Ubuntu is not a democracy and nor should it be - <AUTHOR> http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/03/why-mark-shuttleworth-is-right-ubuntu.html <comment><USER2> Democracy is a damping utility: it pretty much guarantees that nobody too horrible will damage the country or organization but it also pretty much guarantees that nobody really good still can't make appropriate progress easily. Democracy is kind of the safe, average choice of how to rule a group of people.

A good dictator would be really effective and could do tremendous amount of good. The downside is that generally in a dictatorship, the ruler could also be an evil dictator and cause lots of damage.

In business, the owner is the dictator but luckily, he can only crash his own company, and people are voluntarily employed by him. Dictating what the company must do is often called the leader's vision.

If the vision is any good, the company will thrive. If it's bad, it will go down under.

However, if it's about the damn close button, we can only watch how it goes since Mr Shuttleworth has the final say and he will go up or down by his decisions. I don't understand peoples' moaning either: the buttons in Metacity are _configurable_ and even if they weren't, people are not so stupid that if they want to use Ubuntu in the first place it would all break down _because they can't close the damn windows_.

<comment><USER3> >A good dictator would be really effective and could do tremendous amount of good. The downside is that generally in a dictatorship, the ruler could also be an evil dictator and cause lots of damage.

I don't think this is quite right, since it assumes the possibility of a sufficiently good dictator.

<comment><USER4> I think they have happened over time, just not regularly and as with many disciplines, the bad and mediocre tend to outweigh the good, but if you consider Julius Caesar, Alfred the Great, Saladin, Suleyman the Magnificent and Ataturk, then actually there are a few (perhaps more historically than now due to the lower prevalence of current opportunities for would-be dictators).

<comment><USER5> We have historical evidence that there can exist a "good" dictator for an iron-age society. I don't think such a thing can exist for a silicon-age society; it's too complex to run, and inefficiencies you can ignore in the iron age make you grotesquely uncompetitive in the silicon age.

That people in the 21st century still think centralizing everything is the answer to any problem is a testament to the continuing power of the Utopian Dream to override reason. (This is a parenthetical; I am not saying iuguy is advocating it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's nothing to do with democracy. It's about unjustified stubbornness over a poor design choice that will making upgrading implausible for a great deal of users.

<comment><USER7> A great deal of wankers, rather.

<comment><USER6> Are you serious? You have a problem with any sysadmin who runs Ubuntu for non- savvy users?

<comment><USER7> Look, nobody really cares that the window decorations are on the left. I have used X programs on a mac, and I have never closed the window instead of picking the "file" menu. This may happen once a year, about as often as a Windows user hits Alt-F4 instead of Alt-F2.

<comment><USER8> > I have used X programs on a mac, and I have never closed the window instead > of picking the "file" menu.

Probably because Mac menu bar is on desktop and not within the window.

<comment><USER7> Not X programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Buttons left or right, whatever.* What annoys me is that, so far, we have heard _no reasoning_ as to why the close button is _the third from the left_ instead of the most outer one. It makes no sense other than covering their asses for Apple repercussions.

*Except, you know, having the menu bar and window control options 5px apart isn't the smartest thing you can do.

<comment><USER10> Hah, I didn't know that -- that would be pretty dumb.

I assumed the only reason they tried this was to copy Apple. For right-handed mousers (most people) having controls and scrollbars on the right appears to allow easier/faster access. I don't see any benefit in switching.

They never gave any justification for switching sides, AFAICT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are they still harping on about buttons on the left? I admit, from a usability point of view it's clearly a fail, but the good thing about Linux is that if you don't like it you can alter it and make a new release. Perhaps they could call it "RightHandSideBuntu: Linux for human beings who don't want to re-learn basic aspects of window behavor because of some designer's whim".

</comment><comment><USER12> They're making a mountain out of a molehill. Someone can just build a package or a distribution variant (a la Kubuntu or Xubuntu) that overrides what people perceive to be a problem and, bam, problem solved.

People didn't like the brown theme either, but just _changed their theme once Ubuntu was installed_. They can do the same with this.

<comment><USER13> Defaults matter. Most people do not want to fuck around with their computer, they just want it to work right and be sane from the start.

<comment><USER12> _Most people do not want to fuck around with their computer_

Really? Back in the day (10 years ago) when I was crazy enough to do tech support for ordinary folks running Windows, it was _rare_ I'd find someone who hadn't changed all their cursors, their window coloring, and their wallpaper, all to eye burning, heavily customized detail.

I'd guess the customization and theme changing is even more prevalent on something like Linux, considering the slightly better informed userbase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How did I know that this was going to be over the ridiculous button-shuffle on the window decorators: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1186958>

Ubuntu is the only Linux distro in the position to be able to make bold design decisions, but unfortunately the people they have making those decisions are just as mediocre as the rest of the clowns, if not worse.

The few times they've exercised this have been fuckups, like the focus- stealing cpu-churning auto-update popup, and now this childish theme nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER7> The free software community benefits from free software, not from people nitpicking on the mailing list. As the T-shirt says, "Shut the fuck up and write some code."

</comment><comment><USER15> Ah meritocracy; nice in theory, in practice it generally falls apart pretty quickly. (been there, tried it a couple of times)

Anyway; the problem is there is a claimed meritocracy around Ubuntu but it's a bit of a facade. A friend who is a beta tester (and very active bug poster) says it's a bit of an old boys crowd in reality. (not that it's necessarily bad thing; but I hate these sham organisations everyone builds to make it look prettier)

<comment><USER16> Hardy a good old boys club. I would suggest actual examples rather than a 'my friend says' vague statement.

As someone with direct Ubuntu development experience, the majority of packages (ie what they refer to as universe) are generally maintained by community members with very few ties to each other other than IRC interaction.

It is likely one of the easiest projects to get involved with because not only is it not a selective club, but they actively run training classes on how people can get involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thought experiment: what's the open-source analogue to market pressure that would force Canonical to reverse course?

The market system isn't a democracy either, except in one sense - money votes. But when the product is free, and the infrastructure for automatic updates and upgrades from a single vendor is baked in, how do users express their preferences?

<comment><USER18> The same way users express disapproval of paid programs: use another product. (Debian, Fedora, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _I trust a qualified doctor to prescribe my medicine based on what he knows._

OK, if the author refers to Mr. Shuttleworth or the Ubuntu team, I should remind him that the actual doctors behind the new changes are Mr. Steve Jobs and his team. Copying from Apple and doing it right is difficult. We should give credits to Ubuntu team for doing this right.

The idea of free software in my opinion is not just going with GPL and other licenses. Free software communities used to have a free culture. That's what Ubuntu lacks.

But since what Ubuntu actually does is building a business, what's going on is totally ok. Maybe free culture is the barrier of building a good business with free software. So if Ubuntu is taking that path...

"OK Ubuntu, Good Luck with that".

<comment><USER20> The button layout is as far from the Mac layout, as it is from BeOS. It's a new layout, with unprecedented degree of unfortunate in it. The placement of the control group, the spacing, the visuals, and the proximity to other critical controls makes it nearly unusable.

OS X controls are nothing like this.</comment></comment>


How I taught myself electronics - <AUTHOR> http://www.burakkanber.com/blog/how-i-taught-myself-electronics/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious about your experience with learning electrical engineering coming from a software engineering background.

I'm a software engineer, and though I've toyed around with hardware platforms building some basic circuits, I haven't done the deep dive you have.

Do you think anybody doing software engineering for devices needs to know electrical engineering? Or do you think most software engineers will interact with devices via APIs? What negatives or positives do you foresee in a future where devs must know the full stack, or only know a component of it.

If you have some thoughts on that, might be a blog post rather than answering here, but keen to hear your thoughts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I have a biased view here. I'm a knowledge junkie and I love learning systems. In software, I _actually_ RTFM for every single tool I use even tangentially. (As a side note, reading tech documentation cover to cover is actually awesome). So instinctually my gut reaction is to say "yes of course learn the system".

But as far as a more measured, less biased opinion goes: it depends on how professional you want to be. Most real consumer hardware doesn't really have APIs in the same manner that arduino and other user-friendly platforms do; arduino is basically designed to make programmer hobbyists feel comfortable with hardware.

But real embedded systems are programmed on microcontrollers (generally, sometimes we use FPGAs or other exotic platforms) in assembly or a dialect of C. And there, you're not so much "using an API" as you are manipulating output pins directly. So if you really want to work with high powered, professional platforms, you should certainly learn the stack.

Learning the stack is advantageous even with a friendly platform like the Arduino. At low power, most robotics are pretty easy to work with, very few surprises. But as you try and build bigger and more powerful robots, especially where motors are concerned, you start running into real electrical engineering problems (like back-EMF) that you _can't_ fix with software. So if you aren't comfortable with electrical engineering, the first time you attempt a more ambitious project you'll find yourself at a brick wall that you don't know how to get around.

So, unsatisfyingly, the answer seems to be "it depends" ;)

<comment><USER2> That is not an unsatisfying answer at all. I believe a hardware abstraction layer may get us to an api like experience (and have been developing one myself), so wanted to get your opinion.

I didn't want to mention my project before as I wanted to get your unbiased opinion. Great answer. thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! It's a cool project, and ambitious, but definitely worth doing. I'll be rooting for you!

Let me try to poke a hole or two in it for you. Not to discourage you, of course, but just to try and get you to think of some of the harder, less technical problems you may run into.

First, there's a fine line between a HAL and a full-fledged operating system, so be careful there! It's also hard to justify adding overhead or third party code to a system in many cases, especially if you're manufacturing for six sigma. You want every system to be in your complete control, because it turns out that making reliable products is _hard_.

I also don't see something like a universally-used HAL becoming mainstream anytime soon; for almost all production purposes (I don't know the number, of course, but perhaps on the order of 99%) a 50kHz chip with a 30-year old design is _exactly_ what you want. In most cases, you want to use a tried-and- true workhorse that you can get for $0.012 each, and not have to use a $2 chip that's powerful enough to run the HAL.

BUT a universal HAL could be great for hobbyists. Port your code easily from arduino to a powerful RISC to some other platform. That'd be great :)

BEST of luck!!

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I wish I had a better term than HAL, as that does sound like an OS term. I'm doing more of a middleware layer, focused on the hobbyist market first.

I say Hardware Abstraction because technically, that is what it is doing, abstracting away the hardware level.

My project is at [https://github.com/favor/it](https://github.com/favor/it) if you are interested in learning more.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Are Voters Ignoring Experts? - <AUTHOR> https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/brexit-voters-ignoring-experts-by-jean-pisani-ferry-2016-07 <comment><USER2> Some of it is the "emperor has no clothes effect".

Hillary Clinton had to vote for the 2nd Iraq War because she wanted to appear tough. Yet, the Bush administration did not show one shred of evidence to back up it's claims of WMD and in the end the few "non experts" who questioned this turned out to be right.

Where were the experts before the 2008 crash? Or in the 1990's stock market bubble, etc?</comment>


Martini: Real-Time Terrain Mesh Generator - <AUTHOR> https://observablehq.com/@mourner/martin-real-time-rtin-terrain-mesh <comment><USER2> Cool! I just want to point out that the urge to generate an irregular mesh can be quite hardware unfriendly if you want to tesselate the terrain dynamically around a moving camera. The well cited papers on Geometry Clipmaps highlight this. The point is that it can be more efficient to focus on feeding the GPU pipeline in an efficient manner instead of focusing on rendering as few triangles as possible. Irregular meshes thrashes the cache if you retriangulate them all the time (since no data can be reused). A uniform grid has many advantages, unless you're only interested in rendering one static view, then irregular meshes are great!

<comment><USER3> Yep. A uniform mesh of flat quads with a vertex shader doing the displacement will perform better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to learn more, since it seems counter-intuitive — are there any studies / benchmarks on this for modern hardware? Why would a uniform mesh with, say, 10x more triangles perform better if it's not updated often (e.g. a few times a second)?

<comment><USER2> Mainly because GPU throughput is increasing much faster than CPU throughput. Spending cycles removing triangles doesn't matter if the GPU can just churn through them like nothing. In the context of a moving camera you want to reuse as much data as possible between terrain updates. With regular nested grids a ton of data can be reused, only the height needs updating as you move the grids around (and height can be reused between adjacent grids half the time if they have a power of two resolution relationship).

But baking irregular meshes into a tree-structure could be powerful too I suppose, I'm not that familiar with algorithms involving them. All of this is highly dependant on actual size of terrain and LOD requirements, terrain rendering is a deep rabbit hole.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's a thin balance, and to me as someone without years of experience in graphics programming, GPU feels like such a blackbox — hard to predict what will be the actual bottleneck until you implement an approach fully, with real-world loads, and even then it's hard to assess, especially with such variety of GPU performance characteristics on different devices.

So what's simpler / easier to implement in a given system will play an important role, and so are any additional things you want to do with the height data like collision detection, querying, data analysis etc. Anyway, that's a super-exciting topic to learn more about! Thanks a lot for all the thoughtful comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here — thanks for checking this out, everyone! Happy to answer any questions in comments.

<comment><USER4> Firefox looks a bit wacky: [https://i.imgur.com/ivLwxyG.png](https://i.imgur.com/ivLwxyG.png)

Vs. Chrome: [https://i.imgur.com/Go0mt1K.png](https://i.imgur.com/Go0mt1K.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, what OS / device is this on? Looks fine on Firefox 68 / OS X for me.

<comment><USER4> Firefox 68.0, OS X 10.14.6

<comment><AUTHOR> Really weird! No idea what could be the culprit. Some GPU bug maybe?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Worked on my iPad, which is unusual for demos like that. And wicked fast! The article is beautifully written and the information presented with astonishing clarity. Well, well done.

<comment><USER6> Out of curiosity, are you running iPadOS 13 with the "Desktop Class" browser?

<comment><USER7> Works on my iPhone with iOS 12 too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. Seems to have some striking similarity to the quadtree map used for efficient position querying of variably complicated areas.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yes, quadtree-like structures come up all the time when you're dealing with maps. E.g. check out this algorithm I came up with for finding pole of inaccessibility of a polygon: [https://github.com/mapbox/polylabel](https://github.com/mapbox/polylabel)

<comment><USER3> Hey mourner, didn't know you're on HN. Just wanted to say thanks for all the great work on mapbox-gl and the side libraries you've released!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a wonderful presentation of results and code, well done! Very nice to read.

</comment><comment><USER10> This was a pleasure to play with on an iPad. Excellent work.

</comment><comment><USER11> Lots of errors here on mobile:

RuntimeError: renderer could not be resolved

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 9; Nokia 7.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.143 Mobile Safari/537.36

<comment><AUTHOR> That's surprising. Does it help to do a hard reload? Are any other WebGL demos working?

<comment><USER12> I got an error too but I am running Firefox/Sway/Nixos/AMD GPU and WebGL has never worked:

      Content Security Policy: Couldn't process unknown directive 'prefetch-src'
      THREE.WebGLRenderer 107 three.min.js:187:462
      Error: WebGL warning: <SetDimensions>: Failed to create
      WebGL context: WebGL creation failed:
      * tryNativeGL
      * Exhausted GL driver options. three.min.js:190:415
      Error: WebGL warning: <SetDimensions>: Failed to create
      WebGL context: WebGL creation failed:
      * tryNativeGL
      * Exhausted GL driver options. three.min.js:190:440

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love stuff like this. This is like the 5th or 6th time I've seen 3D techniques from the past become real time relevant. The first one I saw was from the 50's and someone just happened to explore it and it happened to run great on modern hardware. I bet there is a ton of stuff out there like this. I do wish there was more of a benchmarking standard. It is great that it now runs in 20ms on his laptop but that says nothing about the actual computational requirements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everyone's hardware is different, so I've included notes about computational complexity of the algorithm in the notebook too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a method for dealing with seams between RTIN tiles of different levels of detail? It looks like it would be complicated to implement.

<comment><USER15> I think I've seen a rather pragmatic hack that has been used in Google Earth for their stitching of terrain: They simply add a kind of skirt at the boundary of each square chunk [0], so that there aren't any white/black pixels. There may be some artifacts between LoDs but they soon disappear when the next chunk gets more refined.

Edit: I think the Google terrain skirts were slanted, rather than falling straight down, so two neighbouring skirts intersect in a V.

[0] [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-terrain-chunk-a- withou...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-terrain-chunk-a-without- skirts-and-b-with-skirts_fig2_235952216)

<comment><USER14> Funny hack, I would have expected some perfect seam algorithm from google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you are getting your data from an image, you already have a mesh (a quad mesh from pixels which could be broken down into triangles a few different ways).

Anybody know about best/easy/fast/interesting algorithms for doing the opposite of the post and "compressing" the data eliminating triangles for a prescribed error or some other metric?

</comment><comment><USER17> any raster imagery overlay come with this badboy? mourner is a maps legend - hats off to him

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Someone just forked the notebook, adding satellite texturing — that's a really cool aspect of Observable (and I'll probably merge it back): [https://observablehq.com/@rzoller/martin-real-time-rtin- terr...](https://observablehq.com/@rzoller/martin-real-time-rtin-terrain-mesh)

<comment><USER3> That made it really clear that texture resolution trumps mesh resolution. Dialling down the mesh detail slider results in very little perceptual difference, but the blurry texture always stands out.

The non-textured demo actually looks _better_. Nothing that can't be fixed by stitching higher resolution sat imagery though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fantastic. Love the demo and the animation.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is slick.</comment>


Decoding the USPS barcode - <AUTHOR> http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3207804&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

<comment><USER2> Great thread, almost like a mini detective story but involving code!

<comment><USER3> SomethingAwful is, hands-down, the best forum on the Internet. If you've got time, this is probably the quintessential SA drama, and it's epic in scope:

[http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=1a3f8a1a28...](http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=1a3f8a1a286abce365091c9f32997535&threadid=1675856&perpage=40&pagenumber=1)

Also from SomethingAwful, though the original post is now archived, the P-P-P- Powerbook prank:

<http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/>

And, if your day hasn't been thoroughly wasted yet, this is my all-time favorite product of SA:

<http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Animal%20Crossing/index.html>

<comment><USER4> I spent the last 6 hours reading about kswizzle. I'm angry at you and also grateful. Or perhaps I don't know how to feel.

<comment><USER5> I spent the last 3 hours. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would love to read this, but I have a policy of not visiting SA while at work.

<comment><USER2> Ok, here's the ghist:

\- Guy's housing company provides backdated letter of deposit deductions, which they are obligated to provide within 45 days else refund the entire deposit no questions.

\- Mailing stamp doesn't have a visible date, instead has an encoded datamatrix [http://img.skitch.com/20090928-q76qg7y1w575ghbqn4t2uwx4eg.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20090928-q76qg7y1w575ghbqn4t2uwx4eg.jpg)

\- Goons (SA users) tidy up the barcode image with photoshop, and do some internet detectivery to track down the tech specs for the image encoding used: <http://www.springerlink.com/content/l847l1357j811101/>

\- Date of mailing turns out to be encoded as 26 90 32 01. Little-endian so, flip and to decimal and it becomes 2009-09-18. Letter is backdated!

<comment><USER7> haha, great executive summary Torn!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article reminded me of two things:

1\. Bar codes are really, really hard to deal with! The complexity of encoding types, physical representation, and in memory representation rivals that of video. I once had to write a system to handle barcodes which included programming the scanner, interpreting the results, and then generating resulting barcodes of the appropriate encoding, correct length, and right checksum. And that was hard with the old 1-D barcodes!

2\. Security deposits suck! I got screwed out of one once (not as much as the guy in this thread, though) because, literally, my move-in inspection noted "spots" on the carpet and on move-out the landlord said, "Those look more like splotches to me." Unfortunately, I was moving 2000 miles away, and the cost of pursuing through small claims court wouldn't have been worth it. That's when an uncle taught me a lesson about security deposits: "You're probably going to get screwed at the end, so negotiate like it's not a deposit but a sunk cost."

</comment><comment><USER9> Ok, so you decoded the date -- how about finding the signing key for the data. :)</comment>


What's luck got to do with it? The math of gambling - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327202.600-whats-luck-got-to-do-with-it-the-math-of-gambling.html?full=true

<comment><USER2> I was quite excited when I saw that New Scientist - generally a pretty good magazine - had a piece on the maths of gambling. But unfortunately it turned out to be an extremely poor article.

The first three sections - on card counting, choosing unpopular lottery numbers and arbitrage - skim very briefly over well-known subject matter.

The fourth section is completely wrong - it applies the maths of a situation where you see a number of opportunities in turn until you choose one (e.g. choosing a marriage partner) to the problem of choosing when to stop gambling (where it doesn't apply at all), and draws nonsensical conclusions as a result.

The fact it was written by New Scientist's career editor is telling I suspect.

<comment><USER3> I was going to post this as an "Ask HN", but since I see someone with the username bayes writing in a probability thread- I figure why not ask here (if its all a coincidence, sorry!)

Would you happen to have a recommendation for a good probability textbook for a first year grad student?

<comment><USER2> I'm afraid my username doesn't reflect any deep knowledge of the field. I studied probability at an undergraduate level many years ago, and still use it in my hobby (writing 'bots' that run automated trading strategies on one of the sports betting exchanges here in the UK), but that's all. I'd go for an "Ask HN" thread if I were you.

<comment><USER3> Thanks anyway. I figured it was worth a shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most comments about this article when it was originally submitted weren't too positive either: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755833>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, I searched quite hard to see if it had already been submitted, but didn't find it. Obviously I searched the wrong terms, or not for long enough. Sorry about the Dup.

Even so, the discussion at that other article was enlightening, probably more so than the article itself, so I think that submission - and sort of by proxy this one - was worth while.

Thanks for finding the reference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting article! I had a similar idea to make sport bets & win money.

So, do you know any site that aggregates bets from different bookies?

Update: <http://www.betbrain.com/> is even listing SureBets :).

</comment><comment><USER6> There is a way to test the 'advantage' of a gambling method. Take the bankroll (eg, how much money you have now, starting at 0), and the amount bet EVER (on whatever number the bets were), and divide the amount bet by the bankroll. So we've bet 100 dollars, and won 100 - the advantage is 1 (or 100 per cent).

If the advantage over 1000s of spins is < 1.3% (or 2.6%, or 5.2%), you won't beat a roulette wheel.

</comment><comment><USER7> Aren't the 0 and 00 (green spaces in roulette) responsible for giving the house its edge? It's definitely not a 50:50 for black:red.

<comment><USER8> Correct (although some wheels only have 0, no 00). With both, it's a 5 point something house edge. Also, the martingale (doubling) strategy falls apart with table limits, even if you have the bankroll.

<comment><USER6> I once figured out it might be possible to 'fold' a martingale so it occurs in less spins. I think the basic idea was making full use of the table limit from the first bet (eg, table limit is 100, normally you'd bet 2 to double the loss of 1, so bet 64), and making full use of the table limit 'bandwidth' before you reach the limit (possibly starting with 64 and halving thereafter to 32, 16, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There´s a probability gap explained in one of those "make money" in <http://en.exposedcasinos.com> they say they´ve found a gap in the limits of some roulettes to make the math work. I´ve tested it and it worked at least yesterday and today. About 300 spins.</comment>


Skype Founder invests $4M in Berlin-based Venture - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/16/atomico-invests-4-2m-in-6wunderkinder-german-name-global-ambitions/

<comment><USER2> It should be noted that while the first Atomico fund was mostly an internal fund from the Skype founders, the most recent fund was raised like a typical venture fund from a group of limited partners. Also there are folks other than the Skype founders involved and from what I gather they do most of the work with the portfolio companies.

The post makes it sound more like a large angel investment from a single Skype founder and given that a lot of angel investors style their investments as "Something Ventures" without actually raising a fund, it seemed worth clarifying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. When reading the TC post this is clarified. I used "Skype Founder" as synonym for Atomico in the title for reasons of understandability -- most don't know Atomico from first glance. More precise would be "Skype Founder's Fund invests in ...". But anyway, Niklas has the highest influence regarding investment decisions and HE is the face of Atomico, so it's fair to talk about his investment in the title. Finally, we have a trend that most big investors typically invest through own venture funds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ahem. They have one product and it's... a todo-list. And not even a particularly good one.

Atomico desperate for investment opportunities?

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be a better title: "Skype Founder paid 4m$ for a To-do List" -- damn ;)

> Atomico desperate for investment opportunities?

You can get that impression if you take a look at their current portfolio.</comment></comment>


Gates Foundation spent $775m on an education project that was worse than useless - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2018/06/27/worse-than-useless-2.html <comment><USER2> That article offered almost no analysis of substance. Instead, unsubstantiated bulletpoints. Not doubting the claims but the article was barely an overview.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Here you find the whole study: [https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2242.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2242.html)</comment></comment>


Why is Greenland so rich these days? It said goodbye to the EU - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/alexsingleton/100065718/why-is-greenland-so-rich-these-days-it-said-goodbye-to-the-eu/

<comment><USER2> Probably more due to the huge grant Greenland gets from Denmark. Which, of course, is in the EU.

I'm not the biggest fan of the EU but the Telegraph has consistently been anti-EU. This article however is shameless in not even mentioning the Danish subsidy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Right, and there used to be, perhaps still are fair-sized US payments for the air bases.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also, Telecom Greenland has a nice fiber cable running through Newfoundland- Greenland-Iceland-Scotland.</comment>


It looks like Intel is developing Bitcoin mining chips - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+MarcBevand/posts/9waJsLiMXfZ <comment><USER2> All for the "benefit" of mining Bitcoin.

The idea is to stick these chips into household applications (e.g. USB chargers), give the appliances out for free, stick the electricity bill on you, and give 75% of the Bitcoin revenue back to the parent company.

Yep, a free USB charger that you amortize over its entire use, at many multiples of what it should cost. It's great for people who love playing a guaranteed losing shell game between buying electronics and electricity.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's impossible to profitably mine bitcoins without screwing someone else in the process. The trick is to screw them as long as possible without them knowing.

<comment><USER3> The scenario you describe is malicious because people don't expect a charger to have "features" which consume large amounts of power without benefit, but it does make me wonder if such tech could be incorporated into electrical items whose express intent is to turn electricity into heat.

Say, a clothes iron, or washing machine/dishwasher water heater (where not already plumbed for hot water), etc.

Since computation ultimately dumps essentially 100% of the consumed energy as heat, why not use it for that?

Obvious arguments against are the cost of the initial hardware, and the engineering difficulty of making something which can actually operate whilst generating kilowatts of heat (i.e. not cooking your cores in the process)

<comment><USER4> The idea has been around for a long while. Google "data furnace".

The crux seems to be Moore's Law. We buy heaters and use them for decades, but any compute device has a useful lifetime of a few years before it's surpassed. If we ever see Moore's Law come to an end, expect to see a lot of highly- distributed computing.

<comment><USER5> Under these conditions, it could still work in irons or especially electric kettles. Those are so crappy nowadays, you have to buy new every two-three years anyway.

<comment><USER4> Unless the device is on almost all the time, it won't compete with datacenters, even on price.

Using compute for heat is a dodgy proposition even where heat is needed at least half the year. The minimal uptime of an iron or kettle really puts the kibosh on the economics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 21 is best understood as an attempt by the VC community to break the Chinese Bitcoin mining monopoly. 21 doesn't appear to be working on Lightning Network like layer 2 technologies that would make the Bitcoin micropayments for server bandwidth viable on the blockchain. In fact as useful financial applications of on chain transactions start to materialize, even P2P payments may start to struggle to be included in blocks.

21 faces one of the most profound information security problem faced by any company. They propose to put their companies capital assets into the homes of consumers and then extract value from those assets in a manner adversarial to the consumers interests. End users/attackers can do everything from blackhole the network traffic of the device to modify the firmware to target the hashing power to a new mining pool. Virtually any weakness in the engineering has the potential to be exploited at vast scale. This should terrify them.

<comment><USER5> > _They propose to put their companies capital assets into the homes of > consumers and then extract value from those assets in a manner adversarial > to the consumers interests. End users /attackers can do everything from > blackhole the network traffic of the device to modify the firmware to target > the hashing power to a new mining pool. Virtually any weakness in the > engineering has the potential to be exploited at vast scale. This should > terrify them._

Mark my words. If this or similar idea ever takes hold and begins to spread, I am going to start an open source project to hack those devices and redirect their hashing power where consumers want in as easy and streamlined way as possible so that everyone could do it.

I'm tired of companies extracting value from customers in adversarial manner, literally telling their users "fuck you" in their faces.

<comment><USER7> This hashing power is useless outside of bitcoin. Even for password cracking.

<comment><USER5> Well, sure. So let it mine for some charity or for the user instead.

<comment><USER8> Or not at all, especially when the price of electricity is usually over the price of mined coins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actually it's even more interesting than "Intel makes a bitcoin mining chip," which really shouldn't be surprising given how much application-specific accelerators have been making noise, and how many of these chips are already on the market. Multibillion dollar companies love to hedge their bets; it'd be somewhat more surprising if nobody at Intel were working on one.

No, the more interesting bit is that it looks like some stealth startup has a close enough relationship to Intel to get them to mint chips. And that's impressive; Intel's silicon manufacturing processes have historically been a black box to outsiders.

It'll be a lot more interesting once more details about this pour out. This could be the start of something huge...

</comment><comment><USER10> Link to the original article: [http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin- mining-strategy/](http://www.coindesk.com/21-intel-bitcoin-mining-strategy/)

This is presumably from the same source as the recent spate of "mining from toasters" articles started by FT's Alphaville [1]), but with a lot more detail.

The Vimeo clip discussed in the coindesk article shows a live demo from Oct 2014 of a bandwidth auctioning protocol, (the article links to the actual transactions eg [2])

[1] [http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the- compa...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that- wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/)

[2] [https://blockchain.info/address/1M9ZeSUStVHCAUqrCr5XhhYqb4GB...](https://blockchain.info/address/1M9ZeSUStVHCAUqrCr5XhhYqb4GBuz9x6z)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why would anyone agree to pay for 100% of the power consumption for an ASIC that only offers 25% of the returns? Consumers may not know anything about crypto-currencies but they understand basic math.

When consumers are offered 5 dollars worth of bitcoin as compensation for a 20 dollar increase on their power bill they'll simply conclude "i guess that bitcoin thing really _is_ a scam"

<comment><USER12> Surely the idea is that the return is more than 4x the cost of the power consumed, so that it's still a net gain for the buyer? It seems unlikely to me that this would actually work out in the long term, but wouldn't that be what they're going for?

<comment><USER11> Then why wouldn't 21 just run the ASICs themselves and take 100% of the returns?

<comment><USER12> That's a good question. For normal miners there's a similar question that's answered by a lack of unlimited capital. That wouldn't seem to apply here, since they're paying for the hardware themselves up-front and trying to recoup costs later. I can't figure out the answer here.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't make sense. There's no answer to figure out. If you have efficient miners, you either run them or sell them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bitcoin is an environmental disaster. What a horrendous waste burning electricity and real, non-renewable natural resources to generate these tokens. For all people complain about the legacy financial system, bitcoin is a real zero-sum game where the more miners join, the harder the block difficulty gets, and the more coal gets burnt.

<comment><USER15> I would like to see some real numbers. Finance is 8% of the entire GDP of the US. The transaction volume will eventually go up unrelated to mining power. It seems like a waste to people who don't understand systems of incentives, but it is a small and insignificant price to pay for more ideal money.

How much electricity is really being wasted? Economics works even if some people's reaction is an emotional one instead of data driven.

<comment><USER11> > _It seems like a waste to people who don 't understand systems of > incentives,_

The implication that bitcoin critics are simply incapable of understanding bitcoin's "system of incentives" is laughably condescending as well as totally inaccurate.

> _but it is a small and insignificant price to pay for more ideal money._

I don't think "decentralized" necessarily translates to "more ideal". Certainly, it's not ideal for most people given all the other drawbacks that come with bitcoin (difficult to spend, difficult to secure, subject to price fluctuations, subject to privacy concerns, vulnerable to critical mistakes like sending money to the wrong address or losing a wallet in a hard-drive crash). Bitcoin is only "more ideal" if you want to perform transactions outside the legacy system; a real use-case, but not a very popular one.

<comment><USER15> Decentralized isn't why it has better properties of ideal money. Interestingly the winklevoss twins have made by far the best presentation of the value of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Intel has been doing limited foundry work for some time -- they have partnerships with Altera (they recently almost acquired them) and Rockchip.

Working with this company is good for Intel -- they fill fab capacity for products that don't compete with x86.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd wager a large amount of virtual currency that these are not specifically aimed at virtual currencies, but virtual implementations of real-world currencies.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can see the advantage for the user (25% of the BTC mined), and I can see the advantage for 21 (75% of the BTC mined) and Intel (sell some chips). But what's the incentive for the _electronics manufacturer_ in embedding these BitSplit chips? If they're not getting a cut and they're not being paid, why would they integrate a chip even if it's free? The downside risk of embedding a chip that may become obsolete, break down, or negatively impact energy efficiency surely outweighs the marketing benefit of saying '21 inside'.

<comment><USER19> The way I read it, the 25% is not going to the user directly. It just simply goes into an account the manufacturer controls and is earmarked for the user. The user will only be able to spend it as the manufacturer allows. This is more along the lines of Google Opinion Rewards rather than being part of a mining group.

<comment><USER2> I have to wonder how they're going to market these things to people without breaking any consumer laws. It seems like you'd almost have to trick people into using them for any extended period of time (like after they get their first electric bill), which will make them a prime target for lawsuits, Attorneys General of every state, the FTC, Congress, etc.

<comment><USER20> > It seems like you'd almost have to trick people into using them for any > extended period of time (like after they get their first electric bill),

I think you greatly overestimate the analysis most consumers put into their electric bills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nobody asked the most important question: "what's 21 Inc's plan in case of BTC exchange rate going south?"

</comment><comment><USER22> Intel will advertise these chips, and claim they have many in stock. They will take preorders in Bitcoin. The lead times will balloon out to several months, under the guise of "burn in testing". People will be angry at not getting their boards, and attempt to cancel their pre-orders. As they pre-ordered in BTC, however, they will not receive the same value back as they ordered, due to fluctuations in the price. A handful of people will receive their devices late, and by then the difficulty curve will have ramped up, making these devices not cost effective.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wish intel would have workable h264 hw acceleration on Linux instead.

<comment><USER24> What are you talking about? H264 acceleration with Intel graphics on Linux has been around since 2010 with vaapi.</comment></comment>


Homemade lab equipment simulating chemical evolution on early Earth - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/the-dawn-of-life-in-a-5-toaster-oven

<comment><USER2> How do they prevent contamination from existing organisms?

<comment><USER3> Presumably they start with sterile trays, plates, syringes, etc. The toaster isn't airtight, but though the whole apparatus could be housed in an airtight vessel, they're probably relying on the 85C temperature to kill most things.

Also, they're not testing the production of microbes, but rather that of polymers. They know if something comes out that they didn't put in.

<comment><USER4> I don't know much about chemistry, but how would they know if an interesting polymer arose of the interaction of the simple chemicals they put in there, versus the breakdown of a bacterial membrane at 85C interacting with the things already there?

<comment><USER3> ISTM that when they balance the chemical equations they'll know if relatively- large masses of "output" chemicals were in some way affected by trace amounts of foreign "input" chemicals, whether the source of those was biological or something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was going to add to those spotting the risk of contamination but then realized my error. This is an accurate model. The earth wasn't a sealed environment. The earth was and is constantly bombarded by foreign substances. Not a month goes by that I'm not reading about some new organic chemistry in space.

That face on mars shows us that life most certainly was brought to earth from elsewhere. So if this machine is contaminated by some student's dandruff then it's only all the more accurate a simulation.

<comment><USER6> Earth was a sealed environment, but it was also completely sterile. Exposing the experiments to a large amount of cells of any kind would totally distort their results.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to bandwidth test a gigabit connection? - <AUTHOR>

I've purchased a gigabit broadband connection at home, marketed as '1Gbit/s'. It is very fast, but I am unable to determine how fast. Is there a way to independently verify a connection like this? Preferably with a neutral third-party.
Mainstream testing services like Speedtest.net give wildly different results, which are rarely more than a couple hundred Mbit/s (many Speedtest.net servers have less than a 1Gbit/s available). I considered iperf but my servers are capped at 100Mbit/s so this is pointless.
Anyone else with gigabit connections out there able to fact-check your ISP's marketing department? If yes, how do you do it? I don't need to see perfect results but I expect to see better than 800Mbit/s consistently. <comment><USER2> Speedtest works by determining your lat/lon position based on your IP address. It then searches for I think around 10 other servers which are within a certain proximity to your lat/lon position and then fires off a bunch of packets to try and determine which one is the fastest. The biggest problem is if the lat/lon coords for any of the servers, or for your own IP address are off in the geoip database, you can end up hitting servers which could potentially be far away.

If you know a server which is close by, you can try using speedtest-cli ([https://pypi.python.org/pypi/speedtest- cli/0.2.7](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/speedtest-cli/0.2.7)) which will allow you to run the test from the CLI. From there you can set the server parameter and get a fairly accurate reading.

</comment><comment><USER3> Go and rent a amazon or linode machine for an hour. Then use netcat and dd for a raw tcp speedtest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll give this a try. Still hoping for a neutral third-party test though, since I will find less speed than claimed from my ISP. That means I still have a situation where they say they are delivering gigabit and I say my tests show differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What about a p2p (torrent?) app?

<comment><USER5> Processing overhead on a large number of torrent connections will overwhelm most consumer routers before they get anywhere near their theoretical max connection speed. Unless OP has a very high-end router, the best test would be a 1-to-1 connection. However, even a 1-to-1 connection (like a rented Linode VPS) will still likely be too much for a consumer router. See the rankings at smallnetbuilder for more info. For example, the fastest AC1750 router can only do 850Mbps from WAN to LAN: [http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless- reviews/321...](http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless- reviews/32196-tp-link-archer-c7-ac1750-wireless-dual-band-gigabit-router- reviewed?showall=&start=2)

<comment><AUTHOR> My router is a Billion 7800DXL, but unfortunately the linked website has zero reviews for that brand. Based on the specs (plus reviews elsewhere and it's higher cost) I expect it will handle a gigabit connection. LAN transfers are crazy fast and torrents hit very high speeds. I'm just looking for something a little more scientific or standardised.

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind that LAN transfers only have to do switching, not routing. Packet switching is easy; routing is a bit harder. I did some research. It appears the 7800DXL uses a Broadcom 6361 ([http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/hardware/?action=h_view&model_...](http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/hardware/?action=h_view&model_id=1429)). According to the OpenWRT wiki, this is a 400MHz dual-core chip ([http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/hardware/soc/soc.broadcom.bcm63x...](http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/hardware/soc/soc.broadcom.bcm63xx)). I would not expect you to get full gigabit WAN-to-LAN. The highest end routers these days are running dual-cores at 800MHz-1GHz and they are barely up to 1Gbps. For example, the Netgear R7000 runs a dual-core CPU at 1GHz and only makes it up to 930Mbps ([http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless- reviews/322...](http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless- reviews/32239-ac1900-first-look-netgear-r7000-a-asus-rt- ac68u?showall=&start=1)).

Also, maybe an easy way to test this would be to disconnect your router and put another PC on the WAN port. You can then run iperf between the WAN port and another computer on a LAN port. That should show you the theoretical peak performance doing WAN-to-LAN. Doesn't help you prove your actual connection speeds, but it will give you an idea of what the router is actually capable of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I didn't see this comment earlier. That is some very helpful info so thanks for replying. I may switch to that R7000 if only because I can load different firmware.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Killer App for Google Voice: Personal Call Robots - <AUTHOR> http://dbreunig.tumblr.com/post/205393157/the-killer-app-for-google-voice-your-personal-call

<comment><USER2> This is quite possibly the best idea I've heard all day.</comment>


NetBSD 7.1 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-7/NetBSD-7.1.html <comment><USER2> NetBSD other than being super portable (dozens of CPU architectures) has spawned some amazing projects that can't be mentioned enough.

* [pkgsrc]([http://pkgsrc.org/](http://pkgsrc.org/)), a super portable and flexible ports system that is used per default on NetBSD, SmartOS, Minix, some Linux distributions, at DARPA, etc. Support for over 20 operating systems (as in _actually_ different OS kernels) * [Lua Scripting in the kernel [PDF]]([https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/mbalmer/fosdem2...](https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/mbalmer/fosdem2012/kernel_mode_lua.pdf)) * [A PGP implementation]([http://www.netpgp.com/faq.html](http://www.netpgp.com/faq.html)) * [A test framework for operating systems]([https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/atf/](https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/atf/)) * [Binary Interfaces for Linux, FreeBSD, SCO Unix, Tru64, Win32, Solaris, SVR4, Ultrix]([https://www.netbsd.org/docs/compat.html](https://www.netbsd.org/docs/compat.html))

Also they have all the stuff like FUSE, used to be pretty big in the Xen world (mostly for the high level portability), recently developed a [pretty nice SMP focused network filter]([https://www.netbsd.org/~rmind/npf/](https://www.netbsd.org/~rmind/npf/) were the first to implement various drives (including implementing support for Apple hardware, before an OS from them officially supported it), their network stack I think still holds the the record for the fastest intercontinental file transfer ever done, etc. They also are pretty secure, which is mostly due to a strong quality focus.

But I think their devs are too busy achieving all those things, rather than hyping the OS, so that's why I have to. ;)

EDIT: Oh and despite all that research and so on, they always remained very pragmatic and non-political. That combination is really rare I think.</comment>


The UR Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.impredicative.com/ur/

<comment><USER2> Beautiful language and beautiful library for web programming. It imports all the practical stuff from heavy theory and mixes it in a coherent environement.

I've seen at least : monads for effects, functionnal reactive programming for reactive interfaces depending on signals (generating javascript behind the scene) and type level functions and records for powerful metaprogaming / generic programming in the haskell sense (independant of the types but dependant of their structure).

The last point is a very powerful one, making Ur's type system more expressive than Haskell's (but I saw recently that Haskell will also introduce kinds).

I'm not knowledgable enough, so I would be interested in an explanation of what the advantage of those compared to SYB-like generics (I would say no runtime type info attached and so more static checking ?). I think generics are not used enough and maybe Ur has a good point here : making easier and safe all the boilerplate of manipulating data representations, which is especially important in a world like web programming.

And I would also like to know what's with in the XML and SQL DSL's : is it a combinator library with syntactic sugar (I guess Scala does this) or is there more type hackery in it also using type transformations ?</comment>


Problems with dx.doi.org on January 20th 2015- what we know - <AUTHOR> http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/01/problems-with-dx-doi-org-on-january-20th-2015-what-we-know.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Noticed in [https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-Janua...](https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-January/076565.html)

> the DOI resolver site went down today because they apparently forgot to > renew the domain, and the author of this blog post from CrossRef (who runs > it) suggests relying on _us_ for persistent identifier stability [...] He > notes "the "persistence" [of persistent identifiers] is the result of a > social contract" \-- indeed.

</comment><comment><USER2> When is a uuid not a uuid? When you can't actually resolve it.</comment>


Pythagorean Theorem proof in a 2100 year old Chinese book - <AUTHOR> http://fermatslibrary.com/s/pythagorean-theorem-proof-in-zhoubi-suanjing#email-newsletter <comment><USER2> From what I understand, the Chinese had often recorded many facts about nature and mathematics very early and accurately. However they never really created much laws. Laws of nature was a western invention. E.g. they observed accurately planetary movements, but never attempted to formulate the laws governing those movements. That sort of thinking was crucial for scientific thinking.

<comment><USER3> Maybe true. The emphasis was on calculations. For example, there was a heliocentric model in India [1], which was too complicated to come from a "simple" mechanical model, but was quite accurate.

But I think we should not be too eager to jump on to "science is only from laws" bandwagon. Courses on the philosophy of science take this dogma to absurd extremes, ignoring how current science is often done. There is enough science done today where the laws are only vague, but we do predict useful stuff from simulations - climate models and earthquake modelling being the most prominent - despite not having "simple" laws behind them. As Freeman Dyson often observes, physicists still don't have a good explanation of why a bicycle doesn't topple when in motion - but we've been riding them for a century and half [2].

I think trial-and-error, and simulations also count as sophisticated science.

It's more than a tad racist to insist that Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese and Indians, as well as medieval Arab scientists were all child races incapable of truly knowing what they were doing.

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

[2] [https://www.wired.com/1998/02/dyson/](https://www.wired.com/1998/02/dyson/)

<comment><USER4> Feyerabend's Against Method goes further: examining crucial discoveries in science reveals no pattern which could be called a scientific method. Everyone sort of freestyles it or does what works.

I think modern western science discounts other sources of knowledge, because it is not just a platonic ideal but a sort of politics of the scientists, which they need to justify the choices they make.

<comment><USER5> This is waffle. 'Western Science' is an abstraction. The 'official position of Western Science' is not an accredited publication as far as I know. More to the point, if you have criticisms of individual scientists (the ones who contribute to science [ i.e., people all nationalities and places on Earth) ] who 'discount other sources of knowledge' please be specific. They may or may not have a point. We can't know unless you specify.

<comment><USER4> Too much troll, didn't read

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So if I'm understanding correctly, this is evidence that about 300 years after the death of Pythagoras, his proof "travelled" over the silk road to China?

<comment><USER7> There's evidence that the "Pythagorean Theorem" was known in Mesopotamia a millennium before Pythagoras. It was likely widely known in the ancient world.

The Greeks wrote their mathematical ideas in a different way than other cultures, so the answers to these questions aren't completely clear-cut.

<comment><USER8> But was the theorem proved?

<comment><USER7> It's really hard to say. Cuneiform on clay tablets was mostly records of finished computations, with the scratch work done with some kind of physical manipulation of tokens or mentally, and most of the instruction and culture transmitted orally.

The Sumerian/Babylonian style of written records did not match, say, Euclid's _Elements_. (They didn't write books full of precise definitions and proofs. They didn't leave behind textbooks, only problem sets and worked examples.) But note that neither did the style of the Pythagoreans necessarily, and the notion that Pythagoras or his disciples made a proof comes from written records from hundreds of years later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My understanding is that the 3-4-5 relationship was known for a long, long time before Pythagorus. I think the ancient Egyptians knew of the relationship. But that's not the same thing as a proof: meaning, the fact has been integrated with the fundamentals of a wider body of knowledge.

I see the illustration, but I don't understand how that's a "proof."

<comment><USER10> >I see the illustration, but I don't understand how that's a "proof."

That's an illustration of the proof. Here is a more modern, animated example: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Pythagor...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Pythagorean_Theorem_Proof.gif) The Chinese proof looks more like this one though: [https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ylzhg.gif](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ylzhg.gif) There is also explanation in the annotations.

<comment><USER11> It's mind blowing when I see a new image like that and it completely changes how I understand the topic. I wish I could find more of those.

<comment><USER12> Search for the phrase "proofs without words" [0, 1]. There's long been a column in _Mathematics Magazine_ by that name featuring proofs in this style, and there is a book of the same title published by the Mathematical Association of America (which I think collects proofs from the magazine column). Lots of examples from other sources will also show up in a web search.

0\. [https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=proofs%20without...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=proofs%20without%20words)

1\. Image results: [https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=proofs+without+words&n...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=proofs+without+words&num=30&hl=en&prmd=visn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiC6Kf95vDSAhVK4YMKHZpjCPIQ_AUICCgC&biw=1024&bih=704)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> happy-go-lucky [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem)

> In India, the Baudhayana Sulba Sutra, the dates of which are given variously > as between the 8th and 5th century BC, contains a list of Pythagorean > triples discovered algebraically, a statement of the Pythagorean theorem, > and a geometrical proof of the Pythagorean theorem for an isosceles right > triangle.

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

> A rope stretched along the length of the diagonal produces an area which the > vertical and horizontal sides make together.

> The lines are to be referring to a rectangle, although some interpretations > consider this to refer to a square. In either case, it states that the > square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the sides.

> If this refers to a rectangle, it is the earliest recorded statement of the > Pythagorean theorem.

<comment><USER13> It's generally understood that the theorem, and in particular the 1/1/2 and 3/4/5 integral triangles were known prehistorically and independently 'discovered' in several places. It's not possible to know what the earliest recorded statement was, because we only have tiny fragments (more commonly, fragments of copies of fragments of later documentation of oral traditions) of what actually was recorded that long ago. Finding such a statement only says that its the earliest we're aware of, and even then its always contingent on a variety of factors.

These sorts of discussions always seem to devolve into "10,000 generations ago, someone who lived near where some of my ancestors later lived might have known more mathematics than people who lived near where your ancestors lived." [The 'That means I'm better than you.' is usually not explicit] Which is boring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wouldn't something from that period be written with seal script? That script looks like modern Han characters with an archaic font - it's completely readable.

<comment><USER15> Someone commented on the site that it's a 17th century reproduction.

<comment><USER16> Also while those are Han, the language is sophisticated to regular Chinese readers. I can't even make sense of the words (individually yes) as a native Chinese speaker.

A far as paper writing, I found [1] which said roughly 100 A.D. some paper production began.

[1]: [http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/tien- hsia.php?searchte...](http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/tien- hsia.php?searchterm=020_chinese_book.inc&issue=020)

<comment><USER17> Can you make an annotated version? Nothing fancy, if you add the translation with paintbrush and host it in imgur, I'll be completely happy.

<comment><USER18> It's traditional chinese but it's a challenge. This is my best guess: [http://imgur.com/a/rnXPW](http://imgur.com/a/rnXPW)

Looks like they were using colour as variable/labels.

<comment><USER17> Thanks! I replied in my other comment, because I made a previous explanation attempt but after looking at your translation I think that it was wrong and I wanted to highlight the differences.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953495)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's probably of value to note that that diagrams that everyone is talking about are not part of the original text.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't know Chinese, but I don't like the explanation in English at the side. I think that both diagrams are part of the same proof, not two independent proofs. I agree with the first comment by Martin Cohen [http://disq.us/p/1h6y5qx](http://disq.us/p/1h6y5qx)

> _The way I read it is that the first diagram says that(a+b)^2 = 4(ab /2)+c^2 > and the second says that c^2 = 4(ab/2)+(a-b)^2. Both of these simplify to > c^2 = a^2+b^2._

I only have a small proposed stylistic change that is to keep the are of the triangles as unknown values, let's call it T. So the first diagram shows that (a+b)^2 = 4T + c^2 and the second that c^2 = 4T + (a-b)^2. And simplifying you get simplify to c^2 = a^2 + b^2.

Is there a transcript and translation of the Chinese text?

<comment><USER18> I made this for another comment. Here you go: [http://imgur.com/a/rnXPW](http://imgur.com/a/rnXPW)

<comment><USER17> Thanks!

Copy of your previous comments in other thread for context:

> _Also while those are Han, the language is sophisticated to regular Chinese > readers. I can 't even make sense of the words (individually yes) as a > native Chinese speaker._

> _It 's traditional chinese but it's a challenge. This is my best guess:_

> _Looks like they were using colour as variable /labels._

\--

Most of my previous guess is wrong :( .

In the second diagrams, they use that the area of the triangles is 6, they are not ignoring the number.

In both pages they ignore the outer triangles. They are not painted in neither graph. If they were using "my" solution I'd expect that the outer triangles in the first diagram were painted with the same color as the inner triangles in the second diagram.

The first diagram makes no sense. It looks like a graphic to show a numerical equality, but the geometric properties give no insight of the numerical properties. Perhaps it was a usual writing style?

There is no 49 in the first graphic (nor in the second) so my previous explanation doesn't fit with the text.

\--

My second unsupported attempt of translation is:

[Second diagram]

The area of each red triangle is 6 [because 4 * 3 / 2 = 6].

The side of the inner yellow square is 1 [because 4 - 3 = 1], so the area is 1 [ 1 * 1 = 1].

The area of the [rotated] square is the sum of the four red triangles and the small yellow square, it is 25 [because 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 1 = 25].

So the side of the [rotated] square is 5.

Then the sides of the triangle at the bottom are 3, 4, 5.

[First diagram]

If we subtract the area of a square with side 5 and a square of side 3 [painted in cyan], we get the area [painted in yellow] that is 16.

[Notice that 16 is the area of a square of side 4, that we never draw here.]

\--

My current opinion:

The second diagram is a proof that in a right triangle with legs 3 and 4, the hypotenuse is 5. I think that this can be extended to any other Pythagorean triple, but one at a time. This doesn't look like a general proof for all of them. This looks more like the verification of an example than a general proof.

The first diagram is an auxiliary construction for the second diagram. It's not very enlightling.

The explanation of the side added in Fermat's library is no a transcript or an explanation of the proof in the main text. It's another proof of the Pythagorean Theorem with a somewhat similar graphic, but it's unrelated.

<comment><USER18> I couldn't translate the middle left vertical sentence on the first diagram because it's a bit too faded. (It said something about the corner...) There's also references about 'this layer/level' all over the place that make me think there may be some paper folding involve but it could simply mean 'this layer is solid yellow' and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know you can use the second diagram to prove the theorem, but it requires an algebraic argument (the other two squares aren't shown). Unless the text says something pretty interesting, this looks more like a proof just for a 3,4,5 triangle.

The first diagram I can't get my head round at all, or is it proving something different?

<comment><USER20> The first and second diagrams are similar, just using the 'outside' vs 'inside' deconstruction.

If we label the sides a=3, b=4, and c=5 :

The first diagram shows that the big outer square of length (a+b) equals the area of the 4 triangles plus the rotated square of side c. (a+b)^2 = 2ab + c^2

[I'm not sure why they drew an inner 3x3 square on its own].

The second diagram puts the same four triangles inside the rotated square of side c, which leaves an extra smaller square of side (b-a) inside.

c^2 = 2ab + (b-a)^2

<comment><USER19> Yeah, the inner square is confusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It was true then...

[http://abstrusegoose.com/376](http://abstrusegoose.com/376)

However paper itself was invented around the same time. How come bookbinding already existed then?

<comment><USER22> Ah, Stigler's Law of Eponymy

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why not 2500 years ago!?

</comment><comment><USER24> Couldn't have said it better myself. I think about this stuff a lot, how much ancient and modern overlap, how much Eastern and western overlap, yet how people still want to divide everything.

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." \- Albert Einstein

"The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and the intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world… Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic, it is learned and it is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That's the power of intuition and experiential wisdom." \- Steve Jobs

Carl Sagan was really keen on seeing 'the bigger picture' too, can't find the particular quote I was looking for. Maybe later.

<comment><USER25> These divisions are very important. As long as mystical beliefs towards Eastern thought are used to cause real harm through herbal remedies and supplements, the public must be taught to give it less importance. Among critical thinkers, it is valuable to look for similarities in scientific histories.

<comment><USER26> Last I checked homeopathy was western. i think your bias towards eastern medicine would be better founded if you were to say faith healing rather than eastern. Within eastern medicine one also finds people who used early forms of experimentation to derive working cures. Examples of working medical cures include boswellia used to treat bursitis, artemisin used to treat malaria. Also both Chinese and Indians had developed anaesthetic before Europeans. Similarly the procedure of rhinoplasty was developed in India. When the British came in western surgeons studied the technique and took it back to Europe. In fact hygiene was a critical part of the ayurvedic surgeons life well before Europeans realized the importance of hygiene in surgery. Of course there are a lot bogus stuff in eastern cures as well but in the west you have stuff like homeopathy. I think the key take away is that you cannot divide by east and west. We are after all human and each culture has their own contribution to the face of the earth.

<comment><USER2> You are trivializing the significant difference modern western science based medicine and earlier medicine. Of course people could come up with all sorts of practical solutions to various ailments and conditions through trial, error and observations. That however does not make it scientific. There is no scientific theory in you Chinese and Indian examples on which to make predictions and explanations. One example would be e.g. germ theory. It allows one to make predictions about things not yet observed. It helps explain why washing your hands is good. Now you can learn this from practical observations, but if you have no idea that the reason is due to germs being removed, then it prevents you from experimenting with and finding alternative cleaning agents or practices.

<comment><USER27> Western medicine is often found by trial and error too. Scientists perform tests of thousands of compounds just in case one of them happens to do something that might turn out to be useful. Some drugs are used to treat different diseases than what they were originally developed for because we noticed that patients with those other diseases mysteriously showed improvements. I can't think of which off the top of my head but perhaps a heart medicine that stopped baldness.

The key difference is western medicine is tested objectively, while traditional medicines are based on belief. A million people getting sick and taking a treatment and recovering doesn't mean the treatment does any good, but they'll believe it does because everyone else believes it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any ideas of it's authentic? China is hyper nationalist so I'm initially skeptical. Might be as fictitous as their GDP figures or sovereignty over Taiwan.

<comment><USER16> > sovereignty over Taiwan

This is the claim that China and Taiwan should reunite since the PRC drove the Nationalist Party out of mainland China. It isn't fictitious, it's merely a political wish to merge the two from the PRC side. Similarly, some Nationalists in Taiwan are happy to take back mainland China, as much as the country is divided on whether Taiwan should remain as it is, or should declare its full independence.

<comment><USER28> Doesn't the PRC's claim on Taiwan boil down to a combination of right-of- conquest ("Taiwan belonged to the Republic of China, we beat up the Republic of China, therefore Taiwan is ours") and Just Because? ("The PRC is the only legitimate Chinese government because the PRC says so")

I'm very skeptical of purely historical claims of sovereignty. If the people of Taiwan legitimately vote to join the PRC, that's their right, but the PRC has no legitimate right to demand it.

<comment><USER29> It must be clarified that mainland of China is also part of ROC according to ROC government[1]. In fact, the mainland and taiwan are in war, just like the Union and Confederacy in American civil war, even if there is not military conflicts right now. More interestingly, ROC actually claims larger territory than PRC (for example, part of Mongolia). It is ROC's constitution, not PRC's government, demands taiwan is part of China. Though it's not the People's Republic of China. And guess what, according to ROC's constitution, mainland China is "enemy occupied area". Therefore people in mainland China does not have right to vote, or legitimately declare independence.

[1] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ROC_Administrative_a...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ROC_Administrative_and_Claims.svg)

<comment><USER28> China lodged a formal complaint and warned of the "destr[uction of] Sino-US ties" because the US president _admitted that the Taiwanese president spoke to him._ If there's a reasonable party in all this, it is definitely not China. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/03/china- donald-t...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/03/china-donald- trumps-taiwan-phone-call-complaint-us)

<comment><USER30> We are incredibly off topic, but I think it's a bit reductionist to call China unreasonable. China is, above all, pragmatic. The Taiwan situation is a farce, but the Communist Party has reasons to believe it necessary. Party sovereignty and legitimacy are based on defending Chinese independence and restoring national grandeur (强国梦) after colonial humiliation. Any change on the Taiwan issue could cause both separatist and nationalist forces to escalate out of control, potentially destabilizing the entire country.

China really doesn't want to find out what might happen if countries start recognizing Taiwanese independence, so the US president poking at that bubble is seen as a threat. China responds with assertive words because fighting with words is better than fighting a war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I worry that China is outcompeting us.

<comment><USER2> Who gives a shit? It is almost always Americans making such statements, obsessed as they are about being number one. If Chine gets richer and more technologically advance that would be good for them and good for us westerners. It is not a zero sum game.

Although to be realistic I don't think China will ever outcompete the US. Not because I don't want them to, but simply because so many fundamentals count in Americas favor and against China. China is facing a demographic catastrophe. The US can easily grow its population with immigration and has plenty of land and natural resources to do so.

<comment><USER32> I agree with the non zero-sum point, however...

 _China is facing a demographic catastrophe._

Strongly disagree. The view on the ground in China is great. Almost everyone has their material needs exceeded, many sectors of infrastructure are second to none, education and internationalization of tastes is increasing, and the society is generally very safe. E-vehicles and e-commerce are everywhere. Rent a bicycle for nothing. Visit the tropics, Himalayas, desert or snow with a cheap domestic flight. Cuisine is arguably the most extensive in the world. Mobile payments are ubiquitous. Internet is cheap to free and literally you can get a signal _anywhere_. Yes, of course like anywhere it's not perfect, but it's really a far cry from America's stagnant and elitist education system, crumbling or monopolistically privatized infrastructure (eg. transport, medicine), and widespread opiate, gun and race problems.

(FYI: minimum wage in most Chinese cities for an _unskilled_ foreigner with any kind of get up and go is 200CNY/hr (~USD$28/hr) these days... a great many western workers are on less than half of that, and would do very well to migrate.)

 _so many fundamentals count in Americas favor_

I would like to hear what these are supposed to be. Having elite universities doesn't count if you rent them out to all comers, default English doesn't count if more people speak it overseas, VC doesn't count if it's easier to get elsewhere, and land isn't needed if your population is already happy to urbanize with extreme density. China owns the world's supply chain and manufacturing, has a highly efficient centralized form of government that can get huge or long term projects done without recourse to political terms, and leads the world in output and deployment scale of renewable energy systems (hydro, solar), modern transport infrastructure, robotics, internet, mobile payment and e-vehicles. Those are some pretty big fundamentals, too. From my perspective all the US really has are systemic global financial and communications surveillance capabilities and a big fat army. Their diplomatic trajectory is nothing to write home about, either.

<comment><USER33> >China is facing a demographic catastrophe.

you didn't refute that. you just said "life on the ground today is good." That's why its called a cliff. Things are pretty good right up to the moment you fall off.

>FYI: minimum wage in most Chinese cities for an unskilled foreigner with any kind of get up and go is 200CNY/hr

But that's not the same thing as minimum wage. Many many Chinese people earn less than that. When you're a Chinese person you can't just hit up your mate on wechat for some bullshit English teaching job whenever you want beer money.

<comment><USER32> There's really no need to refute a statement which goes directly against sustained personal observation, especially when it is made without producing any actual evidence.

Obviously not everyone earns the same, then again local people tend to have more money than even wealthy foreigners at the high end, and at the low end at least tend to benefit from free housing, familial support networks, and do not have to fund international travel to maintain ties to home.

Furthermore, downvoting because you don't agree with someone is considered bad form.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the iPhone and Poor Apple Management have contributed to the Downfall of Apple - <AUTHOR> http://bullcross.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-iphone-and-poor-apple-management.html <comment><USER2> Christ, the linkbait. The "downfall" of Apple is a (hypothetical) shortfall in its _stock price_ because their accounting isn't dubious enough.

Okay, that last bit might be unfair, since I'm no accountant and I wouldn't recognize a massive accounting controversy if it fell on my head. But it seems to me like this is an article debating whether Apple is merely as healthy as it looks or _even healthier_ than it looks.</comment>


Show HN: Unito – Sync Asana/Trello/GitHub/Jira/GitLab/Bitbucket/Wrike/Basecamp/+ - <AUTHOR> https://unito.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> So.. I know this is a dupe of an old post[1] from ~2 years ago but I'm curious on current thoughts of a tool like this. I'm finding myself in need of this, and I just signed up and so far super easy and simple.

How do others approach the problem of syncing these tools when different teams are using them for different aspects of the same project?

1- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12858432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12858432)</comment>


Interacting with a home-made hologram - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/oliver.pavicevic/videos/10153301784242998/ <comment><USER2> Any information about how this was made? It doesn't look like a real hologram. Is it an image that bounce against a glass?

<comment><USER3> [http://uploadvr.com/check-out-this-amazing-homebrewed- mixed-...](http://uploadvr.com/check-out-this-amazing-homebrewed-mixed- reality-hologram/)

> This project was a free time project, simple experimenting for future > applications. There is a DSLR camera with wide angle that transmits a signal > via HDMI to Blackmagic Intensity pro capture card. Oculus is attached to > camera, and it takes tracks all camera movements, while Kinect 2 tracks hand > movements. It's a quite simple setup. The main problem was synchronising a > Rift tracking with camera latency. So this part was a little bit of problem, > and I implemented something quite similar to Oculus time warp and looking > behind time to see where the tracker was when capture image has updated. > Latency has to be compensated for by hand for now.. but maybe I will make a > little latency checker with arduino and a small led.</comment></comment>


Algorithms code snippets – Useful for Interview preparations (WIP) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iamtrk/algorithms <comment><USER2> Would like to see more algos.</comment>


man ffs - <AUTHOR> http://linux.die.net/man/3/ffs

<comment><AUTHOR> Today I discovered ffs(3) is part of glibc. It's a family member of the GCC extensions __builtin_clz(), _ctz(), and _ffs(), for finding the first set bit in a word (dword, qword, multiple widths exist). See: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_first_set](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_first_set)

These functions are useful because they can be mapped to a single instruction, BSF on x86.</comment>


Introduction to Computer Graphics (textbook) - <AUTHOR> http://math.hws.edu/graphicsbook/ <comment><USER2> OpenGL 1.1 ? I didn't know we were in the early 2000.

<comment><USER3> Hey, you didn't pay anything for the book, right?

<comment><USER2> How is that relevant ? I don't know anything about computer graphics but I know for sure that OpenGL 1.1 is outdated. How I'm supposed to know that the whole book is not outdated ?

My time is precious, I won't risk spending it reading an oudated book....

<comment><USER4> How about by reading the dates on the material? It clearly states it was initially published in August 2015.

Then, by reading the chapter on "hardware and software" in the introduction, you would have the remaining explanation you desired.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft sets May 5 date for Windows 7 RC public release - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132118&intsrc=news_ts_head <comment><USER2> I'm not sure why MS doesn't distribute the public releases over a P2P network. They would be able to support many more people downloading with less bandwidth problems.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure that the mere mention of "P2P" is a taboo at Microsoft (management). A lot of people have probably already suggested it, since the developers aren't stupid, but management probably can't do it for marketing reasons.

On the other hand, maybe they are leaking the RCs over bit-torrent early on purpose... _puts on tinfoil hat_

<comment><USER4> If I wasn't on such a limited coputer, I'd go looking for the improvements in windows 7 - I think there's a local caching feature for accessing files over a WAN link so that other clients can get files from their peers quickly instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So soon?! So nice!

<comment><USER3> Even sooner, even nicer: <http://www.ubuntu.com/>

;)

<comment><USER6> Yes, the new Ubuntu is nicer...than previous Ubuntu versions. Got it installed on a VM and set up a clojure environment, which is a pain the the ass on Windows. Still can't wait for Windows 7 to come out though.

<comment><USER3> Nice! Why not run a more striped down version of Linux for that clojure environment? Ubuntu is pretty fast, but it still uses a lot of RAM compared to, say, puppy linux.

<comment><USER6> Ubuntu is more widely supported, and I have 8 GB of RAM. I don't know if using less memory is worth the effort to learn something new. For instance, I rebuilt my dad's PC with an Atom CPU and 1GB of memory and installed Ubunutu on it. It works great. I might give puppy linux a go on my netbook though.

<comment><USER7> Straight Debian is much like Ubuntu, but without the weight.

It's much easier to get it down to a minimal size for VM's (I know a guy who made a tiny version, with barely enough in the kernel to boot.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical Networking [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/Steenbergen.Everything_You_Need.pdf <comment><USER2> Not long ago I was curious to see what it would cost to run fiber instead of copper in my home network, and it turns out that the fiber itself is cheaper (per meter) than copper, but the transceivers at each end and the equipment required to work with the fiber were much more expensive; which explains why much of the long-distance Internet links use it, but nearly no one uses it for their home network... yet?

There's also an interesting failure mode for fibers, known as "fiber fuse", which can happen when the power level is very high and an imperfection in the fiber causes the light to literally start burning it like a fuse:

[http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/28593/InTech- Fiber_fuse_propa...](http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/28593/InTech- Fiber_fuse_propagation_behavior.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > nearly no one uses it for their home network... yet?

Yeah, sorta. It's depressingly rare to find desktop motherboards with SFP ports, much less laptops. You end up converting back to copper anyway.

I have a fiber link in my home network, because I was sick of losing wifi routers every time a storm came through. I suspect the cable modem to be allowing badness to sneak in even past the grounding block (which doesn't ground the center pin, of course), so in addition to a UPS with a coax protector, I now also have the whole "outside" of the network isolated (the cable modem and a fiber media converter, on that one UPS, on its own circuit) by a few feet of glass, from the "inside" of the network (another media converter, wifi router, distribution switch, NAS, etc, on another UPS on a different circuit). There's now no electrical path between the cable HFC network and my inner sanctum, and I haven't blown up any more hardware yet!

<comment><USER4> Asking from a place of relative EE ignorance: Wouldn't you worry about blowing a much more expensive optic transceiver with this setup?

<comment><USER5> $38 [https://store.ubnt.com/products/uf- mm-10g-20-20-pack](https://store.ubnt.com/products/uf-mm-10g-20-20-pack)

<comment><USER6> $16 [https://www.fs.com/products/65336.html](https://www.fs.com/products/65336.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like the full talk is on youtube at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KFpXuHqHQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KFpXuHqHQg)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18108980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18108980)

And an updated one:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__wn9zXFiy8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__wn9zXFiy8)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18109098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18109098)

I'm not sure which version these slides correspond to.

</comment><comment><USER8> So fiber can transfer 20 Tbps+ ? Mind = blown. Great cursory read

<comment><USER9> Well, a single fiber pair and a rack's worth of expensive gear on both sides. The standard front panel ports on routers these day tends to go to 100G with 400 on the horizon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Optical network surprises sometimes like when certain wavelengths on a cable will become unreliable due to damage but others work fine.

<comment><USER11> Do the transceivers work around this (similar to what happens with DSL) or do you have to replace the whole fibre?

<comment><USER10> Hmm no I don't think so, the goal with multiplexing is to keep the streams separate so you can untangle them at the end since you're running multiple customers on a fiber. Losing a wavelength means less streams you can fit on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> heh ive used the phone camera trick heaps of times coming onto a site that has had a dodgy splicer who doesnt follow color standards to figure out which pair I was lighting up...quick and dirty but faster than pulling out the full tesy kit in a pinch

</comment><comment><USER13> Related: a visualization of the wavelength assignment algorithm in optical networks : [https://github.com/afourmy/swap](https://github.com/afourmy/swap)

</comment><comment><USER14> Ah, many of these slides are familiar to me! I used to work on the Cyan (now Ciena) Z-Series shelves way back. Got a chance to help develop some of Cyan's SDN routing tech to generate network routes through Z-Series 2, 4, and 8-degree ROADM cards.

The bandwidth and capabilities of fiber and ROADM still blow my mind long after leaving that industry.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been a contributor to GNPY as part of the Telecom Infrastructure Project. It's essentially a route planning tool for planning optical networks.

[https://github.com/Telecominfraproject/oopt- gnpy](https://github.com/Telecominfraproject/oopt-gnpy)</comment>


Coronavirus is now the 3rd leading cause of death in U.S. - sahin-boydas https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8177481/Coronavirus-leading-cause-death-doctors-say.html <comment><AUTHOR> Well, deaths attributed to C-19 should also decrease other deaths (i.e. total deaths should be equal or more, but other causes should decrease). This is not a 100% add-on.

<comment><USER2> It's more complicated. The lockdown has slowed down spread of other diseases and lowered traffic causalities. On the other hand normally treatable conditions are not getting the required attention. It is impossible to get clear picture of whole effect on death statistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "About 647,000 Americans die from heart disease each year" [1]

So even if 200k die from COVID19 it is a long way away from heart disease.

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> It will become the 1st in a short while

<comment><USER5> For a short while.

Do you know how many fatalities it would take to meaningfully move the CDR for a year or even month?

Do you think CDR will be lower next year because we will eventually get back to average?

<comment><USER6> 7500 per day is roughly the death rate of the country as a whole. We're less than 4 doubling periods from that.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to see what the current daily number of deaths is for US. UK has a good current weekly tally. Can't find anything similar for US.

It would be helpful to determine the amount of overlap. That is, there has been a precipitous drop in pneumonia deaths since January. (That stat is tallied at CDC on a weekly basis.) how many of those have been recatagorized as covid deaths?

<comment><USER8> This is what I use:

[https://www.bing.com/covid/local/unitedstates](https://www.bing.com/covid/local/unitedstates)

As of now (4/4, 4pm EST) I can see 1376 fatalities in the last day, and a total of 8283.

<comment><USER7> No, I mean daily US deaths from ALL causes.

<comment><USER5> It's roughly 7500 daily in the US. another way is the Ave global CDR calculated at the mid point of the year.

1.8% Birth 0.8% Death

~360M * 0.008</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is the future of deep learning Hardware? - <AUTHOR> So, I was thinking about what the future holds for deep learning hardware. It seems like nvidia dominates, but big challengers like Intel (and Nervana!), AMD , Xilinx, etc. are coming up with their own products. Startups like wave computing and graphcore also appear to be doing interesting stuff. I'm very interested in FPGAs for deep learning and even more about ASICs and special chips for deep learning. Are there any papers and/or companies you could point me to? What do you guys think about the future of deep learning hardware? I understand that GPUs are already very good because of matrix multipliers and FPUs, but surely an opportunity exists just by lowering precision (for inference mainly, but apparently stochastic rounding works for training also)? <comment><USER2> The lowest precision is using binary. Look for "binaryConnect" for research. Also the group behind pulpino did a chip implememtation of binaryConnect with great results.

Another possibility is the work of Jennifer hassler from Georgia tech on analog neural networks , including a roadmap of the possibilities.

Those are possibly the most optimal theoretically , but it's not certain that they'll work.

</comment><comment><USER3> GPUs are a bit silly, even though they work well, since the power consumption per unit of computation is higher than FPGAs , and orders of magnitude higher than the human brain. The problem with deep learning is that real brains don't do multiply-accumulates and so contain no power-sucking floating point hardware. So there is a lot of room for improvement here.

</comment><comment><USER3> See [https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/ai- dod.pdf](https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/ai-dod.pdf) for more

</comment><comment><USER4> The best deep learning stack on FPGA I know: [http://mipsology.com](http://mipsology.com)

It will be interesting to see the race between FPGAs and GPUs in the next two years. Both performance and power consumption are going to be improving significantly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Lowering precision has been done already by several firms.</comment>