Startup Financing: The Coming Super-Seed Crash - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/06/the_coming_supe.html

<comment><USER2> Here this post loses me, despite the lively prose:

 _At the same time, more companies seeded means more full-cycle money required to break through the noise and competition, which while drive dilution of seed investors who can't follow-on in subsequent larger rounds. And, importantly, don't forget to add-in the consumer-centricity of so many of these funds, all chasing a financially anaerobic U.S. consumer who is shopped out and indebted to death._

* The notion that huge numbers of seed companies smothers the market with competing firms assumes that (a) most of these firms compete, (b) that they do so with attention/promotion, and (c) that they're all destined for the meat grinder 1/10-chance VC system.

* As amusing as the words "financially anaerobic U.S. consumer" are, is there any evidence that the people who bought things from startups 5 years ago are buying less now? Because what I see is people lining up over night in the summer heat for a phone literally designed to allow AT&T to soak their bank accounts dry.

It seems to me that the reality of seed-funding is just too boring to write about: more companies getting more ideas exposure to the market with a pretty- much constant (low) success rate --- _of course_ there are going to be a lot more failures. That's the point, right?

</comment><comment><USER3> How can something so small crash? The total seed investment market is smaller than some hedge funds. That's the fun of it. Out of pretty much nothing, there is an opportunity for something huge.

<comment><USER4> "Too Small to Fail"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found this comment interesting

 _A parallel factor to consider is that companies these days just do not run out of money. That is not a function of an abundance of capital as much as it is a function of how damn cheap it is to run a company. Burn rates of $4500 for three guys are the norm in my portfolio. Thus, there is not a dependency on seeking a Series A._

This is how our small startup is working and we didn't even need any funding besides FFF. Our budget is very tight, but the emphasis on being break-even very soon helps us focus IMO.

</comment><comment><USER6> His main assertion is twofold: 1) that 'silly number of companies are being seeded' (what is the threshold for silly?) and 2) that valuations are being driven up as a result of the increased competition.

Reading through the comments, however, one sees very well-known / respected seed investors all saying the same thing: valuations are actually quite low, and the dollar amounts of each investment are also so low that, not only is there very little competition between funds, many times they end up co- investing in many deals.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think Paul is missing one big piece here, which is companies that take only seed funding to become revenue positive - they're out there and they're not looking for growth capital from the big VCs, instead they're making things people will pay for...

<comment><USER8> Despite relatively few exits and a large number of overall companies funded, what we have seen is that YC isn't all that far away from getting a positive return on their seed investments, a few mid sized exits or even one facebook like company and the whole thing is a roaring financial success.

I think this will ensure seed funding stays strong, the risk is relatively small with a large potential payoff with only a small fraction of companies making it big. As opposed to say a $5 million dollar VC deal which has a much larger risk attached.</comment></comment>


Iran develops homegrown AI software to speed up coronavirus tests - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/news/484981-iran-coronavirus-testing-software <comment><AUTHOR> Seems to be based on this study: [https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.2020200642](https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.2020200642)</comment>


The Last Days of the Polymath (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath <comment><USER2> Reminds me of this bit by Feynman on the difference between knowing something, and knowing the name of that thing:

[http://youtu.be/05WS0WN7zMQ](http://youtu.be/05WS0WN7zMQ)

There does seem to exist a particular breed of "intellectual" who not only confuses the two, but seemingly believes that conceptual understanding is merely an unpleasant side effect one must endure in order to achieve the ultimate goal, which is to grow one's vocabulary (and grow it beyond recognition, and, more importantly, beyond scrutiny from mere-mortals).

Jargon creep is inevitable when we go expert-crazy, which, it seems to me, is more about marking territory and protecting one's clique than any legitimate concern for the advancement of knowledge.

> "It's simply no longer possible to be an expert in more than one field."

This is a lazy straw-man argument (1).

Of course, experts are necessary, and we'd only go so far before we start running in circles if not for dedicated individuals... But how does this negate the value of polymaths?

This is like saying that wheels on an airplane are completely useless, because wings have been meticulously crafted for the sole purpose of flying. -- The two serve different purposes. The plane can't fly without the one, but it won't get off the ground without the other.

A polymath will never acquire the depth of understanding of an expert, but neither can the expert have access to the more varied sources of inspiration / patterns of thought that a polymath acquires through breadth of experience. It seems obvious to me that the two personality types complement each other (like "the two cultures" \-- problem solvers and theory builders).

If anything, given the insurmountable amount of knowledge we've gathered on any given topic, now more than ever we need to actively research more effective means of cross-pollinating, or run the risk of academic myopia.

\--

(1) or maybe not a straw-man... a red herring? We might need to bring in an expert in argumentation theory -- preferably one with extensive research in the field of informal fallacies -- as I am clearly not qualified to comment one way or the other.

<comment><USER3> > which is to grow one's vocabulary

Not surprisingly, people often confuse well spoken individuals with intelligent individuals. We've probably all met the incredibly polished and well spoken person who was otherwise dumb as a sack of hammers, but it took a long time to figure it out because of their well developed communication abilities sending a confusing signal.

It short circuits our intelligence detectors. It reminds me of Williams Syndrome which, despite sufferers having an average IQ of about 70, confound people who know them because of their high social engagement and constant friendly chatting.

I've found it's often helpful when meeting new people to sit back and observe the quality of the thinking behind their words rather than just the words themselves. The results are often surprising.

<comment><USER4> _Not surprisingly, people often confuse well spoken individuals with intelligent individuals. We 've probably all met the incredibly polished and well spoken person who was otherwise dumb as a sack of hammers_

The classic example being Stephen Fry.

<comment><USER5> ...this seems like a needlessly low attack on the man. Why do you perceive him to be as dumb as a bag of hammers?

A respected actor, comedian and presenter he has also authored a number of novels and several non-fiction works and graduated from one of the most respected educational institutions in the entire world.

Hardly dumb.

<comment><USER4> Because he uses his posh accent and long words to talk utter nonsense, and gets upset when he gets called on it.

One of many: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/stephen_fry_not_upse...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/stephen_fry_not_upset_you_twat/)

<comment><USER5> That's strange considered he published a semi-famous essay taking grammar and language pedants to task.

[http://www.stephenfry.com/2008/11/04/dont-mind-your- language...](http://www.stephenfry.com/2008/11/04/dont-mind-your- language%E2%80%A6/)

How does your link make Fry out to be as dumb as a bag of hammers? You may dislike him personally (shrug) but that does not make the man stupid.

I would also agree that the Register are being needlessly cruel by inviting readers to comb though his statements and then popularise his mistakes. I very much doubt any person on earth could withstand that kind of scrutiny, not even politicians who have armies of people to protect them from making quantative and qualitative mistakes.

Fry speaks as eccentric British comedians from the upper middle class speak. I guess non-natives just don't get it.

<comment><USER4> Here you go: [http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706825-it-s-now-very- common-...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706825-it-s-now-very-common-to- hear-people-say-i-m-rather)

<comment><USER5> That is a poor example for you to choose. Stephen Fry is completely and utterly right.

The Supreme Court also think so [1] as does the Rational Wiki [2] and Salman Rushdie [3]. Fry has expressed a sentiment that a great deal of thinkers and speakers have expressed. Others that have echoed his statement include Phillip Pullman, Penn and Teller, Christopher Hitchens, Lord Mawhinney and other legislators.

Celebrity endorsements run a distant second to the Supreme Court though.

I am unsure how that qualifies Fry as _dumb as a bag of hammers_? Do you think that people _do_ have a right to be offended? How would such a right be defended?

[1][http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-751.pdf](http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-751.pdf) [2][http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Right_not_to_...](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Right_not_to_be_offended) [3][http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/739464-nobody-has-the- right-...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/739464-nobody-has-the-right-to-not- be-offended-that-right)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is exactly the topic I've been pondering recently. I encountered the same kind of problem just within CS during an interview.

Personally, I went back further in the domain to avoid admitting I never had more than zero interest in what RFC writers chose to call something. Really, I view domains as bastions of useless information aside from the harvestable concepts for problems in other domains.

But I am beginning to suspect the industry has 'matured' into the same crap as the auto industry.

I'm curious if others have comments on remaining a generalist in this environment?

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with Djerassi that the term "polymath" is confusing and detrimental. I think it's so because it describes what kind of knowledge one has, not what function that knowledge provides.

 _' Deep integrators'_ I think would be a better term, as opposed to the _' shallow integrators'_ that we call _' integrators'_ today and that know a little about a lot and excel about making lots of conspicuous connections. As opposed to a 'shallow integrator', a 'deep integrator' knows a lot about a lot and excels about having meaningful contributions in a lot of areas and making connections that are deep but mostly inconspicuous (for example, we'll never know what part of the skills acquired while learning chemistry and of the connections made between chemistry and writing made him a better writer, but I am sure this part of "inconspicuous deep connections" exists).

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not quite sure they're gone. He doesn't quite fit the definiton of a polymath, but Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to mind as someone who has been successful in many disparate areas. And Elon Musk has a BS in physics, co- founded PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla, all of which are quite different from each other.

Some kinds of research necessitate knowledge in a lot of different fields. My work is in molecular dynamics simulations, which requires a mix of chemical engineering, chemistry, physics, materials science, mathematics, and computer science. The school I attend even offers a minor titled "Interdisciplinary Graduate Minor in Computational Science".

I think part of the problem is that people don't want someone who is _kind of_ good at everything; they'd rather have someone who is an expert at one thing. My undergraduate advisor told me to not put my undergrad athletic achievements on my grad school application; he said it would be seen as a detriment (I ignored him). But I've often found some of the best people in their fields are also the best at many other endeavors, because it is their work ethic and perseverance that pushes them beyond whatever their natural genetic limit is, and these traits are common to whatever it is they attempt to master.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sure, things were easy when no one knew what an atom was, let alone electrons, orbitals and energy states.

As for whether there are polymaths anymore...

Most research engineers and applied scientists working on large complex builds are polymaths in the classical sense: they know their chemistry, physics, mathematics, thermodynamics, materials science and also programming, controls systems, communications and 3D modelling.

In a non-classical sense...

You can now be a generalist in a single field. There's enough knowledge in a single field like semiconductor manufacturing that you can choose a different specialisation each week and never run out in your lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER10> This strikes me as the startup to end all startups: make the acquisition of new knowledge less dependent on the acquisition of old knowledge. I haven't the foggiest clue how you'd accomplish that, but the person who did would build the next Google.

<comment><USER7> You just made me willing to resurrect a months old pet project that is exactly about this :) I previously labelled it as "too geeky to be commercially viable" but maybe with a different interface it might turn into some kind of usable service with and adds based or subscription based profit model and shit-load of personal data useful for deep psychological profiling by third parties (caugh...).

But I don't have high hopes of creating the next Google... the idea itself cools as it may be it's unpatentable and has most likely been independently invented elsewhere. The technology already exists and once the idea gets out, the likes of Google would definitely have a huge competetitive advantage by implementing it on top and integrating it with their existing infrastructure... so I still can't imagine any way a small startup can make profit out of this.

Anyway, I won't say more but I'll start slowly resurrecting it, and if I don't get any useful business ideas in the meantime, I'll get it to the point where it's a nice cool opensource-project that people can start to play with it to know at least that the idea hasn't just withered and died in my head...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can't be a polymath by choice. Its merely a label other people apply.

Start with the big set of everyone. Then select the subset of people with hobbies (terminally boring people live to work... perhaps exclude the seriously ill) Some fraction of those are interesting (watching TV doesn't count, boring). Some fraction of those interesting hobbies are something they're good at (my flute playing makes dogs howl in pain, frankly I don't care I'm having fun even if no one listening is having fun). Some fraction of those hobbies that are interesting where they have skill have some public component, like the article examples of writing books and holding lecture series. Edited to add another level, people that have very public interesting hobbies that are highly talented, they might get public attention, which is rarer than you'd think.

Then, that tiny little subset, some of them, get labeled as polymaths.

</comment><comment><USER12> > because breaking new ground is so much harder.

I don't think that this is true. Most things seem easier than they were once they were done. It has a little bit to do with how in NP-complete problems finding a solution is really hard, but once you have the solution, testing that it is right is really easy and that the solution looks very straight- forward.

Another nice story showing this concept is the egg of columbus: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus)

</comment><comment><USER13> Heh. I'm not really buying it.

Knowledge is not broken up into clearly defined sections: "music", "history", "mathematics", "astronomy", and so on. Every field seeps into the others, and advancements don't just happen in one single field. Take a random book about history, for example: in it you'll find history of course, but also most likely economics, geography, literature; maybe even some biology, zoology, etc.

I think knowledge works on a compound interest model: the more you learn today, the more you'll be able to learn tomorrow- regardless of the field. Of course, it's much harder to switch from English literature to mathematics than from mathematics to physics. But in a general manner, creativity is creativity and problem solving is problem solving no matter the work that you do.

I know PhDs in mathematics who are also expert violinists, computer scientists who could live from their painting if they wanted, and so on. Again, the boundaries are artificial. The only limiting factors, as noted in the article, are curiosity, patience, and perseverance.

One thing to take into account is that not everyone is putting all their achievements out for the world to see. I know a wonderful pianist who only plays for family and friends; most of his coworkers would probably be surprised to learn that not only is he an excellent programmer, but also an excellent musician. Similarly, people paint, read, play music, etc. outside of their day job, without making it a point of labeling themselves as "polymaths". I would call most of the mentor figures that I've had in my short career polymaths (expert skills in more than 3 "fields", as evidenced by published books, papers, expertise recognized by peers in that field, etc.), but that's not the word they'd use to describe themselves.

I'm 24, and not only am I a much better computer scientist (my main discipline) now that I was when I was 17 or 12 (when I started programming), I am also much better at many other things: writing, drawing, playing music, knowledge of history, literature, etc. Contrary to the accepted common wisdom, I don't expect that to stop at all with age- many people (eg. my PhD advisor, my first boss, etc.) are in their 40s, 50s, 60s and still produce work with ever increasing depth and breadth. I aspire to be like them. There's definitely something to be said for the importance of mentors and models in our daily life- something that I really liked about the academic model.

Maybe it is becoming harder to stay focused on work than it was 100 years ago (also 100 years ago a lot of intellectuals came from wealth or were supported by it, and had less busy days than we do). Nowadays, we have YouTube and Netflix and reddit and hacker news and all that other crap that pushes us to just sit on the couch and do nothing if we don't monitor ourselves. Not that they're bad in themselves (as can attest my HN karma), we just need to be aware of the time we spend on it. A half hour of mindless browsing here and there is fine; an entire evening is bad. I keep a list of activities I consider "constructive" (eg. read a book, program, draw, watch a documentary, play chess, exercise, etc.) and throughout my free time I try to make sure the vast majority of my activities belong on the list. I just spent a few hours working on algorithm problems, and now I am spending a bit of time on HN before dinner- not too bad. There used to be a time where I would spend an entire Saturday playing video games or hanging out on internet forums, which is was a complete net loss intellectually speaking. Again, compound interest.

One thing that my mom would repeat to me all the time as a kid is that the brain is like a muscle: if you don't exercise it, it gets weaker. And it's not about doing a big exercise once a year- it's about daily perseverance. Fortunately, it's never too late to get started.

</comment><comment><USER14> This strikes me as a problem of acquiring _recognition by peers in academia_ , not of making actually useful contributions/products in an inter-disciplinary field. Someone mentioned Musk, but I think there's a sharply increasingly amount of lesser known Edisonian tinkerers and engineers turning out useful ideas and products for customers, they just aren't going to win the Nobel prize.</comment>


Hacker News Digest: A responsive HN with summaries and illustrations - <AUTHOR> http://hackernews.betacat.io/ <comment><USER2> Not to disparage your coder skills, but I think this is a good example of why the "brutalist" style of HN is superior. In exchange for a 5MB deluge of scripts that takes 20 seconds to fully load (actually it just jumped up another 3MB while I was typing this) and a 20s finish time I get maybe ~3 HN entires on screen at a time, versus the main site where I get 20+ entries on 50kb of resources

Also drop the google analytics & addthis trackers man. If the main site doesn't need it then your <1000 hits per month scraper don't need them either.

<comment><USER3> I actually appreciate how they approached their aggregation. It's pleasant to the eyes, is readable, and adds some visual interest to the feed. Little excerpts and thumbnails better help me decide whether or not I want to click on a link.

I don't think information density (in actual space) is as valuable to me as it is to you, though.

<comment><USER4> Agreed! I like the UI. The snippets aroused my interest in the actual content linked a lot more than a bland (and often misleading) title.

These days I often scroll past pages of hacker news without clicking on anything. I used to check out the comments often. But now no longer. The snippets seem revitalize the site for me a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's some harsher comments here, and it's one of my larger fears when posting anything to HN. The technical crowd can be unforgiving at times.

I loaded the site on desktop, I liked the visual arrangement a lot -- it's a clean/fresh aesthetic.

</comment><comment><USER6> Are thumbnails called illustrations industry wide? This is my first time seeing this use.

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure the developer is not a native speaker. The email in the contact link looks like a Chinese name and I've seen this site shared in Chinese technology forums before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hackerbot-for-hacker- news/id14...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hackerbot-for-hacker- news/id1460215083)

Shame self-promotion of my Hackerbot app for iOS.

</comment><comment><USER9> How do you get to the comments from your page? I couldn't figure it out.

Edit: I ironically chose a link with 0 comments. So let me amend that: You should indicate when a link has no comments. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> I actually really like what you have done. I like seeing the first paragraph of the story and the images. Loads pretty fast when I'm at home on wifi

</comment><comment><USER11> The current HN already adapts well to mobile. Though, I suppose some may prefer the more modern aesthetic presented here.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious, how do you get the descriptions from the blog posts??

<comment><USER13> [https://github.com/polyrabbit/hacker-news- digest](https://github.com/polyrabbit/hacker-news-digest)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Holy crap this is beautiful on my phone! Great job!!!

<comment><USER15> wow... really nice!

my new "on the bus" default i think...</comment></comment>


AJAX PHPMyAdmin Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://sqlbuddy.com/

<comment><USER2> Not bad.

I just gave it a shot - 3 things occured to me.

Firstly despite their claims it is fairly similar to PHPMyAdmin but with some Ajaxy stuff and a different layout (not a bad thing - though it is not as "friendly" feeling at times).

Secondly I dont like the login with DB details thing; anyone sensible has long, secure, passwords and I certainly cant recall all my database IP addresses :P

Thirdly I dont like the idea of installing it directly into a website subdirectory like that. Having MySQL administration accessible from my hosts control panel (i.e. unrelated to my domain) feels safer. I can see this becoming a decent alternative to PHPMyAdmin if hosts pick it up as an option!

I have to admit I LOVE the simplicity of the install. Kudos for that - it was as simple as they promise.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually liked that it was similar to PHPMyAdmin. I was looking for an alternative because I was tired of how heavy it was and came upon this. I was also tired of constantly refreshing PHPMyAdmin which, due to its heft, took quite awhile. SQLBuddy had neither of those issues.

<comment><USER2> Yeh - I didnt mean it as a totally bad thing.. I was just put off slightly about their claims to be _so_ different when it's not :P

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah yeah, they are a bit grandiose and set up unreasonable expectations. I sincerely hope no one takes their claim that this will "change the way people think about MySQL" too seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> When I don't need the power of PMA, I use tinyMy: <http://spicausis.lv/tinymy/>

<comment><USER4> Nice, but since it's not being developed anymore, might be useful to mention their referral to <http://www.gosu.pl/dbkiss/> which is also 1 file, easy to install, and pretty easy to use... and supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kind of cool, but I like the MySQL GUI tools instead of a web interface.

<http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html>

<comment><USER6> These are terribly unstable on OS X... and I don't know why.

<comment><USER7> There's always Sequel Pro (the successor of CocoaMySQL): <http://www.sequelpro.com/>

<comment><USER8> +1 for Sequel Pro. I have been checking this out for the last little while and it has been pretty solid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> best phpmyadmin alternative: terminal

<comment><USER10> I'm ashamed to say I do an awful lot of administration from the Rails console. "Oops, I botched my email address, can you help me?"

c = Customer.find_by_username "email@example.com"

c.username = "email@example.com"

c.save!

I know, I know, I could do it with SQL but I have noted a remarkable ability at the day job to forget to include the where clause after a week of crunch. That can have remarkably negative consequences, particularly since the Rails DB doesn't have any particular constraints on it. (It has ActiveRecord validations and, beyond that, you typically have to type more stuff, rather than less stuff, to cause massive screwups.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool alternative to PHPMyAdmin. They'd have to add support for foreign keys for me to make the switch though. Also, I'm not sure it actually uses any AJAX at all (at least not that I've noticed). Lots of pretty JavaScript though. _shrugs_

</comment><comment><USER12> Oh wow. This is really nice.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see something like this as a Rails app or plugin ... even if it was just read-only

</comment><comment><USER14> phpMiniAdmin is pretty good too: <http://code.google.com/p/phpminiadmin>

<comment><USER15> E_NOTICE: Undefined index: login in /phpminiadmin.php on line 44</comment></comment>


YouTube no longer supports 4K video playback in Safari - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/12/youtube%E2%80%A4com-no-longer-supports-4k-video-playback-in-safari/ <comment><USER2> Asking here because this might have some visibility:

What's the status of hardware acceleration of next-generation video standards (h.265, VP9, something else)?

It's my understanding that after VP8 was pushed and then superseded rapidly, hardware manufacturers are now leery of implementing anything other than h.264.

And as a follow-on: what makes generic GPU hardware and software not sufficient for hardware acceleration of video decoding? What is it that makes my GPU stupendously good at pushing pixels and training neural nets and physics calculations and so many other things, but not better than my CPU at video decoding? Is there a reason h.265 and such aren't implemented in CUDA?

I don't know much about video encoding, not even enough to be dangerous, so to speak.

<comment><USER3> CUDA supports VP9 decoding since Kepler iirc.

<comment><USER4> VP9 was added in VDPAU Feature Set F, which was introduced with the later Maxwell chips (950/960 cards have it but 970/980/980ti cards don't).

<comment><USER3> VP9 decoding was supported since Feature Set E, it was running a combination of a native ASIC decoder and a set of shaders running on the GPU. So while it wasn't as power efficient as the dedicated PureVideo hardware block it was still GPU accelerated.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious, do you have a source for that? I know that Feature Set E cards used a hybrid ASIC/GPU approach for H.265 but I can't find a mention of hybrid VP9.

<comment><USER3> It's done via DXVA (2.0) if you query DX on a Maxwell card (or even Kepler) you should get something like VP9_VLD_Profile0: DXVA2/D3D11, SD / HD / FHD / 4K (You can either manually do it, or there is a tool called DXVA checker or tester or something along those lines).

LAV Filters (an Open Source implementation of DirectShow/DXVA filters) VP9 support works with Maxwell cards for sure, I have a 780ti somewhere I can check Kepler also, but IIRC it should work.

That said this would work for many video players that use DXVA or have support for external DS filters e.g. VLC/MPC-HC or proprietary players like Splash, but it won't work in a browser. Chrome for example doesn't allow for external filters iirc so you'll see a pretty big CPU jump. For some reason it seems fine on VP9 1080p videos on a Maxwell card CPU is 2-3% but at 4K it jumps to 70-80% I have a feeling that since Maxwell has partial support in the PV block for HEVC and VP9 they might be able to decode 1080p with it and then do full CPU decoding for 4K, I wouldn't expect CPU decoding for 1080p to be so resource efficient otherwise.

<comment><USER3> Just some more info this is the DXVA GPU accelerated decoder [http://imgur.com/a/9MPsp](http://imgur.com/a/9MPsp) [http://imgur.com/a/q8SfN](http://imgur.com/a/q8SfN) It basically decodes a VP9 stream with a shader and outputs it into an image format inluding NV12 which means you can use PureVideo for direct ouput.

This one can work with either a dedicated media player or with Edge, Chrome does it's own thing and I'm not entirely sure what they do and I have no clue about Safari/Opera/Firefox so if some one wants to fill in about them that would be nifty.

Whilst technically DXVA is a software decoder [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceleration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceleration) It does offload the heavy lifting to the GPU via shaders, so can still some what classify it as "hardware decoding" since softare decoder/encoders are usually defined as CPU only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally, I've stopped watching video directly on YouTube.

Instead, I installed mpv [0], and since it embeds youtube-dl [1] you can play any video with the native UI by running:

        mpv "youtube_url"

[0] [https://mpv.io/](https://mpv.io/)

[1] [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

<comment><USER6> What is your process for browsing for content then, do you still browse the YouTube website?

<comment><USER7> small tempermonkey script replacing all YT embeds with custom URI + custom URI handler calling mpv "youtube_url" (or in my case extracting direct 720p stream [https://xxxx.googlevideo.com/videoplayback..](https://xxxx.googlevideo.com/videoplayback..). link and passing it to SMPlayer)

This lets you watch every single YT clip using player of your choosing. Result is smooth video on 10 year old laptops(1.8GHz Core2) when Flash/browser buildin codecs are barely able to play 480p.

<comment><USER8> Would you consider publishing the script somewhere? I can't speak for others, but I would personally be inclined to use it as I'm looking for a YouTube client alternative.

<comment><USER7> [https://github.com/raszpl/smplayer4YT](https://github.com/raszpl/smplayer4YT)

its a mess, but ~works :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mac users have long known that using Safari extends their battery life. This change by YouTube probably improves it further.

<comment><USER10> I always hear about Safari being described as "the new IE", but after switching back to a Macbook I've tried to force myself to stay on Safari as a default browser and it's pretty great from a user perspective.

It saves an incredible amount of battery life over Chrome (which makes me that much more weary of Electron apps eating up battery and memory at idle). Is there any specific architecture decision by Safari that enables those battery savings?

<comment><USER11> AFAIK the difference is Safari is not as secure as Chrome. Chrome's multi- process security comes at a cost in that pretty much everything a webpage wants/needs to do needs to be shuttled between processes. All network request, all disk io, all graphics happen in other processes. The communication overhead between processes is the difference in CPU usage. It's also why Chrome has 10x less code execution bugs than Safari. Note: Chrome doesn't have 10x less bugs. It has the same number of bugs. It's just by category of bugs it has 10x less code execution bugs.

[http://www.cvedetails.com/product/2935/Apple- Safari.html?ven...](http://www.cvedetails.com/product/2935/Apple- Safari.html?vendor_id=49)

[http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google- Chrome.html?v...](http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google- Chrome.html?vendor_id=1224)

I'm only guessing that as Firefox goes multi-process for security reasons the same thing will happen. Their CPU usage will go up because of the overhead of cross process communication but their code execution bug percentage will go down

<comment><USER12> WebKit2 behaves in the same way with regards to the points mentioned above. The sandboxed content process(es) are responsible for network, IO, layout, etc. The UI process (normally, the browser process) serves only as a broker for developer decision making and final drawing of the laid out content.

See [https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2#ProcessArchitecture](https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2#ProcessArchitecture)

<comment><USER11> AFAIK WebKit2 does not use a separate process for graphics. Graphics calls go directly into whatever api is appropriate (CoreGraphics, OpenGL).

Where as Chrome that's not the case, all OS/Driver level graphics happen in the GPU process. That means all data has to be shuttled from the process that wants to display the data to the GPU process. Even video for example gets decoded in a secure process (because there might be exploitable bugs in the codecs) then that data has to be shuttled to the GPU process so it can be composited with the page. The directives of compositing happen in the render process (the webpage) but eventually have to translated to graphics commands that happen in the GPU process.

None of this is true in WebKit2 AFAIK and is one of the many reasons it has so many move code exploit bugs (15x actually for 2016).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good. Screw MPEG LA for hampering the development of AV codecs and making free software using audio/video a pain in the ass for a decade.

</comment><comment><USER14> As someone who has to live with a 4mpbs connection, if VP9 produces better quality video, I'd want Apple to use it.

I use an iMac, so battery life is not a concern. Even otherwise, I'd take video quality over battery life.

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe it has something to do with costs? VP8 and VP9 are free while distributing h.264 and h.265 content will cost millions in fees per year. It makes sense to use free codecs instead of h.26x

<comment><USER16> > VP8 and VP9 are free

Unless Google ever uses one of your patents, and you have to sue Google over that.

VP8 and VP9 come with a no-litigation clause that basically requires you to share all your patents with Google if you use VP8 and VP9 – which is a shame.

<comment><USER17> No. Here's the license. [https://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/](https://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/)

You only lose the right to use WebM parents if you file litigation against any user of WebM (not just Google) over any implementation of WebM. You can sue Google about anything else and not suffer WebM license consequences.

You're probably thinking of Facebook's open source patent rider. [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS)

<comment><USER16> Indeed, turns out, I was wrong on that. Now I wonder, if i own MPEG patents, could I sue Google for misuse of them, while licensing WebM? There's quite some overlap with them.

And yes, Facebook and Tesla's patent licenses are completely ridiculous.

<comment><USER17> You can sue Google about misuse of MPEG patents and keep your protections under the WebM license, so long as you do not sue Google or anybody else about WebM's patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good. No one stops Apple from supporting free codecs. Google should have done something of the sort a long time ago. But they didn't, and proliferated H.264 usage.

<comment><USER19> VP9 uses a retarded amount of CPU compared to h264, so I can't blame Apple for not wanting to implement it.

<comment><USER20> >> VP9 uses a retarded amount of CPU compared to h264, so I can't blame Apple for not wanting to implement it.

h264 uses a retarded amount of bandwidth compared to VP9, so I can't blame Google for not wanting to implement it.

Google is still providing a choice here, except for 4K where it costs them twice as much. Apple on the other hand has no excuse for not implementing both. There is also a free low-power hardware implementation of VP9 which Apple (who makes their own SoC) could choose to use but hasn't.

<comment><USER21> > which Apple (who makes their own SoC) could choose to use but hasn't.

They don't make their own SoC for their laptop and desktop machines, which is who this primarily affects. 4K on iPhones doesn't matter since they only have 2560x1440 resolution.

<comment><USER12> iPhone 7 Plus, the latest and largest phone, has a 1080x1920 display.

<comment><USER21> Yeah you're right I got it mixed up which of my displays my phone had the same resolution as. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What a waste of battery power.

Most modern computers have hardware ASIC's capable of decoding h.264. It is a total waste to not use it.

<comment><USER23> For most people net speeds is a bigger problem than battery drain.

<comment><USER22> I see your point. In this specific circumstance it would probably not be an issue.

As one could say that 4K video and network speed issues don't go hand in hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> No big loss for me, no matter how you slice it. I don't watch that much video on YouTube and I prefer to d/l it with youtube-dl if I'm going to be involved with it longer than 5 minutes.</comment>


Filming the Speed of Light at 10T FPS - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ys_yKGNFRQ <comment><AUTHOR> Proof that while the speed of light averaged out, over long distances, might be contstant -- that the speed of light IS NOT CONSTANT at the milimeter/femtosecond and smaller scales... it is in fact, choppy...

This is related to the Discrete Vs. Continuous argument in Physics and Philosophy.

That is, things in nature which appear continuous and smooth at a larger scale, might very well be fragmented and choppy, when looked at on a smaller/faster scale...

Also, this video, specifically the last test, points to the possibility of the existence of a higher-dimensional, let's call it a "carrier" (for lack of a better term) wave -- for light.

That "carrier" wave... if it existed, would be the cause for the phenomena we call light in this lower dimension, and the cause for the choppiness at small/fast scales, and may also be responsible for the divergence of result phenomena in the double-slit experiment -- but all of that is theoretical at this point...</comment>


Azure Storage Impacted - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/ <comment><USER2> Azure WebSites are dependent on Azure Storage and our application has been restarting all day long. Our customers are not happy. I find it interesting that they are just now admitting to this issue. Does anyone else have major issues with Azure or is it just us? It's not just today, this occurs on a weekly basis. I would guess we have random app restarts at least twice per week. Every time we reach out to MS, they say "sorry, Azure storage reset"... whatever that means.

Our internal logging indicates our server has restarted 9 Times in the past 24 hours.

4:13AM, 4:14AM, 4:15AM, 4:35AM, 10:05AM, 1:15PM, 6:09PM, 9:11PM, and 11:33PM - all UTC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting enough, we haven't had an issue with production running systems. We're unable to provision new systems and perform some management operations in our storage accounts. It's not too bad so far though.

I do find it interesting that so much more information is on the status page than Amazon lists.

<comment><USER3> Same symptoms here, production is running fine, but we aren't able to view the storage accounts directly or do most things in the azure portal.</comment></comment></comment>


Expandable space habitat fails to inflate in NASA's first test - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-habitat-idUSKCN0YH1RA <comment><USER2> Wow, I really hope this is a 'dramatic pause' and it goes well tomorrow.

What a drag it would be to bet a company on this technology and have it not work. I am rooting for the engineering team at BEAM!</comment>


The Swift Programming Language: The Basics - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/TheBasics.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014097-CH5-XID_399

<comment><USER2> Can read the guide on browser apart from iBooks</comment>


Ask HN: Is trolling on social media a sign that machine learning is overhyped? - <AUTHOR> YouTube comments, Facebook and Twitter are all full of trolls. *
Facebook also has lots of business profiles (not pages) that aren't trying very hard to pass as people, as well as spam pages, forums and the like also using human profiles
With the rise of organized government trolling ops, this issue is becoming much more important.
You'd think that these leading lights would have figured out how to flag bad accounts more effectively than they do, and to train ML models to find similar accounts to those that are closed after manual reporting. But none of this seems to be the case.
Could it be that they simply lack the ability to do so? And does that tell us anything about the state of AI and Big Data in 2016?
*The classic meaning of "troll" not the generecized insult <comment><USER2> These are separate issues.

From the perspective of a social network operator who is interested in personalized data to collect an accurate social graph and ultimately sell ads (or data), spam accounts are arguably more of a threat than trolls, as spam accounts will never exhibit 'normal human' behavior like providing truthful data about their lives or presenting a truthful network of influence.

Troll accounts may in fact promote more engagement (in the most clinical definition of the word), since both trolls and their victims are actual humans. But being harassed drives people away so it isn't just a user retention risk, but also a reputational one.

Outside of social networks, a frequent solution to curb harassment is community moderation like downvotes, which only works if the majority is on the side of the victim and not the attacker. When no such consensus exists, all involved parties will be in disagreement with the opposing side, and any administrative to adjudicate a decision on who's in the right will wrong at least half of the participants.

ML may be able to filter out blatantly spammy content, but moderating adversarial content is something us humans haven't quite solved either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do we know for a fact that they want to solve this problem?

I'm sure they'd love to change user behavior in a way that would produce more interesting interactions. But I doubt they truly want to go after the random fluff and outright delete it. They'd be penalized for it in the short term (less engagement etc).

What really needs to happen is the general public getting fed up with it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm guessing programmatically identifying trolls is a very hard problem. You could identify the really obvious ones from a blacklist of words (e.g. insulting words, swear words) but I imagine many require real world and topic specific knowledge to identify (e.g. implying silly things are true, insults that require parsing a sentence or two to understand).

</comment><comment><USER5> Machine learning is a tool that cuts both ways - sites can use it to try and find trolls, but trolls can also use it to better automate bots.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of the pages and accounts I refer to are not bots, but businesses with obvious names and content, or are run by real people who are from lower wage countries, and not sophisticated at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a sign of trolling being an unsolved problem, not proof a solution doesn't exist.</comment>


Review: Japanese Hologram Pop Star Hatsune Miku Tours North America - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/04/waving-glow-sticks-at-hologram-anime-pop-stars-our-night-with-hatsune-miku/ <comment><USER2> It's a little disappointing they didn't bring up the fact that Hatsune Miku's songs are created by the fans. Anyone who wants to make a song just buys the software makes a song and posts it to Youtube or NicoNicoDouga and if it takes off it becomes part of her hit list

<comment><USER3> When I saw the headline, I thought to myself "the most amazing thing about her is that she is still around" I think this explains it a lot.

That is really cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The absence of Idoru[1] references is surprising. Almost as surprising as learning that book is 20 years old. I may need to re-read it.

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

<comment><USER5> I was just about to write that. Was there anything like take existing at that time or did he project the trends and adding a good dose of Japanese pop culture weirdness, completely on his own?

<comment><USER6> Idoru is also the first thing I thought of when I read the headline. It was written 20 years ago. Gibson has a proven record of being eerily prescient.

<comment><USER7> Instant hot coffee in a can was one of my favourite little ideas he put forward.

<comment><USER5> Yes. I actually came to think about that just recently. The whole scene popped into my mind when making coffee in the morning. It made me feel a bit dizzy actually, and it made me think of what other things that are looking more and more probable.

Anonymous-type groups posing in 3d avatars comes to mind.

I remembered that at the time,I found it implausible that it was possible to go online in Neuromancer without connecting to a fiber or something and that it was just handwaved away. He was right and I was wrong, it was not important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can never tell if the ticketing websites always report that tickets are almost sold-out. Regardless, that strategy just worked on me.

So today I will see John Kasich speak in San Jose and then I attend a J-Pop vocaloid concert in the evening. A most weird day even by SF Bay standards.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hatsune Miku was one of the opening acts for Lady Gaga on her 2014 artRave arena tour.

I attended Gaga's Washington DC show, had never heard of Hatsune Miku, and had no idea what was going on. Hatsune had live, human back-up dancers. By the end of the set I realized this could be the future of music - when I got home I devoured every piece of information on vocaloids I could find.

Lady Gaga talking about Hatsune: [https://youtu.be/7QV63XHoenU](https://youtu.be/7QV63XHoenU)

</comment><comment><USER10> Here we have large groups of people in the US paying to attend concerts given by a virtual pop star created and controlled by Japanese businessmen.

Reality truly is as strange as fiction!

<comment><USER11> Please see the discussion in the comments on Ars. If it wasn't sarcasm, what you said is simply misinformation.

<comment><USER12> Could you clarify, please?

<comment><USER13> The vast majority of popular Vocaloid music is created by the fans themselves, not "Japanese businessmen." In fact, the kneejerk reaction is completely backwards: regular human idols and pop stars are the fake, focus tested machinations of businessmen. Vocaloids are a pure representation of the feelings of regular people. The pop song on the radio was designed and marketed to appeal to a certain audience by people that probably hate what they're creating, acted out by a human puppet. The equivalent Vocaloid song was made by someone that really wanted to write a song about love or loneliness or saccharine positivity or whatever. Ordinary (but talented) people living their dreams through a collective consciousness.

From my perspective, it seems strange that anyone enjoyed the "real" thing in the first place.

<comment><USER14> Bull. These things are not created by a single person.

For a more western example Toy Story 3 might have been a moving story, but it's no single persons vision given form. Instead it's the passion from many distilled into it's most marketable form.

<comment><USER11> Are you claiming the songs are not made by individual persons? I know such song writers personally. It's not that big of a deal to create a song an put it on Youtube.

I don't really get why you are comparing it to Toy Story.

<comment><USER14> The song is just a small part. With human pop stars and Animation you at least get a human's take on some music. But, here the voice is synthesized from several people and effects, the motion are all re-rendered and refined based on feedback from multiple people etc etc.

Yes, it's voice sounds interesting, but it completely lacks emotion. So, the show ends up even more fake than Animation which still relies on traditional voice actors.

<comment><USER11> I think you are misunderstanding something. And also assuming a lot more is going on than it actually is.

First of all, the songs are the main part. All of the rest is just secondary. You can not talk about anything related to Vocaloids without talking about the voice synthesis software, the voice banks and the songs using them.

Secondly, most animations that may or may not accompany songs are little more than slide shows with moving elements on the screen. Many songs don't even have that. Many only have a picture.

Thirdly, out of the songs that become very popular, some get fan made choreographies. In this process, motion capture using a Kinekt helps a lot, but you need to do fine tuning for a smooth result.

Each of these steps is within the realm of what a single very dedicated person can do.

Also, there is no such thing "the voice is synthesized from several people and effects" . Each voice bank has a single donor. And you can purchase the Vocaloid software and voice banks and use them without restrictions.

Sure, if you want to make a concert and charge for tickets, you might do the choreography part more professionally and use fancy projection technology, so people actually have a reason to pay for those tickets. Otherwise people can just compile a concert themselves and project it in their homes. I did just that for my family to explain the phenomenon to them.

As for your last paragraph, I don't think I can convince you something fictional is not "fake". You shouldn't expect animation to look real because that is not the point of animation. As for lacking emotion, I bet you have not heard songs that try to do just that instead of being gimmicky. Try this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BFvN- idN1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BFvN-idN1s) This was made by just two people. One did the music and lyrics, the other the illustration and video.

<comment><USER14> I am not going to comment on the animation, or song in your link. Just the 'voice' which has zero emotional range.

There is an intresting recent study that used really short clips of people laughing and asked: "Are they friends?" This is just laughter and it was played for people around the globe. People did better than random. Not 100% by any means but well past random change for a few seconds of laughter.

Now, extend this emotional void to a full song and it get's down right creepy.

<comment><USER11> I understand what you are saying. I guess not all of are are affected by this. I guess at this point it's subjective. I understand why you might feel it's creepy.

As for the study, I believe you are referring to this: [http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/friends-or-not-laughter- re...](http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/friends-or-not-laughter-reveal- friendship-status-ucla-study) I have not read the article but I listened to the sound clips. They are definitely different. But I do not associate either with friends or strangers. If it were just these 2 clips I would probably identify them correctly because one is more involved and energetic and I know there is one of each kind. But I would probably find it more difficult to identify the type of each clip from a set without any extra knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Imagine once VR/AR become mainstream. You'd have real artists having simul- cencerts in ten stadiums (or in homes for the homebodies) competing against anime performers who don't get exhausted or get sick or who want to retire... So the farce of the "artist" can be all done with --just corporate manufactured music entertainment.

<comment><USER12> You make it sound like it's something other than utopian paradise. I will never interact with any of the artists I listen to so whether or not they are "real" makes no difference to me. Especially since a lot of artists have stage personas who aren't "real" either so it comes down to whether the part is played by a human actor or an animated one.

<comment><USER15> True but now it won't be an artist but personaes put together collectively using metrics and other marketing inputs. There will be no ruse. It'll be obvious and in son ways it's better than pretense.

And, as long as people get value out of that, I'm okay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux It's TODAY in SF, there are still tickets available if you act fast.

<comment><USER16> I'm totally surprised. I had the chance to go in Tokyo but only because my friend could find in re-sale bid at 5x the original price. They got sold out here so fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been waiting a long time to be able to see this show live. Since last December I bought tickets to see Hatsune Miku "live" this June in Mexico City.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am guessing you don't need 3d glasses to see the hologram. If so, I am all for it. They need to replace those very annoying glasses in 3d movies.

<comment><USER19> It's not a 3D image.

<comment><USER20> From the article: "massive, see-through projection screen"

Nonetheless, the projection technology behind this is interesting.

<comment><USER21> I think it's the same type of tech used for the Tupac hologram that was touring a few years back. I believe it all works on the same kind of principle as the Pepper's Ghost illusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't help but thinking about singularity.. but regardless, I believe if done right this form of art can touch the most conservative and cynical.

<comment><USER23> I'm far from the most conservative and cynical, and this form of art lowers my opinion of people in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are already plenty of comments on Ars discussing the various inaccuracies of the article.

I'm not sure pointing them out here would be useful.

For starters, cs702's comment here ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11602173&goto=item%3Fi...](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11602173&goto=item%3Fid%3D11601706) ) is plain wrong.

<comment><USER24> Skimming through the top bunch of comments doesn't reveal much... is his comment "plain wrong" as in it isn't a large group of people? Or they aren't in the US? Or they aren't paying? Or it isn't a virtual pop star? Or it wasn't created by Japanese businessmen? Or reality isn't as strange as fiction?

<comment><USER11> [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11602544&goto=item%3Fi...](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11602544&goto=item%3Fid%3D11601706) summed things pretty well.

It is wrong in the assumptions it makes. For your questions in particular.

\- Yes, this was a concert (with paid tickets), in the US, attended by a large group of people.

\- Yes and no, Miku is often called a Virtual pop star but that is a misnomer if by virtual pop star you mean anything else than just a fictional character who is a popular singer. It is just like saying Harry Potter is a wizard.

\- It depends on your meaning of create. Miku was indeed created by Crypton. But what they created is nothing more than a voicebank for the vocal synthesis software Vocaloid, given it a name and commissioned someone to create the box art for the product. Everything else about Miku (her personality, likes, dislikes, hobbies, friendships, rivalries, clothes, the songs she sings, etc.) was made by fans. Miku is by no means controlled by anyone. Crypton, who have the original trademark for the character have given everyone the right to create what they want with the character. Through the fan art you make (songs, animations, fan fics, etc.) you have as much control on Miku as anyone else. There is no canon version of the Vocaloids.

Vocaloid is the vocal synthesis software created by Yamaha. The software uses voice banks usually provided by third parties. Each voice bank usually has a character associated. These characters are collectively called the Vocaloids. Hatsune Miku is one of the characters for one of the voice banks. It has nothing to do with all the visuals. Fans just created 3D animation software for crating animations with the characters. These animations were eventually used to create the concerts. Crypton, being the original trademark holder started providing these concerts to fans who requested them using fan made songs, fan made costumes and fan made choreographies.

\- I leave the last question about the strangeness of reality to you.

<comment><USER25> Yes. It's all synthesized, and mostly by fans. The Vocaloid software is for sale, for about $100.[1]

Creating a new Vocaloid voice still requires a live singer, who must sing a long list of phrases. It's not a direct voice synthesis. Full singing synthesizers exist, but as yet are not as good.

[1] [http://sonicwire.com/product/vocaloid/special/mikuv3e](http://sonicwire.com/product/vocaloid/special/mikuv3e)

<comment><USER26> Incorrect, not phrases, syllables and sounds and not very many either, at least for japanese. Things get kind of stupidly large only if you make an english voicebank, because english is highly irregular.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/11/donald-trump-won-because-of-facebook.html <comment><USER2> Facebook was able to spread negative news about Trump, but Facebook was unable to stop the spread of negative news about Hillary.

In the end though, it didn't matter, because Facebook's Minister of Truth was unable to stop Trump's rallies. People who actually went to Trump's rally saw the truth, and that truth was very very different from what Facebook was claiming to be true about Donald Trump.

In the end, the truth prevails.

Nothing was more eye opening to the voters than going to a Trump rally, coming back, turning on the TV, and seeing live on TV the media twisting Trump's words and taking it out of context to make him look bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> And also reddit. /r/The_Donald became a regular front page celebrity. Before that, reddit was a Sanders' stronghold.

</comment><comment><USER4> the exact same happened with Trump, "Trump wants to deport all immigrants"</comment>


One Minute of All-Out Exercise May Have Benefits of 45 Minutes of Moderate - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/1-minute-of-all-out-exercise-may-equal-45-minutes-of-moderate-exertion/?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick bait.

Its not exercise for 1 minute. Its exercise for 10 minutes, with 1 minute of that being all out. The actual comparison is 10 minutes vs 45, not 1 minute vs 45 as headline says.

I think author could have said as effectively 10 minutes of interval exercise may have benefits of 45 minutes of moderate exercise

<comment><USER3> This is a nice, informative, concise comment. IMO, it would be stronger if it didn't start with a childish insult.

<comment><USER4> I disagree. It would be weaker if it didn't start with a childish insult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> shawn-furyan This is the idea of progressive overload that has been a core tenant of many weight training programs for a long time. It may be that body composition changes are primarily adaptive responses to stressers, rather than the typical simplified model of 'x work burns x calories'. That is, x work may in some cases be associated, on average, with x calories being shed, but it does not directly cause that outcome in a straightforward fashion. Rather, it may well be the case that your body adapts in proportion to the level of stress that it experiences (that would be consistent with the conclusions here).

Another consideration is that when we assume that natural processes respond linearly, we seem to have a tremendous track record of being wrong. Even with that being the case, essentially every model that covers any aspect of fitness seems to assume linear response. So it's not surprising to see demonstrations that these models don't hold to reality at the extremes.

Since the Fitbit was released, I've maintained that counting steps is a useless activity unless you are very old or infirm. I think that practitioners (i.e. athletes) have long known that intensity is the primary determinant of changes in body composition and athletic performance. It's seemed to me for a while that one of many causes of the difficulty people have improving their bodies is that they 'exercise' rather than 'train'. That is, they think of their workout as putting in time or quantity of work, rather than just trying to improve their performance across various physical tests.

</comment><comment><USER5> I lost 40 lbs after high school by working out 10 minutes / night. Pushups til I couldn't anymore. Crunches til I couldn't anymore. Hitting a punching bag til I couldn't anymore and when that was all done, wall sits til I couldn't anymore.

The first three I went as hard and fast as I could. Best shape I've ever been in.

<comment><USER6> >I lost 40 lbs after high school by working out

Nice work. Please don't take this the wrong way, but it should be noted for anyone struggling to lose weight: Weight loss is 99% diet (calories in, calories out).

Work out all day long, but if you're at a caloric surplus, you're going to gain weight. Never work out, but eat less than you burn, and you'll lose weight.

That said, there are countless benefits to regular exercise, so don't overlook it.

<comment><USER5> I was also eating subway roasted chicken subs for a lot of meals fwiw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11589373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11589373)

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been doing this every day for the last 4 or 5 days, after reading a article about the same study. Basically I sprint around my apartment as fast as possible, try to do clapping pushups as high as possible, do a few forward rolls, jump as high as possible and try to touch the ceiling, and then repeat for as long as I can. I'm having a lot of fun, and I think it's definitely better than nothing. I think it's might even be a good way to get back into shape, and could increase it to 2 minutes one day.

<comment><USER9>
      The volunteers warmed up for two minutes on stationary bicycles,
      then pedaled as hard as possible for 20 seconds; rode at a very slow
      pace for two minutes, sprinted all-out again for 20 seconds;
      recovered with slow riding for another two minutes; pedaled all-out
      for a final 20 seconds; then cooled down for three minutes. The
      entire workout lasted 10 minutes, with only one minute of that time
      being strenuous.

So it's:

      120 seconds slow
       20 seconds fast
      120 seconds slow
       20 seconds fast
      120 seconds slow
       20 seconds fast
      180 seconds slow
      </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====
      600 seconds (10 minutes)

What you're doing is fine, and I'll encourage you to continue it or a variation of it (EDIT: especially since you're having fun, that's a key to keeping up a routine). However, that's not what the article described. The article describes a variation of HIIT (high intensity interval training).

</comment><comment><USER10> "All out" is relative. "All out to an Olympian means the "brink of death" or (220+ heartbeats per minute) and none of these people went all out for a whole minute; it was 20-seconds, three times.

Reading what they did, The warmup seems too short and no real warm down to relax the muscles as needed.

"...volunteers warmed up for two minutes on stationary bicycles, then pedaled as hard as possible for 20 seconds; rode at a very slow pace for two minutes, sprinted all-out again for 20 seconds; recovered with slow riding for another two minutes; pedaled all-out for a final 20 seconds; then cooled down for three minutes. The entire workout lasted 10 minutes, with only one minute of that time being strenuous. ..."

</comment><comment><USER11> I find that rather difficult to believe. e.g. If you consider the heart-rate. 1 minute of say 180bpm just isn't going to equal 45 minutes of 150bpm. I'm sure it does scale to some extent but not that dramatically...

<comment><USER12> Such experiments essentially make a point that the main results of training sessions occur not because of the direct action on muscles and calorie burn _during_ the exercise but rather because of some changes in body self- regulation that are triggered by the training session but act throughout the rest of the day/week.

If that 1 minute of 180bpm causes an upregulation of +1bpm (or an increase of base metabolism for calorie burn) for the whole next week in a way that moderate exercise doesn't, then it can quite plausibly have significant effects..

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> To anyone trying this: make sure you warm up first and stretch afterwards. One minute of instant-on full-intensity exercise of any kind is just begging for an injury.

Especially if you're not eighteen any more like me.

<comment><USER9> The routine in the study included a 2 minute warm up and 3 minute cool down, with 2 minute rests between 20 second sprints. The reporting on this study is frustrating since they keep implying and/or stating that it's 1 minute of exercise. It's 1 minute of _strenuous_ exercise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good luck getting people to truly go all out without supervision in a lab or with a trainer.

These studies have been published before and they don't tell us anything about what people will actually do with the information.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is nonsense. Like people saying oh you can lose weight by being cold or breathing harder/more. Sure there is science behind it but in the end it does not promote maintainable lifestyles.

One minute all out may help athletes already in shape push to the next level. Like at the end of my long distance runs, I do a wind-sprint all out.

But regular people doing regular exercise benefit much more mentally from learning HOW to exercise for 45 minutes every day and increasing their metabolism.

If intensity training for a minute was all you needed, you could do sprints in the parking lot to train for a 45 minute 10K. Good luck with that.

Intensity training is good for fast-twitch muscle. Endurance training is good for slow-twitch. The two are not interchangeable.

<comment><USER16> One of the largest challenges for regular people is finding 45-90 minutes to exercise in the first place. Research on shortening the length of time required for effective exercises is a worthwhile pursuit.

<comment><USER15> I might accept that but it feels like a cheating shortcut somehow.

A major part of long distance running (10k+) is the mental aspect.

You are never, ever, going to get the mental endurance and discipline to run fast for distance by running for a short period of time, no matter how hard.

<comment><USER17> Most people don't want to be able to run 10k+, they want to stay healthy. Sports is fun as a hobby, but not everyone wants to have that hobby.

<comment><USER15> This kind of research allows people to think working out for only a couple minutes is okay if you do it hard.

I think many people could easily train to do 5k and then 10k and get many benefits. Our very evolution came about from persistence hunting which means many people should have the genetics for endurance and far fewer for intensity (speed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 7 minute abs are here!</comment>


Social Media Profiles Hurt Jobseekers More than Help - <AUTHOR> http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/163091/social-media-profiles-hurt-jobseekers-more-than-he.html

<comment><USER2> Don't know if I would want to work for a company who can't accept that I've have been dressed up as a chick, then 'forced' to drink with a bunch of other dudes dressed up with chicks. What if they see that photo of me throwing a cupcake at someone's face?!</comment>


CAN WORDS KILL? "THE GIRL FROM PLAINVILLE" - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a57125/michelle-carter-trial/ <comment><USER2> Actual title is "Behind the Scenes of the Michelle Carter Verdict - Conrad Roy Suicide Trial"

Posting in all caps is against the site guidelines[0], as is not using the original title unless it's misleading or clickbait, which this isn't.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER3> The story is in fact called "The Girl from Plainville" \-- the title you note is the webpage title.</comment></comment>


Ultimate Hacking Keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/

<comment><USER2> I own an Ergodox ([https://www.massdrop.com/buy/ergodox#tab- description](https://www.massdrop.com/buy/ergodox#tab-description)). Here are my thoughts and questions about this keyboard based on my experience with the Ergodox.

1\. Does it require drivers to use a non-standard layout? If I want to customize it, do I need drivers on the computer I use the keyboard on, or just a program on the computer I do the customizations on?

2\. Can I map any key to any button? For example, can I move the Mod key to the caps lock position, and place Enter where Mod is? I think you can; the page says "How about swapping Space and Mod? Or any other crazy remapping ideas? We've got you covered!"

3\. Why is the keyboard still laid out in the "traditional" way, with non- vertical rows? Q should be directly above A, not offset.

4\. I want to be able to have more than four layers.

5\. How does layer switching work? Does pressing Fn go to the Fn layer, or are layers (to use Jef Raskin's term) quasimodes, where releasing the Fn button goes back to the Base layer?

6\. If I switch to the Fn layer, how do I get back to the Base layer?

7\. What if I want to press two buttons on the Fn layer in a row?

8\. Can I use it on Linux? Can I customize it there? Can I use the media keys, and can I use application-specific keymaps?

9\. I hope you can save layouts, and quickly switch between them. Ideally they're sharable.

<comment><USER3> Hi zck!

First of all sorry for the delayed response. Here are the answers:

1\. No drivers required. You only need Agent, the cross-platform configurator application installed on your computer.

2\. Yes, these remapping scenarios are all possible.

3\. I've only used staggered layouts up until this point so it was natural to me to design a staggered keyboard but I'm very interested in matrix keyboards and we plan to design a matrix keyboard in the future if everything goes well.

4\. This might be possible. I'm not sure how much SRAM will be available after implementing all the planned functionality.

5\. Layers are stateless, so you have to keep Fn pressed to use the Fn layer and so on.

6\. Keymaps, however, are stateful, so you can permamently switch keymaps, not having to keep any modifiers pressed. Hopefully this answers your question.

7\. The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard is a fully NKRO keyboard and it features diodes in its key matrix so no ghosting will happen if that's what you are worried about.

8\. Yes, you will be able to do all of this. As a matter of fact Linux is our primary development platform.

9\. Yes, the keymaps and the layers of the keymaps along with all the other configuration settings get permamently saved in to the EEPROM of the keyboard. We also plan to make them easily sharable eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks neat. This also caught my eye:

"Following successful funding we will immediately open source the firmware, the electronics design files and Agent under the General Public License, version 3. We've already released the bootloaders and will also release the mechanical CAD files within 5 years of the initial release."

</comment><comment><USER5> for those of you who like the idea but don't want to wait, check out the ergodox. Similar, but slightly more ergonomic design (albeit with a steeper learning curve). The firmware is already open source, and massdrop has an AWESOME UI for building custom layouts and downloading the firmware for it.

Unfortunately no one really sells them pre-assembled though...Massdrop (and a few other places) does group buys on kits regularly, with an option for getting the more difficult components soldered up for a reasonable fee of $10 or so.

[http://ergodox.org/](http://ergodox.org/)

[https://www.massdrop.com/ext/ergodox](https://www.massdrop.com/ext/ergodox)

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks cool except that I know using a mechanical keyboard will result in me getting murdered by my colleagues in our open floor plan office.

<comment><USER3> There's some truth about this, although brown switches (which we'll also provide) should not be so loud. :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you know you are getting "fair market rate"? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently worried that maybe I'm getting paid less than what I worth. I am a end to end web developer in SV working for a "big company" as a permanent employee. I'm getting $140k salary. But from what I hear I think I might be able to make more. Specially because I am an immigrant (Green Card holder) and not a native English speaker. I don't know how to make sure what is my actual worth in market.
Interviewing can help but there are two problems with interviewing.
1. It can damage my professional repetition if I use other companies as a measurement tool.
2. No other company have exact equal condition. They might be a startup with high risk or a company with bad culture. Even they pay more, I wouldn't be as happy as I am. <comment><USER2> What you are 'worth' is different to every employer as they all have a unique combination of requirements + expectations.

All you can do is find out what the range of $$ people are getting paid for comparable roles and see where you sitting on the line, then figure out if you are happy with your $$ in relation.

Go and talk to recruitment agents. You don't need to tell them where you are currently working, just what you do.

Part of their job is to know what people are worth.

<comment><USER3> I've talked to a fair amount of recruiters and they were all over the place as to what I was worth but a few consistently underpriced my skills claiming they were being "honest" with me.

Also, don't believe the bullshit that a recruiter's job is to get you as much money as possible. A recruiter has a choice of either closing the position for a client and making some money or making nothing. A few grand either way isn't going to make a bit of difference to them. They will work both sides of the table at your expense.

<comment><USER2> A recruiter is not trying to get you as much money as possible, they work for the employer.

There is no black and white answer, just ask high and negotiate down if you have to! Make sure you sell yourself on why you are awesome so they are at least interested in haggling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> .

<comment><USER4> How many years of experience do you have?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have 3 years of "US experience" and about 6 years of experience in total.</comment></comment></comment>


Financial Services Meltdown Puts Chill In Tech Sales Outlook - <AUTHOR> http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=17&issue=20080916&rss=1

<comment><USER2> I wonder if the financial breakdown will affect investments into the tech sector. From my understanding of VC firms, they raise funds a couple years in advance. From that perspective, the startups in the next year or two should still be in a good position, in my opinion (I hope).</comment>


Show HN: Visualize the locations of Wikipedia contributors on a world map - <AUTHOR> https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikipedia-contributor-locations/

<comment><AUTHOR> I put this together as a fun little side project after beginning to wonder about geographic biases present in Wikipedia articles. Here are just a few comparisons that I've tried & found at least mildly interesting...

\- Religious figures: Muhammad vs Jesus vs Vishnu [https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikipedia-contributor- locations/#!...](https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikipedia-contributor- locations/#!/map/en.wikipedia.org/Jesus%26%26Muhammad%26%26Vishnu)

\- Major cities: San Francisco vs New York City vs Chicago [https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikipedia-contributor- locations/#!...](https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikipedia-contributor- locations/#!/map/en.wikipedia.org/New%20York%20City%26%26Chicago%26%26San%20Francisco)

\- World leaders: Barack Obama vs Elizabeth II vs Pranab Mukherjee [https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikipedia-contributor- locations/#!...](https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikipedia-contributor- locations/#!/map/en.wikipedia.org/Barack%20Obama%26%26Elizabeth%20II%26%26Pranab%20Mukherjee)

Here's an album of screenshots [http://imgur.com/a/wmsLX](http://imgur.com/a/wmsLX), if you don't mind losing the ability to zoom in and look around :)

All the code is open source and available on GitHub [https://github.com/theopolisme/wikipedia-contributor- locatio...](https://github.com/theopolisme/wikipedia-contributor-locations). The tool uses a Python backend to access the Wikipedia API and pull a list of revisions for the given articles, then look up their locations using MaxMind's free GeoIP database. On the frontend side of things, I used leaflet.js and a custom-modded (to allow for variable point radii to indicate multiple edits from the same location) version of leaflet.heat to draw the map.</comment>


Show HN: Croovies – Fixing the way we rate and find movies - <AUTHOR> http://www.croovies.com/users/sign_in?signup=hackernews

<comment><USER3> For me it was far too much effort to rate movies - I'll give a thumbs up, I'll rate out of five, but having to analyze exactly what I thought about a bunch of aspects of a lot of movies is just depressing and I quit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is ok - we only really expect power users to rate many movies. Did you try out the "shape search"? We think thats the real value this kind of rating system creates.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

Here are a few more demo pics: [http://imgur.com/a/DQSth](http://imgur.com/a/DQSth)

We built croovies to help people find those "underrated" gems, and give more context to what people did or did not enjoy about a movie. We built a shape rating/searching/recommendation platform in the process (over at BetterContext.com). Let me know if you have any questions!

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting concept and good looks, but the initial movie selection can be irrelevant - it is for me. I'd like to see the results but I couldn't go through skipping that many movies.

You could let the user search and select the 14 movies, or integrate with imdb.com if possible and get user's top rated movies for evaluation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, sorry about that! Hopefully we can remove the onboarding soon - <USER2> just a temporary barrier to give users recommendations upon joining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> in case of a trilogy , how do i rate the originality of the second & third movie compared to the first ? less or equal ?

speaking about trilogy, if the movies number ( example : Matrix I, II, III same for Underworld ..etc ) would appear that would be great ! most of the time it's hard to know which is which only by the title/release-year ...

also can i import my imdb watchlist ?

finally it looks nice, but it take too much time to rate every single movie i've watched -___-'

<comment><USER6> In terms of originality, we wanted to keep that up to the user. Personally, I would rate the first as very original and the sequels, albeit less original, still held their own stories (despite being far inferior).

There's currently no importing tools but that's a great idea!

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> hmmm, I was on my last rating and before I finished, it automatically moved me to the main page.

<comment><USER8> same thing happened to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that! Working on a fix</comment></comment></comment>


" B.C. to choose between 4 systems for electoral reform referendum - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/electoral-reform-referendum-question-eby-1.4683919 <comment><USER2> Justin Trudeau had electoral reform in his election platform; that was swept under the rug when he came into power more deeply than Trump's build-the-wall- and-make-`em pay-for-it.

First I'm hearing about this return of electoral reform. Is this coming from the Feds as a way of distracting the B.C. public from the unfolding oil pipeline boondoggle?

(And is this Canadian cruft even remotely on topic here, by the way.)</comment>


How I Became One of the Most Successful Art Smugglers in the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/how-i-became-one-of-the-most-successful-art-smugglers-in-the-world

<comment><USER2> Cool story I guess but at the end I'm left wondering how much of it is true and how much is exaggerated just to sound 'cool'. I can't help but pick up quite a bit of arrogance in his answers.

<comment><USER3> I was thinking the same. How do you know these stories aren't BS? "Oh, I did some shady things in the 60s..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love reading Vice. Truth is stranger than fiction.

<comment> at-fates-hands Agreed. I just got sucked into the site for an hour and had no idea.

<comment><USER5> Hah! Me too!

<comment><USER6> I highly recommend the Vice Guide to Liberia, if you want to hear about some of the lesser-known failures of colonialism.

<comment><USER7> Did colonialism ever produce anything but failure for the native inhabitants?

<comment><USER8> Malaysia is probably the best success story, but you can easily make a case that India was better off under colonial rule than before or immediately after.

<comment><USER9> India was the producer of the most sough-after goods in the world - so much that when robbery threatened land commerce, some people thought it was a good idea to try a workaround and commission seaships to try to reach it from around the globle - where america stood in the way.

The damage inflicted to India have been huge. It is only starting to recover. My bets for the next world superpower are not on China (due to upcoming demographics problems), but on India.

<comment><USER5> I thought India also had demographic issues?

My money is on Brazil and Argentina.

<comment><USER9> B & A are going to be good, but IMHO not as good as India. I see India at the #1 spot around 2050. More people - as a billion. More education, and people moving back from the US to share their experience. Democracy (improving), and a wariness of how leftist reforms seriously damaged their country in the past. If they can fix the bureaucracy, it's going to be quite hot. (and BTW I'm not indian, this is not some personal bias - I just see a lot of potential)

<comment><USER5> Fair enough. The future is bright, surely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Vice is awesome</comment>


Uber's Long Road into Las Vegas - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/johanabhuiyan/sex-drugs-and-transportation#.ojMW4JdMl <comment><USER2> On a related note, earlier this week Uber secretly threw a massive party in Las Vegas for its employees. I suspect Uber did this for political goodwill with the casinos, as a thank you letter for allowing Uber on the strip.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3256259/Luxury- hotel...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3256259/Luxury-hotels-night- partying-posh-clubs-endless-freebies-Uber-hosts-SECRET-Sin-City-team-building- junket-4-800-employees-world-no-drivers-please.html)</comment>


Consumer Reports now recommends the MacBook Pro after a software fix - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/12/consumer-reports/ <comment><USER2> There seems to be a lot of negativity around Apple's recent products, both justified and unjustified. What I'm fearing is, that Apple's management will disregard them all as unjustified, i.e. see, CR just rushed to report bad battery life but it kinda wasn't our fault and it wasn't the battery.

But battery life aside, there are legitimate concerns that haven't been addressed, such as no updates for a long time. Phil Schiller saying "I have never seen a great new Apple product that didn't have its share of early criticism and debate — and that's cool", then missing sales targets for the iPhone 7 - these things may be a sign that they are gradually losing the sense of reality.

Obviously they are hearing, but are they listening?

<comment><USER3> I think that technology is slowing down. Skylake to Kabby Lake was a negligible performance improvement. It's hard to get everyone excited about the new lineup when there's not a whole lot that's new and cool in the full- size computer world.

<comment><USER2> What people need is not necessarily faster systems, but often just quality workhorse computers to replace their previous (broken or worn off) ones. Fingerprint security, better audio and better battery life would have been a good enough increment to a lot of people to buy the new series. In fact the MBP did perform well in sales, though it could've been even better if all 3 of the above were available on all models.

The iPhone 7 though is a big disappointment, and the fact that Apple themselves overestimated the demand is indicative of that. I think to a lot of people it looked like a decrement rather than increment, i.e. it's a 6 without the headphone jack. Camera? I don't know if I need the new one really. Faster CPU? I'm not sure it's critical for the apps I'm using. Personally, it's the first time since iPhone 3 that I _don 't want_ the new one.

Maybe it's all normal and maybe Schiller is right in that every new product will always be met with criticism. Apple's stuff is now too popular and too important to be dismissed if it's a flop. Who cares if Dell's next laptop is ugly and/or overpriced? No one cares. But Apple is a near-monopoly because of OS lock-in and millions of people's jobs (I'm guessing) literally depending on them.

It's this sense of panic that Apple is slowly building up a bubble around themselves. We don't even know whether it's the usual secrecy around R&D or they simply don't know what to do next.

<comment><USER4> > _The iPhone 7 though is a big disappointment, and the fact that Apple > themselves overestimated the demand is indicative of that. I think to a lot > of people it looked like a decrement rather than increment, i.e. it 's a 6 > without the headphone jack. Camera? I don't know if I need the new one > really. Faster CPU? I'm not sure it's critical for the apps I'm using. > Personally, it's the first time since iPhone 3 that I don't want the new > one._

The headphone port aside, it's an incremental update, with big internal technology boosts (cpu, gpu, camera setup, etc) as always (and waterproof, which is big).

What exactly would the disappointment be? And the 7 is selling more than fine, who said anything about "overestimating demand"?

"In the US, iOS grew 7 percentage points year-over-year, from 33.5% of smartphone sales to 40.5% in the three months ending October 2016. This represents the strongest rate of growth for the OS in more than two years, as well as the highest share seen since the three months ending January 2015 (42.8%). And while Android remains the dominant OS in the US, at 57.9% of smartphone sales, this latest data represents the 5th consecutive year-on-year period decline"

The iPhone enjoyed its largest gains in the UK, where sales of Apple's iPhone lineup grew 9.1% year-over-year to 48.3%. At the same time, Kantar says Android's share of smartphone sales slid 1.8% to 49.6%. iPhone's share of the market also grew in France, Italy, Spain and across the EU5 region as a whole.

other source:

Overall, Slice says, revenues from iPhone sales in November and December 2016 were up 66.9% from the same period last year.

<comment><USER2> There were reports a few weeks ago that Apple is going to cut production of iPhone 7 because it overestimated demand, at the same time it underestimated demand for iPhone SE and other cheaper models. It may still be huge, or even "bigger than ever" but the fact that they under- or overestimate things is an indication of something being not quite right with Apple.

<comment><USER4> A lot of those reports are just rumors and the opposite pans out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I liked Gruber's mention of a Mac Nano idea, I'd love something like a Raspberry Pi running MacOS.

<comment><USER6> Raspberry Pi costs $35. What would the Mac Nano cost?

<comment><USER7> Probably would be comparable to an AppleTV if Apple did indeed make such a thing.

<comment><USER6> I doubt it, the price of one AppleTV is subsidized by future iTunes purchases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Huh, those battery life numbers are nowhere near what those machines actually get in real world O.o

<comment><USER9> Using Chrome and Atom (HTML/JS) applications takes its toll on batteries...

<comment><USER10> I switched to mostly Safari when I got the new MacBook Pro because I understood that there were efficiencies built in that would maximise battery life. Not sure how large a difference if any there really is. In any case I get a few hours when all I'm doing is light browsing. No Atom open, etc. Which is for me OK as I'm usually not away from a socket for very long.

The figure of 15.x hours, however, seems completely unbelievable to me.

<comment><USER11> Try lowering you're brightness. You can get the same subjective brightness as older models at lower levels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm still finding that the battery on this machine sucks. Opened my MacBook pro this morning and the battery was down to 74% (my Air would be around 95 if left overnight in my bag). I've been at work, unplugged for just a half hour and I'm at 67%. Not running anything intensive, just Outlook and Chrome.

<comment><USER13> I have the tMBP 15". I know there is a lot of hate on HN (easy upvotes), but I get 8-10 hours on mine. I use safari.

<comment><USER14> Ditto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I expect the second generation of the new MacBook Pro will be awesome as battery issues are fixed and more software uses the new hardware toolbar.

I bought a MacBook a week after the MacBook Pro was released, and I feel good about that decision because the design is stable and had one hardware update. A really nice device.

I continue to be disappointed by Apple Cloud web services, and as I have said here before Tim Cook and the board of directors should on a regular basis sit down together and use Siri and Google Now/Assistant and honestly compare them.

I very much like iPads, but the weaknesses in web services also affect iPad usability.

</comment><comment><USER16> 3 extra hours of battery life if you skip the touch bar?!?!?!

Wow.

<comment><USER17> It has a lower TDP CPU and a slower SSD.

<comment><USER18> And a bigger battery. And it doesn't have the second thunderbolt controller to power.

<comment><USER19> I'd be very disappointed if that controller takes notable power when inactive. The rest is fair.

<comment><USER18> [https://lwn.net/Articles/707616/](https://lwn.net/Articles/707616/)

"Thunderbolt controllers consume about 2W even when idle"

For a laptop, that's crazy.

<comment><USER20> This is mostly because Linux can't manage Thunderbolt power states. I would be disappointed if MacOS didn't do it however, since the hardware is supposed to be "integrated" with software.

<comment><USER21> True, i can't imagine that being the case in macOS. Though, I was still very disappointed to find out that using the ethernet thunderbolt dongle used more battery that using wifi in my 2015 rMBP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Cool does the software fix add 32GB RAM option?

18 hour battery??? LOL! Come on.</comment>


A Thompson hack virus is found in the wild (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://lists.owasp.org/pipermail/owasp-cincinnati/2009-August/000187.html

<comment><USER2> This sounds interesting. Does anyone have any more links explaining about just how a compiler can even get infected?

Edit: Actually I just looked up and found these:

Some more background info analyzing a c compiler: <http://cm.bell- labs.com/who/ken/trust.html>

How a compiler gets backdoored: [http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/04/15/strange-loops- de...](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/04/15/strange-loops-dennis- ritchie-a/)

A possible counter: <http://www.acsa-admin.org/2005/abstracts/47.html></comment>