The State of jQuery 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jquery.com/2013/01/14/the-state-of-jquery-2013/

<comment><USER2> "jQuery 2.0 now has more patches and shims for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox than for Internet Explorer!"

Interesting.

<comment><USER3> Well if you consider that the support for IE6-IE8 is dropped, it's pretty realistic.

<comment><USER2> I suppose it's three browsers vs one...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "The most exciting news of all? The Plugin site returns!"

Indeed!

<comment><USER5> I for one would love to see the plugin site stay down. There are just way too many terribly written and inflexible plugins around that are mostly reinventions of other terribly written and inflexible plugins. The people in the jQuery ecosystem really need to learn some proper OOP. At the very least, you should be able to do what the Bootstrap's jQuery plugins do - write your own UI class, wrap it around with the jQuery plugin namespace, and send a custom event for every action the class takes. No more stupid callbacks.

Having the plugin site down the past year had been a breath of fresh air. I've discovered a dozen or so truly great plugins purely by world of mouth. I can't tell you how much better this filter is than the searching and rating and commenting stuff on the old plugin site.

<comment><USER3> If you are so against the plugins that are there (when they come back), consider contributing some better ones. It doesn't make any sense for an open- source project to _not_ exist simply because you personally don't like the way the code is being written.

<comment><USER5> Oh you have over-estimated my power to make terrible jQuery plugins disappear. Terrible they may be, they certainly have a right to exist, they just should crowd out the really good ones on an official plugin site.

I have given up on writing jQuery plugins. Something about calling "methods" on the plugin by using a string isn't resonating with me. But since you've asked, I recently have open sourced 2 backbone projects on Github. One has reached 1.0 tho I just discovered a few bugs, another one is coming along with a first release soon.

<https://github.com/wyuenho/backbone-pageable>

<https://github.com/wyuenho/backgrid>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Much has been said that 2.0 dropping IE8 was about code size. I really hope it was a focusing effort rather than size reduction decision.

jQuery minified is ~90K. Even if 2.0 weights half as much, 45K isn't that big a deal, even on mobile. Besides, it's so widely used that if you link to Google's CDN, it's probably cached already.

<comment><USER7> First, I believe that "every millisecond counts" is a good principle in web design. There is enough latency that we can't avoid, which is why we should avoid latency wherever it is possible. Considering this, 45K is a big deal indeed.

Second, just some hours ago, I read that the mere execution (not the download!) of jQuery takes about a second on an iPhone 3G. These devices and similarly weak ones are still out there, which is easy to forget if you test only on the latest hardware.

Lastly, keep in mind that bandwidth isn't always ideal. Consider mobile: In rural areas, 3G isn't always available. When I'm on the train, loading the slim HN itself often is not an issue, while many other pages simply time out. In developing countries, bandwidths are often very low, too. 56kbps still is a realistic bandwidth. And downloading 45K on a 56kbps connection takes almost 7s.

<comment><USER6> Every millisecond does count. But design is about compromise. By that logic we shouldn't use CSS at all, but we choose to pay the price of a few KBs for the returned value.

I'm all for efficiency, I'll use Zepto or a focused custom made solutions whenever I can, I'll squeeze every byte out of the images, serve resolution specific versions, gzip, etc.

But there are some compromises that I'm not willing to make. Take images for example. If I can see image quality degradation on something that I find important, I won't compress it further, even if it's huge. Add a few iPad retina display PNGs and suddenly 45KB seems like small change. Sometimes I'd rather have the user wait for a great result than deliver a poor one fast.

In the case of jQuery 2.0, dropping IE8 support seems a poor and premature kind of optimization. If your target is a memory starved 128MB iPhone 3G on Edge, than 45K for a single JS library is still way too much. Not only it would take forever to load and run, but unresponsiveness and eventual crashing would still be a problem.

I think the effort would be better spent on improving jQuery mobile. People on 56kbps connections could be running even older versions of IE.

<comment><USER8> There's also a difference when you're developing your own site compared to when you're developing a framework or library. If your library is used on more than half of the top 100,000 websites (as jQuery is) then a 45KB saving or a 100ms speed boost, 50,000 times over is a big deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand why they'd drop IE8 support in 2.0 but it's still a bitter pill to swallow.

<comment><USER10> If you're primarily focused on older IE's, I think it's assumed you're dealing with a forced intranet environment (typically government/military/large corp) and/or need to focus on stability, not the latest and greatest. Part of me says "good riddance" as I never got the lock in to XP, but I get why devs might be annoyed with being stuck at 1.9 for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER11> We're not going to be "stuck" with 1.9. Use 2.0 for a smaller and faster library on modern browsers and 1.9 to continue to support old IE versions.

[http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/28/jquery-core- version-1-9-an...](http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/28/jquery-core- version-1-9-and-beyond/) "Our goal is for 1.9 and 2.0 to be interchangeable as far as the API set they support. When 2.0 comes out, your decision on which version to choose should be as simple as this: If you need IE 6/7/8 support, choose 1.9; otherwise you can use either 1.9 or 2.0. ... If your web site needs oldIE support, and we expect most sites will need it for at least another year or two, you can use IE conditional comments to include version 1.9 only when visitors are using oldIE:"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm wondering if they should have give. jQuery 2.0 a separate name to make it clear development on jQuery 1.9 will continue in parallel.

</comment><comment><USER13> Thanks bro for sharing.</comment>


Real time microRNA detection - <AUTHOR> http://miroculus.com/product/ <comment><USER2> First off, there's probably nothing particularly new or exciting about their "patented biochemistry". Amplifying miRNA and sRNA is relatively easy and takes very little time and is something we've been doing for decades -- polymerases can PCR the entirely of one in 0.5-2 seconds and that "as little as 60mins" claim is a result of this and by no means revolutionary. They're essentially doing qRT-PCR in a plate, which would cost me ~$50-80 to do in my lab. This is another case of the patent office being out of their depth and granting patents to anything that sounds magical but believable to a layperson.

Plus I don't need yet another company improperly mining heath data.

On top of that, doesn't anyone else think this is a bad idea to try to test everyone for low incidence diseases? miRNA and sRNAs are OK markers for disease, not great and certainly not definitive. You're guaranteeing that most of your positives are false positives.

<comment><USER3> I think you're missing the point - at least how I'm reading it - the idea is the user friendliness, not that the techniques themselves are novel.

You're absolutely correct that PCR and DNA/RNA amplification tech is nothing new and is (relatively) very simple - to the point where I did it in high school biology (AP) 6 years ago and then a number of times in undergrad labs.

However I am not aware of anything that makes it this easy for a nurse/doctor to do in the hospital - as they put it "without the need of a specialized technician or expensive lab machinery."

There isn't enough information provided to know how useful it will be though. I can see some potentially interesting use cases where a nurse being able to take a blood sample and run a plate with results in an hour could save a lot of time and money. At the same time, it really comes down to the "patented biochemistry" and what specific markers are on the plates.

> On top of that, doesn't anyone else think this is a bad idea to try to test > everyone for low incidence diseases? miRNA and sRNAs are OK markers for > disease, not great and certainly not definitive. You're guaranteeing that > most of your positives are false positives.

That is highly dependant on the disease in question, no?

<comment><USER2> I'm not missing the point. It's a company cashing in on Silicon Valley's recent health disruption bullshit. A well established miRNA testing protocol has been around for about 8 years now and there's an open database of markers. This testing isn't being used because it isn't "user friendly", it isn't being used because there are better methods or the information provided is useless. There are some 1800 'neoplasm associated' miRNAs (abnormal growths), being positive for many of them means next to nothing. Every person has hundreds and thousands of cells undergoing abnormal growth that doesn't mean they have bona fide cancer but they will, after non-specific PCR amplification, ping as "Has Cancer".

They have a sample prep that likely involves several chemicals that no layperson should ever work with and no nurse/doctor has any business dealing with. At most they would what they already do, a blood draw and the hospital lab will do the rest.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious where you're getting any of that information from the linked page - I very well may be missing something, but you are making a ton of assumptions [0] whereas I was giving them the benefit of the doubt until more information is known.

Additionally, there are uses extending beyond cancer that are much more "binary" in nature which is where I see the value.

[0]: * They have a sample prep that likely involves several chemicals that no layperson should ever work with

* what they already do, a blood draw and the hospital lab will do the rest.

<comment><USER2> It's step 1 of their "3 easy steps"[0].... If you read their Wired profile[1], it's clear there's sample prep involved. I do RNA work quite frequently, (high quality) RNA preparation is finicky and involves reagents you can't buy as a normal person and equipment that may not be "specialized" but isn't in your standard Gen practitioners office and definitely in effectively 0 homes. High throughput RNA extraction -- which is what their Mastermix is -- yields OK-ish quality RNA but works fairly well if you have well optimized RT-primers. There are several caveats to quick extractions though, the two big ones for this product are it doesn't work well for human tissue or blood samples and they're either not doing very much testing (literally only 96 specific tests) or they're doing broad range testing and not using optimized primers because there's not a lot of RNA in any given sample. My guess is a combination of the two, there's a reason why the real microarrays we run for research are both expensive and time consuming.

Doctors already "test" for things, and by that we mean the doctors have nurses do a blood draw and that blood draw is sent the the hospital lab. And the hospital lab does the testing. Even with this device, it's still the hospital lab that's going to do the testing. Your lab results don't necessarily take a while to come back because they're hard or cumbersome or take a ton of time to do, they take a while because the lab is running more than just your samples and your doctor has more than one patient (and also might like to sleep at some point). Most labs (that don't need something like culturing) can easily come back in less than 24hours and assuming you were the only one could come back in just a few hours.

I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt, they've shown nothing to merit it. Mass producing what appears to be a hotplate with a non-tunable $5 laser inside a sleek, shiny baby blue case and making a companion iPhone app is gimicky.

There aren't that many diseases that present as binary and those that do have existing, proven tests.

[0]: "1\. Extract the total RNA from the patient's blood sample and pipette it in a standard 96 well plate "

[1] [http://www.wired.com/2014/10/miroculus/](http://www.wired.com/2014/10/miroculus/)

"You can prepare the blood sample, for instance, using a standard off-the- shelf RNA extraction kit, as well as a Miroculus 'master mix'"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: please review Landing Page Analyzer - <AUTHOR>

A lot of my clients/customers need a basic diagnosis of their landing pages. Although every landing page is unique,there are still  some broad themes which define a great landing page (i.e. a page with high conversion rate).
I created this diagnostic tool which helps people to rate their landing page on several different dimensions and in the end get a set of recommendations on how to improve it for better conversions.
Here is the URL - http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/landing-page-analyzer/
Do you think the tool is in right direction? Any feedback or comments? <comment><USER2> Great job! I used it to analyze my most recent project, and I was genuinely surprised by the results -- your questions highlighted areas I've neglected to consider or approached incorrectly. I especially love the detailed feedback after the quiz.

Only feedback I can offer is to perhaps re-evaluate the grammar and spelling in some of your questions -- not a big deal, but an easy fix.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. Yes, I will proof-read all the questions.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable - <http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/landing-page-analyzer/></comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite lock free data structure? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> STM in Haskell is quite nice. I only had a quick play with it, and it was quite a while ago, but the idea IIRC is that you can put messages on Queues called Channels and then consume them.

Here is something I knocked up: [https://github.com/mcapodici/haskelllearn/tree/master/stocke...](https://github.com/mcapodici/haskelllearn/tree/master/stockexchangeprototype)

<comment><USER3> Fairly certain STM is implemented with locks, at least weiteSets are.

<comment><USER2> Ah perhaps. It certainly nicer than an explicit locks in "business" code

<comment><USER3> Sure. But in this context I assume the question is about a specific class of algorithm:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non- blocking_algorithm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_algorithm)

Lots of abstractions 'hide' the locks from you. Very few are lock free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ring buffer. When it comes to multithreading, I avoid using things like semaphores, mutexes and locks.

<comment><USER5> Why do you avoid mutexes and locks? Are they just hard to make bug free when you start scaling them up?

<comment><USER4> For me, multithreading is um complicated. I told someone once that I view people who say that "multithreading is easy" the same way I view a young man who says "I understand women."

All kidding aside, most programs require some sort of multithreading but the ones I write haven't needed explicit mutex, semaphores or locks. (And I've been doing this 30+ years.)</comment></comment></comment>


SpaceX has discovered what caused its Falcon 9 rocket to crash land and explode - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/why-did-the-spacex-falcon-9-crash-2015-4

<comment><USER2> I think there is a bit too much focus on the crashing in the media. Give 'em 5 or 6 tries, they're doing something that all others have deemed impossible or impractical in the past. I think they will nail it next time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dear Mr Musk,

Perhaps it would be best to work with nature and land the thing on it's side.

Heavily Yours, Gravity</comment>


Ask HN: Any Luck Nixing Arbitration? - <AUTHOR> I am evaluating a job offer from a startup that I'm excited about. The team seems great and market opportunity is large.<p>The offer includes a lengthy Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement that forces arbitration. Has anyone here successfully eliminated that portion of the agreement and still joined the company? <comment><USER2> Never tried to eliminate one. But I've had them reviewed by lawyer friends who suggested edits (that were accepted) to make the agreement much more employee friendly while still protecting the company's right to IP created for the company.</comment>


Changelog is Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://changelog.com/posts/changelog-is-open-source <comment><USER2> Kind of surprised this doesn't have more upvotes. For someone looking to get into Elixir this is a big deal because it gives you an inside look at how to build a reasonably sized Phoenix application.</comment>


Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html <comment><USER2> The article does seem familiar, and I think I've even seen it on HN before.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006>

Yep. (There seems to be a slight change in the base URL for the submitted article, but this has been discussed here before.)

Still this is well worth discussing again. It's amazing how much most college- educated people think they know about statistics that they really don't. Two of my favorite quick overview articles about statistics, both by Ph.D. professors of statistics, are "Advice to Mathematics Teachers on Evaluating Introductory Statistics Textbooks"

<http://statland.org/MAAFIXED.PDF>

(the link is dead because of site maintenance now, but should be fixed soon)

and

"The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum?"

[http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...](http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=uclastat/cts/tise)

Both are thought-provoking articles about what usually isn't taught to undergraduates about statistics.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of the film clip Alan Kay showed at one of his talks. It was taken at a Harvard graduation, and it shows many, many Harvard graduates, students, and faculty saying that the Earth was warmer in Summer because the orbit takes it closer to the sun.

[http://www.sigchi.org/chi98/chikids/vol2/headlines/head2.htm...](http://www.sigchi.org/chi98/chikids/vol2/headlines/head2.html)

<comment><USER4> It's caused by tilt/angle of Earth, correct?

<comment><USER2> _It's caused by tilt/angle of Earth, correct?_

Yes. My second-grade teacher made sure her class knew this. A year or two later I learned that the earth is closer to the sun (at perihelion) when the SOUTHERN Hemisphere is having its summer, and the Northern Hemisphere is having its winter.

<comment><USER5> which is why the northern hemisphere has a slightly milder climate.

<comment><USER6> Huh, is this actually true? I had been under the impression that the orbital difference was insignificant from a climate standpoint.

<comment><USER5> there are actually several things at play, eccentricity, precession, and obliquity. the net result is that the north gets milder winters and cooler summers.

<comment><USER2> _the northern hemisphere has significantly larger temperature variation than the southern_

 _the net result is that the north gets milder winters and cooler summers_

One of these statements appears to disagree with the other. If I remember correctly what I've read, the proportion of land rather than ocean in each hemisphere plays a major role in climate, as mentioned by the reply saying that the Northern Hemisphere has more variation in temperature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Oh, and you wonder why I say, "he"? I never have this problem with female programmers...I think women are better programmers because they have less ego and are typically more interested in the gear rather than the pissing contest._

When I was hanging out in Homer Alaska, squatting in the tent city on the beach, I heard that on the halibut fishing tours, the women would catch more and bigger fish. (And halibut are _big_ fish. A 25 pound halibut is puny. You can catch 300 pound halibut, and it's not a super-rare event.) This is because the husbands would bring their fishing egos with them from the lower 48 states and not listen to the deckhands. But the wives, with no preconceived ideas, would listen carefully and do things the right way to catch halibut. (As opposed to trout.)

<comment><USER7> I wonder if this is a "feature" of women or all minorities? For example, do male nurses show the same egolessness as female programmers?

<comment><USER8> I might be misunderstanding your comment, but women are not a minority.

[http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=male+population+in+no...](http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=male+population+in+north+america+vs+female+population+in+north+america)

<comment><USER9> It's bad usage, but in sociological terms, women _are_ a minority because they aren't the dominant subgroup.

<comment><USER10> > in sociological terms, women are a minority because they aren't the dominant > subgroup.

This is a useful sentence to read, because it helps remind me that "sociological terms" have little or nothing to do with honest intellectual framing of topics.

<comment><USER11> I'm going with the idea that you generally misunderstood, rather than the idea that you are trolling.

Consider a monarchy. The king is the majority. It's hard to imagine a world where everyone you see doesn't have the same power and opportunity that we enjoy. But you can see that cultures have existed where one guy was more important than everyone else combined.

You and I know, a pointer isn't a dog. However, people are often irresponsible, and use jargon in common conversation. Take a moment, and consider what is "honest intellectual framing" and what is a "sociological term". I think that while you may disagree, the assertion that women have less power (aren't the dominant subgroup) is a fairly honest analysis.

I haven't commented here in months, and don't plan on replying, but like xkcd says... someone on the internet is wrong. Take a moment to consider the possibility your parent poster isn't a fucking moron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > I think women are better programmers because they have less ego and are > typically more interested in the gear rather than the pissing contest.

People need to stop writing shit like this. If it's not okay to say that men are better programmers simply because of their gender (it's not), then it's not okay to say it the other way around either.

<comment><USER10> > If it's not okay to say that men are better programmers simply because of > their gender (it's not), then it's not okay to say it the other way around > either.

God forbid that someone make an argument and try to support it with data, when one person has already decided for all of us what the correct conclusion is.

WT* ever happened to debate, intellectual discourse, and the marketplace of ideas?

This is one of the things that I find most disgusting about political correctness: that it tries to just wall off huge swaths of POTENTIAL CONCLUSIONS based on an argument that boils down to a misconstrued sense of manners (at best) or political preferences (at worst).

Want to say that ethanol is a stupid idea? THE DEBATE IS CLOSED - NO SERIOUS SCIENTIST BELIEVES THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS ANYTHING OTHER THAN A THREAT OF EXTINCTION.

Want to say that women and men have (a) different average heights; (b) different standard deviations in intelligence; (c) different hormone levels; (d) massively different thicknesses in their corpus collosums, and therefore one or the other _might_ on average, make better programmers/accountants/engineers? THE DEBATE IS CLOSED. IT IS UNACCEPTABLE TO SPECULATE ON THIS TOPIC.

I call bullshit on that.

Intellectually honest people respond to facts and arguments with OTHER facts and arguments.

Intellectually dishonest people try to shut down debates using social control.

WilliamLP writes

"People need to stop writing shit like this"

That's the phrase of a bully, and/or a censor.

<comment><USER13> I think you have some interesting points. I'm going to play Devil's advocate:

An assumption that you make there is that all forms of social control used for discouraging debates/speculation on certain topics are inherently bad or stem from dishonesty. It could be that knowing in advance the emotional, legal, political, or otherwise time-wasting repercussions that a certain type of debate causes justifies avoiding the discussion altogether. None of us go after truth in a completely unbiased manner with no agendas whatsoever, though we may fool ourselves in thinking so.

There doesn't seem to be any disagreement about the social rule of not discussing politics or religion in this forum. We don't think of this as a moral rule, but then what are morals?

<comment><USER10> > It could be that knowing in advance the emotional, legal, political, or > otherwise time-wasting repercussions that a certain type of debate causes > justifies avoiding the discussion altogether

So person A, and B and C are interested in having a debate.

Person X "knows" that persons A,B,and C (and some bystanders) would be better off if they don't even speculate or speak on the topic.

...so person X responds "People need to stop writing shit like this" ?

My objections:

* Why should I accept person X's assertion that he knows - better than I do - what will make me happy, or what will waste my time ?

* If person X truly thinks that, he should make a compelling case, put it on up a website, and respond not with "People need to stop writing shit like this", but with "I think that this debate is fruitless and time-wasting - check out this blog post for why".

* Even if person X is right, for a large percent of people, trying to shut down speech "for someone's own good" is un-American, and illiberal. If it's done under the color of law it's called "prior restraint".

* Even if person X is right given the conditions on the ground, conditions change, and over time his flawless heuristic for when to force people to "to stop writing shit like this" will become more and more disconnected from reality. What's needed is a constant feedback loop that keeps in touch with reality. ...and "ongoing debate" is the name of the ongoing feedback loop.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. As Sophocles famously wrote: "Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Speaking of statistics, FreeBSD comes with a tool called "ministat", which accepts a bunch of input files filled with numbers and tells you how statistically significant the difference is between them. It's frequently used to demonstrate performance improvements in kernel code:

[http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ministat&apropo...](http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ministat&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+8-current&format=html)

</comment><comment><USER16> You know, I've read a bunch of Zed's articles, and I always end up thinking that he's the source of most of his problems. There was a talk I saw him give (can't find the link) to a bunch of college kids where he basically said "phone in your job, do the stuff you love on your own time, everyone else is retarded and they'll never understand you."

Great attitude you have there. I know guys like that; guys who are extremely egotistical, are always right, and know everything about everything. They're team killing, energy sucking, wastes.

He may be able to hack like a dream, and "thanks for Mongrel" and all, but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as him. I think from now on I'll do my best to ignore Zed's perspectives on life; they're more than a little skewed.

<comment><USER17> The talk is from CUSEC, probably this one: <http://vimeo.com/2723800>

As for his "attitude", I've actually met him and talked to him face-to-face. His internet persona is a put-on and he only talks like that to piss people off. In actuality, he's a really nice guy who is super-smart and who does not take shit from people. It's actually too bad that there aren't more of him in our industry. Scope creeps, memory leaks, etc. would be a thing of the past.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for posting this. I went from despising Shaw (based on his writings) to kind of liking him.

<comment><USER19> You like someone for being a double-faced troll? IMO, I like him less now because he actually doesn't believe in what he says online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Serious question: who here who has at least a BS in CS didn't have a mandatory stats class where you learned all about picking sample sizes to give you an accuracy you're happy with or that an average without a standard deviation is nigh-meaningless?

It's just a fact of our profession, there is a significant percentage of people who just slap together APIs and have zero understanding of the maths behind it.

I don't see why it takes Zed 1000 words to say it or why he has to get sanctimonious about it.

<comment><USER3> There's a big percentage of programmers who don't understand O(n^2). On multiple occasions, I've seemed as a guru because of this one little tidbit.

What if the medical profession has as much egregious and widespread ignorance of the basics as programming? Would you be in favor of certification?

<comment><USER21> In medical professions, you go through a period of training (clinicals, internship, residency) where people with tons of experience point out that you never learned anything. This humbling experience is not really available in the CS world.

<comment><USER3> Particularly disturbing, since the only good way I know of to learn programming and system architecture is through mentoring. Basically, our mentoring system is haphazard. There's even a lot of anti-mentoring happening out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't like this article. Yes, he's right: an intuitive knowledge of the relationship between averages and standard deviations is essential. But to presume that the standard tools of statistics should be applied to every problem is to miss the point.

On a superficial level, if you are doing overnight processing of log files, then you probably care more about throughput than latency. In this case, averages are probably a fine metric. On a slightly deeper level, standard deviation is only a useful measure if the distribution is known, and in a lot of real world cases it is not. The right question isn't whether 100 or 1000 tests on the same data provides sufficient statistical power, but whether range of inputs is sufficient to trigger worst case perfomance.

Now, I presume that Zed knows these things and applies them appropriately, but the article strikes me as more snide than helpful. Perhaps as others say he's a great guy in person, but I prefer my stats with less attitude and more insight. Here, for example: <http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes>

[edit: changed my sloppy language from 'has no meaning unless to the distribution is normal' to 'is only a useful measure if the distribution is known']

<comment><USER2> _On a slightly deeper level, standard deviation only has meaning if the distribution is presumed to be normal_

Are you completely sure about that?

I suppose many readers of this thread are more knowledgeable about statistics than I am. I would appreciate hearing from the knowledgeable readers whether or not variance in the observed values makes a difference in the cases discussed in the submitted article.

<comment><USER23> The statement "only has meaning if the distribution is presumed to be normal" is wrong. The SD is a summary of the spread of a distribution. In fact, for most centrally concentrated distributions (including a uniform one) +/- 1 sigma corresponds to about 60% of the mass of the distribution. This is an amazingly useful thing to know.

As the above triva factoid points out, the standard deviation is an important summary statistic. More interestingly by using mean, variance (or sd), skew, and kurtosis, you can describe almost any centrally concentrated distribution. Even distribution with heavy tails.

I think what the OP meant is that most 3+ sigma results are not truly 3+ sigma, because most distributions in this world are not gaussian, but instead have large wings. SD is most useful when you know what the underlying distribution is. Currently it's more in fashion to communicate spread using confidence intervals because they presume less about the underlying distribution.

<comment><USER22> You're right. I was being sloppy.

I should have said something more like "the standard deviation calculated from a sample set is only generally applicable in so far as one is willing to make assumptions that the sample set is representative of the distribution as a whole". The default assumption in traditional statistics (such as quoting p-values) is that the distribution is normal, and in real world situations often not the case.

Your restatement is right on, although I'd go farther and say that standard deviations (and confidence intervals) are only useful metrics with regard to the particular assumptions one is willing to make about underlying distribution. Yes, you can calculate these measures, but they won't help you if your assumptions are irreparably flawed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think I've read this before when Zed was "so fucking awesome". Is his whole "dropping the persona" gig just a way to get more mileage out of old articles?

<comment><USER25> His favorite blog posts are being reposted as essays.

<comment><USER26> He's the new PG, with most of the wisdom replaced by machismo.

<comment><USER27> Ma Kiz e Moe

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I hadn't seen this, so I was glad it was resubmitted.

I think he has a fair point. Here on HN I see a lot of armchair sociologists critique the various articles in the social sciences that get posted, but it's rather unclear to me whether these are well grounded in an actual understanding of the issues involved, or simply habitual incantations of rules of thumb such as "correlation doesn't imply causation."

<comment><USER5> um...rules of thumb are a bit different from identifying logical fallacies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> That's a lot of text to say not much more than "Standard deviation can be as important as the mean; be careful about confounding variables; and if you're an engineer, spend more time learning statistics."

Oh, also, "You're all assholes and I rock."

Truly the Carl Sagan of software.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think a better way to help would have been to spend the time writing a blog post introducing some core stats concepts and showing how to use R to do useful things...

</comment><comment><USER31> Can anyone recommend a decent (read "not boring") book on statistics?

Something along the lines of "Naked Economics" for the stats realm ...

<comment><USER32> There's the Cartoon Guide to Statistics ( [http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon- Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/...](http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide- Statistics-Larry-Gonick/dp/0062731025) ), which, despite its name, is pretty solid and comprehensive book on basics. And definitely not boring!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why is he mixing computer science with programming? Computer science is just a branch of mathematics. It has not much to do with what he talks about afterwards.

<comment><USER34> Computer science is to programming as physics is to engineering. The way SOME programmers constantly put down computer science, especially academic computer science, is a sign of the anti-professionalism in the field. (I decided I better emphasize some programmers since they actually seem to be a very vocal minority.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think this article is _great_ once you get past the rant-iness of it. He makes a bunch of valid points and it's true: a lot people actually don't take these pretty crucial details into account when they're dealing with statistics.

It's kind of a shame that his message is diluted by its delivery. Case in point: about half of the comments here aren't even about statistics!

</comment><comment><USER36> I always hated stats lecture :( . But the book "Statistics for utterly confused" helped me in exams. But still I'm not in love with stats.

Would he kill me?

<comment><USER37> I don't like your chances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> pat on the back for you -- you understand intro college statistics... maybe you just work with shitty programmers that don't understand statistics????? i dunno but most of my colleagues know stats pretty damn well. but maybe thats just because i'm in school

</comment><comment><USER39> I love it when Zed Shaw gets pissed. It's fun!!

</comment><comment><USER40> i think we'll have a huge shortage of programmers shortly

</comment><comment><USER41> I can see some people here claiming this is old (it is) and that it's a repost (it is), but I'll still vote this up, because especially now with people yelling "scaling! scaling!" all over the place, I can't imagine a more fitting time for developers to read this.

<comment><USER42> Scaling? People keep using that word. I don't think it means what they think it means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> 99% of all statistics are made up

</comment><comment><USER44> I've read this before. Zed does not provide any details on learning or understanding statistics in this rant.

<comment><USER34> Statistics and probability is a major course of study - far more than could be usefully taught in a blog. What he tries to do is to motivate people to learn it - which is the first major step to actually learning it.

<comment><USER44> ahh..the old "motivation by calling people stupid" trick ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> So after Ruby and Ruby on Rails, Zed has learnt some R and statistics. Because after reading almost all the article, he basically talks about: average, median, standard deviation.

He should learn a little bit of complexity and calculability by the way, best case, worst case, Big O notation, etc.

<comment><USER46> Because when edu writes a blog post, he includes his _entire life history_ , and, for that matter, the _entire history of the universe_ in it.

I know you've already been smacked down but this is a big pet peeve of mine and worth pointing out. You can always complain that something should have had more information in it, and since that is always true no matter what, the complaint is information free. (A value that comes from a universe of one value contributes zero bits of information.)

<comment><USER47> I'm not so sure about that. A request for more information can be incredibly important (for instance: Tell me who committed the murder! also see: stubs on Wikipedia). Essentially, there is a point of diminishing returns, and after a while, possibly negative returns as the work becomes too hard to assimilate.

However, in this case, I tend to think that Zed included just enough information to get someone who's clueless started - he even included references at the end so that if you DO want more, you can easily get it.</comment></comment></comment>


Letter from a union leader to Tim Cook to reverse Apple's labor discrimination - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2015/04/06/heres-the-letter-a-construction-union-sent-to-tim-cook-begging-him-to-reconsider-apples-labor-discrimination/

<comment><USER2> Anticipating a nakedly political argument, I was surprised to encounter a moving and substantive articulation of unselfish principles.</comment>


Amazon sues Alexaholic, everyone loses - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=350 <comment><AUTHOR> You know, there's something about Amazon. I keep noticing things that are just a little off, morally. First it was the one-click patent. Then I learned that their employment agreement forbids you from starting a startup with anyone else who has worked at Amazon, even if you didn't know them. (Don't worry, they'd never dare enforce it.) And now they sue someone simply for making a better UI to their lame site. There's starting to be a pattern.

If Alexa had a decent UI, Statsaholic wouldn't be a threat. Instead of suing this guy for doing their own job properly, they should just fix Alexa.

<comment><USER2> It seems pretty clear that you're right. What makes it hard to stomach though is that they're seriously on to something with S3 and EC2. Moral issues aside, should developers be wary of the poison spreading to the web services division that they've built their startups around?

It would make me feel better if the other shoe dropped and some other huge company released some competition for S3 and EC2 (I'm looking at you Google). That would provide some competitive protection from them screwing people over and another viable option. I would hope for a startup to fill the void, but this seems like as good a candidate as any for the type of problem where the big guys have some advantage.

<comment><USER3> _It would make me feel better if the other shoe dropped and some other huge company released some competition for S3 and EC2 (I'm looking at you Google)._

Sun has something similar to EC2 called "Sun Grid Compute Utility": <http://sun.com/sungrid/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's funny that so many big companies let their ego get in the way of good business.

I imagine that this lawsuit and loss of community good-will will cost them millions of dollars. Uh, millions of dollars that they could have used to just acquire Alexaholic. They would have gained good-will, great press, and a great developer already passionate about their product.

What a huge blunder - sad to see, especially since they're so innovative in other areas.

<comment><USER5> It's hard to fire workaholic lawyers, and once you've hired them, they'll find people to sue, with or without good reason. Could the moral of the story be: don't hire in-house lawyers if you can, and make sure someone PR-competent holds a big stick over their heads if you do.

<comment><USER6> What I'd like to see is companies hiring lawyers who spend their surplus time blogging. Being involved in the community should prevent them from being as seriously out of tune as this, and if they spend some of their time explaining tech law to the unenlightened (like me), that'll reflect back on the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like they should have just hired the guy.</comment>


Vulnerable Application – How to let them know? - <AUTHOR>

I've found that a site is extremely vulnerable, to a point where i was able to look into the database.
that website collects payments as part of their product and now they have thousands of credit card numbers, expiration, cvv stored in the database. also they store users email addresses and passwords in plain text.
how do you let them know without getting in any kind of trouble or them knowing who you are?
i fear for the people who have their credit cards and information stored there and if this falls into the wrong hands it can leads to a disaster.
i am talking about 40K credit card numbers 34K+ are not expired. <comment><USER2> I'd either let them know in a straightforward way (email or use contact form to ask how to report a security issue), or not let them know, but I wouldn't try to let them know while hiding my identity. Too much could go wrong.

Who knows, your good deed _could_ end up getting you in some trouble. But it's true of any good deed you'll ever do in your life. You can't let the risk of being harmed stop you.

</comment><comment><USER3> These people will most likely not be able to track you down though. Assuming they didn't make their website vulnerable on purpose.</comment>


Make Dark Matter Charged Again - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.04611 <comment><USER2> A certain American politician has ruined my faith in any slogan/title that states, "Make X Y again!"</comment>


Plsdr. Python-based software-defined radio (SDR) - <AUTHOR> https://arachnoid.com/PLSDR/ <comment><USER2> There are many ways to generate an SSB signal. In particular the Weaver method is more common in SDR applications than the phase shift method he/she uses. There're lots of literature online so I don't know why he couldn't find any.</comment>


Alternative to X86, ARM Architectures? - <AUTHOR> http://semiengineering.com/an-alternative-to-x86-arm-architectures/ <comment><USER2> I've often wondered why stack based architectures haven't hit the mainstream. Burroughs / Unisys had stack machines that outran competitors in everything but math intensive programs. With popular languages following in the steps of Algol I would think stack machines would be a good choice. We always talk about passing things in the data stack and pointers out to other data elements, both things a stack machine excels at.</comment>


I'm going to make a programming tutorial, I need your opinion - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I need to write some kind of tutorial/documentation for a programming language I created (http://marianoguerra.com.ar/efene/) and I would like to know which kind of books or tutorials are the best for you.
for example I like these 3:

    * http://learnyousomeerlang.com/
    * http://learnyouahaskell.com/
    * http://diveintopython.org/
 this tutorial will be the first documentation for the language, so I don't know if doing it informal would be good or not.
Also, I would like to hear some kind of examples that would be interesting to use, I don't want to write a factorial or some abstract example, but something that is usable.
The target of the tutorial is for people that come from mainstream languages (C/C++/C#/Java/Javascript/Python) and would like to learn a functional programming language, or want to play with erlang but don't like the syntax.
advices? <comment><USER2> > The target of the tutorial is for people that come from mainstream languages > (C/C++/C#/Java/Javascript/Python) and would like to learn a functional > programming language, or want to play with erlang but don't like the syntax

Recently, I saw a tutorial somewhere (maybe Scheme) where there were different pages for people coming from different languages. That's a lot of effort, but its a thought. So someone from Python can see some typical python sample, and how to do it in your language. Same for other languages.

Typically, we wish to see how to do something in a new language that we used to do in the earlier one. Going from Java to Ruby, I was always looking for this till I actually came across a blog post meant for Java programmers moving to Ruby. (For example, how to do the main() in Ruby).

</comment><comment><USER2> I have a slightly tangential question. I am writing a tutorial for a [library](<http://rbcurse.rubyforge.org/tut0.html>). I'd like the tutorial to have a proper format with Previous and Next links on top and bottom, a TOC, perhaps Index.

Is there some kind of simple tool that generates these ? Or do people write out the whole thing in HTML.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using sphinx an it's really awesome, you can see how it looks (I tweaked it a little)

<http://marianoguerra.com.ar/efene/tutorial/></comment></comment>


Ask HN: A Community Based Volunteer Developers Network? - <AUTHOR> Hello every one, Is there a community or a forum where volunteer developers can help develop websites for some charity or non profit. I dont want any money, all i want to do is help.I am a front end developer.(Apart From MDN) <comment><USER2> We built a platform just for people like yourself.

Please check out www.Crowdraising.co

If you would like to donate your time,please reach out to firstname.lastname@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> There's Agile Ventures: [http://www.agileventures.org/](http://www.agileventures.org/)</comment>


Show HN: HouseFix, Share and Track Home Projects - <AUTHOR>

Wanted the HN crowds opinions on a re-launch that http://www.housefix.com just went through.
It used to be a drupal based site that was pretty lackluster at best. We went through the process of gauging user interest and seeing where there pain points were. We then used that info and went through a redesign using backbone/node/etc. That brings us to the current v2 that is now live.
The point of HouseFix is to provide a simple interface to track the home improvement or home maintenance projects that you need to complete. You can upload pictures of the current state of the project, pictures of what you want it to look like, and then the community can share insights and ideas about your project. Once we get enough people using it, the idea is that you could also open the project up to bids for contractors to provide ideas / estimates for your project. We have 10k+ registered users and are tracking engagement to see where there are issues with the UI/UX and see where we can optimize the funnel.
Would love to get some feedback from the wisdom of HN on ways we could improve any part of the site and/or things we may have overlooked regarding user flow.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I love the concept of the website and the design. However I did find the word "Track" a bit confusing on your title. When I first read the title I imagined a task/calendar type web application.

I'm really impress with the 10k registered users. Can you share what kind of marketing techniques you used?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some affiliate marketing, some facebook shares from registered users, some banner advertising, and some local advertising. Really a hodge podge but with the old design the returns were not what we expected, hence the re-design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love the web page, it's really well done, little correction, why is "sign in" standing alone and with no design in the right corner?

<comment><AUTHOR> We wanted the emphasis to be on "Add Project" - Go ahead and add a project and you get redirected to <http://www.housefix.com/register?inputWish=Bathroom+Fixtures> which has very very obvious call to actions.

Thoughts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the design. Very clean.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> link: <http://www.housefix.com></comment>


A Course in Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://ciml.info/ <comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to the PDF: [http://ciml.info/dl/v0_9/ciml-v0_9-all.pdf](http://ciml.info/dl/v0_9/ciml-v0_9-all.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way to describe your development skill set on a resume? - <AUTHOR>

ex: "Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ember.js, mongoDB, Rails, ..."
Instead of having a plain list like the above, how do you list your skill set / differentiate your understanding & experience with them?
I've been using the above setup for awhile, but I have a couple of problems with it:
1) The list can get long, and potentially lose its value. Does ordering matter?
2) What do I include? What shouldn't I include? At what level of understanding, does a specific skill warrant inclusion?
3) I'd like to differentiate my exposure to each (ex, I'd consider my Rails a 7/10, but my JavaScript a 6/10), potentially ranking by understanding or months/years.
4) What about languages / frameworks that I have used in side projects and/or am just picking up?  I'd like to include them because it shows that I'm interested in picking up new stuff, but their inclusion with what I would consider my core skill set might backfire if it is assumed those skills are all equally developed.
feedback from devs or hr people would be amazing. <comment><USER2> I'm assuming you're talking about a PDF-style resume, right? If you're talking about building a web-based resume, then the list should point to concrete things that you've built, and where possible, links to Github -- even to actual files. I'm not saying this as an expert in recruiting, just saying that _show, don 't tell_ applies to resumes as it does to any other form of salesmenship...and web devs have a very special advantage in this area and should exploit it to the full.

But PDF resumes are often necessary for corporate jobs that have a defined process...either a literal one-pager PDF, or something that is basically arranged like one (i.e. you fill out an online form with text fields)...Looking at my Word.doc resume, which I haven't touched in a year...here's what I wrote under the subhead of "Programming"

> _Programming: Proficient in Ruby on Rails, PHP, Javascript, ActionScript > (Flash), and relational databases (MySQL)_

Uh, OK, that's obviously not _great_ , but I was applying for a general- purpose type of job in which the resume-reader was _not_ a tech person.

However, the "show-don't-tell" parts of the resume were written like this...I don't talk about years of experience, or even how much time I spent on a project...I like to focus on what was actually deployed (and what reaction I got, if any)...in the example below, it should be obvious that my back-end work was more involved than the front-end part, because I don't have much to say other than "I used jQuery"...

\--

 _SOPA Opera ([http://projects.propublica.org/sopa](http://projects.propublica.org/sopa)): This was a Ruby on Rails 3.x site I built to serve as an clearinghouse of information on the proposed "Stop Online Piracy Act" legislation, with landing pages for every state and every Congressmember._

 _I wrote Ruby scripts to gather and process legislative data from numerous sources, including Congress.gov, campaign finance data from OpenSecrets, and the New York Times ' Congress API and designed the site architecture so that I could singlehandedly administer it using Google Spreadsheets, while using MySQL as the database._

 _I also did virtually all of the front-end coding and design, including the use of jQuery plugins to allow users to interactively sort and filter the data._

 _I initially launched the site as a side project, deploying it as a flat-file site on Amazon S3, where through word-of-mouth alone, it received about 150,000 page views (and emails from Congressional staff) in its first week. When we re-launched it from ProPublica, it received as many as a million pageviews in a single day. The Google Spreadsheets-backed CMS allowed me to easily update legislators ' positions on SOPA from the hundreds of constituents who emailed and called me._

\---

(This was on the supplementary section of the resume...so for a situation in which you have to compress onto one page, obviously, bullet-point the most important and most concrete sentences)</comment>


Intel Unveils a Groundbreaking Way to Make 3D Chips - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/12/intel-foverus-3d-chip/ <comment><USER3> Engaget has an annoying cookiewall, could we have literally any other article based on the same press release please? (Or ideally the underlying PR)

[https://hothardware.com/news/intel-foveros-to-usher-in- indus...](https://hothardware.com/news/intel-foveros-to-usher-in-industry- first-3d-stacked-system-on-a-chip-designs)

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/intel-introduces- fov...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/intel-introduces- foveros-3d-die-stacking-for-more-than-just-memory/)

(maybe underlying PR?) [https://newsroom.intel.com/articles/new-intel- architectures-...](https://newsroom.intel.com/articles/new-intel- architectures-technologies-target-expanded-market-opportunities/)

Responding to the actual technology, the key is what they call "Foveros" or "active interposer". Previously chips were limited to having interconnect on one side: the traditional solder bumps. It appears that not only do they have through-silicon vias working but they have combined this with having logic on the die - typically this is a problem because the more complex the logic is, the less flat the active side is. The actual layer thickness will vary across layers and across the die by tiny amounts.

This is basically the silicon version of mezzanine PCBs: you can stack a fully-capable logic chip directly on top of another chip, usually for handling the IO. The example then also has some DRAM stuck on top with standard package stacking technology like the Raspberry Pi.

<comment><USER4> Anandtech's article is even more detailed and has a reasonable interesting interview at the end.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/13699/intel-architecture- day-...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13699/intel-architecture- day-2018-core-future-hybrid-x86)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work for Intel on a team that partners w/ design and manufacturing to build DFX features and tooling. It's been quite the ride to enable DFX for Foveros but it's really exciting technology.

At the end of the day I look at it like this: it's getting harder and more expensive to reduce nano-meter size, getting high yields on 5nm, 3nm and beyond is going to be a multi-billion dollar effort for everyone in the industry, with Foveros we can really squeeze water from a rock and build products on advance node tech even if overall yield isn't the greatest.

I don't think it's a shock to say that the 18 month window described by Moore's Law is probably well behind us. But new innovations like Foveros give me confidence that we still have a long road ahead of us to improve silicon performance.

<comment><USER6> Glad to see more semiconductor folks here! Thanks for all the hard work making the design rules work for this process.

Do you know if there are any real papers detailing Foveros?

<comment><USER5> There may be some white papers floating around describing the tech but to my knowledge no academic level papers have been released yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In undergrad and a little bit into grad school, I did some 3DIC research. It was interesting stuff and really exciting to expand architectural design into 3 dimensions.

The biggest problem was heat as the additional layers trap heat in the chip and make it much easier to let the magic smoke out.

I don't see much in this article explaining any groundbreaking approaches and the diagrams offered look much the same as they did 5 years ago.

<comment><USER8> "additional layers trap heat in the chip" is this really such a huge problem? Many people immediately conclude that this can just be solved via a convecting fluid.

<comment><USER9> Hope your fluid can circulate in micrometers between sandwiches of silicone. I bet it cannot.

Even pure metal solder has limited thermal capacity. Enough that people got mileage from milling down micrometers of chips...

The other side becomes less conductive too.

<comment><USER8> Verging on the dramatically mechanical what about using a low friction ultrathin tape?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't believe anything Intel says in a press report until I see the actual product. We have been lied to and mislead too many times.

<comment><USER11> I could not care less about an actual product. I just want them to convince AMD and Arm that they might be delivering a Moore's law equivalent performance improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds like one of several backup plans to make decently powerful CPUs next year despite dropping the ball on the 10nm process; it's probably mature technology, slightly anticipated from its planned debut (did you notice the slides mentioning the 10nm process?).

In sadly related news, the presentation of "Sunny Cove" CPUs (which might or might not use these packaging techniques) mentions the 14nm process but not the 10nm or 7nm ones, brazenly proclaims an "age of architecture", lists boring incremental improvements and doesn't even try to discuss performance, core count or power efficiency.

</comment><comment><USER13> Chips already get to 100 degrees Celsius with just one layer of transistors: how does thermal dissipation work when you're stacking 'chiplets' on top of each other?

<comment><USER14> I'd imagine integrated channels for liquid or evaporative cooling would work quite well. Something like a 100 micron diameter tube every square mm or so is in principle totally doable.

Obviously a non-trivial engineering challenge but nothing breaking the laws of physics.

<comment><USER9> No they don't. You cannot circulate fluid at micrometer spaces at speed - <USER2> forces are required. (Try it at home, push two panes of glass together and try to push water through. Good luck. You'd crack the glass first and silicone is even less resilient...)

Capillary action works but it is too slow to make a dent in cooling. Heatpipes need like a few milimeters of such micrometer fabric to work reasonably well. Even solid metal mesh is not good enough at the available thickness. (And its capacitance will pose a problem.)

You'd have more luck integrating power hungry thermoelectric components to push heat at huge power cost... (since you will be using exotic materials soon anyway)

<comment><USER14> You vastly overestimate the forces required. Pumping water, let alone a less viscous organic fluid at a few mLs per minute through nominally 100micron pipe is fairly routine. You wouldn't even need 100psi to move a few mL/tube: plenty to absorb the heat output from a fraction of a processor layer.

<comment><USER9> Few mL/min is not enough cooling, that's the point. Way not enough to make a dent. Vapour phase is used in GPU interface already and is comparable to solid copper but lighter, why do you think merging a heatsink with the CPU will work when Intel has trouble even soldering the devices and leaves thick silicone layer on top?

We're talking about something to remove many watts. This means huge capillary volume to compensate for low flow. Which means a lot of heatpipe surface soldered somehow to IHS.

You'd have more success with solid copper layer which is sort of done where possible. (It's often not due to inductance.)

<comment><USER14> math:

200W output per CPU 'layer' on a 17x17mm* die = 17 x 127micron tubes flowing 25mL/min each at 160psi __(easily reducible with moderately larger capillaries) totals 425mL /min. 425mL/min of water starting at 30C and ending at 75C would absorb 45C * 425mL/min _4.16J /C = 79,560 J/minutes or 1,300 watts - about 600% of requisite cooling capacity.

_ nominal threadripper #'s

__[http://www.waters.com/webassets/other/lp/prep_calc/Tubingand...](http://www.waters.com/webassets/other/lp/prep_calc/Tubingandsplitters/Tubingandsplitters.htm?locale=en_US)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > It's developed the first 3D chip architecture that allows logic chips -- > things like the CPU and graphics -- to be stacked together.

So, they just have a theoretical architecture, is that it ?

<comment><USER16> What about that sentence makes it seem theoretical?

I would read the article, but the site refuses to load any text if javascript is disabled, so tough luck for engadget.

<comment><USER17> Here is their PR page for it [https://newsroom.intel.com/articles/new-intel- architectures-...](https://newsroom.intel.com/articles/new-intel- architectures-technologies-target-expanded-market-opportunities/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is the difference between this and multi-die stacking? NAND memory packages typically have up to 4 (8?) dies stacked together. Is this something beyond that?

</comment><comment><USER19> Hah, that's a good name. It means "terrifying" in Greek.</comment>


Black Triangles - <AUTHOR> http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745
<comment><USER2> >It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready to put it to work doing cool stuff.

Wow, talk about big design up front! This sounds like the opposite of today's "MVP first, get something into the customer's hands RIGHT NOW and iterate later" way of doing software development: YAGNI, KISS, etc. Nice reminder of how things used to be done (and still are done in some verticals). I'm having trouble recalling any projects I worked on recently where a "Black Triangle" moment was even possible, given the usual focus on early, customer-visible wins.

<comment> fake-name Hahahahahaha, 'MVP' doesn't _exist_ in hardware or low-level hardware coding (e.g. this, which is a playstation game that presumably runs bare-metal).

In hardware, it's generally like ~80% of the design work before you even have a viable _demo_. If you're writing a bare-metal rendering engine, it's very much the same. MVP isn't used because there is none of the infrastructure even available to have one.

TL;DR MVP isn't possible if you don't have the infrastructure.

<comment><USER3> Not sure I agree. It is certainly possible to hack up the basic functionality of an embedded system; full of magic numbers and lacking the elegant hardware abstractions, OS layer and power management we all want.

Edit: Not to mention in hardware, where you can neglect design for manufacturing, solder modwires everywhere, and power everything off a 10kg power supply. MVPs _do_ exist in hardware and embedded SW.

<comment><USER4> I think there's a difference between an MVP and a _proof of concept_.

You can hack together a one-off PoC for a hardware feature, in order to know the _feature_ is viable--but what you've created isn't a viable _product_ , minimal or otherwise. With an MVP, you'd expect to be able to incrementally improve the design into a non-minimal one, but with a PoC there's no real way to take it and "refactor" it into a shipping product at all. The design with modwires and a 10kg power supply (or the embedded-software equivalent) doesn't share any similarities, except at the most abstract level, with the design that can be mass-manufactured.

Once you're done experimenting and you know what you want, you really do need to design the "production model" from the top down, with all the layers that will enter into the solution considered in advance.

A concrete example: you can't just "write a voxel renderer" and then expand it into a full game engine. If the full game engine will have a rendering pipeline with support for things like dynamic lighting and fur physics, then voxel rendering will be implemented in that engine in a completely different way than in one that _only_ needs to render voxels.

Editing one into the other would be like editing the code defining a b-tree into code for a hash-table: there would be exactly one edit, which would replace all the old lines with entirely new ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We get a lot of these in AI research. When your math is a hideous snarl of abstract algebra and graph structures and your code includes a novel 3d dynamics engine and custom collision detection, it's exhilarating to see your simulated robot so much as twitch a finger in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER6> Oh man, I've needed a term for this for so long and have never realized it! Thanks!

I remember one time, similar to the story linked but I was refactoring rather than coding something new. I made a major breakthrough and, like the people in the article, I was very excited about it. Coworkers (who do low-level stuff - I do FP and CSS stuff) didn't see what was so great (it was clearly visually broken) until I said "Yes, but it's broken in just the right way that I can fix it!" They understood instantly.

I think these kind of "black triangle successes" are something only programmers and mathematicians experience (they are the only two types of people that I've known to sympathize with the feeling.) It's like an invisible thread that connects all types of programmers, from FP guys to kernel guys to web developers to the three people still using Smalltalk to the guys in suits making InterfaceFactoryFactories. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER7> The same thing happens with building construction. If you've ever watched a building being built somewhere near where you live or work, you've seen it: Months go by with it as a vacant lot. Then one day someone cuts the weeds down, and there are some flags sitting around. Then tons of time goes by with bulldozers, and then interminable fiddling around with digging holes and foundation laying. No progress is apparent for a long time, then one day, "whoosh!" there's a building there, once the framework goes up.

There, too, the 80/20 rule applies just as it does in software. Because once that framework goes up and there's all this fast progress, the next step is months of finish work where-- from casual observation from the outside, at least-- things look pretty much the same while all the details are wrapped up.

</comment><comment><USER8> Jay's a legend - worked with him on one of his indie games back in 2004. I remember this doing the rounds a while back and am glad to read again.

</comment><comment><USER9> I suspect most "overnight success stories" are actually built on a mountain of Black Triangles.

</comment><comment><USER10> Back in 2009 I had written one of the first few SSH apps to hit the iOS App Store.

I remember demo'ing it to my CEO, and all he could say was "Oh, you spent all this time writing an App that displays text?"

I guess it's easy to trivialize something when you don't understand its complexity.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here are two orange triangles.

[https://github.com/gopherjs/webgl#example](https://github.com/gopherjs/webgl#example)

When iOS 8 comes out in two days, I'll be playing with that on my iOS device. It's pretty exciting.

</comment><comment><USER12> Fun read, I'd always been interested in buying a playstation 1 devkit to tinker but this might push me over the edge :)

<comment><USER13> Emulators are pretty decent these days and might prove easier to work with and debug.

<comment><USER12> That's very true but there's something sexy about working with the actual hardware. Maybe I'm part masochist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh, this is back online? I looked for it earlier this year after I realised that 'black triangle' wasn't a known idiom among my colleagues, but had to dig into web.archive.org to find it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this just a "spike" in common parlance?

<comment><USER16> No, because this represents a good deal of engineering coming together and actually _functioning_ in concert with itself and working.

It's not just some "woot let's crush some code" and a weekend later everything works and that one difficult feature is working well enough for your live demo; this is having several different layers of functionality coming together and working in unison, each being relatively worthless without the rest of the whole.

When you're building something like a high-performance 3D pipeline, or a low- level embedded system, there's no MVP that really counts and there's seldom any little features to egg you on until these black triangle moments.

It's like being an aerospace engineer--the whole damn thing works, together and at once, or nothing does. That's why I've found web development to be such a nice break from the work I used to do: I can always make seeming progress, because I can always see the results of what I'm working on.

At the same time, I never get the same rush of accomplishment of seeing, say, a model loaded from a custom conversion tool rendered using multiple threads and being lit properly. It's a different sort of work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not to be mixed up with the 1989 North Sea Black Triangle aircraft sighting by Chris Gibson.</comment>


Google Begins Using New Undersea Cable Across Asia - <AUTHOR> http://www.circleid.com/posts/20160906_google_begins_using_new_undersea_cable_across_asia/ <comment><AUTHOR>
      "[...] at speeds of up to 26 terabits per second."</comment>


InfluxCloud: Managed InfluxDB Clusters and Grafana on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://influxdata.com/blog/announcing-influxcloud-fully-managed-influxdb-clusters-on-aws/ <comment><USER2> I was expecting this for a while now. But the pricing part isn't very clear. Is it $149 per instance or for the solution itself? Could be better if the article elaborates more on this.

<comment><USER3> Check out: [https://cloud.influxdata.com/users/sign_up](https://cloud.influxdata.com/users/sign_up) you can adjust the configuration to suit your needs and the pricing moves up or down accordingly.</comment></comment>


How I Learned to Program in 23 Years - <AUTHOR> http://jeffmatthewsmith.tumblr.com

<comment><USER2> I've read the article about 4 times now, and I still have no idea what the point of the title was.

You didn't learn to program in 23 years or 10 weeks. I'm an employed CS grad, and I still don't "know" how to program. Don't mistake this as an "I'm a graduate that can't code" statement, but instead "You (should)never stop learning, and therefore can never concretely _know_ how to program".

Likewise, if you know you like to code, then why didn't you start already? Is this just supposed to be a "look at me, I'm in dev bootcamp for ruby!" attention call? I'm confused.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fair.

The title (and I did hesitate on using it) grabs attention -- enough for you to be reading the article.

I stuck with it largely because I think the decision to learn to program is a culmination of my journey over the past 23 years.

And, I have actually learned to program over the last 3 months. Maybe I should have stated that in the article. I'm currently doing freelance front-end development.

<comment><USER3> I think a better way to have phrased this train of thought would be:

"How It Took Me 23 Years To Learn To Code"

<comment><AUTHOR> Better. Taking the advice. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I clicked on the linkbait title I expected an article by someone who has been programming for 23 years to share their wisdom. If that's what you expected and were disappointed by the content, I can't offer an alternative for 23 years, but I can offer 10: Norvig's "Teach Yourself to Program in 10 Years" <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> "building beautiful, meaningful things. Things that people want."

Just because people want what you've built does not necessarily make it meaningful. Meaning is a very subjective, personal thing, based on your core values. What person x finds meaningful and is willing to pay for, person y may think is meaningless. So ask yourself whether you want to build something meaningful to you, based on your core values or do you just want to build the next hot game/app/whatever, and get rich. There's nothing wrong with the latter, but be honest with yourself.

<comment><USER6> > So ask yourself whether you want to build something meaningful to you, based > on your core values or do you just want to build the next hot > game/app/whatever, and get rich. There's nothing wrong with the latter, but > be honest with yourself.

I didn't read anything in that piece to justify such cynicism and condescension. The author's motivations seem to be anything but financial. It sounds to me like he's after inspiration on a more personal level.

Don't you think you're being a bit too meta-critical? That looks like a pretty straight forward list to me. The author wants to build things that are:

* Beautiful

* Meaningful (to him at least)

* Desired

I'll grant you that desirable does not always make something meaningful, and vice versa, but what does that have to do with anything? How is it -- in any way -- disingenuous to _want_ to build meaningful things that are also desirable?

Hell, even if he's dead wrong about what's really "meaningful" to a significant population of people, it doesn't strike me as some fallacious goal. It seems like genuine good will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you graduated from a university?</comment>


Cash Back Credit Card Comparison - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RcvcjAxSBvbZFrEEZiRZv5Wr-FuyqXBlyphSTuaOqbk/view#gid=0 <comment><USER2> Author of this page, if you're reading this, thank you for making this a plain text table of data with none of the tracking and marketing cruft that most people would do with this data. I really appreciate the efficiency of this approach and I'm grateful to you for keeping it simple.

<comment><USER3> Thanks very much floatingatoll

This is way better than reading endless blogspots and searching on google. How much time did you invest into making this?

<comment><USER4> Why are you asking them? They didn't write it.

<comment><USER5> The 'Author of this page' phrase might be confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're into optimizing things like this, I highly recommend the Doctor of Credit blog[1]. Most credit card blogs are basically just ads for credit cards that make their money off affiliate links, but DoC has made an explicit choice not to do that, and generally has good information without the "this is a super lucrative card everyone should apply for" junk that you see everywhere else.

[1] [https://www.doctorofcredit.com/](https://www.doctorofcredit.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Barclaycard Arrival Plus missing from the list, it's my go-to card. I recommend it to everyone.

* 2 points for each $1 spent + 5% bonus on redeeming (effectively 2.1% in cash back)

* 70,000 points ($700) on signup with minimum spend

* $89 annual fee, waived first year

* No foreign transaction fees

[https://cards.barclaycardus.com/banking/cards/barclaycard- ar...](https://cards.barclaycardus.com/banking/cards/barclaycard-arrival-plus- world-elite-mastercard/)

<comment><USER8> It's a good card, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to everyone. For all but the biggest spenders, the Citi DoubleCash makes more sense because it also gives 2% but with no annual fee. Since you're paying the $89, you'd have to spend over $89,000 annually ($89 / 0.1% difference) to make the 2.1% worth it over the 2%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another good guide from The Wirecutter, that covers more than just cashback:

[https://thewirecutter.com/money/credit- cards/](https://thewirecutter.com/money/credit-cards/)

</comment><comment><USER10> If your spending is high enough: Chase sapphire reserve. Has an effective annual fee of $150 but strong benefits. You can cash out or get a 25% bonus when using it to pay for air travel.

It's metal which seems nice but really isn't. You can't stick it into many machines and eventually it delaminates.

<comment><USER11> Annual fee is $450 not $150. You forgot to mention the $300 travel credit is only relevant if you spend $300+ on travel each year regardless of whether you have the card.

<comment><USER12> It's easy to cash out the travel credit without traveling.

<comment><USER11> Wait really? How? I thought it was called travel credit for a reason...

<comment><USER13> Uber/Lyft count for travel which helps a lot.

<comment><USER11> Huh yeah I didn't expect they'd count most transportation as travel. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-c There's also a bunch of good info on [https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/](https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/) though that is more geared towards signup bonuses.

</comment><comment><USER14> Personal opinion: Straight cash back cards are not exciting at all. You're better off watching what you spend than getting excited about getting $20 back for spending every $1000.

Credit cards in the US are exciting right now because of premium rewards, mainly airlines miles, credit card points (Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi TY, Amex Membership Rewards), which could be worth 2-5 cents per point. Unlike cash back cards, these usually come with a fee though many waive it the first year.

<comment><USER15> I prefer cash back cards because I don't fly enough to care about miles. I also don't really want to think about points that I don't get to spend however I want. But I can imagine if you like the other rewards offered on some cards, you're probably getting more value than with cash back.

<comment><USER14> If you fly even 1-2x a year then why not fund that trip with one signup bonus from one card vs getting a cash back card (which usually don't even come with a signup bonus and if they do it's very small)?

If you don't want to be tied to one airline card, a Chase Sapphire card which you can use to transfer to airlines or book directly with their reservation portal will give you 1.25 cents per point redeemed on flights or hotels.

<comment><USER16> I've tried to pay with points before and it never seems to work out advantageously. A $200 bargain basement Southwest flight will cost like 60000 points. Is Southwest, or international for that matter, an anomaly?

<comment><USER14> That's just...wrong. If you transfer to Southwest from Chase or book directly it should be around 15000 points. Both Chase and Southwest have a point value of greater than 1 cent per point, so there's no way that could be true for a $200 flight.

<comment><USER16> Alright, I'll look again in the future. At the time I wondered if the 'wanna get away' fare was basically cash only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For a no AF 2% card the PenFed card not on the list ([https://www.penfed.org/credit-cards/power-cash- rewards](https://www.penfed.org/credit-cards/power-cash-rewards)) looks better than Double Cash as it doesn't have foreign transaction fees. To receive the full 2% cashback a PenFed checking account is required, but there's no annual fee on that account either.

<comment><USER11> For travel you might want the Pathfinder Rewards card instead. If you're not traveling Citi has the advantage of letting you create virtual account numbers and showing you your FICO score.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some of these are incredible - 6% cashback on groceries? I'd be surprised if the profit margin on groceries was as high as 6%.

<comment><USER6> One theory is that the high rate on groceries is a way to make you carry around the card every day, so you're more likely to use it on other things.

<comment><USER18> With contactless payment systems like Apple Pay, there's little need to carry around more than one default credit card.

<comment><USER19> Unless you end up somewhere that doesn't support ApplePay, and doesn't accept AmEx. It's uncommon (where I live, at least), but it definitely happens.

<comment><USER15> I assume that's why the parent said there's little need to carry _around more than one_

<comment><USER19> But if your 'one' is the '6% on groceries' AmEx, you _do_ need to carry more than one (or accept that there will be places you can't spend money).

<comment><USER15> That card is still accepted anywhere Amex is accepted. But yes, if you want to cover vendors who don't accept Apple/Google Pay or Amex, then you would need to carry multiple cards.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>