The future of iOS is 64-bit only: Apple to stop support of 32-bit apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/3163248/ios/the-future-of-ios-is-64-bit-only-apple-to-stop-support-of-32-bit-apps.html <comment><USER2> The Ars Technica article on this issue cuts to the heart of why this is so devastating: there is tons of software--software which was really interesting and I dare say "seminal" for this important era of computing; and which is _not old or outdated by any sane standard_ \--that this destroys access to going forward, for essentially _no benefit_.

Apple insisted that they get to curate something of critical value, but they don't comprehend the moral weight of that responsibility, and now want to just go around burning down their Apple-branded libraries. It is absolutely sickening, and is the kind of thing we probably need to solve using regulation (which, of course, is likely never going to happen, given how even companies we would have assumed were on our side often have lobbyists fighting _for_ the ability to lock down ecosystems).

[https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/future-ios-release- wil...](https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/future-ios-release-will-soon- end-support-for-unmaintained-32-bit-apps/)

<comment><USER3> i'd just like to interject for a moment..

i wonder how long it is going to take for people to realize the importance of libre software. sure, strong copyleft can be inconvenient for developers, but that inconvenience must be borne to enable users to control their technology. otherwise we end up with the nonsense that we are discussing here: software people want/need, that they are no longer _permitted_ to use because Apple _said so_.

[https://www.fsf.org/](https://www.fsf.org/)

<comment><USER4> Quite. When you accept a dependency on proprietary software, you open yourself to the risk of the vendor withdrawing support. Looks like that risk materialized for some users today.

This is an "I told you so" moment for a lot of Free software advocates.

<comment><USER2> FWIW, as a serious advocate of Free Software (someone who constantly travels around to developer conferences, college hackathons, and even sci-fi conventions giving talks that stress the benefits of the GPL3), this doesn't help and almost becomes a non-sequitor, as it makes it sound like a business decision related to productivity applications. I doubt anyone would say they "rely" on Trainyard, and the Trainyard developer did "rely" on iOS, but they probably liked that and for all I know they are dead now (I realize they almost certainly aren't, but like: this is the extent to which they aren't relevant).

As a free software advocate, there isn't a group of "some users" whom I get to point at and say "I told you so": in fact, most of the people who played Trainyard and enjoyed it probably don't even care that it is going to be inaccessible. And while I sort of care myself about some specific applications, it isn't about people like me either. The devastating reality is that this purge of 32-bit software combined with the centralized control on the computers that are capable of running it is a devastating blow to society as a whole, and the people who are causing it are the people who either don't directly feel the downsides (as historical preservation is an externality, like pollution) or are actually in the minority of people who experience an _upside_.

Advocating for free software is good as it can be a weapon in this fight, but in practice Apple just isn't feeling the burn: when they wanted a new compiler, they hired a ton of engineers and wrote one so they didn't have to rely on gcc anymore. There is only so much power in the lever of free software to force societal change in a way that doesn't continually lead to a handful of resistance fighters looking at the carnage of the land and thinking "I know what will make me feel better: I'll point at the majority of people who don't even understand this enough to notice and the handful of people who are happy this happened and yell 'I told you so'", particularly when developers like Linus Torvalds, who have critically important positions, aren't fighting for the same battle.

My claim: _we need regulation_. In the same sense that we have regulation about pollution--to keep a handful of people who benefit from pollution enough to not care about its downsides to society (and them) from doing horrible things--we need to regulate companies like Apple to force them to provide open platforms and to have some reasonable set of responsibilities when it comes to sunsetting older hardware. The issue of closed vs. open ecosystems is _related_ to free software, but _isn 't the same_, and we need to be paying a lot more attention to the former and avoid a lot of knee jerk to the latter if we want to prevent some of the worst case scenarios.

<comment><USER5> Amen.

I also see this somewhat as a 'own your s __t ' scenario. Apple makes all of these systems and platforms, and then proceeds to abandon them, producing waste (in both materials and developer time for the apps that get updated for nothing but compatibility reasons).

They update their APIs, deprecate the old stuff, at a breakneck pace, and they leave a great mess behind. They should be forced to think more about the mess they are making, and be unable to leave it without penalties. One way for them to not leave it would be to open it up. Another way would be to support older versions for a longer timeframe, and allow users to continue to download and use them.

Either way, it's not in Apple's interests to do this - they're much more content to force this crap down our throats, and rely on us just dealing with it because there really isn't any choice.

<comment><USER6> The mess they are leaving behind are outdated, crappy apps. They don't adapt to modern screen sizes, use memory efficiently, download efficiently (bitcode), etc.

Apple is continuously improving and modernizing it's platform. They should be banning hundreds of thousands of zombie apps that haven't been touched in many years because they are not valuable and misleading to customers. But they don't, they allow you to keep your apps available on the store no matter how old or how poorly written. Finally they have their first platform change that's going to break them, and they can automatically boot them. That's a very good thing.

<comment><USER5> For another example, a thread today brought up Winamp. Winamp's last major updates happened, quite literally, a _decade_ ago.

This is a player that works just fine on Windows 10, and there's definitely a case to be made that it's better [overall] than any more modern alternative.

This type of software can never happen on iOS, and is quickly becoming a relic on Mac OS.

The core principles of good software haven't changed much over the years. UI (in HCI terms) has in many ways not moved forward much at all. Apple are changing their platform it seems, more for the sake of change, than for the sake of real progress. And they're forcing some really good software out because of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even without having read the article (the site is down for me) I can say this is a wise decision.

Currently the 64-bit arm cpu can also run 32-bit code. To support this it contains a 32-bit emulation layer that also exists in a few other places such as caches. By removing that, apple will be able to

1\. Shrink the CPU, hence making room for more cores or bigger caches.

2\. Reduce power usage by removing a significant number of gates.

3\. Simplify the OS code significantly, which will probably improve performance and security.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it would be a smart move if they can actually drop the 32 bit mode from the CPU/SoC but I wouldn't be so sure about that. Having the 32 bit mode may still be required for the firmware/bootloader/OS early boot environment.

The 32 bit mode may be partially or fully implemented using microcode and the actual silicon area that could be saved by this might not be that big.

What comes to OS and firmware, yes it could be simpler but most of the code is probably there already. Getting rid of it would mean more engineering work, not less (in the short term). On the other hand, removing the parts would reduce maintenance burden in the long run. And Apple doesn't care about supporting old hardware anyway so they might as well drop it.

I work with ARM SoC's but the above is no more than an educated guess as I don't know details about their CPU architecture or firmware/bootloader/OS software, take it with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER9> Presumably they can write their firmware using 64-bit code too? is there a reason it would still be 32-bit?

<comment><USER8> If it's all their code, yes they can do it (it might be a lot of engineering, though). But it might contain 3rd party code or dependencies to something that's non trivial to port to 64 bits.

If you go look at the boot procedure of a modern ARM SoC, it's pretty complex (also it's different for every SoC, there's no governing standard like the "PC is for x86"). The CPU may go through several operating modes and the procedure of booting up the cores is non-trivial.

I do not think it's impossible, but the benefits for all that engineering work may not be as great as GP suggests.

They are in a pretty unique position as they control all the hardware and the software, though.

<comment><USER10> There is UEFI+ACPI on ARM also, that's how Windows on ARM works. Windows on ARM devices use a far more desktop-like bootchain than anything else

<comment><USER8> Yes, but that's in addition to the dozens of proprietary boot procedures commonly used by Android tablets and smartphones and other ARM devices.

<comment><USER7> Actually there are more or less only two big ones used in 2017: the well engineered open source boot solution that ARM started and is now backed by Linux and that piece of garbage that Qualcomm uses.

Hopefully next year this time there will be only one.

<comment><USER10> UEFI with ACPI on ARM was started by Microsoft first, but is now the ARM standard :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure that this means what the article says it means. Apple was selling the iPhone 5C in India until less than a year ago. Dropping support for the new OS that soon would be uncharacteristic for the iPhone.

Instead, they may simply be dropping support for 32 bit apps on a 64 bit CPU. Having to support 64 bit and 32 bit apps one a single device forces them to ship two versions of every shared library, and is probably annoying for them in various types of interprocess communication, because, for example, CGFloat and integer types are different sizes.

My guess is that they will release a 32 bit version of iOS and a 64 bit version, and each one will only run apps for the native processor word size.

<comment><USER12> They did something like this for the worst gen iPads. Two years and support was dropped. I believe they've also done it for Mac hardware too. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if they did it for an economy model of the iPhone.

<comment><USER6> It had 256 megs of ram. I'm running the latest OS on an iPhone 5c that is 4 and a half years old.

The pace of change in phones/tablets has been tremendous since the iPhone and iPad were released. Current versions are more than 10x faster and ship with much more ram. There aren't infinite resources at any company (unless you want the army of programmers failed model from IBM of yore), focusing limited engineering resources on most important issues is crucial to making progress.

You got an iPad that worked well. They stopped enhancing it after 2 years. When did your car maker stopped enhancing your car?

<comment><USER13> The trouble with the car analogy is that internet-connected devices need constant security updates, whereas cars don't. A car built ten years ago is as safe as it ever was, minus whatever problems arise from wear and tear. A device running iPhone OS 1.0 will probably not survive long on the internet of 2017.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So developers have roughly 9 months to update their apps or they won't run on 5 year old hardware? This doesn't sound as devastating as some of the tweets and headlines would imply (that seems to be common these days).

<comment><USER15> > This doesn't sound as devastating as some of the tweets and headlines would > imply (that seems to be common these days).

Most of these applications are games, the developer may not even be alive anymore at this point and there's no ROI in updating working complete games just because they are old.

Your basic actual game (not the F2P/IAP garbage) just creates an opengl context and handles touch input, that stuff only breaks when the OS itself breaks core API, I've got many games from my early 3G/iPhoneOS2 days which still run fine on a 7 running iOS10 (though not all of them).

<comment><USER6> If the developer is dead, what man alive now could ever figure out how to open it in Xcode 8 and click "compile"?

<comment><USER16> Many other requirements have been instituted from iOS version to iOS version that require substantial work to bring old code up to current App Store standards. Among them are things like screen size support and retina- resolution assets. Meanwhile, many of these apps still work perfectly fine on iOS 10, even if Apple won't accept those submissions today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This really, really sucks for people who paid good money for 32bit apps. Or even expensive external hardware items that require ancient apps to be useful. Even if the apps are removed from the app store (and Apple has gone on a rampage removing old apps), existing customers always could keep the apps installed until now. If apps stop working and disappear, they will lose a whole lot of the trust that people had in the app store. I'm also curious about how this will affect the usually impressive rate of upgrades to the latest iOS version among active app-purchasing users.

<comment><USER18> The fact that those apps are still 32-bit means they're unmaintained. The fact that they're unmaintained means that they're likely to break at some arbitrary OS update anyway. Even common apps like Tweetbot, by reputable developers, will break on a new major version, so your app that hasn't been updated in years is probably going to die off soon anyway.

The only way to make sure to keep those apps open is to keep from updating iOS, and if you do that this doesn't affect you anyway.

<comment><USER17> There's no reason apps should break on arbitrary OS updates as long as they are well-behaved and stick to documented UIKit APIs and so on. I have apps from 2009 that work perfectly well for the task they need to do. The companies have long since folded and closed down their app store account. Others have similar apps, perhaps controlling $1000+ worth of DVR equipment. I think (and hope) Apple may be underestimating the effect of a vocal minority still requiring these apps, and the chilling effect this may have on paid apps or even free apps for the made-for-iphone hardware program in the app store in general.

<comment><USER2> And a lot of games hardly even use UIKit, relying only on OpenGL ES and some input handling logic: these are the kinds of apps I would expect to essentially never break (and would usually assume a platform bug if they did break).

<comment><USER19> I run iOS public betas and many games break during the beta period of new iOS versions. Even highly-rated apps like Rayman Run has been completely broken for weeks for me; like the audio breaks out, the touch input is not accepted in some menus, etc. At some point I couldn't event start the game. Then, an update arrives and everything is fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Ever launch an app on your iPhone and then get a pop-up warning that says > the app may slow down your iPhone?

Noooooo :( Pleas say it ain't so...

"PDF Highlighter" by omz:software is one of my favorite apps on the iPad. The only PDF app that doesn't have a million things I don't need, and has a beautiful summary of all the highlights you make in your PDFS..plus Dropbox .. plus OCR. Oh, and highlight colors that don't look like they were put in by a 3 year old jesus. What's up with all those annotate aps using FF0 yellow or F00 red? What happened to design? Why do all these PDF apps have to suck so bad as a reading experience?

Sigh.

[https://appadvice.com/app/pdf- highlighter/400191310](https://appadvice.com/app/pdf-highlighter/400191310)

</comment><comment><USER21> For Apple this must be a dream -- drop everything that's explicitly 32-bit. Make some compiler improvements easier, possibly drop some silicon costs, remove lots of #ifdef __LP64__, simplify the kernel, etc.

<comment><USER22> Don't forget that the newest Apple Watch is 32-bit.

<comment><USER23> Apple Watch (from a development perspective) runs bitcode, not armv6/armv7/armv7s.

<comment><USER17> 32bit bitcode. You can't go from LLVM bitcode to both 32bit and 64bit as far as I understand. You need "bit-specific" (architecture-specific) bitcode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "This includes the iPhone 5, 5c, and older, the standard version of the iPad (so not the Air or the Pro), and the first iPad mini."

This implies there is still a "standard" iPad for sale. In fact, the iPad Air was simply the successor to the iPad 4, and the iPad Pro was the successor to the iPad Air 2. There is no "standard iPad" on sale anymore, and there hasn't been for years.

This won't directly affect any device Apple has sold in some time. The iPhone 5C is the last iPhone they released that was 32bit, and was likely to be dropped for software updates with the release of iOS 11 anyway.

In short, there's nothing to worry about, except if you want to run an app that hasn't been updated in 2+ years

<comment><USER25> My dad still uses an iPhone 5. Will he be unable to download any app updates until he gets a new phone?

<comment> X-Istence Yep. Nor will he be able to get the latest version of iOS. So just like any other upgrade that removed older devices from the supported list.

<comment><USER26> Based on what evidence? Apple still accepts 32-bit slices if you want to submit them. 64-bit slices are required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm upset that all of my Llamasoft/Jeff Minter games will go by the wayside. Minter did not find it profitable to make iOS games, so he let his Apple Developer subscription lapse; there won't be a 64-bit recompile of Gridrunner for iOS.

I might have to get an Android device just for classic games, like his.

[http://minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/?p=376](http://minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/?p=376)

<comment><USER6> I'd be mad at Jeff Minter. Not Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Since a 64-bit processor processes more data at a time than a 32-bit > processor, you get faster performance.

Is this true? If I recall correctly, 32-bit to 64-bit doesn't always necessarily mean "end-user performance improvements."

<comment><USER26> _sigh_

Technically it doesn't.

In practice only two architectures matter: x86 and ARM. Both brought cleaned- up ISAs, expanded the number of general-purpose registers, made some features required, and made other improvements during the transition.

So for all practical purposes: YES, the 64-bit transition has actual real benefits to end users besides the larger address space.

<comment><USER11> Assuming you don't need the extra address space, what are those? End-user improvements that is... Performance wise, I doubt that the performance gains from extra registers make up for the higher cache miss rate from the larger code and data sizes.

<comment><USER29> Being able to rely on at least SSE2 is a big win for 64-bit on x86.

Technically you could use 32-bit addresses on a 64-bit processor and not have your data be any bigger, but most languages don't offer a good way to do this (IIRC the HotSpot JVM's UseCompressedOops option does something along these lines).

<comment><USER30> This is actually implemented on Linux/glibc: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI)

You can compile C/C++ programs using this ABI, and get all 64-bit benefits without 64-bit pointers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Arch Linux also recently announced phasing out the 32-bit distribution (though multilib will still be available).[1] Perhaps the start of a trend.

[1]: [https://www.archlinux.org/news/phasing- out-i686-support/](https://www.archlinux.org/news/phasing-out-i686-support/)

<comment><USER32> That's a different kettle of fish.

Multilib means you can still run 32-bit binaries. Although given Linux doesn't have a stable ABI, I haven't found that 32-bit Linux binaries age well (e.g. if you run something from 10 years ago, it's probably using OSS, enjoy trying to wrap that to alsa...).

Arch is deprecating the i686 only distribution. Which IMHO is a good idea. Multilib support is generally excellent, and to my knowledge no one who is shipping i686 systems (e.g. industrial PCs with a 10 year availability) is using Arch Linux anyway.

<comment><USER30> From my experience, the aoss wrapper works pretty well. I had the UT99 Loki/UTPG port running with it with no problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yoz-y It would be good to start some kind of initiative to try to get in contact with developers of unmaintained apps and tu to convince them to do one last build. Or to release the software to open source or at least work with somebody to keep them going. Many will likely not respond but if there is a chance to salvage at least some of them it would be a win.

<comment><USER33> "One last build" generally isn't enough because software might have many issues, including:

— Dependencies on other 32-bit libraries that have not changed.

— Dependencies on entire OS frameworks that have not migrated to 64-bit (and Apple has at least one of these).

— Having a "plug-in" feature, whereby cherished plug-ins have not _all_ migrated to 64-bit so the user must then choose a 64-bit subset.

— Any number of problems in the code itself, such as improper assumptions made about the sizes of data structures or creative solutions that only made sense on 32-bit platforms. After a simple recompile, the code may crash in places or consume much more memory. Floating-point values may produce subtly different results, creating issues all over the place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It feels really weird to me that now 32 bit CPUs aren't considered good enough even for a telephone. Maybe I'm getting old.

<comment><USER35> Did you write this just to be snarky and call it a "telephone"?

An iPhone is more complex than the desktop computer you wrote this comment on and you know it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So basically 4.5 years support max. for your devices (iPhone 5 was September 2012; iPad 4 October 2012)? Also aren't there a lot of these "old" iPads out there with people "refusing to update"?

I think technically it makes a lot of sense but for customers this is pretty bad. Compared to Microsoft's 15 years of extended support for an OS (iirc. 5 is standard). Ubuntu LTS is 5 years. Sure there's a difference when you're the hardware vendor and the OS vendor but still I'm not sure this is a great move.

<comment><USER29> If this is bad for customers, pretty much every Android device except the Nexus must be a living hell. How many Android handsets (including "flagships") launch with an already outdated OS version and _never_ get updated?

<comment><USER35> This is markedly different because most applications written for the first versions of Android still work even on the newest version of the OS. Apple is explicitly breaking 32bit applications from running on the device/OS. Remember we are talking about application compatibility which is not much related to OS updates.

<comment><USER6> Unless the developer recompiles. Which is simple to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It would be nice if they published a list of the software which will no longer be supported.

There is a definite opportunity for app developers here.

</comment><comment><USER38> One of the consequences of this move will be to flush out tens or hundreds of thousands of applications from the App Store.

Why?

It's a simple matter of economics: Creating apps for iOS is, and has been, for a long time, unprofitable for most developers. Last I looked, most can't earn a living, which means they are working for far less than what they could otherwise earn doing something else.

A good deal of the existing 32 bit apps are simply going to die off as developers abandon them.

This could be good, of course, as it might improve discoverability in certain categories. Time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER39> The first apps I've bought for my iPhone were dictionaries. The owners of the dictionary material sold the right to the app developers, but didn't extend it, therefore the developer doesn't even have the right to publish an updated version, even if it would be only a recompile with the never compilers for them.

Which means that even if I've paid for the content, now I'll have to purchase it again from another developer only because some random limitation is introduced, and even that purchases can soon disappear again.

</comment><comment><USER40> So glad this is happening, it'll be a nice forced purge of old outdated apps, also there is no good reason to have a 32bit app in 2017...

</comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone have a comprehensive list of the advantages (and disadvantages besides: "Old software won't work anymore.") of this decision?

Does it reduce engineering/research effort, production costs, chip size, size of binaries, duration of compilation, programming effort and improve performance: If yes, by how much?

</comment><comment><USER42> Online banking app of my bank is 32-bit, so for me it means "don't update anymore".

<comment><USER43> Nobody at the bank could be bothered to push the "Build" button in Xcode since JUNE 2015? (when they stopped accepting 32-bit apps) Sounds like you need to upgrade your bank...

<comment><USER44> I'm guessing it's more because they want to support customers who might still be on iOS 6. The 64-bit compiler only came with the iOS 7 SDK.

Five years doesn't seem like a long time at banks, even though iOS 6 probably has a whole bunch of privilege escalation exploits that wouldn't be very nice to deal with.

<comment><USER45> Seems to be a good reason to have a mobile website as well as apps. Though I've never bothered to see if my main bank even has a decent mobile website because I always use the app. But another bank I use has only a mobile website and has no app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> So the Squeezebox remote app is finally going to break. How annoying.

</comment><comment><USER47> Say what you will about legacy support or planned obsolescence, but Apple has been constantly pushing the computing envelope exactly because they don't have to be Microsoft and get held back by older technology.

<comment><USER48> Yes, only Apple could get away with this and it's great that they're willing to sacrifice a few short term $ for the long term benefit. Sure, a lot of software will become useless. Same as happened with all the Mac architecture changes over the past couple of decades. Apple developers should should expect to stay on the ball and users should expect not to start depending on old unsupported software.

If you prefer longer backward compatibility, and no rush to keep updating everything, use Windows, but pay the price in ugliness.

I'll be glad when all 32 bit platforms are out of use. There's so much duplicated code around and time wasted debugging 32/64 bit mixups.

<comment><USER49> > Yes, only Apple could get away with this

Android phone vendors drop support for their devices and software like a stone all the time, but it's just considered business as usual. Apple twitches in a vaguely unexpected way and the internet burns down in paranoid outrage. Personally, I'm going to wait until we actually find out what this means.

<comment><USER2> So, some people are talking about iOS itself possibly dropping support for 32-bit hardware, while others (including myself) are talking about issues with existing hardware not even being able to run things that will soon no longer be downloadable, and are taking this as an opportunity to lament over the lack of historical preservation of software. FWIW, you might mean the former, but I'm going to address the latter.

In one of the few really legitimately "open" things Google does with Android, they provide emulators for their devices and downloadable historic stock firmwares; and because they don't have control over their hardware, they don't have the ability to implement "actually good" DRM on their application archive files. Apple has set up an environment where when they sunset something, it will actually fade from existence: that is not the case with Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> TIL there are still 32-bit apps for apples.

</comment><comment><USER51> this translates to: swift will be included with the next iOS

<comment><USER15> That makes no sense. You can already develop iOS (or tvOS) applications in Swift, the runtime bits are provided by the pre-existing Objective-C runtime.

<comment><USER52> Every app that uses Swift embeds its own copy of the Swift runtime libraries, since they are not part of the system (the ABI isn't stable yet).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wonder if they will at some point remove the crap that's needed for 32 bit mode from the die. That could shrink the die size a tiny bit.

</comment><comment><USER54> iPhone 5 users are plentiful and will be pretty livid if they are locked out of a future major version over this issue. Apple just can't get out of their own way these days. If I were an iPhone 5 user and was forced into a twinked device like the iPhone SE or iPhone 7 I would probably leave the entire ecosystem and hundreds of dollars worth of DRM purchases behind.

<comment> X-Istence Do you have stats for how plentiful iPhone 5 users are?

The Apple iPhone 5 was released in 2012. Apple has provided those users with 5 years of updates (assuming September is when they will release the new iPhone and also update the major iOS version number).

5 years is a long time in the mobile handset business... I doubt too many people will be livid about anything.

<comment><USER55> You assume everyone purchased the iphone 5 in 2012. The iphone 5c was still selling new in India less than a year ago.

Also new ones still listed for sale direct from Walmart it appears: [https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-iPhone-5C-8GB-AT-T- Locked/4...](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-iPhone-5C-8GB-AT-T- Locked/45722852)

If you purchased a new device and in less than a year support is dropped, yeah you might be livid.

<comment><USER56> Standard practice in the world of Android phones. To add even more salt to that wound the OS was probably a couple years out of date when you bought it as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I can only presume part of a long ramp up for an iOS Macbook play.

<comment><USER58> If you have no 32 bit processes on the system, then 32-bit shared libraries don't have to be loaded (saving RAM), can be omitted from the system entirely (saving disk space), and don't have to enter into the test matrix (saving engineering time). I suspect it's as simple as those optimizations.

<comment><USER59> With hardware SO cheap, and the amount of RAM or disk space these take up it would be self destructive for Apple to ostracize so many customers over something that is literally dirt cheap to accommodate.

<comment><USER60> No, the 32bit libs will cause havoc with the CPU cache. Good to drop them.

<comment><USER59> Yeah sure burn more customer goodwill after the last batch of MacBook Pro's... Apple is in customer maintenance mode, Tim Cook especially, technically this might make sense ,just be prepared for customer backlash at a time when Apple really doesnt need anymore of that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


When computer scientists protest... - <AUTHOR> http://streebgreebling.blogspot.com/2009/09/when-computer-scientists-protest.html

<comment><USER2> Apparently John Oliver (from The Daily Show) was there: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/30686429@N07/3953575603/in/set-...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/30686429@N07/3953575603/in/set-72157622330082619/)

<comment><USER3> Super!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mapreduce, Mapreuse, Maprecycle!

Not bad.

</comment><comment><USER5> also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844770>

Can someone who knows explain what is going on? Things like G20 usually get protested, but I would like to know if the dept was honestly protesting but using funny signs, or just having fun.

<comment><USER6> I was there when they started gathering outside of NSH. It was meant to be a parody of the other protests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.flickr.com/photos/30686429@N07/sets/7215762233008...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/30686429@N07/sets/72157622330082619/)

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.flickr.com/photos/30686429@N07/sets/7215762233008...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/30686429@N07/sets/72157622330082619/)</comment>


Ask HN: How can I find out what libraries a website is using? - <AUTHOR>

Often when browsing the internet I come across websites I find beautiful and there are certain elements I feel I could use in future. However sometimes I find it difficult to understand how a website has been made (what languages) and what libraries have been used for the frontend.
One particular site I have come across I am having trouble with is: http://yungcloud.com/
What can I do to try and discover more about how the website was made. <comment><USER2> You can try BuiltWith [http://builtwith.com/](http://builtwith.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use [http://wappalyzer.com/](http://wappalyzer.com/) for this, but others may have more specific suggestions.</comment>


Worries Grow That the Price of Bitcoin Is Being Propped Up - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/technology/bitfinex-bitcoin-price.html <comment><USER2> dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279300)</comment>


Ask HN: Fitness/Sleep tracker that wakes me up in light sleep cycle? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a smartwatch/fitness/sleep tracker that wakes up me:
- Ideally when I am ready (if such a thing exists) OR
- In my light sleep cycle based on my alarm setting
I have looked around but did not find one that meets my needs. Using Fitbit which uses light vibration, but the best option I found ironically is simpler gentler sounds like `Circuit` on my iPhone.
For the context, I don't drink alcohol, no caffeine intake post 7pm, no electronic devices or TV post 9pm, sleep around 11pm, with night blinds. So trying my best to give myself some quality sleep :-).
Any tips on a device will greatly help, if not someone on HN makes it :-), Thanks! <comment><USER2> Versa 2 or Ionic. Take the most recent firmware update.

<comment><USER3> Hi, You Can look at Huami Amazfit BiP Smartwatch that priced around 5000 rs.</comment></comment>


How one bank's failure triggered the Panic of 1857 - <AUTHOR> http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2015/10/crisis-chronicles-defensive-suspension-and-the-panic-of-1857.html <comment><USER2> As I read this it strikes me how much even the height of capitalism is a participatory, integrated, community-based culture. And how much the actions of a few can arbitrarily affect so many.

Interesting lesson for the startup scene of today, (which I am not a part of, so I don't really know) is what would happen if a large fund (Say, a18z) suddenly looked for exits for ALL of their portfolio companies. Would Silicon Valley see a similar crash to the Panic of 1857?

<comment><USER3> A VC firm typically has many "funds" that are locked up for particular lengths of time. Since that money is locked up & they are taking a percentage off the top, as well as a portion of any profits on exit, there is very little incentive for them to liquidate & take a loss early, unless the invested-in company is close to going bankrupt anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tangentially, you can read about the bank crisis that spawned the worlds first central bank.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholms_Banco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholms_Banco)</comment>


Can a Single Internet Market Do What the Euro Couldn't? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/opinion/sunday/could-the-internet-do-what-the-euro-couldnt.html <comment><USER2> Like what? Like creating a currency of comparable strength and amount as US dollar, to simplify international trade in Europe? Granted, it took the place over from ECU, being a currency with banknotes and coins.</comment>


A note-taking app for technical teams - <AUTHOR> https://memo.ai/ <comment><USER2> Mircea, CEO and co-founder of Memo here. We're super excited to announce Memo!

Memo is a note-taking app for technical teams. With Memo it's quick and easy to save and find code snippets, meeting notes, links, Slack messages, or other short work notes – right inside Slack or on the web.

You can write notes using both Markdown and Slack formatting, including @users, #channels and :emoji:. Organize them in boards, and even link different boards and notes between each other for quick access. All boards can either be kept private or shared with your Slack team.

We're looking forward to hear your feedback or questions!

P.S. We have full support for Slack's new message menus feature: [https://blog.memo.ai/10x-your-slack-apps-ux-with-message- men...](https://blog.memo.ai/10x-your-slack-apps-ux-with-message- menus-98a5a09b3a7a)

<comment><USER3> I want to add this so that my team can check it out, but I'm very very hesitant because that would mean Memo would be able to see the contents of those notes along with any metadata.

We have very sensitive information in notes and can't afford to widen the surface area of possible data leaks. Sure, Slack might get hacked - that's still an issue.....but adding even more untrusted, unpaid services that can read our information is not a great path to go down.

<comment><USER2> Fair concern. We have at-rest encryption on our roadmap and our goal is build a profitable business, so maybe we'll earn your trust later on as we iterate.

<comment><USER4> I'm not the OP, but you should know that for security-conscience people the idea of earning trust does not exist. I should never have to trust you, your web dev, your software engineer, your CTO, your devops guy, your cloud provider, your cleaning staff, and your interns. Rather, provide to me a service that is secure even assuming that the aforementioned entities are compromised, then you'll earn my business and my money.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I can understand that perspective, but it does require some trade-offs on the product side.

Given that we're targeting technical teams using Slack, we focused on productivity features and usability first, but our roadmap is open to change based on user feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it would be huge if you would add a small video or gif to the homepage. I'm having a hard time understanding how the UI works by looking at the screenshot and I find that is critical to me making a decision for a note taking app.

<comment><USER2> That's a good point! We used to have a video, but it was hard to maintain, but we should revisit that.

We have some different graphics in our Slack App Directory description: [https://slack.com/apps/A0G9XHRE0-memo-notes-at- work](https://slack.com/apps/A0G9XHRE0-memo-notes-at-work) \- do you find these more helpful?

<comment><USER5> Those are helpful, but I think in addition to isolated screenshots I'd want to see full screen snaps of what the app looks like. This is to help me visualize it in context of my existing work environment/flow on the desktop.

It seems like there is a lot of interplay between participants too and I'd like to see how that works.

Just some cents on my initial reaction to seeing the product. Kudos though!

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the feedback, we'll look into recording the entire flow from Slack to web app. In the meantime, I don't have a better alternative than signing up :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sign up ... "ok" ...with Slack ... "no"

<comment><USER2> Why not?

<comment><USER7> It seems like an arbitrary sso to offer as the only option.

<comment><USER2> Got it. One of the differentiators of Memo is the deep Slack integration, for example with the recently launched Message Menus: [https://blog.memo.ai/10x-your-slack-apps-ux-with-message- men...](https://blog.memo.ai/10x-your-slack-apps-ux-with-message- menus-98a5a09b3a7a)

We plan to offer G Suite and GitHub sign-in soon.

<comment><USER8> Slack accounts are separate for each team you join. A lot of people join a handful of public and private teams. This means we have to create an account each time?

<comment><USER2> For now, yes. We've noticed that quite a few Slack users have multiple teams, but most of them have just one team in which they spend 80% of their time (usually it's their work team).

We're also planning to add other team logins (G Suite & GitHub) and we also expect Slack to improve the experience for users with multiple teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would I post proprietary code in your app? I don't know about your security measures.

<comment><USER10> Yep. Not going to happen at any reasonably paranoid organization.

<comment><USER11> On the other hand, imagine if this is adopted by one of those clueless marketers at the megacorps and then someone leaks the notes - it will be a much easier read and probably even juicier than the code. Wouldn't that be something!

Just tell them this will hyper-synergize their communications by providing them measurable, AI-powered real time knowledge management. Memo.ai FTW!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> siddharth-shah Really wanted to test it out but asks to signup using slack, could not join(Currently, I do not have a team to join or login). You should alahways a demo or something; or at least some really simple login/signup!

<comment><USER2> Sorry to hear, we are planning to add G Suite and GitHub sign-in soon.

If you'd like to get a better idea of the product you can check out the graphics in our Slack App Directory description: [https://slack.com/apps/A0G9XHRE0-memo-notes-at- work](https://slack.com/apps/A0G9XHRE0-memo-notes-at-work)

We also have more screenshots on our blog: [https://blog.memo.ai/](https://blog.memo.ai/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You might want to consider Twitter integration (different target, I know) but you'd solve a huge problem of size limit of 140 chars which people are solving by posting images of text. Also far fewer issues of proprietary content and confidentiality.

<comment><USER2> We haven't considered that so far since our focus is on technical teams at work, but it's an interesting idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Memo is free for teams of all sizes while in beta.

Sounds ominous.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, English is not my first language. What would be a better way to phrase it?

<comment><USER13> It's good English, but it's not transparent as to what future costs I might encounter if I start using the product while it's in beta, and want to continue using it in the future.

I'm happy to pay to use good software, but it's better to know the pricing plan in advance. I think that [https://octopus.com/purchase](https://octopus.com/purchase) provides a good example:

> Community edition is free for small teams, even for commercial use. It > allows you to deploy up to five projects to up to ten target machines, and > is limited to five users.

<comment><USER2> You're right, we could be more transparent about future pricing. It hadn't come up until now, we'll make sure to address it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> why is this better than free trello?

<comment><USER2> Good question! We're focused on different use-cases (note-taking vs. project management), as well as a narrower niche (technical teams vs. any group of people, teams, families, etc.).

We use both Trello and Memo in our and the usage is quite complementary.

Do you use Trello for note-taking at work?

<comment><USER15> Consider developing an extension (browser), not sure if this is secure at all, but think how easy it would be to grab current tabs, highlight-get text from pages, etc... I've got this for myself but it sounds relevant to your app.

Again not sure about security though, but convenient. No need to switch to another tab while deep in the rabit hole of opening links.

<comment><USER2> Totally agree! A browser extension is on our roadmap, if you're interested to get early access to it I can add you to our "beta program".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Zed on Matt: Conclusion - <AUTHOR> http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-11-06.html

<comment><USER2> For as much shit as people toss in Zed's direction, it's very cool the effort he made for this guy.

<comment><USER3> My hacker news profile was intended to be funny, but I'm now considering dropping the 'but close'.

<comment><USER4> So I look at your profile, then your website, and now much time has passed :)

Those some of the best flash games I've seen. All your own work?

<comment><USER3> Glad you like them! They're all made by us, yes. We're getting quite a few together now... we'll probably have to redesign the site.

<comment><USER5> I bought Robokill and beat it in the same afternoon. It was magical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i've never met zed, but am always impressed with his honesty in everything i've read written by him. I don't think one can ever say that he doesn't actually believe what he claims.

<comment><USER7> Don't you find him to be a bit narcissistic? In any case, I usually read his writing, but I've found his tendency towards autobiography and self-promotion alarming at times.

<comment><USER8> I think it is a joke, and a funny one.

<comment><USER7> Probably. Bottom line is that we can't judge an individual based on something as trivial as a blog, but quite a few people seem to take blogs and such very seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Serious question: Other than this is written by a programmer, does this story have any relevance to Hacker News?

<comment><USER10> _"... Other than this is written by a programmer, does this story have any relevance to Hacker News? ..."_

Yes I think so.

Firstly it shows Zed follows the _"Be good"_ mantra. It's simple to follow, harder to practice but worth the effort.

 _"... I know many programmers are not religious, and I'm not really either, but many churches and houses of worship do good things for people. They feed the poor, take in the sick, and help people who need it most. When you need help, a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple will most likely help you ..."_

Secondly we can practice our sharp analytical skills noting that just because there is a good family that happens to be religious, it does not logically follow that religion itself is good.

<comment><USER9> All good points, but I don't see the genre-specific connection to the sort of things we usually discuss and find interesting around here :)

All of those things are general things that everyone should pay attention to.

<comment><USER10> _"... All good points, but I don't see the genre-specific connection to the sort of things we usually discuss and find interesting around here :) ..."_

Be good ~ <http://paulgraham.com/good.html>

Be skeptical ~ <http://paulgraham.com/lies.html></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AMD's Entire Ryzen 9 3950X 16 Core CPU Inventory Sold Out in Japan - <AUTHOR> https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-3950x-entire-inventory-outsold-japan-worldwide/ <comment><USER2> I think there was a link last friday of Ryzen being top seller for like 6 of the top spots on Amazon.

[https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories- Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Computer-CPU- Processors/zgbs/pc/229189)

It looks like today the top 10 are all Ryzen. This is crazy.

<comment><USER3> Rumour is a corporate client wasn't given access to as many units as they wanted, so decided to buy retail.

<comment><USER4> Still considerably cheaper than Intel...

<comment><USER5> The fact that Intel can sell their CPU higher price than AMD means that supply is the bottleneck.

<comment><USER6> Citation needed.

<comment><USER7> I believe that AMD relies on another company to produce its CPUs which may limit their supply. If they can't produce enough, and there is still a demand then there will be no choice but to go with Intel. This is some guessing on my part, since I don't have any economic background.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it is purely a TSMC supply issue. To put it bluntly; AMD isn't used to selling that many CPUs. Zen 1/\+ brought them parity with intel performance-wise (something AMD has been laking for over a decade). It's only with Zen 2/ the 3000 series that AMD has had both core-count and single- threaded. Before you had to choose between lots of slower cores or fewer/ faster cores.

I do wonder if the 3900x/ 3950x shortage is at least partially manufactured (they're so hard to get they must be good right?). Intel halved their prices pre-lunch which is something that has never happened before, but they still can't match AMD for price/ performance.

AMD has both good CPUs & GPUs (something that is very rare!). Being an owner of an RX 5700, I'm surprised how low the power usage is. If they put a cut- down RX 5000 on a low-power CPU, they could make some decent laptops that don't need dedicated GPUs (memory speed is a bottle-neck especially on a laptop with a single memory channel). That could pose a problem for Intel. I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't been more of a priority for AMD, all Intel can do to compete right now is to literally give their CPU/ APUs away (better to make a loss than lose a customer to AMD). Next year will be a good time to buy a laptop. It looks as though Zen 3 will first launch on laptops, that may pose a problem for Intel...

<comment><USER9> Honestly, I feel that Intel could have the better laptop chips if they get 10nm in a better state. And I say this after building a 3600X +RX 5700 XT desktop this year.

Intel's R&D budget is several times larger then AMD's revenue so they'll always be able to squeeze a little more out of their current chips.

Could just be a timing issue though. Intel might abandon their current 10nm leaving AMD as the default winner by mid/late 2020.

Disclaimer: I'm long on AMD and wishing I bought more 5 years ago.

<comment><USER10> > Intel's R&D budget is several times larger then AMD's revenue so they'll > always be able to squeeze a little more out of their current chips.

But Intel has to compete with TSMC. Since TSMC is making Apple, AMD, NVidia, and Qualcomm chips, TSMC's R&D Budget seems to have won over in this generation.

<comment><USER11> Agree.

TSMC amortizes its RD/CapEx/Op costs over Apple, Qualcomm, NVida, Broadcom, Xilinx, etc.

Apple, Qualcomm paid for most of the heavy 7nm RD/Capex long before to AMD's 7nm production commitments. AMD basically got the 7nm production advantage without the RISK on Fab investments like Intel. It was good that the AMD 's board had the foresight to divest fab to Global Foundry a few years back.

Intel has to amortizes its fab cost over Altera and x86 CPU. Altera part is probably trivial. Intel's huge 10nm investment in RD, Capex depending entirely on one x86 product line to recover. When execute well like 15 years before 2017, it was big advantage. Any execution misses, the FAB RD/Cap cost became a liability.

"Only the Paranoid Survive" \- Last few years, Intel was definitively not Paranoid enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DIY CPU retail market for processors is extremely tiny market. Very high margin, but insignificant.

AMD's challenge is getting enough processors out in the enterprise market. They need to grow the market share now when they have the technical advantage. Intel can sell their inferior CPU's for higher price because they can deliver large volumes and satisfy demand.

Revenue comparison 2018:

        Intel  $70.8 billion
          AMD   $6.5 billion

AMD is fabless, so they are in competition with other GF and TSMC customers for manufacturing capacity. Apple,Nvidia,Qualcomm and many others.

<comment><USER12> "AMD is fabless"

Which also means they can jump to whatever the current hot stuff is in the fab world, letting the big fabs (which are few in number, but still >1) compete on technical merits.

Where Intel has a corporate need to use whatever fabs they've invested in, and to be anchored by whatever the limitation of their fabs are. They aren't really limited by that -- they could just get TSMC to make some stuff for them or something --- but they're Intel so they'll just make 10+++++++

<comment><USER5> They don't jump. Usually make long term deals for each process and design their microarchitecture for that process. AMD moved all 7nm CPU, GPU production to TSMC and they are tied to them for the duration of 7nm.

The question is if they can get all the capacity they need for price they can afford. It seems like high margin customers like Apple and Nvidia are always served first because they can pay more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope AMD doesn't slow down on the performance side with their 3rd generation of Zen.

I want to get a new laptop next year and I hope it comes with a good mobile Ryzen processor with Thunderbolt support.

<comment><USER14> I recently bought a new laptop and actually wanted AMD, but none of the laptops I was inteested in were available with one. It appears that high-end laptops are still ruled by Intel. Do AMDs run too hot for mobile or something?

<comment><USER15> It's not about heat, more probably vendors have a contract with Intel that makes Intel parts more expensive if they are not bought exclusively (it will be worded differently because Intel already got sued for this practice).

I recently bought a Thinkpad E495 with a Ryzen 3700u and thermals are just fine. The surface barely heats up under sustained load. The E series is more budget, though. But the T495 (14") or X395 are of higher build quality (and price) and also have Ryzen 3x00u CPUs.

<comment><USER16> Typing this on my x395 (with 3700u) and can confirm these are really well made laptops.

Linux support is excellent. Openbsd is good but doesn't support this generation of wireless cards yet, which is quite inconvenient; next version perhaps.

<comment><USER17> How is graphics performance / functionality?

I've only ever really dealt wit nVidia and Intel graphics, and highly prefer intel due to tearing fixes.

I'm not a gamer, but do need at least basic hardware acceleration for X rendering etc.

<comment><USER18> Integrated Vega full support landed in June 2018 (kernel 4.17, Mesa 18 for 3D), as long as you have these or newer and a firmware for your card in the system — you'll get full acceleration.

I've been running Debian Testing on 2400G since 04/2018, where I had to put firmware and compile the kernel with the config changes to enable the support, but it was already in kernel tree nonetheless. It's out-of-the-box since 07/2018, way before the release happened.

<comment><USER16> At least on Arch, X doesn't even start 4.19 (linux-lts package), but works fine on 5.2+ (linux package); probably also in some kernels in between, but I only bought the laptop recently.

Likely specific support for 3700u was introduced at some point between these two kernels.

AIUI 5.4 is meant to become the next LTS, so it won't be an issue going forward.

<comment><USER18> AMD added support for Raven 2nd gen APUs in 4.20.

<comment><USER16> That might be it! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> AMD now reminds me of their Athlon/K7 glory days

</comment><comment><USER19> I drove 2 hours to get my 3900X. I was worried it would be too much horsepower but it spends a lot of its time >80% utilization.

These cores are great for debugging threading issues. I would trade it for a 3950X if I could find one.

<comment><USER20> I bought a 3900X also. I, too, would like a 3950X, but the 3900X is so fantastic it's hard to be too upset. I also have 4 Threadripper systems and I just could not get work done without them. My build times for compiling software would be atrocious without them.

<comment><USER21> I'm still on an i5 4670k and 16 gigs of ram. I built this system in 2013. I secured a day one 3950x and it arrived this weekend - the rest of the components are getting here throughout next week - and the speed up of compiles and ability to run multiple VMs at once for testing distributed apps is what I'm most excited about! It's basically a workstation and a gaming rig in one. Gaming is fun but man I can't wait for some faster feedback loops when I'm developing.

<comment><USER20> I was able to get rid of multiple computers and convert from physical to virtual and save on power bills. Once your build is complete you will be incredibly happy. AMD is killing it with these processors. I've never been happier with a tech product line. It just blows me away how much I'm able to accomplish on a shoestring budget now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wish my home server performed more tasks, so I can justify an upgrade from my i7. Unfortunately even as it stands today it's mostly idle despite me doing quite a bit with it.

Besides, it's really annoying I need to upgrade from DDR3.

<comment><USER23> I bit the bullet and upgraded from 4670k + DDR3 --> X570 Mobo + R5 3700X. Costs ~$500 assuming you can keep your GPU, PSU, Case, fans etc. and you don't want to go all our RGB on everything.

<comment><USER22> Among the PC phenomena I've witnessed in my life, LEDs on computers and every other digital thing is one of the most annoying.

<comment><USER23> Haha, I think it can be tastefully done. Of course, the PC shouldn't look like a Unicorn puking rainbows, but I'm a fan of having a glass panel that shows off components with some subtle single / dual color lighting.

So yeah, I made some questionable technical decisions purely for aesthetics but yeah form is kind of important too.

<comment><USER24> It's a nice bonus if something happens to have it. My AM4 motherboard has an RGB LED header, and the Ryzen 1700's included cooler has an LED ring on it, so it gently illuminates my PC build with my favourite colour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm running a Ryzen 5 2600X in my new pc. 12 threads running at 4 GHz for 150 tax included is just too good to pass up.

<comment><USER26> MicroCenter had the Ryzen 7 2700x for $129 and the Asus ROG Strix B450 Gaming Board for $79 today. I picked that up and some G.Skill 3600 DDR4 fir $59.

They were killing it today.

<comment><USER27> do you have the link to the b450 gaming board and the ram?

<comment><USER26> It was a Black Friday special.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm not surprised. The Ryzen line is the best line of consumer CPUs I've seen since Sandy Bridge.

<comment><USER29> why isn't it priced higher then?

<comment><USER30> AMD is still gaining back mindshare. Yes, they're not optimizing for profit right now, because they're also gaining something valuable - entrenched market position. Intel's dominance is incredibly sticky, and their name brand alone is worth 10s of billions. By blowing away Intel at every price point by a wide margin (and with Threadripper halo SKUs with no Intel competition), AMD is flexing and showing they are winners, and Intel are losers. People want to feel like winners when they buy products.

<comment><USER31> The last Intel security bugs made them lose a lot of the reputation they had, at least amongst system adminstrators though.

Now is a crucial time for AMD to strike back.

<comment><USER14> This and their Minix backdoor are the reasons why I wanted an AMD for my laptop, but I was sad I couldn't find a high-end Thinkpad with AMD processor. I hope that will change next year.

<comment><USER16> Why call it minix backdoor? It puts some blame on minix, yet minix is blameless here.

Minix is an excellent FOSS microkernel multiserver OS with a focus on reliability and fault tolerance.

The way Intel is using it just isn't nice.

<comment><USER14> I'm not blaming it on Minix, but it does make use of Minix. I'm mentioning it to identify what I'm talking about. I believe the official name is Intel Management Engine. Or maybe that's just part of it.

<comment><USER16> Intel ME is the name I usually see, and also the name that the tools to remove/disable when possible do reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not surprising given how little supply there seems to have been. Even relatively major outlets like PC Perspective didn't get a review sample.

<comment><USER33> That and the Japanese PC-building scene has become quite tiny nowadays.

<comment><USER34> As in it's shrunken? Why is that? As far as I know the US and European markets have never been bigger than right now.

<comment><USER33> An increasing majority of the average person's everyday computing needs have consolidated into smartphones, perhaps even moreso than other countries. This ate into the markets of both home consoles and gaming PCs. (Though, since Japan already as a console-centric country, the latter weren't really big to begin with.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Question: I can drop Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Arch, etc onto a Core series whatever and get class-leading KMS/DRM graphics acceleration the moment the kernel is running, long before X11/Wayland start. So bootup is reasonably seamless, no flickering etc. Basic 3D works. WebGL is getting there.

And thanks to DRM, I can play around with alternative environments that talk directly to the kernel without X being involved.

So... if I get an AMD APU... how will the hacker/tinkerer experience compare?

<comment><USER36> AMD GPUs should work _better_ than Intel ones with open drivers lately. In particular, Intel has serious tearing issues with Xorg in all kinds of nontrivial configurations, and I've also seen weird glitching issues with compositors after many days of uptime that require compositing resets. I haven't had a solidly good Intel Xorg experience in 5 years (on Ivy Bridge). Functional yes, but not _good_. Bugs go years without getting debugged, and it's a shame the tearing issues have gone on for so long. The xf86-video-intel driver is deprecated/unmaintained, but the modesetting driver isn't quite up to par because it can't include GPU-specific knowledge.

AMD supports all the same DRM/KMS interfaces, has better performance than Intel with open drivers, _and_ also offers proprietary userspace drivers (GL/Vulkan side only, they work with the open source kernel and modesetting side, no weird binary compat issues to worry about) in case you prefer those, but they are absolutely not required.

I'm seriously looking forward to replacing my IVB laptop with a Ryzen once AMD releases 6+ core APUs. Maybe next year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> For perspective: Tsukumo "honten" had 20, Tsukumo eX had 35, Tsukumo Nagoya had 15. 3960x and 3970x had scarcer availability.

I also just saw on Twitter that some of the shops have new 3950x available.

<comment><USER38> Haven't heard of Tsukumo before - do you recommend them over buying on Amazon?

<comment><USER37> They have actual shops in Japan, contrary to Amazon. For some reason the 3970X is (slightly) more expensive on Amazon Japan than the Japanese MSRP. I haven't checked the other models, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. I'm not too familiar with the Japanese market (only from researching for the 3970X in the past few days), so I wouldn't recommend anything in particular, but it did show up during my research. PC Koubou, too.

<comment><USER38> Okay, that's helpful - thanks for your take.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I picked up a Ryzen 7 2700X for $159 on Black Friday. Unbelievable cost:power ratio

</comment><comment><USER40> Sold out on Newegg and Amazon too, as far as I can tell. Looks like AMD did not quite expect this kind of uptake on what is now their "top of the line but reasonably priced" CPU.

<comment><USER41> The 3950X sold out in seconds on Amazon and Newegg, I was watching all morning and I've read the reports from the people who were able to purchase one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Intel stock is all time high, short? Or the market doesn't think amd will cut into their profits....

<comment><USER43> \- EPYCs market share is around 3%

\- Intel makes in a few weeks as much as AMD in the whole year

\- AMD doesn't own fabs and can't saturate market (as seen with 39XXx shortages)

<comment><USER44> TSMC has 6 month lead times on 7nm, and you best believe Apple gets the bulk of their fab capacity. AMD could have the best CPUs on earth. They're not worth anything if you can't actually buy them.

<comment><USER45> Long on TSMC then?

<comment><USER44> They're up 50% over the past year. Might be priced in though, it's a low margin capital intensive business.

<comment><USER46> What do you mean low margin? They're making 45% gross / 30% net, that's pretty respectable I would think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I got an email from Amazon saying the 3950X was back in stock, 25 mins later, it was all gone when I actually checked.

AMD will need to provide some retail guidance for the holiday season, maybe widespread availability won't happen until Jan/Feb..

</comment><comment><USER48> As a segue, is this a good time to buy AMD stocks?

<comment><USER49> Leaving aside the GPU market, if you believe AMD is going to take and sustain a sizable share of the CPU market in the next 2 years (in particular server, mobile and high-end desktop), then the answer is yes.

If Intel manages to keep AMD market share below ~18% in the next couple of years, then probably not.

The value of the stock revolves around how much money AMD is able to generate and the biggest variables here are volume of sales and margins on those sales. AMD's variable costs are probably higher than Intel's since they outsource their manufacturing to TSMC, but their fixed costs dwarf Intel's.

          Intel     AMD

Market Cap $252B $44B

Revenue $19.2B 2B

Earnings Q3 $6B $0.12B

Keeping aside the fact that AMD's numbers include GPU sales, notice how AMD's earnings to revenue ratio is very small compared to Intel's. Also notice that Intel's market cap is almost 7 times AMD's (again, AMD has a GPU business too).

So the key is really, do you believe that AMD will be able to break the ~18% market share (in particular in high margin segments)? My back of the envelope calculations indicate that at around 20% market share AMD should be able to generate earnings close to the billion dollars per quarter, making AMD a buy. If they cannot break and sustain a market share close to that, my answer would be not.

Disclaimer: I have AMD shares and I don't plan to buy or sale given current pricing.

<comment><USER50> It seems odd to mention that AMD has a GPU business without mentioning intel has a substantial amount of non-CPU businesses (indeed, their PC business, which includes stuff like NICs and similar, makes up less than half their revenue).

<comment><USER49> Intel's Client Computing Group – 55% of 2016 revenues

Intel's Data Center Group – 29% of 2016 revenues

Source: Wikipedia

That is 84% of their business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Ryzen 9 series seem to be sold out pretty quickly everywhere. They go like hot cakes. Same thing happened with Ryzen 9 3900X after release. Only relatively recently it became easier to buy it, and it's still often sold out.

</comment><comment><USER52> Damn too late to buy AMD stocks?

It is unbelievable to me, the level of inaction from Intel's managements just sit there all these years with all the advantage and cash they have had, and watch all of these washed away.

Their response? More inaction.

Time to change.

<comment><USER53> There was some action from Intel. They slashed the prices of their 10000 series by up to 50% to be able to compete in terms of price. But those CPUs are just refreshes of their 9000 series so it didn't do much in terms of improving performance. From what I've heard throughout the hardware reviewer scene it also gained them a lot of flack because they announced it a day before the new Threadrippers I think. In terms of new, much more powerful hardware Intel can't do much for now. Maybe 2020 or 2021. By which time AMD will have Zen 3 which promises some more big improvements.

<comment><USER54> The issue with the press backlash was that originally the press embargoes for both the AMD and Intel HEDT parts were both set for the same day and time (Mon Nov 25 @ 9AM Eastern) but then a few days before embargo lift, Intel shifted their embargo time a few hours earlier (3AM Eastern), presumably in a bid to get press to publish their Intel 10980XE reviews without being able to compare to the new (3970X/3970X) Threadrippers (which, incidentally, by and large crush the Intel chip's performance).

This only partly worked - due to how late they changed the times, I saw a bunch of publications just waited until the original embargo time anyway rather than redoing all their comparison slides, and of course, it got everyone to talk about how badly the Intel chips fare, but that was somewhat inevitable no matter what embargo shenanigans they did.

More interesting I think is that in some of the workloads where Intel did fare well, this was via some pretty questionable means (suggesting to reviewers to use MKL-apps that specifically cripple AMD chips without mentioning that): [https://www.extremetech.com/computing/302650-how-to- bypass-m...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/302650-how-to-bypass- matlab-cripple-amd-ryzen-threadripper-cpus) \- at least in the case of Matlab, this can be worked around via an environment setting.

Interestingly, someone pointed out today that the FTC specifically called out the MKL and ordered them to stop doing this back in 2009-2010: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/e4klj0/intel_is_still_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/e4klj0/intel_is_still_sneakily_sabotaging_amd/)

<comment><USER55> Linus tech tips straight up called Intel out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuaiqcjf0bs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuaiqcjf0bs)

The best part is that he didn't wait out the embargo, and published graphs that still included AMD's Threadrippers at the top, just blurred out and unmarked, making it painfully clear that Intel is just beat and a very sore loser: [https://i.imgur.com/RleR7Ou.png](https://i.imgur.com/RleR7Ou.png).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The 3950X are heavily supply limited.

I do not think Baltics got a single 3950x allocated in the November. Theoretically some will be available on 19.12.

Where does one even look for 3950x in Europe?

Scan.co.uk says December 31st at the earliest.

</comment><comment><USER57> I am not a gamer so asking, AMD CPU better than Intel?

<comment><USER58> yes, especially if you are not a gamer.

AMD has better multi threaded performance (in some cases double that of intel).

Intel still has some lead in single threaded performance, and some vector optimizations.

So for general use case amd is better, but there are some specialized cases where intell still makes sense.

<comment><USER57> Specialized cases such as high end development or servers?

<comment><USER59> Servers I'd imagine is where AMD excel, not Intel, considering their primary purpose is serving many users where multi threaded performance comes to the fore. Intels usecase, compiling?

<comment><USER60> On the server it depends. For front end servers, where you are running many connections with no shared state, AMD crushes Intel so bad it's shameful.

On the backend, for things that are not highly parallelizable or memory sensitive, sometimes Intel wins. Things like databases and the like. That was when Intel still used a single ring bus, the mesh should add latency similiar to Epyc's IIRC. I haven't seen any benchmarks of the newest EPYCs vs the newest Xeons though.

<comment><USER61> [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel- am...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-amd- rocksdb&num=2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Can't get the new 3960X & 3970X Threadrippers either.

</comment><comment><USER63> Is AMD having production problems?

<comment><USER64> Not exactly. It's a newly-released product that uses cream-of-the-crop components, but it's sold at consumer prices instead of enterprise prices. So AMD doesn't have a huge incentive to make this specific model first in line for the top-binned chiplets, and they had good reason for getting this product onto shelves two weeks ago rather than stockpiling inventory until after Black Friday.

In the broader scheme of things, AMD is having no trouble selling every CPU they make this year. That's due to a combination of generally high demand for CPUs, Intel's own production problems (which have caused Intel to prioritize other product segments over the desktop CPU segment where AMD's dominance is now clear), and AMD having to compete with many other chip companies that are placing orders for the same TSMC 7nm fab capacity—orders which now require much more lead time than they did at the beginning of the year.

<comment><USER65> So what's the rationale for them pricing it at a point where it makes sense for people to line up around the block? Is it that the initial volume is low enough that the positive press and goodwill is more valuable than what they would gain from price discrimination based on time?

<comment><USER66> I think there are several factors.

a) based on the 3900, the supply will be coming in the next few months, and the price is right, once that happens.

b) pricing it higher now and dropping the price in 3 months looks bad

c) the pricing has to line up sensible against other chips in the marketplace, both Intel's and also AMD's other chips (including last generation). For many people, they may be willing to wait to get a 3950 at today's MSRP, but would opt for something else if the MSRP was $100 more, and that something else might be an Intel chip.

d) it can be hard to know how much demand is really there --- AMD had to order production several months ago, and their pre-launch planning included an assumption that Intel was going to launch something notable in 2019, which didn't happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> A lot of higher-bandwidth, real-time networks to be enabled when 7nm multi core mobile processors enter the market. Personal servers will get a boost. Hopefully 5G rollout will be going well then too.

</comment><comment><USER68> Lmao Intel is completely fucked. The only thing sad about this is that I still can't find a Ryzen 9 3950x anywhere!!!!

<comment><USER69> I bought one yesterday from Newegg at MSRP. Sign up for auto-notify, and jump when they come back in stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> So they sold like 50 CPUs in Japan?

</comment><comment><USER71> Narrator: they only made 12.

</comment><comment><USER72> I don't know why they put the pictures of the lines in the article, because these lines are ridiculous in Akihabara. There are lines every day there for the most mundane products as long as it's new, and this looks far from the lines you get from a new iPhone release, for example.

This is what it looks like for an iPhone release: [https://www.youtube.com/embed/DYpSKo5f-sc](https://www.youtube.com/embed/DYpSKo5f-sc)

<comment><USER2> There's queues for iPhones in almost every country. I don't remember ever hearing about a queue for a CPU...

<comment><USER72> How do you even know they are only queuing for the CPU? As I said in Tokyo there are lines like that for pretty much ANY shop in the morning. This is such non news.</comment></comment></comment>


The Double World: One Man's Search for Meaning in the Seattle Public Library - <AUTHOR> http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/4/field-notes-theory-of-a-double-world <comment><USER2> It's an interesting read, but the author leaves us all hanging without any closure. What else did he talk about in the manuscript? Is it published yet? Have you scanned it yet, and if not why not? If I lived in Seattle I would hasten to go take a read but the world doesn't live in Seattle... and the attempts at making it a thought provoking ponderence leave us with very little substance or data.

All I can do is say "very interesting" and move on with my day because there's nothing else to follow up on.

I count two links in total, one supposedly about the architecture of the Seattle Public Library, but I don't know because it's broken, and another a link to a wikipedia page.

And what's with the random pictures of astronomy? Did they come from the manuscript or are they just randomly inserted by the author for "flavor"?

All in all this is a horribly written article that needs heavy revision, and I don't understand why it is here on HN.

<comment><USER3> I agree that the article leaves us hanging, author should have gone into more detail about what the guys theory was.

So there is a "crazy" guy that goes to the library, the end.

So there is a "crazy" guy that goes to the library and has a theory that the world is ....

The authors one job was to explain this strange guys theory because no one else will look through it. The author failed at that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's the ramblings of an ill man, very evidently so. The description sounds exactly like that of a schizophrenic (compare the sparrowOS/templeOS guy). As I said on that thread, this is not a state we should romanticize or aspire to.

<comment><USER5> Aspire to? Of course not. But you might learn something new about the disease like the high IQ level of some schizophrenics that manage to construct alternate realities with fascinating internal logic.</comment></comment>


Musicload: 75% of customer service problems caused by DRM - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070318-75-percent-customer-problems-caused-by-drm.html <comment><AUTHOR> Key Quote:

Musicload said that artists choosing to drop DRM saw a 40 percent increase in sales since December, and that more artists and labels are showing interest.

<comment><USER2> Just about everyone expects DRM to disappear at some point, sooner or later, as a matter of natural order. Everyone except the RIAA and Msft.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but it is somewhat remarkable that the bands actually make more money without DRM. The copyright holders/labels want us to believe that bands will make less without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another issue with DRM is that the artists really have no control over if their product has it or not. When they started recalling albums at SonyBMG some artists were unaware that the label had put this protection on their product.

</comment><comment><USER4> Remember, DRM is merely an attempt to control how you acquire and experience music. It's a facelift to an aging concept called physical distribution in a web-empowered society.</comment>


A Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing (2016) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.jair.org/media/4992/live-4992-9623-jair.pdf <comment><USER2> Prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15006013](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15006013)

<comment><USER3> I believe this is the "expanded" version mentioned in that discussion.

<comment><USER2> I think this is "just" a cleaned up version of the draft included in the previous discussion. I believe the expanded version mentioned in the aforementioned link is a longer book which grew out of this paper.

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right. I looked at the printed page number of the last page and thought "wow 400 pages!".

Apologies for jumping the gun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually found this to be one of the best explanations on this topic I've read. Fully recommend the author's book too.

Also recommend this as it follows it/is an alternative: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.01619](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.01619)

<comment><USER3> Are you sure you linked to the right article? The linked article is about neural translations using seq-to-seq while TFA is about neural models for all kinds of language processing.

<comment><USER4> It's probably domain/industry/company dependent, but the vast majority (>90%) of NLP work I do nowadays is sequence-to-sequence models.</comment></comment></comment>


Brightcove acquires Zencoder - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/26/brightcove-q2-2012-earnings/

<comment><USER2> Discussion is over here -> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4298420></comment>


Why Finding a Development Job Online Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://hirehumans.posterous.com/why-finding-a-development-job-online-sucks <comment><USER2> Finding a development job online is great. Its just the job sites which suck. One of these things is not like the other.

Most hiring decisions are made through the informal networks. That has, historically, been one of the great benefits of going to a really good school, because you get to make weak ties with folks who will eventually probably be in a position to help you out (and vice versa). Participation online is a _staggeringly_ good way to make weak ties.

Meanwhile, the "Send out a hundred resumes and then wait by the phone" is jobseeking for the truly clueless (and, sadly relatedly, the entry level -- I swear, there should be a class on this at college). It virtually guarantees that any company putting up a job will get a hundred resumes for it, most of them from people who have no capability to actually do the job. Additionally, all the people who are poor candidates on day N will probably still need jobs on day N+1, and they'll probably still be sending resumes. It doesn't take a genius to predict what this does to your applicant pool after iterating for a while.

I think if you're really good your jobseeking process is less likely to involve seeking out companies and more likely to involve saying "I am available for work" in a semi-public fashion, but that is another discussion altogether.

<comment><USER3> >I think if you're really good your jobseeking process is less likely to involve seeking out companies and more likely to involve saying "I am available for work" in a semi-public fashion, but that is another discussion altogether.

This is interesting. Do you think one has to have a high-profile outlet to qualify as "really good", and when you say "really good", what kind of percentile are you talking? Do you mean, like, exceedingly better than average, or do you mean "actually" good, instead of one of the mass-resume- senders?

I think I'm an OK programmer in the disciplines I know, but I don't really maintain a blog and as far as I know I don't have a bunch of regular readers of my profile here.

Do you expect every person worthy of hire to be able to just say "I need work" and automatically get offers?

<comment><USER4> Just for the amusement value [1]: My company is looking for programmers. Or more specifically we are looking for people to work at our office in Cambrigde, UK, of Citrix. Almost everything we do is open source and my very own team is hacking with Ocaml (but the other teams us more `normal' languages).

Please drop me a line if you are interested. My mail is firstname.lastname@example.com.

[1] I was going to submit a "Tell HN" or something like this anyway. You can also find some more text on our recent post on the Haskell mailing list ([http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/177...](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17763)).Of course Citrix.com also has some job offers, but like someone said, going directly is better for you, since your CV does not land on a company-wide pile.

P.S. I got my job (and some other interviews) through contacts I made at the ICFP 2009 conference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every job I have ever had I have gotten either through personal contacts or by sending my resume to a company that I was interested in. It wasn't that people were doing me favors, its just that it put me in the right place at the right time and that was much more effective than browsing online ads. I have read statistics that say most hires are made through personal contacts, otherwise known as "networking"

<comment><USER6> Every job but one that I've had I got through personal contacts.

However one of those jobs was through a personal contact I made through being on a Perl website, and another was a personal contact I only maintained through LinkedIn.

There is therefore no conflict between searching for jobs online, and finding jobs using personal contacts. Furthermore if you're looking for a job online, I would suggest focusing on activities that build your personal network. Which means mostly ignoring the job boards (that largely don't work anyways), and doing things like being on local mailing lists, going to local meetups, being on discussion boards, and using tools like LinkedIn to maintain your network.

Good luck. In this economy you may need it. :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I got my first job online.

I was looking for a junior web developer job so I replied to a number of ads on a job board and got several interviews and a really good job at a startup. All my friends there which were on their first job (they weren't many though) did just as I did too.

Then, after I quit to work on my own startup, I got invited several times by those contacts I made while I worked there so I'd say networking is really good for everyone else not looking for a first job.

</comment><comment><USER8> A couple of years ago I spent a lot of time looking at job boards and craigslist, and the experience was not a delightful one. Finally I found a company that hadn't posted any listings but that I really liked, and just knocked on their door. I actually still work there.

Recently I got _How to get the tech job you love_ by Andy Lester (pragmatic bookshelf). It's a great read whether or not you have a job.

</comment><comment><USER9> very next story is a development job offer win:

WePay (S09, August Capital) hiring PHP engineer to make online payments a better place (theresumator.com)

17 points by billclerico 1 hour ago

<comment><USER10> And there's another discussion about where to find good job seekers at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133360>.

Let's just say that all of these threads really make me (and my project) feel validated.</comment></comment>


There is no good reason to ever buy an inkjet printer - <AUTHOR> https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/there-is-no-good-reason-to-ever-buy-an-inkjet-printer/ <comment><USER2> There's another often overlooked flaw with inkjets: the ink dries out. If you're a typical household printing only a couple times a week, your yield / cartridge plummets. I've had inkjet cartridges that expired after 30 pages or less because i didn't print frequently enough. Jet cleaning wastes pages and pages worth of ink.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. Nonsense. His whole argument is that he's sure you really don't want to print in color. Um, yes I do. And a color laser printer has an enormous cost of materials and can't print a good photo.

I agree inkjet ink is way too expensive. But that's something I can manage and more companies are introducing bulk ink systems if I'm really worried about cost.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I'm the author :-D

I address the photo-printing use case in the piece. There are tons of services (online and local) that will print your photos for you on very good paper for a low cost. I'm very skeptical that any inkjet can consistently produce photo prints at the same level of quality as you'd get from using those services at a competitive cost, because they're buying their consumables in bulk at wholesale prices where you're buying them in small batches after retail markups.

Maybe you're only printing a few photos, and the convenience of having a machine on your desk outweighs the higher cost. But the fewer photos you're printing, the less paying a premium to have hardware dedicated just to that task makes sense.

I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong here, though. If you have figures that can show a plausible scenario where printing photos at home on an inkjet beats getting prints made by a third-party service, post them here and I'd be happy to review them.

<comment><USER4> If you're making an article like this and you know about this case, the first order of business is checking for prices. It might not be too late for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazing how ignorant people are to what is actually in an inkjet cartridge. It is not the cost of the ink. The cartridges have precision MEMS components to dispense the micro scale drops of ink. As with anything mechanical, they have limited cycling, can clog with impurities in the ink, etc.

<comment><USER6> It's amazing how the cost of these MEMS components hasn't fallen at all over the last 20 years whereas the price of other MEMS components (eg. gyroscopes, accelerometers, microphones) have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No. Of course I bought a cheap laser for printing. But I need the cheap inkjet for scanning and faxing.</comment>


Ask HN: Please Review WhereMyFriends.Be (Google Maps/Facebook mashup) - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
We are the same students that released FavoriteThing.Me last week and we're back with another creation: http://wheremyfriends.be
This started as a very crude mash-up of the Facebook and Google Maps APIs that I put together one night after class. Then @ajaymehta and @dshipper saw it while in my room and we thought it would be a cool weekend project!
Basically it allows you to login with your Facebook and see a map with all of your friends on it based on their current location. We are using Google Maps' Latest Javascript API to geocode and place friends that we get from Facebook connect to show people just how worldly they are :)
We ran into some Google API rate limits, but fixed it by storing some of the geocoding data locally on our MySQL DB. We will learn MongoDB next.
We are also currently asking for permissions to publish to users' walls and are posting as soon as the map has finished loading. What do you guys think about this from a design standpoint? We are trying to balance increasing our virality with friction logging-in and potential user annoyance since we're posting on their wall (only once though).
This was meant to be something simple to create but really fun for users to play around with.
Any/all feedback would be great, and if you want to see the code we're releasing it on GitHub soon (after we sleep for 2 hrs and go to class).
[UPDATE] Our Facebook connect was down for several minutes because somehow our app was deleted from the Facebook developers page. We had to create a new Facebook app and change our config file. Should be up now.  Sorry everyone! Thanks! <comment><USER3> Personally I hate allowing applications to use my facebook account. (not your issue, just a personal thing) In good spirit, I tried it out and deleted it quickly after. I have 750 friends. It took about 30-40s to load them all up. Not a problem, since it did it all in real time, so I wasn't inpatient - <USER2> job on that part of the UX. I have friends all over the world so it's pretty cool to see those connections, but don't really have a particular use for this other than a one-time view. My friends who know I'm "worldly" dont need me to prove it to them :)

Your little team of hackers are on to some cool things. Good luck to you guys, you're on the right track!

<comment><USER4> Thanks a lot for your response we appreciate the comments. And thanks for your thoughts on the UX a lot of time an effort went into making it load in real- time :)

<comment><USER3> I think people tend to forget how much "background work" goes into UX. I saw the pins flying down and I stayed on the page the whole time. If it was simply a progress bar that said "We are currently loading XYZ, which is X%" I would have left the page and then came back later (and maybe even forgotten). You kept my attention, that's important.

<comment><USER4> Thanks I agree completely. What users don't realize is that a graphical element that only shows up for a second or two on their screen, something that they might not even think about consciously but that enhances their overall perception of the site, was pored over for hours and hours by designers and programmers trying to figure out the best way to do it. I'm glad we were (moderately) successful in that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Small things I immediately noticed:

\- When initially loading, my map started out over India and I had to zoom out a bit to find where my markers were starting to drop. I don't list my current location on fb, which might explain that, but I do list where I went to school. Perhaps this could be used as a fallback for the default map center?

\- The tooltip text for the markers have  markup tags in them that don't actually get rendered. Not huge, but it was a little distracting.

Other than that, cool toy app. It was fairly easy to use.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your comments. I just fixed the   issue. We'll definitely look at having the app fall back on locations other than your current location - we didn't do it originally just to keep things as simple and clean as possible. We appreciate the time you took to respond!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FB is not really my thing but I (too) think you guys are doing some cool and fun stuff. Keep at it and let's see the next killer startup come out of your dorm!

BTW, if you all need some help with doing the whole geolocation stuff locally on your own server, let me know; I'll be happy to do whatever I can. (We just floated this site - a small by-product of a larger project we're working on: <http://IPLoc.info> )

<comment><USER4> Thanks a lot we appreciate it and we hope so :). The geolocation is actually exactly what we were looking for because Google's API has very strict rate limits. Do you have an API?

<comment><USER6> Sorry, no API, but I can get my people to build one for you - give me a day to get back to you on this.

If you have the option to host everything (including geo DB) on your own server, we can make a self-contained sub-system (PHP + MySQL) and give it to you (with our compliments :-)).

Let me know.

<comment><USER4> Wow that sounds awesome my email is dan (at) danshipper.com I would love to hear from you!

<comment><USER6> email sent, with Sub: HN Forums : Geolocation

<comment><USER7> This is actually really cool and would help me quite a bit with my current project; mind shooting me an e-mail as well (in profile)?

<comment><USER6> Sent, same subject line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Facebook login isn't working for me.

If you post to my wall, just give me a box so that I can opt out.

Also, please make the header blue or something. The orange hurts my eyes.

<comment><USER4> We just noticed that somehow the app got deleted from Facebook - we're still not quite sure exactly what went down but we readded it and everything should be working fine. Sorry for the downtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> clickable: <http://wheremyfriends.be>

sample profile: <http://wheremyfriends.be/profile?id=1341720286>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: Just made the FB log-in compatible with IE6-8!</comment>


CMake Tools for Visual Studio - <AUTHOR> http://cmaketools.codeplex.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I recently put out the first release candidate of a Visual Studio extension adding syntax highlighting and IntelliSense for CMake. Please let me know if you have any feedback or have found any bugs that need to be fixed.</comment>


Popular Science+ (Popular Science magazine on iPad) - <AUTHOR> http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/04/02/popularscienceplus/

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on the prototype ([http://www.bonnier.com/en/content/digital-magazines- bonnier-...](http://www.bonnier.com/en/content/digital-magazines-bonnier-mag- prototype)) which was announced a couple of months ago.</comment>


EU VAT Changes – What App Makers Need to Know - <AUTHOR> http://appdevelopersalliance.org/news/eu-value-added-tax-vat-changes-what-you-need-to-know

<comment><USER2> As it is, it's difficult to make a living as an app developer. This just adds complicated overhead and will eventually push out the small companies trying to eek out a living.

yay progress?

<comment><AUTHOR> The frequency of enforcement will determine whether or not this is a real issue for developers trying to make a living. Many "indie" developers operate below the VAT threshold as-is.</comment></comment>


Norway Used NSA Technology for Potentially Illegal Spying - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/norway-nsa-victory-garden-surveillance/ <comment><USER2> Can anyone with better knowledge of satellite tech explain why this article mentions use against Norwegians and draws a parallel with illegal spying?

The source documents they provide seem to be about targeting satellite traffic (Inmarsat, RU civ/mil traffic, etc) from certain foreign satellites.</comment>


Why Google Has Too Much Control Over Your Private Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/opinion/why-google-has-too-much-power-over-your-private-life.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _Data is the engine of online markets and has become, indeed, a new asset class._

\-- Interesting sound bite.</comment>