skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is gratuitous to take the word "simpler" as some kind of proof that the person you are responding to is an ignorant who uses objectively bad tools. Reality is less clear.

"Simpler" clearly referred to the complexity and the mess created by synchronization in a shared-everything environment, which is where most languages are at with threading (Haskell, Clojure and Erlang are not most languages). This is a valid criticism. You may lose Copy-on-Write, but sharing everything by default, at a low level, does raise the need for complex synchronization, which has its own performance issues.

And this is very good reason to explore and use other concurrency models. This is something that you and the article and the person you are responding to all seem to agree on.

Except that you seem to take any interesting concurrency interface to be threading (no, goroutines are NOT threads) and you draw the strange moral that only the complex problems of threads can be addressed with nice tools and new ideas, but somehow not the problems of other basic concurrency models.

Assuming we have available helpful interfaces for using processes, threads and greenlets - all of which have been produced somewhere - the argument should be about the performance of the foolproofed backends. Preferably based on numbers.
"These sorts of problems will occur in any distributed system which runs at a high rate without humans in the loop"

You write a risk check gateway once. It rarely if ever needs to be touched.

If you do this right, you roll out changes on one machine with strict risk controls (1000 share position, for example) to prevent such a blowout. Then you transition everything else.

Ironically, this should be exactly what other tech firms should do: roll out changes to a small area, check basic problems, and then move on to a larger rollout.
Front Page of HN Gave me 21k Views and 10 New Twitter Followers. That’s Right,10
Goodness no. I think you missed the last paragraph I wrote in the note you responded to.

I'm saying that the begin/end APIs should not have been dropped from the spec in ES2. There needs to be some kind of equivalent, because high performances games and driver writers aren't the only users of the API.
I agree. i become much more disciplined and frugal with my time in Ramadhan and often experience higher bursts of productivity.
You need feedback on whether you are doing well or not. That's the other part of on-line education that is missing.
Huh? Of course the employees in charge of the algorithm and the trading platform are going to get blamed. It's their system that went haywire.
But without those public markets, Facebook would never have gotten anywhere close to where they are today because there would have been no major investments.

Instead, we would likely have multiple, smaller networks that we have to pay for because they wouldn't be able to bootstrap to a level that advertising can cover. That would not necessarily be a worse world.
NCC Group acquires Matasano Security
Photoshop is awful for designing UIs
More Zuckerberg family members work for Google than Facebook
Aaaaannd that's how people learn to cover their track and responsibility by shrouding each step in mountains of process controls and unwritten ^shudders^ protocols.

Mind you, just sending straight to production isn't a panacea, but I couldn't help but laugh all throughout reading of the article
This is very focused on sport. Perhaps it would make sense to have something sport related on the front page. I don't run an organization but I am interested in sports and like sports pools. When I visited your site I didn't really get it and probably would have closed it not understanding it was sport related. However now that I get it I am interested it.

I would focus less on the club benefits and more on how fun it is to play. Very few people run clubs/organizations but tons of people would be interested in playing and might nudge organizers towards it.
this inflection point is almost certainly not unique to you, though since you're probably one of the first to discuss it in this way, you should probably name it so we can all start identifying it in ourselves and other founders :)
Interesting fact. I will show this to my mom.
I think it's really cool to see interviews with woman in tech who are unabashedly passionate and proud of the work they do. (Disclaimer: I work for Gnip)
Relatively few linux users might have a gtx 680 but there are a large amount of windows gamers that have a card similar and may switch to linux if it had steam. Given that 60fps is all that's required it also means that you don't need a gtx 680, a $200 card will probably easily get you 60fps, a lot of the nvidia laptop cards will also probably be enough.
The solar system and most valuable asteroids modeled in 3d canvas/webgl
I agree with your premise -- the issue is that when humans blow up it doesn't cause a cascading runaway failure like robots are susceptible to.
Or am I color blind?

http://db.tt/0zOpPIV2
I Hate to Pick on Facebook, But …
rouxbe.com is very, very good. I went through all of their videos over the course of a week or so a couple years back, and the pacing, depth, and quality of instruction are extremely impressive. I would recommend it to anyone.
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No, you have to pay taxes for 7 years post loss of citizenship.
Does anyone still have a 4gb MBP? I'm still on SL and wondering if I should switch.
Code as art
Developers are the New Decision Making Elite of the Digital Economy
Government isn't very good at its own cybersecurity
Missing generics -- it doesn't destroy type safety, it just forces the developer to write boilerplate variations of every method.

The official stance on that issue is: yeah, but it's better than the hassle of supporting generics (compiler effort, object code size/slowness, and excessive high-level abstraction (a bad thing in the Go world).

I have a foot on both sides: I miss generics when I'm writing one-off low-scalability code, but it's nice to have the speed of low-level Go code, and perversely fun to actually spend some of my coding time writing all those low-level sorting and array-building routines that are the meat of programmer interviews.

Now, when a candidate asks "When will I need to write a method to sort the keys of a map?", I can answer "Every time you use a map[string]T for a novel T!"

I hate novel T now. (<-- This is also a design feature of Go, the passive pressure to not use large hierarchical types, and try to do your work with just maps and slices of primitives)
THe team quickly learns what everybody is going to say for each part of the estimate, and they all throw down the same card. Nobody wants to spend any more time in the meeting, and throwing down an outlier means thinking hard and explaining yourself.
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Also consider Facebook ads and target people who like things like Sports Pools, Online Sports Gambling, etc.

I bet you won't get a lot of direct conversions but indirectly I bet you will get more organizers getting exposed to the offering.
The U.S. Senate has blocked the Cybersecurity Act of 2012.
It's possible that the invocation of "civil rights" is going to make some people roll their eyes at what sounds like a race-baiting headline. But this was one of the best arguments I've read about being cautious in the era of big data. As always, the issue is not that data itself is bad, but what small-minded people who have control of the data wil do with it. And the OP makes a strong case that minorities (whether racial or of any other kind) will be the first to be screwed.
But it's powerful and that is what matters.
We Need An FDA for Computers
Since I'm in Columbus, I'm probably supposed to say that there are no cool places in Ann Arbor. :-)

But the way to find the start ups is to go to the local tech scene meetings: Perl, Ruby, Python, Node.js, big data. Check meetup, etc. Find a few meetings, go and meet people. Make acquaintances, and before you know it, sombosy will be coming over to you to say something like "Hey manglav, didn;t you say you were really good at technology X? Wanna consult for a couple of hours?"
There actually _is no_ "normal, index-based" for loop in Ruby, only a for ... in iteration construct. Most C-style for loops can be implemented as #times or #up_to/#down_to/#step iterations.
Easy database migrations with C# and FluentMigrator
"When I hear people who have skipped a meal complain "my blood sugar is low", I worry for their health. We have fat stores for a reason. Skipping a meal should not be a big deal."

That is such a great point. People have been programmed around the 3 meal regime. I have found it fun to experiment with fewer meals and generally it works fine if I have an primarily protein breakfast I sail through to an early dinner.
The problem is that ExtremeTech is slanting their words in order to sensationalize the story.

Valve (in their blog post):

"This experience lead to the question: why does an OpenGL version of our game run faster than Direct3D on Windows 7? It appears that it’s not related to multitasking overhead. We have been doing some fairly close analysis and it comes down to a few additional microseconds overhead per batch in Direct3D which does not affect OpenGL on Windows. Now that we know the hardware is capable of more performance, we will go back and figure out how to mitigate this effect under Direct3D."

Extreme Tech:

"As for why OpenGL is faster than DirectX/Direct3D, the simple answer is that OpenGL seems to have a smoother, more efficient pipeline. At 303.4 fps, OpenGL is rendering a frame every 3.29 milliseconds; at 270.6 fps, DirectX is rendering a frame in 3.69 milliseconds. That 0.4 millisecond difference is down to how fast the DirectX pipeline can process and draw 3D data."
Modern frameworks do indeed make this easy. Unfortunately, lots of people are stuck working on legacy systems OR are working at a company that has opinionated developers whose opinions are terrible and/or outdated.
E la Carte (YC S10) to Deploy Restaurant Tablets in 113 Airports Nationwide
Emailing local clubs may prove successful but your worry there is that a "fundraising" email may get marked down as spam.

You have to find a way to target the decision-makers in a club. It may be a case of knocking on doors, attending events etc. to get those first clubs on board.
Our team needs leaders. Nobody said they had to work alone.
Count quality not quantity. People come here for the former not the latter.

Also, you'll get more Twitter followers if you tweet stuff that gets retweeted.
Is it possible to purchase a ridiculously expensive insurance policy protecting yourself against the risk of dangerous bugs like this?
The grandparent comment used the term "bad estimate" without acknowledging that the only thing which distinguishes a bad estimate from a good estimate is that bad estimates come back to bite you. My post indicated that the ways in which estimates come back to bite varies based upon the reasons for estimating in the first place, e.g. when the context is "it takes as long as it takes" there isn't a reason to estimate.

The first set of estimates I describe are those in which the estimate comes back to bite you before the work has begun. An example would be an estimate within a publicly traded company which conflicts with the information provided to Wall Street, i.e. the purpose of the estimate is to confirm that all is well so that management can collect their quarterly bonus based on stock price. In another life I participated in those.

The second group of estimates I describe are created to allow management to apply a single big picture fudge factor to account for big picture inefficiencies, contingencies, and information flows such as those which arise from external contracts. When management asks for a best case estimate in good faith, it is uncommon for the inaccuracy to come back to bite the individual providing the best case estimate. The inaccuracy is known going in, and the final estimate is of the third type I describe...i.e. it attempts to account for "known unknowns" and even "unknown unknowns."

The third category of estimate is the only one for which people should be held accountable in regards to accuracy, and any accountability has to be related to the experience and authority to allocate resources of the person preparing it.

Treating accurate estimates as impossible is a cop out. They are done all the time. It just takes experience and feedback and a desire for improvement.
$200,000 doesn't seem an awful lot for 3 software engineers and a graphic designer, including premises, utilities and IT.
Nope, nothing plugged in. No power nap. WiFi is turned off.

I've got some time next week to look at it, and intend to get to the bottom of it. It's annoying to not be able to carry around a sleeping laptop for a day without it dying.
> You write a risk check gateway once. It rarely if ever needs to be touched.

Such checks are only as good as the imagination of the author.

> Then you transition everything else.

Which is all well and good until you have an issue where two independent systems creat a feedback loop. Such problems are only evident 'at scale'.

I'm not blaming or trying to exonerate anyone. I love armchair quarterbacking as much as the next guy but a small trading shop runs a little differently than america's largest electronic market maker.
Marc Andreessen Steps Down From Dalton Caldwell’s Mixed Media Labs Board
Personally, I would avoid it because things that are too big to fit in the sink are awkward to wash, even if I don't soak them.
I bet the CEOs of other domain registers are cow killing douches.
Kind of. Debugging a serial protocol takes time to set up the line monitor, run the tests, validate the behavior against the spec, diddle the state machine to bring it into conformance. Actually pretty easy to estimate that process.

But other code, its different. Especially tinkering with a big ol dinosaur of code, to add/change a feature. Debugging becomes almost the whole effort there.
Yes, when I hear thread I have a specific thing in mind and that thing is not like a coroutine. The difference between process and thread is probably pretty clear to everyone but other concurrent programming models are not very clearly differentiated. Also, because the call stack is such a fundamentally accepted concept, which the article does a good job explaining and illustrating, it's hard for most of us to jump out of our traditional concepts of execution flow.
The carb withdrawal is only for like, the first week, right? Then you'll be scot-free! Or so I thought.
This bit made me stop reading immediately: "The task is way too large to get an understanding of for most programmers. It has to be sent back to an architect.."

I checked the date to see if it wasn't written in 1982 before I closed the tab.
I am not sure about facebook ads, it would be difficult to track conversions as clubs usually require a lot of round table discussions before they commit to anything. Thanks for your feedback!
I personally believe that "Site X gave me %Y increase in traffic" articles are what kill social websites, essentially because increasing numbers of people try to game the site to help drive traffic, and the publishers, rather than the readers, become the customers (see Digg v4).

So hurrah! Fewer followers would be even better.
Good point & I'm not complaining, but it just seemed a little odd to me. The people that did follow me were definitely quality follows.
How did its testing/security practices measure up to other places you've worked? I understand that the tech division of a financial firms might be top notch, but the culture of the moneymaking dept. may mismanage them.
Estonian start-ups should use up all the opportunities that they’ve got
How did they make the colourblindness simulation?
That's what I suspected. For those of us who work with computers for most of our waking hours, our bodies get use to focusing on what we are clicking on. Thanks for your feedback.
I'm guessing people don't want to fork down the money!
Note: I did not shut down dashboard because of reported memory usage, nothing was obvious from activity-monitor either, ie not listed separately as a memory-hog.

However, once I did shut it down (not just remove all the widgets, I had like 10 running, but actually prevent it from starting) my machine was finally back to normal.

I'd be curious to see if anyone here who does experience the memory problems can replicate this.

Addition: since shutting it down, the reported memory usage for the kernel task has dropped a lot, does that make sense?
1. I haven't seen any indication that a majority of the HN population are also sincere twitter users.

2. Your social media call to action is in the same old place everyone else's is; top right sidebar.

I sometimes read posts on Yoast.com. If you look at the bottom of his posts (http://yoast.com/optimizing-tags/) you'll see a a social media call to action. That's where the reader ends up, at the end of the article. So right before they click the X, ask them if they'd like to subscribe for more content.
I am aware of the fact that whatever you can get away with(what you do doesn't affect others, legal team, political pressure, terrorism) becomes reasonable after some time. Religion is just a ruse. It's not that people adhere to everything their religion tells them to. Gay bashing, female subjugation etc. are just bigoted assholes hiding behind their religion and projecting their limited, hateful world view on others.
I must strongly disagree with the article. The problem and its true cause are well known.

Manager: "How long will it take to build X."

Experienced developer: "I'll need a couple weeks to prepare an estimate."

Manager: "I don't have two weeks. Just a rough estimate, no pressure."

Developer: "This is a big project with a lot of uncertainties, with Abdul, Karen, and Jim, we might be able to get it done in 12-18 months, minimum, assuming there are no scope changes."

Manager: "No, that's wrong, we need it in three weeks maximum, and you can only have Amy."

Developer: "The new girl? It will take months just to get her up to speed with the skills. It's impossible."

Manager: "Make it possible."

Developer: "Wishing doesn't make it possible."

Manager: "You geeks are unprofessional and your bad attitude is damaging the company. Where is the can-do team spirit like the sales team has?"

Later...

Executive: "How long will it take for the new project?"

Manager: "Five weeks, just like you wanted, assuming the dev doesn't spend the time posting on the internet."

Executive: "Good I am giving the project the green light then."

One, two, three and four weeks later:

1: "Here are some scope changes."

2: "Here are some change requests."

3: "This should be done completely differently."

4: "The way ABC works has been changed to DEF. Should just be a minor tweak."

End of five week death march:

Executive: "Why is this not done?"

Manager: "The stupid geeks are unprofessional! Please refer to this chart I found on the internet about how these losers don't know how to estimate!"
Not (entirely) true. Robots are not strictly superior to humans in this case because the emergent properties of the system change due to the speed of robot action.

As more robots crowd into the very fast strategy space, there tends to be more collision of strategies and thus more extreme price movements as many robots all try to buy/sell the same thing at the same time. If they all pile onto one side of the market, liquidity disappears and price movements become dramatic. In the very fast strategy space, there is less capability for complex strategies requiring long memories. If you want to save some nanoseconds to win at this winner-take-all market, you need to reduce your memory and processing time.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1006/1006.5490v1.pdf

This isn't saying that humans would never display herd behavior, but that they do so less often.
I don't really feel like 'going after Pinterest'. Makr is more about helping people MAKE new things, not just endlessly re-pin and reblog. Certainly some UI things work on Pinterest, but what we are enabling people to do is quite different.

And no worries about feedback, it always helps us get better and better, so thanks!
thanks for the input, I'll take a look at yoast.
> If you choose to sleep all day, I wouldn't call it a loophole, since you are not hurting anyone but yourself by sleeping all day during the fasting hours.

Well, if you chose to eat, you also wouldn't be hurting anyone but yourself, so that can't be the relevant benchmark.
Isn't there whole sections of Judaism that work out loopholes to God's laws?
You'll still have the driver doing the mapping from id to handle under the hood. It can get to be north of 25% of cpu cycles spent looking this up in some cases.
No, correct estimations mean management knows "X cannot be done in time T", and now can act accordingly to decide what subset/variant of X to pursue instead.

"Dunno, we'll give T a shot" will fail.
> It is gratuitous to take the word "simpler" as some kind of proof that the person you are responding to is an ignorant who uses objectively bad tools.

Given that you subsequently make the point that most toolkits are bad, I think my assumption was safe. But let's not lose the plot here, process-level parallelism makes sense in many cases. It's just not a valid replacement for per-process concurrency and it is most definitely not "simpler." Your failure modes become incredibly complex and varied, and that was my only point here.

More modern environments–the ones you should be using unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise–use shared-state concurrency as a platform for higher level abstractions. But this is still "multicore in-process parallelism" and the underlying model is still threading. Building abstractions on top of in-process parallelism is not rejecting the underlying layer, it's embracing it.

If you are not using modern tools, then yeah correct concurrency is hard and variable degrees of underlying parallelism only exacerbate that. It is also hard to start fires with just flint, steel and tinder. New topic, please.

So I'm not sure what you're taking exception to other than your perception of my tone.
Adding a quick note here about Ramadan - the act of fasting and feeling hungry, thirsty, and tired also serves to invoke feelings of empathy with those who are less fortunate. Essentially, it is a reminder that there are always those who are in need. This is why muslims are encouraged to donate to the needy during this month.

Simply sleeping through the fast and reversing a sleep schedule seems to go against the spirit of the exercise. Of course, everyone fasts for different reasons and it is a very personal undertaking. I just wanted to clarify for those who may be thinking "Why bother doing it at all if you can flip your sleep schedule?"
True. I think it is probably too expensive for most people, especially since it isn't built yet.
I know companies who are good at estimating because they never change how and what they give a client. The designers are forced to design for the CMS.

If all you need to do is to change things then yes it's possible to project fairly accurate.

But in most cases where time estimation matters you can't just use past experience to estimate how much a new project is going to take you. Those are projects where you are innovating/creating/defining a new solution.

So calling it a cop out is seriously underestimating the problem and discussion where it's most important not to.
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You're missing the point entirely.

They gambled on an algorithm and everything related to engineering and operating it.

On some level or another they failed spectacularly and they're calling it a "glitch" - a minor malfunction, a transient error, a spurious little blip.

Say what?

$440 million dollars pissed away over the course of 45 minutes is not a glitch by any stretch of the imagination.

It's a failure of epic proportions at multiple levels. Failure to test, to review, to react and finally failure to own up.