skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I know a number of people who were on the team that tried to "implement" that architecture, and it's highly unfair to them to call it "bad implementation"."

"The point is, it doesn't matter just how forward looking or elegant or innovative the 432 was, if it wasn't possible to build it."

Let me be clear that I'm talking about the design decisions plus implementation. Subsequent work showed that changes to the design would've greatly boosted performance while keeping the overall scheme of things. Summary in the first link with details in other two.

http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/432.html

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=17367&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID...

https://www.princeton.edu/~rblee/ELE572Papers/Fall04Readings...

What are your thoughts on Colwell et al's analysis and suggestions for improving i432?

"There was a reason that the successor i960 was much simpler, and why Glen Myers was brought in from IBM to bring some adult supervision to that architect's sandbox."

I agree with you there. Colwell says i432 was a nice experiment with significant contributions that were forgotten as it failed. I can see that except that it was intended to be a product. Myers understood that products and experiments were two, different things. Hence, the better results with i960. Very unfortunate that it was done in by politics like i860, etc.

Matter of fact, I saw a writer recently mocking F-35 because it uses obsolete, legacy i960MX's without realizing how much more advanced, reliable, and secure they could be vs 2015 ARM chips. People don't appreciate the wisdom in the past and fail to learn from it. Least SAFE and CHERI are exploring these things among others.
> Would it be a problem if several different quasi-species of mosquito lost the potential to incubate malaria?

This assumes it would affect all those quasi-species in the same way
A better question is, if the 158 families that dominate U.S. Presidential Campaign Contributions were 50% wealthier, do you think they would contribute more or less?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/158-families-do...
> Mr. Gates says he reads about 50 books in a year, eschewing digital readers for old-fashioned books on paper. When he is busy with work, he reads about a book or two a week but will consume four or five in the same period while vacationing with family.

huh?
It's easy to believe. IMO wireless bandwidth will always be more expensive than wired, assuming the copper is already in the ground.
It seems like Disque is a "simplified" Kafka, or a more vertically purposed Redis. It seems that it differs from RabbitMQ significantly because rabbit requires a queue to push the messages in, while Disque allows jobs to be pushed independently of consumers being setup.
Although interestingly, I did end up paying 3x the normal rate for the past 7 months, until I reviewed my bills again.

This is how it went.

They had one of those 'not really a discount' price structures going on. i.e., say the normal market price of a service is $100 a month, they'll price it at $400 per month and then say you get a 75% discount. You still pay normal market price.

The contract was for 2 years. After 2 years you can call 'm up and cancel, or renew at a new price. If you don't do anything, they won't cut your service (which makes sense, that'd leave a lot of customers surprised 2 years in), but they'll 'silently renew' the contract every month indefinitely, until you cancel. So you're not actually tied into anything after those 2 years.

But the shitty thing is this... after 2 years, the 'discount' price ends, and you end up paying the $400 rate.

Not just that, but the original $100 'discount' rate (the normal market rate at the time, btw), was for connectivity + a phone, because I got a free iPhone included. Obviously it's not free, it was just priced into the $100 contract.

Plus, after 2 years the market rate of the connectivity + phone dropped from $100 to $50, the connectivity itself cost only something like $30.

So instead of paying $30, I was paying $400. I was never called up or something to discuss my options, they simply executed a silent agreement we made in 2013 in tiny letters.

I made up the numbers btw, they're not as shocking but in the past 7 months I ended up paying $250 more than I should have. Legally what they did was fine, but it was really shitty and felt like a 'gotcha'. I appreciate I should keep track of when my contracts end and check my fees, but when a company exploits this, they're no longer in the business of profiting off offering me a service I want, but they're in the process of unduly extracting surplus cash for non-service above their own market rates. That's 'gotcha' fees if you ask me.

Other than that, I'm really happy with T-Mobile, solid company that I've always been quite happy with. I've contacted them about the above to see if they want to meet me halfway and credit me a substantial fraction of these bs extra gotcha fees. If not I'll likely switch to a competitor, hope I won't have to.
This idea:

"Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups."

seems closely related to the concept behind the book "Design Rules" (2000, isbn 978-0262024662). Here's a summary from the book flap:

"[The computing industry] has experienced previously unimaginable levels of innovation and growth because it embraced the concept of _modularity_, building complex products from smaller subsystems that can be designed independently yet function together as a whole. Modularity freed designers to experiment with different approaches, as long as they obeyed the established _design rules_. Drawing on the literatures of industrial organization, real options, and computer architecture, the authors provide insight into the forces of change that drive today's economy."

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:L9DylaW-KYkJ:sc...
Notes on Discrete Mathematics
It makes the language tricker to learn.
I don't understand why you're being down-voted. It's eminently clear this is what he's doing: it's right out there in the open.

http://fortune.com/2015/12/02/zuckerberg-charity/
was discussed 8 months ago, 126 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9419035
T-Mobile was actually pretty rockin', the best of the bunch, in my town in Colorado. The cheapest, too!

However service in rural areas and along the interstate system was awful. I was either roaming on 1X or without service entirely for very nearly the entire stretch of Cheyenne to Tahoe.

I had to switch, but I think it's the right strategy for the capital-limited underdog. You only need a few towers to cover a city compared to the Great Plains or the interstates, and many people spend nearly all their time in town.
I did not misinterpret you, I understand fully what you are trying to say. I disagree with you. You and I are in the fortunate positions of being able to service debt and even avoid it entirely. Many people are not. Lenders have the ability to take advantage of social and financial systems that require debt, and through the application of their profits can alter those systems so that more debt is required to survive. In my mind, that is capitalism's failure. Spending your future earning potential is fine, buy a boat or a house bigger than you need if you want to, but if you need to go into debt for employment, education, or health care as many in the U.S. do now then something is very wrong. Furthermore, servicing that debt can keep people stuck in debt or poverty and reducing their spending potential, which is destructive to the economy. All of these things can be fixed fairly cheaply but the solutions are being suppressed for the profit of a few.
Those jobs are far and few between, and not usually available to "foreigners" except in rare circumstances.

For example, when a guy here was advertising for jobs in Europe, I contacted him and was politely blown off when I said I was a US citizen. Yes a bit odd since this site is US centric, but there you go.
Ask HN: What is the optimal iteration?
I have a powerpoint presentation Version 1 targeting industry executives. The goal is to create the most convincing presentation. I have n friends (Manny, Moe, et al.), unassociated with the project, whose advice I respect. Time is not an issue. Each of them have roughly the same role and experience in the industry, although they obviously have nuanced perspectives based on personal experience. Should I:

(A) Send Version 1 to each person independently. Incorporate each of their comments.
(B) Send Version 1 to Manny; incorporate his comments, then send as Version 2 to Moe, etc.?
(C) Have them all on a conference call and making changes collectively?
There isn't much you can do, besides slowly re-writing the codebase until you get to the point where new changes don‘t take as long.
Open Letter Google:Let Us Sell Our Apps.Petition from African Software Developer
Chinese arent racist for their Star Wars poster but you are for criticising it
In the early 20th century, big companies were synonymous with efficiency. In the late 20th century they were synonymous with inefficiency. To some extent this was because the companies themselves had become sclerotic. But it was also because our standards were higher.

------------------------------------

Huh? His memory must have stopped in 2000 at the peak of the dotcom bubble. Everything has become much more efficient (both in the stock market and in corporate america) and competitive, with droves of college graduates applying for jobs that can be completed by a high-school dropout.
I'm suffering a bit now due to this happening to me recently....

I had a great work from home job... one that was allowing me to learn a ton of new skills (im an expert html,css, photoshop front-ender yet my JS skills are still at a beginner level). All my co-workers were awesome .. they liked me.. i liked them and they would give me kudos for the hard work I loved doing for them and the company.

Then...Knock, knock, knock .... is heard at my door from a casting director for a new startup/inventor reality TV show. They sent me a message saying we'd love for you to be a contestant on our show you are perfect. These people arent small no names and I initially said no thanks I dont want to risk my job. Though they chased me; made me think this was the way to fulfill my ultimate dream job/professional life goal...a successful & prosperous inventor.

Needless to say, I gave up my job for the reality TV show and well now I am jobless and the TV show was another losing hand!

My New Years and forever year resolution is I WONT EVER RISK STABILITY again FOR ANYONE ELSE WHO KNOCKS ON MY DOOR UNLESS THEY ARE HANDING ME TONS OF MONEY. A few similar and outlandish opportunities knocked previously on my door, yet they too all left me in the long run with a losing hand!
This is silly. Why is having an ever-increasing number of open items bad? As long as you have a way to prioritize them, it is only beneficial to have a large list of issues. Those issues exist in some abstract sense whether or not you acknowledge them in an issue tracker.
i did a survey of low-cost MVNOs over the xmas break, focused on data-centric plans that cost approximately $10 per month (i use google voice). there's also a link to the full list on wikipedia, which you can sort by carrier

http://blog.nqzero.com/2015/12/at-mvno-pay-as-you-go-data-pl...
Kafka has a different data model which works for some scenarios, but not others.

We attempted to use Kafka as part of a job management system, where long-running jobs were scheduled and workers consumed partitions, but what we found was that since consumers work on partitions, a long-running task could block an entire partition's worth of work, with no way to migrate it to another partition.

Kafka works really well when the bottleneck is the broker to begin with -- if you have a lot of small, lightweight messages being passed to other systems, and the broker is having trouble keeping up. Analytics and logs are great examples where Kafka's data model works really well.

But for a smaller number of larger messages that takes seconds to minutes to process (we were using it to schedule data downloads and video processing), workers could be sitting idle while there was still plenty more work to do.

We moved to Amazon SQS for now, but I imagine we'll move to something like Disque in the future.
Having been introduced to Kivy earlier this year as my first python mobile framework I was impressed by how easy it was to prototype with.
How the Survivor Bias Distorts Reality
As Paul Graham states, the metric we measure is the metric we improve. What metric do VCs care about? Profit or societal good?

The current construct has the public and employees in battle against these capilitistic profit seeking businesses.

Sure some generate wealth but they also capitalize as much of that wealth as possible. When Uber and the like create incredible wealth with self driving cars, who will benefit? Society? Maybe with cheaper rides but at the cost of many jobs.

The new rise of B corps leaves me hopeful as a possible transition between the profit game and the helping the world game.
Well, it depends on your method of assessment and criteria. Big companies, in their effort to keep cost down, put workers into relatively larger groups for purposes of monitoring and assessment of performances. However, very high standards are used for assessment and promotion. Remember, we are talking about big companies where so many high flying professionals are competiting seriously among themselves, to work for, for the money, the prestige and the boost to their profiles.

Furthermore, at a big company, workers tend to work together as a more united team. So the flaws of one or a few, are easily swallowed up by the sterling performances of the whole.
http://ayietim.wordpress.com
Well on the future earning potential front, the wealthier you are...
> "we also have social supports for those who are unemployed
"

Something that the very wealthy are trying to roll back.

I think the premise that automation will just shift work to other industries will be severely tested in the age of the self driving car and other forms of advanced automation.
That sounds wonderful ! - A dev kit would be really cool - something like the arduino that students can get their hands dirty with.

I am working for a startup who are involved in the education space, but it's focused on the chinese market, somehow our sale's team figured out how to make chinese consumer pay us money to write code lol.

I moved to London.

yeah - hacker news is weird. Do not let the comments hear or on reddit affect you - you could cure cancer and still be shrugged off.

When I was in Uni I didn't take an modules on OS stuff - too complicated, too much time - and there aren't many things I do with it once it's done ? So if you can convince people of the application - something that will capture the imagination. Something they could do with FlingOS - make a robot, IoT, put on their car/bike ?

I mean I am having a difficult time thinking of writing a custom OS to solve some problem I am having.

I really like your youtube videos ! You should invest in a better microphone - it actually helps !
Hoarding? Do you think rich people just stuff their money in a mattress? Even if they deposited it all in checking accounts, the banks would reinvest it all over the economy.
I think there's a fascinating flip side to what PG calls the refragmentation: the decline of counterculture both materially and in terms of relevance.

PG talks about his yearning for something outside the mainstream bubble. For decades the major source for that was the various mostly youth oriented subcultures that made up what we called the counterculture. Hippies, punks, goths, 80s rockers, hip hop, ravers, geek fandom, and a dozen smaller variants provided something that... well... wasn't "red delicious."

Those things still exist but today they feel more like just another culture in the marketplace. They no longer seem to have such potency or power. Maybe I'm just old but I get the strong sense this is true for young people too. Today young people might visit these little subcultures as tourists, but when I grew up they were a much bigger deal. They became your identity. They were almost religious, like modern mystery cults.

Rave was probably the last great youth counterculture. I haven't noticed another one unless you count the "hipster" artisan living thing and that seems more like a lifestyle brand than a true counterculture of the postwar music+fashion+drugs+ideas mold.

In retrospect those subcultures were more like alternative conformity molds. They didn't really alter the underlying zeitgeist of conformity but just provided another channel on the cultural TV dial. Still I do mourn them a bit. Their greatest legacy was as artistic and musical crucibles and nothing has really replaced them. I don't think it's a coincidence that there has been no major musical innovation since the 90s. There has been good music but it all follows stylistic currents set down before 2000. Rave gave us techno and all its various sub-forms and... that's apparently the end of history music-wise.

Edit: would be curious to hear a counterpoint on the last item. Show me a musical style that is as much of a step change today as hip hop and electro in the 80s or drum and bass in the 90s or acid rock in the 60s.
Agreed 100%, that was one of my take aways from the article as well. I suspect that this dominance is next to fall, and I feel that SV has already passed its zenith, perhaps some time ago, and that locals and those intimately tied to its fabric like PG will not be the first to notice. I think the talk of the last few years about a "bubble" may have been noticing symptoms of this rather than a true "tech bubble". There was a WP article the other day about how people are priced out of homes in SV, with the median home price at nearly a million dollars. We are in the early, possibly mid crisis of student debt, and despite a certain lauding of the dropout culture in the tech industry, this debt has fueled its rise over the last 40 years. It is unsustainable.
EMC plans layoffs
What's the gross click rate? If I run a site that has ads on it, almost all visitors have to download and execute kilo- or megabytes of javascript. Very few users click on an ad.

When an ad impression leads to a sale of something, that's great for that user and the vendor. But how many megabytes of javascript was downloaded and executed by all the users that saw the ad and didn't buy anything? The burden on the rest of us to support those two parties seems excessive.
I think the biggest issue is that we are ignoring that a difference of degree is a difference in quality. Once a small number of rich people have more power than almost every one, our society is controlled in a non-representative way - an oligopoly.

Imagine if one rich person earned all the money in a country. That would be a very bad situation on many levels from concentration of power, to the induction of universal poverty. The question is, how far towards that extreme can you go while discouraging the bad effects? PG has many good points, but there was a major study that showed that US policy is mainly controlled by the preferences of the wealthy, even when the majority of the population disagrees. That doesn't sound like representative government.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...

I don't think we should discourage the vast majority of entrepreneurs, but we should make it harder to get and maintain wealth once you move into the tens or hundreds of millions in assets or income, and past a certain number of billions, possibly blocked. I'm not sure what to do about people leaving the country once they reach that level though so that last part is probably not a good solution, but in spirit we shouldn't let a few people have too much unelected power. They're not just buying new shirts. The problem with wealth is that you can leverage the fact that people like one aspect about you (your ability to provide some business service) into another domain where they don't have to like you so much.
>You had over half of your working career to network, get contacts, recommendations, etc. - if you're still applying for public job ads like the people in 20s and 30s then sorry but this probably means you weren't really good enough at your previous jobs for people to notice you and recommend you.

So? 200+ millions of Americans need to have a job to feed themselves. And several millions of programmers.

Not just the top 10% of them.

Just because you weren't good enough in "networking, recommendations" or some "super star" to have a nice looking resume to be auto-hirable etc, doesn't mean you should starve if you happen to get laid off your job after your fifties...
I'm not aware of the relationship between Nixon era wage policies and the oil crisis. Do you have some info on that?
Empirically, how well do you feel the US government spends its budget currently?

There's often an assumption in these discussions that if a billionaire isn't spending their money in a socially optimal way, the government will spend it better. But if you look at how governments actually spend their money, you'll find very little evidence to support that assumption.
On what time-scale are you looking? A decade out? Two? Three? Europe is in flux in a way that it hasn't been in a long time. And I mean that in a downward way, until the mid 00's we were converging, since then we have been diverging with the '08 crisis as one catalyst and the whole nationalist resurgence as another. Add a couple of million refugees as a convenient scapegoat and the stage is set. Between Le Pen, Wilders and a bunch of other Euro-sceptic parties as well as a widespread fear of everything that isn't lily white you'd have to be a tremendous optimist to think that Western Europe has somehow become immune against war. I hope you're right but the signs are definitely not 'all good' and it would need some serious good news (such as the populists being voted out to the point of insignificance) before I'd be ready to believe it.

Mind you, I'm not pessimistic, I think we'd largely survive such an ordeal, it will never be on the scale of WWII (at least, that is something you'd hope) but it might take more than just a skirmish before the lessons of old would be re-learned. One of the reasons the anti-war sentiment in Europe was so strong in the 1970's and early 1980's is that we were under no illusion what would be the battle field, today the fact that we have the illusion that the battlefield would be anywhere but here is what endangers us more than anything. Two days driving separates the Russian border from Amsterdam, add another one and you've gone from Amsterdam to Bulgaria. Conflicts could easily spill over from one region to another. The first world war arguably started with a single shot, the second followed from that first. I have no idea what Europe would feel important enough to go to war over but it could just as easily be something insignificant as something big.

The most important thing (apologies to Spain, Italy, Romania and Poland) would seem to me to be that Germany, the UK and France keep seeing eye-to-eye. If those ever find themselves on opposite sides of some kind of confrontation all bets are off.
You, Rob Pike and 10 other people.