What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/5902280/what-the-hell-these-game-developers-did-with-your-kickstarter-money <comment><USER3> Software development on a budget of $30k getting described as lavish. Ahh, gamers, they're so cute. Poorly-informed over-entitled misanthropes, but cute. "You're doing your shoestring budget wrong! You should listen to me! I've never shipped anything longer than a blog comment but my years of experience as a pir^H^H^H consumer mean I really know this job well!"

P.S. A business where the successful outcome is the principals end up in personal debt is neither a business nor successful.

<comment><USER4> > Ahh, gamers, they're so cute. Poorly-informed over-entitled misanthropes, > but cute.

As a gamer, I completely agree with you here. The entitlement has grown rapidly over the past 2-3 years, and in my opinion is only hurting those in the industry looking to be adventurous.

Something like Minecraft might be the exception, but look at the shenanigans surrounding the Mass Effect 3 ending (which was not as bad as some would have you believe)—BioWare is releasing DLC to re-work something that was just a clash between (entitled) gamers who interpreted advertising in their own way, and the artistic direction of those who made the game. Considering the backlash, do these gamers think a studio like BioWare (or publisher like EA) will risk a game that isn't just a Call of Duty sequel again? Sure, but the chances are less, and the resultant game is going to tread a significantly less-risky path.

The comments regarding the $1000 (nothing!) spent on iPad hardware are just inane.

<comment><USER5> The Mass Effect 3 ending was shit. Not artistic, not creative. Shit. A piece of storytelling so completely divorced from the previous narrative tapestry as to make even professors of English literature wince with disappointment. Its only explanations are rushed development or a lapse in creative oversight.

On top of being shit, it was not at all what was described by the project leads in interviews or in advertising. Game consumers are "entitled" to receive what is advertised – return policies don't let them vote with their dollars once a deception is unmasked.

You sound like you're parroting the narrative of an industry-captured press, rather than detailing first-hand knowledge of the situation.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't it seem slightly bizarre to claim entitlement to an entertainment product? At least as bizarre as lobbying a film maker/author into re-editing some content that was found wanting.

<comment><USER5> Nope.

I have money.

I give it to you for a product you have promised me, according to certain specifications we have agreed upon.

Here you go.

I am now entitled to the product as described for that money. Mass Effect's epic conclusion was hyped for five years. It was the central selling point of the series. A version of Excel that doesn't calculate things correctly is broken. Similarly, an interactive story that fails to deliver on the promise of complexity and interactivity in its most glorified and advertised of moments is also broken.

Films and books don't belong in this discussion – they are not interactive media. They stand no valuable comparison. This situation is more like a piece of software that ships broken and needs a patch to sort things out. _That_ happens so often as to be unremarkable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Damnit people. I've lost track of how many times the Star Command Kickstarter story has been misrepresented.

The implication is that only $4000 (post tax) was spent on the game and that's an outright lie. They spent 6k on music, 5k on marketing (poster + pax), and 1k to development/demo hardware. That's not necessarily ideal but it's not entirely unreasonable either. You can argue the marketing/hardware issue perhaps, but 6k went directly into the game in the form of music.

The real lesson to take away from Star Command is their under-estimation of time and money required to create, package, and ship backer rewards. That's the real danger that other projects should be wary of.

<comment><USER8> Huh, seems like a perfect representation that very little money actually went to development to me!

Sounds like they didn't do their sums. Also how did they spend so much money on incorporation, costs about £25 ($40) over here.

<comment><USER7> They are a three man team working without any pay. What did you expect the money to go to? Proper salaries and benefits for the team would be a few hundred thousand dollars, not 36k.

Spending $6000 on music counts 100% as "to development" and is perfectly reasonable. For PAX if anything they should have spent more money to create a bigger presence.

<comment><USER9> I'm genuinely curious as to how much music $6000 bought. That can afford quite a decent-length soundtrack.

For not-very-well known composers, I've been quoted in the range of $150-250/minute for music. I assume that if I went a bit higher up the chain (small-time, but established) that the price would rise.

<comment><USER10> As someone who's worked in independent film and has been involved in projects that have spent $10k's and $100k's in music, I dont see this as lavish or irresponsible at all. Musicians are hard workers, and deserve to be paid for their efforts. Just because the developers couldn't hack their way to a great soundtrack and paid for decent/professional work doesn't mean they misappropriated funds. I'd counter that they rightfully spent the money in places that weren't their core competencies.

Edit: I know that film isn't the same as game development, but I feel that the multidisciplinary aspect of game creation incurs costs in a far wider arena than traditional software development.

<comment><USER9> I don't see it as lavish or irresponsible either -- I was just providing a data point. If I could guarantee the sales would be a non-issue, I'd certainly love to step up the production values of titles I make with more varied soundtracks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Direct link instead of Gawker's shallow little summary wrapped around a giant quote from the direct link:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starcommand/star- command...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starcommand/star-command-sci- fi-meets-gamedev-story-for-ios-an/posts/208395)

</comment><comment><USER12> As they said: they clearly overpaid on company formation ($4000 for legal and accounting, which could have been accomplished to the same effect for around $500 if they were frugal, including filing quarterly estimated returns). But still, they'd have ended up with ~$9000 gross instead of $6000; the point still stands.

Some of these Kickstarter numbers look more game-changing than they really are.

But whatever, I'm not a games industry person; I'm really just here to chime my recurring bell about "don't put your company together on a napkin, get the LLC done; it doesn't have to be expensive and it will help you down the road."

<comment><USER13> I'm in the indie games business and I can say they overpaid for everything.

6K for music should be 1-2k at most!

Poster Art - What's wrong with those awesome sprites that Kotaku used. Should be 0.

IPads? More that one?

PAX East? - That's a holiday not a legitimate business expense.

This is why they say so many people don't make their money back in the App Store any more. You can't spend indie money like you work for a AAA studio.

<comment><USER14> _"PAX East? - That's a holiday not a legitimate business expense."_

For a game developer? No, it's a fantastic way to raise the profile of your game. You get the most avid gamers interested in your game (who will spread the word if they like the game) and you get press coverage too. For an exhibitor PAX isn't a 3 day vacation, it's 5 or 6 days of working 12+ hours days, most of them staying chained to their booth in their expo hall.

<comment><USER13> Nar, a game as great looking as theirs would get the press anyhow. The press are dying for more interesting games to write about.

You raise another good point though, not only is it 3k, but its 5-6 days at 12+ hours. A whole week of dev time lost to the event.

Events are great fun, but if you don't have money you don't know what to do with, I don't think they are a very good investment. Not much bang for the buck I don't think.

<comment><USER15> I've been in the fairly unique situation of seeing the results a wide range of companies in the extended games industry (from top games publishers to indies to gaming hardware... etc.) got from exhibiting their products and I couldn't disagree more about it being a good investment.

<comment><USER13> Hey Corin, I'd love to hear more about why you think so. I'm always trying to work out how to best spend my marketing money (and energy).

Do you have any metrics you can share about how an appearance at a show relate to final game sales? Or even press coverage?

For example, if they were to spend that money on banner advertising they could generate say 6-10k clicks through to their website.

<comment><USER15> Press coverage - not metrics, but I've seen an awful lot of stories come out of events, and most importantly an awful lot of journalists meeting exhibitors, from bloggers to mainstream websites or newspapers. Obviously this doesn't guarantee coverage, but it puts the ball in your hands, once you're stood talking to a journalist while standing over your product it's time to knock it out of the park.

I don't really have any customer data I can share with you, the sort of selling points generally used are more vague - such as "The average spend per visitor at last year's event on products sourced at the show was £767, a total audience spend of £79.8m" (taken from the sales pitch of a 2012 event). The overall focus of selling - though I'm not actually in sales so this isn't my direct area - is about the size of the audience, and what sort of demographic they are.

I don't know if events are a good use of your money when it's as tight as that, i.e. if you can chose between $3k on an event or $3k on a PR company, but only one, as I can't think of any exhibitor I've ever had that paid that little, or that was small enough not to have marketing budget around it.

The single biggest argument I can give, I think, is that if you go to PAX you're going to get more people looking at your game than you'd get clicks for $3k online - and when it comes down to it, are you going to sell your game better by having somebody look at your website, or stand in front of you try out your game?

Incidentally, what adverts are giving you that click-rate, and do you have any calculated CPA figures?

edit: I just want to note that like I said above, my experience comes more from big budget companies like big studio publishers rather than indies, so I can't necessarily say events are or aren't a great idea for people like you, just that they do offer bang for buck.

<comment><USER13> Last time I did an Adwords Campaign I was paying about 30-50c a click. I'm doing web games at the moment so really don't have any figures for buying adds on mobile.

I have heard anecdotally that a click in a mobile game costs a lot less.

Fully agree that spending a small percentage of your marketing budget on shows is great. And as I said before, they are heaps of fun and a great holiday for the team. You get to rub shoulders with the press and meet other devs.

But, I think somebody else mentioned these guys aren't even paying themselves a salary yet.

<comment><USER15> How does that 30-50c look once its turned into sales, as in how many clicks per sale? (Unless you don't directly sell anything).

Anyone who exhibits at an event for fun is a fool, as is anyone who exhibits at an event but doesn't find it fun. In my experience - and maybe this differs in other industries or indeed other parts of the games industry - <USER2> couldn't be further from holidays, most event organisers and exhibitors I know, myself included, would tell you they are the most tiring and most stressful times of the year. But for some of us, that's what makes them enjoyable.

Of course there's fun to mix in and around them in ways that being away from the normality of office life let's you have, but it's generally a case of lletting off steam while working crazily hard, not of enjoying a break from working. My last event consisted of 10 days without a break, 10-12 hours minimum, or 15+ during the 4 days of set-up / pack down, but it was still the most fun I've had recently.

<comment><USER13> "How does that 30-50c look once its turned into sales"

Haha, my conversion ratio is not quite there yet, that's why I'm not yet retired.

Once my 50c click pays 55c in sales I'll roll every sale into more ads and be as big as Zynga in no time.

I'm not crazy far off though, last time I had a run at it I made about 85c to the dollar.

<comment><USER15> I don't know what sort of marketing budget you have, but if/when it has a little leeway, try some more targeted advertising rather than AdWords. I'd love to tell you that I could provide it, but the audience I have are PC gamers and I don't honestly think you'd see great results with us, but there will be sites out there that will give you a worse CPC but a better CPA than Google can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Now, right off the top you had $10,000 for prize fulfillment."

The lesson to be learnt here? Very carefully consider your bonus goods. Will making and shipping them cost more than the extra profit they make over the base price? Price 'em out beforehand. And build in a healthy margin of error in case you are wrong.

<comment><USER17> Kickstarter recommends providing intangible rewards. Some people just don't listen to that advice.

To me, it just indicates a lack of creativity. There are so many ways to reward people when making a game, such as allowing funders to name in-game characters or locations, or to have a say in some of the game design. Posters and t-shirts seem like very lazy rewards. And costly of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> OK, I had another thought on this topic, another perspective as to whether this money was well spent.

When you win Kickstarter and get 20-30k as an indie dev, that money is yours. It's in the bank. You're expected to spend it to make sure the game is as good as it can possibly be, sure, but it's now your money to _risk_.

I balk at spending 6K on music, because to me that sound like taking 6k out of my family's bank account, going down to the casino and betting it all on black.

But in reality, that's what I do every day. I sit down at my computer and I bet 1 days salary I can earn it back selling my game directly to players.

My games only have a budget of around 100k each. Most of that my salary. Would 6k on music make 6k more over the life of the game? I don't know? Perhaps. Perhaps I should grow some balls and spend and extra 6K of my family's money on music for my next game as see what happens.

Those risks, those bets, are a lot easier to make when they are somebody else's money. When you have an investor willing to share risks, or a publisher who will own the game when it's done anyhow.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Offering labor-intensive rewards that do not move your project forward are a net loss." <http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/03/rocking-kickstarter.html>

<comment><USER19> But remember, people on Kickstarter are pledging money, not _investing_ money. So if you don't offer good rewards, you won't get any money, and your project will never happen.

<comment><USER20> Unless of course the project itself is the real reward.

I think the tiered award thing hurts a lot of projects by distracting from the basic fact that what you're really contributing to is making the project real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Leaving us with around $6000, which is income, so that was taxed

That's just bad accounting. Making a game costs more than $35k. There should be nothing left to tax.

<comment><USER22> And why does making a game cost more than $35k? Because you need to pay the people making the game so they can _eat_ and _pay rent_. And what do we call the money that we give people for that purpose? Income. Which is taxed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Any _good_ accountant will tell you that you don't have to pay tax on money that has not yet been earned. I've seen two of these article for two different game devs, and they both take into account tax, which should not be part of the equation until the game is actually released.

<comment><USER24> Kickstarter funds count as earnings.

<comment><USER23> I'm sorry, but you are wrong, any basic accounting knowledge (I am a CPA) will tell you that income can be recognized when EARNED, not when received. This is something the IRS agrees with.

Kickstarter funds have not been earned until the product is delivered

<comment><USER25> Aside from determining earned vs. received, surely the Kickstarter revenue must still be offset against expenses before tax can be calculated?

<comment><USER23> Yes, there are many ways to offset the income with expenses. Though what most Kickstarter video game devs are finding out is that they may not use all of the money as expenses in the first year. If you are accounting on a "cash" system, you would have to pay tax, if you are accounting on an "accrual" system, you would not have to pay tax until the game is released, regardless of how many expenses you have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am starting to love kickstarter more and more. It seems like it will be full of business 101 case studies before the year is out.

</comment><comment><USER27> Link to last month's discussion of this story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3847373>

</comment><comment><USER28> We keep hearing kickstarter projects complaining about tshirt costs, maybe kickstarter should start warning people about this.

<comment><USER29> Or someone should make a startup that helps startups sell shirts on Kickstartr, a startup!

<comment><USER30> Kickstarter isn't far from its own optimization industry - like SEO and social media consultants, but guidance for presenting fiscally impossible idea as plausible and tantalizingly close. Then just make a slick concept video, keyword that baby up, and astroturf some buzz. It can't miss!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I personally do not understand why they would have paid for all of the promotional material before the game was near completion. But I will say... that demo is amazing and I am ready to throw money at them.

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting post. I wrote an article on comp.sys.amiga about why software costs so much as a way to try to illuminate the unseen costs in development and support.

I really do think that folks should create the LLC first, get that setup and a copy of Quickbooks or what ever and "practice" running a company first. Seriously, go out and create an LLC right now. Not only will you learn a lot but the cost is moderate. Read the nolo press books, etc.

Do that and the rest is much easier.

</comment><comment><USER33> Since they asked for 20k, I have real doubts they made a good business calculation. Especially if they note that "PayPal and Amazon take their portions" - I'm pretty sure that Kickstarter tells you to adjust for that.

Had they received only the 20k that they asked for, they would now (adjusting for less money necessary for rewards etc.) be left with almost no money at all. That's simply not good business calculation.

</comment><comment><USER34> $30,000 can take you a long way. I stretched $5000 for 6 months producing a game, living like a peasant (in California, no less). These people just spent their money foolishly on a number of items. Salary is number one, whatever you have left after that can be used for other stuff. Why they did not budget salary first, I have no freaking idea. What is annoying is that it gives Kickstarter projects a bad rep, when there are those (such as myself) looking to use Kickstarter for legitimate/better thought-out purposes.

And for the record, I looked forward to this game in particular, even tried to donate money to them outside of kickstarter...

But please don't get me started on YogVentures (ugh)... [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterkewlgames/yogventu...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterkewlgames/yogventures)

<comment><USER35> What's your opinion of YogVentures?

I have a suspicion that developing an open-world game not based on voxels is a _very_ challenging thing, but then I don't work in game dev.

 _edit_ : should've read the full description.

Are the interpolated lines also used for collision/physics?

<comment><USER34> My opinion is that it is kind of a scam. If they can pull it off, I would love to be proven wrong. But so far all they have is a no-name development team that does not even have a website, and it looks like they just used a prefab engine like Unity to produce their demo video.

I've developed with voxels for over 10 years...Marching cubes is nothing new (in fact, I "invented" it on my own without knowing that the algorithm existed) - and how they model the world is the least of their concerns. Making an open world game of any sort is very challenging, and no one has done it that successfully to date (even Minecraft is still more of just a sandbox than a game, although I respect it nonetheless). Not that I would recommend _against_ developing this type of game, it just probably not the first type of thing you want to tackle without sufficient experience (I should know, I've scrapped over 8 engines working on open world games).

Again, I have nothing against the YogCast people, but if they fail miserably it makes raising money for other Kickstarter projects more difficult.

<comment><USER35> Hey, you're the atomontage guy! I'd give you a couple million if I could :)

Totally agree. There are many examples of developers who seriously underestimated the costs for a full game. With the influx of projects, I believe some kind of vetoing will have to be implemented for projects >50k.

<comment><USER34> Thanks, I'm not the Atomontage guy though; his name is Branislav Síleš (although I am a supporter of his project :) ). I built an engine called Genesis in 2004-2006, and since then many unpublished projects (latest at gavanw.com).

$50k is actually a good amount for an independent project...if the team could demonstrate that they can make sufficient progress with that type of funding, it could open the doors to more. Although, since Kickstarter takes 5 percent it wants as much funding to come in as possible.

<comment><USER35> Aw. I saw the posts and followed the links on your blog thinking that was you. Are you developing a similar engine?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Now do the math on building and shipping 85,000 watches.

Hint: Pebble have $117 each to get it done.

</comment><comment><USER37> Reading this it wouldn't surprise me if the whole kickstarter idea came from some shady t-shirt manufacturers as a way to drum up more business. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER38> All I can think of is either complete amateur hour, or a Kickstart project inspired by Mel Brooks' "The Producers"

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't know these guys. My comment isn't aimed at them at all.

I see a lot of projects on Kickstarter where I find myself immediately questioning the numbers. Having the scars to prove that I've run a business or two I generally have a good sense for costs, process and other elements of typical projects. In so many cases on Kickstarter the numbers are so awfully low that you have to wonder what will happen if the project reaches the stated goal and is funded.

It is very easy to end-up working weeks-upon-weeks for $0.75 per hour and have nothing to show for it but a huge loss at the end of the process.

My recommendation: If you are thinking about posting a project to Kickstarter and don't know much about business (profit, loss, fixed costs, variable costs, development costs, tooling costs, regulatory requirements, etc.) spend a few hundred bucks to get advise from someone who does. I would run your numbers by a CPA and some of the other stuff by, perhaps, an attorney with experience in the field. If it is manufacturing related, there might be regulatory issues (UL, CSA, TUV, CE) that an experienced manufacturing engineer might be able to help you with. Be careful, regulatory testing alone can easily get into the tens of thousands of dollars.

In general, don't post a project to a site like Kickstarter unless and until you have had the financial model for your project verified by those best- qualified to do so.

</comment><comment><USER40> Ignoring the suspiciously round numbers and the fact that they grossly overpaid for basically everything as an indie dev on a tight budget, here is what they raised money for:

"Hire extra talent for things like music, sound effects and additional platform development like Android

Promote and market to help sell the game and fund future expansions and possible sequels

Localize the game to other regions like Europe and Asia"

Several of the things they spent money on have nothing to do with any of those and thus the money they spent on them should not come from the money they raised on Kickstarter. IMO.

<comment><USER41> _"Promote and market to help sell the game and fund future expansions and possible sequels"_

Funding the game in development may have been more prudent.</comment></comment>


Why Julia - <AUTHOR> https://ucidatascienceinitiative.github.io/IntroToJulia/Html/WhyJulia <comment><USER2> I recently began learning Julia and initially everything was amazing, except for 1 based indexing but with everything else I could overlook that. Then I attempted building something medium sized and it all fell apart. I feel like it needs some serious work on tooling, the module system, packages, etc.

Has anyone built something medium-large sized in Julia? Maybe I'm missing something. When I was trying to use modules to organize my code the response I got was that modules are more trouble than they are worth so just don't use them. So why do they even exist? That really put me off from Julia despite really liking it otherwise.

I would want to build things with it not just play in a REPL and notebooks.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, that's my experience as well. Julia is amazing for scripts and smaller projects, but I wish there was something like Swift (which I'm increasingly convinced is closest to the ultimate general-purpose language) with all the nice things that Julia has.

Specifically, these things make Julia less suitable for larger projects:

\- Lack of support for OOP. And no, purely functional programming is not the best way to code all projects.

\- Dynamic typing.

\- Doesn't compile to native code (there are ways to do it, but too complicated and there are caveats).

\- Module system doesn't seem to be design well.

\- You can't use a function before it's defined.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, why do you need OOP? I haven't coded OO in about 10 years now. (Mostly Julia, elixir, and functional JavaScript). It's great. Would never go back.

<comment><USER3> Because sometimes it's better for readability and conceptual simplicity to structure the code as objects connected to each other. Most of large-scale successful projects, often written by better developers than me or you, use OOP.

<comment><USER4> And 80% of the internet switches (Cisco and juniper) are controlled by erlang. So?

I think you're looking at this wrong. Part of the reason why so many large scale products use OO, is because they use Java, and java is _awesome_ if you're working at such a large organization that your productivity is most easily measured by pointy haired managers who count how many LOC you've written ;)

As for readability and conceptual simplicity, may I introduce you to something called the Factory pattern?

<comment><USER5> I might be wrong, but my understanding is things happened backwards from that. OOP tried to solve the problem of how to get tons of devs working on huge projects at the same time; java came along to try to be an awesome OOP environment, so Java became the standard.

<comment><USER4> > OOP tried to solve the problem of how to get tons of devs working on huge > projects at the same time

I am skeptical of that history. Simula and smalltalk were academic endeavors long before lots of devs were working on projects, Java became popular because it was a portable C++ which had no pointers and garbage collection.

<comment><USER6> Smalltalk was being adopted across the industry when Java came around, the big difference was that JDK was free beer and one of the big Smalltakers (IBM) rebooted their environment into Eclipse, while jumping into Java bandwagon.

<comment><USER7> Was it Visual Age for SmallTalk which became Visual Age for Java which later became Eclipse? Vaguely remember reading something like that earlier.

<comment><USER6> Yes. With Gamma, one of the pattern book authors, as architect on Eclipse team.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The main issue I encountered as a Julia user is that multiple dispatch doesn't scale very well.

When you start building out a project, it's easy to keep track and debug if multiple dispatch starts failing (i.e. <any> type starts spreading everywhere and Julia slows to Python like speeds).

In medium-to-large projects, it becomes extremely cumbersome to manage this. It's doable, but adds a layer of complexity management to projects that simply doesn't exist in strictly typed or pure scripting languages.

Of course, you can just decide to explicitly type everything - but the issue here again is the lack of enforcement.

In a nutshell: Julia is great when you're a grad student working mostly by yourself on small scale projects! But not so great in prod.

And there's really no problem with that; that's who the language was designed for!

<comment><USER9> > In a nutshell: Julia is great when you're a grad student working mostly by > yourself on small scale projects! But not so great in prod.

Some people would disagree with that

[https://juliacomputing.com/case- studies/celeste.html](https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/celeste.html)

<comment><USER10> This was published on their own website, it is therefore biased toward a good perception of them. It doesn't seem to be a fair and independent review to help build an opinion.

<comment><USER9> And these were not published on their website:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.10277.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.10277.pdf)

[http://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/regier15.pdf](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/regier15.pdf)

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.00113.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.00113.pdf)

I had to go so far as to read the project Github page to find them.

<comment><USER10> In all those papers, there at least one member of the team in the author list, or a member of a partner organization (Intel, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, etc). I wouldn't call them fair independent reviews of the language.

<comment><USER9> Are you really complaining that the people writing about the tool are the ones developing it?

Whose opinion do you want, the Pope? Would a divine sanction be enough for you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > it's faster than other scripting languages

That certainly depends on your use case. For instance, the launch time is ridiculously slow, so that you cannot realistically run a small matrix computation in julia from within a shell loop. It is better to use octave for that, where the startup time is almost negligible (just a bit slower than starting a subshell).

<comment><USER12> I didn't find it slow, but:

        $ time julia -e 'print(1)'
        1
        real    0m0.438s
        user    0m0.300s
        sys     0m0.118s
        $ time python -c 'print(1)'
        1

        real    0m0.040s
        user    0m0.036s
        sys     0m0.003s

it is slower..

That said, instanciating julia every step of a bash loop.. I think it requires a jvm mindset, warmup once and iterate inside rather than outside.

<comment><USER11> > I think it requires a jvm mindset, warmup once and iterate inside rather > than outside.

I do not have this mindset then. I prefer tools who are mindset oblivious. They are really useful!

For example, imagine I have a collection of a few hundred images with their projection matrices (in text files). I want to crop them and apply a simple imagemagick operation (which is not available from inside julia). The elementary solution is to run a shell loop to apply the crop, and call julia to perform a simple adaptation of each projection matrix. This is impossible today: most of the running time of such loop is spent on julia initialization. Half a second to do nothing is simply unacceptable in a serious scripting language.

<comment><USER13> > _I do not have this mindset then. I prefer tools who are mindset oblivious. > They are really useful!_

Yet you picked a specialized tool "imagemagick" (made for working with images), and want to drive it by another specialized tool (the shell, made for file and process management).

Since you want "mindset oblivious" tools why not write everything from scratch, in C?

<comment><USER11> > Since you want "mindset oblivious" tools why not write everything from > scratch, in C?

Because imagemagick, julia and other specialized programs already provide the advanced algorithms that I need. Unfortunately, julia is not a good team player.

<comment><USER14> The Julia tooling is not currently designed for repeatedly creating new REPL/interpreter instances to quickly solve one small problem.

What it excels at is rapidly solving the same problem many times within one REPL/interpreter (since after the first time the code will be compiled), or for longer computations where the overhead of the initial compilation does not matter.

It would be great if it could also get fast at the use case you are interested in, but this isn't currently what it excels at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like Julia a lot, and thought I understood some of it, but this article puzzles me:

> This output is saying that a floating point multiplication operation is > performed and the answer is returned.

But "this output" is:

      %2 = mul i64 %1, %0
      ret i64 %2

which looks very much like an int64 operation and return.

Similarly:

> Here we get an error. In order to guarantee to the compiler that ^ will give > an Int64 back, it has to throw an error. If you do this in MATLAB, Python, > or R, it will not throw an error.

while the quoted input and output is

      In [6]: 2^-5
      Out[6]: 0.03125

(ie, no error, but the correct (floating point) result.)

<comment><USER16> This was written back in Julia v0.5, and the compiler got smarter so I need to update my examples :). Here, Julia specializes now on the fact that `-5` is a literal, and then inlines the literal and corrects the output type using that value. If you define it as a variable and stop constant propogation, it'll error. Stuff like this are making it harder to write tutorials to show what's actually going on, because literals and constants are all getting optimized on now!

Another confounding fact is that Julia optimizes on small unions, so the generated code isn't that bad anymore. Now it just creates a branch. It used to have to do all of inference and dynamic dispatching on the fly, which is what it has to do in fully uninferrable code of course, but a union of two things just does a type check and splits. So now... that example is not as bad as it used to be...

<comment><USER15> Ah, well, I guess that's good news then!

<comment><USER14> As a rule of thumb, it is probably a good idea to ignore Julia articles that are more than a year or so old. Anything that is discussing pre-1.0 may be completely irrelevant at this point. The language has evolved a lot, even the past few years, and it is only with the 1.0 release last fall that the devs promised to start maintaining backwards compatibility.

So there are lots of older articles discussing drawbacks to Julia, or ways to do things in Julia, that simply aren't relevant anymore. Unfortunately they still often are the first links that come up when searching google for Julia questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I did a 5000 line dissertation project in Octave after rejecting Julia. Reason : I had derived the math in linear algebra including Kronecker products; the math mapped to Octave pretty directly, but Julia requred me to translate all the Kronecker products to loops —yuck! kron(A, B) would become 12 lines of weird indices and for loops. On the listserv I was told that Julia was great because it didn't require vectorization for performance, but I only wanted vectorization for graceful expression.

Plus I got annoyed with extra weird syntax, but I can't remember the specifics.

Basically, Julia required more lines and characters and wasn't as close to the math.

Aside:I think Matlab / Octave is a lot like SQL and Tcl: lots of haters, unfashionable, but usually the most elegant solution .

<comment><USER15> Surprises me. Julia can usually stay much closer to mathematical notation than, say, Python or C++.

You can even use nice Unicode notation such as A ⊗ B ⊗ C.

So, `kron` is actually provided by the standard library [1], are you saying that this kronecker product didn't do the job?

[1] search in this file: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/stdlib/Linear...](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/stdlib/LinearAlgebra/src/dense.jl)

<comment><USER17> It was 5 years ago, maybe it's better now.

I wasn't comparing Julia to python or c+, but to Matlab octave.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for that clarification. 5 years is a lot of evolution for a language that was roughly 2 years old when you used it! Might warrant a revaluation, or at least always state the timeline along with your opinions :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I want to like Julia but after a decade of Python, every time I try it, it's a death by a thousand cuts (and outdated Google results). I just can't afford to have productivity drop to near zero for the learning curve plus reimplement everything.

Also I ha e found multiple dispatch to be harder than regular OO methods to locate (for IDEs but grep also).

<comment><USER20> Have you tried methods(some_function) or the @which macro?

<comment><USER21> Yes - doing @edit(arg1,arg2,....) opens the file at the relevent method definition (ie version the same type arguments as given) in my editor. In the julia source code or my own modules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Honestly my biggest bug with Julia was the lack of good programming environment. I detest MATLAB, but I can be very productive in that IDE. PyCharm is pretty good too when using NumPy. For Julia though, the tooling just didn't seem there yet.

<comment><USER23> Juno is actually quite nice. I find it far more productive than Jupyter and superior to Hydrogen

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I didn't know about the Unicode tab completion. I gave it a whirl on the cli and loved it. Then I tried it out in julia-mode in Emacs, and it works there too! What other editors support this?

<comment><USER25> vim: [https://github.com/JuliaEditorSupport/julia- vim](https://github.com/JuliaEditorSupport/julia-vim) I have an F-key shortcut in my .vimrc to turn this on mainly for non-Julia files, so that I can type (maths-y) unicode in Markdown / text files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I tried to like Julia but after a while I realized there was absolutely no use case for me to choose Julia over other languages. It might be useful for new grads looking to learn a language though.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm moving my code that uses statistics from Ruby to Julia, and I love the similarities.

Of course 1 based indexing makes the move harder, but it's worth the effort anyways.

I'm trying to embrace 1 line functions as much as I can, and Julia helps me with it's special notion for short function definition.

</comment><comment><USER28> I just hope they remove the awful @threads macro with [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/22631](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/22631)

Developing anything multithreaded was a major pain.

</comment><comment><USER29> As someone who has never run into performance problems with R, and also knows how to use Python - is there a good reason to learn Julia?

<comment><USER30> Last week I compared a standard regression command across several statistical programs (R, Py, Stata, Matlab, Julia, etc) on a stupidly simple 10x5 matrix, and Julia took _ages_ to run (this is on windows). Even loading the CSV file took seconds in Julia, hundreds of times slower than all of the other packages put together.

I'm not sure if they just suck at Windows, but I was extremely dissapointed... :/

<comment><USER14> The first time you run code in a REPL Julia will have to compile it. So starting a new REPL, and trying to solve a very small problem one time will currently be a terrible workflow for Julia (unless you don't care that it may take a few seconds).

If you had run your code again within the same REPL you'd see it runs substantially faster the second time. Likewise, if you had tried to process a large enough matrix or CSV that compilation time should be a minimal subset of the total computing time, and probably not noticeable.

It isn't a language limitation, just a tooling limitation. The startup times have been getting better as Julia develops, but there is still noticeable overhead the first time code gets run in a new REPL...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why not Julia : [https://juliacomputing.com/about- us.html](https://juliacomputing.com/about-us.html)

27 men and 1 woman, which is a bad parity score, even for a tech company.

<comment> paper-boat That is a terrible argument on the usability of a tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Julia looks for me more like an academic exercise to show you you can come up with a "scripting like" language which is also fast.

It looks julia developers implemented nice looking features, which can cause problems:

       pi = 3
       print(pi)

works, but

       print(pi)
       pi = 3

not (second version makes magic import which imports a constant).

Same for omitting multiplication "*":

       3(x + 1)

is ok, but

       x(x + 1)

not (because julia assumes a function call here).

These adds lots of problems for larger programs and maintainability.

</comment><comment><USER32> Whenever I see people claiming that Julia is fast, I feel like they are cheating.

It is only fast if you don't count the "compilation" times.

For example, every time you are trying to plot something ```using Plots```, it will take over 40 seconds to compile the Plots package.

Then, you have the large memory usage. In my experience, plotting in Julia requires approximately 14x more RAM than in python or Matlab.

Julia has an awful experience, really.

<comment><USER33> That's the trade off I guess, because of the JIT you have a slow initialization followed by very fast code.

That's not really good for a lot of workflows though (if you're running a smallish script over and over for example).

<comment><USER34> If you are running a script over and over (or using small modules to do organize things) it will be very fast and easy to work with. The compilation is just for the first time a script is run, not every time.

It really isn't a barrier any more than, say, waiting for `library` commands in R.

<comment><USER35> I don't think I've ever seen an R library() take more than about a second, and usually the action is complete as my finger is starting to raise from the 'return' key. When I tried "using Plots" in julia, it took several tens of seconds the first time, and several seconds in subsequent sessions. So, slower than R, but not terribly so. I suspect the real advantage of Julia is that it lets the analyst stick to a single language, without (as in the R case) having to write time-consuming components in C, C++, or Fortran.

<comment><USER34> For me the appeal is 3-fold

1) I can contribute to widely used packages like DataFrames and HypothesisTests. I had never made a git commit before this and my only "real" programming was CS 101 in Java. The fact that I could get up and running so easily contributing is a testament to the language's ease of use

2) I think its tough to predict your computational needs at the start of a project. Sure everything can be done in `lme` in R at the outset, but if you need some new bootstrapping procedure that a reviewer wants you might be left connecting some high performance code to an existing, large, R-based codebase. That's tough. I think Julia makes that "refactoring" (if you can call it that) easy.

3) Hopefully Julia will open a lot of doors for me in the future in my research career. I will be able to write interesting simulation procedures that are otherwise too unweildy for the comparison R or Stata economist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I tried an earlier version of Julia (0.7). Then there was an update and all packages started breaking. There was no backwards compatibility. We had to rewrite a lot of code and completely change DB layer. I hope it's more stable now

<comment><USER37> There was a big transition to 1.0 last year, for which 0.7 was a transitional release (1.0 but with deprecation warnings for old syntax). The package ecosystem took a few months to catch up, which may have been a confusing time to start.

The promise now is that things should be more stable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wish Julia would be more strict wrt type coercion of integer to float values.

I've once spent a day debugging the issue caused by the following line of code, where t1, t2 are floats and v is an array:

d = (t2 - t1) * length(v)

It should've been LinearAlgebra.norm():Float instead of length():Int. Had julia been stricter the code would have failed to run, saving me much time.

<comment><USER39> I actually can't think of a single language that doesn't allow you to multiply an integer and a floating point value, yielding a floating point result.

<comment><USER40> Rust.

In Rust, all type coercion must be explicit, you can't even add different integer types:

5i64 + 5i32 // WONT compile

5i64 + 5i32 as i64 // will work

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So... The answer is fundamentally "statically typed", right?

<comment><USER42> Julia is not statically typed, at least not in the common sense of the term.

<comment><USER41> Yes, I got that. But the "good parts" according to this artcle derive from where it can work like a statically typed language.

<comment><USER4> Yeah but it's not statically typed. Let's say you have a machine learning algorithm and you'd like to change your algorithm to have a complex-valued weights instead of float valued weights. How do you do that in a statically typed language?

Let's say you want to test the numerical performance of the fast Fourier transform using an alternative datatype to IEEE 754 (for example bfloat8). How do you do that?

Another application:. I wanted to play with galois fields for reed Solomon encoding. One key step is LU decomposition to recover missing data. Well, as it turns out built-in matrix solving algorithm in Julia is general, (though it does kick over to BLAS for floats), so my galois field type was plug and play, I didn't have to write a custom solver.

<comment><USER43> > How do you do that in a statically typed language?

You can do that only if the interface for both types is identical or compatible. They should offer at least a common subset of the same operations. Hence, "generics" is the answer to your question.

I understand your feeling. But my impression is that this kind of "black magic" isn't always the best. With generics and static typing, if it compiles, you'll know it will work. With "type inference" you need to test it at runtime. It may compile with near-native performance, or it may not. And maybe a small change in your source code will turn near-native performance to dismal performance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Interview with Guido van Rossum - <AUTHOR> http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/frank/rossum_1099.html

<comment><USER2> That article is pre 2001

<comment><USER3> That explains this baffling part of the conversation... Squeak and Disney?

Willison: Yes. Something called MEL . And something called Squeak, _which is being created at Disney_.

van Rossum: Isn't Squeak a Smalltalk derivative?

Willison: Yes. It's used in movie production and 3D graphics, as is MEL. It seems like there's an explosion of _small, single-purpose languages_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have only a very rough knowledge of Python. In which kind of software development would you choose Python and why?

<comment><USER5> Short answer: In most places you would otherwise use Perl, Ruby, C, C++, or Java. It's not as fast as C or OCaml (except in programs which are almost entirely calls to libraries, e.g. string-heavy stuff), but you can rewrite the hotspots in C later (if you ever actually need to), and the overall development time will be much shorter. Even if you never use it for anything else, Python is an _excellent_ prototyping language.

For a more in-depth answer, look at these:

<http://python.org/about/>

<http://diveintopython.org/>

Also, see the standard library's module index, which is one of the places the language _really_ shines: <http://docs.python.org/modindex.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Guys, please stop posting old stuff...

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow this is old.</comment>


Google Voice Android App Lag Issue - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=570c02c0eae77fbf

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. I just thought this was my aging phone.</comment>


What's New in Node.js and libuv this Week - <AUTHOR> http://blog.strongloop.com/whats-new-in-node-js-and-libuv-april-25-2013/

<comment><USER2> Nothing exciting, really.

I'm just waiting on the "We've fixed crypto performance" post.

<https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/5015></comment>


At Initialized Capital, Odd Couple Looks to Do VC Differently - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2018/07/09/at-initialized-capital-odd-couple-alexis-ohanian-and-garry-tan-look-to-do-vc-differently/#456e13c43efe <comment><USER2> Garry, Alexis, and the team at Initialized are the real deal.

In a world where most investors' first question is, "Who else is in?", the hardest thing for a raw startup to find is someone with the conviction to write the first check. They've built their whole firm on being willing to bet on companies before other investors do.

Later on, when things get tough--and eventually, things always get tough--you want somebody who's been in the trenches, knows how it feels, and can help you guide the company between Scylla and Charybdis. Garry and Alexis have been there, and they do that.

If you're starting a company and looking to raise funding, I'd strongly recommend you speak with Initialized. There's a lot of talk in venture. Garry and Alexis walk the walk.

<comment><USER3> Can we get a disclosure on your relation to Initialized?

<comment><USER2> They invested in my first company, which went through YC's S11 batch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Article leads with a photo captioned "Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian are looking to a build a VC firm for 'the next 100 years.'"

The closest the story comes to expounding on this that the firm has their own CRM software and that they "value doing our own research." A succinct summary of the article may be the paragraph leading "Like most VCs, Initialized says it isn't like the other VCs."

<comment><USER5> The irony about VC is that they don't invest in lifestyle business (except their own). Building your own CRM isn't really rocket science. We've built automation and AI into our deal flow and company tracking and a bespoke search engine to help with competitive market analysis.

Want to be different? Run a VC firm like a startup: build proprietary technology to outcompete incumbents and scale in a way not possible without technology. It does't even sound like they have a FT engineer.... Imagine investing in a startup that didn't have a FT engineer! But that's exactly what they (and most VCs) are asking of their Limited Partners! Sounds like a puffy and carefully managed PR piece with a complicit journalist to prime the raise of their next fund without triggering a Reg D 506c registration..

They may have great returns, smarter than most, and have higher conviction, but it's pretty much same old same old of catching the wave of good deal flow from your celebrity network. Nothing innovative here.

<comment><USER6> Actually I am an engineer, as is Vince and Brett in our partnership. Brett and I implemented much of the software that runs YC today including the application process and the internal social network.

<comment><USER7> From the article, it mentions Matthew coming through a cold pitch but then later on it also states that he went through a referral process to get to the cold pitch.

Are you guys doing anything to vet startups minus the referrals?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like a good thing to have another VC firm that actually tries to make its own decisions. It doesn't seem particularly new or ambitious though.

New and ambitious would be attempting to beat YC at its own game. Competing head-to-head with YC for startups and trying to create a version of YC that was meritocratic and scaleable. For the good of the world, startups, and for profit.

Someone could create a version of YC that funds any startup that meets a certain level of traction for example. Or it could do funding by directly measuring the team's technical or other abilities. It could use a blind admissions system that doesn't rely on judging founders in 10 minute interviews.

YC funds just 3% of the founders that ask for funding. It's entirely likely that they fund the wrong 3% and/or ignore a huge percentage of potentially great startups.

There's only a few people in the world able to the raise money necessary to compete with YC and they all seem afraid to even try.

<comment><USER9> If someone was looking to compete with YC one starting differentiator could be to not force teams to relocate to SV for three months; something that YC has proven time and again they're not open to budging on (aside for the mini-not quite YC program they ran). They've explained their rational but I don't buy it.

<comment><USER10> It's easy to forget how important SV is compared to the rest of the world.

SV invests more in startups than the rest of the world combined. It's the only place in the world where people put big money where their mouth is.

I'd love to see YC definitely grow in other places but it boils down to a couple of things. A high concentration of capital, talent and a good business support.

Not a lot of places that have that or willing to cultivate that.

<comment><USER11> Or just white men investing in other white men.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the point here is, a Founder-VC is better than a traditional VC because the Founder-VC understands "the life and art of being in the trenches".

<comment><USER13> And we ship. It's hard to unlearn solving problems via software when you've done it, especially at scale successfully, and it makes everyone at the org (and soon in the founder network) more effective and frankly happier doing their jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've seen this plastered all over my twitter feed. Similarly, story for the new book by Elad Gil.

The incestual promoting among the startup elite is a bit nauseating.

<comment><USER14> I wish I could delete this.

In retrospect, it's perfectly normal to promote your friends' startups, funds or books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> GDPR-free version: [http://archive.is/9LH5U](http://archive.is/9LH5U)

</comment><comment><USER3> Submarine.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. I was thinking the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A real 100 year VC firm would be a DAO. Maybe they aren't as forward looking as they'd like to believe. Much respect to Alexis and Garry, though. It's not easy to go it alone.

<comment><USER18> Why would a VC firm be distributed?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Criticize our website - <AUTHOR> http://www.qawba.com/

<comment><USER2> This web page has about 5 sentences in total and I have to scroll 5 pages to see that. Sick of this design. It's everywhere these days. Just stupid.

</comment><comment><USER3> Following what @georgespencer said, there's no strong brand here. Forget about the website and come up with a brand.

By the way, marketing yourselves to people that will pay you handsomely for professional services and then putting an ad for a $4.99 template at the bottom is a dumb idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> * There is no information of who you are: legal entity or freelancing individuals? What are your names, registration numbers,

* The background image is too dark, couldn't see what it is without having to adjust the angle of my laptop screen

* The "carousel" is a bad practice in general, and in your site many visitors won't even notice there is one, as it doesn't look like one.

* SEO: There's no meta description, openGraph, twitter cards tags (like in many other websites. We're almost in 2015, what are people thinking about?

* Copywriting: find a native English-speaker to fix things.

* the License page has not enough content

* good thing: the highly noticeable call to action "Start a project with us"

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with the English on the page? I have a hard time spotting mistakes.

<comment><USER6> The language is a bit clunky.

> Qawba is a group of developers, IT professionals, and graphic designers that > works for the creation of websites, templates, the logo, posters and banners > as well as the maintenance and updating of websites.

The "that works for" here could probably be changed to soemthing better.

> We are composed of highly qualified with extensive profiles acquired from > national and international companies.

Has a missing word, and the "extensive profiles" feels a bit odd.

<comment><USER7> I was thinking exactly this.

Also the Brand Identity section feels a bit fragmented, and I felt "brand identity" is mentioned far too many times. Feels a bit like it was written for search engines.

There is also a space missing after one of the full stops...

> Your brand is your business identity.Through unique brand

Overall I feel maybe the tone of the website could be a bit more personal. It starts off feeling personal but then the "Who we are" section seems to mix perspectives, beginning in the third person.

I'm no copywriter though, nor am I an expert in English although I am a native speaker. My own website probably isn't perfect either!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You need to invest more time and effort learning the English language, and be extremely careful when proofreading your written text. There are a ton of English mistakes on your page; some are simple typing and/or proofreading mistakes like forgetting a space, but others are far more severe grammatical and/or usage mistakes.

By using the English language for your website, you are targeting English speaking customers. If a potential customer knows English and notices your mistakes, then you're giving them good reason to not trust you to build their website.

Examples:

> identity.Through

You forgot the space after the period.

> our experts are complemented to the latest technology.

This makes no sense.

> We are composed of highly qualified with extensive profiles acquired from > national and international companies.

You need a noun after "highly qualified" such as "highly qualified engineers" or "highly qualified professionals". The prepositional phrase "with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies" makes no sense.

There are more examples, but I don't want to be overly critical. English is a difficult language to learn, even for people who grow up in English speaking countries. Hiring a native English speaker to do proofreading for you should really help improve the quality of your text while also helping you to learn the language better.

<comment> V-2 [http://www.qawba.com/market/fakia-simple-and-modern- responsi...](http://www.qawba.com/market/fakia-simple-and-modern-responsive- landing-page/)

"012\. PEOPEL THINK SECTION"

"Backstrech - [https://github.com/srobbin/jquery- backstretch"](https://github.com/srobbin/jquery-backstretch")

BACKSTRECH??

One would expect a better level of attention to detail from professional designers. This is disqualifying. BTW I'm not even a native speaker, but these typos simply jump out at you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> \- The way the page loads makes it feel like a modal (text for "Brand Identity" and "Who we are" is shown, then are pushed down once the imagery loads).

\- Information density is low... results in a lot of scrolling for small amounts of information. Initial page load "above the fold" offers very little.

\- Lose the mystery meat navigation for "Web design and UI" and "Web Development" (in the "Brand Identity" section) in favor of text labels, or simply blend that content into the rest of the page.

\- While lots of padding/margin is a trend, everything feels so incredibly far apart that it's completely disconnected; maybe a symptom of my 1920x1080 resolution. It's impossible to find something specific (for example, social media links).

\- You made me load ASCII art when the page loaded! It should be removed, however small the additional data transfer might seem. Also remove the other commented HTML such as the ids bannerVideo and our-work.

\- It feels like "Who we are" is important and should go first, or alongside "Brand Identity".

\- Enable compression!

<comment><AUTHOR> Just Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think things could be sized down a bit. Especially places like [http://www.qawba.com/#market](http://www.qawba.com/#market) where it doesn't fit on my 15" retina mbp.

I like the full page effect of the home screen and the text that follows. Maybe have an image in the whitespace like on the contact page? Speaking of, the contact page seems weird to me kind of like it doesn't follow a grid and the typographs looks off to me.

The links at the end should be actual links and not just the circles that are clickable.

License is spelled wrong in the footer.

Cheers.

<comment><USER6> > License is spelled wrong in the footer.

That's a valid British spelling.

[http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/licence](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/licence)

<comment><AUTHOR> License for American English and Licence for British English.

<comment><USER11> That one slipped me by, strangely you get a TV licence from "TV licensing" but a fence comes from a fencing contractor. English, it's weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Contact page: There's a limit to how much whitespace is desirable and I'd say it's probably somewhat less than the 400px between H1 and content and again between content and footer, on the contact page. The page is 3 viewport- heights when it should only be one. It feels spaced out for the very sake of being spaced out.

Contact: Have you seen this when the page isn't super-wide? It's as above but twice as high. 800px between form and submit button. AWFUL.

Home, second pane: Dump the mystery meat navigation. It's cute that you found a few font-awesome glyphs that you liked but they mean nothing to visitors. Navigation shouldn't be pot luck.

There's also no call to action. If I land on the home page, you need to tell me what I can do and what you'd like me to do.

And it looks like a turd if you turn javascript off. Make sure you don't rely on Javascript to display information. It'll cost you business if your JS ever breaks.

And yeah, the whole thing needs cleaning up. It looks like a dev build. In production you want to losslessly recompress your images (optipng, jpegoptim, etc), strip your HTML down (tidy), minify your JS and CSS and pre-gzip everything that's static.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like it but for a company offering branding advice you don't seem to have a discernible brand.

I also always think 'agency' websites without bios and staff photos are basically run by a few 13 year olds. Not a bad thing, but this feeling is compounded by lack of postal address or telephone number. If you have an office, put it on there. Nobody will call or visit, it just makes people feel safer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback and thanks for your time too . i don't know where did you read the word "Agency"!

<comment><USER14> Your business is an agency by definition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's nothing good to say about this website.

As of right now, it: \- Spreads very little information across an enormous space \- Has nothing aesthetically engaging

This means that I feel like you'll make my brand also a sparse and unattractive idea.

</comment><comment><USER16> While the page loaded it showed me a bunch of text. Then once it loaded it just showed me some large dark image of people behind computers with the text "Web solutions and Design" overlaid on it, forcing me to scroll in order to find out anything at all about your site.

I realize this is a design trend lately, but the loading threw me off and I personally think it wastes a ton of screen real estate.

There's also [http://i.imgur.com/4E6DVOe.png](http://i.imgur.com/4E6DVOe.png)

</comment><comment><USER17> You are changing the background image property when a user hovers over the logo. Browsers will not load the background image for any element which is not visible, or where a CSS rule is not active. As a result, the hover version of the logo is only downloaded the first time the user hovers over the logo. A good workaround for this is to create a file with the regular and hover versions of the logo in it, and use the background-position property on hover to show the hover version.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Your brand is your business identity.Through unique brand identity design we help you to distinguish your business from your competitors." \--> You forgot the space after "identity."

The site is very dark. You can hardly see the image in the background with all the black.

Move the example products (like the 4.99 fakia landing page) closer to the top.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The site is very dark and bland which sits badly with "We design unique and original brand identity", which is itself clumsy English.

The site design is not original and others have done it better. If brand identity is important then perhaps you should put some effort into it.

Far too much whitespace and don't be afraid to use colours.

</comment><comment><USER20> You guys do a good job in presentation, however was not directly absorbed by how you would help me, or exactly what the your specialty is. Good design, not a clear enough picture on the company's mantra.

</comment><comment><USER21> The text is pretty hard to take seriously, e.g.:

"Market Qawba: Premium themes to make your things elegant"

Surely there's a more specific word than "things"

</comment><comment><USER22> It's empty, dark/suicidal, weakly branded, already seen, too big, too much empty space, not enough colors, not enough information, portfolio/projects ?, not human, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> Mousing over the buttons to switch between brand identity/web design and UI/web development shows a text selection cursor.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for your feedbacks and criticism, I will take everything into consideration. Thanks for the motivation.

</comment><comment><USER22> And I forget, "fakia" too ! :)

</comment><comment><USER14> There is no trailing space after the punctuation of the first sentence on the page.

</comment><comment><USER24> 'Live Preview' from the Fakia page produces a Host Gator 500 error.

</comment><comment><USER25> your website is awful</comment>


The New Intel: How Nvidia Went from Powering Video Games to Revolutionizing AI - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/11/30/nvidia-deep-learning-ai-intel/#5ded7d2a39cc <comment><USER3> Yes, Nvidia dominates in deep learning and AI, but the risk of disruption by Intel is _much_ greater than a lot of non-technical people realize. Intel has to do only two things to start taking market share away from Nvidia in DL/AI _quickly_ :

1\. Add "good enough" functionality to its high-end processors. Intel is already working on that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709220](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709220)

2\. Contribute open-source code to the main branches of the most popular DL/AI frameworks (Tensorflow, Theano, Torch) so these frameworks support the new chip functionality "out of the box," without requiring any additional tweaking. This is not yet happening, but I'm hoping it will soon.

Many DL/AI developers would be content with "good enough" performance out-of- the-box from CPUs if it means not having to pay extra for Nvidia cards or deal with Nvidia's proprietary drivers.

It would be great for Nvidia to get real competition in this space.

<comment><USER4> There is zero chance that Intel can add "good enough" functionality to their CPUs without changing their memory architecture. A high end i7 might have 35 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Even the biggest, most ridiculously expensive ($6000) Xeons have only about 100 GB/s. Nvidia's GTX 1080 has 320 GB/s. Their P100 has 732 GB/s.

The threat to Nvidia from Intel is in the Nervana chips they recently acquired. Those are presumably using HBM2 and could potentially beat GPUs for neural net training performance.

<comment><USER5> A modern Xeon has 10s of MBs of cache, which has drastically higher memory bandwidth. What matters is how big the matrices (the "model") is not the input data. With native 8-bit or 16-bit support, you can fit an awful lot of model in 30MB.

I'd recommend reading this paper about matrix math on GPUs from friends of mine way back in the day: [https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/gpumatrixmult/gpumatrix...](https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/gpumatrixmult/gpumatrixmult.pdf) . While NVIDIA has built much larger register files and L2 caches since then, a modern Xeon still is unbeatable when something fits in L2 or even L3 cache.

I believe streaming the input data in to update the weights is usually done with non Cache polluting instructions (mm_stream equivalents with the NT hint), so it's not hard to keep it fed.

<comment><USER4> SOTA models are much, much larger than 30 MB. You can't use 8 bits for training (yet?), and Intel doesn't support 16-bit float (they need to catch up with Nvidia on that, it's really a travesty, we could have used it years ago for audio and imaging). Besides, the top end Xeons with the most cache are fully 10 times more expensive than a GTX 1080.

<comment><USER6> IMO the _travesty_ is crippling FP16 on consumer GPUs for exactly the reasons you cite. And given that AMD's Vega GPUs apparently will possess full speed FP16, it appears to be yet another in a long line of arbitrary performance cripplings for the consumer space that is IMO the most annoying feature of CUDA development.

But while FP16 _is_ useful for audio and imaging, FP16 nearly killed NVIDIA over a decade ago* when it lacked the dynamic range for DirectX 9 HDR effects in contemporary games without banding. FP32 was more than enough for the task, but power hungry, and thus NV30 could be used to figuratively fry eggs while AMD GPUs had FP24, which was just enough for these effects.

These days, it's all going in the opposite direction w/r to deep learning, but I find it ironic that INT8/INT16 is missing from the Tesla flagship P100, but present on GP102 and GP104, the consumer GPUs (and yes, I know about Tesla P40, but that lacks fast FP16).

I agree with the top poster that Intel could make quite a comeback here given how far it's currently behind. I also agree that it would be hard to dethrone NVIDIA without higher bandwidth memory, but I don't think that's necessary, a bloody nose is more than enough to turn heads IMO.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pure and utter bullshit. Their core market is by far gaming, as this PDF (that I found via NVidia IR) shows:

[http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-1XAJD4/341168899...](http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-1XAJD4/3411688990x0x917045/7D7AA043-67F6-4D04-A178-B87C3BAA2F0B/Rev_by_Mkt_Qtrly_Trend_Q317.pdf)

Also: The level of their gross profit margin indicates that they are in fact a monopolist:

[http://marketrealist.com/2016/11/driving-nvidias-profit- marg...](http://marketrealist.com/2016/11/driving-nvidias-profit-margins-new- highs/)

(These are not the financials of company operating in a healthy, 20-year old industry - they are the financials of a company that after operates without meaningful opposition in a 20 year old business.)

<comment><USER8> Nvidia isn't a monopolist. They have two big competitors in AMD and Intel.

Intel ship about 2/3 of the graphics chips for laptops and desktops. Nvidia have more than half of the remainder. That isn't a monopoly.

In the discrete GPU space AMD are also there and ship almost half as many unit as Nvidia. That's no monopoly.

The graphics systems for the current consoles are shipped by AMD aren't they?

Nvidia is a profitable company. Calling them a monopolist because they are profitable is unwarranted.

* Edited to fix grammar.

<comment><USER9> AMD ships primarily low and mid range cards, NVIDIA has an effective "monopoly" in the enthusiast market share which has the highest profit margins by far.

That said AMD hasn't managed to ship a 350-400$+ card that's worth spending money on compared to the competition since probably the 7950...

<comment><USER10> That's a ridiculous definition of a monopoly. Using that methodology, you can claim any company has a monopoly that happens to have the best performing thing at the time.

Nobody is claiming Tesla has a monopoly on electric cars because they make the best. And nobody should claim Nvidia has a monopoly on GPUs since they are on top.

<comment><USER9> I didn't claim they had a monopoly, I said they had an "effective monopoly" in only one, albit very critical market segment, in which they ship over 75% of the hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just like this fawning article, a very optimistic scenario for Nvidia is in the market pricing of its stock. Nvidia trades at a 45 trailing PE vs Intel's 15. It's valuation therefore assumes at least 3x more growth than Intel. In a market which it seems literally _everybody_ is trying to target. For example, Qualcomm, (trailing PE 14), just announced a 48-core ARM server processor with vector capabilities for launch H217. And if AMD is allowed to be purchased, and properly funded, by an Asian (or other) entity (already has licencing agreements in place in China), the space could get very crowded for NVDA.

I wouldn't be so sure that the comparison to the 40-year behemoth of silicon, which extracted quasi-monopoly profits for 35 of them, is yet valid.

</comment><comment><USER12> If Nvidia are looking to supplant Intel, I think they key, weirdly, is i/o. In a sense, GPU acceleration of general purpose computation is just a specific case of the more general case of distributed computing (albeit the computers are extremely 'close'). For embarrassingly parallel workloads, i/o is not an issue; the data and computations can be batched, distributed and no further communication required (until you collect the results).

But for mixed, semi-sequential/semi-parallel workloads, I/O becomes the bottleneck. Having to retrieve intermediate results, combine and then redistribute can eat up your gains from parallelisation. It will be interesting to see if Nvidia start pushing for a new standard to replace PCIe, and maybe invest in low-latency, high throughput networking R&D. Who knows? Maybe they'll just build some kind of networking functionality in to their GPUs directly, so data can be transferred NVRAM -> NVRAM without having to travel up and down the stack (until they need to interact with userspace; once on the way in and once on the way out).

Given there are RDMA adapters that can manage ~20ns latency already, it would be interesting to see what could be achieved before we start pushing up against the laws of physics. Even at the physical layer, my understanding is that most networking fibre optics manage about 60% the speed of light.

So, just to make a wild prediction: within the next year, Nvidia will acquire a HPC network adapter company (e.g. Mellanox).

<comment><USER13> Nvidia already has high speed GPU-GPU links:

[http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvlink.html](http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvlink.html)

<comment><USER14> They aren't widely deployed yet - the DGX-1 uses it, though.

I assume it will be infiniband that will be the commodity hard adopted to distribute Deep Learning. However, Nvidia are currently trying to segment the market by providing GPU->GPU direct access via infiniband on only the Tesla cards - not the commodity ones (titanx, 1080 gtx). That strategy will probably be the death of them in Deep Learning.

<comment><USER15> Why are you assuming Infiniband is the winner? There's Intel Omni-Path and there's Ethernet.

(Disclaimer: I'm the system architect of InfiniPath, which is one of the things that evolved into Omni-Path.)

<comment><USER12> Ah, just the man I've been wanting to talk to then :)

As I mentioned in another post, I really think Intel are missing an opportunity when it comes to high speed networking. Why don't they drop all the crazy server market lock-in vendor shenanigans (e.g. brand to brand SFP incompatibility, 'call us' pricing etc.) and just jump straight to the consumer market? I know this means cannibalising CPU revenue, but that's going to happen anyway.

Developers are consumers. In many cases the direction that their skills develop in is largely determined by the consumer hardware they're running at home. The same seems to be true for Ops folks, who all seems to be running vSphere homelabs atm. Based on what others have said here, it sounds like NVIDIA have chosen to cross-sell, and work their way down from HPC -> ... -> Consumer, presumably to extract maximum rents, despite not yet having strong enough network effects o lock out competition.

This seems like the perfect opportunity for Intel to cut the legs out from under that strategy, by aggressively pushing widespread consumer (or at least 'power-user'/developer) take-up of high speed, low-latency networking. And hasn't iWARP been endorsed as an IETF standard (or is on its way to be)? It seems like there's a window of opportunity here, albeit one that gets smaller and smaller as Nvidia slowly work their way down market.

<comment><USER15> Well, Omni-Path has a 48 port switch ASIC. So that's it for consumer accessibility.

But if you want to buy the PCI Express cards, Newegg has 'em. Intel has a great channel organization.

<comment><USER12> It's certainly impressive tech. But, and bear in mind this is just from a consumer perspective, here are the reasons I wouldn't buy it:

\- ~$8000 USD for a 24 port switch is way beyond my price range. I doubt any consumer market could support this ([http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP53G35...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP53G3510))

\- ~$550 USD for a single port adapter is also way outside of my budget, especially since I'd need to buy at least half a dozen of these for my home lab ([http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106290))

\- It's very difficult to find solid information on the product. The Ark page doesn't tell me anything ([http://ark.intel.com/products/92007/Intel-Omni- Path-Host-Fab...](http://ark.intel.com/products/92007/Intel-Omni-Path-Host- Fabric-Interface-Adapter-100-Series-1-Port-PCIe-x16)). The link to the whitepaper (which I'm assuming is actually a marketing brochure) 404s.

\- So even if I could afford this _as a consumer /dev_, I probably wouldn't buy it due to the uncertainty around total cost of ownership. Will it accept non-Intel branded QSFP transceivers? Same question with optical cabling.

\- Given the product brief mentions 'fabric performance [will] scale automatically with ongoing advances in Intel Xeon processors...', it leaves me wondering if this is somehow dependent on some specialised Xeon CPU instruction sets, making it useless for most home labs (which, at best, will be running older generation Xeons from second-hand servers, but more likely CPUs from Intel's consumer line-up).

On costs: If these are just reflective of the cost of production, then fair enough, I guess I'll just have to wait (for either Intel, or another manufacturer, to devise a cheaper production process). If it's not, then I think you're missing the opportunity outlined above, and you'll lose the HPC fight given Nvidia occupy the high ground here.

On compatibility: If this is just some idiot 'multi-channel cross sales' strategy that some genius with an MBA has cooked up, you're going to have a bad time. It falls apart the second someone releases a commodity adapter (which may already exist, for all I know).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Slightly off Nvidia and thinking Intel for a bit.

Where is Intel heading? I dont see Intel gaining a foot in the AI / ML market. Not Knight XXX. And all these supposedly weapon such as next gen AVX, Nervana aren't coming any time soon. And Nvidia knows full well, the same thing about GPU and AI/ML isn't in the silicon, it is in the drivers and library.

So not only this is a huge first mover and mature software advantage, the AI / ML is difference in gaming, where the human cost of Nvidia AI/ML knowledge is significantly more then what the Hardware is worth, which is next to nothing when compared to those salary.

So in the next 2 - 3 years, I dont see Intel getting much from Nvidia. They failed Mobile. Windows 10 is now slowing working towards ARM.

It leaves them with 1), a shrinking, or downtrend PC market. 2) Their Server CPU market with heavy margin which will finally be getting a lots of competition from AMD Zen x86 and Qualcomm ARM Server Chip.

Zen Server chip is highly unlikely to be competitive against intel in performance. But there are lots of margin for AMD to attack. It means a lot of pressure from Intel to lower price.

A lot of ARM Server will be coming in the next few years. Not low end blade, but powerful Xeon like chips. I have always been skeptical of this, but it seems ARM, which is owned by Softbank, whom is also the largest shareholder of Alibaba, whom also operate a gigantic Cloud infrastructure, are All in on this.

This is not saying Intel will die in 5 years time. They are likely to be around for decades after, but i dont see where they could grow and head.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's funny when you think about NVIDIA erratic debut (NV1, SEGA). Then the constant progress to the top of the GPU field. I remember how quickly pro CAD graphic cards became obsolete market-wise (ES, wildcat) when Transform and Lighting was implemented. Now "AI", car vision, HPC .... really "funny". Thanks to y'all Quakeheads I guess. And Crysis.

<comment><USER18> E&S, 3dlabs... I do not miss those at all!

<comment><USER17> I could never afford one, they were only luxury icons to me. Were they complete scams or just overpriced ?

<comment><USER18> At the time they were the only game in town if you wanted OpenGL to run decent(ish) on Windows. It was still a time when you could buy an SGI. Drivers were a mess and price was steep. They weren't a scam, their products just felt lazy-done. Luckily, 'gamer' cards came quickly to OpenGL land.

<comment><USER17> I remember the weird span when 3DS tried to work with vendors with the heidi interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Puff piece. Yes, Nvidia dominates at the moment, but as many have said, this could easily change with a resurgent AMD. They have made all the right moves, IMHO, since Lisa Su took over:

0\. Finally paying attention to software part of equation : hardware for compute has always been very good

1\. drivers are now excellent

2\. whole line of GCN devices (since 2012) are supported and still optimized, unlike notorious Nvidia nerfing of older cards

3\. Has x86 license - if Zen is a success, can build high-bandwidth fabric between CPU and GPU, unmatchable by nVidia except on exotic Power8 arch.

4\. new project focusing on HPC on Linux

5\. they keep pushing OpenCL, which will win over Nvidia-only CUDA

6\. New tools to semi-automatically port CUDA code to run on their hardware.

Well, here's hoping AMD gives them a run for their money in 2016 </fanboy> 6.

<comment><USER9> 0\. Finally paying attention to software part of equation : hardware for compute has always been very good

 _By now supporting porting CUDA "natively", still no real answers to the datacenter CUDA features like DMA, proper virtualization, and networking._

1\. drivers are now excellent

 _The Crimson driver suite is a step in the right direction, if only every 6 months they didn 't had a release that actually physically damages cards._

2\. whole line of GCN devices (since 2012) are supported and still optimized, unlike notorious Nvidia nerfing of older cards

 _Yes that 's an admirable feat, but then again not one really cares about 5 year old hardware for either gaming or ML_

3\. Has x86 license - if Zen is a success, can build high-bandwidth fabric between CPU and GPU, unmatchable by nVidia except on exotic Power8 arch.

 _NVIDIA also has the x86 license it 's more limited and AMD (w/ Intel) did bash them when they tried to add x86 interoperability to their HPC parts but NVIDIA has a very very large IP portfolio._

4\. new project focusing on HPC on Linux

 _AMD has a new project every 2 years, they tend to not die, CUDA on Linux is excellent it 's also the recommended platform._

5\. they keep pushing OpenCL, which will win over Nvidia-only CUDA

 _OpenCL performance on NVIDIA GPU 's is still better, and OpenCL will beat CUDA has been touted for nearly 10 years now..._

6\. New tools to semi-automatically port CUDA code to run on their hardware.

 _With still pretty poor results in many cases, and it only works if you use the most basic use cases under CUDA and this was the bare minimum they had to do so people would even look at AMD hardware at large scales these days since virtually every high performing library is written in CUDA simply because it offered a better solution and NVIDIA actually provides whatcha call it - <USER2> right support..._

Well, here's hoping AMD gives them a run for their money in 2016 </fanboy> 6.

<comment><USER19> Let's compare notes end of next year :) I think things will be quite different by then.

<comment><USER20> Unfortunately, AMD executives have signalled in several interviews that they just don't care about deep learning. Also, I don't think AMD can start focusing on this field 10 years later than Nvidia and close the gap in a year as you suggest.

<comment><USER19> apparently, times are changing: [http://wccftech.com/amd-vega-mi-25-instinct- gpu-accelerator/](http://wccftech.com/amd-vega-mi-25-instinct-gpu- accelerator/)

<comment><USER20> Oh yeah, it seems AMD wants to prove me wrong (I hope so): [http://radeon.com/en-us/instinct/](http://radeon.com/en-us/instinct/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, people seem to forget that all it will take from Intel is to make an ASIC like Nervana's (hint, hint:which they acquired) and suddenly Nvidia's in serious trouble.

<comment><USER22> Intel plans to release their Nervana-based chip, which they're calling "Lake Crest", next year.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2016/11/21/intel- co...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2016/11/21/intel-commits-to- nervana-roadmap-for-ai-first-new-architecture-in-decades/)

<comment><USER21> That has its own problems... Not allowed to tell you, don't ask me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "I always think we're 30 days from going out of business," Huang says. > "That's never changed. It's not a fear of failure. It's really a fear of > feeling complacent, and I don't ever want that to settle in."

I dunno where this company is going next or even if it will be around (independently) in 10 years, but if that's _really_ the attitude of its CEO, then at least today it's definitely in good hands.

</comment><comment><USER24> When AMD acquired ATI a lot of people speculated that Intel would acquire Nvidia. It never happened. What followed was a disastrous series of acquisitions from Intel that never really amounted to much with McAfee being the worst of the lot.

</comment><comment><USER25> Von Neuman bottleneck is ripe for disruption. Ultra low power processors in memory, a few 3ghz cores, and a fat matrix multiply ASIC.

</comment><comment><USER26> non-paywalled link: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwje0aaIgu3QAhUBnxQKHacFAQwQFggoMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Faarontilley%2F2016%2F11%2F30%2Fnvidia- deep-learning-ai-intel%2F&usg=AFQjCNFGcF9I_0uRQq4qwUsQv_SlO_5fwg)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not really ready to call Nvidia the new Intel. Nvidia seems like such a volatile company and I have no idea why. I just feel like I could wake up tomorrow and they could be gone.

<comment><USER28> Care to elaborate? I don't follow them closely but they have seemed to be consistently on top of the GPU market for some time now, at least in the gamer/enthusiast market.

<comment><USER29> Just look at how fast AMD fell. Everyone thought they 'd profit big time from Bitcoin... I remember that I couldn't buy an AMD GPU for weeks in any store in Munich, because everyone and their dog bought them as BTC mining rigs. And then, couple of months later? ASICs entered the field and prices for used AMD GPUs fell through the floor.

The same can happen to NVIDIA, especially when Intel decides to launch something inside their CPUs that is "good enough" for many people.

<comment><USER30> The vast majority of Nvidia GPU sales are to gamers. Intel has been trying to build a "good enough" iGPU for years and years, with almost zero progress relative to their contemporary discrete GPUs.

Even the best current GPUs can't handle the inevitable future high-res VR. This is going to be a stable business for a while yet.

<comment><USER29> > Intel has been trying to build a "good enough" iGPU for years and years, > with almost zero progress relative to their contemporary discrete GPUs.

Intel hasn't had real pressure to innovate for years. They watched the battle and fall of NVIDIA/AMD, and in the meanwhile enjoyed good sales of CPUs for all the cloud computing.

Now, they have intense pressure to innovate - as in the server space ARM is going to eat them up, due to the superior power efficiency, laptop/desktop sales are down (again, because a four-year old computer works just fine if you upgrade its RAM to accomodate Chrome).

Intel needs something mind-blowing and that quick. And NVIDIA too, casual gamers are shifting to console (where AMD has quite a customer base) and mobile (where Samsung/Apple with ARM are in the lead). I haven't seen any performant Intel or NVIDIA mobile SoC solution yet.

<comment><USER31> > mobile (where Samsung/Apple with ARM are in the lead). I haven't seen any > performant Intel or NVIDIA mobile SoC solution yet.

Nvidia does have the Tegra, for the Android tablet market.

Interesting that they've ceded Windows on ARM (aka the rumoured Surface Phone) to Qualcomm - I would have thought Denver's code-morphing architecture would be better suited to emulating x86 instructions than a Snapdragon 835.

<comment><USER29> > Nvidia does have the Tegra, for the Android tablet market.

Which isn't used anywhere except a couple of tablets according to Wikipedia. Samsung, inarguably leader of the high-class Android manufacturers, uses either its own SoCs or Qualcomm. Many cheaper phones use Mediatek or Allwinner chipsets.

<comment><USER9> It's used for it's automotive products.

It's not used because most likely NVIDIA never really wanted to push it, it checked the water a bit with a few 1st and 3rd party tablets/android gaming consoles but this always looked more like to recoup some investment on the side while developing the SOC than an end goal.

The lessons learned from Tegra allowed NVIDIA to build the best (or at least the most powerful) automotive integrated solution currently on the market and at least as far as software compatibility and performance go they have no real competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> [I've withdrawn this (joke) comment. It had read as below the line.]

\--

 _This is totally normal for companies to do. In the 1920s Nvidia made car carborateurs. In the 1820s they made horsebuggy whips. In the 1700s they made ships of the line, which they had made going back to the 15th century. It 's little known fact that the Niña, the Pinta and Santa María (Columbus's three ships) were powered by NVidia sails. yawn._

<comment><USER33> ? nvidia was founded in 1993

<comment><USER32> it was a joke, and if it were upvoted I wanted to keep it but if it was downvoted erase it. I guess I didn't do well but due to your reply I can't erase it now.

nintendo really was a playing-card company foudned in the 19th century though.

<comment><USER34> And Nokia used to make rubber boots and elevator cables!</comment></comment></comment></comment>