Darpa Shows Off Some Things You Can Do with Distributed Electric Propulsion - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/transportation/advanced-cars/darpa-vehicle-technologies <comment><USER2> If any of y'all like this, I am building an open source 3D printed off road robot with in wheel motors and transmissions, and I post regular updates on the project on YouTube. The transmission is currently an 11:1 two stage planetary gearbox that is almost entirely 3D printed (aside from some bearings, screws, and metal pins). I recently drove 2.2 kilometers with it but I'm shooting for 20km and hopefully 50+kms between gearbox services. Can be made on a $1k printer and it's all CC0 open source. Code is python on Raspberry Pi.

Please check it out if that sounds cool!

[https://youtu.be/cU_0M1_TvD0](https://youtu.be/cU_0M1_TvD0)

<comment><USER3> I liked that part of the DARPA-demo the best for sure. It seems obvious that vehicle suspension should be dynamically controlled by software anticipating the terrain. (Maybe cars already have this technology to some extent? I'm not sure.) What's the soft tech in your robot?

<comment><USER4> > Maybe cars already have this technology to some extent?

It was banned in F1, that combined with the skirts for downforce meant for insane low ground clearances with grip off the scales. You could see cornering speeds going up seemingly without end.

context: [https://www.racefans.net/2007/05/17/banned-active- suspension...](https://www.racefans.net/2007/05/17/banned-active-suspension/)

<comment><USER5> Even non-computer aided active suspension was banned. Good readup: [https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/127638/f1-latest- suspensio...](https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/127638/f1-latest-suspension- row-explained)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1st thought: wow, cool stuff!

2nd thought: too bad it's gonna be military use first. I've often heard the argument being made that military applications (and even war itself) somehow drive innovation. While that may be true to an extent, it always rang hollow to me as an argument. Why should civil life always just get the "crumbs" of science and engineering? Why not turn it around, spend most of the research money _and brain time_ on things that benefit everyone (in the US, and worldwide) and then see which of those technologies can be repurposed for the military, not the other way around?

DARPA alone has a bigger budget than NASA, and I just googled "us military research budget" and the numbers for all the arms of the US military are quite staggering, really.

<comment><USER7> > Why not turn it around, spend most of the research money and brain time on > things that benefit everyone (in the US, and worldwide)

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) is why not

<comment><USER8> >8\. Arms races. Large countries can spend anywhere from 5% to 30% of their budget on defense. In the absence of war – a condition which has mostly held for the past fifty years – all this does is sap money away from infrastructure, health, education, or economic growth. But any country that fails to spend enough money on defense risks being invaded by a neighboring country that did. Therefore, almost all countries try to spend some money on defense.

>From a god's-eye-view, the best solution is world peace and no country having an army at all. From within the system, no country can unilaterally enforce that, so their best option is to keep on throwing their money into missiles that lie in silos unused.

Funnily enough, we can come full circle and say that many developed nations can survive these days with very little military spending just because America's massive military is enough of a deterrent.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One advantage of electric transmission for military vehicle is that you don't have a single driveshaft to fail on you rendering you immobile, nor clutches, nor a chance that a single broken wheel will jam the rest of powertrain.

The last point is the biggest advantage of many wheels vehicles over tracks. A detracked tank is a sitting duck, but an 8x8 without a single wheel will happily run away after taking damage

<comment><USER10> How easy is it to insulate the electric motors? My thinking is electric motors in the wheels while crossing a river, opportunity for short circuits.

<comment><USER11> These are probably brush-less motors, so in theory, they shouldn't pose any specific challenges in that scenario, as there are no exposed conductors, only sets of insulated coils/windings and permanent magnets that would end up being immersed in a river.

<comment><USER12> EMP sensitive?

<comment><USER13> Not the motors. They are designed to withstand high currents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Technology is naturally more augmentation than automation. This is closer to the future of driving than the self-driving AI solutions. Our senses will be aided and some tasks out-sourced. This is already happening, has always been happening, e.g. anti-lock braking system or proximity detection with auditory feedback.

<comment><USER14> How are self-driving vehicles NOT an augmentation? We are not talking about self-living bodies here. Self driving vehicles augment our ability to transport ourselves and our stuff without the use of a part of our mental system. It's like walking on the automatic pilot, like in your home, except faster.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it is certainly not a clear cut distinction. You know, I initially listed _automatic_ transmission as an example of augmentation. So it goes both ways too. Anyway, they highlight different aspects and I find the notion elucifying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Darpa should have open betting market for these concepts.

Only thing I might moderately bet on is electric motors inside wheels. Electric motors can be more durable, require less maintenance and perform better.

That shaping wheel concept is obvious no go. I would bet serious money against it. Tank tread is the weak point even in modern main battle tank. Their design is simpler but they have problems with mechanical complexity and short lifespan and reliability. Tracks getting jammed or thrown track is relatively common.

Just take a that wheel to a drive across mud, sand and bushes with lots of sticks and stones and see how it goes. Low maintenance and reliability are high on military priorities.

<comment><USER15> The advantage over tracks is you can lock everything and use the wheel anyway over relatively short distances. So, you trade increased complexity for a vastly better failure mode.

Yea it's bad for the car and passengers, but being able to move even 1 mile after failure is a huge advantage.

<comment><USER13> You may not be able to lock it after you drive in dirt for some time or have any kind of failure where you lose the track.

Having tires with adjustable air pressure, or just adding extra pair of wheels (you may lift them up) to the vehicle seems like simpler idea.

<comment><USER15> Losing track on one wheel is not going to stop one of these things from moving in an emergency. Plenty of videos of people driving even normal cars on rims. ex: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1BgwX3hHgo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1BgwX3hHgo)

<comment><USER13> You are focusing on very narrow concept and scenario.

The overall maintainability, durability and cost is the issue. The ability of brigades to operate long time independently with minimal maintenance logistics is essential.

<comment><USER15> I worked in Logistics simulation for a little while.

Humvee armor was a huge issue as it reduced speeds and increased fuel consumption. However, more armor on a small percentage of them was still extremely useful.

IMO, these are of similar value. You don't replace all wheels, but assuming they mostly worked you could swap them in a few vehicles during a monsoon for example then take them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That extreme suspension vehicle looks like something out of Batman. Bet it's a hoot to drive.

I thought it was interesting that while they're doing a ton of research, it's all one-off stuff. In other words, they could have required all of the experiments to ter with one another using some standard framework. Then they could mix-and-match various experiments to see how well they work with one another. Instead, it looks like they're evaluating each one separately -- with some huge integration nightmare up head if any of them ever make it into the field. I wonder why they do it that way.

<comment><USER17> Im not sure that RD works that way. Innovate, time and compatibility, pick two.

<comment><USER16> I don't know. I know that some mention was made of the pieces fitting already- existing army wheel specs. So obviously for some groups integration was a consideration.

And it's a mistake to think in all-or-nothing thinking here. I didn't say you needed to design a rock-solid integration system, only that it looked like integration was a minimal concern -- and that was an interesting choice.

I come from the tech community. The longer we put off integration, the more expensive things become.

<comment><USER18> This sub-thread reminds me of the monolith vs microservices kernel discussion I see a lot here. Doesn't Linux benefit from specialized pieces being piped together at will?

<comment><USER16> Yep. It's a spectrum and a scale. On various scales you want to apply various paradigms. It's not a yes/no thing.

We know for a fact that no matter what they pentagon does with wheels, they need to fit on a body and cost less than a million bucks or so. Even giving the R&D teams wide latitude for they're playing around in, we can start setting some reasonable guardrails up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hope cars will do this once we've gone electric. Imagine how long you could keep a car if you can swap out a motor with a jack and a socket wrench.

<comment><USER20> The unsprung mass of hub motors makes them terrible for handling, especially at speed (military vehicles top out at "slow person in the right lane" speeds). When you've got a teardrop shaped turd (or economy car, whatever your preferred pronoun is) that's riding 2in off the ground (because how else are you going to be aerodynamic enough to deliver reasonable range) and nearly nil suspension travel (relative to anything expected to operate off road) drive- train and power transmission packaging isn't really an issue (whereas that was the primary issue solved here by going electric).

You should expect to see centrally mounted motors driving the wheels via CV shafts as the dominant EV power-train for the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The video states a 100kw motor per wheel.

Wikipedia states the humvee has a 142kw motor.

Not only the vehicle would probably be lighter (batteries vs motor, gearboxes, etc) but it would have 2.81 more power, so it would probably vastly overperform current vehicles?

<comment><USER22> Batteries are heavy. It is not immediately clear to me that the overall vehicle would be lighter.

<comment><USER23> This is true, but I would expect a military vehicle to be a diesel-electric hybrid.

As a general rule, diesel-electric is lighter than pure diesel for a given rating, because the generator doesn't need a powertrain.

<comment><USER24> That has not been my experience. Diesel generator-motor sets are much heavier than a diesel engine with mechanical transmission and are less efficient. That does not even take into account a buffer battery weight which you pretty much need for power draw spikes and regenerative braking.

Just look at say a Cummins ISB with Allison transmission at 300hp, that's around 225 kilowatts. That combo weighs around 1500 lbs, maybe closer to 2000 with running gear if your comparing to hub motors. A bare frame generator putting out 200+ kw its going to be well over 4000lbs plus whatever hub motors and motor controllers and power systems and batteries weigh.

You can go smaller on the generator and make it up on the battery which means more weight, but even a 100kw generator is going to be around 3000lbs and you won't be able to utilize full power for long periods (long grades).

Perhaps some advanced generator might be lighter, but it essentially the engine with the same size and weight generator attached to it as needed for motors of equivalent power output. Mechanical transmission on the other hand are pretty light comparatively and have much less losses than the mechanical- electrical-mechanical double conversion.

<comment><USER23> This isn't a fair comparison, because you're considering a generator that's intended for stationary use.

Of course this is going to be heavier than one intended for a vehicle, because the weight isn't a consideration, and lighter is more expensive (more precise, higher-quality materials).

What you'd want to be looking at is train powertrains, which are uniformly diesel-electric, because this is the most efficient power configuration.

Or the Chevy Volt, for a smaller example which happens to run on gasoline.

<comment><USER24> Can you point me to a light weight 100kw or 200kw genset that is under 1500 lbs? Bottom line even if a 200kw genset plus motors and controllers was the same weight as a 200kw engine hooked to a transmission, it would have lower efficiency due to conversion losses unless we get practical superconductors.

Trains do not use diesel electric drives trains for efficiency or weight, the need precise traction control to prevent the steel wheels from slipping on the tracks to get moving, the electric drive train gives them that. The actual efficiency is lower than a mechanical transmission once up to speed due to double conversion losses. Modern mechanical transmissions are actually very efficient with very low losses.

The Chevy volt also bypasses the electric system at highways speeds due to the inefficiency of converting mechanical energy to electrical and back to mechanical as most (all?) production hybrids. The Gen 2 Volt actually more aggressively move to mechanical drive at lower speed as it was found to be more efficient. The Volt is also heavier then the Cruze even though they share the same platform.

This is an excellent breakdown of the Volt operating modes, in CS2 and CS3 mode the engine is driving the wheels mechnically: [https://gm- volt.com/2015/02/20/gen-2-volt-transmission-opera...](https://gm- volt.com/2015/02/20/gen-2-volt-transmission-operating-modes-explained/)

Gasoline hybrids like the volt also typically rely on the Atkinson cycle to get better highway efficiency at the expense of torque which is made up for by the electric drivetrain. Diesels are even more efficient and have plenty of torque but also heavier due to a more robust design, this is why they are much less popular in hybrid configurations except in specialized applications like city buses with extreme urban start stop usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Since this is version 1.0, expect lots of failure in the field then lots of fixes for 2.0

<comment><USER26> Heck this isn't even version 1.0 - more like version 0.1 It's the first functioning prototype of what will later become version 1.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The sad part of building all this technology is they need a WAR to put it to use.

</comment><comment><USER28> Doesn't zoox use independent motors?

</comment><comment><USER29> i find it hilarious that this is a 118 year old technology!

Ferdenand Porsche in 1900 presented a sportscar fitted with four electric wheel-hub motors, it was the first all-wheel drive passenger vehicle.

Where is the progress? The cars should have been flying by now.

<comment><USER30> Physical limitations of batteries vs air oxidized fuel. Dragging around your own oxidizer takes a lot of mass which severely limits power.

The real breakthrough will be a battery that can use atmospheric oxygen, like a zinc-air battery. But it hasn't worked out in the last 100 years and it's not clear if it ever will.

<comment><USER31> Batteries appear to be operating on a vastly slower Moore's law at least. They have been sinfully underfunded as a research field historically.

<comment><USER32> It's not really a "Moore's law" thing at all - it's more that, like every single other technology in history that isn't specifically semiconductors, batteries don't follow an exponential improvement curve. They also evolve slower than many other technologies even on a more typical growth trajectory, because battery chemistry has _way_ less room for easy improvement. There's only a few battery chemistries that could even theoretically offer much better density than lithium-ion, and we've been trying to make them work for a long time.

<comment><USER14> My bet is on graphene capacitor batteries.

<comment><USER30> I would bet on biodiesel for long distance highway transport, farm equipment, and other heavy industry; and electric in a bewildering array of form factors for short distance urban transport.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How many billion dollar YC companies had traction before YC? - <AUTHOR>

Stripe: Known founders (sold a company for several million) but had few users.
Dropbox: Launched on HN before YC interviews, might have had traction.
Airbnb: Maybe some from before they pivoted?
Twitch: Evolved from Justin.tv, which had some traction, but Justin.tv evolved from Justin casting his life. No traction beforehand? <comment><AUTHOR> It takes a long time to make a billion dollar company, but with the increased emphasis on traction, I wonder if accelerators like YC are thinking too short term. Would an unknown Justin Kan or Alexis Ohanian even get funded today without traction?

<comment><USER2> Pretty sure most of the $b companies got there in like 4 years or less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't get the feeling that they require traction in the sense of pure # of users, but rather they want to see high engagement among the users you do have. Goes back to what PG says in his essays, better to have 100 people love your product, than 1 million who sort of like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even so, was that true of any of the billion dollar companies before they joined YC, though? I'm not sure it was.</comment></comment>


Rejected names for the original Xbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.edge-online.com/features/11-x-cyberplayground-ehq-the-rejected-names-for-microsofts-first-console/

<comment><USER2> Years ago, when I interned at Microsoft, they did a company survey to figure out what to name what would become Vista. The top two names were Windows Hooker and Windows Heroin. True story.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about TJ Hooker? [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083486/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083486/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > PTP or P2P (Powered To Play)

How could that even come up as an option, given the pre-existing usage, peer- to-peer?

<comment><USER4> Yes, we're always very careful in this industry not to overload TLAs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > TSO (Three, Six, Zero)

Already the "360" that have been used later.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can only imagine someone trying to explain the logic on this one in some ad copy somewhere. "TSO" is the kind of name that requires its own FAQ entry just to explain, and even then it doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER6> Not for the old guys: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Sharing_Option](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Sharing_Option). Thinking of it, you may be right about the "doesn't make sense" part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Unlike the other link I saw about this, this one links directly to the article containing the list, rather than the reblog.

Really internet - are we re-blogging lists at this point? WTF - some people just aren't trying anymore.

</comment><comment><USER7> i actually liked "MEGA". the acronym was meh, but "Microsoft Mega" has a nice ring to it. probably would have gotten some flack at release (sega mega drive, etc) but overall i think the best out of those listed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Christ those are all terrible</comment>


Off the Charts is live - <AUTHOR> http://gum.co/charts

<comment><AUTHOR> I took part in Gumroad's Small Product Lab challenge, and after 10 days came up with a new newsletter called Off The Charts.

It comes out twice per month, and focuses on finding the best, undiscovered, helpful and fun apps for iOS devices. I'm trying to give in depth information on apps as well, and try to give tips and tricks on how to use certain apps to make your life easier.

Eventually I'd like to get app developer interviews. I'm not sure how long the newsletter will last, but I'm doing it right now because I love writing about this type of stuff and have so much fun interacting with this community.

Hope you like it!</comment>


Al Jazeera journalists sentenced to seven years in jail in Egypt - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-23/peter-greste-found-guilty/5543292

<comment><USER2> "Peter Greste and Mohamed Fahmy were sentenced to seven years in jail by a judge and Baher Mohamed was sentenced to 10 years. Three other journalists who were tried in absentia were handed 10-year sentences."

All for supposedly 'spreading false news'...

</comment><comment><USER3> Egyptian here. Puzzles me how such a piece gets all the attention, while hundreds of other Egyptians sentenced to death, and other thousands killed in peaceful protests do not get nearly as much coverage.. Oh, an Australian

<comment><USER4> A foreign journalist working for a news organisation with a pretty good reputation. Generally that's news wherever it happens in the world. I haven't been following what has happened in Egypt. I now know it has become a place where foreign journalists working for Al-Jazeera are sentenced to prison when those in power don't like the reported stories. I'm sure there's a lot more nuance than that and it's a view through a straw at the country but it's not a good sign for Egypt. From spring straight to winter?

<comment><USER5> > From spring straight to winter?

That would be Ukraine, where two Russian journalists were killed recently during bombing of Lugansk.

<comment><USER6> The death of journalists during intense fighting is - while extremely tragic and hopefully rare - not at all comparable to them getting sentenced by courts for simply reporting news. The former is to some degree unavoidable (if they got target specifically then everything changes), while the latter is an explicit act of government against freedom of press and speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Politics in Hacker News? [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER8> This isn't exactly politics is it? It certainly is about geopolitical event, but not quite one party vs another.

<comment><USER9> Because we all agree that we hate republicans... I mean egypt?

It's political, but it's not US politics, so it seems to pass the 'not political' HN test.

Odd, but seems true from my experience.

<comment><USER8> If the US were putting journalists in Jail, it would be equally relevant. Geo politics, yes, as in whatever is going on between Egypt & Qatar. But I'm interested whenever folks like journalists, artists etc are targeted. Snowden was all over HN & you might argues that's political too, but relevant to this community nevertheless.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive - <AUTHOR> http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/products.htm <comment><USER2> Claims "STR of 175MB/s Read and 145MB/s Write", but SSDs appear to be in the 300MB/s to 500MB/s rate: [http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_ssd_840_pro_review](http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_ssd_840_pro_review)

I would have thought write performance would be faster than SSD, though? are SSD rates really that fast? wow...

<comment><USER3> FWIW, Intel's latest 750 PCIe SSDs are benching over 2.5GB/sec read speeds if you want to be really blown away :-) [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-750-series- ssd,409...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-750-series- ssd,4096-4.html)

<comment><USER4> Same for last generation Samsungs (leader in ssd segment at the moment)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That webpage has a last-modified date from 2009...

</comment><comment><USER6> The only thing this has over an SSD drive is that there is virtually no wear- out. Though I'm not sure if there is a practical workload that would take advantage of this, considering SSDs should be able to handle constant I/O for several years before they die.

Is there any other benefit to purchase a HyperDrive over an SSD?

<comment><USER7> > Is there any other benefit to purchase a HyperDrive over an SSD?

Yep, a SSD will fragment sooner or later, the HyperDrive (or any RAM based drive for that matter) is time-guaranteed latency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Had a RAM disk circa 2005 was a fun experiment especially when you could fill it with very cheap DDR 266/333 modules but it wasn't really useful.

You could maybe get 8GB in those days usually you would get only 4GB while it was possible to put an entire game or at least the big chunks of it on there or alternatively some video content it was clear that it would never get anywhere.

They are still much faster than SSD's the problem is not even the cost but it's the fact that none of those can any meaningful capacity even beyond the physical limitations the memory controllers we have just can't support a capacity which will be worth while..

<comment><USER9> I wish people had continued this sort of thing, I had a Gigabyte i-Ram[0] and it was incredible. The most limiting factor was that it used DDR memory slots (maximum 4GB) and the SATA interface. I don't imagine there would be much of a barrier in doing this with more modern technology like PCI-e for the transfers and a big juicy FPGA for addressing substantially more memory. Alas.

<comment><USER8> Problem is the maximum capacity due to memory controller support more than anything else. But looking at the new NVMe SSD's the bottle neck isn't your SSD anymore and they aren't that expensive if you need those speeds for things like 4K video editing...

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I like the concept more than have a need for the thing presently. The OPs page talks about a custom spun ASIC so making a controller wouldn't be a huge problem if someone wanted to sink the NRE into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I came across this while looking for a pure RAM USB stick to use as swap on my Raspberry Pi. I didn't find such a beast, unfortunately. I'm also considering sharing some sort of ramdisk via iSCSI from another machine.

<comment><USER7> Why? The USB bus on the Pi is dead crowded with the NIC, you will suffer from latency issues.

Often enough I ask myself why the network chip couldn't be interfaced with MII like any common cellphone SoC does with WiFi and why the USB host pins of the CPU are not routed through to the MicroUSB connector :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it would slow. ;-) Just for kicks, I was trying to figure out a way to break 1GB, beyond using zram swap. I also have an old 256MB Model B that could be more useful with a little more memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.ddrdrive.com/](http://www.ddrdrive.com/)

[http://www.ddrdrive.com/menu4.html](http://www.ddrdrive.com/menu4.html)

<comment><USER9> That thing is ludicrously expensive.

<comment><USER11> That's because it was purpose built to be a ZIL (ZFS intent log) in large production fileservers. Cost was less of an issue than performance.

<comment><USER8> Still capped at 4GB you can get other PCIE RAMdisks with higher capacity which are cheaper not sure if they'll perform the same tho...

<comment><USER11> Well, for starters this thing is almost 10 years old now. So comparing it to something developed in the last year isn't really fair.

That being said, where's this list of RAMdisks, in a PCIe form factor, with a capacitor/battery backup, and hardened Solaris drivers? I don't think I've ever run across one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Needs a [2003] tag.</comment>


The 1,000-Year GIF - <AUTHOR> http://hyperallergic.com/237627/the-1000-year-gif/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of "Machine with Concrete", by Arthur Ganson: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH- tvxEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg)

From the video description:

      Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by
      1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed
      reduction is calculated by (1/50)12. The implications are
      quite large. With the motor turning around 200 revolutions
      per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before
      the final gear makes but one turn. Given the truth of this
      situation, it is possible to do anything at all with the
      final gear, even embed it in concrete.

<comment><USER3> Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has a similar gear reduction setup attached to a hand crank on one side and a metal trash can within a vice on the other side. Children (and adults) are invited to crank the handle and turn the gears. It takes months to crush each can which is then replaced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One wonders if the museum looses power, will it start over?

There was a mac program that after you entered your birthday would tell you how many seconds you have to live (estimated). It was a little disturbing. But even if you closed it, it would keep counting (by storing the date you entered), so it never could be reset. I'd open it again occasionally. The computer it ran on is long gone (Macos 8 era machine).

Time is relentless.

<comment><USER5> > the artists will store a mother file somewhere and create many iterations of > the loop in various locations — and if one fails, it may be easily > synchronized with, and replaced by, another.

<comment><USER6> 200 years from now, if I was still alive I'd be surprised if anybody gave a shit about that.

<comment><USER7> It's likely everyone will have lost interest and shut the thing down in 200 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So basically it is animated GIF counter. I am not sure if its a spoof or serious art.

<comment><USER9> It was some well known artist who when confronted by a member of the public about some modern art saying "That's art?! I could have done that!" replied "So why haven't you?".

<comment><USER10> I've never understood that reply. I like a lot of modern art, but obviously the person in that conversation is just going to say "because it's pointless and I have better things to do, and galleries won't pay millions for my large blue squares".

If you want to convince someone of the value of modern art, you need to do better than "this piece is important because the artist was the first to think of this incredibly basic idea".

<comment><USER9> I think the key thing is not the idea, but the doing or making. A lot like our industry - ideas are cheap - it's the execution, the making, which is important. Is Twitter a stupid idea? Sure! Could my child have made it? Maybe! Why didn't my child make it?

Good question.

<comment><USER10> Is Twitter a stupid idea? Kind of, but if I had thought of it before anyone else I probably would have given it at least a little consideration. But you're right, I probably couldn't have made Twitter even if I wanted to. I could make something that kind of looks like Twitter, but there's no way I could have executed the way they did.

When people say "I could have done that" in a modern art museum, they mean they literally could have done exactly that. I could paint a stripe on a canvas in exactly the same way as Barnett Newman did. That doesn't mean it isn't art, but asking "why didn't you do it?" is missing the point. I didn't do it because, as I just demonstrated, I don't understand why it was worth doing. "I could have done that" means "anyone could have done that, why didn't the museum just make their own instead of paying millions for it?"

Usually someone familiar with the artist can explain that in the greater context of the art world, it was a statement on whatever, and often those explanations make sense and make the piece more meaningful. I just don't think it makes sense to ask why I didn't do something without first explaining why anyone would do it.

<comment><USER11> Related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire)

Apparently it was displayed upside down. /shrugs. I don't personally think it matters how it was displayed. I don't think it is worth $200, let alone nearly $2mm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The real question is: How large is the file and where can I download it or the script to make it?

<comment><USER13> While I'm not exactly sure as to the answer, I have some info which would be helpful towards answering it.

The file contains 48,140,288 frames. There are only two colors - white and black.

Only the very center of the image (where the number is) needs to be updated for each frame. This area is 400x65 pixels, so up to 26,000 pixels could be updated on each frame, minus the space between the numbers, etc., so I'd guesstimate an average of 10,000 pixels changing each frame.

Each of those 10,000 pixels can actually only be one of two values, but each occupies exactly one byte when uncompressed. So uncompressed (which GIFs normally are not), it'd be about 481,402,880,000 bytes (~0.5TB), plus the full first frame.

However, GIFs use LZW compression. While I do not know a lot about it, I would guess it would probably do quite well in this case. Perfect 100% compression would mean 1 bit per pixel rather than 8. But let's assume LZW would only manage - say - 2 bits per pixel. That'd quarter the total size, making the total about 120GB.

Of course, this all assumes that it is actually a single GIF, which I believe is extraordinarily unlikely. I would expect it's actually rendered on the fly.

Edit: I'm also assuming that the overall image is actually 1280x960 as the image in the article suggests.

<comment><USER14> Compression can do _much_ better than 1 bit per pixel. As a quick test, I just created a 1000x1000 single-colour GIF, which takes 1735 bytes.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, but that is single color. GIFs contain the differences between each frame - not a whole frame each time. I was assuming 10,000 (of the ~1 million total) pixels were actually changing, and must be changed to one of two values - thus "perfect" compression for a single pixel would be 1 bit.

<comment><USER14> _> "perfect" compression for a single pixel would be 1 bit_

I still don't see how that is a valid conclusion that follows from what you wrote before it. It is an optimal representation of the data _before_ you would apply any form of compression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The mention of Cage's _As Slow as Possible_ reminded me of Long Player [1] - another similar project.

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

</comment><comment><USER16> At the least it could have cats.</comment>


Show HN: Single-file components for React - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/digitalie/one-loader <comment><AUTHOR> I am using Vue and React on a couple of projects and found it convenient to have Vue components contained in a single file.

As an experiment, I've created a Webpack loader to allow combining styling and React code in a single file.

This is not production-ready and could be redundant for inline-styled components (in its current state anyways).

Feedback is welcome.

</comment><comment><USER2> I really need syntax highlighting and tab-completion within CSS, because CSS and I don't have a mutual understanding. Atom does this natively within .css files -- is it easy to make it work for JSX-embedded stylesheets?

<comment><USER3> See syntax highlighting section here: [https://github.com/zeit/styled- jsx/blob/master/readme.md](https://github.com/zeit/styled- jsx/blob/master/readme.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Upvoted because I like experimentation however I still cannot think of a reason to structure react components in this style. Is this more of an exercise to port an idea you like from Vue into React?

<comment><AUTHOR> I liked the idea of how Vue components combine business logic and styling code in one file using HTML-like wrappers.

As I mentioned in a comment below I realise there is already a number of ways to approach the problem. I personally didn't find any of the ones that I am aware of being as convenient, so I've created and published this experimental loader to see if it 1. would actually work for React and 2. if someone else finds this concept interesting/convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another example of why we need HTML Modules: [https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/issues/645](https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/issues/645)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not to be rude, but I fail to see what the use case is for this. You can already use CSS in React and a component is often CSS, JS and JSX. What's the win here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @devdad,

Thanks for your feedback!

I guess you mean CSS-in-JS approaches where CSS is either put inside JS code as a template literals/string (styled-components, csjs etc) or as inline styles with JS objects (Radium etc.). Both approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages.

It could be only me, but I personally don't like the idea of having inline styles, although I realise it could be the only way to make styles cross- platform.

The string approach works well and has additional advantage of dynamic property values (in case of template literals). However, (and this is IMHO again), I can't say this is the most readable way to structure code, especially if you rely on IDE/text editor identifying this code as CSS.

There is a third approach, which is basically putting


Golygons and golyhedra - <AUTHOR> http://cp4space.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/golygons-and-golyhedra

<comment><USER2> Delightful to see explanation not just of a result but also of how it was thought up, which is unfortunately rare in mathematics.

<comment><USER3> I recently read a paper of Ryan Williams explaining how one discovers the biggest breakthrough in circuit complexity in the last decade. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1261](http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1261)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        A most delightful way to procrastinate is to
        attempt the unsolved problems on MathOverflow.

agreed

</comment><comment><USER5> This is incredibly interesting, and (thankfully) has nothing to do with golang, as I feared.

</comment><comment><USER6> Spoiler alert: Unrelated comment... don't they sound like STDs? :-)</comment>


Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenarraychips.com/ <comment><USER2> Well if you ever wanted to be 'out there' Chuck's processor would be a great place to start. Chuck Moore invented Forth and has been building machines that can run Forth efficiently for years. Think of it as a Turing machine that can do useful work. He has pushed the edge of computation per watt for years.

That being said, I've heard him talk about this chips for years and it is great to see it finally see the light of day. If you were familiar with the Transputer technology, this is a better take on that, if you are familar with FPGAs you can think of it as an FPGA with processors instead of CLBs.

Things that it can do are similar to what Intel is doing with Larrabee or some of the CUDA stuff that nVidia has done. It doesn't have a GDDR3 interface to a GB of memory so you can't custom build your own GPU, but you could do your own PhysX type engine with it.

It also makes a helluva differential cryptanalysis tool, or a signals analysis tool in general.

<comment><USER3> It might make a good bitcoin mining platform?

<comment><USER4> Not really, it's underpowered and mining lends itself better to vector- oriented processors (like GPUs) rather than CPUs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not being much of a hardware geek, I'm having a hard time evaluating how fast each core is.

From the site: "With instruction times as low as 1400 picoseconds and consuming as little as 7 picojoules of energy, each of the 144 computers can do its work with unprecedented speed for a microcontroller and yet at unprecedentedly low energy cost, transitioning between running and suspended states in gate delay times. When suspended, each of the computers uses less than 100 nanowatts."

How does this instruction time compare to other modern processors?

It sounds to me like some of the benefit to be had here may be from the low amount of power necessary per core. Power and associated cooling is a MAJOR source of cost for datacenters, and so if this really is a significantly lower power consumption (again, I don't know how much power the alternatives use), then it could have a big impact on the cost of commodity computation power.

<comment><USER6> If 1400 picoseconds is the time it takes for a clock cycle (and therefore the minimum instruction time for 1-cycle instructions), that'd be about 700 MHz, which actually seems pretty high compared to what I would've guessed.

<comment><USER7> As far as I know, the cores aren't clocked. Instead Chuck designed his own transistors using his own OKAD II VLSI tools to be efficient on the CMOS process node with switching speeds being dictated by the transistor type and interconnect electrical properties, then designed the cores so that they're only switching those transistors when they do actual work.

<comment><USER8> Ooh, awesome. Clockless computing seems like a really nifty idea, but its difficult. I imagine it might go mainstream when Moore's law finally runs out.

<comment><USER9> "difficult" does not even begin to encompass the half of it. It is really cool in theory, but in reality a ridiculously difficult challenge that existing tools are in no way whatsoever up for.

<comment><USER10> Take a look at the Balsa design system: <http://apt.cs.man.ac.uk/projects/tools/balsa/>

My colleague uses it for research purposes and he said that it is pretty mature.

<comment><USER9> I suspect if the only issue was translating architecture to logic, we'd be doing it already

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Glad to see this thread. G144A12 does better than you'd expect for 18 bit ALUs doing 32 bit circular shifts and adds, but that costs enough extra instructions that for this particular algorithm at any Bitcoin-useful combination of throughput/energy/cost we can't compete with the genuine 32-bit ALUs of the bigger ATI GPUs. Ya can't be perfect for _all_ problems _all_ the time :) Nevertheless we'll be posting an app note eventually on SHA256 as an illustration of techniques in pipelining. The $20 price is for small quantities. Standard exponential decay curves apply for production quantities; we want to see our chips in people's products and are priced to encourage that. As for 20 somethings, nobody in our company gets a paycheck (yet) so someone has to be willing to work for nothing, but if you have a _practical_ idea for an app note and want to work with us to get it done and published please email greg at greenarraychips dot com and let's discuss it. Thanks for your interest, folks - Greg Bailey, GreenArrays, Inc.

</comment><comment><USER10> I certainly should voice my opinion here.

I've done analysis of GA144 before: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810641>

Most of the Chuck Moore design (I reviewed several, starting from M17) can be described by quote from Devil Wears Prada: "the same girl- stylish, slender, of course... worships the magazine. But so often, they turn out to be- I don't know- disappointing and, um... stupid". Chuck Moore designs are all slick, slender, stylish, worship Forth, but they turn out to be disappointing and stupid in the end. The only beneficiary often is Chuck Moore itself. You just cannot apply his experience to other places in the world of computing.

Let's see what we have here in GA144.

The memory inside all cores is way too small for general purpose programs, even if you split your program into 144 parts and spread them across cores. 64 words of RAM, ie, 128 bytes. 128 bytes times 144 - 18Kbytes. Same for the (program) ROM, and you should factor communication code in there. Communication cost affects RAM as well.

They offer no compiler from high-level language like C. You had to learn a specific dialect of Forth and some bizarre (albeit small) assembly language.

The only benefit for general population from this affair is the relative ease of the desing of asynchronous hardware.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_system>

<comment><USER12> Your are focusing on classic applications only.

The GA144 is so different from the classic way of computing that it requires new approaches of development. One very interesting feature of GA144 is that all 144 cores can share instructions over I/O lines. That means every core can send instructions to their neighbors who execute them directly without conversion.

I/O ist fast enough. I guess it should be possible to have (someday) an external interface to SRAM which circumvents the low memory problem.

> They offer no compiler from high-level language like C.

That's right, and that's the real weak spot of GA144. Almost every microcontroller board today comes with C or alike. Mr. Moore loves Forth but I doubt that there are many developers out there who like to be forced to learn Forth just for this single platform. I know Forth, it was one of my first languages I ever learned. It is perfectly suitable for embedded systems but you have to learn a lot to master it.

<comment><USER10> I protyped dynamic dataflow machine which (in theory) could be scaled to hundreds of cores (corelets - something very small which does not have even jump command). In my experiments readying information to be sent accounts for hefty 30%+ of code.

<http://thesz.mskhug.ru/svn/hhdl/previous/HSDF/CoreletTest.hs>

The link above contains some simple "Hello, world!" program, in five "big instructions" which contains 21 corelet instruction in total. 8 of those 21 instructions are send and front advancing instructions - their only purpose is to establish communication between program parts. My machine sends pointers to "big instructions", up to 32 bytes long (up to 32 instructions if you're lucky) while GA144 could send only 4 instructions max.

30% of 4 instructions is 1 instruction. Another one instruction from those 4 is a loop or jump or something like that. So you have two instructions to perform program logic. And this is best case.

So I again express dislike of GA144 as a computing machine. And I again express my gratitude to Chuck Moore for proving that clockless design works.

<comment><USER12> > In my experiments readying information to be sent accounts for hefty 30%+ of > code.

Unfortunately I don't have time to dive into your design but AFAIK the GA144 doesn't need 30% preparation code because every instruction can be executed immediately by neighbor nodes.

That means (correct me if I am wrong) if core X has to evaluate a Forth function of say five arguments then it could pass all five arguments to its neighbors (without any preparation) by sending them the code addresses of the arguments, wait until they have finished and then use their results to compute the function result. These neighbor nodes themselves could evaluate (or delegate) subexpressions to other (free) nodes and so on.

This form of parallelization would require an efficient shared memory access. This problem needs to be solved because AFAIK I/O ports are accessible by the edge cores only. It doesn't make much sense to transport each shared data through several columns or rows of cores.

<comment><USER10> I think you're wrong about many arguments for command send to other core.

You can send a word, ie, "big command" composed from four MISC command. One of MISC commands in "big command" can retrieve data from other core.

So most of the time you will wait to send a command or to receive some data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In past Forth threads I've complained the the Forth model for a computer seems just too at odds with how modern CPUs actually work for me to want to learn it. Well, I look at this thing and its like the soft draft of the future slipping underneath the door, whispering that maybe I should learn Forth after all.

<comment><USER13> > maybe I should learn Forth after all

<http://factorcode.org/>

Make it easy on yourself.

<comment><USER14> That is probably making it harder on yourself as the recommended route for learning factor is to read a forth book and read the factor docs. (Unless something has changed and a book or big tutorial has been written)

With that said, Factor is really cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Love the guy and his passion for its chips, but this 144-computer chip looks like a solution in search of a problem: what is trying to solve? How's the inter-core communication handled? On the other hand, creating weird chips like these, just because you can, is awesome and stimulating a hacker's mind.

<comment><USER16> Some of the industries greatest advances have began as a solution in search of a problem, such as the microprocessor (which its inventor, Intel, didn't think much of compared with memory chips where the real money was). Most fail of course.

If someone can make many-core, in this form, do something useful that can't be done elsewhere (unlike DSP and GPUs, which are already many-core), it will fundamentally upend computing.

<comment><USER17> > greatest advances have began as a solution in search of a problem

.. and the laser(!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can buy a 10 pack of evaluation chips from Green Array's web site or single from schmartboard's website [http://www.schmartboard.com/index.asp?page=products_csp&...](http://www.schmartboard.com/index.asp?page=products_csp&id=532)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think this sounds ridiculously cool and at $20 I could probably afford to play around with it. But I have no knowledge of hardware, just programming. To me chips just look like thin green rectangular prisms. How would I get it to actually, you know, do stuff?

<comment><USER19> You would probably want to buy the Evaluation Board which lets you control the machine using USB ports and an ASCII console.

The thing is, it's just a computer. The real value of this is hooking it to hardware to actually do something. So I suggest starting here instead: <http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/budget.html> and learning how to work with hardware as well.

<comment><USER20> you can do this for about $30: <http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/budget.html>

"suggestion for a complete system"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the only thing Chuck is missing is a few 20-somethings hackers, bent on solving an 'impossible' problem with his chips.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I'm posting it here.

Some possible ideas

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

\- Sound processing (think 144 cores preforming Fourier Transforms)

\- Pico Satellites (This chip has a surprisingly extreme low power requirement).

\- Wireless communication (small power requirement means small batteries)

\- Computer Vision processing. Imagine toys or tools that can process visual information faster than an Xbox.

\- Basically anything that can be done in parallel, that is suited for small size and low power, but doesn't require much on chip memory.

<comment><USER21> Had a rough look on it's instruction set and didn't see anything resembling DSP instructions. So i'm not sure it would be great for all those uses.

On the other hand, picochip sells a 200-300 core DSP , that is being used for the wireless industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> From this PDF [http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB001-100...](http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB001-100503-GA144-1-10.pdf) GreenArrays seems to think it would support DSP

"SUITABILITY: The GA144 is designed to support the largest and most demanding computing challenges that can be addressed with a modest sized die in a relatively inexpensive and easy to use package while still using well less than 650 mW in most practical applications. The geometry allows for generous numbers of parallel paths and/or pipeline stages, or for complex flowgraphs in control, simulation, or DSP applications. Clusters of nodes devoted to functions such as cryptographic algorithms are easily placed in the large array, and the cluster needed to control external memory and run a high level language from it is well out of the way but has good surface area for interaction with other functions. Use it also as a universal protoytping platform for applications destined to run on our smaller chips. "

<comment><USER9> There is a huge difference between supporting DSP and being good at DSP. My $0.50 MSP430, clocked at 32kHz, "supports" DSP.

<comment><USER22> At the very least, I'd expect instructions for things like saturated addition

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Let me get this straight: It's basically a microcontroller timed 144?

Can anyone explain to a nonhardware geek?

<comment><USER24> It's the future, representing a convergence between Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the microprocessor.

Gate arrays are vast arrays of logic gates, which can be wired together in almost arbitrary patterns by a sea of "fuses", typically controlled by state stored in on-board SRAM. They are real time and blindingly fast due to their massive parallelism, achieving supercomputer type speeds when applied to the right type of problem and programmed well. They are more difficult to program than a microprocessor. One way of looking at an FPGA is as an array of tens of millions of very simple computing engines.

Over the years, the number of transistors on an FPGA has been rocketing up. Generally these transistors have been put to use by providing more and more simple logic blocks. We are now to the point where we have almost more gates than we know what to do with, and the chip is being dominated by interconnects. This has seen a move towards including a limited number of elaborate hard wired blocks, such as CPUs and multipliers, in addition to the array of logic.

The logical evolution is to stop providing more blocks, but make each block more complex as transistor counts go up. Eventually we will see arrays of tens of millions of microprocessors, rather than tens of millions of logic blocks. There will be no distinction between a multicore CPU and FPGA.

It's worth noting that the first Xilinx FPGAs, thirty years ago, provided arrays of around 144 logic blocks, similar to the processor count in this chip. Extrapolate 30 years and we will have an array of 10 million microprocessors.

<comment><USER25> >We are now to the point where we have almost more gates than we know what to do with,

limits of von Neumann architecture (and its underlying mathematics of recursive functions) as a mental framework for our thinking about computing.

<comment><USER26> You've piqued my curiosity; could you elaborate please?

<comment><USER27> I shall try, but this stuff gets really hairy, really really fast.

Von Neumann architecture is what almost all computers use today: you have (very roughly) an ALU (arithmetic logic unit) hooked up to a memory bank which stores both program data and the instructions the program consist of.

Now you can add a couple of cores to that, but you pretty soon start to run into problems -- threads which try to access the same data, race conditions, etc.

But the biggest problem is that under the Von Neumann architecture all memory is shared so any thread can access any other threads memory. This puts rather drastic limits on how much benefit you can get from new cores.

You also run into issues like the limited speed it is possible to access the main memory banks with, etc, etc. This is possible to compensate to some degree with caches, but they have their own problems.

But the fundamental problem with them is that they were from and of an era where the clock speed kept increasing and increasing.

Today we have a situation where transistors gets smaller and smaller. But if you are trying to use this to make a traditional CPU with these new transistors, all this gets you is a really small chip.

What we need is an architecture inspired by something else. Personally I am kinda hoping it will be some form of message sending -- you run a lot of small (green) threads which each have their own memory as well as the ability to send and receive packages of information to/from the other cores of on the CPU.

You can have access to a (comparatively large but slower) shared memory bank too (like RAM today).

I like it because it works well with how you would design a cluster of computers (where you cannot afford the illusion of shared memory), how computation is organized under the actor model (which I prefer to threads) and it would be possible to implement with not that much new changes in the CPU.

<comment><USER26> That wasn't a "try" - that was a success. Thank you!

If I may attempt a paraphrase: CPU caches stop being a bandage for slow access to RAM and become a valuable first class citizen for each core of the CPU when coupled with the actor model.

Did I understand you correctly? Again, thank you.

<comment><USER27> Well you could do that today if you as a programmer could manually tell the system "please load addr x, y and z into the cache".

But if the cores of the CPU starts to communicate with the actor model then you wouldn't be using the memory close to the cores as a cache but as a storage area for messages that haven't been sent/processed yet as well as possible for thread local storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The Propeller chip <http://www.parallax.com/propeller/> is another embedded market chip in the same vein although nowhere near as many cores. Having something like this make for some interesting embedded designs.

Also, check the site for the arrayForth stuff.

On another note, it would be interesting if something like these existed in the 64-bit size. Larrabee is interesting, but if it was a simpler stack machine at around this price point then perhaps some work could be done on different ways to do parallelism.

<comment><USER21> Tilera does a 64-bit CPU with 64/100cores.If they would offer access to it using a pay-per-hour model, that would be interesting.

<comment><USER22> I spoke to one of the Tilera guys a few years back about evaluating their boards for use in a telco project I was working on at the time, but gave up because I wasn't prepared to drop $15K on a development board just to evaluate it.

The technology itself was extremely interesting, though, and would probably have been a good fit for what I was doing. Also, the cost of the dev board included technical support and from speaking to the guy, I got the impression that they actually help you port your code to their platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> May be if you use 100+ of these (~14400 'computers') you can build a machine with emerging behavior, brain-like?

<comment><USER29> I knew it. The name "Moore" sounded suspicious to me immediately. Now I know his real name is Chuck Testa!!!

On a more serious note, what we need much more of is not the processing speed. What we need much more of is what I call "memory processability", which roughly means "how many times per second can you process the whole memory" - or something like that. Basically how much CPU is there per RAM. Indexing is a great hack, but a hack it still is. Memory and processing cells must be merged into a single, massively parallel chip.

<comment><USER30> That was done in the 80's: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine> . Richard Feynman had to help the designers with the hard bits.

Users recall them fondly. In the end, clusters became too cheap for custom hardware like this to compete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What are the software stacks that are available on the chip? Forth must be there. Anything else?

</comment><comment><USER32> Is this something I would use in the place of something like an Arduino (for example, putting a brain on an RC car)?

</comment><comment><USER33> Wondering if it ciuld emulate an Apple Ii in real time and, within it, run GraFORTH.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is all new to me. Does anyone know if these chips could be used for bitcoin mining?

However, I believe you would have to write completely new programs if it is possible.

</comment><comment><USER35> Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my side project - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I've recently read the '4-Hour Body' and got pretty inspired. Started the diet and muscle program. Have seen great results so far. Then saw a supplementation chapter, and decided to see about creating the actual stack. I then contacted a company who was making it, and worked out a dropshipping arrangement and set up http://paggstack.com/ (the name of the proposed stack).
My questions for you guys are:
- What do you think of the site? Do you think it looks professional? Would you make any changes?
- Do you like the concept of it?
- Any specific tips on marketing it? I know supplements and stacks are usually looked upon as spammy, but I want to do the best job at removing that image.
I'm mainly targeting SEO and Twitter at the moment.
Btw, I'm doing this to fund my main startup. <comment><USER2> Lachy, I think the site is beautifully designed and you got yourself a great domain name.

I am not sure number of visitors from search are you normally getting but I see you are already #1 for the term PAGG Stack, which is great. You can perhaps try to rank for other related terms for 4HWW by starting a blog or knowledgebase?

Good luck with this project! If you get enough traffic, you will certainly make great revenues from this site.

EDIT: clarified

</comment><comment><USER3> My first thought on entering the site was "What is PAGG?" I'm not sure if you're just targeting people who have read the book specifically, but even renaming your "What does the PAGG stack consist of?" to "What is the PAGG stack?"/"What is PAGG?" or adding a page and a link (I'm envisioning a "What is PAGG Stack?" link up by the cart) that describe the basics would be super helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure thing. I'll add that. The market really is though people that already understand it (that's the way they'd find it). Will definitely still add it just to capture other customers.

<comment><USER3> Awesome. If you do some long tail SEO and set up a blog, capturing any of the current interest in the "Four Hour Body" craze going on right now could be a boon; you could potentially capitalize on people who haven't even read the book by marketing it as a "key component" if that's true (again, having not read the book).

<comment><USER4> Needless to say the blog should also make frequent references to Tim Ferris' book and relevant anecdotes and tips in it (and of course an Amazon affiliate link for those that haven't bought it yet). I'm slightly surprised there's no mention of "As recommended by Tim Ferris' / Four Hour Body" in big letters above the fold in your current home page design. You ought to be able to pick up links from health-related blogs/forums as well as search traffic from people specifically looking for "PAGG stack", and immediate context is invaluable to keep the bounce rate down.

Whilst we're at it, other generic marketing suggestions:

\- draw more attention to the savings for 2 and 3 month supplies

\- offer an auto-rebill option (assuming your drop shipper and supplier is happy with it). Chances are some of your target market are people that quite happily get their Acai Berry supplements sent to them on a regular basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you contacted Tim Ferriss himself? One blog post from him will probably get you more business than any amount of SEO or tweeting? Even if you can't get that, you could probably get some good advice since he's been in this business for a long time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The design looks great; not spammy at all.

At a glance, I was confused by the table near the bottom. The large heading says "What does the PAGG stack consist of?" and the following paragraph is in a low contrast/small font, so I jumped almost directly from the heading to the table. That gave me the impression that the table was describing what you were selling (i.e. 7 bottles for $92 instead of $111), which isn't the intended effect.

An H2 more in line with the rest of the section or a prominent table caption might be a good idea.

Also keep in mind that the largest group of people buying supplements (at least in the US) have aging eyeballs. The size and low-contrast of your P text is going to be challenging for many of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will execute these suggestions when I wake up tomorrow morning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I don't like the industry or the product, the site looks very good, and very reputable. If I was into that kind of stuff I wouldnt hesitate to order from that site.

Out of curiosity, since you're selling a supplement, do you have to carry some kind of liability insurance?

I would contact Timothy ferris, he might give you some free publicity, since this is essentially what he did with brainquicken.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm only dropshipping, so I imagine it would be like buying Panadol at Walmart, you would be suing Panadol, not Walmart. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure that if Walmart sold something which was dangerous they would end up being sued along with the manufacturer; not saying that it is dangerous, just that you might have some liability. I am, however, not a lawyer, and the best advice I can give is to find a lawyer and talk to them about it. Don't put it off, because even if there are no potential legal issues you are probably much, much better off knowing that for sure instead of guessing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Site looks really good. A few minor observations:

\- Details page: Policosanol is listed in the table as 23mb instead of 23mg.

\- Blue box around product photo is distracting.

\- Main body font feels a little too small generally.

\- Possibly too many parentheses on Detail and Contact page.

\- A few punctuation errors, e.g. "The possibilities are endless and the potential is unlimited." should have a comma before "and" whereas "Buy now, and" lower down should not.

\- Front page: I found the "swallow 8 more pills per day" to be confusing. It would be clearer if you listed the # of pills per day that you'd have to swallow using the separately-purchased products and total those up in the table above that pitch.

\- Odd that the 110% guarantee is referred to on the Contact page and nowhere else that I can see.

\- The chat plugin floats onto an awkward space on the iOS Safari.

Again, terrific job. Good luck with this and the main startup.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks great, very clear but I have a few nitpicks:

\- On first visiting the site, "no items in Cart" just kind of floats there on the right. I have no interest in having a cart at that moment, so just hide that text until there is something to display.

\- Don't start chatting with me immediatelly, it's kind of disconcerting (Though it was nice talking to you. Stick to two minutes waiting time or wait for them to engage you ;)

\- It seems very much geared to technology minded people, with detailed comparison on costs, # of pills etc. Not everyone has read 4HB, so give us the cliffs note so we know what these pills are for.

\- I think the two main buttons switching to each others color on hover is kind of ugly, and I'd use a third color on hover for both.

In any case, good idea, good website. I hope it's a success for you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed the cart. Will look into the others in the morning :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just some immediate first impressions.

\- The logo looks small and isolated from the rest of the page.

\- The text in the navigation tabs looks strange, maybe it should be centered?

\- The boxes with the slight shading are missing vertical borders, which looks unfinished.

\- The circles with the prices are not ordered numerically, which was confusing at first glance. Also the text labels in the image are too small.

\- The font size for the description paragraphs is too small; looks like fine print.

\- The colors for the Buy/Learn buttons at the top are badly chosen; when I hover over one, it looks like they're both active or inactive since they're the same color. There should be four different colors or they should be identical.

\- Not sure why "Required" was abbreviated to "Req'd" when adjacent cells have much more text.

</comment><comment><USER12> Any chance you'll go into detail on what it was like to work out the dropshipping arrangement?

<comment><AUTHOR> 'Course. I don't think it'll be the great story you're after though. Initially I contacted the private label nutra companies, but the MOQ was like $5k, and I didn't want to risk that.

So I found a company that was going to be doing it, talked to them and became friends. Then we just negotiated a price per sale, and how we would do shipping (I'd just email them a daily xls).

Very simple. Contact, negotiate, execute.

<comment><USER2> Great, I know it may not be possible for you to reveal here, but if you are OK with it may I ask what sort of margins such these dropshipping arrangements offer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well... I went for around 30% but I researched and decided that that was not nearly good enough, and went for closer to 60% due to their high profit margins.

This will allow me to market it more affectively.

<comment><USER2> Correct me if I am wrong: do you pocket $55.2 (60% of $92) for every sale you make? That is way higher than I imagined!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.paggstack.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> I think you should emphasize The Four Hour Body link more, because it's confusing what a PAGG stack is. That being said, be careful to put a disclaimer that the site isn't affiliated with the author/publisher.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will add that now. Thanks for the reminder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The design looks awesome - perfect for your target demographic - well done.

I noticed that you have taken the brand images from 4hourfatloss.myshopify.com - are they just placeholder images for now? Are you planning on creating your own label brand?

For your phone number - get a Skype online number with voicemail that gives you a toll free United States number - or a number in any country you like. It will cost you a small monthly fee for this service but will provide great benefits to the perception & customer service of your product.

I would suggest some targetted Facebook ads too to drive traffic.

</comment><comment><USER15> I really like your live chat(got to talk with you directly :-) ). Also, I mentioned with you that you should try reddit.com to advertise but don't be too corporate. Looks GREAT!

<comment><AUTHOR> Will definitely take you up on your offer to help write it! I lurk reddit but would probably fail at writing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do you really need the word "hack" in the slogan? Seems like it would confuse the majority of people who may be unaware of its meaning in that context?

"Short-cut to the Ultimate Body" seems sufficient.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Really smart site design. Looks really professional.

Perhaps remove any doubt about spamminess (a word?!) by putting a telephone number for people to ring. Might increase conversions slightly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, being in Australia, opposite timezones, and prices, wouldn't really work.

<comment><USER2> Let it go to voicemail. People won't actually call; only the presence of a phone should increase conversions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The design is great and I think you've done a good job at avoiding that spammy look (envisioning stock images of people with perfect teeth looking right at the camera).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I hear that's great for conversions, but I just can't force myself to do that.

<comment><USER4> I love to see an A/B test of the spammy look vs polished minimalism

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm afraid I'm not even going to try the spammy look. I can't do that. Supplements is a stretch for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would make 2 most important words "losing weight" more obvious.</comment>


Steve Jobs on innovation at Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct2004/nf20041012_4018_db083.htm <comment><USER2> My economic platform as president of the US would be to institute an advanced cloning program to duplicate Steve Jobs and replace the heads of the Fortune 100. I would call this _"The De-Sculleyification of America"_ or _"The No CEO Left Behind Act"_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Q: Is this common in the industry?

A: Look at Microsoft (MSFT ) -- who's running Microsoft?

Q: Steve Ballmer.

A: Right, the sales guy. Case closed. And that's what happened at Apple, as well.

Ouch.

<comment><AUTHOR> from Rise of Sillicon Valley

Steve says " Microsoft has no culture, they just make third grade products."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just out of curiosity, is Apple really that popular in Silicon Valley?

In the places where I've lived, Apple was/is not much of a player at all particularly since the 1990s.

I find it peculiar that there are so many Apple-related posts on YC News!

<comment><USER5> I am seeing an increasing number of engineers switching to Apple @home while continuing develop under Windows only because their employer uses it.

Also, more and more technical books have screenshots in them done using Mac. While I can't say Apple is "popular", I can certainly say that Mac is getting more popular.

<comment><USER6> Actually those technical books you mentioned are always around Web Development, Ruby on Rails, HTML/CSS.

Most of Web Designers have background in Graphics Design. Graphics Design use Mac.

Ruby on Rails developers (most of them) use Mac thanks to the hype and the shiny screencast made by DHH.

While the last reason might not be important, it also has some effect to certain degree to books; IE6/WinXP theme looks old (same thing with IE6/WinXP classic theme) while Safari looks much nicer in those web development books. Basically people need fresh air that's all. It's not that Mac is better.

Did you know that Yahoo! Mail doesn't work in Safari?

<comment><USER7> Safari is crap. I hope the Maccos at least install Firefox on their machines.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Snapchat Starts Selling Spectacles in Vending Machines, Luring Resellers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/snapchat-starts-selling-spectacles-in-vending-machines-luring-resellers <comment><USER2> Selling through vending machines is brilliant, they can distribute the glasses very inexpensively while putting them in places that are easily accessed by their primary users.

This company is amazing. They have found the nexus between social and the real (cool)world. I don't mean just the glasses but their actions as a company. They understand that for tech to be popular it must meet a fundamental need. Apple found it through design,beauty and the need to belong. I think Snap is about to find the same thing for their product. I predict that the delineation that existed between Apple and Microsoft will be coming between Snapchat and Facebook. Facebook will be known as the rough tech giant, as Microsoft has been known, while Snap will be the better refined cool app, as Apple is now.</comment>


Egison – Pattern-matching-oriented Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.egison.org/ <comment><USER3> The creator of the language here, ask me anything. Please check my paper recently I put on arXiv.org. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.0729](http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.0729)

<comment><USER4> This looks super interesting, thanks for including so many demos and docs. I'm pretty new to PL theory, but was recently reading about OMeta - <USER2> "language for pattern matching". For example, here's a png parser in OMeta.[1]

Maybe you could help me understand how Egison compares to OMeta? thanks.

1\. [http://www.joshondesign.com/2013/03/18/ConciseComputing](http://www.joshondesign.com/2013/03/18/ConciseComputing)

<comment><USER3> I read a slide on OMeta. [http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/dls07-slides.pdf](http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/dls07-slides.pdf) Its pattern matching is specialized in expressing pattern matching against lists and trees. Egison aims intuitive expression for a wider range of data types and provide non-linear pattern matching with multiple results on a functional language. Please check a cheat sheet and demo pages on our website. We can get its concepts easily from them. [http://www.egison.org/cheatsheet.html](http://www.egison.org/cheatsheet.html) [http://www.egison.org/demonstrations/poker- hands.html](http://www.egison.org/demonstrations/poker-hands.html)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. It looks to me like Egison is focused on pattern matching of data. While OMeta is focused on pattern matching of syntax (so is used to create and extend new languages/DSLs). Is that a fair comparison?

How does the Egison online evaluator work? Server-side haskell or the ruby extension?

Any plans for a javascript extension?

<comment><USER3> What you wrote is what I wanted to write. We call the Egison command on the server limiting code with side-effects via an API server implemeted in Ruby. All source code on Egison including its website is on GitHub. Please check them, too. [https://github.com/egison](https://github.com/egison) I'm not planning a javascript extension for now, though I'd like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love the 'cheat sheet' accessible from the landing page. Great way to give a feeling of what it's like in under a minute.

</comment><comment><USER6> Because lispy syntax is alien to me, how is this different to the pattern matching of other languages (I barely know the ones about Haskell, and now swift)?

This interest me because I'm dreaming about build a language and think pattern matching is very cool and look like can replace if & case.

<comment><USER3> The biggest difference is Egison realizes non-linear pattern matching against unfree data types such as multisets and sets. I've wrote brief comparison here. [https://github.com/egison/egison#comparison-with-related- wor...](https://github.com/egison/egison#comparison-with-related-work) Please check my paper, too. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.0729](http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.0729)

<comment><USER6> Ok, which are the baby steps to implement pattern matching in a language?, and if is more similar to python/swift than lisp?

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry but I think if you would like to implement a language not only use it, it would be better to learn lisp at first. It is very easy to implement lisp on lisp and modify it as you like. This is an scheme interpreter I wrote in scheme. It's extremely short compared with other language. There are many good textbooks, too. [http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/](http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/)

<comment><USER6> I understand that a lispy language make some stuff about building a language easier, but still is very common to use a imperative one to build them, and in imperatives I'm skilled...

So the question are really 2, to make them more clear:

1- What are the baby steps to make pattern matching?

I could follow a functional language if the explanation is clear, but if the code requiere skills in them I could get lost. So, I ask if exist this kind of resource, if possible. If not, then anything else is ok and them I know I need to devote some time in learn other kind of skills.

2- Is pattern matching more problematic if the language is not functional, inmutable? If is a mix (like with swift), what is the sweet spot (if exist?) or what is needed to make it work easily/better?. So for example, lets imagine that if the language is not statically typed it become harder to implement..

<comment><USER3> I wrote my answer.

1- I'm sorry but I don't know materials for the baby steps to implement pattern matching. However, I think it is not so difficult to compile ordinary pattern matching expression into many nested if expressions, if you have a small language you can manage completely.

2- I think difficulty to implement a pattern matching mechanism is not different for each language. I think writing a parser may be the hardest work.

By the way, I forgot to paste URL for my interpreter I wrote in the past. [https://github.com/egisatoshi/scheme-meta- interpreter/blob/m...](https://github.com/egisatoshi/scheme-meta- interpreter/blob/master/scheme-interpreter.scm) Lisp is easy to write a parser, and it's because I recommended lisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could this finally be a real replacement for Snobol?

<comment><USER8> Egison looks interesting, but I think maybe Ometa is closer to being a Snobol- replacement than Egison -- at least for now.

On a side note, I came across this: [https://github.com/daveshields/gospitbol](https://github.com/daveshields/gospitbol)

<comment><USER3> Why do you think so? I've created Egison not for text processing, but I think text processing is important application of pattern matching and I'd like to do work for that in future.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps Egison might be a useful tool for building a snobol replacement, or perhaps I personally just don't find the syntax to be quite so amendable to ad-hoc text processing. I could very well be wrong, though. As I said up- thread -- it's a very interesting project :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does Egison implement the Pattern Calculus?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_calculus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_calculus)

<comment><USER3> No. I don't refer to the Pattern Calculus when I've implemented Egison. I've implemented Egison to realize non-linear pattern matching against unfree data types such as sets and multisets. The Pattern Calculus seems not for that.

<comment><USER9> Amazing work nonetheless, I'm looking at slide 50 now. Very interesting concept.

I had to google "unfree data types". This seems to refer to data types that are unstructured and therefore no one thought of a way to represent in syntax. For instance we can ask if the first item of a list (a structured data type) is equal to the last, but we do not have good syntax (nor semantics) to ask what are the pairs that occur in a collection. That's why we keep having to translate between those structures in order to do some operations or ask certain questions.

Very cool stuff.

<comment><USER3> I believe Egison has provided good syntax and semantics for that. We have demonstration pages of various Egison programs that you can edit and run online. Please check them too. [http://www.egison.org/demonstrations/poker- hands.html](http://www.egison.org/demonstrations/poker-hands.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> is it compilable? is there a windowing library? roughly what is the speed comparable to? the examples look very nice, gj

<comment><USER3> Thank you. We are providing only an interpreter now. Egison is not fast and we don't provide benchmark yet. The development of Egison is currently sponsored by Rakuten and Rakuten Institute of Technology, but a current active developer is only me.

<comment><USER8> Is there some way to break computation? I had a look at the tutorial, and went from: (take 10 nats) via (take 1 (reverse (take 1000 nats))) to doing the same with 10000000 (or so). ctrl-z and pkill let me go on to to other things, but it would've been nice if ctrl-c worked as well...?

<comment><USER3> If you install egison on your machine, ctrl-c should work on your machine. However, ctrl-c does not work online egison currently.

<comment><USER8> Hm, you're right -- could be that cpu/swappiness was the issue. If instantiate less from the lazy sequence, I can indeed break with ctrl-c, so eg: 30000 is about enough not to eat all resources, and still take enough time that I can ctrl-c--out (and also does complete without crashing if I let it run a little while, about a second I think):

        (take 1 (reverse (take 30000 nats)))

Anyone know if this is a known issue with Haskell (I assuming this is a pretty straight wrap for Haskell lazy lists?) -- that you can get the compiler/runtime into a tight loop eating so many resources that it isn't possible to abort cleanly?

<comment><USER3> Thank you for letting me to know about this issue. I noticed this problem for the first time. Our implementation of lazy evaluation is not straight wrap of Haskell. I'll look into about this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Native or cross platform? Where do you stand - <AUTHOR> We just launched http://www.nativevscrossplatform.com/, and we wanted to understand what you would love to see here? We wanted to bring high degree of bias free information to everyone. Would you help contributing to this information?
Also, if you have any suggestions, please feel free to share here!
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the clickable URL: [http://www.nativevscrossplatform.com/](http://www.nativevscrossplatform.com/)</comment>


DuckDuckGo has a "ddg" bang that lets you search on DuckDuckGo - <AUTHOR> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whatever+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg <comment><USER2> Crazy submitted url sent me this way and that:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whatever+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whatever+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg+!ddg)

Or...

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whatever](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whatever)

What am I missing here?</comment>


Project Aria (FB Glass):research project on the future of wearable AR - <AUTHOR> https://tech.fb.com/announcing-project-aria-a-research-project-on-the-future-of-wearable-ar/ <comment><AUTHOR> > As with any mapping data, security of recorded data is paramount.

This project (and any smart glass for that matter) is a privacy nightmare. But labeling video and audio data as mapping data instead of what it is is disingenuous. And more importantly, even if I'm not a user of this product and don't benefit from it in any way, I have to forego my privacy because of someone else's choice. I wonder at what point will these anti-privacy technology will be banned. How could this work under GDPR?!</comment>


SQL injection in one minute - <AUTHOR> http://blog.detectify.com/post/31942728649/sql-injection-in-1-min A short 101 tutorial on how SQL-injections work <comment><USER2> How many times do people need to talk about SQL injection before people writing web apps get it? This isn't news and this isn't hard to completely avoid. Just do it and stop being amazed every time someone puts a tick mark in an URL parameter (or any parameter for that matter).

EDIT: I looked around this detectify website and found this gem: [http://blog.detectify.com/post/22258359654/zerg-rush-how- to-...](http://blog.detectify.com/post/22258359654/zerg-rush-how-to-influence- google)

"326 exploits found"

I have so much faith that this company will do well. If you're interested in others like it that might fair better, you can try WhiteHat Security or Tinfoil Security, both of which do web security scanning as a service.

<https://www.whitehatsec.com/>

<https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks dguido for the kind words and happy to hear you found the Zerg Rush article. It's all true!

Email us at firstname.lastname@example.com if you would like to get beta access to detectify.com</comment></comment>