Probabilities in the Game of Monopoly - <AUTHOR> http://www.tkcs-collins.com/truman/monopoly/monopoly.shtml

<comment><USER2> Instead of average-case, here's a funny analysis of an extreme case, the shortest possible game:

[http://scatter.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/the-shortest- possibl...](http://scatter.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/the-shortest-possible- game-of-monopoly-21-seconds/#)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a fascinating breakdown. Quite a few people have covered this ground before, but I've rarely seen the raw statistics of the game explored in such depth. (Most commentaries I've seen, for example, start and stop at the probabilities of landing on any given space, perhaps coupling those with the expected ROI of improvements on X or Y properties. But those are only some of the factors in play, and you do a nice job going beyond them).

Apropos of nothing, there's a really entertaining documentary called "Under the Boardwalk" that sort of flew under the radar last year. It's about the history of the game, and the national championships (yes, apparently there are Monopoly players who take themselves as seriously as chess masters).

</comment><comment><USER4> My dad had an article about Monopoly published in 1973 - [http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1973mar24-00044](http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1973mar24-00044)

Including probabilities per space, and expected return per dollar invested.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you like this kind of stuff, here is an analysis of Chutes and Ladders [http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november12011/index.html](http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november12011/index.html)

And another about Candyland [http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december12011/index.html](http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december12011/index.html)

Anyone for Battleship? [http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december32011/index.html](http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december32011/index.html)

Or Hangman? [http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html](http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html)

Or Darts? [http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/january12012/index.html](http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/january12012/index.html)

It's a hobby of mine to analyze these kind of games. Suggestions for other games to look at welcome.

</comment><comment><USER6> (Smiles) Ah, memories of high school in 1985: writing an Apple II program to find the odds of landing on each Monopoly property, a bit surprised that (IIRC) the orange & green blocks were visited with unusual frequency.

Was thinking of a similar analysis last week when playing a simplified "kids'" version of Monopoly.

<comment><USER7> me too, my friend. Apple IIc in my case. Monte Carlo methods worked wonders for a teen who didn't know about Markov Chains and stationary distributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ha... me and my friends would always play by house rules, and start out with a ridiculous amt of money (we even created more money with paper if the bank ran out), so there was no question we would buy every single property we landed in.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great and all, but I suspect many readers will have the same response as I: that as a 10-year-old I'd figured out the best-value spaces just by the jail and Go To Jail placements alone, along with the higher rents and bonus chance cards for some properties over others for the same building cost. It's great for someone to run the figures, but if you didn't know what the answers were largely going to be you're a terrible gameplayer and analyst of your environment!

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's a problem for you, fellow algorithmists: [http://projecteuler.net/problem=84](http://projecteuler.net/problem=84)

<comment><USER11> I have a Lisp solution to this that I wrote some years ago when I was going through Project Euler problems. [https://github.com/2old2randr/Euler/blob/master/monopoly.lis...](https://github.com/2old2randr/Euler/blob/master/monopoly.lisp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gah! He's using horrible US street names! Mayfair et al please! Does anyone have a translation table?

<comment><USER13> Monopoly board images:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=monopoly+board&safe=off&rlz=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=monopoly+board&safe=off&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS450US450&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=kBomUtnAB4apsATwvIHIAw&ved=0CC4QsAQ&biw=1236&bih=643)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Weird how this shows up today. I played Monopoly over the weekend and we were discussing the same thing!

<comment><USER15> A bit off-topic: Please note that we have much better boardgames than Monopoly these days. Have a look at boardgamegeek.com for some suggestions. Carcassone is a good beginners game.

<comment><USER16> Much to the chagrin of the BGG crowd, Settlers of Catan is a much better gateway boardgame. It's easy to learn and it has a lot of social interaction. I'd also recommend Ticket to Ride as the second-best gateway boardgame. I love Carcassone, but it's not nearly as intuitive on the first couple of playthroughs, and the scoring at the end is more than tedious.

<comment><USER17> I've generally had the opposite experience. Carcassone is simpler, and a player can generally play competently on their first game.

Catan, on the other hand, I've found difficult to teach, despite the rules being fairly obvious to me, and there's lots of edge-case rules. (I had one friend get fairly pissed at me that I didn't describe, at the beginning of the game, the rule that a new settlement can break a longest road, which is a rule that hardly ever comes up)

Edit: That said, Catan probably is a better gateway game into European-style board games in general, since it uses many of the same concepts.

Ticket to Ride would probably be my top pick now, though, for a gateway game.

<comment><USER16> Have you played Trains yet? I think that may be one of my new go-to games with new people. It's like Dominion but a lot less abstract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This needs some charts!</comment>


Goldman Sachs May Lose Millions From Ex-Worker's Code Theft - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=axYw_ykTBokE

<comment> brown9-2 Sadly it sounds as if the US Attorney doesn't really understand much about how either the software system worked, or how trading in general works:

 _"The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways," Facciponti said, according to a recording of the hearing made public yesterday. "The copy in Germany is still out there, and we at this time do not know who else has access to it."

...

"Once it is out there, anybody will be able to use this, and their market share will be adversely affected," he said._

It's not as if the software alone allows someone to make trades up to 28% of the size of the overall market.

Maybe if you had their code, infrastructure, co-location, and oh yeah that's right, tens of billions of dollars to make trades with. It's not as if a script kid in Germany is suddenly going to be able to download the trading code for free, and become a multi-millionaire overnight using their trading algorithms without any seed investment.

</comment><comment><USER2> I find it interesting that they had the political pull to get the FBI to arrest the accused in 1 month after filing the complaint. With computer crime and IP theft, it usually takes about 12-18 months before the FBI gets moving to arrest folks.

UBS had 3 folks quit back in March, also allegedly taking about 25k lines of code with them, and while UBS filed a lawsuit a week later, neither of the 3 have been arrested at all. [http://www.businessinsider.com/ubs-accuses-three- quant-trade...](http://www.businessinsider.com/ubs-accuses-three-quant- traders-of-stealing-its-secret-code-2009-6)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't believe the prosecutor that this represents a U.S. national security risk. It takes a lot more than a trading algorithm to throw off markets. It takes a lot of money, and U.S. traders with a lot of money are already doing this. It's called arbitrage.

This is definitely an IP loss for Goldman, but it is not as big of a deal as they are making it out to be. Chances are the U.S. Attorney's office has access to Goldman's pockets.</comment>


Wordpress.com Suffers Major DDoS Attack - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/03/wordpress-com-suffers-major-ddos-attack/ <comment><USER2> I stopped reading at "(DDoS =! Anonymous)". I can overlook the gross gramatical errors that permeate TechCrunch's writing, but transposed characters in pseudocode? Can't handle it.

<comment><USER3> Obviously the bang is stopping the flow of equality from reaching its destination. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everything is mostly back to normal.

<comment><USER5> Do you know how many Gigabits per second it was?

<comment><USER6> It was enough to take out anyone else who shared the same facility (like us...) and seems to have hammered the Layered Tech border routers into oblivion for 5-10 minutes, so I am guessing it was pretty big.

<comment><USER5> Do you know if you have any DDoS mitigation devices in front of the border routers? Something from like Arbor Networks or Intruguard? In a few attack scenarios, it really helps.

We're also facing a multi-gigabit attack this week and have dealt with some in the past. Happy to compare notes if you'd like: firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER6> I should probably know this info but managed to forget it since the site I run has to be placed outside these devices (our everyday traffic is almost indistinguishable from a DDoS.) In fact, that might tell you something, since our Chicago data center was taken out as collateral damage and we sit in front of these devices if you were to draw a big-picture network diagram of the site. From what I can tell so far the attack was just melting the uplinks and it took a few minutes to null-route the various attackers; when things got fixed they did so on specific routes (e.g. Layer3 to the east coast came back before another route the Dallas and the southeast, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TechCrunch hosts itself on Wordpress.com? I thought they just run Wordpress off their own servers. Wouldn't that make more sense?

<comment><USER4> They're on VIP hosting -- <http://vip.wordpress.com/hosting/>

If you're a publisher it's a great deal, we can absorb huge spikes in traffic because the scale of what we do. But you have the risk of being collateral damage in something that affects all of WP.com, like a DDoS or bad code deploy.

On the bright side, anything that impacts all of WP.com is an all-hands-on- deck matter for us since it's the vast majority of our business, so we're as aligned as could be.

<comment><USER8> About this attack, I am curious if that was targeting a specific web site or just the whole inf? Can you share the details? How many different IPs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've felt some ripple effects from this on a self hosted blog from plugins that rely on the wordpress.com API for anything (akismet, stats, popular posts). Not good.

<comment><USER10> Likewise. I hadn't joined the dots on it though.</comment></comment>


PleaseReturn.it - <AUTHOR> http://www.pleasereturn.it/ So twice in the last several months I have had stuff swiped. All too low in value to really involve the police (or have them give a rip). The only thing I could think of was to "register" the thefts on the Internet and hope for a Google search by some law-abiding citizen to catch it. Not much of a hope but it made me feel better.
Except, there was nowhere to do this. So I created PleaseReturn.it as a free place anyone can upload anything you've had taken (except your innocence). It likely won't work, but you can say you at least did something.
There, I feel better already... <comment><USER2> is this site, yours?

site seems very basic but does what it says on the tin. Needs traction to work though...</comment>


US government preparing for coronavirus pandemic that could last up to 18 months - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/19/health/us-coronavirus-case-updates-thursday/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> __US government is preparing for coronavirus pandemic that could last up to 18 months and 'include multiple waves of illness' __is full headline. Rate limited in title.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone have an MVP? - <AUTHOR>

Is anyone working on an MVP they want to share/get feedback on? I'm reading a lot about lean startup methodologies and would love to see a few. <comment><USER2> <http://trackjumper.com> is more or less the first version that was released.

You'll notice the design is less than inspired, there is only one subscription plan, and the product tour is weak. The product itself is a little disorganized, but functional. All in all, it was good enough to release and get paying customers, but not good enough to be proud of or convert at the level I'd like to see.

Check back in about a week, and you'll be able to see a fairly major design upgrade. I redesigned the UI and the entire sales funnel based on customer feedback and will be wrapping that up later this week.

<comment><USER3> I'm always interested to see where the first design comes from.

Did you guys have any inspiration?

Did you start with a template and tweak it?

Do you have a solid design guy on your team?

<comment><USER2> My team is just me. And I'm a lousy, but improving designer. I essentially find a site I like, and then "borrow" design elements from it. I don't scrape or steal - just take some direction. Without it, I'd never be able to get started.

I'm slightly ashamed to publicly admit this, but my design is a poor imitation of what I think is a rather good design here:

<http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/>

I took some cues from them, simplified it so that I could actually do it myself, and then stopped improving it when it was no longer absolutely embarrassing.

The logo is just Arial. Go figure.

I have since redone it almost completely, and I think the new one is much better, but like I said, you won't be able to see it until sometime later this week/next week.

The new design is much more focused and less scattered. Each page has a clear point to get across. Aesthetically, it's nicer as well, although I've confirmed that with precisely zero people.

As far as the app itself, I just made that up from scratch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://easyunsubscriber.com/removeemails.php> was our version 1a. It's a working prototype without any payment mechanisms. ####Edited to add This version is no longer functional - it will say you unsubscribed, but it doesn't actually unsubscribe you.

Version 2 is now at <http://easyunsubscriber.com> and has a few payment plans. We're still doing a lot of testing and tweaking.

We plan on doing a lot of multivariate testing on the current version (2) to find out the best pricing plans to maximize our revenue. We're also testing to see if users are more likely to buy if we have a video demo or just a screenshot.

We also bought version 2's design from <http://www.chimerathemes.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm working on a few right now, but I'm keeping it limited to only Adwords Traffic so I have good benchmarks for future changes.

Here are some resources.

[http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product- exam...](http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product-examples)

[http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-examples-of- Minimum-V...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-examples-of-Minimum- Viable-Product-MVP-released-by-a-Lean-Startup-in-any-industry)

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://letspocket.com> \- my first app, MVP stage. I posted in on HN 2 weeks ago and got an amazing response with hundreds of signups and thousands of hits. Now I'm working on a premium version so I can monetize and start marketing heavily, hopefully within a couple weeks. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

<comment><AUTHOR> nice. what will the premium version have? is it a place to scribble notes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.lifelitup.com> is just the landing page, while we get the alpha up to date. Basically it's like Steam Achievements, but real-life. Mix that with tourism, and boom.

I'm hoping to have an alpha by the end of this week, but I'm never sure when it's "alpha-ready" :(

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking to see a few bare bones MVP's, early stages, or different MVP's at different stages perhaps, I know what they are, just trying to get a post / resource going for HN to see real people's MVP's, not like, facebook, flickr, etc.

<comment><USER3> Here's one I made a while ago for a lean startup machine event - <http://crowdmarkup.com/></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Personal liability releasing an app as a solo dev - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I've been working on an app to help studying math (sort of like a flashcard app), and I'm close to done a v1. I wanted to release it on the various app stores, with free and paid versions. The goal isn't to make a ton of money, just to make _some_ money from software I wrote.
The app itself is nothing controversial, but I wanted to know what I should do to protect myself before launching it, if someone sues me for failing their class or if an NPE claims to have a patent on "calculus on a mobile device."
I'm probably being overly paranoid here (USA based), but as solo a app developer what should I be thinking about before releasing? <comment><USER2> I've done this before. I did nothing. One company complained due to a potential trademark violation and I had to remove my app from one of the app stores.

Practically speaking, worst case is getting an email or a lawyer's letter about something and you have to take it down. I wouldn't let it keep me up at night.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depending on which state you are in it takes a few hundred dollars to form an LLC that could limit your liability if you want to err on the side of caution.</comment>


Sun melting down, and where's Java? - <AUTHOR> http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/1595

<comment><USER2> Sun's fate was always a concern before Java was GPL'd, but it is an entity in its own right now. So, whilst Sun is the lead cheerleader, should they fail there are enough big companies (IBM for one) heavily invested in Java that one of them would take over the reigns.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sun should focus on producing Java acceleration hardware, especially making multicore behemoth servers designed for Java thread concurrency. Sun already has enterprise customers, they own Java, and Java is their customers platform of choice.

<comment><USER4> Sun already has multicore behemoths - it's the CoolThreads platform (UltraSparc T1 and T2 processors). Dozens of cores - and I've used them and they run concurrent Java really, really well.

As for specialised hardware. Sun used to produce/specify the picoJava, microJava and ultraJava processor architectures (processors designed for Java).... They all tanked. The problem wasn't the implementation - it was timing. They came about just when the processor world was coming to the conclusion that the instruction set architecture didn't matter - AMD proved this by bolting x86 onto a RISC core (proved it by doing this, and then by winning the performance war for a number of years with it).

Problem now for Sun is timing again - the market combined with their market share. It will be a challenge to hold onto the market they've got, and a bigger challenge to grow into other areas.

<comment><USER3> By "multicore behemoths" I mean hundreds of processing cores like the Java compute appliances Azul Systems sells.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if "it's open source, this will go on irrespective of corporate situation" is a powerful retention/new acquisition argument for Sun (for Java and OpenSolaris) -- and could ultimately what keeps them alive amidst fears.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had a feeling this would happen as soon as Sun changed its stock ticker symbol to JAVA.</comment>


Do Not Study Biological Science or Anything Related - <AUTHOR> https://leimao.github.io/blog/Do-Not-Study-Life-Science/ <comment><USER2> Utter crap essay. It reads like it was written by a disgruntled and undereducated undergraduate frustrated with biology classes and venting.

> Most of the disciplines in science and engineering share lots in common. > Every new finding is based on mathematical axiom, law of physics, rigorous > mathematical derivation, or verifications in both experiments and practice.

That's false in both ways. Astronomy includes things like "we spotted a surplus of neutrinos a few hours before visible light from Supernova 1987A was seen."

According to the author's claim, astronomy therefore cannot be science.

While, believe it or not, many biological claims _are_ verified by both experiment and practice.

> In principle, every student or researcher in science and engineering should > have very solid skills to do mathematics

That's depending a lot on what "solid" means. Some geologists know a lot of mathematics. Some know little. _Just like biologists._

And it's not like volcanologists can repeat observations of Krakatoa or Mt. St. Helens.

> students from different science or engineering departments are taking the > same fundamental courses which heavily emphasize on mathematics

That's circular reasoning as it assumes that biological science is not part of science.

Let's see, [http://catalog.illinois.edu/undergraduate/las/molecular- cell...](http://catalog.illinois.edu/undergraduate/las/molecular-cellular- biology-bslas/) says that "The Molecular and Cellular Biology major provides students with a solid preparation in molecular biology, molecular genetics, microbiology, cellular biology, biochemistry, physiology, and structural biology. Students will also acquire a strong background in chemistry, _math_ and physical science."

Look at that - a biological science which requires a strong background in math.

> students majoring in life science would still have to attend courses, such > as calculus, linear algebra, and probability and statistics ... Those > courses, however, would hardly be used in the specialized life science > studies. Because you would hardly use math in your study and research, you > forgot.

The author is quite clearly lacking in understanding of what "biological science" includes.

To pick another point, I'll quote from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_genetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_genetics) "Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and between populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. ... _Traditionally a highly mathematical discipline_ , modern population genetics encompasses theoretical, lab, and field work."

> almost all of my former colleagues who study life science totally forgot how > to do mathematics, and how to read mathematical symbols and expressions, > even though they have once studied it before.

Yeah, and I have a Master's degree in physics and a Bachelor's degree in both C.S. and math ... and I've also "totally forgot how to do mathematics, and how to read mathematical symbols and expressions." I can read a page from my once beloved Bartle "The Elements of Real Analysis" and recognize that I've used to know what it meant, but can no longer read it.

So the above quote proves diddlysquat.

> Life science is more close to chemistry than any other disciplines in > science and engineering. So in principle, students or researchers study life > science should have very good knowledge about chemistry. However, based on > my teaching and research experience, it is often not true.

That's just wrong. There's all sorts of biology. Some are closely tied to chemistry. Most are not. A paleontologist is much closer to a geologist than a chemist. A biologist studying vertebrate locomotion is probably closer to a physicist.

> In my opinion, the correct way to do science is one of the followings: • > Deriving theoretical proofs for hypothesis, and doing experiment to verify. > • Doing thought experiments, such as Einstein's pursuing of a beam of light > experiment.

Almost no science is actually done this way. Again, consider geology. The identification of the Missoula Floods was done by gathering evidence first, identifying that it was odd, and _then_ constructing hypotheses which lead to further data collection to support or reject each hypothesis.

Just like, umm, biology.

> The career of life science is driven by publications

Same for just about every other field of science.

> However, the time is different to several decades ago when people's > motivation of understanding life is pure.

Really? Really?! Only those innocent of historical understanding could make that claim.

One word: Lysenko.

I can't do any more fisking. It's not worth it, and no longer fun.</comment>


On Mediocre Software - Where is the Love? - <AUTHOR> http://crazyviraj.blogspot.com/2011/01/on-mediocre-software-where-is-love.html

<comment><USER2> It's nice to see someone in the software industry finally realizing how the current trend of "release when you're embarrassed how bad it is" is destroying people's faith in the software industry. Soon any good will accumulated over the years (if there even was any) will be spent, and the broader population will equate "software" with "crap" unless proven otherwise.

Software companies of all sizes are relying on their ability to trick people into buying complete crap at least once to sell products. It will work once for every potential customer.

Even George W. knows what happens next..."Fool me once, shame on...shame... shame on you... the point is you can't get fooled again"

<comment><AUTHOR> To be fair, I think the current trend (which I agree with, btw) is "you should be embarrassed by your v1 release". This isn't the same as "release when you're embarrassed how bad it is". I hope the difference in both these statements is obvious.

You can release a high quality product of love and still be embarrassed by it's lack of features/functionality a few releases down the line - I see nothing wrong with it. Releasing a product that is 'crap' is something totally different though.</comment></comment>


Was the recent US election rigged? Big data analytics can give the answer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/a-truly-fancy-bear-2384f413df1c#.7yhusik2x <comment><USER2> Although I am pretty agreeable to a someone hacked the election scenario I don't think it is likely to be Russia; Russia wants to destabilize the U.S, but probably not at the cost of putting someone unstable with access to Nuclear armaments at its head.

The best scenario Russian hack would be - make sure Republicans win majority in House and elect Hillary by only a little bit. Next few years investigations and impeachment attempts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It would be cool if somebody could take it up as a side project.</comment>


The Year of the Tablets. Should Apple be scared? [Infographic] - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2011/03/02/the-year-of-the-tablets-should-apple-be-scared-infographic/ <comment><USER2> The infographic has the wrong specs for the TouchPad. It has dual 1.2GHz processors and 1GB of RAM.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see anything in that list that would have Apple scared in the slightest bit.</comment>


The Last Journey of a Genius - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3164300309410618119#

<comment><AUTHOR> I just finished a 2nd book about Richard Feynman in a few hours (I basically devoured it) and went searching more about him and his life. I ran into this video and it was the first time I've seen him. He's such a remarkable figure and his out look on life is amazingly as remarkable. I only wish I had come to know about Feynman earlier, but I'm glad I know and read about him. I'm deeply moved. Thanks Feynman for such wisdom in life and how to live your life like an adventure. And Touva does sound great as a next traveling destination.

<comment><USER2> Might I ask which books you've read about him? Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" You can pick these 2 books on Amazon used for a couple cents plus 3.99 shipping.

<comment><USER2> I'm going to check them out, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The great thing about Feynman is that he defies the image of the world- distant, confused, aloof university professor, but rather comes across like someone you'd love to have a beer with while talking about interesting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> i hope he got his orange juice

</comment><comment><USER5> Ok, this guy _IS_ a genius physicist. However why the hell didn't he just get on a plane and fly to Tuva?!?!? Or hike there!

There are terrorists paying to learn how to fly in the US, there are Mexicans coming across the US border, journalists wandering into Iran, and many other places. However a genius couldn't figure out how to get there.

Instead he spent 5 years figuring out the language and trying to get some sort of random "official" approval through numerous exchanges with people around the world. The botanists however just walked there. I spent 45 minutes hoping to see entrepreneurial thought at work and all I found was genius physicist who couldn't get to a remote country.

Am I the only one that finds this lame? I'm not saying I'm not inspired by his work but his approach to getting to Tuva is the exact way you prevent forward motion in a startup. He put false hurdles/barriers in front of himself to make it more exciting and romanticize it rather than just go there.

Disappointing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Several possible reasons:

\- Touva was probably not Feynman's main goal, but trying to get there is by itself an adventure with Ralph, his friend.

\- He had cancer for almost 10 years. This must have had a tremendous impact on his health.

\- It was the mid-80s, you couldn't just Google about Touva and find out about it.

\- The cold-war was still going on. And probably USSR was still very much a black-box.

\- He worked on several government projects (imagine what security clearance he was when he worked on investigating the Challenger explosion), so going to the a country within the USSR was probably a real challenge.

Granted he could pull some strings in the government to get a piece of invitation paper, but that's not the point. Plus after reading about Feynman, he's not the type of people to do something like that just to go to another mysterious country. He'd find creative ways to do his goal and enjoy the the process as things unfolded. If you feel disappointed about Feynman coudln't fulfill his goal of reaching Touva, then you have miss the point about the whole story. Nonetheless, he did get an invitation to go to Touva a few days after he passed away. So he did succeed after all.

And no, there's nothing specific about "entrepreneurial thoughts" in the video, so you have had a wrong expectation to begin with.</comment></comment>


The worst part about fast food: It's legal - <AUTHOR> http://stephencorwin.com/blog/?p=127

<comment><USER2> I can confidently say that I would not want to live in this man's world. Making things illegal because they are harmful? Ridiculous on its face.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course, the other possible conclusion from positing that drugs == fast food is that drugs should be legal.

<comment><USER4> yes, All drugs (with the possible exception of Antibiotics) should be legal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fast Food is physically addictive. That is the difference between other behaviors and Fast Food. I think it should at least come with warning labels (don't eat more than once a month/year).

</comment><comment><USER5> What else is harmful? (Not accepting the premise that fast food is 'bad' by the way...) Sitting on a chair for hours. Should office work be made illegal?

</comment><comment><USER6> Ah, too many things are illegal as it is. Instead let's tax calorie dense foods and use that money to subsidize healthy stuff so at least parents can afford to feed their kids real food if they want to.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the dumbest Patent that you been Granted? - <AUTHOR> What is the "dumbest" Patent that you been Granted?<p>You can define "dumbest" as you wish. <comment><AUTHOR> One of my granted patents is essentially a mux. Our company did a quick and dirty integration of two ASICs (Northbridge and GPU) by internalizing the IO bus. Muxes were added so that the IO bus could be exposed to allow an external GPU.

As I recall, I initiated the patent for defensive purposes.

I have noticed many SOC/ASIC patents that boil down to a mux.</comment>


Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/rio-tinto-blasts-46000-year-old-aboriginal-site-to-expand-iron-ore-mine <comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 A day later and the usual playbook gets rolled out "lessons learned", "very sorry", "genuine mistake" [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world- australia-52869502](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-52869502)

</comment><comment><USER3> One hundred and thirty odd (provable) generations of family history blown up. Fifteen hundred generations of continual occupation gone.

</comment><comment><USER4> All in favor of responsible investigation of historical significant finds.

But at some point, we live in this world or turn it into a museum. There is so much human activity over so long a period, you can't walk along a riverbank some places without tripping over a Tudor brick or Roman coin.

There's definitely a tension between exhaustive investigation into every find, and getting on with a business. Its never going to be a perfect win for either effort.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been to a Rio Tinto mine in the Pilbara and talked to some people there about a large doughnut shaped piece of work they were doing avoiding some aboriginal site. They do more than just pay lip service to the idea of preserving this stuff.

I'm obviously a bit biased, but I don't expect 40,000 year old sites riddled with artefacts are actually that rare in the Pilbara. It isn't the sort of place where things change quickly. It is much more likely that this is one of the few they've found because it has a mine on top of it that was paying for an archaeologist to fly out and look.

As can be seen from the article - the aboriginals have no idea how old these sites are or what is in them when the mine approvals are negotiated. It makes sense, nobody is keeping a 4,000 year inventory of what practically amounts to buried junk of no value to anyone outside of one small tribe of people. Possibly not even them if I let my usual cynicism seep through.

It is easy to see Rio shouldn't have blown the cave up. It is appropriate to change the legislation. It is reasonable to pay the locals money. If the reporting is accurate that the site was historically rare then it is a loss to the historians. But it isn't international news or an international loss - <USER2> it hadn't been in the path of an active mine even the traditional owners wouldn't have known what it was, or cared about its historic significance.

<comment><USER6> This is utterly false. The original land owners definitely knew it was there and wanted Rio Tinto to protect it. They decided not to, and blew it up instead - the reason given was 'the explosives are already in place and its too dangerous to remove them'.

Australians try to cover up their racism and heinous history with erasing the worlds oldest extant culture, but there is a rising tide that is moving against Australian complacency and wants them to put a higher priority on protecting human heritage over extracting mineral wealth. The original land owners of the Australian continent have a huge case for the return of their lands - these acts are only designed to make it harder for that to occur. Rio Tinto didn't even _need_ to mine in that area - it was merely a convenient way to remove cultural heritage that would've made the original land owners case for native title stronger.

<comment><USER5> > ...the explosives are already in place and its too dangerous to remove > them...

I hadn't heard that before, but it is actually a really good reason. It would be risking people's lives to try and defuse an active shot. Once the explosives are in the ground the shot was going to be fired one way or another.

The aboriginals needed to, and a presume probably did, raise concerns before explosives were loaded.

<comment><USER6> Rio Tinto should have paid to have them removed, plain and simple.

<comment><USER5> It isn't a matter of money; someone could have died. To do that over a historical curio is not responsible.

<comment><USER6> Your characterising this as a 'historical curio' is ridiculous. By the same reasoning we should just leave the bombs dropped in German cities where they are - 'someone could die, disarming them' ...

<comment><USER5> Someone could also die leaving them where they are. There are circumstances where it makes sense to risk defusing a shot, but protecting a historical site in the middle of the Australian Outback is not one of them.

I'd rather tell someone I blew up a 4,000 year old heritage site and get yelled at than tell them I got their son killed protecting 4,000 year old refuse.

The debate should centre entirely around what happened before the shot was loaded.

<comment><USER6> The original owners of the Australian continent were a 60,000 year old human culture. The current owners are occupied by these industries.

It is factually a human rights violation to destroy the cultural artefacts of other cultures. Remember when ISIS bombed the Buddhas of Bamyan?

If China were to, say, demolish the opera house to get at the fish underneath, would you be so happy about it?

<comment><USER5> If someone is choosing between bombing people and blowing up the Buddhas of Bamyan you'd have to be a monster to say the Buddahs are more important.

My advice to you if you argue this with anyone else is pick a different hill to make your stand. I'm not sure how this ended up being a discussion of the cultural heritage vs life or death matters as that was never a real issue here. Mines don't move very quickly, there would have been plenty of time for Rio to do the wrong thing and be critiqued between archaeologists being on the site and the shot being loaded.

The difference between "shot is loaded therefore the caves are condemned" vs "shot is fired therefore caves are condemned" isn't important.

<comment><USER6> I don't need your advice - you have demonstrated callous disregard for the cultural heritage of a group of people who have experienced nothing but callous disregard for centuries. Such authoritarian attitudes as you espouse here are counter-productive to a healthy society.

Your much loved mining company KNEW that the cultural heritage site was there - they dug the holes and placed the explosives regardless. Then when they were confronted, they made up the bullshit excuse that the 'explosives are too dangerous to remove' \- which is of course, utter bollocks.

My advice to you: confront your covert racist attitude and start to understand the violence that is being enacted on a people who do not deserve it, plain and simple. Real Australians should be furious about this destruction of the country's very, very valuable heritage. More valuable than a few sticks of gelignite, anyway...

>The difference between "shot is loaded therefore the caves are condemned" vs "shot is fired therefore caves are condemned" isn't important.

Maybe its not important to those who wilfully display a callous disregard for more ancient cultures than their own, but for those of us who are paying attention to the cost to humanity of this kind of behaviour, it is very, very important that this never happens again.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://wwwmayr.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/personen/erlebach/realprog/node1.html

<comment><USER2> One can tell by the fact that this asshat can't spell Professor Doktor Wirth's first name correctly, that he is an asshat. And probably an incompetent, or at least sloppy, programmer.</comment>


AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/3171161/components-processors/amds-ryzen-launches-march-2-outperforming-intels-core-i7-at-a-fraction-of-the-price.html <comment><USER2> First (amateur) third-party benchmarks confirm a ~$350 Ryzen beats $1000 Intel processors in CPUMARK, 3DMark Fire Strike Physics, Cinebench: [https://www.chiphell.com/thread-1706915-1-1.html](https://www.chiphell.com/thread-1706915-1-1.html)

AMD had said for years their Zen goal was a 40% IPC gain over their previous microarchitecture, but they ended up with a 52% gain: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143/amd-launch- ryzen-52-more...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143/amd-launch- ryzen-52-more-ipc-eight-cores-for-under-330-preorder-today-on-sale-march-2nd)

Today's launch event by AMD's CEO: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8)

<comment><USER3> I'm a bit dubious. If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part? Selling it at 50% or even less raises some heavy alarm bells for me.

<comment><USER4> > If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap?

Because they get exploded in single-threaded performances, so they have to pit their 8-core parts against Intel's 4 cores.

The 1700X will be competing against the $350 7700K more than the $1100 6900K (which incidentally is a Broadwell-E part not a Skylake part despite de 6 prefix)

<comment><USER5> The linked benchmarks are putting the $350 1700X about on par with the $1100 6900K when it comes to both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. Both of those processors are 8-core/16-thread chips. Also the 1700K is a 95W TDP compared to the 6900K's 140W TDP.

<comment><USER4> Again, the 6900K is a two years old µarch, and not one which was considered a great release in the first place. The 1700X will not be competing against the 6900K because nobody gives a rat's ass about the 6900K, the 1700X will be competing against the 7700K and its ilk.

<comment><USER2> The IPC difference between Broadwell (6900K) and Kaby Lake (7700K) isn't that big. 5-10%.

The _only_ redeeming quality of the 7700K is that Intel was able to raise the turbo freq to 4.5 GHz, while the 1700X only boosts to 3.8 GHz. So yeah single- threaded perf will be higher with Intel.

<comment><USER6> Isn't the IPC difference basically 0 and the 7 series only has slightly higher frequencies due to the optimization cycle? So clock for clock 6 and 7 series CPU should yield the same performance.

I should add that the above is the main reason the kaby lake release is so lackluster. There is very little reason to upgrade your desktop to a 7 series (laptops get power optimization and 4k playback support).

It's also the main reason why AMD might look appealing, lack of worthwile upgrade from Intel while AMD delivers twice the cores/threads for not a gread deal more then a 7600K.

<comment><USER4> > Isn't the IPC difference basically 0 and the 7 series only has slightly > higher frequencies due to the optimization cycle? So clock for clock 6 and 7 > series CPU should yield the same performance.

You're talking about Skylake 6-series, the 6900K is Broadwell-E not Skylake despite being 6-branded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just have to say, I really hope that this is real. AMD has burned a lot of trust a few times in overzealously stating performance marks in their prior generations of CPUs. I ran AMD for several years until the Core-2 came out from Intel (currently very happy with an i7-4790K).

If these comparisons are real, my next build may be AMD again.

<comment><USER8> Seems like you skipped over the FX series (Bulldozer, I believe). I got a FX-8320 a few years back, and my brother got a FX-6300. Both are capable processors and are MUCH cheaper than their counterparts (i5 and i3, respectively).

Heck, if I built a PC in the past year, I would have gone with a FX-8350 just because it's so damned cheap yet very performant. Once Zen is out, it's really a no-brainer for me.

<comment><USER9> The biggest problem with the FX series, IMO, was the deceptive marketing. The FX-8000 CPUs were marketed as being 8-core, when in reality every pair of cores shared an FPU and cache, so real-world performance was much closer to that of a quad-core for many workloads. Add on top of that the abysmal IPC (compared to Intel's offerings) and high power consumption, and there was very little reason to get an FX-8350 or similar over an i5.

(Yes, today the FX CPUs are much cheaper, but when they came out they were barely so. I know because I got an FX-8350 as soon as it came out and regretted it.)

<comment><USER2> I have to disagree with that. Most workloads (H.264 decoding/encoding, gaming, typical desktop software, etc) are ALU-bound not FPU-bound. So the FX series is generally beating Intel on the perf/$ metric, just because it is so darn inexpensive. In my experience a $100 FX CPU is as good as a $200 Intel CPU when doing H.264 encoding:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972)

(However the FX series perf/watt is worse than Intel, I give you that.)

<comment><USER9> Video encoding/decoding is definitely a niche for which the FX series had great value when it came out, so I agree with you on that. However, for gaming and most "typical desktop software", having higher single-core performance is much more important than having more cores, and the FX series was a huge letdown there. Then you factor in the extra energy you're using, and all of a sudden there are very few cases in which it makes sense to buy an AMD CPU over an Intel one.

(They're much cheaper now, so it might make a lot more sense to buy one today, but I'm sticking with my Intel CPU until AMD can prove themselves.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really looking forward to this, and I'm glad that AMD's management no longer seems to be on the pipe.

Even if the real world perf is close to the $1K Intel chips it will be a win. It's going to force price cuts from Intel and hopefully spark some competition again.

<comment><USER11> It would be interesting if Apple used these chips in upcoming Mac desktops.

I'm guessing that adopting these lower priced chips without lowering prices would have a negligible impact on sales for Apple if the performance is as good as AMD claims.

<comment><USER12> It would be nice. However, would they be able to still keep Thunderbolt?

<comment><USER13> The standard chipsets do have support for USB 3.1 Gen 2. But mixing in support for DisplayPort would require either a custom chipset (which Apple may be able to do but might not be as cheap), or wait until a Zen-based APU comes out.

<comment><USER14> USB 3.1 Gen 2 plus display is not the same as Thunderbolt. TB is basically straight PCIE. Can't just combine data and video and call it Thunderbolt. Plus 3.1 Gen 2 is only half the speed of TB3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't think of a more spectacular comeback than AMD in the last year or so. They are positioned pretty well for the inevitable convergence of CPU and GPU. That CUDA crosscompiler was such a brilliant move.

<comment><USER16> It's already in the works. [https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_reveals_a...](https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_reveals_a_exascale_mega_apu_in_a_new_academic_paper/1)

CPU, GPU, HBM all on one package. That would be a game changer for building analytics databases. There's a bunch of GPU based databases out now but a lot of the benchmark numbers they give you rely on having the data cases in GPU RAM. Real world benchmarks that require moving data over PCIe are less generous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the low TDPs have to be the scariest thing for Intel. Really interested to see what they can do in the 15-25W range for notebooks and their server stuff.

<comment><USER18> I have to wonder if the AMDs console win for the current generation gave them this badly needed R&D to reach decent TDP.

<comment><USER19> How so? The R&D budget is even lower than before AMD got the console deals.

[https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/r_and_d_expense](https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/r_and_d_expense)

<comment><USER18> Its still better than nothing. AMD management is dysfunctional, they treat engineering as a cost and were cutting it badly during K9-K10 era.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm optimistically looking forward until the independent benchmarks on March 2nd.

<comment><USER21> The NDA on benchmarks is supposedly set to expire on February 28. [0]

Not sure why this PC World article is coming up now. There have already been many stories on Ryzen pricing and the release date of March 2 has been known for several days now... [1]

Product lauch video [2]

[0] [http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-reviews-live-february-28th- tes...](http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-reviews-live-february-28th-testers- receiving-samples/)

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5urylu/when_does_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5urylu/when_does_amd_ryzen_benchmark_nda_lift/)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8)

<comment><USER22> It was known, but not official until now. Also, preorders are now live.

[0] [http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol- newsArticle&I...](http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol- newsArticle&ID=2248241)

<comment><USER23> Thanks

<comment><USER23> Just pre-ordered mine...:D (newegg)

<comment><USER24> Huh, I don't see them on Newegg yet.

<comment><USER23> Do a search for ryzen, they are there.

<comment><USER24> Thanks, I was trying to find them browsing by category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If AMD makes a comeback, how did they do it? Not enough competition and Intel got complacent or what? Or did they just reach the limits and it's not possible anymore to keep the lead and prevent AMD from catching up?

<comment><USER26> They actually have a history of this. They did it with Athlon too.

<comment><USER18> AMD has a history of having dysfunctional R&D:

386DX - copied Intel design verbatim (1:1 microcode). Got sued, won only because Intel had multiple source agreements with IBM.

K6 - purchased NexGen. Designed 100% by outsiders.

K7 - once again hired somebody else's engineers. This time almost whole DEC Alpha design team.

K8 - DEC people had some more steam left in them.

K9-Zen period - no more companies to take over and claim credit for their designs, add terrible management bleeding engineering talent while burning money on stupid ideas like Seamicro = in house garbage with 50% Intel IPC.

Zen - finally managed to rehire competent ex DEC engineer Jim Keller after his successful career at Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm far too broke to shell out cash for a new Mobo and CPU right now, but I'm excited to see what this does to Intel's prices for older CPUs. I'd love to upgrade my i5-2400 soon-ish.

<comment><USER28> Unless you are regularly doing CPU intensive tasks you can probably stick with it a few more years. I noticed since I bought a SSD that most of time the hard drive is limiting the CPU.

Until my DVD reader burned my desktop motherboard I was using a core2quad and it was still fast enough. No lag whatsoever. Now I'm using a laptop with the first gen I5 and I feel no need to upgrade it (I'm using it as a desktop battery life does sucks)

I understand why PC sales drop every year. You just don't have to buy a new one unless yours die.

<comment><USER27> In terms of general use, yeah definitely no problem with the CPU at all. It's zippy enough. But I also do a lot of CPU-intensive gaming (Cities: Skylines w/ tons of mods, RimWorld, Banished, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Jim Keller deserves a frigging statue in front of the AMD HQ, if he doesn't have one there already. I'm not even kidding. His efforts shouldn't be easily forgotten, and it could serve to inspire new generations of AMD engineers.

Beyond the product quality itself, I think AMD has had a pretty smart launch strategy by releasing the CPU chips first to show that it can beat "Intel's best".

But they really need to start focusing on notebooks ASAP. That's where they can steal most of the market from Intel, especially now that Intel is showing signs of (slowly) abandoning the notebook market, by prioritizing Xeons over notebook checks for its new node generations.

AMD should prioritize notebook chips either next year or the one after that, at the latest. They should be making the notebook chips first, before the PC ones. They need that market share and awareness in the consumer market.

In terms of how they should compete against Intel in the notebook market, I would do it like this (at the very least - AMD could do it even better, if it can):

vs Celeron: 2 Ryzen cores with SMT disabled

vs Pentium: 2 Ryzen cores with SMT enabled

vs Core i3: 4 Ryzen cores with SMT disabled. Or keep SMT and lower clock speeds, as Intel did it. This may help further push consumers as well as developers towards using "more cores/threads".

vs Core i5 (dual core): 4 cores with SMT enabled

vs Core i5 (quad core/no HT): 4 cores with SMT enabled + higher clocks and better pricing. Maybe even 6-core with HT, if AMD goes the 6-core route. I honestly don't even know why Intel decided to make "Core i5" a quad-core chip as well, and its Core i7 a dual-core chip as well. It's so damn confusing - but maybe that was the goal. For differentiation's sake, it may be better for AMD to have a 6-core at this level or maybe even an 8 core with SMT disabled - so same thing as Intel, but with twice the physical cores. I don't know why but for some reason 6-cores don't attract me much. It feels like an "incomplete" chip.

vs Core i7 (quad core/HT): 8 cores with SMT enabled

The guiding principle for this strategy should be "twice the cores or threads with competitive/better single-thread performance, and competitive/better pricing).

In a way it would be the inverse of the PC strategy where they maintain the number of cores but cut the price in half. This would mainly focus on doubling the number of cores (because notebooks come with so few in the first place), while maintaining similar or better pricing.

The only ones that don't really fit well in this strategy are the Celeron and Pentium competitors and that's because a dual-core Ryzen, even at low clock speeds should destroy Intel's Atom-based Celeron and Pentium. We could be looking at a least +50% performance difference, and that's what AMD should strive for there as well. AMD should show Intel what a mistake it made when it tried to sell overpriced smartphone chips for laptop chip prices.

<comment><USER30> From what I recall of their recent marketing material, it seemed like like they are looking to corner the market on 64bit ARM servers and also have some hybrid amd64/ARM chip plans to help people wanting to take advantage of ARM in datacenters migrate.. but I'm no expert and this is based on a recollection of marketing materials from a few months back - 64bit arm could be a huge thing in large scale light-duty computing centers (e.g. web/cloud datacenters) because of the cooling/horizontal scale out and also mobile/IOT/industrial so this isn't quite as crazy as it sounds.

<comment><USER22> AMD K12[1] is their full-custom ARM64 core. Originally scheduled for 2016, it was delayed to focus on Zen, probably the right move.

It's still scheduled for 2017, but there hasn't been much noise about it for a long time so I suspect it's been delayed, as they're still focusing on Zen & Vega.

Zen & K12 probably share a lot of elements, so if Zen is awesome, K12 probably will be too.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is really exciting, as I have been waiting to build a new system with the new AMD gear. Lots of people also don't hear about it, but I am super-excited to see the new server class CPU's. I built a quad opteron 6380 system and have been in love with them ever since, but they weren't perfect and had some issues I hope are fixed with this new line.

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting to see multi-core wars starting here.

Intel did not do anything as a market leader, 8 years back I could still buy 4 core machine. Waiting to see, how AMD does on Server parts, 32 cores / 64 cores ? Power9 does 24 cores/ 96 threads.

</comment><comment><USER33> I was highly skeptical when the first info about Ryzen came out. This is looking really promising versus the $300 to $400 price range Kaby Lake i7 (7700, 7700K) CPUs.

And when comparing the 1700/1700X to the $200-250 price range i5-7600 Kaby Lake.

</comment><comment><USER34> every time i look at AMD's stock price from last year to today i really wished i'd been wiser with my money. they've performed excellent and it's showing, this will likely be huge.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wish people benchmark GEMM performance for all of us math folk.

<comment><USER36> Ah, but what should they benchmark GEMM with?

MKL? I don't think so, it takes the worst codepath if the chip isn't GenuineIntel. OpenBLAS? Doesn't have Ryzen support. Doesn't even recognize some AMD cores. ACML? Wasn't updated since 2013 or so.

This is a serious question. What are you supposed to do if you need a GEMM kernel for Ryzen? I sure hope AMD puts out updated ACML libraries _real soon_.

<comment><USER37> I'd like to see benchmarks with OpenBLAS. Unlike ACML it's under active development, unlike MKL it won't deliberately screw AMD performance, and it offers "pretty good" performance across every environment I've tried it in. Good enough that it's not worth paying for MKL, not worth going through ATLAS's self-tuning routine, not worth changing my build scripts to use vecLib under OS X. If OpenBLAS currently runs poorly on Ryzen I hope Ryzen will get some development love, because I kind of hate using ATLAS and at this point it would take a major advantage to tempt me back away from open source components.

<comment><USER36> OpenBLAS performance is atrocious in 32 bit mode because it doesn't properly support AVX with the halved register file. Not the most common configuration, but MKL handles it fine (on Intel chips, obviously).

That said I agree it makes more sense for AMD to contribute to OpenBLAS than anything else.

<comment><USER37> Interesting -- what are the use cases for single precision BLAS on CPU? All the scientific software I use requires double precision and for tasks that do well with single precision, I would have thought that GPGPU would now be the go-to solution.

<comment><USER36> Not if you're shipping software to consumers. (Also, I actually meant 32-bit as in the OS, not the floating point precision)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Good now Intel has some competition</comment>


Show HN: PiUi – add a mobile phone UI to your RaspberryPi project - <AUTHOR> http://blog.davidsingleton.org/introducing-piui/

<comment><USER2> Great project. Just got it working. I have an Edimax 7811 module which of course didn't work being realtek based. I tried Paul's alternative hostapd and couldn't get joy out of that either. Eventually I found this one [http://www.jenssegers.be/blog/43/Realtek-RTL8188-based- acces...](http://www.jenssegers.be/blog/43/Realtek-RTL8188-based-access-point- on-Raspberry-Pi) and it worked OK.

Also as already pointed out the missing CherryPy module need sorting out. YOu could add instructions of where to get it and how to install it for those who don't know

<comment><USER3> I ran into the missing CherryPy module issue.... How did you sort it out? Thanks for all of the great info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like it! Although why would I use it over building a simple webapp hosted on the Pi by using existing server-side technologies such as Flask, Rails etc..

<comment><USER5> No configuration needed in order to talk to it. You just tell your users to connect to the access point it provides, and everything happens automagically from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can someone please give me some instructions on how to set PiUi u without turning the Pi into a access point? I installed Nginx and followed the do-it- yourself instructions from "Configure nginx". Everything is installed and the piui_demo.py works without errors. However, when I type in the IP of the Pi, I only see the "Welcome Screen" from nginx. Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks

<comment><USER7> I had the same problem so I went through the nginx.conf file supplied with PiUi and compared it to the default one in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. In the default one there's an _include_ line on line 71. This pulls in what ever .conf files from /etc/nginx/conf.d/ I then copied the lines 40-59 from piui/nginx/nginx.conf to its own file /etc/nginx/conf.d/piui.conf and restarted nginx. Now when I type in the IP of my Pi in my mobile webbrowser I get in to the PiUi site. However this way does not provide the small graphics components in the UI components. Any ideas on that?

<comment><USER6> Thank you. It seems that I installed another version of nginx. With the apt- get install it worked perfectly. I replaced the whole conf. file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does the phone have to be on the same WiFi network to connect to the <http://piui/>? More specifically, if the pi is running at my house and is connected to my home WiFi, can I run the UI from my phone while at my office over a different WiFi or over 4G?

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm, this does seem pretty nifty. I've never heard of making a device "support" WiFi by appearing as an access point. That seems to offer some huge advantages over making the user configure their device to connect to an existing network. It's almost like Bluetooth 4.0 meets WiFi.

<comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, this is how the GoPro works with its iPhone app and Android app. It's so easy to set up that I decided to adopt it here. It is of course possible to connect the Pi and the phone to the same (existing) wifi network, but then you need to help the user figure out the right IP address to connect to. I messed around with zeroconf/bonjour for this before I settled on this simpler mechanism -> it works but is pretty temperamental. The other thing I have tried on Android is to have the phone create a wifi hotspot with the same SSID and password as my home network. When at home, the devices are all connected nicely, when away, the Pi connects to the phone and (modulo zeroconf being picky) the whole thing works well; couldn't get this to work with the iPhone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool!

> There's even an Android app to make connecting easy and show useful status > info plus an iPhone webapp you can save to your homescreen.

What does the Android app do to show useful status information? Can we expect an iPhone version in the future too?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, the Android app shows the current uptime and system load on the Raspberry Pi in the title bar. It does this by polling a URL which is handled by the PiUi Supervisor (separate python app from your main app). As you can see on github, the supervisor can also list and stop/start apps - I have feature enhancements to use all this planned for Android and yes, I'm keen to expose on iOS in future too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Works great but:- 1) How do I stop the verbose on screen reporting (I use SSH) 2) How do I stop it once it is running - CTRL+C does not work and kill only sometimes works 3) Is there any documentation or more examples please Thanks

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi, got a problem with toggles. I dont understand the code 100% If a toggle has the status "On" i would like to send an OS Command like os.system("send 11111 1 0") to toggle an 433 MHz Switch Unit. How do i do this?

Thanx Stefan

</comment><comment><USER12> I appreciate that work of UI for rPi....i need it to show some datas with highcharts so i need to include html code with jquery...what would the way to do it ? thank you 4 your work - (dkp0h at free dot fr)

</comment><comment><USER13> I ssh into the rpi from my Nokia N900 (has a hardware keyboard), and have a little text based python interface for controlling my heating. KISS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that's neat! Intention was to allow richer, graphical UI. Esp, the timelapse project was a motivating use case for me and seeing the preview images on the phone display is really useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Following manual setup instructions, with raspbian, you end up with 'ImportError: No module named cherrypy' when calling the demo script

</comment><comment><USER15> So one could build a Pi project that was controlled by the interface on a iOS or Android phone? That's awesome!

</comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty neat! How would I go about porting this over/ implementing something similar on the BeagleBoard?

<comment><AUTHOR> Other than the wifi access point set up, it should just work on the BeagleBoard. Follow the detailed instructions on the blog post (not the "easy way" using SD card images) and follow a BeagleBoard wifi AP tutorial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> @jabian : 'ImportError: No module named cherrypy' => sudo python setup.py install ;O)

<comment><USER14> @dkp0h, Thanks I know how install a python module, actually pip does the job. My point is that it should be indicated on the requirementents of the piui installation. Just to help beginners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How fast is nginx at executing the python code? (What's the typical UI response time?)</comment>


Ask YC: Feedback on our webapp (website-building tool) - <AUTHOR>

http://orgu.com
We have just launched a website creation tool for group-based websites. A few student organizations have been using it since alpha (you'll see them at the bottom of the homepage) and they really like it so far.
It utilizes the Blogger XML template language (and can use any template of this type), so the sites look a lot like blogs. However, you might say they are suped-up blogs, with added features like calendar and photos.
We are 2 people, we have recently graduated in the Chicago area, we hope to pursue this as a startup. The webapp is still very much in beta (and there are many half-baked features), but we just wanted valuable feedback from the YC community to help us in future iterations. Thanks so much! <comment><USER2> It's nice work, congratulations! As someone else said, leveraging Blogger templates is a great idea.

All PHP + MySQL?

Curious to know if 'orgu' indicative of the target market, university groups? Or am I reading too much into those four letters? :)

I think your greatest challenge will be breaking out of the huge array of similar and seemingly-similar products out there. This is a battle more likely won by marketing than technology. Find that niche, attack it, dominate it, and you'll do well.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! yep, its all php and mysql. we imagine 'orgu' means something like organization-universe or (you guessed it) organization-university, but in reality we wanted to pick as short a name as possible so groups using the .orgu.com subdomains wouldn't have a long url.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks very nice. Few thoughts: 1\. Why does it ask for my first and last name when signing up? I expected that field to want a screenname, given the pretty standard signup box requiring sn, email, password, password again you find everywhere. 2\. Do you have to use a java uploader for pics? I'd rather just upload one at a time manually than have to have java on my PC. Can that at least be an alternative?

<comment><AUTHOR> we use your f+lname as your identity when you post things and invite other people to the site. the point about the confusion over the sn field is valid, we might want to reformat that screen (or ideally have a live demo that eases into a real membership - like weebly).

we use the same java/activex image uploader that facebook uses (hoping people would be familiar w/ it). however, there should be an option "use the simple uploader" that will take u to a standard file-input setup. let me know if this isnt showing up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The middle box where you have references to Calendar, Easy Photos, Member Directory and Group Blog should be clickable to sample pages. People want to see sample pages before creating their own websites.

It would be great if you let people create websites without having to signup. Once they are ready to save then you can ask them to signup.

<comment><AUTHOR> thats a really good point, thanks. i was just looking at 37signals' backpack homepage and they handle this pretty well. might do something similar

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks nice. Being compatible with Blogger themes is a smart move. How do you plan to compete with Google Pages, Weebly, and all the other site builders? A calendar and a member directory might not be a big enough differentiator.

<comment><USER6> Actually, Weebly isn't much in the same space. The newly re-designed Google Sites (Jotspot 2.0), site/wiki builders like Wetpaint, or social network builders like Ning are all in the "facilitate group communication" space, and all look to fill the same need.

<comment><AUTHOR> we're not so much in the 'group communication' space as the 'web publishing' space. our main goal is to make interesting/useful/rich websites (though we may harness group communication for content). we want these websites to be valuable for those within the group AND mean something for those outside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's nice, but for rock-bottom low-friction signup and easy (Markdown-based) formatting you might want to consider emulating jottit.com.

It's also possibly worthwhile to add a "dump entire site as a bunch of text" button; to bring people back, send them away, or whatever the aphorism is.

Nice demo.

<comment><USER6> Are you kidding? jottit is "nice" in that you can "start using it" right away, but you're slamming users up against the empty form wall in full force. Upon arriving at jottit.com, I don't know what jottit does at all, and I certainly don't know what to put in the damn box.

<comment><USER7> Right. As I said, and for exactly the reasons you state, the only aspects of jottit.com I'd recommend emulating are the fast (lazy) signup and the ability to type Markdown text instead of using raw HTML or a heavy rich text widget.

(And while I happen to think jottit is cute, note that I had reserved the ornate and completely pretentious praise of "nice" for orgu. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the demos. I can see lots of fraternities and sororities using it. Is there any plan to do marketing/pr? Is there also a paid version (to use your own domain)?

<comment><AUTHOR> even though we have launched, we aren't trying to attract major pr yet. we want to beef up a few features a little more first, but when we do, we're thinking (besides announcing on the standard internet portals) to talk to some large national organizations (greek, community, etc). there is no paid version, but you CAN currently use your own domains for free. (in the "settings" tab)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> this looks incredible! it is exactly the type of webapp i've been looking for. many of the other sites are too cluttered, orgu is simple and easy to use. thanks for creating such a great tool.

will you eventually have a way to completely customize my own template and not be limited to the ones offered? also- will you eventually be charging to use the site? how are you planning on making money??

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! you can completely customize your template w/ the blogger xml template language. the editor is somewhat crippled though, u cant expand the html of widgets, but thatll come soon. we're also gonna put up some better documentation for it

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks cool. Did you use a PHP framework for the admin backend, or did you write everything from scratch?

<comment><AUTHOR> we wrote it from scratch

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Using Blogger templates is an awesome idea. How you're supporting them (was it easy)?

<comment><AUTHOR> it was actually painfully hard. we ended up with a very elegant solution though... Blogger has a set of widgets, but we introduce some new ones (like a 'Photos' widget or an 'Events' widget). These sort of inherit from existing ones (by transforming their templates), so designers only have to code html+css for the standard 'Blog' widget and the others are inferred

<comment><AUTHOR> btw, we had to make a custom blogger xml interpreter from scratch

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the info. Now I have an urge to create an open source standard for site themes based on Blogger templates or something else. Some things might be too specific (like the way a typical blog is formated) but lots of the elements could certainly be constructed in a way that they'd be interchangeable across totally different kinds of sites. Maybe Google Gadgets addresses part of this problem. Hmmm...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice site.

One question - How do you handle the auto-creation of user-specified subdomains ? (I ask as I'd like to do something similar)

Do you run your own DNS or do you update records at your DNS provider ? (If the latter how do you automate that process ?)

<comment><AUTHOR> if you have a wildcard in dns records, you can effectively make it a fallback, so thats how our something.orgu.com addresses get mapped to an IP. however, we do allow tld's, we handle that by hosting our own instance of PowerDNS, which is great (u can use mysql with it)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> oh yeah... we are aware of a possible naming conflict with orgoo.com, so we're thinking about rebranding. any suggestions for new names would be appreciated.

<comment><USER13> groupingtogether.com is available if you want to go in a more real word direction.

SiteForYour.Org is also available.

Overall it looks good. You might want to put a live admin demo up so that a site visitor is one click away from seeing what the admin interface looks like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Real nice application! I can't find anything wrong about it, great work!

</comment><comment><USER15> why do i have to sign up to give it a try?

<comment><AUTHOR> ideally we would have a 'live demo' but our current architecture makes this tough. this is 1st on our list though.</comment></comment>


Fedora Muscian's Guide - <AUTHOR> https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Musicians_Guide/index.html <comment><USER2> As a Fedora developer and amateur musician, I really couldn't recommend Fedora (or Linux in general) for music. The DAWs I've tried are terrible. They all have horrible UIs, trouble doing basic stuff and are crash-prone (hint to developers: the DAW should _never_ _ever_ _ever_ crash!) My band uses free GarageBand on Mac which is not very good but night and day better than any of them I've tried. Setting up Jack instead of Pulseaudio is horrible and invasive. Routing USB midi is an exercise in command line randomness.

Can we make this better? Probably. And I guess I should work on it. But right now it's not there.

<comment><USER3> I use Fedora to jam online several times a week and to record a few times a year. The open source Linux music software ecosystem is behind proprietary software available on Windows and macOS but it can do what I need.

Audio system: JACK

DAW: Ardour 5

Synthesizer: zynaddsubfx

Pianos: PianoTeq 6 (proprietary)

Drum machine: Hydrogen

The lack of good drum kits and patterns is my current pain point.

I haven't tried Reaper or Bitwig on Linux yet, but they should be decent if you are willing to use proprietary software.

The Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 USB soundcard that I use is a class-compliant USB audio device and I've never had trouble with it.

<comment><USER4> Reaper and Live have spoiled me. I tried to like Ardour, and it would be great if it's all I had, but it has too many rough edges.

LMMS is good though. I must have made 200+ songs in it before switching to Reaper. I could get by with LMMS and the included synths if I had to. It makes me wish Reaper supported LV2.

<comment><USER5> I would agree, re: rough edges, if we were talking about Ardour 2 or 3, which both missed some important features and weren't as stable as I'd like. But in the last few years, ardour has improved. I do most of my work in it now. Would recommend it to anyone who wants a FLOSS DAW and isn't too dependent on mental models from other audio software.

If anything, LMMS has the rough edges. The interface lacks polish and consistency. There are some awkward things about using it (why do I have to make a blank bar before I copy and paste a bar into it?). And I've noticed some glitchy behavior - for instance, I just made a ZynAddSubFX patch that sounded different as a plugin in LMMS than when I used it in Zyn's own application. Strange behavior like that, but fortunately it's rare.

But all that considered, LMMS is still great, and I appreciate the work it's authors put into it. I don't think of it as a daw; more of a sequencer. But if your music is 100% digital synths and samples, it serves all your needs.

Right now I'm using: LMMS (sequencer), Ardour (daw), JAMin (mastering suite), and Audacity (swiss army knife). I like Reaper. I've used ableton live many times, and I still don't get it - I guess the workflow is optimized for live mixing? I found it less than ideal for recording in a studio.

<comment><USER4> >> _" Would recommend it to anyone who wants a FLOSS DAW and isn't too dependent on mental models from other audio software."_

I recommend against this kind of framing. It comes off as judgmental. My mental models form based on my needs and experience. They're just as valid as your mental models, needs, and experience. Your way of seeing my perspective leads to faulty assumptions about my experience and models.

For example...

>> _" I would agree, re: rough edges, if we were talking about Ardour 2 or 3, which both missed some important features and weren't as stable as I'd like. But in the last few years, ardour has improved. I do most of my work in it now."_

I tried 5 from Mint's repos. Yesterday. I try every version to see if it'll work for me. Ardour continues to be critically lacking for me, based on my needs. Take a step back any time you want to assume someone's view is based on not knowing something you know. It's much more likely you don't know what they know.

<comment><USER6> > My mental models form based on my needs and experience

Except that the workflow for e.g. Live or FL Studio or Bitwig is entirely different from the workflow for e.g. ProTools or Logic or Ardour.

So the extent that your needs and experience dictate a Live-style workflow, then sure, you're right. But if you don't actually know what you're doing or alternatively actually need the linear-timeline recording model of PT/Ardour, then there's no judgement here, just a correct observation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Be warned that this guide was written in 2013 for Fedora 18. A few months back, I tried using this guide with Fedora 31 and I found things have evolved since the guide was written. For example, I gave up on installing the Planet CCRMA packages separately and just used the Fedora repository version. For some programs, in order to get a recent version, I installed from source code. Etc.

Also, there is currently no Fedora Jam Audio spin, so be prepared to fiddle around a bit if you want to use Fedora for music.

</comment><comment><USER8> Music production software is the only thing keeping me from going 100% Linux. Unfortunately this guide doesn't help me much with the key issues

I don't know any production-grade sound cards that have Linux drivers (my RME ADI-2 Pro certainly doesn't) and the DAW that I use (Reaper) only has experimental Linux support. I would guess the Linux compatibility of other DAWs is worse. Audacity can only get you so far.

I would guess many of the audio plug-ins I rely on within Reaper would also have issues running on Linux.

<comment><USER9> > I don't know any production-grade sound cards that have Linux drivers (my > RME ADI-2 Pro certainly doesn't)

Most of the RME HDSP/HDSPe PCI/PCIe cards work on Linux using the ALSA snd- hdsp or snd-hdspm drivers. The ADI-2 can use the generic Linux USB audio driver AFAIK.

<comment><USER6> Many studios use USB interfaces these days and the majority of them work on Linux. I'm the lead developer of Ardour and for the last couple of years I've been using a MOTU UltraLite AVB, which works out of the box (24 channels of I/O, and a totally web-based configuration utility).

Many, many production-grade devices (another example: the Behringer (Midas) X32) work right of the box. The fact that the iPad did not allow drivers forced almost all audio interface manufacturers to clean up their act and get fully compliant with the USB audio specification. The side effect of this is that they Just Work (TM) with Linux too.

(*) the one issue is that this particular device requires a specific version of the firmware to avoid a bug that only shows up on Linux. This is not true in general.

<comment><USER3> Hi Paul, I just wanted to thank you for all the effort that legends like you, Rui Nuno Capela, Nasca Octavian Paul, and others have put into getting the Linux music ecosystem to where it is. Thanks for helping us play music (when we're not programming)!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a professional developer and amateur musician. Honestly, I believe this is a case where the "Apple tax" is well worth it. You can get far with GarageBand and where that falls short you can use Logic Pro, which for $200 is still a far sight cheaper than the other commercial DAWs. Interested in hearing other people's experiences.

<comment><USER11> I feel like the audience this article was written for would do well to try out Reaper. It's a FOSS DAW that has almost every feature you wpuld ever need, but also has a steep learning curve.

<comment> squeaky-clean Reaper is neither free nor open source. Cockos (the company behind Reaper) has several open source libraries used within Reaper, but Reaper is proprietary software that costs $60 for a personal license. The developers don't believe in wasting time on anti-piracy checks, so it's very easy to use Reaper without paying. Kind of like Sublime Text.

Reaper is a great DAW, and I would recommend it to everyone. Whether a beginner looking for their first DAW, or a pro with a million dollar studio. Just pointing out it's not free/foss because that's something I've seen people claim about Reaper for over a decade.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the feedback on Reaper

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ok so many people are commenting that this article is out of date. I've been searching for what the best out-of-the-box music Linux distro would be, so I can dual boot that for any music work. Namely it must have:

\- jack set up and default for everything

\- complete DAW solution: synth set up etc

\- updated, stable software

\- MIDI set up fully

\- real time kernel is definitely a plus

\- acceptable performance on modest hardware

A lot of the recommendations online like Musix are not current at all! I wonder if Ubuntu Studio is the answer, just purely based on the website being updated and professional-looking. I've considered KXstudio but cannot confirm that it is a distro rather than a software repo. AVLinux?

Any firsthand experience? I will test Ubuntu Studio today and report back

<comment><USER13> So after trialing a few of the "audio-centric" distro-flavours I couldn't find any that were particularly compelling (most, Ubuntu Studio included, were installing huge quantities of tools that I was never likely to explore).

I've ended up using Manjaro, with Jack, Reaper, Renoise, Airwindows plugins, a real-time kernel and very little else. It's pretty good.

I found this guide was helpful [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Professional_audio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ugh. I've been using Linux since the .9 kernels/SLS distro days (1995 or so), and I've been producing albums for 13-14 years and recording longer than that, and I wouldn't even _consider_ doing real music production in Linux. It is absolutely not worth the bullshit and the spoons. I want to be _recording music_ , not putzing around with device drivers or scrounging for plugins that don't completely suck.

I mostly use Reaper on a Mac, and pay a monthly subscription for Plugin Alliance plugins. It's well worth the money, because it _works_ , sounds great, and is straightforward to use. Given a choice between spending two hours improving the eq/compression/reverb of a mix and two hours trying to figure out why no sound is coming out, I know which one I prefer.

<comment><USER15> Yes, Reaper is great. I played around with various options and Reaper is the winner for me. I found a 8 channel Firewire Presonus interface in a cabinet at work and that still works great with Reaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Making electronic music is so much more than just operating system support.

You need a DAW and most of the ones that you get on Linux are horrible, except Bitwig. So you would be forced to use only one DAW.

Most of the well known plugins like Serum, LFO Tool and Massive are not available either so you would be limited to the ones included in Bitwig or the basic VSTs that you find for Linux.

And while JACK is pretty good at low latency audio you would miss out on the ASIO control panel provided by your sound card driver. While its possible to get asio working on linux using wineasio, it's a cumbersome process since you need to compile the asio dlls which have licensing restrictions.

You would have a much better experience if you just install Windows on KVM and use PCI passthrough for your sound card.

<comment><USER17> > Most of the well known plugins like Serum, LFO Tool and Massive are not > available either

Though everything that those VSTs can do, can also be done in Bitwig Studio starting from v3.

> miss out on the ASIO control panel

What does this add that the usual tools in Linux can't fix? Also, it's recommended to go with class compliant USB audio interfaces or otherwise interfaces that are supported on Linux. Going with MOTU gear for example is a bad idea.

<comment><USER18> "Can do" is not particularly useful. You "can" sit there and sequence thousands of sine waves in audacity to create any sound that you want... but nobody wants to do that.

Bitwig's grid is capable, but the ease of access for particular workflows is burdensome. Replicating Serum in the grid isn't possible practically, both because of filter designs and the wavetable capabilities, and getting close requires some significant acrobatics.

Massive... much easier. LFO Tool, basically impossible to replicate in Bitwig because the main draw is the _workflow_.

Bitwig is a very capable, fun and useful product for electronic music creation but I think your response to the OP is correct on a very technical, and pedantic level, but extremely unhelpful regardless.

<comment><USER19> Complaining about some missing functionality is also extremely unhelpful. Those of us who've been doing it for years know what the state of things is, and the developers of those closed source plugins know what their stance is. You ask them to do a Linux port and they say "no that would cost too much money and we can't support it". You ask them for source so you can port it yourself and they say "no you're going to steal it". You try to clean-room reverse engineer and write a clone of the plugin and they still get angry at you for "stealing". I don't bother anymore. People just have their workflow that they learned on plugins from 10 years ago, they aren't going to change unless something breaks horribly, and that's that. Those who are brave can still fiddle around with running VSTs in Wine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >[https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en- US/Fedora/18/html/Musician...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en- US/Fedora/18/html/Musicians_Guide/sect-Musicians_Guide-USB_Sound_Cards.html)

this is completely wrong. internal audio interfaces tend to be worse than external audio interfaces. what internal soundcard can compete with a universal audio apollo?

<comment><USER9> >this is completely wrong. internal audio interfaces tend to be worse than external audio interfaces. what internal soundcard can compete with a universal audio apollo?

Audio engineer here. It isn't wrong. PCI and PCIe cards with external AD/DA converters have better performance, reliability and higher channel counts. Eg.: [https://www.rme-audio.de/hdspe-madi.html](https://www.rme- audio.de/hdspe-madi.html)

64 channels in, 64 out. Works fine on Linux.

<comment><USER20> genuinely curious: what daw software are you using with this on linux?

<comment><USER9> > what daw software are you using with this on linux?

I used Ardour for ~8 years, then switched to Non DAW ~6 years ago: [http://non.tuxfamily.org/](http://non.tuxfamily.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone please fix the typo in the title?

</comment><comment><USER22> That would be "Musician", not "Muscian". The actual link spells it correctly.

</comment><comment><USER23> For me music creation is a process of capturing lightning in a bottle.

When I'm ready to record something, my kit needs to work and get the idea into a track right away while I have the idea and the juices are flowing.

If I have to troubleshoot or configure anything while in this mode the creative idea is lost and I get super frustrated.

This is why I've shied away from linux as a music platform, setup and troubleshooting is the last thing I want to do when feeling creative, I just want to plug-in and hit record.

With that said my approach is around physical instruments, maybe it's different if your studio is entirely in the box.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is Fedora 18, which is very old .. 2013

</comment><comment><USER25> Props to Fedora for their thorough documentation, but to a musician looking for a prospective Linux distro to serve their needs, this looks dense as all hell.

I wonder if they might be better served taking a page from something like Ubuntu Studio[0], and just making a spin that tries to preconfigure all of this stuff out-of-the-box for the end-user, so that they can simply install the ISO and get going.

[0] [https://ubuntustudio.org/tour/audio/#](https://ubuntustudio.org/tour/audio/#)

</comment><comment><USER26> Check out "Unfa" on YT, he makes vids on opensource music production. Very good quality content IMHO.

He uses KXStudio iirc.

</comment><comment><USER27> section on training yourself to listen [https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en- US/Fedora/18/html/Musician...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en- US/Fedora/18/html/Musicians_Guide/sect-Musicians_Guide-Solfege-Training.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> Reading this i didn't feel it was addressed to me as a musician. But as an engineer I felt it was addressed to me.</comment>


How to Write Systematically in 11.5 bites - <AUTHOR> http://cryoshon.co/2015/12/22/how-to-write-systematically-in-11-5-bites/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this article because of a written conversation I had with my mom regarding the efficacy of vaccines and their (disproven) potential to cause autism. I figured it'd be well received here because of the tendency of techies to be systematic thinkers and writers reflexively.

In addition to this reflexive/learned practice which most detail oriented people have, I think that formal training in systematic communication is worthwhile for most people to have, even if they've already implicitly taken up the ropes.</comment>