China wants to become a semiconductor superpower, budgeting $100B to achieve it - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21688871-china-wants-become-superpower-semiconductors-and-plans-spend-colossal-sums <comment><USER2> $100 billion is not unrealistic for typical defense budgets. Modern warfare is transitioning from lead to silicon. It takes 6 lines of VHDL to backdoor a CPU. Modern chips have billions of transistors. It would be irresponsible of any modern superpower not to ensure their nation's machines are secure. I am a US citizen, but if I were a Chinese national, I might be worried about things like Intel Active Management Technology. Maybe mutual defense is a good thing if it prevents escalation. I'm still outraged that members of my Congress proposed violent conflict with China as an appropriate reaction to a data breech, as if their own organization had never accessed Chinese systems without authorization. It's probably just theatrics of elected officials from states with large military presence, but how evil is it to propose killing people for sneaking into your computers which you failed to secure properly?

<comment><USER3> > It takes 6 lines of VHDL to backdoor a CPU

Are they still using VHDL?

I wonder what hardware languages are being used by Intel and ARM.

<comment><USER4> VHDL is used primarily in Europe (and in some academic classes in the US), while Verilog is used by the vast majority of businesses in the US, and most of the top schools for VLSI. I know that the vast majority of chip designers I know (which are 90% US based) much prefer Verilog.

As for Intel and ARM, both are primarily Verilog shops, but I know ARM provides both Verilog and VHDL models for the licensed components.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Looking at wikipedia, Verilog stems from 1984. I'm wondering why Intel and ARM don't develop their own hardware compilers. I mean, if Mozilla can decide to start a new language, then certainly can those big companies.

<comment><USER4> Like most languages, they evolve over time. The latest version of the IEEE standard version of Verilog is Verilog 2005, but there are also offshoots, such as SystemVerilog. While most things distributed for interoperability and targeted for general understanding are written in Verilog, most actual designers use SystemVerilog, which was eventually made into its own IEEE standard. SystemVerilog adds a lot of object oriented features, and is a pretty clean addition to Verilog.

As far as why Intel, ARM, and everyone else mostly sticks to these languages is similar reason to why C is still used... it is because it works, and works good enough. After 20 years of just having Verilog, enough people agreed that it needed a update, and SystemVerilog developed. Another big reason is the fact that Intel, ARM, etc. all rely heavily on scripts and design flows that are common between pretty much every semiconductor company... all of the EDA vendors have united around these standards, and in a world where interoperability is required and very little innovation happens on the backend tools, people stick to what works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It will be interesting to watch this play out in the context of the Chinese intellectual property policies and non-enforcement of US copyrights, patents and trade secrets. That might be enough money to reverse engineer Intel's 14nm chipsets. Will it accelerate humanity's technological progress, or will it stifle progress by removing incentives for inventors?

<comment><USER5> >will it stifle progress by removing incentives for inventors?

my guess is it will pressure companies who currently hold on to their secrets without innovating (because they are the incumbent) to start innovating. If your competitors are on an even playing field with you, the only way to survive is to innovate.

<comment><USER6> Problem with copycats is that they remain copycats forever.

<comment><USER7> Everything people say about China today, including your post, is familiar from my childhood... except my old man was talking about Japan.

<comment><USER8> and from my childhood too.. except people were talking about South Korea. I am pretty sure most people/countries started off mimicking and copying, before innovating.

Also the Chinese might catch up faster than people think. Two small examples:- Xiaomi's MIUI has really been one of the most innovative android ROMS out there balancing usability and functionality. Another one, we use multitouch IR-based components. Right now the top 2 most innovative and competitive providers are both founded by Chinese, although one is headquartered in the US.

Basically, the whole "Chinese know only how to copy" argument is an excuse to be complacent, made by people thinking their culture or genes or whatever will protect them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Heard about this few weeks ago. Supposedly there's a formula, 1:3:7, that Chinese firms are using to recruit South Korean engineers.

It means if a S Korean semiconductor engineer joins a Chinese firm in China, he's guaranteed to be paid 7 times of his current salary for 3 years.

So let's say you make $10,000 at current job in S Korea, you will be making $70,000 a year, for 3 years. That's supposedly 'guaranteed'.

I may be off with the formula. It may have been 1:3:9. But I am sure it was 1:3:x, so pretty sure that it was supposed to be for 3 years.

A few dozen engineers did accept the offer so far. In the story I heard some S Korean HR person commenting such poaching went on recently for Display engineers who were recruited away from S Korea to Chinese firms. But he claimed none achieved much success, which I took as their career in the industry didn't last longer or they didn't make the money they expected to make.

China also made massive investment in commercial airliner, resulting in Comac C919. I read however that the C919 mostly had US/EU components though.

<comment><USER10> The 3 in 1:3:x certainly sounds credible, as employment contracts in China typically last 3 years (after which, renewable, of course).

The reason for 3 years per contract? Seems to be a sweet spot. After 2 contract renewals an employee is 'permanent' and essentially unfireable. 5 years per contract seems a bit long and a big buy-in by the employer, and 1 year way too short to expect someone to have the level of assurance and employer buy-in.

So, the 7/9 sounds realistic because of the 3. But I honestly don't expect much to get done, even in 3 years. Someone coming from outside a firmly entrenched organisation has to be a management master to achieve anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been trying to encourage America and Europe to do this with EDA tooling and I.P.. To no avail. Idea is that the whole flow gets good tools, cell libraries, and info on processes that nearly guarantees first pass. Then, a whole platform of I.P., esp I/O or accelerators, are built on several nodes for easy integration and shrinking of third party designs. Multi-project wafers are streamlined for each of those nodes. You get all that free (except MPW's) if you use the host's tooling and fabs with local fabless getting a tax deduction potentially.

Such a setup could make for a HW equivalent of what's happening in embedded with Arduino's etc. A slower pace due to costs but still better than now. Plus, an existing SOC platform at 45nm and 28nm would be great for cloud datacenters that are investigating custom hardware for accelerators and cost reduction. We'd see shit cranking out constantly for that market.

So, it's now up to China. They can have that blueprint of mine for free. I'd also consult on the specifics since nobody here is doing it outside a few academics and smaller firms. Gotta create the end result somehow.

Note to Chinese involved reading: Also, do a FPGA at 28nm and 28SLP with open bitstream and free tooling at low cost. Make ASIC conversions easy with paid, Chinese I.P. as an upsell. Probably sell the heck out of those FPGA's and academics will do most of R&D on their EDA just for fun. Acquire Achronix while you're at it to do the same with their asynchronous stuff. Acquire eASIC and/or Triad for RAD hardware at a discount for Chinese firms. Same advice I give here should help there.

<comment><USER12> Opening up bit streams would be really great. I am still hoping that someday we have completely open source FPGA tools.

<comment><USER11> Here's some fun reading for you:

Open-source FPGA [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-43...](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-43.pdf)

Open-source, bitstream generation for Xilinx [http://drop.isi.edu/sites/default/files/users/nsteiner/soni-...](http://drop.isi.edu/sites/default/files/users/nsteiner/soni-2013-bitstream- fccm13.pdf)

Open-source tooling for lattice [http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/](http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/)

Open-source EDA flow [http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow/](http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow/)

Older, academic tooling for FPGA's [http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jayar/pubs/rose/rosefpga12.pdf](http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~jayar/pubs/rose/rosefpga12.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Countries with cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing capability ban export of such technology to China. If I remember correctly, the Netherlands was the main exception and China's manufacturing equipment came from there. I'm surprised the article failed to mention this.

"[T]he home countries of major semiconductor companies ban the export of leading-edge manufacturing technologies to China."

[http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/semiconductors/latest...](http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/semiconductors/latest_thinking/the_challenge_of_china)

</comment><comment><USER14> China is budgeting this plan to catch up to the US' industry by about 2030. Is there any chance that within the next 15 years, traditional semiconductor chips will become replaced by something else (whatever that may be)?

<comment><USER15> Plastic

[https://semiaccurate.com/2015/11/18/arm-charts-path- printed-...](https://semiaccurate.com/2015/11/18/arm-charts-path-printed- plastic-chips/)

These aren't better than silicon, but they probably will be close enough shortly.

After that, Moore's Law should go operational. And these have a _huge_ advantage in terms of non-recurring expense.

Think taking all of the "maker" stuff but creating a chip instead of a PCB.

<comment><USER16> Sorry but that isn't a replacement for Silicon, not by a long shot. You are not getting 14nm plastic transistors anytime soon.

<comment><USER15> > Sorry but that isn't a replacement for Silicon, not by a long shot. You are > not getting 14nm plastic transistors anytime soon.

You missed the point. The point isn't to replace 14nm transistors.

The point is to allow engineers to do VLSI design like PCB design.

There are lots of interesting things that can even be done with 5um or 10um transistors, but we can't get there because the non-recurring expense is too high.

Here is an example: guitar pedals--specifically the analog delay ones. These pedals all use an ancient MN3205 bucket brigade CCD chip. The chip is dead simple to make, but since the volume is too low to offset the NRE, nobody is willing to make it.

If, however, you could design that chip with an NRE of $1,000 instead of $100,000, you could make a tidy profit. In addition, you would probably pull all of the _other_ functions of the pedal into the chip as well.

There are also other nice benefits to using older and larger transistors. One of them is voltage tolerance. Modern transistors can't take voltages at even 3.3V in many cases, while the old 10um transistors could go to 18V (old school 4000 series CMOS was specified from 3V-18V for most chips).

The point isn't to replace silicon transistors. It's to create a completely separate market at a different volume point.

<comment><USER16> You made an entirely different point.

> These aren't better than silicon, but they probably will be close enough > shortly.

If you had said:

> The point isn't to replace silicon transistors. It's to create a completely > separate market at a different volume point.

We would have no disagreement. You changed your initial entire statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Blowing billions on getting to that 7nm PTM seems like a good move.

That being said, someone should re-invent the antiquated world of EDA, electronic design automation software, the software that you can use to design chips.

Several major problems of Cadence/Synopsis....

* No Forking of designs(not easily) * Min Cost is too high. --Should be browser based solution. * Version Control is lacking in chip design teams today.

It's hard to get single digit cost licenses for chip design.

<comment><USER18> > _\--Should be browser based solution._

Why, oh why? Browser is a crappy environment and its unsuitable for any kind of bigger application. It's too bloated and too constrained. Google is barely able to make WordPad equivalent run in the browser - I don't see any actually usable EDA as a browser solution any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> $100Billion seems a little small, to be honest

<comment><USER20> Intel spends about $10 billion per year on R&D, and a single fab costs about $10 billion (they build one every few years).

If they want to catch Intel, they will want to at least spend as much as them, and also benefit from IP-leakage. So I guess it depends on how far you think they are behind the state of the art?

<comment><USER21> But once you start making semi-conductors you start making money. The 100 billion is the seed capital. Semi-conductors pay for themselves once they're rolling. See samsung's balance sheet.

<comment><USER22> If only. Intel is the only remaining company with own fabs, all others have long exited that particular line of business.

Designing chips makes money, manufacturing them in $10B and rising fabs that stop making profit after a few years not so much.

<comment><USER23> This is not a play against Intel, it is a play against TSMC which is the backbone of the Taiwanese economy. They very much haven't exited the foundry business and are very profitable ($7bn a year or so in net income), and are stealing away even the iDevice SoC business from Samsung these days...

<comment><USER24> Yup, my first thought when I saw the headline was "this is a non-military attack on Taiwan due to the KMT (pro-Beijing party) getting annihilated in the polls two weeks ago".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is one of the few types of arms races that I feel benefits the consumer.

</comment><comment><USER26> Was thinking about this whilst watching Marco Polo on Netflix the other day. China gave the western world so much of it's tech, science and culture within the last millennium. How the tables have turned. I'd put it down to karma.

In general I think it will accelerate humanity's technological progress. Looking on an individual level the most impactful inventors weren't motivated by monetary reward (e.g. Tesla). If you are a true inventor it is a tap you cannot turn off. If you are a bro who is in it for the money chances are you will not invent anything particularly ground breaking. The major concern here is that it's the bros who control the capital.

<comment><USER9> And west is trying to return the favor a few centuries later by trying to introduce basic human rights and/or democracy in China but so far, with not much success...

<comment><USER27> Kinda. The Chinese government has been trying to mix sitting on a powder keg and rapid economic growth. They do not want to become a second USSR by opening up all the floodgates at once. Also, considering how they got to their position, I don't think that any of them have preconceptions of a gentle fall if things go south.

What seems to be the case is that they're shooting for slow incremental improvement, moving from less touchy areas to more touchy areas. They've gone from not talking about corruption to cracking down on it higher and higher up the ranks. It's a very slow sleigh of hand, with the distraction being economic growth, and various distinctly communist tasting programs (the current one should be 中国梦(Chinese Dream), if I recall correctly).

But their fear doesn't seem unjustified. There are still spontaneous uprisings which are usually nipped in the bud before they can escalate by means of information and communication monitoring. That's what they care about. Expats in China using VPNs? They don't give one.

Whilst I'm all for democracy, introducing it to China right now would work about as well as introducing it to the Middle East. Groups feeling under- represented would fraction off, there would likely be civil war, widespread devastation to one of the most populous countries of the world, and worst of all, whilst Iran getting nuclear weapons seems like a looming threat, China does have them. The sheer pandemonium would make Syria look like a backwater stand-off. I may be exaggerating, but then look at the bloodshed of the cultural revolution.

I grew up in Germany, so it's not like I'm opposed or unfamiliar with the idea of democracy, it's an incredible system. But for China right now? Well meant, but not practical. It'd be a less bloody affair to turn the US into a monarchy (to make a comparison). In 20 years, maybe, though it might take longer.

Thinking China can be fixed with a fair heaping of democracy and human rights ignores a lot of very significant details in a country that works contrary to a lot of accepted wisdom in the west.

/rant

PS: There's lots of interesting things going on here, playing churned lover with western ideals is literally the least interesting thing to talk about. The day before yesterday they announced changes to the Visa regimen, coming into effect in March. 72-hour visa free visit in 4 yangtze river cities, and some streamlining of visa/green card programs for tech people and entrepreneurs working in China. Maybe I should have chosen a less ironic user name, because this is starting to sound like a sales pitch.

<comment><USER28> Oh, I thought your user name meant the rapper :)

The new visa regimes are interesting, but it hasn't seem to trickle down yet to us tech PhD people's. Really, China doesn't like foreigners, and they merely tolerate us, making us register at police stations after every trip, making us renew our visas yearly, not giving us access to the same services as natives.

<comment><USER27> Yes, the registration thing is a nuisance. They do seem to be working on ironing out the bugs in the current visa laws though, and there's reason to believe they'll become a lot more lenient, especially to y'all tech PhD people's.

The regulation I'm referring to seems like a pilot program in scope. It allows foreign students to work for and start tech businesses in the Zhongguancun area, as well as allowing people that have worked for 4 years or more for a technology company here to receive a residency permit. That's been exciting me the last 3-4 days since I heard of it, since I've been playing with the thought of doing exactly that.

It does feel like people well versed in technology are the bottleneck for startups over here. Investment is plenty, people with ideas are a RMB a dozen, but tech people knowing more than some PHP or how to set up Bootstrap? Not nearly as many, at least where I'm hanging out.

It's certainly an interesting couple of years ahead, as long as they keep tolerating us here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The American response will be funding more food delivery app startups and playing more games empowering female CEOs of remaining real hardware companies such as HP, IBM or GM instead.

</comment><comment><USER30> I will never purchase a chinese computer, or a computer with chinese semiconductors, or chinese software.

<comment><USER16> So I'm assuming you don't use graphics cards in your computer made by either NVIDIA or AMD, both of which use TSMC to manufacture them?

<comment><USER24> Taiwan != China, at least in terms of "not trusting ___China___".

<comment><USER16> TSMC is building a massive foundry in mainland. If you think the government doesn't have control over everything there you're fooling yourself.

<comment><USER24> Interesting, didn't know about the mainland expansion!

If anyone else is curious: [http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/07/apple- supplier-tsm...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/07/apple-supplier- tsmc-to-set-up-3b-independent-factory-in-mainland-china)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New analysis reveals significant ROI in open source technologies - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/leveraging-open-source-public-institution-new-analysis-reveals-significant-returns-investment-open <comment><USER2> Three blogs deep, there's a link to the actual paper.[1] It's a study of one project, a geospatial database:

 _" Starting in 2009, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and its partners developed GeoNode: web-based, open source software that enables organizations to easily create catalogs of geospatial data, and that allows users to access, share, and visualize that data. Today, GeoNode is a public good relied on by hundreds of organizations around the world ... GFDRR's direct and in-kind investment in GeoNode over the past six and a half years has been in the range of $1.0–$1.5 million USD. Partners have also made significant investments in GeoNode; a conservative estimate of these partner investments comes to approximately $2 million USD over the same time period. GFDRR's investment in GeoNode would be a reasonable amount even viewed strictly as a software development cost: the GeoNode software today represents an approximately 200% return on investment in terms of code written, since thh current GeoNode project would most likely have cost $2.0 – 3.0 million USD if GFDRR had produced it alone as proprietary software, without building an open source community around the codebase."_

This is an unusual situation; many people need geospatial databases, and contributing their local data is useful to them. The value here is in the data, not the code. This is more like Open Street Map than a software package.

[1] [https://opendri.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/OpenDRI- and-G...](https://opendri.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/OpenDRI-and-GeoNode- a-Case-Study-on-Institutional-Investments-in-Open-Source.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > This is an unusual situation; many people need geospatial databases, and > contributing their local data is useful to them. The value here is in the > data, not the code.

I disagree. Every organisation with geospatial data needs these types of applications and tools like GeoNode are viable alternatives for organisations that are invested in FOSS GIS or that can't afford ESRI.

I've worked in GIS at national, state, and local level government and have fought the same battles to bring open source GIS tools into the enterprise at every level - IT leadership are almost always enamoured with COTS products (i.e. ESRI) and resist the FOSS approach of having to assemble something equivalent to ArcServer/ArcPortal etc. Having solutions like GeoNode allow FOSS to actually compete with ESRI when the decision is being made by IT leadership who know nothing about GIS and are impressed by "solutions".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the other hand, what's the average ROI on investing in proprietary software development? It's rarely a question of spending the resources on software development, it's do we spend the resources in an open, or closed way? Nice to see a positive ROI, though - there's definitely a fear that it's just "giving stuff away" and clearly it's not that simple.

I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on how companies should do it because it's good for them financially (although granted that's probably more effective with the intended audience than what I would say). I wish a bigger deal was made about how it's just a douche bag move to sell software and proactively prevent users from having freedom to understand, fix or modify it for their needs - that applies to more than just the source availability and license.

<comment><USER5> ROI for whom?!? Who is investing money here? Who is reaping the rewards of investment? Yeah, no shit getting people to work for free has a high ROI. What the heck?

<comment><USER6> A huge number of open source contributors do so on company time (with the blessing of their employer). It certainly isn't "for free".

<comment><USER7> n00b here. Can someone explain to me how this works. I imagine a good developer is fairly expensive, so letting them do something unrelated to there job must be pretty expensive. How does this make business sense?

<comment><USER4> Quite often the company's product is the open source project. It's just that instead of selling licenses, they're selling support contracts. You could get the software free, but for a fee you get to call the engineer that built it in the middle of the night for help keeping it running. And as a bonus, you get to leverage their ability to drive the roadmap when you have feature requests.

So really the debate here is not "do you hire an engineer full time or not?" it's "do you allow the output of that engineer to be open source or not?"

There's also a perk for the engineer: they work on stuff they can publicly point to as their portfolio full-time. Want to see me code? I don't necessarily have to have a bunch of side-projects on Github. Go check out the JIRA for these huge features I worked on!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A good example of the ROI of Open Source is the OpenEMR project. That free system replaces multi-hundred thousand dollar hospital systems from companies like Cerner. I used to work at Oracle, and when I found out about OpenEMR I remember thinking "this makes the price difference between Oracle Enterprise Edition and MySQL Community look trivial".

A lot of times I hear the implementation cost is where all the money is so it doesn't matter what the software costs. That is sort of true, but large companies are not incentivized to make it any easier to implement, less they put their System Integrators out of business and/or push them to other vendors. The Open Source community does not have this incentive obviously.

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

<comment><USER9> Actually I think the Open Source community does have that incentive, assuming the developers are making a living as system integrators.

<comment> ajc-sorin [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Obvious](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Obvious)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good case study on one successful open source project. Shouldn't be used to draw any broader conclusions about impact of open source on any company's biz model. Some portions of typical software stacks are amenable to open source biz models (such as general purpose server OS), while many others are not.

Note that the study does not actually measure ROI from a revenue perspective, but estimates based on theoretical saved costs: The company invested $1M in open source infrastructure and potentially saved $2M in direct development costs (given that the code base is current worth $3M). [1]

Most interesting takeaway for me is the implications of open source for government funded projects, and a ratification of the idea that contributions of code for some public tool can save the general public tax money. A forward thinking org could try to broker some sort of tax cut based on SLOC contributed to public, government-sponsored projects? Maybe that already exists.

Would suggest studying Red Hat's rise to $2B in yearly revenue to understand how a company takes open source and turns it into revenue.

[1] _GFDRR's direct and in-kind investment in GeoNode over the past six and a half years has been in the range of $1.0–$1.5 million USD...GFDRR's investment in GeoNode would be a reasonable amount even viewed strictly as a software development cost: the GeoNode software today represents an approximately 200% return on investment in terms of code written, since the current GeoNode project would most likely have cost $2.0–3.0 million USD if GFDRR had produced it alone as proprietary software, without building an open source community around the codebase._

<comment><USER11> I'm currently working on trying to replicate the success Wordpress has seen in monetizing open-source, It's my belief that the key to creating a viable open- source product revolves around creating a platform people can host themselves and make it open to plugin development. I don't see much value in the smaller projects most people work on because those rely on licensing for revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I haven't had time to read the report in detail, but it appears that the 200% ROI figure is simply derived from the ratio of externally written software to internally written software. So, by writing an open source tool instead of keeping it closed, they got contributions of code that exceeded their own investment. However, this is not actually the main point of the paper, and neither is it the whole picture. For example they discuss sponsoring in-person events and I don't think that kind of cost is accounted for in their ROI figure. Indeed, the paper goes to some effort to explain that the benefit they received goes far beyond the outside contributions of code. I know nothing of the project, but from their description it seems that it was very well run. I'm not sure that we can reasonably assume that they wouldn't get similar results from a well run consortium, for example.

Anyway, it looks like an interesting report and I look forward to reading it in more detail, but I think the headline in the blog-pointer is unwarranted.

<comment><USER13> Expenses like conferences (both organizing and sending attendees) _are_ accounted for on the "investment" side of the ledger in this report, FWIW.

(Full disclosure: I'm one of the authors.)

<comment><USER14> This specific article is being criticized for not getting the sources right, and multiple intermediate sources are given, which is best, in your opinion, read the actual paper? Or the first secondary source?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most people receive infinite return because they invest nothing.

A more meaningful measure is how _quickly_ you can resolve a problem with open-source for X amount of investment, versus other options. With that, if a package doesn't do what you want then investing _nothing_ appropriately yields NO return; whereas, investing certain amounts of time (asking questions, filing bugs, etc.) may yield more return, and fixing it yourself may yield the most.

</comment><comment><USER16> Mods, can we change the title to that of the source report? "OpenDRI & GeoNode: A Case Study for Institutional Investments in Open Source."

The current title, "World Bank-Sponsored Report Shows 200% ROI on Open Source Participation," the contents of this link, and even the World Bank's own blog's title, strongly suggest that this was a World Bank-commissioned study across multiple open-source projects/communities. Note the plural in OP: "to quantify the benefit of contributing to and participating in open source communities." And the World Bank's blog title: "Leveraging Open Source as a Public Institution — New analysis reveals significant returns on investment in open source technologies."

But that's not the case at all. As noted in other comments, this is a single community, a single project. Granted, it's a successful one. But we shouldn't get our hopes up about "oh s __*, this is an article I can forward to the C-suite to get us to invest in open source! " What we have here is technically accurate clickbait that relies on the brand of the World Bank's analysis. And, in being disappointingly vague, it tarnishes that brand.

</comment><comment><USER17> Link references link:

[https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/leveraging-open- source-...](https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/leveraging-open-source- public-institution-new-analysis-reveals-significant-returns-investment-open)

Which references link:

[https://opendri.org/resource/opendri-geonode-a-case-study- fo...](https://opendri.org/resource/opendri-geonode-a-case-study-for- institutional-investments-in-open-source/)

Which references PDF:

[https://opendri.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/OpenDRI- and-G...](https://opendri.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/OpenDRI-and-GeoNode- a-Case-Study-on-Institutional-Investments-in-Open-Source.pdf)

Titled:

      OPEN DATA FOR RESILIENCE INITIATIVE & GEONODE
      A CASE STUDY ON INSTITUTIONAL INVESTMENTS IN OPEN SOURCE

<comment><USER18> Maybe dang can change both the title and the link. The World Bank blog is quite good as is the original paper. The linked article is complete garbage with a sensationalized title.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, all! We've updated the link from [https://osenetwork.com/2017/06/13/bombshell- report-200-roi-o...](https://osenetwork.com/2017/06/13/bombshell- report-200-roi-on-open-source-participation) to the summary blog post.</comment></comment></comment>


What is the best time to register a domain? - <AUTHOR> When is the best time to register a domain? After you've built the site or before you build the site.  AFAIK you should register the domain with search engines right after you buy it so it can crawl your sites and give you extra page views.  But if I leave it too late to buy it, I might lose the domain? <comment><USER2> If you can get it cheap register it now - you don't have to use it, and the yearly registration is a pittance compared to trying to buy it after someone squatted it

</comment><comment><USER3> It's best to buy it now.</comment>


A New Degree in Architecture, Computers Is Worth More Than Decades of Experience - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/02/19/a-new-degree-in-architecture-computers-or-health-is-worth-more-than-decades-of-job-experience/?mod=e2fb <comment><USER2>
      Freshly minted college graduates who majored in fields like
      architecture, business, computers, statistics, engineering
      and health can expect to start jobs where they earn more than
      high school graduates with decades of experience.

Maybe, possibly, doubtfully true for architecture, or health, but I don't believe for a second that is true in business, computers, statistics, or engineering.

      That's the finding of a new report from Georgetown University's Center
      on Education and the Workforce...

Oh, I get it, this is marketing material. Keep Dreaming.

</comment><comment><USER3> A Degree in Music, Painting Is Worth More Than Decades of Practice.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Study funded by a university finds that degrees are a good investment".

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't see anything that supports the hypothesis in the title. There's no indication of what these people who have "decades of experience" are earning, on the graph.

And going by those numbers, it appears they are way off.

Judging by the salaries I know of a team I worked with recently, only 2-3 years of experience (and no degree) earns %30-%40 more than the degree starting amount. This implies you would be better off with 3 years of experience and no degree than spending 4 years getting a degree. Or even 3 years.

For those with even more experience the salaries ranged from twice to %150 of the starting income of recent college graduates.

Even a graduate degree doesn't seem to pay by these numbers.

Of course I'm eyeballing it with a relatively small sample-- but they aren't providing any statistically significant numbers for the experienced incomes.

<comment><USER6> it's definitely not true that a degree in computer science will get you a higher starting amount than a person with even 1 year of industry experience.

However, I have always been curious to see when/if the degree holders catch up- or if they surpass their non-degree holding brethren.

Personally, I do not hold any formal education- and while working in London after 1 year I managed to get a "Senior Sysadmin" level salary.. but could I earn more with a formal education?

without a degree I'd expect my salary to do this kind of thing:

       75k |         X
       65k |      X
       55k |    X
       45k |  X
       20k |X__________
            0 4 8 12 16

with a degree, could it be more like:

       120k|         X
       100k|      X
       75k |
       65k |    X
       55k |  X
       45k |
       20k |X__________
            0 4 8 12 16

(these are British salaries, before someone mentions that's very low for american/USD salaries)

<comment><USER7> Right? I figure by investing years of practice into yourself, you're sending a very clear message that at least _you_ believe yourself to be a valuable asset. I've seen smart people come to workplaces but, without any zest or vision, they wind up doing only the bare minimum all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I not reading the diagram correctly? In the diagram the dark colors (more experience) are always higher than the corresponding light colors. That says experience is worth more than a fresh degree. What am I missing? Maybe it's a grammar thing, English is not my native language.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am not sure if they are comparing High School graduates in general with those college graduates who ended up getting a BS in CS or if it is adjusted for IQ, field (high school graduates working in the CS field), etc

</comment><comment><USER10> "can expect to start jobs where they earn more than _high school graduates_ with decades of experience"

</comment><comment><USER11> misplaced comma, is it for clickbait purposes ?

<comment><USER12> The original headline is "A New Degree in Architecture, Computers or Health Is Worth More Than Decades of Job Experience" \- in which the coma makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know complaining about journalism is a tired old drum, but..

This combination of "reports" press releases and journalism that cherry picks and tortures statistics is scientism of the worst kind.

Where is cause and where is effect effect? What other things have interlinked causal relationships with these things? These realities are complicated and trying to boil it down to this college degree earns people this much is just not really the way reality works.

A 25 year old with a solid academic background in statistics, big data & business from name brand Universities is likely to be optimizing his earning potential. He's very likely to be getting knowledgable advice, assistance and socialization to this end from parents. This is not a randomized experience. The got into the degree. They passed it. They decided to get into it. Causation runs both ways, in loops, in zigzags.

For a high school graduate with decades of experience… What circumstances yield 35 year olds without any tertiary education in 2015? The starting point is different, the trajectory is different. It's complex.

Coming from a non American who quite like americans I would also point out that there are many uniquely american blind spots here. One is the mercantile approach to education. Universities can proudly and flagrantly advertise their prestige with prices and viscera versa.

First, the American student is a consumer and investor. This is kind of cool and useful in that it forces people to consider realities like the market demand for graduates of a degree. But it also generates the kind of flat, dull and incorrect analysis where a degree is going to be causally linked to a salary, justifying the enormous (and often unnecessary) costs. Universities need this to justify what they charge and students need to justify their spend.

Second, I think Americans have a very weird relationship with the concepts and vocabulary of socialism. Socialism (followed closely and arguably by Liberal Capitalism) was probably the most influentially socio-economic-political movement of the 20th century. The ideas influence the US no less than anywhere. But Americans have a weird relationship with them.

At the centre of it all is the aversion to considering anything from the lens of class.

Universities are now and have always been, central to class issues. They are where class is established. They are instruments of class mobility, class immobility. They are places where class culture is consolidated.

I would guess that class is a major determining factor in earning potential, and that a lot of the mechanics of this are via universities.

When you consider some cluster of college graduates and compare them to high school graduates with 10 years experience, you are comparing samples of class clusters.</comment>


Kung Fury – a comedy funded through Kickstarter [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS5P_LAqiVg/ <comment><USER2> Nobody in the thread has yet called it what it is: retrowave. This was a musical genre first. It wholly appropriates the aesthetics of a subset of 80's media and condenses it into a "historical fantasy" world that is easier to digest than the authentic thing.

You don't enjoy retrowave for its writing or storytelling, generally speaking. Treat Kung Fury like an extended music video and it makes way more sense.

<comment><USER3> I've never heard it called Retrowave before (thought that is a good name for it). I know it by the names Outrun or Synthwave.

Carpenter Brut, Perturbator, M|O|O|N, Miami Nights 1984, Lazerhawk or basically anything from the Hotline Miami soundtracks are all good for anyone wanting more.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget Kavinsky!

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

<comment><USER5> Com Truise is another solid choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A couple of "mistakes" that I caught while watching, thought HN might find them interesting:

\- There's a reference to Viagra (6:20) but it hadn't been invented yet.

\- The "hacking time" sequence around 10:30 contains Java [1] which obviously came from the future.

There are a few others, perhaps intentional. I won't spoil them here :)

[1] [https://www.dropbox.com/s/7478u4gkvnmjg6p/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/7478u4gkvnmjg6p/Screenshot%202015-05-29%2010.14.51.png?dl=0)

<comment><USER7> Also, when the dinosaur is fighting the Nazi robot, the Swastika flips sides.

Boy, I sure hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

<comment> andrey-p I... thought you were joking before I watched the film.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Slowly but surely it is becoming possible to "consume" nothing but Internet for entertainment, even if you demand video. It's still got a ways to go. But Hollywood probably ought to be more scared than it is. (Hollywood _qua_ Hollywood isn't necessarily going anywhere, "the best" are always going to congregate somewhere, but the "current regime" is probably going to _very_ shaken up in the next few decades.)

<comment><USER9> Yeah absolutely, I had some amazing highly personalized collections of youtube channels on different subjects that I could watch instead of TV pretty much 24 hours a day.

Google killed off collections the other day because it makes the viewing experience "better" or some stupid garbage that nobody will ever be able to explain and will certainly be replaced by a worse answer at some point. But for a couple years I basically had a half-dozen highly-personalized tv stations I could watch.

<comment><USER10> If something is nice Google either kills it or makes it not nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is wonderful. Does it remind anyone else of Danger 5?[0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYXHzOqnMpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYXHzOqnMpk)

<comment><USER12> Surprisingly similar.

<comment><USER11> One might almost imagine Kung Fury was heavily inspired by Danger 5. At around 7:30 in the YouTube video, they add Hitler. And then he shoots the phone; a trope memorably used in Danger 5. Also, the cop with the triceratops head - people with dinosaur and animal heads are another major trope of Danger 5.

I'm still appreciating Kung Fury, though. Just an observation.

<comment><USER13> It also reminds me a great deal of Far Cry: Blood Dragon, which used many of the same tropes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I asked them to release it on GOG, to have an official DRM-free download option. If you buy it through their site: [http://kungfury.com](http://kungfury.com) (to support creators) you get access to it on vhx.tv, but you can't download it from there.

Of course you can download it from Youtube using something like youtube-dl, but it's not as straightforward.

<comment><USER15> (I was a backer though) But I can download it from vhx.tv (an .mp4 file).

<comment><USER14> Backers can, but those who buy it now - can't and I don't really see any good reason for it.

<comment><USER16> An exclusive perk for backers only?

<comment><USER14> Looks like it, but it's weird since it's released for free on Youtube anyway. So why should they prevent you from downloading it _especially when you paid for it_?

<comment><USER17> Because they already sold the download option to the backers. People want exclusivity, and those people who have the mp4 are secretly (though not necessarily consciously) feasting on your tears of DRM-frustration because they have something you don't.

This might sound cynical, but that's how people are . There was a documentary that came out last year called _I Dream of Wires_ about analog modular synthesizers, which are going through a renaissance right now thanks to low- cost short-run manufacturing and a much wider audience for electronic music than existed during the previous modular heyday of the 1970s. So they raised lots of money on Kickstarter, and one of the rewards for backers was _exclusive_ access to a 4 hour Blu-Ray copy, with tons of additional footage that would be cut out of the theatrical version, but which you would certainly want to watch if this was your particular nerd obsession. Anyway, the film got made OK, but (as is very typical) the producers vastly overestimated likely interest in the film and discovered the hard way that it was too niche of a subject to appeal to regular documentary distributors. Having gone a bit over budget and spent some personal money to get it finished, they naturally wanted to break even, so after what they thought was a decent interval, they started selling the extended 4-hour Blu-ray edition to the general public on their website.

 _Bad idea._ The people who had bought that thinking they were getting something exclusive were furious, and stalked the filmmakers across every electronic music forum where they popped their heads up, calling them fraudsters and thieves. They weren't any worse, off, as such; they had got their Blu-Rays (although I think they had to wait a long time for them, as with many Kickstarter campaigns that fall way behind schedule), and they included all the promised content delivered to a professional standard. But they thought they had bought a limited edition, and threatened the makers with lawsuits - the result being that the DVD release got pushed way back and the extended 'ahrdcore edition' has had the price jacked up to $199 (which almost nobody will ever spend) in line with the donation requirement for the original reward.

<comment><USER14> _> Because they already sold the download option to the backers._

That's not reasonable. They could get more backers if DRM-free release (for everyone) was a simple part of the base goal. I.e. selling DRM-free as a perk only reduces the number of their backers. I only support those projects which have a clear DRM-free release stated in their goals. And I'm not alone.

 _> People want exclusivity, and those people who have the mp4 are secretly (though not necessarily consciously) feasting on your tears of DRM-frustration because they have something you don't._

This sounds sick. I don't care for exclusivity, I care for art. And actually such kind of attitude in the project would make it feel repealing for me. And of course as with any DRM, it doesn't stop one from copying. That's all besides the fact that Youtube doesn't have DRM. It just makes downloading more manual than it could be.

<comment><USER17> _They could get more backers if DRM-free release (for everyone) was a simple part of the base goal._

I have to say, prove it. My theory is that most people don't care about DRM the same way you do, and that more people like owning something than want to make it widely accessible, based on the abundant evidence already available about their willingness to buy exclusive rewards. What do you base your assertion about the potential number of backers upon?

 _This sounds sick. I don 't care for exclusivity, I care for art._

That's nice of you, but it's a fact that we live in a consumer society and one of the most common sales tools is to exploit the law of supply and demand by creating artificial scarcity - even by limiting the numbers of Kickstarter rewards designed to get people to donate before someone else. You can effectively solicit a higher donation level by restricting the availability of the perk, and I find it hard to blame people for exploiting a business strategy that is known to work.

In all seriousness, how much _do_ you care for art? What $ amount would you be prepared to donate or put at risk by investing? I'm not asking this to win an argument, I'm genuinely curious about the economic value you attach to your ideological position. Would you be influenced by some combination, eg for $x you become a patron of the DRM-free copy but you also get a special T-shirt or other item that's not available to others, and if so to what degree?

 _And actually such kind of attitude in the project would make it feel repealing for me._

You've gotta sell what people want to buy. If you say you're going to be making the top-of-the-line quality product available as widely as possible later, then many people will reasonably ask why they should bother giving you money now. I don't think that people in the aggregate are as generous as you may be as an individual. Now, if you're quite wealthy and in a position make very generous donations that could balance out beautifully, but the basic business model of Kickstarter and similar sites is about raising lots of small donations from a crowd rather than targeting a smallish number of more substantial donors.

 _That 's all besides the fact that Youtube doesn't have DRM._

Yeah but YouTube video quality is shit. Of course it's good by historical standards but then TVs used to be much less capable than today. Many people do not find the quality satisfactory for leisure viewing. If you watch the same video on YouTube and Vimeo (eg many people upload camera tests to both websites) you can see a substantail difference on Vimeo, and mp4 quality would be better again. I don't like watching YouTube on a television, in general. Admittedly this is more of a short-term problem, and it will all be 'good enough' soon enough, just as Netflix streaming was mediocre in quality for the first year or two but now looks fine most of the time (at least on a HDTV).

<comment><USER14> _> My theory is that most people don't care about DRM the same way you do_

It's a common practice for many crowdfunded projects to pitch for more backers by stating that release is DRM-free. You can see people commenting about it, if it's not stated (and projects clarifying this point).

Take a look at fiasco with Veronica Mars crowdfunded film which was released with DRM. Backers of the film said all they thought about this failure. Interest in DRM-free releases was expressed very clearly there. If anything, crowdfunding is a major driver in putting an end to approach of the sick- minded publishers obsessed with DRM.

 _> In all seriousness, how much do you care for art?_

As much as I'm interested in something. If I see a project that's interesting to me, I consider supporting it on condition that it doesn't plan to use such unethical garbage as DRM in result. How much would I invest in it? That depends on the project. I don't do it out of having unlimited funds. Not at all - my funds are pretty limited. I do it because I care for those projects and without my support they are less likely to be created. I don't see how exclusivity fits into this. It doesn't mean I'm against perks - if someone wants to invest more, it's OK if they get more rewards. But DRM is not something that should be added as a distinguishing factor to anything. Because it shouldn't exist to begin with. Would you support the project which says that if you pay more, they'll give ecological wrap for you, but for the rest they'll ship the product in poisonous package?

Another reason to support some projects is to demonstrate demand. For instance, I would support games which are released for Linux (if I'm interested in them too), but won't support those which don't plan a Linux release.

For instance, Underworld Ascendant added Linux support to the base goal after getting feedback about it. As you can see, this also reduces exclusivity - it's inclusive, because more users are reached when release is cross platform. DRM-free release is similar in this sense.

<comment><USER17> OK, but do you have any numbers to back up the economic side of the argument? I get that it's an ethical issue for you, but you lose me when you talk about 'sick minded publishers,' because different editions with or without DRM are simply what they have available to sell, and they're just allocating to wherever they see the best price.

If Alice will pay $10 for a streaming copy (with DRM), Bob will pay $30 for a DRM-free copy, but Carol will pay $50 for an _exclusive_ DRM-free copy, the rational approach is to sell to Alice and Carol for a total of $60. Bob says that other people would be willing to buy the DRM-free copy later, but from the producer's standpoint the only thing that matters is who's willing to pay money up front because a) there are a lot of costs that have to be paid up front* and b) backend revenue is uncertain.

* Of course you can defray those up-front costs by asking people to work for free or deferred pay, which has been a very popular trend over the last decade. But it's awful to work that way and none of the projects I've ever done that for ever turned a profit.

Unfortunately Kickstarter doesn't provide a way to play the two off against each other, eg setting up 2 projects for DRM advocates vs owners and going with whichever one outraises the others.

 _Take a look at fiasco with Veronica Mars crowdfunded film which was released with DRM._

I did. I think it was a storm in a teacup, because the intersection between fans of a TV show and people who care passionately about DRM is just not that big. The primary issue seemed to be that people did not care for getting their digital download through Flixster and would rather have redeemed through iTunes or Amazon. As best I can see from the project page, ~22k people were willing to pay a $10 premium over the next reward to get a digital download in addition to a T-shirt, but not another $15 to get a DVD. About 10% of the comments post-release consisted of grumbling about the Flixster download (primarily that it was slow and/or buggy and unreliable; I'm not sure what percentage of them cared about the underlying principle), so it looks like maybe 2500 people who spent about $25,000 were pissed off, or ~4% of the backers contributing 0.5% of the budget.

The basic problem for producers is this: you can estimate the number of people interested in purchasing a restricted version of the film by looking at other projects which offer that and seeing how many of those reward offerings actually sold. I believe you that there are people sitting on the sidelines instead of donating/purchasing because they care about a DRM-free release, but how do I quantify what that demographic is worth?

 _If I see a project that 's interesting to me, I consider supporting it on condition that it doesn't plan to use such unethical garbage as DRM in result. How much would I invest in it? That depends on the project. I don't do it out of having unlimited funds. Not at all - my funds are pretty limited. I do it because I care for those projects and without my support they are less likely to be created._

OK, but your lack of support has to be set against the number of people who are willing to pay for some exclusive right. In the case of _Kung Fury_ that was about $90,000 - ~6000 people were willing to pay $20 for a 1080p download with exclusive content, vs $5 for the DRM-hobbled streaming version you paid for. So what I'm asking is: if you see a film you think you would like, what extra amount are you willing to pay to ensure it is made available DRM-free? It doesn't matter if you'd make a big donation of $1000 once a year to advance the cause, or you'd rather donate and extra $20 to 50 different projects, or even just 5.

But right now I have no idea how much you and other people who care about DRM are holding back. I looked at several different Kickstarter projects that offer DRM-free downloads (including _Game Loading - Rise of the Indies_ , which raised over $60k AUD) doing a similar analysis (trying to ID how much people were willing to contribute for the digital download only, rather than the next reward with additional swag) and the numbers seem to be in the low thousands. Even if I scale budgets the numbers are a good bit lower, eg about $45,000 in DRM-free download purchases if I imagine that other projects had brought in the same overall revenue as _Kung Fury_ and allocate the appropriate amount to download rewards.

This suggests that there's only half as much money on offer up front for DRM- free downloads as for exclusive offerings, and so that it's more rational to use a market segmentation strategy than to offer the same thing at the same price to everyone. From a producer standpoint, cash is the only thing that people are willing to accept as payment for work, and real cash now is much more persuasive than hypothetical cash later.

I mean, maybe you and other anti-DRM people should set up a fund and disburse grants or something, but only to people who commit to DRM-free movie and game releasing. That's how other people promote their causes. Money talks, as they say.

<comment><USER14> _> OK, but do you have any numbers to back up the economic side of the argument?_

There is research which shows that DRM always reduces potential for sales. So crowdfunding isn't any different in this aspect. Remember, they profit from sales post release too, and not only from crowdfunding investors.

 _> I mean, maybe you and other anti-DRM people should set up a fund and disburse grants or something, but only to people who commit to DRM-free movie and game releasing. That's how other people promote their causes. Money talks, as they say._

In my experience, most crowdfunded projects shun DRM (at least all that actually caught my attention), which is an indication for me that voting with your money works. They clearly see that DRM-free releases gives them more backers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Watching this last night made me feel old. I just don't get it. The ridiculousness and therefore the comedy seems to exist for the sake of being ridiculous. It isn't grounded in anything. That makes it lose it appeal very quickly for me. It reminds me of some of the old SNL movies. It takes a premise that was fun, funny, and interesting and stretches it into something that can't sustain itself. Different strokes I guess...

<comment><USER19> Maybe you are not old enough?

This film is pure concentrated 80's cheekiness and really takes you back. If you were do destroy bad 80's popular culture and keep only 30 minutes of it for reference, this would be it. Of course it does not work alone for many, because everything in it is reference back to the 80's.

It's very well done. I got 80's flashback from just those tracking errors in the beginning of the tape alone (funny how associative memory works).

deeper analysis:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/37mw8y/kung_fury_ha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/37mw8y/kung_fury_has_been_released_for_free_on_youtube/cro20li)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This movie is amazing. Every scene is just genius :)

<comment><USER21> Is it though? I watched more than half of it. It is a bunch of satirical scenes full of memes copy n pasted together with almost nothing in the way of actual storytelling, which makes it less of a movie and more of a collection of youtube clips.

<comment><USER14> It is satire, so enjoy it as is :)

<comment><USER22> it's not a satire at all, it's a parody,i'd even say a tribute. To understand the difference, an obvious example: Robocop is a satire.

<comment><USER14> Satire is a genre, which uses parody (literary approach to the story). So it is both - satire and a parody.

<comment><USER22> Satire requires some kind of political statement or social criticism. Kung fury isn't a satire.

<comment><USER23> One could argue it's a social criticism of 80's exploitation films and Michael Bay movies.

<comment><USER22> > Michael Bay movies.

which are also social criticism themselves ... a social criticism of a social criticism ? now everything looks like post-modernism lol... Seriously, there is no social criticism here, just tropes of 80's movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> SG- Was instantly reminded of Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dofacvjRkc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dofacvjRkc)

<comment><USER24> Surprised no one mentioned this already. I was a KS backer for Kung Fury and pretty sure that Blood Dragon gave them some "inspiration". Love them both!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems like it borrows a lot from Axe Cop

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHGfSBr2FrY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHGfSBr2FrY)

<comment><USER26> My son and I thought the same thing. The fact that they were able to upgrade it to live action and still pull it off was an accomplishment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The production quality is surprisingly good for something I found through a link that includes the text 'funded through kickstarter'.

<comment><USER14> Check this trailer out too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTidn2dBYbY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTidn2dBYbY)

<comment><USER27> Yeah, this is pretty impressive. I assume the production team probably has a lot of experience. Thanks!

<comment><USER28> That guy is 28! What is it with swedes that makes them so non-dilettantes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Cool array of '80s home computers at 10:20, including ZX Spectrum with cassette player _and_ microdrive.

<comment><USER14> See also [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEkrWRHCDQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEkrWRHCDQU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm in Colorado today can't wait to get done work, head back to my hotel, and enjoy some of what this fine city has to offer while watching this.

</comment><comment><USER31> That is so bogus ... Hacker man used pow(x,2)... why would he do that when he could have just done x*x? I mean, that's so freshman CS student...

<comment><USER14> He also pressed Break and the voice said "Enter" ;)

<comment><USER32> He always presses Break instead of Enter. That's some next level hacking right there.

<comment><USER33> He remapped break to enter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I started not liking Triceracops but at the end I was sold.

</comment><comment><USER9> For the people for who this went _wooosh_ , can you chime in if you lived through this time period and remember the media or not?

(full disclosure, I thought it hit the nostalgic feelings I have from that time almost perfectly)

<comment><USER35> I was a kid in the 80's and I thought the movie was pretty accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Kung Fury is more about the faux-80s that was brought about by Far Cry: Blood Dragon.

Not that that's a bad thing, but "true 80s" flicks are a bit different IMO (ie: Breakfast Club, Back to the Future and the like).

<comment><USER37> Saw two (was it three?) decapitations in the first two minutes. One thing which distinguishes the 80s "genre" was that those things were rarely shown outside movies like The Omen. TV was deliberately sanitised, protagonists developed nice, tidy holes when they got shot, they had time for a few last- minute words, they expired with dignity.

<comment><USER14> It's grotesque on purpose. Note the burning baby carriage and "Try cocaine" billboard in the beginning. And that goes all way through, as core of its satire.

<comment><USER37> I realise that, but "80s action comedy" isn't really true. 80s action comedies include such gems as The Naked Gun, Beverly Hills Cop and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

What's the referent for this movie, if it's "80s action comedy"? I can't think of anything like it, it's more like Duke Nukem frankly.

<comment><USER38> You're aiming to high when you reference The Naked gun, Beverly Hills Cop and Bill & Ted. This film references the lower budget fare more than the popular big budget films. Don't think of the films you'd see of the cineplex in the 80s, think of the films you'd either see late night on one of the local UHF TV stations or on VHS, often starring Chuck Norris or some no-name mediocre white martial artist. Also emphasis on Action, not the Comedy (or think of Kung Fury as a comedic take on 80s low budget action films).

I was a backer, but also grew up in the late 70s/80s and this film skewers my childhood movie memories to near perfection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Did anyone else notice that Hackerman looks like the 1980's edition of Bill Joy?

HACKERMAN'S HACKING TUTORIALS - How To Hack Time

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEkrWRHCDQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEkrWRHCDQU)</comment>


Pwake - Wake up call pairing - <AUTHOR> https://pwake.neocities.org

<comment><AUTHOR> I collect contact info from individuals who want a wake up call at the same time and pair them by geographic region so they can phone each other.

This service not automated, complicated or scalable. It uses a Google form to collect information, which is appended to a Google spreadsheet that I have access to. It is hosted on neocities.org, in case I wish to add informational pages in addition to the sign-up form. I manually verify, pair and contact participants.

My goals are modest, 100-300 users, so that the chances of finding people who match are good. If there were more than 300 users I would not be able to administer it manually.

Are there any changes I could make to speed adoption or increase usefulness?</comment>


New human ancestor discovered near fossil of 'Lucy' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/new-human-ancestor-discovered-near-fossil-of-lucy-1.17644

<comment><USER2> How can they tell it was a different species from Lucy just by a jaw bone. By species, I mean not able to inter-breed; unless I have the definition of species wrong.

<comment><USER3> The article (vaguely) describes the differences between this new jaw bone and any other known Australopithecus jaw.

Where to draw the line of "species" is a very nuanced problem. Taxonomy is fascinating and often debated!

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lucy - you got some splaining to do!!!!</comment>


Court: iPod hearing loss your fault, not Apple's - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/30/ipod_hearing_loss_appeal/ <comment><USER2> Liability exposure is much increased today for several reasons:

1\. Legal second-guessing: Here, Apple used a particular design for its ear buds. The second-guessing comes in where courts say, "yes, we know that you made these design decisions but, were you to use some alternative design, or to include an additional warning, you could meet all the legitimate goals of your product while at the same time reducing the number of potential injuries to your customers at no appreciable added cost." The law then defines this deficit (or lack of warning) as a product "defect," not because the product can't be used in a safe way but because the second-guessers have proclaimed that there is a safer way that might be used that still achieves the product's goals at no significant additional cost. Experts are then trotted out to say, "I am an authority on ear buds and the design used by Apple creates avoidable risks and hence needless injuries to customers." The matter is then tossed to a jury for a crap-shoot outcome. Welcome to the modern world of product liability law.

2\. Class actions: The above approach to product-liability law is made far more pernicious when the class-action vehicle givers the second-guessers the opportunity to multiply their damages for every product sold, whether or not it ever caused any injury to anyone specific. When combined with potentially surprise sources of liability (e.g., ear buds that harm no one physically in 99.999% of cases suddenly becoming "defective" because a theoretical argument might be made about how they might be safer), the class-action vehicle turns law from a sleepy-time industry where individual practitioners wait around for individual clients with real injuries to retain them to sue for compensation into a mega-industry where creative lawyers can find nearly infinite ways of creating potentially massive liability risks for manufacturers. Welcome to the world of jackpot justice.

3\. Pleading rules: Modern pleading rules make this stew even more lethal. In essence, the modern world is governed by what is called "notice pleading." The idea is that all one normally has to do is state in broad terms what happened to give rise to a legal claim and the case is set on a path to get to a jury. In recent years, some of this excess has been cut back as these rules have been modified to a degree. Nonetheless, modern judges tend to have very few tools with which to hack away at frivolous claims and to dismiss them before they can reach a jury. The result is that defendants facing even the most bizarre-sounding of legal claims are forced to run up major legal bills dealing with such claims through an expensive process of pretrial discovery and trial. It is not unusual for a modest case involving middle-class parties to go for one to two or more years in such cases and to cost each side six figures in legal fees. In the case involving Apple and the ear buds, the legal costs would easily have run $10M and up if the case were allowed to go forward for a year or so.

4\. Absence of personal responsibility: The modern trend in law sees courts as being protective of citizens in ways that used to be regarded as unnecessary - hence, courts today routinely come up with new or expanded theories of liability that they see as taking on the big companies for the benefit of the larger society. One can debate this either way on the merits but it is a fact of life and it does lead to ever-wider bases upon which defendants can be held liable.

Put all the above together and it is no wonder that common sense goes out the window. It is no longer an issue of "did this party use this product and injure himself in the process and, if he did, did the manufacturer do something negligent or did the product itself not get manufactured properly or safely such as to cause an injury." Instead, it is: "has this party alleged broad claims that show that all purchasers of this product might be subjected to risks that could be avoided with simple warnings or with simple alternative designs and, if so, how will a jury decide that question after hearing all the experts hypothesize about the various alternatives and after hearing experts speculate about how this manufacturer is causing hundreds of millions of dollars of injuries to a broad class of people who might be using this product."

Thus, the law moves from individual cases involving provable cause and effect to group cases involving battles of experts and juries being given enormous power to impose liabilities on product manufacturers.

In this context, it is quite unusual that this case got tossed at the first stage and even more so for the appeals court to uphold the trial judge in that action. Of course, with open forum shopping being the norm in today's world of litigation, other cases can easily be brought in more receptive venues with outcomes that are far from predictable. This unfortunately is how modern litigation works.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any sort law background? Your knowledge is certainly above the general citizen, but the application of the law is off.

1\. Safer alternative design is only recognized in a minority of US jurisdictions. Warning defects is a separate cause of action from design defects. The Apple warning w/r/t iPods is precisely written as it is because of warning defect laws across the country. Also, w/r/t warning defects, there is no duty to warn of open and obvious defects.

2\. w/r/t class actions, damages aren't multiplied by products sold, but rather by injured plaintiffs. There are no surprise sources of liability. The causes of action are mechanical and slow moving.

3\. Yes, you are correct w/r/t pleadings. But a pleading is only the first step in filing a lawsuit. Once that is filed, the facts and evidence starts getting passed around. Also see Fed R. Civ. P Rule 12(b)(6) (motion to dismiss) and Rule 56 (summary judgement). The parties vigorously fight between themselves to rid of the lawsuit versus keep it going. And both Defendants and Plaintiffs drag on lawsuits for various tactical reasons.

4\. Look to the State Legislatures for the law updates, not the Courts. California has an "Unfair Competition Law" that gives expanded causes of actions, and was created by the Legislature, not the courts. Massachusetts has a similar statute (MGL 93A Unfair and Deceptive Business Practices). It is the legislatures moving to protect their citizens, not the Courts.

Yes, you have to prove cause and effect. Lawyers call it proximate cause and it is an essential element in most (perhaps all) causes of action.

w/r/t forum shopping, I guess. There are specific rules on where a suit may be filed. To move to another jurisdiction you need a plaintiff in that jurisdiction. The Apple case was in California because the plaintiff and Apple are in California.

I skipped over some other stuff but those are the big areas that caught my eye.

And yes, my viewpoint is shaped by being a person close to becoming a lawyer.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for your clarifications on products law (I am not a tort lawyer).

On the other hand, I am an experienced litigator and the points I made about litigation process, etc. are spoken from real-world experience going back many years and including a federal clerkship and Big Law tenure where I had lots of experience in seeing how class actions worked in practice. I have simplified those points in order to avoid legal technicalities and have instead tried to express them in terms of their practical effect (which, in the world of class- action lawyering, has much more to do with legal shakedowns than it does with formalities such as proximate cause or actual injuries suffered by individual plaintiffs).

Would be happy to talk further offline if you like - just email me.

<comment><USER3> First, I am sufficiently embarrassed that I neglected to check your profile. I slightly remembered your name, but could not remember why. Then I refreshed my recollection by viewing your profile and remember your Startup Law 101 posts.

I tend to side with letting the courts do their job. Yes, legal shakedowns certainly occur. I am more worried about smaller companies being affected than large ones, though. But that worry comes from much less legal experience than you.

Is it too idealistic to think that Rule 11 limits the scope and frequency of legal shakedowns?

<comment><USER2> Too idealistic, in my judgment, to see Rule 11 as having that effect (for others, this is a rule generally allowing federal courts to impose sanctions for frivolous or bad faith conduct in litigation). That said, I am not hostile to courts and would be the first to say that they serve us well on many fronts - that is what saddens me all the more about the way litigation can be so ill- used in our society as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like any other tool litigation can be used or abused. It's unfortunate that a lot of abuses have gone unpunished and that more people (and companies) are taking these bad examples as 'the way to do it' because everybody else is doing it too.

This is not a purely American thing, though I would definitely contend that the United States has seen some of the worst excesses of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thank god. It's the user's responsibility to know how loud they should be listening to music, and if it's a child then the parents should use the Volume Lock feature. This is like when people sued McDonalds because eating there 3 times a day, 7 times a week made them fat.

<comment><USER3> We may think that it is the user's responsibility to know, but that is not the law in most jurisdictions.

Apple didn't win this case because the Court thought personal responsibility should triumph. Apple won the case because the plaintiffs didn't plead sufficient facts, and therefore the Court dismissed the case.

A better plaintiff, that is one that has actually sustained an injury, could prevail against Apple. The plaintiffs in the case do not allege any personal harm. Secondly, a court in a different state may rule differently. This case applied California law only.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, my original post was just my opinion.

edit: change accidental exclaimation point to period. Stupid iPhone keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "They alleged that the iPod (1) comes with 'stock ear buds...designed to be placed deep into the ear canal rather than over the ears"

Moral of the story: It's hard to win when your allegation is factually incorrect.

</comment><comment><USER6> To my way of thinking the ear buds which are placed within the ear canal are actually better for preventing hearing loss. They allow you to focus just a small amount of sound and still get that perfect musical sensation.

I can't believe that people are wasting their time and money trying to sue Apple over the matter. That is like people suing a car manufacturer because they played music too loud in their car and ruined their hearing. _I'm suing GMC because they made a car that has sub woofers that can play music at tremendous decibels and which has a gas tank which allows the car to run for a long time._

When you compare the two it is clear that both are ridiculous.

<comment><USER7> I like ear buds, as long as there isn't too much ambient noise (e.g. if you're on an airplane, it's impossible to hear anything with ear buds, and you need over-ear headphones).

Also, you probably mean decibels, not decimals. :)

<comment><USER6> _Also, you probably mean decibels, not decimals. :)_

Thanks for catching my typo. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So it's not just about the iPod's output, but the inclusion of "stock ear buds...designed to be placed deep into the ear canal rather than over the ears, which increases the danger of hearing damage".

I always thought it should be a crime that iPods don't come with a pair Sennheiser PX100s. Though not because of any "danger of hearing damage"...

</comment><comment><USER9> By contrast, in France, iPods are limited by law to a maximum of 100 dB. (Sorry, I'm on a laissez-faire kick after just having read Capitalism and Freedom.)

<comment><AUTHOR> And even that is still pretty dangerous:

<http://www.dangerousdecibels.org/hearingloss.cfm>

What bugs me is that if you want to blow up your ears, go right ahead, after all you know your 'comfort zone' better than I do, and what can drive headphones can drive speakers (which require much higher power levels to function) just the same.

Headphones have been plugged in to amps since the stone age of radio technology and nobody was ever stupid enough to sue the manufacturer of a device because they didn't know how to operate a volume control.

<comment><USER10> Oh but you don't place the speakers "deep into your ear canal"... ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ever been to a pop concert ?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why is base 60 more precise for trigonometry, can you give an example? - <AUTHOR> https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2405480/why-is-base-60-more-precise-for-trigonometry-can-you-give-an-example <comment><USER2> With decimal numbers we can write 1/3 as 3/10+3/100+3/1000+..., it is infinite series converging to 1/3\. With base 60 we can write it as 20/60, just one term of series is not null. When dealing with infinite series one would need to pick few first terms of series dropping the rest thus losing precision.

With decimal numbers we can write down exact quotient when divide by powers of 2 and 5, because 10=2 * 5. With base twelve we could write exact quotients from division by powers of 2 and 3. With base 60 we could write anything that comes from division by powers of 2, 3 and 5. It can be archieved with base 30=2 * 3 * 5, and I'm not sure that base 60 superior to 30, it do not allow to write more fractional numbers precisely. Maybe it sometimes simplifies arithmetic operations though. I believe, it is easier to divide by 4 in base 60 than in base 30.

Now we have processors that can deal with great amount of terms of series and can keep any reasonable precision we need (in the most cases at least), but back then it was hard work for skilled enough to deal with arithmetic operations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Counting to twelve is easy with one hand. Counting to sixty is easy with two hands. It is a modern thing to count to ten with two hands.

<comment><USER4> What you say might be true - although there are many people who doubt it, with some quoting research papers - but it simply doesn't answer the question asked, and is pretty much a complete _non sequitur._

<comment><USER3> People use what they use. So if they use base twelve or base sixty or binary or octal or hexadecimal or base five because they have a simple way of counting in that grouping then that's what you'll see them using. Just because we don't use it today doesn't mean anything.</comment></comment></comment>


Show/Ask HN: My side project for over a year; should I take it on full time? - <AUTHOR> https://market.android.com/details?id=com.makeramen.noodles <comment><USER2> Here's my opinion, build another app, or better yet build 3 other apps and diversify your income. 1 mobile app is not enough to require full time dedication, but having 3 or 4 apps to cycle between will keep you busy and should provide good money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I upvoted, and you're not the first to suggest this either. But I must argue that to have 3 or 4 well-ranked apps with a solid income is easier said than done, especially for a single developer.

I wish I had the insight to know exactly what 3 or 4 other apps to write so I can have a steady income. But chances are by the time I finish writing 3 _good_ apps a year from now, I'll be lucky if one of them has as much traction as this one.

The other choice would be to take this app that already has traction (from only my part time work) and pour more time an energy into it to see how big it could really get.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER3> I am facing the exact same decision set in many respects.

1\. I have one good app in dev process in a market segment that is hot, Custom HomeScreens

2\. I know that I need some more apps, was thinking some quick 2d games via using andengine.

3\. I do have some fulltime inquiries that might work as base income to fund the full 12 month weekend-evening dev cycle.

Pull Tim Bray's recent blog posts on making money in the android market. There also was some recent HN articles on android dev's making $120,000 yearly with a paired free and paid approach.

BTW, what dev processes are you using thus far? I am switching to combination TDD and BDD approach using robolectric and robotium/android-mock to take some of the pain out.

<comment><USER4> this blog post? [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/26/Mobile- Mon...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/26/Mobile-Money)

<comment><USER3> that is one of them and he has some more in fact..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who's been doing the nights-and-weekends thing for a long time, my advice is: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Do you really, really hate your job? Is it coming to a point where you have to choose one or the other?

Quitting your job and jumping onto your app full time might accelerate development, but it probably won't accelerate revenue, at least not a lot. Keep growing it on the side and take the leap when it's not a huge step down from your current income and when sales are steady enough that you feel comfortable.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very slick app, but discovery on Android can be tough.

Shoot me an email, aschobel (at) catch.com and I can put you in touch with our Google Developer advocates, you definitely want to get featured.

What are you thinking of using for online sync/backup? RTM? Google lets you backup blobs using BackupManager, might be worth looking into.

Good luck!

<comment><USER7> I've always wondered how they chose their featured apps. Any more insight?

<comment><USER6> You need to contact them and they have a team decide if they will feature you.

They look at how closely you follow the Android HIG, level of polish in the app, have you been recently featured, etc.

We also send them beta version of our apps and they give us great feedback.

<comment><USER3> Thank you! I was wondering how that works even though I have contributed some bug fixes to the android sdk before...

Is there a google page with the addy to send the betas ?

Once again thanks for the info

<comment><USER6> _shrug_ I haven't seen any online page to send betas and such.

Meet a few of the dev advocates at IO, SXSW, and a bunch of the Android events around SF.

<comment><USER3> I just found another way.. several of my Angel VC contacts are friendly with Google Android Dev Advocates..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Catch.com will bring you some tough competition since they raised a few million in capital and their app is free.

I've tried out a ton of todo list apps on Android theirs was the best.

Syncing with their site is key. I can type out a grocery list at home on my laptop onto their site. Then at the store pull out the phone and its there.

That would be a great feature to offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, web app + sync is the big push I would need a lot of time to commit to.

And I've definitely seen catch/3banana before. I feel like they are more competitors to Evernote than to me. Simplenote's recent addition of a list feature has me more troubled, even though they don't have an android client yet.

<comment><USER9> You're right, simplenote doesn't have a native android client but I am a simplenote user and use mNote on my galaxy s; no complaints, syncs flawlessly (haven't used 'lists' though). Just posting in case you haven't seen the app.

Good luck, I'm going to give your app a go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Throws an SSL error/warning:

        This is probably not the site that you are looking for!

        You attempted to reach market.android.com, but instead you actually
        reached a server identifying itself as *.google.com.  This may be
        caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more
        serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to
        visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of market.android.com.
        You should not proceed.

<comment><USER6> Seems to be back to normal, using Chrome 9.0.597.107

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Depends on how much $ you're making from it and what sort of growth you think you can achieve.

I checked out the app and it looks very nice. I will be buying soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm making anywhere from $500-$1500 a month, it really varies based on sales. The biggest leap I want to make is to offer a web version with sync, but that would be a rather large effort.

Ideally I'd like to see it become a Web+Device synced version of Things that actually exists.

<comment><USER7> Why $2.99? Have you tried other price points?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was originally at .99, then raised to 1.99, and eventually 2.99 without seeing significant decrease in sales numbers. But at 2.99 I did start getting comments saying it was expensive, so I decided that was a good price to stay at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Diversify. The mobile app market is very volatile, and you don't want to put your eggs in one basket. As many others suggest here you probably want to make a few other apps which have traction just in case your big one fails.

There's a lot going against you as time goes on. Other people roll out apps, technology changes which could suddenly cut your income -- so yea, highly recommend you diversify.

</comment><comment><USER13> WHY DID NO ONE MENTION RTM? It's by far the best list out there

</comment><comment><USER14> In my experience, when I am thinking about doing something (no matter how big or small), it generally turns out better when I do it instead of when I don't.</comment>


GCC 10.1 Released - <AUTHOR> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-announce/2020/000163.html <comment><USER2> I love the built-in static analyzer _-fanalyzer_ option in gcc-10.

[1] [https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Static-Analyzer- Options.h...](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Static-Analyzer-Options.html)

<comment><USER3> Imagine if -fanalyze was like rusts borrow checker

<comment><USER4> You Rust borrow checker requires special annotations and restrictions put on the code to do its job. I don't think you could something like that automatically on a C or C++ full codebase without having to manually annotate and refactor it somewhat. There are many common (and safe) C and C++ patterns that would be outright rejected by Rust's borrow checker, for instance initializing a structure or array partially if you're sure that nobody is going to use the initialized portion. Or having multiple mutable pointers/reference to the same object.

You could do something like that at runtime though, but then you have Valgrind, basically.

<comment><USER5> > Rust borrow checker requires special annotations and restrictions put on the > code to do its job.

This is a good thing, because it makes lifetimes and ownership explicit and visible in the code. It serves the similar purpose as type annotations in function signatures.

> Or having multiple mutable pointers/reference to the same object

Sure you can have that with `unsafe`. And this is a good thing, because multiple mutable pointers to the same object is at best bad coding practice that leads to unsafe code, and you should avoid that in any language, including the ones with GC. Working with codebases where there are multiple distant things mutating shared stuff is a terrible experience.

If a C/C++ version of "borrow checker" could mark such (anti)patterns at least as warnings, that would bring a lot of value.

<comment><USER6> Can you explain why multiple mutable pointers is bad practice?

I understand the benefits and the risks of them, and understand how Rust prevents both, but I dont yet understand why it's bad practice, and am interested to learn why.

<comment><USER7> The one that affects you as a programmer most is Iterator invalidation. Iter borrows from the vector, you mutate the vector, iter blows up. Simple really. But a lot of code is like this. Borrow from hashmap, insert into hashmap, the slot gets moved around and your pointer is now invalid. That's just vectors and hashmaps; imagine the possibilities in a much more complex data structure.

There are compiler optimisations you can do if compiler knows about aliasing, but that's not so much a software authorship problem. There are some curly problems with passing aliased mutable pointers to a function written for non- aliased inputs, like memcpy and I imagine quite a lot of other code.

But common to all of these things is that it's pretty hard to figure out if the programmer is the one who has to track the aliasing. In hashmap pointer invalidation, your code might work perfectly for years until some input comes along and finally triggers a shift or a reallocation at the exact right time. (I know this — I recently had to write a lot of C and these are the kinds of issues you get even after you implement some of Rust's std APIs in C.)

<comment><USER6> Is this still bad practice if the container can detect when this happens, like Java's? Not saying that it always has to throw like Java, I could imagine implementing a weak iter which we'd check before each operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Extended characters in identifiers may now be specified directly in the > input encoding (UTF-8, by default), in addition to the UCN syntax (\uNNNN or > \UNNNNNNNN) that is already supported:

        static const int π = 3;
        int get_naïve_pi() {
          return π;
        }

Lovely!

<comment><USER9> i don't know if you are being ironic or not, but the non-english speaking world will love it.

<comment><USER10> As a non-English programmer who has seen a lot of code not written using English please, god, NO. The mixture of English and other languages identifiers in the external libraries makes me cry.

<comment><USER11> Yep, writing non english keywords in C++ is like having prolog code inside c++ :-)

(but as a non english person, I find it _very_ helpful to be able to have unicode in strings)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Several C++20 features have been implemented: > P0912R5, Coroutines > (requires -fcoroutines)

Nice to see a bunch of C++20 features making it in. Coroutines seems like a big one!

</comment><comment><USER13> Lovely! Time to see my code go even faster, for free :)

</comment><comment><USER14> memory.c: In function 'mk_entry': memory.c:116:12: internal compiler error: in saved_diagnostic, at analyzer/diagnostic-manager.cc:84 116 | return (struct entry) {safe_calloc(end - start, 1), start, end}; | ^ Please submit a full bug report,

Goes to look at README.Bugs. Holy cow, I don't have time to to check all those places to see if it has been reported already.

<comment><USER15> The GCC community is normally very good (if blunt) at picking up duplicate bugs and linking them to the right place. [https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/](https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/) Is all you need. Just don't feel bad if your bug is closed!

<comment><USER14> Thanks, it was fixed already :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> (side note for RMS, I still have a "RUNGCC" sticker on my car (it's been 5 years !!!))

</comment><comment><USER16> wish gcc 10 was built into ubuntu 20.04

<comment><USER17> If you want the newest version of software, Ubuntu does not cater to that.

<comment><USER18> Well, you might want to run a newer/non-lts release via lxd/lxc. It's probably a much better idea than pulling in willy-nilly ppa's.

<comment><USER19> But at this point, why not simply run Arch Linux?

<comment><USER20> You might want LTS and upgrade some packages when needed/forced and not play the "update" lottery. New updates not only bring you cool new feature and fixes , they bring new bugs and sometimes features are removed or GUIs are moved around. At least with my LTS I worked around for existing bugs , upgraded from PPA the things I needed to, browsers are latest versions and my IDE is auto-updating too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It doesn't seem to be available on the main site or any of the mirrors I tried.

<comment><USER22> > It doesn't seem to be available on the main site

Surely it's available from here at the very least?

[https://gcc.gnu.org/git.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/git.html)

> or any of the mirrors I tried

Seems to be to me?

ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/sourceware.org/pub/gcc/releases/gcc-10.1.0/</comment></comment>