intended, I remember IRAM. Then there was Tilera and Tabula (MPPA/MIMD). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_parallel_processor_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_parallel_processor_array).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Micron has been pursuing something similar for a while. The "CPUs" that you can put on the same die, however, are very limited in what they can do, owing to the specific lithography used on memory chips, and the general lack of die space. They also don't get uniform access to a huge memory range that you'd expect from a "real" CPU, and require you to partition work to fit within the constraints of the memory access pattern they can, in fact, support. The instruction set is very limited, floating point can only be emulated (i.e. slow AF, not that you actually need it for neural networks most of the time). The upside is the unlimited memory bandwidth and very low pJ/byte, with a few catches.

Don't know if this is similar, but if it is, it's going to be a hard sell, especially in the era when 90% of programmers can't even understand what I wrote above.

</comment><comment><USER16> More details: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14750/hot- chips-31-analysis-i...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14750/hot- chips-31-analysis-inmemory-processing-by-upmem)

</comment><comment><USER17> 1980s: RAM in the CPU to speed up the CPU. 2020s: CPU in the RAM to speed up the RAM.

</comment><comment><USER18> Venray tried this:

[https://www.wired.com/2012/01/russell-fish- venray/](https://www.wired.com/2012/01/russell-fish-venray/)

They didn't get huge that I can tell. Might be a tough market.

<comment><USER16> DRAM is a commodity business. It works in huge batches.

Convincing DRAM manufacturers to change things for something at that small scale is a huge challenge.

I don't think venray managed to do that.

But OPMEM probably did.

<comment><USER19> Micron dabbled in this. 2003 project Yukon (shutdown in 2004) and again 10 years later with 2013 "The Automata Processor" (erased from their website).

<comment><USER20> Interesting. The last I can find on the Automata Processor is from 2014, when it was supposedly being delivered to developers within weeks. And then nothing. I wonder what happened to it. Doesn't seem like it ever turned into a shipping product.

<comment><USER21> I only heard of the university of Virginia getting some to work with. [https://engineering.virginia.edu/center-automata- processing-...](https://engineering.virginia.edu/center-automata-processing- cap)

<comment><USER20> Ah, cool. Seems like the latest paper involving the AP is from 2016.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~skadron/Papers/wang_APoverview_...](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~skadron/Papers/wang_APoverview_CODES16.pdf) has more information

<comment><USER20> > This work was supported in part by the NSF (CCF-0954024, CCF-1116289, > CDI-1124931, EF-1124931); Air Force (FA8750- 15-2-0075); Virginia > Commonwealth Fellowship; Jefferson Scholars Foundation; the Virginia CIT > CRCF program under grant no. MF14S-021-IT; by C-FAR, one of the six SRC > STARnet Centers, sponsored by MARCO and DARPA; a grant from Micron > Technology.

I guess the other comment wasn't too far off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at all. The paper is still interesting though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This somewhat reminds me of the Blitter chip, which first came to my attention in the Amiga 1000:

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

"A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory."

<comment><USER23> IIRC the blitter was just a normal coprocessor. I'm pretty certain it wasn't embedded in any way in the memory.

<comment><USER24> As I recall there was "chip" ram and "fast" ram. So maybe not embedded for all definitions but certainly processing chips with privileged access to a subset of memory

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here is a link to the assembler instruction set for the PIMs. [https://sdk.upmem.com/2019.2.0/200_AsmSyntax.html#assembly-i...](https://sdk.upmem.com/2019.2.0/200_AsmSyntax.html#assembly- instructions)

</comment><comment><USER25> You have to obey speed of light latency, and that means putting compute in RAM right next to the data. Key is to have a reusable fabric so all the TSMC customers can pop their own chips in RAM, especially ASICS and micro-FPGAs.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting that they went with a 32bit ISA, given the growth and demand for ML/AI, which seems to lean upon lower precision (8bit), then I wonder if they could of gone for that instead of something more a jack of all trades design.

Which makes me wonder, when will somebody do an ISA dedicated for ML/AI and will we ever see old 8bit CPU's reborn as on memory CPU's.

But we have seen this approach for processing upon memory before and whilst that has not tractioned into a product, this might. Though with Chip design going towards chiplets, ram can and may well become another chiplet in the evolution of that design process.

<comment><USER27> In what domains do people do 8 bit machine learning? Most example code I've seen e.g. for TensorFlow uses float32 matrices.

<comment><USER28> It's quite common to train at float32 but quantize down to int8 for inference. The loss of accuracy is negligible, but you make huge performance gains.

[https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/model-quantization-for- produ...](https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/model-quantization-for-production- level-neural-network-inference-f54462ebba05)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How can i get my hands on this?

<comment><USER30> There are some information on the SDK here :

[https://www.upmem.com/developer/](https://www.upmem.com/developer/) or more directly [https://sdk.upmem.com/2019.2.0/](https://sdk.upmem.com/2019.2.0/)

It seems you have to compile an executable for the in memory processor, and they have some sort of daemon/infrastructure to communicate from the main cpu to the PIM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So what are the security implications?

One would really need to trust the manufacturer.. but how?

<comment><AUTHOR> It can actually be useful for security - you can tell the DPUs to erase memory the moment the OS frees it, reducing the risk of data being read or decrypted. That's probably a very trivial use of the tech, but it's a low hanging fruit.

<comment><USER32> I suppose one could put more of an OS's work with memory into this level, too. Zero it when it's freed, but also keep the free block list updated at this level. Maybe use these processors for aggregating available contiguous blocks when necessary, too. Maybe use these processors to update the virtual to physical mappings and keep free space optimized. Then, when the application actually needs to do something close to RAM it could be given access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm not much of a hardware person but I was wondering why not do the opposite? Pair a massive amount of SRAM/DRAM with a normal cpu as l2+ cache. Or is that what they are essentially doing?

<comment><USER34> SRAM and DRAM are two totally different things.

An L2 cache is just a huge chunk of SRAM, they take more die space and use a lot more power at the benefit of running with lower latency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Where can I buy put options to this company?

20x speedup compared to a CPU looks worse than just using a stock GPU, and we haven't talked about the AI inference chips that are optimized for NN inferencing.

<comment><USER16> GPU's have limited amount of memory.

<comment><USER36> But they can prefetch data. This makes writing code for them a bit more complex, but outside of that the ram limitations are mostly moot.

This fails when data needs to be read and written randomly. However, even if the entire dataset was on vram random reads and writes would still be slow, because of the way a stream processor works. All reads and writes need to be laid out in memory in an order for a gpu to do it's best work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what having these in-memory processing units can do with cryptocurrencies. Serial processing performance is rather low, but there are thousands of DPUs in a memory DIMM.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is a great idea! I'm surprised we haven't thought of this before. Add a simple ALU in there with some request to perform some NN calculations like a co processor!

<comment><USER38> The concept is quite old.

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

[http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/](http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Sorry - I don't know much about chip design: Will this increase the heat produced by DIMMs and will they require active cooling?

Does increased heat decrease the life of RAM?

</comment><comment><USER40> How does shared memory between processes on different chips work with something like UPMEM?

</comment><comment><USER41> Seems like MemPU would be a more fitting name/ordering of letters.

</comment><comment><USER42> computronium</comment>


Silicon Valley is just a state of mind - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seedcamp.com/2007/11/silicon-valley-is-just-state-of-mind.html

<comment><USER2> _Just_ a state of mind? States of mind are the most powerful forces in the world (way more important than e.g. natural resources) and one of the hardest things about a place to change.</comment>


Show HN: Instant Collaborative Lists by Email - <AUTHOR> http://mailpad.eu/

<comment><USER2> I like the simplicity. I guess, the namespace will become clouded quickly, so users will probably develop a lot of different naming schemes - and probably forget the one or the other name. Some privacy info, e.g. "Will you sell my e-mail address" might be well received.</comment>