Ask HN: What are some rigorous ways to review and test usability of web apps? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a better and rigorous ways of reviewing and testing web applications' usability. I use some of this criteria as a measure. But I am not satisfied, I believe even this criteria are vague and can be simplified. What are some you use? Or how can we simplify these points, maybe break them down into something specific?
1. Consistent theme - pattern, layout colour, icons and fonts,
2. Simplicity and minimalism (Avoids unnecessary repetition)
3. Consistent messaging and communication,
4. User assistant and user guidance, with data. Expecting less from the user.
5. Inline help and other documentation
6. Error handling and communication of errors,
7. Error prevention and fallbacks
Are there any that I should include? Is there any way to make them be more specific and dead simple? <comment><USER2> Random thoughts from the internet.

I think the most most rigorous test is deploying in front of paying customers. Usability is not tidy and theoretical. It is practical and messy. The core of usability is functional usefulness not design aesthetics. At the scale of Google, material design may have an absolute difference of a million users. At the scale of the average app, it is probably close to zero difference. Apple's iOS skeumorphism wasn't driving iPhone sales, people used it because the iPhone was useful. Emacs is still going strong after nearly forty years. People use Vim.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except that I am not planning to test an app I built but an app my clients are planning to use/buy. And I would have to use these methods, even though, they are subjective. One way to make it less subjective is what @Msurrow suggested, which I think is so valuable.

<comment><USER3> My follow up @Msurrow 's point:

> This is subdivided into the users skill with technology in general and the > users domain expertise level. Is the end user a novice or expert with tech? > Is the user (or rather the primary use-case(s)) for domain experts of domain > novices?

When I set out to design and implement anything I always try to imagine the least computer / tech savvy potential users as well as the most snobby and tech savvy potential users. After I've figured out who those two extreme groups of users will tend to be I set out to make my designs as "hand holding" as possible for the less tech savvy group while making sure, as best I can, that the way I go about catering to those less tech savvy users won't offend or turn off the most tech savvy users.

While I find it to be one of the most difficult parts about executing and ultimately deciding on a final iteration for release I also find nailing that middle ground as one of the most satisfying single rewards of the work I do. If I can make something that guides clueless computer users through a series of tasks without hangups or significant drop off while at the same time the most tech savvy users have no annoyances or glaring issues to gripe about then I view my job as well done.

I try my best to get the most tech savvy users to acknowledge the detail and care that went into UX / UI / Usability. If I can't display a new / innovative approach, a less redundant approach, or a more streamlined way of guiding a user through the process then my main goal is to create an experience where those two ends of the spectrum both walk away from the experience feeling there was no annoyances, hurdles, or progress halting steps to the process / story / guide / purchase & checkout / etc. Everything should be in it's correct place. Everything should be labeled as needed and those labels shouldn't hog valuable screen space. Errors, notifications, validation checking, and any other changes mid-experience should be clear and obviously placed with color coded nuances. Erroneous use shouldn't trash users inputs, EVER! If you know you will have lots of non-tech savvy users you will have to strategically weigh using innovative UI / UX against the added instructions and newly introduced errors / validation issues that come along with them. Is it worth it to innovate elements and functions that already exist in standardized, well known ways? Will going those extra miles raise the rate by which users interact / check out / continue reading / commit to desired actions?

I think it's easier said than done to set out and then execute this strategy but I also find that it's my personal favorite way of mentally posturing myself when it comes time to make decisions with UX / UI / Usability. Beyond that nothing beats sitting with users as they use your product / app / service / website. I don't know if you have access to potential testing users but I'm sure you could dig up some family and friends to help you run your project through the rigors of real life use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just do usability testing with real target users. Expert evaluation does not reveal any surprises, so it's limited in what it can do for you.

An aside - I find it quite strange that HN has such a blind spot for user research. I've been in the UX/user research industry since the mid 2000s. It's gone from being a niche thing (it was a struggle to find any employers in London who understood what user research was when I started out) - to being a standard practice in big tech companies. Apple, MS, Facebook, Spotify... They're all at it.

It's something you really need to know about if your work involves making any kind of decisions that impact your users.

<comment><AUTHOR> You see, HN's and Reddit's UI is what makes me wonder about everything. I can argue that both these site would score low on many of our criteria yet they strive, even in 2017.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Check out various articles online about heuristic evaluations ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_evaluation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_evaluation) \- as a starting point). They will give you checklists that people use for general purpose assessments.

As a rule of thumbs, it's a good idea to conduct a heuristic evaluation as an initial assessment of usability, make changes as needed, and then conduct an actual usability test to ensure you hit on the points you need and your users can accomplish key tasks in your app...

<comment><USER6> Another good checklist [https://stayintech.com/info/UX](https://stayintech.com/info/UX)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Adding to the list that already exists:

\- task oriented. Don't build a complex do-it-all UI, split it into tasks, one at a time

\- use simple, clear language to support what you want to user to do

\- have a flow to guide the user in the task, so that the user does not need to come back or jump all over in the page

\- do the "mother test": show it to your old mom, if she understands then you are in the right direction, otherwise ask her what she gets and what she does not get from your app. Repeat until almost anyone can use your app

<comment><AUTHOR> I love mother test! Even though it takes as back to the point made by @Msurrow and @scoggs

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> According to Wikipedia, a web app is:

 _In computing, a web application or web app is a client–server computer program in which the client (including the user interface and client-side logic) runs in a web browser._

The last two words "web browser" are very important. Are you testing your app using a variety of browsers? Or, perhaps, you're requiring everyone to use IE 6? :) I'm surprised that such a fundamental issue was left unstated.

Once you test various browsers, be sure to go in and set the minimum font size to a reasonably big number. At least 18. Maybe larger. Why not 24? I don't care if the resulting appearance on screen looks like crap, as long as everything is functional. Far too many web pages and web apps obscure large amounts of their functionality once the font size is increased.

Ask me how I know that. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> The only truly rigorous way is to sit users in front of the app and watch them. Makers are blind to what they don't know users don't know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't that transfer the subjective nature of this challenge from you to users? For example, how do u think an iPhone user will do in an Android phone or vice versa? A win desktop app user in a web app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you work in an office with non-dev's -- like QA's, analysts, regular folks -- ask them. And then listen to what they say.

As a QA, I frequently have the following experience:

me: "This won't make sense to people."

dev: "Oh, but it _has_ to be this way b/c {reasons}"

me: "People are going to get confused. They're going to use it wrong and make errors."

dev: "No, our users are smarter than that."

{6 months later}

dev: "We're redesigning our interface because the users found it too confusing."

<comment><USER11> > As a QA, I frequently have the following experience:

thank you for that impartial, completely balanced anecdote...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For apps that are already in production (and being used), Hotjar and competitors can be very useful for seeing what users are actually focused on. My last company actually went through 4 different iterations of their home page in a year, with the last two being redesigns based on insights from hotjar

</comment><comment><USER13> Great question! I think this is a very tough subject to work with because much of "user experience" is subjective, or at least just not quantifiable and thus hard to measure and compare. Also very few good standards for this exists (afaik).

I have a background in UX/HCI but havn't worked with it for ages, so no good examples but just some general thoughts.

I think you have some good ones on your list, but heres a few you may consider to add to it:

a) You criteria should take into account who the end user is, because that will define a lot of whats good or bad design/solutions in relation to your points 1-7. This is subdivided into the users skill with technology in general and the users domain expertise level. Is the end user a novice or expert with tech? Is the user (or rather the primary use-case(s)) for domain experts of domain novices? I think tech-ability is addressed fine by your 7 bullets (at least here on top of my head). The last one about domain expertise is the most interesting one to consider imho.

Here is an example: When we typically say that a user interface has to be user friendly or have good usability or whatever we call it, we picture a GUI with a visual nice design, well organised information, not too much not too little, it is easy to do stuff and so on. But what about the linux sysadmin - is a good interface for him a consistent theme, layout and coloured buttons etc? No, he just wants a terminal interface and great usability to him is if the darn thing is scriptable and supports unix piping input/output (or whatever is sexy to sysadmins).

In genereal you can say that if the user is a domain expert and the use-cases for the application is specialist work, then you want a user interface that is more complex and requires more time to learn -- and that is okay, because the expert user can invest 5-10 hours (or more) of learning the complex interface if it makes him e.g. 25% more productive for all of his tasks for the rest of the years he'll use the system. On the other hand, if the system is a landing page for a SaaS startup, you need to design something that is understandable and usable the target user in just about 20-30 seconds, otherwise he has clicked on. The last example here is a variant of the "domaine novice" situation, and note that it changes little wether the user is tech-novice or tech-guru.

NB: The same user will be a different kind depending on what part of his job he is carrying out (this also goes for non-work scenarios) - the engineer may be happy with a very complex application for his engineering tasks, but the system for handling expenses should be simple (b/c he knows nothing about accounting).

The crucial point is that good usability is very dependent on who the user is and what the use-cases are. And you need to build that into your criteria somehow.

b) I think you may be able to add a criteria on "expectations" \- do the system (e.g. a button) do what the user expects it to do? This can be down to colouring and icons: The accept button should be green and not red, the floppydisc icon should save the document, not close it and so on. But there are also more complex things like what the system indicates will happen when the last page of a registration wizard is completed. This is basically Donald Norman kind of stuff I'm thinking about (affordances is the concept he is talking about. sadly became a bit overhyped amongst UX designers but the ideas and principles are great).

c) Last thing and also very important is to consider the context of the system (as in IRL context). If for example you are designing a system for doctors or first responders it will be a key part of "good usability" that you can be interrupted and turn away from the screen a lot, and quickly get back to the task in the system again. The obvious example is if you are automatically logged out after 1 minute of inactivity: If the natural workflow, that the system is part of, simply entails that the user will get interrupted often, getting logged out all the time will make the user stop using the system. In that case the system just needs to adapt to the user's context (so thats part of evaluating if the user interface is good or not).

This was a simple example, but the point is to consider the context of the user and the system, because that will tell you so very much about how the system needs to work to _support_ the user, and that in turn will tell you a lot about the user interface. Context is one thing, but the systems part of the workflow (i.e. the entire job/situation) and things like tacit knowledge quickly becomes very important when looking at this level of usability (and evaluation/review). But that is whole research areas on their own (see e.g. Participatory Design, Computer Support Collaborative Work, Activity Theory, and much more. I'm getting out of touch with academia in this area, so these subjects are probably out-dated by now)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is by far the deepest assessment of the situation and it totally makes sense to consider the user and the situation. In fact, building a matrix with criteria and user/situation will benefit the who process and everyone involved. Thank you very much! But, regardless of the kind of UI, user, situation etc almost everything here is subjective, what do you think could be done to avoid the subjective nature of this process?

<comment><USER14> Sit at least four / five users[1] in front of the app and let them use it for a real exercise, asking them what they see (but without using leading questions that would give hints that a user will not get in real use).

No matter how much you analyze and measure your design, there will be expressions that they understand with the wrong meaning, buttons they should use that they can't see, and ways to think about the app that you couldn't possibly have anticipated.

So see what those problems are that you couldn't have find out in advance, fix them, and put them again in front of some more users to test whether they really solve the problem.

1\. [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to- test-w...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test- with-5-users/)</comment></comment></comment>


Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> http://timdettmers.com/2017/04/09/which-gpu-for-deep-learning/ <comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud.

I saw a lot of "should we use Cloud, no its crazy a GPU only costs $X". The key is that if you believe GPUs are going to get updated every year, and/or the best thing for ML may change (see TPU and plenty of startups with custom hardware) then suddenly buying hardware for 24? 36? months isn't as obvious.

We (and AWS and Microsoft) have K80s because Maxwell wasn't a sufficiently friendly all around part. We're all going to offer Pascal P100s and in the future V100s. The challenge for buying your own is that P100s are available now-ish and V100s may be available in less than 12 months.

Buying a P100 or similar part today doesn't mean it won't still be working in a year, but it will suddenly mean you've bought a part that now has much worse !/$ in just N months. If you have an accounting team that is spreading your $Xk over those 36 months, the reality is that you have two options: tell everyone they have to make use the old parts ("we're not buying new GPUs until it's been 36 months!") or realize you're going to get a lot less use out of them.

To be clear, the progress in this space is really impressive. _And_ the same problem above applies to us (the cloud providers). Despite my obvious bias, if I were fired today, I'd be renting to do deep learning just based on the roadmap alone (not to mention the ability to suddenly spin up and down).

Again, Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and want to sell you things that train ML models :).

<comment><USER4> The problem is that a month of GPU time on a cluster can buy you the hardware itself. If you are doing serious deep learning work it's just not cost effective at this point. If the costs come down by half or more, it may start looking viable for people who need a lot of resources.

<comment><USER3> Can you explain your math? A K80 on GCE is $.7/hr x 730 => $511/month if you were really 24x7. A K80 (and really we sell them by the die not the board) is more than $1000.

I don't disagree that a consumer board is about that price, but they're not apples to apples. (Either in memory size, reliability or both). I'm fine with that being the real complaint: (major) cloud providers only sell the Tesla class boards, and they're really expensive ;).

<comment><USER5> > but they're not apples to apples

It would be nice to see Nvidia or someone expand on this, so that users who have to make this choice can do so without guessing. If Google or AWS or M$ could publish reliability information, that'd be cool too.

Illustrative case: I run Monte Carlo work on GPUs and administer a local compute cluster. I tested a workload on a 16 GB P100 and a GTX 1080. A 12 GB P100 costs (academic, EU) 5000 euros while the latter costs 700 euros, but the performance difference is about 2x. Still, when we ask Nvidia reps, they say not to bother installing GTX cards in our cluster, because they aren't designed for 24/7 work, not commercializable etc. Even so, the GTX would have to burn out 3 times before the choice of P100 breaks even. Burning out three times means GTX 1080, then 1180, 1280 etc.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for the answer. When you say performance difference is 2x, I presume the P100 is 2x faster than the 1080 in training epoch time?

<comment><USER5> yep

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is an interesting offer by Hetzner that's available for some month now.

They provide a dedicated server with a GTX 1080 for ~99e/month (111$/month) with adequate CPU (i7-6700), 64G Memory, 500G disk space and 50TB Traffic - there are also on-demand offerings by GCP and AWS, but I do not think they can match the offer by Hetzner: [https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex51ss...](https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex51ssd- gpu). Keep in mind that I am talking about R&D, in particular training of networks - which has lower expectations on availability than e.g. later inference.

Disclosure: I am _not_ affiliated with Hetzner and did not test it yet, but I have a ~40e dedicated machine there for occasional number crunching and everything worked so far (no availability or hardware issues).

Furthermore I am not sure about the exact specifications (Memory-Size of GPU) or if there are different types of 1080s that differ significantly in Deep Learning Performance (see also: [https://github.com/jcjohnson/cnn- benchmarks](https://github.com/jcjohnson/cnn-benchmarks)).

<comment><USER8> The electricity will likely cost a significant chunk of that, if one were running that full time in Germany.

0.5 * 24 * 30 * (30 c/kWH) = $108

However, it'd be a third of that in the states (may be cheaper in WA).

<comment><USER9> Industrial consumers in Germany pay nowhere near 30c/kwh, more like 10-15c. (depending on size and exemptions)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interestingly, AMD is claiming that their upcoming Vega Frontier Editions chips outperform Nvidia's current P100 Deep Learning chip.

[http://hexus.net/media/uploaded/2017/5/30f5633b-1bbf-49b7-9f...](http://hexus.net/media/uploaded/2017/5/30f5633b-1bbf-49b7-9f31-7890e20db28f.jpg)

<comment><USER11> I think signs are pointing to Vega being a HPC beast. But what they really need is the software ecosystem and support, and so far that hasn't been there. So while the new hardware looks cool, I'm really waiting for an announcement that OpenCL tooling got a lot better, or that CUDA is getting first-party support from AMD, anything to tempt those customers away from nvidia.

<comment><USER12> CUDA is getting support from AMD in the form of HIP. In my opinion, the problem is different: even if AMD supported CUDA proper, that still won't lead them anywhere because the reason people use Nvidia is not so much CUDA itself (although it has good tools) but Nvidia's proprietary libraries: cuBLAS, cuDNN, cuFFT etc.

If AMD provided good implementations of similar libraries with OpenCL and shipped them with their drivers (similarily to Nvidia's CUDA toolkit) that would be much better than supporting CUDA, but leaving the ecosystem bare bones again...

<comment><USER13> [https://github.com/clMathLibraries](https://github.com/clMathLibraries)

<comment><USER12> There are even better independent open-source equivalents for some of those, but that is not the point. Good luck compiling some of AMD's clMath libraries without issues. Then, you're "just" left with packaging them properly. Performance is also not stellar compared to Nvidia. Meanwhile, when you install Nvidia's toolkit, you're set with everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If anyone here doesn't want to spend money on $500+ GPU (or the $1k+ ones!), then I'd suggest getting the lowest tier Nvidia GPU for $100~[1]

If that GPU is a real bottleneck for you, then you're much better off spending money on GCP/AWS's GPU offerings. That's because consumer GPUs get superseeded every year and online offering's price will only go down.

So you can spend 10% of $1k every year and keep getting better return on compute / dollar every year.

[1]:[https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681448...](https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487296)

<comment><USER15> >If that GPU is a real bottleneck for you, then you're much better off spending money on GCP/AWS's GPU offerings. That's because consumer GPUs get superseeded every year and online offering's price will only go down.

GCP and AWS have old GPUs and they are really really expensive. If you expect to run workloads for a long time, it would be more cost efficient to buy your own hardware.

<comment><USER14> They are very, very few cases where getting an expensive GPU - anything more than a Nvidia 1060 would make financial sense.

The 1050 is a beginner card is it is perfectly fine to learn and run small nets. More importantly, you can decide if machine learning is for you. Then, comes to second investment, which is actually running real-world models.

Although the online GPU offering is expensive (you can also look around for cloud GPUs with lower SLA requirements for a lot cheaper) you'd be using them for a lot lesser time.

Even if you go with the big three, you can get good pricing if you look around. AWS has a single GPU with 1,536 CUDA cores and 4GB RAM. Looking at the Spot Pricing[1] which is $0.25 an hour, you can get 3000 hours of compute for $750, which is the price of 1080Ti (which is the most cost effective card on the market today).

Now, I would say, 3000 hours is more than enough time one needs to run whatever they want to. You can get a lot more if you go with some other service other than the big three.

If your usage exceeds that, then you are probably using it for commercial purposes, in which case you need to account for a lot more variables (downtime, maintenance, etc). Then you should also consider the deprecating perf/$ your GPU gives you every year over the new ones in the market - especially since the perf jump is a lot more than what we're seeing with CPUs.

If you are doing it for learning, I'd say you're doing something wrong, because you shouldn't need that much power. Also, consider the electricity costs and possible over usage of your computer.

[1]:[https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/) (check US East N. Virginia)

<comment><USER15> There are two problems with your approach:

* Setting up machine on AWS is more complicated than locally, and requires some admin skills.

* If you use spot instances, you need to handle checkpointing, which requires persistent storage, and all of this stuff requires even more admin skills

The goal of a person who starts working with deep learning is to learn deep learning, not how to setup machines, manage them, work with checkpoints, etc.

Also, don't forget that there's a large market for used GPUs and you can get real bargains.

<comment><USER14> >Setting up machine on AWS is more complicated than locally, and requires some admin skills.

There are tons of guides online where you can learn how to do so in <5 mins. Setting up the computer by yourself is more complicated I would say, and would take a first timer days rather than hours.

>If you use spot instances, you need to handle checkpointing

Again, not a big deal to learn.

>The goal of a person who starts working with deep learning is to learn deep learning, not how to setup machines, manage them, work with checkpoints, etc.

I mean, if you're buying a GPU and setting it up, you're more than likely assembling the computer by yourself. You'll also have to _maintain_ it properly. Then you'll have to look for correct drivers and other software which can get frustrating (it did for me).

On the other hand, I just could use a step by step process for the AWS instances since they had a few specific types of GPUs and I didn't have to even think, just copy/paste the commands from the webpage to the terminal. There are even AMIs which setup everything for you, which would require _even_ less effort, but I don't trust them so I go with a clean disk.

Moreover, learning how to use AWS is a much more valuable skill than putting together computers so time well invested I would say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:04az_uB...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:04az_uBF27EJ:timdettmers.com/2017/04/09/which- gpu-for-deep-learning/)

<comment><USER17> Thank you, I was getting Error 500 - Hug Of Death

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My recommendation: 1080 Ti or 1080 GTX.

There is no reason, not to get a Pascal GPU at this point, the performance is simply superior. For a lot of models, we are talking about days of training time, so 20%-30% time saving is significant, and we are not even touching the part that large VRAM enables bigger batch size which you won't get in middle/low end GPUs.

</comment><comment><USER19> tldr: GTX1080ti

They're fairly easy to get now too, in the beginning it was rather hard to get them.

<comment><USER20> You can get an 8GB GTX 1080 for 2/3rds the price and it offers 80% of the performance. If you don't need the 11GB of memory, it's a steal. If you're building a rig with multiple cards, 1080 might be an economical way to get great performance. If you're looking for maximal compute density, 1080 Ti is the way to go.

<comment><USER21> It will also require much more power and cooling this system will rise a cost and reduce stability of the system.

<comment><USER20> The power consumption of a 1080 is actually lower than a 780 or 980, plus a 1080 Ti uses about 50W more power when pinned, so I'm not sure where you're coming from here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> GTX drivers become crippled when the card detects the presence of a virtual environment. This means you can't run GTX in the cloud, otherwise, cloud GPU prices would be much lower. Without the availability of GTX, we've been trying just about everything at Paperspace to bring prices down and make the cloud a viable option for GPU compute. The argument being, there are real benefits to running in the cloud like on-demand scalability, lack of upkeep, minimal upfront costs, and of course, running a production application :) There are other indirect cost saving eg power consumption which can be quite significant when training models for long periods of time. Would love to see a total cost of ownership figure added to this post.

<comment><USER23> Citation please for the crippled drivers?

<comment><USER22> The citation is we're building a GPU cloud and have tested almost every GPU in existence :) Just kidding, here are a few examples:

[http://vfio.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/vfiovga- faq.html](http://vfio.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/vfiovga-faq.html) [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2twq7q/nvidia_appare...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2twq7q/nvidia_apparently_pulls_some_shady_shit_to_do/) [https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt- users/2014-October/m...](https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt- users/2014-October/msg00029.html)

I just quickly googled this so there are probably better sources. Some of these are old but I can tell you firsthand that this is still the case.

There are workarounds for certain hypervisors (KVM mainly) but it's very unlikely that this would be deployed in a production environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's a much more cost effective answer: Use [https://cloud.google.com/tpu/](https://cloud.google.com/tpu/)

Unless you have an unlimited supply of free electricity and don't care about the increased hardware management overhead, it's a waste of money to buy Pascal GPUs for large-scale deep learning.

The following cards have much more optimized deep learning silicon and are publicly available /right now/:

\- Nvidia Tesla V100 (Tensor cores only: 120 TFLOPS FP16)

\- Google TPU2 (180 TFLOPS FP16)

Additionally, Intel Xeon chips with the Nervana deep learning accelerator built-in will probably be available early next year.

If you must control the physical hardware yourself and can't use cloud services, go buy Tesla V100s or wait for the Nervana Xeons.

<comment><USER25> That makes no sense as the TPU2 is not really out yet for actual consumers. AFAIK it's only in closed alpha right now, so if you're actually doing stuff right now it's not a real option. There's also no pricing so the "cost effective" remark can't really be seen.

<comment><USER26> If and when it is for sale, I wonder how many problems with the hardware and drivers customers will face over the years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What impact does Google's Tensor Processing Unit have on the answer to this question?

<comment><USER28> Well, AFAIK, it isn't for sale; you have to go through their cloud offering. So it's not impactful at all on what GPU to get.

<comment><USER14> I mean it can have an effect on where the answer is to not get a GPU at all and use the cloud service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Mirror: [https://web.archive.org/web/20170522190506/http://timdettmer...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170522190506/http://timdettmers.com/2017/04/09/which- gpu-for-deep-learning/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Question: if I'm learning about neural networks and want to e.g. train a network to recognize MNIST digits, do I need a discrete graphics card (probably attached to a VPS that I would rent)? Or can I use the i5 Kaby Lake (which has an integrated GPU) in my laptop to train my network?

<comment><USER31> As other people have said, for MNIST, CPU is fine. One core. You can get over 90% accuracy with a network with just 1 hidden layer with only a few seconds of training. Or something like that. If you've never played with MNIST before, it's kind of amazing how easy it is. For instance, the following idea "works", in that you get results that are pretty bad, but much better than chance. (Even more than 50% right, I think.) Suppose you have 10 arrays:

zeros: each element of this array is a picture of a "0" ones: each element is a picture of a "1" ... nines: each element is a "9"

Compute the average of each array: the "average" 0, the average 1, and so on. Then classify new digits based on which average element they are closest to, using Euclidean distance. This sounds way too dumb to do any good, but the MNIST digits are normalized so well that this actually does something.

Even better: you can have a neural "network" that has zero hidden layers. This actually achieves almost respectable performance, believe it or not.

<comment><USER32> A 0 hidden layer NN is just a linear (or logistic) regression.

On MNIST I think you get something like 60% accuracy.

<comment><USER31> Yes, it is just logistic regression. I just dug up my old code from a few weeks (months?) ago, and it seems that somewhere around 90% is not too hard. 60% is way too low, unless I'm measuring wrong somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Short answer is that you can save weeks of work putting together a machine by just buying from Lambda (We of course use the 1080Tis):

[https://lambdal.com/deep-learning-devbox](https://lambdal.com/deep-learning- devbox)

On average it takes a SWE or DL engineer a few days to set up a unit from scratch. Your company probably burns over $2,000/day so every day your DL engineer or SWE isn't up and running costs you money.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm guessing you don't... you use the cloud, right?

<comment><USER35> For a hobbyist, it probably makes sense to just use some GPU instances on AWS. But it doesn't really take that long for it to become cost-effective to buy a GPU. It only takes a couple of months of full-time use before it becomes cost- effective to purchase the GPU. Even if you're building the entire machine from scratch it takes under a year. (At least, that was my estimate when I was building a rig earlier this year.) If you're doing any serious deep learning projects it's pretty easy to have a model training nearly 100% of the time.

<comment><USER36> Not to mention, I can imagine it's frustrating uploading many gigs of data to amazon.

<comment><USER7> It is not that bad. Either you've your training data local (unlikely) or it is already available in the "cloud" (i.e. a public-facing service). Let's say a typical training set (raw data) is 100G.

Assuming 2.5MB/s Upload capacity with local data, you've uploaded it to your deep learning machine in half a day (100000 / 2.5 / 3600 ~ 11 hours) - <USER2> is not that much, as most of your time will be used for development and fine- tuning of your deep learning tool chain anyway. In most cases the data is accessible via a public-facing service, and assuming 1GBit/s bandwidth you've downloaded 100G in 13 minutes (100000 / 125 / 60 ~ 13 minutes).

<comment><USER37> You forgot the AWS Internet egress charge per GB..

<comment><USER7> What do you mean?

I know egress is one of the more expensive cloud services (e.g. compared to compute and storgage) at AWS, GCP, etc., but if I upload data to my learning system that's ingress AFAIK which is mostly free or less expensive. Btw. current Egress is like 0.1$/GB, so 100G ~ 10$.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying you should always train in the cloud, but I do not think slower Upload or Ingress are the limiting factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm wondering about two things:

1\. Can laptops with, say NVidia 1070 or 1080 GPUs keep them cool at their stock frequencies for a few hours? My work laptop with non-U i7 (Thinkpad T440p) starts thermal throttling in just a few minutes when I compile something large.

2\. Wouldn't two NVidia 1060 or 1070 outperform a single 1080 for training, assuming batch size is kept low enough so that each batch fits in a single card's memory?

<comment><USER39> 1\. Depends on the laptop really. Some have better cooling than others. I'm training models for a few hours every day with an asus rog that has a 1060, and I'm not experiencing any throttling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Site is slammed, but I think this is from a couple years ago. -- Ah, it's been updated.

Is there anything better now than the GTX 1080 Ti?

<comment><USER41> The Titan Xp is better, but it's not so much better that it's worth almost twice the price.

<comment><USER42> Two 1080TIs are way better than one Titan Xp and cost about the same (2x$700 vs $1200). Each TI has 11GB of RAM vs the TitanX's 12GB, and each TI is nearly as fast.

At the NVIDIA conference all the second tier hosting companies were promoting the P100 (at NVIDIAs insistence) but when pressured admitted that their big customers now deploy 1080TIs. Paying for P100s is sort of a clown move even if you're spending someone else's money. The P100 starts at like 10x the price of the 1080TI and isn't much faster and again has just 12GB of RAM (16GB if you pay $4000 more, ludicrous)

<comment><USER43> Usually, but the caveat is they are only better for workloads that are easily paralizable (like hyperparameter search). Multi-gpu models are still very complicated in my experience. And the Xp is a bit faster and has 1gb more memory, which is useful in some edge cases (like large or 3D covnets)

Also if there do build with multiple gpus, watch out that you can give both cards a full 16 pci lanes, not a given in a lot of motherboards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> GTX 1070 8GB has the best performance/cost at May 2017 and a good laptop costs as much as an equivalent desktop at below $2k.

</comment><comment><USER45> I recently bought an Alienware 13 R3 for deep learning (okay, and gaming...) and I'm quite satisfied so far. In addition to the built-in Titan 1060 with 6 GB of DDR5 it's possible to get an external graphics accelerator for additional performance as well (I haven't tried this yet though).

</comment><comment><USER8> The trouble with getting Pascal now is that the card may end up depreciating very very sharply in a year, when Volta with its Tensor unit comes out.

</comment><comment><USER46> [http://ambermd.org/gpus/benchmarks.htm](http://ambermd.org/gpus/benchmarks.htm)

</comment><comment><USER47> How hard does the GPU work on these tasks? Is it Bitcoin mining level power consumption?

<comment><USER19> All out. This is typical:

      nvidia-smi
      Tue May 23 01:41:58 2017
      +</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----+
      | NVIDIA-SMI 375.39                 Driver Version: 375.39                    |
      |</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+
      | GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
      | Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
      |</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====|
      |   0  Graphics Device     Off  | 0000:01:00.0      On |                  N/A |
      | 57%   84C    P2   257W / 250W |  11010MiB / 11171MiB |     95%      Default |
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+

That's during training. I'm running a minimal desktop to have maximum ram for the minibatch (and it still isn't enough but it will have to do).

</comment><comment><USER48> No mention of k80's k40's...

<comment><USER37> K80s and K40s have a K. That's two generations old. We are currently on P and about to be V. If you think K80s are good, you are far _far_ behind the times in machine learning. A single 1080Ti even in a 4U server outperforms 2 K80s.

<comment><USER49> If you're running a rackmount server, you need the Tesla series.

We found that the GeForces tend to burn out when under heavy load, whereas we've not had a single Tesla series ever burn out.

<comment><USER50> Ooh ooh tell us more. Which GeForces and which server chassis? Adequate power supply?

<comment><USER48> Yes - more details please.

We've been using Titan-X and 1080 Maxwells in some Broadberry 4u chassis for the last year/18mths and we've had no burnouts so far.

I'm buying replacement pascals, and I can't justify teslas when I can get 8 geforces for the price of 1...

<comment><USER49> Dell R720 / R730s, dual GPU (typically with K40m or K80) in there with 1100W dual redundant PSUs and the GPU enablement kit. We also set our fans to constant 70% min, to keep the airflow good.

On some servers we introduced the GTX 1080, either along-side a K40/K80 or two per chassis (see [http://arnon.dk/how-does-the-nvidia-gtx-1080-stack-up- agains...](http://arnon.dk/how-does-the-nvidia-gtx-1080-stack-up-against-the- nvidia-tesla-k40/)).

They actually work 15% faster on average compared to the Tesla K series (Remember it's a 5 year old card), but they just stop working after a few months, or return inconsistent results for some operations.

Now, we're not doing graphics with them. We have a GPU database called SQream DB - and we depend on the results to be correct. In the end, they didn't make a lot of sense for us to deploy in a production environment, so back to the Tesla series we went.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The link is not working for me now.</comment>


On the importance of gestures in public speaking - <AUTHOR> http://www.andrespagella.com/important-gestures-public-speaking <comment><USER2> Gesticulation helps the speaker as well. A recent thesis (unpublished) in my graduate program examined the effect of allowing a lecturer to move around and gesticulate vs. sitting still at a microphone. There were positive effects both in the viewer seeing the movement (not surprising) and, more interestingly, the lecture recorded with movement was better (subjective rating, comprehension) even when the viewer could not see the speaker.

<comment><USER3> I ran a similar, although not so scientific experiment a few years ago. I tried to pick up girls in clubs with and without gestures when I was talking to them. This was over a one month period. The actual numbers are classified, but gestures won.

<comment><USER4> I don't think 1 to 0 is really a reliable result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It reminds me of the "suggestions" given to Dwight in the Office (when has to give a public presentation in S02E07), where he's given a video of Mussolini as an example of a speaker with a great body language to emulate - so he does, and it ends up with a wild cheer from his audience.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwights_Speech>

If you haven't seen it, you should - if only to look at the arms movement and remember it's usually _not_ a good idea to look like a fascist dictator when you give a public presentation in the real life!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah, that's a good one! I haven't seen that one. That's exactly why I insist in being careful on how you use gestures - they need to be very subtle, otherwise you'll look, like you've just said, like a fascist dictator :)

<comment><USER5> Indeed - the enthusiasm to use body gestures should be limited to a level compatible with the audience.

As the author explained, it depends on the audience culture.

Suggesting a liberated use of body language to a hacker audience may result in many Dwight-like performances...

(good tip - don't stroke the table with your fist closed)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you have an example of a talk by Zuckerberg that you find brilliant?

<comment><AUTHOR> Zuckerberg being a terrible speaker (2010): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hu3iG8B2g>

Zuckerberg being a brilliant speaker (2011): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OQQ4E2k0Mk>

Notice how he seems to be more confident and relaxed when he speaks. Unlike in the AllThingsD interview, this time he uses pauses and gestures effectively as well.

<comment><USER7> Just to be clear, that's not Zuckerberg for the first five minutes in the 2011 video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know if the important thing is gestures _per se_ so much as it is a sense of the theatrical.

Actors are unique in the performing arts because they "play" two instruments simultaneously. The first and most obvious one is their voice. But the second is their body -- how they move, carry themselves, and relate physically to the other people on stage. A great actor can take the same words another actor just read and turn them into a completely different character, just by the way they use their body.

When people think about public speaking they mostly focus on the voice, but just like in acting the body is important too. The great speakers know how to use the voice and the body together to reinforce the messages each sends to the audience.

If you want to develop your skills with voice and body, acting classes can be a great way to do that, as can training in improv.

<comment><USER9> _Actors are unique in the performing arts because they "play" two instruments simultaneously_

Opera singers are like theatre actors except they need to make music too.

<comment><USER10> Body language and gesture is also important in a wide variety of musical performances. Especially since music, rhythm, dance, and body movement are all so deeply intertwined. Perhaps actors and opera singers (which would also include actors in musicals... sing, act, AND dance) might manifest these traits more obviously, but body language is important to nearly all human performance.

<comment><USER9> As a musician (not a singer), I communicate with other musicians largely via body language, but the audience is largely oblivious to it. Only another musician -- and mostly just those who have played with me -- would understand the difference between lifting my bow 1 cm or 2 cm off the strings of my violin.

<comment><USER10> This is true, there certainly are many cases where the audience is oblivious. But imagine the stereotypical rock/metal band playing. Their stance, how the strut around, how they move, how their hair moves all effect how the audience reacts to the performance.

<comment><USER9> I generally count rock stars in the category of "celebrity actors", not "musicians".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The videos at <http://videolectures.net/> often pick out a momentary dramatic gesture for the thumbnail image. Out of context, they sometimes seem pretty extreme.

I pulled out a selection here: <http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/tmp/vl_gestures.html> (I'm the last one, I believe gesturing about orthogonal vectors during an intro to machine learning.)

</comment><comment><USER12> One thing to be careful about, is that gesturing is something that requires cultural context.

The Western cultures see gesturing as a positive thing, but Eastern cultures (from what I've seen) seem to eschew such tendencies.

Blindly applying a "more gestures are better" kind of rule is likely to run into issues eventually.

<comment><USER13> Very true. Here in Japan I've been told my natural gestures when speaking enthusiastically are at risk of being overbearing, so I've had to learn to control them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very interesting how you went on to note various speakers – specifically how their speeches seemed so different sans gesticulation. Thanks for sharing. (That must have taken a lot of time!)

</comment><comment><USER15> I hate speakers who use gestures and other gimmicks. They make feel like I'm being manipulated. Sometimes I'll close my eyes and try to focus only on what's being said. Other times I'll just leave.

</comment><comment><USER16> Would be interesting to see scans of your notes.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone notice "O' Sole Mio" in the background?</comment>


Why Rackspace Is Suing The Most Notorious Patent Troll In America - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/why-rackspace-sued-the-most-notorious-patent-troll-in-america/ <comment><USER2> > In actuality, it is a bit more complicated. Our dealings with this > particular troll reach back to December 2010 when IP Navigation Group (IP > Nav), as agent for a supposedly secret patent owner, now known as Parallel > Iron, accused Rackspace of patent infringement. IP Nav told us that they > could not divulge the details of their infringement claims – not even the > patent numbers or the patent owner – unless we entered into a "forbearance > agreement" – basically, an agreement that we would not sue them. IP Nav was > worried that as soon as we found out what their patents and claims actually > were, Rackspace would sue to invalidate their patents or for a declaration > that Rackspace does not infringe. We were unwilling to enter into such a > one-sided agreement, so we negotiated a mutual forbearance agreement that > required either party to give 30 days' notice before bringing suit.

That's some shady shit right there.

<comment><USER3> I can't understand why anyone would sign away their right to counter-sue in order to obtain information on something which can't possibly damage them until the information is disclosed anyway (IANAL)

<comment><USER2> It might be the plaintiffs way of identifying targets that don't have the will or money to litigate. A larger company isn't going to sign one of these--it doesn't buy you barely anything.

<comment><USER4> So does it by you a lot of something, or nothing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, patent trolls have reached the level of public relations foil. I think its great that Rackspace is suing these guys but I found the press release made me feel like I do when somebody is trying to impress me with all of the charities they've donated money to. Mutual forbearance agreement? Seriously? Why not sue them right then and there when they foisted that bit of "strategy" on you and charged them with criminal extortion?

My reasoning is like this, either you infringe or you don't. So the patent holder can say "We believe you infringe claims x, y, and z on patents q, r, and s." Or they can't. So if someone tells you infringe but they won't tell you the patent or the claims, and they are threatening to sue anyway, that is a protection racket and actionable under the RICO statutes as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER6> We couldn't sue because we didn't know what we would sue on. They wouldn't even tell us the patent numbers - so we didn't have the knowledge necessary to even file a complaint.

As for suing because of the forbearance agreement, they try to write these things so they are _just_ on the side of the line, and it is really hard to make a RICO suit stick (see Cisco and Innovatio).

We, of course, think that it is just BS. Now we are on record saying so.

\- Van (Rackspace VP of IP)

<comment><USER5> Excellent reference, thanks Van. This comment from the judge in the WSJ coverage[1] of Cisco _""It is enough for now to determine that Innovatio at least has a plausible argument that its infringement claims are still viable," wrote Judge Holderman. The "licensing campaign is therefore not a sham," he said."_ So did Innovatio include the patent numbers? I have read in other cases that legal test for extortion was "credible but not actionable" threat of exposure. (Crosby vs Upshaw as an example, she wouldn't provide paternity data)

FWIW I've added you to the list of technology companies being harmed by patent extortion (I try to keep my congressional representatives informed in order to disallow them the excuse that they had no idea how bad the problem is)

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732490600457828...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324906004578288370005621206.html)

<comment><USER7> Could I talk you into sharing that list?

I have been thinking I should be more proactive with my congresscritters. It seems I am always sending reactive messages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is awesome to see a company put their money where their mouth is, the good will with the dev community they are building with this will easily exceed the costs of fighting a troll in court.

<comment><USER9> This builds up LOTS of good will with me. But still, I'm not sure you are right. The cost of fighting a troll in court can be shockingly large. If it were worth MORE in public relations than it cost in legal fees then it would obviously be an investment they should make, just to become more profitable. I doubt that... I think it is worth a lot in public relations, but less than the same amount of cash would buy in advertising. Nevertheless, it is worth it for two reasons: (1) because it scares patent trolls off of Rackspace in the future, and (2) because it's good for the world, even if it isn't profitable. Sometimes you just have to do things that aren't profitable.

<comment><USER10> I feel obliged to do business with Newegg and now Rackspace whenever I am looking for something they provide. Maybe their prices are higher than some other companies. If that's the cost of defending against patent trolls, well it's minuscule compared to the benefit.

Also Newegg and Rackspace are incredibly cheap so I haven't found anyone that beats their prices anyway. In fact, unless I miscalculated, after I switch from Amazon to Rackspace next week my monthly bill will be lower.

This is above and beyond the "do no evil" motto that Google pretends to uphold. This is actively fighting to improve society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I host at Rackspace. I'm glad (sincerely) that they are using some of my money for things like this. This makes me happy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Whenever I see several different groups behaving in a manner I find obnoxious, I wonder incentives encourage this kind of behavior, and how those incentives might be reduced.

One such way is countersuit, which Rackspace is doing. If everyone (successfully) countersued, the incentive to be a patent troll would diminish.

There might be other ways. Is there some common property patent trolls depend on that might be penalized or forbidden? I've noticed that patent trolls rarely seem to produce anything. Perhaps some sort of "use it or lose it" clause, in which patent holders have a certain amount of time to effectively license their technology to some degree of effectiveness before they can't enforce infringements.

It works in other areas. For instance, in my home state, many people would love to live in the country extremely cheaply, so there's an incentive to set up dubious Christmas tree farms to get nice tax rates. To combat this, you have a certain number of years to turn a profit, and if you don't, you lose the farm credit.

(here's an example of why they do this: [http://www.huntingnet.com/forum/wildlife-management-food- plo...](http://www.huntingnet.com/forum/wildlife-management-food- plots/9023-tax-breaks-starting-tree-farm.html))

<comment><USER13> _> One such way is countersuit, which Rackspace is doing. If everyone (successfully) countersued, the incentive to be a patent troll would diminish._

I was under the impression that these patent troll shell companies are set up so that they have virtually no assets under them. Does countersuing even hurt these shell companies significantly? The only thing I can see countersuits costing patent trolls is time in court (maybe that costs the parent of the shell company money if they operate on a scale where they're hiring lawyers to go sue companies?)

<comment><USER14> Rackspace is more focussed on having the patents declared invalid than hurting the troll any other way. Eventually you'd run out of patents that are even remotely defensible, because they would have to have been filed long before HDFS became as ubiquitous as it is.

<comment><USER15> _Eventually you'd run out of patents that are even remotely defensible..._

The problem is that more are being assigned all of the time. And if the assignee goes bankrupt, trolls can buy the patent rights for a song.

<comment><USER14> Right, but a patent X can only be used to attack technology Y if X predates Y. So once all the pre-Y patents have been struck down you're a lot safer. Even though X might be a totally unoriginal patent, if it predates the technology it's attacking, it might still be hard to defend against. Strike down the patent and it's done - and you cnan't assign another patent in the past.

<comment><USER15> Technologies continue changing. Your core technology may be older, but if you've integrated with some recent Z, you can still be attacked by patent X, even though your core technology is older.

Look at Apple for instance. It is older than all of the patents it is being sued with. Many of the lawsuits that it faces are for cases where the patent is younger than Apple's technology. Apple still gets sued for it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've said this here before more than once. The solution is for tech companies to fund a massive entity who's only purpose in life is to mercilessly sue patent trolls. Destroy them. Go after their patents. Invalidate them. Make it so costly to even attempt to enforce a bullshit patent that they will only dare take that step if they have a really good solid patent.

If the top 100 companies in tech donated just ten million dollars a year to this effort you would instantly have a one billion dollar "kill the trolls" fund. If the fund is not fully consumed during the first year it could become three or four billion in five to seven years. How many trolls are going to be willing to go up against any company with that kind of a war chest to protect it?

Small entities would contribute less. The way I see it, in the US alone, this kind of protection is easily worth $50K to $100K per year for a small entity.

Yes, we are at a point where you might have to consider paying a membership fee to a troll protection association that is equivalent to the salary of a full-time employee. Sad.

The US government ought to also provide a sizable chunk of money to this fund as well as tax-exempt status. Say, a billion dollars a year. Considering the economic damage being done this is chump change. Now you have a kill-the- trolls association that, through public and private funding, could end-up with nearly ten billion dollars in five to seven years. Scary enough?

I am not one for government getting involved in private matters, much less blowing money like they did in Solyndra and others. However, this is a government-sponsored monopoly that they crated. You and I did not create this. This mess is 100% on government hands. And, like most things government does, it eventually went off the rails. It's an absolute mess. They have a responsibility to fix it.

The first step is to grant a sizable amount of money to a private entity that will shield entrepreneurs from trolls. They should hand over the money and get out of the way. Consider it reparations for running such a fucked-up patent office. Then they can go off and take ten years to reform the system.

Oh, yes, they should also make the patent invalidation process 100% free. In other words, anyone should be able to file a patent invalidation action and it should be 100% free. Then we could crowd-source patent invalidation runs on all the patents held by trolls. Form crowd-sourced teams that target trolls and file away.

Seriously folks, this is war. And in war you have to have more powerful weapons than your enemy. The enemy has the power of the monopoly they were granted by the US government. What they don't have is unlimited and massive capital. An association of practicing entities --no trolls allowed-- with billions of dollars available to mount a shield and defend members would be massively intimidating.

The association's mission statement should state that all engagements will have, as a goal, the invalidation of the patents in question. In other words, if you screw with us we will go directly to rip those patents out of your hands. No middle ground. No deals. No mercy. Attacking us means you, as the attacker, risk it all and you better have a real patent.

How many trolls are going to risk that? How many will do it after one, two or several are absolutely decimated in court and their patents invalidated.

One more thing. If a non practicing entity has a patent invalidated they are also put through a bankruptcy style procedure whereby a trustee takes a look at what moneys were derived from licensing the invalid patents. The idea is to refund ill-gotten funds to those who paid the fees.

In other words, hit them with a nuke.

EDIT: Also, on the subject of patent invalidation. This should be ripped out of the hands of the government and run just like a trial. I don't know exactly how it works today, but this is what I have in mind: A judge is appointed to oversee the process. A jury of people well-qualified in the patent's subject matter is assembled. Both parties present their case. The jury deliberates and decides. Fast, efficient and 100% in private hands with the blessings of the US government. Rough strokes.

<comment><USER17> You are overlooking the fact that patent trolls do have real patents.

From the blog post, for example: """ Until Congress reforms the patent laws, companies of all sizes and industries could – and likely will – find themselves in the crosshairs of a greedy patent troll looking for a quick cash-grab. No company is immune, and, sadly, small companies can't afford to fight. If they don't succumb to the troll's demands by settling, they face certain ruin. """

Patent trolls are on the right side of the law. The law is the problem.

And invalidating a worthless patent doesn't harm the troll at all -- no harm in trying, right? They can always get another patent. As non-practiciing entities, they don't have any business at risk. It's asymmetric.

<comment><USER16> No, I am not overlooking that fact. A "real" patent is simply a document that says you were granted one. It says nothing about the quality of the patent or the merit of it at all. I have read through hundreds and hundreds of patents over the years. I can say that the vast majority of them have been gut- wrenching bullshit patents. Yes, yes, an attorney will argue that there are subtleties to the claims that make them unique and patentable. I'm sorry, an engineer knows the real meaning of obvious. Lawyers and the patent examination process obviously don't. For example, the infamous patents on using PWM to modulate LED intensity in order to mix RGB LEDs and create various colors. Utter bullshit. None of them should have been granted. Not one of them. Read them all.

So yes, patent trolls have real patents. That does not mean they are real inventions that were deserving of a patent.

My point is that I would hit NPE's with bullshit patents as hard as possible if they stick their heads out of the sand. If they know you are backed by a multi-billion dollar legal fund with a mandate to invalidate bullshit patents they will only stick their heads out when they have real patents for real inventions. And, you know what, at that point I don't mind. Real invention can be laborious and risky at many levels. And, being that technology has advanced so far, real invention is harder and harder every day because engineering and other disciplines continue to advance.

Practicing or not, if you have a real patent covering a real, no-bullshit real, invention, then that's different. Trolls with bullshit inventions that should have never been granted deserve to have the sewers of Los Angeles dumped into their breakfast each and every morning for the rest of their lives. Since we can't do that, attack them with a multi-billion dollar legal organization that mercilessly goes after their IP assets and seeks nothing less than invalidation.

To me "not obvious to those skilled in the art" means something that has been lost from the process for a long, long time. We need to restore that. The problem is, government will likely take decades to do so, if ever. They can't even pass a damn budget or keep us out of bullshit wars. Now you want them to modify the entire patent system? Right.

The only solution I see is some form of massive legal threat that unifies companies against trolls. It can perhaps go beyond that (some kind of reasonable cross-licensing mechanism between members, etc.). I don't know. Regrettably we need lawyers to craft some of the finer points of something like this.

As an engineer this is incredibly frustrating. I see it as a bunch of lawyers and government bureaucrats fucking with our ability to innovate. I want to create and I want to create with absolute freedom. I want to be a fee man. We are not free at all these days.

I went fishing with my kids today. I had to pay a $50 license fee to be able to go fishing. I have to pay the government for permission to fish. If I needed to fish to feed my family the government could arrest me and fine me further for not having paid them a fee. Luckily I don't need to fish to feed my family. But it is almost surreal to think that the most fundamental act of man, to feed yourself in order to remain alive, requires a license fee paid to government or risk being incarcerated.

Yes, yes, I know about conservation and all of that. The point is that no government agency should be able to get in the way of a person feeding themselves and their family. If that is not a fundamental law of the universe I don't know what could be.

Not the same subject, I know, but it is one of those surreal things to help point out that government actions can have really bad unintended consequences. When it comes to the way patents are being grated what this means is that I am not free to use my brain to create and invent.

If I was completely isolated from society after graduating from college and independently "invented" the idea of sliding a graphical button on a screen I could be sued because I did not apply for a patent. The fact that, as a human being, I can put one idea together with another to create a third idea is being grotesquely violated by bullshit government-grated monopolies. That, is wrong.

That is as much wrong as having to pay the government a license to be able to feed myself or my family. Outside of being able to hunt and forage for food --something every species on this planet does without the need for government authorization and fees-- the one fundamental evolutionary trait that has gotten us here is that we can INVENT. And invent we have. Gloriously. For hundreds of thousands of years. Only now this thing we call government has actually come up with a way to take that from us, regulate it and even have others prevent us from using the fruits of our own mental abilities if they use theirs to come up with the same thing before us.

Have we really evolved?

<comment><USER18> _But it is almost surreal to think that the most fundamental act of man, to feed yourself in order to remain alive, requires a license fee paid to government_

Slightly OT but in this case, given that unrestricted fishing might well cause the fish to go extinct in short order, so nobody can benefit from them to feed their families (see: tragedy of the commons), some form of government regulation might be a pretty good idea, 'fundamental laws' notwithstanding.

<comment><USER16> I think this is where we might differ. I believe that people are fundamentally good. Yes, there's an ass in every crowd, but I really believe most people are good and would voluntarily follow reasonable rules.

That said, I don't have a problem with having carefully chosen and crafted laws that punish bad behavior. In other words, I should be able to go fishing without having to pay the government for a permit.

I'll give you a concrete example of the "people are fundamentally good" idea. Yesterday, as I said, I took the kids fishing to a local lake. When we got there we saw a sign that said something like "<name> Cove closed due to spawning. No boat or fishing". We actually motored by the cove en-route to our spot. There were no signs there and only a couple of buoys marking low submerged rocky formations. Not one person was fishing there. Not one boat entered. There must have been dozens of boats on the lake. This area is very isolated. The closest ramp is nearly five miles away. You could go in there and do as you wish, yet people responsibly respected the request to not do so.

I really don't think most sports fishermen would go out and fish at an industrial scale if permits were not required. Today, you'd easily let everyone know of limits, seasons and issues via email/web methods and the vast majority of people would comply. That's what I believe. I could be wrong.

<comment><USER19> But if ten thousand fundamentally good people go fishing in a river with nine thousand fish, that fish still goes extinct.

And that doesn't account for the one ass who decides to overfish.

<comment><USER16> And a cow is a uniform sphere full of milk.

There's a difference between real life and academic experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was hoping it was Intellectual Ventures.

<comment><USER21> No such thing. It is vultures, as it correctly describes what they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The most notorious patent troll in America is Intellectual Ventures. It's just that because of their clout and their team, they don't get called out.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I'm curious why more smaller and medium sized businesses haven't banded together to form some kind of larger entity to combat these trolls.

There's security in numbers. If I was a patent troll and knew if I was going to sue a company like RackSpace and knew they had 25-50 companies standing behind them with a large pool of legal and financial resources, I'd be more apt to try and find an easier target.

<comment><USER9> > why more smaller and medium sized businesses haven't banded together to form > some kind of larger entity to combat these trolls

Well, one reason is that it may be illegal. We have antitrust laws that prohibit companies that make up a large percentage of an industry from coordinating in certain ways... this is an edge case but might be a problem.

But the main reason is just that it is prohibitively expensive. It's really, really expensive to fight a patent troll, and if you win then they turn out to be a shell company with no assets so you can't be reimbursed for your costs (and probably wouldn't be eligible for that anyway in the US). So for small companies, flying under the radar and hoping they won't notice you seems to be the way to go.

<comment><USER23> yet US has no problem with one company owning the majority of a market ( MS , Google ... ) so much for anti trust ... Small Companies could fund a non profit to help them against trolls, would it be illegal ?

<comment><USER9> I'm not saying that the antitrust laws are written the way _I_ would write them if I were king, but they are rational, if you understand where they are coming from.

They prohibit independent actors from colluding to form a monopoly, but they do not prohibit a company from being successful enough in the marketplace to become an effective monopoly. However, if a company IS that successful, then the laws restrict what the company with monopoly power can do (for instance, they cannot leverage that monopoly to increase their power and market share in a different area of business).

My guess is that funding a nonprofit, something like the EFF or the ACLU but focused specifically on providing legal representation to those sued by patent trolls, would probably be allowed under the law as long as the nonprofit assisted ANY company attacked by a patent troll, not only contributors. If it assisted only contributors, perhaps it could work as some sort of legal insurance policy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can anyone explain if it's possible for this patents to just go from one company to another? Like what's is stopping IP Nav and Parallel Iron from just creating a new corporation and transferring their IP if Rackspace succeeds in this lawsuit?

Seems like they can just start shell companies in order to avoid being counter-sued.

<comment><USER25> Not exactly sure what you're going for, but you sue based on facts as they were at a particular point in time. Transferring a patent or doing a hide the ball move doesn't work so well in court, particularly federal court.

Res judicata is the concept that once a party in a suit has facts determined of a particular situation in one court, that party can't then go into another court and argue the opposite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd love to see a patent troll lose a case, but their breach of contract case seems a bit weak (without seeing the actual contract, since they didn't include 'Exhibit B' in the PDF).

As I understand it:

* Parallel Iron owns IPNav.

* IPNav and Rackspace signed a contract saying that IPNav won't sue Rackspace without giving 30 days notice first.

* Parallel Iron sues Rackspace without giving notice first.

* Rackspace sues Parallel Iron and IPNav for breach of contract.

But IPNav and Parallel Iron are separate legal entities, and so unless Rackspace can argue that they can 'pierce the corporate veil' (which might be difficult if they followed appropriate standards to separate the companies, which I presume lawyer heavy patent trolls would be careful to do) and treat them as the same legal entity, IPNav isn't responsible for Parallel Iron filing the suit, and Parallel Iron isn't subject to the contract entered into by IPNav.

Disclaimer: IANAL

<comment><USER27> Judges aren't stupid. I'd expect a judge to ignore the letter of the contract in such a brazenly obvious case of abuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It would be awesome to see this trend continue; I wouldn't mind seeing big companies suing patent trolls for every possible misstep available.

<comment><USER29> Definitely! Until this do nothing congress gets its act together, it's the only hope we have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm all in favor of fighting groundless patent infringement claims, but a bit surprised to see so much commentary from Rackspace about a pending legal matter. The normal lawyer response would be "we don't comment on pending litigation."

<comment><USER31> It's definitely out of the norm. Especially when the VP of IP (I'm guessing also general counsel) participates in a forum discussion on the topic. Then again, he's the one who can, and is supposed to, speak on such matters for the company.

It could also be an attempt to get Google juice for anyone else looking for info on these jokers.

<comment><USER32> > It could also be an attempt to get Google juice for anyone else looking for > info on these jokers.

It's not that. Schoenbaum (who is General Counsel) has been largely focused on this for Rackspace in DC for a while, and vocal on it over the last year.

[http://www.rackspace.com/blog/author-post- list/?articlesbyau...](http://www.rackspace.com/blog/author-post- list/?articlesbyauthor=alan.schoenbaum)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Respect Rackspace! Maybe I should switch to you from AWS :)

</comment><comment><USER34> Question for someone who knows something about patent law: does Rackspace have a chance of actually making any money here? Simply based on seeing other stories like this, it seems that all these trolls operate through shell companies, which can simply declare bankruptcy without (1) every paying any actual fees and (2) without hurting the parent. Is that true here as well?

</comment><comment><USER35> +1 for Rackspace.

</comment><comment><USER36> Somewhat OT, but I'd love to see the term "patent troll" entered as official legal jargon.

<comment><USER37> It already is, at least IP lawyers should be aquainted with the term, even some scholarly articles at ssrn.com use it. But it probably wouldn't be a prominent term in judgements, because it is too broad and doesn't describe "what the troll did and why it is bad", so it isn't really useful in that sense. I guess the standard formulations would be more like "abusive conduct" etc. (My own jurisdiction isn't angloamerican)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like the use of "duck test" in this. Just like the notorious Interplay manager decreed for the queen animations in Battle Chess... we should get rid of the duck.

</comment><comment><USER39> Where's the petition against patent trolls, America? (Or has this been tried already / would it fail?)

</comment><comment><USER40> Is there a nice legal term for "I hope Rackspace gives them hell"?

<comment><USER41> Yes. "Litigation".

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> scream it from the mountains:

"GET 'EM RACKSPACE!!!"

</comment><comment><USER43> GO RACKSPACE!!!

</comment><comment><USER44> Patent trolls are useless. These people do not innovate at all. They purchase, or file for useless patents, and turn around and sue everyone for the almighty dollar. There has to be a stop, and I applaud Rackspace!</comment>


Show HN: Clippopo – post, watch and share moments in long videos (pre-Beta) - <AUTHOR> https://www.clippopo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's just dawned on me that there should be a place to post, name and share moment in long video. It could be lecture, presentation, review, mashup, etc. from YouTube or another video-sharing platform. And I needed a project to learn Vue.js on (bonus from using reactive framework — smooth switching between clips from one video).

I was so excited of what I get, so decided to share core idea as pre-Beta, with few hardcoded example videos and no user registration. If you fill that you can use it or just would like to see where it goes — please subscribe to be informed when it ready: [http://eepurl.com/gPFUR5](http://eepurl.com/gPFUR5)

Please let me know if there already is such platform and I just don't see it)

I would appreciate any feedback: directly to email@example.com or comment here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Moved to [https://www.clipleap.com/](https://www.clipleap.com/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Twitter bootstrap or material design for your web side-project? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on my new side-project and would love to know what your opinion is on this topic. Which one is more visually attractive to you? <comment><USER2> Bootstrap has better structure then most other UI frameworks, but is built around the fact that you will eventually change the css and images to create your own style. Some of bootstraps styles are pretty limited and bland.

Then there is materializecss that visually is more appealing then bootstap. The color palet alone is enough to consider it, especially if you want to build a flat minimal site. It's also ready to be your full UI experience, but lacks the amount of javascript plug-ins that bootstrap and it's community have built for it(i.e. carousels, popups and some other goodies).

I've never used getskeleton, but its also not necessarily the end all UI solution and is considered a starting point.

Here is a vlog site I built with ROR and materializecss to give you an idea.

[http://dry-dusk-26762.herokuapp.com/](http://dry-dusk-26762.herokuapp.com/)

Boostrap plugins: [http://www.jqueryscript.net/tags.php?/Bootstrap/](http://www.jqueryscript.net/tags.php?/Bootstrap/)

Materializecss: [http://materializecss.com/](http://materializecss.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I started with Bootstrap but ended up with this one - [http://www.getskeleton.com](http://www.getskeleton.com) \- as it's just 12kb uncompressed and unminified, and one file, very small but it covers enough to be productive and look nice by default.</comment>


Bob Mansfield, Apple's SVP of Hardware Engineering, to Retire - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/06/28Bob-Mansfield-Apples-Senior-Vice-President-of-Hardware-Engineering-to-Retire.html

<comment><USER2> A big loss to Apple. I guess he'll see them through iPhone 5 (and maybe the other new thing that's coming for Q4) and then head into the sunset.

When I was at Apple a good friend asked Eddie Cue what it was like during the dark days (pre-Jobs return). He said it was still stocked with some bright people who were suffocated by crummy management. Bob joined in 1999 and set about changing that. Never met him, but I don't know anyone with a bad word to say about him.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I the only one hoping his retirement leads to a second career doing voiceover work?

<comment><USER4> I clicked on the thread to leave this exact comment. I will miss his homely voice on Apple's product videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hadn't seen this closing paragraph before: "Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad."

When did they switch out the "Apple ignited the personal computer revolution..."?

<comment><USER6> Somewhere between selling 3 million iPads in 80 days [1] and selling 1.7M iPhone 4 [2].

[1] [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/06/22Apple-Sells- Three-...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/06/22Apple-Sells-Three- Million-iPads-in-80-Days.html) [2] [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/06/28iPhone-4-Sales- Top...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/06/28iPhone-4-Sales- Top-1-7-Million.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Steven Sinofsky is head of Microsoft Windows, the best-selling and most profitable operating system with 80% marketshare among all devices, and that's before they launch a new desktop and mobile operating system.

Dan Riccio will be head of Apple Hardware Engineering, which make the best- selling and most profitable hardware for phones and tablets, along with best- selling, best-designed, and most-profitable laptops, whether you want to install Windows or run Mac OS X.

Interesting to know that in Apple vs Microsoft, Hardware vs Software, the heads of these franchises are both alumni of UMass Amherst.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like he escaped his remaining pair of $58M golden handcuffs. Well done! Enjoy!

 _…and will be granted an additional 100,000 shares in 2014 should he stay with company…_ – [http://www.macrumors.com/2011/04/27/apple-svp-bob- mansfield-...](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/04/27/apple-svp-bob-mansfield- sells-off-99-of-aapl-shares/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I am in shock. He doesn't seem like a guy that would retire at such a young age. He's such a workaholic that I thought he would work well into his 70s. =\

<comment><USER10> Now he can work on whatever he wishes to.. Why do you assume he will just sit on a couch?

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry, my comment was aimed for someone that has worked with Mansfield at Apple before. This is not a place to start a flame war, take that stuff elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The last 5 years must have been a thrilling but exhausting ride for him. Wishing him a nice retirement.

</comment><comment><USER12> UT grad - Hook 'em Bob. Thanks for your contributions to some great technologies. ~..~

<comment><USER13> Hook Em!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bob was the most likable guy from all the public Apple guys for me, YMMV.

(Not comparing with Jobs etc -- just talking about "likable person" factor).

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh fuck. We are completely utterly, fucking, fucked.</comment>


Google now warns you if you are under a State-Sponsored Attack - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/05/google-now-warns-you-if-it-suspects-youre-the-target-of-a-state-sponsored-attack/

<comment><USER2> For everyone else: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jjijpihkcmlpfmibgg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jjijpihkcmlpfmibggkndgcdmdfeefnf)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not the same. See: [http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2012/06/security- wa...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2012/06/security-warnings-for- suspected-state.html)</comment></comment>


Leading scientists say backscatter X-ray may be far more dangerous than thought - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/assets/news/2010/05/17/concern.pdf

<comment><USER2> That letter is from April. The FDA wrote a response last month: [http://www.fda.gov/Radiation- EmittingProducts/RadiationEmitt...](http://www.fda.gov/Radiation- EmittingProducts/RadiationEmittingProductsandProcedures/SecuritySystems/ucm231857.htm)

 _The recommended limit for annual dose to the skin for the general public is 50,000 µSv. The dose to the skin from one screening would be approximately 0.56 µSv when the effective dose for that same screening would be 0.25 µSv. Therefore the dose to skin for the example screening is at least 89,000 times lower than the annual limit._

Most of the concerns in the letter are addressed. It's easy to spread FUD, but these devices are likely safe. Other organizations and governments have evaluated their safety independently.

<comment><USER3> It does not matter if they are safe (which they aren't), it matters that they be removed.

A little fud now and then is a good thing.

<comment><USER4> If you're willing to say anything to make the other side look bad, why should anyone give you credence?

<comment><USER3> There is a big difference between a little fud and being willing to say anything. These machines have been called, by a reputable scientist, as potentially very dangerous. I see no problem making sure everybody knows that they are dangerous, nor do I particular care to present both sides of the argument.

<comment><USER2> _These machines have been called, by a reputable scientist, as potentially very dangerous._

And 1 out of 5 dentists recommend sugar gum. There are enough scientists in the world that you can always find one who shares your belief. Scientific consensus is a much more reliable indicator of correct beliefs.

 _...nor do I particular care to present both sides of the argument._

I can think of half a dozen pieces of evidence that would change my belief about whether or not backscatter devices are safe. What evidence would you need to convince you that they are safe?

<comment><USER3> This isn't about whether they are safe or not (a subject I don't give much of anything about), but about getting them banned. If we can't get them banned for privacy issues (as they should be) but we can get them banned for something else, then I will take that.

And it was a leading scientist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found the most interesting part of this to be the end when they list one of the concerns as Software. For those who want a point of reference of what _could_ go wrong check out the Therac-25 story <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25>

<comment><USER6> I had the exact same thought.

"Because this device can scan a human in a few seconds, the X-ray beam is very intense. Any glitch in power at any point in the hardware (or more importantly in software) that stops the device could cause an intense radiation dose to a single spot on the skin."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The document was linked here before but is very detailed and interesting, even naming specific issues:

A) The large population of older travelers, >65 years of age, is particularly at risk from the mutagenic effects of the X-rays based on the known biology of melanocyte aging.

B) A fraction of the female population is especially sensitive to mutagenesis provoking radiation leading to breast cancer. Notably, because these women, who have defects in DNA repair mechanisms, are particularly prone to cancer, X-ray mammograms are not performed on them. The dose to breast tissue beneath the skin represents a similar risk.

C) Blood (white blood cells) perfusing the skin is also at risk.

D) The population of immunocompromised individuals--HIV and cancer patients (see above) is likely to be at risk for cancer induction by the high skin dose.

E) The risk of radiation emission to children and adolescents does not appear to have been fully evaluated.

F) The policy towards pregnant women needs to be defined once the theoretical risks to the fetus are determined.

G) Because of the proximity of the testicles to skin, this tissue is at risk for sperm mutagenesis.

H) Have the effects of the radiation on the cornea and thymus been determined?

<comment><USER8> I've been told by an engineer friend of mine that the radiation dose these scanners deliver was dwarfed by the in-flight cosmic irradiation.

He didn't give me numbers, though. It would be nice if a radiotherapist (or another expert) could chime in on this topic.

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

edit: answering my own question: he's wrong.

from [1] :

>The estimated occupational effective dose for the aircraft crew (A 320) working 500 h per year was 1.64 mSv.

> Other experiments, or dose rate measurements with the neutron dosimeter, > consisting of LR-115 track detector and boron foil BN-1 or 10B converter, > were performed on five intercontinental flights.

> Comparison of the dose rates of the non-neutron component (low LET) and the > neutron one (high LET) of the radiation field at the aircraft flight level > showed that the neutron component carried about 50% of the total dose.

> The dose rate measurements on the flights from the Middle Europe to the > South and Middle America, then to Korea and Japan, showed that the flights > over or near the equator region carried less dose rate; this was in > accordance with the known geomagnetic latitude effect.

[1] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VB2-4P2JD46-1&_user=10&_coverDate=12/31/2007&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1533561355&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=520a0ee22c14a68863a239e971832eea&searchtype=a)

<comment><USER9> No, actually your data validates him. Maybe you are confusing 'm' with 'μ', that is, milli- (10^-3) with micro- (10^-6)?

> _The estimated occupational effective dose for the aircraft crew (A 320) > working 500 h per year was 1.64 mSv._

1.64 mSv (milliSieverts) / 500 hours = 3.28 μSv/hour. A 3-hour flight is 10 μSv.

For comparison, the FDA letter [1] linked in another comment here cites the effective dose of the backscatter x-rays as 0.25 μSv.

The cosmic ray dose from a 3 hour flight is 40 times that of the backscatter x-ray. Pretty much "dwarfs it".

(Note that while the FDA letter says the effective dose is 0.25 μSv, the footnote there (11) says that RapiScan is <=0.05 μSv. Not sure how to parse this -- maybe the 0.25 μSv is a regulatory definition, not the real dose. An NPR article [2] I cited earlier claimed 0.02 μSv, consistent with that <=0.05 μSv figure.

While I'm in these parentheses, NOAA has a table [3] of cosmic ray doses as a function of altitude. Pretty much consistent with your source -- 3 μSv/hr at 30,000 ft, 6 μSv/hr at 40,000 ft).

[1] [http://www.fda.gov/Radiation- EmittingProducts/RadiationEmitt...](http://www.fda.gov/Radiation- EmittingProducts/RadiationEmittingProductsandProcedures/SecuritySystems/ucm231857.htm)

[2] [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1268330...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126833083)

[3] <http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/info/RadHaz.html>

<comment><USER8> Indeed. I know the difference between µ and m, but I missed it here.

/hides

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just as a general policy, I don't willingly step into superfluous machines intended to irradiate me.

<comment><USER11> The airplane itself is much less superfluous, but irradiates you far more than the backscatter machines. Are you sure you're not just putting a sort of halo of evilness around the backscatter machines because you dislike them for other reasons?

(Full disclosure: I'm not particularly bothered by backscatter machines as such, but I vehemently object to the paranoid, theatrical, and statistically silly approach to security that has provided the impetus for their installation.)

<comment><USER12> what's your source that the radiation emitted from sitting in the airplane cabin is higher than a cat scan machine?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> DanI-S Airport security is ridiculous. What do we do when the first bright terrorist figures out they can blow up 500 people in the line for the scanner?

<comment><USER11> We'll faint dead away!

Seriously? We could implement pipelined multi-stage inspections, like a security line to get into another security line, and hire more TSA people to make sure everyone is spread out. And have bomb-sniffing dogs everywhere. This would be silly, but I wouldn't put it past the TSA to actually do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I believe what's happening is the use of the radiation concerns is a proxy for the underlying problem: regularly taking naked pictures of the population in the name of security.

I don't think anybody can effectively argue that the whole enterprise is in dire need of grownups -- too easy to get screwed the next time there is an attack. But you _could_ argue that radiation is a key factor, or just wave your arms around and yell a lot. With enough arm-waving, smoke, and mirrors you can make the case that the population is deeply concerned about radiation effects -- regardless of the science -- so "something must be done". "Something must be done" is what got us here in the first place, perhaps "something must be done" is what can get us out.

<comment><USER14> More to the point, it's the government engaging in pornography, illegal search, and sexual assault combined with radiation overdoses in the name of FALSE security.

We already know that they don't work, and they don't even pretend to address any of the real security vulnerabilities. They'll only deter idiot terrorists, not real ones.</comment></comment>


Banking APIs, or, how fraudulent are you? - <AUTHOR> http://www.stephenwhitworth.com/blog/2015/11/29/how-to-score-your-spending-activity-for-fraud <comment><USER2> _> Exposing banking data, with sensible and secure authentication process can only be positive._

There's a pretty huge assumption embedded here. Sure, if there's actually "sensible and secure authentication", banking APIs are great. In the real world, though, nothing is actually very secure, breaches happen constantly, and I think there's a solid case to be made that we would be generally happier, wealthier, and more secure if banks were effectively information silos.

</comment><comment><USER3> All credit bureaus have an API, depending their age you can find from COBOL CICS Sockets to JSON interfaces.

Should we be that much surprised about this?

How to you think businesses ensure that you can afford this revolving credit application?

</comment><comment><USER4> Another example of banking API: [http://docs.fidor.de](http://docs.fidor.de)</comment>