non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers.

There reason why is pretty simple.

In an ideal world, you don't want anything running at all. You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". What you want is to wake up, do whatever work is needed as fast as possible, and go back to sleep. Period. Sleeping chips are lower power, by far, than idling chips.

If it's faster to do that work with an A57, it'll generally give you better battery life to do that. Again, this is right now, based on perf per watt/blah blah blah. Maybe someday, in the future, a53's will be so low power vs a57 that doing something else makes sense. But it's not true now, AFAIK.

Instead, they make big-little because they can't really increase the speed of the higher end cores more without increasing power usage too much.

Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question.

An A53 has a much lower ceiling, but a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57. Yes, if you want to run a benchmark the A53 is not a good bet (and is generally worse in a workload power usage), but it is a very good bet for most real world usage.

Encoding a video should not be CPU, so let's get that out of there. Most of the rest is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. The amount of CPU time you should be spending on these tasks is really low.

For example, web browsing and reading, the CPU should be asleep most of the time.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very silly little tasks for A53's to do, but what you listed are not those tasks.

It's more things like "syncing" or something that is a poll loop and event bound, not something that is in any way CPU bound. Period. CPU bound stuff is not something for the A53's in this to tackle. It makes battery life worse. That is what the actual, in-the-field data says.

" a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57"

Truthfully, for most A53 cores, this is true only in the dreams of the chip designers.

"but it is a very good bet for most real world usage."

Then what, pray tell, do you expect the A57's to be doing in this world?

And why, in practice, has big.little and other things not shown any better battery life at all if it's really a better way of doing things.

I have no doubt it may be a better way of doing things in the future, but it ain't right now ;)

That said there's plenty of lightweight threads and processes that are mostly IO or event bound, do very little compute, and will run in roughly the same time on a small core as a large core, but the small cores have a lower static power footprint (base cost to have them powered up at all), so big.little works out well there.

A sleeping core is obviously the most efficient core, however you have said nothing to discount what I said. Putting a core to sleep is a very costly activity, which is exactly why it happens at the millisecond scale.

Before that happens, the core will likely have been frequency scaled to more appropriately fit the window's loading. I mean, we know this is the case right now, and that "run fast and go to sleep" is not the primary policy. It's "run as fast as appropriate for the workload to fill a quantum, and sleep when there is no workload". There are many if not most workloads that are externally bound, or event triggered enough that sleep is completely out of the question and running faster does nothing.

Your words have been used (out of context and inappropriately) to bolster DannyBee when they represent, literally, all that is wrong with Hacker News.

Modern CPUs have many different levels of "going to sleep" and many of them can be switched in and out of very quickly.

SD storage has always been a mess on Android because it was originally added just as an easy way to port music and movies over. It was essentially supposed to be read-only memory. Then of course apps and users started using it and the ugly, messy history is notorious.

Android updates have been incremental updates for three years now (introduced at the 2012 I/O, and immediately enabled). Your point on that is confused in any case -- why can't it do delta updates (it does...), and why can't the developer do it, but also why does the developer have to do it? You're incredibly complaining about a situation you invented.

And larger APKs are a problem because now the ridiculously easy tools that Google already provides (generating thin binaries for varied targets is extraordinarily simple. A bug regarding expansion files...what is the point of even linking that?) will somehow be unused?

Your post is a very poorly informed rant. I have no idea how it sits on the top.

I'm just frustrated that they're just doing tweaks, rather than any deep fixes. Obviously the platform isn't doomed, because the competitors aren't much better!

Android updates have been incremental updates for three years now.

Hmm, OK! I have seen some news articles around that, but I can't find an authoritative bit of documentation or official blog post. If you have a link handy, that'd be great.

I've observed in practice that all my test devices seem to do full downloads rather than deltas, though many of them are running older OS versions. And I'm mostly concerned about expansion files. It's possible that the APK parts use deltas at least some of the time, though again, in my spot checks that doesn't seem to be the case.

why can't the developer do it, but also why does the developer have to do it?

What I'm envisaging is, the developer builds APK version 2 locally. They send a v1 -> v2 patch to the Play Store (which already has the master copy of APK v1). Use checksums to ensure it's all working as expected, and in the worst case fall back to a full upload of v2.

Maybe from Google's point of view it isn't worth spending any engineering effort to help developers who don't have access to really fast uploads. But it's not rocket science and it sure would be nice.

A bug regarding expansion files...what is the point of even linking that?

I think it's relevant because their recommended method of shipping a really big app is to put resource data into an OBB (a virtual filesystem), but the tools for building an OBB don't actually work reliably. Worse still, Android itself can't mount an OBB reliably! So if you care about stability and/or supporting a decent range of OS versions, you can't use OBBs at all. You have to use a zipfile or something as your expansion file, and manage it yourself. Not a huge deal, but it's more work, and it all contributes that little bit more to the bloat many people complain about.

It is absolutely enabled. It is absolutely working. There is no conspiracy about this. It is one of the reasons most updates take hours to propagate.

You complained about managing thin binaries, so I don't see how the developer managing that would improve anything, not to mention that it adds difficulties to cryptographic signing and verification.

OK, that's good news! I stand corrected.

It would still be great for expansion files to get the same treatment, or better yet to abolish expansion files and just allow big APKs.

I'm a little sceptical that absolutely no documentation or feedback is needed. Surely there are things that I as an app developer could be doing to make the deltas smaller.

You complained about managing thin binaries

To clarify, as an Android developer you can manage thin binaries yourself, as a way to reduce the download size; it's just a hassle. My complaint is really that the Play Store should do that app thinning automatically.

Apple sort of presented it like the App Store is picking and choosing, but it's the enhancements to Xcode that actually enable the functionality. Google could add some tooling improvements to make it slightly easier, but really they've already done all of the hard parts.

Expansion files were a hack, and remain a hack. They are necessary for large games obviously, but really 100MB encompasses the enormous bulk of apps with ease. It would be ideal if Google simply abolished expansion files and folded the sizing into normal APKs.

So any cash-based business is good. Restaurants, car washes, pawn shops, bars/clubs, etc. These types of businesses can make thousands per day gross and are relatively easy to run with low capital down. That's going to be far superior than shipping hundreds of overpriced hard drives per week via e-commerce and hoping to god no one traces back all these credit cards back to you or your pals.

You can learn the basics of accounting and laundering over a weekend if you had to and learn just enough to avoid being flagged by the IRS. Hell, some accountants specialize in these kinds of things.

I also think that you need to accept some level of risk here and that you'll be dealing with audits periodically. Auditing isn't some scary process, more than likely you'll be dinged for more taxes and not be put in jail. You'll come out ahead, especially when you consider outsourcing laundering is very expensive, something like 50-70% and depending on how it comes back to you, that money is also taxable, so another 25% lost on what's left. Running your own business means you only lose that 25% and some overhead.

There is an enormous financial black hole that is just as vulnerable to inspection as simply depositing $1,000,000 in cash in your account. The whole point of money laundering is not only to legitimize the output, it's to make the sources untraceable and arguably viable as well.

The components of a transaction, particularly for the sales of goods, cannot simply appear out of nowhere, or they've done absolutely nothing in the way of money laundering. The people who will ever care about this (the ones who money laundering is constructed to fool) aren't so naive, and if you're selling 100,000 hard drives to justify your income, they're going to ask where you got the hard drives, and demand a financial trail.

Cash businesses that have little variable costs outside of manpower (such as carwashes, laundrymats, even some small restaurants, or selling small crafts on Etsy) are absolutely lucrative tools for money laundering, and can only really get caught if put under heavy scrutiny (e.g. car wash with 10 cars over the week claims revenue of $100,000). As are casinos, and Vegas was built on money laundering -- there are few checks on how much you spend, so whether you spent $1,000,000 in unexplained cash to leave with $950,000 in legitimate winnings, or $10 in legitimate cash to leave with $950,000 in legitimate winnings, it's almost impossible to prove.

There are many, many financial vehicles that are used for money laundering, including life insurance. Selling hard drives on Amazon is not one of them.

The NOx problems were mostly resolved through the injection of urea into exhaust gases (e.g. AdBlue), dramatically reducing NOx emissions while leaving the efficiency and power unaffected. Urea systems add an extra cost and complexity to the vehicle though (not to mention that you need to top up your urea additive occasionally), and VW seemed to find a loophole that allowed them to make small, inexpensive cars without urea injection. They did this by injecting fuel into the exhaust in the absence of Urea, but to achieve the same effect. But this can gunk up the NOx trap if used endlessly (it is far less precise than urea, obviously), reduces fuel economy, etc, so they built this One Little Trick that only actually does that during identified tests.

http://ask.cars.com/2012/11/why-do-some-volkswagen-diesels-u...

VW claimed to have a trick that removed the need for it on their smaller, lighter cars. But that trick was a trick that only allowed them to pass EPA tests.

However, VW added the AdBlue system to the 2015 Jetta TDI -- perhaps because they knew that this was a problem:

http://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/showthread.php?t=765593

On top of that, even though the Passat has an AdBlue urea system, it's still affected:

  On the open road, a Volkswagen Jetta TDI blew through the
  U.S. nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions limit by 15 to 35
  times. A VW Passat TDI (with urea aftertreatment) was 5
  to 20 times the maximum.

So yeah, I'm not a happy owner right now.

For what? I can only speak for myself but my immediate reaction is to click back and feel annoyed, and consider ad blocker options. It has never led to engagement or a purchase. Ever. The end result is that the performance of ads simply collapses, and sites have to get even trickier to entice accidental clicks. Rinse and repeat.

If you work in the "trick click" space, you are just dooming yourself. It is a race to the bottom.

You mean the Slashdot model. Four huge buttons that take up the entire screen while scrolling. No room on either side to avoid them or get past them. Slashdot has become the poster child for this crappy model.

I used to spend a lot of time there. That went down to barely any in recent history as HN and other sources "took over". When the sourceforge adding rubbish to downloads and slashdot reportedly censoring discussion of the topic (they are owned by the same parent company) I realised how little I'd visited in recent months and decided that I never needed to go there again.

Silly tricks like the one you describe when seen on previously respectable sites seem to be a symptom of the site slowly dying and desperately grasping for what it can on the way down.

I think a lot of the time what you're seeing is shoddy web design (i.e. incompetence and not malice). Not saying it never happens, just that I don't think it's common.

Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, tricking people into clicking on ads is not a good long-term strategy for making money online. Savvy marketers judge ads by conversions, not clicks. Sending a bunch of clicks that don't convert is just going to drive down how much you get paid per click.

The primary revenue source of many of these sites are ad clicks (impressions often don't matter). If the function paying the bills are ad clicks, and site stickiness really isn't a thing anymore (nowadays we're all directed by social news, Facebook, etc. Few of us visit specific sites), why not abuse the users that do come by.

A principal web design facet in the past was the notion that you pre-size all of the elements, such that the content layout is static. This basic facet has largely disappeared -- despite being monumentally simple -- and the only rational explanation is that moving content is profitable.

And for sure it is a terrible long term strategy. But the problem is that it's a tragedy of the commons -- your ad payout on most networks is based upon the group norms, not on your own site norms. So if everyone else is click tricking users, your own per click payment drops, so the only viable solution is to join the race to the bottom.

Of the traffic I observed, I was able to (in a few hours) classify 80% of the traffic as fraud. I don't think there were any legitimate users on these sites except ad network operators verifying whitelists and agency teams showing off how much myspace traffic they were buying.

GM is in no universe blameless, but considerations that hold it like murder are irrational.

VW actively and intentionally misled consumers and regulators to sell cars promising mileage and power levels they don't actually achieve without actually cheating the system. They sold hundreds of thousands of cars -- at the cost of significant air pollution (some 200,000 Americans, and millions worldwide, are estimated to die from air pollution yearly) -- based upon these essentially lies. They actively promoted their eco-friendliness, and their great fuel economy, neither of which are actually true in concert.

I find this sentiment, and the moderation supporting it, incredible and almost a demonstration of the Stockholm Syndrome.

This is like kicking kittens and then announcing to the world that you're going to stop kicking kittens. Then why kick kittens in the first place?

No one made Marco create an ad blocking app. No one demanded his coordination with Ghostery. No one demanded that he announce it with great fanfare on his site. Moralizing about him stopping it ignores that it was just a few short days ago that he started it.

And now he deserves accolades for stopping it? This is an incredible discussion. Countless other people with the ability and the means, who actually had convictions about this topic, didn't create ad blockers (much less for personal reward). Others still, who have convictions that favor ad blockers, did and stand by their moral compass. Either groups are in a far better position than Arment's "have it both ways" perspective.

Also, he himself clearly says that he doesn’t think blocking ads is somehow undoubtedly immoral (like kicking kittens) or something. He makes a much more subtle argument, basically saying it’s a complex issue and he doesn’t feel confident in his ability to make the right decisions looking forward in his stewardship of what would probably have been one of the most popular ad blockers on the platform.

He just doesn’t want to make those decisions. He feels uncomfortable making them. That’s it. I think that’s a very sensible argument for pulling the app, especially if you expected this app to be not very popular in the first place.

The anticipation about adblockers on iOS has been fervent and growing for a while now. Marco went and setup an agreement with one of the larger purveyors of block lists, then utilizing that to all advantages to corner the market. I find it highly dubious that he didn't think it would be lucrative.

The ramifications and gray area of adblocking are not new. They are not unknown. This has been a discussion for literally years. As with others, it seems obvious that there is something else that motivated this sudden change of perception, and personally I would wager that very shortly we'll see Ghostery skip the middle man and release their own blocker, probably with some financial considerations.

Sure. That having been said, people do things all the time without realizing how it's going to make them feel. Marco made an ad blocker, turns out it made him feel bad, so he's going to stop doing it. Fair enough.

I'm not trying to suggest Marco is some Saint here. Like you said, he created this problem for himself in the first place. I just can't believe how unwilling HN's readership is to believe that there isn't some ulterior motivation behind him pulling the app.

Not really, because now all those who bought "Peace" in good faith feel bad. We trusted this guy to deliver a good product and then it disappears under us. Grrrrr..

My post above is completely accurate. The moral grandstanding is an embarrassment, and it's worse how well this noise works on HN.