Low-Tech Game Systems (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/GameSystems4.shtml <comment><USER2> A favorite pen-and-paper game of mine from back when I didn't want to listen to the teacher was called "the stick figure man game"

It's two players. Player 1 draws a stick figure. Player 2 draws a hazard that will result in the stick figure's imminent death. Player 1 draws something to prevent the death. Neither player is allowed to repeat.

Usually neither player ever wins, but rather the lecture that the players were ignoring comes to an end.

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone interested in game systems, Mike Sellers' book is the best recent introduction:

[https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Game-Design-Systems- Approach...](https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Game-Design-Systems- Approach/dp/0134667603)

This blog post didn't really do much for me. The blog author's definition of system is not how contemporary game development community uses the word. We wouldn't call decks of cards "systems", they're just game pieces. Systems are things more like "economy" or "crafting" \- networks of mechanics working together.

</comment><comment><USER4> We evolved a car game called Slug Bug. Basically people look for VW Beetles. At the time, the new one did not exist. We would have valued them at 1/3 to 1/2 old school bugs. Edit: we may have done just that. I just got word new beetles were around for some game time. I must find my reference. Lol

Over the course of a few years, rules got made that turned it into a really fun game.

One was you have to declare in specific form.

Slug bug blue! Or slug bugs two red one blue.

Bad form is no points, others can quickly take the call points by following good form. An error might be saying slug bugs, when there is only one. Or putting color before number. No nos.

If any part of the call is wrong, no points. Call remains open as long as bug in reasonable view. Incomplete calls are no points. However, players can correctly call a partial set of visible bugs and get those points.

Driver, if playing gets two points given, but cannot win with less than 4.

Bad call is negative the value of the call. We had a zero floor, but that got exploited so negative scores were allowed.

It is a game of honor. The first kid to get that wrong caused the challenge rules. If trip agenda permit, players petition driver, after a vote to challenge. Driver returns to validate call if possible.

If not possible, players vote to validate call, vote again on intent perception. Nefarious or honest mistake. That vote is grave, because a player seen to be nefarious must have all calls confirmed with form.

NP calls, "Slug bug blue" Other players in good faith seek it and validate with, "bug blue valid"

I have somewhere a verbose write up, "Let's play slug bug!" It contains some lore, how it got started and the last ruleset used.

I wrote it right as the kids and their peers were entering that busy late childhood. Saving it for later. Their kids.

At one point, several families were avid players and would tell me of their sessions and proposed rules. I would communicate them to others so the game was coherent no matter who was in the car.

Was kind of amazing to see evolve.

That one kid abusing it gelled the little community of players. We found out how much people liked that car game. I remember working seriously on the rules. A good game was in crisis. It had to be fun, fair, possible to be redeemed.

That happens after three validated call sessions considered worthy games, not just a trip to the store. At that point, everyone is once again peers, all forgotten.

Sometimes the kids would contribute to the rule making. They were the advocates of form. Just shouting shit was no fun. The structure had to be learned, but simple enough to be fun. That cleaned up the game and made it a thing. Others picked up on it and wanted to learn more.

So, why bother?

Well, I had fun with my kids. This game competed with early cellphones even. It would not always compete with the INFOCOM games I had in the back seat HP Palmtop running frotz, just FYI, but I digress!

There is a time and place for family car games and they are memorable. Play slug bug, or one of your own creation. Make memories.

That is why. I hope more interesting and entertaining than the blog post too. Enjoy! No sleight to the author. I just did not get much on this one, and thought I would share something instead

<comment><USER5> In the 70's we used to play this game, only we called it Herbie. Any time you'd see a VW bug, you'd call out "Herbie", and gain points. At the time there was another kind of car that sort of looked like a Herbie from the rear (a Morris Minor), which - if falsely called a Herbie, resulted in detracting a point.

We can't play that game any more .. neither of those cars are on the road any more. Instead, my kids literally slug each other every time they see a red car, or a yellow car ..</comment></comment>


Interactive Data Visualization for the Web (a D3 book by Scott Murray) - <AUTHOR> http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449339739/

<comment><USER2> I am a total javascript hater but reading just half of the "drawing with data" chapter made me go to the order page (just to see the print edition is not out yet). I really like the style.

seems like I will use d3 instead of gnuplot or gnumeric for even my simple graphing needs in the future. so much control in easy ways and of course that being automateble (as opposed to manually clicking in gnumeric). there might be other ways with python etc but D3 looks fun and hip and dynamic and useful for web stuff so I am sold.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words. My goal with this book is to make the content friendly and approachable. If I can convert a single JavaScript hater, then I have exceeded my own expectations. :-)

<comment><USER4> I'm having a quick read through (3 chapters so far) and I think it is beautifully written. (quite a few broken images in the SVG parts of chapter 3 at present) Edit: just purchased the eBook, and the images are fine in the PDF.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Yes, I hope to get the images on the online version cleaned up, but they should appear correctly in the ebook version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been looking for additional resources to learn more about how to create nice visualizations, especially using D3. It seems to me that with D3 there is a lot of power, but this comes at the expense of a proportionately steep learning curve.

I've also found <http://gis.stackexchange.com> to be an excellent resource for finding techniques and getting help with visualizations programming.

</comment><comment><USER6> This book is an expansion of his excellent D3 tutorials available here <http://alignedleft.com/tutorials/d3/> (though now the free chapters from the book may be a better resource)

</comment><comment><USER7> D3 really is a powerful way to visualize data on the web. Check out the gold standard of d3 charts, created by Mike Bostock: <http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock>.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ebook, please!

<comment><USER2> looks available for purchase right on that site. No print yet though.

<comment><USER8> Oh, interesting. That's how new this book is; when I (immediately) went to its page on O'Reilly, only the Print Pre-Order was enabled. Thanks for the update!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are these 9 chapters all that there will be in the book? There's no details on the product page…

<comment><USER3> No, there will be more chapters! We are just releasing the first 9 to start.</comment></comment>


So many messages, so little time - <AUTHOR>

I'm following Hacker News, SlashDot and two other RSS feeds of programmers and interesting people. But the sheer amount of messages is overwhelming. I've been trying to read all the titles and then pick the ones that are interesting to me. Sometimes they are small articles which I read in about 5 or 10 minutes, sometimes it's a large article which takes half an hour to an hour to read. And there are a lot of interesting topics coming by. I also know I'm probably not the fastest reader in the class.<p>My question to you is, how do you read all of it? Do you scan the texts, just read the titles very quickly and ignore the articles, do you read during the weekends, do you eliminate feeds to read, do you only check in once in a while and stumble upon the interesting articles then and ignore the rest? How do you guys process all this information? <comment><USER2> Use a read later service like Instapaper. You wouldn't want to be reading HN all day because that would just be counter productive. At some point, you have to ignore what's going on and get back to work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I check hacker news every morning, scan the titles and read the interesting (and shorter) pieces. Then I have a read later list (which is pretty huge, ops) with longer reads.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't.

Just browse HN every few hours. A quick scan. But thats it.</comment>


Indie hackers describe their companies in 50 characters or less. - <AUTHOR> https://fifty.weekendprojects.xyz/ <comment><AUTHOR> The first question on the YC application is to describe your company in 50 characters or less, so I asked indie hackers to do the same - [https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-describe- the...](https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-describe-their- companies-in-50-characters-or-less-9420edcf02).</comment>


Ask HN: Why is comment toggle/collapse button so slow? - <AUTHOR> The [-] button on top of comments for collapsing threads is very, very slow.
Can't this be improved upon?
Reddit has the same (similar?) functionality but that's quite fast. <comment><USER2> I actually don't have a speed problem with it. It works quickly for me. Latest version of Chrome on 2015 MacBook Pro.

I do, however, find that comments with block quotes are unreadable on mobile as they have to be scrolled back and forth constantly. That's my main problem with the site.

</comment><comment><USER3> On Reddit, it's just altering the DOM in your browser. If you reload the page, what you collapsed is no longer collapsed.

On HN, it's making a request to the server, which will remember that you collapsed that thread and keep it collapsed if you return to the page in the future.

<comment><USER4> This is the answer. However, it raises an interesting question: are users using collapses to hide threads permanently, or to read the N-level comments first, then proceeding deeper as necessary?</comment></comment>


Windows Phone 8 Preview  - <AUTHOR>

Since Winsupersite seems to be banned on HN (probably due to Apple and Google fanboy flagging, can there be any other reason?), I am pasting the link here<p>http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/windows-phone-8-preview-142154 <comment><USER2> The big news seems to be that Windows Phone 8 will be based on the NT kernel, which seems to have been made minimal enough to run on phones and tablets.

Anyway, sad to see anti-MSFT and pro-Apple/Google fanboyism taken on the extreme on HN in which the major Microsoft-news site is actively censored from being submitted.

<comment><USER3> I just posted the link with no problems - paranoia?</comment></comment>


Does the Internets know my password? - <AUTHOR> http://shouldichangemypassword.com/

<comment><USER2> This is definitely paranoia-inducing. It had a record of one of my addresses from December 2010.

<comment><USER3> Probably the Gawker penetration. The dates of the data sets are listed below the email entry.</comment></comment>


Flotilla for Raspberry Pi – Making for Everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/flotilla-for-raspberry-pi-making-for-everyone

<comment><USER2> Hi I love the flotilla overall but I'm concerned about your choice of connector for connecting the dock to the sensors for 2 reasons:

1\. The module rope appears to go against the USB 2.0 spec as the spec forbids the use of micro-usb to micro-usb cables. Now I know you aren't using USB for the data transfer but the cables could be used by someone who doesn't know that the cables can't be used that way to connect say two smartphones together.

2\. By using the micro-usb connectors on the dock to connect to the sensors someone could connect the sensors to something say a smartphone (with the module rope) or to a computer (using the micro-usb to usb-A) which risks damaging both the sensor and the device been connected to, or worse plugging either the sensors or the sensor side of the dock into a phone charger again with the use of a micro-usb to usb-A. as I'm sure you are aware people will try to connect things together in ways the designer never thought of as long as they can fit together.

Its fine if you have already thought of this and accounted for it by designing protection in or if the usb connectors are just been used while its in development, but if you intend for it to be used in places like schools this could be a major issue as it could quite easily damage equipment its not my place to tell you your job or anything but these are my concerns anyway that is just my two cents.

<comment><USER3> Hey!

1\. The cables have a "twist" internally so they electrically match if you if you attempt to "loopback". They'll also have custom branding on the ends to make it clear they are not USB cables.

2\. The modules/dock/cables are electrically compatible with USB (5V power, 3V3 data) and won't cause any damage to a USB device.

The reason we selected those connectors is because they are rated for many insertions, relatively cheap and easy to get assembled as proper moulded cables, SMT placeable, and strong. We did evaluate many options but nothing came close to the quality at a reasonable price.

Hope that answers your question!

<comment><USER2> Ah that is good to hear as I have seen in the past a number of things which use USB connectors, (for the same reasons you mention) but don't follow the spec at all. Which causes all kinds of fun problems.

Keep up the great work.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey Ben, thanks for submitting this!

This is Jon from Pimoroni - we just launched Flotilla today.

We've been working on Flotilla for just over a year - the vision is to provide an electronics experimentation system that scales with ability and has as few restrictions as possible.

The hardware in the video is a little out of date but pretty representative of our final design. The main change is we've swapped to round/thinner cabling to make it easier to route them around in your projects.

The Dock maintains the state of the system receiving updates from sensors and issuing commands to connected devices. It then sanitises the data and discards duplicates before passing it via USB serial to the host Raspberry Pi.

If anyone has any questions I'll hang around to answer them best I can!

</comment><comment><USER4> Arr!

Phil from Pimoroni checking in! Ask me about Cookbook and Rockpool, or anything else really!</comment>


Show HN: Icebreaker: 200 team building questions - <AUTHOR> https://icebreaker.range.co <comment><AUTHOR> I can imagine some skepticism, so thought I'd share some of the theory behind why we released this free tool.

Hopefully we all know by now that high-performing teams depend on psychological safety: people need to feel safe to take risks in order to do their best work. What we talk about less is how to cultivate psychological safety.

Psychological safety depends on a foundation of trust and belonging, but unfortunately these aren't static. They need to be constantly renewed.

It has been shown that starting group activities with an activity that encourages vulnerability will renew these "belonging cues" and will change the dynamics of the meeting. People will be more likely to speak up and discussions will be less win/lose. This will allow you to get the most out of the rest of the time together.

</comment><comment><USER2> One of the most rewarding things I've learned in the past few years has been how much better work can be when you really get to know your co-workers. Our team uses a team-question like this to start every day and it's helped us tremendously.

A startup is a rollercoaster. I totally feel it: the ups and downs. The healthiest way to cope with that volatility is to build a bedrock of trust between the founders and the rest of the team.

It might seem silly, but doing the work of asking and answering questions like these are the best way I know to develop trust.</comment>


On Proof and Progress in Mathematics (1994) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1994-30-02/S0273-0979-1994-00502-6/S0273-0979-1994-00502-6.pdf <comment><USER2> This is a beautiful piece and I could have sworn it had been discussed on HN before, but maybe not ([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=On%20Proof%20and%20Progress%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=On%20Proof%20and%20Progress%20in%20Mathematics%20%5Bpdf%5D&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)).

There was a good thread when Thurston died, though: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4419566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4419566).

</comment><comment><USER3> Fascinating. Still reading through and processing this paper.

"Mathematicians are those humans who advance human understanding of mathematics."

I would submit that there are mathematicians (great ones indeed) who did not seek to advance human understanding of the subject, but may have regardless done so as a side effect of the thread they tugged upon, the tapestry unraveled. Of course, a utilitarian perspective (at least in retrospect) would consider their ultimately accepted works to have advanced human understanding.

Yet I have observed some mathematicians regard their pursuit to be entirely personal, something to the effect of daring to perceive the true contours of logic and patterns in the universe, in their purest form. They revel in the beauty of universal abstractions, the way another might admire and gaze upon a blue lilac in one's own garden.

With this in mind, I would consider these mathematicians having only first undertaken the more lofty goal of advancing human understanding, at the moment they communicate their perceptions with the rest of the world (by publication or other discourse). At that time, they have decidedly entered into the more heavily social nature inherent in any modern intellectual discipline.

</comment><comment><USER4> I first encountered this essay from poking around in Philosophy of Math. If you picked up a survey of the topic, you might think it's all about formalism vs. platonism. That's an interesting topic, but it seems to me as if there's a contemporary trend (maybe not the dominant one) towards trying to understand the practice of mathematics--what makes a proof good or interesting, what mathematicians value, and how to think about mathematical understanding.

Unfortunately, the teacher I learned about this stuff from was not good at either (a) writing down his own ideas, or (b) telling us who in the literature was going down the same route.

However, Kenny Easwaran's paper "Probabilistic proofs and transferability" ([http://www.kennyeaswaran.org/research](http://www.kennyeaswaran.org/research)) seems somewhat in that vein. Jeremy Avigad has a paper called "Understanding Proofs" that seems relevant, though I never finished it ([http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/avigad/papers.html](http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/avigad/papers.html)).

</comment><comment><USER5> Site's down. Google is yielding a link to the arxiv. I didn't know the site was that old.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236](https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236)

</comment><comment><USER6> Great book on that topic is "Proofs and Refutations" by Imre Lakatos. Good read, very insightful. He shows using an extended example the iterative back and forth between definitions, insights, theorems, proofs (which in the real world evolves in a much more convoluted and messy way than it is ultimately presented).

</comment><comment><USER7>
      An interesting phenomenon in spatial thinking is that scalemakes a big
      difference. We can think about little objects in our hands, orwe can think
      of bigger human-sized structures that we scan, or we can think of spatial
      structures that encompass us and that we move around in. We tend to
      think more effectively with spatial imagery on a larger scale: it's as if our
      brains take larger things more seriously and can devote more resources to them.

Really? I prefer imagining things in front of me, they become more manageable at a scale similar to a paper or me, rather than my house. It just seems more natural, does anyone have any insights on this?

<comment><USER8> The brain has dedicated subsystems for different aspects of spatial and visual understanding.

Certain groups of cells (place cells, grid cells) are known to be involved specifically in the ability to track one's own location and movement within the external world. This ability is likely a very old and important evolutionary invention in the development of higher animals, thus very sophisticated and well integrated with other functions, particularly memory. Think of the method of loci, known already in Ancient Rome and Greece, or indeed how quickly one learns to navigate a new city (or a video game level, say). This probably explains the phenomenon the author describes.

That said, the relative importance of the various spatial-visual subsystems of the brain probably depends heavily on the task, and perhaps also varies between individuals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> His thoughts on how definitions reflect different ways of thinking, as a human, is profound to me. The importance of communication discussed in the paper is relevant for any technical field.</comment>


LG Nexus handset revealed  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/11/3487698/lg-nexus-phone-photos-leak <comment><AUTHOR> After using my Nexus 7 for a while I'm seriously thinking about switching away from the iPhone for my next phone. This doesn't look that different from the current Nexus phone, but if the rumors of built in wireless charging are true I think it'll be enough.</comment>


So your startup got selected for an incubator… - <AUTHOR> http://bradhe.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/so-your-startup-got-selected-for-an-incubator/ <comment><USER2> #5 is especially important. I always tell everyone going through a startup incubator that they should take every piece of advice with a grain of salt. I went through an incubator and one of the most respected advisors of the incubator came in to talk to us about our pitch. He told my company that we should pitch as the "eHarmony for geeks!" Our startup had absolutely nothing to do with dating. He clearly didn't understand, but as an advisor he felt he should be giving advice regardless. Everyone is trying to look out for you, but remember, you're the one that calls the shots in the end.

<comment><USER3> When I was going through an incubator I decided that leadership is listening to all of the advice and experience and then actually making my own decision.

<comment><USER4> i like that description.</comment></comment></comment>


BoA Merrill Lynch publishes target price for Bitcoin: $1300 - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/2013/12/boa-bitcoin.pdf <comment><USER2> Don't get too excited. The actual quotation is

      "Assuming Bitcoin becomes a major player in both e-commerce
       and money transfer *and* a significant store of value with
       a reputation close to silver, our fair value analysis
       implies a *maximum market capitalization* of Botcoin of
       $15bn (1 BTC = 1300 USD).

       This suggests that the 100 fold increase in Bitcoin prices
       this year is at risk of running ahead of its fundamentals."

So if two questionably likely events both occur, BAML think that Bitcoin might have a _maximum_ value of 1300 USD.

<comment><USER3> The assumptions they made are quite insane. To calculate how much value in bitcoins is required to facilitate online trades they fixated on proportion of total US households cash and deposits to their total expenditures. They assumed they will have amount of wealth in bitcoins that's in same proportion to 10% of their online expenditures. Then they extrapolated it to whole world.

Do Americans actually have cash and deposits at all? I was under the impression that most of their household expenditures are either directly coming from their paycheck or are credit based.

Not to mention that they "calculated" (how? they say that they divide 11trn by 0.7trn to get that) proportion to be 0.07 then they sliced it down to 0.04 because Americans have recently started saving money which is unusual.

They also assumed that shops will convert bitcoins back to dollars immediately.

When assessing bitcoins as a store of value they state bizarre things:

"Furthermore, the reputation of gold as a unique and safe store of value has been growing for the past ten thousand years. It will take some time for Bitcoins to acquire that reputation. We don't know how to quantify the value of gold's reputation, but this reputation is probably the main reason that its value is 60 times that of silver."

Personally I though that the reason gold is many times more expensive than silver is the fact that silver is vastly more abundant.

So for me it sounds more like: "If two questionably likely events both occur, BAML think that Bitcoin might have a maximum value of 1300 USD. Unless of course it turns out that pigs actually can't fly, then it could go higher."

<comment><USER4> Historically gold to silver ratio was around 15 -- Coinage Act of 1792 defines ratio to be exactly 15, for example. I don't think abundance of gold and silver changed much since then. So change from 15 to 60 indeed is based on the reputation of gold.

<comment><USER3> Roughly there's 10 times as much silver mined as gold. So you are right that 60 times is a bit high. 17.5 times is estimated proportion of those metals in earths crust (not sure if it takes into account gold and silver dissolved in oceanic waters.

Whether the difference between the actual price of gold and the price that can be derived from fundamentals is a value of trust in gold or, as BAML puts it in case of bitcoin, speculation, is up to debate. Pointless I think because speculation is enabled by trust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My thoughts on the BAML report:

The calculation of BTC's value as a currency uses the correct methodology, which I had previously outlined in this post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829518)

BAML uses M1 (cash + checking accounts) instead of M2 (M1 + savings accounts + time deposits). Using M2 is a lot more aggressive but it also captures the "store of value" value. M2 is really a best case scenario for BTC owners, as it assumes that users will hold their savings in BTC. BAML is fine to be conservative with this.

BAML's inclusion of Bitcoin's value as a money transmission business is absurd. While transfer fees accrue to the shareholders of Western Union, the transfer fees of BTC transfers do not accrue to BTC owners. In fact, the transfer fees are quite small to zero and they accrue to the miners. So if BTC does take share from WU, etc., it only shrinks the pie.

Some posters on HN and elsewhere are saying that BAML is "too conservative", but they have not posted their own numbers and assumptions.

The reality is that BTC's current real economy is nowhere near the size needed to justify the current BTC price, and enormous growth of this economy is already baked into the price. While it's not impossible that this growth can occur, there are real reasons to believe that it won't.

</comment><comment><USER6> In case HN wasn't completely aware, most bank "research papers" are content marketing designed to try and get you to buy products from their desk. They are often very biased and should be analyzed with caution.

I don't know much about bitcoin, but I've seen enough "research" from desks to know the analysis is very slanted - hence the page of disclaimers at the end.

<comment><USER7> The disclaimers are because they used to be overt fraud. Now they are mostly paid for by "soft commission" and are supposed to be "independent research" for people who will not pay for research with their own money but will spend customers money on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They will look like complete fools when Bitcoin goes way beyond their "maximum" value $1,300. This seems like a very shallow analysis, done by someone who's new to Bitcoin, and within a single day.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've always found the notion of a "target price" somewhat entertaining. Its market forces at work - baring Goldman schenanigens - nobody is targeting anything.

</comment><comment><USER10> Author apparently didn't read the article from Merril Lynch

[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/885843-banks- researc...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/885843-banks-research- report-on-bitcoin.html)

What it actually says is that if BitCoin is to be viable it has to be used as Currency exchanged against the price of the local currency at the time of transaction.

This makes sense. You wouldn't want to buy gas based on the high or the low of the day. So you can't say that Gas costs 1/300th of a Coin, and leave that as the price all day because right now that could be Cheap at $900 a coin and Expensive at $1300 a coin.

It also says that there has to be enough people using it for it to not have huge price swings based on Volatility. This also makes sense. We don't buy things with gold often because knowing the value at a given moment is hard. And since we don't trade in raw gold we trade in coins, typically those coins each have values, a Krugerand and a Panda don't have quite the same value per ounce and the difference fluctuates per day. So unless we can get to a point that BTC is only changing fractional percentages per day, people are going to always be changing coins to local currency.

All of this summarized in one sentence:

BoA ML thinks that BitCoin will become a Merchant Services System that works on the instantaneous exchange rate with the local currency, and based on the market share they believe it could have and the total number of coins in circulation the cap will be $1300. (yeah it is a long compound sentence)

</comment><comment><USER11> BoA Merill Lynch current price is 231% of it's target price.

Best regards, Bitcoin.

<comment><USER12> So if you buy in now then Bitcoin becomes a major player in both e-commerce and money transfer. Then becomes a significant store of value with the reputation of silver. And for some reason this estimate is off by a factor of two then you could theoretically double your money by whatever time that all this happens.

All you need to do is risk it all.

<comment><USER11> Unless you've bought in year ago.

Also, you don't have to treat Bitcoin as a mean of storing value. You can use it as a way to transfer money over great distances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Stockbrokers always give a target price about 20-100% more than the current price for any asset. It's a marketing thing. They make commision or get investment fees whether the estimates are wrong or right.

<comment><USER14> Not quite correct. They downgrade below current levels occasionally too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> These analysts are not to be trusted. The stock market is a 0 sum game, your loss is someone else's gain. Analysts and brokers are out to get you at worst, or part of the noise at best. the market is an information/disinformation battle. From a dev mindset it might be hard to grasp, in our world people don't gain anything from worsening someone else's prospect. In fact open source can be actually seen as the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why the double submission pdf - the report has already been submitted and has been in the top for a while - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6859832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6859832)

Yeah, this is direct link to the pdf but does this really justify a second submission (and upvoting to top)?

</comment><comment><USER17> They are way understating the growth potential of a currency that has unlimited growth potential because it knows no borders, and serves as a new technological platform.

</comment><comment><USER18> Lol, right now almost no one is using Bitcoin for actual purchases, because it's not a viable currency yet. Right now it's just an investment opportunity until Bitcoin has found its price.

Then not an investment opportunity anymore and becomes a viable currency. That point is reached when 1 Bitcoin is worth between $100,000-$500,000, because then it has replaced all banks, all currencies and taken up around 10% of the world gross product.

I give it 3 years.

<comment><USER19> "Value" of an investment during a bubble is not a useful number. We can write all the imaginary numbers on the wall we like; only backed currencies reflect real wealth. Because in the end our standard of living doesn't change by fiddling with the numbers; only investing in real infrastructure, energy mining and manufacturing, makes any difference in the real world. Fiddling with numbers just bids up the price of those things, a zero-sum game.</comment></comment>


Reasons to Start a Business - <AUTHOR> http://easymple.com/blog/archives/73

<comment><USER2> "You earn money as opposed to being paid money..."

I think the original of this goes to Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad where if you have your own business you "make" money; if you work for someone you "earn" money. But I may be wrong; correction is welcome.</comment>


Cooking Classes, Live on Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/cooking-classes-live-on-google/ <comment><USER2> Interesting to see how fast G+ is maturing. There's still a lot to fix, though:

 _Mr. Allison said they planned to continue holding classes through the Google+ Cooking School, but hope that the Social Skillet classes will help sidestep some of the limitations of Google Hangouts. For example, each session on Google+ can have only 10 participants, and it is difficult to control when people pop in and out of a session, which makes it harder to streamline something like a culinary lesson._</comment>


Ask HN: Company I Work for Is Interested in My Side Project - <AUTHOR> I've been working on a side project for the past couple of months and the company I work for is interested in probably building it out as a product that we can sell.<p>Since it's something that I have been building out on my free time, what are some precautions I should take to ensure that I keep a major ownership in the project and don't get sidewinded by the company? I don't think they would do that, but I've heard horror stories in the past. <comment><USER2> This can be tough (but also awesome), whatever you do make sure communication is clear and there is a written contract in place. Some companies will place claim on your invention saying you developed it while you were an employee and so they own it. Depending on your employment agreement and the Country & State you reside the success of this will depend. But that doesn't stop them from trying to bully you, so just be cautious.

They may be good people and have no mal intent, but you just need to make sure you do everything in clear, open communication and in writing for everyone. And when you talk to them about it just say that, you are just trying to make sure everything is spelled out and clear so there are no misunderstandings because you enjoy your work and you love your side project as well. Good people will be good with that, weasels will get weasely.</comment>


Material design for Business card - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/sksarath5/pen/pvYbWo

<comment><USER2> .head should be right-aligned, imo.

[http://codepen.io/anon/pen/qEvqrB](http://codepen.io/anon/pen/qEvqrB)

<comment><AUTHOR> If the head is right aligned then all the head element wont be uniformly aligned.</comment></comment>


Mozilla say Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 will be here on time within next week - <AUTHOR> http://techcombo.com/mozilla-say-firefox-35-beta-4-will-be-here-on-time-within-next-week Surprisingly, the Mozilla corporation will actually be in the position to release the highly anticipated, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4. This new update will most likely be the last of its kind until the real big browser comes into play, Firefox 3.5.
This came as a big thrill to me as you all have realised over the last few beta releases, they have been remarkably late! To refresh your memory,they stopped Beta 3 being released, not just once but twice and then moving on to Beta 4. In additon, the fact that they got rid of Firefox 3.0 demonstrating how amazingly different the two versions, 3.0 and 3.5 actually are.
Why were there always delays?
The obvious reason for the delays are the time management issues, that they did not stick to their target plan. However, the most important reason was from TraceMonkey, which is the new Javascript engine established by Firefox. This seems to be vital for Firefox as it is supposedly meant make pages load 2 times quicker and 9 times quicker than Firefox 3.0... <comment><USER2> For those of your who are slightly confused, FF 3.1 (that was supposed to be released in Decemberish) is called FF 3.5 now. I suppose that version number makes a bit more sense given the feature set and time frame.

<comment><USER3> Yep. I've always hated it when companies did the ole version =* 1.5 trick just to make it sound "better", but in Firefox's case, with a brand new JavaScript engine, built in HTML 5 <video> tag support, GeoLocation, and a few other big new features, I guess it does seem like a lot more than just a .1 increment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Incredibly poor writing quality. I'm surprised this isn't some high school kid's blog.</comment>


Nokia Confirms Lumia 900 Software Glitch, Offers Fix and $100 Credit - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/nokia-confirms-lumia-900-software-glitch-has-fix-and-giving-buyers-100-credit/

<comment><USER2> My iPhone's 2-year contract will be expiring soon and I wanted to give the Lumia 900 a serious consideration. So I had the chance to walk into an AT&T store today to try out the phone. I wanted to test the browser and the internet didn't work on the phone! Both WiFi and data didn't work! I asked the store people and they tried and it still didn't work. Finally I was asked to try out the browser on another Samsung Win7 phone nearby. Little did I know that it was an issue with the Lumia 900!</comment>


The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground - <AUTHOR> http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ <comment><USER2> > "middle-income" Americans are defined as adults whose annual household > income is two-thirds to double the national median, about $42,000 to > $126,000 annually in 2014 dollars for a household of three.

$42k for a household of three seems very low to be considered middle-class. I suppose in rural areas that makes sense, but in most population centers that would be fairly impoverished.

<comment><USER3> Conceptually speaking, I think we generally understand what middle income means. People living plainly and comfortably who don't have lavish things or have to surmount debt to stay out of homelessness.

I'm pretty surprised how high that number is.

I live in Los Angeles. I have a one bedroom apt and a 10 year old car. I eat in, try to be thrifty, take trips a few times a year but stay in modest accommodations or couch surf.

With tax, I'd need about 55k to support this lifestyle with zero savings.

That's $26/hr fulltime - a number probably out of reach for the majority of the city workforce.

I wonder how most people get by.

I think people should openly discuss these things - you can't create a transparent open market of human capital if we can't culturally speak of how much we charge and get.

Income disclosure is a method of self organizing towards a more equitable society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> upper class increased from 29% to 49% from 1970 to today

lower class decreased from 10% to 9% from 1970 to today

that looks pretty good to me

<comment><USER5> Those percentages are total income, not population. You've got it completely wrong.

<comment><USER6> this. here's the graph which clearly labels it as aggregate income. [http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/ST_2015-12-09_m...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/ST_2015-12-09_middle- class-01.png)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: SEO today, what's it all about?  - <AUTHOR>

What are the best practices. Is it worth it, whats okay whats not? <comment><USER2> A little SEO is worth it, whether or not you know what you're doing. You can read the free stuff on SEOMoz to get a good idea of best practices.

Essentially, SEO is a way to showcase your content so it's more obvious to search engines that your site is about whatever it's about. That means:

* Fresh content. * Titles and subtitles relevant to what you're talking about (no "mystery meat" headlines -- if you're writing about website usability, say "Website usability," not "The business mistake that could cost your customers"). * A reasonable amount of self-promotion: if you know what you've written could help someone, tell them so; if you see a blog that you like, ask to write a guest post. * In every online interaction, make sure people see that you know what you're talking about -- and make it clear that for the _good_ stuff, they have to pay.

I write a blog about SEO copywriting: <http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/> Read it for more.

</comment><comment><USER3> (a) Content (and attach a blog)

(b) _Be_ the community.

Answer questions on forum(s) related to your niche. Help people solve those problems via Twitter and other social sites. Write in turn about those experiences. Rinse & Repeat.

It's cheaper to cause awesomeness than to buy it.

(c) Adhere to basics, good titles, viral marketing, link building, make it easier for people and spiders to find you site.

<comment><AUTHOR> I try this sometimes, often people get mad at me for suggesting that my site might help them. I try to be upfront about being the creator, but people still seem to have a problem with people who own things "hocking" them in niche sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> of course it's worth it...if you're interested in proactive SEO, you need to focus on building relevant, targeted one way links to your site for the keywords you're looking to rank for. Start with long tail keywords (like 2004 nissan altima 5 speed vs. nissan altima) so there is less competition to worry about. As you build authority on those long tail words, it will become easier and easier to get ranked for the harder keywords. Use your target keywords in the anchor text of the links you build (so instead of "Click here" do "2004 nissan altima 5 speed" as the anchor text)

The best link sources are: web 2.0 site profiles that allow links web 2.0 blog sites that allow articles with links social bookmarking article marketing blog commenting wiki links directory links (though not too much)

Don't go crazy on the number of links you build. There's no set number of links that are too much per day, but what's most important is consistently building links. That way the search engines see you as a long term authority site for your niche.

Also, while on site SEO is a good thing, it really only amounts to about 10% of your rankings. It basically makes it easier for the search engines to crawl your site and determine its topic once they find you.

It's all about links...</comment>


Cool water vapor effect in HTML5 Canvas - <AUTHOR> http://raizin-japan.com/cool/

<comment><USER2> It's 'just' a couple of scrolling images for the vertical and horizontal vapour, and a rotating image for the swirl where they meet. Very effective indeed. I'm impressed.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, when you know what to look you can see the components, but at first glance it looks very believable.

Too bad even such a simple visual hack was enough to get the fans spinning on my mac air (circa 2011)

<comment><USER4> Yeah HTML 5 is such a resource hog! Brign back flash :p

<comment><USER5> The biggest advantage of flash is that it is easy to disable and you don't loose out on disabling it.

Yes, I'm prepared to miss they days of flash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the end result, but i'm not sure why they decided to use 14 canvas tags when 1 would have worked just as well.

It seems wasteful, canvas was designed specifically to allow drawing and manipulating multiple images on a single surface, these guys are using canvas as if it were a div with a background image.

<comment><USER7> Maybe they found it performed better, like Adrian Holovaty found for soundslide: [http://www.holovaty.com/writing/in-defense-of- canvas/](http://www.holovaty.com/writing/in-defense-of-canvas/) (see "stacking canvases")

<comment><USER8> Stacking canvases makes sense when you have ones that either only need to be built on startup or change infrequently. If everything in your animation is moving (like this one) then there's no performance benefit.

<comment><USER9> Are you sure about that? Would be interesting to see a performance comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Goes to show, you don't always need to do things the hard/proper/science way to make something like this convincing. Smoke and mirrors ftw. (although this particular set of smoke and mirrors could probably do with a little optimising. I'ts a good effect nonetheless)

</comment><comment><USER11> Took about 2 minutes before the animation actually started, but clever effect.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is much like how particle systems in games work

</comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't work with my resolution of 1280x1920 px. ;)

<comment><USER14> Why are you so happy about it not working?

<comment><USER13> I am not happy about it, but should I be grumpy?

<comment><USER15> No one suggested that.

<comment><USER16> It was implied

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cpu: 42%</comment>


If Google wants my heart, they can lobby to end the drug war - <AUTHOR>

I think it's great that Google is rallying behind the LGBT movements around the world. Sure, you don't get jailed in North America for being gay, but it can still get you beaten or killed in Jamaica or Egypt. So kudos for fighting the good fight:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/12/google-legalise-love-campaign-rocks
However, Google fighting homophobia is always going to be a fairly ephemeral notion. There will be gains and progress, but it's hard to say what a success scenario looks like for Google on this issue.
I'll tell you what's not ephemeral, though: America's un-winnable "war" on street drugs. It doesn't seem to matter how many African America males they lock up, how many billions of dollars are allocated to ruining the lives of recreational drug users. It doesn't matter that Amsterdam is one of the most civilized places on Earth, or that Portugal's drug epidemic has improved dramatically in most age groups since decriminalization. Quite simply, so long as there's status quo partisan politics and intense lobbying, the saga will continue forever.
That is, unless a logically reasoned and highly funded progressive organization steps in and makes a lot of noise. I'm ecstatic about asteroid mining and colonizing Mars by 2023 just like everyone else, but what I'd like most is for innocent people to stop getting killed or jailed for smoking weed or being physically close to someone else who does. <comment><USER2> "Sure, you don't get jailed in North America for being gay, but it can still get you beaten or killed in Jamaica or Egypt."

You can be tortured to death in the US for being gay.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard></comment>


One Room Configured 24 Ways - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/garden/15hongkong.html <comment><USER2> Did anyone else look at that collection of CDs and think, "I could fit those in a couple inches on a hard drive?"

<comment><USER3> I noticed that too but the article addressed it by saying:

"Mr. Chang, a technophile who checks on his apartment with a Web cam while traveling, refuses to switch to MP3 files because he loves CD cases and liners."

<comment><USER4> It's why I keep my old vinyl even though I've downloaded the albums on FLAC. The old album art is incredibly detailed at 12x12 inches and an album cover like "Blue," a patchouli-infused sleeve ("Like a Prayer"), or a working zipper to Mick Jagger's leather pants ("Sticky Fingers") are all fun parts of the experience of owning a historical artifact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of the fold-away apartment Bruce Willis occupies in "The Fifth Element".

<comment><USER6> The first thing that came to mind when I read the title were the movies Cube and Hyper Cube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The architect in the article Gary Chang has also written a book on his reconfigurable apartment:

[http://www.mccmcreations.com/books/architecture/my%2032m%20a...](http://www.mccmcreations.com/books/architecture/my%2032m%20apartment/main.htm)

</comment><comment><USER8> It is a great concept, but the negative is that it is fantastically expensive, probably at the top end of per s.f. costs anywhere.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but this is the sort of thing a market would be good at, finding some optimal tradeoffs between cost and flexibility... if a market could be created. I don't know inner cities well enough to know whether that is true.

If we're going to cite problems, mine would be that the concept probably only works with one person. With any more, everybody has to coordinate what "rooms" are available and the dependency graphs could be quite odd. Can I cook breakfast if you're sleeping in? Can I get to the shower if you're watching a movie? I would expect that even two people would be significantly inconvenienced and three might just lock up due to contention. Smaller, dedicated rooms may suck, but at least they are reasonably independent.

But hey, for one guy, awesome. It's certainly in the running for "ultimate bachelor pad".

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but you can put two of these multi-use spaces next to each other. His and hers :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is important. If this were motorized, it might enable software- controllable living- and working- spaces with random, dynamic reconfigurability.

<comment><USER12> haha. i can imagine the fights kids would get into trying to get the largest room or move the bear over the middle line (a la the movie brazil).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Brilliant. Borrowing storage idea from book/CD inventories I have have seen.

</comment><comment><USER14> 377 square feet. I still cannot understand why some people get 5k square feet for a family of 4.

<comment><USER15> 377 sq feet is luxurious.

My apartment is smaller and my friends who live in Nagoya refer to it as Castle Patrick. (Half a decade of living in ~120 sq feet will alter your perceptions a bit.)

(P.S. And they wonder why I won't move to Nagoya.)

<comment><USER14> This goes out to show that we always take more than we need. I never lived in 120 sq feet apartment but I am sure I could manage.I hope in a near future we will live in smaller places designed to fit our needs. But I must admit that I would not mind being surrounded by acres of grass.</comment></comment></comment>


RoslynLinqRewrite – Compiles C# by rewriting and optimising LINQ expressions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antiufo/roslyn-linq-rewrite <comment><USER2> Looks nice. A lot of people don't realize how expensive Linq can be. That said, my preference for most (source) codegen is in the editor – this would be nice as an editor plugin.

<comment><USER3> It's true, but 95% of the cases you get much better results by using the right data structures (dictionaries) instead of transforming queries to loops. Still is a very cool thing, hopefully is standardized into Roslyn

<comment><USER4> How would the provided example be better realized as a dictionary?

<comment><USER5> All true, but the example is a demo that doesn't do anything useful, and not typical code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Worth bearing in mind that this only helps if you are using LINQ against in- memory objects (i.e. LINQ to Objects). Depending on how this detects IQueryable providers it will either skip it, break it or worse of all silently 'work' but pull all the remote data into memory for evaluation. I'm hoping it's skip.

<comment><USER7> This project only works with IEnumerable, not IQueryable, see [https://github.com/antiufo/roslyn-linq- rewrite/blob/09216a3b...](https://github.com/antiufo/roslyn-linq- rewrite/blob/09216a3b2ab53474a93db861435c056523f194d0/RoslynLinqRewrite/RoslynLinqRewrite/LinqRewriter.Rules.cs#L167-L181) for instance.

I guess this is for exactly the reasons you talk about, i.e. once it's working with Expression tress too much is unknown and any optimisations would be v. risky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks cool!

> No support for F#

Why is this? Is it a macro (as opposed to working with bytecode directly)?

<comment><USER9> Because Roslyn[1] itself can only understand C# and VB.NET.

[1] `The .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") provides open-source C# and Visual Basic compilers with rich code analysis APIs.` - [https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn](https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be more interesting to apply it selectively to LINQ on hot code paths and keep LINQ's readability where performance and allocations are not a concern

<comment><USER5> If this happens as a step during each compilation then you probably do keep readability of the input source code.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but when you start debugging you will see something else happening than what is in the input source code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If only C# had LISP-style macros... .</comment>


Last we checked, PHP is a framework. - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/06/08/last-we-checked-php-is-a-framework/ Don't get me wrong. I love PHP, but this guy has some interesting views ;) <comment><USER2> Mmmm... leaky abstractions. That's where frameworks will getcha.</comment>


AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Benchmarked – Giving Intel's $1000 Chips A Run For It - <AUTHOR> http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-8-core-benchmarks/ <comment><USER4> More importantly for some, it's a 95W AMD part vs a 140W Intel part. If the power delta stays the same even for mainstream parts, does this mean AMD will become a good quiet option too?

By quiet I mean "I can't hear it at night" not "I can't hear it over the music".

Edit: Also, I think data centers these days are limited in density by power delivery and cooling. Even a 25W delta adds up when you're talking about thousands of servers.

<comment><USER5> TDP is a bit tricky to compare in this situation. The TDP of Intels HEDT chips is dictated by their 256-bit wide AVX units which drive power consumption through the roof when fully loaded, and the chips don't get nearly as hot when AVX isn't being used. Ryzen doesn't have this edge case because it sticks with 128-bit SIMD units and runs AVX instructions over two clock cycles.

I expect the "140W" Intel part will have closer power consumption to Ryzen in non-AVX loads, and outperform Ryzen in AVX loads while using more power.

<comment><USER6> Intel chips use a lower base clock frequency when they're running AVX code than when they're running non-AVX code for the very reasons you mention. In Intel's example[1] they talk about a base freqeuncy of 2.3 GHz without using AVX dropping to 1.9 with AVX[1]. That drop isn't much in frequency terms but you also have to figure in the voltage drop that the lower frequency allows you to cut power much more than you cut frequency. The end result is somewhere between power dropping with the cube or square of frequency depending on whether active or leakage power is dominating. Which is to say that they can save between 30% and 40% of their power by reducing the frequency at the same time they're lighting up a large area of new silicon. So I assume they chose the specific frequencies so that they're always hitting the same TDP whether they're making us of AVX or not.

Of course, performance scales not to far from linearly here so going to AVX is a large net performance win, as you say. It's just that I'd assume equal power consumption on non-AVX loads.

[1][http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...](http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white- papers/performance-xeon-e5-v3-advanced-vector-extensions-paper.pdf)

<comment><USER7> I agree with you but when I clicked your footnote source, oh god - <USER2> marketing wank. The problem with all of these benchmarks (starting with LAPACK in 1979, up until modern day benchmarks used in the TOP500 or the TPC which models a bank for RDBMS performance) is the synthetic nature of the tests and the unreasonable locality of what they end up testing. One of the bazillions of reasons why the base frequency can drop in those tests Intel used is because your CPU(s) isn't(aren't) context switching or having to do things a normal MSSQL or Oracle DB will do.

I.e., LAPACK/BLAS benchmarks are just really big linear algebra matrix problems, so obviously your pre-fetch and branch prediction performance will be significantly better since you aren't dealing with interrupts, locatedb, or Windows DCOM events firing off in the background. You have a huge set of matrices with a _very_ predictable set of branches, fetches, and decodes, so obviously your CPU can optimize for that load, you're just paying for it in latency on the back-end (RAM fetches are the new disk swap ;)).

On all those benchmarks, (i.e. your standard LU matrix decomposition which previously was the basis of the LAPACK benchmarks, though things might have changed in the ~10 years since I've really looked at things) isn't CPU-bound anymore, so of course your instruction-per-cycle load on the CPU isn't where you'll be bottlenecking (and hasn't been since "let's avoid floating-point operations and just use static look-ups instead since we don't want the 10x cost of using the FDIVP instruction!"). Your processor can very easily anticipate from where in that sparse-matrix your next data fetch is going to be. It's the cost of that RAM fetch[1] going along that copper trace which is going to be where you're going to bottleneck on any heavy numerical computation.

The power consumption on your CPU might drop a nominal amount which is great for those marketing white papers, but for a numerically heavy load, you're paying just as much (in total power consumption per 4U in the data center, total heat generation/dissipation within the case, and total processing time) on the back-end for those fetches.

[1] [https://i.stack.imgur.com/a7jWu.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/a7jWu.png) (I normally cite academic references, but this is 'good enough' to convey my point, I hope).

<comment><USER8> > On all those benchmarks, (i.e. your standard LU matrix decomposition which > previously was the basis of the LAPACK benchmarks, though things might have > changed in the ~10 years since I've really looked at things) isn't CPU-bound > anymore, so of course your instruction-per-cycle load on the CPU isn't where > you'll be bottlenecking [...]

That's incorrect, DGEMM and most BLAS3 is way above most if not all processor uarch's aritmetic intensity threshold [1]. Broadwell CPUs are at 10 Flops/byte [1] while e.g. DGEMM is 32 Flops/byte [2], so that's definitely FLOP/instruction bound and not memory.

> Your processor can very easily anticipate from where in that sparse-matrix > your next data fetch is going to be. It's the cost of that RAM fetch[1] > going along that copper trace which is going to be where you're going to > bottleneck on any heavy numerical computation.

You're mixing things up, it seems! LAPACK/BLAS is _dense_ matrix, not sparse, so now you switched topics. Sparse matrix ops are generally >1 Flops/byte (see [2]), so that's indeed memory bound.

[1] [https://www.karlrupp.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/flop- per...](https://www.karlrupp.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/flop-per-byte- dp.png) [2] [http://www.siam.org/pdf/news/2090.pdf](http://www.siam.org/pdf/news/2090.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These last few years Intel was much working much more on bring power consumption down than ... anything else? The performance changed little: [http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs...](http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_bridge_2600k_ipc_review/4) 20%? But now the 15W U series mobile chips deliver the same performance as 35W M chips in the Sandy/Ivy Bridge era which is quite impressive.

This, of course, leads to a tremendous advantage in server CPUs -- if you have capable cores at a lower wattage, you can add more of them. Hence the 14 core E5-2690V4 @ 135W at 2.6Ghz vs 8 core E5-2690 @ 135W at 2.9GHz. So in just four generations from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell, no TDP change, roughly the same or a bit better single thread execution but almost double the core count. If you are willing to drop a tiny bit your base clock further and your TDP higher, perhaps 10% less single thread performance, you can get a hulk of a 24 core E7-8890V4 at 165W. And that's where the big profit is -- currently.

Now some unfounded nonsense: what if Intel is not pulling these crazy prices out of their sorry behind but there's in fact some reality behind them? It just bothers me that the price of the 24 core chip is so close to the 6*6 times of a 4 core chip. It could be a coincidence.

<comment><USER10> I think you sum it up quite good: The thing that Intel did mostly was putting more cores on the chips. However that happenend only for the server lines. With Sandybridge and before the top desktop and server chips were nearly identical, now there's a huge difference. Which also means that during the last years the performance of desktop CPUs increased barely. That might be ok from the point of view that normal users would mostly not benefit from more than 4 cores. However assuming that developing and manufacturing the top-end model of each generation costs roughtly the same the new generation desktop models should probably be a lot cheapter than they are currently sold for.

<comment><USER11> There's been a fork in CPU design goals. Before, the fastest chip was the goal. Now, we have fast single-threaded vs high parallel throughput - <USER3> while there's a spectrum between them, the extremes matter, it's not a case of a Goldilocks solution.

Consumer loads are mostly limited by single threaded performance, though software is increasingly written for more cores. Best choice for a consumer used to be dual core, now it's probably quad core with thermal limited boosting on less parallel workloads.

It's only prosumers doing lots of transcoding or rendering, or CPU intensive VMs, that typically benefit from increasing cores above 4.

Whereas the server space prizes throughput and much of its workload is trivially parallelizable. On the server, higher single core speed mostly just decreases latency for small tasks; if you're happy with the latency, you can get more cores working on shared memory and potentially get big wins in perf.

There are diminishing returns though, scaling up boxes is expensive and unless it's being forced by software licensing or architectural models, things like Hadoop and Spark for spreading the load across a whole cluster are increasingly attractive. This helps solve the I/O throughput problem too.

<comment><USER12> You also had the whole thing AMD seemed to be attempting with their first gen APU design, shifting the floating point workload over to GPGPUs rather than use a dedicated floating point unit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow... I really hope this is true and that it's a sign that AMD have their mojo back. Partly because I have a sentimental favoritism towards AMD, and partly because Intel (and Nvidia) need competition.

<comment><USER14> An AMD 40Mhz 80486 was my first build so I also have a soft spot. At the time it was the fatest x86 one could buy. Gees I even remember lusting after the Ati 8514 Ultra, one of the earliest GPU accelerators, clone of IBM's high end workstation standard of the early 90s, as a teenager. Wow I'm getting old.

Conversely, though I admire Intel for its central place in advancing computing itself, I cannot love the company because it has shamelessly monetized its monopoly over the past 7 years or so with vast overpricing on higher end lines. I for one am definitely doing a Ryzen 7 build as soon as I can get a chip, and the same goes for Vega. So happy to see AMD back in the game.

<comment><USER15> I remember those days and bought AMD then too. There was even a third competitor in those days, Cyrix.

<comment><USER16> I remember cyrix being later in the game with its 686/166 Mhz proc which did wonders.

<comment><USER15> Cyrix had a 486.

<comment><USER11> They marketed 5x86 and 6x86. Faster integer performance than Intel; the FPU was the weak spot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is so much hype with AMD atm. In particular sites like WCCFTech have gone almost rabid with hype. My experience is that AMD tend to over promise with their marketing and rumours. So whilst the hype _may_ well be warranted this time, I'm going to wait for the actual reviews to come through and take these leaks with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER18> Fair enough, but this is a bit more concrete than marketing fluff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Take everything WCCFTECH writes with a pinch of salt, all of this could still be fake. The Ryzen hype train is on full steam and i really hope they deliver, but i'll wait for official benchmarks.

In the last few years, more often than not AMD hardware leaks have shown potential that in the end wasn't met. Things look good for Ryzen though, maybe they can finally make 6-8 Core CPUs mainstream.

<comment><USER20> Which website would you consider "official"? Anandtech?

<comment><USER21> By "official" I think he meant the benchmarks done by the websites themselves, using proper methodologies. In this article the benchmark was submitted by a user, using synthetic tests from a single application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm trying to put this into perspective.

AMD having temporary edge over Intel has happened before. Remember when AMD had Athlon in 1999 and they made huge $1 billion in profits.

Intel's response has always been the same. They cut their profit margins and start selling chips cheaper. They undercut AMD with volume and price and suddenly AMD is in the doghouse again struggling. AMD's best efforts can cut into Intel's profits, but Intel's response is to remove all profits from AMD until it's left behind.

Just compare these two:

Revenue/gross profit/gross profit margin (Sebtember 2016)

AMD $1.1B/$930 mil/4.5%

INEL $60B/$16B /60+%

Even if you add $5.5B revenue from GLOBALFOUNDRIES (manufacturer of AMD chips) to make AMD camp comparison more relevant, there is large difference.

<comment><USER23> >Intel's response has always been the same. They cut their profit margins and start selling chips cheaper. They undercut AMD with volume and price and suddenly AMD is in the doghouse again struggling. AMD's best efforts can cut into Intel's profits, but Intel's response is to remove all profits from AMD until it's left behind.

The last time Intel did that it was through illegal tactics - unlikely they'll get away with it a second time.

[https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/intel-loses-eu- antitrust...](https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/intel-loses-eu-antitrust- appeal/?ncid=rss_truncated)

<comment><USER22> Doing illegal is just optimization.

Intel can undercut AMD lawfully if it wants. Instead of hidden rebates, Intel can openly cut prices.

<comment><USER23> You're failing to acknowledge that AMD can just as easily cut prices to compete. If Intel starts selling at a loss they'll be subject to even more punitive damages than they faced for bribing OEMs. Not to mention they'd be hung out to dry by shareholders.

<comment><USER22> > AMD can just as easily cut prices to compete.

They can't. They don't have profit margins or cash in hand to do that.

> Intel starts selling at a loss they'll be subject to even more punitive > damages t

I think you failed to see my argument. Intel has 60% profit margins. They can cut their prices a lot without making a loss. AMD cant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really want AMD to succeed! Intel's lack of progress and monopolistic behavior have become embarrassing. Competition is best for the consumer. I am really thinking of making all AMD rig after all chips are out.

</comment><comment><USER25> One must bear in mind that wccftech has always been one to _leak_ stuff. Take what you might want to from that.

More importantly though, Intel definitely needs competition. This is really good news and I hope it plays out well.

<comment><USER26> It'll put price pressure on Intel, that's for sure, but I don't know if it'll make Intel work any faster on boosting performance. They're having enough trouble with process and yield as it is.

It's interesting that this time around, if these numbers are true, AMD is not only faster performing and less costly, but also lower power. In the past they've always run hot, noisy, but cheap and fast-enough.

Maybe their experience in optimizing GPU production is paying dividends here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What about ECC memory? Intels desktop processors fail hard on that feature.

<comment><USER28> Why do you need that in desktop env? What's the usecase when it can be beneficial to have expensive ECC RAM instead of the ordinary one?

I was always thinking that ECC can prevent blue screens/kernel faults, but I haven't seen those in years on my laptop without ECC.

<comment><USER29> > What's the usecase when it can be beneficial to have expensive ECC RAM > instead of the ordinary one?

Anyone using ZFS will (or should!) care about ECC support. [0]

Lots of people build their own NAS/SAN boxes, so ECC support on a desktop CPU at a reasonable price point would be very appreciated. Currently you need to buy specific model CPUs (Celeron or Xeon, IIRC) to get ECC support from Intel. [1]

[0] [https://serverfault.com/questions/454736/non-ecc-memory- with...](https://serverfault.com/questions/454736/non-ecc-memory-with-zfs-a- stupid-idea)

[1] [https://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?ECCMemory=true&MarketS...](https://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?ECCMemory=true&MarketSegment=DT)

<comment><USER30> Great use-case for the server-grade Atoms. I have a freenas build with an Avoton 8-core and it's fantastic. Asrock Rack c2750D4i, check it out. Can't wait for the new Atom server chips as well, and I hope AMD launches a competitor in the low-power / storage server market.

<comment><USER31> I am looking into replacing my home server / NAS, and I considered the atom server chips, but they seem just so expensive for their computing power, and also not very power efficient. The 8 core C2750 has a passmark of 3800[0], with an abysmal single thread performance of 579, and still has a TDP of 20W, and the mobo+cpu assemblies go for ~400$.

For way less, if you're willing to five up on ECC, you can get an i5-7500T and a pretty good motherboard, bringing your TDP to 35W but having a passmark of 7055, and most importantly, a single thread rating of 1924.

This might not matter much if you're use is exclusively NAS, but I will probably end up running some virtualized or containerized server, or streaming video possibly transcoding on the fly, and I'm afraid the Atom might become a bottleneck.

Is there a solution that is somewhat competitive with the i3/5/7 on price and power, and has ECC? And, ideally, that comes in a Mini-ITX form factor?

[0] Obviously the PassMark score is only a ballpark estimate to get an idea of how fast is a chip, but still.

<comment><USER32> Look at Xeon E3, for example: [https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911...](https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117611)

<comment><USER31> Thanks. It looks there are reasonably priced mini-ITX boards that support Skylake Xeons (a note to this that are considering this: v5 E3 (Skylake) use the same socket as Cores, but need a different chipset).

The 80W TDP worries me about though, cooling, noise and money/pollution wise (the extra 45W make around 400kWh/year).

Considering the CPU will be idle most of the time, do you have figures about the actual idle consumption of an E3 based machine?

<comment><USER32> There are also lower TDP models like [http://ark.intel.com/products/53401/Intel-Xeon- Processor-E3-...](http://ark.intel.com/products/53401/Intel-Xeon- Processor-E3-1220L-3M-Cache-2_20-GHz)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Competition please! Intel/Nvidia monopoly has brought prices of CPUs and especially GPUs to insane levels.

<comment><USER34> Ditto. Here's hoping the Ryzen will pan out and force Intel's hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ryzen leaks conspicuously don't mention gaming or the i7-7700K. AMD may win in a very small market yet lose the mainstream.

<comment><USER36> Gaming performance is irrelevant for top CPUs, the difference appears only in low resolutions and old games.

<comment><USER37> The "games don't use CPU" line is only really true for multiplatform games that must also run on the low performance PS4/XBox One AMD Jaguar CPUs.

If we look at PC exclusives [1] then we can see that these are extremely CPU- hungry games. This hunger only goes up if we want to achieve a framerate higher than 60, say going for 144.

I personally have an i7 @ 3.8 GHz with GTX 1060 and none of these games can hold a stable 1080p @ 144 Hz. What's more, I've benchmarked the effect of changing GPU/CPU and increased CPU power increases FPS far more than increased GPU.

I upgraded from Radeon R270X to GTX 1060. In multiplatform games this is a huge leap. Battlefield 4 (1080p Ultra) goes from 43.1 to 94.8 [2], a whopping +120% increase. While in Dota 2 (1080p Ultra) that only netted me a +11% gain. Then when I overclocked my i7 from 2.8 GHz to 3.8 GHz I got a +23% increase.

\--

[1] For example Dota 2, H1Z1, DayZ, Civilization 6, Guild Wars 2.

[2] [http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1043](http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1043) & [http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1771](http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1771)

<comment><USER38> Just curious: why do you want to run a turn based game like civ6 at 144fps? Or for that matter anything except super reaction-dependent FPSs?

<comment><USER37> You're correct that it has a significantly bigger impact in reaction-dependant games. [1] Civilization 6 was just a good example of a CPU-heavy game, regardless of whether those frames are that useful. However there's also the case of normalization. After using a high refresh rate monitor, even something as simple as moving the cursor in Windows feels laggy with lower refresh rate monitors.

\--

[1] This being all reaction-dependant games, doesn't have to be FPS. Even fast paced pong qualifies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If I were Apple, I'd jump on this. Maybe then battery life will be better. And hopefully that famed form fitted battery comes out of the woods.

</comment><comment><USER40> Would have been an interesting validation to put the i7-2700K in there. It was nearer the 8350 and would have provided a good baseline to see that the benchmark is actually useful. As it stands, I'm a little sceptical (but also very hopeful, since I'm buying desktop hardware soon).

</comment><comment><USER41> That does not really make sense. Why would physics simulation and prime calculation be so much slower? I would not trust those benchmarks.

<comment><USER42> My guess would be branching behavior. The Intel branch predictor could be better for that sort of stuff.

<comment><USER6> That might be true of the physics simulation but I think that's more likely Intel's better vector processing resources. With a prime search the branches involved ought to be a combination of the trivially easy ones that any predictor should be able to handle and the super high entropy ones that no predictor can guess. So if anything doing badly on the prime test is an indication that it was _AMD 's_ good branch predictor that was bumping up its score on the other tests.

<comment><USER42> The test also said that AMD beat out intel on SSE stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Execs at Intel ain't gonna be too worried, they probably have signed contracts that lock partners up for many years to come

<comment><USER44> In a world where progress has slowed down, being two to three years behind Intel means you're practically interchangeable. This chip isn't an abnormality, it's a sign of things to come, and there's no way it isn't keeping Intel's execs up at night.

<comment><USER14> Amd is prepping a 32 core server beast. Considering Intel just launched a 24 core chip costing _9000 dollars_ , and considering the AMD IPC is looking good, Intel execs must be gnawing down to their elbows at the prospect of AMD walking in to that market at 50% pricing deltas. Over to GloFo though on process. That appears to be the a possible achilles heel here for AMD.

<comment><USER45> > Intel execs must be gnawing down to their elbows at the prospect of AMD > walking in to that market at 50% pricing deltas.

That's not how it works. If they think AMD can make a dent, they'll mark their chips down to be competitive (for whatever definition of competitive they use, which is probably supported by data, though it might not be YOUR definition). Poor Intel will have to deal with only 100% profit instead of the 300% or so they've become accustomed to.

Intel got a knock out from AMD some 15 years ago. Enough people working at Intel still remember it will enough. This aspect of history is very unlikely to repeat or even to rhyme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> not wasting a lot of silicon space on an integrated graphics solution seems to be a big win in terms of increasing the effective power of the CPU without increasing the price as much since in the end the die will likely be smaller.

I am surprised Intel has never come up with some more gaming oriented i7s with more cores and no integrated graphics as pretty much no gamer would run without a discrete video card anyways, but then again without any competition from AMD it probably wasn't worth the engineering effort or the risk of cannibalizing their Xeon offerings.

</comment><comment><USER47> Not a CPU expert here, but isn't this a comparison of AMD next gen to Intel current gen? Won't Intel have a new CPU out, too, when the Ryzen is actually released?

<comment><USER48> These release in less than two weeks. Intel's "current" gen released less than a month ago.

Seems pretty fair to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> One of the best thing about Zen is that it "should" substantially changes the dynamic of Cloud / VPS hosting.

High Memory Instances are Cheaper due to support of 8 Memory Channels. Lower End Instances could be cheaper due to Lower Cost per Core Count.

</comment><comment><USER50> Any thoughts on the huge discrepancy in SSE performance? Something seems wrong there.

<comment><USER51> As mentioned elsewhere, these chips only have a 128-bit SIMD unit (either for power or for space savings?) and so 256-bit SIMD executes half as fast as it would on Intel.

<comment><USER52> But if I read the picture properly, AMD appears to be 8 times(!) faster than anything else:

[http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/AMD- Ryzen...](http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/AMD- Ryzen-7-1800X-CPU-Mark-SSE-Benchmark-WM-840x370.jpg)

That seems to be untypically good, in the market where the new generations brought typically 10-20%.

I still wouldn't say it's impossible, as, for example, Intel had (apparently until Sandy Bridge) much slower NaN handling than AMD, at least without SSE2. So maybe AMD discovered some weak point like that. But until I read some explanation, it does seem to be too good...

<comment><USER51> Ah. Yeah, that looks impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Looking forward to the day when reviews include HPCG (the replacement for LINPACK) as a benchmark, with a little animation showing how hot the different bits of the core run.

<comment><USER54> Should be soon.

HPCG is a memory bound application so I doubt it runs the system as hot as HPL (high performance linpack)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Looks like my next desktop build can be all AMD. With radeonsi/radv catching up and upcoming Vega and Ryzen, it looks quite attractive.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'd really like to see what AMD can do in the ultrabook and notebook segment. Good mobile CPUs with a good integrated GPU could really be a killer feature. I don't know whether the desktop segment is enough for AMD to reboot its cpu brand (although the server market is a more interesting beast).

</comment><comment><USER57> I can't help but feel AMD is shooting the puck where the goal was, but won't be in the next few years. We desparately need GPU-like devices for advanced ML/AI. Even intel knows this and is investing huge in that area to be competitive against NVIDIA[1].

I predict in the future that AMD will come to dominate the home/enthusiasts CPU market, and intel's low-power CPUs will dominate enterprise along with whoever comes out with a CUDA competitor.

1\. [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2017...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fool.com/amp/investing/2017/02/13/inside- intel-corporations-artificial-intelligence.aspx?client=safari)

<comment><USER58> AMD already do that, but no it's not like ML/AI is the main market right now. Nowhere near.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I don't know why I get the feeling that most of this advancement is the result of Jim Keller's contribution. Surely, AMD must have other engineers capable of similar achievements, right?

</comment><comment><USER60> Fingers crossed that this is not a paper release. If AMD can deliver and I can actually buy, I will, to keep the x86 market competitive.

</comment><comment><USER61> Sadly for those of us involved with floating point stuff, Intel is still king (and Nvidia is still the Queen).

</comment><comment><USER14> AMD has been really smart. Freesync is a huge success. It's outperforming Nvidia by about 20% on Vulkan and DX12 on similar hardware because game makers can use their optimized code from the AMD-equipped consoles. On Ryzen, it appears strategically to have reduced the silicon usage from AVX in order to improve mainstream performance and increase cache, while maintaining a smaller (and therefore cheaper) die than Intel's increasingly bloated silicon. It all points to a company, back to the wall, really fighting its corner, optimizing its much smaller resources. If Ryzen and Vega work out as expected, I hope the people responsible at AMD are in for big rewards. BTW the stock has ramped 200% in the past year.

To get an idea of how smart AMD people are, this video instructive:

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

<comment><USER62> AMD last decade has been so stressful even from the public POV, I'm surprised they managed to survive up to Zen.

If ryzen is enough of a success this will be heaven for the company.

I wish them all the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> What about Win7 drivers? Even if the Redmond based company doesn't like marketing about it (an understatement) - please support it. (Recently AMD announced Win7 support only to remove the announcement after after a few days.)

Even Intel supports Win7 with their most recent CPU as well, even if it's not officially marketed, and one has to search around for the driver.

<comment><USER64> Grab a copy of Win10 LTSB-N and get rid of Win7. It has all that annoying crap stripped out.

You should be able to find a copy fairly easily floating around here and there.

<comment><USER65> Thanks for mentioning this, I didn't know the Enterprise version had all that removed. Do you know if it still sends data to Microsoft or not?

<comment><USER66> You can always 'unfuck' a standard edition: [https://github.com/dfkt/win10-unfuck](https://github.com/dfkt/win10-unfuck)

It lists two other repos at the bottom for privacy and de-bloat. I version froze my only Win10 VMs, so not sure if the projects are current for post- Anniversary Update.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open Source Community Manager for Liquibase - <AUTHOR> http://www.liquibase.org/2019/08/improving-community-support.html <comment><AUTHOR> Liquibase is looking to hire a community manager.</comment>