Android Audio Latency - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/11/13/android-audio-latency-in-depth-its-getting-better-especially-with-the-nexus-5x-and-6p/ <comment><USER2> It is really an interesting aspect of the whole Android versus iOS "war", that indeed Google did not up-front plan to make the OS actually useful for realtime Audio/synthesis/processing; but instead, Android has had more of a 'data-center'-like design, wherein the kernel and its onboard assets is more of a 'managed host' than it is 'realtime embedded' sort of system ..

That the Android designers are having to play catchup with this speaks a lot, I think, of how significant design-decisions were influenced by the territory from which the originated - the web, managed systems - and the realm which they hoped to capture - the embedded system in your pocket. Android was not designed up-front to be an amazing media system; iOS, was. Thus, iOS has more synth-plugins and a vibrant, thriving Audio-Application eco-system (seriously, its million-dollar) whereas Android has a lot of new players, but so far: not such a great playground, really, for "Musicians".

In fact, while iOS has really impinged upon the Music-Instrument (Digital) industry, Android has yet to make a dent.

So it is an interesting time to be having new solutions to what have been, relatively, frustrating and troublesome aspects of Android realtime Audio, as a developer.

<comment><USER3> Was iOS evolved from the iPod OS ? a lot ? a little ?

<comment><USER4> I have no idea of the internals of the iPod. As I understand it, iOS benefited immensely from the work already done on OsX. I don't even know whether they planned for it or just benefited from a mature module already in place.

<comment><USER5> IIRC the very first iPods actually had licensed much of the under the hood software.

I could be confusing them with Palm OS, which did the same for the kernel of their first Pilots...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OK, what about the absurd latency for responding to hardware buttons on headphones and the like? My experience across 3 different Android phones has been that when I press the button on my headphones to pause whatever I'm listening to, it will respond about half the time, and when it does respond, the latency is randomly somewhere between 1 second and ten minutes. This is consistent across several sets of headphones, both wired and Bluetooth, and even true of the pause button that appears on the lock screen, which I'm assuming uses the same mechanism to signal the app.

<comment><USER7> I feel like nobody cares about responsiveness anymore. (If they ever did.) My TV takes 20 seconds from pushing the power button before it's ready to show a picture. My Bluetooth headset takes a couple of seconds after flipping the power switch before it actually powers on. My iPhone (and I'd really expect better from Apple!) often takes 5-10 seconds to respond to a press of the Home button.

All over the place, apps and devices get faster and faster, and take longer and longer to actually do what you tell them to do.

</rant>

<comment><USER8> TVs are digital had come with all sorts of other features that require processing. This used to be handled by "secretly" leaving them on all the time. This would waste a decent amount of power, and as brands seek better power ratings they actually turn off now. It's the price you pay for HD. I also suspect that in general Bluetooth headsets always had a similar startup latency.

<comment><USER7> I don't buy it. Nothing about "processing" or HD means it has to take twenty seconds to boot. It's the price you pay for TV programmers thinking a full- sized Linux counts as an embedded OS.

<comment><USER9> Given what I understand the power of the machine inside these TVs to be, there's no reason a large-enough Linux shouldn't boot in a few seconds.

The manufacturer could get even smarter and use something like CRIU [0], along with opportunistic hybrid suspend [1] to dramatically speed up start times.

[0] [http://criu.org/Main_Page](http://criu.org/Main_Page)

[1] Which would work like this: A little while after you power your TV off, it suspends to RAM, and disk. If you power your TV on, the system TV restores its state from RAM. If AC power goes out, when AC power is restored and stable, the TV performs a background operation that uses the on-disk suspend image to get back to its hybrid suspend state.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that these features don't work out of the box. Any feature is going to be judged by whether the increased time-to-market and R&D cost is justified by additional sales. It's worth noting here that nobody buys TVs based on how quickly they turn on.

<comment><USER9> > The problem is that these features don't work out of the box.

What?

 _No_ feature works out of the box. Engineering effort has to be expended to make something work when designing and building _any_ new product. Did you maybe misphrase what you were trying to say?

> It's worth noting here that nobody buys TVs based on how quickly they turn > on.

[citation needed]

A big part of _my_ criteria for purchasing a display device is device and control responsiveness.

My non-technical family members who care about TV made "time between the time you turn the thing on and time it becomes usable" their #3 priority when purchasing their _second_ "smart TV". [0]

It's pretty clear that many (most?) techies are _really_ disappointed in how shitty, slow, and poorly designed most "smart TVs" are.

[0] #1 Picture quality. #2 Overall value per dollar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given the title, I would have liked to see some in-depth analysis on why the latency is as bad as it is? Which parts of the software stack are causing it?

Even though the Linux kernel is less than ideal for audio, it can still provide a latency low enough for music, ie. 10 ms or less.

This is an unbearable situation. There are lots of interesting music apps on the iOS that I would like to use, but only a handful are available on Android. And even if they are available, they are not necessarily usable.

<comment><USER12> > Which parts of the software stack are causing it?

There is a diagram lower down in the article with the components (ALSA, audioflinger etc).

[http://www.androidpolice.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/11/nexu...](http://www.androidpolice.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/11/nexus2cee_Android-Audio-Path-Latency-Superpowered- Audio700px.gif)

<comment><USER11> The infographic looked so much like an ad that I skipped over it.

So this is one of the "good" Android audio stacks, getting 36ms latency. But half of that is "wasted" in user space, in AudioFlinger as well as the app ring buffer (which seems pretty big to me). I'd like to see the comparison to a "bad" Android device.

Doing some internet searches, I found someone who had plugged in PulseAudio to an Android phone and got 20 ms latency instead of the 170+ ms latency from AudioFlinger on the same device [0]. That's pretty huge.

Ideally, there should be no user space middleware component processing audio in between, this could half the latency (according to the diagram), bringing the latency to acceptable levels. But ALSA isn't really intended for routing audio on the fly conveniently (e.g. when plugging/unplugging headphones), so there is some room for improvement too.

Overall, the situation is pretty sad. Linux can do better than that but a modern multimedia device (desktop or mobile) has several audio outputs and hot-plugging, which makes the situation rather difficult using ALSA only. And the userspace audio components just aren't great.

[http://arunraghavan.net/2012/01/pulseaudio-vs- audioflinger-f...](http://arunraghavan.net/2012/01/pulseaudio-vs-audioflinger- fight/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The overall latency (not audio, but the responsiveness, in general) of my Nexus 7 2013 got _much_ worse in Marshmallow. It now takes a second or two after clicking anything to get a response. I'm not sure what happened, but battery life also dropped immediately after the OTA update to 6.0. I don't have a lot of confidence that audio latency has improved, given the overall increased sluggishness of the device. I have a few music apps (Caustic, several DJ things, a couple of classic style trackers), but haven't tried them lately...partly because latency has always been such an issue that it wasn't worth trying to do stuff on it.

Nonetheless, I avoid Apple products on principle, and also enjoy playing with audio stuff (so much so that I started an audiovisual company a few years ago, which I only recently extricated myself from, leaving it in the hands of one of the co-founders), so I'm pleased to see the issue getting attention. I'd love to be able to make real music on my tablet. I have a Gameboy that I use for "on the train" music tinkering, because it has an immediacy that is lost in most modern devices (not merely latency...just the general composition process on something so simple it's impossible to get bogged down in bullshit like selecting the perfect snare sample or something). It's be cool to be able use the Nexus 7 for that purpose.

<comment><USER14> Uh, while I think it's perfectly reasonable to like using a Gameboy for music tinkering, that whole "immediacy" thing you cite about composition process is essentially what got solved with Propellerhead's Figure. I've had it since the first version and it's grown into my personal, portable drum/bass/synth sketchpad and recommend it to anybody serious about composing on the go. Just because you don't know what's out there doesn't mean it's not out there, for what it's worth.

<comment><USER13> Figure is an iPhone/iPad app. There is no Android version.

<comment><USER14> I know, which means that until Android gets its garbage latency issues sorted out, having principles a la "No iDevices" simply cuts off the nose to spite the face.

<comment><USER13> That's your position, which I have not made any assertion about. My position is that I don't buy Apple products. That is not to say I believe Google is vastly better, from an ethical perspective, but, Android is more open. Until I can buy a reasonable Firefox phone in the US, Android will have to do.

<comment><USER14> If I understand correctly Apple products can be "jailbroken" if you don't want to buy a new product and primarily want to use it for actual artistic endeavors. I was simply contradicting your assertion that music software isn't up to par with quick composition, because it is, and to assert otherwise is simply ignorant. In your case, willful, so that's just your own problem, as I noted.

<comment><USER13> Which part of my comment led you to the conclusion that I was ignorant? I specifically mentioned that I'd ruled out Apple devices on other grounds, which, I would think, would be sufficient evidence that I'm aware of the capabilities of those devices. I also mentioned that I founded an audiovisual company; one might conclude from that statement that I've recently worked in the field professionally. One might draw some conclusions from that, as well. I'm just not sure how one would draw the particular conclusions you've drawn, based on the comment that I made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Direct link for the superpowered.com latency testing app: [http://superpowered.com/latency](http://superpowered.com/latency)

</comment><comment><USER16> IMO the biggest reason to be optimistic that this will get this fixed is VR. GearVR had to rely on its own audio stack, but if VR takes off in a big way then I'm sure Google will want to support in stock Android, and that'll only work if they re-architect the Android audio stack to support low latency audio. This could end up fixing the issue for desktop Linux too.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you want an in-depth explanation (AP mostly skims the surface) : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c) is a must-watch. Obviously, it does not cover the work accomplished these past two years, but it gives a good idea of the challenges of audio latency on Android

</comment><comment><USER17> You can watch this I/O session from a few years back:

[https://youtu.be/d3kfEeMZ65c](https://youtu.be/d3kfEeMZ65c)

It probably provides the best insight to the problem Google engineers were and probably is still facing in regards to high performance audio on Android. Even when the latency is brought down, there's still other audio related issues/glitches (like buffer underruns).

Even now that Android is measurably better than it was previously, things like buffer underruns can still affect the overall usability. Increasing the buffer (to fix the underruns) render the device less suitable for such things as using it with external MIDI controller. You can see from Superpowered's audio latency measurements:

[http://superpowered.com/latency#cta](http://superpowered.com/latency#cta)

that the buffer for iOS is half that of the best Android (the dual-core Nexus 9)- 64 instead of 128 for Android.

I

</comment><comment><USER18> > (from the article) [...] It did unquestionably require more time to code in > lots of low-level functionalities that were simply missing from Android's > SDK — and even after all that work, the end result was still far from ideal.

That being said, it's not clear whether the improved latency on newer platforms can be achieve without using Android NDK. I haven't used it, but I know Android 4.0+ supports OpenSL through NDK, and I'm guessing that if you want low latency you need OpenSL. By skimming through the docs, it looks like that's the case, isn't that so? [http://source.android.com/devices/audio/latency_app.html](http://source.android.com/devices/audio/latency_app.html)

So, maybe it does solve the latency issue, and I would gladly use NDK because I like C++ stuff, but I think most developers wouldn't want to do it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have a virtual hearing aid app for iPhone(Enhanced Ears) that simply is not possible right now with Android. I've had potential customers clamoring for an Android port, but I don't want to develop an app that has crippled performance. The audio coming in to the user's ears needs to match moving lips.

</comment><comment><USER20> A few years ago I got into a project that involved pretty tight control of audio latency, in a system with a fair amount of legacy.

"How hard can it be?"

At the end of a year, imagine someone who has spent a year in the Alaska wilderness, strangled three grizzly bears with his bear hands, lived on berries and nuts and fish caught in frigid glacial streams, and generally been up and down the audio stack in the OS and a couple pieces of firmware, involving audios APIs, a USB software stack that we re-wrote, a close examination of USB hardware and how chipsets are fucked up, and how exactly I2C microphones really work. My wife described me as "broken". It took a while to recover.

How hard can it be? Isochronous, low-latency audio can be pretty hard.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hi all -- Patrick from Superpowered.com. We're working on an update to our Android 10 ms Problem article with new data --- quick question: What's not clear about Android latency? What questions would you like answered that you haven't seen answered online?

</comment><comment><USER22> Given that the android tv devices are (imo) more important in this aspect than a phone or tablet, I would have liked to see what latency was on things like the nexus player, shield tv, sony tv (baked in), apple tv, and roku maybe. I assume they would be similar, but perhaps they made some special modifications that will later be incorporated into AOSP?

<comment><USER23> I don't understand why you think that round trip latency matters at all on tvs and media consumption devices.

<comment><USER22> I misunderstood that the issue was input-to-output latency, and was instead thinking of audio/visual sync issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have been writing a game on my spare time that has an audio sequencer for interactive music.

It currently runs on iOS and OSX.

Initially I thought about doing an Android version as the code is all in C++ and it would be easy to port, but if the latency is as bad as described here I might not bother.

</comment><comment><USER25> > The fact of the matter is that sound (along with everything else we know of > in the Universe) travels at a finite speed. In regular conditions, a sound > wave propagates at around 340 meters (or 1100 feet) through the air in a > single second. This means that even for plain old physical instruments, > there exists an audio delay between the moment the instrument is played and > the instant the sound reaches the musician's ear.

You heard it here first folks, in a few years Apple is going to come out with the revolutionary "Cochlea sound", which has such a small delay your ears are unable to perceive that there is any delay at all (while listening from 10-12 inches from your ears of course)!

It will be magical and delight us, and something we never realised we needed until we were told we did. It will become the new standard and a household name, and we'll all have to catch ourselves when we say it and try to use some obnoxious generic term instead (LoALPS perhaps: Low Audio Latency Per Sound).</comment>


The Comandante's Canal - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/10/the-comandantes-canal

<comment><AUTHOR> A profile of the recently re-proposed (Nicaragua was one of the original Central American canal locations, along with Panama) Nicaraguan canal, it's backing, and the dissent. Nicaragua is the 2nd poorest country in the Americas, only behind Haiti, and Ortega (the Nicaraguan president) has promised the canal (back by Chinese investment) would significantly alleviate the country's poverty. There is minimal faith in the project amongst the average citizen, and the political opposition has been vociferous in dissent.

This canal could also dramatically impact the current shipping regime, although I don't really have the expertise to make specific comments.

On a personal note, I have visited Nicaragua, and can't help but think that the proposed canal would dramatically alter the country (currently one of the safest third-world countries in the world and certainly on a slow upswing into what many people picture as a second Costa Rica [dependent on politics of course]). In particular, I can only assume it would destroy Ometepe in its current form.</comment>


Tell HN: Giving Away 10 Promo Codes For Gaia GPS to Hacker News People - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
Since we have 50 promo codes for Gaia GPS, and I'm grateful for everyone's feedback and ad hoc testing from this site, I'd like to give away 10 promo codes to get the app for free to you all. I'd like to give more, but we have given a lot away already and need a few for journalists. The code will save you a cool $2.99 :)
The first 10 people to email me will get a promo code, which will let you download the app from the store for free. If you like the app, we would of course appreciate a good review.
Thanks in part to my post on the release of Gaia GPS today, we are up to 75th in the Navigation category and rising, so thanks for all your support. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=835433
Check out www.gaiagps.com for more info on the app. <comment><USER2> Where shall we email you at?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, email@example.com</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is TechZing podcast coming back? - <AUTHOR> Since Justin and Jason frequent HN I figured this would be a good place to ask. Last episode, or rather 10 minutes of the episode, was posted almost 2 months ago.<p>Any suggestions for alternatives for this style of show? <comment><AUTHOR> Well there you go, new episode posted today:

[http://techzinglive.com/page/1567/291-tz-discussion-no- brain...](http://techzinglive.com/page/1567/291-tz-discussion-no-brain- required)</comment>


Ask HN: Better Shirts – Tailored Shirts Delivered in 48 Hours - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I've had this problem for a while. I'm a tall, slim guy and it's difficult for me to find a nice, well fitting dress shirt to wear. I thought of this idea called Better Shirts a few nights ago. Let me know what you think!
Here's how the service would work:
1. User would browse our selection of shirts (various patterns and colors)
2. User would enter their shirt measurements
3. Checkout!
4. Custom tailored shirt is delivered in 48 hour to their door
Here would be the feature points:
1. Fast, 48 hour delivery.
2. Low cost, high quality clothing (costs are kept down by bulk purchasing from manufacturer)
3. No questions asked return policy and superb customer service (think Zappos)
Other notes:
1. Cuffs, collars, and buttons would all be standard and would follow current popular fashion.
2. There are other services out there that provide custom tailored shirts. But their cost per shirt is some $150+ and they use brand names.
3. I'm certainly not a fashion or textiles expert, but if it's reasonable to sell quality dress shirts at $30 or less (with shipping) that'd be awesome.
4. Interested in working with me? This is just an idea that needs to be vetted out. Email me! email@example.com (temp email to avoid spam)
Cheers!
EDIT: Formatting. <comment><USER2> You ought to be able to get at least $100 million for this idea. Look at how well it corresponds to your typical dot-com:

1\. You have absolutely no understanding of the size of your market, the frequency with which they buy shirts, the price they're willing to pay-- or even whether anyone needs a custom-made shirt on 48 hours.

2\. You're not a tailor, you apparently haven't worked in the fashion, textile or manufacturing industry and probably couldn't tell me anything about how shirts are made.

3\. "Custom-tailored" means "built to fit a specific, usually unique configuration." If "cuffs, collars and buttons would all be standard", you're not custom-tailored.

Also you don't mention fabric, which is one of the most important issues.

Also, most tailors would tell you that if you're just entering measurements in whole integers, it isn't custom-tailored. Now If I can enter "18 3/16 x 37 5/8", that's closer to custom.

But a sine qua non of custom-tailoring is being measured for the garment by someone who knows how to measure.

4\. I'm going to measure myself? And there is a no-questions-asked return policy? That should be fun.

5\. You're planning to get product from wherever they're made to the buyer in 48 hours? You know that most of these shirts are assembled in Asia, right?

They're all minor issues, though. Hey, if Outbox-- or grocery delivery services-- can get funded, I'm sure you can too.

<comment><USER3> Fully agree. For some observations to back up your view:

A quick market analysis (aka, a Google search) finds this video ( [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0weojd1crNQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0weojd1crNQ) ) which shows how manually intensive it is to make a custom dress shirt.

That comes from Deo Veritas. The cheapest shirt they offer is $50. The shirt is made in Hong Kong, and takes several weeks to deliver. The FAQ says USPS charges $15 to send a first class package to Hong Kong, so with profit I expect the shirt costs about $25 to manufacture.

Checking now, you can't make shirts in Asia and have them shipped to the US within 48 hours at that price point. FedEx International Economy (48 hour delivery) for the shirt costs $50 from Hong Kong to San Francisco.

Which means you'll need to make it in the US, or more likely Mexico. Which is why you need to get $100 million to make this idea work. You'll need to set up a maquiladora just across the border, get the building and equipment, set up a supply chain for the fabric, and plan for enough sales to be able to make the investors happy.

Minimum wage for garment workers in Mexico is about US$6/hour. Minimum wage in Hong Kong is under $4/hour. Assuming most of the $25 is in labor costs in Hong Kong, that same basic shirt would cost about $35 to make in Mexico.

This is above your price point.

More expensive shirts take more time to make. Once the labor differential between Mexico and Asia exceeds $60 (the price for FedEx international priority), your Asian competitors can undercut you.

FWIW, I have no idea if these numbers are right. I have no expertise in this field. But if you (the OP, not rufusjones) can't do this sort of back-of-the- envelope calculations, then perhaps you shouldn't enter this business.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for filling in some details. I don't have any expertise in the apparel business either, but general principles indicated how badly thought out this was.

Really, a functioning brain stem is all you need. If this were a workable business model, you could get them at Walmart, because they can get stuff made cheaper than anyone else thanks to their selling clout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd been thinking of generating fitted sewing patterns once, and did a very basic search of what existing software already does that. Based on the (bad) reviews of existing products, I suspect the problem of making clothes fit is harder than it looks. [http://wildginger.com/](http://wildginger.com/) is one company to look at.

Of course, on the supply side, the best way to validate this is talk to some tailors about what their job entails, and learn how mass-produced clothing is made. I suspect that making this work would require finding a way to hire tailors very cheaply, in a location that's within 48 hour shipping distance.

I'd consider buying from a company like this, if I were confident that it actually would fit well, and the style I wanted was available in a lot of different colors. (Some parts of fit are personal preference - like the tradeoff between freedom of movement in the arms vs. clean-looking sleeve caps.) Also, as a woman who'se been shopping with other women, this should also work for womens' office clothing if it works for men. Differences in bust sizes add an extra variable to finding things that fit, and in certain styles (like fitted shirts and dresses that don't stretch), it can make things hard.

</comment><comment><USER5> A few thoughts:

\- The cost of tailoring a shirt here in Beijing can be as low as 15 USD _excluding fabric_. Your labour costs will be higher than this if you want to make things locally.

\- You will need 1.8 to 2.0 metres of fabric per shirt, so your fabric cost will be a _minimum_ of 8 USD per shirt

\- You will have shirts returned because they don't fit right, and need to factor those in to your costs, as you won't be able to resell them

You might want to go online and buy 5 tailored shirts from different supplies, so you can understand the customer experience. Start at ravistailor.com.

I will be amazed if you can offer quality custom shirts in 48 hours for 30USD all-in. You could have custom shirts tailored in China for ~25USD if you are willing to limit the quality and selection of fabrics, but that doesn't leave you much for margin, fulfillment or overheads.

<comment><USER6> Quite a few guys I know in nyc get their shirts custom at 50 a pop, if I recall. It's quite popular. I also think the secondary concern is fabric, ie wrinkle free. I would also say eliminate the hassle of measurements, ie have them take a picture with a standard object, ie credit card, and you do the measurements. Take a look at Europe, there are plenty of companies doing what you want to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As others have pointed out, the feature point of "bulk purchasing from manufacturer" is incompatible with "Custom tailored shirt". You can certainly get a dress shirt for $30 or less at stores like Target, JC Penney, Walmart, etc. but doing real custom shirts require skills and at least an hour or two of work. I watched my mom sew growing up and she's a professional sample maker at a fashion company in Los Angeles and here's the steps I can think of off the top of my head to make a custom shirt: 1) Get your measurements 2) Draw a pattern that conforms to those measurements 3) Cut cloth to pattern 4) Sew pieces together 5) Insert the collar structure 6) Sew buttons 7) Use appropriate buttonhole stitching 8) Sew labels on 9) Iron and press shirt.

<comment><USER2> He probably imagines that they can 3D-print the shirts.

If I remember right from talking to a tailor, collars, cuffs and buttons are almost all of the construction effort. If the idea behind "standard" configurations was "We can make these up in bulk in advance and then just add them to the shirt", this guy has even less clue about how to make a shirt than I thought.

It's kinda the point of "custom"\-- it doesn't get thrown together from pieces and parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm in your market. 6'3", 160 lbs. I was all set to explain why I don't think your idea will work for marketing reasons (short version: A few larger diversified companies get close enough to the mark that they'll take your core business, and you'll need to be able to survive off seasonal variations, which won't work.) Then I found this today: [http://www.moderntailor.com/](http://www.moderntailor.com/) Maybe I'm wrong.</comment>


Build your own Startup Death Clock - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/death-clock.html <comment><USER2> Yay! Jason has reinvented the burn-up chart.

That probably sounded snarky, and I apologize. I guess my point was that these very simple things keep getting reinvented time and time again.

Awesome concept. It is absolutely worth writing about again and a great idea for a blog entry. I also agree that everybody with a startup who isn't break- even yet should be doing this. It's such a simple and trivial thing, yet so immensely powerful. Part of the problem with such simple and powerful advice, as I just demonstrated, is that people too easily discount it because it sounds facile.

</comment><comment><USER3> I could argue with the detail in the math and the actual calculations made, but the point is the important bit.

You need to compute and track when you'll run out of cash, and how fast you're running out of cash.

You need to focus on doing stuff that makes you run out of cash more slowly, preferably negatively.

What gets measured, gets managed: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667248>

I've recently started to apply this explicitly to my email backlogs and my filing backlogs. Both are improving rapidly, and I'm looking to see what else needs to come on board. Maybe it will only last while it's novel, but it's working for now, I'll surf the wave.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully"

\-- Samuel Johnson

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool, I'm totally going to make one of this for my startup.

Of course it might be a little pointless since we're already out of money ...

<comment> a-priori Yes, if you do this and it gives you a date in the past, then it's time to re- think your business model.

<comment><USER5> Or find some funding and/or bootstrapping projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Indinero offers an accurate Death Clock, definitely a great motivator.

<comment><USER7> How do you know it's accurate? Have you calibrated it? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Offtopic-ly, avoid using motion blur to deface private details: in many cases it can be undone. Moderate pixelation is also fairly recoverable when the font is known.

It's usually best to blank it completely (with a bar of solid color) or to add noise into the distortion.

<comment><USER9> I may be mistaken, but I think he just blurred it out for the blog post. Within the company, he may actually show the details.

<comment><USER8> I'm saying he didn't blur it enough. Someone could take a standard image deconvolution package, give it a good estimate of the point spread function, and probably recover at least the first and last digits of each line.

It's probably not very important in this case, considering his general openness, but I thought I'd bring it up just to remind people.

<comment><USER10> I was actually wondering about that - thank you for the specificity of which approach to take instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, there's an idea for a startup — burn-up charts featuring a "Death Clock/Countdown". Could be useful for small teams getting started — and the site could gradually expand into other related services.

P.S. burnupcharts.com is still free...

<comment><USER12> I couldn't resist: <http://startupdeathclock.com></comment></comment>


Show HN: 10 months building a WordPress theme builder. No shortcodes. No plugins - <AUTHOR> https://www.iskulpt.com <comment><AUTHOR> Posted this a couple weeks ago but didn't get much discussion going on, a sharp mind sharpens another etc.

So I set out to create a theme builder that stays true to the WordPress API and allows you to code and style a theme visually. Why this over all the other 100s if not 1000s of options you might ask? In one word, CONTROL. You can place e.g. a post title, comment count, widget area etc exactly where YOU WANT IT. I found alot of the builders are great as long as you stick to _their templates_ , the moment you want something slightly different things get hairy very quickly.

At the moment WordPress support is ready for prime time. I built the application in such way that rolling out support for other CMS e.g. Drupla or Joomla will be a fairly straight forward endeavour.

You will find that my pricing is significantly lower than that market average, and the reason for this is simple. My market is theme shops and developers who want to build the themes they envision quickly but add some further customizations and resell to clients.</comment>


Atul Gawande on Health Care Costs - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/2009/06/01/090601on_audio_gawande/?xrail He is also the author of the book, 'Better: a Surgeon's Notes on Performance' a very remarkable book on becoming better. <comment><USER2> A little context: this was the article that so moved the President that he insisted that Senators read it at a recent White House meeting on health care reform:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/us/politics/09health.html>

<comment><USER3> Also note that the AMA is in favor of additional payments to doctors, and therefore want to see more McAllens.

(Both parents are docs, both are AMA members, both don't care/know about the organization's politics. _sigh_ )

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> John Stossel has an interesting dissenting opinion:

<http://www.creators.com/opinion/john-stossel.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> Link to the article instead of the audio: [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande?yrail)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> He is also the author of the book, 'Better: a Surgeon's Notes on Performance' a very remarkable book on becoming better.</comment>


Can we survive technology? (1955) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf <comment><USER2> "The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit."

"Even in an airplane the number of vacuum tubes now approaches or exceeds a thousand. Other machines, containing up to 10,000 vacuum tubes, up to five times more crystals, and possibly more than 100,000 cores, now operate faultlessly over long periods, performing many millions of regulated, preplanned actions per second, with an expectation of only a few errors per day or week. Many such machines have been built to perform complicated scientific and engineering calculations and large scale accounting and logistical surveys. There is no doubt that they will be used for elaborate industrial process control, logistical, economic, and other planning"

<comment><USER3> Airplanes ran on vacuum tubes? Shit as a electric guitarist this would've terrified me though I guess whatever they used was more reliable and probably power cycled more responsibly.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't say "ran on." It wasn't a fly by wire system or anything like that. But plenty of electronic systems would have used vacuum tubes, such as radios and radar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude "The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit. "

edit : this PDF looks like it has been scanned, but the text is selectable. Not sure I have seen this before.

<comment><USER5> This is done with OCR, specially when digitizing things.

The Internet Archive does this a lot. There was an old 90s book that I needed but they never made an electronic edition. So the internet archive, scanned and digitized it with character recognition to make a select-able PDF like this, as well an epub that can be read on your phone like any other ebook.

Now that book is available for anyone to borrow and read. (its still copyrighted so you gotta access it via their DRM controlled app/website, but that can be easily broken and its better than not having access to that book at all)

<comment> the-dude Thanks for the heads-up. Of course I do know what OCR is. Just hadn't seen it combined in the wild like this.

<comment><USER6> Acrobat has had this as a built in feature forever.

<comment> the-dude Didn't know that either. Makes me wonder if my browser ( PDF.js ) is doing the OCR? Anybody knows?

<comment><USER7> He means that Acrobat Pro includes an OCR system that you can use to add a searchable text layer to scanned documents. Readers like Acrobat Reader and PDF.js do not perform OCR. You won't be able to use them to search scanned documents if the document creator did not run OCR.

Google runs its own OCR pass on scanned PDF documents in order to index them better. It can be annoying when you get a 50 page scanned document as a search result and then find out that it doesn't include a text layer, so you need to run your own OCR or skim the whole thing to find the relevant parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Consequently, a few decades hence energy may be free—just like the unmetered air—with coal and oil used mainly as raw materials for organic chemical synthesis, to which, as experience has shown, their properties are best suited."

I am wondering why this prediction is so off given how other ones are spot on? How the situation back then made John von Neumann believe it, and what happened differently, moving this into the realms of fantasy.

Perhaps if an another effort of a scale of the Manhattan Project had happened, the concept of the "free energy" would have been more realistic.

<comment><USER9> "Too cheap to meter" was a common assumption about the future of nuclear power when it first began. If you only look at the amount of power available based on the raw materials, it's a reasonable prediction.

They simply didn't take into account all of the associated costs and complexities that would be involved with the actual nuclear power plants, not to mention the political and social complications.

That doesn't mean such a future can never happen, it's theoretically possible. We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy.

<comment><USER6> They didn't expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we'd have abundant, clean power today. We may have had hundreds of thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that would pale in comparison to the tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off climate change.

<comment><USER10> > They didn't expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the > nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades > ago, we'd have abundant, clean power today.

The regulation is basically a liability shield and subsidy, the industry wants more, not less, of it to build plants.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't mean that regulation doesn't impede innovation, e.g. by eliminating the incentive to adopt safer cycles. Moreover, the onerous review of reactor designs means there is a high incentive to stick with older designs that have already been reviewed by the government. (Thats a double whammy, because it makes newer, safer designs harder to deploy while reducing the incentive to deploy them.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about man being able to master technology and yet not have have grown comparably enough in spirituality to live as brothers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the kind of explosiveness that man will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe is dangerously small, its political units dangerously unstable.-John von Neumann

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure if there ever existed a man as ahead of his time as Von Neumann.

<comment><USER13> Da Vinci? Bucky Fuller?

Legend has it that when Gödel presented "On the Completeness of the Logical Calculus" von Neumann threw in the towel (on Hilbert's program) on the spot.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for your comment. I didn't know that anecdote.

<comment><USER13> Cheers!

What I find fascinating is, he was the _only_ person in the room to understand immediately. Even today, most people (and I mean mathematicians and programmers and others who might be expected to get it) still haven't internalized Gödel.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Evidence that hypnosis is a real phenomenon (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=218392595

<comment><USER2> I've read many books about hypnosis. Here's a way to describe it. When I shake your hand your mind goes into "shake your hand" mode. "Shake your hand" mode happens at a subset of the set of conscious awareness - it exists from the start of handshake to the end of the handshake. There are exploits a super- conscious person can do to you during those points.</comment>


The Unexpected Management Genius of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-business/ <comment><USER2> Zuckerberg is one of the smartest CEOs in US business today. It's interesting how he's shaped his public persona to seem like a clueless lucky school dropout. People have and will continue to underestimate him and he uses that to his advantage.</comment>


The strange way people looked at food in the 16th Century - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36072989 <comment><USER2> The strange way _upper-middle-class British_ people looked at food in the 16th Century _as referenced by Shakespeare_.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It was thought that the cold English climate made English stomachs hotter > than those of their Mediterranean neighbours and so better able to digest a > meat like beef, which was also more tender in England as the cattle fed on > pasture.

I see nutrition science hasn't improved much since Shakespeare's time.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of the "japanese intestines are longer" theory.

[https://medium.com/words-escape-us/are-japanese- intestines-l...](https://medium.com/words-escape-us/are-japanese-intestines- longer-8a41ca3e7d89#.mdcmtu7x9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No discussion of food and diet beliefs of the time is complete without considering the beliefs of medicine at the time. The article only obliquely hints at this "although it had to be considered whether or not a specific meat was suited to one's "humour", occupation, and even nationality". It's a belief that seems to have held from ancient Greek times and shares much with ancient Chinese and Egyptian beliefs.

The four humours were associated with different qualities, personality types and body types, and consisted of 4 basic substances we were all made up of. Food was thought to be important means of cure and compensating for the humours, and balancing those elements.

It's basically a set of beliefs that dominated for 2,000+ years.

See [http://kheper.net/topics/typology/four_humours.html](http://kheper.net/topics/typology/four_humours.html) or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism) for a bit more depth.

Of course if you were a poor labourer I doubt much of this entered into your thinking on food!

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how many people actually adhered to much of this. Just because some authority says something about food doesn't mean everyone believes it or follows the advice.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like people's view of food is just as irrational today as it was then.

</comment><comment><USER8> V. disappointed this wasn't a buzzfeed listicle of people pulling faces at the dinner table in medieval paintings.

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought HN practice was to prune editorializing clickbait words like "strange" in article titles.</comment>


Nimbus: A digital spending first credit card - <AUTHOR> http://getnimbuscard.com <comment><USER2> From reading the front page, I'm not sure I understand what it is.

Is it something that is middle-ware for existing credit card(s) that handles subscriptions/cancellations? Or is it a 'virtual' card itself? If the latter, I don't see what payment options/systems it works through (Visa, Mastercard, etc).

There is no reference to a legal entity behind it on any of the page, and no reference to privacy or how personal and financial data is handled, so I will not be touching the 'sign up' button.

For the use-case it seems to be focusing on:

Cancel subscriptions and get refunds, plus some money-back scheme. These are 'nice-to-have' features of a payment product.

But core features, at least to me, not addressed on the landing page are: "Where can I use it?" "How reliable is it?" "How safe is it?" "What are the fees [if no fees, why no fees]?" "How's my data handled?" Only then do "What are the bonus features?" start to be a differentiator.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Would love to get your thoughts

The concept sounds lame to me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nimbus is a virtual credit card and app that saves you money on your online spending and in-app purchases. It's easy to sign up for and completely digital.

Would love to get your thoughts</comment>


A Theory on Recreating Email - <AUTHOR> https://bethkolko.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/recreating-email/

<comment><USER2> _At first there would no doubt be piles of email in everyone's account at the start of each day. But gradually that will decrease. Just think — all the email that gets generated because of back and forths outside of work hours will gradually ease. And since you know you can only reach people during the workday, people might actually start walking over to someone else's office/desk. Or picking up the phone. Remember the phone? I loved the phone. So quick and easy to resolve a tricky question over the phone, a little back and forth dialog, you can quickly clarify misunderstandings. Ahh….the phone._

This brings up a fundamental impedance mismatch between "digital outsiders", who have to learn how to use computerized systems and "digital natives", who grow up with these systems and integrate them into their daily lives.

The author thinks of e-mail as a synchronous protocol - something like the phone, but minus the social protocol and human contact. E-mail, however, isn't synchronous. Its asynchronous. The fact that someone sends e-mail at 1 a.m. doesn't mean that you have to reply by 1:30 a.m. It doesn't even mean that you have to send e-mail at 1 a.m. yourself.

The entire point of e-mail is that you don't have to respond right away. You respond whenever you want.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another blog fucked by OnSwipe.</comment>


Patagonia's Philosopher King (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/patagonias-philosopher-king <comment><USER2> I toured Patagonia's headquarters last year after featuring Vincent Stanley, who has been with them since 1973, on my podcast [http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/vincent- stanley](http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/vincent-stanley). The culture was amazing -- friendly, productive, supportive.

I asked a random employee to join me for lunch. Whatever I asked about company vision, culture, etc she knew. When I asked why they did this or that thing a certain way, she'd say things like "Person A saw a problem with how we were doing it before, but couldn't solve it. Person B figured out how to solve it but couldn't implement it. Person C implemented it."

Critical to all their decisions, as I heard, were the environment, employees, suppliers' employees, and customers.

In most places, Person A's recognition of a problem would lead to everyone else saying, "Well, what can you do?" and leave it. If by some chance person B solved it despite the inertia, people would respond, "But what about X or Y" or some edge case and leave it.

Nearly any company could learn from Patagonia's culture.

<comment><USER3> I too was extremely lucky to visit the Ventura headquarters on a random trip to the area several years ago. I was going to get a "surf lesson" from Chipper (who I was half-jokingly told was the highest paid receptionist in the world) but he needed to reschedule. By happenstance, Yvon was there and he was going to hand forge a piton in the old tin shed ... the piton would be auctioned off (for the AAC I believe).

Chipper said, "I can't surf right now but you can go watch Yvon make a piton if you want ... oh here is Yvon right now ... Yvon, meet (my name), (my name), meet Yvon." So I turn and there he is. He's tiny, he smiles, we shake hands quickly, and he's out the door. I'm like, hell yeah ... I want to watch him make a Piton.

Chipper quickly walks me over to the tin shed, opens the door and shoves me into the standing room only shed filled with Patagonia employees who look at me like "who is this interloper?" for a split second before returning their attention to Yvon, who has started doing his thing. Over the next 30 minutes Yvon narrated as he took a piece of iron, heated it, hammered it, forged it, bent it, ground it with the original metal working machines (all older than me). It was as if nothing in the tin shed had changed in decades ... nothing had been cleaned or moved. It was exactly as it had been. And Yvon busted out a perfect Angle piton as expertly as if it was 1960-something.

A bit of Tin Shed action can be seen in the awesome movie Mountain of Storms:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympydy7f1Mg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympydy7f1Mg)

I look back on it now 12 years later as if it was a dream ... but no, I was there. Like the author of the article, I am a 90's guy who found my callings via the Patagonia catalog (I still have my 1st one, Spring 1992). I moved from Kentucky to the mountain west after high school and over the years became a climber, ww kayaker, skier, surfer, mtb'er, etc ... just like Yvon, but never to his level ... dude was an athletic badass before his time. He's also in reality an avant-garde political, social, business and environmental badass well beyond our current understandings IMO. I feel very lucky to have met him and watched him make that piton.

<comment><USER2> I hung out with Chipper too, which was delightful. He took me out for a surfing lesson, but there were no waves that day. With my background in ultimate Frisbee and his freestyling, we had a great time tossing the disc instead.

As it turns out, I had stood next to Yvon in the cafeteria without realizing it. Chipper told him about me but this was November 2018 and there were huge nearby wildfires. Yvon said he had to help his community.

Chipper also took me to the tin shed and for the rest of my visit people treated my visiting it as a sign of honor so I took it that way. Since visiting it, I've noticed the phrase "tin shed" in a lot of their literature and now I know why.

Incidentally, I buy clothes almost only from thrift shops, which means no Patagonia. Their stuff doesn't make it to second-hand, which I conclude is a mix of their fixing policies and quality of manufacture.

<comment><USER4> > Incidentally, I buy clothes almost only from thrift shops, which means no > Patagonia.

I don't know if you've heard about this, but Patagonia offers second-hand buying opportunities. This is the site, more or less refurbished Patagonia wornwear.patagonia.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing that they do fantastically well is the repair program, which is also good for the world instead of their bottom line.

Even years-old winter coats you can bring into a store and they will send it off for repair, instead of you having to buy a new one.

<comment><USER6> The zipper of a down jacket I bought from them would get stuck. They repaired it twice for me, and the third time I took it for repair, they gave me a new one. This was 4 years after I bought it, no receipt needed. I would assume that the old jacket went into their recycling program.

The new jacket came with a sturdier zipper, so it also showed that they acknowledged the design flaw. I've been using this jacket for the last 5 years, and it is still holding well (and never again had a problem with the zipper).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good profile. I feel like the author was having a lot of fun with his thesaurus:

"He has a lifelong habit of collecting garrulous friends and yet a tendency to induce some measure of taciturnity in all but the most voluble of them. His style of reticence is contagious."

<comment><USER8> haha, I guess I'm around a lot of bookish & verbal friends. That sentence didn't strike me as odd in the slightest.

<comment><USER9> I'd suggest that it's not so much the particular words, it's that all the "oddball" words in the sentence are directly Latin-derived -- garrulous, taciturnity, voluble, reticence. This is what gives the sentence a somewhat forced tone - perhaps a good Anglo-Saxon term might provide a punch.

Probably the stock phrases, "collecting friends", "some measure of X", "all but the most", "style is contagious", don't help either.

The quoted words don't seem that well-crafted, but the content of the observation serves as a good character sketch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Personal hero of mine. He pops up in lots of mountaineering documentaries. If only more CEOs were like this.

"I realized we were just growing for the sake of growing, which is bullshit."

<comment><USER11> Yeah I really recommend the documentary 180° South [1] which has both Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia) and Doug Tompkins (The North Face) and has them talking about their philosophy and conservation efforts as well. (A guy retraces a journey these two made in Patagonia back in the 60s.)

[1] [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1407927/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1407927/) / [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC9k2N9z3SI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC9k2N9z3SI)

<comment><USER3> Watch the original ... 180 South was based on ... Mountain of Storms:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympydy7f1Mg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympydy7f1Mg)

<comment><USER11> This is great, thanks! I was wondering where the guy who made the other documentary got the old footage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Read this profile a few weeks ago on a flight, what a badass. Patagonia's summer sale is currently going on [0]. They seem to be one of the few companies that actually takes sustainability seriously so I don't mind the more premium prices of there garments. There 5" baggie's shorts are a personal favorite of mine.

[0] [https://www.patagonia.com/shop/web- specials](https://www.patagonia.com/shop/web-specials)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is Patagonia's marketing at heart not Greenwashing ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing)) ?

I get that they source materials ethically and do things way better than 90% of other clothing companies.

Surely if they truly wanted to minimise their impact on the planet, they would rid their stores of sales and cut back on the amount of new styles/designs that they release.

Where I live there are around 3 patagonia outlets that are always promoting sales of up to 80% off, and that just seems so off compared to what they claim to stand for.

<comment><USER14> Chouinard is quoted about this in the article:

"But I've become cynical about whether we can have any influence," Chouinard said. "Everyone's just greenwashing. The revolution isn't going to happen with corporations. The elephant in the room is growth. Growth is the culprit."

<comment><USER15> Is there any theory/ideas about how a "post-growth" economy would/could function?

<comment><USER16> There are many, it's a very old, very well thought-out tradition. Try reading Kropotkin, or from a more modern perspective, Richard Wolff.

However, it doesn't align with the current vision of orthodox Western capitalism, so it isn't particularly popular in mainstream media or culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I saw him speak a few years back, and he called for radical ideas, like suggesting the entire concept of a publicly traded company as we know it allows companies to throw their hands in the air in regards to their ethics in regards to the environment. This extends into their repair program, and various other sustainability focused goals.

Patagonia is certainly one of the rare examples of what a modern ethical company would look like (however this often includes the fact that their goods are much higher priced than what you find at walmart).

<comment><USER18> Vote with your wallet, pay for good quality and ethical treatment of manufacturers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've done a lot of work with Patagonia, visited their HQ numerous times, and have become friends with a handful of their employees. They are not driven by profit, but by a will to do what is right in the world and for their customers. This all starts and ends with Yvon. This is how you build a culture. It should be studied for generations.

I can't express how great they are to work with as a client -- smart people and everyone's heart is in the right place.

</comment><comment><USER19> All of the gear I've bought from them has been better than the competition in some way that matters. For example I have a couple of sun hoodies from Columbia, and one from Patagonia, and the Patagonia ones cool actively even when there isn't a breeze while the Columbia ones require a light breeze for the cooling fabric to work. They're both great products but the Patagonia one is honestly worth the extra $20.00 or so.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thoroughly enjoyed the NPR podcast "How I Built This" episode [0] on Yvon, it was really interesting hearing his story!

[0] [https://www.npr.org/2018/02/06/572558864/patagonia-yvon- chou...](https://www.npr.org/2018/02/06/572558864/patagonia-yvon-chouinard)</comment>