Show HN: MCU Movies – Movie information and all the latest MCU news - <AUTHOR> https://mcumovies.com/ <comment><USER2> This is very cool. I love the layout. Its beautifully made and straight forward.

The MCU are all connected in one way or another. There is a cause and effect of everything. There are also cameos from other characters in the stand alone ones. I wonder if you could explore that. Maybe something like -

Have a timeline of each character. What they are doing, and what they know at the beginning and the end of the movie. So for example, in Iron Man, Ant Man is just a lowly cat burglar. His timeline would most likely be that way until his first movie.

Or even Thanos, during Iron Man is searching for the Infinity Stones and has tracked them to Earth. He's plotting some action for retrieving it back.

Just some hypothetical that may flush out the site. If you're looking for commerce, perhaps there's a ways to use Fandango to sell tickets. Or even sell merch. I'm not sure how Disney would like the latter, but it may work out in your favor.

Fantastic site!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> MCU Movies started as a simple one page website in 2017, an easy way to keep track of the movies in the MCU and keep an eye on the upcoming movies in the franchise.

I've continued to grow the site as the MCU continued to grow in popularity.</comment>


The doom that fell upon medical progress in the US - <AUTHOR> http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/10/the-doom-that-fell-upon-medical-progress-in-the-us.php

<comment><USER2> The article endorses this criticism:

"The syllogism goes as follows:

1\. Socialism has been a failure everywhere it has been tried; 2\. Everyone knows this; and 3\. Therefore, we need more socialism.

"

The article doesn't provide support for 1. or 2. The rest is ideological self congratulation.</comment>


Gilead announces long-awaited price for Covid-19 drug remdesivir - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/29/gilead-announces-remdesivir-price-covid-19/ <comment><AUTHOR> "For all governments in the developed world, including the U.S. government's Medicaid program and the Department of Veterans Affairs, Gilead will charge $2,340 for a five-day course. U.S. insurers will pay 33% more, or $3,120."</comment>


Xbox chief: Company party's hired dancers "not consistent with our values" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/xbox-chief-company-partys-hired-dancers-not-consistent-with-our-values/ <comment><USER2> Seriously, when will these companies learn?</comment>


Renouncing U.S. Citizenship Is Extremely Tricky Business - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/greatescape/renouncing-u-s-citizenship-is-extremely-tricky-business-4dbe16cbf20a <comment><USER2> I thought (actually I am rather sure that) there is a US$ 100,000 or so "no tax area") for US citizens residing abroad:

[https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international- taxpayers/fore...](https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international- taxpayers/foreign-earned-income-exclusion)

(of course there is the need to do some paperwork yearly for the IRS, but that's it)

If this is accurate a good half to 3/4 of the post is baseless.</comment>


Offshore firms took 50 of H-1B visas in 2013 - <AUTHOR>

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247241/Offshore_firms_took_50_of_H_1B_visas_in_2013 <comment><AUTHOR> Today is the first day that H-1B for next October are accepted, and apparently they know for sure that the limit will be reached so soon that "the agency is prepared to use a random selection process to meet the numerical limit" [1], like last year.

[1] [http://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-accept-h-1b-petitions- fiscal...](http://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-accept-h-1b-petitions-fiscal- year-2015-beginning-april-1-2014)</comment>


This is actually what America would look like without gerrymandering - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/this-is-actually-what-america-would-look-like-without-gerrymandering/ <comment><USER2> The same story from 2014: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/06/03/this- computer-programmer-solved-gerrymandering-in-his-spare-time/)

Not that it isn't still very, very relevant...

<comment><USER3> Also, the president mentioned redistricting reform in his State of the Union address. [http://www.vox.com/2016/1/12/10758738/obama-state-of-the- uni...](http://www.vox.com/2016/1/12/10758738/obama-state-of-the- union-2016-gerrymandering)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the algorithm's redistricting of Maryland, two of the districts have parts on either side of the Chesapeake Bay. The algorithm should consider the actual travel time between two points, and not the straight-line distance.</comment>


Google yanks OSVDB's Checkout account without notice - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/OSVDB/status/7967738314 <comment><USER2> Warning: the following is pure speculation on my part.

[http://blog.osvdb.org/2010/01/04/challenge-osvdb- winter-2010...](http://blog.osvdb.org/2010/01/04/challenge-osvdb- winter-2010-fundraising-goal)

 _or every new vulnerability issued an OSVDB ID from January 1, 2010 through April 1, 2010, I will donate $0.50 (fiddy cents) of my own money to the OSVDB fundraiser. I challenge anyone who feels that OSVDB is a valuable resource to the security community to match my donation._

If people took him up on that, the Checkout account is going to have a surge of small donations, right? Oof. Aside from changing your usual pattern of behavior, which is always a risk with payment processing, small donations are often used to probe stolen credit cards to see if they are active or not. I could see a payment processing algorithm not liking that.

This would be less problematic if Google had customer service at least as good as Santa Claus'.

Sure, technically speaking Santa Claus doesn't exist. But if you post a letter to him, the Post Office puts it in with a big pile of mail, and parcels it out to dogooders. Many poor kids, as a consequence, do end up getting presents because they wrote to Santa Claus.

Dear Santa: For Christmas, could you approve my AdWords ads?

</comment><comment><USER3> Any business relationship can be voided with a proportional amount of effort as it took to enter it.

You got your Google Checkout or Paypal account nearly automatically by virtue of controlling a checking account (by having a pulse) -- why does it surprise you that they'd suspend it an the slightest hint of anything untoward? You're but a twinkle with a twitter account in a sea of fraud.

</comment><comment><USER4> Anything to link to other than a Tweet?

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm. Let's see how this goes:

Google acts like an asshole to somebody. Typically this is because they refuse to spend any money on customer service, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge their verging on monopoly market share (though not in the payments market).

Next, if someone has a big enough soapbox, Google gets embarrassed. Matt Cutts or someone similar shows up to do damage control. Meanwhile, the G screws without repercussions anybody who can't raise a big stink online.

Wash rinse repeat.

See: adwords problems, adsense problems, search problems, payment problems, Nexus One problems, etc

<comment><USER6> This is what scares me away from the Nexus One. I know I will see software support and bug fixes for general (and many obscure) problems for some time to come, but I am wary that I may fall into a gap somewhere, and be stuck with a fancy paperweight. At least Nokia and Apple etc have service centers, a phone number you can call, a real response to your needs as a customer.</comment></comment>


Only 20% of people who can use Apple Pay have done so - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/money/4139330/apple-pay-unused/ <comment><USER2> That's a weird way to phrase what's going on..

        Of the 20% who had [used Apple Pay], most (56%)
        only used it about once a week.

So something like 11% of iPhone 6/6s owners use Apple Pay every week? There's something like 30 million phones in that category in the US, so maybe 3 million people use Apple Pay every week. That's "hardly anyone"?

As more and more phones gain capability with the upgrade cycle and as more vendors install contactless terminals, Apple Pay (and Samsung / Android Pay) are going to grow like crazy. Is there a company on earth who would be disappointed with 3 million weekly users, especially when they get a cut of each transaction?

<comment><USER3> This. It's sort of like the "The Apple Watch is a failure!" articles when the Apple Watch has outsold every other smartwatch combined.

Sometimes it kind of feels like the dinosaur press is really trying its damnedest to bring back the "beleaguered" days.

<comment><USER4> One of my favorite articles like this, from 2 years ago:

> This morning Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) announced a record-breaking weekend for > sales of its new iPhone 5S and 5C. In the first 72 hours more than 9 million > phones were sold in 11 countries around the world.

> To me though, all this over-the-top fanfare and even the record-breaking > first weekend of sales could actually be cause for concern.

> Let's face it this new iPhone is just an upgrade, a refresh, dare I say a > sequel.

Yes. that's exactly what it is. And it sells like crazy.

[http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/09/why-record- ipho...](http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/09/why-record-iphone-sales- might-be-rotten-for-apple-aapl/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The trouble is retailers. I'd use it everywhere if people would support contactless payments. It's how I pay at Sprouts every time.

Heck, Kroger has new terminals that should support contactless payments AND chip based payments, but neither work. Same with my liquor store. Same with IKEA. At IKEA the terminal has a card slot but also has a note taped to it saying "please swipe". At the other two the slot simply does nothing.

But it's more fun to blame Apple and "apathy" than how broken payments are in the US.

<comment><USER6> Countless times at Whole Foods and Home Depot where I walk up to the terminal with my phone and the cashier says, "Sorry, it doesn't work". These are flag ship Apple Pay retailers.

<comment><USER7> I think this is often just ignorant employees (not their fault; they probably haven't been properly trained). I've run into the "that doesn't work" thing at Whole Foods a couple of times, and both times it worked perfectly when I insisted on trying it. The employee was amazed, and said they'd never seen it work before.

I have run into problems at Subway, which is supposedly an official Apple Pay merchant. I can almost never get it to work there (and often they keep the terminal behind the register, so you have to ask for it and convince the employee to give it to you if you even want to try).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think there's still too much social friction. It's really convenient and fast most of the time, but there are several road blocks that I've run in to that made me wish I just swiped my card. Most of these will go away with time.

1\. Their hardware doesn't support RFID, or it has a RFID logo but is disabled.

2\. The store owner doesn't know how it works, or is concerned and thinks it didn't work because they're unfamiliar with it.

3\. The store owner or people in line think its cool, haven't seen it before, and want a demo.

4\. The store owner or people in line act like I'm a techno-douche and don't understand why I didn't just swipe a card like a normal person because I'm holding everybody up trying to make it work with their busted RFID reader.

When none of those things happen, it's a great experience, especially on the watch.

<comment><USER9> RE #4 -- I always just start the Apple Pay transaction while the cashier is still scanning my items. In fact I do the same when swiping a card. Almost all payment terminals support collecting your payment information before the clerk has finished tallying up your transaction. Shaves a couple of seconds off the total experience regardless of whether I'm using a card or RFID....

</comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I love the convenience of Apple Pay, but most vendors don't have it. Pretty much the only place that I've used it regularly is Wegmans, but if I'm buying beer I have to show my ID and at that point I may as well pay with my card.

I like Apple Pay, I really do, but there's hardly enough vendor adoption. Hard to see where the blame lies, aside from the obvious chicken-and-egg problem.

<comment><USER10> > _but most vendors don 't have it._

Is there any financial incentive for them to do the work on installing and maintaining yet another payment method?

<comment><USER2> The big incentive came in October of this year, the liability for fraudulent payments at the terminal switched from the card issuer to the merchants accepting payments. This is in coordination with the roll-out of Chip cards in the US. So basically, all merchants are going to have to upgrade their terminals soon and it really makes no difference to their back end whether you pay via credit card or Apple Pay.

[http://www.emv-connection.com/understanding-the-2015-u-s- fra...](http://www.emv-connection.com/understanding-the-2015-u-s-fraud- liability-shifts/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually wonder if there will be a different ratio in EU countries which are far more accustomed to both contactless chip & pin payments and where cash transactions are much less common e.g. almost everyone pays even for small things like coffee using a card rather than cash.

Sure when you calculate the amount of money transferred cards are the king even in the US but in overall number of transactions and especially in low value (under 50$) the picture changes and the lower you go the more likely you will pay with Cash. In Europe the picture is quite different as debit, credit, and local chip & pin wallets remain dominant both in high and low value transactions.

On the anecdotal side I went through my bank statements online and I withdrew cash only 6 times this year in the UK for a total sum of 270 GBP which is nothing. I rarely use cash the only time I use cash is if i go to a festival or a street market or something similar.

</comment><comment><USER12> The headline is "Hardly Anyone Is Using Apple Pay", but the first sentence of the actual article is "Only 20% of people who can use Apple Pay have done so." That sounds...pretty freaking good? I think of Apple Pay as being mildly successful given how hard it's been for competing systems to get any traction over the last 5 years or so, but I would have guessed that that number was more like 10%.

I also consider Android Pay to be mildly successful, but AFAIK it has about the same level (or less?) of popularity and support. It's just fundamentally not the kind of service where the criteria for success is defined by adoption by a plurality of compatible device owners.

All of these different payment systems are just struggling to gain traction- over the next couple of years, I would consider "success" for any of them to just be getting enough growth and support to stay alive. Once the market has decided that one or more of these systems gets to stick around long-term, then we can start being disappointed that only a few tens of millions of people are using them.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've only had luck with Apple Pay in Trader Joe's and Panera so far. Discover is doing 10% cash back for payments made in Apple Pay until the end of the year so I've been trying hard to find any stores that accepts it, but couldn't find that many places. If it were accepted by more retailers (e.g. CVS, Stars Market), I can see it being more widely used.

By the way, I remember Target, CVS, and some other retailers were working on their own payment system using QR code. I wonder what happened to it.

<comment><USER14> Upvoted for the headsup on the Discover card alone. Every time I've tried to add my Discover card to my Apple wallet, I've been told that Discover does not yet support it.

I would use Apple Pay 100% of the time if it were available. In particular, I long for the day when you can pay with Apple Pay at restaurants so you don't have to hand off your credit card to someone who disappears with it and comes back later.

This Christmas I promised to help set some relatives up with Apple Pay and show them how to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another issue is the lack of participating banks. All of my credit cards work with Apple Pay (and I use it multiple times a week) but all of my parents' cards and a bunch of my friends' cards are simply not supported.

I like Apple Pay, but with EMV rolling out in the US and the CurrentC consortium trying to kill credit card use in the retail space entirely I don't know whether it's ever going to be able to reach wide-spread adoption.

<comment><USER16> CurrentC will never take off. It requires a debit card and a bunch of personal information and puts all of the burden of dealing with fraud on the customer. Users aren't going to be signing up for it in any sort of numbers like they will (and have) with ApplePay, I'd bet. If I go into a store and they either don't take credit or charge extra for credit, I literally stop going there.

<comment><USER15> I agree that CurrentC will (hopefully) never take off but it has already had a chilling effect on Apple Pay adoption. There are many stores that used to allow NFC tap-to-pay but actually disabled that functionally entirely to prevent people from using Apple Pay specifically.

e.g. pre Apple Pay I used to be able to use tap-to-pay with an actual credit card at CVS but they've disabled that functionality on all their payment terminals to block Apple Pay. Now I can just go to Walgreens but that doesn't change the fact companies are actively taking steps to retard the growth of Apple Pay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use Apple Pay regularly at Trader Joe's, Peet's Coffee, Whole Foods, Walgreens, and various other places. Success rate is 100% at most of those stores. For Walgreens, implementation is still rather spotty; works great at some stores, others have had broken readers or have said that their new readers were coming soon, but not there yet.

It's especially handy for occasions when I'd rather not bring my wallet, such as workouts.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have tried to use Apple Pay on my iWatch about 12 times at retailers that have stickers which say "Apple Pay Accepted Here". It has worked 2 times. Just didn't work at all 7 times. 3 times it actually broke the POS system on the register and they had to move me to another register. I just can't be bothered to use it anymore. I just look like an idiot trying.

<comment><USER19> I've never not had Apple Pay on my Apple Watch work. I use it like everyday on the way to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like paying with it, from how the protocol was designed i feel like its less likely to have my credit card info leaked. I find that the biggest issue when paying is that the POS system is on its own mission (fucking hate that weight system (plz return your item to the bagging area)). So i might have to try to complete the payment multiple times before it submits.....

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't see any advantage to it vs. a card with a chip. The card has no battery, is more durable, and can be replaced for free.

<comment><USER22> I think the argument is convenience.

Battery/Durability seem like pretty empty arguments when comparing something that exists in software to something physical since if that was the case most things done on computer would lose.

Also, it's not like you have to replace your phone when you need to replace your credit card #.

Chip cards seem quite a bit more inconvenient than non-chipped cards at least with the chip readers they've started using in the US. Non-chip is a quick swipe interaction vs the chip card has to stay in the length of the transaction processing which for some reason even the non wireless readers take up to a minute to complete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> More accurately, hardly anyone is offering it consistently.

I would love to use Apple Pay everywhere but it's simply not really available. For instance everytime I go to get gas I'd love to but no gas stations appear to support it. I go to Starbucks several times a week and use their app to pay but no option to use native apple pay (only as a payment source). Subway is suppose to offer it but the ones near me don't. A few stores that are suppose to, I've tried but the register person didn't click the right button and ended up crashing the system and had to use a card. Some stores say they support NFC but specifically block Apple Pay for competitive reasons.

Whole Foods is pretty much the only place I know I can use it and have it work. So I think it comes down to waiting for major players to start offering it like gas stations and starbucks so that people will be able to use it consistently in their daily lives.

</comment><comment><USER24> I tend to use it when possible. Aside from cashiers at Whole Foods, I have gotten a surprised reaction of "I didn't know you could do that!" from most of the places that I've used it.

Only Game Stop asked for ID to go along with the Apple Pay. I tend to think that an additional id is not really necessary.

<comment><USER17> Not only is it unnecessary, but you should object. The entire point of Apple Pay is that it is both very secure and completely anonymous. The retailer doesn't need to know your identity and track your purchases. No information about you is passed to the retailer during an Apple Pay transaction: not your name, not your account number, not the type of card you are using. Nothing. Which is how it should be.

The retailer is assured that you are the valid account holder by the fact that Apple Pay can't work without a validated iPhone present, which the user has unlocked with either a security code or a fingerprint. Stolen iPhones are accounted for by the fact that such phones can be easily and instantly disabled or bricked by the user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Until last week, I had an iPhone 5S and an Apple Watch, which is also a combination that works for paying with Apple Pay. I tried several places that claimed to support it, and it didn't appear to work. It took me several months to realize that I had to have the "Wallet" app open on the watch and had to double-click the side button to put the watch in the mode where it's ready to pay. Then you have to get it close to the terminal to work. I bet half the problem is that users don't know the interface for making a payment. My memory of the keynote where this was introduced was that you just held the watch up to the terminal and it paid. That's not the reality of how it works. And cashiers generally don't know how it works, so they can't help you.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm having the similar troubles with terminals that only allow chip and signature or terminals that have a chip slot but only allow swiping.

I've found that if you read carefully it will tell you whether to "insert" or "swipe" your card...old habits die hard.

This is what happens, I try Apple Pay, a lot of times it doesn't work. Pull my card out and insert it. Also doesn't work. Finally I swipe the damn thing and ta-da back to normal.

I almost wish Apple would use geofencing to let us know if the retailer supports Apple Pay or not so I can quickly abort the mission ahead of time.

</comment><comment><USER26> I saw someone awkwardly trying to use their Apple watch to pay for something the other day. It was kind of funny.

I wonder what the numbers would be like in the UK, where contactless payment is already fairly widespread...

<comment><USER27> I'm not in London, but also not in a tiny village. In this large town I've literally seen exactly one person wearing a Watch in the last year.

My local big supermarket doesn't have contactless, so doesn't support ApplePay.

In other stores, I've never seen it being used.

I suspect there's been some take-up in London - but Apple really haven't killed this one, especially considering that iPhones are _everywhere._

<comment><USER11> Almost every store I've been too has Apple Pay and contactless support the only places I haven't seen contactless being supported so far are small mom and pap's store/kiosks which I would be weary of using a card in in the first place (seen enough worldpay PED terminals held together with tape for a life time).

Barclays is still refusing to support Apple Pay since it's trying to kick of it's own payment service but other than that everyone supports it even Tesco.

I haven't seen anyone paying with the apple watch it would be rather awkward based on how most card readers are positions but it's very easy and quick to pay with the phone.

<comment><USER28> I wonder why Apple hasn't ditched Barclays as their customer financing provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's definitely my preferred method of payment. Retailers who don't use NFC related tech like Apple/Google Pay are the last ones to get my dollars.

A friend of mine and I were just talking about Apple/Google Pay this morning and she said it was a lifesaver when she forgot her wallet. I think for most people this is how they will end up using their Apple/Google Pay at first. Then they will claim it's the most amazing thing ever as my friend told me this morning when she went shopping and forgot her wallet.

</comment><comment><USER29> In my current bag, my phone is a lot easier to access than my wallet. So I use Apple Pay wherever I can.

I can't really use it many places. So far it's mostly Trader Joe's and Walgreens. Local coffee shops, farmer's market, I gotta take out the cards. But this will change; a few years ago I had to bring cash to the farmer's market and now everyone there can swipe a card with their smartphone.

It'll be interesting to see what the small-vendor uptake of Square's NFC reader is when it comes out...

</comment><comment><USER30> interesting, I use it at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, quicker than card.

When it works, it works. I can't imagine it won't be standard to pay by phone, with integrated loyalty program.

Meanwhile the chip cards are perceived to be slower than magnetic strip. How is that even possible?

[http://www.businessinsider.com/us-shoppers-are-so-annoyed- wi...](http://www.businessinsider.com/us-shoppers-are-so-annoyed-with-the-new- credit-cards-theyre-avoiding-stores-that-use-them-2015-12)

and never mind the insanity of MCX and CurrentC [http://gizmodo.com/how- corporate-greed-is-trying-to-kill-app...](http://gizmodo.com/how-corporate- greed-is-trying-to-kill-apple-pay-1651233601)

It's only been about a year and I have to think Apple is pretty well positioned to get people using phones, have a feature that works better than Android, and eventually get a nice vig.

If the merchants and banks and credit card companies don't get their heads out of their butts, Apple could even end up being a tail that wags the dog and running the table on payments.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've used it at many places in NYC: Walgreens, Duane Reade, Whole Foods, McDonalds, a local grocer, vending machines, Apple Store, Best Buy.

An important point is that Apple uses a token and not your CC for paying and thus you protect your CC from hacks. When I tell people this advantage (Do you remember Target, Lowes hacks?) they are very interested.

You can also conveniently look up your last few transactions on the phone.

</comment><comment><USER32> Honestly, the user experience of paying by credit card is just getting too complicated. Which of the 3 contact-less payment vendors can you use? Do you hand your card to the cashier or not? Do you swipe it or insert it (who knows, the cashier has to tell you)?

I miss the days when you just handed your payment (cash, card, check) to a trained cashier, and they just handled the rest.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's a bit surprising since Apple Pay has, by far, one of the better UXs for a wallet application. Adding cards is really easy and paying with Touch ID is really simple and intuitive.

I imagined that once Apple finally came out with a mobile payments solution, Mainstream America would pounce on it, but it hasn't seemed to happen yet (or maybe ever).

<comment> jon-wood For wallet apps it may well be best, but the UX doesn't beat my actual wallet, which contains several contactless cards.

<comment><USER34> > but the UX doesn't beat my actual wallet

Why not? You don't need to pull out your wallet, find the right card. You just put your phone (which I'm already holding when I'm waiting in line, but maybe that's me).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Apple Pay does not solve a problem for me when shopping at a cash register. Maybe there would be slight benefit if I had a Apple Watch, which I don't.

It would be great if I could use it more online though. I think I used it once and I didn't have to input my name and address. Pecking this out on an iPhone is a pain.

<comment><USER11> What problem is that? It's quicker than C&P it's more secure than a swipe, you can have all your cards on a single device and select the one which you want to use for each transaction (e.g. to get offers / discounts).

The watch actually is quite more awkward than a phone to use, but Apple pay is definitely convenient, and if you forget your wallet allot it's quite a god send if it's widespread where you live (like it is atm in London).

I can pay for all of my daily expenses with Apple pay atm, this includes transfer (TFL), food and coffee, cloths, electronics, groceries everything.

Is it superior to contactless credit cards? The only big clear difference is that it's not capped in the amount (although some retailers might implement their own cap on contactless) whilst most credit cards limit the amount to anywhere between 10(HSBC debit) to 50GBP(Amex).

<comment><USER35> Issuers pay for fraud so I don't care about security. I don't need to have access to multiple cards. The phone is worth hundreds of dollars and if I have to futz with it at checkout there's a risk I will drop it. That risk is not worth it when I can pull a plastic card out of my pocket.

If I had the watch at least I wouldn't have to fish the phone or a card out of my pocket.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's a dumb idea. Pulling out a card and swiping is quick and easy. And youre not fumbling with a $900 computer while people wait behind you, for no benefit. They'd have to pay 2-3% cash back for people to switch. But that's the money the banks and phone companies want for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER37> I sure as hell don't, assuming the retailer accepts at all (most up here don't), the cashier almost never knows how to make it work and looks at me like I'm trying to pull a scam when I pull my phone out instead of my wallet.

Joys of living in the backwoods.

</comment><comment><USER38> I live in Cupertino and I've barely seen anywhere that even accepts it, and I can only assume that we have possibly the highest penetration of independent retailers anywhere on the planet.

In fact, the only place I see it used consistently is the Apple corporate cafe.

</comment><comment><USER39> Here in San Francisco, I only see it my local independent grocery store, Walgreens, and Whole Foods (where I don't regularly shop). Not Lowes, Safeway, Bevmo, not any restaurant or liquor store, of course.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't use Apple Pay for one very simple reason: it's an automatic habit to reach for a card.

I am not actively choosing NOT to use it. I just have no compelling reason to use it despite my card habit.

<comment><USER41> This is the crucial impediment faced by any new process seeking to replace an entrenched one. Being better is not enough, unless the improvement is massive. The force of habit is just so strong.

<comment><USER40> Interestingly, I got downvoted for my comment. Not sure why, since it's an observation that I'm sure more than one person has. Per your comment, it would seem to be a part of human psychology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> only place I've had a seamless experience is a Coke machine in the Best Western in Moscow, Idaho. Everywhere else has sucked or not worked.

</comment><comment><USER43> There are lots of contactless POS in Canada, and Apple Pay just got here. But it's still just Amex. Not exactly mainstream...

</comment><comment><USER44> I quite like it.

It may count as separate, but it's also really useful for paying on the phone itself. It's how I always pay on Just Eat.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's not well advertised, but I use it everywhere that accepts it when I'm not using cash.

</comment><comment><USER46> More a solution in search of a problem</comment>


How is computer programming different than 20 years ago? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ssg/how-is-computer-programming-different-today-than-20-years-ago-9d0154d1b6ce <comment><USER2> VSCode was late to the party. Atom and Notepad++ were before them. Don't forget eMacs or VI that were first in the text IDE modes for multiple languages.

20 years ago we didn't have Youtube or online courses to learn. Just websites and forums and Yahoo Clubs/Groups. As soon as Visual BASIC got a service pack the old books were obsolete and you had to read on MSDN or the forums or the Yahoo Clubs how to deal with the API changes and language changes. Which management never understood and confused MSDN with MSN.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right about text editors. I was mostly tongue-in-cheek in most of the claims :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been programming for 50 years. Nothing fundamental has changed.

Computers are "intellectual mirrors". What you get reflects what you think you want. Which is almost never what you actually want.

Wrapping "tools" around the intellectual mirror is putting makeup on. It makes you look better but you're still the problem.</comment>


Microsoft retracts Ballmer's Windows 8 in 2012 comments - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/05/25/microsoft_retracts_ballmers_windows_8_in_2012_comments.html <comment><USER2> Isn't it funny? A ship that leaks from the top.

</comment><comment> clark-kent I would like to see an engineer run Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> Anyone but a sales/marketing person, really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last week, well before these comments there was a Microsoft info session at the University of Waterloo. The recruiter curiously said "the next version of Windows, which is going to be released next year." I assumed she misspoke, but I guess this was the target that MS employees knew (and some believed was going happen)</comment>


Burnout and Ops [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa14/conference-program/presentation/lehtonen

<comment><USER2> I know the guy who gave this speech. He's very prolific in his opinions, but so far I've always found him to be a pretty sane guy. Usually in the right. I totally agree with him.</comment>


The bold "pay-what-you-want" restaurant experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2010/06/17/pay_what_you_can_restaurants/index.html

<comment><USER2> "Radiohead makes most of its income by touring, so even if they lose money on the album, but get more popular, they can just go on tour. A restaurant has no other way to get that money back."

This is the crucial point. The Radiohead model is not applicable because for them the albums is a publicity machine that feeds into their real business: concerts, memorabilia, etc. Think Google, every free service/tool/platform they offer funnels into their main search business.

I think for big chain restaurants, like Panera, this may make sense. The loss they suffer from 2-3 stores is more than offset by the huge publicity they gain, but they cannot do it widely. For small unknowns it doesn't make sense to do it continuously but they make try it for short periods of time. Similar to how small businesses tolerate Groupon's huge 50% commission.

Doing this as a short (e.g. 2-3 month) experiment also gives you an excellent indicator of the perceived value of your service.

<comment><USER3> It's also worth examining the cost of the goods being sold. The "cost" of a digital album download is negligible. The cost of producing a meal represents a significant portion of the selling price when you factor in labor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like this model a lot but what if it was "pay what you can", not "pay what you want"? While subtle I think this change in the verb drastically changes the game. Not only is it much harder than you'd think to evaluate for yourself what you can pay but it requires a change in how we calculate value and turns payments into a mutual ethical obligation between producers and consumers. It goes well beyond our naive notion of "voting with your wallet".

</comment><comment><USER5> I was in Berlin not 3 days ago and saw a restaurant that, by all appearances, is flourishing with this business model.

It should be noted that in Berlin, you ride the underground on something of an honor system, and no one j-walks, so the culture clearly supports this kind of business model.

</comment><comment><USER6> Make it a place where you eat every day, and it will be a failure.

Make it a place where you take your girlfriend on payday, and it will be a total success.

It totally depends on context.

<comment><USER6> Also: "Radiohead makes most of its income by touring, so even if they lose money on the album, but get more popular, they can just go on tour." is false and misleading.

Radiohead makes money if the average price paid is more than the average bandwidth and hosting price. And hosting is very cheap nowadays.

<comment><USER7> Very true. And if they choose to use Bittorrent, it becomes even cheaper.</comment></comment></comment>


LLVM Intermediate Representation is better than assembly - <AUTHOR> https://idea.popcount.org/2013-07-24-ir-is-better-than-assembly/ <comment><USER3> A few points:

-LLVM at the IR level still has platform specific information - calling conventions, vector types, pointer widths, etc.

-what was true then is still true now: [http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2011-October/0437...](http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2011-October/043719.html)

-typed assembly languages have existed for a while, no one uses them

<comment><AUTHOR> > platform specific stuff

Yes. If I were to write IR for a real project, I'd probably keep a few pretty large functions to avoid overhead caused by calling conventions.

Very interesting link. Thank you! Though I find the arguments unconvincing. More data needed...

> typed assembly

Yes. But now _every_ mac user and plenty of other people have a typed assembly compiler on their machines! IR is reasonably popular and quite well documented. I'm not saying it's new, I'm saying it's cool :)

<comment><USER4> It's not just calling conventions. LLVM IR also bakes in various assumptions about the target platform, from endianness to structure alignment to miscellaneous facts like whether char is signed or unsigned.

In many of those there is no going back to the original representation, they are one-way.

If you have IR that you can compile to various archs and have it work there, that is a lucky thing in that particular case. But it is not what LLVM IR was designed for nor should that work in general.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand what this means. Could you please give an example of some code that loses information in this way when compiled with LLVM?

<comment><USER4> Say you have a struct type X with properties int, double, int. The offset of the last property depends on how alignment works on the target platform - <USER2> could be 12 or 16 on some common ones. LLVM IR can contain a read from offset 12, hardcoded. Whereas the C code contains X.propertyThree, which is more portable.

<comment><USER6> But that's not how LLVM works, at least when I worked with it a couple years ago. You would define a struct type in terms of primitive types (int64, ptr, etc), and then use getelementptr with the offset of the field path you wanted. Yes, it's a numeric offset, but it's a _field offset_ within the struct, not a byte offset. LLVM handles packing, alignment, and pointer size issues for you automatically.

<comment><USER7> Once you have defined a struct in terms of primitive types, it is platform dependent.

Consider C:

A C int can be 16 bits. Or 32. Or 64. Etc. As long constraints of the relation to the other types is met.

The moment the frontend specifies a primitive type for a field in the struct, that code is incompatible with a whole lot of platforms.

<comment><USER8> Your primitive types aren't LLVM's though, are they? I mean, I haven't looked at LLVM thoroughly (just enough to be familiar with it, a friend is writing a language he wanted some input on), but I would be surprised and disappointed if they had a C "int" type as opposed to "signed 32-bit integer" or whatever. At which point it's compatible with whatever else is throwing around a signed 32-bit integer.

<comment><USER7> But that is exactly the point - that LLVM IR is not platform independent.

The fronted must choose which specific integer type that "int" in C maps to. At that point, the IR is no longer machine independent - if you pick 32 bit signed ints to represent C "int", your program will not match the C ABI on any platform using 16 bit unsigned int as C "int" and you won't be able to directly make calls to libraries on that platform, for example.

<comment><USER8> So use uint32_t?

<comment><USER7> This misses the point. The point is that if you pass a C program that uses "int" through a C-compiler that spits out LLVM IR, the resulting LLVM IR is not portable.

You might not be able to change the C program - it might be using "int" because the libraries it needs to interface to uses "int" in their signature (and handles it appropriately) on the platforms you care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is interesting and pretty awesome. I can imagine having a lot of fun making a toy compiler that emits LLVM IR directly.

Practically speaking, is there a good reason to do this in non-toy software rather than the more-or-less standard practice of using C as an IR? That gives you, in addition to compilation via LLVM, the ability (in principle) to use gcc, icc, et al. (In practice, in many cases people end up using compiler- specific extensions in the generated C, which does impose limitations on portability to other compilers, but that's certainly avoidable.)

I suppose if you are dynamically generating things that need to be compiled as quickly as possible, eliminating an unnecessary compilation step could be a significant advantage. It doesn't seem like such a constraint would apply in most cases, though.

<comment><USER10> C is a heavyweight intermediary language which brings with it a /lot/ of baggage. There's no valid _direct_ technical reason _other_ than financial resource constraints to justify compiling to C (... or JS, for that matter) instead of a more suitable and expressive IR/bytecode.

It's impossible to implement a variety of useful abstractions in portable C -- for example, function trampolines that do not permute register state and do not appear in the callstack after execution.

<comment><USER4> > C is a heavyweight intermediary language which brings with it a /lot/ of > baggage. There's no valid direct technical reason other than financial > resource constraints to justify compiling to C (... or JS, for that matter) > instead of a more suitable and expressive IR/bytecode.

1\. In theory. But what is that "more suitable and expressive IR/bytecode"? I would argue such a bytecode should be portable, but LLVM IR is not that.

2\. There are lots of reasons to target C. C can be compiled by many compilers, while LLVM IR can only be compiled by LLVM to things LLVM can compile to. For example, game consoles, various new embedded platforms, etc. - they all have C compilers, but LLVM might not support them (and possibly cannot support them).

<comment><USER11> All of your arguments about going through C would go away if you had enough money to build your own ideal toolchain, including the development of your own IR for your language.

<comment><USER4> In theory. But it would be _my_ own ideal toolchain. Someone else might make different tradeoffs in its design.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure I understand. The claim is that the only reason to target C is to save money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm intrigued by this idea, but it seems tricky to really use portably if your goal for writing asm is to carefully manage register usage and SIMD instructions. Sure, the syntax is portable, but to get the "right" result, i.e. one that maps directly onto the fast machine code you had in mind, you need to know something about the target architecture, e.g. how wide its SIMD instructions are, and how many registers it has. And if you want it to be fast on two architectures that differ considerably, you may have to write two versions of your LLVM IR, at which point you're losing some of the benefit of an IR. You do still get the advantage that it will at least compile to _something_ on platforms you hadn't previously heard of, but most projects will just use a straight-C fallback function for those platforms.

<comment><USER13> Managing register allocation by hand is unlikely to provide significant speedups, considering that modern register allocators are "pretty good." However, if you are wanting to optimize for SIMD, this can be easily done with vector instructions in IR, without needing to worry about register allocation at all.

<comment><USER14> haberman beat me to it, but register allocation algorithms fall down in very branchy control flow like dispatch loops, basically for two reasons: (1) to make compile times reasonable they tend to have to approximate in this case: (2) compilers don't really know the hot paths in such code like a human would, and will likely make suboptimal spilling decisions as a result.

<comment><USER15> 1\. This is only true in JIT's and similar things that strongly depend on linear time register allocation. LLVM happens to now use a greedy allocator that still tries to prioritize time over allocation optimality.

2\. This is just a bad compiler then. Good static profiling is actually quite good, and quite accurate, in most cases. This includes value and other forms of profiling, rather than just simple static edge estimation based on heuristics. Usually, the thing that gets hurt is not spill placement, but bad inlining decisions.

For diamond shaped switch statement interpreter loops with simple bodies, the real issue is that most greedy/linear allocators are not great at live range splitting. Compilers like LLVM (and to some degree, GCC), move all the variable allocations up to the beginning of the function to make life easy by removing scopes (otherwise you have really really crazy edge cases performing hoisting/sinking optimizations), and then for those that don't get mem2reg'd, can't prove they aren't live all at the same time during the switch due to the loop.

Then they make bad choices about which of these variables should stay in registers because their value profiling infrastructures are non-existent.

Proper region analysis, allocation regions, and better optimistic live range splitting would go a long way towards fixing this, but it's not worth it. There is little to no sense in optimizing LLVM for the very uncommon case of interpreter loops (particularly when one of the goals of LLVM is to ... replace interpreters).

So the basic answer is: It's not really a problem anyone cares to solve, not "it's a really hard problem to solve".

<comment><USER16> Nevertheless, register allocation is still an NP-complete problem and even in AOT compilation everything above O(n^3) is too slow (unless you just compile kernels for embedded software).

Actually, it is not the register allocation itself, which is NP-complete [0]. Avoiding spills and copys is the hard part.

[0] [https://pp.info.uni- karlsruhe.de/publication.php?id=buchwald...](https://pp.info.uni- karlsruhe.de/publication.php?id=buchwald11cc)

<comment><USER15> The fact that some subproblems people want to solve are NP complete is mostly irrelevant, and has been for many many years. Nobody cares about _optimal_ copy coalescing, only "good enough". There are studies about optimal vs non- optimal, and the answer is basically "you could eliminate 20% more copies". That was against the best optimistic coalescers of the time, which have already been superseded by PBQP and other approaches. Also remember that people build architectures knowing what compilers can and can't do, and so processors do a lot at runtime.

As I said, the real issue is that nobody has chosen to optimize for the interpreter case, because it's uncommon and doing so does not help anything else, but comes at great cost.

Choosing the one edge case everyone has said "we don't care about" and saying "see, they suck at everything!" does not seem quite right to me.

For example, it is _completely_ irrelevant to whether register allocation is a problem for tight SIMD intrinsic loops, for example.

At least in GCC (which is what x264 was likely talking about), the issues are GCC's architecture, and not some fundamental "register allocation is hard" issue.

<comment><USER17> _remember that people build architectures knowing what compilers can and can 't do, and so processors do a lot at runtime_

It sounds like you may be referring to MOV elimination by register renaming, which should make the extra moves no more costly than NOP's. I read that Intel post-Ivy Bridge does this, but haven't been able to find any real documentation. Do you know if this is something one can now rely on, or what the limits of this are (number per cycle, size differences, latency)?

<comment><USER17> Answering myself: Yes, this is documented and can be depended on for Ivy Bridge onward.

18.104.22.168 Zero-Latency MOV Instructions

In processors based on Intel microarchitecture code named Ivy Bridge, a subset of register-to-register move operations are executed in the front end (similar to zeroidioms, see Section 220.127.116.11). This conserves scheduling/execution resources in the out-of-order engine. Most forms of register-to-register MOV instructions can benefit from zero-latency MOV. Example 3-23 list the details of those forms that qualify and a small set that do not.

Example 3-23. Zero-Latency MOV Instructions

MOV instructions latency that can be eliminated

      MOV reg32, reg32
      MOV reg64, reg64
      MOVUPD/MOVAPD xmm, xmm
      MOVUPD/MOVAPD ymm, ymm
      MOVUPS?MOVAPS xmm, xmm
      MOVUPS/MOVAPS ymm, ymm
      MOVDQA/MOVDQU xmm, xmm
      MOVDQA/MOVDQU ymm, ymm
      MOVZX reg32, reg8 (if not AH/BH/CH/DH)
      MOVZX reg64, reg8 (if not AH/BH/CH/DH)

MOV instructions latency that cannot be eliminated

      MOV reg8, reg8
      MOV reg16, reg16
      MOVZX reg32, reg8 (if AH/BH/CH/DH)
      MOVZX reg64, reg8 (if AH/BH/CH/DH)
      MOVSX

[http://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/manual/64-ia-32-archite...](http://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/manual/64-ia-32-architectures- optimization-manual.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Julia is a pretty cool platform for playing with this kind of thing in a REPL environment - you can dump LLVM IR and corresponding disassembly for any function, with source line annotation (some things are rearranged by the LLVM optimizer, but it is usually close). No inline IR support yet, but it's a great way to understand the relationship between high-level constructs and machine code.

<comment><USER19> Interesting, I didn't realize Julia had that. Fwiw, many Lisp systems also have this available: if you (disassemble 'foo) in SBCL, it'll show you the asm the function compiled to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It would be nice if the substance of the article actually backed up the title... it doesn't really show this: Yes sure, it's more portable: but plain C is way more portable still.

The places where assembly is justified these days tend to be SIMD inner loops where intrinsic use isn't effective (e.g. due to compilers being pretty lame at vector register allocation) and where a lot of gains can be had by bitops level micro-optimization that depend very precisely on the instruction behavior. I would be surprised if writing LLVM IR was actually better than using intrinsics in these cases.

If it were so it would be neat to see it— an example of taking some well optimized multimedia codec library and converting (some of) the SIMD asm into LLVM IR and showing equal performance would be impressive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally think that IR is _more_ expressive than C. There are two points I wanted to make in the blog post:

\- LLVM IR is cool and in many cases it could be beneficial to use it instead of assembler

\- If LLVM is bad for any reason, writing an optimizer is relatively simple. And, as opposed to hand crafted optimizations, it does scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps I am mistaken, but I was under the impression that the LLVM IR was subject to change at a whim. That may be something to keep in mind if you intend to target it directly.

<comment><USER22> the text format changes, the API stays relatively static (afaik). Most tools use something similar to:

      LLVMContext &Context = getGlobalContext();
      SMDiagnostic Err;
      Module *Mod = ParseIRFile(argv[1], Err, Context);

<comment><USER23> The C API is deemed stable. The C++ API changes every release. The textual IR has so far been forwards compatible. Bit code is also supposed to be forwards compatible but some bugs have prevented this in the past. Backwards compatibility is right out which can be frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The author invokes the idea that writing assembly and writing compiler passes are similar enough activities that you can substitute one for another, but that is not the case.

Good thing, too - I don't even want to think about how buggy and slow compilers would become if random people started jamming passes into them based on nothing but expediency.

<comment><USER22> The cool thing about LLVM is that "jamming passes" in, is something an individual team can do, adding a pass simply involves running

      opt -load path/to/pass.so < IR.bc

Which emits (hopefully) optimised IR. Neat huh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It should be noted that on the official llvm irc channel (#email@example.com) people do not like llvm's IR being called a "progamming language". Rather it's intended to be a representation of llvm's internal data structures. It may look similar to a programming language for sure but it's not the intent behind it. It's a representation that should help compiler engineers debugging their llvm-using parsers.

Also, if you've ever looked at clang's "-emit-llvm" output you will notice that there are some parts of the IR which are hard to be generated by humans, e.g. dgb by sequential number references.

See e.g.: [http://llvm.org/docs/SourceLevelDebugging.html#object- lifeti...](http://llvm.org/docs/SourceLevelDebugging.html#object-lifetimes- and-scoping)

<comment><USER26> To be fair to outsiders, [http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html](http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html) is linked from the main page where the human-readable IR format is referred to as "LLVM assembly language", and with the in-memory representation listed as an equivalent form but not with particular privilege.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The problem with writing LLVM IR code by hand is that is must be in SSA (single status assignment) form which is a pain for humans, and requires graph algorithms to insert phi nodes in the basic blocks. What we need is a non-SSA LLVM IR assembler that converts to SSA -- this would be nice for human authors.

BTW, I taught a compiler course where I gave a project that translated a "turtle graphics" functional language into LLVM IR: [http://ezekiel.vancouver.wsu.edu/~cs452/projects/turtlecomp/...](http://ezekiel.vancouver.wsu.edu/~cs452/projects/turtlecomp/turtlecomp.pdf).

</comment><comment><USER28> To be fair x86 assembly is horrifying.

I've worked with other (mostly Motorola-based or some sort of embedded) architectures, and while a bit cumbersome to work with, the assembly was clean and understandable.

Back in the days assembly was my primary way of getting things done, in part because C-compilers cost money back then and I barely had money left after buying a computer.

Once the "PC" (and thus Intel) had won the war and I set foot in X86-country, I started looking at the assembly. It took me less than a week to decide to give up assembly forever.

So yeah. It doesn't take much to be better than X86 assembly.

</comment><comment><USER29> This needs better examples. I find:

      v4si multiply_four(v4si a, v4si b) { return a*b; }

Much more readable, and just as portable. There's a typedef for v4si, of course, but you do that exactly once and then ignore it. The IR produced is identical, and therefore just as portable.

</comment><comment><USER30> On a related subject, Dan Bernstein of qmail fame created a portable assembly language a few years ago, called qhasm: [http://cr.yp.to/qhasm.html](http://cr.yp.to/qhasm.html) The idea is that processors do pretty much the same things, but with different assembly language syntaxes. With a portable subset, one could then use translators to convert qhasm source into whatever dialect required by ARM, Intel, PowerPC, et cetera.

The latest source code dates from 2007, and it's only a prototype, but it's a clever idea.

</comment><comment><USER31> In the examples given under "vectors" I don't see if they are also multiplatform -- not every platform has "process 4 floats at once this way." Also I don't see the encoding of assumptions of alignment. Not every processor has the same even when the "main" architecture is the same (even x86 generations differ).

I remain suspicious that IR is the only representation you need if you do want to do the things on the assembly level. I welcome examples of somebody in the know.

The another topic is how often IR is going to change.

<comment><AUTHOR> > ... not every platform has "process 4 floats at once this way

Sure. The point is - you can write IR code that multiplies _any_ number of floats and the backend "should" generate reasonable machine code for any architecture.

> Also I don't see the encoding of assumptions of alignment

Yeah, no memory loads there, data passed in xmm0 and xmm1, plenty of simplifications.

> The another topic is how often IR is going to change.

Fair question. I don't know but given the number of projects that currently use it I'm quite sure it'll be well maintained. Also, keep in mind that adapting IR to a future version (if one is created) is still IMO simpler than adapting assembler. Additionally - you can use IR to generate machine code once (for every architecture). That way you won't depend on your users having LLVM installed.

<comment><USER32> > you can write IR code that multiplies _any_ number of floats and the backend > "should" generate reasonable machine code for any architecture.

Except that it doesn't. If you write your code with <2 x float> and codegen for SSE, you'll get <4 x float> code, with two elements going unused. It's functionally correct, but you're potentially missing out on half the throughput. If you write your code with <8 x float>, you'll get two registers for each value, but this can create extra register pressure without actually giving you any increased throughput in return.

<comment><USER23> Other optimization passes will widen the vecorization width to 4 if possible by unrolling the loop!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I doubt it has any practical application outside llvm.git. Why would you want to write assembly by hand in the first place?

1\. To bootstrap. There's various architecture-specific bootstrap code to load the kernel into memory in linux.git. The project largely depends on GNU as to assemble reliably; llvm-mc doesn't work half as well.

2\. To try out new processor extensions. When new instruction mnemonics come out, assembler have to catch up. I'm not sure why anyone would want to use LLVM IR here, because those instructions are architecture-specific anyway.

</comment><comment><USER34> The exciting thing would be to see applications compiled to LLVM IR get JIT'ed. Finally C or C++ apps that could inline through function pointer or virtual function calls at runtime.

<comment><USER35> You might find this interesting, a database query engine using LLVM IR to speed up performance.

[http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2013/02/inside-cloudera- impala...](http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2013/02/inside-cloudera-impala- runtime-code-generation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> How many people still write assembly, and for what purposes?

<comment><USER37> I write assembly most days (I write system libraries--largely floating-point and vector code--for a living). In general the assembly that I write is between 1.5x and 3x faster than what the best compilers currently produce from equivalent C code (obviously for completely trivial tasks, you usually can't beat the compiler, but those generally don't need to be abstracted into a library either; there are also outliers where the code I write is orders of magnitude faster than what the compiler produces). For most programmers most of the time, that's not enough of a payoff to bother. For library functions that are used by thousands of applications and millions of users, even small performance wins can have huge impact.

Partially my advantage comes from the fact that I have more knowledge of microarchitecture than compilers do, but the real key is that I am hired to do a very different job than the compiler is: if your compiler took a day (or even an hour) to compile a small program, you simply wouldn't use it, no matter how good the resulting code was. On the other hand, for a library function with significant impact on system performance, I can easily justify spending a week "compiling" it to be as efficient as possible.

<comment><USER12> _if your compiler took a day (or even an hour) to compile a small program, you simply wouldn't use it, no matter how good the resulting code was_

Some research has been moving in that direction, since there does seem to be a demand for it. After all, if someone is willing to wait for you to spend a week hand-tuning a function, maybe they'd also be willing to run a compiler in a "take 10 hours to crunch on this" mode. Example: [http://blog.regehr.org/archives/923](http://blog.regehr.org/archives/923)

<comment><USER37> Oh, absolutely.

That said, it's also worth keeping in mind the enormous differences in how computers and expert humans currently approach the problem closely parallel the differences in how computers and expert humans play chess; quickly evaluate billions of possible "moves" vs. quickly identify the few most promising "moves" and then slowly evaluate them to pick the best. I fully expect to be regularly beaten by the compiler "someday", but (a) I believe that day is still several years off and (b) even then, I expect that expert human + compiler will beat compiler alone, just as in chess.

<comment><USER38> As a former chess engine author, and current compiler writer, with ideas in search-based compiler algorithms/unbounded compilation times, I hope to accelerate the arrival of that day :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Cloudera's Impala SQL query engine uses LLVM to maximize performance, here's an article published recently talking about how it's used.

[http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2013/02/inside-cloudera- impala...](http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2013/02/inside-cloudera-impala- runtime-code-generation/)

</comment><comment><USER39> For those wanting to play with llvm as a library but would rather not deal with C++, the llvm-general Haskell library gives you nearly every power of llvm (aside from link time optimization, and writing new optimization passes) in a nice high level lib that's already being used for a few interesting compilers out there.

<comment><USER40> Similarly, Siu from Continuum wrote some nice Python bindings ([http://www.llvmpy.org/](http://www.llvmpy.org/)) and LLVM already ships with OCaml bindings ([http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/OCamlLangImpl1.html](http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/OCamlLangImpl1.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This reminds me that I need to learn some assembler. I have a hard time finding resources on conventions, project layout, best practices, tooling. If anybody's experienced in an assembler, I'd love to have some tips and pointers.

<comment><USER42> I can provide many tips and pointers for 6502 ASM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> And C is better than LLVM, from a post a few days ago :)

</comment><comment><USER44> glibc is nuts for not having an LLVM port.</comment>


1997: Steve Jobs joins Apple's board after the NeXT acquisition. - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,986849-1,00.html

<comment><USER2> Actually, it would be correct to say NeXT acquired Apple for minus USD 424M and renamed itself Apple.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Regardless of who acquired who on paper, the NeXT acquisition catapulted Apple from being just an interesting entry in history books (like Gulf Oil) to one of the writers of history (like Standard Oil).</comment></comment>


What would look like to a social network? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/sandbox/infographics/api/

<comment><USER2> Title should be "What you look like to a social network."

Why did the submitter change it to something ungrammatical and nonsensical?</comment>


Sendgrid Live Issue: non-Roman characters getting garbled - <AUTHOR> It seems to have happened from last night (4th November) that emails sent with non-Roman characters e.g. Japanese, Cyrillic etc., are being completed garbled and rendered wrong.
I noticed lots of people in Japan on twitter are complaining but despite this and raising P1 incident, Sendgrid is refusing to acknowledge the issue on their status page and give us updates on the fix. Hoping other people see this and this alerts them to impact. Sendgrid is now the email arm of Twilio.
https://twitter.com/toofu__/status/1191662577723400193
https://twitter.com/t3_heartland/status/1191682021413670913 https://twitter.com/seiketkm/status/1191674672674246656 https://twitter.com/Hi_Noguchi/status/1191662822574346241 <comment><USER2> +1 From Quartz [https://imgur.com/a/ZX20x0m](https://imgur.com/a/ZX20x0m)</comment>


Voices Critical of Turkey mysteriously losing thousands of followers on Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://netzpolitik.org/2017/voices-critical-of-turkey-mysteriously-losing-thousands-of-followers-on-facebook/ <comment><USER2> Wait what... Oh. You mean the country.

</comment><comment><USER3> The [http://www.fbpurity.com/](http://www.fbpurity.com/) browser extension tracks unfriending, but the main feature for me is newsfeed filters.</comment>


Casting Out Nines - Arithmetic trick to check a multiplication - <AUTHOR> http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CastingOutNines.html <comment><USER2> Casting out elevens is a related check, and only slightly harder; you add and subtract alternate digits, starting from the end. So 380258203 is congruent to 3-0+2-8+5-2+0-8+3 mod 11, i.e. -5, which is (congruent to) 6 mod 11. The advantage it has over casting out nines is that it catches all digit transpositions and most inadvertent shifts. 12345 × 67890 is, mod 11, 3 × 9 = 27, which is 5 mod 11. 838102050 is also 5 mod 11, but none of the eight numbers you can obtain by transposing two adjacent digits in it are 5 mod 11, while they are all congruent to 838102050 (0) mod 9. Similarly, if you shifted one of the partial products over by one place by accident while adding up the final product, your result would fail the casting-out-elevens check unless that partial product was 0 mod 11.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you like this kind of stuff, there are a couple of fun mental math books I can recommend:

[http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Mathematics-Secret-Skills- Calcul...](http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Mathematics-Secret-Skills- Calculation/dp/0471467316/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303689258&sr=1-1)

[http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Mental-Math-Mathemagicians- Cal...](http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Mental-Math-Mathemagicians- Calculation/dp/0307338401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303689197&sr=8-1)

It's really baffling that people don't teach this stuff in school.

<comment><USER4> Along these lines, here's how to do square roots in your head.

Let s be the number whose square root you wish to find, and p be the nearest perfect square. You can then approximate √s ≈ √p+(s-p)/(2√p).

Example: √33 ≈ √36+(33-36)/(2√36) = 6 - 3/12 = 6-¼ = 5¾ = 5.75. Actual √33 = 5.74456…

I am a math tutor and taught this to one student who didn't have a square root button on their calculator (albeit I taught it as a calculator trick rather than mental math). He picked up on it pretty quickly.

<comment><USER3> I also really like the simple-but-awesome tricks for multiplications:

1) (a + b) _(a + c) = a_ (a + b + c) + b _c.

Example: 13 _ 14 = 10 * (13 + 4) + 3 _4\. You learn to "see" 13_ 14 --> 170 + 12 = 182.

2) (a + b) _(x_ a + c) = a _(x_ a + c + x _b) + b_ c

Example: 22 * 62 = 20 _(62 + 3_ 2) + 2 _2 = 1364. Here you would see that 60 = 3_ 20, so you add 3 * 2 to 62 to get 68, multiply by 20 to get 1360, and then add 2*2.

Edit: Er, my stars are turning into italics. You get the idea.

<comment><USER5> Try copying and pasting × or ⋅.

<comment><USER2> Or use a compose key: <http://canonical.org/~kragen/setting-up-keyboard.html>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related HN discussion (divisibility by 7; 48 comments):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852210>

</comment><comment><USER7> A question of naivety--why bother with checking by "casting out 9's". Isn't it simpler to simply redo the calculation and check if you get the same result? If you're concerned that you multiplied wrong isn't it just as likely you'll perform a bad check calculation resulting in a false negative/false positive?

<comment><USER2> Casting out nines has a couple of advantages over simply redoing the calculation:

• as the other commenter mentioned, it's much less likely that you'll repeat the same error, because you'd have to do it in a totally different way;

• if the numbers are more than two digits, it's much less work to do casting out nines than to redo the calculation. Multiplying 38020562 by 95942, using the standard algorithm, you have to do 40 digit multiplications, 32 carries, and then sum five six-digit partial products (about another 25 additions) to get your final sum of 14 or so digits; that's a total of 97 operations. Checking it by casting out nines involves only about 26 operations, which can be simplified further by casting out some nines ahead of time — 95942, for example, is obviously 2 mod 9 because the other digits are 9, 9, and 5+4 = 9.

(Side note: is it worthwhile to use Karatsuba multiplication to multiply 38020562 by 95942 by hand?)</comment></comment>


Is It Cheaper to Be Vegan, Vegetarian, or a Meat Eater? - <AUTHOR> http://www.good.is/post/is-it-cheaper-to-be-vegan-vegetarian-or-a-meat-eater/ <comment><USER2> This seems like it depends heavily on what kind of vegan diet you live on. A diet heavy in fresh fruits/vegetables is much more expensive than one consisting mainly of rice and beans, and you can get wildly different per-day cost estimates depending on how you tweak the ratios.

The choices in all the columns here seem pretty arbitrary, too. Are they nutritionally equivalent? Where are those prices from? Etc. Not saying that I disagree overall, but this ad-hoc comparison doesn't give me any evidence either way. For example, if I wanted to eat cheaper on the meat side, I'd just replace that $7.30 chicken fajita with $5 worth of tacos ($3 for a lb of ground beef, $0.50 for some tortillas, $1.50 for cheese/etc.).

<comment><USER3> Yeah, these numbers are totally arbitrary. Just in breakfast, they have the pescetarian eating a $0.50 bagel and the vegetarian eating $1.60 of yogurt and blueberries ... The vegetarian could just as easily eat the same bagel (with a cheaper than salmon cream cheese), or better yet, the same eggs that the omnivore is eating.

I had no idea that there was even an argument that eating meat was cheap. Eating meat in many places is a sign of wealth which has only recently been made available.

<comment><USER4> > _I had no idea that there was even an argument that eating meat was cheap._

In _Food, Inc._ , the case is made that it's far cheaper (and easier, and more psychologically desirable) to get a 99¢ drive-thru burger than fresh vegetables. This is believed to be a significant cause of obesity (childhood and otherwise), especially in the lower classes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're Joe Average, a sizable fraction of your lifetime expense is medical and opportunity costs incurred in the last decades of your life.

Veganism and vegetarianism appear to at least somewhat reduce methionine intake, and therefore act like mild calorie restriction mimetics. Ergo they also somewhat reduce late life expenditure on medicine, and reduce the opportunity cost burden of frailty and chronic sickness:

[http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id...](http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4015)

<http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/calorie_restriction.cfm>

</comment><comment><USER6> This is just silly:

\- meat eaters generally don't eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every day

\- pescetarian's sandwich somehow crazily cheap compared to others

\- pescetarian dinner has two salads; vegan's dinner is a strict subset of the vegetarian. The calorie count should be the same, at the very least

<comment><USER7> really? I eat 2 eggs, 2 bacon every day. hmm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm really surprised this is article is being upvoted. It's a recap of another article from another site, and the sample diet for each category is totally arbitrary. It might be a good topic for discussion, but by itself is wholly lacking in content.

Are people voting for the pretty graphic?

<comment><USER9> I agree; the article is fluff. I upvoted for the discussion.

My partner and I are vegan and it has long been our experience that it's a cheaper way to live, especially given that vegan staples like grains / legumes can be bought in bulk at low prices.

The way I think about it is that meat eaters tend to eat herbivores, meaning that if you're buying meat you're paying for both the production of plant life to feed some animal as well as the cost of raising / slaughtering / packaging that animal. A plant-based diet will always be less expensive as you are just eating the plant material that would otherwise be fed to a cow, pig, or whomever (a simplification, but a helpful one, I think).

Where it _does_ get expensive is with processed cheese/meat alternatives (eg, Daiya and Gardein). My gut feeling is, though, that purchasing these occasionally would at most make our budget match (not exceed) that of a meat eater's.

In the end, saving money is one of the many, many reasons we are vegan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article seems to be written taking as a premise that "conventional wisdom" holds vegetarian and vegan diets to be more expensive than the standard western omnivorous diet. To me, this seems ridiculous; it should be obvious to most people that a vegetarian or vegan diet would be less expensive from readily available information:

(a) when you go to the grocery store, on a per pound or per serving basis, meat tends to be more expensive than in season vegetables or fruits (or grains, beans, etc.)

(b) rich countries consume more meat than poor countries, and as their economies grow or shrink they change their meat consumption (for example, look at China in recent years or the US over the past century)

(c) a junior high knowledge of life sciences and trophic levels (remember the 10% rule?) should make it clear why eating animals that we raise on our own agricultural output (e.g. corn, soy, other grains) would be drastically less efficient/more costly than just eating those crops ourselves.

What _should_ be surprising is that this sample only finds the vegan diet to be less than 25% cheaper than the omnivorous diet. Admittedly, the omnivore on the sample day didn't eat any beef, or large cuts of meat, but still, I would have thought that the vegetarian and vegan options would have been cheaper. I guess really this is a demonstration of the degree to which meat production is subsidized.

</comment><comment><USER11> It'd be interesting if someone took studies on the health benefits to each of these categories and calculated both the direct and indirect costs of belonging to each of these groups.

Although it would be more controversial since the number of factors associated with health cannot be reduced to food choice, it would make for an interesting argument either way.

</comment><comment><USER12> The vegan and vegetarian sections made me cringe, not nearly enough protein. They neglected to include the cost of supplements that you need to take if you plan on being a vegan or vegetarian while maintaining an active lifestyle.

Also, it likely matters what's in season and what is available cheaply in your locale. Someone near the coasts is going to have access to much cheaper seafood than someone in the Rockies and Plains. If you have access to markets where you can buy directly from fishers, farmers, or butchers you can usually see a pretty significant cost savings.

I am very curious where they found a $0.25 serving of salmon and cheese for the pescetarian breakfast. A serving size of smoked salmon is usually 1/2 - 1/4 of a package that goes for 5 or more dollars in the grocers in my area. Some of the other prices were questionable as well ($7.30 for a fish/chicken fajita??).

<comment><USER7> Yes, even when you consider that I can buy $1 8oz Chinese Franken Salmon at the Doller Tree, a 1/4 serving would be $.25 and 1/2 would be $.50 and thats not even including the cheese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a vegan and it ain't cheap. Although nowadays you can buy most vegan stuff from regular supermarket, they are still kind of marginal products and priced accordingly. E.g. soya milk costs more than 2 €/L, while cow-milk is less than 1 euro (IIRC). This is in Finland, Europe.

The funny part is, that most of soya produced worldwide is used to feed the livestock, i.e. converted to meat at pretty bad efficiency rate. So, soya per se is not expensive, and I'm pretty sure soya products could be cheaper than their animal-based counterparts, if produced on a (comparable) mass-scale.

(Then again, the "cheap" concept used here assumes that the suffering of animals has no price, which is not true for most vegans/vegetarians.)

</comment><comment><USER14> It would be better to compare direct substitutes, like tvp vs. ground beef.

The first google results find $3.50/lb for tvp and $6.50/lb ground beef ([http://www.nutsonline.com/cookingbaking/beans/soybeans/prote...](http://www.nutsonline.com/cookingbaking/beans/soybeans/protein- gluten-free.html?utm_source=googlebase) and [http://www.amazon.com/Omaha- Steaks-pkgs-Premium-Ground/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Omaha-Steaks-pkgs- Premium-Ground/dp/B002ZNFHJ4) respectively).

So the conclusion might be true, despite an invalid argument.

</comment><comment><USER15> It would be interesting to see someone try to price externalities into this sort of comparison, although almost certainly the result would be as expected (veganism in a walk) and like all such projections, would be wildly subjective.

</comment><comment><USER16> better to pay the grocer now than the doctor later... a vegan diet will save you later in life</comment>


Is education a waste of time and money? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/rethinking-education-c8754b3d77b4 <comment><USER2> I don't really know where I stand regarding college. In high school I was in the "college is a waste of time and money" boat, so much that I probably seemed condescending and annoying to all of my friends. I was lucky enough to get into programming when I was pretty young, and I made a decent amount of money in high school doing it so I didn't see why I really needed to spend four more years in school. I got a job at a local startup within a week of graduating and boy I thought I was the shit. After a couple months I started to feel bored and realized that I missed learning. I spent a ridiculous amount of time watching physics and math videos at my desk, and then eventually applied to schools and quit my job. I'm at school now and, ironically, I owe it to that job. If I had just gone straight to college I would've continued being the horrible student I was in high school and I would've probably dropped out by now.

I won't speak on whether or not I think going to college is a waste or not, but I do have to disagree with the author's point about high school.

 _> Take geometry, for example. I can't think of a single instance in the last five years where I used any concepts from geometry. Or take language classes. I took four years of Spanish in high school. What do I remember? Nada._

Have I ever used anything I learned in geometry in real life? No, I don't think so. But as a freshman I did think geometry was really fucking cool. Taking that first geometry class helped me discover a love for mathematics which I'm now majoring in. There is probably a better way to help kids discover what they like, but I don't think people who call high school useless have ever really reflected on how important it is. Have I used anything from the more advanced math courses after geometry? Nope. I stayed in school for those classes though.

I think high school isn't necessarily about learning important information, but it's about learning _how to learn_ and discovering your interests. High school gets kids thinking, even if it's about stupid and useless stuff. If you were to just drop some students into classes about "important" things, they'd probably have a very hard time actually retaining any of the information or forming an opinion on it. None of this is to say that high school is perfect, there are probably better ways to do all of this stuff. Taking four years of history probably wasn't necessary for _me_ , all it did was teach me that I didn't like history, but I'm sure someone somewhere took something from it.

Anyway, that's my long, rambly rant about education. I still have no idea what I want to do with my life but I feel like a better person when I'm learning and doing something, and I owe that to school.</comment>


Selectively Ignoring Reset Packets From Your ISP - <AUTHOR> http://www.nnsquad.org/archives/nnsquad/msg00930.html

<comment><USER2> Why reward bad behavior?

If your ISP is breaking your internet access you should switch ISPs.

Pay a little bit more for a better provider, and tell others to do the same. As soon as we stop standing for this bullsh*t, ISPs will have to adapt or die.

But, as long as we keep paying them, they will continue to try and pull this stuff on us.

And pistoriusp: probably not. It is extremely unlikely that your ISP enforces its bandwidth limit per day. What do you mean by "Your connection is reset every 24 hours"? That's a bit ambiguous ...

<comment><USER3> We have 1 national supplier for fixed line internet access in South Africa, it's a 39% government owned Monopoly called Telkom. Although things are getting better this is our only option for now.

This is from their website:

"Does DSL give me a fixed IP address?"

"No, at each login a new dynamic IP address will be assigned to you. Your DSL connection will be reset 24 hours after the last login and a 60 min idle timeout has been implemented."

And the way that they implement uncapped/ capped connection is by separating them in to IP address blocks. So your DSL connection is forcefully disconnected every 24 hours, when you reconnect you get a new IP address and dependent on your usage limit you'll be capped or uncapped. (When you're capped you don't receive any data).

I hope that helps to clear up your statement about our bandwidth limits not been enforced daily.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telkom_>(South_Africa)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In South Africa we are "capped," this means that you purchase a set amount of bandwidth per month, I've got 5GB per month account for which I pay $41 per month. Your connection is reset every 24 hours to ensure that you do not go over your limit.

From this do you think it would be possible to ignore the reset and continue to remain on the "uncapped" account?

<comment><USER4> The "reset" you mention is not the kind of reset this article talks about. This article talks about ignoring RST packets (which are used by some ISPs to selectively terminate TCP connections). You can't really ignore the fact that your ISP disconnects your DSL line every 24 hours.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for clearing that up for me.</comment></comment></comment>


Serverboards 18.04 Released - <AUTHOR> https://serverboards.io/blog/2018/05/17/serverboards_18.04 <comment><USER2> Anybody qualified to summarize Serverboards vs Grafana?

<comment><AUTHOR> Serverboards developer here.

They have in common that both show dashboards, but the strategy is different.

Serverboards focuses on the USQ and SQL to show the data from external services, using third party independent plugins using json-rpc to communicate. Graphana on the other hand also allows to develop plugins to show and extract data, but using their custom protocols. In brief quite similar, different approach.

But Serverboards also allows to create custom screens (react or your own way) and backend plugins (any language, but python best supported) so you can extend what Serverboards can do. For example there is a basic cloud management plugin.

Check [https://serverboards.io/developers/](https://serverboards.io/developers/) as a starting point on what's possible to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Finally we have Serverboards 18.04 ready! Serverboards is our* IT Infrastructure monitoring and management tool."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the hint. Fixed!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Machine Learning Datasets Repository - <AUTHOR> http://classif.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is machine learning dataset aggregation site which can potentially shape into a market place later.

I have focussed on 2 aspects:

1\. Search 2\. Discussion

I was looking for some feedback from the community regarding if there was a need for such a site and what features would be good to add. Do checkout the search page.

Also do you think there is a potential for buy/sell in machine learning dataset space.

I have added around 1000 datasets and I can add another 3K which I have scrapped.

<comment><USER2> _Also do you think there is a potential for buy /sell in machine learning dataset space._

My gut feeling (ironic to use that term, I guess, in a discussion about data) is that the answer is "no". My feeling is that most people use two kinds of data:

a. freely available / open data

b. data they collect themselves

I may turn out to be wrong, but at first blush, I don't see it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @mindrime for the feedback. Thats the feeling I also get. The thing I am betting on is that, there is a chance that above trend is because there is no easy way to buy data or find data on sale. So effectively the hypothesis is that above trend is because of absence of good marketplaces rather than other way round.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. It seems like a hypothesis that's worth testing, for sure!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How many of these datasets are from UCI?

<comment><AUTHOR> around 30% are from UCI archives. The ideas is to add datasets from a lot of smaller indexes also which are currently hard to find. Also was trying to make UCI archive more searchable.</comment></comment>


Simplifying Rails Block Helpers (With a Side of Rubinius) - <AUTHOR> http://yehudakatz.com/2009/08/31/simplifying-rails-block-helpers-with-a-side-of-rubinius/ <comment><USER2> Great stuff. One of the things that always bugged me about rails is the crazy html block helpers that require concating to the output instead of just returning a string.

Being able to build and returning simple strings is going to make rails views infinitely better.</comment>


Samsung goes after blind iPhone users - <AUTHOR> http://blog.davidchartier.com/post/43731094315/samsung-goes-after-blind-iphone-users <comment><AUTHOR> I recently met, and had the opportunity to speak to, an old family friend who has been blind for many years. He's had several guide dogs, and I was hearing for the first time what they _actually_ do (they're far more incredible than I had imagined).

The subject turned to technology, which it normally does when I'm around family, and he showed me his "fancy" Nokia that was especially equipped to help him out. It was very expensive, I presume it came to him through an organisation that helps blind people (he did say, but I've forgotten those details), and he showed me it's special assistive features claiming (with humour) the he would be willing to bet mine couldn't do that.

I flipped out my iPhone (4 at the time I think) switched on the assistive settings (which I'd not done before) and handed it over to him. He had it figured out almost instantly. What blew him away was that the price of this fancy new phone brand new was still significantly cheaper than the phones available through his normal channels - and it was his opinion (after an admittedly short time with the phone) that this was more useful and easier to use than his current phone.

Accessibility is something I think is probably (note I said probably, I have no evidence either way) overlooked by most the startups around here - but I think Apple are trailblazing here too. For most of us these are features we may not even know exist, but for those who need them - they _really_ need them. To take them away could literally be life changing.

<comment><USER2> Apple really is leading the way with accessibility. A family member, also sided with an iPhone over a visually-impaired-targeted phone.

Moreover, they prefer OSX's _built-in_ accessibility features over JAWS and similar software available for Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The patent in question: [http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=...](http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=worldwide.espacenet.com&II=0&ND=3&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=20010301&CC=DE&NR=10040386A1&KC=A1)

 _Speech output device for data displayed on mobile telephone converts data from display into speech data for output via loudspeaker_

</comment><comment><USER4> So.. now that it may affect Apple consumers it's bad.</comment>


SexyPHP: A Fun Way to Learn Object Oriented PHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/SexyPHP-Learn-Object-Oriented-ebook/dp/B00B5WS1Y4 <comment><USER2> I thought it was funny, until I checked out the example content, and realized it was a standard "php" introduction book. It doesn't build off the concept it's title presents, and so I feel it's fair to say this book is just pandering.

Not something I would proudly show off, by any means.

</comment><comment><USER3> "You will also learn ... to manage your code with Subversion" How is this possible in 2013 ?

</comment><comment><USER4> The author is very literally taking the phrase: "Sex sells".

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://sexyphp.net/toc.html>

_Sample Job Description: Jr. PHP Developer \- The Eight Primary Categories of JQuery Features_

o_O

<comment><USER5> Ah, I see! good luck with all that ^_^

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sad to see this.</comment>


Facebook shrinks fake news after warnings backfire - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/27/facebook-false-news/ <comment><USER2> This is brilliant! Share image set to a professionally taken stock photo gives fake news articles a false sense of validation.

Next step: limiting stock photo sales to organizations without journalistic integrity.</comment>


Happy Guys Finish Last, Says New Study on Sexual Attractiveness - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110524070310.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20sciencedaily%20%28ScienceDaily:%20Latest%20Science%20News%29

<comment><USER2> Dear Science, You will never figure out attraction by putting people in a lab and asking them what they like. It's more complicated than that. You'll understand when you're older.

<comment><USER3> _"It is important to remember that this study explored first-impressions of sexual attraction to images of the opposite sex," says Alec Beall, a UBC psychology graduate student and study co-author. "We were not asking participants if they thought these targets would make a good boyfriend or wife -- we wanted their gut reactions on carnal, sexual attraction."_

<comment><USER2> That is just grazing the surface of what is wrong with an experiment like this. For example:

\- people may react differently to photos than they do to real people

\- people may react differently in a lab than they do in a real life courting situation

\- people may lie about their attractions for unfathomable reasons

\- people may not even know what they are attracted to

\- the people in the photos can't necessarily fake emotions convincingly

These kinds of issues confound most psychological experiments but you _really_ can't dismiss them when it comes to sex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FYI: [http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-4-big-myths-of- profile...](http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-4-big-myths-of-profile- pictures/)

</comment><comment><USER5> There's two types of smiling:

1) An honest expression of joy 2) A manifestation of nervous energy

A confident guy in the presence of an attractive woman will do #1. A shy guy will do #2. #2 displays the guy thinks he isn't worthy. The sub-communication is neediness. #1 displays that the guy is comfortable around women like her. The sub-communication is contentment, abundance.

Women can tell the difference.

<comment><USER6> And if the images as shown are really those used in the study then all the emotions just look _fake_. Humans are pretty good at telling the difference between real emotions and fake emotions (which is part of the reason why good actors can make so much money).

I once volunteered for a study on how the brain processes emotion in the voice in schizophrenic patients (I was in the control group... I hope!). While seventy bucks for half an hour's work sounds pretty good when you're a student, it turns out that lying in an incredibly loud MRI machine for half an hour while headphones play a nonstop series of bad actors enunciating the words "It's eight o'clock" while trying to sound "happy" vs "fearful" vs "angry" vs "neutral" is really hard and relatively unpleasant work. Anyway, the point of this story is that the actors on the recording obviously weren't _really_ happy or fearful or angry about the fact that it's eight o'clock, so I always wondered whether my brain processed that obviously-fake emotion differently to real emotion. And who knows if that's what's going on here?

Besides, the guy in his "proud" pose is showing off some reasonably impressive arm muscles which are otherwise hidden under his baggy t-shirt -- no wonder he looks more attractive!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I bet these researchers have discovered that a superficial display of pride in an oversized white t-shirt is popular among men because it highlights boobs. The study is flawed beyond repair.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ok, I will test it this Saturday and report.

<comment><USER9> Hah was thinking the same thing. Going to put it to work tonight</comment></comment>


Why startups should focus on a very small market - <AUTHOR> http://www.kilometer.io/blog/why-startups-should-focus-on-a-very-small-market/

<comment><USER2> This really comes down to if you are small try to find a market you can actually serve well. The only difficulty here is you can become trapped as you build a product too closely fit for one small market and will find it impossible to expand.</comment>