This AI is bad at drawing but will try anyways - <AUTHOR> http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at-drawing-but-will-try-anyways <comment><USER2> Every time I look at AI produced pictures, I feel discomfort and uneasy. These pictures are like a scene from a perfect nightmare.

<comment><USER3> I feel discomfort reading "I feel discomfort and uneasy" because discomfort is a noun and uneasy is an adjective.

<comment><USER4> You can both "feel discomfort" and "feel uneasy", so I think it works.

<comment><USER5> No. You see:

        void feel(x: Noun)
        void feel(x: Adj)

"discomfort and uneasy" is actually an instamce of the superclass of Noun and Adj, but there is no overload for that so it doesn't compile.

<comment><USER6> With better heuristics and fuzzy logic, our IDEs should detect and handle such usage without hassle.

<comment><USER7> I suspect that sort of autocorrections would be AI-complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be great to have an art gallery, digital or physical, devoted to ai produced media. They could run exhibits highlighting different strategies, or have awards for creative or accurate results.

<comment><USER9> Unlike real art, computers can produce a trillion unique works an hour. This will apply to all forms of art in the future, including stories, music and movies. So where is the scarcity?

<comment><USER10> Scarcity matters if you regard art as a commodity to be bought and sold. Otherwise I don't see why it's important.

<comment><USER11> I recommend John Berger's "Ways of Seeing", available on YouTube. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Generate them yourselves:

[http://t2i.cvalenzuelab.com/](http://t2i.cvalenzuelab.com/)

<comment><USER13> It looks like this webpage has been overwhelmed at this point.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely nothing happens when I type something in. Perhaps their GPU allowance ran out.

<comment><USER15> The server is not properly configured.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> (two comments in this thread:)

> _What always fascinated me is how those images look almost exactly like the > hallucinations you get on some psychedelics... The AI must be pretty close > if they can already match the output of a confused human brain._

> _Traditionally, with computer generated stuff, you could clearly see the > math in the algorithms (the sine waves and fractals and whatnot). With AI > generated stuff it looks... natural... It 's a computer no longer letting > you see how he thinks._

The paper "Deep Image Prior" by Dmitry Ulyanov et al. gives compelling evidence that the _structure_ of convolutional neural networks already encodes strong knowledge about the appearance of natural images, independent of any specific _parameters_ (learned weights). Independence from parameters means it's independent from what task the network was trained to accomplish, and of the training algorithm.

This helps explain (IMO) why a neural network with "wrong" weights (meaning, the training process did not fully meet the goal of the project) still produces images that like plausible activations of the human visual cortex, rather than harsh mathematical patterns. The convolutional network structure is biased towards natural-looking images.

paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10925](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10925) third-party blog post: [http://mlexplained.com/2018/01/18/paper-dissected- deep-image...](http://mlexplained.com/2018/01/18/paper-dissected-deep-image- prior-explained/)

<comment><USER17> The connections between Neural Networks and the human brain are superficial at best and it's unwise to abuse the analogy beyond it's limit. The author's make no such claims and I don't think you have the standing to either.

<comment><USER16> yeah I did not intend to claim anything strong about that. edited my comment accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interestingly, Christie's will sell an AI generated painting in the coming weeks. They come from a French startup who seems to create "better" (at least more pleasing) results [https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration- between-t...](https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two- artists-one-human-one-a-machine-9332-1.aspx)

<comment><USER19> There's an obvious blotchy feature grid in all of the images generated by the French team. They don't look like paintings in technique at all, but only what they are: automatic collages of randomly blended pieces of photographs from old art.

The CAN images in that same Christie's article are much better, quite beautiful. But the author of CAN is full of shit in this interview answer:

 _> 'An interesting question is: why is so much of the CAN's art abstract? I think it is because the algorithm has grasped that art progresses in a certain trajectory. If it wants to make something novel, then it cannot go back and produce figurative works as existed before the 20th century. It has to move forward. The network has learned that it finds more solutions when it tends toward abstraction: that is where there is the space for novelty.'_

The algorithm has grasped that art must move forward, so it paints abstract?! Or could it be that feeding random numbers into a black box neural network algorithm is never going to give you a human likeness... No, it must be that the AI just doesn't _want_ to be Rembrandt.

With bullshit meters at this level, the next AI winter must be just around the corner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Link to AttnGAN without the tracking junk:

[https://github.com/taoxugit/AttnGAN](https://github.com/taoxugit/AttnGAN)

</comment><comment><USER21> I typed in "modern art" and it looks about right.

</comment><comment><USER22> I tried using the same phrase several different times and got different results, so it appears the system is not deterministic.

<comment><USER23> That's how GANs work: trying to make sense of random noise (with maybe a hint)

<comment><USER24> You can deterministicly make sense of random noise

<comment><USER25> The point is that the GAN is trained to model the "probability distribution" of the descriptions it's trained on precisely so that the concepts are generalized and can be synthesized/extrapolated. Once trained, you may fix the random seed so that the same description would generate the same image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> And this is why they need human brains in The Matrix

</comment><comment><USER27> This reminds me of the scene from the Matrix when they question whether the AI knows how to replicate the taste of human food "maybe they couldn't figure out what chicken taste like, which is why chicken taste like everything."

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEnJfZ9joY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEnJfZ9joY)

</comment><comment><USER28> This was not a good idea to read at work. I tried to control the giggle but still coworkers noticed and I had to show them.

It's hard not to anthropomorphize the neural net and have a little bit of pity/laughter at its struggle to paint even remotely accurate pictures

</comment><comment><USER29> They'd make good album covers.

<comment><USER30> That was exactly my first thought!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The level of our AI capabilities today means for me that

\- we must not give it any decision making abilities because they will fail terribly on some mundane task

\- SkyNet is not for yommorox, or the day after

</comment><comment><USER32> Fear and Loathing in AI.

<comment><USER33> _We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. …" And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"_

 _Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough._

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Kind of sad it only recognizes English.

Which makes me wonder how useful it would be to use different languages for teaching ML about the world?

Maybe an understanding across different languages might help it differentiate between objects with more accuracy? Tho, I'm probably making this sound far more simple than it actually would be.

<comment><USER17> All the Major AI conferences are published in English, are you concerned about that as well? English has long been established as the lingua franca of Science, it's not discrimination it's just reality.

<comment><USER34> I didn't say anything about "discrimination"? I was merely pondering the possibility that cross-language reference might increase the learning potential of ML.

If it can compare between different language models, then likelihood interpreting the right way could be increased. Google seems to be doing something like this with for Google translate, using Bible translations [0].

[0] [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5npeg/why-is- goo...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5npeg/why-is-google- translate-spitting-out-sinister-religious-prophecies)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> its not as fun when when you can kind of backwardsly induce how limited the training data set is, e.g. when I tried

> a dog on a bun on dog on a bun on a dog on a bun on a dog on a bun on

or maybe I've completely misunderstood it and in a way it's passed my art turing test?

</comment><comment><USER36> Perception of real life may not be what you think it is.

Visual information processing is the visual reasoning skill that enables us to process and interpret meaning from visual information that we gain through our eyesight; perhaps this is not the same for all of us and is well illustrated with this AI example?

</comment><comment><USER37> I'd make prints of some of these for my wall

</comment><comment><USER38> Is this the graphical version of Markov chains?

</comment><comment><USER39> Reminds me of what my kids are drawing.

</comment><comment><USER40> "try"

</comment><comment> fake-name Why the fuck does this link to the amp version of the site?

Change [http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad- at-d...](http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at-drawing- but-will-try-anyways/amp) to [http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this- ai-is-bad-at-d...](http://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at- drawing-but-will-try-anyways) and it actually loads and looks proper.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I posted my experience on mobile was the opposite. AMP page loaded fine. Non-AMP, no images or text at all with multiple refreshes. Don't know why. Non-AMP looks fine now.

<comment><USER41> AMP is nonfunctional with Javascript disabled, non-AMP works fine for me. Perhaps regular page got slightly hugged?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I liked it up until the "subscribe for more" plug at the end.

        I .. ended up with way more than would
        fit in this one blog post ..
        Enter your email and I'll send you them
        (and if you want, you can get bonus
        material each time I post).

Why so stingy about it, author? Force me to subscribe for more funny AI pics? Rather than simply posting the content in a followup article. Right. Then you wouldn't be able to collect all those e-mail addresses and subscribers.

Probably doesn't qualify as a full-on dark pattern, but I am annoyed enough to say that I dislike this approach.

Is this Web 2.0, 3.0, or higher? I'd like to go back to the 1.0.. anyone got a D/L link so I can reinstall the good version?

<comment><USER43> Some people are shady af. Author should come here and explain.

<comment><USER44> This isn't a dark pattern, it isn't shady af, and the author should not be called to the rug to answer for it.

It's just someone trying to build an email distribution list for their (side?) gig. Feel free to enjoy the content without opting in.

<comment><USER43> Oh please. It's a clickbait at best from my angry engineer tone. It's shady because the person lure people in to read it and then at the end just day "btw, if you want to see them? Send me your email!"

How is that not shady marketing? This is bad press. Bad article. This is killing reader morale. We should not encourage people like this to build their gigs. I felt I wasted my time reading this in the first place.

<comment><USER45> > How is that not shady marketing?

Because you've already seen the good content! This blog highlights the most amusing/weird examples of stuff generated by AI. This particular post has 17 - I counted - examples. They're not presented as a listicle or one-by-one slides, there's not an advert between each one. This is exactly the sort of content we should be encouraging.

<comment><USER43> No. I disagree. Just because it has 17 examples doesn't mean it's not a markrting strategy.

<comment><USER45> I didn't say it's not a marketing strategy, but it's really not shady. Again, you've already seen the best content. The rest is an optional, barely- mentioned extra.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Justin Kan, co-founder, Justin.tv - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/1377894938

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it hard to manage somebody's work unless I have an intimate knowledge of how to do it myself.

\- Justin Kan (@justinkan)</comment>


Seedrs - FSA approved online platform for investing seed capital - <AUTHOR> http://seedrs.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> As I understand it this approach is currently illegal in the US.

I think they could shake up startup funding in the UK even more than YC and Kickstarter have in the US.</comment>


Ask HN: Renumeration working part time with a start up - <AUTHOR>

I'm talking with a friend about helping him take a technology he is licensing from a university and productizing it. In essence, I would be the product manager for this product/company. The technology is very interesting and about 70% of the way to "shipping quality."
My job would be pretty standard product management: Determine the feature set needed to ship, figure out how to position the product, ensure launch readiness, and probably roll over into marketing as we go public.
While I'm sure I could put in as much time as I wanted, it will likely be around 15 hours per week until we get the company to a point that its either making money or is ready for seed funding.
The question is what should I ask for in return? If I went straight-percentage of the company, what is a reasonable percentage? Would there be any reason to ask for cash (discounted rate) and stock?
Thanks much! <comment><USER2> Do you need the cash? If yes, then I'd ask to get paid a discount rate. If you don't need the cash and the project is short-term (1-2 months?), then equity only is fine. Just be aware that you probably will never get any money at all if you go this route - just consider it padding for your resume, a great way to get experience, a good way to meet people, etc.</comment>


Freelancer.com using bots or copywriters to write fake user profile content - <AUTHOR> http://yottaram.com/blog/2014/07/31/freelancer-com-stoops-to-new-low-impersonating-their-own-users/

<comment><USER2> every time i hear the name freelancer.com, it's attached to a documented record of behaviour so bizarre that you very rarely see in legitimate businesses. The last one, on HN, at least: [http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/243klv/freelancercom...](http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/243klv/freelancercom_is_destroying_my_life/) what was remarkable to me about that story was not freelancer.com's behaviour towards the dev (which was shameful indeed) but the CEO's response (also published on reddit.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry for this, but thanks for reporting such a horrible breach of trust. I will make sure to never promote Freelancer</comment>


Hulu Adds Commercial-Free Viewing - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150902006019/en/Hulu-Adds-Commercial-Free-Viewing <comment><USER2> It is welcome, but is it too little too late? When Hulu first appeared on the scene, there was very little competition for the content they had (namely brand new TV). Since then most of the major networks have created competing paid services to Hulu that already lack adverts. People avoided Hulu+ because the idea of paying AND getting ads was unwelcomed, and they offered nothing else. Seems like they've burnt through much of their competitive advantage.

Can I also just say, Hulu's adverts might not be so bad if they didn't show you the same advert twice in one commercial break, or six times in one 45 minute show(!). I'd be pretty annoying if I was a Hulu advertiser and I discovered they showed my ad twice in a row and billed me twice (since that isn't an effective way to advertise AND it makes people hate the advert). But as a user OR advertiser it sucks.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems that not all shows will be commercial free, however. I understand that they must have special arrangements with those producers, but it feels very odd.

        Will all shows and movies be commercial free?

        In response to feedback from our viewers,
        we started offering a commercial-free experience
        on Hulu. For a small number of shows, however, we
        have not obtained the rights to stream commercial
        free and they are not included in our No Commercials
        plan. You can still easily access these shows with
        short commercial before and after each episode with no
        interruptions during the episode. Specific shows that
        still have commercials accessible through the No Commercials
        plan will be noted throughout the signup, switching, and
        playback experience. While the list of shows may change,
        these shows are currently: Grey's Anatomy, Once Upon A
        Time, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Scandal, Grimm,
        New Girl, and How To Get Away With Murder.

<comment><USER4> Looking at two shows at random (Agents of SHIELD and New Girl), they don't share any production or distribution, so it must be a per-show arrangement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've yet to find anywhere else with the combination of cheapness and convenience that Hulu offers for the content they've got. I'll happily pay a few extra dollars a month to get rid of the ads.

</comment><comment><USER6> Considering how much advertising seems to affect people (I'm sure you can remember at least one commercial that played even from the early years of your life), it's amazing to think that all of those repetitive, manipulative, annoying ads can be wiped away for free if you agree to drink one latte a month (or whatever you drink).

</comment><comment><USER7> It's remarkable that they decided to keep the commercial offering.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. I think the commercial-sponsored avenue is the way they want to continue.

When you provide a commercial-free option, the only way to squeeze more revenue out of it is to raise the subscription rate. But if you normally serve commercials too, then you can double-dip: you can _occasionally_ raise the subscription rate (which risks angering your customer base) or you can simply add another commercial or two to a break.

And if _that_ pisses off your customers, then it's easy for them to go to the commercial-free plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Too late, I already swore them off when they made me pay to watch commercials.</comment>


Visualizing GoogLeNet Classes - <AUTHOR> http://auduno.com/post/125362849838/visualizing-googlenet-classes <comment><USER2> Nice. But for a change, I want to see a blog that explains the training of the network, including the fine details that are necessary to reach good results.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where does one find the ImageNet class numbers? It doesn't appear to be [http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/browse-synsets](http://image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/browse-synsets)

<comment><USER4> You can download the file "synset_words.txt" with class numbers in caffe via running the script ./data/ilsvrc12/get_ilsvrc_aux.sh . But here's the file online as well : [https://github.com/sh1r0/caffe-android- demo/blob/master/app/...](https://github.com/sh1r0/caffe-android- demo/blob/master/app/src/main/assets/synset_words.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there a good explanation of inception layers in GooglLeNet?

I know they are one of the major differences between it and the Oxford models, but I don't completely understand it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't the fact that I can see the face of a dog (in the animated 'Shetland sheepdog' example) a sure sign of overfitting?

<comment><USER6> No, the quality of visualization and the amount of overfitting are uncorrelated. Both an overfitted and a perfectly generalizing model will return excellent faces of dogs. The method is however a way to tell whether the model is underfitted (because then you won't see dog faces).

In the field of generative models, the way to tell whether a model is 'working', is by calculating the chance that an image in the validation set could have been generated by the model. The higher the total chance of your validation set, the better your generative model.

These 'deepdreaming' methods (and I know, because I created one of them before Google's code was out [1]) are nice and pretty and stuff, but it's literally impossible to tell whether the stuff they generate is a copy from the train set or is truly original. And as long as there is no way to evaluate them based on a validation set, there is no basis to assume that any of them is actually working and not copying and melding images it knows.

But then again, if they are copying and melding, but we can't tell, maybe it's good enough to pass a Turing test? After all, aren't we humans just copying and melding the stuff we know neither?

And, the stuff these networks create are definitely good enough to be 'interesting'.

[1] [http://317070.github.io/Dream/](http://317070.github.io/Dream/)</comment></comment>


Executing Parallel Statements to Improve Performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/parallel-sql-statements/ <comment><USER2> If you're inventing new syntax... Wouldn't an a async/await be more useful - to declaratively indicate the desired dependencies between simultaneously operating statements? That way you can work with the results of an inserted PK or the row count to inform later statements - when needed. Eg. 'returning async'

<comment><USER3> I believe this suggestion came up at the time. I think we didn't do anything like it because it would have been more complicated both to implement and to describe, and because it's not particularly common for people to use/need the values that can be returned by the statements that we can parallelize. The future, though, is long and open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The accompanying RFC, Parallel SQL Statement Execution: [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/0da3da734ce6bf...](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/0da3da734ce6bfdf55f31b973130c3f58c8a1c7c/docs/RFCS/20170124_sql_parallelization.md)

</comment><comment><USER5> "CockroachDB maintains strong consistency across a globally-distributed cluster of computers."

No, CockroachDB does not maintain strong consistency across a globally- distributed cluster of computers. It is a "goal", but not the reality.

People reviewed these claims, and they do not hold (see e.g. Aphyr's review)

<comment><USER3> Why do you say that they don't hold, exactly? We take our consistency guarantees, and correctness more generally, deadly serious. I think it's fair to say that we did quite well on Aphyr's review; he's found some quite obscure issues that were quickly fixed. More details here: [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdb-beta- passes-j...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachdb-beta-passes- jepsen-testing/)

<comment><USER5> "We take our consistency guarantees, and correctness more generally, deadly serious"

That is empty talk, ie advertising.

In a distributed database, as is the state of the art, you sacrifice one of: availability, consistency, performance.

This is true for every db, be it Spanner, or MongoDb.

Best to document what exactly was sacrificed. Just claiming that you "take it seriously" means nothing. BTW good luck :)

<comment><USER6> Is that your own spin on the CAP theorem? Where does "performance" even come into the equation?

And CRDB is a CP system, just like Spanner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems to be a trend that I see across open source projects. They blog about features that Oracle has had for 25 years as if it's something new. Can someone enlighten me as to why there's interest around X DB's implementation of something that's been built dozens of times before?

<comment><USER8> With all due respect, Oracle doesn't provide ACID semantics across a cluster spanning several continents...

<comment><USER9> Isn't that exactly what "Extended Distance Oracle RAC Clusters" provide?

<comment><USER10> No. That still uses ASM. It's effectively low level IO mirroring and needs fast data-centre interconnects and low-latency.

I work a lot with RAC and it introduces more problems than it solves tbh.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bounce Rate Demystified - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kissmetrics.com/bounce-rate/ <comment><USER2> Generally, I like to think about bounce rate as a measure of quality.

If your pages contain good quality content and your traffic is coming from targeted (good quality) sources, your bounce rates will decrease. On average if you increase the content and quality traffic of your website, the bounce rates will naturally decrease.

For this reason, I've often thought that Google should rename Bounce Rate to something a little less erroneous involving the word "quality".

</comment><comment><USER3> For the Rb = (Tv / Te) equation, since Tv = visits to _one page_ , shouldn't Te = Total entries to _site_?

Also, It's worth adding (to me, at least) that a Flash site will have a skewed (higher) bounce rate because most/all of the content is in the .swf in a single .html page. We often have customer freak out over their 95% bounce rate.</comment>


Ask HN: R or Python for Data Science? - <AUTHOR> Hey all, I'm a ruby/js convert from PHP/C/Java world. I'm really interested in Data Science now and am learning D3.js for data visualization. I'm wondering which open source community is better right now for Data Science: R or Python?<p>I'm looking for a large number of interesting projects to learn from but also a welcoming and happy community where I could make new friends. <comment><USER2> Both.

I use R for plotting/processing, Python for scripting and getting external data.</comment>


Understanding process.nextTick() in NodeJS - <AUTHOR> http://howtonode.org/understanding-process-next-tick

<comment><USER2> Excellent article. Node is full of modules that claim to be async because their functions accept a callback parameter.</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback for my startup – https://pho.cl - <AUTHOR>

I'd appreciate any honest feedback on helping me improve the landing page and other parts of the experience on the site. Is the value prop popping? This site is intended for photographers. <comment><USER3> As a website based on critique, I'd like to see an example of a series of photos showing incremental improvement. I know this takes time, but it's the main driver for how others see your site as a benefit to them - <USER2> their skill level and also participating in critique themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking a look. Yes, that's a part of the idea. You can upload revised photos once you edited based on critiques. Critique is the first step but idea is to create a platform for photogs to collaborate. Thanks for taking a look. Any suggestions for improving home page?

<comment><USER3> Just a few representational ideas. You're a photography based website, but the the main photo on the page is covered up with a large transparent black box, let the photo serve as the overall branding of your site. Quick web tools mock up - [http://i.imgur.com/aI3tFvs.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/aI3tFvs.jpg) Similarly the other photos on the page are filled with content (but justifiably so) or are far too small. I really feel that the photograph needs to have a stronger presence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, thanks for the suggestion. I felt the same way but was trying to make the text more legible. I guess I could try and pick a different picture which is more cleaner so that text can still pop. Will try. Really appreciate you taking the time to do the mock up! Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Made some changes based on suggestions. Will continue to tweak

<comment><USER3> Great would love to see the update...write to me jamaya at mit dot edu. Also forgot to mention, but you can also darken the overall image (if using white text) or spot darken where the text is located. It's a technique used by Medium and others.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


SiFive U8-Series Core IP - <AUTHOR> https://www.sifive.com/press/sifive-announces-new-u8-series-core-ip-for-high-performance <comment><USER2> This is a press release. There is a blog post going a bit more technical here: [https://www.sifive.com/blog/incredibly-scalable-high- perform...](https://www.sifive.com/blog/incredibly-scalable-high-performance- risc-v-core-ip)

</comment><comment><USER3> The floating point unit is optional on the U8, which is a non standard choice for a OoO design. Normally if you've got an OoO frontend, sticking a FPU is a drop in the ocean (or can be).

Is this an artifact of them using BOOM (which is just an assumption on my part), since BOOM makes it ridiculously easy to add or remove backend execution units?

<comment><USER4> There are an absolute ton of customization options available. In the context of the decisions that can be made, making FP optional isn't surprising.

I do have to wonder about whether they've got tools for real customers that can effectively test the tradeoffs being made, at least for performance options like cache size & associativity. Even with all the options at your disposal and an intimate knowledge of your problem domain, beating a handful of well made and broadly tested off the shelf designs won't be easy.

I _love_ this stuff, but I'm a bit skeptical if it's actually something the market is asking for. If there were more substantial options like crypto accelerators, GPGPU, video encoding/decoding, FPGA, mixing big and lots of small cores, vector extensions, being able to size up the ALU for specific operations... I could see the pain of custom silicon paying off.

Having accelerators sharing the cache hierarchy is not something the big players have really done much of yet and probably won't until there's so much dark silicon they can more or less throw the kitchen sink in.

[https://scs.sifive.com/core- designer/customize/f9c3a7e1-08b7...](https://scs.sifive.com/core- designer/customize/f9c3a7e1-08b7-464e-8bf9-39da62e2e35b/)

<comment><USER5> One benefit of having customers customize their own cores, is they can iterate their settings (on FPGA) in hours and test the result on their _actual_ workload, not just guess how some semi-standard core might perform on their workload based on SPEC or CoreMark or something.

The announcement says the U87 with (Cray-like) vector processing will be available in H2 2020.(Also ARM SVE-like, but ARM hasn't shipped anything with it yet, and I think hasn't even announced anything with it? Fujitsu has, in a supercomputer) Meantime, the U84 has only scalar integer and FP, with nothing equivalent to NEON on ARM. That might or might not matter to you.

Mixing a reasonable number of cores (up to nine) in the automated SoC configuration tool was announced alongside the 7-series (dual issue in order) cores in October last year. That continues. If you want more cores than that some engineering time would be required to verify it.

[https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive%2F5ec09861-351b-420c-b6...](https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive%2F5ec09861-351b-420c-b6e3-e2b76843044f_linley+report+-+sifive+raises+risc-v+performance.pdf)

Adding QuickLogic eFPGA to a SiFive core has been announced:

[https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/quicklogic-teams- wi...](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/quicklogic-teams-with-sifive- to-make-efpga-technology-available-via-designshare-portfolio-300939385.html)

<comment><USER4> Very cool, thank you!

While you can iterate pretty quickly on an FPGA, I'd still be worried that cutting down a chip to optimize for $/perf works until it doesn't. Something off the shelf would be pretty resilient to algorithm tweaks (ad absurdum you have an Intel chip which performs black magic to run almost anything you throw at it well).

It's pretty hard to overcome the economy of scale of just buying a mass produced chip that's twice what you need but ten times cheaper because they're made in batches of a million.

I should note that my skepticism is coming from a place of "I want this to be a thing". Using the web page to design a chip is an instance of "live in the future and build what's missing" if I've ever seen one.

<comment><USER6> This is not to beat commodity processor/controller silicon. If you are going to build a SoC for whatever reason (peripherals, integration, etc) -- you might as well make the integrated processing exactly what you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, is the U8 core based on BOOM, or is it a ground up design? Or if neither, then what is it?

And the HBM2E+ is some doohickey so customers can combine a RISC-V core with HBM2 memory?

(and if somebody from SiFive happens to read this, there's a typo, presumably HMB2E+ means HBM2E+)

<comment><USER5> Fixed now, thanks.

<comment><USER2> I still see HMB2E+.

<comment><USER5> Really fixed :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How can it support the vector extensions? I didnt think the spec was done yet. Is it?

<comment><USER5> The U84, available to lead customers now, doesn't have the vector extensions. The U87, announced to be made available in H2 2020, will.

The vector extension spec is 99% done. There shouldn't be anything more than minor tweaks from now.

Note that part of the RISC-V extensions philosophy is that specs are not finalized until (preferably) multiple implementations have been made and shown to work as expected in the real world.

<comment><USER2> Is there another implementation of vector extension?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> AFAIU one of the nice thing of the SiFive IP cores is that they were distributed with some kind of free license (although they still required other non-free IPs to be actually used in a chip). Is this still (or was it ever) true?

<comment><USER10> AIUI, the U5 series is BSD/open-sourced as "Rocket", and a version of their shared L2 cache is available as the sifive-inclusive cache. I believe Berkeley uses these artifacts as part of their FireSim ([https://fires.im](https://fires.im)) FPGA-based infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Curious what about this technology makes it front page noteworthy? Has the deep learning community been hotly anticipating the arrival of this technology, or is it more along the lines of stuffing the ballot box?

<comment><USER3> It's the announcement of the highest perf RISC-V core that you'll be able to put your hands on so far.

<comment><USER12> "you'll be able to put your hands on" ... the million dollar question: When???

<comment><USER5> If you're a company making your own SoCs already and want a high performance RISC-V core for a mid-range tablet or phone or an SBC equivalent to the Raspberry Pi 4 or something like that then the answer is "now".

If you're someone wanting to buy a quantity one chip from Digikey or Mouser then it'll be ... when someone decides to make and sell a retail chip. Which might well be someone making their own chip for a tablet or set-top box etc and selling the surplus production.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Refund cost of iPhone app for user x if you sell 2x? - <AUTHOR>

Would this encourage people to buy more iPhone apps and tell their friends about them?<p>Would it be considered gambling? <comment><USER2> If the app is any good it should sell through personal recommendation. Why add a "tacky" promotion that (to my mind) says "dump this app on two acquaintances and you get you money refunded" - message feels entirely negative to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that if you are the 1000th person to buy the app, then you get your money back if/when the 2000th person buys the app.

<comment><USER3> you might want to rephrase the question then, cuz i thought the same thing other posters did.

i think its interesting enough that it could boost the pr on your product or help create an early rush to put you in the top lists, but if i bought an app using that model i wouldn't really be motivated by that fact alone to recommend it to anyone. for me the usefulness and how much i like the app would still way out-trump any need to get my money back.

if you are going with the idea tho, it might be better if there was a 'reward' aspect not just a refund. like 4x = u get paid 1x or something. refunds are frankly not too exciting especially for an iphone app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You mean the nth user gets a refund when the (2n)th user buys? As n approaches +inf.0, the incentive approaches zero. So it's likely to encourage early adopters, and not latecomers. But usually (I believe) the early adopters need no extra motivation. So the question is whether (sales/2) in this scenario is greater than (sales) in the usual scenario.

 _Would it be considered gambling?_

For the buyer, or the seller? :) It sounds a bit closer to MLM than to gambling ...

</comment><comment><USER5> Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps developers would make more money and users would discover more cool apps.</comment></comment>


GNU Bazaar - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Bazaar <comment><USER2> anyone have info / experience with this combined with handling large files? git is a bit crap with large files, wondering if this will do better. (for example 3d game project or other project with lots of fairly sizeable files. (assets / packed files etc.))</comment>


Show HN: Wetransfer alternative I created for fun - <AUTHOR> http://www.upload95.com/ <comment><USER2> how long are files stored? is there a maximum file size?</comment>


A new way to model cancer - <AUTHOR> http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/new-technique-to-model-cancer-0806

<comment><USER2> Clever approach. The problem is as usual the gene delivery. We just don't have a good way of getting DNA into cells efficiently and safely in vivo.</comment>


BI : "Don't fund anyone over 30" - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/vinod-khosla-young-entrepreneurs-2012-9?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sai

<comment><USER2> Typical BI linkbait headline. The VC said younger people tend to adopt new tech more quickly than older people.

Sometimes I wish we could ban BI articles.

</comment><comment><USER3> This sort of nonsense should be illegal. I've met plenty of people over 30 who still learn new stuff at an astonishing rate. I've also met people 25 and below who resisted learning new things like the plague. It's all in your mindset not your age.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't upvote anything from BI from now.</comment>


The shutdown is proof of democracy working. - <AUTHOR> http://www.thepointmag.com/?point=145

<comment><USER2> Wasn't expecting to find this on Hacker News but good read

</comment><comment><USER3> Did you accidentally submit this to the wrong website?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's sarcastic in tone and if you are under the impression that it is republican sided then you only read the title.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any connection to Evan Weiss?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually we went to High School together, but we are not related. That would be pretty cool though if we were.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visualizing Sleeping Patterns on OS X - <AUTHOR> http://www.pedrobot.com/blog/analytics.html

<comment><USER2> The parse.awk script fails on Linux (no -j option to date). I didn't manage to decode what the date command does in the awk script, so I just used the python script instead.

It might be interesting to allow parsing for specific events rather than just when the kernel is logging vs. when it's not.

<comment><AUTHOR> OS X uses FreeBSD date which has totally different cmdline options. I did actually write an awk script that works on Centos 6, I'll upload that shortly. (Edit: I think instead of -jf, you can use --date= on linux.)

The event suggestion is good. Really I just threw the script together last month and occasionally fixed it up when I showed it to friends, so maybe I'll take some time to add that and fix some other things about this (like a prettier graph ^) when I finish my last stretch of schoolwork in the next few weeks. But in the mean time feel free to add that if you want :)

<comment><USER2> I'll take a look this evening at trying to get it to parse specific events. Like you, it's busy times at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Something's wrong with the layout on Lion and Safari 5.1.5. <http://imgur.com/LapyS>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I think it's fixed. Unless I introduced another bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wolfram's graphs were prettier :)

<comment><AUTHOR> True. He does have about a lot more data over a 40x longer time interval, so the noise smoothes itself out more.

Unless you also mean I should have formatted the matplotlib graph better? Mathematica actually has quite nice plotting in general. I also wanted to use d3.js but that sort of defeats the purpose of personal data.</comment></comment>


Private Data - The Real Story:  A Huge Problem with  Education Research - <AUTHOR> http://math.stanford.edu/~milgram/test-build-website.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the desired follow-up on another post to HN

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4649332>

from 67 days ago.</comment>


List of most expensive buildings in the world - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_buildings_in_the_world

<comment><USER2> Unbelievably, one of these is a personal residence!</comment>


NanaGram: Text-to-print service for sharing photos with grandparents - <AUTHOR> http://nanagram.co <comment><AUTHOR> Happy holidays HN. I love today's Christmas css.

I thought I'd pop in and post NanaGram one last time, for people who need a last-minute Christmas gift for their grandparents.

NanaGram is a service that lets you send printed photos in the mail by text message. We give you a unique phone number and you can invite siblings/cousins/family to the account to send in photos with you. At the end of the month we automatically mail 4x6 and 4x4 prints on matte or glossy and mail them to your grandparents or parents. It's a sweet gift that keeps on giving all year.

I created this video the other day and posted it to Show HN, which dives into some of the details in the service in less than 3 minutes. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_J0Uxh1eRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_J0Uxh1eRU)

There's also a shorter video on the website: [https://nanagram.co](https://nanagram.co)

If you want to try it, you can go through [http://nanagram.co/hn](http://nanagram.co/hn) for an extra 10 photos in your first shipment.

Cheers!</comment>


How the U.S. is forcing Internet firms' hands on surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/how-the-u.s-is-forcing-internet-firms-hands-on-surveillance/ <comment><USER2> If you have access to every record of a person's life including financial, it's not hard to find a way to get people to do what you want them to.

</comment><comment><USER3> _" The government's ability to perform surveillance even when armed with a court order depends in large part on the decisions engineers made when designing a product."_

So it's up to engineers building new products to incorporate security from the ground up. No more lip-service to 'Your privacy is important to us' but actual technical changes.

<comment><USER4> The one thing I have not heard amid the denials from Internet portals, search engines, and social networks is any move at all to provide truly secure communications and storage. The only consumer-oriented service I know of that advertises the ability to encrypt your data with your own key is Carbonite, and they did so long before Snowden. They all could do it. They all could provide routine strong encryption, and they could make it simple. They all could have been securing your email from hackers and foreign spies, long before the NSA became an issue. By taking that step they could regain trust. And yet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I consider helping the government that way worse than letting them get the data forcefully with their own equipment, because then the companies won't even protest against it anymore, since they will be "partners in crime" so to speak.

I feel the same way about ISP's handing over data for money and turning it into another profit center.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps, but the problem is that the FedGov's equipment may vacuum up far more than it's supposed to, or disrupt the network, or do a MITM attack not authorized by the court order, etc.

From my article: "A federal magistrate judge sided with the government, despite the fact that 'Carnivore would enable remote access to the ISP's network and would be under the exclusive control of government agents.'"

If you're running a company and care about your users' privacy, would _you_ want an NSA black box with "remote access" \-- remember, you can't log into it and don't know what it does -- inside your firewalls? It might be better to say: Okay, here's a process through which we'll give you a .tar.gz file of the account via Secure FTP. Just keep those NSA black boxes the hell away from us. Hello, PRISM.

<comment><USER4> That's a rationale for sure, but the risks you cite are likely to be present nonetheless if the firewall, networking, and SAN gear you are running has backdoors.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have evidence that the "firewall, networking, and SAN gear" used by Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc. have supersecret government backdoors, we'd be delighted if you could share it with us.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure if this what was originally referenced, and honestly I'd be very surprised if HP storage saw much use in these companies, but the tech support backdoors that have recently been revealed in two HP storage products have caused me personal concern.

My first Google hit, seems somewhat accurate: [http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-security/hp-admits- undocumen...](http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-security/hp-admits-undocumented- backdoors-in-two-separate-storage-lines-222614)

<comment><USER7> The only remote attack is DoS. You'd need physical access to steal data with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Top comment on the page _Honestly I don 't care if the government wants to vacuum up all this info, and they are using it for legitimate investigations and trustworthy people have access to it. My only concern is with the people who have access to this information and intend to do harm with it. Case in point - Snowden._

Is there some decent management tool that would allow tracking/commenting on popular news-websites? This is something where I would approve of a voting ring system.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, you could try hitting up the air force. [http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/revealed-air-force- ord...](http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/revealed-air-force-ordered- software-to-manage-army-of-fake-virtual-people/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So.... the answer to the question in the title is "by law".

The article seems to answer a different question: "Why do Internet firms invest resources in implementing software which aids the NSA's surveillance?" Because otherwise, the NSA will build it themselves, and force the companies to install it inside their datacenters.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think a lot of outrage on this site and others is misplaced. Why are there more posts about boycotting than about affecting change in the federal government?

The efficacy of boycotting is pretty dubious given that prism is probably just one program of many being employed by the NSA and other governmental agencies.

<comment><USER12> These companies go to great lengths to avoid US tax jurisdiction, employing an army of accountants and lawyers to avoid giving money to the IRS. Perhaps they could work with the same dedication to avoid giving their users data to the NSA.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is true, but numbers matter. There's a big difference between the NSA serving 10 FAA702/FISA orders a year on Microsoft for Skype intercepts vs. 10 million. It's targeted vs. wholesale surveillance. We know from companies' disclosures the upper bound is on the order of thousands, and is likely to be far less.

Put another way, there _are_ some actual terrorists/spies/etc. out there, even if the number of terrorists is far lower than the government would like you to believe. If the NSA serves Microsoft with, say, 10 or 100 lawful orders a year to eavesdrop on those communications, is that something worthy of working with "dedication" to prevent? Probably not.

What the companies should be doing is encrypting what they can to frustrate wholesale surveillance. Which Microsoft isn't doing. Which I wrote about here: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57590389-38/](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57590389-38/)

And here: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591179-38/](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591179-38/)

<comment><USER9> When Verizon was served with a FISA request for all their customer's meta data, each day for 3 months, that counted as one order.

That means Verizon might have "only" received 4 FISA orders a year.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, the Internet companies have said that's not what's happening. Facebook has said, for instance, it has received a total of requests covering 18,000 accounts over a 6-month period, which includes NSA requests and local cops trying to find a missing person: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589461-38/facebook- micro...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589461-38/facebook-microsoft- release-nsa-stats-to-reassure-users/)

The Facebook etc. statements were designed to address precisely the concern you raised. Verizon and AT&T, on the other hand, have remained very, very quiet. For good reason: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591391-38/surveillance-p...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591391-38/surveillance- partnership-between-nsa-and-telcos-points-to-at-t-verizon/)

<comment><USER13> > _No, the Internet companies have said that 's not what's happening._

Ah, it's ok then.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have evidence they're lying, I'd be delighted to hear it. Otherwise I'll believe them over a random HN comment, thanksverymuch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article mentions that Microsoft's systems support silently forwarding email to a "shadow account". Here's Google's announcement of the same functionality, theoretically only available to Google Apps administrators:

[http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-api- releas...](http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-api-released- google-apps-audit-api.html)

Any significance to the timing?

</comment><comment><USER15> So, the only "escape clause" US courts have given against this kind of intrusion is end-to-end encryption, hardware and all?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's a good way to put it. Yes.</comment></comment>


True Ventures' Entrepreneur Force Pays It Forward To Budding Tech Leaders - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/16/true-ventures/ <comment><USER2> $3000 stipend for an entire summer? That's well below minimum wage in San Francisco, and less than a fifth of what the large tech companies pay for (technical) internships. If they're trying to "compete with large companies like Google, Microsoft or even Facebook for talent," this hardly seems like the way to do it.

Do I just misunderstand the article? Do the companies themselves make up the rest? Or is this "competing for talent" claim mostly posturing?

<comment><USER3> Hi Paul,

The goal is to try to make this cost-neutral for the students participating in TEC.

When we talked to students who were considering taking an internship at a startup versus a big company, the big issue in many cases was that most startups weren't offering cash compensation. The problem being that even if students really want to try working at a startup, it is really expensive to live in the Bay Area - even for 8 weeks.

So the goal was not to compete with big companies directly on cash compensation (which most startups would never do even for a full-time hire), but rather enable anyone who wants to have experience working with a small team - the opportunity to be able to afford to do so.

<comment><USER2> Maybe the market is different for non-technical internships. I have no particular insight into that. But for a top CS or engineering student, I seriously doubt this would be an enticing offer.

Addendum: I'm really not trying to needlessly antagonize you, but I think your point about cash compensation isn't very sound, because it neglects the equity a full-time employee would receive to offset the below-market salary.

<comment><USER3> Partially agree.

It's a different sales pitch than big companies though - our pitch is we'll cover your living expense and give you the chance to work with a small team and see if a startup is the right fit for you.

Instead of equity - many of the TEC participants get to own an entire product or initiative. Ali Shah out of NYU came on board and over the summer designed and built the entire VodPod iPad App. Andrew Boni at BC was a core part of the team that helped design and push code to the GigaOM site redesign.

At an internship for a major tech company, you're pushing some live code, but its for a small part of a major property. Much like joining a startup early, you get to own major parts of product and get to understand how your work fits into the broader company building process.

P.S. Doesn't feel antagonistic at all - I'm just trying to shine a light on how we think about the situation internally. We know we don't pay participants as much as Google, Apple, etc - but we think it actually helps attract the right type applicants to the program.

<comment><USER2> For the record:

We settled this over tacos and beer. True Ventures is not trying to compete with the likes of Facebook for top technical talent. That seems to be a misleading spin added by the authors of the article at TechCrunch.

True Ventures is instead trying to find people for whom the value of a summer spent working and learning at a start-up and building relationships within the firm is greater than the $12k+ pay delta. I agree that this can hold true for certain individuals, especially people looking to found their own companies in the very near future. I imagine there are many struggling start-up founders who would be willing (not that anyone would offer this deal) to pay $12k for the sort of access a TEC participant has.

Unlike what the TechCrunch article implies, this does not do much to solve the recruitment problems faced by many start-ups, nor is it intended to do so.

Thanks for the tacos, Adam!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is actually something we've been thinking about in terms of hiring and culture. Less on an intern basis (though would have same access, just would be shorter period of time) and more on the basis with full time team members. The people we'd want to bring on board should most likely be entrepreneurs, but for some reason aren't ready/want to join a company first.

How can we educate these team members and give them access to all the cool/smart people we meet? Essentially how can being a part of our team, also help get you ready to start your own company in a couple of years?

The greatest companies ala paypal, fb, goog, fairchild,etc. end up spawning a subsequent generation of entrepreneurs. We want that to be built into OnSwipe from day 1 and not a haphazard bi-product.

Really open to some suggestions on the above concept as it's still rough and we're working on it.

If this interests you, email me: email@example.com . We're hiring (front end+back end) and I know we're doing something like this, just figuring out right approach. You can help us shape it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Disclosure: I was a HackNY fellow last summer.

I'm all for more programs like this, but I don't think VCs should be running them. HackNY.org is a similar program in NYC. The key difference is that it's a non-profit run by educators and hackers with no commercial interests. HackNY is truly paying it forward.

<comment><USER3> Hey Max,

I now work at True and was a part of the first TEC class in 2009.

Was curious if you could go into more detail about why VCs shouldn't run these types of programs.

Our main goal is to help college students connect with startups so they can discover alternatives to the traditional big company career paths they hear about all the time at school. In the end, more people graduating and looking to join startups is good thing for the ecosystem, no matter who is running the program.

I'd propose the opposite, that all venture funds should be running these types of programs. Both to help their portfolio companies recruit and to help educate students about opportunities at high-tech startups.

P.S. If you're looking for the West Coast equivalent to HackNY - you should check out Startup Roots.

<http://startuproots.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just think about the potential impact if YC and the huge network of companies (and supporters here on HN) did something similar ...

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it me or is the title incredibly difficult to parse?</comment>


Feynman's Nobel Ambition - <AUTHOR> http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html <comment><USER2> This is why sometimes the best way to solve a problem is not to directly solve the problem, but just make an attempt to discover more about the problem.

The best example to study to in this case is the P Vs NP problem. I never understood how people can spend years trying to prove P=NP or P=!NP. Unless you already know the answer to question, to begin with a goal to prove it either way is not a wise way to achieve a solution to such a problem. If you try to discover more about this problem you likely to get to a result faster than than the actual proof simply because you can't prove/disprove what is not already proved/disproved. You can only hope to 'discover' a result.

So many times playing around, having fun and trying to discover things for sheer curiosity is likely to lead to more fascinating results.

<comment><USER3> I've found that the application of formalism to most any problem I have in my head takes me down paths I hadn't considered. Said another way, forcing a problem into a straight jacket tends to squeeze out the interesting bits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in the middle of reading Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman (again) and I must say there are many more short little anecdotes that leave you with the same giddy smile as this one.

In case it bears repeating yet again to anyone who hasn't read it, read it!

<comment><USER5> Absolutely seconded! I love that book so much. I frequently give copies of it as gifts in hopes that people will get half as much joy out of it as I have.

His writing style is just so infectious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > .. and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play > with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance > whatsoever ...

Gold.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah it's a cool story. However be careful of affirming the consequent (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent>) ... just because Feynman won the nobel prize because he decided to "play" for a while to reinvigorate his interest in Physics, doesn't mean that if you play for a while it will also result in something useful.

edit: upon reflection I'm not sure this is actually the "affirming the consequent" fallacy after all ... but I think the point is made nevertheless. Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class. Later he built Apple using some ideas from that. This doesn't mean if you take a calligraphy class you will go on to do something useful with it.

<comment><USER8> > just because Feynman won the nobel prize because he decided to "play" for a > while to reinvigorate his interest in Physics, doesn't mean that if you play > for a while it will also result in something useful.

This is awfully negative. I think most people on HN are smart enough to realize that the chances of winning a Nobel prize are very small; it doesn't need continual restatement.

I do like Feynman's attitude. I get the impression that many (not all) of today's physicists take themselves way too seriously. Looking up the old saying: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."

<comment><USER9> "I think most people on HN are smart enough to realize that the chances of winning a Nobel prize are very small; it doesn't need continual restatement."

I think few on HN realize that the chances of building a very successful company is very small ...

<comment><USER10> I think most of us realize it. But we also realize that the reward is so large that it counters the small probability to make a pretty high expectancy, above a regular programmer salary.

Let's say one startup out of the, say, ten thousand of serious startups founded every year will make it. For simplicity's sake, let's say that its founder will be a billionaire and the others will ALL gain their money back and then declare bankruptcy. Then 10^9/10^4=100000, which is better than most programmers' payout for that year.

TL;DR: It's improbable but it's worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's the full book available free online: <http://www.chem.fsu.edu/chemlab/isc3523c/feyn_surely.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the article. I find myself doing math problems all the time just for fun, I am glad that I am not the only one. Of course, I have not solved anything that would ever win me a Nobel prize. But I had fun. One day my 9 year old son and I derived Pi with approximations and a calculator, and my kid likes calculating geometry now. Better than watching TV all day.

</comment><comment><USER13> Paula Scher gave a TED talk that expands on this idea a bit more. <http://www.ted.com/talks/paula_scher_gets_serious.html> Edit: Her point isn't so much about taking a break and doing something different, but that it's important to maintain the sense of play.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wish more people would play with working out plate wobbles than World of Warcraft.</comment>


Relational Data, Document Databases and Schema Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.paperplanes.de/2010/7/5/relational_data_document_databases_schema_design.html <comment><USER2> Document databases are a passing fad, a backlash against the flaws in the currently available open source databases. These flaws have nothing to do with the relational model.

If there was an open source RDBMS that allowed instant/lazy schema migrations, direct map-reduce access to its data, was able to automatically partition and shard, and somehow magically had performant joins you would never see these document database come to be so popular. Document databases have no mathematical grounding analagous to the relational model; the reason is because they are a hackneyed application of the relational model that allows implemention to bleed even further into the model than current RDBMses do. For example, the fact a developer now will have to choose between "embedding" or joining documents together application side has absolutely _zero_ different in terms of the true data model. The data model is unchanged in either scenario, it is just being _materialized_ differently on disk for implementation issues.

Edit: To be clear, the way things _should_ work is you should model your data as a normalized, clean model. Then, you should be able to annotate the data or provide alternative views that "embed" documents and so on to reduce cross- table joins. This is an optimization layer and the actual materialization of these views should be maintained by the database. It should be part of the query optimizer, and your joins should simply speed up once they can access the "embedded versions". The fact that you have to do this all manually and store the data yourself, and basically take on the role of the query optimizer as well, shows that we've traded C for assembly code in the db world with these document databases.

It's truly a sad state of affairs that peoples horrible experiences with whatever particular RDBMS they've used are causing them to react by using one of these document databases. Now, they've got a whole series of new problems. There is no free lunch until someone addresses some of the pain points like schema evolution in a way that doesn't sacrifice everything else.

<comment><USER3> Hi, I think that you are completely right. Schema evolution and easy partition/sharding are broken on current open-source RDBMS systems. Relational data has strong mathematical guarantees as well as useful normalization properties for ensuring consistency.

I have a question about what good solution you have to solve these problems. Are you suggesting that Oracle does this well as a commercial solution? Is anybody at all working on a next-generation RDBMS that makes schema migration truly easy?

For the sharding/partitioning question, is it even possible to make a relational data scheme that stays available and consistent in the case of network partition?

<comment><USER2> The solution is pretty clear, simply make it easy to do what the author suggests in their article, in a safe and repeatable way. You define your new schema, and you define the tranformation rules to run on the old data. In turn, the database applies these _lazily_. There'd be some formality necessary to prove certain operations could be applied lazily to provide a consistent view of the data. People are doing this by hand now; it should be part of the system. One can imagine a mathematical model that involves deferred relational operators. The constraints that would be imposed would probably be that certain operations would not be permissable until others complete. For example, it might be necessary, when running one of these lazy migrations, to "flush" the remaining untransformed rows to the end before you are able to apply another one. The upside is your migration scripts run instantly, becuase they have no side effects until the next transaction.

The CAP theorem I think often gets rolled up into these "NoSQL" discussions erroneously. One can still model data relationally but materialize it in a way that reduces ACID compliance to survive in the face of network partitions. Arguably this is a red herring though. In practice, the "network partition" problem to me seems to be only really worth worrying about if you are Google or Amazon and are running cross-data center data storage. For the majority of the world this is not something that needs to be worried about. (See: VoltDB's choice on the matter.)

Edit: By the way, I'm not saying any of this is easy. It's hard, really hard. (I couldn't do it.) But the point here is that it's easy to get caught up and think these 'new' document databases are solving these problems. They're not. They're putting you back down to the assembly code level and forcing you to do these things yourself. The whole point of the RDBMS is to provide an abstraction layer. They're removing this abstraction layer and heralding it as a step forward. It is, in a bizarre sense similar to how it's a "step forward" for you to be able to access the registers on your CPU, but it's surely a step backwards in many ways as well.

<comment><USER4> The compelling thing about CouchDB is the ability to take a copy of the database offline, make changes, and then sync back up with other copies of the database later (or never).

If this isn't a network partition I don't know what is.

Of course thinking like this is totally unlike what most relational users are accustomed to, but this use case is only becoming more prominent as applications spread to diverse and occasionally connected devices.

I have a hard time imagining practical offline APIs without the full MVCC document model. Once you see this use case's value it's hard not to want to write all your apps so that they can be replicated offline for disconnected use.

<comment><USER5> One relevant point here is that it's relatively easy to merge two branches of changes for a simple (key/value) data model, but harder to merge changes to relational data where there are additional constraints (like foreign keys) which must be preserved.

That said, just because it's easy to merge key/value data, doesn't mean that the results of the merge are necessarily going to be correct. The constraints still exist, they're just not explicit in the data model, meaning that when your network partition gets joined up again and it magically merges all those changes at the key-value level, you may be ending up with data that's broken in subtle, difficult-to-track-down ways because other implicit constraints weren't respected by the merge.

So, merging changes in a way that respects constraints which apply to that data, is a hard problem in general. Key/value stores, with their less- structured data model, sweep that problem under the carpet somewhat in order to make things easier in distributed settings. Relational databases suffer from trying to address the problem more fully.

<comment><USER2> This is a really important point. There seems to be this joy people are having from shedding their schema since they can just get stuff done and not have it get in the way. This should be just as much scary as liberating. You're basically flying on manual now, and there's nothing protecting your data integrity anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I stopped reading when he said consistency is in your hands (with noSQL). Since you have to manage relationships, and doing so requires several round trips to the datastore, and generally doesn't involve transactions, what happens when inserts 1 and 2 succeed, but insert 3 fails? What happens if you crash before insert 3? In high volume applications, these situations will arise and you will end up with inconsistent data. That doesn't prevent noSQL from being useful in some situations, but it's a far cry from putting control over consistency in your hands.

<comment><USER4> CouchDB has full ACID on a single document, so you can avoid these scenarios by writing everything that needs to happen in a transaction into a single document. Modeling your data like this means you are also more robust against partial replications (when using offline mode).

It is possible to do banking this way (CouchDB is probably better for banking than relational systems). Here's an example:

<http://books.couchdb.org/relax/reference/recipes>

<comment><USER6> I'm not too familiar with CouchDB in particular or what exactly a "document" is. Let's say I have a site about books. I need to be able to look up books by author, title, isbn and users who have it in their catalogue. Is there a way in CouchDB to ensure consistency while maintaining those relationships?

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's what the incremental map reduce indexes are used for. Each book would be a document, which you could query by any of those attributes. I'd store the fact that each user owns a book as it's own document, and then you can easily get a view of books by user, or of users by book.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chronix: store time series highly compressed and for fast access times - <AUTHOR> http://www.chronix.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Adrian Coyler discusses Chronix at [https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/03/10/chronix-long-term- storag...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/03/10/chronix-long-term-storage-and- retrieval-technology-for-anomaly-detection-in-operational-data/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Previously, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12020517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12020517)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you. Where do I find the FAST17 paper and slides mentioned in here?</comment>


8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/ <comment><USER2> I'm one of the creators of this demo. For the past several months I've been working on a cycle-exact 8088 emulator (that will eventually be able to run 8088 MPH properly). I don't have it hooked up to any audio or video output yet, but for the first time last night it ran automatically-generated testcases all night without finding any differences from the real hardware.

<comment><USER3> I remember reading a writeup a few years ago from the guy who made BSNES, and him mentioning to get cycle exactness requires a crazy amount more CPU power than getting "cycle-good-enough-for-99%-of-things", and that he had to do some elaborate cooperative threading to get decent performance.

Has this been the case for you?

Also, 8088mph is super cool; great job on it!

<comment><USER4> I remember that one, it's 3GHz for perfect emulation of a SNES which had a <25 MHz CPU. [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes- power-...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one- mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/)

<comment><USER5> 25 MHz is mentioned in the article as a basic requirement of the earliest SNES emulators. The SNES CPU itself clocks in at less than 4.

<comment><USER4> So it's not the clock speed, but an oscillator at 21.47MHz that I was accidentally citing.

<comment><USER5> Ah that makes sense - 6x the CPU clock of 3.58something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favourite part:

 _It's a cycle-counting effect, as there is simply no time to monitor for horizontal retrace. To ensure the cycle counting was consistent, several things were done including changing the system default DRAM refresh from it's default interval of 18 to 19, to get the DRAM refresh periods to line up with CRTC accesses._

(previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338944))

</comment><comment><USER7> When I ran across this a couple years ago, I transferred this to the IBM PC (which was my first computer) over a serial cable (I still have Telix installed) from a Windows XP desktop since it also had a serial port, and use Hyperterminal to transmit the file. And in order to get it to that computer I had to put it on a USB drive.

It was pretty cool seeing it run. That PC was what I used from 1987-1993 and it was mostly obsolete during that time but I tried to get everything I could out of it. There was nothing that approached what this demo was able to do graphically. (There were a lot of cool music programs even for the PC speaker back then though.) Although, I get a memory parity error partway through the demo because I don't have the full 640k due to some bad memory chips on the memory expansion card.

It helps that they designed it for composite output, since I no longer have a CGA monitor, but you can still hook it up to TVs.

<comment><USER8> I had to transfer it to a win2k machine via network, then wrote a serial transfer program in gwbasic and visual basic 6.

I don't have a CGA but some ati clone (forgot name, it can emulate a bunch of modes including hercules), so I couldn't get colors to work in their new 1k mode. The color burst was either not recognized at all or the picture wasn't stable. But that might have been an issue with the modern TV, or both.

Most effects worked really well with that card surprisingly. Kefrens bars started halfway through the screen for some reason but otherwise were fine too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apparently 640K is enough for anyone.

</comment><comment><USER10> If these guys went back to the 80s with this knowledge they would be rich.

<comment><USER11> They mention that a company called Macrocom had figured out part of this trick in the mid-80s... From this linked explanation: [http://8088mph.blogspot.com/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors- new-m...](http://8088mph.blogspot.com/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode- illustrated.html#the_macrocom_method)

<comment><USER12> This link is amazing. The explanation of which characters are used, and the process they used to get to the 1024 colors, is fantastic. Thank you for sharing this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The outro credits manage to play a MOD file just via PC speakers (which normally can just make bleeps)...quite an accomplishment! [1]

[1] [http://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player- how-...](http://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how-its- done/)

</comment><comment><USER14> The graphics are amazing!

About the sound, I remember playing an mp3 through PC speaker on a 386 computer, as well as having a special config for wolf3D that made it play its soundblaster sound effects through the PC speaker, so its single voice square wave can produce arbitrary sound.

Good ending music nonetheless!

</comment><comment><USER15> Whoa Doc, do you mean to tell me this sucker is nuclear?!

</comment><comment><USER16> Congrats with the win! It was an enjoyable demo!

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anybody know and has time to explain why emulators cannot play this demo? I always assumed emulators recreated the hardware in software, so why won't they be able to do something the hardware could?

<comment><USER18> In theory emulators recreate the hardware in software. In practice, emulators _approximate_ the hardware in software. In the case of PCs, there is so much hardware variation, that it was never a requirement to be very accurate in terms of speed, unlike machines such as the C64, Amiga, Atari ST, NES and various other machines, where many tricks found in games and demos depend on manipulating specific hardware registers in very specific timeframes.

This demo has various effects that depend on the _exact_ speed of the CPU and hardware. No PC emulator is anywhere near that accurate, leading to effects not working correctly, or just hanging altogether (eg the end-tune depends on instructions being in the prefetch-buffer at a specific time).

Another issue was the 1k colour effect, which exploits the way the NTSC signal is generated. Most emulators didn't emulate NTSC composite very accurately (just treating it as a 16-colour mode).

The timing in this demo is so critical, that even most clones with an 8088 at 4.77 MHz and a CGA-compatible clone card do not play the demo correctly.

<comment><USER19> OpenEmulator, a little-known emulator for the Apple II, has an absolutely fantastic NTSC emulation, done with GPU shaders. I'm in the process of porting it to WebGL, so that (a) I and others can actually understand it, and (b) so that others can use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> trixter.oldskool.org may be the greatest personal URL of all time</comment>


Open-Sourcing IBM Cloudant's CouchDB Search Integration with Lucene - <AUTHOR> https://cloudant.com/blog/open-sourcing-cloudant-search/

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I work for Cloudant. There are two libraries outlined in the blog:

Clouseau, in Scala: [https://github.com/cloudant- labs/clouseau](https://github.com/cloudant-labs/clouseau) Dreyfus, in Erlang: [https://github.com/cloudant-labs/dreyfus](https://github.com/cloudant- labs/dreyfus)

<comment><USER2> Which version of Lucene are these built on?

<comment><USER3> The POM implies for Clouseau is built on Lucene 4.6.1 and compiled for Java 1.6 and Scala 2.9.1. Also the artifacts don't seem to be in Maven Central.

<comment><AUTHOR> We didn't publish to Maven Central. It's not a library, but I guess we could publish there. Thanks for the suggestion.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Container Data Center Tour (Video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I

<comment><USER2> dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=551938></comment>


Ask HN: Will you pay me for this? - <AUTHOR> Consider the following scenario:<p>a) You tell me something you desperately want to be good at and make a commitment b) I follow up with you on a regular basis (email/phone/video), track your progress and send you reports occasionally <comment><USER2> Some aspects should be taken in to account.

1 People that desperately want to be good at something are delusional because thats is just a dream they see themselves already there but they do not have the key to unlock that door.

2 when people go and see someone to help them out in something they want someone to fix that for them otherwise they would be fixing that by themselves.

3 People like that are emotional strugglers they have mental blocks they do not follow up.

4\. If a third part is going to make them to commit into something they will be blaming the third part for their failures.

</comment><comment><USER3> So basically, coaching then?

Personally, I wouldn't pay you for that, simply because (as people have rightfully pointed out), I'd want a mentor to help me improve at things, not a human alarm clock. 90% of what you mention here could be automated with a free program, and the other 10% wouldn't be all that useful unless you had a decent amount of experience in the field I'm trying to learn.

</comment><comment> jadzia-dev No. If you're not good at this then you cannot provide any guidance or advice. At which point I can just use reminders, or build an app with random positive messages popping up as notifications every week or so.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like this variation of this idea: Put up X dollars and commit to tasks. If you don't show proof that you did it, you don't get the money back. Maybe send the money to a black hole if tasks aren't accomplished... like burning ether-- your company shouldn't keep the money because otherwise there's misaligned incentives, but donating the money to charity seems like it _might_ motivate you to work less (maybe not?), which wasn't your original goal. It's a bit harsher but it means... it actually matters to commit.

In this scenario no one is selling you knowledge--instead, you're forcing yourself to be more motivated. And you make money by taking a small cut when a task gets accomplished, so you have a financial interest in your customers succeeding.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think your idea could work. I did this last year. I helped my friends little brother transition from being a bartender to being front end developer (perfect timing with covid19) and a new friend transition from being lawyer to a QA engineer. We would chat and text message what we are working on, gotchas, hot topics etc. We then would meetup occasionally on Fridays for drinks and talk shop. It was a win/win situation, they got into a new lucrative career and I got a new friend to talk tech with. This all plays into my mantra I got from the movie Office Tigers on Netflix: On your way up, bring those around you with you.

</comment><comment><USER6> I won't pay you, but I'm guessing somebody would.

I guess you would have to establish credibility.

e.g. If someone wants to be a great actor, but you have no acting experience.

I guess you could play the matchmaker role. I know there are coaching services out there, at least one that is 'startup-y', but prob plenty more room.

</comment><comment><USER7> Revealed preference ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference)) is often different from stated preference, particularly with "soft" purchases like this one. Put up a web page - or a few different pages - and find out.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like a great idea, partly because I don't know you and so I have less fear of failing in front of people/the world.

How much do you have in mind?

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://bossasaservice.life/](https://bossasaservice.life/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think this is a desperately needed service but I can't think of the right way to do it.

</comment><comment><USER11> No, unless you're good at it and willing to provide some guidance.</comment>


24 Pull Requests - <AUTHOR> http://24pullrequests.com/?year=2014

<comment><USER2> You may wish to learn some new skills but wonder where to start. Or you may be curious about how, or with what, you can contribute to open-source software, in general or for projects you specifically rely on.

Having your first patch accepted is a strange experience. It's hard to describe, but feels really, really good. Definitely recommended!

For those who can allocate the time for it, this is a _great_ initiative. It makes discovering potential projects where contributions are welcome easy, and it makes it easy to identify which projects which may be a good fit for your contributions.

I have a relatively new project up and running, and I already see a couple of forks. I'm curious about what December will bring :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 24 Pull Requests is back again for a 3rd year, encouraging people to give back to open source projects that they've been benefiting from all year.

The site itself is also open source: [https://github.com/24pullrequests/24pullrequests](https://github.com/24pullrequests/24pullrequests)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just wanted to say that I'm not a programmer, but there are still things I can contribute to Open Source projects during this ace project. Fix those typos, add some documentation for a piece of software you use or myriad other things. I only mention it because I didn't realise this until somebody pointed it out to me!

Also, for any JavaScript types out there looking for something to contribute to, this plugin[0] would help me fly a Quadcopter much easier! Just sayin' ;-)

[0]:[https://github.com/andrew/webflight-onscreen- keyboard](https://github.com/andrew/webflight-onscreen-keyboard)

<comment><USER4> Indeed, documentation and even quick tutorials are often overlooked but they're the first thing you look for when trying out a new project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, even more people dropping random patches, going away and not responding to questions. I would prefer people doing 1 pull request and taking care of it (test, docs) than getting 24 useless pull request. I had some pretty toxic behaviour last year because of this. Though I appreciate the idea I think it give a pretty bad idea to people of what Open Source are.

I've just spend 4 hours on chat the last 2 days explaining a new comer how to use git/github and make a pull request; it was a pleasure. Though it is less and less the case when people just drop by and go away.

I know I'm getting old and grumpy, but I feel the day I'll say the F word is getting closer.

Please Someone open minus24pullrequest.com and ask people to help test and review code instead of just submitting extra work for maintainer.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like you've had some bad experiences here. Is your contribution process documented anywhere? IME well-meaning folks will generally try to conform to existing procedures if it's easy to find out what they are. The more time consuming PRs involve people new to Git/GitHub (and things like rebasing) but even then, I've only seen civil interactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a great initiative and one that I would to be able to be a part of but I have such a hard time coming up with things to do. I have only made a few contributions to open source projects previously and all those were cases where I was using some open source library with limitations or flaws that I had to fix in order to be able to use them in my software and where I fixed them first for me and then decided to share them back with the world. In many cases I added or modified functionality through multiple checkins that amounted to rather large pull requests. I just have a hard time seeing how I will be able to a) find anything worthwhile to contribute and b) be able to do so every day.

<comment><USER7> Here are 179 basic Linux utilities...

        rpm -ql binutils coreutils moreutils moreutils-parallel \
            findutils diffutils sharutils psutils \
            pciutils iputils elfutils | grep -E /usr/s?bin

...some of which likely have parsing bugs which can be automatically identified with this fuzzer discussed on HN recently:

[http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/)

Also, an exciting opportunity to discover what the 'pee' and 'sponge' commands do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Login using github doesn't seem to work (dns lookup failed), in case anyone from the site is reading comments.

</comment><comment><USER9> There seems to be barely more than one person per participating organization, wonder why.

</comment><comment><USER10> +1</comment>


Unfair Employer practice to force Employees to move - <AUTHOR> One of my friends mentioned to me about his employment situation in which they are forced to relocate to Texas or couple of other Southern states in US or asked to leave the company. Company has a big presence in NY city and they are doing cost cutting via relocating. He has been part of the company for 15+ years and now across multiple teams they are giving out notices which are pretty much like either relocate or leave the company. In-case they choose to leave they do NOT get any severance package. They are presenting impossible choices to people in most of the cases people in his company are just forced to leave as it is really hard to move, sell homes, setup kids schools and all other things in short 3 months notices.<p>My question for HN community here is - are such unfair practices allowed to dodge severance pay? Also is there anything people can do legally to stand their ground against unfair practices? <comment><USER2> I think this is why employment lawyers exist.

Sadly this is not a new practice; people used to joke that IBM is short for "I've Been Moved".

<comment><AUTHOR> Also on top of all this drama they have a non compete clause which they are not willing to wave.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is also another way to dodge laying off people as well. Because with that company looks bad on books</comment>


Holocene Calendar; a calendar with birth of civilisation as year one - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar <comment><AUTHOR> It's basically same as the Gregorian, but add ten thousand to every positive year. 1 A.D. is year 10.000 in this calendar. We are now in year 12.015. Founding of Rome is 9.248. What good it does? Gets rid of the A.D.-B.C. confusion, for the most part of human history. Cons? Big years. IMO, I like it, it can be adopted as an international calendar (just like Esperanto is being widely spoken by the international community, eh).</comment>