Why there are no reports on Catalonia protest from Western media? - <AUTHOR> I've searched on Youtube, there are not one single video about this event from NONE of US media(CBS, Bloomberg, CNBC, NPR, Foxnews...)... I'm very surprised by the results. <comment><USER2> Since when did Western = US only?

Here in Norway it's been on the news and in the papers daily for several days.

Some random links:

[https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/pLmjl6/voldelige- opptoe...](https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/pLmjl6/voldelige-opptoeyer-i- barcelona-det-er-veldig-aggressivt)

[https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/EWEnLG/varsler-store- de...](https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/EWEnLG/varsler-store- demonstrasjoner-i-barcelona-fredag)

[https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/awkBqa/demonstranter- ti...](https://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/i/awkBqa/demonstranter-til-vg-dette- er-bare-et-vorspiel)

[https://www.nrk.no/norge/nye-sammenstot-i-barcelona-i- kveld-...](https://www.nrk.no/norge/nye-sammenstot-i-barcelona-i- kveld-1.14743453)

[https://www.nrk.no/urix/catalonias-leder_-_-volden-ma- stoppe...](https://www.nrk.no/urix/catalonias-leder_-_-volden-ma- stoppe-1.14745347)

[https://www.nrk.no/norge/nye-sammenstot-i- barcelona-1.147467...](https://www.nrk.no/norge/nye-sammenstot-i- barcelona-1.14746780)

[https://www.nrk.no/urix/flere-hundre-tusen-demonstrerer-i- ba...](https://www.nrk.no/urix/flere-hundre-tusen-demonstrerer-i-barcelona_-_- vi-horer-skuddlyder-hele-tiden-1.14747985)

[https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/opptoyer-i-barcelona- frykte...](https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/opptoyer-i-barcelona-frykter-at- liv-kan-ga-tapt/71723016)

[https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/dom-over-politikkens- nederla...](https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/dom-over-politikkens- nederlag/71711356)

[https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/opptoyer-pa-flyplass-i- barc...](https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/opptoyer-pa-flyplass-i- barcelona/71708184)

<comment> mcgroin-holden No offence but how many people can read Norway language? US media are read world wide that's why I say it represents the west. Also don't people find it weird at all that there are no discussions of this event on all major Youtube channels feom US/UK?

<comment><USER2> The question was "Why there are no reports on Catalonia protest from Western media?". As I showed, in Norway there has been plenty of reports. I consider Norway one of the Western countries. As with most news it's obviously geared towards the locals, Norwegians, which for the most part can read Norwegian.

But ok, what about something a bit more international like Reuters:

[https://www.reuters.com/search/news?blob=Catalonia&sortBy=da...](https://www.reuters.com/search/news?blob=Catalonia&sortBy=date&dateRange=all)

Multiple daily reports for days.

Ok how about The Guardian?

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/catalonia](https://www.theguardian.com/world/catalonia)

Multiple daily reports for days.

So maybe the question is rather, why is the US media rather silent on this?

[https://www.nytimes.com/section/world/europe](https://www.nytimes.com/section/world/europe) (nothing recent I could see)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/) (has one recent report but that's it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not sure about Youtube, but in general I saw lots of print reports of the riots in Catalonia, and I'm not even much of a newsphile. I'm in the U.S., btw. I wonder how that compares with, say, Europe?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm from Catalonia and I've seen so much reports and discussions and videos about HK protests. It's not fair, we deserve some coverage too. We are also fighting for our freedom..

<comment><USER4> I'm curious to know what other freedoms do citizens in other countries have that you don't. What freedoms are you fighting for?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Saw a real life march of freedom today haven't seen any press though</comment>


Breakthrough Prize - <AUTHOR> https://breakthroughprize.org/news?controller=Page&action=news&news_id=21 <comment><USER2> I'm amused to see Weil's name again in "... the Taniyama-Weil conjecture..." in light of [http://www.ams.org/notices/199511/forum.pdf](http://www.ams.org/notices/199511/forum.pdf) When I first learned about the conjecture in the early 1990s it was always the "Taniyama-Shimura-Weil" conjecture; when Taylor-Wiles mostly proved it, Lang for some reason argued strongly to excise Weil's name from it, and so it was in much of the literature since. Congrats to all the winners!</comment>


Ask HN: I am looking for partners to practice my spoken English - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
Please, feel free to contact me if it could be interesting for you as well. It doesn't matter whether you are a native speaker or not.
About me: I'm a 25 years old guy from Russia. Got a Bachelor degree in Finance & Economics. Founded a travel tech startup, raised a seed round for it.
My language proficiency: Advanced or close to it. My interests: startups, tech, AI, rationality, productivity, mindfulness, books and everything you want to talk about (I'm quite intellectually curious).
Preferred format: 1-hour Skype calls
My email: email@example.com <comment><USER2> Have you heard of iTalki?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll check it. Thanks.

I'll also appreciate any other recommendations of the best services for a speaking practice.</comment></comment>


Ted Nelson on Zigzag data structures (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj9vqVvHPc

<comment><AUTHOR> There is some more info. about it from someone who worked with Nelson on Zigzag: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501597></comment>


New Lenovo ThinkPad Range with Ryzen 4000 and 4000 Pro Mobile - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/15772/new-lenovo-thinkpad-range-with-ryzen-4000-4000-pro-mobile <comment><USER2> On a tangential note, I recently switched from an XPS 15 to a X1 Carbon. The thinkpad is a completely uncompromised device. It feels like a laptop from the future, where nothing sucks. The keyboard is great, the screen is great, the touchpad is great, the keys are all there, it's super light, but super solid, there's a bajillion ports. Anyone considering a new laptop should give a good look at thinkpads. They also have ridiculous sales from time to time - I got my X1C for about 50% of retail price.

<comment><USER3> I have a X1 Carbon that is a few years old now. About 2 years ago I dropped it (lid closed) from about 2 feet up (70cm). And it hit the tiled floor, pointy corner first. I thought "welp here go $2000". But no! A 2x3 mm part of the black surface finish chipped of and I see the bare silvery metal now. Oh and the tile cracked.

<comment><USER4> the X series and the T series are some of the best laptops ever built

unless your work requires you to use macOS, you have no reason to buy a Macbook

<comment><USER5> > unless your work requires you to use macOS, you have no reason to buy a > Macbook

If hardware is all that matters to you, sure. But some people actually prefer the software experience of macOS to that of Windows, for a variety of reasons.

<comment><USER6> i'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on my Thinkpad P2 Gen 2 laptop, using the Budgie Desktop. I'd guess my entire workflow is 95% the same coming from my MBP.

<comment><USER5> There is still the issue of software. Lots of programs that professionals use on a daily basis don't run on Linux and don't have good alternatives that do. Plus, macOS is much better designed and integrated (if that means anything to you), and generally more stable[0].

[0]: This seems to be less true every year, both because desktop Linux is becoming more stable over time, and because macOS seems to get buggier with every release. Still, as someone that uses both operating systems on a regular basis, my MacBook Pro is still marginally more stable than my Linux desktop machine on average.

<comment><USER7> > and generally more stable

People say this yet still use Adobe software on macOS over windows. Despite the fact adobe software runs horribly on macOS compared to windows.

If you buy a Mac for using adobe software you're definitely not buying it for workflow.

<comment><USER5> First, I was talking about software that doesn't run on Linux but does run macOS, for the case where you don't want to use Windows but still need certain programs. For those users, the Windows "workflow" is already a deal-breaker, as is the lack of professional software on Linux, so macOS is the only choice.[0] I also didn't call out any specific software because there is lots of it besides the Adobe suite.

Second, can you elaborate? What makes Adobe run "horribly" on macOS? I admit I haven't used an Adobe product in years, but I used to do some design as part of my job, and I can't say it worked any worse on my Mac than it did on my Windows machine.

[0]: I recognize that this isn't necessarily a huge segment of users, but I for one would be hard-pressed to go back to Windows, even if it saved me a thousand bucks on a laptop.

<comment><USER7> The only software I could complain about on macOS is adobe software. I can't think of any software that gives a bad experience other than that...

If you deal with large photoshop files, and you only have say 8gb of memory. Windows will just get really slow when you move around the document.

On macOS it will crash randomly, and often. Premier you can be scrubbing the timeline, scrub too much, boom premier just stops working.

Lightroom (this is what I mostly used for editing photography) it generates a history of applying changes and removing them, if you begin toggling boom crash.

This is just personal experience, but I know alot of people who do graphic design and they now just have this natural reflex to constantly save their work allllll the time in fear of the software crashing.

Yet on Windows I don't recall any of that software ever crashing...

[https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/photoshop- cc-2020-c...](https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/photoshop- cc-2020-crashing-constantly-macos/td-p/10718719?page=1)

There's many more threads on about the software crashing on macOS than Windows.

In any case I'll probably never buy another macbook again. Lenovo + Ubuntu for me now. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm wondering how long, or if ever, it takes for reasonable people to resume buying Lenovo products after they got busted using a firmware-based rootkit to reinstall their manufacturer spyware onto a freshly formatted OS install (the same year they got busted preinstalling third-party adware, which resulted in an FTC settlement/fine).

Do you wait like a year or three? five? Do you never buy Lenovo again? What's reasonable? This isn't rhetoric: I'm legitimately asking for a figure, as well as a rationale, because I don't know the answer.

Personally I'm in the market for a high end laptop for running Linux, and I just couldn't see myself buying something from them ever, no matter how good their machines are, because I just don't trust _the people in the organization who develop products_ to take system integrity seriously enough.

<comment><USER9> My understanding is that the Thinkpad line is a bit segmented from the rest of the company. As a result, those poor decisions haven't effected the Thinkpad line. It helps also that I immediately switch everything over to Linux

I do understanding that it's entirely feasible for them to rootkit Linux from the BIOS and install malware onto their Thinkpads but I just haven't seen it happen yet

<comment><USER10> Hm, it was a problem on the professional ThinkPad line as well.

[https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop- virus.html?m...](https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop- virus.html?m=1)

<comment><USER11> Naw, that story is ridiculous. One person bought two "refurbished" ThinkPads from _IBM_ and claims they found some stuff on them.

Show me one example - any example - of Lenovo installing any of this kind of stuff on a factory fresh ThinkPad, and then we'll have something to talk about.

Until then, I suggest ignoring biased and axe-grinding sources like "thehackernews".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Major bummer to see they're still using 16:9 displays, even when the lower bezel area could easily accommodate a 16:10 display.

I am however very pleased to see Lenovo embracing AMD in their high end products.

<comment><USER13> For all of its quirks, I love having a 3:2 display on the MateBook X Pro. Besides the Surface Laptop and Surface Book, there's not much else on the market with this aspect ratio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Am I the only one who is upset that Lenovo T series has dropped external battery ? I am running Ubuntu on a T480 with an extra battery in my bag. I don't think any other laptop has ever given me as much joy. And I almost never run out of juice even though I always code without being plugged into a power source.

Bring back the external battery !!

<comment><USER15> The workaround for this is that you can now get external USB batteries that support PD, and most Lenovos use USB with PD for their main charging cable, which means you can carry around a device that can charge your laptop on the go.

It's not as slick as the "swap batteries, now you're fully charged", but on the other side, the USB batteries can charged without the laptop, and you can pick the size you're willing to carry around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good looking laptops with excellent CPUs.

It is a bit unfortunate that they don't support Thunderbolt though. The ability to add an external GPUs/PCIe cards widens the horizon a lot for desktop-replacement systems.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well, I hope those are better under linux than the A485 and aren't running as hot and a sluggish wireless driver ... it has been a disappointment.

<comment><USER18> Things were already better for linux with last year's models. My E495 works flawless with Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So I guess that's the new Thinkpad naming convention?

T490 -> T14

T590 -> T15

..etc

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I believe they're switching to branding similar to the X1 Carbons across everything, so it'll be T14 generation 1, generation 2, etc.

I just hope this doesn't imply they're going to start making laptops a lot like other manufacturers (e.g. less durable, more soldered down components, ...)

<comment><USER21> I can't make any statements regarding quality, but regarding soldered RAM, unfortunately this practice has spread outside of the X1 Carbon lineup. The ThinkPad X280 and X290 have soldered RAM with no DIMM slots, and the ThinkPad T490 has soldered RAM but with an extra DIMM slot for some upgradeability (compare to my T430, which has no soldered RAM and instead has two DIMM slots). There are still some ThinkPads that don't have soldered RAM, such as the P53 and the P1.

Regarding storage, on the other hand, I don't believe the ThinkPad lineup has gone down the road of soldered SSDs, not even in the X1 Carbon lineup.

<comment><USER22> Can confirm, my X1 Carbon doesn't have a soldered SSD. Best laptop i've ever had tbf and works wonderfully under Fedora 32.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As soon as they support Linux...

<comment><USER24> Huh? Who, Lenovo or AMD? They both have fine Linux support.

<comment><USER23> What about problems people mention here? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22969469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22969469)

I love ThinkPad and planning to buy one soon, but reporters of problems with sound and WiFi drivers concerning.

<comment><USER25> The newer Carbons and the X1 Extreme have had a rougher time than most Lenovo laptops. My T480 and T580 were pretty much perfect from the jump, but my X1 Extreme remains disappointing.

<comment><USER26> I installed Ubuntu 19.04 on X1 Extreme Gen 2 and didn't have any issues. Upgrades to 19.10 and 20.04 have been painless as well. Everything basically works.

<comment><USER25> I have an X1 Extreme Gen 1 and it's had power/battery issues since I got it.

<comment><USER27> Yep same on the Gen 1, it's an awful machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great that we now have AMD CPUs in Lenovo laptops.

The Lenovos they should be named AT490, AX490 and AL490 so the next Lenovo model would be named AT500 and so forth. Where A would mean AMD.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there something like the Intel-Management-Engine backdoor on this too? Is it possible to replace it with coreboot or libreboot?

<comment><USER30> Yes, there's the AMD PSP ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor)). It's an ARM core with similar concerns, but even less is known about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Still want to see a 4800H/4900HS with an RTX 2070 Max Q option...

Edit: and at least 32gb ram. It really feels like Intel is paying the laptop mfgs off on this one. Almost every AMD laptop this generation is gimped with single-socket ram upgrades and/or capped with RTX 2060 graphics.

<comment><USER32> What are you doing that needs such a wide CPU _and_ beefy GPU? That's a real narrow niche between GPU-heavy gaming laptops, and cheaper many-cored desktops.

I would love a 4900 with no dGPU, myself. (wide-CPU compile workloads) The iGPU in these is plenty for my portable needs, especially at 1440p.

Ideally we'd have good external GPU support, so we choose to hook it up to a real heavy-hitter.

<comment><USER31> Does it really matter? The fact is, I use that much CPU/Ram for work tasks... and I'd like a 2070 as a baseline for the occasional gaming.

Since AMD systems are likely 1-2 years away from seeing good, broad Thunderbolt support (probably aligned with USB4), eGPU isn't an option. AMD currently does more, with less power than the Intel counterparts in the upper end classes of systems.

Find me a laptop with a 2070 Max Q that isn't at the higher price point that the AMD 4800H doesn't fit into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How does Thinkpad compare to the trackpad of mac nowadays?

The only thing that makes me use mac is the trackpad and retina. I have 15" late 2015 mbp, so far the best mbp out there w/o the butterfly keyboard.

Im still considering to go back to thinkpad for my next laptop since i had t42p, t60 before.

<comment><USER34> I have an X1 Carbon Gen 3 tablet. I have had plenty of issues, but the trackpad is the best I have used since my MacBook Pro, and I don't think a better trackpad experience is better on Windows. Also better than the Surface line, though those would be the next best IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The hardware is lovely, but the quality of the hardware support service is not what it used to be.

I recently had to get service for my current generation X1 Carbon.

Completely understandably, Lenovo are not currently able to provide on-site support at residential addresses. However, right now the best case for a depot repair appears to be around 3 1/2 weeks. Call center staff say that they have been prohibited from giving any kind of a timeline for a repair or even an escalation call-back by management.

Lenovo says this is due to Covid, but friends of mine (And a very chatty call center rep) report that it began in January when they moved their primary repair operation from Tennessee to Texas.

</comment><comment><USER36> 15+ hours of battery life on all of them? I would upgrade my machine for that alone.

<comment><USER37> I find the battery life in Lenovo laptops degrading very quickly, comparing to Apple macbooks. I used X1C 4th gen as well as X1 Extreme extensively, and their batteries are pretty close to dead, only delivering ~1-2 hours of work. At the same time, I'm typing this from a 2016 MBP, which is alive and well, batter is good enough still.

Maybe it's just Linux, which I run on Thinkpads. Overall as a system though, the difference is drastic, not in favour of Lenovo.

<comment><USER22> My X1C6 is ~2.5 years old, and I still get around 7 hours of battery. Screen is usually quite low brightness as I live in the UK and it's mainly terminal/VSCode/browser.

I used to have a couple of things tweaked like TLP etc but when I reinstalled from scratch with Fedora 32 I didn't do any of that. Still get awesome battery life, i'd definitely buy one of these newer Thinkpads in a year or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have a X1 Carbon 3rd gen (2015) that is starting to get beat up (man is it durable though). I've been waiting to upgrade to a Thinkpad with a Ryzen 4000, so I'm super excited about these. I might switch to the T series though (for more RAM) and replace my aging desktop as well.

As an aside I've been running Ubuntu 16 for the last couple years no problem. Recently updated to Ubuntu 20 and it's been great so far.

</comment><comment><USER39> My dream laptop isn't there yet, but this is hopeful. I want an X13 or T14 with an -H series CPU. I think the X13 is unlikely, but Asus has shown us that you can fit a 4900HS into a 14" laptop.

It's not an absolute necessity for me. I do my primary computing on a desktop, and always offload compute onto it from a laptop for anything heavy. It's nice to have some local grunt, though.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is it possible to get a ThinkPad without the rubber thing in the center of the keyboard?

<comment><USER41> Ha, meanwhile I wouldn't buy a ThinkPad (or any other laptop) without it.

As for your question, I've never heard of at least the "real" ThinkPad series laptops (X/W/T/...) sold without the TrackPoint. Does it really bother you when typing? If it's the appearance, you can likely find a black nib for purchase or maybe remove the included nib and blacken it out.

<comment><USER42> Same. Once I learned how to use it, I can't go back.

Recently my work laptop was switched to a Dell without the nub and I noticed reduced workflow immediately.

<comment><USER43> I grew up a fan of the track point, back when trackpads were either nonexistent or hot garbage (at least on PC laptops). Which is to say I definitely "learned how to use it". Then I switched to Mac laptops a decade ago. Since then I've got to touch the track point a few more times and it felt so dated. People still tout the precision, but I can get the same level of precision on a quality trackpad, plus much needed fluidity in general, not to mention multitouch gestures.

<comment><USER44> For me, it's not about precision. With the Trackpoint I can rest my hands on the Keyboard/Homerow and I can use the pointer without having to move my hands at all.

<comment><USER43> That's fair. I personally don't mix typing and trackpad usage very much so that advantage is pretty minimal for me.

<comment><USER42> I think the advantage is bigger than you believe, and I would bet you mix typing/trackpad more than you believe also.

<comment><USER43> Could be, but I'm positive that I use gestures more than I mix typing/trackpad, so there's that.

<comment><USER42> Overall I think you'd still be faster in keyboard, but gestures and such offer a lot in terms of simplicity which is a fair trade a lot of the time. If your workflow revolves around typing however, I would still put trackpoint above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> All I want is X1 yoga with 3:2 screen ratio and AMD ryzen... guess I will wait for X years for them to do anything...

</comment><comment><USER46> I was just on Lenovo's site two days ago looking for new Ryzen laptops. Sweet!

</comment><comment><USER47> Can anyone with experience in HP Elitebook laptops recommend which Thinkpad models I should look at? I like the idea of a Ryzen processor and I prefer ports/power over portability/pose.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really can't wait for AMDs deal with Asus over the Ryzen 4000HS chips to end.

The idea of a T14 with a 4900HS (a T14p, if you will) and no dedicated GPU would make a fantastic compact developer machine.

</comment><comment><USER48> Do these have soldered-on RAM, batteries, and/or SSDs? I usually end up upgrading my laptops over a period and the flexibility in being able to do this is important to me.

<comment><USER49> We won't know 'til they are released. But currently the premium for the higher end (and thinner) "T" series is the cpu and ram are soldered. There might be one blank ram slot, not sure. Ironically for the cheaper 'e' series, the ram is socketed (not sure about the cpu). So hopefully for the new 'e' and 'l' series, they'll stay the same. More than likely because the 'T' series are being pushed to be thinner and thinner, they will remain soldered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> can any thinkpad owners comment on the random shutdown bug?

[https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series- Laptops/X1-Ca...](https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series- Laptops/X1-Carbon-Gen-7-regularly-mistakes-empty-battery-and-shuts- down/m-p/4561156)

</comment><comment><USER51> Looks like a joke. There is seemingly not even one configuration with a display resolution above full HD.

<comment><USER52> They're beginning the rollout in the E-series which is their budget line of Thinkpads. Not sure what your metric is, but getting better than Full HD in a Windows portable for $639 is par. (Surface Go 2, being the one exception I can recall).

<comment><USER51> I'd pay 1,5k€ for a machine with really good specs (USB-C charging, good build, 15", good screen, preferably an AMD processor, good/great touchpad, perfect linux support, upgradable RAM), but haven't yet found a laptop that matches these requirements. I _don 't_ care so much about light weight, as I'm looking for a semi-workstation.

The closest thing I've seen so far is (apparently, it's almost impossible to even find out the model code this is supposed to have, I think it's GA401IV- HA026T?) the Asus Zephyrus G14. There's talk about a 15" version (heck, I'd happily take 17" or more), I sure hope it won't be more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> T15 should have touchpad in the middle, not to the left.

</comment><comment><USER54> Are they all just using an integrated gpu?</comment>


This Mount Everest Disaster Shows The Danger Of Clinging To Goals - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com.au/when-not-to-chase-goals-2014-2

<comment><USER2> That's the entrepreneur's dilemma. How do you posses enough passion and confidence to make it through the tough times but known when to call it quits.

It's the single most difficult part of entrepreneurship. It actually gets harder the further you are along the path.

If you give up too early on all your ideas the decision has marginal difficulty. The more you're invested the more difficult it is to decide to throw in the towel.

So the more you progress as an entrepreneur the more difficult it becomes.</comment>


Data is good, code is a liability - <AUTHOR> http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/11/data-is-good-code-is-liability.html <comment><USER2> I worked on Google's statistical machine translation system during my internship. There, I learned that data really is king. The Google Translator team spends equal effort collecting data as they do improving their algorithms.

The 2008 NIST results [1] show that Google's translator swept every category with unconstrained training sets. That is, when Google was allowed to use all of the data that they collected, they smoked the competition. When the training sets were constraint to a common set for all competitors, better algorithms prevaled. You can be sure that the very talented team at Google will be improving their algorithms to ensure that never happens again. But you can also be sure that competitors will be collecting even more data to counter Google's victories.

[1] [http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/mt/2008/doc/mt08_official_r...](http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/mt/2008/doc/mt08_official_results_v0.html)

<comment><USER3> But who remember that in 1998, how many webpages Google indexed and how many Altavista indexed? Data is important, for spam filter, translation etc. but is far from a "king". We have the fancy that data is much important than algorithm Because now we actually get some really good statistical learning methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see this at a micro level frequently when coding. Very often code that is a complex bunch of if / else statements is dramatically simplified by turning it into a map / dictionary with pointers to either data or functions to handle that type of data (object oriented polymorphism being an instance of this).

There are also interesting parallels with REST vs RPC as well. You can create a rich API of function calls for accessing and manipulating data, but it's nearly always less flexible than just exposing the data and letting people manipulate it directly.

I think the tendency to favor algorithms when it might otherwise not be wise to do so comes from how our minds work: we remember things primarily in terms of stories, scenarios, sequences of events. This causes us to interpret the world in terms of behavior as if behavior is the primary construct on which the universe is modeled. But of course behavior is not primary, data is primary, things are primary - behavior is just a fiction we impose on them. This often leads our instincts in the wrong direction.

<comment><USER5> Hmmm replacing if/else statements with a map/dictionary with pointers to either data or functions. A little off topic here but how do you propose to do this? Assuming we know what polymorphism is. Your map/dictionary style is quite interesting.

<comment><USER6> For languages with first-class functions, it looks like this:

        # Algorithms
        def double(x): return x*2
        def square(x): return x*x
        def fact(x): return (x*fact(x-1) if x > 1 else 1)

        # Data
        choices = { 'A': double, 'B': square, 'C': fact }

        # I/O
        choice = raw_input('Choose A, B or C: ')
        x = input('Enter a number: ')
        if choice in choices:
            print choices[choice](x)
        else:
            print 'Initiating self-destruct sequence.'

It's actually similar to how a switch block works, if each case in the switch statement just calls a function or evaluates one expression.

Also worthwhile: Instead of functions, let the dictionary values be lists of arguments for another (multi-argument) function. Then the lookup is like choosing from a set of possible configurations for that function. A little redundancy is OK, since the table is so easy to read and edit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know it's a popular opinion nowadays, but here's what keeps me from adopting this view (huge amounts of data over algorithms) wholesale: Humans make smart decisions on very little data. How many faces does a child have to "process" in order to learn to recognise faces? Not many. How much does a person have to read in order to learn correct spelling? Not the entire google index I suppose.

Humans work neither on simple deterministic rules nor on huge amounts of data. It's something else. Some very smart "algorithm" that we haven't found yet (Bayes nets don't get there either but they look promising).

If there's a way for humans to be smart without much data there must be a way for machines to do the same. That is unless you believe in some kind of spirit/soul/god cult and I don't.

<comment><USER8> Humans are superior to machines in several ways:

\- we get _tons_ of data, just not all textual. We have visual (~30fps in much bigger than HD resolution all day long), audio (again, better than CD quality all day long), smell, taste, and touch, not to mention internal senses (balance, pain, muscular feedback, etc). By the time a baby is 6 months old, she's seen and processed a lot of data. Don't know if it's more than Google's 18B pages, but it's a lot.

-we get _correlated_ data. Google has to use a ton of pages for language because it only gets usage, not context. Much (most?) of the meaning in language comes from context, but using text you only get the context that's explicitly stated. Speech is so economical because humans get to factor in the speaker, the relationship with the speaker, body language, tone of voice, location, recent events, historical events, shared experiences, etc, etc, etc. Humans have a million ways to evaluate everything they read or hear, and without that, you need a ton of text to make sure you cover those situations.

-we have a _mental model_. Everything we do or learn adds to the model we have of the world, either by explicit facts (A can of Coke has 160 calories) or by relative frequencies (there are no purple cows but a lot of brown ones). My model of automobile engines is very crude and inaccurate while my model of programming is very good. Also, because I have (or can build) a model, I have a way to evaluate new data. Does this add anything to a part of my model (pg's essays did this for me)? Does it confirm a part of the model that wasn't sure (more experimental data)? Does it contradict a weakly held belief? Does is contradict a strongly held belief? Is it internally consistent? Is the source trustworthy?

This mental model might just be a bunch of statistically relevant correlations, but that sounds like neurons with positive or negative attractions of varying strength. Kind of like a brain. I believe Jeff Hawkins is on to something (see On Intelligence <http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0805078533/pchristensen-20>), but there needs to be correlated data (like vision/hearing/touch are correlated) and the ability to evaluate data sources.

I agree that if humans can do it, machines can do it, but I think you're vastly underestimating the amount and quality of data humans get.

<comment><USER9> Don't want to be pedantic here, but your info on our visual bandwidth is a bit out of date. We actually only process about 10M/sec of visual data. Your brain does a very good job of fooling your conscious self, but what you are perceiving as HD-quality resolution is actually only gathered in the narrow cone of your current focal point. The rest of what you "see" is of much lower bandwidth and mostly a mental trick. We also don't store very much of this sensory data for later processing.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I knew all that but my comment was already pretty long. Still, 10M/sec * every waking hour of life is still a lot of data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> But, Data creates Algorithms. For some set's of problems using Machine Learning / AI works well. But, it's inportant to understand what limitations your data creates in the same way that you need to understand what bugs exist in your code.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like a paradox in Lisp since code is data.

Does this mean all Lisp code is good? :)

<comment><USER12> I believe we need a "converse of Lisp" - in Lisp code is data, I believe what we need is the notion "data replaces (most) code". That leads to the question, what really is data, and I believe Codd supplies the best answer to that question. One of the truly original ideas in Computer Science that post-dates Lisp (and is not anticipated by Lisp) is Codd's relational model of data, which is not to be confused with relational databases used for storage.

Note that Codd's model is not Turing-complete, while all but the most trivial definitions of code lead to Turing-complete systems, hence the parenthetical most in my "data replaces (most) code". Data is easy, code is hard could be another way to state that.

We have experimented with such ideas, and we can report that they do significantly improve clarity and therefore productivity.

As an aside to a pg essay, I believe clarity is _not_ the same as succinctness and as a corollary, succinctness does not imply productivity except in the somewhat trivial sense of ease of typing.

<comment><USER13> It almost sounds like you're describing Subtext: <http://subtextual.org/>

<comment><USER14> Subtext looks wonderful. Thanks for the link!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Picture of Single Trapped Atom Wins UK Science Photography Prize - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/picture-of-single-trapped-atom-wins-uk-science-photogra-1822957405 <comment><USER2> Years ago, someone created a similar picture with a single atomic _nucleus_. I'd like to find it again.

Normally, nuclear transitions are invisibly-high energies. X-ray and gamma. But a couple of nuclei have multi-step spin isomer decays (or was it shape isomer?). One step of which is visible. So someone trapped and fully stripped a nucleus, and bombarded it to visibility. Naked-eye visibility. And took a picture. Of vacuum vessel window, with a green(?) fluorescence dot.

I saw that picture years ago. Likely a cover photo on something.

 _I would very much like to find it again._ For use in educational content. A lot of time has been spent looking for it, both by myself, and a couple of MIT science librarians. If anyone has a clue, I'd very much appreciate it. Here is a mockup[1] I gimped for user testing.

Why use it in education? To make the concept of atoms more concrete. Atomic _electrons_ are too small (and slow and fragile) to see with your naked eye. But (a couple of) nuclei you can (under hard-to-contrive conditions). Absent concrete, students build their understanding of materials on muddy misconceptions. For example, one failure-mode in teaching high-school stoichiometry, is students not thinking of atoms as real physical objects.

And to preempt a common response... one professor complained "you aren't really seeing the nucleus - it's only a diffraction dot"... right before they headed out to a star party, to apparently "not see" stars. ;)

[1] [http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/2017-Atoms/assets0/wk/...](http://www.clarifyscience.info/assets/2017-Atoms/assets0/wk/ChamberWindow --fake.jpg)

<comment><USER3> The image in David Wong-Campos' Quora answer [1] is a bit different than what you've described, but maybe it would have similar educational use. David says the image was made with a long exposure time, but that it's (faintly) visible with the naked eye.

It's from an ion trap in Chris Monroe's lab at the Joint Quantum Institute. I assume that if they had stripped all the electrons off the barium atom, they'd probably call it a "nucleus" instead of just an "ion".

[1] [https://www.quora.com/If-an-atom-could-be-enlarged-such- that...](https://www.quora.com/If-an-atom-could-be-enlarged-such-that-we- could-see-it-with-our-naked-eye-what-would-it-look-like)

<comment><USER2> > maybe it would have similar educational use. [...] it's (faintly) visible > with the naked eye.

Indeed! It's nifty to hear of an atomic naked-eye visibility story with provenance. Thanks!

"Atoms are 'too small to see' (it is said)... but not really"' stories are liked.

One of the linked papers has the illuminating laser as ultraviolet (thank you sci-hub[1] - making science part of life), so that's definitely electron transitions, not nuclear ones. I'd expect an X-ray laser to be bigger-than- room sized. And I don't know if gamma-ray laser equipment exists yet.

Nuclear shape-isomer transitions are literally the nucleus changing shape. Say between hugged and non-hugged beach ball shape. They're different energy levels, so the nucleus emits a photon to balance. It squeaks. Squeaks a blink.

I don't remember whether the visible transition was a shape-isomer or a spin- isomer transition. But that emitted photon, is usually an invisible gamma-ray or X-ray photon. A few oddball nuclei, toss out an extra (visible low-energy) photon. So if you hit one of these nuclei with a high-energy photon, it changes shape (or was it spin?), it then quickly changes back, giving you back a very-slightly-lower high-energy photon, and a second, visible photon. And then you do it again. So very quickly (nuclear-time-scale very quickly), that a single nucleus can generate enough visible photons, that it can be seen naked-eye. Seen through a gamma-/X-ray-blocking piece of glass, so you don't lose that eye.

[1] Regards sci-hub, that's one point which didn't come up in the recent sci- hub thread. Often when creating education content, I don't need to actually _read_ a paper - I'm just searching for some little bit of information, that's not in the abstract (often it's in the introduction, or mentioned elsewhere in passing), and am thus stymied by paywalls. Imagine trying to do a google search, with no blurbs, and each link you click costs tens of dollars. Until sci-hub.

<comment><USER3> Nuclear physics is not my forte, but if spin is to be conserved, wouldn't there need to be a spin-isomer transition: one photon in, two photons out --> spin quantum number of nucleus must change to balance?

I think one good way to narrow your search would be to identify a single candidate element (or a few) that has such a "forbidden transition" where, despite being forbidden, the time constant is still quite short (so you can get a lot of light out of repeated excitation of a single nucleus) and the energy gap that gives rise to one of the photons is a mere 1.5~3.5 eV (visible).

With a good searchable database of nuclear isomer energy levels, it should be possible to identify transitions like these, and if only a few elements have them, you can start including those names in the search and maybe get results that point more in the right direction. Or do you already have the names of some of those oddball nuclei you mentioned?

I haven't found a good searchable database, just an ugly scanned PDF of Kocher's "Radioactive Decay Data Tables" (1981). Maybe someone has published a more computer-searchable version of the data since then.

<comment><USER2> > Nuclear physics is not my forte ... [spin conservation consequences]

And very not mine - sorry.

> database of nuclear isomer energy levels [-> identify element(s) -> improve > search odds]

A good idea. My extremely fuzzy recollection is the two-ish were stable-ish mid-weight elements. But it's been a long time.

Thank you for the suggestion. If I go down this path again (for a WebVR page to teach size/scale?), I may try that. Another possibility is to find and ask more people with a related research focus. I'd just hoped that with a relevant HN thread, someone might reply "oh, sure, that's on my shelf; let's see, it's ...". :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Technically, it is not the picture of an atom. The wavelength of light is way too big for atoms. The picture is about the photons emitted by the atom after photo-stimulation. But anyway , one of the coolest pictures I've ever seen.

<comment><USER5> Technically, pictures always represent the light emitted or reflected off objects, not the objects themselves (hence _photo-graphy_ , "drawing with light").

However I agree that "Picture of light emitted just by a single trapped atom" would be a more accurate title and yet still incredibly cool.

<comment><USER6> First, reflection and emission are not the same. But more importantly, the only sensible definition of "seeing an object" is that the _angular_ distribution of the light entering your eyeball carries some information about the _geometric_ shape of the object. Otherwise, we could just as correctly say that when we look at dog we are seeing the sun or the overhead florescent bulbs; that's where the photons came from. Likewise, if I put a piece of strongly frosted glass between me and the dog, it would be misleading to say I can "see the dog" even if the photons that come from the dog reach my eye. The key reason this is wrong is that strongly frosted glass scrambles the information.

<comment><USER7> >Otherwise, we could just as correctly say that when we look at dog we are seeing the sun or the overhead florescent bulbs; that's where the photons came from

No, they didn't. The energy came from the sun, however the photons which are collected in your retina to form the image of a dog were emitted from the dog itself. "Reflection" is just the stimulation of photon emission via radiation.

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

<comment><USER6> You're gesturing at an unconvincing objection: that there is no difference between reflection and emission because there is a sense in which light passing through matter is continuously being absorbed and re-emitted. (I say "gesturing" because you don't actually know the physics; it is completely different than either stimulated emission or the photoelectric effect, which you could tell by reading the Wikipedia articles.) Explaining why this objection is boring and unconvincing would ultimately be a long discussion in the philosophy of science ("how can we keep using folk terminology that presumes a sharp devision between two concepts when a theory of physics suggests they are actually just part of a continuum?"), but you can get a sense of that by noticing that emission generally involves a change in the frequency of light while reflection does not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Joe-Z Link to previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16362085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16362085)

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool, I couldn't find in the text what is the scale of the picture ?

<comment><USER9> > Nadlinger's grand prize photo shows an atom as a speck of light between two > metal electrodes placed about 2mm (0.078in) apart.

From [https://petapixel.com/2018/02/12/picture-single-atom-wins- sc...](https://petapixel.com/2018/02/12/picture-single-atom-wins-science- photo-contest)</comment></comment>


Google and IBM to work on self-driving cars with Continental - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/21/us-germany-selfdrive-idUSBRE97K0RM20130821

<comment><USER2> Some context for those wondering: A few years back, Continental bought the Siemens VDO Automotive business unit from Siemens. Siemens had been powering the dashboard and computing units of several auto companies, which is now owned by Continental.

<comment><USER3> Ah, thanks.

It's interesting to see how the corporate alliances are shaking out. Bosch is supplying hardware for BMW and Daimler-Mercedes self driving efforts... not sure who is behind Volkswagen Audi Group's efforts, as Stanford's efforts seem to be off the shelf components (LiDAR and such).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What does IBM have to contribute to self-driving cars? Google's work has gotten by far the most attention.

<comment><USER4> I couldn't find anything about IBM working specifically on self-driving cars, but given their work on AI (people haven't forgotten about Watson already, have they?), it seems only natural that they would have a lot to bring to the table.

<comment><USER5> Self-driving cars involve vision, classification, most likely planning and logical reasoning, path finding, classical machine learning stuff.

Watson is natural language processing. Models of language, search, some amount of logical inference I presume. Not very similar to self-driving cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "While your car starts, please enjoy this ad."

<comment><USER7> If my car is driverless without extra cost, I don't mind being shown some ads.</comment></comment>


Project mouSTer – Mouse adapter for retrocomputers - <AUTHOR> https://retrohax.net/project-mouster-the-ultimate-mouse-adapter-for-retrocomputers/ <comment><USER2> What a great project.

The ST's mouse was/is terrible. Unergonomic and brittle. Back in the 80s I went several months without one, trying to use programs by using the alt-arrow keys to move the cursor because mine broke (and I was broke, too). And then they went and put the mouse/joystick connectors under the keyboard where they were subject to torque and twisting that could cause the leads to break internally, and were a constant hassle to change (lift machine up to swap joystick... accidentally hit reset or power switch on something, or power cable gets pushed out...)

Mice (and floppy drives) are really the weakest link on keeping old STs running. There have been a few adapters around but they usually require either a PS/2 mouse (getting harder to find), or need software drivers. This looks like a great project.

Happy to see some Atari ST content here.

<comment><USER3> The only trouble I ever had with my Atari ST mouse, which I used for about 10 years, was that the axles got dusty. Well, dusty is an understatement. It was a mechanical mouse, with two axles and a ball with a plastic coating of some kind. As you moved the mouse, the ball brought the axles into motion, thus tracking your (more or less) exact movements.

Every few months I had to use my Swiss knife to scrape the accumulated dirt and dust from the axles. With some finesse, so as not to damage the axles.

The mouse could take quite some abuse too. I used to play Arkanoid (also known as Breakout) a lot, at some point. As well as other games which required a lot of clicking and moving around.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I had a pretty dusty house and had to clean mine probably once a week :-) Gunk collected on those axles pretty bad.

But I had buttons fail, and mouse ports break, both. I have a couple sitting around here which still work, but man are they uncomfortable.

Replacement mice back then weren't cheap, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am not sure whether it is a good idea to use an SMD component for one of the two connectors. Connectors are exposed to a lot of physical stress in particular when plugging in and out. Through-hole connectors are more robust with respect to this kind of stress.

<comment><USER5> In this case the DB9 connector is not just surface-mounted, as it sits on the board edge so the force when inserting it will be taken by the board, and the surface-mounted solder points are at both sides of the board so the pull force will not cause bending as it would in a plain surface-mounted connector.

My hunch is that all that makes up for it. I would be very surprised if it breaks off. I'm however not an expert beyond having repaired several surface- mounted connectors that broke off in my own computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> SmallyMouse is another project in the same space: [https://www.waitingforfriday.com/?p=827](https://www.waitingforfriday.com/?p=827)

The original target was Acorn computers, but it works on the AtariST as well: [https://www.waitingforfriday.com/?p=827#Atari_ST](https://www.waitingforfriday.com/?p=827#Atari_ST)

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, the difference AFAIK is that it only supports USB mice with PS/2 support which becomes rare nowadays

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure it supports normal USB mice: [https://github.com/simoninns/SmallyMouse2/blob/master/Smally...](https://github.com/simoninns/SmallyMouse2/blob/master/SmallyMouse2/main.c#L358)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody know of a project like this for old PCs?

I want to plug a specific USB mouse into a 486 and the mouse chipset does not have the PS/2 emulation layer included with most mice produced in the early 2000's :(

<comment><USER9> There are a couple of KVMs that supposedly do USB to PS2.

ATEN CS82U and IOGEAR GCS1722 are two I looked at. About $55 on Amazon.

<comment><USER8> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That giant "Mouse Lives Matter" image is a cheap and tasteless joke and you're distracting from whatever cool hack you did.

Sorry for sounding like the PC police, but for me it's comparable to showing off some plane autopilot system and saying "you can even program it to fly to the nearest skyscraper"...

<comment><USER2> Yikes. I don't see it, did they take it down?

<comment><USER10> Looks like they did. It was just a "lolcat"-esque (nowadays aka "meme pic") of a white mouse (the animal) with the caption as I quoted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thats super awesome! Hopefully it will spread around. Thanks for creating this adapter!

</comment><comment><USER12> > _Amiga, Atari ST, joystick /gamepad_

No Commodore 1351 support?

<comment><USER13> Unlikely to be similar enough. The 1351 does some very strange things with capacitors and analog output to the VIC.

<comment><USER14> ITYM SID. The 1351 essentially looks like paddles, and those come in through SID registers.

The article says 1351 compatibility "Commodore 64" is planned. However, any joystick adaptor will be sufficient to emulate a 1350, which just looks like a joystick anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A vanilla JavaScript alternative to the buggy vh/vw CSS units - <AUTHOR> http://joaocunha.github.io/vunit/

<comment><AUTHOR> Viewport relative units are awesome, except they're not - they are buggy, unreliable and have inconsistent implementation across browsers. vUnit.js offers a lightweight, robust alternative for them and weighs ~600 bytes after gzip.

vUnit.js calculates the browser viewport dimensions and creates CSS rules ranging from 1% to 100% of its size. These rules are then inserted into a stylesheet which is injected on the fly to the <head> tag.

An observer running every 100ms checks if the viewport has been resized and regenerates the CSS rules accordingly. It's a cross-device, event-less solution to keep track of everything that could trigger a resize on the viewport.

On GitHub: [https://github.com/joaocunha/vunit/](https://github.com/joaocunha/vunit/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks interesting. I have used this in the past, although it relies on non-standard CSS to get the results.

[https://github.com/rodneyrehm/viewport-units- buggyfill](https://github.com/rodneyrehm/viewport-units-buggyfill)</comment>


Six global banks join forces to create digital currency - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjH8s3QkIXWAhVS3GMKHW-mCs4QFggrMAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F20c10d58-8d9c-11e7-a352-e46f43c5825d&usg=AFQjCNFfOlpwOTwqDZlkXmnpjwke15Rfgg <comment><USER2> This is a google redirect to ft.com a pay gate site, not google itself.</comment>


Ask HN: Which role in startups do the least actual work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Whichever tech people understand the least and or are afraid of.

</comment><comment><USER3> hr

<comment><USER4> A family member works in HR and between interviewing, hiring, terminations, review cycle, various visa issues (H1 transfers, H1 applications, L1 intracompany transfers, O1 applications, J1 processing if you do internships), benefits management, OSHA compliance, training, compliance with various other regulations and payroll things tend to get fairly busy.

Maybe less so at startup level, but things ramp up once the company hits 50 people or so.

Most of the work is also face-to-face meetings or phone conference calls which take up time even if your personal contribution to them is minimal.</comment></comment>


Taking back control of your time with RSS and emails - <AUTHOR> https://opensourceweekly.org/issues/8/ <comment><USER2> It's sad that RSS (or Atom) as a way of consuming web content (not considering podcasts) has become a "power user niche". In a centralized world where most people get most of their (fake) news from Facebook or WhatsApp, RSS/Atom doesn't stand much of a chance for gaining broader mainstream use.

The biggest advantage of using an RSS reader is that it's a single place that has content ready for you to consume in a list based interface. The web browser interfaces of websites, on the other hand, have all kinds of crazy and trendy layouts where content is a third class citizen (first class and second class are both reserved for ads). This makes skimming easier and quicker. There's only one way to skim in an RSS reader regardless of which site's feed you're looking at. You don't have to go through the mental exhaustion of skimming several different website layouts, fonts, colors, etc.

I use a couple of RSS apps across devices, and at least one of them is running all the time to refresh content periodically so that I don't miss something (I know there are online aggregators, but I haven't found something that I liked and preferably very cheap too). I don't try to read all the articles across sources since that'd be an endless effort, not to mention completely wasteful. I skim through, read some, star some for future reference or use and mark the specific source (or all) as read.

One thing I hate about many sites that provide RSS feeds is the lack of full text content in the feed. It's always a jarring experience to open the link to the full content and experience chaos that's in complete contrast to the reader experience.

On Mac and iOS, I'd recommend NetNewsWire (free and open source). In the past, I've used RSSOwl (cross platform) and Vienna.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe the principal reason is that social networks have accustomed users to be able to interact with the content they absorb. And as we all think that we say is important...

What I would really love to emerge is a kind of new social network / protocol based only on RSS for following and emails for comments :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice to see my own toy-project `rss2email` listed there!

I wrote that as a trivial golang application, specifically because that the original python-based rss2email project was the only reason I ever had any python on my main server.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use RSS/ATOM every day via the feature that introduced me to the concept - Firefox Live Bookmarks (via Waterfox).

I've hung on as long as I can, but between Waterfox Classic being on an older ESR and it getting sold to Privacy One, I'm ready to bite the bullet and move on to a non-browser rss feed reader.

what rss reader gets as close to live bookmarks as possible? There is the livemarks extension for FF but it doesn't actually update / tell you if a given link has been visited.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you explain your job to your parents and grandparents? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I type things on a keyboard and solve puzzles so that you can do things using your computer instead of calling someone or driving somewhere or going to your mailbox</comment>


Stock market tanks 2.5 percent. Was recovery a dead-cat bounce? - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/20/stock-market-tanks-25-percent-was-recovery-a-dead-cat-bounce/

<comment><USER2> History suggests that it was. My guess, based on the amount of prevarication by the banks, is that the market won't return to its former highs for 10-15 years.

<comment><USER3> Good. I'm 28 and this gives me a few more fire-sale years to stock my Roth-IRA</comment></comment>


On portability of init systems (2014) - vezzy-fnord https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/posts/on-portability-of-init-systems/

<comment><AUTHOR> The only useful information there is "sysvinit uses the proc filesystem (in src/{bootlog,hddown,killall5}.c)", the reset is just water about semi-related procfs stuff.</comment>


Stem Paradox: Why Do Muslim-Majority Countries Produce So Many Female Engineers? - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/11/the-stem-paradox-why-are-muslim-majority-countries-producing-so-many-female-engineers.html <comment><USER2> Not just Muslim countries but also, prominently, India, and parts of East Asia.

An obvious hypothesis: in a poorer country it's super important to get a decently paying career, so young people of both sexes gravitate towards engineering, as a guaranteed solid paycheque (plus solid potential for emigration to a richer country) whether they're particularly interested or not.

In richer countries, there's less pressure to be quite so practical with your career choices, so people have a stronger tendency to do what they're interested in, rather than what will pay the most.

<comment><USER3> Parents choose children's career,since cs pays so well everyone irrespective of what the like is pushed into engineering or medical school.

Teenagers in India are very different from the us,parents control a lot of their life.</comment></comment>


Equihax - <AUTHOR> https://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2017/09/14/equihax/ <comment><USER2> Note the new edit on the blog post: They silently corrected the sample data for Bill Gates, changing his state from WI to WA. Major red flag; if it was wrong in the original data just keep it that way and release a few more samples for verification.

<comment><USER3> i mean to be fair it got fixed on the onion site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool, this is good news as it means I might actually be able to find out my credit score.

I recently sent in an application to Equifax to get my credit score along with all the security documents, proof of address, passport, drivers license, registered mail etc. and they rejected my application because I didn't provide a hydro bill. Unfortunately, I live in an apartment and I don't pay hydro, so I sent in a copy of the lease agreement instead but that wasn't good enough :(

<comment><USER5> If its only the score you want, cant you get that from creditkarma for free?

<comment><USER6> You can also get it for free from (at least) American Express and Discover if you have a credit card from them. I'm sure there are other card issuers that give it to you for free as well.

<comment><USER7> And Mint (owned by quicken) so you don't even need to open a new account or ding your credit. They do, however, serve you ads based on your data -- mostly credit card offers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In case anyone else is curious about any ongoing activity (none yet) at the listed addresses, and didn't feel like transcribing:

[https://blockchain.info/address/1KELNpR9ECN46QaNGxPhoJDL4iqa...](https://blockchain.info/address/1KELNpR9ECN46QaNGxPhoJDL4iqaa7Hgch)

[https://etherscan.io/address/0x8D992F58f3887cCD72A14FE29aD22...](https://etherscan.io/address/0x8D992F58f3887cCD72A14FE29aD22Ed0789f70Ef)

<comment><USER9> let us keep in mind that these balances can be inflated by the final recipients

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I actually kinda hope all the data is made public, as that would (at least hopefully) force people to stop treating knowledge of someone's SSN as valid proof of identity, and lead to a better situation overall.

<comment><USER11> What's your SSN and credit score? Just curious.

<comment><USER12> You missing the point. A single person exposing their SSN right now will suffer, but if everyone's SSN is accepted the companies would have to acknowledge that SSN is no longer secret (in fact it never was intended to be secret).

This whole mess could be trivially fixed by credit bureaus introducing a PIN for every person and require it for opening a new credit line (issue is whether they could keep it safe, but at least it would resolve this problem).

They even already have such mechanism in place, which is done through freezing the file. The problem is that for some crazy reason we are charged when we are trying to protect ourselves.

<comment><USER11> You forgot your credit score.

<comment><USER13> The number itself doesn't tell you much. The score of someone who was constantly indebted can be high as long as they always paid on time. Higher than for someone who earns >$100k per year and never needed to take on debt. Obviously very low scores tell you that something's likely wrong (if the data is correct), but medium to high scores without the credit report don't say much about a person.

<comment><USER11> That is after all what we're talking about here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe the hack occurred on an api reporting server? The examples look like logs of api requests to something that generates PDF versions of credit reports, like an API a bank might use to access credit reports.

When you get your report it goes through a process of "generating" the report which you then download as a PDF. This could be logs from that generation service.

If the hackers got unrestricted access they may have found the API's logs and just copied them along with the PDFs?

</comment><comment><USER15> If I were the real hacker, I would prove it by leaking information that wasn't already public.

If I were someone pretending to be the real hacker, I would show a screenshot of SSNs that I could find with Google (e.g. Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, and Bill Gates).

<comment><USER16> I think you're right. But if they had leaked information that wasn't public, we wouldn't have a way to verify it, right?

<comment><USER17> Well, I suppose you could always try applying for a credit card with the leaked info and seeing if you get approved!

<comment><USER18> Doesn't necessarily work. In my late teens I got confused about what my SSN actually was, and entered it wrong when opening a bank account / credit card. Worked fine.

I realized my mistake a few years later and went through quite the endeavor to fix it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if this will introduce instability in credit for consumers. Could this actually have long term ramifications for the US economy?

<comment><USER20> I wonder as well. I think we all forget how important credit reports are in giving banks comfort to lend (not that this is the only way to do it, but it seems that this is the current way). If people can default on a uncollateralized loan with no ramifications, no bank would lend and the credit engine would shut down.

<comment><USER21> People also forget about of rule of law. I defaulted on my loan?

Sue me.

Want to give me a loan? Search for me in public court records.

<comment><USER20> If you think about it from the bank's perspective though, why would they lend you any money if you were likely to default and they would have to sue you to get money back. That would mean that the cost of your loan would go up for them and therefore, your borrowing rate goes up tremendously.

Humans don't have an innate right to borrow money. It's a service provided by financial institutions for a fee. I don't think credit reports are the best solution (far from it) but they definitely improve your ability to borrow money, at least if you have a good one. :)

<comment><USER22> >Humans don't have an innate right to borrow money. It's a service provided by financial institutions for a fee.

This would be fine, except those financial institutions get THEIR money from the fed discount window. If their service was entirely private, that would be one thing but having the government involved changes the concept of "rights", especially when the fed loans out money with the express reason that the banks will loan it out in turn.

<comment><USER23> Their usage of the discount window has to be miniscule compared to customer deposits, no?

<comment><USER24> Over the last decade it's basically their only source of profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This looks like B.S. to me. \- Who would store date of birth as a string? \- If we are stringifying dob why is address still seperated? \- Why are the credit report reasource Ids in the thousands not 1M +? \- Why is the file size null but the file is listed with it's mimeType?

I know equifuckingsucks at security but this is a setup that would actually just be difficult to interact with from a data stand point

<comment><USER26> "Who would store date of birth as a string?"

Enterprise.

"If we are stringifying dob why is address still seperated?"

Enterprise.

"Why are the credit report reasource Ids in the thousands not 1M +?"

Enterprise.

"Why is the file size null but the file is listed with it's mimeType?"

Enterprise.

Be grateful you are in a position to be horrified. I'm currently fighting my way through a system that is not currently "Enterprise" yet, but was certainly headed full bore in that direction.

<comment><USER27> Exactly. The data model, and particular data typing, being terrible is more indicative of it being legit. Not less.

<comment><USER28> Anyone who has to work with the clowns in the credit reporting biz knows that this data is probably sitting on some COBOL-backed shimmed-out VAX talking to drum memory storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 600 BTC = ~2,111,994 USD

<comment><USER30> Note: The value of BTC dropped more than 10% in the past 8 hours, so the value of the ransom just became much more affordable than before, although it's still higher than the middle of May when Equifax claims the breach began.

<comment><USER31> Just an aside, "ransom" is probably not the right word, since I presume they are not taking money to destroy or not release the data. They're selling the data to anyone, and probably will be happy to sell the same data many times over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Instructions for private buy dosn't make sense. Transaction id is public, so anyone can write them and claim a transaction is theirs.

<comment><USER33> Presumably first person to email gets the private address to buy, so if you're slow you'll have wasted 0.2BTC

<comment><USER34> They should have had you send a message signed with the source address of the 0.2 to their email.

<comment><USER35> I was going to say "Nobody would know how to do this" but in reality, it's probably a bit more like "Not enough people would know how to do this" and if they're taking increments of 0.2BTC, they're hoping or expecting to get some real volume.

Making it just hard enough that anyone with a Coinbase account and a credit card can't just do it without actually running a full node of their own, would probably be bad for business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This seems odd to say, but if they included a price for just a simple name+birth date query, there is probably a decent price point people would actually pay just to know if they are on there. Like if they have even just half of the names querying for their own identities for like $30 a pop, that'd be more than what they are asking for for the whole bulk.

<comment><USER37> Think of the operational cost involved to satisfy everybody's query.

<comment><USER38> Couldn't it easily be automated? A lot of upfront work but then just monitoring.

<comment><USER37> Running servers takes resources too and in this case the servers need to support millions of queries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Bitcoin and Etherium are used too much for money laundering. They need to be regulated. There is also so much energy used to mine the coins. More than many countries. We need to really think about what we get out of building a money a laundering technology primarily used on the dark net.

<comment><USER40> Strong encryption is used too much to coordinate illegal activities, such as terrorism. It needs to be regulated.

Except, how do you actually intend to regulate it? Enacting a law to do so is easy. Actually enforcing that law is another matter.

<comment><USER41> And you know who terrorists recruit? _Children_.

You _do_ care about the children, don't you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > It claims to be the real EQUIFAX hackers, unlike the last darknet site that > was soon taken down by morons.

I hadn't heard about this last site. How did morons take it down? Or is that suppose to mean that morons put it up? English...

<comment><USER43> Both. Morons put it up, got called on it by non-morons, and then took it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is those Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and Bill Gates real SS numbers?

<comment><USER44> Dunno why, but just surprised that Kim K's credit score with Equifax is 643. Unrelated, sorry.

<comment><USER21> That makes sense to me.

Having zero debt (and no credit cards) can easily knock your score that low, even if you have a perfect payment record.

The whole credit score thing is an extortion game:

To the consumer: Want a loan? Buy everything on cash back cards.

To vendors: Don't like the fact that we're upping transaction fees? What percentage of your customers use credit cards again?

If they actually were worried about your ability to repay a new debt, the fact that you already have a pile of debt would not _increase_ your score.

<comment><USER45> It's not the pile of debt that increases the score. It's the history of repaying that debt per its agreed terms that does.

While I'm not a fan of the credit bureau system, I understand the reasoning behind it. It's an efficient way for creditors to get access to the needed information. Lacking that, to allow the bank to evaluate your creditworthiness among other things you'd likely have to provide a list of references of past creditors and then your new potential creditor would have to validate those references individually: verify you had credit with them, verify you adhered to the payment terms, etc.

For better or for worse today instead of an on-demand complete graph we've got a centralized cache. This serves the needs of the financial players better (read: cheaper) while putting the PII of consumers at more risk.

<comment><USER40> The point is that the credit score system is utterly dominated by past credit (and its repayment), even though other factors (like current wealth and income) are far more important in practice - and this leads to paradoxical and absurd situations where someone can be filthy rich, but have low credit score because they have zero credit history, never having taken a loan.

Many other countries don't have such a system, and creditors use your past and projected income as a basis for making decisions.

<comment><USER45> > other factors (like current wealth and income) are far more important in > practice - and this leads to paradoxical and absurd situations

From the perspective of the finance industry, these "absurd situations" are so far below the level of noise that they are effectively theoretical. If you want to discuss "in practice": in practice the users of the US credit system have no "current wealth" worth speaking of (look up the median net worth of US households), and their ability to maintain their existing debt is the defining feature of their financial status.

<comment><USER40> Income is more important than wealth, anyway.

Again, there are many countries - including First World European countries - that don't have the credit score system, or only have reports on non-payments (usually govt-run). They seem to be doing just fine.

<comment><USER45> Lenders in the US are just trying to maximize their risk-adjusted profit - there's no conspiracy here. If income alone was just as good as income + debt servicing history for making the statistical decisions required to maximize credit industry profits (decisions like whether or not to lend, at what rate, at what ratio to income/assets, etc), do you think the lenders would pay the overhead of the additional useless tracking? Are you suggesting that Equifax & Co. are pulling a fast one on the US lenders and their armies of actuaries and after all these years the lenders haven't noticed the uselessness of the product?

<comment><USER40> Not at all. My point, rather, is that the credit industry can still function pretty damn well without having access to aggregated credit history and scores, and so banning the practice altogether, or severely limiting the amount of data so collected, in the interests of public good (privacy protections etc), should be considered a viable option on the table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> EDIT: see philipodonnell's reply to this post for an alternative explanation. I may have jumped the gun.

As far as I know credit scores are not part of credit reports as they do not show up when you request your credit report. If they were storing "credit score" as part of your credit report but withholding that information when you request a copy that would seem to violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

It wouldn't really make sense to store a credit score with the report anyways, it would only make sense to generate it on the fly only when a lender requests it. I'm assuming that different creditors report credit information on different days so it would be changing every time a creditor submitted information on that person which would be multiple times a month for someone with multiple accounts. And if the credit score algorithm was updated they would have to recalculate the "credit score" field on the entire database! This wouldn't really make sense from a technical perspective.

Furthermore, there's not just one "credit score," there's different algorithms for coming up with a credit score. One creditor may request FICO 8 and another one may request VantageScore 3.0 on the same day. Then another comes by and wants FICO 5. So even if they saving a credit score in the database I wouldn't think that they would have a field labeled as a generic "credit score" without any qualifier. It would be "FICO 8 score" or whatever algorithm was used to generate the score.

There's also other problems, I don't have my Equifax report in front of me right now but credit bureaus store alternative/former names which aren't included here. Like for me my reported names are FirstName LastName; FirstName MiddleInital LastName; and FirstName MiddleName LastName. All because different creditors reported my name slightly differently. If you change your name (like Kim Kardashian did - she's Kim Kardashian West now) it would report both your former name(s) and current name(s). I don't see any indication that this sort of information is included.

Therefore I very seriously doubt the authenticity.

(From a technical perspective "pdf" is not a MIME type, the MIME type of PDF files is "application/pdf")

<comment><USER14> You're assuming this is a database dump. It looks more like logs from the service that creates PDF versions of reports for download. That would have a more simplistic data structure that might look like this.

<comment><USER47> If it's a service request log, why service would have field requestId and then set it to null? Of course, you can expect anything from people that have admin/admin security on their employee portal, but looks weird. Also, street data have no field for apartment number - does nobody live in multi-tenant buildings? Of course, there may be optional field for this, but given how many null fields there are, it doesn't look like this API does optional fields. In summary, API response format could be anything, as I said, especially from people who do admin/admin, but on the fact of it it looks questionable.

Also, why credit reports for Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian were created at the same second and then modified at the same second? Probability of this happening as a result of natural client activity - i.e. just watching the logs of the active service - is zero. If the attackers had access to this service and initiated the requests, then why not show the resulting PDFs, that they supposedly also must have had access to if they had access to the API?

<comment><USER47> Also, quick search shows that SSNs of Trump, Kardashian and Gates has been published before. Which means this sample contains only the information that is in the public sources already, or is meaningless (like IDs). Thus, at least the JSON dump thing proves exactly nothing. Of course, if they published a previously unpublished SSN, we'd have hard time verifying it too, so not sure what could be a good proof here...

<comment><USER48> Presumably if someone wanted to sell this data for big bucks they would have found a way to provide a sufficient and satisfying proof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Might as well scrap AML/KYC laws now that everyone can open any account anywhere with someone's ID

</comment><comment><USER50> [https://trustedidpremier.com/eligibility/enroll.html](https://trustedidpremier.com/eligibility/enroll.html)

^ you can see if you or any of the above mentioned people have been compromised using this tool.

<comment><USER51> Yeah, at best, that tool from Equifax is unreliable. People have put in fake users and SSN and still it's told them they were affected. At worst, it's just another way to get customers to sign up for a new service.

<comment><USER52> It's asking for the last 6 digits of SSN and name. Considering that is 1 million unique numbers, out of 146 million potentially compromised accounts, you could probably put any number in there and be reasonably sure of getting a hit.

<comment><USER51> This is a very good point and may explain this phenomenon. However, I'm not 100% sure that those numbers are equally distributed. Still, it may well account for the fact that random numbers still resulted in a hit. Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Posting our president's SSN on your blog after obtaining it from a darknet page... priceless.

<comment><USER54> I applaud your concise cleverness, even if this is not the time nor the place!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> The social security number for Donald Trump in their sample was issued around 1963. Seems fishy.

<comment><USER56> He would have been around 17. That's reasonable, given that many/most didn't get an SSN back then until they started working.

<comment><USER57> The SSA sends you one at birth (now?).

<comment><USER58> If someone applies for it on the baby's behalf. It's still an optional program as far as I know.

If you don't have a SSN, you'll need an ITIN for taxes.

(ITIN - Individual Taxpayer Identification Number)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This really pisses me off. It's only a matter of time before some random person opens up a cellphone, utlity, or bank account... or worse. Completely messed up.

Everyone American should be scared shitless at this incompetence. It's going to cost everyone thousands of dollars over their lives for credit fraud protection. Just another expense to add.

<comment><USER60> It's also extortion. "Please pay us money to solve the massive problem we created." I don't know how it's legal.

<comment><USER61> Not saying it would be great in the short term, but I wonder how it would play out if the entire database was made widely available. It seems like it would be a lot harder to enforce a debt if the borrower was originally identified based on "secrets" that were well known to be public at the time. Maybe then they would come up with a better authentication scheme than "what color was your first car?"

<comment><USER62> It would be an awful lot like the end of Fight Club. Destroy credit records, or reduce them to meaningless, either way the economy would collapse.

People can complain all they want about credit, but the reality is that it exists as a financial service because loaning things with interest is probably older than agriculture in human society. We've just gotten very good at risk assessment, and this going public would ruin our ability to assess risk for years.

Honestly, the credit industry ought to be the ones raging against Equifax's fuck up. If only all the other credit bureaus weren't on eggshells hoping they're not next.

<comment><USER63> Credit and existing credit records would still be easily available.

The only change would be that you need to present photo ID in person to open new credit lines... which doesn't seem that unreasonable really.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Two-Way Communication Is Possible with a Single Quantum Particle - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/two-way-communication-possible-single-quantum-particle?tgt=nr <comment><USER2> This is really fun to think about from an FTL communications standpoint.

The experiment involves thinking of the photon as a wave interfering with itself between two experimental stations. The experimenters can adjust the phase of the waveform locally to determin where the particle manifests. The changes they make locally to the phase of the waveform should propagate towards the other experimenter at the speed of light because the waveform is an electromagnetic wave (I suspect this manifests as a slightly higher or lower energy photon briefly as the change in phase propagates because the phase change region is essentially a brief bit of shorter or longer wavelength waveform).

The experimenters can certainly each measure the photon's position before the speed of light would allow for conventional information propagation (nothing stops them from doing so), but they won't get the other party's message if they do because the phase change won't have propagated to their end yet.

Ok, so far so good - we're safe, no FTL communications. But we just concluded that these two measurements are made on one photon and are essentially decoupled because the E/M wave hasn't propagated the phase change yet. That means there could be scenarios where both experimenters get the photon or neither experimenter gets the photon. But there is only one photon and only enough energy for one photon (we change the phase slowly enough to make sure we don't add a second photon's worth of energy). So we're cool on FTL but just violated conservation of energy, which is also kind of a big no no. It seems like you can either conserve energy or FTL but not both.

I'm sure this will all get worked out and submitted to Physical Review Letters and odds are good both FTL and conservation of energy will be safe from disruption, but it's definitely fun to think about.

<comment><USER3> Conservation of energy is hard to think about in an infinite, expanding universe that has "weird" quantum effects. Apparent local violations of conservation of energy may not be meaningful.

<comment><USER4> In physics, local violation of conservation of energy due to quantum effects is pretty established by now. Unfortunately, these effects don't scale, that is, in larger scale conservation of energy does hold. So alas, you can't use these effects to make a power generator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <Edit: probably wrong> First they can use a single photon to send a message(bit) from Alice to Bob _or_ from Bob to Alice, they can't use a single photon to send a message form Alice to Bob _and_ from Bob to Alice. [note: exclusive or] </probably wrong>

Also, the article is not very clear, but IIUC after one of Alice or Bob decide to send a message to the other one, they must have a clear path to "send" the entangled-modified-photon to the other. (For example, if Alice is in submarine in a cave at the bottom of the sea, and Bob is in the surface, and there are 1 mile of rocks, mud, sand and dirty water, and they can't communicate in any direction, even if they have a magic box with the trapped entangled photon.)

<comment><USER6> But the quantum hype train must be fueled!

AFAIK the only value of quantum communications seems to be that it can provide a tap-proof channel to send one bit of information per entangled photon to a receiver, but only if they have already established the entanglement and have established the timing of the "quantum message" transmission.

This new discovery suggests that the two entangled parties can both encode those qubits with a message and both receive the other party's message before losing the entanglement?

What am i missing here?

<comment><USER7> There is no entanglement, it is a single photon. This appears to be a rare event of quantum physics be accurately reported.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Single wire communication does the same thing. The best example is the telegraph. You have a start, body and end protocol for your message on both ends. The quantum particle replaces the wire. Setting up the protocol and consistently pulsing that particle is the hard part.

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought something like this was supposed to be impossible because it would allow FTL communication? Or is the communication at light speed?

<comment><USER7> The photon travels the full distance between Alice and Bob to interfere with itself and be detected. So not faster than light. You may be confusing this with entangled photons which this would also probably work for although this shows you only need the one photon so entangling multiple photons would be a waste of time.

<comment><USER10> ... you're right. I expected them to use entangled photons (which would have achieved the same but without the delay) and that shaped how I read the article.</comment></comment></comment>


FPGAs and Deep Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://fpgasite.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/deep-machine-learning-with-fpgas/ <comment><USER2> The history of Artificial Intelligence goes back much further than the "early 1980s". It goes at least back to the conference at Dartmouth in 1956, if not back to Turing's 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. The sentence is confusing. When I wrote it I was thinking about expert systems, which really blossomed more or less during the 80s, and not about AI as a whole. I have changed that paragraph adding some of your comments. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So what's changed that FPGA's are making a come back? They were all the rage in 2008/9...however that faded relatively quickly when people realized programming them was a hassle and that programming had direct implications to synthesizability/clock speed/area. Looks like Google Trends shows a downward spiral in interest from 2004 to present, so my intuition was close. OpenCL->HDL and Vivado's C/C++ -> HDL makes the process a bit easier, but it's still not as easy as writing optimized C code.

To get perf on an FPGA over a hard core you must go very wide (as in lots of parallelism). I suspect you could order custom hard cores from places like Tensilica and get far better perf/watt. I love FPGA's, they thrive on parallel integer/fixed point codes if enough time is put into designing the pipeline. It seems for most float heavy codes a hard core unit at a higher clock rate with a dedicated MMU is much better? Am I missing something that changes that?

<comment><USER4> This won't directly answer your question but FPGA boards are now more accessible to hobbyists. That helps with popularity.

<comment><USER3> not sure they haven't always been fairly accessible? I suppose prices are now dirt cheap vs. 2010/11 where I'd have to pay 300-400 for a mediocre FPGA (I've used digilent for years, prices on there have dropped quite fast in the last two years or so). then again, atmel had an FPGA co-processor for awhile at a relatively cheap price (can't remember the name...probably X28 with some characters), but still not really capable of running a neural network at any appreciable depth.

<comment><USER4> They may have been available for sale but people probably did not know about them. That itself takes most of the time. People need to learn about the product and understand how it can be used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's excellent to see FPGAs being increasingly utilised.

As moore's law no longer holds true for CPU, there is increasing interest turning to FPGAs. You can create a truly bespoke Processor for any task.

Of course this is trade of between development time / cost vs processing needs of task.

I suspect FPGAs demand to only increse over the coming years. Intel's integration of FPGA into their line of processors is a promising step and sign of where things may be heading.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if common boring languages/runtimes, say Java/JVM, are easily amenable to making use of on-die FPGAs.

Will we see a new generation of JITs emitting FPGA code?

<comment><USER5> Unlikely for many years (if ever), compiling HDL down to an image to flash FPGA with takes hours. Routing wires etc is very difficult process and is very compute intensive.

JIT for FPGA is quite possibly mathematically impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is literally no new information in this article about DL and FPGAs.

</comment><comment><USER8> I had discussed this with some Deep Learning experts at the local University and they believed that FPGAs won't be as powerful as people seem to think since the many-many connections between blocks will not be up to the task.

In any event, Nerabus is a company (by the same guys as CodeThink) which is interested in running FPGA in the cloud: [http://nerabus.com](http://nerabus.com) I'm not sure if they got off the ground with the idea or if they were too early or what.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hi, chclau, I see you are the author and you are present in this comment thread.

Your post smells like spam. However, other posts on the same blog have content: [https://fpgasite.wordpress.com/2016/08/09/pseudo-random- gene...](https://fpgasite.wordpress.com/2016/08/09/pseudo-random-generator- tutorial/)

What's up? What is this blog for?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sorry. Why do you say that this post is SPAM? Is an article I wrote since I saw several other articles about Deep Machine Learning and about how quite a few companies are using FPGAs for it, and I thought it would be nice for other developers to know.

My blog is for sharing knowledge on VHDL projects for FPGA, but I also share news on the field. I think that knowing where your field is going to is part of the needed knowledge to be a good designer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note that as far as I'm aware all the custom FPGA solutions (and even Google's TPU which I think is ASIC) are really only being used for inference, and only "beat" GPUs on a efficiency basis.

That's interesting and useful, but the real bottleneck with deep learning is the training stage. AFAIK everyone is still doing that on GPUs.

<comment><USER11> But isn't efficiency(and density) almost everything when it comes to data centers ?

<comment><USER12> TCO is. FGPAs have a fairly high initial outlay, and fairly high costs to program. In addition, they often lag behind CPUs both in density (except for hard IP blocks, but that's not what you're buying them for!) and in frequency. You have to be able to get a big win on parallel execution and avoiding control overhead to make them truly cost-effective.

Given that Google's already gone down the custom ASIC path for DNNs (and see Intel's recent acquisition of Nervana for $400m), and how much effort Nvidia is putting into making Pascal a great architecture for deep learning, I'm deeply skeptical of the wins from FPGAs in this space. The volume demands are too high: I suspect they'll fade out pretty quickly in favor of custom silicon.

<comment><USER11> I agree about DNNs.

But in general, do you think that FPGA's will become a big part of the cloud ? or will they just be employed in a few, relatively small niches ?

<comment><USER12> I don't know, but I'm skeptical. It depends too much on whether the computationally intensive (and latency sensitive) parts of cloud-y workloads become highly specialized, or common. If they're common, you'll just have a set of ASIC-based accelerators, or Intel will start putting in accelerators for them on their chips. This is probably the most likely path. But if it turns out that genomics needs one thing, banking needs another, CAD/design/sim another, etc., then FPGAs might work.

Low volume + low money = CPU. Low volume + crazy money -> high frequency trading = FPGAs viable. Low volume + really hard realtime control or fast signal processing -> Often FPGA, but DSPs are still viable. Medium volume + decent money = FPGA. Baidu and MS's deep learning fits here. High volume = ASIC. Google's TPUs fit here.

Machine learning and DNNs seem to be in the process of jumping from mostly-CPU to serious ASIC.

FPGA's success also depends on how well Intel and the ARM ecosystem can start to support medium-volume customization. Intel's historically been more exclusively high-volume, but if you look at the kinds of deals they're inking with their tier-one (and two?) customers, it's clear they're trying to move in that direction: [https://goparallel.sourceforge.net/intel-bets-big-custom- xeo...](https://goparallel.sourceforge.net/intel-bets-big-custom-xeon-chips- cloud-companies/)

The challenge for FPGAs is that the better the design & synthesis tools get to support FPGA, the easier it is for the CPU manufacturers to do the same thing and adapt more rapidly. The core advantage the FPGAs retain is that they can be retargeted much more easily, and their dev cycle is shorter. My crystal ball is fuzzy. :)

<comment><USER11> Thank you.

>> Medium volume + decent money = FPGA.

I wonder though: How important is reprogramming ? because you can create structured ASIC's (something between an asic and an FPGA) at a low enough volume( maybe 500/1000+ ,like eAsic(which Intel are working with) ) ?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I build this web app (available domains)? - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in whether people would use a web app that gave available website domain suggestions from real people for a fee. I'd like to gather feedback as to whether this is useful before actually building it.
It would work by specifying what your website/business/startup/webapp is in a short description and listing some keywords or domains you like, as well as what domain extensions you will accept. You then receive only available domain suggestions from people.
The idea is that coming up with a website name is difficult for many people, primarily because the domain is not available for every good name you think of. For this service you would pay a small fee and receive a list of domains, all of which are available, so you just have to choose which you like the best.
Would you use this? What would it be worth to you if you could get 100 or 200 available domain suggestions? Do you have any other feedback?
Thanks very much for any input or advice. <comment><USER2> similar service: <http://www.pickydomains.com/></comment>