EBay don't understand why people dodge their fees - <AUTHOR> http://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/ebay.html <comment><USER2> Actually, it's clear the author doesn't understand how to list an Ebay auction to accomplish what they're trying to do. Here's how you could have done this EASILY:

1) Allow local pickup as an option on your listing (Does not cost anything!) 2) Put a Buy It Now Price and open it up to Allow Offers to be made.

I'm not sure why a buyer has an incentive to go off platform since after all there is no fee for a buyer to pay through Ebay. The seller pays all the fees so for a buyer to ask to go off platform usually is a red flag for me (scam, wire transfer, etc.).

<comment><AUTHOR> Adding a buy it now price costs 50p upfront, whether it gets used or not, and the buy it now option disappears as soon as any bid is placed.

What you describe might work if I removed the auction component entirely.

Also note that the closest thing to a "scam" that I was subjected to was the on-platform non-paying bidder. The off-platform experience was just 2 honest individuals conducting a transaction without trying to cheat each other.

<comment><USER2> The setup I normally use now if I know how much I want for an item is to do fixed price listing and not an auction and set it at an upper bound of what I would like to get but allow offers so it's sort of like an auction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It really is astounding how people took a once powerful brand and dashed it on the rocks. Granted, there were always numerous unresolvable problems with the concept of online auctions, but eBay also did many things that seem to sabotage their service. I don't know anyone who sells anything there anymore because the majority of disputes are resolved in favor of the crooked buyer. It was also never good for a reasonable person as something about online auctions often causes at least one person to bid ridiculously high on items that aren't even rare. And now I am pretty sure you can't even see sellers' ratings on the results page.

At this point, I only ever use eBay to buy prescription medicine from overseas. I just can't understand how someone could let a once household name rot like this. As evidenced by the article, and my own experience, this is another case of a business blindly believing that the customer is always right and forming policies around that flawed idea.

<comment><USER4> > only use eBay to buy prescription meds from overseas

What?

<comment><USER5> drugs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >eBay don't

I stopped reading there (kidding) but it's apparent the person doesn't use eBay to the fullest extent of features available to you. I don't use it these days because I prefer paying with Paypal + Credit Card & have had that number compromised too many times -- also makes it hard to find specific locksmithing/high end security equipment for building physical security labs, so there's that.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's to create a disincentive for spammy listings - every retailer would constantly flood eBay with repeats of the same items etc to drown out the competition.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought that's what "Buy it Now" was for: to end the auction early, with a sale.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you add a Buy It Now option (which I've done a few times), it costs you 50p upfront, and it disappears as soon as the first bid is placed.

It's just a waste of money unless you get really lucky and it sells before anybody places a bid.

<comment><USER9> That's not how buy it now works.

The main use if it is for fixed price listings. The auction game is not worth the hassle. Want $100 for something? List it for $100 eith buy it now and payment required.

Listing stays up till money is sent. Easy cheesey.

Using auctions for things with fairly well known values is a waste. Days to collect bids then hope winner paid.

EBay is still alive and well. It's just not really an auction site anymore. Most people only use buy it now.

<comment><USER10> > That's not how buy it now works.

Except that it does. Observing that other people use it another way, doesn't change the existing functionality.

<comment><USER9> I mean sure, they can use it wrong.

If you REALLY want buy it now + auction, you use a reserve price.

Say, start at a penny, reserve price of $50, buy it now price of $70.

Then buy it now dies not "disappear" with 1 bid for a penny. It sticks around until you hit $50.

If you really but no reserve and buy it now on an auction, you are literally flushing money down the crapper. Unsure why eBay allows this, maybe easy money for them. But this use case is user error mode, and not how anyone who uses eBay would actually sell on eBay.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thanks, HN, for everything. HN50 for 50% off Exelion servers - <AUTHOR> https://www.exelion.net

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you everyone.

After my pretty dismal launch about a week ago, many of you messaged me and provided everything from business advice to technical advice to moral support from those who've been there before.

This is my gift to you, use HN50 when checking out to get 50% off any server plan, for as long as you wish to keep the plan, including annual plans. Again, everyone, thanks.

Edit: Currently all my 1270v3 machines are out of stock, and so are my 1230v3 SSDs. I'm waiting to get more in stock, but I still have quite a few 1230v3 HDD left.</comment>


Ask HN: Are Aeron chairs worth it? - <AUTHOR> For those of us who spend a huge portion of our waking hours sitting in front of a desk, are Aerons worth the 3x-4x cost compared to an Office Depot/Ikea chair? <comment><USER2> If you're past the point of wondering how you're going to buy your next meal and make rent, then yes, it is absolutely worth it.

I use a Steelcase Leap (I tried the Aeron, but prefer the Leap, go sit in a bunch and see what you like) and it's been worth every penny compared to the Office Depot chair I has previously. I don't sit in it and think "wow, this is a comfortable chair" -- that's not the point. It just becomes an extension of your body and you forget it's there at all. I can sit in it for hours without becoming tired or uncomfortable.

</comment><comment><USER3> NO, not the Aeron; but others with more adjustment are worth the price.

I do a lot of CAD/CAM work, and have spent significant effort attempting to optimize a new workstation setup for long hours at the screen. I set the budget for the first chair setup to over $1000 specifically to be able to include the Aeron in consideration. I then started seeking chairs that would sufficiently adjust to fit _MY_ body, and support it in a number of optimal positions for using the inputs and viewing the screen -- the only criteria that anyone should ever apply to a chair.

I was astonished when I actually checked out an Aeron in detail, to find that it is actually very mediocre, and the adjustment controls are basically crap. Yes, the web back is nice and cool, but even that doesn't actually conform to the body as well as better designed seats and backs. I guess it would be mandatory if you had a hot office and no air conditioning.

I would up with a very adjustable Steelcase chair for way less than half of the price, and I reversed one of the forearm rests (sorry, I forget the model right now, and I'm typing this at a different office). It works more than adequately. My next iteration of the setup will involve something fully recline-able with adjustable support for all 4 limbs -- much like the seating setup for an open-wheel formula car.

</comment><comment><USER4> They are better than a bad chair, but there are definitely decent chairs for less. Also, somebody at my shop had an Aeron (after suffering a lot of ergonomic-induced damage - folks, never work through the pain) and the webbing actually "wore out" (as in, developed a hole) after only a couple of years. We did get it replaced without charge after a short argument but when you pay that kind of money for a chair you don't expect that to happen.

If I were thinking of dropping a grand on a chair, I'd be looking at the humanscale chairs. Admittedly that is partly because I prefer their aesthetics.

Anyway in my experience the number one criterion for a hacker chair is adjustable armrests - adjustable both in height and in width. You can get one of those for a lot less money. The rest of the notable improvements come from other ergonomic changes depending on the problem - for example in my case, my most important mod is to use a very small keyboard in order to minimise the reach to the mouse.

</comment><comment><USER5> I used to have one at my old employer and I did not like it at all. No matter what I did, I couldn't keep the plastic seat edge from cutting into my leg just above the knee. I'm 6'2" and one of my coworkers was 6'4" and he had similar complaints.

Definitely try it out first before you buy one.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it depends on how you sit and your general health. I've got a pretty bad back, but I tend to change seating positions a lot. So generally I'm not that dependent on a chair, unless we're talking about very cheap chairs. I regularly switched between Teknion Contessas at work (comparable to Aerons) and an IKEA chair at home, and found no real difference.

But if we're talking about companies, I'd definitely recommend a higher-priced alternative. While there might be a few people where it wouldn't make a difference, on average there are a few where it's a matter of severe back pain or not. And why risk it? (Never mind that depending on laws or union regulations you'd have problems being an Office Depot cheapskate)

</comment><comment><USER7> At the risk of sounding trendy: Mostly stand, then it hardly matters what kind of chair you have; and (at least in my case) the result is improved productivity and feeling better. <http://kylecordes.com/2010/standing-desk>

More on-topic: I sat on an Aeron a few jobs ago, and really liked it. I've compared an Aeron side-by-side with several "clones" and found the real thing is a lot better. If you are going to sit all day, an Aeron is a good default choice. As other posted pointed out, over the life of the chair the cost is really low.

</comment><comment><USER8> They are nice if you have the extra cash (or want a nice write-off) but I am not sure a $800-1000k Aeron's marginal utility over a $300-400 chair is really worth the extra cost.

Also, if you tend not to sit still and must wear dress pants at the office then expect your belt loops to get worn off. It Used to happen to me all the time. Thankfully I no longer work somewhere with that kind of dress code. The downside I guess is I don't have a Aeron chair anymore either.

</comment><comment><USER9> "So the bottom line is that an Aeron only really costs $500 more over ten years, or $50 a year. One dollar per week per programmer.

A nice roll of toilet paper runs about a buck. Your programmers are probably using about one roll a week, each."

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDevelopers.html)

<comment><USER10> And the one week where you're $10000 short of making payroll, I'm sure everyone will appreciate having the nicer chairs. I can't believe so many people are saying this is a good idea! Yeah they're nice, but I'd wager that most of the companies HN readers will be starting/working for can't afford it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure why but my body can't tell the difference between my $1000 chair and my $100 chair.

The money isn't the issue to me. Even at $1k that's nothing compared to 5 years of comfort. I just don't notice the damn difference.

[http://www.staples.com/Global-Leather-Executive-Chair- Black/...](http://www.staples.com/Global-Leather-Executive-Chair- Black/product_816801)

</comment><comment><USER12> I highly recommend this chair ($129) <http://www.officedepot.com/catalog/catalogSku.do?id=0363871>.

I'm not at the point where a $500 chair is not a big deal. I did a lot of searching before I found this one. Many people reviewed it as being the only sub $500 chair worth having.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's hard to notice any immediate benefit from a few minutes of sitting in an Aeron-class chair, but I'll tell you that after I got my Embody (upgraded version of the Aeron) every other chair I sit in feels woefully inadequate. Knowing what I know now I wish I had made the investment earlier.

</comment><comment><USER14> There's an Aeron-like chair from China that is more comfortable. I use one. [http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/510830/Realspace- PRO-Q...](http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/510830/Realspace-PRO-Quantum- Recycled-Mesh-Mid/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I have an Aeron. I bought it from a now-defunct company for 20% of the original price. There should be plenty on eBay for less than retail.</comment>


AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle - <AUTHOR> https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-reckons-it-can-win-the-high-end-gpu-battle-and-dethrone-nvidia-just-like-it-did-with-intel <comment><USER2> The big problem right now is that ROCm, AMD's equivalent to Cuda for deep learning, is not supported for the consumer Radeon Navi cards. I had hoped it would be supported in ROCm 3.0 when that was released - but there has been no official word, which is worrying. If AMD are to compete in the GPU/DeepLearning space, it will be because they have hardware that is competitive (not even as good as Nvidia), low cost, and doesn't have the same EULA licensing restrictions as Nvidia. Could you imagine taking your TensorFlow program on AWS and just running the same code on a AMD GPU, but costing 25% of a V100 (with 80% of the performance)? That is where they should be. And the "run unchanged TensorFlow program" is not actually a problem - ROCm has been upstreamed into TensorFlow. It is support for their own Navi GPUs that is the software problem right now!

<comment><USER3> I agree that the lack of (official) Navi support is just bad strategy on AMD's part, but I disagree with your numbers.

Their goal needs to be performance parity or dominance, and then perhaps offer a slight discount. That's how they're succeeding with Zen on CPUs. Offering the kind of steep discount you write about is just bad business.

<comment><USER2> At the high-end (V100), Nvidia are price gouging, so there is room for a profitable strategy here where AMD significantly undercut Nvidia. My reasoning comes from my belief that AMD will not reach performance parity in the next generation - for deep learning, at least. If the new Arcturus GPU is competitive with Nvidia's new Ampere chip, that would be great. But they won't sell if they are not significantly cheaper. But they won't be significantly cheaper (Arcturus will be the "Enterprise" GPU). However, Big Navi will be much cheaper and can be used in a data center for deep learning without the legal problems that using a 3080Ti would have. I see this as the same "war" between Enterprise hard-disks from 10-15 years ago. Google came out and built their infrastructure on cheap commodity disks. But Dell, HPE and other vendors would not let you use them - they said they were inferior, etc. Commodity GPUs could "democratize" deep learning - ordinary servers could just include a couple of GPUs as a cheap add-on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB.

Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (often the case in GPGPU) this advantage disappears.

Really all I care about is a good OpenCL driver implementation, especially OpenCL 2.2 support would be extremely attractive.

<comment><USER5> I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup.

As a Linux user, I'll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can help it). What a pain.

A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.

<comment><USER6> Nvidia has traditionally been very easy to use with Linux, as long as you were ok using their non-free drivers. Why was it so problematic for you?

<comment><USER7> Nvidia used to be the less bad option, but AMD's transition to AMDGPU leapfrogged that a long time ago.

They're still focused on their proprietary drivers, and naturally that means that they're way behind on supporting modern kernels. That's an issue if you have other hardware that only had support added recently. Their integration with X11's autoconfig also tends to have.. problems.

Nouveau basically doesn't work for their modern GPUs. My work laptop has a 1660Ti, and X11/Nouveau still can't render anything with it. Wayland/Gnome/Nouveau kinda sorta works, but I'd rather not have to use Wayland if I can avoid it.

Nvidia's support for PRIME is lacking. Their official stance was that you should restart your X11 session every time you wanted to swap. Bumblebee kind of worked, but was very slow and unstable. It looks like they _finally_ implemented support for dynamic PRIME now, but of course they had to name their trigger environment variable something else, so that existing scripts for AMD PRIME wouldn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even if everything the article says is true, and the AMD software environment was also improved to compete with Nvidia, it's probably still not enough to beat Nvidia.

The best they are claiming with Big Navi is 30% faster than a 2080 Ti. Sounds great, but they are comparing a card that won't be available for a year with a card that has been on the market for over a year already. Nvidia will have been working on faster stuff, and the best case for AMD is that they force Nvidia to release their next generation of products faster than they originally planned.

This isn't the same case as Intel which had been struggling with their 10nm process and security issues, which meant their current chips actually slowed down and they didn't have any new answers ready when AMD came out with Zen 2. We have seen that Nvidia has an answer for everything that AMD has done so far (price drops and Super variants to make the Nvidia cards remain the best choice at every level), and likely has an answer for their next few steps. I think the best that AMD can hope for is to achieve parity, they certainly won't be dethroning Nvidia.

<comment><USER9> I agree, the author makes a vague point about the 3080 not being released yet, but AMD also hasn't released their new chip yet.

What I think will be great for consumers is AMD releasing a good competing offer in a similar timeframe as Nvidia releasing their next generation. That may limit the Nvidia price increases, because over the past few generations they have gone up a lot for their top offering. And even a year after release they're still high. That can't stay like that if the next gen mid range AMD has higher performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They aren't going to win anything until they fix their laughably bad drivers and keep them fixed. I have several Ryzens, but there's no way I'd go anywhere near their graphics cards.

<comment><USER11> Agree, I dropped Linux due bad graphics drivers (AMD)

<comment><USER12> Are you really saying that AMD is worse than Nvidia _on Linux_???

I have a Nvidia GPU (on my laptop), and I've had _a truly horrible experience_ on Linux with Nvidia proprietary drivers. I was actually considering ditching my laptop, and buying a new one with AMD chipsets, due to the issues I've had on Linux due to the presence of the Nvidia graphics card. I occasionally play games on my Linux laptop, using Proton (a Steam derivative of Wine), as well as native Linux games. So I do want a GPU. (Although, at this point I've even considered getting a laptop with no GPU and only integrated Intel graphics, since I want to at least be able to do business/work without problems.)

<comment><USER13> The NVidia Optimus switchable cards are not well supported on Linux.

On desktop NVidia is good. On laptops I like Intel graphics. because I don't want to muck around with getting working drivers.

<comment><USER14> I agree. On laptops I usually have an nVidia hybrid GPU but I always switch it off as I don't need it and use only the embedded Intel GPU.

Actually getting the nVidia GPU "really" switched off has often been a bit of a challenge.

Currently on a Lenovo P71 what I do is to have the nVidia-module not loaded (blacklisted or not even installed), load the "bbswitch" module and then execute "tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<OFF" (and check with "cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch" if it returns "OFF"). Without doing this I noticed that the internal temperature when idle was a bit higher than what I thought it should be, so I must assume that otherwise the nVidia kind-of-GPU still consumes some watts even if the module is not even loaded/present.

<comment><USER15> Nouveau ought to turn the card off automatically, if loaded. It might not be able to do anything else, but it should at least do that.

NVidia on desktop "works" for me, but suspend/resume is a fiasco - one cycle and the graphics are never right again, flickering and crap everywhere.

<comment><USER14> > _It might not be able to do anything else, but it should at least do that._ > LOL... :)

Thx - I never even took into consideration Nouveau.

Sorry, I have 0 experience with desktop & suspend (I have 2 desktops, both of them using nVidia, but they're basically servers running databases so I have never made them go to sleep).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> AMD cards also work with hackintosh builds. Some of the cards work seamlessly, others take minor config, but much better than the nVidia support these days.

<comment><USER17> Any recent hackintosh build guide recommendations?

<comment><USER18> Not used it, but this was posted on HN a few days ago [https://infinitediaries.net/my-2020-hackintosh-hardware- spec...](https://infinitediaries.net/my-2020-hackintosh-hardware-spec/)

<comment><USER19> I recently built an AMD hackintosh and although I love it — this build guide is exactly what I'd do if I did it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another issues with AMD are power, cooling and deadlines. Our local term for Vega 56/64 is electro-chargrill, which is not far from true. Those who bought them report that PSU and tower-cooling costs are above normal. AMD can do that again, blow dust in their eyes and roll out a card that could melt your ssd and sound like a jet turbine. Also they are known for "soon" marketing, so that you wait for a year, postponing games that you could play right now with a decent nvidia card.

I think they have their own vision of high-end, while frametime enthusiasts still struggle with making ryzen chips to not stutter three times a second. Measures include carefully choosing a motherboard, a memory kit, finding right timings, right cooling curves, etc. And still stock ring-bused 8700 beats easily any infinity-glued cpu in 0.1% low by a margin. Streamers love ryzen though, as it allows to stream from additional cores and microstutters are irrelevant on youtube.

</comment><comment><USER21> As an outsider, it's encouraging that the debate seems mixed. That seems to point to the idea that real competition is afoot.

A year or so ago, the discussion seemed much more clear that AMD wasn't in the game at all.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm working in ML with NVIDIA, T4, v100, P100 GPUs, taking advantage of the integration with TensorFlow, specifically mixed precision, TensorCores and TensorRT, would like to see those levels of integration with AMD to start considering in our Infrastructure

</comment><comment><USER23> Which would be lovely. High End GPU movement and pricing has been depressingly stagnant.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't know where they make their money, but if the hope is to compete in compute, I'd suggest that they do not "play the game" at all in GPUs and instead put together something 7nm and TPU-like. If I were them, I'd be working on that right now. 1TFLOPs/W would be a good goal, 100TFLOPs in 100W, using bfloat 16. Sidestep the GPU bullshit entirely, print money in a niche instead.

<comment><USER25> I wouldn't consider TPU/NPU/NNPUs a niche. It's inevitable at this point that you'll need machine learning accelerators just for running inferencing on edge devices.

Even if done only on the cloud I can see more could providers investing in their own TPU-like hardware for their clusters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd appreciate RDNA2 card for 2560x1440 too that's not crazily priced. Less power consumption and more performance would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER27> Latest Ampere datacenter rumors are 70% speedup compared to V100, meaning 25TFlops in FP32, whereas AMD in theory could to 15Tflops and in practice only 8Tflops due to their software. They would have to improve speed 3x just to match NVidia's next generation GPUs; I am not sure upcoming Big Navi would be sufficient.

<comment><USER28> It's not comparable in efficiency but AMD is already shipping Vega II modules in the Mac Pro that claim "up to 28.3 FP32 TFLOPS".

And regardless, the article is about 4K gaming. I don't doubt Nvidia will have some 7nm monster but there might be a time period before it launches where AMD briefly regains the crown.

<comment><USER29> That's not equivalent. That's a card with two ASICs on it, with each being 14TFLOPS. It's identical to the V100, but 2-3 years later.

<comment><USER28> Nvidia doesn't make any cards with two ASICs on it. There is no equivalent.

<comment><USER29> Yes, they make the K40, which has two ASICs. They do not make a _current generation_ card with two ASICs.

<comment><USER27> You probably meant K80. K80 = 2x K40 basically, i.e. 2x 12GB 4TFlops GPUs on a single board.

<comment><USER29> Yes, thanks for the correction. I should also add that the reason it's not fair to compare these kinds of cards is the inter-processor link is usually extremely slow. Because of that, performance with that kind of card is roughly equivalent to just having two cards in the machine as opposed to having the chips on the same card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> AMD is blocked by being not versatile enough. Their consumer cards support neither AI nor do they have good Linux drivers.

Of course, the average gamer doesn't care, but developers do. And as the result, almost all the video games - their core sales driver - are not as thoroughly optimized and tested on AMD as they are on the (likely overpriced) NVIDIA cards that developers use in their own home rigs.

<comment><USER31> I chose an AMD card specifically because of their great Linux drivers. Building a system on top of proprietary drivers is a non starter for me. Being heavily dependent on a vendor to support your platform has bitten me multiple times and it's especially frustrating when a proprietary software company uses something like electron but never ships a Linux release. Running these applications in wine is a complete pain in the ass and doesn't even work 90% of the time.

<comment><USER32> I've found amdgpu to be a terrible driver for high end displays; 8K doesn't work, for example.

<comment><USER33> FYI, 8K/4K120 support was fixed with Linux 5.5 release.

<comment><USER32> No, that was 8K over HDMI. 8K over two DisplayPort cables, as the only 8K monitor currently available (the UP3218K) requires, is still broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not an AMD fault, but I'm bummed that the only model of RX 5700 with ITX form factor is available exclusively in Japan, cause a I would love to assemble a full AMD 5 liters PC (without selling a kidney for importing the GPU...) T__T

I guess mini ITX is a niche market.

</comment><comment><USER35> Tempted to try out the Mac Pro with 2x2 Vega2 pros / PlaidML. At $10k, you get 132gb Of hbm2 memory, 4x of a Nvidia v100.

PlaidML got acquired by intel, but looks like amd support is still included.

I wonder if I can convince our hpc people to buy some Mac Pro racs

</comment><comment><USER36> As a MacBook user having equally performing GPU's from AMD is really great. Though raytracing demo's impress me, in-game it's often not so impressive.

So if AMD's there in two years or so the software caught up at roughly the same time.

</comment><comment><USER37> > If the rumor mill is to be believed, AMD's incoming high-end graphics card > could be a monster board bristling with 80 CUs (compute units)

I thought modern GPUs had hundreds of cores, or is a compute unit something different?

<comment><USER31> Imagine you have a fleet of 64 buses each filled with 64 passengers. Does that count as 64 individual vehicles or as 4096?

<comment><USER38> Well "vehicle" in this case is unambiguous - there's no confusion between a passenger and a vehicle in the scenario you described. For many there's not such a clear distinction between "cores" and "compute units" so I can see where the confusion arises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> AMD cards don't yet have any raytracing support, right? I know it's a young technology, but they shouldn't be dragging their feet on it if they want to make a serious push for the top.

<comment><USER40> Real time ray tracing hardware is in a funny place right now.

Firstly, it's not really as impressive as it sounds. You aren't going to be playing a game where you explore a house of mirrors any time soon. Control is a really good implementation, and it's so good it makes it really clear how quickly it falls over.

Better than not ray tracing, but nowhere near non-real time traditional ray tracing.

Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit you take is criminal. We're talking 40%. If you're most people, who buy a graphics card to a budget based on your requirements (say 1440p/60, or 1080p/144, or whatever), supporting ray tracing means you either need to massively over spend (in my calculations about 6 months ago, I would have had to __double __my budget), or drop your quality presumptions in resolution and framerate drastically.

Which brings us to third: support. RTX has been out for over a year, and there is really only 2-3 games where RTX makes any kind of interesting visual difference, and really only 1 (Control) that you're actually going to actively notice after playing for more than 5 minutes.

AFAICT then, RTX is useful as a fun demo to play around with for a few minutes, before disabling it and getting your framerate back so you can actually play the game, and for absurdly rich people (which is convenient for nVidia, because absurdly rich streamers have normalised 1080p gaming on 2080tis for awhile now).

I am looking forward to seeing the shape real time ray tracing takes on consoles, because I presume that will determine the true shape for the next decade or so.

<comment><USER41> >Secondly, at least with the current generation of RTX, the performance hit you take is criminal. We're talking 40%.

I never really understood this argument. If you really need tons of frames for a competitive game, just turn it off. Otherwise, the games that implement it correctly show a marked visual improvement, that can't be computed any faster as far as we know. It's like saying 4k renders 4x slower than 1080p, so it's not worth it unless you can get the same frames. You can, it's just a premium technology and you'll need to budget accordingly.

(this ignores the games that half-ass their raytracing and make almost no perceptible improvement, which to be fair is most of them)

I do agree though, that Control (and Metro Exodus) are the best examples. Every other RTX title just uses it for reflections, which are neat but not as much of a categorical upgrade as RTGI, imo.

People who spend serious chunks of time gaming (but who also remember what reality looks like...) will increasingly notice the inaccuracy or lack of ambient occlusion and shading overall.

This time last year, RTX, in popular discussion, was a joke. I'm seeing more and more people who've looked into it, can see the objective improvement, and are ready to adopt it once as it enters their budget range. It would definitely be a sore sport if Navi had even worse raytracing performance than the RTX series, or none at all. As the hardware proliferates, there will be more and more reason to developers to look into implementing it at its best.

Crazy idea: Maybe we could train a neural network on before/after images of raytraced scenes and implement it with a constant, minimal penalty, like DLSS, or maybe that requires too large of a network or maybe it results in a trippy mess.

<comment><USER40> > I never really understood this argument. If you really need tons of frames > for a competitive game, just turn it off.

I think "if you need tons of frames" may be where your misunderstanding is coming from: most of us don't have tons of frames to give (especially in brand new AAA games that are the only ones implementing this technology).

For most people (and you can see this in sales data and hardware surveys), if they are looking to buy a new graphics card they are going to be buying one that they think will fit their needs for the next few years, not massively overshoot it. If you play games at lower than your monitors resolution, they look bad. If you play games at lower than your monitors refresh rates, you either get bad looking tearing, or lose a much larger proportion of frames than you need to.

To use myself as an example: I recently upgraded my computer that runs on a 3440x1440/60 monitor. My goal was to play games at 1440p60 for the next 3 years (ie until the new console generation settles and we know where things are going). I bought a 5700XT because it provided the best bang for buck, hit 1440p60 in most games benched, and it seemed reasonable that I could drop setting here or there and maintain good frame rates until I was done with it.

The nVidia option was a 2060S / 2070, which would have given me slightly more frames at 1440p, but for $50 more. If I wanted 1440p60 _and_ RTX, I would have had to go all the way up to the 2080ti, which was roughly double the price.

<comment><USER42> > most of us don't have tons of frames to give (especially in brand new AAA > games that are the only ones implementing this technology).

Especially because it's probably first person and over-the-shoulder games that probably get the best benefit from RTX, but those are the same games where a high frame rate improves playability the most. Not 'tons' of frames to be 'competitive', but 144Hz to be able to perform the actions you intend to perform without frustration. So at that framerate, in a pretty game, maybe you could run RTX at 720p? But resolution is pretty nice too, so the performance hit really is a big deal.

The kind of game where you'd get 300Hz and can burn frames on a whim isn't the kind of game that uses RTX, at least so far. Or you'd have to drop the other settings to low, which kind of defeats the point of improved visuals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Iwan-Zotow Their software things (drivers, compilers, apis) are laughable.

<comment><USER29> I would add libraries to that list (cuda equivalent).

<comment><USER4> OpenCL is all you need, and for the sake of a healthy (read: non-monopoly) GPU computing ecosystem you must _insist_ on good OpenCL support! Having an additional CUDA backend is fine if you want, but AMD GPUs are often really strong in a level playing field, which is exactly what you want as a consumer. Basically no consumer ever benefitted from a monopoly, and GPU computing is very important.

I've developed (as lead GPU dev in a 3-man team) two successful rendering applications with OpenCL on all 3 desktop platforms, it's not some kind of impossible task. More developers just have to stick their necks out and do it.

<comment><USER29> It's not, though. The blas and fft libraries are not only much slower (less efficient for the claimed peak of the cards), but they're missing features. For example, gemms don't work on complex half precision in any opencl library I've seen. Batched modes are missing for some types, etc. For basic operations, they're sufficient. But it's hard to get behind libraries that AMD doesn't really control.

The ship has sailed on opencl for Nvidia. It's not going to happen, and it's not worth holding out hope. At this point, cuda has improved at a much faster rate, and the support is much higher. It's just not worth building a new scientific computing product around opencl, since it's as portable as cuda at this point if Nvidia doesn't support it.

<comment><USER4> In principle there's nothing stopping people from developing similarly great libraries for OpenCL, which I would on the one hand expect to happen eventually, but on the other hand it's impossible to deny the existing achievements of Nvidia's software team.

What I'm hoping is that people in a similar position to mine, where I could easily choose OpenCL since I was coding everything from scratch in basically C, choose OpenCL instead of CUDA.

It's completely possible in many cases, and I'm not the world's greatest developer or anything; twice I chose OpenCL over CUDA and both turned out great. Particularly the JIT model is very useful. Judge for yourself:

[https://indigorenderer.com](https://indigorenderer.com)

[https://chaoticafractals.com](https://chaoticafractals.com)

It's also very useful for cross-vendor GPU benchmarking, see [https://www.indigorenderer.com/benchmark- results?filter=sing...](https://www.indigorenderer.com/benchmark- results?filter=singlegpu)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> And when that day comes, I will buy it. But for now I will go with nVidia. Also I badly need same CUDA codebase/documentation on AMD part as well to make such a move. ML is such a breeze when you throw CUDA at it these days.

<comment><USER44> I am stiiiill mostly reading/researching but I'm pretty sure that CUDA is crucial and OpenCL just won't cut it for ML.

That said, AMD had a CUDA clone/conversion system a while back. I'm not sure where that's gone.

The ideal would be to leapfrog CUDA and present something more usable and straightforward, especially something where the memory and threading model is really clear. CUDA already seem pretty good but there's always room for improvement.

<comment><USER45> well, there is SYCL

<comment><USER4> I believe it's going to get a lot of support from Intel as well for their forthcoming GPU efforts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Cuda and ... it is not just hardware.

</comment><comment><USER47> It needs the help from Nvidia just like Intel helped them winning the CPU battle.

</comment><comment><USER32> AMD can't even get 8K displays to work under Linux.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'll believe it when I see it. ATI has never made a good product and nothing has changed recently to turn them around.

<comment><USER49> The ATI brand hasn't been in use for something like a decade.

<comment><USER48> Same technology and same ship being run by the same people. Why patronize a rebrand if nothing has changed?

<comment><USER50> >being run by the same people

Not true. They're gone as of a year or two ago. Ironically, they're at Intel.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


WebPack is not the only way - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/fusebox/webpack-is-not-the-only-way-6ddb67e99be9#.1txqp6ixr <comment><USER2> This looks awesome.</comment>


David Brooks column on "Amy Chua Is a Wimp" - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting to couple this article with the new data on test scores. If you missed that the test scores indicate that pairing like students US scores against International students produce similar results. Asian US students score about the same as other Asian students, etc.

I have struggled with this debate for a long time: does falling US test scores mean falling US predominance? But that hasn't modified US start-up success or other factors. This article continues to paint a picture for me that despite the lower test scores compared to other nations, there are lots of actors that go into life-long success. Attention and memorization are just two of them.</comment>


Brain4cars – Cabin Sensing for Safe and Personalized Driving - <AUTHOR> http://www.brain4cars.com <comment><USER2> OK, driver looks to left, system tracks head and reports a left lane change is likely. Reasonable enough. If you attempt a left turn without looking first, alarm?

It seems an interesting experimental setup for studying driver behavior. As a product, though? This is a startup.</comment>


Why the Japanese Don't Litter - <AUTHOR> http://japantravelcafe.com/japanese-culture-2/why-the-japanese-dont-litter <comment><USER2> Japan's very low number of public trash cans isn't just because of this "tradition and culture of courtesy and bringing trash home". It is also a direct result of a Sarin gas terrorism attack that hit the Tokyo subway system in 1995, whereupon some of the weaponry was deposited in a public trash can. Afterwards, the number of public trash cans was dramatically reduced.

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

Source: Friend who grew up in Tokyo and was 10 years old when the attacks happened. He was using one of the attacked subway lines regularly.

<comment><USER3> > It is also a direct result of a Sarin gas terrorism attack that hit the > Tokyo subway system in 1995,

Precisely, the author is just plain ignorant. By the way the same thing happened in France after the metro bombinga.

<comment><USER4> And in the UK after enough IRA bombs in wastebins.

<comment><USER5> And, of course, getting rid of wastebins in the UK hasn't stopped bombings altogether, but it has made it frustratingly difficult to dispose of your litter (I do happen to always take mine with me anyway, but evidence suggests plenty of people don't). Much better - and in use in sensible locations - is a simple transparent bin/bag. Why they're not in use in more places, I'm not sure.

<comment><USER6> When I lived in the UK (2002-2003) I was told that its perfectly acceptable to leave your litter on the train platform against the wall as there are people who regularly come by to clear it. Is this still true?

<comment><USER5> I've never heard that. It's certainly 'acceptable' to leave litter on the train at the final stop, but other than that I think pretty much all littering is approached with typical British sensibilities - we frown on it, from afar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Japanese dont litter ? This must be a good joke !! Japanese litter everywhere where they feel safe to do it. Go to a Hanabi Taikai (fireworks in summer) and on your way back you will be WALKING on litter for 1 kilometer. Go hiking in the mountains and you will see the extent of Japanese littering when noone is looking. Mountains of cans thrown away by hikers. Go in the countryside and see whay people leave on the side of the street. Oh yeah, they do litter just like everyone else, they are just a little more ashamed to do it public, and in the city the public services are just very efficient at cleaning up anyway.

<comment><USER7> There's trash all over the street in parts of Roppongi and Kabukicho on a Friday or Saturday night, same as any bar district in the US or Europe.

I think people are overlooking that it's rich folks at the World Cup. I doubt the Americans down there are leaving trash around either.

<comment><USER8> Neither of these places are pinnacles of Japanese society - all bars, strip joints, and foreigners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In Tokyo, I do very occasionally see people eating while walking or even inside a train. It's probably more common now simply because there are more take-out possibilities, e.g. take-out from Starbucks. There seems to be less stigma now.

The article paints a little bit of a rosy picture regarding people and their trash. I do often take home my trash so that it can be properly disposed of (the city picks up different kinds of trash on different days, for proper disposal or recycling), but I do this somewhat reluctantly. Who wants to carry around trash? And sometimes, if I'm lazy, I put the trash into the outside trash bins of whatever convenience store happens to be nearby. In fact, I think the now ubiquitous presence of convenience stores goes a long way to explain why there are very few public trash cans.

While most people here do not litter, there is a small percentage who do, either regularly or because they're drunk and have lost their sense of social responsibility. But there's always a group of volunteers (often senior citizens) who clean things up every morning. Also, the well-heeled routes are often in front of stores or restaurants, and it's not surprising that someone will be cleaning up in front.

But overall, there is very little littering.

<comment><USER10> Ya it was cleaner when I was in Tokyo but people also smoke more there and the subways are crowded. Pros and cons.

<comment><USER9> The smoking is a peeve of mine. So many young people in Japan smoking. It's very surprising because people know better.

<comment><USER10> They do know better but what I witnessed in Japan was wayyy too much group think going on and not enough individualism.

That's probably why there hasn't been that many successful startups in Japan when there's a population of over 100mm ppl.

<comment><USER9> Startups or not, and getting a little off-topic, it will still be thrilling to see a humanoid land on the moon, perhaps even more thrilling than seeing a human doing the same thing.

And just for fun (because I like the story), according to the Wikipedia article, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soichiro_Honda](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soichiro_Honda), Mr. Honda had a little "startup" going in elementary school:

"Honda was not interested in traditional education, his school handed grade reports to the children, but required that it will be returned stamped with the family seal, to make sure that a parent had seen it. Soichiro created a stamp to forge his family seal out of a used rubber bicycle pedal cover. The fraud was soon discovered when Honda started to make forged stamps for other children. Honda did not realize that the stamp had to be mirror-imaged. His family name 本田 was symmetrical when written vertically, so it did not cause a problem, but some of other children's family names were not."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Conversely, check out Yoyogi park on the Monday after a hanami weekend. The ground is covered in garbage, broken bottles, cans, etc. Or check out the square at Shinbashi station after the salarymen finish their impromptu outdoor happy hour. All flat surfaces are littered with convenience store wrappers, empty beer cans and cigarette butts.

<comment><USER2> The culture of conformity is at work even during times of disobedience. ;)

edit: Kind of like "cut days!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last time I was in Shinjuku (2009) there were actual cigarette police in special uniforms who followed smokers around and publicly chastised or fined them if they littered. I saw 3 salarymen get busted within about 15 minutes. The fact that this system even exists indicates that the Japanese do litter.

On the flipside, all the fast food joints had wastebins sorted by garbage type, and I did get death stares when I accidentally put some rubbish in the wrong one. Eating while walking also got dirty looks, but conversely you could buy beer and snacks on some of the trains and drinking alcohol in public is allowed.

Site has been hugged to death, cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oIkNRIM...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oIkNRIMkh- IJ:japantravelcafe.com/japanese-culture-2/why-the-japanese-dont- litter+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au)

<comment><USER3> > Last time I was in Shinjuku (2009) there were actual cigarette police in > special uniforms who followed smokers around and publicly chastised or fined > them if they littered.

It's probably not working very well, because Shinjuku in the morning (at least Kabukicho, if that's what you were referring to) looks like a warzone filled with trash. They do an amazing job to clean it up everyday, however.

<comment><USER12> It was the South-West end during the daytime, the crowd seemed mostly business people. I get the feeling that Kabukicho and Golden Gai are treated as their own little walled gardens of sin :)

I was also surprised by the number and condition of the homeless. I had expected a communal minded society would look after such people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you are actually wondering "Why the Japanese Don't Litter" let me save you the trouble of reading this article, which basically can be summed up as "Because they don't."

<comment><USER14> And that, right there, is an profound summary of why a strong, common culture is so important for a social unit: it's the only proven way to escape the prisoner's dilemma of society.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOK6mE7sdvs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOK6mE7sdvs)

<comment><USER15> Careful comrade, you're bordering on crimethink there. Why, next you'll be reading unsanitized research papers! Be on the _right_ side of history, comrade.

<comment><USER14> [https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/3935515136/hA69BE910/](https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/3935515136/hA69BE910/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> America is actually quite tidy compared to much of the world I've visited, where the notion of binning rubbish is completely absent and children, animals, and adults are exposed to litter and refuse and pollution as a constant and inescapable fact of life.

Hard to take this seriously.

</comment><comment><USER17> Google in Images "Japanese school children clean their classrooms" and you'll find dozens of photos, not just of putting things away, but literally scrubbing the classroom floors. Even one photo of the guys cleaning the urinals. Maybe a prank shot. But may as well not be.

The Japanese see cleanliness and orderliness as a primary virtue and leaving a place that they have used clean is taught and reinforced by peer behavior at a young enough age as to become second nature. The fans at Toulouse probably didn't even think about it.

<comment><USER18> Not a prank shot - they have actually managed to convince generations of kids to clean their school's toilets using chemicals and no special training. They mask it as "culture" but it's a cost saving measure, they could be getting lessons and an education during that time.

<comment><USER19> I don't think you can really separate it out like that. It is part of what You Just Do At School, definitely, but it is also conveniently a cost-saving measure, sure. That doesn't mean that if you tried to cut it out, that parents wouldn't complain about it.

At any rate, having seen both, I assure you that there is infinitely more bullshit that American kids are doing at school instead of learning, compared to Japanese.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To me, "not littering" is different from "cleaning up for others". I need an article to explain why the Japanese clean up for others.

<comment><USER21> Fans of any flavour enjoy being subsumed by the crowd and I can imagine this behaviour was a way for those Japanese fans to prolong their feeling of group solidarity after the match.

I'd like to have witnessed the propagation of the clean-up-the-stadium meme as it happened. My guess is that for most of the fans, they'd have been initially ambivalent; the niceties of this situation being unfamiliar. One fan decided it was the right thing to clean-up and their neighbours then propagated the activity throughout the population without giving it too much thought. Once the cleaning was in motion, each fan would have to define their range of cleaning for themselves. Since the area is not specified, they'd err on the conservative side, cleaning a maximal range for any of their possible ejecta. This would reflect a preoccupation on quality over considerations such as opportunity cost or fairness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I was in Japan for a few weeks, I was shocked how immaculate the whole country was.

You know what else shocked me? A flight attendant passing through the airport lobby noticed a small piece of paper litter on the floor. Without any hesitation, she picked it up and put it in her pocket.

You see other workers do the same. They don't just leave it up to cleaning staff. Everybody helps out. It's a cultural thing.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm getting a 503 error from the link; here's a Coral Cache version that's working:

[http://japantravelcafe.com.nyud.net:8080/japanese- culture-2/...](http://japantravelcafe.com.nyud.net:8080/japanese- culture-2/why-the-japanese-dont-litter)

</comment><comment><USER24> Why do people clean their room and not throw trash on the floor? The same reason.</comment>


Tomorrow's Internet Turns 20 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theawl.com/2015/10/cycles-blah-blah <comment><USER2> The Awl's articles make me miss Google Reader.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Cybersecurity Interview Questions? - <AUTHOR> I'm most interested in defense, not so much white hat hacking. Particularly focused on appsec, cloud security, IAM and ops, but grateful for any feedback. <comment><AUTHOR> This question came to mind when I read this excellent post: [https://danielmiessler.com/study/infosec_interview_questions...](https://danielmiessler.com/study/infosec_interview_questions/#netsec)</comment>


Who Y Combinator Companies Want - <AUTHOR> http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want <comment><USER2> > And no profile was liked (or disliked) by more than 80% of companies.

Umm.. in the first column, 2 reds, 26 greens (rest whites, ignored), thats more than 90%.. but I think they included whites as reds.

Overall, it looks like YC companies are just like all the other companies.. no standard template to pass each ones' interviews.</comment>


No, Don't Take the Shortcut - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/no-dont-take-the-shortcut-7d92d8eb48a0 <comment><USER2> I really hope the irony in the fact that this is posted to a content aggregator with it's own automatic styling and layout (as opposed to self hosted and self designed) and spread via the internet (instead of the hard work of some physical means) is not lost on the author.

Technology is, at it's core, a shortcut. I think you'd be hard pressed to find people on this board that would agree it should be avoided.

</comment><comment><USER3> Jesus Christ!

People really have a lot of trouble losing weight and often resort to surgery after attempting many other methods over many years. Pretty shitty to call it a shortcut.</comment>


Ask HN: Internet without ads – how should content be monetized? - <AUTHOR> My dream is to create a perfect platform for writers to share/discuss fiction and earn income from it. I want this project to be beautiful and elegant and awesome, and I will never run ads there. So I am thinking about the right way to monetize it, that would be the most convenient for both writers and readers.
Given that more and more people will be using adblock in the future, this is a question many content creators on the internet will need to ask. I think it is a big problem that internet will be facing, and solving it would make for a great startup idea.
So I would love if you could share your thoughts and ideas on this topic - what is the best way to monetize content such as blogs, videos, comics, fiction?
- Micropayments?
- Patreon?
- Paywall and subscriptions? (monthly/yearly?)
- "Pay what you want"?
What are the other possible options?
How in your opinion would the perfect system look like? <comment><USER2> Some things cannot be monetized. Such as content. What I'm getting at is what is your strategy to fight competitors and copyright violators who prefer to operate at a lower price, such as free? Especially in an era where everything gets cheaper over time, hosting, storage, bandwidth, etc?

If you can't monetize content, monetize verbs / activities / actions. So kickstarter-ize it? This author will not upload until $100 of total donations or $1 or $1K or whatever. Of which the middleman gets a cut of maybe 10% or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Patreon is a good model. Micropayments and "pay what you want" are also attractive, but probably harder to bring customers to.

We're in an increasingly "app-ified" world, so I could see mobile/desktop apps that connect to a service and pull down articles in exchange for a subscription (this could also be done in-browser, but I like the idea of a native application so you could ideally keep articles offline easily). Netflix (or Steam) for text, in a way. This has already been done by a variety of publications, but I think the biggest issue is that they all have their own separate subscriptions to manage. If there were an open standard for this kind of thing, it could all be integrated into one app where you can easily subscribe and unsubscribe to each service on a monthly basis. That would also make a la carte articles easy to serve; get a headline and a snippet with a price next to it as well as user reviews of the author and the article.

</comment><comment><USER4> Before the iPhone, the cellular carrier 3 actually tried to sell internet content.

No phones had wifi and most content needed to be reformatted for your 3G flip phones, so they sold subscriptions for Youtube, their own programming and music services. I even think they had a Facebook option.

In a way it was kind of cool, for $5 a month you got all you could stream Youtube videos - in a time when people where often billed a dollar for 10 megabytes!

</comment><comment><USER5> Micropayments are not an option right now due to the friction: no one is going to give you their payment information. It requires a large amount of trust.

One particular advertising model I like is internal advertising. I've been brainstorming a business model to compete with a webcomics ranking service that removes the need to rely on external advertising services (Project Wonderful, Google AdSense, etc.). In my opinion, this is the least intrusive monetization strategy.

Since your ideal users would be generating content, with the intention of having as many people as possible view and interact with their content, you should use this to your advantage. Instead of advertisements, you have "curated content". Since you have a wealth of internal data (from, say running Piwik analytics) and can categorize the content on your service, content creators can pay to have their stories presented to users, beyond whatever free presentation they get.

Meanwhile, you can return some of that overall money to reward content creators based on the number of users they've generated, or perhaps users returning on a normal basis. This should incentivize better content.

The downside to this model is that you already need a sizeable viewership for any creators to pay for sponsorship. You'd have to invest heavily in your service before you get any returns at all, especially since you have to attract quality content creators.

In the first 6 months or so, I'd imagine any "rewards" would have to be given out of your personal finances, since you won't have people throwing money at you until the rewards for purchasing sponsorship are tangible.

Advertising isn't much better in terms of income, however. You make almost no money when your userbase is small, and the adverts tend to make users think less of your site (and not come back).

(Disclaimer: I have never tried this before, although I intend to. I also doubt I'm the first to think of this model.)

</comment><comment><USER6> ad blockers have a tough fight to gain widespread usage, specially because ads are the de-facto monetization strategy, plus they are so easy to use.

A service such as yours offer the value of not showing ads, which for some niche is something worth paying for, so a subscription based service seems natural.

<comment><USER3> > ad blockers have a tough fight to gain widespread usage, specially because > ads are the de-facto monetization strategy, plus they are so easy to use.

The fact that ads are easy to use and ubiquitous is what will make ad blocker usage skyrocket.

<comment><USER6> Think of ads as spam. There are a ton of spam filters, nevertheless spam cannot be eliminated completely. Ads are even harder to remove since they represent a revenue stream. THE revenue stream online.</comment></comment></comment>


Steven Frank Gets Reply From Phil Schiller on iPhone Boycott - <AUTHOR> http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/160726521/on-saturday-night-we-drove-up-to-seattle-to

<comment><USER2> After years of dealing with Apple, I've learned that the only thing that gets their attention is negative press.

It's pretty clear that they're listening.

This is why I find comments disparaging those who complain about the App Store to be remarkably silly and short-sighted. Complaining -- publicly -- is exactly how you get a corporation like Apple to change. Unless you disagree with their aims, why disparage those that voice their negative opinions in an effort to enact change?

<comment><USER3> I've only been watching the app store from a distance, so maybe I'm missing something from my perspective. But it seems Apple has been getting negative press from the beginning of the app store and made little effort to change, at the expense of both developers and iPhone users (and likely Apple itself). It's good to see them changing now, but I have to wonder what rock they've been under for the last year or more.

<comment><USER4> Negative tech press and negative _popular_ press are different things. When the tech press disparages you, that will likely have no correlation at all to how either the public _or_ the developers see you. When the popular press say something bad about you, the public's opinion will start to shift, and then the developers will feel justified in changing their minds to a greater extent. To put it another way: the tech press has said bad things about every version of Windows. The popular press only said bad things about Vista.

<comment><USER3> _When the tech press disparages you, that will likely have no correlation at all to how either the public or the developers see you._

I'm not an app developer, but I'd be quite surprised if the tech press Apple has been getting has not discouraged developers or potential developers to some extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _He went on to say that the rumors of widespread e-book app rejection I'd heard were false — that specifically one e-book app had been rejected because it facilitated iPhone-to-iPhone sharing of (potentially copyrighted) books. But that otherwise, there was no sweeping ban on e-book readers._

That's only true under Apple's tortured reasoning that they're not 'banning' apps by only allowing them rated XXX, even in the period before the rating system was live.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's great that Apple are listening, but this quote from the article stands out to me:

"Technically, nothing specific has actually visibly changed in the last few days. I said I wouldn't go back until I could see actual demonstrable progress being made."

Of the legitimate concerns Steven Frank raised, did Phil Schiller commit to anything actionable or measurable?

</comment><comment><USER7> NEWS FLASH: Corporation gives non-answer, changes jack shit, and expects sympathy and understanding. Typical.

<comment><USER8> Except for drip with sarcasm, this response does nothing but be less than helpful. Being against corporations because it's cool to be against corporations isn't productive. Most of us would jump through flaming hoops to be a corporation influential enough that people would care about what we did.

The question is whether this is lawyer-like non-commitment or an actual step towards improving relations. It's too soon to tell, but there's no way wrote derision is in order. We should encourage this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apple is known for their secrecy and grand announcements. The debacle they have gotten themselves into in this case requires transparency to get out of gracefully. I hope that Phil makes some sort of (grand) summary announcement about their upcoming transparency. And that it actually materializes.

</comment><comment><USER10> Note to all: Phil Schiller is actually a human being who lives on earth and reads the news. He also sends an email from time to time.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure he does. But most of the time corporate execs have this 'iron curtain' on communications with the public or media. So when a corporate exec from a large company sends something out it can feel like a big deal...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apple is trying to do innovative things like the App Store. In trying something new, they made mistakes. And if they want to keep innovating, they have to keep making new mistakes. I hear all the time that we as entrepreneurs need to fail fast and fail often to innovate.

I think this is just the price of innovation. You're not going to hit ever ball out of the park and some foul balls will wind up hitting someone in the stands.

Keep making good reasoned arguments about the flaws but boycotting seems unreasonable.

<comment><USER13> What is innovative about the App Store?

<comment><USER12> An innovation is a new way of doing something. A cell phone maker actually owning the store where applications are sold online was new and successful or we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Really, how many applications would the iphone have if AT&T or Verizon controlled what was allowed to be downloaded there?

<comment><USER13> Dunno, but for-pay apps not endorsed by the carriers have been around forever. Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Palm have had third-party apps forever.

<comment><USER8> And nobody used them.

The app store has changed mobile application delivery forever. If you want proof, look at the recent moves by all 4 of the examples given.

<comment><USER13> I doubt the App Store matters. People loved the iPhone before there were apps, remember?

Palm OS, Windows Mobile, etc., etc., died because they fucking sucked, not because there was no single app store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are two things stopping the iPhone from having an impact comparable to the original Macintosh: (1) The closed nature of the App Store and (2) being tied to a single carrier.

Remove those two restrictions, and the iPhone becomes a new geek toy, which will translate into apps which are _much_ better than what we have on the AppStore right now. The barrier to entry into the AppStore is simply too high, which is keeping most developers from taking on more ambitious projects.

</comment><comment><USER15> This personal approach to the problem by Apple is the best thing they can do at this point. Now they need to follow up not only with words, but with actions -- make the App Store a fun place to develop for again.</comment>


The billionaire that dreamed of creating a guns empire - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/a-billionaires-dreams-of-creating-a-guns-empire.html <comment><USER2> For anyone who reads the entire article, it's almost as if Feinberg made a hedge: either his investment or his patriotism would increase in value, regardless of the election outcome

</comment><comment><USER3> One note, Remington has never, or at least not for a very long time, been a particularly high quality gun manufacturer, aside perhaps from their shotguns (and I don't know about their current quality, only that of the 870 in the '70s and '80s), e.g. see the Model 700 rifle safety debacle including how they handled it, so blaming all quality problems on any particular manager brought in from the outside is not accurate.

Besides well publicized stuff stuff like that, this opinion is based on my father and grandfather being lefties, and Remington being the most accommodating company for them for rifles for many decades.</comment>


Ask HN: What would you want to see in a DevOps monitoring handbook? - <AUTHOR> Some background: I'm an Ops engineer in a Small UK ISP. I joined when most the team was new, and the previous Ops engineers had moved up to higher positions. Because of this most our systems were dated, and I've had to learn a lot to bring us up to modern monitoring standards.
I've been wanting a side project I'll enjoy for a while, and I get asked to train new hires at work on our stack, so I was thinking of writing something anyway. I'm not looking to make a lot of money, but maybe printing or selling it as an eBook could help pay my DigitalOcean bills.
The stacks I'd be writing about would be: Icinga2, Grafana + Graphite, rsyslog/logstash, Graylog, Collectd, etc. As well as tech I'd cover the general methodology behind running a complete DevOps monitoring setup, not just a configuration guide.
What kind of things do you think would be worth including? Whether I write it for profit or just for new hires, I'm going to write it anyway, so suggestions welcome. <comment><USER2> I'd read such an ebook. How to add monitoring infrastructure redundancy, or how not to make it a single point of failure. Any info on state of the art for alerting ([https://pushy.me/](https://pushy.me/) or such). And the usual self- hosting via third-party hosting comparison.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've already planned out some more advanced topics for stuff like using carbon-c-relays behind a keepalive VIP and using multiple caches etc. I've set things like this up at work and due to the nature of my work we have to have redundancy and backups of everything.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Scale 3D, API for 3D labeling of LIDAR, camera, and radar data - <AUTHOR> https://www.scaleapi.com/sensor-fusion-annotation#9ad1290 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! I'm Alex, CEO and co-founder of Scale. One of the biggest bottlenecks to development in perception and vision for robotics and self- driving companies has been the ability to label 3D data. The ability to label LIDAR, camera, and radar data together has been able to massively accelerate our customers' timelines.

We've worked with a number of self-driving companies like GM Cruise, nuTonomy, Voyage, Embark, and more to build high-quality training datasets quickly leveraging our API. Scale is the perfect platform for this work—we're focused on really high quality data produced by humans via API.

<comment><USER2> hey alex, your link is not working for me!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey — what browser / device are you using?

<comment><USER2> chrome / desktop

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the first demo you use WASD to move around. Personally I use a very different keyboard layout but that's not what I was going to say but actually while we're on the topic it should be noted that in some countries they use AZERTY [0] which means that more people are actually affected by the particular choice of WASD than just those of us who have chosen non-standard layouts like Dvorak or Colemak so maybe consider making it possible for the user to define keys to use after all even though I wasn't going to suggest that.

Anyway, the thing I was going to suggest was to allow click-and-drag with mouse to be used in order to look around. Also touch-and-drag on mobile devices. And provide on-screen buttons for mobile device users to move forwards and backwards and sideways.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! If you try using it on mobile, we actually have joysticks for you to use which might work reasonably well. I'd try it out.

<comment><USER3> > we actually have joysticks for you to use which might work reasonably well. > I'd try it out.

Ah indeed so you do :)

I tried it now and like you said it works reasonably well. The pan-joystick is a bit sensitive on iPhone 7 Plus both in portrait and landscape mode IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi @Alex. I love the job you are doing! Few questions:

1\. Is pushing API for LIDAR means that ScaleAPI is going to focus more on self-driving tech?

2\. How do you see your tech to comparison to what comma.ai is doing?

3\. What is the minimum resolution for lidar data to make meaningful annotation?

</comment><comment><USER5> Very cool! Have you considered applying this technique for labeling Building Infrastructure Management (BIM) Pointcloud data? One of the challenges when dealing with as-built BIM capture is understanding exactly how point clouds are mapped to real-world features.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. We'll definitely explore that data type!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do humans generate these labels? Not from this field and I am curious about the UI aspect of it. It's not like you can give each of your min-wage labelers a VR headset/controller to draw bounding boxes with.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's part of the secret sauce :) But we work very hard to find ways to allow our Scalers to label incredibly complex data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wait... I can't be the only one thinking "these are humans?"

<comment><AUTHOR> It's amazing what humans can do :)</comment></comment>


AMD PSP: Firmware TPM Remote Code Execution via Crafted EK Certificate - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2018/Jan/12 <comment><USER2> Yeah, while it seems that every modern CPU is affected by the recently discovered vulnerabilities, Intel and AMD still refuse to release their source code for the ME and PSP. Therefore, everybody on this planet has to run hardware with a lot (by all odds) of unpublished zero-day vulnerabilities.

And to make matters worse at least for Intel we have indications that those security wholes are the result of a calculated risk to afford a higher development velocity: [https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/](https://danluu.com/cpu- bugs/)

This year is going to be fun...

</comment><comment><USER3> I think "remote" here means "host to TPM chip". Which is still bad, but not on the level of "install a rootkit on a powered-off machine" like some of the Intel ME exploits.

</comment><comment><USER4> AMD PSP is basically their equivalent to Intel's ME, so this is not surprising... but then it says

 _This function is called from TPM2_CreatePrimary with user controlled data - a DER encoded [6] endorsement key (EK) certificate stored in the NV storage._

If I understand correctly, this is related to SecureBoot and to do such operations with the keys and certificates, the user has to have physical access to the BIOS/UEFI setup already, correct?

<comment><USER5> The PSP is already quite long in the tooth. I think AMD will switch to ARM's recently announced "SecurCore" soon, just like Qualcomm did for the Snapdragon 845:

[https://developer.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/sc300...](https://developer.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/sc300-processor)

<comment><USER6> That "processor" has been out for at least ten years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Platform Security Processor (PSP) is built in on all Family 16h + systems (basically anything post-2013), and controls the main x86 core startup. PSP firmware is cryptographically signed with a strong key similar to the Intel ME. If the PSP firmware is not present, or if the AMD signing key is not present, the x86 cores will not be released from reset, rendering the system inoperable.

The PSP is an ARM core

</comment><comment><USER8> Timeline with a sane date format:

2017-09-28 - Vulnerability reported to AMD Security Team.

2017-12-07 - Fix is ready. Vendor works on a rollout to affected partners.

2018-01-03 - Public disclosure due to 90 day disclosure deadline.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like it's already fixed.

"Timeline </comment><comment>== 09-28-17 - Vulnerability reported to AMD Security Team. 12-07-17 - Fix is ready. Vendor works on a rollout to affected partners. 01-03-18 - Public disclosure due to 90 day disclosure deadline."

</comment><comment><USER10> For a while, I was pretty excited about secure enclaves, as a tool before homomorphic encryption reaches practicality. If remote code execution on the PSP means broken remote attestation, that hope goes down the drain, quickly.

Maybe, the keys in the PSP are still protected by secure computing technology, like ARM TrustZone…

<comment><USER11> Until a vulnerability is found in ARM TrustZone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh, god. At this point I no longer trust ANY computer for mission-critical business at my company.

We're going back to pen and paper. The extra safety makes the hassle worth it.

<comment><USER13> If you stay with a system that is as open as possible from the lowest levels of the hardware to the highest level of the software, and if you airgap, and audiogap, and RF-gap the system permanently until it ceases to exist, you are pretty fine.

Also, more practically, two computers with different ISA and underlying hardware that compute the exact same high level semantics, that don't know each other but transparently share the necessary hardware (for example hardware random number generator), talking to the world through a simple electronic checker, that stops the system if both computers don't communicate exactly the same information bit by bit, is also pretty safe, even if you use backdoored computers. Just make sure both computers don't contain identical backdoors (which is not that difficult).

High and sufficient security in computer systems is practically possible. We just don't work at it. Instead we work on JavaScript and WebAssembly and proprietary hardware and software.

<comment><USER14> > JavaScript and WebAssembly

Isn't WebAssembly a huge step forward in the ability to distribute portable, high-performance, sandboxed code?

<comment><USER13> Code, that is unreviewed, unaccounted and executed automatically. Now it shall be high-performance, too? Does the sandbox work? Does it really work? Are there no side channels? Are you sure? How do you make sure you don't take part in a DDoS attack or mine cryptocurrencies for somebody else? These are just points I can come up with spontaneously.

Besides that, the appification of the web is bad because it leads ultimately to dependency on software that is outside of the users control.

<comment><USER15> This is all already true for Javascript, wasm doesn't change that much here.

<comment><USER13> It makes the use-case for this type of code deployment wider and it's more effective at what it's already used for.

These are two reasons why developing and supporting WebAssembly is finally against the interest of the users.

<comment><USER16> How does it do that exactly? Anything you can do in wasm you can do in JavaScript, only was can do it faster. This freak out that some people have over wasm is bizarre to me on a technical level. I think it comes down to lots of JavaScript devs being threatened by more difficult languages being useful for web pages.

<comment><USER13> I don't program in JavaScript.

> Anything you can do in wasm you can do in JavaScript, only was can do it > faster.

It's faster and more flexible because it can easily be targeted by compilers. That is the problem. This might sound surprising. Allow me use an analogy to explain it.

Let's assume some new technology was invented to more easily breed cattle for meat production. I completely understand why some people would want that, and develop it. I think breeding and killing cows and bulls just to eat a steak is unethical. So, I would absolutely refuse to work on the technology, and I'd expect the same of everybody that cares about being ethical.

Now, coming back to JavaScript and wasm, it is used to deploy code in a way that takes the control of the software from the users to the developers. The deployed code is unreviewed, unaccounted, unsigned and executed automatically. I consider unsafe in the computing sense. So, I consider code execution on the web unacceptable. Since, wasm makes that easier and more efficient, I'm opposed to it.

On top of that I consider JavaScript a bad language. I'm worried by how much it's pushed as a teaching language.

<comment><USER16> > It's faster and more flexible

I can see where you are getting confused. It is actually just faster. Again, there is nothing you can do is wasm that you can't already do it javascript.

> The deployed code is unreviewed, unaccounted, unsigned and executed > automatically. I consider unsafe in the computing sense. So, I consider code > execution on the web unacceptable.

All of these things apply to javascript.

> On top of that I consider JavaScript a bad language. I'm worried by how much > it's pushed as a teaching language.

This has absolutely nothing to do with anything in this thread. It is pretty clear that you have biases and frustrations that have nothing to do with technical merits.

<comment><USER13> It's irrelevant if it's just faster, or has other technical merits, too. What those specifically are is irrelevant, as the political and societal consequences of advancing that way of code deployment are bad independently of that. My whole point is solely based on these consequences.

<comment><USER16> You keep making that assertion, but you haven't really backed it up by anything. If you are talking about obfuscation, javascript can be obfuscated just as much as webasm. Again, all IO must happen in javascript anyway and anyone can look at a text representation of webasm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 And AMD were confident the same issue from Intel ME would happen to them.

Glad someone proved them wrong, and that hopefully we'll get a proper killswitch for these backdoors.

</comment><comment><USER17> >Fix is ready. Vendor works on a rollout to affected partners.

</comment><comment><USER18> not sure why somebody would want to use a fTPM over a dTPM. Especially since most computers now have a dTPM. (well my cheap 80 € mainboard can switch between fTPM and dTPM.)

</comment><comment><USER19> 2018 is going to be a great year for zero day exploits.

<comment><USER20> Hopefully 2018 will be the year where CPU manufacturers finally start taking security seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> damnit AMD, you're supposed to be the undedog who came out victorious after this whole mess</comment>


Catalogue of Manmade Material on the Moon (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://history.nasa.gov/FINAL%20Catalogue%20of%20Manmade%20Material%20on%20the%20Moon.pdf <comment><USER2> > Javelin

<comment><USER3> > Urine collection assembly, small > Urine collection assembly, large

Ha!

<comment> norea-armozel At least Bear Grylls won't need to drink his own urine if ever goes to the tough it out on the Moon. :></comment></comment></comment>


NASA Sysadmins Are Going to Reformat the Mars Rover - <AUTHOR> http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/09/01/nasa-reimaging-opportunity-rover-on-mars/

<comment><USER2> Eh not really the most challenging technical thing Nasa has done.

They flashed, and re-programed the Voyager 2 space craft when part of its central logic died. Yes part of its hardened Motorola 68000 died, and they just recompiled their code so it wouldn't use that op code.

They also diagnosed this problem, and re-programmed the robot, with a bad chip... While it was twice the distance from Earth then Pluto.</comment>