Wireless system can power devices inside the body - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2018/wireless-system-power-devices-inside-body-0604 <comment><USER2> The main thing I got from the MIT article is this:

"This system relies on an array of antennas that emit radio waves of slightly different frequencies. As the radio waves travel, they overlap and combine in different ways."

This is known as constructive interference, pretty nifty to see it used in this context. The range has been increased from 10 cm to 1 meter since the paper I co-authored on this subject. Impressive!

These kinds of applications have also been a long time coming. With IoT devices and NFC readers looming around the corner, I think it is likely that we will see some pretty innovative medical inventions. Likewise, as mentioned by NKosmatos, we need to take the security aspect very seriously. Some of these NFC devices are programmable, and should defend against attacks that could lead to events such as withholding life-saving medicine or misreporting biometrics.

For reference, check out this paper I co-authored:

Suitability of NFC for Medical Device Communication and Power Delivery (2007)

[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4454171/](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4454171/)

And if you're interested in an early paper about RFID-delivered viruses, check out this by Tanenbaum et al.:

[http://www.rfidvirus.org/papers/percom.06.pdf](http://www.rfidvirus.org/papers/percom.06.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Isn't this description flawed though? Waves of different frequencies are independent in power. Thus they don't interfere (when time-averaged) -- at all. Zero. (this is because signals of different frequencies are orthogonal in the time-average integral of product sense)

What creates interference is difference is _phase_ among waves of the exact same frequency.

It's odd that the paper author is making such basic EM theory mistake, and I wonder what the actual device construction is like. (since it cannot work the way he describes at steady state)

Maybe he's interpreting phase modulation as frequency modulation? Of course at steady state all frequencies would be the same, making this a weird/incorrect interpretation I think.

<comment><USER2> My understanding is all frequencies interfere with all other frequencies. When averaged, the total power is probably not affected, but the power at any given point at a small enough time interval should be noticeable.

But then, I'm not an antenna designer, I may have something fundamentally wrong in my understanding. :)

<comment><USER3> The problem is as soon as you're speaking of "frequency" you're already on a time-scale where the power doesn't interfere with other frequencies (as long as the medium is linear, etc -- which is almost certainly true here). In the mathematical/technical sense (in linear system theory)it's quite clear that different frequencies would interfere, it's a basic entire principle of linear circuit design that's been used for centuries -- systems have a Frequency Response where each frequency is independent as a result of the eigenfunction property. Personally I just think it's a big oversight, maybe they were trying to give a laymen explanation and confused themselves. What they're doing must be some form of phase modulation, _maybe_ they're interpreting as short bursts of frequency modulation (with a stable steady-state frequency), but as I said this is not an illuminating view imo.

Edit: Actually I think they might have frequency control indeed. That would be a good idea to find a peak in frequency response (i.e. "resonant power transfer"), not for any directivity gains through constructive interference. That might be the source of confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Radio waves are used to power cochlear implants. There is a chip & receiver unit that is inserted under the skin on the head, with electrodes that go into the cochlea. Externally there is an antenna that is held on the head next to the skin, using a magnet to hold it in place. Radio waves are sent across the skin to power the chip and control the electrodes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Plenty of nefarious applications for this. The range alone blows away existing RFID designs, which will make it the preferred "chipping" technology for surveillance states everywhere.

<comment><USER6> There are positive uses. I can see this being useful for monitoring health in animals raised for food in addition to the medical applications the article mentioned.

That said, the potential for abuse is limited by what society will tolerate. We tolerate tracking and alcohol monitoring bracelets for people who drive drunk. If we tolerate tracking implants for sex offenders on parole or something I'm sure it'll filter down routine probation sentences eventually.

<comment><USER7> We tolerate tracking devices with camera, microphones and banking history in our pocket. We even pay for it. So i wouldn't count of the public wisdom on this. Or anything really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >The implants are powered by radio frequency waves, which can safely pass through human tissues. In tests in animals

why animals? couldn't the researchers just swallow that "prototype about the size of a grain of rice" themselves and/or get several paid volunteers?

<comment><USER9> Because animals have no say and they don't have to pay the animals. Once it's done the animals will just be euthanized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the first "promises" of nanotechnology I ever read about was that you could create batteries so small that just calling your cellphone would charge them I wonder if that is fundamentally the same idea.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting and for sure there are numerous applications for such devices, but they didn't mention anything about security and possible interferences. Sounds very promising but scary at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER12> I want to power my earbuds without ever removing them. If they can do this I would be the first human tester.

I'd also love to start my car, without having to remember where i left my keys.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can it power tumors?

More seriously, though, nanotech or relatively small implantables/injectables powered by radio or induction could do a lot for medicine... If anyone could afford it.

</comment><comment><USER14> How much energy could a device extract from blood sugar?

<comment><USER15> I'm waiting for someone to invent the implantable chip that converts blood sugar into heat/light purely with the intention of wasting that energy.

Grab enough power to monitor blood sugar, to make sure you aren't putting someone into a coma, but otherwise just try to burn an extra few hundred calories a day.

<comment><USER16> Why waste this energy? Couldn't they devise a way to mine bitcoin with it? :)

<comment><USER17> Oh god, just what the world's food distribution problems need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does the device come out when you need it to?

</comment><comment><USER19> Texhnolyze here we come.</comment>


Show HN: TOP.ST – Get the news before it starts trending - <AUTHOR> https://top.st

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

I created trending news aggregation service called TOP.ST. Ratings are based on people's social network activity and updates in real-time. At the moment the service works in 29 countries. More countries are coming in future. In next updates I planning to add news categories and thinking about e-mail digest.

I'm looking for a feedback. Feel free to ask me any questions here or by e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> It looks good and seems to capture the vibe of the moment well.

Any details on how it works? Which networks do you monitor? Is it just Twitter? How do you know where people are from? Do you go by language? Only take into account tweets with geo information?

<comment><USER3> Not OP but I'll hazard a guess it looks for URLs which appear at an accelerating rate on Twitter, using a whitelist of domain sources (since we see several frequent domains).

One feedback is I'd avoid the animation effect until the user has been idle for a few seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent idea about waiting for idle to update ratings. I thought a lot about how to prevent changes while user scrolling the list. At this moment user have a pause button, to do it manually, but your suggestion looks more useful. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just made me think about how much time I could waste reading utterly useless information. News, never again!

Good concept though and good execution.

<comment><USER5> Not to be snarky, but isn't that what you're doing on HN? ;)

<comment><USER4> Most stuff here is not useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rather than currently or soon-to-be trending, is there any application/website that compile last week or month trends?

I'm not interested in knowing whats trending today, but I don't want to be completely out of the loop either.

<comment><USER7> [http://wordlink.com/monthly](http://wordlink.com/monthly) [http://wordlink.com/monthly/startup](http://wordlink.com/monthly/startup) [http://wordlink.com/weekly](http://wordlink.com/weekly) (Front page is daily)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is pretty cool. The one thing that i noticed is that there are a lot of 'duplicates', in the sense of one event being covered by a ton of different websites and then being shown multiple times.

I'm wondering if would be possible to use some sort of string pattern matching algorithm (perhaps bolstered by comparing article submission times?) to group 'like' stories together to mitigate this effect, perhaps allowing a the user to expand a given group to see all of the stories pertaining to that 'event' in order of popularity.

</comment><comment><USER9> Bookmarked. This is a great website, simple design well executed, but I'll give you my gripes, too.

First thing I'd do? Get rid of the blurred background for readability's sake, it makes me feel like I've got glaucoma.

Also, I whitelist scripts and I'm oddly outraged when I land on a page which hardly functions without. At least tell me I have to enable JS. It's a minor thing but first impressions and all.

I'm intrinsically uncomfortable with websites moving without my say so but it may grow on me in this case (just don't over do it ;).

The only other thing that's grinding my gears is more general and counterintuitive. Namely, news being weighted toward what people want to read, rather than need to read.

However, I'm probably just being an idealist... after all, who doesn't need to see a raccoon riding an alligator?

Edit: Just found the pause button, it's a good compromise.

</comment><comment><USER10> In Belgium here, and somehow the website figured out I speak dutch (which is quite correct) and used i18n which I presume is written by a Frenchman studying medieval Dutch. So maybe allow me to switch to English i18n, like I always do, or look for a better translator for dutch.

Right now, the logo for example has 4 words and 2 grammar mistakes. So the use of dutch i18n is really bad if you want more users in the Netherlands.

Just a heads up. Looks very interesting otherwise, might use it as my landing page. I'm that kind of news-junkie.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for your suggestion. I temporary switched all locales to english.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting! My only (design) suggestion: The H1 title looks like a logo. I'd add a logo there and move the H1 to somewhere more visible (At least for the first few months of the site)

Funny, a couple weeks ago we launched our Chrome extension that sends you a notification every time there is a top story on HN also called TOP. ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653)) :D

</comment><comment><USER7> We built this 2 years ago and applied to Ycomb with no luck both years. Everyone we have uses it everyday but it's difficult to penetrate the publishing market. Still we work with large marketing firms to offer intelligence services. Full text searchable [http://wordlink.com](http://wordlink.com) and [http://analytics.wordlink.com](http://analytics.wordlink.com)

</comment><comment><USER13> Two short remarks:

* it would be nice to have a static <noscript> version, or at least a message asking to enable Javascript, rather that seeing the templates

* I was going to make a remark on the automatic updates, but I finally spotted the "pause "button; maybe make it a little more obvious?

Otherwise, the website looks really fast and neat and the country filter is very handy!

</comment><comment><USER14> What is the value in being so current? Unless you are doing HFT or disaster response, you probably want to get your news distilled, curated, in batch form, and aggregated over some time.

Where is the Sunday paper of the internet?

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks cool. My one gripe: it looks like there's a footer when I switch between time intervals, but it's impossible to get to since the stories continue loading as I scroll down.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks all for your replies. It's really very helpful. Unfortunately HN says that I commenting too fast. But I promise, that I reply for all questions as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very cool. I like how you update the list. Page up/down doesn't seem to work though.

Edit: my bad, my focus was still on the country dropdown.

</comment><comment><USER17> Good stuff. Been looking for something like this for a while. You plugging into all their APIs or are you scraping?

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there an API available/in the works so people can play with this data?

<comment><USER19> I would use and pay for API access too.

<comment><USER19> A POST request to [https://top.st/top/1/GB](https://top.st/top/1/GB) is good enough for my needs. Can you email me commercials if you would allow me to do so (email in my profile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sockpuppet votes and comments are not allowed on Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER21> this is great! -- would be nice to add categories / filters.

Also interesting if each story had a 'stats' page with some numbers so it's not so much a black box.

<comment><AUTHOR> Categories will be added in a few weeks. And each link will be have a chart with historyc data.</comment></comment>


Why the Oracle Java Patents Were Literally A Joke Played by Sun Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://techdirt.com/articles/20100817/00061910645.shtml

<comment><USER2> The article's reasoning seems to be that because Gosling said that some Sun engineers tried to see who could get the silliest patent, _ALL_ Sun patents filed by those engineers were silly.

<comment><USER3> All software patents are silly anyway.</comment></comment>


Procedural Content Generation in Games - <AUTHOR> http://pcgbook.com/

<comment><USER2> My favorite example is the FPS .kkrieger ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG- sKFaB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0)) which is entirely contained in a 96 KB EXE. Recently I learned the source for that (and other projects) was released a couple years ago, even if in a pretty messy state: [https://github.com/blog/1103-ten-years-of-farbrausch- product...](https://github.com/blog/1103-ten-years-of-farbrausch-productions- on-github)

Skimming around I found this snippet at the end of chapter six. Are the authors even aware of .kkrieger?

 _As we can see, all existing work on generating graphical game has targeted games in the style of classic arcade games and home console games from the early 80's, or simple arcade games. There is still considerable work to be done here, and nobody has yet constructed a system that could generate novel graphical games of high quality, comparable to the novel high-quality board games produced by Cameron Browne's Ludi system. However, there is also considerable opportunities in devel- oping game description languages that can effectively and economically describe other types of games, and game generators that take into account the specific game design affordances and challenges that come with such games. For example, what would it take to generate playable, interesting and original FPS games?_

<comment><USER3> Codewise, the most horrifying/amusing bit of .kkrieger is probably the insane metaprogramming to save 230 bytes of space:

[http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming- for-...](http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excited to see a chapter on L-systems. I just discovered these recently and was amazed at the beautiful results from simple grammars.

For anyone else interested, there's a free PDF book all about the subject. It's "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants"

[http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop.pdf](http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Here's a cached version of the first chapter, as the site appears to be down:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:I4Ikw4K...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:I4Ikw4KK6lwJ:algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop- ch1.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Archive.org has the full book:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20131022191108/http://algorithmi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131022191108/http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every once in a while, I've been reading the articles in this interesting blog[1] that covers various topics on procedural world generation. I've found that some of the articles (like, for example, this one[2] covering the creation of vegetation using space colonization instead of L-systems) are very educating.

[1] [http://procworld.blogspot.com/](http://procworld.blogspot.com/)

[2] [http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/02/space- colonization.htm...](http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/02/space- colonization.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> The old PC game Star Flight used a procedural system to generate planets on the fly because there wasn't enough storage space on disks:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight)

<comment><USER9> Elite is a better example.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_\(video_game\))

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

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

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

<comment><USER10> The Elder Scrolls : Daggerfall is another notorious early user of procedural generation to generate an incredibly large open world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I couldn't find a single pdf version of the book, and I failed to find the copyright to know whether I'm allowed to upload such a version myself. In any case, the following two lines are what I used to unite the files using bash and the pdfunite utility (available as the poppler-utils package in ubuntu) for my own personal use.

        for i in {1..12}; do wget `printf "http://pcgbook.com/wp-content/uploads/chapter%02d.pdf" $i`; done
        pdfunite chapter*.pdf ProceduralContentGenerationInGames.pdf

<comment><USER12> or on OSX:

        for i in {1..12}; do wget `printf "http://pcgbook.com/wp-content/uploads/chapter%02d.pdf" $i`; done
        "/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py" -o ProceduralContentGenerationInGames.pdf chapter*.pdf

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How Hackable is it? ¹ FOSS ² Limited Access to API ³ Closed/DRM Only god, the developers and xkcd can know how it works.

The Division (Ubisoft) WazHack (Some very enjoyable and challenging gameplay) CubeWorld The Dead Linger Elite ³ X3 Reunion/Terran Conflict ² (a few sectors) nice script interface. Starlight Inception (Proprietary) FUEL 2009 (team Asobo) Looks great. Dead Rising 3 (zombies appear "unique" ) Limit Theory.

Also: (Hackable is anyones guess.) [http://www.pcgamer.com/tag/procedurally- generated/](http://www.pcgamer.com/tag/procedurally-generated/) Sir, you are being hunted. GUN_MONKEYS Nowhere Chasm Dustforce Race the Sun A Valley Without Sun

DLC and MODS Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark. (DRM killed it. no longer playable) Legend of Grimrock. ² (Excellent Scripting.)

Engines (Nearly every modern engine is well represented.) Irrlicht3D ¹ (FOSS, Source, API and documentation are super.) Unreal ² Excellent Editor and Scripting. Unity ² Excellent Editor and Scripting. Affordable Minetest ¹ (FOSS, Irrlicht3D -> LUA script API) Minecraft ¹ (Source code available for early releases.)

From Giantbomb.com for release in 2014-15. [http://www.giantbomb.com/procedural- generation/3015-328/game...](http://www.giantbomb.com/procedural- generation/3015-328/games/) Daylight (Unreal Engine) similar to Amnesia:The Dark Descent Invisible, Inc. StarCrawlers Darkest Dungeon Sunless Sea Mountain Outpost Save Yourselves Fancy Skulls Mew-Genics Unreleased ( The teaser is a great. Put the coffee away before watching this.) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXCp8xS0YzI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXCp8xS0YzI)

Unfinished Infinity MMOG No Mans Sky The compilation of GCC. (Not funny? Please, accept my apology..)

<comment><USER13> Eek! - I'll do better next time, sry.

<comment><USER14> What were you trying to do? I don't understand your original post at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone point to some good/well known mobile games that use procedural content generation?

I can think of AoE and Worms on the PC, and i enjoyed both of these tremendously.

<comment><USER16> did AoE really use procedural generation? it could have been due to the immaturity of the genre, but i think you'd be hard pressed to procedurally generate balanced RTS maps. seems more forgivable for something like Worms, but still kind of dangerous.

<comment><USER3> Age of Empires on the PC did indeed have random map generation. Age of Kings also included the scripting language that let modders create their own scripts to generate new types of procedural maps. The cells from the random generation were also repurposed as part of the pathing.

Most of the default scripts ensured balance by having a set of identical resources by each player's start. An example of the scripting language, placing a gold resource near the player start:

      create_object GOLD
      {
         number_of_objects 7
         group_placement_radius 3
         set_tight_grouping
         set_gaia_object_only
         set_place_for_every_player
         min_distance_to_players 8
         max_distance_to_players 14
         min_distance_group_placement 4
      }

<comment><USER16> if you can play different races or have different terrain abilities, symmetry is not the only balance issue

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a bunch of articles and info related to procedural content at [http://pcg.wikidot.com](http://pcg.wikidot.com) which might be of interest to people reading the linked book. I haven't read enough of either to comment on their overlap or relative merits.</comment>


YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/education-43956001 <comment><USER2> A bit of chatter here about "it eventually catches up to people anyway" that I think misses the point.

You want people to learn when the stakes are low. This is better for them, and it's better for all of us. School should gradually go from low stakes to higher stakes, not be a low-stakes zone the whole time that then tosses people into the real world. Otherwise you're presented with terrible choices like expelling a 20 year old for a habit they learned when they were 8 and never got called on, vs letting them get away with continuing to cheat.

Making it easy to cheat and lie when the stakes are low helps create situations like "we can't trust anyone who says they know how to program so we have to waste a lot of interview time on tedious crap."

The first solution that occurs to me seems to be smaller class sizes and differently structured assignments with more of a "tell me about why you wrote this" type interactive stuff. The same way you'd do when looking at someone's github, to see how deep their understanding of the code there goes.

<comment><USER3> When are the stakes low vs. high when it comes to academic plagiarism? I would think that the stakes are always quite low, at least until you get to post- graduate academic work where plagiarism can have legal or serious ethical (e.g. medical research) problems.

You seem to be claiming that at some point the stakes become _" truly"_ high, and thus we ought to _artificially_ punish plagiarism so that people learn that there are consequences.

<comment><USER4> A recent TIFU (Today I Fucked Up) on Reddit, depending if you believe it - I'm inclined not to, described such a situation:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8g33nv/tifu_by_plagia...](https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8g33nv/tifu_by_plagiarizing_my_last_essay_in_college_and/)

They were allegedly expelled for plagiarising a 500 word essay.

> She sent me to the dean with the recommendation that I be expelled. Now the > dean told me I can't graduate. I spent 4 years working on an engineering > degree. I have over $100,000 in loans, and I can't be hired without my > degree. My life literally vanished in the matter of 20 minutes.

The irony is they could have literally scrawled anything on the paper and flunked, but passed the year.

Whether or not this story is true, universities certainly have grounds to expel you immediately if you're caught cheating. And if you've spent $100k on a degree that you need because of professional accreditation... those are quite high stakes.

<comment><USER3> Aren't those the artificial high stakes we're talking about? I'm asking what inherently high-stakes situation that is preparing you for.

<comment><USER4> For a real world situation? Just look at the Google vs Uber trial. IP theft and corporate espionage is incredibly high stakes. You can presumably make a lot of money selling secrets, but if you're rumbled, that's your career over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a former University Librarian and Residents Director

A) Cheating happens more then it doesn't. In a Philosophy Class which had a dozen seniors all cheated in Spring Semester. Professor flunked them all by giving them an F and told them they were lucky they weren't expelled. President Graduated the students and fired the professor. Then on appeal the President was fired and the Professor rehired with a raise.

B) Shocked that YouTube or any stock traded company would allow these videos to stay up. Morally this is wrong since cheating hurts everyone in education.

EDIT:

C) No one was ever expelled for cheating, ever at my school.

<comment><USER6> As someone that used to write papers for cheaters: it doesn't bother me much, because higher education is already eating itself alive in the US. The impact of a few students paying others to author papers on their behalf is nothing compared to the massive grade inflation one sees at top universities in the US.

<comment><USER7> It's always intriguing to see how people justify grossly unethical behavior to themselves.

I don't think the issue is your disservice to higher education in general or grade systems as a whole, but to your customers, who never receive the education they were meant to, and that they paid for.

<comment><USER8> Ethics are in the eye of the beholder.

<comment><USER9> ...Something nobody ever said when they were on the receiving end of someone else's poor ethics instead of the one partaking in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I get the outrage over cheating, and it really bothered me in classes that graded on a curve that the cheaters would really adversely impact the people who didn't.

But there is a meta question here, why does a youtube "star" even succumb to the idea of advertising/promoting a cheating product, when doing so might put all of their Youtube revenue at risk? Maybe it is because they get crap Youtube revenue and 'several hundred dollars' is enough to push past their moral compass.

People put a lot of heart and sweat into their Youtube channels. Perhaps it is that Google is increasingly sucking more and more of the money that _used_ to go to the channel in order to prop up their service which can't get advertising revenues to support it.

I wonder when the Screen Actors Guild is going to figure out they have another battlefront to engage on.

<comment><USER11> "Several hundred dollars" heh.

These deals are worth at least 5 digits, sometimes 6.

<comment><USER10> From the article: *"Channels with tens of thousands of subscribers can be offered hundreds of dollars for each advert."

Where do you get the 10's of thousands of dollars figure from?

<comment><USER12> Tens of thousands of subscribers isn't very many.

<comment><USER10> _" According to The Economist, influencers with at least 100,000 subscribers on YouTube can get an average of $12,500 for a sponsored post, with payments going up rapidly if you have one million subscribers or more. But those figures refer to endorsements by people who are celebrities in their own right. Someone who's only well known on YouTube might not command that kind of pay."_

[https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars- with-14-...](https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars- with-14-million-monthly-viewers-earn-less-than-17000-a-year-research- shows.html)

Suggests you can get low five figures for an endorsement with 100,000 viewers.

<comment><USER11> Looks like if you scale it up from those numbers to the several million subs category you'll easily get 6 figures, possibly 7.

<comment><USER10> I don't doubt it, but people with several million subscribers are in the 97 - 98th percentile. They are even less likely to risk their revenue stream by pushing something that is clearly cheating. (Not that the guys who offer a cheating service wouldn't love to have their endorsement of course).

I am thinking about people on the bubble who have enough subscribers to be considered 'famous' but not so many as to be making bank like the top 3% do. The economist article suggests that revenue as a 'youtuber' drops really hard from the high end, into the not so high end personalities.

<comment><USER11> The article mentions multiple people with millions of subs that's taking money from cheating sites. I'm also thinking of one of my favorite channels: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFkbsvbJl7w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFkbsvbJl7w) Definitely raking in the money these guys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Discussions about cheating aside, I find it hilarious watching these YouTube influencers dropping these ads right in the middle of their videos without even a hint of remorse. I mean, I get it, they want to make money, but still.

It reminds me of the days when some YouTubers would promote/endorse products without specifically saying they were paid to do so. Or worse, promoting products for gambling sites that they had business interests in.

It's interesting to see all this play out, it almost feels like it's the wild west on YT right now. Every time the regulators try to come in and enforce some policy, people still find the loopholes to create a quick buck.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands As someone who worked as a grad student in a large Midwestern university, these "paper writing" services have been around since the dawn of time.

As a grad student, it was hilariously easy to spot these for several reasons. One, the writing style is usually inconsistent. You'll have a student writing at about a high school level suddenly start using huge $5 words? Highly unlikely. Or a student who writes almost exclusively on one topic (our school had a ton of ag engineers so anything farm related was a favorite) and then suddenly is interested in the micro-economics of island based economies? Yeah, that's a big rad flag too.

As a University, our golden rule to clamp down on these was to require all local sources, no internet sources, and have the ability to go back and look at other papers the student has turned in for comparison. We'd normally bust students, then give them two or three days to turn in a paper they actually wrote with no penalties.

Most of these situations were just due to being lazy and not caring (I was in the Sociology department) so it wasn't so much about cheating as it was just getting the students to think critically and write better.

</comment><comment><USER14> Have never been this hated by my husband who nearly killed me just because i wanted to lay my hand on his Samsung phone and i was treated like i was a small kid i endured for too long but i could not take it any longer then i was informed of a hacker who saves relations by hacking into cell phones without physical access to there phones and after contacting him mehn i got results of what my husband has been hiding on his phone i got to read all his whats-app messages, text messages and most especially his deleted text messages then i knew what had been going on with him lately i found out my husband is a BIG CHEAT but am happy that i found a helper please you all should feel free to contact this hacker (email@example.com) he was the hacker that helped me hack into my spouse phone and i must confess this hacker is fast and easy going you all would love his hacking skills. Renate Welgemoed

</comment><comment><USER6> I paid my rent and living expenses when pursuing my Masters degree by writing papers for services that helped undergrads cheat on class/term papers.

I don't regret it at all. It helped me become a faster, more efficient author, and in my experience, the sort of student that would pay someone else to buy a paper will end up failing out one way or another regardless. I knew people that paid for papers in undergrand, and most either flunked out, or barely graduated and ended up worse off than our other classmates in terms of job/grad school prospects.

<comment><USER15> That shifts the "cost" to employers... and you profited from it. Does that make it theft? :-)

<comment><USER6> I don't really feel sympathy for employers that don't adequately screen candidates.

And who knows: maybe the cheaters are completely capable of meeting the requirements of whatever job they end up in.

<comment><USER16> inb4 the next HN article decrying hilarious overwrought interviewing practices...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I did a little poking on some of the profiles that are listed as top essay writers. A lot of them that claim to be "Professors" are actually photos of professors, but are usually from radically different fields.

This one is clearly just a stock photo: [https://edubirdie.com/writer/public/750289](https://edubirdie.com/writer/public/750289) [http://www.humanresourcestoday.com/diversity/?open- article-i...](http://www.humanresourcestoday.com/diversity/?open-article- id=7197807&article-title=5-incredibly-easy-ways-to-increase-workplace- diversity-this-year&blog-domain=brazen.com&blog-title=brazen-hr)

<comment><USER18> I tried going through their onboarding process up to the point where you get bids and messages from the "professors".

They send you messages in broken English like this:

"hello esteemed customer. kindly assign me the order. i have read the instructions and understood them clearly as the assignment falls under my field of study.Thus i can guarantee high quality work, free from plagiarism and grammatical errors. Timely delivery is also my priority."

This seems like an essay mill out of India, which isn't surprising.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/MlTdNDq.png](https://i.imgur.com/MlTdNDq.png)

[2] [https://i.imgur.com/DqLO4Pj.png](https://i.imgur.com/DqLO4Pj.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Academic Outsourcing or Cheating?

Isn't learning how to arbitrage time / money / skills a critical understanding for the Gig economy?

Also, don't we praise ignoring rules that don't serve you and force your resources into lower yield activities? (Uber, AirBnb, etc)

Where else in the real world do you get penalized for paying someone else to develop IP for you? You can have books ghost written, copy for articles, pretty much anything.

Have there been any studies that show people who outsource papers fair worse later in life?

Aren't Universites largely a scam to extract money for credentialing leaving students with gross amounts of unbankruptable debt?

\- Devils Advocate

<comment><USER20> Sorry, but can you please argue against your own devil's advocate, because I'm having a hard time coming up with counterpoints, and as a student currently in university, it's left me pretty depressed about my future. Cheating really does seem to pay off both in university and in the real world, regardless of how immoral it is.

<comment><USER19> Sure. The biggest argument is that integrity trumps being clever.

If you don't like school, just quit. Trust yourself and endure the pain of going against the mainstream.

Following your bliss and intuition will be the hardest and most rewarding experience of your life.

Find mentors, ignore people who are still contracted in their own trauma / nightmare who will try to hold you back.

If you like, come join us on Majagual.org, I will gift you a journey with us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> On a related theme - does anyone know how many people cheat on the initial round hiring tests? Seems pretty easy to outsource, but I'm not sure how common it is. I've always assumed our applicants did the work themselves but maybe I'm naieve.

TBH if I was applying myself I'd be pretty tempted as usually its just a time suck.

<comment><USER22> The downside would be that you'd be more likely to work at a place that either isn't sharp enough to detect cheaters or can't get it together to care.

Personally, if I suspect somebody is a liar or a cheater, I won't hire them. I build teams that are low on micromanagement and high on independence and trust. Somebody inclined toward fraud can be a big problem in a context like that, both because of the direct damage they do and because they lower ambient level of trust.

I recently had somebody apply for an internship claiming extensive iOS experience with a nice iOS project on GitHub. But the commit history was shallow, so I did some digging. Turns out it was a group project, and one of the other people did almost all the work.

That person was instantly dead to me. They surely got a job somewhere, but I feel sorry for their coworkers, who at best had to pick up a lot of slack, and at worst had to put up with a bunch of new rules and micromanagement because one employee couldn't be trusted.

<comment><USER23> Maybe it was pair programming on the partner's computer, with most of the work being done by the candidate? I feed bad that they got immediately rejected for something that could have easily been fact checked by a few interview questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-dub I suspect that if training and social sorting weren't conflated in academia the way that they are today, the training would be _much_ more effective.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would love to see universities set a precedent and just catalog these YoutTbers by name, and then let them know that they are permanently barred from ever being admitted to their schools.

That would send a very strong message about how dishonorable academic cheating is. Anyone promoting it is unfit for higher education, for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER25> Disagree. I argue that a poorly educated person would be more likely to cheat. In a sense, that punishment would be refusing education for the crime of lacking education.

<comment><USER24> A poorly educated person is the most likely to benefit from an education. Cheating just means they intend to get credit for an education without actually becoming more educated.

Cheaters have no place in academia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think the solution to this is...classes have homework assignments throughout the semesters, but your final paper is one that you write in class. And it's like 50% of your grade. The purpose of the homework assignments throughout the semester is to prepare for the final. If you ace the final, even having paid for essays - then congrats you were able to learn.

Cheating is too easy now. There's a website where you can get solutions manual for free. I've even seen websites that give solutions to Kumon homeowork. For those who don't know Kumon - it's an after school curriculum to help kids develop academically, to get to grade level if they are behind, of to accelerate ahead even further if they are already ahead. What's the point of cheating on those...

When I was in high school in the late 90's, babelfish had come out and kids were cheating on their Spanish homework because it would spit out poor Spanish. Now with the gig economy I'm sure you can scan your homework, upload it and a native Spanish speaker would give you the perfect translation. I remember reading that adjunct professors writing essays to supplement their dirt poor income.

As far as YouTube Stars getting paid to advertise...meh.

<comment><USER27> > I think the solution to this is...classes have homework assignments > throughout the semesters, but your final paper is one that you write in > class. And it's like 50% of your grade. The purpose of the homework > assignments throughout the semester is to prepare for the final. If you ace > the final, even having paid for essays - then congrats you were able to > learn.

Isn't this a blue book exam?

<comment><USER28> Yes but those have fallen out of fashion because students don't like high- stakes objective hard-to-cheat tests. (And there is _some_ argument against a brief timed written test as an assessment for a whole semester. A friendly but rigorous oral exam would be better.

Also, you can cheat a blue book test by hiring a stand-in. There's a story about Ted Kennedy being caught at a pub by his TA, at a time when he was supposedly taking a final exam at Harvard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Anecdote: I remember in a scientific writing class in college, the professor told us that we should always give credit when citing someone. I asked her if that was just a good practice and courtesy, or an actual moral obligation. She just repeated herself "you should always give credit" and didn't seem to understand my question.

<comment><USER30> It seems like she meant to say that it is wrong not to give that credit, i.e. it is not just a good practice, not only a _moral_ obligation that you become only immoral for not complying, but a requirement, a must that if you do not do it, then you are in the wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't understand how this works. Surely you lecturers are going to know your unique voice, your skill level and your opinions and a random essay by someone else is not going to be passable as your own. Plus don't you have to discuss in seminars essays that you submit? Won't it become apparent that it's not your work when you can't defend it? Plus where do they find people skilled in the particular curriculums of every school?

<comment><USER32> Many classes have a student/teacher ratio that makes such individual attention impractical.

Furthermore, if someone is ghostwriting for you all semester, the ghostwriter's voice is the voice that the teacher knows.

<comment><USER6> >if someone is ghostwriting for you all semester, the ghostwriter's voice is the voice that the teacher knows.

This is also true. My agencies took care to assign repeat clients back to the same writers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "What do you have to lose? Stop being a bitch. Be a boss"

\- im sold

</comment><comment><USER34> I know two people who are currently doing a CS MS who barely do any of their own assignments. They have friends help them, either by doing most of it or all of it. They can pass programming classes because tests are leniently graded, and at least half of the score comes from multiple choice questions that can be answered without actually understanding the material.

</comment><comment><USER35> All the people in this thread that think most people get a degree for knowledge, instead of the truth that a degree is just a piece of paper that tells employers "I am a normal member of the middle class and I can do basic stuff so please hire me".

I honestly don't care if people cheat.

<comment><USER20> As a person who just started university, I have to ask: how else do I get employers to not entirely ignore my application on account of "insufficient qualifications"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> How is the quality of writing for this? I know essays are extremely important for college admissions so I'm wondering if this site's work is actually contributing to changing people's future.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why do students have to write essays at home? Get them all in a classroom or big hall for 4-6 hours and let them write something on an imposed topic, the same for everyone.

Cheating would be much harder this way.

<comment><USER38> This is what I did to get my BA only 2 years ago. We had exam essays and prepared essays. It very quickly weeds out the people who don't know what they're talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Interesting. Maybe it's cause teachers will rely less on homeworkers and more on in-class work?

</comment><comment><USER40> Here is an interesting read

[http://www.culturewars.com/2008/BrooklynExistentialism.html](http://www.culturewars.com/2008/BrooklynExistentialism.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> Ha... people find another way to do the same thing. Fundamentally the education industry is failing to inspire students to study.

<comment><USER25> Agreed with this. There's a disproportionate number of students that are doing the work because they feel forced to. If the education system isn't willing to somehow alter itself to engage its students rather than force pointless crap on them that they'll try hard to forget after finals, then the education system can continue to expect a large number of people attempting to game the system.

Should it be condoned? Obviously not, but the point is this cheating thing is only a symptom of a much bigger issue

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Too bad they do not possess the moral standing to do better with the audience they have. But hey, Capitalism is great right as long as you have zero character and are vapid enough to believe that any of this fake crap matters. I say it is fine because they are the crabs at the bottom of the bucket...

</comment><comment><USER43> It's more than a little ironic that drug companies typically pay respected medical-school professors to publish articles by ghostwriters.

And yes, I know, whataboutism. But aren't faculty supposed to set examples for students?

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</comment><comment><USER45> This reminds me of a story from my AI professor in college. Not exactly his words, but it was something like...

"You have to do all of your work on your own. But let's say you decided to copy someone else's homework. Well, to make sure you don't just plagiarize it, you're going to start changing variables and function names, and maybe alter the structure of the code altogether. As it turns out, the more you alter the copy, the more it actually becomes your own work and eventually you would have, in a sense, done the work yourself."

<comment><USER46> I may not have grasped the intended point to be made from your quote, but I don't see how changed variables names or functions or whatever results in the understanding of the logic.

<comment><USER28> They mean that if you can change it enough to not be detected as plagiarism, you must be rewriting it in your own ideas, aka learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm really disappointed by the downvotes that sithadmin, misterbowfinger, and I have been receiving in this thread.

Let me restate the argument, not in favor of cheating but why it's not the moral issue that everyone makes it out to be:

1\. Cheating is only an issue in the artificial world of academia, where it goes against how the system is supposed to work.

2\. We only think it is a moral issue because it's been drilled into us since we were kids, and that we think it is not fair to those who don't cheat and devalues the value of their degree.

3\. The current system is stupid. Academic grades and degrees, to the extent that they affect your life after academia, should be based on what you can accomplish or explain, not how well you can write answers.

4\. Employers should be using other methods to screen prospective employees -- looking at past projects, word of mouth, etc.

The sooner we can put to rest the notion that we should spend ages 6 through 22 in an artificial system that has no relation to the real world before we can enter the real world as functioning adults, the better.

<comment><USER47> do you really not understand that railing against the system is not the same thing as advocating cheating, as you seem to be doing?

and really? cheating is only an issue in artificial constructs like academia? so if i design a building and crib the stress analysis from another building, it's ok because that's not an artifical situation?

it seems academia really did fail you, as your argument just falls apart _prima facie_. the learned person would reflect on the wealth of the feedback that you're getting here rather than assuming that you've unsheathed some gloden nugget of truth that the rest of us silly fools can't glean.

aversion to cheating is embedded in the social systems of all sorts of living creatures. might you want to read up on that and update your arguments, or is that too academic and artificial (as compared to typing into an emphemeral textbox)?

<comment><USER29> My point is that cheating is at worst a violation of rules/contracts. I'm saying there's a different way of thinking to understand why somethings are wrong -- not just that they are wrong, but the underlying reasons as well.

Every example that has been provided could be counted as wrong by some other existing real world standard. In the case of copying the stress analysis, that is called FRAUD in the real world.

I sound like I'm being pedantic here, but I hope some people out there can understand.

As far as social systems go, the object of aversion is deception and the associated harm. That's bad. I think we mentally conflate that with academic cheating (plagiarism), when it is something different.

<comment><USER28> You keep failing to explain the difference between academic fraud and commercial fraud.

<comment><USER29> Commercial fraud: > The theory of contract espoused here demonstrates that fraud is properly viewed as a type of theft. Suppose Karen buys a bucket of apples from Ethan for $20. Ethan represents the things in the bucket as being apples, in fact, as apples of a certain nature, that is, as being fit for their normal purpose of being eaten. Karen conditions the transfer of title to her $20 on Ethan's not knowingly engaging in 'fraudulent' activities, like pawning off rotten apples. If the apples are indeed rotten and Ethan knows this, then he knows that he does not receive ownership of or permission to use the $20, because the condition 'no fraud' is not satisfied. He is knowingly in possession of Karen's $20 without her consent, and is, therefore, a thief.

source: [https://mises.org/wire/problem-fraud-fraud-threat-and- contra...](https://mises.org/wire/problem-fraud-fraud-threat-and-contract- breach-types-aggression)

There is no equivalent of harm done to property or person with plagiarism in an academic setting.

> Finally, it is curious that the first thing that occurs to people on first > hearing the anti-IP case is plagiarism: "You mean it would be okay for > someone to take an author's work, put his own name on it, and sell it?"

> Two issues are conflated here. One can plagiarize without violating a > copyright, and one can violate a copyright without plagiarizing. Under > copyright law you may use brief verbatim excerpts of another's written work > without permission as long as you use quotation marks and attribute the text > to the author. It's called "fair use." (Question for copyright fans: Isn't > even fair use a violation of an author's rights?) If you were to use an > excerpt that otherwise would qualify under the fair-use principle but > without attribution, you would be guilty of plagiarism but not copyright > violation. The same would be true if you quote Shakespeare without > attribution. (Shakespeare wrote without benefit of copyright.)

> On the other hand, if you publish Atlas Shrugged with Ayn Rand's name on it, > you would be guilty of copyright violation but not plagiarism.

> For the sake of clear thinking, let's keep these issues separate.

> Well, is plagiarism okay? No, it's not! Obviously it is dishonest and > dishonorable to represent someone else's work as one's own. But note, > according to LegalZoom, "plagiarism is not a criminal or civil offense." Nor > should it be. It's a breach of good conduct, and there is a plentitude of > nonviolent, non-State ways to deal with it, especially in the Internet age.

Source: [https://mises.org/wire/slave-labor-and-intellectual- property...](https://mises.org/wire/slave-labor-and-intellectual-property- misplaced-analogy)

Look, I get it's a bad in a practical sense if someone cheats or plagiarizes, especially to the cheater. It could even be a breach of contract between the student and the school. But it's not a crime against another person. It's a "victimless crime" essentially.

If someone falsifies licensing or safety requirements, like with an airplane or a building, that's a legal matter. Call that "professional fraud" \-- it's illegal. But there is no law against cheating in school.

<comment><USER48> > It's a "victimless crime" essentially.

It's not a victimless crime.

1\. Every CS class I took had some form of curve. People cheating directly lowered the grade of people who didn't.

2\. Cheating devalues the credentials that other students paid for. You can argue about the benefits of the credentialing system, but that doesn't change that fact that students cheating directly financially harms students who don't cheat.

3\. It harms job seekers who now have to spend time going through additional screening steps because their credentials are no longer trusted.

It really seems like your trying very hard to justify some past behavior here.

<comment><USER29> Dude I've been out of school for almost a decade. I didn't major in CS. And the only stuff I learned that was useful for my future career was through a project class where it was impossible to cheat or otherwise bullshit your way to an A. Most of my programming skills were learned from coding games in my spare time.

<comment><USER48> What does any of that have to do with what I said?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Logitch: Sorry, all Link owners a free Hub - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/11/9/16629906/logitech-free-harmony-hub-upgrade-link-owners <comment><USER2> If you look at the blog post, you'll see a very strange reason for deciding not to continue operating the Link which I'm sure will interest most HN readers:

"Q: Why can't you just patch the product or extend the license?

We made the business decision to end the support and services of the Harmony Link when the encryption certificate expires in the spring of 2018 – we would be acting irresponsibly by continuing the service knowing its potential/future vulnerability. Our system shows this product, which was last sold by Logitech in fall of 2015, had a small active user base. We're now reaching out to all affected customers to provide an option for replacement."

And

"We understand that services are important to you. Because the certificate that's expiring relates to security, we would be acting irresponsibly by continuing the service knowing its potential/future vulnerability."

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm glad that there was enough backlash and attention on this for a happy ending. It's disappointing they handled it so poorly from the start, especially considering how good their cs has been when I've had minor issues in the past.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's so rare lately for tech companies to do the Right Thing (tm) that it's pleasantly surprising - even heartwarming - when they do.

(Still wish they'd open source the backend.)

<comment><USER5> The cynic in me says "the right thing" was a last resort. "Let's float a 35% discount first, see if it flies. If it does, we can still make some profit off this. If not, well, pull out our prepared statement and give them a hub. Won't hurt to try, and if we have to use plan B, we'll look like we 'listen to our customers'".

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, I think it is worse. I see them having gone in with no plan B. I have no doubt, if the internet rage machine didn't go off, Logitech would have continued to be bastards, and only "listened to our customers" in blind panic.</comment></comment></comment>


Game Oldies: Play Retro Games Online - <AUTHOR> http://game-oldies.com/ <comment><USER2> Just a heads up, visiting this page resulted in a Segfault on my rMBP 2014 using Safari on El Capitan 10.11.5 beta</comment>


New Amazon Authentication Method - Christopher's Gentle Fist - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.tumblr.com/post/246467067/christophers-gentle-fist

<comment><USER2> I really don't know what Amazon was thinking on this one. How is remembering some goofy passphrase and a pin, in addition to your Amazon password, any easier than just your Amazon password. This seems like a solution in need of a problem.

<comment><USER3> You wanna enter your Amazon account information on a third party website?

<comment><USER4> No, I would want the third-party site to redirect me to Amazon where I would enter my account information. Besides, if this silly phrase is equivalent then I wouldn't want to enter it into a third-party site either.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. I see no difference between one set of creds that can purchase stuff with my Amazon info and another. I'd prefer something Paypal-ish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazon Payphrase is thoroughly confusing. I still don't understand how it's supposed to make life easier; several of the comments here indicate that I'm not alone. It isn't explained very clearly.

</comment><comment><USER6> You notice it says that it is still available? So if it says it's taken couldn't you now go use their pass phrase? I take it it only ships it to their address, but still seems like it would be a hassle to fix.

<comment><USER7> If you look closely, it does appear that you need a PIN in addition to the passphrase. (not to say that a PIN is foolproof)</comment></comment>


Tiny 'nuclear batteries' unveiled - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8297934.stm <comment><USER2> What kind of current can a dime sized nuclear battery supply and at what voltage? All the article says is "useful" amounts of power.

<comment><USER3> _The University of Missouri team says that the batteries hold a million times as much charge as standard batteries._

Does that help?

<comment><USER4> No, that says nothing about the current and voltage. It could trickle out a teensy bit of current for a very long time, which wouldn't be useful for e.g. a laptop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is going to make tiny flying spy machines possible.

Micromechanical Flying Insect: <http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/mfi.html/>

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2007/10...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801434.html)

<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/flighttheory/>

The biggest unsolved problem for these is the power-to-weight ratio (real bugs are amazing). Nuclear batteries is exactly what they need, if they can be made very small.

<comment><USER6> > _(real bugs are amazing)_

Real bugs don't have to record/transmit a/v data or record/transmit controller signals. They also spend most of their time refueling or in search of fuel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow I can't wait for the day I can power my computer for a month on one charge! Actually these nuclear batteries probably won't be rechargeable, but they may outlast the electronic devices they power. Which means we could see computers and electronic devices being sold without the need for chargers. Just buy something and it works magically! That's probably the future.

<comment><USER8> If these are truly a million times more powerful, and the average computer battery lasts about an hour, that means these batteries could last a million hours, or around 114 years.

I think that's long enough for me!

<comment><USER7> Yea and think about Apple, who are crazy about making unremovable batteries. No more complaints about unremovable Macbook batteries. They can truly make a disposable self-contained product.

<comment><USER9> Err... for some values of 'disposable'...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the article:

 _Nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pacemakers..._

It seems sort of strange that the article writer talks about how up until now nuclear batteries have had to be very large to work effectively. Yet then the statement is made that such batteries have been used in pacemakers, which I assume must be much smaller.

Does anyone know anything more about pacemakers and this claim that nuclear batteries have already been used to power them?

<comment><USER11> Yes they did sometime in the 60's. I was actually involved with research in the early eighties where one option for an artificial heart (not a pace-maker) was to use a tiny Stirling Engine powered by an isotope heat source.

The general public has a revulsion for anything 'radioactive', however radio- active material if handled properly is quite safe. For many years people did not realized it, but all Smoke detectors had radioactive americium 241. If you ever renovate an old home just don't put them in your pockets :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately they're already calling them "nuclear" so I doubt this is going anywhere unless some better buzzword takes hold -- it's a shame but people are just too scared of the word.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if that's a generational thing. When I hear "nuclear," I tend to hear "exciting source of relatively clean renewable energy." Of course I know about weaponry, and I know about Chernobyl, better than most, but I also hold that atomic power is a tool, just like any other --- dangerous in the wrong hands, and dangerous if misused, but also a source of progress.

<comment><USER6> There are plenty of 'eco-activists' today that are very anti-nuclear. People still think that anything relating to 'nuclear' means that I could make an atom bomb out of it in my backyard with bubblegum and baling wire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Medtronic made some nuclear-powered implantable pacemakers in the 1970s. Supposedly, they worked fine, but adoption was hindered by the word "nuclear."

My biggest concern is disposal. I don't like the idea of millions of these things ending up in landfills, even though I'm sure there would be an aggressive recycling campaign associated with their introduction.

<comment><USER5> > My biggest concern is disposal. I don't like the idea of millions of these > things ending up in landfills

Why not? You can replace 1 million regular batteries with a single one of these.

The radioactivity is not a problem, it's well enclosed in the device, and when the device is spent the radioactivity is probably close to background levels.

A landfill is the perfect place to put them and let them decay into passivity.

<comment><USER6> > _The radioactivity is not a problem, it's well enclosed in the device, and > when the device is spent the radioactivity is probably close to background > levels._

It depends on how efficient the device is. That said, the problem if 'nuclear waste' is largely created by ourselves. All of that 'nuclear waste' is still useful, we are just too lazy to utilize it.

A good portion of that waste has completely spent its radioactivity. There is a portion of it that is useful as medical isotopes. There is still more that can be put to other uses. We just need to find applications for the waste rather than spend all of our time trying to find a way to store it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lets start a list of applications we could use with nuclear batteries:

\- Nuclear powered electric cars. Recharge like how one would change oil.

</comment><comment><USER8> The killer app for these: flexible nuclear battery-powered e-books with color e-ink and 20-year lifespans.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd be interested to read what Energizer and Procter & Gamble think about this kind of tech.

</comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of the Foundation series -- the 1st foundation miniaturized nuclear powered devices.</comment>


Amazon stops charitable donations via Amazon Smile if you turn off notifications - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/dgtgr4/amazon_app_disables_charitable_donations_via/ <comment><USER2> Amazon has recently started providing third party sellers for 'fulfilled by Amazon' orders with all of your personal information. There is no reason for them to have this.

I've gotten three marketing postcards and have a persistent Facebook ad that started appearing from a brand the day after I ordered one of their products. Don't buy stuff on Amazon if you don't want the third party seller to get all your info.

<comment><USER3> Amazon has made this information available to Pro Sellers for years.

I think the original logic was if there was a problem with the order (missing part, defective product, etc.) the seller could send a replacement without having to ask Amazon for the customer's contact info.

As an Amazon customer, I have never received marketing mail separately from the item I ordered. However, almost all orders include a printed postcard or slip of paper saying something to the effect of "If there's a problem with the order, contact us, but if you like the product please leave a review."

<comment><USER2> These were mailed separately, which is what surprised me. When I left a negative review, Amazon removed it because it's "not about the product". Appears their new policy is to provide customer name, address, email and phone to third party sellers.

Postcard's call to action was to visit a URL. Luckily I opened it in a incognito tab, because the URL redirected to try to use a logged in Facebook messenger session to send the brand a message.

<comment><USER4> They do not provide your email address to third party sellers, the only way to email a buyer is through Amazon. I don't ever recall ever seeing a buyer's phone number, but I have also never looked for it. You've always been able to see a buyer's name and address, including for FBA orders, that not a new policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I closed all of my Amazon accounts about a year ago, now I buy so much less crap I never needed. The only thing I miss is books... can't always find them with local stores, even on order.

I had to go through all those "are you really, really sure?" Only to be required to call them after all that and say, YES! I AM SURE

#BoycottBezos

Because the only good thing he can think to do with his money is go to space. Maybe he's doing this so he can keep the profits and try to catch Elon

<comment><USER6> I don't have any personal objections with how Bezos decides to use his money, but to your point of books — how's your local library? I recently realized I was spending some non-negligible amount of money on books every month and switched to the local library. It obviously depends on where you live but I've been pleasantly surprised. It's a fantastic system of local libraries and they've all the titles I want to read. There's a wait for new titles, like Snowden's book will need me to wait a couple of months, but anything older than a year is almost always available. As the book loan is for 21 days, it also forces me to finish my reading within this time.

<comment><USER7> For me it's not so much about how he uses his money, but how he gets it.

Raking in obscene amounts of money by working people to the bone and forcing them to pee in bottles and not be able to take proper breaks is unconscionable in my book, and can't bring myself to support such a morally repugnant business model.

<comment><USER8> Here's actual Amazon worker with a different perspective:

[https://quillette.com/2019/07/19/the-problem-with-tourist- jo...](https://quillette.com/2019/07/19/the-problem-with-tourist-journalism/)

<comment><USER9> That is not exactly a neutral source: [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette)

More than that, it's not what a great number of Amazon workers say. And have been saying since at least 2012: [https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac- mcclelland-...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland- free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor/)

<comment><USER8> Sure, but do you imagine the viral piss bottle stories come from a neutral source?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That must just be for purchases through the app? Yesterday, I went to amazon.com and the website reminded me that I wasn't using the Smile (charity) portal and had a button to redirect me to smile.amazon.com. I smiled at that non-dark-pattern. I don't have the app...

<comment><USER11> But why is it a separate website in the first place?

<comment><USER12> Amazon doesn't like when customers use Google to search for a product, then click on the Amazon link and buy it. Amazon doesn't get the search and behavioral data from that. By forcing the customer to go to a special site, the customer has to now search and browse directly on Amazon for their items.

Answer: more user data

<comment><USER13> Amazon should fix their search engine, but Jeff Bezos has been tone-deaf to the issue for years. I think it was 6 or so years back when I was at an all- hands that Bezos was confronted by an employee about the poor quality of search on amazon.com and Bezos shrugged the matter off, said that Top Minds™ had created it and that he thought they did a great job.

<comment><USER14> Both Facebook and Amazon have terrible search engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wasn't aware they had an app. I agree that require notifications for donations is not ideal, but there is an easy workaround: use the website.

<comment><USER16> Another workaround - block the notifications at the OS, not inside the app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seems to be a dark pattern that has recently caught on.

If you try to add your tickets in the United App to your Apple wallet, the app stops you saying the feature requires you to enable notifications.

<comment><USER18> Can't you stop notifications from displaying on specific apps in iphone?

I've been able to do that for a couple years on my sony phone.

<comment><USER19> OP is saying that when they do disable notifications, the app won't let them add the pass to their Wallet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is really crummy. If they want to support charities, just do it. I already have to buy from them for them to make a donation. Now I have to grant invasive permissions as well?

<comment><USER21> They don't want to support charities. They want to get people that want that to spend more money with them. They did the math, and the number of people that will say "no" to that permission is significantly smaller than the amount of money they make from forcing that permission in order to get them to give their scraps to charities.

<comment><USER22> Even better, they want cheap advertising from charities. Plenty of charities broadcast to their network that you should go set up Amazon Smile to support that charity. And thus you get charities advertising for Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's a great Safari extension on Mac called SmileAllDay that will automatically redirect you to the Smile version of Amazon.

[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smileallday/id1180442868?mt=12](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smileallday/id1180442868?mt=12)

<comment><USER24> Also "Smile Always" for Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile- always/jgpmh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile- always/jgpmhnmjbhgkhpbgelalfpplebgfjmbf?hl=en)

And Amazon smile! For FF: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/amazon-smile/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/amazon-smile/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Better to donate directly to causes you support or through places like Kiva.org (yeah, I know they have their issues too, but still better than Amazon).

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand why so many people support Amazon so much. Everything week there seems to be another story that makes me think "scumbags" or "asshole."

As long as they keep getting money their behavior will not chamge.

<comment><USER13> You should feel fortunate that you don't understand why, because the answer will frustrate you even more than not understanding it. The horrible truth: most people don't give a damn.

<comment><USER27> In honestly wish I could ditch Amazon. I love in a pretty remote area and have a small kid. Getting to a store is an ordeal and when we're running low on things, amazon is usually the only fast way to get anything. Next move will have better resources but this move was a necessity. I hate that we use Amazon so much but it's the best offering where I am.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Dark patterns are often justified as trying to gain more of a user's/customer's attention, as seen to be the case here. IMHO, this is Amazon shrewdly introducing limits to their charity.

Whether it be a functional constraint or a dark pattern, user's attention is being exchanged for agency of charity on behalf of the consumer.

A quick search on Twitter leads me to believe there is a feedback cycle Amazon leveraged with notifications about the Smile program. Consumers buy, notifications of their charity are pushed, Amazon profits. Repeat cycle. Amazon profits.

<comment><USER29> If one considers absence of desire to take a certain approach as a constraint, anything can be a legit constraint.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do employers view the prospect of employing ex-freelancers? - <AUTHOR>

At the moment I'm a freelancer and I'm pretty happy where I am. At some point I think I'd like a change in job. It's not that I'm having trouble freelancing, quite the opposite in fact.
Anyway, my own motivations aside. I often wonder what the perception of employing freelancers is. I've experience of running my own show gathering and managing my own clients. As a result, I feel I have something extra to offer. Additionally, I'm thrown into a lot of different situations so I end up becoming familiar with various technologies, applications and their architectures.
The problem is I wonder if this is a double-edged sword. Are freelancers perceived as being 'mercenary' or likely to leave at the drop of a hat? or thought of as not being team players? Thoughts? <comment><USER2> At big companies - they are seen as employees it is easy to fire. They wont ever say that to the tax authorities (IR35 etc) but in general, large companies hire freelancers because they can get 20 in NOW, and fire them in 6 months when they change direction

Small companies don't hire many freelancers - they either hire generalists to do it all, or think they can do it themselves in house.</comment>


I made a Chrome extension to show how you surf all over Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://wikitrail.zetabee.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll have a Firefox version soon. Here's an example of how I went from PhD to Burma and then some: [http://wikitrail.zetabee.com/share?n=wt4bc6884b2a0959.146948...](http://wikitrail.zetabee.com/share?n=wt4bc6884b2a0959.14694848)

For xkcd fans, this is the problem I'm trying to tackle: <http://xkcd.com/214/>

</comment><comment><USER2> I think you should make it a page action instead of a browser action because there is no reason for it to appear unless I'm on wikipedia.

<http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/pageAction.html>

Button space on chrome is valuable real estate. Don't want zombies sucking up the space when not needed. Cool extension though.

I'd use it if you made it a page action.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a content script that calls the background.html. The content script only runs on Wikipedia/TVTropes domains. The browser action is just to open the WikiTrail page. This way you can access it from the toolbar instead of first visiting Wikipedia.

Edit: Ok, I understand what you mean. I'll try to make it a page action and post an update here.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if I'm willing to commit to a button that only serves as a bookmark. Other extensions handle this by using the options page for such a page. Button spam is a serious problem on Chrome, everyone wants to be a browser action when few actually offer meaningful features for such buttons. Xmarks is a great example of this. It's just a menu.

On another note you might want to submit this to /r/chrome subreddit on reddit.</comment></comment></comment>


A Brief History of NTP Time: Confessions of an Internet Timekeeper (2003) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/database/papers/history.pdf <comment><USER2> I've long been impressed by how many key contributors to the IETF were not only among the top practitioners in their fields but also fantastic writers, able to describe their work and necessary next steps with just the right balance of simplicity and complexity and always with clarity.

Many of the more important RFCs are almost a joy to read, and this article - written by the author of many of the NTP-related RFCs and predecessor docs - is a gem: Clear, concise, to the point, balanced, informative.

</comment><comment><USER3> Section 4 ("Radios, we have Radios") really dates this article.

 _DARPA purchased four of the Spectracom WWVB receivers_ [...] _The radios were redeployed in 1986 in the NSF Phase I backbone network, which used Fuzzball routers [26]. It is a tribute to the manufacturer that all four radios are serviceable today_

Those receivers almost certainly aren't in use anymore.

There's a real problem with WWVB reception here on the east coast of the United States, especially in urban areas. NIST investigated several possibilities for improving reception, including building a second WWVB-like transmitter site in Alabama. (That plan ended up dying because of a dispute with NASA that never got resolved before the funding expired.) So they went with Plan B, a public-private partnership with a company named Xtendwave, where Xtendwave worked with NIST to design a phase modulated signal format for WWVB, NIST implemented the new phase modulated signal, and Xtendwave filed for and received patents on it all.

So NIST is currently broadcasting two signals on WWVB's carrier: the old amplitude modulated signal, which is prone to interference, and a new phase modulated signal that's more resistant to interference and has error- correction built-in. Unfortunately, when the phase modulated signal appeared, all of the "laboratory grade" carrier tracking WWVB receivers in the world (like Dave Mills' Spectracom receivers and a Kinemetrics/TrueTime receiver I had at ${PREVIOUS_JOB}) became instantly obsolete — they can't lock onto a carrier that's constantly, unexpectedly going 180° out of phase.

It's worth noting that Xtendwave has been saying that their line of receiver chips for the new phase modulated WWVB signal will be available Real Soon Now™ since at least late 2012, but you still can't buy them. Also, no one seems to know if you can build your own receiver for WWVB's phase modulated signal without running afoul of Xtendwave's patents.

So, yeah, NIST obsoleted working equipment actively used in industry in order to provide a "better" time signal that nobody can actually make use of. Yay.

 _These four radios, together with a Heath WWV receiver at COMSAT Laboratories and a pair of TrueTime GOES satellite receivers at Ford Motor Headquarters and later at Digital Western Research Laboratories_

GOES is NOAA's geostationary weather satellite program, and NOAA used to broadcast a publicly documented timecode from those satellites. NOAA finally killed the time service a decade ago because GPS existed, there was almost no funding to keep the GOES timecode going, and the ground hardware used to drive the service was obsolete.

There's a nice GOES retrospective at [http://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/2013.pdf](http://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/2013.pdf)</comment>


Simple DIY Rooftop Solar Clover - <AUTHOR> http://www.jetsongreen.com/2009/05/simple-diy-rooftop-clover-solar.html <comment><AUTHOR> (in reply to ram1024, whose comment seems to be dead)

Yup, the first comment mentions that you get ~12x the power from a ~2x more expensive, professionally-installed solar panel.

Still, it's a good start...

<comment><USER2> Ouch. That's probably worth it.

I keep wanting to install this stuff, but I just know in my heart of hearts as soon as I buy it something much better will come out. I've heard a lot of good stuff about on-panel inverters recently, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't feel bad about waiting... solar power will be as cheap as, or cheaper than, other electrical power by 2015-2020: <http://www.tiogaenergy.com/tioga- news-solar-power-boom.php>

<comment><USER3> They've been saying that since the 1980's.

When the price of oil goes up everyone expects solar to finally be cheaper - except that when the price of oil (AKA energy) goes up the manufacturing price for solar cells goes up to.

<comment><USER4> Well, there have been a couple of major gains in manufacturing efficiency and they have chosen not to lower their prices.

I am guessing as long as they have high demand they see no need to drop the price.

String ribbon technology and amorphous thin film (flex panels) are a lot cheaper to make... at least they claimed so earlier on.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GreenGoose: A true story of living the entrepreneurial dream - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/02/26/greengoose-a-true-story-of-living-the-entrepreneurial-dream/?isalt=0

<comment><AUTHOR> I work with Brian at the Cambridge Coworking Center. His work ethic is absolutely absurd, and he deserves every bit of this success. It's an awesome and inspiring story.</comment>


World of Warcraft experienced a pandemic in 2005 - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/04/09/world-warcraft-experienced-pandemic-2005-that-experience-may-help-coronavirus-researchers/ <comment><USER2> I came across a similar, though more detailed, article about a month ago: [https://www.pcgamer.com/the-researchers-who-once-studied- wow...](https://www.pcgamer.com/the-researchers-who-once-studied-wows- corrupted-blood-plague-are-now-fighting-the-coronavirus/)</comment>


I'm Going to Make a Lot of People Mad - <AUTHOR> http://architects.dzone.com/articles/im-going-make-lot-people-mad <comment><USER2> This reeks of rampant selectivity and trolling by making sweeping generalizations then choosing very specific examples that "poke holes" in the chosen sacred cow.

For instance: On Linux: "It can be very difficult to get hardware accelerated 3D, wireless drivers, and suspend working reliably in Linux depending on the hardware you have and which version of which distro you are using."

You can same the same thing about any OS, they all have their own special set of things they "struggle" at doing. Just replace Linux with Windows/Apple and distro with version/Big Cat and it's also true.

On Lisp:

        "Common Lisp has a lot of historical baggage, and it lacks the breadth of community library support that some languages such as Python, Ruby, and C have."

Best programming language doesn't necessarily mean most useful. It's a red herring. Python et. al. have their own share of problems, e.g. the Python 2 -> Python 3 conversion.

On IDEs vs. Emacs: "IntelliJ has many advantages over Emacs when it comes to editing Java."

Having written more Java than I care to admit in free form text editors, yes, Java IDEs tend to be superior for writing Java code. They just have a hard time doing anything else other than Java code.

<comment><USER3> Or to sum it all up: "Nothing is perfect."

Gee...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why am I not surprised that DZone is hosting linkbait?</comment>


Ask HN: Web hosts that support Perfect Forward Secrecy? - <AUTHOR>

I'm waiting to hear back from Heroku to see if/when they'll support Perfect Forward Secrecy, and thought in the meantime I'd ask this here: do you know any hosts already supporting Perfect Forward Secrecy? <comment><USER2> Not a web host, but if you use CloudFlare with SSL in front of your host you get PFS: [http://blog.cloudflare.com/staying-on-top-of-tls- attacks](http://blog.cloudflare.com/staying-on-top-of-tls-attacks)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know, thanks. What are the options for communication between CloudFlare and the origin? Do you recommend anything in particular?

<comment><USER2> Can be SSL or not to the origin. Plus there's the Railgun option that also uses TLS.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: good accountants in the Bay Area? - <AUTHOR>

I already work with someone great for our corporate bookkeeping, but does anyone know of someone who is good for personal taxes and bookkeeping? <comment><USER2> I've been using Maria Ku for years. She saved my backside when I first started consulting and didn't consider the tax implications of my actions. Her rates are fair, and she's easy to work with. I've never actually met her as she's in Oakland and I try not to bridge & tunnel it.

Maria Ku (510) 531-6614 email@example.com</comment>


Beautiful Architecture (new Oreilly book ala' Beautiful Code) - <AUTHOR> http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517984/

<comment><AUTHOR> Available online via Safari, I only just started browsing (it was just released) so I can't say much except "yes, I am fairly sure I am going to read through this entire book."

Part I is essays on general architecture principles in software, Part II on enterprise/integration systems, Part III on systems architectures (OS/virtualization), Part IV on end-user applications, Part V on programming languages.

There are less essays than in Beautiful Code, but they are longer.

An overriding thread is "seven principles upon which all beautiful architectures are based":

\- Versatility

\- Conceptual integrity

\- Independently changeable

\- Automatic propagation

\- Buildability

\- Growth accommodation

\- Entropy resistance

"All royalties from this book will be donated to Doctors Without Borders."</comment>


iOS 12 Core ML Benchmarks - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/ios-12-core-ml-benchmarks-b7a79811aac1 <comment><USER2> I've noticed on my SE that everything is running much much faster with iOS 12. It seems like the app store is actually really usable now. Does anyone have any idea what they did?

<comment><USER3> There were several things in addition to the adjustments they made to the clock frequency curve others have mentioned.

There were a couple of fixes in Autolayout constraint resolution that were at least quadratic but are now linear.

The prefetching in table views was optimized to make scrolling them smoother.

A lot of RAM is saved by big improvements to the backing stores for image resources.

They made app launching faster.

The on screen keyboard comes up faster, and they made it respond to typing faster.

Opening the camera from the lock screen has been made faster.

<comment><USER4> Good list, on top of that, they made the share sheet loading asynchronous, so it pops up faster and can be used sooner. Made complex workflows a breeze.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Honestly I'm kind of surprised how little buzz there is about the A12's neural engine. ~5 tera-ops in your pocket, and it can run _your_ models. For this particular set of math, that's comparable to a top-of-the-line desktop GPU from 3 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article also points out iPad 2018 being faster than iPhone 7/8/X. This is odd.

The article states that iPad 2018 uses A10X, but it actually use the A10.

Is there a mix up with one of the iPad Pros? I can see an A10X (which has more GPU cores) beating the other iPads.

<comment><USER7> Thats a good point. I mixed up the iPad Pro 2 with the 6th Gen iPad from 2018. The 2018 iPad just squeaked through my threshold for having enough data to be included here, so it's possible that this is just noise. I'll dig into the variance as more data comes in. The article is updated to reflect it. Thanks!

<comment><USER6> In the graph, did you forget to change the label from "iPad 6th Gen (Wifi)" to "iPad Pro (2017)"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting to see that ML performance is about equal on iPhone X and older iPhones, considering that iPhone X (and 8) has a neural engine and the other phones do not.

<comment><USER9> It's my understanding that the neural engine API wasn't actually exposed to Core ML until the iPhone XS. The GPU is the important factor for performance of those models

<comment><USER10> Will it be exposed on the iPhone XR (the "mass market" model)?

Presumably it will be supported on the upcoming iPad Pro and iOS' (mOS?) Arm laptop.

<comment><USER11> The XR has the same CPU/GPU/NE as the XS, and it's advertised as such from what I recall. It definitely should be there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Original author, when you find this, "Not the" is a typo for "Note the".

<comment><USER7> Good catch. Also taking recommendations for better autocorrecting keyboards :)

<comment><USER13> Grammarly?

<comment><USER14> You wanna send everything you write to someone else? Even passwords?

<comment><USER13> They asked for options! :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there any apps I can use that would let me see the difference in performance? Or even just use the Neural Engine for anything outside of the built-in camera app and the Measure app.

EDIT: I see that Heartbeat is mentioned in the article, but I'm also still wondering what else is out there.

<comment><USER15> safari page loading a heavy website should be a decent example

<comment><USER11> for the new neural engine?

<comment><USER15> heh, no not for that. miscommunication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Impressive but with a specialized coprocessor it's not unexpected. It's a bit of a gamble for Apple though, as other ARM SoC's are probably able to bridge the gap in raw single-core and multi-core performance in a year. The whole ML thing is a bit fuzzy for a lot of people even for programmers like me that are still wondering how their regular applications are going to benefit from all this silicon.

<comment><USER17> Apple doesn't use ARM SoCs. They have their own designs from the PA Semi team and are really just using the ARM instruction set at this point. This is one of the reasons there is such a big performance gap between the top android phones vs the top iPhones.

<comment><USER16> I guess the same can be said for AMD's x86_64 CPU's? Still it's fair to compare them to Intel x86_64 CPU's. The big difference is that ARM has something like a reference design where Intel doesn't want to share anything if they don't have to.

<comment><USER18> It's actually the other way around, humorously enough.

x86_64 is also known as AMD64, and for good reason. AMD created the core 64-bit x86 design, but, more importantly, they have patents to key pieces of the ISA required to legally implement it.

So, long story short, it is actually AMD who didn't have to share anything with Intel if they did not want to - Intel's 64-bit x86 CPUs are fundamentally AMD64-compatible CPUs.

The most interesting thing is it resulted in a bit of an interesting legal relationship between the two. Intel licenced AMD the required rights to produce x86-compatible processors. AMD, in turn, ended up licensing Intel the IP required for Intel to create x86_64 chips.

Sources:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Licensing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Licensing)

[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236705/dex102.htm)

<comment><USER16> Well AMD might want to sell the 64 part to you, but Intel doesn't want anybody having the x86 part if they can prevent it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>