How to Build a Million-Dollar Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.trizle.com/topics/1250-how-to-build-a-million-dollar-business

<comment><USER2> To build a million dollar business, you only have to convert 300K out of 30M, which is only 1%! Unfortunately, there are numbers less than 1%. It's entirely possible to only convert 0.1% or 0.01%. Are you okay living off of $100K? What about $10K (0.01%)?

See: <http://sivers.org/1pct>

<comment><USER3> Hey sivers. I mentioned it below, but throwing your marketing dollars entirely on the 30M probably won't be the best idea because you don't know your initial conversion ratios. You can try it on a sample size to get the ratios, and then build up gradually as you're hitting your numbers profitably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love how "make the product" is step one. That's the easy part, right?

I also think the complete premise is off target. This guy is talking about selling a newsletter for $25/month.

Most high-quality magazines go for $25/year, or even less. And most of those magazines have large staffs generating quality (usually) content so that the customer is willing to part with that $25/year.

If this guy wants to sell me a weekly newsletter for $25/month, that better be one hell of a newsletter.

Unless the whole point of this article was describing how to fool people into buying a low-quality product. In which case, why not just go all the way and start pushing fake Viagra? You'll get a lot more than 300 "contacts" a day if you're spamming!

What the hell happened to "Make a quality product, promote that product, sell the product, improve the product, repeat"?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, making the product is hard but there are many newsletters that cost way more than $25 month.

Here's a list of investing newsletters that cost more than $25/month.

[http://www.marketwatch.com/news/newsletters/newsletters.asp?...](http://www.marketwatch.com/news/newsletters/newsletters.asp?dist=#frm)

There's even one that is $100 month and I've seen others that are even more.

The difference between these and "high-quality magazines" is that these are extremely targeted to a specific audience with a minimum of advertising.

<comment><USER4> Then they probably have a staff working full time generating content for those newsletters?

I'm not doubting that there are newsletters worth $25/month, I'm doubting that creating a newsletter worth that is a one-man job. (And especially a one-man job where that one man spends most of his time making cold calls.)

<comment><USER3> Hey Nate. Sorry for the clarity issue. Running a $1M one-man operation is definitely pushing it; it's possible, but that's probably too much to put on one's shoulders. A typical $1M company probably has around 5 employees, which I should've mentioned. (The exact revenue per employee however should be based on your industry's averages to see how you fare with your competitors/industry)

<comment><USER4> I saw your post below, thanks for explaining a bit more of the context.

Sorry if I came through a bit cynical and sarcastic, reading your post I thought you were pushing a more get-rich-quick philosophy. Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Baloney. If growing a business was so predictable there would be absolutely no place for startups. that's the sort of intellectual fraud Taleb refers to in the Black Swan.

<comment><USER7> Three cheers for calling this article what it is!

Quoting from a comment I made previously:

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

A good friend of mine described the articles displayed here as a "rat's nest" which does not lead anywhere. At first, I thought he was crazy; then I began critically looking at said articles.

I signed up here looking for what the original post posits providing; what I found were articles about startups, business, marketing, the current/next great gold rush, followed by the token (recently it has been improving) programmer/hacker article. And the articles about startups, business, and marketing were not great on any scale; in fact upon critical review, said articles advocated rather bad strategies. Strategies which amounted to little more than legalized scams, strategies which optimize for the short term, strategies promoting win at any cost, strategies which advocate me first and to hell with the consequences; in short, strategies of which Phineas Taylor Barnum would have been proud.

Before joining the Hacker News community, I was interested in starting my own business. Now that I see what is advocated as "startup culture", I want nothing to do with starting a business in the United States (because my conclusion is the culture and laws of the U.S. have optimized for short term gain, with the resulting push towards the strategies mentioned earlier). What happened to a business (either startup or established business) having integrity in all of their relationships, being a responsible citizen of the business ecosystem it operates within, and providing a legacy beyond the generation within which it was founded?

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

So now here is my dissenting opinion of the linked article: if all you are concerned about is the money, then you have already lost.

<comment><USER8> It is hard to k ow where to begin when addressing all of the delusions about building a successful and worthwhile business that you seem to be suffering from. If you want to create a business that operates with integrity and honesty that lasts for generations you start by creating one that can last for a month. Get feedback from your customers and the environment in which you operate to see if you can make it last for a year. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. No one who creates a worthwhile multi-generational enterprise starts out knowing exactly how it will be accomplished, and most are honest/knowledgible enough to admit this.

It sounds like you are not cut out for entrepreneurship in any culture; I would suggest a return to academia...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well gosh, that IS easy. Why not simplify it even further then.

Just pitch until you sell to 1 person. That person will tell their friends and create 1 more customer, and so on. Now you can just sit back and wait while the millions roll in. The rest, as they say, is maaaaagggggiiiiic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey guys. I'm the topic's author.

I think Trizle makes more sense if you read it in context with everything else on there; my total apologies for the ambiguity.

Some points:

1\. The typical $1M business has about 5 full-time employees working on it (~$200K in revenue per employee); so while building a business that generates that much by yourself is possible, it's out of the norm. I should've definitely mentioned that.

2\. You probably don't want to throw X market dollars at something without understanding your conversion rates first. First, get your average conversion rates (you can do that through statistical inference) from a random sample of your target market, determine if the model is profitable, then gradually expand your reach.

3\. The "$25 bi-weekly newsletter" is just one product example; you can replace it with whatever product you're selling, and then use the model to determine your conversion rates to get an idea of how many pitches it'll take with your current model. For instance, selling a $200 product would take 10x less pitches than a $20 product (in terms of revs) to make X.

4\. The free market creates incentives to provide as much value to your customers as possible; it's a broken system when you let get-rich-quick folks exploit others and get rich; mechanisms drive society, and that's why the Trizle articles tend to emphasize that providing immense customer value as the sole way to building a solid company for the long-term in a free-market economy.

There are no get-rich-quick-schemes, and any model that tells you that you can consistently earn greater returns than Warren Buffett's annual ROE of 20% is likely suspect. Solid, long-term companies, are built over years/decades.

\</comment><comment>

BTW, I love Ycombinator's board (pleasantly surprise someones posted the article here); I come back daily to read the stuff you guys/gals post on here. I come from a technical background (EE degree, using Rails daily), so it's always a fun read every time.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds simple and... it sorta is. If you spend some time learning about sales, you'll recognize the "rejection is good - it's one step closer to the next yes!" theme.

In this vein, I want to recommend "Ready, Fire, Aim" by Michael Masterson. It focuses on the same topic (selling subscriptions to information products) but the ideas can be applied to most product businesses. The focus is on getting those first sales, figuring out how to convert, _then_ fleshing out the product.

</comment><comment><USER11> This article has an underlying assumption -- that you have already created a product for which people are willing to pay $25 a month, if only they hear about it. Which must include testing, revisions, etc, which can only be well done if you receive feedback from a customer base.

In other words, to build a Million dollar business, first you need to... build a million dollar business.

</comment><comment><USER12> Its a good reminder that you have to sell, sell, sell.

But his example that your selling an email newsletter with valuable information, leaves you wondering when you have time to create the newsletter. If you actually did have time to talk to 100 prospectives a day, you would have zero time left for anything else.

A better representation might be: say you have what it takes to research and put together a very compelling newsletter that you can charge $25 a month for. Now lets say, your wife is also at home unemployed and you both magically can last a year trying to bootstrap the business. You bust your butt creating the product and your wife makes 100++ phones calls a day. Sell, sell, sell.

<comment><USER13> Well said !

I am surprised an article of such low quality made it.

The difficult part would be to create a _bi-weekly_ newsletter that people these days will be willing to pay 25$/m for.

What has this to do with startups ? This article is about making infomercials to sell the next AbsShaper.

<comment><USER3> Hi Murkin. I'm not saying it's typical, and I'm probably using a bad example here, but business owners in my experiences dealing with them fall heads over heals for purchases that will help them grow revenue. A solid product that just does that, and pitched well, will make the $25 seem like a pretty good deal for them. 7-page business research reports (e.g. from Forrester, Gartner, etc.), for instance, tend to go for a few hundred dollars, so businesses do spend on investments that give them good returns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This advice may be good for someone selling a commodity, but for software, it doesn't make sense to me.

Basically, OP says to sell a large volume of a commodity product to many customers. Since you only convert 1% of your prospects, you'll have to do a lot of pitching. (100 * a large number = a really large number).

Sounds like you'd be selling all the time with no time left for programming.

I'd suggest exactly the opposite: Spend almost all of your time building a great product, and do one of two things with it:

1\. Make it a niche product and sell it to a small number of tightly targeted customers. Your conversion rate should be much higher than 1% and you can charge much more, not needing so many customers.

2\. Make it a web-based commodity and leverage technology (SEO, blogging, etc.) to reach a large audience. You don't "pitch" thousands of users, you just reach them and let your product pitch them for you.

I just don't understand how someone who can program (which is the critical path for software products) should be spending all of their time selling.

<comment><USER15> Mark Cuban says sales solves all problems. I think he's right. The company with the best sales (not the best product, best SEO'd website, most informative blog, etc.) will probably have the most success. Doesn't mean you have to cold call.

<comment><USER16> To boil it down more, it's customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lifetime value of the customer (LVC). Great products help drive down the CAC and increase the lifetime value of the customer. Sales are great and an often overlooked aspect, but just one piece of the puzzle. You can have an awesome close rate, but if the product sucks and they leave, the LVC goes to shit. You can do a ton of sales as well, but if the cost to close those sales and acquire the customer is too large, you become unprofitable.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Unique wedding gift for an avid HN reader? - <AUTHOR> Throwaway for obvious reasons.
I'm attending a wedding in the next few months for a very close friend who is also an avid HN reader.
He's an engineer and CTO of a Bay Area startup.
He is ridiculously well traveled.  He deliberately avoids all news, but is one of the most well informed people I know.
His bachelor party was the most unconventional I've ever been to, and as a result, the most memorable.
Traditional registry based gifts seem so...unnecessary for him.
I want something elegant, yet simple - and memorable in its uniqueness.
Any ideas from folks who are the best distillation of his personality I've found en masse? <comment><USER2> Buy him a blender ironically.</comment>


Einstein's PhD Thesis - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/WhinerVikram/status/1294574777122918400 <comment><USER2> Considering giving twitter a try again. How easy is it to stear clear of all the politics side of things?

I tried a few years ago, but killed my account when I realized that having all of the posts literally designed for maximum outrage show up in my feed was causing stress that I just didn't need in my life.

<comment><USER3> Another source of outrage on Twitter is the snark.

There's one statistician on Twitter that I check periodically. They often post links to interesting papers. Unfortunately they often post snarky remarks as well. Recently they called Nate Silver naive in a fairly condescendingly way. There was no explanation about why the Nate Silver tweet they were responding to was naive, just an assertion and condescension. The level of casual disrespect among Twitter users is awful.

[https://twitter.com/cubic_logic/status/1293916568615673858](https://twitter.com/cubic_logic/status/1293916568615673858)</comment></comment>


LipNet: Sentence-level Lipreading [VIDEO] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa5QGremQf8 <comment><USER2> Yet another really impressive deep-learning result. From scanning the paper, the data-sets seems to be rather limited though (that's why the sentences are so contrived), so hard to use in real life situations at this stage.

To me this has some very interesting applications: e.g. surveillance cameras can scan crowds and conversations can be searched using word-queries. Or maybe people will want to do sentiment analysis of what is said in a store or restaurant.</comment>


blog.pmarca.com: Now playing: Silicon Valley short attention span theater - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/now-playing-sil.html <comment><USER2> Since when have the opinions of non-customers mattered?

With almost every new idea, you see many posts here or on TechCrunch that say, "I don't get it, won't use it, or already use a similar app."

Most entrepreneurs actually listen to that. Why? Your goal is not to please everybody. Your goal is to release a product. Listen to the people who actually bother to fill out the feedback form because they love the idea and tell you ways to improve it. Those are the ones who WANT to pay you or use your product.

Money is a good barrier to entry that lets you only deal with serious people. But with a lot of new apps being free in order to boost their user counts, and lots of people registering for your service, you REALLY have to increase the filter even more, knowing that 90% of the people who signed up probably don't even care about the concept, as opposed to 1% of the people signing up for a paid service who may not actually want it.

A lot of these VC blogs are just spams to get you to to associate VCs with development. But, really, focus on your product, as VCs will always be there.

<comment><USER3> As a side note, for some types of apps, what customers say they want is usually the exact opposite of what should be made;) In this case you've really got to be determined in order to press on...

That said, I too absolutely despise the feedback: "I don't get it, won't use it, or there are a thousand similar apps out there"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now that they've opened it up I consider Facebook to be essentially another web built on top the main web. One that has identity, messaging, sharing, networking, etc built in. Much more literally a web 2.0 than the other definitions of that term.

Assuming the Facebook guys don't do anything weird, it should be a marketplace much like the main web: survival of the fittest. Anyone who thought Facebook was going to let them skip the hard part of "making something users want" was just confused.

I'll be working on Facebook stuff long after the Techcrunch 50,000 has moved on.

</comment><comment><USER5> For once I disagree, though: if the promise of Facebook apps was to go to a million users within seconds of launching them (which was the first impression), then being disappointed after five weeks could be justified.

Sure, there will be upcoming successful Facebook apps. But if Facebook is not that viral, why bother, and not go back to growing normal internet applications instead?

</comment><comment><USER6> Marc spends a lot of time talking about the TC50K. I wonder what fraction of those folks use Facebook on any regular basis. Much like folks that don't use Twitter commenting on its usefulness, I think that the TC50K's opinion doesn't count when discussing Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree and I suspect the real reason is that very few people actually need all those consumer internet services or the gadgets built on their APIs. If something is useful you don't dump it after using it for a few weeks.</comment>


Privoxy, a non-caching web proxy with filtering capabilities - mutin-sa https://www.privoxy.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I used this maybe a decade back on Windows. Currently using uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger + DNS blocking over dnscrypt-proxy (gives me a local caching resolver as well), but I miss Privoxy.

<comment><USER2> Me too. As I recall, I used it to force proxification of traffic for applications that didn't normally support proxies (although I may be mistaken...). Great bit of kit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am stopped using privoxy for adblocking few years ago with widespread HTTPS adoption. Their filters + small number of custom rules provided good protection long before adblockplus.

</comment><comment><USER4> No doubt based on or inspired by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron) , which does have HTTPS MITM capability --- the one thing a lot of filtering proxies lack. There's unofficial (as they all are --- the author is long deceased) patches to add support for the latest OpenSSL libraries and other minor useful enhancements.

<comment><USER5> Privoxy was based on Internet Junkbuster[1], whose last public release (1998) was a year before the first release of Proxomitron (1999).

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Junkbuster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Junkbuster)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> From 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822974).

</comment><comment><USER7> it actually becomes less and less useful nowadays, due to the fact that most sites are running https instead of http. privoxy can not proxy https well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Last updated over a year ago. Is there any benefit to using this over something like Pi-hole?

<comment><USER9> I am still using it but it becomes obsolete fast as more traffic becomes HTTPS.

<comment><USER10> You can pair it with something that generates https certificates on the fly, like mitmproxy.

<comment><USER11> It is generally easier to use Squid in reverse mode. It is a production quality proxy that can do reverse proxying. You can generate a CA cert, install it onto Squid chain it to privoxy and install the CA cert into your browsers.

Mitmproxy is great and we use it a lot, but it will have a pretty big hit on your performance. They have a more streamlined tool, mitmdump that is more aimed for these use cases, but it is still not written for performance first.

[https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-setup-transparent- proxy...](https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-setup-transparent-proxy-squid- howto.html) [https://wiki.squid- cache.org/Features/DynamicSslCert](https://wiki.squid- cache.org/Features/DynamicSslCert) [https://wiki.squid- cache.org/Features/SslPeekAndSplice](https://wiki.squid- cache.org/Features/SslPeekAndSplice)

That link is an exact recipe for what I am talking about. It isn't really trivial to setup, but it does work well. Then, you can transparently privoxy ALL of your connections. You have to mix and grind several ingredients together.

Specifying proxy is always easier/better, but transparent with upstream (from squid) proxies is possible. Squid can also do much of the ad blocking as well like privoxy, just without as nice of a config look and feel.

edit: Just keeping things simple, I use squid with dynamic ssl certs, non transparently and have most of the rules I used in Privoxy working fine on Squid as the "one proxy" to run browser through. This prevents needing to monkey with proxy rules. As a bonus idea I also run this Squid on a perma- privacy-VPNd box, and always force certain site traffic through using a browser configuration like ProxySwitch Sharp. If you are really paranoid you can keep your sensitive traffic through your home / more trusted connection (whitelist style) and then route everything else through Squid/Privoxy.

Setting up a nice little Linux VM that simply can't route traffic without the VPN connection is very nice, it ensures traffic thru your little VM can't leak if something on the VPN fails.

<comment><USER5> Is there anywhere I could read more detail on this setup? I'm not exactly clear on how it works.

Do you have:

A: client -> squid -> privoxy -> internet

or

B: client -> privoxy -> squid -> internet

And some more details on the exact squid & privoxy setup would be nice too.

I've long wanted to get privoxy working over HTTPS, and would love to know the details of how this is done.

<comment><USER11> Direct proxy, no transparent, client -> privoxy -> squid -> http(s) sites. I trust Squid at the tip a lot more. Forwarding Privoxy to another proxy is easy. Read the Forwarding section of the Privoxy manual. Setup Privoxy how you want. Forward to Squid. Follow: [https://wiki.squid- cache.org/Features/DynamicSslCert](https://wiki.squid- cache.org/Features/DynamicSslCert)

You should then have the perfect proxy centipede. For bonus fun use dnsmasq and blacklist domains via DNS too.

Things get much more complex if you want to do things transparently. Now you have to monkey with iptables. The idea is similar though. Start with Privoxy getting all HTTP traffic on a router. Forward to Squid. Have Squids dynamic SSL cert on your client devices.

<comment><USER5> So is privoxy happy handling HTTPS requests as long as it's fronted by Squid? I guess I'm still not clear on how/why that works. I thought privoxy could only handle HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a similar project that does dns filtering? That would workaround HTTPS.

<comment><USER13> Run your own DNS server, such as dnsmasq. For example I have a homegrown script that gets a few adblocking lists and constructs a dnsmasq config out of them (dedupe + merge + map to black hole IP).

<comment><USER14> dnsgate does that: [https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate](https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A decade or so ago when I was working on residential gateway/set-top box project, I used Privoxy to filter certain words from URLs via C/Linux programming.

</comment><comment><USER16> Privoxy was an offshoot from IJB, the Internet Junkbuster which I guess started around 1996.

If interested in reading about the aversion to web ads and concern over privacy in the 1990's and early 2000's, check out IJB's old website. It is loaded with information. The IJB code is still around in at least a few places. While I prefer local DNS and local SSL-enabled proxies to filter ads, believe it or not ijb, as old as it is, still compiles and runs.

To quickly get the list of urls from archive.org, something like:

            curl -o ijb.urls https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=www.junkbuster.org\&fl=timestamp,original

            exec sed '
            /^[12][0-9]* h/!d;
            /^[12][0-9]* h/{
            s/^/http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\//;
            s/ /\//;
            #^M is "\r"
            s/^M//g;
            }' ijb.urls

</comment><comment><USER17> I always had a really tough time configuring this in a way that worked for me when I tried it. It's hard to see what it's doing. But, useful if you can set it up to work for you.

</comment><comment><USER18> Isn't privoxy native code?

I wouldn't recommend running this, as it most likely is an excellent way to get a remote exploit on your machine.

<comment><USER19> Can you elaborate on this? What do you mean by native code, other than it being C? Why would a loopback listening daemon be an excellent way to get a remote exploit?.

<comment><USER18> It parses and rewrites HTML in C. And it is an esoteric tool. Throw AFL at it for a day, 100% chance of segfault.</comment></comment></comment>


US spy operation that manipulates social media (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

<comment><AUTHOR> "A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom) [...] to develop what is described as an 'online persona management service' that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world."

Since this article was published in 2011, do we know which company makes this?

I'm curious if these identities are auto-generated or if they're just manually controlled. This raises all sorts of concerns about spam, fraud, identity theft, etc.</comment>


How to scan local files for secrets in Python using the GitGuardian API - mackenzie-gg https://blog.gitguardian.com/scan-secrets/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just a heads up that the contact sales link on the blog is broken: [https://gitguardian.com/contact](https://gitguardian.com/contact) should be [https://gitguardian.com/contact-us](https://gitguardian.com/contact-us)

</comment><comment><USER2> you can also use a local cross-platform static analysis tool like : [https://github.com/xfhg/intercept](https://github.com/xfhg/intercept)

If you fancy regex ofc, but needs no changes into your codebase or internet access from your pipeline.

</comment><comment> mackenzie-gg How to scan local files for secrets like API keys and security certificates in python using the GitGuardian API.</comment>


Why Paul Graham and Matt Mullenweg Are Both Right? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.venturepact.com/why-paul-graham-and-matt-mullenweg-are-both-right

<comment><USER2> the "office-first v. remote-first" debate brings to mind Conway's Law: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"

So depending on the product, remote-first might actually be a pretty ideal setup. Or not. Very context-dependent</comment>


Broadband in SF - <AUTHOR>

Hello all,
I just moved to SF, and am in the midst of making the most important decision of my move: What broadband service should I subscribe to? I think ATT, Verizon and Comcast are available in my area. Anyone have any recommendations? I like to spend my nights hacking away, but don't need an uber-fast connection. Reliability is most important to me.
Thanks,
Eddie <comment><USER2> I've had AT&T for as long as I've been here (at first it was SBC). I've only had one outage that I can remember and service has been acceptable. Prices have gone down since SBC bought AT&T and changed their name and it seems like customer service has gotten better a little bit though I haven't had to call them many times.

Also it now looks like if you turn down some of the promotional stuff you can get the same prices w/o a year long contract which was not the case back when it was SBC.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://Speakeasy.net> has always worked really well for me. I get 8 static ips 6Mbps/768Kpbs in Milwaukee, WI. I know they are on the west coast too. I also have to say that their service is top level. I feel like i have the Bently of internet connections with how well they treat me.I highly recommend them.

<comment><USER4> Another happy speakeasy customer! Never had any issues with their service. Highly recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They are all horrible companies but Comcast is very fast and won't make you sign a year contract like some of the phone companies. On the other hand I had ATT in SF when I lived there and the service was fine. Speakeasy is good but a little bit more than Comcast if you bundle internet and cable.

</comment><comment><USER6> Comcast throttles bittorrent; you may want to avoid them for pragmatic or idealistic reasons.

<comment><USER7> Comcast seems pretty fast to me, but their customer support is horrendous - the only play in their playbook seems to be: "turn off the modem and reboot your computer"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Been generally happy with ATT (SBC (PacBell)) DSL over the years. Price keeps going down, speed up as long as you ask to be on an updated promotion (which sometimes requires a 1-year contract, not a big concern for me).

Another option not yet mentioned: Astound cable (was RCN; see astound.net). I was happy with RCN (very fast problem-free service) for about 2 years, then moved to an area RCN didn't yet service. Might be worth a look for completeness.</comment>


Why Don't More Humans Eat Bugs? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sapiens.org/culture/eat-bugs/ <comment><USER3> A comment was deleted, which said,

> For the same reason we don't eat grass. We get them preprocessed by other > animals and then eat them instead because they are tastier.

The reason we don't eat grass is because our digestive system can't really absorb much energy from it. Eating grass requires a very specialized digestive system, and we just don't have those specializations.

The reason grass isn't tasty is because our taste has coevolved with our digestive system so things we can digest are tasty.

Bugs are tasty. We can get nutrients from bugs. Do you like breadcrumbs on your macaroni and cheese? Try ants instead. They give the same crunch and a similar texture, but a bit of a different flavor. I think it's a nice contrast to the load of soft carbs and fat in macaroni and cheese.

That said, I'm still going to use breadcrumbs. I'm just not that adventurous. Bugs are treated as novelties, not food, in mainstream US culture. If they're not part of your tradition, you end up making a big deal out of them.

<comment><USER4> I encourage you to research what percentage of bugs are actually edible and a reasonable source of protein in northern climates. And then research the eating habits in regions where the percentage of edible and protein rich insects is significantly higher. Within there, I imagine you will find an answer.

<comment><USER5> Also, insect are hard to find in the winter, and much harder to raise at a reasonable quantity than cows and chickens.

And if your 1000 sheeps escape in the wild, you have a chance to get some back, and you will be able to protect you fields against them.

It's practical.

Plusyou don't have to care about venom when cookinh lamb.

<comment><USER6> > and much harder to raise at a reasonable quantity than cows and chickens.

Doubt that. Livestock eats up much more energy than its meat gives back (i.e. you would have to feed 7kg of soy protein to get 1kg of meat protein).

With insects such as Mealworms that's much easier. They basically eat anything and they turn it almost 1:1 into valuable protein. Also you can raise them pretty much everywhere, even in crammed indoor farms without it being cruel.

It's sounded more like you were imagining wild crickets being collected from grass fields or something... which is obviously not a good solution.

<comment><USER3> > With insects such as Mealworms that's much easier. They basically eat > anything and they turn it almost 1:1 into valuable protein.

I looked up the feed conversion ratio for mealworms, I found values around 5:1. This is comparable to beef. Chickens are much better, somewhere around 1.5:1. Some other insects are better or worse in terms of FCR.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689427/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689427/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing about some insects - I used to have fish in an aquarium that were large enough to eat crickets in one bite, and every single insect I caught in our home and put in the water also had parasitic worms that tried to escape the host insect immediately when it realized the insect was in water - <USER2> parasitic worms seem to take up most of the insects abdomen. This might not be a problem in non tropical parts of the world, but it's like a horror movie in miniature.

[http://theconversation.com/the-parasite-a-crickets- nightmare...](http://theconversation.com/the-parasite-a-crickets-nightmares- are-made-of-19364)

<comment><USER8> Farmed insects like silkworm should be safe to eat, I often stir fry them as a snack with beer. Quite tasty!

<comment><USER9> Are farmed tapeworms safe to eat?

<comment><USER8> Nematode aren't insect though :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was eating out with an "ideologically motivated" vegetarian friend of mine, who doesn't eat meat because it's "ethically wrong", and he ordered crabs. I challenged him (jokingly, but ready to argue my point on aesthetic grounds): "Crabs are just giant bugs, and you're a vegetarian, so why do you eat bugs?"

He replied "I eat bugs because they're the enemy!"

<comment><USER10> > vegetarian friend of mine ... he ordered crabs

Not a vegetarian.

<comment><USER11> That is literally the entire point of the whole comment that they made you pedantic ding dong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Because they're gross looking and honestly don't taste that great (speaking from experience). It's not rocket science.

<comment><USER13> There are many parts of the world where bugs are considered to appear and taste palatable. Some are delicacies.

The idea that all bugs are gross is largely due to unfamiliarity. Most unfamiliar foods are considered gross the first time someone tries them (as anyone with kids can attest).

With that said, some of the large ants commonly eaten in southern Mexico are extremely bitter. Not my favorite for sure.

<comment><USER12> >The idea that all bugs are gross is largely due to unfamiliarity.

I'm really, _really_ skeptical of this idea. One of the most interesting phobias is Trypophobia, fear of irregular patterns or of small holes/bumps. It's not really a fear, ... but more of an evolutionary response. Humans are good at recognizing patterns and irregular holes/bumps tend to mean disease or "something gross and dangerous probably laid eggs here". Those things tend to be insects, or bugs, or whatever.

As an aside, eating bugs has become all the rage with some of my more culturally eccentric friends. I don't really know why, since they can definitely afford actual food and seem to engage in this as some kind of signal of cultural experience or "competency".

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

<comment><USER13> Ants, termites, wasps, bees, cicadas, grasshoppers and crickets, beetles, beetle larvae, moth larvae, caterpillars, ... have a very wide range of appearances, textures, flavors, habitats, diets, ....

I don't see why Trypophobia would have anything to do with a fear of eating insects rather than, say, honey, pomegranates, sunflower seeds, or strawberries.

There are many things commonly eaten in e.g. the USA which are considered disgusting by some people in other countries. Fermented cabbage, non-dairy "cheese" product, twinkies, weird stuff made out of jello or marshmallows, deep-fried butter, wonder bread, raw kale, ...

There are also many foods eaten in other parts of the world which don't look weird and have nothing to do with bugs but most e.g. Americans refuse to eat for no apparent reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a cultural thing.

When I was very young growing up in Zambia, we used to eat those flying termites that appear everywhere after the rains, as well as a certain type of caterpillar.

And I remember them being delicious. Then we flew off to the US for about 6 years.

That was enough time for me to completely lose the taste for them on a very visceral level.

</comment><comment><USER5> Fried spiced bugs are tasty. Raw bugs not so much. I liked fried scorpio. Raw cricket, taste like crap.

I guess if you take grass, deep fry it and put cummin on it, it tastes ok too.

You can eat a cucumber, a carrot, an apple or a steak raw. Even things you need to cook, such as wheet or potatoes, taste alrigh by just being boiled in water.

<comment><USER15> You can eat potatoes raw too.

The human digestive system evolved in the Paleolithic to easily digest starchy roots like the potato. Besides meat, starchy roots were a favorite.

Wheat btw is a Neolithic phenomenon. And there is some proof that grains are toxic and that some of those toxins aren't annihilated with cooking. Grains being toxic is an evolutionary trait meant to discourage mammals and insects from eating the seeds. Fruits are meant to be eaten, but not seeds.

Could insects be toxic too? The dose makes the poison, plus it takes decades for us to observe the effects.

Also deep fried food is unhealthy, no matter the food. Vegetable oils and high temperatures don't mix well.

<comment><USER5> Somehow i don't think a restaurant selling raw potatoes will suceed much though :)

<comment><USER15> I meant that you can eat potatoes raw and it won't make you sick and it won't give you nausea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this clip sums it up pretty well. Albeit, they're talking about living in tiny houses. But it's the same general idea. Joey's commentary is on point, IMO.

[https://youtu.be/yxXoRtRr3WE?t=65](https://youtu.be/yxXoRtRr3WE?t=65)

Also happens to be hilarious, but I don't disagree with the point he's making.

TL;DR Most people don't live like that because more desirable choices are available, and they're prepared to spend more to achieve that.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's not so strange to eat bugs. Aren't crustaceans, particularly crawfish and the like, the bugs of the sea? They certainly look and behave like insects, scavenging the ocean floor.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was very apprehensive when i first tried roasted crickets. By the time i was on my second spoonful, i was wondering the same. Why haven't i had more of them?

It's the mental block that we've been conditioned with. That bugs are "disgusting" things.

<comment><USER19> I had a similar experience. I've had fried crickets, they are delicious. It is like eating a tasty crispy french fry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've had deep fried crickets and deep fried mealy worms. I think its was the preparation that put me off them.

The crickets tasted/felt like semi crunchy shells. Not very enjoyable to eat and the after effect was lumps of ground up shell in my teeth.. meh

The mealy worms were not quite as bad as the crickets but waaaay overpowered by the herbs and stuff mixed in with them.

I'm also very much anti deep fried anything so I'd really like to try them prepped another way.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not about being squeamish. It's about having better options.

My ancestors (up to a generation ago) lived in a place that was a frozen wasteland for half the year (so no bugs for all that time) and basically subsisted off grains, cabbage in various stages of decomposition and products of animals that could actually survive long enough to be useful.

As efficient as it seems today to be able to farm crickets, for farmers a few generations ago it would have been much easier to simply keep a few cows, pigs, and plant things than waste time trying to catch crickets and grasshoppers who can't even survive the winter. There's a reason the cultures who do eat bugs do so opportunistically and don't waste a ton of resources on it.

</comment><comment><USER22> We don't eat bugs because nobody has yet developed a machine that can affordably extract the meat.

We don't eat cattle whole. When we make burgers, we leave out the skin and poop and horns and teeth. Bugs aren't any different.

<comment><USER23> If you were 1000x the size of a cow, you probably could (and would) eat it whole, as your teeth would mash through bone and skin without a problem.

<comment><USER22> I could, but I wouldn't, because those parts taste bad. The poop is particularly awful.

<comment><USER24> The are a lot of things that people eat whole, such as sardines, anchovies, and other small fish. Some cultures even use bile as a flavoring (see Papaitan from the Philippines), and others eat bugs (crickets and grasshoppers are very popular).

<comment><USER22> In the USA we don't do that.

Our sardines and anchovies have the head and guts removed, and probably the tail. We do sometimes eat skin and bones. The same goes for canned salmon and herring.

We also peel, decapitate, and gut our shrimp. This is probably a better comparison because the exoskeleton is similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> No idea why people don't eat more but I like eating deep fried insects e.g. rice grasshopper, silkworm etc. the taste is just as awesome as mainstream the deep fried chicken or french fried sort of things that we have been eating since we was child :) also, where I live they even sell insects as snack packaged food (Exactly like potato chips packaging) in supermarket and minimart these days. I don't mean I eat them as my primary source of protein but rather just eating it as a snack during watching movie at home instead of popcorn.

</comment><comment><USER26> You can get every kind of bug on some markets in China. They taste disgusting. In Korea you can get silk worms in cans. They taste neutral. If prepared fresh on the street the taste is hardly bearable for any Westerner.

You now buy an insect burger in Germnany [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/22/bug- appetite-g...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/22/bug-appetite- german-supermarket-sells-burgers-made-from-worms)

</comment><comment><USER27> I think there are recommendations on the maximum amount of bugs that can fall into a can of green beans or a bag of potato chips. So per year I've eaten a certain amount of bugs without knowing. Ignorance is probably biss.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there a good field guide to edible insects of New England, or does one just need to join an entymology club?

I look into this every couple years and I have yet to find anything good.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've heard that I'm unknowingly "eating" bugs everyday by drinking ground coffee

I don't know if it's a fact or a myth

<comment><USER30> There are almost no crops that are totally free from bugs, coffee has extra stages of sitting and drying too which would do it no favors either. It's just not enough to worry about, just like the shit you inhale when you smell a fart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My best case imagination of the future is that we get all our dietary protein from buffalo worms. Insects are some of the most efficient systems for converting plant mater in to human dietary protein, the fact that humans have a disgust response against them is one of the saddest facts impacting the future of our planet.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd like to eat insects, but they're a lot more expensive than chicken.

</comment><comment><USER33> If access to meat is the problem, why not just go vegan?

</comment><comment><USER34> Cricket flour tastes, like, really bad.

</comment><comment><USER35> We do all the time. Ever had lobster?

<comment><USER5> Shell fishes have marinated in a tasty iodine and mineral packed salted water, that also have the benefit of preserving it from a lot of infectuous agents.</comment></comment>


Apple Maps - <AUTHOR> http://maps.apple.com

<comment><USER2> Interesting that this seems to redirect to Google Maps for me although we can infer with some degree of certainty that Apple has some future plans for this subdomain.

Apropos to Apple's shift to Open Street Map I feel both excited and apprehensive: for instance someone pointed out to me that the new maps won't display transit information (or don't currently, we'll have to see what happens after iOS 6 is launched) but at the same time I'm happy to see OSM gaining traction.

Edit, here's what dig tells us:

        ; <<>> DiG 9.7.3-P3 <<>> maps.apple.com
        ;; global options: +cmd
        ;; Got answer:
        ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 742
        ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

        ;; QUESTION SECTION:
        ;maps.apple.com.			IN	A

        ;; ANSWER SECTION:
        maps.apple.com.		2918	IN	CNAME   gsps28.ls.apple.com.
        gsps28.ls.apple.com.	219	IN	CNAME	gsps28.isg-apple.com.akadns.net.
        gsps28.isg-apple.com.akadns.net. 272 IN	A	220.127.116.11

<comment><USER3> Whoever was speaking at the time (Forstall?) mentioned that they would showcase existing 3rd-party transit apps. Taking a look at the sketchy VTA, BART and CalTrain apps I've tried this is not an adequate replacement. Hopefully there'll be a way to access Google's maps through the web or a Google app.

<comment><USER4> You should check out Embark's transit apps <http://letsembark.com/>. I'm not in California so I'm not sure about their BART and CalTrain apps, but I use it in NYC and it's fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bit worried if honestly Apple maps can ever stack up to Google. We use directions with public transportation all the time, and if that's missing from Apple maps, it will be a significant decrease in experience.

<comment><USER6> It is odd. It is missing but the icon is still there in the app. It looks like it simply lists apps available in the app store that provide routing services (none are displayed though).

Walking directions work.

Also, the maps are (IMO) significantly worse in quality than Google Maps. Turn by turn is nice though. Something that Google Maps should have implemented a long time ago.

It will interesting to see what the Google Maps app introduces and whether Apple accepts it.

<comment><USER7> >Also, the maps are (IMO) significantly worse in quality than Google Maps. Turn by turn is nice though. Something that Google Maps should have implemented a long time ago.

The build-in Android map application has had turn by turn for some time now.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. Google could have implemented it on iOS if they had wanted to, but that was a pretty big selling point for some people to get an Android phone over iOS.

At least it was for me when I bought my Nexus One unlocked after eBaying a free-on-contract HTC Pure instead of getting the iPhone 3G(S? not sure if it was out back then)

<comment><USER9> Maybe they didn't want to take the risk of it being rejected as 'duplicating existing functionality'. I know that some apps have got through nowadays, but has the policy changed to allow this, or is Apple allowing these on a case-by- case basis?

<comment><USER7> No, they didn't do it because Apple was already paying them to use their maps.

If they came out with their own Google Maps application that had feature parity with the Android app, I would imagine that most iOS users would switch immediately to that app instead of Apple's built-in one.

That could have potentially cost Google a lot of money, assuming that Apple was paying on a per-use basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This isn't news. The redirect has been in place for a while. I posted a link to exactly this a few hours ago before digging around and finding that it's been up there for a while.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is redirecting to google maps for me

<comment><USER12> That's the joke.

<comment><USER13> .jpg

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am really skeptical about Apple Maps. Maybe they can get data as good as Google. Maybe they can even do directions as well as Google.

I think they will falter on one of the most important parts though. Google Maps has a fantastic search. If it does not match up, then it will definitely by an issue.

<comment><USER15> In London Apple Maps on iOS 6 beta are nowhere near beta level. From my Twitter feed today, many including screenshots:

\- Streets are shown as numbers, American style. 'A405' rather than Old Kent Rd. Nobody in the UK uses these numbers for directions, or knows what the numbers are beyond 2 or 3 main highways. Nobody will ever say A405 in conversation. The numbers are useless, and the names aren't shown.

\- No tube stations are shown

\- The water is missing from parts of the Thames

\- Searching for 'Bank Tube' takes you to Bank, Azerbaijan.

<comment><USER16> This is exactly what I was afraid of. To me maps are one of those critical smart phone features, and if maps in iOS 6 suck as much as you are describing, it's reason enough for me to switch to Android.

Apple is really trying to alienate their long term customers. I liked them better when Google were friends and when they made computers software developers and creative pros would use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If they can get it working correctly with multitouch trackpad gestures I'll be stoked.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full link: maps.apple.com

<comment><USER18> redirect to maps.google.com

Maybe it just works in the USA?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> over under on the time that it takes for this to be changed?</comment>


Jolla: The market wants an alternative to iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/europe/jolla-the-market-wants-an-alternative-to-ios-and-android/

<comment><USER2> The _sellers_ want an alternative to iOS and Android. A possible reason why none exists on the market--at least not with significant numbers--might be that the buyers don't want it. More precisely, buyers don't seem to want anything that sellers are able to produce at the price they'd be asking for it.

I'm not sure what are the proper rules to anthropomorphize the market, but I'd say that for the market to "want" something, you need sellers to produce something at a price which buyers are willing to pay.

You've got a polished and tightly controlled garden with iOS, a commoditized ecosystem in which to find commoditized phones with Android, and a base to develop one's own walled garden _a la_ Amazon, again with Android. There's nothing very exciting for non-Apple sellers here indeed, but that's a pretty good situation for buyers; I can't think of a buyer problem which would be best solved by a completely new OS.

<comment><USER2> ACtually, the answer lies in the article:

> why would an operator choose to work with you? > > we can integrate the > operator's value-added services into the device

Translated in plain english: "Operators mourn the pre-iPhone times when hardware makers and consumers were their bitches. We'll try to sell them the leashes to get their bitches back, because they're the only one who've got a problem we can fix with a new OS"

<comment><USER3> Yah. The public has been -clamoring- for crappy pre-smartphone branded apps like Verizon's V-Cast.

Can't wait to buy mine. Hope it comes with RealPlayer too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The market _has_ a credible alternative to iOS and Android, the market just chooses not to use it, which brings to question whether or not the market really wants an alternative to iOS and Android.

<comment><USER5> You mean WP? It's not really an alternative, it's iOS in different clothes. It's even more closed and walled than iOS, and most fruits in that garden are rotten.

Only way to succeed with walled garden is to have the best fruits in there.

<comment><USER6> Your presumption of what constitutes a viable third alternative is flawed. Most people (mass market) don't care about openness.

<comment><USER5> They care when they are forced to use inferior products. For example, IE on WP and Apple maps on iOS6.

<comment><USER7> What do maps on iOS6 have to do with the walled garden? Third-party map apps are allowed on the App Store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find it really sad that most of the comments here are disparaging. I, for one, do want something that isn't Apple's walled garden or Google's personal information hoover.

These are hardly the two best things we could come up with.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am sad that WebOS didn't make it. Not only was it a credible alternative, it was also well thought-out and _fun_ to develop for and hack on. I'm curious what Jolla will turn out to be exactly, but I also wish someone would just go and revive WebOS already. Someone with hardware pull. Someone like the Nokia of old.

</comment><comment><USER10> Windows? Come _on_. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo>

<comment><USER11> I was looking to buy a N900, but now Nokia is dead to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> OS's form natural monopolies. The more you sell, the more software is written for the OS, the better the OS becomes.

Its why nobody has come close to displacing windows on desktop computers.

The web helps even the playing field in become a platform that works on all devices.

</comment><comment><USER13> Another alternative to iOS and Android will actually sell more iOS and Android devices. While it's true that a small number people will switch for the novelty of it, the two natural monopolies will actually benefit more.

Whatever the alternative is, it should target the market which iOS and Android leaves out at first: regular dumb phones.

</comment><comment><USER14> But will it run on my N900?!

<comment><AUTHOR> Jolla is based on Mer, and Mer runs on the N900 <https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo></comment></comment>


Intel to cut IoT jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel-cut-iot-jobs-2017-07/ <comment><USER2> It's been said already, but these products were destroyed by support-forum-as- documentation. You can get a light blinking on an Arduino in five minutes. On the Edison, it took all my free time for a couple days to even figure out what pins were what. During that time, the excitement of building something more complicated on it evaporated. We are programmers, not documentation detectives on a scavenger hunt. I hope anyone who threw a bureaucratic monkey wrench into a proper documentation hub uses their unemployment to reflect.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree. Unfortunately, so many semiconductor vendors are going this way (for ICs) as well.

For example, there are so many parts on the Texas Instruments web site for which you can not get any support, unless you are a heavy volume customer. They even turned some of their product forums to "read-only". You can't even post a public question anymore.

Similarly, Xilinx had an official support channel (Webcase). A few years ago, they made to decision to only have that support channel open to their Tier 1 (or whatever they call them) customers. We can no longer ask for direct support from Xilinx with the money we spend on their chips (~100K USD worth of FPGAs) every year.

... and don't get me started on Qualcomm.

<comment><USER4> Not sure what these companies are thinking. They might not realize, but some small companies get big. Some of the young engineers of today will be the CEOs of tomorrow. The people who are getting shitty support from Xilinx and Qualcomm right now are likely not to want to do business with them later. Furthermore, some big companies actually do listen to what the engineers have to say. IMO, big tech companies are failing to understand why you should try to have the technical people be on your side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _> IoT accounts for less than 5% of Intel's sales. The group had revenues of $721 million last year_

This isn't a surprise to anyone who's encountered any Intel IoT product. I think for most of us, the biggest question was why it took Intel so long to pull the plug.

Intel released products for IoT, then didn't update them forever (look at how many times they announced successors [0] [1] to the Quark) and they wonder why no one was interested to build products with their solutions.

As an aside, this article is terribly written (grammatical errors everywhere, spelling mistakes like "msrket").

[0] [http://www.cpu- world.com/news_2014/2014070801__Dublin_Bay_So...](http://www.cpu- world.com/news_2014/2014070801__Dublin_Bay_SoCs_to_replace_Quark_processors_in_2015.html)

[1] [http://wccftech.com/intel-quark-liffy-island-seal-beach- proc...](http://wccftech.com/intel-quark-liffy-island-seal-beach-processors- roadmap-details-leaked/)

<comment> m-j-fox What surprises me is $721m seems like a lot for a product no one buys. Also surprised it's not worth employing 100 people bringing in $7m/yr/head. I would employing such people.

<comment><USER6> Not a big sum for a semi business. There are quite a few semiconductor companies of less than 100 people and billion buck sized revenues

<comment><USER6> one waffer for less than a 100 waffers tapeout will cost at around 9k if we talk about 14nm.

it is very likely that they were actually making losses

<comment><USER7> How many useful die per wafer? Is there a ballpark yield for 14nm?

I too suspect this was not a profit-in-the-now division. They were probably playing a long-term game. I think they ceded the game to someone else .. but who?

<comment><USER6> >How many useful die per wafer? Is there a ballpark yield for 14nm?

~550/580

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Intel rode too long on the x86 and the horse is now tired. It has been tired a while but there were deep moats around Intel. Manufacturing technology was one but others have been catching up as mobile provided the market and cash for sustained investments. Wintel was another but both Microsoft and Apple are both looking at ARM. On the server side ARM, graphic chips and FPGAs are taking away and are threatening to take even more business.

Intel seems to know they need to break into new business. But doing that with the mindset and within the constraints of a quasi monopolist is very, very hard. Building something new requires not just resources but calendar time, commitment and freedom not just on the technical but also on the business model side. Focusing on your core strength is an excellent mantra until one is in a corner and by then it is hard to think different.

<comment><USER9> Intel's entire business is based on high margins. Trying to take that orientation and apply it to low-margin markets like mobile and IOT has been a complete failure for them.

I don't think they actually care (yet) because a few billions is peanuts to them as long as they have their high margin business but the wolves are at the door.

AMD is actually much better positioned because they have gone through a very painful restructuring and reorientation toward a business model that works with low-margins and they now seem to be coming out the other side.

Intel will eventually have to go through the same restructuring and it will be even more painful for them because they have a lot further to fall.

<comment><USER10> The only other high margin semiconductor business I see as a competitor to them is not AMD, it's Nvidia.

Gpu technology from Nvidia is continuing to unlock new capabilities that make upgrading a CPU less important and as more code becomes gpu dependent it'll matter less what CPU architecture you are running.

That opens the door for arm to enter the server market.

That is doom for Intel.

<comment><USER6> Ja, even now Nvidia can simply put an average general purpose core into GPU to run Windows and release something like libGPU to let devs access computations on GPU directly.

I believe that they are acutely aware of that, but at the moment they chose "to not to slaughter a hen laying golden eggs"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Intel's main problem is that in the age of commodity OSes, bytecode executable formats, bare metal runtimes and SoC that rival a Pentium class processor, the processors doing the work are kind of irrelevant.

Sure someone still needs to write those AOT/JIT compiler backends and virtualization layers, but it has become a thin layer in the overall stack.

<comment><USER12> Even without bytecode and VMs, a x86 machine has virtually no advantage over $otherARchMachine in these niches.

<comment><USER13> In practice that's just not true. There are a lot of manufactured products using $otherARchMachine, but good luck making a decent self-built video player using anything but x86 (kodi on raspi is simply too slow, hell, even retropie cannot actually run n64 games on anything but the most modern pi, whereas they're perfectly smooth on a 10 year old x86 laptop)

Having a mini-ITX for everything, including even nas storage (I hate the people calling this cloud storage), is so much better it's ridiculous.

<comment><USER14> > decent self-built video player using anything but x86

The Pi chip was originally designed for set-top-box usage. Much of the die is video decoder, I believe. So if you have the right drivers and maybe an MPEG2 license it should be fast. [https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-video- features/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-video-features/)

<comment><USER15> Correct

Your average set-top-box (cable or whatever) doesn't have an x86 and it runs fine. But accelerated video play requires proprietary software

Not sure how it works on Android, but I guess it's more or less integrated there (so you can have accelerated video play easily and "in the system")

<comment><USER11> The majority of users don't care what kind of drivers are on their IoT gadgets, as long as they fulfil their purpose.

<comment><USER16> they will care when their devices get hacked because the kernel is impossible to update for anyone, including the vendor.

<comment><USER11> Android, home routers and webcams are the living proof they don't care.

<comment><USER16> Only because we haven't have a Sasser level event yet, an android is far worse on the security front than XP ever was.

<comment><USER11> Stagefright comes to mind.

<comment><USER17> Not even close to Sasser or SQL slammer. Imagine every other person not being able to turn on their phone all of a sudden tomorrow morning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I blame [https://twitter.com/InternetOfShit](https://twitter.com/InternetOfShit)

<comment><USER19> They're fighting the good fight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> People in this thread are flaming Intel, I suspect this is just the first of many major vendors/companies quietly droppping IoT (whilst proudly announcing their new AI/VR/TLA offerings!)

<comment><USER21> What is TLA?

<comment><USER22> I guess TLA is supposed to expand to "three-letter acronym", meaning that it does not stand for any specific buzzword technology, but the whole buzzword- powered innovation cycle itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> From what I heard in Malaysia's Intel sites, IoT are used as reasons to open new departments or new turfs for some second class managers. No wonder it is missing the mark in what it is doing.

<comment><USER24> That would explain a lot. But why does Intel allow it? They already lost mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> IMHO, the market is evolving toward tinker. Many arduino and raspberry pi have been sold. Many people are buying 3d printers. Many android phones have been produced at small scale. We love the idea that we can build (or fix) stuff ourselves.

This would mean an open market with a fierce concurrency (and low margins).

I hope that this is the future, but Intel like many chip makers are fighting against it by blocking documentation of their products (using NDA and/or huge prices).

<comment><USER26> I love that stuff, but I have a hard time seeing it move beyond early adopters. I just don't think that more than 5-10% of the population wants to mess around with the guts of their tech.

Some versions of those things may go mainstream, but only after they get to the point where people don't have to do the technical and creative work (e.g., click a button and your 3D printer makes the new iPhone case you want, so you don't have to wait for it to be delivered).

<comment><USER27> _I just don 't think that more than 5-10% of the population wants to mess around with the guts of their tech._

Maybe 1%-2%.

Most "Internet of Things" devices just don't _do_ very much. They lack any actuators.

There are lots of things that can be done to make heating, ventilation, and air conditioning more efficient and comfortable. But the good stuff requires installation. Mechanisms to open and close windows. Dampers. Sensors for humidity, CO2, CO, temperature, rain, and fire. Wired connections to everything. (Battery replacement is unacceptable in commercial environments.) All this is available from major HVAC vendors. Usually for too much money. (Window openers seem to start at $500 per window, so nobody buys them.)

A few years ago I went to an IoT meetup in SF, in the Dogpatch area. This was in an old industrial building. Skylights overhead had openable windows on manual chain falls. Outside windows overlooking the bay were openable. There were overhead fans and a standard HVAC system. None of this was powered and controlled. So the place overheated and became uncomfortable with too many people inside.

In a space like that, as more people come in and the CO2 level goes up, the overhead windows and side windows should open and the overhead fans should go into reverse to bring down the CO2 level. Then the side windows should be adjusted to maintain temperature. As evening comes and the outside temperature drops, the side windows should close more. At some point, heat may be required. As people start to leave, the CO2 level will drop, the overhead windows start to close and the fan speed drops. When everyone leaves, and the motion detectors see no movement, everything closes up and the temperature is allowed to drop to 60F or so for the night.

Some hotels have systems like that in function rooms. Any space with a widely variable people load, such as a classroom or conference room, should be equipped with CO2, humidity, and temperature sensors connected to actuators which can do something about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So Intel is now confirmed to be missing the mark in both the mobile and now the IoT market. Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ironically, I just saw an ad to this webcast:

"Get into IoT with Intel" \- [https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/108829149494036582...](https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/1088291494940365825)

</comment><comment><USER29> The IoT market is going to grow significantly and Intel drops it? Why not reboot it, after a "lessons learned" and some serious study of the e.g. Beagleboard, Pi and Arduino ecosystems, to check what works (hint: price matters. Lots of easily driven 3.3v GPIOs matter. Battery life matters. Sometimes integrated connectivity matters, if it doesn't kill price or battery life).

Have they not learned from the Xscale fiasco that dropping a soon-to-be hugely important market is not the best strategic move?

And it's not like both predictions are/were any difficult to make.

They have the technical chops to do it right, their mainstream CPUs are ample proof of that, and this sector _will_ get a lot bigger. Their top management either lacks the balls/vision to drive the idea to success, or is acutely aware that they would never, ever be profitable in a market where the end product is under $40 (sometimes under $5).

I don't know which alternative is sadder.

<comment><USER14> Many big corporates, and indeed people, when faced with a choice between "give up" and "admit mistakes then learn from them", will choose "give up".

<comment><USER30> Why is it a given that Intel have to be there? It maybe be a market that they are in fact not geared toward. Just because there is a market doesn't mean they need to be there, doesn't mean they can make money and doesn't necessarily mean their core market will go away.

Many times companies will try to get into new markets or channels as a hedge, just in case their cash cow goes tits up. I give them credit for seeing that it was right to bail.

Closing a $700m unit and laying people off is a pretty big admission of a mistake - they just see there's no viable course correction. Giving up is sometimes the best option.

<comment><USER29> > Why is it a given that Intel have to be there?

Because their name stands for INTegrated ELectronics and they just failed at it.

> Closing a $700m unit and laying people off is a pretty big admission of a > mistake - they just see there's no viable course correction. Giving up is > sometimes the best option.

Agreed, not disputing that, just trying to analyze the reasons behind the failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> strategically, the selling of its ARM department was a big mistake, the x86-IoT obviously can not make up for that and take off.

Intel has tried multiple times for the embedded market, so far not that great.

I'm now watching the yocto project for what Intel is the main force behind, it is a bad idea(over engineered to say the least) with a few good people running it.

<comment><USER32> I'd love to know more on why Yocto is a bad idea and what could be an alternative. no sarcasm.

<comment><USER33> Yocto is not a bad idea in a vacuum. But Yocto doesn't have a good hardware platform for low cost IoT, so it is limited to a narrow category where Intel's mainstream CPUs can play. And to the slice of that market that won't go to Microsoft's IoT variant of Windows, nor to Android Things. I doubt there will be, for example, a Yocto-based car infotainment system.

<comment><USER34> Automotive Grade Linux is a Yocto based distro for exactly that. I even saw job postings on LinkedIn for "AGL experience!" After I dug in a little bit, I found that it was just built on top of Yocto/OE.

[http://docs.automotivelinux.org/docs/getting_started/en/dev/...](http://docs.automotivelinux.org/docs/getting_started/en/dev/reference/source- code.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The hilarious thing is, Intel probably still has enough top talent to compete in an open ISA market, and they still have some edge in process technology. Then again, AMD can probably beat them in the medium to long run.

If they want to tend to these markets, they are going to have to give up on being the single source.

</comment><comment><USER36> I seem to recall that IBM would not even try to enter a new market unless they could count on a sustainable 1 billion per year in sales.

Seems that Intel, sales $721 million after several years of work, has a similar metric for new business opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER37> Another major Intel "experiment", following the failure in the mobile market, bites the dust. Next-up, Intel's $16 billion FPGA bet? Machine learning chips seem to become _more_ specialized, not less.

<comment><USER38> To design, prototype & manufacture a Machine Learning ASIC with decent performance costs $10m+ to develop which is why FPGAs still have a large share of the low volume and/or high end market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> They are late to the party and their stuff is too complicated and consumes too much. Also BLE devices with an 8051 (a CPU from 1980) won the game.

Also despite of the hype IoT was not such a big thing (despite for the hobbyist market, where people(me included) get quite excited by building a temperature logger)

</comment><comment><USER40> More like "Intel to still shoot itself in the foot continuously for 10 years".

We had a comparable theme on the Curie/Edison/Quark post a few weeks back. They just don't seem to get it.

</comment><comment><USER41> > I'm not sure what AMP is, but it's missed its mark.

AMP pages load super fast for me on mobile so not sure how you can say that if you're just basing that on not understanding the design choices behind AMP.

Would have been nice if the author had investigated why Google is recommending so many JavaScript libraries that seem so large instead of just assuming it was a very bad idea. For one, AMP will be loading the JavaScript in a non- blocking manner so the page will appear to load fast and if you've visited an AMP page before the JavaScript will be cached (unless there's so many different versions...?).

</comment><comment><USER42> That's all right. They don't get it. Just the way life rolls. The creative people are gone. Just the nature of innovation.

</comment><comment><USER43> Except in X86 CPUs it really seems Intel has absolutely no idea what they are doing.</comment>


Ruby DSL for building JMeter test plans - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/flood-io/ruby-jmeter

<comment><USER2> If it's Ruby, then it didn't even stand around DSL.</comment>


Powering CRISPR with AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> http://benchling.engineering/crispr-aws-lambda/?hn <comment><USER2> I know it's old hat on HN, but I just wanted to point out how close to science fiction this article is. This technique to edit genomes is only a decade old. This startup is able to run sub-second searches without requiring any of their own infrastructure.

It costs them less than a _$100_ a month.

It was written by an _intern_.

<comment><USER3> >This technique to edit genomes is only a decade old.

Actually, this technique is about 3 years old.

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6121/819.short](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6121/819.short)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While reading, I just kept wondering why this search needs to be in the cloud at all. Finding 20 byte strings in 3GB can be done on a laptop very quickly.

<comment><USER2> That seems partly a reference to this classic article <[https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/hadoop_hatred.html>](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/hadoop_hatred.html>) "Your data isn't that big".

But in this case, it does seem incredibly advantageous to be able to scale up to any number of parallel searches, and to be able to search arbitrary new genomes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> AWS Lambda is great for inconsistent atomic workloads. However, I had a fairly disappointing experience with Lamda when I tested it just last week.

For example, you cannot send dynamic response headers using the AWS API Gateway (the complementary service to expose HTTP endpoints). In my case I wanted to change the mime-type depending on JSON vs JSONP response.

It's also not possible to connect Lambda directly to ElastiCache and mostly you are expected to work with S3 or DynamoDB (Amazon's proprietary JSON store and what was mostly responsible for the data outage recently in US East). ElastiCache would allow easy persistence which is why it's surprising it can't be connected to given that it's an AWS service (you can connect to it by creating an EC2 proxy but that would defeat the purpose of a serverless architecture).

Some other oddities were sniffing the response body to set HTTP headers as opposed to just allowing your Lambda function to set the HTTP header directly or parsing the JSON response as opposed to doing a regex match.

<comment><USER6> I've been playing around with API Gateway & Lambda a bit lately, and it definitely feels like these services are sometimes built by teams that don't talk to each other.

API Gateway tries really hard to HIDE things from you. For instance, you can't see what the requested URL was without using a fair bit of VTL to put it back together from some other variables. Any only lately can get you a full list of query parameters, without having to specify them at the time of API creation. In fact, it seems like most of the work on API Gateway, since it's release, has been to let end-users have more access to data they hid in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi Vineet,

I'm a huge fan of CRISPR. I've been following it closely since I heard Radiolab's podcast about it.

I'm also the founder of the JAWS framework, which is an open-source application framework built entirely on AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway: [https://github.com/jaws-framework/JAWS](https://github.com/jaws- framework/JAWS)

I would LOVE to grab a coffee with you or anyone on your team some time, and chat about lambda or CRISPR, or anything really :) I live in Oakland and my email address is austen[at]servant.co

Also, will you be at Re:invent? I'm doing a breakout session on JAWS and I'll be there all week.

Good luck to you!

Austen

</comment><comment><USER8> I kind of forgot that while lambda only supports node, you can use it as a glorified wrapper to call your c++ code

<comment><USER9> they also support java, and both node and java can launch other things on amazon linux including bash, python and ruby according to their docs

<comment><USER10> I'd be nervous about java - the startup time of the JVM plus the slow execution at the beginning until everything gets JITed makes me think overhead could easily trump execution.

<comment><USER11> Q: Will AWS Lambda reuse function instances?

To improve performance, AWS Lambda may choose to retain an instance of your function and reuse it to serve a subsequent request, rather than creating a new copy. Your code should not assume that this will always happen.

[https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Our old server infrastructure cost thousands of dollars each month just for server costs.

Using the new Lambda infrastructure, we pay for the number of Lambda invocations, the total duration of the requests, and the number of S3 requests. This comes out to $60/monthfor hundreds of thousands of CRISPR searches!"

Well, how much of that money you spent on EBS storage for your copies of genome data?

EC2 instances could read from S3 directly as lambda does, maybe that could alleviate the cost a lot.

Using AMI S3 backed instances could save a lot too.

But great work, nonetheless!

<comment><USER13> EBS costs are actually fairly small ($9 a month per instance for 90GB). More than 95% of our costs were just paying for the EC2 servers.

<comment><USER7> Right.

My friend is refactoring an app at his company right now, using only Lambda via JAWS and we ran some numbers on the cost savings. He's retiring 2 EC2 c3.large instances which were costing $2.97/day. On Lambda the app will cost $0.05/day.

We don't hear about it nearly enough yet, but the cost savings of building apps on Lambda are huge. Then you add in the time saved on devops... and you realize how seriously disruptive this tech is.

<comment><USER14> Yes, this is the key point of microservices: it's not the modularity, nor cross-language nor "webscale" etc.

It's cheaper, because more efficient use of resources, because finer-grained. Each component of an app only gets what it needs; and the vendor can sell that unused capacity to someone else.

Geometrically speaking, finer grains pack tighter, wasting less space.

They also utilize multi-core effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Of note, the latest thing in reference genomes is representing them as a graph data structure, which importantly allows variation to be incorporated. Some of the newest methods for mapping short DNA fragments (that come out of the most common type of sequencers) take this approach. They use a genome index though, which takes a lot of computational effort to build before hand.

Anyway, benchling wants to avoid genome indexes from the sounds of it, in case users upload their own genomes. Having said that, if someone is doing multiple searches, it would quickly become more efficient to just index the genome. I would have thought most people seriously concerned about off target CRISPR hits would be using high quality reference genomes though.

<comment><USER16> Are you referring to string-overlap graphs for de novo assembly? In that case, isn't CRISPR addressing another problem?

<comment><USER3> I think Gatsky is referring to the method described here:

[http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537916/rebooting-the- hu...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537916/rebooting-the-human- genome/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently have started looking harder at lambda after realizing that you can use 1M requests / month for free indefinitely. I just worry about vendor lock- in with services like this - if for whatever reason you want to move away its a rewrite at best. If amazon was to open source the lambda implementation allowing me to run my services somewhere else with a config change id probably buy into it completely and never move away...

<comment><USER17> If Lambda open sourced the engine, but didn't make it super easy (as in a 1-button deploy, nothing intentional) to stand up your own stand alone Lambda service, would that be better?

On my projects that have been open sourced, we mostly open sourced to make debugging easier and make extension authoring easier. I've gotten comments from people that that makes them feel easier about vendor lock in, but honestly, I haven't seen many people try and stand up their own service. Would you say that matches your own expectations?

<comment><USER9> yeah pretty much. I don't want to move, I want to have the ability to if something goes bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if it would be possible to go the other way. How close is CRISPR to a primitive of Turing complete computation?

Take it from s/xxx/yyy/ into being /bin/sed. And then run the search in wetware.

<comment><USER19> Crispr is a homing system. It allows you to address a specific part of (genetic) memory. It is a single component in a much larger system. A required, and otherwise missing component. But it is just a component.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They might be able to save a bit on costs by caching locally. Lambda instances can be reused if TPS is high enough. I think the limit is 500MB in the /tmp directory.

</comment><comment><USER21> How are you getting such quick responses from S3? In our own testing using Java. It was taking over 500ms just to initiate the connection with S3 from Lambda.

<comment><USER13> We're getting around 100ms connection times. We're using the Node aws-sdk to get things from S3: s3.getObject({Bucket, Key})

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Did I miss it or doesn't the article mention what server does the slitting and combining? Is this also done in Lambda?

<comment><USER13> I briefly mentioned it in the "New Infrastructure" section, but we're doing the splitting and combining of results on our web servers.

<comment><USER22> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


China's most advanced Big Brother experiment is a bureaucratic mess - <AUTHOR> http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2019/06/24/2003717472/1 <comment><USER2> "Lu Wenting, a Suzhou resident who says she does about 24 hours of volunteer work each week, said that she had never heard of Osmanthus, even though it is supposed to grant public transport benefits to those with high scores.

She found out her own score was a healthy "123" after Bloomberg reporters helped her look it up on the WeChat app run by Tencent Holdings."

Nice. I can pull up my social credit score on an app. I am wondering, though, that if I were to challenge an incorrect portion of the score, will I get another "black mark" on the score? Because I didn't trust the system?</comment>