AMD responds to Linux kernel maintainer's rejection of AMDGPU patch - <AUTHOR> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2016-December/126684.html <comment><USER3> I really don't understand why AMD cares so much about getting their driver upstreamed. If their code doesn't meet the kernel standards and they don't want to fix it then just package it up as kernel module and ship it like Nvidia does. Distributions will package it using DKMS and other than some occasional troubleshooting they wont even notice. It's really no difference than Windows in that respect.

His arguments seem really weak. Apparently the AMD team believes that the kernel should accept this code despite it not meeting their standards because:

* Otherwise they'll write angry blog posts about how mean the kernel maintainers are.

* They're a primarily Windows shop.

* They don't have the resources to do it right.

* They don't have the time to do it right.

* They're 'trying' to do the right thing.

* They believe that AMD is a big enough company to get special treatment.

* "But Andrrroid gets special treatment"

* There are lots of people with unreleased hardware that desperately need driver support.

* They're doing in wrong, but the current kernel maintainers are doing it wrong in a different way so it should be okay.

* Graphics drivers are what's preventing the 'year of the Linux desktop'.

<comment><USER4> The claim that AMD, a company with gross profit in the $1 - 2 billion range, does not have the resources to support a dedicated development team that can do a good job on upstream-able code is just farcical. That's a question of corporate priorities, not resources, and gets precisely to the critique of corporate culture that was in question.

> There's only so much time in the day; we'd like to make our code perfect, > but we also want to get it out to customers while the hw is still relevant.

And this has always been the damn problem with AMD's drivers, even in their wheelhouse, Windows. They just have a slipshod attitude toward the software end of their core business.

<comment><USER5> AMD doesn't have "gross profit in the $1 - 2 billion range". They have about $1B in revenue per quarter and have had negative profits (i.e. they lose money) for quite some time now. They were on the verge of bankrupcy about a year ago. Maybe Zen can turn their fortunes around, but they're correct in that they don't have the resources for a dedicated development team right now.

<comment><USER4> It does, in fact, report around the gross profit I specified. Why don't you look at the financials [1]. I think many people in this thread, including you, don't know what the term "gross profit" means.

[1] [http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol- fundIncomeA](http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-fundIncomeA)

<comment><USER6> I had to look it up. And you're right, I didn't know what the accountants think gross profit means. The thing is, gross profit doesn't include operating expenses[0]: "rent, equipment, inventory costs, marketing, payroll, insurance and funds allocated toward research and development."[1] As you can see on the page you linked, for a company like AMD, their operating expenses are _huge_. And that's not even including expenses from taxes and debts. So the number we _really_ want, and what I imagine most people are thinking you meant, is net income. Which, you'll notice is sadly rather negative.

[0] [http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/031015/what- differen...](http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/031015/what-difference- between-gross-profit-operating-profit-and-net-income.asp)

[1] [http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operating_expense.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operating_expense.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Coming from the FreeBSD perspective, I would freaking _LOVE_ it if some drivers had a HAL (or, really, OSAL). Instead, for the vendors that cannot allocate the resources to properly support FreeBSD, we have a linux kernel compat shim that tries to translate from the linux kernel apis to FreeBSD ones. This is much harder to deal with than a HAL because it makes it even harder than a HAL to reason about the code.

One recent example is that I was debugging a rogue DMA issue in a driver that uses the linux kpi shims. I wanted to use the Intel DMAR to try to catch the DMA, but because of the use of linux shims, the driver would not work at all with the DMAR. We had to improve the linux kpi shims to do busdma, rather than just use pmap_kextrect() to convert kernel virtual to physical addresses (and this was a hack, because there is a gigantic imedence mismatch between dma_map_single and busdma). And, as soon as we had the driver working with the DMAR, we caught the rogue DMA.

Weeks of my time could have been saved if, instead of writing to Linux, the vendor driver had included a full hal that supported busdma. Instead, they wrote to the linux kpi.

And I fully blame the Linux kernel maintainers for this. They're on top of the world and can dictate to hardware vendors to remove their portability shims. Meanwhile, other OS projects get the dregs.

<comment><USER8> I'm sympathetic to BSD, but that seems like a lot of misplaced blame to me.

Companies don't write FreeBSD drivers because there's no ROI for the hardware companies. Making the drivers doesn't help them sell more hardware. Likewise, the LK devs made these decisions because their vision of the kernel doesn't involve HALs, not to spite FreeBSD.

<comment><USER9> I don't know if HALs in the kernel would have been the smart thing to do here (I'm not familiar enough with the problem to comment; generally, abstracting hardware access behind a HAL _is_ a smart thing, but "generally" is a really bad snare trap).

On the other hand, I'd _really_ love to see the Linux team getting the same treatment that Microsoft gets whenever they encourage lack of portability, even where portability would be irrelevant. A whole thread about this, and not once was the word "EEE" uttered.

I'm sure business had nothing to do with the Linux team's decision here, I'm just a little pissed at our double standards ("our" as in the open source/free software community of users and developers). AMD's criticism is not without valid points. Getting drivers _to work_ (let alone in upstream) while the hardware is still relevant is difficult and requires a lot of maintenance, hacking and testing due to things like API changes, undocumented/shifting ad- hoc conventions and so on. Driver development on Linux is very much unlike what you expect with a Windows background; the sheer fact that they managed to convince a largely Windows-only shop to let them do it, with an eye to the future, is amazing.

I'd have expected to see questions like "why did these guys write the whole fsckin thing, all 100,000 lines of it, and only found out it's not upstreamable _now_ ". I've been hearing of AMD trying to get their Linux drivers in good shape for a long time now. "We don't do the thing that is most fundamental to your architecture" looks like the kind of problem that could have surfaced within, I don't know, two emails?

Edit: I do think that the LK maintainer was right not to merge this. What bothers me is that everyone's focusing on everything _except_ the examination of the technical issues and what would benefit Linux users.

<comment><USER10> > I'd have expected to see questions like "why did these guys write the whole > fsckin thing, all 100,000 lines of it, and only found out it's not > upstreamable now"

AMD was told 6 months ago that it wouldn't be merged if they didn't follow certain guidelines. Then they didn't follow the guidelines.

What bothers me here, is the way AMD's management has handled the whole thing.

It seems like management demanded it be a certain way, and the coders were forced to build something they knew would be unmergable. And then management chucked a hissy fit.

There's been really good work here, and management has got upset, rather than follow guidelines, or nVidia's example.

It reflects really badly on the company, which is sad considering the space for AMD left by nVidia's Optimus kafuffle.

There is a market for GPUs here, but it does need to show some professionalism, which they (management) haven't.

<comment><USER9> I agree that there is room for disagreement between the two approaches. However, I don't think that AMD did things this way just because of short- sighted management. A HAL-like layer is a solution that I've seen or heard of in a lot of places, from a lot of hardware manufacturers that want to support Linux.

It may seem -- and may well _be_ \-- a sub-optimal solution, but it's not worse than what we have now, and AMD looks willing to commit to the long-term support of the HAL and the drivers. This is likely something that they want to do not just because they're lazy and would rather spend the money on something else -- it's likely that their management genuinely sees the development and maintenance of an entirely unabstracted set of drivers for Linux as inefficient, _especially_ when you look at how much money they make out of it. And they aren't entirely wrong.

Deucher's remark about the Red Hat silo may look malicious and abrasive, but it has a glimpse of truth. I could make a really cool photo album by taking snapshots of developers and managers who are only familiar with Windows and hear about the challenges involved in writing (and upstreaming) a non-trivial Linux driver.

I'm not saying that the driver should have been merged as it is just because there's no alternative. I do think, however, that it's a little presumptuous to think its architecture is the way it is just because managers are stupid. Maybe a third option, that's not HAL but also addresses the concerns and requirements of AMD exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The kernel maintainers don't necessarily want your code.

Additional shit in mainline increases the maintenance burden. If the code isn't putting upstream maintainability above all else in its implementation, then it's generally not getting merged unless someone wasn't paying attention or some other forces compelled an exception.

Alex's first reply reads like he's willfully ignoring that aspect of the NACK. It's not a coding style issue, it's a HAL issue. Upstream isn't interested in maintaining a HAL and living with the impedance mismatch from day zero. The driver can stay out of tree. This is just about code getting into mainline.

I'm personally very happy to see the gpu subsystem maintainers paying attention and having the maturity to know a fool's errand when they see it.

<comment><USER12> Then again, we're not talking about some wierd network card driver here.

We're talking about having a constant up-to-date driver on par with Windows for a major GPU card manufacturer. A driver which has caused a large amount of desktop users to return to Windows due to its historical issues.

While I get the reasoning for rejection, the typical OSS rejection attitude is also problematic. I kinda don't see a dialog happening here on how to resolve problems both sides have, just a repeat of posturing which has historically brought us awesome things like binary blob drivers that only work with single version of kernels (yes, I'm looking at you every ARM GPU ever!).

<comment><USER13> > We're talking about having a constant up-to-date driver on par with Windows > for a major GPU card manufacturer

Nvidia manages to do this without any conflict with the kernel maintainers by simply not mainlining the code. If functionality trumps code quality, AMD can release kernel modules.

Perhaps the best current solution for all parties is for AMD publish sources on github and release kernel modules while getting PRs from the community to get the code up to meet the kernel standards. When the time comes, it will be duly mainlined.

<comment><USER14> Without any conflict, uh?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ)

> Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with.

> \- Linus

Kernel devs are antagonizing the only two GPU makers that matters. Besides the kernel, there has been some flame going between NVIDIA and Wayland devs too. Open source devs are immature men who do not understand the word compromise.

<comment><USER13> > Without any conflict, uh?

> Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with.

> \- Linus

This had nothing to do with the kernel and everything to do with the lack of optimus support (years later, its still shit).

> Kernel devs are antagonizing the only two GPU makers that matters

Maybe the 2 should ask Intel for some pointers on how to contribute to the kernel the right way.

> Open source devs are immature men who do not understand the word compromise.

I suspect that's part of the reason the kernel is stable, and for that I'm thankful. Not compromising on code quality is something I wish more projects would do, if they had the well-earned political/social capital the Linux kernel has.

<comment><USER15> Sarah Sharp worked for Intel and apparently didn't manage to contribute to the kernel in a way that would make communication with Torvalds particularly pleasant.

I extend my sympathy to anyone paid to contribute code to Linux.

<comment><USER16> She never had any unpleasant communication herself, for what it's worth.

Most people who are paid to contribute to Linux, including myself, are very happy to do so, and no, it's not a case of Stockholm syndrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do feel Dave went a bit over the top in his response. If he keeps it technical it's easier to fix, people want to see their stuff merged. When he makes it personal (which he kind of did) it turns people off.

That being said, I do think Dave probably made the right call, but I also think he may need to compromise on this one. That being said, AMD should strategicly try and get their GPUs supported. Couple that, with merging an OpenCL version of Tensorflow or something and AMD would probably be more valuable than Nvidia. I think both groups could benefit and should probably sit and try to work it out in person.

<comment><USER18> From his point of view the AMD guys were told that this code wouldn't be merged as is six months ago and now they come back with a massive code drop and very effectively put him in the position of having to be the bad guy.

I think we'd all have some sharp words we'd like to use in that situation even if the better part of our natures might counsel us to keep them to ourselves.

<comment><USER12> The kernel essentially demanded they drop the idea of cross-platform driver (which is what makes nVidia drivers work so well on Linux and is keeping them in lockstep with Windows releases) and maintain a full separate copy with a small team.

It was unrealistic six months ago as it is now. And yet, I still don't see a constructive debate from Linux (or AMD) side on how to sync the goals. All I see is Linux people posturing about how they don't want to be the second platform and AMD refusing to rebuild the driver just for them.

These kind of attitudes bring us awful situations like Android Linux devices each having a broken fork of Linux kernel to accomodate closed proprietary blobs because neither side is ready to step together.

<comment><USER19> why does AMD need to be in the kernel? Why can't they release the way nVidia does?

or open source it, develop along with upstream but don't make it part of upstream.

<comment><USER20> You're asking a question with a very complex answer.

I'll start with a short answer - AMD wants to have at minimum a _reasonably good_ baseline functionality on linux, out of the box. If that answer doesn't make much sense, please read on for the complex bits.

To provide some historical context, Linus gave a VERY public, VERY brutal rant on NVIDIA and their drivers four years ago.[0] At the time, NVIDIA's closed drivers were an opaque blob which basically reimplemented the entirety of OpenGL. These collided with everything else.

The open drivers (nouveau) were slow and far behind in features. The situation was bad enough that you couldn't necessarily even _install_ a linux distro on a system with NVIDIA chip because the open drivers wouldn't work well enough for X and/or desktop environment to initialise properly, let alone remain up and functional.

In effect, if you wanted to run linux, you were best off _without_ NVIDIA.

Fast forward year and a half. NVIDIA had come out and committed to improving the linux driver situation. They still couldn't open source their current- generation drivers, but they had realised the horrible reputation of their hardware on linux was going to be a persistent PR nightmare, and thus an existential threat to their growing mobile division. A space where they were up against Imagination Technologies. (Don't get me started on ImgTec, please...)

NVIDIA needed to get their hardware and software processes aligned in a way that _they would work reliably out of the box on linux_ , everywhere. Even if the user only needed to keep the freshly installed or upgraded system up long enough for them to download and install the closed drivers, the system really should not break. Incidentally this meant that even the open drivers should be "good enough".

Over the past 3+ years, the situation has improved. NVIDIA has managed to shed their reputation of being completely broken on linux, they have worked closely with kernel folks to get their more recent hardware supported sensibly out of the box and in the process (I believe) they have managed to reduce the code delta between their windows drivers and linux drivers.

It helps that during the same 4 years we have had OpenGL on mobile drive the separation of duties between EGL and GLES (v2+). These changes, with all the refactorings, have also provided a cleaner split on desktop - to the point that it is no longer absolutely necessary to provide full OpenGL implementation. You can, for most parts, expect that EGL just works; that DRM and KMS both just work; and that your highly optimised GLES implementation can happily live on top of these layers.

As a result, your closed driver offering has less to override. Of course it's going to be less unstable!

Disclosure: in my previous job, I helped integrate couple of EGL+GLES driver stacks with Wayland on mobile systems. I learned to hate mobile GPU drivers with a passion.

P.S.: I haven't read enough about Vulkan to know if it improves things or not.

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

<comment><USER21> Although you don't say it directly but by saying that "The open drivers (nouveau) were slow and far behind in features." and then that the situation improved because of Nvidia involvement you are not being honest.

Nvidia hasn't improved performance or contributed features to nouveau.

Their changes are limited to code that is mobile chip-specific and from time to time they contribute some reliability fix that affects non-mobile chips, but only if benefits mobile.

Since Maxwell 2 (9xx+) their chips are designed to be hostile to nouveau, by requiring firmware loaded by the driver to be signed by Nvidia (hardware refuses to load firmware that wasn't signed by them). It means that without Nvidia blessing nouveau for example can't change the fan speed (but still can change clocks! how ridiculous it is?).

Nvidia contibuted signed firmware loading for non-mobile chips (so called SecureBoot), but only because it's also required by mobile. And they still have not released enough firmwares for desktop cards to be usable...

<comment><USER20> > _Although you don 't say it directly but by saying that "The open drivers > (nouveau) were slow and far behind in features." and then that the situation > improved because of Nvidia involvement you are not being honest._

> _Nvidia hasn 't improved performance or contributed features to nouveau._

Fair point, I didn't realise it could be read that way. Thank you.

Nvidia has contributed enough fixes to make their hardware sort of respond out of the fox. Yes, primarily for devices on mobile space, and occasionally on non-mobile when the same fixes happen to apply. I believe this is directly a result of same hardware designs being used across the board.

I didn't mean NVIDIA were being particularly nice, although I didn't know about the active hostility against nouveau. (IIRC their driver employees are contractually prevented from contributing to nouveau, but I can't find reference. At least there I can understand the reason.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> AMD's response is 25% talking about unrelated Exynos code, 35% sarcastic complaints about Linux culture and 20% explaining why its naive to care about code quality and style. It concludes with a barely veiled threat about how they won't change and that not merging their code is what is keeping Linux off the desktop. I think we're done here.

<comment><USER23> > It concludes with a barely veiled threat about how they won't change and > that not merging their code is what is keeping Linux off the desktop.

It seems to me that they made no threat. They simply endorsed NVidia's product line for anyone interested in running Linux on the desktop.

<comment><USER24> Gotta say this is my takeaway. If near latest kernels work with nvidia, I'll buy nvidia in the future (I'm all amd at the moment).

<comment><USER25> And yet AMD releases far more of it's specification for its chipsets than Nvidia does (which releases next to none). This is the reason that the AMD open source drivers are within 10~20% of performance of the closed source drivers on a number of chipsets (not all) whereas on Nvidia chipsets the open source driver is often just to boot a system and get X running enough to install the closed source driver.

<comment><USER23> > And yet AMD releases far more of it's specification for its chipsets than > Nvidia does (which releases next to none).

That is only relevant if any third-party has any interest in taking up the challenge of developing an alternative driver.

<comment><USER25> And the open source drivers that do exist (and are far better than the Nvidia open source drivers) are proof that said third parties exist. So the net take away is that if you are a pragmatic open sourcer then you should buy AMD hardware. And even better support the open source coders who do write these drivers; cash, bug reports, testing, documentation, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> On a tangent: what the fuck is up with the giant quotes at the top of these messages? They're technically fulfilling the letter of netiquette by not top- posting, but they serve absolutely no purpose.

If you aren't going to take the trouble to pull out short quotes to respond to, please just delete the message altogether. All our clients have _excellent_ support for threading these days, and we can find the message you're responding to without needing it repeated in full every. single. time.

(This criticism also applies to the message this was responding to: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136426))

<comment><USER27> Some clients just fold the quote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I also stand on the kernel maintainer's side.

Kernel is not your AMD's kitchen-sink:) They are always fighting for any holes. The maintainers become the maintainers because the community think they has the qualified capabilities. The best way is to argue in technical side: for example, why you should have such complexities, how to control the complexities or something like. No technical response makes non-sense and low down your reputation in the community.

</comment><comment><USER29> I didn't see where Dave slagged AMD's culture, and I think everyone was very polite and detailed about why this doesn't fit.

I understand why AMD wants to have one code base, but the kernel needs to have one consistent code base and style and can't afford to do otherwise. There's nothing stopping AMD distributing the code, it just won't be upstreamed.

<comment><USER13> Because rather than believing the AMD kernel devs are misguided about the kernel, he suspects the higher-ups at AMD are not listening to them. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13143371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13143371)

<comment><USER30> That's probably far more accurate and much more fair than assuming they're just shit programmers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is yet another situation where I (as a user) am being held hostage [1].

The net result of attitudes like these is that I can't have a working multi- monitor desktop Linux setup, because everything is hopelessly broken and requires many hours of tinkering just to kind-of sometimes work.

I find it sad.

[1] Apple has been excelling at this recently, too, with the forced move to USB-C and dropping of the headphone jack — to "make progress" at my expense, where I am held hostage in the dongle-world as companies "move to new standards".

<comment><USER32> Hm, some folks have installed Ubuntu, plugged in monitors, and it works for them.

KDE usually screws up when I plug a monitor into my notebook, but Xfce doesn't.

It's not a kernel issue.

KDE has a guy, he's singlehandedly awesome, yet of course a bit strange when it comes to interacting with mortals, who works on "these" things: [https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2016/09/to- eglstream-...](https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2016/09/to-eglstream-or- not/)

And see, that it's NVIDIA that's currently holding back the year of the multi- monitor Linux desktop, because they're not supporting Wayland, like the others (Intel, AMD, Android).

<comment><USER33> Best i can tell, Xfce gets it right because by virtue of being short staffed they trust X to not screw up. KDE and Gnome would rather see X get out of the way and let them do their "magic".

Sadly the latter people are now in control of "X" development, or perhaps i should say post-X development, thanks to Wayland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "This is something you need to fix, or it'll stay completely painful forever. It's hard work and takes years, but here at Intel we pulled it off. We can upstream everything from a _very_ early stage (can't tell you how early). And we have full marketing approval for that. If you watch the i915 commit stream you can see how our code is chasing updates from the hw engineers debugging things. Daniel Vetter Software Engineer, Intel Corporation"

Intel got their sh*t together, why can't AMD ?

<comment><USER35> Well, whatever Intel has been doing, they're just successful as merging their codebase. It doesn't mean the driver is stable though.

The KMS/dri driver itself certainly has _major_ unsolved issues since basically forever. The KMS driver for broadwell graphics was trashing the screen with massive horizontal flicker until kernel 4.8. That's not a long time ago. It's still not solved BTW, just got less frequent. Random pipeline stalls happen on an hourly basis. Tons of graphical glitches and random performance issues with the "glamour" accell path. I've stopped reporting issues at their tracker, as they just get ignored.

The performance of the KMS driver is also inferior to their existing xorg driver in a number of very important scenarios (Xrender is particularly affected).

Sure, I do have vulkan drivers as first class, but my screen flickers, I get graphical corruption and the driver hangs the entire system with certain shaders. I can see inkscape repainting beneath my eyes like it's '84\. Wow. And I'm trying that with 4.9 rc8.

I've been using laptops with integrated graphics for almost 10 years. The moment you can get the intel driver to work half-decently, they're already rewriting it. I wish I was kidding.

Intel _does_ have the money. They're actually doing worse in my mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Did I miss the mud-slinging and corporate culture bashing from the original rejection? I can get the AMD dev being a bit sour by the whole situation if they personally spent time working on this rejected patch, but damn.

<comment><USER37> There were certainly implications that the AMD coders were making technically compromised decisions:

> The reason the toplevel maintainer (me) doesn't work for Intel or AMD or any > vendors, is that I can say NO when your maintainers can't or won't say it.

And telling them to sit in a corner and really THINK about what you've done, young man:

> I'd like some serious introspection on your team's part on how you got into > this situation and how even if I was feeling like merging this (which I'm > not) how you'd actually deal with being part of the Linux kernel and not > hiding in nicely framed orgchart silo behind a HAL. I honestly don't think > the code is Linux worthy code

All pretty mild, really, but I'm not the one who got the email telling me my months of work was not Linux-quality and would not be merged.

(I _am_ giggling at the idea of "Linux quality" being held up as an ideal)

<comment><USER38> > _... but I 'm not the one who got the email telling me my months of work ... > would not be merged._

See, the thing is that they were told previously -- back in February? March? -- that this wasn't gonna happen. Instead of trying to work out a better way forward, AMD effectively ignored that, went back to work, and just now came back and said "here's 90k LOC, please merge".

Dave replied -- rightfully, in my opinion -- "no".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think the issue is more or less clarified behind the scenes. Have a look here from AMD's bridgman

[https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest- phoron...](https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix- articles/916781-it-looks-like-amdgpu-dc-dal-will-not-be-accepted-in-the-linux- kernel?p=917174#post917174)

<comment><USER40> And this is the thread that bridgman points to: [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri- devel/2016-Decemb...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri- devel/2016-December/126698.html)

Much more constructive interactions, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Is all we care about android? I constantly hear the argument, if we don't do > all of this android will do their own thing and then that will be the end. > Right now we are all suffering and android barely even using this yet. If > Linux will carry on without AMD contributing maybe Linux will carry on ok > without bending over backwards for android.

Could someone here fill in the details for the uninitiated? Do the kernel devs feel a pressure for the kernel to stay relevant in the Android world?

<comment><USER42> I don't know the details either, but honestly, I'm amazed that Google hasn't just thrown Linux out and built a microkernel with a Linux-compatible syscall API. That way there's a single binary that only cares about standard ARM things like memory management and scheduling and doesn't require hardware vendors to tweak it for every new SoC. The SoC-specific drivers can be written and updated separately just like apps. Maybe then it would be easier for vendors to keep their shit updated so I don't have to throw out my perfectly good phone just because a company doesn't feel like porting their changes to a new kernel version.

<comment><USER43> Linus made the right engineering choice when he took the monolithic route in the 90's. However, the technical advantages of that architecture are now moot. Sooner-or-later, Google is going to get tired of Linux's shortcomings and build a replacement OS.

<comment><USER44> They seem to have started:

[https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/](https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/)

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

<comment><USER45> They also have some folks working on Akaros. [http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu](http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Original email: [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri- devel/2016-Decemb...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri- devel/2016-December/126422.html)

Proposed driver code: [https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/tree/drivers/gpu/d...](https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display?h=amd- staging-4.7)

The file with the atomic functions: [https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/tree/drivers/gpu/d...](https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/amdgpu_dm/amdgpu_dm_types.c?h=amd- staging-4.7)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Discussion of the rejection here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136426)

</comment><comment><USER22> Dave's response: [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri- devel/2016-Decemb...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri- devel/2016-December/126701.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> I admire AMD for even trying to work with Linux on a driver solution for The Kernel. I am very worried about the development, because since Nvidia fucked me over with utterly crappy hardware in the past, now, that AMD started making decent hardware. I use three different kinds of operating systems at the same time, an Linux is on the least position of being stable and useable. There's always something broken in Linux, not working, patched/made worse - it's a mess. I'm not trying to defend Windows or something, it's been a rough for Windows too. MacOS leads the way. But, Linux is existing as long as those two did, and it's a huge pile of patchwork. Maybe it's supposed to be that way. But then I understand why it never had a year of Linux desktop.

</comment><comment> vertex-four For the record... AMD are perfectly welcome to publish their patches and try to convince Ubuntu/Red Hat/etc to include them in their own forks of the kernel (no distro uses a completely vanilla kernel, they all have their own patchsets they apply on top of it for various reasons). The only great loss here is that AMD can't force kernel developers to maintain substandard code, and will have to do it themselves.

<comment><USER48> Which they generally fail at due to lack of manpower and pace of changes in the kernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Alex, from AMD, has now posted a response saying he over-reacted [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri- devel/2016-Decemb...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri- devel/2016-December/126757.html)

<comment><USER50> Everyone should take a deep breath and read this - it wasn't even a merge request originally, just an RFC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I don't know about AMD drivers but Nvidia's Linux drivers are so iffy. For one thing, I often notice some flickering of one of the windows that I have on the desktop (it's totally random and it usually involves some window in the background. But the biggest issue is that I can't suspend my PC because once it wakes up, GFX driver just goes nuts and everything starts to stutter and every window's corrupted and the only option is to hit the reset. Drives me nuts :(

I'm glad that AMD is still not giving up on Linux!

</comment><comment><USER12> I think this is a great situation to quote Linus on Linux supporters inside companies (not 100% same, but I think related):

(on litigation against companies that contribute)

> Anyone in the company that pushed to use Linux is now seen as "wrong" and > instantly is pissed off that external people just messed up their employment > future.

> \- Anyone in the company that resisted the use of Linux (possibly in ways > that caused the code not to be released over the objection of the previously > mentioned people) are vindicated in their opinion of those "hippy"[2] > programmers who develop Linux.

...

> Now, even if, after many years of work on your part, you do get that code, > what is the end result? You have made an enemy for life from the people who > brought Linux into the company, you have pissed off the people who didn't > like Linux in the first place as they were right and yet you "defeated" > them. Both of those groups of people will now work together to never use > Linux again as they don't want to go through that hell again, no matter > what.

(source and context: [https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit- discuss/...](https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit- discuss/2016-August/003580.html) )

...

I think this is the worst part of this SNAFU - Dave has just proven every naysayer in AMD right that Linux is not worth supporting. He cut away feet from the team that has supported and fought for an equivalent opensource driver support on Linux which would be released in lockstep with Windows releases. He has also proven right everyone on nVidia which has talked against opensourcing their drivers and keeping them as a horrendous binary blob. He has also pissed off his greatest ally inside AMD.

All with a single "no". Not "We can't accept this, let's talk about how to make us both happy". With that he gave new ammunition to every manager at every large hardware corporation that's fighting against opensourcing their drivers and made every Linux supporting team lead in such corporation less likely to push opensource world forward. It seems we're stuck in shitty Android kernel forks with shitty GPU binary blobs in near future, with only Windows as a proper contender for good 3D performance.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not blaming Dave for refusing the patch for tech cases. I AM blaming him for refusing it so flatly and not actively working more with AMD to get the situation fixed. This is not a minor thing - having stable AMD drivers in kernel would really push Linux desktop forward, make sure Linux is compatible with several Macs among other machines and put pressure on nVidia to opensource theirs. But you don't get there by belittling contributors and cultivating "us vs. them" mentality.

<comment><USER52> > Not "We can't accept this, let's talk about how to make us both happy".

He gave them that answer 6 months ago, and they ignored it. This was not an abrupt rejection out of nowhere.

<comment><USER12> The "answer" 6 months ago was "Yeah, you'll have to write a full Linux driver yourself and maintain it." type deal.

It was unreasonable then as it is now.

If I tell you "You need to rewrite your product in Brainfuck or I'll kick you out in 6 months.", the fact that I told you that doesn't make it any less insane.

<comment><USER44> AMD is trying to merge a Windows driver with enough shims to make it sort of interact with Linux. That might as well be written in Brainfuck from the point of view of a Linux kernel hacker trying to figure out WTF it does.

To merge a driver into the kernel is to accept responsibility for maintaining it, which they recognize they are not prepared or even interested in doing.

<comment><USER53> They've made it clear that this code doesn't come from the Windows driver, it was specifically written with the intention of being usable on any platform. Also, they seem quite willing to maintain it. The problem is that the Linux developers aren't willing to merge code that's usable on anything other than Linux.

<comment><USER44> Thanks for the correction. They aren't relying upon a Windows API that Linux kernel hackers have no experience with, but instead a new API that _nobody_ has experience with. That's still a huge problem for the maintenance that in- kernel drivers need; they can't have a driver which only one company understands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This actually feels kind of good to me as someone who's trying to get his code into the kernel. Big guys are not getting any special treatment. It feels fair.

</comment><comment><USER55> It's very simple, Linux won't bend the rules for anyone, and that includes AMD.

The sooner they realize that, the faster they can actually work together with Linux kernel maintainers.

</comment><comment><USER56> Do these drivers have any relevance to OpenCL etc? It seems that could be a bigger market for AMD on Linux than graphics/gaming.

<comment><USER57> The GPU driver that's required for both gaming and OpenCL is already in the kernel. The current issue is, if I understand correctly, is related to display management stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Seems kind of silly that the Kernel should be nanny to all drivers. Drivers to me should host their own repo, and provide proper integration tests before they are blessed. Some sort of --externDrivers="foo2016" flag you pass to the build. No drama on how horrid their code is because the Kernel shouldn't care.

<comment><USER30> It's not that easy though. The kernel doesn't have a stable internal API, which means that it's nearly impossible to maintain an out-of-tree driver. The kernel operates on a classic google-style monorepo model (well, maybe google- style isn't a good term, after all, they certainly didn't invent it...) because when someone changes a kernel API they are obligated to ensure the change is propagated to all related code. You get maintenance basically for free in the kernel, but only if you build an in-tree driver.

FWIW, a proprietary "binary blob" driver has already been available for a while that was built out-of-tree, but it constantly has to be updated for the latest kernel and doesn't release a version for every single kernel, so it's very difficult to use it unless you either 1) specifically use the exact version the driver requires (which is ridiculous-you should be able to dictate which kernel version you want) or 2) use a well-known and well-supported repo (which limits your choice as well). Ultimately, the best way to get driver support into the kernel is to go through the standard kernel channels.

And also FWIW, the kernel does care about how drivers are written-even if the driver is out-of-tree, its possible shittiness reflects back (totally unfairly, I know) on the kernel. By having a gatekeeper for device drivers, they can ensure that the kernel is as stable as possible for as many users as possible, and that's a laudable end goal. It's also orthogonal to wide hardware support, as all that was required in this situation was for AMD to adhere to the guidelines properly, but they didn't do so, so they have no right to be upset that their code got rejected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Would love to see FreeBSD take their code.

<comment><USER57> [https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base- graphics](https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics) just takes whatever crap is in Linux. Very few people are there to maintain all that, so the focus is on reducing the diff with Linux and improving stability on Intel GPUs. Maintaining an additional patch written against Linux doesn't make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This (and the replies on this thread from Linux supporters) shows how far away Linux is to be an acceptable alternative to Windows on the desktop. Instead of welcoming such a big hardware manufacturer with open arms and try to reach a compromise (and understanding that a company is not going to devote infinite resources to something that's not really as profitable as Windows, because you know, companies are created to make money, not lose it - they aren't not-for- profit orgs) the kernel maintainers choose to focus on purity and style crap. Well, enjoy your pure code and your 2% desktop marketshare. The next time you recommend Linux to someone, when he finds out his graphics card doesn't work well you can put the blame on the hardware maker as always.

</comment><comment><USER61> I absolutely love that the maintainers can stick up to any company that tries to add shit code to the kernel.

There is no excuse for AMD. The response reads like a total whine to me.

It's not the kernel maintainers fault that your company does not give you proper resources or approach Linux in a correct way.

If you had proper opensource drivers I'm sure the "in" crowd hackers you speak of would take it from there...

I've personally had horrible experiences with AMD drivers on both Windows and Linux. I had a GPU that worked wellfor my purposes, even ran games well enough for me, but you dropped driver support for it, so I was left with no option but to buy another card...

</comment><comment><USER62> This was all a big ado over nothing. John Bridgman and two other AMD devs have backed away from Alex's initial flame-y post, and are trying to de-silo their codebase, break up the commit into smaller patches, and move forward (despite their marketing dept. getting in the way of fully-upstreaming beta cards the way Intel does).

</comment><comment><USER63> AMD has been good to Linux and Linux community always supported AMD. Its principle from beginning of creating x86 clone has been something similar to what Linux is to other OSes. There will always be some up and down but has not gone too much away from Linux.

</comment><comment><USER64> I am not familiar at all with this stuff but honestly people should be working on a way to isolate external code in the kernel at runtime somehow. I wouldnt want to be in either position, I dont want to maintain somebody else's shitty code or get any kind of bugs for my own code from it but I also wouldnt want to be in AMDs position and adhere or rewrite some code that I'm absolutely fine with as it is. There is a lack of a project vision if people reject code that would otherwise lead to great "commercial" aka user adoption success. The maintainers are understandably reluctant to accept new code, especially if it doesnt even try to adhere to the coding standards. He even acknowledged the political situation but it wasnt even his job to care about that. There needs to be somebody over him who's job it is to make him accept that code or figure out a better solution.

<comment><USER44> The problem isn't runtime isolation. The problem is that if you merge a Windows driver into the Linux kernel, the Linux hackers won't be able to make effective and safe changes to it as the rest of the kernel evolves, because it's nearly unreadable to them.

An unmaintainable mess with lots of users is not a victory unless users are paying you for shitty work.

<comment><USER64> Runtime isolation would absolutely solve that problem, it would safely shift the blame to AMD if the thing becomes broken. Without it, the kernel devs now have to maintain more and more code that they probably dont know anything about. I dont see how that can possibly be a good solution. I dont see how anyone can even argue that. Why should a 3rd party graphics driver NOT be a plugin instead of core code? Stupidly obvious to make this an isolated plugin.

<comment><USER44> The whole point of putting drivers in the kernel tree is that they get properly maintained as part of kernel development. All the kernel hackers are responsible for keeping all the in-kernel drivers working. If it's at all acceptable for a kernel change to break a driver with no fix, that driver doesn't belong in the kernel tree.

<comment><USER64> The whole point of plugins is that they dont need to be maintained as part of the core product. Seeing AMD's response, it's obvious that they dont expect Linux kernel devs to maintain this thing. They should offer a proper and easy plugin interface for the kernel where devs can make drivers for it without having to merge code into the kernel itself. This really seems too obvious, at some point the kernel will have too much code, will have to support too many different pieces of new hardware to be understood or maintained by anybody. I'm sure Windows doesnt merge 3rd party graphics driver code into their subversion repo, that would be insane. But just because Linux is open source, it has to do that.. no of course not.

<comment><USER65> They do already have clear interfaces that do this. Some modules have less clear interfaces, but if you followed what they were saying they actually said that it would have been easier if they had subclassed some of the code and followed the way that most folks were writing atomic code.

And there was a function with the bane "validate" that didn't, well, _validate_. In a bit of code that rung alarm bells.

<comment><USER64> > And there was a function with the bane "validate" that didn't, well, > validate

so what? you still dont seem to grasp the concept of plugins. Plugin = the 3rd party developer can do whatever he wants and it doesnt hurt the core product.

<comment><USER65> You say "so what", but that _is_ the so what. A core Linux developer saw a massive commit come though from AMD and couldn't understand it easily.

The point that has been made over and over in these threads is that if you want to develop Linux code then you can't just stick a development team to work in complete isolation from everyone else in the Linux development community and expect to be able submit grand unifying architectures you designed to make it easier for your company but that make it harder for everyone else.

If you want to do this, then you really need to work within this particular community to effect change. For instance, there apparently are some standard idioms that have emerged from within the atomic code. The way AMD have done things is different enough to confuse the core maintainer, and he has reasonably said that he doesn't want to accept a commit like this. Hence his comments about the HAL and a massive middleware layer.

The bottom line is: AMD want to merge this into the kernel's main tree. But if they want to do this, they have to get through the maintainers, and the maintainers have to consider the whole picture and _not_ just your team, no matter how hard they have worked on their code.

The AMD team seem to have worked in a silo, not released to the CI servers and from what I'm reading broke stuff that others then fixed. So when the AMD guys did a big release all at once like this, then they got told - politely! - <USER2> their code wasn't up to scratch.

<comment><USER64> I'm not arguing with you over what they did, I have not read about it enough. I didn't even read the the exchange in full. This is purely political and a sign of a lack of leadership. The Linux guys should be so grateful for these drivers that they do everything they can to keep AMD happy.

> The point that has been made over and over in these threads is that if you > want to develop Linux code then you can't just stick a development team to > work in complete isolation from everyone else

that's a problem for Linux

> The bottom line is: AMD want to merge this into the kernel's main tree

No, AMD wants to have working AMD drivers on Linux. It's more than likely that they were told to do it this way and this way sucks. A lot.

But hell, maybe Linux devs think that Linux is so important now that they can pressure AMD devs into doing whatever they want from them. Maybe it works, maybe it wont.

<comment><USER66> > I'm not arguing with you over what they did, I have not read about it > enough. I didn't even read the the exchange in full. This is purely > political and a sign of a lack of leadership.

"I literally don't even know what I'm talking about at all, I'll admit it -- but definitely, trust me and my immediate assessment of the situation, it's accurate"

LOL.

>> The bottom line is: AMD want to merge this into the kernel's main tree

> No, AMD wants to have working AMD drivers on Linux.

Are you even _reading the words you type_? AMD _already has working drivers_. They're right there. You can go look at the code right now, 'git pull' it and install it on your machine. What's stopping you? Your inability to read, apparently?

No, it is literally -- by the definition of the above email -- the case that they want to merge already existing code upstream, into the kernel, and have upstream share the maintenance burden. That's part of the deal -- if AMD code goes upstream, everyone helps maintain it, and in turn, they help maintain everyone elses.

But it turns out, upstream doesn't want their code in its current state. Of course, they don't have to merge it upstream -- they just want to. They don't even have to merge it upstream now or "soon", but they would have liked that. They could easily ship the AMDGPU driver as an external module using DKMS or something, just as things like ZFS-on-Linux do, and start ironing out problems for upstreamability while actually shipping drivers to people.

They have drivers. The drivers work already, in fact. Having them upstream is totally different. Try _reading_ the article and doing some digging through this thread to understand the context.

> But hell, maybe Linux devs think that Linux is so important now that they > can pressure AMD devs into doing whatever they want from them. Maybe it > works, maybe it wont.

You realize that given AMD's history -- it's entirely possible AMD needs Linux more than Linux needs AMD, right? Linux doesn't need to win the desktop or win over AMD, it thrives in its own market and has been surviving perfectly well without them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> >We don't happen to have the resources to pay someone else to do that for us.

Typical AMD bullshit. They do have resources for developing garbage like 'Gaming Evolved App' just to abandon it 6 months later tho.

<comment><USER57> Gaming Evolved was not developed by AMD, it's a branded version of raptr.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Didn't the AMD guy respond months ago that he expects they'll reduce it to like 30k loc? What happened to that?

Not that this is the crux of the problem, just curious.

<comment><USER33> It is not about compromise, it is about the long term maintainability of the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Nice: so many we's in the last paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER70> At this point in time, those who don't support Linux are only hurting themselves.

</comment><comment><USER71> oh this is good _gets popcorn crunch crunch_

</comment><comment><USER72> We should be thankful to AMD for keeping thousands of poor people warm this winter.

</comment><comment><USER73> Well, there's a reason I only ever buy NVidia video cards, even for AMD CPUs. I'm fine with AMD not being interested in Linux support, I'll just vote with my wallet.

<comment><USER60> Yes, because NVIDIA has been great contributing kernel code. /irony

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> What I don't get is how one kernel maintainer can make such a massive decision that affects all of Linux. That's some near-totalitarian level of power.

After reading the arguments, I'm kind of on AMD's side. I get what Dave wants, but it seems extremely idealistic.

<comment><USER75> The Good King is how Linux has come to run the world's servers. I am perfectly fine missing out on some incidental functionality here or there in order to keep this power structure which had protected the Linux kernel thus far. It seems to work extremely well.

<comment> this-dang-guy I'd prefer to see NVidia style drivers, personally. I don't give a rat's beans if optimized video card, nic, etc drivers are open.

I just want a system that will work properly _without_ them. Not 60FPS on Ultra settings in <game> work, I mean boot and function as a normal user's desktop.

<comment><USER75> Yeah, I don't care about nvidia drivers, either. AMD doesn't need this _in the kernel_ anymore than nvidia does (and they don't). Kernel modules work just fine for drivers. I don't want some convoluted shit crammed into mainline because <company> chooses to ignore feedback about their code. I am perfectly fine with this one guy shooting down AMD's pretentious attitude here. If it weren't for those kernel devs, good luck getting a Linux system to "boot and function as a normal user's desktop" because of all the crap that would be in there. Like systemd, just piles of crap in a confused, kitchen-sink orgy.

<comment><USER33> I have come to fear that we will eventually need GPU drivers in the kernel directly, thanks to more and more of the graphics code out there assuming DRM/DRI etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: for X number of page views how much adsense can you expect to make? - <AUTHOR>

Is there some general formula that I can use to figure out how much adsense a site makes compared to how many page views they get and the CPM?
I'm looking for something like: at X number of page views with a CPM of Y, the site will make Z dollars.
Any links to information that I should read to learn more about this stuff? <comment><USER2> For adsense, it really depends on the subject. Is it a high or low paying subject? Some categories are "worth" more to advertisers so you'll receive more for each ad. This is what adjusts your CPM.

There is a sub-component of CPM when considering adsense and other forms of advertising, and that is your click through rate, and it's just the percentage of visitors who click on the ads. Many adsense ads only pay on clicks, which means that you'll have to design your site so that your ads are likely to be clicked on. Ads at or near the top of the page do better than those at the bottom of an article or hidden on a sidebar somewhere.

I can't tell you what Google pays for each click, because quite simply, Google doesn't know what it will get! It's all dependent on how valuable certain keywords are to advertisers.

A typical website running ads through an impression based ad network should earn about a $5 CPM. That number can go up to around $100 if it is a highly targeted and valuable demographic.

It would be difficult to tell you what the actual equation would be, because there are the previously mentioned variables that we can't accurately predict:

How valuable are the keywords you're offering?

What will your clickthrough rate be?

I hope this helps!

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a definitive list but if you were interested in mesothelioma (and who isn't?) you might get $50 clicks on adsense:

<http://www.cwire.org/highest-paying-search-terms/>

That article is not exhaustive, is disputed as inaccurate, should be used as just an indicator, because as dkokelley said, it depends.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm.... As soon as I can launch my mesothelioma social network for people who have recieved DUI's, I'm golden!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> not really. depends on the number of uniques, type of content on your website, is the content niche, the type of users, demographics, geographic location, how much relevant inventory is available, etc.?

You are better of experimenting with adsense and other adnetworks. Use pubmatic (<http://pubmatic.com>) to get a better sense for which adnetworks are better for your website/</comment>


Goop offers case study on how to sell snake oil (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/defense-of-gwyneth-paltrows-goop-offers-case-study-on-how-to-sell-snake-oil/ <comment><USER2> It is very strange to me that in an increasingly skeptical, atheist society, believing in astrology, and "energies," and "toxins," and "chemicals," and crystals, auras, etc...is essentially met with at most an eye roll. I mean that people with real jobs, in charge of real things, believe that eating "ancient grains" _means_ something. You'd've thought that all of this would've been on the way out with the rest of organized religion, but it seems like it's on the _rise_.

There is a subreddit with a moderate amount of traction called "witches vs the patriarchy." My soon-to-be-mother-in-law was ecstatic to have been told by her psychic that she is, in fact, a witch.

Goop is not the problem, it is an outlet.

<comment><USER3> Large chain drug stores, pharmacies, sell homeopathic garbage mixed in on the shelf with the real medicines, with of course the homeopathic declarations well hidden to fool shoppers. They are hurting and possibly killed people. There's aren't just stores like GNC, they are licensed pharmacies with trained DPharms. A few pharmacists have protested, but overall they are silent about the malpractice occuring under their watch at their stores.

<comment><USER4> I was in CVS one day, and I think there or somewhere I saw signs making a big deal about not selling tobacco...and I was like, how is tobacco less appropriate than soda and homeopathic medicine in a _drug_ store? After all nicotine is a drug and the other two aren't! Plus they are arguably pretty destructive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I mean everyone should be contemptuous but none more so than feminists. What a shame Hollywood celebs like Gwen aren't using their marketing power to attract attention to say, effective and accurate sex education for teens. Or debunking this garbage that "you can't do math"

Gwen sees women as an opportunity to exploit ignorance for money. Hollywood.

</comment><comment><USER6> Gwyneth Paltrow should be in prison. She found the perfect victims in women who are too wealthy to garner public sympathy. She found the perfect crime in one that is so obvious that one would be embarrassed to admit to having been a victim.

<comment><USER2> Do you actually think she should be in prison?

<comment><USER7> Yes? When other scammers commit fraud that hurts the people who buy in to the fraudulent health claims of their products they can't just excuse themselves with "but I was in the Ironman Movies".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If only everyone read Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark[0], or at least the Baloney Detection Kit part.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle- Da...](https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle- Dark/dp/0345409469)

<comment><USER9> Should be required reading in school. Someone recently asked me what's the most important book I've ever read, and I said this.

Every human should know about the potential fallacies of the mind, how to find truth, and how to be happy simply 'not believing' something (distinct from 'disbelieving') until you have evidence either way.

If there is any set of ideas that improved my life the most it's definitely these-- thanks to Sagan, Michael Shermer, James Randi and others, and no thanks to any of my high school or college professors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I clicked on the link with alarm, because Amazing Goop is one of my favorite products, and really works:

[https://www.homedepot.com/p/Amazing-Goop-3-7-fl-oz-All- Purpo...](https://www.homedepot.com/p/Amazing-Goop-3-7-fl-oz-All-Purpose- Adhesive-140211/202533796)

<comment><USER11> Same thought - Goop adhesive is pretty good in general. For those who didn't click through to the article, this is about the Goop online retail site/"lifestyle brand" that peddles a bunch of new-age garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was worth re-examining given the Paltrow family connection to WeWork

</comment><comment><USER12> Condé Nast invests in some weird stuff. Back in the 2000s I remember they were trying to buy an acquaintance's message board that was filled with vitriol and hate speech (the site owner was a good dude, not hateful at all), and I questioned what kind of strategy could possibly make that a smart purchase.

<comment><USER3> Was your acquaintance jedberg?

<comment><USER12> no, but that's not a bad guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Although not harmless, this stuff is unfortunately not harmful enough to allow Darwinism to happen, unlike some of the radiation quackery that was popular in the early 20th century...

</comment><comment><USER14> I never cease to be amazed that people buy into obvious snake oil, it has been rife in tech since the beginning.

<comment><USER15> Never underestimate the ability of people to convince themselves that something they wish was true actually is.

<comment><USER16> So true. I remember as a 23 year old nerd when Pons and Fleischman announced cold fusion, I soooo wanted it to be true. I was literally drunk with the thought of the sci-fi possibilities it would bring. If the reality check hadn't come so quickly and someone semi-reputable had offered a "Mr. Fusion" for the "low, low price of <some number I could just barely afford>", I may well have been sucked in.

<comment><USER4> I just checked and apparently Pons and Fleischman was in 1989. Was cold fusion a thing in the 70s or very early 80s? Because I vaguely remember a story about a company that claimed to have done it some time before 1984.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chain of fools: Upgrading through every version of Windows - <AUTHOR> http://rasteri.blogspot.ca/2011/03/chain-of-fools-upgrading-through-every.html <comment><USER2> Microsoft should consider including a version of this video on their forthcoming release of Windows 10 to run during the install process. This would make for a happy trip down memory lane for the older folks and it would also show those youngsters out there how much things have improved. The install would breeze by with this little video to watch, plus, if there were any niggles, you would think nothing of it as you would be reminded what a pain it was to install the earlier versions.

The video would also be of great practical benefit to those that had spent the last few decades locked away in prison, or having been in a coma or having been in a forced-labour camp in North Korea for all of that time. They could be quickly brought up to speed and made aware of the many new innovations.

I think that the use of GParted is telling - the Microsoft way is to force a fresh format of the disk in order to go from FAT16.

Coming soon: similar video of Slackware being installed and upgraded from version 0.99 to 14.whatever. That's bound to go viral.

<comment><USER3> Actually, Microsoft has a FAT16 to FAT32 converter, which he presumably used since I don't recall gparted having that ability. Unfortunately, they provide no way to resize the partition after converting it.

<comment><USER2> Good point! It's been a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's nothing. I remember a while back the NT 4.0 source code was leaked and being the devious shit of a teen I was, I downloaded it. I found the source code to the calculator and reversi, and decided to try to build/run them on Windows 7 with VS 2010.

It took about 30 minutes to get the calculator working, and about 3 hours to get reversi working. 14 year old source code (this was in 2010), complete with a GUI and mouse interaction, forward ported in one night. I was extremely impressed.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Can you do the same thing with Mac OS?

Nope. Apple has based Macs on 6 different architectures ["24-bit" 68000, 32-bit 680x0, 32-bit PowerPC, 64-bit PowerPC, x86, x86-64]. Each migration has had a few years of backward compatibility that was phased out in favor of the new architecture.

</comment><comment><USER6> People give microsoft a lot of crap for Windows having a lot of cruft but the fact that backwards compatibility works as well as it does is incredible.

<comment><USER7> backwards compatibility is a burden, not a feature.

<comment><USER8> <Get of my lawn rant>

Tell that to the millions of companies that don't have the money/means to update their os/stack every year and still rely on software written in the 90s

</Get of my lawn rant>

<comment><USER7> Yes, that's exactly what I mean. It's a burden which we grudgingly accept, but it's certainly not a feature. Nobody loves the dentist either, but we need to go occasionally

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> sologrrl, your account has been hellbanned. I don't know why, though; your link is what you claim it to be except that the audio track has been muted by YouTube because it's a copyrighted Daft Punk song.

<comment><USER10> If you look at sologrrl's comments ([https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sologrrl](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sologrrl)), you can see that her last three comments are all dead. She was most likely banned not for her most recent comment, but for her last few non-dead comments (which repeatedly criticize Hacker News's moderation across multiple threads).

<comment><USER11> So is this like a weird twilight zone episode where if we criticize the higher powers bad stuff happens? That kinda makes me feel funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> interesting that his main complaint was the fact that color schemes did not import from windows XP and beyond from previous versions.

loved this video, got my dose of nostalgia for the night.

</comment><comment><USER13> Watched, chuckled, now savoring the masochism...</comment>


Alexis Ohanian interviewed after talk at Waterloo - <AUTHOR> https://www.communitech.ca/alexis-ohanian-praises-waterloo-startup-community-at-techtoberfest/

<comment><USER2> Cached version

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.communitech.ca/alexis- ohanian-praises-waterloo-startup-community-at- techtoberfest/&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvns&strip=1)

<comment><USER3> Another live version here (non-cached) [http://hyperdrive.communitech.ca/blog/posts/alexis- ohanian-m...](http://hyperdrive.communitech.ca/blog/posts/alexis-ohanian- meets-his-waterloo-and-loves-it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I organized a talk by Ohanian at my university last week. His talk focused on entrepreneurship, and key points included that innovation can happen outside the valley, and that midwest startups are starving for engineers, so we shouldn't feel like we must flock to the valley to join a startup.

<comment><USER5> Woo! Full recap of Internet2012 Bus Tour here: [http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/reddit-hits- road-14444...](http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/reddit-hits-road-144446)

And this: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/why-is-this-man-running- fo...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/why-is-this-man-running-for- president-of-the-inter)

<comment><USER4> Hey! I know you! Thanks for the email this morning.

I forgot to mention that Innovation was misspelled on the poster you have been having everybody sign.

<comment><USER5> Whoa! Good catch. On the giant scroll?

<comment><USER4> Yes, I saw that at T-REx while you were presenting. There was a missing "n," if I recall correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was at the hub for this discussion. Alexis is an awesome, down to earth guy, and had a lot of valuable wisdom to share on starting a company.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've heard SV investors agree it makes sense for companies to stay near a top notch university no matter where it is, in order to hire and retain the best. It's the same talent that SV companies get anyways. Coupled with a lower cost of living and less poaching, it's kind of a win-win.

<comment><USER7> Most people in Waterloo dream of getting out of Waterloo.

<comment><USER8> Being a Waterloo engineer, I agree with this wholeheartedly. Perhaps even more importantly, I'd say the top talent disproportionatly dreams of getting out of Waterloo. Most quality students want to get down to Cali.

I respect what Litt, Pebble, Bufferbox are trying to do, but I don't think young talent is the reason their doing it. I think that the cost of living, tax credits and familiarity are the reasons they're back in Waterloo.

All the power to me, but for me, California sunshine seems too good to pass up when there's three feet of snow on the ground in the middle of February.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everyone should experience Silicon Valley. Vidyard's investors and network of influence are SV based. I'll never negate that.

Reasons I'm in Waterloo = Availability of Talent, Retention of Talent, Cost of living, Quality of Life

We've never had an issue with young, technical talent and I firmly believe that we have the best. That's more that can be said for our Californa based batch-mates.

Some people like the snow ;).

<comment><USER8> I'm just running off personal experience here (I've been through the Velocity Residence and Eng), but of the 10 smartest kids I know, all but one is in The Valley/Seattle. I think they plan to stay South after graduation.

Why do you think you can you get better talent? Less competition? People want to be closer to home? You can offer more in perks, salary, ect compared to local companies?

Ps. Sick boots in that lederhosen picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're experience is certainly common but might be changing. When did you graduate?

Yes, Maybe, Yes. Great Engineers tend to be focused on solving interesting problems with great people over warm-weather that they'll rarely enjoy.

Thanks - they're actually long socks :P

<comment><USER8> I'm still in school; just finished 3A, so ive got a pretty fresh look at things. It seems to me Waterloo's stature is rising in The Valley, and they are offering more jobs. I had about 30-40% of my class go to Apple this semester, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've spent a couple of weeks at Communitech and the energy is absolutely amazing. Everybody was incredibly driven.

If not mistaken, Communitech even claimed that "one new startup comes out from there every day".

<comment><USER10> For somewhere around a year now, we've had an average of one new startup registering with our Venture Services Group each day. I am struggling with the correct way to be pedantic about it, it's just the connotation of "comes out" that I want to highlight - the startups registering with us don't necessarily meet any minimum requirements, versus those who graduate from one of the incubation or accelerator programs we run or are associated with.

(I work for Communitech, but not in VSG so my understanding is likely to be only slightly more refined than noirman's, and could have a hole or two)

(edit to add: we're working on fixing the site!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Too bad the site is down. Alexis is really an insightful person. He really understands the web.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting how Alexis talks about the importance of the possibility to "stay home and do great things" for some people. Well, sounds right but isn't startup a thing that's all about change - including lifestyle? Isn't it possible to have some valuable insights when you leave your comfort zone and go some place you didn't know before? I'd rather advice Silicon Valley guys just try and leave their cozy warm place and go and try to make a startup on Alaska, for example - that's the kind of adventure for startup-guys, not for sissies.

<comment><USER13> He's commenting more on the fact that SV seems to be the only place for startups to thrive. There's lots of opportunity at "home".

in a way, it's in line with your desire to advise SV guys to leave their cozy warm place. You may feel "safe" going to the valley, but you can (potentially) achieve just as much breaking ground in a different locale.

<comment><USER12> I agree with the fact that there's lots of opportunity anywhere, although... there maybe more opportunity in US than in Russia, for example. Anyway you got to try and to do something - no matter where you live, that's true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great to see Waterloo impressing such a talented dude

</comment><comment><USER15> No questions about the Reddit staff's relationship with violentacrez?

<comment><USER11> Pretty sure Alexis Ohanian had left Reddit by the time VA started messing around.

<comment><USER15> If nothing else one could ask him what he thinks of what the "early Reddit employees" did in his absence. And isn't he still on Reddit's board of directors, anyway?</comment></comment></comment>


Kevin Rose Resigns From Digg, Closing Round On New Startup - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/18/kevin-rose-resigns-from-digg-closing-round-on-new-startup/ <comment><USER2> Kevin Rose usually gets a lot of crap about Digg when posts about him show up. And you know, sure, Digg might be considered a tragedy to some (which, come on, really isn't), but I really, really respect the guy.

He really helped usher in the social web era, as neither a designer or a coder, mind you. He hustled his site using the opportunities at hand, raised tons of money, got shot to be on covers of some really huge magazines, and probably had a ridiculously fun time through it all.

If you listen to some of his videos, it's easy to see that he's got lots of big ideas, and he's put himself in a position to make it happen (again, without bringing any technical skills to the table, which, I think, is impressive and speaks to his ability to inspire people). If you look at his about.me/kevinrose, you'll find that he's also an investor in lots of really popular services, and he's well-connected with the best of the best in the valley.

So, props to Kevin. He's done some big things (Digg, Revision3), other smaller ones (Pownce, WeFollow), and seems to be onto others. I certainly would love to be in his position.

<comment><USER3> How was Digg fundamentally different from Slashdot? No editors?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, articles on /. were approved by CmdrTaco et al. Digg was basically the first to let users vote on stories to get them to the front page.

<comment><USER5> well, kuro5hin and others had done this before. Digg was the first to break through to broad usage on this (at least in the US).

<comment><USER6> Digg really took off when two things happened:

1\. Silverorange came on board and made a beautiful design.

2\. We jumped all over this cool new thing called "Ajax," though really we were on it when it was still XMLHttpRequest.

Humbly, I think I deserve credit for 2 at digg. I didn't invent ajax, but I was kind of enthusiastic about it back in 2005, enough to make it work for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm reminded of the BW cover: [http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Technology/images/kevi...](http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Technology/images/kevin- rose-business-week.jpg)

My, how times have changed.

<comment><USER8> i was in that article. what an awful piece of "journalism"

<comment><USER9> Not the most auspicious introduction (for me at least) to Sarah Lacy.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. Lying to your subjects about what the article is about is scummy as hell.

<comment><USER10> Just out of curiosity, what was the article supposed to be about?

<comment><USER8> New entrepreneurs. Instead it was more about Kevin's posse or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why are they comparing twitter to digg? It's not at all the same thing. I mean, twitter is like drinking from a fire hose, no curation at all just tons of stuff being dumped. Digg was more like sink water, decently cleaned can be enjoyed all the time. Reddit is more like good spring water (you can pick the spring you want too, depending on your mood) and HN is Evian water ;p

Again you don't use fire hose for the same thing you'd use water from the sink. It's complementary.

<comment><USER12> I would argue that both Reddit and Digg are like drinking from the Ganges river; in that the amount of shittiness is related to where along the source you decide to drink from.

<comment><USER13> I love this, and am sharing it with the rest of team reddit right now. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> He should merge Revision3 with Leo Laporte's TWiT network and go for the gold.

<comment><USER15> The combination of live conversation style TWiT shows and the highly produced Rev3 stuff would really be unstoppable.

<comment><USER11> I'm puzzled by why they haven't teamed up. I was under the impression they had a good time during the screen savers.

<comment><USER16> Last I remember, Kevin no longer has any involvement at Rev3.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure Rev3 and TWIT should merge. TWIT seems to focus more on niche tech topics like Security Now and Floss Weekly so they can build a relatively small loyal following. Rev3 seems to be going for the mass market, which is why they produce lots of movie and game review shows.

Rev3 is more like G4 while TWIT is more like TechTV.

<comment><USER15> TWiT has a lot of air time to spare on produced content.

You mention two of the least watched TWiT shows... They are more defined by This week in, Macbreak, and iPad numbers wise

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just as Digg seemed to be on a slight up, this happens. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin? Hopefully he is re-kindling the idea of Pownce: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce>

<comment><USER19> Kevin has not been actively involved with Digg for months. The slight up has had nothing to do with him and his official resignation will make no difference

<comment><USER18> That's good news, then! Rooting for Digg, it has a special place in this scene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did he make so little money from digg that he needs to raise funding to get $1m for his new start-up?

<comment><USER21> Even if he can afford to do the whole thing himself, remember the old adage:

 _If you need advice, ask for money. If you need money, ask for advice._

He may have raised money specifically to bring in some investors who can contribute some wisdom and experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Digg's CEO Matt Williams responded on Digg comments about this: [http://digg.com/news/business/kevin_rose_resigns_from_digg_c...](http://digg.com/news/business/kevin_rose_resigns_from_digg_closing_round_on_new_startup/20110318233453:ae8c984ad504485598461a8db7d0f86c#20110318233453:ae8c984ad504485598461a8db7d0f86c)

Disclaimer: I work at Digg.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there an actual link to a source other than the TechCrunch article?

<comment><USER24> This is Techcrunch we're talking about here, not the New York Times.

<comment><USER25> How can you link to "say multiple sources"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> End of an era.

</comment><comment><USER27> I really like this news. the whole world has watched Digg go down in flames over the past year or so. It had to be at least a little embarrassing for Rose. It's refreshing to see someone that public pick up the pieces, move on, and try again.

</comment><comment><USER14> Kevin Rose needed a Sean Parker to help him maintain board control and guide him.

<comment><USER28> Maybe. Digg is also old enough it was structured and architectured under an old-school (You need at least 15 to 30 engineers) approach for a content site. In that way, it was a sort of bridge to what we've got now -- it got the social crowd-sourcing of content part together, but it didn't have the minimal engineer part together.

You can bet that getting the money to pay all those guys, who then needed sales guys to make the big sales to pay them and the engineers, who then ... contributed significantly to Digg losing its place in the world. I betcha that the new startup has significantly tighter hiring policies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Reddit down to one developer and Kevin Rose resigns from Digg. This sounds like a recipe.

</comment><comment><USER30> muchos props to krose. he has put up with a lot of shit from people and handles it really well. pioneer in the space. he should write a book! (and then a movie)

i'm looking forward to the business week headline covering this

</comment><comment><USER31> If there are "multiple sources", wouldn't it be possible to name them?

</comment><comment><USER32> his next startup? I'm calling it now: Dug.com</comment>


Barcelona Supercomputing Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/barcelona-supercomputing-center <comment><USER2> I heard a nice saying once, can't remember the origin precisely. It goes along the lines:

Before, men believed they are the image of their Creator, and nowadays they believe they are image of their creation. I.e. it can often be heard today that humans are like computers, that they have similarities etc.

Original article goes nice with this I think. Otherwise than that, I quite like the aesthetics of supercomputer and its surroundings.

<comment><USER3> I hope that they will continue to keep Torre Girona in as close to its original condition as possible. It's not abnormal for the church to stop using buildings as churches if it makes sense, but it is a beautiful building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was there! About 8 years ago during a school trip. The church lies next to a picturesque small lake, and once inside its simply stunning.

I regularly took part in tours of the local super computing center (Munich), but the BSC is really something else. Would definitiv recommend going to see it (book in advance!).

</comment><comment><USER5> I was there a couple of times. It's an amazing place for a DataCenter.

You can see the datacenter from above, from the second floor. I think it's a great place to take some shots for an evil headquarter of a spies movie.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love this place. I want to see it in person some day, and I'm glad to hear they give tours. When the Mare Nostrum was first built, I sent the picture of it sitting in the middle of the church to a friend. He posted it on Fark, I think, and one of the comments was that the picture was an "obvious Photoshop"!

</comment><comment><USER7> The aesthetic doesn't work for me, can't explain why, and I know a building is a building, but the dichotomy between old and new, subjective and objective, it just clashes.

I don't assert they should or need to appeal to my aesthetic, nor that the aesthetic value in any way impacts their ability or success.

Just a personal opinion and observation.

<comment><USER8> It seems to be an allusion to the christian cathedral in Córdoba that's built around a mosque.

<comment><USER9> You have it backwards: the church was built in the middle of the mosque.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough. My analogy was about the practice of remaking a place of worship into a place to worship something else.

<comment><USER10> Funnily enough, the mosque was built atop the original Visigoth church. And God knows what was that church built atop of. Hm, maybe we should build a supercomputer on top of it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was there as well like 2 year ago or something. Very well decorated btw.

</comment><comment><USER12> Having been there, its a really interesting location, quite beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER13> IBM have the best showrooms.

</comment><comment><USER14> Three cheers for secular humanism!

A side benefit of entire populations grown weary of fairy tales, now the land formerly reserved for tax-exempt politicking can be repurposed for economic growth that benefits even unbelievers.

The irony of this occurring in the home country of the Spanish Inquisition is (to me) very satisfying. The arc of history is long, but apparently it really does bend towards justice.

<comment><USER15> Read something about Spanish Inquisition: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_of_the_Spanish_In...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_of_the_Spanish_Inquisition)

<comment><USER14> I did -- it looks like 3000 people were killed in it. Less than the myths would have you believe, but still a lot of people to kill on purpose (especially if they're not actively trying to kill you). I'm just not a big fan of using fairy tales (or anything else besides open hostility from belligerents) as an excuse to kill other people.

It was certainly interesting reading, though. Thanks for the link. I learned quite a bit from reading it and the linked main Inquisition page. It does seem to be used as propaganda out of proportion to its true toll.</comment></comment></comment>


Not just another app: Number26 (Berlin) aims to take banking to the next level - <AUTHOR> http://tech.eu/features/4760/number26-banking-profile/

<comment><USER2> What Number26 is doing is essentially: create a simple UI for accessing your bank account. Think of it as wrapping the "traditional" mywirecard service (= prepaid CC service with a terrible UI) in a modern interface with some added functionality similar to what your bank would expose via HBCI (which is usually offered by banks in Germany as part of their online account management product).

They haven't solved how to deposit money: you need to manually wire that from your real bank account into the bank account associated with your "prepaid bank account" for the MasterCard.

All in all, I don't really see the added value over my regular bank's web interface + PayPal (or similar). That's coming from someone who's got access to regular credit cards of course. And I - arguably - don't need real-time access to my transactions if I know that they usually show up on my online CC bill within 3 days max.</comment>


AMD Polaris Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/radeon-polaris# <comment><USER2> They make it seem as if, they just invented HDR.</comment>


Security flaw lets anyone bypass Samsung Galaxy S II security - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2011/09/30/major-security-flaw-lets-anyone-bypass-att-samsung-galaxy-s-ii-security-video/# <comment><USER2> Headline is sensationalized and doesn't properly capture the flaw: it's a bug in the lock screen, not a remote exploit. Lock screens are, as I hope everyone knows, very weak "security". They protect vs. casual snooping, not a determined attacker with physical access to the device.

</comment><comment><USER3> Specifically the AT&T model of the Galaxy S II, the Sprint model correctly implements the security screen.</comment>


AwesomeChartJS – Simple Javascript – HTML 5 Charting Library - <AUTHOR> http://blogfreakz.com/html5/awesomechartjs-simple-javascript-html-5-charting-library/

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or are all the charts on the demo page more or less unreadable?

I've used <http://www.rgraph.net/> in the past, and it seems significantly more developed than this library.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice, but it's no <http://dygraphs.com/>

<comment><USER4> It looks alright, but I'm not sure how it's better than Google's Annotated Timeline Component? [http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gall...](http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/annotatedtimeline.html)

<comment><USER5> It's not flash?

<comment><USER3> Exactly. It's SVG, which means it runs on iOS devices plus any smartphone, plus has IE7+ support (with excanvas). It truly rocks. Built by a Google engineer. Google uses it behind the scenes for some of their internal BI tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Blogspam that adds no information or opinion.

Actual library is at: <http://cyberpython.github.com/AwesomeChartJS/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks promising... I hope others in the community build on this...</comment>


Ask HN: How to make my own font? - <AUTHOR> I would like to make my own font(s) using open source tools, what do I need to know and what tools to use?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> [https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/](https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/)</comment>


Mario Marathon 4 raised over $91k in 4 days and not quite finished yet - <AUTHOR> http://www.mariomarathon.com/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> All the money raised from the Mario Marathon goes directly to the Child's Play Charity which is run by Penny Arcade. Child's Play gives video games, books, toys, etc to sick kids in Children's Hospitals world wide. Helping kids heal isn't just a medicine thing so donate a few bucks if you're able to. It's a great cause!

</comment><comment><USER2> Donate Please ^.^</comment>