Raspberry Pi's GPU double the performance of iPhone 4S - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-raspberry-pi-gpu-outperforms-iphone-4s

<comment><USER3> Not really embarrassing, no one is comparing the power consumption. Apple could easily go to a more powerful GPU if their battery power allowed them. But I think the current 4S GPU is the one that fits for the current battery technology.

<comment><USER4> I wonder when mobile devices are going to contain FPGAs. They are often a factor of 100x power/performance better than CPUs/GPUs.

<comment><USER5> FPGAs are typically 5-20x worse in power consumption and max speed over a dedicated ASIC with the same logic. That is the price you pay for flexibility of being able to change your design at the drop of a hat.

For now, they are the low volume option (<1-10m units) if you need special interfaces. If all you are doing is number crunching a Gpgu would likely be a more effective option.

<comment><USER4> While superb for power and performance, the problem with ASICs is that you can't embed an ASIC fab in your mobile phone ;) On the other hand, doing number crunching on a GPU will quickly burn your your battery. FPGAs seem like the ideal middle ground.

<comment><USER5> Yes and no. I would say that GPUs are the middle ground between traditional serial CPUs and truly parallel FPGAs.

FPGAs are not a silver bullet. If you can express your design using a GPGPU instruction set, then by all means please use that. Its going to be more efficient by an order of magnitude, from power consumption and especially cost.

High end FPGAs can easily run in the $30k for a single unit range (this is what NVidia is going to buy to simulate their latest design in hardware, its not likely going to end up in a shipping product). They are also relative power hogs. Their strength lies in highly concurrent systems, especially around data streaming from disparate interfaces to other interfaces, when you can't put enough I/O bandwidth into an existing processing solution.

GPUs are good at processing and will floor an FPGA there. They are relatively terrible at I/O.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A sentence «and should double iPhone 4S performance across a range of content» is a really authoritative benchmark I suppose...

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, that makes this thing a lot more interesting to me, if true. So many designs these days pair monster CPUs with underpowered GPUs it's almost embarrassing (especially as Apple continues to show that powerful GPUs are important for a good user experience). The 256 MB of RAM will be very constraining for any app trying to use all that power, though.

<comment><USER8> The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of RAM and seems to do ok, as games like Uncharted and God of War show.

It does mean you'll need to be more careful and considerate of how you use that memory though (and admittedly, on a console like a PS3 the OS takes up much, much less space).

<comment><USER9> The PS3 has 256 MB system RAM and 256 MB dedicated video RAM. So it has twice as much RAM as the Raspberry Pi.

<comment><USER8> I'm aware of that, does the Raspberry Pi not have separate video ram? If not, that is my mistake - I didn't look closely and made an assumption. If it has a shared block of RAM (like the Xbox 360 Xenon, which has 512mb shared) then that is a significant difference - but still plenty to work wonders with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> But does the Raspberry Pi run on a battery?

The iPhone is highly optimized for mobile use. Both in hardware and software. Can the same be said about this chipset that the Raspberry Pi uses?

If not then the comparison is not very fair.

<comment><USER11> yea according to their site you can run it on 4 AA cells. Can you buy an IPhone for $25? <http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs>

<comment><USER10> That is pretty cool. You can't buy an iPhone for $25 but you also cannot buy a Raspberry Pi for $25 that has WiFi, 3G, BlueTooth a display, 64GB of flash and 512MB of memory :-)

Anyway, I look really forward getting my hands on an RP.

<comment><USER11> Yea I was looking at the video of it running XBMC. Thinking of running it as a media center

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The ARM11 cpu is too old, I wish they used at least a Cortex-A8. ARM11 has a virtually addressed cache with aliasing issues that requires all sorts of hacks in linux kernel, it will require old compiler flags and lacks other ARMv7 features. It's the cpu from 2005. I wonder what the price difference would be if they used an A8.

<comment><USER13> There are some similar cool open hardware projects sponsored by TI. They have better specs, although their prices are quite a bit higher. I don't know if it is because they do lower volumes, the chips cost more, or price just wasn't as much a concern when they were designed.

The beagleboard-xm has an A8, 4 usb ports, and 512 ram for $150, the related beaglebone has arduino like pins and an A8 for $80, and the pandaboard has an A9, 1gb ram, and wifi for $180.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, didn't know about these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> #education

I am interested to know what other folks think of the potential to build low cost PCs using Raspberry Pi (RPi) for education in India & the developing world.

I am curious to know what other people think of OLPC XO3 vs RPi vs Aakash (the Indian govt.'s low cost tablet)

OLPC <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8428147.stm> [http://asia.cnet.com/what-can-we-learn-from-the-olpc- xo-3-0-...](http://asia.cnet.com/what-can-we-learn-from-the-olpc- xo-3-0-tablet-62213156.htm)

Aakash Ubislate7 [http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/01/08/the-inside- story-o...](http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/01/08/the-inside-story-of- indias-50-computer-tablet/)

1\. Raspberry Pi(RPi) requires monitor + mouse +k/b while XO3 is self- contained. 2\. RPi is more geared to be a lab machine or a home pc while XO3 is more of a personal device.

3\. From a pedagogical viewpoint, IMHO, i think younger kids should not have a digital device 24x7 as they could possibly get "addicted" to it . It is more important to impart a sense of curiosity(scientific temper) & hunger for learning, & having an XO3 might hamper kids' social activities - <USER2> outdoors & playing with other kids, being fit, taking part in sports.

So i feel younger kids could be exposed to low-cost computers( made of a RPi) in school, which are low cost & encourage tinkering (open source, simple inexpensive hw) while older (say high school kids can get their own personal XO3.

#4. From an Indian perspective, i wish the Indian govt scraps the crappy Aakash tablet in favour of the XO3.

[http://phonemantra.com/2012/01/olpc-india-head-rips-into- aak...](http://phonemantra.com/2012/01/olpc-india-head-rips-into-aakash-calls- it-pre-beta-and-questions-its-indian-ness/)

The vast majority of schools in India are run by the govt & most govt. schools dont have a computer lab or the computers:students ratio is abysmal. The RPi could be an excellent, low-cost way to create computer labs in all govt schools, colleges & vocational institutions.

#5. Internet connectivity

<http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml> <http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs> <http://www.akashtablet.com/>

The XO3 comes with 802.11b/g & most importantly 802.11s(mesh networking) & the concept of school servers, so kids can download learning content even if access to the larger public Internet is not available.

Aakash has GPRS( much slower) & RPi supports wired ethernet & USB WiFi dongles.

Exciting times ahead for sure & would love to hear what other folks think

cheers

p.s. Detailed interview with Eben Upton, RPi's executive director (free registration required)

[http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/digitalfoundry- inside-...](http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/digitalfoundry-inside- raspberry-pi)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is just a linkbait title. "XXX compared to YYY Apple product" is a guaranteed click. Too bad they don't actually compare XXX to YYY...

</comment><comment><USER17> shame the BCM2835 won't be open sourced anytime soon...

<comment><USER18> So far as I can tell, this significantly limits the hack value of the Raspberry Pi. Sure, it runs Linux... whatever version was current when it first shipped. Considering Ubuntu and Fedora both ship new releases every six months, a year and a half or two years into the future and what you can do with the Raspberry Pi will be limited to what outdated binary packages you can find, or what software you're prepared to compile yourself on a tiny embedded processor.

I guess $25 isn't exactly a high price to pay for six months to a year of messing about, but it seems a sad fate for an otherwise remarkable piece of hardware.

<comment><USER19> I think you are too pessimistic on it's lifetime. Firstly, the foundation will likely continue to update the software. Most of the patches they made to the kernel are going to be submitted upstream. Even if the foundation doesn't do it, it can be maintained by the community. It's not infeasible to maintain a fork, although the work will increase with time. Even if it becomes stuck on an older kernel version, it's still not very difficult to run a distribution on top of that, since the userspace-kernel interface is very stable.

<comment><USER20> The community can't maintain the patches, thanks to Broadcom's policy of not releasing documentation unless you commit to ordering a hundred trillion parts or are employed by them (as the Raspberry Pi folks are).

If the point of this thing is to promote computer science education, then it's already dead. Remember, not everything happens in userspace. For example, there are advanced operating systems courses out there that are focused very closely on the low-level side or are based on non-GPL-compatible operating systems where they can't simply lift stuff out of Linux.

It's nobody's loss but Broadcom's: the educators will go for platforms like BeagleBone instead (which, although more than double the price, is still cheap), the students will have the benefit of well-documented hardware, and TI will be happy that many of those students who grow up to work in the embedded space will be specifying TI (rather than Broadcom) SoCs.

<comment><USER8> Whilst I would certainly agree it would be nice for the chip to be open- sourced, saying that it means the Pi is 'already dead' is ridiculous hyperbole.

The Raspberry Pi _is_ designed for computer science education, but it's designed primarily for _Children_ , not University Students. If you're at the point of running 'Advanced Operating Systems' courses then you can find whatever you need, but 12 year olds aren't likely to be doing that.

What they folks at Rasberry Pi are trying to do is encourage people _who've never coded before_ to start writing programs. If they can write simple userspace linux programs (I'm talking text adventures and the like) that's what's important. The device isn't intended to replace ultra-hackable low level devices, it's just a cheap PC that children can tinker with without their parents yelling at them if they break the family PC.

The Rasberry Pi is _anything_ but dead.

<comment><USER20> They absolutely don't need special hardware to start programming.

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that my first exposure to coding was when I typed "10 PRINT BUTT 20 GOTO 10" into BBC BASIC. I didn't need anything more than the computer I had at school. The modern-day equivalent - typing "python" into the terminal - isn't much different, and still a lot easier and cheaper than getting something to run on an external Linux board.

<comment><USER21> This _IS_ today's version of the BBC Micro. AFAIK, the BBC Micro was a cheap design to encourage computer education since regular PCs were very expensive.

I too cut my teeth on a BBC Micro. My school had ~20 of them. If they'd bought PCs, they would have had maybe 5?

The Raspberry Pi will do the same thing today, especially in poor countries which don't have computers as a matter of course in their schools.

You're talking from an overly Western-centric perspective when you say that typing "python" is cheaper than the RPI.

The world has 7 billion people, many of whom live in poor countries. At $35 with the ability to use a regular TV as a console, this thing is well within the reach of poor person even in a poor country like India to buy as a splurge for his kid who he's told my their teacher is bright.

I, for one, think this is going to be revolutionary.

PS: I also plan to use it for some home automation projects. It can run off of batteries (!!!!!), and is a plain old GNU/Linux distro. How cool is that.

<comment><USER20> The BBC Micro was actually quite expensive compared to the other micros of the time. (I don't think the IBM PC was ever considered a "micro", and other micros were probably more capable anyway.) If I remember correctly, the goal was not to produce a design that would compete mostly on cost but rather one that was British and would do the flashy stuff the BBC wanted to show on their computing series.

I agree that the Raspberry Pi will be revolutionary, not because it will rejuvenate computer science teaching, but simply rather because it's a cheap computer.

<comment><USER21> > I agree that the Raspberry Pi will be revolutionary, not because it will > rejuvenate computer science teaching, but simply rather because it's a cheap > computer.

Yep. It looks we were mostly in agreement then! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't care about the GPU, but I'm glad to see XBMC running on the thing.

Next up, I want to see some Ubuntu Pi edition, and perhaps even some ChromeOS fork.

My hope is to be able to attach that to the back of a monitor/TV and get a usable browsing and movie watching machine.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know if Raspberry Pi has an education / grant program? I'd like to present this to my high school (Small alternative Technical School) and I'm sure they'd love a curriculum that they could review.

</comment><comment><USER24> Little confused here. Has the Pi project changed from "low-cost education computer for the masses" into "iOS-killing mobile game platform"?

<comment><USER25> I suspect this[x] is just a way to bring attention to the Broadcom chip that powers the RPi

[x] i mean the article, not the Pi project itself

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does the iPhone 4S actually use a Tegra 2? Everything I've read indicated it used a PowerVR GPU, just like every other iPhone, not a Tegra 2. The article seems fundamentally misguided and incorrect if this is the case.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/4951/iphone-4s-preliminary- ben...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4951/iphone-4s-preliminary- benchmarks-800mhz-a5-slightly-slower-gpu-than-ipad-2) says SGX543MP2.

<comment><USER27> Why do you think the author says iPhone 4S uses a Tegra 2? He doesn't say that.

I'm curious, though, is it really a fully open source computer? How does that work when it uses an ARM chip? Or does the open source part refer only to the OS? As soon as ARM replaces ARM11 with Cortex A7 or whatever, we should ask them to open source ARM11.

<comment><USER28> I'd say its more closed source than open. The schematic is not released, the chip is a Broadcom ARM (not even for sale to the public), the GPU runs a binary closed blob. Even the boot sequence involves closed source binary "magic".

It runs linux. That's open. The rest, not so much. Its still awesome. It just is what it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It can decode and output a 1080p signal. What more do you need from a GPU? :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Did anybody read the article? There is no demo or measurement, the manufacturer is promising, in an interview, that the SoC _should_ perform like that.

Also, it's pretty confusing, mixing statements about Tegra 2 and iPhone 4S, which are quite different beasts.

It would certainly be impressive, but I'd rather wait for at least a demo, if not proper benchmarks, before throwing the party.

</comment><comment><USER31> It seems to me that they're comparing a USB powered device to a battery powered device.

The iPhone runs its GPU in a particular way, and its GPU was chosen based on the fact that the iPhone needs to have its battery last all day.

However the Raspberry can draw a continuous 1A without rest, because it effectively has an infinite battery.

So, sure, you can put a larger GPU in a device like that.

</comment><comment><USER32> * yawn * Let me know when I can freaking buy one! I'm sick of having to use their VM to develop my software, damn it!</comment>


Ask HN: How do you organize your photos? - <AUTHOR> Do you organize your folders by year? By topic? By season? Where do you store them? Do you have multiple copies? <comment><USER2> I ingest photos with rapid-photo-downloader [https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/](https://www.damonlynch.net/rapid/) 1) rapid-photo-downloader handles renaming. I rename using dates + filename because that's easy to automate and renaming with semantic content requires decision making during ingestion. 2) rapid-photo-downloader also will copy the stream to another location as a "backup" while downloading. In the end, I wind up with a set of RAW files that I cull and edit and a set of RAW files that I don't cull and edit.

Rapid-photo-downloader is reasonably rapid when working off the SD card. And so the first level of organization is no effort. Which is good because organizing photos is not something I enjoy and not something that I've found ever provides much payback in terms of time saved for time spent. So aside from date, my organization is various "shoe boxes" living on various hard drives and thumbdrives...and some old photos on DVD's...and some older photos in physical shoe boxes.

So deeper organization is pretty much ad-hoc and short term with darktable color categories and tags that seemed to make sense at the time. On the other hand, I am not required to make my photos searchable for someone else, so dates work reasonably well because I roughly know when I took the image I am looking for and I can call up a date range of images in the Darktable lightable and visually scan for the ones I am seeking. Well and mostly because I don't have long term relationships with particular images...Usually I prefer to make something better than what I've already done to what I've already made.

If I had a really serious business records case for documentary photos, I'd probably consider hard copies and physical filing. It makes records retention and destruction more clear cut...though it would depend on the use case.

</comment><comment><USER3> Travel photos in folders like 'YYYY-MM-DD Location', non-travel family photos by people, professionally-significant photos in a different hierarchy, incidental photos -- where the topic isn't common to many other photos -- in a catch-all folder.

All files renamed by EXIF date.

No multiple copies; in fact, aggressive deduplication.

Mirrored on a different drive, and an additional copy in the cloud.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you use a software to rename your files by the EXIF date?

<comment><USER3> On Windows machines, I usually have IrfanView installed as an image viewer, which can do this batch-rename with a GUI.

But I have also used scripts for this in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apple Photos app with original, full sized files on iCloud. Periodic backups to external HD. 27k photos arranged in hundreds of albums which are organized in dozens of folders which are organized in 6 master folders + a handful of smart albums ( favorites, videos, screenshots, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Google photos unlimited storage from my phone. Any pictures I care about I just move to my phone to upload on Google for free full size backup</comment>


My HN Dinner Party #2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/hacker-news-dinner-party-2/

<comment><USER2> Great idea on the dinner party and the food looks delicious. When I travel to the U.S I will hunt down that dude and force him to have dinner with me.

On another note, why would anybody store energy as air? The inner pressure on those canisters would be huge, and you would either have to bury them or risk explosions. I'm imagining huge air tanks in some field, which could potentially blow up at any point.

I really that differences in altitude are the safest way to store energy. Or even better, something you can do off the coast, so we can finally start using all that ocean space.

</comment><comment><USER3> 3 of the guests to a small dinner party are vegetarians. So his entree is lamb. _sigh_. Vegetarianism is frustrating.

<comment><USER4> He made something where the vegetarian substitution was straightforward.</comment></comment>


UK firm's surveillance kit 'used to crush Uganda opposition' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34529237 <comment><USER2> For reference, Gamma Group are a well known bunch of evil bastards in the UK. Nothing they do is considered honorable. Literally nothing. They also pretty much have a license to do what the hell they like under government mandate as a lot of things they do are actually pretty much illegal if someone founded a startup to do it today.

It says everything about the place when I had my CV put forward by an agent a few years ago for a "high tech position" in the "expanding data sector". Wouldn't reveal who it was to start with due to an NDA. Moment I got told who it was, it was "fuck off". And you know what I got stick from the agent for actually having some ethics. Clearly it's not common these days otherwise outfits like that wouldn't have any staff.

Then again they seem to groom people without experience or understanding of exactly what they do at university job fairs.

I await my bag and tag for criticising them.

<comment><USER3> > actually pretty much illegal

Not at all. This is like saying weapons manufacturing is illegal, just because they can be used for committing murder. As for Gamma Group being 'evil' that's also a bit of an overstatement. I don't want to get into a huge ethical debate here, but the principle is that tools are morally neutral, their users or mis- users are the ones that should be criticised.

<comment><USER4> At some point it becomes the bully on the playground, holding your arm and hitting you with it, chanting 'stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!'

Weapons manufacturing in bulk for sale to anybody with cash can be called evil, with good reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a British citizen, how can we stop this from happening again.

I don't think writing a letter to my MP is going to change anything since I write very often (yearly, since snowden) about surveillance, and nothing changes.

<comment><USER6> Surprisingly, there are many quiet parts of the Conservative Party who think this sort of thing has gone on too long. Especially the (increasingly small) Libertarian branch. People like David Davis (the former candidate for party leader) are a good start. Ditto reach out to people in the House of Lords, whatever we may think of the institution, there are many very influential voices there. Baroness Manningham-Buller for example, though the former head of MI5, is actually a surprisingly strong critic of such surveillance. Esp when it's over seas.

<comment><USER7> David Davis, will all due respect, is completely isolated in his own party and mostly fulfils a theatrical role these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Such software should be classified as arms for export purposes.

<comment><USER9> Would you say the same about Metasploit or Wireshark? If not, where do you suggest the line be drawn?

<comment><USER10> Software that runs on your own computer is not a weapon; software that is designed to run on other people's computers without their knowledge or consent probably is. That would put Wireshark clearly on the acceptable side of the line and Metasploit in a very questionable place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article is awfully light on what exactly was sold to the Ugandan government.

The article states the technology can be used,

"to spy on the enemy, collect data, intrude enemy systems, intercept enemy communication and also manipulate transmissions. "It can covertly be deployed in buildings, vehicles, computers, mobile phones, cameras and any other equipment deemed worthy for information extraction or surveillance."

I mean from the article it could be anything - a software interface on top of standard CCTV cameras, voice activated microphones on government and government sympathizer personal electronic devices or just a piece of analytic software for parsing through data they've already collected.

Doing a bit more digging it appears that Finfisher (the tech sold to Uganda by Gamma Group) is a spyware tool that uses common security exploits including phishing and social engineering to infect target devices and monitor them. It appears to do this in a somewhat automated, click-to-launch, way.

<comment><USER12> Come on, the important part is "intrude enemy systems, intercept enemy communication and manipulate transmissions"

The big red flag for you should be "enemy" rather than "someone I disagree with politically."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If these allegations are true, then I find it hard to imagine a fair and just society arising in these countries.

It would appear to me that autocratic governments are being given additional tools to retain power and more control over young democracies which have not yet developed the institutions necessary to 'self-correct' or reverse/prevent the abuse of such tools.

In my view, it is those who are most likely to agitate for a more democratic society and create institutions that demand for accountability who will be targeted and silenced.

This will deny those countries of the very people who are needed to create the kind of country that their citizens dream of.

Imagine such tools in the hands of the British during the time of the birth of the United States.

I am left with a bitter taste in my mouth. I am not quick to see a dystopian future, but it will make it harder for needed change to come. I welcome any alternative viewpoints that can shed a kinder light on this situation.

</comment><comment><USER14> The software seems kind of irrelevant to me. They recently arrested the main opposition and threw them in jail on trumped up charges. You don't need software for that.

>Police arrested the country's main opposition leader and a dozen other officials from his party in dawn raids on Thursday, as President Yoweri Museveni scaled up efforts to thwart a mounting challenge to his three-decade rule.

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/ugandan-opposition-leader- kizza-...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/ugandan-opposition-leader-kizza- besigye-arrested-on-public-order-charge-1444922283)

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think the technology, and who sold it to whom, is the real story here. We all know that the NSA and GCHQ have similar capabilities. I imagine China, Russia and several other states do too. The point is, this power will corrupt.

Consider this quote:

> people deemed dangerous to state security like government officials and > opposition politicians are being surveilled

What happens if Labour look likely to win the election and someone decides Jeremy Corbyn is "dangerous to state security" because he opposes renewing Trident. What institutions exist to ensure that he can't be surveilled?

<comment><USER16> There was a ruling this week saying MPs can be surveilled by gchq, it'd be interesting to know where the immunity really is - the PM and his cabinet? Opposition leaders? The opposition leader? [http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech- policy/2015/10/gchq-allowed-to...](http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech- policy/2015/10/gchq-allowed-to-spy-on-mps-and-peers-secret-court-rules/)

Oh, and David Cameron has already called the Labour party run by Corbyn a danger to national security. [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david- cameron-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron- claims-jeremy-corbyn-is-a-threat-to-national-security-10498651.html)

<comment><USER17> And the day you want to cut GCHQ funding? Well just a moment minister let me play you this before you make a final decision...</comment></comment></comment>


Training a Neural Net to Generate CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#training-a-neural-net-to-generate-css <comment><USER2> "1 one parse error on *zoom: 2 !important;"

That might be a parse error according to validator, but it's actually a pretty commonly used hack for old Internet Explorers - real browsers drop such invalid declaration, while IE (up to 6 I think, although 7 still accepted some other character IIRC) parsed it anyway and ignored the asterisk. What's more - this quirk is commonly used with, guess what, the "zoom" property, which is one of the common ways to trigger "hasLayout" mode in IE engine (although you'd most likely use it with value "1" instead of "2").

So this NN simply wrote a compatibility hack for IE6 :)

<comment><USER3> It's reassuring to think that there'll soon be a growing population of smart systems and artificial intelligences that hate Internet Explorer too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you like his work, consider donating to gwern on patreon. [https://www.patreon.com/gwern?ty=h](https://www.patreon.com/gwern?ty=h)

Note: I am obviously not gwern.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you find this combination of Natural Computation and arts (or styling in this case), you might want to take a look on papers published on these tracks:

* Evolutionary Computation for Music, Art, and Creativity - [http://cilab.cs.ccu.edu.tw/ci-tf/ECMAC2015.html](http://cilab.cs.ccu.edu.tw/ci-tf/ECMAC2015.html)

* EvoMUSART - [http://www.evostar.org/2016/cfp_evomusart.php](http://www.evostar.org/2016/cfp_evomusart.php)

* International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging - [http://expressive.richardt.name/2015/CAe/Home](http://expressive.richardt.name/2015/CAe/Home)

* Generative Art Conference - [http://www.generativeart.com/](http://www.generativeart.com/)

I've seen a few papers working on CSS in the past.

<comment><USER6> See also [http://computationalcreativity.net/](http://computationalcreativity.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Someone correct me if I am wrong here, but these char-rnn based outputs are great to look at and experiment with - but they dont seem to be of any practical use. All that they are capable of showing is that an RNN can "remember" things. The biggest question is how do you make any use of these things ?

Is it possible to nudge the RNN in a particular direction - so that it produces something that we want ? Perhaps there is an answer to this in Alex Graves et al. Paper on Handwriting generation. A more thorough explanation or exploration in this direction would perhaps help ?.

Anyone really working on generating CSS ( conditioned! ) ?

<comment><USER8> No experience actually trying, but I'd suspect the first step would be training a system on combinations of CSS and HTML; all the really interesting behavior comes from the interaction between the two.

Then I imagine you could do interesting stuff by e.g. constraining the HTML and seeing what kind of CSS was spit out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can it center vertically?

<comment><USER10> Probably, if trained with data containing display: flex

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> it could be a nice experiment to have a basic html structure and a picture, and then attempt to generate the style until the rendered html match the image.

genetic css?

<comment><USER12> Yes, a generative model of HTML+CSS is definitely a direction I'm nodding towards. (I discussed it briefly in the previous section about reinforcement learning in general.) I'm still hazy on the full architecture: you need an RNN to generate the CSS, you probably want to feed in a particular HTML page to target the CSS onto, the users' browsers generate the reward signal, and you can create images of the HTML+CSS combo as rendered in a web browser and bring in a convolutional network somehow... There doesn't seem to be anything quite like this in the literature that I've come across.

(Actually, there's a surprising dearth of reinforcement learning in general. Very few blog posts or demos or introductory materials. It makes it hard to understand what is new about DQN or how the whole system works on a concrete coding level.)

<comment><USER13> Reinforcement learning seems like overkill if you're just trying to match a single target. RL agents want to maximize reward accumulated over time, while you'd be happy to find a single good state. You could frame this as stochastic optimization (MCMC or simulated annealing) over the CSS string, with some combination of RNN and convnet serving as proposal.

The best paper award at CVPR this year ([http://www.cv- foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2015/ht...](http://www.cv- foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2015/html/Kulkarni_Picture_A_Probabilistic_2015_CVPR_paper.html)) has an architecture somewhat like this: instead of a web browser they're using a 3D rendering engine, and searching for pose parameters that cause their rendered image to match an observed image. This is just Bayesian inference using MCMC, where they train a deep net to function as a data-driven proposal distribution.

If your goal were to _actually_ get a working system, you'd probably want to do inference directly on a parameter vector encoding all the relevant quantities - heights, widths, font sizes, colors, etc. of the various boxes, etc. - that you could programmatically ground out into a CSS file. Trying to do inference over the raw text is making things artificially hard since you have to put so much work into even just getting correct syntax. Though maybe that's part of the fun. :-)

<comment><USER14> I think the optimal way to do this would be to use an RNN that can walk up and down the DOM. So it starts at the HTML tag, and chooses which path to go up and down, visiting each node. Then iterate through every style attribute and predict what value it should have.

This would create a simple way of generating CSS styles for a document, without dealing with the complicated issues of RNNs having limited memory and producing correct syntax.

Then you can use these predictions as a prior probability over what the CSS styles should be. Then you can use some kind of bayesian optimization to find the optimal settings in the least number of experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Letting my imagination run wild, I'd add a speech recognition module, generating CSS from a spoken description of layout etc.

After some busy work along that line, we would arrive at a generation of PLs where you don't write source code but have it generated from interpreted speech input.

I'm not so sure I (as a programmer) would really want that, but it would seem a rather obvious line of development.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ability to generate sense out of thin air must be nightmare for anyone trying to fight spam. Will this ever make into our inboxes?

<comment><USER17> Well the spam-bots will learn to generate cool stories, we may actually enjoy spam..

Has anyone trained RNN on YCombinator comments ?

<comment><USER11> Interesting idea.

If there were any bot reading comments, it already know your idea ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh, I was looking forward to getting into ML and NN, but given my crappy i3 CPU/integrated GPU, seems like I am not.

<comment><USER14> You can do ML. But you won't match the performance of state of the art deep learning networks. Training on CPU isn't _impossible_. Gwern said it was a 20x slowdown, others said it was only as bad as 10x. But for smaller models it should be feasible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Training a NN to be subjective? Cool story bro, keep telling it.</comment>


Ask HN: What is it like to write code for Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a college student from a far away land.<p>Getting a strong job title from a hip and well-grounded company (like Google, Facebook and many tech startups) in Silicon Valley and writing code for them in your favorite programming language is a long pipe dream for me. I'll never know what it's like. <comment><USER2> Probably overrated. There are smart people and companies in other places too.</comment>


Apple Opens Development Office in Hyderabad - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160518006584/en/Apple-Opens-Development-Office-Hyderabad <comment><USER2> Direct link to Apple's press release on this. [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2016/05/19Apple-Opens- Develo...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2016/05/19Apple-Opens-Development- Office-in-Hyderabad.html)</comment>


Ask HN: What JS framework do you use for web apps? - <AUTHOR>

Trying to find out what JS frameworks people actually use to build web applications rather than what people talk about ;)
By frameworks, I'm referring to things like Angular, Dojo, etc. If in doubt, mention it.
I'd also love to hear about what people think of the ones they've used.
I'll collate all this together and report back :) <comment><USER2> Surprised it has not been mentioned but almost everything I build not matter the higher level framework, starts with require.js. Require alone goes a long way to cleaning up code structure and overall architecture. I like Dojo for really big corporate apps where I am basically replacing a desktop app with a web based equivalent. It's popularity has faded in the past few years which is a shame, because it and Ext are really the only two frameworks around that are targeting enterprise apps.

For consumers facing stuff I generally use a combination of Backbone, jQuery, underscore and some other libs added in as needed. That is probably the most common stack you will see out there.

</comment><comment><USER3> jquery.

fancy frameworks introduce complexity, bloat, bunch of magic that works behind the scenes. for small stuff you don't care about it might be nice, for anything serious i would run my own code.

<comment><USER4> That's funny, as someone who's got a ton of bloated jQuery that we've mostly migrated to Backbone, I would have argued exactly the opposite.

Our front-end guy, who is a jQuery wizard but new to Backbone, originally looked at the conversions I'd done and was quick to remark at how clean it all was.

Is there magic? Sure, but in Backbone, not that much of it. There's decidedly more in Ember, but they're both open projects so you're welcome to go scour through the magic and figure it out for yourself.

I would feel remiss if I didn't also point out that code you write in Backbone is just as much your code as code you wrote in jQuery. As for magic quotient, I would also suggest that jQuery is more magical than Backbone, on the whole. If you think otherwise, that probably just speaks to a lack of familiarity with one compared to the other.

<comment><USER5> Serious question. I haven't figured out the need for MVC in JS. I'm primarily a PHP programmer, and I use a custom MVC on the back-end. I don't see the point in having two MVC frameworks (one in front, one in back). At the end of the day, the front-end has to talk to the server to get data, doesn't it? What's the difference?

<comment><USER4> You may not, necessarily, but Javascript Frameworks 1) aren't necessarily exactly MVC anyway and 2) if you're using the MVC in both frameworks, that's sort of the wrong way to do it.

Using Django as the example (which has its own stack behind it) and Backbone as the front-end, the only part of Django I really end up using, from an end- user's perspective, is the ORM and JSON serializers.

The way that backbone works is that your 'models' don't read to or write using the database, they read and write using APIs that you define with your normal framework. So, where in Django, you might execute a .save() on a model to commit it to the database, that same .save() operation in backbone will execute a PUT or PATCH request to your API endpoint to which its bound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> angular.js

This series of quotes from a dev I work with captures a common visceral experience of working with angular.js for the first time: "I've never been so frustrated with code before" ..an hour later.. "You stare at something broken for 20mins, then the fix occurs to you and the truth of it is just so beautiful." We switched from backbone.js to angular.js about 8 months ago, and the team is generally very happy.

</comment><comment><USER7> EmberJS: <http://emberjs.com/>

It's primarily author is Yehuda Katz, the man behind (much of) Rails 3

</comment><comment><USER8> jQuery + Backbone + Marionette for rapid prototyping. I usually throw in Handlebars for templating.

</comment><comment><USER9> Backbone.js

</comment><comment><USER10> jquery, jquery mobile only for the page/events system, not the ui

</comment><comment><USER11> SilkJS and Enyo

</comment><comment><USER12> knockout.js

require.js

durandal.js

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you find Durandal? It looks pretty much exactly what we want

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Angular.js</comment>


Apple's Share of Smartphone Industry's Profits Soars to 92% - <AUTHOR> http://on.wsj.com/1M4WXQx <comment><USER2> The headline makes it sound like Apple is doing better compared to Samsung than it really is -- as the article details, Samsung makes 15% of the profits. Apple and Samsung's share of the profits combined exceeds 100% because some manufacturers are losing money.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's an odd stat. For instance, if someone new enters the phone market, and spends a ton of money and loses a LOT of money, the total profits for the industry go down, and if Apple makes the same dollar profit as the year before, their profit share number goes up. If the next year, that new competitor goes out of business, their loss is not included in the total profits of the industry, and Apple's share of the profits goes down.

So you could make a pretty convincing argument that this profit percentage number is kinda meaningless. Why not just look at gross profit? Dollars compare to dollars pretty well.

<comment><USER4> > For instance, if someone new enters the phone market, and spends a ton of > money and loses a LOT of money, the total profits for the industry go down, > and if Apple makes the same dollar profit as the year before, their profit > share number goes up.

I think it said that the 92% figure was based on the top 8 manufacturers, which are mostly stable in terms of who they are from year to year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> None of the other companies have a repeatably successful flagship phone that comes anywhere close to the iPhone in terms of brand recognition and prestige.

Some might argue the Samsung Galaxy, but the image associated with the galaxy is not one of luxury, but of practicality and a sacrifice in usability in exchange for for customization; the general Android vs. IOS argument.

Luxury breeds profit by turning users into silent evangelists/role models. Combine this with Apple's extremely strong ability to [1] set prices (Android is not a direct competitor, it's a whole different marketplace with its own internal competition) and [2] force costs onto partners (who wouldn't want to work with Apple and see that volume of business with those nice margins?) and it's no surprise that the iPhone is destroying competition on the profitability metric.

<comment><USER6> Maybe before, but the S6 screams luxury IMO, and is very clearly attacking the iPhone head-on.

<comment><USER5> I would still argue that Android does not compete directly with IOS. People who are purchasing the iPhone are buying into more than just a phone: they are buying into the Apple lifestyle and joining the iPhone/Macbook/Apple Store experience.

People who are purchasing the S6 aren't buying into any lifestyle as far as I can tell. Maybe they'll share a common bond with some other S6 users, but I wouldn't call the Samsung ecosystem (what is the Samsung experience even?) luxurious. It takes more than just one product to build luxury and desirability.

<comment><USER7> In this case desirability is tied to fashion, people buy an iPhone because they see other people with an iPhone.

None of the Android phones has ever really gotten the same cachet that the iPhone does (Samsung nearly got it right with the S3) but it's down to perception and marketing.

In terms of device capability Android phones are considerably higher spec and just as usable (5.x is a big improvement) but it doesn't really matter, fashion and marketing wins out.

You see this in other areas, Sennheiser headphones are demonstrably higher quality (in sound and construction) than "Beats by dre" but if the difference is small enough then fashion wins out again.

<comment><USER8> Such a tired, tired argument.

More cores != better usable specs.

If you prefer security and privacy, there's a strong case for iOS.

If you prefer day-of-release software updates, there's a strong case for iOS.

If you prefer robust photography solutions, there's a strong case for Apple's camera hardware and software.

If you want to create audio, there's a strong case for the low latency of Apple's stack.

<comment><USER7> Who said anything about cores?

Android phones equivalent to the price of an iPhone have higher resolution screens, more storage and RAM.

Android phones half the price of the iPhone have equivalent screens, storage and RAM.

I have Nexus devices so I get day-of-release software updates (even my Nexus 7 2012 is running 5.1.1)

I couldn't care less about photography solutions or audio so that really doesn't apply.

Privacy, agreed, Android is a data hoover out the box.

<comment><USER9> ... and yet, with all that horsepower, they still stutter and lag like crazy. An iPhone might be a less powerful computer, but you wouldn't know it from the UX ( _if_ you are upgrading every 2 years and running the iOS release that was designed for your phone - running too many versions ahead can produce a similar experience).

<comment><USER10> I guess it's different for different people. My wife's Nexus 5 that she purchased a couple of months after I got my iPhone 4S has held up much, much better than the iPhone did. I was so frustrated with how laggy and crash-prone my iPhone was (especially next to my wife's still-awesome Nexus) that I ended up buying a G4.

<comment><USER11> It may be worth noting that the Nexus 5 came out more than two years after the iPhone 4S (Oct 31, 2013 vs Oct 14, 2011), and as of now it hasn't even been 2 years since the Nexus 5 was released.

That said, it has been less than 4 years since the iPhone 4S was released; they shouldn't be failing yet, and that reflects poorly on the iPhone (as well as iOS) in your case. However, I'm also not yet convinced that the Nexus 5 will be operating well in late 2017 - that's yet to be determined.

<comment><USER10> Interesting, I didn't realize that. We bought both of them new from the carrier a few months apart. We each just asked for an inexpensive model of the respective brands, so I guess that is largely down to the Nexus 5 being crazy cheap and Apple keeping the 4S in circulation for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And that kids is what you get when you deal with carrier update plans for your devices, allow bundling of crapware with the phones and do your best to kill your operating system with fragmentation ...

A political decision that was bad is keeping on giving.

Apple victory was given to them

<comment><USER3> Except that Android phones sell great, they just don't make much money for their makers.

<comment><USER13> The point stands. People who have a choice (have enough money) choose iPhone rather than allow crapware and not having access to timely updates. I am very pissed with Samsung for not upgrading my Android from 4.4.2 yet. I used to be an iPhone user and while using iPhone I didn't have problems upgrading my phone to the latest version.

<comment><USER14> But there are "pure Android" options (e.g. Nexus and Moto X) that get timely updates that don't have any of those problems.

However, even those great phones still have the problem of having to compete against one another, and there is very little differentiation since Google owns the experience. I get some key innovations on Moto X that I don't get on iPhone (the ability to redden the screen at night is key for me, plus nice things like automatically detecting when you're driving so incoming texts and voice calls are read to you), but Moto X still has to compete with other high end Android devices so they are limited in the premium they can charge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see Nokia got around 2/3 the profits in 2007 when the iPhone started. I guess the profits tend to flow to those who have the best designed phones. I wonder if it'll still be Apple in another 8 years.

([http://9to5mac.com/2015/07/13/apple-smartphone-profit- share/](http://9to5mac.com/2015/07/13/apple-smartphone-profit-share/))

<comment><USER14> But 2007 was really before the whole app ecosystem took off. For anyone who has invested a significant amount in apps, there are much higher switching costs now than there were in 2007. Plus, besides just the actual monetary costs, people USE their smartphones MUCH MUCH more than in 2007, so there is a much greater cost in just having to learn a different OS.

<comment><USER16> The costs for switching isn't that high. Most people don't spend a lot of money on apps. More than half of the money is spent on games anyway. These are played for a while and then new games are purchased.

The handful of productivity apps won't exceed 20$ for the vast majority of users.

I buy lots of apps and games. Every time I switched platforms (webOS -> Android -> iPhone -> WP), I spent around 15$ to cover my initial needs. Compared to what I pay for a phone, it's negligible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am surprised. I have friends and family members with iPhone 6 and 6+ and they are very nice but I think my Note 4 is even better. The quality of the videos and pictures I take are unbelievable. The Android OS is configurable and easy to use.

I do have a theory: I see some people install hundreds of crappy apps on the Android devices; perhaps that hurts performance? I use my Androids as is, except for a very small number of additional apps.

</comment><comment> norea-armozel It's weird how Samsung, LG, and HTC are struggling to make a profit on their phones (some have very good phones like the LG G4 which even Chris Pirillo said it was a good phone), but Apple just keeps growing their profits. I wonder if it has to do with how they've limited number of phone models or is it purely brand recognition that's driving this growth.

<comment><USER18> Is it possible--not saying it's so, just asking a hypothetical question--that Apple just makes more desirable phones?

[Edit] Wow, everybody, I meant more desirable as in; people are willing to pay more. I know FTA that they are only 20% by volume.

<comment><USER19> Apple's actual market share is less than 20% of all smartphones worldwide, though their share of _profits_ is at 92%. This is not about their phone selling more than other phones (they aren't necessarily), but rather how Apple manages profit margins. Their phones are much more expensive than the competition, command premium prices and thus yield premium profits.

<comment><USER20> Yet, in at least North America, equivalent "high end" Android smartphones cost the same _on contract_ and even off contract than iPhones. I can get an older iPhone 5c for free (probably a 5S is I go with a smaller carrier). Where are people paying a "premium" for the iPhone?

Is is that not _enough_ people choose the flagship Android devices to move the needle? I'm genuinely curious/asking because it seems/appears there's some parity (price) between the current flagship Android devices and Apple's newest.

<comment><USER19> Also, profit formulas aren't that simple. You have consider Apple's costs vs their revenue for each phone, and also their contract terms with providers vs other phones. I don't know the details. But perhaps Apple earns more for their phone contracts even if consumers pay the same. One thing we do know is that Apple leads the world in an extremely well-oiled production pipeline and network of suppliers that no doubt also helps keep their costs down and thus their profits high. I doubt Android manufacturers are operating at that same margin.

<comment><USER20> Good points. I would imagine that Apple has a better supply chain, and more aggressive/favorable terms with each provider than competing smartphone makers. I'm not sure it accounts for the entire difference. I wonder if there's a middle area or marketplace where people pay disproportionally more on average which helps this figure (92%) climb so high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm going to suggest why Apple are successful at phones:

1) Timing/Being First (remeber before apple when everything had a hardware keyboard?)

2) Branding and Advertising

3) Product Hardware (features are all just right - camera, battery, performance, screen etc.)

4) iOS + App Store (no-one wants to change their apps)

5) New features first (consistently first with new features - iphone, retina, gorilla glass, siri, touch id)

6) Android + whatever seems inferior (and largely is)

7) They charge lots more money

8) They have fewer products and so can drive down the cost of manufacturing.

9) They are run by smarter people not marketing departments.

10) They do all of the above TOGETHER and all of the above support each other. If they start missing one the others start to be less desirable/possible too.

<comment><USER22> 1) No. 2) Yes. 3) Battery life is not "just right" Ask ... anyone.

... this is boring...

9) Wait, what? Did you really just say that?

<comment><USER23> 1) Who else had 60fps smooth UI on a phone/tablet before Apple? 9) Marketing drives gimmicky features and empty specs - Samsung's hover touch and gaze detect that is off by default because using them is a pain, 4 slow cores instead of 2 fast ones, OS defaults that favor energy burning features (location services, true multi-tasking), screens with higher res that are indistinguishable to retina screens but with worse color profile.

Some companies have fixed some of those pain points with their recent models, but it's too little too late for the existing consumer base who buys flagship products.

<comment><USER22> 1) What are you on about? Who said anything about 60fps UI? OP mentioned physical keyboards. That was what my comment was directed towards. There were touchscreen only phones before iPhone that didn't have physical keyboards.

60 fps... That's like jumping in and saying, who had true HD phones first? We could spend all day telling each other who had what before who.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Because of Apple stores, iPhones have an enormous amount of good support. In Manhattan there are 6 stores including one open 365/24/7\. You could make a Genius Bar appointment at 3 AM if you wanted. The people are nice and the support is good including 1-800-MyApple.

I use iPhone's FaceTime Audio a lot domestically and internationally since it has better audio quality (HD audio) then the regular network. Verizon is now offering HD audio but only on their newer phones and only within the Verizon network.

On the iPhone 6, FaceTime Video over cellular uses half the bandwidth of previous models.

<comment><USER25> If anyone else is curious about the bandwidth thing, it's becasue the new phones have a h265 chip, and use that codec.

[http://www.phonearena.com/news/New-Apple-iPhone-models- use-h...](http://www.phonearena.com/news/New-Apple-iPhone-models-use-half-the- bandwidth-for-FaceTime-thanks-to-H.265-codec_id60665)

If anyone else is curious, this does a decent job of explaining it. [http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/h-265-hevc- encoding-e...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/h-265-hevc-encoding- explained/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This quote stands out the most, "One key to Apple's profit dominance: higher prices. Apple's iPhone last year sold for a global average of $624, compared with $185 for smartphones running Android"

Literally Apple can command a 3x price premium in the same product category. I'd like to see Android flagships broken out from this number, however.

The issue of Apple profit dominance is pretty complex and I'm sure there are really smart people looking to understand and attack it.

<comment><USER27> That average price includes phones of low specs and high specs, while Apple only does high(ish) spec. The Samsung Galaxy is similarly priced to the iPhone.

There is plenty of price premium built in there though, that's for sure.

<comment><USER28> Apple only does premium phones whereas Samsung et al do premium as well as mid-market as well as down-market devices.

The iPhone is basically always more expensive than the equivalent Samsung Galaxy device. The Galaxy S6 is currently $549 for a 32GB version with a high- res 5.1" QHD screen (better than 1080p). The semi-equivalent iPhone 6 is $649 for a 16GB version with a mid-resolution 4.7" screen (approximately 720p) is a full $100 more expensive than the S6. Upgrading the iPhone to the next memory size up (64GB) adds $100. Upgrading to a high def screen (6 Plus with a 5.5" 1080p screen) is another $100.

One big reason Apple makes so much more profit than everyone else is that they sell lesser specced phones for a higher price than the competition's higher specced phones. Most people think of the iPhone 6 as being equivalent to the Galaxy S6 despite having a smaller, lower resolution screen, 1/2 the storage space for music and pictures, slower processor, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Isn't this similar to the PC market? The beige boxes became a commodity, and all profits went to Intel and Microsoft. Dell, Compaq, Gateway, HP, etc. all barely made money in the consumer market. How will Samsung, HTC, et. al differentiate their devices?

<comment><USER30> Not exactly. The profits went to Intel and Microsoft because they were figuratively selling ALL the computers. Apple is gobbling the profits in a different way.

Samsung/HTC/others aren't failing to make money because their products aren't differentiated, it's because they're selling large numbers of low-end, low- margin products. The question is how they can compete with Apple on the high- end. Nobody's managed to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Alternate title: "20% of people paid _waaaay_ too much for their cellphone".

<comment><USER32> What a curious thought, that i seem to see repeated over and over.

What exactly is more expensive about the apple product here:

Apple iphone 6 - $649.92 full retail price

Samsung galaxy s6 edge - $779.76 full retail price

LG G4 - $599.76 full retail price (on sale)

HTC One M9 - $649.92 full retail price

This puts the iphone as the second least expensive flagship phone currently available, prices are all straight from tmobiles site.

If we expand the storage and bump to the top models:

Samsung galaxy s6 edge - $959.83 full retail price

Apple iPhone 6+ - $949.99 full retail price

Was your point only that everyone who buys a flagship smartphone is paying 'waaay too much' for their cellphone?

If your point was that Apple's smartphones are somehow the most expensive ones, then you are simply incorrect; this is the belief i was trying to counter with these numbers.

edit: formatting

<comment><USER33> I paid $1 for my Galaxy S5 upgrade, with a two year contract extension. Essentially I got the phone for free because I planned on keeping my carrier for the next two years anyway. That cost was subsidized by my carrier, and probably indirectly by Samsung also. I've never paid sticker price for an Android phone, and I don't know anyone who has.

"One key to Apple's profit dominance: higher prices. Apple's iPhone last year sold for a global average of $624, compared with $185 for smartphones running Android, according to Strategy Analytics. "

You can't say the same when buying an iPhone. There's more complexity to this than sticker price. The numbers don't like, Apple pulls in 92% of the market's profits while selling less than 20% of the phones. Use logic and tell me what that means.

<comment><USER32> As I said in my first comment,

>Was your point only that everyone who buys a flagship smartphone is paying 'waaay too much' for their cellphone?

Your statistic only shows that android serves all market segments, and does nothing to show that Apple phones are more expensive than the phones with which they compete. Yeah the Moto G is less expensive than the iPhone, if thats your point the discussion should stop there, because we are comparing a budget segment phone to a flagship segment phone.

>I paid $1 for my Galaxy S5 upgrade, with a two year contract extension. Essentially I got the phone for free because I planned on keeping my carrier for the next two years anyway. That cost was subsidized by my carrier, and probably indirectly by Samsung also. I've never paid sticker price for an Android phone, and I don't know anyone who has.

Ok, so lets do a price comparison that way

With a 2-year contract on verizon (couldnt find contract prices on tmobile):

LG G4 - $199.99

HTC One M9 - $199.99

Samsung Galaxy s6 - $199.99 (after $50 mail in rebate)

Samsung Galaxy s6 edge - $299.99 (after $50 mail in rebate)

iphone 6 - $199.99

iphone 6+ - $299.99

The galaxy s 5 is the same price as the 5S, both last years flagships

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So why are so many companies jumping in if there were not much profits? I see variety of low end Android sold in India, surely they would exit if they don't make a profit.But many are now upping the specs and releasing good quality mobiles. I checkout out a 400ppi mobile with Android 5 which seemed better then my N4. It seems at least in India the mid to high level mobiles sales might fall back.

</comment><comment><USER35> > An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment

But the huge, smug grin on her face was probably telling...

I tend to have Apple devices nowadays but I have to say this is a bit concerning. One would hope that there's enough money to go around to encourage innovation and competition. If it stays this dominant for one vendor, it surely will cause things to stagnate.

<comment><USER4> > If it stays this dominant for one vendor, it surely will cause things to > stagnate.

It might, although I could also see the opposite: if everyone is doing okay, selling enough to get by and grow with the market, there might be less push to get out there and try new things. Instead, companies would compete on price, on advertising, on superficial design. But if there are lots of companies struggling to find a foothold, then they'll be lots of motivation for trying new things, in search of anything that'll work, and give them an advantage. There's no margin for them to be complacent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> You really have to wonder why any one would even want to consider getting into this business at this point. It's a blood bath and there is only one winner it seems.

</comment><comment><USER37> Funny how this news makes me think i may have a better deal buying an android phone next time, since they're making less margin over me.

<comment><USER5> This also means that they care about you less. It's a numbers game for these high-volume, low profit companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is called a "Winner takes it all market". What is interesting is that smartphone became such a market considering the profits, because when considering the revenue it is much more fragmented.</comment>


RobotQuest: An MMO programming game API written in Haskell and MongoDB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/seanhess/robotquest

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. What do you do with a project you haven't worked on in months? I don't know if I'll ever "finish" this, but it's an interesting project regardless, so I'm putting it up anyway.

There aren't many open-source web applications/APIs written in Haskell and MongoDB, so hopefully it'll be valuable for that alone.

Note: I am a Haskell noob, but I'm proud of what I've done so far.

I'm planning on writing up some detailed blog posts. What would you like to know more about?

Server is currently live at: <http://robotquest.tk></comment>


Review of e-Conomic a popular Accounting App for Small Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://www.getapp.com/blog/e-conomic-review/

<comment><USER2> the reviewer obviosuly doesnt know the market then as i would say not only is FreeAgent a competitor, but it wins hands down: <http://www.freeagentcentral.com/>

<comment><USER3> And no mention of Xero or LessAccounting. I suspect this may be a paid review.</comment></comment>


A Neural Network for Factoid Question Answering Over Paragraphs - <AUTHOR> https://cs.umd.edu/~miyyer/qblearn/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty impressive. It beats average human performance in the history category, but is outperformed by humans in literature.

Note that part of the data preparation process includes building a dependency- parse tree. From the abstract I'd thought the model was learning to do that too, which would have been _very_ impressive.

In general this approach is somewhat related to [1] in that both rely on knowledge representation similarities. I'm not entirely clear about how this groups approach interfaces the learned model and the IR querying.

[1] _Open Question Answering with Weakly Supervised Embedding Models_ [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.4326v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.4326v1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Correctly"/traditonally speaking, "factoid" does _not_ mean "small fact".

It actually means something that _appears_ to be a fact, but is not. For example, the statement that "Lightning never strikes twice in the same place."

Interestingly, the phrase "A factoid is a small fact" is a factoid... regardless of whether you use the slang definition or not.

<comment><USER4> Upvote, because correct and precise language matters.

The -oid suffix means 'having the form or likeness of'.

Androids are not small men.

<comment><USER5> "Correctness" is determined by usage, and in this case usage has decided that "Factoid" means small fact. If you use it in any other way, people will misunderstand you, which is an impediment to comprehension. Explaining yourself is an impediment to having an actual conversation, as it derails the conversation.

<comment><USER4> Usage is floating and amenable to change. At some point usage was different from what you claim it is now (do you have sources to back that up, btw?). The "small fact" people sure didn't let 'em stop that from using the word wrongly (at that point of time, at least, "small fact" was wrong according to your definition, also).

Edit: I checked the Merriam-Webster, and there at least the classic definition is listed as the primary meaning. The alleged "current use" is listed as secondary. I think we can agree your claim to be a factoid - we just can't agree on what that means! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would really be interesting to see a "computers-on-Jeopardy" competition that was open to all comers. (The 'Watson' appearance, while impressive in many ways, was essentially a contrived IBM infomercial.)

<comment><USER7> I think you are describing TREC[1]. Over on the chatbot arena, there is The Loebner Prize[2], also interesting, but in general the systems are over learned.

[1] [http://trec.nist.gov/](http://trec.nist.gov/) [2] www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html

<comment><USER6> TREC, as far as I know, doesn't have a competitive question-answering format, with definitive right or wrong answers.

Jeopardy is a widely-understood game format; a competition-via-API would be understandable to a wide variety of competitors, from leading researchers to precocious cranks.

<comment><USER2> There's TREC QA, which finished in 2007[1]. This year they are doing TREC Live QA[2] (which looks pretty challenging!)

Outside TREC, there is the CLEF QA track[3]

[1] [http://trec.nist.gov/data/qamain.html](http://trec.nist.gov/data/qamain.html)

[2] [https://sites.google.com/site/trecliveqa2015/](https://sites.google.com/site/trecliveqa2015/)

[3] [http://nlp.uned.es/clef-qa/](http://nlp.uned.es/clef-qa/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice to see they have links to the datasets. Definitely the type of thing to be combining with the always-listening devices

<comment><USER9> Yep, I can see it now. Overhearing conversation about getting high and food and saying "Do you want the 2-day or 1-day premium shipping for your marijuana + cheetos order?" ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could somebody explain to me what those arrows next to the heatmap are supposed to represent?

Why does "left" link to "avoids" link to "by" etc.?

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice work guys!</comment>


Congress asks Google if Glass infringes 'on the privacy of the average American' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4338104/congress-asks-larry-page-if-google-glass-infringes-on-privacy <comment><USER2> One caucus in Congress asked Google whether they will protect privacy. Google PR will respond as vaguely as possible, reassuring them that they will protect the privacy of users, and that users can already and will be able to opt out of certain types of data collection.

I, for one, am far more concerned about being filmed and photographed nonstop in public.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dear Congress:

Please look into the NSA "Stellar Wind" mass wiretaps before you start in on a product that isn't really sold today. We'd all appreciate your cooperation on this one.

Thanks!</comment>


What Is Systems Programming, Really? (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://willcrichton.net/notes/systems-programming <comment><USER2> If your domain of discourse is the computer itself or the functionality of the computer in the world (store/compute/ communicate) than it is system programming. Else it is application programming.

It has nothing to do with the actual programming language.

<comment><USER3> I think anyone's opinion on what makes something "systems programming" has a lot to do with what it meant when they learned the term. The quotes from Stroustrup and Alexandrescu, for example, very much call out language features.

<comment><USER2> Right. They confuse "system programming languages" with "system programming"

<comment><USER4> There are languages that are clearly better suited for systems programming. You might call these "systems programming languages." Would you write a file system driver in PHP?

<comment><USER2> Openstack was written in python...

Personally I use go for everything.

<comment><USER5> Isn't garbage collection the problem for being in the system programming?

<comment><USER6> No, that is a common myth from the GC-hate crowd.

Here is some stuff to get you started,

"The Cedar Programming Environment: A Midterm Report and Examination "

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/33ff/212245ff8af0359e911883...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/33ff/212245ff8af0359e9118832c9f29ee1fd291.pdf)

[http://www.projectoberon.com/](http://www.projectoberon.com/)

[http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front](http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front)

[https://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/modula-3/](https://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/modula-3/)

[http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about- midori/](http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/)

[https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems- programmi...](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programming/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it would be a unfortunate for people to start redefining what "Systems Programming" means because it is vague enough now as it is - and we don't have the luxury of being able to go back and update the term in the historic literature.

My understanding is that, in effect, "Systems Programming" is analogous to "Operating Systems Programming", or rather you might say (given the increasing size of operating systems these days) that "Systems Programming" is a subset of "Operating Systems Programming" that deals with the direct manipulation of memory in order to provide a useful abstraction for "user" software - remembering that most hardware interaction is via memory. Obviously, in order to do "Systems Programming" you need a "Systems Programming Language" that allows such direct access to memory.

These days, "Systems Programmers" would be those working on the Linux kernel, or microkernels, or graphics drivers (basically those who have complete access to memory) though those developing services one layer up might also consider themselves to be such (especially micro-kernal-based operating systems).

It is probably worth emphasising that "System" is a generic term that is used in a lot of different contexts. I think "Systems Programming" is used in the context of a "Computer System", while modern day cloud programming would be better described as "Distributed Systems Programming" as it is in the context of a "Distributed System" (though I've probably just annoyed a whole bunch of distributed systems researchers).

I think that what the author of the article is talking about is "System Architecture" (or perhaps "Distributed Systems Architecture").

Should we talk about this as programming at all?

<comment><USER8> > I think it would be a unfortunate for people to start redefining what > "Systems Programming" means because it is vague enough now as it is

Indeed. When people call something "systems programming" when it is just e.g. server programming, it feels like when you are being told that "hacker" means the same thing as "cracker" because that's what most people think it means.

In my slightly angry opinion, "Systems programming" is one of those terms that are convenient _because_ they are vague and look cool. The plural on "systems" is suspicious in itself. It's not just one system they are working on, but many. Impressive, isn't it? The funny thing is, if you look up the definition of "system":

 _a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole_

... not so many people actually do that. I think programmers usually work on one thing, one component of a whole system (guess why you are part of a team?). I'm not sure about how uncommon the opposite is because I actually do that - I have worked at the driver level, OS configuration level and at the application level in order to make a product work - and I am not that much of an exceptional programmer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've primarily writing C++ for over 15 years. I don't think I'd ever heard the term "systems programming" until the last few years when Rust talked about it. I don't have a super formal CS education and most of my career has been in gamedev.

What is sytems programming? I don't know. I don't care either. It's an arbitrary label that is rarely used and doesn't affect anyone in any way.

</comment><comment><USER10> > To summarize, what we call "systems programming" I think should be called > "low-level programming." Computer systems design as a field is too important > not to have its own name. Clearly separating these two ideas provides a > greater conceptual clarity on the space of programming language design, and > it also opens the door to sharing insights across the two spaces: how can we > design the system around the machine, and vice versa?

Alternate definition whose source I can't recall:

Systems programming is everything that isn't application programming.

Maybe it's time to update that with:

Systems programming is everything that isn't application programming or low- level programming.

<comment><USER11> So, HTML?

;)

Slightly more seriously, systems programming seems to me to be approaching the lowest levels, so including "not low-level programming" would give the wrong impression that it includes the _really_ high-levels ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe not the thread to post this, but I've seen too often "systems programming" be intertwined with arrogance and gatekeeping. As if these skills are special and inherently more difficult to pick up by developers without them. But tbh all software engineers are programming abstract machines at various levels. Systems work is just a different abstract machine to grok.

My education is in relevant skills (CompE), but the attitude I keep running into in this domain has really started to disgust me, even if it isn't everyone. When it's people I've seen in leadership, that's enough :/

<comment><USER13> "As if these skills are special and inherently more difficult to pick up by developers without them"

It's because they are.

<comment><USER14> My limited experience with bare metal programming tells me they are not. This is just a different abstraction layer to learn. Often low level abstractions are much simpler and less broken than high level programming. Even if something goes wrong, you can plug in a logic recorder / oscilloscope / led (!) and in minutes you know what's wrong. But this doesn't work if you have 10 semi-broken layers below.

I have 15+ years of experience in hl programming and almost none in low level, yet I feel like at home with bare metal stuff. And it is a lot of fun as well.

<comment><USER13> I wholeheartedly agree with you, it surely is fun, especially when it is a toy project!

As for the systems programming please see my answer to a sibling comment.

<comment><USER12> This comment is a lil passive aggressive. "Toy project"

<comment><USER13> It isn't, I meant it.

And you misuse this word, try googling what it really means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Systems programming concerns the code between hardware and the application programmer. So pretty much kernel programming.

Application programming concerns the code between kernel and the ordinary user.

Essentially, systems programmers write software that application programmers can interface with. Application programmers write software that ordinary users interface with.

It gets fuzzy at the edges like most definitions, but that's how I think about it generally.

<comment><USER16> I've always thought of compiler programming as systems programming. I guess it fits your definition of being something application folks interface with in addition to kernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's really (or was back in the day) simply short for "operating systems programming"

<comment><USER18> That makes sense. But everything we program are systems so shortening it like that isn't really helping anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One litmus test that a former coworker applied was "how resource constrained is the application"?

I think conceptually this is a better test, more so than say if you have access to a raw pointer - because more important parts of how to handle core issues like scheduling, storage management, concurrency, parallelism and distributed computation manifest themselves in many forms.

I started my career doing C programming in a OS / kernel environment. In retrospect a lot of pieces of applications I've worked on are what I think of as systems, and many parts of kernels are more applications than systems.

<comment><USER20> How resource constrained is the Linux kernel when running on a modern x86_64 machine with 16 GB of RAM? Not very. So is Linux kernel development for this platform not "systems programming"?

If you're going to say something like "but the kernel should be _fast_ when servicing syscalls", you are right, but that is not a _resource constaint_ , it's a _user requirement_. LibreOffice should also be _fast_ when reacting to my keypresses, but I hope we agree that LibreOffice development would fall into the "applications development" camp, if we have to put things into bins.

The truth is, we don't have to put things into bins. There is no need for a muddy, fuzzy term like "systems programming". If you're doing "kernel programming" or "embedded systems programming on resource constrained microcontrollers", you can just say that directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17948265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17948265)

</comment><comment><USER22> I was really liking this article, until the "dynamic typing sucks" and "functional programming is the path to enlightenment" stuff came up at the end.

Specially jarring because it's out of nowhere. That conclusion does not follow from everything that comes before.</comment>


The Solitaire Encryption Algorithm (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that despite Schneier's best efforts, the Solitaire algorithm may not be as cryptographically strong as he hoped:

[http://www.ciphergoth.org/crypto/solitaire/](http://www.ciphergoth.org/crypto/solitaire/)

(there's also the potential problem that the NSA's supercomputers have grown a lot more powerful in the decade-and-a-half since Cryptonomicon was published)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but apparently it's good enough for short messages of a page or so. Its weakness only matters when an adversary has megabytes to work with.

<comment><USER4> It is also reasonable to use abbreviations. This not only impacts letter frequency, it also speeds encryption and reduces the efficacy of a Dictionary style attack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone aware of any newer hand ciphers that have been produced since 1999, especially those subjected to continuous, aggressive high-speed attack throughout their design?

<comment><USER6> There's Handycipher[0] from 2014. I remember learning about it from Bruce's blog[1], but haven't a clue how secure it is.

[0] [http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/257.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/257.pdf)

[1] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/a_new_pencil-...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/a_new_pencil- an.html)</comment></comment>


imgp v2.4 – Blazing fast image resizer and rotator. Go crunch 'em - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jarun/imgp/releases/tag/v2.4 <comment><AUTHOR> What's in?

\- New option `--quality` (`-q`) to specify quality [default: 75]

\- Homebrew tap for OS X users [`brew install jarun/imgp/imgp`]

\- Option `--quiet` is now `--mute`

\- Use global fill color white (#ffffff) for alpha channel</comment>


GCC 4.8 Breaks Broken SPEC 2006 Benchmarks (fixed) - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/544123/

<comment><USER2> It's disappointing that SPEC refuses to fix the code and is spreading disinformation like "it is at minimum arguable that the code fragment is compliant under the C89 standard". If the global 'int d[16]' is placed at the very end of a page (which the linker is allowed to do), that code compiled in the most naive possible way will SEGV.

<comment><USER3> Unless the C89 standard says something about VM interaction (I'm too lazy to check), it seems like your complaint is misguided.

<comment><USER4> How so? The pointer pointing past the last member of an array may not be dereferenced. Doing so is UB - end of story.

<comment><USER3> As I said, I'm to lazy too delve into the C89 spec (and too young to have actually programmed in the pre-VM days), but my (only slightly) educated guess is that on the type of machine/OS C89 would have been targeted at, any exceptions thrown by reading past the end of an array could be solved by adding more memory; the same solution as would be required if the array was increased in size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As pointed out by the LWN crowd, the article author is mistaken, because the 4.8 release doesn't do this. <http://lwn.net/Articles/544123/>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not really a crack at micro-optimizing C code, so can anyone here explain to me why the given function was written in the form it was?

Why not something like this:

      int d[16];

      int SATD (void)
      {
        int satd = 0, dd, k;
        for (k=0; k<16; ++k) {
          dd = d[k];
          satd += (dd < 0 ? -dd : dd);
        }
        return satd;
      }

Does this generate slower code?

<comment><USER4> _Does this generate slower code?_

No, or at least not with an optimizing compiler. It was probably more about writing compact code.

Personally, I'd have used abs() and gotten rid of the temporary variable dd altogether:

        int SATD (void)
        {
            int satd = 0, k;
            for (k = 0; k < sizeof d / sizeof *d; ++k)
              satd += abs(d[k]);

            return satd;
        }

<comment><USER7> Good thinking. Most modern compilers will recognise abs() and generate efficient code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Should SPEC pay for static analysis services like Coverity on the code that enters the benchmark?

Or does it take a law to make them fix bugs in the code they ship?

</comment><comment><USER9> As pointed out in the comments the code is quite contrived to begin with, no surprise such mistakes go unnoticed.

As long as a warning is emitted when the compiler relies only such undefined behavior it is a good thing to optimize this heavily, there are not many other ways to get more performance from C/C++.</comment>


Show HN: Fill Free Space, a casual puzzle game, based on a very simple mechanism - <AUTHOR> http://www.tapirgames.com/Games/FillFreeSpace

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a sister game of Push Out Fans, I posted it several days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9366498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9366498)

The two game share a same code base. Hope you like them.</comment>


Paradoxes of the freelance world - <AUTHOR> http://www.elvismontero.com/2009/05/11/paradoxes-of-the-freelance-world/

<comment><USER2> This all boils down to the fact that clients hiring freelancers are often clueless about defining their own needs and identifying/hiring someone who can get the work done.

It is _very_ frustrating to see how many people seem to be looking for unpaid or grossly underpaid labor, and that some of them are probably succeeding.

This is why establishing strong relationships with your best clients is a key aspect of freelancing.</comment>


Inertial Scrolling - <AUTHOR> http://joehewitt.com/post/inertial-scrolling/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't inertial scrolling refer to the scrollable area keeping on scrolling when you drag a bit and let go? And accelerating if you drag it "more"? (Like iOS table views do.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The site barely works in Google Chrome and doesn't work at all in Firefox 3.6.

<comment><USER4> It what ways does it not work? (I didn't have any issues viewing it in Chrome or Firefox 4, but I may be missing something and not know it)

<comment><USER5> In ff3.6 you don't even see the pics (are there pics? I assumed so because it is a photo blog).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's great to get almost fullscreen photos in chrome, but scrolling the text feels a bit tiresome. Pgdn helps a bit, but then the text ends up in an arbitrary position most times. If pgdn == new image, and pgdn again == comment on top of new image, and pgdn a third time == new image again, then that would be optimal. This is nitpicking though. This is a beautiful way to showcase your photos.

<comment><USER7> I made it so you have to scroll the text a little bit further so that the photo would stay pinned down long enough that you could see it, and scroll horizontally to the other photos. You're right, though, that page up/down (and arrow keys) would be a nice way to nav also.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, keyboard buttons don't have to be power-user focused if you explain it. You might find [http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/06/the-125th- anniver...](http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/06/the-125th-anniversary- of-the-death-of-king-ludwig-ii/100085/) interesting : )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> very bad on android.

Or I get zero content (browser in android more) or I cam only scroll vertically (in desktop mode) in a way I can only read the first few left chars</comment>


Navy seals discuss toxicity of ego [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/businessinsider/videos/10153195181519071/ <comment><USER2> If you like these guys, Jocko has a new podcast that's very good - [http://jockopodcast2.com/](http://jockopodcast2.com/)

The recently published a book: Extreme Ownership[0]

He gave long interviews to Tim Ferriss[1] and Joe Rogan[2]

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs- ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs- ebook/dp/B00VE4Y0Z2/) [1] [http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/09/25/jocko- willink/](http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/09/25/jocko-willink/) [2] [http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/jocko- willink](http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/jocko-willink)

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't really know any of those guys before watching the video. Thanks for the info.</comment></comment>


Billboards Are Like Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://clayallsopp.com/posts/billboards-are-like-facebook/

<comment><USER2> The worst part is that the person pictured next to the Revolights ad _almost certainly_ does not know that they're being used next to the ad.

Here's an experiment guaranteed to make the front page of HN if you can write it up well: take screenshots of all the newsfeed ads you see and send them to the person pictured asking them if they were aware their image was being used that way.

<comment><USER3> This really sucks for people who like hundreds of random things. It use to be that people would like EVERYTHING... now that's coming back to bite everyone in the ass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world > more open and connected.

If this is their mission statement they are failing miserably.

They would be succeeding if their mission stated "keeping in touch with friends" or "share cool stuff with friends", which for me is already great.

Of course, when you have a mission statement made by a board, you end with lots of grandiose BS and buzzwords like "open" and "connected".

<comment><USER5> Trying to make the world more open but keeping all the information in a walled garden.

<comment><USER6> I don't think this is necessarily hypocritical. They never claimed they wanted to be "as open as possible in every conceivable way", they just said "open". For obvious reasons, sharing all of their data would be risky, if not suicidal.

<comment><USER7> It is hypocritical when you can't view posts marked 'Everyone' (public) unless you log in.

<comment><USER8> That's not the case. I just copied url to post I made to 'everyone (public)', set my browser into private mode, went to that url and I could my post just fine.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for clarifying. It's been a while since I clicked on a Facebook link. When I tried it just now, you are right that direct post URLs will work. But when browsing a public page or profile, there are pop-us that obscure the rest of the screen as you scroll or hover over links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please learn to distinguish between metaphors and similies.

"* are like Facebook" is clearly a similie.

</comment><comment><USER10> Let's hope that Facebook is experimenting with this, such that the end-result is not 80% ads. Facebook pages are starting to get noisy. I'm trying <http://www.pinvolve.co/> and it removes all ads from your FB pages.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's word of mouth morphed into shove down your throat.

But I actually find it very helpful. Now anytime my friends likes a page, the pages most recent post (or something) gets displayed in my newsfeed.

I've used this to my own benefit multiple times.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's a big reason that I don't use it anymore! That and the interface changing constantly and security issues!

Admittedly, I do have a fake account for my website that's updated automatically if anyone actually cares.

</comment><comment><USER13> You can always install AdBlock, which blocks all ads.

<comment><USER14> Yes! It's amazing to me that ads still generate any revenue this day and age (last decade or so) AdBlock or not.

<comment><USER15> Not sure if that comment is meant to sarcastic or not but ads are main driving force behind the freemium model of the web. Whether it be Google, Youtube, Facebook or even Reddit and HN, you won't get to access them for free unless there exists a potential for advertisements. Like most others I hate to be at the receiving end of these advertisements, but that changes when it comes to promoting a startup, especially when it is known to be the best medium.

<comment><USER14> It's not. I've only clicked on ads once or twice in my life and that's mainly for lack of relevance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I never stayed up all night chatting to a chair and sending it links. I'll give it a shot tonight. Also, when you make a chair bigger, it usually becomes a couch or a love-seat in the same way that when you make thefacebook.com bigger, it becomes a disgusting mess of ads and garbage applications all designed to get more data about you in the hope they can sell you something.

Seriously, the only people FB is fooling are the fools who use it. While those people exist (and they always have throughout history), FB or some sort of FB (social network) will exist. The problem is, like the author, people know that they don't want to be part of FB and yet they still are. Yes, it's an addiction, but it's an addiction that can be defeated. And you don't even have to do 12 steps. It's just one step and two weeks of waiting to delete your account.

The excuses form people who claim to hate FB but still use it are getting quite old by now. If you really want to make a point, cancel your FB account and then write this. It'll resonate a lot more.

<comment><USER16> This vitriolic hate for facebook from certain parts of the tech crowd has always confused me. Where does this come from and, further, why is it extended to users? Why must facebook users be considered "fools"?

<comment><USER17> _Why must facebook users be considered "fools"?_

Because zuck once said that about anyone who trusts him?[1]

________________

[1] _Zuckerberg's IM: People Who Trust Him Are "Dumb F_ *ks"

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-tavakoli/facebooks- plumm...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-tavakoli/facebooks-plummeting- stoc_b_1969020.html)

        Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

        Zuck: Just ask.

        Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

        [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

        Zuck: People just submitted it.

        Zuck: I don't know why.

        Zuck: They "trust me"

        Zuck: Dumb fucks.

<comment><USER18> I'm responsible for making sure 10 or so websites are professional and are ready to represent the brands of a $100+ million dollar company. It's a big responsibility. I once said I couldn't believe those idiots would trust _me_ with that task. Does that mean I think my employer and my bosses are idiots? No. It's just a way of expressing humility and coping with the fact that a task comes with a high amount of trust and responsibility.

In my case and in Zuckerberg's the comment was made in private and never meant to be heard by the public. I think using this quote against him is a cheap shot and a total copout to avoid answering the parent's question in any real way. If everyone's private comments were held against them then every person on earth would be vilified. I'm no fan of Facebook but I am a realist and when you try to use that quote against him you come off as blindly anti- Zuck/Facebook.

So to rephrase the question, why do _you_ think Facebook users are fools? And if the answer is "because mark said so" then I'm sure I can find Zuckerberg being extra complimentary of Facebook users and then I'd ask "so which quote do we go with? The one that suits your belief or would you prefer to come up with your own reason?"

<comment><USER19> If there's humility in calling your bosses idiots, is it in the form of sarcasm? I understand the "wow, I'm in this position" thing, but there's a disconnect.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>