End of Moore's Law: It's not just about physics - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/end-of-moores-law-its-not-just-about-physics/ <comment><USER2> For a nice dose of doom and gloom, I quite like the dark silicon paper[1], which explores the limited use we'll get out of Moore's Law, _even if_ it manages to continue (and as far as I understand it, transistors/$ has already flat lined so it's at least temporarily over).

Since we're no longer getting good power scaling out of shrinking, if Moore's Law keeps up, we're just essentially getting price discounts.

A nice thought exercise for me is what would computing look like if you could fab wafers for free, today. Sort of the ad absurdum take on Moore's Law continuing.

We'd have more memory, and a ridiculous amount of flash storage, and high end graphics cards would become cheaper (but not faster). Desktop CPUs might look more like server CPUs, but single core performance wouldn't change one bit.

We'd probably see heterogeneous computing a whole lot more. Xeon Phi like processors on package next to Haswell cores at the very least.

Probably computers would start to have FPGAs in them, as well as large amounts of niche circuitry to compute hashes, encode videos.

We might see computation embedded inside memory (I think Hynix did this recently but I couldn't find a link). Maybe memory that accelerates garbage collection in order to accelerate modern workloads.

So there are some interesting places to go, especially from a Hacker News perspective, but even if transistors became _free_ , we still wouldn't see the rate of progress we did in the 80s or 90s (in terms of speed up to the tasks we're doing).

Of course, this is all near to medium term stuff. I personally believe we'll see that rate of progress again when we move off of silicon, to a different computing paradigm, or (most likely) both - I can't believe we'll inch our way to science fiction computing, or that science fiction computing won't be possible at all.

[1] Dark Silicon and the End of Multicore Scaling (ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/dburger/papers/ISCA11.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Oh, if transistors became free we could realize a huge boost in performance. We could basically take the cream of the crop and use only 9-sigma parts. (The range of part quality is pretty wide, cost/rarity is the challenge)

We could also abandon yield-oriented design constraints, and a few other things.

Now this probably isn't something that would keep doubling every year, but there _would_ be an initial large bump.

<comment><USER2> Not so fast! I must object to the loophole you claim to have found.

I said the wafers would be free; testing ~100 trillion of them to find the best costs extra :)

I never even thought of that angle - do you know how much better such a part would realistically be? I thought binning was mostly a matter of defect reduction (where some defects are slight). But at that extreme level, it could be a different game altogether.

<comment><USER4> People keep demonstrating 1THz transistors on the lab. So, I'd say that such part would get up to a around 100GHz clock (a few switchings per pipeline stage), with our usual architectures.

And it would use an insane amount of power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have, perhaps, a different perspective. I have been spending a lot of my income on computer hardware and power for the last decade or so; and being involved in spending other people's money on same for another half-decade back.

My take? When Intel thinks they are ahead, compute doesn't get cheaper.

In the DDR2 days, If you were on Intel, you had the choice between the stunningly inefficient and expensive rambus ram, or a stunningly shitty memory buss with (not very many) low-power ddr2 modules.

At the time, the AMD HyperTransport system was absolutely beautiful. Even on cheap boards, you could get more than 2x the low-power ddr2 ram modules per CPU that intel could. (at the time, lower-density modules were dramatically cheaper, per gigabyte, than higher-density modules) It worked way better when you had multiple CPUs, too.

Then ddr3 came, and Intel came up with their QPI systems, which were awesome. AMD came back with a competently built ddr3 platform, too; the G34 systems were a huge upgrade from the mcp55 chipset socket F platform.

But the benchmarks came out in Intel's favor, even when AMD had twice the cores. I mean, you could argue that the AMD systems had advantages in some limited situations, but they had lost the dramatic advantage.

As far as I can tell, intel has been largely resting on their laurels, price- wise. The E5-2620 is better than, but really not radically better than the E5520. Now, some of the higher-end E5s are pretty nice, but they are priced accordingly.

Until Intel gets some real competition again, we have to pay for our performance gains.

So yeah, really, until AMD gets their legs back under them, and I hope the A1100[1] will do it, I don't expect dramatic performance per dollar gains from Intel.

[1][http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to- acceler...](http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to- accelerate-2014jan28.aspx)

<comment><USER6> I agree. HyperTransport was stunning when it came out. Revolutionary, even. Ditto for AMD64, still the standard as we speak.

I'm not sure, however, if this is due to Intel resting on their laurels vs an entire Intel generation being shown the door because of epic (excuse the pun) fuckups. With the (largely wasted) effort expended on Itanium / Itanium 2 / EPIC / IXP / Netburst / etc, no wonder other vendors excelled. The MHz wars took a horrible toll on Intel for mainstream x86 with things like Prescott, with its 31 stage (!!) pipeline.

Stalls on Prescott were horrific for performance. On IXP, microcode screwups (often due to explicit caching) were horrific for customers. On Itanium, everything was horrific. I doubt we will ever know exactly how much these escapades cost humanity. On the other hand, maybe we're all richer for lessons learned.

It seems Intel is not interested in screwing up so badly anymore, so I think it's the competitors' turn to sweat. Intel still has a long way to go in recapturing territory it could have already had; ARM and MIPS have come a long way in the phone/server and NPU/packet processing space respectively, and they don't look as easily dislodged as AMD...

<comment><USER7> It's even worse than you enumerate: echoing lsc and his mention of "stunningly inefficient and expensive rambus ram", the highest level architects at Intel were petrified by DRAM size, I think it was, concerns, and ordered some stunningly stupid things that at least in some cases the engineers under them knew wouldn't work. Intel had not one, but two *1 million part recalls", one of which was for motherboards just before OEMs were going to start shipping.

And AMD, which only occasionally manages this, did everything right for a short period of time with their K8 microarchitecture (P6 style, 64 bits, HyperTransport plus on-chip memory controller) while Intel was screwing up so much.

I wonder how history would have gone if they hadn't then taken 2.5 years to start delivering the successor K10 microarchitecture, and another half a year to deliver one that didn't have a screwed up TLB. Intel is not the sort of adversary you can just give three years to get its act together, especially with their historical manufacturing prowess keeping them at least a process node ahead of you (and pretty much everyone else?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's always been economics. EUV already works. E-beam lithography already works. Carbon nanotube transistors already work. III-V transistors already work. It's just that none of these technologies work as cheaply as double patterned silicon.

<comment><USER9> The fact the we can't manufacture transistors cheaper doesn't mean we won't see big jumps in compute value.We could seem improvements from fpga's(500x max),approximate computing(100x-1000x), packaging(3x-10x) or the radical option of analog computing(6-9 orders of magnitude for brain simulation etc).

Also, there's still huge amount of value to unlock from software, interfaces and the rest.Just look at the iphone where most of the value comes from a great touch interface and an app store. Moore's law is just a bonus.

<comment><USER3> 500x performance improvement from using fpgas? Where do you get this number?

<comment><USER9> Asics can max out at about 1000x , and zvi orbach has a recent column talking about how to make an fpga with 50% efficiency of asic.

[http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1322021](http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1322021)

<comment><USER3> I must have misunderstood, I thought you were saying FPGA's will surpass CPU's 500-fold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We still have a magnitude order or two of computing power that we can squeeze out iff the semiconductor density/price stops.

We don't implement many optimization possibilities in each hw/sw layer because the "layer below" keeps changing all the time and we need to keep compatibility. Once we could say "this is it, this layer is as good as it will ever get", then (and not a day before) you can start to re-architecture everything above it to maximize performance by throwing away flexibility that won't be needed anymore.

E.g., instead of transistors being spent on translating x86 to the underlying microcode and cycles being spent on translating JVM/CLR bytecode (or javascript) to x86, we'd be able to define a single standard and adapt both processors and compilers to that. You can't break compatibility at every technological change - but if you have a reason to believe that it will finally be stable (which hasn't ever happened yet) then it does make sense to make a single final switch that disregards all compatibility and legacy issues - even if the benefits are small, they accumulate for each such layer and you only have to do it once.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been hearing about the end of Moore's Law ever since I was a kid. I remember smart people citing wave lengths and economics convincing me that there as no way we'd go beyond 300nm. Oh yes, and that would mean the end of x86 as well (since intel wouldn't have the process advantage to compensate for the less efficient CISC).

Well, maybe they are right this time, who knows, but I'm way more skeptical.

<comment><USER12> Moore's Law broke a while ago. Note the _past tense_.

nVidia couldn't get their economics at 28nm. RAM cells are now _more_ expensive in 20nm than 28nm. There are lots of other examples.

Remember: the strong form of Moore's law was that transistors get _cheaper_ ever 12-18 months. The original formulation of Moore's law was always about economics, not technology.

The problem is: nobody knows what to do.

You now need clever circuit design and humans who can squeeze another 15-20% out of existing technologies. Unfortunately, all the humans who knew how to do custom VLSI design are dead, retired, or doing something else since custom VLSI was fool's errand for so long (see DEC, IBM, Silicon Graphics, etc.).

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure you can extrapolate that from one company's use of one foundry's process nodes. Intel at least seems to be doing well with their 22 nm process node.

<comment><USER4> Yep, they seem to be doing well, but they are almost an entire doubling time later if you compare the two previous doublings with to Moore's law.

<comment><USER7> This might in part be explained by their moving to nonplanar FinFET transistors. And in practice their geometry doesn't quite match the idealized drawings: [http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1261761](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1261761)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing I can predict with complete confidence is that we have no clue what the path forward for improving computer processing power will be from 2022. It's fun to speculate but that's a long time for new technologies, approaches, and architectures to take hold. Intel isn't the only company with an interest in improving the state of the art here.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think maybe we might have been mis-reading Moore's Law for years, or rather, Moore himself might have mis-stated it.

The radical changing reality that it describes is the number of transistors a person could economically employ at any one time to perform work on their behalf.

So yes, physics and economics might provide us with a limit (or increasing slope of difficulty) for the construction of single chips, the _practical effects_ of the Law continue unabated, at least as far as I can see. The average person continues to be able to employ more and more electronics to perform work for them. This is increasing geometrically.

I'm not trying to dismiss either this DARPA guy or Moore, just point out that the specific details of Moore's Law may not be as important as we make them out to be.

In my mind, the big obstacle we have now to continued growth is small-system, imperative thinking. Systems of the future will be massively parallel. I have no idea how long it will take the IT industry to truly transition, but that's the next big hurdle, not counting atoms inside a switch.

<comment><USER15> Yea I remember reading that DWAVE could tackle classical computing problems at 20 petaflops. All of Google today is 20 petaflops, across many cartoon colored datacenters.

If you can produce small numbers of expensive computers that are more efficient than millions of cheap computers cobbled together, you are still advancing how much computational power each person has access to.

But a significant problem with this approach is most real time video games aren't practical when the computer is far away.

<comment><USER16> Latency isn't the only issue— do we want to be building a world where people are constantly trusting third parties to process their data privately and correctly?

Certainly there are also cryptographic workarounds to those problems but their overheads are so high as to make the outsourced computation somewhat pointless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the talk by the DARPA guy:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpgV6rCn5-g#t=15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpgV6rCn5-g#t=15)

</comment><comment><USER17> Worst formatting I've ever seen. Anyway:

 _Colwell said that for the Defense Department, he uses the year 2020 and 7 nanometers as the "last process technology node." But he adds, "In reality, I expect the industry to do whatever heavy lifting is needed to push to 5nm, even if 5nm doesn't offer much advantage over 7, and that moves the earliest end to 2022. I think the end comes right around those nodes."_

Let's assume that in 10 years time everyone agrees we have hit the wall on how small we can go. What then? Is there any reason to believe that popular architectures of today are necessarily optimal? I'm curious to hear people's ideas about what we do instead of shrinking dies.

My personal guess is that we move towards massively parallel systems with large numbers of low-power cores, but bare-metal programming completely and work on developing smarter and smarter compilers to take advantage of parallelism. My personal hope is that we find some sort of cold optical switching technology that lets us build ridiculously fast computers that look like glowing crystal cubes. Of course, I have no idea how that would work, or I'd be out pitching it XD

<comment><USER18> Have you heard of photonics crystals?

[http://optoelectronics.eecs.berkeley.edu/eliy_SCIAM.pdf](http://optoelectronics.eecs.berkeley.edu/eliy_SCIAM.pdf)

But I think that since the features of the materials are on the same order of magnitude as the wave lengths of light you are trying to switch, this actually makes things bigger. But still really cool.

<comment><USER17> I had heard of it and I know that has been some progress with optoelectronics recently, but hadn't looked into it in this detail - thanks. Most of his recent work seems focused (groan) on things like solar cell efficiency and suchlike rather than my fanciful goal of a completely optical processor, but I need to read more.

Maybe I should ask him to lunch, since I live within walking distance of UC Berkeley and don't really take advantage of it :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yeah, I'm sure someone had similar doom and gloom to say about vacuum tubes.

The thing is, you just don't know where the next technological revolution will come from. Yes, we've about hit the limit for silicon, and we may very well stagnate for another decade because of it, but there's always going to be someone scrappy enough to try what the big slow incumbents won't.

</comment><comment><USER20> There are gains yet to be realized besides reducing the size of the process. For example, reversible (a.k.a. isentropic or adiabatic) computing offers a way to reduce heat generation, which might combine with 3D construction in interesting ways. New ways of designing chips might allow progress to continue, but they're hard and risky. They're not terribly attractive as long as shrinking the process offers predictable advances and remains economically feasible.

Still, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate how crazy just getting under 10 nm is. The wavelength of light that is visible to the human eye starts at around 380 nm. Looking at a 10 nm chip with violet light would be like trying to navigate your house by sonar using a sub-woofer as your emitter!

</comment><comment><USER21> One thing that seems to be glossed over in his argument is the impending move to 450mm wafer technology. That should allow Intel and others to continue shrinking at reasonable cost.

</comment><comment><USER22> > it's time to start planning for the end of Moore's Law

Do we? Because all current software runs on current hardware. Even if in the next ten years we only get another 1% increase in speed, then the current software will run at the current speed (something which we are all perfectly fine with right now). I think it's indeed a doom and gloom article.

<comment><USER23> I want it. Python is 100x slower than C. I want a language that doesn't need to worry about performance. I want computers optimized for humans, not them. I want computers that can model the weather, the ocean. I want search algorithms that optimize car engines, electric plants. a million x isn't nearly good enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> smaller devices will provide the economic drive, just as they did when 14" HDDs had enough performance.

</comment><comment><USER25> Either this article or the guy's speech perhaps both are pretty lame. No supporting facts are presented as to why he thinks the 7nm generation will be the last frontier. He just basically states the obvious that if there is no profit motive or the technology isn't there then it won't happen. No kidding.

The whole article reads like an appeal to authority.

Are there any factual reasons to believe this time is actually different than the past 35 years?

<comment><USER26> > The whole article reads like an appeal to authority.

You might be right. But Colwell isn't just a country rube who hitched a ride into town on the turnip truck. He's been there, done that, _literally_ made billions of dollars in profit for Intel. I reiterate:

       Bob was the chief architect for a number of design
       teams who, *LITERALLY*, no exaggeration, generated
       billions of dollars in profit for Intel.

You might have heard of a few of the products he architected. [1]

"Authority" is frequently wrong. But this guy certainly deserves a little more respect than your flippant dismissal.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Colwell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Colwell)

<comment><USER25> Interesting, I wonder why it doesn't say that in the article which would lend a lot more credability to it. It just talks about his position with DARPA

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For decades I have heard that 11nm would be the end of Moore's law as we know it. This is proving to be true. CPUs have been frozen at 1 to 4GHz for nearly a decade, with the latest advances going to power savings. Currently at 22nm, the next step is 14, and then 11. Perhaps they can eek out one more jump to 7nm or 5nm, but I expect that will barely be worth the effort and thus will drag out for at least decade itself.

But Moore fans need not worry. There is a clear next step, and I am wondering why no one is talking about it: Optical Interconnects. Connecting chips and circuits within chips with optical channels should allow plenty of room for speeding up processors and reducing power requirements well into the mid-21st century.

<comment><USER28> Clock Speed is not relevant. In that "decade" our single thread performance has increased a fair amount, but we now have an additional 4-8 CPUs in the same amount of space.

An Ivybridge will very handily beat a Northwood based system even in single threaded performance.

<comment><USER29> Dont get me wrong, I love having all of my 12 cores, but I dont really count that as improved speed. More (no pun intended) importantly the rule was every 18 months if I'm not mistaken, not 10 years. Lets double it and add a little bit, 3 years ago you pretty much could have bought the same machine.

in the last 3 years, processors have been about 3.4ghz, 3 years before that it was still around 3.1ish. I personally haven't noticed any improved performance on single threads. they pretty much do things at the same completion time.

I have a 12 core 4.5 ghz machine (3.4 overclocked), and I ran a compute intensive process on a 2010 machine that was 8 cores 3.4ghz and they finished about 5 minutes later at about the exact same time.

i'm not saying all things are equal and that things havent improved, just that i would have expected a lot more from something that was supposed to double (and get cheaper) every 18 months after 4 years</comment></comment></comment>


Google submits plans for 1m sq ft London HQ - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/01/google-submits-plans-million-sq-ft-london-hq-construction-kings-cross <comment><USER2> and who will work there when all foreign workers will be gone?</comment>


Ask HN: Can you live w/o hackernews or w/o google? - <AUTHOR>

Curious - there are plenty of google alternatives (none perfect), but there just is almost NO Hackernews alternatives that combine this range of topics.
As such, if you had to lose one, which one would it be? For me, it would probably be (very reluctantly) Google.
Also, how does this translate to the broader qn of search vs. discovery? <comment><USER2> Google is much more valuable especially if you take services into account, such as google code, gmail, google maps, etc etc

Hackernews you can get away with using rss to a good extent and the blog/articles official comments.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, technically "no", since Google pays my salary. But assuming I found another source of revenue, sure. It's as easy as turning off the computer, which is nowhere near as tragic as many people make it out to be.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would definitely lose Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER5> I could lose either one. There are HN alternatives too.</comment>


A Guide to Website Security for Non-Experts - <AUTHOR> https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/06/guide-securing-your-business-s-online-presence-for-non-experts <comment><USER2> _Even Security Advice Expires With Time_

This is the major take-away, in my opinion.</comment>


Analysts: Oracle vs. Google May Hurt Future of Java as Dev Platform - <AUTHOR> http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/08/oracle-google-lawsuit-hurt-java.aspx

<comment><USER2> What I wonder is, long term, how does Oracle's willingness to pursue lawsuits like this affect the adoption of other JVM languages like Scala, Clojure, Jython, etc.

If you were contemplating starting a new project using Clojure, for instance, would this lawsuit give you pause? I think I would worry about it, at least a little.

<comment><USER3> Why, exactly? Will the impact (if any) on android change those languages? I can't see how.

Those fretting about "Oracle's stewardship of Java" all need to take a breath. Honestly, things can't be worse than they were under Sun -- except perhaps in the eyes of those that make platform decisions based on the patent-management policies of multinational corporations. If FUD or "morale" or "community" is the chief concern for others, then they've forgotten the lessons of Java's history: i.e. the shit keeps hitting the fan in different ways, yet code running on JVMs is _everywhere_ , and that'll continue to be the case for decades.

Anyway, I honestly can't see how this has any bearing on "userspace" as it were. If I were a VM vendor, I'd be very concerned, but application and library developers would seem to be entirely unaffected by the suit.

<comment><USER4> > Why, exactly?

Imagine you are developing a new language to run on the JVM, and it turns out that to get a 10x performance improvement, it would be really great to have this new bytecode instruction added to the JVM. To get it into every JVM, you would have to go through Oracle anyway, so nothing changes there. But if you wanted to distribute your own variation, a hypothetical openJVM+, Oracle is saying that they may well go after you with patent suits.

Good for people happy with the current JVM, looking for stability. Bad for people wanting to bring innovations to the JVM without explicit consent from Oracle.

<comment><USER3> Bollocks. People in the alternative JVM language space have been hankering for all sorts of VM changes/additions for _years_ , including TCO, fixnums, method handles, continuations, etc etc etc. How many openJVM+ implementations have ever been implemented, nevermind used out in the world? None, AFAIK -- the progress, as it is, happens in the MLVM, which is under the umbrella of OpenJDK.

So as I said, the exceptions to this might be highly VM vendors, such as Azul, GAE, and various people that have worked on (maybe deployed, I don't know?) full-stack Java operating systems and/or Java-on-a-chip (for embedded applications I suppose). Anyone developing applications, libraries, et al. are entirely unaffected AFAICT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe with open-source developers, but not with Java's corporate bread-and- butter. They might actually like the warm security blanket provided by purchasing official Java licenses, support contracts, certifications, etc that Sun wasn't quite corporatey enough to provide.

</comment><comment><USER6> Java is practically dead in the water now. Oracle will be lucky if their database product doesn't get badly damaged.

The best developers at Sun were already leaving, with this ? - if I was a recruiter I'd be outside their offices on monday handing out flyers.

Oracle has committed seppuku. They simply won't be able to hire good developers any more, they've horribly tainted their brand. For the next 3-5 years while the lawsuit goes on they're going to be the SCO of the developer world. No decent developer is going to want to touch them.

Any time one of their developers introduces themselves as "I work as a developer for Oracle" to another developer at a party, conference, meetup etc. what do you think the topic of conversation is going to be ?

Once software development companies are no-longer able to hire the best developers there's only one direction for the company to go in.

<comment><USER7> Bad reputations don't hurt anyone in this business. Up until the 90's no other company had a bully reputation as bad as IBM (e.g.: their Hollerith machines were used by Hitler to control who was going to the gas chambers).

But still, no other company in the world has attracted so many bright minds (Jon Von Neuman, John Backus, Ted Cobb, etc), got so many Nobel prizes or made so many important technological achievements.

<comment><USER6> In the past IBM, AT&T Labs, and now Google all had the huge advantages in being at the cutting edge of research which allowed them to attract talent.

If you want to see a company dying because it can't hire good developers because of it's reputation look at Nokia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been thinking an openJDK fork would be inevitable ever since the Sun acquisiton was announced. The one upside to this announcement is it may just accelerate the fork by making Oracle's hostility to free software more obvious. The community should be able to get the JVM moving forward again.

<comment><USER9> What would be the point of a fork?

If the fork subsets or supersets Java, or if it fails to comply to the Java specification, I believe that Sun's patent promise does not apply, and so the fork would be vulnerable to Oracle patent suits.

<comment><USER10> And you can't prove compliance without getting a JTCK license from ... Oracle. Which Sun wasn't very interested in supplying to the Apache Harmony project, and when I checked into the terms a few months ago they're still _very_ restrictive. Basically if you aren't furthering openJDK, forget it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Depending on the outcome of the negotiations, Google (and somewhat less directly, the telcos and end-users) will have clearly taken hit points against a critical part of the Android stack.

A discussion of vertical integration and competition and of maintaining control over the key parts of the product stacks, of managing outside dependencies, of Adobe, and of Google and J2ME, from a few months back:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-is-a-genius- contro...](http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-is-a-genius-control- freak-2010-5)

And what Oracle might seek in return here will be interesting. Buckets of money would be the most obvious, but Oracle can also play a much longer game.

</comment><comment><USER12> For me, the big question is: where does all this leave IBM? IBM has a huge investment in Java, but now Oracle has made it clear that they're not going to play nice. The senior guys at IBM have to be thinking long and hard about that...

</comment><comment><USER13> Gee, you think?

<comment><USER14> Even "obvious" articles need to be written because there are many people out there for whom, they aren't obvious.

<comment><USER15> i.e investors

<comment><USER16> Investors who can't see that suing people who use your technology might reduce the popularity of said technology should probably not be investing in technology. As Warren Buffett says: invest in what you know.

<comment><USER6> Suing people who use your technology without licensing it is typically a net positive. Hence it needs to be pointed out why that isn't the case here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Of course, Oracle's action threatens what we know as Sun's Java.

Indeed, it kills Java ME stone dead. But it was dead a couple of years ago. So no loss there.

However, I'm not clear how this affects Android, since Android is not Java.

When I code Android I 'feel' like I'm coding Java, because the syntax is the same. But I'm not running Java. I know that, and I feel that.

So, if Oracle want to attack Java, or protect its patents, take your pick, I say: knock yourself out. Here in Android world, it's no concern of mine as I'm not using Java.

Attacking Java isn't an attack on Android development. Although that appears to be what Oracle thinks it is doing.

<comment><USER18> My reaction was the opposite. They're not going after people who use their Java implementation or OpenJDK, they're going after the distributors of an alternate implementation of something like Java that is infringing on the patents related to language implementation. Oracle's (formerly Sun's) Java versions, including ME and EE, still look safe.

</comment></comment><comment> contol-m I'm wondering if the lawsuit has anything to do with Apple. Ellison and Jobs are best friends, as far as I know.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is anyone else's reaction to the situation: "Oracle is dispensable"?

<comment><USER10> Well, not any time soon (the Java/JVM ecosystem is too big, too rich). But in the long term, at the moment I agree with this observation in the article which captures the most relevant and important issue for me:

 _Forrester Research analyst John Rymer agrees [ this will have a chilling effect on developers ]: "I think this lawsuit casts the die on Java's future," he said. "It will become a slow-evolving legacy technology. Oracle's lawsuit links deep innovation in Java with license fees, and that will kill deep innovation in Java by anyone outside Oracle or startups hoping to sell out to Oracle. Software innovation just doesn't do well in the kind of environment Oracle just created."_

"Deep innovation" in e.g. JVM GC for functional languages (Clojure) is _exactly_ the sort of thing I'm interested in ... and that's now at best on hold while I get a better grasp of this mess and its implications. But the real scope of the implications probably won't become clear for years and I'm certainly not going to wait that long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just the latest event to make the LNPP/LNPR stack more attractive. (Linux, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Python/Ruby)

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone think Google didn't plan for this? Isn't this a great excuse to displace Java and use their own language? I'm already scared.

</comment><comment><USER22> That would be just dandy. I wonder how many decades school will continue teaching Java after it has truly and finally become obsolete?

</comment><comment><USER23> _Oracle vs. Google May Hurt Future of Java as Dev Platform_

Maybe that's not such a bad thing.</comment>


Postgres Parallel Indexing in Citus - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/01/17/parallel-indexing-with-citus/ <comment><USER2> The row counts are very small. Technically, it demonstrates the point.

But if you have a Ferrari, you don't use it to take your child to school in 14 seconds, you drive it on the open road.

Show a case where serial index builds are impractical, but parallel builds bring it back to a reasonable level.

EDIT: this sounded more negative than I intended. Obviously parallel index build is an important feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> No disagreement on the lighter touch of the benchmark in this case, it was primarily for illustrative purposes. If you have ~ 10 GB of data then all the standard serial index creation should perform just fine. It's the same case more broadly for Citus, if you only have 10 GB of data there's no point in thinking about scaling it out, it's not until you get to 100 GB or larger that you want to consider something beyond a single node or likely need more parallelism.

<comment><USER3> I agree. More and more blog posts should work from some realistic examples. This is not to undervalue parallel indexing though.</comment></comment></comment>


Is it okay for me to initially charge low rates on an Elance? - <AUTHOR>

Looking to make a side income doing freelance work, but compared to a lot of these people with lots of reviews it seems hard to break in. Is it okay to charge a little lower than I'd like to as well as make my proposals good to break in? <comment><USER2> It's a very tricky decision. When I first started freelancing, I charged a pretty low rate (~30/hr around SF), and it did get my started (getting great amounts of referrals etc). Unfortunately, I had to sacrifice my code quality b/c the amount of gigs I would work on at once in order to live here, and I noticed that the people who normally book low rate devs are the ones you REALLY don't want to deal with. So I would say never, ever ever charge a rate lower than you think you are worth. It may get you some gigs, but low rate attracts crappy projects/people. The people you generally want to work understands that high rate means better code/happier life in the long term.

<comment><USER3> > I noticed that the people who normally book low rate devs are the ones you > REALLY don't want to deal with.

This sentiment ought to be highlighted. It gets repeated often enough on HN that some people here get sick of hearing it (search for patio11's "pathological customers/clients"). But there are always people who _haven't_ encountered this idea, so I think it bears repeating: People looking for a basement bargain deal bring all kinds of other expectations that will _markedly_ impact your patience/time. This has the effect of eating up _any_ value you may have gotten out of charging a low rate to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some personal thoughts and opinions here:

People that go on Elance to find workers, well, they get what they pay for. I am sure that there are some great freelancers out there but you are far better to find yourself local clients, charge more, and get referrals.

Really, try face to face business first. More and more people are realizing that talking to India at 4am is pain in the ass. Also, a lot of people think that they can go on Elance and hire a guy that is charging 14 goats, and they expect this to be done as if they were paying him 100 goats.

However, face to face business will really depending on how you present yourself, your age and if you can sell.

All these websites: Elance, 99 designs, etc etc are making money for their co- founders (hopefully), and very little for freelancers. Getting 40 logos for 299 dollars? 40 people working for 299 and 1 of them is getting paid.

Don't sell yourself low.

PS. I deal with small businesses that tried these things, even larger companies that make millions of goats / year. And they tell me these stories after they hire me. I laugh! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm about to start attending meetups and other events, so with some networking and meeting new people that may help me out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've actually just started doing this as well, so I can relate. Rather than focusing on offering the cheapest rate, make sure that your proposal is rock solid.

Be picky in the jobs you choose, but once you decide to put your bid in, invest time to understand what the client wants and make sure your proposal reflects that. It's not always easy, because sometimes there's only very limited information. Just treat every bid like a job interview.

It's also perfectly OK and normal to charge a little lower at first, until you collect feedback and build yourself a good reputation. But make sure you set the right expectation. I always put my normal rate in the proposal, but reflect a discount where necessary to make sure that I remain competitive with the other bidders.

And last, make sure you deliver what you promise :)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is my 3rd year on Elance as a fullstack developer with a main focus on backend, and last year I made around 80k. In the beginning, it was very hard to compete with established users and 10$/h developers. In Elance, having a track a record with high ratings is pretty important, so my first few jobs were some easy scripts that were guaranteed to be 5 stars (I made sure on the proposal that I don't care much about the price but that I need a good review)

After establishing a bit of credit, you should be picky on the projects you choose and make sure that you are not throwing a generic proposal. Treat each one uniquely. Have a resume/portfolio ready. Ask questions about the project and more importantly, give suggestions about pain points.

<comment><USER7> Fascinating - I have a dozen questions for you ! I will stick to three, but really desperate for high quality info on elance and the like

1\. Roughly how many jobs a year do you take on?

2\. What's the median price - and roughly how long does it take you to do (ie what's your daily rate?)

3\. Are the projects / buyers high or low quality (I get the impression it's a lot of unrealistic projects or simple projects at 10dollars total

I assume you live in the Isle of Man ? This does not strike me as Vietnam- cheap-lifestyle so I am surprised to say least - is that 80k USD

(for non UK folks, Isle of Man is an island just off UK mainland near Scotland. It's basically same as living in UK For lifestyle purposes but technically it's its own independant region)

<comment><USER6> Ah, it's just happened to be my domain, I don't live in Isle of Man.

Yes, it is 80k USD. My rate usually revolves between 50/75$ hour, but I generally try to charge by week. Last year, I think i worked on 3-4 relatively full-size projects including:

\- Backend for an iphone app \- Backend/web frontend for a continuous event processor, a commercial offering in par with <http://riemann.io/> \- Backend/web app for a job board in restaurant industry

It is actually pretty easy to filter out low quality buyers: They will mass advertise the project for nickels and pennies. They will always try to negotiate the rate along the way. They won't answer your questions about the project details or simply have no clue.

<comment><USER7> What is the balance between filtering out and actual paid work? Most "normal" consultants expand to a point where full time bizdev is needed - what do you see as the equivalent here? Would you and two or three others with good reputations pay someone to filter elance for you?

What about expanding into more traditional bizdev?

Have you started to see word of mouth recommendations and repeat business, or is everything start-from-scratch?

I must say I am surprised - I have only ever browsed elance and the jobs you describe seem like hens teeth.

Are you afraid of the work not being there (ie exists really just not on elance) or is there a great deal of good quality work if you can find it?

Might have to sign up and see of course :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What kind(s) of people use Elance? Is the Bay Area that devoid of real jobs that someone would have to go on Elance to cobble together some projects for income? Or do most people use it to supplement their income? Or is it mainly for students with little experience who just want to build portfolios and make a little on the side? (Nothing wrong with any of these, I was just wondering.) Or is it people with bad reputations that can't get jobs otherwise. (That's probably the bad ones.)

</comment><comment><USER9> The sooner you can you can ditch eLance, the better. Spending all your time writing well-thought-out proposals for people who simply want the cheap price is rather disheartening. You're better off finding clients in your local area. Go to meet ups, meet other devs, meet people within your own community. You'll have a much higher return.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, you should underbid in the beginning, until you get a couple of jobs and good ratings.

I started a month ago, and was the hardest to get the first job. After that one, and good review from client, jobs started to come up more often.

So, keep trying, underbid in the beginning, and don't give up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. Trying to get my first gig. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can try building a good portfolio on your own site, and then linking to it from Elance. Might allow you to get better clients. Though from experience, those type of sites are filled with the kind of clients you dont want.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm also interested in this because the rates that some people post seem way too low. I've seen people post $14/hour or $1200 to create a fully featured youtube clone.</comment>


People Are Still Dumb Enough to Pick Up Abandoned USBs and Plug Them In - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/study-shows-half-of-abandoned-usb-sticks-get-picked-up-1769816895 <comment><USER2> No, software developers were stupid enough to give a dumb storage device the ability to run code without the user's knowledge or permission.

USB drives are thought of as purely for storage, like a cassette or CD. People aren't stupid for not knowing they can have malware on them.

<comment><AUTHOR> > People aren't stupid for not knowing they can have malware on them.

Yeah, USB vulnerability is an unsolved issue, people are generally uneducated about computer security and this thing ought to be common knowledge.</comment></comment>


The quiet, massive rezoning of New York - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2014/02/the-quiet-massive-rezoning-of-new-york-078398 <comment><USER2> I see alot of new high rises always being build near places where no one will ever live, especially for the price that they ask for.</comment>


Show HN: Voucherify – Voucher infrastructure through API - <AUTHOR> http://voucherify.io <comment><USER2> I was looking for something like this recently to try to do some server-side validation of discount codes to automatically add things to a customer's cart if they have the right code on an ecommerce site. Typically ecommerce stores validate discount codes and payment info behind a secure layer on a different domain, so it's difficult to create any interactivity around your vouchers without pinging a secured server, unless you risk exposing your vouchers by embedding in the client side code. This would be really useful if it could be used to at least _create_ codes on platforms like Shopify, so that you don't have to create them once on your site and once on Shopify.

Also... I hope you have a rate limiter.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would this functionality really be hard to implement yourself? What is the benefit of using a service like this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, although it seems doable in a reasonable time, there're a few things you need to take care of from dev perspective e.g. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22333237/generating- uniqu...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22333237/generating-unique-hard- to-guess-coupon-codes)

But from what we've gathered so far the most time-consuming thing for software developers (especially in e-commerce industry) is the maintenance phase. Meaning - the time when voucher campaigns are "in production". Marketing team wants to stop the campaign as asap as possible, customer service team has to handle another customer coupon complaint, management wants to know the ROI of campaigns and so on. This is what our platform help solving too.

<comment><USER3> right :), thanks for the use-case for an outsider like me.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How long do you think we have until 64 bit is no longer enough? - <AUTHOR> Computing started out from the brains of men. Then we use writing tools to write it it out, and then we invented machines to help us compute. From abacus to analog machines to digital ones. This evolved from single bit to four, eight, sixteen, thirty two and nowadays sixty four. What an amazing journey it has been. I remember when 32 bit was all the rage. Nowadays 32 bit machines are no longer viable for dealing data larger than 4Gib.<p>So today we're at 64. 2^64 is not small for most of what our computing needs are. How long do you think it's going to stay viable for the masses? I hoping to spark interesting discussions, anecdotes, stories and what not from the HN crowd, perhaps throughout the weekend :) <comment><USER2> In a way they are already obsolete. If you asked the top quantum physicists 5 years ago when they thought we'd have viable quantum computers, some of the top people in the field predicted that it would be in about 50 years. Well it's happening now. There will definitely be quantum computers for sale by the early 2020s, and I'm not talking D-Wave here.

</comment><comment><USER3> RISC-V has some 128b word length support or at least has reserved space for it. Still, I doubt there will ever be a large enough demand/market for that to justify the development. Even applications like crypto would probably use ASICs+FPGAs rather than burden a general purpose CPU with all those extra wires.

Never. Is never soon enough?</comment>


"Secure" passwords at MasterCard - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/Jjabwv5

<comment><USER2> I hate this stuff. They are trying to make it more secure by forcing you to mix it up a bit, but they end up making it less secure. Quite a few people are going to follow the "recipe" exactly.

It's just like a few of the banking sites I use that prevent pasting of passwords and some of them break 1Password. That just makes me choose a far less secure password so I don't have to futz with entering "HBmpRJukt=[WbBynhTm8s" every time

</comment><comment><USER3> The fact that they have a maximum (20) and a low maximum at that, and also have issues processing specials, suggests to me that they're storing in plain text.

Even DES could handle specials, the only thing that cannot is running an SQL query with the plain text string within that (not even using a parameter), and only having the column set to 20 characters. I can think of no hashing algorithm old or new which had these kind of limits.

Try doing a password reset, do they email you your old password?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that's the same sort of thing I think about whenever I see this crap too. It's understandable with banking systems, they're often forced to interface with old and antiquated mainframes with formal constraints, but it's simply unacceptable in a modern system.

Even if the solution winds up being storing the hash as _the_ credential and simply hashing it in transit with middleware, it's better than this garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm all for a good laugh at the practices of large corporations, but this is probably just because they need to support telephone banking. EDIT: Looks like it's not for telephone banking, ouch!

<comment><AUTHOR> This was at the "developer zone" where you keep track of your API keys and other stuff to access Mastercard services as a developer.</comment></comment>


Motorola teases Xoom Super Bowl ad, paints Apple users as drones - <AUTHOR> http://www.edibleapple.com/motorola-teases-super-bowl-xoom-ad-paints-apple-users-as-drones/

<comment><USER2> There are some very serious arguments to be made to the effect that Apple's iOS platform has created an effective infrastructure for censorship. This is demonstrated most strikingly in my opinion by the adult app purge that sex educator Violet Blue documented (nsfw link: <http://www.maclife.com/article/feature/apps_and_men>). If you want to understand how censorship can happen, look at what is done with sex.

Given that, I don't see it as hyperbolic or insulting to point out the irony in Apple moving from invoking 1984 to attack competitors to building an architecture unprecedented in its capacity for censorship and control. While I don't know if the Xoom ad is that highbrow, the serious argument has been made by others, and it's clear that Motorola is capitalizing on that line of discussion.

</comment><comment><USER3> I switched from PCs to Macs in the early 1990s because I got tired of dealing with drivers, etc. Since then, on BBSes and not online, in the "technology" media and in advertising, I've seen no end of derogatory characterizations of apple users.

I am sure they don't think we're going to switch by insulting us. (A lesson Apple probably learned right after the original 1984 commercial.)

So, why is this still so popular? I think it is a form of ideological immunization. IF you characterize your opponents derogatorily (extreme example: comparing jews to rats by the nazis) you rally your troops with feelings of superiority.

Once Apple users are seen as inferior, all their arguments immediately become null and void. Political parties do this too- conservatives are characterized by liberals as rejecting science, liberals are characterized by conservatives as being irresponsible or pot smokers.

I don't think this is good for society. I much prefer (no surprise given I'm an apple fan) the "I'm a Mac" ads that apple did. Though I think PC users missed out that the PC was the most sympathetic of the characters, because they expected it to be derogatory to PC users and so that's how they saw it. (illustrated by Microsofts "I'm a PC" campaign which was a response to the ads they thought Apple was making, not the ads apple was actually making.)

So, when Motorola says Apple is Big Brother who are they kidding? Nobody. They're just spreading rationalizations.

<comment><USER4> You're illustrating your own point. You complain about a world where people only see things from their own viewpoint, and tend to filter things to only strengthen their viewpoint.

As illustration, you believe that those super insulting "I'm a Mac" ads aren't insulting.

I'm sorry, sorting into tribes is a part of human nature put thrtr by evolution itself, and you can't escape it.

Rather than those idealistic "we shouldn't do this" type speeches, recognize those base influences, moderate them and harness them.

That's why both regulated capitalism and constitutional democracies have been so successful. They moderate and harness base influences such as greed.

<comment><USER5> The Mac ads are insulting to the PC, perhaps, but not the PC users. It's one thing to say "hey, there's a better way" and another thing to say "you're stupid for picking your way".

<comment><USER3> Because he believes himself superior to mac users, the act of saying "hey, there's a better way" is another way of saying "you're stupid for picking your way (because there's a better way)" The ideological immune response ties self esteem to the product choice. Note the comment about "regulated capitalism" and the reference to "greed" as being a "base" instinct. In his world view, he is unable to conceive of the possibility that people in government might be greedy and that their "regulation" is simply a protection racket.

Finally, I never complained that ideology was an effective marketing strategy. Clearly it is. But I do think it is bad for society because it is anti- intellectual.

<comment><USER4> Of course I'm superior to Mac users, I'm a Linux User. (Yes, this is sarcasm). I do think I made a better choice, that's all.

I highly doubt that I'm unable to conceive of the possibility that people in government are greedy. I just finished saying that greed is a base instinct that nobody is immune to. Which is why regulated capitalism and constitutional democracies are such nice compliments -- you get a chance to boot the crooks out every 4 years or so. It's far from perfect, but better than the alternatives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


20/20: "Stupid in America" - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfRUMmTs0ZA

<comment><AUTHOR> In hopes to keep this on topic, I'll ask a question: what would a startup that is disruptive to our education system look like?

Automated education sounds good. But in practice systems could be much, much better. Most teaching programs I've seen are found in the bargain basement bin at Staples.

Why?

<comment><USER2> A system like YCombinator that starts at the K-12 level. Students would be trained in programming, art, writing, and other methods of creation. When they graduate they get $15,000 and one shot at starting a business. In return, the school gets 2-10% of the company.

<comment><USER3> This makes my brain explode.

<comment><USER4> Ask Sequoia for ten million and try it as a charter high school?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A school is good or bad because of the population of students, rather than the teachers. And so, if you _choose_ a school, and if you choose the "best", it happens to be the one with the best students. When everyone does this, it quickly leads to a regression to the mean.

Depending on the geography, this isn't a problem. But in an area in which there are wildly different populations of students near one another (as in many cities, where the poor and rich neighborhoods exist close by) it won't work. Parents in rich neighborhoods won't stand and watch the average IQ of their public school drop 15 points as idiots are bused in.

<comment><USER6> 1) "Best" is subjective. What you consider best for your kid most probably will not fulfill the needs of all kids.

2) IQ has absolutely nothing to do with being rich or poor.

<comment><AUTHOR> "2) IQ has absolutely nothing to do with being rich or poor."

But being rich or poor can at least be correlated with IQ, right?

My intuition is that IQ is a greatly imperfect measure, but the correlation of high IQ to positive things and low IQ to negative things is just too strong to ignore.

Perhaps you've seen this figure: [http://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/images/...](http://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/images/iq_table_1.gif)

<comment><USER7> Why are we even talking about IQ, like it's even important?

I could be wrong, but in my opinion the only thing that IQ has really proven is its ability to predict how well a person will do in school. I doubt it really does much for predicting titans of industry (or some other area) and success in general.

I think its main flaw is that in general, life isn't constrained to a limited set of multiple choice answers; it's a lot more open ended and chaotic. Not to mention that some of the questions used to administer these tests are biased... and o yeah, there are also different types of intelligence...

(Yes I have a high IQ, and high scores of other major ancient traditional testing methods.)

IQ or the way it's currently administered is just too archaic, limited, and just outdated. It needs to change.

<comment><USER6> I totally agree with you, chaostheory. IQ completely ignores social skills (aka Emotional Intelligence), which is extremely important.

I brought up IQ simply because the previous commenter mentioned it.

<comment><USER7> Glad I'm not the only one to think that the idea of an IQ or how it's tested needs to change - Good thing you reminded me of that book too hehe</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/7259207/scientific-paper-scam <comment><USER2> This topic is deeply offensive to my people.</comment>


Websockets for AWS API Gateway - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-websocket-apis-in-amazon-api-gateway/ <comment><USER2> Inability to use WebSockets/long-polling is the primary reason I haven't been able to use FaaS as my API layer, so this is great news. I would say the primary barrier I see remaining is db connections for RDBMS. Where a normal persistent environment might just use connection pooling, and indefinite amount of lambda instances connecting to a DB requires a separate instance running something akin to PGBouncer. It's possible that this is simply the long term solution, but prior to this announcement I would have said that bi- direcdtional communication with a client on FaaS architecture was not going to be possible, so I'd be interested to see if an alternative service or bit of functionality crops up.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be very similar to the Pusher Model of a WebSocket Proxy. It fronts the WebSocket connections for you and forwards all the messages to your HTTP endpoints. It will be interesting to see if AWS implements things like presence channels, etc.

<comment><USER4> You could implement presence on this, as it will send events on connect and disconnect.</comment></comment>


Fashion 2.0: Social Curation Start-ups Target Fashion Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessoffashion.com/?p=21534

<comment><USER2> God I hate how everything is "curated" these days. Pick a new verb.

<comment><USER3> Would you like to pick one for us? I can't think of an appropriate synonym.

<comment><USER4> Filter? See also: You Are Not a Curator <http://newcurator.com/2010/03/you- are-not-a-curator/>

<comment><USER3> Filtering suggests a far more mechanical process than curating. Filtering requires an algorithm, curating requires taste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.chictopia.com/> is also in a good position to provide this sort of service. They have much of the same information and an engaged user community.</comment>


Silicon Valley entrepreneurs turn to fasting and 'smart drugs' - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_30109953/hacking-brain-silicon-valley-entrepreneurs-turn-fasting-and <comment><USER2> Medical students ad doctors have been in on the game and using pharmaceutical agents to boost endurance and perfomance for a long time. Interesting though, is the angle on ketosis as a booster of cognitive ability.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm suspicious of such pills. The idea of brain hacking isn't ethic. Are we sure that these people take smart drugs volunteer? Maybe they work laboratory guinea-pig?

</comment><comment><USER4> I find that intermittent fasting and low-calorie diets in general do heighten the senses. They all have their drawbacks though.

<comment><USER5> What are some drawbacks you've experienced?

<comment><USER6> No pizza</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you back schoolkids to buy them digital maker technology? - <AUTHOR> Say schoolkids wanted Arduino kits to experiment with, or wanted Raspberry Pi devices or other low cost electronics and robotics components, would you or your company be willing to back them for $20 to $50, no questions asked, nothing in return except thanks? <comment><USER2> I think that to attract real money, you'll have to set up some system whereby marketing rights of the creations revert to some administrator set up by the fund, and the proceeds split in a weighted fashion given the proportion of each donor.

You could create a baby angel fund...so a cupid fund?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you mean by creations or real money - there wouldn't be any fund.

I'm just talking about buying low cost computing devices for kids who want them so they can learn and be inspired and have fun.</comment></comment>