Why Can't America Solve the Hunger Problem? - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2017/06/why-cant-america-solve-the-hunger-problem/530151/ <comment><USER2> > "Walmart doesn't pay its workers very well."

I've worked with the very low income, and Wal-Mart (and McDonald's) are at top of their respective categories as desired jobs. Both pay _better_ than most alternatives. Our state's Wal-Mart entry jobs pay 20% more than minimum wage.

> "pays its workers so poorly, they have to rely on food stamps and food banks > to make ends meet."

Wal-Mart, by quota, hires people their diversity report calls "people of color". In 2015, 51% of people Wal-Mart hired were "people of color". At least in my state, African-Americans are six times more likely to be on food stamps. If Wal-Mart hiring matched the general population ratios, then their food stamp stats would look much more like the general population.

There are real problems in the word, but Wal-Mart's wages aren't one of them - they pay better than the alternatives. I really don't get the Wal-Mart hate.

But having helped someone fill out a job application for McDonalds, I'd personally take a programmer interview any day. That was way too many fricking questions.

<comment><USER3> I have a different take on the article. Wal-Mart is merely an example that the author found relevant. You can substitute by any other alternative.

The point the author wants to drive home is that the minimum wage is so low, workers can't provide for their family without supplementing it with food stamps. Because they have food stamps, Wal-Mart and alternatives keep the wages low. Food industry also profit from food stamp massively, so they have incentive to keep wages low so more workers need them and spend them here.

This is a vicious circle, that doesn't help worker escape food insecurity.

<comment><USER4> Minimum wage is not intended to be "support a family" wage, and it never was.

<comment><USER5> Yes it was. It was specifically designed for a man to support a family of four with a modest lifestyle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > They're using those resources in a way that allows corporations to come in > as problem solvers rather than problem causers—but to also not really > address the root causes and to perpetuate the problem through just treating > the symptoms of it.

I feel like I would understand what the whole article means if I could unlock the mysteries of this paragraph.

Food banks as a concept don't make any sense. We already have a well-developed food distribution system: it's called grocery stores. There is no way food banks can accomplish the procurement and delivery function at lower cost than existing retail channels. That militates towards simply writing people a check with which to buy food.

There is a small subset of the population that would use that check to buy drugs or the like instead of buying food for their kids. Those people don't need food banks, they need to be assigned a social worker.

<comment><USER7> The idea is akin to this: You have a cold, but you take medication to prevent it from hampering your work. However, this means you do not rest, which would cure the cold. The moment you stop receiving the medication, the cold resurfaces.

In this situation, the cold is the root cause, the medication is the corporate 'problem solution', but the medication is also perpetuating the cold by making the proper solution less attractive.

The proper solution would be to change incentives such that sick workers are allowed to, and comfortable with, taking time to let the cold clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read most of this article and skimmed the rest--- there doesn't seem to be a consistent thesis?

Allowing soda and other "junk" food maybe isn't the best thing, and I'm sure there is some mild bed-sharing between Kraft/BigSoda and the foodbanks, but I'm also in favor of letting people spend their benefits how they choose to.

Andy Fisher also recommends a higher minimum wage, which I disagree with. It makes it harder for people to get started in a job, and also if there are a lot more people applying for $15 jobs than there are jobs, it opens the likelyhood that discrimination will take place.

Economists are kinda uncertain about this though: [http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/15-minimum- wage](http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/15-minimum-wage) The conclusion seems to be "$15 isn't that high of a wage so it won't distort the market that much."

<comment><USER9> "I read most of this article and skimmed the rest--- there doesn't seem to be a consistent thesis?"

Hunger isn't a solved problem in the United States, and it's either because the food banks aren't doing a good enough job, the corporations are too cozy with the "anti-hunger complex", the government isn't doing a good enough job, income inequality is too high, or because the public thinks that that food drives do more good than they actually do.

I'm first in line to point out that things in reality have complicated causes, but I have to agree that this is all over the board and if I put on my manager's hat, I don't think any group comes away with any actionable items from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a hunger problem, or is there a poverty problem?

The USA has an obesity crisis and the overwhelming majority of the population is fat, obese, or morbidly obese. Is that hunger? Or is that from poverty? Or something else?

<comment><USER11> It's from bad food. It's been overly processed to where there is no nutrition, so actual problems of hunger and malnutrition are no longer addressed. Just cravings.

<comment><USER10> But is someone really hungry or starving if they're overweight or obese?

They may be feeling hungry, or have cravings, or have some other side effect of destroying a bodies ability to handle insulin, much like a drug addict feels cravings for their drug, but is that hunger? Or just a side effect of abusing food like any other vice or intoxicant?

I'd imagine where hunger is real elsewhere in the world, and people are genuinely starving, lacking food, and otherwise malnourished, they'd find this type of discussion in the fattest country on earth to be offensive.

<comment><USER12> Nutrition is not only about the quantity of calories but also about their quality. If you look at the food Intake of some impoverished fat person you're likely to find that they consume too many calories of low quality food void of proper nutrients fats and proteins but full of sugars and fast carbs. That's not only because of education but also cause the crap food is the only thing accessible and affordable to someone in the low income end and/or living off food stamps.

<comment><USER10> > but also cause the crap food is the only thing accessible and affordable

I hear this often, but it is much more expensive per meal to buy prepackaged garbage food, microwaveable meals, junk etc, than visiting the vegetable section along with bulk rice or beans, and meat. The difference is the latter requires 20-30 minutes of cooking and some minimal effort, whereas microwaving the package garbage meal takes 2 minutes.

Not everyone likes to cook, and many people don't want to deal with cooking after they're tired from a day at work, but it's not really about affordability until you're approaching organic foods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Because America isn't trying to solve the hunger problem.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder about America's utility function.

"The hunger problem" is clearly someone else's problem, but what would be America's problem? Something about competing with other countries in various aspects of power, while mainaining and servicing its internal power structure, probably.

How relevant is feeding people to that?

<comment><USER15> > How relevant is feeding people to that?

It doesn't generate shareholder value. Unless you're a grocery store or food producer whose customers are subsidized by food stamps or similar programs.

Feeding people also reduces the risk of a revolution (whether peaceful or violent) forcibly changing our power structures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The root cause, IMO, is rent-seeking. Various groups can achieve their goals through making it more expensive to be poor. Parking tickets, land rents, civil forfeiture, bank fees, occupational licensing and restrictions, regressive taxation, de-facto requirements for university degrees, wage theft, and probably more things that I don't have the time to dive into.

We the resources to end hunger in America. The massive reduction in workforce dedicated to agriculture is evidence of that. The problem is that "or you'll starve" is a highly effective tool to coerce economic rents out of people, so efforts reducing the amount of hunger just means that rentiers can squeeze more out of those barely making it.

</comment><comment><USER17> America can't solve the hunger problem because a significant and politically powerful segment of America is ideologically devoted to capitalism, and hunger (more generally, the threat of being unable to meet basic life necessities) is the whip at labor's back on which capitalism depends.

Hunger is not a problem for capitalists, it's a solution.

(The article seems more about the network of interests that have grown up to profit off the determination of America to _not_ solve hunger while paying lip service to the ideal of doing so, but that's not the root of the failure tomsolve hunger.)

</comment><comment><USER18> > Sixty percent of the non-elderly who receive food stamps are in households > where there's at least one person working.

This was the stat I was curious about. But it is generally underwhelming.. Should 1 person working in a household really expect to be able to feed, house, and clothe everyone? And if 40% of people on food stamps don't have jobs.. that seems like a much more obvious starting point. They are potentially capable* of working, but are not. Why is that?

*barring mental illness, disability, etc. Which is another issue I think could be solved sooner than rebuilding the entire food welfare system.

</comment><comment><USER19> To read this headline:

hunger problem => food insecurity

where "food insecurity" is not the same thing as starving, or getting enough calories in a day to survive (although it can include severe lack of food.) Food insecurity can be more about not being able to afford balanced meals, or not getting enough to eat some of the time.

I recommend the linked report, Household Food Security in the United States in 2015: [https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub- details/?pubid=797...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub- details/?pubid=79760)

</comment><comment><USER20> Because Americans get really mad when someone else gets something for free.

<comment><USER21> Unless it's farm subsidies.

<comment><USER8> No, we get mad at those too. Trust me, if I could I would shred the IRS Tax Code and simplify it.

I also canvassed in Des Moines, Iowa in 2008 for a presidential candidate who was _not_ in favor of farm subsidies, and was especially against corn-ethanol subsidies. It, surprisingly, didn't come up that much?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.

<comment><USER22> What would you teach "a man" to make a living in this economy?

<comment><USER4> I am simply pointing out that you do not "solve hunger" by just handing out daily rations of food at a food bank.

You can keep people from going hungry by doing that, but it doesn't address the underlying problem and in fact it likely perpetuates it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The US throws away 50% of all food produced. Because it isn't "pretty enough" to be sold in retail stores. So America absolutely can solve the hunger problem. It just doesn't want to.

</comment><comment><USER24> America can't solve The Hunger Problem because every time we do people who make a living in that business change all the language to resurrect it.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you think about it, all social problems stem from a single word:

superiority.

So, why can't America solve the hunger problem? Because there are some who want to be superior to others. The end. The main value of being a "have" is not being a "have not". So if you give things to the "have nots", then you've undermined the "haves" (the distance between them has decreased)

<comment><USER26> Socialism wasn't very economically successful. But, well, we had our (imported) bread aplenty and butter was rationed equally.

<comment><USER27> Well, by some markers they were quite successful. When comparing socialist countries with capitalist counterparts of the same GDP/capita then the socialist countries were doing remarkably well.

Sure we are not thought this in the west. Remember "history is written by the victors"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Why doesn't" is the better question. We clearly can.

</comment><comment><USER11> Because American's food supply has been so overly-manufactured and processed that it doesn't really satisfy hunger and nutrition, but rather addictive cravings.

<comment><USER29> This. I've worked in food banks and an operation offering low-income persons and the homeless free food. While I applaud the organizations and people trying to do something, a lot of the food we give out is junk. Lots of high- carb, highly processed, high-additive containing foods.

The sad part is that I recall when at one operation I worked at people didn't want the fresh stuff when we got it. Sadly, I think they are addicted to the processed garbage.

<comment><USER30> ... or they simply don't have the time to do much cooking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> North Americans are the most wasteful people in the world [1] and I have a suspicion that the USA Government is the most wasteful in the world too (tons of articles about wasteful spending).

[1] [https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food- IP.pdf](https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER32> > Walmart is perhaps the most egregious example of this. Walmart doesn't pay > its workers very well. And because it pays its workers so poorly, they have > to rely on food stamps and food banks to make ends meet. So then, Walmart > goes ahead and uses its charitable donations to pay food banks, to pay anti- > hunger groups to support SNAP—which enables [Walmart] to pay its workers low > wages. And then it also redeems about 1 in 6 SNAP dollars around the > country.

Yet another argument for raising the minimum wage in the short term and moving to basic income in the medium-to-long term. The current system boils down to company scrip with added obfuscation.

<comment><USER33> What if the premise is wrong or misguided? In other words, Walmart doesn't pay well because retail doesn't pay well. Nobody is forcing people to work at Walmart, and if they could, wouldn't they find better paying jobs? What keeps people working at walmart? Is it possible the rest of the retail sector isn't able to pay much more so they're all in the same boat?

<comment><USER22> If your company makes so little money that your employees literally can't eat and make rent, then your business has failed and it's not up to the government to prop it up.

<comment><USER33> I get it, but most of retail is Hemorrhaging money. Don't get me wrong, I want to see everyone being paid what they're worth and then some but most people I see argue about retail wages, they single out Walmart but don't have any data to explain why.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Chelsea Affect (2002) - <AUTHOR> https://granta.com/the-chelsea-affect/ <comment><USER2> wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Chelsea

wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Miller

www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2010/dec/19/10-best-chelsea-hotel-moments

</comment><comment><USER3> Curious and sad about Behan.</comment>


The application deadline for Work at a Startup is tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.posterous.com/the-application-deadline-for-work-at-a-startu <comment><USER2> If we're not able to attend but would like to submit our resume to the YCombinator companies, is there a good place to do so? I'd be tempted to submit my resume via the application, but it doesn't seem fair to the startup companies to have to sift through resumes from people unable to attend.

<comment><AUTHOR> We should build something for that. Stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Any word on how many applicants will be invited?

</comment><comment><USER4> Would it be possible for you to post a copy of the presentation slides for those that are unable to attend?

<comment><USER5> It's going to be streamed live, for those that can't attend: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1346118></comment></comment>


Video: iPhone OS on 24" multi-touch screen - nice! - <AUTHOR> http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=4210

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone know if this is real and how to get this working?

</comment><comment><USER2> its a fake video IMO</comment>


Dynamic Automatic Differentiation of GPU Broadcast Kernels - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08297 <comment><USER2> One of the author here. Working on this paper was fun, one of the most interesting lessons I learned was that divergence on GPUs has dramatically fallen in cost on modern architectures.</comment>


Erie woman receives $284B electric bill - <AUTHOR> http://www.goerie.com/news/20171225/erie-woman-receives-284-billion-electric-bill <comment><USER2> Somehow I expected a story about crypto mining.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was thinking crypto mining or a grow house</comment>


Chicago Quietly Shortens Yellow Lights by .1 Sec, Writes 77,000 New Tickets - <AUTHOR> http://slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/10/16/chicago_shortens_yellow_lights_makes_8_million_off_new_tickets.html <comment><USER2> This is just a way to raise taxes without public scrutiny or the honesty to do it openly.</comment>


CBOE exchange website down minutes after releasing Bitcoin futures - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/kunalgosar318/status/939998633277009920 <comment> shit-show All your resources needed for today's Bitcoin Futures Launch on CBOE:

CBOE Chart Updates: [http://www.cboe.com/delayedquote/advanced- charts?ticker=XBT%...](http://www.cboe.com/delayedquote/advanced- charts?ticker=XBT%2fF8)

CBOE XBT - Bitcoin (USD) Futures Table: [http://www.cboe.com/delayedquote/futures- quotes](http://www.cboe.com/delayedquote/futures-quotes)

Cryptonaire live forecast updates: [https://cryptonaire.com](https://cryptonaire.com)

Bloomberg Live Coverage: [https://www.bloomberg.com/live/us](https://www.bloomberg.com/live/us)

CMC for BTC indexing including non-US pairs: [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets)

WCI for BTC indexing only US pairs: [https://www.worldcoinindex.com/coin/bitcoin](https://www.worldcoinindex.com/coin/bitcoin)

<comment><USER2> This comment is the exact reason why I cringe when anyone mentions anything related to trading.

Notice, he/she did not link anything related to how the future contract works?

How can you trade something you do not understand?

I would be fired the first day if I couldn't explain to my boss how the instrument/contract was constructed.

How do you think quants model? _First they understand how the contract works_

If they mess the basics up, then "Houston , we have a problem."

<comment><USER3> It's "resources needed for today's Bitcoin Futures Launch on CBOE", not "resources needed to understand how future contracts work".

While those would certainly be good as well, they assume that you know what's going on in the first place. It's not like we need to post a primer on JS and node ever time a new npm package is posted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok, so these bitcoin futures let people bet on the future bitcoin price without actually owning any bitcoins, without having any actual stake in the actual market. (these futures are settled in cash, so nobody ever has to deliver any actual bitcoins)

That seems to be an ultimate insult and revenge of the finance industry toward the original idea behind bitcoin.

I am again amazed how the finance industry gets to have their own tax-free casinos (where they play the game of I win / You loose with other peoples money) while ordinary gambling addicts have all kinds of rules to play by and taxes to pay when they need a fix for their habit.

That said, I also fail to see why any sane person would want to play this specific bitcoin futures casino. Even at current market cap, the bitcoin price seems to be easily manipulated by a few "bitcoin whales", so it would seem the odds are stacked heavily against these new wannabee bitcoin investors. It seems like a new way to make even more money for big bitcoin traders.

I'm grabbing popcorn.

<comment><USER5> I thought the original idea of Bitcoin was to be a currency and make fiat money obsolete. The finance industry is simply acknowledging that it's a speculative asset and mostly interesting for its volatility, something that fits well within its longstanding frameworks.

<comment><USER6> This is my thinking. The volatility of bitcoin is insane and fascinating. It'll be a real experiment if futures flattens it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And here I thought it was Bitcoin that had scaling issues. Someone should make a futures market for Bitcoin on the Ethereum block chain settled in ETH just for irony.

<comment><USER8> I'm honestly surprised that there aren't more crypto financial instruments that are implemented/valued in other cryptos.

<comment><USER9> The problem is they are heavily correlated in downward movement. They all crash together. So you cant effectively short BTC in ETH because even if you win, you lose.

<comment><USER10> Take a look at ripple

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone explain how the bid/ask and data for futures can be interpreted? Sorry futures noob here.

<comment><USER12> Bid is latest buy order. Ask/Offer is latest sell order.

Many exchanges have the "maker-taker" model. If you add liquidity to the order book, you are paid by the Exchange. If you take liquidity away from the order book, you pay the Exchange.

<comment><USER13> It's not the latest order, it's the highest (bid)/lowest (ask) _open_ order.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just their "marketing" website. Trading systems look normal.

<comment><USER15> Not sure whether it's the same site but the site which hosts current prices is unresponsive: [http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin- futures](http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures)

<comment><USER16> the trading system isn't a website: it is fix-fast (data) + fix (trading) over dedicated links

they can't packet the actual exchange because they don't have a link to it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just as a data point — as of this posting, the volume is a whopping... 828.

<comment><USER18> Trading just started and CBOE is not nearly as big and as active as CME.

Also, trading volume for futures in general is pretty low. You're rarely going to see volume above 100k a Sunday night. Coffee futures have around 23k volume right now.

<comment><USER17> I'm well aware, it was meant as a data point for anyone not aware who could possibly think for a second their public website going down has anything to do with demand :)

<comment><USER19> I suspect a lot more people are interested in watching it than immediately investing in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if they are getting DDOS'ed. Many crypto exchanges do get DDOS'ed before a big move. It is the nature of the beast since these market are not regulated and the "elite" guys operating on it think this is how free markets work (whoever has the most toys win).

<comment><USER21> The CBOE website is separate from the trading system. Futures in the US are regulated by the CFTC. There is no reason to believe that this is manipulation. As others have mentioned, it is likely that their website is simply getting hugged by the Internet due to the new contract.

<comment><USER20> I know that, but DDOSers target everything even if it doesn't stop operations.

I also think some bitcoin exchanges are using this model too. Bitfinex trading did not stop when their website went down the last time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone have a link to a public API endpoint? Status Page? or has trading ceased entirely?

Unanticipated demand? ddos? what's going on here?

<comment><USER23> Trading is unaffected. You can see quotes at any brokerage that allows trading futures, though you may need a paid subscription for access to non-delayed quote data. Look for the symbol XBTF18.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a DDoS attack, as all bitcoin exchanges have suffered from them, but I don't know what they think they're accomplishing because unlike bitcoin exchanges the CBOE website is completely separate from the trading systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So what keeps one of the so-called "whales" with massive balances from buying a huge amount of put orders and then tanking the market with a huge afterhours sell just before the execution date?

Buy the coins back at the depressed price, and you could do this every month like clockwork.

<comment><USER25> (Not a trading whiz.) Is there anything in this strategy that would prevent any other trader from piggybacking on the swings and making money? I could it see it working the first month but I think a lot of other traders (perhaps with better trading equipment - think HFT) would be prepared and could split the available profit in subsequent months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think all the bitcoin fans making this out to be a big deal is kind of funny. The volume of futures exchanges shits on any of the fly-by-night bitcoin exchanges. Professional traders don't google CBOE to look at marketing material, lol.

<comment><USER27> I think the consensus in the bitcoin community is that it won't have any effect and Bitcoin will continue chugging along as it has.

It was mainly the bears saying the futures would increase shorts on bitcoin.

Can't imagine anyone in their right mind would short bitcoin right now though...

<comment><USER28> > Can't imagine anyone in their right mind would short bitcoin right now > though...

Why not? I can't believe anyone in their right mind would significantly invest in Bitcoin right now.

<comment><USER29> One can simultaneously believe something is neither worth buying nor shorting. In this case, Bitcoin's volatility and meteoric rise make predicting the timing of its crash risky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Shocking, shocking...</comment>


FBI links Pensacola shooter, Al-Qaeda via cracked iPhones, 'no thanks to Apple' - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/18/fbi-links-pensacola-shooter-to-al-qaeda-with-cracked-iphones-with-no-thanks-to-apple/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'll thank them. Thank you, Apple, for supporting privacy in the face of unrelated ultimatums. Privacy for all is privacy for one.

</comment><comment><USER2> The best part in the article:

"At first, it wasn't known which iPhone models were in question but a week later, it surfaced that they were older ones, the iPhone 5 and 7. As we noted at the time, both are easily crackable through third-parties, but the FBI continued to ask for Apple's help."

[https://9to5mac.com/2020/01/14/fbi-encryption-apple- unlock/](https://9to5mac.com/2020/01/14/fbi-encryption-apple-unlock/)</comment>


Lessons Learned in Large Computations with Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://nirvdrum.com/2009/09/17/lessons-learned-in-large-computations-with-ruby.html

<comment><USER2> Listen friend, this isn't what Ruby is good at.

Acquire a C program, a C-Assembler program if possible and drive it from Ruby with an API.

Don't do mad cranking with Ruby.

<comment><USER3> Ditto. I spend 95% of my time writing Monte-Carlo based financial simulations. Obviously, they are computationally intense. That being said, after many years, I finally figured out that prototyping in in a scripting language (formerly Python now Ruby) and then factoring out parts into other languages for speed (usually just a C++ or C/CUDA binary via a `cmd` call) makes me 100 times more productive than just doing it in C.

<comment><USER4> Funny, I do a lot of stuff with Monte-Carlo* as well and I have reached the opposite conclusion. It's soooo much easier (and more pleasurable) to prototype in Python versus chasing down null pointer violations all afternoon. At least for my simulations I have always found that 90+% of the execution time is spent in one or two routines which can then be factored out into C (or FORTRAN, which is faster.) Also, it's much easier to inspect and graph your data in Python; when I develop in C I tend to skip these things because they're such a PITA. I can't help but wonder what I'm missing.

Although, at a 100x productivity increase, I might have to give it another look; I'd be out of grad school by Halloween.

*For the uninitiated, Monte Carlo is a fancy way of saying "for loops."

<comment><USER3> I think you misinterpreted what I said. I prototyped formerly in Python, and now with Ruby. I also do not chase down null pointer violations most of the time (except when debugging any CUDA exported functions that need speed).

<comment><USER4> Ahh, righto, sure did! Well then we agree. How do you like CUDA? We just took delivery on a 4xTesla C1060 box which I can't wait to check out. Sadly it's sitting in a closet right now because of departmental squabbling over who must foot the air-con bill when it gets plugged in :-)

<comment><USER3> I have a single C1060 on my desktop system -- it is the single greatest investment I have ever made. Granted, debugging CUDA is not great, but the for many things Thrust alone (<http://gpgpu.org/2009/05/31/thrust>) can make demolish any bottlenecks so you can get closer to your idea rather than spending all your time on metal. However, I have to play with OpenCL...especially now that OSX has built in support!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is _exactly_ why our company is using a combination of JRuby and Java. There's some big "infrastructure" bits (like search) that really are better done in Java, and it's wonderful to be able to leverage that while still using nice terse Ruby for the majority of our code.

There are those that prefer to use MRI or YARV with C, and more power to 'em. However, I'm getting too old and lazy to spend all my time chasing down memory bugs.

</comment><comment><USER6> _My takeaway from the project is that Ruby is a great language hampered by a terrible execution environment._

He has a problem with execution speed and blames the tool instead of using the correct tool for the job. I could probably hammer a nail in with the back of a screwdriver but it would be better to learn how to use the hammer. Sigh. Call C from ruby/python/any interpreted language if you NEED speed.

<comment><USER7> "blames the tool instead of using the correct tool for the job"

Uh, why the negativity? Basically he is saying that Ruby is not well suited to certain tasks. How does that differ from what you say?

<comment><USER8> The screwdriver is not "hampered by" its poor nail-driving capabilities.

<comment><USER9> Okay, but I can write code just as quickly in Perl or Python and it'll be several times faster than Ruby. I can write that's Haskell that's just as elegant and concise (although it takes me slightly longer) and that runs orders of magnitude faster.

Increasingly, I'm unclear on what this unique advantage is that Ruby supposedly has that makes up for the atrocious implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any advice for programming languages that are both fast and pleasant to use? How does LISP fare? Or maybe Haskell (because of the static typing)?

<comment><USER10> "Pleasant to use" is not benchmarkable, it is subjective. You can benchmark the speeds and figure out which one runs something faster, but it's very hard to quantify what languages are the most pleasant to develop in.

Some people like OO, some people like FP. Some people like things explicit, some people want things inferred.

All these popular languages are built around various trade offs. As I understand it, the functional languages allow you to use FP for your high- level stuff, but tend to be a bit slower than C (like one order of magnitude). Ruby has a lot of flexibility and allows for rapid development, but can be very slow for some things. C is fast, but it's C.

Get what I mean? Try a few. Find a language that works the way you think.

<comment><USER7> OK, different attempt then: are there _ANY_ other choices than C/C++ and Java for high performance computing? (No Fortran please, I suppose).

I think there is a fundamental reason why languages with dynamic types will usually be slower than languages with static types, but some statically typed languages should be able to compete in terms of speed?

I suppose that puts Scala and Haskell on the map. I am not a 100% sure about LISP - I think there are variants where static types are optional?

Nitpicking aside, let's assume "pleasant to use" means "deemed cool by the HN crowd". Just give me _some_ suggestions, then I can still decide if I agree or not.

Edit: in the flawed language shootout, Haskell seems to kick ass: [http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ghc&lang2=icpp&box=1)

I guess learning Haskell just moved up several steps on my TODO heap.

<comment><USER10> Play around with the Computer Language Benchmarks Game. It's good at showing what some of the trade-offs are. Of course, it's really not very scientific, but it gives you an idea. <http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/>

You'll usually see C, C++, Java, Haskell, OCaml, Fortran, Scala, and Lisp in the 1-10x range (of the fastest solution). They all should be reasonably competative on most things, and so you might make your decision based on personal preference and available libraries.

This is in contrast to things like Ruby, Perl, and Python which are often take 100x the time.

<comment><USER7> Thanks - I really need to pick up one of these languages. I know Java well, but don't want to use it anymore. So far I have only tried "slow" alternatives, though. Given my interests (machine learning), sometimes speed is called for.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Screencast: Introduction to JaxScript, a new JavaScript library - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/15127654

<comment><USER2> <http://www.jaxscript.com/>

How about some text before the video?</comment>


Why UT Austin is second-rate at producing startup founders - <AUTHOR> http://greengiraffe.posterous.com/why-ut-austin-is-second-rate-at-producing-sta

<comment><USER2> I think the same article could be written about lots of top ten schools, particularly the larger ones. Take UCSD for example: top 10 CS program, great city for young people, decent amount of angels/VCs floating around La Jolla, huge city (LA) only an hour away with access to even more capital... yet there hasn't been a major tech SD startup since mp3.com.

Big schools do not foster startups. I wonder if it's because smaller schools have more in common with startups? They have smaller staffs, leaner budgets, and typically fewer ridiculous processes. Key example: I just applied to Stanford and UTCS for my PhD. Stanford has clear info on deadlines and sent me an automated email reminder a few days before the app was due. UT Austin requires you to fill out two separate applications (one for the general UT system and another for UTCS), with different deadlines for each, inconsistent deadline info between the two systems, requiring duplicate information, and setting up a convoluted group of user accounts.

It is very hard to get big schools to understand startups. Virginia Tech was pushing very hard to encourage starting more tech companies, but their approach was to build a gigantic Corporate Research Center with isolated buildings and establishing formal "partnerships" with established or funded companies. Projects like the BT transit app get buzz only after they are a hit; and they don't try to compound the momentum by getting an order of magnitude more students working on their own apps, but rather let everything die down and force the few startup-friendly professors to start all over again.

As with most big organizations, the problems are fairly obvious. It's just nearly impossible to get them to change anything, especially since the main issue is a lack of willingness to change things.

<comment><USER3> Just a side note, I see CS program ranking thrown around here quite often. Exactly where are these pulled from?

<comment><USER4> Generally, the US News and World Reports college rankings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I went through ChE at UT Austin in the 96-00 period. Most of my friends were in CS or EE (which kind of explains my actual career path) and it seems that their experience was much, much different than this persons. They were hacking C and Perl and the better ones were getting odd jobs in industry through their professors by the middle of their Sophomore year.

They had some pretty challenging real world like projects to do (way more than I ever got a chance to work on so early, that is for certain) from identifying a problem, choosing the infrastructure that would be most conducive to solving the problem before the deadline, coding the solution and finally, testing the crud out of other people's projects...

Finally, at the first opportunity, a bunch of us broke off and started a company and so on etc. etc.

It is easy to blame culture and professors or other people in authority but ultimately the bulk of the community, in this case, are students. It is ridiculously easy to start a student organization. If I remember correctly, UT will even grant $700 or so to get started so there is little excuse not to generate interest and involvement. Then again, maybe it is better to just go hack and meet like minded students...

As a side note, I think it is a terrible idea to get business students involved in any attempt at a startup. They add very little and tend to want to take over in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am a UTCS graduate, working in industry.

At UT, I spent 2 years programming both Haskell and C++, and then 2 years with very little programming. We focused instead on theorem proving and linguistics. This has a lot to do with Dijkstra's legacy in the department.

Implementation, industry, and start-ups are thought as an exercise left for the reader, and not part of curriculum. Throughout my career, I've always felt proud about this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Am I missing something, or is this article just another variation on "my CS program didn't prepare me for my particular career of choice because it didn't teach me everything I needed to know on day one?" You can make this claim about any CS program you want and how it should teach agile development practices or Ruby or version control or whatever particular thing you've found useful during your day job, but that really shouldn't be the measure of a degree program. I think an undergraduate program should be measured in two ways:

\- Does your education enable you to identify general types of problems and know how to solve them? (as in "oh, this can be expressed as a graph search problem and I can create an admissible heuristic, so I can use A* to find the shortest path between these two points, done")

\- Did your education provide a solid enough understanding of the fundamentals to enable you to learn most things that you don't understand fairly quickly?

That's it. How hard is it to learn git (or your source control of choice)? A particular development methodology? iPhone programming? The average turnaround time I've seen from hiring a new college graduate to having that person be a meaningful contributor to a large project is between two and three months. I'd much rather that CS programs keep preparing them for more and different theoretical things instead of limiting that for the sole purpose of trying to make that transition period a few weeks shorter.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a graduate of UTCS.

I only had one class that used Java. Different classes were taught in C, Lisp, Scheme, ML, Haskell, etc. If anything, most students complain about not enough Java.

It's certainly the case that startups aren't emphasized. What's emphasized is research. For the professors that are really working with students, they are focused on getting them into a graduate program.

The type of research done at UT tends to be pretty forward looking and not the type of thing its easy to build a start up from.

But honestly, 99% of startups aren't dealing with the products of advanced university research. For the most part, a successful startup needs people that are solving problems that have already been solved before. It's not the type of thing that a research university really should be pushing students toward.

</comment><comment><USER8> _First, our professors think that getting a job at a big, stable company is a good thing. Is it?_

Yes. Most people aren't looking to start a company right after graduating college.

Startups are rare. Successful ones are practically endangered species.

</comment><comment><USER9> > (I've met seniors that have never used version control!)

I was one of those seniors, albeit at UT Dallas. I wasn't alone, by far. I was a Comp Sci major, not a Software Engineering major, but the majority of my classmates probably couldn't write a piece of code that ran.

No real solutions, just reiterating the scary facts about people who call themselves programmers.

<comment><USER10> Is source control considered that large an educational opportunity that the lack of classroom discussion is a barrier? When I hire someone that is a 15 minute conversation and maybe a cheat sheet taped to their monitor - regardless of education. If they can't pick it up by the end of the day that's usually a good sign that things aren't going to go well.

Not that there aren't plenty of educational opportunities surrounding the implementation of a good control system, just that teaching basic usage just seems to be a little simple.

Now not being able to write running code is a serious problem and it is frightening that someone could graduate after 4 years of computer science and never have written a working program.

<comment><USER9> It is simple, but not having had experience with source control is usually an indicator that the developer in question probably isn't very good.

And yes, I did basically just say that I'm probably not a very good developer. :)

<comment><USER10> From a hiring standpoint its not something I look for in recent graduates. I also don't ask whether you have learned to use an IDE. Those just aren't things I expect you to have been taught in a high-quality cs program because those are things I expect to teach you on the job in under a week - along with all the other project specific things you will need to learn (like which frameworks we are using, what coding standards we use, our check-in policy, etc.) If you have learned to use them and are familiar with them, great. It won't really affect your chances of being hired though because in our next project we may be using a completely different set of tools, and I will expect you to learn how to use those instead.

Now if you are claiming 5+ years of professional experience and have never used a source control system that is likely to trigger a whole set of negative questions surrounding what kind of experience you actually have, but it isn't a deal breaker - just a warning sign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So I did my BSEE at UT and am now doing a PhD at Stanford. While at Stanford, I have been a part of two funded startups (cofounder of one, and 5th employee at the other). It is certainly the case that Stanford offers many more opportunities to explore startups, entrepreneurship, and general business education for ee, cs, and other technical majors. That is due to three main things. The first is a handful of startup/and business courses such as MS&E 273 (Technology Venture Formation), and EE204 (Business for Computer Scientists), and a few others. Note that these are graduate level courses, but they do count as 3 graded units of engineering credit. Also note that I have not included the iphone app etc courses. While these are cool hacker courses, they don't really focuses on how to start a company or the principles of running a business.

The second thing is the constant presence of startup companies on campus. They hold hack-a-thons, infosessions, sponsor events and competitions, and so on. This is extremely important to get students excited and involved in the startup world, as it is very different from big company world.

The third thing is that many of the students (though still a minority) are interested in or currently pursuing a startup. There are several on-campus business plan competitions that are well attended by engineering students and there are terrific resources on campus (and around campus) for pursuing startups.

Honestly, I think UT is doing a pretty decent job. Austin has a fairly strong startup presence, and I know startups recruit there. There are certainly hack- a-thons and business plan competitions. I think they could certainly benefit from a few business oriented engineering courses. My main gripe about UT, as the OP mentioned, is their curriculum and the general attitude is extremely focused on cranking out engineers for large companies (and they are very good at this). I do not think that their goal should be to generate more startups, but I do think that they should provide a more well-rounded exposure to different opportunities. While I was there I got very little exposure to research, and almost no exposure to startups (for the record, I was at Stanford for almost 2 years before I got involved in a startup).

So in conclusion, Stanford is certainly not a magical startup land like many think it is, but they do provide a very well-rounded exposure to different opportunities. UT is already doing a decent job of promoting entrepreneurship, but they could be doing a lot more, especially in their curriculum.

</comment><comment><USER12> I agree with some points, but I also see the benefit of learning real programming from Java/Haskell.

I graduated from UTCS and I see too many web programmers just load up RoR Gems to perform something that takes 10 lines of code. Same thing with jQuery libraries... young programmers are not learning how to program, and if you tell them there is this shortcut they will take it.

Foundation is needed, that's the hidden secret. After you master foundation, then you can hack any code no matter the language.

<comment><USER13> The UT ECE department does a pretty good job trying to remedy this, but ends up having the opposite problem. Yale Patt's EE306, Intro to Computing, takes the class from transistors up to assembly on a simplified architecture.

Intro to Programming helps students get their feet wet in C and the subsequent Data Structures and Algorithms courses are entirely Java. Intro to Microcontrollers is C and assembly.

Here's where UTECE falls flat, with respect to startups. After getting a decent foundation in "Real Programming", further specialization in tools useful for web startups (php/ruby/jquery) is left as an exercise to the student. Case in point, I'm a 3rd year Comp. E and I have yet to hear the word "database" uttered in a classroom.

A web apps class doesn't even have to be good. I would take it just to meet other hackers who are probably self-taught by now anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found that this article could easily have been written about my University, from which I graduated about a year ago. I wanted to do a startup-esque project for my Senior Design capstone project, and I had no end of complications in getting the project approved. It seemed every other student was doing some sort of "academic" endeavor working under a professor (with students all in the same major of course).

I would guess that a majority of Universities are somewhat narrow in their focus and what their definition of success for their students is.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the problem is that the feedback loop between UTCS and the Austin startup community hasn't hit a critical level. I can't name a single product made by an Austin startup that I've used, while I can think of dozens within a few miles of Stanford. Additionally, plenty of SV startups are within walking distance of Stanford, whereas most Austin startups are at least 10 minutes (by car) from the UT campus and are located in office parks, rather than the open pedestrian environments of University Ave and Castro.

<comment><USER16> If you've ever read a customer review on Dell's, Macy's, Costco's, or Home Depot's websites, you've used an Austin startup product - BazaarVoice. If you've recently booked a vacation rental, you've almost certainly used one of HomeAway's properties (they're in the middle of consolidating the entire industry). Maybe you've looked for a job via Indeed.com? Use Gowalla instead of Foursquare (Gowalla relocated from Dallas)?

The startups are there; they are far and few now but rapidly increasing. I fully agree with you on the disconnect between academia and the startup community though - it's frustrating just how hard it is for Austin startups to hire UT talent.

<comment><USER17> Or if you've ever used a Dell computer. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The title of this article is kind of BS. I went to UT's business school and studied Management Information Systems (I call it watered-down computer science), and I founded a successful startup with another UT grad.

The courses at UT, even in the business school, do not prepare you perfectly for startup world. But an important thing to realize is that being a startup founder is about desire and taking risks. It's about eclipsing the limitations of your formal education. There are plenty of successful entrepreneurs from even just my class at UT. The real founders pick up and go to San Francisco or New York to get shit done.

I agree with your general sentiment that the CS department should integrate with real world projects more. I don't think UT in general is a haven for future startup founders. But since when is it the role of a university to produce startup founders? That's a personal duty. Saying UT Austin is second rate at producing startup founders just doesn't make sense. The good ones, whatever school they happened to go to, go to Silicon Valley or their industry equivalent, so you aren't around them anymore to see.

This is more of a comparison of Austin tech to Silicon Valley tech, which, for the foreseeable future, Silicon Valley will win definitively. That's why the tech entrepreneurs that you're missing are out here. =)

</comment><comment><USER19> I was in UTCS from '00 - '06. I got a chance to program in a diverse set of languages, learn a lot of theory, and get introduced to many practical concepts like networking, security, and databases.

They give students the tools, the entrepreneurial desire has to come from within.

</comment><comment><USER20> I just graduated from UTCS this past May.

It's completely true that UT's CS program teach you real world programming. But that's completely besides its purpose. UT's CS program is about the _fundamentals_. Every required CS course teaches knowledge and concepts that stand the test of time.

The required part of the degree is about 1/3 programming, 1/3 theory, and 1/3 computer architecture. The purpose of the degree isn't to teach you how to run a business, how to run a web stack, or even how to work in the corporate world. It's about learning the fundamentals of Computer _Science_.

I completely sympathize with the author. The whole time in UTCS I was thinking, "This isn't going to help me run a startup. I don't need this degree. Am I wasting my time?". But in the end, I realized that learning these fundamentals made be a better programmer overall.

I don't know who claimed CS programs were supposed to teach students how to run startups, but in my honest opinion, UT has a very good CS program.

</comment><comment><USER17> Two of my friends had successful startups from UT Austin: audiogalaxy.com (founded in the Napster days, now doing mobile audio streaming) and adtuition/adtuitive (acquired by Etsy).

Maybe UT could be a better place for startups, but I never got the impression that it slowed them down for one second. They were just too focused on getting stuff done to worry about product competitions or entrepreneurship classes or whatnot. In fact, I have to wonder in some cases if those sort of things can be a distraction and give people the illusion that they are an entrepreneur without actually taking any risk or producing anything of value (the two essential ingredients, imho).

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not fair to blame the small Austin startup community on UT. Austin doesn't have angel investors and VCs tripping over themselves looking to fund the next Twitter killer in the same way that the bay area does. It makes for a smaller startup community, but also one that is more focused on building real products.

Full disclosure: I graduated from UTEE and have worked at some really great small companies in Austin.

</comment><comment><USER22> Comparing anywhere to Silicon Valley is probably unfair. I moved from SF to Austin are they are too different to seriously compare.

While UT can do better, there's nothing stopping the students from connecting with the various tech meetups and incubators around Austin. We're each responsible for our own education.

I went to grad school at UT (advertising) and sadly almost nothing I learned there applies to my day-to-day work (co-founder at a web design/dev shop). I was a tad bitter when I finished but channeled the frustration into motivation. There are people within academia who get it (usually adjuncts or people with private sector experience), but most don't and never will. That's why they're there.

The programmers I've worked with that have a CS background (formal or not) are a cut above those without. I'd liken it to a classically trained pianist. If you can play Beethoven you can easily figure out how to play pop, but the reverse isn't true.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a UT honors EE graduate and co-founded JobSpice (YC S09). I will admit that going through the UT system is not conducive to starting a startup -- you kind of have to break the mold.

The classes that are taught are great if you want to work for a large company because for the most part, the professors at the undergraduate level do a good job of teaching what's needed for those type of careers but do not actively promote entrepreneurship.

I was lucky in that my advisor encouraged me to go my own direction, and I started JobSpice less than a year after I graduated but wish I would have started something during my time at UT. The problem lies more in the culture that UT promotes at the classroom level. In addition, outside of Michael Dell, you don't hear stories about past students creating companies in their dorm room like you do at MIT, Stanford or Harvard.

</comment><comment><USER24> A CS program is not a business school, it's supposed to be teaching a science: that is, a set of tools for exploring and explaining the laws of the universe. There's no more reason to promote startups in CS than any other scientific field.

CS departments have relationships with large corporations because they have money and sponsor research. Startups don't. This influx of money has warped the field. It's better to ask why there isn't more science in computer science than to ask why there isn't more business.

<comment><USER25> I completely agree with your second point, however the value of promoting startups is that it is exciting and provides real world applications for what you are learning about. I am a biologist, and the truly great and respected biologists are those that don't simply use the tools given to them. They tinker, they screw stuff up, they see what happens...and that is exactly what a startup should be doing!

<comment><USER24> I would argue that it's also what a scientist should be doing. A startup is trying to find money, a scientist is trying to find truth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I went to UT around the time of the dot com crash. The curriculum was not always so Java-centric. It used to start out with Scheme, C++, and Assembler. I think it was a year or two afterwards that most courses started using Java for everything.

As far as startups, I do remember most of us wanting to work at Dell or AMD when I was an EE undergrad there. We would all go to the career expo and put our resumes in these giant piles. Never hearing back from anyone led me to explore other opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER27> At UT there are a few great upper-division software engineering classes, both in EE and CS. In particular one software engineering class I took has small teams act as a startup. You find a need, go through the process of figuring out what to do to meet the need, implementing the solution and then shipping the solution. For ours we created lesson-planning software for a elementary school teachers.

</comment><comment><USER27> Two friends I went to UT undergrad with have started startups: \- <http://www.buildasign.com> \- a very successful company that sells custom signs \- <http://factorcode.org> \- While the startup portion didn't turn out to be commercially viable, their startup helped to improve Factor.

</comment><comment><USER28> I know the author is writing about the CS department, but a UT Austin grad (in communications I believe) , Brooke Moreland, just received $1 Million in funding for her startup Fashism.

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/social-shopping- sit...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/social-shopping-site-fashism- gets-cash/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I would guess that the source of department donations would drive focus for many universities - and not many startups are dropping seven figures for new buildings or fellowships.

</comment><comment><USER30> Really good article about UT's CS department - the situation is very similar for the EE department as well.

</comment><comment><USER31> That was an interesting read. So, any alumni still in Austin working on a start-up?

</comment><comment><USER32> This post proves exactly why people are recommending not going to College. If you want to be an academic researcher, go to college for CS. It really does work well. If you want to program, start programming on projects you are interested in and build your resume.

<comment><USER33> College will teach you lots of useful stuff outside of programming etc. I use my Berkeley education everyday via critical thinking, researching competitors/markets etc, presenting confidently, writing, argumentation and slicing through rhetoric etc. It would be naive to think that you can run a startup successfully by simply banging on a keyboard.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: How would you teach a Facebook Apps course? - <AUTHOR>

A while back I was given permission to run a course at Carnegie Mellon entitled "Creating Facebook Applications".  I have free reign to do what I want with the course, but from conversations with people in the industry, I have narrowed down a few specifics.  Here's the info:
* The course will have 20-30 students in each section and will meet once a week for 80 minutes
* Students will work in groups of up to 3, and will develop 3 applications over the course of the semester (one sample "learn the API" application and two legit applications)
* There will be a product fair towards the end of the semester showing off the apps.
Since I'm sure most people here are pretty familiar with the past/present/future of the Facebook API, I figured I'd ask what you would like to see if you were taking such a course.  Specifically:
- What topics would you like to see covered besides virality, monetization, and scaling?
- How should I measure success of an app?
- How much should I guide the application concepts, should I restrict one of the 3 apps to "education themed", or should I let the students run wild?
- Any speakers I should get in touch with to see if they'd like to give a talk (I have a few in mind already)?
- Is it worth inviting VCs and other influential people to the product fair?  It's much further for most of them to travel than going to, for example, Stanford...
I'll be spending the summer preparing for the course, so any input to help direct my lectures would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> Why make them create 3 apps? You want 30 super-extra-cool poke apps?

Why not make them make 1 app that actually does something? That means, no pokes, gifts, quizzes, walls, etc.

Haven't you noticed that people HATE these apps? And that there are literally tens of thousands of them? That's about all you're going to be able to create in 1/3 of a semester, as a 1 day a week class, having no facebook experience.

Also, the api is not so difficult that they need to make a throw away app. You can figure it out as you go along. It could all be covered in 80 minutes of lecture.

Is it worth inviting VCs? No. If they make ridiculously useful apps, they'll get attention without a VC circle jerk.

"virality, monetization, and scaling" How about you teach scaling, but only when someone actually needs it. Monetization, I'd hope, is taught in a business course, and virality could be covered with about a 10 minute powerpoint. Instead, I'd talk to them about how to leverage the data and social connections of their users, and how to use that to solve practical, every day problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I agree that I _hate_ those apps, the good ones do have a massive userbase. While I do intend to discourage stupid pointless apps, I won't explicitly ban them. Though 3 may be a little high, I may switch it to 2.

Keeping in mind that the course is meant to give a taste of something that wouldn't normally be taught in an average course (forgot to mention that), I think giving a taste of everything is a fair gameplan. Though talking about leveraging the "social graph" is a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, I don't think this is the type of course people should be taking in college. At most it should be a component of a web technologies class.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a relatively light course, worth 1/3 the units of a regular course. It's meant to give people a taste of something, and isn't a full-fledged course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should get in touch with BJ Fogg at Stanford. He taught a class recently that was similar.

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_stanford_learned_b...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_stanford_learned_building_facebook_apps.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> Already spoke to him a few weeks ago, he gave some great advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd broaden the scope of the class to tackle the more general topic of scalable viral applications and how to develop, integrate, and monetize them.

1\. Development. Introduce microframeworks designed for rapid development of small footprint apps. Tackle initial product design issues with viral applications.

2\. Integration. Show the students how to (1) integrate their apps with Facebook and other services and (2) bridge their small apps to larger legacy apps and other web-based services.

3\. Monetization. Here you can cover metrics, user feedback, virality, etc, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't want to sound negative here. I personally don't think Facebook itself has any cool feature or technical challenging stuff for college student. I was a grad student 15 years ago, I don't think then it would have been a kick for me.

I guess anything around the concept of Facebook and how it impact users experience or usability stats; in short anything related to the frenzy around Facebook will be much useful and educative to student.

To the question how much can you achieve with Facebook API? Very little technically

</comment><comment><USER7> Some thoughts:

You should let the students run wild on at least one of the projects. Don't limit their creativity. While it would be great if Facebook users were interested in education themed apps, they are not. Just have them make apps based on things they wish they could do on Facebook. Crazy and stupid ideas can actually work, so mind as well not focus them in the wrong direction. The more times they get to try these ideas, the more they will learn what works and what does not.

Successful apps so far are all about connecting people in different ways and allowing self-expression, so that should be emphasized. Multi-player games are also getting big. From what I've seen, tools have not been so successful.

Since presumably not all the users will be adept at design, giving them a run through of various interface/design elements of Facebook's design would help in making better apps that users become comfortable with faster.

Facebook's platform has a number of different bugs and quirks (like its crazy implementation of Javascript) which merit discussion.

Don't forget to talk about other services like OpenSocial, even if it's a Facebook class.

</comment><comment><USER8> One subject you could explore is how the metrics given by Facebook affects the perception of a "successful" app. The primary metric for applications is daily active users, while Facebook itself defines an "active" user as someone who logs in at least once a month - I always thought that distinction is interesting. The secondary metric are total installs. Things like repeat users, page views, pages/visit aren't as used. This has the strange effect that large quiz apps - which tend to rise and fall in a matter of about a month - are usually seen as more "successful" than applications with a steady returning user base.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think success is easy to measure - the number of users for that app.

Regardless of how they do it, what it is, that is the 'success' of a facebook app.

I wouldn't put any rules like no poke apps, if they can create a super-duper- cool-elite-poke app that still takes off now, they are doing something right on the marketing/viral side.

<comment><USER10> Measuring success that way is really just turning the class into a seminar on viral marketing in facebook. If the class were for credit and one were the competitive sort, it would be "easy" enough to send out spam mails and to advertise the app as doing something amazing that it doesn't really do.

Rather than look for "success" metrics, I think the students might appreciate a qualitative assessment of their efforts from bkrausz.</comment></comment>


Things I Won't Work With: Peroxide Peroxides (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/things_i_wont_work_with_peroxide_peroxides <comment><USER2> If you've not had the pleasure, take some time this weekend to read John D Clark's amazing book Ignition!

[https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...](https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf) (PDF may not render properly in Chrome)

<comment><USER3> Chemistry is a fascinating subject, people who don't like it become that way mostly because of terrible teachers, it's also my own experience. If you study chemistry on your own you will find it's much more fun and useful for understanding the world, many aspects of our whole modern society exists thanks to chemistry, i wish more people opened their eyes to it.

Here are some fun podcasts to listen: [http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/podcasts/](http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/podcasts/)

<comment><USER4> I have a theory that everyone who studies chemistry is some kind of pyromaniac.

<comment><USER5> I always say that there are only two real specializations in chemistry - pyrotechnics and drug manufacturing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is my favorite of the series: [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/san...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time)

<comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/thi...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride), if only for the call-out of a chemical supplier that claims to sell the stuff by the buttload.

Second favorite goes to [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2006/05/30/thi...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2006/05/30/things_i_wont_work_with_frisky_perchlorates), if only for the phrase "I'd like to shake the hand of whoever determined that property, assuming he has one left."

<comment><USER8> That one has my favorite chemistry quote:

        At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to
        dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its
        gentle and forgiving nature.

<comment><USER9> Fluorine is in almost every chemistry joke. That's not a good sign if you need to handle it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are things that we shouln't work with, but we do because we don't know the associated risk, some examples:

      -maintenance of your DOT4 brakes? do not touch the DOT4
       brake fuild, it's absorbed though your skin and it will
       kill your kidneys when they try to filter it.
      -Old house in america? check you don't have any pipe
       soldered with lead, hot water will eventually make it
       evaporate
      -lead in electrical solder wire
      -mercury, a powerful neuro-toxin

Edit:

      -again, old house, check to change the paint, yep, lead
       in the pain again.
      -close to an airport? beside noise, lead in the airplanes
       fuel
      -Teflon... again Dupont and 3M
      -Aluminum on cookware... toxic

lead was one of the technical debts introduced by a guy (1)... the same guy who introduce it to the fuel making a generation at least 10 iq point less smart.... and created the CFCs in aerosol... Dupont, GM and others did a lot of money on that.... as always.

(1) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr).

<comment><USER11> 1) DOT4 doesn't exactly jump through the skin-- it's no dimethylmercury, or even DMSO. Its MSDS recommends against "prolonged" skin contact. It's not much worse than any other common hydrocarbon solvent, like gasoline. [http://www.brake- eng.com/global/downloads/dot4fl%20dot%204%2...](http://www.brake- eng.com/global/downloads/dot4fl%20dot%204%20material%20safety%20data%20sheet.pdf)

2.) Hot water certainly doesn't "evaporate" lead-- lead's boiling point is 1700C. Hot water can _leach_ lead from solder joints, if your water isn't treated properly: [https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/basic- in...](https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/basic-information- about-lead-drinking-water)

3.) Yeah, lead solder isn't great to spend a lot of time with, which is why RoHS was introduced in 2003: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive)

4.) Where are you going to find bulk metallic mercury in any house built in the last three decades?

5.) Lead paint was also phased out years ago.

6.) Leaded avgas _does_ still exist, and _is_ bad. Don't buy property near airports that fly small planes.

7.) Teflon is about as chemically inert as a flororcarbon can possibly be. You might be thinking of Perfluorooctanoic acid, which is involved in Teflon production, and is pretty nasty: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid)

8.) Aluminum cookware isn't toxic, are you nuts?

<comment><USER12> A house older than three decades, but there was an interesting story (previously discussed on Hacker News) about some poor guy unexpectedly finding a huge lump, probably left over from an old heating system.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357115)

<comment><USER13> Not a lump; it's liquid anyway. Lots of tiny droplets under our floor: [http://www.jefftk.com/mercury-under- floor-2x.jpg](http://www.jefftk.com/mercury-under-floor-2x.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Previous discussions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8440486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8440486) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9021919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9021919)

</comment><comment><USER15> I never tire of seeing this series reposted. I only wish he'd written more since 2014.

<comment><USER16> There is probably only so much he won't work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why chain-mail gloves? I guess it would react with plastic gloves, but wouldn't some peroxide get through the gaps in the chain-mail?

<comment><USER18> I'm also curious. If the peroxide explodes, a layer of chain mail could protect against cuts from the shrapnel, I suppose?

<comment><USER19> I'm guessing, but since in other contexts metals are used as a catalyst to decompose HOOH I suspect that it protects your hands from direct exposure. This would release a lot of heat, but that's likely better for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Several of his articles mention chain mail gloves. I'm curious how those would protect you from chemicals, since chain mail is obviously quite porous. Or are they just meant to protect you from shrapnel when the container explodes in your hands?

(I also recalled my father demonstrating to me, at a young age, how a candle flame wouldn't penetrate screen-door mesh, presumably because the metal is conductive; and wondered if mail might perhaps give some fire protection similarly, by spreading the heat thin. That seems unlikely, though.)

<comment><USER21> Yes, the chain mail protects you from the experiment detonation products, such as fragments of blast shield or fume hood, lacerating your hands. Also recommended is an iron face-mask and heavy leather apron.

The candle effect you mention, is the principle behind Sir Humphry Day's safety lamp, as used by miners, which used a wire gauze screen to prevent flames igniting other flammable gases in the mine atmosphere. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_lamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_lamp) for more information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was calling in an order for some Acetic Acid one day and the lady asked "Glacial?"

I said, "Well, I think I'd like it a little faster than that."

</comment><comment><USER23> He mentions the Me-163, which used peroxide. A fuel leak would dissolve the pilot.

<comment><USER24> It is more probable that the pilot would be violently redistributed in the atmosphere.

<comment><USER25> Yeah I doubt it used oxidizer to refrigerate the cabin so an averaging of the pilot/atmosphere ratio seems more likely than a dissolution oxidizer leak[0]. And it would probably set the pilot on fire rather than dissolve it:

> Because of its extreme oxidizing potential, T-Stoff was a very dangerous > chemical to handle, so special rubberized suits were required when working > with it, as it would react with most cloth, leather, or other combustible > material and cause it to spontaneously combust.

At 57% methanol and 30% hydrazine hydrate (by weight), the reductant wasn't exactly innocuous either.

[0] even more so as the reductant and oxidizer were picked for their hypergolic combination, ground explosion is not unheard of for 163.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm finding the peroxide-ozone as suggested wastewater treatment an interesting suggestion. Any further soures on that?

<comment><USER27> A web search found [http://www.calpoly.edu/~ceenve/enve/jsczechowski/enve436/pro...](http://www.calpoly.edu/~ceenve/enve/jsczechowski/enve436/projects/UV/UV- Ozone-Peroxide.html) .

> Based on these results the use of the UV/Ozone/Peroxide, especially the > modified UV/Peroxide system, proved an effective process for removing and > containing VOC contamination in the groundwater. The system was designed to > treat 30,000 m g/l and the average influent was 25,00 m g/l. Along with the > high contaminant removal, the system design conditions were met. The > modified UV/Peroxide process replaced the UV/Ozone/Peroxide system, because > the initial system, containing ozone, required lots of maintenance on the > ozone generator and the delivery system. Ozone leaks were discovered > (causing downtime) and the residual ozone proved to be corrosive in the > reaction chamber.

This supports the description that Lowe gave.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=UV%2FOZONE%2FPEROXIDE+TREATMENT&t=...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=UV%2FOZONE%2FPEROXIDE+TREATMENT&t=ffsb&ia=web) seems to be a fruitful search term.

<comment><USER26> Thanks. I did see that earlier.

More toxics / contaminants remediation than sewage treatment. Might be interesting to see if it could break down, e.g., dioxins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if somebody has done similar posts (as well written and humorous) on "Code I won't work with".

<comment><USER29> [http://thedailywtf.com/](http://thedailywtf.com/) would count as "Code I've been forced to work with".

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This are some cool unventilated kitchen experiments involving leather, sugar, flour and 99% hydrogen peroxide: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i06SnRCQN6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i06SnRCQN6U)

</comment><comment><USER31> " _High-concentration hydrogen peroxide was formerly available in 70, 90, and 98% concentrations in sizes of 1-gallon, 30-gallon, and bulk-tanker truck volumes._ "

From the HTP Wikipedia page.

I grew up 3 houses from I-40. I'm surprised I'm alive.

</comment><comment><USER32> (2014)

Entertaining, as always.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Instead of being locked in a self-storage unit with two rabid wolverines, why not three?"

</comment><comment><USER34> For me, hydroflouric acid.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is Corante no more?

<comment><USER36> Dr Lowe moved everything from Corante to _Science_ including the archives. Not too long ago. Corante was having too many technical problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is a fun 2 minutes if you enjoyed that blog. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6MfZbCvPCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6MfZbCvPCw)

</comment><comment><USER38> After this publication I shall use this sequence _O-O_ as my favourite emoticon. Or oxygenicon.

</comment><comment><USER39> Hooh?

<comment><USER39> No seriously, what is the author intending to say that when repeatedly putting it between sentences.

<comment><USER40> It's a fairly common informal way of writing the chemical formula (H2O2) that tries to be a little more faithful to the geometry of the molecule...

so HOOOH is hydrogen perperoxide, literally a chain of three oxygen atoms with a hydrogen atom at either end. In my electrochem (Chem 2) class, the instructor used to sometimes write HOH for water.</comment></comment></comment>


Does simultaneous multithreading still make sense? - <AUTHOR> https://www.codeblueprint.co.uk/2019/11/05/does-smt-make-sense.html <comment><USER2> I worked on a project where the (large) customer had some legacy requirements about percentage of "CPU" our application was allowed to use. The requirement was written back in the days when a single computer really only had one core, and once things like that are written it's hard to get them unwritten.

For our application (heavily numeric, very well behaved cache access), turning on hyperthreading only increased real performance by about 10% (measured as work completed per unit of time). However, we settled on a metric where we defined CPU use to be load average divided by number of cores. Doubling the number of cores the system showed in top allowed us to meet the required margin.

So from a bureaucratic point of view, hyperthreading was a 100% improvement.

</comment><comment><USER3> Flagging this as it's an absurdly shallow article apparently combining about 10 minutes of "research" after hearing something on twitter with conflating typical end user use-cases and an entire technology. The "tuning" and "oh noes my VMs this is surely a new problem nobody doing virtualization has ever thought of" section is too absurd to even bother with. But for the security aspect it's worth pointing out that in many, if not _most_ [1], true performance critical environments all code being run is trusted. The system or cluster is dedicated to being given one specific job after another to crunch on, exclusively by authorized users in authenticated ways and outputting exclusively to a controlled channel going off-system. Even if it ever should have a problem, it would merely result in possibly some corruption of data in flight and some downtime as the whole thing was re-imaged, but nothing that would be remotely worse a 15-50% drop in performance (!). For roots sake.

\----

1: where "most" means "in the raw amount of hardware $$$ spent".

<comment><USER4> There aren't really many "performance critical" multithreaded environments in the world. For the most part you either have something that doesn't scale and needs a really fast thread or you have a cost equation about how many servers you need to buy/maintain. The main exception that comes to mind are extremely large databases that heavily resist horizontal scaling due to poor design (of either software or database).

I'd argue most large compute by total $ is actually shared at the host level i.e. public/private cloud or user devices. Basically the only things that aren't are dedicated clusters for specific applications and a few hundred supercomputers while AWS alone has over 100x as many cores as the largest supercomputer.

Also I don't think there is a high horse to be on about an article not targeting the audience of the largest exacompute scale clusters, not everyone/everything at HN need be at the forefront of the field to avoid being flagged.

<comment><USER5> Er, there aren't many performance critical multithreaded environments? Latency sensitive systems disagree, and those are all over the place.

<comment><USER4> Can you give examples of something that scales via threading but requires in a single thread the function takes 500 microseconds instead of 600 microseconds to compute that actually contradicts that "most" systems aren't this way?

<comment><USER6> Most professionnal audio software is like that - you can have e.g. a thread per track to make it simple but you also have to ensure that each execution cycle does not take more than 1 millisecond else you get audio glitches. And there is no limit to how hard you have to improve - this is a central factor for people buying your software (see dawbench) and artists really really don't like limits - they will always try to add more effects, etc etc on each track.

<comment><USER4> Agreed but I'd hardly call pure software professional real time audio setups a disruptor of the vast majority of systems. Put all of these niche compute heavy multithreaded real time use cases and you have <1% the CPU market.

I.e. my claim was "There aren't really many 'performance critical' multithreaded environments in the world." not that there aren't any.

<comment><USER6> > Agreed but I'd hardly call pure software professional real time audio setups > a disruptor of the vast majority of systems.

I mean, there's still a few hundred thousand people registered on DAW-related forums so certainly a fair bit more are using those. That is more than a dozen european countries. Sure, it's not angry birds but I do not think that it is relevant to cater to the lowest common denominator of software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of course SMT makes sense. Why would it not be? Article says that thats because ppl only count the threads in their "cpuinfo" output and get the wrong impression? Intel vulnerabilities are not SMT vulnerabilities per-se, they are side channel attacks on a specific SMT implementation.

<comment><USER8> Also want to add that to say "don't use SMT because it's insecure" is the same as saying "don't use a cache because it's insecure" or "don't use speculative execution". As a short-term fix, I would 100% agree that disabling SMT e.g. OpenBSD's approach is awesome and shows their security-consciousness. But to preach "disable SMT because it's too challenging" feels very lazy.

Additionally, as you've said, it's _still_ uArch dependent. For example-- the Fallout vulnerability (one of the MDS attacks) only worked on Intel machines, but not AMD+ARM, most likely due to the differences in how the two designs handled store-to-load forwarding on the store queues/buffers.

The author seems to also value security over performance. I do as well. But the balance between performance and security is a fickle one, and I feel that "SMT is nonsensical" is a bit too much

<comment><USER9> >> Additionally, as you've said, it's still uArch dependent

Intel would love for everyone to disable SMT regardless of vendor. That would help them with relative performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Given the mismatch between memory latency and how fast a cpu can actually run when it does have data, SMT still does make sense, sometimes, for some kinds of system. bigger better caches make it less useful and security... well. "Ownership" of ones computational environment is a metaphysical debate now, this is just one more bullet point on the list.

</comment><comment><USER11> In the linked article about ghk's talk, you find this tidbit: "If you're not using a supported distro, or a stable long-term kernel, you have an insecure system. It's that simple. All those embedded devices out there, that are not updated, totally easy to break."

Is he still talking about SMT, or just poor security of Linux in general?

I'm wondering about this since "all those embedded devices out there" that I can think of are not running CPUs with SMT.

<comment><USER12> Tons of stuff like NUC's used as digital displays, kiosks, etc, everywhere. I'd be surprised if even half of that was on a proper update path.

Embedded isn't just like, microcontrollers. Think about all the times you've seen a BSOD on a billboard.

<comment><USER13> If it doesn't have a jtag connector it isn't embedded.

<comment><USER4> This comment is extremely ironic considering it was an Intel processor that spurred the widespread use of JTAG and all the way up to Skylake Intel products had traditional JTAG connectors. These days they do JTAG over a physical USB port but I'm not sure how the shape of the port is supposed to matter.

JTAG on the NUCs actually led to a CVE as well IIRC.

<comment><USER13> JTAG has nothing to do with Intel per-se but everything with BGAs which made it super hard to get to certain signals.

<comment><USER4> It was (relatively) uncommon until Intel released the 80486, then it became very popular and was found on basically every chip. Not that there weren't devices before and after that used JTAG but none nearly as influential in it's growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In my mind, SMT made more sense when core counts were low. These days, desktop use cases can more often run out of threads to run than places to run them. Server use cases can often run more threads, but it might not be useful to run 32 cpu threads if your NICs can only properly run 16 queues.

<comment><USER15> For computational tasks, I've seen SMT give a roughly 50% performance increase compared to not using SMT on the same machine.

Much of that depends on how 'regular' the executions are. A highly optimized FFT or BLAS routine will benefit less than a sparse matrix computation, where part of the time is spent in indexing, rather than floating point operations.

<comment><USER16> Some SMT on/off benchmark comparisons on a Ryzen 3900x. Confirms your "sometimes 50+% / sometimes nothing" experience.

[https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-smt- off...](https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-smt-off-vs- intel-9900k/3.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some benchmarks for orientation: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel- skylake-ep-vs-amd...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep- vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/15)

<comment><USER17> Also for different workloads: [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD- Ryze...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD- Ryzen-9-3900X-SMT-Perf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This makes me wonder how SMT handled in linux kernel especially on cpu-idle and scheduling then I have found below articles, sharing for those who is also interested in:

1- Rock and a hard place: How hard it is to be a CPU idle-time governor [https://lwn.net/Articles/793372/](https://lwn.net/Articles/793372/)

2- Many uses for Core scheduling [https://lwn.net/Articles/799454/](https://lwn.net/Articles/799454/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I would say that one of the major performance boosts of Zen over Bulldozer is the introduction of real SMT due to the expiration of the patents. Bulldozer had CMT which is not the same technique.

CMT vs SMT (very simplified view): [https://i.imgur.com/AcZnipK.png](https://i.imgur.com/AcZnipK.png)

As you can see, with CMT, you have the same amount of ALUs than with SMT but a single thread can only use its dedicated ALU leaving the other one useless meanwhile SMT allows a single thread to use all ALUs.

<comment><USER20> > due to the expiration of the patents

How do you know that's the reason?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's certainly good for Amazon, where they pawn off a thread as a "vCPU".

If SMT dies off, it would be a pretty big margin hit for them.

</comment><comment><USER21> How will SMT evolve with the frequency down-clocking required by AVX-512? Might a thread be penalized because it happens to be executed concurrently with a AVX-512 thread on the same score?

<comment><USER22> I thought down-clocking was on the first generation of low-end almost-not- Xeons with AVX-512? Will a 2018/19 Xeon Gold or Platinum really down-clock?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> FYSA, SMT in this context is _simultaneous multithreading_ a.k.a. _hyperthreading_ , not _surface mount technology_.

Hardware folks can safely move on.

<comment><USER24> And not "Satisfiability modulo theories" either, it seems. I would never recommend people to "move on" from an interesting article, though.

<comment><USER23> Agreed.

At first glance, I genuinely thought this was going to be a pitch for yet another fragile additive manufacturing toy with narrow usecase, or a new process that enables IPC-7092 designs on the cheap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish that acronyms would be written out if they have multiple meanings in the computer context. My first thought was "how can satisfiability modulo theory ever not make sense?"

<comment><USER26> I thought it was Surface Mount Technology and was wondering what kind of replacement was being proposed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Cores sharing some caches make sense but no maybe smt does not make sense.

<comment><USER28> Or does SMT make sense because looking at instructions coming in and branch predicting to execute some speculatively can only go so far, and sometimes hints from the application that "hey, this can be run independently of that" helps with overall throughput?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yes, it does. Instruction level vulnerabilities arise from execution of insecure code.

If you have to do so, your security is already compromised. Shared hosting, virtualisation, and etc are all insecure by definition.

</comment><comment><USER30> Intel i5 desktop chips don't have hyper-threading (SMT) and haven't for the 10 years they've been available. Typically the i7 variant of the same CPU has been about £100 more (roughly 50%). The point about only 5% extra die space makes no difference to the consumer, as there is/was quite a high cost premium on desktops for that feature. Now Intel has removed hyper-threading from most of it's i7 desktop chips, and you get 2 extra cores over the i5 version instead.

<comment><USER16> _" Intel i5 desktop chips don't have hyper-threading (SMT) and haven't for the 10 years they've been available."_

That's mostly true, though there have been a few desktop i5 processors with hyperthreads.

Like: [https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/43546/i...](https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/43546/intel- core-i5-650-processor-4m-cache-3-20-ghz.html)

<comment><USER30> I didn't spot that one, though it was almost 10 years ago and I don't see more recent examples. My point was that a large number of users don't actually have hyper-threading on the desktop.

<comment><USER20> What about i3 processors. Or laptop processors, AFAIK those all support HT.</comment></comment></comment></comment>