Secrets of Pixar's inner circle - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-pixar12mar12,1,1507644.story?track=rss

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure it's a ceiling as much as it's a runway congestion problem."

\- I think a company with so many talented people has to find a way to make them feel ownership. Perhaps a mentor program that after so many years allows you to at least co-produce a movie.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah... Sorry guy, but the reason there's very little room at the top of Pixar's food chain for you is that you can't tell a better story than Brad Bird or Jon Lassiter. This viewer's opinion is that there is a light-years difference in quality between Pixar movies and dreck like "Horton". The latter is clearly designed only to separate parents from their money, by any means necessary - other than actually producing a worthwhile film, of course.</comment>


Tired of Sucking at Coding Interviews – What Else Can One Do? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Practicing is _very_ helpful. pramp.com is good for getting over the nerves and practicing the (approximate) format. For the actual problems, there's a lot of resources out there. Cracking the Coding Interview is not a bad place to start. If you really want to get good, do competitive programming. Read Laaksonen's Competitive Programming book, practice on cses.fi/problemset , codeforces.com , hackerrank.com , codechef.com , etc. If you have the time, study CLRS Introduction to Algorithms.

(not affiliated with any, just resources I enjoyed and found useful)

<comment><AUTHOR> Any reason you didn't mention Leetcode? I'm all over leet code right now.

<comment><USER2> I personally just hate leetcode for largely subjective reasons. Its problems tend to be poorly specified and uninteresting compared to the other places, editorials are spotty, and there's too much push to pay for a subscription for my tastes.

If you're into it though, I wouldn't push you to abandon it, whatever keeps you going is best (and I know at least one person I know has improved a lot there)</comment></comment></comment>


Unlike proprietary software, why is it difficult to sell Open source software - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> By "sell," I assume you mean "get people to use." (Few will pay for software that they can legally download, unless they are somehow convinced to donate some other way. Few will pay for support for software, especially if it is good, which means that it is intuitive and reliable enough to not require support.)

Some (definitely not all) open source software lacks the other 90% of the stuff people want, including good design (visual or otherwise), good documentation, etc. Many new features that commercial software has are important (it's not obvious because different users depend on different sets of those new features).

The exceptions exist (for example, Firefox is well-designed, and has lots of new features), but they are just that - exceptions. Try to find a good 3D modeling package that's open source. Blender you say? Not many in the gaming industry uses, and that's because it simply isn't competitive with 3ds Max.

Also, some people (myself included) have moral problems with the GPL, so they try to avoid using GPLed software whenever possible. (Things are getting easier for me because most of the open source software I use today is BSD or MIT licensed.)

<comment><USER3> I am unfamiliar with the moral problems people have with GPL. I have no personal interest in the GPL, but am just curious. For our education, would you elaborate on that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Support.

With a paid product, I know that I paid money and expect a level of support commensurate with that. I know that, if something goes wrong, I can pick up a phone and contact someone. The quality may not be great, but at least it exists.

With an open source product, that does not necessarily exist. I find myself searching through catacombs to find anyone that can respond to my requests. And immediate turnaround time? forget it. Even with the paid open source software, the turnaround time is terrible (take red hat as an example). Quite frankly, I dont think anyone who tried to sell open-source software really tried to solve the support problem.</comment>


We A/B Tested Our Employees' Lunch and the Results Were Astounding - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@amandoabreu/we-a-b-tested-our-employees-lunch-e20557ec8a2 <comment><USER2> I snorted I laughed so hard, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love how it ends.</comment>


Announcing Joyent Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.joyentcloud.com/2011/09/joyent-announces-the-new-joyent-cloud-sets-new-bar-for-cloud-analytics-performance-and-data-resiliency/

<comment><USER2> For the EC2/CloudX,Y,Z users here. Have you compared your cost with the cost of running your own cloud on top of dedicated servers from a traditional provider?

I know that with EC2 you can "follow" your requirements and start/stop instances, but even by considering a perfect predicting tool which would cut 50% of my instance requirements with EC2, I am still cheaper having 2 times more hardware than needed with my traditional provider.

I pay $150/month for the equivalent of a high memory extra large instance. I can ask to have them in different data centers all linked together within a private lan (VLAN). I look again and again, I never reach the point where it would be cheaper to run in the "public" cloud. I run my own cloud with KVM/Ganeti.

I think the cloud is nice if you really have a system which can follow your demand over the day/week but you need to be quite big for it to start to save you money. You can go a very long way on a single box...

<comment><USER3> If you want just 1 or 2 mid-sized servers running 24x7 with traditional software on them like an RDMS, AWS is almost entirely the wrong choice.

A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed to be particularly reliable.

The real power of AWS isn't the ability to stop and start cheap instances quickly, it comes from services like S3 and Elastic Load Balancing, and SimpleDB.

If you build your systems on top of these extremely reliable services, you can achieve uptime much greater than you can achieve with 1 or 2 standalone servers (whether they've got the word "cloud" in their name or not), while not spending the massive amounts on high availability or fault tolerance that you previously had to pay.

<comment><USER4> "A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed to be particularly reliable."

Source?

An AWS instance is simply an OS running on a virtualf (xen?) machine. On the largest instances you may in fact be the only virtual machine on the physical hardware.

Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of AWS? Your safety is just an illusion. Your MTTR is out the window. When you go down, youll have an outage that goes like this: "we'll be back in a day or two when I order new hardware and drive it to the colo. Also, the database will be time warping to the last backuP 24 hours ago."

Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly redundant and single fault tolerant.

<comment><USER5> > "A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed > to be > particularly reliable." > Source?

Reading the AWS EC2 forums for any length of time or launching your own EC2 instances into production and watching them fall over from time to time.

All arbitrary, but I don't think anyone that has deployed on EC2 with more than a handful of servers would ever describe it as an overly stable service.

> Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of > AWS? Your safety is just an illusion.

In theory, absolutely agree. It sounds like you were agreeing with the OP to be honest, but just getting pedantic about single-AWS instance vs single- dedicated instance in another hosting company.

Sure, best practices dictate trusting a single point of failure is not a good idea.

In practice, my dedicated deployments (at RimuHosting if that matters) are infinitely more stable than my EC2 deployments and I think that data point is worth _something_ \-- not going to bet the farm on it, but I'm also not going to treat my dedicated servers like I would flaky EC2 VMs.

> Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes > with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly > redundant and single fault tolerant.

You are agreeing with the EwanToo from what I can tell...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, so they are comparing to the OnDemand pricing of AWS, not including that 3-year reserved instances on AWS are somewhere in the ballpark of 48% cheaper, BUT, they have this footnote at the bottom of the pricing page that seems like a really interesting differentiating approach[1]:

        No Charge For Data Transfer Up To 20TB Per Month Per
        Account. 100TB free data transfer for customers over
        500GB memory

On AWS, 20TB == 2,000GB * $0.10/GB (avg) = $200

and I suppose if you have enough SmartMachines on lease that you are pushing 500GB+ total of memory in your account, they up that to 100TB of transfer.

It looks like overages are a fairly reasonable $0.08/GB[2]

I think we are finally witnessing bandwidth becoming a race-to-0 for big cloud providers and I love it (I know there have been prediction-papers here on HN before about how it will eventually become free or near-free, it is just interesting to see the different ways we can get there). Best of luck to Joyent and it's great to see another strong competitor in this area!

ASIDE: Anyone have a geographical map of the data center locations you can deploy in the Joyent Cloud? One of the big appeals of AWS is having decent global coverage and I am trying to find more information about that form their site with no luck at the moment...

UPDATE: For anyone interested, just got this back from the Joyent team about the location of the data centers:

      We launched today with two datacenters.  WEST is in
      Emeryville CA and SW is Las Vegas NV.

      Inside of my.joyentcloud.com you will have a choice of
      datacenters when provisioning a server.

[1] [http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing- comparison/smart...](http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing- comparison/smartos-linux/)

[2] <http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/smartmachines-2/options/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Performance claims and DTrace support aside, the costs are similar for instance-hours for low to medium-sized instances.

But completely different if you are doing more than 15GB of outgoing bandwidth: _"No Charge For Data Transfer Up To 20TB Per Month Per Account"_

[http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing- comparison/smart...](http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing- comparison/smartos-linux/)

</comment><comment><USER6> As their default (and quite interesting) offering is SmartOS, I'd like to ask if someone has some recent experience with (Open)Solaris networking. I still remember the day when it (especially its x86 incarnation) was renowned for having syscalls that were slow as molasses – IIRC, actually a big boon for the then-fledgling Linux.

How does it fare at memory allocation, especially under load? How good is their select successor (i.e. their equivalent to epoll/kqueue)?

<comment><USER7> As I recently discovered, you cannot run a software firewall of any kind inside a solaris container. Everything else about SmartOS seems quite great to me, but my evaluation term was limited.

<comment><USER8> Actually that is not the case. In SmartOS you have two options for networking. You can run a zone in "IP exclusive" mode which will give the zone full control over its networking stack. This means you can run a firewall or even change the IP addresses, etc from within the zone. SmartOS makes that apply to VMs as well. There are also anti-spoof mechanisms built into the OS to ensure that you dont get unfriendly neighbours.

Here is a rough overview: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris_Network_Virtualizat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris_Network_Virtualization_and_Resource_Control)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like a good competitor for AWS. I think as a customer it is always good to have some high quality competition amongst the vendors. This will push AWS to try to replicate or better the features being offered by them and also keep them from raising their prices too much.

The list of customers for the joyent cloud looks quite impressive. So this might already have been tested quite thoroughly by these customers and doesn't look like as if it is launching just now.

I think they should introduce a free tier like AWS's micro instance to allow ppl to test drive this new cloud.

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing/smartmachine- pri...](http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing/smartmachine-pricing/) -> 404.

<comment><USER11> This is a better link (not the comparison to EC2 pricing): <http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-2/smartos-linux/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a worse link to me, mostly because they don't include the "Joyent Cloud Advantages" section like in the EC2 comparison. Those are very relevant points, especially 20TB bandwidth per month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Their regular pricing page and their EC2 comparison page don't seem to match. One example - On the regular pricing page, XL has 32GB of memory, 760GB of disk, and costs $1.12 per hour. On their EC2 comparison page, in two places XL has 16GB of memory, 480GB of disk, and costs $0.64 per hour. In another place on that page it has 8GB of RAM and 240GB of disk and costs $0.64 per hour.

</comment><comment><USER13> Pricing page is 404. Cached here, though obscuring the lower end of the price range: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y7ZEmSC...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y7ZEmSCDbJQJ:www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing/smartmachine- pricing/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I was looking for details on SmartOS. What is it and what does it run?

<comment><USER15> SmartOS is the OpenSolaris fork.

<http://www.joyent.com/products/smartos/>

<https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live>

<comment><USER16> In addition, from what I know, Joyent has hired many of the original contributors to solaris and opensolaris (and now SmartOS).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does Joyent count inbound traffic as part of its bandwidth calculation or does it offer free like AWS ?

</comment><comment><USER18> So the prices are pretty much identical to Amazon EC2. Why would anybody choose an unknown player versus somebody very experienced like Amazon?

<comment><USER19> There are some notable names running on Joyent's infrastructure. They could have used AWS instead, but they didn't. I don't know if that means anything though, since there are odd ducks in every crowd.

One thing I like about Joyent is they're not trying to solve hard-to- impossible problems like Amazon (e.g. EBS), but rather realistic and immediate problems (e.g. guaranteed disk latency). For all EBS's promises, the latter is vastly more important to me; I've had few problems EBS would solve, and a truckload that higher-quality I/O would.

Also, those analytics are nothing to sneeze at. That's worth almost as much as the IO.

<comment><USER18> If you really care about low latency, get a dedicated server. You will even get better specs if you spend the same money. There are amazing deals out there, like this one:

<https://robot.your-server.de/order>

<comment><USER20> This is all desktop hardware. Its not the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Qemu-KVM + SPL + puppet + some monitoring? Yeah, Amazon should start looking for a PANIC-button. ^_^

Update: Oh, come on. I've clicked to the TECHNOLOGY link and what I saw instead of technology review is load of BS. SmartMachines? OK, even I know that one should market any crap with Smart or Easy or Eco or LowFat prefix in it, because, you now, I have a SmartMachine... OK, fine. But what about technology?

Instead of writing that you're building a solution based on fast, light- weight, low-overhead, in-kernel, native virtualization system and RedHat supported libvirt stack, that you're co-sponsoring and actively participating in development process, and here is our contribution and so on, I see loads of BS. KVM is faster than Xen? I know that, thank you. I have a KVM instances running on my Laptop. ^_^

You're using ZFS? Linux native port? FUSE? So, you're active developer and tester? Co-sponsor? You have hired or supporting active developers? Providing a feedback to community? No? You just trying to sell me something you called a SmartMachine, OK, fine. I don't buy it. ^_^

<comment><USER22> SmartMachines == OpenSolaris / SmartOS (their IllumuOS-based distribution).

Also, they are actively developing and co-sponsoring IllumOS (and are IMHO the only reason why it didn't die yet), so next time do some research before bashing on a good company.

<comment><USER21> Point taken, thank you!

So, if it OpenSolaris based, then nothing to see here. Community is too small. Who will write and test up-to-date drivers for all new hardware that vendors are pushing to the market each half-of-year?

<comment><USER23> Why should that matter for cloud hosting? If you wanted to be able to install OpenSolaris on random hardware it might matter. But this is a closed environment where you never see the underlying hardware.

<comment><USER21> If it will be a closed platform, it doesn't matter.

I had a lot of experience with Solaris (x86 only - people tried to run Informix/Oracle on a cheap hardware) starting from Solaris 7 and onwards. It was always a problem even to install it. And lack of working compiler makes things even worse.

Starting from Solaris 10 they did a lot of work to improve the overall experience, but too late - everyone migrated to Linux to run the same crap.

And I must say, that after it was installed and tuned it was running quite stable as a database server and it can deal with heavy loads, while similar Linux instances failed now and then. But it was 5 years ago. Modern Linux kernels can handle everything quite well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


iPhone 6S getting iOS 14 is like the Galaxy S6 getting Android 11 - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidauthority.com/ios-14-iphone-6s-android-1131739/ <comment><USER2> It's crazy to think supporting a five year old device is now considered ground-breaking. Windows did (does?) officially support devices fifteen years old. Desktop developers are only now starting to release apps that don't support Windows XP, released twenty years ago.

From a consumer perspective, it's crazy how often we're expected to replace mobile devices (even though the story now isn't as crazy as it was five years ago) and how much we shell out for them (even putting aside the monthly bills associated with them). Not to mention a PC was shared by the family and now every kid needs their own phone. Great for the economy but oh so wasteful.

<comment><USER3> Windows 10 can install on a typical 2005 PC? I'd be surprised if that's the case.

Anyway, the point of the article isn't that five years is all that long, it's that Android's two-year policy is despairingly short.

<comment><USER2> I believe so. The 32-bit variant, at least doesn't even use SSE2 acceleration, iirc.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/windows-10-specifica...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/windows-10-specifications)

1 GHz CPU, 1GB ram, 800x600 display, 32GB drive. Those are not 2005 specs, those were easily around in 2000.

<comment><USER4> Yes but Linux will run on these same specs, while actually being usable (including for web browsing) and even snappy at times. In fact, you could even halve the amount of RAM and still be quite fine. (And 2000 is definitely pushing it. Mid-2000s seems more likely.)

<comment><USER5> I run Ubuntu on 2017 PC (8700K, 32GB RAM, admittedly, HDD), and it is nowhere near snappy. Boot takes over 2mins until apps actually start to show up, starting new Terminal instance takes over 3sec (if not over 5). Regular programs like VS Code or Firefox are about the same as on Windows.

<comment><USER6> Software are more bloated than 3 or 5 years ago. Performance with a HDD will suffer as everything has to be loaded to RAM before the CPU runs the code. Put a SSD in this machine and for most tasks your experience will be the same as with a brand new PC.

<comment><USER5> That would contradict a claim about 2005 machine being snappy with Linux. 2005 machine probably does not have an SSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> compiler-guy The thing that holds most android manufacturers back is that their chipset vendors don't update their drivers for newer kernels.

So the next version of android comes along and requires a newer kernel, and the phones built around these chipsets can't be updated.

The chipset folks see no new revenue for forward-porting their hacked up kernels and drivers, and therefore aren't interested in updating.

That is the problem the Android ecosystem needs to solve.

Because Apple controls the full stack, they have no problem forward porting any custom changes that they need. It's all the same codebase.

<comment><USER7> This might be a contributing issue, but it seems this is far from the only reason why Android has such shit upgrade lifetimes.

Android itself doesn't have a strict requirement for an updated kernel. It will typically run fine on the original kernel tree the SoC launched with.

OnePlus occasionally does this, they are currently rolling out Android 10 for the OnePlus 5 and 5T, based on the original kernel tree. That's a 3 year old device (and I hate that I'm using a 3 year old device as my best example)

It seems like most Android vendors simply choose not to offer extended updates.

<comment><USER8> Android device manufacturers make their money when you buy a new device. Apple, on the other hand, makes money when you buy apps (in addition to making money on device sales I'm sure). They have an incentive to make sure that the latest OS runs on as many devices as possible, so that developers can release their apps to a wider audience, and so that Apple can make more money. Google wants apps to run on as many devices as possible, so that's why they bend over backwards to support older devices with their SDK. Samsung doesn't have any incentive to update the Galaxy S6 since that won't bring them any additional revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you bought an iPhone 6S Plus 128GB at launch, it cost you $949. $189.80 per supported year so far.

If you bought a Pixel 1 128GB at launch, it cost you $749. $249.67 per supported year over 3 years.

(The iPhone 6S Plus has same 1080p resolution as the standard size Pixel phone, which is why I use them as the base, but for folks wondering...)

If you bought a Pixel 1 XL 128GB at launch with the higher resolution screen, it cost you $849. $283 per supported year over 3 years.

<comment><USER10> I like that the updates are offered. I wonder how usable these older devices are after updates.

I have an iPhone 8 which hasn't been usable since the last update. Most functions work but the performance has taken a nose dive. Some apps crash randomly.

I would not use that device as my daily phone.

<comment><USER9> I have an iPhone 7 I bought for $110 recently on Swappa to mess around with iOS development. It runs the current iOS 13 version quite well.

I'd suggest checking your battery health and maybe doing a reset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm unsure whether I'll ever forgive Google/Verizon for only offering 2 years of support for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. After all the promises of "this is our flagship phone and we'll absolutely support it!" and then... only 2 years?

I've my issues with Apple like anyone else, but at least my phone is supported for a reasonable amount of time - 5 years or so?

</comment><comment><USER12> This is one of the many reasons why I switched to the iPhone after 7yrs on Android, and I'm also getting my mother a iPhone as soon as possible.

My mom is used to android phones, its complex but she's understood the basic design language and can navigate the phone easily. Whenever she needs help though, its a massive struggle for me to do tech support over phone / video call. Each android phone is different, and we've never had the same phone, and we both get frustrated because the menus and the steps needed to modify settings is different.

With an iPhone though, regardless of the iPhone model, I can send her a screen recording that she can easily replicate on her phone. Consistency is extremely valuable for a non power-user, and only iPhones offer such consistency over multiple generations of iPhones, and iOS updates. Yes there are changes, such as the switch from TouchId to FaceId in iPhone X, but they are incremental, as compared to the confusing experience of switching from a Samsung device to a OnePlus or a Xiaomi device.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wait.. Apple support a 5 year old phone? Why the heck am I still using an Android device? I have a Galaxy S8, while I'm still lucky enough to get the occasional security update, I won't be getting the latest Android release (at least officially), although the CPU in it is probably perfectly more than capable of running Android 11.

I have been considering getting a new phone and I keep eyeing up the iPhone 11 Pro, mostly because of the longevity of available software updates. Secondly, with an Apple I'm not subject to waiting for the carrier to push out the update.

</comment><comment><USER14> Companies don't backwardly support old phones so they can ship new ones. Planned obsolescence.

However, Apple rightly foster "brand loyalty" (awful phrase), by doing exactly the opposite. And with the knowledge that people sell phones second hand, thus increasing Apple's market share, and future customers.

It sounds like Samsung could learn a lesson or two.

A phone does have a shelf life though (4g, 5g...), but it's not as short as these companies would like you to believe.

<comment><USER6> UMTS (3G) is still up and running in many locations, sometimes HSDPA (3.5G) is faster than congested/low signal LTE and it still is totally adequate even for video streaming.

Those are early 2000's technologies which telcos are upgrading from to increase subscriber density, but on the customer optics, they are mostly equivalent to 4G.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This makes the old 4" SE still viable too! Apple was still selling them until late last year – it's a fantastic little phone (with an obsolete camera) – and you can get them refurbished for about $100. Highly recommended if you want to hold and use your phone with one hand comfortably, or forget if it's in your pocket!

<comment><USER16> It's been running iOS 14 quite well. Such a great phone!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The worst part of Android which Apple said screw you to was that each Samsung phone and others has to released with a firmware bundle specific to a carrier for each country (Orange/Vodacom etc ...).

</comment><comment><USER18> It's true, Apple products age very well. I don't like iOS much, I hate its restrictions, but this is the number one reason for why I like Apple's products.

I'm a previous Android user, my iPhone 8 is almost 3 years old and I'm thinking of keeping it for another year or 2. I also have 2 Macbook Pro laptops at home from 2012 and 2015 respectively and I actually prefer them over the 2019 model from work. And a first generation iPad Pro (2015) that's better than what I see on the market for Android.

Was just thinking of getting a Samsung tablet, but this is making me reconsider. All of my Apple products still work and are kept up to date.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'll be honest. It's true that it makes Android look a bit bad, at least the ecosystem. But this only matter in the iOS world, where the the whole park always move to the latest version, and you're required to get the latest version. Because on android, you can still download apps from the PlayStore for an Android KitKat. On iOS, if you're 2 versions behind, your device is getting pointless.

<comment><USER20> The App Store still supports older iOS builds.

<comment><USER21> I have a first generation iPad and the App Store will still allow me to download compatible apps. The Kindle app still allows me to download purchased books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I first bought an iPhone (iPhone 5, I was a slow learner), Android's track record with updates was terrible but Google/ Samsung/ etc said it was going to get better and promises were made. I was skeptical and bought the iPhone. Every year since then, it seems like more promises and efforts get made by the Android crowd but it's never gotten more than marginally better and only for the top end phones.

There are other reasons I don't use Android, but this was very distinctly the single reason I bought iOS initially and I've never regretted it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Almost five years ago I got a OnePlus Two when it was released and about the same time my then work gave me a new iPhone 6 (unrequested by me, and when they appeared they told me I had to take it).

I still use that OP2 as my daily driver, now with LineageOS 17.1 (Android 10, the current version) installed on it. It's not blazing fast but the battery is at 80% capacity and it otherwise works well (and has a 3.5mm jack).

This obviously is the enthusiast option, but the first OnePlus had Cyanogenmod as the factory installed OS on there. If their relationship had continued and Cyanogen hadn't imploded it's quite possible that the OP2 would have the latest build on there officially as LineageOS is what Cyanogen became. Unfortunately there are no builds of 17 for the OP1.

That iPhone of the same vintage? I gladly gave it back when it was stuck on the then just-outdated iOS 12 and there wasn't much of an obvious future for it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Google updated the original Pixel to Android 10, which was nice because that was beyond stated major updates period. That was followed by a single security update before it was abandoned.

I don't understand why they wouldn't keep issuing security updates when they already did the hard part of the major update.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd sure appreciate it if Android phones got five years of support. Right now my GS8+ is relegated to quarterly security updates only, and even _that_ is a pretty big achievement in the Android world.

It's probably time that I upgraded it, but nothing _new_ even appeals to me anymore due to nearly all phones ditching the headphone jack, even the phablets. The "newest" phone I can find that ticks all the boxes I want (wireless charging, headphone jack, expandable memory slot) would have to be a regular S10, which is over a year old at this point.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you think that a smartphone should be supported for much longer than 5 years, consider Librem 5 [0] or Pinephone [1].

[0] [https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/)

[1] [https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/](https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/)

<comment><USER27> Knowing basically nothing about either of these, I'm super curious as to if either company will exist in 5 years. I've set myself a reminder and am looking forward to the result.

<comment><USER26> You do not need those companies for the software support. You only need upstreamed drivers for Linux kernel for the hardware. This is what these companies are doing and Android doesn't.

Similarly, my laptop from 10+ years ago works flawlessly With Debian 10.

<comment><USER27> Sure, but it's nice to have an active company for repairs, replacement parts, support, etc.

It'll certainly keep running without a company backing it, but there have been so many similar initiative, I'm personally curious how this one will turn out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's still not even close to the oldest PC Windows 10 supports. I've found Windows 10 to be happy on ~any PC with more than one core, 4+ GB of RAM, and, most important, an SSD.

<comment><USER29> I still think the SSD requirement doesn't make sense.

RAM is cheap, and XP/win7 worked well without HDD, so I don't understand why SSD matters.

<comment><USER30> Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer (after accessing remote systems over the network). It usually becomes the bottleneck after increasing RAM for most users, in my experience. The bus that transfers data from your hard drive to the CPU is _much_ faster than what many spinning disks can actually manage. Address that, and many performance issues go away and you approach the essential limit of your system (bus speeds).

Of course, I say this primarily from the perspective of a developer, where hard drive access is frequent when building systems. But a lot of workloads are similarly HDD dependent, but maybe not to the same extreme.

<comment><USER29> > Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer

I guess the SSD is also slower than the RAM, so generally, storage is always slower. Ethernet/wifi is generally as fast as a HDD, in order of magnitude.

There are many possible ways to avoid accessing the HDD, by buffering things and storing them on ram as often as possible. If HDD worked well on windows 7/xp/linux desktops, there are no credible arguments why it would not work properly on windows 10.

Again I would say the problem is Wirth's law, which here easily benefits SSD. At one point, for an OS like windows is becoming so much complex that it becomes just impossible to optimize things appropriately for something else than a HDD. Backward compatibility and hardware compatibility might be one source of the problem, but I'm sure there are other things at play.

I'm suspecting that in the end, the hardware people and people at microsoft decided to abandon the idea of having an OS that works well on a HDD, because the SSD industry would obviously benefit from this.

Wirth's law has completely replaced Moore's law, in my view. I say this over and over, but when climate problems will cause economic problems, computing will return to an era of lightweight software and hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can confirm, that even on beta 1, it runs really, really, really well on the 6s. I wonder if they rewrote all of the UI in swift or just really cleaned up the libraries because the perceived speed, that thing makes a end user device feel fast because it quickly moves you from on screen to the next when you command it to, is improved over 13.5. I can also confirm that it runs really well on an ipad (5 i think) with the same generation SoC, though I have seen more bugs with things like widgets. In my limited testing, all of the apps I run often work, i love that it tells me when an app is trying to use network discovery and allow me to block it. I might install it on my daily use phone by beta 2 its so good.

</comment><comment><USER32> That is the single reason I switched to an iPhone. I don't want to pay US$800 for a phone that will stop being supported after 2, 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Even with a phone that old, Apple is still sending it the latest iOS 14 > features, which will allow people still holding onto that device to use it > for at least another year.

I'm running an iPad 3 with iOS9 and a OnePlus 3 running Android 9 that I bought off Craigslist for $200. I know it's like driving a 20 year old Corolla, but does lack of the latest OS make a device unusable? If my current car worked I wouldn't buy a new one to get auto distance cruise control.

I haven't found features on smartphones very compelling probably since 2015. Fingerprint sensor is nice, more speed is nice, but the complexity of what I use it for isn't that significant.

</comment><comment><USER34> One of the central tenets of Apple's marketing since forever is that price != value, and this is the manifestation of that idea. You might be paying more for an iOS device, but unlike Android ones, it maintains its value for years on.

</comment><comment><USER35> Even better iPad Air2 was released a year earlier than iPhone 6S and it's getting iPadOS 14; it's like Galaxy Tab 3 Lite which was released with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and never got even a single OS upgrade getting Android 11.

</comment><comment><USER36> Little-known fact:

As part of the "Android Enterprise Recommended" program, some Android devices (such as rugged devices) receive FIVE years of updates.

Unfortunately they are all very expensive and most of these devices are not standard phones.

<comment><USER37> Hmm, according to this page[1], google pixel 1 has the android enterprise recommended seal, but it seem to be out of support after 3 years. Last guaranteed security update is October 2019 according to this page[2].

[1] [https://androidenterprisepartners.withgoogle.com/device/#!/1...](https://androidenterprisepartners.withgoogle.com/device/#!/15)

[2] [https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en](https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en)

<comment><USER36> Pixel 1 is not a rugged device

<comment><USER37> Yeah, but which one of those rugged devices that has five years of support? The page doesn't provide that information, and if we use the "android enterprise recommended" filter, it listed pixel phones that obviously don't have 5 years of support. Or are all those devices marked as "rugged" actually got 5 years of support? I tried going to some of the listed rugged device manufacturers website and they don't seem to indicate how long they'll going to support their device (unless the information is hidden somewhere).

<comment><USER36> It was mentioned here: [https://9to5google.com/2018/09/05/google-android- enterprise-...](https://9to5google.com/2018/09/05/google-android-enterprise- recommended-rugged/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I much prefer Android over iOS, but this is the only reason I switched to an iPhone 11 last year.

</comment><comment><USER39> iPhone SE (1st gen) will get iOS 14, too. "Be still, my heart."

<comment><USER40> What's interesting is the iPadOS supports A8-based iPads like the Air 2 and the Mini 4, while the new iOS does not support any A8-generation devices like the 6/6+.

<comment><USER16> I believe the iOS 13 cutoff was mostly a function of onboard RAM. (iPhone 6/6+ had a fairly anemic amount for what was being expected of them.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The ability to install a custom OS like LineageOS again gives the advantage back to android

<comment><USER42> Spot on! Coincidence: my Samsung S6 is on LineageOS 17.1 since May - that is, Android 10 - and despite being an unofficial build, I've got everything covered - save a few minor glitches. Before that, it was on the last official update (7.0).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sigh .... as an Android user this really hurts.

<comment><USER43> Does it though? Most android users I know don't care how recent their OS is. Most Apple users I know don't care how recent their OS is. Most people I know don't update their OS because then they have to update a bunch of other stuff too.

<comment> t-writescode The defining reason for my original switch back to iOS from Android was lack of confirmation that a security update would be released to my phone.

It absolutely impacts the reasoning for some iPhone and Android users.

edit: added words to the last sentence

<comment><USER43> I think it's a very tiny number of user though. Most users don't care about a security update and many actively avoid them. A phone updating all the time is seen by many to be a bug, not a feature. If my car was constantly nagging me to take it into the shop to be optimized, I'd be pretty annoyed. If it was taking itself to the shop and coming back telling me I now needed to update my seat belts in order to work with it's newest updates I'd be further annoyed.

I switched from iPhone to Android because I end up breaking my phones after about two years and I can't be paying more per annum for a phone than for a car. I need an email client, web client, maps and sometimes a camera for taking a reference photo. It's astounding to me that the cost of meeting those needs seems to be increasing over time instead of decreasing.

We've seen over time how Apple uses software updates to aggressively force new hardware purchases. The latest OS doesn't support version X of the software, and more often than not your device doesn't support OS version Z so open up thy wallet and get the latest hardware. This is precisely the reason people are terrified of updating their software. It goes from working to not working. This impacts my reasoning for NOT buying Apple hardware.

EDIT: You know what, I change my mind. This gains some respect from me for Apple. I hate phones in general and I'm just grumpy.

<comment><USER44> I don't think your car comparison is a fair one. You don't see your iPhone nag you to take it to an "Apple shop." They usually update while you sleep.

My Tesla does the same thing, it's a car that literally gets software updates while I sleep. And it's AMAZING. I get new features (sometimes a new alarm system, one time a dash cam system, another time Spotify and once it made the car actually faster) for free! There's no taking it to the shop or nagging or anything. This is an amazing feature.

On the android side you literally have phones that don't get critical security patches - that's the scariest type of "it doesn't work anymore so you need to go buy new hardware" because you don't even know you're at risk.

Android devices not getting OS updates after two years, especially $800 android phones, is obscene. There's no way to defend that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> And yet, cue the armchair commentators about how Apple tries to hobble your hardware to make you buy a replacement.

<comment><USER46> I hear this conspiracy theory so often from non-technical people. I think what's going on is that obviously this isn't being done intentionally, but rather each new release is mainly written for and performance tested on the newest Apple devices (not to mention obvious hardware differences like CPU instructions/speed/cache size/memory). Apple might test that everything works, but they're not on these older devices 24/7 that they'll notice slight degradations. Also, devices are not uniform. On some devices the flash memory has been written to countless times and degraded. Other people are running tons of crapware or have the storage full to the brim. Finally there's always going to be some psychological suggestion going on: if I tell you to look for a certain thing, you'll be more likely to notice it, real or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I used Android phones for several years before switching to an iPhone 8 two years ago. I think the major reason why manufacturers don't care to provide updates is because they don't expect those phones to last more than 2 years. It's not a joke. I've had some mid-range to expensive Android phones (HTC, Samsung, Motorola) and none of them lasted more 2 years. Whereas my wife's 6 year old iPhone 5s is still working! How do you explain that? Every Apple devices I've owned so far has been incredibly reliable and held their value really well. My wife's 6 year old Macbook air with 4 gigs of RAM still works fine and runs the latest Mac OS! I don't think I can get that level of support from any other vendor.

</comment><comment><USER48> The fact that Samsung won't even provide Android 10 for my Note8 should be criminal, even by their policy of only updating their devices for two "major" revisions. They shipped it with Android 7 when Android 8 was already out.

</comment><comment><USER49> Given the harm caused by cybercrime, plus the increased police work, governments really ought to make a minimum duration of security updates mandatory.. Phones are already required to meet a raft of various regulations.

</comment><comment><USER50> That, and supported battery replacement from the oem is why I recently switched from Google Nexus and Pixel phones to an iPhone 11.

<comment><USER51> I called Motorola support once to ask about a battery replacement for a Moto G (3rd gen). They told me it was impossible and effectively that I should buy a new phone.

<comment><USER43> [https://www.amazon.com/MAXBEAR-Li-Polymer- SNN5965A-Replaceme...](https://www.amazon.com/MAXBEAR-Li-Polymer- SNN5965A-Replacement- Motorola/dp/B07QW1KLBW/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=moto+G3+battery&qid=1593028123&sr=8-3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's been surprisingly easy to support various Apple devices.

I think the notch and home-screen-bar layouts were a bit tricky but they did have APIs in place and it was OK.

The biggest issue really was the 32-bit to 64-bit hardware transition; I remember seeing weird graphical issues because floating-point results were slightly different with float vs. double.

</comment><comment><USER53> Has anyone done a comparison to see when iOS 14 features were introduced into Android? I believe picture in picture works on the S7 (which was introduced 4 months after the 6S).

Normally I'd feel a bit bummed about missing features and long term support is a problem but there wasn't much that was new to Android.

</comment><comment><USER54> Nice work Apple. My 6S is having problems†, but I don't want to let it go. Headphone jack and lack of biometric scanning.

† Battery is shot and lightning connector bent from their impractical dock I fancied in years past. _Very_ difficult now to get the perfect angle to allow charging.

<comment><USER55> I guess the jacks need a clean-up after sometime. My lightning jack was not holding the charging cable anymore and I was super desperate to lose access to the phone during Holidays.

I went to an Apple Store and they just cleaned-up for me (walk-in). I bet the same applies to the headphone jack ;)

<comment><USER54> My phone's port is bent from use of these docks:

[https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone- lightnin...](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightning- dock-white)

It looks good but after a few years destroys the port due to lack of support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I often compose music on the go in GarageBand on my iPhone.

I own several pairs of _extremely_ high quality and highly accurate headphones, and; no - I don't want to carry an adapter around for headphones that _prevents charging_ while headphones are plugged in. That's obviously logistically a no go for anyone performing live with an iPad. I'd never want to rely on battery power live.

Even if I hadn't invested in my audio gear and headphones specifically so much, the latency on Bluetooth has made it a non option forever - unless I buy one of the select few W1 certified Beats units, which then is just an additional expense.

Apple does not currently offer, and it seems that they have no interest in offering, a phone that I will buy in the future. I couldn't believe they pulled the headphone jack on the SE2, it seemed like the last 'fuck you' to the audio content creators they've claimed to support forever.

iOS 14 support on iPhone 6S means Apple keeps me as an iPhone user for maybe another year.

I will probably be downgrading to a dumbphone and an old, flash-drive modded iPod gen 3 or 4.

</comment><comment><USER57> I have a beater iphone 5s around to stream podcast and music while I'm doing yard work. Works great! pretty smooth OS UI..

Can't say the same about any Andorid phones from the same era.

Looking forward to this new era of Apple ARM chips in desktops!

</comment><comment><USER58> Love how my old Galaxy S6 is stuck on ancient Android 7. And it's the verizon version too, so I can't unlock the bootloader. Perfectly capable device, what a shame.

Switched to iPhone SE a while ago because of this.

</comment><comment><USER59> I found a big difference in application and app store support for older versions. You need to keep updating the iPhone to the newest version of iOS because if you don't, all the apps will be undownloadable. When they stop updating it, it's toast.

I had an Android Gingerbread (2.3) phone for a while when KitKat was out, and I had lots of software to download. Then I updated to one on Marshmallow (6.0) and it had plenty of software and probably still does. I'm not sure how much software is still available that works on Nougat (7.0.1) on the S6 all the way through Android 10, but I was really disappointed that I couldn't even keep the iPhone 4S alive as a toy because all the old software was gone.

However, it's lame that Google drops security updates so early.

<comment><USER60> The minimum iOS version supported for most apps is iOS 11,sometimes even iOS 10.

<comment><USER59> Yes but the old versions disappear more quickly. So if they decide to upgrade to requiring 13, they don't leave an old version available.

<comment><USER61> Yes you can. Apple will allow you to download the "last compatible version" going back to iOS 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> One of the reasons I left Android for iOS was just this issue. 2 years of updates, then you're expected to purchase a new device. My iPhone 11 I expect to have for many years. Hopefully 5+.

</comment><comment><USER63> Size is important and that is something Apple should have deal with from day one. It miss the big phone time and now it miss the small phone time. Really want to have a small one.

</comment><comment><USER64> You can still install Linux, FreeBSD and FreeDOS on an old PC.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h And if phones used UEFI (or openfirmware or whatever), you could do just as well there (subject to driver support, but that's varied on PC, too). The absurd lack of standards in phone bootloaders and device trees is killing us.

<comment><USER26> You will probably be interested in Librem 5 or Pinephone.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Given that I own a Pinephone, you would guess correctly:D

I'm having trouble finding out whether this truly helps though; do either of those have a bootloader/firmware that provides device tree info to the booted OS, or are they still relying on the booted system to have its own device tree to describe the hardware?

EDIT: [https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/devicetree/usage- mode...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/devicetree/usage- model.html#history) _implies_ that u-boot can probably feed a device tree file to Linux at boot time?

EDIT2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_tree) says, "As an example, Das U-Boot and kexec can pass a device tree when launching a new operating system.", so yeah it looks like that would work! Sweet:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I think that no one in the comments recalled that the last times that older iPhones got the last updates, they became slower with reduced artificially reduced battery life.

So somehow, despite getting updates, old iPhones were becoming less functional and users would get the feeling that they have to change it for a shiny new recent more powerful iPhone!

<comment><USER30> The battery life wasn't artificially reduced, it was naturally reduced by years of use and charge cycles. Apple should have done a better job of communicating why they slowed down the systems, and perhaps made it an option rather than just doing it, but having had devices that shutdown because of the battery (while it still had a charge, but was not capable of providing power to the CPU running at full-speed) I'd have preferred slow downs to random shutdowns.

The latter makes the device unreliable and unusable, the former makes it reliable and _maybe_ unusable for some applications. It's also rectifiable by replacing the battery (which I've done on several iPhones myself, and used stores for others just for the convenience). That last part is what Apple _should_ have communicated to people. We did that with my dad's old iPhone 6 and it went from "slow but usable" to "like brand new and snappy".

EDIT: A note, the device I had that did that to me was a laptop with a spinning disk hard drive. When the battery started failing the laptop was fine until I hit the GPU (which was often, I was in grad school and doing a lot of graphics programming). Plugged in there were no issue, but on battery it'd bring the system down when I ran anything that made the GPU and CPU run close to full-speed. Fortunately I was able to get the data off, unfortunately I'd pretty well fucked the system before I realized why it was happening (so it happened a few times) and ended up just replacing the whole laptop rather than just getting a new battery.

<comment><USER65> Indeed, you are right, they did not reduce the battery level but reduced the performances after the update.

So before the update, your phone was reasonably fast. A new phone/os version comes out, you have an automatic update, and then your phone will be slower to do the tasks that it was doing well before.

So, as an user what will be you conclusion? If you are not even aware that performance slow down is due to the update, you will think "my phone become older, I need to buy a more recent one!".

For memory:

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

"Apple Confirms It Degrades Your Old iPhone's Performance"

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple- iph...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple-iphone-kill- switch-ios-degrade-cripple-performance-battery/#7dfd1fd116a8)

And to be remembered, they were fined for that by the French regulator:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> The Android update model is very different from the iOS model since many Android vendors only support their devices for a short time, often no more than 2-3 years where Apple provides updates for a much longer period. This is offset by the fact that the core of Android is free software, on top of which you can - but do not have to - install Google-proprietary parts. I choose not to install those parts since I prefer to keep my data (mostly) to myself.

When Apple says "that's all, folks" they mean it - the device will no longer get updates. When Samsung says "that's all folks" the user can install one of the alternative distributions and continue to use the device.

I'm using a Galaxy SIII - using it right now in fact - with Android 9 more or less _because I have not updated it to v10 (the current version of Android) yet_. I might upgrade it, then again I might not, the thing works fine on v9. For reference, this phone was launched in 2012 (3 years before the iPhone 6s) with Android 4.0 and got official updates to 4.4. It then got updates through Cyanogenmod, later through LineageOS. It is still updated OTA (as in 'over the air', like when it was new). Once Android 11 comes around it'll probably be ported to the SIII, the limiting factor tends to be driver support.

[1] [https://www.xda-developers.com/developers- android-10-samsung...](https://www.xda-developers.com/developers- android-10-samsung-galaxy-s-ii-galaxy-note-3/)

<comment><USER67> _When Samsung says "that's all folks" the user can install one of the alternative distributions and continue to use the device._

The problem is that a tiny percentage of users actually do that. It leaves the rest vulnerable to any security issues that are found after the last update.

<comment><USER66> That is a matter of user education comparable - but not equal - to what is keeping 'the year or Linux on the desktop' always somewhere in the future. The difference is that LineageOS (et al) is more or less identical to (the better) vendor-supplied distributions while Linux is a different operating system, not just a different distribution. Once installed something like LineageOS is just as easy to keep up to date as vendor-supplied distributions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> It used to be Apple was criticized for dropping support for phones too early. Now, they're still supporting the iPhone 6S, a phone from 5 years ago. Did Apple change their policy due to criticism, or have they honed their tech to improve support for older devices?

<comment><USER69> Apple beats Android in the smartphone space but Windows has a much stronger desktop support record

<comment><USER70> I think that's fair. Big Sur support is limited to 2014 iMacs and later, which is a shame because my late 2012 iMac is absolutely fine for home and business use still.

<comment><USER21> Intel released Haswell in 2013. Big Sur probably requires features introduced with it, such as AVX2, new low power states, increased GPU execution units, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Those updates have a price though [0], Android phones sure have their issues, but I never heard something about Google slowing down Pixel phones after updates. Moreover, if your Android device is not supported anymore, you can still opt for LineageOS, with iPhones you're pretty much fucked up.

0: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724)

<comment><USER72> Since you keep posting that link, I don't think it's the smoking gun that you think it is.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT208387)

<comment><USER71> I'm well aware of this, but I guess my point was: it's not just black and white like many people wanted to picture it in this thread, I use an iPhone 6S myself.</comment></comment></comment>


What happens when you don't use an Adblocker - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/ddlhwx/what_actually_happens_in_the_background_when_you/ <comment><USER2> This is a great way for the average joe to visually see something happening happening in the background beyond the Networking tab in developer panel.

Now, if only I can find a visual 'What happens when you use Chrome' post.</comment>


Ask HN: Does your company allow Hackathons? - <AUTHOR> Our company does not and I'm trying to get a sense of how common/uncommon this is.
Reasons given by leadership:
1) It is a lot of time (and therefore money) to not put towards roadmap items / things that "will never get used"
2) It creates dissonance between Eng and other teams (eg why don't the other teams get a day to do events like this?  And of course, to suggest involving the other teams would invoke #1)
3) Though they have heard arguments that Hackathons might be good for culture building, they "honestly don't see the connection between a hackathon and culture building"
I have never heard of a company outright saying "Absolutely not, we will not have a Hackathon", so I'd be curious to hear if any of you have. <comment><USER2> I guess the reasons could depend on many factors. However, my past experience with employers is that they wanted to participate in hackathons and community meetups in order to 1) stay up-to-date with what is new, 2) cultivate a relationship with people that are passionate about building, 3) give back to the community from which they derive benefit, 4) make space for ingenuity and creative thinking, and 5) Recruit/collaborate with the best candidates and companies.

While it is true that many of the projects that result from a hackathon are not going into production, in my opinion the learning of new tech, the exercise in fast-paced collaboration, and the fun factor of building obsurd things and sparking creativity do have a value that a company shouldn't shut the door on.</comment>


Facebook rejects female engineers' code more often - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/2/15517302/facebook-female-engineers-gender-bias-studies-report <comment><USER2> I don't think code reviewers are looking at the gender of the committer and reaching for their scrutiny glasses. Other than the rank issue mentioned, it's fully possible that the code submitted may have co-incidentally been of lower quality in the window sampled. This has no bearing to the author's gender.

A similar sampling can be done on race, color, religion, sexual orientation ... but it's easy to forget that correlation isn't causation. And I say this as a person belonging to a minority.

Headline grabbing non-news

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because the submission with Facebook Female Engineers Claim Gender Bias was removed by mods very promptly.

I think it's pretty clear that we now have active censorship perpetrated by HN mods.</comment></comment>


The Honest Answer To: "Can I learn to code?" - <AUTHOR> http://jackfreeman.io/2014/06/23/the-honest-answer-to-can-i-learn-to-code/

<comment><USER2> I like to think that the usage of a 2.2mb (which took 1.7 minutes to load on a 15mbit connection) background image was meant as an illustration to the article's point.</comment>


EU Parliament supports the possible suspension of U.S. data sharing agreements - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/eu-votes-to-support-suspending-u-s-data-sharing-agreements-including-passenger-flight-data-7000017677/

<comment><USER4> Good.

I'm also glad they're investigating the criminality of the UK government - <USER2> had assumed they would get away with it, rather like extraordinary rendition, because they didn't take the data _directly_. A big fat fine for Westminster could be just what the doctor ordered here (and I say that as a UK taxpayer.)

Now we just need similar investigations into the NSA under the 4th Amendment - I wonder what the US is waiting for...

<comment><USER5> Hmmm, all that will do is fuel the stupid debate we in the UK have over being in Europe at all. Personally I think the EU should haul us over the coals, not just a fine, but actual sanctions. However, I'm not sure the EU really has the balls to do that. And frankly I don't want to give that nasty UKIP bunch any fuel what so ever.

An issue I see is that actually the UK is more in to this that even the US. Might not have the depth and scope, but certainly the intention, with out even the fig leaf of a constitution. American citizens have some rights to work with, we dont. When you get down to it, we are facilitating the US spying on the EU, as we seem to be some sort of gateway hub between the EU and the US, and we, for some reason I do not understand, favor the US over Europe. While much of the embarrassment is on the US, the Snowden lark puts the UK in a very exposed piggy in the middle position where we might get forced to pick sides. The US can take care of its self, but the UK could be left deservedly politically stranded.

On the other hand, the EU has a lot of its own problems and Im not sure it has the motivation to pick a proper fight with the UK. All we'll probably get is some posturing to appease who ever is complaining, and normal BS will resume.

I have to say, given all that, it rather amuses me that a few years ago Obama was telling the UK it should look more to Europe than the US. Heh, I suppose now we know why: We are the US agent in Europe.

I have to wonder if long term the Snowden leaks are more damaging to the UK than the US. People will still deal with the US because of its economic and military power, neither of which apply to the UK.

<comment><USER4> If we're "forced to pick sides", I don't think we'll pick the US. The government might want us to, but all it takes is a list of the stuff we all hate about US foreign policy - Drones, Asymmetrical extradition (and Gary McKinnon), Guantanamo Bay, etc etc. That stuff has no mirror in the EU, all they're trying to do is get us to obey our own laws.

I hope the EU has the guts to give us a short, sharp shock - or I fear your last hypothesis, about UK isolation, may be accurate.

<comment><USER6> The UK media is owned by people who have a vested interest in keeping the UK on the European fringes. The US-UK relationship will remain 'special'. Only a large amount of negative public opinion could change that and the UK media controls public opinion. QED...

Freedom to protest and demonstrate has been steadily eroded in the UK. The police have long term spies within pressure groups such as Occupy, green issues and animal well-fare.

Remember that an estimated 1 million UK citizens marched in the Stop the War anti-war protest [1]. Worldwide on Feb 15th 2003, millions more.

These protests had no effect.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003_anti- war_prot...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003_anti- war_protest#United_Kingdom)

<comment><USER7> I'm genuinely curious, who and how do those people have a "vested interest in keeping the UK on the European fringes"?

<comment><USER8> I'm not so clear on the why, but the who is pretty easy:

[http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/editor-blog/162/just- why-...](http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/editor-blog/162/just-why-does- rupert-murdoch-dislike-europe-so-much)

<comment><USER6> The why:

      In a separate article for this website Professor Antony
      Glees wrote: "Sky News itself is having a field day with
      the eurozone crisis. Of course, Murdoch never liked the
      euro or the EU for that matter." Murdoch's anti-EU stance
      could quite possibly stem from the desire to avoid
      regulation of his media empire, from Brussels. We know for
      sure that he had plans for even greater penetration and
      influence in the UK media market. I mean, whether you are
      a Europhile or a Eurosceptic, do we really believe that
      Murdoch is interested only in defending British institutions
      like the pound rather than expanding News Corporation's
      portfolio in mainland Europe and beyond?

Read more: [http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/editor-blog/162/just- why-...](http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/editor-blog/162/just-why-does- rupert-murdoch-dislike-europe-so-much#ixzz2YdqXJibz)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> But EC is not suspending any data sharing deals (yet), which could have huge economic effects since it could mean that flights to the US are grounded. But it is my understanding that the US would be the one that would order flights to be grounded if the EU no longer meets the requirements of the data sharing agreement.

<comment><USER10> You know, I'd really like to see what would happen when "push came to shove". It would either tear-off the fig-leaf of terrorism or the rest of the world would really understand that the US government has developed into a paranoid, frightened, bully.

However, more likely is that some deal would be struck (behind closed doors, of course) that would allow business to continue as usual - shutting down most if not all transatlantic commerce would be a gargantuan step for anyone to take. I don't think that would change the long term direction this issue is heading in though. We're either going to end up with court supervised limited snooping and more transparent governments or an all-pervasive surveillance state where absolutely everything is going to be hoovered up and stored for later use.

UPDATE: One of the goals of the European Union is to avoid war on the continent. With the road of economic and political integration riddled with pot-holes of various sizes perhaps the new direction to unite everybody is personal freedom - freedom of movement, freedom of speech, etc. Europe certainly has the history to justify why these are laudable goals. With partner countries such as Iceland (which has Europe's longest running parliament) showing the necessary leadership, the time has come for Old Europe to become Bold Europe.

<comment><USER11> >Old Europe to become Bold Europe.

The country most likely to lead any such move would be Germany; Germans are today extremely well-inoculated against disingenuous reassurances by governments.

<comment><USER12> Putting Germany and bold in a sentence seems still to go down badly across many European nations. Some might even suggest that (the/a) purpose of the European idea was to keep a reunified Germany from going bold again.

<comment><USER13> What, really? Is there really a tangible fear that Germany would blow up in everyones faces again, _still today_?

<comment><USER14> Some would say that it has already happened. Germany's behavior of pushing austerity everywhere and depressing German wages has played and still plays a significant role in causing and prolonging the economic depression that a number of countries in the south of the Eurozone are currently in.

It's not in-your-face as a war is, but does that really matter for the people who suffer from it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's worth noting that this is a non-binding resolution, in case it wasn't clear from the article's title:

 _" the Commission now has the authority from the Parliament to suspend PNR and TFTP, but it falls at the Commission's discretion. Resolutions passed by the Parliament are not legally binding,"_

<comment><USER14> This is a very important point. Democracy is really lacking at a European level, and a large part of that is that the Parliament has almost no real power.

Whether it is _sufficient_ to give the EU Parliament real power is questionable, but if the EU is to become a proper democracy, then giving real power to the parliament is at least _necessary_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good news albeit won't make a big difference for United States. Let's get rid of the SWIFT data sharing while we are it, it's not U.S.'s business.

<comment><USER17> Get rid of all the financial data passing to the US! Fuck them, they were the absolute worst player in the financial crisis. How dare they demand that everyone send them all the details of almost all financial dealings.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, when they don't use _any_ of it against bankers or embezzlers - <USER3> against online poker players and marijuana buyers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yesterday, whether this vote would pass was in serious doubt. Now the doubt remains whether it will be put into effect.

</comment><comment><USER20> Please note that this is not that the EU supports suspending data sharing agreements, this is simply that the parliament will support it if the EC supports, which it probably won't.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is great. Finally some consequence to NSA's actions against the government directly given that all the checks and balances are not working.

For example: There are now secret courts and secret judgments that lacks binding power (NSA ignores them anyways). Despite the media revealing more and more lies, the congress does not seem to care (half of them did not attend the NSA talks). The rest that do have little power to stop them or even talk about them at all.

<comment><USER22> Congress doesn't care because most Americans don't care.

We _want_ our government to do these things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The UK warn that closing trade negotiations could cause the loss of over 400,000 jobs, but must also realise due to corporate spying, it might have cost the UK much more than 400,000 jobs.

<comment><USER22> How?

<comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage)

<comment><USER22> That doesn't explain how at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _" Should the Commission decide it necessary to suspend the data sharing agreement of passenger details — including personal and sensitive individual data — it could ultimately lead to the grounding of flights between the EU and the U.S."_

It's simply not going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER25> They took their sweet time i was beginning to think their all a bunch of pussies. I'm all in favor of this even if it puts European citizens in a slightly difficult situation with some potential jobs on the line. Europe needs to have boundaries and spying on its citizens should be unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is the irony of this not lost on anyone else? In light of recent events it appears they'll be able to get the data anyway, whether or not it is sent over.

</comment><comment><USER27> Good to hear something good from the EU !

</comment><comment><USER28> they are only supporting? They should immediately cancel them.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hopefully this will make it easy for the US to stop paying for defense of the EU and spend that money at home.

<comment><USER30> Do you have any sources for this bizarre statement?

Today, any excessive US presence in Europe is most likely a symptom of over- reaching US Foreign Policy rather than something the EU requires.

<comment><USER29> Fine, then we can close all EU bases, save a ton of money and you can defend your own shipping routes, I'm sure you will be fine.

<comment><USER31> US bases outside of America are vital to the US if it wants to operate on other continents[1]. The bases in Germany for instance were used for medical care of casualties from Iraq and Afganistan. It's fair to say that without such bases, the US probably could not operate in the way it does.

The US has aquirred it's bases for different historic reasons. Some, in the pacific, were leased off the UK for money. Others, like the bases in Japan and Germany, were forced on countries that lost a war with the US, and as few who fought in or supported that war are still alive, you can see why those countries might consider whether they benefit from them.

It is hard to separate beneficial activities that the US does, like the protection of shipping as it travels past East Africa, from it's pursuit of strategic objectives, such as rivalry for dominance in Africa with the Chinese, and middle eastern power blocks. And in addition, there is a legitimate counter terrorism aspect, which probably benefits the US more than other countries.

The thing is that the US had a great deal of control over Western Europe, imposed by force in the 1940s, and declining since then, and this was achieved as part of a struggle between the US and USSR, where European countries were really pawns. As the power declines (in part due to increasing strength and unity between EU countries), it's hard to imagine that the US will be able to maintain it's bases.

I think you should try to see it more dispassionately. There is a strategic game, where people lose and win, often in different ways at the same time. As American power declines from it's peak this century, it may be more comfortable to view it as a neccesary horror, rather than America's god appointed role, as a lot of Europeans view their own countries real politique.

[1] [http://blog.heritage.org/2013/04/26/u-s-military-bases-in- eu...](http://blog.heritage.org/2013/04/26/u-s-military-bases-in-europe-are- vital-to-americas-security/)

<comment><USER29> I truly hope the EU decides to get rid of US bases as it will make it harder for the US to get into these ridiculous wars. As for American power, the problem is not that it is declining, the problem is that it is so far ahead that it is a joke. There is no balancing power. Yes China is growing but it is hardly a peer. The EU should really be the balancing force but it sure doesn't look likely.

<comment><USER32> "Balance of powers" is neither a moral imperative, nor a historically effective way of preventing war.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Controlling a Quadcopter with Hand Gestures - <AUTHOR> http://www.thejumperwire.com/articles/controlling-a-quadcopter-with-hand-gestures/ <comment><USER2> Hand Gesture controls bother me. I see all these fancy implementations enabling hand gestures such as the Google ATAP project called Soli [1], but none of these replace haptical feedback. One of the major aspects of any haptical human-to-machine interface is feedback and robustness. When you turn a high quality 30 indent encoder from Alps [2] or avionics grade Elma encoder [3]; you'll realize the value of haptic feedback. There is a reason why cockpits are full of knobs and dials, although unfortunately, that's changing due to highly integrated multi-function glass instruments.

Problem with hand gestures is robustness. Theramins (hand gesture based music instrument) are cool, but they take forever to master and I am not saying they are trying to replace pianos, but let's just say - iPad pianos are not fun precisely because of the lack of feedback.

I really think gesture based controls are inferior. They have no place in my living room, my car or anywhere in my life.

That said, I think the implementation of hand gesture based systems as pointed out in this article are truly interesting. It is a challenging problem.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QNiZfSsPc0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QNiZfSsPc0)

[2][http://www.alps.com/prod/info/E/HTML/Potentiometer/RotaryPot...](http://www.alps.com/prod/info/E/HTML/Potentiometer/RotaryPotentiometers/RK097/RK097_list.html)

[3][https://www.elma.com/en-as/products/rotary- switches/rotary-s...](https://www.elma.com/en-as/products/rotary- switches/rotary-switching-products/encoders/)

<comment><USER3> I wish we could meet somewhere in the middle for user interfaces in general. We went from dedicated buttons and knobs to slates of glass. I was really hoping for reprogrammable buttons and knobs instead, where labels and scales are replaced with LCD displays.

IMO things like the Model 3 just take it too far.

<comment><USER2> I don't know how to explain this but I'll try my best:

 _Categorized /Binary controls_: Things like clapping to turn on/off lights, or a hand gesture to navigate to home in a car.

 _Continuous controls_ : Changing temperature, modulating a note (Theramin), controlling a quadcopter as in this article.

Binary/categorized controls are kind of ok. Hand gestures for continuous controls are _not_ ok.

<comment><USER4> I remember reading about some Google project that used haptic self-feedback for continuous gesture controls: To turn a virtual knob you'd rub your fingertips in a turning motion and to move a slider you'd slide your thumb along your index finger.

I think that's a pretty clever solution; unfortunately I can't find the blog post right now.

EDIT: They call it Project Soli: [https://atap.google.com/soli/](https://atap.google.com/soli/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A friend of mine has managedd to 3d print his FPV drone. The nexy step is that we're going to join forces and then we're probably going to hook it up with some Myoband or similar device to control it in a more "natural" way - hopefully we'll be successful - has anyone got any tips for us?

</comment><comment><USER6> I did this with a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 and a Leap Motion. I let one of the project managers at work fly it in the cafeteria and she put it into the ceiling. I'd like to have tried it with FPV, as you had to look at the drone while keeping your hands in a reasonably tightly defined area above the Leap Motion.

</comment><comment><USER7> Might be relevant for some of you.

Former colleagues of mine were experimenting with leap motion control for drones. They also had other experiments with the holidays lens and Oculus rift. I'm not sure whether they brought it together.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/parrotsonjava](https://www.youtube.com/user/parrotsonjava)

</comment><comment><USER8> Hand gestures are not "entirely controlled", I mean you might want to cough, sneeze or yawn and put automatically the hand before your mouth, or you might be wanting to swat/chase a fly or mosquito away.

If you are hand gesture controlling - say - a browser or a painting app, at the most you use undo or back, but what happens with the quadcopter?

</comment><comment><USER9> When I see hand gestures controls, my first thought is: it will be very painful very fast! It does look great in Sci-fi movies, but IMO it is not very practical.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is so cool. I can't wait untill holo-lens like device become cheap and ubiquitous

</comment><comment><USER11> What happens if you sneeze? Just wondering if things like that have to be accounted for.</comment>


Deep Learning and Quantum Entanglement [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c931/6491b8d991fabbf9b28c449d66df6a50f841.pdf <comment><USER2> Here's my understanding after giving the paper a once-over: the authors decompose a convnet with _linear_ activations (instead of, say, ReLUs, as is common) and product-pooling layers (instead of, say, average- or max- pooling layers, as is common) into tensors[1] that have the same structure as a quantum many-body wave function. In other words, this convnet is equivalent to such a function.

This equivalence allows the authors to use quantum entanglement measures to quantify this convnet's ability to model the correlation structures of its inputs (i.e., its "expresiveness"), and tie that ability to the number of feature maps in each convolutional layer.

I LOVE seeing these kinds of connections across different fields.

[1] By "tensor" I mean this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor)

<comment><USER3> Is the quantum multiverse then the mind of Spinoza's God implemented as a linear convent?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My random stream-of-consciousness reference reactions ...

Tegmark & Lin's discussion of how deep learning maps onto the physical world: _Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?_ [1][2]

The work of Aerts et al. more than 10 years ago, including how vector space models of human categorization show QM structure [3].

Lucien Hardy's exquisite teasing out of the difference between classical and quantum probability: _Quantum Theory From Five Reasonable Axioms_ [4]

It turns out that the innovation, power and strangeness of QM is related to separating physical processes into:

1\. Linear continuous unitary reversible evolution relying on complex amplitudes (wavefunction propagation).

2\. Non-linear discontinuous irreversible 'collapse' or 'measurement' or 'entanglement' or 'correlated branching', with probabilities based on the Born Rule (real values from the square of wave function amplitudes).

Neural nets also decompose a problem into successive alternating layers of reversible continuous functions and discrete irreversible categorical decisions (e.g. softmax/sigmoid logistic classifiers).

An even more obscure tangent is that most of the financial market is now constructed from 'options', which track continuous values with a continuous payoff, but offer a choice of execution to collapse the option and create a real financial result, e.g. see N.N.Taleb's dicussion of _optionality_ [5].

[1] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.08225.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.08225.pdf)

[2] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MdSE-N0bxs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MdSE-N0bxs)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Aerts#Quantum_structur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Aerts#Quantum_structure_in_psychology)

[4] [http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0101012](http://arxiv.org/abs/quant- ph/0101012)

[5] [http://fooledbyrandomness.com/ConvexityScience.pdf](http://fooledbyrandomness.com/ConvexityScience.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Thank you for posting this.

Similar thoughts have been percolating in my stream-of-consciousness for a while, especially after coming across an earlier version of Tegmark & Lin's paper some months ago.

My take is that deep neural nets work so well in practice because not all distributions of natural data are equally likely (and therefore, the no-free- lunch theorem(s), which assumes all distributions are equally likely, doesn't hold in the real world!); and that, in turn, is because the distribution of natural data is a consequence of the laws of Physics / symmetries of the universe in which we happen to live.

PS. You will enjoy the following papers too: "An exact mapping between the Variational Renormalization Group and Deep Learning" \- [https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831](https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3831) ; and "Mutual Information, Neural Networks and the Renormalization Group" \- [https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.06279](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.06279) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tl;dr: from what I understand, they use a mathematical tool used in physics to measure the quality of some deep learning networks.

</comment><comment> bra-ket the last co-author is the founder of Mobileye</comment>