I can't watch my brother's graduation because the organist played Star Wars - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/8rcedt/i_cant_watch_my_brothers_graduation_ceremony/ <comment><USER2> 1- Create a p2p encrypted audio only repo.

2- Put on youtube silent videos only, the audio channel containing only some fsk code with encrypted code and sync information, then upload the audio channel into the repo.

3- distribute a browser extension which plays the video from YT and the audio from the repo using the syncing information from the audio channel.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did the organist obtain permission (appropriate license) to do so?

Or is it the case he did but its not possible to communicate that to YouTube?

Very different problems, one is failure to understand copyright the other is YouTube having a poor user experience.</comment>


Are Palantir employees' Common shares worthless? - <AUTHOR> http://www.paloaltoonline.com/square/print/2016/02/23/are-palantir-employees-common-shares-worthless- <comment><USER2> I don't know anything specific about this Palantir outfit, but unless they're doing something unusually generous with their option structure, then duh, yes, of course the shares are worthless - they're ALWAYS worthless. That's the game, and that's always been the game. The founders end up with something, the first few employees end up with enough to feel like they didn't completely waste their time, and everyone else gets a job for a while. That's how it goes.</comment>


Yegge: Software has its own political axis - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4vQtz

<comment><USER2> Interesting take. I'd like to know what a "proper" use of eval would be, being on either side of the programming "political spectrum." Except, for cases where the user is trusted enough to execute code directly in the system (such as systems that generate other systems), I don't see and have not seen a single good use of eval(). I've seen tons of horrible uses for it though.</comment>


Winners of the 2021 Breaktrough Prices - <AUTHOR> https://breakthroughprize.org/News/60 <comment><USER2> Couple of typos in the title.</comment>


Pine64's $199.99 14 inch Pine Pro laptop now available for pre-order - <AUTHOR> https://androidrookies.com/pine64s-199-99-14-inch-pine-pro-laptop-with-arm-chip-and-manjaro-linux-distro-now-available-for-pre-order/ <comment><USER2> I'd love to try one.</comment>


BlackBerry Hits '0%' Market Share Nearly Ten Years After iPhone Launched - happy-go-lucky https://www.macrumors.com/2017/02/15/blackberry-hits-zero-market-share/ <comment><AUTHOR> I would think ultimately it was Android that was the nail.</comment>


How online ratings affect your judgment - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/how-online-ratings-affect-your-judgment-0808.html <comment><USER2> The news wasn't clear, and I couldn't find the actual papers. But what does "positive" and "negative" mean? Does "positive" means "similar to one's belief", just positivity in general (in tone, wording of a comment etc)? Or does "positive" = positive amount of karma/ comment ratings (which seems to be the case, by my understanding)?

<comment><USER3> I couldn't find the article without passing through a paywall. But this article [1] summarizes the methodology decently:

 _" We used a site very similar to Reddit," Aral says. Here's how it worked: The researchers convinced an anonymous website–under the promise it would remain nameless–to allow them to test slight manipulations in online voting. Over six months, the research team took a small percentage of more than 100,000 written comments and slightly altered their vote rating as they were submitted. Four percent of the comments were given a positive edge (a single upvote) while another 2 percent were struck with an immediate disadvantage (a lonely downvote)._

[1] [http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/nueroscience/...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/nueroscience/upvotes- downvotes-and-the-science-of-the-reddit-hivemind-15784871)

<comment><USER4> my wild theory: what if the site in the study was HN!?

disclaimer: I have no idea and tldr

<comment><USER5> Come to think of it, at one point in the not-too-distant past I did see a fair few new-ish comments with zero points instead of one, where I couldn't see anything about the comment that was objectionable enough to be worth downvoting.

I don't remember what my response to those was - probably I just figured that someone was having a bad day or read something into the comment that I wasn't seeing or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is more info about the paper's background and ramblings on twitter.

[http://tjm.org/2013/08/08/proposal-experiment-to-compare- ope...](http://tjm.org/2013/08/08/proposal-experiment-to-compare-open-vs- paywall-publishing/#more-5516)

DOI:10.1126/science.1240466

</comment><comment><USER6> I usually like to read the methodologies on studies that cover online behavior before I consider their results, but I can't in this case because of a paywall. Does anyone have a link to the full text of the study?

<comment><USER7> I can't find this one, but there are similar papers floating around.

Social Bias in Online Product Ratings: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis: [http://misrc.umn.edu/wise/papers/4b-2.pdf](http://misrc.umn.edu/wise/papers/4b-2.pdf)

Social Bias in Online Product Ratings: [http://www.econ.sdu.edu.cn/advance/uploadfile/20120409081915...](http://www.econ.sdu.edu.cn/advance/uploadfile/2012040908191596.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Here's one that draws pretty much the opposite conclusion of the study in OP's article. It focused on stock message boards, which might not be quite the same.

[http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5130/](http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5130/)

I should note that I'm pretty close to the author. She'd be happy to answer questions I imagine.

<comment><USER3> Is there access to the full dissertation (i.e., not just the description/abstract)?

For those interested, the key statement in this study: _Using an experiment, message board influence on an investment decision and attitude was tested. The results indicated that individuals that received negative message board postings did have a significantly higher change in investment amount as compared to a control group that did not receive any message postings. The positive message board group and the control group were not significantly different in their amount of investment change._

The methodology of the experiment isn't detailed in the description. But it seems that one major difference between this study and the study in the OP article is the action taken by the user: change in monetary investment, and upvote/downvote. People behave differently when their personal money's on the line, so this is an important difference. So I'm very curious as to how this study ran its experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The fiddled with the ratings of which "major news-aggregation web site"?</comment>


The Killing of Osama Bin Laden - <AUTHOR> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden <comment><USER2> I read this article, and it's a great read. But my reaction was "even if this is true... so what?"

If they had used the lie to get support for "enhanced interrogations" (like people quoted in the article recommended), I'd be mad. If the US government had been holding bin Laden and waiting for the right time, I'd be mad, too. If Obama blatantly lied about the story for political points, I'd be mad.

But, basically, it seems the story happened mostly like it was told to us, and the changes were mainly to not implicate Pakistan or the informants. I wish we had a more transparent government, but hey, we flew into another country and murdered an elderly man... The story we got could have been worse. The gist seems to be true.

The claim is that Obama used it for political points, and he certainly did benefit. However the story he told was _much_ closer to the truth than the story the CIA/people quoted wanted to tell. They wanted to say it happened via drone attacks. So, we're mad that Obama didn't lie enough?

The only "lie" from Obama was that it was a courier (rather than a deflector who probably has family in Pakistan), and that they were met with resistance (which would have implicated Pakistan and upset the Saudis/etc if the truth came out).

(Note that similar stories came out after we captured Saddam Hussein, saying that he wasn't found in a hole: [http://nation.com.pk/international/14-Apr-2015/saddam-was- no...](http://nation.com.pk/international/14-Apr-2015/saddam-was-not-found-in- a-hole-as-claimed-by-us-report))

<comment><USER3> rogerhoward makes some excellent points.

Some other things, assuming for the sake of discussion that this writeup is accurate:

1\. It damages the relationship of the jackboot community and the administration: the SEALs were deployed to hit Bin Laden, and were told that this would be done without fanfare. Instead, within hours, the White House and company are bragging about the whole operation. This is not how proper clandestine things are done, one imagines.

2\. It damages the relationship of the jackboots in particular and the administration: having to suffer the indignity of signing what is a effectively an NDA for premeditated murder--and then watching two folks get away with breaching it because it supports the new, official story--cannot have been easy for the folks involved in the raid.

3\. It damages the State department's credibility (hah) with Pakistan. We agreed that steps would be taken to reinforce the government's position with its people, and that we wouldn't implicate them--they would save face. Instead, we put up a flimsy half-baked cover story, and decide not to go with one that leads to lots of easy questions, which will never have answers that are either convenient or satisfying. Look how Gates reacted during the thing-- was not happy.

4\. It damages the relation of the government and its people. As seen through the FOIA requests, it's pretty obvious that several parts of the story don't really jive. So, it's obvious that there is either bad record keeping in place, or a coverup of some sort. Not in the dramatic sense, mind you, but just minor misalignments of documented reality with official story.

~

The problem isn't that they had the guy whacked--it's that they perhaps did such a thoroughly and unneeded job of lying about it afterwards.

If you want to see how this sort of thing should be done, look at the Israelis.

<comment><USER4> > Instead, within hours, the White House and company are bragging about the > whole operation.

That's because the helicopter crash threw the old plans out the window. Once there's physical evidence of the Americans' raid, you've got to get ahead of the story. Obama simply had no choice.

<comment><USER5> Personally, I feel like this whole question is just one of many instances of information in the article that I find highly dubious.

This is Osama bin Laden. The US had been hunting him for years. There was _no_ way that the president wasn't going to announce his death from the rooftops, and I have a hard time believing that any senior member of special ops thought otherwise. At those levels even the military officers are canny political operatives, they don't get their stars otherwise, and they would have known that this raid was going to be publicised.

So yeah, the fact that the White House was talking about this mission mere hours after its completion is a total non-surprise, and it would have been obvious to anyone involved that this would be the case, helicopter crash or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reporting like this is so unconvincing because all the sources are anonymous and there is no way to corroborate the assertions of the reporter. It's as though he asking us to accept a story told by the Easter Bunny and confirmed by the Tooth Fairy. The explanation of why all the subterfuge is necessary is quite unconvincing. If you consider each of the reasons separately they make little sense. Given that the US SpecOps community is nearly completely Republican in its sympathies it makes no sense that this story would go unleaked by those elements. This version of the events also requires a vast conspiracy within the journalist community that has widely reported on the story from the perspective of numerous SEALs. Finally, what of all the injured SEALs on the crashed helo. No medevac, no casevac, no reportage. The US would definitely sacrifice a dozen lives to keep advanced stealth technology out of the hands of other governments. Fails Occam's Razor miserably.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, Sy Hersh has built a reputation for both breaking big stories but also getting big claims wrong. Personally, I find his description of his primary source a bit worrying: "(a retired senior intelligence official) ... (knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad) ... (privy to many aspects of the Seals' training for the raid), and (to the various after-action reports)."

That's four assertions about his source, and none of them indicate that the source had any official role in the lead up to or the execution of the mission -- or, indeed, that he was even active in the IC at the time. That, plus the source's use of Vietnam-era terminology, suggests he could have started his career in the 1960s or very early 1970s, and thus could be at least five and as much as 10-15 years retired from the IC (assuming he had a full career at the Agency), and relying on contacts still active in the community for his information. The only statement that indicates the source had access to primary-source docs regards the SEALs' AARs, and even then it's impossible to be certain that Hersh's phrasing actually means that.

In this, Hersh is starting to remind me of many conservative writers who relied on similar source of often dubious quality -- Michael Ledeen's close connections with SISMI (now AISE) being one example, or the network of former CIA officers who whiled away the post-Stansfield Turner years running private intelligence shops and flowing questionable allegations to the _National Review_.

If Hersh _is_ right -- and "right" in this case, given the explosive nature of his allegations, doesn't even mean in the ballpark, just playing the same game -- then this story is huge, the sort of thing that would forever color Obama's place in history and would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground. But extraordinary claims require &c., and the fact that Hersh had to publish this in the _LRB_ rather than The _New Yorker_ or _WaPo_ (both regular outlets for many of his scoops) indicates that their editors were very uncomfortable with his sourcing as well.

<comment><USER8> I read the article, because it's at such variance with the official version. I have no idea how close to reality it is. My gut feeling is that your skepticism is justified.

 _would probably bring Hillary 's political hopes crashing to ground_

Here we disagree. To put it crudely: NOBODY GIVES A FUCK!

Let's look at something IMO much more serious, Hillary's prowess at trading commodities.[1] She supposedly makes a cash deposit of under $1,000 into a trading account, and through a series of quite astute trades walks away with about $100,000 (about $323,000 in today's money) in about ten months, all as part-time activity.

As someone summarized it:

       Only four explanations can account for
       these remarkable results.

       1) Blair may have been an exceptionally
       good trader.

       2) Hillary Clinton may have been
       exceptionally lucky.

       3) Blair may have been front-running
       other orders.

       4) Or Blair may have arranged to have a
       broker fraudulently assign trades to
       benefit Clinton's account.

Unless she was one of the greatest "amateur" commodities traders of all time, this was nothing more than a bribe to the Governor and First Lady of Arkansas.

But, like I said, NOBODY GIVES A FUCK. As Wikipedia put it: "There were no official investigations of the trading and Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing."

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

<comment><USER9> Nobody gives a fuck because there's no story. It was a long time ago and the combination of Blair being good and Clinton being lucky. They all made money, Clinton got out of the market before Blair, and then Blair went on to lose money.

<comment><USER8> _the combination of Blair being good and Clinton being lucky_

Did you read the Wiki? Someone did some calculations of the "luck" involved:

       Using a model that was stated to give the
       hypothetical investor the benefit of the doubt,
       they concluded that the odds of such a return
       happening were at best 1 in 31 trillion

For comparison, current Powerball odds are a mere 1 in 175 million. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerball#Payout_and_odds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerball#Payout_and_odds)

<comment><USER9> Yeah. If you calculate the odds on any given combination of trades they are frequently vanishingly rare.

Lottery wins are incredibly unlikely too, and yet people win them.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but if the person winning the lottery is part of the lottery company, or has connections to it, a lot of suspicion seems warranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _'We thought the best way to ensure that his body was given an appropriate Islamic burial,' Brennan said, 'was to take those actions that would allow us to do that burial at sea.'_

Islamic burials don't specify unceremoniously chucking people into the deep blue sea. Occam's Razor suggests that he was thrown into the ocean to prevent proper identification. Or, if it was really him, that he was killed and discarded to prevent interviews/investigations into his past associations.

The fact that the government would pretend to worry about "appropriate Islamic burials" stinks to high heaven.

<comment><USER12> He was probably too badly disfigured by having a few clips unloaded into his face, and the US didn't want any pictures leaking out.

The other justification for his at-sea burial, that I've read-that his grave would become a place of pilgrimage if his body were returned to Saudi Arabia is laughable on its face to anyone who knows the least bit about wahabbism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even if this article is completely true - so what? Even if he has found a 'smoking gun' to some double-switch operation by the CIA, and the public story isn't the whole truth, who cares? Job done.

The details simply don't hold any water though.

1) You don't destroy military hardened electronics systems with concussion grenades. All you'd do is scorch the paintwork.

2) The 'killed by a drone, confirmed by DNA evidence' supposed cover story is ludicrous. If he was killed by a drone high in the sky over the mountains, how on earth is the US supposed to have got a sample of his DNA?

3) The Saudi government would never fund Bin laden, as he was utterly opposed to the ruling family. Yes he was funded by Saudis, but not by the government. Outsiders frequently make this mistake, assuming that Saudi funding for Bin laden, and his family connections there, mean Saudi official support. That's a complete missunderstanding though and implies the author only has a pretty superficial grasp of the relationship.

4) The story that the SEALS were shooting in self defence is entirely necessary, otherwise they would be open to accusations of murder. They would know that and the idea that they would complain about it is ridiculous.

5) If only Bin Laden was killed, who did all the corpses locals found and photographed in the building belong to? Did the SEALs plant the AK-47s and Makarov pistol found at the compound? But if the SEALs were against the administration's re-packaging of the details of the raid and are as above- board as described in the article, why would they collude by planting fake evidence?

The whole thing is completely incoherent.

</comment><comment><USER14> > The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, > and that the senior generals of Pakistan's army and Inter-Services > Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance

Well, duh. The ISI officers and generals needed to be able to claim that and if the US people wanted their co-operation they needed to provide plausible deniability.

I am confused as to why this is presented as remotely surprising.

</comment><comment><USER15> The biggest glaring fallacy with the CIA story I see is that the Pakistani's did not know about the presence of OBL in the country. The article mentions that the house was 2 miles from the military academy. Abbotabad is a garrison city, which means that there is quite literally armed forces present everywhere. I have been to Abbotabad, and there is no way that the Pakistanis would not have known about it. It is akin to saying that OBL was found a couple of miles from West Point and the Americans did not know.

<comment><USER16> I have been to Abbotabad too, and many other places right next to and within military bases in Pakistan, and it is pretty damn easy to live there undetected. No one is driving around checking houses. And even those who do, like meter checkers, are happy enough not to read your meter given say, 10 to 20 dollars worth of incentive.

Also Abbotabad is a real life city, not just some garrison town. And even if it was just a garrison town, it would still befull of un-armed non-military people. How do you think military people live in a garrison city? They aren't faceless storm troopers, many have families living right there. And many, many civilians providing services, from food to dry cleaning to road maintenance to flower delivery etc etc.

<comment><USER15> It is not about living undetected. Of course it is full of civilians, but the point being that due to current threats to ALL army bases and centres, there is always a check in place for security purposes. And with the notorious hand of the Pakistani intelligence almost everywhere, the narrative in the article seems highly likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > By then, the military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in > Abbottabad at a secret former nuclear test site in Utah, and an elite Seal > team had begun rehearsing for the attack.

Question: What former nuclear test site in Utah? Am not familiar with tests in Utah. The model seems to have been in North Carolina? See [http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/10/satellite-images- captu...](http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/10/satellite-images-capture-cias- secret-bin-laden-training-facility/57771/)

</comment><comment><USER18> 'faced with an unarmed elderly civilian'. I know it's only a quote from 'an offical', but Osama was 54 when he was killed. Ill possible. But hardly 'elderly'.

<comment><USER19> The author selected that quote, like all the rest, to make a point. It's little slip ups like that that let you judge someone's biases in an objective way. No fair reporter would imply Osama Bin Laden was ever 1. unarmed 2. elderly 3. a civilian. It's a deeply wrong and misleading quote, intended to bias the reader in favor of the author's narrative. If these guys would order a hit on a a little old innocent grandpa, what wouldn't they do?

The article's theory is built on a house of cards, like a most conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

<comment><USER20> Is 'Osama was an unarmed civilian' even under dispute? I thought that was the official story.

<comment><USER21> Even 'civilian' in that context is misleading. Technically true, but misleading, as it's trying to play up the innocence of the person.

A drug cartel kingpin is technically a "civilian", as is the head of a global terrorism network, as is the head of a human trafficking network. None of them are members of a recognized country's militia, but they still command significant force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not buying this story. There is a lot of fudging going on.

Here's a gem, for example: "None of the Seals thought that Obama was going to get on national TV and announce the raid."

What the hell. How do you explain a downed stealth helicopter in Abbottabad then? It just happened to come down by itself?

<comment><USER22> Because the agreed-upon cover story was that OBL was killed in a drone strike, not by a Navy Seals team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't want to be nitpicking conspiracy dude, but one thing seems wrong. The article mentions several times that the electricity to the town was cut for the raid. But it was widely reported that someone live-tweeted the raid as it was happening (without knowing what was going on), which shows the power must have been on. [http://mashable.com/2011/05/01/live-tweet-bin-laden- raid/](http://mashable.com/2011/05/01/live-tweet-bin-laden-raid/)

<comment><USER24> Umm people use GPRS/3G/4G all the time here. And we have power backups in most homes since grid is not so reliable here.

Source: I am writing this on a highway in a rural part of Pakistan. Abbottabad is very urban.

<comment><USER25> Wait I thought Pakistan just got 4G licenses late last year? When I went a year ago even Mobilink didn't have 4G?

<comment><USER24> Yes, you are right. Even then, GPRS still works better here than some areas of SF. Also, since each home has their own UPS backup. WIfi would still be working since phone lines were working (DSL via phone line is common here).

In short: tweeting would definitely not have been that trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I desperately want this to be true just because I'm a political junkie and a student of history and it'd be a great start to the week to see the White House, State department, Pakistan, and everyone else respond to it. Definitely rooting for a Charlie Rose interview of Hersh. But there does seem to be only one main source he relies on and the whole story and its details just seem so perfect.

It will be interesting to see if his story is corroborated in the weeks and months to come.

<comment><USER27> What were his most interesting points?

Trying to decide whether to read it. It's long.

<comment><USER28> \- ISI bribed tribal folks in Hindu Kush region to turn over Bin Laden sometime during 2001-2006. \- From 2006 onwards senior elements within the ISI kept Bin Laden hidden from the world. -ISI was essentially playing a double game, telling americans they knew nothing about Bin Laden's whereabouts and receiving boat loads of weapons and cash to deal with terrorism; while telling the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda they would keep Bin Laden safe from the Americans as long as they didn't cross any boundaries set by the ISI. Saudi's helped the ISI with Bin Laden's welfare and well being apparently. -Americans didn't sherlock holmes Bin Laden's hideout but a leaker from the ISI had come to the American's and asked for the 25 million dollar reward and safety of his family in exchange for Bin Laden. -Bin Laden living in Abbottabad was under constant monitoring by ISI living in a de facto prison. He was not running any command center but living out his last few years while health deteriorating. \- Obama wanted proof before sending Seals a senior ISI medical officer was living in Abbottabad and got that proof.He was given a portion of the reward. \- White House tells Pasha and Kayani( heads of Army and ISI) they are monitoring a high value target in Abbotabad. Pasha and Kayani freak out and cooperate because if Pakistani Public, Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda find that ISI and Pak Army gave Bin Laden away to the Americans all hell would break loose. So the narrative of the "All American" no help from anyone had to be constructed, because how would it look if the American people found out the Pakistan Army and ISI was hiding Bin Laden 2 miles from a major Pak Army training facility. \- Pasha and Kayani make sure the two BlackHawks are not intercepted by Pakistani Airforce no radar goes off, and the ISI agents guarding the house are not present when the Seal team comes in. -Unarmed Bin Laden is executed, no firefight ensued as the compound was empty( only Bin Laden and his family) the Seals chill for 20 minutes waiting for some other helicopter to come because one of the helicopters really did crash . If this where real the Seals would have all gotten in 1 helicopter and gotten the hell out, but there was no threat. -Obama really wanted to brag so instead of planning a story, he immediately got a speech prepared(lots of discrepancies in his speech that night he thanks the pakistani's in their continued support to fighting terrorism). CIA and senior Army people freak out he wasn't even supposed to mention the pakistanis, lots of backtracking and revisions of the story come in the days that follow.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for summary, I dint read the article.

Looks like they say there was no firefight, but I remember there was a guy from Bay area, Pakistani techie in Abottabad that night and he live tweeted the gun fight and explosions before any news came out. Wonder how that would fit this new narrative?

<comment><USER12> Gunshots are gunshots. It would be hard for someone listening from a distance to tell who was doing the firing, or if there was two-way fire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy"

Is there a person alive that doesn't know this? The same can be said of any powerful nation's policy throughout most if not all of history. Ending the story on such a truism as if it's an exposure is lame.

</comment><comment><USER31> I spent an embarrassing amount of time scratching that asterisk wondering how my screen got so dirty.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is the interview he refers to with Durrani in February ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UeWkBYfJBM);](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UeWkBYfJBM\);) I remain as unconvinced now as I was by Carlotta Gall's clearly one-source one-note story or the unconvincing psychological analysis of the Pakistan army from this 'retired source', (why couldn't he just go try to wangle an interview with the informant?) His contention that the Americans were running Jundullah in Balochistan was eventually made out to be unfounded. This is plausible but unfounded, it doesn't ring fully true just yet.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am reminded that (i) there is, as far as I know, no independent corroboration of the purported killing of Osama Bin Laden, and (ii) it was politically a very convenient outcome for the Obama Administration.

<comment><USER33> If he was still alive then he or his allies wasted a wonderful opportunity to discredit the US. I don't think they're that dumb.

It's like one of the arguments against faked moon landings. The Soviets would have been highly motivated to disprove the events, and had the skills and resources to do so if they had been fake, yet they didn't.

<comment><USER32> I think it's unlikely that he's still walking around :) However, it is possible that he died or was captured some time before he was allegedly killed. I think that we are unlikely to see any independent evidence either way.

Again, this was a very convenient outcome for the Obama Administration.

<comment><USER34> >Again, this was a very convenient outcome for the Obama Administration.

So was the unemployment rate falling. What's your point?

Something "good" happening during an administration is not evidence of conspiracy.

<comment><USER32> "Trust me, this great thing happened which is going to increase my popularity. There's no to verify that this great thing actually happened, but you know that I wouldn't lie to you."

<comment><USER33> Given how embarrassing it was to the Pakistani government, wouldn't the fact that they never disputed its occurrence lend great weight to the official story? Unless the theory is that the raid happened but just didn't result in killing the guy, which seems pretty weird.

<comment><USER32> At its peak in 2010, the US gave Pakistan 4.5 billion dollars in aid [1] (although in more recent years this value has decreased). That sort of money can buy a lot of cooperation.

[1] [http://www.cgdev.org/page/aid-pakistan- numbers](http://www.cgdev.org/page/aid-pakistan-numbers)

<comment><USER35> Isn't it pretty likely that Pakistan, or more specifically the ISI, used some of that money to fund the Taliban? Sandy Gall mention this in his book "War Against the Taliban" \- here is a review:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9042196...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9042196/War- Against-theTaliban-by-Sandy-Gall-review.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Mr Hersh is still stuck in Vietnam. This is foxnews quality reporting. Brutal.

</comment><comment><USER37> I remember where I was when the towers fell (working at home that day in s.f.). I remember where I was when Reagan was shot (playing mini golf in junior high).

I don't remember where I was when Osama bin laden was killed. It just felt like such an inevitability and correction to history that it should have happened already. Remembering what I was doing was pointless.

Also, everything before was such a waste. We wasted so many lives in Iraq when the real enemies were the Pakistani intelligence service and Saudi Arabia. I just wanted to forget it all.

<comment><USER3> There arguably weren't any real enemies to the Republic, other than the folks who saw an opportunity to use fear to repeal our rights.

<comment><USER38> Defining an "enemy of the Republic" really is just a rhetorical technique to assert what the goals and values of the Republic are. Sometimes it is one that the residents of the republic broadly agree with because they share those values and goals either explicitly ("I want myself and my kin to avoid getting killed in a building collapse") or implicitly ("I'm totally fine with a credit-based economy, though I wish it worked out better for my group.")

Occasionally it is a rhetorical technique with powder and steel behind it.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps I was a little too flowery. :)

Anyways, the point intended was that, while there are transient enemies of The American Dream (however one may wish to define it within reason, but including the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and general zeitgeist of 20th century America), they tend to go up in flames with their victims.

The true enemies, though, see that by either exploiting or altering the processes of government and manipulating popular opinion, and they tend to integrate themselves with the host and extract as much value as they can. They are also more likely to stay around, having become part of the system. It's unfortunate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> OBL's not dead. He mostly hangs out in the break room at Langley. HW Bush, prince Bandar, and some other guys from congress stop by and they all reminisce about the good old days.</comment>


Invalid Object Is an Anti-Pattern - <AUTHOR> http://solnic.eu/2015/12/28/invalid-object-is-an-anti-pattern.html <comment><USER2> While this article hits on a very true aspect of validation, I think the real problem that needs to be solved is a bit deeper:

There are really four levels of validity that we care about:

1) absolutely invalid data that indicates an unanticipated system error

2) invalid data that the caller (or user) must fix.

3) invalid data that the caller/user can optionally fix but that we wish to warn about (via UX or in the log)

4) invalid data that is optional and so can be made valid by deleting it.

I have not yet seen a system based on types/typing that elegantly captures the four cases above. ActiveRecord validations feels like an antipattern because it is in some ways weaker than typing, but in some cases more flexible.

So we typically resort to ad-hoc approaches that are essentially custom code doing the same thing in many projects. ActiveRecord validations removes boilerplate and makes it easy to give user feedback for simple flat object structures with predictable semantics and low probability of logic errors. This changes with nested structures.

I wonder if it would be possible to do something along the lines of the Maybe monad to handle scenarios 1-4 above via pattern matching...

<comment><USER3> This is exactly what I'm trying to solve with both dry-validation and dry- data.

I wouldn't agree with the low probability of logic errors in AR validations though. I think a DSL with lots of options is a recipe for logic errors. This is the reason why I decided to use predicate logic as the base for dry- validation. It supports nested structures easily, it also supports defining high level rules that rely on results from low-level rules (typically type checking with additional constraints, who would have thought ;)).

I'd love to know more about your idea for using Maybe monad in validations. Using pattern matching crossed my mind more than once but so far I haven't seen a real need for it (in dry-validation).

This is an awesome comment btw. These 4 points describes this problem in a very clear way. It's such a fundamental problem and I believe people should have a good understanding of what it involves.

There's one thing I'd add to this - coercion logic. It's very common that you need to coerce values coming from "the outside", and there are different rules for coercions depending on the context. That's why in dry-data you have different coercible type categories and "form" category is dedicated for web forms.

<comment><USER4> I think the coercion you talk about is a mapping that should take place outside the object. I would love to see a validation library like yours made for Django.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of things in Rails are are anti-patterns in large code bases, but pragmatic in small ones. ActiveRecord itself is a prime example: when you start an app, putting your business logic directly in ActiveRecord objects works pretty well in most cases, but later on as the models proliferate and grow, you realize that some of them contain business logic which is far too complex to warrant being conflated with persistence concerns. The result is difficulty grokking the higher level business logic that crosses database table boundaries, and potentially slow tests because you can't reliably test complex logic without hitting the database. Of course it's easy enough to add a service layer in a Rails app, Ruby is very flexible, but there's no convention for it so there is a high barrier for making this decision since you lose the benefits of shared patterns.

Some might argue this is bad and Rails got it wrong not to anticipate this problem, but I think it's a good decision to avoid incidental complexity for the 95% of Rails apps that will never grow beyond a certain point. In fact this is a significant reason Rails was able to get traction: in 2004 Java had solid, proven solutions to all possible concerns, but the combinatorial complexity of configuring and making them all play together made simple apps take 10x as long to get working. It's smarter to ship fast and then refactor based on real-world feedback than attempt to implement the perfect architecture before you even know if you're designing the right solution.

<comment><USER3> You are right with everything you wrote except one thing: ship fast and the refactor is not only often extremely difficult and risky, there are cases where it becomes almost impossible.

That's one of the reasons why I've been working on libraries that could provide similar level of convenience and allow you to rapidly prototype something _but_ with a better foundation where things can be refactored more easily.

<comment><USER6> You're being overly modest. You should mention your contributions to the ruby community with respect to Ruby Object Mapper as an example. I have not used it in a project, but in any future undertaking I will most certainly give it a look.

One of the reasons I've started to look more to Elixir and Ecto as ORM is because issues like immutability come up more and more.

In an ideal world we'd have a dynamic client side querying language like GraphQL, a simple application layer that maps REST to CRUD without constraints pushed upon it based on the ORM, and an ORM abstraction that allows for immutability in our models. Concurrency and race conditions are shouldn't be a developers concern when working with higher level framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not a Rails dev (.NET actually) but I have stumbled with this question before: should I allow invalid objects to lay around my domain?

It may be tempting to validate as soon as the constructor/setter is hit. And this works great for things like a name length or an email format as the article points out. The problem with this approach is when you hit a validation that is complex and/or needs IO. What if there's some info in the database that would allow or not you to construct the object the way you need? You would go to the database and check the info in your constructor?

Strike one.

Some validation only makes sense on a specific operation. The object you constructed, due to some business rule, may be invalid to delete but valid to update for instance. Feels more natural to validate the object with a context: is the object valid _to this operation_?

Strike two.

Not to mention the inconvenience of never being able to have invalid entity for things like integration with other systems and logging. What if you receive, from a webservice or something, a valid object format-wise but invalid from the business rule perspective? Being able to deal with an invalid instance feels more natural, when logging such exceptional behavior, inform the other system about it, etc. In this scenario of inevitable invalid data is better to handle it built into one entity rather than fighting against a bag of properties without any form at all.

Strike three.

<comment><USER8> > Some validation only makes sense on a specific operation. The object you > constructed, due to some business rule, may be invalid to delete but valid > to update for instance.

These are two different concepts I feel you are mixing up. An object may be valid, but that doesn't mean it's valid for all operations. For example there is basic validation that a file object is valid if it exists, but if you only have read access to it .append("foo") will fail on it. But it's still a valid file. Your constructor should be checking for the first kind of validity, and your methods for the second.

> What if you receive, from a webservice or something, a valid object format- > wise but invalid from the business rule perspective?

That is what you need an [anti-corruption layer]([http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2009/07/07/domain-driven- de...](http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2009/07/07/domain-driven-design-anti- corruption-layer/)) for. The object makes sense within that other services domain but not within yours. That domain may be closely related to yours, but it isn't you. You need a separate object for that (a simple struct ought to suffice usually). Then you act as a gatekeeper only allowing conforming objects into your system. Basically filter out the shit, and make sure if it makes it past your gate it is clean. Otherwise you might want to use the [state pattern]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_pattern)) to allow for different validation rules of the same object (eg legacy accounts might not have an email address but all new ones must).

> What if there's some info in the database that would allow or not you to > construct the object the way you need? You would go to the database and > check the info in your constructor?

This is touchy. Sometimes, if it's important enough then yes. Sometimes you can code around it (eg having case numbers auto-generated at time of persistence). Other times you bite the bullet. Other times you rearchitect the data (storing it in memory to do the check quickly). Or as a last resort, except it as a compromise and start coding up some roll-back functionality. Aim for the ideal, and know when to step backwards towards the practical: that is the art of software development.

<comment><USER7> I _kinda_ agree with your first remark. I once acted just as you described as my rule of thumb. But after sometime I found out that deciding if a validation is bound to the operation or not and if the cost (IO) of doing it first hand is worth or not isn't black and white as we want, they all have different tonalities of gray.

As for the second, this anti-corruption layer is dealing with validating the format of the data (typical deserialization problems such as missing properties and invalid types) or the actual content? If it's the first it should be done outside the domain, that's a transport/markup specific thing. If it's the latter that's the domain job. My problem is when you don't instantiate the actual entity (that you know it's well formed) to check its content, dealing with a bag of properties for such thing (that should be done inside the domain) is awful. The domain should deal with its entities and nothing else.

The third, from the experience I have, is a big flashy "no no". Our typical boring OO systems may not be religious as FP is with side-effects, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have a little strive to isolate it. Unlike with the actual operations, the instantiation of the entities may take place in a myriad of places. When you mix this with IO side-effects as latency you contribute to create a little monster that you have to peek and poke to find out what's going on.

<comment><USER8> > If it's the latter that's the domain job.

The domain's job is to represent and encapsulate valid transformations in the domain. If it's not valid within the domain then it doesn't belong in it. If you get a well-formed XML file that has -7 as a social security number, that is not something that your domain has to deal with. It should be caught by the corruption layer. It's not a valid value for your domain. Where I work we regularily build an import domain that allows users to see all the invalid data and manually correct it before allowing it into the rest of the system. Once I have an instance of a Person object I should be able to trust that it is sane.

> The third, from the experience I have, is a big flashy "no no".

It depends; I'd say it's on a case-by-case. Doing a read can be much more acceptable than a write. It's all about trade-offs at that point, but the benefit of knowing "if I have an instance I know that it is sane" means you don't need to litter your code with guards and that pays dividends in maintenance and bugs and agility and testability and, yes, even performance. A big factor is the cost of load. I usually work on low-load (~14 concurrent users) high-importance systems (eg global pricing management) where correctness is at a premium and we usually have system resources to spare. YMMV. As I said: it depends.

<comment><USER7> > If you get a well-formed XML file that has -7 as a social security number, > that is not something that your domain has to deal with.

Agreed. That's a type/format problem. But if, for whatever reason, the domain should process social security numbers that starts with 9 differently that should not be outside of the domain by all means. That is your business rule, you should "trap it" in the domain.

> where correctness is at a premium

The correctness of both are the same. The programming effort and the performance between those differ, but it's never a correctness trade-off.

\---

But instead of arguing back and forth, let me give you a problem that I had to deal with before:

Suppose that to have an entity with a state X there must already exist in the system an entity with state Y. Also, to have an entity with state Y there must already exist in the system an entity with state X.

How do you solve this deadlock "the chicken or the egg" problem if you never allow invalid entities to exist?

If you do allow invalid entities it's pretty simple: you instantiate both and handles both, together, to the domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That first example is a little silly. Rails validations have little to do with instantiating objects and are mainly concerned with preventing persisted invalid state (why they are designed to run before calling "save"). This is incredibly useful as a safeguard against persisting bad data, which is much more harmful than simply instantiating an object with bad data. Validating objects during instantiation sounds great, but it isn't really the purpose of ActiveRecord's validations.

That said, the second example is very cool/interesting. Anything that makes type more explicit in Ruby is a move in the right direction.

<comment><USER10> the second example misses what is most important about Rails validations which is spitting errors (plural is important) out for a form. by using an exception which goes off when a field assignment is not valid it is restricted to only giving back a single error.

<comment><USER3> dry-validation supports typical validation behavior known from rails where errors are gathered and represented in a string representation. In fact it's much "smarter" than AR validations as it only executes validation functions that are needed and fill in other _potential_ error messages based on rule definitions. This is one of the reasons why it's multiple times faster than AR validations and more extendible.

With dry-data constrained types it's a different story. It raises type errors because we're dealing with lower level objects of your system. Personally I prefer to see a meaningful type error rather than exceptions like "foo called on nil" etc. Not to mention that constrained types increases the chance of spotting type-related bugs earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Both libraries are using each other, which is a cool synergy [...]

Or an ominous circular dependency, depending on how you look at it.

<comment><USER12> I had the same reaction, "why didn't he abstract away the dependencies in a third library?"

<comment><USER3> That's gonna happen, as I mentioned they are both young libs. A shared dependency will be introduced very soon. I should've mentioned that in the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The validity of an object depends on the observer. If you require all Customers to have a billing address but a person is in the middle of a multi- page checkout, should their Customer record be invalid if they've only filled in their email so far? What if they want to come back to the form later?

Rails tries to fix this with the `:on` option for validations ([http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel/Validations/C...](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel/Validations/ClassMethods.html#method- i-validate)), which goes woefully unused in Rails apps.

Now you can do:

      customer.save(context: :checking_out)
      # which is different than
      customer.save

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm struggling to see the improvement here. The validations are harder (more confusing?) to use, require more code/work and then apparently try hard to provide the exact same integration that the original thing provides? Sooo whats different or better now?

</comment><comment><USER15> Functional programming phrases this as the "make illegal states unrepresentable" maxim.

<comment><USER16> Now that I'm on the functional side of things, I can say confidently to my past self and all the "OOP but never functional" practitioners out there...

Learn more about this concept. Make illegal states unrepresentable in your program.

It will greatly help how you think about programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Meh, I'm not so sure.

"Why do we validate data? Typically, to make sure that invalid state doesn't leak into our systems."

Surprisingly, no! We validate data to put all the business validation logic into one place, regardless of whether that data is being persisted or not. In fact, a good argument can be made that the most important purpose of centralized object validation is to _allow_ storing objects that are out of whack -- and that our code should degrade gracefully on load when the object is invalid -- whether that load occurs from the UI, a feed, or a persistent datastore.

Perfectly fine to argue the other way. In that case, nope, it doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER3> It's not feasible to have validations centralized. You don't validate objects, you validate data that your system received from somewhere. How it's done depends on the type of this external system, the format and sometimes the context in which you validate, that is specific to your system. This is one of the reasons why AR validations don't scale so well.

Having said that, there are many systems where AR and centralized validation works just fine.

<comment><USER17> I hate these discussions because you're right, but in a limited way.

Yes, it is impossible. I should have said something like "locally centralized to the compilation unit"

As gandalf pointed out, "IsValid" really asks a bunch of questions at the same time, and talking about it in the abstract is always going to miss the full depth. As a for-instance, there's clean data in terms of my datastore and then there's clean data in terms of whatever app I'm looking at. In a system of any size, these are most likely not the same thing. (And yes, that drives us crazy, but such is the way of large datastores)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think I'd rather just use a language with a good type system than write Ruby in that sort of style. The value of types is greatly diminished if there isn't a compiler to make all sorts of wonderful optimizations and find bugs for you. At least until Ruby the language implements gradual/soft typing directly.

The library mentioned also raises exceptions for bad input. Unfortunately, exceptions cripple the runtime performance of Ruby so I wouldn't consider that a smart thing to do.

<comment><USER3> You'd get these runtime exceptions anyway, but they would be obscure and often hard to debug. Once you define core objects in your system that you construct from external sources (like a database) you establish a contract that the source is trusted and it's expected to provide valid data. If that doesn't happen, for some reason (and it happens), you want to see it as early as possible and a meaningful error can be very helpful.

This obviously doesn't come even close to a statically typed language but I believe it's a huge improvement over the typical approach in Ruby where you...just don't care and hope for the best ;)

<comment><USER18> > _You 'd get these runtime exceptions anyway, but they would be obscure and > often hard to debug._

Only if you use the bang versions of save/update/create, which I don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a strong advocate for this and to an even larger extend some of the improvements that Trailblazer project have introduced.

Reform, a component of Trailblazer, uses virtus for coercion and Dry::Validation methodologies described.

it's worth a look for anyone who found this post enlightening.

<comment><USER3> I should mention that dry-data will replace virtus in reform, as it's a) faster b) simpler c) more flexible :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the example in the article the libraries smell a lot like a reinvention of JSON schema. What am I not seeing?</comment>


With Cryptocurrencies in Free Fall, One Big Firm Doubles Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/technology/andreessen-horowitz-cryptocurrencies-fund.html <comment><USER2> Active discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17395493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17395493).</comment>


Intel is changing the future of power supplies with its ATX12VO spec - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcworld.com/article/3518831/how-intels-changing-the-future-of-power-supplies-with-its-atx12vo-spec.html <comment><USER3> Four important things to consider:

First, this already happened to some extent. Outside of drives and fans, the virtually all of the power used in your system is exclusively 12v; either from the 12v pins on your ATX24 or P4 or EPS12 connectors, or via the PCI-E connectors; very little non-drive or non-fan power is supplied via 3.3 or 5v rails.

Second, almost all PSUs today use 12v DC to 3.3/5v DC converters to increase efficiency given how little 3.3v and 5v is required. The PSU itself is often designed internally as a high efficiency multi-module single rail 12v-only design.

Third, Intel is not in a position to dictate anything. Intel has tried to float many changes in the standards (such as the WTX board standard (with matching incompatible mobo plug), and the BTX board standard (using ATX plugs)), and all failed. The only thing that stuck was using 4 and 8 pin PC Minifit Jr plugs (the same ones ATX, PCI-E and countless other plugs come from); and, annoyingly, somehow not compatible with PCI-E's pinout.

Fourth, Intel is also not the dominant player in the field now, AMD is. They failed to get major changes through as the dominant player, what makes them think anyone cares to hear what they have to say today? It is unlikely AMD will ever ship machines that don't ship with normal ATX unless they just jettison the ATX24 altogether.

Side note: 12v capacity: ATX24 144w, P4 192w, EPS12 336w, PCI-E 6 75w, PCI-E 8 150w, and the PCI-E slot itself 75w.

A modern desktop could theoretically be ran off a dual EPS12 and a PCI-E 8+8 for the GPU; modern mobo designs run the CPU and RAM VRMs off the EPS12 entirely, modern GPU designs run the GPU VRMs off of PCI-E plugs and the VRAM VRMs off the PCI-E slot power, very little power of any voltage is supplied to the system via ATX24.

Another side note: Any board that has a legitimately clean 5v rail for USB is _not_ feeding it off the PSU directly. Any board that has absolutely garbage USB power probably committed this sin.

<comment><USER4> > Fourth, Intel is also not the dominant player in the field now, AMD is.

This is delusional - AMD's market share is like 15%.

<comment><USER5> I agree it's delusional, but to give some hard data, Mercury Research published its quarterly findings on x86 market share as of Q4 2019[0]. Specifically:

\- On the server side, AMD market share is only 4.5% (up by 1.4 percentage point from last year)

\- For desktop, market share is 18.3%, up by 2.4 pp from last year.

\- For laptop, market share is 16.2%, up by 4.0 pp from last year.

\- For overall x86 chips, market share is 15.5%, up by 3.2 pp from last year.

So it's pretty clear that AMD isn't quite leading the market, although there is an overall upward trend in market share, and the rate at which AMD is gaining market share seems to be on the rise. Maybe in 4-5 years, AMD will be the dominant player. But it's still too early to call them this.

[0]: [https://www.techpowerup.com/263612/amd-desktop-processor- mar...](https://www.techpowerup.com/263612/amd-desktop-processor-market-share- now-at-18-3-mercury-research)

<comment><USER6> > Maybe in 4-5 years, AMD will be the dominant player. But it's still too > early to call them this.

Highly unlikely. This is AMD's prime time because Intel screwed up, and they've peaked at 15%. I predict Intel to gain the pace in a few years and dominate the market once again.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps but I'm not so sure we may see things play out in AMD's favor since they are fabless but Intel remains shackled to ever more costly and difficult fabrication. Either way they did hire Jim Keller and I am excited to see what he can do with their resources and technology.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. Intel's capacity needs are huge, to the point where the benefits of outsourcing just can't happen. Also, it's not a good idea to rely on others, because they can screw up. Remember 28nm and the graphics fiasco?

Sure, the costs will be high and there will be some risks of an in-house fabs but it's Intel. They're better off with it.

<comment><USER8> > Also, it's not a good idea to rely on others, because they can screw up. > Remember 28nm and the graphics fiasco?

How long has Intel had 10nm on it's roadmap? I think their earliest roadmaps said it should have happened 5 years ago.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/thumb/5/5c/7nm_densities.sv...](https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/thumb/5/5c/7nm_densities.svg/1050px-7nm_densities.svg.png)

Because their 10nm is denser than tsmc's so called _7nm_?

<comment><USER5> TSMC has a new process called N7P EUV that has a higher density than Intel's 10nm process[0], in production since last year. They also are on track to have their N5 process in production next year, which is supposed to have an even higher density[1]. Obviously, N5 isn't in prod yet so this is just a roadmap, maybe they'll hit roadblocks like intel here.

But still, it's disingenuous to claim that Intel is trying something that wasn't achieved by TSMC already. TSMC has already beaten Intel on transistor density fair and square.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process#7_nm_process_node...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process#7_nm_process_nodes_and_process_offerings)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#5_nm_process_node...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#5_nm_process_nodes)

<comment><USER6> N7+ EUV is 1.2x denser but also it's yield is horrible according to sources. [https://wccftech.com/tsmc-7nm-euv-yield- alleged/](https://wccftech.com/tsmc-7nm-euv-yield-alleged/)

And you can't compare tsmc vs Intel directly because their target chip size is different. Intel produces chips size of avg. 180mm² while tsmc and others aim for under 80mm². Even the industry leader producing small chips are suffering in yield for ranges of 113MTr/mm². Intel producing huge chips with 100.76MTr/mm² density even without EUV means they are going through the right way.

With those knoledges on non-EUV nodes I expect Intel to be on par (which it already is) or be superior than others in about 1-2 years. [https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/File:5nm_densities.svg](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/File:5nm_densities.svg)

People having insight to this industry doesn't think Intel has ever been left behind in this race towards density. Fanboys and regular people influenced by the media does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love computers with 12VDC native power jacks. Why? My solar-powered van (interior only, the engine is still diesel) is 12VDC everywhere, and that's good clean battery DC, not some noisy-ass AC/DC conversion.

I love it so much that 2 of the last 3 computers I built (on an ATX form factor) were 12VDC native. I have external AC/DC power supplies for them, but when travelling/living in a solar-powered environment, I get to just plug them straight into the clean juice.

Sadly, monitors used to be this way too - they came with external power bricks and were 12VDC native. But sometime in the mid-2000's, something changed. My guess is that someone figured out how to shrink the necessary converters to a size that made it more "sensible" to put them inside the monitor. Result: almost impossible now to find a monitor you connect to a 12VDC supply. The one I have in the van took me months to find on ebay back in 2015. The only exception are "TV" monitors specifically made for RVs, which is great and all, except that most of them are crap compared to a modern monitor.

One small problem with plugging 12VDC native computers into a solar system: it's not atypical for the solar charge controller to drive the charge voltage over 14V, at which point most internal "PSUs" designed for 12V will shutdown. You need a voltage regulator between you and the battery-terminal voltage.

<comment><USER10> I'm just waiting for electric vehicles and their technology to invade the van and RV market.

It would be really cool to have a solar/battery powered vehicle you can power from DC. A bus-sized RV could easily generate 5kw from current solar panels just on it's roof.

Current RVs do have both 110v AC and 12v DC systems, but they're not easily integrated. 12v is too low to power bigger stuff like air conditioners (1500 watts = 125 amp wiring!) and converting DC to AC requires expensive inverters.

A really cool solution would be high-voltage DC powering DC appliances directly and stepping down to clean lower voltage DC close to where it's needed.

<comment><USER9> Electric vehicles are a long way from the sort of mileage that would allow them to effectively replace vans and RVs. We routinely drive 5-800 miles in a day in our van. This isn't going to be possible until battery replacement takes over from battery charging.

And yes, our van has 120VAC (1kW) available, but I prefer to use it only for things where's there no alternative (e.g. our toaster, or recharging laptops, sigh).

As far rooftop, we have the long Sprinter with about as much solar as you can get on the roof given that you need (at least) an exhaust fan. That gets us to 540W. The most I've ever seen on a van was 3kW and that was an ... insane ... physical setup.

<comment><USER10> I bought a tesla 700 miles away and drove it home the same day.

As to RVs and vans:

\- the cybertruck ships in the next year with 500 miles range, and will charge at 250kw/1000 miles per hour

\- the tesla semi is coming soon

\- other companies are entering the game

\- people have been putting lithium ion batteries in their RVs.

\- EVs have electric air conditioners now.

Separately I will say if you're driving an RV 5-800 miles in a day (regardless of power source) that's a really hard trip. I find 300 miles in the saddle taxing and 150-200 lots nicer. Leave, drive and arrive during daylight hours and enjoy the trip.

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't want to drive 5-800 miles a day every day, and I don't. But when we do (e.g. just trying to get somewhere before staying there for a while), I don't want to be cramped in that way.

The cybertruck charging rate sounds great, but where are the charging stations? You know, the ones in southeastern Oregon or southwestern New Mexico?

I'm not trying to be a debbie-downer about this. I absolutely believe in an electrical vehicle future. But I don't believe it will happen via charging - it will happen via battery swapping, probably using a standard mandated by national (or international) level bodies.

<comment><USER10> [https://www.tesla.com/supercharger](https://www.tesla.com/supercharger)

[https://www.plugshare.com/](https://www.plugshare.com/)

any rv park

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In one sense this feels like pushing the efficiency problem under the rug. There's a requirement for _power supplies_ to meet a certain efficiency standard, and generating 3.3v and 5v rails are pushing that number down. Solution? Move that task to the motherboard where they won't count against the power supply efficiency requirement.

Of course, from a purely engineering perspective, it really does make sense and it's overdue.

<comment><USER12> The motherboard "knows more" than the PSU though, it should be able to better deal with these idle power situations by shutting down things that aren't used anymore and powering them back up when needed. An external PSU would have tighter constraints regarding power availability and wouldn't be able to optimize the power profile quite as aggressively since they don't really know exactly what they're driving.

<comment><USER11> Many DC-DC supplies have auto-standby/idle modes that take care of this problem in an automatic way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Makes sense. Should have happened long ago. All those old voltages date from when +5 from the power supply was used directly by the logic. Facebook's Open Compute rack delivers only +12 to the boards and drives, and that's from 2011. There's a power supply in the base of the rack that takes in three-phase AC or 48 VDC or whatever and puts out +12VDC. All other conversion is on the board. This is just catching up desktops to where the data center went years ago.

<comment><USER14> I believe the Open Compute designs moved to 48 VDC for efficiency.

<comment><USER13> Ah, they did.[1] The power busbars are in the same place, so you can't have both 12V and 48V in the same rack. The connectors are intentionally incompatible so you can't plug into the wrong voltage.

[1] [http://files.opencompute.org/oc/public.php?service=files&t=8...](http://files.opencompute.org/oc/public.php?service=files&t=827d028fc82b4b55315a4d7815b43c78)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > PSU vendors don't want to release ATX12VO products for DIY builders until > there are motherboards that support ATX12VO. Motherboard vendors don't want > to create products until power supply makers support them.

Seems like that could be addressed with one of two adapters:

\- A passive adapter cable with a female ATX connector (with the 3.3V and 5V pins disconnected) and male ATX12VO connector

\- An active adapter cable/board with a female ATX12VO connector, the necessary circuits to step voltages down to 3.3V and 5V, and a male ATX connector.

One or both of these could happen today and immediately solve that chicken- and-egg problem for the custom market, no?

<comment><USER16> This is already somewhat happening, but it's very niche:

[https://j-hackcompany.com/?product=j-hack-m2427-for- corsair-...](https://j-hackcompany.com/?product=j-hack-m2427-for-corsair-sf- series)

[https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/m2427-cable- manage...](https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/m2427-cable-management- freedom.10349/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It was bound to happen eventually, there has been a long trend towards point- of-use regulation displacing multiple output supplies. I'm just surprised they went with 12V, and not 19V which has lower rectification losses, less power loss to wire/trace resistance, and a large existing design ecosystem from laptops where 19V has been the norm for years.

<comment><USER18> Why is it 19V for laptops? I had suspected it's to compensate for voltage drop at linear regulators. Batteries are either 11.1(3.7v 4 cells) or 14.8(3.7v 3 cells 1-3 parallel) and these voltages doesn't seem immediately consistent with ATX12V to me.

<comment><USER19> The nominal voltage of a battery isn't the maximum voltage, 3.7V lithium cells are typically charged to around 4.2V.

A 4S battery (or equivalent) will have a nominal voltage of 14.8V and a maximum voltage of 16.8V, which leaves 2.2V extra, probably to account for losses.

Why 19V ended up being the typical voltage rather than rounding it up to something like 20V or 24V is beyond me (probably a matter of compliance, try checking IEC 60950-1 or related standards).

<comment><USER20> I have seen many laptops where the charger sticker says the output voltage is 19.5V. And the nearest USB-C standard voltage is 20V, so that's probably what most newer laptops which charge through a USB-C socket use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 12V makes so much more sense to be sending around - the losses at lower voltages are rough. It would be nice to replace legacy molex connectors with a more modern standard, however.

<comment><USER22> > It would be nice to replace legacy molex connectors with a more modern > standard

Any example of the modern one? I personally have no issues with the current one. I am not sure if those molex connectors should be called as legacy.

<comment><USER23> The SATA power connector is the obvious successor. Most random doodads (e.g. internal fan controllers) have moved from using molex connectors in the past to SATA power connectors now.

<comment><USER15> > Most random doodads (e.g. internal fan controllers) have moved from using > molex connectors in the past to SATA power connectors now.

They have? I've literally never seen this in the wild.

<comment><USER23> I've had this fan controller in my desktop for probably five years now: [https://www.thermaltake.com/commander-fp-10-port-hub-for- pwm...](https://www.thermaltake.com/commander-fp-10-port-hub-for-pwm- fans.html)

<comment><USER15> Huh. That's pretty cool. I've only seen (and used) the Molex to whatever-that- connector's-called adapters, which is indeed what I used in my Threadripper build about a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how easy this would make server local UPS systems. A battery with a single buck/boost converter should be enough as a power supply. Just need to add a mains fed charge circuit.

<comment><USER21> Probably would allow _very_ cheap power supplies w/built-in UPSes. 12V±5% voltage is the allowed range.

<comment><USER25> Most desktop users would probably prefer a UPS that also ensured their monitor stayed on.

<comment><USER26> I actually leave my monitor off UPS intentionally. While I'm away, I'd rather my workstation survive a brownout or short loss of power and if I'm actively working, it's easy enough to move the monitor's power cable to the UPS to save my work and shut down. My CPU draws ~45W at idle; my monitor draws a whopping 130W — having it on battery materially shortens the off-AC runtime.

<comment><USER23> Your monitor shouldn't draw 130W at idle. My 34" monitor is ~3W in sleep mode, 34W when on. Even my eight year old 55" TV only draws 90W when on.

<comment><USER26> It's a 10 year old TFT: [https://support.hp.com/us- en/document/c02159509](https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c02159509)

"Typical power consumption: 130 W."

<comment><USER27> Right, but doesn't it suspend when you're away? DPMS should be at least an order of magnitude less, if not two.

<comment><USER26> Nope. I turn it off when I'll be away for a long time. But not if I'm just grabbing food or doing some housework or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's an interesting development. Things like -12V made sense on the 80s (sigh), while high-powered 3.3v/5v needs made sense on the 90s (it still makes some sense today, for example for USB)

Though one thing they might have considered but maybe rejected was going for a higher voltage single rail power supply (something like 24v)

Your board might still need those voltages but will have to DC-DC convert it themselves (as opposed to a multi-tap transformer as the article was implying)

<comment><USER29> pretty much all modern boards use DC/DC power stages from 12v, even for 5v and 3.3v stuff.

<comment><USER30> Indeed, found that for myself when got into mobo design.

ATX 5V is really unsuitable for USB power, and can play tricks on you.

Similarly, 3.3V from PSU is useless at powering 3.3V logic.

You have to do power staging on board to guarantee that PCI and i2c stuff turns on after the bridge/soc.

Some PSUs don't follow reset timings, or don't do them at all on standby rail.

So if you do ATX power by the book, you may end up with improperly inited board, and 3.3V ICs booting up before the CPU.

So, yes, most of ATX power supply functionality is already duplicated by most mobos

<comment><USER31> >ATX 5V is really unsuitable for USB power, and can play tricks on you.

Why? I don't think current motherboard duplicate 5V converter.

>you may end up with improperly inited board, and 3.3V ICs booting up before the CPU.

Why it cannot just hold reset line for these chips high until CPU started?

<comment><USER32> A lot of peripheral IC's don't have reset lines. Sometimes this is a big big problem. You can end up with failure to come up maybe 1 in 10,000. Exactly the sort of thing that shows up late in development or worse in the field.

Tip: If anyone tells you power supply and reset sequencing is 'easy' ignore them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This makes sense for specific use case computers, specialty ones, etc. So it'll be adopted. And because of economies of scale it'll push into actual desktop computers and their mobos. Having to dissipate all that heat on/in the mobo will be terrible for actual desktop computers. But it'll happen anyway because it's better for corporations and the desktop market doesn't drive their decisions.

<comment><USER34> A typical CPU (or SSD even) uses a voltage of 0.9V currently, surely it doesn't matter whether the motherboard is converting 12V to 0.9V or 5V to 0.9V.

Back when this stuff was originally designed 12V, 5V and 3.3V was all you needed (actually with the AT standard it was just 12V for motors and 5V for logic, that was pre-CMOS). Now every component requires a different voltage (if there's any standard it might be 1.8V or 1.2V), and to get several hundreds watts of power at 0.9V would require cables about an inch thick.

12V is the defacto standard for powering pretty much anything these days. Converting 12V into whatever you want is utterly trivial and incredibly efficient.

<comment><USER25> Maybe for a lot of things, but I've seen plenty of SSDs that only need 5v power, and I've never seen one that only needed 12v.

<comment><USER35> You mean 3.3V (since M.2 is 3.3V only)?

It's trivial to convert 12V to 3.3V tbh

<comment><USER25> No, I mean if you look at 2.5" SSDs with datasheets specifying the operating voltages, they will commonly specify 5 volts.

Intel SSD 530? "5.0V SATA Supply Rail" [1]

Seagate 600 SSD? "+5V Max" [2]

Toshiba SG5? "Supply Voltage 5.0 V ±5%" [3]

Swissbit X-60? "5V± 10% (3.3 V available upon request)" [4]

Apacer SV250-25? "5.0V ±10%" [5]

So the statement that "12V is the defacto standard for powering pretty much anything these days" isn't accurate in the case of 2.5" SSDs. I acknowledge desktop computers often supply 12v to the motherboard and graphics card, of course!

(Some 2.5 inch SSDs, like the Micron 5100 Series use both 5v and 12v [6] - <USER2> I agree that M.2 is 3.3v only)

[1] [https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...](https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product- specifications/ssd-530-sata-specification.pdf) [2] [https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product- content/ss...](https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/ssd- fam/600-ssd/en-us/docs/600-ssd-data-sheet-ds1780-3-1305us.pdf) [3] [https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/content/dam/toshiba- ss/a...](https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/content/dam/toshiba-ss/asia- pacific/docs/product/storage/product-manual/SSD-SG5-Series-Brochure- Revision1.0.pdf) [4] [https://www.mouser.co.uk/datasheet/2/615/X-60_fact_sheet-163...](https://www.mouser.co.uk/datasheet/2/615/X-60_fact_sheet-1633266.pdf) [5] [https://www.mouser.co.uk/datasheet/2/24/SV250-25_AE2.255XXC....](https://www.mouser.co.uk/datasheet/2/24/SV250-25_AE2.255XXC.XXX04_Spec_rev1.1-1602155.pdf) [6] [http://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/671/5100_ssd-1283974.pdf](http://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/671/5100_ssd-1283974.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Only as anecdata, in my practical experience over the years, I needed to change many power supplies[1], and very few motherboards. (excluding replacements due to upgrades)

I would go a little bit further and say that the PSU is probably the most replaced "standard" part of a PC, followed by hard disks.

I also a couple times repaired a PSU replacing this or that failed component, but it is simply not worth the time and money, as spare new PSU's are cheap enough, the replacing is very easy whilst even procuring a single chip or capacitor is complex for non-professionals, besides the soldering tools, etc.

Hopefully the parts that age or however tend to fail will remain in the (easily replaceable) PSU, otherwise we will see an increase in replaced motherboards.

Some sort of (standard) "daughterboard" with the voltage regulating components would have made more sense (to me), but surely it makes less sense from an industrial manudacturing point of view.

[1] be it due to capacitors, power transistors or mosfets or _whatever_ , and due to _whatever_ reasons, be it aging, power surges, etc.

<comment><USER37> Are you buying bottom of the barrel PSUs? I've had the same Corsair unit in three machines over the last decade. Works perfectly fine.

<comment><USER36> >Are you buying bottom of the barrel PSUs?

If you mean that "standard" OEM PSU's (think Asus, Fujitsu, IBM/Lenovo and a few - mini-ITX Shuttle cases) are "bottom of the barrel", yes.

Then, since often an used, original, non-standard (say) IBM/Lenovo PSU can be found for a mere 100-150 € on e-bay, I started getting el-cheapo (though not el-cheap _est_ ) ones with no appreciable decrease (or increase) in durability, putting them externally and re-mapping the cables.

For the mini-ITX cases (that use a not-very-common form factor) I gutted new 1U server PSU's and managed to fit them in.

The PC I am writing this with (ASUS) is 2008 and I replaced a PSU in 2012 and one in 2016 or 2017, cannot remember.

Out of the four IBM/Lenovo's I have at another office, dated 2010 or 2011, two have still their original PSU, two have the external adapted ATX, no other parts replaced.

All in all (and for _whatever_ reasons) I would estimate that over a 5-10 years lifetime of a system[1] there are:

1-2 replacement of PSU's

1 replacement of hard disk(s)

No replacement of other parts, let alone the motherboard.

Sice 2012 I am at the third Fujitsu ThinClient (used as router) with PSU failing (in this case they are so cheap second hand that I change the whole little machine).

[1] the mini-ITX's (there were three of them) before being decommissioned) lasted 2003-2018, i.e. 15 years, running NT 4.0 or 2K 24/7 each with 2 PSU replacements, the last one, being a server grade PSU most probably would be just fine for another five or more years.

<comment><USER38> That is an insane rate to be going through PSU's. Many of the enthusiast PSU's myself and friends have put into our computers usually outlive the other components. Generic grey box PSU's off ebay usually dont have the same standards as a SeaSonic or Thermaltake unit

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I remember the days when Microsoft and Intel would host the "PCxx" spec (where xx was the last two digits of the year) and tell everyone what all the standards for desktop machines were going to be for the next few years. Those days are gone though.

12V rail PSUs are nice for a number of reasons but I always liked that you could feed your DC input from the AC side or a battery and have a "free" UPS at the same time. It is a bit tricky with a switching supply since you don't want to have the battery seeing 25Khz power outages as the switcher turns on and off but its very doable. With a little bit of instrumentation you could have the PC itself control charging and monitoring the battery itself so only a minimal amount of hardware needed to give every motherboard its own UPS.

<comment><USER40> I am very much interested in this, using DC power sources is the future. How do I go around adding a 12V DC power supply to the ordinary ATX computer? Can you find some links for this?

<comment><USER39> Such supplies exist for some levels of power. Very popular in the MiniITX community where power levels are < 300W.[1]. There is also a wealth of material on developing DC to DC converters and a number of modules for the same.

For a non-engineer putting something together I would look at DC-DC converter modules (see [https://www.digikey.com/products/en/power-supplies-board- mou...](https://www.digikey.com/products/en/power-supplies-board-mount/dc-dc- converters/922?k=dc%20to%20dc%20converter)) that provided the necessary power rails, at the power level that was required.

Such a solution would not be compact and integrated like one that was designed from scratch to be used in this way, but would certainly work.

I used one of the MiniITX supplies to power a system that is mounted in a box on a tree with a solar panel charging a deep cycle battery. It is the download/storage point for a number of wildlife cameras nearby.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/250w-DC-ATX-Power-Supply- Supplies/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/250w-DC-ATX-Power-Supply- Supplies/dp/B00NB6U3TS)

<comment><USER40> Thanks, this is useful. I am thinking about building a UPS at home from batteries, so it can supply around 650W of DC power. I assume that using voltage of 12V on the supply side of the DC-DC converter would be too energy- inefficient for such high a power, so I'm thinking I'd better string such 12V batteries in series to get higher voltage, say 300 V. This should have minimal transmission losses, so I can lead this to my DC-DC converter via standard electric wires.

<comment><USER39> Most of the mid-range UPS systems that are rated at 650KVA or above will use dual 12V batteries for 24V driving an inverter. You can get 1kW inverters for RV's but they need thick (0 gage) wires connected to the battery.

For "universal" battery power (and lots of gear in the market already) consider 48V power. That has been the standard at phone companies for decades so there is a lot of support for it. I once bid on a 10kW 48V inverter on eBay that had been removed from service at a phone company. It made (240V two phase power for telephone racks).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This will make motherboards more expensive and fragile. Desktop chipsets from Intel can only support two generations of processors. While a good PSU can have ten years of warranty.

<comment><USER42> A plan for planned obsolescence?

<comment><USER41> Delivering only 12V has its own pros, so I will give them the benefit of doubt. But I think this move will increase my cost of building desktops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Not the first time Intel is pushing for tighter VRM integration.

Haswell had FIVR, which I think was pretty revolutionary, the die itself contained VRMs for the CPU, IGP, memory and more.

Sadly, they gave up on it, probably because it made the processors run hot as hell.

There's not enough die area to cool all of that plus the processing cores and multiple controllers themselves

</comment><comment><USER44> Why 12v though? What requires that much voltage? The chips are running at a few volts. Spinning drives are gone, is it just for fans? Seems silly to provide 12v then shift it down again.

<comment><USER45> True, but motherboards need to shift down anyway. The motherboard controls the voltage of the CPU, and that can be anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> So I guess this makes it cheaper to make lower-idling power supplies; or does a high quality current ATX PSU, like one of the Seasonic Titanium models, not meet the CEC standards for idle power?

</comment><comment><USER47> I actually want a spec that is similar to Apple's Mac Pro, there should be Zero Cables.

</comment><comment><USER48> The big advantage could be finally moving the PSU out of the case, and having it as just an external power brick. This will make systems significantly lighter and smaller (and thus more portable), take heat out of the case, and improve airflow.

You can already buy 330w laptop chargers - just beef them up and you could easily run a mid-grade gaming PC.

[https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Adapter- DA330PM111-ADP-330AB-332...](https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Adapter- DA330PM111-ADP-330AB-332-1432/dp/B00CGA5JQM/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=330w+laptop+charger&qid=1583854491&sr=8-6) You can already buy

</comment><comment><USER49> Fuck them. Building retro PCs using modern power supplies will get ever more harder now.

<comment><USER50> It'll be easy to find converters once the market shifts. There are enough retro builders that one will get built.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Why does this still have 10 pins?

2 pins would be plenty. 12v Power, Ground, and an overlaid capacitively coupled 2 way data comms running at a few hundred khz to send and receive status messages, fan speeds, model/serial numbers, firmware/ temperatures, on/off commands, etc.

<comment><USER52> 1 pin is called PS_ON, this shorting to ground turns it on. 1 called PWR_OK which says everything is working in some way I don't want to research. 1 +12V for stand by. 1 +12V sense for detecting voltage drop or something. And then 2 normal +12V and 3 ground. There is 1 reserved pin as well (rectangle connector so needs even pin count)

<comment><USER34> > +12V sense for detecting voltage drop or something

This is actually the best bit, incredibly smart idea. It's a kelvin connection to ensure that you get 12V at the motherboard, regardless of power dissipation in the wire.

<comment><USER53> Why is it important to have absolute accuracy on the 12V pin?

<comment><USER54> Not absolute accuracy, but you can easily drop a few volts on transmission losses if the cable is poor or damaged.

<comment><USER55> If you drop a few volts on the 12 V cable of a PC you're about to start a fire.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are you tracking API changes? - <AUTHOR> We're constantly writing services, bots, and apps that include dependencies on external APIs. When those APIs inevitably change, we usually need to adapt to those changes. I've been in situations recently where my code breaks in production because of an API deprecation I wasn't aware of. How do you handle this situation? Do you use any tools or processes for API tracking? Curious to hear about your experiences! <comment><AUTHOR> Got a dev.to thread here as well with some initial discussion: [https://dev.to/vbordo/devs-what-tools-do-you-use-to-keep- tra...](https://dev.to/vbordo/devs-what-tools-do-you-use-to-keep-track-of-api- changes--5cd8)</comment>


Ask HN: How to get traction? - <AUTHOR>

I'm wondering how you go from 0 users to your first 1,000 users, especially if it is for a service that is not really similar anything else. I've read the blog by the duck duck go guy, but I didn't feel like I had a satisfactory answer. <comment><USER2> Without knowing what kind of service you're providing, it will be hard for many to offer any advice, or potentially good tactic ideas for you.

Some general advice I'd provide is:

\- Figure out the characteristics of your users. What kinds of people have the problem you're solving? Be as specific as possible, and segment into multiple groups. Think about age, gender, interests, activities, group memberships, places.

\- What kind of tools and services do those people already use? How do those services get their users?

\- Where can your different types of users already be found? What communities are they part of? What types of sites do they frequent? <http://quantcast.com> is a great tool for this. This list: <http://socialmediaanswers.com/niche- social-networking-sites/> and lists like it are another good one.

\- What kind of things do your potential users talk about? Can you find them using <http://search.twitter.com> and <http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch> ?

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> >I'm wondering how you go from 0 users to your first 1,000 users, especially if it is for a service that is not really similar anything else.

You don't approach the problem backwards, that's how.

A "product" without a need is like an answer without a question. You should always have, at minimum, at least 1 user that finds the product _useful_ before you even develop anything.

Assuming you have a least one person who is having a problem solved by your product, the issue then becomes to find other people with the same problem. Your product should sell itself to them.

What problem does your service solve?

Who has that problem?

Go introduce your problem to them. If this model doesn't fit for whatever "but, but" you can come up with, I would humbly suggest abandoning this product and focusing on another.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the product does have a need. It is a replacement for something I've been doing in an ad-hoc way for a while now. I would use what I'm planning on making even if it never took off, but I figured it would be pretty cool if I could get other people to use it too.

It is a tool oriented toward programmers and from what people have been saying it seems like you just have to get it out there and also combine it with a little advertising for things programmers might search for.

<comment><USER4> Why don't you just show us what you've made? We seem to be your target market anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> I plan to :), but I just started working on it. I figured I would solicit feedback from HN when I finish in a week or two once I have an initial version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're at zero, just try to get to 10 first. Then go for 100. Think small, get feedback, and improve. I think Paul Buchheit said that a startup's first goal is to reach 100 passionate users.

</comment><comment><USER6> In one word: Marketing.

Either Organic (SEO), Social media (Twitter, Facebook, Blog posts) or PPC (AdWords, Ads on relevant blogs).

</comment><comment><USER7> [Link removed, didn't realize was same as mentioned.]

If your service is truly unique you might find some good rates on keywords.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I found that link useful. I hadn't read that post. I was referring more to his book on getting traction from which he has links to a bunch of interviews.

Link I'm referring to so the original commenter doesn't have to re-edit: [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/ways-to- get-100-...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/ways-to- get-100-potential-customers-for-5-a-day.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> -create something free to give away and reach out to popular bloggers to ask for reviews

-join niche forums and participate</comment>


Introducing the Dropbox Sync API - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/26

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. Given how many developers are somewhat unhappy with iCloud's reliability and what not it'll at least provide another choice. Might even spur Apple to try and make it work better than it currently does.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool! Dropbox still sorely needs event driven webhooks or a stream of sorts. Their /delta is solid but requires an _insane_ amount of data to catch up if I just want notifications of recent changes.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is, hopefully, an example of how thin client devices will eventually take over. I am writing this from a Chromebook, which I love but unfortunately is hamstrung by the fact that wireless internet is not yet 100% reliable. Once we guarantee that we will have internet nearly everywhere and with a reasonable price tag/battery effect, all files will be accessed through APIs like this one.

</comment><comment><USER5> iCloud offers one benefit over this, which is iCloud allows record-level syncing (for SQLite databases using CoreData).

Dropbox is file-level syncing. So if you have a database app managing many records in tables, Dropbox will sync the entire database when even a single record changes. iCloud would only sync the record(s) than changed.

<comment><USER6> iCloud offers a theoretical benefit but is a bit hosed today when it comes to record-level syncing: <http://noidentityapps.com/blog/?p=905>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was hoping to hear about rate limits (how many events can be handled in N seconds) and/or maximum number of requests per day by a given App ID.

Did I miss any mentions of these, or are there none?

Dropbox has my attention in any case. I might just incorporate this in my current project.</comment>


ClusterPuck99: The first Xbox One game to be ported to WebGL - <AUTHOR> https://www.airconsole.com/play/party-games/clusterpuck-99 <comment><USER2> AirConsole is an impressive project by itself!</comment>


Show HN: My simple site, powered by Cassandra/Sinatra/Unicorn - <AUTHOR>

Clickable: http://xenng.com<p>Thanks for your attention. <comment><AUTHOR> URL: <http://xenng.com>

</comment><comment><USER2> Why Cassandra?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's quite a simple site so any rdbms can be fitted. But because I'm doing an experiment to evaluate Cassandra for a future project.

So far so great, it works very well for me. I can easily change the schema, and get a new EC2 node up and running instantly with less effort .

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's really cool, thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.</comment></comment>