SoftBank set to sell UK's Arm Holdings to Nvidia for $40B - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/6bfe40a5-2426-4743-98cd-6fed9dd01b98 <comment><USER3> I think this is a very bad and short-sided deal.

ARM is in such a great position currently. There's no reason to sell except that SoftBank is in desperate need of capital. On top of that, Nvidia is likely to be a terrible steward of the IP. Nvidia has a terrible track record of working with other companies, partners, and open source developers. ARM has become a de-facto standard in mobile space, and Nvidia will likely use that position to strong-arm competition. This will push vendors out of ARM and into some alternative ISA. While long-term this might end up being great for RISC-V, it's going to cause a huge fracture in software stacks at the exact WORST time. Finally we're starting seeing huge convergence on ARM in Mobile/Desktop/Server space. One ISA to rule them all! Nope, now Nvidia is going to destroy that progress and set everything back another 5+ years.

Please, somebody tell me I'm wrong. I really don't want to be so pessimistic about this.

<comment><USER4> Why on earth would we want to converge on ARM? The first ARM architecture that was somewhat palatable was ARMv7, everything before that an unusable mess of different chips with vastly different capabilities. Their extensions are bad (read: subtly incompatible) late copies of what Intel and AMD are driving. Most of the innovation happens not at ARM, but their respective licensees. It took others inventing EFI to get some form of BIOS-equivalent for ARM, but even today the company gives the impression that they couldn't care less.

<comment><USER5> I agree with what you said, but there is a reason for wanting to converge on ARM.

There exists no good alternative.

ARMv8.2 or newer is a very well designed ISA, while RISC-V is a very bad ISA and I would hate to be forced to use it.

OpenPOWER is a far better ISA than RISC-V, but unfortunately most developers do not have any experience with POWER and they have the wrong belief that POWER is some antique ISA while RISC-V must be some modern fashionable ISA. Therefore even if OpenPOWER is much better, it is less likely than RISC-V to be used as a replacement for ARM.

I and probably thousands of other engineers could design a much better ISA than RISC-V in a week of work, but no one of the creators of those thousands of new ISA variants would be able to convince all the other people to choose his/her variant over the others and start the significant amount of work needed for porting all the required software tools, e.g. LLVM and gcc.

So, if ARM would no longer be an acceptable choice, I do not see any hope that its replacement would not be greatly inferior.

<comment><USER6> Why is RISC-V bad? You spend paragraphs ripping on it without actually explaining why it's bad.

<comment><USER5> This has been discussed many times on many forums on the Internet.

The summary is that RISC-V is inefficient because it requires more instructions to do the same work as other ISAs and it does not have any advantage to compensate for this flaw.

Those extra instructions appear especially in almost all loops and the most important reason is that RISC-V has a worse set of addressing modes than the the vacuum-tube computers from more than 60 years ago, which were built only with a few thousands tubes, compared to the millions or billions of transistors available now for a CPU.

Because of this defect of the RISC-V ISA, the Alibaba team who designed the RISC-V implementation with the highest current performance (Xuantie910, which was presented last month at Hot Chips) had to add a custom ISA extension with additional addressing modes, in order to be able to reach an acceptable speed.

Whenever the designers of the RISC-V ISA are criticized, they reply that the larger number of instructions is not important, because any high-performance implementation should do instruction fusion, to be able to reach the IPC of other ISAs.

Nevertheless, that is wrong for 2 reasons, instruction fusion cannot reduce the larger code size due to the inefficient instruction encoding and the hardware required for decoding more instructions in parallel and for doing instruction fusion is much more complex than the hardware required for decoding less instructions with a better encoding as in other ISAs.

<comment><USER7> > Nevertheless, that is wrong for 2 reasons, instruction fusion cannot reduce > the larger code size due to the inefficient instruction encoding

RISC-V includes a compressed extension that makes instruction encoding competitive or better than x86(!), and with none of the drawbacks of ARM's Thumb modes.

<comment><USER5> Compression methods reduce the size of the code, but that does not matter when assessing the efficiency of the base instruction encoding.

If you would apply the same compression methods to a more compact original encoding then the compressed code would be even smaller.

Competing ISAs, such as ARM (Thumb), MIPS (nanoMIPS) and POWER also have compressed encoding variants.

<comment><USER8> Are there any benchmarks (in terms of code size, runtime performance, energy effiency, ...) available for OpenPOWER vs RISC-V?

(and if not, what would be some of the metrics to objectively compare the architectures?)

<comment><USER5> It is very difficult to make a non-biased comparison between different ISAs.

If you just compile some benchmark programs for 2 different architectures and you look at the program sizes and the execution times, the differences might happen to be determined mostly by the quality of the compilers, not by the ISAs, in which case you could reach a wrong conclusion.

Many years ago, on one occasion I have spent many months working at the porting of a real-time operating system between Motorola 68k and 32-bit POWER. At another time I have also spent a couple of months with the porting of many device drivers between 32-bit POWER and 32-bit ARM and Thumb.

Such projects required a lot of examination of the code generated by compilers for the target architectures and also a lot of time spent with writing some optimized assembly sequences for a few parts of the code that were critical for the performance.

After spending so much time, i.e. weeks or months, with porting some large program, whose performance you understand well, between 2 ISAs, you may be reasonably confident of having a correct comparison of them.

If you want to reach a conclusion in a few hours at most, it is unlikely to be able to find an unbiased benchmark.

RISC-V is however a special case. Even if I have never spent time with implementing any program for it, after having experience with assembly programming for more than a dozen ISAs, when I see that almost any RISC-V loop may require up to a double number of instructions compared to most other ISAs, then I do not need more investigations to realize that reaching the same level of performance with RISC-V will require more complex hardware than for other ISAs.

Also, when comparing ISAs, I place a large weight on how good those ISAs are at GMPbench, i.e. at large number arithmetic. In my experience with embedded system programming large integer operations are useful much more frequently than traditional RISC ISA designers believe.

While x86 has always been very good at GMPbench, many traditional RISC ISAs suck badly, because they lack either good carry handling instructions or good double-word multiply/divide/shift instructions.

RISC-V also seems to have particularly bad multi-word operation support.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the perspective and GMPbench reference. I'm sure you're correct that RISC-V has a lot of optimization work to do both at the compiler and chip implementation levels.

I'm curious whether vector operation support in RISC-V might also make up for any apparent shortcomings in raw arithmetic throughput - I guess a lot of it will depend on the types of workloads involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On reflection I'm a bit surprised that a consortium hasn't emerged to offer more for Arm given the concerns expressed here:

\- $40bn isn't a lot in aggregate for the companies that are heavily invested in the Arm ecosystem (Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon etc) - maybe even Intel would take a small stake!

\- The $40bn is partly in Nvidia's (arguably) inflated stock. Would cash be more attractive?

\- Could probably partly fund through a public offering in due course.

<comment><USER10> > _The $40bn is partly in Nvidia 's (arguably) inflated stock._

This is _SoftBank_ we're talking about. Do we really want to bring up inflated stock as one of their concerns? ;)

<comment><USER9> There is bound to be some sort of financial engineering going on too.

Doesn't Son have a stake in Nvidia so maybe this is to help support the Nvidia share price?

<comment><USER11> Giving $40B of Nvidia stock to a cash strapped seller hurts the stock price.

<comment><USER9> I was wrong on Son having a holding in Nvidia too - seems to have sold it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that concerns about this being the end of Arm are overdone - I expect that the UK government will get some assurances about maintaining the HQ in the UK etc and that Arm's business is sufficiently different to Nvidia's to make wholesale merger with Nvidia's existing operations counterproductive.

However, I can't see how they will avoid enormous conflicts of interest between Nvidia and other competing Arm customers and that this will be to the detriment of everyone who makes and uses Arm based products (except Nvidia).

<comment><USER12> > However, I can't see how they will avoid enormous conflicts of interest > between Nvidia and other competing Arm customers and that this will be to > the detriment of everyone who makes and uses Arm based products (except > Nvidia).

Yes, this. I see people talk about this but not enough imo. How on earth would Nvidia ever be allowed to purchase Arm? That's a massive conflict of interest. I know the rules don't really matter when we're talking about companies this large but this is so blatant, to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If this goes through, I expect Nvidia to become the new Intel - a humongous, anticompetitive chip monopoly. Today, people refer to Intel as Chipzilla; tomorrow Nvidia will carry that moniker.

<comment><USER14> > Today, people refer to Intel as Chipzilla; tomorrow Nvidia will carry that > moniker.Today, people refer to Intel as Chipzilla; tomorrow Nvidia will > carry that moniker.

Intel will always be the "Chipzilla". nVidia won't replace them but, will join it as the "Chipkong". So we'll have _two_ problems, not a single but, different one.

<comment><USER15> Duopolies everywhere.

<comment><USER14> It won't be a duopoly because nVidia doesn't make x86 hardware. Even if they did, there would be three contenders (AMD, Intel, nVidia).

nVidia is becoming an AI/HPC behemoth. GPUs for Compute, ARM for feeding the GPUs, Infiniband for interconnect. All in a tightly integrated, closed package. This is a clear monopoly.

They're light years ahead in terms of GPU development and Debugging tools when compared to AMD. CUDA cornered AI/GPU computing it seems. Intel's interconnect foray has fizzled, like their Xeon Phi / Larabee efforts. So, nVidia has the interconnect (Infiniband) and compute part for now.

CPUs can be challenged and disrupted. It's a mature technology. AMD can catch nVidia in enterprise in medium term (hopefully), but Infiniband has no competitors for what it does. And no, 100G Ethernet is no match for 100G Infiniband (we use it a lot since DDR. It's an insane tech).

We're living in interesting times.

<comment><USER16> Looking 10 years into the future, do we really need x86 though? Is it not possible that Intel will loose and CISC will become basically obsolete? (Yeah, I'm ignoring AMD here for no good reason, but we were talking about nVidia vs Intel anyway.)

<comment><USER14> Looks somewhat unlikely. We may have other architectures as mainstream and, they would be more energy efficient for the same performance of x86 in mainstream use but, pure SIMD computation is underrated IMHO.

Yes, AVX has a clock penalty but, if your code is math heavy (scientific, simulation, etc.) it's extremely convenient for some scenarios still.

GPUs are not perfect for "streaming data processing" or intermittent processing because their setup and startup time is still in seconds. You need to transfer data first to the GPU if you want the full speed also. In CPU computing this overhead is nonexistent.

I develop a scientific application and we've seen that with the improvements in the FPU and SIMD pipelines across generations, a 2GHz core can match a 3.7GHz one in _per core_ performance in some cases. This is insane. This is a simple compilation with _-O3_ only. _march_ and _mtune_ were not added intentionally.

Unless GPU becomes as transparent as CPU, we either need to catch or surpass X86 on SIMD / pure math level to replace it completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Regardless of the consequences of selling to Nvidia…that's not a great exit, is it? They bought ARM for $32 billion, and they are getting $40 billion for it? With all the money sloshing around in the debt markets, I figured they'd get a bit more.

<comment><USER18> Depends on how much leverage they used. If it was all cash on hand the that's a poor ROI, if they only put up say 8b then that's a nice return over 4 years.

<comment><USER11> 8B at zero percent interest would only increase the return to about 6% compounded.

<comment><USER18> SoftBank bought Arm in 2016 for $32 billion. A 32B investment turned into 40B over 4 years is 6% ROI. (32 * 1.06^4) = 40.3

8B + 24B loan turned into 40 Billion - 24B loan = 16B or 8B in profits minus interest. Which could be up to a 19% annual ROI 1.19^4 ~= 2x. I don't know what their loan interest rate look like, but I suspect it's shockingly low.

<comment><USER11> Sorry I misread your post, thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nvidia already has their own ARM SoC, they just merge Arm developers to the team.

I suspect that Nvidia changes the business model of Arm a little and starts to sell high performance Nvidia Arm CPU's directly to server, laptop and mobile manufacturers.

Then we will have Intel, AMD and Nvidia in both CPU and GPU markets.

</comment><comment><USER20> Also on Reuters: [https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-arm-holdings-m-a- nvidia/nv...](https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-arm-holdings-m-a- nvidia/nvidia-nears-deal-to-buy-chip-designer-arm-for-more-than-40-billion- sources-idUKKBN2630XH)

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh the joys of stock markets. Nvidia makes around 3B a year (profit), they have 10B cash. IIRC Arm isn't really a cash cow. How can they afford such a deal? There market capitalization is 330B - for whatever reason people are willing to pay that much for their shares. Money is cheap nowadays - <USER2> thanks to Corona. So, they sell some warrants, sell a few new shares and it's done.

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://archive.vn/PLQr3](https://archive.vn/PLQr3)

</comment><comment><USER23> The disaster that was WeWork could ruin ARM.

<comment><USER24> or: The disaster that was WeWork could accelerate the adoption of an open- sourced, royalty-free ISA.

<comment><USER25> An open source ISA isn't going to be any better than ARM if it's being sold to you by AWS, GCP, and Azure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It simply wouldn't make sense for NVidia to maliciously impose upon ARM after acquisition, as many of the commenters are concerned. I'm not saying they won't, but because the present situation would limit any efforts to do so long enough that it would be futile.Consider the perpetual license agreements ARM holds with companies like Apple. These companies are best positioned to resist meddling with ARM. As an example Apple will forever have access to the ARM ISA, so NVidia can't simply stop them from using existing designs. The processors Apple uses are all custom designs anyway. If future designs were purposely kneecapped, they could just improve their currently licensed designs until a suitable alternative is produced. Hindering future processor designs won't hurt the biggest players in the short term, and in the long term it will only drive them to the competition. NVidia could take the approach of slowly drifting new designs to greater integration with their own GPUs in such a way that alternatives would be displaced - either by favor of NVidia GPUs or by the difficulty in using alternatives. This would be obvious though, and would again drive their users away. NVidia hasn't had great success like they have had with GPUs in any other market. I see this as an opportunity to diversify and secure their future, and they want to take it.

<comment><USER9> It's not just about Apple. Suppose you're an SoC designer without an architecture license who makes SoCs that successfully compete with say Tegra. Maybe you have a license to use Cortex A77. Lets assume that A78 is the successor to A77.

\- Will Nvidia sell you a license to A78 to enable you to continue to compete with Tegra or are you stuck on A77? \- If you can't get a license to A78 where do you turn? RISC-V? Possibly but will you still have a business by the time a competitive RISC-V design emerges from somewhere?

The point is that Nvidia might play fair but the temptation to hinder those who compete directly with its own SoCs - where it will make a lot more money - will be great, and who will stop them if they do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do Apple actually work with Arm currently or is all their Apple Silicon stuff completely on their own? I don't actually understand the issue they have with Nvidia but they seem to have one.

<comment><USER28> As I understand it, Apple has a special perpetual license for the architecture thanks to it being one of the companies that founded ARM. This deal shouldn't have too much impact on Apple.

<comment><USER29> I think you're thinking of PowerPC?

To my knowledge, Apple was not involved in any founding of ARM (the company or the ISA).

ARM history, according to Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History)

Edit: I guess you could quibble about 'founding', but really I'm wrong, and my own link proves it!

————

Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. – Arm6

In the late 1980s, Apple Computer and VLSI Technology started working with Acorn on newer versions of the Arm core. In 1990, Acorn spun off the design team into a new company named Advanced RISC Machines Ltd.,[30][31][32] which became Arm Ltd when its parent company, Arm Holdings plc, floated on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998.[33] The new Apple-Arm work would eventually evolve into the Arm6, first released in early 1992. Apple used the Arm6-based Arm610 as the basis for their Apple Newton PDA

<comment><USER30> _> Apple used the Arm6-based Arm610 as the basis for their Apple Newton PDA_

The ironies of history: one of Apple's most infamous failures ended up being the foundation of their later success.

<comment><USER31> Including how much JavaScript kind of resembles NewtonScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Along with cpu's ARM also makes mobile gpu ip (Mali), nvidia as well in their tegra. I would be surprised if this deal went through.

<comment><USER33> Mali was an ARM acquisition. It makes sense for NVidia to smash Mali and RTX together to allow Android manufacturers to compete against Apple.

Apple built their GPU studio from ex-Imagination staff and will introduce 3 GPUs over the next year: Sicilian, Tonga, Lifuka to support their mobile and desktop plans.

The question is whether ARM will sub license this combined GPU tech, or if it will be NVidia silicon only.

<comment><USER34> I think Android manufacturers need SoCs with 16MB L3 shared across the CPU+GPU+DSP+NN like the A13 more than they need RTX in a GPU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Apple is famous for compiling all its OSes to different architectures. We saw it with the quick switch to Intel and this upcoming switch to ARM. I'm convinced someone somewhere at Apple is firing off an email asking: "hey, are we compiling our stack on RISC-V?"

</comment><comment><USER36> Hopefully European and American governments will step in and stop this. This is terrible for the future of ARM as a somewhat neutral platform and the Industry as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER37> What effect does this have on Apple and them basing their own chips on Arm?

Are the now so far down their own road of development that it doesn't really matter?

<comment><USER38> None whatsoever. They have a license from the Newton days which allows them to do whatever they want perpetually.

<comment><USER39> Is there a citation for the perpetual licence? I would have just assumed they would have purchased a long-term licence to build cores for a particular ISA version

<comment><USER40> You just have to implement ARMv8 architecture in your SoC also nothing prevents you from extending it further with ML or GPU bits.

I doubt that NVidia controlled ARM will ever be so inclined to sell another architecture license ... they would rather sell you their own designed ARM chips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Related read (a reminder on the history of the original acquisition): [https://www.wired.co.uk/article/softbank-vision- fund](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/softbank-vision-fund).

</comment><comment><USER42> UK government should save ARM !!!

</comment><comment><USER11> Well, looks like I've been hugely wrong on this all along. Seems like one of the biggest overpays in acquisition history, I can't fathom how such a tiny company with such mediocre growth deserves such a massive premium.

</comment><comment><USER43> Unpaywalled link [https://pastebin.com/ugZpqfPE](https://pastebin.com/ugZpqfPE)

</comment><comment><USER44> Well... on the bright side I like what Tegras have been able to achieve. The Shields and the Switch are neat machines. Maybe we'll see some more ARM designs that can compete with Apple.

<comment><USER45> No, everything Nvidia is evil. We're supposed to be hating on them, right? Can I get my upvotes for perpetuating the hive mind now?

Seriously. I'm excited to see ARM owned by a hardware centric company. That said, I really don't expect this to have much impact in the near term. Licenses are already in place. China will probably spin competing chips based on their own ISA before too long(5-10 years).

I'm frankly interested to hear what folks in HW have to say. Hearing the repetitive, uninformed opinions of users and SW folks isn't really telling me anything informative about this. I'm an embedded SWE and I'm not seeing much to worry about. Would it be better if Apple bought ARM? Huawei?

This notion that a hippie commune is going to buy ARM and lead us all into open source nirvana where free, cutting edge IP rains down from the sky is frankly goofy.

<comment><USER9> Why would you be excited?

Nvidia can (and do) build their own ARM ISA CPU's offer them in the market so we already have access to Nvidia's take on the architecture. Do they have established expertise in ISA design or microcontrollers?

Maybe I'm missing something?

<comment><USER44> Like I said, maybe there's room for GPU improvements in the ARM designs. Seems like nVidia could do something like pack in hardware DLSS. They license out their GPU designs so its not far fetched that their GPU features make their way into mobile ARM chip designs. The Tegra was a bit power hungry but maybe having control of the full stack can alleviate that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> ARM should be converted into a non-profit foundation or something. Should be able to be financed by the licensing deals. But SoftBank couldn't make 40 billion with such an idea.

</comment><comment><USER47> I wish they went public. I'd love to invest in them long term

<comment><USER48> Well now you can. Through NVDA.

<comment><USER49> gigglesnort

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is so dumb. Just IPO and take the windfall.

</comment><comment><USER51> SoftBank really really needs that money

</comment><comment><USER40> The important players like Samsung/Apple/Huawei are already ARM architecture license holders so they can do their own thing if they don't like the direction that NVidia is going in.

A 128 bit version might be an issue in the future.

<comment><USER52> I could imagine we might see an architecture with 128 bit word sizes, but I doubt we'd see 128 bit pointers (aka a 128 bit address space) any time soon. Itd just be more annoying than anything. I personally have even written software where we do pointer path to get 32 bit indexes rather than storing full 64 bit pointers simply because of space constraints (like trying to fit a hot struct into a single cache line)

Having a native uint128_t would make dealing with IPv6 addresses a lot nicer though :)

<comment><USER53> > but I doubt we'd see 128 bit pointers (aka a 128 bit address space) any time > soon.

I can see 128-bit pointers being a thing: not because of 128-bits of address space, but for the ability to embed type information directly in the pointer - which could improve performance for dynamic-dispatch scenarios or runtime type-safety built-in to the hardware itself.

> Having a native uint128_t would make dealing with IPv6 addresses a lot nicer > though :)

[We're already there]([https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34234407/is-there- hardwa...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34234407/is-there-hardware- support-for-128bit-integers-in-modern-processors))

<comment><USER54> Not type information, but CHERI capabilities: [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri...](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri- morello.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> 25% more than they paid just 2 years ago?

<comment><USER56> Softbank bought ARM in 2016 and paid $32B ($35B of 2020 USD after 4 years of inflation).

And today they get $40B but partly in Nvidia stocks... Assuming that Softbank manages to sell immediately the Nvidia stock and get their $40B, it is more like 14%. In the same timeframe Nvidia stock went from $30 (Jan. 2016) to $480 (Friday) or x16.

Softbank would have a way better outcome if they had invested in Nvidia 4 years ago, than investing in ARM. The potential 14% they got over last 4 years, is not great.

<comment><USER57> Softbank acquired 4.9% of Nvidia for $4B in May 2017. They sold it in February 2019 for $3.6B (according to this [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/06/softbank- vision-fund-sells-n...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/06/softbank-vision-fund- sells-nvidia-stake.html)). Another hilarious example of Softbank's market timing expertise.

Compared to other investments, an ARM sale of $40B would be a home run...

<comment><USER58> I wonder what the return would be just taking the opposite position of everything Softbank does is...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I would have thought Apple was a better strategic fit for Arm and likely to be able to pay bigger bucks too.

<comment><USER60> People are speculating that Nvidia might end Arm core licensing, but Apple would definitely shut it down. Apple's culture is totally incompatible with Arm's business model.

<comment><USER36> What how would Apple shutdown what Nvidia is doing? If they buy ARM they can stop selling licenses for it if they like. Of course they have to honor any prior contracts with other customers but when those run out, adios. Apple has their own license to use ARM architecture/ISA as long as they like, so what Nvidia does when they own ARM is really no concern to the fruit company

<comment><USER61> Do you have a reference about Apple having a perpetual license? I just found many articles that claimed they have an ARM "architecture license" but no specifics, and 8 years ago in 2012 ARM PR'd the deal as "long term" which might be relatively close to today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> what are the implications for Apple

<comment><USER19> Apple has architectural licence, so they can do whatever they want.

Apple uses just ARM instruction set and design the microarchitecture by themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> With the removal of the 'web' button, could we possibly get a non paywalled link?

</comment><comment><USER64> The anti-trust works so well these days...

</comment><comment><USER65> Hopefully they use it to f&#@ Qualcomm.

</comment><comment><USER66> why dont huawei/xiaomi/lenovo/zte buy arm?

and then the hilarity of trump banning doing business with arm afterwards would be worth some popcorn...

</comment><comment><USER67> now nvidia is the new intel, it owns arm and can do whatever it wants to.

time for other big companies checking out alternatives

</comment><comment><USER68> This makes sense. Most of the Jetson/Xavier/Nano boards already use a Carmel ARMv8 chip. I just hope this spurs more development in ARMv8. Currently the majority of ARM is ARMv7 (smartphones and Raspi).

<comment><USER69> Raspberry Pi 4 uses ARMv8 according to Wikipedia: the ARM Cortex-A72.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Processor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Processor)

<comment><USER61> Pi 3 and the V1.2 revision of the Pi 2 were ARMv8 too (Cortex-A53).

edit: also re smartphones, Android SoCs started to move to v8 CPU cores 5 years ago, in the Nexus 5X/Pixel 1 generation.</comment></comment></comment>


Details on the German government malware's applications - <AUTHOR>

The German (more specifically Bavarian) newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung" (sz) reports details of investigations where the "Bundestrojaner" (government malware) was actually used in Bavaria.[1] I could not find a similar source in English so allow me to summarize.
Some background first: The malware's initial purpose and intention was to provide means of wire-tapping otherwise encrypted communications (skype, https etc.) by listening in right at the source. So, basically they would install the malware on your PC either by covertly entering your home or e.g. while checking your laptop at the airport. Needless to say, these actions are very grave invasions of your privacy, thus the premise for the Bundestrojaner always was: authorities are only allowed to use this in cases of very serious crime and to counter very serious threats - needless to say, it was sold as a means to prevent against terrorism. And it was stated very clearly that it is only allowed to do wire-tapping and technical measures must prevent the software from doing anything else! The CCC's analysis of the malware a few days ago[2] showed that it goes far beyond that and even offers means of accessing your hard disk and loading additional modules once it has been installed on your system - and that this functionality was intentionally obfuscated in the machine code, so whoever developed that thing clearly knew what they were developing was very illegal.
So, the sz reports 5 cases in Bavaria in which the Bundestrojaner was used and not a single one of them qualifies as "serious crime", rather they were fighting petty crooks and scammers:
In one case, they could not get sufficient evidence against a group illegally selling pharmaceutical products and narcotics but the malware (unlawfully!) yielded them 60.000 screenshots - this is the same laptop that the suspect's lawyer then gave to the CCC for analyzing.
In the second case, they used the malware against a group of online scammers selling electrical appliances which they would then not deliver but take your money. They are suspected to have scammed around 120.000 people for around 10 million Euros. The malware was installed by covertly gaining physical access to one of their systems. (The shocking amount of victims aside, this is still petty crime.)
In another case, authorities used the malware to crack down on a group of fences who stole clothes and hygiene products and sold them overseas. They took screenshots but ultimately couldn't make a successful case against the group in court.
In the last case in sz's article, they installed the malware remotely to monitor a man selling doping to bouncers. He has a prior record of theft and scamming and was sentenced to four years.
sz goes on to sum up a few more instances in other German states where the malware was used, again just to monitor organized crime and organized drug-related crime.
So, clearly none of the cases qualify as very severe crime. According to sz, the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) rejected an early version of the malware specifically for the reason that it offered means of taking screenshots and allowing access to the hard disk; a later version that only offered wire-tapping was found usable, though. The malware found and analyzed by CCC is said to be that older version, according to its maker Digitask.
I, for one, am going to put my tin foil beanie back on and switch to a more obscure OS and architecture combination - and on a more serious note, I feel let down by how unprofessional and downright clueless the government over here handles pretty much all technology related matters. We need stronger pirates more than ever.
[1] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/spaeh-affaere-wie-bayern-mit-dem-trojaner-kleinkriminelle-jagte-1.1159712
[1] (google translate) http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sueddeutsche.de%2Fdigital%2Fspaeh-affaere-wie-bayern-mit-dem-trojaner-kleinkriminelle-jagte-1.1159712
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3088687 <comment><USER2> The German government reportedly paid €2M to have the spying malware developed:

[http://www.securityweek.com/german-government- paid-€2m-r2d2-...](http://www.securityweek.com/german-government- paid-€2m-r2d2-malware)

</comment><comment><USER3> Spawn of Stazi dogs. Thankfully USA has this shit well covered off with 4th-A. Unthinkable.

</comment><comment><USER4> USA? Shit well covered? 4th-Amendment? Your information is a bit out of date there my friend; the USA did it first:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Lantern_(software)></comment>


Swift 2.2 Released - <AUTHOR> https://swift.org/blog/swift-2-2-released/ <comment><USER2> As someone who refused to sink any significant time into Swift until they open-sourced it, I have found it to be the most productive statically-typed, native language out there. Its type system feels like the best of C# and Rust, while it feels that the speed at which one can pick it up is not that much greater than that of Go despite being a much richer language, (I've started learning in January and am at the level now where I can take on a fairly complex Swift project and feel comfortable about being able to finish it in time, plus I now use Swift for almost any programming task, 90% of them at least). Plus, you have to give Apple credit for getting the open-source release right, (GitHub, pull requests, proposals, mailing lists, frequent dev builds, Linux support - I guess Chris Lattner has been the one driving this, but I have to give credit to Craig Federighi and Tim Cook for letting him do it.)

The only part that frustrates me is that SourceKit seems to crash every other minute for no apparent reason - but that is no fault of the language itself.

Swift is the first piece of Apple software I'm genuinely excited for. Congrats to everyone who contributed to the 2.2 release

<comment><USER3> > the best of C# and Rust

e.g.? I've only just scratched the surface of Rust and dismissed C# as a Java clone (but maybe I shouldn't have?). What's some examples of the best of Swift that you see?

<comment><USER4> One case where C# is far superior to Java is generics.

Generics were a cutting-edge feature in 2005. Microsoft took the opportunity to start from scratch, and released the .Net Framework 2.0 without backwards- compatibility, and with full support for generics. A List<String> is actually a List of String.

When Sun released Java 5, they didn't want to disrupt the established Java ecosystem. Their implementation is called "type erasure". As an example, List<String> is actually just List<Object>, with automatic runtime typecasting to String. [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/generics/erasur...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/generics/erasure.html)

Java's solution works well enough, but it breaks down in certain scenarios, such as multiple levels of generics. For example, when getting an element from a List<List<String>>, Object is not cast to List<String> (which doesn't really exist), but merely List.

C#'s implementation of generics became even more sophisticated with C#4, which introduced covariance and contravariance. [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ee207183.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ee207183.aspx)

<comment><USER5> > Generics were a cutting-edge feature in 2005.

I was already using C++ templates in 1994 with Borland C++ for Windows 3.1!

Ada, CLU and ML go back to the late 70's / early 80's.

<comment><USER6> Templates are not proper generics. Templates can be used to emulate generics, but they are not the same thing at all. Templates are not first-class citizen of the type system (they don't survive to the typechecking phase), while generics are. You cannot write a generic list implementation in C++ and have it typechecked.

<comment><USER5> Now I am curious about an example where generics are able to do what templates, which are Turing complete, aren't.

<comment><USER4> I think of templates as an automated copy+paste mechanism. C++ templates can bloat the compiled executable pretty significantly... If you define a generic Foo<String> and Foo<Widget>, C++ templates will generate two separate binary implementations. C# will use the same implementation, and perform type checks using reflection at runtime.

Further support for the idea that C++ templates are an automated copy+paste mechanism is that you're allowed to give templates arguments that are not types.

Further reading: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/c6cyy67b.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/c6cyy67b.aspx)

<comment><USER5> It is not how you think of them, rather what is possible to do with their expressiveness.

C# type checks imply a performance hit and are an implementation detail. Nothing prevents a C# compiler to choose another one. It has nothing to do with generics vs templates.

For example Modula-3 and Ada compilers use the same approach as C++ for code generation of their generics.

So where is that example of something that can only be written with C# generics, but not with C++ templates?

A github gist maybe?

<comment><USER6> It is not the case of what can only be written, but what can be written and _typechecked_. C# generics offer much stronger type safety for library writers than C++ templates. C++ templates are not type-checked. C# (and Java, and Scala and Haskell) generics are.

<comment><USER5> Yes they are type checked.

That is what enable_if, type traits, if constexpr and eventually concepts allow for.

<comment><USER6> No, they are not. This code compiles fine, despite an obvious non-generic type-error. You may add whatever number of type traits, constexprs, etc there, and it will still compile fine as long as syntax is ok.

      #include <string>

      template <typename T>
      void foo(const T& arg) {
        int x = std::string("int expected");
      }

      $ g++ -c template.cpp
      $ // see, no error

Templates are only syntax-checked. The type checker is not even executed on the non-generic code inside of templates. The type checker will be executed _after_ the template is instantiated (expanded). At that point, generic types do not exist. There exist only concrete types.

<comment><USER5> They are still type checked when they are instantiated and the code is as generic as always.

Uninstantiated templates are dead code that will be stripped anyway.

<comment><USER6> Did I write anything different?

Sure, you can type-check them for particular type arguments. But you can't type-check them generally at the generic level and you have absolutely no guarantee that your library code is free of type errors. Not a problem if the goal is to produce the final executable, but a big problem for a library writer, who doesn't control the inputs (in this case: the types provided by the user of the library).

And AFAIK C++17 concepts do not address this problem, really. I can constrain my input types with them, and the calling code will be forced to conform to them (and the compiler will present a nice error message if it doesn't), but there is still no checking on the other side - that is if the template implementation is correct assuming these constraints. I can publicly declare my code requires T.bar(), then shamelessly call T.baz() in the template implementation and the compiler will not catch it.

This is like a Python program. You don't know if it type-checks before you run it, but even if you run it once or twice and it was fine, that doesn't guarantee there are no type errors.

<comment><USER5> Yes.

The code line _int x = std::string( "int expected");_ has zero relation with any of the template arguments.

So a programmer error that doesn't have anything to do with the types provided for the template.

Sure it will be caught in C#, because its build model assumes the existence of modules and everything is compiled to binary.

In C++ a similar compilation error would occur when compiling the translation unit into a library where the template is instantiated.

Of course, most templates being header only the error will only occur when instating it, but it will still blow on compilation and prevent the final generation of the exe, dll being produced.

Also errors related to semantic type check, independent of template arguments is relatively easy to achieve with unit tests.

I still fail to see how a generic system that doesn't offer partial specialization or meta-programming as being more powerful than templates.

<comment><USER6> I never said more powerful. I said stronger. In C++ you need unit tests to check something I can have statically proven in C#. And obviously you can't instantiate your template for all possible valid input types, because this number can be infinite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like two potentially breaking changes at source level:

[https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposa...](https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposals/0011-replace-typealias-associated.md)

[https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposa...](https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposals/0022-objc-selectors.md)

<comment><USER8> Don't forget the removal of the C-style for loop, along with the increment ++ and decrement -- operators.

[https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposa...](https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposals/0007-remove-c-style-for-loops.md)

[https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposa...](https://github.com/apple/swift- evolution/blob/master/proposals/0004-remove-pre-post-inc-decrement.md)

<comment><USER9> I am baffled by the for loop removal thing.

I just spent a while reading about both stride and for ... in, and I feel like there are any number of cases where I would rather use a C-style for loop.

<comment><USER10> I'm not familiar with swift, but Python doesn't have C style for loops either. People just write:

for i in range(10):

instead.

<comment><USER11> More generally, people write:

for item in sequence:

which is somewhat general (sequences include lists, dicts, strings, tuples, generators, text files and more [2]), and it covers a wide range [1] of use cases.

[1] Pun not intended.

[2] Basically, any iterable. This include custom iterables you can define, which can then be iterated over using the same standard for loop. A unifying feature of the language:

"The use of iterators pervades and unifies Python."

[https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/classes.html#iterators](https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/classes.html#iterators)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i can't believe how much people here on HN love swift! do you guys really love stuff like implicitly unwrapped optionals and awkward syntax where you need exclamation marks all over the place. not to mention their insanely complicated use of enumerations. what about a completely half-baked standard libraries where even basic string operations such as doing a substring are unnecessarily complicated and verbose? i simply cannot see any real basis for all the love for swift.

<comment><USER13> >implicitly unwrapped optionals

This only exists for objective-c introp, and the creators are actively trying to find ways to get rid of it. On the other hand, in nearly every other language, all pointers would be considered implicitly unwrapped optionals, while in Swift you get optionals built in (food for thought).

>awkward syntax where you need exclamation marks all

Oh come on, syntax does not define a language. If they used a different character or an operator, would you be more happy? Either way, it does take some getting used to but eventually it feels natural.

>insanely complicated use of enumerations

What?! This is one of my favorite features! You can represent so many things with an enum and it can make your code much safer. My favorite two examples are representing JSON as an enum, and the fact that Swift's Optional is actually just an enum with cases .none and .some(T).

>basic string operations such as doing a substring are unnecessarily complicated and verbose

I somewhat agree with you on this. They have their reasons (mostly because strings can have varying sizes, so indexing a utf8 string, for example, can give unexpected results) but I still wish they did something about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Happy about renaming typealias to associatedtype, now I don't have to constantly explain why I am using typealiasis when dealing with bugs.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sad Ubuntu LTS user:

> error: opening import file for module 'SwiftShims': No such file or > directory

Apparently the problem with GCC ABI break hasn't been tackled yet.

[https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-23](https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-23)

As info, the only workaround is to rebuild Swift from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER15> now they just need to open source Xcode..

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure you'd really want the crap-fest that is Xcode's code. It has so many bugs and issues that it's a better idea to completely dump it and either start over or give up and adopt something like AppCode, like Google did with Android Studio. Making developer tools is just not Apple's forte and Xcode's sad state of quality and performance is clear indication of that.

I'm thoroughly convinced that Apple has an internal-only IDE that they use that is far better than Xcode and is actually functional, much like the internal Radar tool. There is no way Apple's engineers could get any work done if they use Xcode.

Or, they should start charging money for it so they could justify spending resources on the dev tools. One of the reasons (among many) that Visual Studio is still the king of all IDEs is because Microsoft charges money for the serious bits of it (Pro and higher).

<comment><USER17> >I'm thoroughly convinced that Apple has an internal-only IDE that they use that is far better than Xcode and is actually functional, much like the internal Radar tool.

That's an interesting point and it makes a lot of sense. With the scale of the codebases a lot of them are working on I also don't see how they could be productive while working in XCode. And also XCode could not be this buggy and broken if it had internal developers working with it and constantly reporting bugs.

<comment><USER18> The experienced developers at Apple are no different than the experienced developers elsewhere. They use the LLDB command-line and write their code in Emacs.

I've never liked Visual Studio, and the last time I worked on a serious Windows product most of the experienced developers used WinDbg and cordbg rather than the neutered Visual Studio debugger. And some guys still wrote their code in Visual Studio 6 rather than the newer .NET IDEs.

My problem with Xcode today is that it's too much like Visual Studio. I'll take Xcode 3 with LLDB any day.

<comment><USER19> Command-line tools are great but graphical displays can be useful, too. The real problem is that pane/window management on OSes is years behind where it should be.

What I _want_ is a way to take any view I please, from any application, and arrange it _anywhere_ in a standard way with keyboard support and sensible omissions of chrome. If this means 65% of my screen is terminals, 20% web browsers, 10% some graphical view from Xcode and 5% notifications, that should be perfect fine. Instead, the most the Mac has been able to cobble together is a simple split screen view and that is only for Full Screen.

And, we also have: Xcode with its own completely custom and quirky pane/tab management scheme, terminals with their own pane/tab scheme, browsers with their own tabs, etc. Individual applications continue to feel some need to over-engineer their own pane/window management to compensate for lack of system support.

There are some signs of hope though. The direction Apple is going with Mac view controllers could theoretically put them in a position to finally turn individual views into first-class citizens that would be feasible to interleave arbitrarily across applications. At that point, command-line tools could integrate very nicely in arbitrary ways with elements that really benefit from being graphical. We'll see.

<comment><USER20> I have been using [https://www.spectacleapp.com/](https://www.spectacleapp.com/) for a while now, and it has performed like a champ. Easy window resizing and organization with keyboard shortcuts.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Will Survive SESTA – Startups Might Not - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/google-will-survive-sesta-your-startup-might-not <comment><USER3> Remember the Communication Decency Act I and II from the 90s? Or the Clipper Chip? Back then it was child porn online and the like which justified web publishing regulation.

This time it's sex trafficking as the excuse.

It seems whenever it's time to try internet regulation again, dip deep into the jar of sex related justifications.

<comment><USER4> The rationale is simple: opposing this makes you a defender of pedoporn or of sex trafficking. Fortunately serious NPOs have protested being used as excuses for inefficient regulations.

I wish we made a constitutional amendment to protect online freedoms. Every two years there is a new attack on those, it gets tiring.

<comment><USER5> Are you suggesting we should tell the people who are attacking online freedoms to make an amendment to protect them? Who do you think would get to be in charge of writing and passing such an amendment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If one wanted to uncover criminal wrongdoing on the internet, the last thing one would want to do is lose the signal.

It won't stop the activity, it will push it to a place that is harder to detect.

<comment><USER5> At which point the authorities will demand access to even more invasive techniques. All part of the plan...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The US Government has been trying to get here, to this regulatory point, for two decades. They're going to get what they're after.

The barriers to entry for building online will go up dramatically, as they have in every industry in the US over time. People mistakenly think the US is a Capitalist nation, with few economic regulations, when in fact the opposite is true, the US economy is very regulated. That borderline psychotic power addiction that emanates out of Washington DC, has its sights set squarely on the Internet as its next conquest. Why? It threatens their conventions - <USER2> understanding of how things do or should work - when it comes to political power and what they've always known. This latest election turned most of them inside out and they'll do anything to bring the Internet to heel if that helps to return their idea of political normalcy. The $100,000 Facebook-Russia media performance going on right now is all about that, finding an angle to launch from to begin heavily regulating politics online. SESTA is similarly about using a convenient angle to launch a regulation assault, to acquire vastly greater control.

The only good thing I can say about the powermongers currently on the move, is they're extremely obvious in what they're doing and why.

<comment><USER8> Why can't we just host our sites in Somalia or something?

May seem facetious but in all seriousness I was watching vice a few weeks ago and the Somali disapora is returning and building infrastructure and high quality housing with absolutely no government regulations or taxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain why the reporting requirements of 18 US 2258A aren't sufficient? [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A)

Why cannot they be simply amended to include sex trafficking?

<comment><USER7> They have vast means to prosecute sites like Backpage. As other articles have noted [1], the DOJ has refused to get involved in going after Backpage for years, which should be an outrage given the context.

The obvious conclusion is, it's all intentional. The DOJ has been told to stand down, so the SESTA pushers can build up a case for the need for new legislation, new levers of power & control over the Internet.

[1] "CDA 230 does not shield platforms from federal prosecution. The law very clearly outlines that exception to the liability shield, anticipating that crimes like child pornography and child exploitation would be prosecuted by the federal authorities. The US Department of Justice, for whatever reason, has not shown any inclination to pursue sites like Backpage."

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16308066/sex- trafficking-...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16308066/sex-trafficking- bill-sesta-google-cda-230)

<comment><USER9> By the way, Backpage has shut down their adult services section. Their traffic did not drop to zero however, as seen at [1].

That means that Backpages has had other substantial legitimate uses, besides adult services. Craigslist also had adult services section, that it voluntarily shut down [2]. This begs the question: why is Backpage prosecuted, but Craigslist was not? What has changed between 2009 and now?

1\. [https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/backpage.com#trafficstats](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/backpage.com#trafficstats)

2\. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/craigslist- gives...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/craigslist-gives-in- will-shut-down-erotic-services-section/)

<comment><USER7> Or of course consider how they went after Kim Dotcom, the effort that was put into crushing Megaupload and Kim over common media piracy.

Are we to believe that the DOJ & Co couldn't have smashed Backpage for knowingly allowing trafficking years ago? They couldn't have scooped up proof that the operators knew about that activity, a dozen different ways given the tools at their disposal? They could destroy Silk Road and get Ross Ulbricht, but they couldn't get the Backpage guys on anything? Bullshit of course, it's beyond obvious those guys knew what their site was facilitating, they were making a vast fortune off of it.

It all reeks of being allowed to continue as an enemy number one to facilitate legislation like SESTA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe I just don't fully understand the bill...but how is this not an open and shut violation of the first amendment? Not in the usual "i can say what i want and nobody can stop me" kind of way, but in the "government cannot directly censor its citizens" kind of way. Particularly with the inclusion of automated filtering, it sounds like the government mandating that _all_ internet companies disallow anyone from posting content matching a set of parameters. The target (sex trafficking content) doesn't matter, the important thing here is that its sweeping government mandated censorship, with legal ramifications.

Am I missing something that makes this constitutionally allowable?

</comment><comment><USER11> If we are talking about legislation to regulate communication platforms that "enable sex trafficking" [needs disambiguation]...

... then why aren't we talking about hotels, where victims are sex trafficked,

and cars, where victims are sex trafficked,

and cash, which facilitates anonymous sex trafficking

and planes, which facilitates international sex trafficking

Why stop at the internet? Let's go after every company on Earth.

/s

</comment><comment><USER12> While I agree that SESTA is a bad idea, does anyone have the full context for this quote from Blumenthal?

> Goldman: There's no doubt that the legitimate players will do everything > they can to not only work with the law enforcement and other advocates to > address sex trafficking and will do more than they even do today. At the > same time, the industry is not just the big players. There is a large number > of smaller players who don't have the same kind of infrastructure. And for > them they have to make the choice: can I afford to do the work that you're > hoping they will do.

> Blumenthal: And I believe that those outliers -- and they are outliers -- > will be successfully prosecuted, civilly and criminally under this law.

I'd like to believe a more charitable interpretation he misunderstood the point of Goldman's question and the "outliers" he's referring to are the "illegitimate players" (as opposed to the "legitimate players" that Goldman references). I personally doubt that he was saying that the "smaller players" are the outliers who will be prosecuted.

IMO, saying "But in that unusual moment of candor, Sen. Blumenthal seemed to lay bare his opinions about Internet startups—he thinks of them as unimportant outliers _and would prefer that the new law put them out of business_ " is quite disingenuous. The zinger at the end weakens the quote with its trite outrage. Just having the first part of the quote -- "But in that unusual moment of candor, Sen. Blumenthal seemed to lay bare his opinions about Internet startups—he thinks of them as unimportant outliers" \-- would be a more accurate characterization, and is just as powerful.

<comment><USER13> I don't see a transcript anywhere, but here is the full hearing (I just googled the quote and found a link in another article)

[https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/9/comm...](https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/9/committee- announces-legislative-hearing-s-1693-the-stop-enabling-sex-traffickers-act- of-2017)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just saw the new Kingsman movie. Minor spoiler alert:

In the movie, the US President is complicit in a scheme that would kill all the recreational drug users in the world. Blumenthal's comment reminds me of this. The guy's an idiot.

</comment><comment><USER15> This makes the point that SESTA would disproportionately harm small/new businesses compared to big/existing ones. Which gets me thinking, there are some people (those involved with the big/existing businesses) for whom that is a feature, not a bug. Less competition for them to spend time crushing. Which means there's a chance this isn't actually about sex trafficking at all, but just another big-business power-grab on behalf of Blumenthal's backers. My cynicism knows no bounds.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if this will do anything to encourage a more decentralized web?

</comment><comment><USER17> but google will die under the mountain of lawsuits and justice for their various crooked enterprises, not to mention people are going to (again) get sick and tired of being spied on by f'ing corporations.

so that part of the headline is irrelevant.

Also SESTA is bad. booo SESTA.</comment>


Scientific Integrity Incident at USGS Energy Geochemistry Laboratory [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.doioig.gov/sites/doioig.gov/files/2016EAU010Public.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> "... As part of the inquiry, USGS convened a Scientific Integrity Review Panel to further investigate the matter. The report of inquiry concluded that the laboratory had a "chronic pattern of scientific misconduct" and that "data produced by the Inorganic Section were intentionally manipulated by the line- chemist in charge." The identified issues predominantly affected coal and water quality research and related assessments." from 2nd paragraph, Pg. 7</comment>


Uber's Losses Widen as SoftBank Launches Bid to Buy Shares - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/uber-s-third-quarter-loss-is-said-to-widen-to-1-46-billion <comment><USER3> Uber had $6.6bn on hand at the end of June [1]. That means they are down to $5.1bn.

Absent cost-cutting, that implies a 9 to 12 month runway. Even if SoftBank injects $1bn, that could only mean a few months' runway. A large fine in the Waymo case [2] could literally bankrupt them.

[1] [https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/23/uber-is-still-burning- cas...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/23/uber-is-still-burning-cash-at-a- rate-of-2-billion-a-year/)

[2] [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/waymo-uber- tr...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/waymo-uber- trial.html?referer=https://news.ycombinator.com/)

<comment><USER4> Honestly if they need to make money, they can lay off a ton of staff, and license their logistics software to a lot of companies. It wouldn't be what their game plan has been, definitely a severe pivot but they would be a money printing machine for years to come.

<comment><USER5> Their revenues are in the billions per year, and so their investors would be looking for new revenues in the billions. The assumption that there's an untapped multi-billion dollar market for logistics software that they could quickly dominate - quickly enough to avoid running out of money - <USER2> unwarranted.

<comment><USER6> There's an enormous opportunity in UberEATS if they can get the unit economics right. They could also retreat into already profitable markets .

<comment><USER7> I've used UberEATS a couple times, but after figuring out that it's basically impossible for delivery people to make much real money off of it I feel really bad.

Not sure if the unit economics can ever work out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Better source, and one that the article references:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/uber-s- th...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/uber-s-third- quarter-loss-is-said-to-widen-to-1-46-billion)

At this point, two things are clear to me:

1) Uber will IPO, there's just oo much money and influence behind it to stop that.

2) I'd be really worried if I was an employee about my options and also about my job.

Employee's now ahve two large worries hanging over their heads.....

What about my job and what about my options...

With Uber preparing for an IPO, they'll od what most companies do, clean up their balance sheet. And with the losses piling up they'll start cutting costs, which as for most tech companies starts with employee's.

And now I don't htink anyone believes that they'll IPO at anywhere close to the 60+ Billion valuation they had a year ago.

Infact SNAP looks like a great model to study for what an Uber IPO might look like, lots of good first day to week action with price rises but then a steady stream of down days leading up to their first quarter report which will almost certainly show them loosing money and then much larger short interest leading up to a huge lock up expiry of their employee's options.

Given how much money institutional investors put into the company, and the late stage at when they did and given how much they valued the company at, I'd be very afraid if I was an option holding employee at just how many shares are going to flood the market before I get to try and redeem my own options.

And to top it all off, the biggest thing driving their valuation recently, self driving cars, appears to be in serious jeopardy, can anyone make a credible case of Uber having self driving fleet in the next 5 years?

 __EDIT __to those of you who i confused with layoffs. No one is saying that Uber needs to be profitable when they go public, but their burn rate had better be decreasing. T

hey don't need to fire 3 billion dollars worth of salary, no one would think that's a wise move, but they had better show they are moving towards profitability, and the easiest way to show this is a string of quarter where their quarterly loss is decreasing and the easiest way to do that is to cut costs and the largest cost is people.

<comment><USER9> > And to top it all off, the biggest thing driving their valuation recently, > self driving cars, appears to be in serious jeopardy, can anyone make a > credible case of Uber having self driving fleet in the next 5 years?

Uber currently sends teams to major cities all over the world to build maps for self driving cars. They outfit cars in those cities with 6 figure camera rigs and enable 'passive collection', where maps are built over the course of normal rides. After that they actively collect any missing pieces and move on to the next city. They've got teams in C / D level cities (which I won't name because I don't want to ID anyone but are the international equivalents of a Baltimore MD or Miami FL).

They are not positioned as well as say Tesla IMO but they also aren't just sitting around waiting for something to happen on this front.

<comment><USER10> And if those maps were built with illegally obtained lidar technology (or just if the judge thinks _they might have been_ ), they become fruit of the poisonous tree.

<comment><USER11> I thought fruit of the poisonous tree was only relevant in evidence collection: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is strange that private investors are willing to fund my discounted travel.

<comment><USER13> I seriously don't understand the endgame here.

Apparently, it WOULD BE possible to completely kill off the legacy taxi industry given 10 years or so of artificially subsidized pricing. So I understand the concept of disrupting a previous oligarchy, replacing it with a new monopoly, and then profiting through rent seeking.

But where are the barriers to entry that would allow Uber to solidify as that new monopoly? There's already Lyft today... and once Uber starts to charge their true costs, then we'll likely see numerous other competitors emerge to compete on price. Ultimately, they're _just a phone app_! Most Uber drivers today are running the Uber app and Lyft app side by side anyway.

The usual playbook calls for the early leader to pay off politicians, and have them write new laws or regulations that raise the barrier to entry for future competitors. But Uber's playbook has been to take an antagonistic stance toward politicians, rather than buying them off. So what's to stop some newer competitor from beating them on price... or some huge company to swoop in after Uber establishes the market, and beat them by cross-promoting and leveraging their other lines of business?

<comment> sjm-lbm I honestly think the original vision was something similar to Amazon: bleed money when they are an online bookstore, make it all back when they swing for the fences and go for replacing all of retail. Likewise, Uber might lose money as a taxi service, but the idea would be to make it back in self-driving tech that replaces all transportation with 5 lanes of self-driving Ubers zipping about in all directions.

The problem is that 2017 seems like a major hiccup in this vision. The original visionary is gone. There's been some issues with self-driving technology. Lyft wasn't a huge problem when they were small and had no self- driving tech, now they are much bigger and have a viable self-driving tech partner in Ford... and so on.

It'll be interesting to see if this is actually the case, and, if they are off track enough, how they might change the way they operate.

<comment><USER14> It doesn't make sense. If the endgame for Uber is self driving cars they'd have much longer runway if they were a startup doing only that, instead of bleeding money on both ends. They were originally an app company from the time when an app gave you easy access to capital. It's more likely the self driving thing was something they had to do to keep the high valuation as a tech company. It was probably an easy pick since it's something in vogue not too far from their normal business.

<comment><USER15> It's also something that would potentially kill their initial business so they had no choice I think but to go into it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am sorry, but I don-t understand why they lose so much money. They take 30 % of all trips, they don-t have cars, they don-t pay salaries to drivers. Is it the infrastructure so expensive?

<comment><USER17> In many markets they pay drivers more than they make on each ride - significantly more.

It happens in various forms, but I suspect minimum-payout subsidies are one of the main causes.

In many cities Uber is trying to shorten wait times (so there's a car very close to you always), and the only way to do this is to flood the streets with drivers. Flooding the streets with drivers lowers each driver's earning ability, since there are now more drivers competing for the same number of passengers.

To make sure drivers don't quit, Uber has been in the habit of guaranteeing payouts - if you work this area during a particular time period, they guarantee you a minimum level of earnings, paying you the difference if there aren't enough passengers.

This is a big part of how they lose money - in order to maintain a system where a car is always nearby, they need to pay drivers a lot more than they make from the passengers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > as the ride-hailing leader struggled to fend off competition, legal > challenges and _regulatory scrutiny_

A good read on this topic calling these business _Regulatory Entrepreneurship_ :

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2741987](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2741987)

</comment><comment><USER19> Anecdotally, Uber seems to have a large foot print. If it were to fail I wonder how much the economy would be affected? Ie would it start an end of much of the sharing economy - and thus trigger some market corrections?

<comment><USER20> I suspect there are enough competitors (Lyft, Eat24, etc) that would pick up the slack almost immediately.

<comment><USER21> And I am sure most places have local competition. In my city there were at least three companies doing the same before Uber even showed up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's to stop Uber from slowing the burn via an increase in base prices? People would still use Uber as long as it's A) more convenient than other transportation B) better quality rides than cabs and C) just a little cheaper than cabs.

There are surely other forms of revenue they can spin up too, but this seems to be pretty straightforward, especially in markets where they have already decimated local taxi firms.

<comment><USER23> Increased competition. Lyft is burning through money at an unprecedented rate to catch up with Uber given that they smell blood this year and investors ala Google are willing to subsidize the burn. At some point, this has to stop but 2017 does not seem to be the year.

Source: Lyft pushes back profitability after increased burn - [https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/unpacking-lyfts- projected-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/unpacking-lyfts-projected- financials/)

<comment><USER24> >Increased competition.

Maybe I'm weird, but:

1) I don't even look at what the price of lyft is. So they could up the price by a significant percentage I wouldn't even notice.

2) Even if Uber was more expensive than lyft, I would almost definitely still take uber.

<comment><USER23> You're not weird and this is precisely why Uber is still the market leader. But there is a cohort, in some specific areas where Lyft's network is on par with Uber's such that price, and more specifically targeted discounts, do play a part. Lyft can analyze which one of its riders has not taken a ride in a while (and is hence presumably using Uber) and target them with discounts.

<comment><USER25> Lyft just can't shake the ... downmarket vibe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is this abnormal given their size? I remember similar articles about Facebook, Twitter and others.

<comment><USER27> It certainly allows recycling jokes from 2000. "They may be losing money on every sale, but they'll make it up on volume."

<comment> mark-r That joke is a _lot_ older than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> OK, a down round at last. "The sale of those shares would value the business at $48 billion, a 30 percent discount to the last private valuation."

I'll bet that gets trimmed even more if the deal closes. Losses are increasing, not decreasing.

</comment><comment><USER29> And of course given how things have been going for them in the courts this week all signs point to a massive hit in the Waymo lawsuit.

They still don't have a real business (a company kept on life support by constant external cash injections is not a real business).

</comment><comment><USER30> Very relevant here: [http://www.businessinsider.com/australian-fund-manager- calls...](http://www.businessinsider.com/australian-fund-manager-calls-uber-a- ponzi-scheme-2017-5)

</comment><comment><USER31> Uber has raised more than $11B over the years. Does anyone know how much of that is left and what their runway is?

edit: runway to IPO I meant

<comment><USER32> Apparently they are at about $5.1B cash-on-hand, not including the potential $1B SoftBank investment. So they have about a year of runway right now.

<comment><USER33> > So they have about a year of runway right now.

I think that assumes their burn rate will not increase. Which, historically, is not the case. At their current increase of burn, assuming it is linear, they're probably looking at less than a year. Maybe even as little as 9 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How much of it operating the part everyone is familiar with, vs investment into the self-driving cars and other expenses?

</comment><comment><USER35> > Uber Technologies Inc.'s net loss widened to $1.46 billion in the third > quarter, according to people with knowledge of the matter, as the ride- > hailing leader struggled to fend off competition, legal challenges and > regulatory scrutiny.

"according to people with knowledge of the matter.."

How is reporting like this legal? Is this not speculation?

It baffles me that no fact checking/ benchmarking exists for such a major news platform.

<comment><USER36> It's strange to me that you assume that just because sources aren't named in public that no fact checking occurred.

As far as legality, there is a system in place; if it's false, it's handled in civil court.

<comment><USER35> >It's strange to me that you assume that just because sources aren't named in public that no fact checking occurred.

It's hard to take things seriously when people/organizations do not take/put skin in the game.

From a risk perspective it is genuis, but from a readers perspective it is problematic in my opinion.( I am not a fan of gossip)

What's stranger to me is how you assume that they fact check....

For all I know they do, but it defeats the purpose of confidentiality agreements if sources speak up when they are explicitly told not too. (I am referring to confidential finance contracts)</comment></comment></comment>


Programming War Stories: Connectix - <AUTHOR> https://aarongiles.com/programming/war-connectix/ <comment><USER2> Virtual PC was a great piece of software back then in 2003-2006.

You just installed a Virtual PC app. After that, you could install and run nearly any x86 OS right in that app. No hypervisor or SLAT tweaks were required; it all worked literally on any host x86 CPU you can imagine.

Fast forward a few years and Virtual PC was killed off in favor of a new Hyper-V technology from Microsoft. To be precise, Virtual PC was just rebadged as Hyper-V, plus it took some amount of changes.

You immediately felt a substantial difference: instead of an app that always works everywhere, you've got an OS component that should be installed with a lot of ceremony and tricks. Hyper-V was also very picky on CPUs it could run on: it wanted some obscure features (like SLAT) that only the newest and more pricey CPUs could provide at that time. It also had miserable performance when it came to graphics and mouse interactions. A big and disappointing departure from a Virtual PC tiny app that could do it all on every CPU you had at hand.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Hyper-V transition for Virtual PC is loosely covered in the next chapter: [https://aarongiles.com/programming/war- microsoft/](https://aarongiles.com/programming/war-microsoft/)

How the standalone app originally worked: _" In order to begin taking over the machine, we first had to gain access to kernel mode. To do this, we just identified an unused interrupt vector in the OS's interupt vector table, and patched it to point to our own code—which lived in user mode. (Security experts are rightly freaking out at reading this.)"_

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. I worked on a processor simulator a while ago; it brought back memories of getting things running... You can do some really funky things when you implement enough of an MMU. When we showed a demo during one of our executive updates, we showed them that we could run one of our hypervisors inside the simulator and boot to an OS, which was impressive enough at the time. However - through the entire demo, what we didn't mention was that the simulator was actually _itself_ running inside an instance of the simulator, and that the entire demo was really:

A Host laptop (Linux, little endian), running the simulator (of a different processor ISA, big endian), where we'd launched yet another Linux, running the simulator (of yet a different processor ISA), where we'd launched the hypervisor, which was hosting a Linux guest OS which we could SSH into. :-)

At the end of the demo, we exited out of one of the shells, and then showed them that the entire demo was running inside the sim, and quietly proved how far we'd come.

Yes, it was slow, but - it was mathematically correct, and simulating a processor for which the silicon hadn't yet been taped out.

I'm really proud of that team. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was an early adopter of Virtual PC on OSX. I have to say that it never worked to a performance level of being useful even for business needs like running basic business apps like Excel, Outlook, Visio, Ecco Pro and the like.

I abandoned the idea of VirtualPC once Microsoft bought connectix as they were still the EvilCorp of the time.

I did not see any useful PC virtualization on OSX until Apple switched to Intel and VMware jumped into the game.

<comment><USER5> And that's why I had the DOS Compatibility Card for the PowerMac in the pre OS X days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I never tried Connectix's PS emulator, but I do remember that era and purchasing one of the weird Bleem CD keys for a product that took forever to come out. Eventually ePSXe became the dominant emulator. I remember playing and beating FF9 on it.

I'm really glad he worked for a company that said, "Go for it," and in doing so, set a pretty important legal prescient.

It's not the first time a company has reversed engineered a BIOS. That's how we got some of the first IBM PC Compatibles. Compaq did the same thing, except they had two teams. One that reverse engineered a BIOS and wrote a spec, and another that wrote the new BIOS, giving them a clean-room design they could defend legally.

</comment><comment><USER7> Virtual PC for PPC was a work of art. Some early version had _Voodoo1 /2 passthru_ which managed to eke out several frames per second in a game like Counterstrike. Although the emulator was good enough to let me play the network install of Starcraft at a LAN party on my souped-up PowerMac.

<comment><USER8> Was there not a spawn version of Starcraft for Classic Mac OS?

<comment><USER7> Probably, but this was in an age where I only had 56K dialup and piracy meant sitting in a queue in Hotline for ages. And I had no other Mac-using friends to borrow from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else remember the Connectix Quickcam?

[https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=con...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=connectix+quickcam&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

<comment><USER10> ...oh man i just had a déjà vu xD

[http://www.crynwr.com/qcpc/](http://www.crynwr.com/qcpc/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favorite is how they managed to get Connectix Virtual from 1989 to support the Macintosh IIci. Even [https://tidbits.com/1994/07/25/transition-to- powerpc-ram-dou...](https://tidbits.com/1994/07/25/transition-to-powerpc-ram- doubler-1-5/) mentions that "I want to thank the PowerPC software team in particular for spending two hours with us in March thumbing through the source code answering specific questions were stuck on at that crucial stage of the project. "

</comment><comment><USER5> I bought two products from Connectix that made up for the sorry state of MacOS at the time. RAM Doubler that helped work around how Mac allocated memory and Speed Doubler, a better 68K emulator for PPC Macs.

<comment><USER7> Speed Doubler was fantastic on 68K Macs as well. It had a smarter disk cache and added multithreading to the Finder for file copies and trash emptying long before MacOS 8

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Connectix Virtual Game Station was a GREAT piece of software.

I played tons of PSX games with it, it was simple and did a great job.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Gaming Historian did a video on PS1 emulators, including Virtual Game Station: [https://youtu.be/UGHul1PrXCE](https://youtu.be/UGHul1PrXCE)</comment>