Suicides in Rural America Increased More Than 40% in 16 Years - <AUTHOR> http://acsh.org/news/2017/03/16/suicides-rural-america-increased-more-40-16-years-11010 <comment><USER4> The lack of opportunity in rural America is disheartening to say the least. I feel the election of Trump is a direct reflection of the lack of empathy people have from cities have for rural America.

I grew up in New Hampshire in a very rural town with a population of 4,000. Rural life sat well with some of my peers, but I loved tech and quickly left through college enabled by my parents ability to point me in the right direction, which many of my peers didn't have. The difference in opportunity I saw in the cities versus New Hampshire was staggering, not even comparable. I've enjoyed my life as I've explored more of America and ended up in the Bay, but every time I go back to New Hampshire there is always a tally of people I knew who died to Heroin. That or one of my friends succumbing to their addictions again. I know these people extremely well and I can confidently say the only difference between me and them was opportunities to enable my mind and parenting. It's disgusting honestly.

Now I would love to solve this problem, but the lack of empathy I've seen in the cities for these people is the worst piece of this puzzle. People in cities have the privilege of wealth and the ability to direct America in a way rural America doesn't. The issues they face in rural America are completely ignored. While they cite that the popular vote strongly favored Hilary, they forget why the electoral college was created. To help rural America from being completely ignored while the cities with denser populations sway the votes towards their issues.

I encourage everyone to go talk to a person in a rural county that is provided cheap heroin through foreign drug smuggling groups that don't have any opportunities. Empathize with their problems. Do I think transgender deserve equal rights? Absolutely. But go to a town ravaged by heroin and lack of financial growth and bring up transgender bathrooms to them. They will be baffled by your lack of knowledge of how their lives operate.

<comment><USER5> "People in the cities" (who tend to be strongly left-leaning) literally _want_ to give money to the less well-off people in rural areas to help support them. It's the right-leaning candidates who are opposed to wealth redistribution.

Who is missing empathy for whom? From my perspective, the fiscal conservatives from the rural areas have relatively less empathy than vice versa.

<comment><USER4> Giving money is not the issue in rural America. It's not social welfare such as health insurance or anything of the sort. If anything I'd say there's a lot of disgust with how many rural Americans live off the system.

It's lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that? Tesla isn't opening up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon. There certainly isn't as many amazing colleges such as UC berkley there. Throwing money into unemployment and welfare won't solve the problem at all.

Trump literally said I will fight to get you jobs back. Ignore if that is true. Ignore if he is an idiot. Ignore if that works in the long term. He was the only candidate that actually said a single idea that was directly aimed at helping them.

<comment><USER6> > It's lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that? Tesla isn't opening > up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon.

In generations past, Americans picked up and moved to where the opportunity was, rather than staying put. Why is it unreasonable to expect the same now?

The economy has permanently changed - those jobs are never coming back. On the other hand, moving is far, far easier in 2017 than it was for those on the Oregon Trail or the Mayflower.

<comment><USER4> Yes so you want to have every move to the city where the opportunities are. Which may be fine, but imagine for a second someone telling you that 'you should just move from where you are because where you were born isn't good enough'. Not very considerate. Also, they would be thrown into an environment that is wildly different than there own with far less money than everyone else and lack of skillets and knowledge to thrive.

They would be an extreme disadvatantage. Now I don't disagree that that may be a solution, but seriously take a step back. Ask yourself if you think you just said is empathatic towards people in rural America?

Ask yourself if you had said that about other issues in America. 'Why can't black people just start learning how to code to catch up?' 'Why can't gays just get over not being able to be officially married?'

Basically what you're saying is 'why cant people that aren't me adapt to how I operate?'

<comment><USER7> > imagine for a second someone telling you that 'you should just move from > where you are because where you were born isn't good enough'

Now imagine telling a corporation that 'you must build your factory only in City X' \-- why should they? They will build where they find space at good rents and an industrial ecosystem and workers.

What if the factory owner lives in California. So he has to move his life across the country and build in New Hampshire because a rural worker in New Hampshire didn't want to move themselves? How does this make sense?

<comment><USER8> Exactly!

Viewed by the capitalist system, these communities are useless. People hate feeling useless, even if you give them everything they need to live (the Democrat's solution)

So, how do you make economically irrelevant communities viable?

I have no idea.

<comment><USER9> Make remote work the standard option whenever possible. For example, all the paper pushing work can be easily made remote and distributed to rural areas.

<comment><USER10> If you make remote work the standard, why wouldn't a company offshore it to remote workers who are often wildly cheaper due to market forces and market distortions (like minimum wage laws)?

There are plenty of English reading/writing/speaking people in India capable of remote work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I note that they attribute suicide to 'lingering effects of the great recession' although they show no spike in suicides around the great recession, just a steady increase.

The 'elephant' in this particular room is that America has been involved in a prolonged military engagement in the middle east, nearly continuously since 2001. Further, the military and the national guard, tend to draw on young people from rural areas disproportionately because of the otherwise lack of opportunity to work. As a result we have sent over a million young people into war and then dumped them back into their home towns when they chose not to re- enlist or where discharged for other reasons. They commit suicide at a rate of 20 a day[1]. Take them out of the trend lines and see how that affects your analysis.

[1] [http://www.militarytimes.com/story/veterans/2016/07/07/va- su...](http://www.militarytimes.com/story/veterans/2016/07/07/va- suicide-20-daily-research/86788332/)

<comment><USER12> Excellent point. I'm also curious about comparing the demographic that enlisted with the equivalent demographic cohort that stayed home in terms of age, educational attainment and socioeconomic status. Was the military the only hope they had for employment or did those that stayed home prosper economically and do generally well.

<comment><USER13> Military service is almost never the only option, but it's often the best one for those who come back OK. Economic opportunity, travel, access to education, and social status in one package? That's a combination that's otherwise difficult to come by in rural Appalachia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When i was young, we were taught that Americans are used to moving and this is the main reason why America is rich: people easily pack up and move to where the opportunities are, so businesses don't starve without workers and people don't sit in the dirt in the hopeless places for the rest of their lives. It is strange to see that this seems to be no longer true and people feel so attached to literally hopeless places they found themselves in.

<comment><USER15> I completely agree, but there are good reasons not to want to move. If you've lived and worked with the same people for the past 30 years, you may not want to pack up and leave that tightly-knit community when the factory shuts down. Further, if you have a mortgage, it may well go underwater as property values plummet.

On the other hand, the US has (had?) an array of social programs to help people in those situations transition into new roles. The Atlantic published a pretty good piece* on why they haven't wound up working out as well as they could, and it does sound like a major reason is that people won't move to where the jobs are. And regardless of their reasons for wanting to stay, that usually is on them, isn't it? Otherwise, they're essentially asking the government to subsidize their lifestyle choices.

* [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/trade-w...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/trade-winners-losers/504584/)

<comment><USER16> I think the property value issue is important. If a major employer closes and people want to leave/no one wants to move there, property values go down. Even if you're not underwater, you're in a much worse position. To move to a place with more opportunity is much more expensive, especially if you have no guarantee of long term, stable employment.

<comment><USER14> No one has that guarantee these days. Also you are in a much worse position regardless of if you sell or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While the 40% number is interesting, the average increase across the nation was 30%.

The much bigger question here is why did the rate of suicide increase more than 30% for the entire nation in a 16 year time span? It's a fairly consistent trend across all sorts of economic environments regardless of whether we were in a boom or bust.

It's a shame there isn't a deeper analysis here. I have so many questions. Is the cause related to drug abuse? Would better healthcare help here? Is it mostly economical? Is the trend consistent across similar nations? Or could there be a link to something we mass consume and don't realize is harming us (similar to just a few decades ago when everything had lead in it).

<comment> happy-go-lucky The root cause seems to be lack of education and drug abuse epidemic.

<comment><USER18> Let's say we got to a point where every single individual has a bachelors or higher? What would that change? What about if everyone got a Masters or higher?

You think this will change anything? I doubt it, there would just be an increase in the job requirements due to credential inflation.

<comment><USER19> You're conflating education with credentials.

Imagine instead if every single individual could: read and write at a high level, think critically, compare loan options rationally, perform their own limited legal research (tenants' rights, welfare eligibility and application), plan their own investment strategy for retirement, etc. It would be a huge boon.

<comment> happy-go-lucky True, education is to help realize one's full potential. It's not about credentials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this suicide attempts included I wonder? Cities definitely have more help groups and "watch" groups. Chances of survival are also more around cities if someone spots you can calls emergency services. (Someone noticing their loved one/roommate attempting something and calling the doctors for example: someone I knew had their stomach pumped under 20 mins of them taking pills and survived).

I think opioid addiction is a symptom and not the cause. Maybe disappearance of rural environment where one grew up contributes to not being able to cope even more.

Slightly offtopic but: [http://www.davidsongifted.org/Search- Database/entry/A10554](http://www.davidsongifted.org/Search- Database/entry/A10554)

<comment><USER21> > Is this suicide attempts included I wonder?

I don't think so. It's hard to define what a suicide attempt is, but most definitions would see far higher than 15 attempts per 100,000 population.

EDIT: 2013 saw about 40,000 to 50,000 deaths by suicide in the US, with about 450,000 hospital treatments for self inflicted injury.

<comment><USER20> Ahh, thats pretty high. Also, accidental overdose is also not considered attempted suicide and accidental OD is more likely to lead to death in rural areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> An interesting challenge to me is: how are these numbers reconciled with understanding the communities involved?

Most people on Hacker News, I think, would argue that NYC, Boston, and New Haven have more in common with each other than say, a rural, sub-10k population town in West Virginia.

But in this analysis of suicide rates, it's actually places like New Haven County in Connecticut and Wirt County in West Virginia that are more statistically similar than either is to Boston or New York City. In my own state, Des Moines and Iowa City would both be in the same category as the very rural towns with marked increases in suicide rates. If the suicide rate is a regression to a mean, what is it about dense major cities that slowed that?

And what is it that makes what I - an Iowan - think of as a city statistically similar to the poorest and most rural counties in America?

Discussion aside, I encourage anyone who has considered taking their own life to reach out and talk to someone.

        National Suicide Prevention Hotline
        1-800-273-8255

<comment><USER22> Outside of the immediately surroundings of Yale, New Haven is a pretty bleak town that has seen far better days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is consistent with Ann Case and Angus Deaton's work on rising mortality rates in the US outside of major metro areas, especially among adults without college degrees. Rising all-cause mortality rates, not just suicides, have already become the rule for many of these places.

Many comments here mention opioid overdoses, and it's notable that, just as with opioid deaths and hospitalizations, rising mortality rates are distributed across almost all groups. But they are by far most severe among whites, who are in their late working years (~45-65 years old), and who live outside of major metro areas. (Education data are not included in this report but it's probably a safe bet that we are disproportionately discussing the un- degreed.)

Yet, if you look at the CDC's data on suicide methods, only a small portion of the increase is explained by drug overdose suicides. Drug suicides are up markedly, but they remain only about one-seventh of the total and one-third of the increase. Instead, the largest increase is in deaths by hanging/suffocation/strangulation, which is twice as large in raw terms as the increase in deaths by drug overdoses. Suffocation, not drug overdoses, is the main reason why non-firearms suicide deaths have become as common as firearms suicide deaths.

What does this tell us? Well, for one thing, people who suffocate themselves are frequently people who don't have access to firearms or lethal drugs - <USER2> who aren't familiar with them. Anyone who wants to understand rising rates of suicide should look especially carefully at why Americans are now suffocating themselves at a much higher rate.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was just commenting to a friend of mine that the trend towards remote workers may reverse the shrinking of small towns. Not everyone wants to live in a big city, and if they can work for a company that is not located there, some will prefer smaller towns. Making sure that all of American has broadband will be as important as RFD was in the day to preserve our rural areas. For those who don't know what RFD is, it is Rural Free Delivery, and it meant that people in rural areas didn't have to pay to have their mail delivered. It completely revitalized the rural areas. Sears & Roebuck prospered because they could sell to the whole country. Today, broadband internet access is needed for everyone. I live in a rural area, and reliable, fast broadband has just become available. I have a remote job, and broadband makes it possible for me to stay living here. I can see where pockets of remote tech workers would want to live in the same place, maybe having a co-working place to go to. I have a co-working office I use several days a week that is all technical workers. It's the perfect balance for me between being home all the time, and having an office with other remote workers to work with.

If people can live in these communities with an income that is middle class, they will help the communities to prosper, which may help reverse the trend towards suicide and drug use. I sometimes eat at the restaurants and shop in the stores of my small town. Our insurance agents and lawyers are there, and we do our banking there. Having real opportunities to maybe open a store, or work at the insurance office for the residents there might help their lives improve.

My cousin's son died of a heroin overdose, and he was the nicest, funnest guy. Everyone loved him. Do city people think that those who are suffering are just losers who deserve their fate? That is simply not true. Many have families who love them, and the potential to have a good life, but heroin is such a strong addiction. They need help, not condemnation. I think the de-criminalizing it is essential to solving the crisis. My cousin's son would maybe have survived and gotten help if his friends would have brought him to an ER. I think they were afraid of getting arrested and having their place raided by police, and they rationalized that he would probably be ok by morning. If they didn't have the threat of legal problems over their heads, they might have called 911 when he was unresponsive. Instead, they decided to wait it out, and he died.

These are not easy problems to solve, and it will require people to challenge their ideas about who needs fast internet, and who the people affected by the heroin epidemic are.

<comment><USER25> > Do city people think that those who are suffering are just losers who > deserve their fate? That is simply not true. Many have families who love > them, and the potential to have a good life, but heroin is such a strong > addiction. They need help, not condemnation. I think the de-criminalizing it > is essential to solving the crisis.

It's darkly amusing to read this because drugs have been ravaging the inner cities for _decades_ and "city people" (as you call them) have been saying this for about 50 years. The response from the rest of the country was the War on Drugs. You might've heard of it? See, it was widely believed that black and brown people suffered from problems of "culture" and the only solution was mass incarceration.

Anyways, I don't see this sudden outpouring of sympathy for rural whites accomplishing much of anything. There won't be a "egalitarian awakening" \-- political polarization and paralysis is only going to deepen and solidify. At the end of the day Americans don't give a shit about the poor whether they're inner city blacks and latinos or rural whites. The national conversation right now, keep in mind, is about whether Meals on Wheels is "delivering results" and how much to increase the military budget by.

But then even if America wanted to I doubt that America could handle the sort of systemic disaster that is runaway inequality. It's a structural issue; the country simply wasn't built for dealing with such a threat, it's too big, too decentralized, and ultimately too capitalistic. The only thing that stopped the runaway inequality of the 20s was the Depression and World War. In that light, I suppose, one could actually think the GOP's destruction of of the modern regulatory framework and the rabid anti-China rhetoric is a good thing.

<comment><USER24> Not everyone agrees with the War on Drugs - I certainly don't. I'm white, but I was raised from a little girl to respect people, so I never had the idea that "black and brown" people, as you put it, are not in the same boat as I am. Not that I think your assessment is wrong for many people in America. I also agree with your assessment about the political polarization. It's depressing, and there aren't easy solutions. Like I said, I live in a rural area, so I come into contact with some very bigoted people. They think because I'm white and in that community, I must agree with them, so they end up saying some pretty horrific things. I do try to engage them in a discussion, but I feel like it's a drop in the ocean.

I don't know what our future is, but the inequality is not good. Are we headed for a major catastrophe? I hope not, but look how bad Germany was before WW2, and how rapidly they have changed since. I hope that's not what it takes to turn things around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm not saying it explains all of the rise, but I wonder how much of this is more accurate reporting. I'm from rural America, and people dying of a "gun malfunction" or similar accidental deaths was a common thing. Nobody local was confused, but protecting the family was a large concern.

</comment><comment><USER27> You can fix rural areas by leaving them alone. But it has to actually alone. I mean, get rid of the residential building code and any zoning restrictions on house construction.

It used to be that a man or man and wife could build a new house for themselves, but the city regulations have been exported wholesale to the rural areas, and the expense of subdivision of land drives up land prices.

So now it is virtually impossible to bootstrap by saving a lot of money by buying a few cheap acres and building a small house: everything has to permitted and to specification, reducing the comparative advantage that should be present.

</comment><comment><USER28> How many of these suicides are war veterans?

Don't people from rural states have a disproportionate number of enlistees in to the military? And hasn't there been a huge increase in veteran suicides since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars?

<comment><USER29> >I wonder how many of these suicides are war veterans.

The overall share of combat veterans within the population as a whole is much smaller than most people think. It's less than 1%. While the suicide rates are much higher than the general population, the total numbers are relatively insignificant.

<comment><USER28> 1% of the total US population, but what percentage of rural America, and (more to the point), what percentage of the suicides in rural America?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Check [https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/](https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/) for more. One of the best posts in 2016.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for posting this ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It appears to be a broader epidemic than just the US. Australian media also report that rural suicides (particular polarised amongst older farm owners and young people) has been on a marked increase over the past decade.

Over here it has been mostly attributed to the extended drought, and the general decline of agriculture as a core factor of GDP, as well as the popularity of hard drugs like ice in rural areas.

Not sure if that correlates with the conditions in rural US as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> In my opinion it's not a US only thing. Every country seems to have increased rural->urban migration.

Couple this with the concentration/centralization of manufacturing and economies-of-scale and there is less and less opportunity/jobs in rural locations.

ps. There is NOTHING in any of trumps policies that will change this. e.g if manufacturing is not in china/Mexico/Bangladesh then it will only go to major population centers.

</comment><comment><USER34> The relationship between urban and rural regions is also interesting.

From 1910 to 1990, rural population grew from 50m to 61m, bobbling about a bit in the process. Call it a 124% growth.

In the same period, _urban_ populations grew from 42m to 187m, a 445% increase.

Among other things, this means that there's been a persistent shift of political power from _people_ to _land_ , effectively, via the Electoral College. Given the strongly conservative tendencies of rural populations, this helps explain the voting and electoral patterns of the past several decades.

Having spent my share of time in and travelling through many of these regions, the social welfare patterns are fairly easy to understand. The region _has_ visibly sagged over the past 30 years.

[https://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/files/table...](https://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/files/table-4.pdf)

</comment><comment> norea-armozel I think the biggest reason for this trend is the decline in health and human services across the various states which have large rural populations because it's been the politically expedient thing to do when budget crises happen because it's assumed they rural pops will just move to the big city and get the services there. Little do they realize that takes MONEY. So, when you're dealing with the same economic downturns which cause the budget crises also lead to underemployment and unemployment you're not going to see many of those folks move because they have no money or very little of it. Ultimately, there needs to be an honest discussion among the rank and file of the American conservative movements on these matters. Specifically, they need to acknowledge that their whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality isn't working and that a whole new program needs to be adopted. Specifically one that acknowledges that Randian/Right-Libertarian approaches are dead ends in terms of sustainability. Whether they like it or not they need to accept that there needs to be some level of welfare in government especially now when the greatest disruption to employment opportunities are ahead of us (not behind us). We can't assume there will be plentiful well paying jobs that can/will emerge in the rural sections of the US. We need to assume the opposite as distance is costly to most industries and there's barely an operable infrastructure to support building up those rural parts of the country (especially when it comes to the Internet-based IT jobs). If there's anything they should do I think an infrastructure bill that focuses on getting Internet access and education programs out to the rural parts of the country would be a good first step on top of rebuilding and augmenting existing welfare programs.

</comment><comment><USER35> Didn't we just go through two major recessions in 2000 and 2008? Is anyone surprised that more people are giving up hope in recent times with all the factories closing, major retailer closing, unemployment at incredibly high levels (U6, not official statistics) and massive debt from student loans?

<comment><USER36> Recessions on average happen every 8-10 years or so. There was a recession in 91-92, one in 81-82, etc. That part of the business cycle is pretty cyclical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Whoa! What a depressing thread. From the thread one would conclude this is not a country but a collection of economic interests.

Hopefully this dry soulless perspective is limited to a small technical group in the bay area.

You will simply not got this level of callousness in any country with a sense of a 'collective history and shared existence'.

Sure there is 'callousness' in many places but there is also a sense it is wrong. Here some seem to have not only shed the sense of guilt or collective existence but celebrate their lack of empathy. No wonder this is the only country that takes rand seriously.

<comment><USER38> >No wonder this is the only country that takes rand seriously.

Most of the people who show no empathy to rural America are actually extremely left, self-righteous city dwellers who _hate_ Rand.

I often get the feeling that most left-leaning people who don't show empathy towards rural America are actually only left-leaning because that's the "morally correct" stance. Evidently, they don't care at all about others and will take every chance they can get---that is, every situation in which it is socially and politically acceptable for leftists---to feel superior.

I'm not saying the right has any more empathy. I'm not saying the world needs more or less Rand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Without belittling the difficulties of rural areas, it seems just as concerning to me that all the lines in this plot are trending upward.

</comment><comment><USER40> Pretty nice correlation between this and the advent of OxyContin.

</comment><comment><USER6> > imagine for a second someone telling you that 'you should just move from > where you are because where you were born isn't good enough'

Sounds to me like how this country was created. Are rural Americans so weak that they can't handle a tenth of the hardship their ancestors endured to create this country? If so, then it sounds like they're the ones standing in the way of Making America Great Again.

<comment><USER41> Rural Americans are stronger than you know. We always have been.

But strength isn't enough, and it hasn't been for a long time. You have to be smart, too, and ambitious - I was, when I moved to Baltimore right out of high school, with the idea of turning my lifelong interest in programming into the sort of career that Mississippi didn't, and so far as I know still doesn't, have the industry to support. Lot of people where I'm from had ambition, often beyond anything the local environment would support. Lot of them had the same smarts I did, too, and in many cases better - behind all the pretty talk, I'm really not all that bright.

But smarts and ambition aren't enough, either, and haven't been for a long time. You have to be lucky - I was, when I discovered at age six the avocation for programming that's since developed first into a marketable trade and then into a solid career. Not that I knew that was what I was doing, of course. I just knew I really loved writing code, and I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to find that out and luckier still to have a family able to support it with an Apple II. Absent that luck, I'd have gone nowhere, because I'd have had nowhere to go. Maybe to college instead, and had a small chance of learning a marketable trade and a guarantee of decades' worth of debt. Maybe just nowhere. And that's not all the luck I've had - not by a hell of a long shot. That was just some of the earliest.

That's the thing about a life like the one I've built, the life you're saying that everyone where I'm from should build, as though it were as simple as choosing to do so - none too fancy a life, to be sure, but I'm in no debt, and my career is stable and remunerative enough that I can afford to send considerable money home to those among my family who haven't had my good fortune - that life _is_ the result of good fortune, to an utterly implausible extent. Had any of an enormous number of events turned out even _slightly_ differently than it did, I would not now be in a position to tell you what an ignorant, prejudiced jackass you must be to have said something like what you just did. At ten on a Sunday morning? I'd probably be Ubering people from brunch to shopping, or something, in a car I'd have gone into debt to buy, always counting in the back of my mind how many dollars I need to make today in order to break somewhere close to even, and it'd be a miracle if I managed in even one month to send home what I send home every month now. My laid-off mother wouldn't be getting the right care for her Graves' disease, because who could cover the co-pay? And my cousin, paralyzed last year in the sort of "industrial accident" that happens when you're so hopeless broke that cooking meth looks like an option? Well, he'd still have the communicating pressure ulcers over ~15% of his body that he got from his first, incompetent, care team. So odds are I'd have a couple of funerals to worry about pretty soon, too, and that's far from cheap, quite aside from the fact that rednecks feel the loss of loved ones every bit as much as real people do.

So, okay. You want to talk about rural people overcoming hardship to make lives of worth in the modern world? Hi there. I've done it. Having done it, I've had a great deal of opportunity to observe the degree to which doing so requires overcoming vastly opposing odds. Lest I be mistaken as arrogant, let me note this is not a boast. This luck is no cause for pride, any more than would be to have bought a winning lottery ticket. That I happened to be well placed to exploit the lucky breaks I got pales to insignificance alongside the vast, _vast_ number of lucky breaks I've had - and much more so alongside the fact that, had matters gone only slightly differently from how they in fact have, all the smarts and ambition in the world wouldn't mean a damn thing.

And here you are, arguing whether you know it or not that that kind of astonishing luck _scales_. Not only that, but slandering the people left behind by the fact that that kind of astonishing luck _doesn 't_ scale, left behind with no option but to make the best life they can under the circumstances or give up, and whose circumstances have grown latterly so hopeless that many of them _are_ giving up - and that's the thing you overlook here, the crucial point on which your ignorance or carelessness renders all the rest of your analysis worse than useless. When those of my ancestors who immigrated did so, they did it because America was a nation capable of offering them hope - hope of a better future, for themselves and their descendants, than their home countries could any longer sustain. Even those others of my ancestors who were transported under criminal sentence, who lived years or decades or the rest of their lives under effective indenture, with their liberties sharply circumscribed - even to them, America was a beacon of hope for the future. But that was many years ago, and since then, America has changed. Where my ancestors and the ancestors of my cohort found hope, that hope has gone, to be replaced by hardship that seems everlasting and in far, far too many cases is. Somehow, in spite of that, many of us survive - <USER3> all, to be sure, and fewer every year, and in circumstances which I misdoubt would horrify a lifelong city man. Shall I tell you about the shack where lived some of my happiest childhood memories, and the way black mold gets into chipboard walls? But that's not where I live any more. I had the good fortune to go on to better things. Many among my cohort did not - people whom I loved and ran with and hated and fought with all through my childhood and adolescence, people who knew me and whom I knew in the way of children who hold nothing back, in the way that later life never can quite offer, men and women who taught me how to live and understand my place in the world, how to be a worthwhile human being, who initiated me into all manner of mysteries both wonderful and terrible, and made it possible for me to attain whatever value I can ever hope to manage.

Those people, you're calling _weak_.

And then you wonder how a Trump happens.

Well, worse is coming, if things go on as they have. Worse first for you and then for us all. I don't want that. No sane man with any grasp of history could possibly want that. But the lie of progress, of the universe having an arc that bends inexorably somewhere, is too seductive, and the closest thing it offers to consolation is that I might get to see some people like you dragged screaming into hell before my own turn comes. I don't want that. I'd much rather none of us gets dragged into hell at all. I voted for Trump in large part to try to stave that off - in the hope that such a shocking setback might give rise to a general reevaluation of perspective on the left, to something which might lead to the realization that you cannot, you _may_ not, simply wash your hands of whole peoples in their millions and expect to carry on as you please, never needing fear any consequence. But that hasn't happened and I don't think it will. Instead of reevaluation we see exhortations of greater energy for the cause, and instead of any gesture toward rapprochement we see intensification of the same exclusionary rhetoric and behavior that's brought us to the pretty pass we stand in now.

And I don't expect you to change your mind because of what I've said here, either. It would astonish me if you did, not least because I've been much more honest than kind, which is too common a failing on my part in any case; effective rhetoric in this circumstance requires perhaps above all that the fissures of a fragile ego not be struck. But here I've barely tried to be otherwise, because I have in large part given up - be what I may, I'm hardly insusceptible to an absence of hope in my own right, and I've long since ceased to see much cause for _that_ in my efforts to warn people away from the abyss into which they seem hell-bent on dragging us all. But if I've achieved nothing else, as I so strongly suspect to be the case, then I may at least find whatever consolation there is to be found in the fact that, when your turn comes as a turn will come for all of us, you'll have no excuse for failing to understand what is happening, and no ability truly to say that you were never told. Meaningless as it is, if that's the best I've got, then I'll take it. And who knows? Perhaps you will surprise me after all.

<comment><USER42> Why does it take being lucky to learn how to program?

Access to a public library w/ a web browser would be enough to learn the client-side of the world. A donated or sub-$200 laptop and a free GitHub account would be enough for almost all the rest of it (save for some top-tier ML or distributed-systems work).

Not that I'm suggesting everyone flood to being a programmer, per se, but becoming one has to be amongst the absolute lowest barriers of entry to a decent living that has ever existed short of being born into landed-gentry.

It requires no credentials. It requires almost no capital. It's trivially easy to advertise your skills (via engagement in a popular open source project). It's harder and more expensive to become a groundskeeper than it is to become a programmer.

<comment><USER41> Yes, all of this is true _today_. (Most of it, anyway. I strongly doubt that "advertise your skills via open source participation and leverage that into a paying career" scales as well as you seem to suggest. And 'watwut is right about the rest. When did you last use a computer in a public library? It is rarely an environment conducive to study.) None of this was true when I started; perhaps you overlooked my mention of the model of machine on which I did that.

But that's beside my point in any case. My point is that that wasn't the only good fortune which mattered - necessary, to be sure, but not sufficient. Had I not in later life happened upon a job with someone who made it possible for me to transition from the second-shift telephone support role for which I'd been hired into what became my first real dev job, and served as an apprenticeship in business besides, I'd be driving that Uber today.

Again, my point is not that one or another specific piece of good luck made it possible for me to build the professional life I have. My point is that to do so has required _so many_ pieces of good luck, any one of which going differently would have changed the entire course of affairs, that it is impossible to imagine this approach could scale. It's like flipping a coin ten times in a row fairly, and having it come up heads five times and land on edge the other five. Clearly that can happen, or I'd be driving that Uber right now. But you cannot reasonably expect it, or demand it, or require it, of anyone.

<comment><USER43> Let's not forget your point about voting for Trump to "shock" our nation and wanting to drag other folks to hell with you.

That's likely where you lost sympathy.

<comment><USER41> Yours, perhaps. But your erroneous reading of my statements here suggests strongly that I never had it, so that doesn't seem like too much of a loss. Perhaps you'll convince me otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > "People in the cities" (who tend to be strongly left-leaning) literally want > to give money to the less well-off people in rural areas to help support > them.

It's more accurate to say that they want to give _other people 's_ money to the less-well-off. I don't know that it's terribly empathetic to use violence to take someone else's wealth and give it to another in order to get warm fuzzies or votes.

Last night, I went to a banquet for an organisation which is (AFAIK) entirely funded voluntarily, and which helps folks in crises (natural and man-made disasters, e.g. hurricanes, earthquakes and wars) all over the world, regardless of creed. They only spend 8% of their revenue on fundraising, which I think is pretty good. I voluntarily wrote them a cheque, and was glad to do it.

The moral calculus would be completely different had I voted to send armed agents to raid your bank account and give those funds to the organisation.

<comment><USER45> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905286) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER44> I think it directly addressed the point re. empathy in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905286), and was no more or less off-topic than that comment.

<comment><USER45> It's the generic ideological talking point that's the problem. Those only ever lead to generic tangents, which are the wrong kind of tangent—plus usually flamewars.

<comment><USER44> Thank you for responding; I do appreciate that.

Isn't '"People in the cities" (who tend to be strongly left-leaning) literally want to give money to the less well-off people in rural areas to help support them. It's the right-leaning candidates who are opposed to wealth redistribution. Who is missing empathy for whom? From my perspective, the fiscal conservatives from the rural areas have relatively less empathy than vice versa.' _exactly_ as much of an generic ideological talking point?

It certainly led to a lot of heated discussion, e.g. the top-rated comment in that thread, which stated in part 'If anything I'd say there's a lot of disgust with how many rural Americans live off the system.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I just read a tweet , that 1 of 5 given a 10 day supply of opiates will go on to abuse it. I worked midnight shift in a big pharma chain in rural US. I have seen 1st hand the damage the pill mills from (rural doctors )our having on our rural populations. They have lost their jobs to NAFTA. I was able to get them to stop selling brass pot scrubbies ,go (plastic) junkies would use for screens. You could tell when they came in for the scrubbies, the checks came out the dealers knew when to peddle. One of docs had a thriving Buis. Local doc - highschool phys.- slum landlord (shell co.) and a pill mill for a day job ! ps. one junkie was selling pils $15 a pop he said & that 8yrs back ; said it took 20min lick coating off ; for grind & snort . . sad !</comment>


Video series for game devs (Interviews with Gabe Newell, Chris Avellone, & more) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/user/newmediarightsstudio/videos?flow=grid&view=0

<comment><AUTHOR> Discovered from Reddit thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/131fno/gabe_newell_ta...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/131fno/gabe_newell_talking_about_how_valve_works_chris/)</comment>


Air pollution causes 'huge' reduction in intelligence, study reveals - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-pollution-causes-huge-reduction-in-intelligence-study-reveals <comment><USER2> If this study is corroborated by other studies, we should change our investment strategy of high-tech companies based on the location of the personnel and firms.

</comment><comment><USER3> What about smoking then?</comment>


A 32nm 1000-Processor Array - <AUTHOR> http://vcl.ece.ucdavis.edu/pubs/2016.06.vlsi.symp.kiloCore/2016.vlsi.symp.kiloCore.pdf <comment><USER2> It is surprising the paper makes no comparisons with GPUs. So I will do it.

For starters it looks like they are talking about integer operations (I only skimmed the paper and it mentions an ALU, not an FPU), whereas my GPU numbers below are single precision floating point numbers. So it is apples vs oranges.

So, a modern 14-16nm GPU like the Tesla P100 or RX 480 does about 5 to 10 trillion ops/sec at 200-300 W, and approximately 30 pJ/op. So GPUs are about 5x less power efficient. The paper authors did a good job. However GPUs are not optimized for absolute power efficiency, but mostly for performance per $.

<comment><USER3> (Dynamic) Power consumption goes up with square of voltage, so a comparison with a gpu's max power efficiency point (almost certainly underclocked and undervolted) could change the comparison significantly.

<comment><USER4> _Power consumption goes up with square of voltage_

This needs to become common knowledge amongst nerds and tech types.

<comment><USER5> It was more widely known, when every geek overclocked; no more.

<comment><USER4> I was underclocking when everyone else was overclocking. Because I wanted _quiet_!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So how do you program such a beast? What progress is being made on that front?

Cache coherency seems really hard to give up on, and even CPU-GPU cache coherency is becoming the expected norm, with even ARM delivering it.

<comment><USER7> It's very hard.

In the mid 1980s there was a CPU called a "Transputer" [1] made some of the people who moved to ARM. These CPUs could be connected together in huge networks and directly talk to each other.

The network of CPU's could auto-discover its topology, but coding for so many CPU's was difficult. Some specific algorithms scaled well with the number of CPUs, but most did not.

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

<comment><USER8> Occam did it quite nicely.

I think the reason transputers didn't 'make it' is not because they were super hard to program (it was only a little bit harder than programming a regular computer), but because the price premium you paid for a transputer set-up was too high and x86 got faster _very_ rapidly.

This is right around the time when the first 386 machines were launched and in a very short time we went from 12-20 MHz 286 boxes (and some 68K machines for the lucky ones) to 33 MHz 386 machines with a ton of RAM.

So the advantage that transputers had was eroded very quickly and I don't think INMOS was ready to match pace.

Now that we've reached the end of the line for that kind of speed increase we are seeing a renewed interest in multi-cpu fabric architectures, of which the transputer was an instance.

<comment><USER9> >> x86 got faster very rapidly.

Is ARM ( or something else) going to surpass x86 (amd64 whatever you want to call it) in the near future?

<comment><USER10> Just a layman, but i get the impression as of late that things are running into thermal and feature size issues.

And that these will affect all ISA equally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of the Ambric am2045 with 336 cores from 2007. They put 40 of these into an X-Ray machine for a total of 13,000 cores.

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

[http://www.embeddedinsights.com/epd/Diagrams/nethra- am2045.j...](http://www.embeddedinsights.com/epd/Diagrams/nethra-am2045.jpg)

<comment><USER12> There's (1) talking about getting ~60 tflops from ~130k compute elements by 3d assembly of 128mb ram . But it requires microfluidics cooling so it would be very expensive.

But in another paper(2), the authors say that offering this chip, even expensively ,could start building the ecosystem and and environment to start a Moore's law like race to solve the heat issue via photonics .

(1)[https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Fft-on-Xmt-Case- Study-...](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Fft-on-Xmt-Case-Study-of-a- Bandwidth-intensive-Edwards- Vishkin/4f9bd24ea869f64c4457f69ad6d9dc2b3ddb93ac/read/page/7/panel/1)

(2)[http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/17153](http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/17153)

</comment></comment><comment> white-flame I think that [http://venraytechnology.com/](http://venraytechnology.com/) is the only high CPU density design I've seen that seems useful for general purpose, large-footprint computing, but their launch model (sell to a DRAM manufacturer and cash out) didn't go anywhere.

So many of these tons-of-cores chips can't really do much per chip, and are only suited for streaming algorithms like encryption, data packet routing, video stream processing, etc. They also have nowhere near the memory bandwidth to compare to GPUs, or to feed those many processing units with unique data per unit.

Would somebody please think of the memory requirements? :-P (or Venray, please seek investment and start pushing your designs yourself)

</comment><comment><USER13> Thinking out loud.

Instead of imagining applications per processor, I imagine this device could map threads or message handlers to processors. It could work better with a functional language or at least some language that didn't explicitly manage parallelism in code but rather in the runtime. Offload the app writer to just coding algorithm and not thread synchronization.

E.g. imagine each timer wait being a processor spinning; each I/o loop being a processor that blocked/looped on an I/o pin state. With so many processors to schedule, it wouldn't stall application progress to spin or block an individual strand (until you ran out or processors). To make this efficient, they'd want interrupts and semaphore state to be hardware-supported. Instead of polling a memory location, block on a shared register masked where each bit was a condition. So instead of a 'kernel call' it'd be an opcode or small loop. Latency of wakeup then becomes about 1 machine cycle.

I imagine with the right runtime support this could be a useful device for a large I/o server. It could reduce latency of processing each client message to just the execution time. No time burned in kernel calls, process switching, stack copying, interrupt/event latency.

<comment><USER14> I'm an ex game engine developer and I bristle anytime anyone thinks any existing functional language is better for multicore. Specifically garbage collection alone will make any language an order of magnitude slower generally per a single core. Also the C/C++ game development community at least has great approaches to multicore which makes C/C++ linearly scale with scores to boot, see for example: [http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022186/Parallelizing- the-Naugh...](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022186/Parallelizing-the-Naughty- Dog-Engine).

I love functional languages, more for thinking in them, prototyping ideas, especially compilers/visualizers, and etc. But for any language that adds garbage collection, immutable data structures (way more operations per write and crazy memory thrashing/alignment issues), unless used sparsely or in a mixed paradigm (ugh, except maybe scala/clojure) are going to pay a magnitude of performance loss.

Mind you there are tricks around using more system languages (C/C++/Rust/D etc) for a lot of the heavy lifting with the application core being functional that gets you closer to the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER15> Garbage collection is an idea. It can be slower, or faster, than other memory management techniques depending on implementation and specific usage.

Functional programming languages do not _require_ a GC. They just largely have it.

"Fibers" like you linked in the presentation (m:n green thread scheduling) have been in use for decades. Many, many languages other than C++ have had them for over a decade. Go is built on them.

Functional languages _can be_ better for multicore because of referential transparency. As a game dev you are used to working on 4-8 cores. Some of us work on 40-80 cores * 10k machines and have been for years. Much of your complaints such as immutable data overhead make sense if it let's you work on 10x more cores at the same time. I will also point out that immutable data _really_ is not 10x slower, unless you think those Haskell micro bench marks are all lies.

<comment><USER16> >Functional programming languages do not _require_ a GC. They just largely have it.

No they just require Infinite Memory [1] XOR GC.

Pure Functional programming has no concept of Alloc/Delloc. Let alone the concept of binding/assignment can fail. These are real. To quote James Michens [2]

>Pointers are real. They're what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can't just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. Denying the existence of pointers is like living in ancient Greece and denying the existence of Krackens and then being confused about why none of your ships ever make it to Morocco, or Ur-Morocco, or whatever Morocco was called back then. Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be dealt with so that polite society can exist.

[1] Infinite memory simply means more memory then the program can ever consume... But the halting problem exists so you can't actually know how much memory your program will consume :P

[2] [http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch...](http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf)

<comment><USER17> PreScheme was a LISP to replace C for low-level programming. Used manual, memory management instead of GC. Very fast and efficient.

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.3.4...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.3.4031&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Formally verified plus a Scheme48 interpreter as part of VLISP project.

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

ATS has no garbage collector that I'm aware of. I've seen it used in device drivers and 8-bit MCU's.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_\(programming_language\))

LinearML is GC-less, functional, parallel programming.

[https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML](https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML)

So, functional languages neither require GC's nor infinite memory. Two also combined low-level efficiency with easy, formal verification vs C programs. So, that's higher mapping of idea to code, high efficiency, and better safety all at once.

"You can't just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip"

I believe I just did with PreScheme. Microsoft goes further to straight-up use a theorem prover to do x86 coding.

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/nick/coqasm.pd...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/nick/coqasm.pdf)

<comment><USER16> Well yeah but these languages aren't purely functionally which was what the original discussion was centered on. If you throw imperative elements into FP they're very useful yes. But you've broken the functional paradigm.

Also if all these things are amazing why aren't anyway using them?

<comment><USER17> Lambda Calculus and Turing Machine are equivalent in power. You can, as many academics have, model imperative programs as functional ones. You can compile functional programs, as almost all compilers do, to imperative code in C or assembler. We often make the distinction on syntax and structure a bit but they're both passing state into functions that optionally produce state. Edit to add that my forays in hardware show it's all functional (analog) underneath: mathematical functions running continuously without memory emulating abstract machines.

"Also if all these things are amazing why aren't anyway using them?"

Social and economic factors as usual. See Gabriel's essay Worse is Better:

[https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse- is-better.html)

Just take C language. I have its history in detail and with citations. It was literally an engineered language chopped up to run on bad hardware, chopped again with arbitrary alterations on bad hardware, and slightly extended for bad hardware again. Most people had bad hardware. Worked good on that. Spread like a virus with gradual improvements. Still nowhere near what engineered languages can pull off in various tradeoffs to consider. Yet, almost everything is written in it now thanks to it working on half-assed hardware, a MULTICS chop called UNIX doing so, UNIX distributed freely, and UNIX written in C. Social & economic factors spread it like a virus plus improved it to approximate solutions designed under cathedral model with better properties.

[http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG](http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG)

Meanwhile, alternatives sprang up that kicked both their butts in capabilities. The LISP machines, functional's answer to whole systems, had a flow and consistency you still can't match with modern stacks. B5000, a HW/OS combo designed for safe languages, would've given hackers hell. Amiga's combined SW and HW offloaders for excellent performance... like today's servers & game consoles. BeOS screamed in concurrency, multimedia, and ease of use while popular Windows and Mac boxes couldn't do but a fraction of it. AS/400's and VMS boxes ran, ran, and then ran some more with at least one person forgetting how to reboot them haha. Some in high-security survived NSA pentesting while things that get easily smashed by amateurs prevail today for _security-critical work._ I think it's clear a language or system's technical superiority has almost no causal relationship with mainstream adoption by laypeople or technical people.

Actually and sadly, it's usually better to bet on Worse is Better approaches with slight improvements for success or adoption. Occasionally, you can bet on The Right Thing with a win as Mozilla is doing with Rust. Heck, even Burroughs B5000 lives on in Unisys mainframes. OpenVMS lives on in Windows NT family as it cloned it for desktops minus strong focus on quality (sighs). ZeroMQ is a good example in middleware. Nix applying database-style principles to package management. Technically superior stuff occasionally mainstreams but not often. Human nature usually wins. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's important for people to know these are _eight bit_ CPU's. Least, that's what every other incarnation has been.

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

Asking what to do with 1,000 32- or 64-bit cores != 1,000 8-bit cores. Suddenly the value proposition doesnt seem so great. Such designs were used successfully, though, in both neural networks and genetic algorithms. Could probably handle stuff well that normally goes on DSP's.

</comment><comment><USER18> This sort of thing, taken to even greater extremes, could be an interesting match to Actor languages, with an actor mapped to a processor. The overhead would be likely be _ridiculous_ , as most actors would be blocked most of the time.

However, if it is true that we are now able to put a lot more transistors on a chip than we can power, that might actually be a feature rather than a bug. Assuming that power management is awesome and these actor-processors consume little or no energy when blocked, the power/performance ratio for most application should be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone have a link or the name of another weird architecture that was posted a while ago? (~3 months maybe?) I remember that there were a large number of cores that all communicated with each other in some weird way and that they like didn't have main system memory or something like that...

<comment><USER20> Pretty sure you mean us (REX Computing; [http://rexcomputing.com](http://rexcomputing.com)), though I would not consider our network on chip "weird" :P

Our big difference that you were trying to remember was our use of scratchpad memory which is simply stated as this: We can radically reduce power consumption, increase density, and increase speed of on chip memory (SRAM) by removing the traditional hardware caching system. We instead use a purely software managed memory system, through some very fancy (or do I dare say "smart") compiler techniques that are enabled by a a very simplified architecture and the ability to guarantee latency for all memory operations. We can still have main system memory (meaning DRAM), it is just instead of having a bunch of complex hardware that burns a lot of power and wastes a lot of space in order to automatically fetch pages out of DRAM, we structure the code for each core to efficiently pull only the data necessary when it is needed.

<comment><USER21> Perhaps you've noticed the architecture of the new top top500 system. There's currently an HPC guessing game on filling in blanks in <[http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-...](http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway- report-2016.pdf>) but of course CPU comparisons stop at Knights Landing.

One of the things I wondered about is how Linux is adapted to such an architecture. I couldn't find anything from REX on operating system support.

<comment><USER20> Yep, have seen it... it seems to not be exactly what was described by the Chinese at ISC or SC last year (their original description being much more in line with a DSP), though there is not much data available. All of the articles I am seeing today are calling it DEC Alpha "like", though the only real source for this seems to be the wikipedia article for the family of processors, with the latest version being in 2013. Dongarra even specifically says in the paper you linked that it was _NOT_ related to the Alpha ISA, so it seems like all of the media articles are incorrect ;)

As for REX, as dnautics said, we've been mostly focused on running raw compute kernels on the current simulated versions (software and FPGA), and for the soon to be in hand silicon (coming this fall)... one of our projects internally is to port the L4 microkernel, and a telecom focused RTOS, but that is as far as our operating systems plans go for the near future. I'd also love to get a Plan 9/inferno demo running on it for fun, but we've got more important work to do at the moment.

<comment><USER21> Oh, so I guess the Sunway thing isn't as much like Neo conceptually as it looked to me from what little information I had. (I wasn't thinking about the ISA.) Of course the media are mainly useful for indications to chase primary sources.

The point about the OS related to the Linux-based one for Sunway, but maybe it only runs on the management processor anyhow, with just offload to the others. I'd commented in that respect that we really don't want something like Linux in an ideal world, so I'm pleased to see mention of L4.

Thanks for the comments, and good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Dug around a bit for the paper, found this 2 page PDF:

[http://vcl.ece.ucdavis.edu/pubs/2016.06.vlsi.symp.kiloCore/2...](http://vcl.ece.ucdavis.edu/pubs/2016.06.vlsi.symp.kiloCore/2016.vlsi.symp.kiloCore.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> The paper doesn't really explain how the its suppose to handle memory. You have a 1000 processors and 12 modules with 64KB ram. Now if you have to access real ram how will that be done? You would need a massive bus like a GPU so you could keep all the chips with data to do work. How do you keep the processors starving for data.

I understand its an academic project, but I wish they would explain what the real life use of this thing would be?

Here is another project I found: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilocore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilocore)

Not the same thing, but I wonder how much they sold? More like like 1000 small processing units instead of full cpu.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm certainly hopeful this will lead somewhere useful. Intel tried with Larrabee but apparently couldn't get the perf they wanted, especially with comparisons to GPUs

It would be great to know what the trade-offs are with this architecture

<comment><USER25> you mean xeon phi. I think it's still around. It is plenty fast, but not much better tdp than a gpu (which are commodity (read this as cheap)).

<comment><USER26> Xeon Phi is around and used in various financial computations. The problem with GPUs is not TDP, but programming flexibility. Programming a GPU is very hard to do well for generic computations, whereas x86 like CPUs have millions of programmers who can do a pretty decent job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Would a language like Erlang make sense for a machine like this? Run 1000s of communicating processes without any shared data.

<comment><USER28> I don't think Erlang's VM is that optimized. Currently (as far as I remember) the upper limit is to run 1024 schedulers (threads) but I imagine it certainly wont be 10x more efficient than running 100 schedulers on 100 core machine

<comment><USER29> Architecturally it's a perfect match for such CPUs. If you listen to Joe talks he was talking about designing for 1000 core cpus more then 10 years ago. It is his stated opinion that Erlang is perfect match for such situations.

<comment><USER28> Of course it's (much) better than anything else... though my experience is that it's quite hard to scale your application that much... You always need some shared resource and it gets ugly. And I also suspect Erlang has some implementation quirks (for example the algorithm of deciding which scheduler gets which process) that will prevent it from scaling that much. Yeah, I do believe that some day we'll reach such scalability, probably just not today.

<comment><USER29> Each scheduler has it's own run queue there is higher level migration logic to balance run queues based on statistics collected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> link to press release: [https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/worlds- first-1000-processor-chi...](https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/worlds- first-1000-processor-chip)

</comment><comment><USER30> AIseek[0] had 10,000 processor chip in 2006, with simple connectivity and simple ops that were perfectly matched for graph algorithms. Their demo[1] would not be impressive today, but doing it in real time in 2006 was quite a feat and basically impossible without specialized hardware. Unfortunately, they're no longer in business.

[0] [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/75766-new-ai-chip- would-m...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/75766-new-ai-chip-would-make- games-smarter) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSQI2hinp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSQI2hinp0)

</comment><comment><USER31> > _KiloCore processors ... store data and instructions inside i) local memory, > ii) an arbitrary number of nearby processors, iii) on-chip independent > memory modules, or iv) off-chip memory._

Ah, like GreenArrays' GA144, which contains 144 discrete cores - each with a small amount of memory - that can communicate with each other. The rationale with this chip is that you store data in the memory of one or more neighboring core(s) if it won't fit in the ~64 bytes (IIRC) of the core you're working in.

</comment><comment><USER32> Where can I buy a sample?

</comment><comment><USER33> Arguably the first 1000-processor chip was the CM-1, made in the 1980's: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine)

They also bury the lede somewhat. Apparently the KiloCore is a 1.78 _Terahertz_ chip:

> The energy-efficient "KiloCore" chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 > trillion instructions per second

Edit: they later say it's 1.78 GHz. I guess "trillion" is just a mistake?

<comment><USER34> Saying 1000 cores running at 1.78 GHz are a "1.78 THz chip" is a bit like saying 1000 cars driving at 65 mph are a "65,000 mph car"

<comment><USER35> It is. But while it sounds absurd, there are cases where it makes sense. For loads that are parallelizable, both the 1.78 THz chip and 65KMPH car make sense for similes.

I wouldn't say they _are_ a 1.78THz chip or 65KMPH car, but like them.

<comment><USER36> It's a modern version of the megahertz myth: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth#Modern_adaptati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth#Modern_adaptations_of_the_myth)

I think this makes even less sense as we go to 1,000 processing elements -- even Amdahl's law is too optimistic for the workloads deployed in these scenarios (i.e., having an embarrassingly parallel computation workload doesn't help if we still need to access memory, including going through the shared interconnect(s) to do this, while also keeping cache coherence in mind --and most workloads have phases that have to be synchronized, assuming we eventually want to write the results of our computation somewhere): [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ddperf/archive/2009/04/29/parallel-s...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ddperf/archive/2009/04/29/parallel- scalability-isn-t-child-s-play-part-2-amdahl-s-law-vs-gunther-s-law.aspx)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Fix Online Journalism - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thefeedia.com/how-to-fix-online-journalism

<comment><USER2> This seems more like a plug for your startup than an informative article about journalism -- might have wanted to mention that in the title?

Edit: The link at the end of that post even leads back to this post...</comment>