China forcing birth control on Uighurs to suppress population, report says - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53220713 <comment><USER2> One child policy specifically excluded ethnic minorities, including Uighurs.</comment>


Geek Improvement: Find and keep track of the things you geek out about - <AUTHOR> http://geekimprovement.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, Hacker News! I'm the creator of Geek Improvement. Just wanted to drop a few lines in the comments.

There's always that one movie / book / video game / pen-and-paper RPG / [insert here] that I'm baffled I hadn't heard about before, especially since it aligns with my geeky interests. Roughly three years ago, I realized that this scenario occurs all too often. So, I set out to build Geek Improvement as a remedy with a bit of HTML / CSS knowledge and without a lick of programming know-how.

After debating the frameworks and languages du jour, I settled on Python / Django and began hacking away. It's taken juggling college and later a job for the last two-and-a-half years, but I'm finally at the point where Geek Improvement is ready for a public Beta. Folks who take it for a spin will be able to keep track of what they've read / watched / played, add items to to-do and wishlists, and sift through items by geek types.

There's still plenty to refine and many ways to grow, but I'm happy that I'm finally able to share it.</comment>


Regarding embargoes - <AUTHOR> http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/regarding-embargoes <comment><USER2> There was nothing "on purpose" about our confirmation (that the bug Halvar posted on DailyDave was the same as Kaminsky had shared with me). It was a pure accident. The person who accidentally hit the "publish" button on the story wasn't even involved with it; they were doing something else on the blog.

I do appreciate the distinction you made between "confirmation" and "revelation". Most of the media at the time ran with the latter, incorrect concept. It's more fun that way, than that someone was simply able to guess the bug from the embargo description.

Clearly, it's hard to come up with a better example of how much a shitshow PR- enhanced embargoes are. I lean your way in my feelings about embargoes and about cool-kids cliques.

<comment><USER3> The bigger problem with embargoes are the cloudflares of the world, who use it as a marketing angle (as per the post). I think embargoes don't work, won't work, even if well intentioned. Just get the details out, let people take the steps they need/want in the immediate term, and incentivize the parties involved to fix sooner rather than a usual tardy later.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Launch a 10k node cluster on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/manuelbernhardt/akka-rapid-benchmark/ <comment><USER2> I get 404 page, is the repository set to private?</comment>


The iPhone 5s Review - <AUTHOR> http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review <comment><USER3> I find Apple so incredibly impressive. They target a few key features with every release, absolutely nail those features, and sell the new products perfectly. Their product line-ups and messages are constantly evolving, but slowly, determinedly. And so they achieve things no other company seems capable of - like an unlocking mechanism that is going to be market-defining. Why? Because when the other companies become jealous and try and come up with their own versions, they'll rush and release something half-baked, and out of the confusion only Apple's solution will speak to consumers. Apple is so far ahead of the competition it's ridiculous - maybe Google can compete in the medium-term, I'm not sure. Apple's confidence and poise is awe-inspiring.

<comment><USER4> Not responding to the fawning per se, but specifically the "unlocking mechanism that is going to be market-defining": face unlock seems undeniably cooler still, works reasonably well, has been shipping on all Android phones for _nearly two years now_ , yet certainly hasn't "defined" any markets.

How exactly is putting a little scanner inside a button going to be meaningfully better? Like face unlock, it's at best a cute trick. Apple's past genius has been about finding new _fundamental_ ways to use technology. Slightly easier protection against spousal snooping doesn't qualify, sorry.

<comment><USER5> I remember when two of my friends got Android phones that were face unlockable. First thing we did was hold up an iPhone with a picture of their face to it and it worked to unlock the phone! We tried this a bunch of times and it worked every time. I don't know if the technology still sucks like it did about a year ago but I have a feeling that Touch ID will not be foiled as easily.

<comment><USER6> They updated it to check for a blink, but even the android phones that had a fingerprint scanner a few years ago, and made by the same company Apple later bought, isn't getting any respect so clearly any non-Apple approved security engineering decisions are _declasse_.

<comment><USER7> More trolling from you, just like elsewhere in this thread. As you are no doubt well-aware, Apple's fingerprint scanner is not at all the same technology as the Android phones of the last few years, which all, without exception, use the type of sensor you must swipe your finger across. These are less reliable, less fast in recognition, and less secure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interestingly enough the GPU is approximately the same speed as the upcoming (or current?) generation of Android phones with the Snapdragon 800 SOC. In the past Apple has generally held a large performance advantage in that area. There is potential that in 6 months when the next Galaxy/HTC phones are released that they will be significantly ahead of Apple for 6 or more months.

<comment><USER9> As Anandtech points out: the iPhone 5s' PowerVR Series 6 moves to a fully scalar architecture (allowing better shaders and GPGPU performance) but loses a lot of raw triangle performance in the process (30-50% slower than iPhone 5 in some cases). On shader heavy scenes (T-Rex HD) the tradeoff is worth it (iPhone 5s is 30% faster than any other GPU).

Apple (and PowerVR) have made a couple tradeoffs in this generation that sacrifice performance on some tests for better shader capabilities.

Final point: it'll be interesting to see what these numbers look like when the bugs in the different graphics tests are resolved (are they compiled using the armv8 instruction set?)

<comment><USER10> That 30% faster figure is because the iPhone is rendering the scene at a lower resolution than many of the phones with larger, 1080p screens. Look at the next graph where each phone is rendering a 1080p scene to see the difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> """ ...but if Apple doesn't offer a larger display option soon then I believe it will lose some users not because of cross shopping, but out of frustration. """

I don't get this huge screen trend for phones. That's not a smart move from an ergonomics perspective. Almost person person that has a phone with a big screen has to use both hands to comfortably use the phone, one to touch and the other to hold.

One would argue that more pixels == more content. But that's not an issue with iPhone 5 even though was with previous models. I mean, not an issue if you don't have ads taking up your precious pixels. And that is easily solvable by paying for your content and apps which has other benefits too.

Anyway, I feel the iPhone 5 screen size is perfect. And I still have one hand free to do whatever I want. I think more pixels are not more useful than a hand. People who think that too won't get phones with cumbersome screens, unless they have huge hands.

<comment><USER12> Almost everything looks better on my wife's bigger Galaxy Note 2 screen compared to my Galaxy S2 screen. I can see more TODOs in my toodledo.com task manager (my primary usage), you can read more without scrolling in your browser, YouTube videos are a pleasure; it's like you're traveling with a mini-home-theater that can fit in your pocket, and using the stylus to make handwritten notes is actually practical.

I hardly notice the issue of having to use two hands to hold the phone. On the other hand, if you have to look at your phone while walking, which is uncomfortable when using a smaller screen and dangerous (bumping into people; maybe even uncivil towards others, come to think of it), the larger text on a larger screen makes it more comfortable and you get done taking a glance at what you want more quickly.

In the US, unlike here in Hong Kong, there seems to be a stigma attached to holding a large screen phone, almost as if people are extremely worried about looking uncool. In Hong Kong, the recognition of the practical advantages of the larger screen and the shift away from Apple to Android phones was overnight; the pace at which everyone adopted the Galaxy Note 2 (and other Android phones) after the iPhone 5 was fairly dramatic. I wish there were some statistics on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reading through the comments here, I see a lot of reference to GPU speeds. Anand mentions in the article that the new iPhone 5s is more powerful than the 2010 Macbook Air 11" and has more graphics performance than the iPad 4. I used to be one of those guys who would build his own PC and spend hours overclocking everything for the maximum performance gain but I do not understand this;

What's the infatuation with performance in a cell phone?

Snappy is snappy but there are diminishing returns here past a certain point; I think Anand stated it best when he said it is "the most future-proof of any iPhone ever launched"

<comment><USER14> Phones haven't quite reached the point that desktop computers have. With a desktop, a 5 year old machine today is still completely useable even with the latest software. Meanwhile, a 5 year old phone is the original iPhone. This generation of phones might be the beginning of that era, but the increased performance in phones is still enabling new features that weren't possible before (full res burst with image evaluation, 120fps video editing, etc).

If it's true that the iPhone 5s of today matches or exceeds the performance of a laptop from 5 years ago, that could mean we're not long away from full- featured convergence devices (plug your phone into a monitor+keyboard to turn it into a complete PC)

<comment><USER15> It runs about as fast as a Core2 Duo 2.4GHz from 2010, which was used that year in the Mac Mini.

So, yeah, we're there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Personally, I prefer proximity unlock, I shouldn't have to touch the phone at all. This might be done with Bluetooth LE devices, the same way modern keyless entry works for cars.

If my phone is within a meter or two of my keychain, or I'm in my car, then it is unlocked. This is especially important if you want to use it while driving via voice and don't want to have to unlock after each interaction.

Ditto for Moto-X style notifications. I shouldn't have to press the home button to see that tweet that just came in, in fact, I should be able to ask the phone to read it to me, through my headphones.

The fingerprint scanner is definitely a step up from 2-N touches (swipe to unlock + passcode), 1 touch is better than 2*, but zero touches is even better in some circumstances. Never having to think about needing to unlock.

<comment><USER17> The number one place I would want security on my phone, would be at a bar (or party), where someone might take my phone when I'm distracted, and then doing either something innocent ("lol. im gay. party hard!!!") or nasty (transfer $100 to own account), depending how well I know them. This could easily be done within a meter or two of me, without me noticing. Adding some rules could be nice (be in car, charging at home etc), but generally, I would want my phone to be locked unless I'm holding it.

<comment><USER14> That's what I'm worried about with Touch ID. The new "draw a penis on someone's forehead when they're passed out" is going to be "unlock their iPhone with their finger and post things on their Facebook".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is one of the most thorough reviews I have ever seen. I loved all the information and benchmarks.

<comment><USER19> AnandTech = reviews for engineers. The use of actual lab-bench display testing alone puts them in a category of their own.

<comment><USER20> By engineers, for engineers, I might add. No offense, but most writers on tech sites tend to be writers who are interested in technology, whereas AnandTech is full of engineers who are interested in dissecting and explaining technology. Not to pick on anyone, but if you gave the writers at The Verge, for instance, a month to review the iPhone 5S they would not cover the depth that the first page of this review covers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I miss Steve Jobs. I once remember him saying something like,'I'm a little worried about Cook; he's not a gadget guy.'

Did anyone notice during the Apple press conference, the head honchos tried to capture Steve's enthusiasm, but it seemed forced?

I don't understand why they are making such a big deal out of multiple colors? I guess it's a calculated marketing decision? Maybe they think the Iphone will end up a fashion statement? Sorry, but I don't think Job's would care about different colors, or a fingerprint scan--at this point in history. I'm pretty sure hackers will find a way around around the scan pretty quick? Out of respect for Jobs, I'm more than content with my Iphone 4, and my Ipad 2. They get the job done, and their still perfect for my needs. I don't think I'll buy another mac book pro for a long time. I have a feeling I'll be able to buy parts forever?

<comment><USER22> If you watch the keynote when the mac came in different colors, you'll see he emphasizes their new see through body and colors just as much as apple is emphasizing the iPhone 5C's colors.

In fact, Apple had a poster with all the different colored macs in a circle, and below that it just said "Yum".

Steve Jobs said Tim Cook isn't so much of a product guy, correct. But that was Steve's opinion. I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment.

And out of respect for jobs you're sticking with dated technology? I don't quite understand... If he were alive he'd probably push you to update your device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Fingerprint scanning is yet more evidence that the iPhone was designed in sunny south California rather than chilly northern Europe.

Resistive touch screen may not allow multi-touch, but at least I can use them when wearing gloves (and no - gloves with a capacitive finger tip don't count).

<comment><USER24> Noseprint?

<comment><USER25> It allows for 5 stored "fingers", so you could set things up for each thumb, each index finger and your nose. Assuming there aren't any security issues about using a nose -- and that you're not worried about security much anyways -- you should be golden. How unique are nose prints?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 5S definitely a nice upgrade and I don't see any reason to get a 5C beyond color and slight battery life advantage (presumably on non-motion usage). Saving $100 on a $2,000+ service contract is nothing.

But I'm super disappointed that Apple didn't target 5S battery life for dramatic improvement. The 5's battery life is already awful and it looks like 5S is even worse. Ugh.

<comment><USER27> [http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the- iphone-5s-review/9](http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/9)

with the exception of cellular talk time, the 5 and 5S are near the top...

<comment><USER28> Gee, silly me, caring about the cellular talk time on my phone. That's the _last_ thing anyone should use a phone for.

<comment><USER29> You talk on your phone for 9.3+ hours /day between charges? That sucks, I'm sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone else think like we're already in the "core 2 duo" era of smartphones? I look at my galaxy s3 and the newer phones and don't feel much motivation to upgrade.

<comment><USER31> In the daringfireball.net review Gruber specifically mentions in benchmarking the 5s outperforms the 2008 15" macbook that he has.

It's hard for me to justify from a 'need' perspective to go from my 4S to the 5s, since to be honest the 4S has no slowdown at all and is a great phone.

I'll probably end up donating it to my mum and moving her from dumbphone into smartphone land.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Supposing A-series chip performance continues to improve at the rate it has been, how long until an Apple TV with the then-current high-end A chip puts games on a TV of the same quality as current-gen video game systems? What about next-gen?

<comment><USER10> The GPU in the PS4 is, essentially, an Nvidia 7900-class GPU. Anandtech recently did a comparison of old PC GPUs to current SOCs and the results are surprisingly close. I'd imagine Snapdragon 800 and Oscar close the gap considerably. [http://anandtech.com/show/6877/the-great-equalizer- part-3/3](http://anandtech.com/show/6877/the-great-equalizer-part-3/3)

edit: I'm stuck in past. This comment is about PS3 not PS4.

<comment><USER33> The PS4 GPU is significantly more powerful (orders of magnitude) than an Nvidia 7900 class GPU, unless you meant PS3 or Radeon 7900 series :).

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Only 1GB RAM?! bah humbug

<comment><USER35> I was hoping they had finally bumped it up to 2gb, but I guess not. I often read this is related to battery life, can anyone corroborate?

<comment><USER36> DRAM requires periodic refreshing or the cells lose their memory. This refreshing uses energy. More bits, more energy. You get the same issue with SRAM (think CPU caches) though without the refreshing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Any ARM experts around? The sagacity of the move to 64-bit is explained in terms of getting rid of cruft, and via analogy to a similar move by Intel on the x86 line. But I thought that the largest boost to that line comes from the many additional registers available under 64 bit mode. In ARM, with its RISC architecture, there are already a nice number of registers, so I'm wondering where the true advantage lies -- especially an environment of strongly constrained memory.

<comment><USER38> Yes, the biggest boost to x86 performance in the move to 64 bit came mostly because they doubled the number of regsiters available to what was previously a very register poor ISA.

The ARM ISA has different legacy issues: the design makes it much more expensive than it otherwise would be to pipeline the CPU in order to get decent performance. The ISA was designed for an in-order CPU: at the time pipelining was something that mainframe / workstation class CPUs did. (ARM was designed in the very early 80s; Intel released a pipelined CPU in 1989 - <USER2> 486, and then only for simple instructions.)

For instance, every ARM32 assembly instruction has a bunch of condition codes which determine whether to execute the instruction depending on the state of the status bits in the program counter. You can also determine whether a given instruction will set the relevant status bits in the processor. This means you can do nice things like encode an if (R2 < 0) then (Add 1 to R3) else (Add 1 to R4) in just three instructions: one for the test, an instruction if the relevant flag is set & a second instruction to run if it's not set. No branches! You can also branch on any or all of the condition flags. This makes for very compact code. The trouble is that it's hell to pipeline because you have to keep track of all the possible states of the status bits and follow all the possible branch paths that result, whilst keeping track of all the dependencies.

They've also done things like simplify the exception handling so that the CPU needs fewer shadow registers, which again reduces power requirements.

<comment><USER38> RealWorldTech has a good article here: [http://www.realworldtech.com/arm64/](http://www.realworldtech.com/arm64/) if anyone wants to do a slightly deeper dive into the ARM64 ISA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> what an EXCELLENT review. Seriously. The author went through so much detail. It's ridiculous how thorough this review is - loved it. Thank you.

<comment><USER40> As usual for Anandtech - by far the best review site around, at least for the technology side of devices.

<comment><USER41> I wouldn't call it "by far" the best. TechReport IMO has taken a similar style of super-duper in-depth reviews. Phoronix is the only review site that does this kind of in-depth review... except from a Linux-slant. (how good are the drivers for various graphics cards. Which CPU offers the best compile times, etc. etc.)

What CNet lacks in depth, it gains in breadth. CNet has far far more reviews of decent quality than any other site I know. In comparison, the few reviews that Anandtech / TechReport do are _far far_ deeper than anything from CNet.

I think overall, I prefer TechReport over Anandtech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Looking at the benchmarks - the A7 SoC is a pretty darn great achievement for Apple! And more than that it is a serious threat to Intel given it is within striking distance of 22nm Bay Trail at 28nm and two less cores!

If they continue this - the next gen MacBook Airs will be running the A8 or even A7x with full day battery life. Intel better have something disruptive up their sleeves!

<comment><USER43> Current MacBook Airs already get full-day battery life. Apple/ARM and Intel are quickly converging from two sides – but the cost of switching architectures (while something Apple certainly has been quite good at in the past) seems too high to me for the payoff, and that's even if, spec for spec, ARM could beat out Intel. Add to that that the relationship of Apple with Intel seems to be a quite good one (so there is no reason for petty politics) and I really don't see it happening.

24 hour battery life (instead of 12) and half the performance in a MacBook Air seems hardly worth it to me. To my mind that device is already more constrained by performance than battery life.

(Conversely I also don't see ARM/Apple getting too slow to keep pace with Intel on the mobile side, so I don't see them switching there to Intel, either.)

<comment><USER44> Apple owns a stake in ARM and likely has more influence on their direction than they would with Intel. Apple is fond of controlling their destiny and that means controlling the entire stack. They might keep iOS and OSX separate but I could definitely see them unifying hardware across all their lines as much as possible. They avoid the margin paid to Intel and can lower costs via scale.

e: I know they had a stake in ARM at one point, but I'm unsure if they still do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think the Anandtech reviews are one of my favourite parts of a new iOS device launch, talk about thorough.

Interesting comment was made that the A7 seems capable of driving a larger Retina screen than the iPhone, which gives credence to the rumour that the next Mini will shift to Retina, if they've managed to offset the battery life concerns as well anyway. The A7 does seem really rather impressive, I don't know hardware as well as I'd like, but that was some fairly effusive praise in the review.

<comment><USER46> It's not that surprising given that the A5 has been powering the iPad's retina screen… Or am I missing something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Focusing on the fingerprint unlock thing. I'm curious how this is going to evolve. I wonder if this will be the new two-factor auth. If I want to log into a website (via Safari of course) on my Macbook Pro, do I have to swipe my finger on my iPhone? I wonder if something like this could start replacing passwords (long-term)?

<comment><USER48> I read somewhere that a fingerprint couldn't replace a password, as they are different auth methods, and the fingerprint can't really replace the password. Does anybody know why? I searched the article but haven't been able to find it.

<comment><USER49> My guess is it's referring to the "something you have", "something you are" and "something you know" [1]

Current two-factor authentication on the web combines something you know (password) with something you have (mobile phone with an app that generates tokens).

The parent is suggesting this could change to something you know (password) and something you are (fingerprint). It could easily be extended to include something you have by combining the fingerprint with a token generator on your iPhone.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- factor_authentication](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- factor_authentication)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I thought NFC was more impressive then fingerprints ... :)

</comment><comment><USER51> Comparing CPU performance using Javascript benchmarks isn't very useful-- much of the difference depends on which Javascript engine is being used.

<comment><USER52> Isn't it exactly a very useful benchmark if you are going to use the phone primarily for browsing webpages with javascript on them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Can't wait to get my hands on one. Soon ;)

</comment><comment><USER54> 8x MSAA. Impressive.

<comment><USER31> Does this mean AA is actually applied in games? Not quite sure what to make of it.

<comment><USER54> PowerVR TBDR architecture is great at handling MSAA. I think quite a lot of games will be able to use it (as it was with 4x) [http://gdcvault.com/play/1015331/Bringing-AAA-Graphics-to- Mo...](http://gdcvault.com/play/1015331/Bringing-AAA-Graphics-to-Mobile) (~page 28)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> It smells like 2005 nokia to me.

</comment><comment><USER56> All I can say is that TouchID is the new Siri.</comment>


Show HN: I made a site that searches and compares travel info of 230+ countries - <AUTHOR> https://www.thebasetrip.com <comment><USER2> Great resource, well made. Bookmarked.

This will be a good supplement to nomad list.

<comment><USER3> >This will be a good supplement to nomad list.

I thought the same thing

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually made a title based on makebook.io, and @levelsio actually retweeted the thing and started the ball rolling so yeah - awesome guy :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a new user and this is my very first upvote and comment here. Great idea and very good realization. I'll use it for sure.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a nice idea and nicely designed. However, there's some questionable info for the US at least. I would strongly recommend tipping more than 5-10% in restaurants and just rounding up in taxis. (And on the other hand tipping for hotel cleaning is less universal.) I'm also not sure how to evaluate the cost comparisons in a country as large and diverse as the US.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. One of the next steps is to break down the USA to States because of the differences.

<comment><USER6> Is there anywhere in the US where tipping like that is accepted? Everywhere I've lived it's been 15% minimum for servers and a lot of people tip 20%.

Edit: Actually looking at the site now and it suggests 15-20%.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I fixed it in the meantime. My mistake :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow just loved it! May be some share links will be handy. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome and filled with awesome tips!! Very nice!

</comment><comment><USER9> Impressive information for daily routine.

</comment><comment><USER10> As someone who loves traveling, awesome!!

</comment><comment><USER11> Well done, simple, informative.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is really cool!

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice stuff buddy!

</comment><comment><USER14> very nice, good job</comment>


Review my sci-fi novel about P vs. NP? - <AUTHOR> i've written a manuscript of a sci-fi novel that deals with, among other things, p vs np. think douglas adams mixed with neal stephenson, and a dash of joyce to make it delicious.
anyone with this link can read and comment. thanks!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A8XAyTh_zD74wUYH2OU2HbPVZ0P0MnpIxSihXRYZ-5s/edit?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> So capitalization isn't something you do?

<comment><AUTHOR> only for emphasis. i've gotten a number of comments about that, so i may change it.

<comment><USER3> If the story is not _about_ language emphasis, then the lowercase text is distracting from the real story. :)

<comment><USER4> I've seen some quite good examples of this in some things I've read. A poem I know was written incorrectly in order to force people to read it in a particular accent[1]. Also, "Feersum Endjin" by Iain M Banks has some chapters written from the perspective of one of main characters written in non-standard English[2].

        Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.

[1]: [http://www.tomleonard.co.uk/main-publications/intimate- voice...](http://www.tomleonard.co.uk/main-publications/intimate-voices/the- six-oclock-news.html)

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

<comment><USER5> Then of course there are the classics such as Trainspotting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The capitalization seems like a really minor issue, easily fixed, and ultimately not that big a deal, but that's Hacker News for you. That said, if you want to be the ee cummings of novelists, go for it. Novel writing is an artform, not a programming language. Cormac McCarthy doesn't use quotation marks, so what. Big deal.

Being a fan of both Adams and Stephenson I want to read this when I get an opportunity, did you write it during NaNoWriMo by any chance?

<comment><AUTHOR> i did. it's been stewing in my head for a long time.

a friend finished last night, saying it was a "rough gem." high praise; i'm much more inspired to finish.

my goal is, among other things, to get some concepts in computer science into the mainstream thought. to me, p vs np is the most fascinating question ever asked.

<comment><USER6> Cool, I started a novel during NaNoWriMo this year as well, although I'm still finishing up the first draft. Your concept sounds interesting, can't wait to check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone else is mentioning the lack of capitalization, which is a problem, but i'm also going to suggest you follow standard practice for this a bit further and use 1.5 or double line spacing. That will make it a lot easier to read.

Also, if you ever plan on sending something to an editor, standard manuscript format: [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mslee/format.html](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mslee/format.html)

<comment><USER2> It's not really the same. Not capitalizing things is breaking the language's rules. Having a small line height is an easily changed, arbitrary, and mostly subjective "issue".

<comment><USER7> I agree with you. Better spacing would make it much easier to read, in any case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The constant lowercases are equivalent of not indenting your code. You are not going to be taken seriously.</comment>


No matter how much "karate" you know, someone else will always know more. - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/the-ten-commandments-of-egoless-programming.html

<comment><USER3> > Don't rewrite code without consultation.

This is linked to a pet peeve of mine, especially with restless, young developers. There's a significant difference between the two statements "I don't get this code, it's crap, let's rewrite it." and "I understand this code, it's crap, let's rewrite it". I don't know how many times I've seen someone go down the path of seing battle-tested code, not understanding it, thinking they can rewrite it better only to spend a month falling in to all the same pitfalls that lead to the original code. The middle road is of course refactoring. Cleaning up the code in small, discrete steps to something you can understand and work with is many times better than just tearing stuff out and restarting.

<comment><USER4> _There's a significant difference between the two statements "I don't get this code, it's crap, let's rewrite it." and "I understand this code, it's crap, let's rewrite it"._

There are cases when the code is a convoluted, buggy, unintelligible, undocumented, untested and untestable mess. In those cases re-analyzing what it _should_ do and re-implementing it from scratch is often both faster and more reliable way of dealing with required changes. Especially if you consider resources spent on maintenance over a significant period of time.

At this point, I get the nasty feeling that many people who preach "don't ever rewrite" mantra are the people who have produced large volumes of code in the past, but consider themselves too "senior" to maintain it now. The common rhetoric regarding "young/junior programmers" only confirms that notion.

<comment><USER5> Analyzing what the code _should_ do is insufficient. You must also know what it _does_ do. Somewhere, someone is depending on that and they will be angry when your rewrite, perfectly spec conforming though it may be, doesn't work the way it used to work.

<comment><USER4> Any change to a badly written application can break some obscure functionality or integration. I repeat, _any_ change. Assuming that you're still working on the codebase in question (and why else someone would care to rewrite it?) there is a constant threat of breaking changes. Heck, with certain types of code regular issues after updates are nearly inevitable.

If you rewrite something, you will at least have understanding of how things work _right now_ , which allows you to quickly and reliably deal with surfacing compatibility issues. On the other hand, updating legacy code to deal with those issue is a) much slower b) likely to introduce other issues.

And no, you cannot always slowly refactor old code. That is, in many cases it will take several orders of magnitude more time that a complete rewrite with new features plus all the rewrite issue mitigation.

Been there, seen that. Many times. So far I haven't regretted a single rewrite I've done in my professional life. If your experience is different, than maybe, just maybe, you should look at how you approach rewrites, rather than dismissing the whole concept as "wrong".

<comment><USER5> Geeze, I offer a little advice to anyone considering a rewrite and now I'm a professional failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hate this list. It should really be called the Ten Commandments of Good Little Worker Programmers. The 'commandments' are all about creating nice friendly programmer cogs that work smoothly together, minimising hassle for their employers.

There's nothing there about programming as an art. There is nothing there about pushing the boundaries of what is possible through determination, vision and, yes, ego. There is nothing about solving complex technical problems through sheer force of will.

To hell with 'egolessness'. Why shouldn't programmers have an ego. And, indeed, doesn't it take an ego to do anything great, to think that preposterous thought that you can do something no-one has done before.

<comment><USER7> For the vast majority of us, technology is one component of the business. The rest of the business is about figuring out how to lower shipping costs so that we make more money per item shipped. Or how to deliver food more efficiently. Or accounts receivable software.

And none of those problems are, well, are particularly hard or complex, at least not enough in my mind to justify ego as you've portrayed it.

There are plenty of professions where people work just as hard (harder, even, including people in the knowledge-working industry) and do not complain nearly as much as developers.

There is a lawyer in our office who works very hard to ensure that we are selling wine in a compliant way across multiple states with different regulations. That person's job is at least as difficult, if not more, than my job writing python. But you'll never hear them complaining because we only have apple juice, rather than orange juice, in the vending machine.

<comment><USER6> You are kind of making my point for me. This is a list drawn up from the perspective of a business owner who obviously would prefer all his employees to be egoless automatons who work smoothly together in the most cost-effective and efficient manner. Yes, from the business perspective (or the project management perspective or the agile coach perspective or the countless other professions that have infiltrated software development), this list is absolutely great. Couldn't be better. Five-star perfection.

However, from the programmer's point of view - and that is the view I was arguing from - the list is pretty detestable, at least in my view. People get into programming usually because they want to make things, because they want to be creative. But - in the vast majority of cases - they end up working on legacy projects that require absolutely no creativity, where, indeed, creativity is frowned upon - see Commandment 4. You are saying they should shut-up and deal with it. I am saying, fuck that, they can complain as much as they like.

Having said that, even better than complaining would be for the programmer to ditch the job and start creating their own software, under their own terms. But, of course, you would need a bit of an ego to have the guts to do that.

<comment><USER7> Haha, I am all for people squeezing out from under The Man and creating their own software.

I read Commandment 4 ("Don't rewrite code without consultation") differently. My opinion is that if you are working on a team with developers, you have to be judicious about making big changes.

It is possible (likely!) that some of that code was written because of some weird Python behavior or to handle an edge case from a buggy external API or some odd behavior from another internal system.

I do advocate "if you want a change, write some code and make the change." But a wikipedia-style edit war between programmers' egos is also not productive.

In the context of a business, "creativity" can and should mean "creative ideas that have the potential make more money." It is unfair to ask someone to pay you a salary for unbridled side-project creativity; that is what your disposable income is for!

Even when you are running your own business, well, it isn't a business unless you ask the question "how can I create software that my customers will pay for?" rather than "what shall I make which sates my creativity?"

I'd suggest, then, that this list is relevant for anyone trying to make money, because that always entails working with some other person (fellow programmer, business partner, customer) and that can only happen when you have a harmonious relationship with - and are willing to bend a little - for these people.

<comment><USER8> _It is possible (likely!) that some of that code was written because of some weird Python behavior or to handle an edge case from a buggy external API or some odd behavior from another internal system._

If that code is in there without at least a comment mentioning that, then you have bigger problems than handling people's egos. This kind of thing is precisely what comments are for.

 _I do advocate "if you want a change, write some code and make the change." But a wikipedia-style edit war between programmers' egos is also not productive._

False dichotomy.

 _In the context of a business, "creativity" can and should mean "creative ideas that have the potential make more money." It is unfair to ask someone to pay you a salary for unbridled side-project creativity; that is what your disposable income is for!_

Tell that to people who came up with 15% "innovation time" at 3M and 20% at Google. Of course, Google's 20% got subverted as far as I've heard, but that's a completely different topic.

The point is that creativity should be exercised at the right time, in the right place and in a right degree.

 _I'd suggest, then, that this list is relevant for anyone trying to make money, because that always entails working with some other person (fellow programmer, business partner, customer) and that can only happen when you have a harmonious relationship with - and are willing to bend a little - for these people._

This has nothing to do with making money. It has to do with your project being successful or not. It has to do with people on your team being reasonable most of the time and having a good manager (or something equivalent) the rest of the time.

Having said all that, "Don't rewrite code without consultation" should be a no-brainer. Not necessarily for Jeff's reason, but because if it's someone else's code, chances are that there might be something you don't understand about it; on the other hand, if it's your code, there might be someone using it and your rewrite could break it for them. Checking this stuff is usually a good idea.

<comment><USER9> > If that code is in there without at least a comment mentioning that, then > you have bigger problems than handling people's egos. This kind of thing is > precisely what comments are for.

Comments are a poor substitute for collaboration.

> Tell that to people who came up with 15% "innovation time" at 3M and 20% at > Google.

As far as I'm told, 20% projects always had to be approved by your manager. So I suspect that they are not quite as open as you are thinking.

<comment><USER8> _Comments are a poor substitute for collaboration._

Of course they are, seeing as how they're only one form of collaboration. I wouldn't think that writing a comment to draw people's attention to some non- obvious aspect of code would count as anything but a form of collaboration.

 _As far as I'm told, 20% projects always had to be approved by your manager. So I suspect that they are not quite as open as you are thinking._

Which is why I did say, in continuation, that the 20% has been subverted at Google. From what I've heard, it hasn't _always_ been that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The only true authority stems from knowledge, not from position.

That's certainly not the full story. In many organizations, having a lot of knowledge about something that someone else is supposed to know more about is a good way to make them feel uncomfortable or in extreme cases dislike you.

From a practical vantage, knowing how to apply what knowledge you do have (and having the will to follow through) is a lot more valuable.

It doesn't help to have a broad and deep understanding of software development and business but be socially awkward and suffer from severe akrasia.

<comment><USER11> _In many organizations, having a lot of knowledge about something that someone else is supposed to know more about is a good way to make them feel uncomfortable or in extreme cases dislike you._

This. I worked for one org (USMC) where I was a young(er) worker, with more knowledge about our job (micro-computers, LANs) than most of my superiors. And this was okay. Encouraged, even. My lieutenant's job was to lead a team, not be a know-it-all.

Then I stepped into the civilian world and found a majority of managers were freaked out when their juniors knew more than they did.

<comment><USER12> On the other hand, in the armed forces, rank commands respect (or at least all outward forms). In the civilian world, those with rank may be more insecure.

<comment><USER11> I think it's more about culture, not respect for rank.

A guy is supposed to learn at least the basics of the next higher-up job, sometimes two. Team leaders are supposed to reach down two levels, ensure juniors are properly schooled to step up.

Obviously this is so if one's leader is zapped, juniors can step up and carry out the mission.

But this works out well in nominal peace-time and non-combat jobs, too. And the better trained and schooled one's juniors are, the better the unit can carry out the mission.

Example: one week into a three-week field exercise I was given 20 minutes to pack and report to a new, temporary, job, far away from my parent unit.

We could do this because everyone under me (all of three guys, but still) knew what I did and could do the job. The only problem it caused was that they suddenly had one fewer person to stand watch in the server CONEX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is interesting that all of us are getting a different takeaway from this list; something different resonates with different people.

It also surprises me that these lessons originated in 1971 (though I had not heard of this text until just now.)

Back then, IBM was hiring English majors and training them in assembly to work on OS/360 etc. It would not have occurred to me that developers back then would have cultivated a stereotype of a "prima donna."

Because to me, and perhaps this is a reflection of my age, it has only been recently that the popularity of joelonsoftware-esque "pamper your developers!" has led to a culture in small companies where we demand free beer and 36" Macs as a condition for employment.

Or has it always been that way for developers (of young tech companies; none of this really applies if you work at Fidelity Investments) modulo the greatest tech of the day?

<comment><USER13> I think this is just supply-demand of the current labor market. There are enough lawyers to go around, but not even close to enough good developers. I think it will continue to be that way for a long time

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, you have compared apples and oranges: "lawyers" and "good developers" (as opposed to "good lawyers".)

What I mean to say is - and, of course, this is all unsubstantiated - <USER2> are plenty of coders and lawyers to go around, but fewer good lawyers (with relevant experience in a field of business, for me it is the wine biz) and good developers (can you follow the instructions on our code test?)

Possibly good lawyers simply get paid more than good developers, and so that - combined with a different culture between the two professions - engenders a different sense of professionalism.

What is the essential quality about dev which causes our culture to be different than other professionals (lawyers?)

<comment><USER14> Well, as someone married to a lawyer I one thing that is completely different is that they have to worry about their professional license - if they screw up badly enough then it can be taken away and then they can't work as a lawyer anymore.

There is no sanction that can be applied to a developer that will mean that they can never get employed as a developer again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> * Be kind to the coder, not to the code. ^ * Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience. - My friend/cofounder has been inspired by the codeyear thing and have been bringing to me a lot of silly code issues... guess i was being a bit rude with him lately.

<comment><USER16> I'm frequently in a room with people that know less about mathematics and programming than I do (and let's be clear, I don't regard myself as exceptionally talented in either field). It's not surprising, that's usually the reason I've been asked in to consult.

The great joy is discovering what these people know more about than I do: electronics, cartography, avionics, wet film processing, fire fighting, violin making, linguistics, ... it's always a surprise finding out just how much some people know about their particular interest and how well they can make you appreciate it.

I'm get a little tired of hearing "the IT Crowd" cackle on about how stupid their users are, maybe that is true for them but it is possible to go out and find end users that stretch and challenge you as a programmer to meet their needs.

<comment><USER15> being the only tech guy in the room sometime sucks. But you are right.. there is more to just math and programing.. You are right^

<comment><USER17> Meh. I've done the rounds as a statistician, and it would be pretty unusual to meet somebody who knew as much as me about what I do - in fact, even if I meet another statistician, there is almost surely no chance they know everything I know. I am always the expert, at what I do. And then I have to try really hard to get any idea of what everybody else is doing.

<comment><USER18> > it would be pretty unusual to meet somebody who knew as much as me about > what I do

What do you think the odds are?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The corollary: All human knowledge can be known.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sad times when Atwood is giving coding advice ...</comment>


Former Canadian Diplomat Detained in China, Adding to Tensions - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/world/asia/michael-kovrig-china-canada.html <comment><USER3> If there's any delusion about Meng's arrest NOT being a political stunt that the US is pulling, set such thoughts aside. How many banking executives were arrested after the 2007/2008 financial collapse? If you picked 0, you not only picked right, but also saw the Justice system not pulling stunts.

Huawei - like the banks, is a company that has allegedly violated sanctions against Iran. A just response would be to go after Huawei, the company - <USER2> in a way has already happened with multiple bans within the US and from allies.

Despite China having a much worse and unjust Justice system, I believe their response is appropriate, but tragic - in that individuals are now being horse traded by Nations. But the US did start it! And if you naively think the US/Canada are merely enforcing the law without bias, then you have to explain why high ranking officials of US companies never get arrested by the Justice department for crimes committed by the companies

<comment><USER4> No, a just response would exactly be to go after the people responsible (that is, the criminals), instead of a fine just paid by shareholders. Executives only fear personal consequences. But you are proposing retaliation against individuals who had no involvement in criminality.

There is only one basis to complain about Meng, which is the extra- territoriality of US sanctions law. But it isn't even about sanctions, it is about fraud committed by lying to lending banks. When executives set up structures to achieve deception they can't expect to escape consequences.

<comment><USER3> There are always people in high places doing criminal things on the behest of their employers/companies. Like I stated, the 2007 financial meltdown is a prime example.

It's fairly obvious why this particular case is being aggressively pursued. FYI - Western execs probably break a ton of Chinese criminal laws, expect some arrests there if the West selectively chastises Chinese executives for bargaining chips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HN title diverges from article title, which I find is counterproductive on giving the reader a hint on what to expect. The real title of the article is "Former Canadian Diplomat Detained in China, Adding to Tensions".

I might be wrong, but to "disappear" to me means that it's not clear what happened to them, except the journal doesn't seem particularly unsure about that aspect of the story.

<comment><AUTHOR> The title may have changed because I just copy/pasted it here when submitting. I did not add "disappears" myself, and I am happy if a moderator wishes to change it now.

<comment><USER6> The titles of Times articles are in flux during revisions. Discrepancy between posted and observed titles therefore does not necessarily imply that the poster editorialized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is important to always be aware that arrests and disappearances in China are about state power, never ever about justice. Just ask a crime victim. Then ask a victim of state persecution.

Even the killing of a street dog in Hangzhou is about state power and you cannot forget that.

To take down a Huawei executive and break a trade flow involving Iran is majorly affecting the state (the Communist Party), so they will fight back with thuggery against Canadians and Americans.

<comment><USER8> And the west isn't like this whatsoever? Do people actually believe this about china and think that the liberal west doesn't have state power seeping through every nook and cranny?

<comment><USER9> Sue the government in the US, compare your results to a similar suit in China.

<comment><USER8> Edward Snowden.

<comment><USER10> Julian Assange</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Smart file comparison tool for XML, JSON and Property files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/madushadhanushka/differ <comment><USER2> Nice tool. How about extend this to compare source codes?</comment>


The Intel Skylake-X Review: Core i9-7900X, i7-7820X and i7-7800X Tested - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested <comment><USER2> The 7740X retaining dominance in browser-oriented tests demonstrates the continued bottleneck we suffer due to the "single-threaded" (or nominally single-threaded) predilection of web browsers, the DOM, and JavaScript. Servo and other concurrency-oriented innovations are going to be very welcome when they arrive in earnest.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why anyone would design a website so complex that there is a noticeable benchmark difference between $100 processors and $1000 processors.

<comment><USER4> The view that web apps can only be for simple things is a dated perspective, but also probably a symptom of the fact that it's not really possible to take full advantage of many CPU cores in a web application.

An in-browser photo editor or 3D modeling software would be expected to run much better and apply complex effects or render models much faster on high-end hardware. It sort of works this way with WebGL content, but even there you're limited to feeding the render pipeline with a single thread.

I want the web as a platform to succeed. It is the only truly universal runtime and with some care it could offer very few performance trade-offs. I sincerely hope tools like servo and others unlock this potential.

<comment><USER5> From first principles, one shouldn't expect the menus or other simple rendered parts (things not involving backend traffic) of a user interface to have any perceptible lag on a sub-100 processor, be it an application for web, mobile or desktop. Most likely they shouldn't involve millions of computations or hundreds of megabytes of memory reads.

But looking from the other end, somehow they definitely do. And we're probably wasting trillions on this problem. Wasted time, wasted electricity, wasted batteries, wasted computers and phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TL;DR: Intel is having hard time to keep up against AMD. It reminds me the Pentium 4 era, when Intel had to push clock and power consumption to crazy levels [1]

[1] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex- revie...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review- core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested/8)

<comment><USER7> It's a pretty natural consequence of how much crap Intel piled in on this release. Cache, mesh, and AVX512 all consume a great deal of power.

Contrary to what the sibling comment says, Ryzen is nowhere near Intel's performance here. Even in very parallel tasks like x264 video encoding, the 7800K (6-cores) is beating the highest-clocked 8C Ryzens by almost 6%. Comparing apples to apples, the 7820X (8C) is 33% faster than the 1800X.

That's a very good place for Intel to be overall, even if their power consumption is higher than I'd like to see. Downclocked Xeons will probably beat Ryzen's efficiency. And there may be some UEFI/microcode gains to be made here as well, both in efficiency and total performance.

The bigger problem (for the enthusiast market) is the thermals. Intel just switched from solder to TIM on the HEDT processors and it's very clear that they cannot move heat out of the package fast enough and it's limiting the total OC, which would likely reach 5 GHz a good chunk of the time.

[http://i.imgur.com/9e8Trr3.png](http://i.imgur.com/9e8Trr3.png)

<comment><USER6> 33% faster encoding x264, at what price? Ryzen 7 1800X: $499, Core i7-7820X: $599 (+20% over Ryzen). You can also cherry-pick tests where the Ryzen gets better performance or better performance/price, and not just tests involving AVX usage. Also, in cheaper Ryzen's the performance/price gets abysmal in favor of AMD. BTW, you can compare also a $599 GPU performance encoding x264 versus that Intel CPU and see how "fast" are Intel CPUs in comparison.

<comment><USER8> Are there any GPU x264 encoders that don't look like garbage compared to ffmpeg -c:v libx264 -preset veryslow -crf 18?

<comment><USER7> No, when I encode my vidya sessions for archival I use 1440p variable-fps (60fps) NVENC H264 for the first pass at an absurd bitrate (40mbps) and then I use x264 variable-fps veryslow CRF 24 for the archival pass.

veryslow is where the magic happens. As far as I can tell that's where you start getting decent quality/compression. If I increase CRF any higher (decrease quality) then shit gets super blocky super fast. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to crush high-quality streams like that in remotely realtime, you need to record 1440p (and dump an archival stream to disk) and then transcode to 1080p since that's doable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the meantime, the 6 core Broadwell-E I7-6850K has seen a big price drop - down from $650 to $480 on several sites. It's still expensive compared to the Kaby Lake I7-7700K, but if you wanted two more cores then it's now a much more reasonable option. People seem to have very good results overclocking it, too.

Edit: Having just seen that the i7-7800X is priced at $389, I'm thinking the I7-6850K is still overpriced, unless you need 40 PCI-E lanes.

<comment><USER10> Why not go with a Ryzen 7 1700 instead if you want more cores?

<comment><USER11> I looked into this and was going to buy a Ryzen or wait for the Threadripper for a huge multicore video transcoding server we run, in an attempt to source parts for an upgrade for our last-gen i7 platform. Unfortunately Ryzen's performance in ffmpeg is dismal, relating to its poor AVX performance, it seems.

I've seen comments on their platform being "poor" due to software not tuning for the platform specifically, which is definitely possible. But unfortunately I can't bank on that for now, so we had to stay with Intel for our batch transcoding processes. Still very excited to monitor this product line; it's been a long time coming.

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-18...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-1800x-linux&num=5)

[http://www.pcgamer.com/the-amd-ryzen-7-review/4/](http://www.pcgamer.com/the- amd-ryzen-7-review/4/)

<comment><USER12> That Phoronix FFmpeg test clearly measures 2 - 4 threaded speed only, so Intel's fast quad core CPUs shine there. The test description is "H.264 HD to NTSC DV" where the main bottleneck is slow H.264 decoding (CABAC decoding is somewhat difficult to parallelize).

You should look for x264 (H.264/AVC encoding) or x265 (H.265/HEVC encoding) tests. HandBrake is often used as a frontend for these, so the test may be named Handbrake H.264 HQ encoding or something like that.

x265 benefits a bit more from Intel's faster AVX instructions, but Ryzen (or Threadripper/Epyc) is still a very valid choice for high quality HEVC encoding. The GPU alternative would be Intel Skylake's GPU-accelerated encoder through Media Server Studio, which has scored well in MSU's test: [http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2016/](http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2016/)

As for H.264 encoding, there are no GPU encoders that could approach x264 quality.

<comment><USER11> Great post. I can tell you my benchmarks using GPUs and various platforms didn't favor x264 encoding, as you also noted.

>x265 (H.265/HEVC encoding)

Not something our services can reasonably support or use currently, so even if true, Ryzen/Threadripper is still probably not something we can go with.

I look forward to switching in 2-3 years when we re-visit this conversation, or adopting it for other services soon. I'm very excited for AMD's competition and fully willing to switch; I just haven't seen the evidence that supports that it would be a good idea for our particular use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised at how well Ryzen is holding up in FP terms despite the relative lack of flops on paper. I guess having a separate floating point cluster is enough of an advantage to make up for that? It really makes me want to see how it works with robot motion planning at work.

</comment><comment> dis-sys Saw some test results on Chinese website claiming that once fully loaded the temp can jump to 100+ degrees when running at stock frequency without any form of overclocking.

It that true?

[http://img1.mydrivers.com/img/20170620/0ff9382549894c64a9989...](http://img1.mydrivers.com/img/20170620/0ff9382549894c64a9989e9d578c3e7e.jpg)

<comment><USER14> These are the first Intel HEDT chips to not have a soldered heat-spreader. Instead they are using thermal paste between the chip and the heat-spreader. This is generally accepted to be bad practice since they use cheap paste and it's dependent on how the paste was spread on each chip. I also believe that Intel has basically said water cooling is a must for these chips.

<comment><USER15> Well anandtech already found that water cooling is simply insufficient to cool these for overclocking. You _need_ an active thermal sink AKA a compressor cooler, and then you're still limited by the TIM-gunk; heat-spreader at 25 °C, core at 100 °C.

I suppose for the next generation Intel will announce that liquid nitrogen is basically required.

<comment><USER16> Usage of liquid nitrogen would put us just a few steps away from achieving superconductivity... Thanks Intel, I guess?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I´m surprised to see how the AMD Ryzen are still holding on the benchmarks

<comment><USER18> I've got a Ryzen 1700 I built for work, it's so good I'm shifting up my upgrade at home to back of this year and looking hard at the 1700X.

It's just fantastic at the price point.

<comment><USER19> My 1700x build for video processing has suffered major instabilities -- app crashes and BSODs -- memory corruption type errors. I went through 4 different types of DDR4 memory until I found some that works, even though it isn't on the ASUS's Qualified Vendors List. My advice is to make sure your RAM can do 15-15-15-36 timings (or better).

<comment><USER20> This is why I'd rather lose 25% of the performance these days and take a canned pre-built PC. I just can't afford the time to find this out. It was bad enough trying to find a working set of drivers for my T440 and that only took an hour or so.

I lived through the age of self build K6's, Athlons, dual Celerons and SLI Voodoo 2's and heatsinks the size of a can of coke. I'd rather just have a shitty old thinkpad and a box in AWS now. This all happened when I realised a naff old Pentium III 1.4 GHz (Compaq AP230) was actually my goto machine despite having things 3-5x the speed.

I run a fair few high CPU/RAM simulations with LTspice as well for ref.

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't buying memory on the motherboard makers list also have served to save said time?

<comment><USER20> Not necessarily as on at least two times in the past, it didn't work properly without frigging around with timings.

<comment><USER21> Been building pcs since 2003. Always bought known to be compatible ram never had an issue with ram. Received a defective motherboard once ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> i7 7820X is the CPU is probably the best system price/performance overall in the long run right now. Threadripper might be competing it depending on what you do but we don't know about it yet. For software developers having over 50% lead in compilation performance compared to ryzen 7 1800X (nightly build of chromium on visual studio) should make it a good choice.

A) In system price there are many components and that makes ultra cheap CPU:s in other vice identical configurations not so good price-performance.

B) Performance is really the performance differential from what you upgrade. And even more importantly the performance differential years from now to systems of that time, if you upgrade to a system that lasts 5 years before you upgrade or to a system that lasts 7 years before you upgrade is significant in terms of price/performance because later means you get the high performance early and price last longer.

C) Significantly higher single threaded performance compared to Ryzen 7 the main contender. There are still many tasks that are single threaded, especially if you run legacy code.

D) AVX-512 I doubt the review benchmarks are in AVX-512 but some legacy code. AVX-512 increases both width of vector and fraction of code and algorithms that can be parallerized significantly. Once compilers are well tuned to use AVX-512 the code compiled with AVX-512 optimizations turned on should be significantly faster than what it was before hand. Simply being able to do 8-16 times work per cycle in large variety of tasks is significant advantage even if that is for a good fraction of time instead of all the time.

Personally I7-920 has given me far better price-performance compared to people who bought dual core at the time simply because it has lasted LONGER so it had superior price/(time between CPU upgrades) measurement. Right now in that same measurement I7-7820X is the king.

So in conclusion I7-7820X is faster in both real legacy code and the future code, and gives good enough performance longer simply because code that you run when you would start considering upgrades run much faster on it simply because of extensions.

</comment><comment><USER23> Any idea, why is Intel so much better at Chrome compilation?

<comment><USER24> The chrome compile test doesn't like L3 victim caches. Ryzen does badly as a result. Clock for Clock the Skylake-SP cores do bad as well, but Skylake-X is well clocked with cores, so it's still top of the charts.

<comment><USER15> But Skylake-X has a victim LLC now as well...

... I'd suspect the memory channels here.

<comment><USER24> Skylake-X has double the L2 cache, double the DRAM channels, more cores and a higher frequency. They compensate :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice to see a breakdown of the myriad of AVX-512 instruction sets. This isn't something Intel was saying much about prior to official launches.

<comment><USER26> This is something Intel has said for over 2 years now, AVX512 has several instruction sets under it. CD is probably the biggest gamechanger since it now allows you to vectorize code that you couldn't before due to memory conflicts that arise from identical elements in the array.

But the difference between Skylake-EP/X and XeonPhi in relation to AVX-512 support were known way in advance.

<comment><USER25> > But the difference between Skylake-EP/X and XeonPhi in relation to AVX-512 > support were known way in advance.

I don't think differences in specific instructions were known in advanced, at least at/ shortly after KNL launch. Or rather I was instructed not to mention it.

<comment><USER26> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512#New_instructions_in_AV...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512#New_instructions_in_AVX-512_foundation)

The instruction set info on that page is 2-3 years old, nothing has changed since then.

I've seen those tables at least a year before the KL launch they were also available on Intel's webiste (the blog irrc) at least a year before KL.

I don't know who told you that that information is embargoed.

EDIT: The inital table was here: [http://software.intel.com/en- us/blogs/2013/avx-512-instructi...](http://software.intel.com/en- us/blogs/2013/avx-512-instructions) the blog post no longer exists, try archive.is

[https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/performance- tools-...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/performance-tools-for- software-developers-intel-compiler-options-for-sse-generation-and-processor- specific-optimizations) "The instruction groups common to both the Intel Xeon Phi processor x200 and the Intel Xeon processor are AVX-512F and AVX-512CD. The AVX-512ER and AVX-512PF groups are implemented in the Intel Xeon Phi processor x200 only. The AVX-512BW, AVX-512DQ and AVX-512VL groups are implemented only in the Intel Xeon processor."

[https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/additional- avx-512-in...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/additional- avx-512-instructions) This used to lead to a PDF with the tables, the PDF is still there but it's a living document which is updated every time, the latest revision was in 2017 but as early as 2014 there was already a split into COMMON-AVX512, MIC-AVX512, CORE-AVX512 with a difference between future Xeon Phi and Xeon processors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looks like we're back to P4-style levels of power use. Not sure how I feel about consumer chips running 150 watts on the regular. That's a lot more carbon in the atmosphere for questionable reasons.

[https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel- Core-i9-7900X...](https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel- Core-i9-7900X-10-core-Skylake-X-Processor-Review/Power-Perf-Dollar-Conclusi)

Incredibly, the 7900X is hitting 240 watts. When was the last time we had a chip that burned that much energy? Granted, its destined for the server room, but a 2U quad CPU box will be hitting 1000 watts on CPU usage alone at 100% utilization. That's close to a medium-sized window AC unit.

<comment><USER28> Yes, those TDPs made them dead on arrival for me. I moved to mini-ITX for my main system and won't be going back. There's no room in my case for any watercooling hardware. I run a Ryzen 7 1700 which is a 65W TDP 8 core, 16 thread CPU.

I was going to hold off for Intel's response, but I knew they wouldn't have anything with 8 cores that was anywhere near 65W TDP. CoffeeLake should offer lower TDPs, but with 6 cores max which seems unappealing compared to 8C.

I'm going to revisit Intel after they've had time to prepare a real response to Ryzen in ~2020 or so.

<comment><USER29> You can put watercooling pump and radiator outside of your case.

<comment><USER30> Kind of defeats the point of mini-ITX, though, for some of us.

<comment><USER7> There are mITX/mATX cases that are small/portable and very functional for water-cooling as well.

I use a Raven RVZ01 (see also FT01 for less aggressive styling) and I have a 120mm AIO in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Those Base/Turbo numbers seem off 3.6 / 4.0 GHz (6 core) 3.3 / 4.3 GHz (8 core) while they both are 140W parts.

ED: looks like it's missing the favored core mode which is probably important for gaming. Which brings up an interesting question if CPU's are now going to last ~5 years, is buying a 500+$ CPU reasonable?

<comment><AUTHOR> Intel treats TDP numbers as more of a vague classification than an actual indication of power consumption. "140W" is basically code for "tons of power".

In PCPerspectives i9-7900X review you can see it uses significantly more power than the i7-6950X despite them both ostensibly being 140W parts.

[https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel- Core-i9-7900X...](https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel- Core-i9-7900X-10-core-Skylake-X-Processor-Review/Power-Perf-Dollar-Conclusi)

<comment><USER26> No, Intel classifies TDP as the instantaneous maximum power draw, AMD classifies it as the average maximum draw over a period of 1M.

<comment><USER32> But jsheard's link shows multiple chips using way over the listed TDP. Here's a whitepaper from Intel that explains what it means (as of 2011) [PDF] [https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/white- paper/resources-...](https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/white- paper/resources-xeon-measuring-processor-power-paper.pdf)

 _Thermal Design Power (TDP) should be used for processor thermal solution design targets. TDP is not the maximum power that the processor can dissipate. TDP is measured at maximum TCASE._ TCASE is the temperature measured on the heat spreader over the CPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Eh. Going with AMD for my next home system. Power and cooling is the key for a home theater + game system.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why is a 6-core Intel processor beating the more expensive 8-core Ryzen at video encoding?

<comment><USER15> Higher clocks, much larger thermal envelope, twice as many memory channels, ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Browsers that take advantage of multiple cores more effectively will accelerate the rate at which Intel circles the drain in consumer applications.

EDIT: why the downvotes? explain yourselves

<comment><USER36> Intel isn't really circling the drain and their future woes are more likely to be caused by overall shrinking of the PC market, not by loss of market share to slower chips. As good as Ryzen is, it will probably only increase AMD's market share from 5% to 10% due to inertia and such.

Speaking of browsers, they aren't really a good benchmark for 6-10 core processors since anything is going to be fast enough. Also, existing JS can't really be parallelized so I suspect even a magical browser would still benefit from single-thread performance.

<comment><USER34> It might be possible to do auto parallelization in some cases like what GCC can do:

[https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/AutoParInGCC](https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/AutoParInGCC)

Still, it might be even better if people would stop writing such JavaScript intensive websites. They are not very friendly to blind internet users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wow. From multiple sites releasing reviews it's clear that an embargo was just lifted.

And anandtech couldn't bother writing a proper article? Sentence after sentence just hard to read, with extra commas and just poor sentence structures. Did they not have time during the embargo?</comment>


Mozilla is laying off 250 people and planning a 'new focus' on making money - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-quarter-staff-250-people-new-revenue-focus <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121166), which was posted earlier and has more background.

That one is another third-party article. Not sure whether the press release is the best source here. ([https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corporate%20press%20release%20by:dang))

Edit: the press release wins (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24124788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24124788)).

</comment><comment><USER3> Thread with Mozilla's post :[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a dupe of: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)

</comment><comment><USER5> They should convert to a Worker-owned Cooperative [https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/how-to-convert-a-business- into-a...](https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/how-to-convert-a-business-into-a- worker-owned-cooperative)</comment>


AMD muscles in on Xeon's turf as it unveils Epyc - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/amds-zen-steps-into-the-server-room-with-epyc/ <comment><USER2> Pretty impressive specs.

My favorites:

* Cortex A-5 security/boot processor

* High throughput I/O (I always thought QPI was a great improvement over HT, seems like they've gone one further)

* 290GB/s memory controller (excellent for algorithms that need to span many many GB and can't fit into a GPU)

Clever bit, comparing against Bulldozer in places where they can't beat Xeon.

All in all, looks like the competition has truly heated up.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's unfortunate that they have built in USB 3.0 controllers rather than 3.1, especially given that Thunderbolt wont be available with AMD based systems.

<comment><USER4> I hadn't been aware that Thunderbolt wouldn't be available on AMD systems... indeed my understanding was that Intel's release of Thunderbolt royalty-free open specs opened the path for inclusion by anybody. Was I wrong?

<comment><USER5> That spec opening was only _announced_ a month ago. It's not going to be open until next year[0], far too late for inclusion into silicon that's probably being manufactured right now.

[0] "In addition to Intel's Thunderbolt silicon, _next year_ Intel plans to make the Thunderbolt protocol specification available to the industry under a nonexclusive, royalty-free license." [https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world- thunder...](https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world- thunderbolt-3-everywhere/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No word on APUs, no word on HSA. Is HSA just dead?

<comment><USER7> The AM4 socket that accepts the new non-APU Ryzen chips has support for the eventual APUs that will be released. All AM4 motherboards have display options built-in AFAIK, Neweggs shows the majority have HDMI ports on board but some have DisplayPort. AMD will eventually release the APUs probably under the Ryzen 3 brand.

<comment><USER6> The promise of HSA was to make computation in both CPUs and APUs seamless. Nobody is even talking about it now.

<comment><USER7> Maybe it's far enough along now. Now one talks about SSE anymore, did it go away?

The discrete dies on Epyc all communicate with faster version of PCI-E(the Infinity Fabric), GPUs communicate with PCE-E, SSDs communicate with PCI-E.

AMD certainly hasn't given up on HSA: [http://www.amd.com/system/files/2017-06/TIRIAS-AMD-Epyc- GPU-...](http://www.amd.com/system/files/2017-06/TIRIAS-AMD-Epyc-GPU- Server.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Between this, iMac GPU deal a few days ago, and mining crypto; I've went ahead and bought a ton of AMD shares.</comment>


Uber for Gift Giving - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/08/complete-with-a-note-writing-robot-bond-is-uber-for-gift-giving/

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, they are more like MailLift for consumers :)</comment>


Google announces Android 4.3, the latest incremental Jelly Bean update - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/07/google-announces-android-4-3-the-latest-incremental-jelly-bean-update/

<comment><USER2> Excellent! Now I can start buying up those BLE exercise devices I've been eyeing!</comment>


We Need Better Masks - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2020/06/we-need-better-masks <comment><USER2> Done! Well, at least 4/5 of the HBR criteria. See [https://www.kioma.us/products/mask](https://www.kioma.us/products/mask) and please support us with a purchase!

I'm a YC alum in the healthcare field, and this respirator mask is a project I spun up with friends.

We designed and are actively selling a home-grown full face respirator that addresses 4 of the 5 criteria in this HBR article: Protection, Scalability, Comfort, and Reusability. Style is in the eye of the beholder, and some people think our design is ugly ;)

Protection: only full face respirators have proven effective in the field against Covid. Our respirator is a sealed system for 3-in-1 protection, replacing separate mask, googles, and face shield.

Scalability: we designed it for rapid-response distributed manufacturing.

Reusable: it is washable in soap and water. You can also alcohol spray/wipe it. Additionally, the filters are replaceable, and super-easy to do. The filter media we've tested ourselves at 94% 0.3 micron efficacy; however, that is not an independent certified test.

Comfort: it is cooler, dryer, and more comfortable to wear for long duration. My daughter has rock-climbed in it for several hours, to give you an idea of how comfortable it is. The design saves the nose and cheeks from the pressures of partial masks and googles. Cold air is cycled in and through by wearer's own respiration.

Style: Well, we can't win them all :) Aesthetically some people like it, some people don't. We do our best, but we prioritize function/safety, scalability, and price point over style.

<comment><USER3> Make it dishwasher safe and you've got something here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This article repeatedly mentions the main issue with masks right now, that they require widespread adoption and usage, while pretending "better masks" will somehow solve it.

<comment><USER4> Exactly! This article is a great demonstration of how tuned out and ivory tower much of the medical establishment is.

What are the real problems with masks? Did they bother to talk to or even count mask users? From my experience masks are inconvenient to carry, put on, and take off. Wearing them is not only uncomfortable but adds minor difficulty to breathing.

My work as a cleaner is exhausting and accounted for by the hour. Masks turn my work from miserable to borderline unbearable. Exactly how do masks effect temperature and breathing? No one knows or cares! I am convinced I have experienced several events of serious and dangerous hypoxia as a result of needed to wear a mask while working. Have any of these people bothered to quantify the risks of hypoxia while doing strenuous work and wearing a mask? Maybe ivory tower work doesn't get them breathing hard so it is okay?

Being slightly off with their marketing game might be excusable, but one would expect medical professionals to have some nonzero level of bedside manner and actual interest in not doing harm.

<comment><USER3> Apologies, but I'm having trouble with your response. It doesn't seem to be related to the article or my comment.

This article is all about creating "better" masks for general public usage in social situations.

It seems to say that even with, or because of, those not wearing masks, the mask-wearers need more effective masks.

<comment><USER4> I am saying that this "better" metric you refer to is badly defined in this article. A mask that allowed for easier breathing would potentially be used more frequently and reliably and would do less damage to the wearer. That seems better to me. The ease of carrying, wearing, and also cleaning are other important contributing factors. You are agreeing with the writer that the only contributing factor to "better" is the capacity to lower infection rates when correctly worn. That isn't merely wrong, it is dangerously and offensively stupid.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for clarifying your point.

They touched on multiple points of "better" in this article... one of which is "Comfort", "For example, Stanford researchers are experimenting with wearable devices that pump oxygen into masks to make them more breathable."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to add production-grade security/authentication to my REST API? - <AUTHOR> So I have a basic Flask CRUD API fully built. By that, I mean the routes, responses, and error handling.
So now I want to make it public and assign keys and tokens to developers just like how most APIs do. When I sign up for say Twilio or Plaid or any modern developer platform, I am assigned a public key, secret key, and token and I get a dashboard for this.
How do I add these things to my own API? What am I supposed to read up on or is this done through a third-party provider? What are the libraries and packages I should be looking into? Are there any tutorials for such things? What about things like usage control and rate-limiting? <comment><USER2> You could use an Oauth2 server to generate the entire flow including keys/tokens etc. There are self hosted options like ory.sh or you can get a premium provider like Okta/AUth0 etc.

If you want something simpler, you can just create your own API token for each user but then you will have to build things like regenerate, refresh, expire etc etc. Protocols like OAuth2 make all this standard but adds complexity.

</comment><comment><USER3> How secure do you want it to be? Also - what are the chances your users will leave API keys in their source code repo or pass them around to other devs on their team?

A lot of the reasoning around API security depends on who your users are and what type of protection you want, or need contractually, around the data behind your API.

There are likely going to be OAuth libraries you could use, everything should be behind HTTPS.

</comment><comment><USER4> Keys and tokens sound like OAuth. You will need to understand the roles that each party plays in OAuth (are you the application or the identity provider?), and configure/use Flask appropriately. I'm not that familiar with Flask, but a cursory search says that it supports some of OAuth.

Or you might say 'screw it', and use HTTP Basic auth with HTTPS.</comment>


BBC admits its viral "women write better code" story was fake news - <AUTHOR> https://hequal.wordpress.com/2016/12/28/bbc-admits-its-viral-women-write-better-code-story-was-fake-news/ <comment><USER2> Original article [0].

Here's the BBC's analysis of the complaint [1].

[0] [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35559439](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35559439)

[1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp- reports/ecu/womenwriteb...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp- reports/ecu/womenwritebettercode)

<comment><USER3> Here's the original HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The hequal article is pretty bad, and at least as biased as the BBC one, but they are at least right in their conclusion.

I haven't ready the study itself, so it might be the BBC that misunderstands things:

1\. Using "pull request acceptance rate" as a proxy for "code quality" is highly dubious. It might equally well indicate that their PRs are more relevant, smaller and hence easier to review, more basic or any number of things.

Since we are looking at a ratio, the gap could also be in the numerator. Maybe men are just more likely to submit PRs, for a given skill level. Many people claim that female developers are being put down by their peers, so it would be natural if they are more hesitant to file a PR, only doing so when they are certain it's good. Etc.

2\. The findings are based on a subset of total pull requests, namely those with users whose gender can be identified one way or another. Clearly the slight gender gap could just as well lie here, for example "skilled female developers are more likely than unskilled ones to be show their gender on Google+, compared to the ratio for men".

Also, since there is such an enormous difference between the absolute number of male and female developers (probably at least an order of magnitude), it's quite surprising that the gap here is only a couple of percentage points. Given that difference, it's easy to imagine lots of potential reasons for the small bias.

</comment><comment><USER5> This site appears to be a mens rights site, pretending it's "egalitarian" when it's anything but. Just skimming both this article and the About page, it's pretty strongly insulting feminism and dismissing their complaints, while at the same time complaining about misandry and '"genuine" discrimination'.

</comment><comment><USER6> Soooo this article challenges the original article's validity with stuff like:

> There are far more male users on GitHub then one could argue that men are in > fact far better at coding because far more are actually doing it and many > women are missing in action. Perhaps the small number of women who get > involved are marginally better on average, but they would still be vastly > outnumbered by men who are equally or more capable

How is this more valid? They complain that the study is not scientifically peer-reviewed (which is fair enough, I don't challenge that) and then come up with this dodgy analysis? Gee they sound stupid.

<comment><USER7> This could be valid with any number of probability distributions.

Comparing two populations (in the statistical sense) is tricky, especially if you have a huge difference between them. Then you can make some really weird claims, especially by omission.

What does "women write better code" mean? It could mean any number of things. Some I thought of:

* On average, a woman will write better code than a man. This is saying the mean of the "woman code quality" distribution is higher than that of the "man code quality" distribution. But again this metric is problematic without standard deviation. Because if there are simply more men than women who code, you still have a better chance at hiring a man who codes better than average if you can exclude the lower part through some bound (e.g. basic aptitude tests or interview), especially for long-tail distributions.

* Woman as a whole group write better code. I don't even know what this might mean, but maybe they aren't so obsessed about writing shitty javascript frameworks. Could be interesting for a psychologist. I just made a few things up for the sake of an example explanation: E.g. that the "women" population prefers to code on an existing project vs alone (i.e. new project), that that population prefers projects with a more social structure and therefore pull requests so through smoother because everybody know everyone, etc.

So you really can't say anything for sure without the data, but you can make up click-bait-y articles. Note how there are conveniently no graphs in the article, just a picture of a redheaded women looking at a laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's no such thing as an objective source. Advertisement, journalism, propaganda... they all blend together. It really shouldn't be shocking that so many are retreating into their own echo chambers. What's the point of trying to find a reputable source of news, when none of them are?

<comment><USER9> Because some of them are? And some of them retract their mistakes?

<comment><USER8> The post linked goes into depth as to why this retraction is too little too late. Having no filter process that prevents obvious click bait nonsense, with a retraction a year later is not worth praising. Best to internalize some skepticism about all "news" and question studies "especially of the gray science variety." Being bothered because it's easy to label outlets with biases you don't like, while forgiving those you do, is just human nature, and I'd wager at the root of why my comment keeps fluctuating wildly as to its rating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aside from the story, I really do think that women write better code.

I think it stems from society's tendency to be overly critical of women and the things that they do. If an external force is hypercritical of you, then most people would internalize it. I think this logically leads to better outcomes in things that require critique, like code.

Now this idea has much farther reaching (and more negative) consequences for women imo, but I think it applies here.

<comment><USER11> "Women write better code" seems like an ill-defined statement to me, even assuming you agree on "better" code. Does that mean that the average woman writes code better than the average man? Does it mean that the average "programmer" woman writes code better than the average "programmer" man? Is there anything in there about the the variance in female or male programmer ability? There are a huge number of metrics that would fit the statement, some of which may be true and some may not be true, and many of which might have different conclusions about how "actionable" that information is.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get up to speed on mental models for building IoT projects? - <AUTHOR> I'm starting an IoT project with a client.  I've been building web software for two decades and would love to get up to speed on key IoT concepts.
Things like device shadows, choosing between MQTT/HTTP, how an MQTT broker works, the key challenges and good approaches around ingesting data, sending OTA firmware updates and new device settings down, the pros and cons of rolling our own vs e.g. using AWS's tooling.
I've googled around and have found piece parts.  But are there any good ebooks or similar resources I could dive into? <comment><USER2> Are you doing the firmware as well? Are you using pre-made hardware or developing custom hardware? The first place to start is at the hardware, because everything starts there and it may not support stuff you are thinking about right now. OTA is a very vast topic and can be easy in some cases if you are using existing platforms or can be quite an undertaking if you roll your own.

There are pre-built platforms like Particle where you get OTA and a basic platform for a nominal fee. They have pros and cons as any platform does. Plenty others as well.

MQTT is nice, but not all embedded platforms will support it for a variety of reasons. Security is a major component to embedded work as well.

My opinion having done these projects. Define the needs of the device and the features it needs to support now and over the next 3-5 years (best the business can predict). Then define the hardware based on those needs, that will let you know what software architecture(s) are reasonable. That will also let you look at various IoT platforms that exist like AWS etc and match them to your requirements. This up front process is way more important than it is with something like web development.

I can share war stories about what happens when you choose hardware via the MVP methodology like you would for a web project. Let's just say it never ends pretty, hardware is harder, takes more time and requires a more methodical approach then rapid iteration of typical software engineering. Of course, if you are just trying to check the temperature and humidity at a location and log them, it isn't very difficult and is solvable using off the shelf components which are low risk/low overhead.

Happy to answer questions if I can.</comment>


Boeing reveals "the biggest breakthrough in biofuels ever" - <AUTHOR> http://www.energypost.eu/exclusive-report-boeing-reveals-biggest-breakthrough-biofuels-ever/

<comment><USER2> This is really exciting: using salt water in an aquaponics system to produce fish and biofuel in the deserts.</comment>


Looking for a keybase.io invite code - <AUTHOR> If anyone has a spare Keybase.io invite code, could you please PM me? I'd like to share mine if i got in there. Thanks in advance!! :)
Update:
Thx to constantin i got in.Now i got O Invitations Available,but you can still leave your email address here, someone (maybe me) may send the code if available. <comment><USER2> Would you share one with firstname.lastname@example.com please? ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update:

Ok, Got 5 Invitations, Who want it?

<comment><USER3> Do you still have them? I'm interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, just leave you email here.Try it, it's cool!</comment></comment></comment>


Rami Ismail to Indie Startups: You Don't Stand a Chance - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZn9a9-Gyc0 <comment><AUTHOR> A lot of the advice translates to start ups.</comment>