Programming language versioning bothers me - <AUTHOR> http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/07/25/versions/ <comment><USER2> > Now you're left to the lowest common denominator in the name of > compatibility. Have you really accomplished anything? What's the point of > having new features if you can't actually use them?

Programming languages making new revisions is better than the absence of revisions.

> All of this would be different if you could just compile this stuff to a > binary format

Hardly. C99/11, C++98/03/11/14/17/2a -- these changes modify syntactical language features available during compilation _and_ target libs. This article is from 2012 but its author appears to come to this conclusion as of yesterday [1]. Unfortunately, instead of embracing the change that takes place in both Python and C/C++, she seems to reject it all due to the complexity introduced.

Indeed, some folks tend to embrace portability over all else. CPython itself only started to move beyond requiring C89 within the last couple of years, and they're selective on which C99 features they're willing to leverage. It's an extraordinarily portable project, IMO. OTOH there are projects who leverage more modern language features in C or C++. Those projects sacrifice portability, often to move the complexity of some of their design elements into the compiler and/or platform libraries. I believe that the latter is a better option, when it's available.

[1] [http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/02/cpp/](http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/02/cpp/)

<comment><USER3> > It's an extraordinarily portable project, IMO

is it, though ? I write daily in C++17 and have yet to find a relevant platform where a pure C89 program such as CPython would work and mine wouldn't. I mean, for hell's sake, you can target Commodore 64 and MS-DOS with the latest c++ revisions.

<comment><USER4> I imagine this depends on how you define "relevant". I think a lot of companies still use AIX, and Python compiles just fine on it, but I don't think there's a compiler that supports C++17 on it.

<comment><USER3> There is GCC 4.8 at least, which is more than enough to build GCC 7 and use c++17 afterwards

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The only reason this is a problem is because a language like Python is interpreted. Programs are usually deployed as source. This means the platform that will execute the program needs to have Python installed, and that environment comes into play.

With C you are usually delivering a compiled binary executable. If they did add a feature to C, you could use the new compiler with the new feature on your local development environment. It wouldn't matter at all to the place you deployed it, as long as you make a compatible binary.

There do exist some tools to build binaries from Python, and other interpreted languages. They still need a lot of work. I would say that it should even be a part of python itself. I see no reason that I shouldn't be able to do something like

      python --compile hello.py > hello

      ./hello

      "Hello World"

Or on Windows

      python --compile hello.py > hello.exe

Now the target environment doesn't even need Python to be installed at all!

<comment><USER2> > With C you are usually delivering a compiled binary executable. If they did > add a feature to C, you could use the new compiler with the new feature on > your local development environment. It wouldn't matter at all to the place > you deployed it, as long as you make a compatible binary.

You're mistaken. C has added features to its standard library before. It allows you to detect the presence of this feature at compile-time with a preprocessor definition. But if your compiler supports the feature and your target does not, in most cases you will get a fatal error regarding symbol resolution from the loader.

This problem is remarkably similar to the one faced by Python developers. The difference is that Python's philosophy includes a statement regarding "batteries included", so its standard library has taken on more frequent additions than C's.

In order to portably target multiple environments, you will occasionally need to handle ImportError (disable a product feature or have a fallback implementation) or (in C, e.g.) provide a fallback implementation designated as "weak". Or forego portability, capitalize on the feature, and raise the requirements for your target.

<comment><USER6> By "from the loader", do you mean the linker? Most of us regard that as part of compiling.

Or are using .dll or .so files?

For a static C program, regarding compiling and linking as part of the same (build) process, I see only two possible outcomes. Either I get an error at build time, or I get an executable that I can drop on the target that will run.

The one exception I can see to this is if the program is going to make an OS call that some versions of the OS don't support.

<comment><USER2> > By "from the loader", do you mean the linker? Most of us regard that as part > of compiling.

No, I meant from the dynamic loader (like ld.so).

> Or are using .dll or .so files?

Yes, that's a very common idiom for libc and libstdc++/libc++. Yes, you're right that statically linked binaries will not suffer this dependency and usually end up more portable (often at a cost of some memory and security/maintenance).

> The one exception I can see to this is if the program is going to make an OS > call that some versions of the OS don't support.

Exactly. This is actually a little less rare than C library features, from what I've seen. But, here, like ImportError and providing weak impls, you can handle ENOSYS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a little-appreciated benefit of using Common Lisp: the language is both standardised and stable, so a library from 2000 is very nearly as likely to run on an implementation today as it was then, or as another library is now.

I do wish that there'd been a newer standardisation effort since, for a couple of reason, but it's really, _really_ nice that the people haven't had to waste effort updating working code to deal with language changes.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, that's one of the more important advantages of Common Lisp in my book. But the reason it works so well is that the standardized version was based on plenty of experience and experimentation, and that it's powerful enough to be extended from user code; same goes for C to some extent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perl 5's twofold approach to solving this mess is to use compile time checks to manage new features. The _use VERSION_ syntax lets you specify a version of perl. The _feature_ pragma lets you enable or disable new features on a case by case basis. In my experience, this works really well.

The _feature_ pragma (see [https://perldoc.perl.org/feature.html](https://perldoc.perl.org/feature.html)) lets you manage new features on an individual basis. You just write: _feature NAME_OF_FEATURE;_. For example, _feature signatures;_ In this case adding subroutine/method signature support. This is a compile time check.

If you don't want to hassle with enabling features on a piecemeal basis, you can also specify a version of perl you wish to rely on with _use VERSION_ (see [https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/use.html](https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/use.html)). For example, if want all of the standard features of perl 5.26.1, you say _use v5.26.1_.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Can this happen in any language? Sure. Play with enough deep, dark stuff and > I'm sure you can can unleash run-time equivalents of nasal demons anywhere.

Also databases, caches, REST APIs, syscalls (e.g. libc), docker, dependent libraries, browsers and much much more....

In spite of that I don't see it as being an intrinsically difficult problem to solve. Just make a best effort to run the same versions of stuff in dev and test as you do in prod (with python, pyenv and dependency pinning is your friend here) and make liberal use of sanity checks - if it's only tested on versions x->y, put in a check that fails with a message if it sees anything else.

The main problem isn't that ^^ that is hard, it's just that nobody really does it or recognizes how much time can be saved by doing it.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a problem in some contexts but not others. Much software is run in environments controlled by the same party as the code. If one needs a new feature, one upgrades.

Dependency management for software you're distributing is a hassle, to be sure. The version of the language is one of many considerations. System calls, memory constraints, paths, and many other things can differ from one environment to another.

</comment><comment><USER12> It blew my mind when I first realized that in Clojure projects the programming language is a dependency of the project itself. Of course, there is still the JVM, but I personally have never run into JVM version problems.

<comment><USER13> > _Clojure projects the programming language is a dependency of the project > itself._

That's no different than any other interpreted language...

<comment><USER14> The difference is one of semantics; of course all interpreted languages depend on their interpreter environment, but for some reason they do not always actually put it inside of their dependency tree a la package.json, requirements.txt, etc.

The reason this is so natural for Clojure is that it's a hosted language; the standard library & language itself is decoupled from the runtime platform (JVM).

With Clojure, it's actually funny to think that I have projects on my hard drive that use 3-4 different versions of clojure (not even counting various versions of clojurescript!), without any issues. Doing this with, say, Node.js requires a lot of extra ceremony.

<comment><USER15> To add to this, Clojure benefits strongly from being a Lisp. The language syntax itself might change once an ice age, and even then libraries can extend it with macros. Old Clojure code will very likely run with the latest version.

Clojure(script) benefits as a compiled language as well. If Clojure 2.0 suddenly discovered Postfix notation was the GREATEST THING EVER, my 1.6, 1.8, and 1.9 projects and JARs are entirely unaffected. They could even run side by side, from the same interpreter version, without so much as a shrug of concern.

> (not even counting various versions of clojurescript!)

That made me laugh! Clojurescript should use a date stamp as the incremental version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It was really challenging for me when i wanted to learn Javascript. The articles and blogs which i came across online are written in many different versions, and the syntax.

<comment><USER17> Don't even get me started on ES2015 and ES6 being the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't know the author. Is it possible she is young enough not to have lived through the mutability of C before we settled on a stable definition?

Her argument seems to say 'coming from c' which suggests she didn't experience difference in handling of ints, shorts, signed and unsigned, alignment, #pragmas. C on SCO UNIX was not identical to C on an Apollo domain. It might have been one C standard (K&R) before ANSI C, but it was not one implementation and 'language features' are not at root that different to coding to compiler behaviour.

Oh.. getopt() wars...

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a frequent pain in the .Net world. I find the solution pretty simple though. Setup your dev environment to only target the oldest platform version you need to run on. If you ever get a new client with even older platform versions, dial back the version in your environment and see what breaks.

I guess though, I have the benefit of checked types. When using this same strategy with an interpreted language, you're definitely leaning hard on your test coverage.

<comment><USER20> This _was_ a frequent pain before .Net 4.5. Now thanks to Roslyn you can use the latest language features and target .Net 4.5. A lot of stuff works even on .Net 4.0 if you fix that annoying problem with the class they moved around.

<comment><USER19> True. For reasons too irritating to explain, I'm often working with pre .Net 4.0 environments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Needs (2012) in the title

</comment><comment><USER22> i guess this is where go really shines. it's a nice modern language that statically compiles by default. you can kind of do the same with a scripting language. just statically compile the interpreter and distribute the interpreter with your program. [tho, this might be harder than it sounds depending on the licenses of the libraries you have to link with] i know a lot of windows java programs ship a JVM internally as part of the install process.

</comment><comment><USER23> add (2012)

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a reasonable point but perhaps a bit outdated? Containers more or less allow interpreted languages to be "statically linked". In the past you had to care more about whether system X had library Y installed but that seems like an edge case in today's world.

<comment><USER25> Not everyone can, or wants to use containers. They solve certain issues but bring others into the mix. This is hardly a "solved" problem. It is very much not outdated.

<comment><USER26> > This is hardly a "solved" problem

You query the language runtime for the version and use it as an assert. It's standard everywhere, except in the web where polyfills are still a thing.

<comment><USER25> Sorry, I was meaning to say that "containers!" is not the solution.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Chrome extension to show LinkedIn work history as timeline/Gantt chart - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/intimeline/jofbdgknlmdnjlienfbmochdmeljaaen <comment><AUTHOR> Spent some time going through LinkedIn profiles and wanted to get a better overview of work history and so spent a few hours creating this first version of a Chrome extension to show LinkedIn work history profiles as a timeline bar chart / Gantt chart</comment>


Audrey: GitHub for Siri - <AUTHOR> HTTPS://getaudrey.com <comment><USER2> How is this 'github for Siri'?? The reason I clicked is more because I thought I was misunderstanding, and so I was curious. But I don't think you can continue with a non-sensical comparison.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm interested where GitHub comes into play here. Took a look at the website but didn't see anything the resembled git or GitHub funtionality.</comment>


Speed Matters for Google Web Search [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/speed/files/delayexp.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the actual URL to the PDF that I submitted: <http://code.google.com/speed/files/delayexp.pdf>

HN automatically turned my link into a scribd link...</comment>


Having Fun with ActiveX Controls in Microsoft Word - <AUTHOR> https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/having-fun-with-activex-controls-in-microsoft-word/ <comment><USER2> That was a fun read,wonder if any activex controls can be used to download remote executables.</comment>


Run OS X from a USB Drive - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5739259/how-to-create-a-portable-hackintosh-on-a-usb-thumb-drive

<comment><USER2> I have a feeling they're doing things entirely incorrectly.

1) this is for Hackintoshes (should be in the title here, but isn't), and it uses a 10.6.2 hackintosh distribution, not your standard install disks.

2) they're using CopyCatX, a drive duplicator, instead of the disk utility. Does this matter?

3) CopyCatX is a $60 piece of software, though it shows it in what appears to be the disk image containing the portable 10.6.2 image... I wonder if this could be construed as supporting piracy.

4) If you're running on Mac hardware, you can just install to an external drive of any type, or image your drive to another, and it all works happily. CopyCatX isn't necessary there, why would it be necessary for copying a disk image in another case? It's an _image_.

<comment><USER3> _2) they're using CopyCatX, a drive duplicator, instead of the disk utility. Does this matter?_

It matters; Disk Utility doesn't create a bootable image.

<comment><USER4> it doesn't matter

 _$ man bless_

<comment><USER3> It matters because you need the extra step and the article didn't mention doing so. Not that there isn't a way around it.

<comment><USER2> Actually, it does:

> _Hit Options and make sure you're using the Master Boot Record option. Then > hit Apply to format the drive._

<comment><USER3> That doesn't say anything about making a bootable partition. Just that it involves the MBR (rather than EFI, which Mac uses by default), somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, cool. I used a thumbdrive as my primary Mac for a few months in 2009:

[http://carlos.bueno.org/2009/12/soul-of-portable- machine.htm...](http://carlos.bueno.org/2009/12/soul-of-portable-machine.html)

It was pretty nice, not having to lug a machine around. But there were enough minor annoyances that I gave up. I think eventually your computer will be an image you carry around on your phone.

</comment><comment><USER6> Short version:

        % sudo ditto -VX / /Volumes/My\ USB\ Drive

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not that easy to launch a hackintosh. And to launch a _snow leo_ hackintosh from a _USB stick_ means to take your experience to a whole new level of pain.

I'm fairly certain you should not try this if you value your time and aren't going to use this with a mac. And if latter applies, you don't need that guide at all, effectively rendering whole article pointless.

YMMV.

<comment><USER8> Tried to insist that I'd been there done that with Hackintoshes to a kid that saw me in the hostel lobby using my macbook and that it wasn't worth my time to fuck around. (Only reason I'm not using Arch or FreeBSD) He didn't seem to 'get it'.

Maybe it's a contractor thing, I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone one found a solution for older Macs not running on Intel? I've been successfully with a firewire external HD but not a USB key. (The machine could still be useful with a USB.)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm trying to imagine why anyone would find this useful. Does anyone have any idea?

<comment><USER11> I would love to be able to build my own PC that runs OSX.

<comment><USER12> No need to, they sell them at the apple stores.

<comment><USER13> Not the "build my own PC" part.

<comment><USER12> If you want to stay legal and use OS/X you'll have to forego that part.

That's not how I would like to see things but that is how Apple wants you to use their software, and if you abide by their terms of service that is how you should use it.

That you _ought_ to be free from such restrictions is something that I agree with but if it were ok to run OS/X on 'foreign' (i.e. non apple) hardware then the apple clone factories would spring up like so many mushrooms.

And I'd expect that to not just be limited to the mac and OS/X but to be applied to Ios in a heartbeat.

Apple has chosen not to license their software separate from their hardware and that is their right. So it becomes our right to either buy apple hardware or to go elsewhere.

<comment><USER13> Apple licensed OSX to clone makers in the past, but that was one of the first things Jobs put a stop to if I recall correctly. There's a strong thread in Apple's strategy to prevent computing from becoming a low margin commodity. This helps Apple with its image of high-end or well-crafted devices, increases profit etc. Which is a smart move if you don't own the entire market (but can differentiate yourself from your competitors)

Apple was profitable before the iOS devices hit and much of that was due to this kind of smart thinking. It reminds me of Nintendo, who, despite not dominating the market, still manages to be quite profitable (especially compared to their competitors) with a very similar strategy.

Letting anybody build any ol' system willy nilly would cannibalize Apple's profits, plus give them quite a bit more work since ensuring drive compatibility with random hardware would become a major priority.

As a user I think it sucks, but I have to respect that as a business strategy.

<comment><USER14> > As a user I think it sucks, but I have to respect that as a business > strategy.

No, I do not think _respect_ is quite what it deserves. It does not flow from their capability, but from particular exploitation of given laws that allow market restriction. Respect them for making good products, not for avoiding competition. Respect them for persuading you to buy _their_ products, not for preventing you from having more choice.

<comment><USER15> I've ran a hackintosh since 10.4 and I've never seen Apple do anything to actively prevent users from doing it or pursue anyone for a non-commercial EULA violation. They stop resellers like Psystar, and they've broken a few things which appeared to be ancillary to moving their own products forward (Atom CPUs), but they could be far more annoying about it every point release if they really felt like it. Early on, they also needlessly released a few fat binary hardware drivers for ethernet, sound, and wifi devices that have never been bundled in a real Intel Mac.

Apple certainly has the means to stop it, but I don't think they mind the fringe hackers running OSX. I've seen a few people converted by it, and I own a few real Macs plus the hackintosh as well, and I suspect most people who hackintosh are Apple customers of some degree. Getting stuffy about it could be pretty damaging to their perceived good will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is for "hackintosh" setups, just to point out. Mach/OS X itself, on a real machine, actually treats all block devices identically - without hacking around, you can boot a Mac off of anything, be it a USB stick, a harddrive attached over USB or FireWire, even booting one Mac from another Mac's internal storage by directly linking the two via FireWire (so-called Target Mode).

<comment><USER17> I've successfully installed Snow Leopard from a USB drive. You can also install it _to_ a USB/FireWire drive. If you're particularly adventurous, you can put the installer on a partition of an external USB/FireWire drive and, from there, install it to a partition of _another_ USB/FireWire drive.

You will, of course, need a Mac to do all that. In some cases you might also need a working OS X install.

EDIT: I realize everything I mentioned above is possible with a Linux distro, but doing this is far easier on a Mac. You just go to System Preferences, select a boot volume and you're good to go.</comment></comment>


After correcting for demographics, US schools fare better than EU/Asian schools - <AUTHOR> http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html <comment><USER3> There's something a little creepy about saying there's nothing wrong with the American education system by only looking at those in the US of European descent and excluding all others.

Basically it doesn't matter how well or badly the rest of the population does, it doesn't change the OP's hypothesis.

The point about immigrants scoring lower is well-taken but this is largely a language barrier. How exactly does this apply to, say, the African American segment of the population, many of whom have been in the US for hundreds of years and most of whom know no other language than English?

Socioeconomic factors, the education level of your parents and so on obviously come into play here but I read this post and read it like this: "if we exclude all the problems in the US education system, the US education system is fine!"

Perhaps that's not entirely fair but one must be very careful before discounting selection bias when drawing conclusions such as these.

Now I'm not claiming the US education system is bad. Frankly I have no personal experience with it (coming from the "negative gap" of Australia).

I will say one thing: the US has something we don't in Australia and that's a tenured teacher system that makes it (near-)impossible to fire teachers [1]. It's still not easy in Australia but it is easier. That strikes me as a problem.

[1]: <http://reason.com/assets/db/12639308918768.pdf>

<comment><AUTHOR> _There's something a little creepy about saying there's nothing wrong with the American education system by only looking at those in the US of European descent and excluding all others._

Controlling for exogenous variables is "creepy"?

African Americans (and Asians) are excluded from comparison simply because Finland doesn't have them. Similarly, when comparing the US to Asian schools, the author excludes whites as well. The point here is to compare like to like.

<comment><USER3> And you don't find the idea that in terms of education potential, the author's _assumption_ that there is something fundamentally different about Americans of Asian, Caucasian or African descent just a little bit creepy?

Like I said: I totally buy into the immigrant argument (including the language barrier) but to only compare Whites from the US to Europe (for a supposed "like for like" comparison), you're going beyond language and culture and introducing race as a variable.

And no this isn't some kind of crypto-racist accusation. I just don't see how you can reasonably differentiate between someone of Chinese descent whose ancestors came here in the 19th century to build the railroads to someone of Irish descent who came here a century ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> _And you don't find the idea that in terms of education potential, the author's assumption that there is something fundamentally different about Americans of Asian, Caucasian or African descent just a little bit creepy?_

That's not an assumption, it's just a possibility the author is attempting to control for.

 _I just don't see how you can reasonably differentiate between someone of Chinese descent whose ancestors came here in the 19th century to build the railroads to someone of Irish descent who came here a century ago._

The simplest way to reasonably differentiate between them is to look at them:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Irish_Americans.jpg>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_American>

You seem to be asserting that allowing for the possibility that cultural or biological factors might affect educational outcomes is creepy. Is that an accurate assessment?

<comment><USER4> And what bearing would these visual differences have on education, pray tell?

<comment><USER5> People don't only have stereotypes about others.

A lifetime of people looking at you and reacting to you causes you to perform differently. Performance can change surprisingly quickly. Researchers have found that reminding people of their ethnic identity before they take a test will affect their performance on the test in accord with racial stereotypes. (Asians improve, blacks get worse.)

While it is politically correct to try to be colorblind, reality doesn't cooperate. You can be PC and pretend those effects aren't there. Or you can be intellectually honest and honestly look at how big an impact they have.

(That said, we can and should reduce the size of those effects. However we can't even begin to have a proper discussion of how to do that as long as we shoot the messenger that tells us that the effect is there.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a common problem when looking at the US as a whole compared to many other countries. The US is a huge, very diverse place. When I travel to the NE, then to the south, and finally to the west coast it feels like I've been in 3 different countries. The language while still english is slightly different, the attitudes are different, and the people are different. In this environment it really does make sense to have less federal involvement and more local involvement since each locale likely has completely different issues.

On the whole it makes much more sense to start breaking the US into regions when doing comparisons with other countries. From there we might be able to find the real problems and look for focused, local solutions.

<comment><USER7> I try to explain North America to others like this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Nations_of_North_America>

<comment><USER8> It's actually very interesting. Anecdotally, as somebody who grew up in a "Foundry" area...when I think of moving to another city, other Foundry cities come up first in my mind as places I want to live. I never really attributed it to _regionalism_ but I suppose it makes a kind of sense. Even regions geographically close to mine don't have the same kind of draw as those close to mine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Libertarians in the United States have often claimed that the public school system (which has more than 90% of the students) is a disaster."

The Libertarian argument isn't that public schools are a disaster. Their argument is that the federal government shouldn't be involved in education and it should instead remain a local or state issue where people have more direct control over the system.

<comment><USER10> That's one of the philosophical arguments (though many libertarians don't think state or local governments should be doing schools either), but it's also quite common for libertarians to argue that one reason people should support their view is that the current public schools are a failure and thus need major reform.

<comment><USER11> There are two types of libertarians, consequentialist libertarians and natural rights libertarians.

They come to more or less the same conclusions, but for entirely different reasons. The former's argument appeals to the efficiency and productivity perceived to be afforded by a libertarian society. The latter has everything to do with whether or not the existence of, say, public schools is _just_. Either side will tend to argue that you, luckily, don't have to choose between prosperity and justice, but always fall back to their philosophical roots.

<comment><USER10> That reminds me of an interesting counterfactual that I believe Ilya Somin proposed (he's a libertarian law professor born in the USSR). Most market advocates believe communism, and especially the USSR's version of central- planning, strong-state authoritarian communism, was wrong as a matter of principle.

But what if the USSR had managed to keep a high standard of living, comparable to how it did quite well in science? And let's say it also avoided some of the worst bouts of mismanagement, like the large famines. Even libertarians who argue that central planning is inefficient might grant that it's at least hypothetically possible that the USSR could've turned out much better / less badly than it did, had a few things and personnel been different. What would people think of it then?

His guess (iirc) is that, unfortunately from his viewpoint, the USSR is as unpopular as it is basically because it "didn't work": it had a lower standard of living than the capitalist west, large famines, etc. If it were authoritarian but "worked", so East Germans and Muscovites had the same televisions and cars as West Germans and Parisians, he fears the anti- communism consensus would not really be strong at all.

<comment><USER12> Wait, who says the USSR _wasn't_ effective? However bad things were during communist rule, they were worse beforehand. Not to mention that it brought one of the most heavily battered combatants in WWII to become a superpower afterwords.

Plus, there are plenty of examples of capitalist governments that have had famines and such. India is a notable example.

<comment><USER11> I don't want to open a can of worms, but there's a hefty debate behind your insightful (but succinct) comment. I feel like a couple counterpoints to your statements are in order, though.

If the quality of life of the USSR increased, we need to ask two questions. Would it have increased _more_ or _less_ under a more liberal regime? How are you factoring in the murder of tens of millions of people? Even low end figures show that 5% of the peak Soviet population was slaughtered or imprisoned.

Regarding India's woes, systems of government/economy are in no way a panacea. Besides, India's economy was extremely communist, almost explicitly modeled after the USSR. India only turned to liberalizing their markets recently, even later than China.

<comment><USER13> India began on socialistic ideals and the streak continues somewhat to the current day (it has reduced immensely since the liberalization in the early 90's). That being said I do not recall India or its economy being communist at any point. (There is a Communist Party of India to this day but it has never been significant on the national stage).

<comment><USER11> Wikipedia can tell you more, but India employed 5-year plans and nationalized a fair share of industries, among other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author is clueless about the research in this area. I was formerly the co- founder of a social mobility think-tank so I'm pretty familiar with the work that's been done in this area.

The author's statement "In almost all European countries, immigrants from third world countries score lower than native born kids." is just false.

A quick look at the British data will tell you that students from Chinese or Indian ethnic backgrounds do considerably better than "White British":

[http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/c...](http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm081014/text/81014w0030.htm#081014100004585)

This is broadly true in most European countries.

If you look at for example children of Pakistani immigrants, they do much better in some countries such as Canada than they do in the UK. Cross-country studies pretty much all agree the difference is down to parental background.

If the parents have middle-class backgrounds than their children are much more likely to perform better than average (regardless of country of origin).

Essentially by cutting out non-whites he's just disproportionately cutting out the poor and lower-class children which is pushing the scores. It's nothing to do with race. Note particularly how he's treating the ethnicities which are primarily middle-class as "white" (e.g. jews).

</comment><comment><USER15> The Daily Howler ( <http://dailyhowler.com/> ) has been blogging about the "our schools aren't bad, everyone just likes saying they are" for months and months and months. He's talking about this study today as well, and notes the real cause of this isn't really immigration, but the legacy of slavery (blacks score _75_ points lower than whites):

"Among those 34 OECD nations, only the United States spent centuries aggressively trying to stamp out literacy among a major part of its population. The legacy of that benighted history lives with us today, although our "reformers" work very hard to avoid such painful discussions."

<comment><USER16> I'm with you until you point the finger at slavery. Blaming it on the "legacy of slavery" seems to me to be intellectually lazy: first, it is vague to the point of uselessness. Second, it ignores all of the things which have happened since the end of slavery, some of which happened as the part of the aftermath of slavery, but some of which happened for completely independent reasons. It also ignores the fact that slavery ended at very different times, under very different circumstances, in different parts of the country, but those differences largely aren't reflected in test scores or other measures of social or economic success. If we're going to solve the problem, we need to identify the real, proximate causes so that they can be addressed.

I don't have any stats handy, but I've read several times that after the civil war, blacks saw steady improvement in their economic status, on similar (albeit slower) trend to various immigrant ethnicities who faced initial integration troubles, but that this progress stopped and then reversed in the '70s. This reversal correlated very strongly to the rise of out of wedlock births among blacks. I've read that, if you correct for single-parent/dual- parent families, the difference in school performance between all ethnic groups almost completely disappears, even if you don't correct for things like income level or the education level of parents (although those two things also correlate with single/dual-parent status, so correcting for it tends to correct for them to some degree). Did slavery cause marriage and stable families to decline among blacks over a century after the 13th amendment? It seems to me that, just as our society was finally putting "the legacy of slavery" to rest, something else happened to hurt the black community even worse. If we can figure out what it was, we'll be well on our way to closing the gap. Unfortunately, so much damage has been done at this point that I don't think that simply removing the original cause will fix the problem-- extra measures will be needed to repair the damage.

<comment><USER17> _something else happened to hurt the black community even worse. If we can figure out what it was, we'll be well on our way to closing the gap._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_drug_laws>

<comment><USER16> I would categorize this as more of a catalyst than a cause. Once the breakdown of family norms begins, this would accelerate the process by putting more young black men into prison, turning some of them into absentee fathers, thus normalizing single motherhood. However, strong family structures tend to discourage illegal or risky behaviors like drug dealing or drug use, leading me to believe that something else must have happened to weaken them before large numbers of black men would end up in prison for drug offenses. Furthermore, I doubt if there is much overlap between the set of "guys who would deal illegal drugs for a living" and the set of "guys who would settle down with the girls they impregnated and be good fathers, if only they weren't in prison." In other words, the increase in drug dealing/use (which facilitated increased incarceration due to draconian drug laws) and the increase in single motherhood were not cause and effect, but rather effects of the same root cause.

<comment><USER17> The problem with the Rockefeller drug laws and subsequent enforcement was the unequal application - despite the fact that whites and blacks use and deal drugs at roughly the same rates, blacks are more likely to be arrested and jailed for drug crimes and given longer sentences.

You talk about "norms" but as was pointed out in another HN thread (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2031655>) drug use is essentially a "norm" in the USA. The problem is that only certain segments of the population get punished for it, which leads to not finishing school, not being able to get a job, etc. It certainly is a cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> After correcting for me being short,fat and middle aged I'm an olympic athlete

</comment><comment> DanI-S "Guys, don't panic - our schools are great, as long as you're white!"

If they're failing to educate a large number of students, they're not working as intended.

<comment><USER9> Thats not what he concludes. It's "as long as your parents are educated".

<comment><USER19> He didn't control for parental education, he controlled for recent immigration status.

<comment><USER9> It seems like he is using immigration status as a proxy for parental education level. As he later notes the effect is non existent and in fact opposite in Canada and Australia which he attributes to the skills based immigration system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The main reason I "think" liberals want to poor money into the public school system, is because most teachers/educators are liberals. If there was a study of politcal parties in the American Education system, it would vastly weigh towards most educators are Liberals/Democrats.

<comment><USER21> That would mean, by itself, pretty little. They could be liberals due to the liberal stand on education, not the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I seem to recall a similar study I heard about a while ago, showing that although the average life expectancy of Norway was a lot higher than that of the US, people of Norwegian descent in the US tended to live longer than those in Norway.

<comment><USER20> Whats the crime ratio. How many people get murdered in the US compared to Norway. Those numbers you speak of are scued not to a persons health, but to how long they actually live. Maybe taking a survey of everyone above 50 of each country since they have grown past many stupid accidents and are less prone to being killed and see what the ratio is then...

<comment><USER23> The murder rate in industrialized countries is much too low to have a significant effect on life expectancy. The vast majority of people die of disease or accident. 15k people were murdered of 300m in the US in 2009. That's 0.005% of people per year, meaning roughly 0.3% of people die from murder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Correcting for demographics, US schools are great. Correcting for demographics, the US doesn't have a disproportionate number of incarcerated citizens. Correcting for demographics, the US doesn't have much of a jobless problem. I couldn't decide which was more charming, the claim that Americans of European descent (65% of the population) are not some sort of elite, or the call to compare African Americans to those in their "home nations". The US is their home nation! This article is racist rot.

<comment><USER25> Actually, only the former may be correct, and in any case, it is the only claim that is discussed in the paper.

If you close your eyes you will not be able to see if a problem exists, identify it, find a solution and follow it through. And calling people names would not help either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any time taxpayers are paying real money for something, one part of the value proposition is price. I have lived outside the United States, and I have a first-generation immigrant to the United States in my immediate family, and I live in an ethnically diverse ("race" or place or birth considered) neighborhood, with supposedly good public schools. What most analyses like this ignore to too great a degree, and what most of the more than 100 comments posted here so far aren't focusing a lot on is how much provision of government-operated schooling costs in the United States compared to what it costs in other countries. By most reasonable standards of comparison, United States schools provide less learning added to learners per dollar of inputs than most schools in quite a few other OECD countries. That's apparent whether one looks at a variety of comparisons of mathematics achievement (a crucial educational goal), or second-language achievement (a goal often neglected in the English-speaking United States), or in science achievement (a safeguard against irrational public policies). Having grown up in the United States, and having lived overseas for two separate three-year spans, the second one with my children, I can't be complacent about the provision of government-operated schools in the United States.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's important to know what sort of problems US schools face. It seems likely based on a lot of evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) that US schools are no worse than EU and Asian schools. However, American schools do have a different problem because we can't simply accept the inability to educate a huge subset of American students merely due to their culture or ethnicity. Less diverse countries may seemingly have an easier problem in education, but that doesn't get rid of our need to cultivate a literate and educated citizenry.

But there are even bigger unexamined issues at play here. Firstly, are we able to accurately measure quality of education through these studies? Given the increasing reliance on college degrees as necessary credentials for basic competency in core skills such as literacy and math it seems likely the answer is no. Secondly, what confidence do we have that modern public schooling provides _any_ educational value? Given the similarity of educational achievement on standardized tests across much of the developed world when adjusted for socio-economic status one has to wonder. How much of a students basic educational competency would they acquire regardless of public schooling merely due to the educational status and expectations of their parents and peers?

<comment><USER27> Followup: consider a "control" experiment (which, due to ethics cannot be conducted) whereby schools are replaced with "classrooms" of hundreds of students and a single custodian. There is no curriculum, there is no teaching, students sit for several hours a day at desks. They are allowed only to read or write, sit doing nothing, or do anything that looks vaguely like doing homework (though it could be doodling), as long as it's done quietly. Every month their parents are asked to fill out a survey of how they think their children are doing education wise, but there are no consequences attached to any of this.

Now, the big question is how would students fair in terms of education in this experiment relative to existing schooling, especially when correlated by socio-economic and cultural background? I highly suspect that we'd get similar results to today's educational system. Kids with educated and/or affluent parents would tend to acquire some modicum of education, other students would do less well.

The work the OP has done tends to lead to this conclusion which is not anything like an endorsement of the current public educational system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A few thoughts that occurred to me:

What is PISA? Why do they only target 15-16 year-olds? Are they a representative sample?

Can the entire test be lumped into 3 categories: Math, Science, and Reading? All of these subjects are interrelated.

Anyone can play with these numbers until a preferable conclusion is made. For example, the first graph that the article presents makes Greece look half as competent as Finland.

<comment><USER29> PISA is a set of standardized triennial tests organized by the OECD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's a better article here: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jim- taylor/are-public-educa...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jim-taylor/are- public-education-chic_b_798354.html)

The real point is that this person is controlling probably more for wealth/income than anything else.

But the problem persists. If most of our country is being educated as if it was a third world country, what does that say for the future of the US?

</comment><comment><USER31> "In almost all European countries, immigrants from third world countries score lower than native born kids. Why? No one don't know exactly why." might want to adjust this, has a double negative and feels awkward to read

</comment><comment><USER32> "After correcting for demographics..."

GOOD students will do fine in almost any school system. I think what makes a difference is how you motivate the kids with problematic backgrounds.

Excluding them from studies is certainly NOT the solution.

</comment><comment><USER33> This reflects human biodiversity. When you compare groups with similar evolutionary backgrounds they have similar levels of intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER34> _"So much for the bigoted notions that Americans are dumb and Europeans are smart."_

Yes, let's move to other bigoted notions...

</comment><comment><USER35> Perhaps I missed it but why not consider mean racial IQ as a factor in the differences found.

</comment><comment><USER36> tl;dr: We manipulate data until the US looks good.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is fairly mind-blowing to me, and if this argument is true, then we need to look at education reform a different way.

<comment><USER38> The best way to describe this argument is "not even wrong."

Judging the quality of our schools solely by using standardized tests to compare our students with students in other countries is moronic, and excluding minorities is even more so. Yes, of course parenting and culture have an enormous effect on student outcomes, but this data doesn't actually illuminate anything of use. Don't get me wrong, it makes an interesting talking point, but there's nothing here that you can actually use to make schools better.

<comment><USER39> I think that's the point. There IS nothing that needs to be done to make schools better. Reforms need to happen culturally and at home.

<comment><USER30> I don't understand how that follows from the data? Even comparing apples to apples, so to speak, the US is at the 25th %ile. With most countries above (and below) being likely countries, once you exclude the poorest 35% from our country.

To put it another way -- stacking the cards in our favor should really put us a lot higher up the stack, considering he didn't control from spending or income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's a very old story: But if compare students in Finland with students in the US with ancestors from Finland, then might have something. Similarly compare students in Nigeria with students in the US with ancestors from Nigeria. But do NOT compare all students in the US with all students in Finland.

To heck with Nigeria and Finland. Instead, there is a general result: For some positive integer n of, say, a few dozen, take n relatively homogeneous populations. Give the tests. Take the best, say, 5 populations on that test. Now, for population n + 1, take a 'mixture' of the populations of the n other populations, give the test, and compare with the top 5. Then very likely population n + 1 loses. This is true just by a simple convexity argument that never mentions Finland, Nigeria, or the US but still does explain why the US has a hard time beating the best of the homogeneous countries.

The NYT, the McKinsey study, etc. won't tell you any of this.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm taken aback by this whole discussion. For all the bashing that goes on in HN about schools being glorified test prep centers and not living up to their potential for educating students, we sure are quick to accept "studies" like this that use test scores as an indicator of intrinsic worth of the educational system in a country.

</comment><comment><USER42> "After correcting for demographics..."

I didn't read the article, but isn't that just a fancy way of saying "certain people are smart and certain people aren't. We just have a lot of stupid people."

I exaggerate, of course, but that's how it looks from a cursory glance.

Correcting for demographics is the one thing _we cannot_ do in measuring education's effectiveness, as the purpose of an education is for folks to gain habits and be able to do things in the real world -- a world that does not care which demographic you belong to.

<comment><USER5> You should read the article. Because that is really not what it says.

One of the major demographic things corrected for is the fraction of the country that is made up of immigrants. First and second generation immigrants perform significantly worse in school, and this relation holds across most countries. (The significant exceptions are Australia and Canada, which have a skill-based immigration system that selects immigrants who are likely to perform better in school.)

It is worth noting that the author was an immigrant from Iran to Sweden. (I don't know whether the author has since moved elsewhere.) Furthermore the author in the comments very strongly comes out against the notion that any race is naturally less intelligent than any other.

<comment><USER42> I think you've got race on the brain and are missing the point.

You can't externally label and measure groups of people -- by race, by income, by percentage of immigrants -- as part of an effort to improve education outcomes.

This is management by statistical measurement, and it's fraught with problems, the basic one is that it confuses measurement with meaning, correlation with causation.

Externally-defined statistical measurements are attractive, as they claim to give understanding. But in reality they provide very murky value at best.

<comment><USER5> Take a look at [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-EMpadQx4hM/TRKZ5kB-49I/AAAAAAAAAY...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-EMpadQx4hM/TRKZ5kB-49I/AAAAAAAAAY8/c_2n4vdbkPk/s1600/immigrant.jpg) and tell me again that it is appropriate to ignore immigration levels in judging how effectively the education system is doing its job of educating students. (Note that the exceptions of Australia and Canada are discussed in the article.)

When factors that big are out of the control of the education system, a proper analysis of the performance of the education system itself should not ignore them. The resulting outcomes may not be what is wanted, but that is not necessarily the fault of the schools.

<comment><USER42> I looked at the link, and I also read the article.

Full analysis here: <http://bit.ly/i8WTbA>

<comment><USER5> My summary of your analysis. _People aren't statistics so you shouldn't form your opinions about anything involving people using statistical data._

I'm sorry, but that trips my BS detector. It lets you believe anything you want to believe, and makes those beliefs impervious to any data you might be presented with.

If you don't believe me, then ask yourself these questions. What experiment can you imagine setting up that would convince you that immigrants truly are at a disadvantage of school, even when the school tries? What experiment can you imagine that could convince you that significant academic gaps between ethnic groups are not within the realistic ability of the school system to fix?

I suspect the answer is that nothing could ever convince you. In which case your belief is a position of religious faith, and is impervious to any form of data.

By contrast I accept that student performance is affected by many factors, some of which are out of the ability of schools to control. Schools can't readily fix what language you were raised with, your family's attitude towards education, various other possible problems at home, the effects the stereotypes have on self-image, and cultural differences around things like what age it is appropriate to start having children. Yet those things are strongly tied to your ethnicity, and have a significant impact on your academic performance.

How big a factor is this? How difficult to control? I don't know. But when presented with data that suggests that it is enough to explain the educational differences between the US and other industrialized countries, I'm not going to throw it out out of hand. And conversely if presented with different data that says it is not enough, I'm not going to throw that out either. I'm going to read both analysis, and form the most educated opinion that I can.

<comment><USER42> I'm going to try to throw aside all this emotional content and go at your point, mainly because I think you might learn something here.

Look -- I don't care about immigrants, one way or the other. Statistically, sure, you can make a measurement that has a correlation. Good for you. Lots of measurements and correlations in the world.

To directly answer your question, why would I go about conducting an experiment to show that immigrants are at a disadvantage? To what ends would that serve? What would be the point?

Instead, I might would look at teacher performance, or learning styles, or class size, or school construction, or any one of a million other variables that correlate with immigrants doing a good job. Then I would look for correlation between your immigrant groups and those other variables.

You can pick and choose things to measure and emphasize all day long -- and it doesn't get you anywhere. You want to say that schools are doing a great job and there are factors outside their control that make their outcomes poor in certain circumstances. Fine. I get that. Could be true. Might not be true. Worth exploration.

But the measurement of data and the observation of a correlation is just the initial, total bullshit stage of actually fixing anything. Most of the time correlations don't pan out. Most of the time there are counter-examples to the conclusions you want to reach. Most of the time things change right after you measure them. Most of the time people who don't want/know-how to solve things just sit around making these observations as sort of a chatting class. Most of the time it's nigh impossible to string together any of these correlations into something useful. Something that sounds insightful? Very easy to do. Something that actually has value? Very difficult.

The reality of things is that schools are paid to make a difference, and that there are certain skills that are non-negotiable in our environment. You can add the fact that some schools are doing a very poor job of teaching these skills.

I think those statements are not very provocative.

So, make whatever measurements you want, find whatever correlations you want, build whatever models you want, _as long as it further serves the purpose of doing the business of schools: providing an education_. If the only purpose is to provide excuses and make ourselves feel better, then it's not really worthwhile. Just go decide you're going to feel that some schools never got a fair shake and be done with it. It's fine with me. It's a perfectly valid point of view to have.

Everything in life is like this, not just schools. You have a job. You do a poor job of it. You either: a) dig down into some data to provide evidence you are not at fault, or b) dig down into some data to start forming models you can test, _realizing that the formation of models is only the barest beginnings of anything worthwhile at all_. You seem to want to make the measurement, observe the correlation, then announce that it's causal (and then, presumably, go forward to draw some sort of political conclusion)

That's just a bit too far.

How big a factor? How difficult to control? Who knows? Who cares? The point isn't to sit around making observations and bemoaning our ignorance and lack of funds/talent/whatever. The point is that the data is only a very small bit of a solution. We can sit around measuring things and pulling theories out our ass all day long. Not going to help any kids get a better education. The only thing it might do is make us feel better about our preexisting opinions.

I'm not saying that these assertions are false. I simply don't know. All I'm saying is that this type of conversation can go on for a long, long, long time without any useful results. You don't want to do that, either in the real world or with some philosphical school-immigrant problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> If you like, you can follow the author's suggestion to jump to the graphs to avoid the methodology. But then you'd miss the following important adjustments being made to the figures :

""" So ... let us compare Americans with European ancestry (about 65% of the U.S population, and not some sort of elite) with Europeans in Europe. We remove Asians, Mexicans, African-Americans and other countries that are best compared to their home nations. In Europe, we remove immigrants. """

The author has a clear agenda : Some American citizens are more equal than others.

<comment><USER5> If you jump to the graph and read what it says on the legend, you would _not_ miss that. It says that right there in the legend on the graphs.

If you read the article, you'll find reasoning for that methodology. Furthermore I suspect that _every_ major ethnic group does better in the USA than in their respective home countries. From the data in the article, it holds true for those of European and Asian descent. Given what I know about the appalling state of education in Mexico, I am sure it applies for Hispanics as well. I know less about Africa, but wouldn't be surprised if the same holds for African-Americans.

I fully agree that we can and should do better about erasing differences, but on the whole I'm happy counting that as a success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Beside what said by Cletus, I think that the main problem behind that post is that nobody is saying that American are dumb. The problem is that many Americans are ignorant (please don't take offense here), especially regarding things outside the US. For example the italian school system (the only one I really know) sucks big time, and it doesn't prepare students to the real world in any way, but on the other hand it provides a pretty good general knowledge, that helps to have a more open and flexible mind.

<comment><USER45> In the conversations I've had with Europeans on the internet many have an ignorant, almost comical view of American culture. Perhaps everyone is a bit provincial.

Europeans and American leftists have a tradition of claiming Europe is better than America that goes back centuries. If hard facts aren't at hand, they'll make up soft ones. American schools might be better than Italian ones in every way, so you just claim that Italians have "a more open and flexible mind" - <USER2> conveniently unmeasurable quantity. It sounds like you are simply asserting stereotypes as fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I flagged this article:

1) poor style, using his own experience to draw vast generalizations

2) clear editorializing, so the author is pushing an agenda and makes no attempt at objectivity

2) data is possibly cooked. For instance, the author says removing recent immigrants in Europe could raise the score by 50 points, then goes on to look at the white population for the US, and it's now 24 points ahead of Europe. So you corrected one country and not the others and are draw huge conclusions from that fact?

<comment><USER47> He excluded first and second generation immigrants from the European set in his comparison.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can I junior dev/intern for a programmer position at 40? - <AUTHOR> I am an immigrant and survived doing petty jobs for many many years, learning to program while working. I have a college degree which seems to be of no use in US and I learned a lot of stuff just to get employable as a developer and I have hacked a few stuff primarily using Java, Go, Angular, React, D3, docker, elasticsearch, cassandra, MySQL etc and learned a lot more may tools and reporting software. How can I find a Junior developer job or an intern position and what minimum hourly job can I expect if any ! <comment><USER2> Have you considered trying to contribute to a trendy and/or heavily used open source project? Especially one backed by a vendor?

If you start contributing useful bug fixes or features to Puppet, Chef, Cassandra, Spark, Mesos, Kafka, anything Hashicorp, etc. you're almost certain to be able to get a job working for the vendor(s) backing those technologies, or at the very least a company heavily reliant on those technologies, and you can probably side-step the intern/terrible-pay angle completely.

Especially if the vendor's market is less mature and stable and they're currently undergoing a growth-hiring phase. Databricks, Mesosphere, Confluent, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a ton. This is a brilliant idea.

<comment><USER2> Sure thing. Hope it helps.

I met a woman (she comes to my Elixir meetup occasionally) who basically did this after deciding that a lifetime of being a barista wasn't what she wanted for herself, and it worked.

New shapes of opportunities and career paths like that are probably my favorite thing about the open source software ecosystem.</comment></comment></comment>


The System Bottleneck Shifts to PCI-Express - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/07/14/system-bottleneck-shifts-pci-express/ <comment><USER2> The bottleneck is not PCI-Express, not even the 3.0 version. The bottleneck is shipping processors with just 16 PCI-E 3.0 lanes (!). Things are changing with the new high end desktop processors, with 64 PCI-E 3.0 lanes (e.g. AMD Threadripper [1]), which is massive: 128 GB/s, and hardly a bottleneck. The 4.0/5.0 versions will allow reducing costs by requiring less lanes, thus using less pins, being cheaper to produce.

[1] [http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-threadripper-vega- pcie-...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-threadripper-vega-pcie- lanes,34581.html)

<comment><USER3> The article is directed at the hpc/server market. Xeons have had 40 pcie lanes each for long time. Pcie bandwidth on desktops is only a problem for a very small number of people.

<comment><USER2> They could make 32-lane PCI-E slots, then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Taking a more skeptical look at the issue, we might have Intel to blame for the stagnant system interconnect.

As it gets harder each year to improve CPU performance, the HPC community has shifted to more workload-specific accelerators, most notably GPUs for high- throughput parallel data processing. These accelerators still rely on the host CPU to dispatch commands, but in recent years we've seen workloads really focus on and target the accelerator device (eg neural networks on the GPU).

If one wants to build a multi-GPU cluster, then the CPU quite plainly "gets in the way" \- performance can very quickly be bottlenecked by weak inter-device bandwidth (PCIe 3.0 x16 = 16GB/s, vs. the GTX 1080 Ti onboard DRAM's ~500 GB/s). Not to mention the fact that the PCIe controller is on the CPU die, meaning inter-node bandwidth and latency also strictly favor the CPU.

For large-scale systems, the value proposition of multi-GPU is greatly neutered by reliance on the PCIe bus, and so Intel stays relevant for many applications. And for the last 5 years, Intel's utter dominance of the HPC/server market meant that they could limit PCIe lanes without much pressure from their customers. With Ryzen/EPYC (128 PCIe 3.0 lanes!!) that old order looks set to change.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's the whole story, though. With some advances in storage, PCI-e is not far from being a bandwidth bottleneck in even consumer PCs (thinking about NVMe as an example.)

<comment><USER6> > NVMe

Even there the CPU can be the bottleneck. I have a Samsung 960 Pro that's theoretically capable of 3GB/s reads but when you use disk encryption even with AES-NI the processor can only do ~2GB/s.

<comment><USER7> What about when SIMD?

<comment><USER6> That would probably help. Not sure what Linux LUKS supports specifically, but it's testable via "cryptsetup benchmark".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> NVIDIA has their own bus to interconnect cards call NVLink: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink) Seems like an attempt to get around this.

Memory is also really slow too, but AMD's 6+ memory controllers will help.

<comment><USER9> NVLink is called out specifically in the article as a workaround for the delayed creation of PCIe 4.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I certainly don't have much to add on any of the technical discussion here about the host side of things, but speaking as someone who in a previous life had to run miles and miles of IB cable under the floors, rip out mysteriously broken cables and run their replacements back in, these high-capacity ports are a godsend for switch interconnects. I can use more ports on my edge switches and run way fewer shitty $1500 Mellanox ISL cables if I just want my hosts running FDR IB.

</comment><comment><USER11> Specifically, a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot can't even support a 200 Gbps NIC. Apparently the Mellanox ConnectX-6 NIC takes up two slots.

<comment><USER2> PCI-E 3.0 x16 has 16GB/s bandwidth, being 200 Gbps 25 GB/s, so yes, it is not enough.

Even having enough bandwidth, handling 25 GB/s data, except for hardware- accelerated network processing, is very hard when current processors have 60 GB/s of RAM bandwidth (DDR4, dual channel), and even with zero-copy modern OS is going to be hard for the CPU to process the packets on continuous full load. That's mind blowing, and amazing :-)

<comment><USER3> DDR has a much higher bandwidth than this. The old V4 Xeons could get close to 100 GBps, and the new skylakes out now have a 50% increase by going to six channels. On top of that, Intel has a feature where the packets coming off the wire are stored in cache first, so you could see much higher packet processing performance, depending on the type of application.

<comment><USER12> Have you tested the numbers?

<comment><USER3> [http://www.anandtech.com/show/8423/intel- xeon-e5-version-3-u...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8423/intel- xeon-e5-version-3-up-to-18-haswell)

[https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/Memory-Performance- for...](https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/Memory-Performance-for-Intel- Xeon-Haswell-EP-DDR4-596/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No mention of power requirements/allowances? I recall some gpus a while back being a big deal because they just squeezed into the power envelope allowed by pcie. I don't know if this governing body also controls the power specs or if they're even related.

<comment><USER14> High-end GPUs have a second or even third power connector, direct to the PSU. The power supplies to support them have dedicated 12V rails for each. The case you're remembering was due to trying to build cards down to a lower price by not including this connector and running very near the max allowed power that can be taken from the PCI slot connector. IIRC When combined with cheap motherboards and power supplies it resulted in failures.

The 6-pin PCIE power connectors can handle 75W, the 8-pins 150W, according to the specs. Some video cards have multiples of these connectors, to allow for very high power consumption. If more power is needed they'll just add more and require a bigger power supply.

<comment><USER15> GPU servers nowadays use proprietary form factors for GPUs anyway (like SXM2).

<comment><USER16> I'd be curious to hear who is using servers with the proprietary form factor GPUs. The prices for datacenter vs. gamer versions of the same GPUs have gotten really out of whack, where a 1080ti is $700, and a P100 is $7000, and at least on FP32, they have the same performance.

From what I hear, most all of the major DL research labs are using 4U servers with 8 of either the 1080ti or the Titan Xp rather than the SXM2 Teslas. On the other hand, all of the cloud providers seem to be sticking with the Tesla products, and pricing GPU instances commensurately. I really wish there were a cloud provider that offered instances with the gamer cards in them so that companies in the DL field weren't effectively forced to buy and manage their own hardware.

<comment><USER17> A P100 has a gp100 with nvlink, hbm2, and a 610mm die, while a 1080ti or titan Xp has a gp102 with gddr5x and 471mm die. It is not like quadro vs geforce where they both run on a gp102 with different drivers, the gp100 is considerably physically larger and has a much smaller userbase. I would be very surprised if they have the same fp32 performance in real world situations.

<comment><USER11> OK, so let's compare eight GP102s against one GP100. Is there any metric where GP100 wins?

<comment><USER18> Power consumption and space consumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems kinda of silly, especially since PCI-Express is not cache coherent.

Why not just connect high performance devices directly to hypertransport, Infinity fabric, QPI, or whatever the fast cache coherent serial interface of the day is?

<comment><USER20> The first generation of Infinipath did exactly that. We had to create a slot standard for Hypertransport (HTX), convince motherboard makers to build boards with that slot, and then at the end of the day we just ended up convincing everyone that they never wanted to go that route ever again.

These days Intel's putting Omnipath on-package for Xeon Phi and Skylake. Likely it's still a PCI-Express connection, but it doesn't count against the total available lanes for external cards.

<comment><USER21> > and then at the end of the day we just ended up convincing everyone that > they never wanted to go that route ever again.

Hmm, why? Intel executed well with Nehalem while AMD stumbled, leaving HTX even more niche than it already was, or do you mean there was some fundamental (technical) problem with it?

> These days Intel's putting Omnipath on-package for Xeon Phi and Skylake. > Likely it's still a PCI-Express connection, but it doesn't count against the > total available lanes for external cards.

Assuming the parts with integrated omni-path use the same socket, some pins will be needed for the OPA connection, no? Presumably pins that were reserved for PCIe in the normal chips, I'd guess...

<comment><USER20> Look at photos -- Omnipath Skylakes have an extra connector.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My problem with PCIE has always been latency issues. While more lanes will help with throughput it still doesn't help me get data on and off my NIC any quicker.

</comment><comment><USER23> Do busses matter in devices with a singular SoC, like modern phones and tablets? If not, then perhaps laptops/desktops could follow suit?

<comment><USER24> Yes, storage for example isn't on the SoC, so bus speed will limit storage speed.

<comment><USER25> Is PCIe really the bottleneck for storage devices? I haven't measured experimentally to see, but just off the top of my head, it seems like an x4 PCIe 3.0 slot should be able to keep up with everything but the latest SSD's (and for those, I'm not really sure.... depends on the workload as well probably).

<comment><USER20> It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the more flash chips you've got the more bandwidth is possible, but there's not much incentive to go faster than x4 can if you know the device is going to plug into x4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Topic is too overgeneralized. For general computing cases PCI Express is not the bottleneck, nor it will be.

<comment><USER20> This blog "offers in-depth coverage of high-end computing at large enterprises, supercomputing centers, hyperscale data centers, and public clouds."

It's not about general purpose computing.

<comment><USER27> Yeah they even link directly to PDF datasheets of PCB laminates and prepreg material (the core layers that the copper adheres to on a printed circuit board) that were used in an effort to show why they are having issues.

Pretty specific. Good article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This article confronts PCIe with eth/IB multiple times.

I wonder, does the author know how network cards are attached to CPU? There is no magic, apparently. And on most desktops you can not even have a full size video card and a 10GE adapter working simultaneously at full speed. And this bottleneck is in CPU (its interfaces).</comment>


ACTA gets final stake through heart as EC drops court referral - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/acta-gets-final-stake-through-heart-as-ec-drops-court-referral-7000009070/

<comment><USER2> But don't worry because there's CETA and if that fails we've got another one on the back burner.

We, the media industry, understand how important it is to the people of the US and the EU to get these provisions into law, so we'll keep funding the lobbyists until we all get the laws we want. We're only doing it because we love you so damn much!

<comment><USER3> "No, this isn't like ACTA at all, it has an entirely different acronym"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What parties/groups are trying to get sensible copyright laws on the books? Where do I send my money if I want to support them?

<comment><USER2> Pirate Party.

There's a lot to disagree with about them, but they seem to be the only force pushing in the other direction. Depending on which country you're in they are garnering some amount of support. I believe they even have an MEP now.

<comment><USER4> I started here: <http://www.pp-international.net/> but could only find legislation they are against, not any they are supporting. Stopping bad legislation is going to be a game of wack-a-mole until better laws are adopted. Is there any new legislation we should be supporting and lobbying "mainstream" (for want of a better word) politicians to support?

<comment><USER2> If you're in the UK (I am) then they have a specific manifesto here - [http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/media/uploads/Manifesto2012.pd...](http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/media/uploads/Manifesto2012.pdf)

Reading through it I might have to join, there's very, very little I can find to disagree with there.

For any americans - It leans heavily on the liberal side of things (as do I) though doesn't veer too far into the more blatantly socialist stuff. It does include a so-called Tobin Tax which I think I agree with, but could negatively affect the UK economy if the folks doing the HFT stuff leave...

So yeah. Unsure about other countries. I think a bit like the Greens there is international collaboration but not a top-down structure.

<comment><USER4> I did find that earlier. What I'm looking for though are specific draft laws/bill/acts. I can't find any.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. It would be unusual (IMHO, though IANAPolitician) to see stuff that specific when the party hasn't even got a single seat here.

The manifesto is a pretty specific statement of intent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "At least six of the signatories need to ratify ACTA if it is to come into force anywhere. Sadly for those who favour the agreement, the withdrawal of the EU and its 27 member states means there are only eight signatories left."

Sounds like there's still a fairly good chance of it coming to some countries - when it's there they can keep repushing it.

<comment><USER6> 22 EU governments actually signed ACTA:

<http://www.geekosystem.com/acta-primer/>

So in theory, they could still adopt it all "independently", I think. I mean I don't think the EU Parliament "rejection" means that they aren't allowed to make their own laws like this if they want to, does it? It's just that they might not do it because of the whole backlash and because the EU Parliament rejected it, too, and it would look very bad if they tried it now. Although they might still try to include parts of it in different laws and try to do it as stealthily as possible, but it's very unlikely most of them would do that right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://youtu.be/VCBTFh3IhQY> (English part starts at ~7")</comment>


Using Meltdown to steal passwords in real time - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/misc0110/status/948706387491786752 <comment><USER2> Man, this is some really scary stuff.

Intel seriously needs to up their game because AMD is going to destroy in 2018 if they don't. Like it's not even a joke anymore. How does a multi billion dollar corporation let something so huge like this slip past? It doesn't make any sense.</comment>


Is Unity3d banned by new Apple SDK licence? - tomh- http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/7408/is-unity3d-banned-by-new-apple-sdk-licence

<comment><AUTHOR> You know, I have to say, that given what we know now, even without clarification, it is clearly risky in the short term and dangerous in the long term to be using tools like Unity. That is, if you plan to base a business on the iPad, iPod, iPhone platform.

It's also a somewhat stunning to see people pondering whether or not Apple can be sued. Clearly most people here are unfamiliar with the licensing terms of other mobile gaming platforms. The terms for Nintendo, for example, are far more egregious. And if the mobile gaming terms scare you, then you should refrain from even looking at the terms for big three console development.

My point is that if this is to change, it will not be in court that the change happens. Running to the government should, in general, be avoided in all entrepreneurial activities. It invites 'help', of the kind that may be unintended.

Vote with your IP on this issue. If you think these terms are bad, don't develop for Apple's platform. If enough developers stop developing for it, things will change.

If you try to get around it by using something like Unity that compiles to C, Apple is just going to gain access to Unity, ascertain the 'fingerprints' if you will, and ban you on that basis. Software forensics has been around a good deal longer than Unity, so I would not bet against it. The only question is whether or not Apple cares to be strident about these rules. And if I am investing my money, I wouldn't bet against that either.

And really, why play cat and mouse, when you can develop elsewhere? For web, or for Android, if Google ever figures out how to deliver a package attractive to consumers.

I realize I am proposing that we engage in a massive game of the Prisoner's Dilemma, but talking to Apple won't work. They may be willing to accept something now, but not in a year. So you're still screwed.

Best to vote with your IP.

<comment><USER2> Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are very clear about their restrictions up front and enforce them consistently among licensees. It is very difficult when developing for console platforms to get yourself into a position where you have spent hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on development only to be told that your game has been rejected.

The problem with Apple in this case and in many others is that they do not enforce every app's compliance consistently and see no problem with the fact that they don't.

<comment><USER3> "Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are very clear about their restrictions _up front_ "

This is the crucial point. You can talk to a human at those companies if you have any doubts whatsoever about what is allowed and what isn't, or if you're trying something that sails a bit close to the wind. They do occasionally change their rules, but there is usually some wiggle room, and they give you notice. The changes are generally also not as drastic as this. With Apple you don't find out until _after_ you're done and have submitted your app.

Besides, the rules tend to be fairly obvious and predictable stuff, with the occasional technical subtlety, not the kafkaesque nightmare that is the iPhone SDK Contract.

The Nintendo developer newsgroups are pretty friendly and staff (real humans!) are very keen to help you out - I guess the barrier to entry is also somewhat higher than to iPhone development, but it's much more pleasant and predictable than Apple, which only ever seems to act as one faceless corporation.

<comment><USER4> That's like the difference between enterprise and small business sales. Apple could in no way afford to offer that level of handholding to all its tens of thousands of app store developers under the current arrangement.

I'm under the impression that the bigger name developers do have more contact, and if you have the budget to develop something big, you probably have access to them as well. If this is not the case, this is clearly something they should do, because otherwise it will stunt the development of big software projects on their hardware.

<comment><USER3> I get the impression you have to be a _lot_ larger to be in Apple's special club than you need to be to be a Nintendo developer - I know studios with <5 permanent staff who are doing DS & Wii dev. With Apple it doesn't seem to be a matter of "pay us $X and we'll help you get your title published", it's more of a "you have to be big enough that we can even see you from our ivory tower, and only if you bend over". Don't forget Google Voice on iPhone isn't happening, and neither is Opera. Does Nintendo let you publish a game that competes directly with Mario? Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unity is probably the most broadly used tool that's impacted by this change; many popular games are made with Unity.

Apple is aware of this - they briefly rejected all Unity games in November of last year for unpublished APIs before an update brought Unity back into compliance. [http://toucharcade.com/2009/11/12/ravensword-and-many- other-...](http://toucharcade.com/2009/11/12/ravensword-and-many-other-unity- powered-games-rejected-by-apple/) <http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=35744>

I'll be very surprised if this language isn't modified to give Unity a pass, or to relax this rule for games.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've heard they're confident they're in the clear, but I wonder if Apple will be forced to ban them to not lose some sort of legal dealings</comment>


How'd they do that? - <AUTHOR>

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home<p>Window location changes, but the page seems to not reload. Is this a new technique with HTML5 or javascript? <comment><AUTHOR> Aha,

<http://www.html5laboratory.com/working-offline.php></comment>


Show HN: urlbox.io - Add beautiful website screenshots to your site - <AUTHOR> https://urlbox.io

<comment><USER2> This is a great idea. I was actually working on something similar yesterday! The beauty of this is that it has so many uses! I think all the haters need to chill and think about this for a minute. Yeah, it's probably a wrapper around webkit2png but outside of HN people...

1\. Don't know how to use the terminal

2\. Can't install webkit2png themselves (there are _a lot_ of things that can go wrong - just ask me because they all went wrong for me yesterday. Everything from QT4 libs missing to $DISPLAY not being set, to the PIP package not installing correctly, to X-server connection problems)

3\. Even if they had webkit2png they wouldn't know how to write a wrapper that took a damn screen shot, _then_ resized it as a thumbnail, _and_ changes the screen size so you can see a preview for multiple devices.

4\. Don't have a Linux (or even POSIX compliant) machine locally or hosted somewhere.

This may seem simple here (well, to me it's more intermediate) but outside HN people will probably go nuts over this. Shameless sorta plug: I just started a project yesterday that does a very similar thing except it's meant for designers to take and store screenshots for inspiration and then plop them into a pretty UI/gallery. I'm going to open source it and host it though.

<comment><USER3> Issue is that it isn't unique, there's other players like <http://blitline.com/docs/blitshot>. They are also a lot more expensive.

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's an issue at all. I get what you're saying though. I know many times I've built something that already exists and whenever it happens my version falls into one of 3 categories:

1\. Something that someone else is doing better. Fail.

2\. Something someone else is doing exactly the same. DRY/don't reinvent the wheel fail.

3\. Something that does something seemingly the same as others but because it adds something others don't.

I think urlbox falls into category 3. There are lots of ways that a new entrant can be successful. Just tailoring it to a specific use-case honestly goes a long way towards success in my book. For example, Blitshot seems to be all about image processing of screenshots in general (and if it's not let's say it is for the sake of example) - you get an API for screenshots and image manipulation and it's up to you to find a use for it. But if someone else enters the fold, like urlbox perhaps, and says "our API is for purpose X and you can only use it in these ways" they could actually be very successful despite not offering what someone else is. There are a lot of people who'd rather use a product with less features in general but whose features are tailored to their use case than another product which offers the same and more but with no specific focus. Look at Pinboard. It's basically Delicious for a specific user group. All it lacks is the social aspect of it which you're not forced to use with Delicious anyway plus Pinboard is far more expensive (anything is "far more" expensive than free). I think Pinboard is a great example even if it doesn't fit exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a single-purpose app like this, at least it could do a better job at rendering the screenshots, if you ask me. I tried it out on my site (no custom web-fonts, pretty standard stuff) and the font-rendering looks awful:

<http://cl.ly/image/3S2E3Z3i412n>

<comment><USER5> It's probably related to linux font rendering.

<comment><USER2> Not necessarily. I'm going out on a limb and guessing at what they're using under the hood and if I'm right then font rendering wouldn't be the issue. I assume it's some sort of app that uses webkit to render pages then x-server to create the png. So in my experience, what's usually the problem for me is my own markup. If you're not meticulous about cross-browser consistency then this sort of stuff happens. It's not that it looks terrible, but it's just disappointing as it's not what you're used to seeing or what you want people to see.

<comment><USER5> I can't guess at exactly what they're doing, but when I built something very similar we noticed bad font rendering across the board until we tweaked the font rendering. It's often as simple as choosing a better font to use as the default when one is not specified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this product trying to compete with free plugin-in's like _Screen Capture (by Google)_ , or is it trying to be more of a "live site" preview generator that you see on like inspiration-esq sites or theme seller sites? I don't think that is fully clear in the marketing site.

</comment><comment><USER7> So, this is a web based API wrapped around webkit2png starting from 9.99 a month?

<comment><USER8> Seems like it, though that could come in handy.

<comment><USER9> By the looks of the terrible font rendering it's most likely khtml2png.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wanted to sign up, but the form had autocomplete disabled and you lost me there. What's the incentive for doing that? I never understood it.

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks great. I've been having one heck of a time trying to get good screenshots lately. It takes up a lot of my time. I'm really interested in your service, but for whatever reason when I punch in a url it won't render a screenshot. It just hangs on the ajax spinner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi porter, Our servers were overwhelmed by the number of requests coming through. You should try again maybe?.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone else doesn't get it?

</comment><comment><USER13> While there appear to be a number of sites operating in this space (documented some here: [http://web.onassar.com/blog/2012/11/19/web-based- screenshot-...](http://web.onassar.com/blog/2012/11/19/web-based-screenshot- services-and-software/)), this looks simple and straight-forward. While the cost is prohibitive for me since there are free alternatives (<http://immediatenet.com/>), it's great to see more competition in this space.

For what it's worth, I'm using it on my site <http://imnosy.com>

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a good idea, I actaully created something similar using PhantomJS the issue is web fonts there isn't a solution to rendering typekit webfonts using a headless webkit implementation see <http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/issues/detail?id=247> for more details.

As soon as webkit is updated to have better support for OTF fonts urlbox will become so much better

<comment><USER9> I'm confused as to why OTF will make everything better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I played around with the sign-up form because I'm designing something similar at the moment. Once I get a "username not valid" error, I can't re-enable the submit-button anymore. You might want to fix that. Also I don't think that the username was already in use, because I entered a random email. Probably a validation error.

To say something positive: I like that the headline changes the last word periodically. That caught my attention.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting question, especially as the Sony/KDE-Icon-thing is such a topic today:

Is this copyright infringement? They use apple.com as an example. The grabbing process clearly doesn't happen on the client side. Even if it did, what would be the implications of using Apples website, logos and trademarks embedded in your content without user interaction?

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks to URLBox, Implemented on my URL Shortner <http://xgd.in/>

Checkout - <http://xgd.in/viewdnsinfo+>

Note: I am removing it, since it does not work when a person is not logged into the system - its a shame and a sham

</comment><comment><USER18> What makes these screenshots "gorgeous" or "beautiful"? They look like pretty standard screenshots to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> Seems to not be working in Opera 12.14. Cant see any screenshots. Anyone else with same problem?

</comment><comment><USER20> You may need to install some unicode fonts.

Try a url like <http://renren.com> and it only has certain characters.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is an example of multiple screenshots rendered on same page.

<https://urlbox.io/demo>

</comment><comment><USER21> No flash plugin.

That was a hard to solve problem for me I would love to pay for. What they are offering does not look competitive.

<comment><USER2> I know how to get Flash working in case you're interested. I'm assuming here that you (and they) are both using Webkit2png. In that case what you do is install Flash ([package-manager] install flash-plugin) then...

Well, the gist of it is that once you have Flash installed you need to enable plugins (-F plugins -F javascript) as well as set the wait ('-w 10' for 10 second wait before shot's taken) option so that the Flash has time to load.

This article helped me quite a bit. Apparently there's a problem with the wait time so you may need to dig into webkit2png's source to fix it. [http://gfdsa.gfdsa.org/2012/08/making-web-pages- screenshots-...](http://gfdsa.gfdsa.org/2012/08/making-web-pages-screenshots- with-webkit2png-flash-included/)

<comment><USER21> Wait was making me a trouble. I solved it by doing a few shots by hand. But thanks for the future reference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The webpage does not work in Opera. The top image with search is missing and the bottom ones are just empty image tags.

<comment><USER23> It just sits and spins for me in firefox too - maybe it is too overloaded at the moment.

(I did wonder if it was because the sites I tested it with were IPv6 only, but even IPv4 sites are doing nothing.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> That thing where it says "web font support" apparently means the opposite, I'm afraid.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is this running on phantomJS? Looks like webfonts aren't supported.

<comment><USER26> I use PhantomJS for something and they aren't supported, I believe there are a few workarounds though bu injecting additional js into the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems pretty handy

</comment><comment><USER28> Why?</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone have a github repo they'd like someone to contribute to? - <AUTHOR>

I'm finding it difficult to explore repos on Github for the purpose of finding one to contribute to (yes, I went to the "Explore" page).<p>JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Python, and Ruby are all fine with me. Does anyone have a repo and a feature that they just haven't gotten around to? <comment><USER2> Yes! <https://github.com/saltstack/salt> While Ohloh[1] says we have had 240 unique contributors over the past 12 months, we are always looking for new ways to use and extend the project. Feel free to hop on #salt on irc.freenode.net and ask questions, ask on the salt-users google group, or just fork the projects and sling us a pull request.

Disclaimer, I am a part time coma obtained of salt. My IRC nick is the same as my HN username. Feel free to ping me with questions!

[1] <http://www.ohloh.net/p/salt/factoids>

<comment><USER2> s/coma obtained/co-maintainer/ #damnyouautocorrect

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been meaning to make a Chrome extension for SelectorGadget (<https://github.com/iterationlabs/selectorgadget/>) but haven't had time. That might be a fun project for you.

<comment><USER4> TODO:

\- Look into using :nth-of-type(n)

\- Fix bug with Reddit.

More details ?

<comment><USER3> Send me an email: andrew @ andrewcantino . com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been trying to make infinite scroll better, by including History API support: <https://github.com/outdooricon/infinite-scroll-with-history>

</comment><comment><USER4> Trying to have some language detection for (<https://github.com/hemanth/togist>)

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://github.com/gitlabhq>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll check it out.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin Plunges as Much as 23% from Wednesday's Record High - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/bitcoin-drops-as-much-as-23-percent-from-wednesday-s-record-high <comment><USER2> And gold has gone up a bit too. It's almost like when this non-tangible asset reaches the the price of a tangible asset, people switch.</comment>