Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again - <AUTHOR> http://tghw.com/blog/magic-how-to-launch-a-product-so-no-one-will-ever-use-it-again <comment><USER2> Indeed. If free-text SMS was an ideal way to interact with online delivery and concierge services you'd think someone would have done that already on an existing service. So then, why can't I just order from Seamless or Instacart via SMS?

Oh right, because that experience sucks mightily. I have this lovely full color screen that can display menus, location and delivery times, let me search by cuisine, choose various customizations, etc etc. Then a "magic" computer sends the orders to the restaurant via an already configured and tested system so they are expecting an order and can fill it quickly and efficiently.

Or alternatively, thanks to this innovative new startup, I can SMS to some random number and say "I want food or something do you have any burritos" and then have them text me back, etc, etc.

BUT WAIT says the new startup. IT'S NOT JUST BURRITOS, in fact it's not just food. You could ask for a burrito today and a flight to Cancun tomorrow, and you only have to put one phone number in your address book.

Aha, the real value proposition emerges. This startup uses their proprietary technology to know that Seamless or Instacart or Expedia exist already, and then they use it for me. Except it takes twice as long, without the UI/UX those services have perfected, and costs 30-50% more money.

Step one: Landing page

Step two: Corner the market on taking SMS messages and using them to punch orders into existing apps, using skilled college graduate US based labor.

Step three: VC/YC EXPLOSION

Step four: Profit

<comment><USER3> Virtualized personal assistant services aren't really anything new. This one just had an interesting/novel/awesome (and probably unsustainable) approach to the onboarding, UX, and price model - instead of "hiring" a "virtual assistant" and doing a bunch of sign up forms and paperwork, you just punch an address and card and away you go.

As for why people want a personal assistant to shop for them when they could just use an app, think about it this way:

To get things (even online), I have to:

      * Decide what *specifically* I want (brand, item, size, etc.)
      * Decide where to get it from
      * Obtain their website or app
      * (often) Sign up for an account
      * Enter a bunch of information to order what I want
      * Follow up if it's late or wrong

With this service (or a hired personal assistant) I have to:

      * Decide what type of thing I want
      * Tell someone to make it happen

Also, I wouldn't call Instacart or Expedia's interface "perfected." Thanks to the way the industry works there's still not a single website where I can say "find me the cheapest flights from point A to point B in date range X" and have it _actually_ do so. With Instacart, I can't just punch in a natural- language grocery list and say "get me decent quality options for each, but make the beef grass-fed please." I have to go through a huge array of brands and potential sources for each item and decide what to get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've launched something (once) that went from 0 to breaking in less than 10 hours. I aged at least a couple of years and it took weeks before we managed to get a grip on the situation. We were about as unprepared as could be. This is what all of you starter-uppers are dreaming of, but when the growth is higher than you can handle you're going to have to move _really fast_ if you want to capture your potential. Unfortunately we had no idea what we were doing so I'm pretty sure those first weeks cost us dearly. Fortunately for the magic people their scaling issues are something that can be overcome and I really hope that they'll do well because of this.

Cut them some slack and think about how hard it would be to pull this off with such rapid growth _without_ having any delays or issues during the first phase of rapid growth. Dealing with high levels of traffic and orders is hard, dealing with high levels of growth is a lot harder still.

Amazing they managed to ship the order at all.

<comment><USER5> At the very least they should've set up an auto-reply that explains they've been flooded with unexpected high load, with an average reply duration of half an hour or whatever it was at the time.

<comment><USER4> Would you suggest they do that during or after trying to deal with said unexpected high load?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had to wait, in my apartment, for 40 MINUTES.

"Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E)

<comment><AUTHOR> I love that bit.

But in this case, waiting an hour and a half for a middle man to do what it would have taken me 2 minutes to do wasn't worth the extra $9 they were asking for.

<comment><USER7> Why'd you rely on a very beta web service being offered to the public for _the very first time_ to do what you could have done in 2 minutes?

I didn't make an order, but I fail to see how you could have been surprised by this. They have no idea how much demand they were going to have at launch, and it's not a service that can scale easily.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't rely on it. I tried it out to see how well it would work.

When I first signed up, they wait-listed me. Then, a few hours later they let me (and apparently everyone else) in. They didn't need to do that, but they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note that the "Magic is a beta product released less than a week ago" excuse is irrelevant.

If Magic wants to be competitive, it needs to have services equal to or better than existing options. (The Postmates comparison mentioned in the article is valid). That's the way it is with all startups and "they're just figuring themselves out" is not a sympathy granted by the marketplace.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. They launched a beta to see if anyone would use it. If no one used it, then they could cut bait and move on.

But people did use it, enough that it caused them to be horrendously slow. This means they should put more money into making it bigger. If there are a few hundred "innovators" (in the Everett Rogers/Crossing the Chasm sense) who were so alienated by bad service during the beta that they will never ever use it again, even when it becomes a good service...well, that sucks but has no bearing on the ultimate success or failure of the service.

If you're going to beta test something, you have to expect it to have a few flaws. That's the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You actually submitted a story to hackernews about trying to order a burrito and it was $5 more expensive than you wanted it to be...?

<comment><AUTHOR> The story is about a very disappointing first user experience and how it led me to never want to use the service again. The burrito is just a side plot.

<comment><USER4> I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway success. Wait a while to give them a chance to get their act together and try again.

First user experience during the hockey stick phase being 'poor' is to be expected for anything with this degree of growth. Try scaling anything through three orders of magnitude in 24 hours and you'll get why.

The amazing thing to me is that your order got delivered at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> First, they had an invite wall when I signed up. I was ~4000th in line, but they let me in anyway. This was their first mistake.

The bigger problem is that their service is just a simple middle man. They don't provide delivery services, they just choose which service to use. For the examples they gave (food delivery, grocery delivery, airline tickets), it's never going to be worth it to me to have them charge me an extra 25% to pick between the three services that will do that for me (Postmates, Instacart/Postmates, Hipmunk). What's more, SMS makes it more difficult to order. Postmates' interface is much better than trying to text an order in.

It's not that this is just an MVP. It's that this service really only takes away the decision of which other middle man to choose, and there's just not enough value there.

<comment><USER11> Do they just keep your CC # on file?

<comment><USER12> They use Square, so you set up a payment method attached to your phone number, and they use your phone number to check out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't worry. It's just their "minimal viable product". <\-- Hate that, that phrase has become an excuse to ship/launch crap.

<comment><USER14> Hmm, not sure it's an MVP - it lacks V.

<comment><USER15> If it creates buzz and makes money, it's viable. A few unsatisfied customers should be irrelevant in the greater scheme.

<comment><USER14> So are we suggesting that we know the missing step?

      1. Build something
      2. ???
      3. Profit!

We're suggesting that it's

      1. Build something
      2. Reduce convenience, increase price, piss people off, but get press
      3. Profit!

???

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No, this is exactly how early-stage startups often work. It's a great lesson to anybody who hasn't experienced it. Planned launches rarely go as well as planned, and big visibility happens when you are the least prepared. Been there, experienced that.

According to the team, this was a side project, they had put a crappy landing page out there (with Times Roman as a font and got some flak for that) and somebody else submitted it to Product Hunt and it took off. They quickly improved the landing page and started handling orders.

Now almost everybody reading HN knows them. They chose a brand name that is easy to remember. If they get their shit together in 6 months and relaunch, they will be totally fine. Most early stage startups can only dream of the kind of visibility they got.

The bigger problem is that this kind of surprise success doesn't necessarily validate the idea, but at least now they can see and start to measure retention.

</comment><comment><USER17> Despite the humour and, on the surface, being a story about ordering a burrito, I think this is actually a very useful 'what not to do' cautionary tale for startups. They've clearly got a concept which, on paper, sounds like a good idea. They've then rushed development and gone to market without actually testing enough to know that they can deliver (literally) what the customer wants. That kind of early0stages growing needs to hapen before the company can gain a public reputation.

<comment><USER4> That's simply a function of growth. You can not prepare for runaway growth like this, it's easier said than done and from the sidelines it looks like a piece of cake.

At this level of growth _any_ action that you did not automate away will bite you in a terrible way. And that's what all the handbooks say right: wait with automation until you've found your product:market fit. But what if that outruns you?

<comment><USER17> I agree, but in this context I think that it's a valid criticism as their business model is a sort of 'all things under one roof' delivery system that should be prepared to offer a simple delivery like this one ate a competetive price/timeframe. I'm definitely not saying that people starting a business, particularly one in a service capacity, shouldn't expect to have to adapt with growth. I suppose the main point I was making is that prior to launching you should ensure that you are fulfilling your core functionality to at least a market-comparable level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess I am wondering how Magic is supposed to succeed. Most sites I need to go to tend to have very custom means to make ordering efficient, in the few cases where you might not know where to order something from a quick search is all that takes?

Who is their target market? Let alone if I saw another service hitting up my site like this I would likely try to find out why customer's weren't finding it on their own or using it on their own, two things which would be at the top of the list to improve all the time.

Perhaps to give people a separate billing point to reduce exposure of personal information? Look I just paid thirty bucks for a pizza and Pizza Place will never know it was really for me!!! Seriously the only convienence I can see if reducing the number of entities with my CC info

</comment><comment><USER19> The latency is certainly understandable for a product that just went live to quite a bit of promotion... but considering that they included an invite barrier to keep things from outpacing their infrastructure, there's obviously a pretty severe point of failure here.

</comment><comment><USER11> For some contrast, a first-time user could fire up the Domino's app and have a pizza delivered at the regular cost (+ tip and regular delivery charge) in 30 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's so hard to find good help these days.

(Or people on HN who understand irony, apparently.)

<comment><USER21> I honestly hope Magic amasses a lump sum from all the suckers and takes off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Magic say they include the Tip.

<comment><USER23> As far as I understood, the main issue was the astronomically huge latency, not the price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why are you using the Reed College logo on your website? Your resume doesn't list any activity there. Watch out for legal issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Griffin is a family name. I've looked into it and that particular representation of a griffin predates Reed's use of it.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it seems that that graphic is distinct from the Reed seal. Best of luck then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> ITT: mean-spirited people bash the hard work of others.</comment>


Facebook A Haven For Hate Groups - <AUTHOR> http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/09/report-facebook-a-haven-for-ha.html

<comment><USER2> Best response to this is in the comments onm the articles:

 _Outside the U.S., you're asking Facebook to make politically based value decisions. No Iranian should claim that the holocaust didn't happen, because holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. But can an Armenian group claim that Turks committed genocide against them, when it is illegal to make such claims in Turkey?_

It's a complicated mess - just where do you draw the line (beyond what your legally required to do)</comment>


Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

<comment><USER2> Ooooh. Why gaze at our own navels, when we can ask other people to make a collaborative fingerpainting of our collective navel, and stare at _that_ instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> The link here is older than the article at Wikipedia itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Best of luck to proving notability. From what I can tell, the requirements for not getting hit by a speedy deletion for not being notable get more stringent every day.

<comment><USER4> I would argue that Hacker News is at least as notable as Digg or Reddit.

In other words, absolute notability may be hard to establish, but in this case relative notability is a cinch.

<comment><USER5> >> "I would argue that Hacker News is at least as notable as Digg or Reddit."

Notable to us, sure. But notable to the world? I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this submission is an abuse both of Wikipedia and of Hacker News.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand. Surely the exposure of being on here will result in the article being improved.

In fact, I don't understand why there is any opposition at all. I am positively baffled.

<comment><USER6> First, WP has a thing about coordinated editing strikes on articles, especially when there's a WP:NOT question, especially when the subject of the article is coordinating the edit. It's true that WP people are always on the lookout for any perceived slight, but they're consistent about this one.

Second, stoking a minor controversy by creating a WP article about HN that immediately gets flagged NN --- an article with virtually no content, on WP, an article itself inferior to almost any navel-gazing HN debate thread about HN --- and then requesting that HN come in and fix it... that's also an abuse.

And hey, it's just my opinion. I didn't flag the article.

<comment><USER7> But it's a new article. How should it be improved if not encouraging people to edit it? Isn't that the whole idea behind Wikipedia? There is no need for this process to be contentious. All it needed to be unflagged not notable was some references. I went and Googled up 5 articles; it was painless enough. Where is the abuse?

The article had no content because it was just made; it started with the opinions of one person. That's why it was requested for people to improve it. That's what Wikipedia does, it writes and improves encyclopedia articles by crowdsourcing. Saying it's an abuse because the article is bad is ridiculous. That's the whole point -- to fix the article. And no, it is not abuse. It's an intended use of the system. You are saying it is an abuse because it is controversial? That seems inconsistent, this site thrives on debate and in this case such debate can only improve the quality of the article.

I still don't get it. I went and reedited the article, I would encourage you to give it another pass.

<comment><USER6> I don't think any less of you for disagreeing with me. And I don't think we should be using HN to organizing WP editing drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why would we need an article? It would be about a paragraph long. I don't think this is really appropriate for inclusion in wikipedia.

<comment><USER9> Indeed - unless anyone can put forward a convincing argument for inclusion then I will flag it not notable.

<comment><USER10> I continue to be dumbfounded the the deletionist philosophy.

( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mergism> )

If Hacker News is not relevant to someone, they'll never search on the term or look for a definition.

If Hacker News _is_ relevant to someone (they overheard a reference to it, or saw a link, or checked out the website and still don't get "what it's all about", or "who started it") then an article is quite relevant.

If we're talking about a non-searchable Borges library, then I understand why people might want to winnow the books, so as to increase the information density of what's left.

...but in an age of infinite storage and effective search, what's the theory for deleting information?

I've never heard an argument for why deletionism provides more utility than alternatives.

<comment><USER11> I generally agree with you. However, suppose there are good reasons behind the deletionist philosophy. What might they be? Some possibilities:

(1) Inclusion in Wikipedia is a statement in itself. It says, "This is notable." In the case of non-notable subjects, the statement is false, and so the problem is one of inaccuracy.

(2) Information on a non-notable topic is very difficult to check for accuracy, update, etc. Thus, the proliferation of non-notable topics would lead to lower overall quality.

(3) Pages on generally non-notable topics would tend to reflect the viewpoint of perhaps just one person who considers the topic important, or, similarly, one company. They would thus be prone to excessive POV stuff, advertising, etc.

In summary, every argument I can think of boils down to lack of notability -> poor quality.

And perhaps that does mean that there should be a notability standard on Wikipedia. On the other hand, I think it is clear that a large number of those people labeled "deletionist" have a notability standard that is significantly too high. (I also think it is very clear that HN is notable enough for inclusion; I'm rather baffled that anyone would think otherwise.)

<comment><USER12> Honestly, no, there are no good reasons behind the deletionist philosophy as currently embodied on Wikipedia.

The problem is that, although Wikipedia has policies for maintaining quality and relevance, they have fixated on something which is _not_ a policy (notability, which is merely a guideline) and given it a status so far and above all other policies that it's hard to see as anything other than irrational extremism.

A good first step toward improving Wikipedia would be the utter abolition of the notability guideline, replacing it instead with the much more useful and relevant question of "does this article present information which can be verified by consulting reliable sources?" (see policies: WP:V, WP:RS) This maintains quality and relevance (since now the criterion is not "I've never heard of it/it doesn't have X results in Google/etc.", but is rather "no sources can be found to corroborate these claims"), and does away with the endless wanking over what is and isn't "notable enough" for Wikipedia.

<comment><USER9> I can prove who I am and have acres of relevant links and sources to the bits of software I have written and the sites I maintain.

Do I deserver a spot there? I doubt it.....

Notability guidelines were always important in my WP time. I would say 90% of the articles I cam across doing clean up tasks were just grime that cluttered the place up. There is no point having useless stuff there - it reduces what relevant stuff you can find!

<comment><USER12> I still just don't see what harm it does to have not-notable-enough-to-you, but reliably-sourced, verifiable information in Wikipedia. What is the problem that deleting solves in this case?

(of course, the flip side: I have, I'm told, for a while been hovering just near the bare minimum criteria to be "notable" enough for Wikipedia, and the thought of having to endure the endless stupidity that is having an article about one's self frightens me to no end)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, I made the article. It's pretty small, but maybe somenone wants to expand it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The first expansions already happened. Perhaps more people want to improve it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Gents if were going to edit the article can we PLEASE attempt to stick to content guidelines.

Words like "strive" are weasely and should be avoided (this is an encyclopedia). Report on what was said (and if PG said "I strive" then say something like "Graham has said he strives to").

And umm... some of those references make very little sense

This link for example: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/mar/10/apple-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/mar/10/apple- television)

It is interesting information but ONLY relevant if there was any particular effect from the HN crowd (aka meaning it deserved mentioning in the article - which it doesnt as far as I can tell). Indeed the best place for that to be mentioned is Woz's article.

Im editing and removing some stuff now - dont kill me :)

</comment><comment><USER7> There are plenty of commercial blogs that have covered Hacker News but I don't think that's enough anymore... has a newspaper or magazine or tv show mentioned hacker news?

I added some links, one of the things I love about Wikipedia is that someone will fix my citations. :D

<comment><USER14> I'm guessing if Huffington Post covered Hacker News, it would be considered notable.

It is stupid that blogs like Techcrunch and Mashable aren't thought of as being creditable enough to get something on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia keeps up that mind frame in 2-3 years, they will stop adding articles, because there will be no more Newspapers or Magazines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Some famous users of Hacker News include David Heinemeier Hansson[3], Joel Spolsky[4], and Michael Arrington.[5]_

DHH has posted 25 comments and Michael has made 1 post and 3 comments.

Are there any "famous" people in, say, the top 50 percentile of activity? :) _(Update: I've removed my reference to Joel as he seems to be an active user - awesome!)_

<comment><USER16> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=spolsky>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We do not have a Wikipedia article, yet.

Who's ready to prove notability?

</comment><comment><USER17> Sorry to say, but I believe that our name is holding us back. We joke about it, but to the other 99%, there's nothing funny about "hacking". With another name (Programmer News? Coder News?) we could have a more mainstream presence.

Then again, maybe this is exactly the way pg & friends want it.

<comment><USER18> Maybe we can control the traffic dynamically. When traffic is low we can switch to "Coder News". As the server load grows larger the title can switch to "Disco News". As we approach redline, we'll see "Accounting News".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wikipedia is such a disgrace, I don't think HN ought to be on there.

They DELETED the article for the Snoopy Calendar!

Wikipedia ought to be deleted.

<comment><USER20> > They DELETED the article for the Snoopy Calendar!

I always wondered if that was a widely circulated bit of ephemera or not... My first exposure to a computer was in Kindergarten during a field trip to a military base. The sysops kindly printed off a late 70's sheet for each student. I never saw or heard of the program that made this until late college and only in asides. (And Google doesn't seem to have much info, besides the infamous "nerd purity test" question.)

<comment><USER19> The Snoopy Calendar [http://www.users.on.net/~farnik/wikicgi/wiki.pl?SnoopyCalend...](http://www.users.on.net/~farnik/wikicgi/wiki.pl?SnoopyCalendar)

is what Real Programmers <http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html> have taped to the wall . . .

Seriously, Wikipedia has become DAMAGING . . . why? because I am intimately acquainted with a certain topic (religious) and - after scouring the web for months - I finally found THE, THE definitive informational resource for said topic, in the form of a website, I proceeded to add links to the website to the existing related articles. I had never contributed, as I felt that what I had to contribute was not truly worthwhile . . . until I found that site, and realized I could contribute something of high value. What happened? The FREAKS DELETED ALL I CONTRIBUTED. Links to a site that had no ads, no commercial links, ALL FREE, all accurate, all simply priceless, as there is a serious lack of accurate info on that religion . . .

From that moment on, I wonder HOW MANY, JUST HOW MANY great sources of information I will never know existed after using Wikipedia . . . the thing is a cancer, a black hole, a false sign, an utter failure if you ask me, because (and this is the kicker) links that lead to 100% erroneous information in the articles I contributed to, those, why, THOSE didn't get deleted! Bunch of ignorant, arrogant, little thugs running that site . . . it's a travesty.

<comment><USER21> are you by any chance a Scientologist?

<comment><USER19> No, I am not. Not by far.

I know you did not ask, but I am a Vodouisant, as in, the Vodou (oftentimes spelled "Voodoo") religion is my religion. I am also - at the same time as if often the case - Roman Catholic (no relation to my username either BTW :-) ) as I was raised Roman Catholic.

Am I militant about my religion? No.

Do we aim to "convert" people? No! Newcomers are a PITA if you ask me.

Am I tolerant of all other religions other than Islam? Yes.

Is my life dominated by religion? Not at all. I keep things in perspective.

Are there reliable and accurate sources of information for Vodou? Hardly. I can count the online sources in one hand.

The whole thing with Wikipedia was just horrid, I truly do think it was partially motivated by plain racism, as Vodou is basically a black people's religion, although it is open to all races and sexual orientations.

<comment><USER19> A-ha! Another racist and/or religiously intolerant character just downmodded me . . . unbelievable.

Well, here's the thing folks: HACKERS simply don't do that . . . there are way too many people here that simply don't belong here, and need to scram like pronto.

Edit in reply to comment below:

Mayhaps I should have stated that I disapprove of its tenets of violence, among many other aspects of it, instead of saying I am not tolerant of it. Since I refuse to act (such as downmodding you or anyone who disagrees with me) on my opinion I guess I am tolerant of it in spite of the sheer loathing I feel for it and its practitioners.

Anyway, I hereby leave the discussion, any who want to take advantage of this go ahead and ridicule yourselves.

<comment><USER22> "Am I tolerant of all other religions other than Islam? Yes."

I think people might find this somewhat offensive. Islam is a diverse religion spread over all parts of the globe. Your comment seems to dismiss it entirely.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: New platform connects human rights activists with people who can help - <AUTHOR> https://beta.movements.org

<comment><USER2> Nothing for domestic rights in the US, Canada or Latin North America? The 'regions' page doesn't let me select North America.

<comment><AUTHOR> Movements.org focuses on closed societies (rated Not Free or Partially Free by Freedom House) with populations above 15 million.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In other news, China, North Korea, and Syria jointly announce their intent to acquire Movements.</comment>


WHO says there's 'no evidence' that recovered Covid-19 patients are immune - <AUTHOR> https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/04/25/npr-no-evidence-that-recovered-covid-19-patients-are-immune-who-says <comment><USER2> I wish people would stop obsessing about this.</comment>


On recruiters and job boards (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/370 <comment><USER2> Last year, I was looking for contracting gigs and was posting on many of the various job boards. it's amazing how many jobs are posted by recruiters.

On a site like Indeed.com, which I know pulls jobs from other sites, at least 60 or 70% of the tech jobs are posted by recruiters.</comment>


Less Than 40 Percent of Web Traffic Comes From Humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.statista.com/chart/1894/global-website-traffic-by-source/

<comment><USER2> I'm wondering how they determine good traffic or malicious traffic.</comment>


UPJS - <AUTHOR> http://www.upjs.org A new and fresh JavaScript Library. <comment><USER2> I have no idea what your library is supposed to provide from your front page. What's the elevator pitch?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I should go with a short description. Thanx for suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hot to expand the community?

<comment><USER3> Your tutorial doesn't explain why it changes "green"'s colour but not "blue"'s.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Horcrux.io – Anonymous Free for All Message Board - <AUTHOR> http://horcrux.io

<comment><AUTHOR> A friend of mine is creating this app in NodeJS. You are encouraged to find bugs or give feature requests.

The github is: [https://github.com/OutThisLife/horcrux](https://github.com/OutThisLife/horcrux)

</comment><comment><USER2> The signal to noise ratio is exceedingly low on the website. It looks like some people are really, really easily entertained. Does he plan to add the ability to block spammers and such?

<comment><USER3> Creator here. Yes, it's random, but that's - hopefully - going to be a part of the beauty in the future.

I don't want to moderate it at all. Ever.

<comment><USER2> I don't know if anyone is going to see a bunch of random useless/offensive/spam posts as 'beauty'. It appears to only store the last 50 or whatever posts, so it's trivial for a spammer to just flood the last 'legitimate' post off the bottom of the page. Without moderation or posting limits, I can't see anyone but spammers making use of this site, frankly.

<comment><USER3> I think we'll see in time. It's too early to tell what it'll become - but my method is to be hands-off, regardless, and see what becomes of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Frankly I think the last thing the world needs is another one of these, which is why I never hosted the one I wrote.

Increasingly I think the real need is in self-curated media.

<comment><USER3> Creator here. Could you explain by "another one of these"? Is it the anonymity that you don't like?

If so, I'd have to completely disagree. I think we need more anonymity on the internet, not less.

<comment><USER5> I think what jarcane was saying was another site like, yikyak. I agree that there needs to be more anonymity on the internet and everywhere in general but I don't think its needed for sites like this. It is a cool site and everything, but I do not think it adds value or substance.

<comment><USER3> Oh, yeah. It definitely isn't meant to add value.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A 19th Century Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/12/fantastically-wrong-thomas-dick/

<comment><USER2> "[T]he New York Sun dropped a bombshell of a story: Astronomer Sir John Herschel had erected an enormous telescope in South Africa that could magnify celestial bodies an astounding 42,000 times. And when he pointed it at the moon he saw a field of poppies."

In case anyone would like to read more about this fantastical hoax, I highly recommend Matthew Goodman's excellent book about 19th century newspaper hoaxes, The Sun and the Moon. It's a pretty fun book that tackles topics that range from the relationship between religion and science in pre-Civil War America, through to the relationship between P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe, and the rise of cheap newspapers targeted to the mass public (perhaps the antecedents of Buzzfeed, etc.) [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0023RSZPA](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0023RSZPA)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like an early version of the Drake equation, only with the number of stars with planets very low and the probability that a planet has life very (like really, really) high.

<comment><USER4> The Drake equation involves making the same huge, and potentially wrong, assumptions that Thomas Dick made.

It is good that it gets us thinking about the potential for life and drives us to explore, but I suspect some of the calculations made at the SETI institute and such will be completely wrong.

<comment><USER5> The drake equation is an illustrative relationship between assumptions about life and likelihood of it happening independently. If the assumptions are incorrect (as they likely are), it doesn't reduce the value of illustrating said relationship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Dick writes: _"This is a conclusion which is not merely probable, but > absolutely certain, for the opposite opinion would rob the Deity of the most > distinguishing attribute of his nature, by virtually denying him the > perfection of infinite wisdom and intelligence."_

> _For as bizarre as all this may seem, notice how scientific Dick was about > his theory._

Very loose interpretation of "scientific".

<comment><USER7> It seems pretty ambitious to claim that you're wise and intelligent enough to be able to know what an infinitely wise and intelligent thing would want.

<comment><USER8> "Surely god would never disagree with me"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > In 1837

I'm pretty sure that in 200 years from now many of the current knowledge of the world will be ruled out as dumb and naive. Just give the guy a break.

<comment><USER10> That's a fair point. We added "19th Century" to the title.</comment></comment>


Web Trend Map, built with CSS 3 & HTML 5 - <AUTHOR> http://webtrendmap.com/

<comment><USER2> What is it about CSS3 & HTML 5 that makes this impossible on "older" browsers? Maybe I'm missing the point, but I'm not really seeing anything that couldn't already be done cross most browsers?

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty slow.

<comment><USER4> Runs great for me on Chrome/XP. Everything else seems to be bogged down. (including Safari on OSX)

<comment><USER5> Works perfectly on Safari and Firefox (OSX)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Works great for me on Safari 4.0.3 (on OS 10.6).

</comment><comment><USER7> _Sorry, webtrendmap.com is only compatible with Firefox and Safari._

Too bad.

<comment><USER8> it's html 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We need more explanation as to what new CSS and HTML elements you've used!</comment>


Why Gates and Jobs shielded their kids from tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/why-gates-and-jobs-shielded-their-kids-from-tech <comment><USER2> I think we shouldn't (as I posit the title is doing) conflate "technology" with "attention-fueled consumer products". I'd like my (future) kids to be able to work with technology, but not waste (too much, whatever that means) time on time-filling consumer content online.

My hypothesis is that by giving them games and toys that are explicitly designed for them to modify for their own entertainment, they will learn to make technology in their image rather than the other way around.

For example, Minecraft is hugely popular with kids (or at least was the last time I looked), and can be a gentle introduction to concepts that can be applied to technology. I grew up on Lego Mindstorms, which blew my young mind when I could build and program a Lego robot to do whatever I could figure out how to program.

<comment><USER3> LEGO mindstorms is a product that you assemble and program.

Minecraft is designed to fill your time. Though there is thinking involved, it's a time sink.

<comment><USER2> Vanilla Minecraft without guidance isn't especially educational. But my impression at least is that players often add mods, and then might want to make their own. And there are opportunities for programming inside of Minecraft. And some of the more impressive "creative mode" constructions rely on scripts to automate much of the grunt work. For instance: [https://nostarch.com/automateminecraft](https://nostarch.com/automateminecraft)

My inclusion of Minecraft is about the ease and support of modding/scripting/botting rather than the vanilla game. There's a certain subsection of professional developers who got their start by modding their favorite games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I mean it's simple. Once you see how the sausage is made you obviously don't want your kids involved. Fundamentally most tech products are made with the goal of exploiting human behavior in order to increase engagement with the product.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's that, really. I mean to some degree (there's a blurb in the article about Gates limiting screen time due to an unhealthy attachment to a game), but not completely. Both Gates and Jobs saw the transition of no Personal Computers on up to smartphones, etc. Because of that I think they still understood the importance of going analog. Being in the field they understood there's more to life than computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its important to note that: A. This is utterly unproven, much like non ionizing radiation, there's a movement dedicated to scaremongering about tech, Its fine as is but always keep in mind that more often then not the research is not as thorough as one of such magnitude should be, "Veratasium" did a video about cellphones and brain tumors, a very interesting and topical watch B. Who are Steve jobs, Page, Zuckerberg, And Gates? They are mostly smart, hard working individuals who quickly adapted themselves and the tech to the public, using their invention for personal profit, "Conglomerateion", charity work and research. Their success isn't some magical virtue, they were lucky enough to be at the right position to size opportunities the rose, through their dedication they still are somewhat relevant today. They are NOT great educators, nor do they claim so I believe, advice on how to use tech they've created should not be taken from them, nor should advice on raising children, based upon those children they probably did not raise. Nearly anyone knows about Kennedy's sister today because the Kennedy's had a name to protect, much like the British royal family, and the families of those corporations heads, we don't hear about their failures, we certainly shouldn't take tips...

<comment><USER7> I think the ideas of the people who are talking about cellphones and tumors can be traced back to _Johnny Mnemonic_ , where an illness caused by EM waves from electronics was a major plot point. Gibson in turn got the idea from Pana-Wave, a Japanese cult who lived in the mountains, wore white robes and lived an austere life avoiding electronics, whose waves they said were poisoning them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rich people have nannies/caretakers to keep the kids entertained. For regular folk its too tempting to 'catch a breath' by using electronics to keep the kids quite for a minute.

Especially bad in USA where you can't just tell your kids to 'go out and play' and leave you alone. Thats what we did when we were growing up, come home, finish homework and head out to play. Parents had it good back then :D.</comment>


You browse mobile? - <AUTHOR>

how many of you browse HN with mobile? Or any other site? I'm realy tired of 800k+ pages with fancy graphics, want to make mobile browsing bearable. Any takers? <comment><USER2> Do you have an iPhone? If so, try out Instapaper if you haven't. It's great; it cuts through all that crap and gives you the content you want to read.</comment>


Laws of Physics Can't Trump the Bonds of Love - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/laws-of-physics-cant-trump-the-bonds-of-love/

<comment><USER2> _I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts._

\-- Richard Feynman

Let's hope science some day may prevent the disease that afflicts his son.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was really unsure if I'd like this article. I'm still not sure if I do. It's about how a teacher motivates his students (science can help his son), but the way it's framed is very grating.

There's this wrong idea out there, that you run into everywhere, that love is independent of physics. That a simulation of a human, grounded in rules of reality, wouldn't tend to its children. It grates me.

A good analogy is: would you take an article about the fun of skydiving and title it "Can falling trump physics?"?

<comment><USER4> Falling can be described in terms of physics, but the rush you get from it can't be. Not with today's machinery. The model we call physics may be so off- base as to be inapplicable at that stage.

I see what you're saying, but he's talking about 'the meaning of it all', which doesn't feel like a scientific thing.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps I'm missing your point. The rush you get from skydiving _is_ explainable by physics. The human fight-or-flight response induces the adrenal gland to release epinephrine, which causes a raised heart rate, excitement, etc. Even complex feelings like "yearning to find the meaning of it all" and "loving your disabled son" have a biological basis.

(Disclaimer: I get my science facts from Wikipedia and xkcd)

<comment><USER6> I suggest you also use Wikipedia to get some philosophy: Look up "Qualia". Science is wholly incapable of explaining just exactly why feelings feel the way they do. "Adrenal gland releases epinephrine" is the trigger but it is not sufficient to describe the experience of a conscious person.

<comment><USER7> Most Qualia are rather well understood an example taken from wikipedia "the perceived redness of an evening sky".

You can talk about why they sky has 'redness' but subjectively what's important is the sensors in your eye, and how what happens to the signal. If you look at the research, people have tracked what causes each receptor to fire and then followed colors back though the optic nerve. So, really the subjective feeling is a signal we have tracked what more do you want?

Often when people say science can't explain X, really what they mean is they can't follow the explanation.

<comment><USER4> I'd just like to point out that by definition, that's not qualia. You're talking about something else—which is fine. You can deny the existence of qualia all you like, and many people do.

Dennett has made a very good case for the term being so abused as to be useless. He argues against its existence and seemingly the existence of anything like it. I don't really agree with him in this extended sense but I can't define exactly what it is I do agree with, so for now I can only say that there is a lot more to learn about consciousness and related phenomena.

<comment><USER7> Feel free to edit wikipedia, _Qualia: individual instances of subjective, conscious experience ... Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky._ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia> But, I think you might be thinking of something else.

Some people object to saying Subjective Experience the same thing as Brain State. But, I have never seen an argument that does not at some point presuppose the difference. AKA assume a p-zombie exists...

PS: The Chinese room is a thought experiment is a great analogy for consciousness, they only reason to suppose the room is not intelligent is if you presupposes requirements that's the vary existence of such a room disproves. A computer or person following the instructions may not understand Chinese without the instructions but by following them they create something which does understand Chinese. Just as neurons are not by themselves conscious, but together and in the correct arrangement they can create consciousness.

<comment><USER4> Go back to the 'definitions' section. Dennett went by this (and similar formulations), and made a compelling argument. I would advise reading _Quining Qualia_ if you are interested. I believe that is where he made the case so well. (You can probably find it on the web.)

The Chinese room is a frustrating argument, and I essentially agree with you on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Without getting too much into any sort of philosophical or religious discussion this is a really touching story. Merry Christmas everyone.

<comment><USER9> Beautifully told too. No patronizing narration, no saccharine soundtrack, just a really amazing story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most beuatiful exposition of the weak anthropic principle I have ever encountered.

</comment><comment><USER11> The good old straw vulcan <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan>

</comment><comment><USER12> Amazing. What would happen if we replaced every crappy teacher with one like this one? How different would the world be in 5,10,15 years? We need more teachers that are as passionate and devoted as this guy.

</comment><comment><USER13> "We say atoms are bound by weak attractors. Why not admit the truth: the Universe is held together by love."

</comment><comment><USER14> Sorry if it annoys anyone to bring in politics on this beautiful article here on Christmas, but here's what I have to say:

Bookmark this article. Then, next time you are talking to some dittohead who is in favor of No Child Left Behind-style education, you can send them the link and say, "where does this fit in with your standardized testing horseshit?"

<comment><USER15> Wat? What does this have to do with standardize testing? The article doesn't mention standardized testing once.

Standardize test has nothing to do with measuring individual students or individual teachers. It's a method for measure large scale changes. For example does all day kindergarten lead to student being better educated? Thanks to standardized testing in Ontario it can be measured whether or not students improve with all day kindergarten. You can argue for better test and you can argue for better application of the results of tests but there is no argument against benchmarking.

Without a benchmark you're just shooting blind. People who are against standardized testing are the Jenny McCarthy of education. They think they can just tell when an education method is effective without measuring it

<comment><USER16> Yes, you are exactly right. I realized in high school that my standardized test scores meant absolutely nothing except as a kind of survey of the school. By no means were teachers "teaching to the test". And the material measured by the standardized tests was so basic/remedial that there is no way it would have been difficulty for AP track students - so fast changes in those scores would have been a pretty significant indicator of institutional failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This ties into my own philosophy: We define what the universe means. Intelligent life. We're the only ones that care, so it's up to us to decide what the universe is all about. That's frightening, but freedom is always a little bit frightening.

We get it wrong, as we have in the past, but, over the past 500 years, we've been, overall, getting better and better at it over time.

There's no guarantee we'll continue to improve. But, on the other hand, there's no, or very likely no, external grader, imposing an arbitrary standard on us. Our standards are our own, which means we have a chance at measuring up to them.

<comment><USER18> > That's frightening, but freedom is always a little bit frightening

On the other hand, there is no evidence for the existence of free will. So we are just a part of the universe that has become conscious, aware of itself. But we can't escape physics. We are still just complicated sets of reactions. We don't really have choices.

<comment><USER19> > On the other hand, there is no evidence for the existence of free will. So > we are just a part of the universe that has become conscious, aware of > itself.

Meh... how would one even go about proving the existence of "free will"? It seems unfalsifiable -- outside the realm of science even, which is solely concerned with forming models that make accurate predictions of natural phenomena.

I should mention that our current best understanding of nature is that certain aspects of it are perfectly random (deviations in measurements of incompatible observables). Some people believe that since nature is not deterministic, this is where "free will" comes in (I do not). Regardless of what you believe, it's not science.

<comment><USER20> I'd say its rather simple, and similar to what has been done already. Wire up someone to an (eeg if i recall rightly), have them "choose" between two disparate things. Measure the brain response.

If when they "choose" you already have an idea of what they chose before they consciously became aware of it, it is likely that you do not actually have free will. That is, your conscious mind is only deluding itself into thinking it chose what processes in the brain have already decided.

[http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_d...](http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_decision)

I think that was the gist of the study, its been a while so I might be off. Corrections welcome!

That said, I've always thought it an interesting philosophical question of if we don't have free will and our paths in life are somewhat deterministic, it really puts a damper on our legal and moral systems to a degree. That said its just a thought experiment at this point. Maybe this is a "bad" approach to determining it, but the experiments do cast doubt on at the very least our perception of free will and determinism.

<comment><USER21> Except it isn't that easy to. There is probably going to be some bias, not to mention that subtle unconscious hints from participants could be picked by the participants.

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22144-brain-might- not-...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22144-brain-might-not-stand-in- the-way-of-free-will.html)

Also it's important to remember most of science theories can be overturned easily by new evidence. So I'm not sure science is 100% certain in either way.

<comment><USER21> Late edit: "subtle unconscious hints from researchers could be picked by the participants"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developers--2002-vs.-2015/ <comment><USER2> Finally someone using a tiling window manager! I don't know how the stacking folk survive, look at the insane amount of windows just floating around.

<comment><USER3> I like the concept of tiling managers, but find the implementation lacking. Touting being entirely keyboard driven and configured by learning what to edit in some text configuration file seems like an anti-feature to me in a GUI management system.

I want to be able to drag the windows around to rearrange things with my mouse, not have to remember or look up keyboard shortcuts. The model of dragging things around with a mouse is intuitive and simple. Sure, have the keyboard shortcuts as well, but give us both! If I wanted to have to look up the documentation every time I need to perform the simplest operation with my software tools, I'd use git.

I would love to see some sort of tiling layout manager you could run on top of KDE. (Heresy, I know.)

<comment><USER2> >I want to be able to drag the windows around to rearrange things with my mouse

The whole point of a tilling window manager is letting the WM do that for you automatically. I use xmonad, you can use the mouse to select windows and even drag them around (though the combination of floating and tilled windows is ugly and unproductive). You have to configure everything from a text file with comments, but how is that any different from a GUI with labels and input boxes? It shouldn't take you more than a few days to get used to the shortcuts or define your own. Doing everything from the keyboard greatly improves productivity if you also use vim/emacs or other keyboard-driven text editor for work + the shell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Warren Toomey: "my mail is stored locally, not on someone else's server"

What does this mean exactly? Is his machine a mail server?

I used to know an engineer/scientists who only used a single laptop (linux) and it acted as his mail server. When he travelled he used dyndns (or some such thing) so that delayed mail would be delivered to his laptop. Could never get a straight answer about whether this worked all the time or not (whether he ended up missing emails).

<comment><USER5> Some mail protocols (and clients if you want to) delete the mail on the server when downloaded to the client.

<comment><USER4> ah like POP?

but presumably the server could unbeknownst to the user, still keep copies of all incoming emails right?

<comment><USER6> So could any transit server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't do a whole lot of software (got caught up on the hardware side of things), but one thing I'm noticing is that nobody makes extensive use of "advanced" IDE features as in eclipse or visual Studio.

Is this personal taste, or has it to do with the scope of the projects these guys are working on?

<comment><USER8> The selection of people certainly makes it less likely that they use IDEs that look like Eclipse or VS. But the editor windows you are seeing may look plain, but I bet most of them have quite fancy features set up, that do a lot of "IDE"-stuff.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it would be interesting to see how Bram gets around the vim source code, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pretty much what you expect from such people. Not very customised and quite boring. A long time ago I used to "rice" my dev machine. I customised _everything_ but these days I work with mostly the defaults with a few changes such as font and colour scheme. A terminal, code editor and doc browser (usually a terminal or browser) is all I really need. Oh and a decent music player (Winamp for me, it still kicks the llamas ass).

<comment><USER11> I'd wager it's super customized behind the scenes, just not in ways that we'd see from a screenshot. Watch any of them work for five minutes and it'd be obvious.

<comment><USER10> I am not so sure. I have met a few famous developers and I used to be surprised just how "boring" their setups were. Rob Pike was the only person who seemed to _really_ configure his environment. A lot of old school devs just continue to use the command line in whatever form it is available. Even to the point that some just used cmd rather than bother with things like Cygwin.

I was surprised to see Bjarne using a standard Windows XP machine. Not sure if he used Visual Studio or what but he didn't do anything special as far as I could tell.

Then of course you have RMS who still lives in the 1970s :)

Edit: Like I said in my previous post I quite like using whatever the default is. A few changes here and there but on the whole it is much easier to move around if you just learn to work with whatever it comes with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Richard Stallman (2002) I don't know how to make a screenshot, because I > normally use my computer in text-mode. I have X and GNOME installed, but I > use them only occasionally.

Does anyone else find this quote completely absurd? What a ridiculous disconnect from modern computing, even in 2002, to use text-mode.

<comment><USER13> Stallman has always been pretty anachronistic. Sometimes I think he's trolling us: [http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/](http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/)

"For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time."

<comment><USER14> That's actually a pretty awesome idea against impulsive browsing. The most frequent kind of browsing.

<comment><USER13> Here's Stallman showing another awesome means of self sustinence:

[https://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ](https://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 4/6 developers describe their desktops as "boring".

<comment><USER16> And that's good, a desktop shouldn't distract from its contents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Only one of then uses a tiling window manager today (although many of them look like they arrange things in tiles anyway)

<comment><USER18> I personally can't get used to tiling wm's, but I use Unity's aerosnap-like all the time. It's either full-screen (I have two screens and the more screens you have the more often you can go full screen) or aerosnap. I rarely have random size windows around. I don't have OCD by any measure, but random size windows on top of each other just annoys me.

<comment><USER19> I use awesomewm, which is, well, awesome. Each of my workspaces has a preconfigured layout: floating for browser, auto tiling for terminals, etc.

<comment><USER20> Awesome is the bomb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For Stallman's case, surely there is an emacs command to copy the the whole frame, mode line and all, to text for pasting into a mail buffer.

But seriously, it does make me wonder how much of the vast system he retains and uses. Using it for a decade, myself, (certainly not working ON it or understanding the internals) I learn new parts every month but forget a lot, too.

<comment><USER21> There is [1]. I'd like to find a package that saves the layout in a form that regenerates the screenshot in a terminal when you cat the text file it outputs.

[1] [http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ScreenShot](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ScreenShot)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am liking to open the images go full-screen .. to feel seeing at their machines

you can see how all they --or we?-- moved from 4:3 to 16:9

</comment><comment><USER23> I believe my only change has been from Notepad2 to Sublime and from Firefox to Safari.

</comment><comment><USER24> Stallman ........ yes! I'm searching for the screenshot tool

</comment><comment><USER25> previously: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query="unix.se"&dateRange=all](https://hn.algolia.com/?query="unix.se"&dateRange=all)

notably: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10469824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10469824)

<comment><USER26> Nope, this is the follow-up of that first article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> So Kernighan uses the sam editor, classic.

</comment><comment><USER26> I submitted that 3 day ago and it was not met with interest. hn is a strange place some times.

<comment><USER28> Don't worry they're only internet points :)

<comment><USER26> true, but Anders, the guy who wrote the post said to me: "here submit it, for some shiny, shiny points" :-)

<comment><USER28> Now I feel much sadness indeed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brad Feld vs. Tesla for new Patent Office Name - <AUTHOR> http://crowdhall.com/h/61 Colorado Senator is holding a crowd-sourcing contest to name the new patent office after Colorado's top innovator. Brad & Tesla are the clear favorites. <comment><USER2> someone did a little twitter campaign to get brad feld's name some support and brad retweeted it, so looks like he's okay with the idea :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks great!

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome</comment>


Ask HN: What was your worst "oops" moment? - <AUTHOR> Given the recent GitLab data incident, I think many of us likely have scar tissue from a time we did something regrettable in production.<p>- Accidentally nuked the production database? - Deployed a not easily reversible change? - Decommissioned irrecoverable infrastructure?<p>In the interest of empathy and #HugOps, what are your horror stories? Share them here. <comment><USER2> I isolated myself for 5 months (unpaid) to build an app based on a simple idea I had. I went OCD on it until it was done and live. Passion took over and I really wanted to see it live. I realized a few week later that no one actually needs it. I was so convinced by the quality of the app, that people would want to use it... I bypassed the most important thing - does it really bring any value? Not really. I was totally blind coding for 5 months... Do your market validation first and do not necessarily fall in love with your own product. This is not something I could have built in a month, I knew it was a big investment up front. Oops!

<comment><USER3> I did something very similar - left my job a bunch of years back to create a social network for angel investors. I wrote up some lessons from my failure here: [https://github.com/rshekhtm/VentureTap](https://github.com/rshekhtm/VentureTap), with this paragraph most relevant to this discussion:

"The biggest non-technical takeaway for me was that development in a vacuum can sink a project that may have otherwise stood a chance. Confusing secrecy for competitive advantage, I was very guarded about sharing my thoughts with other people and in fact did not solicit feedback until after the first cut of the code was released. Having read books on angel investing, I thought I understood the space - if only I had been aware of the concepts of lean software development! If nothing else, I gained appreciation for transparency and communication, albeit too late to make a difference for VentureTap."

Oops :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Worked on a project for almost a year with PHP 5.6 (I started the project knowing PHP 7.0 was already out there for anyone to use). This might have been fine to leave for a little project, but since it is a SaaS and likely will require updates in the future, figured I'd switch it over to PHP 7.0 (better security, speeds, etc.). Upon the switch, there was nothing but errors. Turned out that some database code I was using wasn't compatible with PHP 7.0. Had to go through every file that touched the database and update it with new code. Luckily the project is still in development and hadn't yet reached public use, so "oops" for using outdated code, but "awesome" because updating the code from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0 took about a week... and now I have more peace of mind. It'll be years before PHP 8.0 comes out, right? Hehe.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not really tech-related, but a few years ago, I took an Uber to another city for a concert, and accidentally used my company's credit card to pay for the trip.

What made it worse was I told my boss I was sick that day, and couldn't get out of bed to go to work.

<comment><USER6> You could tell you went to a doctor you knew in that city. Uber receipt does not show what exactly you did there, does it?

<comment><USER7> That appointment with Dr. Dre at 10pm?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not necessarily a "tech" oops moment, but many years ago, I accidentally boarded a wrong flight and realized after fighting for the same seat with another passenger for few mins. Luckily, I was able to get out on time and run to my real flight. This is how the conversation went:

Me: Sir, this is my seat.

Person: Are you sure ? I think this seat is mine.

Me (annoyed but confident): Please check your boarding pass

Person: Ok let me check

...In the meantime, someone yells from another seat "You guys both going to austin/texas right?"

That was my oops moment. I was not going to texas of course. That seat was half way through the plane and people were still getting in. :)

<comment><USER9> How was not this detected at boarding gate?

<comment><USER8> yea I was surprised too. I vaguely remember now but the person checking the boarding pass just took it and not sure if they actually ran it through the scanner. Sometimes, they just manually tear one portion of the boarding pass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Accidentally cut over to a new production db before making sure the old db was fully synced. Noticed 2 DAYS later.

</comment><comment><USER11> Long long ago in a previous century, I worked on a project with a "seasonal" production cycle (develop for six months, run it for six months, etc). I spent a dev cycle on a project to pull scanned image storage out of Sybase BLOBs and into the filesystem, for a massive performance boost. This meant restructuring our disk and db sizing, since the vast majority of our db storage was tied up in those BLOBs. After months of dev and careful testing, it was ready to go.

It was my crowning achievement on my first big programming job, a massive mark on the system. And it was intended to be my last - I had taken an offer in another city. The first day of "production season" was my last day on the job I'd worked for four and a half years.

So when production started on Friday morning, the DBA noticed something bad - the databases were filling _far_ faster than expected. Like, "We are going to run out of space in four hours" kind of faster. The space was supposed to be enough to last for three months, with room to spare! Oops.

So instead of spending my last day saying goodbye to all my friends and colleagues, I spend it in a blind panic, trying to figure out _what the hell is happening_? I'd tested so thoroughly!

But my tests were tiny in scale compared to the scope of the system in production. One scanner running for an hour or so is nothing, compared to twenty of them running 24/7\. I couldn't even begin to dent the db size, even with the apparent bug. I missed something.

After a few hours of panic, I found the bug. It was a latent bug dating to the very beginning of the system, caused by the difference between NULL and 0 in a C pointer. You say there's no difference? Well, allow me to retort! The Sybase db library would, given a BLOB column in a table, automatically allocate 8k of space for it if you passed in a 0 pointer for content, but would not allocate if you passed in NULL. Right there in one of the thirty-odd _excellent_ Sybase paper manuals (they really were excellent), if you read it. It never showed before then, because those 8k allocations were swamped by the size of the real images being inserted in most rows.

That was a remarkable day.

And in the end, I feel vindicated, too. I had argued strenuously to remove the BLOB column completely, but the DBA (a cautious fellow) resisted, because he wasn't sure what other impact that might cause in other code. Lava Flow antipattern, right there. If we'd removed the column completely, as I suggested, the bug would never have occurred.

</comment><comment><USER12> Went to a client meeting one day early. Not my fault entirely as the organiser didn't bother to give me the change of date.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was 18 years old, and working at my first software development job. These were the waning days of dumb terminals, leased lines, and modems. We had no "test environment" \- test was dev, test was production.

The system was an RS6000 minicomputer (actually, it was like an overgrown PC) running AIX, and I was remotely logged into it over a 9600 baud leased line, direct to the client. It was their production system for Arizona's indigent healthcare system - AHCCCS. My employer was a mom-n-pop shop that developed the system, in PICK (we used UniVerse on AIX).

All I recall today was that I was testing some kind of data conversion routine (or something of that nature) on the database for the transaction data; that is, the claims transactions. These were input via hand-entry and/or scanned document (usually a combination). My testing consisted of running the routine (which read from live data, but wrote to "test" database records), checking the output, clearing the test records, tweaking the code, then re-running the routine again - until it was right. You can see where this is going...

So there I was, doing a repetitious task, getting into a mindless rhythm - when disaster struck: I cleared the production tables. Oops.

I held my head, and let out a loud moan. People looked up from their desks. Before they could ask me what was wrong, all of the phones in the office lit up. Every single phone was ringing - because of me.

My supervisor and I were called into the owner's office, and asked what had happened. My head was hung, I explained the issue, he asked my supervisor why - I thought heads were about to roll, me being a kid, my super (thinking back to then) not being that much older (late 20s). The owner asked my supervisor what could be done; he thought quickly, realized that tape backups from the night before had been made, and that the table I blew away could be -mostly- reconstructed from two other tables I hadn't touched. A bit of fast coding, a restore from backup, and most of the data could be restored by morning, leaving their data entry people to re-enter a few hours worth from paper records.

Amazingly, we weren't fired on the spot, but told to get to work, and make it quick. We pair coded at that point, built and tested the conversion routines meticulously on our development box, then moved them to production to run. We backed up the remaining data, and ran the conversion on a test batch, then combed thru the output to make sure it looked right. We ended up staying thru the night to the next morning, but it got done, and our company continued on with the client. They were one of the bigger insurance companies in the state at the time; I have no idea how much money was lost due to my slip - but it wasn't insignificant, I'm certain.

I learned valuable lessons from that experience - the importance of backups (extremely recent ones!), the need for a testing area, and to never use production for testing, making sure to check twice before pressing the return key on a "delete everything" command, plus how to be fair and calm in the face of disaster, toward a very junior member of a team (that one from the owner).

Let's just say I haven't repeated that mistake in the 20+ years since; looking back on it now as an older and more experienced developer, it was definitely one of those "why would we fire you now? You've just been taught a very important lesson for a lot of money, which you'll never repeat again!" kind of moments.

That was my first software development job; the first that launched my career only 6 months out of high school with no degree. It was a great place to be to learn many lessons which have remained with me since.</comment>


How To Make Wealth (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html <comment><USER3> A request to HN users: do not upvote based on the article source alone, especially if you have already seen this. This article is 6 years old, and I would be surprised to discover that a significant number of HNers have not yet read the essay (which is excellent by the way, if you really haven't read it yet).

If enough new users found upvote-worthy value from the article being submitted this time, then that's great, and the front page ranking is well-deserved. My concern is that given the age of the article, it will remain on the front page despite most users having already read it years ago, without the community really gaining any new value from it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Written to read and reread. What's wrong with that. After 6 years our mind might already loaded and bloated with many things.

That's why the 'refresh' button is there.

<comment><USER4> I can see real value in re-submitting this if there are a series of submissions or comments that shows this is a current topic of interest but it would be a shame if HN became more like TV with endless repeats.

Having said that I think classic Paul Graham essays such as The Submarine should be re-read at least once per year and perhaps more often than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I stopped after the first paragraph: _If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years._

Come on. Startups are long shots, a gamble, definitely not a reliable bet. Most startups fail ( <http://hubpages.com/hub/why-startups-fail> ) and very few are massive successes. It's the rock-star model of getting rich - <USER2> try, few succeed.

Was a "venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages" a "reliable way to get rich" ? There were pirates, the danger of sinking the ship in storms or on rocks, scurvy, unpredictable conditions at the other end of the voyage etc... basically it's high risk, high reward.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps it would be a good idea to read the entire essay before passing judgement. Indeed, you'll find your point is addressed in the very essay you stopped reading.

<comment><USER5> Contradicting yourself is not the same as addressing a point.

<comment><USER7> Stopping after one paragraph is not the same thing as reading an essay thoroughly enough to form anything but superficial criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just finished reading the all of _Hackers and Painters_ after getting a cheap ebook from O Reilly. I wondered if there is any criticism of some of the economic theory ones? Specifically the one that follows this one in the book, _Mind the Gap_. (It says essentially that economic disparity isn't necessarily bad for society)

I don't have the background in economics or history to know if his examples are sound or not, but the part of me that tends towards more liberal values finds some of the arguments a bit repellent. Somehow, it seems to me that using the fact that "in ancient Rome the price of slaves varied by a factor of 50 depending on their skills" to help justify CEOs and baseball players high salaries is probably inherently flawed.

While reading it on the subway on my Android phone in epub format, the footnotes were broken, but I had hoped that the footnote attached this tidbit was some qualifying statement about why slavery isn't necessarily the best model to use when thinking about the worth of people today, but I was disappointed to find that the note was just more details on the economics of slavery and a reference, and seems to miss completely how flawed that line of thinking might be.

Is there anyone who is more economically educated who knows of some criticism of these essays? I know this probably sounds like someone who has had their beliefs questioned and wants to re-affirm them, and of course that's part of it. But I also remember reading the blog post "Dabblers and Blowhards" which picked apart PG's ideas about painting based on some (possibly) mistaken ideas about that history... so I'm suspicious.

Ultimately I would like to learn more about economic theory like this, so I'm looking for "criticism" in the sense of thoughtful discussions and response, not necessarily outright disagreement.

And thanks!

<comment><USER9> It seems like you're looking for _ethical_ criticism of _Mind the Gap_ , not economic criticism. I thought it was clear that the prices were just how much Romans were willing to pay for the services of people of varying levels of ability, and that the detail of who was receiving payment was not really part of the argument, although it apparently distracted from the argument itself in this case.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, I think you're partly right, re-writing the analogy that way does make it seem more reasonable to me. (I still think it's a bad analogy) But there were other parts of the essay I wondered about... the "Daddy model of wealth", the historical time periods and "whether you could accumulate a fortune by creating wealth has been turned on and off" ... These are ideas (like PG's about oil painting being like Lisp hacking) I just do not feel qualified to judge - they are interesting, for sure, but I can't know if they are accurate or reasonable. So I hoped someone else could point me in the right direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The line, "Money is a side effect of specialization" reminded me of one of my favorite Gary Vaynerchuk lines: "Do the single thing that you know best. Bring it to the lowest level. The sweet spot. It doesn't have to be music, doesn't have to be hip-hop, doesn't have to be P. Diddy. It can be P. Diddy's hair."

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a good article, but the second old pg essay we've seen today. Is this some type of strategy to gain points by re-submitting old pg essays?

For the record, this is my favourite and I quote from it all the time, much to others annoyance.

<comment><USER12> I'm a new user. I too have just discovered today that quoting pg does seem to make some people here uncomfortable. However even they admit themselves that those are words we quote are of wisdom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _I would be surprised to discover that a significant number of HNers have not yet read the essay_

I don't know... it'd be interesting to know how frequently new users sign up, and what the average "age" of the accounts are, who regularly read/post. Personally, I suspect there are quite a few newer users who might not have read that (or any other given) pg article; but I can't prove it. Heck, I've been around for a while now and I doubt I've read all of pg's articles.

<comment><USER14> Yup, there's always new people. The "collective knowledge" of the crowd doesn't instantly permeate to new or infrequent visitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can make wealth, but lets be realistic it is often easier to steal it (not with guns, but with things like patents, lobbyism, etc), so why make it?

<comment><USER16> If you don't already know, I think it would be very difficult to tell you.

</comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen [2004]

<comment><USER17> Is this the new HN equivalent of 'first'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've read it before too - but thanks for the re-submission anyway. I hadn't realized the strength of the title before. 'Making Wealth' is a great phrase to evoke and question the idea of 'Making Money'.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think he nailed it for the most part. Anytime you hear a person of 'wealth' talk about becoming financially successful, they too define it as 'wealth' and not 'money'.

That's probably where the line is drawn between those who have a lot of 'money' and those who don't.</comment>


How to Manage Processes from the Linux Terminal: 10 Commands You Need to Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.howtogeek.com/107217/how-to-manage-processes-from-the-linux-terminal-10-commands-you-need-to-know/

<comment><USER2> Pretty straightforward blog spam. Meh.

I want to know how to prevent fork bombs, or runaway processes from hogging all the CPU. I want to know meaningful ways for determining which processes are attached to which file descriptors, and listening to which sockets.

I want to know what everyone uses for restarting their wayward processes.

</comment><comment><USER3> lsof</comment>


YouTube - Steve Jobs early TV appearance - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzDBiUemCSY&feature=player_embedded <comment><AUTHOR> This video affirmed to me that even Steve Jobs had a period in his life where he wasn't as confident on stage as he is now. Great public speaking is no natural or innate trait, but something that can be learned by anyone that has the perseverance to stick with it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Pay attention people. This video is already on the front page. Stop blindly voting stuff up.

</comment><comment><USER3> two words: nice beard</comment>


Antarctica is screwed and so are we - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/4920/antarctica-is-screwed-research-climate-change-global-warming-melting <comment><USER2> I read a very detailed book around 2001 on climate change. The title escapes me now. The book laid out just how badly in the crap we are, and the main takeaway was that drastic changes to our lifestyles are the only hope for preventing climate change with disastrous consequences. No such change is evident yet. Even efforts like the Paris accord etc are like sticking our heads in the sand compared to the level of change that's required. Personally I'd advocate for population control, but it's deeply unfashionable politically to have something like a one child policy. So instead we give people the freedom to breed at will, and our ever growing population guarantees problems ahead. Still if humanity does disappear life will no doubt continue.

<comment><USER3> we should be discussing ending meat subsidies. I think people would not consume so much of it if steak was $30/lb. There are cheaper, healthier ways to get protein and b12.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > what happened 10,000 years ago was natural. What's happening today is human- > caused

So it's also natural. It's like calling the man made elements unnatural. Just because you ascribe constraints to condition, doesn't make it any less natural.

<comment><USER5> I agree. Is there language that differentiates between human processes that are in equilibrium/harmony with the rest of the non-human world, and those that are not? Artificial vs. natural is the first pair that comes to mind, but I don't think it truly captures the idea.

My opinion is that as time moves on, we're going to develop that language to describe the human effect on the rest of the world that doesn't necessarily separate humans from the rest of the world.

<comment><USER6> That's literally the definitions of natural and artificial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you prefer your text as, you know, _text_ , put TheOutline through Outline:

[https://outline.com/5wP4eL](https://outline.com/5wP4eL)

</comment><comment><USER8> My favorite climate change joke: "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a really good article but yikes, yikes, yikes. Not good news.</comment>


An Invite App to Call Pandas - <AUTHOR>

My co-founder and I are from Madagascar. We love doing cool things such as talking to pandas. They have a lot to offer that we miss out on because we're stuck behind our screens. We decided to build an app to help you find a panda near you. It's called ImDown, and we just released it for iOS.
It's the simplest invite app and aggregates all people's invites nearby anonymously into a feed. You can see what's happening nearby wherever you go. Let us know what you think!!
Cheers, Team Panda <comment><USER2> Why the story about Madagascar and pandas? The website and app doesn't mention it so I sounds simply made up and adds confusion.

Link to the app: [http://okimdown.com/](http://okimdown.com/)</comment>


Immuter: A new way to update deeply nested immutable state in react/redux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zaaack/immuter <comment><USER2> Nice. I've seen quite a few immutable update utility libs out there. This bears some similarities to others I've seen, but looks like there's some differences as well. My only immediate concern would be the dependency on Lodash, but admittedly many projects will already have that in use already.

I'll also note I actually already had this added to the "Immutable Data#Immutable Update Utilities" section of my Redux addons catalog :) [https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem- links/blob/ma...](https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem- links/blob/master/immutable-data.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your linking! Just in case, the lodash might not be a big problem since I have already using babel-plugin-lodash, it won't bundle the whole lodash in the final bundle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For inspiration for even more sophisticated solutions to this challenge it is probably worth looking at Haskell lenses and/or Clojure/Script's Specter.</comment>


The Ultimate OS X Snow Leopard Stack For Rails Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.metaskills.net/2009/9/5/the-ultimate-os-x-snow-leopard-stack-for-rails-development-x86_64-macports-ruby-1-8-1-9-sql-server-more <comment><USER2> I recently re-did my entire rails dev stack when i upgraded to 10.6. and I made the point of avoiding MacPorts this time around. It always ended up being a hassle for me.

these proved handy:

[http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-mysql-on-snow- leopar...](http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-mysql-on-snow-leopard/) [http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-ruby-rubygems-and- ra...](http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-ruby-rubygems-and-rails-on- snow-leopard/) <http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-git-on-snow-leopard/>

</comment><comment><USER3> > Open up your MacPorts config file located at > /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf. Around line 59, find the section that > has the build_arch and set it to x86_64.

You don't need to. Here's the default value:

        # CPU architecture to compile for. Defaults to i386 or ppc on Mac OS X 10.5
        # and earlier, depending on the CPU type detected at runtime. On Mac OS X 10.6
        # the default is x86_64 if the CPU supports it, i386 otherwise.
        #build_arch                     i386

Note the comment: if your CPU supports it, the default build_arch will be x86_64 anyway.

</comment><comment><USER4> This guide is very "SQL Server"-centric, which I would imagine won't be of too much interest to many Rails devs.

Still, for those working with SQL Server, it is very good.

</comment><comment><USER5> That was worth clicking through just to learn about Homebrew (<http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew>). Not sure I'll be leaving MacPorts for it, but it's good to know alternatives exist (and no, fink doesn't count).

<comment><USER6> I've been using Homebrew for about a week. It reminds me of the early days of Gentoo, a very simple system that makes it easy to add your own packages (which is good because the current selection is fairly slim compared to the alternatives).

It's basically a nice way to manage locally complied packages, but it doesn't do a lot for you. For example, once you install MySQL you'll have to do any post setup yourself, like adding a mysql user, creating the initial database and setting it to start on boot.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Email to RSS - <AUTHOR> https://myrss.email/ <comment><USER2> A demo of how the feed looks would be great.

Does it support attachments? All email headers? What about spam?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Actually makes sense. The target is for newsletters so no attachment support, spam filtering (for now) and access to full email headers (no RSS element this will fit in).</comment></comment>


The Easiest Hard Problem: Balanced Number Partitioning - <AUTHOR> http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/14705?&print=yes

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a generally good article, but it gets two things irritatingly wrong. First, it presents the problem as only existing in the case of partitioning into two sets; in fact, the problem is usually considered in the case of partitioning into three or more sets, since the two-set case is really just the (far more widely known) Subset-Sum problem.

Second, the article gives an example of a two-set partitioning problem and then states that "the only sure way to find the one perfect partition is to check all possible partitions", i.e., that the optimal algorithm runs in O(2^N) time. In fact, there is a trivial O(sqrt(2)^N) algorithm for the problem.

<comment><USER2> Where can I read more about the O(sqrt(2)^N) algorithm?

<comment><AUTHOR> The gist of the algorithm is covered in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem#Exponential_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem#Exponential_time_algorithm)

Going from the O(2^(N/2) N) algorithm described in the wikipedia article to O(2^(N/2)) just involves keeping the lists of subset sums sorted during the construction process, thereby avoiding the need for the expensive sorting step.

That said, the O(2^(N/2)) algorithm requires O(2^(N/2)) space, making it less than ideal; in most circumstances, an algorithm which generates the lists of subset sums for each half of the list on-demand using a priority queue is better -- this approach takes O(2^(N/2) N) time, but only O(2^(N/4)) memory.</comment></comment></comment>


Pixel 2 is hiding a custom Google SoC for image processing - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/the-pixel-2-contains-a-custom-google-soc-the-pixel-visual-core/ <comment><USER2> Can somebody explain to me why they wouldn't just do this on the GPU? Isn't the GPU already designed to perform "hardware-accelerated image processing"?

<comment><USER3> For the same reason Google's TPU was an order of magnitude more efficient than Nvidia's previous "pure" GPUs, or why video codec accelerators are also faster and more efficient than GPUs for video decoding. The GPU is still pretty "general purpose" compared to a chip that only does image processing and not much else.

I hope Google will eventually reveal if the IPU shares any DNA with the TPU at all.

<comment><USER4> These developments are quite funny. At one point GPUs were just fixed function hardware. As more flexibility was needed for novel applications, programmability was added.

Now we are going to back to fixed function units as the calculus has changed in favour of power savings and against flexibility.

I'm interesting in seeing what advance in tech will change it again in favour of flexibility.

<comment><USER5> > the calculus has changed in favour of power savings and against flexibility

This has _always_ been a trade-off. For instance even with desktops, once video handling became common we first had video decode/encode being handled by GPU acceleration. But now most CPUs include dedicated h264 (and more recently hevc) decode/encode support, eg [0].

Although it's much lower computation, hardware acceleration is also offered for audio, and I'd take a guess the reason the Apple APIs for checking which hardware supports hardware-based audio encode/decode [1] has been deprecated is now because all supported devices provide all possible capabilities.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video) [1]: [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/audiotoolbox/16204...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/audiotoolbox/1620452-hardware_codec_capabilities?language=objc)

<comment> TD-Linux In the case with audio, it might be the opposite - even with a modern audio codec like Opus, an Apple CPU can decode an entire song into RAM in a fraction of a second. At that point, the CPU has to wake up anyway to download another song from Spotify or read one from disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was kinda feeling dumb reading this... SoC is "System On A Chip"... "A system on a chip or system on chip (SoC or SOC) is an integrated circuit (also known as an "IC" or "chip") that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic systems. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio-frequency functions—all on a single substrate."

<comment><USER7> Thanks for that. When I see the string "Google SoC", I interpret that to expand to "Google Summer of Code" so I was rather confused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its own CPU, and a PCIe endpoint? Sounds like a good persistent exploit vector. I wonder what tasks it will be used to accelerate.

<comment><USER9> It's only useful as a persistent exploit vector if it has persistence. If I was designing this, it'd be simpler to have it boot off an image downloaded from the main SoC rather than giving it its own flash.

<comment><USER8> Good point - if it's just got firmware uploaded from the SoC, it's more of an escalation / memory protection bypass vector versus a persistence vector. I also wonder what gets sent across to it - for example, if a malicious video from the web could land on the coprocessor.

Mostly it's just fun seeing more and more co-processing devices arrive in phones as they get broken :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When people started talking about Dark Silicon they didn't mean silicon that was never turned on.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> So maybe Google wants to build a device that needs image processing, but the (initial) volume can't justify a full-on custom ASIC. (And for some other reason -- power, space, ... -- this hypothetical device can't use an FPGA.)

Maybe find a device that does have a custom ASIC (e.g. Pixel 2) and add the image processing functionality to that ASIC. Then perhaps use same custom ASIC for both devices. As long as the extra functionality doesn't increase the cost of the original ASIC, problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER12> Its own DDR4 RAM? Anyone know the bandwidth or capacity?

</comment><comment><USER12> The submission URL should be changed to: [https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel-visual-core- image-p...](https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel-visual-core-image- processing-and-machine-learning-pixel-2)

</comment><comment><USER13> >If Google ever set out to compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon line, an IPU is something it could build directly into its own designs. For now, though, it has this self-contained solution.

If Google wanted to do this they would probably have to buy out QCOM and their patents.

<comment><USER14> Or at the very least pay a boatload of money in licensing fees. Qualcomm owns a huge chunk of IP in the mobile network space - they were responsible for the initial push behind CDMA back in the early 90s.

<comment><USER15> I wonder when the key patents expire... as old as it makes me feel to write this, the early 90s were over 20 years ago now.

<comment><USER16> Even the late-ish 90s were 20 years ago. Oh god</comment></comment></comment></comment>