Atlas Shrugged movie in 2008 (Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart) - <AUTHOR> http://imdb.com/title/tt0480239/maindetails <comment><USER2> Projected length: 12 hours, with a 2 hour John Galt monologue.

I wonder if Ms Jolie understands the point of the book.

<comment><USER3> From what I've heard, her and Brad Pitt have both loved the novel for quite some time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pitt as John Galt?

<comment><USER4> He would be the perfect Ragnar

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not getting my hopes up until its greenlit. Plan B is pitts development company, and Baldwin Entertainment Group are the ones with the rights. BEG has been consulting with luminaries from The Objectivist Center (NOT the Ayn Rand institute, which would be bad news for the movie) and they have been working for about a decade on a shorter script, with three-part miniseries versions that Turner was going to produce, and now a single moview version that will be reportedly 3 hours long. Though there has been some talk of doing it as two movies, or a trilogy like the Lord of the rings, I believe the script now is a single movie.

The book is, of course, quite long, but there is a lot of it that can be lost- many of the sub-plots about various businesses who shrugged and secondary and tertiary characters can be lost.

So long as they don't get Antonio Banderas for Francisco, I'm up for it.

I think Pitt would be a good John Galt because Galt is, ultimately, a minor character with little "screen time", though I think Pitt may want to play Rearden. I am confident that Jolie can do a great Dagny, if she's in the mood to.... but for both of them, Pitt and Jolie, they really want to have this movie made and I think they will make it even if their schedules don't work out for acting in it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ditto on Banderas. I think Javier Bardem would fit nicely: <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000849/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think Jolie is a terrible casting choice. A friend of mine suggested that a more appropriate choice would be some unknown actor. I think that would lend a lot of credibility.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's hot.</comment>


Data Referenced Journalism and the Media – Still a Long Way to Go Yet? - <AUTHOR> http://www.r-bloggers.com/data-referenced-journalism-and-the-media-%E2%80%93-still-a-long-way-to-go-yet/

<comment><USER2> Media will be led by their consumers, and to a good first approximation, no one anywhere (including many talented people in "highly technical" fields) has a decent grasp of statistics and probability.

Maybe if we didn't wait until university to teach people the unintuitive stuff, more people would get it or retain it longer. Sadly, for many people there exists no such thing as an unintuitive truth.

Update: ...or maybe I'm projecting my own faults on more people than is fair.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks like one ambitious dream. I'd be pleased if news articles consistently offered simple links to primary sources. Even that has quite a way to go.</comment>


Ask HN: What's wrong with note taking applications? - <AUTHOR>

I'm writing a web app that combines note taking, mind mapping and to do list management. What features would you look for in such an app? What's missing in the tools that we have now? <comment><USER2> The problem with them for me is that they are on the web. If it's not a desktop app in which I store my data in files local on my machine, I'm not interested. I use OneNote today and am very happy with the note-taking aspect. It has no todo list or mind-mapping management so I have other apps for those.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you prefer a desktop app for offline use (not just for privacy) then it can be done using something like Gears or Air. The app might save some or all notes locally and sync them when necessary. With a web app you can work from other computers/ platforms and mobile devices (android, iphone, netbooks). Don't you think that's important?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For quick notes I use a clean little OSX desktop app called Notational Velocity[1]. The only thing I would want in a dedicated note taker that it doesn't do is sync over the internet.

1- <http://notational.net>

</comment><comment><USER4> I use Steven Frank's W2 wiki. It's a basic Wiki, supports Markdown, in PHP. Meant for the iPhone, but I use it on my Mac too.

Doesn't support mind maps, lists, etc of course.

<http://code.google.com/p/w2wiki/>

</comment><comment><USER5> I just use OmniOutliner Pro.</comment>


AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/print/15044/the-amd-ryzen-threadripper-3960x-and-3970x-review-24-and-32-cores-on-7nm <comment><USER2> The biggest indicator of the success of AMD Threadripper line to me is that Intel has been forced to cut the price of their newly released i9-10980XE CPU by $1000 compared to i9-9980XE while maintaining practically indistinguishable performance.

<comment><USER3> The only advantages are AVX512 and optimized Intel compiler/libraries now.

<comment><USER4> Is avx512 an advantage really? Iirc the machine has to go into another mode where processing across the board becomes slower except for the avx instructions, which to me seems only useful for niche hpc "measuring contest" applications.

<comment><USER3> Even if 10980XE downclocks to 2.8GHz while using AVX512, it's still 10x faster in MKL than Threadripper 1/MKL.

From the AnandTech review, 3D particle test was showing AVX512 effect nicely:

[https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15044/113590.png](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15044/113590.png)

10980XE had 3.9x speedup compared to 3970WX per core using AVX512.

So for some scientific computing purposes (maybe game physics?) AVX512 is worth it.

<comment><USER5> > (maybe game physics?)

Not game physics, as it puts the CPU in a lower speed regime it'd have negative implications on the rest of the games performance. So far, that AVX512 requires this lower speed (due to thermals) is an implementation detail, and it could be expected that newer processes (Intels 10 or 7 nm?) would allow them to work AVX512 tasks on full speed.

Until that happens, and everyone has AVX512 (because it'd be a massive fail to have a game that requires you to have a HEDT Intel processor to play), it'd be a nice gimmick to have on very specific tech demos, and performance sensitive scientific code that you know will run on a certain machine with certain characteristics.

<comment><USER6> Games will ship with AVX512 special paths once the AMD chips in consoles support it. Until then it is just a fancy feature to make already fast CPUs a bit faster.

Game programmers will put time into making slow CPUs faster. Outside tech demos or hardware marketing tie-ins no budget is allocated to making yet more spare capacity.

<comment><USER7> What kind of games care about such specific instructions? Unless you are writing something in assembly, that's not something game developers usually are focused on.

<comment><USER8> Unity is a very high level engine, that uses C#, and it now has a system built in that lets you write code that looks like C# but will translate it to whatever SIMD instruction set is available, like ISPC.

There are also various libraries that leverage metaprogramming to do similar things. I don't think you understand what game devs are willing to do, to get a few more polygons and pixels on the screen!

<comment><USER7> _> I don't think you understand what game devs are willing to do, to get a few more polygons and pixels on the screen!_

Totally depends on the trade-offs. You can write your whole game in assembly, and target very specific hardware, and may be beat optimizing compiler (doubtful). But at what cost? Time spent on that could be spent on making more games.

Normal up to date hardware handles games just fine, as long as they are not using some abysmal and poorly parallelized engines. Modern CPUs with more cores are also helping that, especially after Ryzen processors opened the gates for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great review, but the highlight for me is that windows task manager view of CPU utilization. It's like looking at a spreadsheet:

[https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Task%20Manag...](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Task%20Manager%202_575px.jpg)

<comment><USER10> I remember Linus playing around with a Xeon Phi CPU with a few hundred threads. The task manager was all percent signs.

[https://youtu.be/fBxtS9BpVWs?t=200](https://youtu.be/fBxtS9BpVWs?t=200)

Looks like Microsoft has already got 1000+ cores on Windows: [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel- Intern...](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel- Internals/One-Windows-Kernel/ba-p/267142)

Can we get Bruce Dawson[0] one of those? I wonder how many more bugs he'll run into.

[0] [https://randomascii.wordpress.com/](https://randomascii.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER11> I'm really curious about the machine it's running on. 896 physical cores is an odd number - 32 x 28, 16 x 56 or 8 x 112 are the likely combinations. The picture identifies it as a Xeon Platinum 8180 which is a 28C/56T CPU. Are there systems that support 32 Intel CPUs in one host? I thought quad socket was the practical limit these days.

<comment><USER12> It says right there, Xeon Phi 7210.

Knight's Landing supports 4-wide threading per core so you get 256 threads, which is exactly what it shows in task manager under "logical processors".

<comment><USER11> I was talking about the Microsoft article, not the LTT video, which are using different CPUs.

The HP 32 socket chassis (8x4 socket boards) seems to be the answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _Last AMD generation was 250W, this one is 280W: if we're not there already, > then this should be a practical limit._

A good point for people looking to use this in their home server like I am. It's going to be really hot if you're getting your money out of it.

At some point there's not an efficient way to _cool_ these processors when the ambient room temperature rises too high. Anyone have suggestions for that? I'm in a weird position where power is cheap but I can't AC my garage (where it's located).

<comment><USER13> Also, 280w comes out to be about $58 a month in electricity for Bay Area pricing (29c/kWh). Collocation will probably be cheaper for some folks.

<comment><USER14> That's only if you use all cores 24x7 and all ALUs within those cores (vectorized workloads), which is very unlikely unless you're doing straight up linear algebra on the CPU.

In CA there's also the issue of not having electricity in the first place sometimes though. So power _consumption_ seems kind of secondary.

<comment><USER15> > That's only if you use all cores 24x7 and all ALUs within those cores

These chips don't run at a fixed frequency. They dynamically adjust based on thermal limits and power limits.

You only have to burden _most_ of the cores/ALUs to hit maximum power. Any load above that threshold uses the same amount of power, as frequencies nudge down to compensate.

<comment><USER16> That doesn't sound right

<comment><USER15> Why doesn't it sound right? Just look at the chart in the article: [https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Power%20Grap...](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Power%20Graph.png)

The power limit is configured in the BIOS, and can be disabled, but with these massive chips they default to throttling down and capping power consumption so that you aren't forced to go crazy with the cooling system (and motherboard and PSU capacity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" AMD Pre-Announces 64-core Threadripper 3990X: Time To Open Your Wallet"_

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/15151/amd- preannounces-64-cor...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15151/amd- preannounces-64-core-threadripper-3990x)

<comment><USER17> How much would that run for 5K?

<comment><USER18> Probably. Or AMD pulls another rabbit out and calls it $2500 in mid 2021.

<comment><USER3> I doubt it. This is new AMD with ridiculous prices when they face no competition. I'd say it's more likely to expect $6k than $2.5k.

<comment><USER19> I don't really see how the pricing is ridiculous though. They're still way cheaper than what Intel charged for the same cores a year ago, and they have more cores than Intel can even offer on their best workstation chips. If you compare against 28 core Xeons, the new Threadrippers are a downright bargain.

<comment><USER3> I meant in comparison to what we were used to. Now a semi-decent TRX40 board is $700, entry-level TR3 is $1300. Top-end x399 board is $550, entry-level TR is $250. There was a huge jump in prices compared to previous generation of HEDT.

<comment><USER20> Board cost is due to PCIe4 support mainly

<comment><USER3> Which is kinda unnecessary as there is no single GPU on the market capable of saturating PCIe3 and situations where one needs a sustained transfer between multiple M.2 SSDs that could saturate PCIe4 are very rare. Only 100Gbps+ LAN is probably practical for a few total pro users.

<comment><USER21> Actually, its pretty easy to get bandwidth-bottlenecked in GPU-compute.

I know video games don't really get bandwidth bottlenecked, but all you gotta do is perform a "Scan" or "Reduce" on the GPU and bam, you're PCIe bottlenecked. (I recommend NVidia CUB or AMD ROCprim for these kinds of operations)

CUB Device-reduce is extremely fast if the data is already on the GPU: [https://nvlabs.github.io/cub/structcub_1_1_device_reduce.htm...](https://nvlabs.github.io/cub/structcub_1_1_device_reduce.html). However, if the data is CPU / DDR4 RAM side, then the slow PCIe connection hampers you severely.

I pushed 1GB of data to device-side reduce the other day (just playing with ROCprim), and it took ~100ms to hipMemcpy the 1GB of data to the GPU, but only 5ms to actually execute the reduce. That's a PCIe-bottleneck for sure. (Numbers from memory... I don't quite remember them exactly but that was roughly the magnitudes we're talking about). That was over PCIe 3.0 x16, which seems to only push 10GBps one-way in practice. (15Gbps in theory, but practice is always lower than the specs)

Yeah, I know CPU / GPU have like 10us of latency, but you can easily write a "server" kind of CPU-master / GPU-slave scheduling algorithm to send these jobs down to the GPU. So you can write software to ignore the latency problem in many cases.

Software can't solve the bandwidth problem however. You gotta just buy a bigger pipe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> AMD slaps Intel around a bit with a large trout.

<comment><USER23> Man, that's a blast from the past – thanks for the chuckle!

<comment><USER24> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78b67l_yxUc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78b67l_yxUc)

<comment><USER25> Right series, wrong clip, I thought it was going to be this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8XeDvKqI4E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8XeDvKqI4E)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why no compilation benchmarks? Say, a Linux, chromium or GCC compile. All that cache must make it fantastic at compiling.

<comment><USER27> Ever since moving to Win 1909, our compile benchmarks have been a bit off. I was at Supercomputing last week, literally got back Saturday to start writing the review, and I need to get some time to debug why it's not working as it should. I've got Qualcomm's Tech Summit next week and IEDM the week after that, so you'll have to wait a bit. Ian (the editor of the review)

<comment><USER28> I can't resist asking something that's been bugging me for a long time. The issue of insane travel schedules has openly plagued AnandTech for a long time now, both delaying reviews and severely impacting their quality when they do come out. Every tech website out there covers the big events in roughly the same way, very few do proper deep dive technical reviews like you've done in the past. Is it really the best use of your time to (partially) squander the comparative advantage you have in favor of rushing from one event to the next, reporting the same things everyone else does?

<comment><USER29> If you don't show up, no one knows you exist. He has to do everything the other guys do and more in order to stand out.

<comment><USER28> His CPU reviews in particular have at times been virtually unparalleled in the industry. I don't think name recognition is an issue. It's just painful to see that suffer for run of the mill industry news reporting.

<comment><USER29> Think of it as networking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> 6 pages of gaming benchmarks and not one compilation speed test. Baffling.

<comment><USER31> This is my frustration with almost all tech sites. The AMD press deck included compilation benchmarks, but the only others to reliably provide them are Phoronix.

<comment><USER32> Most reviewers don't bother doing compile benchmarks because they're not as familiar with them and perhaps they don't come in the same "canned" form as every other gaming benchmark. It may also be that each site caters to a particular audience.

On the other hand bench results have to be comparable and relevant (in time). Which is easy when you run the same still widely played GTA V year after year on every new CPU. But comparing compilation time for kernel version 3.11 (released at the same time as GTA V) seems a lot less relevant today.

<comment><USER31> Maybe this would change if someone would pre-package a build environment with source code, a nice gui and fancy abstract visualization of the compile process.

<comment><USER33> Phoronix does this already AFAIK.

[https://github.com/phoronix-test-suite/phoronix-test- suite](https://github.com/phoronix-test-suite/phoronix-test-suite)

<comment><USER31> Phoronix does do this, but it's unfortunately harder to use than would be required for wide adoption in the press. It really has to be as simple as downloading an exe that pops up a window with a "go" button when run, and has to show some nice things happening on screen. Game and graphics benchmarks do this, so that's what they use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love it how CPUs have more onboard memory than my whole first computer now.

<comment><USER35> It's been a while since the L1 cache size (64KB) has exceeded that of my first computer. What I find crazy is that a single Ryzen core has more in _registers_ than some of the computers I've used.

AMD64 has 16 64 bit registers, but Ryzen actually has 168 behind the scenes so it can pipeline and reorder multiple instructions simultaneously. That's almost 1.5KBytes of memory, more than some microcontrollers have in ROM or RAM.

<comment><USER36> It's actually a lot larger if you look at vector registers - AVX registers are 32 bytes each and there are also ~168 of them in modern AMD and Intel CPUs, resulting in 5KB of registers. With AVX-512 the number is 10KB!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Respectfully, intel looks like its hiding under a chair by refusing to release anything with similar core counts.

I mean I would also be afraid that Amd has a

> Manufacturing Process

> Performance

> Power Consumption

= IPC

<comment><USER38> Intel even refused to give i9 9900Ks to Linus Tech Tips because LTT had a Ryzen 3950X and Intel didn't want them benchmarked.

<comment><USER39> They still got one, though, through Origin PC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > _Thread + Ripper was a clever play on words: anything that had plenty of > threads, the hardware was designed to 'rip' through the workload._

Tangent, but is this really a play on words? And if so, what is the other meaning here?

I get the meaning where lots of cores are ripping through workload. But the other one I don't. The closest guess I have is that it's like a comic book hero (The Incredible Hulk) ripping through his clothes because he is so big and powerful. And I don't guess it refers to a seam ripper (the sewing tool).

<comment><USER41> AMD's (and Intel's) marketing teams are awfully enslaved to the gamer market - gamer aesthetics, big bold packaging, insane names that sound like something off of Tron, the whole RGB enchilada.

AMD started it with Ryzen. That name sounds like a character from the Lord of the Rings. And then we Threadripper - violent to say the least, and finally, EPYC - cheap play of the letters.

What happened to marketing like the IBM System 360? Elliot Noyes is rolling in his grave. I don't think the marketing teams are to be blamed, its the consumers and the Taiwanese influence around what a computer product should be marketed as such.

<comment><USER40> I guess I never thought of it in a gaming-oriented way, although it totally makes sense.

Ryzen also sounds like "rising", and even like "horizon", which are both pretty positive and non-gamer-y.

Ripping has other meanings too. It can mean going really fast or energetically, like "the driver ripped right past the race leader on that corner" or "let her rip" when you launch something at full speed. And a sawmill or woodworker uses a circular saw, band saw, etc. to rip wood, which means dividing it along the grain, the natural direction it wants to split. Which I suppose makes a good analogy for embarrassingly parallel compute problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Has anyone seen independent reviews for database performance on EPYC 2 / Threadripper 3?

I'd love to recommend the AMD platform for customers with large databases, but there's is zero reputable information available on the Internet. The vendors can't be trusted, because they obviously cheat their ass off, such as Intel disabling security patches, using ludicrous hardware configurations, etc...

<comment><USER43> Phoronix has done a few DB benchmarks on EPYC 2. [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=EPYC](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=EPYC)

Don't forget that if comparing to old benchmarks, there's a bug with Intel's TSX now and the mitigations once again seem to take a nice hit if your database engine makes use of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> 280W TDP?! That's more than what a large refrigerator uses ..

<comment><USER45> >That's more than what a large refrigerator uses ..

That's partially due to good insulation in modern fridges. After all, if the insulation is perfect, you could run a fridge on 0W (assuming you don't open the doors).

<comment><USER46> How's that? By powering them with Maxwell's Demon?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon)

<comment><USER47> Watts are joules/second - with perfect insulation and doors not opening, the only energy used is the energy used to cool the contents initially. As time approaches infinity watts approach zero, despite the energy consumed initially. c/t -> 0 as t->INF given constant c.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Any official announcement for 8-channel 4TB LRDIMM TRX80/WRX80 chipset yet? TRX40 is underwhelming compared to high-end x399...

<comment><USER48> What's missing?

<comment><USER3> TRX40 can do only as much RAM as x399 (256GB) as there are only 32GB (ECC) UDIMMs available. With incoming 64-core TR that would be 4GB/core or 2GB/thread, which is way too little for a CPU that would cost ~$5k. TRX40 boards also for some reason have fewer PCIe slots (4) than x399 (6) or x299 (7) boards. I can't call them "Pro" because of that - fewer GPUs for Deep Learning is not a good idea in a workstation-level tech.

<comment><USER49> To be honest, it sounds like your particular needs are best served by an Epyc.

<comment><USER3> TR has usually higher CPU frequency and more agile BIOS, for less $.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The benchmarks on the Ryzen Threadripper and Zen 9 3rd gen cpus look great. I have been looking to find prebuilt gaming desktops that don't have issues with those chips. Newegg reviews show failures around their units and Amazon isn't much help either. Is this truly a build your own situation? Not necessarily issues with the CPUs but the overall quality of the build and bios issues/DOA status. Any recommendations for BYO or prebuilt options?

<comment><USER51> Build your own! Single components offer longer warranty(usually). You can research decent RAM, decent hard drives and so on.

Building a PC these days is trivial, back in the day there was a lot more fiddling with bios, now things are simplified and its mostly plug and play.

I actually might build a computer and make a detailed written guide, but I would love to help if you decide to go this route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> it'd be funny if amd came out with something like intel phi pcie cards, after intel discontinued them. But for my mostly unet / fcn, segmentation deep learning models, gpu's will continue to be the goto, until we get into a few hundred cores range...

<comment><USER39> I really want one of those, even though I have almost no use for one. Maybe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I started wondering about the physics of removing 280W of heat from the tiny silicon die/dice. Is most of the heat conducted through the metal connections or through the package? What material is the package made of?

<comment><USER54> It's not actually that tiny and it's pretty spread out. The HEDT chips are physically very large.

You can see how the dies themselves are laid out here: [https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15151/amd_rome-678_678x452...](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15151/amd_rome-678_678x452_575px_678x452.png)

And you can see how physically huge the package is here compared to desktop CPUs you may be more familiar with: [https://images.app.goo.gl/T5kpz8WyjGHV8Vqm8](https://images.app.goo.gl/T5kpz8WyjGHV8Vqm8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> 32 cores at good price point. Now there's no reason to lease all those VM's and use kubernetes. Unless of course, we are all I/O bound due to the bulk of the work being telemetry and tracking. hmm....

</comment><comment><USER56> An advice for the younger enthusiasts out there: don't buy this _yet_, it's an overpriced pseudo-workstation platform for now, even if you can afford it.

It's nice to watch (and have) new CPUs pushing the available computing performance up, and bringing new features. With Ryzen 3000/EPYC Rome this finally happened in a meaningful way, and TR is(shortly will be) the most powerful CPU there is. _AND_ Intel is getting kicked in the ass, which is good.

But objectively, even if AMD is better value than Intel now, it still is overpriced.

The first problem is with the launch price. This kind of system maintains the top status for one year or so these days. Then it slips into mainstream level which can be got for 50%, 30% price. Look at what happened to 2950X, or EPYC Milan platforms. They were similarly expensive at launch and they are mainstream performance now, their prices have fallen dramatically as well. (If you want AMD, those are much better choice now.)

The second problem is, the TRX40 motherboards available now are simply underwhelming and disappointing, take a look:

[https://www.pcmag.com/feature/372107/first-look-all-the- amd-...](https://www.pcmag.com/feature/372107/first-look-all-the-amd- trx40-motherboards-for-third-gen-thre/6)

You can get 16,24,32 cores for x $1000, but only 4 channels of memory and 3-4 PCIe slots and 2010-era networking? The Xeon workstation boards are so much better. Here is how you design a motherboard in this price range:

[https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11spa-t- motherboard...](https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11spa-t-motherboard- review-an-intel-xeon-w-3200-platform/)

It's like mobo manufacturers are thinking, the TR CPUs are cooler than Xeons, let's make a killing on expensive gamer-like motherboards.

If you're after nice punch performance on the cheap, go here, sort by performance, then look for rows with highest value.

[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/CPU_mega_page.html](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/CPU_mega_page.html)

The result for me is, if you're after performance but clever with money, go for 3900X or 3700X on an B450 board, anything else is kind of stupid for most people.

If you're after solid workstation with ECC and 2020-level, connectivity, Intel Xeon W now or wait for better motherboards (unlikely to happen).

</comment><comment><USER57> can it run crysis, though?

<comment><USER58> It might even run it in CPU-rendered mode...

<comment><USER59> I think this is the part where it gets interesting. Once you have enough parallel general-purpose compute horsepower available to run a physically- based renderer (e.g. what Pixar uses) at frame rates beyond 30/second, you can start to enter into a realm of arbitrarily-complex scenes within real-time applications.

How far off are we from this possibility, assuming someone sat down and optimized existing solutions for this use case?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> review _" AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 (Castle Leak) Review Roundup"_

[https://videocardz.com/83333/amd-ryzen- threadripper-3000-cas...](https://videocardz.com/83333/amd-ryzen- threadripper-3000-castle-leak-review-roundup)

</comment><comment><USER60> All these products are great but I still can't get a Ryzen 9 3950x anywhere for fucks sake. I'm tired of waiting. Amd should work on their supplies.

</comment><comment><USER61> What does "nm" mean, really?

It's only barely useful to compare generations within one company's fab model.

What's a better measure to use? transistors / m^2 ?

Or at least to label properly as "7 AMD-nm" to avoid false comparison to "Intel-nm"?

<comment><USER35> Million transistors per mm^2 has been proposed as a comparison metric:

[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mtr-mm%C2%B2](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mtr- mm%C2%B2)

There are lots of different transistor sizes on a chip, so it also specifies what kind of transistors to measure.</comment></comment>


Awesome Developer Streams: curated list of awesome developers that stream - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bnb/awesome-developer-streams#awesome-developer-streams- <comment><USER2> Surprising that Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness, Jai) is missing, given that Casey Muratori is listed (the other really popular game dev that streams).

Nevertheless, he streams game development and creating his programming language at @Naysayer88 on twitch and regularly posts his videos to Youtube. Skip the beginning of his stream or you may be instilled with the overwhelming desire to go out and buy cupcakes.

* Twitter: [https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow](https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow)

* Twitch: [https://www.twitch.tv/naysayer88](https://www.twitch.tv/naysayer88)

* Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/user/jblow888](https://www.youtube.com/user/jblow888)

<comment><USER3> I scrolled through the list looking for this myself. How are you going to have a list of development streams and not include the most popular developer streamer. This list just feels weird, like giving a list of popular programming languages and not mentioning java.

<comment><USER4> That's why it's hosted on github. To quote the 5th line:

> ...make your change to this file and open a pull request!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title says "curated", but in my experience all the "awesome-*" lists have just a few criteria for merging PRs, highest among them that changes keep the list sorted alphabetically. The approach doesn't have any opinions about whose streams you should try watching first. How is this all that different from searching google for "developers who stream", except that on this list it's easier for people who would be far down in the search results to get noticed?

As for this "awesome-" list, the same holds for all of them that I've seen.

<comment><USER6> This list is basically curated by the developer streamers as it's been brought to our attention :)

<comment><USER5> So it's "curated by the community" ? If so that sounds like "crowd-sourced" to me.

There's an opportunity to evaluate some of the content that's listed here, imbue it with more structure, and espouse opinions about what's worth watching and (crucially) what _isn't_. People might disagree with you, but they can curate their own list.

<comment><USER6> I'm sure people would find value in that, I look forward to seeing what you put together ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not seeing any lispers, maybe that's my sign. :)

<comment><USER8> [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMV8p6Lb- bd6UZtTc_QD4zA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMV8p6Lb-bd6UZtTc_QD4zA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You all might also be interested in [https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/)

</comment><comment><USER9> +1 for Suz Hinton at the top of the list. That's a bad ass lady. Also great on Twitter ~ @noopkat

Edit: Also does anyone know if there are any good Ruby streamers? I don't see any on the list.

<comment><USER6> While noopkat is awesome, the list is in the order that people were added :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish there was some way to isolate developer streams discussing programming in the FFMPEG libav API from the countless "how to use FFMPEG" videos.

<comment><USER10> And trying to search with "libAV" brings up dork videos emotionally raging about the libAV fork that died.

<comment><USER11> Try proper names like avcodec, avformat, avio and avutil. These should work as opposed to late libav.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Step two for anyone fancying a weekend hack or similar.. use the Twitch API to monitor which ones are live or not and present that info on a single page we can visit to watch a live programming stream right now.

<comment><USER13> [https://codepen.io/stephenleebarker/full/zNvWJQ/](https://codepen.io/stephenleebarker/full/zNvWJQ/)

<comment><USER14> Ask and you shall receive. Pretty awesome, did you just write this?

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I just had to modify an older project, adding YouTube would be the next step but lunch is over lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> twitch.tv/nodebotanist (bias disclosure: that's me, so you'll have to decide awesomeness for yourself). Hardware, Node.JS, and sometimes how to make technical content (meta).

<comment><USER6> why not just create a pr for the repo?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> i have been looking and looking but can't find good streams or videos of people coding in a lisp (e.g., common lisp) or a smalltalk. this is really disappointing because i would love to see these (supposedly) more dynamic environments at work. i would also take any SML or f# videos as well.

there is a korean guy on youtube who does some live coding in common lisp for music and visuals, which is really cool, but that's all i have found.

any suggestions?

<comment><USER17> this guy has a few F# videos: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAiiOTio8Yu69c3XnR7nQBQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAiiOTio8Yu69c3XnR7nQBQ/videos)</comment></comment>


7 satellite imagery providers view of MH370 - <AUTHOR> https://www.mapbox.com/blog/flight-MH370-search-efforts-from-space/

<comment><USER2> It's fascinating to see all of the space-borne assets in use here, as well as the obvious apparent differences in capabilities.

... and this is just the non-secret satellites.</comment>


Ethereum - A Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper

<comment><USER2> A wide net, made in Canada, to capture all the fish. The number of hats(competitors?/opportunities?) we now can choose from just exploded ten fold:

"Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, company governance, contracts and agreements of most kind, intellectual property, and even smart property thanks to hardware integration.

Ethereum borrows the concept of decentralized consensus that makes bitcoin so resilient, yet makes it trivial to build on its foundation." To find out more about how Ethereum works, consult the whitepaper:

[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White- Pa...](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa..).

</comment><comment><USER3> In the second half of the _Keiser Report: New Crypto Phenomenon Ethereum (E569)_ (published Mar 1, 2014), Max interviews Charles Hoskinson, a cryptographer and one of the people behind Ethereum: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdAnyC45ZbU&t=724](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdAnyC45ZbU&t=724) [video]</comment>


Redox: A Rust Operating System - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jackpot51/redox <comment><USER2> I know this is a young project, but right now it looks like a terrible waste of Rust's features. Raw pointers everywhere, most allocations unchecked, and _264_ unsafes in just the kernel.

 _unsafe_ is a necessary escape hatch, but the temptation to use it to write C-style code is strong.

<comment><USER3> Hello, I wrote Redox, and I completely agree. I have been doing pretty substantial cleanups in this manner recently. At first, I had to start with pretty nasty code to get things going. Within the last week, I seperated out fundamental applications and moved them to the filesystem. This also meant writing a syscall interface, which is currently compatible with Linux system calls. Unsafe is often necessary in kernel land, and I am always rewriting code to make its use span smaller scopes.

<comment><USER2> Hello! I think it's possible to encapsulate unsafe pointer operations so they're only required in memory allocation, I/O primitives, and device DMA. I'll open a github issue or two with thoughts.

Out of curiosity, are you modeling this on an existing code base/architecture, or is this a new design?

<comment><USER3> This is a new design, but the syscall interface is like Linux, the read/write/open/close/ syscalls are the same ABI.

As for unsafe, it would be possible to make much less of the kernel unsafe. The kernel allocation could be exposed in an interface like this:

struct Memory { address: usize }

impl Memory { fn new() -> Option<Memory>; fn realloc(&mut self, size: usize) -> Option<Memory>; fn size(&self) -> usize }

impl Drop for Memory { fn drop(&mut self) }

PIO could be wrapped up MUCH better:

PIO8, PIO16, and PIO32 could handle inb, inw, ind. A lot of my driver bugs have come from using the wrong size!

MMIO could be handled similarly.

The PCI driver could give drivers a limited set of PIO and MMIO structs to operate on

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rust really seems like the next step in system programming.

Would it be possible to have this lifetimes/borrowing stuff in a scripting language?

Like, I care about who owns something, but I don't care about what something is?

<comment><USER5> Don't scripting languages typically not exhibit the problems that Rust attempts to address?

<comment><USER4> I had the impression Rust tries to get memory safety without the need/overhead of GC.

<comment><USER6> I don't know about the borrowing system, but I believe there are several Lisps that avoid mark-sweep garbage collection. NewLisp is one such example, though I think they sidestep the issue by copying everything by default and using efficient allocation/deallocation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The blog was a good read. I agree with acconsta that the description doesn't seem to utilize Rust's better attributes. Plus, that it's "starting to look like Linux" (author) may or may not be good. I'd look at Wirth's Oberon or A2 Bluebottle for a simpler start: type-safe, memory-safe (mostly), GC'd OS with good documentation, source available, and a simplicity focus for easy re- implementation. Rust, in theory, can do whatever it did and faster.

Additionally, if doing clean-slate, might be worth looking into alternative models for constructing or securing OS's. EROS security OS, SPIN OS's type- safe linking for acceleration, Minix 3's reliability scheme, JX OS's architecture, Microsoft's verified VerveOS scheme, maybe even Amoeba distributed OS just for kicks to see what it could do today. Lot of stuff that might be better than Linux model with a Rust implementation in terms of reliability, security, extensibility, or developer productivity.

Just a thought for Redox author or someone else wanting to try an OS in Rust. However, best thing to come out of Redox project, imho, isn't the OS so much as this article:

[https://redox- os.org/index.php?controller=post&action=view&i...](https://redox- os.org/index.php?controller=post&action=view&id_post=5)

Great write-up on an equally great strategy of developing with hardware that's well-supported by both native OS's and virtualization. That's worth copying and expanding in other projects. Maybe worth a dedicated list like the HCL's where there's a list of computer builds that are easiest to develop on with or without virtualization. Or list it one piece of hardware at a time.

<comment><USER3> That was so good I put it on the blog!

<comment><USER7> Didn't see that coming haha. Glad you liked it. At 135pts & front page, you apparently are cool enough for Hacker News. Probably a cool project in a HN- favorite language led to this. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am Jackpot51, I wrote Redox and would be able to confirm with a master push.

To start, this wasn't supposed to be public yet. I was preparing cleanup before release, and I hope it is not seen as complete.

I am excited to see how much attention this has gotten, and I would be willing to answer any questions about Redox, how to use it, and how to contribute.

I have a blog at [https://redox-os.org/](https://redox-os.org/) where I recently posted screenshots.

We can IRC at irc.mozilla.org #redox

</comment><comment><USER8> "Redox is not correct, secure, or documented. It does a lot of things in a cavalier, leave it up to the application, manner. Applications can malloc and forget to free, Redox will not clean this up. Applications can access missing memory or kernel memory, Redox does not care. All applications run in Ring 0, and have all permissions. Some syscalls use vtables that rely on exactly the same struct defintions in userspace as kernel space. Syscalls cannot return values, except by writing them into a passed pointer. Memory allocation is done in the application, and uses a global memory allocation table that applications directly modify. None of its functionality is documented, outside of example source files." \-- [https://redox-os.org/](https://redox-os.org/)

Yikes!!!

<comment><USER9> OS development takes time and he clearly states this will change, criticizing such a young project with halfquotes is unfair and discouraging for the developers. shame on you.

I'm waiting for OS development to start up in rust as it is clearly the better choice then C/C++ for a kernel.

<comment><USER10> How easy is it to deal with raw memory in rust? That's the main reason for using C in my opinion.

<comment><USER11> Not sure is it like this anymore, but might be worth giving a read:

> But allocating memory seemed like a fun exercise. To allocate something on > the heap in Rust, you can do

> let a = ~2

> This creates a pointer to a 2 on the heap.

[http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/03/12/the-rust-os- story/](http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/03/12/the-rust-os-story/)

<comment><USER12> That syntax has been changed, actually. Now, to allocated an owned pointer allocated on the heap, you use the Box type:

> let a = Box::new(2);

I believe it's an unstable feature currently to use the "box" keyword to heap- allocate a value, which can also be used in pattern matching. I saw somewhere that "box" will be made into an overloadable operator, such that you can easily create reference-counted and atomically reference-counted types.

<comment><USER13> Yes, that's generally correct. We still haven't fully decided on the exact syntax. If anyone wants to get involved, this RFC was the one that got merged, but hasn't been made stable yet: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0809-box-...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0809-box-and-in-for-stdlib.md)

And this is the active, in-final-comment-period one which modifies it: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1228](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/pull/1228)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I do not understand much about low level languages or operating systems, but could someone explain why does this project need C in its codebase?

<comment><USER14> Disclaimer: haven't had time to read the code yet.

It is probably easier to do all of the massively unsafe things required to initialize in C than it is in Rust. Then Rust is just used after C does its dirty things.

<comment><USER15> That shouldn't ever be necessary. Part of the point of Rust is that you _can_ do unsafe low-level work, so long as you tag it with the "unsafe" keyword to enable pointer arithmetic and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Redox is a Rust based operating system, designed to be modular and well > documented.

How does one _design_ something to be well documented?

<comment><USER13> Well, depending on your definition of "Design", you do things like

      1. Ensure you have the tooling to produce nice docs.
      2. Build time to write docs into your planning.
      3. Actively try to find people who will write good docs.
      4. Focus on making your code understandable, so that the
         eventual docs will make sense. Spaghetti code is hard
         to document.

<comment><USER16> (IMO) that is taking documentation in consideration while designing, and not _designing to_ (it's not the actual purpose of the design).

Pedantism aside, I guess it was a phrasing issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can someone clarify, but it looks like it's going to be a monolithic approach here correct?

<comment><USER2> In the current Redox design, _everything_ runs in privileged mode, so it's kind of the ultimate monolith?

<comment><USER17> I kinda got that from the blog, but I guess I was more curious if anyone got a whiff of longer term design goals and if that was where things were headed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Judging by the syscall implementation, seems to be 32 bit only? Apologies if I missed something in the docs, such as they are.</comment>


Recycle robot – using raspberry pi and tensorflow - <AUTHOR> http://recycleai.tumblr.com/post/158972483103/first-hack-of-a-recycle-robot-using-raspberry-pi <comment><USER2> My main problem with recycling as done today in most cities I just don't know what do they expect from me. In London my district had different bins for different colors of glass. I live in NYC now, where I hear they have a 2 stream system, one for metal and glass, one for paper and plastic but most public buildings just have "recycle" and "trash". Should I throw a plastic bottle in there? I know you can recycle some plastics but not all. Cardboard is obviously recycled, but can I put in other paper boxes (not necessarily corrugated) between the cardboard? What about my paper coffee cup? Is that compostable or recyclable paper or trash?

In a weird way a machine like this would solve my issue if it were programmed by the building or city to do the right thing...

Edit: typos

<comment><USER3> I have friends in Europe, and last time I stayed with them they tried to explain, as best they understood it, the local recycling scheme. It was so complex that packaging has something like 5 different recycle logos, and their municipality only accepts 3 of them, but they're all just a circle of arrows pointing at each other with a number in the middle.

So can you recycle the brown bottle with the more square shaped arrows and the "3" in the middle? How about the next bottle exactly the same with the "3" in the middle but slightly more swirly arrows? Or the same square arrows and a "4"? They didn't even know, so they presort, show up at the recycle center with everything and get rid of what the employees there will accept and take home the rest for regular trash.

It's a huge waste of everybody's time. And the 20 minute drive to the local recycle center can't be helpful.

<comment><USER4> Most places in Europe I have lived will pick up everything from public containers not further than a few tens of meters from your house.

You only need to drive to recycle very-specific trash like baby diapers, dangerous substances, furniture and big appliances.

Common division is as follows:

\- Blue for paper and carton \- Green for glass (some places classify glass in three colors: green, brown and white) \- Brown for compost \- Yellow for Metal and Plastics \- Other: Anything that does not fall on the previous containers.

Exceptions: batteries, electronics and dangerous substances, which, as I explained before, need to be picked or brought to a special recycle center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome! Kind of like a microscopic version of a full scaled recycling sorter facility.. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIVKmwzWSuc)

<comment><USER6> Take a look at [https://youtu.be/SIVKmwzWSuc?t=73](https://youtu.be/SIVKmwzWSuc?t=73)

for the "first optical sorter".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow! This is a fantastic application of Tensorflow. I am a mechanical engineer and I am constantly thinking of ways I can use AI/ML in my systems/work. I think that there is tremendous opportunity for using tools like Tensorflow in unsexy applications such as _recycling_.

</comment><comment><USER8> If the maker is around: Open Food Facts has an insanely large db with recycling info, barcodes as opendata.

pierre at openfoodfacts dot org

<comment><USER9> I'm not the maker, but that's super helpful Pierre!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was thinking on my morning walk about making a small drone that could fly through an area looking for trash it can pick up.

It could potentially go places that are difficult for humans to get to pick up some litter, like trash in streams or thickets.

<comment><USER11> Drone Wall-E?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd love to see this replace the current multi-bin setups I see most places. The ones where you spend so much time trying to figure out which is the right bin that inevitably some people just dump everything in the easiest location. It doesn't take many mistakes to ruin the efficacy.

An automatic sorter could solve that and training could be tailored to the location.

Starbucks seems like a good pilot location.

<comment><USER13> This problem is solved with off site recycling. People get it wrong either through ignorance or laziness. Just dump it all in one bin and sort it at the facility. It's cheaper and more accurate. Add an arm to pick things off a conveyor belt, then you'd have something.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but ...

It provides some jobs, yes. But mostly low-wage.

Broken glass is a key issue. It's especially hard to separate from paper. I vaguely recall that silicon is also an issue for aluminum.

<comment><USER13> If your skills are limited binocular vision, object recognition, and an opposable thumb and n 2017, you're screwed. Hell, you've been screwed for 30 years. Everyone knows this.

<comment><USER14> Yes, and that's the problem. The US had welcomed them, because lots of dumb work needed doing. But now, not so much.

So how do societies deal with them? People with no prospects, especially young men, are dangerous.

<comment><USER13> Government make-work programs, but they're pretty much boondoggles by design, because you're intentionally not optimizing for cost-benefit? But rather maximizing headcount.

If I was in charge retrain people under 50 for something, with more education subsidies (including free post-secondary education) increasing as Age decreases (eg an18 year old goes to college, a 45 year old learns welding) but with the caveat that you have to move out of Methlandia. (Relocation package provided.)[0] People over 50 or those that don't take the offer get free carfentanil.

[0] [https://newrepublic.com/article/131743/poor-get-trapped- depr...](https://newrepublic.com/article/131743/poor-get-trapped-depressed- areas)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm new to AI/ML, so it would be interesting to see the source code used for this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not bad at all.

A little self promotion: I'm part of a startup making robotics for recycling... maybe a little further along than this project :-) but it's a great start!

[https://resource- recycling.com/recycling/2017/03/21/carton-p...](https://resource- recycling.com/recycling/2017/03/21/carton-plucking-clarke-brings-robots- recycling/)

[http://amprobotics.com/](http://amprobotics.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> We don't need a robot to do it for us, we need an environment that teaches us to do ourselves because we should. A better arrangement would be for the pi to light a simple led lamp over the bin it is supposed to go in, and let the human learn to do it themselves from habit. Otherwise it is an impressive engineering project you put forth.

</comment><comment><USER18> Really cool project, this inspired me!

FYI: ZenRobotics has been developing waste separation technology for years now. Not sure on what stage it is now but according to their website, they seem to have some working solutions already. [http://zenrobotics.com/](http://zenrobotics.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is something of great interest to me, though I don't have the wherewithal to pull something off like this. I'm glad someone did.

Although this is at a hobbyist scale, I think it might develop into micro- recycling sorting, one of the pieces to help increase the rate in which we recycle goods.

</comment><comment><USER20> Neat project! Love it.

Sort of sad to see the most useful object to recycle (the steel scissors) went to the landfill. The recycle value of that one item would have dwarfed the value of a year's worth of banana peels.

</comment><comment><USER21> Impressive, it's already more intelligent than half the people in my apartment building.

</comment><comment><USER22> What a cool project. Nice!

</comment><comment><USER23> Love to see code...</comment>


Facebook Makes Big New Move to Capture More User Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_makes_big_new_move_to_capture_more_user_d.php <comment><USER2> Making your user registration dependent on your compliance with another company's terms of service seems like a ridiculously unnecessary risk.

<comment><USER3> The reward is one-click sign-in for 500M users. If you're an instant personalization partner, zero-click sign-in for 500M users.

To have zero-or-one-click sign-in for half a billion users is a useful feature to have. Just keep your own login system if all else fails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I pretty much stopped reading after this line: "Web development thought leader Jeff Atwood...". That and the press release-type of comment above it.

And I agree with everyone else here. Trusting your users to Facebook is a dumb-ass thing to do.

<comment><USER5> Totally agree. Who made him thought leader? His rise to fame is like Newt Gingrich in the 90's. He isn't great, but amassed a huge following.

But too bad every other website owner that wants a few extra users will do what facebook decides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _All under the watchful eye of Facebook, a company that leads the world in online identity and specializes in user data security. It's a very smart move, but raises questions about the company's growing power._

I honestly can't tell if the author is saying that tongue-in-cheek or if it's copied from a press release.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. I have no confidence in Facebook's authentication of people... in what way do they verify that people are who they claim to be? Do they require a credit card number? A driver's license number? ANYTHING verifiable at all?

<comment><USER8> That's no worse than most site registration systems. Banks aren't going to use Facebook logins anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's all fun and games until all of your users are locked out one day because facebook isn't happy with you or has decided to enter your space. <http://www.lamebook.com/>

It's bad for the website. It's bad for the user (versus, say, an independent universal id). All of this because you don't want to use a password manager and are frightened about hackers? Meh.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's all fun and games until someone sends WikiLeaks the full details of their data sharing/mining a week before the IPO.

</comment><comment><USER11> Related news: [http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-social- login...](http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-social-login- preferences-2010-12)

Google is more used than Facebook by Janrain users.

</comment><comment><USER12> FTA _"Facebook is gobbling up user data left and right, that's the price for the power, convenience and security the company's identity services offer"_

I consider that price far too high. If your site looks like it just crawled out of an odesk freelancer's bitbucket, then I will give it a dummy email and random password because I do not trust your site. People need to be acutely aware of sites they can trust and then adjust their behaviour - not simply give everything to Facebook and assume its taken care of- because its not.

<comment><USER13> I agree with you. Many sites out there are not to be trusted. However, not everyone is like us. If they visit a site, and there's a required registration, with the form already pre-filled, they'll simply click the 'Register' button. It's easy, slick and fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Users get scared when a site asks them to login via Facebook or even Google. If this is the only option you offer, registrations will suffer a lot. I don't know who would use this.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious - do you have any data supporting this? I see it on HN based on anecdotal evidence (or none) all the time. It would obviously have different effects on different market segments, but I would love to see some analysis on this.

<comment><USER14> No hard data, just lots of complaints when I tried it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let's say I have a Facebook account, I will use it to access all sites I use, Facebook deletes my account for a reason(which may be political) and I loose all my info on all these sites.

This sounds like an even greater risk to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> And then goes down....

</comment><comment><USER18> This could affect Facebook in a negative way. Think about big sites that get spammed with tons of fake email user accounts. Making Facebook registration the only option, these spammers will be forced through Facebook first, which just hurts Facebook. (Or do they want that so they can report a larger than accurate userbase? heh)

<comment><USER19> I think Facebook wants that problem – but not to inflate their user numbers, rather to become better at pruning their system, improving it as the one true- life identity authority.</comment></comment>


No Pill Can Cure Addiction | Psychology Today - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/addiction-in-society/200804/no-pill-can-cure-addiction <comment><USER2> I upvoted this, but I think the headline is slightly misleading - I think they are saying that no one drug can cure all different types of addiction.

This seems, in a sense, almost self-evident; it is a bit like saying that it is impossible for one patch file to fix all possible bugs.

At the time of writing, one of the Wikipedia definitions of addiction was "a continued involvement with a substance or activity despite the negative consequences associated with it". Just like it takes some reasoning and domain specific knowledge to decide if something is a feature or a bug, it is not trivial to decide if a consequence is negative or positive, and requires a lot more logic than can be achieved with drugs binding to receptors in the brain.

Pleasure evolved because it makes animals do things which cause the genes for pleasure to be passed on (for example, eating food, having sex, or even more indirect things like solving a problem or acquiring knowledge to help achieve goals in the future). Addictions are really conditions where things which aren't useful to an individual invoke the pleasure pathways, because they are too recent for evolution to have got the pathways right, causing a distortion of priorities.

So it seems self-evident that any workaround to the distortion of priorities will need to specifically lower the pleasure / bump the pain of harmful things, relative to the beneficial things, rather than simply making everything unpleasurable by the same amount.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that this would even be surprising: do people really expect every high-level, qualitative human mental state and behavior to be caused by a really simple element of brain wiring or chemistry, like a particular neurotransmitter being imbalanced, or presence/absence of a particular structure? Much of pop-neuroscience seems to, believing that for every/almost- every interesting high-level X, there's a "gene for X" or "neurotransmitter that causes X", and therefore a cure (in the case where X is bad) that consists of a fairly simple blunt instrument, like a pill that changes levels of one neurotransmitter.

But even in intro math classes studying relatively simple dynamical systems, it quickly becomes nontrivial to try to trace back high-level, qualitative behavior of a system to specific elements of the system that cause that behavior--- much less to point to which parts you should tweak to cause a particular desired high-level change. Craig Reynolds sometimes calls it the "reverse emergence problem" in computer graphics and agent simulations: our system is doing high-level-thing A, we want it to do B, which of our low-level rules are causing that and how do we fix it? There often isn't a simple answer or clean change to make, because the answer is "lots of rules interacting causes this, and any change you make will change lots of other things too". It would be pretty surprising if the common case in neuroscience, dealing with a hugely complex dynamical system, really turned out to be much cleaner and simpler than that.</comment></comment>


6 Unusual City Maps, Locals vs Tourists - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dohop.com/index.php/2011/05/19/locals-vs-tourists/

<comment><USER2> Instead of going to someone else's blog post, here's the original link, by the artist Eric Fischer: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/7215762420915863...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624209158632)

It includes a description of his methodology.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eric Fisher is fully credited at the bottom of the post, with links to him and the photostream this is taken from.

<comment><USER3> Woah, that information should definitely be in the introduction, as is customary for blog authors who are presenting the work of others. I didn't know it isn't your work until I read this comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated the post, Eric Fisher is now credited both before and after the photos.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the publicity!

<comment><AUTHOR> You are most welcome. The maps totally deserve the attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In case you don't read to the end, more cities can be found here:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4671594023/in/photost...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4671594023/in/photostream/)

Other American cities that I looked at include DC and Boston.

</comment><comment><USER6> Notes on Philadelphia: Most photos on the regional rail lines are by locals, even on the northeast corridor. Tourists in Fairmount park are not making it much further than the zoo and art museum, which is unfortunate because there are lots of great areas north of that. I would have expected more activity in both rivers due to the tours and rowing that take place. Penn/Drexel campuses are photographed much more than the Temple campus.

[http://flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4671522359/sizes/o/in/pho...](http://flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4671522359/sizes/o/in/photostream/)

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems that locals at Berlin are not keen on taking photos of their own city.

What's that area center-right in SF that apparently no tourist likes to go?

<comment><AUTHOR> Downtown Oakland

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> San Francisco is the best one. The bright red of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge combined with the deep blue of everything south of Market.

Sydney has me confused. Who _are_ all these locals taking photos of a few major roads south of the city. Is that big thick one Botany Road? It's not really worth photographing.

<comment><USER9> Tourists take pictures of public works. People take pictures of their houses.

<comment><USER8> Ah, but this is nothing _like_ a population density map of Sydney. Sydney is huge, it stretches way off in the north and west directions. What you're looking at here is basically the areas immediately south of central Sydney -- probably only 10% of the population lives in that area (though admittedly the 10% demographically most likely to use flickr).

Besides, those major roads don't have that many people living on 'em.

<comment><USER4> People also take a lot of pictures of local businesses, although looking at Street View for that street that also seems a little unlikely. Maybe it is one of those people with a bicycle helmet camera taking pictures of their commute every day? I'll have to take a look at the pictures and check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be nice if one could overimpose those graphs to a google map.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know what the blue/red/yellow lines represent?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is in the post, but blue = locals, red = tourists and yellow = unknown.

Data is gathered from flickr profiles of photographs taken in those spots.</comment></comment>


Airbnb built an AI that turns design sketches into product source code - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2017/10/25/airbnb-ai-sketches-design-code/ <comment><USER2> That's pretty cool they spent a bunch of money on AI to save themselves a copy and paste from the template library to the prototype rendering system.</comment>


Advice for young graduates looking for a job - <AUTHOR>

As a young graduate, I'm shocked by the positive feedback my application process has had with method B, compared to the depressing results it gets with method A.
Method A is of course replying to job ads. I think the people who post such ads experience the kind of tsunami you see when you post a job on Elance. Which means that even if you as a candidate carefully select ads where you truly believe you're in a position to add value despite your inexperience, you probably won't get a reply. And when you do get a reply, it's usually pretty generic. Don't ask for more specific reasons, you'll get on your contact's nerves.
And then there's method B. It gets you answers such as "we're sorry it took us so long to get back to you, our team would like to meet you", or the company cofounder trying to call you multiple times after reading your email. If those were girls' reactions to your texts, you'd get some positive adrenaline flowing and feel much better than with method A, right? And you'd be right to. Method B is finding smaller companies by yourself and browsing their website for "Jobs" pages. Those are the true hidden gems you're looking for, as they're often not published elsewhere and you're in competition with nobody. 25% of my applications have used method B and have resulted in: a PHP test where they found my code wasn't commented enough (a great error to learn from); a Java test for which I haven't had feedback yet but which I feel I rocked; an interview and a tough sys admin test where most of the questions were too advanced for me (still led to a position opportunity); an email asking for an interview; an email saying they already found somebody.
Even though the last one is the less positive of the bunch, it did feel good because they provided me an honest reason to not interview me. This is in contrast to my results with 60% of my time spent replying to job ads and which resulted in: anger, frustration, wasted time, pure opacity & meaninglessness. <comment><USER2> To add to this, I'm a recent graduate looking for a job and I can't seem to find these "smaller companies" you're talking about. I'm in the field of computer vision and machine learning but I can't seem to search the right criteria or reach anyone but the bigger companies like IBM and Facebook. Where are you looking for these companies and what do you search to find them?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good question and something I would have elaborated on if it wasn't for the 2'000 characters limit. I find these companies either by visiting websites I've been a happy client of (and who are in a niche I'm probably interested in) or by searching for technological keywords (HTML5, PHP, web agency, etc.) on Google with results limited to my country. In my case the companies I click with tend to use the (mainstream) technologies I want to work with. I wouldn't know how to do if I were in a more abstract field such as the ones you mention, sorry.</comment></comment>