If money doesn't make you happy, you probably aren't spending it right (2010) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20&%20WILSON%20(2011).pdf <comment><USER3> Last year I sold some stock from my last startup, a little over $1m after taxes, and I can say it's definitely changed things for the better.

In this period of time, I have been able to:

\- Quit my founder position at that startup (thus avoiding potentially being tied to vesting or retention clauses, in case of an acquisition)

\- Own my house, and invest in a few other apartments, which turned into a little side business with great margins

\- Start a new company investing my own money, and not requiring a salary

\- Travel and live in a few different cities as I build the new startup

\- Completely forget about the price tag when buying small-ticket things: a taxi ride, asking for an extra plate, an occasional flight, paying a round of drinks

It's not as it money made me happy by spending it, but it did remove a lot of the constraints I had before. It's made me feel like the default state would be to be carefree and happy, and as long as you can keep the worries and the stress away, everything will go alright.

As a new worry, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how to reinvest it wisely and continue living like this. It's not overwhelming, and it's not very different than what doing my finances felt like before, but doing it a larger scale adds a new dimension to it.

<comment><USER4> I agree with most of your decisions but:

> Completely forget about the price tag when buying small-ticket things: a > taxi ride, asking for an extra plate, an occasional flight, paying a round > of drinks

Needs a little asterisk, you're changing your lifestyle to one that you probably can not yet afford, be careful with that, these 'little things' really add up over time.

Other than that: Congratulations :)

<comment><USER5> i completely disagree - he has a small but successful real estate business and has presumably close to or over $1M in assets. he _definitely can_ afford a tax ride, an extra appetizer, or a flight somewhere without thinking about the implications of the cost. if not this guy, then who? do you have to be a billionaire before you can order an appetizer without guilt?

i'll describe the lifestyle you probably can't afford - $20k vacations, $500 dinners, $100k cars, and $1M houses. not appetizers and taxi rides. appetizers and taxi rides are normal things that normal people buy. even normal people who don't have a successful exit under their belt and don't have a successful new business as an investor.

this irrational overemphasis on frugality i always see on hn just seems like a different form of elitism / pedantry to me. since most of us have money, it's just a covert way of signaling an extra level of self-control and discipline (which are usually required to make money, but since so many of us make money, we've got to find novel ways to signal that extra status).

<comment><USER6> I am honestly curious but is there a link or survey somewhere that says most HNers make/have money?

<comment><USER7> There have been occasional polls, on topics such as salary, exit amounts, etc. People generally consider the results of these polls unreliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Money is the most tricky thing men will ever face. Not talking about extreme poverty here, the following is what I've learned:

More money leads in almost all people to artificial value, short term superficial happiness, degradation of the soul. On the outside it looks great and shiny, but on the inside the soul starves and craves true happiness. Unfortunately, most rich people react unconsciously by spending more and more, in a desperate effort to fill the ever growing gap.

Longer term less money creates in almost all people higher valuation of the most simple and basic things, which translates to true happiness for the soul. Less money can restore happiness if people are willing.

But there is of course a lot more affected by the money in our lives, especially the ego. A rich men easily thinks he is really someone, a 'great' man, special, gifted, etc.. The poor man will most often struggle with the opposite thoughts and feelings, while in the end it's all false.

If I ever again have quite some money to spend, I'll be very vigilant, you'll see me desperately trying to hold myself back. Never trade your soul for money (or power) is my advice. And if you have a lot of it, use a substantial part to help poor children for example, give them food, education, that will create you some ever lasting happiness, at least, if you can hold yourself back from growing your ego on that.

<comment><USER9> >More money leads in almost all people to artificial value, short term superficial happiness, degradation of the soul.

I could not disagree more. In the vast majority of cases, money leads to less misery. Then you just lead your life without the obsessive material thoughts so many struggle with.

I do agree with your last point, though, that once you reach a certain level of stability, you should focus on either reducing other people's misery if you have the power to do so or creating things (either yourself or by proxy) that wouldn't exist in the world without your help.

<comment><USER10> It's strange to me that people think having or not having money is directly tied to obsessing over money. These are two separate things that aren't actually connected--the number in your bank account and the state of your mind.

You can have $1bn and be totally miserable and miserly, you can have .15 and be generous and happy, and vice versa.

<comment><USER11> _> you can have .15 and be generous and happy_

On what planet? You aren't going to be happy begging for food, walking everywhere you go, having no place to shower or sleep, not having clothes, etc. Certainly, each extra dollar gives you less marginal happiness as you move up the net worth scale into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. But if you aren't able to meet a certain reasonable minimum standard of living, you will be absolutely miserable.

<comment><USER12> "if you aren't able to meet a certain reasonable minimum standard of living, you will be absolutely miserable."

For some people their minimum standard of living dose not require money. Buddhist monks[1] come to mind. There are also people that simply want to live away from society and thus have no real need for money.

[1] [http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhistworld/layguide.h...](http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhistworld/layguide.htm)

<comment><USER13> I think the discussion was assuming you didn't have someone taking care of your material needs for you, like a monastery or a parent.

<comment><USER14> I know people who have lived off the grid (or on a boat), without a paying job, happily. It does get wearing, and people don't seem to do it for too long - but that can be years.

(To give some examples of lifestyles that do not require income, nor external people paying for things.)

<comment><USER13> Definitely true. I think the parent was overstating it saying that one would be miserable without money.

But the larger point stands, your state of mind and your access to resources are connected, very strongly at the poverty end. There are definitely people who can be very fulfilled with very few resources (until they get sick or it gets very cold) but they would all be happier with a bunch of money, even if that's just to give away to those in need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was happiest 15 years ago working as a raft guide and traveling the world. I had very little money then, but I was very happy. I got to do what I loved every day. I usually made two large purchases per year (the opposite of what this article suggests) - a kayak and a return ticket to my next destination.

I now sit in front of a computer. Earn OK money but not enough to retire on anytime soon (I am in Spain just now, money isn't great here). I guess I make lots more smaller purchases than I did in the old days (though they are usually far less meaningful to me than the large purchases I made back then). I was definitely happier back then.

<comment><USER16> Your old life reminded me of the Mexican fisherman story :)

[http://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican- fisherman...](http://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherman/)

<comment><USER17> The difference is that you have to fish everyday, or you starve and you can't "play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos" any more.

Where as in the 15 years later version, you don't need to fish at all.

<comment><USER18> if he loves to fish that shouldn't be a problem though, thus giving him 15 extra years of peaceful life

i know, he could get injured and not be able to fish, but on that note, in 15 years he could find out he has cancer and not be able to enjoy his money

<comment><USER19> His kids would, though.

<comment><USER18> they may prefer 15 years of quality time with dad to a load of cash

PS: I'd love to hear some arguments on this, not just simple downvotes. Is HN turning into a place like: "you don't think like me, so I'm downvoting you and moving along"?

<comment><USER20> If you've ever fished for a living, the argument seems ludicrous.

Fishing can be treacherous work. You might get rich with a big haul or die when the whether turns bad.

There are many factors, enviromental pollution, ecosystem changing, etc. It's not unusual for these small local fishermen to have very very bad years. And it's not just small outfits that hit tough times, do some research on the tuna industry and decline in tuna population.

Reality doesn't always go along with our cozy zen story. We haven't even mentioned the fact that turning your hobby into a job is quite often a very bad idea.

<comment><USER21> In the case of the story of the fisherman in Mexico, he is not going on big hauls that pay big bucks. He is in a small one man boat in a bay. He is not catching thousands of pounds of fish, he is catching 2-5 fish a day.

<comment><USER20> You can't support a family catching 2-5 fishes a day. This is not prehistory. You need to catch extra to sell so you can afford to take your kid to the doctor and buy them medicine when they get sick.

You need to buy clothes unless you plan on leaving yourself and your family naked. You need to buy school supplies for your kid. These things do not come for free my friend.

The life of a fisherman is a harsh one and none, not even the poorest fisherman can live on 2-5 fish a day. You need money to buy a fridge to preserve your catch because some days or even weeks, you will catch absolutely nothing. There are fishing seasons. At the very least, you need to buy salt to dry and preserve the fish.

Have you ever watched a family wept when the rain came down while they were laying out their fishes to dry?

I think some people on HN have a tendency to romanticize poverty, and that might be because they've never been without money. Backpacking around India and SE Asia does not give you a true experience of poverty.

Sure, you'll take some pictures to show off on Fb, instagram, twitter and then eventually hop back on a plane to fly home. Try living like those people for decades. Watch your wife die from childbirth. How are you going to afford a trip to the hospital on 2-5 fish a day? People routinely give birth without an ultrasound beforehand and they do it at home. Watch your precious kid die from malaria because you can't afford proper treatment.

I speak from experience here. There is nothing, nothing noble about poverty.

<comment><USER21> > I speak from experience here. There is nothing, nothing noble about poverty.

Your problem is with the well known allegory, not the people on hacker news romanticizing poverty.

Your position seems to distance itself from the allegory because we have no sense that this community in Mexico has first world medical care, schools, or western clothing.

The allegory also suggests this as 'simple' life, which most probably means selling the fish at market as soon as the fisherman comes in - no salting, no drying, etc.

<comment><USER20> My point is, the allegory is a farce that trivialize reality.

The simple life is not simple. No life is ever simple.

The allegory masquerades as false wisdom.

I know quite a few guys that went back to their home country and attempted to live that "simple life".

Now they're all coming back, most usually do it around the time their first child enters grade school.

All this despite that fact that they have significantly more money than the local population. Just imagine if they didn't.

There's a very good reason why there's so many illegal immigrants in first world countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are all sorts of complexities here that's difficult to capture in sweeping statements, statistics, principles or studies.

Money (problems) are the source of lots of unhappiness. Stress and its consequences. Failing to make ends meet is stressful and unhappy. While being a broke and careless 26 year old in love might be fun, in most circumstances being broke sucks. Choosing between a dentist or ballet class for your 5 year old is not pleasant.

There are noncausational correlations between making money and happiness. To a large extent, having money is one big example of successfully functioning in our society. It's therefore probably correlated with all sorts of other types of functioning. Making money is often succeeding at controlling your life. It's similar to other successes at controlling one's life (deliberately and successfully choosing a career or family life). These are related to happiness.

Feeling successful is pleasant in itself. Most of us work most of our lives. Money is the main reason. Not making much money is (with many exceptions) failing to make more money, failure is unpleasant.

My Shtick recently is attempting to be deliberate. There's a lot of romanticism around serendipity, less so about deliberate action. They're not really competitive, but they often feel like they are. In any case, spending your money in a more happiness generating way is being deliberate about being happy. It extends past money. Be deliberate about spending your time, your effort and anything else you spend on happiness and you will probably be more happy.

<comment><USER23> Money are the source of lots of unhappiness, but as they point out: We adapt.

The research does not support that "being broke sucks".

The research supports that _starving_ and _being homeless_ sucks. The moment you are not starving, and have shelter, peoples happiness level is on average almost as high as the happiness level of a rich person.

> Feeling successful is pleasant in itself.

It may be, but as we adapt to having little money and success, so do we adapt to having lots of money and lots of success. It does not bring substantial added happiness other than _shortly after we achieve it_. Being given a raise, or promotion, or public praise gives us happiness, but that happiness fades very quickly. Similarly, not making much money, or failing, is unpleasant but the unhappiness it causes is very much temporary unless you keep doing worse.

Avoiding adaption to an improved situation, and ensuring adaption to a worse situation is key to maximising happiness. You are best served by a slow, steady "drip" of improvement than suddenly achieving wealth, fame or success for example. Conversely, if you need to make cuts, you are far better off cutting your expenditure further than necessary, get used to it, and slowly see things improving, than you are making small cuts with the risk of having to cut back further.

Apart from relative effects on adapation, money overall has _very little_ direct impact on happiness other than at the extremes:

If you starve; if you're homeless; if you lack access to mental health services; if you lack access to health services that can prevent or slow a degenerative condition (pretty much any catastrophic health change is subject to adaptation as long as the change is over quickly - e.g. amputees are as happy as most people relatively soon afterwards - but conditions that slowly become worse avoids adaptation).

(See Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis" for more on this, and a decent chunk of references)

<comment><USER22> I'm far from up on the research, and I've heard conflicting versions of what research supports. But, this article seems to be treating the relationship as clearly causal but modest.

From the first paragraph:

 _" Scientists have studied the relationship between money and happiness for decades and their conclusion is clear: Money buys happiness, but it buys less than most people think (Aknin, Norton, & Dunn, 2009; Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002; Frey & Stutzer, 2000). The correlation between income and happiness is positive but modest.._"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Try living in a medium size city in the Philippines.

There are neighborhood stores here all over the place and they don't charge much more than you would have to pay by buying in bulk at a larger store. When I'm not shopping at a neighborhood store, I go to the local market. Each of these places are very bland. Basically just a bamboo or concrete house with the products hanging or stacked up in shelves. Often you just order through a barred window and they give you what you ask for. After shopping like this for months, walking into a regular grocery store is an assault on the senses. Packaging, marketing and colors everywhere. Things at the smaller stores are also really cheap because the locals have to be able to afford them. At the larger grocery stores I'm floored by the prices of everything. I avoid grocery stores as much as possible.

The selection of products here is slim. I can spend all day looking around different stores and not find one thing on my wishlist. Otherwise I find nothing interesting. Many products are cheap and low quality because expensive items don't sell. I'm happy living here and I have the things I really need.

Happy + have everything I really need + have money + nothing to spend money on = abundance of sorts. I don't know if I feel rich, but it's strange feeling like money doesn't really do me much good. Daily expenses are super cheap. I only have going out to eat to spend money on. My favorite meals only cost $1 - $3. When everything is cheap, an expensive meal seems excessive.

Further screwing with me is that I can help out with simple tech stuff at these restaurants and I can eat for free. Business owners here don't know how to use things like Facebook, which is basically the internet for the Philippines. It's not really worth my time, but I like to help. There goes my main expense outside of rent and utilities.

<comment><USER25> Indeed. It's somewhat durable, too -- while I certainly experience a lot more luxury since I left Davao, I'm no longer comfortable with even LA-without-a- car level extravagance being treated lightly.

I think it's worth pointing out the mirror of your thoughts (which are completely correct -- if you haven't had cheap and simple options, there is a deep luxury to it): If you're going to buy nice things -- which are the only options in America, truly -- enjoy them.

Food and housing seem so obvious to me. Like, you can get a chicken sandwich here, and eat something that is recognizably made of chicken (you can in the Philippines too, it's just that's more fancy than normal). I guess it never struck me how much of a luxury even the low-end of American foodstuffs are.

And I can get an apartment near Detroit that (1) can be air-conditioned to exactly the temperature I want, and not just a tolerable temperature, and (2) is, well... nice. Not falling apart, no holes in walls or things, consistent electricity, internet speeds exceeding 100kb/s (often by 30x).

Now, I don't need all this luxury, but man, the modest increase in expenses (maybe 2x? I live pretty cheap in America) definitely increases quality of life. If it didn't, I would probably not live here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Money may not buy happiness, but it's strange how often it's a factor in things that make you unhappy.

The unhappiest I've ever been was during a difficult period with my family. Money was definitely involved, and the center of much of the issue, but it was the troubles in the relationship with people close to me that made me unhappy.

If money had never been an issue, I never would have had either trouble and things would be different today. The money part of the situation was trivially resolvable, but the relationship one has lingered for the better part of two decades and looks like it'll never find a satisfactory conclusion.

<comment><USER27> "Money doesn't buy happiness" is something said by either the very rich - <USER2> don't have to worry about money - or the very poor - to avoid getting even more unhappy about their situation. Having trouble paying the bills will cause stress, stress causes relational issues and whatnot.

Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does help with the basics of life. Which is why a minimum wage and by extension liveable income if you're unable to work should be a basic human right. That, or a similar form of supplying basic human needs - housing, food, water, clothing, privacy, access to information, hygene, etc.

<comment><USER23> "Money doesn't buy happiness" is largely demonstrably true for _most people_ in their current situations. The available research does not back up any large correlation - causative or not - between happiness and wealth outside of very extreme situations:

If you starve, or lack shelter, money unambiguously increases average happiness substantially. Once you are fed and have somewhere to live - even if crappy - peoples happiness are minimally affected by additional money.

There are ways which you can leverage more money to increase your happiness, but interestingly the best approaches involve living below your means, no matter how much or little you have: The most efficient way of leveraging wealth into happiness is to ensure that you build a buffer so that you can maintain a slow, steady upwards trajectory as much as possible.

<comment><USER28> Actually not. Money increases happiness logarithmically. Of course, work may decrease happiness and there's an optimal work/money tradeoff involved, but the happiness payoff from money, per se, never stop.

<comment><USER29> Are you talking about reality here? Do you even have a meaningful way to quantify happiness (the one that you claim maps to a logarithmic relationship)?

<comment><USER28> Things like this: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-c...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily- chart-0)

The standard way to measure happiness seems to be to simply ask.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3922794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3922794)

I'm guessing this was submitted because I linked to it in a comment.[1]

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8581524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8581524)

</comment><comment><USER31> For anyone who is interested in a shorter version of this journal article, Wall Street Journal reporter Andrew Blackman posted an article today titled "Can Money Buy Happiness? Here's What the Science Says." It's behind a paywall, which is why the harvard journal article is listed here (I'm assuming).

But if you have a subscription, the link is at [http://online.wsj.com/articles/can-money-buy-happiness- heres...](http://online.wsj.com/articles/can-money-buy-happiness-heres-what- science-has-to-say-1415569538)

The main points seem to be:

1) at the margin, it's better to spend money on fleeting experiences over material goods 2) money buys happiness up to a point (i.e. $75K per year, then there's diminishing returns) 3) don't get into debt or you're in for sadness

</comment><comment><USER32> Money works like RAM: More RAM than the running processes require will not make your computer any faster, but if you run out of RAM it will make it slower.

<comment><USER33> That's a really interesting way to look at it. I think you're right, thanks for including that piece of insight.

To continue - Having more RAM also makes you more likely to run programs you don't need, or don't care about. Limiting the RAM left available for the applications you do.

It's easier to kill processes though than drains on your income.

<comment><USER34> How do you know what programs you need to run? Why would we think all the good ones are low-RAM? I'd need to see a profile of apps and RAM to even begin to conclude anything.

Either the analogy isn't working, or more money (or RAM) has a good chance of letting me do more things that I value. I think the 2nd.

<comment><USER35> > How do you know what programs you need to run? Why would we think all the > good ones are low-RAM? I'd need to see a profile of apps and RAM to even > begin to conclude anything.

Wisdom, aging, getting to know yourself. I sure love a $300 meal, but eating out 5 times a week isn't going to make me any happier than going to that place once a month and cooking on my own the rest of the time; maybe ordering a cheap dish at my favorite Chinese place.

If you enjoy looking good and your wardrobe already has everything you could reasonably wear on a day-to-day basis and some special events, the chances that an additional piece of clothing will make a marked difference on your happiness is extremely low.

If you have sex with your lover as much as you could possibly want, more sex will not increase your quality of life; most likely it will be a negative.

There's a point where we just saturate on the hedonistic aspects of life, even the ones with supposed higher purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I used to have money. When I got divorced I decided I would let my wife have it all. It was mostly hers to begin with, so it wasn't some great act of generosity. She walked away with somewhere around $2MM in liquidity. I walked away with about $10,000.

It's really made very little difference. Money makes some things easier, but I wouldn't associate that with happy. They are two separate things. There was a time when I thought money would make me happy, and I think there was a time where maybe it did, but there was a realization that my "happiness" wasn't my own. I don't even know if that makes sense to anyone but me, but that's the only way I can articulate it. I was happy because I thought I should be happy with all the stuff and "freedom", but at the end of the day I didn't really care about those things.

Now I'm in this place, this awkward state, where money can't buy any of the things I want. It's a confusing place to be because the world doesn't really operate that way. I wish money made me happy. That would make everything much easier.

<comment><USER37> I saw a good TED talk[1] a while ago about this topic, and the speaker made the interesting point that people use the word happiness to mean different things. You can ask someone how happy they are feeling at a given moment, or you can ask them how happy they are with their life in general. And we evaluate those two feelings in very different ways.

He mentions at one point that studies about how people feel in the moment were very correlated with money, but only up to the point that they didn't need to worry about it anymore. After that, it had little bearing on their experiential happiness. But when asked how happy they were with their lives, the more money, the better, with no limit. Which seems to me more like pride in an achievement.

I wonder if the happiness that wasn't "your own" was because part of you was happy when you thought about where you were in life, but you were also aware it wasn't really improving your day-to-day experience. Kind of a cognitive dissonance between the two ways you were evaluating your happiness.

I don't know, you think that's even close?

[1] [http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...](http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory)

<comment><USER36> That's somewhat accurate. I'd not seen this TED talk either, so thanks.

The day-to-day didn't really change above a certain income, and that income limit (at least for me) was pretty low. Even living in both Manhattan and San Francisco where things are expensive.

All the things I enjoy aren't really that expensive. You don't need millions of dollars to read a book, watch a movie, listen to an album, or have sex. These things are only very marginally improved above let's say, the $75K mark. You don't even need millions of dollars to go out to eat every night.

Money can give you more discretionary time. But that free time can't be spent in any way (at least none that I found) that feels rewarding while everyone else you know or care about is at work. You are still bound to rest of the world. I think that's what I like about more European, or day I say socialist, lifestyles. I need other people to spend time with. I've found hanging out with extremely wealthy people who don't do anything to be extremely boring and almost uncomfortable.

If I woke up tomorrow and suddenly had $10 million I'm not sure I'd be any happier. I'd go out and buy some new clothes I guess, a bigger apartment maybe. I'd still wake up in the morning and turn on the radio to listen to NPR. I'd still eat the same yogurt, same strawberries.

People start to do silly things with money I don't understand. Giant TVs they don't know how to work, fancy cars they never drive. Or buy some house with rooms that sit empty. I'm just like, why? Why would you do that? When people say these things make them "happy" I wonder if we actually feel completely different emotions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Summary: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/tombarlow/2011/06/15/how-to- buy-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tombarlow/2011/06/15/how-to-buy- happiness-with-money/)

</comment><comment><USER39> "Principle 1: Buy experiences instead of things"

Figure 1 - highest on the happiness index is "making love"

I see what you're saying. ;)

</comment><comment><USER40> A year ago I stopped spending my money on "things" and start spending it on free time. My life is much better now.

<comment><USER41> This is indeed so true; yet money doesn't buy time. Unless you are in your dream location there's always inherent costs to visiting relatives / friends, match their schedule, or simply go wherever you feel good. So you end-up with a double need for money ;)

Still ... I fully agree!

<comment><USER42> In some degree, it does. If you have more money than you need, you can opt to work less hours (not everyone can, but in Germany for example most people have that option).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yep, I always knew it's entirely my own fault that I'm not happy. I just have to get better at spending money. Why didn't I think of that myself. I'll get out now and find myself a coach that will teach me all the tricks I need to know. After all if you can buy everything, why not the knowledge on how to get happy spending money? It's so easy once you look at it the right way!

</comment><comment><USER44> "While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery." ― Groucho Marx

</comment><comment><USER45> While I can see how principles 7 and 8 could help most people, they wouldn't work for me.

Every purchase of an item I intended to use long term (2 years or more) was preceded by anywhere from days to weeks of research, reviews, and comparison shopping. It's a huge brain drain, but it was worth it. I now have 98% of all possessions I'd want, with the remaining 2% having not reached the right opportunity yet (I'm also quite frugal). More importantly, I did not follow the herd. I found that an overall rating is a good rough indicator (thus saving many hours of work on my part), but you still need to look into individual reviews, because not everyone has the same tastes or standards or needs or use cases as you.

I now have a comfortable place, possessions that are built to last, and very few wants that would require more money to satisfy.

So has money bought me happiness? I believe a better way to phrase it would be to say that money is no longer a barrier to my happiness.

<comment><USER46> Because you seem content with this path, may I ask how old you are, or at least how long you've been on this path? I'm also curious to hear examples of the 2% you mention.

I'm young but I try to have this same approach of taking the time to buy nice things which will last (furniture, kitchenware, camping gear), and tend to be a bit obsessive about ratings + reviews. I sometimes wonder if this is the "right" approach or if I would be happier buying cheaper crap and spending less time doing it. I do find strong intrinsic value when I'm confident I bought the thing which best fits my needs after doing hours/days of research.

<comment><USER45> I'm 39 now, but I started this path late. Most of my life was spent going from country to country, with all of my possessions able to fit in two bags. I was also reduced to the shirt on my back a couple of times in business ventures gone wrong. What I've discovered is that there aren't actually _that_ many things to get. A bed, a dresser, a kitchen table and chairs, a couch, a coffee table, a TV, stand, amp and some speakers, living room chairs, a desk + chair, a bookshelf. After that it's outfitting the kitchen and bathroom, clothing, and some art for the walls. That covers the necessities. Beyond that it's just supporting your hobbies & things you do for fun. The other 2% are things like a car (I just use Zipcar for now), some of the more high tech gizmos for the kitchen, more camping gear, good pots & pans once I get better at cooking - Stuff I can live without, so I'm content to wait for a really great deal before buying. The best part is finding something you know you'll need eventually (because it's on your list), but it's available now at a deep discount because some shopkeeper is desperate to be rid of it.

That's actually the key: having the ability to be patient. For about a year, I kept a list of everything I wanted to buy, including links to what were the best in each area. Then I'd keep an eye out for sales, check out garage sales & flea markets, go to second hand stores, surplus stores, etc. I tried to not buy unless I could get it for 70-80% off the new price or better, while still of acceptable quality. For brand new stuff over $50, I'd usually only buy at 40% off or better. To completely furnish my place with stuff I'll never replace, I spent about $2000 over the course of a year. Some stuff was free. Some stuff was damn near free (my solid oak desk was $20) Some stuff I ended up paying a fair price for, because I would accept no substitute. My biggest purchase was a 50" TV for $500, which I'll keep for the next 10 years or so unless it actually breaks. My older, 8 year old 32" TV I now use as an external monitor. It still works like the day I bought it, but then again I also researched the shit out of it before buying (Sharp Aquos, on sale 40% off).

The best part about buy-it-for-life stuff is that a used item is just as good as a new.

The research is slow and tedious. The key is to not be in a hurry. There is a finite amount of stuff to get, and you can probably survive without it for awhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The generalizations in this paper based on cherry-picked studies aren't very convincing. How people react in contrived situations, and how people live their life are quite a bit different. The word "suggest" appears 17 times in this article, where the author extrapolates from the findings of a single research experiment. It reads more like an opinion piece than anything scientific, and I'm certainly not going to change my habits from what's written in it.

</comment><comment><USER48> This reminds me of a great story: [http://totalfratmove.com/guy-goes-to- mexico-to-kill-himself-...](http://totalfratmove.com/guy-goes-to-mexico-to- kill-himself-spends-week-doing-coke-and-banging-hookers-decides-to-keep- living/)

There are no NSFW pictures just a text...

</comment><comment><USER49> One of the greatest books IMHO which gives very practical advice how to achieve and maintain happiness in life is Raymond Hull's old classic (1969) "How to get what you want". Interestingly enough (and although written by a Canadian) it is quite well known in Europe, not so much in the US: [http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-to-get-what-you-want- ray...](http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-to-get-what-you-want-raymond- hull/1001022338?ean=2940150528680) the comment section on amazon is interesting to read as well: [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0671783270/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0671783270/)

</comment><comment><USER50> Somerset Maugham has a nice quote in _Of Human Bondage_ : "Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five." Although he does have a point I don't quite agree with that POV.

What I think money should be viewed as (we're talking about a good amount of money here, let's say 2-3x your living expenses) a super power. Like all super powers it can be used for good or evil (or, more probably, wasted). You can do a lot of good with a relatively small amount of money. You really cannot do this or think about such things if you don't know where your next lunch is coming from or if you will be able to afford to send your kids to college.

</comment><comment><USER51> _"Money doesn't just buy you a better life — better food, better cars, better pussy — it also makes you a better person. You can give generously to the church of your choice or the political party. You can save the fucking spotted owl with money."_

I know, I know.)

</comment><comment><USER52> Everything else being equal, of course I'd be happier to have more money.

But all things aren't equal, and many of the things one is supposed to spend one's time on in order to make maximal money are things I am unhappy spending my time on.

(That having been said, the article is about getting the best happiness bang from whatever bucks you do have, which I have no argument with. I suppose I'm just saying, in many cases, the optimal happiness I could purchase with some money stream is the free time "purchased" by not working for it in the first place.)

</comment><comment><USER53> I poor all the money I can into my future self. That actually does make me happy. I don't see lifestyle inflation as a good idea especially for young people.

<comment><USER54> Me too. I figure, if I can get some shit done in my 20s, I can have a pretty sweet time in my 30s, running a small company and spending time with my future family rather than working an unfulfilling 9 to 5 and trying to make up for it by partying hard on the weekends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> These 2 put out a book on the subject as well. It's worth a read if you found this paper helpful.

[http://books.simonandschuster.com/Happy-Money/Elizabeth- Dunn...](http://books.simonandschuster.com/Happy-Money/Elizabeth- Dunn/9781451665079)

</comment><comment><USER56> In this thread: Generalizations

</comment><comment><USER57> Related TED talk for those interested: [http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness](http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness)

</comment><comment><USER58> It's all about your utility function.

If you are not optimizing for personal happiness but for something else, then the fact that it doesn't make you happy doesn't mean you aren't spending it right.

</comment><comment><USER59> The happiest people I've ever met were those who had just enough money / education to be comfortable but just little enough to not know any better.

</comment><comment><USER60> Ah, yes. "If you can't spend dough, what [are] you hustlin' for?"

</comment><comment><USER61> Coming from the hood, I wanted to say that I could not disagree with this article more.

Life is fair. Just like the late poet said, "More money, more problems." Life always finds a way of balancing itself out.

<comment><USER62> People who say "life is fair" are usually the ones who have an easy life. It's a way to blame people for their problems.

<comment><USER63> "It's a way to blame people for their problems." Why does blame have to be part of it? Or are you saying that people who use that phrase are implying that people are to blame for what problems they have because life itself is fair?

<comment><USER62> Yeah, I'm saying that people who say "life is fair" usually haven't had horrible problems like birth defects or having their house burn down. It's also a way for people who have had incredibly good luck to rationalize why they have it so easy while other people struggle.

<comment><USER61> I'll share my story with the world soon. My life wasn't easy at all, and unfortunately, it still isn't. However, I'm working as hard as I can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Money sure makes me happy.

I hate working for other people and my profiyltable business has allowed me to continue to work for myself.

</comment><comment><USER65> <sarcasm>What an actual topic for hacker news community! I bet this topic will go to top 3!</sarcasm></comment>


Potato gun, lightning, and sonic magic: Google Chrome Speed Tests - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/05/potato-gun-lightning-and-sonic-magic.html

<comment><USER2> How does one find a job doing that? Forget programming, I want to make potato guns to promote what the rest of y'all have done!

<comment><USER3> [http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/new- york/mark...](http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/new- york/markcomm/index.html)

<comment><USER2> Oh, so I'd have to move to New York :(. I knew it couldn't be all good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fascinating! 'Tis healthy to remember that technology can sometimes be used for intriguingly creative but basically useless purposes, and not just for one week a year in the Nevadan desert.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm new to HN, read the introduction at <http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html> and found the concept really great but doubted that people really can restrain themselves from posting "funny" or "cool" stuff.

Then I find this. I'm not sure if I'm disappointed that those ambitious goals can't be met or if I'm thankful that someone pointed me at a funny video. Maybe both.

<comment><USER6> I think that guidelines suggest that it shouldn't _only_ be funny or cute, there has to be something more. In this case it's a pretty clever form of advertising, plus it's related to Google Chrome...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The making of: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oarMXGq3gI>

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know the firm that makes all the chrome ads? They're awesome.

<comment><USER8> I believe Google's communications team produces them.

<comment><USER3> the group is called Google Creative Labs. see [http://www.notesondesign.net/inspiration/advertising/google-...](http://www.notesondesign.net/inspiration/advertising/google- gets-creative/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This video contains no substance. It's an advertisement (albeit entertaining). Flagged.

<comment><USER10> Flag silently. (Comments about flagging contain no substance either.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not quite clear on what's being 'tested' in these videos. The idea is give a practical visual comparison of really, really fast things to google chrome loading a web page.

Because it's so practical, you don't need a tesla coil to duplicate it yourself (and be disappointed). Go to google, search for pandora, and click on the first link. Okay, so clearly they're not talking about transfer/load/rendering times. Let's click refresh. Well that was quite a bit faster, wasn't it? But still no lightning bolt.

Cool video, but I'd be worried that users will be underwhelmed when they test it for themselves...

<comment><USER12> why do you hate fun?

<comment><USER11> :)

I don't! I think this video is absolutely awesome, and I deeply, deeply wish that I could trade in my current line of work to make these videos for a living.

That being said, I can't replicate Chrome's load times as seen in that video :)

<comment><USER13> The tedious parts of the job are left on the (proverbial) cutting room floor. Like construction projects, there's a lot of people just standing around waiting at a shoot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I was lured into Monsanto's GMO crusade. Here's what I learned - <AUTHOR> https://undark.org/2019/06/27/monsanto-gmo-crusade/ <comment><USER2> Author has a political axe to grind.

<comment><USER3> Seems that way. Misrepresenting Peterson's views and disregarding _why_ he was invited to the talk (to give his opinion on why people hold anti-GMO views). She does have a point about the driving force behind much of the GMO debate being about uncertainty. This is especially true when Monsanto is hiring ghost writers and sponsoring biased research. You just can't rely on the science.

<comment><USER4> What is misrepresenting his views?

<comment><USER3> In her linked Slate article (that she authored) she said (about Peterson)

"[Peterson] became hugely popular following his swift rise to notoriety in the fall of 2016, when he refused to comply with university policy on addressing students with preferred gender pronouns." He publicly stated be had no issue using preferred pronouns, but his non-compliance was with Canadian federal Bill C-16 which forced their use and he felt was 'compelled speech' therefore unconstitutional. He framed it as a free-speech issue, but his opponents tend to frame him as a bigot who doesn't respect trans rights.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that Peterson himself misrepresents the situation. The bill simply classified trans people as a class similar to racial or religious minority. Meaning don't discriminate. It wouldn't make it illegal to misgender someone per se. Like walking down the street or by accident, but as a teacher to repeatedly and knowingly misgender a student you are pretty much by definition harassing and discriminating against them. Its basic common sense, but he tries to pretend it's a free speech issue. He's invented an innocuous sounding argument for allowing harrasment and discrimination against trans people and its allowed him to tap into a general anti-trans sentiment which runs deep through conservative culture which has resulted in fame, wealth, and notoriety. Think it's kind of dark.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


iPad software issue grounds 'a few dozen' American Airlines flights - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/28/8511993/ipad-issue-grounds-american-airlines-737s

<comment><USER2> It seems like a real world exploit of the IOS Wi-Fi bug discussed here a few ago.</comment>


Introducing Cosette – a SQL solver for checking semantic equivalences of queries - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@uwdb/introducing-cosette-527898504bd6 <comment><USER2> Author here. Happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER3> Nice idea, but it breaks quite quickly (still). Tried to see if Cosette can prove equivalence of these two queries:

        /* define schema s1,
           here s1 can contain any number of attributes,
           but it has to at least contain integer attributes
           x and y */
        schema s1(x:int, ya:int, ??);

        schema s2(yb:int, ??);        -- define schema s2

        table a(s1);            -- define table a using schema s1
        table b(s2);            -- define table b using schema s1

        query q1                -- define query q1 on tables a and b
        `select distinct x.x as ax from a x, b y
         where x.ya = y.yb`;

        query q2                -- define query q2 likewise
        `select x.x as ax from a x, a y, b z
         where x.x = y.x and x.ya = z.yb
         union select 1 as ax from a x where 1 = 0`;

        verify q1 q2;           -- does q1 equal to q2?

Got a syntax error:

        Syntax Error.
        ERROR: (line 19, column 8):
        unexpected "s"
        expecting "--" or "/*"

There are many other bugs up to the point where this is not really usable.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for trying out. The parser error report is not great now. The real error actually, it should be "union all" rather than "union".

I changed your query:

/* define schema s1, here s1 can contain any number of attributes, but it has to at least contain integer attributes x and y */ schema s1(x:int, ya:int, ??);

        schema s2(yb:int, ??);        -- define schema s2

        table a(s1);            -- define table a using schema s1
        table b(s2);            -- define table b using schema s1

        query q1                -- define query q1 on tables a and b
        `select distinct x.x as ax
        from a x, b y
         where x.ya = y.yb`;

        query q2                -- define query q2 likewise
        `(select x.x as ax
         from a x, a y, b z
         where x.x = y.x and x.ya = z.yb)
         union all (select 1 as ax from a x where 1 = 0)`;

        verify q1 q2;           -- does q1 equal to q2?

The Rosette execution indeed returns a counterexample (since they are not equal). There is an error in Coq code generation part, we are fixing that now.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I understood later on that you're not supporting union yet. Would have been nice, though, there are quite some caveats when trying to transform distinct / union into one another... :)

Btw, another parser error happened when I indented the code, e.g. pasting the indented code from Hackernews here into your tool. The parser then complains about \r or something like that.

<comment><USER2> Please try again now :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Play services 8.1 - <AUTHOR> http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/09/google-play-services-81-get-ready-for.html <comment><USER2> One notable new feature in 8.1 is the new permissions model (run-time permission checking).

More info can be found here in this blog post (also published today): [http://android-developers.blogspot.ca/2015/09/google-play- se...](http://android-developers.blogspot.ca/2015/09/google-play- services-81-and-android-60.html)

As well as in the official documentation: [https://developer.android.com/preview/features/runtime- permi...](https://developer.android.com/preview/features/runtime- permissions.html)

As usual, this new feature (verifying and requesting permissions at run-time) has been backported into the V4 support library.</comment>


Geeks vs Nerds: Are you a geek, or a nerd? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mastersinit.org/geeks-vs-nerds/

<comment><USER2> Someone mixed up 'Geek' and 'Hipster'.

</comment><comment><USER3> This thing is so retarded and stereotyped...</comment>


Dark Reign 2 Open Sourced - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/darkreign2/

<comment><USER2> I spoke with the repo's owner. It's actually a leak. Contribute at your own risk :)

<comment><USER3> So why is Google still hosting it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 2011.

A leak as kbok_ mentions.

SVN contains a copy of the full game. Copyright violation #2.

</comment><comment><USER5> This should be the final destination of abandonware. Becoming open source and nurturing the next generation of game developers.

<comment><USER6> Id Software has been an inspiring example here, open-sourcing several historically significant game engines. <https://github.com/id-Software/>

However, they typically don't include the full game data; you have to use them with data from the free trial versions or contributed by the public mod community (something else Id really helped foster). Does anyone know if this is necessary for them to retain rights to the IP?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nostalgia! I absolutely loved the soundtrack to this game.

<comment><USER8> Definitely. The original CD-ROM version contained regular CD audio tracks, so it's easy to rip. It's been in my collection for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I enjoyed the original from the Studio in Australia, wish they could open source that engine.

</comment><comment><USER10> They want multiplayer added. Is the thing even setup to handle multiplayer? Eg can the RNG's be synced? Are things determanistic? It looks like a RTS, are there fast rounds that you can sync on?

<comment><USER11> The game already has multiplayer. The issue is that the servers were taken down years ago. I think their goal is to create a new server for the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If there are legal issues with this code, would it be possible to remove the proprietary parts but still keep the game hosted under the LGPL?

</comment><comment><USER13> The upload has been made last year - what's the news?</comment>


Why didn't Larrabee fail? - <AUTHOR> http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20didn%27t%20Larrabee%20fail%3F%5D%5D <comment><USER2> > Larrabee ran Compute Shaders and OpenCL very well - in many cases better (in > flops/watt) than rival GPUs

Oh god the horror that was OpenCL on Xeon Phi.

1) It was extremely buggy. Any OpenCL program of decent complexity was bound to encounter bugs in their driver.

2) FLOPS are not the only measure for computations / simulations. The bandwidth is is extremely important for many applications. Whatever Xeon Phis OpenCL was doing was not achieving anything close to its peak. Any OpenCL kernels we had tuned would end up improving the performance of the host CPU (16 x 2 Xeon) as well. It would usually result in the Xeon CPU performing better than the Xeon Phis.

3) NVIDIA released multiple generations of their GPUs since Xeon Phi was released. The performance per watt on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs has been improving substantially over the last 3 years while Xeon Phi's stagnated in 2012.

4) Even their claim for best FLOPS / WATT is wrong. The Tesla K20 released around the same time had the same power usage (225W) but about 50% higher FLOPS (2TFLOPS vs 3TFLOPS single precision).

The only selling point was that they were x86 cores and hence did not require rewriting your code. But you _had_ to write additional directives indicating what part of your code you wanted to offload to your accelerator and when you wanted to get it back. The best performance ironically came after a lot of tuning for your application.

4 years down the line, GPU based accelerators still dominate the market and growing. and I wonder how many of the researchers who went with Xeon Phis regret their decision.

<comment><USER3> I agree with all of your points but I think KNL will be a turning point.

Traditional multi core CPUs simply aren't an option to advance in the HPC space any more. Per generation there's not enough of a performance improvement to make it effective. And buying more of them isn't feasible from a power perspective. So everyone is going to have to re-write for massive parallelism. I think Intel's KNL and future Knights will be the most attractive path for a lot of people. You have the tooling and familiarity of x86 and a simpler memory model than GPUs.

<comment><USER4> Do you still need to use vector instructions on KNL to get top performance? If so then forgot about "familiarity" when rewriting.

<comment><USER3>
      Do you still need to use vector instructions on KNL to get top performance?

Yes, but this is also the case for regular Xeons.

      If so then forgot about "familiarity" when rewriting.

When I say "familiarity" I'm referring to tooling in things like compilers and debuggers as well as just the instruction set.

<comment><USER5> Right. The only thing that looks particularly different (compared with the typical HPC node intended for workhorse vectorized code) about KNL on paper is the memory system, and possibly integrated interconnect. Given the usual library support, I don't see why there should be significant re-writing to be done, any more than for other AVX transitions (unless you're developing BLAS etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The jury is still out. Larrabee is in the wild but it's a hell of a long way from 'not failed' \-- every single deployment I'm aware of suffers from massive failure rates of the hardware and every single developer I've worked with much prefers to work with Tesla gear.

It's all well and good for them to aim for 'prestige buys' like Tianhe 2, but when the marketing smoke clears, the product is not achieving the things we in HPC buy products to achieve. Utilization rates are in the toilet across the ten or so Phi contracts I touch. I'm sure KNL's integrated architecture will change this, since everyone will just get this by default from vendors, but I don't know a single site who decided to buy Phi twice.

As far as I can tell, Phi is a play at a numbers game: you can ram up the Rmax of your system under LINPACK, regardless of whether it creates any actual value for your users. In other words, it's a cheap way to claw some false cred out of your top500 position, and not so much a useful HPC tool yet.

Time will tell, I guess.

<comment><USER7> I am setting a unit up now for a customer. In the years I've been working on them, the toolchain you need has not gotten much better ... no ... it went from complete crap to meh.

You really can't not use the intel compilers for them. Gcc won't optimize well for it at all. This means that in addition to the higher entry price for the hardware, you have a sometimes painfully incompatible compiler toolchain to buy as well, and then code for. Which means you have to adapt your code to the vagaries of this compiler relative to gcc. These adaptations are sometimes non-trivial.

I am not saying gcc is the be-all/end-all, but it is a useful starting point. One that the competitive technology works very well with.

From the system administration side, honestly, the way they've built it is a royal pain. Trying to turn this into something workable for my customer has taken many hours. This customer saw many cores as the shiny they wanted. And now my job is (after trying to convince them that there were other easier ways of accomplishing their real goals) to make this work in an acceptable manner.

The tool chain is different than the substrate system. You can't simply copy binaries over (and I know they have not yet internalized this). The debugging and running processes are different. The access to storage is different. The connection to networks is different.

What I am getting to is that there too many deltas over what a user would normally want.

It is not a bad technology. It is just not a product.

That is, it isn't finished. It's not unlike an Ikea furniture SKU. Lots of assembly required. And you may be surprised by the effort to get something meaningful out of it.

As someone else mentioned elsewhere in the responses, the price (and all the other hidden costs) are quite high relative to the competition ... and their toolchain stack is far simpler/more complete.

The hardware isn't a failure. The software toolchain is IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" Make the most powerful flops-per-watt machine. SUCCESS!"_

Hum not at all... Larrabee gets _destroyed_ by the competition in terms of flops-per-watt. Knights Corner is rated 8 GFLOPS/W at the device level (2440 GFLOPS at 300 W). For comparison Nvidia Tesla P100 rates 4× better: 32 GFLOPS/W (9519 GFLOPS at 300 W) and AMD Pro Duo rates ~6× better: 47 GFLOPS/W (16384 GFLOPS at 350 W although in the real-world it probably often hits thermal limits and throttles itself, so real-world perf is probably closer to 30-40 GFLOPS/W).

Also, if Intel wants to make Larrabee gain mindshare and marketshare, they need to sell sub-$400 Larrabee PCIe cards. Right now, everybody and their mother can buy a totally decent $200 AMD or Nvidia GPU and try their hands at GPGPU development. And if they need more performance, they can upgrade to a multiple high-end cards, and their code almost runs as is. But because Larrabee's cheapest model (3120A/P) starts at $1695 ([http://www.intc.com/priceList.cfm](http://www.intc.com/priceList.cfm)), it completely prices it out of many potential customers (think students learning GPGPU, etc).

<comment><USER9> _Larrabee gets destroyed by the competition in terms of flops-per-watt_

While I expect the graphics cards to have the edge in performance per watt for brute-force math, I'm surprised that the current GPU's would have _that_ large of an advantage. Are you sure you are comparing the same size "flops" for each?

And while it's in keeping with the article, I don't think lumping all the generations together as "Larrabee" makes sense when comparing system performance. While availability is still minimal, Knights Landing is definitely the current generation (developer machines are shipping), and as you'd expect from a long-awaited update at a smaller process size, efficiency is a lot better than older generations.

Here's performance data for different generations of Phi: [http://www.nextplatform.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/intel...](http://www.nextplatform.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/intel-xeon-phi-compare-table-1.jpg)

And here's for different generations of Tesla: [http://www.nextplatform.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/nvidi...](http://www.nextplatform.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/nvidia-tesla-lineup-1.jpg)

From these, the double-precision figures appear to be:

2016 KNL 7290: 3.46 DP TFLOPS using 245W == 14 DP GFLOPS/W.

2016 Tesla P100: 5.30 DP TFLOP using 300W == 18 DP GFLOPS/W.

I don't know if these numbers are particularly accurate (I think actual KNL numbers for the developer machines are still under NDA), but I think the real world performance gap will be something more like this than one approach "destroying" the other. If you are making full use of every cycle, the GPU's will win by a bit. If your problem requires significant branching, Phi won't be hurt quite as badly.

 _Also, if Intel wants to make Larrabee gain mindshare and marketshare, they need to sell sub-$400 Larrabee PCIe cards._

The interesting move Intel is making is to concentrate initially on KNL as heart of the machine rather than as an add-in card. This gets you direct access to 384GB of DDR4 RAM, which opens up some problems that current graphics cards are not well suited for. I think this plays better to their strengths: if your problem is embarrassingly parallel with moderate memory requirements, modern graphics cards are a better fit. But if you need more RAM, or your parallelism requires medium-strength independent cores, Phi might be a better choice.

 _But because Larrabee 's cheapest model (3120A/P) starts at $1695_

While it's true that Intel's list pricing shows they aren't targeting home use at this point, List Price may not be the best comparison. For a while last year, 31S1P's were available at blow out prices that beat all the graphic cards. In packs of 10, they were available at $125 each: [http://www.colfax- intl.com/nd/xeonphi/31s1p-promo.aspx](http://www.colfax- intl.com/nd/xeonphi/31s1p-promo.aspx).

It's true that even at that price they were not a great fit for most home users: they require a server motherboard with 64-bit Base Address Register support ([https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/Will-your- motherboard-...](https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/Will-your-motherboard- work-with-Intel-Xeon-Phi-490/)) and they require external cooling. But if you were willing to be creative ([https://www.makexyz.com/3d-models/order/b3015267f647354f96ff...](https://www.makexyz.com/3d-models/order/b3015267f647354f96ff04d809d10add)) and your goal was putting together an inexpensive many-threaded screaming number cruncher, the price was hard to beat.

<comment><USER10> Would _love_ to kick tires of one of those Knight's Landing cards.

It might be possible to pull off similar tricks as on normal Intel Xeons. I wonder what kind of memory controller it got. Does it for example have hardware swizzling and texture samplers accessible?

But we use exclusively Nvidia for our number crunching product. And since the relevant code is implemented in CUDA, we have an Nvidia platform lock-in. Other options are not even on the table, and will not be.

Intel would be very smart to offer a migration path from CUDA code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is a reminder to me that people are bloody critical of things that they don't really understand. Many products are killed, many research ideas never take off even if they're proven to work well. Ideas/products are often killed, not because they weren't great, but for a litany of other reasons having nothing to do with the awesomeness or usefulness of the idea. Products are killed b/c of politics, lack of a massive market, and most importantly poor execution. Even when things fail (research, products, otherwise), they often have a huge impact on the ecosystem. The product might fail (in this case, it really didn't), but the ideas will live on.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is fun to read, I'm always amazed as the disconnect between public presentations and the engineering reality of what's really going on.

For me, "Larrabee" died during it's first public demo in IDF 2009 [1]. At the time I was working on CUDA libraries at NVIDIA. I remember everyone watching the stream to see how much of a threat it would be. When we saw the actual graphics, everyone started laughing. "Welcome to the 1990s!" At that point it was obvious that Larrabee would not be a graphics threat to NVIDIA, it just had too far to go. It was not a discrete GPU killer.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-FKBMct21g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-FKBMct21g)

</comment><comment><USER13> A graphics card where the graphics core is actually an x86 application running on FreeBSD running on the "GPU"? That you could even log in to? That sounds out-of-this-world-amazing. What a shame it wasn't released like that.

<comment><USER14> Actually Xeon Phi is almost the same thing except it's not sold as GPU. You can ssh into it or run software rasterizer on it's cores and only thing missing would be host graphics driver.

<comment><USER15> It's also missing the texture units.

What I hear from my friend who works in the GPU industry, one of the main outcomes from the Larrabee research project was: It is possible to do most of graphical operations on a SIMDed general purpose CPU, with good performance. Everything except texture decoding, which really needs dedicated texture decoding silicon. And with texture units taking up 10% of the silicon, Intel really needs to decide if they want to sell it as a GPU or as a general purpose compute unit with 10% more cores. Intel chose the latter, and you can't really blame them, as you can sell dedicated compute units for more money.

Sony ran into the same problem with the PS3 and the cell. They originally designed it so the game developers could implement whatever rendering method they wanted, in software, on the SPUs. But the performance wasn't high enough, partly due to texture decoding taking up too much time. By the time it was discovered this was a problem, the cell was more or less finalises. Sony were considering adding a second cell to the console, to brute force through the problem, but eventually they asked Nvidia to hack together a traditional GPU.

<comment><USER16> What does "texture decoding" actually consist of here - mipmap+interpolation?

<comment><USER15> Nothing terribly complex.

For the typical case of 2D uncompressed textures with some kind of trilinear/anisotropic filtering enabled, you are basically just calculating 8 addresses based on texture coordinates and clamping and mipmap levels, doing a gathered load (and CPUs hate doing gathered loads). Remember to optimise for the case that each group of 4 addresses are typically, but not always right next to each other in memory.

Then you use trilinear interpolation to filter your 8 raw texels into a single filtered texel. With the exception of the gathered load, none of these operations is actually that expensive on CPUs, but shaders do a lot of these texture reads and it's really cheap to and faster to implement it all in dedicated hardware.

You can also put these texture decoders closer to the memory, so the full 8 texels don't need to travel all the way to the shader core, just the final filtered texel. And since each texture decoder serves many threads of execution, you have chances to share resources between similar/identical texture sample operations.

And while the texture sampler is doing it's thing, the shader core is free to do other operations (typical another thread of execution). It's not that the CPU can't decode textures, its just that CPU cores without dedicated texture decoding hardware can't compete with the hardware which has the dedicated texture decoding hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sold on the " __1\. Make the most powerful flops-per-watt machine. " success.

From my knowledge that claim only makes sense for the ever-shrinking domain of applications that haven't been ported to GPGPUs with _simpler_ cores. I also don't understand how the best "flops-per-watt" can be extrapolated from the fact that the Phi is used in top ranked TOP500 machines.

The Phi really just seems like an intermediate between CPUs and GPGPUs in the ease-of-programming vs. perf/watt pareto curve.

<comment><USER18> Here's the list: [http://www.green500.org/lists/green201606&green500from=1&gre...](http://www.green500.org/lists/green201606&green500from=1&green500to=100)

I see NVIDIA near the top at 4.7 GFLOPS/W and the old Xeon Phi at #44 at 2.4 GFLOPS/W which supports your argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tom is conflating two premises - As engineers the team has done some nice work, but as a product Larrabee has failed.

\- The perf/watt has not been competitive

\- For the most part it has not been loved by its users

\- The market share/penetration is small

\- There is no evidence sales have been material to Intel; In fact it's not even clear it's been profitable

On the upside, though the product has failed to date, it's not dead. Maybe the 2016 release can turn things around.

Also it's nice that AVX512 came out of Larrabee, but the last line claiming credit to a single person seems dubious.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yet, from the point of view of someone seating on the GDC Europe rooms hearing how Larrabee was going to change the world of game development, back in 2009, I think we can state it did fail.

<comment><USER21> > I think we can state it did fail.

I think we can state it did fail as a _graphics processor._

<comment><USER22> I think the point is the author is being EXTREMELY disingenuous when he claims Intel didn't even want to make a GPU.

<comment><USER23> Read again, the claims were very specific in regards to a _discrete_ GPU. Also, the author worked at Intel on Larrabee so unless you have proof otherwise I think it's best to give them the benefit of the doubt as to accuracy of the claim.

<comment><USER22> Did you not read the original post you responded to? They were ALL OVER this in the middle part of 2000 proclaiming larrabee was a discreet GPU.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/2580](http://www.anandtech.com/show/2580)

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/3738/intel-kills-larrabee- gpu-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/3738/intel-kills-larrabee-gpu-will-not- bring-a-discrete-graphics-product-to-market) [http://www.cnet.com/news/intels- larrabee-more-and-less-than-...](http://www.cnet.com/news/intels-larrabee- more-and-less-than-meets-the-eye/)

[http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Larrabee-New- Ins...](http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Larrabee-New-Instruction- set-gives-developers-first-glimpse-new-GPU)

<comment><USER23> Read the original post again. I don't care what the news sites said at the time, the guy who wrote the post literally worked on it.

Read the post carefully.

<comment><USER20> Do you know who is Michael Abrash?

GDCE 2009, "Rasterization on Larrabee: A First Look at the Larrabee New Instructions (LRBni) in Action"

[http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1402/Rasterization-on- Larrabee-...](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1402/Rasterization-on-Larrabee-A- First)

There were another Larrabee talks, but only this one is online.

The marketing message was not only about graphics, but how the GPGPU features of Larrabee would revolutionize the way of writing games.

<comment><USER23> Yes, I know who Abrash is -- I have one of his most famous books on my shelf. I'll say it again, the author's claims were _very_ specific:

 _in terms of engineering and focus, Larrabee was never primarily a graphics card_

Note the author says _primarily_ and is specifically talking about it in terms of _engineering_ and _focus_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > This page requires JavaScript to function properly.

Hint: For a page with nothing but text content you're doing it wrong. Even more so since this is a static site and you have to go to extra effort to break normal degradation of HTML content.

<comment><USER25> Once again someone down votes you because they disagree.

Personally I also browse with javascript disabled and thought the mandatory JS was silly. Hence I did view source, and lo and behold it is a tiddly wiki, with 2MB of html containing every article.

While github now has pages.github.com and the ability git pull/push your wiki (git clone email@example.com:username/project.wiki.git), I'm not sure how well that works for using on another web server or locally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Isn't this a case where Intel should not of talked about their internal R&D until they had a clear product & message to bring the market? I wonder if this lack of discipline cost Larrabee the correct narrative that it should have.

<comment><USER27> If I remember correctly, the idea at the time was to catch up to Nvidia/ATI (leapfrog them, really) in the discrete GPU market. Thus by announcing the technology long before it was ready, this would put a damper on their competitor's sales and lead. Kind of like an externalized Osborne effect.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _But Intel management didn 't want one, and still doesn't._

Why is this the case? It seems counter-intuitive given the recent Nervana acquisition (presumably to compete with NVIDIA)

<comment><USER14> This might have something to do with their patent dispute with Nvidia that cost them $1.6 billion back in 2011. Probably Intel still want (able to) compete with Nvidia on compute, but not graphics market.

<comment><USER29> Do intel integrated graphics suck because of patents?

<comment><USER30> Mostly it's because of the limited power budget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> O.K. fucking major rant below. Disclaimer I worked for an vendor selling large quantities pretty much anything in the HPC space at the time KNC came to market and I now work for a different (larger) HPC vendor.

      When I say "Larrabee" I mean all of Knights, all of MIC, all of Xeon Phi, all of
      the "Isle" cards - they're all exactly the same chip and the same people and the
      same software effort. Marketing seemed to dream up a new codeword every week,
      but there was only ever three chips:

          Knights Ferry / Aubrey Isle / LRB1 - mostly a prototype, had some performance gotchas, but did work, and shipped to partners.
          Knights Corner / Xeon Phi / LRB2 - the thing we actually shipped in bulk.
          Knights Landing - the new version that is shipping any day now (mid 2016).

I can kind of see what the author is getting at here but it's worth reminding general readers KNL is a wildly different beast from KNF or KNC.

1\. It's self hosting, it runs the OS itself/ there is no "host CPU".

\- Yes KNC ran it's own OS but it was in the form of a PCI-E card which still had to be put into a server of some kind.

\- Yes KNL is slated to have PCI=E card style variants but the self hosting variants are what will be appearing first and I honestly don't think the PCI-E variants will gain much if any market traction.

2\. It features MCDRAM which provides a massive increase in total memory bandwidth within the chip. Arguably this is necessary with such large core counts.

3\. Some KNL variants will have Intel's Omni-Path interconnect directly integrated which should further drive down latency in HPC clusters.

      Behind all that marketing, the design of Larrabee was of a CPU with a very wide
      SIMD unit, designed above all to be a real grown-up CPU - coherent caches,
      well-ordered memory rules, good memory protection, true multitasking, real
      threads, runs Linux/FreeBSD, etc.

Here's an interesting snippet, drop "Larrabee" from the above and replace it with "Xeon". I'm just wanting the point here that the Xeon and Xeon Phi product lines are only going to look more similar over time. For a while now the regular Xeons have been getting wider. Which is to say more cores and fatter vector units. The Xeon Phi line started out with more cores but is having to drive the performance of those cores up. Over time we're going to see one line get features before the other e.g. AVX512 is in KNL and will be in a "future Xeon" (Skylake). And it's widely rumored that "future Xeons" will support some form of non-volatile main memory, something not on any Xeon Phi product roadmap today. The main differentiator will be that Xeon products need to continue to cater to the mass market whereas Xeon Phi can do more radical things to drive compute intensive workloads (HPC).

      Larrabee, in the form of KNC, went on to become the fastest supercomputer in the
      world for a couple of years, and it's still making a ton of money for Intel in
      the HPC market that it was designed for, fighting very nicely against the GPUs
      and other custom architectures.

Yes at the time Tianhe 2 made it's debut it was largely powered by KNC and it placed at number 1 on the top 500.

Did KNC as a product make a lot of money for Intel? Probably not. Yes they shipped a lot of parts for Tianhe 2 but for other HPC customers, not so much. At the time putting a KNC card against a Sandy Bridge CPU it wasn't leaps and bounds faster. Yes you're always going to have to re-factor when making such a change in architecture but the gains just weren't worth it in most cases. Not to say there haven't been useful deployments of KNC that have contributed to "real science", but it was not a wild success by any measure.

As for "fighting very nicely against the GPUs and other custom architectures", I don't think so. When KNC got to the market Nvidia GPUs already had a pretty well established base in the HPC communities. Many scientific domains already had GPU optimized libraries users could pick off the self and use. Whilst KNC was cheaper than the Kepler GPUs on the market at the time it wasn't much cheaper. Again back to regular Xeons, for a cost/ performance benefit KNC wasn't worth it for a lot of people.

      Its successor, KNL, is just being released right now (mid 2016) and should do
      very nicely in that space too.

I do agree with this, KNL is going to do very well. There are whole systems being built with KNL rather than large clusters with some KNC or some GPUs.

      1. Make the most powerful flops-per-watt machine.

Not sure what is mean here, most efficient machine in the top 10? Tianhe 2 is not an efficient machine by any stretch of the imagination. For reference here's the top 10 of the Green 500 for when Tianhe 2 placed as number 1 on the Top 500.

[http://www.green500.org/lists/green201306](http://www.green500.org/lists/green201306)

      SUCCESS! Fastest supercomputer in the world, and powers a whole bunch of the
      others in the top 10. Big win, covered a very vulnerable market for Intel, made
      a lot of money and good press.

Yes KNC provides the bulk of the computing power for Tianhe 2 but at the time of writing of the above is number 2, not number 1. Secondly that is the ONLY machine in the top 10 that uses KNC AT ALL.

</comment><comment><USER31> Just yesterday ASRock announced a Xeon Phi x200 (Knights Landing) system. This is now using a main CPU socket instead of a PCIe extension card and it seems to support only a single LGA-3647 socket (that's a LOT of tiny legs). So ASRock took four of these, each taking half a U (Supermicro had similar formats with their Twins) and packed four into 2U.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for pointing this out. It's an interesting design: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/10553/asrock-rack- launches-2u4...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10553/asrock-rack- launches-2u4nf-x-200-knights-landing-xeon-phi-cpu)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Thinking of the Phi as a special-purpose part misses an important point: CPUs will not get much faster. Vector units will get wider and core count will increase. Programming for Xeon Phi gives you a view of what a CPU will be a couple years from now. Right now my laptop has 4 cores running 8 threads and the only reason it has exquisitely fast cores that dedicate large areas to extract performance from every thread (rather than investing all those transistors on something else) is because our software is built for ridiculously fast versions of computers from the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER14> I suppose a lot of ideas behind graphics on Larrabee end up in OpenSWR project. So anyone interested in scientific visualization might check it.

<comment><USER33> I think Larrabee was interesting because it had the potential to go the other way - it could emulate existing rasterization APIs decently but would allow for new realtime rendering approaches - like raytracing in to some sparse voxel tree structure for non-animated geometry - maybe do hybrid rendering where you would do deferred shading/rasterization for dynamic scene and then ray trace in to the tree for global illumination with static scene and similar stuff.

I'm sure emulating OpenGL on the CPU has it's uses outside of being a reference for drivers and such - but it's not really that exciting, GPUs are already excellent at doing that kind of rendering.

<comment><USER34> I also wish that had taken off; 3d-graphics via a software ray tracing engine would in a sense be a return to the way things worked in the 90's before hardware rendering, where every game had its own custom engine and developers were always trying crazy new things. In some sense, GPU hardware has gotten flexible enough that we're sort of back in that world again, but writing GPU code isn't quite the same as writing a renderer from scratch.

When it comes to ray-tracing in particular, as far as I know there really doesn't exist (except perhaps as research prototypes) any hardware platform that's great at ray tracing. CPUs are okay but they need more parallelism. GPUs are okay but (as far as I understand it) they aren't good with lots of branches and erratic memory accesses. It seems like KNC/KNL ought to be ideal for this kind of thing (and in fact, it appears a fair bit of effort has gone into optimizing Embree for Xeon Phi).

<comment><USER20> You can still do that kind of stuff, but on the GPU with geometry/compute shaders.

Now with Metal, DX12 and Vulkan GPU languages, maybe that is ever more approachable, specially in cards like Pascal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Larabee was a glimpse into the future. 10, 15 years from now, are we really going to be discretizing our computers into seperate CPUs and GPUs?

<comment><USER20> Sure we are, that is the path of the last say 5 years, even on mobiles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Only slightly related, but: why do all Intel consumer-oriented processors now feature an integrated GPU?

<comment><USER37> A simple answer would be to raise market share in the gpu market. Also a lot of non-gaming software uses the gpu for various tasks, even office and photoshop nowadays. But they do not need a full-fledged gpu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My comp sci professor has a good rule of thumb: "If I can't buy it on Newegg, it doesn't exist."

Searched for 'Xeon Phi' on Newegg just now and only desktop CPUs show up. 'GTX 1080' brings up 59 results.

</comment><comment><USER39> Ugh. This guy has been spruiking Intel for atleast a five years.

</comment><comment><USER40> Govt HPC buys.</comment>