The economics of the Tour de France - <AUTHOR> https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-the-tour-de-france/ <comment><USER2> From a nerd/technical point of view, one of the great challenges of the tour de france is the live HD video feed from the helicopter camera platforms to the broadcast/editing studio. Considering the mountains and terrain often in the way, the distance of the route, and the fact that the event relocates itself every day.

It was considerably less difficult in the 480p analog days.

Here's an older example of the aerial camera work.

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

Also the live video feeds from the camera operators that ride pillion on motorcycles chasing the riders. That presents its own unique technical challenge.

<comment><USER3> 480p?

France used 576 25i in analog days. And why would analog be any easier than digital? A WMT will give acceptable pictures for this type of shot at about 5mbit which is far less than 8MHz. You can get about 40mbit on an 8MHz channel which gives cracking pictures even at 2160 50p

<comment><USER4> Analog is easier than digital because the signal degrades gracefully, whereas with digital it is all-or-nothing. So raw bit rate is not quite as important as the degree to which you are losing packets.

<comment><USER3> Digital comes with tons of error correction - especially if you use the entire 8mhz. While analog degrades with just slight issues, digital remains rock solid past the point an analog signal would be unacceptable to put out in air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Themes rhat can be pulled from this:

\- Creative business models: _L 'Auto's_ original inspiration.

\- Routing and right-of-way economics: playing towns off one another for course rights.

\- Advertising. \- Risks of authoritarian collaboration and/or short-term thinking.

\- Winner-take-all (or much: the 1st-place finisher is awarded about 20% of all prize money) economics.

\- Business-vs-talent returns: most riders earn minimum wage.

\- Patronage/sponsorship models and risks.

\- "Buying" success.

\- Tradition and mythology vs. business.

<comment><USER6> > \- Business-vs-talent returns: most riders earn minimum wage.

Where so you get this from?

There is a mandated minimum that is around the median salary of my country, so much higher than minimum wage of most countries.

New young riders in the UCI Pro Tour level reportedly get a fair bit more than the minimum, on the Tour they are not usually fielding a more experienced team and earn more. If they prove themselves the earnings go up fast.

Cycling pays little compared to basketball, football etc. but they are well paid compared to the general population at Tour level.

<comment><AUTHOR> If he read the article it says the mandated minimum wage for a rider is $35,000, but most riders make more than that.

You might have a hard time living in say California on that wage but in parts of rural Europe you could get by comfortably. You definitely could in Michigan.

<comment><USER7> How can you get by comfortably in Michigan with a $35k income when health insurance deductibles are $5k+ and out of pocket maximums are $6k to $8k and premiums are ~$2.5k+ per year?

Plus federal income, FICA, state income, sales taxes, and Michigan's famously high car insurance prices? Add on saving for retirement / emergency healthcare expenses.

Doesn't leave much for a comfortable day to day life, especially if you have or intend to support a family.

<comment><USER8> You understand only a small percentage of insured get anywhere near their deductibles in any year let alone their out of pocket maximums?

Private Insurance is there to prevent you from losing your home or racking up a massive debt, not pay for every single medical expense.

<comment><USER7> Childbirth will get you there in no time. My under 1 year old had to go to doctor 3 times for various normal infections from daycare in February this year and it cost $850, plus $80 for a state mandated lead test that I just got a bill for.

The point is $35k per year gives you no breathing room, and certainly doesn't quality as comfortable. Even for single young people in great health, they can't build any wealth and they will lose whatever they do get due to various health/auto/etc issues that come up.

<comment><USER8> Sure but $35K a year is fine for a young man looking to start a career in competitive cycling. He doesn't need to save his way to build wealth, his role is a lottery ticket itself, if he moves up he'll make ten times as much, if he doesn't he quits after four or five years and gets a "real job".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most interesting part for me:

> ... riders must formulate their Tour de France strategy around maximizing > visibility for sponsors.

> Winning the tour is fantastic — but not necessary — for brand exposure. > Often, you'll see lesser-known riders break away from the pack to give > sponsors media time, even if it isn't technically the best thing to do.

> "The entire Tour is about getting eyes on the company on your jersey," an > ex-pro who wished to remain anonymous told us.

<comment><USER10> Riders from the wildcard teams are especially prone to go for suicide breakaways. It was a huge source of confusion when there wasn't any breakway the other day in the tour. It's literally worth hours of commercial air time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The more you learn about the bike industry the uglier it looks. For example Trek married itself to Lance Armstrong, in the era before he was proven to be a massive dope cheat.

Trek at the time and their legal department caused millions of dollars of damages to Greg LeMond and his bike business he had licensed to trek. It turns out LeMond was speaking the honest factual truth all along about what an absolutely terrible human being Armstrong was. All later admitted by Armstrong, and by members of the former US Postal team in sworn depositions.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that Trek has ever apologised for how they treated former TdF winner Greg LeMond.

> "for years, Greg LeMond has done and said things that have damaged the > LeMond brand and the Trek brand as a whole"[1]

Given that they regarded LeMond's whistle blowing as against what Trek stands for you have to ask your self, what does Trek stand for?

1\. [https://web.archive.org/web/20120609190914/http://www.trekbi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120609190914/http://www.trekbikes.com/pdf/media/en/Trek_PressRelease_FINAL.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Yes exactly. They rode that Armstrong/livestrong/US postal/discovery team pony for as long as they could, as hard as they could, as long as it kept selling bikes and provided a huge benefit to the bottom line.

Trek also managed to take the brand name licensed to them by one of the people who can reasonably lay claim to the title of "inventor of the mountain bike", Gary Fisher, and run it into the ground.

Other major brands are almost as bad. Giant was the sponsor for the T-Mobile team of the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s in the Jan Ullrich era, which was just as rife with organized doping. They knew full well about the doping allegations (also all later proven and admitted by the team members once retired) and did nothing as long as the financial figures looked good.

Every single sponsor of the uci protour teams from 1990 to about 2015 knew how absolutely ingrained systemic doping and cheating was, and continued to funnel money into the western European Continental cycling races and team corporations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are no spectator fees because it's not a spectator sport.

3 hours of traffic and waiting ...

And then the anticipation ...

The 'zoom ... zoom zoom zoom' \- in 1 minute it's over. That's it.

On the last leg in Paris, you get 5x that, but still.

It's nice to see once but 'paying' for so many reasons is out of the question.

Nice to see a newspaper find a way out of the scourge ...

<comment><USER13> > 3 hours of traffic and waiting ...

If it isn't a spectator sport... why do you have to wait in traffic to get to it?

Seems like a 'nobody goes there it's too busy' sort of argument?

<comment><USER14> It's a giant party.

No one goes to the Kentuky Derby to watch the horses run for 90 seconds - that's much better done on TV.

<comment><USER13> > It's a giant party.

So... it's a spectator sport?

<comment><USER12> It's an 'event' and the furthest thing from 'spectator sport' because there is literally almost nothing to spectate.

Its 3 hours of 'prep' because the courses are usually way out there, way far away from anything, and near the route traffic is upside down, maybe there is parking maybe there is none, nobody knows.

It doesn't happen at a 'venue' that's designed for sport, it happens out there in the French boondocks.

So you make a day of it ie sightseeing.

It's an excuse to get out and see the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The Economics of Professional Road Cycling" which they cite about halfway through is absolutely worth the read if you're the kind of cycling fan who enjoys a good academic paper.

</comment><comment><USER16> The cycling model is flawed because their is no distribution of screen rights amongst teams.

Basically the race and teams ownership are separate. As a result you have a few big teams and the rest scrambling for pennies

Some teams have tried to access the viewing money but the lack of solidarity amongst teams has failed. Also the owners of the tdf own a lot of the big races

<comment><USER17> > Basically the race and teams ownership are separate.

This isn't a problem per se. For example, this is how it works in football in most countries and I think most people would agree that football would be enhanced by following a US cartel system.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely not. Almost no one would.

<comment><USER17> Yikes. I meant to write "would not be enhanced". I need a subeditor. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's also an opportunity to develop amd test new technology, but it wasn't mentioned in the article. [https://www.bloomberg.com/press- releases/2019-07-04/ntt-and-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/press- releases/2019-07-04/ntt-and-a-s-o-continue-to-transform-and-revolutionize-the- fan-experience-of-the-tour-de-france-with-new-technology-deal)

</comment><comment><USER20> Didn't realize there was that big of a difference between 1st 2nd and 3rd in terms of prize money. That might partially explain why a rider in 2nd doesn't try and make a move on the last stage - they would risk blowing up and moving down to 3rd

<comment><USER21> The article discusses this at the bottom a bit but prize money at any pro bike race is treated like a team bonus and shared. The article does say it's all about sponsor exposure - from final podium place/stage win/jersey - the riders make more money in exhibition races post TdF where the top riders (based on TdF yellow/polka dot/green) are paid appearance fees.

<comment><USER22> Exhibition "races" only in the very broad sense. The post-tour criteriums are almost as fake as pro wrestling- the riders have agreed beforehand who is going to "break away" and cross the line first, though occasionally one of the local amateur riders they have in there to make up the numbers will decide to have a go:

[https://cyclingtips.com/2016/08/when-the-post-tour-crits- don...](https://cyclingtips.com/2016/08/when-the-post-tour-crits-dont-go-to- plan/)

In terms of the economics of these races, they are much better spectator events as they take the form of laps around the centre of a small city. The audiences still doesn't pay, but it's much easier to go watch- so the city will pay the race organiser, both to put their city on the map and for the economic benefit of all the food and drinks the spectators buy, often from stalls or trucks that have paid the city for a license...

[http://www.alpsandes.com/posts/2016/7/28/jurgenmettepenninge...](http://www.alpsandes.com/posts/2016/7/28/jurgenmettepenningen)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the nicest desktop virtualisation software for macOS? - <AUTHOR> I run a lot of Linux software (e.g. emacs) on macOS by ssh-ing into a Linux virtual machine. I share a folder with the virtual machine to make everything more seamless.<p>I'm currently using Parallels to achieve this and it works pretty well. Does anyone have a preference for some other virtualisation software (e.g. VMWare Fusion) over this? I am using a macOS laptop so battery life is something I should consider too. <comment><USER2> Have look at xhyve [https://github.com/machyve/xhyve](https://github.com/machyve/xhyve) Was pretty performant for me compared to other tools.

*Not on Mac anymore, switched to Linux few years back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thank you!! I've not heard of this before and it looks pretty interesting (also because it doesn't require kernel extensions)</comment></comment>


Debt-Laden Millennials Want Their Own Startups but Can't Afford Them - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-22/debt-laden-millennials-want-their-own-startups-but-can-t-afford-it <comment><USER2> I think a lot of my peers have (for better or worse) a stronger aversion to debt and risk, having matured right after or during the last economic crisis. We've been warned about credit card debt, sleep debt, and now student debt. Fundamentally when you don't have some minimum level of capital you need to take the more certain outcome. Nobody's dropping out to form a startup, but they might take a semester off to work at Facebook or Google.

Even the highest paying tech internships can't cover the cost of attending expensive private colleges. God forbid you 'merely' do banking, which pays $16k for a summer before tax, aka half the cost of a semester at my school. This is without considering the additional cost of wanting to eat and live better than cheap pizza, food truck chicken over rice, or info session sandwiches.

(I cut out a lot of snark above, but college tuition is just too damn high)

<comment><USER3> I really think the problem is that people are unwilling to shop around for a cheaper college education. In the Midwest, I bought an affordable engineering education by starting at community colleges before going to a large university. I'm very successful in my career if that's the measure you want to use. If you are adamant about going to a university on the coasts, you'll pay out the nose.

<comment><USER4> Honestly no offence meant, but you won't be very good in your connections. You won't know the right people, the alumni or professors or generally all the actually important people that will give you massive leg ups if you want to start a company.

As for learning? Your peers won't challenge you, you'll be exposed to easier lessons, to easier concepts, you won't really get challenged at all. When I was keeping up with this stuff, in the UK the shit unis taught Java, the good ones Lisp or Python. The whole ethos is different. A friend of mine got a 1st (best degree in UK) from the 2nd tier University he went to.

But he couldn't remotely handle complicated code written by our literally genius colleague (I've honestly never met someone so insanely good again in 15 years). He was not anywhere near 1st material in a real top-tier university. He would have been lucky to get a 2:2.

I know someone who did the 2nd tier route and who is genuinely good. He, perhaps like you, is the exception, not the rule.

<comment><USER5> Complicated code? That doesn't sound like genius to me.

<comment><USER6> I think a genius coders makes a complex problem into simple code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _Sixty-two percent of millennials have considered starting their own > businesses_

I call horseshit. "Considered" in the same way as "considered what life would be like if you could fly". There's a giant difference between daydreaming and taking even the first step towards merely investigating what's required to start a business.

> _72 percent think startups are "essential for new innovation and jobs,"_

I'd be genuinely surprised if 72% even knew what 'startup' meant, let alone have such a strong opinion of them.

I'd believe the above numbers if the survey was limited to an area which is hyper-aware of startups, like a college in SF or similar.

<comment><USER8> They don't want a startup. They want a start up like the ones they see on TV - frosted glass and ping pong tables and people being paid millions for goofing off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is not something specific to millennials. Unless you are already wealthy, starting a business requires trade offs, patience, and creativity. While millennials might have different obstacles than their baby boomer parents, that doesn't mean millennials lack the creativity to conquer them.

<comment><USER10> This is wrong. Starting a business requires customers.

To get them, you first need to meet them. Good luck with so many established businesses around. You do not get the chance to prove yourself and grow with your customers unless you invest upfront a lot. And since millenials are broke, funding comes from their parents generation that also keeps the profits. Have a nice life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The good news is that i don't believe doing a startup out of college is the best idea. Startups serving millennial are way over saturated. There are bigger and more important problems in areas that college grads haven't experienced yet. Get a job at a _growing industry_ that you are _interested_ in. Don't take the job just based on salary. Learn the ins and out of your trade. When you are ready to take the plunge your startup will have a better chance of being useful. Your insider experience and network will be a competitive advantage.

<comment><USER12> How do you measure whether an industry is growing?

What are some industries that you're watching right now?

Just looking for ideas ;) 28yr old looking around here.

<comment><USER13> Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality. 3D Printing. Drones. Robotics. Autonomous vehicles. Internet of things (maybe, I think there's more resistance to this one). Chatbots/voice recognition. Biotech in general. Maaaybe commercial space travel.

Any of those tickle your fancy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Since many are burdened with massive student debt, they can't afford to > launch startups...

I'm really dubious of this as an explanation. The figure I found here[0] says the average debt is $37k. I bet that the median is actually quite lower than that because of how wildly different tuition can cost (private liberal arts versus state college). Either way that's not "massive" and hardly explains a cultural change.

This[1] article calls the group the most debt averse generation ever. Well which is it?

[0] [http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/05/02/student-debt-is- ab...](http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/05/02/student-debt-is-about-to-set- another-record-but-the-picture-isnt-all-bad)

[1] [https://www.google.com/amp/www.cnbc.com/amp/2014/09/05/debt-...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.cnbc.com/amp/2014/09/05/debt- averse-millennials-steer-clear-of-credit-cards.html)

<comment><USER15> Do you come from a wealthy family? 37k is a lot to pay off when you're just out of school, STEM included. That's like 500-700 a month if you want to pay it off in 3-5 years. That kind of obligation makes it really hard to quit a job.

<comment><USER14> I'm not saying it's not a lot, I'm just saying I'm dubious about it as an explanation for the article's theory. Also, that's the _average_ debt. I believe the median is probably much lower but unfortunately I can't seem to find any research in this area. I would love it if someone pointed me in the right direction.

<comment><USER16> You seem to think that paying off debt is not important. Why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how much this is about not wanting to "work for the man" vs. wanting to control their own financial destiny.

Yeah, startups are high risk, but if you can get something going, you are, for the most part, able to control your success to a larger degree than if you are in some random company where they could do a departmental layoff anytime they need to juice numbers before an earnings report.

Younger generations have a lot more financial uncertainty and distrust in their lives, and often see taking things into their own hands as the only long-term solution.

</comment><comment><USER18> And yet, they'll keep re-electing the politicians who brought us the insane run-up in undischargeable student loan debt. Call me when they've decided to stop being complicit in their own destruction.

<comment><USER19> This seems pretty toxic...

<comment><USER18> No kidding. Putting college kids into basically debt slavery until they are forty, it's hard to be more toxic than that! And yet, the college kids keep voting for them. I don't have an answer to this problem. :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here in the Midwest it costs ~$90 to get an LLC set up. That is about all there is to having a startup.

<comment><USER21> This is a poor response. Starting a startup is hard work. It takes a lot of time and if you're saddled with debt and high housing costs to need money to survive. A lot of people simply can't afford to live without a paycheck.

The bar for starting a startup is actually getting higher. While setup costs are coming down the product expectations are rising. Not only are all the good ideas taken but all the bad ideas are taken to, so no it's not a simple matter of setting up an LLC (besides you probably want to do it as a Depaware C-Corp if you want venture funding...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Contrary to their rep as job-hoppers, only a quarter of those surveyed saw > switching jobs frequently as the road to success

useless without a baseline.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Young people would rather own companies than work for them." Yeah, how is this news?</comment>


OUToftheCLOUD: The Next Generation in File Sharing Solutions - <AUTHOR> http://prelaunch.outofthecloud.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> It offers a dynamic presentation and instant delivery platform for its users. Pre-register now to reserve your place in line for FREE!</comment>


Ask HN: What is your dumbest project on Github? - <AUTHOR> Since people are mocking strangers' code on Github, maybe in solidarity we should share our own most embarrassing contributions to Open Source/Free Software. I see a lot of people saying they are hesitant to contribute things now, which is a terrible shame. Perhaps we can encourage others by showing that none of us are perfect. <comment><USER2> URL says it all.

[https://github.com/minimaxir/display-justin-timberlake- sexin...](https://github.com/minimaxir/display-justin-timberlake-sexiness)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I've just added that to all Google searches. Brilliant!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A (general purpose) migration tool written in bash.

<https://github.com/zenoamaro/rash>

Honestly, I planned to do much more work on it before showing it to someone, like tests (yes) and a real launch script, and then it would probably become less ridicolous. Or maybe not.

But even then, why not? I had fun building it, and I learned a lot. And if there's something in the world that I like, it's a fun toy.

<comment><USER5> I've seen a bash migration thing in a production environment before but yours is a lot cleaner and well organized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote my own dotfile backup tool[1]. I am, as far as I know, the only one that uses it. Untold millions of these exist, I'm sure there are many that do it better.

Now that I think about it, most of my stuff on GitHub is, well, not necessary. I always think to myself "I enjoyed writing it, maybe someone somewhere can find it useful."

[1]:<https://github.com/jakebasile/dotback>

</comment><comment><USER7> Mine is intentionally bad: <https://github.com/ao5357/retina-spacer-gif>

Perhaps other projects are unintentionally bad, but the above-linked was intended to be funny.

</comment><comment><USER8> I tried to make a PHP-based (it's my primary language at work, so easy enough to dabble in) version of the classic BBS game TradeWars. (<https://github.com/brianseitel/oasis-wars>)

I got universe generation down (though it's slow), and I started on populating it with ports, but I couldn't quite figure out how to properly figure out how much the traders should charge for goods.

Anyway, it was fun while it lasted, but I got distracted by other projects. Maybe some day I'll come back and work on it some more...

<comment><USER9> This project is definitely not dumb to me. I have many fond memories of TW2002 and I still can't find anything online that matches its level of involvement (fairly low with the turn limiting) and excitement. EVE is out of the question - it's just too much for me.

I seem to recall finding a text file years ago that laid out the algorithm for port material buy/sell pricing. Can't seem to locate it now but if I find it I'll report back.

Keep up the good work. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny you ask, last night, I got Wordpress running on Heroku.

<https://github.com/mchung/heroku-buildpack-wordpress>

Why? For the lulz.

</comment><comment><USER11> I made a watermarking plugin for jQuery/canvas mostly because someone asked if it was possible to do entirely in javascript (for a Business Catalyst client, so no backend was available) and after I explained why it was a terrible idea I went ahead and tried it anyway.

Most of my projects are like that... experiments and self-education which are probably useful just to myself.

<https://github.com/kennethrapp/cmark>

</comment><comment><USER12> Most of my personal projects are at least a bit embarrassing, but those two are the worst:

XML to LaTeX parser (failed proof of concept) <https://github.com/hamaxx/lml>

And shell simulator in JS (just for fun project) <https://github.com/hamaxx/jsbash>

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this reminds me: it's not on Github, but I have a project that uses XSLT to convert a data.xml file into both LaTeX and HTML versions of my resume. On the one hand it's useful enough that I still use it, but on the other it's pretty hideous. The XSLT looks for special XML elements representing characters that will need to be escaped for either LaTeX or HTML, like <underline/> and <amp/>. Pretty ironic that I generate my resume with code I wouldn't want an employer to see. Maybe I should put it on Github after all.... In my defense it looks like it dates from 2006.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Regrettably, this is my most popular piece of code I've released: a ruby gem for parsing a goddamn stupid text format used only by the website Rightmove. I pity the poor fools who have needed to use it.

<https://github.com/robotmay/blm>

</comment><comment><USER14> <https://github.com/DanL/shortener>

A URL shortening API using Django. I had more-or-less never used Django before this. If I'm committing any Pythonic sins, by all means, elucidate me.

</comment><comment><USER15> <https://github.com/PAntoine/look>

There is many, many, many reasons this is bad. Just look at the command line.

PS: It also duplicates several unix CLI functions, just like the project in question.

</comment><comment><USER16> ActiveRecord, except it isn't active (nor record). Not an actual project, just a piece of code.

<https://github.com/eduardordm/inactiverecord>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll go first. Here is a command-line utility in C that counts:

<https://github.com/pjungwir/range>

I thought I had a worse example, but it turns out it's not on Github . . . yet. :-)

<comment><USER17> Awesome - it's like `seq(1)` but with other bases.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not totally useless, but then neither are search/replace. I'm pretty sure I hadn't seen seq when I wrote it. Perhaps the most embarrassing thing about it is how over-engineered it is. But I don't get to write C very often, so I wanted to enjoy it as long as possible. :-) What's wrong with sharing something like that with the world?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> <http://code.google.com/p/endgames-stuff>

Where I store little throwaways. Metscrape2 is probably the most interesting.</comment>


Why do programming languages implement the unary operator "+"? - <AUTHOR> It's practically and aesthetically useless for me. I've never used it. <comment><USER2> [https://stackoverflow.com/a/7611586](https://stackoverflow.com/a/7611586) claims K&R says it was added for symmetry, but in C and C++ it ¿nowadays? also converts _char_ to _int_. That can be useful to print the values of characters ( _std::cout << c_ outputs a char, _std: court << +c_ its value).

In JavaScript: to convert strings to numbers.

In Python: to assert that a value is numeric (throws a TypeError if it isn't).

In Perl: among others, replaces an initial '-' in a string by a '+' and vice versa ([https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Symbolic-Unary- Operator...](https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Symbolic-Unary-Operators). See also [https://perlmaven.com/the-magic-unary- plus](https://perlmaven.com/the-magic-unary-plus) for more power/weirdness)

</comment><comment><USER3> Completeness.

Also, sometimes syntactically nice to emphasize the sign:

         double pos = +foo;
         double neg = -bar;

Occasionally useful in auto-generated code. There are strange edge cases you might find it useful. "I've never used it" is a bad judgment of its general usefulness.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm designing a minimalist language and I'm not sure if I "need" to implement it while looking at it from a minimalist perspective. But I mostly won't until I find a good enough argument.

<comment><USER3> Almost 0 overhead to implement. Same precedence as unary '-' so extra parsing is trivial. No need to generate as AST for it.</comment></comment></comment>


NoDeployFriday: Helpful or Harmful? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/better-programming/nodeployfriday-helpful-or-harmful-f67e32432c31 <comment><USER2> (Readable version - [https://outline.com/eYGUCw](https://outline.com/eYGUCw))

If you do "no deploy Fridays" you're saying you don't trust your deployment process, and it won't be easy to get back to a working state if something goes wrong. Fix _that_ problem.

<comment><USER3> Plus, until you get rid of "no deploy Fridays", you'll never fix the underlying deployment problem.</comment></comment>


How to compare two packed bitfields without having to unpack each field - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190301-00/?p=101065 <comment><USER2> It's from Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog in a new design, hardly recognizable. It's a pity they changed the layout.

The trick is pure magic, never thought about it that way.</comment>


Freevolt: RF energy harvesting to power the Internet of Things - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/09/freevolt-perpetual-free-rf-energy-harvesting-to-power-the-internet-of-things/ <comment><USER2> Other articles on this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10308511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10308511)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10306293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10306293)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10304387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10304387)

<comment><USER3> To save you time: All of which are empty.

This made no sense back then. It still makes no sense now. You can't harvest useful amounts of RF energy.

<comment><USER4> Well for a suitably frugal definition of "useful", you can. See their whitepaper: [http://getfreevolt.com/downloads/RF%20Energy%20Harvesting%20...](http://getfreevolt.com/downloads/RF%20Energy%20Harvesting%20Whitepaper.pdf) Any EE experts around, willing to validate their assessments?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _We asked Lord Drayson if there were any limits on the number of Freevolt harvesters in a given area, or if there was a critical number of harvesters that would then impact cellular or Wi-Fi signal reception. He said "no" in both cases._

Both these answers are simply wrong - they are absorbing power from the RF spectrum. Of course there will be some impact.

<comment><USER3> Well~

In fact "no" is probably the right answer, unless you use enough of them to build a Faraday cage. That's because they pick up practically no power at all, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This technique was already used in the 1930s by people living close to the powerful AM transmitters in Berlin and Hamburg to run electric lights. It was outlawed, though.</comment>


Introduction to Amazon Web Service Platform [pdf now free] - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11209457/Introduction%20to%20Amazon%20Web%20Services%20Platform.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> A while back I wrote a pdf for an introduction to the amazon web services platform

[https://gumroad.com/l/HGlv](https://gumroad.com/l/HGlv)

But it wasn't selling well so here it is free if anybody is interested. Some things are updated with the new VPCs, but overall it still mostly the same.</comment>


Show HN: Beautiful career pages - <AUTHOR> https://www.moonpitch.com/#/login <comment><USER2> 1\. There should definitely add different options, not only singing up with Google. What if I don't want to share my Google account?

2\. Drop the "Are you sure you want to close this chat?". It's annoying and reminds me of Windows' stupid prompt dialogs.

3\. CREATE AND MANAGE CAREER PAGES: "Brand" is an empty laptop screen. "Change" is some website and "Job" is about moving to a different place, which is so far, so you even have to fly there?

</comment><comment><USER3> I like it.. but at first it the header portion looked like just an image or image/slider. Maybe it should be full width, needs other that a white background or the 'Signup with Google' button made larger.

<comment><USER4> yes, you are right. We are looking into that, will fix it soon

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would love to see a sample page+workflow to guide me through to actually signing up

<comment><USER4> [https://www.moonpitch.com/dudegenie](https://www.moonpitch.com/dudegenie) On your first login we have facilitated a small tour kind of thing which explains in detail, what section means what. if you still face problems please use the chat client and feel free to buzz us anytime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Work emails need not be google. Where the signup for the rest of us?

<comment><USER4> We are on it, will be implemented in a weeks time

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Easy to use tool. Job referrals just got smarter.

</comment><comment><USER8> Efficient and useful product</comment>


The Science of Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://dustincurtis.com/the_science_of_entrepreneurship.html <comment><USER4> > _In scientific research, an experimenter develops a hypothesis with a > suspected theory and then builds an experiment to support the hypothesis._

This is a mis-charaterisation. Most likely the author knows, but scientists don't build experiments to support their theory or hypothesis. They use their theory to make a prediction, and then design an experiment to test that prediction. If the prediction is vindicated/validated by the experiment then the theory is supported.

Of course, this is the theoretical progress of science. In practice it's not as clean cut, but it's a good goal for our aspirations.

Having said that, I think it's an interesting article. Being specific about your model, being specific about your business theory, being specific about testing your model by performing experiments, and being specific about adapting your business model to take account of the results of said experiments, might be worth making explicit, rather than leaving implicit, haphazard, or even nonexistent.

If you want to make money, why not use (the theory of) science to help!

</comment><comment><USER5> Meh.

It's a nice theory, but it's not particularly useful to someone who wants to start a business, or who is already starting a business. We make and test theories about the future in all our human endeavours - not just entrepreneurship. Even going on a date is testing a hypothesis about the future.

So, in summary, this article is correct about the human decision process, but incorrect in the implicit assumption that this is something specific to entrepreneurship.

<comment><USER6> Thanks. The point I was trying to make was that developing a philosophy behind building a company is not generally considered a strong requirement for most web companies.

And if you develop a powerful enough theory for your market, and then build toward that theory rather than arbitrarily building a website with a function, you'll have a higher probably of eventual success.

I've seen a lot of companies just fail because there was real driving force behind the product more than "hey, that'd be cool, I think." That approach might work sometimes, but I think you can vastly improve your chances by having an underlying prediction for the market you're entering.

<comment><USER5> Sure, and I never criticise the noble aim of trying to figure out ways to increase our chances of success (we need all the help we can get). However, I think you'll find a stronger correlation between "being aware of a very pressing and important unmet need that people are willing to pay to resolve" and success than between "making a philosophical gamble on the future" and success...

<comment><USER6> I think in many ways those are the same thing. It depends on how wide of a market you want to capture. If you're just solving a single problem, like web forms (wufoo), then it's easy as long as the problem is real.

If you're trying to start a company that changes an industry, like Hulu or Tesla, your predictions need to be quite a bit wider in scope. I'm referring in the article to the latter kinds of companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the parallel to scientific hypothesis is an accurate description of entrepreneurship. It is the process that I teach in my undergraduate course, without identifying it. My only caution is that focusing on the future of the market can lead one to focus on product features and not customer needs. Customer need drives the market and gives one the basis for the evolving market.

</comment><comment><USER8> you are misusing the word 'theory'. and you are completely butchering the scientific method in the idea you propose(what you propose is not a theory.. nor close).

Mitch Kapor also did not have a theory.. he had an 'idea' an 'hunch'.. but not a theory.. theories have been proven by rigorous reproducible testing.. it would been hard for him to have done that; because lotus 1 2 3 .. was a completely new revolutionary idea. If he had spent the time to come up with a true theory based on years of testing with consumers.. diffrent types of UI's etc.. well someone else would have beat him to market..

there is nothing wrong with working off of hunches.. and in fact probably the fastest way to market.. and if your hunch doesn't work then come up with another idea..

companies that work off of proven ideas, and theory.. are large companies looking to make steady growth..

you wanna make millions.. fly by the seat of your pants.

</comment><comment><USER9> growing a company that's specifically built to rapidly experiment and learn is a powerful idea. I'd say that the initial problem or market insight - <USER2> "hypothesis - can sometimes matter less.

</comment><comment><USER10> _A true entrepreneur has to predict the future._

I think this is a horrible misconception. If you want to build the next billion dollar company, perhaps. But if your satisfied with building a multi million dollar company, all you need to be able to do is take a reasonably critical look at the past. What sort of products have people characteristically paid for, despite the quality of available options being low? Answering that question doesn't require prediction at all.

</comment><comment><USER11> What the hell font is that? Is it available on UNIX?

"The Science of Entrepreneurship" text on the site.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is also usefull to backport and apply all those TTD, XP and Agile concepts.

<comment><USER12> OK. I will try to explain.

There are big problems with software development - complexity and requirement of the special state of the mind. This is why there are still no programming factories. There are already data-indexing and query processing factories, but you still should think and write.

All those methods, form Booch's RUP, Beck's XP, Fowler's Refactoring are an attempts to adapt scientific methods, psychological and human behavior models, and even religious concepts to the process of the writing software.

The point is that these common ideas can be also adapted to a business processes.

For example, RUP is about planning and circles of iterations - <USER3> approach. XP is about reuse human behavior - little steps, being sure you hadn't broke anything, look (run tests) at your beloved code 10 times a day. Refactoring is about continuous improvements, little changes, that makes your code easier to understand, which means easier to modify and support. This is, probably, from dictionary and guide-books writing. You're writing the code is for humans, not for compilers.

Of course, not one of these methods fits all, but you can make a mix by yourself. Some from there, some from there. It is like cooking. All sources and ingredients available - just try, learn on failures and try again.</comment></comment>


160 GB/s Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) RAM - <AUTHOR> http://www.micron.com/products/hybrid-memory-cube

<comment><USER2> This seems pretty cool. I'd be interested to know why it's so much faster. Is it just because the controller is extremely close to the ram modules?</comment>


My website similarity search engine (feedback please) - <AUTHOR> http://www.moreofit.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I cooked up a prototype of this project about a year and a half ago. While the results were encouraging, I lost motivation and it just collected dust for all that time. In the past 3 weeks I've revived the project and given new life to it.

The project started when I wondered: "What if delicious tag signatures were vectors, would their nearest neighbors in n-dimensional space be a good match for similarity?" The answer took awhile to figure out, but it was a yes. For me at least, it wasn't an easy problem to solve; finding the nearest neighbors with each vector having 10 dimensions, with total dimensional space about 50,000. Figuring out a way to solve this in a timely manner was a joy.

At the time this project was first started and the first prototype completed, there were absolutely zero sites, other than google's sub-par "similar" link, that offered this. Well, there was "similicious" but its index was tiny, and results weren't too impressive. Now I count 5 full fledged services that do a pretty good job. Some are ranked quit highly and probably make a decent buck. I really think I missed a decent opportunity by not pushing through the last 20% of the project, and losing motivation entirely.

But, like they say, better late than never.

Questions/comments are welcomed/anxiously awaited.

<comment><USER2> curiously, delicious itself used to have a URL-URL recommender, but it didn't really scale and I had to turn it off.

<comment><AUTHOR> First off -- thanks for delicious. Not sure if it's apparent, but moreofit uses its rich data.

If I might ask, how did the original URL-URL recommended work? Was it simply a query to find other URLs with the most matched tags, or was tag order also taken into account?

<comment><USER2> It looked at the other URLs the users bookmarked UN the same way, normalized partially for popularity.

So I never looked at the global tags - user1's use of tag x was distinct from user2's.

Man, I miss that dataset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A lot of the results look great, like ikea.com, for example. However, trying tougher queries yields no results. Php.net has no results (message still says 500 results found), and the message explains results were filtered for the tag 'php'; clicking "click here to undo this" gives a 404 error. Also, number10.gov.uk, the equivalent of whitehouse.gov for Britain gives a message the site is not popular enough for results. The overlay for "about these results" doesn't have a 'close' prompt, so users who may not be technical enough to try clicking outside the message area would be stuck on that screen. Overall, it looks like it has nice potential. Is there a way to see beyond the top 10 results? The first 10 results for Mixergy.com look great, but I'd like to see more results! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback.

I just fixed that broken link. The automatic hiding of a tag is meant primarily to hide tons of duplicates that would happen if you searched for "amazon.com" for example. I guess I should check to see if it hides _too much_ and if so, leave it in.

Paging is not implemented yet... and curiously enough you're the first to request it. Surprised it took so long!

Which "tougher queries" did you try? If you get a response that "the page was not popular enough" then there's not much I can do. I'm relying on delicious to have tags for the URL, and if none are present, then I'm SOL.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll have pagination done shortly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice work! I tried amongst others "dpreview.com" and the results I got were very exhaustive. Pretty much the list I would have made had you asked me for websites that review digital cameras.

It also works for international websites (the results for my favorite German- English dictionary [+]) but you could maybe work on eliminating duplicates.

[+] [http://www.moreofit.com/similar- to/dict.leo.org/Top_10_Sites...](http://www.moreofit.com/similar- to/dict.leo.org/Top_10_Sites_Like_Leo_Dict/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

Some duplicates can be removed by selecting the "domain only" option, since pages are often indexed separately "foo.com" and "foo.com/home/". I agree that this should be automatically completed -- it's a difficult task that I'm not keen on doing yet.

Medium-sized niche sites, like dpreview.com, work especially well. I'm glad you noticed. If you'd like to explore a little bit more, you can try [1] and fussing about with the tags. Maybe change one to be "satire" and see what happens. The possibilities are endless, as in essence you are exploring a 60,000 dimensional universe of links. (By the way, the "tag search" option is available by searching for a site, then clicking "search by tag signature" just below the first hilited result.)

[1] <http://bit.ly/bcNumG>

Again, thanks for the feedback and I'm glad you found the results satisfactory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google's had this since about 2000, but its results suck more:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=related:news.ycombinator.com>

You may want to play up the "best" angle more than the "first" one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, though I suppose by "first" I meant "first whose primary purpose is to provide similar sites".

I'm glad you think moreofit's results "suck less". :)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, definitely don't play the first angle. The first think I thought of when I read that was Google's similiar link that I use pretty often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was working on something like this a little while ago. I also saw all the competition (sites similar to a site that shows similar sites :)

I wasn't smart enough to do what you did, I was thinking of somehow building the directory by hand, or by turkers, etc

What finally killed my ambitions was sears.com. I reasoned that a similar-site search would only make the big time if the search was perfect, but what is a perfect match for sears.com? truevalue.com? perfumes.com? clothes.com? or another department store like kmart? You descend into category madness.

All those competitors of yours are also latecomers, I remember in the 90's netscape's browser had a pulldown of similar sites built in.

I think its very possible you'll make a few bucks off this if you can get some buzz, but I'm not sure if these similar site searches will ever be a killer app because the problem is so huge.

Oh, I also discovered that if you put the domain you are matching in the URL, like you are doing now, Adsense does a great job at targeting ads.

One more thing, you forgot the bookmarklet! I want to be on a site, click the moreofit bookmarklet, and do a search. But of course you're now in subdomain hell, if they are on secure.shoes.com, do you search secure.shoes.com or or shoes.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Kevin! Glad somebody else has a shared interest in this problem.

Sears.com is a very difficult problem to solve. The "category madness" you bring up certainly is a very good point, and I rely on the wisdom of crowds to mitigate this issue. After a site has been tagged thousands of times, I'm assuming that the unique description of the site is pretty good. However, there is a slight "snowball effect" present with my dataset (delicious): When a URL is first tagged, those tags are suggested to all future people who bookmark it, causing the initial set of tags to have more bias.

At any rate, back to sears.com. The current matches now are all stores, but they're not at specific as you suggest they could be. Moreofit offers a "tag filter" feature, and a tag signature matching feature for this occasion. Of course, it all depends on the user being savvy enough to use these things.

On moreofit, you can specify tags and how important they are for your search.

Try these results to see what I mean: <http://bit.ly/cVXgED>

I agree that it will never be a "killer app," however, I do think it pretty useful and a preliminary search on Google shows a lot of interest in searches for "sites like chatroulette" and "sites like XXX". I'm hoping to serve those customers' needs.

The bookmarklet is coming soon -- and subdomain hell isn't a big issue -- search the subdomain first, if no matches, then the main domain.

<comment><USER8> The problem with searches for "sites like xx" is that people entering those search strings are likely to be fairly unsophisticated users (who aren't aware of the "similar" button or related: syntax, let alone the possibility of there being dedicated sites for that kind of search). Moreofit.com looks more like a power user tool.

The other problem is that Google's results for the suggested "sites like" queries are pretty helpful - they generally return articles and q&a pages with exactly the lists the end users are looking for. It might require more clicks to get there, but even the non-savvy user should be able to managed it.

I was impressed by the results returned by moreofit though, especially for websites that don't have numerous linkbait articles about "Top 10 websites for ....".

The tag importance sliders are especially neat, though one minor usability issue is that the update button (bottom right) is a long way away from the sliders and the text advising you to click it. The Google display ads returned when you do a URL search are horrendously irrelevant and probably deter users from clicking on the targeted text ads above them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to make it so a search for "sites like bla" would bring me somewhere near the top, with a link to "top ten sites like bla" which I feel would appeal well to these users.

Google's results for these searches are OK. I've noticed it takes a substantial amount of time to scan through the links and figure out which forum posts might contain some good information. When clicking through, sometimes I'd find good suggestions, sometimes not. It's a similar experience if you search for some obscure error code and end up scouring a few pages to find out how somebody else solved it (sometimes in one of those god awful non- threaded 1-comment-per-page bulletin boards -- how do they still exist?).

I'll work on fixing that update button issue.

If there's one thing I noticed, it's that hardly anybody has used the "tag sliders" feature, or any other search options for that matter. They're either content enough, or don't care enough, to delve further into results. From a technology standpoint, I find the tag sliders feature to be really exciting. You can craft your own URL and see if anything matches it.

The horrendous Google Ads are something out of my control -- Google won't allow me to supply the keywords for the page, and if they haven't indexed the page yet, they'll show crappy generic horoscope ads. I need suggestions as to how to get more relevant ads up there. Perhaps an ad service that allows _me_ to supply the keywords. Know of any?

And, of course, thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, I clicked it, entered by blog, and expected a clusterfuck. Couldn't have been more wrong, the results are probably as close as anything I'd expect: [http://www.moreofit.com/similar- to/alexgaynor.net/Top_10_Sit...](http://www.moreofit.com/similar- to/alexgaynor.net/Top_10_Sites_Like_Alexgaynor/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> excellent work!

The only think I'd say is to make the "update" button more prominent (eg add another one beneath the "searching for tags" sliders). A few times I wondered why it was not updating the results, and had to hunt around for it. Maybe some people, at the margin in terms of interest, would give up on it because of this.

It would be nice if there was some natural way for the results to update without specifically requesting it - eg. like how the "moreofit" links work. The way google does it in "search tools" for time choice is interesting: it provides typical defaults, that are linked (eg. Past 24 hours,Past week etc). I've _always_ used it by just clicking on one of them, so the issue of "updating" doesn't occur. [reminiscent of 37signals' defaults]. Perhaps the truth is that while someone might theoretically want the results from the past 22 hours, in practice no-one ever does. Thus, the defaults are adequate. For your importance sliders, I guess this could be done with two links "important" vs "secondary" for each slider.

Of course, sometimes you want to assemble a search, and only _then_ execute it (not have it update after every single term is added). For this, the standard practice seems to be to have a "search" button directly underneath however the search is configured (eg this what google search does for "custom range", for time, in web tools). So this would mean adding a "search" button beneath the sliders (not labeled "update", even though that is also an accurate description - I guess, maybeuse "moreofit", if you want to promote the brand at possible expense of usability).

tl;dr add a "search" button beneath the "searching for tags" sliders.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I think adding another update button below the tag sliders is a good idea.

As per the "more natural way of updating results", I might use Ajax to plop in the new results when any search options are changed.. though this could lead to further complications: Currently you can click on a tag to add it to the "include" and "exclude" tag filters. If you click a tag and suddenly the results you were looking at abruptly disappear and reappear, it might not be so nice.

What do you think of this idea: Any time a change is made to the search options, the "update" button starts glowing (fading in and out or changes colors) so as to notify the user that it wants to be clicked?

<comment><USER10> Glowing is an interesting idea, but I think just placing the search button beneath would be helpful enough - then it's obvious to the user that they need to hit that, and it's easy to find. That would solve both of the problems that I had, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Got a little creeped out by your "auto suggest" feature. I'm guessing you're using the CSS technique described here <http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/tools/spyjax/> ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Finally, somebody noticed! Hardly anybody is using "auto suggest" ... which is good -- I'm glad people have URLs in mind to search. Yes, I'm using the browser history hack that's been around for ages. It's going to be patched up by all major browsers in probably under a year, so don't worry. I think the latest safari already has it covered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow. After some brief testing, I am also very impressed with the results. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER13> I tried it on google reader (<http://reader.google.com>) and most of the top matches are google reader itself.

It worked better on reddit.com though.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a prime example of when to filter by tag. (You can do this by clicking on any tag)

Here's results for "reader.google.com", except omitting any results that have been tagged with "google":

<http://bit.ly/dnsgfk>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's interesting is that I can use the website to find websites similar to itself.. or, wait a minute, can I? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose it is _a little_ ironic that moreofit.com isn't itself indexed. It's not popular enough :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How are the results compared to google or DDG's in your test samples?

<comment><AUTHOR> Google's "similar" link is akin to my results with "popularity" sort, only worse. That is, Google seems to do this: "What other URLs have some keywords in common with this one?" And of those, it sorts by "which is most popular?". The results, well, they're not at all impressive which is why I made this in the first place.

However, Google's index is much greater. Currently you can't search for non- semi-popular URLs on moreofit, but you can on Google. So they have me beaten there.

What is DDG?

<comment><USER16> DDG: <http://duckduckgo.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> reddit and reddit.com shows two different search results. I thought reddit will refer to reddit.com

<comment><AUTHOR> The query "reddit" is assumed to mean you are searching for sites that have been tagged as "reddit", which is different from "reddit.com" which is assumed to be a URL.

At any rate, if you search for "reddit" it should suggest "were you looking for sites like reddit.com?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> reddit search returns reddit, but the other results look good

</comment><comment><USER19> delicious API? Why not just say so?

<comment><AUTHOR> Delicious API.

Where would you like me to say it? It will probably go in an "about" page, but I don't think there's any benefit to the possible confusion of "what is the delicious API?" by putting it on the front page.

<comment><USER19> Just a very small "Powered by Delicious" at the bottom of the page would give some added credibility and clarification.</comment></comment></comment>


AMD is edging closer to breaking Nvidia's graphic dominance - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/17/amd-versus-nvidia-radeon-vii-7-nanometer/ <comment><USER2> Wanna know why AMD drivers are so broken?

I talked once to an AMD project managery guy. He told me how they have several teams in different countries. And for each feature/bug different managers have to "bid" with weekly resource estimates. Bid too high and you dont get enough work for your peoples. Bid too low and they end up with unpaid overtime. Rinse and repeat.

And these are kernel developers...

EDIT: to be clear, I am rooting for competition to Intel and NVIDIA. I just dont think this kind of culture can work on the software side.

<comment><USER3> Seriously? That doesn't work in an entity who share the same revenue. Everyone lose.

They should rather hire the economist as their boss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With a $5000> card (MI50) AMD is forced to sell at a loss to be able to meet the same performance levels NVIDIA had for the same amount of money ($700) 2 years ago.

If this is getting closer I think they need a better tape measurer.

With 16GB of aquabolt HBM2 on a 7nm node there is no way AMD is losing less than $150 per card without even accounting for opportunity loss.

In fact this card is the reason why the head of the RTG was fired when suggesting to sell it at $749 at a loss.

The 2080 for all intents and purposes is a mid range die.

The only thing AMD is competing on atm is price and for them it's a lose lose situation until Navi comes out and that is only if Navi could actually be competitive above the $300 price bracket as it's a Polaris successor its not clear if AMD will have anything on the level of the 2080 not to mention the 2080ti based on Navi.

AMD had to drop the prices of VEGA to around $300 due to the RTX 2060 they are likely also losing money on that front, they are losing money on Radeon 7 and hopefully they will finally make money with Navi.

<comment><USER5> AMD doesn't have to win in discrete at all to make a killing. They only have to dominate the lower end, which they already are positioned to do with current APUs - these chips can manage 30hz/720p playability in most new games, which is easily ignored if your requirement is competitive gaming minimums or 4k, but in terms of price/performance, it's near unbeatable.

The Radeon VII is ultimately just a repurposed workstation card given flagship treatment. It's not where AMD's business really is, ever since they went down the route of semi-custom and small dies. While pushing RTX could renew Nvidia's advantages, the only game console they're on these days is the Switch - no raytracing to be seen there. Developers accommodate the Geforce cards for PC releases, but AAA going console-first precludes designing most content around RTX. They've made a lot of moves to try to repurpose high end graphics for other markets, but it looks like it's going to be very rough for Nvidia in the next few years if they can't find a "blue ocean" that needs both speed and programmability.

<comment><USER4> AMD's APUs are good but aren't really that popular with gamers, Intel's new iGPU also looks impressive as hell, as they are already competitive with Vega 8 with their current lineup this new one seems to be a powerhouse for integrated graphics.

It seems that AMD will have competition on the APU side very soon, and I really hope Intel would pull it off and actually be competitive in the discrete market as well in 2020 or 2021 and that their GPU adventure isn't going to get a backroom abortion.

<comment><USER6> The problem is most people who game aren't "gamers". By which I mean they aren't necessarily interested in the hardware or anything else except "will this game run?".

<comment><USER7> I'd bet there is a very large market for pre-built "Fortnite battlestations" in the $500 to $700 range, a little above current-gen consoles. If that's your budget, then AMD is the obvious choice.

<comment><USER8> Is there data for that? Anecdotally, I was thinking about buying a gaming PC recently. Every single thread you find on reddit about PC gaming starts with 'don't buy pre built.' It is engrained in the gaming community at this point that pre-built wastes money to the tune of hundreds of dollars, and PCs aren't all that difficult to put together.

As it stands $500-700 gets you 1080p gaming thats better looking than current gen consoles; this is the entry level and its already several notches above APU.

<comment><USER6> But if you're reading reddit threads on this I think you're several levels removed from the average person who plays games. Sure "gamers" will read up on this and be part of the gaming community but PC games are now mass entertainment and not the niche it used to be.

Few people build their own PC. Many more play games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Depending on how much stock you put into the Steam Hardware Survey, it's worth noting that Nvidia still controls 74% of the market relative to AMD's 15%: [https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/)

I also feel like graphics cards are one of those weird things that command a lot of brand loyalty, so it's probably going to take more than near- performance-parity to move the needle.

<comment> j-c-hewitt I think the marketshare contributes more to the actual inferiority of AMD cards at the midrange compared to the hardware specs.

Because AMD is a minority and game developers know it, driver-related bugs that would be priority 1 to fix if it affected nVidia users are bottom priority for AMD users. The AMD midrange cards are wonderful in terms of the hardware for certain displays and competitive in every way from a hardware perspective. Especially if you are looking for 60fps+ @ 1080p you can get awesome deals by going with AMD.

Just be prepared to occasionally have issues like BSODing whenever a game renders a lot of white textures like snow scenes for six months at a time unless you downgrade the drivers to a specific version, which will then be fixed in a driver update and broken again if you are an AMD user. Or to occasionally have driver crashes that developers acknowledge and don't fix for months. And to fuss with shader cache settings and things like that because those settings are busted for AMD for some specific game you want to play.

It's not even necessarily that the drivers suck. They don't suck. They're fine. It's that the developers don't have a big incentive to fix bugs that only impact a smaller segment of the market. While it's not like there aren't a lot of nVidia only bugs that crop up, because of its market share, those bugs are almost always a higher priority to fix and you really notice it if you have used both GPU manufacturers at the same time over a period of years or have used both at various times.

Most of the nVidia tech gimmicks usually suck and are uninteresting (HairWorks, physx, realtime ray tracing) and those that don't suck are usually matched quickly (Gsync). But the marketshare alone is sort of a perversely positive feature because it just means you are on the same drivers as the majority of the market so bugs that impact you are a higher priority for developers to fix.

<comment><USER10> There's nothing gimmicky about real-time raytracing.

<comment> j-c-hewitt Now, in the next 3 months, this year, it is a 100% gimmick that is all running on hybrid technology instead of full ray tracing. I own an RTX and I can tell you that it is a gimmick that no one turns on except to see what it looks like once and you can count the number of games that support it on less than one hand.

Over the next 3 years and the next generation of cards, absolutely, great technology.

<comment><USER10> Jesus, maybe appreciate the fact that just a few years ago real-time raytracing was nothing but a pipedream. Now we have cards on the market that can do a limited amount of real-time raytracing. That's huge. Next year they'll get faster. The year after that they'll get faster. More games will support it. Developers will buy in. This is a generational change that will take 10+ years. That doesn't make this any less significant. It's not a gimmick if it's going to take time for things to develop. That's how things work.

<comment> j-c-hewitt In 2019 it is a technically interesting gimmick that tanks your FPS. This shouldn't be that controversial, because it is the nearly universal opinion of reviewers and of people who have the card. What is interesting from a technical perspective can easily be a gimmick from the perspective of a consumer. I bought an RTX for the regular performance and maybe DLSS (which although not widespread is not currently a gimmick). By the time actual ray tracing and not hybrid ray tracing gains wider adoption, the next generation of RTX cards will already be out.

I can even link you to a video from a Youtuber sponsored by nVidia that essentially says that it is a nice-looking gimmick that will be nice for cinematic single player games that isn't that useful for fast paced multiplayer games in which most gamers will pick performance over image quality most of the time. DLSS because it is a performance feature is in a different category. Like Hairworks RTX is a tech demo type feature that most users will turn off to get dozens of FPS more.

<comment><USER10> It's either this or we don't get raytracing at all. Do you not understand how things develop? They have to start implementing it somewhere and develop the tools and engine to support it, but the hardware doesn't exist for them to do raytracing globally. They have to gain experience and develop practices for implementing it. This is a good first step that will lead to more. How are you not getting this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe for the competitive consumer graphics market, but I don't see them disrupting Nvidia's hold in the HPC world. With Nvidia's NVLink, you can achieve high bandwidth data transfer between graphics cards without having to pass through the PCIe to CPU. If you have large computations that require syncing data among multiple GPU's, NVLink is your most performant option by a large margin. That's not to mention how much further ahead CUDA is from Sycl, OpenCL, ROCm, etc. I certainly welcome the competition (and hopefully an open standard). In my experience, CUDA is ahead on developer tooling, performance and productivity features (Thrust, Unified Memory, C++17 support, etc).

<comment><USER12> AMD's NVLink is infinity fabric (MI60, MI50) isnt it? with 200gb card to card transfer rate... Did you take that into account? I agree the toolset is light years ahead of what I seen from AMD, but I'm not much into that.

<comment><USER11> Ah, I hadn't seen that announcement. It looks like this was announced recently (November 2018) and it's still 100Gb/s slower throughput than the latest NVLink. Either way, it could certainly be interesting if they compete on price, but I cannot find any information yet on actually using it to sync with OpenCL / ROCm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Radeon 7 (Vega 20) is a major overkill for gaming though. It looks more like a 3D rendering targeted card. Upcoming Navi cards supposedly should be more gaming oriented and more affordable.

<comment><USER14> As somebody who uses my cards for rendering in my freelance work and hasn't played a AAA game since my teenage years, I'm definitely hoping to see AMD kick some ass and competitively drive down some prices. Especially since they actually seem to give a shit about linux drivers. Those saints!

<comment><USER13> Sure. Open source Linux drivers is exactly why I'm using AMD and not Nvidia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm no graphics programmer. I'm mostly interested in the compute (OpenCL, CUDA) side of things. I don't own an NVidia GPU, so my experience mostly relates to AMD.

I'm certainly interested in AMD's Linux "ROCm" push. I really think the programming model there is relatively easy to understand, but there are major flaws in the documentation and implementation.

For example, OpenCL 1.2 on ROCm 2.0 isn't stable enough to run Blender Cycles. Yes, you can render the default cube, but very slowly. On a real scene, Blender Cycles on OpenCL ROCm can take 500+ seconds to compile, and the actual execution seems to hang (infinite loop and/or memory segfault, depending on the scene) on anything close to a typical geometry.

Note that Blender's OpenCL code is explicitly written for AMD's older OpenCL (AMDGPU-Pro OpenCL implementation). Blender has a separate CUDA branch for NVidia cards. So OpenCL ROCm is at very least performance-incompatible with OpenCL AMDGPU-Pro. The Blender OpenCL code probably has to be rewritten to work (ie: not infinite loop), and maybe even become efficient on OpenCL ROCm again.

\</comment><comment>--

AMD's hardware is fine (not as power-efficient as NVidia, but performance is fine, in theory). But the drivers / software stack is clearly immature. Even as ROCm has hit a 2.0 release, these sorts of issues still exist.

AMDGPU-PRO with OpenCL1.2 is workable, but feels old and cranky. (OpenCL 1.2 was specified in 2011, and is missing key features. Its atomics model is incompatible with C/C++11, its missing SVM and kernel-side enqueue... etc. etc.)

AMDGPU-PRO OpenCL2.0 is theoretically supported, but is still unstable in my experience. ROCm OpenCL (both 1.2 and 2.0) is still under development, but doesn't seem to be ready for prime-time yet. (At least, with Blender 2.79 or 2.80 Cycles is any indication).

AMD HCC seems usable, but there aren't many programs using it. AMD HIP is an interesting idea but I haven't used it.

I know NVidia has driver issues / software issues. But CUDA Code written 5 years ago will still have similar performance / implementation if run on today's cards, on today's software stack. I'm not sure if the same is true for AMD's OpenCL code (between AMDGPU-PRO OpenCL1.2 and ROCm 1.2).

\</comment><comment>----

Long story short: the only mature AMD OpenCL compute platform seems to be OpenCL 1.2 on AMDGPU-PRO. Fortunately, it also seems like AMDGPU-PRO will work for the foreseeable future, but AMD really needs to clarify its platform to attract developers. (Ex: prioritize testing of ROCm OpenCL to ensure performance-compatibility with existing OpenCL 1.2 code written for AMDGPU- PRO)

<comment><USER13> Is OpenCL implementation open source in the PRO package?

<comment><USER15> No. AMDGPU-PRO is closed-source.

Which is partially why ROCm exists. Its the OpenSource implementation of AMD's driver stack. AMD seems to have indicated that the Open Source ROCm drivers are the way of the future. Its a sentiment I can certainly get behind (and AMD has even pushed the ROCm driver stack to the Linux Kernel proper).

But ROCm isn't ready quite yet. So I think in practice, people will still be relying upon the older AMDGPU-Pro drivers. At least for the next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Methinks the title is a bit too strongly worded. At that price point Radeon VII is unlikely to win many customers over. If some of the recent leaks[1] turn out to be true, then we can talk about "edging closer to breaking Nvidia's graphic dominance."

[1] [https://youtu.be/PCdsTBsH-rI?t=1247](https://youtu.be/PCdsTBsH-rI?t=1247)

Edit: added timestamp to video

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure I follow the reasoning in the article. It says if ray tracing flops, AMD will take the lead, but then goes on to say that AMD believes ray tracing will be important and is working on it.

<comment><USER18> It's not too dissimilar from how AVX instructions are so poorly implemented on AMD CPUs - they may support it but it may not be core to their strategy (no pun intended).

<comment><USER19> At some point I'm hoping to see AVX completely emulated in microcode and replaced with an embedded GPU core that can write to an L3 or L4 cache.

This slow scaling of 128->256->512 bits in the instruction set is more or less a solved problem in the GPU space with shader compilers and AVX would mostly be redundant with GPUs if it weren't for the memory bandwidth constraint.

ie: When it comes to vector processing, go big or go home.

AVX/SSE are a compromise from back when CPU die space and bandwidth was more precious. Now that we have 8-32 cores on a die with a good bus between them, it seems like duplicating those AVX units 8-32 times is less optimal.

<comment><USER20> What you think of as "vector" processing is currently being used by compilers to speed up things you didn't think were vectorizable. This is possible only because these instructions are pretty cheap latency-wise. By introducing huge latency, you'd be ruining performance of autovectorization, which accounts for a lot of the performance gains in the past decade.

<comment><USER19> After years of staring at HFT disassembly, I'm thoroughly disappointed by autovectorization.

Here's the simplest godbolt example I could think of to illustrate, summing a string of fixed length and non-fixed length: [https://godbolt.org/z/O_M5fU](https://godbolt.org/z/O_M5fU)

You can see that the most recent GCC fails to use the AVX512 zmm registers even after being configured to do so (afaik) and also fails to use more than 4 registers. Clang does better, using zmm* and all the registers.

But in both cases, the amount of code generated is quite large. If you compile with -Os instead of -O3, no vector instructions are used for some reason.

So when you load this code, no matter what, you're loading a bunch of instruction cachelines, which will destroy most of your latency gain unless the input is very large. And even if your input is large, you'll fault that data anyways.

So what's the point of doing this on the CPU again?

<comment><USER15> I don't believe Knights Landing supports an 8-bit ZMM add.

Changing the code to 32-bit ints results in the "vpaddd zmm0, zmm0, ZMMWORD PTR [rdx]" that you'd expect from the auto-vectorizer.

> You can see that the most recent GCC fails to use the AVX512 zmm registers > even after being configured to do so (afaik) and also fails to use more than > 4 registers

In the 32-bit vpaddd code... "vpaddd zmm0, zmm0, ZMMWORD PTR [rdx]" becomes a new zmm register allocation in the register-renamer (due to a cut dependency). I doubt any code would be any faster.

In any case, its not about "the number of registers used", proper analysis is about the depth of dependencies. I'd only be worried about small-register usage if the dependency chain is large (which doesn't seem to be the case).

EDIT: I had some bad analysis. I've erased the bad paragraph.

So it seems pretty good in my eyes.

<comment><USER19> The clang code loads the 8-bit words into 16-bit vector instructions and parallelizes using a tree-algorithm to minimize dependencies.

So already it's better than "pretty good" and it's still verbose.

But neither of these compilers are able to optimize for code size while using AVX, so the ((code size)/64byte cacheline) * (~100ns loads) will still kill your performance on any data set that's smaller than a few kilobytes.

<comment><USER15> > The clang code loads the 8-bit words into 16-bit vector instructions and > parallelizes using a tree-algorithm to minimize dependencies.

You specified the "int sum", so that means "sum" needs to follow 32-bit overflow semantics. I don't think it is possible to do 8-bit

> But neither of these compilers are able to optimize for code size while > using AVX

You can totally do that. You're specifying -O3, which is "speed over size". If you want size, you want -Os, and then use -ftree-vectorize to enable the auto- vectorization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I (selfishly) hope they succeed. NVIDIA is getting ridiculous with their constrained supply of $1200+ high end GPUs.

<comment><USER21> as someone that bought AMD stock with the belief that NVIDIA was over priced and it was about time it swung back the other way...me too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Related, AMD's stock has been heavily manipulated for years: [https://seekingalpha.com/article/4153502-institutional- short...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4153502-institutional-short-sale- amd-abusive)

<comment><USER23> This is very interesting. Are you aware of any more research into this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's certainly a very small part of the overall GPU-buying community, but nearly the entire hackintosh community has more or less abandoned / foresworn NVIDIA due to lack of mojave drivers. Even on older macos releases, the nvidia drivers were awful.

</comment><comment><USER25> Good, NVIDIA should bankrupt as soon as possible, because of their opensource stance.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are drones suddenly popular? - <AUTHOR> What technology in the last few years made drones this popular? <comment><USER2> Energy density of electric batteries rose _a lot_ (2 minutes of flight X 15 minutes); so did the amount of computing power available (autolevel first, simple steering second, integration with cameras and smartphones last). Oh, and they also became cheaper for this (and unrelated reasons, like mass production).

</comment><comment><USER3> I think rebranding played a large part in it too, no-one wants an 'rc helicopter' but everyone wants a (predator) drone.</comment>