Nvidia announces RTX 2000 GPU series with '6x more performance' and ray-tracing - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/20/17758724/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-specs-pricing-release-date-features <comment><USER2> Hmm, 24%-42% performance increase (14/16TFlops vs 11.3TFlops) for 70-90% price increase... And prices were already inflated by crypto that is now collapsing. Not sure who is the target market for this tech honestly. Still only 11GB RAM, even if 50% faster, making it a nonsense purchase for Deep Learning enthusiasts (state-of-art models are already larger).

Unless somebody invented RTX-based coin of course, then this is the minimal price...

<comment><USER3> Where are you getting a 70-90% price increase?

1080s are ~$450, will now be $799. 1070s are ~$400, will now be $599.

(I'm going off the top hits on Newegg)

<comment><USER4> For the 1080, by your numbers, $799/$450 represents a ~78% price increase.

<comment><USER5> First those are founders edition pricing which cost an extra 100$. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17802871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17802871) Also 1080's did not start at 450$ each.

The 2080's price will drop eventually, until then nVidia has no reason to lower prices when they are going to be sold out for weeks if not months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      			2080 Ti FE	RTX 2080 Ti	GTX 1080 Ti
      Price			$1,199		$999		$699
      GPU Architecture	Turing		Turing		Pascal
      Boost Clock		1635 MHz	1545 MHz	1582 MHz
      Frame Buffer		11 GB GDDR6	11 GB GDDR6	11 GB GDDR5X
      Memory Speed		14 Gbps		14 Gbps		11 Gbps
      Memory Interface	352-bit		352-bit		352-bit
      CUDA Cores		4352		4352		3584
      TDP			260W		250W		250W
      Giga Rays		10		10		?

      			2080 FE		RTX 2080	GTX 1080
      Price			$799		$699		$549
      GPU Architecture	Turing		Turing		Pascal
      Boost Clock		1800 MHz	1710 MHz	1733 MHz
      Frame Buffer		8 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR5X
      Memory Speed		14 Gbps		14 Gbps		10 Gbps
      Memory Interface	256-bit		256-bit		256-bit
      CUDA Cores		2944		2944		2560
      TDP			225W		215W		180W
      Giga Rays		8		8		?

    			2070 FE		RTX 2070	GTX 1070 Ti	GTX 1070
      Price			$599		$499		$449		$399
      GPU Architecture	Turing		Turing		Pascal		Pascal
      Boost Clock		1710 MHz	1620 MHz	1607 MHz	1683 MHz
      Frame Buffer		8 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR5	8 GB GDDR5
      Memory Speed		14 Gbps		14 Gbps		8 Gbps		8 Gbps
      Memory Interface	256-bit		256-bit		256-bit		256-bit
      CUDA Cores		2304		2304		2432		1920
      TDP			175W		185W		180W		150W
      Giga Rays		6		6		?		?

<comment><USER7> 2080 Ti FE, 1259 Euros. All US companies follow this simple formula: $ to Euro 1:1, add 25% and then add 50-60 Euros for Free Shipping.

<comment><USER2> It's the 2-year warranty, translation of manuals and a need to have office in all major EU markets due to different legal stuff that makes it all pricier.

<comment><USER8> Don't forget taxes. US prices are typically listed without tax included, whereas I'm guessing the European ones include VAT.

<comment><USER7> Most probable explanation. 19% in Germany. So, $1199 in US, ~$1443 in Europe. 1199 * 1.19 = ~$1427. $1439 with Austrian VAT of 20%, but price is still 1259 Euro, so it seems nice. Seems about right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since the post with the product page got merged here:

[https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics- cards/rtx-2080...](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics- cards/rtx-2080-ti/)

Most of it is dramatically lit renderings of fans and vacuous marketing-speak of course, but there's a tidbit near the bottom of the page about NVLink I find interesting.

      "GeForce RTX™ NVLINK™ Bridge

      The GeForce RTX™ NVLink™ bridge connects two NVLink SLI-ready graphics cards with 50X the transfer bandwidth of previous technologies."

I guess NVLink is finally becoming relevant as a consumer technology then? Do you think this will be the GPU generation when consumer motherboards capable of pushing things to the GPU by NVLink will appear as well?

<comment><USER10> > Do you think this will be the GPU generation when consumer motherboards > capable of pushing things to the GPU by NVLink will appear as well?

first you'll need CPUs that support NVLink, and that's currently limited to the not so consumer oriented POWER9.

<comment><USER11> NVLink works fine between GPUs even if the CPUs are x86. Just look at the NVIDIA DGX boxes/stations. [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/04/NVLin...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/04/NVLink-topology-e1491278374674.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Title is clickbait, 6 x performance gain is for ray tracing only, which is normal, Pascal cards didn't have the ray tracing muscle of the new cards.

<comment><USER13> What are the approximate gains from the last gen, i.e. 1080->2080 or 1070->2070, for a non RTX enabled game? Would be speculation at this point I assume, but just based on clock freqs, mem bandwidth and the number of units on the chip?

<comment><USER14> 24% - 42% improvement according to an earlier Top comment...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really hope that the next generation of AMD Radeon have a good performance and their efforts to port TensorFlow and others works.

AMD need to put on NVIDIA on the same heat that Intel got with the Zen architecture.

NVIDIA is too comfortable, with a very high price and crazy demands ( you can´t use Customer cards on Data centers)

<comment><USER16> What effort to port tensorflow?

<comment><USER17> [https://gpuopen.com/rocm-tensorflow-1-8-release/](https://gpuopen.com/rocm- tensorflow-1-8-release/)

<comment><USER16> Upstream it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The prices are obscene. The '70 tier has usually been my tier of choice, but they're sliding that up from the $400 range to the $600 range.

I actually just scored a 1080 in the realm of $400, presumably because crypto demand dived, and they had a lot of stock coming into the new generation announcement. I'm glad I got it, because it's going to be a while before I touch cards at these price points. Presumably when they filter down to a 2060 or something it'll be affordable?

<comment><USER19> I think I spent $300 for a 970 and I've been keeping an eye out for something that has 2x the performance at the same price. I guess the replacement will be the 2050?

<comment><USER20> I think I'm in the same boat as you - but I'm hoping for 1.5x performance and a bit less heat / power usage.

I think I'll leave the "4K" gaming to the Xbox One X.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The prices are absolutely insane. I was prepared to pay £599 for the 2080, but £749 for a non-Ti card is a joke. It feels to me like Nvidia knows there's no competition from AMD so they can ask for literally any price and people will pay it.

<comment><USER22> Remember that in the US you have to factor in the upcoming 25% import tariff.

<comment><USER23> Which has nothing to do with the prices in Europe.

<comment><USER22> Not true. Prices in non-US countries are almost always tacked onto US prices + extra import duties, VAT, and other regulatory fees (thanks EU!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Some clips of the Battlefield V demo real-time reflections:

[https://twitter.com/dan_mitre/status/1031599285576650757](https://twitter.com/dan_mitre/status/1031599285576650757)

[https://twitter.com/dan_mitre/status/1031599199316529158](https://twitter.com/dan_mitre/status/1031599199316529158)

[https://twitter.com/dan_mitre/status/1031598556585582595](https://twitter.com/dan_mitre/status/1031598556585582595)

<comment><USER25> The water reflections are better, but the non-RTX water is already pretty good; the last link with the fire reflection is pretty baller though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is anything known about the number of tensor cores in the new 2080 Ti? What about the float16 performance using the Tensor cores? I couldn't find this on the spec page [1].

[1] [https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics- cards/rtx-2080...](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics- cards/rtx-2080-ti/)

<comment><USER27> A couple of sites have said 384 TC's, which would be approximately ~50% of the v100/new high-end Quadro card. Would like to see a confirmed source as well.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, it seems at the moment that there's no confirmation on to what degree they're actually enabled either. It may well be that NVidia will make them available for inference via DirectX so they can do AI based denoising and anti aliasing in games but artificially limit support in frameworks for training so as not to eat into the Quadro / Tesla markets. I'm holding off on ordering one until I see more info on that.

<comment><USER26> > It may well be that NVidia will make them available for inference via > DirectX so they can do AI based denoising and anti aliasing in games but > artificially limit support in frameworks for training so as not to eat into > the Quadro / Tesla markets. I'm holding off on ordering one until I see more > info on that.

Good point, that would not be cool. I'll wait with ordering until more is known about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Using DNN for generating higher resolution images[1] in realtime at fraction of the performance cost is quite brilliant. Is there any info it if this is nvidia proprietary technology or general feature of DirectX Raytracing that will eventually be available also from AMD and Intel?

[1] Though showing CT/medical imaging as one of it's applications is a big no- no

<comment><USER30> > Is there any info it if this is nvidia proprietary technology or general > feature of DirectX Raytracing that will eventually be available also from > AMD and Intel?

This is a general feature of their RTX 'pipeline', not just DirectX, so I imagine Vulkan will introduce support eventually. Whether AMD will be able to put it into GPUs is a different story, but it appears they are doing some of their own work in the area of Tensorflow so they may provide their own equivalent.

> Though showing CT/medical imaging as one of it's applications is a big no-no

Why is that? They weren't showing it as an application of their higher res image DNNs, that was just an example of where they have used DNNs in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel like there is a hard limit on rendering tech right now. We saw 4k upgrades to the PS4/xbox and next gen consoles might be a way off.

I thought the gaming industry was waiting for hardware that would let you render Marvel movie style graphics. Things that just barely hit that uncanny divide; that would give the player comic book film style immersions.

The demo video they posted does look pretty impressive. Is this the generation of video cards that will take us there, or if not, what is the next big innovation in gaming/graphics going to be?

<comment><USER32> One of the major challenges when trying to generate realistic, believable graphics is correctly modeling ambient light. Without that, adding higher resolution displays or finer polygon meshes won't get you there.

The most efficient and accurate methods of modeling ambient light are fundamentally based on ray tracing. Path tracing is probably the best known and most popular, photon mapping is another. They are both based on random sampling, so the more rays you can trace per frame, the more accurate the lighting calculations are. (Inaccuracies tend to manifest as graininess.)

<comment><USER33> With denoising in place, the inaccuracies manifest as low resolution. (similar to pixellation or blur but not as even)

Apparently nVidia is using a variant of beam tracing if patents are to be believed.

<comment><USER32> That's about what I'd expect. If they're doing it sensibly, though, it should only affect the resolution of ambient light effects, not the portion of the rendering that comes from primary rays. So, the geometry would have sharp edges, but the caustics might be blurry. Seems like a good tradeoff if it drastically reduces the overall computation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Any idea of how these GeForce RTX's perform in deep learning applications compared to Quadro RTX? (price/performance ratio)

I assume that they might have decent inference speed, but how about learning?

$800 card would be nice for initial testing and developing in personal desktop machine. Or are they somehow crippled??

<comment><USER27> These will make a good card to experiment with. I am going to purchase one when I can. More RAM which is nice for larger models, but you can do a lot with 8GB of ram, especially if you are just getting going. Do not let worrying about having the latest and greatest hardware keep you from getting started. Time is the most important resource to have, not spec sheets.

These cards look like they will have Tensor Cores, which should give a significant boost (e.g. ~50% of P100/V100 performance for certain operations at ~10% of the cost) over the 1080 series.

The Quadro's have a higher spec ram (think ECC vs. DDR) which is important for a workstation GPU, but the price difference goes up in a hurry. My suggestion would be to learn on a RTX and then you can rent a Quadro if you need more power to play with.

<comment><USER34> > These cards look like they will have Tensor Cores,

How they look like that? Do those cores support FP32 precision? I'm genuinely interested.

<comment><USER2> No, from INT4 to FP16. Inferencing can get nice boost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why would we want raytracing as for 'gaming' as opposed to the rasterizers we have now? Is this a gimmick or are there algorithms for post processing and the like that could take advantage of this?

<comment><USER36> I believe there are a lot of "tricks" engineers have developed to accomplish rendering goals that would be more natural with ray tracing. The added simplicity would lower the barrier of entry for more complex effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone know how they are offering better raytracing performance? Are there new api's or something?

<comment><USER38> This is exactly what im wondering, with the next gen consoles confirmed for AMD CPU/GPU I doubt there will be much Ray Tracing tech in the next generation, which means we're looking at 3-5 years before this tech can be mainstream.

These GPUs will be antiquated by the time Ray Tracing can gain any real traction...

<comment><USER39> I believe that lots of games already do ray tracing/casting when they render (especially for things like lighting and reflections), so there can be benefits even before games switch to 100% ray tracing.

<comment><USER40> For the most part it really isn't "ray tracing", it's _close_ but almost everybody "cheats" because of the performance gains.

Even if some games do using ray tracing for some things, the developers would have to update their game to support the features of a currently very expensive and uncommon card. Not to mention most gamers have a GTX 1060 or less according to steam to give you an idea of what the current "mainstream" is at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Anyone know if the raytracing cores on these things can be used to accelerate Shadertoy style raymarching stuff? This technique has been threatening to break through into the mainstream for a while now.

<comment><USER42> This DirectX raytracing sample does a variant of shadertoy style raymarching.

[https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectX-Graphics- Samples/tree/m...](https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectX-Graphics- Samples/tree/master/Samples/Desktop/D3D12Raytracing/src/D3D12RaytracingProceduralGeometry)

This is basically a rewrite of iq's primitive shadertoy using DXR, with additional, non-SDF objects like metaballs. [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Xds3zN](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Xds3zN)

I'm not sure how much of a speed up you'd get from using this API though. Most of the complex shadertoy shaders are unoptimized and brute-force given the limitations of the environment, and you can render similar scenes without a raytracing API using similar techniques in more efficient ways. The talk on Claybook at GDC 2018 or Alex Evan's Siggraph 2015 talk are good examples of ways to scale procedural sign distance field rendering. They both assume dynamic scenes or user edited content, there are probably other tricks that could be used to accelerate mostly static content.

<comment><USER41> Links to the two talks mentioned (I think...):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpf7Ua3UqOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpf7Ua3UqOA)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Are these Ray Tracing Extensions and Hardware going to be exclusive to Nvidia, at least for the time being? Assuming AMD didn't know about it until now and had to work and implement it, it would be at least 3 years before a Ray Tracing hardware are included in their GPU.

And in terms of efficiency, how much better is this Hybrid Ray Tracing (HRT) compared to current Shadow Maps and reflection? I assume the latter needs a lot of fine tuning but are faster while HRT is a lot simpler and slower?

I think right now the "highest" graphics quality isn't bottleneck or most important part at all, ( Whether majority of gamers were able to go to the highest graphics quality is a different question ) we sort of reach that stage some time after Crysis. It is how to reduce the time needed for designer and developers to reach that fidelity. I assume HRT will help designer to get what they want quicker?

Because somewhere along the line, most game developers only wants to give me the best graphics looking gaming possible, and the fun and storyline part seems to have faded. Apart from Nintendo.

P.S To those calling this expensive, the $999 RTX 1080ti gets you a silicon Die Size of 775mm2, along with very fast GDDR6 memory. Even your top of the line CPU don't come close to this die size, let alone the inclusion of memory.

<comment><USER44> For the software side: All of the games demoed were using DXR (DirectX Raytracing) for which RTX is just a backend for. DXR works on any recent AMD GPU (albeit slowly due to the lack of dedicated hardware) and AMD was a hardware partner in development of DXR.

For the hardware side: AMD has not said anything about specialized hardware for ray tracing. They almost certainly have known about it for quite a while but nobody (publicly at least) knows if they ever started on this.

</comment></comment><comment> Sol- Is ray-tracing a very large improvement for rendering quality or do you have diminishing returns now that "conventional" rendering techniques already employ such good heuristics and approximations to make the scenes look good?

Just curious since I don't know much about the state of the art of rendering and the implication of ray-tracing (other than the fact that it's, somewhat trivially by how it works, the most accurate method).

<comment><USER28> A lot of the clever tricks employed to get effects like reflections, ambient occlusion, soft shadows and GI effects using rasterization are 'hacks' with a lot of edge cases and artifacts. They're not terribly robust. Ray tracing let's you get better quality with fewer artifacts because there's less 'cheating' going on. You can get better quality in more situations with less manual tweaking, if you can afford the performance cost.

Artifacts around the contact points of shadows and reflections and artifacts for reflections and ambient occlusion of off screen objects are places where ray tracing can give much better visual results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> At these prices I think I will keep on playing 1080p/60Hz for a couple more years.

</comment><comment><USER46> Kinda disappointed that there is no improvement—in fact a small reduction—of the raw GFLOPS computing power, compared to Volta: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_20_series)

<comment><USER47> Titan V is a $3000 card. Getting close to that performance on a $1000 card is a big leap forward.

<comment><USER46> Good point, but what about the comparison with the old 10-series Titan Xp (released at $1200)? The 20-series improved peak GFLOPS perf by a meager 10%. I still would have expected more from upgrading from 16nm to 12nm. I guess floating point perf wasn't a priority for Nvidia in this microarchitecture refresh...

<comment><USER48> Much of the silicon is now used by RT cores and tensor cores. These were not on the Titan xp, for better or for worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Putting AI/ML aside, I have a question for graphics experts or/and gamers: what is the practical [1] ceiling of the current champion, the 1080ti? I was under impression that that card already was much more than most people needed. In other words, is the new generation only useful for 4K gaming?

[1] By "practical" I mean on 1440p@144Hz monitors.

<comment><USER49> VR, for one, is going to (eventually) have insane resolution and performance requirements: a flat 90 to 120fps with perhaps 4K resolution _for each eye_.

Even my regular 1080 has trouble with a few current-gen games.

<comment><USER50> It doesn't have to be that bad. If they can get foveated rendering to work (rendering only the part you're looking at in the highest resolution), it will dramatically cut the performance requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Here's how a VR enthusiast should think about this news. Make an estimate for when 90Hz 1440P VR can be supported by the average laptop. I think that would be a good benchmark for the time a year before the widespread adoption of VR/AR by the general public.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder how long it'll take to get these cards into a "Nano"/ITX/small form factor? Is it even going to be possible after a certain point? IMO, it's the ideal size for eGPU builds, but so far, you can only go as high as a 1080.

(Here's my hacky 1080 eGPU build over TB2: [http://archagon.net/blog/2018/07/25/egpu- redux/](http://archagon.net/blog/2018/07/25/egpu-redux/) And just to assuage any fears, there are attractive, pre-built options of the same size for TB3! I had to go this route because TB3->TB2 adapters don't work with my model of laptop.)

</comment><comment><USER52> I wish there was more information about the acceleration structures and how they're generated.

When I worked on hardware raytracing, my conclusion was that the actual tracing was not the difficult part. That can be very well optimized, requires very little silicon to do and is only really limited by memory bandwidth.

The difficult part for real-time raytracing of animated scenes is generating efficient acceleration structures fast enough.

It makes sense that the API for this is opaque, but it would still be nice to know what goes on behind the scenes.

</comment><comment><USER53> >RTX 2080 draws up to 215 watts of power.

It actually went up over baseline 1080. 175 vs 215. And so did the 2070, it also eats more than 1080 while using a more modern litho.

</comment><comment><USER54> I think the RTX 2080ti FE might be the first card worth the 1200. I'd get one and never get another for 3 years probably.

</comment><comment><USER36> Can someone point me towards the deep learning tech they reference for improving ray tracing performance?

<comment><USER55> They're using deep learning as fancy Anti-Aliasing mechanism, to fill gaps which GPU didn't have time to properly raytrace or to upscale parts of images. As I understood from what I seen ML there mostly for AA.

<comment><USER56> You mean denoising? In RT raytracing you're generally short on samples and need to interpolate between them / smooth over the shot noise.

<comment><USER57> In their Siggraph presentation last week they mentioned using AI for both denoising and antialisasing (but they didn't provide anymore details about it).

<comment><USER58> It's likely mostly for denoising, I highly doubt it can have enough power to perform both denoising and antialiasing. The ray tracing presented would be sampling and then use the model to fill the gaps.

<comment><USER28> You're effectively training the network for both when training for denoising as your ground truth images are both denoised and anti aliased. With ray tracing both problems are brute forced by the same approach of throwing more samples per pixel at the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Could anyone comment on the likely state of Linux drivers for these new cards?

I've anecdotally, previously been recommended to use either AMD or Intel GPUs, even when out performed by Nvidia, because their open source drivers will usually easier to deal with.

Is this still the case?

My own use case would be mainly for Blender.

<comment><USER60> Do you have an ethical requirement to only use open source drivers? Because there are official closed source nvidia drivers for linux. That is what I have always used and they have worked well. Games work, dual monitors with weird aspect ratios work, etc.

<comment><USER59> I don't personally, not for this anyway. It's more about community support.

If the close source linux drivers are up to date and work well that would probably be enough for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Nvidia has also pulled out of crypto mining. [https://cryptocoinspy.com/nvidia-pulls-out-of-crypto- mining-...](https://cryptocoinspy.com/nvidia-pulls-out-of-crypto-mining- sector/)

</comment><comment><USER62> Stats that matter for deep learning: 616 GB/s Memory Bandwidth, 11GB memory. About 27% improvement over 1080Ti, assuming mem b/w is bottleneck. 11GB is too low - business decision to segment gaming and deep learning markets.

</comment><comment><USER63> It was about time... The old series is, well, pretty old by now, but (to me) never really seemed worth the upgrade from my r9 290 (used for Vive/VR gaming).

Maybe mid-2019 will see me dropping some money on a new GPU, once prices settled.

<comment><USER64> I'm right there with you. I'm still running a 290 as well, and haven't really been able to justify an upgrade, especially given I really only play Overwatch and Rocket League.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Can anyone suggest a 4 GPU build for a non-GPU budget of USD 1500 to 2000 (i.e., not including the cost of the 4 GPUs, which will vary depending on which GPU is chosen)?

I will add to this the cost of 4 GPUs (like GTX 1080 Ti or higher).

</comment><comment><USER66> Any clue on how this thing will compare to a 1080 TI?

<comment><USER67> In terms of real time raytracing the RTX will blow the GTXs out of the water...

For anything else? Remains to be seen.

<comment><USER68> This is my big question too. It's pretty standard marketing: if your new product isn't impressively better than the old one on commonly used benchmarks, you invent a new benchmark where your new product _is_ impressively better. I wonder how much of the "look how much better these cards are at ray-tracing!" actually reflects real-world improvements users will see, and how much is there to create a benchmark that shows a big improvement over existing GPUs.

<comment><USER67> I don't think it's that bad. The RTX is a whole new architecture and will have significantly more cores. The bigger question is probably just how the performance is compared to the price and power consumption.

Realtime raytracing wasn't feasible before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> While we're at this, has anyone got significant training perf improvements for Titan V. Best I've seen is 2x of 1080ti for 4x the price.

</comment><comment><USER55> I just realized that what in dark corners of mobile games we call Whales, NVidia calls "enthusiasts".

</comment><comment><USER70> Love the idea of using ConvNets for spatial and temporal resolution interpolation.

</comment><comment><USER71> When we can expect gfx 1080 prices to drop given this new release?!

</comment><comment><USER72> those can't be used for crypto mining, otherwise, you will find out that they aren't worth the money.

</comment><comment><USER73> can't wait to not afford these because of bitcoin miners

</comment><comment><USER74> But will it mine?

<comment><USER75> I sure hope not.

<comment><USER58> It has ddr6 - it will be quite decent albeit overly expensive/inefficient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I am usually able to keep a card for several generations before I can't get 60fps at 1080p in games anymore. Unless you're a professional gamer I don't get the appeal of throwing that kind of money at a card.

<comment><USER72> if you have bionic eyes, you need 200fps... some people use video cards for other purposes, also.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Proper JSON Property Naming - <AUTHOR> http://commondream.net/post/9915916269/question-proper-json-property-naming

<comment><USER2> Since JSON is essentially JavaScript, I'd go for camel case. Also, it saves bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't make the mistake of assuming it will only every be consumed by Ruby. Make it make sense for JSON, not the initial language used to write or consume the code.</comment>


AWS spot instance prices rising? - <AUTHOR> I see some signs AWS spot instance prices are starting to creep up.  I am sort of guessing this is related to increased demand from COVID-19 induced app usage increases.  Anyone else seeing this?  Any one know if AWS is doing OK keeping up with demand? <comment><USER2> A small amount in most areas, yeah.

Frankly I'm surprised they have spot capacity at all, given how much other providers are struggling to work at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I see Azure is struggling more indeed. They have smaller overall size, and way more regions so that must be a really hard combo to maintain proper spare capacity.</comment></comment>


Scaling Etsy - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mcfunley/status/1194713711337852928 <comment><USER2> As someone who scaled the database at a company that dealt with over a petabyte of data, here's a few thoughts I have:

It seems like the biggest issue Etsy had was a lack of strong engineering leadership. They relied on an outside consultant to rewrite their application in a fundamentally flawed way. The lack of eng leadership resulted in both poor technical decisions being made and bad engineering processes for how the app was developed.

Etsy's biggest technical mistake building an application using a framework that no one understood. This led to the predictable result that when they deployed the application to production, it didn't work. Even if the application had worked, Etsy still would have needed to maintain the Twisted application indefinitely. Maintaining an application written in a framework no one understands sounds like a recipe for a disaster. Sooner or later you are going to run into issues that no one will know how to fix.

Process wise, Etsy made the mistake of not properly derisking the Twisted application. They only found out that it didn't work when they were deploying it to production. They made the same issue a second time when they tried to deploy the replacement. When I'm building a new service, the first bit of code I write is to test that the fundamental design of the new service would work. Usually this only takes a few days instead of the months it takes to implement the full service. It sounds like Etsy could have setup a simple Twisted app that did a fraction of what the final version did. If so, they would have found a number of fundamental flaws in the design before having spent a ton of time building out the service.

To be honest, this story shows how a business can succeed even with a bad engineering team. It would be one thing if this sort of incident killed off Etsy. Instead Etsy has gone on to become the $5 Billion company it is today. I'm not saying engineering doesn't matter. All I'm saying is you can build a pretty successful business even with a bad engineering team.

<comment><USER3> _All I'm saying is you can build a pretty successful business even with a bad engineering team._

I completely agree. The most important lesson I've learned in the past decade of software development is:

Good product/UX design can save bad engineering, but it doesn't work the other way around.

<comment><USER4> 100% this.

Tackling a real problem > Having a big addressable market > Good product / UX > Great Engineering.

Strictly.

Great Engineering pays back at a much larger time scale and makes for an enabler or a breaker at the critical scaling stage only. You can get surprisingly far with a protoduction service and still build something huge (see Twitter).

Great design is atomic and homogenous. Weak technology leadership ends up in opening up a vacuum that gets filled by Architecture Astronauts (Etsy), every team doing their own thing technologywise (SoundCloud), or at the very worst, some dogmatic homebrew NIH stack (various places I've worked at).

Every unhealty Technology organization looks unhealthy in its own way, but the great ones look all alike: Clean, simple, rather homogenous and logical.

<comment><USER5> This is only true with boundaries around engineering quality. There can be not so great engineering making it impossible for the business to be successful because their solution is more expensive than the revenue generated.

<comment><USER6> Depends on the type of software. If you're building transactional software where your business is doing a few bucks cut per user transaction, the software can be tremendously bad before it hits into revenue, as long as you're not totally busting the user experience

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On an unrelated note, I hate how this has become the trend for long-form content- What should've been a normal blog post is now being chunked into smaller distracting paragraphs with each containing its own paths to deviate from the original topic (comments, retweets, etc.)

I wonder what's the motivation though - is it the likes? The informal setting? I really miss those days when we just had content sitting with default font styles inside plain 'ol HTML tables.

<comment><USER8> Though not universally the case, I like to quote @foone's thread on why he publish on Twitter and not a blog post:

[https://twitter.com/foone/status/1066547670477488128](https://twitter.com/foone/status/1066547670477488128)

(Threader: [https://threader.app/thread/1066547670477488128](https://threader.app/thread/1066547670477488128))

<comment><USER9> Genuine tip then: write your story on Twitter, then copy paste the compiled story from Threader into a proper blog post and replace your tweets with a link to the blog post. Problem solved!

<comment><USER10> People expect more from blog posts. Its ok for a Twitter thread to be rambling, to backtrack and clarify the premise halfway through, but this is not accepted in a blog post, which needs to be structured more like a traditional essay and it _needs to be edited_. Someone without the attention- span or patience to write a blog post in the first place is certainly not going to go back and revise/edit a perfectly good tweet-storm just to make someone on HN happy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can sympathize. We have a Twisted database abstraction layer that was built in house. You call http endpoints that perform database operations. It has routing logic so applications only need to call someEndpoint.json and not worry if we've sharded the backend recently, scaled read replicas, migrated a write master, etc. It has caching, query piggy-backing, connection pooling, and other bells and whistles.

While we have been able to scale it out for volume of requests, it did not scale well for multiple teams and multiple services. It became a single point of failure whereby the access patterns of one team to their own databases could affect other teams abilities to access their own databases.

We've since moved to a new model whereby team's own their datastores and access methods, speeding up development and reducing negative impact teams can have on each other's data layer. Legacy access continues to be migrated off endpoint by endpoint, database by database. I look forward to the day of never having to look at Twisted code ever again. The framework is aptly named.

If you are looking for a similar solution for MySQL, I currently recommend ProxySQL. It allows for a topography whereby teams can control their own proxy layer and still have most of the benefits outlined above.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ha, Spouter a middle layer for talking to DB instead of just talking to DB (proxy to do connection pooling, etc could be between). This kind of project came up at my previous job and while I didn't know about Spouter at the time, I knew I didn't like the idea one bit.

Managing a DB + middle layer for a small and an already stressed DB team? Can't imagine that going well. The problem was that they spent too much time doing reviews for simple SQL patterns for CRUD + operational issues like debugging database performance issues or watching devs perform migrations. Of course they have other things to do in their job.

My opinion was the root of the problem is database choice and practices. If all I want to do is simple CRUD, then give me good scaled Redis cluster (AOF enabled), dynamo or something that constrains the query model. DB team can worry about about the cluster management leaving me to worry about structure. I could consult DB team if I needed opinions for multiple cases. Give me a way to watch db performance as well, so DB team does not need to watch over a migration at 12am or some off period.

Sometimes I may need higher performance or more dynamic queries, so just creating a table or elastic search with only indexable values to get the ids works. Use those IDs to fetch from original store.

<comment><USER13> > My opinion was the root of the problem is database choice and practices. If > all I want to do is simple CRUD, then give me good scaled Redis cluster...

Throughout my entire career I have come across very few simple crud applications that will actually work properly with denormalized data structures. It's not even about scaling users, it's about scaling your schema. The very first instance you encounter where a document has a nested array will start to cause problems, and the only way to solve it is to push more complexity and state management onto the client. Which is bad interface design, and quickly gets out of control.

If you really do have a simple crud app, and don't want to put too much effort into running your RDBMS, just use MySQL imo.

<comment><USER12> I was working at a company of like 400 employees using MSSQL, so simple CRUD is not limited to simple crud app. Simple CRUD operations are insert, select, update, delete. Given that we auto generated the code and sql (stored procedures) and pasted it into the codebase made me think, why bother with this if I could develop new features without SQL at all.

Why should my queries be a stored prod or prepared stmt if all I need is get, insert, update, delete an object. Yes, the auto generated code wrote to the database as an object as in all fields included in the query. Why? There's no transactions, foreign keys, etc. since some tables where stored in different databases. Using a relational db as object store included people inefficiently using it as an object store.

In my own projects, if I need the speed, columns are indexed while unindexed data is binary. I can explode out (unserialize) the binary data into cache.

Point of my post was centralizing database access tends to be a bottleneck for team efficiency. If not the devs then the db owners. Augment my abilities to execute don't try to completely change it where it brings a whole set of unwanted problems that were not there before.

<comment><USER13> I'm not saying you made an inefficient choice. If you only need to interact with objects that have no relations or nested lists, then denormalized data is likely not going to be a problem. But this is a remarkably niche use case. In practice, nearly all cases I've seen where people have come to this conclusion, it's because they didn't properly analyse their schema to begin with.

That's not to say all use cases for such technology are niche. A lot of CMS applications can fit into that paradigm very well for instance.

I'd also say that storing binary data in an RDBMS is a seperate anti-pattern all together.

<comment><USER12> Every column you write to a db is binary at some point. When you choose a type, all you asked the DB to do is interpret the stored binary data in that way. By choosing binary type to store data, you've declared to the db not to interpret the data. You don't hit issues with charset collation/encoding, database interpretation (lack of 128bit ints), and etc. Think about it, what is an integer? It is 4 bytes of data.

Anti pattern depends on use case. Yes, I absolutely do not agree with your generalization. Storing binary data in an RDBMS is not an anti-pattern. Binary data can be of any size. The bigger the binary data the less rows you should expect to store. At some point (maybe the binary data is images/watermarks, etc), you have to choose a replicated file system to use that as the part of the datastore operations.

Furthermore, I've only worked on high qps applications, so maybe I'm a bit biased on how to use the database efficiently. :)

<comment><USER14> Congratulations, you've offloaded to your app what your database is designed to deal with.

Storing all data as binary is an anti-pattern too, regardless of your qps.

I wouldn't store anything but metadata in the database, the blob can be somewhere like S3.

<comment><USER12> It depends on use case. If you cannot take that then agree to disagree and discussion is no longer warranted. I've been on both sides and take my experiences with me.

You can assert anti pattern, but knowing how to structure your tables matter. SQL has BLOB, BINARY, VARBINARY choose the proper type depending on trade off. Models that include blobs can be structured in DB to avoid IO issues (indexed data includes id). Go to S3 with the id. How does what you are saying differ? My first post literally says this.

Not only can be structured to avoid IO issues, but are protected via a cache where the unindexed data is exploded.

Of course with high QPS I want to offload CPU cycles away from the DB. Scaling the app is easier than a DB.

Scratching my head here. Are you arguing for just use only SQL? Why would I do that.

<comment><USER15> I'm sorry, but no matter what you think storing all unindexed columns as binary is very, very weird. You can write all the documentation you want as to why this is superior to what literally everyone else is doing and has been doing since the dawn of time, but it won't stop people joining your project thinking that you are mad.

This kind of thing is the stuff of horror stories. Now I have no doubt that you've convinced yourself that this is a great approach, but it's not, and it will be replaced as soon as you leave (assuming you're not a one man band).

<comment><USER16> > I'm sorry, but no matter what you think storing all unindexed columns as > binary is very, very weird

You may be surprised to learn that several very large and well-known social networks use this technique -- serializing unindexed columns into a blob (typically compressed at some level) -- for their core product tables. It's not really that "weird", if you consider that literally tens of thousands of engineers work at companies doing this.

Conceptually it's exactly equivalent the same technique as putting all unindexed columns in a single JSON or HSTORE column. Newer companies use those; older companies tend to have something more homegrown, but ultimately equivalent, typically wrapped by a data access service which handles the deserialization automatically.

This technique is especially advantageous if you have a huge number of flexible fields per row, and many of those fields are often missing / default / zero value, and the storage scheme permits just omitting such fields/values entirely. Multiplied by trillions of rows, that results in serious cost savings.

<comment><USER12> It's a very boring technique really in hindsight. I guess one is really at the top 1% when you work at a high scale company and you see techniques that question the assumptions one holds. Databases like MySQL, as you pointed out, are embracing this technique, but make the inner data indexable.

Also [https://www.skeema.io/](https://www.skeema.io/) looks like a good product that I'll have to checkout. Looks like a better product so far compared to solutions like flyway/liquibase. Full featured suite for DB migration from dev -> prod is exactly what I've been raving about. Like it is "boring" tech as in no one really wants to touch it, but it is the easiest to screw up and products like this really take it to the next level.

The responses I've seen in this post appear to be from people who've never used dynamic fields in a db and advise against it by saying it is an anti pattern. If it is an anti-pattern, bring on all the anti patterns as I'd like to not wake up at night or be pinged for slowness.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, it's always interesting seeing the contrast between textbook computer science approaches vs practical real-world solutions. For some reason, people get especially hung up about academic CS concepts in the database world in particular... I've found things are never that clean in the real world at scale.

Thank you for the kind words re: Skeema :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of similar debate I had with one of my friends falling for NodeJS FOMO. The actual codebase was RoR and he wanted to go for Node for no apparent reason. I was able to talk him out of it but what I understood from discussion was peer pressure of "hey all of this could have been async". While I admit blocking threads might not be permanent solution, they can still take you pretty far. Not to mention the folks wanted a MERN stack and I believe leaving Postgres for Mongo without a damn good reason is just crazy idea.

<comment><USER18> Isn't SQL -> mongo a meme now? I mean, are people still seriously considering this outside of one or two very specific use cases? At my workplace the only outcome of this would be an awkward silence and weird looks.

<comment><USER19> Yeah having worked on a mongo stack there are N problems caused due to the unstructured nature of mongo and there's so many problems with existing ORM solutions chiefly the fact that they're trying to create structure where it doesn't exist. This was a decision taken aeons ago and there's not much we can do to change it now but hope the guy who made that decision is happy cause I sure am not

<comment><USER20> Only thing I've found mongo good for is the warm data path where you need slightly more permanence than a straight pub sub (like getting the last 2 minutes of events upon connection) but you really don't care about throwing the data away after that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> OP here—if it's not obvious from the tweets the timeframe of this story is 2007 through 2008.

</comment><comment><USER22> >I managed to not get fired because through this whole thing I was talking shit about it.

I know it's unprofessional to comment on other developers work negatively, but I do see it often in the work place and it does serve to distance an individual from the group that is failing.

It's sad but true, and this is an example, employers say they want professionalism but they incentivize against it.

<comment><USER23> There's 0 downsides to criticizing everyone else's projects and systems so a lot of people do it. This is kinda exacerbated by the fact that we engineers have a reputation for being incorrect about the stability of systems we build ( there are good reasons for this, and I personally don't think it's possible to avoid that impression even when it's not intended).

I wonder if this team would have done better with tools that offer better observability (metrics, logs, tracing etc.). An example of a rewrite that went well [https://avc.com/2019/12/grinding/](https://avc.com/2019/12/grinding/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's amazing how relatable these anecdotes are. Change a few key words here and there, and this tweetstorm could describe most engineering leadership failures I've seen.

Nearly every tweet describes scenarios that can only happen when engineering management is M.I.A. or too inexperienced to recognize when something is a bad idea.

\- Attempting to solve problems with a rewrite in a different programming language. This can be the correct long term decision in specific scenarios, but it's rarely the correct answer for bailing out a sinking ship. You need to focus on fixing the current codebase as a separate initiative rather than going all-in on a rewrite to fix all of your problems. Rewrites take far too long to be band-aid solutions.

\- Rewriting open-source software before you can use it. If Django doesn't fit your startup's needs, the solution is never to rewrite Django. The solution is to use something else that does fit your needs. Your startup's web services needs are almost never unique enough to merit rewriting popular open-source frameworks as step 1. Pick a different tool, hire different people if necessary, and get back to focusing on the core business problem. Don't let the team turn into open-source contributors padding their resume while collecting paychecks from a sinking startup. Save the open-source work for later when you have the extra money to do it right without being a distraction.

\- Hiring consultants to confirm your decisions. Consultants can be valuable for adding outside perspective and experience, but the team must be prepared to cede some control to the consultant. If you get to the point where you're hiring a "Twisted consultant" instead of a web store scaling consultant, you're just further entrenching the team's decisions.

\- "Nobody was in charge". Common among startups who pick a "technical cofounder" based on their technical skills, rather than their engineering leadership skills. When you assemble a team of highly motivated, very smart engineers, it's tempting to assume they can self manage. In my experience, the opposite is true. The more motivated and driven the engineers, the more you need explicit leadership to keep them moving in the same direction. Otherwise you get the next point:

\- Multiple competing initiatives to solve the problem in different ways. Letting engineers compete against each other can feel like a good idea to inexperienced managers because it gets people fired up and working long hours to prove their code is the best. That energy quickly turns into a liability as engineers go full political, hoarding information to help their solution succeed while casually sabotaging the competing solutions. In a startup, you need everyone moving in the same direction. It's okay to have disagreement, but only if everyone can still commit to moving in the one chosen direction. If some people can't commit, they need to be removed from the company.

\- The "drop-in replacement" team. This is just a variation of having engineers compete against each other. Doesn't work.

\- Allowing anyone to discuss "business logic" as if it's somehow different work. This leads to engineers architecting over-generalized "frameworks" for other people to build upon instead of directly solving the company's problems. At a startup, never let people discuss "business logic" as something that someone else deals with. Everyone is working on the business logic, period.

I have to admit that when I was younger and less experienced, I plowed right into many of these same mistakes. These days, I'd do everything in my power to shut down the internal competition and aimless wandering of engineering teams.

Ironically, these situations tend to benefit from strategically shrinking headcount. It's not a fun topic, but it's crucial for regaining alignment. The key is to remove the dissenters, the saboteurs, the politicians, and the architects creating solutions in a vacuum. You need to keep a cohesive core team that can move fast, commit to one direction even when they disagree, and not let their egos get in the way of doing the right thing.

The real challenge is that those employees tend to fly under the radar. The people quietly doing the important work and shipping things that Just Work can be overshadowed by bombastic, highly opinionated "rockstar" engineers. Founders need to be willing to let those rockstars go when they no longer benefit the company, no matter how good their coding skills might be in isolation. A coordinated team of mediocre but diligent engineers will run circles around a chaotic team of rockstars competing against each other.

<comment><USER23> > The real challenge is that those employees tend to fly under the radar. The > people quietly doing the important work and shipping things that Just Work > can be overshadowed by bombastic, highly opinionated "rockstar" engineers. > Founders need to be willing to let those rockstars go when they no longer > benefit the company, no matter how good their coding skills might be in > isolation. A coordinated team of mediocre but diligent engineers will run > circles around a chaotic team of rockstars competing against each other.

So much this. The bombastic Rockstars not only create unnecessary ego driven political fights that are distractions to a business delivering value, but on the occasions they do deliver, it's often not what was promised. But their social skills (or privilege) allow them to cruise through failures.

Whereas a team of devs that work well together that are hungry to learn, willing to have an open minded conversation about systems, that deliver consistently: they are what really keep the business from falling apart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > an infamous incident where one of the investors had to drive to Secaucus to > physically remove the other engineering founder from the cage.

I really want hear this story.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd love to hear more stories like this

</comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone have a version that isn't 37 Tweets?

<comment><USER27> [https://twtext.com/article/1194713712516423681](https://twtext.com/article/1194713712516423681)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Interesting" "feature" of their platform that I see monthly, and more recently given the season. I get a message like "where's my table?"

But I'm not a seller. My username is simple and a common first name. I've approached them a few times, and there's no interest in fixing it. Yesterday, I found where I could open/sever the connection between those messages and my email. It's been going on for years.

Many confused users, although I have little idea how long they stay that way.</comment>


Butcher Chop - Great New iPhone Game - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/butcher-chop/id601950074 My name is Michael Eirinberg. I am 13 years old and am proud to announce that I have just completed my second iPhone app, Butcher Chop. It is an incredibly fun and addictive arcade game. Buy it now! <comment><USER2> Congratulations. It's great to see kids so young able to do this.</comment>


Ask HN: How did you get rid of your allergies? - <AUTHOR> I've had a mold allergy and a pollen allergy since I was a little kid. And i suffer from it very often.
It is often sad that this can be psychosomatic. Some people say that a repatriation therapy should help. But others have gotten rid of their allergies through food changes or other things.
What experience do you have in this field or can anyone scientifically explain why the above things cannot work? <comment><USER2> Allergy shots: [https://www.aaaai.org/conditions-and- treatments/library/alle...](https://www.aaaai.org/conditions-and- treatments/library/allergy-library/allergy-shots-\(immunotherapy\))

For years I suffered with what I thought were mold allergies (they got worse after rain...) I finally went to see an allergist, got tested, then committed to the 3-5 year course of treatment.

I never thought there was anything I could do besides Zyrtec/Sudafed/Kleenex. Turns out I was allergic to dust mites, and there were some concrete changes I could make in my environment (wood floors, cleaning regularly, ...) That made a huge difference while I retrained my immune system.

I'm two years into shots (monthly now, not weekly), my symtoms are significantly better, and my only regret is that I didn't do this 20 years ago.

<comment><USER3> Very much this. My wife is going through this very thing right now. It's been a few years, and her symptoms have improved dramatically. She went from being bed ridden if allergies hit her hard to high pollen warnings barely affecting her. Her allergy specialist set her up with multiple nasal sprays (one steroid, one antihistamine) and a regimen to follow everyday. She went from multiple shots a week to once every couple weeks, and she's receiving the full dose instead of a diluted one which she was originally given. The improvement has been worth its weight in gold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've got a family member having success with having a simple air purification system in the house (with HEPA filter). It made a huge difference, sleeping better, more alert. It doesn't help with the day to day when outside, still uses medication for that. But at least inside, life is a lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had an allergy to certain types of grasses. I changed my diet a bit to try and alter my gut flora alongside not avoiding the grasses. The allergy is significantly less/not noticable & far more tolerable. I even stopped antihistamines.

<comment><USER6> I had great success by doing intermittent fasting (I don't do it anymore). I had pollen, grass allergies, various food intolerance. I couldn't eat plums, grapes, figs, cherries, even bananas. My throat would get sore and lips swell.

After changing my diet and doing intermittent fasting for about a year I completely cured myself. I haven't grass allergy in more than 5 years. I can eat any fruit without any signs of discomfort.

<comment><USER7> Could you describe your diet? What kind of food did you stop and start eating?

<comment><USER6> No meat, reduced on sweet stuff, pastries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only thing that helped me was moving to a new city 8 hours away. I had been suffering my whole life up until moving for college, and had done all the typical treatments an allergist will suggest, but the treatments never helped. Where I live now, I can't say exactly what it is about the area that helps, but it's like I don't have allergies at all.

<comment><USER9> Same experience for me, I did move back though, and it has a marked improvement from existing conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had daily headaches and lived in a mental fog - until I had sinus surgery. My "turbinates" were made smaller, and my impression is that now when allergies make them swell there is still room to breathe. Made all the difference. My life is different since the surgery.

</comment><comment><USER11> If there are other health issues, work on them. My general understanding is that you react allergically in part because your system is generally overloaded. This proved to be a useful metric for me. Getting generally healthier cut back on how many things made me itch and break out in hives and so forth and also cut back on the severity of my reactions for those things that do still cause me issues.

Look up the standard medical advice on keeping your house clean and mold free and etc. It does exist and it is well established, respectable, etc, but doctors tend to gloss over it in favor of writing you a prescription. Go do all that stuff in spades first before trying anything "crazier." That alone may give you substantial relief.

This means also look into things like Sick Building Syndrome. Maybe it's the place you are living or working. That actually happens.

From discussions I have had with people who researched (read up on heavily) this stuff, it's possible that having an undiagnosed parasitic infection promotes allergies. I have no idea what step two is with such info. Just tossing it out there.

I used to spend time on a chelation list (it's how you treat metal poisoning). Metal poisoning may be a factor in allergies and is something most medical doctors won't test for or treat (or, if they do treat it, from what I gather, they often mistreat it -- according to a guy with a PhD in chemistry and published author I used to know who was trying to promote proper chelation).

If you explore that, you will likely find yourself in the land of woo and conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers and they will hate on you just as much as the general public hates on their ilk if you don't drink the koolaid and parrot the same things. So if you want to look into the possibility of metal poisoning and don't want to join in the mantra that all doctors are evil and the government is a conspiracy and so forth, gird your loins and expect to be given hell from all sides and be in the wrong in the eyes of everyone.

Or maybe you will get lucky and find sources of support that successfully take the middle way on such things. It's been a few years since I hung out in chelation spaces online. Maybe there is better stuff these days.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is probably impractical, but move to another region.

Suffered from "hay fever" since I was a kid. Summertime was the worst time when I didn't take my _[allergy medication flavor-of-the-month]_.

I went to another region in the US for college, was there about 10 years before moving back and it really improved my allergies in my home state.

That's a drastic suggestion; but one none-the-less.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm told by friend that drinking nettle tea helped him a lot with these sort of allergies. Basically he drinks it every day. So trying it myself, will see how it goes in the spring.

</comment><comment><USER13> I take some Ebastine when an allergic strike hits (Pollen and dust). Tried other anitihistamines but ebastine doesn't make me drowzy.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have some pollen type allergy in the fall, one drop of sesame oil in each nostril in the morning, before going fishing, does wonders during the day...</comment>


Ask HN: What are concrete use cases for concurrency - <AUTHOR> What sequential use cases, e.g. mapping a list, would you transform to concurrent code? Concurrency tutorials often seem theoretical concentrating on techniques not use cases. I think it would help people with more concrete use cases where concurrency is faster or better or more secure than a sequential version.<p>What would be your concrete examples? <comment><USER2> Concurrency for algorithms shall exploit the many core architecture of current CPUs or even explore many machines (nodes) available. Concurrency can be interpreted as a way of optimization, and one shall start with optimization only at the bottle necks (zen wisedom). That's why parallelism is often applied at compute intense parts of the code (there is even a science about that: High performance computing). Map-Reduce is one of the classic and most widespread approaches.

</comment><comment><USER3> Annotating data with multiple services, you can send the same doc out to (i.e. ML entity recognition) several services at the same time. Merge results when they get back</comment>


The myth of the overnight success - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2012/03/16/the-myth-of-the-overnight-success/ <comment><USER2> Brilliant. The press loves a typical "love at first sight" story, and over time all we remember is the survivors. Psychologists call this the survivorship bias ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)). I think in tech startups someone ought to name this habit the "Techcrunch Bias".</comment>


The boring truth about Social Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-boring-truth-about-social-security/2011/09/08/gIQAp9oaCK_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein <comment><AUTHOR> This of course assumes that there will be no more major demographic shifts, which is not a foregone conclusion. But demographic shifts are quite slow to affect pensions.</comment>


Tindie says forget Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/05/tindie-says-forget-kickstarter/ <comment><USER3> I'd like it if one of these marketplaces emerged that was more careful about vetting sellers. I've ordered Raspberry Pi-related gear off of two unrelated e-com sites in the past month (one was Tindie) and have yet to receive the goods (or any indication they received my order) 3+ weeks after the funds changed hands.

This isn't kickstarter. When I pay for something, I expect to receive it in a reasonable amount of time, or at least receive an explanation of what's going on. A little transparency would go a long way.

<comment><USER3> I think it's ridiculous that this comment got downvoted. I read hacker news every day and want to have a conversation about fulfillment, business models, and maybe learn about various marketplaces and how they're dealing with the problem of fulfillment and inventory management.

Sometimes conversations here can get a little sharp-elbowed, but I can't help but think I'm getting downvoted because I said something marginally negative about Tindie.

Is this what HN is becoming -- say something nice, or don't say anything at all?

<comment><USER4> I agree that your comment had value and didn't deserve to be downvoted. That being said, I think you're jumping to too big of a conclusion based on a single (assuming it was only one) downvote - that HN has become a place where contrary opinions are squashed. Chances are good that someone simply isn't aware of the community standards as to when they are and when they are not supposed to downvote - that downvotes are meant to be reserved for when a comment adds no value to the conversation, not when one simply disagrees with the opinion being shared. In that case, the person needs to be educated to the community's expectations. But we should also not rule out the possibility that someone meant to upvote you and instead pressed the downvote button, which are entirely too close to one another, and of which there is no ability to reverse.

<comment><USER5> Or someone simply thought that the comment was jumping to conclusions with no real data about the actual cause of the problem.

Shipping problems are common enough that two instances close in time does not say anything about _either_ seller, and even if one is bad is does not mean the other is.

Only over the last month I've have one package I ordered from an Amazon Marketplace seller get lost... by Amazon Logistics (first time ever I've seen Amazon's tracking show "package lost by carrier"), and another, from a Kickstarter project, stuck in DHL-limbo for 3 weeks - neither problem had anything to do with the sellers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been a member of the maker community for several years now - <USER2> purple PCBs, selling kits, going to Maker Faire's, etc.

I have a lot of friends, myself included, who started selling their items on Ebay, PayPal's button, or some variant of Magento. Nearly all of them have moved their shops to Tindie. When I was at PyCon, I happened to run into people I knew (independently!) at their booth.

I'm still not sure exactly how they'll reach profitability (they only take 5%) and I'd love to see better tools for sellers (a la shipping.) But I really like what these folks are doing!

<comment><USER7> thanks @memset!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey HN,

Just saw this was picking up steam so if you have any questions, happy to answer them! Some might remember me from my posts a few years ago when I quit my job to learn how to code. Happy to answer any of those questions as well...

Emile

Founder of Tindie

<comment><USER8> My dad and I have ordered all sorts of cool stuff off of Tindie, from Launchpad Boosterpacks to RGB LED matrices. I just wanted to say thanks for this cool service you've provided to sellers and buyers alike!

<comment><USER7> Sure thing! Glad we could help!

<comment><USER9> How was your experience teaching yourself how to code?

<comment><USER7> Saved up, took a year off, and just went at it. Having friends that knew Python definitely helped when Stackoverflow couldn't help. Usually that was because I was asking the question/thinking of the problem wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I like about this is that it doesn't leave the buyer -- here, explicitly a buyer -- in the twilight zone that Kickstarter does. Kickstarter calls you a "backer", and a bearer of risk to some extent, and for this some people in the Oculus case have come to feel like investors and felt seriously cheated. Seriously, search HN.

Actually pricing what a Kickstarter "backing" offer should cost like is a lot like pricing financial derivatives. By offering to back a project, you're swapping a call option for something like a CDO - there are tranches, there are levels of haircuts, etc. etc.

Tindie is just Etsy for Arduino hackers. Congratulations for cutting that Gordian knot!

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like it is for already created products, so is for a different audience than kickstarter. Although, honestly, if I were a maker I'd just pick the one with more traffic and customize or V2 to qualify for kickstarter if I had to since it gets a lot more eyeballs and eyeballs are where the money is.

<comment><USER12> Oh, I don't know. I don't think I'm alone in enjoying making things and sharing them when feasible... but am not that interested in running a real business doing it.

I realize that I'll never make enough income to replace a normal job building this sort of stuff, so a way to make small runs of useful things and actually get them to people who are interested sounds pretty appealing.

As is, I just post stuff I'm making on blog.saikoled.com, but when I have some time I'll definitely look at putting up useful gadgets on something like this. I just don't have the interest to quit working on my real company, get enough investment/funding to make a serious product, and deal with the stress of pitching it to people on kickstarter =P

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tindie is an awesome service, if you're at all interested in (hobby) electronics. There's a nice spectrum of products available, and there's always something new.

I was sad the day the "Supplies" category of product was retired, since there was plenty of stuff available which is hard to find, or just way more expensive, but I understand the need to focus and try to find a clear niche.

Speaking of Kickstarter, it seems possible for the two to co-operate: there's at least one product (Nick Johnson's "Re:Load Pro" active DC load) that I've backed on Kickstarter, and on the day the funding was complete I noticed it's also available (as a pre-order) on Tindie.

Kickstarter: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nickjohnson/re-load- pro...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nickjohnson/re-load-pro-a-dc- active-load), and Tindie: [https://www.tindie.com/products/arachnidlabs/reload- pro/](https://www.tindie.com/products/arachnidlabs/reload-pro/).

</comment><comment><USER14> I am wondering why I have yet to see this tindie mentioned on hackaday.com

To the founder, I would approach them for an advertising deal if at all possible.

<comment><USER7> They were the first to write about us :)

[http://hackaday.com/2012/04/30/tindie-an-etsy-for- electronic...](http://hackaday.com/2012/04/30/tindie-an-etsy-for-electronics/) [http://hackaday.com/2012/06/27/an-etsy-for- electronics/](http://hackaday.com/2012/06/27/an-etsy-for-electronics/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As lnanek2 said below Kickstarter and Tindie are serving 2 different markets. Kickstarter allows projects that require things like tooling to be crowdfunded prior to launch. You cannot supply a plastic spoon product to customers before you have the spoons.</comment>


Guardian records first operating profit since 1998 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48111464 <comment><USER4> > However, the operating profit excludes cash payments of between £25-30m for > capital costs and other business expenditures, which are an annual draw-down > from the Scott Trust, of which The Guardian is part. If these annual costs > were included, The Guardian would still be loss-making

At first, I misinterpreted this to mean they're counting money granted by a wealthy donor as profit. And without that, they would still be losing money. But, as clarified in the comments below, the Guardian is actually _paying_ the Scott Trust. Also the Scott Trust _owns_ The Guardian. Forgive my confusion. This isn't a straightforward relationship.

> Nevertheless, the operating profit marks the completion of a three-year plan > that few observers thought likely to succeed, and which leant heavily on a - > for British media at least - eccentric business decision to ask readers to > contribute financially for something they could get for free.

So the business model is asking users for a donation? This sounds more like a non-profit to me.

I guess this is better than bleeding millions/year but we can hardly call this a good business.

<comment><USER5> > So the business model is asking users for a donation?

With people's ever growing concerns about malware, ransomware, privacy invasions and the invasive nature of ads, people are turning to Ad-Blockers so this makes sense. I started using an Ad-Blocker a long time ago and I've always struggled with it because I know it's robbing sites of revenue, and at the same time I felt violated by all the ads I saw whenever I turned it off.

Back in 2017 when the Guardian started showing those big yellow banners at the bottom of articles, I started contributing. If I'm on a site more than a few times a year and they have an option to contribute, I try to.

I really think there's some space for innovation here. I like contributing to journalism and I don't want to setup annual subscriptions for 20 different sites, but I can't easily keep track of which sites I frequent or when I last contributed.

<comment><USER6> There is Blendle, but I hate paying per article — it places a restrictive barrier on freely browsing articles. Blendle also misses a lot of quality newspapers (like the Dutch NRC).

<comment><USER7> I love the original idea of Blendle, low price articles, no payment if you leave within a few seconds.

Haven't used it recently since they hadn't too many of the articles I wanted && I have a sneaking suspicion that refunds aren't as easy anymore.

<comment><USER8> I tried it and didn't like the model. Paying per article is just crazy, it makes you feel like you have to watch what you're spending all the time. I'd rather a fixed amount that leads me read as much or as little as I choose

<comment><USER7> Is it somehow worse than browsing a bookshelf in a bookstore or the magazines in a kiosk?

<comment><USER9> No it's not worse. I think the author you replied to was stating that it's nicer to pay a flat fee and get unlimited viewing (itunes, google play, spotify, netflix, etc). Can we have that for journalism?

<comment><USER10> Apple News?

I'm genuinely intrigued by the promises of that service, but I'm not willing to pay $1000+ for hardware to access it.

<comment><USER11> Well, if you go iPad, $400 but point taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whilst there have always been loony left, misandrist etc. articles in the Guardian (I speak having read it regularly since the 80s) I'd argue that to make their supporter model work they've had to drop their editorial standards lower still.

<comment><USER13> > Whilst there have always been loony left, misandrist etc. articles in the > Guardian

Speaking as someone on the left in the UK, I can assure you the Guardian has been more and more centrist as time goes on. I think the confusion is that they do in fact publish loony articles sometimes on social issues, because guess what? That's easy to do without really addressing any economic problems.

On the economic front they're as centrist as they get, regularly attacking the likes of Corbyn in ways that the Sun is starting to envy, smearing Assange once they're done profiting off him, printing puff pieces for the Saudi Crown Prince etc. The Guardian is no darling of the (grassroots) left, I can assure you.

<comment><USER14> Monbiot still has a regular article there, he's as far left as it gets. Maybe a holdover from the past but the Guardian is still really keen on nationalisation, regulation, state control over everything, the EU etc. The modern left doesn't argue in terms of _direct_ state control anymore, just indirect control through vast and vague regulations.

<comment><USER15> > Monbiot ... is as far left as it gets

Not at all. See The Dangerous Cult of the Guardian by former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook:

[https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/28/the-dangerous- cult-o...](https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/28/the-dangerous-cult-of-the- guardian/)

> George Monbiot, widely considered to be the Guardian's most progressive > columnist, has used his slot to attack a disparate group on the "left" who > also happen to be harsh critics of the Guardian.

Media analysts Media Lens have written a lot on Monbiot too. [http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert- archive/search-t...](http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert- archive/search-the-archive.html?searchword=monbiot&searchphrase=all)

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure that refutes anything. One of the hallmarks of far left views is the intense infighting between rival factions that seems to accompany them. Far left types attacking each other despite agreeing on nearly everything is not new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Guardian editor-in-chief on breaking even against the odds: [https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/may/01/the- guardian-...](https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/may/01/the-guardian- break-even-katharine-viner)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've setup a yearly donation of €12. As someone outside of the UK, The Guardian has proven to be one of the few sources of reliable, in-depth reporting on the Brexit shambles (I do miss ColinCaserole though).

Ideally, I would be able to set up an all-you-can-eat subscription to a number of well-regarded international newspapers for languages that I am proficient in and access them at will from both a single portal (like Blendle, but absolutely not paying per article) and the newspapers own websites.

<comment><USER17> >'The Guardian has proven to be one of the few sources of reliable, in-depth reporting on the Brexit shambles.'

In many ways, The Guardian is a remarkable paper. It does not publish falsehoods, or - for the most part - appeal to the worst in people. It is committed to the defence of civil liberties, and to ensuring that journalism is open to everyone, regardless of their income.

But it's coverage of Brexit is highly partisan. It is not unreliable in the sense of being inaccurate; it is simply one side of the conversation.

<comment><USER18> I'm an avid reader of The Guardian and donate 50EUR a year.

Of course it's partisan on Brexit (as is The Economist, btw) and of course its general direction has a leftist slant (and why should it not?)

That said, I think it's one of the few remaining quality papers in the UK, which provides overall accurate reporting.

What makes me gag sometimes is some of the writers in The Opinion section. But that's fine too. If it's too crack-pottery I'm alsways free to ignore it.

Their Long Read section[1], though, is fantastic long form journalism and that alone justifies my yearly donation.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long- read](https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long-read)

EDIT : Slight clarification

<comment><USER19> > and of course its general direction has a leftist slant (and why should it > not?)

Because when you go into every news story already convinced that the left are in the right in a given situation then your reporting is compromised.

<comment><USER18> No paper is strictly objective and it's not supposed to be.

I think that's completely fine as long as the direction is clear and the reporting is accurate.

On the other side of the spectrum we would have, for example, The Wall Street Journal.

While I personally believe that _some_ of their opinion writers are even worse than _some_ of The Guardian's opinion writers there's no doubt that The Journal delivers some stellar world class journalism.

Or would you apply a different standard there?

<comment><USER19> I think people can at least try not to bring their bias to work, or failing that actively declare that your reporting is designed to campaign for a particular politics. The Guardian doesn't even attempt that.

They approach reporting like an angry anonymous Twitter account.

<comment><USER17> There is no such thing as impartial journalism. You have to select and interpret events. You cannot but do so from a particular perspective. The Guardian does a far better job than most newspapers at upholding accuracy in their writing. They don't lie to or manipulate their readers.

<comment><USER19> How come for example the Times manages to include opinion pieces by views across the political spectrum and the Guardian doesn't? The Guardian don't even pretend to be trying.

<comment><USER17> 'Trying' to do what? If you accept that a paper cannot be impartial, then what ought they be trying to do? It seems to me, from what you said, that you wish for them to be as plural as possible. Perhaps that's one virtue.

But there's nothing illegitimate about a paper having a particular political persuasion. Every paper does. What they should be judged by - holding politics equal - is the vocational standards of journalism: sobriety, rigour, accuracy, style, and a refusal to appeal to the worst in humans. I would say the Guardian does very well on all these counts. You say that it doesn't declare its politics, but it does: you only have to read their editorials. Not that it's a secret; everyone knows.

As for The Times, I can't speak with any authority. I don't read it, because it's behind a paywall. I know they're a centre-right paper who sometimes publish those on the centre-left. But my sense is that the former massively outnumber the latter, and that they rarely if ever publish social democrats and socialists.

The graph in this study fits, broadly, with my intuitions:

[https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles- reports/2017/0...](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles- reports/2017/03/07/how-left-or-right-wing-are-uks-newspapers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You know, I don't particularly agree with the leftist bent of the Guardian. However, that being said, the Guardian is, by far, one of the highest quality publications available today. While the views don't always align with mine, I can respect quality. Wishing the folks at the Guardian continued success; I appreciate being exposed to alternative views that consistently challenge my own.

<comment><USER21> Call me a dreamer, but I believe unbiased reporting should be the goal of journalism and I associate a "political bent" with _poor_ quality.

You must be associating (lack of) quality with how sensationalist/tabloid- style a publication is, which is more superficial.

> I appreciate being exposed to alternative views that consistently challenge > my own

Which is why a publication should aim to challenge its readers with _opposing_ opinion pieces, instead of constantly reinforcing their beliefs (aka "the easy way out").

<comment><USER22> > Call me a dreamer, but I believe unbiased reporting should be the goal of > journalism and I associate a "political bent" with poor quality.

If you want "unbiased reporting" you get articles like: Angela Merkel ate Aspargus yesterday.

That's unbiased. It's also irrelevant. Anything more interesting will always have a bias as long as it is written by humans.

<comment><USER23> For (largely) unbiased reporting read the Financial Times - [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/financial- times/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/financial-times/)

The Guardian do pretty well: [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the- guardian/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/) \- but are well known to be left leaning

<comment><USER24> Financial Times have a very strong bias towards liberal economic policy. They support de-regulation and reduced state involvement in markets. Similar to the econmist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The headline is incorrect. The Guardian recorded positive EBITDA, but did _not_ record positive Operating Profit (almost universally used to refer to EBIT).

The original source[0] seems to deliberately conflate the two measures: "GNM has achieved its break even goal delivering an operating profit at EBITDA level of £0.8 million"

The BBC article then parroted the 'operating profit' part, leaving out the 'at EBITDA level' qualifier, thus turning a slightly misleading statement into a factually incorrect one.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/p/bcd4a](https://www.theguardian.com/p/bcd4a)

</comment><comment><USER26> They're an excellent publication that publish stories[0] that the New York times, LA times, and other institutional newspapers would not dare to touch.

If you value your privacy and your constitutional rights - please consider donating to the Guardian. They are one of the very few news organizations that are not censored by the US/UK gov't. [0]:[https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/the-nsa-files](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-files)

<comment><USER27> I have a friend whose email was hacked. His personal photos of himself, his wife and child were taken. The guardian called him and said "we need a quote from you about an article on XYZ or we'll release your personal information found in the e-mails." So in this particular case "If you value your privacy" does not apply to the Guardian. Unless you feel they have a constitutional right to blackmail people?

<comment><USER28> That is an extraordinary claim, and needs some evidence for it to be taken seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wasn't 1998 the midpoint of one the greatest economic booms in history? Kinda like the one we are currently in? As a 90s kid I remember hearing about how record unemployment and stock records on TV back then. It's amazing that the guardian hasn't had a profit in 20 years.

This just shows that major news companies are not real companies, but state or systematic enterpises. I can see microsoft or google going out of business sometime in the future. But I can't see the guardian or the nytimes or any of the major news companies going out of business. Because they are part of the system though they claim to be the ones keeping an eye on the system.

If I were a betting man, I'd bet that in 100 years, amazon won't exist. But I'd never bet that the nytimes wouldn't exist. Though amazon may be a trillion dollar company, it's still a company. Whiles the nytimes is more than a system. It's part of the power structure.

</comment><comment><USER30> One thing the Guardian gets right (in my opinion) is their online subscriber model.

I subscribed to it, the cost is reasonable (£5/month) and it was easy to sign up and is easy to cancel.

Recently I wanted to get some news from a more right-wing perspective, so I looked at paying for the The times.

Their site advertises a two month £7.99 subscription, which is fine.

However what you don't find till you go to sign up is after that it's £26/month which isn't cheap and, far worse, to cancel a subscription you have to phone them.

This kind of classic dark pattern (easy to sign-up hard to cancel) was enough for me to cancel out and not complete the sub.

<comment><USER31> I fell for the Times subscription too. Fair enough, I did expect the cost to increase after the initial promotion period but not the hurdles required to cancel.

But then, when you subscribe and find you're seeing as many ads as you do with free to view alternatives it's not surprising they are going to rely on keeping you locked in for as long as possible?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> HN is weird sometimes: this submission of mine was made earlier, on the same subject, and only attracted a few sparse comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19803586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19803586)

I am always interested in looking at cases like these and try to discern why one submission received a lot more attention than another one. I guess it's more haruspex than science.

<comment><USER33> It's all about that headline. Yours conveys a reference to information, this one conveys the interesting part up front. In a world where both print and digital media are seeing consolidation and bankruptcy almost daily, this is a story of an outlet with quality journalism making a profit. It made my Friday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't really get this "have the old media survive" stuff.

Media always need resources to get produced, no matter which format. So they are never independent. Whoever provides these resources has the power. But that's not a big deal because it applies to almost everything. And if you say profit is the master ,then you need to do attention whoring and advertisement. If politics is your master then you do propaganda. If a super rich is your master, then you will keep silent about their allys and denounce their enemies. All that is normal. It's not perfect but it can't be improved either. You can only exchange one master for another.

And you also don't have to worry that there won't be a master. Of course there will always be people who want to reach out to N other people for a number of reasons. Some people just like the attention, some use it for power plays, some use it to convince people to do something.

And no matter what's in it, there will also always be consumers. Because they too like a good show and some attention.

So honestly we should simply not mind. If you work in the industry see where things are going and develop skills in that direction. If you own a medium, try to innovate and/or buy developing new media. If you are a consumer simply consume what you like the most.

<comment><USER35> > Media always need resources to get produced, no matter which format. So they > are never independent. Whoever provides these resources has the power. (…) > It's not perfect but it can't be improved either. You can only exchange one > master for another.

There's a big difference between being dependent on (a) a wealthy owner, (b) big advertisers, and (c) readers.

<comment><USER36> I'm not sure I've ever seen a successful news organization that hasn't relied on some combination of all three.

<comment><USER37> Well the Guardian has managed to be successful without a wealthy owner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The Guardian has become a clickbait rag in the last decade. I can't say I'm happy their bad behavior is being rewarded.

<comment><USER39> Do you read the Guardian? I do, practically everyday, and I can say - <USER2> someone is centre-right, i.e. not the guardian's idea of their readers - <USER3> just isn't true.

This comment ignores the existence of Owen Jones, of course, but still.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Would like to know how much they receive via Brave/BAT: [https://batgrowth.com/publishers/website](https://batgrowth.com/publishers/website)

Could be a nice boost to adoption if it's significant, but maybe they want to keep it their secret ...

</comment><comment><USER41> Shameless plug, we're hiring: [https://workforus.theguardian.com/careers/digital- developmen...](https://workforus.theguardian.com/careers/digital-development/)

<comment><USER42> > To apply for this position you must already have the right to work in the > UK.

Why must be dreams only be dreams? Signed, a developer in continental Europe.

<comment><USER43> Brexit hasn't happened yet. You still currently have the right to work in the UK.

<comment><USER44> Even after Brexit (if it ever happens) you should still apply. Rights to work in the UK can be acquired. From my observation the number of non EU IT workers (and foreign workers in general) out-number those from the EU

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The Guardian is one of the most toxic news sites around. A lot of their pieces are complete fluff filled with snarky opinions. It's pretty damning when you read a "news" article and it sounds like a little kid rambling on.

<comment><USER46> Do you have an example of them being toxic? I read it a fair bit and there's some pc/lefty silliness but it seldom sees toxic.

<comment><USER47> Some example of quality Guardian writing:

> _Like walking into a space and suddenly realising everyone there is white. > You know that feeling? When you go to a rooftop bar in Peckham and you worry > that you've inadvertently stumbled into a Klan meeting?_

Just imagine the same text with white replaced by black and Klan by gang.

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/22/avenge...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/22/avengers- endgame-superheroes-marvel)

<comment><USER48> That's an opinion column about a superhero movie. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't expect subtle sociopolitical analysis in that sort of material in _any_ newspaper.

<comment><USER47> That was exactly my point. The Guardian casually drops anti-white bigotry in articles as random as a superhero movie review.

If that statement had the word black instead of white, the next day the author would have been fired and an extensive apology published on the front page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I do read it quite often, however I would never ever pay a penny for it until it opens up comments under all the articles and not just some vanilla news,where you can be pretty sure there won't be much of a debate. There many ways to achieve self moderation if hiring extra staff isn't an option.

<comment><USER50> I would be happy if comments on contentious articles were only open to donating members so they have some skin in the game and are contributing to the cost of moderation. Problem is they become full of drive-by trolls if left fully open.

<comment><USER49> In the country where I come from,we've got a very popular online news website. comments are are split into two categories: registered (facebook,google+) and anonymous. Users also have an ability to upvote/downvote or flag comments.It does work pretty well tbh.

<comment><USER50> Maybe. I think if someone visits just to troll having to donate to a publication they dislike might be a reasonable deterrent and it improves user tracking for moderation. It could serve to focus the conversation to people who at least respect the publication as a whole even if they disagree with a particular article. Seeing comments by people who clearly just dislike the Guardian don't really add much. Comments like "Typical left wing Guardian nonsense" are pretty common and useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> PT Barnum knew how profitable this business model was years ago. There's one born any minute. Its a pity, too, because The Guardian used to do real journalism. Now its a rag pushing conspiracy theories and MI6 propaganda. Unbelievably, they still haven't retracted their debunked story about Paul Manfort turning invisible and meeting Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy three times. Embarrassing.

<comment><USER52> Why would they retract the story ?

They had sources whom I am sure they trusted and since it happened in 2016 before the change of the Ecuadorian government it's plausible that there was implicit support for the meeting. Assange was hardly some innocent bystander during the last US election so he definitely has form.

Fact is that when you have a situation like this we simply don't know what the truth is so who is it to say that the Guardian is wrong here.

<comment><USER51> There was no mention of any meeting whatsoever in the Mueller report. There was no mention of any meeting whatsoever in the indictments and trials of Manafort. There is no video footage or picture of Manafort ever being anywhere near the embassy, or even in London, during any of the _three_ times that the Guardian claimed they met. Your tinfoil hat has to be very, very tight to believe that Manafort could have secretly met with the most watched man in the world, in the city with the densest surveillance network in the world, without anyone seeing him, without a single picture being taken, without any evidence at all that he had every been there. Not only did he do supposedly do this, but he supposedly did this _three times_!! Its been many months since the story was published, and the Guardian has shown absolutely no evidence of any meeting. The fact is that no matter what you think of Assange, Manafort, Trump, or anyone else, this is a stunning journalistic failure. The fact that the Guardian continues to stand by this story (silently) without offering any evidence of its veracity is a terrible stain on what was once a very good paper.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to differentiate between MVP and not completed product? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A working definition: An MVP has been put in front of users. That's what makes it a whole product.

An alternative take: [http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/01/minimum-viable- prod...](http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/01/minimum-viable-product- process/)</comment>