skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm probably in a very small minority but I think that the 'free ride' we got from Moore's law in terms of transistor density leading to an increase in clock frequency has caused us to be locked in to a situation that is very much comparable to the automobile industry and the internal combustion engine.

If it weren't for that we'd have had to face the dragons of parallelization much earlier and we would have a programming tradition solidly founded on something other than single threaded execution.

Our languages would have likely had parallel primitives and would be able to deal with software development and debugging in a multi-threaded environment in a more graceful way.

Having the clock frequency of CPUs double on a fairly regular beat has allowed us to ignore these problems for a very long time and now that we do have to face them we'll have to unlearn a lot of what we take to be un-alterable.

I'm not sure about much about the future, the one thing I do know is that it is parallel and if you're stuck on waiting for the clock frequency increases of tomorrow you'll be waiting for a very long time, and possibly forever.
thanks for the posting.

Quick feedback:
you use "lX" as a variable name. That makes the code barely readable, because the letter l looks VERY similar to the number 1 in most systems.

It might sound nitpicky but it does distract from the article.
Think of a bank that CANNOT have an effective vault because there is technology available that allows people to walk through solid matter.

You could outlaw (or make difficult to use, restrict its features) the walk-through-walls technology. Or you could just stop clinging to your old idea of what a bank or a vault is.
This is really pedantic, but I also think it's important: class is a keyword (well, really just a reserved word) in JavaScript as well. The reason it's important is that some engines will actually have issues if you use syntax like this[1]:

var obj = {class : "blarg"};

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Reserv...
No worries, thanks for pointing it out. I had to edit it from my mobile in a Manic Street Preachers gig before the edit window closed on me.

Kindle should really allow cut and paste, a fair use amount (let that debate begin!). Then I wouldn't have got it wrong.
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I doubt quanticle's intent is to say the music industry should die simply because the Internet makes piracy easy. I certainly wouldn't say that. What I would say is the music industry needs to adapt, and find a business model that works in an Internet-enabled world. Instead, they're digging in their heels and trying to "solve" this problem by suing their customers and trying to turn their customer base into felons. Actually, I take it back. The music industry absolutely should die. They're just a bunch of middlemen who are now living in a world where the Internet makes middlemen obsolete. Musical artists absolutely should thrive, and there's ample evidence to suggest that they can thrive in an Internet-enabled world. For a perfect example, just take a look at Jonathan Coulton. There's absolutely no reason to believe that musical artists can't continue to create and sell their music with the Internet. But the music industry itself is a parasite.
I think there is a somewhat unstoppable direction towards automation but it will probably be shaky and filled with potholes.

For example, its been interesting to see the consumer response to the self checkout stands in the big chain stores. Those self-checkout stations in their current form I would say are somewhat of a failure to encourage automation at least from a consumer's standpoint. I'm a techie and I actively avoid them. Why? I and the other people I'm waiting in line behind take forever because we are all slow in finding the bar codes on each product. Not only that, 1 out of 10 times something seemingly goes wrong with checking out a product - the product needs to be verified by a store manager, the product gets scanned twice, etc. which all usually end up taking longer than the regular checkout lines. Interestingly a few of the stores near me just recently removed their automated systems after having them for many years. (I'm actually hoping one day they slap RFIDs on everything and you can just push your basket through a scanner.)

But I think the risk with robots and automated systems is when things go wrong when interacting with an unpredictable human. Technically when things go wrong its usually user error but not through the consumer's eyes - to them its a stupid robot that keeps on throwing their sandwich on the ground and their response is usually to run back to the old reliable way.
Coder Vs Programmer
From everything I've seen, the Internet has made distribution, sales, and publicity of indie video games vastly easier than before. This is especially true with high-profile distribution channels like Steam and Humble Indie Bundle and others. The indie video game industry seems like an industry that really does get the internet and understands that it can be a powerful force for good rather than just a means for people to pirate your stuff.
sorry the guys are fulltime on this, from stockholm, sweden but making our way over to NYC
>The difference between your examples and the music industry is that buggy whip makers lost because they had an inferior product; who would want a horse-driven carriage when they could have a car?" But here, people are still TAKING the music, just without paying. That's the problem.

I think an argument could be made that the music industry has such a piracy problem (I concede this here, in spite of the music industry constantly reporting greater profit) because it is providing an inferior product, or service.

(I am linking to the discussion.) There was a very interesting GamaSutra article posted here about a month ago, on how Valve sees piracy as a "non-issue": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3155052

The summary from 10,000 feet is that the way to beat the pirates is to give those that buy the product a better service than the pirates do. Making music as difficult to acquire (oy, the fuss they put up about previews and digital distribution!) and use (format shifting, moving your music along with you) is not a a very customer-friendly mod of operation.

I buy my music, but, with BitTorrent, you can listen to the entire song before you buy it. I don't know how much music I passed over because I didn't want to waste money on something that I may or may not like.
No. The post is saying "HTML is too complex". The comment is saying "No, it's actually no more complex than anything else you already understand, it's just that you don't understand it yet".
It's true that a ton of people do not like all the parentheses. This cannot be understated and it's particularly important to get this point across to lispers. It's tough to accept that if you, yourself, can't see any problem at all with them and in fact may well consider them a blessing for delineating pieces of syntax.

But most people don't like them.

This means you don't have as large of a following. Which means you don't have as many libraries. Which makes new programmers even more likely to choose python over lisp. Additionally python looks more like whatever languages people learn in intro CS classes. This further increases python's following....and its libraries...and it keeps snowballing.

And to answer your other questions, yeah, most people don't care about performance and GIL-locked performance is just good enough for what they're doing.

Most people these days are gluing things together and essentially doing plumbing (all of it single-threaded), and python is great for that.

Machines are fast enough these days that most tasks don't call for multiple cores/threads or even really efficient single-thread performance. It's just the way things are.
Daniel seriously big thanks on all the feedback.
- I think chrome is having a bug, its been a pain in the ass
- ok cool we will look into it, it should have been flags
- we are enabling more of a guided tour using png over lays soon
- thats just me be some bug, looking into it
- we have a light gamification aspect that we want to highlight, our vision is the more you help set up recommendations, introductions and interact with people comeing to your city or helping your friends, you earn points that translate to great discounts or freebies when you do get to travel!
Ellipses are stable orbits too.
Install rsync;)
The first part seems interesting. The whole thing is way too long to be read by a tired soul in a single read.
Best of 2011 – Genre and Special Achievement Awards
Hypothetically speaking, just because you didn't catch a virus doesn't mean that that virus can't be incredibly effective (or "viral").
With Subversion branching and merging was still a mess, at least everywhere I ever saw it used.
Apple’s A5 processor now made in the U.S.
correct, back to the drawing board! :)
Curious, what makes you say that?
Not sure why you think you're expressing a minority opinion, you're stating generally accepted fact. We hit the soft limit years ago, that's why Intel finally dumped the Pentium 4, they realized they couldn't make it scale.

Everything since has been about finding ways to do more with fewer cycles, and more research and education on parallelization at all levels (from on-die branch prediction up to google-scale distributed systems). I don't know of anyone who disputes this in principle.
High(er) Frequency means that you have to run at a higher core voltage (this is, in part, because gate propagation delay is inversely proportional to bias voltage, i.e., the voltage corresponding to a 'high' or 1 bit). You have to decrease the propagation delay so that the clock tick gets everywhere in the processor quickly (one part of the clock doesn't lag the other parts, called clock skew). So in order for things to run faster, you'd have to run it at a higher V(bias). Now that means that there are higher thermal costs (things get hotter) - heat produced is proportion to voltage.

So its now mostly a thermal management problem. This is the primary problem in the newer chips. Even though we can pack in more transistors, we can't get signals among them faster without higher V and making it run too hot.

Therefore, our solution is to use the extra transistors to create a separate new processor, running with a different clock, so the 'tick' doesn't have to reach all parts of this rather big chip, but just needs to be synchronized intra-core.
Lots of opinions and advice here already. Some of it is good, but I felt strongly compelled to post a dissenting view based on my practical experience as both an "ideas guy" and as a successful founder of several companies.

It's true that ideas are worthless without execution, but I get bent out of shape every time someone spouts this mantra because it's only half of the story. A bad idea well executed is still a bad idea. You can waste a huge amount of time, money and energy throwing your passion into a bad idea.

Some of the most toxic advice is that you should just "pick one or two of your ideas and turn the volume up to 11 on them for a few years, no matter what!" aka "just start, you can always pivot". That's totally bullshit in the real world. Reputations get tarnished, and every opportunity you take costs all of the other opportunities you didn't take.

Now, that also doesn't mean that you should curl up in the fetal position and hope the world stops asking hard questions. It's possible that one of your ideas is the next Facebook, but the realistic truth is that statistically you will never dream up the next Facebook.

And that's okay. In fact, it's great. You can start forgiving yourself now.

My feeling is that it's perfectly fine to be addicted to having ideas and suppressing your excitement long enough to analyze the ideas for flaws. This isn't time wasted not executing, it's time invested in two valuable activities: practising the skill of spotting deadly flaws and rolling the dice on another idea. This is a much more pragmatic opportunity cost than believing that the world is counting on you to deliver the next major cultural wave, and soon.

Let's say that you realize none of your ideas (so far) are the next WWW or automobile. Nobody is going to be disappointed in you for teaming up with another person to build their idea. Insisting on building your own idea to feel validated is like refusing to adopt kids with a different skin color — it doesn't hold up to unbiased scrutiny. So my advice is that you should stop beating yourself up and be open to opportunities that originate amongst your self-selected, startup-inclined friends.
Lots of companies die because of bad strategic decisions. These guys were positioned to become millionaires or to make nothing and they made some bad strategic calls and got the nothing.

Good example of a company with good tech, good timing, and a good idea that fails because of business decisions. This is the kind of case where it seems a Harvard MBA could have made all the difference.
Because we've been designing around electromagnetic interference instead of designing with it. A lot of energy is wasted as heat and this heat has to be managed. Even the name electromagnetic "interference" tells you this. It's a conceptual waste that creates an energy waste. Abstraction will only get you so far when your abstraction is fundamentally flawed.
I don't mean this as a backhanded compliment, but you're in no way in the small minority. You've very eloquently explained what pretty much everyone considers to be the actual situation.
I have no idea what this issue is, it seems to happen to me on every facebook auth window like on turntable fm as well
haha use it as you want ;)
Future of what? I don't know any use case where I would want 3D graphics on my web pages.

Running games in a browser? That's a stupid idea to begin with. Browser should be just a document reader, and games are not documents.

Why are we reinventing wheel again? Games used to be crappy, and now we want crappy games again? Why is it so amazing if something runs in a browser? Why don't we think about other solutions like making native apps more web-like?
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we feel the facebook integration creates a better social experience than couchsurfing already provides. I've been a coachsurfer for many years but I really enjoy knowing that this person is somehow connected to me, ie friend of friends.
I wish people would quit asking this question. This is just another case of the Mhz myth. Who cares what the clock speed is if modern CPUs can execute instructions 2-4x faster per clock than they did 30 years ago.

Go look at the Bulldozer design, 2 hardware decoder/scheduler engines, 4 integer ALUs, 2 fp ALUs, all per core...

A shared L3 cache per socket that is owned by the memory controller and is socket-local to other sockets (ie, all memory controllers conspire to cache system memory efficiently and synchronously know what is cached across all sockets)...

And the memory controllers also accept memory requests from ANY core on the Hypertransport bus, no matter which socket, and multi-socket boards commonly have one memory bank per socket, thus 4 sockets of dual channel DDR3-1600 would indeed give 820 gbit/sec of bandwidth that can be accessed (almost) in full by any individual core[1]...

The ALUs have execution queues, and any thread (currently 2 per core) can schedule instructions on it to maximize ALU packing...

And you can now buy Bulldozers for Socket G34 that have 16 threads/8 cores per socket, and G34 boards usually have 4 sockets.

So again, who cares what the mhz is?

[1]: A 4 socket setup has 4 or 6 Hypertransport links, on AM3+ and G34+ sockets this would be HTX 3.1 16bit wide links running at 3.2ghz, or 204 gbit/sec per link.

On a 4 socket ring, that would be 204 gbit/sec off each neighbor's memory bank, plus another 204 gbit/sec (also the speed of dual channel DDR3-1600) from the local memory bank, thus leading to 612 gbit/sec that could be theoretically saturated by a single core.

On a 4 socket full crossbar, it would be the full 820 gbit/sec.
Sadly, searching for "make it rain" does not produce the desired results.
I demand that the existing media conglomerate distribution model be left in place so that I may be told what is worth "consuming" and who I should look up to as a star.
Last Convoy of American Troops Leaves Iraq, Marking an End to the War
What Must an Educated Person Know?
Who cares what the clock speed is if modern CPUs can execute instructions 2-4x faster per clock than they did 30 years ago.

If you could increase clock speed on these modern processors twofold, would their performance improve?
You can make this robust by using a double-SIM phone at either end. If both parties have one, you can easily get two bits per missed call, as there are four ways for Alice to call Bob.
But robotics hasn't really gotten its consumer spotlight yet.

If we ignore robotic vacuum cleaners and toys. But there are some incredibly cool robotics applications.

What needs to happen is a "killer application" of a robot in workplace that will be transferable to home. Off the bat I believe that robotic cars (or autopilots as they will be known) will be first major application of robots that can be transplanted from corporate world into home use.

And I can easily see that in 10 years a lot of new cars will be 1. electric and 2. will have an autopilot option.
Why is it so amazing if something runs in a browser? Why don't we think about other solutions like making native apps more web-like?

What's amazing is that something that runs in the browser will run on every platform where there is a browser (with some proper care of the inevitable small standard deviations). No such luck with native apps.
Did you mean that as a good or a bad thing?
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LOL, what is JavaScript then, if not interpreted?

I'm not going to get into a semantic argument, perhaps to you Java is not interpreted either, but to me anything that doesn't compile to a binary directly executable on the CPU is substandard in terms of performance. And I'm sorry to surprise you, but in 3d graphics we're still starved for processor cycles, otherwise we'd have ray-traced, globally illuminated games with huge environments to play with.
The switch: Python to Node.js
OK, I give up. I won't convince you from across the oceans and through the internets that white patriarchy is a reality; you apparently live in the nice world where oppression of the poor, the black and women doesn't exist or at least doesn't matter, and I must live on a different planet than you. That won't be much more than a sociological experience I guess.
Is this just a subvertisement for Mongo?
I love CoffeeScript, and I would hate to see this become part of the language specification.

Just a few things off the top of my head:

- Why does defer() look like any other function.

- Completely changing the return keyword's meaning if "autocb" is a function argument is just silly.

- The generated JavaScript is utterly unreadable and unquestionably comes with a performance trade-off.
Right, but decreasing the size of the chip means that you effectively can get signals around it faster (because they don't have as far to go) and allows them to be run at lower voltages as well - modern CPUs seem to be generally around 1V, but 10 or 20 years ago they were around 2V, so there is (or has been at least?) a reduction in that over time as well.
The 1st comment is rather impressive:

"Wow. I’m the author of Big Brother – the first web-based system and network monitor… still just C and some scripts… that level of complexity scares the crap out of me!"
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Moore's Law still applies today; the number of transistors continues to double every couple of years. However, the transistors no longer go towards making clock speeds faster; instead, we get more parallel cores, and more impressive instruction sets.

And I agree that we've taken too little time to look at parallelism. In particular, our current approaches to concurrency (such as mutual exclusion or transactions) don't actually provide much in the way of useful parallelism; they just serialize bits of the code that access shared data. We don't actually have many good algorithms that allow concurrent access to the same data, just concurrent access to different data.

Currently writing my dissertation on exactly this topic: a generalized construction of scalable concurrent data structures, which allows concurrent access to the same data from multiple threads without requiring expensive synchronization instructions.
Could you write (graphically) Battlefield 3 in WebGL, assuming you'd be able to compile it to run efficiently?

As for your second question, JS is very useful, I love JS, I write 90% of my code in JS. But we're talking sophisticated 3d apps here, not whether it's useful at all.
Well, maybe 20 years was too far of a shot. But I assume you're associated with the Irrlicht game engine, so I assume that when you write "is WebGL the future?", you don't mean "will it be useful at all?" or "will some silly casual games be possible in WebGL?", but whether it will be a legitimate gaming platform, capable of competing with desktop gaming (which is where Irrlicht competence lays, afaik).

And to that I say firmly: no.

I like the demos you've linked to (and I've seen them before), no doubt they're quite impressive, considering the constraints of the browser environment.

But when I put them in context of what one could run on a computer natively, these demos remind me of Quake I. Sorry.
> I really wish xhtml would have won in place of HTML/CSS.

This makes me doubt that you understand what you are talking about. XHTML and HTML have exactly the same semantics. CSS has little to do with them (you can use CSS to style you XML documents if you wish so). With CSS3 and modern browsers you can pretty much avoid anything to HTML just for styling purposes. Heck, take a look at http://camendesign.com/ It's not visually complicated, but there are no IDs and CLASSes in the source.
On IQs and Fake Weathermen
It's JIT compiled and WebGL shaders are compiled as well. It is a native code executable on CPU, read how Crankshaft in V8 works.
It's true that JS is at the moment N times slower than C++ (N in range 1 to 10). It's not true that you need to use JS that much to have great graphics. Everything you pointed out is done on GPU afaik.
And if you wait a year or so, JIT + type inference will make JS basically as fast as C++.
(author here)

Big Brother is pretty cool. I remember using it long ago too :)

I certainly respect the simplicity of BigBrother, but the scopes of the products are completely different. Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is a SaaS built with the ability to be used by hundreds of thousands of unique customers, monitoring millions of 'things'. It also has a goal of never losing the trust of our users -- user's generally don't care if your data center is having a bad day, but they certainly do care if you didn't alert them when their site is down, and so multi-region durability gets added to a requirement list.

Complexity does come from these kind of requirements.