Finding And Buying A Domain Name - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/finding-and-buying-a-domain-name.html <comment><USER2> I think the rent-to-own idea is pretty clever but how would you structure the control of the domain--DNS, etc. I would be reluctant to build a business around a domain which an unscrupulous domain "land-lord" could then redirect to a different site at his whim. I understand that there would be a contract to prevent this sort of thing but while the issue is in courts, your business just died.

<comment><USER3> >> I would be reluctant to build a business around a domain which an unscrupulous domain "land-lord" could then redirect to a different site at his whim.

That was my first thought when reading that option. You'd definitely need some legal coverage if you decide to enter into that kind of agreement.

<comment><USER2> If the demand was high enough, someone could make a company that held domains in escrow during these sorts of arrangements.

<comment><USER4> Is already there, see: [https://www.escrow.com/solutions/domain_name/domain_name_hol...](https://www.escrow.com/solutions/domain_name/domain_name_holding_services.asp)

<comment><USER5> Unless I missed something, it doesn't appear that the buyer can "use" the domain while in Escrow.

<comment><USER4> My apologies -- you seem to be correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On the subject of using words with no meaning, Aaron Patzer had a different philosophy:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1219141>

When I saw him speak at WebbyConnect a few years back, he said that he felt the competition's use of hard-to-spell and hard-to-remember names like Wesabe and Geezeo really hurt them (and helped Mint). While it doesn't seem to have hurt Zynga, there is a difference in that the name of Zynga's products are quite easy to spell and remember.

<comment><USER7> There seems to be a major divide between two-syllable non-meaningful words and three+ syllable ones. Etsy, Zynga, and Google don't sound that hard to remember compared to Wesabe or Geezeo. I suggest a simple test for domain name desirability: the value of a domain name is inversely related to its score in Scrabble.

How do people feel about longer combinations of meaningful words, like BingoCardCreator, SecondMarket, or AppointmentReminder? I see a tradeoff between the number of total words and the complexity of each individual word, e.g. CreditKarma vs. HotOrNot.

<comment><USER8> Then Zynga(18) is worth less than Geezeo(16), which ain't the case!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tend to agree with 37Signals on this -- they basically say that the name of your product matters a lot more than that product's domain name, so long as you get a domain that's "close enough." If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense, because most people find sites on the web either by following links or by searching Google/Bing/etc., neither of which rely on knowing what the destination URL is.

His advice of buying the actual product name (e.g. foursquare.com instead of playfoursquare.com) post-launch is good advice though, because it can help push your product beyond the early adopter stage.

<comment><USER10> By way of example...

A couple of years ago, my buddy and I made a parody site "Woofer" -- like Twitter, but with a 1400 character _minimum_ per 'woof'.

We tried to buy the domain name woofer.com. We tried rent to own. The owner wouldn't budge.

We ended up purchasing "Woofertime.com". Within 1 month we were the top organic search result for "woofer", even above Woofer.com and Wikipedia.

(It's since fallen to #4, and in truth I'm not even sure if the site works anymore. It was just a joke. But, the fact remains that during its peak, we didn't need the .com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this was written up here on Hacker News a few weeks ago but it is relevant for this discussion and thought I'd link to it if anyone is interested. It is 24,000 five-letter domain names that are available: [http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-...](http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available- brandables-com-domains-full-list)

(I'm not the author but I bookmarked the site for some new projects. I didn't find anything that jumped out at me on a first pass but maybe something will for you!)

<comment><USER12> I'd just like to add I made a similar blogpost, 20337 available alliterative .com domain names [http://rawsyntax.com/post/4839370351/20337-available- alliter...](http://rawsyntax.com/post/4839370351/20337-available-alliterative- com-domain-names)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Domains do NOT have to cost you ANY $$$ I have started OpenDomain - an Open source project that lets open source groups use for FREE: Please contact me @JSON if you would like to use NoSql.Com 4NY.Com 4DC.Com wUSB.Com JSON.Com LocalFeed.Com Free.TV

Some references: Dries Buytaert Founder of Drupal CMS <http://buytaert.net/drupal-com>

Brendan Eich Creator of JavaScript, CEO of Mozilla OpenDomain: <http://www.ecmascript.org/>

Jon Ferraiolo, IBM W3C - the leader of the OpenAjax Alliance <http://www.openajax.org/OpenDomain.php>

Peter S. Andre Jabber protocol <http://xmpp.org/xsf/press/2005-12-30.shtml>

Tim O'Reilly [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_inner_circles_of_10...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_inner_circles_of_10_geek_heroes_on_twitter.php) OpenDomain: <http://Oscon.com>

Others <http://nunit.com/blogs/?p=36> <http://www.greylisting.org/about.shtml> <http://archive.fosdem.org/2008/sponsors>

</comment><comment><USER14> It's interesting that Wilson says "Etsy" doesn't mean anything. I assumed it was a phoneticization of "etc.".

<comment><USER15> hmm. i never thought of that. i'll have to ask rob kalin if that was the inspiration. i don't think so.

<comment><USER16> According to this CNN article: "in a January 2010 interview for Reader's Digest, founder Rob Kalin finally revealed the secret: "I wanted a nonsense word because I wanted to build the brand from scratch. I was watching Fellini's 8 ½ and writing down what I was hearing. In Italian, you say 'etsi' a lot. It means 'oh, yes.' And in Latin, it means 'and if.'"

[http://articles.cnn.com/2011-04-22/living/website.name.origi...](http://articles.cnn.com/2011-04-22/living/website.name.origins.mf_1_skype- service-etsy-laser-pointer?_s=PM:LIVING)

<comment><USER17> It's also a Greek word, meaning (roughly) "like this".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would anybody be interested in this?

I have relaun.ch. It's free for a month. If you get over 100,000 uniques it's yours forever. Otherwise I give it to the next company with a good idea, with similar conditions.

I don't care about the money, just if you have a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER18> personally I find that domains are severely undervalued for what they are.

I mean think about it...once you own a domain, you have a monopoly on it. You can charge whatever you want...and if someone wants it, they have no choice but to go through you.

<comment><USER19> If somebody wants it... There are ~91 million registered .com domain names, and >220 million domain names of length 6 or less. The mode, the most frequent domain name length, is 12.

There are quite a lot of free domain names.

(source: the zone file we got from verisign that we use for nametoolkit.com)</comment></comment>


Go Data Structures (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://research.swtch.com/godata

<comment><USER2> _> As an aside, there is a well-known gotcha in Java and other languages that when you slice a string to save a small piece, the reference to the original keeps the entire original string in memory even though only a small amount is still needed. Go has this gotcha too._

That is no longer the case in Java. String.substring() now makes a copy. I think it doesn't matter much which of the two approaches a language takes as long as everybody knows it. This needs to be in the language spec and can't be an implementation issue.

<comment><USER3> for historical note, this change was made in may 2012 Java 7u6

<comment><USER4> That's kind of a big deal for a point release...

<comment><USER5> There is a good reason for it however. [http://www.javaadvent.com/2012/12/changes-to- stringsubstring...](http://www.javaadvent.com/2012/12/changes-to- stringsubstring-in-java-7.html)

<comment><USER6> Here's more nitty-gritty from Oracle: [http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs- dev/2012-Ma...](http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs- dev/2012-May/010257.html)

If I'm following, a Java string used to be a []char and offset/count ints, and this change let them drop those ints. You saved RAM if you had a lot of little strings, but paid for extra copying if you took lots of substrings.

Go slices/strings don't have a pointer to the "original" backing array, just a pointer to the first byte in this (sub)string. It doesn't need extra fields to do substrings by reference.

I think part of the technical reason for the different string headers is that the Java designers didn't want their GC to have to handle "internal pointers" into strings/objects (maybe for performance reasons?), whereas the Go designers decided to support 'em (maybe to support more C-like code in Go?).

<comment><USER2> Go does not support internal pointers into strings. You have to use slicing for that.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I mean that there's an internal pointer in Go's in-memory representation of the string, not that there's a naked byte pointer directly visible to the programmer.

Go's GC's support for internal pointers means it can use a pointer-and-length representation for substring references. Java's lack of support for them means its string representation needs a pointer to the start of the char array and a separate offset and count in order to do the same substring-reference trick. (And, I'm saying, that helps explain why Java and Go now do substrings differently.)

There are other places where Go's ability to use internal pointers is exposed more directly to the programmer: for example, Go lets you take the address of an array element or struct field and pass around the resulting pointer.

<comment><USER2> _> Go's GC's support for internal pointers means it can use a pointer-and- length representation for substring references_

Only if the String class is implemented in pure Java, which it currently is. But it doesn't have to be that way. Oracle could go around the Java language features and implement the String class in native code just as Go does with several builtin types. You may be right that it would be more difficult to do than in Go because of garbage collector specifics.

But I guess the real issue is a philosophical one. Is it a good idea to let the standard library use features that are not available to users of the language?

<comment><USER6> I'm saying I think it would take GC rearchitecting for Java to be able use a pointer into the middle of the string in its internal String representation, because Java's GC, unlike Go's, is currently not built such that a pointer into the middle of anything keeps that thing "alive" for GC purposes; you have to have a pointer to the beginning. Sun made that choice that in hopes they could write a faster GC that way, I suspect.

Given that GC design, Go's two-word substring references (pointer into middle of string + count) wouldn't work; even if String were a builtin, with the no- internal-pointers GC design it would need to be at least three words (pointer to start of string, offset, count).

tl;dr of my larger point is--I think Java needed a few extra bytes/String to support substrings by reference because of how its GC works differently from Go's, and I think that explains why Java decided to remove its substring-by- reference trick while Go didn't. (And I'm not trying to say either way is worse, just trying to really grok why they're different.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note that this is from 2009. Although the main details have not changed, the int type is more commonly 64 bits now (since 64 bit architectures are much more common)

<comment><USER8> Do you know what version that happens in? I tested on my 32 and 64 bit platforms with golang 1.1 and a static definition of an integer results in type int (which is explicitly 32 bit)

      package main
      import "fmt"
      import "reflect"
      func main() {
          i := 3
          z := reflect.ValueOf(i)
          fmt.Printf("%s\n", z.Kind())
      }
      // $./test
      // int
      // $

It's my understanding that this intentional and won't change, only explicit declarations of int64 are 64-bit.

<comment><USER9> The size of int on 64-bit systems was increased to 64 bits as of Go 1.1: [http://golang.org/doc/go1.1#int](http://golang.org/doc/go1.1#int)

<comment><USER8> Cool, thanks for the clarification, this makes sense!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish there were a way to create custom data structures without casting to and from interface{} all the time. Heck, it would already help if there were a shorthand for interface{}, like "any" or something.

<comment><USER4> The usual pattern is to use a type that requires the thing you pass in to have methods that you use for the data structure, like sort.Interface[1]. It's faster, safer, and better than using interface{}.

As for shorthand, behold!

        type any interface{}

[1]: [http://golang.org/pkg/sort/#Interface](http://golang.org/pkg/sort/#Interface)

<comment><USER10> That introduces a new named type though, i.e., the "any" in your package is different from the "any" in mine, which is not what I want.

(Unless I'm mistaken here, which might very well be the case.)

<comment><USER4> Check it out: [http://play.golang.org/p/l9yn0PRbrd](http://play.golang.org/p/l9yn0PRbrd)

Anyway, that's the point of go's type inference- if the object implements the necessary parts of the interface, it counts as that kind of object.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> make(* Point) seems much better than having a separate _new_ keyword. Surprised to hear that was changed after just a few days.

<comment><USER12> The "new" keyword is practically unused in modern Go development, but is kept for backwards compatibility. The usual way to make a point is "p := &Point{}", without using any keyword.

<comment><USER13> Not true. I count "new" being used about half as often as "&Point{}" in the Go standard library. That's not "practically unused".

      g% cg -c -f 'g/go/src/pkg.*\.go' '\bnew\(' | total 2
      1485
      g% cg -c -f 'g/go/src/pkg.*\.go' '\&[A-Za-z0-9_.]+\{' | total 2
      3051
      g% cg -c -f 'g/go/src/pkg.*\.go' . | total 2
      430482
      g%

So 430,482 non-blank lines of code, 1485 lines with new, 3051 lines that look like a struct pointer literal.

<comment><USER14> If I had to guess, I think they meant that anyone writing new code will avoid using 'new'.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Driverless Cars Threaten to Crash Insurers' Earnings - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/driverless-cars-threaten-to-crash-insurers-earnings-1469542958 <comment><USER2> The other bubble that driverless cars are going to pop is ticket revenue. There are a lot of police departments and cities who have structured a lot of their budget on heavy-handed enforcement of motorists.

That's going to decline significantly once driverless cars are scrupulously following the rules of the road. And any tickets that get written will be going against a giant corporation like Google, with detailed information about what the car was doing at the time of the supposed infraction, a lot more financial ability to fight the ticket, and a lot more incentive to protect their reputation.

<comment><USER3> What makes you think Google will fight my ticket on my behalf? Surely, it would benefit them to have traffic laws written to clarify that the occupant is still liable for any laws his self-driving car breaks.

Also, as the other commenter said, the laws will adapt. The purpose of traffic laws is to maintain $X level of revenue, so if revenue starts to drop, local governments will increase the number and complexity of traffic laws until revenue is back to the expected level.

<comment><USER4> The end state for driverless cars is most likely not individual ownership. Large companies will probably own fleets of cars available for hail. In this world, the fleet owners would probably develop a rigorous process to cost effectively fight traffic tickets.

Even if local governments tried to increase the complexity of traffic laws, the fleet owners would increase spending on fighting tickets; this would result in an arms race which would be costly for the local government. It's much easier to extract rent from the little guys.

The worry I have is of increased enforcement of local non-traffic laws to make up revenue.

<comment><USER3> I'd expect it would be cheaper in the long run for those large companies to influence laws to move ticket liability over to their customers rather than take on the expense of fighting traffic tickets themselves.

<comment><USER4> Possibly, but that's assuming no aspect of consumer choice in the survival of ride hailing systems. If customers had to worry about tickets, they would quickly migrate to a competitor which assumed liability.

<comment><USER5> The same way that competition ensures things like Net Neutrality because consumers vote with their wallets?

<comment><USER4> Most people don't care about net neutrality. Most people will care about having to pay tickets in self-driving car fleets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nappy-doo I'd expect the WSJ to know better -- this article (while technically correct) miscategorizes how insurance works.

First of all, the article states that premiums will go down -- a reasonable, but not proven thesis. We don't know what will happen to insurance volume or prices, both of which go into calculating total premiums.

Secondly, the article doesn't really describe to readers how insurers make money -- almost no auto insurers make money directly on premiums. They make money on the float they get from premiums. Competition prevents most from making money on premiums directly, with some exceptions (GEICO, with the low cost sales model comes to mind). A reasonable assumption is that float will go down (again not proven), but we're also in an extremely low-interest-rate world right now -- something that's tough on insurers anyway.

But almost neither of these points matter.

Auto insurance is a required by most states (some states allow you to have a bond instead of insurance). It's mandated. These laws have to be repealed, and likely will remain intact for years while the transition to driverless cars happens. Similarly, liability and insurance will be required for malfunctions, tampering, and bugs.

IMO, P&C insurance, and specifically auto insurance's, imminent death has been greatly exaggerated.

<comment><USER6> I don't see insurance dying overnight, but if their cars are _solely_ used in driverless mode[1] then it's in the manufacturers' interest to take on that risk directly: since they're ultimately liable for [virtually] all risks cars are compulsorily insured for[2] it makes sense to cut out the middle men and keep that float to themselves as well as streamlining the claims process. The ability to make mandatory insurance contingent on getting cars serviced expensively at approved dealers is a nice little bonus. So you get the mandatory insurance certificate with the car,[3] and a whole bunch of B2C auto brokers and insurers are left selling policies which are entirely optional and which consumers consider much more unlikely to be claimed on

Sure, some parts of the industry (Lloyds reinsurance syndicates underwriting the portion of the manufacturers' liability they're not willing to self- insure, which is probably the idiosyncratic risk of a negligence claim over software updates) still exist, but all those B2C players are fighting for a much smaller share of the pie which continues to decline as more people switch to exclusively driverless cars and they don't really get stolen any more.

[1]I think this is a _very_ big if in the foreseeable future, but it seems to be assumed by the article.

[2]there's still a market for insurance against vandalism, fires not caused by the car itself and [to a much more limited than before extent] theft, but that's probably not compulsory in most jurisdictions and so a much tougher sell for the insurance companies.

[3] they could even build in the annual policy renewal fee for the design life of the vehicle into the purchase price if they really wanted to. I'm also assuming here that there's no legal impediment to individuals' motor liabilities being underwritten by a division of the vehicle's manufacturers in most jurisdictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good.

just like universal unbreakable glass might hurt glaziers.

just like getting people to commit less crimes might hurt for profit prisons.

just like people not getting attacked might hurt self-defense courses.

I realize this is perfect-world absolutist thinking but industries that exist because of something wrong in the world shouldn't have a right to exist when that wrong is removed.

<comment><USER8> "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -The Shirky Principle

<comment><USER9> Great quote. I call it corruption, self-preservation that hurts the masses, and status quo thinking. Technology is going to hopefully disrupt all of this.

<comment><USER8> It's the only thing that can, if history is any guide. Society and "ethics" are so often a function of our technology, however simple we now consider that tech to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article's title is a little misleading. This would shrink the market as a whole. Revenue would go down and earnings would go down as a result. _However_ , it wouldn't have to affect profitability.

In fact, profitability would probably go up on these policies initially since the safety benefit would be immediate, but the implied risk in the policies would only come down over time as the safety works it's way into statistics.

(Apologies if I'm not using correct terms. Not an actuary.)

<comment><USER2> Only if the insurer in question is solely involved in auto insurance.

From the insurance company's perspective, they need enough of a capital reserve to mitigate the risk of a sudden shock in payouts. Spreading across larger geographic areas mitigates that risk somewhat, as does spreading through multiple businesses. Auto insurance is probably a particularly nice gig since it's relatively unaffected by things like natural disasters and would have a relatively smooth cashflow.

So, less capital from auto insurance means more capital has to come from somewhere else - more borrowing, if nothing else. That probably translates into either reduced profitability, or higher premiums on other kinds of insurance.

I'm not an actuary by any means, but that's my guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why would they lower prices? The government mandates we MUST have insurance, so they know they've got a continued source of business. They'll simply increase profits. The average American has absolutely no way to correlate the amount they pay for insurance to what it costs the insurance company.

<comment><USER12> They can't do that because other companies will undercut them to gain market share. They could collude to set prices, but that's illegal in the US. Also, some auto insurance companies aren't organized as corporations, such as the Auto Club of Southern California, which is a not-for-profit mutual. They aren't saints, but since they redistribute most of their profits to policyholders, they don't really have much incentive to keep prices high.

<comment><USER13> Corporations have been doing illegal things for a while now. All you have to do is to share a reasonable part of illegal proceedings with the government - it's called a 'fine'.

<comment><USER14> Please don't be edgy and dismissive on HN

<comment><USER13> I am not edgy, I am pointing out that just if something is 'illegal' it does not mean corporations won't do it.

<comment><USER5> The fact that something is illegal means that there is a risk in doing it, and a cost in hiding it. It's not quite the same situation as if colluding were completely legal and above-the-board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another thing that's going to take a huge it is police departments. Many of the initial encounters with police are by way of a traffic stop and patrol. With a self-driving car, there's no longer "probable cause" because the car is driving itself. This will cut off a huge source of income from the police and at the same time reduce the need to have so many police, which, in my mind, is a good thing. Expect entire highway patrol and regional agencies to be shuttered.

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't a healthy accident insurance industry a form of the broken window fallacy? There's a few people in my life I'd gladly have back and shrinking insurance companies would be a tiny price to pay.

</comment><comment><USER17> Insurance is a field in need of some disruption, regardless. A few numbers, in case people find it interesting.

The average insurance company only pays out about 50% of its income as loss (heavily dependent on sector, but for auto it's about right). For auto, they all use more or less the same ISO policy docs. They mostly all use the same call centers. Their adjustors are usually shared. Honestly, the only thing that really changes is the marketing.

Which is why 30%+ of every dollar you pay them goes to marketing. For auto, they are in this weird local maxima where 40% is loss, 30% is marketing, and 30% is profit. They expect to keep a customer for about 2-3 years, and then have to repeat the whole process. It is really sad.

</comment><comment><USER18> An improvement in safety is wonderful news. The public spending less money on insurance is wonderful news. All the individuals busy managing an auto insurance business have plenty of time to find a better use of their energy.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not sure how it would affect prices, but if driverless cars (let's call them autopilot-mobiles) take over the world, they may not be owned by individuals anyway, but instead bought as-needed from corporations (e.g. "Just $100 a month for the Commuter Plan".) This would shift insurance industry focus from insuring millions of individuals to thousands (or maybe only dozens) of corporations, so they could also save money on advertising. I will miss the gecko. And Flo (a little.)

<comment><USER20> And if it is dozens of corporations, there's no reason they wouldn't just absorb the insurance function. Right now because insurance is bought by consumers there's tremendous value in having a recognizable consumer-facing brand (Gecko & Flo). But if the car provider already has the ongoing consumer relationship, offering the insurance is a straightforward financial feature. Plus they'll be way more informed about the risk characteristics of their customers and vehicles. I don't see any remaining reason for separate auto insurance companies to exist if this version of car purchasing takes over individual ownership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Correct me if i'm wrong, but wasn't "insurance" a criminal activity a mere century ago?

If so, why is it bad for it to disappear again?

Can't read the full article, since wsj have a competently implemented "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In" shield.

<comment><USER22> There are many forms of gambling that were prohibited until they were renamed in a way that appeased influential religious communities.

Off the top of my head I can think of insurance products and the futures market.

But if you can find citations that will be very helpful for me!

<comment><USER23> Insurance is used for a fundamentally different purpose, to socialize risk.

A good quote I found: _insurance transfers risks that already existed; gambling creates risk for entertainment._

<comment><USER22> A rationalization for Evangelicals. Once you realize the distinctions are all rationalizations to appease people that require cultural distinctions, you'll stop trying to rationalize a difference between financial chances.

Think "why am I more comfortable with gambling because my state mandates I pay it" and think about what circumstances led to that, and then think about what prompted you to care at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Shouldn't the drop in revenues be balanced by the decrease in payouts?

<comment><USER25> What they get from the customer covers operating costs and payouts. Insurance makes money by investing that mountain of cash. Smaller mountain, smaller profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Still think there will still be a market for old school non automated cars. For the hobbyist or pleasure drivers on weekends. People still love their cars.

</comment><comment><USER27> Other declining industries will be emergency health care and organ transplants.

</comment><comment><USER28> In a perfect world, we wouldn't need insurance (everything would go right all the time). The closer we get to that perfect world, the better.

</comment><comment><USER25> Am I the only one who bothered that seatbelts (1968) weren't included on the death per billion vehicle miles graph?

</comment><comment><USER29> if the insurance companies can keep state laws in place, perhaps less revenue but also less payouts = more profit(?)</comment>


Google returns 11600 results for "PHP sucks"  - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?q=%22php+sucks%22

<comment><USER2> And 117,000 for "ruby sucks". This game doesn't really prove anything.

<http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22ruby+sucks%22>

</comment><comment><USER3> and 4 for "amazing broccoli lasagna".

<comment><USER4> 4.8 Million</comment></comment>


An XMPP interface for Campfire (node.js) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/causes/node-xmpp-campfire

<comment><AUTHOR> I started this during the latest <plug>Hack-a-thon at Causes (causes.com/join_us),</plug> and now it's beta enough to open source.

Unlike some other existing solutions, this one behaves like an XMPP MUC (group chat), and doesn't require that you run your own XMPP server or have an extra XMPP user.</comment>


Web-blocking and Illegal Sites - <AUTHOR> https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/blog/2011/jul/25/web-blocking-and-illegal-sites/ <comment><USER2> I don't even like the term "illegal sites". It's like the term "illegal books" or "illegal thoughts".

Anyone advocating for sites to be illegal is probably not too interested in freedom.

Can sites advocate doing illegal things? Sure, just like books. I can legally write, publish, buy and read books on how to make bombs and drugs. That is different from actually making and using bombs and drugs though, a very important distinction. There are plenty of documentaries and movies that show drugs and bombs being made and some are quite accurate. That is not illegal either.

Can sites be used to gather together to plan criminal activity? Sure, that's called conspiracy and is illegal whether done with the internet, via phone, postal letter, or meeting in a cave with dissidents. Again, a site being a medium of conspiracy doesn't make sites illegal any more than paper used to convey a bank robber's note makes paper illegal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Should we call the 'undocumented' sites.</comment></comment>


Triangulate my position based on driving distance and times. - <AUTHOR> http://far.to/2i

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea for this just hit me last night--I envision it being useful on places like Craigslist where proximity is useful information but I wouldn't want to actually make my address public.

<comment><AUTHOR> ...and I've hit my query limit for the day. I guess that means I should work on round 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It's a neat idea but I think you need a clearer explanation of how to use it. Is it your intention to allow people to create their own entries?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, just go to <http://far.to/>. My explanation on the page could use some more work--suggestions welcome--I had a hard time coming up with concise instructions.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I obviously mentally filtered the "/2i" from the URL so I thought I was already on the home page. :)

Your additional "create your own" link makes this clearer.

It would be nice if it was more obvious that the URL is referring to a specific location--perhaps provide the option to "name" the location? This would enable you to be more verbose with "How far away are you from _a seller in San Francisco_?" for example.

Even changing the wording/layout to something like might help:

Heading: How far away are you [from]? far.to/2i Enter your address and you can find out how many miles and how long it would take to drive to this location.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: insanepenguin.com (weekend project) - no idea what this is useful for - <AUTHOR> http://insanepenguin.com/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com&hacker=scrambled%20eggs

<comment><USER2> [4tehlulz]([http://insanepenguin.com/goto.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fejohn.org...](http://insanepenguin.com/goto.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fejohn.org%2Fblog%2Fjavascript- as-a-first-language%2F&general=genital))

</comment><comment><USER3> Scrambled Egg News. Heh.

</comment><comment><USER4> phishing made easy.</comment>


Top 10 popular programming languages and their history - <AUTHOR> http://visual.ly/history-programming-languages <comment><USER2> "How will java's recent security vulnerabilities affect its popularity?"

This is the one question the infographic takes the time to ask. It's a poor question, but one many people seem to ask after the recent java plugin vulnerabilities.

Java hasn't been popular for in-browser development for many years now, and even at its height it was never _that_ popular. These security vulnerabilities only affect Java use cases where untrusted java code is expected to be restricted to limited system access. This is not the environment mainstream java software will ever run in, so the mainstream use cases for java are entirely unaffected by these security issues.

The majority of Java software falls into two classes: desktop/native software and enterprise/server software.

Desktop/native software, like Minecraft or Android apps is either intended to have full system access (Minecraft) or is already restricted to making system calls through a rigid API that requires user permission to have access to (Android apps). In addition, Android uses its own Dalvik VM, so issues with Oracle's JVM are immaterial. Security of browser applets is a non-factor in both cases (android phones can't even run them).

Enterprise/server software are Java web applications, Java services, and other enterprise/web/server architecture pieces. These don't run on end user machines and are trusted applications, so JVM sandboxing is not really a concern.

There is absolutely nothing insecure about Java as a language. Occassionaly, there are issues with certain implementations of Java. These latest security flaws were in an implementation of Java that very few people use. Yes, everyone should remove Java from their browser, but if they were even using Java it almost certainly wasn't in the browser to begin with. The plugin has stuck around far long than it was useful, so good riddance.

Removing Java from a system altogether, as I have seen many people recommend, is in general too far and may break desktop apps users depend on that are not a security threat.

Sorry for the rant... I'm actually an ex-Java developer who has fallen for Ruby. There are plenty of legit problems with Java, but security generally isn't one of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem I have with _any_ of these types of rankings is always the basis, which is so nebulous that it never holds up under scrutiny.

In this case, popularity is measured in terms of the number of programmers using a language, the number of training courses, and the number of third- party vendors.

I use about 5 different languages on this list, and another 3-4 that aren't. Which group am I counted in?

Training courses = popularity? Hmm, maybe. That also represents a sales angle, so it's skewed. As pointed out elsewhere, Javascript is incredibly popular but I don't find a lot of training courses available for it. It must not be popular!

Third-party vendors? Guess it depends on what you're selling (again, sales skews the line.) Some languages don't formulate well to products being sold (think dynamic languages that can't be compiled/obscured).

And lastly, what purpose does a popularity list _not driven by job descriptions_ serve?

<comment><USER4> > And lastly, what purpose does a popularity list not driven by job > descriptions serve?

The only purpose a popularity list driven by job descriptions serves is in determining the employability consequences of getting the language on your resume; every other conceivable purpose of a popularity list is best served by one not based on job descriptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Ada Lovelace credited with first computer programming language; wrote an algorithm for the Analytical Engine (early mechanical computer)_

This is often credited as the first computer program ever written and by extension she is often credited as the first computer programmer. Those are great things and accurate as far as I know, but I think saying that she created the first programming language is a bit disingenuous.

<comment><USER6> Here's the algorithm she described:

<http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html#NoteG>

Seems to resemble a mathematical proof more than anything, but perhaps this just means that mathematics was the first programming language. :)

EDIT: Actually, in Note E she appears to introduce a custom notation for the machine. Perhaps this is what the article was referencing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Terminator ran COBOL? The screenshot clearly shows 6502 assembly language: <http://www.pagetable.com/docs/terminator/01-23-27.jpg>

<comment><USER8> It seems you're right. That's pretty bothersome. "The Terminator is written in COBOL" is practically an urban myth at this point. There are a plethora of articles about it.

[http://landofthefreeish.com/code/the-terminator-was- written-...](http://landofthefreeish.com/code/the-terminator-was-written-in- cobol/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This document is a mess. The title "The History of Programming Languages" does not correspond at all to the content.

No mention of machine language or assembly; no mention of functional or declarative style languages like Prolog, SQL, SetL; no mention of major languages like PL/1, Basic, Ada, Algol; no mention of a compiler or interpreter; one line on Lisp, banishing it to 1959; no mention of any theoretical underpinnings like Turing machines, Lambda calculus, computability.

I couldn't understand why anyone would put so much effort into making it look pretty and so little into making it communicate until I got to the end and learned it is just an advertisement for a security auditing program. They are really only concerned with current popular programming languages because that is what their prospective customers are using.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hmm ... those are not all the most popular. They are just the most widely used.

The real test for popularity will be which languages the polyglot programmers will choose if unburdened by legacy code . I think that we will see C/Python/Perl/Javascript there but i have yet to hear a good word for Java or the dark corners of C++.

<comment><USER7> > The real test for popularity will be which languages the polyglot > programmers will choose if unburdened by legacy code

See the GitHub top languages: <https://github.com/languages>

<comment><USER11> While you could do much worse for a measure of popularity, some languages are popular, but dont have a huge open source community. For example, Objective-C and C# are both probably higher in reality.

<comment><USER7> Because it's not popular. People use Objective C because iOS is popular, not the language.

<comment><USER12> There's no evidence that the GitHub list is comprised only of entries where the developer chose the language because they truly enjoyed or liked it.

The only reason that Javascript is at the top is because of the Web's popularity in my opinion. Personally I've seen many, many more people say they enjoy C# and think it's a well-engineered language than I have seen for Javascript.

Then of course we have people who choose languages based on their ideology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A primary use of Perl is graphics programming??

<comment><USER14> And Python was created to support a variety of programming styles.

While not strictly untrue, depending on what you consider a "style", it did cause a double-take.

<comment><USER15> Style as in functional, object-oriented, etc. Not tedious bikeshedding about whitespace and brackets.

<comment><USER14> I know, that's why I said it's not strictly untrue. Depending on your current state of mind, "style" may mean something different to you. I didn't mean to imply it was untrue, just that it did make me pause for a second and think.

The truth is, since I'm programming in Perl most of the time and I'm not restricted much in style (in the paradigm sense), I'm often changing between functional, imperative and OO "styles", so I don't think of "style" as referring to that very much. To be clear, I don't think this is inherently a benefit of Perl, but of the class of languages to which it belongs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Errr, where's JavaScript?

<comment><USER2> The infographic describes a little about JavaScript's history, but it is a little surprising to see it not listed in the top 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They just forget about Python and Ruby half way down...</comment>


The End of Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> https://rodneybrooks.com/the-end-of-moores-law/ <comment><USER2> I dunno, it's very different than things were. I built my current desktop in 2011, and aside from an ssd and upgrading from a 560 to a 970 gtaphics card, haven't made any changes. I'm running everything I want, multiple VMs all the time, Visual Studio, games at max graphics. Ten years ago, using a six year old machine meant you wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of running new software, but this one is chugging along admirably, and probably will for the foreseeable future. Unless everything moves to Electron, but if that happens, it really is the end times.

<comment><USER3> > Ten years ago, using a six year old machine meant you wouldn't have a > snowball's chance in hell of running new software [...]

Do you have some evidence for this claim? I'm not saying I disagree -- indeed, I suspect it might be true -- but I'd appreciate some evidence to back it up.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if that needs any evidence of the person was simply around back then. Basically this is saying that 2001 hardware wouldn't be able to run the new software in 2007, which at least to my recollection, is absolutely true. Not only is there 32bit vs 64bit, we also started to see more cores rather than the standard single core in 2001

<comment><USER5> I agree with you that this claim doesn't need evidence, but for anyone interested.

Starcraft 2 came out in 2007. These are the original system requirements. [https://www.lifewire.com/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty- requi...](https://www.lifewire.com/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty- requirements-813007)

I remember receiving the game as a gift and having to tell my grandma that my single core PC wouldn't be able to play it. I think my PC was only 3 years old at the time, not even 6.

<comment><USER6> I think you're miss-remembering. Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty was released in 2010. I played it on release on my Core 2 Quad/GeForce 8800 GTS machine that I built in 2009.

Blizzard announced they were making SC2 in 2007. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_II:_Wings_of_Liberty...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_II:_Wings_of_Liberty#Development) there wasn't even a closed beta until early 2010.

Regardless, the minimum requirements you posted are single core CPU's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Once you get down to 5nm features they are only about 20 silicon atoms wide.

This is a complete misunderstanding of modern processes.

It's conflating _feature size_ with some measure like "wire width". Feature size is best thought of as the tightest corner radius you can cut in a piece of wood. Actual logic (and wires) are far larger than this. There's actually a shocking amount of room "down there", still. The problem is that lithography probably won't scale down after some magic number (say 2 or 3 nm), and we'll have to do something else clever. It's been a while since I looked into this, but IBM's smallest AFM-created transistor is ~10 atoms, which is something like 4 _orders of magnitude_ (or more!) smaller than, say, 10nm.

<comment><USER8> Really ignorant question, but does size reduction affect heat dissipation at all?

<comment><USER9> Yes. Most of the power goes into charging and discharging the capacitance inherent in each wire and transistor gate every time a signal changes. When you shrink by 2x, the capacitance goes down by about 4x (because it's proportional to area) and power goes down 4x also.

(It's not exactly square-law, because the sides of wires have capacitance too, but at least at larger sizes it was close.)

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling) for details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One point that I wish the article had expanded on is the impact on software development. In a recent speech, John Carmack talks of how the power of the desktop will never reach mobile.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vlYL16-NaOw&t=14m20s](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vlYL16-NaOw&t=14m20s)

This is incredibly exciting. I see the end of Moores law as the return of the era of performance-oriented software development. The past decade was ruled by software methodologies which optimised for developer time at the cost of performance. Moores law was the crutch on which such latency ridden software limped into userland.

With the stabilization of hardware performance, developers can once again put dedicated time and effort into crafting performant software with the assurance that hardware gains will not render their efforts useless in 2 years.

<comment><USER11> > This is incredibly exciting. I see the end of Moores law as the return of > the era of performance-oriented software development.

And I see this as the exact opposite. Optimizing for developer time is one of the largest productivity enhancements we have. A true/pure positive feedback loop in technological progress. Optimizing for performance is getting little real gain for large human cost.

The end game of optimized for developer efficiency is we can design and implement "anything" we can think of in almost no time flat. The end game for optimizing for performance is it takes significantly longer to develop a program just to run it on the equivalent of 5 years ago hardware.

An analogy: it's early in human writing. People have trouble expressing average thoughts. We can either teach society to have a better grasp on writing and expressing complex ideas precisely. Or we can teach people to write really small because we're running out of paper.

The positive feedback loop of improved development is enormous.

<comment><USER10> If I may, a rebuttal.

The software methodology that has evolved over the last two decades has focused on development time. As such, there has not been much focus/research on performance-first methodologies. I see no reason that developer time cannot be optimized in a performance-first methodology, it's just that a developer time oriented methodology has years of fine tuning in it.

An example for this is video game development. If you look at some talks given by Mike Acton, you can see that it is possible to ship a game while optimizing for developer time. A triple A game is arguably one of the most intricate and complex projects under the label of "Software Engineering". I see no reason why we can't learn from such sub-fields and apply it to general software development.

I also disagree with you saying that "Optimizing for performance is getting little real gain for large human cost". Not optimizing for performance has had led to the creation of unresponsive text editors, slow word processors and a plethora of other latency-ridden software. This in turn affects the user and unfortunately alters their expectations for software.

There is no technological reason why Visual Studio 2017 should not run on a 5 year old laptop, yet that is the state we are in.

<comment><USER11> > If I may, a rebuttal.

Of course - when it's performing well, it's what this site shines at.

> I see no reason that developer time cannot be optimized in a performance- > first methodology

Well clearly it can but it won't be nearly as much of a priority. Just like performance isn't as much of a priority when focusing on developer time. It's not clear what you're specifically rebutting in this section. We're both agreeing that developer-performance will improve significantly less in this model.

And unresponsive text editor gives at most what a 3x slowdown in performance. Very little of a programmer's time is actually inputting text or data. While let's take the other extreme to show a point: Building a distributed transactional relational data driven application from scratch (because our tools weren't built because people would have been optimizing performance of late 90s hw) would be a 1,000x loss of developer productivity.

The scaling factor of productivity just utterly dwarfs human interface performance.

> There is no technological reason why Visual Studio 2017 should not run on a > 5 year old laptop, yet that is the state we are in.

True, but almost everyone would rather 2017 VS not run on a 5 year old laptop, then the best available product right now be Visual Studio 2005 era functionality highly optimized so it can still run on a 5 year old laptop.

<comment><USER10> If text editors slowed down by 3x, I'd be happy. The latency I am complaining about is orders of magnitude higher than 3x. This is the most rigorous benchmarking that I am aware of:

[https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/](https://pavelfatin.com/typing- with-pleasure/)

Each of those tables show that the difference in performance is not 3x but at least an order of magnitude, if not more. I think this is where our disagreement stems from.

Your next point is valid, it would not make sense to develop such an application from scratch. However, I'm not talking about rebuilding from scratch merely prioritizing performance. This can be done by learning from Data Oriented Design where developers give a lot of importance to performance critical issues such as cache locality. This can be done without rewriting our tools from scratch, it just means that the developer will have to understand how memory works. It's not a tools issue, it's a knowledge issue.

Your last point on Visual Studio makes me want to re-iterate the core of my argument: Performance and developer time optimizations need not be mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER11> > Performance and developer time optimizations need not be mutually exclusive

Completely agreed. But since they're not mutually-exclusive why aren't you happy with the status quo? As stated we already can work on some perf improvements while focusing on developer productivity. I believe the reason why you aren't is logically, you'd rather the balance be shifted more towards performance. Which makes sense, but is illustrative of why saying "they aren't mutually exclusive" isn't a counterpoint. We're both discussing where the focus should be - not that the only options are all are nothing. If non mutually-exclusive were the solution, you wouldn't be happy to see this change and a shift towards performance.

> Each of those tables show that the difference in performance is not 3x but > at least an order of magnitude, if not more. I think this is where our > disagreement stems from.

Agreed. But taking sublime text as an example. I see peak ide/editor is roughly 7x faster across various tests, and slowest ide/editor is roughly 7x slower. Even combining both we see at most a 50x change in technical measures. Not in human productivity. The majority of the time people are sitting waiting. I think most people would argue that it doesn't take user 50x as long to write any program in Eclips/IDEA as it does in GVim. So that technical slowdown while annoying has a significantly lower impact on user performance.

Any my argument isn't that users shouldn't have to know about performance, or that performance is bad, it's that resources spent on performance come from being spent on productivity.

Here is an alternate view: Writing most software improves developer performance (text editors, communication tools, file system drivers, languages, compilers...). That better software ecosystem allowed developers to then write more / better software.

Over some timescale we can approximate this as P(t2) = P(t1) * e^(r _t). Where P(x) is developer productivity at time x. And t is a timespan. And r is the "rate of return" or productivity improvement by writing software. Saying a developer now needs to spend 30% of their time on performance means we now have: P(t2) = P(t1) _ e^(.7 * r * t). Due to exponential growth this means significantly less productivity over the long term. This is no different than annually getting 20% returns or 13% returns in the stock market. I sounds like a little, but over a long time scale (or a high scaling rate) this adds up significantly. Meaning right now in 2017 we'd be using a decade or older technology (If peak performance slowdown had hit in some year in the past).

Overall I appreciate the debate and enjoy hearing different opinions. In this one, I feel we may just have different values here in the software space. I feel in an ideal world a developer would spend zero-time on performance. Since we don't live in an ideal world we have to spend some, but every bit of time spent on performance is time not spent on building a product. So we should want to minimize the amount of engineering time focused performance. My take is that you feel differently.

<comment><USER10> I think your last sentence sums it up perfectly. It does seem that we have different views on software. Rebutting your points would just rehash my above comment.

The only new point I'd like to add is one that requires imagination. Imagine if we had adopted performance oriented mindset 20 years ago, instead of today and we solved the developer productivity conundrum that we both care about so much. What a wonderful state software would be in, where IDE's can be installed in seconds, each action is instant and the engineer is completely intimate with every aspect of their baby. This depth of knowledge offers a certain creativity that results in amazing things. It lets engineers rise above what is good for the business and gives them the freedom to push software to it's utter limit. That's evolution. That's progress. That's engineering.

PS: The reason I quoted John Carmack specifically in my first comment is because he is such an engineer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh goody, it's time for the annual 'End of Moore's Law' article.

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0375960102...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0375960102013658)

<comment><USER13> Reminds me of IPv4 address space exhaustion articles of the past.

<comment><USER14> That's gotta finally happen SOME day, no?? I speak seriously.... Of course, by the time it happens, I wouldn't be surprised if we come up with a solution that people like better than IPv6?

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity, what do people dislike about IPv6? I know next to nothing about networking, but it all I've _observed from people_ against IPv6 is that it looks weird. It's downfall seems to be that we're so embedded into IPv4.

So ignoring IPv4, what is the problem with IPv6?

I was hoping we were still slowly making the switch. In the same way that the modern web took ages, but eventually adapted to update browsers more than once a decade and now it's reasonable to use modern JS features. I didn't give up hope on the "modern" web features.. should I give up hope on IPv6?

<comment><USER15> It's above most people's memorisation threshold, more than just looking weird. But the real limitation seems to be that nobody wants to make a change which has no benefit for them - and _so long as you can still access all you need_ , there's no benefit to switching over to IPv4.

And ISPs are holding us up too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I recently wrote this article on a book from 1965 called 'Electronic Computers'

[https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/11/11/towards-a-national- compu...](https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/11/11/towards-a-national-computer- grid-electronic-computers-1965/)

In there is an image from 1965 of a graph similar to Moore's Law:

[https://zwischenzugs.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/20171105_11...](https://zwischenzugs.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/20171105_1137192-e1510393753138.jpg?w=840)

I'd be interested to know if anyone has the first edition of this book, or whether there were other similar graphs floating around at this time.

Note that the image also shows a storage graph alongside computing power. Does anyone know if this graph was continued, or extended into a 'law' also?

<comment><USER11> That's roughly the same rate as Moore's law. 100x every 10 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It may not be the end of Moore's Law, but the increase in resources needed to run modern software has definitely slowed down.

In 2017, my mom is using my old 2006 era Core Duo 1.66Ghz Mac Mini running Windows 7 with only 1.5GB of RAM. She mostly uses it for tutoring when she doesn't want her students on her main computer. It still runs Chrome and Office surprisingly well. It has plenty of USB2 ports, Bluetooth and Gig E Ethernet.

i cant imagine getting any use out of the computer I used in 1995 - a PowerMac 6100/60 with a PPC 601/60Mhz processor and a 486Dx/2 66Mhz Dos Compatibility Card in 2006.

My Plex Server is a 2008 era Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell Laptop running Windows 10 with 4Gb of RAM.

</comment><comment><USER18> The end of Moore's Law doesn't necessarily have to imply a deceleration in technological evolution, as Ray Kurzweil and others have pointed out. In their view, Moore's Law is just one single phase in the "law of accelerating returns".

<comment><USER19> Which is what this article also argues. As we can no longer rely on Moore's exponential increases we will start looking elsewhere to evolve technology. A new "golden age" as he calls it.

Maybe that'll mean looking beyond von neumann for general purpose architecture. Maybe it'll mean designing a lot more specialised architectures, similar to how the GPU is specialised for graphics processing (and useful for some other tasks) or how most mobile devices come with specialised processors. Maybe it'll mean something completely different.

The future of computing is exciting again.

<comment><USER20> Like peak oil. But there might be a (seemingly) interminable lull.

Meanwhile, I like the idea of physically massive GPUs if they can't get smaller (also doing ML, CFD etc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The author argues that the number of meaningful operations a device can do per second will not keep growing exponentially. The reason he gives is that while we can add more parts that work in parallel, this has limited benefit:

        The speed up starts to disappear as silicon is left idle
        because there just aren't enough different things to do.

I think there will be enough 'things to do'. Looking at real world applications of more processing power like AI and simulations, I expect them to be perfectly parallelizable.

<comment><USER22> > I expect them to be perfectly parallelizable

Unfortunately, the real world does not meet your expectation. You're talking about a class of problems called 'embarrassingly parallel': [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel)

Only a very tiny proportion of problems fit into that category. AI and simulations tend to be more easily parallelizable, but CPU-CPU communication is slow at any scale and imposes a limit to how much parallelism can be exploited.

The original statement is accurate:

> The speed up starts to disappear as silicon is left idle because there just > aren't enough different things to do

Efficient parallel algorithms require a problem that can be divided into smaller independent components and solved separately. Not every problem can be divided in this way. Crypto algorithms are the classic example; there's no way to perform round N+1 without first performing round N, and this is very much by design.

<comment><USER23> > Only a very tiny proportions fit into that category

Actually, it is exactly the other way round: most problems in the real world are about local communications of cells in a 3 dimensional lattice. Including, relativistic limits to communication. So an ideal architecture for that is a 3D cellular automaton. With bigger cells, you've got nodes on a 3d mesh (torus). Incidentally, the topology of most supercomputers.

<comment><USER24> > _most problems in the real world are about local communications of cells in > a 3 dimensional lattice._

Uh?

<comment><USER25> Multi-cellular life, fluid dynamics, etc. The physical world generally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here is a graph from Wikipedia data until the AMD 8-core Ryzen: [https://twitter.com/azwinkau/status/869461530324107264](https://twitter.com/azwinkau/status/869461530324107264)

As soon as a plot like this shows a "stop", there will pop up lots of possibilities for research and funding thereof. Physical restrictions predict this stop within the next years.

<comment><USER23> Except that Intel's own data show that the constant doubling no longer applies. I have no idea what he means by Wikipedia data. See no source there.

<comment><USER24> > _I have no idea what he means by Wikipedia data._

I imagine it is this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How do we think about AI/ML stack moving into GPUs and custom chips? Maybe Moore's law as envisioned is ending but it is probably changing in new ways to help scale the jobs and tasks we have based on the type of task.

</comment><comment><USER28> If only Moore's law applied to clock speed instead of some useless measure like number of transistors.

<comment><USER26> That is more like Dennard's law [0] but that one stopped roughly 2001. You could also watch Koomey's law [1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey%27s_law)

<comment><USER29> Moore's law is number of transistors.

 _Moore 's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone have a summary?

<comment><USER31> Learn to read?

EDIT: I try to not degrinitgrate the illiterate, but as the first commenter on this thread (you), I've gotta go "gosh!" Please tell me how I am wrong. (It's possible that I am both wrong and having a bad day)</comment></comment>


There's a Compelling Reason to Upgrade to Premium Pandora - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/willburns/2017/04/20/this-article-will-sell-more-pandora-premium-upgrades-than-its-ad-campaign/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting take that choice with music is the toughest hurdle. I run into this all the time on Google Music. I open the app and I want to listen to something. I can choose a list of things I've heard recently (nice because I like to listen to albums), but when I'm not feeling my recent additions or plays, I'd like to deep dive into my library and listen to stuff that I haven't heard in a while.

There is a heavy focus on "what's new" but in reality anything can be "what's new" if the user has never come across it.

Personal curation of content can be one of the most satisfying activities of my day yet, it's the most gimped with services.</comment>


How Prisoners Make Moonshine - <AUTHOR> http://www.thefix.com/content/making-moonshine-prison91272

<comment><USER2> It's rare for me to read anything about prison without it strengthening my desire to abolish the concept entirely.

<comment><USER3> If only there was a workable alternative eh. But I can tell you right now I would not feel comfortable letting violent sociopaths roam freely

<comment><USER2> I'm not suggesting closing prisons tomorrow, but if we do, I just wonder how many violent sociopaths will actually be released. Is it 1% of the prison population? A tenth of a percent? I don't think it's a substantial portion.

<comment><USER4> I've been to state prison, not county jail, in Florida, for 13 months.

They are loaded with people with whom you would want to keep away from your loved ones. Way more than 1%.

I could tell stories, but what's the point?

Just FYI.

<comment><USER2> Are a large portion of them inherently violent sociopaths? Or do they seem like people I want to keep away from my loved ones because they've been caged animals for a while?

<comment><USER4> Well, put it this way..I was a "caged animal" for 13 months, and you would have no issues whatsoever with me around your loved ones, so the logic that the environment is making convicts (the preferred way to label "prisoners" who make it to the state prison level) into monsters is flawed, at least in my case and experience.

I specifically did not say a "large portion", but a significant one, much larger than 1%.

If I remember correctly, approx. 12% of the convicts in the institution I was in (Gulf Correctional Institution[1] in the Florida panhandle) were serving life sentences for murder related convictions.

Does society really want convicted murders roaming freely through it?

[1] [http://www.dc.state.fl.us/facilities/region1/150.html](http://www.dc.state.fl.us/facilities/region1/150.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> con-templative Reminded me of this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRMok0gslpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRMok0gslpA)

</comment><comment><USER5> A good friend of mine used to teach ESL at San Quentin. He described to me in great detail the "pruno" trade in the prison, including the elaborate exchange of services for scrap fruit and pilfered trashbags from the commissary as well as the even more elaborate system for distribution and payment of the finished product.

</comment><comment><USER6> In this they're starting with wine - why not just drink the wine? It says they make 5 gal (40 pints) of wine down to 6-8 pints; then drink half a pint - isn't it easier to just drink 2 pints of wine. Presumably the answer is in secretion of the drink.

How do they get hold of 5 gallons (~20 litres) of wine?

<comment><USER7> Transportation and storage of contraband are both large issues in prison. Concentrating the intoxicant can be quite useful.

They made the wine in the manner the article this one references describes. Where 'wine' is just what they call any sugary liquid that has fermented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Incidentally, has anybody read any more by or about the author, Seth Ferranti? It sounds like he managed to get a job as a writer for this "the fix" site while in prison somehow. There's gotta be an interesting story in that.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminded me of the movie the Great Escape. There's a scene in which they make potato moonshine: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md2GFtBCIh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md2GFtBCIh8)

</comment><comment><USER10> Can confirm, although the article shows a more complex recipe than what I understand. All that hose and rubber bands and things aren't easy to come by.

Source: brother is in prison.

</comment><comment><USER11> Im not sure if the detail listed in this article is a good thing or a bad thing. I would hate to see my kids read this article and get any ideas. I know at that age I was just deviant and nerdy enough to want to try something like this.

I wonder how often they make methanol in these stills as well. Even under semi controlled conditions this is a risk.

<comment><USER7> As long as they are making sugar wash (or wine as the article calls it) instead of a fruit based one the chemistry does not allow for methanol to be created, is my understanding having researched this fairly heavily in college before making my own still.

Also if you did make a fruit based wash when you ferment it the methanol will evaporate first (or at a lower temperature than the ethanol if you have that level of control).

This whole article is rather poor as a guide and there are much better and more complete resources on how to build better distilling equipment with a tea kettle, some copper tubing, and a bucket. It is a good article for understanding how prisoners do it, which is its intent.

I mean if you are a prisoner or you are limited to the same resources as a prisoner; then sure, I guess its a guide that you could use. Otherwise a better guide and $20 bucks at the hardware store will have better results, for home distilling experiments.

Keep in mind home distilling is illegal in most states, some have alternative fuel creation exceptions or small allowable amounts.

<comment><USER12> > Keep in mind home distilling is illegal in most states, some have > alternative fuel creation exceptions or small allowable amounts.

Isn't it still illegal on the federal level?

<comment><USER7> You know what I never checked the federal level. At the time I was doing this I figured if the state said it was legal in a certain case then the feds didn't have a problem either. I since realized how wrong I was about that logic, although it still makes more sense to me than the reality.

<comment><USER12> If it is illegal at the federal level, I would think it wouldn't be an enforcement priority if it was allowed by the state. On the other hand, it's probably part of the tax code and that does tend to be a powerful enforcement motivator.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft mapping course to a Jetsons-styled future - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/technology/business-computing/02compute.html

<comment><USER2> This is a cool thing that's been suggested in Sci-Fi for the longest time. However, I notice one flaw:

> "More compelling, however, is Laura's ability to make sophisticated > decisions about the people in front of her, _judging things like their > attire_ , whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred > times for appointments."

This is not necessarily the best judgment of a persons importance. I've met and seen a lot of very rich people who ware clothes you certainly wouldn't expect; two brothers own a series of coffee shops and I've seen both in jeans and t-shirts, another is a guy supposedly worth over $50 mil and he wears the same ripped and faded shirt virtually every day.

My point is, there's a lot of people who've got extremely rich not by wearing a fancy suit and tie, but because they never wasted a single penny and brought that mentality into their job. If you start stalling people because they wear crappy clothes then you're going to start getting problems.</comment>


Over 9,000 Cisco RV320/RV325 routers are vulnerable to CVE-2019-1653 - <AUTHOR> https://badpackets.net/over-9000-cisco-rv320-rv325-routers-vulnerable-to-cve-2019-1653/ <comment><USER2> " _This vulnerability affects Cisco Small Business RV320 and RV325 Dual Gigabit WAN VPN Routers running Firmware Releases 126.96.36.199 and 188.8.131.52_ "

RV320 firmware update: [https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/routers/rv320-dual- gig...](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/routers/rv320-dual-gigabit-wan- vpn-router/model.html#~tab-downloads)

RV325 firmware update: [https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/routers/rv325-dual- gig...](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/routers/rv325-dual-gigabit-wan- vpn-router/model.html)

I don't know why it is so difficult for companies to put links to download the firmware update that fixes the vulnerability. They would probably get 300% install rate if they put in this simple effort. Yet they never do it, and people always have to look in the comments for the links, or navigate the clunky support websites to find it themselves.

<comment><USER3> That's akin to saying businesses have trouble updating to Windows 10 because the ISO is hidden in the clunky support website. The install rate is purely driven by the businesses apathy to upgrading and has nothing to do with spending an extra minute to get the download link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> HN hug of death

<comment><USER5> Google Cache to the rescue [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0C9JOc...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0C9JOcG0rpQJ:https://badpackets.net/over-9000-cisco- rv320-rv325-routers-vulnerable-to-cve-2019-1653/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)</comment></comment>


Obama Administration Urges Immediate Action on 'Inversions' - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/articles/obama-administration-urges-immediate-action-on-inversions-1405475326

<comment><USER2> The best tricks to lower you tax rate are only available to the largest companies. Startups pay full price.

New startup idea: tax evasion as a service. It would use the same transfer pricing techniques like Google and Apple. Money would be shuffled using the Double Irish, Dutch Sandwich, etc. Shell companies would be formed and "office space" and "employees" would be shared between the various subscribers. The company would handle all the paper work, legal requirements, incorporation and account setup. You'd pay for the service with a small percentage of your savings.

I'm against tax evasion, but if we're going to have it, we may as well make it fair to the little guys.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I understand the frustrations of tax dodging, I have to admit that this increasing barriers against capital flight reminds me of a economic 'Berlin wall' and ultimately doomed to fail.

Given the fluidity of people and resources, over-taxation could be considered damage and easily routed around (to borrow a phrase).

At some point, we're going to have to address the reasons why people/money are leaving. Unfortunate, that take is harder than rhetoric and simple laws.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why shouldn't the US create a tax structure that encourages businesses to "invert" to the US?

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, cracking down on companies pulling these sorts of stunts is a good idea.

However, I think a better idea is raise capital gains taxes on foreign companies since this "trick" only really benefits the investors. I suspect if the Board's stockholder backers finds themselves paying more for their foreign investments they might reconsider...</comment>


Zuck complains about Chill auto-posting to wall (ironic) - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/103716847685048716973/posts/8n2LDFTpi5E

<comment><AUTHOR> How funny is it that +Mark Zuckerberg of all folks is complaining about folks auto-posting to people's walls?

This from the guy who automatically posted your movie ticket purchases to your wall.... and who let's folks automatically add you to groups you don't want to join.... and who automatically let's your photos be recognized by facial recognition software.... and allows folks to autotag you and puts those autotagged photos at the top of your wall..... and who paid a fine to the government over the beacon project...... and..... and..... well, you get the idea.

<comment><USER2> First off, we agree that Zuckerberg has no place complaining about this stuff, but the main point of the complaint was not that the chill.com app it posts crap on your wall, but that it makes it seem like you wrote it. Even in their response to Zuck ( [http://chill.com/blog/2011/08/chilling/our-response-to- mark-...](http://chill.com/blog/2011/08/chilling/our-response-to-mark- zuckerberg-2/) ) the examples they put there are very different from their own.

Otherwise, their opt-out strategy seems on par with the rest of crappy, spammy, FB apps out there.</comment></comment>


Blueprint is a CSS framework - <AUTHOR> http://bjorkoy.com/blueprint/

<comment><USER2> Okay, so I looked at this. I don't get the point of the grid system. Rather, what I want to know is: if you're going to laboriously simulate tables in CSS classes, why not just use tables? It would be simpler, more easily understandable by human readers, scales up and down better (Blueprint doesn't do non-fixed layouts yet, apparently), and in HTML4, at least, would usually involve less markup.

Against this, it wouldn't be quite as easily read for the tiny fraction of a percent that use screen readers. That seems like a very small price to pay for the major wins.

<comment><USER3> Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I guess what blueprint and yui (<http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/>) buy you is consistency across different web browsers. Tables with applied css (or their own attribute may behave differently depending on what browser is viewing it)

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the reset.css approach that both frameworks use. This will normalize your document so that it looks the same in various browsers. Then you can start re-building your look using their guidelines and the fonts.css or typography.css and to create consistency across common browsers and operating systems.

It's quite amazing how different a blank html document with an h1 and p tags looks from one browser to another let alone from one OS to another (margins, padding, etc). The examples with both frameworks give you something to try out before you use it too so you can see how it will look.</comment></comment></comment>


Grooveshark signs licensing agreement with EMI - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/13/grooveshark-slips-past-emis-lawyers-signs-new-licensing-agreement-instead/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately it is US only, so it fails to be a game changer, but I guess congratulations are in order.

<comment><AUTHOR> Worse, usually once this kind of companies get deals with record companies, they close their sites to non-US users. It's what happened with Pandora and Last.fm, also Hulu on the video scene.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps Chris (physcab) can clear up some of these issues for us?

<comment><USER4> While I can't talk specifically about the deal terms, I can say that we are very pleased with the agreement and think it represents forward progress for the industry.

If any of you guys have further questions, I would encourage you to contact our PR guy who is normally very responsive.

I'd prefer to stick to coding anyhow :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Care that Facebook is killing privacy? You might be an old fogey - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/backlash-old-people-facebook/

<comment><USER2> Anybody that spends just a few minutes reading about privacy on the web, and hell, elsewhere, would most certainly care about this. This old fogey crap is very tiresome. As if having any sort of age to you immediately means you care more for things that don't matter.

They may not care about their privacy, but I do. The rights of others are also my rights. It's not theirs to squander away so easily.

FYI, I'm 27.

</comment><comment><USER3> _The company asks survey participants: "If you've heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, was it positive or negative?"_

That's an incredibly subjective question to ask if you're out to show correlation between age and reverence of personal privacy.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this is the wrong question to ask. I'm an old fogey - 44 - and I don't like Facebook. But, it's not about the privacy - there is no such thing on the Internet - and if you don't recognize that, well fool you. The question, me thinks, should be: Care that Facebook is sneaky?

</comment><comment><USER5> Care that facebook is killing privacy? You might be a [whiney, entitled dipshit]([http://www.paulcarr.com/facebook-breached-my-privacy-and- oth...](http://www.paulcarr.com/facebook-breached-my-privacy-and-other-things- that-whiny-entitled-dipshits-say/)).</comment>


Only Half of Tech Pros Like Their Salary - <AUTHOR> http://insights.dice.com/2016/02/16/only-half-of-tech-pros-like-their-salary/ <comment><USER2> I'm not saying they're necessarily _wrong_ , but remember this is from a company with a financial interest in seeing more job-search activity :p

</comment><comment><USER3> Historically high salaries? My understanding was that median salary was basically matching inflation.</comment>


How To Watch Videos in ASCII Art - <AUTHOR> http://oreilly.com/pub/h/4441

<comment><AUTHOR> This has some screenshots:

<http://liquidweather.net/howto/index.php?id=74></comment>


Visualizing DC Home Price Ranges in D3.js - <AUTHOR> http://trends.truliablog.com/vis/pricerange-dc/

<comment><USER2> I would place the black box somewhere else and make it non-movable, because right now it obscures everything under it and moves too quickly I think. But it is a good job, could be helpful for me a year ago when I was looking for a place in DC )

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out the new data visualization from Trulia on home price ranges in Washington DC</comment>