skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I clicked through to the article that "ultimately annoyed" the author -- I found it to be a pretty decent, high-level discussion of architecture patterns in the real-world (N-tier, monolith, microservices, event driven, etc). The names may indeed be "25-cent word for a 1-cent idea" but they also allow people to put a shared name to a concept. In reality, very few systems follow a strict set of patterns 100% of the time, but having a shared vocabulary is useful for communication.

The friction between "architecture astronauts" and in-the-trenches engineers is nothing new. I think the author has identified the age-old struggles of dealing with Big Design Up Front UML diagrams, overbearing adherence to named patterns, and the disconnect between design and implementation that can happen in any project that has more than one person.

I would challenge the author to spend time trying to build up the community rather than tearing down others. Help clarify the "unintuitive names for very simple ideas", be open to new ideas but think critically and share your thoughts. Coming up with a new way to categorize someone as a poser or misguided does neither.

(Aside, you may want to consider removing the gendered pronouns from your lists -- there are women engineers and architects of all skill levels. I'm sure there was no malice, but it's worth writing in a way that makes everyone feel included.)
Does it support C APIs and/or Numpy / Scipy?
I bought my sister a $50 Firefox phone for Christmas. She's never heard of it, of course. But she loves it!

Why did Mozilla give up so quickly? Did they really expect to take the market by storm overnight? I don't get it.
Really disappointing ! This API would have made it possible to embed plugins like "Sidewise Tree Style Tabs" in a chrome window. But I understand their point. One should not forgo simplicity for additional features.
argv is a null-terminated array of string.
Expressing scorn towards people who didn't major in your field of choice: also pretty 'hipster,' I guess.
Slightly off-topic, but does anyone know the name of the type of design/ decoration around the text, for instance in this image?: http://blogs.harvard.edu/houghton/files/2015/11/EB7.A100.740...

Have been wondering this for quite some time.
Not quite related but right now I'm dealing with an infrastructure architect that a) refuses to document things because of some misguided sense that this will buy him job security and b) constantly chases the latest shiny tech without regard to how it fits into the overall system or ongoing maintenance and support. Frustrating to say the very least.
I hate when people use big words. Effing hipsters.
Aren't there a number of cars that can already do this? I recall watching an episode of Top Gear where the car parked itself while the driver was not in it.

I only wondered what happens when it can't find parking?
I actually think most of the push will come from transportation/logistics companies, where labor expenses tend to be quite high. Imagine if trucking companies could replace their drivers with self-driving trucks, for example. They would massively increase their profitability.
Consider your drug conviction example, and lets say the algorithm is linear regression so I can give a very simple explanation.

The model will then be FICO = stuff + (-1) x (drug conviction).

I.e., your FICO score is lowered by 1 point if you've been convicted of drug use.

If you are correct, some enterprising quant can take your hypothesis. He can then rerun his regression with (drug conviction, black) and (drug conviction, white) as variables. If your hypothesis is correct the result will be:

FICO = stuff + (-0.5) x (drug conviction, black) + (-1.5) x (drug conviction, white).

This is because the bias in drug convictions makes it less predictive for black people.

If you are wrong the coefficients will be equal [1]. If you are right he just made millions of dollars for the bank he works for and probably added $100k to his bonus.

What you are discussing is strictly a statistics problem.

[1] For examples of this type of analysis on social indicators (I don't know of any on credit allocation), see these papers:
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/labor/sem... http://egov.ufsc.br/portal/sites/default/files/anexos/33027-... http://ftp.iza.org/dp8733.pdf
Have some stones and comment with a main account. His article resonates with many developers, that's why it's #1 on HN as of this comment. And throwing a personal attack because you stalked him online is pretty low and immediately telling.
Ain't the Dunning-Kruger effect grand? Sadder is that the author is the submitter. He wrote this drivel and thought "awww yeaa!"
Not at all. I meant to say you nailed it. The mistake was mine in not putting it so succinctly first
Nothing other than it is totally irrelevant to architecture
calloc is a library function, as opposed to a system call, so it calling memset is no different from the caller doing so. calloc will do the write in "copy on write". Calling memset on every byte in a buffer should qualify as "touching it".

This is why I said "in user space".
The Trouble with the TPP, Day 5: Rights Holders “Shall” vs. Users “May”
Change your job, or change your job.

You could discuss how the lack of documentation is causing the team issues; maybe even frame it in a way to highlight how documentation will make him more useful (more time to spend on architecture vs answering questions, better chance that his architecture will be implemented as designed).

Express your concerns about introducing new technologies -- something that I've had some success with is asking 'which library/framework/dependency will we able to remove if we add this new one?'. Propose that the architect allocate time to training the team or being on pager duty or fixing maintenance bugs if they feel strongly that a new tech is the best decision.

If that doesn't work and the situation is unworkable, then consider a move.
TIL reading somebody's public code linked from their blog about code is "stalking."
> it's sufficient for them to have been chosen so as to be decidably comparable.

Indeed. :-)
This part:

"Know-it-all / hipster
Probably studied philosophy, english, film-studies, or engineering."

should cause us to remember this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

"An ad hominem... is an attack on an argument made by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, rather than attacking the argument directly"

We should remember, when we see an argument that starts with such a lazy use of a stereotype, there is a good chance that we are looking at a bad argument.
Ah, true; this whole thing makes very little sense for the general case. Most workloads aren't like this.

The real goal here, in my mind, was to allow people in those particular high-performance domains (gaming especially, though the other ones would probably benefit too) to code at a higher abstraction level.

In my ideal world, a physics engine, for example, would be implemented in code as actors sending messages—with one actor for each physical (e.g. collide-able) object. Not only is that really expensive; the naive approach wouldn't even work! (You need "tick" events spammed to every physics-actor once per frame, which is just absolutely ridiculous.) But then the compiler transparently takes that and spits out something that isn't actor-modelled at all, but rather is a modern-day physics engine doing GPGPU SIMD to arrays of quaternions.

Or, in short: I want to code games in Elixir, without an impedance mismatch in the places where one of my actors' components turns out to need groupwise synchronous shared-memory evaluation rather than piecewise asynchronous reduction-scheduled evaluation. (That sounds like something that should be followed up with "and a pony!", but—given that the Erlang BEAM VM already has the infrastructure of "dirty" schedulers for CPU-bound tasks, and an LLVM IR step in its JIT which could be shunted over to a PTX-ISA target—this actually shouldn't even be that hard an extension to make.)
>Expect around 10 minutes of video to take an hour to get through.

As someone that's started to put together video instructions, it also takes an hour to put together 5 minutes of content. Because, while the first time it seems fine, it takes countless revisions to iron out assumptions of the audience and thoroughly explain things.

But the end result is definitely worth it.
From his bio page:

"Self-taught all-around software-guy in his 20s. Just moved out to California. Passionate about software, psychology, self-sustaining systems, and business. Dabble in everything else (philosophy, go, reverse-engineering, painting, writing, chess, meditation, music, DVORAK). Preference for writing in fragments rather than sentences. ;)"

So, philosophy is only bad if you study it in school!
From the author's blog:

"Self-taught all-around software-guy in his 20s. Just moved out to California. Passionate about software, psychology, self-sustaining systems, and business. Dabble in everything else (philosophy, go, reverse-engineering, painting, writing, chess, meditation, music, DVORAK). Preference for writing in fragments rather than sentences. ;)"

Obviously, philosophy is only worth attacking if you studied it formally.
The pull into garage feature seems targeted towards people who have tiny carports like you see everywhere in SF.
The point is that assigning a FICO score -- any score -- is a strong predictor of future scores, to the person and those dependent on them. If the current score is unfairly distributed in society due to other historical effects, the computation will actively work to maintain the distribution.

A quant doesn't care how they make their money, and they certainly have no desire in leaving their Nash equilibrium.

Again, if you say you want to enact a conservative policy, say so. It's perfectly OK. But don't program conservatism into an algorithm and then claim "it's only math". It isn't.

Of course, being in a Nash equilibrium makes conservative algorithms much easier, as they don't require bargaining with other players, but that doesn't make them any less conservative.
Heavily disagreed - the budget deficit issue comes from a combination of state refusal to properly fund the MTA, and the MTA's own shittastic (and more than likely corrupt) processes for contracts that results in everything being vastly more expensive than it should be.

Not to mention vastly more expensive than every other first-world infrastructure project.

The problem with a zone system is that it effectively punishes the poor for being too poor live near work. The further out in NYC you go the less able people are to afford higher fares, but yet that is exactly what a zone system does.

And like most other direct subsidies, the subsidized MetroCards are a terrifyingly bad solution to this - for one thing in a zone system, even with subsidies, the poor will still end up paying dramatically more than they do today to get to work. Not only that, only the poorest of the poor even qualify for these MetroCards, leaving out a vast income range for whom transit costs are still a burden and a substantial portion of income.

A zone system with subsidies will likely end up looking like:

- The extreme poor pay slightly more than they do today because of the combination of living very far and subsidization.

- The "merely" poor pay dramatically (possibly 2x+ multiples) more than they do today because they are "too rich" to qualify for subsidization but yet live at the outer reaches of the transit system.

- Middle income individuals pay more than they do today, they don't qualify for subsidy but they live > 1 zone from work.

- Upper/upper middle class individuals pay similar or slightly more than they do today, because they don't qualify for subsidy but are likely to live within the same zone as work (i.e., Manhattan below 110th).

A zone system, even with subsidies, will be insanely regressive to the point of comical absurdity.

Ignoring the fact that it's incredibly regressive, the zone system also won't do much against the budget issues the MTA faces - if you're going to squeeze someone for money you don't squeeze the residents of Brighton Beach or Bay Ridge or Hunts Point or Elmhurst - they don't got any money left to be squeezed out. Mid-low income families living in the far reaches of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, for whom transit is already a high percentage of their monthly budgets, have little left to give.
Air has to be at a high pressure to sustain humans. AFAIK all spacecraft use pure O2 atmospheres at low ~3psi pressures.
The Steady Progress of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s Unofficial Linux Port
You're essentially making an argument from the efficient market hypothesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

In other words, the algorithm won't be biased because there is a buck to be made by removing the bias.

But the efficient market hypothesis is weird. It's kind of like Schrodinger's Cat. If you can find some specific instance where it's wrong and publish it then the market corrects itself, so if you observe a bias then it ceases to exist. So now on one hand, we know that biases can exist because people have discovered them in the past; it's just that those biases have already been published and are being taken into account. We can speculate that more exist but we don't know what they are. On the other hand, maybe now we've finally found them all (or the remaining ones are negligible) and the efficient market hypothesis becomes true.

But notice that the thing to do if you believe the efficient market hypothesis is wrong in a particular case is clear. Prove it, because you'll be able to make a lot of money by making the world more just.

Which is why we need transparency. Because the market participants can't find the bias if they don't have the information, and then the efficient market hypothesis will certainly be false.
This is a very interesting hypothetical from a public policy standpoint. Perhaps the city would find a need to subsidize parking for the sake of pollution, traffic, and energy consumption concerns.

edit: maybe subsidize is the wrong word, but rather that they will incentivize affordable parking and make more available.
AMA: the OpenAI research team
Yes, it's supposed to be sandboxed. But

"programs which invoke undefined behavior at the source language level may be compiled into WebAssembly programs which do anything else, including corrupting the contents of the application heap, calling APIs with arbitrary parameters, hanging, trapping, or consuming arbitrary amounts of resources (within the limits)." [1]

So now it's possible to hammer on the entire JavaScript API with invalid parameters. How long before someone finds a hole?

[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/205
If you want to force banks to make suboptimal credit allocation decisions for political reasons, go ahead and openly advocate for it. And be sure to openly accept blame for it if those loans go bad and we have another banking crisis.

Just don't try to claim you are attempting to eliminate bias. Eliminating bias is a job for statisticians, not politicians.
Can we please stop calling people who disagree with us "hipsters"? No one's disagreeing with you ironically.
1) 99 Designs for Voice Acting.

Particularly for videogames / commercial video production, there's a lot of small parts that are strictly scripted, and where I'd imagine it's inefficient to spend a lot of time searching through voice actors' portfolios when what you really want is just to hear a good take.

2) WordPress-native, content-aware, publisher-friendly analytics

There's a big gap in analytics software for analytics that are tightly integrated with the CMS, and focus on providing insights about content, not just pages. The same piece of content appears in many forms, in many places across the site, for varying lengths of time. How does content length affect bounce rate? How long should content stay in a particular slot before it starts getting diminishing returns on traffic? How much traffic do articles with a particular tag typically get within their first week since publishing vs their first year?

Most publishers would be totally unable to answer those questions without a month-long data integrations effort from multiple sources (assuming they've done some of the setup work with something like Google Analytics event-tracking to have the data in the first place), even though it has big implications for everything from site layout to editorial guidelines to long-tail traffic potential for content around a topic.

3) Street team marketplace, dynamic printing, and verification system as an app.

An elance-for-street-team-members site that could let companies post 'missions' for people in any major metro or college campus who want to do street team tasks, who have signed up through an app. Flyer posting, handouts, chalking, etc. Street teamers verify their work with the app through a combination of photos and location-tracking during the time they mark they're working on a mission.

Companies could optionally use the marketplace's software to create the flyers or handouts, which allows for the marketplace to both make sure it's print-shop ready and provide dynamic URLs / QR codes unique for each flyer or handout, for additional verification and results tracking.
Once that happens, it wouldn't be just tesla's that will be auto parking densely. Any other car is equally susceptible to cause fire as all cars have batteries and most have inflammable fuel. Its not yet here, but auto parking densely probably meant cars can be tightly packed as you don't have to leave enough space for you to open doors. As the car is self driving, it can go to the garage and park next to some other car. Its doable now, if those garages have some sort of beacon to notify unoccupied space and if all cars have beacons to notify/detect its edges. Its not hard to implement at all.
I think SIMD.js need more operations, which may not directly map to hardware, but are "at least no worse than what applications would do otherwise":

1. The most obvious operation is multiply-accumulate, which would map to either multiply + add instructions, multiply-add instruction (with intermediate rounding), or FMA instruction. For a linear algebra (BLAS) library, it would be a one-minute fix to make use of this operation, and it would double performance on modern CPUs.

2. Another kind of operations I would like to see is load-and-deinterleave/store-and-interleave, e.g. operation which loads 12 floats of interleaved RGB data and returns 3 Float32x4 vectors with red, green, blue components. These operations map to a single instruction on ARM, and map to a nice sequence of instruction on x86 with SSSE3, and to a much longer sequence of instructions on x86 with SSE2. The best a developer can do with the current SIMD.js API is the analog of very suboptimal SSE2 code.

3. Operations which extend the type, e.g. load 4 16-bit signed integers and extend them to 4x32 vector. The optimal sequence is:

- PMOVSXWD xmm, [mem] on x86 with SSE 4.1

- MOVQ xmm, [mem] + PXOR xmm2, xmm2 + PCMPGTB xmm2, xmm + PUNPCKLBW xmm, xmm2 on x86 with SSE2

- VLD1.16 dTemp, [rAddr] + VMOVL.S16 qOut, dTemp on ARMv7.

The best the developer can do with SIMD.js now is SSE2 approach.

If you are interested in these ideas, I have more operations in mind that would be useful.
Cold Hard Data Feelings (one for the Data-Geeks)
Google-Backed Study: Self-Driving Cars Have a Better Crash Record Than Humans
PHP RFC: Make a simple, secure cryptography library
x86 uops are very wide, much wider than RISC instructions and more like VLIWs; P6 uops are 118 bits and I haven't easily found any description of the newer models but they are likely even wider.
Calling another poster a "stalker" for reading someone's code on github after that person condemns a lot of other people for being bad coders and asserts that they're better is totally bizarre. Are you the author of the original article?
Fitbit lawsuit: Class action suit claims monitors don't perform as advertised
Our current system of packing litres of gasoline in a tight space can't be any safer, could it?
Oh _sure_ they're not.
Well sure they do. They drive super-conservatively.
How Startups Are Working On a Decades-Old Problem in Education
Ehhh, OP's characterization of hipster seems a bit off.

> He may be likened to Dwight Shrute, or the comic-book guy.

OP's characterization sounds more reminiscent of the pedantic 'nerd' than of the 'hipster.' Take most hipster fads of the past decade -- trucker hats in the early 2000s, vinyl records, hand cranked burr coffee grinders, people dressed as lumberjacks and park rangers in Bed Stuy, 24 year olds dressed like your grandma in Portland -- and the key characteristic is the fetishization of a noble, yet obscure and disenfranchised past, a poetic revelry in faux poverty. This seems a bit off from the typical 'comic-book guy' stereotype.
Fine, UML probably isn't the fix, but maybe it would be helpful if developers were able to communicate via drawing a consistent set of objects and interactions without having to explain themselves at a simple level.
Is there such a thing as "architecture ground controllers"?
If you do it that way, you don't get the famed scalability; it's still limited by the scalability of the mysql backend.
I'm pretty you would pass whatever sort of bar exam for a "Low Level Programming" certification they might deign to thrown at you. You're the 0.001%. (Although 0.001% might be the wrong number—I'd hazard 0.1%, or maybe even as high as 0.5%.)

Which is to say, your story matches my hypothetical pretty well. You effectively created the same structure as Rust has, where there are safe and unsafe sublanguages, and the "master" developers thoroughly audited any code implemented in the unsafe sublanguage.

Which makes my point: there exist a small set of people qualified to write in "full C", and a much-larger set of people who aren't; and the only way—if you're a person who isn't qualified—to write C that doesn't fall down, is with the guidance and leadership of a person who is.

Though I think maybe your thesis statement agrees with that, so maybe I'm not arguing with you. Not all the developers on a given project need to be from the qualified set, no. But at least some of the developers need to be from the qualified set, and the other developers need to consider the qualified ones' guidance—especially on what C features to use or avoid—to be law for the project. As long as they stay within those guidelines, they're really working within a DSL the "master" developers constructed, not in C. And nobody ever said you can't make an idiot-proof DSL on top of C; just that, if you need everything C offers, your the only good option is to remove the idiots. :)
Recommendations for a Gophercon Talk Proposal
I'm working on a proposal titled 'Building a Web Startup in Go'. It will be about based on my experience at building https://localraces.com from scratch by myself in all Go. There is a little JavaScript, but only when required. Given that title what would you like for me to talk about? Consider this like an AMA, but if the question or answer is really good I'm going to use it in my proposal and not answer.
I made no claims about the EMH. My only claim is that if bias like what you describe exists, it's something that statisticians rather than politicians need to identify and fix, and that the statisticians in the position to fix it have perfect incentives to do so.

Politicians have neither the ability nor incentive.

Similarly, if someone were claiming that we need political oversight of UI/UX choices, and that American web pages need more red/white/blue to improve conversion rates, I'd suggest that this is a job for web designers rather than politicians. I'd also say that if you just want red/white/blue designs for patriotic purposes, you should openly advocate for that and not talk about conversion rate.
Maybe he was being intentionally self-critical, in an ironic way.
I feel like it's more like a straw man attack. He's making up a fictional character then tearing it down.