NASA: Let's Explore Venus in Solar Zeppelins and Build a Cloud City - <AUTHOR> http://sacd.larc.nasa.gov/branches/space-mission-analysis-branch-smab/smab-projects/havoc/

<comment><AUTHOR> Could Venus be a more enticing option for an upcoming manned mission than Mars? Not having to perform descent and subsequent launch, such a mission presumably could be done for a fraction of the cost of a Mars mission.

<comment><USER2> There are three possible mission plans I know of for Venus. 1) Venus flyby, like what was planned in the 1970s with Apollo hardware. 2) Orbit Venus, and 3) this one to descend into the atmosphere.

For Mars there are four: 1) flyby, 2) orbit, 3) land on one of the Martian moons, 4) land on Mars. The latter has a variant: Zubrin proposed that we can make rocket fuel on Mars and use that for the ascent and/or return.

Of these, I don't see why a flyby does anything other than say we did it. Our automated probes are now much more capable than we had in the 1960s/1970s. Though if a human were useful, the Venus is definitely quicker to get to than Mars.

As far as I can tell, it's about the same amount of delta-v to get to Mars as Venus, so orbiting either is possible, except the longer flight time for Mars and back means a lot more extra supplies (something like 5kg/day * 14 months?) and more risk of something going wrong. Venus comes out ahead.

But what does a human orbiting either planet add that a robotic probe does not?

The most often given example is fast response time for a rover, since it's at least a 4 minute lag for Venus and 6 minutes for Mars. I would rather have a dozen slow rovers on the ground controlled from Earth, or a dozen long-term probes orbiting the gas giants than a single one by a human above Venus. In any case, we know we can put capable rovers on Mars. On Venus they tend to melt.

This one to descend into the atmosphere of Venus means a return vehicle almost as powerful as what's needed to get someone off Earth. That's going to be tough to solve. Our biggest balloon launched rockets are, I believe, from amateur organizations. OTOH, robots don't need to come back to Earth.

Landing on a moon of Mars would combine Mars observations and visual exploration of (what's believed to be) an asteroid. Though it would be easier if we go to a near Earth asteroid instead.

In the balance of things, I think Mars is still more enticing. Though I'm definitely in the robot probe camp.

And I would much rather have people on the Moon again, since my hopeful belief is that trained geologists on the ground for a full lunar day would be more capable than the equivalent cost in robots at understanding lunar geology. (I ask myself though if it's worth the 1% chance of death.)</comment></comment>


On that which I call Semantic Logic - <AUTHOR> http://mjsaah.net/post/semantic_logic/ <comment><USER2> I did not find this blog post clear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'm still trying to flesh out the concept. This post was an attempt to do that via examples, but I guess I haven't really succeeded.

Was it the structure you found unclear? Or the examples/analysis?</comment></comment>


YugaByteDB – A Transactional Database with Cassandra, Redis and PostgreSQL APIs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/YugaByte/yugabyte-db <comment><USER2> Does anyone know a comparison between this and CockroachDB? Or have experience running either in production?

They seem to compare against other databases, but not against Cockroach which seems to be the biggest competitor. I'm looking at implementing a global-scale database cluster with very specific requirements, and YugaByte seems to meet those but a comparison against CockroachDB seems warranted.

Edit: just noticed they do compare features against CockroachDB: [https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/comparisons/#distributed- sq...](https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/comparisons/#distributed-sql- databases), but they don't have an in-depth comparison.

<comment><USER3> YugaByte only added distributed transactions in the new 1.1 release (previously, it only supported single-row transactions). The architecture is a variation on 2PC and seems sound, but I think it's fair to say that it's early days. Meanwhile, Cockroach and TiDB both have battle-tested implementations.

YugaByte is pretty quirky. Rather than settle on a native data model, they offer several "personalities" that mimic other products (Cassandra, Redis and PostgreSQL), and you can mix and match them. But they've implemented each API with their own set of weird warts. For example, their CQL implementation has CREATE INDEX, but it does not index existing data [1]. You have to either create the secondary index _before_ inserting data, or force a reindex of everything with a dummy UPDATE statement. Who would ship such a product?

More warts/Cassandraisms: UPDATE is actually an upsert; an update that doesn't match a row will insert it. And SELECT ... WHERE expressions can only use AND expressions (!) [2].

Hopefully the forthcoming SQL API should be saner, but it's very limited at the moment. It does not seem to support joins, transactions or indexes, for example. Meanwhile, CockroachDB and TiDB both have rich SQL implementations, including joins and aggregations, with cost-based query optimizers that can take advantage of multiple indexes and table statistics.

It seems more appropriate to compare YugaByte with distributed key/value stores like FoundationDB, Cassandra, Scylla and Redis.

[1] [https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/explore/transactional/secon...](https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/explore/transactional/secondary- indexes/)

[2] [https://docs.yugabyte.com/v1.0/api/cassandra/dml_select/#roo...](https://docs.yugabyte.com/v1.0/api/cassandra/dml_select/#root)

<comment><USER4> Those things you mentioned are just how Cassandra works. It's a wide-column key/value store and everything is an upsert because that's how the write path is designed, there is no read-then-write (other than LWTs). If you're using an application that expects Cassandra then this is normal so why would Yugabyte change the semantics?

It's true that indexing is unfinished but they've also long been problematic in the CQL data model so Yugabyte is moving faster and actually releasing something for those who can work with it. Cassandra took years to come up with several types of indexes that all have problems and Scylla is overdue by 18 months on their implementation.

<comment><USER3> That's why I referred to the behaviour as Cassandraisms.

The question was posed in the context of CockroachDB, so my answer stands -- CDB vs. YugaByte is an apples to oranges comparison, seeing as YugaByte isn't an RDBMS by any useful measure, and has a very long way to go to get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I see databases like this pop up, a part of me wonders why they don't devote effort to develop a plugin for MariaDB or PostgreSQL? Follow in the steps of Citus Data.

<comment><USER6> Several months ago, setup of a Citus Cluster seemed to be a not straightforward, while at the same time I was able to setup and run a CockroachDB cluster in less than half hour with docker. I've checked YugaByte documentation about setup, and CockroachDB still won in operation complexity.

I doubt that the same will be done with PostgreSQL or MariaDB anytime soon. People are begging for a good and easy psql HA cluster setup for ages, and it is just not happening (yeah, they are getting closer and closer), while such DBs fill a need with good results.

<comment><USER7> @isoos, I'd be curious to understand more about why you thought YugaByte would be more operationally complex to deploy, as we strive to make things as easy to get started with as possible...

For example, for local testing, in our Quick Start docs section, we have info for: mac/linux, involving just downloading and unpacking the release and you should be good to go; for local docker, you can download our control script; for k8s download our sample yml.

Finally, for non-local testing, we have a Deploy > Manual Deployment section, highlighting the 3 steps for downloading YugaByte, bringing up Masters (metadata nodes) and then Tservers (data nodes).

Note: I work at YugaByte.

<comment><USER6> With CockroachDB, I was able to create a cluster with three commands, one command on each node (docker run ....), one port on each node. It can't really get more simple than that.

With YugaByteDB: I needed to think about master and tserver nodes, to run them and connect them separately. There was no clear guide that had "run these three docker command on the three different nodes" and be done with it.

Note: I run everything is in simple docker images (and not compose, not swarm, not kubernates, just plain docker images).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Those are a lot of claims. Databases that make half those claim, turn out to be misrepresenting some of them. So far its empty promises on a box.

When can we expect independent 3rd party evaluation of all these claims? The most famous one is Jespen:

[https://jepsen.io/analyses](https://jepsen.io/analyses)

Because this all sounds way too good to be true. What's the catch? How stable is this? Are the claims tested other than in theory?

<comment><USER4> They made a post about testing with Jepsen: [https://blog.yugabyte.com/jepsen- testing-on-yugabyte-db-data...](https://blog.yugabyte.com/jepsen-testing-on- yugabyte-db-database/)

<comment><USER8> Awesome. Thanks. This is very very encouraging!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Design is very similar to Hbase minus the dependency on Zookeeper and HDFS. RocksDB has been very smartly modified to use it as an optimized storage layer.</comment>


Apple claims the new A9x faster than an intel core i5 mobile chip - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/3k9vie/apple_claims_the_new_a9x_faster_than_an_intel/ <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone knows what's the RAM size in the forthcoming ipad pro? It was rumored to carry 4GB DDR4 RAM (which would be really awesome), but since then the source of the rumor (e.g. an Adobe blog post) has been redacted for the part talking about the RAM size...

It's understandable that Apple always tries to conceal certain hardware configuration details for their products, possibly out of the worry that consumers might compare those configurations across devices built on different platforms...But I just wish I could at least mentally compare a certain Apple device to its predecessors, then I could know if some apps will freeze again when I switch tasks...

<comment><USER2> Just wait for the teardown.

<comment><AUTHOR> if they could keep it secret until then, their lips must be really tight...</comment></comment></comment>


Why The Hell Do I Need Types? Because Fahrenheit can't be less than −459.67 - <AUTHOR> http://geekabyte.blogspot.nl/2014/04/why-hell-do-i-need-types-because.html

<comment><USER2> While the _general_ concept is valid, the _specific_ example in the headline relies on the idea that negative absolute temperature cannot exist, which is false. [1]

Perhaps more significantly, the article could use some examples of how different approaches to typing solve this problem, and discussing pros and cons; "not all numbers are valid for all numeric-valued variables" is a fairly shallow observation standing on its own.

[1] See, e.g., [http://www.quantum-munich.de/research/negative-absolute- temp...](http://www.quantum-munich.de/research/negative-absolute-temperature/)</comment>


EBay: Our paid Google advertising was a total waste of money - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/13/ebay_study_google_paid_search_not_worth_it/

<comment><USER2> Their advertising wasn't particularly targeted, either. If you typed "non- existent golden unicorn dung", they'd just put up an ad that said "find non- existent golden unicorn dung on Ebay". Anyone who looked at it would know that it wasn't pointing to a particular item and that is was just siphoning off traffic in hopes that you might find or sell something. This is pretty much one of the stupider ways to use Google's tech. It's not surprising that their ROI was dismal.

<comment><USER3> Not sure why this got downvoted because it's true and we've all seen it. I won't trust anything ebay says about marketing because they are completely out of touch with their own users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd think that it has more to do with the nature of ebay's business. Sure, I might click the link and check the prices on ebay, but why would I want to deal with private merchants, slow shipping, paypal, signing up for an account (if new user) and a bunch of other things that go along with ebay if I don't absolutely have to?

I'd be interested to see Amazon's return on advertising.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm utterly confused by ebay's move here. They have the brand exposure. If someone is looking for something and would find ebay acceptable, they would go to ebay directly. Someone who finds ebay unacceptable would not touch an ebay ad. Why would the company think ads would help at this stage?

<comment><USER6> Not saying I think they're correct, but I would imagine they're targeting people who know about eBay, don't have an opinion regarding them one way or the other, and aren't going to take that extra step to check ebay.com for their next purchase.

As the article said, to "draw them in."</comment></comment>


Windows Exploit Programming Primer [2 hr video] - <AUTHOR> http://securitytube.net/Windows-Exploit-Programming-Primer-video.aspx

<comment><USER2> Posted this course content up a while ago. More material from this course can be found at:

<http://pentest.cryptocity.net/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Shoot the camera operator.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you grateful for? Happy Thanksgiving - <AUTHOR> What are you grateful for near the end of 2018?<p>Happy Thanksgiving everyone! <comment><USER2> THE I N T E R N E T</comment>


Zirtual Fired 400 Employees Right Before It Was Acquired. Now They're Suing - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2015/08/14/zirtual_fired_400_employees_right_before_being_acquired_now_they_re_suing.html

<comment><USER2> I feel like I remember reading that startups.co acquired Zirtual's assets and not Zirtual the company. Possibly they did this so they wouldn't be liable for anything like this?

As is, whatever is left of Zirtual presumably doesn't have any assets worth suing over.

<comment><USER3> Yes, in general an asset purchaser is not liable for judgments against the seller. But there is the potential for a buyer to have "successor liability" under certain circumstances. Usually, it's when the sale is really a de facto merger, with continuity in the identities of shareholders. If this was a cash sale of assets, that would not apply here. In some states there are ways to get successor liability when the buyer continues the business of the seller, not in Delaware.

Of course the assets were sold for cash, so that's in the husk of the company. If that money exists, it'll be hard for shareholders and insiders to get it out of the remnant company without running into trouble in the inevitable bankruptcy. But even if the employees win, they're judgment creditors and behind a few people in the line for that money.

<comment><USER4> I thought back pay had a very high priority in bankruptcy. Are WARN act payments considered ordinary judgments rather than back pay?

<comment><USER3> Good point. I think unpaid wage judgments are given the same priority as unpaid wages. Either way they're behind secured creditors. If the company had bank loans secured by collateral, the banks may have dibs on the proceeds.

<comment><USER2> Venture debt would be unsecured though right? Probably all (or nearly all) of their debt falls into that category.

<comment><USER3> Yeah if they have mostly venture debt it's probably not secured by collateral.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. What a mess. I feel bad for the founder, even though she handled the situation badly.

<comment><USER6> I feel bad for the hundreds of employees she essentially stole from and left in the lurch.</comment></comment>


Princeton Looks to Break Up the White Male Money Monopoly - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/princeton-looks-to-break-up-the-white-male-money-monopoly <comment><USER2> How is this not blatent discriminaton? They are only choosing donors based on gender and race.

This doesn't really set a good example when we are trying to get away from this backwards thinking.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone Using a USB Drive as a PC Replacement? - <AUTHOR> Since OS distros can be mounted on a USB Drive and booted, curious whether anyone uses a USB Drive as a laptop replacement. Are there any pitfalls? USBs seem a convenient way to turn most computers into a personalized PC <comment><USER2> Something like 15 years ago, during college, I kept a series of windows "Portable Apps"[0] on a thumb drive, which allowed me to take my most frequently used applications and settings with me to any of the computer labs on campus, etc.

[0] [https://portableapps.com/](https://portableapps.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: iPhone Web App or iPhone App? - <AUTHOR>

Hello all,
Sorry, this place is becoming my goto place for benign questions, being a lowly lone developer has its drawbacks!
You are looking for some information via Google on your iPhone/iPod touch. You find a link to a website that has all you need. Two options:
1) The website is optimised for the iPhone and looks nice enough but is fairly dumb i.e. no location awareness, access to contacts etc.
2) The website says, hey we have an iPhone app, you need to install it to see this lovely information. The app is free and fairly small (< 2 MB).
Would option 2 put you off enough to go elsewhere? It's not intended as a walled garden, it's a choice between me developing an iPhone app AND an iPhone web app and have them co-exist, or go with just one option.
Obviously having just one is easier for me but I want to keep as many people happy as I can because I'm that kind of guy.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> If you can, I'd do both:

Making an iPhone-friendly website isn't very hard, and using the iUI will allow you to easily integrate a psuedo-iPhone interface.

Then, your iPhone application would pull in your iPhone website, while also providing the other functionality you want to include (location awareness, contacts).

</comment><comment><USER3> Build a webapp, then build an app which is just a wrapper for the web app. All the app will contain is safari with the webapp loaded. This gives the ease of building and ability to use without installation advantages of webapp with the appstore visibility of an installable app. If the app is popular enough you can then build a proper app that has better features is you need them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you charging for it? If you do, definitely an app.

</comment><comment><USER5> An iPhone web app will also work on Androids Platform and I'm assuming Nokia's S60 Platform(it uses a webkit browser).

So there are some benefits to being platform "agnostic" (even though it's not as true in this case).

</comment><comment><USER6> Yelp has three options: Main site telling you that there is a Yelp app in the app store (I guess it's using the UA string), mobile site, yelp application.

Ideally having both is nice, with the same functionality sans the native-only stuff (e.g. like you said location awareness and contacts). Yelp has different limitations for all three options - today I tried to look up a restaurant on yelp's app and found it, but I had to go use the full regular site to write a review (how irritating).

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah, I agree with the other folk, doing an iPhone site shouldn't be hard. How often will people be coming back to get this information? Native apps have huge advantages in UI design and functionality that can help display information in more useful ways. But if its short, simple stuff, an iPhone friendly website might be the easy way. Then you can go with an iPhone app for power users and provide more functionality.

</comment><comment><USER8> Based on your questions and your last comment... let's be clear here. You aren't wanting to make an app just to view content right (ala plugin)? The purpose of the native app route is to provide better/easier/more interaction with your site/web application. If it's just another way to view the site, I would just do an iphone optimized site ala m.digg.com, espn, foxnews, cnn, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you can get away with it, a webapp. Given Apple's restrictions on 3rd party software, a webapp gives you the most freedom and future compatibility though it does mean sacrificing the beauty and elegance of native code.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you have both, maybe you can justify charging for the app (assuming that it has some advantages over the site, such as location awareness). Use the Web version for free, and pay for the app if you want more.

</comment><comment><USER11> If the application was good enough (and the price was right), I'd certainly install it on my phone.

There seems like a dearth right now of really good iPhone applications, so the more the merrier, I say.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, I was worried that it may seem like asking someone to install a proprietary plug-in just to see my site but I guess it's not exactly the same.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems like both is the best option, thanks everyone!

</comment><comment><USER12> iPhone Apps are good if

a) You want to charge for the app

b) iPhone's MobileSafari can't do what you need, performance-wise or feature- wise. Note the gap is narrowing now that MobileSafari has touch events and hardware accelerated 2D and 3D transforms.

</comment><comment><USER13> I used iUi to build a web app. It was surprisingly simple!</comment>


Apple demolished by Microsoft at PC events - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-demolished-by-microsoft-at-their-respective-pc-events-2016-10-27 <comment><USER2> A false media narrative. Apple will sell millions of MacBook Pros. Microsoft will be lucky if they even sell a million of the very cool-looking but niche Surface Studio.

<comment><USER3> No.

This is about the "PC Event". Is patently clear MS have the upper hand and Apple was a huge letdown with the biggest backlash of the century so far (from the PRO crowd).

This is not about sales, but perception. Even when WinTel (before) sell way more than Apple, Apple get the "cool" vibre.

This was not.

And this is not as before, where the typical gloom and doom about Apple was declared.

<comment><USER4> There's always backlash from the self-proclaimed "pro" crowd about Apple's events. So many people can't get past the idea that Apple's aiming at the general public, not at their little power-user niche, and so they declare that Apple has "lost its way" or are otherwise putting out bad products, even though they'll sell them by the butt-load since, ya know, they're aimed at the general public and the general public will buy them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i'm deleting Hacker News from my feed reader until all these Macbook/Surface Pro articles are past.

<comment><USER6> In 2 months when people try out the new laptops and learn that they can easily press the escape button, there's going to be a lot of people feeling pretty dumb about the things they said.

<comment><USER7> If that's the case, I doubt they'll remember they said anything about it at all, much less feel pretty dumb about it. It's just human nature.

It's too early to tell. While I trust the Touch Bar will be good (or at least good enough) for most people, it's likely there will be some people who aren't happy with it.</comment></comment></comment>


Japan's Robot Picks Only the Ripest Strawberries (video) | Singularity Hub - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/12/04/japans-robot-picks-only-the-ripest-strawberries-video/ <comment><AUTHOR> Someday, robots will grow food for you on your roof and exterior walls. They'll give plants individual attention, keep bugs away without chemicals and pick things at exactly the right time.</comment>


Ask YC: Co founder doesn't believe in product idea - <AUTHOR>

My co founder (a programmer) discovered a competing product today and completely lost faith in our product. Saying he can't create a better product than the one he found. He also said he doesn't want to reinvent the wheel.
I'm discouraged and am thinking about finding a new co founder. The prospect of trying to find someone to make this product with me is daunting.
Does anyone else have this problem? Where you have a co founder and you feel like they can do great work but you feel like you are dragging them along for the ride?
I would appreciate any advice. <comment><USER2> The way I see it, there are two scenarios:

1\. Your co-founder is right, your competitors have created something way beyond what you could ever create, and your venture is not worth pursuing. If this is the case, you must either rethink your approach or shut down.

2\. Your founder is wrong, and has been scared away by a little competition. Many people can be scared away when competition comes up. These people are not the ones you want as co-founders. _Do NOT drag these people along for the ride!_ This person will drain your energy and slowly sink your company. There are bigger bumps than competitors showing up, and a founder that will bolt at the first sign of trouble is not who you want on your team.

The problem is that discerning between the two can be difficult, if not impossible for someone so closely involved as another founder. Have family, friends, and colleagues you trust talk to you about your situation to help gauge which of the situations this is. Also keep in mind that it is not necessarily one or the other. It could be mix of both 1 and 2, so be aware of this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate this response. I think it's #2 but I'll think about it some more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there merit to what he's saying? What exactly is the value that you'll be providing over the extant competitors? If you've chosen a poor market, why not find a new one?

If on the other hand his criticism is not really constructive, he's not suggesting anything new, and his spark is gone, then the situation is untenable. My experience has been that tolerating "co-founders," "partners," or "early employees" who lack passion for the product just doesn't end well. Get rid of him.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice everybody. I thought I'd add that while the competing product is very polished, and run by an excellent company, they're not exactly the same.

It's sort of like Mint.com and Quicken. They both help you do the same thing but they approach it completely differently.

Our product is going to do A, B, and C but the focus is on item A. Our competition also does A, B, and C but they put all of the focus on B.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Listen to what he is saying and come up with a convincing argument for why your project is different. After all, users and investors will ask the same thing. If you can't then perhaps he is right.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll think about this further. I've been making the case for our product for a long time though, and today when he gave up because of this other product, I didn't know if I really wanted to convince him. I wondered if it would be a mistake to keep him as a co founder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You might try to find out what he wants to make, what would get him excited. You need him to program something he will actually do and in turn you are going to have to market it. I don't see many other choices...

</comment><comment><USER6> It sounds like he knows what he's talking about. If you can't inspire him that your idea is good, you aren't going to inspire customers or investors. Listen to his arguments and fight it out.</comment>


Preact : a smaller, faster React alternative - <AUTHOR> https://blog.logrocket.com/introduction-to-preact-a-smaller-faster-react-alternative-ad5532eb6d79 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053082)

</comment><comment><USER3> To all people who write React-alternatives: please modularize as much as possible. For example, JSX-like syntax is not necessary and some developers might not want to use it; therefore, it should be in a separate module that is completely optional. Also, the virtual-DOM part may be useful in itself, therefore it should also be a separate module. React offers some tools to more easily manage state, but please acknowledge that there are developers out there that have even smarter ways to deal with state.

<comment><USER4> I disagree, and prefer monolithic frameworks than modular ones.

Catering for a common configuration of modules allows the maintainer and contributors to make more assumptions. These assumptions allow them greater freedom to optimize performance and simplify interfaces.

Lego like frameworks have to be uber generic thus catering to theoretical computer science aesthetics rather than real world practical use cases.

if a developer wants to stray from the "recommended" path, they should do so at their own cost. The community should not belabor themselves to accommodate outliers.

maintaining these projects is really hard work.

<comment> git-pull Echoing this. Some personal anecdotes:

Back in 2012, I remember when Backbone Marionette broke into pieces. It made "logical" sense, but the instances you'd actually want to pull in the event library without taking in Marionette is rare.

There's a certain sense you have to be tactical with decoupling stuff. I decouple front ends from libraries because I don't want my users to be forced to use my CLI front end when they just want an abstraction with minimal requirements.

I get away with it because there's 1 library and 1 frontend.

In JS, there's a front end, a library, and an extension marketplace that make you wonder what they were thinking when they were decoupled. Stuff like extract-text-webpack-plugin.

Guess what that plugin does: It allows you have your CSS show up as CSS files instead of JS. But the title denote that, (forget that fact you'd expect webpack to have such simple stuff in webpack itself.) It instead is "extracts text", despite the fact the convention of "text extraction" means nothing to web developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this viable to use as a drop in replacement for React? I am concerned about the license using React, that would be the sole reason to chose something else. I also got few projects in React that we would like to keep.

<comment><USER6> Be very careful. If FB holds any patents covering React, they are also enough likely to cover Preact. And there is no patent grant at all with Preact.

<comment><USER7> Also, for all we know FB might hold patents covering parts of Angular or Vue as well. Avoiding React because of the patent grant is a complete non- sequitur.

The only thing we know about FB's patents is that using React means they won't sue you over patents covering React and they won't revoke the grant if you countersue (unless you countersue for patents _you_ hold over React).

The entire hysteria seems to only be backed by armchair lawyering and open source purism (the latter of which is orthogonal to whether there is a legal risk or not). There are plenty of major corporations that likely hold an arsenal of patents who use React despite these concerns.

Unless you're an Apache project (and thus have to worry about open source purity) or a direct competitor who intends to sue people over patents (and thus have to worry about patent warfare), stop worrying about patent grants.

<comment><USER5> What about the following situation:

We are approached by a big company to buy our startup. In that case do they have the same limitation of not being able to sue Facebook? Do you think that Amazon or Google would be as happy buying your startup with React as without it? I was just wondering about this angle.

<comment><USER7> Amazon uses React. [https://medium.com/@blairanderson/amazons-new-brand- stores-u...](https://medium.com/@blairanderson/amazons-new-brand-stores- utilizing-react-framework-a22f56e9e206)

Google uses React. In fact, that's why the language used in the patent grant was changed. [https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/7293#issuecomment-2...](https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/7293#issuecomment-233302318)

Apple uses React. [https://twitter.com/soprano/status/705516380913692672](https://twitter.com/soprano/status/705516380913692672)

Twitter uses React. [https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/02/twitter-react-mobile- stac...](https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/02/twitter-react-mobile-stack)

Microsoft uses React. [https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/](https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/)

Seems like they don't care what some guy on Medium thinks.

<comment><USER8> Seems like sound logic that given many different companies including those in competition with Facebook are using React that there should be no worries for the rest of us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm really curious, what did they have to throw overboard to lighten the load from 45kB to 3kB? They list a handful of missing bits[1] -- I'm not a React developer so I don't know how significant they are, but they don't _sound_ like the sort of things that'd multiply the size of the codebase by fifteen... So what's the deal? How so small?

[1] ([https://github.com/developit/preact/wiki/Differences-to- Reac...](https://github.com/developit/preact/wiki/Differences-to-React))

<comment><USER10> Some key points:

1\. Preact eliminated white/black lists and uses regexes instead [1]. These lists take up huge amounts of space in React/ReactDOM [2].

2\. No synthetic events, just native `addEventListener` [3].

3\. Only target the DOM for rendering, no React Native to worry about.

4\. Less invariants, error handling, and error messages

[1] [https://github.com/developit/preact/blob/master/src/constant...](https://github.com/developit/preact/blob/master/src/constants.js#L11-L12)

[2] [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/src/renderers/...](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/src/renderers/dom/shared/SVGDOMPropertyConfig.js#L32-L121)

[3] [https://github.com/developit/preact/blob/master/src/dom/inde...](https://github.com/developit/preact/blob/master/src/dom/index.js#L69)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want something which is even smaller and simpler, there's snabbdom[0]. The core vdom implementation is 200 SLOC, everything else is provided via modules, either first-party (toggled classes, event listeners, thunks, hyperscript, …) or third-party (jsx, template strings, …)

[0] [https://github.com/snabbdom/snabbdom](https://github.com/snabbdom/snabbdom)

</comment><comment><USER12> For Scala lovers, here are the scala.js facade: [https://github.com/LMnet/scala-js-preact](https://github.com/LMnet/scala-js- preact)

</comment><comment><USER13> anyone can chime in on whether preact can be covered under the same patents that apply to react ?

<comment><USER14> Patents don't apply to React. React includes a license addition that prevents you from suing Facebook for software patents, _in general_.

<comment><USER7> Preact doesn't come with any patent grant, especially not one from Facebook.

If you're worried about having to sue Facebook, nothing stops Facebook from hitting you with patents covering Preact. However the patent grant does prevent them from hitting you with patents covering React if you use React and aren't suing over your own patents that cover React. You're even allowed to countersue them if they sue you first (again, as long as you don't countersue over React).

IOW if you're concerned about Facebook patents:

Preact: no protection

Angular, Vue, Ember: no protection

React: full protection as long as you don't sue them first and don't countersue over React patents

Unless you have inside knowledge of FB's full patent arsenal, using ANY code written by ANYONE puts you at risk of being sued. The only difference with React is that you actually know they can't sue you over that specifically.

<comment><USER15> > if you use React and aren't suing over your own patents _that cover React_

Is this correct? The way I read it, it concerned any software patent

<comment><USER7> Read the full patent grant.

> The license granted hereunder will terminate [..] if you [..] initiate [..] > any Patent Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or > corporate affiliates

> [..] Notwithstanding the foregoing, if Facebook [..] files a lawsuit > alleging patent infringement against you in the first instance, and you > respond by filing a patent infringement counterclaim in that lawsuit against > that party _that is unrelated to the Software_ , the license granted > hereunder _will not terminate_ under section (i) of this paragraph due to > such counterclaim.

[https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS)

In other words: if Facebook sues you (and it can't be about React if you use FB's React with the grant) and you countersue, the grant will ONLY terminate if the patents you use concern React.

So you can still defend yourself as long as you don't attack React.

EDIT: FWIW (ii) and (iii) are basically scenarios where you sue other people over using React, so those aren't really relevant when trying to countersue Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To nitpick proptypes aren't part of react core anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> how does this compare with react fiber?

</comment><comment><USER18> People seem to be praising Preact, like its a revolutionary. Its an amazing alternative, especially if you dont agree with the React license but its a complete rip off of React so credit where credits due.

<comment><USER19> It's not a rip off, it's an implementation of react api.</comment></comment>


WiFi capacity doubled at less than half the size - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/wifi-capacity-doubled-at-less-than-half-the-size <comment><USER2> Wouldn't this be an either-or? Half the number of antennae for the same bandwidth, or the same number of antennae but double the bandwidth?</comment>


Yelp Cuts Mark 'First Wave' of Tech Jobs Seen Lost to Pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-10/yelp-cuts-mark-first-wave-of-tech-jobs-seen-lost-to-pandemic <comment><USER2> The people who were predicting/doomsaying a tech industry recession was going to hit us were partly right. I guess we'll never know for sure.

My opinion is that it was going to be a slow fall, with less people trying to become "unicorns" and less people trying to fund them.</comment>


NASA Future Orion Missions and Deep Space Gateway - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/for-the-first-time-nasa-has-begun-detailing-its-deep-space-exploration-plans/ <comment><AUTHOR> More details:

[http://www.waaytv.com/space_alabama/how-nasa-plans-to-put- bo...](http://www.waaytv.com/space_alabama/how-nasa-plans-to-put-boots-on- mars-using-huntsville/article_6e3453de-13c5-11e7-847e-3fe56b428c09.html)</comment>


What I Learned About Building Apps - <AUTHOR> http://feint.me/articles/5-important-things-i-learned-about-building-apps

<comment><USER2> I found that, FOR ME, the most commonly requested feature only affects my lowest common denominator of users.

It seems that the most requested feature on my primary app is a very "social" feature, meaning only the most "social" people were requesting it.

A competitor came out that STARTED with the social feature and it appears that very few people use it.

Not that the feature is off the table, but I didn't let users determine what goes to the top of the list. I've learned which features create more customers, and I'm sticking with that for now.

</comment><comment><USER3> What I learned in building my app was how many different ways people used my app. I found that once I asked why they wanted certain features and learned a bit about their usage behavior, I could more clearly ascertain whether this was a smart idea or an aberration.

</comment><comment><USER4> An interesting counter-example is Goodreads.com. The number of features on the site is amazing, and consistently growing.

At a first glance it seems to be a fairly basic site for book reviews, but the deeper you dig you find a full fledged used-book exchange, quizzes, lists, comparison shopping, profiles, trivia, quotes, videos, short stories, etc.

I'm not sure how they manage to keep it all under control or how they decide which features will be useful, but they do a great job with keeping users engaged in multiple activities on the site, no feature seems neglected or empty.</comment>


Kenneth Reitz responds to fundraising controversy - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/ziJTHy3 <comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/kennethreitz/status/1125491474068639744](https://twitter.com/kennethreitz/status/1125491474068639744)

"Apologies for posting a draft blog post before it was ready for posting. I intend to post it, once finished."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19826680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19826680)</comment>


Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm was designed in 20 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/8/96632-an-interview-with-edsger-w-dijkstra/fulltext <comment><USER2> See also my talk about "Big Data" in the 1950s: [http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/the-great-railway-caper-big- data...](http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/the-great-railway-caper-big-data- in-1955.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There already is a HN submission of this (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14112814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14112814) ). But I found this so amazing, I feel it should be viewed by more people. One of the most famous algorithms (one that I learned in a CS course called graph theory) devised in 20 minutes! Wow :)

CTRL + F on:

There's a curious story behind your "shortest path" algorithm.

<comment><USER3> There is a probably fake anecdote about Picasso. It's repeated everywhere on the internet: [https://www.google.com/search?q=picasso+5+minutes](https://www.google.com/search?q=picasso+5+minutes)

In spite it's probably fake I think it's enlighten here. You must consider not only the 20 minutes to devise it, but also the 5 or 10 or 20 years he was studding before this.</comment></comment>


Any Open-Sourced Style Guides? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 18F created a pretty good style guide.

[https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/visual- style/](https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/visual-style/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks interesting; thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For Javascript: \- [https://github.com/feross/standard](https://github.com/feross/standard) \- [https://github.com/Flet/semistandard](https://github.com/Flet/semistandard)

Node: Both of these include a style-enforcement tool that can be scripted via NPM scripts.

For CSS: [http://semantic-ui.com/usage/theming.html](http://semantic- ui.com/usage/theming.html)

Note: Semantic-UI is a lot like Bootstrap in that it provides a lot of useful visual classes/components. In addition, it can be extended to use custom themes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We are most likely to go ahead with PrimerCSS ([http://primercss.io/](http://primercss.io/)) combined with few elements from Bootstrap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome lists are a good place to start.

[https://github.com/lipis/awesome-style- guides/blob/master/RE...](https://github.com/lipis/awesome-style- guides/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER5> Assuming you mean CSS style guides these should keep you busy for a while: [http://styleguides.io/examples.html](http://styleguides.io/examples.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks; I like Mailchimp's, but we can't use it for commercial use due to their license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A style guide for what ? Code ? Website ? Application ? Written articles ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Website; self-serve dashboard to be precise. We are building a Proximity Marketing solution, see: [http://beaconstac.com](http://beaconstac.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clash of clans free gem</comment>


Error Beneath the WAVs (follow-up to "Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times") - <AUTHOR> https://john-millikin.com/%F0%9F%A4%94/error-beneath-the-wavs <comment><USER2> "Audacity will happily mangle the shit out of audio data. You can verify this by opening a .wav, writing it back out, and comparing the two files. It's also fun to look at the spectrogram of an "empty" audio file that got passed through Audacity."

This is surprising. Has anyone else noticed this and identified a safer program to use?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a known issue, for example [https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,96031.0.html](https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,96031.0.html) from 2012 discusses it. You can render Audacity safe for lossless audio editing by changing the default "quality" settings to match your data format and disabling dithering.

Here's the settings I use for lossless editing of CD audio: [https://i.imgur.com/a7VqOuj.png](https://i.imgur.com/a7VqOuj.png)

<comment><USER3> That is interesting, it, would be good if there was a lossless mode that automated this.</comment></comment></comment>


South Park Season Premier Sets Off Everyone's Amazon Echo - <AUTHOR> https://www.maxim.com/entertainment/south-park-season-premiere-sets-off-amazon-echo-units-2017-9 <comment><USER2> These creators are just great guys. Not only is this again a sign of them being on the edge of healthy creativity, but they're also the only show that just has all episodes for free to watch.

There's a documentary on how they make each show "a la carte" each week, and never missed its deadline except once, but it's often been a close call of just a few minutes.

Edit: "6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ- Un8JjUwo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ-Un8JjUwo)

<comment><USER3> I thought the only reasons they offered their content for free (ad supported) was that they were competing with a major piracy site dedicated exlusively to streaming their episodes.

<comment><USER4> I read years ago that they explained that they placed the episodes free online because they were tired of going to pirate sites to get convenient access to their own stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Audio is a terribly insecure channel to accept commands through. You presume no one else has access to the device because it is physically locked in your house, but sound travels through walls and through speakers. Heck, you can even make a window pane into a speaker with some simple gear.

It's no big deal when the worst case scenario is being served up a search result you don't need or listening to a song you didn't request, but you definitely wouldn't want to link voice recognition tech up to anything non- reversible like a stock trade or the lock on your front door.

<comment><USER6> In case anyone missed it, the commands don't have to be audible:

From [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf)

> DolphinAttack ... modulates voice commands on ultrasonic carriers ... to > achieve inaudibility. By leveraging the nonlinearity of the microphone > circuits the modulated ... commands can be successfully demodulated

<comment><USER7> Yes, scary indeed, deactivated Hey Siri.

<comment><USER8> Hey Siri is keyed to your specific voice. A random person can't activate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They should add a character named alexa, and have everyone address her by name and order her around.

<comment><USER10> Don't forget Siri.

I still don't understand why these companies cannot let us choose a name for our listening devices. Computers can be named, phones too.

<comment><USER11> My understanding is that these devices have ASICs which listen for their names, the actual pattern for the name coded into hardware, meaning that you can't easily select a new name.

Voice recognition takes more CPU power than the devices have, especially if you are trying to prolong battery life, and I think the more complex commands are relayed to a server instead of parsed locally.

<comment><USER12> Low-power DSP chip, I believe. For more complex tasks like voice recognition it generally makes sense to use something that at least resembles a general- purpose CPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fact that these voice response devices don't lock into a particular set of users' voices is a major problem. In fact, multiple times I've had a Google ad cause the phone it was playing on go do a web search triggered by that ad. Totally insane.

<comment><USER14> For Google Now that demand is reasonable but Amazon Echo is designed to be triggered by anyone in the room, not just a specific owner.

<comment><USER15> The demand can still be reasonable for the Echo, if you believe that it is terrible design to be triggered by anyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tim Cook's voice (or someone else from the presentation) enabled Siri on my phone during the iPhone X event (watching over YouTube). I thought it was supposed to be locked to my own voice though?

<comment><USER17> Apparently you have the same voice as tim cook to a robot?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if there is a low-pass filter on Alexa's microphone? Triggering your Alexa with ultrasonic commands outside of normal human hearing would be even more entertaining. Ads already embed ultrasonic chirps to some extent for tracking purposes.

<comment><USER19> Check out DolphinAttack

Demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21HjF4A3WE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21HjF4A3WE4)

Paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09537.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I sure wish I was one of the lucky bastards who was selling Gomphocarpus Physocarpus on Amazon. They really hit the jackpot!

[https://www.amazon.com/GOMPHOCARPUS-PHYSPCARPUS-PLANT- HAIRY-...](https://www.amazon.com/GOMPHOCARPUS-PHYSPCARPUS-PLANT-HAIRY- ANNUAL/dp/B01HDSSNGO)

</comment><comment><USER21> I feel like I should get a writer credit for this episode: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724174)

<comment><USER22> I don't have a link, but an implementation of your project did make the rounds on YouTube and/or Twitch a while back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Didn't Google have this issue with a Burger King commercial? Shouldn't Amazon have learned from that, and tried to cut this kind of thing off?

</comment><comment><USER24> The underlying problem is not being able to rename assistants.

<comment><USER25> Indeed - but it's a much more difficult problem than it seems at first glance (unless you're okay with an always on, always streaming to the cloud microphone).

<comment><USER24> Should be done locally anyway, assistant should have some functionality (alarm, timer, calendar, etc.) when you're completely offline.

Other comments indicate the assistant names are hard coded in ASICs but they certainly don't have to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Countdown to Stone and Park enduring a lawsuit under the CFAA.</comment>


Found+READ: A new blog for startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/14/new-blog-at-gigaom-focusing-on-growing-a-startup/ <comment><USER2> Interesting to note Om and Niles have given up doing podcasts. [0] Words are more timely, easier to produce, cheaper and in the end much more interesting than voice (expensive, time consuming & technically difficult).

Reference

[0] onpodsessions, 'Phased Redeployment'

<http://onpodsessions.com/2007/03/phased-redeployment.html></comment>


Ask HN: Finding remote work as a half/full-time student? - <AUTHOR>

I am a 6th year Software Engineering major, taking school slowly to support myself.  I have been trying to find remote work for a few weeks through GitHub, StackExchange Careers, and WeWorkRemotely.  I have managed past the second interview at one place but haven't even received rejection e-mails from the other eight.
I feel I am a prime candidate for remote work...  Passionate about CSC since middle school, raised on IRC, have superb internet access, and am very self motivated.  I have 10+ yrs experience with Arch Linux (Desktop, Debian servers), C++ (mostly C for class now), SQL (MySQL, but starting to move to PostgresSQL), PHP (less so, I prefer Node.js, Lua, Python, Ruby, or * in that order now), and HTML/CSS. I tend to master the languages/tools I prefer when possible, but I am also a quick learner who loves experimenting with new toys and am very interested in DevOps--sounds fun as much as I love Linux.
The startup I have been with for the past 5 years is having funding issues, and I am getting nervous about renewing a lease without a good opportunity. Not the worst outcome, but free rent, food, and getting to focus on my own projects living with my parents while finishing my education doesn't seem worth the hour commute both ways from class, peers, friends, and downgrading to a much lower quality/reliable internet and power.
My skills and toolset have increased and have become fairly polished... I have rejected interview requests from Amazon (quite a few, they offered to fly me to Seattle), Google, Netflix (dream job), and Etsy because of required relocation within the last 6 months.
I know I could be a major asset to someone; I just haven't had any luck finding them. Has anyone had a similar experience, what did you do?  Where can I find remote jobs that will at least let me know I am not a good fit?  Am I marketing myself incorrectly?
http://selby.io
http://www.selby.io/resume-safe.pdf
https://github.com/selbyk
https://careers.stackoverflow.com/selby
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/selby-kendrick/50/289/650
Thanks for any advice!
-Selby <comment><USER2> Your resume lists responsibilities, not accomplishments. I know it might sound stupid given your qualifications and the interest you've had from big boys, but some of these smaller gigs for remote work read the resume differently. Read up on askamanager.org about changing resumes from responsibility- to accomplishment-focused. It could make a big difference for an hour of rewriting.

</comment><comment><USER3> weworkremotely, careers on stackoverflow also has a remote search option.

</comment><comment><USER4> angelist, jobscribe, remoteok, subbreddits with remote jobs. good luck!</comment>


ReCAPTCHA just got easier (but only if you're human) - <AUTHOR> http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-just-got-easier-but-only-if.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised to read that this is focusing primarily on numbers; I thought one of the values of ReCaptcha was to help improve OCR and deal with difficult-to-digitize text. I realize that house numbers also need digitization for google maps, but I wonder if this points out that the OCR goal wasn't being reached the way they wanted it, or if there is some other way they will approach it...</comment>


Read the legal print.  Verizon fail. - <AUTHOR> http://m.store.verizonwireless.com/iphone/

<comment><USER2> "Some type of 2yr contract" is actually easier to understand than whatever they were going to put there...</comment>


The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk - cool-RR http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-ii-posturetalk-powertalk-babytalk-and-gametalk/ <comment><AUTHOR> On both this piece and the earlier one, I was kinda surprised that startup/hacker types would be so interested. I guess my mental image of the audience here is younger, fresh-out-of-college entrepreneurial types. Perhaps I am wrong, and there is a good proportion of people with mature org. experience as well?

I am also surprised by the number of people who seem to think small/startup companies are immune to these dynamics :)

(p.s. I did spend 1 year as the first employee of a startup... I found the same dynamics to apply, mutatis mutandis). Anyway, thanks for reading and keep the great conversation on!

Venkat

<comment><USER2> Well I'm 40 and I've seen a number of people drop comments that make it clear that they've been around long enough to not be kids.

That said I'm sure there are a lot of bright kids around as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if there's a vocabulary in some industry, like maybe the gambling world, that can describe the players in this game without loaded words like 'sociopath' and 'loser'. I sort of liken the clueless to a scam artist's potential victims, someone who thinks he can play and win against a scammer but clearly can't, vs. a 'loser' who knows not to bother.

<comment><USER4> but it's only about "winning and losing" from the sociopaths perspective. as mentioned in the first installment, lots of "losers" lead very fulfilling, non-work centric lives.

<comment><USER3> That's what I mean, the 'loser' is the one who chooses to not play the game when he knows the house (sociopaths) sets the rules to always come out on top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very long article, but very interesting points. Worth a careful read if you've skipped it because of "tl;dr". The first article, "The Gervais Principle", is also very good.

</comment><comment><USER6> It is very good that Venkat(author) is introducing all these words and giving them solid definitions. It brings conversation to this new plane because we now have these words in our vocabulary. Great job, worth a careful read.

<comment><USER7> Very often a lot of management posts tend to be fairly short and be very heavy on jargon. It makes it hard for those who haven't been following the field for a while to follow along.

I also like the way he actually explains the connections to other books and posts when appropriate instead of just referencing them and assuming they have been read as I've seen some other authors do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A strange game.

The only winning move is not to play.

How about a nice game of chess?

</comment><comment><USER9> I've always felt that as an engineer I don't know how to handle or maneuver through office politics.

<comment><USER10> And you're right!!

<so sorry - couldn't resist..!>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was deeply upset by this on an emotional level, mostly because for all of my life, I have not had an intuitive hold of this kind of communication. Consequently, I have been operating on an entirely separate plane, making it difficult to relate to and understand other people.

I would truly appreciate advice from someone who understands my situation. I am not interested in sympathy.

<comment><USER4> I think a lot of engineering types are out in the cold on this one. what helped me was studying acting (the art of believably imitating social situations).

<http://greenlightwiki.com/improv/Status>

start reading Robin Hanson's blog Overcoming Bias, he's an economics professor who posts a lot about signaling.

<comment><USER11> That article is _tremendously_ helpful because I don't have a natural intuitive grasp of status. Thank you.

One thing that confuses me is when it's strategic to act high status, and when it's strategic to act low status. For example, sometimes, when you need something from someone - do you want to raise their status, and make them like you? Or do you want to convey high status, so they will want to associate with you? Or should you try to juggle raising your status and then lowering it, in order to achieve the illusion of parity?

E.g. Selling to a customer, getting a job, getting help with something in the workplace. . .

 _Somebody_ has got to have written something about this. Please help.

<comment><USER4> How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

the original. so lucid I doubt it will ever be dethroned as the best. hmm, can't find an online version right now even though I know multiple sites have a plain text version. anyone have a link?

a direct answer: I personally think it's better to act high status the vast majority of the time, only acting lower status when it is absolutely required. when I started doing this people's reaction to me immensely improved (night and day difference).

<comment><USER11> Well, doesn't How to Win Friends and Influence People offer advice like sincere and lavish praise? That's low-status, unless coming from the position of an authority position (high-status).

Maybe I'll do some experiments.

Something else I am interested in is how social/contextual status subconsciously sabotages people in the context of sport or business.

<comment><USER12> (before I get started, I can't praise HTWFAIP enough - [http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/verifying- theories...](http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/verifying-theories/))

It's not low status unless you overdo it. Everyone enjoys validation for what they do, and while some people get more praise than they want for some things they do ("Hey, Michael Jordan, great game!"), there are other parts of them that are starving. People are not monolithic, they're made of many facets.

One example from the book was of a guy who built theater seats trying to get a deal with a bigwig from Kodak. No one ever got to meet with Mr Bigwig for more than 5 minutes, and Mr. Theater had to wait months for his 5 min appt. When he went in, Bigwig was gruffly resistant to a sales pitch, but Theater first complimented his fine wood paneled office. That disarmed Bigwig and got him talking about how he used to really care about carpentry and craftsmanship but has been taken over too much by his work. Two hours of conversation, no mention of the theater, and next week Bigwig ordered the chairs for his new theater fro Mr Theater. Complimenting Bigwig's business acumen or wealth would have had no (or probably negative) effect, but there was another part of him that was starved for recognition.

Enough rambling, go read the book! You can find a pdf online if you poke around.

<comment><USER13> Found the PDF. Thanks for giving that clue :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Moral Panics and the Death of Fun - <AUTHOR> http://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/moral-panics-and-the-death-of-fun/ <comment><USER2> Moral Panic? Fun?

This guy was a C-level exec for a financial journal making rape jokes and using racial slurs without even the pretense of "my opinions do not represent my employer".

Sorry, to ruin your "fun", bro. The "misfits and troublemakers" quote you're building this on refers to people innovating and working against the system to make something new, not insulated fratboys making rape jokes on twitter.

You can have your free speech, but no one has to pay you to keep a prominent position while making it clear that you are espousing illegal hiring practices and being an otherwise narrow-minded dipshit. You are not a rabble-rouser or mischief maker, just a retrenchment of the same bullshit most everyone else in the world is sick of.

You drew the target on your back and are whining that people pulled the trigger.

Thanks for playing, though!

<comment><USER3> As far as I know there are no actual instances of sexist behavior attributed to Pax Dickinson outside of shitty jokes on Twitter. He might be an ass, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with de-facto blacklisting purely as a response to offensive speech.

(And since this is deep in identity politics territory I'm saying that as a gay man of middle eastern ancestry.)

<comment><USER4> I think it has a great deal of worth, especially considering how much people in his (and most) industries operate with twitter as a public-facing manifestation of yourself.

Secondly, not wanting to do business with someone because they are an ass...sounds pretty reasonable to me.

<comment><USER3> It's reasonable in the individual case, but the effect is still forcing someone out of the industry for making blasphemous, err, offensive jokes. (not, as far as we know, being an ass at work) This seems uncomfortably similar to blacklisting someone for being a Communist, even if it's an emergent blacklisting and not a top-down edict.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it curious that people seem to think "freedom of speech" somehow equates to "freedom from consequences." You can say what you want, but if you tweet racist, homophobic, and sexist remarks, or say them out loud for that matter, don't be surprised if your employer, friends, and family decide you're a jerk and unceremoniously dump you.

It's not a "liberal elite" enforcing their will. It's that you're offensive and people don't like you.

</comment><comment><USER6> This numbers among the worst cases of self-righteous apologia I've ever encountered.

Face it, Pax: This isn't about having your career "irretrievably damaged" for "having fun". This is about getting caught and called out for having been an asshole. Full stop. Those two categories don't have to overlap, and I'm perfectly within my rights not to want to work with, or be around, people who think they do.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Death of Fun

When your fun is directly at the expense of people who don't share your gender, skin color, class, or orientation, maybe it should die.

> this was speech on the internet. No one was physically harmed by my tweets. > Relief was never more than a Block button away.

When you are a public figure of any kind, your personal values will either be exposed as soon as you are given a microphone or they will be unearthed later. The fact that he crafted these unfunny and tasteless jokes and is now pulling the "free speech" card while blaming others for not blocking his account sooner.

<comment><USER8> Also I don't think he was fired for his tweets, but for his opinions.

Put another way, he wasn't fired for tweeting hateful things, but for having those opinions. All his tweets did was show the world that he was this hateful person, one who shouldn't be in a position of power.

<comment><USER9> Nothing happened merely because he held opinions. It was when he began expressing them in a harmful and embarrassing manner that it became a problem for him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So I started reading with an open mind, but then made the mistake of clicking on a link to his tweets[1].

At that point I stopped reading because I really don't care what he has to say unless it's remorse and repentance. Those aren't off-color jokes, those are hateful screeds that reflect a real lack of character. I not only would have fired you, I would have reviewed our hiring process to make sure we didn't get anyone like that again.

Pax, if you can't own your mistakes and recognize that _hateful awfulness isn 't funny_ then I don't think you should be writing stuff on the internet.

[1] [http://unvis.it/valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider- ctos-i...](http://unvis.it/valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your- new-tech-bro-nightmare-1280336916)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've had a lot of dealings with the "I'm just expressing my opinions" crowd. I think it's a disingenuous claim. You're not being shunned merely for opinions, you're being shunned because your application of those opinions is actively harmful.

</comment><comment><USER11> Somebody emailed us who was worried that letting this post be killed by user flags was unfair to other users who were carrying on a legit discussion. They asked if we were meaning to suppress the defense of an unpopular point of view. The answer is no, and we've unkilled this thread accordingly, although it's so late that doing so is mostly symbolic.

We often unkill flag-killed threads precisely so discussion can continue. Had we been more aware of this post at the time, we probably would have done that. There's too much material on the site for us to be aware of it all. That's why you should email firstname.lastname@example.com if you see something amiss—that's guaranteed to bring it to our attention.

<comment><USER12> Maybe kill the link to the story next time, though? Let the thread live, but not the promotion of bad content or (more importantly) the framing that content provides for the thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "I have a long, long record of successfully working with women, working for women, and having women working for me."

This is the "some of my best friends are X" defense, for X = women.

Given that women make up 50% of humans, this is somewhat less convincing than when X = gay or X = black. And it's been shown to be totally unconvincing even then.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm guessing this is being upvoted to give everyone a voyeuristic glimpse to a slow train wreck</comment>


Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules - <AUTHOR> https://research.facebook.com/blog/879898285375829/fair-open-sources-deep-l20earning-modules-for-torch/ <comment><USER3> Sadly, this has facebook's new, horrible patent clause.

For those who aren't aware, it says

1\. If facebook sues you, and you counterclaim over patents (whether about software or not), you will lose rights under all these patent grants.

So essentially you can't defend yourself.

This is different than the typical apache style patent grant, which instead would say "if you sue me over patents in apache licensed software x, you lose rights to software x" (IE it's limited to software, and limited to the thing you sued over)

2\. It terminates if you challenge the validity of any facebook patent in any way. So no shitty software patent busting!

<comment><USER4> Here's a link to the patent clause: [https://github.com/facebook/fbcunn/blob/master/PATENTS](https://github.com/facebook/fbcunn/blob/master/PATENTS)

DannyBee, I'm having a hard time envisioning what sort of scenario might trigger this, and what the repercussions might be. Any chance you could explain?

<comment><USER3> Do you mean the first part, or the validity provision? as a reply points out, it is incredibly broad.

Assuming you mean the first part (the validity provision seems "obviously bad" to me), let's lay out some scenarios:

You make your important software dependent on this software. Congrats, facebook can now sue you with impunity because you can't afford to lose these patents.

Worse, the fact that they have given you a grant does not prevent them from suing you, and the second you counterclaim, you lose. Note also that the grant specifically does not cover "the Software in combination with any software or other technology provided by you or a third party." So if you take this stuff and run it in a pipeline, and facebook has a patent on running it in a pipeline, you don't get that patent and they can still sue you.

(Again, in the apache case, you'd only ever lose the patent grant _if you sued facebook over the software in question_ ).

Ignoring direct cases, facebook can also use this as leverage during acquisitions that use their software (Nice software, shame if you were to lose rights to it), etc.

There are potentially an infinite number of ways to use this kind of stuff.

Also note this kind of thing has been looked at in the past. There is an entire discussion here: [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/archive- license/200...](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/archive- license/200311.mbox/browser)

from when v2 of apache license was being written, etc.

There are reasons the Apache grant has become pretty much the standard - <USER2> people and corporations find it a pretty good balance of various concerns (being able to defend yourself in patent lawsuits, etc).

What Facebook has done is entirely one-sided. It benefits Facebook only, and even then, it generally only helps them in situations _where they want to sue people_. None of this really helps defensively. If they wanted it for defense, they'd write it differently to cover defensive situations.

<comment><USER5> > You make your important software dependent on this software. Congrats, > facebook can now sue you with impunity because you can't afford to lose > these patents.

I have been rattling the clause jawns posted around in my head, and I cannot see this. I agree that the clause is onerous and I would not incorporate software that had such a clause into one of my products without a backup plan. I do not see how this gives Facebook the ability to sue anyone with impunity. The clause applies to alleging patent infringement BY Facebook or its subsidiaries (i.e., _you_ are suing _them_ ) or if Facebook is specifically suing you for patent infringement. Clause section b only applies if your defense is based on invalidating a Facebook patent; saying, "We don't actually infringe that" does not trigger this clause.

<comment><USER3> First, The only thing most companies have they could use against facebook, if facebook were to sue them, _are_ patents.

Second, "saying, "We don't actually infringe that" does not trigger this clause."

This is false. Such a claim is a claim that facebook's patent claim is unenforceable against you. This falls directly into the "unenforceable" language.

Also note that you claim it requires lawsuits. Actually, as worded, it does not.

In fact, it says " The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, for anyone that makes any claim (including by filing any lawsuit, assertion or other action) alleging". It specifically says "assertion or other action". It does not require lawsuits.

So arguably, just by posting a blog post that says facebook's patent is invalid, you'd lose rights, because that is an assertion that a right in a patent of facebook's is invalid.

If it's not meant to cover this, it's not at all clear what the difference between "an assertion" and "a lawsuit" are supposed to be in the examples, or what "other action" would constitute.

<comment><USER5> > First, The only thing most companies have they could use against facebook, > if facebook were to sue them, are patents.

Facebook sues me for stealing proprietary information after hiring one of their engineers. I have no patents. How do patents help me?

> This is false. Such a claim is a claim that facebook's patent claim is > unenforceable against you. This falls directly into the "unenforceable" > language.

It is not false. Claiming a patent is unenforceable is not the same as claiming something you are doing in a specific case is not covered by a patent. "Unenforceable" has a specific legal definition.[1] The list of common actions that argue unenforceability: patent is invalid; inequitable conduct by patentee; delay in braining suit for infringement; patent misuse. Please explain how "our product doesn't infringe this patent" meets this definition.

> Also note that you claim it requires lawsuits. Actually, as worded, it does > not.

I did not state that it requires lawsuits. You claimed the clause grants Facebook the ability to sue with impunity, and I was using the clauses to refute that statement in that context. I am well aware that the clause, as written, does not require lawsuits.

[1] [http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/patent- infring...](http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/patent-infringement- defenses.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I appreciate that Facebook open-sources their libraries, but they have an awful habit of dumping source code on Github and then continuing to develop it internally without pushing those changes back out.

For example, Facebook open-sourced Thrift, then proceeded to develop it internally, and recently released out a fork of thrift, not merging anything back into the original tree.

Likewise, they open-sourced Corona a few years ago, their Hadoop fork, and I'm pretty sure that branch has been abandoned too.

So I'm really hesitant to start using any projects out of Facebook unless they develop some processes to actually maintain these projects.

<comment><USER7> From the article:

> We hope that these high-quality code releases will be a catalyst to the > research community and we will continue to update them from time to time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Too bad it is Torch. Working in the lua environment is not enjoyable at all. Every error becomes a long procedure of looking deep into the source of the framework since there is no type information or stack traces to go off whatsoever. You are constantly guessing about the shape of the data or what parameters are supposed to look like.

<comment><USER9> there's clear and well stack-traces at the lua level. there's great debugger (in fblualib, called fb.debugger). there's an inbuilt profiler into LuaJIT. too bad you've had a bad experience.

<comment><USER8> Thanks I am always willing to give it another shot with more tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a recruiting move. Facebook is building its DL team, and to do that, they need to grow the community using their tools.

<comment><USER11> I see no issue with open sourcing tools to recruit developers. Honestly, that's one of the best methods I can think of.

<comment><USER10> I'm not against it. It's a great way to recruit devs. Just wanted to point out that they would likely be recruiting from the community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Paper with proper summary: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7580](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7580)

<comment><USER13> This paper describes one part of the fbcunn release (the fast convolution layers implemented via FFT, with the source available at [https://github.com/facebook/fbcunn/tree/master/src/cuda/fft](https://github.com/facebook/fbcunn/tree/master/src/cuda/fft)). There's a lot more in fbcunn if you want to check it out.

<comment><USER14> In my experience, the fully connected layers are the bottleneck. The other issue was the alternating compute-heavy convolution and the IO-heavy pooling. I'm curious how this FFT implementation stacks up against cuDNN (what's the speedup like for just the convolutional layers? and then what's the overall speedup like?).

<comment><USER13> [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.7580v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.7580v2.pdf) compares the convolutional implementation with the cuDNN layers. For the FC layers, it's just CuBLAS `sgemm`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We've been using Torch for a while at work, really appreciate Facebook doing this. Some of us had a hard time adjusting to Lua, but it was well worth it.

<comment><USER16> I'm curious what your team experience was with Lua.

IIRC, Lua is even more liberal than Python in that if you mistype a variable name, it will silently give you 'nil' rather than throwing an exception.

Also, the prototype system is a little wonky. It seems overly flexible and makes you do too much work yourself, which would make it hard on a large team all getting started at once.

If Torch gets popular I wonder if something like TypeScript or Facebook's own Flow would start to make sense.

<comment><USER17> > IIRC, Lua is even more liberal than Python in that if you mistype a variable > name, it will silently give you 'nil' rather than throwing an exception.

Like most things in Lua, that is easy to customize. You can just add an __index metamethod to environment tables. There are various 'strict' modules which do just that.

<comment><USER15> Thats what we love about Lua, it gives us control of the side effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know what Facebook is using the AI for?

<comment><USER19> Basically everything in FB has one main goal: Ads

Secondary goals might be: Spam detection and extracting info from the graph/pictures, etc

FB identify people from your Social Graph in Pictures, for example

<comment><USER20> "Basically everything in FB has one main goal: Ads"

Is this actually true, or a glib answer? Ads certainly don't feel like much of the FB experience, nowhere near the level of Google, or even Twitter. They're negligible, really.

Whereas shaping the feed and identifying people in pics, etc, is central to the FB experience.

<comment><USER21> > Ads certainly don't feel like much of the FB experience, nowhere near the > level of Google, or even Twitter.

Facebook creates an artificial distinction between labeled ads (which are, of course, obvious ads) and posts with paid reach (which are also ads, but presented as normal content), exactly for the purpose of maximizing the quantity of ads while minimizing the _impression_ of content being dominated by ads.

<comment><USER20> Right, so ads don't feel like much of the FB experience.

My point is that FB seems much, much more focused on creating an engaging user experience than it does on ads, so it seems wrong to say that their deep learning efforts have ads as their one main goal.

<comment><USER21> > Right, so ads don't feel like much of the FB experience.

Right, but the issue was the claim that with FB everything is about ads, not the UX _feels_ like it is about ads. Making ads not _feel_ like as much of the FB experience as they are is, itself, about ads -- and, particularly, is about maximizing the degree to which the FB experience _is actually_ about ads.

<comment><USER20> "Making ads not feel like as much of the FB experience as they are is, itself, about ads..."

Well, we just disagree here. I see it from exactly the other end. That the main FB goal is to engage users, and minimizing the (necessary, but grudgingly so) ads is about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow great. I dreamed of an AI platform based on LuaJIT a few years ago. Torch and FB's deep-learning module sound amazing!</comment>


Implement Unified Autoplay Policy - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=715049#c42 <comment><AUTHOR> Per the Chromium Bugs comment, it's now available in chrome://flags (at least in 62.0.3202.62, which is a standard stable release). The option label is "Autoplay policy."</comment>


White House opens Web site programming to public - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091024/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_web_site_1

<comment><AUTHOR> More details: [http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes- drupa...](http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal)

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow. Talk about dumbing down to the point of incoherence "The White House has relaunched its Web site with programming code written by the public. The White House says it's overhauled the technical aspects of the site and now there's computer code written in public view, available for public use and able for the public to edit."</comment>


Show HN: Tool for Apple Receipt Validation - <AUTHOR> https://www.revenuecat.com/verify.html <comment><AUTHOR> I whipped this little tool together because I'm often using curl or postman to debug App Store receipts and having a standing tool was just easier.</comment>


Dielectric Grease vs. Conductive Grease - <AUTHOR> https://www.w8ji.com/dielectric_grease_vs_conductive_grease.htm <comment><AUTHOR> I've been confused about the application of dielectric grease in the past, specifically in regard to usage on conductors like plug wires, terminals, and wiring harness connectors. Apparently the grease won't insulate because it has low enough viscosity that it will be displaced, and connectors will still have metal on metal contact, while remaining sealed from the elements.

I suppose an experiment is in order with some half century old automotive wiring connections.

EDIT: This is an interesting experiment that seems to support this hypothesis. [https://youtu.be/vACXF3EYiUY](https://youtu.be/vACXF3EYiUY)</comment>


Concluding the Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/concluding-the-great-mp3-bitrate-experiment.html

<comment><USER2> "I think it's clear from the basic summary statistics graph that only one audio sample here was discernably different than the rest – the 128kbps CBR".

Well, no, it isn't clear to me, at least not with the data in an un-sorted table. But visually, yes, it is clear: <http://i.imgur.com/08s2S.png>

<comment><USER2> well, I always yell at others for creating graphs which aren't anchored at 0, so here you go: <http://i.imgur.com/7YrHi.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why didn't he randomize which order the samples appeared in?

</comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr - 128kbps CBR audio has such bad quality nobody should use it, but all options of higher quality are indistinguishably different to the masses.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's been a number of years since I compared, but I ended up doing rips at 320 VBR (or CBR -- I'm forgetting, at the moment) with the setting that allows bandwidth to fluctuate to whichever of the stereo channels momentarily has a greater, calculated need ("stereo" or "joint stereo").

Yes, the difference was noticeable, on a well-regarded iAudio player using decent can headphones. At 320, I was finally, really happy with the resulting rips. Though I'd still archive in a lossless format.</comment>


Making Robots [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcFOWIq3cIc

<comment><USER2> If you want to visit the uncanny valley, I recommend to watch the Boston Dynamics part. [1]

[1] [https://youtu.be/OcFOWIq3cIc?t=1571](https://youtu.be/OcFOWIq3cIc?t=1571)

<comment><USER3> The speech is actually interesting, you can see that they put emphasis on perpetual motion for balancing the robot. That's what makes their robots' motion look so "biological" i think, as opposed to others which look like they're trying to compute the next perfect move.

Just as if their robots was doing "just move, and try to correct with another move if the last one wasn't perfect". The name of the company reflects this.

At least that's what i guessed from the speech, i'm not an expert, so correct me if i'm wrong.

<comment><USER4> I think saving energy might be much bigger motivation. Taking advantage of inertia like humans and animals are doing is probably a far more efficient form of movement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone know if there's any robot purchasable by regular people (means not ROS kind of robot) that would be programmable?

<comment><USER6> I know that NAO is programmable [1] but I haven't seen where you can buy one. Maybe out of stock.

[1] [https://www.aldebaran.com/en/robotics-solutions/robot- softwa...](https://www.aldebaran.com/en/robotics-solutions/robot- software/development)

<comment><USER7> Even if you could buy one, one of them costs 12k euros last I checked (a few years ago)</comment></comment></comment>


Politics is a Mind-Killer (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ <comment><USER2> Author says "politics is war by other means". This is often cited as a good thing; the very intense/ brutal nature of politics is in some ways an outlet for a society instead of war.

Also America is a weird nation. Other countries have an academic domain called "American Studies" that is full of fascinating insights about ourselves. One is that historically the US has been a very bipolar nation. Incredibly fearful of being weak / thinking itself weak, certain the decline of American empire is on the way, and at other moments filled with religious fervor, manifest destiny, and build a Navy larger than every other single Navy in the world combined.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=tonnage+of+largest+navies&ie...](https://www.google.com/search?q=tonnage+of+largest+navies&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en- us&client=safari)

<comment> aaron-lebo We study that domain in the US, too. I'd actually imagine most of the scholars are American.

This is very much not something restricted to the US. The French, Germans, British, Chinese, Russians, etc have their own cycles very much related to their self-image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Politics is just the process of mind killing. Its unlimited democracy and people's habit to collectively decide about everything possible. When everyone gets vote on everything, manipulating others (and yourself) can result in real gain.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would say: politics is not a mind killer, political parties are.

</comment><comment><USER5> (2007)</comment>


Arm Helium: New vector extension for the M-Profile Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/arm-helium-the-new-vector-extension-for-arm-m-profile-architecture <comment><USER2> The blog post [https://community.arm.com/arm- research/b/articles/posts/maki...](https://community.arm.com/arm- research/b/articles/posts/making-helium-why-not-just-add-neon) has more useful content.

<comment><USER3> So, Helium is similar to Neon, but optimized for simpler CPUs with fewer gates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meantime, in the royalty-free side, RISCV's work on V extension continues: [https://www.embecosm.com/2018/09/09/supporting-the-risc-v- ve...](https://www.embecosm.com/2018/09/09/supporting-the-risc-v-vector- extension-in-gcc-and-llvm/)

<comment><USER5> I wonder what level of concern RISCV raises internally at ARM. Are they panicked, or just adjusting strategy in a more routine way?

It seems the moves from Western Digital would be concerning to them.

Though I suppose on the other side, there's not yet any credible/volume RISCV general purpose CPUs yet (just MCUs), so maybe they aren't yet scrambling.

<comment><USER6> Given their public reactions, I imagine they see it as an existential threat.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/)

<comment><USER7> ARM has done an incredible job legitimizing RISC-V.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I downloaded the spec and took a look.

TLDR: it's pretty much a traditional short-register SIMD, but with the addition of predication, including handling the tail of random-length loops using the vector processing body (as in RISC-V and Cray), not an extra scalar loop as previously needed.

\- provides 8 "Q" vector registers, always exactly 128 bits each

\- overlays the FP register file (32 "S" registers of 32 bits each / 16 "D" registers of 64 bits each)

\- MVE-I (8/16/32 bit integer) and MVE-F (16 and 32 bit FP) subsets.

\- architecturally defined to execute each vector instruction in 4 beats

\- 1, 2, or 4 beats per "architecture tick", and can vary during execution. An "architecture tick" might or might not be 1 clock cycle.

\- two forms of predication, each with its own mask: "loop tail predication", which is like RISC-V/Cray "vl" (but described as a mask), and "VPT predication" for data-dependent conditions. The two masks are ANDed together.

\- A VPT block is defined as the n instructions following a VPT or VPST instruction, where n <= 4

\- can be predicated with the condition or the inverse of the condition. Similar to the existing If/Then/Else predicated execution. e.g. VPT, VPTT, VPTE, VPTTE, VPTEE, VPTEEE variants.

\- "VPT can be considered as the vectorized combination of CMP and IT"

\- predication is per-byte regardless of the element size.

\- loads set predicated-off bytes to 0, other instructions leave them untouched

\- VLD2/VLD4 and VST2/VST4 are provided for interleaving/deinterleaving. Each instruction always loads/stores exactly 128 bits to/from 2 or 4 consecutive Q registers.

\- there is also scatter/gather

\- there are some fancy operations. e.g. VCADD: Vector Complex Add with Rotate. This instruction performs a complex addition of the first operand with the second operand rotated in the complex plane by the specified amount, either 90 or 270 degrees. Also VCMLA: Vector Complex Multiply Accumulate.

</comment><comment><USER9> Fun times, can't wait to have these in the Cortex M line. Of course the chips start to look more and more like the Pentium line of old.

</comment><comment><USER10> The current dsp instructions are pretty limited, interested in seeing these!</comment>


Website that shows top TV series IMDB ratings by episode - <AUTHOR> https://whattowatchon.tv/better-call-saul-2015-tt3032476 <comment><USER2> This is amazing</comment>


2018 Is the End of Social Media as We Know It - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/futuresin/2018-is-the-end-of-social-media-as-we-know-it-1e5658f41a5 <comment><USER2> _It's game over for social media in 2019._

Uh.. I think not.

 _For the first time, the majority of US internet users between the ages of 12 and 17 won't use Facebook once a month this year._

Oh right, the headline and half the article is just talking as if USA = World.

 _Facebook is mostly a GenX and older Millennial channel, never again to be mainstream with younger generations._

Is that true across all/most countries? That just doesn't sound right to me. Because I know it's "mainstream with younger generations" in many countries, to say the least.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any app that can run full Python on top of Android? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Not sure what you're asking, but if you want to run simple Python scripts you could run them through [Termux]([https://termux.com/](https://termux.com/)) on your Android phone. You can even write them in Termux using vim or something too.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about

[https://kivy.org/doc/stable/guide/android.html](https://kivy.org/doc/stable/guide/android.html)

?</comment>


Personal Health: Sorting Out Coffee's Contradictions - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/health/05brod.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> I wish people would just go about their lives and stop swinging between coffee/alcohol/chocolate/meat binges and abstinence. There is a middle road you can take and you don't need to stress so much. Just role the dice and get on with life. After all that's what we are bloody here for!

Sorry, rant over.

<comment><USER3> Classifying items into a straight Good/Bad category makes for good article baiting. (Coffee: Is it Bad for You?)

Coffee, like just about everything else on this planet, has good and bad characteristics. One will find that the negative effects of anything that impacts the body will occur at either extreme of the consumption range. (No consumption or Over-Consumption)

As with anything, moderation is the key to avoiding most side-effects. Granted, articles instructing you to moderate consumption are not nearly as provocative.

<comment><USER4> While that's all true, it misses the fact that _people want rules_. We're classifiers by nature: our brains want to sort things into "good" and "bad" regardless of what the truth is. The only solution here is to educate everyone about all the subtleties of the issue and force them into using more fine- grained categories.

Which, if you read it, is kinda what this article is trying (vainly, maybe) to do.</comment></comment></comment>


Honeywell One Step Closer to Universal Quantum Computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/05/28/honeywell-one-step-closer-to-universal-quantum-computer/ <comment><USER2> The honeywell team seems unusually optimistic and at the same time cautious about the hype potential. Other efforts Ive read about in the last couple years conceeded that practical quantum computers may never happen. Honeywell has the right attitude if they really have something. Best to keep the cards close on that one.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there any good "quantum computing for dummies" type material out there?

I read these articles, and sometimes the comments are so all over the place that I'm not sure if we're talking about a thing that could ever work, or something more akin to snake oil?</comment>