UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/115309653 <comment><USER2> Yosemite has been a major regression in almost every respect, I actually regret upgrading. Aside from the obvious and major performance and stability issues the major features are just plain broken. For example, try answering your phone from your computer. It takes way too long to actually pick up the call from the phone and then when you try to answer it bugs up so that in the end you can never actually answer the call. This is completely unacceptable behavior and a feature like this should have never been released unless it was exceptionally reliable and seamless.

It seems Apple is more concerned with showing off the concepts behind these features than making sure they actually deliver a solid experience when their released. Another case in point is the changes to AirPlay for the AppleTV. The new approach to connecting a device should be a big improvement, instead it's a buggy mess that makes it nearly impossible for us to use it anymore.

One of the most refreshing things about moving from primarily using Windows/Linux to a Mac for me was the sensibility, stability and the fact that things just worked the way you expected them to. Now that seems to be completely lost.

<comment><USER3> I'm at my wits end with Yosemite. I'm very seriously considering switching to Linux or Windows. Of the numerous problems this OS has, my biggest problem is waking my rMBP from sleep. About 20% of the time, it just doesn't wake up and requires a hard shutdown. I never had that problem with Mountain Lion or Mavericks.

<comment><USER4> I recommend running Linux (any stable distro) with Xfce. It's worked/looked exactly the same for years[0], and there won't be any sudden/unpleasant changes in the future either.

0: [http://xfce.org/about/screenshots](http://xfce.org/about/screenshots)

<comment><AUTHOR> While I'm (we're) critical of the regressions when it comes to UI performance, switching to linux means giving up an entire ecosystem of apps, completely changing workflows, and in some cases depending on the kind of development that one does, making our jobs impossible.

<comment><USER5> That's why for me Linux is the only sensible choice of platforms. All the other platforms means giving complete control over my tools to a single company.

<comment><USER6> So much this. I've settled on elementaryOS 0.2 (based off Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) for all my development, staging, and production environments, being netbook, notebook, All-in-One desktop, Mac mini and all my VPS servers. Software package consistency is a invaluable, and you don't even have to give up on the looks:

[https://github.com/vivaserver/MoonLion](https://github.com/vivaserver/MoonLion)

<comment><USER7> to me, Ubuntu 14.10 is still very rough. there are so many inconsistency everywhere: shortcuts, software's ui, etc...

take a simple example: usually Ctrl Q (cmd q on os x) means quit. try doing on os x will quit the app 9 out of 10 times. on ubuntu? not really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like the entire compositor has a performance regression. This includes dragging windows, and seems to have nothing to do with transparency.

When running OS X virtualized inside VMWare Fusion (which does not have hardware accelerated video drivers for the guest), Mavericks was very usable. Yosemite dropped to 2fps (measured using Quartz Debug tools).

I had to use Quartz Debug (available in the Graphics Debug Tools here [1]) to disable beam sync to make it usable again. In VMWare, this takes me from 2fps to around 50fps for basic operations like dragging a window around and _typing_.

I've observed noticeable improvements disabling Beam Sync in a native environment as well. Unfortunately, I've found no way to do it without leaving Quartz Debug open. Quartz Debug also has an FPS meter in the menu bar under "Window -> FrameMeter". My framerate when dragging a large window in Yosemite with "Beam Sync: Automatic" is around 40fps. With "Beam Sync: Disable" it's almost a steady 60fps.

A stable test in System Preferences for me is the Dock settings.

[1] [https://developer.apple.com/downloads/](https://developer.apple.com/downloads/)

<comment><USER9> I think a big part of it is the glass blur effect that they put on everything with yosemite.

I also feel that since iOS 7 that stability and quality has gone down a lot, or they got too ambitious with the glass blur effect.

<comment><USER10> The glass blur effect is actually disabled in VMware and other unaccelerated graphics devices. You can disable it on intel/AMD/nvidia too, the setting is in the accessibility part of system preferences.

They've just removed the last remnants of pure 2D acceleration support in Yosemite, it's HW-accelerated OpenGL or nothing now. They also changed the timing of screen updates, which locks some drivers at 8FPS. Finally, the rounded corners on windows seem to be broken in the software renderer.

Before you go blaming VMWare etc. for not offering an OpenGL driver: Apple doesn't document those APIs at all, there aren't even headers files. They don't even officially support writing a graphics device driver at all (according to DTS), but they provide enough source code so you can figure out how to do so, albeit not providing 3D acceleration.

<comment><USER8> At some point I'm going to attempt shimming CoreGraphics or wherever it ends up to fake 3D acceleration by proxying the OpenGL calls to the host without using a real driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> was heavily involved in the beta testing of 10.10, In my experience Yosemite is by far not only the most buggy, but also slowest release of OSX.

I am saddened to report that only one of the many performance regressions I reported was actually fixed (In that case within Mail.app).

A huge portion of the performance problems seem to be stemming from the graphics subsystem. If you use Yosemite on dual Retina or even WQHD displays you'll know what I'm talking about.

Add graphics glitches, immature theming and wireless problems to the over all poor performance and were talking about major issues in areas that OSX has been known as a leader in.

My biggest issue is that Apple seems to be ignoring most of the core performance issues that are being reported - just look at the number of unresolved posts on the Apple forums.

I do hope that Tim Cook is becoming aware of the drop in reputation that OSX has received since Yosemite and is leading his teams to perform more in depth performance soak testing before releases in the future.

<comment><USER12> Its especially bad on the 13" rMBP which has a relatively weak GPU. When using scaled resolutions the UI lag is very noticeable, i also get some redrawing issues of icons. You can improve the situation by disabling transparency effects, but that produces some graphical glitches.

In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life improved as well.

Current GPUs in the Macbooks are just not ready to handle the massive resolutions used for scaling. Just try to run a 60fps youtube video in a scaled resolution and you will see your system load go up to the point the video might even stutter.

<comment><USER13> > In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. > Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably > less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life > improved as well.

I don't think that 1680x1050 is native or even half-native on the 13. IIRC the Air is 1440x900 and the 13 rmbp is less than that (when you count the points).

This is why I keep telling people who want a 13' Mac to get the air, but sadly very few listen…

<comment><USER14> I used a 11" Macbook Air at uni before getting a rMBP. IT was buttery smooth, nothing could make it stutter on Mavericks. Great experience although the screen size was a tad on the small size. I eventually settled on a rMBP 13" (2014 edition) and couldn't be happier. Sure, i sometimes get stutter swiping through fullscreen apps or using Chrome on heavy pages but the retina and its scaling makes it so much worth it. Seriously, couldn't be happier. Reading text on this is phenomenal.

And it's not buyer's remorse or anything like that, i got it for free through a university programme and could have got the Macbook Air if i wanted to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You would think with all the smart, detail oriented, outgoing people at apple, SOMEONE would have pulled the person responsible for shifting to a yearly cycle and tell them: "look, this accelerated release cycle, it's not resulting in quality software. It's hurting our reputation. It's not performing on 2 year old hardware. People are losing faith in our ability to release stable bug-free builds. Users shouldn't have to cross their fingers when upgrading. This is Apple."

But no, that's probably not happening.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't even understand who they're competing with by doing yearly updates. It's probably a big scramble to get features released and for what? To beat Windows 8? To beat linux? They don't have any threats when it comes to desktop operating systems, so they should slow down and make some quality updates.

<comment><USER16> It keeps the size of each update much smaller and less error-prone. Each update contains a few significant changes and lots of minor ones.

It's a good strategy for a variety of reasons:

      - it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis

      - it lets apple break/disable bad apps that have entered the ecosystem

      - it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world.

      - it lets the actual periodic security updates be used only for critical fixes.  Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware.

      - Apple's biggest strength is attention to UX details.  Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.

None of this excuses buggy releases, but overall it's significantly less buggy than any similarly ambitious OS out there.

<comment><USER17> >it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis

I doubt they will be making significant changes every year. 2014 was the exception

>it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world

Too many key utilities are extremely outdated due to GPL3. Apple also seems to be moving away from free software wherever it can

>Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.

They seem to be letting the consumers do a lot of the testing (with the open beta for instance). Many features seem half baked, conceptually, and in execution.

<comment><USER18> Away from Free Software™, yes. Away from open-source software? Not at all. The MIT/BSD-licenced parts of OSX get updated all the time.

<comment><USER19> MIT/BSD is free software too. What they're moving away from is copyleft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This particular issue is probably due to process isolation and sandboxing.

In Tiger, all of those pref panes were loaded into the System Preferences app, and each pane could access all the same data as any other. 3rd party pref panes are supported.

In Yosemite, each of those panes is its own process.

That doesn't excuse it, just saying something about what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wish SL were still getting updates, it was the best OS release Apple ever made. It went downhill the moment they went to annual release cycles.

I rather wait 2-3 years for a new OS update that is stable, fast, and responsive than dealing with all weird glitches that's turning me off OS X for good. Windows 10 in alpha builds feels better than Lion-Yosemite.

<comment><USER22> I agree. I stuck with Snow Leopard as long as I could (enough software was no longer compatible). No other mac OS in my experience was as stable (I've been using system macos 7)

I'm always hoping Apple will release the next os with no new features and the requisite performance and stability updates.

My work basically has issued a blanket, don't upgrade to yosemite, but the new app update system seems to always strongly suggest it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The decline started with Lion. Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of the OS. They were able to offset or mask some of this with SSD drives. But, it has become pretty sloppy for folks that really wanted to tune their systems for performance. Couple that with the questionable changes on the UI over the last couple major releases and I didn't see anything I wanted anymore.

<comment><USER24> Adium still lists 14% of their users on Snow Leopard.

[https://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion](https://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion)

It's painful to support these days but I'm still trying keep my apps compatible with it.

<comment><USER25> Adium has had a huge decline in users, though, since then, so the percentage isn't as informative.

For example, if you look back to a couple years ago, we had ~180k stats pings for the same week period[1] as we do now at ~20k[2].

I think what you're seeing/reporting here is that users who still use Adium are not entirely upgrading. That's probably true, but has more to do with Messages.app in newer versions supporting iMessage than anything else.

(I was one of the Adium developers for years. I don't even use it anymore because of the prevalence of iMessage and the decline in general IM.)

[1]: [https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2012&week=01&graph=bar](https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2012&week=01&graph=bar) [2]: [https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2014&week=51&graph=bar](https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2014&week=51&graph=bar)

<comment><USER24> That's too bad Adium is in decline. I've always tried to not rely on Apples built in messsaging and hoped a lot of other users still felt the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I hadn't noticed any perceptible performance differences in Yosemite on my 2011 MBP.

After reading this article, I opened up System Preferences on an external WQHD monitor and... yes, indeed. That transition is _not_ very smooth. Informally, it doesn't seem slower ...it's just not as smooth as the old effect.

As another poster noted, in Yosemite those panels now use a cross-dissolve effect instead the simpler slide and fade in earlier versions of OSX.

Thing is, I'm not sure I would have noticed this in a million years.

How much time do you guys spend clicking around in System Preferences every day? This really affects you?

I don't know of any other apps with preference panes that use this effect. I tried two other apps (iTunes and Pages) and neither one uses the cross dissolve.

I understand that this small regression is merely emblematic of the issues some of you are experiencing; none of you are claiming that System Preferences itself has a huge impact on your daily lives. But this is such a ridiculous regression to select as the poster child for Yosemite's perceived woes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree the example I posted is ridiculous. Let me explain why I did it.

I was a hackintosh user for years. I got an old lenovo from 2007 with an intel core 2 duo and thought it would be fun to install OS X Tiger on it. Install went smoothly except the intel integrated graphics wasn't supported.

I decided to check out System Preferences to see how much had changed in all these years. I immediately noticed this perfectly smooth animation between panels. I couldn't believe it was so slow - and with no graphics driver! So I tried it on my rMBP and it was incredibly laggy. I just quickly recorded it with my phone and thought I'd show just one small part of OS X that really represents a much bigger picture of UI performance regressions.

<comment><USER20> Hm, I don't think this is a good example if the point is to talk about general graphics slowness, because the slowness here is not due to generic graphics issues.

This is slow because each pane is running in its own process and it's doing some complicated cross-process graphics stuff to get all the drawing into the same window. This changed in… maybe Lion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting. The flashing at least seems to be an isolated System Preferences bug, as I don't remember seeing it in any other applications.

Would be better to compare a larger number of UI interactions - Finder, Safari, Exposé/Mission Control, iTunes, etc., to more clearly establish a pattern rather than just claiming it anecdotally. Not saying the pattern isn't there, but proving it would be a breath of fresh in air in an area typically so subjective and dominated by perceptual biases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tiger didn't have Mission Control, but I certainly think there are other tests that could be done that really compare all aspects of the OS.

I can tell you that Mission Control is, at times (far too frequently) extremely laggy for me on OS X Yosemite. Couple that with apps leaking memory, leaving me with mere megabytes of free RAM, and my top of the line rMBP slows to a crawl.

<comment><USER28> Dashboard has become virtually unusable in Yosemite. "Laggy" is an understatement. If I'm activating it after a restart, it can take a full minute for the widgets to become active. The same selection is available instantly in Snow Leopard. Thank goodness I've got a partitioned drive, and can switch back and forth between Y and SL as needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not sure what everyone is talking about, I loaded Yosemite on my 3 macbooks (2010 11" air, 2011 13" air, and 2014 13" pro) and it works perfectly on all with no glitching whatsoever.

<comment><USER29> Could be a retina thing. I see it on my MBPr 15 2013.

<comment><USER30> Same here with the MBPr 15" 2012.

I recommend a clean install of Yosemite. After upgrading from the beta versions to the final release, I still had UI elements misplaced (e.g. the address bar in Safari was 1/3 the width and stuck on the left edge).

A clean install fixed the UI alignment and some other minor quirks. I still notice occasional black squares in Safari which cover a portion of the screen; a page refresh seems to resolve the issue. But Firefox developer edition, on the other hand, is snappy and responsive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> While loitering in the local Apple store, I got on a new 5k iMac and started launching a bunch of applications with multiple windows, alt-tabbing and clicking around really fast, etc. Normal dev workflow stuff..

Discovering the glitchy flash in the system preferences pane was really unsettling. Almost a uncanny valley type situation.

I'm still on Mavericks. I've been waiting for bug fixes from Apple and application support for non-Apple apps before upgrading to Yosemite. But after seeing the glitchy-ness on the 5k and reading these comments..

Both recent upgrades are pretty disappointing. When I first got an iPhone 4, I was astonished by how there were practically zero bugs, especially compared to my previous no-name OS, bug-infested phones.

Are there actually more bugs in Yosemite/iOS8? And if so, can we identify potential factors?

Technical challenges shifting to Swift? Regular product life cycle growing pains? Decreased focus on OSs from Apple Increased product-lines/technologies? Pivot from price-skimming to market-capture business strategy?

<comment><USER29> > _Are there actually more bugs in Yosemite /iOS8? And if so, can we identify > potential factors?_

No. There are some bugs and some glitches, like in every release.

Nothing to write home about, except from a small percentage of the population with a Mac from a faulty production run (but that's hardware, not the OS), or with some software that's hogging the cpu (but that's the software, not the OS).

I have this flashing in System Prefs -- it's a small annoyance, but nothing especially interesting or getting in the way. There are 2-3 more bugs. And some things introduced

I was there from OS X 10.2. People have complained for every single OS X release...

<comment><USER32> Haha 10.2, yeah in 10.2 you were lucky if you could get something working after 30 minutes in bash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Earlier this year, around 3 months ago, when i bought my brand new Macbook Pro 15" Iris Pro (the one without discrete graphics card). I was i disappointed in the performance of the UI, and i uploaded 3 videos to showcase the problems.

A 2000$ dollar machine stuttering when i drag windows around.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUHfjD6qWc&index=1&list=UUE...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUHfjD6qWc&index=1&list=UUEhez4TDTdadtDShVrCE1kA)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1xhpFRDNdQ&list=UUEhez4TDTd...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1xhpFRDNdQ&list=UUEhez4TDTdadtDShVrCE1kA&index=2)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGYjFRQrSM&index=3&list=UUE...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGYjFRQrSM&index=3&list=UUEhez4TDTdadtDShVrCE1kA)

</comment><comment><USER34> That's also what I experienced. Yosemite UI Performance is super slow compared to Mavericks. Maybe by rewriting the UI Code they also got rid of speed optimizations from the Bertrand Serlet era :/

<comment><USER35> Turning off transparency in the Accessibility preferences fixed it for me.

<comment><USER36> And now you get the funny black corners in the hud when changing the volume... Polish is needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I recently updated from Mavericks to Yosemite on my 2012 rMBP. Even with no transparency on my battery life was down from 6+ hours to less than 3.5 hours! And everything is so annoyingly slow. After 3 days with Yosemite I had to use my wife's 2009 Air for something, it's running Mavericks, and wow, the speed! That day I restored from a backup and now I am back to running 10.9. My battery is back to 6+ hours, and my laptop is flying.

I also updated my iPad 3 from iOS 6 to iOS 8. Now it's unusable! So, so, so slow. And that I can't even downgrade. If you are going to screw things up, Apple, can you at least give me an option to downgrade.

I think the main problem is the monolithic aspect of the OSX and iOS. Why is the Mail or Face Time app part of the OS?

<comment><USER29> > _I recently updated from Mavericks to Yosemite on my 2012 rMBP. Even with no > transparency on my battery life was down from 6+ hours to less than 3.5 > hours! And everything is so annoyingly slow._

Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up.

Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain?

Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case?

<comment><USER37> >Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain? >Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case?

Yes, I did perform basic investigation. I switched from Chrome to Safari, because Chrome was eating battery like crazy. I shut down anything that I wasn't using. Browsing the internet on Safari I was getting 3.5 hours on a charge. I even timed it! And I am not the only one, read the Apple forums complaining about this. I even reset the PRAM, as Apple recommends. It didn't help. Now I am running a lot more apps, using Chrome, compiling stuff in the background, and still getting my usual 5.5-6.5 hours of battery life (depending on the load). So, yes, I did spent over 20 hours of my life trying to make Yosemite work, and then gave up and switched back to Mavericks. I had a CC backup, so it only took 20 minutes.

>Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up.

Also, I didn't not mention anything about memory usage, but you are right, the memory footprint was lower. About 1.6gb on average, vs 2.6gb with Mavericks. But I don't care about that, I have 16gb, so I have RAM to spare. On the other hand, I can use all the battery life I can get.

Apple does some amazing things, and some really bad things. It's important to give them due credit for the mazing things, and call them out on the crap that they put out as well. Yosemite is very slick looking and a very pretty operating system. But it is very buggy, and what Apple put out as a GM release is beta quality at best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The UI performance decline is more drastic in "System Preferences" than in the rest of the system. It's because some of the pref panes (General, Security & Privacy, etc..) are actually remote views and involve launching processes for security (address space separation) reasons.

</comment><comment><USER39> Yosemite uses a variation of a cross-dissolve transition when changing/showing content after a mouse click, whereas older versions do not. Give it a try and pay close attention to the window.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've also had lots of problems with Yosemite, but I don't think this comparison is useful at all. The Hackintosh looks like a fresh install with nothing else running, whereas the rMBP has other apps running. When I don't have 100+ Safari tabs open, Yosemite runs a lot better.

<comment><USER41> The graphical glitches that he notes however, happen even on a powerful, plugged-in 15" retina model. I just tried it myself. Some parts of each screen, including the blue (or grey) themed UI elements for tabs or dropdowns, take longer to move to a selected state. It's unclear whether the delay is due to the time it takes to load the preferences for the screen -- that it can't do so before you click -- or if the graphics themselves take that long to draw but already know what state they should be in. It's funny, I knew something had changed, but I couldn't pin-point it until this video. Until the side-by- side, I figured the glitches were a side-effect from it being "too fast" since there's no transition animation. But it's obvious the animated version simply felt smoother and more integrated as a UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's sad really. I continually have incredibly high expectations for OS X and it's new releases. However, they keep proving me wrong time and time again.

I used to be incredibly "gung ho" about upgrading to Apple beta's. Then, with iOS 7, that all changed. I had to do something I've never had to. I took the beta off my phone and put back on iOS 6. Same with iOS 8 -> iOS 7, despite the nagging feeling at the back of my head that I shouldn't upgrade.

I think the real issue is, that ideals like Facebook's "move fast and break things"[0] (important to note they've stopped using that technique) has become the moral of big companies to fight the decreasing return on investment each new developer brings. To compare, the impressive thing to me about Google is that they ship so fast, with so few issues.

Despite Tim Cooks solid leadership, I think Apple is really in a grey area right now. Yeah, their profits are at an all time high, but the reason the profits exist is because they have the best hardware and software combination. As soon as one side of that edge goes away, then it might be prime time for a dedicated Microsoft to step back in.

[0] [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/reflecti...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/reflecting-on-3-years-at-facebook/415679363919)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those who haven't read the video description:

Here's a very quick, unscientific comparison of one tiny aspect of UI performance in OS X Yosemite vs. OS X Tiger. Although this is just one example, I personally see these kinds of hiccups throughout OS X constantly. The machine running OS X Tiger is actually an Intel Core 2 Duo PC (hackintosh) from 2007 with no hardware accelerated graphics support in OS X (it's an unsupported intel integrated graphics chipset that was never used in a real mac, hence the unsupported graphics). Therefore, the Tiger demo is running without QE and CI. The machine running OS X Yosemite is a late 2013 15 inch retina MBP. Automatic graphics switching is disabled for the demo, forcing the machine to use the much more powerful Nvidia graphics card. I also have the power adapter plugged in so that the system isn't in a low power state. I've been using OS X for 8 years now. From 2007 to 2013, I used hackintoshes (custom built with compatible hardware). Those machines ran Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks. I got my rMBP in 2013 and it's now my primary machine. It first ran Mavericks, then I upgraded it to Yosemite this year. It's been my experience that the performance of all of my machines has noticeably declined since the release of Lion. In terms of UI performance, my rMBP running Mavericks/Yosemite is nowhere near as responsive as any of my Snow Leopard machines were. Fingers crossed that WWDC 2014 focusses on major speed and stability improvements for OS X and iOS. New features are great, but not at the cost of performance.

</comment><comment><USER43> I am currently working on an OpenGL based UI toolkit and recently purchased a 4K monitor and a EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti to drive the display for testing purposes. As you might expect, it appears taxing to push 4X the content over the bus or have the card render content at a high resolution.

This may not be the effect seen here, but it is the first thing that came to mind. I am not sure how well system hardware has kept up with display technology.

<comment><USER17> Not strictly resolution dependant. The same problem is present on current model macbook airs and non-retina imacs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I noticed a lot of UI speed degradation as well, especially when using a dual monitor setup and changing focus from one screen to the other. This was the most visible when OSX tries to refresh the menubar icons. I did a fresh install (instead of upgrade to the beta) and things seem to be a little better but I guess this just has to do with the fresh install clearing my mac of all the bloat that it acquired in the past years.

</comment><comment><USER45> I do agree that Yosemite has had some performance regressions, but people seem to remember the older operating systems with rose colored glasses. I used 10.3 to 10.5 on the 2005 PowerBook G4 (1.67 GHz) and it was _incredibly_ slow. Spotlight was nearly useless. The fans would frequently spin up. And let's not talk about Finder locking up when a network mount disappeared. Right now I use 10.10 on the original 2012 Retina MBP, and even though Yosemite is a bit slower than Mavericks it is still leagues faster than (Mountain) Lion on the same machine (which is what it shipped with). The biggest performance regressions I've seen have been in Safari, but Chrome doesn't seem to have the same problems.

I think they are paying attention, since 10.10 performance has improved considerably since the first DP, but they need to do more. I wish they would stop fucking with it on a yearly cycle and just release a stable, fast operating system with no new features. The graphics system needs more optimization and they need to kill HFS+ (but that's a whole different can of worms).

(Edits: wording)

</comment><comment><USER46> It's probably too much to hope for a stability and performance focus for iOS 9 and OS X 10.11, but damn if I don't try.

</comment><comment><USER47> My first Apple Computer was a black MacBook 13" bought in 2007. The OS installed was Leopard and I was extremely happy with it.

The experience contained quality, responsiveness, stability as well as productivity enhancements. Hadn't missed Windows and Linux at all.

The experience remained perfect as the OS was gradually getting updates up to 10.6.8, the latest Snow Leopard version and the hard disk drive was changed to a solid state drive.

At that time I bought a MacBook Pro 13" with an i5 processor, and was introduced to Lion.

Believe it or not, I used my older MacBook more. It "felt" much more solid and responsive. Well at some point I gave it away, and was stuck with the Pro model.

As the OS updates where coming along, things were expected to get only better, just like I had previously experienced. But no! I'm currently using the latest Yosemite, and hate it when I notice tiny buggy things happening.. [ for example, try to disable the transparency in accessibility features, and get clunky black corner edges around the volume box as you adjust the volume up/down ]

As I became a more experienced programmer, I realized that good software is perfect software. Thus anything I notice that's not right (and doesn't get fixed when it's a known issue) is a hint for a lot more bugs that I might never get to experience. So essentially I feel like I've lost the stability and security feelings that used to keep me close to the Mac OS.

I really miss Snow Leopard, and hate the path Apple is following. I could bitch about their phones too but that would be more derailing.

PS: I wish there was an image out there of Mac OS 10.6.8 I haven't got a spare Apple machine to boot 10.6.7, update it to 10.6.8 and create a bootable disk for my MacBook Pro

Does anyone know if such an image exist, or perhaps can create it?

</comment><comment><USER48> Even with "Reduce Transparency" enabled (blur disabled) I've had times when Mission Control operates at 2 frames per second on my 13" 2013 rMBP. This never happened using Mavericks.

If you try full screen zoom on Yosemite with an external display attached, it's similarly unusable.

<comment><USER49> This. I love the full screen zoom but had to turn it off for my thunderbolt display. Also I had a hot corner for Mission Control that was similarly laggy, had to turn that off too :(

<comment><USER50> the zoom with a thunderbolt display attached is unbearable! I really hope they fix the jankiness

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm hoping that 10.11 will perhaps be the release that refines things quite a bit, concentrating on stability and generally cleaning up messes like this.

Let's remember that they did a fairly major overhaul of everything with Yosemite. This is just how software works sometimes. But you're right, there was a certain amount of UI stability during the Tiger through Snow Leopard era that I wish that Apple would get back to.

Try switching between the tabs in the "About this Mac" dialog. The framerate is truly shameful. Astonishing that it got approved at all. I had to try it on a couple different Macs at the Apple Store to believe that it wasn't some random problem I was seeing.

</comment><comment><USER52> This isn't the first time that things have gone wrong with a new version of OS X. The shift from 10.6.8 to 10.7 was an absolute catastrophe from both a performance and a stability basis. 10.8/ML was slightly better, and, I've stayed on 10.8.5 waiting for 10.9/Mavericks to stabilize.

From colleagues who use it, and the various KEXTs that I also have, it looks like Mavericks, and KEXT support for it, actually hit a pretty good stability plateau around June/July of this year - so I"m looking forward to upgrading to it sometime early in the next year.

There is zero chance that I'm going to be considering 10.10/Yosemite as my production platform (if at all) any earlier than 2016. I'm always slightly bemused at how quickly people feel the need to rush into the next operating system. Was the older one really all that bad? About the only thing I'm missing right now is Omnifocus doesn't support 10.8 (10.9 or newer). Other than that, I can live with the various warts on 10.8.5 (particularly now that FTDI drivers don't kernel panic my system every time I pull out the USB cable) - Kernel Panics are now a biweekly (instead of every couple days)event, and my only real need to reboot the system is when my USB devices aren't recognized (usually after a sleep) - but a 3 minute reboot and everything is fine again.

Still - I think it's good to call Apple on their crap - 10.6 was actually a pretty decent release, and I don't think they've managed to get one that good out since then.

<comment><USER53> > I'm always slightly bemused at how quickly people feel the need to rush into > the next operating system.

The difference with this release is that it's a pretty big UI overhaul and some developer features such as storyboards for Mac aren't available on older versions. People who develop for the Mac or iOS have little choice but to upgrade.

I've been running Yosemite since DP 1, and haven't had any major problems yet. There are minor annoyances, but on the whole, Yosemite's feels like a step up over Mavericks(after using it for a little while). Although I should mention that I have a pretty beefy computer with 12Gigs of RAM and a decent graphics card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's that fucking applegraphicspowermanagement.kext !! I'm not even kidding with that kext name. If you delete the kext, repair caches and reboot you'll see 10x better and smoother animations.

More about kext itself; it contains the list of supported graphics cards (poor one) and power states for them. Some states are badly done even with supported graphics cards. I had a lot fun with this kext back in the ole' days after Intel switch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you provide a source / more information on this solution? Surely there are drawbacks. And you mention using this solution back in the day - are you sure it's still applicable?

<comment><USER54> This is coming from Hackintosh scene, but I've had enourmous improvements on real Macs as well, which includes Macbook Pro, Air and Mac Pro (not latest gens).

Easiest way is to make backup of applegraphicspowermanagement.kext or just rename it to applegraphicspowermanagement.kext.bak and then rebuild you cache with app like Kext Utility.

Only drawback I see is that graphics card will now use native power management and not Mac OS one. One thing I've noticed, applegraphicspowermanagement.kext has list of graphics cards, so if your card is not identified it appears that generic power / sleep states are being used thus producing glitches.

A bit more about power / sleep states. You've probably noticed that when you have certain animation first time in OS X, it is choppy, but second and third time it's animated perfectly. That's where applegraphicspowermanagement.kext is messing up the states. You can try it on Launchpad or Mission Control animations.

Here's more info on the issue, it's for nvidias but it applies to every graphics cards although ATI is generally more supported on OS X.

[http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=311](http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=311)

[http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/266036-guide-edit- app...](http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/266036-guide-edit- applegraphicspowermanagementkext-to-unleash-nvidias-gtx-570580-full-power-and- save-energy-at-the-same-time/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I read so many reports of Yosemite being faster that I was beginning to think I was the only one who was disappointed.

I have an older machine (2010 Mac Pro tower), but it's been upgraded to 16GB RAM and an SSD over the years. I experienced an initial degradation in UI performance with Mavericks, but after the first OS update it was as fast as ever. Yosemite comes out, and now it takes over second to switch between Safari tabs on an otherwise idle machine. I had hoped that like Mavericks, this would be resolved in the first OS update, but no such luck. I enabled the "reduce transparency" option (this was recommended to speed up the UI) but it didn't help.

My mid-2012 MBr doesn't seem to suffer from this. I wonder if Apple just didn't consider video cards in older hardware. Not an unreasonable thing to do, but I'd have preferred a "sorry, this machine can't run the latest OS" message instead.

</comment><comment><USER56> I have a mid 2009 13" mbp, and for me, it has been very slow since mavericks, probably bceause it only has 2GB of RAM and no SSD, since recent version of mac os have been optimized to use SSDs. The superdrive is busted, and there's no USB boot possible with this version. Linux or windows-bootcamp are not good options since they both seem to make the laptop ventilate like crazy.

I intent to buy a 80 euros 8GB RAM upgrade, but still, it's quite sad to see such solid hardware with such crappy OS. No official way to downgrade. The processor has 3MB of L2 cache and honestly I'm sure a C++ IDE would run better on a linux-running, 300 euros, celeron laptop.

I feel like I fell for the apple hype.

I really feel apple is now worse than microsoft regarding screwing users. Now you can run windows 7 without a product key, and it won't really bother you too much.

</comment><comment><USER57> Don't worry, in a few years when iOS gets a major 3D-look visual upgrade it will trickle down to the desktop and things will be back to normal. In the meantime I've switched my macbook to dualboot Linux and only boot up MacOS when I have to use one of the programs not available for Linux.

</comment><comment><USER58> Animation in general is just plain broken in Yosemite (and iOS 8). I'm not up to date with the latest frameworks, but I believe there's been a fundamental API change, because its basically possible to break any animation by just causing an event to happen before its finished. This happens all the time in iOS, you can get it to break mid-rotation and end up in a half and half state: [https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/532578692804124672](https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/532578692804124672)

On OS X, its the same thing. Here's me easily repro-ing in Safari: [http://tolmasky.com/letmeshowyou/Yosemite/Safari%20Animation...](http://tolmasky.com/letmeshowyou/Yosemite/Safari%20Animation.mov)

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't know what it is exactly, these things are very subjective, but the UI does seem to have lost some feeling of smoothness. Transitions are starker than they used to be, strange blinks as you see in this video, and more.

I am not sure what to think of our current era of Apple products. The software seems to be more slapdash now, as if they are trying to do too many things at once.

On the other hand, this was the first time I upgraded the OS and all my development tools worked without my wasting time on silly problems. They do seem to be more developer-friendly now, but I mean that purely in a technical sense. In terms of developer relations they are perhaps worse than ever.

</comment><comment><USER60> Just checked on my 2007 MBP--I'm also getting flashes. (Translucency is turned off.)

</comment><comment><USER61> Not really sure what causes this, but I learned that Apple changed the layouting algorithm to Cassowary a few years ago [1]. Because languages have different word length (eg. German words tend to be much longer than English words) and UIs should be readable in every language. Apple now uses constraints to layout the UI and the algorithm tries to find a good solution through iteration and has to reiterate for every size change. Visual effect might also trigger this.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_%28software%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary_%28software%29)

<comment><USER62> As someone who has used it extensively, Auto Layout is not a cause for performance UI regressions. Not by a long shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Interesting that this was the UI aspect that was chosen for a video. In my experience, Yosemite performed very poorly when clicking on a folder from the dock (very low framerate). My problems were worse than bad UI though, I was losing data. Yosemite frequently (every other day) crashed hard-core and the only option was to power cycle. Though I save frequently, sometimes I just hadn't hit Cmd+S yet, and in some running processes, it corrupted data. (On a Late 2013 MBP.)

Reverting to Mavericks made everything silky smooth again. Not a single crash or performance hiccup. I think I'll stay here for a while.

</comment><comment><USER64> Since we all have anecdotal evidence about the merits and perils of any OS update, I find this video of another anecdote extremely counter productive to the discussion.

Two systems, with different specs, different resolution and different apps running yielding different UI performance is really useless.

If anyone have a spare mac and a few hours doing nothing, please re-do this experiment using fresh OSX installs on same hardware and then we actually have SOMETHING to talk about.

</comment><comment><USER65> Yeah. Just look at this menu bar when switching focus from internal Retina display to external non-Retina ATD. [http://cl.ly/2W172H0l3s0z](http://cl.ly/2W172H0l3s0z) This bugs the hell out of me.

Not so long ago I grabbed myself a G4 MDD with 768M of RAM — it was much more responsible in terms of UI. 3-4 browser tabs slowed it down though, while my current rMBP13" from 2012 works ok with a lot more.

<comment><USER66> I see this ALL THE TIME. Makes me think that Apple did no testing with dual displays. I've noticed times where it's taken 2-3 seconds to settle down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Have been holding off on upgrading to Yosemite until the dust settles. I find it funny that I'm not even getting nagged at all to upgrade (unlike on iOS where I was getting nagged constantly to upgrade to iOS 8). It's almost like Apple themselves aren't even confident enough in Yosemite to be usable right now.

</comment><comment><USER68> I don't know anything of desktop/native applications, but web. My question to the people on the other side of the isle: why aren't all the view panes preloaded, and pre-rendered? In this day and age, where 64mb of RAM is easy to come by, I don't see (as a web developer) why this approach isn't taken.

<comment><USER69> You're only counting the application you're looking at though. Multiply that by all the applications running, and pretty soon 512MB of VRAM is looking kinda skimpy.

And one of those applications is a browser, which is liable to have a _huge_ amount of prerendered stuff it wants to blit.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's also worth noting that drawing UI elements is relatively inexpensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Ah, yes, the flicker and delayed drawing. I noticed that also a few years ago with Windows applications. They used to be written with the Win32 API or MFC or even VCL, but when WinForms became popular it introduced a lot of ugly flickering, especially when resizing windows with many controls on them.

</comment><comment><USER71> Might help to disable all those animations/transitions they keep adding. I have entered these defaults settings on all my Macs and they have sped up my experience a lot:

[http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/63477/70074](http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/63477/70074)

</comment><comment><USER37> Also, this is part of the final build?

[https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*EdAxsHqdZmZ7...](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*EdAxsHqdZmZ7o6JO6e_TWQ.png)

Really, this bug was reported in the original beta, 6 months ago!

<comment><USER72> I think that only happens when UI transparency is disabled. I don't have the same issue[0]. I find Yosemite to be fine with a few exceptions, Safari is not as fast as I'd like it to be, and I've had issues when attempting to answer the phone on my laptop. I think Apple needs a Snow Yosemite, where they focus on fixes and performance with minimal new features.

[0]: [http://imgur.com/KIIbsfr](http://imgur.com/KIIbsfr)

<comment><USER37> Yes, it only appears in "reduced transparency" mode, but that's no excuse. Again, this is a well reported bug that many people have noticed 6 months ago and it would take an Apple intern 20 minutes (maybe an hour if they were very inapt) to locate and fix the issue. It's just not a priority to them. I really wish that they would switch to a 2 year OS release cycle, and work harder on stability of the core OS. They can pull Messenger, Mail, Facetime, and all the other apps out of the OS package, and add features to those all they want, but I want the core OS to be stable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I did have many of the issues commented here but recent beta releases fixed many of them for me. Wifi seems stable, I can answer phone calls if the phone is nearby, it certainly become faster over time.

I'm on a previous generation rMBP 13".

</comment><comment><USER74> After Mavericks I swore I would wait to upgrade until the second patch of the next os. So I'm sitting here on Mavericks waiting for 10.10.2 to drop.

If you slightly shift your upgrade schedule you're only 3 or 4 months behind. No big deal.

</comment><comment><USER75> 2012 MBP retina with 8gb ram here.. Major performance issues with Chrome -- when videos are playing in tabs, 10+ tabs open, etc. Systems Preferences are the least of the problems I've came across.

</comment><comment><USER76> My biggest OS X problem of 10 years – switching keyboard language – got worse in 10.10, because now it doesn't work at all in the "Share" dialog.

</comment><comment><USER77> The only application holding me back from using Linux on all my machines is xcode.. only if there was a wine for mac apps that could run xcode.

</comment><comment><USER78> Also, compare this with the "about this mac" dialog, the transitions are slow as hell. This would never, ever have shipped under Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER79> This is simply sad. I downgraded to Mavericks after a week of pain with Yosemite, I won't upgrade again, I don't trust it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER80> This video is pretty useless. Randomly clicking on settings icons on one computer with Tiger and then another with Yosemite is a poor method for comparing UI performance. Does the two computers even have the same hardware and configuration?

Many people don't like the look of the new Yosemite UI. That's fine. It's a radical change. But don't make ungrounded statements about the perfomance until you have done some proper testing.

</comment><comment><USER81> I wonder if this was done on the latest apple hardware. Apple always appears to regress older hardware without fail.

<comment><USER32> Yes, generally people want OSs to do more, not operate faster.

Therefore most of the time the performance benefits are eaten by additional software.

It's most apparent on older hardware that was already running close to max capacity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Performance has degraded with Yosemite. Stability is not an issue. I use it on both older and newer machines.

</comment><comment><USER83> Wow, the day I finally upgrade to Yosemite this story and its comments arrive. Hours too late. :-(

</comment><comment><USER84> For me the installation bombed. Just locked up forever in 1 min remaining.

<comment><USER85> This has happened to me during every OS X upgrade/reinstallation I can remember. The first time, I also assumed that it just wasn't working. I've since learned that the 99% is deceiving in terms of the expectations it might give you. You just have to be patient and it'll eventually work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The performance is ok for me (Air 2011).A bit slower but stable so far.

</comment><comment><USER86> jobs died in the middle of his plan of covering osx and ios and forever owning apple consumers. now crook is executing it without the reality distortion powers that jobs had.</comment>


Four Reasons Why You Shouldn't Buy the iPhone 4 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.ocweekly.com/heardmentality/video-games---humor/why-you-shouldnt-buy-the-iphon/ Now that all the hype and excitement surrounding the iPhone 4 has died down a bit, let's take a step back and consider if it's worth your time and money. Is it worth it to upgrade from last summer's 3GS model? Is this a good time for first-time users? <comment><USER2> curious that this is filed under "Video Games - Humor" on the site.</comment>


McDonald's: you can sneer, but it's glue that holds communities together (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/08/mcdonalds-community-centers-us-physical-social-networks <comment><USER2> I was just at the one in EPA by Facebook and I thought the same damn thing. Dudes with facial scars and a limp come through to get a meal for $10/2000calories, students as well grabbing a snack on their way home from one of the nine schools nearby. Its like a YMCA for homeless people, along with the library.

</comment><comment><USER3> I read this back than and went back and forth believing and not believing that this is an advert.

<comment><USER4> I only have anecdotal evidence but anecdotal evidence I do have.

1\. There is a McDonalds that was near my Elementary school, actually used to be my favorite place as a kid and it was the place where I would socialize with kids from the Boys and Girls club about a block or so away. Even though there is a large municipal park across the street and numerous bars and clubs and restaurants around that area, you could still see people actually meeting, or just hanging out there. I have no idea what this particular McDonalds* is like nowadays, but I've heard through the grapevine it's become the epicenter for numerous drug problems in the neighborhood, which are only complaints you started hearing about once Whole Foods opened up across the street. I suspect that it is neither the epicenter of the drug problems in the 'hood given exactly what that particular neighborhood is famous for, and it is famous, nor do I think it has actually changed at all in the last 20 years.

Most likely the only thing that changed is there are a lot more affluent people in the area which are taking issue with having a symbol of poverty in their presence, across the street from a supermarket that just so happens to symbolize their wealth.

2\. There's another McDonalds I would walk past every day on my way too and from school. Often it was faster than waiting for the trolley bus as the trolley part of the bus would often fall and slow everyone down back in the day and my route to Middle school and later High school was an L-shaped route. Eventually the local MTA replaced the trolley buses with an updated model and the problems were at least reduced, but not eliminated.

Passing this same McDonalds you could make a few observations. First, the people there were of two particular demographics, and the housing nearby was Section 8. Second, just pass the McDonalds there would be a park, nothing fancy, just a bit of grass and some benches in the middle of the block where quite a few locals would socialize. Third, just past this park was a rundown boarded up church with empowering messages targeted towards a particular demographic. Directly across the street from this rundown church was a police station loaded up with surveillance cameras, even more than I observed around other police stations at that time. Going back towards the McDonalds but across the street now, there was if I recall correctly, a salon or a barbershop (both? been a while), a liquor store, a pizza place (these might have been one and the same) and apartment buildings. Not too far away in either direction were two community centers.

What's my point? Humans are social beasts, we gather together over hot beverages and food, whether our incomes are large or small. More affluent people have more options for this, but much of the time people like to go out and gather with those around them, particularly when they have fewer options.

Advert or not, the thesis of this article is not _wrong_. Go to low income neighborhoods and find a McDonalds, get yourself a coffee or burger or whatever and just sit down and watch people. Go to areas where McDonald's exists but where the surrounding area is being gentrified and watch the looks of disgust on peoples' faces as they pass through and by poverty. Coming from a different sphere of life, it's pretty hard to read an article like this and not think this is just a paid advert, and I understand the reaction, but I would not doubt that for many communities, this article is basically the truth.

* Given just who many of the people on Hacker News are and the metro areas they tend to reside in, in numbers anyway, there is a better than even chance you can figure out exactly which area and which McDonalds specifically I'm talking about.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Opencourseware for Economics? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Say no more: [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/)

Enjoy, do not forget to take frequent breaks from the great material to hydrate

<comment><AUTHOR> This is why I love HN, thanks a ton !

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Economics is a huge field. Is there something specific you want to learn? eg macroeconomics, microeconomics, economics applied to business, behavioral economics, finance, etc

Khan Academy has good material as well.

[https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance- domain](https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm more interested in basic macro / micro economics theory. and Business Intellignence. Thanks for the link, I will look into this course

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Debunking Economics" is a pretty good book on mainstream economics, and why it's mostly wrong. Unlike similar books, it demonstrates the wrongness via self-contradiction, as opposed to by saying "but you're ignoring X and Y", so you also get nice overview of mainstream economics.

</comment><comment><USER5> Courses from FEE.org are excellent.

[http://courses.fee.org/?utm_source=fee.org&utm_medium=topnav](http://courses.fee.org/?utm_source=fee.org&utm_medium=topnav)

</comment><comment><USER6> During your studies remember to be very, _very_ careful what you read. There's good links here thus far, but there's a lot of rhetoric pretending to be instruction out there.</comment>


Looking for recent (late March) article on Internet advertising efficacy - <AUTHOR> There was a news article recently, late March I think, where a major advertiser did tests deploying ads and not deploying ads and there was no impact to their traffic. If anyone remembers which article I am talking about, I'd really appreciate help in finding it. Thank you in advance. <comment><USER2> "Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results"?

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/chase-ads- youtub...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/chase-ads-youtube-fake- news-offensive-videos.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I think that's it- thank you very much!</comment></comment>


Gay World of WarCraft guild forced to change name because of user complaints - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/gay-world-of-warcraft-guild-forced-to-change-name-because-of-user-reports/ <comment><USER2> The name was "GAY BOYS" in case you want to save a click.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone still hire "Junior Engineers"? - <AUTHOR> I remember this being a pretty common title in job postings ~5 years ago. It seems the only thing anyone is looking for is "senior" devs now. <comment><USER2> Been teaching myself to code for the last few months and have noticed the same thing. It is hard to develop skills on small projects and being a part of a bigger one in any capacity is what I was aiming for, so I check periodically. 3-5 years experience seems to be the norm. I know this is only a guideline for the 'ideal candidate' but still, I would just be floundering their expectations.</comment>


Is it legal to mention the sex as part of job description.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nauassociates.com/?job_listing=software-engineer-php&utm_source=Indeed&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Indeed

<comment><USER2> Bizarre, never seen that before. Its illegal in the UK and Australia, not sure about the US.

<comment><USER3> It's illegal, but in vogue to intentionally seek females.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like a huge violation of Title VII.</comment>


Learning to Learn - <AUTHOR> http://simpleprogrammer.com/2012/09/23/learning-to-learn/

<comment><USER2> Does anybody have any (other and more thorough) resources for 'learning how to learn'? Perhaps book suggestions? One of my goals is to become an autodictact / polymath and I'm seeking way to make the process of acquiring new data / skills / learning more time-efficient and more organized (and systematic).

Are there any kind of 'learning theories/strategies' out there? I'm not seeking resources per se (I know about Khan academy, MIT OCW, 'bookportals' on Tor etc), but rather some sort of systematic method similar to the one described in the link but perhaps more detailed and (maybe) anecdote-/experience-based.

<comment><USER3> The Pragmatic Programmers have a book on learning called "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning". I own it and would highly recommend it, one of the more underrated books. It covers the Dreyfus learning model which was mentioned in the article.

The examples and language tend to be programming related (for example one chapter is titled "Debugging your Brain" iirc) because that's the intended audience but I'd also recomend it for non-programmers.

Very good blend of theory (Dreyfus model, r-/l-mode) and practical advice on how to improve your learning and generally use your brain better.

[http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and- learni...](http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning)

<comment><USER2> I actually do own a copy, thank you for reminding me to read it again. Very useful strategies and the type of 'metaphors' used in the book (CS/IT-related) made it easy to understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Despite the fact that this was filtered through HN seeing a stock picture of a key and then skimming quickly and seeing even more stock pictures turned me off from reading the article. I thought it'd be interesting to point out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I usually add images to post to help break up the text and make some mental connection between sections that I am talking about and a picture.

So Q. Is the problem that the images are stock images? Or is the issue that there are images?

Wouldn't just a bunch of text and no images make it much harder to get through the content?

Not arguing one way or the other, just curious on thoughts on this.

<comment><USER5> IMO, if the images don't aid the text, they are unnecessary. If people are going to read an article that long, the pictures aren't going to help break up the content. For me they were a bit distracting and actually caused some weird line breaks (I actually stated thinking about creating a bookmarklet that would zap unwanted DOM elements with a click).

Other examples of long blocks of text which people read include books, articles on <http://alistapart.com> (okay they have one but it is classy and fits with the site), and long comment threads on hacker news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is spot on. I agree with many of the things in the article. Especially the part about setting quantifiable goals. Too many times I find myself not doing this and getting "lost" in the process of learning and then kinda giving up from being overwhelmed.

<comment> q-base I totally agree, but what really sets this apart is not only the quantifiable goals. The key, in my opinion, is to have a practical goal. If your goal is to learn C# and be able to write it fluently, then that is kind of quantifiable. But if you set out to learn C# to program a specific game/applikation etc. then in my opinion, you would learn much more along the way.

<comment><USER7> I attribute that more to having direction. Sometimes when learning things one simply meanders through a field, absorbing knowledge as they find it, and figuring out how to use it.

When you have a concrete goal (I want X to happen), you can (usually!) figure out what you need to learn in order to make X happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apropos of learning new programming languages, part of the way I familiarize myself with new programming languages (or technologies, as applicable) is by maintaining a list of toy projects. These projects ought to be relatively well-defined. Big bonus points for being able to scale upward in complexity; some languages are more similar to others, and so it's less challenging to do basic stuff.

Examples: IRC bot, todo app, text adventure, sudoku solver.

Beware of getting stuck approaching these problems in the same ways as you did a previous language, though. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> What tools do you use to mindmap your learning plan when you decide to pick up a new topic? I have tried workflowy and trello, but something is missing....

I wish there was a dedicated app for creating your own syllabus or learning path.

<comment><USER9> Markdown and a good text editor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> arrived here expecting a heated debate on email obfuscation, thank you hn!</comment>


Ketamine: Now by Prescription - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/11/ketamine-now-by-prescription/ <comment><USER2> My doctor prescribes me sublingual ketamine for use at home. He has been doing this for 2+ years and his insurance hasn't changed at all (a common refrain of IV clinics that scam depressed patients).

The issue is that psychiatrists aren't willing to help people by prescribing off label. They want to blame someone else -- just like this blog entry.

A few other things that make this post suspiciously inaccurate is:

1) Listing IV clinics as a legitimate route of treatment with ketamine. This isn't the case. Many of the doctors at these clinics suggest patients try to extend their treatment time in between doses and augment with an oral anti- depressant to maintain the effect -- often the oral anti-depressant is prescribed by another doctor.

The author admits that these aren't mental health professionals:

> That meant going to a ketamine clinic that had nurses and anesthesiologists > for IV access

A doctor doesn't need to be present. There is a clinic in Albuquerque where nurses moonlight on their lunch breaks, take your credit card, and start the IV.

2) The author talks a bit about the ROA being important. If it was important (i.e. only one ROA actually works) it would be the first anti-depressant of its kind. The author should be more skeptical about this. The author claims that there are studies where the ROA of intranasal doesn't work, but there are also plenty of small studies with alternative ROA's that appear to have an effect.

> Almost all previous studies on ketamine have examined it given IV.

That's because it's easy and one study copies the protocol of other successful studies. These studies referred to by the author are short in duration and have a small number of patients. So for all purposes they are equal to studies that look at other ROAs.</comment>


Ask HN: Tips for marketing a *good* app? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there,
I'm a student, and an iOS app developer; I've published a couple of apps in the past that have been mildly successful. However, nothing I've published has come close enough to making enough revenue to live off for when I leave college.
After improving my skills a lot over the last year or so, and teaming up with a designer, I think I may have an (in development) that could achieve some sort of success. However, I am aware that marketing and PR are key in the 'app game', and so I was wondering if anyone has any tips for marketing an app? (I'm not experienced in app marketing practice at all)
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Here are a few tips that I have found worked well

Bloggers: Reach out to bloggers who have reviewed similar apps and offer them a sneak peek before launch, if the app is solid they will write about it.

Ratings: Ask users if they are enjoying the app after 3 uses, if they say yes ask them to rate, if no ask them for feedback. This will capture bad feedback and push positive reviews

Cost: If it is a paid app consider making it a lower price for launch so it has a greater chance of trending

App screenshots: Show images of actual people using it, this spells out the use cases

</comment><comment><USER3> Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Don't listen to the haters. Nothing even comes close to the level of marketing Facebook can give you to your target audience...and it's cheap! Enough said</comment>


HTML5 Pong with 0 lines of javascript - <AUTHOR> http://cssdeck.com/labs/css3-pong-with-scoring

<comment><AUTHOR> And the write-up from the author: [http://www.sitepoint.com/css3-pong-insane- things-to-do-with-...](http://www.sitepoint.com/css3-pong-insane-things-to-do- with-css/)</comment>


Making GNOME Terminal GNU screen-aware - <AUTHOR> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeTerminal/ScreenIntegration

<comment><AUTHOR> In a nutshell, they are discussing changing GNOME Terminal to "speak" GNU screen -- automatically attach to existing screen sessions, option to automatically enter a screen session when starting a new Terminal session, list screen "screens" as tabs in Terminal (or through some other chrome), couple scrolling so that the scrollbar in Terminal scrolls in screen, and generally making screen integration transparent to the user.

As a heavy G-T and screen user, I am very excited about this proposal. It sounds like to make it feasible they would have to modify screen to expose library functions, in order to not wind up parsing the low-level terminal codes.

</comment><comment><USER2> It's unfortunate they want to do this by exposing a library interface --- that suggests there's no way a remote screen could be integrated into the terminal in the same way as a local screen.

I'd love to be able to have remote sub-screens show up as tabs.</comment>


PostgreSQL Parallel Aggregate - <AUTHOR> http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/parallel-aggregate/ <comment><USER2> At last! This was the only feature I was missing in Postgres for years.

Postgres is so amazing I still find it hard to believe it's free. I abused it many times (as a graph database; as a real-time financial data analytics engine with thousands of new ticks coming in each second; as a document storage with several TBs of data per node), and amazingly, it just worked. Magic.

If in doubt, choose Postgres.

<comment><USER3> > I still find it hard to believe it's free

PostgreSQL is only free if your time has no value..

(Paraphrased. In jest..)

<comment><USER2> Do you know any commercial database with comparable level of documentation and community support?

I worked with a certain other database from a company starting with "O" and ending with "racle", and support/documentation quality was abysmal. Our support contract was quite basic, but still, it expected to be better than free alternatives.

It was very NOT.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry, but documentation is one thing Oracle is NOT lacking.

[http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/nav/portal_booklist.htm](http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/nav/portal_booklist.htm)

<comment><USER5> He probably meant "readable" documentation....

<comment><USER6> I took it to mean the Oracle's support was lessor than that of Postgres', despite paying a fee for it up front.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems the parallel aggregation increases efficiency of queries linearly with regard to CPUs, close to "perfect parallelisation." I have some 8-core boxes running PostgreSQL and this is still good to know.

<comment><USER8> It looks good up to 30 parallel worker processes. It does start to diverge a bit after that, but still very impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just love PostgreSQL.It is an awesome gift in open source community.I just cant believe it is free.Seriously,if you have not tried PostgreSQL before,please find a time to check it out.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm looking at evaluating Postgres for the data work I do at work, which would replace the (expensive) MS SQL server we are currently using. Aside from performance boosts from being able to throw more hardware at the problem due to lower costs, is Postgres as performant as MS SQL?

<comment><USER11> I think that is a tough question to answer because it really depends on what you're doing with the data/database. Some queries may run faster on one RDBMS and some may run faster on another RDBMS. I would like an answer to this question as well. I did a quick search and I haven't found any modern comparisons of performance between databases, but it would be great if there was a more modern and expanded version of the SQLite comparison[0].

I can say that I use Postgres and have not been disappointed with performance and it costs me $0. I encourage you to try it out. If you're a heavy user of SSMS, then you will have to change your flow a bit to accommodate psql. However, once you get a handle of psql, it's actually a pleasure to use.

[0]: [https://www.sqlite.org/speed.html](https://www.sqlite.org/speed.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Parallel aggregate over cores in a node is fast, but parallel aggregate over many cores across many nodes is even faster:

[https://www.kentik.com/metrics-for- microservices/](https://www.kentik.com/metrics-for-microservices/)

[https://www.kentik.com/postgresql-foreign-data- wrappers/](https://www.kentik.com/postgresql-foreign-data-wrappers/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I would assume that when you query billions of rows, the disk is the bottleneck, not the CPU. What am I missing?

<comment><USER14> Several things:

\- disks (SSDs) are very fast now, so cores are saturated more easily (when queries actually process the data instead of just reading it)

\- multiple parallel (random) reads will likely be faster on HDD and SDD to some extent (esp. on larger RAID setups)

\- the best optimization is still lots of RAM and people have that these days, so 100% CPU utilization during queries happens more often than not (the benchmarking setup seems suitable for more than 1 billion rows...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> ...on a 32 physical cores machine.

<comment><USER16> And? 32 cores are very affordable.

<comment><USER17> They're not always sitting idle waiting for one big OLAP query (well suited to parallel aggregation) to come in to exhibit a 25x speedup.

Let's say you've got a web application with some cookie-cutter OLTP queries (which are well suited to serial plans ... no parallel aggregation benefit here). Your CPUs are running at 50% then some big OLAP query is going to come in and get maybe ... 13x faster.

Which is a nice performance improvement, but not 25x.

These numbers are a good validation of the work done in PostgreSQL, but you can't look at it and look at your X core machine, and say "my workload is going to be 25x faster!"

<comment><USER18> > Let's say you've got a web application with some cookie-cutter OLTP queries > (which are well suited to serial plans ... no parallel aggregation benefit > here).

in my case, the OLTP queries run against a dedicated slave that's mostly busy doing nothing, waiting for the next OLTP query to happen. So for me this will be very, very nice :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Improve Your Tests by Being an Evil Coder - <AUTHOR> https://coderefinery.wordpress.com/2019/08/15/an-adversarial-process-to-improve-your-tests/ <comment><USER2> I've done the Evil Coder setup. I found it good as a game and a short group exercise, but also something that quickly lost its value/appeal after a short time.

The problem is, if you're pairing on a real-world problem, if you play the Evil Coder, you need to remove yourself from solving the problem or communicating, which are both essential for pairing. Instead, you use this time to teach the other person what their tests actually do.

And if you're not solving a real-world problem, it's actually just practicing.

After that one time neither I, not my poring buddy at the time resorted to this practice any other time. We both got the point - not as much of an "aha" moment as I though it would be - and the red-green test approach works good enough for me.</comment>


So Long, Carbonmade: A feature from conception to completion in one day. - <AUTHOR> http://spencerfry.com/so-long-carbonmade

<comment><USER2> When I saw the title of the blog post I thought CarbonMade was shutting down. Took a few paragraphs to be sure they weren't. If you haven't read it, they are't. They just added a feature to ask why people are leaving when they close their accounts.

<comment><USER3> Yup. Not shutting down. :)

That's just the verbiage we're using here:

<http://carbonmade.com/goodbye>

That's what the article is referencing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not entirely sure that implementing a textbox form in a day is something to brag about. For comparison, yesterday we added some vital statistics for historious to the backend (churn, active users, repeat users, etc etc) with graphs and all in a few hours...

It's great when you're a small startup and you can go "hey, we need a form so people can give us feedback when they cancel" and then have it ready in a few minutes, but I don't see it as something extraordinary.

What customers _do_ appreciate, though, is when they send you an email about some small feature request or bug report and you reply 5 minutes later saying "thanks for catching that, we just fixed it and it's live". People aren't very used to getting bugs fixed just by reporting them, and we get some very happy customers this way.

<comment><USER5> Let's not be in a hurry to post a contradictory opinion; let's try to understand what an article is really about and what it's trying to say -- I don't see how anything other than the most cursory reading of this article could lead you to the conclusion that it was "bragging about implementing a textbox form in a day".

Paragraph 1: The introduction; Spencer introduces the topic of the article (note that "text box" isn't anywhere in this), and why he found it to be important.

Paragraph 2: Spencer introduces another, secondary topic, where he explains a common issue encountered by small-but-growing development teams.

Paragraph 3: Spencer explains his approach to handling part of the problems explained in the previous paragraph. He isn't fully resolving all of the problems associated with project management, but he's found a particular way of handling one aspect of it, and he's sharing that with us.

Paragraph 4(ish): He ties the approach outlined in the previous paragraph into the problem introduced in the first paragraph. Incidentally, this is rarer in the navel-gazing blogger set: he's introduced two topics of conversation and tied them together in just 4 short paragraphs. Good stuff!

Paragraphs 5 & 6 start the next section of the article with some exposition. Eh, OK.

Paragraph 7 is meaty, and explains why they concluded that a standard selection-type survey wasn't what they wanted.

Paragraph 8 concludes this section with an explanation of their choice of targets for the exit survey.

The end section here has a little more exposition, in the "author is hanging out with you" format, along with some examples of early data which support his supposition way back in the first paragraph that mining the data would be valuable.

So ... this isn't about implementing a textbox form in a day.

\--

On another note, this sort of thing is a large part of why I personally don't bother keeping a regular blog. Why the hell should I spend any time writing something that people are going to piss on without even properly reading it?

Online forums are bad enough, attracting an audience of half-interested know- it-alls doesn't sound like a fun time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to see the move from "we can obviously implement a feature in a day... probably in an hour" to "impressive to introduce a rather basic feature but with introspection" — not a bad thing, since while it seems like the startups are moving slower, the features are being considered with greater gravity than "shoot, let's just code it and deploy"

</comment><comment><USER7> It's nice to see stories like this, that walk you through the entire process, even if it's a simple feature. This is pretty much the essence of agile development, but without the ceremony.

<comment><USER8> With a small team, on a startup where you write your own requirements, agile is so easy it's impossible _not_ to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interestingly spencerfry.com seems to be blocked by OpenDNS as "Proxy/anonymizer".

I've experimentally flagged it for review.</comment>


Nvidia's Arm deal sparks quick backlash in chip industry - <AUTHOR> https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-arm-holdings-m-a-nvidia-industry-anal/nvidias-arm-deal-sparks-quick-backlash-in-chip-industry-idUKKBN2650GT <comment><USER2> Being able to block ARM reference designs from Huawei's HiSilicon and other fabless Chinese semiconductor firms like Rockchip and Allwinner has a huge impact on the United States' ability to block China's technological ambitions.

Right now I'm not interesting in having a debate about whether or not that's a good thing, but it would be good to have a realistic and sober discussion about the impact on this acquisition on China's technological ambitions.

There have been recent reports that China's leading semiconductor firm (called SMIC) will be added to the Entity List, which will blocks its access to western technology. If true, this effectively scuttles China's attempts to compete with Taiwan's TSMC and reach semiconductor fabrication parity. SMIC's ambitions heavily rely on freely accessing US-aligned technology: specifically lithography equipment from the Netherlands-based ASML and engineers poached from Taiwan's world-leading semiconductor manufacturing firms.

On the x86 front, when AMD was desperate for cash a few years ago they setup joint ventures with China (THATIC and Hygon) and were transferring AMD's then current-generation Zen 1 architecture to China. Further transfer has also been blocked via the Entity List. It's also worth noting that AMD is in a much better financial position after the success of their Ryzen product line, so has less need to make difficult trade-offs by transferring their current- generation technology in exchange for short-term cash injections, so it seems very unlikely they will applying for an export license.

At this point, if I was China, I would invest heavily in RISC-V based cores, and openly release highly competitive designs.

<comment><USER3> There is an ongoing fight between ARM China and ARM HQ, and the CEO of ARM China simply refused to accept her dismissal. [1] I guess this is a political point (and I'm sorry), but it might be that ARM China simply refuses to acknowledge US sanctions in the future.

> At this point, if I was China, I would invest heavily in RISC-V based cores, > and openly release highly competitive designs.

That's actually exactly what they are doing![2] Alibaba claims to have developed the most powerful RISC-V processor up to date [3] and Huawei has long been rumoured to be working on their own design.

[1] [https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/Arm-China- asks-B...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/Arm-China-asks-Beijing- to-intervene-in-row-with-UK-parent)

[2] [https://cntechpost.com/2020/07/25/risc-v-processor- designed-...](https://cntechpost.com/2020/07/25/risc-v-processor-designed-by- five-chinese-university-students-successfully-tape-out/)

[3] [https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/08/21/alibaba-on-the- bleed...](https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/08/21/alibaba-on-the-bleeding- edge-of-risc-v-with-xt910/)

<comment><USER4> It never occurred to me that a division of a company could just... secede from the parent company.

What could the parent company even do if something like this occurred across less-then-friendly national boundaries? Could the parent company sue to force the errant division to close? In what court?

It's bizarre that it's not more common...

<comment><USER5> it's even more bizarre: Wu controls Arm China because he's physically in control of a seal that gives him power to sign documents with the company authority[0].

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/main-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/main- street-doesn-t-want-weird-loans) look for "Who controls a company?"

<comment><USER6> This is so comical and yet so expected when you give arbitrary importance to things like that.

<comment><USER7> It's a cultural thing, though it does seem a bit extreme in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _> Being able to block ARM reference designs etc.... has a huge impact on the United States' ability to block China's technological ambitions._

Practically speaking, aren't ARM designs so widely used among the major chip manufacturers that Chinese companies/agencies are likely to have copies of important stuff anyway?

Or does the implementation of ARM designs work somehow more proprietarily (or opaquely?) than just the customers receiving files full of chip designs?

Because I imagine that the prohibition against being able to use ARM is really only meaningful to _legal_ and royalty-paying law-abiding customers. If a rogue agent has the designs already, what's to stop them from using them?

I'd be curious to know how ARM protects the designs from just being copied, or what the mechanism here is. Or maybe their designs are useless without the supporting software, etc. ? ARM's value is the _licensing_ of the designs and that they hold patents/copyrights, not the absolute knowledge of the designs -- is that right? Are their designs themselves that hard to copy?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not about having the designs as you think. It's about the ability to sell products based on ARM IP.

* "rogue agent" can't sell products with ARM based technology inside.

* "rogue agent" can't produce ARM based chips in foreign fabs (TSMC, Samsung)

<comment><USER9> With it looking like SMIC will be added to the excluded company list I don't think they'd mind producing unlicensed chips. I doubt the Chinese government would ban their sale either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> With NVIDIA relying on Samsung for fabbing their new Ampere line of GPUs using their 8nm process, and Samsung now relying on NVIDIA for ARM, I wonder how this relationship will develop.

I'm guessing that NVIDIA will try to squeeze value out of this acquisition (though not as aggressively as, say, Qualcomm would), but going too far might backfire on them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good time to look at RISC-V . Some companies in chip industry may do it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately, the more Chinese companies complain, the more likely the deal will go ahead unopposed by US/UK/Japanese regulators.

<comment><USER13> Could be a nice one for UK regulators to hold over the world, need some ammo for those various trade negotiations that are on going/up coming.

The US have exercised the same form of economic warfare (and when that fails actual warfare) for decades now, might as well take a turn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > "China is going to hate it"

The upside is that when mainlanders are upset, they can use their smarts to push forward RISC-V.

> South Korean chip industry officials and experts said that Nvidia's Arm buy > would intensify Nvidia's competition with Samsung, Qualcomm and others in > self-driving cars and other future technologies, while raising concerns that > Arm could hike licensing fees for competitors.

Oh no, more competition! Maybe Samsung can ask its little brother, the South Korean government, to intervene.

</comment><comment><USER15> What we observe right now is the beginning of AI tech wars. I hope it will stay cold and will boost new peaceful applications.

</comment><comment><USER16> To those of you who haven't made a CPU before: CPU technology is more like a javascript framework than a natural resource. When someone says "block China from US CPU ISAs" think "block China from US javascript frameworks". Then you'll have the appropriate sense of how silly it is.

<comment><USER17> If javascript frameworks is patented then yes, you can. For reference ARM big little scheduler is patented[1], you need to license from ARM if you use any of their big little design. RISC-V under BSD license might change this.

[1] [https://patents.google.com/patent/US9710309](https://patents.google.com/patent/US9710309)

<comment><USER18> If push comes to shove, why would you expect China to respect a set of patents that strangle its economic growth?

<comment><USER19> Because that would result in a more devastating response from the side that holds patents. If china stops respecting international trade laws and agreements, other nations will hurt china's interests in return. Given the scale of the things, the weak spots will be found inevitably.

<comment><USER20> Judging from China's policies towards Uighur Muslims and Hong Kong, I think China isn't very worried about foreign censure.

<comment><USER19> There is a difference. Nobody in the first world _really_ cares about Uighurs or Hong Kong. However, there are quite a handful of parties who _do care_ about patents (and resulting profits).

<comment><USER21> China has been pilfering intellectual property from labs & private companies via APTs for the last couple of _years:_ what are the handful of parties who care about patents going to do - write a strongly worded letter? If China decides it wants to get the latest ARM design and/or ISA in the future, do you doubt they can acquire them? Sure, they won't be able to call it "ARM" but you can bet it will be compatible[1].

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_Peri#Fiat_Panda_cop...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_Peri#Fiat_Panda_copy_controversy)

<comment><USER19> They wouldn't be able to sell products with this 'acquired' architecture to anyone. Just ask how Huawey sales are doing in US and Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Separating the ARM specific concerns could someone shed light on the generalised apprehension around Nvidia?

</comment><comment><USER23> "...Nvidia took great pains to emphasize that Arm will continue to act as a neutral supplier..."

Yeah, right. Even if by some magic nVidia has this intention (hard to believe) it will only last right up until Trump or his successor decide to use it as a club against whatever country they decide not to like at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Nvidia will retain Arm's United Kingdom headquarters - which exempt it from > many U.S. export control laws

I was not aware that all it took for a U.S. company to profit from bypassing national security concerns, human rights protections, and weapons proliferation limits[0] was to simply open a foreign HQ or buy a company with one.

Not that Arm or Nvidia plan to do any of those things, but it sounds like a regulatory moat to me.

0: [https://2009-2017.state.gov/strategictrade/overview/index.ht...](https://2009-2017.state.gov/strategictrade/overview/index.htm)

<comment><USER25> Or they just want to protect themselves and their customers from an US administration gone off the rails.

<comment><USER26> And so they have an office in a politically stable region: The UK!</comment></comment></comment>


Distributed Hash Tables, Part I - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6797

<comment><USER2> It would have been nice if the submission title noted that this is from 2003.

</comment><comment><USER3> The "leave" portion of the protocol strikes me as unrealistic. Typically, when a node leaves a network it does so without warning and doesn't have tie to copy its data back. Maybe some level of redundancy will be discussed in the followup.

<comment><USER4> I noticed that too. But i can understand why the left it out. As soon as you add redundancy you need to start worrying about write consistency.

<comment><USER5> I would think one would dedicate N*2 nodes for a dataset N and just copy the data in any given node to its closest neighbor node. If the lookup for the primary node fails, try its closest neighbor, and if you really want to get snazzy then have that failover neighbor start to copy data to its closest neighbor until you get a replacement node up. A failover daemon on each node will detect when a neighbor goes down and block writes to a copy of data until it's sure the neighbor is down, and won't accept new copies until both it detects the neighbor is back up and has resolved time-based differences in datasets. Probably not foolproof but it's a start :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think an interesting follow-up to this since it's now 8 years old, would be an article on setting up DHTs in the cloud, like on Amazon's EC2. As demand for the database/application goes up, rolling additional nodes in real-time would be pretty snazzy. It would 'seem' to me that most use cases need a redundancy level of 3 per location, and then spread across three locations. The capital costs of physical equipment, racking, zoning within a facility for redundant power etc. make a cloud solution much more interesting for 99% of use cases.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not much new on the distributed side of things since 2003, perhaps except for bitcoin then.

Anyone know how it went with that ant-based file sharing network, mute or something?</comment>


3 Reasons not to use Apache mod_rewrite - <AUTHOR> http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2008/07/07/3428.aspx

<comment><USER2> This is an obvious pitch for F5's (expensive) products.</comment>


My Experience Selling With Gumroad - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/experience-selling-gumroad/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm happy to answer any questions here as well. I had a great experience with Gumroad and highly recommend you use them for selling your next product.</comment>


Show HN: Fedora – Shopify for Education - <AUTHOR> https://usefedora.com/signup

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I'm the founder of Fedora and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

We were teaching on Udemy but found it really hard to scale a business without having ownership of our users so we built Fedora.

Version 0.1 was literally video hosting, a Stripe integration and a legit Mixpanel integration.

But over the next few months, the product evolved quite considerably. First came progress tracking to make it more like an actual school. We then innovated a bunch of marketing and payments as we added the ability to create course bundles, charge users subscriptions on either a single course or the entire site, an in-built affiliate program, native integrations with more third party tools and a pretty sweet coupon code engine.

Right now, we have about 100 schools using it in private beta and today is the first day that absolutely anyone can sign up to create a school.

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting. I can see why you'd want to own your students/users to customize an experience for them, and with that be able to better monetize them. Who are the target users you're focused on bringing in? Do you think they'd be able to handle the marketing effort themselves, as opposed to say Udemy who's doing a part of this for you?</comment></comment>


Texas cave sediment upends meteorite explanation for global cooling - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-07-texas-cave-sediment-upends-meteorite.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Volcanic origin for Younger Dryas geochemical anomalies ca. 12,900 cal B.P.

[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eaax8587](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eaax8587)</comment>


The Unlikely Medical History of Chocolate Syrup - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unlikely-medical-history-chocolate-syrup-180964779/?no-ist <comment><USER2> "Pharmacists once used chocolate syrup to mask the bitter flavor of their remedies"

As a flavoring, not with a medicinal use all its own.

<comment><USER3> That does work really well, I've used it on crushed pills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always wondered what the original flavor of Coke tasted like with Cocaine as an ingredient.

<comment><USER5> Still is made with coca leaves, so probably similar.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. For anyone wondering: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Company](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Company)

<comment><USER7> Wow, that's genuinely shocking. Had someone told me that at a party I wouldn't have believed them.

<comment> King-Aaron It surprised me when I started working in a cardiovascular lab and seeing legit cocaine in the 'drugs of addiction' cabinet. Turns out it's an extremely good vascular constrictor and is still used in certain hospitals around the place.

<comment><USER8> Especially for sinus surgery. My mother had it used in hers! Odd, isnt it, but we use morphine for pain relief so I guess it's not that crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Chocolate milk was also originally sold as a way to sell milk that was an inferior grade.

<comment><USER10> I wonder what % of all products started this way.

Also related, milk producers that are being milked (sic) by distribution giants are now pivoting to icecream because 1) they can sell at much much higher profit 2) traditionally made ice cream was forgotten and people realize how better the flavour is

<comment><USER11> What is this traditional method that is superior? There seem to already be plenty of excellent commercial brands as well as purveyors using various liquid gases for rapid freezing with minimal crystal growth.

<comment><USER12> The ingredients are usually something like egg yolks, heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla (or other flavorings). It's put into a freezing container, where the edges are constantly scraped by paddles.

There may be excellent commercial brands, but most of what's out there is crap.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I've done that. Ben and Jerry's does it better. I don't think there's any Great Ice Cream Awakening - I see more and more premium brands on the shelf. They all exceed my criteria for being excellent. People who are happy with crap will still buy crap.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>