Cloud TPUs in Beta - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/02/Cloud-TPU-machine-learning-accelerators-now-available-in-beta.html <comment><USER2> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

I want to highlight this paragraph from the post:

> Here at Google Cloud, we want to provide customers with the best cloud for > every ML workload and will offer a variety of high-performance CPUs > (including Intel Skylake) and GPUs (including NVIDIA's Tesla V100) alongside > Cloud TPUs.

We fundamentally want Google Cloud to be the best place to do computing. That includes AI/ML and so you'll see us both invest in our own hardware, as well as provide the latest CPUs, GPUs, and so on. Don't take this announcement as "Google is going to start excluding GPUs", but rather that we're adding an option that we've found internally to be an excellent balance of time-to- trained-model and cost. We're still happily buying GPUs to offer to our Cloud customers, and as I said elsewhere the V100 is a great chip. All of this competition in hardware is great for folks who want to see ML progress in the years to come.

<comment><USER3> Any plans to support AMD GPUs and the Radeon Open Compute project? The AI/ML community really needs viable alternatives to NVIDIA, otherwise they will continue to flex pricing power. Google, via TensorFlow, is in a phenomenal position to promote open source alternatives to the proprietary Deep Learning software ecosystem that we see today with CUDA/CuDNN.

<comment><USER4> Google would happily accept patches to enable support for it.

AMD hopefully has a team writing such patches now. It makes business sense for them to do so.

Google is getting even more price gouging from Nvidia than the general public, and has even more incentive to level the playing field.

<comment><USER5> Or the opposite - they're getting nice savings in return for not actively developing or encouraging CUDA/cuDNN alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That $6.50/hr rate might be the big deal here. Amazon does offer instances with a V100 GPU ([https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on- demand/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/), the P3 instances), but if you're training something like ImageNet, you'll want the biggest image (p3.16xlarge) at _$24.48 /hr_.

Attaching a VM of similar power to a TPU on Google Compute Engine is much cheaper ([https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing), n1-highmem-64, +$3.78/hr to the TPU cost for $10.28/hr total).

Per recent benchmarks for training ImageNet ([https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/](https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/)), training ImageNet on a p3.16xlarge cost $358, when this post claims it'll cost less than $200. (EDIT: never mind; the benchmark uses ImageNet-152, and Google compares TPU performance against ImageNet-50) Interesting.

<comment><USER7> Back of the envelope, a TPU costs a little more than 2x as much as a Volta on AWS P3, and delivers a little less than 2x the performance (180 TOPs for the TPU, 100 for Volta). On a raw performance/$ metric, I'm not sure the TPU is that interesting.

It might be worth it if I were willing to pay a huge amount to get back results from an experiment faster, by using lots of TPUs- distributed learning on GPUs doesn't seem easy yet.

<comment><USER2> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Peak ops/second isn't the only thing that matters though. You have to be able to feed the units. The V100 does lots of finer-grained matrix multiplies which can make it harder to keep up.

Don't get me wrong, the V100 is a great chip. And we're all looking forward to more (preferably third-party) benchmark results, to tease out when one is the better choice for a workload. But don't just compare ops/second or any other architectural number.

<comment><USER8> This makes no sense, the V100 has _more_ memory bandwidth than both the TPU and TPUv2

<comment><USER9> V100 has 900gb/s memory bandwidth [0].

TPUv2 has 600gb/s _per chip_ x 4 chips, so 2400gb/s [1].

As we've discussed elsewhere [2], comparing TPUv2 to V100 on a _per chip_ basis doesn't make much sense. Who cares how many chips are on the board? If Google announced tomorrow that TPUv3 is coming out, which is identical to TPUv2 but the four chips are glued together, nobody would care.

The questions that we should instead be asking are, how fast can I train my model and how much does it cost?

Per elsewhere in thread [3], on Volta you have 900gb/s per 100Tops/s = 0.9 bytes/s per op/s, whereas on TPUv2 you have 2400gb/s memory bandwidth over 180Tops/s = 1.33 bytes/s per op/s. This means that TPUv2's memory-bandwidth- to-compute ratio is 1.33/9 = 1.5x higher than Volta's.

We can do a similar comparison for memory available. V100 has 16gb per 100Tops, TPUv2 has 64gb per 180Tops. So the memory-to-compute ratio for Volta is 16g/100T = .16 milli while for TPUv2 it's 64g/180T = .36 milli, for a ratio of .36/.16 = 2.25x higher on TPUv2.

Does any of this matter? Does it translate into faster and/or cheaper training? Do models actually need and benefit from this additional memory and memory bandwidth? My guess from working on GPUs is yes, at least insofar as bandwidth is concerned, but it's just a guess. I'm excited to find out for real.

(Disclaimer: I work at Google on XLA, and used to work on TPUs.)

[0] [https://images.nvidia.com/content/technologies/volta/pdf/437...](https://images.nvidia.com/content/technologies/volta/pdf/437317-Volta-V100-DS- NV-US-WEB.pdf) [1] [https://supercomputersfordl2017.github.io/Presentations/Imag...](https://supercomputersfordl2017.github.io/Presentations/ImageNetNewMNIST.pdf) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360212) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16359531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16359531)

<comment><USER10> I responded to your other comment to disagree, and I'll do so again here.

Nobody is comparing DGX1-V to a single TPUv2 chip, because it doesn't make any sense to do so. they are totally different kinds of machines. But for some reason everyone is comparing a cluster of 4 TPUv2 chips to a single V100 chip.

It only makes sense to compare 4xTPUv2 to 1xV100 if they are equivalent in some meaningful metric, like total die size, power, etc.

In lieu of any available data, I'm going to continue to assume that each TPUv2 chip is roughly comparable in terms of power & die size to each V100 chip. If this was grossly wrong, I would expect that all four would be condensed into a single chip, which would dramatically increase the performance of the interconnects.

We could resolve this rapidly if there were any data available about die size, TDP, anything of TPUv2.

<comment><USER9> > But for some reason everyone is comparing a cluster of 4 TPUv2 chips to a > single V100 chip.

I agree that some people are doing that. Marketing, I suppose. But that comparison is explicitly _not_ the point of my parent post. I'm comparing the "shapes" of the chips -- specifically, the compute/memory and compute/memory- bandwidth ratios. These ratios stay the same regardless of whether you multiply the chips by 4 or by 400.

The point I was trying to make is that V100 has a higher peak-compute-to- memory(-bandwidth) ratio than TPUv2. This much seems clear from the arithmetic. Whether this matters in practice, I don't know, but I think it is relevant if one believes (as I do, based on the evidence I have as an author of an ML compiler targeting the V100) that the V100 is starved for memory bandwidth.

> In lieu of any available data, I'm going to continue to assume that each > TPUv2 chip is roughly comparable in terms of power & die size to each V100 > chip. If this was grossly wrong, I would expect that all four would be > condensed into a single chip, which would dramatically increase the > performance of the interconnects.

I'm sure Google's hardware engineers operate under a lot of constraints that I'm not aware of; I'm not about to make assumptions. But more to the point, as we've said, things like die size and TDP don't directly affect consumers. The questions we have to ask are, how fast can you train your model, and at what cost?

Just as you don't like it when people (incorrectly, I agree) insist on comparing one V100 to four TPUs, because that's totally arbitrary (why not compare one V100 to 128 TPUs?), I don't like it when people insist on comparing TPUv2 to V100 on arbitrary metrics like die size, or peak flops/chip, or whatever. So I disagree that we could resolve anything if we had more info about the TPUv2 chip itself. None of that matters.

<comment><USER8> Well, if you ignore power consumptiom because ",it doesn't matter to the end user", you're talking about economic comparisons, not technical comparisons.

BTW, I absolutely agree that memory bandwidth is the bottleneck, I've built my company around that assertion and the data for that exists (Mitra's publications come to mind)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is exciting. There are lots of specific reasons to choose Google Cloud over AWS (and vice versa), but proprietary hardware is surely an advantage that is going to be hard to replicate / compete with. If TPUs hold up to the hype, GCloud may become the _de facto_ for ML/AI startups.

<comment><USER12> >If TPUs hold up to the hype, GCloud may become the de facto for ML/AI startups.

Don't startups want to win a big exit though? Google won't need to buy the startup for billions, because the TOS already grants them permission to use all the models and training data for free. Seems like a Faustian bargain to me.

<comment><USER13> Regardless of the TOS saying that or not (I haven't read them), I can think of at least two reasons why your statement doesn't hold:

1) AI __startups __usually don 't have a lot of value to potential acquirers based on their data, but based on other things (e.g., talent, customers, business model, platform, brand). That's like saying you shouldn't use AWS because Amazon can just steal and commercialize all your data.

2) There are other companies than Google that acquire startups

Having said that, I highly doubt that Google can just use all the training data to on GCloud to launch their own products with that. They can surely look at it and maybe do stuff with them internally, but I am pretty sure that they can't use them commercially.

<comment><USER12> >They can surely look at it and maybe do stuff with them internally, but I am pretty sure that they can't use them commercially.

How would you ever know if they did? People who worked at Google have been accused, by Google, of stealing the entire self driving car program and taking it to a competitor.

<comment><USER13> First of all, that's wrong (as another comment pointed out). Of course, the probability of them stealing your stuff is non-zero, but it's very rare. Even if you use all your own hard and software, people still can steal your stuff :-)

<comment><USER12> I can be hacked by malware which can leak secrets from air gapped, Faraday caged machines. Therefore, I should put my billion dollar idea on the public cloud and just trust Google.

I shiggy diggy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interestingly, GCP now appears to be available to individuals in Europe. It wasn't like that before, no idea when that policy got changed. Before, GCP wasn't even a consideration compared to AWS (which always handled that).

<comment><USER15> More details: [https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/resources/vat- overview](https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/resources/vat-overview)

<comment><USER14> "You can't change the tax status of your Google Cloud Platform billing account."

I think this is what tripped me up before. I closed my business years ago but it was completely impossible to get Google to fix this. Now it fixed it "by itself".

Just a warning to everyone before signing up with your main Google account :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some things:

A "single TPU" is 4 ASICs. It is not clear if it makes sense to compare a "single TPU" to a "single GPU."

As a point of reference, NVIDIA's numbers are 6 hours for Resnet-50 on Imagenet when training with 8xV100. From a naive extrapolation, 4xV100 would probably take ~12 hours and 1xV100 about two days.

Google has previously only compared TPUs to K80, so it will be interesting to see some benchmarks that compare TPUs to more recent GPUs. K80 was released in 2014, and the Kepler architecture was introduced in 2012.

<comment><USER9> > A "single TPU" is 4 ASICs. It is not clear if it makes sense to compare a > "single TPU" to a "single GPU."

Why does the number of chips matter?

Put another way, suppose Google tomorrow announced Cloud TPU v3 which was one ASIC identical in all ways to four v2 ASICs glued together. Would that be notable in any way? Seems like it would be a nop to me.

I think what matters is, how fast can you train a model, and at what cost? Doesn't really matter if it's one chip or 10,000 behind the scenes.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't matter in the ways you are considering. The ultimate comparisons are going to be time, cost, and power to complete some benchmark, just as you say.

I only mention the number of chips because loads of people are comparing the "single TPU" to a single V100 with the assumption that it is meaningful. I don't know the TDP, die size, etc. of the TPUv2 chip, so it may well make more sense for ballpark comparisons to compare "single TPU" to 4xV100.

For example, a "single TPU" has 64 GB of memory, whereas a "single GPU" has 16 GB (V100). Is this meaningful? I don't know.

It just seems like something worth noting. I could buy a DGX1-V with 8xV100, rebrand it as the TWTW TPU, and then go around and tell everyone how my TPU is 8x faster than GPUs. It appears that everyone is normalizing by marketing unit until benchmarks come out, which is potentially flawed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That may be Google Cloud competitive edge for AI startups. Both in terms of development cycle and cost efficiency.

Hard to replicate by competitors: AWS and Azure.

</comment><comment><USER17> How does this compare to Nvidia GPUs on AWS price/perf-wise?

The article makes it sound like this is a new thing...

<comment><USER18> Google claims[0] the TPU is many times faster for the workloads they've designed it for.

> On our production AI workloads that utilize neural network inference, the > TPU is 15x to 30x faster than contemporary GPUs and CPUs.

As far as I know this will be the first opportunity for the public to prove those claims, as until now they've not been available on GCP. I don't mean to sound skeptical–I'm quite confident they're not exaggerating.

[0]: [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/04/quantifying- the...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/04/quantifying-the- performance-of-the-TPU-our-first-machine-learning-chip.html)

<comment><USER19> Keep in mind that what you linked refers to TPUv1, which is built for quantized 8-bit inference. The TPUv2, which was announced in this blog post, is for general purpose training and uses 32-bit weights, activations, and gradients.

It will have very different performance characteristics.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> tensor processing unit

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

</comment><comment><USER21> This seems a bit pricey compared to other offerings. Wouldn't an ASIC make things more economical?

Seems like in terms of cost per performance, both AWS P3 spot instances and Paperspace v100 offerings are more economical.

Are these prices expected to become more competitive once it is out of beta?

<comment><USER22> isn't the tpu kind of a deep learning asic?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this just go-faster-juice for Tensorflow code or does it have other implications? If you train on TPUs can you still run the model efficiently elsewhere?

</comment><comment><USER24> I assume Azure and AWS have some buddying up with Intel/Nervana and Nvidia counterstroke to Google TPUs. I can't quite imagine what it will be though.

<comment><USER25> Amazon announced today they are working on their own TPU type chips.

<comment><USER26> Do you have a link for that?

<comment><USER25> "Amazon is reportedly following Apple and Google by designing custom AI chips for Alexa"

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/12/17004734/amazon-custom- al...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/12/17004734/amazon-custom-alexa-echo- ai-chips-smart-speaker)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What are the chances of TensorFlow code gradually optimizing for TPUs over GPUs?!

(Yes TF is OSS, but realistically Google is putting much more resources into it)

<comment><USER28> Very low. A lot of the performance on GPUs comes from Nvidia's optimizations in CuDNN -- it's mostly a matter of making sure TensorFlow feeds the right formats/etc. to CuDNN for core NN ops. TF should run well on CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, and likely future embedded accelerators (via tensorflow lite, which already supports the Android Neural Networks API).

(I'm part time on Brain, but, of course, this isn't some kind of Official Statement(tm)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there any way to use these for applications other than tensorflow/machine learning?

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm puzzled by the phrase "differentiated performance per dollar."

Is it more performant, or less?

If it's less performant, why mention it at all?

If it's more performant, why not simply say "better performance per dollar"?

<comment><USER31> It is both more performant overall as well as per dollar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> We really need a standard easy to run benchmark.

</comment><comment><USER33> When is off the shelf edition coming?

<comment><USER34> My guess: Never

<comment><USER33> I hope that's not true, for the sake of progress. Todays clouds wouldn't have happened if AMD and Intel had restricted cloud use of their processors.

<comment><USER34> Among other things, it would be expensive (in a ton of ways), a digression, require providing direct end user support in a way they aren't good at.

It also would have significant export restrictions: Neural network related asics are very tightly export controlled:

[https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/forms- documents/pdfs/1245-...](https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/forms- documents/pdfs/1245-category-3/file)

(search for neural network)

My 2c: It would be an expensive waste of time for Google :)

Though certainly, not gonna disagree it would be cool for the sake of progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> does anyone thought about cryptocurrency mining?

</comment><comment><USER36> Game-changer.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't like it. Google is mixing too many things. No way to buy a TPU. No competition from other cloud providers. Proprietary hardware and vendor lock- in.

<comment><USER38> This is really Tensorflow as a service. You get an IP address and a port you send gRPC requests to:

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/blob/master/tools/diagnost...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/blob/master/tools/diagnostics/diagnostics.py#L103)

Presumably, there's a whole server behind that address that has all the right drivers and libraries: details you don't need to care about.

The only partial lock-in is that not all ops are supported and you need to figure if there are any parts of the graph in the critical part that will run on the CPU instead. There's a tool for that:

[https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/cloud-tpu- tools#tpu_compat...](https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/cloud-tpu- tools#tpu_compatibility_checker)

Competitors could launch something similar that uses GPUs tomorrow. Now, if you don't already use TF and don't want to switch, that's another story.

<comment><USER37> That's my point. Competitors are largely moated out by high costs of TPU production and proprietary drivers.

<comment><USER38> Why are proprietary drivers a blocker? As long as you expose the same gRPC interface, your customers don't need to know what happens behind the scenes. You could have an FPGA or a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pis hiding.

<comment><USER37> I should clarify. I like all the individual pieces(hardware, cloud services, grpc interface) I just wish you could opt into them independently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Someone at Dell/HPE headquarter - When can we start selling "Integrated TPU" machines. ;)

Google aspiring to be leader in Cloud machine learning. Let's do On Premise.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reading the TOS it seems like this is a really great deal for Google:

"When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."

All your training data are belong to us.

We can use your models to improve ours.

The terms will prevent me from using it. I can't grant Google permission to redistribute HIPAA PHI.

<comment><USER40> Cloud TPU product manager here.

The TOS you are quoting only refers to the information you provide in the survey. Here are the Google Cloud TOS: [https://cloud.google.com/terms/](https://cloud.google.com/terms/) if you're interested in what Cloud does with customers data.

5.2 Use of Customer Data. Google will not access or use Customer Data, except as necessary to provide the Services to Customer.

Your training data and models are secure.

<comment><USER12> This URL isn't on the TPU beta signup page. The Google TOS is. Perhaps you can see the confusion? I would be reluctant to trust random 37 karma guy on Hacker News message board on this particularly important consideration.</comment></comment></comment>


Objective-C overtakes C++ to become 3rd most popular language - <AUTHOR> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/

<comment><USER2> Even taken with a large grain of salt as the TIOBE rankings must be, this is unfortunate since Obj-C is a pretty poor language, IMO.

After a year of working almost exclusively in Obj-C I still haven't come to enjoy its verbosity and awkward and incomplete collection classes. The lack of namespaces and inadvertent selector overloading are a regular nuisance. And the Cocoa frameworks are more dynamic than they need to be and heavy use of notifications and KVO make code a rat's nest of indirect jumps that are very hard to follow.

It's ok as a widget glue language, I suppose, but really a lot of other languages could serve that purpose just as well without standing over the flaming pit of C all the time.

The new collection literals and operator overloads for the collection classes will help, of course. And you have to give Cox some credit for a design that was, in its time, quite visionary. But language design has caught up to and passed Obj-C by in the meantime. If it weren't for my reservations about having one more software layer between me and the machine I would have moved to MonoTouch/C# a long time ago.

<comment><USER3> I think that Objective-C is pretty sweet.

The problem is that you can't cherry-pick language features. Each of them has implications for the rest of the language, forcing you into some compromise. As an example, when Objective-C picked great compatibility with C, it picked some great strengths (using existing C libraries, language familiarity, being close to the metal) along with some downsides. For me, the Objective-C strengths are worth the downsides.

Some of your points are purely subjective. I would pick Objective-C verbosity again, because it makes me think less. I can generally parse long words at a glance and code completion saves me typing. Some identifiers are too long indeed, but the consistency is a win. For me.

I don't see what's so awkward about collection classes and you don't say what is that you miss. Granted, the collection literals are too verbose, but that will get much better with the upcoming Xcode release, just as you said. And even the older, verbose syntax is not a language deal-breaker for me.

KVO and notifications are not always roses, but can you give an example of what bugs you along with a solution in a different language that you consider superior?

Again, my main point is that each language design is a compromise and I quite like the compromise represented by Objective-C. Namely, the simplicity of the language, the balance between the metal and a higher-level language, the readable syntax and the standard libraries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, any Objective-C developers should definitely try out AppCode from JetBrains - <http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/>

<comment><USER2> AppCode definitely makes things a little less painful.

Unlike XCode, it even gives you pretty decent refactoring, which is impressive considering how hard that is in a language with a preprocessor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Though on the same chart Ruby is climbing while JavaScript falls. Being involved with both, that's certainly not how it's playing out on the ground.. (Yes, yes, the old story about TIOBE being useful for trends and not absolutes.. :-))

<comment><USER5> Yeah ... agreed. I can't understand how Perl could be above JS either.

<comment><USER6> You underestimate just how much Perl there is out there (hint: a lot)

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry but there is no way there could be more perl out there than javascript.

Although I agree that a lot of people underestimate perl generally speaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Shows how pointless TIOBE is. C++ is still light years ahead of Objective-C use in the field.

<comment><USER9> In which field? Surely Objective-C & Apple's frameworks are much more suited towards general purpose mobile apps? And surely C++ is much more suited towards e.g. games?

<comment><USER10> How about anything that isn't developed solely for iPhone/iPad?

Objective-C is high on the list because it's trendy to write iPhone apps, so people blog about it and write a million "How to get started with objective-C" tutorials for it.

Outside of that niche, and a really small group of OSX developers, there's zero Objective-C development. It's barely even possible to write Objective-C on Windows or Linux.

<comment><USER11> On Linux, Gnustep offers a really good Objective-C stack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most used is not the same as most popular !

People use objective-C when programming for iOS or iPhone. These are popular, not the programming language.

<comment><USER13> At this stage there are alternatives like PhoneGap or RubyMotion, allowing you to bypass objc entirely

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Crap. Time to switch to C.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Usual caveats about taking TIOBE with a grain of salt...

<comment><USER15> I glance at TIOBE from time to time. My biggest gripe is just because a language is searched does not mean it's being used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do that many people still use Visual Basic? Honestly, I'd like to know. I'd think surely that group of people would be on C#/.NET?

<comment><USER17> There's still a lot of legacy software running VB, e.g. the camera software that I'm currently working with now. Software written in VB.net for the most part plays nicely with C#.net, so there's no hurry to upgrade.

I find it hard to believe that it actually _increased_ in ranking though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not really surprising: Except for some very limited cases, I found that python performance is comparable to C++ performance for solving problems (obviously using python/C++ idioms where relevant). I rarely use C++, opting for C for performance reasons.

<comment><USER6> > _Except for some very limited cases, I found that python performance is > comparable to C++ performance for solving problems_

I have a hard time buying this. What cases have you found where Python is comparable to C++?

<comment><USER2> Python is comparable to C/C++ when the code you write spends most of its time in the many Python libraries which are written in C.

If your program spends most of its time actually executing code in Python then a comparable C++ implementation will probably be two or more orders of magnitude faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Given the peculiarities of Tiobe, I'm more surprised about Ada being on the list at all.

<comment><USER17> Out of curiosity, who uses Ada? The DoD?

<comment><USER19> The aerospace industry, traffic control, railways, industrial automation, banks and the military.

<http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really like objective-c. I think my perfect language should be something between C++ and objective-c.</comment>


Google Researchers Add Attention to Augment Convolutional Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/syncedreview/google-researchers-add-attention-to-augment-convolutional-neural-networks-1490e9c245e1 <comment><USER2> Interesting, especially fully attentional modules as alternative to conv layers (rather than in addition to). I hope they continue playing with it, especially while evolving better architectures.</comment>


GitHub Won't Help You with Hiring - <AUTHOR> https://www.benfrederickson.com/github-wont-help-with-hiring/ <comment><USER3> I made the mistake of thinking an active github account was a good proxy for "Is this person interested in tech enough to work here?". I was called out on it at a conference (fortunately for me at a bar and not when I was on stage), by someone who pointed out that many people just don't have time to work on side projects and push them to Github.

Maybe they work 8 hours a day on a bank or government project that is all private and then they spend the rest of the day acting as a care giver to a relative, studying, or volunteering in a women's refuge. All noble activities that I would consider positives for a candidate, but I'd never know if I just checked "Do you go home and cut code out of hours?".

I mistook my own privilege of free time as a universal truth and I'm glad I was called out on it early on and able to change my (interviewing/screening) ways. I wonder what else I need someone to call me out on...

<comment><USER4> I will still think odd that's someone who is a professional hasn't found one bug in an open source lib that is worth a PR or even an issue in a decade of work.

<comment><USER5> Most software engineers will be on a commercial contract that doesn't allow contributing to open source projects. Even if you issued a PR or raised an issue, it would have to be on a throw away account and you wouldn't include it in a CV.

<comment><USER6> There are also a lot of software developer's that have contracts where they can contribute to open source but it has to go through legal. Which makes it to much of a pain to actually be worth doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let's be clear - it's OK to write shit code. There are many many contexts in which writing shit code is perfectly valid. Indeed there are times when writing shit code is almost a requirement. You're experimenting, you're researching, you're learning, you're having fun, you're in the initial build stages of something, you're under time constraints.

And lots of code should not have tests, or be works of art, or be bug free, or be commented, or be comprehensible to less experienced developers.

It's a problem that Github is used for assessing programming skills at all because those assessments ALWAYS look for consistent perfect code as a high arts with full code coverage etc etc.

Public code also has time context - maybe you wrote that four years ago when you were new at some technology or skill - what exactly does that mean to the assessor who is seeking perfection?

I don't want to direct anyone to my code as an assessment because it's _always_ misread by the assessor. Even worse I find myself rethinking posting code online because I think "but what if I get assessed on this will it hurt my career"?

I think that analysis of people's public/Github code is a hiring antipattern and the fallback of those unskilled in assessing candidates.

</comment><comment> jon-wood When interviewing someone I will try to track down their GitHub profile, and having some decent code on their is probably going to make me more inclined to hire you since it gives me a data point on how you work. However for all the reasons listed in this article I'm just going to disregard the lack of a profile or a profile with limited content, I'm trying to hire a professional software developer to do work here, and whether or not your hobby is running a large open source project doesn't really influence how good you are at your day job.

<comment><USER8> I had an interesting interview a few months back, the interviewers said "Please pick a smallish repository and walk us through the design and implementation".

I talked for nearly an hour about one of my projects, first of all the broad design, then various interesting aspects of the implementation. (Most projects have lots of "dull"/"boring" code, but I certainly highlighted the areas I had the most fun/pleasure/difficulty implementing.)

Was a nice interview, although it was only possible because I've posted a whole bunch of projects online. I know other people keep their stuff private, or don't even write code in their spare times.

<comment><USER9> I've interviewed people who don't have public repositories so instead I'll ask them to bring some code with them that they can talk about. It could be a school project, it could be a single function or an entire system. For me, the exercise is mostly about evaluating communication skills.

<comment><USER10> I mean, I can't bring my work code with me, because NDA. I might not have side projects because life, and school was a long time ago --- actually, I don't know if I even have that code, most of it I archived on the school shell server and they kicked me off around 10 years after I graduated.

Also, my side project code is garbage, because only I am going to look at it, and so it only needs to make sense to me (and maybe, future me), and it's more fun to write awful things.

I'm sure this gets you good insights on some candidates, and probably is pretty decent for fresh grads (who should have something from school), but I can't imagine it working well for a lot of experienced candidates.

<comment><USER9> Hearing why your side project code is garbage is useful too. The code itself is rarely very interesting. It's all about hearing you describe what's interesting (for positive or negative reasons) and to see how you answer questions or challenges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't see why everything has to be bucketed into 'good' vs. 'bad'.

A well-populated GitHub profile can be a positive signal to me. It makes it easier for me to see how a prospective candidate works and thinks, and provides me with a more useful and instructive set of questions to ask during an interview.

It is also possible that I will discover that the candidate is not sufficiently experienced to meet the requirements of the position that they are applying for, but at least this way I don't have to try to ferret out these answers or waste their time.

An unpopulated GitHub profile is a neutral signal for me, and means that I need to spend more time trying to tease out the answers that are simply given to me with a well-populated profile.

<comment><USER12> > It makes it easier for me to see how a prospective candidate works and > thinks

Be careful making even these assumptions. My GitHub is a subset of my side projects combined with some old work stuff that was reprioritized. Many of my repos lack tests because they're for such a small number of users it's more efficient just to test manually and handle issues personally. That doesn't mean I don't write tests in my professional life. Similarly, many projects may be older and my habits have evolved since then.

<comment><USER13> I don't think he's making assumptions.

Is it unreasonable to say "more data allows me to make a better decision?" It could be completely noise! But it is still data.

I think in fact you are making assumptions based simply on the fact that he is observing data.

<comment><USER14> > Is it unreasonable to say "more data allows me to make a better decision?"

Yes. If you read data about A as data about B, more data will give you a worse understanding.

> It could be completely noise! But it is still data.

You are not technically wrong in saying that noise is data, but your implication that it is somehow better than no noise is wrong.

<comment><USER13> Ah ok that make sense.

As a more philosophical question, how do you know a priori if it is noise or signal? Wouldn't you have to look at it?

<comment><USER14> The discussion in this thread is basically this:

A says: "I like it when a candidate has a github, because it gives me and idea about how they code"

B replies: "please don't. My github code, like an unknown proportion of all github profiles, is hobby code and doesn't follow any of the standards my professional code follows."

In this case, you need a prior that says "even if it looks legitimate, the data might be completely invalid and we cannot tell from the data"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> First thing I do when a resume crosses my desk (as a hiring manager) is check their GitHub (or GitLab) profile, if they supply one. It is an important weapon in our arsenal for helping determine which hire from a shortlist gets called in for interviews. Just having an empty profile is better than no profile, but one with repos of your work is best and worth extra points. It has made the difference in our hiring decisions.

Unfortunately for me, I came from a world where everything had to be open source, but moved to a closed source world where everything I produce, even in my private time, belongs to The Company. IP lawyers have to check the bowl before I flush. I am paranoid that my public commit log being empty will affect my chances of getting a job in the FLOSS realm once again.

<comment><USER16> > [...] but moved to a closed source world where everything I produce, even in > my private time, belongs to The Company. [...]

So you can't even commit something own, when in private, because company you work for can sue you, just because?

<comment><USER17> I also have a contract like that. They don't sue you, but everything I produce is intellectual property of my employer.

Not very useful when working on open source, which is why I don't.

I argued about this before signing, but this has been in every contract I have ever read and when I argue about this they will always say it is standard practice to include.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lets face it, recruiters do a terrible job of screening. They dont understand the job, so how could they ever detect the tells of in group / out group?

Plus, you can generate activity for your profile. It's a game of cat and mouse.

[https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-github-kind- of-12b08a46d0...](https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-github-kind- of-12b08a46d02e)

<comment><USER19> Honestly, I think the biggest problem is our own expectations. The way IT recruitment is just now, is not substainable and makes little sense.

* There are more developer jobs than developers

* We're constantly afraid of developers who can't code

* We decide to test every developer often with non-real-world scenarios and weird things they'll never do in their job and if they did do, you would be very concerned.

* Not only do we test them for things things they won't be doing, we also expect them to spend hours and sometimes days doing these tests.

* We reject people for weird random reasons. They don't understand one concept correctly, so clearly they can't do the job ever.

* We then hire recruiters, who realise how screwed out recruiting is and that it's often potluck. And realise this is a basic funnel, so they go and search out anyone who has a rough chance of doing being able job.

* We then blame the recruiters because people don't meet our weird standards.

For real, most companies need to realise they are not FAANG. They do not have an endless source of people wanting to work for them because of the reputation. Many of these companies that are acting like they can expect people to jump through hoop and hoop, have employee churn rates of 6-12 months and are competing with many other companies in their local area for the same talent. We continually act like like doing this job always requires the best. From what I see at most companies, you need one or two people who can archectect your system and explain the designs to people and after that you just need people who can follow the designs. We can say "But everyone should be able to do archectecture designs", if you want to spend your days discuss design plans and the benefits of this and that fair enough. But that's not what a company needs, a company needs people to write code they don't need 8 out of 10 to be designing code, they need 8 out of 10 to be "boilerplate" code so to speak. And if someone is able to take a code design and implement it without making it more complex then they're good enough for the job. Google is famous for making people jump through hoops and then have them do basic tasks, because doing basic tasks is what is important.

That's just my rant of the week on IT recruitment.

<comment><USER18> > a company needs people to write code

Most of these companies would only need 1/2 - 1/4 as many "coders" if they'd get rid of their Not Invented Here syndrome and let the coders dictate how the product functions (technically). So many times I've had to build products that are arbitrarily designed by non-technical folks who don't realize that dictating their preferences, instead of flowing with the existing tech, quadruples the implementation time.

That's just my rant of the week on stubborn folks who think their company is a snowflake that requires a bespoke software solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Of course if you already have a job in tech and 3 other companies on the resume it doesn't matter so much.

For people straight out of university their side projects _are_ interesting to recruiters though as there's not that many other references you have. This is even more true for people not coming through the normal CS pipeline, working on their own projects and shipping something is a good way to show that you know what you are doing.

Especially when so many people coming out of CS studies don't even know how to code.

<comment><USER21> That is so bizarre to me, in Portugal pure CS theory without any kind of project deliverables is a math degree specialisation, what one would do the last two years of a 5 year degree in maths.

Spending 5 years in any kind of engineering degree without being evaluated just doesn't happen, unless one would be cheating on their project assignments.

<comment><USER20> > Spending 5 years in any kind of engineering degree without being evaluated > just doesn't happen

Passing programming assignments or university projects is very different to actually knowing how to code or think about solutions on your own I think.

<comment><USER22> Main difference would be the time pressure. Our coding assignments could be done generally at our own pace, though of course there were deadlines. Also the "tricky algorithm" and "off the top of your head" aspects generally weren't there - of course way back when, there wasn't a whole lot of code public so you couldn't just copy off the internet. though of course some cheated and copied each other's work.

Perhaps universities should start acting like more like what the companies are testing for nowadays, in order to prepare their students better. Timed coding quizzes every week, automatically validated like HackerRank, Leetcode, etc.. It wouldn't even have to be these tricky algorithms - maybe just a something like implement quicksort, etc. (without using the API calls) in like 30 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why do we have to make everything so forcefully career driven? Just enjoy writing code and showing it to the world if you want - no strings attached. Github helps in this case.

<comment><USER24> As the article points out, it's because recruiters have started to ask for links to Github profiles.

Hence the topic.

Having a Github profile is "being forcefully career-driven" because it's now a potential gate put in place to work at increasingly more companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article is from 2018.

You can now make your private contributions a data-point on your public profile[1] without giving away private information

[1] [https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing- yo...](https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github- profile/publicizing-or-hiding-your-private-contributions-on-your-profile)

<comment><USER26> How many businesses even store their internal code on GitHub's public service? Everywhere I've worked has used self-hosted solutions.

<comment><USER27> Every customer I worked with stores their code either on github or bitbucket. The only one who doesn't let me use my self hosted git repository (I mean the copy on a server of mine.) They also have a copy they can pull from there.

All of them are medium / small sized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been using Github long enough that I have my first name (not a terribly uncommon name) as a username.

I have no idea what it even means to follow somebody on github.

Why? I use github to host my code, to collaborate with others. I use issues, sometimes wiki, pull requests (obviously) and so on. But it's not a social platform for me. I don't _want_ it to be a social platform.

I guess following means I get some kind of notification when they do something? I'm drowning in gh notifications already, and switched off most.

So I'd discard followers on github as any kind of metric right from the start.

</comment><comment><USER29> I asked ~50 candidates for some code I could look at, and not one had anything public to show me. I think being active on GitHub and having personal projects is a great sign, but it's so uncommon that you can't really knock people for lacking it. I personally use GitHub, but don't have anything of substance public. My previous employer actively fought against us contributing to open source (even though the company operated 100% on OSS). I still did so anyway, for tiny fixes that irked me.

<comment><USER30> I was on the panel for 300+ candidates and only 2 had any substantial gh presence - one had a bunch of prototypes that he specifically created to show off during interviews ("let me show you how i implement deque in a new language over two weeks") and the other one was legit and worked for OSS company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe I missed the forest for the trees, but it sounds like OP is almost discouraging people from contributing to their GitHub profiles?

If you are a well know or experienced dev with a long resume of working for closed-source companies, then, yes, you don't need a GitHub profile. For younger people or developers switching domains, GitHub contributions and personal projects might be the only way of showing their worth to future employers.

<comment><USER32> > Maybe I missed the forest for the trees, but it sounds like OP is almost > discouraging people from contributing to their GitHub profiles?

It wouldn't surprise me. There is a lot of content online that appears to be created for the sole purpose of finding work or as part of school/university projects. A lot of that is of limited value, which diminishes the signal:noise.

But I think the main point of the article is that it is unlikely to be used in the hiring process. People either don't see if as being of value or realize that it can be gamed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think I agree with "Followers on GitHub Show Popularity Not Talent" to some small scale, but that example is idiotic, who is going to submit a fictional character's GitHub profile as their own.

Most of the time when there is +50 people following someone it means that at the very least they have one significant repository, published article or somewhat known through other means (blogs are one).

<comment><USER34> I think the point is that people follow profiles for arbitrary reasons, not because they are great programmers.

<comment><USER35> I follow people that are great programmers personally. I find that the famous open source programmers are typically the ones with the most followers:

* BurntSushi: 4.4k followers

* wesm: 9.6k followers

* tj: 43.6k followers

The followers section of the post may have cherry picked a non-representative example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> My activity graph is almost solid green just due to commits to my private dotfiles repository, so yeah it's not that useful. On the other hand even if no one looks at my profile, the projects on there allow me to put extra keywords on my CV which could help with resume screening if nothing else.

<comment><USER37> > My activity graph is almost solid green just due to commits to my private > dotfiles repository

Same here lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Fwiw I was interviewed at the beginning of the year because a recruiter found a 5yo stackoverflow post that I completely forgot about (I probably have something like 3 posts on SO).

</comment><comment><USER39> Actually, GH doesn't just show open-source contributions. It will also show private repos, if you set that (I think it's on by default).

Some folks use this to "game" their activity logs. I've heard of people writing scripts to draw pictures in the activity log. I haven't actually _seen_ it, though. That's mostly because I haven't bothered to look.

I encountered one activity graph that was _insane_. It had about 15,000 commits per year. I work 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and have about 3,000. I know of folks with 5-6K, that I believe are legit.

Then I clicked on one of the squares, and saw that it had about 600 commits in _one day_ , in a private repo, along about a 24-hour cycle.

The person obviously had written a script, that checks stuff into a "dump" repo, automatically.

So, the lesson is, _caveat emptor_. The activity log is an _outstanding_ way to view someone's working style and velocity. Since I do pretty much everything in open-source, you can run number-crunchers on my ID, and see what I do, when. GH has an API. I suspect there's some interesting stuff out there (someone posted a pretty cool CLI tool in HN, a while ago, that showed graphs of the time of day most people did checkins).

Back when I was a hiring manager, I would have _killed_ for the kind of info the GH activity log can give. Totally knocks "Draw Spunky" tests into a cocked hat.

<comment><USER40> Important caveats to the private repo contributions:

1\. It is opt-in, so your private contributions do not show up on your profile by default[0].

2\. Not every org is running on GitHub public. If you're using a GitHub Private server, or if your employer uses something else like GitLab/Gitea/...

3\. If you leave the org, your contributions to private repos might get removed from your profile. Unless you read the docs and remember to STAR the repos you worked on. Apparently, now they also count opening an issue/PR for this, but I haven't tested this[1]

[0]: By default, visitors only see public contributions on your profile.

[1]: [https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing- yo...](https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github- profile/why-are-my-contributions-not-showing-up-on-my-profile)

<comment><USER41> Thank you, never heard of "have to star", contributions line become empty after years of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I can tell from experience that this is not true.

Sure, a lot of great people do not contribute to open source, yet I do (maintain a sizeable popular project), and nearly half of the interviews spend a good time discussing the work I do in opensource.

</comment><comment><USER43> Their code and whether they are not crazy are basically the only things i care about.

Everything else is a less accurate proxy measurement. Unsupervised, self- motivated, goal-oriented adulting ... that's what I need

Doesn't matter what company, these basic requirements don't seem to change.

</comment><comment><USER44> I laugh at that as an job application requirement and move on. Anyone thinking a look at a GitHub profile will prove skill, is sadly mistaken and not sometime if want to work with. Considering most code is property of employers, nothing to see.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've been a hiring manager for 10+ years and I've used the candidate's code on GitHub for helping pre-interview screening decisions numerous times. Good code on GitHub is a good sign, of course I can change my mind after actually interviewing the candidate.

This phrase from the article over simplifies this and is frankly childish: "People still seem to think that you can figure out how talented a developer is merely by looking at their open source contributions"

Duh. It says that some people "still" think that you can do that by "merely" looking at their OSS contributions. But maybe, just maybe, others can use it "merely" as a data point.

</comment><comment><USER46> To argue that GitHub won't help you with hiring doesn't just require showing that it's not perfect, it requires that other methods of assessing people (Interviews? Degrees?) absolutely dominate it. But the arguments made against github would work against any such method. Yes there are impressive people without an impressive github page, there are also impressive people who fail interviews, don't have degrees, etc.

> Not only are GitHub profiles not that helpful for hiring developers, it also > seems like they aren't that much help for developers that are looking for > work.

Why try to dissuade people from something they aren't doing anyway?

</comment><comment><USER47> > While he has written a ton of code at his work in the last year, he hasn't > posted anything that can be viewed publicly: he has no public commits, he > hasn't created any repositories of his own and he has an insignificant > number of followers. Despite all that he's still the best developer I've > ever had the pleasure of working with.

This is more a problem for the developer, not the company. The company may have a smaller pool of candidates by evaluating based on GitHub profiles, but they will have more data to use in their evaluation. If they don't have the resources to pay for the premium of being selective, they may evaluate candidates from a wider pool (those without GitHub profiles/history). The candidates without GitHub profiles will receive the attention from those companies not willing to pay a premium for their services.

This can be generalized in other ways beyond GitHub. GitHub, in this sense, serves as a marketing tool, similar to LinkedIn, a personal site, a blog, a resume, etc. Provided it's a free marketing tool, the developer has little to lose by investing their time into marketing theirself and a lot to gain by receiving more demand.

<comment><USER48> Have you ever been able to look at someone's code and immediately figure out whether it's good or not? I think it can be easy to see if it's really bad, but sometimes it can be hard to tell if it's okay code, or really good code. The problem is that you might have extra information to make a hiring decision, but it requires orders of magnitude more time to evaluate.

For example, if the whole project is done by a single person do you evaluate their design and code? What if it was just a one-off project that they didn't care about so it has copy-paste code in a few places. Is that bad?

If you ask candidates to point out examples of good code, then is that really meaningful? What if a mediocre programmer can find a few places where they wrote some strong code. What if that code was made good through a strong review process?

I think the problem is that it's too difficult to determine if open source contributions are actually representative of the way someone will code in a job.

<comment><USER49> I don't think the most useful info you can get from someone's Github involves the sort of deep analysis you're attacking in your comment.

Nobody is deep diving your code like this, btw.

Looking at someone's code projects can tell you some things like how they might write a README, if there is one. It might present a concrete project they built that you can discuss in an interview; what was the hardest part of this project? It can tell you where they are roughly on the scale of "barely started programming" and "clearly are experienced" (an experienced developer can glean this very quickly from someone else's code—even what they choose to paste from Stack Overflow—it isn't as hard as you think).

Reading the code line by line looking for "strong code" is something that beginners think employers will be doing, but they don't. Just like developers don't evaluate libraries like this, they do a more topical, holistic page- through.

Of course it isn't going to tell you exactly how someone will perform on the job. That's not the goal post (the absence of Github usually means you have nothing to look at at all). It just has a few useful signals like looking at a chair that a carpenter has built.

It seems like you are suggesting that the chair a carpenter built in his own time couldn't possibly give you any reliable signal about how the carpenter works, because what if the carpenter was in a rush? Well, let me point out that a rushed veteran and a rushed beginner will cut completely different corners. Kind of like how a skilled artist with only 10 seconds to draw something can still express a great deal of their expertise merely by how they attacked the problem.

<comment><USER48> Let's look at that chair analogy, you are presuming that someone can look at a finished chair and say it's a good chair, and the carpenter who built it is probably good. But in order to do that evaluation, you need to spend time examining the chair. And you don't have any guarantee that the chair was actually made by the person presenting it to you. Maybe someone else helped them build it, or they built it using step by step instructions they found online. My issue is that the evaluation can take a lot of time, and if you are not familiar with the project, it makes it really difficult to get anything useful.

If your hiring process always requires github code, then the chance of people faking it, or presenting code that isn't theirs is going to increase. And if you are looking at it for a project a candidate can discuss, you can do the same thing by choosing something from their resume.

In my opinion, it just doesn't add that much and will wind up taking up a lot of time. You would also need to decide when in the process you look at the projects. Doing a proper eval would still likely take hours for a small handful of candidates, so you wouldn't want to do it until a person was well down the interview path. And at that point is it really adding much more than you already know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> >Most GitHub Projects Aren't Impressive

So make an impressive one.

My team lead would sometimes ask me to help evaluate potential candidates and sometimes we looked at GitHub profiles if one was supplied. No problem if not, but if so then it's a data point.

The claim above from the article is true. Mostly nothing is actually impressive and if you're not careful it's easy to have something count against you. It's actually a bit of a trap.

As a result of that I decided to make all 50 public repos I had private and instead just work on a single public repo of decent depth/quality.

What I wound up doing is create a small web app in a domain I would never be interested in trying to turn it into a commercial product, then I use it as not a single project, but a series of inter-related projects that build on each other. Mostly it's a playground for me to learn new things and explore ideas. So I first did an API. Then once I had an API I took the opportunity to learn a new front end tech and made a front end with it. Now I'm working my way through learning IaC with it. After that I'm gonna use it to learn serverless.

Each additional project with it makes it more valuable to me. More valuable in the sense that each project completed increases my motivation to do the next one because it becomes a more fully fleshed out piece of software and feels more "worth it".

I haven't switched employers since I started it about a year ago, but I think it'll definitely help with positioning. As it is it helps me with my career anyways as I have a semi-realistic environment in which to try things out to evaluate their pros and cons.

</comment><comment><USER51> I somewhat disagree with the article only because as a co-founder and also as early engineer in previous startups I've worn the interviewer hat a lot and candidates with solid github portfolio projects demonstrated to be better suited for the role than those that didn't have projects to demonstrate their skills. I agree that there are a ton of 10x engineers that don't do any public open source stuff but at the same time you'd know they're good just by having a conversation with them or reading posts they've written. One of my previous employers has also expressed that they were impressed by my github projects and I feel like that gave me leverage over other candidates. It really depends on the employer and I think the larger the company the less they care about your open source projects or how good your portfolio since there's a lot of churn and they can afford it unlike early stage startups where they do a little more diligence on early hires.

</comment><comment><USER52> It could if you were smart about it. See the scripts at:

[https://github.com/adamtornhill/code- maat](https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat)

You could identify high quality devs that are suddenly funemployed with a burst of github activity - and reach out to them in a non-sleazy manner.

</comment><comment><USER53> No doubt 'activity' is a worthless metric.

But someone who created and maintained a good repo, that's actually used by other people (doesn't have to be many), where the code is relatively clean and actually works ... this says quite a lot actually.

Of course the major caveat is that this doesn't mean that someone who does not have this is 'not good'.

Finally, if someone has made any number of contributions and they are objectively 'not good' \- this is also a negative signal.

So 'if there is a github profile' and the code/usage can actually be looked at, it might be useful criteria it just needs to be contextualized.

</comment><comment><USER54> By showing that almost no recruiter check the GitHub repos cannot tell if such contributions make a candidate stand out.

If someone has tangible contributions through GitHub, they probably write that down in the resume. The interviewers may check their claims either during interview or on GitHub before/after the interview.

The problem is that if a candidate performs moderately well in the interview (e.g. coding interview), while he/she has made many contributions through GitHub, should the interviewer recommend the candidate? My belief is that most interviewers will not take the risk or take the responsibility for a potentially wrong hire.

</comment><comment><USER55> Thank you! I have been complaining about this forever. 99% of software I write is closed source! It seems like we get punished for this when in reality it's the company's policy not to publicly expose proprietary information.

</comment><comment><USER56> While the author makes some valid points, I disagree with the general stance of the post (and, more broadly, quite dislike most generalizations like that). Obviously, no decent hiring manager in their right mind will base their decision purely on someone's GitHub profile. At the same time, relevant profiles with enough information could be a very useful signal and data point. In other words, I think that using GitHub profiles to _augment_ other available information is a worthwhile element of the overall hiring strategy for [software] engineering teams.

</comment><comment><USER57> I fell into this cycle where I posted my projects on GitHub. I was constantly chasing the green tick every single day. All my projects were representation of bad code. At the end, I learnt that successful developers usually pay mere attention to Github and more attention to problem solving and consistent learning. These days, I use Github as a reference to concepts I learn. When a day come where I can consider myself a master on a language, I'll take on an open source project to solve a real world problem with the knowledge gained.

</comment><comment><USER58> This 100%. Especially the 'most projects are uninteresting' part.

I see a lot of enthusiastic students writing yet another Tensorflow something of 2 files and uploading it to GitHub. That does not mean these projects are interesting.

It is hard to get great project ideas. On the other hand it is quite easy to slap together yet another python data visualization 'project'.

Another thing is, plagiarism. Some people create repository out of cloned files. (if forked, it will be shown as forked on GitHub).

</comment><comment><USER59> While the article is technically correct, it is completely wrong on its message. I can't use GitHub profile as a negative factor, but totally can as a positive one. So, active GitHub profile literally helps with hiring like in "requires less effort from both candidate and company sides".

</comment><comment><USER60> Non-representative counter example: we produce only Open Source products, and I review the public code contributions of all technical staff during pre- interview assessment. If you're hiring Open Source developers then past Open Source contributions to other projects are useful and important.

</comment><comment><USER61> I've taken to maintaining a singular "portfolio" repo that contains bits of a code with pointless code (like standard framework boilerplate files) omitted, with a README in each folder for context and explanation.

</comment><comment><USER62> I agree with the article that the quantitative metrics(contribution statistics, followers, stars, LOC, etc) are not really good vor evaluating someone. But its still good for checking 1. The type of code one writes and in what languages, maybe documentation and 2. The interactions with other people in form of PRs and issues.

I guess that most recruiters don't have the time to look at that but it definitely could be valuable.

</comment><comment><USER63> having worked at multiple of most peoples "dream companies", i can tell you very few of the engineers i met had every contributed to open source, and no one cared. and furthermore the company wouldnt let employees contribute, as it created copyright issues

</comment><comment><USER64> HN comments here probably more valuable to the world than any HN story I can remember

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't get it. Obviously assessing candidates by only looking at their GitHub is a bad idea. But if a candidate does have a good GitHub, that's useful information.

</comment><comment><USER66> Year should be added to the title since this is really outdated.

</comment><comment><USER67> GitHub also record contributions in form of issues and pull requests. Not contributing to projects you are using for your work looks like a bad signal for me.

<comment><USER36> Not everyone uses open source for their work. Even if they do how likely is it they'd have anything to contribute? Can you mark down most developers who use Java or Spring because they haven't found a bug in them to report?

<comment><USER68> If they do, I'd say it should be very likely the moment they start using anything smaller than Java/Spring for anything serious. I opened issues and/or PRs for about a dozen libraries and frameworks, and that's probably 50% of what I could open if I had more willingness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> > The vast majority of software being produced is closed source software

I found this claim surprising. I would have guessed that the narrow majority of software produced these days is open source, but I don't have a citation for that. Do others agree with the article's "vast majority" claim?

<comment><USER70> A minority of software is open source. It's the bubble of Github and HN that makes open source to be more prevalent than it actually is.

<comment><USER71> > A minority of software is open source.

How do we know this to be true? Has anyone checked?

<comment><USER72> Look at all the software running on your computer right now, how much of it is open source? (Including OS, drivers, ssd/efi/cpu/misc controllers firmware). Email every website you visit and ask to get the source code. Go and check all gadgets in your house which contains a microcontroller or cpu, how many of those can you get the source code for? Ask your car manufacturer for the source code of all its systems. Go out in your city, look at all computerized utilities (screens, payment systems, traffic lights, elevators, power plants, public transport, the list goes on..)

Does it really need to be checked? Seems blatantly obvious to me that most software is proprietary.

<comment><USER69> > Look at all the software running on your computer right now, how much of it > is open source?

Most of it? The hardware, OS, web browser, window manager, terminal emulator, and text editor all are, anyway. There are a few proprietary bibs and bobs, but really not that many.

> Go and check all gadgets in your house which contains a microcontroller or > cpu, how many of those can you get the source code for?

My impression is that most of this IoT-type devices run Linux of some variety. They might have some proprietary stuff on top (though not a ton, given the GPL), but that seems to be basically another check in the "open source" column.

> Ask your car manufacturer for the source code of all its systems.

Well, it's a Toyota, so it's running Automotive Grade Linux, so…

> Does it really need to be checked? Seems blatantly obvious to me that most > software is proprietary.

It doesn't seem blatantly obvious to me, but it's interesting to hear your perspective

<comment><USER70> Just because some part of the underlying software is open source (AGL) does not suddenly make the whole thing open source. And you're in a minority if you're using linux or some variant of it as your OS. The world outside of tech circles is much more closed source.

<comment><USER71> > And you're in a minority if you're using linux or some variant of it as your > OS. The world outside of tech circles is much more closed source.

Do you realise most people's primary computing device - their phone - <USER2> running open source Linux?

<comment><USER70> And a large part of it is Google's proprietary code. Hardly anyone runs pure android without any closed source components.

<comment><USER61> Correct, but that wasn't what was being responded to, it was this claim:

"you're in a minority if you're using linux or some variant of it as your OS"

Ultimately the point you made here is what's important: that there is plenty of closed source that runs the world, even if underlying infrastructure is open.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Upcoming API Days/ Hack-a-thons? - <AUTHOR>

Between now and say January 1, what are the best hackethons coming up?<p>- In the Bay Area? #sf<p>- In the world? #world<p>like 2-3day ones. <comment><USER2> Twilio (#sf) is hosting API Hack Day on October 24th. It's just one full day, but should be really good: <http://apihackday.eventbrite.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to ask a follow up question: is there a good website that specifically tracks these things? I always seem to get news of them after the fact.

<comment><AUTHOR> seems like hacker events would be a thing for YC to track.

it would be great if there was an ical feed based on keywords.

a few years ago i bought the domain name hackerweekend.com, but maybe there is a better domain.

if it doesn't exist anyone want to build it?</comment></comment>


Kanye West wins 'Coinye' Bitcoin infringement lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/28532895

<comment><USER2> Key quote:

 _Documents filed this week show that 10 of the named defendants lost by default because they did not respond to the case._

<comment><AUTHOR> Crypto is the big winner in all of this as Kanye just gave the field a whole load of PR. Bitcoin to the moon!

<comment><USER3> Ignoring the fact that altcoins tend to be seen as competition to Bitcoin, Dell accepting Bitcoin did nothing to the price (it actually has dropped), but I'm sure Kanye's barely-news will make all the difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> what does the article have to do with bitcoin? or 'bitcoin infringement lawsuit'?</comment>


Making out is its own reward - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/making_out_is_its_own_reward.html <comment><USER2> I hate to make a meta-comment, but what in the world does this stuff have to do with Hacker News? I continually see people complaining about newsworthy but non-technical articles being posted, and yet hundreds of comments on these posts. Is the HN community really that sex-starved?

<comment><USER3> Here we go...

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity._

<comment><USER4> What's "intellectual" about the article?

Also, how do we know that it's "good hackers" voting this stuff up?

That little clause is a wormhole to the redditverse, as people use it to justify pretty much anything.

A much more fun game is "7 degrees of hacker news", where you try and create the most tenuous link possible to defend the "HN worthiness" of an article. Like saying that "Well, this is about hacking, because, see, they had restrictions, and they learned to hack around them! See!" I'm sure others can do better.

(Not that it's a bad article, of course... it's just not something I'd consider germane)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note that this link comes from the discussion of Feynman - "You Just Ask Them?" -- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1196928> .

<comment><USER5> Thanks for posting the link. I just read the entire page, hundreds of comments. Fascinating. Like very few writers - Ebert has a rare gift of making people write back to express themselves. Everyone has personal stories. Reading through the hundreds of responses, Ebert has made them happier by letting them express them.

Two comments stood out.

"Let me share my favourite guidance from Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, my mentor in life: "Life is the accumulation of all the moments we live. One who cannot live meaningfully today cannot hope to lead a brilliant life tomorrow. No matter what grand plans one makes, if he does not value each moment, they will be just so many castles in the air. All the causes in the past and all the effects in the future are condensed within the present moment of life. Whether or not we improve our state of life at this moment will determine whether we can expiate the evils we have caused since the infinite past and be able to build up good fortune to remain for all eternity. The key is whether or not we have faith strong enough to decide that this may be the last moment of our life. The above passage, therefore, gives us the principle for changing our karma."

Two:

"Here is an homage to the passionate kiss, in a poem by a romanian poet, Nichita Stănescu - "They kiss". In beautiful images as well, next to the translation <http://bit.ly/54KtKw> Wonderful kissing pictures, then and now: <http://bit.ly/b2sWCI> ('Le Baiser de L'Hotel de Ville') , <http://bit.ly/bjtZAV>

Ebert: I just tweeted "They Kiss." Yes, the video plays perfectly once the poem has been read. Such a melodic language. And I love your taste in movies and books on your blog. "

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Brilliant! Made me smile and nod a few times. Choice quotes;

 _Like many old farts my age, I don't know what to make of the sexual habits of younger generations. I hear about Hooking Up. ..[SNIP].. Let me assure you that Hooking Up was discovered long before it was named._

and

 _Some of the truest words I've ever written are:

It is more erotic to wonder if you're about to be kissed than it is to be kissed._

<comment><USER7> That latter quote is wonderful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure I agree on all of his points (particularly the stuff about my generation and sexting and so forth), but this struck me:

> _"They "go places in a group of friends." Jeez, haven't these kids ever > heard of ditching your friends in order to...whatever?"_

This is the only way I know things. This is the only way my peers and I in my generation have _ever_ done things. Maybe I'm not in the right subculture or whatever, but for us dating almost entirely arises from the above... I wonder how "dating" worked back then?

<comment><USER9> _I wonder how "dating" worked back then?_

Even before dating-via-Facebook, etc., I think things were different.

From watching Happy Days, etc., I conclude that back in the day, people used to "date" multiple people in parallel, and were only monogamous if they were "going steady".

But by the late 70s to early 80s (when I was of the age), this wouldn't have been tolerated. You can only be "dating" one person at a time.

So maybe the doing-things-as-a-group thing is a work-around that's allowing a person to interact with more potential partners than the one-at-a-time rules would allow.

<comment><USER10> _But by the late 70s to early 80s (when I was of the age), this wouldn't have been tolerated. You can only be "dating" one person at a time._

My time was a bit later, late 80s to early 90s - but at that time the general rule as I experienced it was that above-average women and exceptionally attractive men could get away with multiple dating partners, but it was off limits to the majority,</comment></comment></comment>


Font sizing with rem - <AUTHOR> http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/font-size-with-rem

<comment><USER2> Pixels work fine in real browsers, they worked fine even since and they don't require strange math or resetting a child element. And because they work, they don't require a fallback.

If a specific browser doesn't support a very specific feature, I'd say: screw that browser. This isn't about an essential page feature missing, heck, it's not even about the page not looking the same across browsers.

This is about allowing the user to change the look of the page. If a user is advanced enough to even know they can do that, then they might also be advanced enough not to use IE.

This feels like optimizing the completely wrong thing - and even changing the spec to accomodate a browser issue (which will never support the new unit anyways).

At this point, there's no advantage to use 1rem instead of 10px, aside of IE9 support.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just like most of web design, all of this seems so insane. We can't use pixels, so let's use ems. But ems don't work, so we need rems. Those don't always work, so let's also specify pixels. WTF!

Great post, though.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a web designer, but what's wrong with old fashioned points as measurement unit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Physical units like points and inches render inconsistently because operating systems make different assumptions about the pixels per inch of a screen.

They work great for @media print styles, though.

<comment><USER5> Physical units _intentionally_ render at a fixed physical size across devices (with the exception of some broken browsers). If I ask my browser for an 8.5in-wide box, and hold a piece of (US letter) paper up to my screen, the width matches exactly.

If you really want a fixed size in pixels, use pixels, but please don't for anything other than images (and take care with images).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but this is only true if the operating system knows the correct ppi for the display (not guaranteed) and only useful if you know the physical dimensions of the client (almost never).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It shouldn't matter what the sizes are, only the size relative to other element matters when it comes to the design.

The unit might as well be 1d (for _d_ istance) because the browser can scale the representation of the scenegraph up and down like any vector graphics viewers, think PDF. It's also a small task to offer an alternative CSS for those who want to read the text instead of admiring the spaciousness of the design and the tininess of the fonts.</comment>


Yahoo's New Media Device (Sex Appeal?) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/08/yahoos-new-media-device/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's biggest problem...

Sex Appeal Score: 2 out of 10.

</comment><comment><USER2> Too ugly.</comment>


Doing Windows, Part 7: Third Time's the Charm - <AUTHOR> https://www.filfre.net/2018/08/doing-windows-part-7-third-times-the-charm/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting, I had not realized that Apple's practice of bullying the competition with lawsuits dated from its early days.

<comment><USER3> It wouldn't have characterized it as bullying. They were defending their IP which they had spent a lot of time and effort developing... though a lot of the concepts they themselves had taken from Xerox PARC.

In retrospect, there was a ridiculously long gap between a GUI standard on the PC platform vs the rival platforms at the time. Part of that was the slow transition to 32-bit.

<comment><USER4> I believe Apple licensed tech from Xerox, but Xerox didn't understand its worth. A bunch of ex-Xerox people later joined Apple (Larry Tesler, Alan Kay).

<comment><USER5> Plus if you look at old Smalltalk systems they are nothing like the GUI used in the Lisa or Macintosh. The concepts (mouse, bitmapped display, menus, object-orientation, networking) were Xerox's but the implementation (pull down menus, icons, drag and drop) were Apple's.

(object-orientation and networking were two things Steve Jobs later said he wished he had taken to Apple, so instead made sure he used them in NeXT - hence Objective-C and the BSD layer in NeXTStep and now macOS)

<comment><USER6> It was certainly a lot less refined, and you couldn't just sit down in front of an Alto and get to work using today's knowledge. However they were very close, the original Lisa and Mac OSs were essentially polish on the broader theme. That doesn't diminish the fact they actually brought it to the masses - however their work was undeniably derivative.

<comment><USER7> I have actually sat down and used an Alto - it was not impossibly hard, if you'd used or touched some early XWindows stuff

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The dawn of the wintel, perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER9> Duplicate: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17680958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17680958)

<comment><USER10> That submission has no comments and less votes than this one. Reasonable dupe.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does the future include browsing to virtual machines? - <AUTHOR>

Is the future browser one that includes concepts like browsing to URLs that point to virtual machine images that download and execute inside some sort of container environment?<p>Where the browser is downloaded along with the HTML and JavaScript to execute inside it (I did read about such a concept somewehere a while back). <comment><USER2> [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/embassies/](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/embassies/)

Yeah, it's a cool idea but considering the hate for Java applets, Flash, and NaCl I don't see it happening.</comment>


news.yc is broken - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we should all thank Mr. Graham for this oasis from the (inevitable) decline (and popular ascension) of reddit. But, I think that the website is imperfect and looking to reddit for inspiration may be helpful.

The feature I miss most from reddit is the automatic marking of open links. Looking for new stories on news.yc is tedious. One needs to read each headline and try to recall whether the story is old news. I think that adding this functionality will be easy

I also would like the ability to save links.

I think that it may be useful to give users the option to display and rank the links they think are most important in their profile.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the suggestions, but it keeps the site cleaner if people submit feature requests through that link rather than as individual stories.

<comment><USER3> Our bug fixer is suggesting you add a post to the "Feature Requests" thread, <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=363> , in case that isn't clear. There's a link of the same name at the bottom of some of the site's pages.

Isn't this one of the things that should be spelt out on the submission page? I'd link to my previous post on it but the "threads" link only goes back so far with no paging so I can't be arsed to find it.</comment></comment></comment>


IPhone devotion blinds Silicon Valley app developers  - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/11/iphone-devotion-blinds-silicon-valley-app-developers/ <comment><USER3> Two huge reasons keeping developers on the iPhone -

(1) Ease of development - cocoa + objc isn't very hard, and often is quite fun. Its roots in smalltalk help in the appeal to ruby/rails people, and, let's face it, cocoa apps are just plain sexy

(2) Non-Apple / Android handsets have a terrible distribution system. Carriers are in the stone age and have no intention of budging one bit. I've gotten back evaluation reports from carriers with complaints like how their bottom- end, 25-character wide phone screen couldn't read text, thus they wouldn't ship on any phone. It's attitudes like this that scare the crap out of developers.

<comment><USER4> Add to that a customer base that actually buys apps. How many other cell-phone platforms have a customer base that buys anything more than ringtones?

<comment><USER5> I think Palm and Blackberry have healthy 3rd party app markets.

<comment><USER6> The only people I've met who have either of those devices are "business people" for lack of a better word. A market very different from the iPhone crowd - the hype certainly isn't about bussiness applications. Maybe the demographic is different elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> iPhone: Standard hardware specs, standard input mechanisms, standard form factor.

Nokia: Hundreds of different hardware specs to target, dozens of input mechanisms, wildly differing form factors.

<comment><USER8> Macs vs PCs all over again? Cheap and customizable won over expensive, designed and usable.

But Apple has cracked a mass-market since then (iPods), so either they've learned how to dominate or (more likely) found the market that suits them in the form of "special-purpose consumer electronics".

This latter hypothesis predicts that if the iPhone category become a general computing device, Apple will lose.

<comment><USER9> Looks like we are still waiting for the "IBM Compatible" of smart phones.

I also wonder what effect customization of hardware will have. With OS 3.0, hardware add-ons for the iPhone just got a whole lot easier. Arguably the iPhone is already highly customizable, selling a billion apps which don't require a fixed keyboard.

<comment><USER8> Yes, "IBM Compatible" is it exactly: modular vs. integrated.

Integrated components (hardware and software) enables them to work very together, in terms of efficiency as well as usability. To make something as tiny and as fast as the iPhone means you have to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your components. Apple have done such a brilliant job, it is not at all apparent that the iPhone processor is on the slow side (about 600MHz [1]).

Modular design becomes possible when the components become faster, because you don't need to integrate to get adequate performance. You can slap things together, even mix and match. Anyone can do it. It get customizable, but the most significant result of fast-enough components is that it gets cheaper.

Faster components are inevitable. When they're fast _enough_ , the iPhone acquires comparable competitors. How fast is "fast-enough" for a smart phone? I don't know, but according to Moore's Law, smart phone processors will hit netbook speeds (1.6GHz) in a bit over 2 years: 27 June 2011

[1] [http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/01/iphone-processor- found-62...](http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/01/iphone-processor-found-620mhz- arm/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of course. iPhones are a fun platform well suited for a single programmer to spend evenings writing apps for. Nokias are a "serious" platform designed for "real companies" to devote teams of "software engineers" to develop software for.

<comment><USER11> A year ago, I looked into writing a simple application and getting it published on Nokia etc platforms. It was slow and expensive to get anything certified. And you seemed to have to redo it all for version upgrades and even bug fixes.

Apple's app store is the best thing that ever happened to Symbian (Nokia, etc) developers AND users, since the App store is soon copied by everyone.

<comment><USER11> On consideration, to be fair, I should add that I quite liked the Symbian Java APIs (without being a fan of Java; boring). The APIs had lots of interesting functionality, but it was just not realistic to get applications signed so you could do a serious install on mobiles. The painful App store method looks like a dream, in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before the iPhone, some smartphone manufacturers (Microsoft) thought it was normal to wipe out the user's data with a mobile operating system upgrade.

The iPhone is a 3rd generation* product.

* Jared Spool's definition 1st generation - All about the technology. The Motorola brick phones.

2nd generation - Features - camera/games/ringtones/contacts/SMS/mms/mp3/games/voice dial/speakerphone/etc

3rd generation - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the headline is misleading. It's not that devs are being blinded by the iPhone, it's just that it significantly raises expectations for what the "Develop and Sell a Mobile Application" experience should be like.

</comment><comment><USER14> As an SV and US outsider I can definitely see a dismissive-ness towards other platforms. However rather than blindness I see it more as a group phenomena like a 'collective subconscious' that can often drive a meme towards a self perpetuating dominance. The group senses that if they all push together they can create a new dominant platform and benefit from being early adopters. For a time this can lead to the kind of sustained dominance that SV is experiencing but of course nothing lasts forever - just look at the US automotive industry.

</comment><comment><USER15> A billion apps downloaded, a billion dollars paid to developers.

Developers want money and fame and the iPhone provides both.

Easily.</comment>


There could be meteors hitting the atmosphere close to the speed of light - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-02-meteors-atmosphere.html <comment><USER2> 1% of the speed of light does not sound to me as "close" to the speed of light.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what counts as sub relativistic speed for a meteor?

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

</comment><comment><USER4> Physicists out there, Shouldn't the mass of these objects increase as they are traveling at that speed according to Einstein. Also does the increase in mass means size of just mass within the same size ?

<comment><USER5> _> Shouldn't the mass of these objects increase as they are traveling at that speed according to Einstein._

"Relativistic mass" is an outdated concept; it's really just another name for "total energy".

 _> does the increase in mass means size of just mass within the same size ?_

I'm not sure what you mean. Objects traveling at relativistic speeds will be length contracted, so if anything their apparent "size" decreases.

In any case, as has been pointed out upthread, the speeds actually being observed are only about 1% of the speed of light, so relativistic effects are too small to matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am annoyed by the way the article says "close to the speed of light" and then revises that to "1% of the speed of light". You can call 90% "close", or 99%, or 99.9%, etc. But 1% is not close.

Also, again, in the beginning it says "relativistic" and then switches to "sub-relativistic". I don't know exactly what the latter is, but surely it implies _not_ relativistic?

<comment><USER7> There's lots of apparently sloppy editing. For example:

> Despite having a sound theoretical basis, the question remains as to whether > or not meteors larger than a grain of dust enter Earth's atmosphere at sub- > relativistic or relativistic speeds. These would be meteors that measure 1 > mm (0.04 in), 1 cm (0.4 in), or 10 cm (4 in) in diameter.

I mean, what, they're quantized?

<comment><USER5> _> There's lots of apparently sloppy editing._

Typical for phys.org. They're going for eyeballs and clicks, not accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Troubling- if any were to hit one of the poles, it could cause a massive impact.</comment>